Tuesday, September 02, 2008

onward fish for today is a new day

it's finally complete! today marks the birth of the jan-ai scholarship website. thank you to all those who put such hard work into the site - it's lovely. from this day forth please go to http://www.jan-aischolar.org/ for further information. if you feel you can, please donate to help jennsee's legacy continue to aid and inspire young artists of all ages.


this fish is also archive fish. i will aspire to make backup versions of all fishy content in case the site ever goes underwater, but i will not post anything more to this site. i am sorry for those of you who, like me, wishes it would go on forever, but marching uphill is hard when you only have gills to breathe through. believe me, i will always cherish the fish and all our dear fishies who made it a wonderful ocean to swim in.


the following links are brought to you by the letter "J" and the nubmer 23:
jan-ai scholarship
memorial fish
jennsee's last fish

see the world through jennsee's lens: tourist of everything

some specific archives:
writings of the fish
fishlists
fish-eyed views


alas it is time we part. "To absent friends, old gods and the season of mists; and may each and everyone of us always give the devil his due."

farewell,
mysfit

Friday, March 21, 2008

happy birthday fish.

happy vernal equinox. happy spring.

like a story. you. from night into morning. from equinox to solstice.
balance to daylight. you.

happy birthday fish.

Wednesday, September 05, 2007

Sorry for the late notice folks.

The Jan-Ai Scholarship Fund
Requests the pleasure of your company at our
First Annual Fundraiser to
Provide scholarships to young, aspiring artists

Photo Exhibit and Sale
Saturday, September 29, 2007
6:00 – 9:00 o’clock
The Atlantic City Art Center, Garden Pier
New Jersey Avenue & The Boardwalk
Atlantic City, NJ

A celebration with music, wine and light fare
Silent Auction Included
Admission - $60 per person*
RSVP required (by Sept. 15)

If you are interested please send me an email ASAP at mysfit17@yahoo.com and I will forward you a formal invitation.


Tuesday, September 04, 2007

converstaional farewell fish

The fish: I miss you.
mysfit: i know, i miss you too. but i miss—
The fish: I know.
mysfit: you’re not mine, you know that, right? you never were. not jenn see’s, nor oldben’s; but a life that rose up through the interactions between the three of us and those who followed their own fishes here. i can’t do that alone, i’m sorry, i can’t shoulder that responsibility. i do still love you, though.
The fish: But you’re leaving me, you’re—
mysfit: i’m not! or i already have. or – well – there’s the chaos journals for me and i thought i would try to keep this site up-to-date with scholarship fund info and maybe that wouldn’t be so emotionally draining, so, well so painful, you know. maybe it won’t be so tough.
The fish: So that’s it, huh? That’s great. When it gets hard, when it gets tough, you—
mysfit: hey, i know this sucks, but i’ve got to try to start, if not over, then again. hell, I can’t even delete or update your dead links, like each change to the template takes her further away. it’s kinda like not giving you a bath, ever. i keep trying, but—honestly fish, i’m sick of feeling like my blogging life is trapped in the twilight world. there’s been some talk of—
The fish: I hate when people talk behind my source code.
mysfit: let me finish! there’s been talk, a lot of talk, recently about the potential strength of techno-friendships and looking through the archives, it just reminds me of what a vibrant and living site you were.
The fish: I was magnificent wasn’t I?
mysfit: the best.
The fish: You’ve been mostly absent for more than a year – what makes you think that the chaos journals will hold you here any more than I can?
mysfit: maybe they won’t. won’t know till i try will i?
The fish: And you’ll visit?
mysfit: and post about the Jan-ai Scholarship fund and maybe other things, as often as I can – we’ll see. until then – good night sweet fish.


love,
mysfit

Tuesday, August 28, 2007

article linkfish

for those of you who are interested, here is the link to the article from the philly inquirer i mention in the below rant: Proof of an afterlife

i agree with the comment that the reporter did a decent job capturing the friendship and love shown on the blogoshere. i have long held the view that humans are machines of communication, as we are constantly creating new methods to do just this. at the risk of sounding cheesy, i never really thought about the fact that these new methods also open up new ways of experiencing love.

thank you all.

love,
mysfit

Friday, August 24, 2007

connectiveness and the fish (a rant)

so this has been on my mind recently and i thought i would put it out there for those who still occasionally wander through the fish. the jan-ai scholarship fund has been going strong now for more than a year and we are constantly regaled with tales of how much the web-community (blog-community, photo-community, myspace-community, etc) has shown an outpouring of love for the jenn see. so much so that there is a reporter in philly who is doing an article on jenn and how her death affected her "web friends".

it got me thinking.

she kept saying that jenn's passing affected people who had "never met her" or "didn't know her". this is a misconception. those of you who interacted with jenn through the fish or through comments on your blog or through any of the myriad of places that she left large footprints of insight, wit and veracity, you met her in cyberspace and knew her well, somewhat or just in passing. just like anywhere else. jenn was jenn. she put everything she was in her posts and rarely held anything back when carrying on conversations, even if there were the delayed conversations of commentary or email. where i have cultivated mystery by refusing pictures or through my handle "mysfit", and others create whole new personalities for themselves, jenn see ('see' being the verbal pronunciation of her last initial) never went in for that kind of thing. she was her writings, her photography, her posts and they were her. your interactions were as real as you made them because hers were as real as she could make them.

we live in a world that is suffering from separation anxiety and doesn't even know it. where i don't know my neighbors, can stay in my house connecting to you in your house and never see your face, never know your name and never know you. yet you are the christophers of cyberspace. you can change your name, your avatar-face, your personality from site to site, from post to post and it is only what you send out that i can read. but how much you can really hide in this virtual world is intertwined with how much i refuse to see. how different is this than in the mundane, non-digital world?

things have certainly changed over the last 15 years but the internet got a bad wrap in its infant stage with all those sexual predators and became a perceived tool of deception. in a lot of ways this perception hasn't changed. as william gibson said in a recent interview, current technology makes it both harder and easier to keep secrets. (see article: here) identity theft, credit card fraud, email monitoring, ip tracking. the perceived stability of the internet is only a imagined security blanket and we all know it. data can be lost, corrupted, erased.

in this world, is it any more surprising that people are astounded by the love and grief you, my fair fishies, have shown for the passing of a friend. perhaps our rioting call should be "a virtual friend but not a virtual friendship! not a virtual love!" jenn see was ever a being so full of creative and connective energy that her close friends (some she met on the web) couldn't help but feed on it and energy like that cannot be diminished except through nonuse. so when she felt trapped in a location where she wasn't comfortable, she spread her energy out into the blog community, into the internet, reminding us that this medium is not about information or about stealing from each other but about communication. she put her writing on the wall and though it is not forever, it is a really big fucking wall. over the miles and the years, you who connected to jenn see were reminded that there are other people sitting behind their computers and many of them, regardless of age, space or experience, are just like you.

Friday, June 22, 2007

“No good fish goes anywhere without a porpoise” -- Lewis Carroll

Dear fish,

it’s amazing how a year can go by just like that. it’s just like Relativity to force each day to crawl by in agonizing slowness, but for a year to splash by like a raindrop. i blame Einstein - it was his idea after all.

for those of you who have followed your fish to this site for the first time, know that today we are looking to the stars hoping for any sign of our missing fish:

for those of you looking for some connection, some words of comfort, some well, some kind of fish anyway, i have only a poor shadow of a dream to share, but hopefully it will suffice.

through many trials and tribulations, i descended through the house and out the backdoor. at the entrance to Styx Ave, a woman stopped me because i could not take a bottle of living water onto the street. i quickly drained the water, backing up only slightly because i knew the guardian was trying to turn me away. once through, i strolled down the sidewalk and there i saw her, huddled with some lost souls on the other side of the road.

she was wrapped head to toe in a fusion of fashions that nonetheless looked fabulous on her (but you knew it would). she was wearing two pairs of dark sunglasses so that i could not see her eyes. she stood up when she saw me and the movement cause her glasses to fall off - but she scurried to get them back on and grinned. we bantered a bit about this fully knowing that had i seen her eyes, the dream would have ended, such was the rule of the dream.

at this point we began walking, me on this side of the street and her on the other. we talked of many things that, like dreamthings often do, faded instantly upon waking, but were comforting in their time.

there was one point that was important - one thing I have to share. while we were bantering, i thought of saying a thing but before i could, she spoke it to me instead. and as we walked in conversation, she passed through buildings so that i could only see her through windows and could not speak to her, yet still she answered my unasked questions.

you must understand what this means: that she is able to glimpse our minds from time to time and knows when we are thinking of her - and perhaps in those times, since distance as we know it in our living bodies no longer applies to jennifer, take comfort in the belief that such a connection brings you "closer" to her than when she was alive.


for a wonderful tribute to jenn please visit stainless steel droppings - (thank you carl v. for saying many of the things that i cannot)

i love you all. i miss her dearly.

mysfit

Thursday, April 26, 2007

shakespeare rolls up to the fish one day -

dear jennsee,

not sure, why but this seems to be playing through my mind of late. ah romeo and juliet - irritating huh? i suppose it was either this or puck's closing speach in midsummer night's but we can wait for that. (should have been King Lear, but you know, i'd never pick the right speach...)

MERCUTIO
O, then, I see Queen Mab hath been with you.
She is the fairies' midwife, and she comes
In shape no bigger than an agate-stone
On the fore-finger of an alderman,
Drawn with a team of little atomies
Athwart men's noses as they lie asleep;
Her wagon-spokes made of long spiders' legs,
The cover of the wings of grasshoppers,
The traces of the smallest spider's web,
The collars of the moonshine's watery beams,
Her whip of cricket's bone, the lash of film,
Her wagoner a small grey-coated gnat,
Not so big as a round little worm
Prick'd from the lazy finger of a maid;
Her chariot is an empty hazel-nut
Made by the joiner squirrel or old grub,
Time out o' mind the fairies' coachmakers.
And in this state she gallops night by night
Through lovers' brains, and then they dream of love;
O'er courtiers' knees, that dream on court'sies straight,
O'er lawyers' fingers, who straight dream on fees,
O'er ladies ' lips, who straight on kisses dream,
Which oft the angry Mab with blisters plagues,
Because their breaths with sweetmeats tainted are:
Sometime she gallops o'er a courtier's nose,
And then dreams he of smelling out a suit;
And sometime comes she with a tithe-pig's tail
Tickling a parson's nose as a' lies asleep,
Then dreams, he of another benefice:
Sometime she driveth o'er a soldier's neck,
And then dreams he of cutting foreign throats,
Of breaches, ambuscadoes, Spanish blades,
Of healths five-fathom deep; and then anon
Drums in his ear, at which he starts and wakes,
And being thus frighted swears a prayer or two
And sleeps again. This is that very Mab
That plats the manes of horses in the night,
And bakes the elflocks in foul sluttish hairs,
Which once untangled, much misfortune bodes:
This is the hag, when maids lie on their backs,
That presses them and learns them first to bear,
Making them women of good carriage:
This is she--


not to worry, queen mab ain't got nothin' on our girl jenn!


love,
mysfit




more to come:

Friday, December 22, 2006

this fish is drunk fish



so this is it, huh? life without jenn? there are days when i'm not sure if i am up to it. it's like missing an essential part of you. one that infuriated you, made you elated, destroyed you to help you rebuild again... in other words was all the things i need and she's just not...

tonight, after six months i am angry, i am reaching out to touch..., i am still.

i plan to drink... well i am drinking lots of wine. you'd be proud of me lov, you found "cheep red wine" with it's brown paper label - i found "house wine" with cheep white and black label. i drink in honor of my dearest friend, my sparing partner, my co-collaborator and well, just you, jenn.

i miss you darlink.


love,
mysfit

p.s. i'm your huckleberry

Friday, November 17, 2006

sadfish, queryfish, ftw fish

why isn't the world a story?

why don't tears fix everything that's wrong?

why can't i touch her wings?