$disanpoter

consolidation

for those of you who don't pick this up off of facebook, i'm switching this blog over from typepad to here. it's silly to have both services when i have the time to use either so infrequently.

tilting at mountains

the nice thing about jet lag is that it builds solitude into even the most ambitious travel plans. like here on this overnight bus to bilbao with Bis sleeping, albeit fitfully, in the seat next to me, and darkness all around. it's close to 3 and i'm far from sleep. outside the terrain is growing hillier and more ragged, and i'm realizing the minor miscalculation in scheduling all our travels between destinations for times when i won't be able to take in the landscape. in the darkness, what i can mainly see are the texture of the wild grasses, the stretches between the larger bushes and trees, the smoother tracts of the dustier surfaces. they form a cadence in their passage across the bus window. It'll be interesting in the morning to see if it is as arid as this midnight vision suggest and it will hold any of the colors my mind anticipates...

a moment ago, we passed a random hill with 2 upright trees on it which looked almost exactly like an illustration of Don Quixote I once saw. i could be wrong, but i believe that's from an entirely different part of the country. just goes to show how willing a mind can be to find connections, yet it's still got me wondering about how much of what we see as fresh and new in works of art and literature is not so much to the credit of the creator as to their surroundings or the social context of their life - or not even that, so much as the difference (or differential, really) between what is familiar and real to them and what is familiar and real to us who are absorbing their work. not such a mind blowing thought, that...it's funny though, because i think it also highlights how much energy people can spend pursuing a contradictory ambitions of experiencing a different reality from their own (however temporarily) but also perpetually seeking out intersections among ones personal reality and that of others that serve only to reassure them that there is such a thing as commonality and communal experience.

where ever we are now along this route, there's a persistent glow along the horizon. it gives the impression of massive cities aglow, just behind the hills (or mountains, i suppose, though we're in them so i'm not sure of the right term, here), but then the road rises and the countryside is only vaguely dotted with towns or clusters. with the nature of my own thoughts, it's as if the landscape is playing tricks on me, feeding into my own skepticism about human connections. like it's winking at me.

...i'm going to have to read Don Quixote again; i remember too little of it...

mi bubble es tu bubble

in a few minutes, bis and i will be out the door and on an overnight bus to Bilbao and a 6 day excursion through el País Vasco - Basque Country, but the last hour or so has been a pleasant lull after a frenzied day trying to sort out lost luggage issues and buy a few replacement items to keep the cold out of my toes and the stink of over-worn clothing out of my nose.
christmas eve and christmas were surprisingly americanized since we spent our meals with other students in bistra's masters program, stopping by one girls apartment for a drink with the entirety of her boisterous and jovial family then having a more subdued dinner with another girl and her nuvo-hippie cousin. he was a nice guy and eager to share his recent experiences (and pictures) from burning man and a month long meditation training. after a photo tour that included several shots of the making of a plaster booty-monster, he very sincerely offered to walk us through a short meditation exercise. being christmas and all, we were up for delving into the somewhat spiritual, but i had a very difficult time keeping a straight face afterwards as we went around describing the ambiance and particularities of our imagined safe zone 'bubbles.' there's more to that, but the bus awaits....or won't, which is the real issue.

or not

i bailed on much of what i needed to get done this weekend. yesterday i was supposed to be out of the house and into work at 9, but instead i woke at 8:30, did some house things and by-passed work for housing works, where zack and i spent some time discussing the facebook "page" we're experimenting with to share some of our cooler finds. then i went to work for a few hours prior to heading up to a choral concert with betsy. it wasn't such a good concert so we ended up drinking sake and watching movies on demand until the wee hours - or until a disastrously mis-executed discussion turned argument on what it means that the pope is the head of the Church. that simmered down though, and we finished watching "A Nativity Story,"  which was mildly ridiculous on so many levels...
this morning, i did not get to work at 9 or go to the gym in compensation for missing ample time at either yesterday. we had brunch at noon at 107th street, instead, and got to work around 2. at that point, i decided that maybe it was 'okay' to spend time uploading collections of photos to my facebook albums, because, heck - i do care about the events of my life and the things i encounter. it matters to me, and perhaps maybe i deserve to be able to spend a sunday afternoon doing something other than trying to stick to a schedule based more on mitigating opportunity costs than on genuine desires to do any part of it at any point in time.

and that's the weekend. and now i'm off to hang out with my friends.

time addict

i could stop. i could. i don't deliberately fill up my weekends. i don't really run by a schedule, but the things that need to be done slip into the slots afforded them by the things that have times set by others. this is not my doing. it is not my fault that by friday morning, the free time available to me for the weekend has dwindled to nothing, and i stand in the doorway feeling like crying and hesitating to leave, forestalling the moment when i commit myself to the next 72 hours. tomorrow, unless i oversleep, i will leave the house at 9am and not return until well after 11. sunday if i am lucky and don't oversleep, i will have 4 hours of awake time at home to get ready for the week before leaving and not returning until 11 or midnight. i do this to myself. i do, but it still makes me want to cry.

when am i supposed to put up my collection of interesting advertisements and images? when am i going to draw all the functional products i wish the world had created already? when am i going to get my facebook project done or help with websites or finish stories or organize my apartment or learn about dolphins or persians or languages? i just need to stop doing things so i can accrue some time to do things. it never stops; it just changes.

okay. sorry. i'm done complaining.

a city full of unavailable options

i don't want to go home tonight. not yet. but there seems to be no alternative. both the bookstores i enjoy spending time in are busy with events tonight, and i don't have my gym clothes to be able to stop there instead. i asked some of my coworkers if they wanted to grab a drink and play pool, but they both said not tonight. one of them said possibly tomorrow, which i would like, though i have pottery class. the other scoffed at me, which makes me think 'not tonight' should mean never. i don't understand scoffing. it's not a reaction i have to other people. it assumes a preposterousness to the initial inquiry.  as a reaction, it's like the mirror of 'whatever.'   
most of my department is out for various reasons, as well, which is difficult. i am again without a supervisor and will be for at least a week. i've yet to fully adjust to the changes in scope and aim for my position, so not having guidance is fairly stressful. it's not that i don't have an idea of what needs to be done; it's that i don't always have access or authority.

dolphins and the dangers of clove oil

i have health insurance now. it's nifty. ironically, two days after the policy went into effect, my back molar flared up again with a serious toothache. it was late already, 9pm, and so i tried to treat it myself with extra strength tylenol and the topical application of clove oil. This did nothing for the pain, and at midnight, I decided it was worth going to the ER. From this I learned that prescription painkillers really work and are completely worth it. Though one should hoard them, once one has a bottle, because 5 hours in the ER waiting for simple prescription for anit-biotics...not so worth it. Before this, however, or rather after - but the damage was done before hand - i learned that too much clove oil will kill your taste-buds for days. I think I chemical burned my tongue. Literally nothing tastes. You know how they say 90% of taste is smell? So, not true...my coffee smells, my soup smells, my yogurt even smells - but on my tongue they are like the nutritionally enhanced powdered cardboard Meg had to eat in A Wrinkle in Time. So anyway, beware: clove oil is potent stuff.

In other news, last thursday while having drinks with some people from work, the conversation turned briefly to dolphins. Dolphins, it turns out, absolutely rock. They have language skills; they have an innate impulse to rescue or otherwise help not only other dolphins but sometimes people; and they have been believed to be people who got sick of human society and returned to the sea. I'm suddenly very interested in dolphins.

Also, I've decided I need to learn some very basic Spanish, since i'll be over there for a few weeks. If anyone has some recommendations on how to do this most effectively, let me know. Also, I'm starting a collection of ad encounters in my facebook photo albums and I've been working on that page for the sub-basement. So that's exciting...and i'm reading a book on Dadism and Surrealism which has me reflecting on the turbulence of those and surrounding times and wondering whether our own time is so rapidly shifting that it will fail to have any such distinctive peaks in trends or movements once it's a part of history. Jane Jacobs wrote a book called Dark Ages Ahead, which i have somewhere and haven't read. I think perhaps I should.

Also, I've been feeling lost lately. I realized a few weeks ago that I no longer have favorites, that I may never have had favorites. Those things I might call favorites aren't so much works i've enjoyed or found particularly moving or insightful or engaging; they're simply the ones that stick with me. Like A Famished Road, i didn't finish it the second time i went to read it, and yet images and perspectives from it continue to emerge as points of relevance in other conversations or encounters. What this means, i don't know. I wonder if the validity of 'exceptional' is diminishing within society.

 

location irritations

following up on the dorky data-based posts, i've spent a sizable chunk of the day researching options for a static resource that can be referenced dynamically to provide location information, because really, how many local, independently established copies of city-state-country data does the world need. it's a waste of effort and resources for every sales, product, mailing system to have it's own in-house set of tables for this information when they all must comply with rules and conventions established by national organizations. it's ridiculous and i resent the fact that i live in a world that hasn't come up with a better more widely adopted solution for this. oh...incidentally, this is a rant.

dreaming paras

i've been sitting downstairs at mcnally robinson today, ostensibly available for gift-wrapping (donations benefit housingworks), though little gift-wrapping has been requested. Garrison Keillor is upstairs singing something for a very happy crowd and the book sellers have been stopping by, chatting aimlessly, then going off on some book-sellery task through-out the evening. fortunately, they're chill enough to let me use the internet while i'm sitting here behind the counter, so i've been researching facebook applications and other information management topics for the dual purpose of fine-tuning the concept i have for a flashcard mashup application and finding some useful applications to extend the page we're putting together for the sub-basement project.

the flashcard application i have in mind would be different from most user made listing tools. it would simply provide a storing place for pairing of information; instead it would provide users with a place to store categorized transformations on public information. a user would create a list by pointing to a source url then specifying which fields/tags within the source information represented identifying information, detail information, and categorical information. These differentiations would then determine what information went on which side of the cards. cluster cards could be generated automatically from multiple identity records with the same category field values. categories would also be assimilated into a larger hierarchy that hopefully would facilitate merging of source data and sharing of lists. field values pointing to media files would automatically become identifier cards for such things as art history or music identification aids. finally, while users would always be free to point their list sets to a set of data they uploaded themselves, the hope would be that in forcing them to reference information not stored within the flashcard service, they would begin to seek out opportunities to leverage information maintained by subject authorities and the subject-matter authorities would respond by increasing the accessibility and utility of the data they manage.

outlook not so smart

sometimes business technology is stupid. in fact, frequently business technology is stupid. like this: microsoft exchange is fairly sophisticated in what it allows you to do for sharing standard mail objects across within your organization. it has quite sophisticated rule capabilities for sorting incoming mail as well and even some for out-going mail - but they don't have the very basic feature of negating selection criteria. you can't say do this for everything that is not such and such. now that might not seem like a terribly useful or necessary thing, but there are a few use-cases that could at least be set up as a standard option. like do this for all messages not sent within my organization. this would be seriously useful, for say, adding a v-card to messages sent to business partners, prospective clients, etc. it's ridiculous that not only doesn't it exist, but it can't be set up without some kind of macro call. it's such a simple thing...adding not to things. sql does it. and while we're on the subject...microsoft...shouldn't it really have been named macrosoft. seriously.

M is for MHOГO

my brain is fragmented this morning. i think this is the fault of the book i've gone back to reading after a bit of a non-fiction break. i've been having trouble reading through this book because within a paragraph of starting into it, it's got me spinning off into a world of supplemental ideas. so my mind's fragmented, thinking about life as a series of statements object-action code syntax like so:

print_r $lindsay.state;
>array( 'not bored', 'fragmented')

and thinking about how best to implement specialized content in facebook platforms. it has one flaw in common with myspace that irritates me to no end: the idea that one frequently refers to one's own profile page. most of the applications i would want to create would publish stories in the newsfeed i receive not publish items on my behalf in the newsfeeds of my friends...meh. like news, friends blogs, study review (ie daily german vocab), etc. fortunately facebook has added this new 'pages' concept for businesses which could provide such a service...i'll have to explore that. i suspect the service pages won't actually permit specialized per-user content so it might not be very useful at all...

and thinking about  how i need a better pandora station, so i'm trying out intersection stations by picking two disparate artists and seeing what happens. i'm annoyed with Up Up, because it's not, actually what it purports to be. so i've put manu chao with moloko to see what craziness that stirs up.

and thinking about how i miss my friend. it's not a frequent thing, missing people...but there are some. standing in wait for the A train again at JFK saturday night, i had such an intense sensation of remembered experience it stayed with me all the way home.

it's fun thinking in layers.

so sweet and so cold

i took myself to mcnally robinson again today - this time for a reading by the authors of A Book of Beginnings and Endings and The Memory Palace of Isabella Stewart Gardner. I'd been more intrigued by the former, because i have always been interested in the idea of publishing a collection of endings. I bought both books; i think they will be thought provoking, though the first author's reading was annoying. she was clearly responding to the cultural expectations of poetic prose emerging out of the slam poetry movement, for she employed the same softened speech, sing-song intonations and arbitrary word stresses you find in bad slam poetry, the kind that mimics the style to compensate for a lack of substance or genuine motive. it's a shame, too, because what i read of the work beforehand was fairly good and got completely lost in the delivery. both authors had a refreshing balance of theoretical and critical knowledge of narrative without getting mired down in over-intellectualizations either in the work or the discussion.
during the question and answer, betsy called. i hopped out and agreed to come meet up with her and the D of infamy up at chat n chew. that made for some interesting interactions, not least of which was an evolving friend:not friend motif. more on that can possibly be found here, either in the presence of words or by way of their absence. after we went to decibel to digest the situation and dispense of any lingering misgivings by way of innebreation and a bit of willful absurdism: we played drunken haiku. it was, as it should be, amusing and a poor literary showing (on my part at least...betsy's were better). hers are at the link above; mine to follow (bold words are the ones we had to incorporate):

save the world, lose the girl

don't you hate when you discover a band 3 years after they've ceased to exist? good for the bank account bad for the social calendar. on that note, don't you hate it when a song starts off perfect and then...just...isn't? sigh. like i could do better. like this band. they're a little loud for me at the moment but i could like them on another day. one former band mate's started a label and another does cheeky dance stuff so at least it's opening paths to amusement.

i'm going to see this group, the section quartet, tonight at Maxwell's. I've never been there and strings happen to be exactly what i'm after tonight so i'm pretty psyched for the adventure...which is good because i just lost 3 hours of work that didn't save properly and need something to look forward to.

you, cup, lie

i have taken myself to McNally Robinson's because they have stone tiles on their floor and elongated window panes and a book on Egyptian Math I resolved on saturday to come get for myself. Because their cafe has imported courtesies foreign to this city. when i got here, there was a large mug on the table with the remains of a long abandoned green tea within. it was that shade of white meant to evoke a rustic backwoods feel and found on hearty objects, like tubs, crockware, over-sized mugs in urban cafes. it had printed simply on its side in a mock-eroded typeface the word coffee, and i thought to myself well, see - that's the trouble with words, when you let them stick around long enough they start to lie to you.
this morning i became fascinated with a baby on the train. she had such precise expressions and such a pointed sigh. i began to wonder how one would think as a baby and how it's quite impossible really to either represent the thoughts of a baby or think them with words. how would one go about narrating an experience occurring prior to the end of the mirror phase in cognitive development...would you dispense with I entirely? or would you distribute it evenly across all reality? would you dissociate to individual objects or use only verbs? the baby girl on the train at one point looked backward and up towards her father (he was definitely her father; they had the same nose and mouth) and mirrored his gesture to bring their hands together in a horizontal high five. what would accompany this in the mind of a 6 mo old? i see me. smiles and hand up. touches. not really adequate, is it?

sometimes, it occurs to me that the more i record my thoughts here, the more i lay bare the volatility of my own perspective were someone to actually read through a mass of entries chronologically, but that presumes, i think, i finer skill that i possess for articulating my own thoughts. lucky that.

i spoke to bistra today, too, which was really nice. she said i sounded good, so much more relaxed that i've been in the past, and it was gratifying to know that it was true - and likewise - despite the crazy intensity of her schoolwork, she sounds good. there's more to that reflection, commonalities to the way we interpret our experiences that are more relevant to my day and that it was also comforting to touch upon, however briefly, with a friend whose understanding i don't have to question, but it doesn't belong here.   

trust and violence

the new york times has an article today on bantu traditional belief in witchcraft fueling an upswing in instances of child abuse. the sociological explanation given for this is the continued strife and hardship in the area forcing families to seek out reasons for expelling from the family otherwise unsupportable children. its the darker side of the same traditions underlying ben okri's The Famished Road, so my reading of the article was peopled by the colorful spirit world described therein. It certainly brought insight into the commentary that the police too often believe in witches and will back away from cases a child abuse where the child is suspected of being a witch. i found myself caught in the eternal trap of wanting to use logic to combat religion. if you accept that if you believed to be true what the actors believed to be true, you would be likely to behave in the same manner, how do you go about telling them they are wrong because you do not believe in the outcome of their actions. so i want a world where children are not strung up by their ankle and beaten. i'm not convinced that world is possible. on a micro level pastors and social-workers try to intervene, but beneath this particular manifestation lies a sociological need to preserve resources. without one form of witchcraft there would be another. on a macro level we can try to balance the distribution of the worlds resources, support micro-credit, but then there are just increasing costs. teutonic plates shift; water-levels rise; the ferocity of storms increase;  houses collapse; cities crumble; breadwinners are crippled or killed and life moves forward; civilization caves to unrest.
and then you ask yourself if those children survive, will they too believe in witches at opportune times. you remember last week's article on cognitive dissonance and suspect that when the conditions are right few are immune to believing the most convenient explanation at the time. you wonder if you yourself would be complacent in the deaths of innocents and have no answer, and so you go out for a drink with your friends.