He just phoned me at 10:30 in the morning to see if I’d chopped anything yet, with the chef’s knife he gave us at 9pm last night. Reminded me to chop something that would usually stick to the knife, like a potato. It will fall right off. But then wipe the knife right away, because it isn’t stainless. Stainless steel doesn’t hold an edge.
It’s cute because he knows that can get annoying, but he forgets. It’s too exciting! The potato will fall right off!
This morning I cut up the gigantic pineapple that has been ripening in our fruit hammock since Sunday’s rock club. (Somebody left it here… Liam?)
1. I like cutting up pineapples, since learning a cool method from my parents’ housekeeper in Jakarta. (Even if it was really weird that they had staff.)
2. Whoa. This pineapple was sweet and delicious, but so enzymatic it felt like it was eating our faces. Who will win the battle of pineapple vs. man?
Yesterday was grading day at kung fu— with the founder of the Canadian Wing Chun association no less— and now I have kung fu fever. After an hour of practice, two hours of gradings, and an hour of staring mesmerized at Sigung demonstrating our corrections (so relaxed and flexible!), eleven of us went for dinner… for another two hours. Epic!
When I finally got home I was still a bit wired and despite it being almost midnight, Galen was not yet home from his slightly mysterious staff meeting. I distracted myself from both sources of nervous energy by trying to draw out the end of The Confusion as long as possible. Thousand page books become a familiar presence— I don’t want to finish and be lonely for my science-fiction/pirate/economics novel.
I managed to read slowly until Galen finally got home at twenty to two, totally boozored. Turns out the reason his boss thought it would be nice if everybody “dressed up a bit” for this meeting was because he was throwing a surprise five course dinner with wine pairings catered by the chef from Brio and getting them all plastered on a school night. So funny! Poor Galen came home in his dapper pink pinstripe shirt, unable to stand upright without swaying, and casting class 14 smells that I chose to blame on the duck confit. Seriously. Farts like no farts the earth has known before. I suggested we bottle some in case we ever need to make potions or spells. We could label it “Ogre Breeze” or something and keep it in the back of the pantry.
We had some excellent sleepy/wired show-and-tell, then watched half of Standing in the Shadows of Motown to keep Galen awake until he sobered up a bit. Who ever heard of a cute drunk? I seem to know a lot of boys who get extra adorable when they cross the legal limit. Galen was cuddled/sprawled under a blanket, sipping ginger ale and giggling whenever a tambourine player made an appearance on screen. Which was quite a lot.
We finally went to bed around four, and so far we’ve both managed to have real work days today anyway. This is my version of take back the night: having late-night adventures on weeknights. I don’t think I do that enough.
Granny: “What I want, is a phone… for my wrist. So I can call if I get in trouble.”
Me: “Oh yeah. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a phone like that. But lots of cell phones can clip on your belt.”
Granny: “I don’t wear a belt, though. What I do wear, is my wrist. And my wristwatch.”
Me: “Hm. Most cell phones are too big to wear on your wrist. How about hanging it around your neck, or keeping it in your waist pack?”
Granny: “But you see, I’d want it to be convenient to get to. When I’m in the car, driving, I can get to my wrist really quickly.”
Me: “So you want a private detective, wristwatch walkie-talkie?”
Granny: “Yeah!”
Next time my grandmother invents something that already exists, I should just buy it for her even if I think it won’t actually work very well with her lifestyle. (I mean, she phones me and plays her answering machine messages into the phone and has me say them back to her. Pretty sure a cell phone would be a bad idea.)
Galen’s granny invented music videos one time. She even got the dominant structure right. (“Darling, do musicians ever make little movies to go along with their songs, as a marketing device? You could have scenes of the band playing, mixed with scenes of the band, say, walking down the street.”)
It seems like there should be some way to define this quality. Technology or media so right that grannies spontaneously invent it.
I learn more words from spell check. Just now, my email client suggested “cavicorn” instead of favicon. So earnest. “Do you mean cavicorn?” I wish I did, spell check. But I don’t know anyone who has hollow horns, or how I would use that trait in a metaphor.
This is really just an excuse to tell the internet about the time my spell check suggested I edit a love letter to read “Dear hognuts.” I let that suggestion come up a few times before I finally added hotnuts to the dictionary.
I’m a little embarrassed to be quoting Einstein here, but I really liked this bit from The World As I See It (via Communication Nation):
“The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science…
“I am satisfied with the mystery of life’s eternity and with a knowledge, a sense, of the marvelous structure of existence — as well as the humble attempt to understand even a tiny portion of the Reason that manifests itself in nature.”
Einstein relates the experience of mystery to religiosity, but for me it’s the cornerstone of atheism. Mysteries remain mysteries, and are satisfying without reaching for explanations.
(I realize Einstein is not an embarrassing figure; it’s just that he gets quoted in such flaky ways. The idea of anti-science new agers using Einstein to back up their desire to make science bow down to rainbow vibes is a bit of a cliche for me. There is a chiropractor at the corner where I cross to check my postbox who has several “Imagination is more important than knowledge” posters propped up in the window, and it makes me cringe. I don’t mind rainbow vibes, but I do mind bad science and dumb posters.)
Hallowe’en is my favourite holiday, balanced by Thanksgiving and New Year. I was up late at a pretty dull party, and up early for a long, slow breakfast with a lumbering behemoth of a group (my cousin’s bicycle activist tour coworkers), and now I am too tired to make witty paragraphs. It’s a list format day.
Highlights from my adventures as Bride of Frankenstein:
And of this Hallowe’en in general:
The whole reason I like Halloween is for the costumes. I can’t come up with a reason that costumes are important or worth a holiday, but I stand by Halloween. New Year’s I like for the cyclical celebration, and Thanksgiving because gratitude is one of the few things I practice in what could be considered a spiritual way. That one actually is important. But the costumes!
Being a hard ass is occupying so much of my thinking time these days that I might have to add a whole blog category for it. Category: Does this count as being a jerk? Or, Category: Suck it up, everyone! Or Category: Fishing for compliments is not advised in THIS pond, sucka.
Oof. Rambling follows.
I make a point of not offering unsolicited judgements about people (I’m not so arrogant as to think I know what people need to hear), but for my own sanity I do pipe up and extricate myself from the kind of sweeping statements that my friends make a lot. “We’ve all been there.” “We all know this is great.”
Category: does this count as being a jerk? What if I don’t manage to be witty about it every single time? What if sometimes it reminds people of things that make them twitch?
That makes people feel bad. I don’t like to make people feel bad. But I love getting to the bottom of unflattering truths because it’s so helpful and satisfying in my own life, and I don’t want to give that up just so some wimps can keep their vanity intact. (See? Being a jerk. Who calls her friends a bunch of wimpy peacocks?) This whole situation makes me uncomfortable, so I’m pretty sure there is something unflattering I need to find out about myself (rather than a good reason for me to find new friends).
An obvious starting place is that I don’t have a lot of sympathy for people feeling bad. Or rather, I don’t have much sympathy for people who fail to take responsibility for their feelings (e.g., blaming jealousy on someone else), or who fail to adjust their silly expectations (e.g., confusing what you want with general manners or laws of physics).
I’ve been trying to track down reading material to give me ideas about how to be honest about everything without being a jerk. It’s become the major crisis of my self-esteem.
So far, I’ve come up with a list of virtues I should probably work on: compassion, patience and forgiveness to soften the blows; silence and apathy to contain the damage; and trust to make it all possible. I’m pretty good at the patience and forgiveness, but not much else. I think I’ll make a chart, Ben Franklin style.
The one clear benefit of all this pondering is that I’ve finally figured out my gang name, 7 years after Galen the Lucky Ass, Matt the Ghost Ass, and Rebecca the Tight Ass founded The Asstastic Four. With me. The Hard Ass.
My friend and erstwhile coworker Justin just found 1.3GB of my old MP3s in the dark recesses of his work hard drive, from last December when I was briefly stationed on his machine. He was happy to have “Common People.” Thinking about it, I believe I deposited that song on at least 3 workstations on that campus, and possibly also on a network drive.
Fangirl/pirate/slob/nomad.
Being propositioned by a drunk couple is much funnier when the couple is Raggedy Ann and Andy.
“Montreal was really dirty when we were there because the garbos were on strike.”
~ my new Australian friend
Two tier one ISPs were down today. It’s totally annoying, but I love when the internet gets physical. I love hearing people explain that this wasn’t a problem with users or servers— it was the internet itself that was broken. Hello, internet! You’re a physical item! That doesn’t come into focus very often.
From Slashdot:
Why couldn’t this have happened during my business day? For just once when a user calls and asks “is the internet down?” I’d like to be able to say “actually, yes, it is.”
A vagina fan wrote me today, with a kind little note about how I’d helped him expand his perspective on women, etc. Apparently he’d been reading my site for awhile, but was finally motivated to write when he realized I was a knitter.
“Personal experience had taught me that knitters, cross-stichers and crafters are sexually repressed introverts just passing the time until they die. Golly, another theory blown all to Hell.”
I am going to tell people that all the time now. “Oh this? I’m just passing the time until I die.”
My granny just called to see if I would accompany her to a protest march on Monday, in support of the teachers’ strike. Of course I will!
This is not a usual activity for granny, but criticizing the BC provincial government is. Part of the reason I’m so excited to help her with this is that it seems like an excellent expressive outlet for her, and I think she likes that too. It’s granny to 11. She seems to feel exactly the same way I do about her being 85 and protestin’ the government: it’s awesome, it’s admirable, and it’s kind of cute.
I’m intrigued yet again at how aware she is of her age and other people’s perception of it. She’s not embarrassed or righteous about being 85, she just rolls with it. I think she might make a sign, which I would love to see. I mean, everybody would want to see my soft, white marshmallow of a foremother carrying a “support workers’ rights” slogan constructed out of cereal boxes and recycled Christmas paper or something, right?
I probably sound like I’m making fun, but I’m really, really not. I find my granny hilarious most of the time, but she thinks I’m ridiculous too and that’s half the fun of hanging out. She makes me spazz by using her Depression-era instincts to save broken rubber bands, and I make her spazz by getting my tongue pierced and building web sites. But we see each other’s point most of the time. I think granny likes being scandalized by her grandkids as much as we like scandalizing her, and vice versa.
I need to save this feeling for when the old bird is being stubborn and long-winded about some boring medical issue. Last night we had a beer together (mildly scandalous) and sorted her knitting box, and now she wants to go protesting, and our relationship is perfect.
I’m about to launch the next website in what will eventually be a sort of stable of websites that I publish. This one is a knitting wiki covering techniques, patterns, people, gear, etc., and linking the diverse partial references that are already online. In general, my vision for this stable of sites is for each to be a sort of calm at the center of a chaotic storm of information, a viewpoint on the fray, a simple starting point into the endless details.
It isn’t just me who is inspired to focus, filter, reduce. Simplify the information. Smaller, smaller.
FM publishing is doing a similar thing (but about 20 times sexier, with celebrity power): collecting individual authors and blogs into a “federation,” a reliable brand. FM Pub approved. One less thing to worry about.
And this Squidoo thing; filtering through expert “lenses” to find worthwhile content. Rollyo allows focussed, limited searching. RSS is about checking a bunch of websites in one place instead of all over the internet.
A Kottke discussion several weeks ago about the future of the web inspired a lot of comments about simplification, unification, resolving the chaos of the web and our million interfaces into some palatable, consistent format.
Is simplification a productive way to deal with overwhelming media? It feels defensive to me. Save us from the information!
I don’t really buy the possibility of simplification. When does anything get simpler? My icon for this impossibility is the closing chapter of Death and Life of Great American Cities… Jacobs discusses the leap we need to make to thinking about complex systems in useful ways, and how everything from cities to medicine depends on it. Complex systems can’t be conceived of by scaling up a set of simple rules because there are too many interactions to keep track of, but neither can they be understood properly as broad generalizations because that misses the complexity. I wonder if some of this push to simplify the web is an attempt to make generalizations easier, and I’m wary of that. I want to find a way to engage with the overwhelmingness and know it for what it is.
But meanwhile I make these websites that collect and filter and editorialize the chaos? I guess that having a clearinghouse is not really a cop-out; it frees up energy to engage with the overwhelming media-soup in other, more useful ways. RSS doesn’t tend to reduce people’s information intake; it just makes it more convenient. It makes room for more.
A major reason that I like to do things manually on a regular basis is to get a feel for how much work is really being done. I go to individual websites instead of firing up Bloglines, I walk my groceries home. I don’t make jobs impossible by insisting on this approach, but I like to keep in touch with the inconvenient ways (yes, I know life gets a lot more inconvenient than typing URLs by hand).
When I walk instead of riding in a car, I keep a human perspective on my spatial surroundings. This is how long it takes a human to travel this distance. This is how big the space is compared to my body. Then when I drive or bike the same trip, I know how big the distance is, and how the vehicle’s capabilities compare to my body’s. I like having that perspective. It keeps me grounded.
In a similar way, I like visiting websites individually to keep a semi-human perspective on my informational surroundings. This is how many sources I’m reading; this is how much time I save by aggregating.
I’ve kind of run out of steam here without any new comment on businesses and projects that aim to simplify our interface with the internet. I’m just percolating. Hopefully something will pop out soon and I can make a website about it 🙂
Milton Glaser in The Believer : I think the worst scam that was ever performed on the innocent American people is this idea that retirement is desirable. It’s only desirable for people who really hate what they do.
Oh, that makes me happy. I get so tired of people who don’t do work that they love. I sympathize when my friends are trying to figure out what they want to do, but I have a lot more fun when somebody is actually excited about a plan.
I remember a class debate in about grade 10 social studies, a typical assignment to argue the merits of capitalism versus communism. The argument that, as I remember it, won the debate for the commies was that money is not a failsafe motivator for work, or everyone would want to be a highly paid doctor or lawyer. People do work for love too, in greater or lesser ways. Some work is so well-loved that nobody can get paid to do it (e.g., most art, parenting).
I go through phases of being frustrated by that, that a lot of great work gets done without pay, and some people can’t afford to do the great work they’re capable of. But right now, I’m just glad for the parade of free work that constitutes the bulk of the internet. Just people making stuff out of love. Bunch of commies!
(Sometimes it is really obvious that I have a tendency to take each new idea that I like and make it the symbol of my life philosophy for a week, until it has been processed and integrated throughout my entire brain. I don’t think a grade 10 class debate really resonated with me as the height of political discourse; it just stuck as the identifiable moment when this particular idea took root with me. Mr. Hansen and his rumoured hippie butterfly tattoo awarding the day to the communists.)
For several years I’ve been percolating on a project relating to beauty. Specifically, I’m into people’s differing tastes. I love overhearing people behind me at a movie having a conversation that goes:
“Why didn’t you tell me your friend was so good looking? I would have worn a clean shirt.”
“What, so-and-so? I can’t believe you find him attractive!”
Just now I walked a block or two with a couple of girls from the neighbourhood, and one was going apey for a local trumpet player’s looks. Getting only vague support from her friend and me. Awesome.
I have practically no taste in common with my friends. Whenever Rebecca thinks someone is really beautiful, they just look really skinny to me. Kelby’s definition of beautiful women seems totally random to me. Growing up, I thought I just had immature taste because I could never predict who my mum would declare “beautiful,” but I still don’t agree with her most of the time.
I love this. I love that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so obviously. This is what I think about whenever anyone gripes about the evolution of sexual attraction or the media’s portrayal of women. I think: but none of my friends can agree on who’s a sexpot. I think: I can dress however I like, and someone somewhere will drool.
Galen and I have nearly identical ideas about both male and female beauty, which is a fun thing to have in common. I had forgotten, until I started making a list of my friends who have weird taste in hotties, that we used to say we had the same taste in girls. Right before the two of us got together, Rebecca made the connection that a girl I’d been a bit obsessed with the previous summer was Galen’s girlfriend at the time. That was one of the things that got counted as fate during the infatuation stage.
I just printed a bunch of index cards with little progress charts for different activities. Billable hours, housekeeping, new habits for the businesses I’m brewing. The charts are very cute! Tiny boxes on little cards. Mmm.
It felt beyond nerdy to print these out. Bordering on unhealthy. I don’t want to obsessive or over-regimented. But the chart I’ve been keeping for kung fu classes has really helped me remember to go, and stay motivated. I get a lot more out of lists of accomplishments than I get from schedules or to-do lists. I like the open-ended intention of a chart. “Here is something worth measuring. Do what you will.”
Previous charting attempts have been hit and miss. I can remember making charts for things since I was about 10 years old, and this kung fu chart is the only one currently alive.
Judging by this kung fu chart success, I’m guessing that being able to see patterns at a glance helps me stay with a chart. I have a steady stream of Xs in the Wednesday column but Monday kung fu has been erratic— that’s real information. I tried to build this latest batch of charts to show some kind of result on both the rows and the columns, instead of only along one axis.
Now I need a chart to chart the success of different kinds of charts! If my charting were about scientific discovery and not about personal motivation, I’d be right on that.
My copy of Drew ‘s Toothpaste for Dinner book arrived on Monday, among other packages addressed to birthday boy Galen. Hooray! Some things:
I want someone to write one of those comprehensive, cross-disciplinary books about the pure joy of the word fuck. I’ve been getting a lot of satisfaction in the last few days. My favourites, overall:
Last weekend I hung out and watched bird documentaries with some buddies (good idea, Anya!).
My favourite part was how each of us apparently had a favourite bird fact, and each of these facts featured in the documentary.
Rebecca’s highlight was the breeding habits of cuckoos. In case you never took a biology overview in University, a cuckoo lays a single egg in another bird’s nest (hence the term cuckolded), and when the baby cuckoo hatches it pushes the other eggs out of the nest.
Most parasitic cuckoos lay their eggs in the nests of smaller birds, so a cuckoo baby grows to monstrous proportions— sometimes bigger than its fake parents or even the nest— and drives its surrogate mother crazy with incessant food requests. The cry of the baby cuckoo sounds like a whole nest full of normal baby birds. Just imagine that for a second: a huge baby that sounds like 10 babies. That’s like something that got edited out of Alice in Wonderland for being too scary.
Among the million things I like, I like monster babies, and really any sort of monster reproduction. Monster sex, monster pregnancy, monster birth, monster mate-wars, monster parenting. I think what I like is complicating love with grotesque evil.
This is all a very long introduction to some comics by Natalie Dee, who I think might be even more into monster sex and evil babies than I am:
