www.gerrietts.net

It's odd that out of all the things brewing in my life, this experience is going to be the one I write about today. Maybe it's because it's so settled for me, and so much else is not quite settled out yet. Regardless, I've been observing my response to Nabokov's Pale Fire over the course of my reading, and it's an unusual enough response that I wanted to paint it here.

Still in the process of developing a proper style for the site, but I imported a bunch of random thoughts that I'd collected into a Google document, into the blog. I have some stuff I'd like to write, but I'm really just interested in getting things put together right now. I'll write more later.

This post marks the first piece of "genuine content" I'm putting into the website, although I'm excluding the front page only because I haven't done much to clean it up for the current website yet. I have a long list of tasks I'd like to accomplish yet, but I'm feeling pretty good about getting this installed and going.

This thought is days old, jotted into email the night of the Decemberists' concert but a day or so old even then. Copied out of email:

Generosity is like a social acid test: extend a bit of yourself, expect nothing in return, but see what comes back. Try to make sense of it, try it on for size, see how much you like it. See how much you
can count on it. Extend a bit of yourself and see what it gets you.

There is some danger there, though, because "see what it gets you" can be confused with "see what it's worth" and the two aren't really alike at all.

I was doing some reading, the other day, on alternating current. I've done a little bit of electronics, and all of it was done using direct current. But prior to Friday or so, I hadn't really understood how alternating current worked, despite the very clear fact that it sees much more use than the direct current model. The difficulty, I think, was I couldn't understand -- or didn't understand -- that alternating current doesn't really have the same mechanics of "flow" that a direct current circuit does. In alternating current, the flow reverses periodically.

I wrote my brother this morning: Been obsessed with the idea of "meaning" lately, but I wonder if what I use that term to describe, is just some sense of narrative, which life mimics or doesn't.

I wrote my brother this morning because I've been sending him texts daily, to remind him that I'm here and that I care. He seems to be in pretty rough shape right now, but he won't talk about it.

I've been thinking about "meaning" though because the ideas I had above, were not very articulate in their handling of the idea.

I love the natural world, by which I mean the areas of wilderness and preservation efforts where human development has not overrun the terrain. I can date this affinity back a long way, to high school at the latest, and probably earlier than that. I've felt a connection to natural processes, and a sort of admiration for the ideology I identify as Native American, this sort of living in harmony with nature and being an integral and respectful part of it. I don't think these ideas are especially uncommon, but they're also in a sort of tension for me.

Jason Jordan wrote in his aim comment, "convince me that life is worth living." It made me think, less because I think I can convince him, and more because I wondered why I myself was convinced. I haven't always felt that way, but I do feel that way today.

I've been thinking a lot lately about perception. This line of thought was ignited by a read of Anathem and partly by an article in Wired on "the neuroscience of magic." It's a long-term area of interest for me, though, as evidenced by a few of the poems I wrote as an undergrad, and my constant affection for Robert Anton Wilson and his body of work.