butterflykiki | Recent Entries

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags

Life: the universe, and everything... My current temp job, which I've had for 8 and a half months, enjoyed a good bit, both because of the work and the people, is coming to an end on Friday. They don't have the budget to keep me, and someone else got the permanent opening I applied for in July (and it took them 'til mid-August to get their act together and tell us, yeesh). I'm bummed but hopeful. Anyway: next week I'll probably be panicking, again. I was really hoping I'd have a new job before this job ended (they told me three weeks ago) but it is not to be. SO!

( I'm diving in to Agatha All Along in order to distract myself. )

Speculation and other commentary welcomed! Just please keep it to the episodes of Agatha and WandaVision, not anything else that might have leaked or been in a trailer. :)

Talk about not sticking the landing. Or the middle. Or the corners. So yeah, massive annoyance and spoilers for all six episodes ahead.

( There's about five things I liked in among about 20 things I am going to ignore. Randomness ahead. )

By comparison? I'm really looking forward to Loki Season 2, based on that stellar trailer.

Today I:
- got my haircut
- got my car washed
- took my car in to get 4 new tires (ack, pricey)
- hit the pharmacy on time to get my prescriptions
- picked up all my mail and packages and such
- bought my last Christmas present for this year
- finally found those neat big cards for my aunt & uncle
- got dinner
- got home
---- and the evening is still young, whee!

...I should probably wrap something. But let me bask in the moment. Or maybe I'll go wrap some lights around the balcony.

How're the holidays treating you guys?

Current Mood: accomplished
Current Music: "I Know Victoria's Secret (She Was Made Up By a Dude)"

Seriously, I love this show so, so much, and I plan on writing a rant on why (aside from it feeding all my revolution-and-"V-the-miniseries"-love and Diego Luna and others who are awesome) but for now: best guesses for the grand finale of Season 1 next week!

( Speculation so I can say I TOLD YOU later )
10. Watch this show, people. WATCH IT. IT IS SO GOOD. SO SO SO GOOD.

Current Mood: bouncy

( Cut for hat love. And some Moon Knight spoilers. )
I am going to a poetry workshop this weekend, with my mom, with Camille Dungy running the workshop. It should be a very good time. So here, have some more poetry:

Association Copy
BY CAMILLE T. DUNGY

Lynda Hull

Maybe you sold it to buy junk. Though I like to think not.
And I don't want to think you used the money for food
or rent or anything obligatory, practical.
A pair of boots, perhaps. Thigh high burgandy boots
with gold laces. Something crucial as lilies.
Mostly, I want to believe you held onto the book,
that your fingers brailed those pages' inky veins
even in your final weeks. I want to believe
words can be that important in the end.

Who can help the heart, which is grand and full
of gestures? I had been on my way out.
He was rearranging his bookshelves
when, in an approximation of tenderness,
he handed me, like the last of the sweet potatoes
at Thanksgiving, like a thing he wanted
but was willing to share, the rediscovered book—
he'd bought it years ago in a used bookstore
in Chicago. Levine's poems, with your signature inside.

That whole year I spent loving him, something splendid
as lemons, sour and bright and leading my tongue
toward new language, was on the shelf. These
weren't your own poems, autographed, a stranger's
souvenir—we'd spent vain months leafing through
New York stacks for your out-of-print collections—but you'd cared
about this book, or cared enough to claim it, your name
looped across the title page as if to say, Please.
This is mine, This book is mine. Though you sold it.
Or someone else did when you died.

We make habits out of words. I grew accustomed
to his, the way they spooned me into sleep
so many times. Now I am sleepless and alone
another night. What would you give for one more night
alone? No booze. No drugs. Just that hunger
and those words. He gave me The Names of the Lost.
Need comes down hard on a body. What else
was sold? What else—do you know?—did we lose

Camille Dungy, "Association Copy" from Smith Blue. Copyright © 2011 by Camille Dungy. Reprinted by permission of Southern Illinois University Press.

So this is going to be a mostly non-spoilery post, regarding such things as Egyptian gods, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and what I remember from reading Egyptian mythology when I was 11. Also just a general kind of wondering about the upcoming stuff in Moon Knight, based on Wikipedia and what I remember from ages ago.

( Mostly cut for really excessive length, not spoilers. )
Definitely bed-time.

It's just so me.

One Art
BY ELIZABETH BISHOP

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Elizabeth Bishop, “One Art” from The Complete Poems 1926-1979.

Current Mood: amused

Okay, I don't. I just really want one. I can't even remember what got me onto this mental curve, but, Easter is coming up, the Kentucky Derby is coming up, I want a hat.

( Cut for large pix of large hats. )

I don't need three hats. Don't let me buy all of them. I JUST WANT ALL OF THEM.

Current Mood: cheerful

( Down yet another rabbit hole we go! TW for serious mental health issues on TV )

I may burble again at some point.

In Blackwater Woods

Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars

of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,

the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders

of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is

nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned

in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side

is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.

“In Blackwater Woods” by Mary Oliver, from American Primitive. © Back Bay Books, 1983.

Went looking for one of his I hadn't read yet, and found this.

Don't Go Far Off

Don't go far off, not even for a day, because --
because -- I don't know how to say it: a day is long
and I will be waiting for you, as in an empty station
when the trains are parked off somewhere else, asleep.

Don't leave me, even for an hour, because
then the little drops of anguish will all run together,
the smoke that roams looking for a home will drift
into me, choking my lost heart.

Oh, may your silhouette never dissolve on the beach;
may your eyelids never flutter into the empty distance.
Don't leave me for a second, my dearest,

because in that moment you'll have gone so far
I'll wander mazily over all the earth, asking,
Will you come back? Will you leave me here, dying?

Pablo Neruda

Celli's entries including this one here reminded me of this!

Because I saw Joy Harjo in person last April, and will hopefully find more cool poets this year. You can listen to her read this with music backing here. (She is also a saxophone player!)

This Morning I Pray for My Enemies
Joy Harjo - (1951- )

And whom do I call my enemy?
An enemy must be worthy of engagement.
I turn in the direction of the sun and keep walking.
It’s the heart that asks the question, not my furious mind.
The heart is the smaller cousin of the sun.
It sees and knows everything.
It hears the gnashing even as it hears the blessing.
The door to the mind should only open from the heart.
An enemy who gets in, risks the danger of becoming a friend.

Harjo, Joy, Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings: Poems; Copyright © 2015 by W. W. Norton & Company.

Current Mood: calm

Allright. Who's seen all 6 eps and is up for beta'ing a 2000-word gen piece, set immediately post-finale?

*curses at Marvel in Slovenian*

I love using Kenzi as my icon. She is the embodiment of mischief-face, and very appropriate when talking about Loki.

( Questions answered: true lies and Loki. ) So yeah. I think the series has come full circle, and answered all the implied questions they brought up. I hope to heck that none of the character development is lost, and that we don't just wind up with Loki having Leveled Up his Magic; but with Loki having truly changed. And I hope, hope, hope, we see Mobius and Sylvie again, because they are also Agents of Change :D and they deserve to keep going into the next multi-verse.

Current Mood: contemplative

Like it says on the sticker above. I really am enjoying the hell out of this show. I just have to put all these thoughts here, in some kind of order. Possibly I've had too much caffeine (read: any at all) in the last four days or so.

( Cripes, this might lead to fanfiction, IDEK. Spoilery as all anything. )

Ahem. So, More later, probably, IDEK.

Sometimes I start asking myself questions, and it leads ridiculous places. Reading today NYTimes article about vaccine resistance, they were dividing the resistors into groups (I live in Wyoming, where those who are not yet vaccinated are at 65%; 25% of those people are Skeptics) - some of whom are sure that there are plots, and that maybe they're going to be implanted with ID chips and transmitters when they receive their vaccine. (!?!)

ANYWAY. Because of this, I went "that is so crazy, what, are you living in an X-Files episode?!" Then I realized, "hey, people chip their dogs and cats... maybe it's crazy, but is it possible?" Then I wondered, "How much would that cost, anyway? And what would be the point?"

So, if you, like me, start wondering about things for no good reason, I give you:
The Shocking price of RFID tags, from September 2016. And also, Tractive Dog Tracker, GPS vs. microchip from last Friday (May 2021).

Main points from article 1: these things require a reader ($1.5K to $20K), and each RFID tag can cost from $0.10 to $25, depending on whether its active or passive. Also, their range is about, oh, 100 feet at best.

Main point from article 2: microchipping is passive, and sure, you could inobtrusively microchip a person (the chips are in glass bottles the size of a grain of rice), but that won't give you their location. It would just beep! and link you to a database with more info on them if you scanned them. A GPS tracker is the size of a credit card, and about half an inch thick. Easy to put on a dog or ankle collar (I'm thinking Neal Caffrey's ankle tracker in White Collar now.) You can't inject that into a person without it being incredibly obvious. So yeah.

Extra thoughts:
~~ Also, why bother microchipping actual people when nearly everyone's car has GPS, everyone's phone is always on and usually has GPS location on too, everyone logs in to their phone and computers from locations that are mostly ISP-tagged, and everyone uses credit cards which can be checked for location of purchase, if not in real-time?

...I worry about my Wyoming neighbors, is what I'm saying, except I'm the one who went down this rabbit hole to get all these details in the first place.

Current Mood: silly

I really ended up liking this series after a couple eps, and the best part for me was the crime guys. This video moves fast enough that it won't spoil you for much, but give you a very good idea of who are crew are.

"Trouble"
https://archiveofourown.org/works/31239197

("Here. Comes. Trouble.")

( Poetry and Magic and Hijinks. And some more clues for the future. Also, spoilers. )

Tell me someone else has seen and loved this cinematic 'masterpiece' (in the same way Jupiter Ascending is a 'masterpiece', okay?). I hope so, because I'm about to blither about it for a bit. I just re-found this on Amazon Prime and have rented it, and I'm rewatching it for the first time in aaaaages. Maybe 10 or 15 so years, at least, and I didn't watch the whole thing then. Comparing little 11-or-12-year-old Kiki's reactions to seeing it on TV, (maybe 13? Hmm) and analyzing it again now.

( Cinderella before Drew Barrymore gave us EVER AFTER )

The Way West
by Raphael Kosek

My daughter is driving
across the continent, eating cheddar
in Wisconsin, waking to a cougar's yellow
rasp, sleeping tentless
in a corn field where a mysterious

insect leaves a sore story of welts
over her face, her neck—
she is off my radar, and it feels like
part of me is floating off the map,
past the flannel of sleep, the safety

of novels—I hear the wind over her phone,
constant. The wind, her voice
informs me, never stops blowing in South Dakota
where the Black Hills are not really black
but green and grey like Cezanne's mountains.

Her hair glistens with a mid-American
sweat I have never felt, her car
runs into the different hours
of a different night. We have
lost the clock between us, the familiar

gone strange. Prairie, so flat, she says,
you can see the sun for a long time.
I feel something flatten out between us—
and ease into a rhythm where the plains
of her life, of mine, drift

buoyant, open, rising without words,
hours, or habits—
new country.

“The Way West” by Raphael Kosek, from American Mythology. © Brick Road Poetry Press.