Melanie Anne Phillips

Well, it's been a hell of a last ten years.  But things are better now.  In fact, as of today. Basically, all the crap I've had to deal with and knock down pieces of, one by one is now behind me.  The last scheduled commitment from since we moved from Oregon back to California for business about three months ago was completed today.  And so, I find myself full of energy with some money in the bank and ready to grab life by the something or other. So, while I went for months without posting things here, I'm back again (among other things). This blog was supposed to be my catch-all for every creative thing I did in any field and also for all the cool things I come across on the Internet, hence, "Life and Times" as it says on the masthead. But, I got blocked up because I wanted a real chronology and everything I ever created before was backlogged and unorganized.  So, I dumped a bunch of it here, but that wasn't very satisfying as there was no way to see ...

I like a clean ship.  But life isn't like that much.  Especially these days with all the gigabytes of information one carries around.  It's worse than possessions.  With material things, at least they can be crammed into a storage facility where you know you still have everything but just can't quite get at it very easily. But your digital life is another story.  With all the different web sites, blogs, and the social media, everything you've created, everything you've expressed about yourself - hell, you're whole personality - your SELF, is spread all over creation, a bit here, a byte there, and there's no single place you can go to get it if you want it. Things get lost that way, out of site (sic) out of mind.  There's got to be a better way.  Wouldn't it be nice if every time you created anything, a blog entry, a photo, a sound recording, a video, a caption for a picture, a personal journal entry - whatever - that it could simultaneously: 1. b...

Okay, so I've been working about six hours now on this archive project, trying to get all my creative works and personal history (family photos and such) up on one place on the internet in a form where it can be accessed by both date and topic. And I've accomplilshed nothing. Oh, I've tried myriad of ways, but it keeps coming down to this: it's a hell of a lot of work! Now, it's one thing to spontaneously create something and toss it up on a blog or Facebook or Google+ or YouTube or Twitter.  But, it is about ten times as much work (and no creativity involved) in archiving it and organizing it. So, rather than make the archive organized and accessible, I've made a radical decision: I'm going to put things on my internet archive, but leave them disorderly and inaccessible.  The point of the archive is not really to show all my crap along with the jems, but just to ensure that nothing is ever lost due to one of the aforementioned social network sites c...

Here's another thought...  I'm finding it absolutely frustrating to take every single posting or journal entry that I make originally on the internet (such as this one) in the very convenient form of this blog system and then try to reproduce it in my home page archive in some form such as in a Word document.  What a pain in the ass! On the one hand, I want a permanent record of this stuff that can't be deleted at the whim of a company, on the other hand, who wants to spend five times as long documenting each thought as it took to originally think of it and post it? What's more, I still haven't figured out a good way to present this stuff.  I started with a page called "Chronology" and though I have tried dozens of ways to organize it, they all suck.  For example, if I create two columns - one for a creative timeline of what I invent and the second for a personal history of what's going on day to day, though it clearly shows the side by side relati...

On the day before the New Year, I continue to give a lot of thought about my key focus for the year to come.  Last year I determined that 2011 was to be my year of organization for all my creative endeavors, family history, personal interests, etc.  And that effort was largely successful as I have now gathered all of those materials into boxes, into foldes on my computer, and online on my web site, blog, and various social networks.  But just having the material organized, I'm finding, is not sufficient.  Rather, it means nothing unless it is contextualized and presented in some consistent accessible fashion.  Through all of these decades I've been a little fount of creativity and documentation, snapping photos, shooting videos, inventing quoatable aphorisms on Twitter.  And I've saved all of and, as of the end of the Year of Organization, has gathered it all together.  But it is hardly accessible, not grouped in any useful form, and much of it exsit...

Illume By Melanie Anne Phillips In the quiet of the night, My heart wakens, Flying free above a land I do not know. And yet, familiar is the realm below. It stirs some long forgotten harmony, Of hazy evenings past. There was a time, (do not lament), there is a time again…. Here, in this moment, this feeling, I soar above my mind, Upon the winds of whimsy. An open heart, Free and clear, The moment, the moment, unending. All is transient, yet what remains? Is it the ripples of our passing, That holds the truth of us? Perhaps when our essence, Resounds against the rocks of other souls, Do we, ourselves, take form? Or is concept , That unique beat of each singular heart, Sufficient to the task, alone? Soliloquy, conceived, received Which most embodies substance? Does form outweigh the raw emergence of experience? Or are they twins, Joined at the thought, ‘twixt heaven and earth, And me and you? We bob ...