mas maris ex machina

A funny thing happened to me the last time I was up north visiting the folks. Something that happens every once and a while...

I was changing the oil on my car when (while under the vehicle) my dad pulls in the driveway. I slowly get out from under the car as he approaches with a sly smile on his face. Looking on with approval at the fact that I managed not to make a mess of his driveway, or get myself pinned under the jacked up car, he says: "So, you still know how to do this stuff, eh?" In man speak a comment like this is tantamount to that music that plays when two gunslingers are about to have it out in some dusty corral. Being that it's my dad, I chuckle and tell him that even though I've been pushing a pencil for the last few years I haven't fallen completely to the dark side. If it were, say, my friend Ed (who is pretty small for a giant) I'd have clocked him right then and there. Not in the face, mind you, but a good solid left hook to that meaty part where your shoulder meets your collar bone. Why would I do this? Because in the manverse you don't take that kind of shit!

Ever since it stopped being ok to be a mamma's boy I've been keenly interested in the machinations of masculinity. And while I feel like I've gained some perspective over the years, and try to be an individual above and beyond my social programming, I still can't resist the call of machismo form time to time. Fixin' cars, chopping wood (hmmm...), doing anything that involves putting small parts together to make bigger ones (construction), or breaking big parts into smaller ones (demolition) leaves me with a throbbing impulse to check in the kitchen for a beautiful, apronned, and suspiciously barefooted woman making me lemonade. Hopefully those who know me will give me the benefit of the doubt here and not interpret this either as: 1) in your face sexism or 2) some lame ass Christian confessionalism. It's neither, I assure you.

I am speaking from a place of curiosity, and I suppose, the assumption that this may be a shared curiosity amongst people in general. For example: am I merely falling into some sort of culturally normative bear trap when my brain sends out feel good vibes over being able to swing an ax really well? Or is there actually something to this desire to engage in gendered activities that works towards my happiness as a complete person? These aren't really new questions by any means, but they are fresh in my head these days. And while I sort of tend to campaign against the constructs of gender and the limitations they impose upon free thinking people, I still like the fact that somewhere inside, I get a kick out of various ways in which men's men get their hands dirty. Hmmm...I think I hear a leaky faucet in the apt. next door...think I'll go take a look...

Post-Post Crapout

ok, two apologies to get out of the way...one: sorry for not posting more. I hope to develop a regular posting schedule ( I am thinking twice a week) but I am not sure how that will shape up just yet. Two: I had a great post that got lost tonight and no longer have the heart at this late hour to try and re-create it from scratch. I promise some new stuff soon.

Mixed Messages

Talk of making mixed CD's came up in conversation the other night and it got me thinking about something that ties into blogging and also (though only sort of related) ties into what I think partly makes life worth living.

See; we live in this world of bullshit right? Fake Plastic Trees and all that... At least some of us draw lines in the sand using words like this. Sometimes, however, when I get to feeling a certain way, I think that beyond the *real* or the *fake* what we have are simply moments. These are both real and imagined, and evolve in the anals of our brains as we hash them up time and again to get a laugh at parties or whatever. *Moments* are very special. For me they are locators of those things I tend to think people are talking about when they speak of 'hearts' and 'souls'. Mostly, what makes a moment great between two people is that you see a naked aspect of a person. Naked honesty, naked fear, naked anger, naked joy, its as titilating as that moment of intimacy right before that last stitch of clothing falls to the ground and is equally life affirming.
I'm a junkie for these types of moments. I love people; and I love all of the shit that comes with loving people, I really do. When I think of the sheer magnitude of the chaos any given person has to sift through in a day, sharing a clear moment of truthful vulnerability becomes all the more mystical. This is also why I like mixed CD's so much...a mixed CD shared between friends or lovers captures a moment in ways that a picture just can't. I remember toiling for hours over CD's obsessing that they were just right...why? Because way back before I had the gumption to articulate what I felt about these little Magnum Opuses, I sensed that if I did my job correctly that I could capture something that was beautiful, magical, human, and most of all--fleeting. There's a reason, I feel, that things like sex get conflated with concepts like death. They are both the same in how they remind us of our ultimate, ubiquitous, and undeniable fleeting nature. The greatest moments, both good and bad, occur like a bolt of lightning and surge through the body. Infusing or draining it of what we call life. The objects we consider the most beautiful in life are equally fragile and fleeting. Butterflies, Orchids, Aurora Borealis, youth, ect... I think now of plums and how they taste the best just before they begin to rot. That's life. That's a moment. Feel it, and its gone. That's why I love mixed CD's so much. They are efforts to pay homage to great moments. And Blogs, as I see it, can do something of this nature too...blogs represent an infinite 24 hour space in which a person may record a moment or even (say, through the rather anonymous arena of the blogverse) expose themselves in a rather telling blog entry. This could create the opportunity for readers to connect in that meaningful, beautiful, and fleeting way with bloggers...a kind of human beackon amidst the chaos of the virtual universe.

Out of nowhere...

I get a lot of time to myself these days on my commutes back and forth to work and I have a love/hate relationship with this time. On good days I can reflect on things in a positive way and maybe give unappreciated moments thier proper due; on bad days I get bogged down in the post-modern (Blech, I hate that fucking word) hall of smoke and mirrors and come home wondering why it is I am not out doing something more "meaningful", whateverthehell that means.

Anyway, I realized on one such trip that a few rather momentus things have been going on that, as they occurred, didn't have me adequately flipping out. One of these momets was finishing my last essay and other work for the final summer course of my degree. I sort of snuck up on that paper and out of what seemed like nowhere, I was done. It sort of just materialized in front of me. I am laways suspicious of papers that write like that because I never think I've done enough to test my thesis or whathaveyou, but the novelty of being done has far outstripped my desire to be a student for about 4 months now, so I was willing to chuck that bad boy on the heap like the grenade it will most certainly be for my transcript. For now I enjoy that blissfull time between marks posting where I can still revel in the possibility of an academic future. Of course, this is a digression from the point though. I am done. I am living the life that I will be living for the next year as I type this. Somehow, through habbit or whatever, I was convinced up until recently that Sept. would bring some kind of change, ot trigger, or starting point to my work-a-day lifestyle...but that has already happened. I'm here. This is it. Wow. Its like that metaphor we talk about to describe really bad sex...where the girl wonders when things are going to get started and the guy is already lighting a cigarette. I was waiting for school to end and work to happen, thinking that there'd be some kind of lead-in, some kind of transitional foreplay to signal to me what was about to happen...yet here I am waking up day after day in a job, feeling like someone spiked the punch.