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Yesterday being a Friday, my blog entry was a poem. It was a reflection of something going on in my life, as poems generally are. When I woke up this morning I found myself thinking about the relationship between poetry and the events in life that inspire it. Coincidentally, several friends, after reading the poem, called me up today to say that they loved it, and also to ask, with some concern, whether I’m ok. Which I guess is also a kind of compliment on my poetry. 🙂

The relationship between poetry and reality is funny though, isn’t it? A poem takes some aspect of reality, and then sharpens and polishes it until the underlying emotion is honed to a fine blade, reflecting light while cutting like a knife, clean and bright and able to draw blood.

Prose is quite different: It is best at describing the messiness and complexity of things, and there is a different, rougher kind of beauty in that. All the clash and bother, the sturm und drang of our imperfect selves in constant collision, that’s the stuff of real life.

In truth the woman I was thinking of yesterday is now in a relationship that is clearly right for her. The man she is with has a lovely graciousness, a calmly accepting and open soul, which perfectly complements her madcap headstrong wildness. Watching them together is quite beautiful. You can see how these two people fit together, and how one day their children will have the opportunity to draw from the best of both: Her wild soul and his calm one.

I am self-aware enough to know that she and I together would probably end up as a disaster – two ornery individualists each trying to charge up a different hill at the same time. We’d tear everything apart in no time, like a locomotive with two engine cars, each pulling in the opposite direction.

And yet I think that yesterday’s poem was completely true to the feeling that inspired it. Perhaps the truth is something like this: We dream in poetry, yet we live in prose.

Forget the time it all made sense
Say nothing in your own defense

Move along, just agree
Do not talk of what might be

Please do not show your confusion
Pretend that it was all illusion

That simple touch, oh do not treasure
Its terrifying pain and pleasure

Try to think each gesture through
Make a list of things to do

Don’t indulge in deep despair
Do not touch her perfect hair

The knife cut inward hurts the most
Remember you should make a toast

Speak in measured tones, and slow
Say of course you’d love to go

Try your best to hide your fear
Rome is warm this time of year

Do not think of that embrace
Was I clawing at my face?

Don’t scream your pain unto the sky
It’s possible you will not die

Today a friend asked me the following question:

“Blogs are a very public way of revealing thoughts. Did/does it make you uncomfortable at times?”

A very good question. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that the answer is non-trivial. The best analogy I can think of is with driving a car – a wonderfully efficient way to cause death, dismemberment and general public mayhem. When you drive, you have complete freedom at all times to kill yourself and others. All it takes is a simple turn of the wheel and you are toast.

And yet millions of people drive cars every day, for the most part without mishap. The only thing protecting them from certain death is their own highly developed sense of self-preservation.

Putting your thoughts and emotions out there in a blog is something like that. Theoretically at any moment you could say something that would inappropriately confuse public and private knowledge, betray a friend’s trust, or in some other way be the equivalent of pulling your pants down in public (with or without that second pair of pants underneath). And then of course there is always the danger of being found guilty of BWI (blogging while intoxicated).

So many perils.

And yet the moment you put your hands on that wheel, step on the accelarator and pull out into traffic, a wonderful thing happens. You realize that you really do value your life, a certain circle of privacy, the trust of your friends, the line between sane and insane. It is perfectly ok to discuss thoughts and emotions in public, to look at the ways that powerful encounters with other people, both positive and negative, have pulled upon your heart, transformed you, made you see the world in a new way. People talking about those things together can be an exhilarating, therapeutic, community building experience.

But it is not ok to use any of that as an excuse to go on a destructive tear.

And so I find that I am never tempted to just spin the steering wheel randomly, cause a ten car pile-up, find out what a head-on collision feels like, or what would happen if I just drove this sucker off that bridge.

After all, I’ve got places to go, and these thoughts and emotions are just the vehicle to get me there. So I’m going to put the top down, gun that accelarator, and go for a ride with whatever friends care to go along with me.

It had now been a full three weeks since they’d ridden into the low country. Cloud capped mountains ranged over the horizon on all sides, and the sun hung high in the morning air. Blossom was off nibbling on some sage down by the stream, which was fine with him. She’d been going since sunrise, and flecks of dewy sweat still glistened on her flanks. He figured the old girl could use a little rest after the hard riding of the last three hours. Besides, this was as good a spot as any to take the valley’s measure.

He turned the metal cylinder over in his hand. Squinting his eyes against the sun’s glare, he tried once again to read the marks engraved on its side. He couldn’t make head nor tails of it. Some sort of writing, but sure as heck like nothing he’d ever seen. Oh well, it didn’t hardly matter anyways. Carefully he pointed the cylinder toward the cloud above the mountain ridge up ahead. Just like before, the cool metal surface heated up slightly in his hand, and he could hear the faintest click. The cloud over the ridge winked out and was gone, leaving nothing but pure blue sky.

He counted off six, seven seconds before the boom came. He nodded to himself and adjusted the brim of his hat. A little over a mile left to go. He gave a low whistle and Blossom trotted over. With the grace of long practice he swung up and eased his lanky frame into the worn leather saddle. It was time to settle some scores.

In answer to Sally’s question, a friend of mine got married. It was one of those “let’s sneak off to the Justice of the Peace, just the two of us, and only tell everyone afterward” deals. I was sure they were going to wed at some point, but nobody knew it was going to happen quite so soon. Took a lot of people quite by surprise. But it’s very happy news.

And that’s not all! Today I bought a magical gadget that lets you draw in 3D. In one handy dandy kit you get two colored pencils (one red and one blue), a little adjustable holder thingie that looks like a drawing compass so you can draw your red and blue lines side by side, and a pair of magic red/blue 3D glasses, to make it all jump out into the third dimension. The whole thing set me back all of seven dollars. Pretty reasonable, if you ask me.

And on top of all that, it never runs out of batteries!! Although you do need to sharpen the pencils from time to time.

And I also bought new shoes. So I guess it’s happy news all around.

South Beach in Miami is another world, a world that contains mysteries, a tangled mashup of opulence and seediness, of beautiful young people just starting out and old folks barely holding on. Teenage models saunter to their next shoot, oblivious of the crazy old ‘Nam vet staggering along Ocean Drive muttering to himself. Overweight tourists from the midwest gape in confusion as two beautiful young men share a passionate embrace on their way home from the Palace bar. The lovely Casa Casuarina (the former Versace mansion) is only steps away from sad little old boarded up Deco-style hotels awaiting their final doom. Here everything seems to find its opposite.

Looking at the rows of boarded up buildings, I sense an uneasy turmoil lurking just behind the image of happy sun kissed throngs sipping their afternoon drinks by the ocean. The recent real estate crash is turning things upside down, the reality of the approaching recession starting to creep into a place that prides itself on being disconnected from anything as mundane as mere reality.

South Beach has become such a jewel ever since Michael Mann’s TV fantasy of Sonny Crockett’s world caused the real place to become revitalized, transformed into its own fabulous television image. A dream brought to life. I hope South Beach manages to hold on to that dream.

For the first time in years I am speechless. Utterly speechless. Sometimes you hear something, some news, that you cannot even begin to process. And today…

Well, yes. today.

All I can say is congratulations. Perhaps tomorrow I will find my voice again.

Did I say congratulations?

As I mentioned the other day, I am at a Microsoft sponsored conference that is being held on a cruise ship. There is something unique about being surrounded by computer scientists in an enclosed space for five days. For some reason it reminds me of one of my most vivid memories from the SIGGRAPH computer graphics conference.

It was a number of years ago, and I was having a really interesting discussion with one of my colleagues about how difficult it is to get a good research paper published in the SIGGRAPH conference. One of the problems is that because space is so tight, they rarely accept papers that are longer than eight pages (which is much less space than you get in the usual scientific journal article).

We were both bemoaning how tough it was to compress all of our brilliant ideas down to such a small number of pages, when I told my colleague something that Chekov had once said: “One should write as if standing on one foot, and then edit as if sitting in a comfortable chair.” He just looked at me for a long moment, and then he said “I never really watched Star Trek.”

That was the point in the conversation where I decided to change the subject…

Perhaps one day we notice
That time is streaming past
It doesn't even see us
As we stand upon its shore

But we don't really care
After having caught a glimpse
In a few and scattered moments
That everything had changed

Oh sure we'll talk about it
Some time later over coffee
Show our memories like scars
And act so nonchalant

But we've really only lived
In those remembered stolen moments
When we'd crashed together only
To fly again apart

So we try to catch our breath
To pretend our little stories
Are only idle tales
We had told ourselves one day

But yet, we keep our secrets
And on leap days we remember
When we stole a page from time
And life was truly lived

I know this is going to sound insane, but I am writing this from a cruise ship, courtesy of a Microsoft conference on games and computer science. I am currently on the $100 wireless internet plan – you spend $100 and then when you’ve used up all your minutes you get to spend another $100, unless you forget to click logout, in which case they continue to charge you even while you sleep. All thanks to the miracle of the internet!

As I type this there is a comedian next door in the “Celebrity Theatre” making bad cruise-themed jokes. He is so bad he’s good. Well, ok, that’s not really accurate. He’s so bad he’s bad. Meanwhile, today I gave my talk on the topics of inexpensive interfaces for science-education games, procedurally animated virtual actors and universal programming languages. The usual. People seemed to like it.

Oh my god, the comedian is now making bad jokes about Hurricane Katrina. Words cannot begin… He just made a joke about the antisemitism down in New Orleans after the hurricane – it seems they were all against the Levis… OK, you had to be there.

I’m going to be on this ship for four days. Rumor has it we are headed to Cazumel. Sigh. The things I do for computer science….