{"id":515,"date":"2001-08-13T07:49:00","date_gmt":"2001-08-13T07:49:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/?p=515"},"modified":"2024-11-28T18:42:53","modified_gmt":"2024-11-28T23:42:53","slug":"recycled_insigh","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/2001\/08\/13\/recycled_insigh\/","title":{"rendered":"Recycled Insight"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>We\u2019ll start with a quick quote from a towering literary figure:<\/strong><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>But it\u2019s not me so much as my brain. My brain just sits up there, reporting back to me, clicking on and on like ticker tape. Sometimes it feels like my brain is smarter than I am. It doesn\u2019t seem to matter what I want. My brain just goes on and on relentlessly, expanding to space.<\/p>\n<p align=\"right\">Carrie Fisher, <i>Surrender the Pink<\/i><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>I\u2019ve been a little down on myself, berating myself for not writing much here that showed any insight or revelation. It dawned on me, though, that I just take stuff like that for granted, so I just don\u2019t think to share once I sit down to post. My brain, fidgety thing that it is, is constantly processing what I read and watch and do and remember, and constantly spitting out minor revelations, or at least the raw material for them, which usually take shape the moment I turn my attention back toward a particular subject. I\u2019m often surprised when I start to talk about some damn thing or another, and discover that I seem to be able to piece together a reasonable opinion. (Except when asked about any or all of those things that have never crossed my mind, which usually prompt me to raise my eyebrows quizzically and exclaim, \u201cHmmm, I have no idea at all.\u201d I don\u2019t like to fake opinions.)<\/p>\n<p>Here are a few recycled thoughts, then \u2014 ideas usually shared in conversation or pondered during heat-crazed walks around town:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\">\n<ul>\n<li>Exhausting as my social calendar has been, I still really like the idea that the widespread Homo Blog Clique has forged so many links here in the analog world. Getting to know the people behind the blogs adds new and exciting dimension to what they write, just as familiarity with their writing makes getting to know the people easier once you meet them. It is a clique, of course, the natural result of a filtering process we all go through as we browse around and link and bookmark and then weed out all the sites that don\u2019t hold our interest after a while. Just like in the normal world, we formed a big clique based on shared obsessions, experiences, respect, or circumstances. The thing is, an internet clique casts a wider net, catching a wider variety of fish. Clique we may be, of some kind or another, but it\u2019s certainly one made up of an extraordinary variety of interesting people. It\u2019s incredibly self-indulgent, though, to keep writing about meeting each other. It\u2019s OK. I guess, but still self-indulgent.<\/li>\n<li>I\u2019m perfectly willing to let run-of-the-mill Hollywood movies play me like a fiddle, but I can only take so much. I love action movies and period movies and all that stuff that is so emotionally manipulative, that practically writes itself after the initial exposition. Doesn\u2019t bug me \u2014 I\u2019m sometimes there just to have entertainment spoon-fed to me, and that\u2019s fine. They\u2019re so easy, though, that they set me up for the thrill of seeing films that catch me off-guard and really make me think, laugh, or gasp in sublime shock. that\u2019s a lot of added value, baby. <i><a href=\"http:\/\/www.mgm.com\/ghostworld\">Ghost World<\/a>,<\/i> for instance, was so brilliant because I found myself laughing moments later, once the dark and sublime jokes had a chance to sink in and stew. And it ended without any real resolution, an honest and courageous way to end a movie that more Hollywood movies should be willing to try. Things in life don\u2019t always end in nicely resolved circumstances. It\u2019s a lazy convention of theater and film and literature to tidy up everything that\u2019s been written, instead of ending on a note of an unkown, unknowable future to come. Sometime a pat ending is right for the story, sometimes (and I\u2019m thinking especially of <i><a href=\"http:\/\/www.aimovie.com\">A.I.<\/a><\/i> here) it\u2019s an enormous effort spent to do what&#8217;s expected when ending the story without wrapping it all up would have been more thought-provoking and more satisfying.<\/li>\n<li>It\u2019s been a wild since I\u2019ve really had a crush on someone. I miss those. I miss that feeling of desperate lust and fascination, that kind of primal longing and fluttering of the heart. A good crush is bittersweet. It\u2019s also good copy. I like to think the drought has nothing to do with my getting old and jaded, and just more to do with me not meeting anyone that extraordinary recently.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><!--\n \t\n\n<li>The jet-set lives of my friends are pretty glam when I think about them all together. Paul's just returned to England from Rio; Mark just quit his dot-com job and is selling off everything he owns to move to Florence and study furniture design; Jen is here from Milan for a quick visit; Jim has just made plans to join me in San Francisco and then maybe go to Asia for a couple of weeks before coming back to go to Iceland for the weekend with me, Wendy, and William; Simon and John are planing their own trip to Iceland and Scotland since Simon has to go visit his grandfather in London, anyway. It's ridiculous, really, to get around like this \u2014 we can't really afford it. However, I think that commitment to seeing and doing new things so far outside the scope of everyday life in America is just the sort of attitude that has drawn us all together as friends.<\/li>\n\n\n--><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>We\u2019ll start with a quick quote from a towering literary figure: But it\u2019s not me so much as my brain. My brain just sits up there, reporting back to me, clicking on and on like ticker tape. Sometimes it feels like my brain is smarter than I am. It doesn\u2019t seem to matter what I &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/2001\/08\/13\/recycled_insigh\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Recycled Insight&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-515","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ultrapersonal"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/515","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=515"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/515\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":71884,"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/515\/revisions\/71884"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=515"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=515"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=515"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}