Daily Life: The Cool of the Night

The cool of the night
Like crisp sheets slips over you
A dreaming embrace

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Daily Life: Children of the Night - SHUT UP!

Silence is a precious commodity in our modern world. It is rare we can reach the point of true silence unless we are enclosed somewhere or isolated somewhere. I am craving a certain silence today and I suspect that the craving is going to be mostly denied. Here at work, between the chattering of voices, telephones reading, keyboards rattling, construction in the building, loud conversations in the hallway - well, silence seems a rare commodity.

When I find that I cannot attain silence, I can often attain a small degree of the same need by putting in my earphones and listening to my iPod. It is not silence, but it is mercifully free of the assorted distractions that come from working in an enclosed area with multiple people, including a few who have irritating voices, either in tone or mannerism.

Today, I am craving silence. I just flashed on the movie Love At First Bite, with George Hamilton. There is a scene in the movie where, awakened by the howling of wolves, Dracula arises from his coffin, blinks, and shouts: "Children of the Night - SHUT UP!". It is a funny little movie if you have never seen it before.

Poetry: An Ocean of Chance

An endless current
Has tangled our worlds together
An ocean of chance

(My entry today over at One Minute Writer)

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Daily Life: A Tad Hot

It is chasing 10:00 PM here in San Jose. We are having a spell of warm weather that is supposed to last through the end of the week - days are in the low nineties and high eighties, which is hot for here. I had been running the AC more that I usually do, so tonight, when I made it home, I kicked open all the windows and fired up the fans to get some clean air circulating. They are whirring away fight now and I am sure if my apartment had wings it would take off.

It was a quiet day at work today with a triple set of time consuming challenges that rose up, a customer request, a mistake during a deployment of code, and a server problem - the full gamut. Fortunately, because it was a quiet day, they were all resolved rather smoothly. After work I swung by the grocery store and met my friend Tony at Johnny Rockets (Tony had dinner, I had ice cream and a brownie), then picked up some odds and ends and swung home.

I spent most of the evening reading - I am nearing the end of Assassin's Quest and am letting it stretch out - I should finish it by this week and then I plan to be on to Dean Koontz's "Relentless" - I am looking forward to it very much as I have heard from two other Koontz fans that it is very good. I have about three weeks until I start my vacation - a full two weeks plus off. About half of it will be spend in San Diego at the ultimate pop-culture event, Comic Con San Diego, and the rest of it will be spend at home - I am definitely looking forward to both parts of the vacation! It has been a long stretch since my last vacation that was longer than an extended weekend, though in all fairness I have made it a point to take several shorter, more local, vacations, it's just not quite the same.

I still feel semi-blocked when it comes to writing - I have a couple of stories I would like to tell, but they are just not coming out - they are in there, sort of hovering. I get a feeling they are going to hover a little more and then come pouring out all at once, which will be kind of cool.

Poetry: Haiku Upon Waking

I glimpsed your face
In the sun dappled leaves
That woke me today

-For T.R.

Daily Life: My Favorite Farah Fawcett Memory

It was the summer of 1977. It is hard to believe that it was over thirty years ago. I had gone from St. Francis Indian School to Philips Academy at Andover, MA for the summer semester on an exchange program. I went with James Murphy (always James, never Jim) and Leo Little Bald Eagle, on scholarships. It was, for me, a journey into another world. I'd gone from the poverty of the reservation* to the insular world of a private prep school in the space of an airline flight, my first. We were housed in dorms there on the campus and I had a small simple room that opened up onto the stair landing. There wasn't much in the room - a bed, a desk, a dresser and a pair of chairs. It was nice though. The window looked out over the front porch of the dorm.

It came to my mind yesterday with the death of Farah Fawcett. I recall that iconic poster on the wall of my dorm room, there at Phillips Academy. I was just looking at their website. It took me a moment to orient myself (I oriented off the Oliver Wendell Holmes Library, were we would often sprawl on the lawns. The Commons, where we ate our meals. The Gelb Science Center, where I had a class in Animal Behavior. The Tang Theatre, where I saw one of the first plays I can recall. The Bell Tower. I also had classes in Fencing (LOL - with swords, not for cows and horses, I was a master of that later by the time I went there and could string barbed wire with the best of them, as the small scars on my hands attest).

I've been sitting here at the computer taking the virtual tour. I have fond memories from that summer, as it was probably my first real exposure to the world beyond the reservation for an extended period of time. I can recall going downtown to shop at a small bookstore, built into a house. The Science Fiction/Fantasy section was in the attic and it was there, during that summer, that I bought and read Edgar Rice Burrough's entire "John Carter, Warlord of Mars" series of books. It was also there that I checked out and first read the Lord of the Rings (having read the Hobbit the summer before, oh, about a hundred times). I recall an ice cream shop downtown as well. Mrs. Barrett, an English teacher at St. Francis Indian School, was from the area and on several weekends she had us over to her mothers house to BBQ and to play in their pool. (I think that was probably the first time I ever swam in a personal swimming pool as well.) I remember we imprinted a duckling for animal behavior glass and I named mine "Ham". I remember how much fun it was learning to fence. I also learned to play tennis that summer.

Some very fond memories, tinged with the bittersweet. Leo died several years later in a car accident back on the reservation. James, last I heard, was married, living in Colorado, and still working behind the scenes in television. I have no idea what happened to Mrs. Barrett, but I have very fond memories of her and our other English teacher at St. Francis, Ms. Weed. They managed to instill in me (as did my family) the love of reading and literature that remains with me to this day. Two years later one of my sisters attended the same summer session. She has equally fond memories. Except, she got hit by a car crossing the street and spent several weeks living at Mrs. Barrett's mothers house as she recuperated.

*The Rosebud is one of the poorest places in America, but when you grow up in that poverty, you simply don't realize it. Though it may be economically poor, it is also rich in ways almost unimaginable - tradition, beauty, family, a profound sense of place.

Daily Life: The Simplicity of Beautiful Things

Midway through the day I decided I would have dinner al fresco
tonight. The weather is perfect for it. Highs touched eighty, low
probably into the sixties. The sun is golden, the skies a vivid blue,
the mountains a deep shade of lush green. I sat at a table with a red
checkered table cloth.

The waitress was a slender woman, verging on lean, indeterminate in
age, shoulder length brown hair, hazel eyes, a face with character, a
wry smile, a New York accent, just enough wrinkles for her to have a
lived in air. She was dressed in black shoes, black slacks, a white
shirt, a black vest. The only variant from her uniform her belt,
broad, leather, black with silver rings and, like her face,
comfortably worn.

First was a tall glass of iced tea. Second an appetizer of fresh
tomato, Greek olives, mozarella cheese, drizzles with a basil olive
oil. Third a four cheese pizza, fresh, warm, with delicate flavors
spun together. For dessert, the magic - Sheer Bliss Mediterranean
Coffee ice cream, delicately mined from the tin with a tea spoon.

The end result, the simplicity of the beautiful things of life. Good
weather, good food, good company and love traveling down strange
vectors.

Sent from my iPhone

Daily Life: Num Lock, Egg Drop Soup, and Noil Silk

Well, it took me a while to figure out how to turn the NUM LOCK off on this laptop. In the course of learning that I managed to find out how to put it into battery conserving sleep mode! I guess we learn something every day.

I woke this morning for a dream of noil silk (a type of raw silk), of great bolts of it draping and cascading. It was a visually powerful and charged dream. The dream pretty much set the mood of the day for me and I moved through the day with an strong sensual awareness. Work went smoothly, productively and quickly. Lunch was a simple egg drop soup (not the best I have ever had, that honor usually goes to Tao Tao in Sunnyvale, where they make an excellent egg drop soup. I wrapped up the day reviewing a couple of training modules (all in all a vast improvement over what we have in place now), so that was good focus time. I like those moments in work where you lose yourself.

Dinner was a chicken Caesar salad and a bottle of sparkling water at a local restaurant, then a quiet evening at home. I spent most of the evening reading the last of the Robin Hobb trilogy I have been working my way through, called “Assassins Quest”. It is also an excellent read. I about twenty five percent through it and I will probably dedicate another hour or so to it tonight. I’ve also downloaded the Kindle application for my iPhone, which has me doing something I used to do years ago but fell out of the habit, which is read on breaks and at lunch during work. That is speeding me through the novels a little faster.

Then, I have Dean Koontz’s new novel, “Relentless” waiting in the hopper. (That is actually a tribute to Robin Hobb – I am a huge Koontz fan and when he comes out with a new novel he is automatically bumped to the top of the list – and in this case, he wasn’t – because I want to see how Hobb wraps up the Assassins Quest.)

It is a beautiful evening here right now. The day was hot, in the high eighties, and now it is dropping off into the seventies, heading straight into the sixties. There is still a band of soft gray at the western horizon and a few stars are peeking out. I’ve got all the windows open, there is a cooling breeze drifting through the living room, and having had a good conversation with my dear T.R., I am wrapping the night up with a little bit of writing and “So You Think You Can Dance”. It is a guilty pleasure for me, and I tend to be fond of guilty pleasures.

Daily Life: Are You In Over Your Head?

“If you aren't in over your head, how do you know how tall you are?”
T. S. Eliot

I shared the quote above today with several people, including those folks that work for me. I thought T.S. Eliot expressed something very important that people, including me, sometimes struggle with. There are definitely times when we want things to just go smoothly, we'd like the pace of change to slow down, we would like to just ride a constant current through life. Life and the universe often have another opinion on the whole subject.

However, I think the above quote hits right to the core of it all. If you are not stretching, if you are not pushing yourself to the edges of the envelope, if you are not trying to clamber over the walls of the box life has settled you into, how do you know what you are capable of? Good management, good mentoring, good leadership, good teaching and good parenting all have this in common. They seek to encourage people to reach beyond themselves and to be taller than we really are.

Years ago, when I was lost and trying to find myself, a large part of that journey was trying to figure who I really was. As anyone who has ventured on the journey of self-exploration rapidly discovers, it is a lot harder than it looks. Starting with the mores and norms of our general society we wander down through the specifics of our subclasses and subcultures, all the way down into the tiny little daily habits that infuse our life, we are often shaped very much by the environmental influences in our lives.

We often discover that there are many things in our lives that we do or fail to do because of external influences that we did not deliberately consent to. We may dress a certain way because we perceive that is the way we are supposed to dress. We may cling to a certain job because we have convinced ourselves it is the best job there is. We may not seek out a new position because…well you get the picture. We conspire to hide the internal self in the camouflage of the external self.

There are a lot of reasons we never reach out to the world to measure ourselves against it, to see how tall we are. Many of them are very good reasons and involve that intricate balancing act that is life. But, often enough, they are default decisions. We do not measure how tall we are simply because…we don't. So, that brings me to wonder today - how tall am I? How tall are you? Are we in over our heads? Why not? My answer is simple, on reflection - I am not as tall as I could be. I am not in over my head. Finally, I really like T.S. Eliot. Smart guy.

Daily Life: Three Days Later

Well, I had an excellent three day weekend. About 9:00 a.m. on Friday I drove over to Pierre and Helen’s. I amused myself packing that morning. Here is the scenario – I am driving across the city, about ten miles from my apartment, where I am going to spend three nights. You would think it would be simple – a few changes of clothes, the usual traveling toys, the Kindle for reading. Well, I end up taking four baskets of laundry (might as well do laundry over the weekend while I am there), three laptops (work laptop for Monday or anything that arises over the weekend, personal laptop one because that is the primary laptop I play with, and personal laptop two (my old Mac) because I want to move some data from the Mac over to the personal laptop, specific some photo files loaded on the Mac. Then of course, to support that hardware, I have to take the assorted chargers. Three laptop chargers (I forget one, we will get back to that later in this entry), my iPhone charger, my Bluetooth charger, my camera charger, my electric razor charger, my Kindle charger. Then, I take some movies that I want to watch (including Season One of “The Big Bang Theory”), I take a game I want to play (Resident Evil 3), and I take two software packages I want to load (Photoshop and Sony Audio). My suitcase is pretty much entirely packed with electronics accessories. It is a good thing I brought four baskets of laundry. In short, I have enough stuff in the car, you would think I was going away for a much longer trip! All this from the guy who prides himself on his ability to pack lightly and quickly.

Once I settle in though, it was an excellent semi-retreat style weekend. Friday was nice, Saturday I took Timmy (the dog) out for a hike. Of course, Timmy is a small dog so his idea of hiking is walk a hundred yards and then have me carry him the rest of the way. Fortunately he is small enough that you can drape him over the shoulder and he can stay comfortably perched there. (Small note – someone really needs to invent doggie Tic-Tacs. Timmy could use a whole box of them.) Then, in the afternoon I socialized with friends, which was very nice and relaxing. Saturday evening was quite – I watched the movie Knights Tale (the rock and roll jousting movie starring Heath Ledger) and some incidental televison and then read deeply into night. Sunday was the pure retreat day. I spent most of it playing on the computer and watching The Big Bang Theory – which, if you have never seen it, is a sincerely funny television show. Both Saturday and Sunday I came online and made my way through the morning wandering chat and surfing the web and laughing, both with the things I saw and at the things I saw. Sunday evening I cooked some tortellini, conversed with family and friends, and the later in the evening watched “Mama Mia”, which, I have to say, I found surprisingly good.

I woke this morning with a great phone call from T.R., and then went off to log on and attend a teleconference briefing for management about forthcoming changes in our benefits packages at work. From there, another quick pair of meetings – and then the battery on my work laptop conked out. Followed in short order by the battery on my iPhone. I plugged to iPhone into the wall and loaded Timmy up and drove home to get my work laptop charger. Timmy went absolutely insane, running through the entire apartment and crawling into everything, all the while frantically sniffing. When his whirlwind scent tour was completed, he seemed quite content. We drove back across town and I stopped to pick up a deli sandwich for lunch. Now, it is nearing 1:00 PM, lunch is finished, and I am sitting here in the cool morning listening to the fish tank bubbling, Timmy snoring, and birds singing outside. Not a bad weekend at all.