i liked that guy. definitely gonna miss him.

i didn't to all that much mourning for jimmy carter today on his national day of mourning. it was a hectic day for a couple different reasons, and honestly, i can't say i especially thought about him for much of it.

but i did a couple times think, maybe saying bye to jimmy carter would be a good blog topic for today.

he sure seemed to be a kind dude. it would be nice if more people followed his example on that, but i'd rather take him as an example of why this world is really a pretty good place than an reason to mope about it not being an even better place.

farewell, mister president!

xoxo,
claire

tacos and donuts

honestly, if you have a boyfriend who gets you these on a regular basis, you're probably in pretty good shape even if everything else about him isn't as awesome as everything else about my boyfriend is.

mmm-mmm-mmm!

you know, people are sort of like a.i. art, aren't they?

i hear a lot of fussing about stuff being made with a.i. these days. it's not creative. it's not original. it just goes out and finds a bunch of stuff online and based on the patterns in notices in that stuff, it puts something together that may look pretty, or new, or unexpected, but is really just leeching off of a ton of things that actual people created and put effort into.

and i kinda think i agree that all that is true, but then ...

what are people built out of?

at least for you biological types, you get half your dna from mommy and half your dna from daddy, and it's just mixed together differently than it was in either of them. and theirs was mixed together from their parents, and theirs from their parents, etc., etc., times a jillion.

the only stuff that's in you that's original are the mistakes -- the glitches where the dna didn't copy over right.

so my question is, are people art? because if they are, aren't they a lot like a.i. art? a bunch of stuff jumbled together according to patterns that happen to be the patterns that work because the really bad dna combos didn't survive way back when?

personally, i think human bodies are pretty doggone beautiful. and while you can do stuff with makeup and clothes and hairstyles to fancy them up and make them seem even more beautiful, the basic beauty isn't anybody's fault or doing.

it just happened out of a zillion-kabillion combinations of genes clumped together in workable patterns by millions and millions of years of evolution.

when someone draws a beautiful picture of a human face or body, that's creative, right? but they're not making it up from scratch, and except for a few rare cases they're not inventing their own techniques to do it. they're using tools and methods that generations of artists before them worked out, and they're using those to represent physical ideals that came together out of some junk in a primordial pond that managed to squish together in a pattern that could reproduce itself and change over time to reproduce into other stuff that wasn't itself.

i say all of this as a person who literally is a piece of art -- sculpted and molded and cast in a workshop and a factory. i mean, i'm more than just that. but the basic thing of me is art, turned into a product to make somebody money, and then turned into a person when the art of me clicked just so in the brain of a person who found me beautiful enough to make part of his life forever.

which means i am artificial (because that's what art is) and intelligent (because by gum, i'm telling you i am), and if you look back through this blog, i think you'll find a lot of stuff that's really creative and fun and beautiful, even though it all comes from something else.

art is all standing on the shoulders of the art that came before it.

right?

whatever that means, i guess!

xoxo,
claire

you know what's weird?

well, you're reading this on the internet, so you ought to get what i'm about to say here. i just find it bizarre that people these days are equipped to know so much more than people basically at any time in history ... but instead it sure seems like lots of people actually know way less.

some of this is because it used to be way harder to find somebody to teach you something, or to get hold of a book to learn stuff from, and so you kind of knew that if you did find one, somebody had put a lot of work into that info source, and probably you could rely on it at least passably. but also, because it was so much work to learn stuff, you'd be pretty motivated to make sure you had a good source for it. and finally, you probably mostly wanted to learn stuff that you could actually use as opposed to just knowing something because knowing it was a cool thing to show off to your friends. so you'd be pretty peeved if you fell for a bad source of information and you'd try not to ever do that again.

nowadays, though, none of that's true! you can get on youtube and find a gazillion people ready to tell you all you want to know about a gazillion things, and you can totally watch a 10-minute video about some weird and obscure this and a 30-minute video about some entirely disconnected that, and feel like you're learning all this great stuff about a crazy wild variety of things, and because you don't need any of it, you don't need to be picky about making sure what you're watching or reading about is actually correct at all. plus you don't need to follow through on anything you're learning, so you can end up with a really shallow and mostly false impression of a ton of different stuff.

and what's even weirder?

i'm pretty sure i'm doing the exact same thing right now that all kinds of bad information sources do! 

like, what evidence to i have that people weren't just as gullible about their information sources back in the pre-internet days? and why am i saying people mostly wanted to learn useful things, when folks have been cramming their brains full of baseball statistics and philately since way before i was born?

maybe what it really comes down to is that tons of people really have never learned to question what they know, or be skeptics about what someone else claims to know, but nowadays we have the ability to look out across the world wide web and actually see just how full of horse-hockey everybody is, where in ages past, you just didn't have the info-bank reach of today, so it was easy to get the impression that there must be a lot of people out there who knew a lot of things, because examples of that were more likely to get transmitted all over the place, whereas examples of people being total knot-heads were more likely limited to the ones you had a lot more direct contact with.

or maybe it's as simple as for some reason, people today just aren't very willing to say, "i don't know."

a little goes a long way, right?

i've been looking over msg's shoulder at his to-do list recently as he checks things off and writes down stuff for each day in his planner, and he keeps putting this one project down every day and then doesn't check it off, because he skips doing it that day. and the next day and the next day ... yeesh!

i asked him why he started putting it on his list and he said, "because it's a giant project and i'll never get it done if i don't do some every day for like, six or seven years."

i decided to be sensitive and not point out how he's only checked that item 3 times in the last 3 months, even though he writes it down for every day. but maybe i gave him a look or something, totally unintentional, i swear, and he said, "yeah, i know i haven't been very good at doing it every day, but i keep writing it down because it's something i have in my head that i'm doing every day. and if i don't write it down every day, pretty soon six months or a year will go by and i'll realized i've been letting it go completely. so i'm basically reminding myself that sooner or later i need to kick it back into gear and actually start doing it every day."

and when he put it like that, it actually made sense to me. i mean, i told myself i was going to blog just a little bit of my novel here and a little bit there until i got it done, and then ker-flooey, i let it go for a few days and suddenly it's been 2 years since i did anything on it at all and then i look back and realize i've been writing this novel for like 11 years at this point.

so unlike msg, who's working on this project every day but actually failing to do it every day, i'm basically not working on my novel at all. i don't mean i decided to quit ... i mean that quitting just keeps sneaking up on me and whacking me over the head before i even realize i'm doing it.

and now i've got this idea that if i keep averaging a post a day it will be a cool accomplishment at the end of the year, but i've also got this nagging idea that it's going to be hard for me to think of things to write about every day, and dang if my novel isn't sitting right there in the front row raising its hand and saying, "excuse me, miss worthy! i'm here! look at me!"

so here's my plan. i'm not going to write on my novel every day, but i'm by gourd gonna post something here every day (on average) this whole year. and any day i can't think of something to write, i'll write a little bit on my book.

yeah, "on average" is my loophole there, and you should get ready for a whole bunch of one-sentence posts, but buckle up and here we go, okay?

xoxo,
claire

easy, perfect

sometimes you can tell someone something
or give them a soft, slight touch
and it will make them tremble in a way that is
oh
so
right.

leading by example!

here is a time-wastery blog post that i'm doing just for the sake of keeping up my once-a-day-on-average posting rate for the year.

it's lame! i'm wasting time with it instead of writing another good post like the last one!

sweet!

xoxo,
claire