So long and farewell, but come on over for lots more of the same.

As you should know by now if you’ve been paying any attention, Tom and I are getting married this Saturday, September 2, 2006 at Loudonville Community Church. We’ll be heading to Cape Cod for the week and then back to New York City to take up real (and improved) life at home in Brooklyn.

So, I’m changing my name. I won’t be Alissa Clark anymore. I’ll be Alissa Wilkinson. (It sounds like a writer, right?) This URL has therefore become obsolete.

Therefore:
Update your bookmarks to tomandalissa.com!

We’ll be co-blogging there - I’ll be writing the vast majority of the content, as I spend more time in front of the computer, and Tom will be popping in and doing a good bit of photoblogging. We will also be adding richer content, including reviews of film, music, and books, combined photo albums, and general mayhem and fun. alissaclark.com will remain active for at least a year so that people can find me.

So update your bookmarks! tomandalissa.com.

A few minutes after Tom walked in, he looked at me, and said, You know, we’re getting married in like, a week?

Yes, we are. A week and a day.

Last night we had artichokes and ginger chicken and watched The Talented Mr. Ripley, which I’d never seen and Tom hadn’t seen in about nine years, I guess. (What? Freshman year of high school was that long ago?) Great movie. What a cast. I want to read the book now.

We looooove our Mukka Express. So yummy, so easy to clean, sooo good.

I went to a workshop at the Manhattan Center yesterday given by Edward Tufte, who is to information design what Jakob Nielsen is to web usability. In other words, he is the man. And I got all four of his books as part of the conference fee, which is awesome. And it was a day “off”, which is always a good break.

We bought our surrogate wedding rings yesterday in the East Village. The ones we really want are just way out of our price range right now and needed a lead time that was almost longer than our engagement, so we figured we’d just go for the gritty version for now and get the real ones when we can.

Other wedding things are coming along. We’re doing what we’ve termed the “burn party” on Saturday night with Ken and Sarah at the apartment. W00t w00t.

We’re in single digits today.

To make a long story short, we bought a lot of furniture this weekend - a lot of it discounted. We assembled it last night and now we are awaiting the (cloudlike pillowtop) mattress delivery on Friday. I will be happy when I can sleep on a bed again. Our couch is a little . . . short (though otherwise surprisingly cushy). It’s great to have at least half the apartment in semi-order, and a DVD player and a TV and a couch. I feel like a grownup, albeit a grownup inhabiting a cute shoebox.

We also saw Little Miss Sunshine, which was brilliant and hilarious and off-kilter and the best movie I’ve seen all year, and Half Nelson, which was brilliantly acted but not as good as I wanted and expected it to be.

Dad update: he is doing outpatient therapy (which means if he’s feeling ok, he may even be able to make the wedding!), and he’s in good spirits when I talk to him but he’s uncomfortable physically and not really able to sleep. Pumping arsenic into your body isn’t the most energy-giving activity in the world.

I was out yesterday, working from home and awaiting the furniture delivery, so when I got in this morning I was thrilled to discover that our Bialetti Cappuccino maker (in silver, not spotted) was delivered, as well as our VillaWare Uno Belgian Waffle Maker (big pockets!). Wooha! As I told Laura, we are highfalutin’ peeps now.

Constant aboveground travel numbs the senses to all the beauty, I think. I drove thirty miles every day through fields and forests and a quaint old city for four years of college and rarely saw what was outside my window; and now, when I go back, I’m stunned by how lovely it is to see the sky and the trees. I’m frustrated that I can’t find those greens and blues in tin cans to slather on my walls. And that there’s no texture that’s like the river’s ridged limpidity.

Most of it lately is from the streaming direct almost-autumn sunlight (anticipating the perfect New York fall and soft sweaters and the ability to sip hot coffee in the morning again) and the fact that this autumn will start with the most blatantly life-changing event I’ve ever experienced, to date, and I think it will be all the more reason to love this season.

Anyhow, if you don’t know what it is, if you haven’t experienced C.S. Lewis’ “joy” or Emily’s “flash” then track the light, see through your windows, experience texture, unbind your wonder-member and fall in love again.

I am beginning to write my life story
On blank sheets of paper
The one that I write everyday
Whether or not I pick up a pen
The days: pages
The nights: illustrations
My mouth: dialogue
The years: chapters

Characters come and go
The protagonist which is me
The antagonist which is me

Somedays I lose the plot
And flounder
I can’t remember why I dreamed of what I now have
Joyless hours lay about
Like fish on the bank of a river
Gills no longer even heaving
And these are the pages I wish I could leave out
Pages where nothing much happens
Pages where I sabotage myself
With muddled thinking
And lack of will
And the pale pasty flowers of malaise
I paint all over my walls
With the paintbrush called
What if
If only
Instead of
What is

But every writer knows we have to write to find out
We have to write to discover what wants to happen
We have to write to know where the story needs to go
We have to write to learn why we are here
We have to write to find we are not alone

And a few days back I had an epiphany
I am not going to talk about my epiphany with anyone
Because I have a long list of failed epiphanies
That I talked about too soon

But in the meanwhile
Here are a few reasons why I might bother to get out of bed
I can work to serve my future children
If I should ever have any
Give them the gift of passion and persistence
In my own life’s work
I can write to bring some heart and warmth to others
However few
I can strum music to make the world a little wider for my friends
I can fling handfuls of muddy joy at a whitewashed church
That all too often misses the point
And missed the point again
A church that would rather be white than alive
I can give back what I was given and let it be multiplied

I want to put on this threadbare tuxedo and serve
Is this not what any good film does
That makes us want to watch our own lives
And take care not to miss the good parts
Any song that makes us want to pull the car over to the side of the road
Any book that someone labored and poured over
That makes us weep and smile together
A painting that makes us breathe deeply
The air sweeter because of its existence
(Close your eyes and still see it)

These are all gifts that were ultimately the work of servants
Whether or not they knew what they were doing
They served a thirsty world a glass of water
The best they could offer
Surprising Jesus and even themselves

There is at times much dogged effort that goes into creating good things
But by mopping our brows with the backs of our hands
And continuing to run after something that we sometimes cannot name
We hope to see our love made physical
Find our feet have left the ground
And hello, we are suddenly being skyjacked by joy (are we not)
And it is fleeting

And by doing the least we could do
We occasionally find ourselves doing more than we knew how
Last first
Lost found
Unbound

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls,
Roll your eyes:
Now it’s your turn

Linford Detweiler (from here)

So Tom and I went up to visit my parents this weekend, mostly to see my Dad before he starts his treatments. Dad is holding up ok, though he’s feeling worse as time goes on, which is to be expected. Mom said he had an EKG yesterday before his first treatment and he’ll have to continue to have EKGs because his heart has trouble handling the arsenic. (Isn’t it just great to think that they’re pumping poison into my dad?) He is doing outpatient, for now, and so far is fine at home.

We had a good weekend, hanging out with my family and some family friends, eating a lot of junk food, watching Junebug, buying wedding shoes, getting lots of people fitted for suits and tuxes, and drinking really random things at Starbucks. I had an iced caramel macchiato for the first time, which is much better than the too-sweet hot version.

I have a good-sized smattering of work to do this week; programming, design, writing, and oh yeah, my job. We also need to actually buckle down and buy a bed this week, and probably curtains. Mmm. I want sleep.

Or maybe just better coffee.

Speaking of coffee, Tom and I had a discussion on the train ride home that I keep thinking about, regarding beverages and their place in relationships and social circles. Specifically, we were thinking about the differences between the effect a cup of coffee and a glass of wine have on the brain. It ended with the idea that a mugful of coffee sharpens the intellect and makes you think better on your toes (it doesn’t really keep me awake - it just makes me smarter), but a glass of wine makes you slow down, stop thinking about all the things that you need to do and all the circumstances of your day, and focus on the conversation at hand and the person in front of you.

I guess it’s not that interesting, but it’s mildly intriguing to think about.

I seriously need a haircut. I don’t think I’ve had one since April, and my hair is yicky. It just needs a trim. I am so haircut-o-phobic and afraid to let anyone near my hair with scissors (which explains why I go to Bumble & Bumble, since they cut with razors). Anyhow.

I don’t claim to be a brilliant writer - or even a completely grammatical one, which should be abundantly obvious from this humble blog - but I do a fair amount of editing, and I’m admittedly rougher on other people’s work than my own. And here are my top ten stylistic tips for aspiring writers that I’ve been compiling for a while, many of which are scavenged from Strunk & White but keep popping up.

This list could also be called “how to not let your editor know you’re an amateur”.

1. Don’t ever say “the fact that”. It weakens your sentence. You don’t need to point out that it’s a fact if it is a fact, because facts, by nature, are self-evident.

2. Same with “very”. Please, use very very sparingly, and only when it’s very necessary to prove your point.

3. Cut, cut, cut. And then cut some more. Everyone is too long-winded in their first draft, so please, cut it down by one-third. Say what you mean, and be done with it.

4. Stop using adjectives and adverbs, in general, unless they’re key to the phrase and your readers’ understanding. You may think it sounds nice, but it’s just too dang wordy.

5. Find out what the passive voice is, and then don’t use it.

6. Please learn your/you’re, its/it’s, and there/their/they’re. This was something we learned in the third grade.

7. Don’t ever use all-caps, and refrain from using italics unless you have a compelling reason. Your phrasing should provide the emphasis for the word. If it doesn’t, revise.

8. Please use paragraph breaks. And remember, there’s rarely a reason to have more than five sentences in a paragraph. I’d rather have a too-choppy essay that I can paste together than a huge block of text that I just can’t read.

9. Do not use cliched metaphors - “big as a house”, “tired as a dog”, . They make no impact on the reader because they’re commonplace. Find a new description, something that will prompt a doubletake in your reader and make them smile.

10. Learn to punctuate.

</steps off soapbox>

And please, ignore my grammar mistakes in this entry. :)

P.S. Little-known fact about me: I think one of my life ambitions is to edit a literary journal, like Image.

It’s just, the longer I’m gone, the more I realized how it really messed up my head.

Add it to the list of “the ways RPI messed me up” - I become easily obsessed with projects. I can’t rest till it’s done. I feel horribly guilty if I’m doing anything other than working on the project.

Case in point; I’ve been working on the IAM website, doing some major brain surgery. I’m rusty on my PHP/MySQL code, but the gears are slowly creaking and turning. So I’ve been spending a lot of time working on it in the last four days or so - in fact, most of my time.

Now, this is a good thing. I like doing this work (it’s creative and it lets me try new things at a relatively low risk and they’re actually excited about implementing web 2.0 ideas). I’m enjoying it.

But suddenly, I’m back in RPI mode. What is RPI-mode, you might ask? The best example is that infamous capstone project of the fall of my senior year, for which I did a whole stinkin’ lot of coding, architecture, and documentation. I was also working two jobs (both coding), as well as interviewing for full-time employment (which meant I was booked up or out of town a lot more than I should have been, as there were a LOT of companies who interviewed me), and oh yeah, I had three other classes.

In other words, if I wasn’t sleeping - and that was “usually” - I was coding, or talking to people about coding, or sitting in classes where we talked about coding. I often spent eight to ten hours a night after class and work coding. Sixteen to seventeen hours a day.

I couldn’t read a book, I couldn’t watch a movie without feeling guilty about not coding. My social obligations dropped to the bare minimum because of work. I remember sitting down and working out that if I stopped sleeping, I might have a chance in hell of actually finishing all that work.

Of course, it ended, and we got an A, and I did graduate that spring, and all is happy. And I think it’s important for people to work their butt off in college, if only to realize how not-hard they have to work when they get out into the “real world”. This whole full-time job is a piece of cake compared to earning a degree at RPI. And by gum, when you earn a degree there, you really earn it.

On top of it, as any RPI student knows, illness, bad weather, terrorist attacks, family conflicts, sleep deprivation, and pretty much anything short of death is no excuse for not showing up at class or turning in an assignment late. Several professors would drop you an entire letter grade for missing more than one class.

In short, RPI turned me into an involuntary workaholic.

So anyhow. I am learning, right now, that it is actually ok to take time off for recreation and enjoyment, even if you have a project in the works. It’s ok to schedule some time to do the work, and then to stop doing it when that time is up. It’s even ok to have to push a deadline off when you have family/life conflicts. People are nice and they understand and they will not drop your letter grades if you can’t finish everything.

Other ways RPI messed me up:
- I’m still a solid A- type. We didn’t have grade modifiers when I was there, so a 90 was as good as 100, and a 90 was about all I could pull on the energy I had left (except in the infamous-and-still-bitter-about-it cases of Computer Science 1, Calculus, Introduction to Literature, Database Systems, and Introduction to Logic). At any rate, I want to be better than that.
- Saying you earned a “business” or “management” degree still prompts involuntary snickering, even though I know that, in all reality, you probably worked hard and learned a lot for your degree.
- I am only now recovering from a serious allergy to the color pink.
- I’m constantly catching myself mentally referring to technology as a “real job”.
- The sheer amount of women on the street and in the subway still surprises me.
- I have a hard time keeping myself from getting all patronizing when people ask me technical questions.
- I snicker at people who use IE.
- I’m still figuring out how to act around girls who didn’t go to RPI.
- I am never going to be able to settle for a “good” computer. I’ll always need an awesome one. :P

SAVE THE DATE: Thursday afternoon, February 22, 2007 through Saturday evening, February 24, 2007 for the next IAM Conference in NYC! Topic will be “Redemptive Culture” and key note speaker will be Jeremy Begbie, Founder and director of the international research project, “Theology Through the Arts,” and author of Voicing Creation’s Praise: Towards a Theology of the Arts.

Other presenters include David Hegeman, author of Plowing in Hope: Toward a Biblical Theology of Culture (thenativetourist.blogspot.com); Joshua Trent, Chief of Staff of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services); and possibly the Limon Dance Company (TBD.) Location will be the Tribeca Performing Arts Center.

Tom and I will be there, come hell or high water, and you should be too. You’ll be sorry if you miss it.

Tonight I’ll go home and chug on through some more work for IAM - more fun, though I am much rustier on programming than I used to be. I did manage to get a pretty solid database structure together for them this week, and I just got a script working that logs users in and out, completely with mildly-encrypted password (woohoo!). I rock, verily, and sometimes.

After doing a little more with that, taking out my trash, and finishing a logo design for another client tonight, I think I may actually break down and read for a while. My brain is performing a meltdown from lack of real use, and I need to do something that does not involve sitting in front of a screen and jabbing at little black plastic squares.

I did, however, have some lovely writing-related news yesterday, and that brightened the day up considerably. A first: a real print article. (One of the profiles from the book I contributed to - Angela’s profile, in fact - will be in the next print issue of RELEVANT, and I’ll be credited under my married name, Wilkinson) But this is an article I’ve genuinely pitched and had accepted and not had the editor just quit returning my emails. Hurrah! More details when it gets closer.

I am slowly going through my weekly routine of eating everything in my refrigerator. I cleaned out most of the vegetables yesterday, though I have three yellow tomatoes in my fridge that need eating, and still have a bit of ice cream. I also suspect that a bunch of the food in my kitchen cabinets has seen better days (a lot of it was from Tom’s kitchen, which means it was bought when he lived in Boston, which was not recent) and need chucking.

Things have started disappearing from our wedding regstries! (Shameless plug 1 and 2.) We got the first one yesterday from some awesome friends:

We also have several wine goblets and the ice cream maker, which is good news for the future Wilkinson family. Tom is as in love with ice cream as I am with pizza, so now he can get it whenever he wants. Experimentation is the name of the game.

Lastly, the dude who made this hat has my utmost respect.

Call me a cold New Yorker, and then please, please, stop standing in the middle of the sidewalk.