shift ever dumbening One of my early experiences with curved test scores at UCLA was in a chemistry class where a "C" on a certain test was somewhere around 28/100. Success, then, was basically being stupid, but just less so than your classmates. I also still have the visceral memory of slicing and dicing my way to a perfect score on difficult math exams. A completely different sensation stares me down now, though, as I walk through the labyrinth of successes and failures of learning to create visually. A score of 95 on a science test may not have been the score hoped for, but it's still a good score, and objectivity has a certain taste to it, win or lose. This taste had become so familiar to me until recently. Playing with words has been part of that tranisition, that learning how to sit with the uncertainty of creation. But art is a whole other ballgame still. Each week, each day, even within each class, my mind struggles, trying its old patterns of pigeonholing every little act - goodbad goodbad goodbad - and finding that that doesn't work any more. It's like running your hand through a bowl of chilling gelatin, right when it's lost in that brief netherworld between liquid and solid. What _is_ this?! Internal external positive negative praise criticism objective subjective: there are so many more variables, flowing and influencing each other. Heisenberg's mosh pit. My apartment begins to fill with my silly little sproutings, and I have to laugh as that damn quote she always said from Rilke, about loving the questions themselves, comes running back full steam. Still a world of victories and defeats, just with new spices. 030211 ... phil B = C - A C - B = A 031011 ... ferret 123, easay as aybesee. wuntuthre, easy as abc 031012 ... freed shift into another relm. shift unoticed. do not disturb. just shift without disruption. shift. move. do somthing. get up and shift. 040515 what's it to you? who go blather from