Keep Learning, Keep Doing, One More Day

Another Pithy Quote from the rocks at Butler Park.

The Visible Woman...learns.

When I am wasting time I try to pass it off as something useful. 

Playing tennis? Every day I can stay on my feet is good, right? "Trot over and pick up that ball," I tell myself. "It's cool you can still trap the ball between your tennis shoe and your racket and smoothly make it bounce into your hand," I marvel. It may seem to others, and some days to me, that I'm not learning anything new. But I am, I swear. My 82-year-old companion for tennis (it is almost always us and two other people) has recently (in the last year I think) begun to aggressively play the net biding her time and making a great angle volley. On her serve I have her go forward. We are old ladies and we are stuck in many habits, but we can evolve.

Wasting time on the puzzles in the newspapers? But...you can learn a new word or fact. Yesterday's The Wall Street Journal crossword (Friday is the only day The WSJ  has a puzzle I like) reminded me of a word. 

abscissa, n.  Mathematics (in plane Cartesian coordinates) the x-coordinate of a point: its distance from the y-axis measured parallel to the x-axis.

I say 'reminded' because, with a degree in mathematics surely I knew this word at one time! I love knowing this even if I only remember for a few hours or until it pops up on Jeopardy! 

Clearning? Around here a lot of cleaning is dusting and straightening books and magazines. I stop and open them at random occasionally just like I do in the book store and read a paragraph or two.

As long as you are learning (and forgetting and learning) you are alive. I know it won't keep the grim reaper (18 down in yesterday's WSJ puzzle: death personified) permanently at bay. I read the obituaries. Mortality is always at hand. No, it just makes still being alive worthwhile.

Writing or Typing?

This reflection of me and himself was taken at Barney's, I believe, on our recent trip to NYC.

The Visible Woman...writes.

What does it mean to write. Is it just typing? Do you have to have coherent sentences? Or not? Are fragments OK? Should you spell it 'okay?' Should all the letters/phrases/sentences add up to something. Just how important is conventional use of punctuation? I noticed early on in online journals (blogs now) that sometimes a casual emphasis was added by radical period stops. Every. Single. Time. I saw that usage it impressed me as something invented online which I never saw in print. Oh...maybe somewhere in Joyce's Ulysses but he did tend to running along without a single period. "yes I said yes I will Yes." Breathless that.

Since I fell hard off the blogging bandwagon and started tweeting (with an app connection to facebook sending the tweets there) I have abandoned the paragraph. Sometimes even the complete sentence. (Although once my thoughts or those of others and some pictures arrive on facebook I may run on and on.)

But I've not lost the desire to communicate, to write (type?) something with meaning. To reveal rather than fragment or obscure. To encapsulate at least one idea. To comment on current events. (OK, okay, in my pictures, as above, I tend to fragments, obscurity and received reality.)

From July 2009, early in my twitter career, I offer a couple of old tweets to show you what I mean. (Points for knowing the current event implied in that first one.)

Later I think I'll write (type?) about working within the restricted space of 140 characters without breaking my rules for writing so completely that I become disgusted. And I may also write later about typos. Argh. Ugh. There is lots of time and space in this holidailies stream after all!

Divagate

Am I there? In the picture I mean. My life is like that.

Yesterday I uploaded this picture, titled this entry 'Divagate' and typed "Am I there?" Then I could do no more. I had no words to spill into pixels and keep up the stream that is supposed to be my (almost) every day Holidailies 'obligation.'

I'm a wanderer. It's so with tasks. It's so with reading. It's so with my stories.

I love this word. This title. Divagate. No, no, it isn't a scandal at the Metropolitan Opera.

divagate, v. intr.

1. to wander, stray
2. digress in speech

Love it. This was dictionary.com's word of the day sometime in the last couple of weeks. I actually pay them money to have access to the site with more info and less ads online. But word of the day, facebook and the iPhone app (which is ad-rich) are free. But...I digress.

I was so, so sad yesterday that I couldn't write. I felt empty. We went out to our house which Dad used to live in. Every time I go out there it makes me sad. And sadder. Like when I'm tossing and giving away 'stuff' I'm emptying my dad, maybe even my parents, from my life. Some of that stuff had been with them as long as I knew them. But. Oh. Well. It's really the memories, right? That's what people say. Of course, I have a lot of pictures and souvenirs. If a computer goes to screen saver after a few minutes a picture of my dad or mom will flash up.

I was also sad because we are getting old. My skin is getting thin and these red 'blood under the skin' bruises appear out of nowhere. Sometimes the skin breaks. We have our ailments. We are old. We both get Social Security checks. For now. Who knows what the Congress has in store. FFP's troubles and surgeries capped by a mother of a stomach ailment last weekend just made me feel it was all worth nothing. There would never be fun again. Just illness and worry. Trips to the drug store, etc. My in-laws are still alive. But old. I worry about them. My dad's youngest sister was in the hospital after falling. (She did get to go home and sounded pretty good today.) She is only 17 years older than I.

I am so lucky. But still I was sad. But words can make me smile. But I wander. Divagate!

Fragile and Fleeting

This moment...is gone now.

Life is fragile and fleeting. Even the most solid things turn out to be ephemeral or change before our eyes. We are the most fragile thing in the landscape, though. Well, except for certain other living creatures.

This is a change I embrace. Really. Except, of course, when it takes my body down an inexorable hill and takes my friends and family away forever, here and there, randomly.

I'm writing this because I like the words ephemeral and inexorable. Not really. But I do like them. I wonder when I learned them. Did I find them in an article in The New Yorker? And run to the 'old school' paper and board dictionary (my favorite American Heritage one that I had several editions of?) to see the definition. Why have these words stuck in my head and left me confident of theirs definitions when words like jeremiad always send me back to the dictionary (premier dictionary.com, twenty bucks a year)?

Seeing my dad's decline, reviewing say the last seven years since my mom died, makes me realize how you lose things, bit by bit and step by step. One day you can, the next day you really can't, you rehab but don't come all the way back.

And yet, we can build up. I haven't exercised enough the last two months, too entrapped in my dad's illness and my own sloth while sitting around with him in hospitals, at home, waiting to do what he needs. When I get back into my program, my stamina and muscle tone will improve. Indeed, the simple home PT my dad is getting is helping him make gains back. Against the grain, improvement while declining.

We improve, we slip, we slide. It's over. It's enough to make you eat good food, drink good wine, have a cocktail or two, listen to music and do frivolous things. And...when I've escaped the care-giving mode? That's just what I've done. And I've only managed to feel a little guilty about it.

Today's shop window reflection self-portrait is intended to convey the fleeting and fragile feeling (very alliterative!) and was taken Saturday at the wonderful Mercury gift shop on Second Street.

I'm easily entertained...

...but also easily bored.

In the presence of words (almost any book, magazine or newspaper will do but spare me the Sports section with no news of tennis and Romance novels) I am almost always be entertained. I may be distracted by something else and lose track of the reading, but I won't be bored. I read the program at concerts and events before they begin (assuming I haven't taken a magazine). I read ads. Pictures are nice, too.

Give me a keyboard and the right mood and I can type until the cows come home. My dad used to whistle for them to do that on the old 60-odd acre home place at about dusk. But I could type on until midnight. I may not say a thing but I will produce a stream of letters formed into English words but the sentences may make sense, alone or together. I will even invent initialisms like HQWF (How Quickly We Forget). Even though I hate them. Laugh out loud! Not going to abbreviate it.

I can people watch endlessly, browse the WEB and, even, read old online and handwritten journals by yours truly for hours on end.

Unless I get distracted.

I am easily bored in some ways. Playing tennis the other day with someone who never runs after an errant ball and who strolls into position to receive, back turned, holding up her hand and saying 'wait a minute' strains me. So I start observing things and entertaining myself. Noticing how the uniforms (all red outfits, all white visors) on some players down the way look, wondering what weeds have opportunistically poked through the cracks in the awful court we are using, considering the resemblance of the Lacrosse player practicing on the half court behind us to a send-up painting of a kid with a backwards cap on the cover of The New Yorker a few years back on the anniversary issue. (Supposed to be a Gen X version of Eustace Tilly he was.) And so it goes until I get a chance to touch ball to strings. Or to serve. I like serving because I get to hit more balls. Two aces Tuesday. I don't hit hard but I move it around. I've been writing a poem in my head about math, tennis and boredom. I work on it sometimes while I'm bored at tennis.

Fractal branches cast fractal shadows against the order of the lines.
Perpendicular lines and partial lines carving the court into rectangles.
Spaces of in and out and fault and ace. Rules about touching and missing.
Why twenty-seven feet? Or twenty-one? A three-foot net at the middle.
I see a pattern and yet not. Only one prime in sight. But I digress, interrupted
By caroms in three space, arcs predictable except for spin and striking
Nails in the tape to hold the lines to the clay surface. How far apart?
How distracted and yet focused the math makes the tennis and the ennui.

No, that isn't the poem. It's just random lines I constructed just now to illustrate.

I have been writing a short story in my head (although it might be a novel or a novella or a part of a novel) for a long while about a guy hitting tennis balls on the very court where I played Tuesday so I thought about that when things were going. too. slowly. I like how some online writers invented the technique of adding extra periods to slow you down as you read. The story has a bicycle rider and an SUV and so when I see a bike go by and then an SUV I visualize what the protagonist (a guy from Odessa, Texas, I'm not sure why) sees through the fence and wind screen.

Yeah, I'm easily bored and yet, sometimes, when I flip from running my iMac as an Apple to the window running XP under VMware and it has gone into a screen saver mode and is showing my own picture collection to me I just sit there, watching pictures I've already seen over and over for a few minutes. But in front of the TV with the satellite hookup and a DVR with captured episodes of this and that I can be so completely bored and unable to be engaged that I have to get up and get something to read.

I watch a lot of TV and movies at home. And sometimes they are pretty exciting and encompassing. But I get bored if I JUST watch them. And not just because of commercials which we usually skip anyway. I almost always read as well. Newspapers usually. So I'll be reading about Somalian pirates, Taliban areas of Pakistan, Obama's dog, Broadway revivals of "Hair" and "West Side Story", whatever, and sort of watching with one eye and listening. Makes sub-titled movies (which I love especially if they are French although German is sort of amusing, too) hard to follow. I also like to work puzzles while watching TV. I will learn a new word in a crossword (e.g.: marten; toque meaning a woman's hat instead of a chef's tall one) and not be able to contain myself until I look the word up in a real or online dictionary.

There is infinite entertainment in this apartment and yet I get stir-crazy to leave it now and then. Then when I'm out I get eager to come back and settle down with my computer, newspapers, books.

I stay engaged with movies, in a dark theater, although I like to have some food and I hate the food except for the Alamo where drinking beer and eating fried things and actually watching the movie keeps me there. Unless my mind wanders.

This restlessness, dare I say bordering on attention-deficit, makes me anxious. So, I guess I go from being entertained by many things to boredom to anxiety, all in the space of minutes.

When I was in school or at work in meetings with presentations by others, I had to write something to stay focused. It might be about what was being presented. It might be a 'to do' list or a grocery list or a doodle. It might be an idea only peripherally about the content the lecturer was presenting. One such segue produced an idea which is one of the few ideas that both received a patent for some of us at the company and actually made a bit of money in the marketplace.

I see people who are really focused on something. Maybe it is a very BIG thing like running a company or non-profit or a tiny thing like a very focused hobby or sport. Nothing gets my attention like that. I'm used to starting on things and never following up. Blogging and posting pictures online is something I've been pretty faithful doing (if that's the proper word) but, let's be honest, the form is constantly changing. And it isn't a thing you finish. It's the equivalent of notebooks full of non sequitur musings created during lectures and other entertainments that did not fully engage my dilettante mind.

Lately I've been watching people who focus closely on something, shutting out distraction. They are creating businesses, fighting for causes, writing books and plays. That will never be me, I guess. And my accomplishments will always be brief breakthroughs: an idea, a sentence, a paragraph, the short essay, the clever bon mot. The other day on twitter I said:

viswoman found blogging reduced her writing to a few paragraphs. Twitter to 140 characters. New service: Heartbeat. Nine letters or less.

I thought I was so clever. Heartbeat. In some techie worlds it is a notice that some process or service is there, working, alive if you will. And the word has nine letters. And yet when I tried to label this post, selecting from labels used on some of the prior 638 posts, I ended up with more than two hundred characters which, apparently, is the blogger limit.

Reading, Writing, Words, Memory

A while back I wrote about my unwritten books and called out a book by George Steiner that I wanted to buy with that very title. (But didn't because the unread around here is threatening enough already.)

Last night we were headed out to watch the UT Women's Basketball team take on an early, hapless opponent at Erwin Center and, as we were planning to walk, I looked around for a small, intense bit of reading material. What should I find but Marcel Bénabou's Why I Have Not Written Any of My Books, translated from the French by David Kornacker. (Have I mentioned that, if only I knew a foreign language well and wasn't ADD, that I think I would make a great translator?) But, yeah, digression...that's why it's in parentheses. I didn't remember owning this book, let alone reading it. (I'm pretty sure I hadn't cracked the cover.) Plus, for a moment I thought it might be the book that I was talking about in that other entry. That's hard to admit. I write and research stuff and then forget it. (I forget my own life in this way, in large measure. I've recently been rereading online journal entries from September 2001. There are many things in there I forgot I did and felt. Sadly I linked to places that were interesting that are gone from the Internet. I did not, by the way, go back to these entries because of 9/11. No I was looking for something else that, it turns out, occurred around that time.) But I really digress.

So I found Bénabou's book and took it to the basketball game and read some of it while keeping an eye on the action. You know, the downtime of time outs, half time, etc. Anyway. It's a very interesting book. Unfortunately I was reading it away from computer or dictionary, though, because there were words I didn't know. I like reading books with words I don't know, but I am frustrated if I'm dictionary-less at the moment of reading. For example, prolegomenon. Geez, one guesses it's like a prologue in spite of looking like a word for a person favoring certain Danish toy bricks.

It's funny but certain books I own I sort of remember reading while not watching basketball. (Even if I remember none of the contents.)

Is this forgetting of the particular in favor of some other kind of memory? Does it support remembering definitions of words in books, general knowledge of behavior and assumptions? I don't know. As I attack the NY Times Magazine puzzle this morning, I wonder. Where is all this stuff kept in my pitiful head? And why is some of it gone or impossible to access? And, if I wrote a book, would I forget it to an extent that I could read it (like the books of others) and have it feel fresh all over again.

In that vein, I'm going to type another bit of my unwritten novel here, assuming I can find the scrap I wrote it on in a book I'm not reading.

The harried woman scurried away as they emerged from the jetway. He was loitering, staying to the right of other rushed travelers. The woman was now chatting into one of the two phones she'd retrieved from her bag while they stood, unavoidably touching, in the crush of the aisle a few minutes ago. He paused by three newspaper boxes, one each for the Austin, Houston and Dallas papers. The Austin paper said in large type "Two Austin Men Dead in Berlin Attack."

I reread the paragraph I blogged before prior to typing this in. And I wondered about changing a word. The paragraph above I typed faithfully from the scrap I wrote in on in the coffee shop on Wednesday. (Did I mention I in this entry that I did that? Anyway. Somewhere I thought I mentioned it.)

What's the point of this entry then? I think to give you a chance to see inside my brain on a Sunday morning. It's a mess, isn't it?

Not Me

I live too much in my own head. This is a reflection of some stranger taking a picture of signs on South Congress. I like it because the stranger is masked by the camera as my self portraits often are and because it appears that the van is choc-a-bloc with imported bric-à-brac. I like using those two combination words in a sentence.

I should talk to other people more. But I tend to want to retreat more. To escape obligations to interact.

My head is a fascinating place, but I need to get out more. Or not.

Taradiddle

The other morning I made my regular morning call to my Dad and he said "I have a word for you." He disappeared for a moment and returned to the phone and said 'taradiddle.' Then he spelled it. He found it while reading "Out of Africa." I looked it up (online, of course) and found:

taradiddle
1. a trivial lie;
2. pretentious or silly talk or writing

This seemed funny and appropriate to me somehow.

And I think it is a tribute to my dad that he is still finding words he doesn't know in books he's reading. That's probably the reason he's lived as long (and as independent) a life as he has.

I Guess I'm An Opsimath

Word of the day: opsimath. [Confession: I'm spending lots more time upstairs now that all my computers are up here. There is a book of obscure words in the toilet.] For those of you not inclined to follow a link:

Definition:	a person who becomes a student or learner late in life
Etymology:	Greek 'late in learning'

Perhaps it is too late for me to learn to be organized. Perhaps it is too late for me to make sense of the Apple OS. If anyone needs someone to stress test Windows XP, I can put it into a tizzy. I'm trying to do everything on my condo-bound machine. Pretty well succeeded with some archives to move. But there were hiccups. And my VMware XP is no longer snappy to restart. Hmmm.

Why I 'Diblog'

I just coined this word, 'diblog', as a combination of 'diary' and 'blog.' (I'm sure someone else already coined a word for this or thinks blog is sufficient or thinks, as I once did, that you should just call it a journal and journaling.)

You see, I want to write. I do. But all I do is write journals, diaries, scribbles, blogs, online journals, whatever. As it says in the blurb to the right: "Pretending to write but really just blogging."

But what I do isn't exactly blogging. Depending on what you mean by blogging. Sure I provide links and take the occasional stand on the issues of the day or write what would pass for an essay now and then. But mostly this venue is really personal. Sometimes it is very much in the spirit of 'what I did today.' Like a diary. My writing outside this venue, offline, in notebooks and Word documents on my computer is very much in that diary vein. I do have what I consider a real blog (The Journal Of Unintended Consequences) but it doesn't get updated nearly as often as this space. I have a picture blog, too, that gets updated every day (Austin, Texas Daily Photo) but the writing is secondary if often voluminous. It's about the pictures or is supposed to be.

Visible Woman and my writing offline has always been diary-like for the most part. Or it's a journal if you will. I cannot seem to complete a book, article, essay. I have completed a few (unpublished) short stories. And yet this year I have written thousands of words of 'diblog' here and over two hundred pages in offline Word documents.

Why do I do whatever you call this? Well, I think I know.

One of the main reasons is that everything is more easily dealt with once it's translated into words and put down on paper or in pixels.

Another reason is because I want to have my say and not really be edited by anyone. I get comments, but I can moderate them. I can accept edits sent in although they rarely are. FFP will point out typos and mistakes and I can edit them if I wish. No editor is trying to keep me on point, trying to puff things up or slim them down.

And yet I love to edit myself. With my online musings and my Word docs I can edit anything at any time. I was just pondering writing this and I went back and looked at an almost eight-year-old entry on my old WEB site and I wanted to remove a single period. So I did. What power! Once you write a book it's nice to see the permanence of it...but wouldn't you be itching to edit it?

And finally I 'diblog' because I want to remember what I did today and yesterday and I seriously will completely forget if I don't write or type it down somewhere. See those old paper journals above? I was glancing through one of them and I was writing about having our Old English Sheepdog put down. In 1991. Of course, this is something I remember doing and even the approximate time. But the other things going on at the same time, forgotten. Except I wrote in that book.

So yeah that's why I'm here (or over there or inside my own computer) writing what I do. Because I want to deal with my demons, be heard, avoid editors but always be able to edit and, years from now, remember where I was and what I was thinking. I'm not here trying to influence anyone else or become famous. I'm not seeking readers. So, no I'm not sure why I join things like Holidailies because I'm not really seeking readers which is one purpose of portals. Fact is, for a long time I purposely did NOT join portals. I even went to a conference for online journal writers (JournalCon they called it) one year before the word was 'blog' and listed my name in the program without a WEB site!

By the way...I spent my morning at my club playing tennis and then working out a little. I drank an espresso smoothie at the club. This afternoon I ate a chicken sandwich. I changed the filter on my coffee machine. We considered going to a movie but decided to stay home and watch the bowl game with the Texas Longhorns playing. I plan to read, do some things on my 'to do' list and maybe watch a DVD. Just in case I forget later what was up with me on December 27, 2007.

My Bellwethers

Bellwether is such an interesting word. I think I always thought, hearing it, that it had something to do with weather. Maybe the bell part was the bell on a buoy or something else that rang wildly when the weather was changing. But no. Wether is a castrated male sheep. Such an animal might lead the flock. With a bell around its neck. Hence the secondary usage we have come to know: "a person or thing that shows the existence or direction of a trend."

The picture above is a reflection in the window of Lambert's touting Barbecue and Cold Beer and reflecting the new downtown AMLI construction. Lambert's shows a trend toward adaptive reuse among the new construction, one also reflected in the Ballet Austin building and the Long Center. My bellwether on the whether high rises will win over little two-story former stores with historic limestone walls will be whether, in fact, that strip of stores housing Las Manitas and such becomes a Marriott. My bellwether for when the boom in building skyscrapers was over in Austin (and in spite of those under construction I think it is over for this cycle) was the announcement of the Four Seasons project. The bellmen are still parking cars on the ground where it might be one day. Note that the W hotel complex has a fancy sales center but no sign of construction. (I do think it will get built in the nearer term but perhaps that is wishful thinking because I want a fancy hotel/condo complex near my new home, the 360 condos, with the Austin City Limits studio instead of a vacant lot.)

My bellwether for whether I will like movies, plays, music and lots of other things is whether FFP likes them. (Apologies for implying that there is anything like the original meaning for this word here!)

There are many people in my life who are reverse bellwethers. I have one friend who I know if she likes a piece of music then I will hate it. This is in spite of our very complementary feelings about food and wine. I have several friends who, if they would wear a piece of clothing, then you can be sure I would not. There are in fact lots of people that serve as reverse bellwethers for me. If they are buying, I should sell. If they are riding a trend, I should get off. This is very handy. One should be careful not to ignore people and media sources than can be uncanny guides if only reversed.

Well, that's me today, signing out, carefully avoiding the topics mentioned yesterday.

Caducity

The Butler Dance Education Center, the new home for all of Ballet Austin's administration, classes, rehearsals for the professional company and small performances, is almost done. (In other words, everything Ballet Austin except the big performances will be in this building.) Silver and gold 'ribbons' are dancing across floors with words from donors.

It's been a day for me to miss people, too. Life is transitory. Perishable. Caducous. I've been cleaning out one of those boxes you keep around of sentimental stuff. We call them 'archives' or 'souvenirs.' Often there are date labels but they can be wildly inaccurate. I find that by going through them I can weed them down to about half the size.

There is sadness, though. You'll be going through the boxes flipping old holiday and thank-you cards into the recycling and the handwriting of people who are gone stops you. Or some notes you made about your goals and desires makes you pause and think how little or how much has changed for you. Or you see a signature and realize you have no idea who this person is who has in the past written a 'thank you' note to you for some kindness. Or you find notes from someone pledging undying friendship. Only the friendship has, in fact, been extinguished by them.

Among the handwritten notes, colorful postage stamps and ticket stubs is a sheet torn from a page-a-day calendar featuring words. Caducity: the quality of being transitory or perishable it reads. March 12, 1990. Nothing special about the date, but over seventeen years gone.

Absinthe Makes the Heart Grow Fonder

I love words but I'm not a fan of puns really. I kind of miss Paris. As cool as shop windows can be in Austin, you are lots more likely to see cowboy boots or punk clothing than absinthe paraphernalia. In an attempt to capture the fun we had in Paris (or maybe just to get back to our roots of having fun in Austin) we went to the Elephant Room last night. ("Cool Jazz in the Basement 365 Days a Year...3426 consecutive nights of music and still counting."). Paris wishes they had a place like this with NO SMOKE. I used to think about going there and then think about the low ceilings and the exhaust of all those smokers and think 'nah.'

Another acquaintance of ours, roughly our age, died. That either means I should keep living with vigor like I did yesterday or get a checkup. You know...I'm thinking the former. Didn't know this guy well. We worked with him long ago and then we would see him and his wife dining at a restaurant near us in recent years. (Fonda San Miguel if you must know.)

But, yeah, I do love words. Lately I've been thinking how I like foible and today I'm thinking how I like paraphernalia which has an obscure meaning as well as the one we are familiar with..." A married woman's personal property exclusive of her dowry, according to common law." Not so much use for that one anymore. We've come a long way baby.

This has to be the most rambling entry I've ever made. So be it.