MindSpinner

The MacBook Pro comes equipped with a little camera, enabling video conferencing, and more relevantly, a little program called Photo Booth. You can launch this program, click the camera icon, and see yourself as you appear to the computer’s camera eye. (This can be unnerving. It is certainly revelatory, if you need an update as to how your neck is aging.) You can take a picture of yourself and manipulate it in iPhoto. I experimented with this briefly, sent a picture or two to a friend, and removed the icon from the crowded line-up at the bottom of the screen on my menu bar (or whatever it’s called).

My daughter discovered this tool within days (admittedly, I showed it to her), and one day, while I was out, she took more than 200 self-portraits and made a slideshow to burn to a DVD. At first I was a faintly repulsed by the vanity implied by the enterprise, but when she showed me her shots, I realized that she is an artist at work, both behind the lens and in front of it. Every teenager is in the business of defining a self, in refining persona(s). I was fascinated and impressed.

So this morning, I clicked down into my Applications folder and launched PhotoBooth.

No make-up. No shower and ministrations of hair dryer and curling iron to tame a light case of bed head. Just me up on a Sunday morning, reading the news and writing an email or two, with bright sunlight shot through the window warming one side of my face. If I sat just so, I could capture half my face in light, half in shadow, like the moon was the other day. This time, it was strong light, not deep shadow, that blotted features out, leaving only a lighted eye and a bit of curve around the mouth.

Last night on the phone, a friend asked me what metaphor had been mine that day. I had busily cleaned house and was not thinking then of metaphors. Instead, I was watching Off the Map on the laptop, curled up in bed with the cat at my feet, letting my mind float like a leaf down the darkening stream of evening. But this morning, looking at this image as I did the moon the other day, I know I’m all wrapped up just now in light and shadow. What one makes visible, the other renders invisible. There is a part of myself and a part of being that I can’t apprehend except in darkness where all the edges of things are erased and one slips into all. I have dreamed of flying, on a dappled grey mare with wings, and all on my own, low over fields just where the wind meets the grass, then over water, at the lake at home. I do not dream of flying during the day, but only at night.

In darkness all the words ever printed in black ink on white paper for a time mean nothing at all. I can know the curve of your face only by its touch, your thought only if you speak aloud. I will know the sound of your breathing, and mine. I can meet you - and the sky above, the grass beneath my feet, the night breeze - sans exteriority. I know the cat in the basket by the little sigh he makes in his sleep or the sound of his rough tongue raking his fur. And I am a part of the dark. I know unboundaried belonging to everything that is.

Light on the other hand, defines the otherness and distinctness of all around. The cat is a cat, gray and white, sleeping under the camera tripod at the window, where I took a pre-dawn picture of cresent moon and the morning star. I am the woman sitting cross-legged on the bed in front of the computer, looking through the lower half of her glasses to see the screen. This daylight world is a world full of nouns designating difference, of seeing and being seen, of walking in one’s own shoes one’s own way, of making impressions; even the shoes themselves make impressions. Text reappears on pages, on screens - the drumbeat of messages and ideas intensifies to cacophony.

Daylight is also the time to slip into the garden early; it is all the colors that life is; it is the dappled sea of leaves above on a lazy afternoon in the forest where it is possible to fall asleep midday and dream while a bee gathers pollen from a flower and flies away with golden thighs. Daylight illumines my children’s faces. When they were younger, I thought it beamed right through their faces, as if they were themselves dazzling little suns.

Light grows all things, sustains all things.

The brain takes light for a brush to paint all the beauty that we see - the endless sky, the wave arcing and pouring itself into the shore, the spring duckling cracking through its shell, the crystal under the microscope, the green rock I found 35 years ago in the desert, sitting now here in my garden. Likewise light tells all the horrors, of faces and bodies torn irreparably by wars, of the polar bear drowned. It reveals the concrete hives of our cities, their honeys and their stings, the labyrinths of our perceptions in art. Light tells our justice and our injustice. It supplies metaphors on which we rely for truth. Yet too, too much of it blinds, blots out, just as darkness does.

We are made to partake of the gentle revolutions of light and dark - these are a part of the gift, for we need both ways of knowing.

Watch out! I have a new laptop (no ordinary laptop) and a two-week spring break approaching. No more borrowing the kids’ eMac at 5:00 in the morning or when nobody’s sitting in front of it. No more passing over what wanted to be written because there’s no ready opportunity to sit down and hash it out. (Pen and paper don’t work so well for me anymore.) No more checking my mail through Yahoo and jotting only the quickest replies. Now I can sit on my bed and write whenever I make the time (beating back lesser claims upon it). I can download photographs and share them, upload and order those pictures my mother wanted of the kids, and find out what I want to know via the Internet without having to wait in line or deal with haphazard connections at school.

I’d rather cook dinner every night over an open fire than live without a laptop and an Internet connection. I’d rather wash clothes in the bathtub and hang them out on a line. Did I mention how grateful I am to have this extraordinary tool, this doorway to the world, this means to conversations that matter? Or how grateful I am that this dimension of my life is important not only to me but to people who care about me? WOW moment in progress here.

This weekend finds me feverishly working on behalf of a friend to use WordPress both as the basis for a website and a blog, in order to speed the creation the site and to make it easy for my friend to manage both.

I am not a sufficiently good geek (I am no geek at all, alas) to figure out how to implement the static home page plug-in available for WordPress, at least within the time limits I have. I followed directions after downloading it, created a page called home.php, and found to my horror that it did not hold hands with the style sheet intended to format it. The results were predictably ugly. No doubt SOS queries could be sent to WordPress users and in a week or so, with the help from here and there, I would have this conundrum conquered, but I don’t have a week. I have this morning.

So this is what I’m doing. I’m installing a blog of identical design in two places, at the root level of the domain and in a subdirectory called “blog.” The pages of the website to reside at www.whatever.com, are “pages,” not “posts,” except that the home page is both a page and a post so that it appears permanently on the sidebar and as the content of the page. No more posts are to be written on this blog, so that the “home page” post stays put. I’ll pull out the bits of code that pull up categories and dates and comments. I have figured out enough to manage that.

The second blog, at www.whatever.com/blog/, will function as the blog, with links to whatever.com website pages in the sidebar and via navigational buttons at the top. Comments and categories will appear in their appointed places. The whole thing will look pretty seamless and will be easy to manage.

No doubt there are better ways to proceed for those who have time and know-how, but for now, this workaround looks good to me.

A few posts back I envisioned getting away without hand-coding XHTML and CSS for the Web site project. Hah! Well, now I’m coding both, in a trial-and-error, beginner’s luck, book-in-hand sort of fashion. I’m pretty sure any shortcuts would lead to more work in the long run, not less. Best to do things right in the first place. As of today, the right stuff shows up in the right places on the template page, the fonts are correctly applied, and it’s on to details and page creation tomorrow. For right now, I’m taking a good, long walk by way of decompressing.

I love smart uses of technology. AquaMinds NoteTaker is like a Moleskine notebook for the Mac, only better, except that it can’t fit in your pocket or your purse, which is why I’m smitten with Moleskines, too. (Windows users should look at Microsoft’s OneNote instead. The look is different, but the concept is similar.) NoteTaker generates as many notebooks as you like. Notebooks are lined or unlined, with sections and pages quickly accessed via a table of contents you can view in an exandable panel to the left of your notebook pages. In your notebooks, you can enter and organize simply everything from A to Z, including text, hyperlinks, images, film and audio clips, and more. There are multiple ways to share your notebooks, including publishing them to the Web.

The applications in education are endless, as are the applications in anybody’s daily life. I have started a notebook for school, a notebook for my friend’s Web project, and I’m going to start a household notebook, too, with all the information I need to keep up with and currently have to scrounge for. If I ever take/find time to write in a serious way, NoteTaker will be my writer’s notebook. My sixteen-year-old son is now an avid NoteTaker fan, and before school starts, my daughter will know how to use it, too. (No doubt I can interest her in learning all about it by showing her how she can create a catalog of all the outfits she’d like to buy, with pictures and links - an appalling but infallible strategy.)