amy in alabama

don't h8 me cuz i'm *twittered*

For all who have been waiting with bated breath, the new computer has arrived. Same as the last one, a little more hard drive space and a slightly different keyboard. No more numbers lock. There goes my aspirations for part time number crunching.

OMG LOL & btw I totally h8ed the movie last night but brad pitt is so hot. beers @7 & FYI I'm loving this sandwich!

With only 116 characters, counting spaces, I'm able to give kudos to some unknown fellow twitterer's joke, critique a film, expound on an actors abilities (physical), and make plans for the evening, all while indulging in a sandwich on Twitter, the latest in social networking. News travels fast these days and I hear in the publishing world editors change houses and decisions are made so quickly it's near impossible to keep up with, or was. Those on the newswire attach links, images, and even video to move the word along. I can imagine the free and easy service aids the tech world as much as Hollywood. I hear Wall Street has started it's own, highly guarded network called Warble where in-the-knows can peck out rumors and suspicions of who's going to jail and who's headed for Skid Row (although I have not confirmed this information).

I love the Guardian's take on Twitter. They're re-writing their archives and it's damn hilarious.

From an April 1, 2009 article by Rio Palof for the Guardian online:

From the archive

Highlights from the Guardian's Twitterised news archive

1927
OMG first successful transatlantic air flight wow, pretty cool! Boring day
otherwise *sigh*

1940
W Churchill giving speech NOW - "we shall fight on the beaches ... we shall never surrender" check YouTube later for the rest

1961
Listening 2 new band "The Beatles"

1989 
Berlin Wall falls! Majority view of Twitterers = it's a historic moment! What do you think??? Have your say

1997
RT@mohammedalfayed: FYI NeilHamilton, Harrods boss offering £££ 4 questions in House of Commons! Check it out

And thank you to the New York Times for showing me just how broad my twitter networking can reach. The Celebrity Twitter Ecosystem made me realize just how many of my favorite celebs are on twitter, posting all day, many of them making conversation, presumably with someone else, I can't follow. But that doesn't stop me from feeling a little bit closer to them, like we really are friends. Demi Moore keeps me up to date with all things she and Ashton, complete with pics, and Snoop Dogg always remembers to give a shout out to his "hungry twizzles" (I fell a gin and juice break coming on - oh shizzle), Martha Stewart thinks Seth Myers is cuter than Jonathon Rys Myers, and Ellen, dear old Ellen always keeps me laughing. 

Of course not all my friends are famous, but those other guys, some local, some in far off places, are just as dear to me and I'm so fortunate to keep in close touch with them! I like to keep in touch by posting my incredibly entertaining and insightful blog entires. Boo-ya (and a double snap)! 

Meanwhile, I'm thinking of writing my first novel right onto to Twitter. 140 characters a day and I'm golden. It's the next thing in self-publishing. Daily installments with nail bitting action will surely keep the fans attention. What do you think Bessie will do tomorrow? Will she kill her best friend's lover out of jealousy or eat a doughnut? I can't hardly stand it!!

Stay Tuned!

 

more uninvited abstract art, or where's my new computer?

It really does spread, coagulate, and continue.

Ooh, trippy, image behind the image.

requiem for a cracked screen

Last weekend my sister and I drove 1300 miles to Jacksonville, Florida and back to visit our father. I tucked my beloved machine behind the drivers seat, where it would be safe from the sun, other luggage, and curious desperadoes looking in parked windows for goodies. In my genius I managed to put too much pressure on the laptop when I pushed the seat back. CRAAAACK. Only there was no sound, no immediate "DOH", so I can't honestly say that's when it happened. I didn't discover it until that night, when I was balancing the edge of a king size bed with sister beside me, our host on the other side of the bed, and two 85 lb Standard Poodles all snuggling in for the night.  F*@#! 

However, I think it happened earlier that evening. We had just left the nursing home where Dad lives, parked in Five Points, and were headed to the Mossfire Grill for much needed cocktails and supper. I was entertaining my sister with the subtle motion of the motorized seat moving back and forth, up and down. It was totally funny. Really. 

While I'm not amused yet, I think I might be able to see the abstract beauty in the shapes crawling across the screen of my lifeline, some day. These pics certainly don't do it justice, but man are they trippy to look at from my end. I don't know where the crack ends and the photo begins.

Requiem for a Cracked Screen

As the blackness creeps into broader splotches of dead pixels and varying cracks sneak further into my line of vision, chipping away at my spirit, it is obvious I will have to say goodbye to you. Oh, where is the Save Amy Fund now? Broke, depressed, can't work. Why do you have to leave me now? 

Oh, the places you've been with me. Buenos Aires, Mendoza, Costa Rica, Portland, OR. 

I found you in New York, in SoHo. Do you remember New York? Do you remember the 2 a.m. dramas below our window in Queens? Can you remember all the wine orders we sent across Verizon's DSL lines? Can you recall all the crap I've written on you, in fits and starts?

In Argentina we built HTML pages together. Have you forgotten all the photos of Rio and Salta? The bad blog entries? 

And now in Alabama you are leaving me, slowly, patiently, relaxing across my work space, stubbornly stretching out, no regard for my needs. Perhaps, so is death for us all.

It could be worse. You could not be replaceable.

geophagia, or just tasting?

My friend Shelby showed me how to taste dirt.         

"I eat dirt," she said out of the blue.  I wasn't sure what she meant at the time, and waved off the statement in favor of a more tangible course of conversation.  But when she invited me out to watch a sawmill in action, I was inducted into the practice of tasting soil for it's composition and texture.

While she isn't a geophagist , although she admits to spooning red clay down her gullet in the past, when she was anemic, and still harbors a predilection for crunchy New York shale, Shelby looks for the aspects a good soil needs for gardening: clay, to supply good drainage, silt, which is rich in organic matter, and sand, which aids in drainage and heat retention.  In my Master Gardener class they taught us to look for these elements by massaging the soil in our hands.  Oh, but it's so much more fun to taste it!  

my found putty poem

My friend Rob recently gave me a green Silly Puddy.  "It's a stress reliever," he said.  

I've been using it all week as I struggle to finish a final draft of a story I've been working on for a long, long time.  This evening I'm very close.  This afternoon, when I was close, I sent Rob an email thanking him for my Silly Puddy, and he sent this back:  

"My God, that's a found poem!" 

Found poetry is taken from already existing text and re-shaped, re-designed into poetic stanzas, often without the poet adding a single word.  T.S. Eliot is noted to use this form in The Wasteland.  Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams are also noted to have worked in the genre.  I share my Silly Puddy poem with you, as originally written and misspelled, but re-formed into poetic lines by practiced published poet friend, Rob.  Kumquat Meringue  is an inside joke (and also a magazine).  I'd share the joke, but it's not that funny.  

Kumquat Meringue! 

by Amy Collins

I love my green Silly Putty!

It helps me think and write.

I play with it all the time.

I can't stop touching it.

 But I dropped it on the carpet

and now it's all fuzzy.  

Here are some found poems from our former Secretary of Defense, Donald H. Rumsfeld, as re-printed by Slate Magazine.

The Unknown

As we know,

There are known knowns.

There are things we know we know.

We also know

There are known unknowns.

That is to say

We know there are some things

We do not know.

But there are also unknown unknowns,

The ones we don't know

We don't know.

—Feb. 12, 2002, Department of Defense news briefing

Glass Box

You know, it's the old glass box at the—

At the gas station,

Where you're using those little things

Trying to pick up the prize,

And you can't find it.

It's—

And it's all these arms are going down in there,

And so you keep dropping it

And picking it up again and moving it,

But—

Some of you are probably too young to remember those—

Those glass boxes,

But—

But they used to have them

At all the gas stations

When I was a kid.

—Dec. 6, 2001, Department of Defense news briefing

A Confession

Once in a while,

I'm standing here, doing something.

And I think,

"What in the world am I doing here?"

It's a big surprise.

—May 16, 2001, interview with the New York Times

Try your own found poetry                    

and post it 

here 

under comments!!!

Trashing the Fridge but Keeping the Spa Tub

If you're not Going Green these days you might as well consider yourself heathen.  If you take your own cloth bags to the supermarket and eschew environmentally incorrect plastic baggies, worm compost (even in your tiny no-outdoor-space apartment), buy products made from recycled materials, or eat locally grown organic foods, you're doing something.  Everyone is doing something.  These eccentric folks are pushing the parameters by throwing out their refrigerators:  Trashing the Fridge        

A friend, and my mother and I have been casually talking about establishing a sustainable commune, only more like an old school neighborhood where everyone helps everyone else.  One mower might sustain the lawns of three families instead of one per household (of course I'm all for eradicating cookie-cutter, unnaturally established lawns and replacing with native plants and grasses).  In our commune we grow all our own veggies and fruits and a few grains.  We have dinner together, but each have our own space - secluded and respectfully private.  We are not converting our vehicles into decorative planters or trading in for a horse and buggy.  Lure of Rural Living Draws City Couple 

We'll keep chickens, cows, goats, and self-gorging geese for foie gras.  We'll have DSL, a cooling unit, furnace, and spa tub in every yurt.  Yes, we'll live in yurts.  Colorado Yurt Company photos page

Now that my iPod is re-charged, I have to get back to watering the leaf mulch.

subway groovers

I miss these guys.  What can I say, I miss New York.  I'm tempted to list all the things I miss about the city, but it's too early in the morning, and has been better said by Colson Whitehead in The Colossus of New York.  

Ironically, my favorite mug, my I (heart) New York mug, the only mug I use for coffee, and the only mug in the house that only I use, broke last night.  I paid $10 for it at an overpriced gift shop in the Laguardia airport a year ago.  It was an impulse buy and a daily bit of comfort, a reminder of home as I make a new home in a strange, strange place.  I am now resigned to drinking out of a too bright, too cheery mug adorned with smiling, colorful fish who appear to be singing "Good Morning Sunshine!" 

Bah Humbug.

Colossal's Last stand:

Back to the subway dancers.  I was always a tiny bit afraid one of them might lose control of their limbs and land a wayward foot in some unsuspecting passenger's head, or the weight and balance of an inverted move would be too great, and their wrist or ankle would snap (like the handle on my beloved mug).  But it never happened that way, not when I was watching.  These guys are the professionals.

NY Times Subway Breakdancers