girl eat machine.

Taking the time to troubleshoot my way into my old blog was totally worth it. There’s 90 days between me and the option to undo what I’ve done, but I think I’m down with my decision to DELETE. Plus, I scored some sweet old pictures out of the deal:

More to share later.

(reposted from December 23, 2006)

an adult stands in little girl shoes
smaller than the tree she long out grew…
a new tree, a new age, a new view –
now both she and her father must look up at the branches,
after staring down upon them for so long
no longer does the girlchild help put the tree up,
the woman comes home to it
stands besides the lights
looks on and clings to her father
what is this feeling?
and we watch it together
she, i, and he
because we’re all a part of each other
and the lights shine different colors over those same cheekbones
that same curvy forehead
that can be wrinkled for
planting
and scrunched up against wind
wild and cold
next to city streets
and on mountain tops
under hazy distant sun
just like the old brothers who sowed their
land and gave blood and love and sweat
so that one day we could
walk and talk
and remember them as though we
knew them, stood with them on the battlefield
sat around sacrificial fires
how smoke and fire in our faces
spoke with curve sliding tongues
and actually knew the thing which we (he) desperately
emulate(s)
and instead of searching the treeline for their figures
we would stand among our ancestors
under the trees
in the black
knowing their waters and lands

and this is what he thinks about when
he asks me if i’m embarrassed
about what I did
and she says no
and wonders about it
curled against him
in the yellow of their artifical lights
in the black of new england night
in the warmth of his house,
the one she grew up in,
girlchild running around putting up the stockings
that were already up when the woman came home

– she admires them
without pinching the toes as she once did
and admires her house
instead of raging against it as she once did
and she stands beside her father
and they feel equal under the mass of that new
fake plastic tree
with its candy lights and bare branches
that they plan to fill together
and they turn off the rest of the lights
twist the candles off
flick switches and pull plugs
stand together,
feel settled.
the women bends to unplug
the tree lights
(a different plug than last year)
and the house is taken with darkness.
she is so tired and the black is so warm.

my father turns to her
and touches my back.
we walk up the stairs, parting
into the light of our bedrooms
where we douse our lights separately
and sleep in a house
stained with our footprints
echoing our fantasy
our history
chronicling our pain,
our remembrance
our movement
our progress
with little notches in the walls
and little bookmarks in the chapters of our hearts.

I’m sorry to subject whoever is out there reading this blog to my poetry, but I feel a compulsive need to share. This is, I guess, my blog. Theoretically, I can do whatever I want…

…So long as I remember I’m doing it in public. At the risk of inspiring some nerdy Sherlock Scraper Holmes, I’ll share that I recently rediscovered a largely hidden (thank goodness) blog I wrote a few years ago. That’s where I found the poem that follows — written about Christmas 2006. I’m sure some of my questionable quality poetry turns some of you off because I’m a bit of a poetic literalist, but I’ll admit that I think the style works for the story that follows. But then, I’m biased.

It’s an interesting experience, sharing poetry. All shared writing involves a bit of audacious vulnerability, but Western (or, at least, American) culture is particularly harsh towards the perceived airy, artiness of poetic thought. It’s a squishy place that I’m working on making myself more comfortable with, if only because it’s an artform I can’t quite escape from. Watching Howl recently reminded me of that notion — that there are some things that must be said and can only be said in poetry.

This phantom blog, on the other hand, is an expression of vulnerability I’m not comfortable with: a dangerously near-to-public diary. Bleh.

Working for a tech- and web-focused group as I do, the topic of our individual relationships with the Internet comes up a lot. “I could have sworn that Friendster was going to go big!” … “When did your friends stop posting their crushes on Live Journal?” … “We called them “video web logs,” though we didn’t know what to do with them.. The idea of things being Public in the way they are now was foreign. Sharing was an idea in its infancy. The Internet radicalized our commons and the notion of what and how we could share there — and it still is radicalizing them.

Thus, my dilemma.

I no longer know the password to get into my old blog — heck, I think the login information has changed through all the mergers and buy-outs that have happened since I fatefully typed out alllllll those entries so many years ago. But, it doesn’t matter: I need in. I’m sure there will forever be cached somewhere the awkward pinnings of my awkward younger self, but though She’s part of my history, she doesn’t reflect Me now. Man, thinking about it, I can almost relate to the people that all those CNN Special Report sexting teens will be 6 or 7 years from now, cursing YouTube, Facebook, Flickr, and 4chan for blasting and caching their pictures all over the Internet.

I’m going to post the poem separately in the entry that follows. Related: catch the title reference?

A+

XKCD makes my life so much better.

…and OkGo.

Found via a roboticist who also builds Rube Goldberg machines who will be speaking at TEDWomen.