miscellaneous pathology: May 2003 Archives

i started the cleaning with my computer table. figuring he was either in there somewhere, unless he'd been eaten by the cat, always a possibility. but no.

this is the story of chrispy, not just a bee body, art. unintentional, but art nonetheless. and my mascot. pictures are here. so much symbolism.

now i have a wonderful little clear plastic rounded-coffin-shaped thing for him, saving it for when i found him. but i have to get him in there. i've moved him at least twice using a piece of paper, but i need to be able to pick him up from that little corner & maneuver him into a tiny box. don't think an eight and a half by eleven sheet of paper is going to work. not sure what will. just scooted him with a pen & it cost a fairly decent scream & two squeaks, plus the skincrawls.

i can do this.

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update: i might have been able to. but i didn't. chris's sister was here & i had her do it for me. she touched it. with her hands. i couldn't watch. oh, & here are some works-in-progress shots of the doll arms projects, these are intended as gifts for my coworkers. (also there's an old lens thingy in there, for good measure).

yes, i'm cleaning. i'm multitasking.

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and finding treasures in boxes in the garage, which i was not cleaning, but ... um ... multita... you know.

with all of the pictures i've been taking of me, you'd think i like it. oh no. it's a very difficult thing and for the most part it seems foolish and ridiculous.

seemed. it seemed ridiculous. & i would stress if the shots looked posed, as if i should look like i snuck up on myself & caught a perfectly natural candid shot. (which is much more ridiculous than the mere fact that i constantly take pictures of myself). so why would i be trying to get the same shot over & over?

i mean, where exactly (as i asked myself this afternoon), is the fun in that? goodgod if i'm going to have a strange self-indulgent hobby like this, i may as well embrace it rather than try to act nonchalant & pretend i'm not actually doing what i'm doing. look, i take about, oh, twenty, thirty pictures of myself a week these days. which is a little strange, yes? i'm no stranger to strange, strange is good for me. so i am doing this strange thing, why on earth would i trying to make like all normal about it? what would be the point?

no matter what i do this feels foolish. however i seem to need to do this, & so i should just get on with it right?

nothing like it. of course we're not talking about solid, undisturbed sleep, we're talking couchsleep here. i've been a couchsleeper for years now, & life, in general, is different if you _never_ go to bed.

may have been the pain pillers i took for my headache. at one point this morning my son was making a package to send to a friend, and i remember thinking, hmm, maybe we shouldn't send that one, what if it has magic powers? luckily i didn't actually say this, i have enough experience with being mostly asleep & functioning anyway to filter these sorts of things out. there are lots of levels of sleep, many of which can be worked into one's daily routine without disturbing it all that much. especially if one has long hair & can arrange it so the hair obscures a direct view of the closed eyes. except that time in chemistry class when the teacher decided to separate some hydrogen out of some h2o & then blow it up, causing the sleeping person to jump about a foot or two, greatly amusing the rest of the class.

i passed that class with a solid c-, even though i slept through almost all of it. ahh, memories. to this day the periodic table of the elements is like a blue valium to me.

my life is a series of naps, some longer than others. it's a very restless & unsettled existence. i like to think of it as an on-the-go lifestyle rather than a sleep disorder thankyouverymuch.

i waited a decent interval before i brought in the deviant little sculptures. you want your coworkers to think you're weird, but only a little - trust me on this one. i therefore omitted the origins of things i have scattered here & there on my desk:

these are constructed out of eyeglass lenses & parts, wire, pen parts, adding machine roll cores, & most importantly, nail polish and crazy glue. if you are looking for an excellent polymer to bond plastics, look no further. a combination of standard liquid crazy glue, applied in layers along with a clear nail polish, makes an incredibly durable adhesive. makes epoxy look like kindergarten paste. smells pretty good too.

in the first picture i've pointed out a few of the many bizarre aspects of these thingys. these are around seven years old now. the one with five lenses stuck together? it was dropped, recently, on a hard surface. one of the lenses cracked, but the adhesive did not fail. in fact all of these things have survived seven or more years being moved around stuffed in boxes & so forth. now, the second one, it's the most deviant of all, because at some point it began to be ... something. it's ... it's some sort of postapocalyptic industrial processing facility. really. & like most postapocalyptic things, it's made out of a little bit of everything, all of which is garbage.

see that's the sticky part, the part where you inquire where i got all those eyeglass lenses, & i answer, lenscrafters. what, they give them to you, you ask? well, sort of. i mean, they just threw them away. & they had the cleanest garbage i've ever seen. it wasn't icky at all, & for a time in my life i was able to have a nice wardrobe of prescription eyeglasses i wouldn't have otherwise been able to afford -- how did i know they were my prescription? held them up to my eyes, if i could see out of 'em, they were. oh, i know you're saying eww right now. then again i bet you never found a 27" stereo color television in a dumpster because it had an imperceptible scratch on the picture tube. look, i didn't get in the dumpster, i didn't get icky, i just had many many pairs of glasses & some leftovers. in the course of fixing up discarded eyewear, i made the accidental discovery of the glue/polish polymer, & i had all this nail polish & of course a nice junk drawer full of bits of this & that & well, things just ... happened. i also discovered that really interesting things happen when you pour glitter nail polish into the concave part of a plastic lens & set fire to it. not that you should ever do that! i've done it, so you don't have to. the answer? extremely interesting blackened bubbly glittery textured blob & a smell that honestly never ever goes away. ever.

i have more things, i need to get them in some good strong light & get pictures of them too, they're madly interesting little pieces of trash.

i am a very contradictory individual. take this forinstance: the first image is a screenshot of my desktop. i didn't straighten it up, i just rolled up the windows. this is a windowblinds theme called 'toys', it's quite functional as far as being able to organize my shortcuts (without which i forget i have stuff). the second one is the desk the computer's sitting on.

i'm cleaning it right now, ok?

also, i can't help but wonder how i can take a picture of myself in the mirror and see an entirely different image in the mirror at the time, than the one the camera captures. why?

first one, in the bathroom, & yes, i'm cleaning the bathroom mirror today too. second two were a spectacular sunset outside my office window, those were intended for the mirror project, but naah.

it could be worse. it could be worse! worse. it could be. because if there's one thing that's been trepanned into me it's that the thought that it can't get worse is almost if not always the precursor of it going ahead & getting worse.

so the fact that i'm home & my car won't start & i'm deeply overdrawn & a paycheck that would make me non-overdrawn is 26 miles away & have i mentioned my car won't start? & affording time off work isn't something i can do right now? but the being home bit, isn't the car's fault, that would be me not having a babysitter today. no babysitter. no car. & not one but two paychecks out there i should have had days ago, which would have saved big bucks in overdraft fees, if i'd had them, however i did not. & that fact would be my fault, basically, mostly because i tend to try to seem somewhat nonchalant about when i'm paid, i have issues with seeming needy & desperate, especially when i am. apparently i prefer a life of quiet unspoken desperation.

it could be worse.

they're still at it, you know. they never really stopped. & when one of those useless newsletters i used to think might be useful comes in with the subject line saying "leave those links blue!" (yes. with an exclamation mark.) i become more or less furious. i'm not sure fury is the appropriate response, but hey, gotta go with what i've got here. here's the argument: all the links on the internet should be underlined and blue, because people are stupid. sure, sure, people are stupid, i'll concede that, but honestly, if there's anyone still out there that becomes hopelessly confused and thinks that an entire page contains nothing to click on just because the links aren't blue? they should get off the internet and go back to mining navel lint full time.

*breathe* ok, now i know that in a business setting it's important for the bottom line to cater to anyone capable of buying no matter how much of a bottom feeder they are. fine. but there are so many ways to make it imminently clear that a link is clickable (for instance, including the text "click here" in the link), it just requires a little creativity. so what we have here is people who don't want to think, pontificating on the subject of how other people don't want to think, concluding, 'don't make us think'.

you know what i think? i think we should ban 'link blue' from the internet entirely. make people think, dammit. THINK.