I’ve been exploring a lot professional opportunities lately. None of them are firm. None of them are yet a path.
I walk around on tippy toes, trying to find a foot size spot of earth for the first step.
In other news, I completed a twitter bot for nshrine. Twitter users can place candles by messaging @nshrine. See the twitter bot help page for more information. Enjoy.
I used to know four things.
I mean really, really, know, for certain, in a shut-up-you-can’t-tell-me-otherwise. Because it’s important to feel this way about something, and dangerous to feel this way about the wrong things, I revisit the List of Things I Believe often. This time, I made a dramatic addition to the list while my son fell asleep on me. I’d like to make this into a “you know, my son taught me something today” type of tear-jerker, but it can’t be. My son was falling asleep on me, in the same rocking chair in which my mother rocked me to sleep, and I was thinking about cold certainty.
The list used to be:
I’ve always been uneasy about that last one. It assumes something, and perhaps a great deal, about time. The last bit doesn’t count at all when I’m completely satisfied. But HA!, I don’t care about the list when I’m completely satisfied anyway, so it doesn’t matter. I’ve come up with other cheap tricks to get around that uneasiness, but nothing’s stuck for long. Here’s the next trick.
I need to work on the wording quite a bit, but that’s the list for now. In the end, this list gets me to a point where I can guess that other things exist. Why I would bother with this while a warm bundle is spreading a drool spot on my shoulder is another issue entirely.
Over 25,000 candles have been placed in public shrines (and now private shrines) on nshrine.com. Though it was a public candle in a well-traffic shrine, I don’t feel quite okay about linking directly to it here, as it was a candle of mourning.
So I have mixed feelings about the milestone. Though if you browse a few shrines, you’ll see that there are many playful and even goofy shrines, most shrines and candles are for people to mark or share the sorrows and losses they’ve experienced. So I can’t really jump up and down–”Yay! Another moment of mourning!”–I can be pleased that there’s one more moment where someone expressed something probably best not left unexpressed.
I feel pretty confident of my ability to frame a snapshot of a flat snapshot. I’m back to trying to understand how deeper things flatten in the camera. I suppose at some point I should learn how to represent depth well, but for now, I’m just trying to flatten more and more. In this case, I think I took it to an absurd degree. This is a light fixture on a pipe sticking out of a wall about a foot below a medallion.
Me: Hold on. Glove.
Flora: Daddy, you don’t have to take a picture.
Me: No, I don’t have to. I’m going to.
Flora: Same thing.
I’m looking mostly for provocation to see myself differently. My life has changed a lot lately, and now I need to make even bigger changes. I’m exhausted emotionally and spending most of my time seeing how high and how low the mood swings can go.
I have enough to think about when I walk and though I’m looking, I’m not giving myself the opportunity to see. I snap pictures without really acknowledging what I’m looking at, or thinking about what they mean. After I loose the context and I see them on the screen, I give myself the time then, and I get it, sometimes.
After photographing thousands of gloves over several years, I can’t recall ever seeing a removed glove finger all alone. Yesterday I saw the one on the left one block away from my house. The one on the right I saw yoday about twenty five blocks away.
Please make up a meaning.
Where and how I fit in has been in a swirl lately. I’ve had plenty to think about, too much to think about.
Normally I look for signs to provoke new thought and to think differently. The most striking things I see now are those that stop thought. A light pole on a freeway bridge next to a bus stop has a twisted, half-painted ground wire. It’s home enough for a cluster of moss. It’s home enough to say ’shhhhh’.
I was listening to Memo From Turner downtown. In between verses a 60s woman walked past and began speaking. I turned to see her among seven or eight bike staples, asking “Is this where I tie up my horse?” Then turning her head upward to ask the clouds threatening rain “IS THIS WHERE I TIE UP MY HORSE?”
(No photo, so here’s a traffic cone.)