Photo Credit: Blueberry; altered, photocopied, and scanned by Grimes

From “Insomniac” (1961):

And everywhere people, eyes mica-silver and blank,
Are riding to work in rows, as if recently brainwashed.

These lines, along with many others in The Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath, really spoke to me once. My parents bought me that book, along with The Journals of Sylvia Plath, Letters Home, a hardcover edition of The Bell Jar, several individual poetry volumes, and the wicked cool action figure from the Crazy Women Poets line. Just kidding on the last one, of course, although I would actually buy one now if it existed.

In short, my dad and stepmom were very supportive of my teenage Plath fixation. It was the aspect of my black eyeliner-wearing brooding phase they tolerated best, with good reason. They had finally found a way to steer me back toward actual literature after watching, aghast, as I succumbed to preteen series novels. Thanks to a brand-new circle of friends and a generally depressive outlook, I was reading poetry written by a woman who not only used big words but also won a (posthumous) Pulitzer. My father, who read us Moby Dick at storytime when we were in our mid-to-late single digits and tried to substitute War and Peace for my Babysitters’ Club book when I was ten, was vastly relieved. Although I never finished War and Peace (wholly on principle), I devoured the Plath stuff whole. Mainly in the wee hours, as appropriate.

Why, you ask, have I injected this anecdote into Project Janna? Well, I can’t sleep. At least not at night, as my current job requires simply that I work, with no prescribed schedule. I have slowly made my way around the clock to the 5 AM-2 PM sleep schedule. It’s not a bad schedule, except when I need to be awake in the morning for some reason, and tomorrow is one of those days. This dilemma brought to mind the poem quoted above, and I tracked it down in one of the volumes I have diligently transported from dorm room to apartment to apartment for the last ten years.

I was taken aback by the bleakness of Plath’s words, which you can read online here. The poem is beautiful (those Pulitzers don’t come easy), but, wow, it’s so depressing. My personality has changed dramatically since I was sixteen, and, reading this, I realize that’s a good thing. I do think it’s character-building to have moments of despair, but there’s a limit to how much of this:

Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.

Lady Lazarus, 1962

is healthy.

Maybe I should have stuck with War and Peace. After all, sometimes macro-crises are better than personal ones. Regardless, I did make it out of the teen years without undue influence by a woman who, though unquestionably brilliant, stuck her head in an oven at the age of thirty. Fortunately for myself and for a few social justice causes, I learned to channel my angst toward fighting problems outside my own mind.

Happy Election Day! I tip my subversively patriotic hat to all the voters out there, and hope that you too saw Forrest Hill of the Green Party and a Medical Anthropologist from the Peace and Freedom Party listed as options for Secretary of State. If not, at least your ballot did not also include the name of a man once referred to as “Conan the Republican” by George Bush the Elder.

I signed up for permanent absentee, which means that my participation in this fun civic ritual involved padding downstairs in my pajamas to Brooke and Lian’s place to replicate their voting strategy. I argue that, instead of indicating laziness on my part, this is actually an example of how resourceful I am. After all, Brooke and Lian are both heavily involved in progressive politics, and know way more about this stuff than I do.

Um, yeah. Obviously, that argument is completely transparent. Upon recognizing my loser-ness, I went precinct walking for Aimee Allison, a city council candidate from the district next to mine. While I couldn’t vote for her, this race is crucial to ensuring a progressive majority on the council. Brooke has been working mad hours in support of her, and I figured the least I could do was take one morning to trudge up hills and hang door signs. I did a super good job, too. I am confident those door signs will play an essential role in getting out the vote.

I eagerly await the election results. They will surely indicate that we have cast away our Governator, and that the Oakland City Council is well-poised to start the Revolution.

The first test of Janna’s Ability to Properly Maintain a Website Sans Handholding is nigh. Wordpress, the blogging software that powers Project Janna, has been tweaked, prodded, and refined to produce version 2.0.5. It’s the second upgrade since I did the initial installation in July, so methinks I’d better play along. Damn Wordpress for being so security-oriented, and so, so … perfectionist. Who needs that?

This means Project Janna will be down, hopefully briefly, in the wee hours of Monday morning. I have to remember all the little hacks that were so seamlessly absorbed into the site I forgot to document them. Ha! If I don’t return, you, loyal readers, and you, new NaBloPoMo readers, know what to do. Lavish praise on Rad Businesses. Stick it to the Evil Businesses. Most of all, Blogicize the Revolution! The internets are counting on you.

I have a new obsession, and that obsession is Flickr. I uploaded a couple of photos last week to test the waters, and then became intrigued with all the fun features. Groups – yay! Contacts – way cool! Tags! Sets! Notes! Comments! Eeeeeeeeeeee! The only drawback is that they don’t call blogging directly from Flickr “Flogging.”

Soon after I found this additional way for the Internet to suck away my time, I discovered that I had reached my upload limit for the month. Faced with the maddening prospect of allowing 5,000 photos to languish on my hard drive until the halfway decent ones could be transferred piecemeal to their rightful home at Flickr, I bought a “Pro” account. That’s right – for $25 yearly Flickr will pad your ego with a fancy title, even if you know nothing about photography and carry around a basic point-and-shoot camera. What’s not to love about this fabulous site?

In related news, Flickr has shaken up the Project Janna design a bit. A recently uploaded photo now appears in the sidebar – if you click on it, you’ll go to my Flickr page. This is an experiment that will end if it distracts too much from the photo in the leading post. If you have an opinion on that, leave a comment.

Permanent changes include the deletion of the “Recent Posts” section of the sidebar, because it was mostly redundant to the first page anyway. Additionally, the Links have been moved to a page you can access at the top right, along with the Archives and About Page.

In a semipermanent sense, I had to remove the footer because it suddenly started appearing in the sidebar. I checked the code against the backup files, but couldn’t find the problem. I finally quit when I began to fear my brain melting down from seeing too many brackets. This is what I was talking about when I wrote that I shouldn’t be trusted with a website.

Enough rambling. To review (or introduce, for those who skip long paragraphs): look at my Flickr page, and complain in the comments if you don’t like the site tweaks. Oh yeah, and get a Flickr account. If you’re nice to me, I’ll add you as a contact.

One of my friends told me I should watch The OK Go Video on YouTube. For those who haven’t seen it, it’s a music video that involves synchronized treadmill dancing. In other words, it’s one of those bizarre cultural phenomena everyone should check out, if only to avoid being the only person on earth without no frame of reference for freakishly dressed men cavorting on exercise equipment.

I soon discovered that YouTube is a cultural phenomenon in itself. It sucks you in with endless inane, humerous, painful, and/or priceless moments caught on film by everyone from professionals to the kid down the street with a webcam and a ukelele. The secret to YouTube’s success? After you watch a video, you get suggestions for related features. Many of them can be categorized as an embarassment to the clueless person who put them there, as well as to humanity, but you always think the next is definitely going to be better. I fell into the trap headfirst, and meandered my way through at least an hours’ worth of footage.

I started with:

A song by an artist named Terra Naomi
Several covers of this song, based on her teach-yourself video (this version, by a preteen kid, is really awesome)

I was then diverted to a “banned/vintage commercials” category, which included the following:

Humerous XBOX commercial with lots of gratuitous violence
Ad that uses a screaming child to sell condoms
Too-hot-for-European-TV Agent Provocateur lingerie ad
Nike breakdancing commercial
Weird Canadian beer commercial

The video that finally epitomized my loser-dom:

Kittens playing in a box, accompanied by peppy music

I have officially banned myself from YouTube. I’ve encountered some impressive procrastination tools in my lifetime, but this one is downright dangerous. It even puts straight-up internet surfing to shame.

Symbol etched into a sidewalk in Oakland:

Symbol I sketched for a class project, aiming to illustrate the word “activism”:

I guess you could argue that Mercedes-Benz would benefit from a guerilla art campaign. However, I think I’ll file this incident under “Mortifying Moments”, along with the time I wondered aloud whether Whole Foods carries Diet Coke.