Category: General Musings

No matter how good we are on our best days, we often judged by our worst.

That magical word, ‘anything’.

For me, the question and answer is not so much about intent, but knowing acquiescence.

The act of giving yourself over while understanding, at a fundamental animal level, just how deep you’ve let yourself be drawn into his world.

Its done in steps, sometimes subtle, sometimes not.

“What would you do for it?”

The answer is a binding twined tightly against you until your very breath catches.

After acquiescence comes the testing.

I imagined her a place.

She was a precocious child and an indecent tease, but her laughter made me smile.

The sanctuary I built for her had paper walls; on them I wrote her letters, but the rain made the words transparent, kissing the ink into rivers of black.

I never left her alone; there were cats that prowled the garden and tempted the stairs to the marble where she slept. They would nibble on her toes while she slumbered and she would dream of oceans and brightly colored fish.

I fed her plump fruits that tasted of bittersweet sunlight and sorrow. She drank from a cistern of clay and bathed in the cask of oak.

When she wept, I made it thunder and she would huddle under garments made in sunset hues, her sadness forgotten.

She kissed me once, but she thought I was part of the dream, or part of the storm, or a memory, or a ghost.

Family. Friends. Lovers.

Work. School.

Twitter. Facebook.

—

My life needs context, not meaning.

Moments of clarity, when we step back from ourselves and see the mechanisms of our lives; the pattern of behavior, the needs that inform our decisions.

The ironic truth is that this understanding doesn’t make our actions any more effective.

But it can make use self-conscious.

We become awkward, our knowledge making us move out of step.

We slip away from the rhythm and rut of the life around us when our natural inclination is to fall in line; the people about us sense the change, adjusting course to avoid anything that threatens the routine they’ve so carefully crafted to insulate themselves.

Still.

Still, all in all, I’ll take perspective over comfort.

I have a tin box filled with paper airplanes. It once held Christmas cookies sent by a muse of mine.

This is the direct result of the fact that, having not received a new desk calendar over the the holidays, I was forced to find one myself. This is never a particularly good idea, because given a choice, I am not going to be content with a calendar of Dilbert cartoons, inspirational sayings, Irish castles, LOLcats, or fun facts.

I find myself drawn to items that challenge.

Which is how I ended up with a calendar made of daily airplane origami.

Each day reveals a new design and every morning has seen the creation of a new plane. Some are designed for flying, kite-shaped gliders and sharp arrow-headed fliers. Others are merely ornamental, taking on the shape of intricate spacecraft and realistic bi-planes. There are designs beautifully elegant in their simplicity and complicated blueprints with tailwings and rudders.

They all go into the tin box.

We are mid-way through February, and the box is already full.

So here is my question.

What do you do with a tin filled with colorful paper airplanes?

This winter has been missing something.

I realized, yesterday, it’s the cold; To accommodate guests, I’ve had my heater running for the last couple of months.

Last night, I shut off the heat.

And I slept as if tomorrow was a cool blue dream.

We can measure our lives by days.

Or we can measure it by moments.

I know which I choose.

There is a walled garden, long overgrown; the stone fountains are silent, and green vines travel the course where water once ran. The flowers of the garden are wild, bright, and ferocious.

It is an untouched garden, a beautiful, forgotten, place, and it is here that lost angels spend their time.

Including the wicked angel, who visits the garden alone; she is a lost angel, but it was by choice.

She comes to pluck dark purple tulips and orange carnations, laughing dandelions and thorn-pricked roses, taking them all and weaving them into her hair.

Wherever she goes, she wants to leave flower petals in her wake.

Her wickedness is not born of cruelty; she spreads wickedness as others share love. She invites decadence. She inspires devilry. She dances naked outside windows, in the snow, and leaves teardrops in the drinks of the lonely. She joins silhouettes of lovers and the shadow puppets their lovemaking leaves upon the wall.

She kisses the wrist of a woman dreaming of yesterday’s regrets, runs fingers down the spine of a young man in an elevator until his shivers make him gasp.

She reminds them all what it means to be alive.

She is a lost angel, but she wants it that way. To be found, meant being caged, and then she could be wicked no more.

I’ve worked in customer support. And while my experience was in a highly technical field that required more than rote recitation of troubleshooting scripts, I understand the reasoning behind them: when the majority of the problems a call center receives can be fixed with three or four standard steps, it only makes sense to walk people through them.

So for those times I find myself unable to resolve an issue on my own (mostly in relation to Internet or cable service) and end up calling customer service, I do so with a good idea of what they will want me to do; I call prepared, and my issues are often resolved quickly.

Often. But not always.

Four months ago I purchased an Asus 1005HA netbook in preparation for my trip to Europe. It’s slim. It’s slick. It has an eight hour battery time. I love it.

Well, I love it except for the fact that it periodically refuses to boot and I have to ‘restore’ it to its factory settings. The good news is that this is easily done by holding the F9 key while the netbook boots. The bad news is that everytime I do this, it wipes out all the software I’ve installed, all the writing I’ve done, and all the pictures I’ve saved to it.

After the eighth time this happened, I called ASUS’ technical support and had the following conversation.

Me: Less than four months ago I purchased an ASUS netbook. Recently, I’ve been having issues with it refusing to boot. I’ve restored it to the factory settings, but after a few days I have the same problem again.

ASUS Customer Service: Have you installed anything on it?

Me: Yes. Firefox. Yahoo. AIM. Nothing particularly invasive.

ASUS Customer Service: It’s possible you have a virus.

Me: The netbook hasn’t been on-line since the last time it crashed. It couldn’t have caught a virus.

ASUS Customer Service: Alright. [pause as the next step is looked up] Let’s restore it to the factory settings. I need you to…

Me: …hold down F9 as it boots. I’ve done that. Eight times.

ASUS Customer Service: …
ASUS Customer Service: Oh.
ASUS Customer Service: Well, let’s do it again.

Me: A ninth time?

ASUS Customer Service: Yes.

Me: We…can. But I’m fairly sure I already know the outcome. In a few days, it will crash again. After restoring it three times and having the same problem, I thought there might be an issue. After five, I was pretty sure there was. And after eight…well, after eight times, I think the mystery has gone out of what will happen next. Barring a miracle, I have my doubts that a ninth attempt will heal whatever illness has struck down my netbook.

ASUS Customer Service: …
ASUS Customer Service: I really need you to restore it. And then if…

Me: When.

ASUS Customer Service: …if it crashes again, we can move onto an RMA.

Me: Right. [pause] You realize that every time it crashes, I lose all the work I’ve done on it?

ASUS Customer Service: …yes.

Me: And that the chances of it crashing for a ninth time are extremely high?

ASUS Customer Service: …yes.

Me: So let me get this straight. You want me to restore it and use it for the next three to five days knowing that any work I do on it will be lost when it crashes again?

ASUS Customer Service: Yes.

Me: [after about ten seconds of silence] Got it. What is the reference number for when I call back? …

ASUS: 1, D’jaevle: 0

Of course, there’s no way in hell I’m going to restore it, use it, and wait for it to crash again. I’ll leave it in it’s comatose state and call back in a few days with an excellent story about how it struggled valiantly for a few more days before succumbing for a ninth time.

So. Yes, I understand the importance of the troubleshooting steps customer service reps aref forced follow.

But the demise of common sense is just…tragic.