the loose association

2006-10-11T10:05:00.000-07:00

A wind in the door.

Madeleine L'Engle, after writing A Wrinkle in Time, wrote three other books that continue the story of Meg, Charles Wallace, and Calvin. The first follow-up story is called A Wind in the Door, and as weird and science-fictiony as it is, I think I might like it more than the first book.

The underlying theme of the book is that size is relative. Perhaps it takes reading the book to really understand the implications and magnitude of this idea, but here's an example. Think of how incredibly small we, as humans, are compared to the universe. This book then asks you to think about, say, a cell in your body. How small it is compared to its relative universe, your body. And if you paid any attention at all to your biology class in high school, you know that even the human cell is a densely complex thing. We also know that something as (relatively) small as a cell has an immense effect on our bodies. For instance, what about a cancer cell? Its effects are felt not only throughout the body, but also it affects the people who know and love that person. And the chain reaction continues to cosmic levels.

Size is relative and, as the book suggests, not all that imporant. Regardless of how small or large you seem next to someone or something else, there is always something incredibly larger or incredibly smaller that is just as important as you are -- as complex and unique as you are.

2006-02-24T05:53:00.000-08:00

Enmeshed.

I think BarbCobb talked about this in humanities class once. Something about life being like a cloth, a weaving. And we are the threads. We are dependent on each other, and if one thread is pulled out, the whole thing unravels.

I'm not sure she made that analogy. But I wonder.

Are we the sum of our experiences? How different would we be if someone was missing from our lives? How different would the lives of others be without us? It seems easy to think that we are individuals on clean, linear A-B trajectories. But we're not, I don't think. We are all enmeshed in one other somehow. And I don't think it is as simple as the choose-your-own-adventure books, as if our path is determined by choices and experiences traced along a fractal diagram.

I think it's more like a woven tapestry -- more complex and beautiful than we think.

2006-02-14T21:53:00.000-08:00

Artifact.

I am intrigued by postmarks. I guess I don't look at every piece of mail and scrutinize the red stamp, but this one caught my eye. It's so perfect. How often do you see the mark directly on top of the stamp? And it's almost completely even, clear, and legible. Also, orientation is nearly aligned with the angles of the envelope. I find it remarkable.

Postmarks are so unique. Not just their placement or legibility, but what they say. They seem to embody split seconds. A time and a place. A certain documentation personalized for each correspondence. Much like snowflakes, no two are exactly alike. And I, being one more for the reading of letters and numbers rather than crystalline patterns, fancy these oft-overlooked markings. They're like little works of art, little texts that are (usually) easily discernible.

I must say, a digital time stamp on an email or on a blog entry has zero character and holds no fascination for me. And surely someday, tangible correspondence will no longer exist in the form of post. I'll miss seeing the haphazardly wrought stamp marks. Of course, they'll probably be kept as artifacts of olden days when such cumbersome tasks, such as handwriting, were performed.

2006-02-10T09:35:00.000-08:00

Communicative disease.

By being a language major, being currently enrolled in a communication class, and having a communication major as a best friend, I should know what the word communication means. But it sure is hazy.

In the class I'm taking (communication in the classroom), we have debated what is and isn't considered communication. Some people have a difficult time grasping the concept that you don't have to try to communicate, but I think I'm under the (possibly erroneous) impression that we communicate continually. Well, except in states of cognitive unresponsiveness -- about which I am not 100% certain. So if we communicate all the time, what's this communication breakdown that the world is experiencing?

It's interesting to me that we have labeled this time in history The Communication Age. Also called the The Technological Age. Technology has become synonymous with communication, basically. Now, my OrgCom-approved vocabulary is rusty, but isn't technology (email, text messaging, instant messaging, telephone, voicemail, etc.) the context of the communication with language most often being the medium? (It's getting all jumbled up in my head because the History of the English Language according to Lorrah says that language is "conscious communication that is consistent within a culture.") Anyway, I think all this terminology is irrelevant to what I want to say.

And what I want to say in pretty circular, so if your head's not spinning yet, hang on.

Technology -- what has been called communication and is at least supposed to be making the world a smaller place by facilitating near-instant, wide-spread communication -- has been blamed for the communication breakdown. This term communication breakdown I'd say, refers to the dwindling of human contact and interpersonal communication. Because we all now have to have a cellphone stuck to one ear and an earbud in the other, we cannot even communicate with those around us. Or can we?

Like I've already said, we are always saying something -- with or without words, with or without intention. And when we are so distracted by the pieces of silicon and plastic wedged in our heads, what we are saying is pretty clear: I couldn't care less about what's going on around me. That's be a pretty offensive message to send to other people. But here's the rub: No one is receiving the message because we have also blocked up our receptors.

I forgot one thing: In the communication model, there is a recipient of a message. But there are no more recipients. Or at least there are only a few. We have to listen, too. And it's hard to listen when we don't shut up.

I don't mean to be negative. Really. And I'm sure this rambling is uniformed and full of holes and generally incoherent. But are we just sending messages out into the air with no one to receive them? We're all trying to say something --and I know what we all have to say is important and significant -- but it just floats away from us into an atmosphere of unretrieved messages. It's not unlike a book, which says nothing at all until someone picks it up and reads it. It's not unlike me typing all of this and then sending it out into the unknown -- not knowing and maybe not even caring if I'm heard.

That's not healthy.

Very Loosely Associated: Golden Silence

2006-02-09T20:49:00.000-08:00

Clarity.

There's nothing quite like the feeling of clarity. I like it when things are clean, clear, and crisp. I like when things appear bright, balanced, and bearable. I want to feel relaxed, radiant, and rested.

Nothing clarifies like a healthy dose of alliteration.

2006-02-08T21:20:00.000-08:00

Dot matrix.

Because I am increasingly morphing into Betty Sue "Homemaker" Crocker, I baked a cake tonight. Okay, I haven't learned how to scratch one out of a rubber band and a toothpick yet (wait, that's Betty Sue MacGyver) like my sister who baked the above work of confectionery art, but the 84-cent cake mix from WalMart -- now that I can rock. It's a chocolate-iced marble cake because, frankly, I need the chocolate. And as I was slathering on the icing -- feeling rather like Augustus Gloop -- I had a flashback.

The spatula strokes (think brush strokes) left in the chocolately goodness reminded me of the birthday cake your mom made you for your first birthday. Instead of spending the money to order a nice one from the bakery (because you were inevitably going to annihilate the cake with your grimy little one-year-old hands with icing oozing between your grimy little one-year-old fingers), she just made one like the one I've got sitting on my counter. And she bought those little gritty dot-matrix-looking candy letters (I only remember them in some combination of blue, yellow, and white) and pushed them into the icing to spell out Happy Birthday! in the miraculous event that the letters didn't break during the perilous journey from the grocery.

That is the kind of cake you see in the foreground of yellowed Polaroids.

Did anybody ever really eat those letters?

2006-02-07T12:59:00.000-08:00

Mediocrity.

I find it alarming when I realize how mediocre I am. In a vacuum of sorts, I can grow my head to enormous sizes. I can convince myself of my own greatness until I'm pulled out of that vacuum and thrust into the presence of true greatness.

In a similar sense, I think I am wise and so far beyond simpleness until I see a little kid who has stopped following his mother across the lawn to lie down in the grass -- just to examine a leaf and spring back up again. A simple and shameless act, yes, but one that I have long dulled the capability of doing. He is the wise and I the simpleton.

It's like looking up and feeling like I'm falling backward. All to find I've gone nowhere at all.

2006-02-06T20:52:00.000-08:00

The Wanderer.

As I sat in the three-hour long Early English literature class tonight -- in which we discussed the role of fate in the lives of the Anglo-Saxons and the adoption of Christianity into their belief system -- my mind began to wander. With all the seeming meaninglessness of life, the mutability, and the inevitable decay, it sure would be easy to become an existentialist.

We call existentialism "modernist thought." But there in the elegy "The Wanderer" is an Anglo-Saxon confronting the problem of existence. And this is what I asked myself (I wrote it in the margin of my notebook paper): Who first asked why?

How far into history (or prehistory, I guess) did man get before he asked himself, "What's this all about?" It could not have taken long, could it? Why. Such a difficult word. The two year old knows it well. (What of high minded modernists?) And there is never an end of answers for the incessant questioning. Why. Why. Why. And it comes down to a firmly spoken because over top of a wearily thought I don't know.

I can't help but see both sides. I won't accept that there are no answers, but I cannot help but nod my head in a bit of concession at the one who can't seem to find any.

What a tremendous burden it must've been to be the first to reach beyond the tangibility of the what and grasp into the void of why.

2006-02-05T22:07:00.000-08:00

From my Aunt Millie's house, my Mom brought home this huge plastic jug -- think giant dill pickle jar -- full of spools of thread. Many of them are wooden spools, which aren't made any more. In a sudden bout of inspiration, I took about thirty pictures of the conglomeration, which gave me several moments to think on the antiquities that I was seeing. See the right bottom-most spool in this photo? The Coats and Clark spool? I was obsessed with getting focused shot of it. This is about as close as I came.

On my way back to Murray, I started scheming up a bundle of projects, as if I need more. And this photoblog was one of them. The other was to take matters into my own hands and make the purse I've been wanting to buy. So I stopped at the nearest exit with a WalMart and raided the fabrics and crafts section. And because I haven't yet inherited the lumbering jug of thread, I bought my own. Two plastic spools of Coats and Clark thread, now under the name of just Coats. $1.97 each. That's a far cry from the large spool that I found whose sticker read with an enclosing sunburst graphic, "5 for $1.00!"