Website Troubles

There are style sheet imps and code gremlins playing badly among the pages of this site. So far, the blog layout is holding up, but the rest of the site is just doing an HTML version of the funky chicken.

Enjoy this page - while it last. Heh. Repairs forthcoming.

UPDATE: 07/27/09 @ 10:53 a.m.

All pages now reporting success!

Submerged

It is all gone now - the world of air breathing creatures and screaming sounds demanding, requiring something every moment of all days. Gone. This viscous shell into which I have plunged protects me and presents to me colors vibrant and dancing on the scales of fish and small bubbles of relief, ascending, taking with them each a small measure of my former dependence on demands and oxygen. I grasp razor edged rocks with delicate fingers ignoring pain for freedom and beauty of this moment. I will soon need to return, but not now – not for an eternity of heart beats measured in a few more clicks of the clock – the clock that ticks still, up there.

Juggling?

First. I am NOT a juggler. Nope. Notta.

However, this show was amazing and I discovered an amazing sub-culture that has, well, made me paranoid that there are jugglers everywhere. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Quoting

Try to learn something about everything and everything about something.
- Thomas H. Huxley

Blog moving...and Gender Variants

Hopefully, in a few days this blog will be moving to my new site - http://www.kimewilliams.com.

In the mean time I have been wondering about some gender issues. I have noticed - with all due reverence and distance - an interesting discussion over at Simmonne's about 'bums' - butts. The discussion has been mainly among women and has been a delightful, if playful, affirmation of physical attributes. It is lovely, actually, that these ladies are so supportive, complimentary and encouraging of each other's appearance.

Which got me to wondering if men would be similarly impassioned to each other. The following is the imagined conversation that went on in my head:

Me: Hey, Dave... I was reading this woman's blog about liking her own butt, and how interesting it was that the ladies that comment were celebrating their favorite's among their own and each others body parts. Do you have a favorite physical attribute?

Dave: Dude. You're gay. I got your body part right here! Hey - where was that site? Do they post pictures?

Yep. What was I thinking?

Quoting

For a true writer each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed.

-Ernest Hemingway (1899 - 1961), in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech

Skin Crawling

Spend some time with someone who gets under your skin.

When I as in college, among the various subjects I studied was physics. I remember very little of that complicated subject, but one concept that sticks with me is that in order to have movement, friction is necessary. Just a quick jaunt down memory lane to the last time my truck as ‘stuck’ in the mud and I fully understand the need for friction in order to move.

The need for friction makes sense in physics. In order for an object, a car for example, to move from one point to the next, friction must exist for there to be sufficient traction for movement to happen. There are obviously many more factors - laws even - at work in the equation needed to get that car moving, but my point about the necessity of friction make sense easily enough.

What brings me to this – and what this is about, really – is pondering the need for friction on an interpersonal level as we attempt to move through life. Without stretching the analogy beyond recognition, I have thought quite a bit recently about how even though I often choose to be around like-minded people, very often it is when I am face-to-face with an individual or idea that just grates on my nerves that I become most passionate, and I know passion moves me. Isn’t it true that we often hone ourselves against the wet-stone of contrast?

So, I hang out this thought today – Should I intentionally seek out times to be around a person, place or thing that I know irritates me? Is a possible solution to ease, and perhaps apathy as simple as forcing myself to experience something I am against?

Should I spend time periodically with someone who gets under my skin?