it was heaven sent
Jan. 9th, 2015 11:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
yamamanama69 days until the Vernal Equinox
I don't think I'll ever find that quote about saying goodbye to the twentieth century any more than I'll get to say goodbye to the 21st century, which is really just the 20th century with more surveillance and more polar vortices and the Muslims replacing the Jews. But I found a wonderful quote from This Alien Shore.
God save us from an Earth in which all men are the same.
God save us from a colony where that is the goal, or assumes that for its norm.
Give me a thousand people speaking different tongues, worshiping different gods, and dreaming different dreams, and I will make of them a greater nation than you can make with ten thousand of your genengineered duplicates.
For mine will have the spark of greatness in them, while yours will live for conformity, worship mediocrity, and take their carefully modulated delight in predigested dreams.
-Reigning In Chaos: the founding of Guera Colony
So much happened tonight that I'm going to blank on a lot of things. Basically, what happened is that Emma has some art in a gallery in Somerville and she's submitting a new one soon that uses an old TV set, and she introduced me to a bunch of her friends and relatives, and she introduced me to them with "this is my friend, Yama" so SUCK IT. We trusted her, and we were right.
As I've said before, it was merely freezing instead of bonechillingly cold. The worst days of winter are those bright days that are nonetheless as cold as death.
I'm normally very quiet when I walk (in fact, it creeps people out) but the floor in the Somerville library made me feel like Lana and probably made the people downstairs think there was a frigging AT-AT upstairs. There's a book about Boston in the future that predicts a wall around the city to protect it from the Atlantic, and floods in the Callahan Tunnel. If you ask me, a wall's the wrong approach. We need channels and artificial lakes and bays and seas the water can flow into when the ice melts and we can drain them out when the water recedes. I think it's a great idea, just really ambitious and very expensive.
She told me to favorite one of her tweets, if I ever find it amongst all the feminism and science that is my twitter feed. Which, she says, is the greatest twitter feed anyone can have.
If you too are on Twitter, there's a link to it in the sidebar. I'll PM you a list of people who might try to harass you by proxy who you should block immediately.
Deva Indian Bistro is good but a bit pricey.
There's a store in Davis Square called Benoit
balls. Nailed it.
The Painted Burro has Mexican food. But it made me think of The Painted Bird. I'm not reading that. It's about life in Nazi-occupied Poland so it's not a very happy book, but I'm not sure if it's the opposite of happy in that it makes you sad or it's the opposite of happy in that it makes you want to feed members of the Kalmyk Kavalry Korps to a woodchipper. Right now I want my journal to be about happy things, like skylarks and cotton candy and bubblegum and butterflies and ukuleles. No "people who are desperately hoping this latest incident will lead to a pogrom," no "people who are dejected that their pogrom never got off the ground," no "people who say French people are good at a pogrom, and then mope because nobody actually died in the mosque shooting and kabob stand bombing," no "the west maybe wanted to get rid of Gadaffi but didn't care what happened in Libya afterwards so they did nothing to help their nascent democracy."
Although I actually do find it funny that the Muslims are like "Dude, what the fuck?" and the conservative right-wing Christian groups are like "YEE-HAW! They deserved it!"
I don't find the magazine funny. If ever I dreamt about South Park or editorial cartoons by batshit right wing cartoonists, that's what it would look like. Incoherent and kinda offensive. Mostly incoherent.
Speaking of "dude, what the fuck?" Emma gets a lot of "dude, what the fuck?" looks when drawing people in public. I got one weird look a long time ago but I don't think she realized I was drawing her.
Emma used hot chocolate in one of her drawings.
Someone else did a cassowary and young girl and Lady Gaga, someone did the guardian of Hell which had the head of a hyena and the head of a turkey vulture, someone did Herman The Worm getting stuck in a drinking straw. Peaches did a cartoon of Oppenheimer and Teller.
It might have been a true fact about the French language not having a word for something but unfortunately I don't remember what that something was (actually, I think it was "phonetic," because she said Solei is French for sun without that L. It's also "sunshine" in Catalan according to Google Translate). I followed it up with "they also have no word for gratitude," which was a joke.
She suggested maybe swimming to Socotra because you really can't get there any other way. Spoiler alert: you can't swim that far.
She says that people in Madagascar had tortoises as pets even though it was illegal there. She wanted to see the radiated tortoises but I don't think they're there now.
Winter can eat a buffet of dicks, by the way. That's how I know how long winter is and the day and hour of the vernal equinox and how many days are left. I'd tell you how many hours until the equinox but that site requires I plug in the dates manually each time. Oh, it's a great site otherwise.
I didn't know how long autumn or spring are by memory. Just winter and summer.
Emma says the worst month is February because it feels so much longer than it really is and winter has outstayed its welcome, but I say it's January, because it's colder, longer, the days are shorter, and February is where you start to see signs of change. Emily or possibly someone else is right that it can and has remained cold well into May. December may be darker but at least there's the holidays to look forward to and everyone has lights up. In January, everyone takes their lights down but it's still dark at 5:30 PM and super-depressing.
The best months, of course, are July, August, September, and October.
I asked Emma who would want to live in Florida. Yeah, the weather's nice, but there's no culture. I'd take winter if it meant we have things like The Consul and the MFA and the art shows.
Sahin is from Karachi, Pakistan and is learning tenor sax and played piano badly. I suggested that Emma learn to play every instrument in existence, even the ones that don't exist, like the Katzenklavier. You don't even have to make a real one where you press the keys and it yanks the cat's tail or rams something up the cat's butt, you can just autotune cats in heat or cats in the bathtub, A through G sharp or G or whatever the last note on the scale is.
She says I should make a Virtual Katzenklavier. It's not too hard, right? I just need the software for it.
I told Emily that anyone can be creative in some way, even if you're not an artist or a writer or a musician. I also told Emily that I think the Gods of the Internet put me on some sort of universal Do Not Engage list and most people who do engage with me on the internet get exiled to an alternate reality.
Emily looks a bit like my friend but she's in Seattle right now, gloating about how the weather is merely kind of shitty instead of bonechillingly cold. I told Christina (Portuguese, sign of the Death Seraph) to eat a bowl of dicks.
I met Emma's brother though I didn't realize it was him. I also met her cousins.
Emma's not a vegetarian like I thought she was. She says everyone thinks that about her.
Emma's never been to the Gardner museum. I announced that the statute of limitations on art theft is over so, seriously, just give the art back. There's even a nice reward. Plant it on your worst enemy/rival druglord if you're that concerned about being imprisoned.
I thought a woman was Gabriella. From the side and back, they do look alike, but their faces are totally different and I don't think I've ever seen Gabriella wearing jeans, but everything else (scarf and black shirt) I could see her wearing. What's not OK is mistaking her for Gabriella for a second time.
In fact, I'm not the only person who mistook her for someone else.
Emma's willing to let me shanghai her into making a mural for the Wildlife Center. I'll just have to talk to people there and maybe see how feasible it is to bike from Braintree.
She might try to see me there in the spring or summer.
Emma didn't get her art into Chroma, which is about abstract colors (hm, I have some things I should have submitted, I'm just oftentimes afraid they'll get lost or damaged). That sucks but at the same time, since it's winter, we're no longer obligated to go anywhere and I can just spend the day sleeping and playing Avernum 2: Crystal Souls. Although we might go to see it together. It really depends on what she wants to do. And we're going to try our best to go to the art museum together soon.
A woman named Amy was playing the ukulele at Davis Square. She told me that she'd sing winter songs and Christmas songs but people really appreciate when she sings about Hawaii and beaches and hot summer nights in places far away.
She has a bandcamp so check it out. And don't even [censored] because she does[censored]e.
http://amykucharik.bandcamp.com/
It's actually Slovak, not Ruthenian or Ukrainian like I thought it was.
I met a woman with pink/blue hair on the way home, who was an Aggie student but this doesn't matter because she graduated before I started volunteering at the wildlife center and she wasn't one of the students who did the internship there anyway. She sings.
another woman asked how long I've been making art for.
It's cool, because I thought on the way there that nobody actually noticed me drawing, and usually, and maybe the weather is getting them down.
there will be edits later. I'm sorry. I'm tired.
burning question: what weird world does someone live in where there aren't people with colored hair everywhere?
I don't think I'll ever find that quote about saying goodbye to the twentieth century any more than I'll get to say goodbye to the 21st century, which is really just the 20th century with more surveillance and more polar vortices and the Muslims replacing the Jews. But I found a wonderful quote from This Alien Shore.
God save us from an Earth in which all men are the same.
God save us from a colony where that is the goal, or assumes that for its norm.
Give me a thousand people speaking different tongues, worshiping different gods, and dreaming different dreams, and I will make of them a greater nation than you can make with ten thousand of your genengineered duplicates.
For mine will have the spark of greatness in them, while yours will live for conformity, worship mediocrity, and take their carefully modulated delight in predigested dreams.
-Reigning In Chaos: the founding of Guera Colony
So much happened tonight that I'm going to blank on a lot of things. Basically, what happened is that Emma has some art in a gallery in Somerville and she's submitting a new one soon that uses an old TV set, and she introduced me to a bunch of her friends and relatives, and she introduced me to them with "this is my friend, Yama" so SUCK IT. We trusted her, and we were right.
As I've said before, it was merely freezing instead of bonechillingly cold. The worst days of winter are those bright days that are nonetheless as cold as death.
I'm normally very quiet when I walk (in fact, it creeps people out) but the floor in the Somerville library made me feel like Lana and probably made the people downstairs think there was a frigging AT-AT upstairs. There's a book about Boston in the future that predicts a wall around the city to protect it from the Atlantic, and floods in the Callahan Tunnel. If you ask me, a wall's the wrong approach. We need channels and artificial lakes and bays and seas the water can flow into when the ice melts and we can drain them out when the water recedes. I think it's a great idea, just really ambitious and very expensive.
She told me to favorite one of her tweets, if I ever find it amongst all the feminism and science that is my twitter feed. Which, she says, is the greatest twitter feed anyone can have.
If you too are on Twitter, there's a link to it in the sidebar. I'll PM you a list of people who might try to harass you by proxy who you should block immediately.
Deva Indian Bistro is good but a bit pricey.
There's a store in Davis Square called Benoit
balls. Nailed it.
The Painted Burro has Mexican food. But it made me think of The Painted Bird. I'm not reading that. It's about life in Nazi-occupied Poland so it's not a very happy book, but I'm not sure if it's the opposite of happy in that it makes you sad or it's the opposite of happy in that it makes you want to feed members of the Kalmyk Kavalry Korps to a woodchipper. Right now I want my journal to be about happy things, like skylarks and cotton candy and bubblegum and butterflies and ukuleles. No "people who are desperately hoping this latest incident will lead to a pogrom," no "people who are dejected that their pogrom never got off the ground," no "people who say French people are good at a pogrom, and then mope because nobody actually died in the mosque shooting and kabob stand bombing," no "the west maybe wanted to get rid of Gadaffi but didn't care what happened in Libya afterwards so they did nothing to help their nascent democracy."
Although I actually do find it funny that the Muslims are like "Dude, what the fuck?" and the conservative right-wing Christian groups are like "YEE-HAW! They deserved it!"
I don't find the magazine funny. If ever I dreamt about South Park or editorial cartoons by batshit right wing cartoonists, that's what it would look like. Incoherent and kinda offensive. Mostly incoherent.
Speaking of "dude, what the fuck?" Emma gets a lot of "dude, what the fuck?" looks when drawing people in public. I got one weird look a long time ago but I don't think she realized I was drawing her.
Emma used hot chocolate in one of her drawings.
Someone else did a cassowary and young girl and Lady Gaga, someone did the guardian of Hell which had the head of a hyena and the head of a turkey vulture, someone did Herman The Worm getting stuck in a drinking straw. Peaches did a cartoon of Oppenheimer and Teller.
It might have been a true fact about the French language not having a word for something but unfortunately I don't remember what that something was (actually, I think it was "phonetic," because she said Solei is French for sun without that L. It's also "sunshine" in Catalan according to Google Translate). I followed it up with "they also have no word for gratitude," which was a joke.
She suggested maybe swimming to Socotra because you really can't get there any other way. Spoiler alert: you can't swim that far.
She says that people in Madagascar had tortoises as pets even though it was illegal there. She wanted to see the radiated tortoises but I don't think they're there now.
Winter can eat a buffet of dicks, by the way. That's how I know how long winter is and the day and hour of the vernal equinox and how many days are left. I'd tell you how many hours until the equinox but that site requires I plug in the dates manually each time. Oh, it's a great site otherwise.
I didn't know how long autumn or spring are by memory. Just winter and summer.
Emma says the worst month is February because it feels so much longer than it really is and winter has outstayed its welcome, but I say it's January, because it's colder, longer, the days are shorter, and February is where you start to see signs of change. Emily or possibly someone else is right that it can and has remained cold well into May. December may be darker but at least there's the holidays to look forward to and everyone has lights up. In January, everyone takes their lights down but it's still dark at 5:30 PM and super-depressing.
The best months, of course, are July, August, September, and October.
I asked Emma who would want to live in Florida. Yeah, the weather's nice, but there's no culture. I'd take winter if it meant we have things like The Consul and the MFA and the art shows.
Sahin is from Karachi, Pakistan and is learning tenor sax and played piano badly. I suggested that Emma learn to play every instrument in existence, even the ones that don't exist, like the Katzenklavier. You don't even have to make a real one where you press the keys and it yanks the cat's tail or rams something up the cat's butt, you can just autotune cats in heat or cats in the bathtub, A through G sharp or G or whatever the last note on the scale is.
She says I should make a Virtual Katzenklavier. It's not too hard, right? I just need the software for it.
I told Emily that anyone can be creative in some way, even if you're not an artist or a writer or a musician. I also told Emily that I think the Gods of the Internet put me on some sort of universal Do Not Engage list and most people who do engage with me on the internet get exiled to an alternate reality.
Emily looks a bit like my friend but she's in Seattle right now, gloating about how the weather is merely kind of shitty instead of bonechillingly cold. I told Christina (Portuguese, sign of the Death Seraph) to eat a bowl of dicks.
I met Emma's brother though I didn't realize it was him. I also met her cousins.
Emma's not a vegetarian like I thought she was. She says everyone thinks that about her.
Emma's never been to the Gardner museum. I announced that the statute of limitations on art theft is over so, seriously, just give the art back. There's even a nice reward. Plant it on your worst enemy/rival druglord if you're that concerned about being imprisoned.
I thought a woman was Gabriella. From the side and back, they do look alike, but their faces are totally different and I don't think I've ever seen Gabriella wearing jeans, but everything else (scarf and black shirt) I could see her wearing. What's not OK is mistaking her for Gabriella for a second time.
In fact, I'm not the only person who mistook her for someone else.
Emma's willing to let me shanghai her into making a mural for the Wildlife Center. I'll just have to talk to people there and maybe see how feasible it is to bike from Braintree.
She might try to see me there in the spring or summer.
Emma didn't get her art into Chroma, which is about abstract colors (hm, I have some things I should have submitted, I'm just oftentimes afraid they'll get lost or damaged). That sucks but at the same time, since it's winter, we're no longer obligated to go anywhere and I can just spend the day sleeping and playing Avernum 2: Crystal Souls. Although we might go to see it together. It really depends on what she wants to do. And we're going to try our best to go to the art museum together soon.
A woman named Amy was playing the ukulele at Davis Square. She told me that she'd sing winter songs and Christmas songs but people really appreciate when she sings about Hawaii and beaches and hot summer nights in places far away.
She has a bandcamp so check it out. And don't even [censored] because she does[censored]e.
http://amykucharik.bandcamp.com/
It's actually Slovak, not Ruthenian or Ukrainian like I thought it was.
I met a woman with pink/blue hair on the way home, who was an Aggie student but this doesn't matter because she graduated before I started volunteering at the wildlife center and she wasn't one of the students who did the internship there anyway. She sings.
another woman asked how long I've been making art for.
It's cool, because I thought on the way there that nobody actually noticed me drawing, and usually, and maybe the weather is getting them down.
there will be edits later. I'm sorry. I'm tired.
burning question: what weird world does someone live in where there aren't people with colored hair everywhere?
