Java

Reinventing the square peg to accomodate round holes. Large-eyed and morphic in nature. I like to make people coffee in my small apartment, stargazers, books and how they smell, empty journals, psychic network and the disinterested self-sufficiency of cats.

I advise you to take a break, sit on your couch, and write someone a text message Haiku. For example:

Today it is hot-
I have iced peppermint tea...
Sit and talk of things
In my flat by the river
Though we don't have time who cares!

or:
On the way to work
I saw a half-naked man
Keystone Avenue
Bible bum, he wheeled, wrong way
On the street I passed him by

Or whatever. What we are after is 5-7-5-7-7. And while we are on the subject of dispensing free advice, it just occurred to me that I live very close to a body of water, and it is nice to go visit it every day and muse into the flow. If you take it, I'll follow my own.
Besides communing with the river, I spend my time in fluid mutability, melting glass in my small garage while the maintenance guy looks at me suspiciously. "I wonder if she's making pipes," I imagine him thinking. "I wonder if he's making atomic bombs in the shed next to the laundry room," I muse to myself as I set a molten pendant in the kiln.
This is part of the ebb and flow of my day. My neighbor, Richard, stops by to make sure I'm not too cold and politely inquires if I'd like a beer, all the while pensively stroking his beard. If Moses worked for Nascar, he would look (and act) something like Richard. Two little girls always pass me in the morning, and their mommy rushes them along, undoubtedly muttering cautionary words about "bad" girls who play with fire and consort with Satan. I smile sweetly as they turn around and point, hoping that they will turn sixteen and beg their parents for a torch and an oxygen tank.
Then there's the Chinese couple who watch me through their window, which is opposite my garage, and they think I'm a nice girl and a hard worker. I would like to introduce them to my mother and have them tell her, in earnest, halting English, all of the above, minus my thoughts on the maintanence guy and my morbid desire to teach young children to play with fire.
I really am a nice person, not that I have ever valued nice as an admirable quality, I just add it to a whole other list of qualities that I contain, including spontaneous mutism, tightrope wavering and contrived fragility. So I am nice, the little girls are nice, the maintenance guy really is nice, but he can't figure me out, the Chinese couple is so nice that it hurts, and I think nice is an understatement when we are speaking of saints, and Richard is a saint. I don't have to leave my small apartment complex to see all of this, so when I'm not seeking salvation and running from sin on the other side of the globe, I stay here and melt glass as the moments flow by. Here's a panorama of this week's creations!

Click the eBay icon below to see my glass jewelry on sale this week!

Today I learned about Enneagrams. In lieu of therapy, I have resorted to online personality quizzes, tarot and pinball to gain a more enlightened view of myself and others. Tilt.

So I'm a helper. I like to help others in the erroneous and egotistical belief that I am needed and important. The horror that I experienced upon receiving these results leads me to believe that maybe I should max out my credit card and invest in a therapist. Who knows. Well, at least I'm not out to save the heathens, I have no problem with sin per se, just bad coffee.

Anyway, it's Friday night, and by all accounts I should be out being social, but the only thing I can bring myself to do is muse into the night to the tune of Spandau Ballet and their hit song, 'True'. This song invokes a sharp, nostalgic pain of yearning for times past, an era smelling of aerosol hairspray, a decade of legwarmers and Ronald Reagan and crooning mullets.
Let us ponder the meaning of the lyrics:
I bought a ticket to the world
But now I've come back again
Why do I find it hard to write the next line
When I want the truth to be said
I don't know about you, but I really relate to this. I, too, find it hard to write the next line, although for now I'll leave the truth alone and take the 5th. What really touches me about these lyrics is that they make no sense at all.
Consider the following verses:
With a thrill in my head and a pill on my tongue
dissolve the nerves that have just begun.
Listening to Marvin (all night long)
This is the sound of my soul,
this is the sound.
Always slipping from my hands,
sand's a time of its own.
Take your seaside arms and write the next line.
Oh I want the truth to be known.
We have substance abuse, Marvin (Gaye, presumably) and the fleeting, temporal nature of sand that serves as a metaphor for time. The dreamy protagonist of the supermarket aisles of my shattered youth provides the listener with all the ingredients for a good party: MDMA, Motown, sandy beaches and cheesy pickup lines that sound sincere because the dopamine's racing and everyone feels a benign sense of gratuitous and fuzzy fraternity. Despite the masquerade, the listener perceives a cathartic burst of self-realization as the protagonist ponders existential questions of time, space, the truth, and the sound of his soul. Pretty heavy stuff for a six year old buying detergent with her mom at Safeway.

Click on Spandau Ballet to learn your fortune!

Finally, a site that lets you easily make free ringtones with your own music, no spam, no nubile half-naked sailor boys, made by nice people with good ideas. Check them out!