Category: Uncategorized

If you haven’t seen it before: Overheard in New York.

I’m also using Delicious now. Here’s my feed. (I should add it to my sidenav.)

He is a walking sound byte. Here are my favorite quotes:

“Think about honking if you like conceptual art.” -this may be an actual bumper sticker

“Entropy requires no maintenance.”

“There is a lot of fertility in broken down structures.”

“Jaded is the sound of wonder turning to ashes in your mouth.”

[Update: To give some context to this, I saw Bruce Sterling and Rirkrit Tiravanija have a public conversation tonight at the walker.]

I figured it’s been a month since i wrote in here, so i’d better write something. Let’s see.. what have I been up to?

I finally got a design from my brother for his website, (actually from someone he enlisted to help him,) and built it out. I had the idea of letting him update it via flickr, since most of the content will involve images of some kind, and he already updates his flickr account. His links page is just a delicious linkroll. I have to do some work to get some of the pages to look more like a gallery rather than just the latest photo, but that should be easy. It was amazingly simple once i figured out i should use phpFlickr.

Mondo also happened since I’ve last written, and I never even mentioned my trip to San Francisco to visit kristin and yami. (I had a great time both weekends.) Even though I was only in San Francisco for a weekend, I really felt like I got a sense of the city, which i’d never been to before. I took some great pictures, and it was really good to see people.

I have also been sick twice in the last month. I think I’m getting over the second illness now. (I hope I am anyway, it has thus far been a thankfully brief 48 hour thing.) The first was one of the worst sinus infections i’ve ever had. I didn’t even realize it was a sinus infection until i rolled over one morning and felt the pain blissfully fade as snot drained out of a deep crevice in the back of my sinuses.

I also started a writer’s group. We have met twice so far, and the last time even spent a couple of hours critiquing each other’s poetry. We decided that two or three poems each is too much for us, and will be sticking to one poem each from here on in… But i think it went really well, and am excited to do more workshopping. I haven’t had an excuse to print out my poems in a while, and it’s always interesting how I see more things I want to change every time I look critically at one of my poems.

When is it time to stop chasing your dreams? When you’re dead, that’s when.

Life is compromise, relationships are compromise, but hold onto your ideals and keep struggling toward them at whatever cost, or you become boring, or worse: bored.

Far too many people ‘settle’ and far too few of us keep up the struggle for their ideals.

But just as bad as settling for something that isn’t one of your immediate goals is to set your goals in stone and never reevaluating them to see if they are attainable/realistic/what you still want. I mean, what would happen if you reached all your goals and/or ideals? Someone asked me a question recently that got me off on a tirade about this. Basically they asked: “What would it take for you to reach a point in your life where you were satisfied with what you had and where your life had taken you?” My answer was nothing, and everything. Nothing because I believe you should always make the best of what you have, and try to be happy with what you have, and nothing because if you are ‘satisfied’ with what you have, then you stop growing. You stop moving toward the next goal, and that stopping is death.

They used to think that sharks had to keep swimming to stay alive, and that would have been a good metaphor here, but they discovered that sharks do stop swimming sometimes, when they sleep. So maybe it still is a good metaphor. I never want to sleep. I want to keep moving until I die.

[I posted this yesterday in response to a blog entry over on myspace. I think it’s important, and also something I’ve been thinking about quite a bit lately, hence the repost.]

After you’re done ogling the newly announced Opera browser for Nintendo DS, take a look at this other article I ripped off from slashdot:The Top Ten Sci-Fi Films That Never Existed. Yes, I was pissed off that they copped out of writing 10, and combined 8-6 and 1-2, but it’s still a well written diatribe about how sci-fi films generally suck, and could be SO MUCH BETTER. Plus, after reading it, I started following the other article links at the bottom of the page, and have decided that A Pointless Waste of Time is my new favorite website. I haven’t found a source of geek humor this good since discovering Penny Arcade back when it was still funny.

Other wastes of time I heartily recommend:
A WoW World – I’ve been saying this for years.
One Trilogy to Rule Them All – Quantifying the suckiness.
The Great Porn Off – Porn is addicting? Who knew?
The Gamer’s Manifesto – What games should, and should not, be.

Relationships are fucked. You’re damned if you do, and damned if you don’t. I prefer to err on the side of “do” myself, but it’s not always up to me.

I spent the last hour or two reading through a bunch of Home Detention Lady’s posts, (thanks for the comment!) and thinking about relationships in general.

I would like to think that any two people in the world are a potential match. Any two people could “make it work” with enough compromise and effort. I think those are the kickers. These are the deal breakers.

With 100% effort and 100% compromise, I could date anyone in the world. But I’m not about to do either, and especially not right away. I’m probably not going to make more than a 5% effort in the first month of a given relationship, and screw compromise in the early stages… if we can’t find common ground, then it’s just not worth it.

But I think the longer you stay with someone, the more of both a relationship needs. The more you know about someone, about their habits, about their “flaws”, about the character traits that you don’t immediately adore and admire–the more compromises you are going to have to make in both principal and your vision of that “ideal relationship” that everyone has floating around in their heads. And also as time passes, more effort is required to maintain an acceptable relationship for both parties. Effort to stay in synch with the wants and needs of your partner. I think this is absolutely a natural state of affairs.

But of course, as the levels of effort and compromise required to maintain a relationship change, people re-evaluate. I think all too often, “people” (not talking specifics here, ha!) think that they’ll find the perfect person, with whom they never have to make any compromises.

I went to a juggling convention last weekend in madison. My friend peter was in from the netherlands, and seemed to have a good time even though he doesn’t juggle or unicycle. He even bought three balls before he left, and a festival t-shirt!

I’m back out in the “dating” world, and damn does it suck. I love meeting and getting to know new people, but I hate the in-between stage immediately following getting to know them, when you don’t know if you should be balls out in love with someone or if that’s just going to scare them away. OK, I guess the real news is that Katie and I passed through that stage, and it pretty much scared her away. I’m over it mostly, but I still get pissed off when I think about how she never seems interested in hanging out anymore.

I was going to write a whole bunch more, mostly about how i feel really needy and clingy today, but instead I’m going over to mike’s place to finish a puzzle and maybe watch a movie or something. But first, about the needy and clingy thing… I guess the crux of it was that I wanted to talk about how I am totally a codependent person in most of my relationships, and how I don’t necessarily think that’s a bad thing. I’m flailing around feeling all lonely, and of course it occurs to me that maybe I shouldn’t feel that way. Maybe I should just try and get along by myself for a while.

But here’s my response to that: Fuck it. Fuck that. Fuck being independent. We’re social creatures! Without friends, I’d have blown my brains out long ago. (OK, maybe family had something to do with that too, but I’m serious when I say this.) Without people to share this meaningless existence with, I honestly wonder whether it would be worth it. (Of course, I have no way of knowing if that statement is true, because I have a great network of wonderful friends.) Anyway, I WANT to be codependent. I want to get back to that place with someone. I know it’s not going to happen overnight, but I realized this afternoon that it’s not about kids, it’s not about being a grown up, it’s not about laying in bed together planning our futures… it’s about trusting someone to be there, and leaning on them, depending on them, for the things that matter. I want that, most of the time, way more than I want to be dating people. Nuff said.

[Note, some of the beginning of this post was excerpted from a myspace message to an old friend. Hearing from him was unexpected and cool.]

[Note II: I meant co-dependence here in the sense that i am dependent on my partner, and they are (hopefully) dependent on me. The popular “addiction enabler” definition of the term “codependnet” is not at all what i was getting at, and it was brought to my attention that I might have meant that here. I did not want or mean to add that connotation, and I hope this clears up any confusion. Thanks. (added 01-27-2006)]

So I’ve decided I’m going to atone for not writing a novel in november by writing at least 50,000 words before next year’s nano. But I’m going with the mindblurbs style novel-length writing idea. “No plot, no problem” will be literal in my case. The difference is that I won’t even be trying for one.

It’s all a bit like prose poetry. I had briefly wondered whether others have written novel-length stuff in this vein, but hadn’t done any searching until this morning. To be honest, I hadn’t even known what to search for until today when I somehow dredged up a phrase out of a particularly dusty corner in my brain labeled “automatic writing”. The wikipedia entry on automatic writing led me to another on Surrealist Automatism, which is probably closer to what I’m trying to do.

“In 1919 [Andre] Breton and Philippe Soupault wrote the first automatic book, Les Champs Magnetiques [The Magnetic Fields] while The Automatic Message was one of Breton’s significant theoretical works about automatism.”

I know I have read a bit of surrealist writing, and all I remember was that I found it dense and difficult to get through, but rewarding. I will be hunting down both books in the near future. (This also gives me new appreciation for The Magnetic Fields, the band, which has been a relatively recent discovery.)

Nate challenged me to do this blog archive game. I did a quick google search and couldn’t find the origin of this game, so if anybody knows it, send it on my way. Anyway, here are the rules:

The Blog Archives and Hidden Meanings meme. The criteria:
Delve into your blog archive.
Find your 23rd post (or closest to).
Find the fifth sentence (or closest to).
Post the text of the sentence in your blog along with these instructions. Ponder it for meaning, subtext or hidden agendas.
Tag people to do the same.

“I sometimes fantasize about certain individuals having a more active role in my life… Twists of circumstance putting distance between potential romance.”

I’ll count the second part even though I capitalized “Twists”, grammatically it should have been the same sentence.

Anyway, I don’t have any fucking clue what I meant when I wrote that shit. The post is about possibly moving away to follow laura when (if) she went to grad school. And maybe I was talking about her, but probably I was talking about relationships with other people, people still in the cities when I move away. Trouble is I don’t have any clue who those people might have been. I certainly don’t think anything came of any of them. (This was about the time I had a couple of one-night stands, but otherwise I was only actually dating Laura, and I can’t find any indication of any huge crushes or anything.)

Anyway, I guess this is semi-relevant, because Katie and have talked a few times about moving to Chicago in a few years. I mentioned this to Christy and she didn’t like it one bit.

Anyway, so I’m supposed to challenge someone else. I guess Yami and Dr.Bombay, you’re both it.

I can’t decide how I feel about this decision. I am simultaniously incredibly relieved, and also a bit disappointed with myself.

I mean, of course I’m disappointed with myself. Writing is a big deal to me… but the weird thing is that I’m also not disappointed. I feel daunted by the task ahead, and also less interested in it than I’ve been before.

I feel like nanowrimo is the wrong way to write a novel. Yes, it is good for getting ideas down on paper, it is probably exceptionally good for getting your stentences straightened out–good for the practice of writing, but it is not necessarily good for the parts of writing that I am bad at… the finishing, and the plot. I am terrible with plots.

I have this picture of myself at 45 writing novels. Maybe even at 35. But right now I want to still be in my 20s (last year for it) and enjoying life to the fullest. Not stressing about work or novel writing, or how I’m going to fit both into my day.

I am still going to make an effort to write more frequently. Perhaps I will make an effort to sit down every day and write. Yes, I will do that at least through november. I think I will try and actually finish up the novel I wrote last year for nanowrimo. But more importantly, I think I’m going to try and write a poem a day again. And I don’t want to stop at the end of november. I want to write a poem a day for at least a year. I’m going to write a poem a day until next november, and maybe then I’ll do nanowrimo again as a 30-something. (But without the something.)

Yeah, so how are things? Things are grand, things are fucking great really. I’m dating someone wonderful, and I’m learning to do aerial acrobatics. (Albiet the latter quite slowly; I think I might start going to class more than once a week.) My work has moved to a real location again, which is quite nice. I’m taking the bus to work more or less every day and loving the time I get to read.

Oh yeah, and I’m going to take at least a half-hour to read every day.

So yeah, not writing a novel this november, but I’m going to write a poem every day, and maybe a bit of last year’s novel. I’m definitely going to print that fucker out and do some major editing. And I’m going to take time to read every day. And maybe start playing guitaur again.

…and I’m not going to feel guilty for not writing 2,000 words a day.