Hi

I read somewhere once that you should write up a couple of extra blog posts to keep in reserve for when you have nothing to say, but every time I've done that, whatever I've saved seems totally inappropriate for standing in on any day other than the one it was written on.

That being said, even though my computer's been gimpy, I've still been blogging during my lunch break at work. I emailed the posts to myself and now I'm not sure what to do with them. We'll see.

In short, Monday and Tuesday were so hard to get through it was painful, but then the week improved substantially. Coffee and exercise always seem to do it.

This week I didn't buy tickets for Wilco, Gogol Bordello or the Brian Jonestown Massacre because I don't want to go alone. I saw a poster for Band of Horses the other day but I'm not going to that either because I can't expect anyone to dish out the money to see a band that they've never heard of from a genre they aren't interested in. As wonderful as my friends are, they all like emo bands, the Dixie Chicks and Jan Arden to the exclusion of absolutely everything else.

And it's all well and good for my sister to say that she's there to go to all of these things with me, but if she was truly born to be my substitute for a normal social life, she would at least be legal drinking age. I want to call up customer service to complain.

And the whole idea that I'd wait two and a half years before I'd do anything fun is just stupid, especially since I don't particularly relish the thought of living past 25.

But I'm complaining and I shouldn't. That isn't what I set out to do. It's just that I get so angry and frustrated and sad and then I blog about it, even though people would rather read happy happy happy and tits. So sorry.

It's like the nature channel, only different

This seems to be the summer of ogling, because I was at the gym at lunch with some of the people from my office and we let this guy join in with us and all of a sudden the game got really, really competitive, like he was trying to impress me or something. There is also a marked increase in the amount of random guys staring at me on the bus this year and I want to tell them all to shove off.

I don't know about this whole mating thing anyways. As humans we have the audacity to call ourselves more civilized than animals and yet it seems the best that we can manage for attracting the opposite sex is the puffing of feathers and strutting in circles and awkward conversation. We're no different than pigeons and I'm not impressed.

During these encounters I always hear a little narrator and an uninspired flute trill. "The male approaches the female, dressed in athletic wear. He will use this guise to catch the female off guard in the hopes of having time alone with her. The female is busy interacting with others of the same species so the male must smile in order to indicate that he wishes to join in...

...

"Having completely tired out the female's companions, the male extends his hand in supplication. The female shakes it, then promptly leaves the building, evading the advances of the male..."

Tomorrow they'll be locking antlers or making bizarre calls or lying on the ground, presenting their bellies to me or something. Oh joy.

MIA

I know I'm not supposed to apologise for being MIA from blogging, but I feel I have to. My computer decided that it would die Tuesday morning and though I've been able to check my email from work, I haven't been able to do much else.

It wasn't a crash, just that there were too many programs all wanting to start up at the same time when I turned the computer on, which meant that it never once froze, but it got damn close to it. At the moment, I have it running and I've cleaned up my harddrive a bit and removed or changed the options of a couple of the offending programs, but I don't know yet that the computer will actually run if I restart it.

I've got a little more maintenance to do before I will feel comfortable about turning it off. Needless to say it's going to be a bit of time before I get caught up on what everyone's been up to, especially since I have a million different places to be tomorrow.

But I will be back with a vengeance very soon, I promise.

With pictures.

Beirut

I had this song stuck in my head all day. I think I'm officially obsessed with Beirut. I've listened to Gulag Orkestar almost non-stop since I got it a month ago. It's the accordions and the trumpets and Zack Condon's voice.



I got new speakers for my computer and now all of a sudden I'm hearing all sorts of parts to music that I've never really heard before. I find myself wondering where the piano accompaniment came from, or the bass line, or a second harmony. It's like I'm listening to completely different music.

And speaking of music, today at work I got bored of listening to "artists similar to Broken Social Scene", on last.fm, which is usually what I listen to at work and instead typed in Beirut and so much awesomeness that I had never previously heard. It's going to take me at least a week to track it all down, which is good, because the music on my computer was getting kind of stale.

I feel like I'm the shrew today

Alright, at Du's request, here are more pictures of the dramatic rescue. I must confess that after planning and plotting and looking forward to that for so long, I now have no idea what to do with myself. My life has become empty. All I can look forward to now is coming home after work and eating dinner and going to bed. Quath help me if I ever retire or achieve my wildest dreams.

I've been really irritable these past couple of days. I had this crazy idea in the car today that maybe if I got a hysterectomy or something it would fix it, but seems to me that that is a sort of really outdated bit of medical wisdom that never actually worked in the first place. Besides, it's not PMS. It's just that I'm finally coming down from a few weeks of feeling pretty good and I can either feel sad or bitchy, and bitchy's better than sad.

I guess I have to feel some guilt though at thinking again that perhaps it would be nice to euthanize my father to put him out of his misery at being stressed at work and having poor health and not being able to understand computers and having two absolutely rotten talentless disappointing children and getting old and being frustrated with absolutely everything and credit card debt and losing his memory and being right when people are wrong and losing his mother last month and talking about himself as if he's orphaned and fighting with relatives over what is to be done with what she left behind which is nothing.

He has this crazy idea that instead of using money from the estate, he will personally pay for some sort of memorial thing for her, to which mom replied that no way in hell is she dishing out the money to see her mother-in-law immortalized when they need a new roof and a new furnace and haven't paid off replacing the hot water tank last month yet. I fully expect the conflict to come to blows, but in the mean time it's throwing dad's blood sugar and blood pressure way out of whack.

Funny thing I've noticed, though, is that when mom drives to things we have a habit of getting there on time, because she deliberately avoids roads where there is construction and street festivals instead of driving right into them and then swearing lots, like dad. So imagine our surprise when we arrived at Bard on the Beach half an hour early without ever having gone more than 10k over the speed limit.

We saw Taming of the Shrew today in the midst of all the weird weather. Rain, sun, rumours of thunder showers, all cycling through every few minutes, but that's Vancouver weather for you. At one point the heavens opened up and it got really noisy under the tent, just as the actor on stage paused in the middle of his monologue about it being a cold and rainy day to say "what with the weather!" at which point the entire audience cheered.

In spite of the rain, we stayed nice and dry under the tent for which I hold Mikhael personally responsible.

This year's production was set as a spaghetti western with lots of gunslinging and desperado types, and the token Mexican for comic relief. Good, as always, though I think I liked the post-Cromwell restoration version better. The silliness just seemed to fit that period.

Your mission: rescue Batman

A couple of weeks ago Batman landed on the roof just below my window. I tried to reach him, but only succeeded in pushing him further down.

I decided that I would wait to get it until later. But why should I climb out on the roof when I can get my sister to do it instead?

I, database

It's weird how it happens. I'll be sitting there and then all of a sudden I'll be hit with the futility of everything. Today it's my del.icio.us. I have so many things saved in there, so many tags: shopping, government, coffee, media, music, podcast, norsk, activism, art, design, web2.0, photography, photos, photoshop, knitting, nostalgia, iran, iraq, oil, fansite, news, communication, consumerism, human.rights, stick.people, food, social etc. etc. etc.

One of the inherent functions of communication technology is that in using it it changes how you think. With the invention of writing all of a sudden people didn't have to remember everything anymore. You could just write it down and look it up later instead.

So how do databases change how I think?

It's a pasttime you find on the internet - collecting things. Doesn't matter what things. List them, index them, store them for retrieval later, possibly, if need be to recall them. Take something and collect all that there is to see and hear and know about it. The size of such projects are overwhelming. There is very little quality control, very little heirarchy, nothing to assure you that one particular thing is more relevant than any other thing, except, perhaps, the frequency with which it is linked to, and even that is misleading.

And instead of stopping for a moment to think about what we are saving and why, we continue to feed it because yes, in this day and age, it is possible to see 18,000 pictures of cats with their tongues sticking out and to know the exact date, time and contents of Kurt Cobain's penultimate bowel movement.

In this day and age there are far more indexes pointing to information than there is information itself. It was a phenomenon first noted about pornography, but which has since spread to practically everything else. When you link to something, you aren't creating new content, just indexing something old. It seems that the only things we really know are where to find information it if we needed to know it, even though we probably won't.

At least that's the case with my del.icio.us. I have hundreds of links, all tagged and sorted. A large portion of them are things that I came across and linked for later, because I didn't read them at the time. But will I ever read them? Probably not. I don't have the time or the patience. And if I look at things that I saved a year or two ago, will they still be relevant for the same reasons why I tagged them in the first place? Likely not.

And how many links listed in my del.icio.us are now stale or dead? How many of them would I actually be able to retrieve should need or desire warrant it?

Why do I have tags called "estonia" or "packaging" or "ngo"? I have never once used them to look anything up. I don't even know what I'd find if I did. I can't remember why I saved anything under them. Why are "bibliotek" and "library" different tags? Why didn't I combine them in the first place?

There is no narrative, no logic, no heirarchy to any of it, and I can't blame a computer or a database. It was all of my own doing as I, like the rest of the internet, unconsciously work to immitate the machines and structures we use every day. Today I hate it. Tomorrow I'll go back to the same old same old, linking and tagging and storing shit that you or I will never use.

Keep the lolcats away from me. Seriously.

I try really hard but most nights I can't sleep. Last night as I lay in bed I rolled over on my side, with one arm resting on my mattress and the other kind of parallel to it, up in the air.

All of a sudden the words flew unbidden from my mouth: "Invisible Tom!"

And it was that precise moment that I realized that my geekiness has ascended to all new, previously unimaginable heights. I began to laugh hysterically and then I couldn't get to sleep.

Holy sheisse I must ban myself from the internet.

I drew a fish.

What can I say? I'm speechless, to be honest.

I drew a fish.

I'm contemplating adding a person on facebook when really I should just do it, but I'm thinking that it might send the wrong message to this person or some other stupid rationale that I'm bouncing around inside my head.

Lately I've noticed that I have developed kind of an intolerance to raw spinach. It doesn't matter where I've eaten it, home or a restaurant. As long as it's raw, I get a nasty stomach ache and diarhhea for a good 4-6 hours immediately following my meal. I can't think of any reason for it. Before about four months ago, I'd never had a problem with the stuff.

I guess you didn't need to know that.

Some people set up a drumming circle outside about four hours ago, which was cool four hours ago, but now I'm tired of it. The rythm doesn't change, and neither does their location. It's starting to get irritating.

I'm listening to Thirteen Tales from Urban Bohemia by the Dandy Warhols right now, which in my humble opinion, is pretty much as close to perfect as an album can get. The first three songs, especially. I love how they blend into one another. I wonder what it feels like to create something like that, knowing all along that it's good? I wish I could feel that.

Inkwells

Have you been acquainted with my inkwells?

Back in the day Vancouver used to be mostly tidal salt-water marshes, entirely unsuitable for building. Then they brought in some Dutch people, who, in a manner that I'm told is typically Dutch, created the waterfront as we know it today through several years worth of diking, draining and filling.

What did they use as fill? Garbage, of course. And that means that sometimes when they do excavation and start to prepare sites for building, especially old industrial sites, sometimes the machines unearth garbage that is 60-80 years old. The inkwells came from a hole that was dug behind the Vancouver Flea Market, shortly before it was backfilled to discourage antique hunters from digging in it.

I love old garbage dumps because there are always treasures to be found. One time when we were on a rockhounding trip, we left an unsuccessful dig for fossils and started to drive around some of the backroads, looking for where someone had told us UBC geology gets their fossil samples.

Climbing up through the forest, I found some rocks left behind by someone who had highgraded their findings, but not the dig site itself. What we did find, however, was a smallish garbage dump. After digging among the rusted tin cans, we emerged with some hip flasks, gin bottles and a couple of other miscellaneous things. The crowning jewel of our find, though, was a large glass oil lamp, which, upon being placed in the window at home, developed a purple tint.

Sometimes old glass turns purple because before WWI they used to put manganese in glass to make it clear. The manganese reacts with UV rays and eventually gives glass a purple tint. During the war they needed manganese for making weapons, so they found something else to add to glass instead. That means that if an antique piece of glass turns purple when you leave it in the window, it was made before 1914.

A note, though, to people wanting to try this: the purple can't be reversed. Don't say I didn't warn you.

The inkwells won't change though. They're not old enough, but I like them anyways. So many pleasing shapes and so many variations on the same mundane theme and purpose, kind of like the variation you'd find in clothespegs.

My favourite, though, has to be Skip: the successor to ink.