Restless

Restless
I'm not sure why
Brain alert
Overalert
Body ready to spring
I'm not sure what I seek
Too restless to read
Too restless to pray
And yet
Caution against temptation to find peace in buying
Caution against reading to lose myself in fiction
I wish to keep my feet
Planted firmly in reality
Restless!

This bitter pill

This bitter pill is hard to swallow
But it will be good for me, if I can overcome.
May God help me.

Sitting on a bench at Finlayson and Shelbourne

Sitting on a bench at Finlayson and Shelbourne
Cherishing each moment of a lazy Sunday
Before the tidal wave hits on Monday
Or maybe not a tidal wave
But merely the tide coming in more strongly
More intensely, but still calm in its own rhythmic way

"It's not a spilly kind of thing"
Says the daughter to the mother beside me
The bus is late and the travellers are restless
Restless to travel to nowhere in particular
"Here comes the bus" and they stand.

Sometimes the brain is tangled

Sometimes the brain is tangled
The long-distilled calm uprooted
By a few moments of reality
We struggle to recapture the peace
Grope the air, grasp the wind
Finally, giving in, coming back into reality
Leaning on the counter, biting the cut melons
And realizing that normalcy is not so bad as we had thought
We just had to reacclimate to our circumstances

And poetry helps
Poetry lulls the outer brain into a daze
Deadens it, tranquilizes
Til once again the inner brain peeks out
Unguarded by its older sibling
Steps out, breathes in
Sings

And so I extol the virtues of bloggetry
Poetry on blogs
By poetloggers, ploggers, bloggets, bloets
The emancipation of thought by verse
The writer is freed, the reader admittedly fettered
And so bloets are different from poets
The bloet tries a little harder to be clearer
People do read it; it must needs be clearer
The writing a little less obfuscated
Cultural references admitted at the risk of anachronism
Rough verse favoured over painstaking precision
The ocassional typo admitted without fuss

To the aspiring bloet I recommend
No university course in poetry
No printed anthology of verse
But recordings
Of poets reading their poems
There is a cassette put out by Caedmon, where you can hear
Yeats' trembling voice, and Auden speaking of Yeats
Atwood's trembing voice, and Dylan Thomas'
MacLeish's alien voice, and Robert Frost's
Pound's mischievous voice, and e e cummings'
And Eliot's haggard voice, decrying the world.

I am sitting on the hybrid bus

I am sitting on the hybrid bus
Destination firm, though changeable
The weekend continues to peter away
Today's objective: rest
Tomorrow's will be what it will be

Heavy eyelids
Dancing to the cadence of the hybrid bus
Today is a writing day not a reading day
Reading is pleasant. But some days
Are writing days on which reading is inappropriate.

Writing on the hybrid bus is hard
The nausea creeps into my mouth
My companion must be wondering
What I am doing tap tap tapping into my PDA
Every few stops

Bloggetry is blogging in verse
And as there is metablogging so is there metabloggetry
In the substrate of verse you can be lazy
Thoughts half-formed will suffice
The thought half-understood will coalesce with other thoughts
Producing a vague sense of what you are getting at
Which is better than nothing at all

Bloggetry eschews convention
High thoughts and webwords co-mingle
Love Death Google

Sitting in Mayfair mall

Sitting in Mayfair mall I hear
The shouts, complaints of a child against his parents
The stomping, the crossed arms of a son against his father
The threats, the orders of father to son
The pointing fingers, the scowl of mother to child
The violent words each heaps on the other
The storms of family life.

Starbucks on Blanshard and Fort

Starbucks on Blanshard and Fort
Peanut butter oat bar
Green tea frap
Slowly slowly slowly
Sunday melts away
Religion promulgates detachment
But sometimes the body asks pampering
Green tea frap

And maybe I shall buy a book
The library is closed but maybe I shall buy poety
The bookstore is open and maybe I will buy fiction
The used bookstore, with authors I do not know
The oat bar crumbles in my hand, breaking my reverie

Practitioners of GTD will find
Their life pulled in four directions
Time-sensitive actions
Time-insensitive actions
Processing In
And, surrounding the others:
Daily disciplines

Practitioners of GTD will find
Their lives
Compressed
Sandwiched between contexts
Squeezing every last oily drop of time
Between their cold plates

* * *

If I had to choose between
A Palm
And a Pocket PC I think I should choose
The Palm next time
Being simpler it is naturally closer
To the brain
Instant on

* * *

Fame I tasted
Fame I desired
Fame I feasted on
Of Fame I tired

I was getting an error "the cabinet file required for this installation is corrupt" with my Visual Studio Setup project (using the vsdrpcom and vsdracom options). Maybe it's because I haven't yet installed ArcGIS .NET Support ...

Yay! GTD Weekly Review Complete!

Like a marathon runner striving ... and reaching ... the end of the course, I completed my GTD review for the week, and am mentally drained. Hooray ... (slump). I feel exhausted, but at the same time relieved. Started at 3PM, finished at 8PM (lotsa breaks in there). Hoo boy! Now I can rest.

Anyone in Victoria reading this who does GTD?

        // For some reason, using the ternary operator as shown below causes
        // an ExecutionEngineException. Since these exceptions "should never occur"
        // according to MSDN, this is a .NET bug. [Jon Aquino 2005-08-08]
        //
        // return date == null ? (Object) DBNull.Value : convert(date);
        if (date == null) {
            return DBNull.Value; 
        }
        return convert(date);

Yippee - GTD weekly review done for the week! Celebrate with me!

Father John's homily

- Christian mission: awakening the world
- Jesus prayed on the mountain
- Jesus calls peter to walk on water - he's alright as long as he keeps eyes on J.