I love the twist that’s in play here as the United States’s government structure makes its own dents and distortions in the ‘progress’ it wants for everyone else:
When the United States beat the Soviet Union in the first race to the moon, it confirmed the view, to many, that capitalism rules and communism sucks. […]

Some voices sound out of lungs
like a fine oak barrell,
or at the edges of notes
run their hands through dry grain,
or play hard on the sinews of the face and throat
as though with a heart-broken bow.
Some sounds all feel the same.
When I closed my eyes outside that cabin,
our first winter in Canada,
the wind in the […]

Before I encountered open source there was so much I couldn’t grasp about computers, networks, and the Internet. Because I couldn’t really see them. Their power and their limitations were only dimly outlined while the core of what they are was closed. Learning how a computer works by seeing the progress of its processes […]

some voices sound out of lungs
like a fine oak barrell,
or at the edges of notes
run their hands through dry grain,
or play the sinews of the face and throat
as though with a heart-broken bow.

to do today-
1. laundry
2. pack for family reunion
3. emotionally prepare for family reunion
4. set up post for El to publish on Open while i’m gone
5. write one last little thing for blog (and maybe a drawing, eh?)
6. shower (if there’s time)
7. get El to give me a mini driving lesson while laundry’s drying
8. resist taking […]

(for “how to talk to teenage boys” i put myself in the position of a teenage girl and thought of what i wished i’d known, or what i slowly figured out. this one, i’ve realized, is trickier. I never was a teenage boy. But I’ve known some teenage girls in my time, and I can […]

or anyone, really
1. try and understand what they’re saying, even if you keep thinking they’re just stupid or insane.
2. try and get their jokes- try out their perspective on what’s funny.
3. remember that, like teenage girls, they are still largely a loose accumulation of how the world’s been marketed towards them, by corporations and by […]

So this is Cole the Kitten.
The thing is, I’ve never really been a cat person. I’m more like the geeks on tv with the inhalers and the puffy eyes. Not like the ones that need to live in fear of peanuts or bees or sunlight or milk, thank god.
I’ve been […]

My boyfriend’s mom’s house is a zoo. It’s not like there’s goats in the backyard or anything, just a couple of your regular house pets who happen to be completely mad and to create the impression of a houseful of crazy instead of two cats and a dog. The dog is half black lab half […]

Want to hear me speak this to you instead?
Speaking of lying about things, (as I was in this post about Kitchen Ballet) I used to lie a lot more. The first lie I remember telling was when me and my mom lived in a small apartment at the University of Waterloo. We always called […]

An internet friend asked me for some feedback and I went off in a long and wordy diatribe about poetry. I’ve decided to cut out the stuff directly relating to her work and to post it here for my own reference. Maybe you’ll find it interesting as well. This is the second response I’ve given […]