Positively Glorious!

I dreamt last night
that we meditated on a kiss.

Minutes
spent as we leaned toward each other
skin to skin.
Arms surrounding like fire.

Hours
passed while lips felt the fabric of other
warmth.
Breathing, we filled the lungs of one another.

Tingled days
of starbursts we spent as our embrace shocked us
from neck to loins.
Bodies alive with a desire almost torturous.

Weeks
floating as we pulled apart in that one, long, magical moment
eyes locked.

A month
A mystic kiss that lasted
a whole month.

I dreamt last night
that we meditated on a kiss.

The truth, sadly, is much faster.

Seconds
Lips brushing in an open doorway.

Moments
A quick peck in the car.

The truth, sadly, is much faster.

But I dreamt last night
that we meditated on our kiss.

Has it been that long?

This is crazy. I love writing so much, and yet haven’t written anything since before freakin’ BELTANE!!

I’ve got lots of stuff in my head, it’s just that I haven’t taken the time to actually write it. The reason for this is actually the topic of a blog post I’m, well, writing in my head. It’s called “The Off Switch” and it’s about the fact that I don’t seem to have one.

Anyway, I’ve updated to WordPress 3.0, but still have yet to finish some posts. Hopefully, I’ll get to that soon.

Another note about the 8 spoke wheel from the glorious Anne Key:

Greetings! Today is the First Day of Summer,  the cross-quarter day between Spring Equinox and Summer Solstice. If we think of the summer as the Season of the Light, then we can see that now it is definitely lighter in the mornings (am I the only one waking up at 5am?).  This holiday is usually called Beltane, but I’ve been thinking of it as the  Greeting of the Flame because it heralds the beginning of the long bright days.

I feel a sense of relief  and respite at this point of the year after this busy and intense Spring. Though the sun has me up and working earlier and earlier, I find myself mid-day searching out the sunny spot on the couch, reveling in the light. Take a moment at this cross-point in the year to revel in the light of your own accomplishments, and give a word of thanks to those whose light has warmed and illuminated your life.

Note on Dates: Traditionally Beltane is celebrated on May 1st or the eve before. Astrologically, the First Day of Summer may be calculated as the date the Sun is at 15° Taurus (Tropical system), which currently Falls around May 4th to 5th.

This is one of those posts that I could write up on mettadore.com, because it seems techy, but that’s precisely the reason I’m writing it up here, because it’s not. This is something better suited to the general public, so here.

Jess and I recently got cell phones. After some initial difficulties with service we went with Verizon. Immediately after starting service, I noticed that Verizon was charging $4/month for a service they call “visual voicemail.”

For those who don’t know, visual voicemail is a “special service” where they record the voicemail, transcribe it into text, and store it in an email-like account that you can read, or play back, at will– without the need to call into your voicemail.

Hrm… sounds like the free service called Google Voice to me.

Continue Reading »

Recently, Jessica and I took the plunge into Cell Phone land. After years of working without them, it was becoming evident that my business work was suffering a bit. Also, since we don’t have long distance on our house phone, Jessica wasn’t talking with her family as much as she wanted. So, after a grudging decision, we jumped in.

Jess didn’t want a smart phone. Just a regular phone without a bunch of bells and whistles. Me? Because I’m such a geek, I jumped straight into the Android Open Source operating system world with a Motorola Cliq.

Mostly, it’s because I do a lot of things that warrant a certain amount of information accessibility. But it’s also because I just like to play with computers, and the smart phones of today are more powerful computers than I was programming on 15 years ago. Amazing.

Still, the most fun I’ve had with it so far is not really techy at all. It’s something that phones have had for a long time: Custom ringtones.

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So I’m walking down the street last night. It’s dark, and I’m walking fast because I’m meeting my fair Jessica at a restaurant and want to be there before her, because I don’t mind waiting for her, but I know she doesn’t like waiting for me.

So, I’m walking faster than usual.

It was a beautiful night, actually. Pretty warm. I had my favorite brown leather “not used for a motorcycle anymore because I sold that to Jessie’s father” jacket and a new pair of  “original, hard as freakin cardboard because I’m not buying any of that ‘about to break down pre-washed’ crap” Levi jeans.

So there I am, hair down and flowing, all 6+ foot of me, striding down the hill thinking “I can’t wait to get to the restaurant and read my book until Jessie shows up.”

But that’s not what other people were thinking, I guess. Continue Reading »

Here’s a story. It’s apropos of nothing, but I’ve been too busy to write enough here, so I thought this would make people smile.

I could go on and on about how it’s a story of Social Networking, and how sometimes the world is a better place because we’re closer, or at least more able to contact people for random bits of meaningless and make friends.

It could be a story about how we’re not so distant, or maybe how we’re differently distant.

But it’s not, because then I’d feel the need to actually do a bit of research to support my theory, and post it on mettadore.com, which I know plenty of people are sick of. So, rather than anything meaningful, it’s merely an amusing anecdote.

I was at work, drinking maté, typing away, la la la, work work work, data data data, la la l–

AHH!

I spilled maté on my mac!

Well, the story’s a happy one, because, as you can see from the image of my tweet, physics saved me. That’s not always the case. At certain times, physics is a right bastard, particularly when I’m on my skateboard, or ice skates, or standing on my roof trying one more time to get my Superman Underroos to do their damn job!

Anyway, physics is sometimes a bastard, but this time it was cool.

So today, I got an email message from someone that made me chuckle:

Hi John-

Google led me to your tweet from 1/28: “The surface tension of water is strong enough that water won’t flow into certain sized holes… like those of a MacBook Pro’s speaker.”

I just spilled a (small) bit of iced coffee onto my 15″ 2008 MBP left speaker grill, so the topic is near to me… The coffee seemed to just sit on the grill for the couple of seconds it took me to wipe it off. My empirical evidence supports you theory.

First, I looked on the web for teardown photos to see where the microphone was. No luck. Since I’m wondering if I might have any trouble, I was wondering if you had any more background for your MBP speaker/surface tension info.

Thanks!

I thought it was pretty funny that someone would actually look up “surface tension” or something like that- what a total geek. What was funnier was that I actually looked it up, and started to do a calculation the day it happened, just to see. Now “that’s” a total geek!

Anyway, I sent a message back, mostly to be funny, because I always feel both funnier and more helpful when I connect to someone through social networking.

Hi! Wow, pretty funny connection. Social Networking FTW!

So, no, nothing. No problems and no later developments. I did calculations of surface tension in grad school and the size of those holes are, in fact, too small. However, I will give the caveat that certain things increase or decrease the surface tension of water. “Uh oh? Where’s he going with this?” You ask.

For instance, cat spit. I have some knowledge of cat spit, and it decreases water’s surface tension. Don’t ask me how I know this, it’s an embarrassing situation that I’m still in counseling for. Suffice it to say that if you have a cat, you may want to be careful letting him drink beverages around your laptop (The whole “lack of a thumb” thing is hard for them, but I’ve learned that now, and we’re moving on)

Anyway, I’m not sure where coffee is on this. Whether it increases or decreases it. However, even if it decreased it, it would have to be an insane amount to get into that grill. My suspicion is that the Apple engineers are somewhat sloppy drinkers, and have thought about everything– based on they’re own klutsy habits!

I think your safe. Yay Mac!

Hope everything else is equally peachy.
-J

The whole exchange got me thinking about my New Year’s Resolution for 2009, which I’ve re-resolved for 2010. That was “to be more Irish.” It’s a tough goal. Being Irish is nothing to sniff at. It’s no easy feat, but I’m convinced I can do it if I work hard enough. This exchange bodes well, because the Irish have a saying that a stranger is just a friend you haven’t met yet.

This person shot me an email out of the blue, and email to a stranger, and email to a friend she hasn’t met yet. That’s the cool thing about social networking. We’re all friends.

Yay for Social Networking! (and yay for the Irish, too!)

I have this habit of playing a silly game that I call “The Deep Joke.” The name is a bit of a “thought train,” but basically comes out of a childhood search for meaning and an album called “Deep Breakfast,” itself named after a book.

Anyway, when I was a child, I learned something about comedy. I learned that there were things called “jokes.” I know, it’s not revolutionary, but to me it was pretty amazing, because as soon as I learned about jokes, I started– as is my wont– pushing the boundaries of them.

Very quickly I found that the concept went deeper than I thought. Because most jokes were about something. That’s like the fundamenal joke. The simple joke. A comment about something. They’re fun, sure, but I wanted more.

Maybe it’s because of my father, and his semi-Indian-incredibly-subtle-always-multiple-meanings form of communication, or maybe it’s just because I really liked jokes. Whatever the reason, slowly, I came to realize that it was much more fun to be had if you didn’t limit yourself to simply making jokes about something. It was possible to make jokes about about something.

It became my habit to make what I started to call “deep jokes.”

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I have this common statement that I make that’s actually an inside joke that I think only I get. Whenever I’m ending something, I say “Well, you know what the music means.” I’ve been given cause recently to wonder that some people might not.

I had a wonderful dinner the other evening with a friend that Jessica and I’ve met through our local community theater. We’ve been wanting to get together to chat for a while, and finally had the chance to visit them for dinner. It was a really exciting night for me because her husband is a bagpiper, and I really, really love the bagpipes. Not the Great Highland Bagpipes (The “GHB,” as they say), I love small pipes.¹ That small, very ancient instrument that you can safely listen to in the intimacy of a small room and which rarely fail to touch pluck my heartstrings.

This man was a small piper, and I was really excited to finally be in the same room with this great instrument. I was even honored by being allowed to play them! For the first time in my life, I held this wonderful instrument in my hand and managed to get out the few first bars of “Mary Had A Little Lamb” before collapsing into laughter.

What bliss! It was as night filled with music and conversation, but there was one interesting conversation that the night brought on which I thought about long after the night was over. In fact, I thought about it all that night, and all the next day.

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1. And there are a lot of small pipes. In fact there’s a list of bagpipes that shows that they are ridiculously culturally ubiquitous in Europe, Asia, and Northern Africa. [↩]

Yesterday, I saw an interesting snippet on Manton Reece’s blog. It’s actually a snippet of a snippet, because it was originally written by Seth Godin:

When I was at MOMA last week, I saw a list of director and artist Tim Burton’s projects. Here’s the guy who’s responsible for some of the most breathtaking movies of his generation, and the real surprise is this: almost every year over the last thirty, he worked on one or more exciting projects that were never green lighted and produced. Every year, he spent an enormous amount of time on failed projects.

This is not at all a surprise to me, because I do the same thing. Continue Reading »