has this ever happened to you?[Feb. 17th, 2010|09:00 am]Dodge![Tags|science]
today the alarm went off and i got up and went to set it to let me sleep for another 30 min., but i fell asleep on the way across the room. i was dimly aware of a vertiginous sensation and of holding the shelf that the alarm clock was on, but apparently i made a Godzilla sound and pulled the shelf over and spilled CDs across the floor. i came to with the alarm clock in one hand and Erik supporting me and CDs everywhere.

this happened once before, when i fell asleep on the way to feed the cats and collapsed in the cat bathroom and banged my ribs and arms on the sink. i thought that was pretty funny, because it seemed like part of my brain was awake and another part wasn't, but this time is not funny because i scared Erik and made a mess. Although it is a little funny that i made a Godzilla sound and pulled over a small building-shaped thing.

both times i had just (inexpertly) woken up. have you ever had an experience like this? Link2 comments|say what?

a poem i wrote last year[Feb. 8th, 2010|10:21 pm]Dodge![Tags|dreams, music]
4/12/09
te'ebrini- Arabic endearment meaning "may you bury me."

i am all these things, my body,
my stiff muscles and my quick-jumping skin
my horselike chuffing and my too-fast hands
my rolling eyeballs and my wild attention
my slopes and angles

as if we are all angels fighting blindly, struggling in a thin fluid, all, every one of us, together

4/13/09
books to read:
Sue Hubbell, Broadsides from the other orders: a book of bugs
Daniel Abdal-Hayy Moore
Attar, The drunken universe
the Quran (the pretty translation)
i am way slacker today. get to work!

and then you push through the fence of sticks that we, with our long grasses, trussed up by the house, and you plow your feet into the road to see what grows
and dust of the world drifts down on your hair, burying the raw shining you took with you and the spores and pollens of many lands nestle against your skin, and you return to us years past the limit of our memory with your body bristling and aflame with the sprouts of many nations, roots dragging behind you out of their long bed, and you measure yourself against the floor to see if you still fit the place you left and all your sprouts and spores take wing and scatter to the hidden places where our closest herbs call home, and stake them out, and knock the food from their hands, and piss in their wells, and cuckoo their children, and stain our quilt of long grasses with their wild accents, and your body is the hill where families picnic, and no one remembers your name. where are you pushing through? are you the traveler or the road?

checking Hs against the fake book your eye is drawn to a torn corner and twelve pairs of brown shoes, three days before your eleventh birthday you ate a pastrami sandwich but you can't imagine that now. where do they go, the ways we once could believe? the ways we found things likely? what interpreters are we now? all things are thin and sticky, and they peel off one after the other.

4/14/09
This poem tastes like cumin and sage, ochre and gray-brown, barely turmeric. acres of trees have grown up along the highway, but nothing yet pushes through its surface. coyotes cross it now without caution, and rabbits drop their bones there of a night. it still when it rains smells like yellow and mushrooms, but will not grow the yellow -green algae i smell, will not become slimy with oranges and pinks, will not take on a rind and ferment. in time, like all things, the land will subside and pull pot-holes in the highway, and rain will gather there and pull the pollens in with it, and boil down to a thicker soil, and long grasses will push their sugar tongues from beneath it, and it will be a bowl of roses. so there will still be pottery when we are gone, but no eyes to make it beautiful. there will still be time when we are gone, but no memory to tell its story.

4/18/09
we are tying the grasses in bundles, we are heaping them in armfuls upon a sled and dragging it to the front of the house. we are twisting handfuls of grass together until is arcs over itself in colors. we are winding it purple over gold like a woman's hair twisted dry in the sun. we are wrapping green around gold and tying it off with a square knot. we are dragging the things we once carried by their dangling arms, legs, hair, muffled by a sled of grass. we are lying down together muffled, quiet like, rubbing out skin against purple ridges, throwing gold at the sun. oh how i love you Baltimore. we are eating the timbers from the inside out, and making a mansion out of each. we are elevators. we are running over eachother in waves and nestling and spreading out our infants.

4/19/09
and how they all run inside us, and how we too are the mansions, and how we are wrapping our hands around pillars of grass.

they're cherry-bomb-smart, these drops and galleys, these bright feathers we clutch to our chest, these blue sky with gold sun in them, these empty fullnesses, hollow hearts, birds-singing, lion-roaring, clock-clicking, equation-spinning, cake-baking, cherry-growing, ore-alloying, tight-holding, ours. jaws ajar and out they grow, rootless lianas, seated in air.

4/28/09
remember, its emptiness is fullness.

remember how tired we were, and how our hearts flashed inside us, and how we wove them together into music. remember the sled ride home. remember dragging the sled over the grass we pushed down, and the burrs in your hair, and the sun stinging your cheeks. remember the yeast smell of summer. remember the river pouring through air, the way we sucked it into our cheeks and held it there, the way we gurgled and gasped in it. remember gasping for breath. remember the dryness of lungs before a fire, and the way we invited flame in, the skin of stone under our hands, the breathing hearth holding in the dancers. remember craning your neck to look up its throat and the purples the dancers had streaked there, remember their indigo hands trailing over the stone. remember how you fed them pillars of grass and they snapped maypole around them until all was asleep. remember how you rolled your eyes around the room all smeared with indigo and shivered for the dancers to come back. remember how you found yourself wrapped in purple and you rolled your arms to feel it brush against you. remember how you danced yourself warm, slapping your feet on the stone, until you were full of pillars of grass and blazing. remember how you looked up and found them, the dancers small and distant, cold and emaciated, shivering above you, swimming in indigo. you are a small house in the wilderness. you are slapping the ground. when you let go and sank in indigo their dancing was lace around your arms, and the sound of bells. they are dancing to the drum of your rose-red heart. Linksay what?

(no subject)[Dec. 9th, 2009|11:19 pm]Dodge!there's a bunch of secrecy about magic in a lot of traditions. you get initiated and they teach you more stuff. in my experience, this is backwards, a sign of a tradition that's about tradition rather than magic. magic is secret not because the people that understand it are keeping it from you, but because it can't be explained. you do stuff, you practice, and you start to get it. initiations are going at it from the outside in, from appearances to get to substance. practice is discovering substance, and appearance drapes itself on that.

i wonder if in some traditions, during initiations, they put your head in a place to get it faster. interesting idea. Link3 comments|say what?

symmetry[Oct. 26th, 2009|06:47 pm]Dodge![Current Mood |i should be working]
the order of events:

1. i read _Game of Thrones_ and developed a huge crush on Tyrion Lannister
2. i saw Peter Dinklage in an episode of 30 Rock and developed a huge crush on him, because he reminded me of Tyrion Lannister
3. HBO cast Peter Dinklage as Tyrion Lannister.

well done, HBO. Link2 comments|say what?

BFA show me![Oct. 23rd, 2009|03:56 pm]Dodge!hey! BFA show is soon! SJSU Gallery 5 Nov. 2-6, reception Tues. 3 6:30-9ish. some of the work for it is here: www.flickr.com/confoundedcontraption
and some is not there yet. you can come see if you want to!

http://confoundedcontraption.com/art/bfa.html is a website where y0u can see one piece, and the info again.

i find promotion awkward. even though this isn't really promotion, it's just an invitation, i keep getting half-way through a sentance and thinking why would you care about my BFA show? i guess maybe you like art. i don't really think you like art, but maybe there'll be free food? but maybe i'll run out of food. but maybe there will be other people there that you like and you can talk to them? anyway. jtlyk, BFA show. Link1 comment|say what?

colorgraphemia and language modality[Oct. 19th, 2009|08:28 pm]Dodge![Tags|brains, science]
so, i have mild color-graphemic synaesthesia. i feel dumb about it, because i didn't have color-graphemic synaesthesia until about 2 years after i did a research paper, over the course of which i found out what color-graphemic synaesthesia was. it kind of looks like i have synaesthesia hypochondria. i've been keeping records of what letter or number is what color at month or two intervals, on the theory that if i'm just making this up i won't have consistent colors, and it seems pretty consistent. anyway:

(heres what ive noticed:Collapse)
Linksay what?

(no subject)[Sep. 13th, 2009|05:58 pm]Dodge!hey, my friend has a bunch of feral cats in her neighborhood, and she's been catching them and trying to take care of them. there's three tiny kittens need homes. can you help out a tiny baby kitten in need of love? even if you can't keep one, fostering one until we can find a permanent home would help. do you know anyone who could adopt one?

get in touch. Link3 comments|say what?

(no subject)[Aug. 24th, 2009|11:32 pm]Dodge!hey, i made that blog like i threatened. http://confoundedcontraption.blogspot.com/ next post; people i met at SFZineFest, and their awesome comix. Link2 comments|say what?

(no subject)[Aug. 24th, 2009|09:04 pm]Dodge!like so many of us, i get periodic migraines. they aren't diagnosed migraines, but they match descriptions of migraines i've heard, so that's what i'm calling them. at the worst, they're debilitating headaches with disorientation and light sensitivity and nausea. sometimes it's just disorientation and floatiness. here's what helps, in order of degree:

distraction. somebody funny to talk to puts it off, sometimes long enough to get over it..
caffeine. knock the headache part right out, and the nausea usually goes with it. disorientation i can deal with.
sleep. sometimes you just have to turn off until it's over.

hope this helps you deal with any similar thing.

in other news:
imma start a professional blog about projects, events, etc. on my homepage. i have a hierarchy of online intimacy: lj is the highest, then facebook, then twitter and this new blog. so you all are invited to read my twitter (confoundment), but twitter friends are not necessarily invited to read this blog.

i'm procrastinating on inking this drawing, because what if i mess it up?!?! it's for a friend, and i'm pretty sure they'll stop speaking to me if it's lame.

other things i've been thinking about: synesthesia, sign language. Link1 comment|say what?

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