the wombatcave

Beaause goats are the traditional protagonists fending off evil ambush by trolls hiding under bridges.

In modern usage, I tend to define a "troll" as someone who sabotages productive dialogue with deliberate malice, under the pretense that they're honestly just trying to pursue this particular angle on the topic and don't understand why this would make any reasonable person upset. However, what they're really after is the reaction and ensuing chaos. Whether they really believe their own topical angle is largely irrelevant.

There's the alternate maritime analogy, which I still insist ought to be spelled as "trawling" or "trawlers": deliberate malicious disruptors who don't even bother with a pretense, and just apply brute-force methods like goatse image posts or airhorns to trap their targets into reactive thrashing.

I don't know what to call quasi-trolls who really are clueless about social cues, and may be aware that they're annoying people with their topical approach but at least genuinely believe in its importance. or maybe they're not even aware that people are being annoyed, or don't understand why anyone would be annoyed by this argument because annoyance just seems unreasonable.( Read more... )

I've now lost count of how many lampwork classes I've gone to, though I could probably recover the tally from my checkbook register. I'm enjoying them, but I'm not quite sure what long-term goals I have, if any.( Read more... )

...I've been unsuccessfully trying to work out another color-coded "elements" set of magatama necklaces: the five (or six) Eastern ones (earth, metal, wood, water, and fire; air/sky was occasionally added to the set in China) or the four Western ones (earth, water, fire, and air; let's ignore "spirit/aether" for now).( elemental color stuff )

So instead, I've ended up working out two pieces (for "piece" = necklace and matching earrings) of color-coded emotional dyadic symbolism; I've mostly tried to base the color linkages on English-language idioms, but they're bound to be somewhat idiosyncratic (frex blue <- healing <- the Virgin Mary's robes? is the only way I've managed to rationalize that one).

The blue one is sorrow/healing, with teardrop shapes and freshwater pearls; pearls are formed around a core of pain, but the mollusc uses that to form something precious and beautiful.

The yellow one is fear/hope, with long rounded tubes to resemble a draped yellow ribbon and some transformational play with little lemon-shaped beads-- they first appear as single drops, in obviously lemony format; they then combine with other beads to form a sort of stylized bee; and finally in the centerpiece, the lemons form the petals of a flower. I've probably overthought the symbolism, but there's sort of a double idea of lemons/lemonade and bees/honey. It might be one of those things that requires too much explanation, though.

So now I'm pushing around various red beads, with a general idea of double-edged passion: love and/or violence. There are some odd little drops I'd like to use that resemble a closed fist-- I have no idea what their original cultural context was, but they seem like a possible good match (and the only thing I've ever been able to work them into was a notional nod to the goddess Kali's hula skirt of severed hands). Or if I can find more conventional teardrop-shaped drops in red (they're probably around here somewhere), they could probably undergo transformations in a similar way to the lemon, from individual blood drops to clustered flower buds or pomegranate seeds etc.).

So that would complete a red/yellow/blue triad of primary colors, but I'm still curious about finding a similar emotional dyad for green; "jealousy" would be one obvious starting point, or perhaps a more general sense of "possession/acquisitiveness" if material greed is also folded in-- but what would be a good oppositional emotion that's also associated with green? If the "green" holistic/global movement is taken into account, perhaps a dichotomy between selfishness and... um... I'm not sure how to articulate its opposite in this context; taking account of the effects of one's own actions on other people? "Generosity/harvest" would be easier to describe, but doesn't quite feel right to me :|

(Not really a little jig of despair; more like a slow waltz of apathy. How do you set goals when your only goals are to *have* goals?)

They have so many things I do not want,
And yet it's not as if I have my own
Things that would take their place. The telephone
Rings to itself; the unsaid elephant
Fills up the room as unread papers count
The days to weeks, the trees to empty bone.

I have nothing to say to them, nor words
That I could say it with: pluperfect hope
Without a present tense, an isotope
On Xeno's path of lives half-lived. Absurd
To linger there, better to move forward--
But I've no address on my envelope.

No, not sleep-drinking per se. Found this article while poking around the web for material on apnea and circadian disturbances. As evidence that I am a big geek, the first thing that came to mind was Sohma Yuki, the very much not-a-morning-person ratboy from Fruits Basket.

This paper seems very similar to one of the wheels I was trying to simultaneously spin around and re-invent in my previous entry, though centered more around the Indian diaspora than what I'd been poking at. I'll have to read it more carefully when my brain cell is working again.

And yes, of course there's a gulf of homelessnesses(es) between the metaphorical state of rootless cosmopolitans and the literal state of unemployed mental illness in a cardboard box; existential angst sometimes seems a decadent luxury reserved for those with the leisure to contemplate their existence rather than exhausting themselves for the mere sustenance thereof. Still, there but for the grace of the wombat-consort go I.

It's a surprisingly bright, sunny morning, and therefore too cold to slide open the glass patio door. The wombatcave is nestled within a fractal set of gaps among the hills-- there's the big gap all the way from the coast where the tidal fog comes through every night, plus we're down near a streambed where mist tends to collect/persist even when the hills are dry and clear. The misty foggy stuff buffers our local picoclimate to a fairly consistent year-round average, so that clear days in winter are Too Cold and clear days in summer are Too Hot.

Without access to the hinged flap in the screen door, the cats have resorted to sullen punk lurkage (and occasional failed pounces) at the birdfeeder on the other side, or rather the confetti scattered below it. When I first hung the feeder from the eaves, all we got at first were some bluejay-type things-- not the crested bluejays I grew up with on the East Coast, though they're roughly the same size; these are black-headed Stellar's Jays and crestless scrub jays.

Which brings me to a conversationish thing between me and the wombat-consort this past weekend, both sides having been delivered entirely in the same Marvin-the-Paranoid-Android deadpan monotone--

Him: That's a lot of little brown birds out there.
Me: We finally widened the clientele. The bluejays were too big to balance on the feeder, so they just kept dive-bombing it to piñata millet all over the deck. I guess the key was finding birdseed that wouldn't roll out and had to be et in situ.
Him: Is that brown basmati rice out there? The organic brown basmati I bought from Trader Joe's?
Me: It smelled stale when I found it in the back of the pantry. Must be at least two years old by now.
Him: Don't birds explode if they eat rice?
Me: Yes. They do. This is why all birds have gone extinct in Asia. Sometime new species attempt to migrate in, but come rice-harvest season, it's back to the exploding feathery carnage as far as the eye can see.

--at which point I suddenly remembered Miles Vorkosigan's question to Ekaterin in the attic during A Civil Campaign: "How can you stand me? I can't even stand me!" Not that the wombat-consort himself seemed to mind, but still. Sigh.

In the midst of trying to tessellate together small scraps of poetry, I think I've finally figured out why I've never liked "The Waste Land" On the other hand, I may be any combination of misguided, trite, or incoherent :b ( Read more... )

Dangit. I was asleep for most of the past 36 hours, and am already starting to get drowsy again despite my antinarcoleptic meds. I really don't want to increase my dosage again, esp. since the FDA is reputedly planning to clamp down on off-label prescriptions and I don't have a formal diagnosis of narcolepsy per se.

On a possibly related note, I think that last week, I completely tanked the first job interview I've had for the past year-- it was for a "library assistant" position, but almost all of the questions were about generic customer-service issues rather than anything that seemed really specific to, well, libraries. By the time they asked me for a closing statement about why I wanted to work in a library, I was very tempted to say, "So I wouldn't have to deal with people", but managed to suppress that. However, I have no memory of what I actually did come up with-- certainly not the reasonably truthful answer that came to me on the way home, which was that after assessing my non-labwork skills, I figured that I wasn't sure that I had that much useful knowledge of any one particular field, but I was pretty good at knowing how to look stuff up. Unfortunately, it seems that to be a Real Reference Librarian, I'd have to get an actual degree in Library Science-- which might not take much longer than a two years' program for a master's degree, but I still don't know whether I really want to work in a library to start with.

However, I've finally achieved a vague resemblance to professional authorship, at least in the sense of actually getting paid in something besides contributors' copies or an entry in my yearly employee evaluation. Didn't pay all that much, but then the market value of sharp sticks in the eye continues to decline by comparison.

I've been pondering the following for a few days, and still can't decide whether the proper reaction is, assuming there is such a thing. Still, there's practically no chance that anyone directly involved is likely to find my blog, esp. without any incriminating keywords/names.

Sometime last week on one of the sites I usually follow, a new user appeared whose general outlook on life was a strange blend of cynicism and despair: "People suck and you just have to live with that, although I woulddn't if I hadn't promised to." Gradually he started to reshape the entire discussion so it was All About Him, though I genuinely think it wasn't entirely deliberate on his part-- he kept filling in more of his personal background, of which the most pertinent part was that his only reason to hold back from suicide was a promise made to the second love of his life before she died from cancer. The regular posters gave up on him eventually, and it's entirely possible that the site owner just plain locked him out as being inconducive to the original topic. But I felt obscurely sorry enough for him to start poking around the web for more information about him and his late sweetie. ( Read more... )