So, I'm back. It's weird. I'm mildly surprised to see its been less than a year, and, of course, even more of the girls I really liked are gone. There are probably new ones I'll really like, but sometimes I feel like that cartoon character screaming to the sky, "Why do things have to change!" Except I know why. It's just some changes, usually seemingly trivial ones, make me a touch sad for a little while. As regards this site, the changes in question will rarely be in doubt. Anyway, I've nothing insightful or Earth shattering to share (and if I had the latter I probably wouldn't. I rather like this planet). I was more or less just saying hello. Hello again, everyone.

Have we had some good times? We've had some good times. I'm going to be taking off, though, letting my membership expire and disappearing into the aether. There are a couple reasons for this, none of which I'm going to go into any detail about. I did want to say, though, I mostly enjoyed my time here and all the people I've met on the site. You all (well most of you) were awesome, and made me glad I joined. I might be back, maybe in in a matter of months, maybe more, maybe less. We'll see, but either way, take care all my buddies, models I've spoken to, and models I've gushed over, even those of you who will never read this because you are no longer here: Oxalis, Apexxx. Rin, Flux, Hedy, Northsider, notoriousDUG, Lanelac, oJAEflo, Malloreigh, Roguescarlet, Peacheskitty, Salome, Lavonne...you know what? I'm going to forget people, so let's just go with everybody. Those of you who I did mention, you may consider yourselves super-awesome if you like. So, take care everyone.

P.S. Anyone who likes can still reach me through Yahoo either on messenger or my email. My SG username is the same as my Yahoo one.

So, it was either Christmas or Christmas Eve that I was listening to NPR's broadcast of Joy to the World when who was introduced on stage but Catherine Russell. I'm a bit of a fan of hers, and her music this performance was unsurprisingly delightful. What got me the most, though, was her performance of I've Got Your Love to Keep Me Warm. It was easily the best version of the song I've ever heard, and I've wanted to hear it again since. Unfortunately, I've been able to find neither a recording of the show nor any mention of a recording's existence on the internet. I keep listening to Etta James' rendition of the same song but, and Lord strike me down if I ever say this again about her music, it just isn't good enough. This, really, is not fair. Also, if I ever hear a recording of her performance again and I end up not caring for it very much, I will be very cross with the world.

This was the beginning of a blog post I started over a month ago, saved as a draft for some reason, and never finished.

Maybe I should have given it a week or so before posting so it would have been exactly one year. I don't imagine that serves any actual purpose, but...no, but nothing really. That really would have been pointless. Regardless, this past year has been eventful despite my lack of updates. (Dear lord, this is essentially an annual update. Is this what my laxness has reduced me to? What's wrong with me? Seriously.)

What is wrong with me, indeed. Either way, seeing as I'm trying to get back on the bandwagon, I've always found it odd that SGC never has anything planned for New Years. I suppose I could always have taken matters into my own hands, but my New Years Eves are usually spent with a handful of my closest friends, a tradition I will more or less be keeping tonight. So, for everyone I won't see in the next few hours, Happy New Years to you all.

Oh, dear lord. This is odd. Almost awkward. There was a time I came to this site regularly and tried to blog regularly. Now I stopped by because a friend mentioned Will Weaton had reviewed the fourth edition of Dungeons and Dragons, a gaming system whose newest iteration is still a source of controversy among gaming nerds like myself and my gaming group in particular even months after its release.

"Really?" I asked, opening a new tab on Firefox. "I'm guessing its on his site?"
"No, it's actually on...um...Suicidegirls."
"Oh, on his Geek-in Review?"
"I think so. Maybe." Answered my friend who had always had a thing for SG, but never joined. "The link was on ENworld, but you can, you know."
I stopped, and it struck me as perhaps a touch sacrilegious that I was going to visit a site featuring naked girls and populated by friends I had not seen in perhaps a year or so to read a column about fourth ed. That, obviously, didn't stop me.

So there I was, back at a site I at one point hadn't been sure my membership had been renewed to because I changed banks and in retrospect couldn't remember whether I'd done so before or after my membership did its annual rebilling. While here I decided to stop and looked around. It was an odd feeling, poking around this old cyber-haunt after such neglect and change. Despite all the changes the site had seen, though, I eventually recognized what drew me to it initially. Going through my old favorites especially, whose numbers, were I to vet them today, would surely decrease, I was oddly struck by something I seemed to almost have forgotten: rather than having much to do with sex, my attraction to the site had been mostly about beauty.

I remember being a younger man checking out porn for the first time and, after the initial thrill, getting bored with it pretty quickly. Sex, I decided shortly thereafter, was not much of a spectator sport. That never stopped me from browsing through porn sites on occasion, though, but none would hold my attention for very long. For a while I didn't get why I kept going back to them, the XXX clips and images of a couple mid-coitus, usually involved in some scripted passionless affair, generating as little interest as they did. I eventually understood as I began to pay attention to the images I found myself most drawn to. More than anything else, it was the female form itself that grabbed my attention. For the most part, though, sites that allegedly focused on the beauty of the female form failed to hold my interest for very long because of their definitions of that beauty. Then I found Suicide Girls and was completely smitten.

Going through those old favorites, I saw much of what grabbed me before. Its not that I had forgotten, really, but that's a digression for another time. Seeing them, I decided to do some browsing. I was sad, but not really surprised, to see Flux had gone. She had always been ridiculously awesome. Q and Rhys are as beautiful as ever, and it was odd to feel nostalgia mixed with the normal emotions that come when looking at a good set. (Yes, I do have favorites among the local SGs, but I daren't say whom) I felt a bit like I was poking my nose into places I didn't quite belong browsing the groups (Except when browsing SGC. Browsing SGC just made me feel remiss.) And then I came to my blog. It's ridiculous to think I haven't blogged here in over a year, but I had just posted a lengthy reply to Will's review. Actually, I haven't blogged at all in some time, but that doesn't help any. And so I went to create a new post, and stream of consciousness took over the update I'd planned to make. So here's the update because if I put it off for later saying I've already written enough, it might never get done.

My mother was diagnosed with breast cancer, underwent treatment, and is now in remission. I put just about everything aside to be with her for that time, which wasn't as necessary as I had thought it would be, but I don't regret having done it. My sister has gotten married and my brother is now engaged. Thankfully, they have continued to not comment on the fact that I spend most of my time single. My sister is expecting, which has me looking at baby toys for my first niece. Lamaze's toys, for the record, are brilliant. I was talking to my father when the topic of shaving came up and I mentioned my annoyance with cartridge razors, saying I planned to buy a safety razor as soon as I could find one for less than fifty dollars. (I really don't need the handle to be made with silver, as flashy as it may be.) He apparently misunderstood something somewhere and got me a high-end electronic razor that Christmas. It works fine, but it made me think of cartridge razors longingly on occasion until it broke under warranty, and I had to send it in for repairs. Then I started thinking about my electric razor longingly. I still plan to check out safety razors at some point. I worked as a deputy field organizer for the Obama Campaign in Madison. It was the most enjoyable work with the most awesome group of people I've ever done and worked with. If I worked less than twelve hours in a day I felt like a slacker and enjoyed every day of work. I now find myself completely unemployed, yet I'm somehow not worried about my future at all.

Twenty-six and still aging. How non-monumental a number, but still, it's a birthday, and even birthdays in between the tens and fives are important. Also, and perhaps more importantly, Stars - Your Ex-Lover is Dead, which I've been listening to compulsively since discovering it nearly a week ago, is one of the most beautiful things I've heard in years, so beautiful it occasionally causes me honest physical pain.

This is cross-posted from my other blog which I had not posted to in months and in is slowly getting a redesign...or as much of a redesign as one can give their blog on livejournal. Also, more attention. It's vaguely symbolic that this is being done done while my life is in the middle of the current dishevellment, I suppose, but as far as I am consciously aware, it is also coincidental.

---------------------------------------------------------------

New beginnings. I've not written in a while, and this itself is not uncommon; though, this is perhaps the longest I've gone without writing here. So, new beginnings. It's a phrase that gets tossed around a lot. Leave the past behind, get a fresh start, begin things over with a cleaner perspective. It sounds like too much of a fallacy to me. The past is always with you. The trick is not leaving it behind, but not letting it consume you. My old works are embarrassing but occasionally surprising and an unavoidable sign of who I once was. If I want to move beyond them, I must mentally move my mind forward, not forget my older work ever existed. There are no fresh starts, no new beginnings in any real sense. Life continues, and if I want to move in another direction, then my life simply takes a turn. Nothing starts anew. The metaphors that insist otherwise are misleading. The everything that has come before will, to some degree, always remain with me, as it should, so while I know some people would call this a new beginning, while I understand "the thing to do" is to start a new blog to leave behind everything the old one meant, I will be doing none of these things. It's true I might eventually open another blog, but that would only be to have a blog that's not hosted on Livejournal. Also, I would post the link here and import (and copy edit. I mean, dear god have you read some of those posts?) all my old posts. I would be kidding myself to say they mean nothing, even if they mean nothing good.

Still, the subtle changes you see here do, in fact, correlate to changes in the physical world. A farewell to some old friends, several of whom I still wished to be friends with despite, well, despite a variety of things that had occurred between us. A conscious decision to, once and for all, get over old habits developed in my youth for reasons that really were very foolish; though, perhaps I could not realize it then. It surprised me,on reflection how much those old habits remained with me over the years without my realizing it. Yes, things are changing. I very much hope for the better.

So, I've recently read both a Wizard of Earthsea and Perdido Street Station. They're both excellent books but are dramatically different in writing style. Ursula K. Le Guin accomplishes what Mieville does in a third the number of pages. Her writing style is sparse, and at first this was a source or irritation, but for all its simplicity, it is not simplistic. There is nothing poor or insufficient about it. It is, in a sense, minimalist if it must be given a label. It tells you everything you need to know to enjoy her story, suffers from no ostentation, and never fails to be powerful in the dramatic moments of her story.

Mievelle's writing, or rather his prose, is lush. There were occasions I wished I could scoop it from the pages it and physically savor its flavor. He is one of the only writers in years that made me reach for a dictionary at regular intervals, which I appreciated. His prose itself gave details of this fascinating world he created and the societies within it; though, sometimes his love of his own word was painful to observe. Spelling chemical spelled with a "y" instead of an "e" is one thing. Using a full page to describe the geography and inhabitants of a district followed by a description of which districts surround it and what train lines runs through it during one of the most dramatic moments of the book is irritating. If I really wanted to be reminded of where the Sud Line ran, again, I would look at the map helpfully provided at the beginning of the book.

When I was younger and just deciding to be a writer, I had a decided preference for more minimalist writing. It was my belief that all the flowery descriptions and metaphors didn't really matter. What did was the story you were telling, and all those other descriptive flourishes, in the end, just got in the way of it. Years later I began to abandon that stance with no real conscious mediation or logic attached to the decision that I can recall. Now I've come to some place in between the two stances and wonder if I will, for some reason soon come full circle. It does not help that I was just reading the writing of someone who was once a very dear friend of mine (though I am not sure if she ever realized it. She has since stopped speaking to me. I'm not really sure why. I don't recall having ever said anything or done anything untoward to her, nor did she ever mention I had. I suppose I do have some ideas why, but they are petty, and in the end, I suppose I really do want to think better of her.) and she has mastered prose. That much is obvious to anyone who reads her writing, but what she lacks is inspiration. I don't believe them to be mutually exclusive, but I remember a conversation about writing we had once where she expressed having difficulty finding stories to write about, which it seemed she really did want to do. She's now, last I heard, a newswriter. As far as I am aware, she has not a creative work to her name.

Perhaps this comes to mind because mind because, more than what to write, my mind tends to paralyze itself with indecision regarding how something should be written. iInvariably when trying to write anything significant , several different ways to write it come to mind. This is far from comforting, but I currently have a great desire to write, and I worry this will affect me once again.

Finally, my mother has cancer. I discovered this not long ago. Perhaps this has spurred my current desire to write. It was this, in fact, that I originally meant to write about, but even now I find my mind veering away from the topic, as if afraid to discuss it. She just underwent surgery, which went, as do most things, both better than we feared yet not as well as we had hoped. If you are religious, please keep her in your prayers. If not, in your thoughts. I would be greatly appreciate it. Thank you.

I have been negligent, and horribly so. I had pondered whether or not I was going to remain on the site, and in the end I remained, but did nothing about that fact. A ridiculous course of action if ever there was one. I suppose it does not help that I've only had access to the internet for three days out of the last two week, but that is two weeks, not two months, which has roughly been the time since I made any investment of reasonable measure to the forty-eight dollars I pay every year to the owners of this site. Entirely too much has passed for me to catch up just now, given the amount of distractions pending and my current state of mind, but in summary, this has probably been the worst two months of my life, and yet I don't really feel bad about the fact. This means either something is really wrong with me, or very right. To mention the least of my troubles, I should first mention I've resisted modding my phone for the more than twe years I've had it. It struck me as unnecessary expenditure, and, to a certain extent, I supposed leaving my phone unmodded made it unique. Regardless, I am cross with Sprint. They had given me a free ringtone, it seemed, for no reason other than that I am a customer, but now I don't know which one to chose. This, I am now sure, was part of their insidious plot, eventually intended to result in the purchase of many other exorbitantly-priced ringtones,but I shall defy them. They will see. I will come away with but one free melody, and my phone will be rockin...something because of it.

I've been inactive for a stupidly long time. My apologies.

So, Mexico. I haven't been there since I was roughly two years old, and it's probably from this visit that the earliest memories in my life come from. Returning, then, was nowhere near as strange or surreal as I had anticipated it to be. I had heard the warnings given to me by my brother and sister, both of whom visit Mexico much more regularly than I, about the state of the area, my grandmother's (Abuelita) house, and the general condition of everything, really. In a sense, I was almost disappointed to see things in so un-desperate a state when I arrived.

I visited to help Abuelita around the house with a handful of longstanding issues neither she nor the recent visitors to her house were able to deal with and to celebrate her ninetieth birthday with her. In truth, though, those reasons were bordering on ostentation. I did and was happy to do both of those things, but the reason that called me there most powerfully was I had begun to feel I never really knew my grandmother. Whenever I saw Abuelita anytime after my two-year-old trip, it was when she came to Chicago. I can't remember a time, though, when she wouldn't talk lovingly about her house back in Mexico and say she couldn't wait to get back to it; if we wanted more time with her, we would just have to go visit her there.

A few weeks before my trip, my sister called me. She had just come from Abuelita's house. Despite the fact that she had visited Mexico a few times in the intervening period, she, too, had not visited our grandmother at her house since our childhood visit. The conversation was about many things, in the background were those things she said Abuelita needed help with and how she wished she could have stayed for Abuelita's birthday celebration. Her section of the town she lived in wanted to throw a party for her. She had become the neighborhood's grandmother over the years, but she would not have it. One of her sons had died not long ago. She was still in mourning. Instead, the local church would dedicate a mass in her honor. The most important part of that conversation to my mind, however, was my sister's account of Abuelita's behavior. What she described did not sound like the grandmother I knew. It sounded like someone much more vivacious, someone much more alive. Abuelita in her element, in her home, it would seem, was much more than the person I thought I had come to know. Her ninetieth birthday was coming, and work was slow. I booked a flight the next day. I wanted to get to know my grandmother, really know her, before she died. I'm sure she still has a good number of years left in her, but the timing was opportune, and that was not a chance I wanted to take.

The end result was a trip spent uncovering a good deal of exaggerations. Abuelita's house was nowhere near as small or dilapidated as my sister had led me to believe. My sister was fond of the place, it would turn out, so she left me with a series of disclaimers so I would not be taken aback by it when I arrived. I grew fond of it as well. Her garden was similarly not as large as was described to me in the tales I had been told, but it was still larger than I had expected. She has plants growing she does not know what to do with. Some of these plants happen to be trees. None of them are weeds. In the middle of this is my grandmother. Abuelita has a brand of tortillas she likes. They make them a mile away. They sell them in stores near her, but some mornings she wants them straight from the source and will walk there to see them made, chatting with friends as she passes their houses along the way. Her memory, at ninety, is not what it used to be. She will forget, sometimes, where she put one thing or another and have to spend some time looking for it. Sometimes, though, something you say will remind her of a song lyric or poem from decades ago, and she will began to recite or sing it, word for word, from memory. Also, as much as her children insist, she will not leave her home. She's happy with her life there, and if she dies, she says, she dies, much to their horror. She's had ninety good years. If God comes for her tomorrow, why should she ask for more? Everyone dies. If they're so concerned about her welfare, they should visit her more often. The doctors have declared her sound of mind and she stands by their judgment.

In short, she is an awesome old lady. I was aware of this before, but I am more aware of it now. There's something about having conversations like this:
"So how old am I now, eighty-six? Eighty-eight?"
"Ninety."
"I did just celebrate my ninetieth birthday, didn't I? Mother of God, I'm old."
That sets her apart in my mind.

On a side note, while I am normally annoyed when writing is peppered with seemingly gratuitous, easily translatable foreign words, I do it here for a number of reasons. Abuelita for those of you who don't know, is Spanish for "Grandmother." As happens with some relatives, that has become how I refer to her and have referred to her since I was a child. I put it in italics, though, so non-Spanish-speakers don't think that's actually her given name. The thought of my calling her by her given name, you see, feels disrespectful. Abuelita is my name for her, even if it is not the one on her birth certificate. As a name, and not a title, it would inappropriate to translate it. I do use "grandmother," on occasion, but I use it in reference to the relationship much like "my friend" or "my cousin" is still used in writing where they are also referred to by name.

So, as long as I can remember I've had a profound like of good stories. They've always been one of the most wonderful things to me and have dictated the various forms of media I would take in. It goes back to my father reading, no, telling me stories as a child. So long as we were in bed before nine (Yes, we had a late bedtime, but when you look at your parents and say, "But to wake up at seven I need to go to sleep at eleven to get a full eight hours, I think they're kind of stuck.) he would tell us a story. I don't remember him ever reading us one, though. Instead, he would just weave it as it was being told. They were invariably fascinating and I'm sure at least partly responsible for my never doing my reading homework, as on any given day, hungry for stories, I would most likely had read through the story assigned for class months before and already answered the comprehension questions in my head, therefore having no desire to repeat the endeavor on paper. I remember being so fascinated by The Indian and the Cupboard as it was being recounted to us during reading time that I borrowed the books from my teacher at one point when we had a three day week-end and read ahead, finishing the entire series before she finished reading to us the book we were on. When I was eight I took my birthday money and went to Borders, which had become my new favorite place in the world, and bought as many books as I could afford. Most of them were disappointing, but Bunnincula, the one hardcover I purchased has remained a favorite to this day.

I remember the exact point where my desire to read good stories evolved into a desire to tell them. I was in the tenth grade where we were given the task of writing the account of an astronaut's findings on another planet. Most of my classmates wrote a paragraph or so detailing specimens or resources found. I wrote a four-page (I think it was four, but don't quote me) account of an astronaut whose shuttle went off course taking him outside of the solar system where he was picked up by an alien shuttle just as the last of his ship's life support was failing. In the end, he ended up joining up with a rebel faction who stopped the government from plunging the alien planet into an interplanetary war with Earth. While writing that story I thought about how I always enjoyed essay assignments and decided what I wanted to do was to write for a living. This decision would be challenged various times, but it would never lose. That is not to say, however, it is the only such decision with any conviction behind it, but that is a story for another time.

I'll write about my trip to Mexico next time. I meant to now, but I keep running into posts I forgot I was writing.