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Author: James Brush

James Brush is a teacher and writer who lives in Austin, TX. He tries to get outside as much as possible.

Searching Is the Perfect Gift

December 19, 2005 • • 2 Comments

I learned about this over the weekend:

GoodSearch smaller logo

Goodsearch is a search engine that donates a portion of its ad revenue to the charity or school of the user’s choice. You simply select your favorite charity on the search page, do your search (which is powered by Yahoo!) and eventually the organization that you selected should receive a check. If your favorite isn’t listed, I think you can enter it for them.

I’ll be searching on behalf of The Periwinkle Foundation, a nonprofit based at Texas Children’s Hospital that provides a free summer camp for childhood cancer patients. I’ve been involved with Periwinkle for 17 years as a counselor and video producer, and I love having the opportunity to help them out every time I search. Hopefully they will soon need buckets to haul all the cash around.

So give it a whirl. Help out your favorite nonprofit or school and let your search be part of your gift.

Weekend Cat Report: King of the Ottoman

December 18, 2005 • • 2 Comments

Morrison watching TVThe greyhounds are taking the week off in order to give Morrison a chance to share some of his adventures. He’s a twelve year old black-and-white goodboy who is probably more outgoing and gregarious than either of the dogs. He is also in charge.

Last week, we got an ottoman so as to kick up our feet when watching movies, but Morrison quickly realized that what we had actually purchased was a king-size cat bed. The hounds have attempted to turn it into a greyhound bed, but as much as he likes them and will often sleep next to them, he has had to draw a bright line and make his stand here upon the ottoman. So the dogs have been chased off the ottoman and generally reminded with a good hiss about the workings of the heirarchy around here.

After conquering the ottoman and deciding that the couch is better anyway, we all settled in to watch The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys, a thriller in which a group of cruel Catholic school boys set out to poison a beautiful panther with narcotics and then frame it for tearing up their teacher’s classroom. The film spends too much time detailing the mundane and trivial lives of the twisted cat-hating altar boys and not enough time focusing on their innocent (“Animals are without sin”, we are reminded at one point in the film) victim, the majestic cat. Morrison found himself at the point of tears when the cat succumbed to the drugs, but cheering mightily when the cat’s friend came to rescue his buddy and engage the cowardly human in combat. The battle scenes were a bit tame and went by too quickly for Morrison’s taste, but he loves movies in which justice is done even when the filmmakers attempt to align the audience’s symapthies with the bad guys. Hopefully there will be a sequel that focuses on the panthers attempting to put their lives back together.

A Logic Problem

December 16, 2005 • • Leave a comment

I remember nonsense like this from the GRE many years ago:

Cat and Dog 2 are both black and white. Dog 1 and Dog 2 like to play and roughhouse. Cat has diabetes and so must have access to food 24/7. Human 1 and Human 2 are gone for large portions of each day. Dog 1 and Dog 2 love to eat Cat’s food. Cat also has arthritis so his food must be on the floor so he doesn’t have to jump if he doesn’t want to. Dog 2 can jump over gates that Cat 1 can walk through. Dog 1 gets free run of the house, but would eat Cat’s food if given half a chance. Dog 2 likes to chew on things she shouldn’t. Human 1 and Human 2 should…

a) become veterinarians and work out of the house.
b) keep Cat confined in a single room while gone knowing that he probably doesn’t care since he sleeps all day anyway.
c) confine all three separately in different parts of the house.
d) write silly logic problems about it.
e) both a and b
f) both b and d
g) b, c and d
h) a, b and c

We’re going with ‘g’ for now.

Blogging and Writing

December 16, 2005 • • 3 Comments

I’ve been blogging a little over two months now, and it seems a good time to stop and take stock of this new world that I’ve joined. One thing I love about the blogosphere is that it’s such a dynamic world. This is a world that is changing constantly, moving alongside the static internet and the offline world with its own rules, ideas, insights, opinion-makers and landscape. I feel like I’m part of a vast library that is being written as I type this. It’s a library in which the texts are all connected and alive like neurons in a brain. It’s also a library in which the small stories of people’s lives unfold alongside the big ones that make history, connecting and interacting in fascinating ways, either through posts or blogrolls. When I think about this, I feel lucky to be a part of it, though still a newcomer.

I also enjoy reading the daily posts on my favorite blogs. I love discovering the treasures and unknown musings of some fantastic writers and unknown thinkers, publishing their insights in this most perfect DIY medium. That do-it-yourself aspect is my favorite part. Anyone can publish and find an audience, albeit in most cases a small one. Filmmakers and musicians have been putting their work out independently for years, now writers can as well.

I love knowing that sometimes something I’ve written has moved a fellow blogger to comment or respond through email. That’s a great feeling. As is looking at the site stats and seeing regular readers, known only as familiar strings of IP address numbers, emerge in places where I don’t know anyone. For a writer, finding readers is a profound and moving experience. So to you who tune in regularly, thank you. You make my day.

I learn quite a bit by reading things that I wouldn’t have found on the static web. I’m learning about life, about writing, about the internet, about HTML and CSS, about politics, about everything.

And writing everyday, I learn about myself too.

That’s the best part: Writing on a daily basis again, even when it’s just quick posts has been great for me. I generally haven’t done it for years. I tended to set aside large blocks of time – a few hours a week, a summer vacation, a weekend day. But I never maintained that all important constant practice that is so essential. It feels like part of me is waking up again and that’s a nice feeling. I find myself more motivated than ever to either submit or self-publish that second novel that’s sitting on the hard drive, to get past page one of the third one that’s half-written in my head and in notes and outlines in my drawer.

And so, running the risk of laying it on a bit thick, I throw some Thoreau that comes to mind whenever I think about embarking on new adventures such as the beginnings of this blog and the start of new projects: “Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.”

So there it is. This experiment that I started in part as a way to give myself something to think about other than my dog who passed away a few months ago has gone from being just an experiment to being a regular part of my life, somewhere between a hobby and a way to work on my work.

And now, I promise no more blogging about blogging for awhile.

Cyber-Regionalism

December 15, 2005 • • 2 Comments

When I used to teach Fahrenheit 451, the classes always got into interesting discussions about the effects of mass culture on local variety. My students found nothing odd about the fact that one can drive from Miami to Seattle and eat in the same highway restaurants and stay in the same motels, all the while listening to the same music that everyone else is enjoying, and if you look at the other travelers in the other cars, most of them, regardless of where their plates say they’re from, will be wearing the same clothes from the same stores. One can get this impression from traveling through airports as well. I’ve often wondered what, if anything, is lost when our whole country develops this kind of paste-pudding sameness (to paraphrase Bradbury).

Many kids found it comforting. I find it disturbing. I like eating different foods, hearing new music and strange accents, but it seems to be quite difficult to find anything uniquely local anymore except in a few places (such as Austin – “Keep Austin Weird”) where concerted efforts are made to hold on to what originally made that place unique. If you want to see what some little one-horse town has that makes it special, you have to look pretty hard. Often you’ll find relics of what once made it special, but the place will be closed, the event cancelled, the people dead, senile, or moved away.

But then I start thinking about how many of us find our little niches online. How many CDs by obscure low-fi indie rock bands from random cities do I own? I know people from Chicago who’ve never heard of The Sea and Cake or Tortoise or Sam Prekop. So I start thinking that perhaps regionalism isn’t so much dead as perhaps it’s moved. Perhaps we still have our regional variety and local culture, but without material landscape. Instead we have sites that we inhabit and with whose denizens we share common interests and concerns be they movies, books, music, politics, religion, philosophy, whatever. It seems oddly comforting to think that we still have our hometowns despite the fact that they’ve gone digital.