Category: telling

Today

I started my weekend on Friday, and spent all of today goofing around with Rock Club, and Zoe is coming to visit tomorrow so I know that will be a write-off. I can’t separate my slacking from my fever-induced laziness. I want to be so productive, and not get stuck on predictable tasks, like whenever I have to do the part of design that involves making something pretty, or presentable. I rock the functional part, but the decorating is really hard. Yes I know they work together. I’m stuck on visual stuff on two different projects right now. Three, really. It’s painful. I’m so full of ideas, honest. I can work so hard. Honest. I don’t know how to make the pretty things come out of my head.

This has to be the year that I learn to draw. Studying colours and type and alignment helped, but if I’m aspiring to something other than boxes, I need to have less clumsy hands.

Party in my head

Robin wants to make a porn magazine for straight women. I could get on board with that, mostly because Robin is awesome and has interesting hobbies and ideas. She volunteers with an anti-violence project and a sexual assault centre, and a sexual health clinic. That is all the shit that I should be doing, since I’ve styled myself a purveyor of sex education info. I spend more time thinking about sex as a head trip, and arty possibilities and altered states brought on by orgasms. Porn show’n‘tell discussions with Robin would be reasonable and worthwhile, I imagine, and also fun and out-of-bounds a bit.

I’m really interested in private publishing right now, and I think it would be extra interesting to make this porn magazine for personal consumption only, instead of mass production. Fame and attention is the background of practically everything on the internet; purposely private media is something I haven’t explored a lot. I’m compelled by the idea of publishing and working and producing for my friends only. That’s a very human scale with different social consequences, completely different from international online communities. I’ve been finding Rock Club a lot more intense than other websites that I make, and also more casual. Just like everyday friends. I like it.

When I imagine this porn magazine, it would involve pals bringing some item that they were hot for this week (or this month), to put in the magazine, and then we could talk about the contents while we craft the magazine. That is a real snapshot of my daydreams; Galen would laugh. EVERYTHING IS ALLOWED: THE CRAFT PROJECT AND MEDIA THEORY EXPERIMENT.

Eventually maybe we’d get the magazine figured out enough that it would be fun to publish it for real. Right now I want to call it Perv Unit. Today and yesterday I am an unstoppable daydreamer, coming up with names for porn projects and planning the tiny urban estate of my future family. (I’d like to keep peacocks in the front yard, because they are regal and completely ridiculous, and know how to kill snakes.)

Life Jam

Feeling a bit weird about giving a PowerPoint presentation to my friends last night, because I was mostly sincere about it. I made a PowerPoint presentation?? About entrepreneurship??

While I was hunting for pictures to use, I ran across a rich vein of future desktops. So there’s that. There’s this, I mean:

My new optical capabilities

On the way home from Idaho this summer, Galen and I stopped in Vancouver and got ramen at Kintaro, at Denman and Robson. I remember taking a photo of the business sign across the street, but the Lomo ate that picture and I had forgotten what was so great about the sign.

We had ramen at Kintaro again this weekend, and holy shit that sign across the street was something. Laund’rays laundry and tanning, for your pleasure:

Laund'rays sign in Vancouver.

At first I only twigged to the awesome name, so the note about tanning is kind of behind a tree. Still good.

This was the first time I’ve taken my new Christmas camera out of the house. I like the way I bonded with it right away, developed that sensory possessiveness where something feels wrong if it isn’t in my pocket. I’m not usually a gadget person (I actually don’t have any other portable electronics). Usually I’m bonded to some giant hunk of paper or textile when I’m out and about, but adding this camera to my body was eeeeasy. So tiny, and quick. Thanks, Mum and Dad.

power jam

costumes. costumes are a productivity tool.

this morning, on my way between breakfast and the bank, i saw a business man running full tilt down the street. a business man like from a children’s book: in a conservative, navy blue suit and tie, with dress shoes, holding an open umbrella upright above his head. running fast, with long steps making his trousers flap. his tie might have been over his shoulder, but that seems like an embellishment that i would add.

i used to want to organize some kind of annual soccer game where everyone would wear power suits. navy vs. brown (i.e., bankers vs. car salesmen), or white shirts vs. blue shirts. (i also like camping in skirts and mary janes, or just generally taking control of my office wear.)

but the connection that made me realize what an excellent, if obtuse, productivity tool was available to me in costumes was remembering, when i saw the business man running, how much better i like doing housework if i’m wearing a tiara and carrying a wine glass. the glass could be full of water or hot tea for all i care, but carrying it around makes dusting or scrubbing a fun time. an event.

i’m sure you understand right away, what it is like to do housework in a tiara and carrying a wine glass (or a martini glass), because i tried explaining all of this at the sara marreiros show tonight and everybody caught on right away. “you should get some of those slippers with the fluff on the front.” and the thing is, i had some and i ran them into the ground doing housework. we are all on the same page here.

i’ve been thinking about running stairs lately anyway, because it seems like a weird and efficient urban exercise option, and i think if i got a washable power suit i could really get into running. you can wear running shoes with a skirt suit, i think. that’s a classic commuter move. nylons would be best but i have to draw the line somewhere (and they look really weird with my furry legs).

a lot of self-employees and telecommuters make a point of getting properly dressed to work at home, because it gets them into productivity mode. i do that too (my key items are a bra and real pants). i’d like to figure out a home office costume that goes one level further, not just into productivity mode but into like, titan of industry mode. what is the word for one of those pillars of society who wield massive business powers yet are admired for their philanthropy and preferably also some type of artistic skill? genius? character? sarah’s imaginary friend? i want to get into like, gomez addams mode. mon sauvage!

contenders for my new work outfit.

  • a clerical cloak of some type
  • a green bookkeeping visor and crisp shirt
  • power suit
  • my old default: the tiara and the wine glass
  • sassy underwear (possibly combined with the clerical cloak?)
  • dresses with hosiery and jewellery. and footwear.
  • cleanroom spacesuit.
  • specialized garment, like a lab coat or a utility belt
  • monochrome outfit of any kind

i think part of what is holding me back from my ultimate productivity-sauvage costume is that all the glamorous titans of yore were dudes, and the lady workers did not have cool 3-piece suits that suggest timeless power. this is an unforeseen feminist battleground.

One down

Today I bought six low-energy lightbulbs and put them in the fixtures we use the most. Kitchen mostly.

I feel virtuous and green, and also homey. Our place is a real castle lately: tidy and well-stocked, with enough places to sit. Now with environmentally sound lighting.

Soon I’ll go to rock club and see if my secret pal likes what I picked for her. Rock club is making me like my friends more. It barely comes together most times, and runs like a case study of social groups, but I like that about it. It helps me accept my friends for being human, even when they flake out or pry for attention or forget to leave room for me. We seem to be gradually adjusting the rock club setup to get the best side of most of us.

My new bookmark

I’ve tried to do this several times. Hopefully this time it will take.

If you use an index card as a bookmark, you can note down any mystery words to look up later. Most words are not mysterious enough to warrant a dictionary interruption (for me at least), but by now I really should know for certain what lugubrious means.

I bet if I make a chart, I’ll remember to use it. I’ll just trust my friends not to tease me when I leave that lying around.

Goodbye, 2005. It’s been swell.

All that goal-setting required some stock-taking. I keep such close tabs on my business development and my personal growth that all I really want to tally up is my reading list for 2005. I barely read at all this past spring, but really got down to business in the fall. I wish I’d actually kept a list, so that I could name the quantity of books I’d like to read in 2006. Why is a numerical goal so appealing? Je ne comprends pas.

Read in 2005

These go approximately reverse-chronological, from memory only. Emphasis shows stuff I especially enjoyed.

  1. The Blind Assassin, by Margaret Atwood
  2. Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
  3. Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell
  4. The Tipping Point, by Malcolm Gladwell
  5. Loop-d-loop, by Teva Durham
  6. Knitting without tears, by Elizabeth Zimmermann
  7. Freakonomics, by Stephen Levitt
  8. The Confusion, by Neal Stephenson
  9. Quicksilver, by Neal Stephenson
  10. Post Captain, by Patrick O’Brien
  11. Master and Commander, by Patrick O’Brien
  12. The Search, by John Battelle
  13. Designing with Web Standards, by Jeffrey Zeldman
  14. The Zen of CSS Design, by Dave Shea and Molly Holzscholg
  15. I Will Fear No Evil, by Robert Heinlein
  16. A New View of a Woman’s Body, by The Federation of Feminist Women’s Health Centres
  17. Petals, by Nick Karras
  18. Bazaar Bizarre, by Greg Der Ananian
  19. Not Wanted on the Voyage, by Timothy Findley

So that’s 19 books, plus a lot of comics. Considering how familiar I got with the library this year, I’m sure I’m missing several no-name typography books and the like. But maybe 30 is a reasonable goal for 2006. 30 then, to be reassessed in June!

To read in 2006, in case I forget…

  • Infinite Jest
  • Confederacy of Dunces
  • Sound and the Fury
  • The System of the World
  • What the Body Remembers
  • Guide to Getting it On (for myvag)
  • The Erotic Mind (ditto)
  • Godel, Escher, Bach (finally kill it!)
  • The Nature of Order #2
  • Laws of Media
  • Emergence (finish skimming it… I’ve read a lot of the books in its bibliography, but it would be good to put it to bed)

Ultimate Jamie experience

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!

Ananas

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?

I only write about how much I love everything

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.

But you could invent one


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.

Add to dictionary

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.

Mmm, mysteries.

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.)

High holidays

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:

  • So that’s how you use Tupperware to build tall hairstyles…
  • Galen’s great-aunt: “So dear, you’re a ‘goth,’ aren’t you?”
  • More great-aunt: “How did you get your hair so tall?” (Making me feel suddenly awkward because her everyday hairstyle is a beehive variant and I wasn’t sure whether she thought mine was ridiculous or not.)
  • Dragging the hem of my white dress in puddles and mud on purpose, because it was only a bedsheet.
  • Still having gray streaks in my temples at breakfast today, and getting to talk to our waiter about it. He still had metallic green fingernails from a Satan costume. We said one sentence each, I think, but I liked it. He was a good waiter. I might have had a 5-minute crush on him.

And of this Hallowe’en in general:

  • Mistaking Rebecca for a couch twice, instead of recognizing the back of her California Raisin get-up.
  • Walking around having serious conversations about work and responsibility and taking charge, and being taken by the snippets that passing pedestrians must have heard coming out of that Raisin, with her huge aqua-rimmed sunglasses.
  • The whole city smelled like brussel sprouts. Probably from fireworks? Hopefully from some anti-loitering stink-bomb we imagined the city bureaucrats setting off.
  • So many fireworks going off. I love the spectacle, but this year I was actually moved by the way pretend-bombs emphasize the absurdly peaceful and neighbourhoodly place I live. (Bang!… no flinching. “I’m sure that’s fine.”)

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!

Hard ass.

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.

Data slob

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.

Parallels

  1. Alchemists thought it was cool to leave bits of gold laying around unattended to show they were not chasing wealth, and that their metallurgic investigations were mystical and divine. (I recently read Quicksilver.)
  2. Cory Doctorow and Lawrence Lessig are both Disney superfans. Are these activists for restricted copyright leaving a giant copyright-hungry corporation lying around?