This

So I've been to Iceland.  It was pretty.  This is pretty, too:



It's funny.  Icelandic shares much more in common with Old Norse than it does with English, but it remains nonetheless pretty Germanic, and there are bits and pieces of the lyrics that I can pick out.  Some of the words are so transparent it's almost like coming home again.

Interestingly, the music was written in the '70s, complementing lyrics from the early 13th century.  The old and new meet very nicely here.

L is in SF this week for a conference, and so I've been spending a bit of time alone here in the house.  Cleaning is not much of a substitute for companionship, but there is bare floor in places where there once was not.  This has been a busy travel season for her; she was in TX last weekend.

The past weeks have largely seen me doing some studying, interviewing (nothing new yet), and in general trying to sharpen up.  I often recall that my early years (by which I mean something like six to eight years old) are a gigantic blur of confusion: I never knew what was going on or what was really happening.  I think the same thing characterizes all of my years; it's just that I'm more articulate about it now.

With L's trip to TX, I learned J's next form last Saturday.  It's an evolutionary step, probably to the same degree that Jeong Seong is above the rest of the TSD curriculum.  It's intricate, gorgeous, circular, and just lovely.

We watched The Last Samurai and I took pictures of his fish tank; this latest made the cut:

It's my new computer background, at least for a little while, replacing the shot of the snow.


People ask me often enough how things are going, and often it's all the same.  Sometimes I find a discontent stirring with this answer.  I attribute part of this to the usual desire to perform and to be seen performing (in the major sense of that word, really; it is the desire more to have someone from the outside appreciate and respect my successes).  But I think, too, there is a part that is the holdover from being raised to leave the house. 

I struggle with wanderlust and empathy both (though not to the extent others may), and it's a bad combination.  Despite my sentimentality, it's easy to leave things, and occasionally people, behind.

All that said, most of the opportunities have been in Seattle.  R&K live there, and with a sufficient combination of linguistics and graph theory, I might be able to make it at Logos.  Who knows.