Author: tiphane

Aurora

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I wrote this while listening to the music “Aurora” by Ola Gjeilo, after questioning a personal experience as real, and I remembered seeing faint aurora borealis and questioning that and other unusual visions in the sky. Receive the light waves undulating your body Like a lullaby singing along The pathways of your nervous system It is real, for you and no one else That vision, you didn’t make it up You are the only witness of these lights The colors, as you perceived them, are unique To your biology, your senses, your life within and without Let them become part of you As we go into the night. Image source: pexels.com, https://www.pexels.com/photo/dawn-by-the-stream-26646276/

Dancing in the Parade

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I danced with a group of 200 people in the 2026 San Francisco Pride Parade!  It came at a particularly difficult moment for me.  I turned 70, and solidified my presence in the here and now, assiduously attending my modern dance classes as well as developing a personal choreography for the East Bay Queer Open Mic.  I became more comfortable learning and assimilating new choreographies (which change every month).  When Pride month came, I had been going through a roller coaster of emotions and had been forced to stop all news sources, especially those telling me about the repression by the U.S. government and making us the target of hostile and uninformed opinions.  I was questioning whether I would even show up at all.  I was beaten. When I learned about Rhythm and Motion’s Dance with Pride program, I hesitated.  Was it a fitness program like Zumba classes, in which case it might be hard on my joints?  Was it going to be posing new difficulties that I have when I’m trying a new class …

Beauty in the Mind

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A beautiful boy appeared From deep into memories of a time when Beautiful boys couldn’t be friends, Pulled apart by words insinuating Who they were should be hidden Deep into their young minds. The beautiful memory sank in a sea of denial Called the ordinary life, a mask To hide behind, until It became safe to retrieve And cherish. Remodeling the mind, Now free of insinuations, Beautiful thoughts rest Like dreams on soft pillows Keeping them unbroken and Protected from invaders.

Beautiful Boy

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My mind beelines to a time when Beautiful boys like us could play together Before they were made strangers and Wrapped themselves in protective layers My mind beelines to a Pride Sunday when I followed Your beeline to booths filled with people like us, With new possibilities ringing left and right As in a pinball machine, activating dormant feelings A monarch butterfly flew in our path like a guide To reveal our inner beauty My mind beelines to an imaginary time dimension When liberated from our cocoons we savor every minute Flying and fluttering together, As imperfectly as the monarchs in a monarchy Of two, taking turns at revealing a new leaf here, A new burgeoning flower there, On trees growing strong together with deepening roots My mind beelines to an old image of me When you captured my essence today Of the beautiful boy that had gone dormant For a long time until We found each other

musique et poésie (1)

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I’m starting this series today because I heard some learners of French were sharing poetry, and I keep a playlist of songs from mostly 50 years ago that I listened to back then, when I was young! 1- Les Feuilles Mortes This is a well-known song and poem by Jacques Prévert that you’ll hear translated as Autumn Leaves, however the translation leaves a whole lot of it out. So get the one sung by Yves Montand (French actor whom I remember from movies like César et Rosalie and Z). I don’t know if this link will work for Apple Music: https://music.apple.com/us/song/les-feuilles-mortes/1444874656 It was also sung by Juliette Greco, Edith Piaf, and many others. It’s a song about remembering happy days spent together on the sea shore (“et la mer efface sur le sable, les pas des amants désunis”), the fallen leaves an image for thoughts, feelings and remembrances that have since died out and that the cool wind from the north blows away. Or something like that… 2- Je t’aime, moi non plus This one …

More Bags!

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Lately I’ve been making grocery-size bags with the bottom made of a layer of a rigid mesh sewed inside the canvas, which you can’t see because of the lining. I just finished this one (I think I will keep it for myself!) But if you want one I offer these two at the Shawl-Anderson Dance Center online auction!

Do Me a Favor and State Your Pronouns

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In the space of the first two weeks of the Trump regime, they have managed to eliminate DEI not only across government agencies, but also on corporations. Any mention of the existence of trans and non-binary people have been removed from official documents, and everyone was surprised to see LGBTQI+ suddenly was truncated to LGB (hint: some wealthy donors are gay). We ceased to exist. I’m not too worried… They’re wrecking so much that they are going to provoke much bigger crises. I’m actually relieved that they’re erasing us, it won’t be on the minds of tourists improvising as gender police. It was thanks to DEI trainings that I started using They/Them or She/Her pronouns (this regime also put an end to all DEI efforts and even blame DEI for causing plane collisions – it’s code for saying they only want white men everywhere, preferably the ones without a fully developed frontal lobe, but I digress). I don’t say “She/Her” alone, because in reality I am afraid of a backlash. I concede that I make …

The Elevator in my building

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The elevator in my building is relatively simple to operate… But judging from the occasional bell ring I can hear from my apartment, people get confused with the bottom row of the panel. The buttons for the five floors are close enough to their legend and distant enough from each other to make it a clear choice. There’s even Braille although I would have to check with a blind person to know if it’s working for them. Fortunately they thought of putting a star next to the number 1. Too often I see, especially in buildings with a basement, an assortment of letters the user has to guess… Sometimes there’s LL or B for the basement, and G for Ground Floor which could just be 1, because this one user (me) keeps thinking it’s for Garage while LL suggests Lobby… The problem with the bottom row is that it contains both a frequently used pair of buttons to request door opening and closing, as well as two buttons that trigger the alarm. It isn’t clear …

DYI User-Centered Design and Usability

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Too late in my working life to have any effect on my work, I took a class from Richard I Anderson, a survey of user-centered design and usability research, which at the time were relatively new. Designers were relying on their own instincts or copying from others who dominated the market, and more often than not Computer Science curriculum never included the possibility that we were making our users’ lives more difficult by imposing our views on them of how they should interact with our creations. To make matters worse, our employers insulated departments from each other, and conflicts would arise about “who owns the user.” Was it the industrial designer, hired by Marketeers to entice consumers to buy the product, or the Engineer who applied their techniques to the best of their knowledge? I was neither of them, relying mostly on intuition (not really great either), and never being able to impose my views (I came to specialize in fixing other people’s software because I could take it home and rewrite it with clarity, …