$disanpoter

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.

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):

when i said i loved you, i meant to drop my weapons

there's a song i like from a band that only existed for a few years while i was in college. it's called the good-bye song and it's by North House. They won the battle of the bands when i was a freshman (perhaps only regionally; i'm not sure). that title there is a line in it that i find particularly relevant to the way I have in the past and I know many other women also approach romantic relationships. i ended up going out to lunch with some of my co-workers today and the conversation turned towards our various perspectives and experiences in dating. its funny how often talk can turn to dating ideologies among people who profess not to be all that into the whole thing. i guess that just goes to show how much emphasis is placed on it in society (or how fundamental it is to human existence, depending on what camp your in). i'm having very mixed feelings at the moment over some of the comments i made that i don't feel accurately represent the worldview i have now or the ideals i try to live by. i guess that's what blogs are for, for correcting those situations - if in a rather futile way, considering the people who are likely to read this are already familiar with my thoughts and those that are likely to have taken from it a different impression of what i'm about these days will never read this. but so it goes. and just for the record, i no longer date or even sleep with people i'm not interested in talking to, and in fact it's not so much that i did enter into liaisons with people i had no interest talking to as it is that it took my a while to understand the reasons why i was perpetuating relationships i no longer had an interest in...

anyway. that's all on that. hopefully i'll get back to the more interesting aspects of this week later. it's been a rather pleasant week and weekend...(there's not much point in rehashing the rest of the conversation here: not that it wasn't interesting, but as is usually the case with things involving dating and romance 'it's all been done(/said) before'

the uses of un-inspired music

i went to a disappointing performance last night. i'll post some clips from it later, because the artist was a fairly solid performer. it took me a few tries to articulate what was so disappointing about: it was billed as indian fusion, but in fact, turned out to be a series a songs that were all fairly solidly located in one genre or another and merely varied from each other. the first song was heavily pop-y; the next more latin with a smattering of indian drumming interludes; the next heavily indian. so all in all, they lacked the experimentation and interplay i associate with and find intriguing about fusion.
the up-sides of this are two-fold: it's prompted a very engaging conversation on how a listener pursuing new music encounters songs and uses them as nodes in a network to explore versus the intent and merits of the original work, and it reminded me of when we saw the Chemical Brothers and the similar, though more minor, disappointment i experienced then - and in reminding me, got me pursing a well-honed Pandora station on for the south-asian inspired electronica i was hoping for.
In the ways of nodes, it split out along any number of other spokes, as well, so the back current of my brain is enjoying a bit of a frenzy of potentials to be reaped later right now: (the image of which, itself, has reminded me of the tobacco juice glaze patterns from ceramic class which distributes outward in organic tendrils of gradient tone and my excitement about using them on something this session) multiple new station creation for related sub-genres, digging up the junoon concert cd somewhere in my closet, the uses and cases of node-spoke information structures, instrument creation and experimentation...and on.
there were some cool things about the performance. I appreciated the piece where he re-tuned his guitar to imitate a sitar. that rocked. he also had a riff on "I want to be in america" from West side Story that was amusing, not to mention a well-delivered dig.
I may post some excerpts from the conversation later too, because as we all know, my friends are smarter than me and say more interesting things. :)

4 things that made this past hour bearable

minor borges moment ; minor someone thought my thoughts better than me moment ; this chat exchange [edited for typos] about that minor borges moment:

me: did you see the pointers one?
friend: oh yeah ive read em all at least twice

gonna make a montage poster

for my room

 

me: dork

not that i don't approve

 

friend: you're just jealous you didnt think of it first

 

me: i can only reference that object that might potentially admit to such a condition

 

friend: last i heard you were a deep copy of that object

 

me: i can't one up that. it's not possible

 

friend: could go last resort options < your mom jokes >

 

me: last i heard you were a deep copy of a bastard child of a your_mom_joke object?

 

friend: oh snap... its on now

at least my implementation doesnt leak memory

im not sure what the hell that's implying but yeah take that

 

me: your implementation's so jank it leaks your mom's memory

 

friend: i leaked memory into your mom and corrupted her process

me: i had a comeback involving mother, bored, short and jump

but then [in fact, i got distracted by work]

 

friend: hahhahahahaha

and the fact that when it this was over i was no longer suffering from low-blood sugar and had miraculously managed to get work done at the same time.

got me on my knees

there's a certain blending of memories between my junior and senior years in college that i always find disconcerting. music that i'd acquired off the network drives late sophomore year when that was at its high-point but remember finding and listening to for the first time in the closet of a room i had in lake house. conversations with people in locations i only hung out in after they were gone. it's a strange and twisted forest, memory is. but today i think the reason for these incongruencies to be much simpler. college was a vast darkened plain of insomniac nights spent feeling impossibly alone - why wouldn't my memories of thoughts and activities i experienced alone stretch out throughout that time?

its funny how a word can set off a musing like that. i fell asleep last night composing an opening paragraph to a short story i'd like to write called the "Secret List of Obligations." So this morning before getting to my work, i ressurrected the writing board i'd made a while ago and shifted it over from this typepad spot to my actual website (there's no writing there yet). In doing so, i found one of the first attempts i made at the hadley story - only the persona at that point was laila. that stirred memories of why i'd named her laila to begin with, including my residual fondness for eric clapton's layla from sophomore year when i had a handful of acoustic bootlegs i listened to just about everyday. one was without words - an impossibly soulful water-like tumbling of guitarplaying that rose and broke like waves coming into the bulkhead. even now, even just the echo of what my mind's ear can recall of that song, brings me immediately back to the memory of how the night felt to my skin at 3 or 4am walking past the lake on my way home. all that, just from stumbling across something i'd written long enough ago that i was still living in williamsburg. it is, isn't it though - funny how the mind works?

of course, wellesley coming up so quickly probably was helped along by the fact that my book group's tonight. i'm a bit nervous. i've got a coffee date with the president of the nyc alumnae association before had to discuss possibly filling the co-chair spot for programs. being the dork i am, i'd like to offer some more education programs, learning series, knowledge shares. things less tied to the ever-present climbing the whatever-takes-your-ambitious-fancy ladder en masse as we wellesley women are groomed to do. but i'm nervous, still. her enthusiasms have the same tone i associate with some people's compliments, positive, but indiscriminate - a kind of innocent insincerety.

also, i've neither finished the book nor am a huge fan of it. it reminds me of someone who grew up wallowing in the abortive emotions of hemmingway without sensing the underlying authenticity and who thus creates plausible and richly developed characters but places them in a culture and society she constantly undermines more for the exercise of it than anything else. that's a bit harsh. she a proficient writer, but i think its true that her recent success has far more to do with the fact that she died in auschwitz than the endurability of her work.

in other news my father and brother may be coming up this sunday. perhaps i can get them to go to the frog exhibit with me - though that does dissentigrate my friday plans somewhat.

brain child of the bubble chart

i was standing by the cubicle of my collegue CRD, recounting how i had accidentally quelched a conversation the other night by expressing my aversion to Michael Moore (and being gratified with CRD's parallel revulsion while watching an interview of MM) when a minor epiphany revealed itself to me in the form of a phrase: "brain-child of the bubble chart." Just below the surface my mind had been plasmating...following a series of links that went sloppy logic => gleefully, spritely concept hopping => brain-storming exercises => bubble charts => hippie era education reform movements.

i've yet to fully research this impression i have of him -and i've also yet to see Sicko, so it's possible if improbable that his MO has changed since i last checked - but from what i know, his narrative style in film and writing remains is an exercise in fully exploring the fecundity of a-logical reasoning, in how far you can stretch the boundaries of association. it's not so much that the individual expositions lack foundation or basis, nor is it that there is no connection between the things he juxtaposes; it's simply that he goes about merrily stringing together a confluence of data with no real effort to properly relate the nature, scope, or strength of the connections he makes. my skepticism towards him is similar to that i developed for deconstructive literary readings. one can place some merit in the credibility of the information presented, but the leaps and conclusions are immediately suspect. well, but i'll still have to see Sicko. the point was, i feel like perhaps i understand the man and what he was going for better now, having related him to the bubble chart exercises. it almost inspires me to cut him a bit more slack.

interestingly, from this perspective he reminds me of both the subject and the author of that other book i read recently, Finding Atlantis. There, too, the thrill of pursuing potential connections and detailing interesting tangents ultimately removed from the narrative its original intent.

homo thigmophilian

one of the interesting things i've learned reading this Rats book is that rats are thigmophilic (i may be misspelling that), which means they like to touch things and they rely heavily on touch to identify and negotiate their world. i was remembering this today as i watched the performers of the chinese theater workshop painting on their stage make-up at the natural history museum. i'd stopped by after brunch with Lan and her friend Ichiro to see what new exhibits they have and discovered they were having a special festival on mythic creatures. (They also have one on frogs, which I'm so looking forward to checking out this friday.)  watching the face-painting, though, my skin recalled the sensation of cool paint gliding off the bristles of paint brushes, which got me thinking, once again, about my own thigmophilic lifestyle, with my ceramics and my polished wood and love of warm stones and dewey grass, and then wondering whether most people also are as keyed into touch as i am or whether it's more often a taken-for-granted sense. the attention we as a society (or collection of societies) pay to touch as it is used to enhance sexual interactions could be an argument for either side. on the one hand it points to how much of an impact it can have on us; on the other, it pitches touch into a rarefied context and in doing so diminishes it's significance in non-sexual experience. that's all i got on that. i went to see the chinese opera exposition after that and was distracted from my musings on touch.

the mini-opera performance was pretty sweet too though. it was a scene from the Journey to the West where Monkey King steals peaches from a banquet and heaven and then fights Dragon King. I was disappointed there wasn't more singing, but entertained by the acrobatics. i'll be looking into this art form more now. and i may buy some face paints - fun fun. i would so love to have a face painting party, but let's be honest, who would come?

other than that the weekend's been pretty good. I was bummed friday because i either hadn't heard back from friends i'd reached out too or had heard back from them that they were out of town or otherwise unavailable - so i was all resolved to enjoy my solitude - by sheer force of will if necessary - when one did call back and invited me to party thrown by some vassar graduates. this is not to say that i was not, in actuality, enjoying my solitude. i'd been reminded earlier in the week that part of why i've become more susceptible to concerns about whether the people i've met and attempted to befriend recently actually like me is because i've shifted to far into trying to be social at the expense of the things that make me interesting to myself.  and really, how can i, with my concerns over maintaining a realistic perspective and realistic expectations about life, convincingly represent my interests as interesting if i haven't actually been pursuing them. it's like linguistics. can i say i'm fascinated by linguistics when at this point it manifests itself in nothing more than wordplay? i don't know. better to dig out my notes and refresh my memory.

oh, right, so the point of that. i had actually been enjoying my evening. i'd gone to a gallery talk on drawings from austria and germany at the morgan library and museum then sat in the atrium cafe, drinking a beer and nibbling a mushroom croutin, listening to the string ensemble and attempting to sketch one of the players.  realizing quickly that i should stick with practicing on things that don't move, i switched to my own shoe but with nearly equal results. then i wandered out into the breezy evening to plop myself in a park somewhere and study the new art book i'd bought on japanese homes and await more information on the possible party. i'd just exited with my phone rang and thus the timbre of the evening shifted.

the only mildly negative happening of the weekend were an errant comment about passive aggressive intentions and the discovery that someone who had claimed not to have a key to my apartment, then not to know where it was, and had in other ways blown off my requests for its return, then used it to retrieve something from my apartment. i don't really care to go into the details of this unpleasantness. but it has put me in a frame of mind today to be less hopeful - no more pessimistic - in regards to my recent (by which I mean the last few years) efforts to reach out and befriend people. it sucks, but it'll pass.

on the plus side, i have a tentative plans to play pool with a guy from work next week. yay for pool and yes, yay for new interesting people.   

i also saw scoop and sherrybaby last night with AHo. the former was awful; the latter...nearly exceptional. so i'm saving it for a post of it's own once i've digested my reactions to it.

oh and finally, on an amusing note, i was somewhat hyper yesterday while getting the movies and ingredients for dinner last night. i kept making 'we' comments and i realized it wasn't so much a royal we usage as a energy-overflow 'we,' kinda like my enthusiasm was too much for one person and so it needed to implicate more actors. all in a casual playful way. otherwise, you know, i'd be a crazy person.

of shoe horns and sweet moods

harvest moon. each time
it rises, it ends the world
with each breath, each sigh

the first time i saw a harvest moon, i thought perhaps the world was ending. not that i really believed that, but sometimes the vision of something can be so breathtaking it raises the thought in your head in spite of the soundness of your modern science-informed disbelief. i was alone in the first house we had on shelter island - it was the summer i worked at coecles harbor and thus lived alone during the week while my parents were in the city. the house was set just back from the wetlands and looking out, you saw first the tall reed grass and the lone scragley tree, then the still water, and then the gentle slope of the causeway and little ram, then the sky. the moon was rising where the causeway met little ram. it was a fiery orange, watery and wavering over the dark green of the island at night, and it was consuming the sky. i can find no more emphatic way of describing it for someone who hasn't felt it, it just seemed fitting that the world might end in the gradual swallow of that mellow yet massive orange orb.

harvest moons make my soul ache. i just told this to my friend A Ho, but i doubt it seemed very relevant or significant in the midst of an IM chat. we're picnicing tonight. i'm looking forward to it. as if the above isn't indication enough of it - i'm feeling in the mood for serenity and beauty. positively pastoral, which is always an odd feeling to have sitting in the hard, urban-minded chest of mine. it's the beauty thing. beauty heals me. it's my spirituality.

in other news, this morning i was thinking of having a party at my apartment in the not to distant future. this got me on the topic of themes and i thought i could have an silly 80's movie party where we watch Dark Crystal and the Neverending story. why did i think of these? i think because i've lately been in the mood (on the plasmating level of thinking and mooding) for a movie night and because i sadly do not get to go to a lecture tonight on parchment - oh and because in confluence with this someone on facebook had an image of two old elvish people - all of which reminded me of the aura of arcana cultivated in NES...anyway so this led to the slogan "M is for Mangey" because they both have mangey puppets. but, this, i quickly realized would not be an attractive party quip...but could make for an excellent smarmy t-shirt!

Co-incidentally, shortly after i thought this to myself in the midst of a simultaneous conversation about the shortcomings of the frameword we're building our data management application in, my co-worker CD offered up an equally amusing (and more usable) product. I had exclaimed in surprise and preemptory enthusiasm that i'd found some functions in the function reference that might actually be useful to us. A moment later, I corrected this saying, well...they show potential for being shoe-horned into something useful - and CD said, yes it's too bad they don't use that as a marketting tactic, pass out a bunch of shoe-horns with [the name of infrastucture service] printed on them. so it was amusing to me. so what. i'm a dork. we know this already.

hope and stasis

i'm listening to Dido's "Do you have a little time" this morning. It seems like an appropriate selection today, though i'd be hard pressed to say why. There have been times in the past when i've felt exactly what she describes in it toward one person or another: "if you should stop for a while you will find me standing by, over here at the side of your life." If anything, I feel like the person she describes - only without anyone waiting around on the sideline - and amidst a fog of others in the same condition. (and of course now, this has prompted an image of us all as atoms bouncing around and occassionally passing off electrons to eachother). Perhaps it's that a feel more and more like I, and the people i care about, are on both sides of that situation, and this song condenses the poignancy of that opportunity cost into its simple words and the heavy inevitabiliy of the orchestral line.

anyway. i'm sombre today. life is hard. i feel blessed for the recent good things that have come into my life: new friends, new acquaintances, new opportunities and new exposure points for long standing interests. i feel at peace with the possibilities of maintaining a rich and rewarding life that serves some value to more than just myself, but it's been very hard going getting to this place. and it makes my heart ache that we are often so alone (or feel so alone) in our efforts to get there.