Watermark

Webstream: My Week on the Web

Stumbled:

• Via Negativa & Blog Archive & Kobayashi Issa: haiku about shitting
• Ample Sanity: The Meaning of Life
• Evolving Times: How to Install Love - very clever essay via Essential Keystrokes
• Poetry.com rhyming dictionary and thesaurus
• (This is kind of serious) - more on life
• Kaliedoscope Toy
• Virtual Friendship and the New Narcissism - found at frizzylogic
• Imagining the Tenth Dimension - A Book by Rob Bryanton - this is very cool!

Bookmarked:

• Juicy Studio: Colour Contrast Analyser - from scorpy01 in a discussion at BlogCatalog
• Color Palette Generator
• Tools For Choosing a Color Combination

@ Blogging Blog:

• Cool Avatars & Network Aggregation Profiles: mEgo
• Bloggers Unite: Bloggers Against Abuse

@ Abide:

• Recent CFS/FMS/M.E. Research

Here at Watermark:

• Feed Disaster
• Snapshot 26 September 2007
• BloggersUnite | Poetry Thursday
• Comfort

Comfort

   

   

 

For more comforting critters, try:

• The Carnival of the Cats at This That and the Other Thing
• On Sunday, the new carnival will be at Life from a Cat's Perspective
• Weekend Cat Blogging at Masak-Masak
• Bad Kitty Cats Festival of Chaos: Pets Garden Blog
• & Friday Ark at Modulator

 

BloggersUnite | Poetry Thursday

Today is Blogging Against Abuse day, a Community Challenge from Blog Catalog. I have a poem that is appropriate for this challenge: The Therapist.

I am linking rather than posting for two reasons:

• This poem is written in long lines, and that format works much better at Oratory than it does here at Watermark.
• This poem deals graphically with the subject of sexual abuse/assault.  It is important that the reader be warned -- this can be a difficult and painful read for some folks.

This is also my Poetry Thursday post. Sadly, the topic for this week was Utopia, and my piece is anything but. Still, there it is.

From the Poetry Thursday site:

For the next few weeks, several Poetry Thursday participants will take turns hosting the Thursday post on their blogs. This week, please visit The Red Door Studio where you will be able to a) leave your comment linking to your Thursday post about poetry, b) find out next week’s prompt. Next Thursday's host will be Liz Elayne.

Snapshot 26 September 2007

The dogs bark
at intruders.
Which anyone is.

A goldfinch sings
on the other side
of the window.

I open the shutters,
close them. Is there
another side

to this wall?
I am uninhabited.
Come in.

 

Thank you, Andrew and Kasper, for help with revision.

Feed Disaster

[Thursday morning: fixed, I think]

 

Subscribe to my feed

In trying to consolidate my feeds, I have somehow managed to unsubscribe about 140 of you.

Please resubscribe!

Webstream: My week on the Web

Bookmarked:

• pictobrowser - a flickr toy, found at Blog U
• HTML color codes
• Devlounge | 15 Design Decisions That Annoy Readers
• Get the Most Out of Flickr / Wired How To's
• WidgetAvenue - flickr 3D SlideShow
• Funky Ways to Express Yourself - another new avatar place, by invitation only, and I don't have one
• SlideFlickr.com - create and embed Flickr slideshows
• Facebook Applications and Privacy - How to Configure Facebook Applications « Internet Duct Tape
• Ten Things I Hate About You, Facebook « Web Worker Daily
• How to use Facebook without Losing Your Job over it « Internet Duct Tape

Stumbled:

• Jill Greenberg - via dailywebthing linkport - It's marvelous. It adds to the question of just how different are 'they' from 'us', anyway?
• ALLIED by Jeneane Sessum: You Know How I Feel About Blogrolls - Jeneane loves blogrolls!
• squidfingers / polaroids / bishop2 - intriuging

Here at Watermark:

• Miscellaneous Unimportant Questions
• mEgo
• eMail confusions
• Poetry Thursday/ Secrets
• Virtual Cats, Again
• One Web Day | One Small World
  

One Web Day | One Small World

Today is OneWebDay 

The Web is worth celebrating.

OneWebDay is one day a year when we all - everyone around the physical globe - can celebrate the Web and what it means to us as individuals, organizations, and communities.

There are days, in these difficult times, when I feel there is little hope for us, as a species on this world we sometimes seem bent on destroying. On those days, what hope I find is here, on the Web; in the connections we make as individuals, one to another.

The Web has a lot to offer that is informative, or beautiful, or trivial and disturbing. For me, the heart of the Web is the personal blogs, where we each offer something of ourselves to each other. Now, when war or disaster strikes in some other part of the world, I am likely to think -- to feel -- I know someone who lives there.

Because we do grow to know each other, in a new and uncertain sense.  This knowing is a reminder, an awareness, of how small our world is; how connected we really are. That the bell -- be it funeral bell, celebration bell, or alarm bell -- tolls for us all.

Ideas like this should be more often shared, especially nowadays when the world seems to be in need of dialogue and understanding among different cultures, in a way that it has never been before.

Click that Miniature Earth graphic to go see a short, powerful movie --  one of the jewels our Web has to offer. 

If our world still seems large to you, go look at The Size Of Our World.

We are so small, to hold so much.

Virtual Cats, Again

Last week I got a note from:

Nekoface International is owned and operated by cats from the future (the year 2009).  The creatures from Nekoface.com create clothing fashions, cat music, and other forms of art that express their everyday adventures living in the city of Shinbun.  The company is named after a cat (nekoface), who is the president and CEO of Nekoface International and was created over 100 years ago.

... which reminded me that it's time to do another Virtual Cats post (the first one is here.) Virtual Cats is the second most popular search term that brings folks to Watermark, right after Orange Cats (oh, and there's another virtual cat, an orange one, there) so it's no doubt time to update it.

Nekoface insists that s/he is not virtual, but a real cat from the future; and forgives my confusion.

First, for virtual exhibition of real cats, go here:

• The Carnival of the Cats at The House of Mostly Black Cats
• On Sunday, the new carnival will be at This That and the Other Thing
• Weekend Cat Blogging at A Byootaful Life
• Bad Kitty Cats Festival of Chaos: Bad Kitty is still recovering from being hacked.
• & Friday Ark at Modulator

And now, on to the virtual:

Poetry Thursday/ Secrets

From the Poetry Thursday site:

For the next few weeks, several Poetry Thursday participants will take turns hosting the Thursday post on their blogs. This week, please visit jillypoet where you will be able to a) leave your comment linking to your Thursday post about poetry, b) find out next week’s prompt. Next Thursday's host will be The Red Door Studio.

I'm still working on The Love Series, but have nothing new from it to post. I do, however, have an old poem that is in line with the prompt for this week. It's one of my best poems, too.

   

Secrets

Listen. I will tell you everything. The weather is turning. 
Soon it will be time to unroll the Persian rugs and lay them
on the polished floors. 

I will hold nothing back. I am brittle, like glass; like leaves
of a tree too long without water; a cocoon, untenanted,
exposed to the sun. 

This morning I wore a jacket to walk the river path. Two crows,
in their black robes, pecked at the body of a thick green snake. 
My mother was a northerner.

She carried me across thin ice. Many times I slipped beneath
the frozen water. I never knew my father. Tomatoes are laid
on the kitchen counter,

red bulbs on the maple wood. I prepare the knife:  steel blade,
sharpening stone. I want to slice to the seedy centers without
bruising the skin. 

I loved my father. He had perfect, beautiful hands. He kept
them manicured and clean. There are reasons you must not
touch me. My grandmother

lived with God in her garden. She fed me carrots and peas,
she put white lilies by my bed. I am telling you everything. 
It is cold here. 

Birch trees bend in their white sleeves, leaves hissing in the wind. 
A blade of sun slants down, casting serrated shadows on the hard
ground. Are you listening? 

Do you understand? The dog waits, and waits, at the door. 
Yesterday, I dropped the Murano vase. It cannot be repaired. 
I cut myself on sharp, thin air.

 

eMail confusions

On the second of this month, a friend sent me an email:

well?

So I shot back (ok, I didn't shoot it back; I sent it yesterday):

no.

you?

& he responded something along the lines of:

I'll try to decipher this later.

At which point it occurred to me that his first email might not have been an inquiry into my state of health, but a simple question:

are you there?

So I sent this, which I post here so we're all up-to-date:

allow me to elaborate

you said: 'well?'

which i interpreted thusly: 'are you well?'

and so replied: 'no, i am not well. but then, i seldom am. however, i am presently less well than is common, and focusing unduly on same.'

and i then inquired, accordingly, into your state of being: 'and how are you?'

but this interpretation may be a consequence of my current tedious preoccupation with unwellness.

i shall now desist speaking in latinate

i am here.
i am unwell.

you?

I'll be back soon.