The following is going to be hard to make heads or tails of if you haven't read a certain book. And even then, it could be hard. Tough.
"Take that, gravity."
This is something I've said privately to myself at the precise moment of takeoff - the very second the rear landing gears lift off the ground, every single time I have flown anywhere, ever. Except once.
It's a fascinating feeling to me, not just in a sensory way, but in an intellectual way - I mean, with all the force I can muster, I can make myself jump maybe 3 and a half, 4 feet in the air, for half a second. Despite appearances, I weigh considerably less than a commercial aircraft full of hundreds of people, their luggage, and a galley full of pretzels to placate them. The force necessary to completely escape the pull of gravity while hauling that much, and then remain buoyant all the way to Poughkeepsie, or whereever, somewhat blows my mind. The fact that we as humans have devised and built machines that do it so routinely makes me want to absolutely celebrate and jeer at nature, as evidenced by the above quote. I like it when we win.
I've never cared much for the oft-quoted end of Reagan's Challenger speech, which is in and of itself quoting liberally from a poem called High Flight by John Gillespie McGee (which, to get all tangental and me about it, apparently rips the line I dislike so much from a poem published several years earlier. But I'm getting ahead of myself.)
I have such conflicting feelings about this poem, because the first line, "Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth" - I could have a passionate European romance with this line, for reasons you now understand. It would be better if "of earth" were "of gravity," for general applicability, but overall I still absolutely love it. A mixture of poetry and anthropomorphizing elemental concepts of physics in a triumphant and defiant celebration of human ingenuity and exploration. I'm totally there.
The second quoted line, though - "and touched the face of God" - ruins it for me. Setting aside the larger question of whether God exists and is in fact using the earth's thermosphere to put on his contacts, visiting space is not touching his face. This doesn't even make the slightest bit of sense to me, and the rest of this paragraph is a rant to that effect. God would have to be, like, shaving with the Blue Ridge Mountains as a razor for that image to make any sort of quasi-literal sense to me, and in a figurative sense, I have absolutely no context for what it indicates spiritually to have touched the face of God. It could just as easily be "I have peeled the scab of God" and presuming it is not a literal meaning, I have absolutely no idea what this is supposed to imply. I'd go so far as to call it sophistry, which is a word I have been grateful to know for nearly 10 years now, as it succinctly expresses something I have hated for 10 years before that. Sure, it sounds profound and spiritual, but even within that spiritual framework it doesn't even make any sense, at least to me. Wow, I kinda got all over there, and wayyyyy off the point of this post. Without even having touched the face of God.
Anyway, that one line, when it hits me, poisons a great mixture of lyricism and expression with something baseless and nonsensical, and that, I find, is an absolute tragedy, as there is some great stuff in the poem, and one line causes me to resist it all.
This resistance also comes despite the fact that Reagan chose bookend excerpts, which I do frequently with all manner of source material on this very blog. I find it's a good way to basically say "The content of this post is similar to that of the content between the quoted points in something else." At this point it may be helpful to imagine I am winking at you.
That first line, though, it's a killer. As I said, I've celebrated that same sort of neener-neener mentality every time I have ever taken off in a plane, except one.
That one time, I was entirely too preoccupied with opening a card I'd been given only moments before, and had been instructed to open upon takeoff, presumably in order to do so in sync with She who Gave it to Me, who for the purpose of this post I believe I shall call Jane.
The contents of the card I shall leave out for personal reasons, and to satisfy my internal quota for crypticism, but suffice to say I cling to it very dearly during the stressful time I now find myself in.
It's not quite a Luxor token, as these things go, but it's the only thing to ever make me miss a chance to strut and caw in the face of all reason and physics, as the seemingly impossible and definitely improbable routinely took place all around me. This should say something.
Now, I look down the barrel of the hardest part of my life to date - packing it all up, turning my back on it, and going somewhere new. Taking a chance on adventure and love.
The thing is, I am not particularly scared. I have let go of outcome. I have a token to get me through this hard part, and it in itself is a reminder that I've already won, because I've got someone who doesn't care how this goes, and will invent some sort of ridiculous dance with me anyway.
This is what I found this past weekend. None of the fine details matter, because I've already won. Over the past couple months I've found myself emotionally up and down, slugged repeatedly, on the brink of losing it several times, and I kept coming back.
This weekend, though, I saw the arms go up.
Touchdown.
This weekend, I sneered derisively at probability and physics.
Take that, gravity.
[also, jane]
This is the kind of thing that gets me all hot and bothered.
Yeah, it's a documentary about a typeface. Not a font, a typeface. This predates fonts. It's 50 years old. Sure, that's younger than Times New Roman, or Palatino or most any of the big names from Monotype and Linotype, which were type foundry industry giants I like to pretend were involved in a bloody and operatic battle of wills similar to that of Edison and Tesla. However, in that shorter span of time, Helvetica has taken on a hell of huge percentage of what you could laughably call the "market share" of ANYTHING PRINTED IN ANY ROMANCE LANGUAGE AND ALSO FUCKING CYRILLIC. Plus, I just like it. Serifs, as far as I am concerned, can largely go to hell.
Yeah, I'm a huge fucking nerd.
You want a piece of me?
[Lanston vs Mergenthaler TO THE DEATH]
I don't know why I keep posting topical things when there's so much going on in real life, but here I am anyway.
This blog runs on the back of Movable Type, which is the first blogging software I ever came across, and which I have continued to support and use even through their licensing fiasco and the increasing ease of use and functionality of their primary competitor, Wordpress.
I had done a manual edit-resave-archive process on my website framework for years, and so software that actually did all the drudgery for you was a complete revelation to me. This was before blogging was something they talked about on the nightly news - I saw it merely as an automation of what I'd been doing anyway, though I could definitely see how it had the potential to unlock mass publishing for everyone who could manage basic double clicking.
Movable Type's been through its trials and tribulations, as I pointed out - they were woefully behind on comment management at a time when comment spam spiked, and at this same moment unveiled a wildly unpopular licensing scheme to try and make some money off their work. I narrowly escaped being affected by this licensing scheme through a cunning combination of laziness in updating and taking advantage of the fact that they brokered a compromise with the Pitchfork crowd and delivered a free 3-blog-one-author version. This solved my needs - though I was upset at the limitations, it did what I expressly needed and I had become accustomed to it. Others, however, were outraged. That moment raised the notoriety of Wordpress considerably, and with some of the hosted solutions gaining steam and benefiting from a collected userbase (Livejournal, then basically all social network sites that let you write, though I hate calling those 'blogs,' especially Myspace,) MT had been playing catchup for some time.
They still are, really, even with TypePad and Vox and the updates they've made to their software. Every new blog I've helped friends bring to life has been Wordpress. I have stayed with MT this far because for my own purposes I'm used to it, and I personally find WP's template editor maddening.
I'm currently typing this into version 3.34, which finally got some good comment management, but still was ripe for spam to overrun it. I'm using the Scode plugin to provide captchas to counteract that, and an autosave plugin to satiate my now-hair-trigger rage at webapps that don't autosave my work. Six Apart, you can thank Google for my newfound intolerance.
Anyway, with these two plugins, I finally have little to bitch about with MT. I don't have to screen out the spam, the Captcha does a wonderful job of that, and MT's default junk comment system allows me to delete them en masse very efficiently. I haven't lost any writing in some time thanks to the autosave plugin. I find it annoying that I need to rely on the third party developer community to get to what I consider "adequate," but as I'm not paying them anything, I suppose it's not my place to get too cranky.
So, being that I finally have an attractive and functional system I can't bitch about, I had to log in to a Six Apart News post of: "MT4: Time To Give It A Try."
I'd read that they were going back open-source and generally free a while back, and had resisted the urge to check it out, because...well, it finally worked right, and they would probably change stuff.
I've gone ahead and set up a test doodle blog, though, as I cannot resist authoritative headlines like "Time To Give It A Try." So far, I'm not a huge fan. They've rolled in some important features, like autosave on posts, and the ability to easily create static pages, which have been standard issue in Wordpress for some time. Their new template editor is absolutely fantastic, allows drop-down inserts of the cumbersome-to-remember special tags, and color codes the template code for easy readability.
But the administration UI is sluggish, harsh on the eyes, and though it claims to be customizable, I'm not immediately seeing how. My issue with Wordpress is that the admin UI never did it for me, and unfortunately it seems they have run in that direction in MT4. Slow, blocky DHTML menus seem to be what is on the offer in MT4, and it's a shame, because MT3's admin UI was for the most part a thing of beauty. Narrow, perhaps, given the average monitor these days, but quite good. This new thing is like a demo for a new browser standard, and while I assume they will polish the chrome before release, it makes testing it very annoying for me.
Anyway, testing 4 beta 5 has made me yearn for the elegance of my somewhat-modified 3.34, and so I came running back to it, and that caused me to begin writing.
This is hardly a review, and I may even have some facts wrong about when they introduced certain features - I have always been very behind the times on my MT installation, because they tend to monkey with shit a lot and blog writing is very ritualistic for me. Screws me up if the candles are all gradient-ified now and the gold trimmed gown has the pockets on the left side now. Anyway, as I play with it further, a more detailed examination of MT4 will be forthcoming, as will the decision about whether to migrate to it.
[elephants hate eggshells]
Actual Quotes from me:
After seeing Live Free or Die Hard:
"I don't want to alarm you, or have you feel threatened, but I think, if the opportunity were to present itself, I would totally do Bruce Willis. I don't mean I'd chase him down or stalk him or anything, just, you know, if it so happened, he and I somehow landed in that kind of situation, I'd go for it."
Less than six minutes into Transformers:
"I would totally have sex with Peter Cullen's voice, and it's NOT EVEN A TANGIBLE, PHYSICAL CONSTRUCT!"
I would mention the other "big" summer movie I saw, Spiderman 3, but I do not count it as a summer blockbuster because: a) it was early May, and b) it sucked horribly. Also, I wouldn't say I was particularly gay for it, although I find Kirsten Dunst so very unattractive that it may have actually contributed to homosexual tendency by repulsion rather than attraction.
I'm comfortable with my heterosexuality despite having said these things, though I will admit to being leery of my lust creeping into intangible waveforms. Seriously, though, Peter, call me. That's all I need.
There was absolutely no point to this post, but I had the luxury of driving the eternity home from Kennesaw, and much of it cropped into my delirious and sleep-deprived brain. I suppose there are a couple of funny bits that may justify the potential alienation I may be inflicting on any genuinely gay person who takes their sexuality seriously enough to object to me using the phrase "gay for" as a puerile source of humor. Sorry 'bout that. It's okay, hypothetical gay reader, you can admit to being totally hetero for Mila Jovavich. I have conducted actual studies and found quite conclusively that everyone wants to do Mila Jovavich, women especially. So, you're in on this too, Lesbians. We can all bond over that. The Fifth Element may prove to be the most significant catalyst for the understanding of sexual identity of the 20th century.
I've read over this now several times, and decided I rather hate this post. However, it feels so good to have posted something that I'm going to leave it.
[strangely i find i am heterosexual for porn]