$disanpoter

the return of pleasant

yesterday saw some minor nuisances but ended on a positively up-beat note. i stopped by Winston's cubicle and ended up chatting easily for quite sometime about the signing bridges and projects, about films and books, about variations on the theme of challenging conventions, about my perpetually unfulfilled collaborative project fantasies. it was easy and engaging and left me with much to think about.

i went home and had a poor run. my hips and knees refused to stop twinging, which in addition to concluding the deliberation on whether to get new running shoes deciding me about the idea of setting a new route to work in the mornings. this is a good outcome to a bad run.

after, i made some lunch pasta for later in the week which i will more likely end up scarfing down for dinner tonight: gnocci in mushroom sauce from archer farms. yummy. then i met up with allison for more low-key chatting. among  other things, we reflected upon conversations. how there are people you just fall into conversations with easily; how there are others that are always more - if not awkward - stilted, even when interesting; and still others with whom one can have an easy, even long, conversation that ultimately  gets no further than flitting across the surface of one's self/life/connection to the world. And then there are others who only begin to have an easy conversation when it's not with one person in particular. anyway, it's interesting...

i'm in a contemplative mood from all this. on the train this morning i returned to those apostrophe pieces i've been thinking about and ended up musing on the similarity between the tone i perceive them in and the tone of the preludes. of course then i started thinking about the boycotting the work of dead people because of their personal failings, though i don't...so meh

sugar, water, and glucose

sometime last week or the week before - it must have been the week before since karen and the Ms were still in california - betsy and i went on a midday mission for sushi and came across a new confectionery store. i've been meaning to check out their website ever since, because really, who can resist a name like papabubble. "until i got to the links page, this opener on the "about us" section had me somewhat unimpressed with the international presence of papa: "we love making things out of sugar, water, and glucose." really? - because i prefer making things out of water, sugar, and H2O.

the links page led me to someone trying to capture the music of suspension bridges and bring them together into an orchestra.  it's just the kind of convergent experiment i dream of. papabubble is redeemed (and suddenly i have "prepare ye" from Godspell whining in my head). not to mention, it's set me in a mood for digging up old projects and pursuing new ones. like making my own string instrument on my ceiling and picking up that introduction to Egyptian Math i came across at McNally Robinson's today. sigh.

lindsay is happy. lindsay is sugar-high.

a is for awake

i'm sitting in aroma on houston this morning, having arrived off the bus form Shelter Island at 9:30 for a 10:30 rendez vous that's been pushed back to noon. it's not such a bad thing, 2 hours' kill-time can be put to far more efficient use than 45 minutes. Now i have time for freerice before getting back to work - or a little reflection. Actually, i started this up when a throaty female rendition of Imagine came on and much to my surprise, I found myself listening to the lyrics for the first time in years. I'm not usually such a fan on the song. I find the melody generally a bit too syrupy and bland and the initial lyrics not so impressive, so i'm not sure i've ever been conscious of the later ones. They're not nearly as steeped in idealistic overkill, and it strikes me that my aversion to the song is fairly ironic considering it's half about cognition and mental-representations...anyway. the song-selection has since deteriorated, so i'm going back to free rice for a bit...

last thursday, i went up to columbia for a lecture on printing in the late 15th century and contemporary practices regarding correcting and 'emending' manuscripts. it was quite interesting, and after, zack was kind enough to give me and a fellow UBC Subber a tour of the library where he works. Both of which i'd like to reflect upon but lack the focus for at the moment. also on this tour, randy - the other subber - made a remark about my vocabulary. once in second grade the elder sister of a classmate remarked upon the extensiveness of my vocabulary during a birthday party. i feel the same way as an adult as i did then; it inevitably prompts me go back and reassess the actual extent of it, for i personally don't find it all that impressive. thus, the freerice time passing.  there's quite a difference between knowing a word  exists and knowing its meaning, and that doesn't even get into the various grades of accuracy in verbal comprehension. anyway - i feel like this blog - in all its mundane wordiness - is a fairly apt indication of my failings in this respect.

slippage

my life, my mood has been slipping steadily over the last few months into a state of alert neutrality. it's not unwelcome. it comes with the appearance, however misleading, of a complete lack of emotional charge to the decisions i make and interactions i participate in. it was nice this summer to be social and to laugh and chat so easily. it was warm and intoxicating to experience the potential for new friendships, to get to know and enjoy the company of different personalities, but summer's over now. now it's pleasantly simple to be alone.

my job is going well; i've got a title and defined responsibilities now in addition to the laptop. my work challenges and continually interests me, and it promises to provide clear, focused opportunity for achievement as well the development of professional relationships. all aspects that have been somewhat lacking from my previous positions with their more fluid goals. because my emotions have abandoned me, this situation resonates, thrums even, with a solid sense of satisfaction, like some finely polished and crafted piece of wood: a thing that can be steadily appreciated through and for its use. 

-- this is amazing. i'm at my mother's now, and there is a gull that has remained suspended and stationary about 15 feet out from the deck. the wind is that intense. i could watch this ocean for hours.--
all that said, the sense of that my daily life if shifting into a different mode, is mostly in my head. i can't really claim the week has been calm and solitary, when saturday's lunch turned into a stroll through soho with allison, deme, and betsy, followed by coffee and then beer. sunday i was out most of the day with pottery and fondue after, and tuesday, wednesday, and thursday all saw me in various social and intellectual contexts. yet, they were more sober interactions, in all connotations, and i think that made the difference. also, the conversations have tended more towards the intellectual world in which i'm most comfortable, and i think that's settled the willful distractedness with which i passed through the summer.
honestly, i'm not really sure what has shifted or how - perhaps it's the legitimacy of my work position trickling down into a renewed ambition to build my life into something more productive, but i feel like my personality has slipped somehow. my interests seem more readily accessible to me. my mind more focused. i'd rather go running than talk aimlessly; i'd rather be working than out drinking.

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.   

public secrets

i found a post today that i never got around to finishing entitled "public secrets and other unspoken constants." The body of that post held only this:

so the meeting i had yesterday with MF (president of the nyc alum chapter) went quite well, though having left early, i wasn't able to speak with her again after the book group.

notes for this post

    * but i need every drop
    * programs co-chair opportunity
    * book group discussion
    * "them"
    * the interactive story about things left unsaid

the first bullet point referred to an exchange with CD in which he said something about there possibly not being enough coffee left for a full cup and i exclaimed with spontaneous sincerity "but i need every drop!" why do i remember something that incidental? seriously.

the second bullet was about misgivings in relation to a possible position on the board of the nyc alum association, and as betsy got to hear about over the weekend, they've only become more justified - to the point where i really can't be bothered. i feel like i'm expected to jump through hoops to gain entrance into a club and i'm just not interested in that. it reminds me of a situation i heard a colleague describing a while ago in which he had to with-hold information in order to get information the should have simply been available to his whole group, a game he was completely capable of playing, but found ridiculous. after having me come up to the UES for coffee then have a phone interview with another board member for what is technically an elected position, i heard nothing for months. when i casually brought up the fall transition at the last book club meeting i got evasive answers. then, weeks later i got an email asking me to sum up my suggestions and observations. when i sent back a quick query as to when the annual meeting was, i got no response. whether i come off as someone who want to take to much control, whether it's just flightiness on the part of the president or whether its some personality mismatch, i don't know -  whatever the game is that's going on on the other side, i'm just not interested in playing anymore. i have too many other projects i want to get back to.

i do wonder what the public secrets was about. i know on one level it referred to my own assumption that i'm a fairly easy person to read whether i actually talk about what i'm thinking or not. this however is not really worth a post, so i'm left tonight scratching my head over what other instance of public secrets unrelated to my own had me thinking about such dynamics. what i do know is that the latter half of the title was an inverted reference to 'variables' and that bewilders me. 

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.

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'

algernon anyone?

sometime - actually, alot lately - i find myself asking myself when i ceased to be capable of intelligent, non-work related thought. it's in large part why i haven't written much here lately. that and a kind of mental exhaustion that we all knew would follow the intensity of this summer's social scene. i miss it though - the summer and the constant influx of experience and information. now i feel like a neuron in the midst of a refractory phase that does not end. incoming firings abound, but i just don't respond.
i heard part of a panel discussion tuesday at housing works. it was part of some series associated with Jane Jacobs (will link to later). They were discussing the future role/nature of media, and they had two editors of electronic journals and two editors/journalists affiliated with print journals. I was most intrigued by the elder of the print journalists who came in his three-piece suit and was amusingly staunch in his perspective on the merits of what he considered to be 'real' journalism compared with what is today passing as journalism. Beyond that, though, I was disappointed. The opening comments dangled the possibility of an insightful and stimulating conversation on the current state, the limitations of, and the unique qualities of distributed versus singular (one journalist/story) reporting and print versus electronic versus blended access - but these topics were hardly touched upon and only referred to, really. the Blog-o-sphere panelist was too soundly ensconced in the fervor and culture of being a part of that community to speak about it from a comparative perspective. i tired of her comments when she it became apparent that throwing around the term 'dead-tree business' somehow endowed the discussion with greater insight. same kind of tired one experiences listening to the followers of fringe political perspectives that have so wholly accepted the truth of their chosen theory that it ceases to be the product of critical analysis or thought. as if the fact there there exists some particular social condition itself validates reducing the entirety of human interaction to an outcome of that social condition. [see, i'm not expressing things well? ug. what i mean is the tautological trend you find in people's perspectives sometimes.] anyway, i was disappointed they didn't even speak meaningfully about the continued [possible/future/current/anything] influence of jane jacob's work. i went downstairs to sort books.

weds reuven helped me out with some music practice, which was both enormously helpful and soundly enjoyable - i've been missing music in my life - and then we met up with deme and some friend of his who were(/are?) in town from california. i was so tired, deme told me i was and went home after a single drink. but the cast of players was pretty interesting. carolina smacked my leg early on and exclaimed "it's so great that girls have curves out here; in LA i'm considered curvy." i was amused. hopefully i'll see them again before they head out.

and yesterday, i got soaked by the rain on an ill-advised, but ultimately worthwhile, excursion to finish up the pieces from my pottery class. the reward for this mock-dedication was a chill and contemplative conversation with my pottery instructor about life-choices and balancing interests, as well as a free demonstration on how to create a particular kind of texturing that i'm quite a fan of, actually. also, i realized when i got there, the beneath the impatience to get back my pieces to which i had attributed my willingness to troupe over there through yesterday's downpour was a longing to be back in that space. these realization are always an odd experience for me: a mixture of quiet revelation and the recognition that it should have been (and in someways was) obvious. afterall, most of my experiencing of life is about spaces, encounters and venues coming together as a kind of fleetingly occupied space. i went there because i already miss the studio time, being there, pushing clay.

that's pretty much the week. i saw my family over the weekend - my grandparents, my aunt and uncle and cousins. it was good, but like when kara visited, it was the kind of complete and whole goodness that needs no comment. a returning to what can be accepted without question and simply enjoyed.

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. :)