RADLAB0 IS PART OF THE PROBLEM!
Cow Of Doom and briiiiian need robot parts for robot costumes! Send your extra tubing, duct tape, aluminum foil, old colanders, etc. to them! Contact me if you need their addresses, and I shall reward you with a hand-drawn postcard after they receive your contributions.
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I've come to realize that, deep down, I am always resisting arrest.
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To those of you who have or will host or attend a noder gathering, or if you are secretly interested in finding out about other people on the site by reading what has been written about them, or if you are monetarily impaired in a manner that prevents gathering attendence despite interest (thanks, Devon!), Walter's writeup in E2 Gatherings is an excellent resource. Please, go take advantage!
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Oh, right, pictures!
Chris took these:
http://www.angelfire.com/ny5/jrminga/turkeys.html
http:// www.apt103.net/~tangent/chris-o/chris.php
And Gwen should be held responsible for these:
http://www.wertperch.co.uk/gallery/view_album.php?set_albumName=album01
These are Jared's:
http://www.apt103.net/~tangent/imgbank/turkeys/turkeys.php
Please do this: go look at wormhole. Read all the technical writeups, read the theory, read it, absorb it, fit it into your skull, make it part of your vocabulary. Then, read the Webster 1913 definition of same term. Go! Do it now! It will make your day better, I promise.
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I was wondering what color I'd end up if you ground me into a paste and then dried me out into a powder. Probably brown. Pretty much everything organic ends up brown.
It's a trust issue, you know, and that's what impresses me--your ideas, they are a major part of what makes you who you are (this especially in this environment where all we know of each other is either a direct reference to or deduced from those bits of text we have opted to make public). But look how amazing all of this is! For whatever reason, each of us was compelled to make an account, settle down with some square brackets, and *share* something with the rest of us! And look at the content--all of these amazing factual nodes, the intense and wonderful works of fiction, the opinions and commentary, the people who expose their vulnerable underbellies and discuss personal experiences of pain, the people who write to share their joy (gads, just look at all of the nodes about being a parent, they are amazing). Look, how can we be entirely cynical and bitter in a world where a mess of strangers are willing to spend their limited free time making something as beautiful as all of this? Yes, I am trying to restore your faith in humanity by saying what has already been said in a million places. Is that really such a bad thing? You've already let your guard down enough to share yourself. Maybe the fact that you are still here means that there are magical, valuable things out there, and maybe it's okay to occasionally be happy about that.
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Innuendo is just speech with good pipelinks.
PLEASE NOTE: THE LOCATION OF THANKSGIVING HAS BEEN CHANGED.
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invader's blood marches through my veins like GIANT RADIOACTIVE RUBBER PANTS!! the pants command me...do not ignore my veins!
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Maybe love is in the little thoughtful things we do for each other. Maybe love is remembering to brush your teeth when you get up to go to the bathroom before they've woken up in an effort to spare them your morning breath. Maybe love is planning to seem spontaneous because you know that would be the best way of showing them that you care. Maybe love is inviting them for Thanksgiving in spite of your weird relationship because you can hear loneliness in their voice. With one failed marriage under my belt at the age of 24, it would probably be misguided of me to claim that I am well-suited to the consideration of this topic.
But...
I don't know. What do you think?
She says, "maybe love is impossible for anyone to completely keep. it's like a bird. it perches where it wants to," and, "love is unconditional and absolute. anything else just isn't it. and the opposite of love isn't hate, it is fear. when we walk through our fears, we leave room for love."
He says, "What I think is that love relishes in morning breath as base proof of intimacy. But my love has always been unusually messy - I still have cast-off clumps of hair from people whose breath I was once in a position to smell."
He said this: "I think love is pure and easy. When it get's tricky is when you start confusing need and addiction with love. love is an act of letting go and just being, it does not want or need anything."
He said, " Love is what I felt in its immensity one night when I fell asleep, with a hand on my daughter's mother's stomach.
Love is a beautiful thing, I think. Look at how amazing you all are, telling these intimate details about your philosophy to a stranger! Do you have any idea how brave that is? I am honored. Thank you.
I could fill a page with all the things that he said, but these are the ones that particularly resonated with me: "It's a fierce thing, like a tiger stalking. It surrounds like swimming in the ocean. It's sweet like honeysuckle, and as tenuous, from the small span of life. It is that bit of us which is the ruah, the breath of God."
Later, he said, "I'm pretty sure love is when you give every single red Mike and Ike, and eat all the green ones so she doesn't have to. At least, there's only one person *I'll* do that for."
It's starting to sound more and more that love 1)is difficult to put into words, 2)makes you do things that aren't too hard on you but mean a lot to the object of your love, and 3)makes its presence known at interesting moments.
He said lots: "love is ineffable. not just difficult to put into words, but impossible. we do our best - metaphors and anecdotes. love being like a rose or a river or a story about two birds. ultimately it's not something that can be seen in anyone but yourself. i'm not the kind of person who believes in things like souls. universal experiences aren't really universal - they're colored by what came before them, and what comes around them. every time you love it's completely different, and so with every one who loves. when i say 'i love you', i can't ever prove it, but i'm as sure of it as anything, and it's as true as anything. you get to define love for yourself. there aren't rules unless you make them. there aren't lines unless you draw them. it isn't true unless you believe it. never let anyone tell you otherwise."
He said, "regarding luv: it's all that stuff that's already on yr homenode. but sometimes i wonder if it's that different from habit. growing so connected to someone over time that it's more natural to be with them than apart from them."
He has been in love, and you can tell from what he said: "love is when you wake up next her at 4:30 am and watch her face, the freckles, the contour of her eyebrows and lips, her nose. you're suddenly not tired in the least and you realize you woke up at 4:30 am for exactly that reason to watch her sleep. the universe works in mysterious ways, love is what keeps it that way. of course, that's just been my experience. there are a million other things that love is, but that's the freshest one on my mind." About 4 minutes later he added the following: "love is the warmth that floods your body from time to time, for no reason other than someone loves you and is thinking about you, somewhere."
She proposed this: "love is appreciation in its entirety - of nuances, smells, habits, ideas, traits. All these things become not simply endearing, but valuable as parts of a greater whole. At this point, love becomes beautifully simple."
She asked permission before contributing, but she didn't have to (and neither does anyone else. I like to collect things. This seems like a worthwhile and valuable collection). She said, "Love is one of the few and wonderful resources out there to which the theory of starvation economics does not apply. Unlike other resources, like money, one does not run out of love. In fact, I have found that the more I love, the more love I have to share. That's my main problem with Love as society sees it, that view is based on the idea that if you love more than one person, your love is somehow lessened or cheapened. It's not. What is this resource that I call love? It's the ability to respect and value another person so much that their happiness becomes just as important (no more and no less) to you as your own. Their pleasure gives you pleasure. Their pain brings you pain. When shared, love becomes a way to bridge the gap between subject and object, "I" and "other". Because this division is so primal, love is absolutely primal. Its psychological power is not to be trifled with. Yum!"
He brought up these points: "Love is never isolated, we see tinges of it in everything around us. It colors our world. Lust, Compassion, Charity, Sacrifice, Passion, Understanding; all these and more suggest, yet fall short of the incomprehensible nature of love."
He offered, "on love: it is convulsive; no, it is an evolutionary process bringing the world to an omega point, or maybe it's an illusion but whatever its nature, it is imperfect, and maybe this is its perfection because that makes it uniquely human. or maybe i'm just full of crap. who knows."
And the bit I find really interesting is that, while everyone seems to agree that love is powerful and dangerous and intermingled with all of these other strange thoughty things, no one has suggested (and I have to agree with them on this omission) that love means thinking that the object of your love is perfect. So you can love people and also find them frustrating and annoying and misguided and downright idiotic. Maybe that's why so many people have problems related to how they deal with their families; They love and hate their parents/siblings, etc., and it's hard to recognize that those emotions, while disparate, are not dissonant.
He wrote me a lengthy e-mail about the subject of love, discussing it's dichotomous nature and how difficult it is to characterize (and doubtless the two points are related). He said a lot, but summed things up well with his final remark. "I am. Love is. I can be no truer than that."
She is, incidentally, an absolute delight on the phone. She also contributed this: "I know that love is warm, and I am pretty sure it can't be put in a bottle. I believe it's a whole lot bigger and stronger than I often give it credit for. It is alive, and its breath is where songs and babies come from. It's holding the universe together right now, and it's responsible for that nagging feeling that you should really give your sister a call. It always, always gives up the last piece of fried chicken. It is gracious in surprising ways; it never lets anyone feel uncomfortable or stinky. It looks you straight in the eye, is incapable of lies, and brings life and healing wherever it is applied. If you give it an inch it will take over every square mile of your heart, this is true, and it will eat darkness like candy corn. It is synonymous with light, it rejoices in serving, it listens patiently, and it laughs at the very idea of death. It is brown and golden as a field during harvesttime. It is not a mood, it is not a concept, it is not a philosophy. It is yours for the asking and not for sale at any price!"
Reflecting upon the stuff I wrote (yes, that stuff, right up there, before the big list of what all of you folks said) back when I first embarked upon this mission, I realize that I've not really spoken about what I think love is. I mean, sure, I offered up that cynical diatribe you see above, but that doesn't say anything. (Had you fooled, though, didn't I?)
Well, here goes: when I love someone, it means that I have found them worthy of my trust and respect. It means that I look forward to the most trite and mundane things, like doing laundry together, and imagine the most elaborate and delightful impossible adventures, all for the pleasure and well being of the object of my love. There is a desire to make space in my life for the object of my love, and a sense that my own space is not reduced in so doing. For love I will lay myself transparent and bare, even though the thought of being so vulnerable terrifies me. And for my love I will create a place in my heart where they can themselves be transparent and bare, and still feel safe.
Love is something so rewarding that it is okay that it is so frightfully painful to lose.
I said this, "You know, the bits on my homenode, the bits that I said? They make me out to be some kind of cynical heartless bastard, which I am not. And everyone has been so sweet and kind about telling me what they think and feel and about how they love, and there is a beauty in it (and a surprising consistency to it, which is so delightful and has such interesting implications). But I am nervous about advertising what I feel about love. And I don't quite know how to put words to it, except to describe examples, and even those are thin pale shadows of the feelings they purport reference to." in an e-mail to her and she suggested that I paste it here. She is deliciously wise and lovely.
He put it very elegantly: "Love is perfect. It's the only thing in the world that I'd want to be in forever."
She said, "love is the peaceful feeling that settles about your shoulders, and it's the fire that ignites your belly. you cannot decide who to love nor when to love. You can only choose to have the courage to open your heart and accept it when love makes its appearance."
He said, "RE LOVE AND SHIT: I think love is that feeling that builds up deep inside your soul, like a warm spring afternoon, that allows you to fight your way through circumstances that seem impossible. Love is the ultimate power in the Universe and those who can harness it will never find themselves without the strength to carry on."
She has said it before and will likely say it again: "love is a strange and multifaceted fuckton of crazy."
she gave her answer in parts. "On Falling in Love : This part is like riding the rollercoaster. The slow ride of anticipation to the apex, full of nervous apprehension and then one moment of looking over into the void before fasterthananything falling. Then you ride, and you're knocked back and forth, but in a good way, sort of addle-brained and breathless and wind-in-your-face bewitched. And hopefully, when the ride ends, you are sort of happy, shakey kneed, holding someone's hand, and you want to ride it again. On Love : A concept that occasionally loses meaning, because it's a plain old word, too. It's built too high and scares people, or lowered too far and doesn't mean anything. Love is simple, really. It's as much a father dying for his children as it is splitting your last cookie with a good friend or cooking someone dinner. The examples sound so far removed from each other but they aren't. The sentiment is similar->valuing a person's well-being as much as your own, but without actively thinking about it. Without analysis. Love is happening all around in an infinite number of ways."
So maybe love is like light (i.e. it has the properties of both a particle and a wave) in that love can be defined both as a series of seemingly trivial tasks that you unthinkingly undertake for the object of your love, and as a soul-crushing and bewildering force that constantly threatens to destroy you. Nice!
He kept it short and sweet: "Love pays attention."
She reminded me of the details: "each breath, each eyelash, each mole, and all the other verysmallthings are buttons that make my heart swell."
He offers, "To me, true love doesn't feel like a scene from a Hollywood flick or the toothpaste commercials where the dude gets laid because his teeth are pearly white...It's feeling perfectly safe and secure in the arms of another person. For some reason, it's just right. I can't explain it any better than that."
She said, "Here's what I think: Love is that feeling of floating happiness and laughing for no particular reason other than that you’re in each other’s company; it is knowing that you can be mad as hell right now, but that doesn’t undermine your connection; it is a sense of family, of security, of being known and accepted, and cared for."
She said, "i think we use metaphors when we talk about love because metaphors express the relationship between the universal and the particular (that is, the tangible). and that's what love is. feels enormous, but may express itself in something as a finger wrapped around yr finger. that said, the metaphor i most strongly favor is that of a warm ocean. the trick is not to give into yr anxieties and thrash around and drown yrself. the trick is to just float, to let the waves carry you. that is all."
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The thing that I wish I could explain in terms simple and elegant enough to fit on a t-shirt is this: Regardless of where I am geographically, if I am in his arms, I am home. And I can't think of anything else that causes me more joy or alarm.
GIVE.
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So, these two markets are flying along (please, people, just suspend disbelief for a second, okay?), and one looks over to the other and says, "Hey! You're a market, you can't fly!" Sure enough, the market drops, like a stone, to the ground. Unperturbed, the remaining market continues flying. Ruffled, the now-grounded market shouts up, "You're a market, too, why can you fly?" The flying market smiles serenely. "Oh, I'm not a market,"
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Here we go again!
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I'm still trying to work this all out.
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If you need to talk, just /msg me. Seriously.
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