I don't really feel very well today.

I was cold and it was about 80° (26°C) according to my mom's Galileo Thermometer (accurate up to the °C), but it felt really cold in the basement, so I took the Thermometer downstairs and set it on the bathroom floor with the door open so I could see it from where I was on the couch wrapped in blankets while I played Inindo. It never said it was any colder than that, which is nowhere near cold.

Anyway, I forgot the thermometer was there later when I got up to use the bathroom, so I accidentally tripped over it and it broke, spilling water and rubbing alcohol and shards of glass everywhere.

Goodbye mom's Galileo Thermometer. I hope she doesn't kill me when she gets home.

And I still don't feel quite right, despite being assured by the now broken thermometer that I'm not supposed to be cold.

I wish Heather were online. We didn't get to talk all yesterday and the day before when she was trying to say something important I was delaying her and then I just got offline before she could, and now that I look back on it that was really, really mean. I want her to get online so I can apologize.

Ah well.

I think I need help with a problem. I'm asking anyone that's had this happen to help me if they could, either with themselves or their significant other.

I've been seeing this girl for nearly 3 months now. We love each other very much but there is a problem. She gets into this mood where she just wants to push me away, leave me alone. I'm not hanging on her every moment of the day, or on the phone 24/7 with her. I'm not obsessive so we both know that isn't the problem.

These moods aren't related to PMS but are heightened by it. She doesn't understand why this is happening and it hasn't happened to anyone she's dated in her past. It worries me because I do love her very much and don't want the relationship to end. She feels the same.

We both want the relationship to coninue. We've come to that conclusion but we're stumped on how to approach the problem. We know we don't want to lose each other.

Thank you in advance. You can /msg me or reach me at my screen name Crawn2003CHS on AOL Instant Messenger.

Crawn2003

Keep on downvoting it if you like... I'm more concerned about the girl than the XP that I have....

Still working to get everything together for my senior exhibition, the opening for which is on Sunday, as detailed on November 21, 2002. Things are going reasonably well - everything will be done on time. My father has written a wonderful introductory essay about the show - that is what he does, as the art dealer. The following are his words:

There is a spark within our creative centers that enables a capacity to illuminate the world which we perceive.
It is in this same sense that an illuminated manuscript is created - in which, as if representatively, the ordinary letters of initial capitals are embellished to express the inherent capacities of the text to enable passionate insight (which some call the the grace of the Holy Spirit).
It is also the tradition of the expressive landscape. Barbara Haskell, in her essay "Transcendental Realism in the Stieglitz Circle: The Expressionist Landscapes of Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, John Marin, and Georgia O'Keefe," proposed that "though the twentieth century saw confidence in the indissoluble union of God, nature, and America shatter, the mystery of nature and the religious and moral overtones which adhered to it remained...Nature seemed singularly capable of providing the solitude and introspection conducive to spirituality...Nature as subject...offered a sympathetic vehicle for the expression of emotional states."
In the paintings of Christopher Busta-Peck that world of nature is integrated with elements of a gentle domesticity such as a picnic table, a woodland path, a steepled church across the green. And, in particular, the viewer is positioned in the process of a road or trail that leads further into that landscape. The work is magnetic in its effort to come to terms with the mysteries of the world, casting whirling spells to establish creative and emotional sense.
In the collages we find the same sense-making, that effort to integrate and find comfort in the embrace of mystery. However, here the universe is that of man, in which he takes ephemera of culture to deconstruct, then reconstruct. The principle difference is that here his sense is embracing, in the paintings it is expanding.

William Busta

Very little of the following text is new - it came from my last daylog. After I wrote that daylog, many noders suggested, no, demanded, that I provide images. The urls of images of most of the works of art in the show have been added. The pictures do leave a bit to be desired, I know, but they are what I can do with the digital camera I have - show up for the opening and see them at infinite resolution! Thank you all for bugging me about this.

The state of my senior exhibition, as of Saturday, 30 November, 2002. This is required of all graduating art majors at Hiram College, just as papers and presentations are required in other majors. My show opens on Sunday, December 8, 2002, so I have a week to get everything together.

Three of the eight paintings I did this semester are unfinished, though they are close to being done. All of the pedestals have to be painted (one each for the three books I will be showing, one for the catalog for the show). The two walls that the two assemblages will be against have to be painted, as they are surely heavily scratched and marked. And mounting hardware must be put on everything.

The gallery space is in the art building, a sort of atrium on the first and second floors, with the majority of the space being on the second floor. On the first floor, there are doors on the east and west sides of the building. A large staircase goes up the center of the atrium. The walls on the first floor are a textured cloth that has been painted white. The second floor walls are cork on drywall, barely sufficient for hanging art and damn ugly.

The basic design of the exhibition is as follows (All are listed left to right. Dimensions are in inches, with height followed by width followed by depth.):

First Floor

North Wall

Pond, Trail, Hiram College Field Station
2002, oil on canvas, 48 x 72
http://williambustagallery.com/cbustapeck/lake.jpg

Tree (large assemblage)
2000, bicycles, circuit boards, wire, and screws on wood, 96 x 72
no image available

East Wall

Most likely nothing.
maybe:
Blackboard, Downstairs Studio 2001, oil on canvas, 12 x 18
http://williambustagallery.com/cbustapeck/Untitled-25.jpg

South Wall

One Corner of the Studio (top)
2001, oil on canvas, 22 x 30
http://williambustagallery.com/cbustapeck/Untitled-15.jpg

Studio at Night, Winter (bottom)
2002, oil on canvas, 22 x 30
http://williambustagallery.com/cbustapeck/Untitled-16.jpg

Spring
2001, oil and acrylic on canvas, tail light, staples, on plywood, 98 x 49
no image available

West Wall

Winter Scene, Night, Just Outside the Stuido
2000, acrylic with pigment on paper, 38.5 x 25.5
need to find some way to mount this!
http://williambustagallery.com/cbustapeck/Untitled-12.jpg

Studio with Couch and Canvas, Winter
2001, oil on canvas, 30 x 22
need to unwarp canvas!
http://williambustagallery.com/cbustapeck/Untitled-14.jpg

Second Floor

For the sake of sanity, due to the funny shape of the walls, these works will be listed clockwise, starting with the edge of the atrium.

Assemblage with Floral Border
2000, acrylic, wallpaper, wire, and found objects on canvas, 48 x 65
http://williambustagallery.com/cbustapeck/Untitled-09.jpg

Late Night in the Studio
2001, oil on canvas, 24 x20
http://williambustagallery.com/cbustapeck/Untitled-18.jpg

ccunning and Segnbora-t
2002, oil on canvas, 20 x 22
http://williambustagallery.com/cbustapeck/Untitled-17.jpg

Studio Panorama
2000, watercolor and acrylic on paper, on paper, 13 x 36
would probably be a good idea to find a way to mount this one, too
http://williambustagallery.com/cbustapeck/Untitled-13.jpg

Field, Diagonal Road, Mid-Afternoon, Fall
2002, oil on canvas, 48 x 72
need to finish painting
http://williambustagallery.com/cbustapeck/Untitled-03.jpg

Summer Past
2000, wood, bicycle parts, paper, and Polaroid, 87 x 57
http://williambustagallery.com/cbustapeck/Untitled-08.jpg

Perry Monument
2001, acrylic and found paper on paper, 25 x 19
http://williambustagallery.com/cbustapeck/Untitled-11.jpg

Observation Building, Hiram College Field Station, Early Fall 2002, oil on canvas, 48 x 72
http://williambustagallery.com/cbustapeck/field.jpg

Church, Trees, Parking Lot, Cemetary, Mantua Center
2002, oil on canvas, 48 x 72
need to finish done!
http://williambustagallery.com/cbustapeck/Untitled-01.jpg

Church, Road, Fall Leaves, Mantua Center
2002, oil on canvas, 48 x 72
need to finish
http://williambustagallery.com/cbustapeck/Untitled-02.jpg

On the Balcony, Frohring Art, Twilight
2002, oil on canvas, 48 x 72
http://williambustagallery.com/cbustapeck/porch.jpg

Painting Studio
2001, oil on canvas, 40.5 x 54.5
http://williambustagallery.com/cbustapeck/Untitled-04.jpg

The Edge of the Woods
2002, oil on canvas, 48 x 72
http://williambustagallery.com/cbustapeck/Untitled-05.jpg

Assemblage with Four Circles
2000, found objects, bicycle parts, screws, and acrylic on wood, 65 x 52
http://williambustagallery.com/cbustapeck/Untitled-07.jpg

liha and Phyllis Stein in the forest
2002, oil on canvas, 20 x 16
http://williambustagallery.com/cbustapeck/Untitled-20.jpg

Revelation in Backstrip
2000, acrylic and paper on paper, 10 x 6.5
http://williambustagallery.com/cbustapeck/Untitled-27.jpg

Outside the Darkroom
2001, oil canvas, 16 x 26
http://williambustagallery.com/cbustapeck/Untitled-19.jpg

The Border of the Field and the Woods
2002, oil on canvas, 48 x 72
need to unwarp canvas
http://williambustagallery.com/cbustapeck/Untitled-06.jpg

Studio, First Floor, Frohring Art, Another Angle
2000, acrylic on canvas on particleboard, 39 x 48
http://williambustagallery.com/cbustapeck/Untitled-10.jpg

Lake Erie Sunset
2000, acrylic on paper, 10 x 12.5
http://williambustagallery.com/cbustapeck/Untitled-29.jpg

Memorial Day, 2000
2000, acrylic and paper on paper, 10 x 12.5
http://williambustagallery.com/cbustapeck/Untitled-28.jpg

Self Portrait
2000, linocut and paper on paper, 10 x 13
http://williambustagallery.com/cbustapeck/Untitled-26.jpg

Yielding and Paying (book)
2001, watercolor, gelatin silver photographs, watercolor, and found paper on paper, 20.5 x 15.25 x 1.75
(selected pages)
http://williambustagallery.com/cbustapeck/Untitled-32.jpg
http://williambustagallery.com/cbustapeck/Untitled-33.jpg
http://williambustagallery.com/cbustapeck/Untitled-34.jpg
http://williambustagallery.com/cbustapeck/Untitled-35.jpg
http://williambustagallery.com/cbustapeck/Untitled-36.jpg
http://williambustagallery.com/cbustapeck/Untitled-37.jpg
http://williambustagallery.com/cbustapeck/Untitled-38.jpg

The History of My Own Times (book)
2001, watercolor, photocopy, ink, and found paper on paper, 16 x 12 x .625
(selected pages)
http://williambustagallery.com/cbustapeck/Untitled-40.jpg
http://williambustagallery.com/cbustapeck/Untitled-41.jpg
http://williambustagallery.com/cbustapeck/Untitled-42.jpg
http://williambustagallery.com/cbustapeck/Untitled-43.jpg
http://williambustagallery.com/cbustapeck/Untitled-44.jpg
http://williambustagallery.com/cbustapeck/Untitled-45.jpg
http://williambustagallery.com/cbustapeck/Untitled-46.jpg

PowerBook Book (book)
2001, found paper, acrylic, and stamps on PowerBook 145b,11.25 x 9.5 x 2.75
(selected pages)
http://williambustagallery.com/cbustapeck/Untitled-47.jpg
http://williambustagallery.com/cbustapeck/Untitled-48.jpg
http://williambustagallery.com/cbustapeck/Untitled-49.jpg


Works that may or may not be in the show

WTC Painting 1
2001, oil on canvas, 16 x 20
http://williambustagallery.com/cbustapeck/Untitled-23.jpg

WTC Painting 2
2001, oil on canvas, 20 x 16
http://williambustagallery.com/cbustapeck/Untitled-24.jpg

GangstaFeelsGood and ccunning
2001, oil on canvas, 20 x 16
http://williambustagallery.com/cbustapeck/Untitled-22.jpg

Indra363 in Sleeping Bag
2001, oil on canvas, 16 x 20
http://williambustagallery.com/cbustapeck/Untitled-21.jpg

Bowler Parlor
2000, ink on paper, 12 x 16
http://williambustagallery.com/cbustapeck/Untitled-30.jpg


This is it. It's all just about ready... doing all the things that need to be done, labels, painting, the like.

I am really pleased with this body of work, and I hope that you can make it to the show. See my daylog November 21, 2002 for details.

There are doors that let you in
And out
But never open
But they are trapdoors
That you can't come back from

Little words were exchanged today. We spoke intermittently, but it wasn't through direct conversation. Instead, we played this game with instant messenger profiles. Being her playful self, she put some of my lovely prose into her profile, and reading it, I decided I would do the same. It became a game of virtual tag, with every touch bringing us a little bit closer. Closer to what we are dancing around. Closer to tomorrow night.

Hers - "all i want to do is drink some vino, eat some italian, and have a good time with you :)"

His - "i think you just made my day. is that okay?"

Hers - "I like the way things are going."

I grow tired of words. So the phrase goes, that actions speak louder than words. Yet acting is exactly what we do every day. I try to act calm, collective and reserved. It's excitement, eating the twisted seconds of my day; it's nervous termites eating the whittled hopes I have been pouring over for what seems like forever.

It's building. The climax should be tomorrow, but for all the right reasons, I hope it's not tomorrow. I hope it's forever. An eternal climax. I think that's like sitting on the peak of the world.


-- previous

Thinking.........sinking.....feeling........drinking.....deciding.......wondering....falling........more drinking........depressing..........worrying........fretting.........dessicating (I feel like a coconut)....

Then again, maybe tomorrow will bring sobriety and peace, although it will probably bring sobriety and angst. I'd settle for love an laughs.

The milk of human kindness?............It's trapped in the coconut!

This daylog was brought to you courtesy of Prozac, Bacardi Gold and Sleep Depravation.

Addition 06 December 2002. Noding while intoxicated is a seriously fucked up thing to do,

Today was the eclipse in Southern Africa. I am in Cape Town and we therefore saw only about a 60% darkening of the sun (which was still quite impressive). The path of the totality hit Africa over Angola, passed over Namibia, Botswana and the northern Limpopo province of South Africa (including the Kruger National Park). It then continued along over Mozambique towards Australia.

The totality was supposed to hit Musina (where 100 000 people were expected to gather) at 08:18 this morning. The totality lasted for 68 seconds. Astronomers say the next total eclipse in the region will not occur until 2030, so everyone wanted to make this one count. Apparently (according to news reports) there was some cloud covering on the path of the totality which left hundreds of tourists frustrated and pointing their massive lenses at the clouds hoping for a break through which they might get a peak at the diminished sun.

As for myself, it's a beautifully sunny day in Cape Town and the 60% darkening that we witnessed wasn't really noticeable unless you were specifically looking at it (the temperature did drop a little, but not significantly). But despite only feeling a small part of the effects of the eclipse it was still a wonderful experience. Just to be able to witness the gentle movement of those two massive celestial objects as they came together and parted again was a beautiful thing that was at the same time humbling and comforting. The main thing that I will take away from it is a reminder of how big the things out there are and at the same time how much we are in contact with the rest of our solar system and everything beyond it.



There’s this funny game I’ve been playing as I ascend through the ranks on E2. Something that I call “looking up and down” that I am sure I’m not alone at doing. Every morning when I get to work and log in I scroll down to that my username is the lowest entry on the screen. Then I see what literary giants are visible at the top of the list. On select mornings, if I get to work early enough, I can see all the way to the top of the list. I see all the names with the dollar signs beside, and dream of one day being king of the hill.

I am an XP whore. I know.

I then scroll down so that the bottom of the users listing is at the bottom of my browser window. I look to see if my name still appears down there. On some evenings, when there’s a multitude of other happy noders online, I cannot see it. It fills me with jubilation to know that I’m no longer a “newbie”, and that I am making my way through the listing.

I am an XP whore. I know

I understand the concepts of E2. I know that quality overshadows quantity, and in that I relish every time I add something meaningful to the nodegel. I know that fundamentally E2 is a database, and that what I add is forever being immortalized within. I lament on thoughts that someday someone will happen across my write ups, when I’m long dead in the ground, and wonder what my life must have been like. Mostly though, I sit and fantasize about having a four-digit XP value. About having a picture on my homenode.

I am an XP whore. I know

So this is what oblivion feels like.

I am an idiot sometimes. It's been a damn long time since I've been a newbie at anything, and I feel the cold winds of Everything2 draining my will to node.

Today I'm critiquing a friend's poetry collection (which is to say her collection of work to date). After two nukings in a row, I don't exactly feel like I'm doing the world a favor by writing anything. Later, I'm planning on sorting books from my collection to give away as presents, since I don't really have money for anything new.

Time to find out if you can have negative experience.

Update - Some people are real quick on the draw in blasting the newbies today, it seems. Fair enough.

This morning I finally got those dang dance manuals successfully onto the Internet Archive site. Go to http://www.archive.org, click on "Texts" on the right side about half way down, and then search for "dance".

More work on recognizing sites and domains that have identical information. Also added some code for handling cookies in our web crawler. On both topics there are many sites that do really odd things.

Ruth Anne and Amelia are visiting me in San Francisco for the second half of the week. I snuck out of work in the mid afternoon to go get them at the airport. Amelia was everybody's darling in both airports as well as on the plane. When we got back, I got to show off Amelia to some people at work, and then we went out to a nearby Japanese restaurant in the Presidio. Amelia, it turns out, is quite enamored of miso soup and udon noodles in addition to everything else.

What with the three hour time change and whatnot, we accidentally kept Amelia out just a little too long, and she went ballistic for the 15 minute walk back to the car. We managed to get her to sleep in the car, but then she woke up again when we stopped, and there was a lot of noise and excitement at Brewster's house so getting her back to sleep again wasn't easy.

I also surfed over to mrskin.com for a moment, and discovered that the free video clip today was a topless Reese Witherspoon. But don't tell.

Antarctic diary: December 4, 2002

Remembrance of places distant

Kristan wanted to hike the Taylor Valley. They wouldn't let her do it unless someone who'd already done it once went with her.

Strange as it seems, that someone was me. And strange as it was to me, I remembered the way. When we came to blind corners, I remembered the decisions I made last year. I knew where it was going to be level, and where steep. The frozen puddles. The mummified seals.

Trudging through the alien landscape, I was the guide.

How is it I know my way though this place? This pernicious nothingness. This life. This ice.

The hike from Lake Bonney to Lake Hoare is about 12 miles. Hikers pass three glaciers. The final mile is over a blue-ice lake, so you need stabilicers to keep from slipping and bruising yourself.

We took four and a half hours. We really cruised.

"Stan" took a lot of pictures. She's doing a series on the dry valleys for her newspaper back home. Even with stopping for five minutes every so many hundred yards, we still got to Lake Hoare fast. That meant climbing a number of moraines. Fording frozen glacier moats. Climbing rocks. Slogging up hundred-foot high sand dunes that feel temperatures as cold as dry ice in the winter. Winds as strong as Hurricane Andrew.

We took a break next to a mummified seal, now dead some couple thousand years, its body preserved by the arid cold air.

I munched a Cadbury Energy bar. Stan ate the leftover Antarctic Cod from our Thanksgiving dinner.

"We're pretty lucky," one of us said. It doesn't matter which.

The other said something as profound as, "Yeah," and that was it. The number of people who have walked that path are well recorded, starting 99 or so years ago with Scott's men during the voyage of the Discovery. Unlike most places, the ever-omniscient "they" know everyone who's walked between the lakes.

It is that fact we considered when we pondered our fortune. The Seuss glacer before us. The Ferrar to our back. The warm katabatic winds swirling around us.

An hour later we passed through the defile, a thin passageway between the Seuss and a mountain wide enough for humans to pass. After many pictures we made it to Lake Chad, so named because the first explorers, upon sampling the water, discovered through intestinal distress the lake contained a natural magnesium laxative, and so named it after the toilet tissue they'd brought.

Without sampling the water we donned our ice spikes, called stabilicers. These are like the flip-flop-style sandels one wears at the beach with flathead screws turned into the bottom. You strap them to your hiking boots with velcro flaps, and then you walk on the screwheads which give you traction on the glare ice.

After an hour walking on blue ice Stan felt looked like a frozen swimming pool, we reached the Lake Hoare hut.

Inside, one of the mechanics was working on the camp solar system (for electric power). His name is the same as mine, and when a call came in on the camp radio they needed someone with our name at the dive hut on the lake, he asked me to cover. After all, wasn't one of us as good as the other?

I thought not. He was the one with the tools.

He pled for about 30 seconds. I relented.

I loaded up his tools and one of the limnologists came by on the Polaris ATV. She drove me 2 miles across the frozen lake to a place where they'd sunk a 3' diameter hole in the ice down to the lake water.

The diver was standing in his dry suit. The wires to his communications helmet had come off.

I want to say I went to work quickly, but the truth is, the I first had to stab myself in the finger with a sharp, brand new leatherman tool. Some tape had to be cut off the dive hose to release the communication wires and the tech there was too afraid to cut the hose to do it herself.

As a man without a job or insurance, I carefully removed the tape sacrificing my finger instead of piercing the expensive pressure hose.

Under any other conditions, this would not be an issue. In the dry valleys, where any human contamination is a violation of international law, it was an environmental crime.

Thank god for electrical tape. "Stan" (who was there to photograph the dive operations) wrapped my finger in black tape and I quickly repaired the wire, becoming an Antarctic hero for about four seconds.

I drove away on the ATV feeling I'd done something good for the Antarctic program, sustaining injury for the greater good of science.

Back in the hut I learned I had to now classify the electrical tape a biomedical hazard, and tossed it in the appropriate bin locked with massive structures capable of retaining cancer cells and Ebola virii.

But the divers were diving, and the hike was had, and all was well at Lake Hoare camp.

As I settled in to a dinner of conversation, Thai curry, and Tang I pondered my fortune and decided that life, in general, was well worth living, and that the strange turn mine had taken made mine all the more worth having.

No matter what happens on this earth, in my life, from now on, I have been with these people and done these things.

I will remember.

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