Like a puss I ripped off V's milk crate, like a puss I bussed (partially) in to work. But I biked home via Bridge and Lincoln yesterday, and I'll probably do so again today, and I feel great. Plus my lether jacket got soaked in the rain, and now it feels soft and supple.
I guess biking little over half of my commute is better than not biking at all, and one day I'll remember that King Street isn't that bad of a ride and save a lot of time.
I love biking, but it's hard enough just to find a reason to get out of bed in the morning.
I beta-tested my work commute with a milk-crate cabled on the back. Results were mixed.
Being rather unflexible, I can't swing my back legs over my seat, let alone the backpack I've placed in there. I could _wear_ the backpack, but the reason I want a basket is to avoid doing that when I've stuffed my laptop + textbooks + knitting + whatever. I could learn to mount my bike like one mounts a horse, but I probably should buy elbowpads before attempting that. I anticipate messiness.
Bus-drivers aren't always cool with it either, I found out. In their defense, baskets are a big eyesore in their windshield.
Ideally I ride the bike as to NOT take the bus, but I know how unmotivated I am in the mornings. Getting from my house to Conestoga mall is trivial, more trivial even when biking to the stop takes three minutes instead of ten. Bussing to work at suboptimal times or walking from the mall takes longer than the first segment's bus commute. Biking involves taking King Street up or crossing the highway and some convoluted trip down bridge and lexington, so I'm balking at biking entirely.
Sometime this week I'm going to look at easily detachable baskets or bike-bags, which saddens me as I have placed great sentimental value in my stolen-from-cafe-1842 milk crate. But I suppose I'd rather not die, and I'd rather not feel like an idiot mounting and dismounting, and I'd rather not mumble about how annoying it is to use my bike, and ultimately I'd rather use my bike than not.
I'm going to try biking home via Bridge and Lexington today, I think, and see how annoying that ride is.
Bought a book on making cookies. It's rather sad, but I've never made cookies before. But now I need a cooling rack.
Saturday was spent feeling empty in the back of my head, that feeling of being so exhausted and useless and beaten down that nothing really matters beyond getting through the day. So I actually cleaned my room thoroughly, all the mess generaters have been pruned with the exception of having too many clothes and books. That starts now-ish.
No, that was Sunday. Saturday was spent cleaning Sinister/![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
dont_ask_me_why's house and knitting. I did feel cheerily good about myself, though, because of cookies and cleaning and inviting people over for said cookies.
My housemates are planning a trip to England (London and Norwich) and I'm invited, I think. Better start figuring that out, just in case they're serious.
After taking most of the month off, my knee is finally back in a runnable shape.
I took my first week back of running a bit shorter (and a bit faster) than I normally run. In the next few weeks, I'm going to crank my mileage back up to a good base (~40-50 miles). Come mid-February, my marathon training schedule kicks in and my mileage is going to ramp up.
The extended warranty on my laptop computer, Calamari, expired this month, which means it's been three years since I got this machine. A lot has changed in that time. Windows 7, streaming of my favourite TV shows almost everywhere (except for Modern Family, freaking CityTV, ABC does it, why can't you? But I digress...), the death of PC gaming outside of casual games (which I do enjoy, don't get me wrong). In some ways, my reason for needing a new computer are less than they've ever been. After all, even at work, I get by with an antiquated system and the 2000 version of Microsoft Office.
The biggest factor for me is where I'll be in the next few years. If I'm looking to move to somewhere that requires airplane travel in one-to-three years for doctoral studies, I'd much rather have a new laptop. If I'm staying in the Toronto area, I'd get a desktop, because my dollar goes farther in terms of performance. I also get easier upgrades as technology marches on, and they simply don't feel as flimsy as a laptop.
Still, if I'm being honest, the only real reason to want a better computer is so World of Warcraft runs more smoothly. I don't really play the game enough anymore to justify dropping more than $1,000 for that.
There is some essential flavour of the acid trip that, I don't know, for me is laced with Richard Linklater movie scenes and the shimmering guitar cutting sound in popular Chemical Brothers singles. It is you forgetting your own existence for half a night, actually living your dream of being nothing more than an inanimate camera.
The reason I write this livejournal, the times I'm not just playing with words, is when I'm trying to recreate the scene of vivid scenes in books and movies and literature, have a sense of what it means to be creative and express such wonderful things.
And I found it entering a dark bathroom where a person was recentering their "chi" (word-provided arbitrarily by me), not sure in any way how I or they'd react, trying to get their dream-like rhetorical questions to form some kind of human truth I could latch upon because I'd be fucked if I willingly littered out a single thing about myself, assholishly tossing aside any attempt to quid quo pro information because my information was boring, even to establish a common ground of interest, and I'm gonna be real rueful then next time I meet him. Maybe I'll admit a bashful smile.
And I found it on the tip of Kerry's pen as she, like the chick in that youtube video before the cow came chompin', just peep-peep-peeping out little calligraphy trails until you'd think the last dot would dribble out, but she'd suddenly burst into more. And then she'd sit up and cock her eye, all schoolmarmish under her fleece pajamas, out from under her glasses to eye a thing so she could put it down on paper.
And I saw her not as a visual but as a paragraph, something straight out of Bronte (who I've never read.) And I saw myself penning the exact same kind of tale as those Linklater filmns or Chemical Brothers scores, I was having my acid moment, my youth confusion moment, and though I'd never be able to write it well for anyone else I had finally written it for me.
And now I have a little thing inside, an achievement or an understanding, to keep moving forward better than when I entered.
--
And that's the public bit. I finally got the visual thing, I was around people with whom I wasn't afraid to lose my self and inhibitions, I finally got that point where I knew for a fact that I couldn't separate the outside world from me, and every little moment when someone did something I couldn't trace back to me was 'hallelujah.', and I finally listened to music the way stoned people do (Yoshimi vs. the Pink Robots, of all things) and I said some things (I think) I'd regret saying sober but I'd rather have real in other people now. I hope nobody tells me if I did. I hope the right people heard.
I get Iggy Pop, I get how he cuts himself with broken glass and walks on audiences' hands and smears peanut butter, and oozes green out of his cock, but I'll never be able to demonstrate why to anybody. Probably for the best, that.
--
And now my ego returns, all Johnny Rotten like, and I'm comfortable amongst the bullshit again.
Things I have on the needles:
-Lacy cardigan, for me. Maybe halfway done. Needs bottom, sleeves, and buttons.
-Socks, again for me. 2/3rds of the way through the pair.
-Green shawl. For me. Good in class knitting until the rows got too long, which is why I haven't worked on it since July.
Things I need to knit before WHOC:
-Hat for landlady.
-6 tiny surprises.
-Alpaca scarf.
-Possibly 2 other things.
-Dishcloth
My goal is to finish the socks, the tiny surprises, and the alpaca scarf before I fly home on the 21st at the very least. That way I can work on either the sweater or the shawl over the holidays. Or maybe another pair of socks. I can always use more socks.
![[mood icon]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/opiummmm/foxies/working.gif){kind=small}
busyWent to the movies with Arianne and her housemates, but that's not really the important part.
Her room, filled with Dylan and Jordan typing naughty phrases on text-to-speech websites, has baby blue walls. Various posters, neatly aligned, cover the walls with just enough space to imply framing. A particular section of them are tilted, tastefully so.
She has books, a million of them, they're spilling out of the bookshelf like mine and cover her windowsill. Except unlike me, where they're scattered all over the floor and desk all Walter-Benjamin-like (at least that's what I see him doing in my head anyway), hers are all neat. She's got a million books but she's in control.
And she has a beanbag char and an Ibanez acoustic detuned guitar that feels absolutely lovely to strum. I fell into it and closed my eyes and just smacked the guitar some while listening to an internet lady robot say "I want to fuck you up the asshole" dispassionately.
For the first time in who knows how many weeks, I was at peace, I was in a good place.
One of the few spontaneous reasons to go to Toronto (surprise extra ticket to a concert) opens up, but it -- as expected lands -- on the same day as a party I've been organizing for a while.
Boourns. Oh well.
--
Finally attached a milk-crate to my bicycle. It's really handy, it's really wonderful, I wanna scrawl "Spirit of 1842" across it in spraypaint, but now I can't swing my legs over to ride and dismount. I have to do this stupid little hop thing. Oops.
--
I keep fucking up my knitting, fuck.
I am reading Please Kill Me, an uncensored oral history on the history of (American) punk. I am reading about Iggy Stooge specifically, I went to smash and punch things, have been wanting to all day in resonse to the abject brutality of the Warhol/Detroit garage scene.
One feels the force with which Reed/Cale and Osterberg/Asheton/Alexander changed the world. Even being told that these guys were the prototype of the music I live in, it doesn't hit you until you witness how they live. You hear about drugs, sex, but it doesn't really mean anything until you hear Iggy Pop slam his dick across the living-room table, asking Ron Asheton why it's leaking slightly green.
I can see why Lou Reed would be anyone's hero. What an asshole! How does such a queer man represent all that is great about male heterosexuality? Just the way he says "Rock and Roll is so great, people should start dying for it ... Maybe I should die, all the great bluesmen did ... I don't wanna die. Do I?"
Nico I'm still warming up to, I don't know much about her but I enjoy the conflicting ways she's portrayed. I kind of admire Ron Asheton in this book way more than Iggy Pop, even though Iggy Pop remains way more important due to his cutting-on-stage/smearing peanut butter and meatballs/ walking on the hands of the audience thing. Ron Asheton sounded like a burly in control, steering the guys (unsuccessfully) when the rest of the band, including the leaders, are too fucked to operate properly. That the interpretations of him from others seem to match what he himself says, that means something in a book that's entirely he-said/she-said.
There's a draw to change the world like that, try to tear down that stupid thing of rhetoric and politics and holier-than-thouisms? To get on a stage and scream something at the world, perform something, not to win them but to strip yourself down into something primal and take all the dressings of a scene down with you ... but why does it always have to involve blood-tipped syringes and not affording sandwiches and stupidity and brutal sex games?
I don't know the answer, but I'm intuitive enough that this question is rhetorical. Fuck. Fucccccccccck.
I am fairly confident that I'm one of the uglier people on the bus. I have no basis for this beyond my self-image. This is relatively new, it happened over the fall, it happened when my bathroom gained a mirror with a slight downwards angle. I am beginning to accept this, going uglier, growing older, mattering less, meaning less.
But I close my eyes and listen to music, the Minutemen or Boards of Canada or Slowdive or whoever (never Sonic Youth, because that's all in .ogg format) and my lips relax into a smile. It isn't the music, it's the self-evaluation of current state that comes with having nothing to do on a bus, it's the music as it advocates my current mindset and current mood to the listener. If only I was my headphones, quietly presenting myself to others not as this physical thing but as the result and cause of the music on my playlist. Maybe then I'd, but for now my lips rest -- half-smiling -- in musical response to my own testimonial.
As long as I've got that, a half-smile in response to my current state at whatever state, I've got something.
Due to a warped M.I.A. record that I have to hold onto until replacements arrive, my cubicle currently sports a hip-hop look. It also has a Fallout bobble-head, a pretty work-supplied fractalesque orb, a jar of almond butter, a colonial-era teatin with pictures of nineteenth-century India, and so on. It's cozy.
My ex-officemate, feeling his place to be spartan, picked up a little plant. That's not a bad idea.
Today someone stepped into my cube to check out my record 'collection', wondering if I bought them only for show. It was good, it's what I used to do with a team-manager's office a year ago because he'd always have interesting books and trinkets rotating around, the Principia Discordia and all that. And now people might start doing that to me!
Then we talked about my roomates, since they were the catalyst for the record thing. Fraternization, hurrah! I like this new office.
--
Today I'm actually going to eat lunch and read in the cafe area, perhaps even move our occassional backgammon game there, see if that will produce spectacle. I don't normally set aside a lunch-break but it seems like a useful thing.
Last Thursday during Bible study, our leader asked everyone what their plans were for American Thanksgiving. The idea was to figure out how many people were going to be around that night and if it was worth holding group.
Of the eight other people in the room, everyone had somewhere to go. Six have family in Washington State. There's a married couple, who have each other and their seven-month old daughter. And then there's me.
That's probably the worst part about being single with no family in the area - you just can't get together with your family whenever you want to. When everyone else around you is spending time with family, you're stuck alone.
Thankfully, a couple whom I know through church has invited me to join them for Thanksgiving dinner on Thursday. In the absence of family nearby, I'm thankful for good friends in the area.
At least I'll be home for Christmas.
One thing I am am comfortable turning into busy-work is filling out or correcting info on MusicBrainz whenever I have an opportunity.
Every time I read a book on Vim, it is like reading the journals of a lover, it opens up new avenues of adoration. I only hope my ability to interact with him has grown to reflect all these new dimensions of understanding.
Spectacle is so delicious because superficialty allows things to remain genuine for me. I do have a value-laden world view, it however is unable to descend as deep or principled as others. The spectacle of a thing allows me to contribute to movements with which I sympathize, but I neither need to inherit their entire way of thinking nor do I have to forgive their lapses of logic or ethics or consistency or charity.
Does that make me ingenuine? Of course it does. One day I will even remember that, I will stop forgetting that I am ingenuine out of principle. I will stop forgetting that I am at odds with the idea that one must be idealistically genuine in order to be a person of value.
This makes me less usable and less comforting, perhaps, but I strongly believe that I have other qualities which make up for this open and oft-stated caveat.
The days when I feel most and least valuable tend to be one and the same. Perhaps it's like the earliest hours of a vote, where the final outcome panel oscillates wildly back and forth with each additional feedback. For those moments where I haven't invented enough cheap excuses to carry forward with a thing, all I can do is grit my teeth and hold on until I am distracted by others into forgetfulness. If I'm lucky, I will be fed enough material to interpret as some kind of success. If not, I survive until the next chance.
--
I am content with being yelled at from time to time for trolling, because while it decimates my self-worth on bad days I cannot reconcile belief as anything but a sacrifice to convenience. None of it really matters anyway, if I'm not a slave to scaping by without conflict, I'm a slave to obsessiong over a subset of countless injusticies in the world, and if I'm not a slave to that then I'm a slave to ennui and nihilism. There is no way above this except survival and the hope that I don't have to go through this again after death.
Any of these might be more productive alternatives however, so who knows? The only way to really achieve something in life might be to become narrow-minded, to focus on some little thing, to *actually* do some little thing, and hope that any schizophrenia you cause towards progress will be drowned out in the grand scheme of things.
I don't expect that to happen to me, though. I'll simply have to stomach the bad times as I currently have them. There is worth, novel and productive worth even, in how I'm currently living. That's what I think.
--
One of the essays I read in ancient times claimed that feminism's importance was its key to all other equalities, that any other marginalized group could at least shrug and say "At least I'm not woman." To break out of this prejudice, it was claimed required and resulted in the breaking of prejudice itself.
--
I bought a bandana yesterday in the hopes of emulating an ascot or cravat. I would like to see how far I can get without wearing anything collared.
--
I bought a reading-light which clips on to books. I have never slept so well.
I drove on an actual road - the kind not in a parking lot - yesterday. It's a pretty nerve-wracking experience for, well, everyone involved. I'm in the "Gee, why does anyone need to drive faster than the breakneck pace of 40 kph?" phase. It's weird to see things from the driver's seat: I don't feel I get a good view of anything; all this car is in the way, every direction I look.
In other news, I might be interested in having another man in a dress in World of Warcraft. I was doing the Grizzly Hills PvP quests to raise my Warsong Offensive reputation, and I got harassed by three mid-70 Alliance characters. I couldn't put up a decent fight at all on my shadow spec. I spoke with the main warlock in my guild, who said Seed of Corruption would've taken care of that situation. I've been planning to play with an orc mage in Cataclysm, but maybe an orc warlock now might be just as fun.
Friday (yesterday) was pretty interesting.
Finally it didn't rain in the morning. So I walked to get the bus to work like usual - and discovered that after the shaky bridge there was no way of making it to the bus. There was no more Washington Road - it was river at best. So I called my previous boss from the road (I didn't remember my current boss' number) "I can't get to that side of city but I will try to get there eventually".
Eventually, a few hours later, I made it.
And everyone was happy.
It will take a few years before I can use that reason/excuse again. No more flood+high tide for being late.
But I had a good time...
Interesting parts come from the flood. Most downtown was affected by the flood. 18000 houses are without water. We are high so there is water, even for shower. Feels so luxury. More flood expected for a few days on tide, and so is also having no water for a week. Sigh...
Not that I'm not particularly South-Asian, merely a blood inheritor and even then from a weird Portugese anomoly state. Hell, I'm not even much of an immigrant.
And it's not like M.I.A. is in any way speaking for me, as an artist or a Tamil refugee or a Londoner or anything. It's just one of the few proudly South-Asian things that feels neither appropriated and defensive (local Indian-derived youth culture) or inaccessibly exotic (Trilok Gurtu, Vanraj Bhatia, truly south-asian people.)
That she's a gumbo of genuine British and Sri Lankan existance probably helps, as does her melting of agitation and pop, the personal and the political, strife and good living.
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