$disanpoter

creature comforts

i'm reading a set of short stories by Aimee Bender called Willful Creatures. despite a certain flatness to her writing style and a pervasive tone of fiercely held neutrality, i continue to read them, because they are familiar to me, the flaws of the characters, their motives, the logic driving them are all familiar to me. as i told a colleague in the elevator on friday, it's like going home. i may not like what i find, but i know the truth of it. it's like karma too. today i read one story about a woman treating a social situation like a game. friday, after quite a number of more pleasant encounters, i found myself playing a game with some guy by being a difficult dance partner, because i wanted him to leave me alone but also was not entirely willing to turn down the distraction of being danced with - because i didn't know where to be just then. i didn't feel fun; i felt out-of-place. i didn't want to leave because i'd blown my original plans when my cell phone died. i wanted to spend time with the people i'd come with or their friends because i do like the people i'd come with. yet i shouldn't have come, because i knew somewhere beneath the alcohol that they didn't really want me there. i didn't want to be home alone either or out drinking by myself which i was likely to do if i left, so i stayed on and danced for obliviousness. i was happy to dance by myself, really. also dancing by myself among the other dancing girls was a less obnoxious activity than traversing the area in front of the bar in some cat-and-mouse exchange.
to me, if a girl walks away from you twice and declines another dance and refuses to give you her number, that's a fair indication she's not interested. if you ask to dance again, you deserve to get someone whose ambivalent about dancing with you. the guy left ultimately; he walked away. i was relieved. then i left. one friend was looking very happy lying back on the couch with his eyes closed next to a girl he'd hit it off with; the other i couldn't see immediately but wouldn't miss me. i got around the corner, down a block and a half, and sat down on a stoop crying. i'm still not totally sure why i was crying,  in the same vein that i'm still not entirely sure why i agreed to continue dancing, but a sizable chunk of it was frustration over the continuing pattern of attracting guys i'm really not interested in (and apparently sending signals to the contrary), but never being attractive to ones i actually find interesting - let alone attractive. but seriously, how is it that they are interested in the version of me they encounter. i don't get it. it's a coarse, careless creature - distracted, drunk, willful, challenging. i find her despicable and am bewildered to imagine what they could be seeing. why follow someone who walks away from you? why smile at them and flatter them with untrue statements that they are good dancers and other bullshit and cavort about the floor. why say warm things to them when they refuse to stay next to you on the bench and go on asking for their number?
it disrupts the myth in my head that feelings can be mutual when i am confronted with situations when they are so clearly not. it shakes my confidence to believe any form of interest or friendliness is mutual. then i end up alone in familiar neighborhoods that aren't my home anymore, crying because i don't like myself and all the coats i've painted over this fact are flaking away.   

dispatches

Malcolm Gladwell, in the Tipping Point, extends a hypothesis of productive human inter-connectedness as a result of the combined contributions of three types of people - one of which is the Connector. For the other two, read the book. This is a role I make no claims of inhabiting. My aunt is a Connector, and an amazing one and person at that; I merely have a brain that inherently seeks to match-up incoming information not immediately relevant to me with the person(s) i know of who might find it most useful or valuable. It's a just a spin-off mechanism. That said, if i've tagged you on this post, for at least on of what follows, I had you in mind [feel suitably appreciative here]:

• thursday 23 Aug (tomorrow!): McNally Robinson (independent bookseller with stellar selection and equally exemplary attention to interior design and layout) hosts authors in the up-and-coming literary magazine New York Tyrant. check it out. live the dream or just talk the talk. the wine they'll be serving is sure to help with the latter.
• also of note at McNally Robinson,
  
  • book group focusing on International Literature (tell me, does this surprise anyone?)
  • spanish language discussion group, for those of you who have the good fortune to read borges, cortazar, and the others in their original words. every saturday at noon. led by the former owner of a bookstore in Montevideo.
  • 9 Sept 7pm fiction writing workshop: standard gotham writer's workshop free seminar. i may have attended one when i interned there; either way i remember them being fairly solid.
• intersting tidbit on evolution: in his foreword to The Deep Hot Biosphere, Freeman Dyson mentions a hypothesis extended by the author of the book and ultimately confirmed, that at one point in the history of the world the poles flipped by 90 degrees. This event corresponds with an explosion in the diversity of evolution. niftiness, no?

That's it for the dispatches. There was another, but i've forgotten it. I've had to finish this up at work, too, so i'll have to add the rest of my thoughts on the things i've been reading later.

the one and only

the last two books i've read Finding Atlantis and Apex Hides the Hurt have both left something to be desired, which is not to say they weren't valuable or enjoyable reads. now, i'm reading Rats: Observations on the History & Habitat of the City's Most Unwanted Inhabitants and thus far, it's shaping up to be a delightful romp of informative playfulness. The author's tone is casual but quick, self-aware and amused without imploding into self-indulgent references. Setting the paperback down on my desk this morning as I came into work, however, my attention was caught by a different equally amusing aspect - that particular brand of egoism that belongs entirely to new york - the presumptive use of 'the City' as a synonym.

What makes this amusing is contemplating how intentional this substitution of 'the City' for New York actually is. Is it the author's intent or merely the cover artists or is it merely a not entirely unwarranted double-entendre of coincidence? The author could be refering to the City to mean the general urban situation, where the particulars of his research only happen to center on New York. He does give some attention to other cities and even some non-cities, afterall. Whatever his intention is, however, the cover artist, in creating an aberration of a map of manhattan with central park in the shape of a rat, clearly took the meaning of 'the City' as any new yorker would - and then finally there is the delayed epiphany of mine that was so utterly characterist of a new yorker as Reader: "oh...it's possible the title's not only refering to new york city."

thus - or ergo as my friend EL is wont to say - this morning, i am amused.

other things also have recently amused me. i was talking with my coworkers about the pitfalls of driving in the suburbs and the level of obliviousness some drivers are capable of and somehow the conversation deviated to catholism and the pope's apparent issuing of the new 10 commandments (for drivers). RB commented on the inadvisability of counceling drivers to cross themselves to counter road-rage, and the removal of hands from wheels that this would require. CD one-uped this by imagining a driver doing the rosary instead, at which point i suggested they make steering wheel covers with raised beeds so that devout drivers could do their rosaries without having to remove their hands from the wheels. the combination of ridiculousness and viability belonging to this imagined product was quite amusing at the time - to more people than just me, even.

additionally, during lunch with my mother and her friend kathleen on saturday, a new yorker-ish cartoon popped into my head fully sketched in that proprietary scrawlish style they favor of someone, with their glass held up in their periphery and being dutifullly refilled by a server, commenting on how easy it has been for them to go through life with a 'half full' outlook. not at all original but amusing in how solidly keyed to the magazine it is. like the poem we had up on our refridgerator for so many years : 'you want a social life with friends, a passionate love life, and as well to work hard everyday. what true is of these three you can have two, and two can pay you dividends, but never can have three.'

of course from my perspective neither of the surrounding two have quite the cross-compartmental fallout of the middle one, so the choice has been relatively easy thus far for me.

the incurable indominible covergence of dreamspace

no matter how phenomenally screwed up my dreams are, it rarely takes me more than the train ride into work to trace back all the points in reality that correspond to the random details in my dream. frankly, i find that aspect more disturbing (usually) than the dreams themselves. it's as if some fierce disembodied will is exacting it's brand of omnipotence upon my unprotected sleeping mind. you cannot escape the reality of your waking life; it can become twisted and bizarre, but even the most innocuous details will manifest themselves. take DC - DC became the de facto location for the latter half of my dream last night because the plane when down there. i don't think i've ever dreamed about being in a plane crash before. i dreamed expectations of explosion and closed my eyes waiting for impact, then felt the velocity shift from verticle toward horizontal as the pilot managed an emergency landing. that was interesting. interesting in that it makes one wonder how much of how we react in dreams is a reflection of our unguarded instinct, a suggestion of how we might actually react to similar conditions in waking life, and how much of our dream behavior is still subject to our own vision of who we want to be. if you ask the writers, they will tell you it's all the latter - our dreams are where we are absolutely and only who we want to be, except when we are absolutely and only who we most fear we are. i don't know the answer. i steeled myself, closed my eyes, and concetrated on reconciline myself to the fact that i was about become splattered carnage. how is that a genuine reaction? it's a cliche. i can't even muster satisfaction for/with this dream self it's so suspect a response.

after the plane was saved, we disembarked in DC with some confusion. it didn't make sense that we would even crash land in DC as DC was not en route from Boston to NY. this logical incongruity never resolved itself. instead, i was judged to be ill and rushed to the hospital, where i was ministered to by my father who received my lab results back in the form of a text message. he was checking my pulse so i saw the message when he got it. it said something about the pnemonia going cardial, which makes no sense now, and he said 'oh shit' and rushed out of the room. he returned with a dose of morphine and then pulled out huge needle that had to find its way into my lungs from an entry point above my collarbone. this, apparently, was a dully painful experience even with the morphine and i remember trying not to cry out too much because i didn't want to make my dad feel worse about causing me pain. but groan i did. why morphine, i do not know. not so oddly, in the dream i felt significantly comforted by the fact that it was my dad taking care of me. it was all parental love and protection tinted.

and that's about it on the news front over here. i'm a bit bummed that my housing works activity is falling back to every other week instead of every week. i should look around for something else to do regularly in the meantime. oh and i'm disappointed in the two most recent books i've read, but i'll have to organize my thoughts on that and update this on them later.

howsit

it's odd having occassional readers here. this used to be essentially a publically accessible but virtually unknown place for me to record my thoughts and feelings about the things that happened in my life. now i find myself turning away from here as a place to explore my more private thoughts, especially those i have some uncertainties about. this is not a bad thing. in fact, this morning, i merely find myself appreciating the organic way in which, contrary to the typical exhibitionary drive of blogdom, maintaining this blog is enforcing boundaries between what i want to keep private, what i want to keep relatively close, and what i want to share.

for one thing, i find it interesting to see the ways the need for these boundaries and for negotiating between them can affect my writing style. I think i'm more attuned to this this morning in part because of the contemplations i left out of my last post on the events of last week and in part because of the concrete and authoratative language i've had the pleasure of employing in the instructions to the user interfaces i'm working on. some posts are like lattice works, the unweildiness of the syntax growing in direct proportion to my impulse to control how much of my own feelings i reveal. it's not a particularly brilliant or unexpected observation, but its thought-provoking nonetheless.

more so though, sitting with myself after posting last night was an eye-opening experience. i realized there were reflections i very much wanted to put some expression to, numerous discrete events from the past week, both minor and more significant, that were valuable to me but in a way that is oddly personally - oddly because there's nothing about them i would necessarily hide, but because i don't feel the need to share them to validate them or to prove to myself that i am okay with the lack of certainty and omniscience they involve. it's hard to explain - and plus, it's new this being okay with imbalance and uncertainty - but here's an example: lately i haven't been depending on my friends assessments of behavioral interactions i relate to them to either confirm or moderate my assessment of the situation. this while scary, is a good thing for me. but last night, instead of trying to mitigate this by placing greater confidence in my own reasons and assessments, i kept returning to the idea that i simply can't know. however much a given situation appears to me to be a certain way, it's possible - even probable at times - that it feels entirely differently to other people involved. there are always times when one is confident that they can judge someone's enjoyment or displeasure, but really, there are just as many times when these aspects are not apparant. it's not that this is such a new concept for me, but usually this inspires a desire to take decided steps to push away or completely cut out the people in my life i feel such reservations over. that instead, last night i simply lingered on how much i had enjoyed the company of just about everyone i spent time with last week, from the people i'd just met to the good friends i hadn't seen in weeks, today seems huge to me.

you are here

one of the rare set of books i never finished (of which there are at most 10 thanks to the irritating fact that these will continue to bother me until i do*) is The Bug. you would (and i did) think this would be a uniquely well suited book for me, being about computer programmers and their pursuit of unsolvable things, but it's not. it did manage to infiltrate my MO in one lasting way, though. the protagonist had developed a habit of leaving himself notes in the code starting with "you are here," and i have since found myself oddly inspired to act similarly. there is something just - as in les mots justes - about the break from first person that it places between the work of one day and that of the next, the shift it perspective it encourages separating the coder from the coded.

and of course with the instructions that follow, there is also something calming about these notes to self. the return to the lone coder the voice of a guide. even when it is your own voice telling you where you are going from a time only very briefly in the past, it sparks confidence that the steps are indeed going forward, if only on a rather meaningless path towards a minor cron job or import protocol.

but more than that, it recalls the trope of guide and guided throughout history in all its manifestations and it recalls the traditions of imperative syntaxes in narratives that i've grown up reading - and because i can leave these "you are here" messages dangling there for myself to find later, and upon finding them feel the direction falling back into my life, i feel a more subtle or saturated understanding of how and why those kinds of statements can so effectively move us forward.

it's kind of like the self-fulfilling nature of future tense statements... anyway

this offends me

Unhooked: How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love, and Lose at Both It follows 9 female subjects - some in high school, some in college - for a year in order to document its case. I'm sorry but how can you even draw the conclusion that these women have 'lost at both.' People looking for love don't often find it in a year, even. It's more than reasonable that young women who aren't looking for it don't acquire it. They're not even out of college. criminney...

slime molds and other delicacies

I had a very enjoyable chat with Jonathan last night while he waited for Amy to get home. It's really so nice to have a more experienced programmer next door, and it's also great to have neighbors who pop a squat and stay for a while...

that's all. it's just nice.

i also made some killer coffee ice cream. in fact, i can't wait to get home and have some of it! Too bad that's not going to be until 8 or 9...

underwhelming

• i'm thinkin' i may get something sweet and yummy at starbucks and spend part of the afternoon reading in the part/columus circle...really, i should already have left the office, but no i just keep working on stuff. In other news I screwed up the nerve to ask this guy if perchance he and his fiancee enjoy games and he said "I love board games." So they're getting invited to the next. Even better they're thinking of moving to park slope...i don't know why i'm so enthusiastic about cultivating couple friends. i think maybe it's the allure of stability. maybe it's simply a way to reduce the odds that a relationship i've invested in will become complicated and fall out from under me... 
• my dream last night was not as strange as they sometimes are. i dreamed i was at some convention at a large round table meeting about minds matter. the convention resembled some blend of all the common areas and cafeterias I spent my high school saturdays in. not so surprising that. some exchange in the dream prompted me to mention 'i kissed someone once in this cafeteria who was quite intelligent. it didn't go anywhere, but later he turned out to be gay, so i wasn't to bothered by that.' this is actually not true. i don't think i ever kissed someone at a speech meet. i'm not entirely sure i ever even kissed someone in the school building...but that's high school for you. what is true is that my team teased me mercilessly about the boy who seemed to follow me from one event to another over the four years we competed against eachother....
  but returning to this dream - i was speaking with rissa, who'd asked about my interview had gone. i related it to her frankly, but it turned out she already knew. it was a bit of a test. then she said that she too was favoring this other applicant due to her experience in establishing writing programs. though i brought up my own experience in assisting others with their writing, she sustained her judgement. and i deferred to her judgement. if they both thought i was not the strongest candidate than i should not be given the position.
  what's strange about this, to me, is that i essentially had a dream about not getting what i'd really hoped for and feeling okay about it. feeling like it was just and fair. that's a strange thing to feature in a dream, no?
• there was something else that was supposed to go here....we'll see if i remember. something about integrity and what a watershed issue it is for me. there's nothing that makes me want to sever all ties with someone so quickly and so unappologetically as an indication that that person might be deficient in integrity.
• also, the summer's employee free books opened today. i already ordered my 5. one's a graduation gift for my mentee...

Laura

[29Mar] i finished that book. it's funny how this pattern repeats itself in my life - i take a month or more finishing a book, then without really realizing it i burn through 3 or 4 in less than a week. like i've been starving. maybe i am. ignoring the object usually being food, how far from starving is craving really. not very. it's more like suffocating though. i feel starved for whatever is pulling me into these books the way you feel starved for air when you dive deeper than your air lasts.

it was good, though, this book. i don't know why it's a Vintage Crime. it's no more a crime story than Catch Me If You Can was. more later...