Any of you folks need any web design work done? I can program custom applications as well. I've got some time on my hands now, and I'd like to take a couple of private contracting jobs to keep me busy.

Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size. Without that power probably the earth would still be swamp and jungle.

The glories of all our wars would be unknown. We should still be scratching the outlines of deer on the remains of mutton bones and bartering flints for sheepskins or whatever simple ornament to our unsophisticated taste. Supermen and Fingers of Destiny would have never existed. The Czar and the Kaiser would never have worn crowns or lost them. Whatever may be their use in civilized societies, mirrors are essential to all violent and heroic action. That is why Napoleon and Mussolini both insist so emphatically upon the inferiority of women, for if they were not inferior, they would cease to enlarge. That serves to explain in part the necessity that women so often are to men. And it serves to explain how restless they are under her criticism; how impossible it is for her to say to the this book is bad, this picture is feeble, or whatever it may be, without giving far more pain and rousing far more anger than a man would do who gave the same criticism.

For if she begins to tell the truth, the figure in the looking-glass shrinks, his fitness for life is diminished. How is he to go on giving judgment, civilizing natives, making laws, writing books, dressing up and speechifying at banquets, unless he can see himself at breakfast and at dinner at least twice the size he really is?

--Virginia Woolf

Happy anniversary honey -- thanks for enlarging me :)

it's on the tv. it's a sack and it's floating, caught up on a draft of air. through tinny speakers music plays and you're caught up too. the camera zooms. it's just this plastic sack and some bricks behind it. you pause the movie. the sack holds still, suspended in dead frame. the lack of music is punctuated by the hum of your refrigerator. it's out of context. it doesn't work. it's just a sack.





you feel scared, like it's the music or the way the sack was moving that brought you beauty. you are terrified that beauty depends on violin strings and camera angles. you want to be those things. to stare at the bag and have your mind make it dance, to squeeze a symphony from the synapses. but your head is dry. the fridge is humming. ice crashes in your freezer because a machine is making it.

you walk to your kitchen. your fingers stick to the ice cubes and they clank in the glass. the water you pour inside tastes like metal. you sit down. stare at the glass of the tv. in your head you stare past the glass. see the vacuum tube and the diodes and the circuit board. you follow the cable to the dvd player and worm your way to the disc, to the laser shining on the disc. you become the laser and read the ones and zeros. you decode them. you make the sack dance. you make the music sing.

to your surprise the disc continues well past the movie. the disc has entered the realm of metaphysics, and you watch as the ones and zeros tell you terrible secrets. you want to stop watching, but you are the laser, the unblinking eye, the perceiver of beauty. the disc takes you to the end of time. you watch as the final things are said, and the last light winks out.

it's just you now. the laser. watching for beauty. seeing nothing at all.