Poem for Thursday

Sonnet #21
By Petrarch

I have offered you my heart a thousand times
O my sweet warrior, only to make peace
with your lovely eyes: but it does not please you
with your noble mind, to stoop so low.
And if some other lady has hope of it,
she lives in powerless, deceiving hope:
and it can never be what it was to me,
since I too disdain what does not please you.
Now if I banish it, and it does not find in you
any aid in its unhappy exile, nor knows
how to be alone, nor to go where others call to it,
it might stray from its natural course:
which would be a grave crime for both of us,
and more for you, since it loves you more.

--------

Translation discovered via by way of . I can't read Italian, so I tend to stick with English sonnets, but this one is lovely.

Yay, I got all my work done for Wednesday! All right...so I did not catch up on anything else, from holiday stuff to mail and comments; tomorrow is another day. came over, and we ate not-very-good-for-us food and watched Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which I haven't seen since I first saw it in the theater. It's as good as I remembered and I loved getting to see the deleted scenes. Such an optimistic film for all its darkness: reminds me of Peggy Sue Got Married only with a male protagonist this time, asking the same questions about whether love makes it worth making the same mistakes all over again, and in both cases concluding yes, it does. That's pretty much how I've always felt about things.

The movie makes me think about people who cut and run -- just disappear out of your life like you'd never existed. There seems to be a real temptation to do that on the internet, where you can change your name, create a new identity, drop friends and pick up new friends whenever you feel like it; that seems more rare in real life, though I guess I've known people to do somewhat similar things, pick up and move without warning or regret. Today I electronically ran into someone I knew in a fandom long past who had pretended to be multiple people, to the point of picking fights with herself just to shoot herself down and prove a point on a mailing list, and it was kind of bizarre to stop and realize that actually I might have run into this person online many times since I thought I last "saw" her, but I wouldn't have known. It is mystifying to me when people do this, or when they have multiple personalities specifically to participate in Fandom Wank or Customers Suck or things like that. Is it stupid of me to do my bitching under my own name? It does seem to get me in trouble, though rarely with anyone who really matters to me.

Sometimes there is nothing funnier than getting confirmation that what you thought were two independent people (who obviously "knew" each other and whom you thought must have been friends because they praised one another's fanfic and picked fights with one another's adversaries) are actually the same person. It's particularly funny if you didn't particularly like either of them in the first place. But when you think you know someone, and then discover you only know 1/2 or so of them, the discovery can be unnerving and occasionally upsetting. Eek, I'm babbling when I should be trying to get my life in order. Tonight's laundry got folded during The West Wing which I still enjoy more than any hour of television most weeks, even though there are a thousand little things I miss from previous seasons and some stuff that bores me. I mean, Penn and Teller as themselves in an episode with a flag-burning subplot! Can you imagine if a pair of gay magicians burned a flag at the White House at a Bush daughter's birthday party?

Have discovered that none of my computer's four USB ports are 2.0 or high speed. Don't think I can use the new DVD burner. Am very frustrated. Also, I don't have a video capture card, and really need a bigger hard drive and could use more RAM...in other words it would probably cost nearly as much to upgrade this system as it would to buy a new one. This is even more frustrating as I cannot afford either. Now: should I keep the burner in the hope that NEXT year for my birthday and Chanukah I can either upgrade my computer or buy a new one, or is that insane, given how fast technology changes, and should I simply anticipate getting a built-in DVD burner someday? This external one was a gift, and can be returned but only within the next two weeks. It's silly to be this frustrated over a gift, huh? Am hoping that if bad things happen in threes, then this is number three and I'm done!

I saw on the news tonight that one of the cheetas at the National Zoo had died; I think it may have been the one I posted photos of last week. This makes me sad. On a lighter note from the world of baseball, "Minor League Team Capitalizes on Steroid Controversy", with specimen cups and Mello Yellow. *g*


The Manhattan menorah. It's really easy to tell before what date this was made, huh? We got one for ourselves earlier in 2001 and one for my parents when it became a memorial menorah.