Rune Nation

On breaking up with dignity

Perspective:

Realize that Neil Gaiman has an ex-wife, so it could be worse. At least Neil Gaiman didn’t break up with you.

Viciousness:

Remember how stupid he looked in dress clothes.

Realize:

Like Tranströmer said and Sugar repeated, “every life “has a sister ship,” one that follows “quite another route” than the one we ended up taking. We want it to be otherwise, but it cannot be: the people we might have been live a different, phantom life than the people we are.”

Our love is the ghost ship that didn’t carry us, my darling (my friend). There’s nothing left for me to do but salute it from the shore.

I love you. Just you, and you all the time. What can I do?

I can’t say it to you, I would never. Because you would tell me that you love me too, and I would hear the of course in your voice. I love you too (of course I do. Can we go to lunch now?).

I don’t mean to be melodramatic (you are too). But I’ve got to eulogize.

You hate when I say I wish it were like it was. You don’t ever think of it? That first night when you pulled my head down on your shoulder and we fell asleep braided together and you woke up in the middle of the night just to whisper that you loved me.

I didn’t hear you (I was asleep, duh), and you don’t hear me now.

I wake up just to let it all out. I wake up to whisper into your spine that I love you, ocean-wide and forest-deep. It’s a ritual that keeps me safe, that protects me from the morning, and from the thunderous importance of things that don’t matter.

I remember how you used to look at me and say “It’s never been like this before.” And we’d realize that we were the first people to ever race hand-in-hand to the rim of the world, and laugh right over the edge. You still say, “It’s never been like this before,” but I know you mean that it’s never been this hard, this confusing, with anyone else. Me too. Me neither.

But I love you. Who could love anybody that isn’t you?

You used to ask me to marry you all the time, like some sort of proposal parrot. And I would tell you I’d marry you and then divorce you and then marry you again, just for the fun of it.

But I can’t tell you anymore. I have to be hard, to keep from being soft. Because I want to be with you as long as I can. And now that there is some eclipse in your love, I don’t know how long that might be.

It’s the pain that kills, but the happiness that is to die for.

P.S. And NOW you want me to come over and play in the snow with you. You crazy, boyfriend. Or maybe I am, cause of course I’m coming. Good Lord.

Focus

Probably this is how everyone is, but I can’t just read one book. I can read three books, for instance (like now), but I can’t read just one. I can’t give any one thing my full attention. They make a pill for this. But I’ve only got, oh maybe 100 years left to live, and I can’t afford the time.

The books I’m reading:

“The Lucifer Effect: How Good People Turn Evil” - very good book that I’ll probably never finish
“Writing Down The Bones” - definitely will finish because I can swallow it without having to chew
“An Anthropologist on Mars” - good, but not as pretty as his last book. Why should that matter when it’s a book on psychology? It does matter, though. Good writing is half content and half form. Anything else is half-assed.

A four shower day

Whenever I have to work on something too tedious to even look at, I find myself taking a lot of showers. Pre-work showers, post-facebook-trolling showers, lunch showers, afternoon tea showers, etc.

Taking showers is NOT procrastinating, because how could it be?? A shower is never wasted time! It’s a service I provide for the nice people around me. Being clean, very clean!

Profound

Him: [drunk] You are a goddess. And me, I’m a godder.
Me: [sober] What’s a godder?
Him: A male goddess.

My undereye circles are upside-down triangles

Tonight is the last all-nighter of my student life. I think that’s why I’m up, even though I don’t have to be. I also think I know why I’m writing when I could be talking to someone instead. See, I could share this moment with someone, but they’d forget in time, and I can’t, ever. My brain is warm goeey cement and everything sticks, and I’m always stuck in it.

So, suppose I called up the people I loved or walked one room over to talk to the people I like. My sappy brain would remember too long after they forgot all about it. When they forgot, it’d just be me. And then it would be just exactly as if I’d made the whole thing up in my head. There’d be no functional difference.

I’m a happy girl, loved and mostly free, but I’m sad tonight. No particular reason except I feel like I should be and I’ve got no problem with that.

Just the same, no more violin music for me.

Goodbye, lovely Brandcenter. You were a complete bitch, and I love you for it.

My favorite things to do today

1. jump up and down!
2. drink
3. cry

(Not) Innovation!! Instead, villain fingers.

This post is so far off topic that it might as well be on the moon, but villain fingers creep me the CRAP out.

Watching a movie, I never really know whether the bad guy is irredeemably bad or just intriguingly conflicted until I see his hands. Villain fingers are always long and knobbed, usually with terrifying oval fingernails. The true baddies are transparent like that.

The best of the worst comes from Germany, in the form of a silent silhouette film from 1926 in the form of perfect brilliance. The Pan’s Labyrinth villain is blank nothingness beside it, owes everything to it. I would SUPER like it if more people knew about Lotte Reiniger. Here she be (fastforward to 1:35 if you want the villain fingers):

Innovation!!

Vilfredo Pareto thought that the world is just two people, repeated many times over. One person conserves, the other creates. Think Goofus and Gallant here. Goofus preserves yesterday. Gallant postulates tomorrow.

Pareto thought most people are creatives, and I agree. Hell, it would be misanthropic not to.

So, the world is flush with people who adeptly make new combinations out of old things and yet, so few people are innovative. WHY!

Because folks rarely activate their potential as innovators. Innovation feels like divination, like peering into a crystal ball or interpreting a pile of drenched tea leaves. It has that sense of magic and unreliability. Future-thinkers are never treated very well, not when they predict the future, like sooth-sayers, and definitely not when they populate it. Too much to shoulder unless you’re both creative AND brave.

Basically, innovation is just creativity bent to some purpose. Innovation is productive, it solves a problem or improves some process. It is the antithesis of contentment.

Think of a kaleidoscope, with its finite bits of glass, flicking into a never-before-seen pattern with a twist in the wrist. That’s innovation, except the wrist is market forces and the eye that perceives this newest pattern belongs to the innovator.

It’s more than perception, of course. In fact, it’s fundamentally action. An innovation can’t really exist in someone’s mind, it draws its first lifeblood when it becomes an actionable solution.