out of the blue

My first of four finals is over and done with. No more poetry. Actually, it's the class that I'm saddest to see go (besides Ethics, for which I still have to write a paper). I knew everything I needed to know, but I had a heck of a time analyzing the poem that we were given. "For the Union Dead", by Robert Lowell. We had to analyze these lines:

Shaw's father wanted no monument
except the ditch,
where his son's body was thrown
and lost with his "niggers."

The ditch is nearer.
There are no statues for the last war here;
on Boylston Street, a commercial photograph
shows Hiroshima boiling

over a Mosler Safe, the "Rock of Ages"
that survived the blast. Space is nearer.
When I crouch to my television set,
the drained faces of Negro school-children rise like balloons.

Colonel Shaw
is riding on his bubble,
he waits
for the blessèd break.

The Aquarium is gone. Everywhere,
giant finned cars nose forward like fish;
a savage servility
slides by on grease.

Yeah, tell me if you've got anything. Later I may post something along the lines of what I wrote, even though its not a very thorough job. After all, it was in-class, hand-written, and at a time when all I wanted to do was to get out of there!

By the way, if you're interested, I put together a database-driven poetry page that has everything we read in that class besides the collections of poetry (The Wellspring by Sharon Olds and Human Wishes by Robert Hass). It was a combination web design and poetry-studying project, and I'm quite happy with how it turned out. Lots of practice for my long-term blog programming project. The code in the background is anything but pretty, but it's quite functional as long as you don't use the admin system much. I still have a few bugs to work out there.

If you do want to go through the poetry we read, I'd suggest ordering by date read. Dr. Marshall worked out a pretty good order in which to read them. Lots of good stuff in there.

It probably says something about me that when I read a headline like "African Union Official Is Hacked to Death in Darfur," I immediately think "Blasted militant nerds…."

There are many things in life that have eluded me: the perfect phrasing of a poetic line, that uncanny ability to fold one's tongue into knots that was so vogue in elementary school, the satisfactory completion of a culinary experiment. But tonight I was pleased. Tonight I cooked a never-before-(personally)-attempted dish. A simple salmon linguine. Not impressive to those of you who are born chefs, but nearly unprecedented for me.

Sure, I can cook those things that are familiar of long experience. I have few problems with omlettes, or pies, or even pot stickers. But when I journey into the realm of dishes that I haven't yet tangled with, I always fall prey to some small blunder. Perhaps I forget an ingredient, or cook something too long, or forget to perform one step before another. Not this time. Tonight, I avoided all such snares. I timed things rather well, and when everything came together, it was perfection. I was pleased. So, if you want a salmon linguine with a Greek salad and foccacia bread topped with garlic and olive oil, come to me.

"In the beginning was the Word. Then came the fucking word processor. Then came the thought processor. Then came the death of literature. And so it goes."

-Dan Simmons, Hyperion

(I'm not sure if this offends anyone, but I thought it was a very good and legitimate use of profanity. Like some profane poems, it falls apart without the "offensive" word.)

"The first temptation of Sakyamuni was desire, but he saw that it led to
fulfillment and then to desire, so that one was easy."

"Suppose, before they said silver or moonlight or wet grass, each poet
had to agree to be responsible for the innocence of all the suffering on
earth,

because they learned in arithmetic, during the long school days, that if
there was anything left over,

you had to carry it."

– Spring Drawing 2 by Robert Hass, Human Wishes

I hate it when I do something stupid that just makes everything worse. I hate everything about situations that make me do that. I hate being angry and not being sure whether I have enough reason. I hate it when people think I'm in the wrong just because I'm trying harder than anyone else not to blame people. I hate so much about what's going on.

The thing is, I'm at least partially right. I'm not completely insane. I have reason. I am the one who tries to understand people, and who MANAGES IT. Nobody beats me there. I can't argue in such situations because arguing takes indignation and I can almost always understand what the other person thinks. That's why I'm so bad at being angrily indignant.

I hate overreacting. I hate underreacting. I want to react perfectly every time.

The problem with rarely reacting angrily to things is that when you DO, it seems so much worse than it is. Some things other people do all the time, but when you do its huge. If I were to swear at someone, it would hold ten times the power as if most other people did. But it didn't even come to mind. I'm not that far gone yet.

Anger makes you unreasonable. It controls you. I don't want to let it. Now I can't face things simply, because the simple way requires being able to deal with things. I'm going to have to smash my own mind into oblivion to try. I've been trying, and it's been fruitless. Now that things are worse, I have to try harder, and I'm angry and its approaching impossibility. I can't see the end.

I just looked at the web statistics for azureabstraction.com, and it surprised me. While the operating systems of people visiting is pretty typical (98.7% Windows), the browser surprised me.

Here are browser statistics as found on w3schools.com:

March
IE 7: 0.6%
IE 6: 58.8%
IE 5: 5.3%
Firefox: 24.5%
Mozilla: 2.4%
Netscape: 0.5%
Other: 1.5%

However, on azureabstraction.com, you get a very different picture.

Firefox: 56.9%
Mozilla: 34.4%
IE: 7.3%
Safari: 0.3%
Opera: 0.2%
Netscape: 0.2%
Unknown: 0.1%
Epiphany: 0.1%

Thank you. I am proud of you guys :)

   Aaron making a fool of himself
+ Becky not giving me the time of day
+ Cami, Jenny, Rusty, Soren, and Nathan leagues away
+ lots of time to think while not participating in the loss of mind-sense upstairs
= madness

Yes, its true. Jesus hung out with prostitutes and tax collectors more than the "holy" people of the day—the Pharisees. Do you think that was an accident? The Pharisees, who looked down on those they saw as less "holy" than they were, were the very people Jesus despised. The Pharisees were caught up in their contrived laws and boundaries that they weren't able to love other people. They worried more about whether others washed their hands before eating or whether someone walked a certain distances on the sabbath than with the things that mattered. They were hypocrites.

Today, many Christians are just as hypocritical as the Pharisees in the Bible. They look down on those people less "holy" than themselves. They condemn the gays and lesbians when they themselves are in fact much worse off. If homosexuality is to be considered a sin, then the only part that is sinful is the physical act of sex. Love cannot be a sin. However, those people who think themselves so high and mighty, they are the true sinners. Theirs is a sin of hate.

An internet ministry called xxxchurch.com (funny name, eh?) distributes bibles at pornography events, and they were trying to get a bible made with a cover similar to the picture at the top of the post. They ordered 10,000 copies of the custom bible from the American Bible Society, but recieved a reply that "the wording is misleading and inappropriate for a New Testament."

Are they serious? Would they stand by the statement "Jesus doesn't love porn stars." I hope not! If so, they are guilty of hypocrisy just as great as the Pharisees. Jesus loves Porn Stars JUST as much as he loves those nice holy Christians who go to church on Sunday and never considered looking at pornography. In fact, Jesus would have spent MORE time around the former sort of people: "It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners."

That was an ironic statement, because the Pharisees needed to be saved even more than the prostitutes, but they were unwilling to listen. How many Christians today would be just as unwilling to listen to Christ's message if he came down from heaven and started preaching again? How many would condemn him as crazy, or claim that he is lowering God's standards? I suspect it would be a good deal of those that consider themselves good, upstanding Christians.

So now I'm goin' back again,
I got to get to her somehow.
All the people we used to know
They're an illusion to me now.
Some are mathematicians
Some are carpenter's wives.
Don't know how it all got started,
I don't know what they're doin' with their lives.
But me, I'm still on the road
Headin' for another joint
We always did feel the same,
We just saw it from a different point of view,
Tangled up in blue.