i am SO into the new Heartless Bastards album right now.

additionally, any of you not listening to the eminently lovable (he flirted with my girlfriend! where was i?! i want to meet him!) M. Ward, including his new album, Post-War, should start immediately.

The number of Americans who have died in Iraq has now exceeded the number that died on September 11th. I've been thinking about this, hoping it would never happen, pretty much since we first invaded, and it's affected me a lot more than the anniversary itself. Or maybe it's a combination of the two -- 9/11/2001 marked the beginning of a tumultuous period in my personal life as well. It's the day when Katie, with whom I'd been smitten for a few months, first felt something reciprocal. Our 5th anniversary is in a few weeks.

I don't know where I'm going with this... it's just that it's weird that the two things are forever linked for me, you know? It also feels a little strange that the ways that it affects me to think about 9/11 now are so startlingly different from the way it affected me at the time.

I'm also running on an uncharacteristic amount of caffeine, so all mental connections are being made faster and stronger and much more circuitous. I swear my blood is humming, and if I finish this cup, it'll be playing Rach II.

It's been awhile. How are y'all?

everybody watch this now:

http://movies.crooksandliars.com/TDS-Stem-Cells.mov

i'm not moving away, and katie's only moving down to eugene. i like my job and my boss likes me. i've befriended one of the most wonderful people on the planet and he lives right across the street when he's not touring the world being a rockstar. i learned to knit socks.

i'm also starving for a better artistic outlet than i have. it makes me crazy that i'm not good enough at anything to pay attention to what i'm making rather than how i'm making it.

but man: thank god for spring. i like feeling feelings.

when i was a freshman at carleton, i had a little blue notebook that i wrote in almost every night. i was usually either high or exhausted or both, but i wrote anyway. i took it with me when i went to visit my friend daniel in st. paul in march, and when the sun came out and the snow started melting, we walked around in tshirts and scarves and drank wine out of coffee mugs and wrote together.
i lost that book a few months later, and as it's the only one i've ever lost, out of the dozens of notebooks i've kept since i was very small, i'm convinced that everything in it was the best thing i ever wrote. very convenient. all i can remember, really, is a few lines from that poem i wrote with daniel. something about a red-headed woman, something about how "we can smile with our teeth again, and mean it", and something about march being the month that will save me, over and over again.


it's a good thing that in portland, march comes in february.

happy year of the dog, y'all.

i was born in the year of the dog, which means that i will soon be turning a multiple of twelve.

You are the fox.


Saint Exupery's 'The Little Prince' Quiz.
brought to you by Quizilla

bored on monday = haiku meme!

LiveJournal Haiku!
Your name:	furplepig
Your haiku:	if i do have a depth a fierceness and a baby at home i
Username:
Created by Grahame

LiveJournal Haiku!
Your name:	furplepig
Your haiku:	going to fight me my two roommates my greyhound and the hr department
Username:
Created by Grahame

I got a call yesterday from Mark Lofstrom asking me to be co-chair of the 2006 LGBT Family Reunion.


Yeah. Whoa.

What's even more amazing to me is that i'm seriously considering it. If they'd asked me six months ago, I'd have said never in a million years. (Well, not out loud...) Besides needing a break from Carleton in general, I left with a bit of a bitter taste in my mouth as far as the whole queer organizing thing goes. But I think I need to get over myself, and besides, I can't complain if I'm not trying to contribute somehow, right? I'd actually been thinking over the last couple of weeks that I'd like to get a little more involved. And I do think I have some good ideas...

So, I need your input. I don't want you to tell me whether you think I should accept, just if there are things you think I should consider and might not have thought of.

Like, "whoa, kate, that means you'd have to help lead meetings where you might be the youngest person in the room" or "you could come visit me while you're in northfield for said meetings!" or "are you sure you want to get up in front of a room of people and try to convince them to give money to carleton?"

Hit me.

1. Go here.
2. Pass it on.
( my answers )

okay. i had a really busy weekend and am only on page 200 or so. this is no one's fault but my own.

but i think i just had a fairly significant plot point of HBP spoiled by someone's icon.

in what world is this okay?






ah well. i guess the only thing to do is finish it tonight so this never happens again. :)

and i do have a life, and possibly even other interests. in fact, if i haven't posted video of me spinning fire within the week, someone kick me, k?

I've loved Harry Potter for years, but now, in the leadup to the Half Blood Prince release, it's reaching comic proportions. At the rate i'm going i'll finish rereading #5 well before saturday, and i just can't imagine reading something else in the meantime, so i think i'll have to go back and read #2 again. I woke up this morning with the vague feeling that i'd been dreaming about Dumbledore's death, and then when i read this headline: Four "dangerous enemy combatants" escaped from the main US base in Afghanistan I could've sworn it said "base in Azkaban". Which of course doesn't even make sense.

Only three days left! *does a little dance inside her head*

Okay, on with your day.

for some reason, i was just reminded of a conversation i had with my dear friend daniel on new year's day, 2000. we were talking about the rapid progression of technology; neither of us had a home computer in 1990, nor internet access in 1995, and we wondered, come 2005, what we would take for granted that we couldn't then imagine.

so i realized today that 2005 is more than upon us, and i guess the most immediate answer is google. i performed my first google search a few months after that conversation, and though i was impressed from the beginning, i had no idea that five years later it would be my portal to much of the internet, as well as a constant source of food for thought. i certainly never would have guessed that in 2003 i'd take a class that involved reading the paper that first introduced and explained PageRank. (if you have even the faintest glimmer of understanding of linear algebra, and that's about all i have, read it right now.)

2000 was also the year when i first downloaded an mp3.

so how about you folk? what services or gadgets are such an obvious part of your life now you can hardly believe you didn't use them (or maybe even know what they were) 5 years ago?

so, apparently dinosaur comics so precisely fits my dorky sense of humor that when i showed the lady this one she asked me if i wrote it. and she's totally right -- i don't need to write a comic strip now because the one i would write already exists.

as of this time tomorrow, i will have a jeffrey todd doten in my possession for the first time in...um...a year and a half. being the sort of boy that he is, i didn't know until a few hours ago that he wasn't coming "sometime in late june" but in fact RIGHT NOW.

i don't know how to say what it is about jeffrey that makes me love him more than most every other human i've met... but does it say something that this song never fails to remind me of him?

And if I was a hurt man
I'd find a way to put my faith
Into a woman that could take me from today
Maybe I need somebody that could save me
From the parts of myself that keep making me crazy
And if I was a wise man
I'd climb to the top of the mountain peak
To think about strength versus weakness
I'd find a point that rests a couple of feet above your head
And figure out how I could try to help you reach it
--Atmosphere, "If I Was Santa Claus"

he demands so much of me, in just the way that i need it... and yet loves me even when i'm myopic and stupid. and i get him for THREE WEEKS!

the man behind "freedom fries" is now against the war.

(also, i'm going to minnesota tomorrow!!!!)

the lady and i will be in the fair state of minnesota from friday night until monday afternoon. we plan to spend most of the day (or at least the afternoon) on saturday in the n-field, and i want to see you!

so if you have a few minutes on saturday, give me a call at 507.202.1876 (yes i still have my MN number, but sadly it's still long distance from northfield) and we'll arrange a rendezvous. we'll be skipping all around town, but in the interests of simplicity, i vote for descending en masse upon q&a house.

love love love!

omg the shins live in portland now. *jumps up and down*

This entry is dedicated to Sean May, Raymond Felton andminervacat, just three of the many folks who helped me win my office tourney pool. (!)

In other news, the lady tore her achilles playing basketball two weeks ago. She had surgery last week, and is recovering well. There were about 36 hours in there, right after the surgery, when it almost killed me to look at her face, she was in so much pain... but she's doing so much better now that she even went out to lunch yesterday. And as difficult as it is to watch her suffer, I really, really like taking care of her. Thank god for flexible work hours, health insurance, and domestic partnership.

Speaking of which, she finally got a job!! A really good job too... she's gonna be working in the same department as me, although in a separate building and on a completely different project. (Not to mention making a little more than I do.) You know she's a smart lady if they hired her even though she was all loopy from the oxycodone during the interview. :)

So yeah, it's all about Katie these days. Not much to tell about me, but I'm generally good. It's rainy (duh), but there are cherry blossoms and tulips and lilacs everywhere, which makes it pretty impossible for me to be in a bad mood.