On Reading Love Stories

Perhaps with this foray into dating, my mind is elsewhere, but I'm finding a lot of beauty in life right now. Not specifically in my life, but in all the little occurrences: the cloud passing by, the stray rays of sun in the morning, the way the steam from my shower fogs up the bathroom mirror.

I also just finished re-reading Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer. A lot of you may recognize it from the movie of the same title starring Elijah Wood. I respect both works for the mediums in which they portray the story and the limitations and openings available therein. Like the other Foer book I've read, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, EII was so touchingly sad and beautiful, in the same way that makes you want to simultaneously laugh and cry and – sit.

The way the three parallel narratives intertwine and converge is such a postmodern expression of form as means to convey content. Listening to my friend Ryan talk about it with my roommate the other day, I likened it in part to someone reading the box of letters I have from Emerson and reading them in chronological order. There's a certain kind of sense and themes that come up, but lacking the other half of the correspondence you're often left to fill in many of the blanks yourself.

I've also been reading Other People's Love Letters edited by Bill Shapiro, and I'm realizing that with a postmodern sense of textuality that encompasses all forms of communication, the idea of “letter” is a bit narrow and here has been expanded to include everything from notes on the back of a receipt to text messages, emails and what would traditionally be thought of as “love letters.”

The more I think about it and kind of combine these ideas in my head, the more I feel like almost all writing (or to be more broad, composing) is an act of love, or at least an act of passion, be that with a context of interest or emotion.

So often we pass playlists and mix CDs for our lovers. We post pictures and status updates and videos online in recognition of the people we care about. We feed them.

In many ways, I consider this blog a love letter to my journey through life. Just as acelessthan3 is so integral a part of who I am as a person and character, Widdershins is a keystone to who I am as a writer.

I'm teaching myself to appreciate the little things more because in the end, that's all we have regularly. Little things that make us smile.

I had an idea the other day to get a deck of cards and call it “54 Reasons.” On each card, I would write a different reason I had to smile and either randomly shuffle the cards and break them out as a mood booster, or give them away. I don't know if I'll actually follow through with this plan, but it's a loosely thought out idea somewhere nestled into the horizon.

I'm not sure how I feel about reading love stories, because the kind of love stories I like most are tragedies, are full of hope and sadness and fear. And they don't always have a happy ending.

Musings On the Life of Playing Card

I am a playing card.

You call me, Ace because I am less than three. But I wonder, and here I question myself even, am I really?

What is less than three? In becoming Ace, it was <3, a simple way of saying a heart.

I could just as easily have made myself the lovers, two less than three, which would mean I am one and two and three. But no, I am Ace. Other than a number, but not quite royalty. I do not seek to put myself above.

And yet... and yet, and yet, and yet, it is a question we always start with: "Ace's high?"

No, thank you, I tend to stay away from marijuana on my own, though I find I'm less averse to recreational substances in social situations, except when athletic or scholastic endeavors expressly forbid it.

You see, numbers are tricky things with their subtle in-betweens. They are gradients full of infinities. Less than three is more than me, so I'll take that nasty little letter (better than an F as they taught us in school) with it's up down illusions of grandeur parked right at the beginning of the end.

But nay, do not set me aside to fade in the glory of the sun. Shuffle me back into the deck with my brethren.

I'm touched. Really, I am. Your dirty fingerprints are all over me. Stains of chocolate and juice and grease embed themselves in my vinyl-plastic coating.

Shuffle, bridge, shuffle, clack. Cut the deck and there I am, hiding right on top. Did you ever see such sleight of hand?

Acelessthan3

I'm pretty sure I set this one as a scheduled post for last Thursday. Dammit, blogger, quit doing this to my scheduled posts. I schedule them to post at a certain time, post them at that time, geez, is that so hard? Oh well, posting now.

Who is Acelessthan3?

I'm pretty sure that at his most basic level, Aceless is some extension of me. It's been my chosen pseudonym for over half a year now, the façade I hide behind whenever I need to come up with a new username.

I like to think though that Aceless is a little more and a little less than me. Aceless is me in a mask, the parapersonality through which escapes all the jokes and intelligence I don't let myself show, the elegant fool on stage. He is the Locke and Demosthenes to my Peter and Valentine (please get that book reference whether you love or hate the books). But at the same time, he's so much more superficial and surface level, lacking the depth and experience of his own identity, always sharing and drawing symbiotically upon my knowledge and experience.

Of course, it's getting hard to tell the two apart. It's not like Aceless is some exclusive avatar I use while gaming with a specific circle of friends, no, virtually all of my presence online has become or is in the process of becoming an annex to the construction that is Acelessthan3.

And to think, it all started with a deck of cards.

Origins

I was at summer camp up near Leavenworth (yes, Power of Hope, the same one I talk about all the time. You would too if you had the chance to experience it, which you do have the chance, I'm telling you that you do. Look them up: http://powerofhope.org) a little over a year ago. One of the youth there with me was a boy by the name of Cyrus.

Now, Cyrus was a bit of a clown and a thespian. He had a knack for taking your attention that made him a natural magician of the stage. It was really no surprise that he did card tricks. At the end of the week, he gave away his deck of cards. Pick a card, any card and it's yours to keep. I think you can guess which card I drew.

Well flash forward to I think it was around January 2009. I'm signing up for some internet site; I don't rightly remember which one, but the site's asking me to create a username and I want one that's unique to me. I flip through the pages of the journal I got at camp and still write in, and I stop on the page where I've taped the card.

That's it! I'll use the card. But to put as my username theaceofhearts is altogether too mundane and in all likelihood already taken. I need something original. So I look at the familiar ace of hearts shape and imagine how I would type that. Perhaps if I used the well-known emoticon for a heart: A<3? No, special characters aren't allowed. And then it hits me, spell out A<3. Acelessthan3 and my internet pseudonym is born. Incorporation

It was around this time that I started talking to a rather tech-savvy friend who convinced me to sign up for several more social networking and data storage sites, each requiring a username. By now I'd become fond of Acelessthan3. It's distinctive and with the creation of my plurk , thanks to my enrollment in a literature class called Nanotexts, and twitter accounts had gained a level of personality as I wrote through Aceless.

When I started designing and silk-screening my own t-shirts, A<3 became my signature so you would know it was an Acelessthan3 original print. When I make mix CDs for friends, I always take the time to create cover art to go with it and invariably sign the bottom with "An Acelessthan3 Original Mix." Hell, I've even begun to sign personal letters with Danny A heart (since I don't know the coding to make an actual heart appear there, with the heart being underneath the A in true card style). If I weren't so comfortable in my identity as Acelessthan3, I'd be worried about this overlap.

Cartomancy

For the past few weeks, I’ve been attempting to teach myself cartomancy or card reading: Tarot’s idiot younger brother, and to say the least it’s an adventure. The closest I’ve ever gotten to divination before has been those little paper fortune tellers people made in elementary school, so I’m finding there’s a lot of history to this.



As an abridged version of the tarot deck, people have been using playing cards for fortune telling for almost as long as they’ve been around. No source is exactly sure whether they were developed first for games or divination, but the deck of cards have been around for at least 600 years and used for both.

Now, I know there are some who would argue that the mathematical laws of statistics make this kind of fortune telling a load of crock. Statistically speaking, you have the same 1 in 52 chance of drawing any one card first; however, I found one site that gave me some food for thought:

“Statistical laws imply that a deck, properly shuffled, will yield the same chance of a given Card being drawn. But the key to this axiom is that this is true – but it is a law of averages; if you draw a Card from a deck ten thousand times, you’ll find that each Card has roughly the same chances of being drawn … but for small numbers, the Universe has a method to communicate with us.”
- Excerpted from the Arcana Arcanorum

Pair that with the hundreds of different spreads used by those consulting the cards and there are near infinite combinations that can be interpreted by someone who knows what each card is said to represent.

Being that I’m a novice, I’m not yet very good at reading the cards. In fact, I wrote all the meanings on the cards to save me the trouble of looking them up every time I do a reading.

All the same, it’s a good distraction when I’m bored or unable to sleep or just have a nagging question that I don’t know who to ask. So excuse me while I shuffle up and start reading.