Tag: feelings

Long ponderous rant about simplifying the internet

sarah

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 🙂

Commies commies commies!

sarah

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.)

Who’s a sexpot

sarah

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.

House of 100 jades

sarah

I popped awake at a productive hour this morning, and settled in to repot a bunch of plants. My favourite plant care activities are the radical rehabilitation procedures. Put all the potted plants in the shower together, for example, or prune the shit out of something.

Most of all, I love how much the plants love these treatments. I freely admit to being thrilled to see a plant go from dusty and withered to shiny and covered in buds. I don’t think you can get that kind of immediate gratification by watering a cat or whatever. (Maybe you could, if you let the cat get dusty and withered first?)

Today’s surgeries mainly involved our 400 jade babies. The sprawling jade plant in the kitchen has been slowly shrivelling up with some weird rot that starts in the middle of branches, so I had accumulated a lot of twigs and cuttings in my attempts to prune the evil out of it.

It finally became clear (through a shower experiment) that the chief jade was suffering from compacted soil and water wasn’t getting to all of its roots. Time to excavate, amputate and bandage it with nice new dirt. It was a good opportunity to prune off some of the large, tangled branches and plant them in more balanced positions. I have yet to grow a houseplant that is properly pruned with unencumbered limbs, but that’s definitely a goal.

For several years (about 2001 – 2004?) I frequented the You Grow Girl forums and was really into growing exotic and rare houseplants (tropical fruits, carnivorous plants, mimosas that move when you touch them, etc.) but through all the experiments and casualties, I’ve never gotten tired of the lovely old jade plants.

Galen brought a small, bushy one into our relationship, which has become the squid-like kitchen jade. His mum gave us one of her huge, semi-trailing jades in a pot about 2 feet across, for Christmas one year. The rest of our jade farm was spawned from those two. Some of them are so excellent right now that I’m tempted to name them. One in particular would be “Teen Heart-throb.”

Growing up I never saw jades at other families’ houses, so I still have the feeling that they’re kind of special, even though you can buy a 6 inch pot for like $5 at any corner grocer. They want to live. That would be a big credit to a plant even if it didn’t have cool succulent-spoon leaves. So we’ve agreed that having 10 jade plants in every room in the house is not only acceptable, but desirable. I’m glad that Galen is into having a zillion jade plants too. By the time I’m any good at kung fu, we’ll be able to refer to our apartment as The House of Potted Jade.

All these foxy new pots of jade are giving me the houseplant itch. I need to buy lemongrass anyway, so maybe I’ll plant a stalk. And maybe some tamarind seeds. Those were the hottest seedlings I think I’ve ever seen— their first real leaves are these big fronds of pinnately compound leaflets, and they develop red, peeling bark right away. I managed to grow three I think, but they died when we went travelling. (No blame on the plant-sitter; tropical seedlings are hardly a fair thing to impose on a helpful friend. The jade did fine.)

Now with more catcalls.

sarah

About four days ago I decided to make an effort to look more hot, since that’s a pursuit I usually neglect. This basically involved buying a second pair of pants and making a point of brushing my hair.

Results: astounding. Even in the depths of my teenaged depression I was able to appreciate my body as it was, so I’m used to feeling generally happy about my looks. More interesting is the way that every day since my resolution, at least one stranger has complimented or catcalled me.

It feels a little conspicuous, like ““movie stars get their hair cut every day so no one will notice and make fun of them, like at our school”:http://www.kithfan.org/work/transcripts/four/gavpreach.html,” but I can ride it out. I like seeing cute people out and about, so it’s pretty fun to contribute my own cuteness to the neighbourhood. It makes me happy about our neighbourhood that my take on hotness can fly here.

Since I haven’t always been successful at this mission, I’d like to catalogue a few points in case I get off track again later.

  1. Spending money on my hair is always worth it.
  2. Exercising: also worth it.
  3. Clothes that fit. Give the other ones away! I’d rather wear the same awesome skirt three times a week than rotate through a selection of almost-good clothes.
  4. More than one of things. One scarf solves a problem, but two scarves is more fun. Further, both will last longer.
  5. Newer clothes look better because they aren’t worn out.

Generally, my barriers to hotness are laziness and being a cheapskate.

Live octopus tentacles, a dining opportunity

sarah

I have an ongoing love/eat relationship with cephalopods. Squids and octopuses are among my favourite wonders of nature, being so smart and alien and jet-powered. And yet, so tasty. I’ve required small pep talks a few time in restaurants when someone has ordered a delicious tentacle dish that I can’t bring myself to eat even though it is surely a triumph of human culture (barbecued squid, pasta with olipetti, common kalimari, octopus sashimi…).

The best perspective I’ve come up with to handle the awesomeness yet deliciousness of my tentacled comrades is that life isn’t fair. My ongoing meditation on cephalopods is partly to do with my fascination with hard truths. I can’t be friends with octopods because they are ruthless killers. Also, I eat them. But I want to give them my love. C’est la vie, c’est la poubelle.

So I’m really fascinated by this account of eating live octopus tentacles , still writhing on the plate and trying to kill the brave diner. (Don’t miss the movie linked in the comments.)

I snapped out of the absolute stunned trauma of having to fight with my food and attempted to regain control of the situation… Without hesitating, I bit hard on it over and over and over again while mumbling “Die! Die! Die!”

Eating live tentacles embodies almost my entire relationship with cephalopods. They fight, I desire. They are worthy opponents. I am conflicted, but must commit myself or I will barf. I’d rather be friends, but any relationship will do.

Separately, I like food that won’t come to you, but demands you play by its rules. Wasabi is like that for me: I can’t think about anything else when wasabi catches me off guard. I reckon live tentacles would be the same. There’d be no daydreaming about the office while battling a tentacle into the chili sauce.

All in all, now seems to be the time to re-examine my decision not to be a ruthless killer. I used to be OK with ruthless cruelty and domination in high school. Maybe this is yet another trait from the past that is resurfacing now that I’ve stopped taking birth control. That would be unsettling.

Leftovers (almost left behinds)

sarah

It is really easy to stop writing. I think of ideas or stories I want to write down every day, but if I don’t act on the seed within a certain window, the urge just sort of passes.

  1. My ideas are not worth writing down for posterity, or they’d be worth writing down the next day.
  2. I should write more often, if I’m going to write at all.

Urges that have passed in the last few days:

  • Telling you about Antony and the Johnsons playing in a cathedral in Vancouver. Especially about how overwhelming and fantastic it was after about the fourth song, when the sound man finally turned up the volume just enough to resonate in the architecture. And about the comfort of seeing a genderqueer sensation sing in a church, along with a varied crowd of freaks and families and plainer sorts. I really like it when things don’t have to be burdened by being a radical act.
  • Writing out the caffeinated explanation I came up with for why I laugh so much. I don’t think of myself as a giggly person, but somebody probably does. Once the caffeine wore off, this train of thought seemed highly drug-induced: self-absorbed and overly sincere. The jist of it was that I laugh at the paradox of everything being absurd, yet perfect. Am I in my ninth grade mystical phase all over again? I did not know caffeine held this potential for unselfconscious declaration. Maybe it’s a better vision quest drug than I initially thought.

Seitan, alchemy, the pantry

sarah

i am eating homemade seitan! i was resigned to creating an inedible learning experience on my first try (or two), but the results of this first attempt are just fine. a little denser than the packaged stuff i usually buy, but tasty. best of all, a $5 bag of vital wheat gluten looks like it will produce at least 12 packages worth (street value $36).

(for the uninitiated: seitan is a chewy vegetarian protein source, made by boiling a dough made from wheat gluten. also known as wheat cutlets, and the usual ingredient in mock chicken dishes. these are my seitan recipes.)

i don’t yet understand the correlation between pre-boiling consistency and final product. the transformation from wheat flour to fake meat is a weird one. i thought my dough would fall apart during boiling for sure, but it came out huge and puffy and dense. how can something be puffy and dense? meat replacement is alchemy. next time i won’t knead it so much.

this reminds me of canning, in that i have a giant and very heartening stash of seitan in the fridge now. galen wisely asked if seitan could be frozen. at that point, it would become a full-fledged member of the long-term food stores, which is always a satisfying occasion.

the pantry seems so noble, despite being basically a glorification of material gain. maybe the nobility comes from crediting outside sources (the bounty, the harvest, the earth, the fields!) for the treasure. or from the alchemy of turning cheap raw materials into valuable stores using a laborious ritual. (and such a ritual! complete with charts of numbers, specialized glassware, rules that can be bent and rules that can’t.)

Convergence of unlikely killers

sarah

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about being violent and hitting people, because of learning kung fu. The validity of using force in self-defense is so obvious to everyone in the world except me that I haven’t been able to have a discussion about this with anybody, really.

“I can’t see how I could justify hitting someone in the face.”

“Well, if they were going to hurt you otherwise, it just makes sense.”

“But— “

The End.

After eating too many Penguin caffeinated mints yesterday, I finally figured out why I was so hung up on this. I’m happy about this for two reasons!

  1. Problem solved. I am suddenly really grounded about hitting people in the face. This feels much more stable and honest than my previous inner turmoil. (More below.)
  2. I think my caffeine-induced revelation counts as a junior Vision Quest, which I’ve been wanting to add to my problem solving repertoire for awhile.

Why I couldn’t just hit people, already

I think my hang up was that most rationalizations of self-defense would require me to either believe in the law of the jungle (eat or be eaten, man!), or some kind of means vs. end justification, both of which options run directly into the hardest part of my hard-ass ethical instincts (the part that says “TRY HARDER”).

At first I tried to go with the dog-eat-dog strategy, on the grounds that life is not fair. Man, do I love to get down with the unfairness of life. (It’s the core of atheism for me, and why I love it so much. I’m not the apple of god’s eye? Hot.)

But. Despite my addiction to Hard Truth, being allowed to punch somebody back seemed like a cop out. Does someone else’s violence really give an excuse to me, a separate person who believes in being peaceful?

Relationships are magic.

And there you go. An attacker, and a defender. Two separate people… who are having a relationship. It takes two to fight. If I’m being attacked, I’m already in the fight, and that relationship already has hitting in it.

For some reason, this relationship perspective makes a huge difference to me. I think I can defend without adding any violence. (Sure, I could escalate with really disproportionate defense, like explosions. But also I could do something appropriate.)

This really jives with one of the things I like about wing chun— it is focused on ending the fight, rather than having an extended battle or taking revenge. The point is just to bring the relationship back to a non-violent state. If either person can run away at any point, it’s done. I can live with that.

Post script

A separate hard truth that has been popping up lately is that I can’t get friendly with octopods, even though they are so interesting, because they are ruthless killers. I am intrigued by my potential to be a tough bitch. What would happen if I got to the point where I could take an octopus? (This is silly.)

inspirational, celebrational…

sarah

galen and i rented the best of the muppet show and disc one of season one, then went back the next day for disc two. there is so much muppet show in our house now— children’s dvds are only $1 to rent for a week!

when i was little, i thought the muppet show was for adults because it was so violent and unfunny and confusing, and not remotely educational. now i watch it and it’s obviously made with little children in mind— half the skits are pre-verbal and make heavy use of colourful blobs.

but it is really weird. it’s about a bad variety show. that’s a rather complex angle for a tv show— celebrating weirdness without making it cool at all, just loving these bad performers with monobrows, and never letting them finish their acts or get applause. i remember finding the lack of closure really dissatisfying as a child. someone would start singing and just fall off stage and it was over. fozzie never got to upshow the hecklers. it was frustrating to watch!

i thought this would just be silly tv to watch after work or during dinner, but i’m finding it deeply satisfying. affirming, even! it’s such a complete vision of love and bad art and diversity (and puppets).

predictably, my favourite parts now are the parts i found most confusing when i was young: gonzo and sam the eagle.

gonzo is at max power in the first season. i never really understood that he was a performance artist, not just a chicken fetishist. “and now our resident artist, gonzo the great, will eat a rubber tire to the music of the flight of the bumblebee.” (booing ensues.)

sam the eagle is practically the president of the US right now. it’s comforting for a weirdo such as myself to see moral righteousness coming out of a grumpy blue bird instead of a man in a suit.

but i think my absolute favourite moment is seeing sam the eagle in a chorus line of male muppets in the opening credits of later seasons, singing “it’s time to put on make-up”.

Wing Chun for cowards

sarah1 Comment

At Kung Fu class tonight I was forced to conclude that I really am a pacifist. Or at least a coward. Even if someone were trying to rape me or murder my baby or perpetrate some other excusable motivation for self-defense bordering on vengence, I can’t imagine actually hurting anyone on purpose.

Skipping all ethical discussions for the moment, this makes studying a martial art really weird. As you’d expect, none of the instructors gives the impression of violence, just power, and the focus of the classes is always on defense and response, rather than attacks or abuse. And it’s all fascinating and efficient and really cool, and has lots of side benefits for mind and body.

But it’s still absurd to me, even in this responsible context, to learn how to elbow somebody repeatedly in the face and then knock them out with a blow to the back of the neck. Wing Chun is all about overkill; this kind of exercise comes up a lot.

I think I’m happy that I don’t actually want to punch anyone in the face, ever. My concern is only with how to stay motivated to kick hard and train my muscles to respond to any opportunity to break an attacker’s elbow. Because I do want to get good at this, for some reason. I’d rather learn Kung Fu than soccer or distance running or whatever.

Actually, I have a second concern, too: to stop laughing awkwardly whenever I realize what we’re about to learn, and stop needing to give my partners little pats to reassure myself that we’re cool. The “I’m not actually trying to hurt you” disclaimer is supposed to be covered when we bow to each other at the start, and I’d like to get into that “we have an understanding” mindset. But I can’t settle on an understanding. Everything we do in class sets off major cognitive dissonance in my mind: “Why would I ever even pretend to do this to someone?” vs. “This is so awesome!”

My bow/disclaimer needs to include something about how I’m about to enter a strange altered state induced by my rich inner life.