Loved this parody entitled, “The Lonely Planet Guide To My Apartment” from a recent New Yorker. I need to write one for people brave enough to come to my house or office.

Since my birthday is coming up, the appropos quote is this one.

Elise saw her first corpse at a funeral today. When she saw the deceased in repose she asked, “Is that just a sample, so we know what she looked like.” Yes, dear it kind of is.

It’s very bad form to ever post poetry on a blog.

I came across this poetry writing exercise that seemed to good to pass up. This was inspired by a poem by Goerge Ella Lyons entitled “Where I’m From“.

My take on this is beow the fold, read it for laughs. Send me yours or blog it f you aren’t chicken.

The inspiration for this came from the blog don’t eat alone.

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One of my all time favorite blogs is postsecret. On this website they post scans of post cards, sent anonymously, each containing a secret. They are sad, funny, and sometimes disturbing. This year they published a book which I recently picked up. As I flipped through the book, marking my favorites, I found myself saddened that more of the submitters didn’t have anyone in their life to share their secrets with.

I believe the sadness I felt, allegedly viewing someone else’s secrets, is really a reflection of my own sadness. While I imagine that I feel sad that the baptist minister’s wife can’t tell someone that she doesn’t believe in God, the bigger truth is that I am sad that I am so full of stories that I am unwilling to share.

I have started to make my own postcard to send in to the postsecret web site on more than one occasion. I always find myself stuck; which secrets and how do I represent it best? The blank space on the card becomes a prison rather than a window.

If we become our own myths, is it possible that my hesitance to actively participate in the making of my own myth will result in delays in my personal development?

Tiny Daisies (Pretending it’s Spring), originally uploaded by djwudi.

Reading that makes me long for both spring and having hair.

My new word for today is "tocsin". It means alarm given by a bell.

I recently ran into the lovely term, "Architecture Astronauts." Joel Spolsky recently mentioned this lovely  term recently in reference to the hype surroundin Web 2.0 and the long ago hype surrounding P2P . I’ve had similar feelings although I never had such a neat term for it. I first had this sensation when I ran into material where people think we should re-organize the web into neat little ontologically correct collections where you can reliably search for synonyms and always get the one you meant and not the other one.

I’m always relieved when I realize that working code always wins out over complex but architecturally correct diagrams.

monkey-button

To incorrectly button or zip a shirt or sweater. Generally creates a kind of strange lopsidedness where the collar of a shirt doesn’t line up properly.

Usage: “It looks like you monkey-buttoned your shirt.”

I had never heard this phrase before this week when co-worker wore a stylish sweater which looked as if it might have been monkey-buttoned, but wasn’t. I used to have to have monkey-buttoning problems a lot as a child. I’ve mostly grown out of monkey-buttoning, but it still happens sometimes.

Parting by Emily Dickinson.
My life closed twice before its close;
It yet remains to see
If immortality unveil
A third event to me
So huge, so hopeless to conceive
As these that twice befell.
Parting is all we know of heaven,
And all we need of hell.

For the last few weeks I’ve been working my way through “The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson.” I had read bits and pieces of her work before but had never tried to work through the entire canon. The more I read, the more amazed I am at both her ability to capture emotions and how thoroughly modern her writing is. (No, I don’t care if you can sing them all to the yellow rose of Texas.)

[Poem Courtesy of the Writers Almanac]