celesteh – Page 49 – Les said, the better II

Yesterday

I stayed up late the night before working on my symphony thingee, which nobody commented on, which must mean that you all hate it as much as i do. I’m thinking maybe i should move some of the brass stuff over to the bassoons or something, cuz brass is loud.

Got too early (well, actually, late, but it seemed too early), to go to the extra session of Ron’s Recoridng Culture seminar. He’s gone for two weeks, going to china to adopt his daughter and maybe do some skiing. Apparently she’s right next to China’s largest ski resort. Anyway, I crawled, slug-like to ron’s class and than aftwerwards met with Ron and Jascha to discuss TA duties for leading workshops in ron’s absence. I’m not at all clear, but I think Jascha is. Spacey normally, now spacey and tired. I think they’re supossed to do a mix of some sound file to come up with a CD that they could shuffle play in their room for 24 hours without being driven to suicide. Jascha and I gave them sound files of a german guy playing billiards and some Maggi Payne and Brenda Hutchinson sounds. Maggi’s sounds were BART, filtered BARt and something airplane-ish. Brenda’s sounds seemed to be a maybe a close miced vacuum cleaner, perhaps and what sounded like it could have been a field recording of the exploratorium, which would be logical, since she works there.
Then, after that and doing some other non-essential stuff, I took a nap from 2:00 pm till nearly 8:00. It took me a long time to wake up. My neighbor knocked on my front door to complain that there was dog poop “all over” the back yard. My front door is broken and will not open. I called the landlord a week ago. She called me back. I didn’t return her call. (ok, I just returned her call) Nor have I paid the heating bill, the phone or the electricity. I did however go out a few days ago and fix my cell phone and buy my textbooks. But I haven’t read the textbooks enough. I’m behind on my reading for last wednesday, for a class that I skipped. I’m so not on top of things.
[you may wish to skip this paragraph] So I went out to the backyard and found one small piece of neglected poop. Xena is evil. If you walk up to her while she’s pooping, she’ll stop and then wait until you aren’t looking and go someplace else. This is more than you needed to know about poop. As Renee once said, if you’re talking about poop, you’re a mom. So I went to pick it up and damned if wasn’t completely frozen to the ground. I’m not a fan of this “winter” thing. I dug it out with a snow shovel. I’ve been peering around the backyard today in the daylight, and I’m not sure about this “all over” claim, all though there are a lot of chunks of frozen mud wich might confuse you if you need glasses.

Gay Bar

[This paragraph is ok again] So I ate all the leftovers and some canned soup and then went to Angela’s house and then we went to the Polo Club in Hartford. The Polo Club was reccomended by Tom. He’s het, but his girlfriend is bi and he’s the only person I know who is actually from Connecticut and exists at all outside of the tiny grad community. He’d never been there. He’d go with me, he explained, but it was his 8 month anniversary with his gf and they had to have sex.

Male strippers

So angela and I show up and there’s thumping techno music and the guy charging us the cover explains that the drag shows and male strippers have three shows at 11:00, 12:00 and 1:00. oic. The woman checking IDs is clearly a dyke, but the bar is full of boys (duh) and the woman who gets us a table and beers (budweiser) is not a woman.
Gradually, the place begins to fill up and the percentage of females starts to increase. I look around and decide they’re either fag hags or straight girls who want to see naked gay boys. I go to pee and there’s a conversation about whether getting your stomach surgically reduced is a good diet strategy. “Yeah, but she looks great!”
Angela is getting increasingly excited. It’s her first drag show and mine too (unless you count Fairy Butch). Finally, the show starts and out comes a big, bitter, middle aged drag queen. “I’m in so much spandex that if it blows, it will take out the front two rows.” she explains. “Four rows!” somebody shouts. “fuck you.” she replies.
She starts making fun of the het boy in the audience and then turns to the women I had pegged as het. They’re not het. They’re all lesbians. I have no gaydar in CT. There were actually a lot of lesbians around. Who knew?
After mocking everyone who is not a gay man, she disappears and the first stripper comes out. He’s wearing a police shirt, dark blue pants with handcuffs on them (definitely not police pants, tho), designer sunglasses, and bright, white tennis shoes. He undulated for a while and finally stripped down to small black boxer briefs. Angela kept whispering to me that he was crappy dancer. then he disappeared. The next performer was a man in a gold sequined dress lip synching some song. Angela was so moved that she had tears in her eyes. Actually, I saw many people with tears in her eyes. People kept comming up and tucking dollar bills into her dress or handing them to her. (and by “her” i mean the man in a dress, not angela. pronouns are slippery in drag.)
Then a guy came out in tiny white boxer briefs with a big tub and sat in it and pretended to take a bath while the song “rubber ducky” played. Then her got out of his tub and started stretching and squeezing a big sponge over his head to “rinse off.” He removed his briefs and was wearing a white, not quite opaque, g-string. He was happy to see us. I shifted uncomfortably. Guys were stuffing dollars into his g-string, as this was a stripper sort of thing. He held up a towell to his waist and off came the g-string. He was sort of flapping his towel around, tittilatingly. la la la
Then the MC was back, in a blonde wig, wearing several layers of tutu, lip synching to Cindy’s Lauper’s Girls Just Wanna Have Fun. She strutted around and revealed her grandma underwear. She caught sight of me and jumped in my lap to give me a lap dance. I was a bit taken aback, so she ground my head into her fake breasts. ack. Angela was falling over laughing. I gave her a dollar afterwards. then the 11:00 show was over. angela wanted to leave to go to the grad party, so we left and did not see the subsequent shows, nor did I talk to any lesbians. alas.

Grad Party

We showed upa round midnight. Everyone was pretty drunk. this one guy was very drunk. I hadn’t talked to him since the start of the last semester. He went to wesleyan as an undergrad. Wes boys want to be sincere. They want to be your friend. So he touched my arm gently, perhaps to steady himself, and slurred that he was very sorry to hear of my recent breakup. I explained that I needed a beer right away and got a can of budweiser. It was a budweiser kind of night. I eventually caught up to the party’s level of inebraition and was dancing to Abba’s Dancing Queen and then It’s Raining Men. campiness was all around me, everywhere I went. So we danced to 2:30 in the morning and Deborah explained that one of the astronomy grads, who was not at the party, wants to sleep with me. I have my own pimp now or something.
Tom just emailed me today asking if I want to go to the Polo Club with him tongiht. I think I’ll say yes.

Problems

As I see it, there are two kinds of problems. One is right-now problems and the other is past problems. Right-now problems are ones that areoccuring right-now. Example:

A: does this make my butt look big?
B: no, your butt is already the size of Romania
A: that hurt my feelings
B: I’m very sorry.

I think those should be addressed as they come up, like person A does in the example.

Past prolems are things lurking from the past. Example:

A: It hurt my feelings last year when you shot my dog.
B: It was rabid!
A: You don’t know that for sure. We should have brought it to the vet.
B: It was chewing on a human baby!
A: That dog was very important to me!
B: You’re a lunatic!
A: you’re an insensitive jerk!

Past problems are lurking around and they must be addressed or they will erupt in bad ways, but as we can see from this example, bringing them up can also be dangerous. I think that in some cases, past problems require a professional referee to help people sort them out.
there are my thoughts about problems. thank you

Introspection

My relatsionship with Christi had many problems. We had different methods of dealing with them and different ideas about what they were. What we were agreed upon was that June 2002 – the end of 2003 was a messy, bad time. My way of dealing with this was simply not to deal with it. I wanted to focus on loving each other and hope of the future. Christi wanted to directly address these lingering issues. Neither of us has especially good communication skills, so when she would try to address these problems, I would not get what she was talking about and be upset and not want to think about the bad past.

She, however, wouldn’t let go of the past and so the past rose up and bit me at the start of winter break. I spent the winter break contemplating the past and patterns in our relationship that had not changed since we were 19 even though we had changed and the patterns weren’t good then and had gotten less good over time. The past was a huge ocean, rising up and threatening to drown me. It was too big. I didn’t understand what Christi was talking about and it hurt me. The way she said it hurt me, but I didn’t tell her that. If only we would just focus on the bright and hopeful future, it would all go away and everything would be ok.
The magnitude of past hurts, when I couldn’t ignore it anymore, was overwhelming. How christi tried to talk about it (and I resisted) hurt in a correspondingly overwhelming way. Not only was it huge and horrible, but she wouldn’t let go of it. I couldn’t see a way to let go of it without letting go of her. It was the only thing I could think of to do. Trying to talk about it would just hurt me further. It would hurt her. There was no point in drowning ourselves in an ocean of woe. I stopped talking to her to avoid having to talk about this. I was frustrated by her unwillingness to simply embrace my vision of a future disconnected from the last 2 years.
Today, Alvin told a story about a guy explaining his compositional style by writing the word Beethoven on a piece of paper. then he wrote “19th century.” then he wrote “minimalism.” He drew an arc from “Beethoven” to “minimalism,” bypassing the 19th century and then wrote his own name next to “minimalism.” It’s a nice notion to think we can ignore the 19th century, and indeed we try, but it’s foolish to assert that it hasn’t changed and affected us as composers. Lou Harrison editted Ives, who took all of his ideas from the 19th century. I listen to Lou and get ideas from him. I come from a 19th century musical heritage which I cannot escape from.
But I wanted to escape from the last 2 years. I wanted to draw a line from returning from Europe in 2001 (full of ideas and enthusiasm) to the present. And maybe this composer in Alvin’s anecdote could make a reasonable claim to being unscathed by the 19th century, but I couldn’t make a similar claim about 2002. I didn’t want to talk about the last couple years. I didn’t want to think about them. But with Christi arriving and the sort of introspection one engages in around the New Year, I did think about them. It was a deep chasm from which there seemed to be no way to get out. I told Amy later, “how much can two people hurt each other before it’s enough?”
So I stopped talking to Christi, but I couldn’t stop thinking about her. I got back to school and thought, “I want to run away from home.” but I already had. running away from home doesn’t help. Problems have an uncanny way of following you. Trying to ignore things doesn’t make them go away. focussing soley on the future is not a way to fix problems of any kind. My denial of the past was as useful to our relationship as Dubya trying to fix the deficit by setting up a lunar base. Both ideas are fueled by a sort of optomism, but a ludicrous way to deal with any sort of present problem. Both require a solid foundation that needs/needed repairs before it support such a project. My refusing to talk about the past or deal with it was like Dubya ignoring WMD stuff in the State of the Union. It must be addressed. (I must stop comparing myself to Bush!!)
I never told any of this to christi. It didn’t fit in my world view of “if we just ignore this it will go away.” It certainly didn’t fit with fleeing tidal waves from the past. and it was a tidal wave. The past had been steadily collecting behind me, waiting for me to examine it. It’s like the reading backlog I’m already generating in my Mystic Voices class. (alas) I cannot explain how overwhelmingly huge the unexamined past was or be less metaphorical in my description. What is true is that I needed/need space to deal with huge personal demons. I could not discuss them with Christi then. It looked like I would never be able to. Breaking up with Christi seemed like the most sensible option and the least painful for me and for her.
Obviously, breaking up with Christi and fleeing to Connecticut did not make these demons disappear. I took with me two carry on bags, one checked bag, and the maximum limmit of emotional baggage (one day in therapy and I’m already in cheesy metaphor land). And I’ve been examining the recent past. And suddenly many of the seemingly hurtful things that Christi said seem to make sense. Suddenly, it’s clear that she was trying to slay some demons instead of having them creep up on us forever. That our 19 year old patterns didn’t fit anymore. That we had to talk about the future not in vague, hopeful terms, but in the concrete and rooted in our experience. She also hurt my feelings. Neither of us is good at this communication thing. It’s hard to do over the phone. She may not have hurt me on purpose.
I love her
So now what?

New Cell Phone

So apparently, it was not beating my cellphone against a pillar in Oakland that temporarily cured it of it’s antenna woes (although that seemed to help). My pld phone existed on a different frequency than the new system in Connecticut. this explains why my reception was steadily degrading (as they changed the system) and why it would spring back to life in NYC and CA.

I have a new phone as of today that works on both the NY/CA frequency and the new CT frequency and it didn’t cost me anything. The guy at the phone store assured me that my old phone would be sent to CA and sold as refurbished and not go into a landfill. He also gave me the name and phone number of a recording studio in Hartford that often needs bassists to sit in on pop/punk recording sessions. I also learned that the fancy new cell phone rings are actually mp3s. so my dream of composing cell phone rings is a bit odd then, since any song can already be a ring. I’m going to double check this last fact. But maybe I can play in a poppy punk band at least.
My personal ad is liove, but doesn’t yet have a picture. So far, no replies. I’m feeling far less certain about things than I did earlier. My confusion and unhappiness is great. My tears flow freely. I went to the school shrink and cried a lot. She wants to see me for the next two weeks. she does a great concerned expression. It must be hard to listen to woes all day. I had dinner with some undergrads and said i had seen one of the shrinks and they all knew her. Everyone in Middletown is insane. The people in the mental hospital are insane. The people in the halfway houses are insane. the people in the grocery stores are insane. everyone connected to the university is insane. we’re all damn crazy around around here. I want to go home. I kind of wish that I had never come.

Boston

Yesterday, Jess, Angela, and I went to Boston for a day trip.
We left kind of late, which is fine with me because I was mostly into clubbing, but it disturbed Jess. She used to live in Cambridge, the suburb (?) of Boston which contains Harvard. She did not go to Harvard, but went to Brandeis (where she got her first masters), which she commuted to. She did her undergrad at Columbia. When in Connecticut, she likes to go to New Haven and hang around Yale. She clearly has an Ivy League fetish.

So we went and hung around her old haunts from her year in the area. She was intent on showing us everything cool. When some members of our group had to go to the bathroom, for example, she declared that she would take us to the public restroom voted “best place to pee” by a local free newspaper. (It was considerate, but I think the place voted “closest place to pee” might have been better suited to the occasion.)
My goal was to go hang around the gay district. Her goal was to take us to museums, but we left too late, so in liue of that, we went to the best coffee shops and bookshops in the area. She took us to a cafe called “the Other Side,” which was very granola-crunchy and actually had really good beer. There is good beer on the East Coast! Hope returns to a cold, dark world.
We rode the MTA, but they kept raising the faire by a nickel, so we could never get off of it.
Ahem. We rode the MTA around and ate and drank coffee and visitted bookshops and esteemed restrooms and actually got a pretty good tour of Boston. It was kind of dark out and very very very cold. I was wearing two swearters, thermals, a ski jacket with a scarf inside and another scarf outside and a ski hat and the hood of the jacket and ski gloves and was feeling only a bit cold. Angela was suffering.
We went to a lesbian dance club at place called Club Hollywood Boston, that I found listed in a free weekly newspaper, but I dunno if it’s the one giving out restroom awards. We showed up around 10:45 and left around 12:15, so thigs were pretty much just getting started as we left. This was because Jess wanted to park by Harvard and ride transit around, which was logical as she’s new to having a car, etc. But like other transit systems that I can name, the trains stop running pretty early.
Anyway, I danced with Jess a few times which was fun. I realized that it was not going to help my goal of picking up chicks, as people would think I was with her. And furthermore, I’m much too shy to pick up chicks, they have to come for me. I know I’m awkward and not a great dancer and somehwhat (ok, very) nerdy looking, which is truth in advertising. But I also realize that there are women on earth looking for nerds. By which I mean that I’m much older than the last time I was single and I know I don’t have to pretend to be something much hipper than I really am to get chicks. Not that I wouldn’t mind being hipper. What am I trying to say? something about self-esteem, probably.
But this doesn’t cure my shyness. The only stranger that I talked to, aside from telling someone that I was in line for the bathroom, was the coat check woman. And the bartender. Someone cute approached me and asked if I had dropped a sock, since there was one lying on the floor near me. I laughed. but I had to leave and spoke to her no more.
The dance club scene might not be the best place for me to cruise for chicks, but it is super-fun dancing with Jessica and I’d like to go again.
We got home around 3:00 am.

What happens next

Ok, so the HOA was vengeful. you can’t do stuff without asking first. However, Ellen has been encouraged to work with the design review comittee (which includes an architect), to come up with a shorter version of the shack which is not nailed into the wall (big sticking point due to water penetration issues, which are really very minor, but you know . . .). Her plan, she told me, is to tear down the old shack and re-use the materials to construct the new one, which will keep her busy for a quite a while and hopefully will not fxck up her upcoming gig in Seattle.

Somebody on the HOA wrote an angry letter about the shack, condeming it and attacking me, saying that I had been asked to attend the meeting, but had refused. Indeed. I told everyone that I talked to that I would have loved to attend, but classes were starting. I’m sure that any other person in my compound would have skipped registration day and the first day of classes and bought a last minute new plane ticket, so I feel like quite a slacker. But there was this class I wanted to add, for which I had emailed the professor asking for approval, but she didn’t write back. I felt like attending the first session was necessary to get the class. It was a hard choice for me, since the class isn’t offered every year. Finally, my education won out, mostly because I didn’t want to spend hundreds of dollars on a new ticket and also have to pay late fees. Sharon would not beleive this, but so far, I have avoided all late fees. I have not even asked the grad office for mellon balls, although they often have cookies out and actually, one time they did give me mellon balls, now that I think about it. this is the difference that a big endowment makes.
anyway, I didn’t see this letter, since it went out after I left. But there have been many similar letters with neighbors denouncing each other during my time in that compound. I really like Berkeley. I live in nice area. I have neighbors that are actually very nice in social settings. Nevertheless, I’m very strongly thinking about selling after I finish with school. This would be after another 14 months at Wesleyan. a possible year in Germany after that (I hope) and maybe a PhD program, so not for a while. There’s some sinister similarities between homeowners associations and Maoism. The denunciation thing. It’s an exploitable part of human nature. I used to have a coworker at netscrape who said that the Stanford Prison Experiment showed that you didn’t have to train people to be concentration camp gaurds, you could just get them to do it automatically (I’m so glad I’m out of the software buisiness). I think that Maoist denunciations work the same way. You can exploit people’s natural tendencies to support your system. It’s prolly easier than capitalism, since it doesn’t require a gigantic media apparatus constructing rediculous myths and pounding people with them constantly.
I’m a good leftist. I want to beleive in a noble human character that would come out under a just economic system. People would farm in the mornings, code in the afternoons and write symphonies in the evenings, to paraphrase and mangle Marx. But there are people in the world (I’m no longer talking about my HOA, but more about political groups in Italy and the US) who are true beleivers in facism. There are people strongly dedicated to the other side. Some of these folks are paid by plutocrats. some of these folks are plutocrats. some are afraid of alien other. but there are some folks who just believe in facism. How do they get these ideas? How do you neutralize these ideas? How can you fight this tendency? Is it learned? Is it inborn? Is there some cultural meme that could be stamped out, thus leading to the utopian sisterhood of humans?

School

Anyway, this semester, I’m taking Mystic Voices, and undergraduate Medieval studies class that I didn’t know if I would get in to, Alvin Lucier’s composition seminar, a group tutorial in SuperCollider (taught by Ron Kuivila, my advisor), Colloqium, and Gamelan. Jessica told me that I have to take a different ensemble this semester and I can’t keep taking the same one. If this is the case, then I’m going to take Anthony Braxton’s ensemble, although I would need to ask him to waive the pre-req, which I think he would do. I plan to take his ensemble next fall, along with gamelan, and take fewer academic-type classes.
For the record, although I whine about back pain, I really like gamelan. The songs are groovy and the ensemble is low stress. We had our first meeting tonight. I played the gong, which is the most laid-back of all the instruments, since it only plays at the end of phrases that are 8, 16, 32, 64, or 128 notes long. Hypothetically, phrases could also be 256, 512, or 1024 notes long. There’s a cutoff somplace, the longest phrases ever actually written, but I can’t remeber if it is 256 or lower. I feel very ethnomusicologically-oriented when I play gamelan. Last semester, the ensemble was the grad student social club. this semester, there is a teem horde of undergrads and few grad students. There’s me and a small group of PhD students, but I feel good about it.
I’m sort of half TA-ing Ron’s Recording Culture class. I’m not officially assigned to the class and the last hour of it conflicts with the Mystic Voices class. Ron said this would be ok. There’s a parking garage in Middletown that plays loud Baroque music year-round in an unsuccessful bid to drive away youths from a coffee shop located in the first floow of the building. In the warm months, the youth hang around the coffee shop anyway. In the cold months, nobody would sit outside and get snowed on to drink coffee, but they leave the music on anyway. The parking garage is music is highly irritating. Somehow, Ron convinced the parking garage owner that his Recording Culture class should be allowed to do an installation there for 24 hours, where they use the Muzak system. He’s involved in curating a seperate event, called Rock’s Roll, at a museum where composers submitted stuff that’s supossed to be played on top of each other. Composer A’s tracks play at the same time as Composer B’s. Ron’s starting off his class by having them mix the submitted stuff, including things that were not picked for the museum. The submissions include works by Maggi Payne and Brenda Hutchinson (I think The Star Strangled Banner is among them). Maggi’s stuff sounds really cool. I haven’t listened to all the submissions yet.
I do not know if semi-TAs get to do anything for the parking garage, I’ll keep you posted. But personally, I think the owner should permanently cancell Muzak and let me install some SuperCollider patches. I could just stick a laptop in their PA system, which would not only be more economical than paying Muzak fees, but would also be much more interesting and just as likely to drive people away. I’m thinking about that thing I did a long time ago with virtual memory. I’m thinking about just intoned triads that might make people want to hurl themselves in front of trains. I’m thinking about fingernails on blackboard type sounds. Dubya talking backwards about terrorists.
I want to do more stuff with Dubya. I noticed a certain melodic quality when he said “In fact, what the terrorists have done is caused us to take an assesment of what’s important.” There’s interesting pitch material lurking there. It’s higher pitch than the rest of his speech. Insincere. Sing-songy, almost. I went to the WhiteHouse webpage and fired up AudioHijack and started capturing the State of the Union address. Only when he started tlaking about Hydrogen-powered cars, did I realize that I was grabbing the wrong year. If you can stand it, go listen to last year’s address. The text is very, very similar to this year’s. I didn’t get as far as weapons of mass destruction before I quit listening. For some reason, they haven’t posted this year’s address. I heard a rumor that Democrats applauded when he said that the Patriot Act was set to expire this year (thank god), so maybe they’re editting that out.
I don’t know what I’ll do for political audio-mangling if Dean wins in the fall. I guess I could use his Iowa roar thing.
So, except for Mondays, I have a much more relaxed schedule this term. I’m also only taking 4.25 units this semester, instead of 4.75. I might even have time to write music. I heard a rumor that Alvin will require us to write a string quartet. So I’ll be in the library with the score to Ruth Crawford Seeger’s String Quartet and the CD, trying to figure out how she did what she did.

Mood

Often hopeful (like right now), but with a tendency to slip in to anger or despair. In Berkeley, walking around often restored me to hope. Here, not so much. I’m speculating that it’s the cold + people often don’t bother shoveling their sidewalks, thus making the walks somewhat treacherous (what’s with my neighbors? they pile trash in their yards. they don’t shovel snow.). Also, in Berkeley, I felt a sense of belonging to a larger thing. I am a part of the universe, etc. Here, I feel rootless. I tell myself that I’m part of the universe, but I feel more like a Christmas tree, cut off from my roots and dragged to suburbia to eventually wind up being tipped over in the middle of the unshoveled sidewalk, next to garbage cans. I’ve got an appointment with Behavioral Health (aka: a shrink) on tuesday.

Moving Targets

Asking a 15 year old to write about “who am I” is silly, because by the time the teacher gets around to grading the paper, the kid will have changed entirely. People go through some periods of intense change. I was talking to my housemate last night about Saturn Returns and he, who is the same age as I am, told me about how lately, he’s been his moodiest since the age of 16. “something’s going on.” we concluded.
So, there are some things I know about myself: I’m queer. I like music and programming and I’m good at both. Aside from that, instead of trying to pin myself down as a moving target, it would be more useful to have a goal state. So instead of “who am i,” “who do I want to be?”
I would like to be the sort of person that my astrological sign says I should be. (what I love about California: it’s ok to treat astrology with seriousness. anywhere in the country. just say you’re form from california). I would like to have creative ideas and follow through with them. I would like to be smart. I would like to be kind and caring and thoughtful and mindful and mellow and grounded and calm and serene and an activist and ambitious and driven and relaxed.
some of these things conflict, but there’s contexts for everything. also, i would like to be able to leap tall buildings in a single bound.
I met a woman during break who makes a list of what she wants to achieve in a year and then on the other side of the paper, she writes what she’s willing to do to meet her goals. she carries the list with her and looks at it first thing in the morning and last thing at night. I’m not sure that I want to be that driven, though. But it does raise the question of how I reach my goal state of being both highly active and very calm. What would I put on the reverse side of my list?

Who am I

When I was a sophmore in highschool, I was assigned to write a paper on the subject of “who am I.” This is what occurs in catholic highschool religion classes. I wrote a paper telling the teacher to bug off, it was none of his buisiness. When I was a junior in highschool, I was assigned to write a personal statement which would be useful for college apps. I started it with “‘I am gay.'” explaining that my previous year’s paper should have started with that sentence. When I was a senior, I borrowed the phrase from Socrates that “the unexamined life is not worth living.” In college, they quit making us write these papers.

Maybe that’s why I have so little sense of self now. I was talking with Amy, former housemate, on the phone today and she asked who I was without Christi. I have no idea. So I’m giving up on self-loathing, because I’m not even sure who I’m mad at. I used to rant about how individuality is over emphasised in Amerikan culture. I still think this is true. “Rugged individualism” is a myth put forth by people who want to renig on the govt’s role in the social contract. But maybe some individuation is a good thing.

I’ve had a very crappy couple of years. My mom died. My marriage broke up. I think that I can’t live for other people. Other people are unreliable. They die or leave. I have to live for myself (whoever that is). This is, of course, tempered by the idea of community. There’s a fine line here. I need to be self-reliant, and I need to be conscious of how my decisions affect other people.
My plan was to explain the aimlessness of my mid-twenties by explaining that I was “finding myself.” Unfortunately, I wasn’t looking hard enough. Jean says that by the time my Saturn Return is done (I’ve got one year left), I’ll be an entirely different person than I was before, so I’m guessing it means that it’s ok that my sense of self is somewhat confuddled.
My friends and neighbors that I’ve been talking to all tell me “hey you look good!” Like I’ve undergone some sort of change. And a positive one at that. I was thinking that I’ve finally met my goal of becomming mellow as fxck, but then someone told me that it was having short hair. Alas, still angsty. Not yet mellow.
Saw Autmn and Stephen and my dad tonight at a show at 21 Grand. It was groovy, especially the first tow acts I saw, most especially the second one. Beforehand, I played my new tunes for my dad. He heard the triad one and asked if I was going to see a shrink at school. I enjoy this reaction, actually. I want people who hear the piece to think of throwing themselves in front of trains. I want it to sound more melancholy. I want people who hear it to feel the crushing pain of existence bearing down on them from all sides. I want them to realize that in two short years they can lose the two people who are most important to them. That love doesn’t conquer all. It doesn’t conquer anything. Everything that they have faith and hope in will eventually crumble and come to naught and trying to stop it is like trying to stop the tide. I want listeners to taste their own mortality.
So far, I have not come upon exactly the right sound design to get these reactions.
when next I post, I’ll be back on the east coast.

the hoa board president just came over and related concerns of people who are trying to sell their places and how the temporary structure might affect them. so we’ve got three yes votes and 11 probable nos. Ellen started talking about how she wouldn’t have moved here. why didn’t we talk to her before building the thing? i wasn’t even around then, i was at school.

when my mom was sick, a group of people and I went to see Minority Report at the big megaplex theatre in Mountain View. It was a Tom Cruise movie with lots of action and random violence, although somewhat written by my favorite sci-fi author. I shook the whole time the movie was on, totally overwhelmed, and hoped that nobody would notice me shaking. Afterwards I panicked in the parking lot about whether my mom would take all of the toxic pills that my dad refused to put out of her reach.
i feel like that now.
I couldn’t keep my mom safe. i couldn’t make things work with christi. i can’t garuntee that ellen won’t be cast into fast food jobs. i can’t cant cant do anything. cant do anything but sit here, tiwtiching, blog posting.
I think “i’m an asshole,” but then i think it’s been stressful lately, “this is not who i am.” well, then who the hell am i? i am a failure in relationship. i am someone who lures people here with false promises of working space, then shows up unexpectedly, has a major crisis, acts like an ass, is unable to deliver the promised work space and is totally incabable of dealing with the stress. i can’t go to the dmv without having to breathe deeply the whole time. but, hey, maybe this is not who i am. maybe there is a capable human lurking deep somewhere, maybe out for a holiday, maybe getting a bite for lunch, maybe hiding under the bed.
these woes aren’t even that bad, not like mom swallowing a pile of god-knows-what in the middle of the night. (thank god she never got into the pills. i did not hysterically go insist in the middle of the night that something be done. i can’t remember how this was resolved.) why can’t i function?

today

Ellen told me the Halvah eases the crushing pain of existence. I think she may be right. I’ve been in the kind of mood lately where thoughts like “I’m an asshole” and “I am a bug splatted on the windshield of life” seem profound. So a short scene came to me on bart.

We walked into Mamounds. “You’ve been so glum lately,” she said, brushing a wisp of her long dark hair from her face. She smiled encouragingly and her hands fluttered gracefully.
The woman behind the counter stared at us impatiently. “Can I help you?” she asked.
“What do you have that eases the crushing pain of life?” I asked.
“Halvah for $1.50” she indicated the display case on the counter.
“Can I have a chocolate one and a turkish coffee?” I asked.
“For here or to go?”
I shrugged at Jessica.
“For here.” Jessica directed.
I got my truck smog checked and registered. It took a long dern time. And I figured out how to record audio on supercollider. The help file has a bug in it. and I wallowed in self loathing/pity for a while.
I talked to two of my neighbors about the temporary structure in the backyard. The Home Owners Association is meeting a week from today to decide if they will compell us to tear it down. Ellen was explaining to me this morning that if she loses the temporary structure, she’ll lose her Seattle gig and be forced to take minimum wage jobs and live in a studio apartment and have a budget to buy a few pieces of drawing paper periodically and dabble in art on weekends.
Please light a candle dedicated to your diety of choice that the association decides to let it stay. their issues are twofold: 1. It didn’t get pre-approval from the design review committee. (my defence: uh sorry. i wasn’t here when it was built.) 2. It may cause water penetration (my defence: it’s only going to stay up until may 2005. the possibility of structural damage in that time is remote. and i would of course be responcible for any repairs required as a result of it’s being there temporarily.)
One neighbor was supportive. the other was on the board. she indicated that people have to face consequences for their errors. So because the review comittee was skipped, there is no way in hell that she would allow it to stay. also, it’s important to keep art in perspective. it has it’s place in life, but that is secondary to property values.
we’re having an open house on saturday so people can see the temporary structure and get an idea of what things are about. of course, neither ellen nor i posses social skills in any significant degree. i fear it will be a disaster. i’m thinking of trying to pull in outside talent to pitch our case.
doom.
i don’t have the energy for this. i have important self-loathing to do.
any suggestions from anyone would be extremely welcome.