Category: Writing

May 11, 2005 /

In other Anacrusis-tangent news, I’m happy to report that Holly threw my gauntlet right back in my face and did, in fact, prove me wrong. I reprint her story-poem here, with her permission, to keep it from getting lost to the winds of LJ-feed comment rot:

The Burger King is fat with youth,
With adolescent pageantry,
With shining eyes revealing truth.

He’s fifty-two; unagingly
He lounges over golden thrones
With adolescent pageantry.

Unwrinkled cheeks, uncreaking bones;
But nothing sinster to dread.
He lounges over golden thrones.

No bloody baths, no gingerbread.
He chargrills souls to golden brown
But nothing sinister to dread.

Adorned with shining paper crown
His sceptre’s high; his forehead clear;
He chargrills souls to golden brown

And swallows them with ginger beer.
The Burger King is fat with youth,
His sceptre’s high, his forehead clear
With shining eyes revealing truth.

Terza

May 11, 2005 /

Aahhhh, I can’t do it! I did manage to write this within the constraints I imposed, but it ends up too incoherent to be a real story, so I’m sacrificing the basic premise in order to satisfy the extra ones. That’s weak. Ergo this isn’t going in Anacrusis, but I’ll gladly dump it on you here, where apparently I have no standards.

I no longer think it’s possible to write a terzanelle in 101 words that’s still a good story, and I’m positive it can’t be done in meter. I’d love it if you proved me wrong.

There’s little to Terza but her frame.
She rolls. Nine sixes again:
at the Thousand-Year Club they’re all the same.

They gambled away bad luck, when
they thought they were wise.
(She rolls nine sixes again.)

When age dulled their eyes,
they’d gamble that away as well,
they thought! They were wise.

Terza chose to lose Hell
(she’d be different here);
they gambled that away as well.

Risk can’t be where fear
is not. Alone she’d be different; here
she’s one more clone.

There’s little to Terza, but her frame
is not alone at the Thousand-Year Club:
they’re all the same.

Obligatory reflection

May 5, 2005 /

Thanks for everybody who called, wrote or commented to send me birthday wishes, and to all the people who showed up at my partylike entity. You’re all great! And I am made happy by material possessions: DC gave me more of the awesome restricted-access Actors Theatre notebooks, and Maria gave me about a jillion books and DVDs and an ice cream cake and apparently something else that hasn’t arrived yet, and Lisa gave me–exclamation marks!–my first-ever illustrated story! (Of Fortado.)

Despite my inexplicable knee-jerk belief of the past several months that I’ve been 26, I’m 24. Tonight I sent off the third-to-last thing I have to do to graduate. Almost done.

It doesn’t honestly feel like I’ve lived in Louisville that long. I feel so much more competent now, in so many areas, than I did two years ago: working with humans, writing code, writing, traveling, using public transportation, applying the principles of aikido to solve nonphysical conflicts–all the things I want to spend my whole life doing.

Also, I think this is the year my brain starts dying!

Actually I am quite good about commenting

April 29, 2005 /

I spent most of the past week and almost all of the last 24 hours writing code for my Master’s degree project, because I’m a terrible person. And then today I came in to work on zero sleep for the first time. This should be different.

On the bus here, I had a dozing dream about falling out onto a huge slick plain of PHP and whitespace. I knew it was stuff I’d written, but I couldn’t figure out where in the whole scheme it fit. I was lost! It could be miles to the nearest comment! It was pretty scary.

I have (wisely, I think) decided not to write an anacrusis about this.

April 21, 2005 /

I’ve had to disable the little sidebar thingies that tell you when Anacrusis and NFD are updated, but hey, that’s what RSS feeds are for. It’s for the best anyway; that was some of the hackiest code I’ve ever written, and I’m glad it’s gone.

March 19, 2005 /

I need PHP to go up one level of a directory, then go back down several more, to include a file. I don’t know how to do this, but I’ve been getting around it by using a URL instead of a path; now Dreamhost is turning off the option of using URLs in include statements, for (good) security reasons, so I can’t do that anymore.

I also absolutely can’t find a way to do it the path way. It won’t work with an absolute path from the root directory, nor from the highest web-accessible directory (I’m in a Linux / Apache environment, if you hadn’t guessed). I can’t use ..s to ratchet up, or do any other kind of relative movement I can think of. Does anyone know how to get what I want?

Actually, Lisa, I think you’re the only PHP programmer who reads this, so maybe I should have just emailed you. But I might be wrong.

Update 0224 hrs: Never mind. I found out how to do it, but it doesn’t help, since I need to have Apache parse the file (a NewsBruiser portal CGI, if you hadn’t guessed) before I grab it, and an internal include obviously doesn’t do that. I’ll have to use the curl library, once I figure out what it is.

And I know I’m a bad programmer for going with this setup in the first place, but I had the choice of frames, meta refreshes or dumping a load on PHP, and it was rocks and frying pans all over.

Let’s see if LJ picks it up this time

March 10, 2005 /

Don't blog on me blog, verb / To noisily and simultaneously void one’s spleen, stomach, bladder and bowels.

In case you can’t read the text on the second one (which would be the back), it’s the Devil’s Dictionary 2.0 definition of “blog,” so of course this would be pending Mr. Knauss’s approval.

Seriously, if I got a couple dozen of these printed up, would anybody else be into it? I know my bitter, self-mocking iconoclasm is somewhat uncommon within my circle of readers, but there is a time and place for the ironic acknowledgement of one’s own participation in an overhyped and crass medium of expression. Like, say, concerts.

March 5, 2005 /

“[M]eaningful self-expression is not just a tool for success in the academy and the professional world (though it is that, too), but an essential component of finding and living our call to be human.”

Beautifully written and perfectly described. Sean’s a better diarist than I, and he’s the teacher I’ll never be, but this excerpt from one of his letters says exactly what I try to say whenever I discover a new and interesting human: clear thought and writing are rare, and powerful, and of tremendous value in the world.

If I read your blog or friend your LJ, it’s because I am fascinated by your finding and living of the call to be human.