Everything In Between

As has occasionally been the case, Danica has recently been unsettled by her own opinions of her body image. I came up with this haiku on beauty the day after she encouraged me to write more poetry. While possibly not of the highest caliber, I do happen to like it and I think it is quite a good result for one of my first atempts at writing a haiku.

The real beauty in
beauty is its uniqueness.
Natural beauty.

This is therefore dedicated to my love, Danica, whom I think is naturally the most beautiful person I have ever seen.

Um, yikes. Lots’a work to do. And it’s fuuun. :)

On a related note, I am quickly gaining very important experience. I was confronted with a very old web site, BasilRouskas.com and begun trying to convert it to an XHTML/CSS mix. Educationally, I determined it would be no better that way, because the design of the site is thoroughly bad. Or, more objectively, there is almost no consistent design element anywhere on the page. Except for the fact that adding some CSS could potentially increase the site’s accessibility, it would be no help in terms of ease of maintenance.

That said, if it were designed accessibly in the first place, and this is was the final design, it’s an example of a web site which I would much rather view in a text-only browser.

Thankfully, InsideManagement.com is not at all like that. It was very obviously designed by computer programmers, not web designers. I can tell by looking at the markup their PHP is producing. None the less, the overal design does lend itself nicely to CSS, and recoding it has been fun. I have learned some lessons from this recoding attempt too, such as not to even attempt to re-create a site pixel-for-pixel. Why? Because sites are often designed improperly the first time around. Not just visually, but their internal organization is often just plain off, or they have made concessions to the integrity of the markup to accomodate out-dated design techniques (like splicing images into table-cells). Web design is easy and fast with CSS. If only IE wasn’t such a major browser. ::sigh:: I can dream…

Yesterday, Danica called me late at night. During our conversation I mentioned that I had begun writing periodically again. Though I meant to say "prose," I had a bit of a Freudian slip and it came out as "poetry." I suppose she was intrigued because, though I did clarify what I had intended, she told me to "Come up with somethng" and recite it to her, then and there.

After struggling for a few moments, I concluded that I needed my keyboard. I have a ton of trouble concentrating on anything, especially language, if I can’t see immediate feedback as to what I’m doing. Writing a sentence out on the computer offers the opportunity to edit it in real time. If I simply speak, I too easily "forgets" what I said a few seconds prior and my train of thought breaks down because it isn’t being guided by anything.

As an aside, that’s a very interesting basis for a more conceptual discussion about racing thoughts. I shall have to come back to that one time…. Anyway.

Back to the point, Danica quickly interuppted me and told me not to use the keyboard, get back into bed and just speak without thinking and come up with a poem. I moaned and groaned somewhat, but ultimately obeyed and tried a little harder.

What I recited did not look like this at all. Only the subject is the same. Even though I was convinced that my utterings were horrendous, Danica insisted that she liked them, and encouraged me to recite more poetry on the spur of the moment. I didn’t then, though I thanked her and said I’d probably work on what I already thought of. If it proved fruitful, I could try again with something new and then edit it later.

Below is editted piece, after a few moments of tinkering with the memory of what I recited, typed up on my computer.

Placed with purpose at the bed of a river,
Each stone waits. Their patience is molded from the calm
The river loans them, and at the end of their journey
No stone has moved. But their shape is perfect.

I judge the defendant fruitful. The sentence: he must recite more poetry off the top of his head, not record it in any manner, and then edit the piece soon thereafter. ::grin::

I just wanted to share this, a 1,000 character description of my love.

Danica’s name means “morning star.” Like a star, she is serenely beautiful outside and chaotically so within. She has a subtle, almost imperceptible strength that draws everyone she likes towards her. Those fortunate enough to be caught in this inescapable gravity well will be left speechless by the breathtaking adventure they will soon undertake, for they will learn what it is like to be in the presence of a celestial being. She is kind and selfless to a fault. She can be a friend, a confidant, a lover, and a partner in crime all at once and in as many ways as she has friends. Like the morning sunlight, her cheery nature can wax and wane. Occasionally it is covered by mists of sadness and self-doubt. In these times she struggles not to die like a star collapsing in on itself; she knows she will only emerge as a black hole. So far, she has succeeded. She has been my morning star for some time. I hope that should I awake tomorrow I can see her radiant smile once more.

It has occured to me that I need to wash my hair. Actually, it had—past tense—occured to me several days ago, though I have not yet actually done anything about it. This is because I do not have any shampoo in my apartment, and though it stands to reason that I should probably go buy some at the supermarket two blocks away, I have not done that either. Truth be told, I haven’t done anything in the past several days except work on web sites, eat, sleep, and fantasize about my sweet heart returning from California. I had been counting the days on my PDA’s calendar, but that quickly got depressing so I stopped.

To help myself cope, I’ve been re-reading Emotional Intelligence, by Daniel Goleman. In it, he describes everything about emotions in neurological terms. Some might find this frightening or consider the idea that their most passionate, most depressing, and most pleasureable feelings are "nothing more" than chemicals in their brains, but I find the reverse to be true. It is enormously comforting to understand that all of what I am feeling is neurological, physical on some level, and thus under my control.

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I suppose it was obvious to most people, but it wasn’t to me. That’s either the beauty or curse of individualism, depending on how you look at it. At 4:00 AM tonight, I started watching The Truman Show. I guess I just wasn’t tired. Last week, I was depressed—I had been for at least a couple of months.
I had just come back from a week-long vacation to California with my girlfriend. The vacation was wonderful, certainly destined for a memory of great happiness, but the months prior to leaving, and the few days after my return were becoming progressively worse.

I worked at the United Jewish Appeals Federation of New York, as a support team member in the TeleGiving Department. For those of you not familiar with UJA-Jargon, TeleGiving is the nice word for TeleMarketing, and support team members are part-time employees without titles, and usually without a team. My particular role was, more or less, computer operations support though in practice it turned out to be computer operations period.

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