Thu | June 30, 2005
subscribe
there is a subscribe feature where I can list people to be notified about new posts. let me know if you want to be added to the list.
| Posted by Lily at 08:14 PM | comment
Kush Tandon said on Jun 5, 07 12:22 AM:
Lily,
Put me on your subscription list. Thanks !!
Happy 07.04
Cheers,
Kush
launchcast
my online radio station of the moment. who knows how long before I get bored of this. however, not I'm listening to it at the moment, because I'm at cafe muse and they are playing music in another language. yay. and the apple bread is good. yum. what am I doing here? nothing. just need to be here because I'd feel drained if I went straight home. unfortunately i'm basically having cake and pastries for dinner.
Web/Tech | Posted by Lily at 06:57 PM | comment
more morbidity
"You will never be so close to life as in the moment before your death."
I had wanted to include that line in the 'illness' "story" but it didn't fit. Perhaps I'll do it later. Or write some other story which does have that line. It seems that, unless you die in your sleep, you will never be more aware of life than when you are about to die. I suppose that assumes that feeling alive has something to do with consciousness, or that consciousness heightens your sense of being alive.
| Posted by Lily at 10:32 AM | comment
C said on Jun 5, 07 12:22 AM:
My take on the life & moment of death statement is that we take things for granted and won't know just how precious life is until we lose it. Take the line from Joni Mitchell's Big Yellow Taxi - "Ain't it always strange to you that you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone." It's human nature to want the things we can't have. Life, whether we know it or not, is the greatest gift we have and it make sense to me that at the moment of death - when life is lost forever - life is what we want more than anything else.
Wed | June 29, 2005
illness
"Don't stand too close," said the mother to the child. "You don't want to catch Mommy's germs."
She rested from the effort it had taken to speak the words. They had tasted metallic as they passed the back of her throat. She had the sensation that while she spoke, or even breathed, her brain swelled and pushed against the inside of her skull.
The child sat on a spot on the bedroom floor and disassembled a toy-- a set of three dowels on which donut-shaped pieces of smaller and smaller size are stacked. It was a toy for infants, but the mother also knew it as a logic puzzle. The challenge was to transfer the stack of donuts from one dowel to the other in the fewest number of steps. Only one donut could be moved at a time, and a donut could never be stacked atop a smaller donut.
The child began to manipulate the pieces. The mother closed her eyes and focused her thoughts on her illness. She felt that by thinking about it, identifying its elements, and describing it to herself in greater and greater detail, she gained control over it. Every cell on her surface simmered with fever and sweat. She felt areas of her skin cool and then reheat as she shifted, exposing them to the air. She listened to the air. There was no fan and no draft; it was something like the air in the middle of the night. It undulated with her breath-- or perhaps her breath disrupted the ambience of the room. The sound of the room trembled beneath the sound of her breath. The sound of her child playing with the toy did not disturb it in the same way. It was so much louder as to be incomparable.
Time crawls slowly forward when one is sick, and she timed its passing like a musical conductor feeling the beat. She felt the beats pass until she knew its rate. Time was passing at a fifth its usual pace.
Finally she opened her eyes. The child had finished stacking the pieces and had looked up for approval, which the mother gave with a smile. Then, perceiving a form in her misty thoughts, her face acquired a devious expression.
"I like being sick," she whispered stealthily. The child showed no visible reaction. She continued, "I am so conscious of being alive. I feel every moment; a breath is an event. I am walking along the cliff of extinction and peering into the chasm below. There is nothing more exhilirating-- more refreshing-- than a virulent cold."
Histoires | Posted by Lily at 01:04 AM | comment
Tue | June 28, 2005
today
this afternoon i'm at K, working on a passage. this morning-- what did i do? I've forgotten already. I killed some time surfing friendster, an indulgence I only allow myself once in a long while. I am still a little sick, so I have been taking it kind of easy. Though sometimes I notice I am sick for exactly as much time as I have. I knew I would have to come in today and I recovered just in time. I worked on another short fiction last night, a little, about a sick person. I'm not sure what I'm doing with it. I'd better finish it before I lose enthusiasm for it. which is often a problem with stuff I start writing.
journal | Posted by Lily at 02:55 PM | comment
Mon | June 27, 2005
today
I am at home. I rescheduled my tutoring appointment for tomorrow or wednesday morning, though I should probably have just gotten it over with this morning. She is taking the GRE on Thursday and I didn't want to get her sick. She was probably more bothered at rescheduling than sitting next to me when I have a cold. Now that I'm thinking about it, I realize this is the second time I've rescheduled with this tutoring student. And yet if I had gone this morning it would have been awful, because I had run out of cough syrup and hadn't done (and still haven't done) the passages we're going to do next. I will have to do those later today.
Now I have been doing miscellaneous things, and thus basically been doing nothing. I did start to make a spreadsheet of all my books, for no reason, but which I will probably work on and try to finish today. At least, I will finish listing all the books on my bookshelf. I have books in boxes that I will probably not include just yet. I don't really know why I'm doing this, except that I've thought of doing it so often that I have just finally decided to do it.
journal | Posted by Lily at 02:54 PM | comment
Sun | June 26, 2005
Parts
"Do one thing for me."
"What?"
"Come to this party. You are the perfect person for the part."
"Part? What part?"
"The part of cool-looking companion."
"...who isn't your boyfriend?"
"I think it'll be clear we're just friends."
"You want me to go with you to this party so you can stalk James."
"So I can see James."
"What makes me cool? That I'm black?"
"No... just... you're tall. And you dress well."
"And I'm black."
"No that has nothing to do with it. In fact you might be the only black person there."
"So why am I so good for the part?"
"I can chat with you and James at the same time. You've met him."
"Fine. I'll go."
And this is how we wound up at Phil's house on July 4th weekend. Ralph, perhaps sore at his role as an accessory, carelessly consumed most of the vegetable platter. I situated myself so that I could see James and we talked about nothing.
"Well that was useless," he said as we walked away.
"No, it wasn't."
"You hardly talked to him."
"But he looked at me a lot."
"Perhaps he was only looking at you to wonder why you were looking at him."
"I wasn't looking at him. I was talking to you."
"Then how did you know he was looking at you?"
"I could tell."
"Whatever. That's nothing."
"It's something. It's next to nothing but it's something."
"Well I'm not going to play this little part again."
"You had the bigger part," I said, letting his eyes rest on mine. "You had more lines. We talked all night."
Histoires | Posted by Lily at 04:01 PM | comment
Sat | June 25, 2005
welcome to my new blog
So I've decided to blog here instead of at friendster. Someone told me that he was getting a message from friendster every time I posted. I don't want to email 50 people every time I post. So here I am.
I learned that Odille, which previously I had only known as a label of clothing at Anthropologie, is from Swan Lake. I watched part of that ballet on PBS at 4 am. I thought about E's pretentious friend whom we ran into at Whole Foods, and who said she was going to the ballet, but she pronounced it weirdly. I've never watched ballet on tv before, though I've run across it several times. It was actually kind of entertaining to watch the fluttering legs and connect the motion with emotion. And I liked the subject of deception and love.
nonsense | Posted by Lily at 09:17 AM | comment
Thu | June 23, 2005
awesome
yaaaayy!!!!!! YEAH!! yes. (whew)
I can't believe I did all that. That was crazy. Seriously, installing Moveable Type is no joke. I had to like, configure cgi files. I think those are perl files. No, I don't even know. I don't remember. Anyway that was scary. That was like jumping off a cliff. and hanging there in the air for like four hours. That was great. I want to go again. I'm going to do something else now though. I'll have to think later, of what I want to do with this now that I have it. I might just keep my friendster blog, and start a different blog using MT. or, migrate my friendster blog to this blog. Now I've got to go. I didn't intend to work on this all afternoon but once I got started I just kept going. And now it's done. Yeah. I'm buzzin' right now.