Category: Stuff

A haibun is a combination of prose and haiku, with the haiku usually reflecting the writing, but not necessarily directly referencing it. It provides a personal perspective while still being detached; humorous and light, regardless of topic.

I learned about this style of writing from Loren Webster, who provided a particularly deft haibun today, about sexual desire and enlightenment, writing:

I’ve often felt in the past that that I would be a better person if I could free myself from my desires. After all, most great religions I’ve studied seem to imply that one of the first steps in attaining enlightenment is to free oneself from desire, particularly sexual desire.

As I’ve aged, in fact, I’ve comforted myself with the idea that as my sex appeal declined my desires also declined. Ideally, it seemed to me that the two would meet at the very point where pure enlightenment compensated for the fact that no woman in her right mind would even consider sleeping with me.

I chuckled when reading the last, a smile that froze on my face, as Loren acquainted his readers with the fact that he’s recently been diagnosed with another form of cancer. Operable, but not without side effects, such as medication that takes sexual desire but doesn’t leave enlightenment in its stead.

If I fuss and worry, I’m sure I will annoy Loren to no end, so what I’ll do instead is talk about hiking. It is, after all, a shared form of linguistics.

Perhaps these things work differently for women than for men, because I’m not sure that as I’ve gotten older my sexual desires have decreased. When I was younger, the drive for a ‘man’ dominated much more than today, but much of that was mixed with other complicated needs, such as reassurance that I was attractive, interesting, and above all sexy–that primitive little monkey in my head again, waiting to be mated.

What I’m finding is that I’m as sexual as I was in my younger days, but my sexuality isn’t necessarily tied up in ‘having sex’; I can also experience sexuality in my code, my writing and photography, and especially when I’m hiking.

I could even say that hiking is an erotic experience, but then I would have to bring in trite comparisons such as “when I touch the rocks of Castor Shut-Ins, I’m really touching myself”; or “the Slot was a crack in the earth — like a vagina waiting to be entered”. Then there would be the rocks thrusting skyward, like giant penises (or is that giant breasts?) and boulders and balls, or some such thing.

Oh, please. Why must all discussions of sensuality be reduced to a catalog of body parts? And why must all that is erotic be reduced to sex?

What is sex other than an intimacy and a passion, a fulfillment, and above all, a celebration of life? And isn’t this what I experience every time I complete a challenging hike, surrounded by the incredible beauty of the Ozarks, isolated from other people, and dependent only on myself?

It seems to me that rather than suppress one’s sexual desire to achieve enlightenment, one should give into it–to experience it in the wind, and touch it in the plants, and taste it in our drink, and above all hear it in our words.

Of course, I wouldn’t be adverse to the ‘real thing’, either. I am not celibate, only single. But I’m not dependent only on sex to find sexual completion.

Be well, Loren.

(Okay, okay, I’ll stop fussing.)

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

I am not one to do movie reviews. I rarely write on a movie I see, and when I do, it’s usually favorably. But I feel compelled to write about Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, primarily because I disliked this movie so much.

I found my reaction to be somewhat disconcerting, too, because it seems to be such a universally beloved movie. I don’t think I’ve read one unfavorable review of this movie, either by webloggers, in comments at Amazon and other online sites, or by professional critics. However, I disliked the characters from the first five minutes, and my loathing for them only increased as the movie progressed.

This movie is “urban angst” taken to an almost pure artistic form. It’s like walking through a showing at an art gallery consisting primarily of photos taken of reflections from car door handles.

The premise behind the movie is that the lead characters are so shattered by their breakup that they have all memories of each other wiped out (or start to have them wiped out), so they won’t have to suffer the pain of loss. Yet the lead character, played by Jim Carrey, finds that he can’t let go of his former love (played by Kate Winslet), and tries to hide memories of her here and there, to protect them. The concept is extremly novel and the execution intelligent and creative. But it failed with me.

I’ve found through personal and difficult experience that the loss of love and the bitter and hollow disappointment that can come from such, is a rich, and even beautiful experience, albeit best when viewed from a distance. It is just this loss of love, or love unmet that forms the inspiration for much of our art. I have a hard time understanding how a person would want to eliminate even one second of this experience, no matter how painful.

Of course, Carrey’s character finds this out as the erasure is taking place, and this begins the real journey featured in the movie. But by then, the necessary connection I felt you needed to have with his character before this journey takes place just wasn’t there, at least not for me. He irritated me. His girlfriend irritated me. Even the lady in the waiting room crying into her hankie irritated me.

The filming was clever and ingenious, but I sometimes think that this movie was a case of a director wanting to try different techniques, and then finding a story that would connect the dots, so to speak. Maybe if I had accepted it as such when I watched it, I would have at least appreciated the dots, if not the journey between them

It started with a chair. I had no comfortable chair in my room, but there was one not being used in the living room. However, the chair takes up more room than I had, so we had to move the computer table.

The computer table wouldn’t fit where we moved it, and we had to move the large bookshelf downstairs to make room. Once moved, we still found the long table wouldn’t fit, so I decided to move the white fold up table into the corner as a computer table.

But the white computer table wouldn’t fit in the corner, and besides we had to move the bed and now it was too close to the table on the other side that held my stereo and television. I asked my roommate how big were the tables in his room, and would he be up for a trade?

We then moved my bigger table out, and my smaller table into the corner and moved his smaller tables into the other side of the room to hold the TV and stereo.

But after we moved the chair upstairs, and it fit nicely into the corner of my room, right by the window, there was a space left in the living room; we moved the full size futon over and then placed the bookshelf where the futon was. However, we had to move the tall, square table over behind the couch, but I get the Rembrandt lamp for my room. And the Marvin picture.

Since I really don’t have as much room as I did, I gave my older printer to my roommate; when he was connecting it up to his computer, he happened to notice that when he unplugged his laptop that the batteries are no longer working. So I’ll be giving him my Dell laptop, which I’d planned on anyway, going purely with my Mac.

Moving the bookshelf meant I now I had a bunch of music CDs covering my bed, and no place to put them. We solved this problem by moving the two, slim white wire bookshelves up into my room, and the half circle table over by my bed to hold my lamp and the three books I’m reading at the same time. We had to move all the rest of the books downstairs to the bookshelf; it seems brighter in the room, but I am going to miss not being surrounded by books.

My roommate is downstairs exhausted, mumbling something about thinking he was exempt from all this shit now that we’re divorced. I said it only works that way when you have a bad divorce. I said next time he should cheat on his wife and leave the toilet seat up, and then he wouldn’t have to spend his Saturday re-arranging furniture.

Yesterday I spent the day burning CDs of my photos on my Windows machine, in preparation of reformatting the hard drive and givng the computer to my roommate. I ended up offloading over ten gigs of photos, which is a lot of pictures. I imagine I should have been backing all the work up to this point, because what would have happened if the hard drive had crashed? Why, I would have had to go out and take more photos. The horror of it.

I also spent time finding and downloading new games for my freshly re-formatted PowerBook. Not a variety of games: one game, with several different implementations. The only game I play is Mah Jong solitaire, which resembles the original Mah Jong tile game in the use of the tiles, but little else.

I don’t like games. I used to at one time, and had a collection of popular board games and learned to play most card games (but not Bridge) and even played Chess, though I wasn’t very good at it. I enjoyed play pool, and wasn’t half bad at this. I also enjoyed pinball and would spend hours playing Pong and Frogger when these appeared in my favorite pub.

(I would probably still be tempted with an oldtime frogger game, if you place one in front of me.)

Somewhere along the way, though, I lost interest in games. I do not like role playing games, and when my neighbor tried to interest me in these in college, about the only thing I liked about it was the pretty dice. If I went to Vegas, I wouldn’t gamble — no, not even to put one coin in a slot. I’d enjoy seeing the architecture more than anything, or perhaps watching the people.

What’s odd about this is that gaming and programming have long gone hand in hand, and it’s assumed that if you’re interested in software or development, you’re also interested in games. But once I programmed my first game online, a silly little tic-tac-toe written in old VAX Basic, I soon lost interest in gaming and computers.

I’ve been given beautiful computer games, which I try only once. I’ve watched others talk about their MUD (Multiple User Dungeon) experiences and I’ve thought wistfully that they sound like they’re having fun, but not fun enough to join.

Does this make me sound dull as dishwater? Like the cook that commands dozens of dessert recipes, all of which start with “…create a basic, vanilla custard”?

But I like solitaire Mah Jong. Currently I’m trying out three shareware versions of the game for the Mac: Super Mah Jong, which provides interesting layouts; Aki Mahjong, which is really quite a lovely gameboard; and Burning Monkey Mahjong Solitaire, which has a rather interesting, and subtly sophisticated “Boss is Coming!” option.

“Waiting for inspiration…”

“Fearing change…”

I’ll be trying out other variations this week before I settle on the ones I want to license — there are dozens of variations of the game.

There is no real trick associated with playing Mah Jong solitaire, it’s the most uncomplicated of games. The key to playing is never focus on the tiles that can’t be matched. That’s what usually trips you: you’ll find your eyes drawn to the prettier, more colorful tiles; or you start to play on one specific pattern, only to discover you had found the wrong match. From this point on, though, you can’t keep your eyes off these tiles and you miss the pieces that can be played.

If you really master the game, and this is more difficult than it would first seem, your play becomes smoothly rewarding; your moves confident, and progressing without many hesitations or pauses.

I treat solitaire Mah Jong more in the nature of a focus stone to play with while I work things through rather than as a game–somewhat like worry beads or the Catholic rosary. The fact that I’m downloading multiple versions of the game tells me that I have many things to work through.

For those who positively, absolutely, cannot stand to live in America any longer AND who are single: Marry a Canadian!

Many of the profiles are very funny (or, I certainly hope were meant to be funny) and just what we need right now. My favorite is from the 50 year old minister who says what he’s looking for is A fine, upright woman interested in spreading the WORD, and checkers tournaments in the Rec Centre.

You have to love those Canadians — they know how to liven things up.