I'm free!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I love when people's timing is perfect through no intention or even knowledge of their own.

caved to MJ, long since to MD, was so wrong about MT.  More tonight. It's just all so good.

This is poetry. Oddly, reminded me very much of an all-time favorite I once saw on train on commute (Poetry in Motion) at a could-not-have-been-better time (as always happens with this kind of thing) & immediately memorized and have turned over, observed and sat quietly with in my mind many times since:

I had grasped God's garment in the void
But my hand slipped
On the rich silk of it.
The 'everlasting arms' my sister loved to remember
Must have upheld my leaden weight
From falling, even so,
For though I claw at empty air and feel
Nothing, no embrace,
I have not plummeted.

ETA: see, tolja: just typing it up made me well up. I took only one liberty, and that was only punctuational. I think it's that they have similar intimate conversational rhythm.

I've always had trouble with the size of clouds.
I know they're huge. I can see their shapes.
But I don't really see them as objects
on the same scale as trees
and buildings.
They're a backdrop.

Stars are the same way.
I know they're scattered through an endless ocean,
but my gut insists they're a painting
on a domed ceiling.

If I try hard enough,
I get a glimmer of depth,
a dizzying sense of space.

But then everything snaps back.

So one summer afternoon

I set up two HD webcams
hundreds of feet apart,
pointed them at the sky,
and fed one stream to each of my eyes.

The parallax extended my depth perception
by a thousand times,
and I stood in my living room
at the bottom of an abyss
watching mountains drift by.

"he looked like a 4-year-old who got pushed in front of a tv camera"

I have everything I want, in excess.

AUGH there's a reason I haven't listened, really listened, to the "tribute" peace on earth/walk on in public! The end... AUGH

LeWitt

However randomly the building blocks were placed, this was going to happen eventually, because of math.'l qualities of the building blocks' geometry; it just happened to happen here. Is it a coincidence or not? Yes. Nothing less than a comment on life and, as I choose to take it, nexus of free will and God's. Reminds me of the end of "Synecdoche." Breathtaking if one lets it be.

Well, I *tried* to read under a tree but had forgotten that places that are not New York feature Jack Russell terrier-sized mosquitoes with whom I am invariably wildly popular. Settling for an umbrella'd table in an ivy-bedecked courtyard. This place is NICE. As they say, I think I'm gonna like it here.

Tim was even more freaking fantastic than usual today. Lot of gulping in that room.

He mentioned in passing how the word "affection" is 'of course' related to "affected". I NEVER NOTICED THIS BEFORE. I even checked and he's right: both from L., to have something done to one, to be acted upon. So there's a curious passivity to it: you've been acted UPON and affection is a RESPONSE, in a sense being of less agency than it appears. (It also therefore doesn't necessarily have the lukewarm, 'something less than, or in any case not quite the same thing as, love' quality that I think it currently connotes.) Beautiful obvious corollary there. Strengthened and supported my current reading of Searching for God Knows What in which, though I don't agree with everything he says, his emphasis on God's relationalness is hitting me hard just right and I'M STARTING TO FEEL AS THOUGH SOMEONE PERHAPS IS TRYING TO TELL ME SOMETHING HM IF ONLY I COULD FIGURE OUT WHAT.

Today's "heard in a store" music acquisition: MoZella, "Stay". Always such a sucker for that heartbreaky nostalgic VI7b5/ii/V sequence. V of v of V! Entrancing. Gorgeous mathiness. Galaxies whirl.
So immediately taken with the other snippets that for the first time since October 31, 2000, I just bought an album.
Super-digging her r&b, throwback, gently gritty London-y vibe, and her (her producers'?) playfulness with rhythm and orchestration.

Oh!! Also heard a mind-blowing cover of "Fancy" in which "plain white trash" was replaced by "plain black girl", but can't find :( gotta start carrying around my iPad

Let's trade, he said. Outrageous, scandalous, appalling offer. I took it.

One never can see, or not till long afterwards, why any one was selected for any job. And when one does, it is usually some reason that leaves no room for vanity. Certainly, it is never for what the man himself would have regarded as his chief qualifications.

 :)

a severe mercy to be sure, but a mercy.

I don't like the cutesy poo bon mot that challenges just reveal who you are. I don't like its fatalism, and I think it's simply untrue. Of course who you already are influences how you come at them, but I think they very much do make you. I might even say that's what they're FOR.

I love when people who've never done so before suddenly give you exactly what you need, just when and in exquisitely rightly the way you need it, without knowing it. (EMM) "Coincidence", I'm sure.

Me: I don't have a birthday resolution but my non-New Years resolution is to be more positive.
EMM: But that's so HARD!
HC: It's impossible!
Me: I'm doomed to fail!
HC: Why even bother trying?

Raccoon in Ronkonkoma, NY, got its head stuck in a peanut-butter jar, ran up utility pole, and was self-marooned there for 8 hours before a utility worker was able to come try to rescue him with a hook, which jostling resulted in the jar falling off and the raccoon fleeing.

I am sometimes, some ways the raccoon getting jostled and going 'wtf God leave me alone can't you see I've got a problem here?' followed by 'gee thanks for nothing besides scaring the crap out of me and leaving this hook-shaped scrape in my fur' and running off.  I can't help wishing it didn't take as long as it sometimes does to figure out what He was up to, or at least to remember that He knows what He's doing, or at the VERY least to assume that He was up to some good.

partway thru a new song realized its structural similarities to Love (III) the sweetness and savoriness still makes me at minimum tear up every time.

Love bade me welcome, yet my soul drew back,
        Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-ey'd Love, observing me grow slack
        From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning
        If I lack'd anything.

"A guest," I answer'd, "worthy to be here";
        Love said, "You shall be he."
"I, the unkind, the ungrateful? ah my dear,
        I cannot look on thee."
Love took my hand and smiling did reply,
        "Who made the eyes but I?"

"Truth, Lord, but I have marr'd them; let my shame
        Go where it doth deserve."
"And know you not," says Love, "who bore the blame?"
        "My dear, then I will serve."
"You must sit down," says Love, "and taste my meat."
        So I did sit and eat.

Progress: went to TSC and only cried a lot, instead of at hysterical may-need-to-be-quietly-taken-away levels as previously. Teaching was bit disorganized as usual and yet hit the spot as usual.

"The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist." Nice, but I think the believer's version of this might be "The best - most effective - trick the devil pulls is making you forget that the lies he puts into your mind are lies, or even that they're in your mind at all." Thought about that - those - a lot today. Had a nice (un?)blinding spotlight shone on them; had Birbiglia-style wave after wave of metaphors come over me helping me to understand the state I was in (the slowly and contentedly boiling frog; being choked by a knot of python-like jungle weeds) as well as to fumble with, seize, analyze and (re-)start believing (trusting) things I hadn't even noticed I had not been believing. "USE YOUR BRAIN." Sovereignty. "Knows, Wants, Can." The lies, and my unconscious belief itself in them more than in God, do not rate as even the most trifling challenges to Him and thus not only can He dispatch them but it is His desire and pleasure to do so. So though I might not (if anything provably should not) trust myself, I choose to trust that. Also, had a question answered. All so good.

Went back to my hfg after a longish hiatus and enjoyed it much. Had forgotten some things.

Everyone knows I can rarely let something be [fill in the blank- usually 'funny']... I must take it apart and understand WHY. (Also no one is surprised to learn that I was one of those kids you'd have been ill-advised to leave alone in a room with anything you didn't want disassembled.)

OK, so today while slogging through ankle-deep slush on and beside the sidewalks of midtown, I thought of this video that was flying around the internet awhile back (reminder to self: watch on mute):


and I remember even the most steel-hearted people I knew tearing up (at minimum). Why?

Because it's so touching. Why?

Because despite everything - the long absence, his youth at the time of the friendship, his wildness - the lion did something the humans had barely dared hope for. He remembered them from before, how much he'd loved them, and welcomed them. More than that - he ran to them and swept them up. A creature of such power that he could crush them with a pawswipe, choosing to restrain it enough so he could express love, joy and tenderness instead in a way that they could survive through. At some core-of-our-soul, sub-cellular, sub-molecular, cosmic, eternal way, we know we're meant for that, even if we don't.  Groaning for it, you might even say.  So seeing something that adumbrates it, awakens an unbearable longing for an ineffable sweetness of the existence of which we are sure despite never quite having experienced it. Now and not yet. CS Lewis would have loved it.