beautiful lines

“Say, puerile, that the buzzards crouch on the ridge-pole
And sleep with one eye watching the stars fall
Below Key West.

Say that the palms are clear in a total blue,
Are clear and are obscure; that it is night;
That the moon shines.”

-Wallace Stevens, from “Two Figures in Dense Violet Night.” Harmonium.

lyrics: 13 & god’s “soft atlas”

a vision:
your ghost blowing up globes.
tightening them off with an x-axis-esque c-clamp,
Then Setting them down through the clouds
onto empty department store shelves.
where they sit facing all sorts of islands
out toward dead wee-hour isles.

has the earth come loose from its galactic neck beneath
you. Let go from the space surround it

cut off above the clouds
dropped down done to the sun system’s floor
crooked pearl of the one universe
cleaved, fell rolling toward a corner of the cosmos
in the blacked and quiet of come time

“and you are all lamb, for this.”

Spring is at your back again
this time rare with your clarity…
while patches of you thought whole
had turned up still.
made a tar of your woe
and flesh there in

Have you gone half dead…

Yet… yet have you to let the worst most be
as if it were atlas to your world of cope

And no one is out there scared
you’d set your eyes off on the ceiling
in the dark
think of a song or maybe breasts
or missing body parts

“without a universal law there is no gravity
without a gravity there is no atmosphere
without an atmosphere there is no chance at life
and with no chance at life…I don’t exist.”

too bad…

i will be asleep when the lunar eclipse happens. but grad school is early, and reading is late.

[shit, that's the way it is.]
-brian.b

iCal to do’s, and how to do ‘em.

this is a stupid post to have to make. i LOVE apple, and in general i find their programs extremely intuitive. but it took me several days to figure out how to make iCal “to dos” disappear after they are completed. if you just uncheck the “show completed to do items” from the “to do” toolbar, nothing happens.

you need to delve deeper, but not too much deeper. full guide here; short guide below.

1. go to ical > preferences > advanced tab.
2. change “hide to do items [x] days after they have been completed.”
3. change [x] from 7 to whatever you want; i went with 1 so i can see what i have completed for at least 24 hours after finishing.

[sigh, apple, sigh]
-brian.b

wow, condo[m] living

my neighbors upstairs (read: RIGHT ABOVE MY ROOM) sound like they’re having an all-out orgy. i mean, there’s banging and screaming and more than one woman’s voice.

welcome to miami.
-brian.b

and just like that…

i am suddenly a very very very busy man.

[welcome to grad school]
-brian.b

i can’t believe how STUPID i am

this one takes the cake.

tonight, while reaching for my ethernet cord from my bed, i leaned forward and pulled my OPEN AND RUJNNING macbook off of my bed onto the floor. that’s a two foot fall. i IMMEDIATELY saw the following sad sad scary screen:

anyone who knows anything about macs knows that THIS screen (like the windows blue screen) is almost always the harbringer of certain doom. and, what makes my situation even stupider is that i broke my ibook in a very similar way. you’d think i would have learned my lesson, once upon a time.

but you’d be very wrong.

back to the story: i followed my computer’s demand (screw “request” – i had no options) and i completely turned off my computer. the plan was to leave it alone for a few minutes but i was just waaay to anxious to see if i had to shell out real money for repairs.

but, amazingly, my macbook booted up without delay or even a slightly longer load time. i ran three disk verifications on my hard drive (after backing up essential data, of course) and my hard drive passed in each one.

magic? apparently not.

while it is always, ALWAYS a bad idea to drop your laptop, apple has considered the possibility of this event and has come up with some countermeasures.

(1) the macbook’s hard drive is “rubber-mounted,” meaning that the most breakable (and arguably valuable) part of your laptop is cushioned a bit.

(2) mac os x has what they call a “sudden motion sensor” protocol built in to try and save your hard drive if the computer “senses” it’s being dropped. now, as of yet, computers aren’t prophetic or intelligent, so “sensing” is more a poetic term than anything. what “sensing” means is that the hard drive will be immediately notified of sudden jarring of any laptop hardware and TRY to “stop” in time to protect the its data.

lord willing, apple’s forethought will be enough to overcome MY stupidity. but only time will tell if there’s any long-term damage to my computer.

hopefully i won’t find out in the middle of an unsaved graduate paper.

[in conclusion, don't drop things you like. unless they're bouncy balls.]
-brian.b

updates from miami

1. clubs are loud and garish.
2. i do not like to bump and grind.
3. i can put down five drinks in an hour and still function, but
4. you only need two a day to keep your heart running.

[that's the way of it.]
-brian.b

so apparently…

all people do in miami for fun is go drinking and dancing in south beach.

i really miss board games.

[here's to how it was]
-brian.b

lawlzcopter

tonight my roommate’s cat “turbo” dragged himself all the way around one of our couches.

with his claws.

on his ass.

he is an incredible cat.

[the end]
-brian.b