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For my last week in My Lovely Apartment, I am living with minimal extras. Remaining are my futon (sans frame); my desk (sans 4 less-used drawers), which mainly remains because my computer needs somewhere to be; my halogen lamp; some food, including a stockpile of ice cream that i realized over the weekend i may need help to dispose of non-wastefully; most kitchen and bathroom supplies; one week's clothing (more or less... er, more); my two wall calendars; and my Gauguin poster. plus the leaning tower of mail-to-sort that I feel I ought to sort before leaving on general principle. Note: no television, dvd player, nor dvds; no radio/boombox, nor CDs; no chest of drawers; no bedside lamp; a mostly empty closet; no floor-standing photo frame; no bookcases nor books (sob) - well, except for a couple of borrowed books that i really need to return. No distractions except the computer, which is a hella big distraction, but at least I sent the computer games away.

With the futon (and bedside stuff) on the floor, and my apartment seeming bigger with all the missing furniture, I feel like I'm camping out. It's kinda fun. ....sigh.

ah well. I will get another apartment, with its own charms. Apartment-hunting is exciting, so many possibilities.

or maybe, if I somehow hit it big or win the lottery or something, I could buy instead of rent. ah, dreams.

When I say Bush is not evil, I mean not actively, intentionally evil. But one of the notable things I remember from Psych 1 (taught by Professor Zimbardo of the infamous prison experiment) is that evil can be sneaky - people have a great ability to rationalize their behavior. Nazi concentration camp guards could figure "I'm just following orders," etc. I don't feel like getting into a great discussion of the nature of evil today - not only do I not feel up to the required level of coherence, but I have a lot of moving to do - but the phrase "banality of evil" crept into my mind a while after writing last night's bit. and, "the only thing required for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." There's an awful lot of nothing in American politics these days, at all levels, and it tends to scare me.

after the rereading of old entries i did recently i don't want to write about politics any more at least until i figure out better what i think. because my thinking changes sometimes. and then i get uncomfortable about what i wrote already, and when i type uncomfortable it tends to come out in lowercase. and run-ons. and fragments. (not that it doesn't anyway.)

but then g w bush goes and says something like we should log the national forests more in order to prevent massive forest fires. UH, NO. these fires are happening because (1) there's a big drought on, (2) for a hundred years we have been preventing as many fires as possible, thus building up a large supply of underbrush kindling/fuel, because we thought fire was evil (and oh because the loggers didn't want to lose their property), when in fact it is a normal part of the healthy ecosystem, depending on elevation and exact ecosystem in question. ponderosas expect fire. high altitude spruces don't so much. sequoias need it for their seeds to germinate. this is from memory but i think i have it ok.

I don't think Bush is evil. I think he has his strengths and weaknesses like anyone else. But I think he's a politician, not a statesman. I don't know if Gore would have been any better in general, but I think he'd've been better about the trees. Clinton was and is a total sleazeball, worse than those two, but at least he set up a whole passel of national monuments on his way out.

I didn't really want either Bush or Gore. I would have voted for McCain if he'd been available. A moderate Republican, who has voted against drilling in the Arctic Wildlife Refuge if i recall rightly. Then there's the campaign finance reform. perhaps he's a bit hawkish but we've got that anyway. and sometimes i prefer decisiveness to waffling. And he has some personality. Bottom of my uncle's class at the naval academy, renowned for his partying abilities, but he refused to get out of jail free when the Vietnamese offered to let him go home because his father was an admiral. He stuck it out with all the other POWs.

Even towards the very beginning of the country, there were plenty of politicians in the system, but it just seems like the early days had more far-seeing people in government than we have now. Is it just an illusion of selective hindsight? Abraham Lincoln was a politician, but he was more than that. Can't we find another one or two of those somewhere? or have the parties rigged the game drum-tight (with the help of self-interested, and uninterested, voters)?

In a little over a week I won't be in my lovely apartment anymore. (strategic retreat aka financial restructuring.) I will miss

• days where the setting sun hangs in my homeward path as a red ball just piercing the horizon's purple haze
• having utterly complete control of my living space
• my balcony, where i can observe up and down the street and across the way, except where the tree blocks my view - the tree blocks more than it used to, when i moved here two years ago
• the tree, leaves rustling in a summer afternoon breeze
• my view of the hills in the distance across the 405 in the morning, and of the "FOX" pinnacle of the Village theater lit up at dusk
• the moon as i saw it yesterday, full and orange and just risen over the still sunset-lit buildings of Wilshire as I approached on the freeway
• being able to walk to UCLA even though i never did as often as i thought i would
• being able to walk to movie theaters, especially the Village
• having a garage to put my beloved car in
• being 30 minutes away from work (20 on a good day) instead of 60
• being able to walk to In-N-Out Burger

I will not miss

• car alarms going off in the parking lot
• having no money to spare, and going into the red at the slightest provocation
• ...hm.

silly me. this whole web journal is my statement of principles. shallower waters, often, than i would like to think, but c'est moi.

How's this for a statement: Sunlight is good (as long as I'm wearing either sunblock or a big floppy hat). As a southern California native, I've grown up used to plentiful sunshine as the default weather condition. I'm not sure whether it would affect me to live in a place where that was not true. Like, for example, a place where this morning's overcast sky is the default condition. Better for photography in some ways, but not as satisfying as if it were to just go ahead and rain, then blow clear and bright and sparkling. I might not mind a place where it rained more than Los Angeles, if the sun always came out afterwards.

I wonder if the amount and type of weather one is exposed to as a child has any influence on the development of one's brain chemistry, anything to do with predispositions to cheerfulness or melancholy. hm... surely there's plenty of stronger influences.

Yet on a sunny summer morning, I throw open my windows to the bright blue sky, take a deep breath of cool clear air (west LA), listen to the green leaves rustle and the mockingbirds call, stretch my arms up high, and smile to no one in particular because I am immersed in beauty and feel energized to attack worthy tasks. On a cloudy morning, I open my blinds but not my windows, look out, and feel like curling up with a book or computer game, something cozy and introspective. Too bad it's not quite a weekend yet.

whatever the weather, for the next few weekends i'll be plenty busy moving, carload by carload, but that's another story.

I am slowly learning how to do things I ought to know, such as reading web stats. My favorite Google so far this month is from someone who searched for "arafat dance with camels".

also, "statement of principles"? I'm not sure what I mean by that. In the dream it was more just a sentiment of 'damn, there won't be anything for the biographical note to quote from me.'

also, rereading that dream, it's lucky I don't subscribe to Freudian dream analysis.

Now that I've had a bit more sleep ... had a dream this morning about being in NYC when a fleet of blimps full of gunmen (whom I somehow knew to be Russian, possibly mafia) appeared over Manhattan and started picking off pedestrians at random, which I escaped because I saw them from a distance, but then was having a terrible time packing a bag in my apartment to flee to this house in New Jersey where some friends were, and I knew I'd better the hell hurry or there would be no chance of beating the crowds out of the city before the word spread, except I was having an awful time getting my shoes tied, and as I was sitting on the carpet madly struggling with them an announcement came over the building's P.A. that a nuclear submarine had just been spotted entering New York harbor, and we were advised to evacuate the building. noises of panicked fleeing commenced from the hallway. "ohhhhhhhhh shit," i said out loud. it was looking more and more like my sole purpose in life was to be a biographical note of tragedy in the life of my brother, who would go on to become a giant of American literature, but meanwhile I was about to become one of the people who thinks they're going to escape, but ends up as a doomed extra in a crowd scene. whereupon to my great relief I woke up.

I took two things from this dream: (1) always have an emergency bag packed and ready to go, and (2) if I were to somehow die around now, I would be very annoyed because i'm not DONE yet. My life to this point has consisted mainly of procrastination. Yes, my family and friends would miss me, but I haven't produced much of anything for the world in general to remember me by, not even an organized statement of principles that could stand in as a sort of epitaph (in lieu of an actual clever one which would have to wait upon a random flash of inspiration).

pondering.

sleep is underrated.

A long-expected birthday present arrived right on time yesterday, namely the dvd of a certain movie. I love the Lord of the Rings book, and I also love the movie, and I don't care about the changes here and there that the movie makes to the story. It looks like the next one will have some notable differences, too. I am completely cool with this for several reasons. One is, I can't help liking more screen time for the girls; another, changes must be made for the demands of cinema. But the primary one is the way Tolkien wrote the foreword/prologue/appendices. He wrote them as if he were discussing/translating an ancient manuscript, even mentioning differences between different copies of same ("this being the only copy that includes the whole of Bilbo's 'Translations from the Elvish'"). So in my view, Peter Jackson's movies are working from a variant version of the story, a newly discovered copy, that has some differences from previously known versions of the story. As people tell stories and they are handed down, this sort of thing happens all the time. This way of looking at it makes it even more fun, for me.

3. 0. Me. Weird.

It feels like the sort of occasion on which I should make a resolution or three. Here's a few I've thought of:

So today is my last day of twenty-nine-ness. Society tells me I'm supposed to be depressed about this. I suppose I'm a little wistful, but I don't think it's as big a deal as perhaps it used to be. Everybody's living longer and better these days (well, us industrialized people anyway), and what used to be the halfway point, or worse, is now (universe willing) maybe a third. What creature walks on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, and three legs in the evening? See that, that's thirds. I'm just about to stand up.

or hey, by hobbit reckoning I don't come of age until 33. Three more years of irresponsible "tweens" to go!

well, not quite. I still haven't improved my web design skills enough to do more than vary my same old basic layout. But at least it has a new picture.

Due to an idle Googling of "purple tricycle", I discovered that someone else still has a (mostly) purple tricycle that looks to be the same make and model as ours! (theirs seems to have endured a bit more wear, and is missing its handlebar tassels, but is obviously the proper sort nonetheless.) This makes me happy, especially since her little daughter is learning to ride it, thus preserving it for another generation. hooray!

no no no no no no. don't want to be angry ranty politichick. want to be cooooool insightful writerchick with subtle glance and wit so sharp that they don't notice right away that they've been sliced clean in half.

Not that my strengths lie there. I know this. Historian by nature, librarian by trade, I collect, observe, most at home in description. the billow of an afternoon fogbank, a full cup of cloud shining white in the sunlight, brimming against a ridge of green hills, overflowing them with grey streams down their crevices in slow-motion. the absolute stillness of a desert sunrise, witnessed from a sleeping bag on a low hill under what had been a sky full of stars, shooting in manycolored flocks with bright flashes, cheered by small groups of camping humans, but is now a sky of smoothest blue, the air vibrating only to a single birdcall. these things capture my memory and push me to share them and my happiness in them.

mmm. that's better. {{sigh}}

.....but i still don't like bush (though lieberman is not encouraging me that a gore admin would have been much better in some ways). too bad we have to wait two more years to try again. meanwhile, hang in there powell, don't let 'em run you out - you're our only hope!

6 August 2002: curing what ails

That China business yesterday got me rereading old entries, and regretting some of them. Inevitable, I suppose. But on principle I try not to alter entries after the day they're written, except to fix factual errors, spellings of names, and such. I just want to reassure anyone who may have been puzzled or disappointed that I have recovered from whatever softness of the head was ailing me here and there, and am heartily sick of the Bush II reign. Afghanistan could perhaps have been handled better, but could also have been much worse. Otherwise, we have corporate luuv, citizens and noncitizens held incommunicado for indeterminate periods of time without charges, and elephant-in-the-china-shop foreign policy. not that unilateralism (or corporate luuv) is exclusive to Republicans; Joe Lieberman is annoying me lately also. at least the arctic wildlife refuge has been saved so far.

sigh. i can't formulate right now. too tired to rant. maybe i'll try this again tomorrow morning.

Hm. I got a nice email from someone who'd read my China section on regulus.org, which was a bit surprising since I didn't think anyone was looking, and nothing's near done yet over there. But I guess a googlebot wandered by or something, so I might as well put it over in my "scribblings" links, to the [left]. Perhaps this will push me to finish a bit quicker. perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.

5 August 2002: spin me round like a record, baby

San Diego Comic-Con on Saturday was wheeeeeeexhausting. and here and there felt like something I should have done fifteen years ago, when I was still making up stories about Dungeons & Dragons characters. But mostly I just had a grand fun day, spending time (and money) mainly on two areas: various Lord of the Rings related events and displays, and the half-table of Bruno's Christopher Baldwin. Who is, by the way, a charming and friendly fellow as well as a talented artist/writer. A day well spent, and next year I'm registering ahead so I don't have to wait in the hella looooooooooooooooooooong on-site reg line.

oh. and, hello, yes I'm still here. Funny, I kind of disappeared from note-writing last year late spring - early summer, too. That midsummer zone, not good for the writing.

but I'm back now.

( 2001 ) ( january ) ( february ) ( march ) ( april ) ( may-june-july ) ( september ) ( october ) ( november ) ( december ) ( 2003 )

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