$disanpoter

a distributed history of being

i slept once with someone else. by which, i mean that there exists a single instance in the history of my passage through bedrooms where i remember experiencing a return to awareness, wakefulness. all the rest, whether in long(er) relationships or transitory ones, whether in platonic or romantic situations, and regardless of whatever other contexts and events make them significant to me, the memories are infused with a sense of perpetual restlessness and imposed stillness.
i was reminded of this last week by a comment that may or may not have referred to actual observation of my lack of sleep (the alternative is it simply referred to a prior comment of my own regarding my general lack of sleep) but the true meat of the reference is less relevant than that it has since gotten me thinking about one's own experiential history as it is held in the memories of others. for instance, the above mentioned history of my passage through bedrooms as it exists collectively in one person's memory of their cheek on my shoulder added to another's waking to the discomfort of their leg all pins and needles under the weight of my own added to another's choice of words (or of silence). tonight it seems to me that i am truly no more substantially expressed in my own memories than i am in this hypothetical accumulation.   
at lunch today, i was working on ideas for the hadley story. i think i've got a good idea of how to start it (which i wrote about that over here). thinking on it, though, got me into the mode of thinking about narrative structures and sometime around the time when i was debugging an import script, the running dialog in my head started questioning the possibility of a voiceless narrative. i didn't realize it at the time, but the germ of this, too, was that offhand comment a few days ago. in fact, the image version of my experiences as they register in other people's consciousness came first, but simply wasn't articulated, and from that - bifurcated by the prism of expressing reality in class objects - came the question of whether one could go one step further and present a narrative that truly remained at the level of distributed awareness. what i mean comes from several sources: emergence by steven johnson, rats by robert sullivan and the discussion on mobs near the end, among others - situations where you cannot see the whole in the part, where detailing the individual within the mass bears no observable relation to the behavior of the mass. would it be possible to write a narrative that held the readers awareness at this level, at a level that does not even anonymously single out individuals? i don't know. when i try to reflect on either this or the exposition of character though other characters' memories i come up empty handed.
for the mob narrative, you have some like tale of two cities that amass many characters, but that's really what it is - an ensemble cast, not a description of what the collective whole perceives that the individuals cannot. likewise, one can see narratives like chronicle of a death foretold as approximating or experimenting with the notion of identity as perceived by others rather than experienced by oneself, but that not entirely the same. it preserves that boundary between perception and experience even in the mind that thinks it. my perception of another as a person is different from my experience of them. the difference being for instance, a person's awareness that i am moving versus the experience of that as shifts in weight or errant sounds.
anyway.
before the first of these thoughts came together, the inner narrative of my evening rang out with the words. yes, i am waiting. i am always waiting. for things that i know will not happen as much as for those i know will. and then i remembered the lines of one of my favorite poems "because we cannot learn how not to want, we have to learn by waiting how to wait. and i wait well." perhaps when i have something more condensed to say about that i will. in the meantime, it's sleep, and then hopefully some more worthwhile thoughts on this whole distributed history of being thing. i think it has potential. maybe not for me though.

prodigal JSON

work-wise, today kinda rocks. otherwise...perhaps not so much, but i'll get to that.

i've been trying to get a web-form working so that it updates its drop-down menus and fills in certain other kinds of data on the fly using the ever-popular AJAX techniques. all last week, I worked troubleshooting why a simple XML document requested under-the-hood was not being recognized as such. the cruz of the problem lay in the fact that while there were a magnitude of help pages walking through a single, virtually identical method of grabbing the XML content, there were next to none offering alternatives or troubleshooting steps should the  method not work as expected. it's a common failing of technical how-tos. finally this weekend, i made the decision to scrap the development i'd already done to deliver and digest content in XML and switch over to JSON.* this was not an insignificant decision as it meant essentially writing off at least 20 hours of work and potentially investing an additional 20+ hours to get back to the point i theoretically should have been at early last week.

much to my delight and relief, it took only 5 hours to redevelop the functionality and i can now progress confidently in mapping out the rest of the abstract functionalities i'll need to make a working system.

a side effect of all this, however, was mentioning to a friend of mine that i hate javascript (which is still true), to which he responded by asking what i was trying to do. i explained that i was trying to "implement an AJAX call using JSON objects to populate a select list." this may be gibberish to you, but he knew what i meant, and because of that, i was finally able to accept that my failure to describe to non-techies what it is i want to do with my life does not actually indicate a lack of substance underlying my interests.

on a more personal note, i've been composing more of the hadley story in my head since the weekend. it's a tricky thing. i still hesitate to express through it the kind of emotional soul-searching i've been doing? going-through? the past few years and especially this last and its silly since i've pretty much expressed most of them here. for instance, on the walk back from the bus, i was thinking about joel and how he has a serious girlfriend now (which i'm not actually upset about) and flipping that up into an imagining of past relationship for hadley and how she might think about its failing (before she gets over it), which became an interior monologue in 'hadley voice' about how we would like to have an explanation or some modus operandi for how another person works that we could appeal to when their interests don't match our own and how that just does happen. but really that's just me acknowledging that i still haven't figured out how to accept another person's lack of interest in lieu of actually figuring out how to do so. it's hard to write about some chic figuring out how to do something you yourself haven't figured out how to do. it just makes me feel kinda silly. raw and silly.

*JSON represent structured data in a way that more closely resembles how it looks in actual scripting languages, whereas XML represents it as a series of explicit containers and container-content items.

limit as x approaches infinity of i/x, where i is me and x is air

i got off the train today. i got into work. i got to my desk and said hello to my co-workers. i sat down to type. i regrouped my thoughts. and it hit me; i just want to disappear.

part of it is undoubtedly the return to my daily reality after being away for a few days. it's not that i don't like my life, because all in all i do right now. it's not even that i'm not enthused by the work before me here at the office, because in fact i had the choice to take the day off and i didn't because i wanted to get some more done on these particular tasks. it's not that i don't want to be social...okay, so it's not that i do want be anti-social. i just want to not be right now. if i could, i would dissapate into the ether and reconstitute in a millenia or two.

fly. flee.

...grant me the serenity to be an unbounded vector unfettered by localizing parameters, unbent by interference, unhindered by friction or error or physics, continuing on in an undefined void without space or time or even a plane to be a point on. a directional quotient modified by an aspect of intensity amidst nothingness...

i want: not.

spotless mind

today has been a thematically odd day, or a thematically contradictory day - take you pick. having had a surprisingly pleasant conversation with all of my immediate family (on my father's side), i am filled with a yellow golden haze of possibility: the possibility that the past can dissolve away and the future can continue in complete absolute separation from anything behind that haze. it's the very definition of 'warm fuzzy,' this feeling dominating my day. it would even be classifiable as hopeful, but for the fact that hopeful would be remarkable and the unremarkableness of this feeling is part of its charm. you know, the feeling that this forward-looking optimism could possibly be/come normal.

i hesitate to fully articulate the glowing seedling that is this possibility, the drama-free relationship. imagine it. it's breath-taking. it's enough to inspire you to get up early and go running. go out with friends and not need to talk about what's bothering you. it limitless in its transmutations, this possibility. it also, of course, has delivered a renewed clarity of what, essentially, i'm longing for. not to be motivated out of present-tense perceived lack but a future-tense (note, not conditional/potential tense) perceived gain. that and affection without drama. love, respect, warmth, all that fuzzy shit.

anyway. on the other hand, prepping for a grad school application has me recalling past relationships and conversations, so that in these very same minutes that i am reveling in the potential to forget, i am surprising myself with the vividness of my recall for turns of phrase and the sharp brilliancy of feeling understood by another human being.

in other news, i'm missing skin today. sigh. where for art thou Bit 'o Play?

transparencies, projectors, lessons

like i said. sometimes, i hate my own transparency. like how i write more here when i'm feeling generally vulnerable about my life. i don't know why i sometimes feel like my connection to the world is so tenuous. it always seem the more ironic for occuring when, by all measurable signs, i'm more connected to the world around me. like the last two weeks. do you have any idea how many days i've spent all by my lonesome in the past two weeks? not enough - but it should be a good thing. maybe it's just the New People factor. they introduce new potentials to be misunderstood. i've grown comfortable with you my friends and the idea that you're not really going to think i'm a terrible person for some stray imperfect remark, but new people they bring back that feeling that all could go wrong over a 2 second exchange --when in fact the reality is, it's highly improbable that a new person would be paying enough attention for it all to go wrong over a 2 second exchange. i know this, and yet, i find myself returning in turn to each of the new people i encountered saturday night, monday, tuesday, last week. there's a new wellesley alum in the neighborhood. there are the people i've invited to my book club. the friends of the guy who i didn't meet before and the one i'd already met and would like to know better. all of them opportunities to fail to be interesting enough. 

derek commented upon this the other day with insight. he said when im with new people i make more of an effort to be charming, then he amended this to making more of an effort to be in the center of the conversation. i think this is unintentional. i think i'm just making more of an effort to not be obtuse. anyway. the point is, i haven't had evenings to myself, uninterupted, and i think counter-intuitively, it's making me feel more lonely and isolated, because i've stretched myself to thin with all the people interaction and haven't had that private time to re-condense myself into the me i can recognize as a worthwhile person. that makes sense doesn't it?

in other news, the plumber is supposed to actually show up today and install my washer dryer, which would mean no more laundromatting for this lazy urban dweller (and by extension, hopefully, no more mysteriously disappearing undergarments. because that's just kinda creepy).

and in even other news, i'm done with writing the manual with chancey. it's been sent in. its not on my plate anymore, nor on hers. oh, and i'm apprenticing briefly as an assistant editor with one of they niftier new people i've met.

and for scary news, we have the acceptance into the next stage of the NYC Teaching Fellows application process, wherein i must appear for an interview and present a lesson plan. what was i thinking. me? lesson plan? perhaps i will teach something on bio-ethics.  like medical research in the rainforest and its impact on local ecologies? would that qualify as a lesson plan? i would do math, but oddly, i dont really remember the learning of maths beyond fischer's mack truck explanation of epsilon-delta (yes, i'm still bitter) there went my decent grade in calculus. and with it the decent grades in the classes immediately preceding it. is it sad that i remember my schedule from sophomore year in high school? i think that's pretty sad. hmm...may fractions. or tens and hundreds places. or sentence diagramming.

disconnect

i'm sad tonight and for no real reason beyond a general sense that the lack of a more enthusiastic interest on the part of people i've met recently is mostly my fault. so i'm listening to the tail end of jason mraz's first album where the tone mellows out at least to poignant if not melancholy. "The Boy's Gone" is a meaningful song to me. I relate to it more than many songs i listen to these days. how's that? i don't know. but i do.

i think i'm frustrated by my own feelings. i can report on them so much more easily than i can experience them. derek and i had a bit of a falling out last night over the technicalities of being friends these days. he was upset that i could be so anxious about other interests when i wasn't so stressed out about him and i came very near to giving away the heart of the issue. i don't understand other people's interest in me. why is it that i can stir in myself a milder version of just about any emotion the person in my company is feeling, unless that feeling is directed towards me. I can feel sad for someone else's loss or betrayal. I can find some way to relate to someone's nervousness or enthusiasm. I can share in my friends' joys, but when it comes to people being my friend, caring about me, wanting to get to know me better, the concept is downright unfathomable. I can accept its veracity the way one might accept the physical presence of a wall one once ran into, but my gut finds no way to get at what that feels like - willingness to spend time with Lindsay, even eagerness for some, there is no interpretive schema for that. It seems wholely unrelated to my own interest in talking to or sharing or hanging out with that other person.

it takes months and years of someone continuing to show up or call for me to being to feel like whatever is in them to inspire such behavior might have substance. so anyway. i'm frustrated about that today. it would be some much easier getting to know new people if the underbelly of my mind wasn't always waiting for them to drift away again.

the callback

maybe i've mentioned having met a guy at a party two weeks ago that i had a really good time talking to. he got my number and called a week later, then didn't return my return call for four days, at which time he invited me to a party today. but that phone call was hurried and rushed and he said he'd email me the party info later. he never did, and yesterday i called and left a message that i hadn't gotten it. no phone call; no email. the thing is, i could get the info from someone i know is invited and show up, but i feel like doing so would be showing up uninvited. wouldn't it?

so now i'm bummed for the very typical reason of having looked forward to the potential of getting to know someone who apparently ceased to share that interest sometime since asking for my number. sigh. bummer of a day.

that's all. just mopey me with no saturday night plans.

loss less

it's been a week. being strapped for cash, i've radically broadened the scope of my job search. i applied to two temp agencies, which beyond needing money i'm hoping to hear back from, because i wouldn't mind temping for a while. i feel a need to 'look around' and not commit that wouldn't be accommodated by a full time job. after my interview with oxford, where my own hesitancy was a major detractor from any impression of competence i might have hoped to give off, i've concluded i need to have a more solid grasp of my own skills before i try to convince anyone else of them. to that end i've returned to small building projects, with the added task of actually documenting what i attempt to do. Thus i'm setting up a job tracking database this afternoon and mapping out the framework of it in a word document as well. outside of that, life as been a hodge-podge.

i saw a film over the weekend that inspired me to what to make some small stunning dv project with my camera. i even preliminarily roped derek into it. st pattie's day was uneventful in a petulant way. chancey, arnie, arnie's friends eddie and ellen and i went out for chinese food spent far more than we (at least chancey and i) intended. not good when you don't have a job. i'll be living off the take-home for the rest of the week. arnie's behavior towards me has once more devolved to an indiscriminate "it's not always about you" to anything i effort i make to join a conversation. this is especially frustrating, when my interest is in fact in regards to what someone else has said about their life, and has left me generally un-inclined to give him the time of day. others have suggested that these comments may reflect his displeasure that events of the evening, and of evenings in general are very infrequently about him. i just see him consumed by an effort to reinterpret all that transpires in a way that shines favorably on his own hopes and struggling with reality's resistance to be thus interpreted.

returning to this film - if you haven't seen it Notes on a Scandal is an exceptional, well-crafted film, with solid performances by even its less notable cast-members, stunning cinematography, and if not always subtle, still rewardingly complex psychological exploration.

also, this week, I read this enjoyable collections of longer short-stories: Sonechka: A Novella and Stories. Ulitskaya has a strong narrative voice. Her stories are laced with the muted humor of ordinary existence and move a multi-generational cast of characters through privilege and hardship with ease. Her exposition of the impact of political situations has left me both deeply intrigued by a people who have weathered so many dramatic changes in a lifetime and bemused by the relative simplicity of the american worldview.

finally, i have begun the "there is no sex in this book" story and am happy to be in a sustained mood to write this week. hopefully it will hold. if any of you would like to read/ offer feedback of the non-effusive kind, please drop me a line. i've also returned to some of the Hadley work with pleasing results.

an in my personal life, i am missing you all, with the exception of course, of those who i've today. my romantic life has some good prospects but nothing solid yet, which i'm okay with.

oh, and i've applied to teach english in japan. i have designs to leave the country for a while. i think it would be good for me, no?

and then, there's grad school...

otherness

i have not grown so much since high school; back then i think i shielded a resistance towards getting close to people with personal awkwardness and ineffectualism; today i am just blunt and unapologetic, but i still don't let people get close to me. instead i let them occupy space in my life. i can't tell them how i am feeling so i just don't object to them being in the room while i feel. how is this a healthy thing? i know it's not a healthy thing. my brain thinks, and the way it thinks, like a multi-pin lock falling sequentially into place (this then this then this and there you are, all unlocked) creates the false sense that i should just be able to apply the logic of being a more adult person with more adult emotions and more adult behaviors and have done with all this non-feeling non-relationships.

why can't i? why does every action and plan and every social step forward i've taken in the past two years boil down to effort to demonstrate that i have moved on from something i have very much, and probably very obviously not moved on from? i don't know the answer to this. i keep hoping that going through the motions of being human will let me be human again, but it doesn't. they just rise to crest at which point they can't sustain the underlying lack of the impulses that should be bolstering them and then disintegrate to a point where they can rise again in a different place with different people who haven't figured out that that's all there is to being a part of my life.

i'm sorry to be so about me and not very entertaining today. it's a bit of a crisis of faith, here...only without the faith component.

oh the things we allow ourselves to do

to ourselves.

i remember reading a short story about a ghost who'd haunted a family, emerging suddenly from silence and disappearing just as silently a few years later. the ghost actually was never seen, it moved things and made noise, but its departure caused easily as much distress as its presence had. the youngest child missed the ghost fiercely and struggled under the rest of the family's tacit agreement to pretend there had never been a ghost in their midst. it's amazing how often we miss things and people that weren't good for us when they were around. that's all i have to say on that.

today, it's also  weighing on me today how strongly and suddenly experience emotions we've put on hold for a while, years even. my grandmother passed away this week after a prolonged decent into the oblivion of alzheimer's disease. this is something i have sat with and anticipated for many years now, accompanied by varying degrees of sadness and regret (there are few things i regret in my life. even the most painful experiences - and there have been several recently - i don't regret the way i do some of my adolescent interactions with my grandmother.), but now there's a solid pressure in my chest. Somehow, despite the irrefutable scientific fact the my grandmother's mind had degenerated beyond her memories of family and self, I could help hoping when I saw her that the might be a moment of recognition or solace or comfort, just a glimmer. How we sustain such impossible hopes is a constant enigma to me. To hope for the return of what we had, even when sustaining that hope relies on accepting the possible existence of magics we don't believe exist and equally desperate contradictions, it's amazing. for 8+ years my mind has given me a wall of cognitive acceptance and rarely let me past it into the mire of my own thoughts. my grandmother no longer existed; my grandmother was no longer there. and now, now i'm hit with the full force of a hope i'd hidden from myself.

i shouldn't be surprised. i have a well-established habit of continuing to hope for what can never be. it must be the optimist or the utopian in me, that seed that simply cannot believe that what is not good cannot me repaired or resolved or regained or restored, the heart in me that simply expects things to become right in the long run, despite every truth and knowledge informing me that it's never going to happen.

in short, i have a dubious and peculiar grasp on reality. it's not that i don't know what is real; i know very distinctly what is real. i just don't believe in reality. or perhaps it's not so much even that i don't 'believe in' reality. It's more like i don't accept it. i don't accept what is; i pursue what should be. I'm not advocating that or glorifying that. it's not such a good thing. it causes a great many problems and difficulties and hurt to me, but it might just be the single most defining and persistent characteristic i possess.