Friday, February 26, 2010

But trust me, on the sunscreen.

It occurs to me that I have another goal in progress that I have not yet addressed explicitly. One of the most enduring favorite things in my life is "Everybody's Free (to wear sunscreen)," the Baz Luhrmann "graduation song," and, as such, it is the basis for goal 77. The true intention behind this goal is to "try ten different ways to be a Good Human Being." This goes above and beyond simply being nice or pleasant to be around or ambiguously believing that there are Serious Global Problems that Someone Somewhere Should Address - this song tells you how to live, how to be humble and embrace your flaws without getting mired in them. Anyway. Here goes:

1) I'm wearing sunscreen. Really. My moisturizer is SPF 15, and I'm about to put a bottle of sunblock in my car as the serious beaching is about to commence. No lines and wrinkles and skin cancer for me, thanks.

2) Dance - even if you have nowhere else to do than in your own living room. Aside from dance recitals in my youth, I tried very very hard to avoid dancing in public all my life. Despite years of training, I'm moderately ungraceful and - perhaps because of those years of training - I really don't know how to dance, like, at all, without choreography and a few weeks of practice. Luckily, the world contains this magical substance, "al-co-hol," which enables those such as myself to set aside all feelings of shame and uncoordinatedness and get down with our bad selves. I have therefore now danced TWICE in front of other human beings, and, let me tell you, it is very liberating. I greatly desire to try it again very very soon.

3) Don't be reckless with other people's hearts; don't put up with people who are reckless with yours. I'm... trying. And generally succeeding. Take my word for it. These are goals in progress, right? Right.

4) Understand that friends come and go, but with a precious few, you should hold on. Work hard to bridge the gaps in geography and lifestyle, for as the older you get, the more you need the people you knew when you were young. Enough said.

So that's four bits in progress. Arguably, I am also doing well with another, Don't mess too much with your hair, or by the time you're forty, it will look eighty-five. It's hard for me to judge... I mean, I feel like I abuse the crap out of it, but the reality is that I only dye it every two or three months, my straightener is still wrapped up in its cord from moving this summer, and I don't even own a blowdryer. We'll see in twenty years, I guess. Also, technically, I am also following a sixth piece of advice, but... I never read Cosmo in the first place and even when I do glance at the ladies' mags, they certainly don't make me feel ugly. Like, maybe I could lose three pounds and tone my upper arms, but. Definitely by no means ugly. Gosh. Anyway. Progress.

Side note: Angels in America is coming to New York's Signature Theatre for the 2010-2011 season, along with a whole mess of other Tony Kushner plays, and I am so so so excited about it. I swore I posted about it already, because I found out about it at least two months ago, but... apparently not, according to the search I just ran. The Signature says it will be the first large-scale revival of both parts EVER in New York City - I have full faith that it will be the most magical experience of my life.
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Monday, February 22, 2010

Finally....

Here's "The Iceman"! Check it out, for reallll. The philosophical and ethical implications are boundless and I want to discuss them with all of you!

On a semi-related-but-not-really note, I finished reading two books in the last two days, one of which qualifies under the "recommended to me" goal, and one which I just picked up, started reading, and promptly stole from my friend because it is thoroughly awesome.

How I Became Stupid is a delightful reexamination of the age-old plague of ennui that befalls all the youthful intellectuals of the world from time to time. Although it doesn't provide any realistic* "solutions" to the deeply painful experience of being too aware of the world, it playfully deconstructs all the normal alternatives: alcoholism, suicide, and Prozac. Moral of the story: moderation is the key to a (functional) intellectual life. It's not groundbreaking or exceedingly innovative in any way, it's just a legitimately pleasurable reading experience.

The second novel, Identity, seems like a reasonably standard story plot (middle-aged couple begins to question their love because they are really - gasp - questioning their own identities) but is a technical marvel. For instance: it was not until page 150 that I became aware that every few paragraphs or so, the narration switched between past and present tense, normally something that I'm a huge stickler against. But when handled properly, tense change is an incredibly effective way to pace a story. Like most advanced writing techniques, tense changes are best experienced on a subliminal level, to be discerned explicitly upon a second, closer read. Nabokov has the same effect with his use of metaphor: there are certain sentences in Lolita that you need to read over and over again to realize exactly what has just been said. Not because the language is too dense, no - it's more that you've just been lulled into such a sense of bewilderment at the ease and flow of the language that you don't pay attention to the actual words. Since ripping one such example out of context from either book would only negate the effect in question, you just have to take my word for it. And all this is not to say that the philosophical discussions of projecting and mirroring and identity-depending-on-other-people's-perceptions-of-you-as-well-as-your-own aren't valid and equally good parts of the book, just. I wanted to highlight the joyous element of simply reading this text.

Reading these two books at the same time amplified certain themes that have been simmering in my mind lately, and each highlighted certain undertones in the other that... well, I probably would have picked up on them anyway, but the juxtaposition was lovely. Only they both cut pretty heavily into my aim to become a hard-hearted cynic, traversing the world in self-satisfied, misanthropic solitude... stupid need for stupid friends and stupid love and stupid human contact. Blech.

*Re: Realistic solutions.... spoiler alerts. See below.

What the fuck, stupid indie soulmates. That's some fucking bulllllshit. I spent ten years of my life undoing the damage Disney did me as a child, and having my hard won pragmatism battered from all pop culture angles... It isn't enough that Carrie and Big end up together, or Jim and Pam, or Josh and Donna... now the fucking offbeat literature that is supposed to PROMOTE shrugging off all that mass media crap and living your own life has to succumb to the storybook happy ending? Yes, it's very easy to live true love when SOMEONE IS WRITING YOUR SCRIPT FOR YOU.
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Wednesday, February 17, 2010

It's just so much easier to do them in batches...

Below are four (4) SPTs. The first doubles as evidence of my first four hours on a Habitat worksite; the second doubles as evidence that I'm pretending to learn June on the West Coast; the third and fourth together serve to prove that I'm running out of ideas for these when nothing special is going on.


spt 1-25

spt 1-25

spt 1-25

spt 1-25



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Monday, February 15, 2010

A Nervous Romance

Oy. I forgot to dropbox the Iceman article files, so I'll have to make the pdf tomorrow. In the meantime, an update of a different sort: I watched Annie Hall on Saturday night, the second of the twenty-five greatest movies of all time ever I have viewed since starting this whole shebang. I loved it. The story was adorable without being fuzzy, the script was hilarious, and the little extra bits Woody Allen threw in, like the animated scene and the subtitled "yes we're talking but we should be fucking" scene, just made it an excellent piece of film work. I also loved how it is obviously one of Jerry Seinfeld's favorite movies, or Larry David's, or both.

Oh! On Friday last week, I donated $25 on Donors Choose to a fourth grade class that needs posterboard and markers to make maps of the US and the world. As you may recall, I am a huge fan of coloring maps in order to internalize geography, and there was some special corporate matching thing going on in honor of President's Day... it was timely. I'm now 10% done with the Donors Choose goal!

I like quantifiable progress. I should actually figure out how many stitches are required when knitting a sweater... if I were to estimate, I'd say I'm about 73% done at this point. Progress has ground to a near-halt because I'm at the cap of the right sleeve, and I knit it in the round so I'm not entirely sure how to close it off since it needs to taper up. Ugh. I'll get there.
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Thursday, February 11, 2010

Four little things

For the past couple days, I've been bouncing back and forth between the bathrooms at the office in order to read two lengthy biographical profiles in two separate issues of the New Yorker - a magazine which now hates me, because I can't even post a link to an article from LAST WEEK'S (dated this week, but that's another beef for another post) issue. See, unlike every other periodical publication on the planet, the New Yorker has seen fit to completely digitize their archive through some sort of flash player... you see the layout exactly as you would if you were holding the paper copy in front of you, with the cartoons interspersed in the articles and everything, but it's a flat image. You can't highlight the text, no copy-pasta... the pages aren't even pdf, half of them are jpgs and half are pngs. Utmost fail. I do, however, have Adobe Acrobat here at the office... I might make my own pdfs and toss them up to mediafire for future safekeeping.

The best I can do for now, though, is tell you a bit about them and post links to the abstracts. First up, "The Iceman." In the far reaches of the frigid north, fittingly, a ninety-one year old man is leading the charge for cryogenic freezing to replace standard burial practices. In Ettinger's ideal vision of the future, everyone on earth takes turns playing Frye - being "reanimated" in a couple hundred years, checking out the sights, and going back to sleep to give someone else a shot/wait another couple centuries to see what else is happening. I have two major questions about this: 1) since you can only be frozen by having your body pumped full of antifreeze after you die, meaning that your brain is off - electricity, dead, synapses, dead. Let's grant that in the distant future, there's a way to reanimate your cells physically - where is the scientific basis for believing that that body would actually be you? I mean presuming you could walk and talk, would you be able to reminisce about your past, or even care that you were alive again, let alone at all? If you didn't have memories, wouldn't it really traumatize you to be a zombie? You probably wouldn't even know what a zombie is, you wouldn't have any language at all - you'd be an infant trapped in an adult body with a fully developed yet completely empty brain. How would that even begin to work?

Second question is, say you even can get over this whole dead synapse thing (and please, if you know anything about neuroscience at all, by all means let me know what the plausible scenarios are here), or work out the cylonesque up- and downloading of consciousness... anyway, say reanimation works, and when you wake up, you are still aware that you are you and this thing has happened and you understand that you are in the future... and so are ten thousand other people that day whose turn it is to live again. If everyone is really truly living in turns, for a few years at a time, say, how does progress continue? By the third or fourth cycle, will anything have even changed? We have the innovations we have today because of the combination of the collective unconscious and the constant injection of new minds into the macro thought process. You build off what's come before... and if you're what came before, and so is everyone else, and if everyone was only in it to see the rocket cars and moon colonies, then it just stops. Right? At the end of the day, I respect the equitable impulse to say that everyone should be able to have their turn at glimpsing FutureEarth, but... how long would that actually be interesting? How long until people would begin to not refreeze? Is it possible to be that petrified of death?

The way the New Yorker piece describes Ettinger's history and psychology, I think perhaps this freezing nonsense is the (pseudo)scientific equivalent of the rapture mania in the far-out evangelical churches of America. As a young boy, Ettinger feverishly read sci-fi stories about conquering death and the consequences thereof; after being shot in the Second World War, he even wrote one of his own. Interestingly, his story has an odd sort of twist that makes cryogenics seem much less appealing than you'd think the founder of a lab warehouse for it would want you to think it is. I would describe it to you, but I firmly believe this is an article worth reading, and so on Monday, I will make the pdf and post it. Plus, this is long enough already, and those four little things I was going to post became one big thing so rapidly that, aside from the other article, I can't even remember what the third and fourth things are. Ooopsie. More soon.
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Monday, February 8, 2010

I'm gonna do my best swan dive...

The following is untitled and will likely permanently remain unfinished. But it's something I wrote a while ago and I'm trying to be courageous and less of a perfectionist, and that means posting something imperfect and letting it just... be. It's a start.

---

So, anyways, that’s all that’s going on here. Miss you, come home soon, write often, all that.

Really, though.
Love,
Me


Elena dabbed at the drop of water bleeding the “M” in “Miss you” into a fuzzy, inky snowball, salvaging the “iss” and the sentiment of her sentence. Before folding up the sheet, she surveyed the letter and its strange geography of similarly blotted characters and entire words interrupted by a sudden upstroke, like an EKG, or a seismograph, detecting strong beats. She considered that if she were sending this to anyone else, she would have been too ashamed and rewritten the entire thing. Her big sister, though, was the one who had always stayed up with her at night when the thunderstorms rolled onshore, telling her stories to distract her from the sharp cracks that still made her jump. She would understand. Elena giggled, figuring her sister would even appreciate the gesture of sending along the evidence of the storm. She slid the letter into its equally rain-spotted envelope, licked and sealed it shut, and glanced up at the clouds as she scrambled, barefoot, down the porch steps and across the lawn to the mailbox.
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Sunday, February 7, 2010

St. Patrick's - January 15, 2010

I visited St. Patrick's three weeks ago with my friend Chelsea, approximately two and a half hours after landing at JFK. It was literally that much of a priority for me. Architecture innervates my soul, and, having escaped the suffocating clutches of Daytona for the weekend, it was a delightfully symbolic way to start the trip.

I'd been there once or twice before, years and years and years ago with my family, and when I was twelve, I read this book, a thriller in which a rogue IRA cell takes the cathedral hostage for no apparent reason. Most notable line: the 50/60 something Irish dude tells the young chickadee who seems to be his sidekick, "Girlie, I've been shot at more times than you've had your period." Most notable image: some dude climbs up on of the spires outside, either to light the building on fire, put that fire out, or set up some sort of signal for the cops. It's good times.

Anyways, Chels and I had an excellent time peering at all the saint shrines, conjecturing about why Catholics light candles for them, sneaking glances at people crossing themselves to find out if it's left-to-right or right-to-left, and, you know, just generally being slightly less respectful of the space than we probably should have been. I took quite a few pictures, most of which did not come out quite as well as I'd have liked because I didn't want to use the flash. I've culled the best and dumped them into a new photobucket. I got bored while I was uploading them so I ran the "old photo" script on my favorite; it is now below the cut and is the link to the full album. If you don't want to flip through all the pictures manually, there's a slideshow before the first one. Technology, woo! I also stuck the SPT from that week below the cut here, since it was taken while I was there and everything. The three subsequent SPTs should be posted before it's time for the next one to be taken. Hopefully.


spt 1-25

Photobucket





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