$disanpoter

burn baby

there's a dramatic reading tonight of the Daughters of Troy that i'm thinking of going to. like the touring cabaret, though, it's a thing i would want to see with a few others so that i can have people to talk about with after. i've learned this. somethings one can get just as much out of alone; other things gain there value when the serve as a starting point for discussion among interested parties. not that it has to be deep and serious discussion; it can be casual and light or boisterous and punchy or any number of things. it's just that some experiences forms of are meant to be absorbed by the many and something is lost when they are instead absorbed only as a solitary mind. i was disappointed not to see the cabaret, but it would not have been the thing i was disappointed to miss even if i'd gone. Daughters of Troy is a bit less solidly located in that range of things i'd want to see in a group, so i may go even if no one else does. also, it's at mcnally robinson, and the stone there suits my mood today.
my mother's coming in tomorrow; we're supposed to meet in the morning to go to bloomingdales. i'm really not looking forward to this. i hate bloomingdales; it's a waste of resources, even if they're not my resources. also, my mood's been shifty lately. i find myself craving time to myself and still getting myself into time with others - because individually, i do want to spend time with each of those people. it was easier when it was all fluid-like and intoxicated.
other than that the last two weeks have been fairly rewarding. i'm stilling liking my work environment, and all the people i've met there. it's a nice mix. i saw my friend cecilia when she was in from san fransisco, and i always enjoy catching up with her. i've promised to compile a cog sci book list for her and i'm looking forward to the review of my own readings (and planned readings) that that will necessitate. also, i went to a developers meet-up for facebook applications, which inspired a near frenzy of information-structuring and -facilitating pipedreams that drove me through the first half of the week in hyper and high spirits - though, as you can probably tell already from the tone of all this, that's faded somewhat.
the latter half of the week has returned me to one of the major philosophical currents of my life: the nature of friendship and interconnectedness, of possibility and often its lack, and the minor-tragedies and pleasures that come from that.

when i don't want to be feeling what i'm feeling, i tend to flip it into a drifting contemplation of the literary or folk-historic tradition of it. thus the event bulletin for Daughters of Troy set me to thinking again about how very interminably long we've been subject to these hopes, fears, horrors, joys, insecurities, intractibilities, sufferings, humors, rages, snatches at eternity or glimpses of truth that compel us through life and generations - of how long we've been these human creatures that we are. thus, my frustrations with pottery class last night and my own temperament going into it steering my thoughts on the platform this morning towards selkies and short germanic peoples in the woods and by the sea weathering darkness and blustery winters and the high aching scent of solitude in the night air.

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.

sustainability

in this post: facebook interests, website for starpower program, french sociology book, housing works orientation, run in with the office hall monitor, possibility of sustainable relationships, possibility of sustainable activities, architecture and support beams, g-tech, kai and the winos, hallelujah ...

[so i'm adopting this new blog form, mostly to help me remember my thoughts as i come back to this throughout the day. my posts have diminished on this temp assignment, and that's not good, since a significant part of its purpose is the delayed value of me rediscovering my own thoughts months later. the downside is y'all might actually have to look to my blog to see the actual contents of the post. :{ ...not to assume that you necessarily want to or anything like that]

so...starting with hallelujah...A.Ho and I got a drink at the Bourgeois Pig last night since Tuesday are half off bottles all night, and while we were there a particularly stunning rendition of Cohen's "Hallelujah" came up on the playlist, which reminded me how much i like the song and especially the part "i heard there was a secret chord that david played and it pleased the lord but you don't really care for music, do ya? it goes like this, the fourth the fifth, the minor fall, the major lift, the baffled king composing hallelujah..." to begin with there's the overtone of isolation - not any generalized sense of isolation, but the particular isolation of being one among many. it's the implicit significance of the aside "but you don't really care for music, do ya:" here the singer is considering the possibility of an essential truth that could reconnect the lone person with the divine and it's irrelevant to share because the very vehicle one requires to share it cannot be accessed by the person the singer is trying to connect with. then on top of that there's the allusion in 'the baffled king composing' to our capacity to create thing greater - even more human - than ourselves, and the doubly poignant aspect that very often we can experience being profoundly touched, we can create that which touches us profoundly without having access to the why or the how it manages to do so. there's so much hope in that for being human. i guess that's what i love about the song, it's this poignant bundle of the yearning and the hope and the weakness and the tragedy of human experience. [i'll rewrite this so it's not as fumbling, i promise]

I is for Individual

Last week sometime, a conversation i was having with a friend touched upon the term 'soul' and its relevance in a world of science and empirical data. it wasn't a particularly unique topic of conversation in the history of my interpersonal relationships;* what made it noteworthy was being succinctly informed that the reason i could get away with continuing to use the term 'soul' was because i had effectively redefined it  in such away that it no longer contained those elements that conflicted with an agnostic or atheist worldview. it was quite the good point, though my summary probably leaves you wondering about that. in pointing out that my concept of a soul was more a concept of inviolate individualism, it got me reflecting on how central that concept it to the values that govern my life. (and a little bit worried about them)

it went 'soul' -> soul = non-biological/psychological essence -> inviolate individual. and that got me thinking about how central the concept of individualism is to my system of values. it's not just that i place a premium on my own individual experiences; it that my understanding of other people and their lives begins with the axiom of their equal status as individuals. my impulses to contribute to the world and what efforts i make to be a better person or volunteer more or what have you, they all begin not with a vague notion of all the people out there to be helped, but of all the individuals out there who deserve to have the individuality of their experiences and efforts respected. i don't know how to explain it better. my concept of what it means to be human begins with being an individual. it's not that that's a unique concept; i mean we as a culture have tried to differentiate ourselves on the basis of reason or sentiences or self-awareness or other cognitive features for quite sometime, but today i'm less worried about that than about the possibility that i might be overlooking some very crucial elements of being human by over-prioritizing this notion of the individual.

or i was. then i went looking for my post a while back on the so small self and found this one instead, which is chock full of half-cloaked secrets but is really about how important it is to not only be an independent individual.

anyway. i don't think i'm wrong in the intensity of my appreciation for people as individuals. i think it's one of the few things that redeem me for not always being emotionally up to par, but i do think that maybe i'm less able to see those aspects of humanity that don't emerge from an underlying premise that we are all unique autonomous creatures.

*this can be explained by my habit of talking about the things i haven't made up my mind on yet

animals and the unreal

Lini and I had an interesting conversation  last night walking home from Me Kong, which if you're in the area is worth checking out, especially their coconut sticky rice with shitake mushrooms. yum. we ran into this sweet looking stray who wanted food and petting, but was too cautious to come out from behind the fence to get petted. she would meow and sniff our hand (through the fence) and then back up a foot and roll onto her back beseechingly. if only we had not been gluttons (i speak for myself here) and eaten all that was served to us we could have given her/(him?) some, but alas.
it got a talking about no kill shelters and whether when one gets a pet one should try to get one from the euthanizing shelters in order to spare one life or whether to go to the no kill shelter in order to support the institution. this led to talking about the animals in our lives, and i commented that having cats is one of the tangible reminders to me that the word is fundamentally unfathomable. i can never fully understand the reality of my cats, what their lives are to them or their motives, whether they are happy from the food and love they get or just satisfied or even if they aren't satisfied. the people in my life at least offer some illusion that i have access to their state of mind. there are comments made and the maintenance of socialized life that seem to reveal things about people. there is context in abundance to use as an interpretive sieve until you yourself believing you've got that person pretty much nailed down, you know how their reality relates to yours. with people it's easier to ignore the division between what we perceive reality to be in our heads and what it actually is.

but pets, to me at least, are a reminder that that's all bullshit. and that in my case is a very important thing to be reminded of considering how much i prefer to have everything figured out ahead of time.

which brings me to an update on the boy scenario. he did in fact call back. and i had a good time hanging out with him and his friends saturday night, but we do not yet know whether he had a good time hanging out with me. because he is not quite figurable - outable, being the new entity that he is. also, anytime i hang out with new people, i seem to have a willfully poor memory of what all went on. i hope i wasn't an annoying person or said un-relatable things.

why can i not be omniscient. why? why?

a tyranny of lines

we have been duped by time. it has asserted in our minds the dominance of the sequential, the consequential, the linear. We write in lines, our speech doesn't double back on itself and our thoughts too, hamstrung by the means we have at our disposal to express them, we experience as linear. But our world is not linear. It is not cartesian; it is fully multi-dimensional, and it is frustrating to me that is a source of frustration for me that it requires such a steely grasp on our minds simply to begin to perceive it in the way it really is and to be able to contemplate that our own experiences of it are beyond our comprehension.

Perhaps all that is a load of crap I can't hope to substantiate. it seems to me that we already know that we do not think linearly, yet, we so often perceive our thought processes as such. We may perceive branches in the the thought process that takes us to a given conclusion but we don't see them occurring sequentially – or at least, if one begins with the observation that languages develop words of distinction for variations that are immediately relevant to the speakers of the language, then we certainly failed to develop sounder methods for expressing correspondence and synchronicity among events.

What's my point. I don't know what my point is. My point is linearity of expression is limiting us. My point is we would not be alive if our brains processed things linearly and we should try to tap that ability for our conscious minds as well as our autonomic systems. My point is if we try can we develop non-linear forms of communication. Can we have computers that are not strings of 0s and 1s or are we imprisoned not only in time but its aftereffect, that no matter how fast a neuron travels, it still is traveling in time across space, that no matter how sophisticated our object oriented programming languages and visual programming languages grow, they still must descend into a realm of tyrannical linearity before fulfilling their tasks.

I want to know. 

ban does best but...

it's not my underarms that need freshening up; it's my familiarity with these...

Web Technologies I need to cozy up with:

• .Net
• SOAP
• XML
• AJAX
• DOM, yes the dom. (dom da dom dom DaaaaaaOM)

Platforms, Projects, Concepts I need to fool around with more often:

• the Wikis, not to be confused with the Wookies, young master.
• Movable Type
• Proto/ mash-ups
• there's another somewhere - oh write, that storytelling scripting language

Companies I need to get familiar with:

• Coghead
• outside.in
• ThinkMap
• hmmm...one that will hire me, perhaps.

I'm feeling a bit swamped
...and my battery's running out.

i'm going to pull a classic avoidance move here and not work on any of these. instead i'm going to return to the Hadley story and get her out of that post-party breakfast she's currently in the midst of.

mis-kismet

so it's not a real word and it might even be a misspelling of its base word to begin with, but i'm swamped and kismet isn't even english to begin with, is it? - english or no, it is apparently spelled that way so i'm okay there at least.

turns out steven johnson is teaching a course on public intellectuals, which you'll recall from my post before vacation, has become the most recent focus point (http://del.icio.us/disanpoter/thinkers) of that ever present sensation that i'm stuck in the landslide of people scrambling to keep pace with their chosen trendsetters and just falling further and further behind. anyway. it's not me; it's the information - or Information, the stream of it constantly flowing in and over itself in successive waves of new. i know this. i know there is too much being created to keep up with it all - even with 'it all' only in those areas i've fixated on, but still.

so now there's this seminar at NYU, that would be awesome for me, and would be kismet, in that i was just thinking about how i need a better, more structured, less maintained by me (who has adopted the airline philosophy of booking and double scheduled all her brain cells), source of following and reflecting on the ideas of these public intellectuals, and here's this seminar guided by a man i already look to for those things and respect on just that.

only it's mis-kismet, because it's already started, and i'm not in NYU and it's probably to late to sign up for the course even if it were open to non-matrics.

hmm... non-metrics, would that be a subtle dig at us luddite yardage users?

okay. i'm just way having way to much fun with words and syntax structures today. back to work.

White Noise

I've hit that critical mass point again where all my thoughts and goals are piling up behind my eyes and at the outskirts of my brain like a throng of trapped and terrified creatures. the image that comes to my mind of course is that of the townsfolk locked in the burning church. it's that kind of undoing of self where the center that was meant to bind the group together in the best of ways becomes the source of their destruction instead. That's how my brain feels right now. I need to reorganize myself and my projects. I have so many ambitions - though ambitions with it's outwardly focused connotations is less the word i'd like to use than something else might be. There are so many potentials i dream of seeing fulfilled and provided for - in myself, in my life (the people, groups, and whatnot that i feel connected to), and in the world at large: or at least the world of minds represented electronically. It's not so much about me acheiving these things as these things being acheived at all. It's stressing me out...

So to start with, i'm going to more rigorously set up my space over at the disanpoter domain around projects. I'll keep this one for babbling in the hopes that one can become some kind of point of collaboration. I only wish i was smart enough and productive enough to be able to work with those minds i admire most ...

really really not happy

it's amazing to me today how not happy i am with my life. maybe i do need to move. maybe that was what i should have done back when i was seriously looking into grad schools, before i got this job and before it looked like thing might possibly work out with joel. i'm not sure i can get over what happened with him when i have to walk by the places i felt such passion and love anytime i go anywhere in the city, and especially when my workplace is surrounded by them. it's true, i can finally almost go days without thinking about him, but it's only on the surface. and today, today i've realized that i'm really really unhappy. i'm not even sure it's depression. it doesn't feel like it. i'm alert; i don't feel hopeless; i still feel fairly cheerful (which doesn't quite make sense). i just ache inside.

i want to write; and then i can't. i want to paint; and then i can't. i want to repair other relationships in my life and i just can't. i'd like to think i still believe that a deep genuine connection is worth the risk, but when it makes you never want to date again and it makes you retreat into yourself away from your friends and your family and anyone who reaches out to you at all...i just don't know.