Sunday

February 11, 2001

SuRu's birthday card...

I'm not an artist but I play one on the WEB.

Eastside...a place that still has a blackboard.

Time is the only thing there is. Yes, yes, you think there are relationships, spirituality, material things, money. Maybe you even think the diet you just started is a real, palpable thing.

But none of it means anything unless you wind up the clock and start timing it. Even that diet. A timeless frozen moment doesn't allow consumption or loss. You are 178 pounds forever in a timeless moment and you can't even enjoy a whiff of food.

Money buys time to do something other than the mundane, buys things you need time to appreciate and does you no good (theoretically) when you leave this mortal world.

Sundays make me think of these things. Especially if you get up with nothing planned beyond a dog walk. And then open the back door and see that it is raining. Now you officially have nothing. Planned. Nothing planned. So you could do about a hundred different things. Work on your links page, clean up your e-mail. Read. A digitial video magazine. Or The New York Times. This book on DreamWeaver. I've been trying to get a rollover to work. (Mouse over the pictures on this page and see if it works.) Well I got it to work but I'm still confused. I can use the knowledge of how to do this for something useful and productive. Can't I?

Oh, yes. I could clean up this office. Which is a state of disarray. Piles of boxes and stuff on the floor. I'm sort of working on a lot of things. I need more days at home to get this all organized.

Since it is SuRu's birthday and dog walking is rained out, I feel we should offer up something she wants to do. Something fun and diverting. She is up for this and suggests shopping but weird shopping and rain might not be pleasant. We decide on art at the Jack Blanton and a late lunch meal...somewhere. And agree on a time. She is installing a firewall on her new DSL and getting the company's VPN to work on it.

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Art. What is it? The Rembrandt to Rauschenberg show now going at the Blanton Art Building can certainly leave you pondering that. Cildo Meireles' How to Build Cathedrals presents a hauntingly beautiful ceiling of bones and floor of pennies. There were strong lights above the bones, black netting surrounding it. It was strangely beautiful and up to four visitors at a time were invited to go right in and walk on the pennies. (But be warned, it said, they are slippery.) SuRu and I surreptiously added two pennies from her purse. With that and our footprints in the pennies, we changed the artwork. Didn't we? Is it less or more now?

There are lots of older works, too. Tiny Rembrandt etchings and hundreds of year old sketches for paintings that, to me, are even better than the paintings sometimes because they are so free.

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We spent a lot of time at the exhibit and it was 3PM when we went to lunch. I had been pondering the food issue while wandering about in the museum. I had placed the suggestion of Eastside into play and my companions took it up. FFP and I bought SuRu lunch in honor of her birthday. We shopped at the gift shop in the parking lot, but didn't buy anything.

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FFP and I spent some quality time. I guess. We watched Hitchcock's Thirty Nine Steps. We watched King of the Hill in which Hank mooned Ann Richards who played herself. The Simpsons was OK, too. Especially when Homer says what the family learned from their experience with tennis: "Don't try to do stuff, just watch."

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Was the day productive? Was my time well-spent? Hard to say. I certainly enjoyed myself. I learned that the French word auréole meant halo. I relearned the meaning of synecdoche. I saw art. I figured out a bit about mouse over behavior. I made a fun card for our hosts last night. Still, another day has passed. And what have I to show for spending my time? I must say that I have had days when my time was wasted much more profoundly than today.

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I occasionally search dogpile for my name. Some search engines dredge up our site. But I was delighted to discover that a search for 'visible woman' caused Alta Vista to list my journal as the second item. There was a feature on Excite for a few days one time that allowed you to see what people were searching for. It just rolled by like a Dow ticker. I found it very cool. Then they figured out, probably, that someone could capture it. It is very valuable info, apparently. For figuring out what marketing trends are and such.

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