$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.

or not

i bailed on much of what i needed to get done this weekend. yesterday i was supposed to be out of the house and into work at 9, but instead i woke at 8:30, did some house things and by-passed work for housing works, where zack and i spent some time discussing the facebook "page" we're experimenting with to share some of our cooler finds. then i went to work for a few hours prior to heading up to a choral concert with betsy. it wasn't such a good concert so we ended up drinking sake and watching movies on demand until the wee hours - or until a disastrously mis-executed discussion turned argument on what it means that the pope is the head of the Church. that simmered down though, and we finished watching "A Nativity Story,"  which was mildly ridiculous on so many levels...
this morning, i did not get to work at 9 or go to the gym in compensation for missing ample time at either yesterday. we had brunch at noon at 107th street, instead, and got to work around 2. at that point, i decided that maybe it was 'okay' to spend time uploading collections of photos to my facebook albums, because, heck - i do care about the events of my life and the things i encounter. it matters to me, and perhaps maybe i deserve to be able to spend a sunday afternoon doing something other than trying to stick to a schedule based more on mitigating opportunity costs than on genuine desires to do any part of it at any point in time.

and that's the weekend. and now i'm off to hang out with my friends.

time addict

i could stop. i could. i don't deliberately fill up my weekends. i don't really run by a schedule, but the things that need to be done slip into the slots afforded them by the things that have times set by others. this is not my doing. it is not my fault that by friday morning, the free time available to me for the weekend has dwindled to nothing, and i stand in the doorway feeling like crying and hesitating to leave, forestalling the moment when i commit myself to the next 72 hours. tomorrow, unless i oversleep, i will leave the house at 9am and not return until well after 11. sunday if i am lucky and don't oversleep, i will have 4 hours of awake time at home to get ready for the week before leaving and not returning until 11 or midnight. i do this to myself. i do, but it still makes me want to cry.

when am i supposed to put up my collection of interesting advertisements and images? when am i going to draw all the functional products i wish the world had created already? when am i going to get my facebook project done or help with websites or finish stories or organize my apartment or learn about dolphins or persians or languages? i just need to stop doing things so i can accrue some time to do things. it never stops; it just changes.

okay. sorry. i'm done complaining.

a city full of unavailable options

i don't want to go home tonight. not yet. but there seems to be no alternative. both the bookstores i enjoy spending time in are busy with events tonight, and i don't have my gym clothes to be able to stop there instead. i asked some of my coworkers if they wanted to grab a drink and play pool, but they both said not tonight. one of them said possibly tomorrow, which i would like, though i have pottery class. the other scoffed at me, which makes me think 'not tonight' should mean never. i don't understand scoffing. it's not a reaction i have to other people. it assumes a preposterousness to the initial inquiry.  as a reaction, it's like the mirror of 'whatever.'   
most of my department is out for various reasons, as well, which is difficult. i am again without a supervisor and will be for at least a week. i've yet to fully adjust to the changes in scope and aim for my position, so not having guidance is fairly stressful. it's not that i don't have an idea of what needs to be done; it's that i don't always have access or authority.

dolphins and the dangers of clove oil

i have health insurance now. it's nifty. ironically, two days after the policy went into effect, my back molar flared up again with a serious toothache. it was late already, 9pm, and so i tried to treat it myself with extra strength tylenol and the topical application of clove oil. This did nothing for the pain, and at midnight, I decided it was worth going to the ER. From this I learned that prescription painkillers really work and are completely worth it. Though one should hoard them, once one has a bottle, because 5 hours in the ER waiting for simple prescription for anit-biotics...not so worth it. Before this, however, or rather after - but the damage was done before hand - i learned that too much clove oil will kill your taste-buds for days. I think I chemical burned my tongue. Literally nothing tastes. You know how they say 90% of taste is smell? So, not true...my coffee smells, my soup smells, my yogurt even smells - but on my tongue they are like the nutritionally enhanced powdered cardboard Meg had to eat in A Wrinkle in Time. So anyway, beware: clove oil is potent stuff.

In other news, last thursday while having drinks with some people from work, the conversation turned briefly to dolphins. Dolphins, it turns out, absolutely rock. They have language skills; they have an innate impulse to rescue or otherwise help not only other dolphins but sometimes people; and they have been believed to be people who got sick of human society and returned to the sea. I'm suddenly very interested in dolphins.

Also, I've decided I need to learn some very basic Spanish, since i'll be over there for a few weeks. If anyone has some recommendations on how to do this most effectively, let me know. Also, I'm starting a collection of ad encounters in my facebook photo albums and I've been working on that page for the sub-basement. So that's exciting...and i'm reading a book on Dadism and Surrealism which has me reflecting on the turbulence of those and surrounding times and wondering whether our own time is so rapidly shifting that it will fail to have any such distinctive peaks in trends or movements once it's a part of history. Jane Jacobs wrote a book called Dark Ages Ahead, which i have somewhere and haven't read. I think perhaps I should.

Also, I've been feeling lost lately. I realized a few weeks ago that I no longer have favorites, that I may never have had favorites. Those things I might call favorites aren't so much works i've enjoyed or found particularly moving or insightful or engaging; they're simply the ones that stick with me. Like A Famished Road, i didn't finish it the second time i went to read it, and yet images and perspectives from it continue to emerge as points of relevance in other conversations or encounters. What this means, i don't know. I wonder if the validity of 'exceptional' is diminishing within society.

 

M is for MHOГO

my brain is fragmented this morning. i think this is the fault of the book i've gone back to reading after a bit of a non-fiction break. i've been having trouble reading through this book because within a paragraph of starting into it, it's got me spinning off into a world of supplemental ideas. so my mind's fragmented, thinking about life as a series of statements object-action code syntax like so:

print_r $lindsay.state;
>array( 'not bored', 'fragmented')

and thinking about how best to implement specialized content in facebook platforms. it has one flaw in common with myspace that irritates me to no end: the idea that one frequently refers to one's own profile page. most of the applications i would want to create would publish stories in the newsfeed i receive not publish items on my behalf in the newsfeeds of my friends...meh. like news, friends blogs, study review (ie daily german vocab), etc. fortunately facebook has added this new 'pages' concept for businesses which could provide such a service...i'll have to explore that. i suspect the service pages won't actually permit specialized per-user content so it might not be very useful at all...

and thinking about  how i need a better pandora station, so i'm trying out intersection stations by picking two disparate artists and seeing what happens. i'm annoyed with Up Up, because it's not, actually what it purports to be. so i've put manu chao with moloko to see what craziness that stirs up.

and thinking about how i miss my friend. it's not a frequent thing, missing people...but there are some. standing in wait for the A train again at JFK saturday night, i had such an intense sensation of remembered experience it stayed with me all the way home.

it's fun thinking in layers.

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):

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.