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I finally figured out how to make a little FavIcon (the little icon that appears next to your favorite links in Internet Explorer)...so if you have made the tinyblog a favorite, go ahead and kill the favorite, reload the page, and re-bookmark it. Cute, isn't it?
If you haven't made the tinyblog a favorite...well, isn't it about time?
...I'd never have any time for my own posts. But really you have to go look at Mena's silent movies of her and Ben. It is just too damn cute for words. It looks like WAY too much work went into it, too, but it's worth it for me of course.
more notes from retreat (8-27-01)
It took me awhile to get my shit together emotionally today. I had wierd, lonely, crazy dreams last night, and I woke up this morning to find that I had caused a mouse to be drowned in my own urine.
Freeform outdoor peeing is verboten here. I dunno if it's a smell thing, or an animal thing, or a not-defiling-the-retreat-land thing. In any case, it's either the outhouse, or plastic pee-pots that we bring down to the cabins, and then empty in the morning. I happened to take a pee-pot without a lid, and didn't go find a lid.
I went two days without emptying mine, or perhaps the poor guy would've been able to touch bottom and last until morning. Normally, a mouse wouldn't be able to get into one of them, but I place my little urine deathtrap partially beneath the two lowest stairs.
I woke up to a bit of a stomach ache. It was very cold and when I saw something big and black in my pee-pot, I hoped it was a leaf or something. Man, what a way to go.
Normally it feels so good to kick off my shoes on the shrine room porch as the gong to call people in is being struck...but today I was restless and my knees hurt. After meditation I didn't even get up, just sort of lounged there. The Lama came back in and started doing walking meditation. I joined him, and while doing something so simple, I immediately felt a little better. It was good to move my body.
I went outside and did some chi kung and then breakfast. Then the sun started to come up.
Time for kitchen duty.
I am back! Some notes from retreat (yes, I could not help but blog):
I expected it to be a longer drive here, but much of the grunt work is done by the Tsawassen and Schwartz Bay Ferries. We only had to drive just past the Canadian border, about two hours.Then, off the Schwartz Bay Ferry, it's about 2 miles of regular road, and 6 miles up hill on a twisty, rocky dirt road that threatened to rip the pan from my Civic several times over.
Once up on the KDOL land, though, it was astounding. The air smells like wild honey and the view is tremendous. I quickly felt the amazing gravity of the place. I realized that it's a place that was built for the sole, pragmatic purpose of being a place where people can live and practice dharma. It is only the basic essentialsdining building, shrine toom, a kitchen/shower ("one shower every three days/ navy showers only"), a shrine room, and little cabins. The cabins have 2 neat little matresses, a little shrine table, and most importantly, doors that serve as effective barriers against mice and raccoons.
I have not seen any mice, but the local raccoon family is quite bold. We saw them several times in broad daylight hanging around the kitchen and the compost bin.
They are used to human beings who are trying to practice non-aggression, so they have little fear. If a door is left open, they will amble carefully in and nose around for food. Even the mice have little to fear. There are little traps stocked with peanut butter, but they merely confine the mice, and we have to check the traps periodically to make sure that they do not die of dehydration.
This may seem silly to some, but when you're sitting there trying to cultivate a state of mind that cares equally for every single being without prejudice and without exception...well, it's a little hypocritical to be setting deadly traps designed to crush the spines of a few little beings who committed the horrific sin of wanting to eat a bit of one's oatmeal.
So please think of some reason and Email me. I'm sure you must have something to say.
it's danieltalsky@hotmail.com
Bonus points if it is intriguing or intimate or inappropriate, but just a "hi" will be nice. I'm of course not telling anyone they have to do anything, but how can you ever get what you want if you do not ask?
I don't think arrogance is very artful, though, so that's some kind of stumbling block. Or maybe not, maybe being aware of the arrogance is a good first step. But then it's easy to get arrogant about that. It seems like there's this constant unmasking to mindfulness, like I realize that it's just one act after another. I drop one act and then realize that there's an actor dropping that act, too. Doing the inspired act and then the arrogant act and then the humble act and then the...
I wonder what is behind all the acts? What am I acting for? Who is acting?
I do not know.
There's two very good reasons to go head over to Warp Records' Site. One is to see a really fantastic flash interface implementation (and I assure you, I am a hard sell).
The other is to see the finalists of an animation contest based on the songs of the new album by Square Pusher. Square Pusher's new album Go Plastic is this kind of sweet, spastic electronic music that really makes me think twice about electronic music. It's constantly shifting and moving, but still maintains this kind of coherence that makes it supremely listenable.
Months ago, people were invited to make animations based on the songs on the album, and the finalists are displayed here as quicktime movies. I recommend the animation for the song Go! Spastic. Enjoy!
This is the sort of thing I would never be exposed to if it weren't for my super-hip, yet extremely accessible and sweet friend Beth. So this is via Beth, but there's no link to her, cause she doesn't have a site. She's too cool for that.
Just so everyone knows, I'm going to a little meditation retreat from the 24th to the 29th, and so the tinyblog, and Email will just be empty voids, much like my mind, for those 5 days.
Oh c'mon, try not to whinge so. You can handle it...in fact, I think I'll put up a pretty archive page so's you can look through some old posts if you really get desperate for Gruesome Accident Tales or something.
Now I work graveyard, but I used to work during the day shift at Spacelabs Medical.
Once, my office chair broke, and our office recieved another chair as a loaner. It was a black leather captain's chair. No one else in the department seemed to want it, so I pulled it over to my desk and sat down in it. It was ok, but not as comfortable as my regular chair.
I didn't think anything of it for a while, but then people coming in from outside the department would come in, they would say, "Whoa! How'd you get the fancy chair?"
"It's just a loaner." I'd say.
People who had never been in the department before and had to ask a question would walk right past my boss and come over to ask me their question. I like to think that if I would have kept the chair, I would be the CEO by now, like The Overcoat by Nikolai Gogol.
In Gogol's story a young, poor Russian clerk finally one day finds his coat is too worn to even wear to the office. He takes it to the tailor who tells him it is way too far gone and he needs a new coat. The clerk trips out, but finally agrees to buy a new overcoat. The overcoat changes everyone's perception of him and he gets all these promotions and social attention and his life is changed.
In Gogol's story though, the coat is stolen from the clerk and without it, he lacks the imposing power to get the police to actually look for his coat (It's a very Russian kind of story) and he soon dies. In my case, however, my chair just got repaired, and then they took the loaner. Simple as that. I didn't get a promotion, but I'm still here to write about it.
Shauna's latest is what blogging is all about. She wins the tinyblog pulitzer for "Blog Defining Post" for 2001. Congratulations.
Abstract Speed
Giacomo Balla, 1913
Oil on canvas (530x750), Private Collection
"And so, faces smeared with good factory muck—plastered with metallic waste, with senseless sweat, with celestial soot—we, bruised, our arms in slings, but unafraid, declared our high intentions to all the living of the earth:"
From The Manifesto of Futurism.
Futurists...arrogant, sexist, cocky young Italian boys. Incredible painters. Everything is nicked from the Bob Osborn's excellent Futurism site.
tinymom
Today's post is brought to you by my mom, who graciously allowed me to post this portion of her Email to me upon returning from Spanish Immersion Camp:
"I have been at summer camp. It was a Spanish immersion camp at the Hunt Hill Audobon Sanctuary in northern Wisconsin. It was very fun, kinda like girl scout camp. We had friendship bracelets, secret pals, name tags and games in Spanish. The only difference was that we got beer or wine and happy hour before we went to swim in the lake under the stars. Full moon and a meteor shower. With cute latin hotties. The next to the last day I turned my ankle in a rabbit hole and sprained it. So I came home a day early and missed the big fiesta on the last day. My ankle is still rainbow colored but it is getting to the stiff stage, which is much better than the painful stage. There were at least five nurse practitioners in the camp so I received excellent initial care. The young counselors offered to carry me everywhere but I really just wanted to go home and stay put for a few days."
Glad to have you back, Mom.
Survey Says!
Finally the results are in. Thank you to everyone who wrote funny, funny answers, and especially thanks to everyone who just wrote normal, honest anwers about themselves. Although I only really posted one group, I appreciated them all!
Blogger didn't seem to want to deal with such a large post, so I made this snazzy page to display my answers to each question, along with a few of my favorite answers. Some people are really funny!
One time I got so angry that I just felt like I had become anger. I remember it really vividly. It was about 6 months ago and I just woke up one morning really irritable. I went to BuddhaChurch™, which normally really cools things down, but somehow, that morning, it just irritated me more deeply. I couldn't even stay through the whole chant about compassion. I got in the car and drove home.
On the way home I realized that the irritation had grown into full-blown anger. It was amazing, amazing anger. It felt sort of good, but it was really just remarkable. Any direction I would turn my attention I would discover only anger. I would look at other drivers, or think about people in my life, or even look at inanimate objects, and each of them would bring up a new facet of anger directed at that specific thing or person.
I went home for a few minutes and took a shower, which took the edge off it a little bit. Then I went back and sat in a chair and listened to the Lama teach. I can't remember what he was teaching about because I was in sort of a wierd fugue and I kept falling in and out of sleep. When he was done, though, I realized that it had sunk in some, and I felt very calm and even. The anger was gone.
The reason I bring this up is because I had a similar experience today, but with disappointment. I had planned to go to a friend's Art History Presentation. I had written her and told her I was coming and I had recieved directions from her. I got home from work at about seven in the morning and her presentation was only a few miles away, at ten. I hadn't slept all night, and I thought I would get a couple of hours of sleep, so I would be able to stay awake for the presentation.
I set the timer on my alarm clock and promptly passed out. I woke up to the phone ringing...my sister calling me. I looked first at the clock and saw that it was almost two PM and I had long since missed the presentation. I picked up the phone and had a normal conversation, but from that moment I just had this sense of disappointment like I had missed out on the most important thing in the universe and nothing else was entirely worth doing.
I knew it was absurd, but I'm glad my sister was calling to remind me to bring my car over to her house so she could take a driving test for a new job she was applying for. It forced me to get out of the house, otherwise I think I might have just crawled back into bed and stayed there for the rest of the day.
I just felt like disappointment itself. I was disappointed that I missed the presentation, I was disappointed with where I was in my life and how I was behaving towards people, and I felt acutely her disappointent and it felt almost unbearable to me. Really, it was a kind of conciet and melodrama. Probably it didn't affect her that much, but I just couldn't get over it.
I felt pretty much inconsolable until I got to work. Nothing like the rigors of responsibility and routine to bring one back to oneself.
Oh did I have fun Saturday night at the White Trash BBQ held by my gay massage clients. It was quite an affair, and fun was had by all, from Thommie Rae to Sallie Mae. There were industrial strength bags of Cheetos, copies of the Weekly World News, and packs of Great Value cigarettes for all. Not to mention the cooler full of beer margaritas. You've never had a beer margarita?
In the immortal words of Lambtummy, "It doesn't taste like beer...and it doesn't taste like a marguerita!" Lambtummy, who has an 10 month old girl at home, and who was my ol' lady for the evening, strapped her favorite kitchen towel to her belly, and went barefoot and pregnant. On the drive down she informed me, "I'm not going to tell anyone I'm not pregnant unless they ask."
At first, people just assumed she was drinking fake Boone's Farm Sangria from inside that paper bag...but when she fired up a Great Value cigarette, people started to look a little uppity. Finally people started to ask which was fake, the booze or the baby. She fooled everyone...and we got a picture!
After everyone was in on it we all chilled and had a great evening. Everyone admitted that she had the hands down best costume, blue lipstick and all. Now that's class.
By the way, if you haven't filled out the tinyblog survey, then get on the stick, Bobbie Jean! I'm gonna give 'em a day or two more to accumulate.
Also, I think I'm going to publish my favorite answers for each question. SO with your Email, please include whether or not I have permission to do so, and whether or not I have permission to credit you.
I came across in my Email one of those middle-school kinda surveys from a friend. You know, "What's your favorite color?" and all that. I have to admit it, I love the things.
I got to thinking though, these are fun, but they're not really the questions I would want answers to. So, in response, I composed my own survey. Please cut and paste the following into an Email, meticulously and carefully answer all the questions (you know you want to, it's all about you!) and Email me the results:
What name do you prefer to be called?
Have you ever hallucinated something you knew wasn’t there but looked real?
What is your favorite kind of tea?
What languages do you know swear words in?
Do you believe in a benevolent creator?
If so, do you have a relationship with it/him/her?
Do you believe in homeopathy?
What famous person you really wish you could be friends with?
What makes you act the most evil?
How much does your mom know about your life?
What music did you once love but can’t even listen to now?
What’s the dirtiest book you’ve ever read?
Are you a top, bottom, or versatile?
What is your most prominent dysfunction?
What is your favorite font?
What is your favorite kind of salad dressing?
Ever had a major illness or injury?
Ever come close to death?
Would you kill a man if it was you or him?
Would you kill a man just for lookin’ at you funny?
Are you still friends with your exes?
What do you bring to a potluck?
Say one nice thing about the author of this survey.
Okay, two things.
Say one nice thing about yourself, too.
Now Email it to danieltalsky@hotmail.com and whoever else you want to know you so intimately. If you get any good responses, email those to me too. Any questions you feel should be added?
A big, stupendous, totally biased review of What's New Pussycat? that will take you two days to read.
This is likely to be one of the least objective reviews I have ever written about anything? Why, because Shauna is a friend of mine. How much of a friend can you be with someone who couldn't even fly to see you for less than $800? Pretty close friends, amazingly enough. Especially amazing since I haven't even seen a photo of her taken in her adult life. Who knows, if she didn't live in Canberra, the capitol of Australia, we could be married by now.
Our friendship has enriched me in a multitude of ways. For instance, now I can make such authentic Australian exclamations as, "Don't just sit there like a stunned mullet," or "ooh er!" or "he's a shonky fuckwit". From her I learned the very idea of blogging, as I came across her site on the lovely, but now defunct Astounding Websites. Eventually she even came to host the tinyblog. In addition she has helped while away countless hours at my boring graveyard job with her dulcet tones.
Shauna tells stories about her life. And they are funny. Ok, they're not all funny. Sometimes they're heart rending, but more often than not, they still manage to be funny.
But Shauna doesn't want to be funny. Evidently being funny doesn't do much for winning the Nobel prize for literature or at least becoming some kind of meme-creating A-lister. I'm not sure which she would like more, but something where the lead singers of Radiohead and Gomez would come and give her hot kisses while groping her arse is the main aim, I think.
Well, funny might not be good enough for Shauna, but it's good enough for me. Unlike the other reviews I've done, I had already read Shauna's blog in its entirety before I sat down to review it. Besides, it's a sweet kinda funny, a tender kind of funny, a self-effacing kind of funny. Shauna doesn't realize that to tell a heartbreaking story like it's funny is a gift, and a rare one. She doesn't understand because she is a pretty insecure cat (read: ignored on ICQ, and step away from the site stats, missy).
Consequently, she doesn't realize that she had created quite a little body of work since May 2000, when she created her weblog. It's a fair amount to read, and I'm going to suggest that you read all of my picks. So I'm just going to leave this post up top for a few days, and you can take your time and get to know Shauna, her dog Harry, and her sister Rhiannon. While you're there, don't forget to pay homage to the evil Mr. Guestbook.
suing cadbury
supermarket epic
where I place on the foodchain
taking a roman holiday
if only life were more like ICQ
don't dis the beegees
clean your ball regularly
wank once a day
the intoxicating mix of expensive shampoo and the crappy FM radio station
dad told me that the mechanic must be "a shonky fuckwit"
advantages of having bountiful breasts
if you could talk to one person, living or dead.
then came jilly, willy, milly, dilly, lily, and willy nilly.
Nooo! Stereo!
we have to steal something!
a bunch of vacuous bitches
and last, but not least, the quintessential Pussycat Post:
ooh er, angry redhead!
Enjoy. I insist.
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This is me and my cast. I was supposed to have it removed today, and the doctor's secretary called me and said that due to a family emergency, my doctor was going to have to reschedule for one more day. The darn thing is starting to get pretty itchy and chafey, and I was freaking a little bit, but I decided to blog about it, and revel in it's safety and security for one last day.
Currently on my cast (in approximately chronological order):
la bras des haricot vert (translation: green bean arm)So, today is the last day to sign my cast. Click the tinycomments button for this post and let me know what you'd write on my cast if you lived in the same part of the world as me. Even a name with a little heart over it is OK by me.
MY POOR ELBOW
FEEL BETTER --> (arrow pointing to elbow)
Margaret (little heart over "a")
Ummm.., Daniel Talsky, your yummy.
Loverly Boom Boom Boy -- E
Healer Monster Ladro
Ouch! Jessie Ann :)
Lisa (little heart dotting the "i")
The warp and weft of ShellyWeb
Oh dear. Shelly and I have had the biggest struggle with her archives. I've been meaning to review her for about a month now, and trying to make it so there were unique links on all of her posts, as I love to compile a "tinyblog favorites" to go with a review. Finally, she got all of the archives on her old HTML posts working, and then today, when I went to read her, suddenly the newer archives weren't working.
So, I thought, can I write a good review without a best-of, from memory? I think I can.
When I first happened upon the ShellyWeb, (one of Melissa's picks, by the way) she had a layout that included a picture of herself that made it look like she was about 16. That, combined with a searingly sincere missive to love and her current boyfriend, made me think she was 16, and I instantly put her on my sidebar as a delicious little guilty pleasure.
As time went on, however, I found that Shelly is not 16. She's a mom with a preteen daughter from a tragic relationship, and she's older than me.
She has the taste of life on her tongue and it comes out in her posts. She's a moody cat, and you will often find her either in heaven or hell. So, it's hot pain and hot pleasure every day. She aches so thoroughly and loves so hard it makes me love and ache just to read her. I hope that man really loves her, because you can tell her heart is really in it...in everything.
Oh, I did get one absolute link to work, to a favorite early story:
Enjoy! Salud, Shelly.
Ok, so that's over. Now maybe you know a little more about me than you ever wanted to do. I think it's about time to quit stalling and finish up the last of the reviews.
Well, what about the guy who followed her home from Shari's? Where did he fit in? Cam lowered her head even more. It was him, she said quietly. Oh, I thought...so not some random guy who followed her home from work. It was her boyfriend that she just didn't want to admit to having when she called me. And he had never beat her, they both confirmed...and the violence had most often been started by her, they both confirmed. When the cops get called, the first 2 times by her, and the second 2 times by a neighbor who heard the noise, they just arrested the big guy.
Please understand. As someone who outweighs her by a great deal, I feel he holds a greater responsibility, but I was a little dismayed to find the whole situation so different then I had thought that morning. It seemed to me now like two tumultuous people in recovery, both with fucked up pasts, but who clearly loved each other. I didn't realize she had been abusing drugs and alcohol so recently, and, well...I know how she gets. I started to feel like perhaps they weren't such a bad match.
I was dismayed, and I said to them, "Well hell, good luck to you both, then. I could never figure out how to make it work safely, and I hope you two can." I started talking to Cammy about the end of our situation, more candidly than we perhaps ever had?and suddenly we were arguing about it. About the same things we had argued about a dozen times before. I sat there as we both made the same bitter case to each other. He looked on, dismayed as hell, and not sure how it had come to that.
At last I stood. "Look, Cam, nothing is going to be resolved tonight. We?ve been through this before. I love you, I'm no longer afraid for your life, and it's 10:30 and I have 150 miles to drive tonight."
She was confused and upset, but I just couldn't get caught up in it again. I knew she would calm down and we would talk again. I bade her ol' man well, and slipped out the door and got in my car with the bittersweetest of feelings. Life is not some cut-and-dried way. It's insane. There?s no solution, just a path, and I swear to God I am trying to walk it.
end! thank you to anyone who read the whole damn epic!
We went for Mexican and it was good. We got along famously. After dinner they took me to their favorite park in Wenatchee and we sat and talked for a long time. I felt like a father figure to both of them somehow and I talked to her boyfriend almost sternly, in the voice of my sister, "Once you put your hands on her, it's already out of control." We talked and reminisced for hours as he looked on a little, like someone who didn't get all the "in" jokes.
It's not had this feeling like: Oh wonderful, what a wonderful man, and what a wonderful situation she's in. But I felt safe knowing I would be leaving that night, and not feeling as if her life were in immediate danger. More, however, came out when we got back to their apartment.
That was when I started to have a little bit of a funny feeling about her stories in light of meeting the person she was talking about. I wanted to ask them what the details were when they were both in the same room. I had come to find out what the situation was and now that I had their confidence I asked very specific questions.
I asked if it was true that he had never raised his hand to her. "I only ever just held you down!" he said, "But I did make some pretty nasty threats."
"You bit me once," she protested.
"You were punching me, and you put your hands in my mouth," he weakly rebutted.
I found out that Cam had relapsed more than once since she'd been in Wenatchee (which she never mentioned) and that she had been drinking as recently as the previous Saturday - and now she was on Valium. Could it be that in her confusion and hysteria things had gotten blown a little out of proportion? It suddenly made a little more sense why she had lost her job.
What about the banditos, I wanted to know. Was it true? Were there such people? Did the bandito boss really exist? What was the story? Wasn't Cammy's life in danger with all of these unsavory characters coming to her house?
to be continued...
He actually seemed quite calm about it, and just looked more sad and dirty than homicidal. I looked him in the eyes, "Hey, are you coming to dinner with us?"
"Uh, yeah. Let me take a shower," he said. I knew that any kind of immediate danger had passed. He took a shower, and then Cammy did, and there we were staring at each other across the room.
He admitted he was confused about me being there, but wanted to reassure me he was cool with it. I said I was glad, but I figured as much, and if he were going to kick my ass he would have already done it. Besides, I explained, I knew my own intentions and Cammy and I were far beyond ancient history. She was just someone I very much loved, and was really concerned about.
I pushed my luck a little and said that I thought there was ample reason for my concern. To my surprise, he just looked at me and said, "I know. I know. I’m just trying to be in it for the long haul, though."
He was so sincere and it wasn’t what I expected. I grew bolder, and asked him something to the effect of why he was kicking her ass, then. "I never raised my hand to her," he said. I did my best to not alienate him by being judgmental, and tried to identify in some way. Turns out it wasn’t too hard, and I recognized in his story one similar to my own.
I asked him if I could take he and Camella out to dinner. He brightened and said, "You know, actually, that would be really nice. We’re both broke." By the time Cam got out of the shower we were swapping stories and talking about the various rewards and challenges of living with her. We grinned a little as she came in the room.
to be continued…
Would I be the first to curse the day netscape ever decided to create their sorry-ass 4.x browser? I just looked at the tinyblog in 4.7 for the first time and I am crushed. For the love of GOD if you are using Netscape 4.x upgrade your browser!
Please direct your attention to the new and improved Pie in the Sky, at Melissa's new and ultra-snazzy doman, augustsky.com.
She was looking much better than the last time I saw her. She was pretty emaciated last time I had seen her in a courtroom, and now she had put on a bit of weight, and had some color in her cheeks.
She was a little loopy, and this time, when she told me about what her doctor had given her, she said it was Valium. Her manner was a bit confused, and I looked sadly at her…such a broken woman. She wanted to know what was going on with every person she had known in my life. I got comfortable in her coziest chair when the phone rang. I knew immediately who it was.
I heard snippets of the conversation, "…no, Daniel is here…not like that…"
"That was him," she said, when she walked back in the living room, "he just got out of jail."
"So he’s coming over?"
"Yes. He said he’d be on his best behavior."
to be continued…