Month: May 2010

This has not been much of a holiday weekend. I worked Saturday, and had a few side jobs today that kept me out until the early evening. Tomorrow, I hope to do something relaxing, before my three day pre-Maine grindhouse.

Perhaps because of the Memorial nature of the weekend, I was quite contemplative today. Most of my running around was in upper Weschester, and, due to the nature of travel in this part of the world, that necessitated a vehicle. My folks were nice enough to let me borrow one, but that meant walking around places I once haunted, and now mostly reminisce over.

In a single day, I visited:

-the first bar i was ever thrown out of, and later banned from. It is a nail salon now. Talk about a letdown.
-three places i almost died… All were vehicularly related, and all near misses (two got me into the hospital)
-the spot where I lost my virginity
-the first house I lived in after my folks’ place (I was at their place too)
-the house I lived in with my first fiancee
-the server room I built up from nothing but a card table and a power strip
-the pool and pond I frequented every summer for over a decade
– a 7/11, which has been the only thing consistently open in my parent’s town for my lifetime

It is a lot to contemplate in a day – all the might-have-beens and odd twists of chance and fate. On the way out of the 7/11, I was asked by a local kid (who, in hindsight was probably not born when I was pulling similar tricks) to buy him a Dutchie, which are now almost 2$. I obliged, enlivened, somehow, by the exuberance of youth and pot in opposition to the weight of time weiging on my contemplations.

The event I worked yesterday was for the 30th anniversary of CU’s graduate program for Arts Administration. There were several speakers (one of whom was the founder of the program), but in all the speeches, there was one speaker in particular, whose words resonated with me.

She was talking about dichotomies, and how often, people feel the need to choose between extremes – rigor and creativity or nurture and nature. She visualized these dichotomies, during her speech, using her hands, holding them far apart vertically, she visualized the weight and distance often generated around such decisions. To show how she dea

lt with such situations, she brought her hands around 90 degrees, into a horizontal line, then brought them together.

This gesture (some of her speech was about dance and gesture, and how the two were historically interrelated), to her, represented the way to overcome a lack of willingness to compromise on seemingly disconnected extremes, perspectives, or agenda.

My memory road wanderings left me thinking about this point in her speech. I cannot regain the trappings of youth, but, at the same time, the knowledge and perspective I have traded that mantle for are quite dear. The continuing payments required to maintain that upkeep are what make one yearn for the freedom of youth, perhaps, but the powerlessness of that time in life was almost like a slap in the face outside of 7/11.

I am trying to be the joined hands of these two ideas – youthful memory and cynical experience. There is a middle ground, but it is transient, like a rainbow or fogbank. You cannot dwell there, only occassionally glimpse and reminisce as your heartstrings dance.

To all those, before me, and now, who gave of their lives, or gave their lives, so I can work and walk and think about all this, there are no sufficient words to adequately encapsulate the debt incurred in that exchange. Suffice to say that my meanderings, and the memories of all those intertwined in them, as well as the livleyhoods of all those close to me, exist at the whim of your sacrifices. For that, there should be more than a paid vacation day of barbecues. Accept my paltry thanks, and hopes that when the check arrives, you are/were satisfied with how the bill is paid.

They must be planning a really weird talent show in the afterlife…

Tonight, A. and I finished the last episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.  I forgot how good it was, the end of that series, particularly the rendition of "My Way" on the horn, crossfaded with the show’s anthem.  One of the things that has been bouncing all over the ‘net today is the end of Lost.  Honestly, I don’t give a shit – gave up on that show after three episodes.  What does interest me though, is something I noticed watching DS9, which, tangentially, is connected to the end of that series as well.

Time.

There are a bunch of flashbacks in that last episode of DS9, which jump across a number of seasons.  The show happened over less than a third of my life – it was something that I can link, season by season, with things that were going on, in my world.  Now, A. and I got through the whole thing in what, a little more than half a year?  It was still enjoyable, but less remarkable.  The digitization of episodic shows have changed the viewing interaction – that doesn’t increase or decrease the production values, cast, or writing, but it does change the way those things affect you.

I guess I have come to realize something that is a pretty big negative about the "on demand" phenomena.  The art (or entertainment) which one absorbs in an episodic manner (which is part of the enjoyment) becomes less relevant, or, at least, less poignant, looking back, because there is no waiting for the next episode.  I’m not advocating cutting back to network schedules and commercials, but there must be some sort of medium in here somewhere…

This is something the Losties can relate too – they had to wait for that episode – happy or not, they slogged through seasons to get to it.

I had a similar revelation finishing the last of Stephen King’s Dark Tower novels. Without delving into spoilers, the circumstances of that last book impacted me because I had been reading those characters half my life – I was invested in what happened to them, in a way I don’t think I would have been if I sat down to read the whole thing in a weekend.  Same with Dune, or Wheel of Time, or Game of Thrones.  I’ve read entire series end-to-end, and thoroughly enjoyed them, but they were not as poignant as the ones where I slavered after the next book’s release.

Fiction is part of our familiar world – when it grows as we grow, it affects us, just like atmosphere or what is in the water.  It changes us, over time, as our perceptions and interests change, over time.  I wonder how that ebb and flow will be altered, as attention spans grow ever shorter, and the crap to chrome ratio reverses itself, before it is all meaningless drivel, with an occasional high point of land sticking out here and there before it is eroded.

Content may be king, but patience is the government-in-exile.

Many moons ago, I became one of those LJ users who got a lifetime account.  This was a good thing, I thought, to have a permanent space that was floating out on the net, that I wouldn’t have to maintain any infrastructure for.  I made the switch to LJ in 2002, and, since then, have been a faithful user.

Unfortunately, recent events (mostly surrounding Sixapart’s handling to EDMD) have left me realizing that I’m tethered, rather than free.

There are still a lot of people here where LJ is my primary form of communication, or keeping up-to-date.  I am not leaving, but I am going to start crossposting.  I set up an actual blog on my website (which is a two year old project which dies today), which will sydicate here.  You can still comment here, if you want, but I set up openid so you don’t have to keep logging in after the first time, if you want to comment on my blog.

This, of course, presumes that there is something I say worth commenting on.  Supposing that is true, I’m working on making it as simple as possible.

So A. and I went apartment hunting today, ostensibly to scout neighborhoods, and see what we thought was a decent fit.
We ended up putting down a deposit on a 1200+ sqft duplex with a washer, dryer, 2.5 bathrooms, and a freakin backyard!

I cannot say I am thrilled to leave Manhattan. All I can hope is that I can entice some of you to no-mans-land on the occassional weekend for barbecue. It will be a schlep to get there, but a pleasure once you are there.

For the record, I am calling hate on the G train in advance. I will likely be walking to the C, or getting a bike, and back-and-forthing to the 2/5.

Now I just need to figure out how to swing paying two rents for two months, and being able to afford movers.

Whee. I just gotta keep looking at this pic to remind myself why I am doing this.

this makes me hope someone will buy one, rip the audio out, and create an android hack.

was one of the days you wish you could take back, right from the getgo.

It is funny how sometimes the best mirrors in life come from re-discovering people who have known you well, for long periods of time, but haven’t talked to you recently. While I was in California, I met up with someone who I had last seen when I was a very little kid. N. was an astounding human being, and one who I owe a great deal of correspondence. As an adult, I have a completely different view of, and interest in speaking to this person, than I did when I was wee.

I’ve had a couple re-connects in the past week, that have left me wondering who, or more specifically, what I have become since last I saw them. Our society so often labels people by profession. From that angle, I guess I am a technologist – but that is also a part of who I am, and what I am about. It seems an inefficient container – all cellophane and impossible to open without a screwdriver and a jackknife. I’m more than that – I write, I game, I volunteer, I take pictures, I answer questions… Mostly, I try to make people laugh. I haven’t thought about doing that for a living when I was a kid, back before I first met Neil.

I think the central challenge to that whole “What am I?” connundrom comes from work – spending more time than anything else on a given week doing something so that the remainder of the time can be spent fed, in shelter, preferably with additional ameneties. I don’t know how to make a transition from thinking of myself as a patchwork quilt of interests and talents, to a holistic picture of a person. I’m good at some things, I suck at others – I’ve never wholly dedicated myself to any one interest, talent, or aspect of my life – I think that has kept it interesting, for sure, but it has also left me wondering if I’m missing something. Given unlimited funds, I’d be an entropenour, instead of a technologist, and, shortly thereafter, I’d become a bartender at the best bar that never turned a profit.

I’ve always kinda wanted to be a blacksmith – I bet that would probably create some pretty holistic changes…

Part of all this crap is why I am going back to school – to get that one thing that says “someone formally recognises you are a smartypants about this one thing”. I think that is pretty dull, honestly, and am kind of dreading the process – most of my academic pursuit, at this point, is limited to preventing opportunity denied. Beecause that “work-mirror” refuses to see people for what they have done, but, rather, focus first on if you have gone through the expected processes, then, second, where you did those things, and eventually, you come around to “so what experiences have you had?”. I like to think that the patchworks that I am is what makes me interesting, and that the experiences and wild stories are far more important than the things so many people have in common, with blends of tiny difference.

I need to make some lists, and get some shit done – hopefully, I can hold off my life preventing me from finishing them, as it often does. The two big things on my horizon are Maine and Moving – after that, I should be in the gulf of summer, which has always been a productive time for me – hopefully I can tap that to bring some of these half-developed embreos to ambulatory disasters.

Hopefully. Seems odd writing it. I’ve always been a pessimist – my greatest comfort being that the real world has to work really hard to come up with scenarios that match my “worst-case”. Maybe that needs to change too, for me to get through everything I want to, in the time alloted me.

Maybe. I don’t know. If anyone finds the user’s manual lying around, please forward me a copy so I can dig up that answer.

I bet the Mayor’s press aide is really happy that he turned Times Square into a pedestrian mall, and that he was in DC Saturday.