k fed up

How Caffeine Can Cramp Creativity

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 12:50:33 -0400

Caffeine prevents our focus from becoming too diffuse; it instead hones our attention in a hyper-vigilant fashion.

—Maria Konnikova on how caffeine short-circuits creativity: http://nyr.kr/15dRvAQ

I was just about to make an iced coffee to drink while I work on a poem. Guess I should just grab a beer instead.

The only photos I have of me and my father are from my childhood, before the divorce when I was...

Sun, 16 Jun 2013 16:50:46 -0400

The only photos I have of me and my father are from my childhood, before the divorce when I was fourteen, and they’re all of the entire family.

It’s OK, though, because we are writing a new history moving forward, and the pictures in my mind are far more valuable to me because the relationship is so much easier.

I only have tiny blips of wishing him to be more communicative, less isolating now. When I feel to reach out, I reach out, and I don’t get upset that it’s on me to make contact. Amazingly, he reaches out sometimes, too.

I never tell him what I think he should do, or how he should think or feel about anything anymore.

And he doesn’t tell me to stop singing, either.

Ruby Red…

Sat, 15 Jun 2013 21:11:25 -0400

Ruby Red…

Robin understands. She’d make the perfect travel...

Sat, 15 Jun 2013 19:22:41 -0400

Robin understands. She’d make the perfect travel companion, methinks.

I'mma pack those bags under my eyes and take a trip to New Zealand. What the fuck.

Sat, 15 Jun 2013 19:08:53 -0400

Happy Saturday! Kid is at a sleepover, mate unloaded the...

Sat, 15 Jun 2013 19:02:01 -0400

Happy Saturday! Kid is at a sleepover, mate unloaded the post-market truck, I made garlic scape pesto and pickled some scapes. We were going to hit the movies but there’s nothing playing that wowed us (I want something deep and dark about love and death). So we made 8:00 reservations at Moe’s in Akron like young people who don’t typically go to bed at 9:30 even on a Saturday. My throat gland thing is still really awful but I’ve been faking feeling awesome all day for an insane number of customers, and it apparently worked. And yay for Sunday and no need to set an alarm. This has been a GPOY on a Saturday.

Nothing like an Ohio grown Bunny Berry!

Sat, 15 Jun 2013 14:47:04 -0400

Nothing like an Ohio grown Bunny Berry!

Portulaca in the morning.

Sat, 15 Jun 2013 07:45:50 -0400

Portulaca in the morning.

jotheseawolf: rocketfists: thesonicscrew: land-of-greyjoys-and...

Fri, 14 Jun 2013 20:50:59 -0400

jotheseawolf:

rocketfists:

thesonicscrew:

land-of-greyjoys-and-cannibals:

jonnybuckland:

misocorny:

doctorplushrump:

arachnid-tea:

haave-you-met-ted:

ruckycharmconveniencestore:

jonnybuckland:

my mom came into my room and was all

hey I just downloaded Clocks by Coldplay, it sounds awesome

and this is what she downloaded…just listen to it

oh my fucking god

This is great!!

Dayum that’s classy

the song is now 100000x better

i only have followers bc of this 1 post

my dad will be the happiest person if I show this to him

oh god…i love it

*salsa dances out of the room*

I love this.

i just… what??

Just poured myself a shot of tequila so I can enjoy this properly.

Dog Math*

Fri, 14 Jun 2013 07:36:24 -0400

1 lb. brown sugar + doggy digestive system = explosive diarrhea.

*dogs can’t do math.

I have a fever. I woke up with it, a stuffy head, and a...

Thu, 13 Jun 2013 16:44:00 -0400

I have a fever. I woke up with it, a stuffy head, and a massively swollen gland in my neck, then spent 5 hours out in the damp air at my Thursday market. Ibuprofen made that almost bearable but it wore off and now I’m burning up, which means I had to cancel my plans for this evening. I was really looking forward to it, too.

"it walked out of the light"

Thu, 13 Jun 2013 08:21:07 -0400

mkimarnold:

There are advantages to aging, my friends tell me. Think of all the stupid little things you no longer worry about. I nod and laugh, but I wonder if this is true. It doesn’t seem to me as though I have let anything go.

I meet my friend at the bar I haven’t been to in some time. The menu has changed. The bartender. I ask this new one about his predecessor. “Gone,” he says. “I’m the only guy here.” I explain to him that the old bartender – we’ll call him Ken – would see me through the glass door on my way in and start mixing my cocktail. He nods slowly. “But what if you wanted something else, you know, for a change?” I have no way to answer this so I just laugh out loud instead.

It’s not really true, what I say about Ken. He’d always ask as I sat down. Why would I lie?

It’s still a few minutes before E. arrives. When she gets there, we hug. We talk about writing projects. Things we are reading. We talk about aging. I tell her of my resistance. My childish insistence on denying its realities.

“I don’t know why I am fighting this,” I tell her. “I think I should embrace it.”

“You are supposed to learn to love it,” she says. “Love your pain, love your struggle.” She spreads her arms out wide to demonstrate.

“I feel like I am just angry all the time,” I say.

“Maybe you can learn to love that, too?”

—

My mother was forty-two when she married. Forty-five by the time I arrived, a pre-packaged, fully-formed toddler. Had she given birth to me, it would have been at forty-two, the age I will turn this fall. It is difficult to imagine having a child now. Not only the physical demands pregnancy and childbirth would make on the body, but that sense of starting again. Of such intense attention and care. Of being completely consumed by the endless tasks of early parenting, the constant vigilance, the sleeplessness. Those early months of being beholden to the needs of this small creature with whom there is no reasoning, for whom there are no real boundaries of time or between bodies. I am very aware of infants when I see them – out walking or traveling. In restaurants and parks. I am drawn to their smallness, the stab of nostalgia for a particular kind of fantasy of motherhood, but I also feel such relief. Not me, I think. Not me.

And yet the fact of it – that I might no longer be able to choose not to have a child, that my body will in fact render such questions irrelevant – is a bit of a blow. Like the early waking, like the constant irritation, like the heaviness I feel in myself, it is an undeniable reminder that my body is changing, has in fact always been changing. That from the moment of my birth has been marching me toward its inevitable conclusion. I am not yet ready to love this.

—

The year I turned forty, I found myself pulsing white hot. I was alive to my body, attuned to its desires in ways that were startling, unsettling. I was a raw animal, an exposed nerve. Fierce hungers. I explained this to a friend of mine who laughed and said, “Oh that is just your body’s last gasp before menopause.” I was unable to speak to her for days.

—

I tell my friend that I am going to try to embrace the struggle. Love it, as E. suggests. “Why would you do that,” she asks. “I have always known you to be a fighter. Why give up now?”

I suppose it might be a fair question, but also not an uncomplicated one. “Maybe I’m tired?”

“No. You are the most tireless woman I know,” she says. This strikes me as the kindest thing she could have said. Something I did not know I needed to hear.

—

The year before I turned forty, I met a writer – an older man who had recently retired from decades of high school teaching – and we maintained a sporadic correspondence for a few months after the seminar we had been in together ended. I expressed to him some of my earliest anxieties about turning forty. Some weeks later, a book arrived from him. It was called Forty: The Age and the Symbol, written by an anthropologist about the cultural invention of the so-called midlife crisis. It traced the traditional and mythological meanings of the number forty, and scanned literary and historical texts for the appearance of the number, the symbol. Assembled the references and evidence to conclude that our understanding of it – the number, the age – has changed over time and will continue to. Intended, I think, to provide some relief to the middle-aged. To suggest that maybe these years of mid life are not so limiting as we might think.

I thanked this friend for sending it, pointed out all that I found interesting and notable in it. I did not tell him that the book did nothing to explain the madness I felt living in my own skin.

—

In Anne Carsons’s “The Glass Essay,” the speaker is struggling through the end of a love affair. She visits her mother and her ailing father and reads Emily Bronte. She describes a series of visions that come to her while she attempts to make meaning of this time. There are thirteen visions in all. The piece concludes with the last of these. I read it as a kind of passing from the fierce clutch of a thing to perhaps what might be an embrace:

I saw a high hill and on it a form shaped against hard air.

It could have been just a pole with some old cloth attached,
But as I came closer
I saw it was a human body

trying to stand against winds so terrible that the flesh was blowing off
the bones.
And there was no pain.
The wind

was cleansing the bones.
They stood forth silver and necessary.
It was not my body, not a woman’s body, it was the body of us all.
It walked out of the light.

My thoughts are now turning to fifty - a dark chasm. I haven’t found words, but these words resonate. <3

janetisserlis: meeting, day one This pleases me.

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 19:54:34 -0400

janetisserlis:

meeting, day one

This pleases me.

I’m probably a little bit too excited about what I just...

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 17:36:55 -0400

I’m probably a little bit too excited about what I just found on my doorstep.

superseventies: Model wearing a crocheted dress, photographed...

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 16:12:28 -0400

superseventies:

Model wearing a crocheted dress, photographed by Richard Tam, 1970.

My mom had a Stanley dust mop that looked just like this, except it had a brown handle.

Gratitude

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 09:26:53 -0400

for a brand new day and another opportunity to stay in my center during the child’s ongoing storm.*
for a cup of coffee roasted by people I like.
for the nursing home that my mother in-law moves into today being close by so we can visit easily.
for enough cherries on the sour cherry tree to make an actual pie if I can keep the birds away.

*I have so much work to do on myself with this relationship. I’m stymied by how easily I get pulled out of the space of kind firmness and into shrieking banshee. I dropped some f-bombs on my ten year-old yesterday – the fact that she spent 90% of the day being a hideous little troll is no excuse for my reaction – and today I am really struggling with how hateful I sounded. Way to parent, Kelly. Nice job.

Sonder [2:39] from John Koenig’s The Dictionary of Obscure...

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 07:49:18 -0400

Sonder [2:39] from John Koenig’s The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

sonder - n. the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own…

When I’m not writing dictionaries, I’m a graphic designer and video maker, so I decided to expand one of my definitions into a video. Enjoy.

scholvin: tiffehr: Prince: Purple Rain, 1983 (Video) @...

Tue, 11 Jun 2013 17:25:41 -0400

scholvin:

tiffehr:

Prince: Purple Rain, 1983 (Video) @ Antiquiet

Everyone knows the song. Play the first few chords and you’ll have everyone around you singing along. But in 1983 that wasn’t the case. Instead you had a capacity crowd silenced by the song’s first performance. This is one of only a handful of bootlegs of this track that does not have the crowd going nuts; instead they listen to the song and literally see history in the making. Obviously they can’t sing along, the song is new. So instead they listen; Seeing Prince at his absolute rawest in a tiny club with bad sound, sweating his ass off for the Minnesota Dance Theater Company. And melting off faces with one of his best guitar solos.

I’m not a huge Prince fan, but this is fucking amazing.

Are you kidding me.

superseventies: Dolly Parton ARB always.

Tue, 11 Jun 2013 15:32:04 -0400

superseventies:

Dolly Parton

ARB always.

futurejournalismproject: Catching up on the NSA’s Surveillance...

Tue, 11 Jun 2013 08:44:06 -0400

futurejournalismproject:

Catching up on the NSA’s Surveillance Program

As we adjust our tinfoil hats and try to make sense of the revelations that the US National Security agency has been monitoring email, cellular and other digital traffic for years now, we do a lot of reading.

It’s a fluid story with new facts coming to the fore about as fast as reporters can tweet them.

There are a lot of moving parts. First and foremost is news of NSA snooping on American activities via its PRISM program. Then there are denials by the Google, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft that they provided the Feds with back door access to their servers. Honest!

We’re not sure which is scarier: that they’re lying and actually do and did, or that they’re telling the truth and the government snuck in undetected.

While The Wall Street Journal appears quite happy with the program (Thank You for Data-Mining) and The New York Times quite angry (President Obama’s Dragnet), here’s some of what’s coming across our radar to help people get up to speed.

Chronicle Of Higher Education, Why Privacy Matters Even if You Have ‘Nothing to Hide’
“Privacy is often threatened not by a single egregious act but by the slow accretion of a series of relatively minor acts. In this respect, privacy problems resemble certain environmental harms, which occur over time through a series of small acts by different actors. Although society is more likely to respond to a major oil spill, gradual pollution by a multitude of actors often creates worse problems.”

The Guardian, Edward Snowden: the whistleblower behind the NSA surveillance revelations (Video)
Any analyst at any time can target anyone, any selector, anywhere. Where those communications will be picked up depends on the range of the sensor networks and the authorities that analyst is empowered with. Not all analysts have the ability to target everything. But I sitting at my desk certainly had the authorities to wiretap anyone from you or your accountant to a Federal judge to even the President if I had a personal e-mail.

New York Times, How the US Uses Technology to Mine More Data More Quickly
“American laws and American policy view the content of communications as the most private and the most valuable, but that is backwards today,” said Marc Rotenberg, the executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a Washington group. “The information associated with communications today is often more significant than the communications itself, and the people who do the data mining know that.”

The Guardian, Boundless Informant: the NSA’s secret tool to track global surveillance data
A snapshot of the Boundless Informant data, contained in a top secret NSA “global heat map” seen by the Guardian, shows that in March 2013 the agency collected 97 [billion] pieces of intelligence from computer networks worldwide… The level of detail includes individual IP addresses.

Wall Street Journal, Technology Emboldened the NSA
The NSA’s advances have come in the form of programs developed on the West Coast—a central one was known by the quirky name Hadoop—that enable intelligence agencies to cheaply amplify computing power, U.S. and industry officials said. The new capabilities allowed officials to shift from being overwhelmed by data to being able to make sense of large chunks of it to predict events, the officials said. [Related: Why Metadata Matters, via the Electronic Frontier Foundation.]

Tips and Tricks

Wired, Hear Ye, Future Deep Throats: This Is How to Leak to the Press.

Fox News, A guide for journalists (and everyone else) to avoid government snoops.

Medill National Security Zone, Digital Security Basics for Journalists.

Slate, How to Shield Your Calls, Chats, and Internet Browsing From Government Surveillance

Bonus: Our Surveillance Tag is a deep dive into all things… err, surveillance.

Image: Feeling Safer? by John Cole.

Holding for later.

k fed up

How Caffeine Can Cramp Creativity

—Maria Konnikova on how caffeine short-circuits creativity: http://nyr.kr/15dRvAQ

The only photos I have of me and my father are from my childhood, before the divorce when I was...

Ruby Red…

Robin understands. She’d make the perfect travel...

I'mma pack those bags under my eyes and take a trip to New Zealand. What the fuck.

Happy Saturday! Kid is at a sleepover, mate unloaded the...

Nothing like an Ohio grown Bunny Berry!

Portulaca in the morning.

jotheseawolf: rocketfists: thesonicscrew: land-of-greyjoys-and...

Dog Math*

I have a fever. I woke up with it, a stuffy head, and a...

"it walked out of the light"

janetisserlis: meeting, day one This pleases me.

I’m probably a little bit too excited about what I just...

superseventies: Model wearing a crocheted dress, photographed...

Gratitude

Sonder [2:39] from John Koenig’s The Dictionary of Obscure...

scholvin: tiffehr: Prince: Purple Rain, 1983 (Video) @...

superseventies: Dolly Parton ARB always.

futurejournalismproject: Catching up on the NSA’s Surveillance...