Hastings MN
Snail Lake
Because time is short for so many projects right now, I'm hallucinating that I have time to play with the innumerable new/old web gizmos that I have been avoiding-- such as being able to post directly from flickr. The semester is obviously about to commence.
Victoria
What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.
I only had one class with Dr. Mikelonis, but we hit it off right away. My research lead me back to Nietzsche today, and I remember the concluding essay she shared with us at the closing of one of the first graduate seminars I attended—I don’t recall the course title, but it was a survey of theories of metaphor. She invited me discuss visual metaphors in subsequent incarnations of the class, and we spoke from time to time about photography and stereography. She was incredibly generous with her time, and inspiring in her love for the genuinely complex. Most of her professional resume reflects her interest in pedagogy and intercultural communication, but this wasn’t the Victoria I knew. Most of her friends called her Vickie, but I somehow couldn’t—perhaps because she always called me Jeffrey (no one except my mother does that—but it’s the name on my transcript). Names aside, our relationship was entirely informal.
Unintuitive
Sometimes I really miss Greymatter (Noah Grey's ancient blogging platform). Things just made sense. The new MT 4.0 isn't making much sense to me yet, but I suppose I need to post this test entry to see if things are still working.
So far, ahem, the upgrade process has been a nightmare. I hosed my first installation, but thankfully not the database (I hope). I'll know for sure in a second.
Case in point: I went to preview and then publish this test entry. The preview screen displayed the entire individual page archive (with comment form). Without thinking about it, I hit the "post" button at the bottom of the screen, which then attempted to post a non-existent comment to a non-existent entry. To post the entry, I had to hit "Save" at the top of the screen. Change frequently sucks.
Storms
I woke up to rain beating on my ass. Nice trick, because there was only one small window open, half the room away. The wind blew it sideways around fifteen feet* through the small gap until it found my coppertone bum. The next thing that I noticed was the sound of the bombs going off, rattling the bed. I glanced at the clock: 4:30am.
In the south, thunderstorms are generally an evening thing. The instability of the overheated pregnant air causes them. In Minnesota, just as often as not, the greatest lightshows are at an hour where no sane human is paying attention. The room started to look like it was a disco, flash flash flash boom boom boom. Of course, this made me feel like it was time for a drink. I wandered into the kitchen.
When I came back, my deaf wife had been roused and was standing at the larger, closed window—“The world is getting washed” she said. I went back to the ocean-portal sized opening in the wall and closed it, thinking that my ass had been washed quite enough.
* Krista made me measure: it was only five feet.
