Just 'cos...

Because... Can you really have too much of something you love?

I had to buy this newest incarnation of Pablo Neruda's 100 Love Sonnets. Had to.
It's just so sweet in this little format that fits as well in the palm of my hand as it does in a back pocket.
And the pink, and the gold foil... Had to.
I love reading these and thinking of he and Matilde living on Isla Negra, sitting on the beach, eating fruit...

His simple dedication to her:

"...I am like a scorched rock
that suddenly sings when you are near, because it drinks
the water you carry from the forest, in your voice."

I love that he waited several years to publish them, in effort to spare the feelings of his second wife. I love that it was more than a passing infatuation and that after years of ups and downs he and Matilde finally married and stayed together, happy, and in love for as long as they lived. Reading the sonnets feels almost voyeuristic; but I am so in love with their love and the perfect, and imperfect and precious way he was able to express it. Viva Neruda!

"Drunk as drunk on turpentine From your open kisses, Your wet body wedged Between my wet body and the strake Of our boat that is made out of flowers, Feasted, we guide it - our fingers Like tallows adorned with yellow metal- Over the sky's hot rim, The day's last breath in our sails. Pinned by the sun between solstice And equinox, drowsy and tangled together We drifted for months and woke With the bitter taste of land on our lips, Eyelids all sticky, and we longed for lime And the sound of a rope Lowering a bucket down a well. Then, We came by night to the Fortunate Isles, And lay like fish Under the net of our kisses."

"I can write the saddest lines tonight. Write for example: 'The night is fractured and they shiver, blue, those stars, in the distance’ The night wind turns in the sky and sings. I can write the saddest lines tonight. I loved her, sometimes she loved me too. On nights like these I held her in my arms . I kissed her greatly under the infinite sky. She loved me, sometimes I loved her too. How could I not have loved her huge, still eyes. I can write the saddest lines tonight. To think I don’t have her, to feel I have lost her. Hear the vast night, vaster without her. Lines fall on the soul like dew on the grass. What does it matter that I couldn’t keep her. The night is fractured and she is not with me. That is all. Someone sings far off. Far off, my soul is not content to have lost her. As though to reach her, my sight looks for her. My heart looks for her: she is not with me The same night whitens, in the same branches. We, from that time, we are not the same. I don’t love her, that’s certain, but how I loved her. My voice tried to find the breeze to reach her. Another’s kisses on her, like my kisses. Her voice, her bright body, infinite eyes. I don’t love her, that’s certain, but perhaps I love her. Love is brief: forgetting lasts so long. Since, on these nights, I held her in my arms, my soul is not content to have lost her. Though this is the last pain she will make me suffer, and these are the last lines I will write for her. "

~Pablo Neruda (1904-1973)

Wait... They don't love you like I love you.

My wet dreams...

More Soko...

Late Fragment...

And did you get what you wanted
from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved,
to feel myself beloved on the earth.

-Raymond Carver

Today my mother said to me...

"You know what, squeezing someone the size of a
watermelon out of something the size of a lemon
has earned me the right to speak to that
watermelon however I want...
For life."

Words of wisdom, yo. Don't mess!

Pardon me, I'm involved in some minor Soko obsession right now...

If you were an ocean, I'd learn to float...

Happy St. blah blah bla...

Oh, bring me sweet dreams tonight, and help me be good tomorrow...

"Thank you God for this fine day
and bless all the children all over the world...

Thank you for the plants and the animals...

Oh, bring me sweet dreams tonight
And help me be good tomorrow..."

I miss you.

Wake up...

My pasta making soundtrack today... :)

Not much makes me LITERALLY lol... but this did.

"Over Christmas she had a tree-trimming party that I went to.
Yeah, I trimmed her bush…
Shit.
Please don't put that in."

-Gerard Butler, Men's Health magazine re. Jennifer Aniston

Your ex-lover is dead...

Klaxons does Blackstreet... and I like it. :)

Get it while the getting's good...

Free EP by Cults- the awesome 2 piece mystery band out of NYC. Love them. Love that they're label-less and fresh. Love that they're generous with the 3 song EP download. Love that they're making my itunes go: UGH! Again, lady?!?!

;)

Oktapodi...

Hello...

Hello, hello...

:)

Cap pas cap?

Burning barf... My body is a wonderland.

The master cleanse, an update:

So it's now day two, and I have a little story for you... When we left off yesterday, my will-power was... ummm... slipping. But I'm a catholic, so guilt works wonders on me. I got myself back on track and drank around 32oz of the lovely lemon juice/maple syrup concoction (it really is quite pleasant). Something I wouldn't mind drinking every day, actually.

And looky, I even documented my cleansing optimism for you:

But, oopsie poopsie! Don't forget to add the cayenne pepper!

It should be noted that the cayenne pepper is treated as a "to taste" ingredient; and in my cleanse-induced haze, that instruction was akin to "as much as you can handle, the more the better, knock yourself out, burn the toxins out of your system".

So I did. I absentmindedly poured a cruel amount of cayenne pepper into my drink, and gulped it down as quickly as possible.

Oh, you may need some backstory here to fully appreciate the impact of such an incident on one such as myself...

As a person who subsists primarily upon vegetable soup, cookies, and mineral water- suffice it to say, I am not a spicy person. I don't like spicy foods, I don't order anything suggestive of spiciness in restaurants and I like my salsa mild. VERY mild. It's funny, but I guess I just enjoy foods more when my mouth isn't in pain while eating them. That said... I really have no experience with cayenne pepper in my day to day life. My mother cooks with it, and I know that it's a spicy spice, and therefore I never ever buy it, or use it, much less eat it. I'd say there was close to a tablespoon of it in my 32oz lemon water yesterday. It did taste spicy, but I thought- Swallow, swallow, swallow... Mind over matter, just get through it and then you can drink some water. I swallowed so quickly that it wasn't until the final ounce or so when I realized I couldn't breathe.

Have you ever owned a bulldog? If so, you're familiar with the lovely gakking noise they sometimes make. It's not quite a cough, not quite a gag, but it incorporates the two nicely.

I gakked. I did the fancy bulldog gakking over the kitchen sink, unable to breathe for close to a minute. I then swallowed another 24oz or so of lemon water without the cayenne pepper. Nothing. So then I just started filling up the cup with plain water, swallowing, gargling, gakking... I became incredibly dizzy and lightheaded. I then (inevitably) threw up. Now, I can't quite decide what's worse, drinking large amounts of cayenne pephorror in highly concentrated citric acids, or vomiting them up and having them come out your nose; but I am now an authority on both.

Later in the day, I went to James' baseball game.

Damn that little league snack bar.
Damn it all to hell!!!

But fret not, the trusty guilt kicked in again, and sulking, I handed the nacho plate over to my dad, who was more than happy to "help". :)

I had carrots, cauliflower, and raw mushrooms for dinner with guess what, lemon water!

For breakfast this morning... A tangerine and lemon water. JUST lemon water. I can't even LOOK at you, Cayenne Pepwhore. For my mid-morning snack, quinoa in miso broth. It tastes... mmm... cleansing.

But what I really, really want right now is fruit salad. THIS fruit "salad"...

Can I just be done now? I promise my body is never going to reach the point where I'm craving the lemon water and thinking a saline solution tastes like chicken noodle soup. Ever.
:,(

Cleanse Ahoy!!!

So it's day one of the master cleanse and I'm going to keep you informed of the progress.

7:30 am
Mineral water w/ lemon.

8:00 am
Chips ahoy cookie.

11:45 am
This business...

Wish me luck!!! :)

This makes me want a pressure washer really badly...

Why the Internet Will Fail (Newsweek, 1995)...

Just came across this article from Newsweek in 1995. It lists all the reasons the internet will fail. My two favorite parts:

"The truth in no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works."

…

"Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we’ll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure."

If Newsweek is as good at maintaining the journalism industry as they are at fortune telling, they should be around for a long time.

The Internet? Bah!

Hype alert: Why cyberspace isn’t, and will never be, nirvana

By Clifford Stoll | NEWSWEEK

From the magazine issue dated Feb 27, 1995

After two decades online, I’m perplexed. It’s not that I haven’t had a gas of a good time on the Internet. I’ve met great people and even caught a hacker or two. But today, I’m uneasy about this most trendy and oversold community. Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms. They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems. And the freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic.

Baloney. Do our computer pundits lack all common sense? The truth in no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.

Consider today’s online world. The Usenet, a worldwide bulletin board, allows anyone to post messages across the nation. Your word gets out, leapfrogging editors and publishers. Every voice can be heard cheaply and instantly. The result? Every voice is heard. The cacophany more closely resembles citizens band radio, complete with handles, harrasment, and anonymous threats. When most everyone shouts, few listen. How about electronic publishing? Try reading a book on disc. At best, it’s an unpleasant chore: the myopic glow of a clunky computer replaces the friendly pages of a book. And you can’t tote that laptop to the beach. Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we’ll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure.

What the Internet hucksters won’t tell you is tht the Internet is one big ocean of unedited data, without any pretense of completeness. Lacking editors, reviewers or critics, the Internet has become a wasteland of unfiltered data. You don’t know what to ignore and what’s worth reading. Logged onto the World Wide Web, I hunt for the date of the Battle of Trafalgar. Hundreds of files show up, and it takes 15 minutes to unravel them–one’s a biography written by an eighth grader, the second is a computer game that doesn’t work and the third is an image of a London monument. None answers my question, and my search is periodically interrupted by messages like, “Too many connectios, try again later.”

Won’t the Internet be useful in governing? Internet addicts clamor for government reports. But when Andy Spano ran for county executive in Westchester County, N.Y., he put every press release and position paper onto a bulletin board. In that affluent county, with plenty of computer companies, how many voters logged in? Fewer than 30. Not a good omen.

Point and click:

Then there are those pushing computers into schools. We’re told that multimedia will make schoolwork easy and fun. Students will happily learn from animated characters while taught by expertly tailored software.Who needs teachers when you’ve got computer-aided education? Bah. These expensive toys are difficult to use in classrooms and require extensive teacher training. Sure, kids love videogames–but think of your own experience: can you recall even one educational filmstrip of decades past? I’ll bet you remember the two or three great teachers who made a difference in your life.

Then there’s cyberbusiness. We’re promised instant catalog shopping–just point and click for great deals. We’ll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obselete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month? Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet–which there isn’t–the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople.

What’s missing from this electronic wonderland? Human contact. Discount the fawning techno-burble about virtual communities. Computers and networks isolate us from one another. A network chat line is a limp substitute for meeting friends over coffee. No interactive multimedia display comes close to the excitement of a live concert. And who’d prefer cybersex to the real thing? While the Internet beckons brightly, seductively flashing an icon of knowledge-as-power, this nonplace lures us to surrender our time on earth. A poor substitute it is, this virtual reality where frustration is legion and where–in the holy names of Education and Progress–important aspects of human interactions are relentlessly devalued.

STOLL is the author of “Silicon Snake Oil–Second Thoughts on the Information Highway” to be published by Doubleday in April.