The Importance of Being Art

pharminatrix asked what the purpose of art in culture was. My not entirely coherent reply:

To express the things that are hard to express but are recognizable once they're expressed. To set down emotion in a lasting form. To commemorate. To show someone how it looks through the eyes of the heart, not just the eyes.

When I write down "I was driving through the city at night on the freeway and it smelled cold and sad" you don't feel what I felt. When I show how it was in words, my writing crowd was bowled over and felt if not the identical emotion, something similar.

It's a record of the intangible and the ephemeral. As a scientist, I was trained to work with the tangible and quantifiable and extract meaning from them. As an artist and magician, I was trained to manipulate the tangible and quantifiable to produce transcendence.

We are all shut in our little boxes of heads, and the moment of art is the reaching out between those and saying, "Yeah, I think I was there too." Art ties a society together beyond mere common memes.

Hooray for Animé Night!

Introduced English to XKCD. That right there is an OTP, friends.
Lots of geeking and chattering.
Watched a lot of Noir.
7pm now, rather than 6; that'll give more time to get ready.

No prostitutes in the establishment or grounds.

http://laviroutade.nuxit.net/francais/asie/chine/Jiangsu/Shanghai/bar.jpg

And a similar confusion may characterize my day at work. It's going to be a beauty. I get to pull stats. Lots of stats. That I wanted to have done by today, not on today.

(no subject)

Guess what is in the parking lot right now.

Calling police non-emergency number.

Poor Vash: Update

Alas, I should have called the police that moment, because now they cannot help me.
My insurance company is investigating the issue, and will contact the people
attached to the tags after they run the tags. Any contact information I can glean
about my new co-workers(!) would be much appreciated by my insurance company, as the
insurance company of the culprits generally only spits up an address.

Is it an abuse of position to provide my insurance company with the contact
information? *smile* *snarl*

We still have the pieces, and there are matching pieces missing from that vehicle. I
have photos.

Afternoon.

9:48 AM 2/7/2007
Holy bananas, why is this simple file taking so long to save?

9:57 AM 2/7/2007
Tired. Yay for applesauce.

10:28 AM 2/7/2007
I'm still bloody pissed off over stuff that happened years and years ago. There's no way to figure out cause and effect, but at this point I'm chalking it up to a lesser curse to mitigate a greater curse. I don't think someone with my temperament would have survived the greater curse directly.

10:43 AM 2/7/2007
"That's gay" is one of those phrases that really gets applied badly across the board. Most amusing use of it last night (guess who was using it: hint, not one of the ladies) was to describe a wretched fashion statement that had at least three of us wondering: "Would the stereotypical fashion-conscious gay guy let that one get by him? I'm thinking no."

11:11 AM 2/7/2007
"Bastard Operators from Dell" succeeded at utterly cracking English up. I like making people laugh the right way.

11:16 AM 2/7/2007
I think people are scared of spreadsheets because they look at the cell references in a formula and just freak. I appreciate the way you can put numbers that you want to do something with in a spreadsheet, then type "=" into an empty cell where you want the calculation to happen, and then enter what you want it to do with simple arithmetic and then it happens. If you need it to take a number from somewhere else, by gum, you click on the place where that number is and it happens!

2:14 PM 2/7/2007
Carpool Wackiness ensues. Looks like the only person I'm picking up at this point is trystan_laryssa, as everyone else is finding their own way somehow or not going. OMG I really do need a van if I'm going to be carpooling, but at this point so not doing anything crazy with cars.

4:07 PM 2/7/2007
I've talked with the police (not so helpful) and my insurance company (very helpful) and my co-workers (very interested in all the drama, very approving of my cool ride, saying that I should totally try and get it on Pimp My Ride). I should probably go and talk to Site Services in the form of my elder clone's husband. I need tea anyway, and I have a query running.

4:21 PM 2/7/2007
Queries seem to be behaving themselves. I got a big brown envelope from my elder clone's husband, Mr. Site Services Jr., and got wished best of luck by Lobot, Mr. Site Services Sr. My insurance company will talk to their insurance company and them; I'll not speak to either them or their insurance company.

4:35 PM 2/7/2007
I'm waiting on a query. I have the most of my stats out; now I just have to do the thing with the thing that we're looking at to see about the thing. (Being vague here, yes, but since it's not live yet for the interviewers, I can't talk about it in public. But it's a nice thing for the phone goons who are doing a good job like they're supposed to be.)

Posted using TxtLJ

The traveling manager says I have to get any info myself. Alas.

Paul Pettigrew would Not Be Pleased.

http://wyldemusick.livejournal.com/603525.html