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November 27th, 2009
 | 05:25 pm - imperatives towards feeling better
I recently realized that I have been doing far too little to utilize the resources on campus. It occurred to me that when I moved here I was so adamant to "have a life" that I chose to live in a more lively San Diego neighborhood rather than grad housing or elsewhere in the cultural pit that is La Jolla, the area around school. But because of this, I have been also somewhat neglecting campus. But, of course, campus is, or at least could be, a real locus of action. I just haven't figured out what to get involved with or how.
If I am going to be some kind of technology and culture scholar, I should really be more actively involved in technology and culture projects in San Diego, and why even go to grad school if not to take advantages of the resources and opportunities that come with being involved with that institution? Last week I started to research what kinds of opportunities might be available for someone with my admittedly limited formal skill set, but I am starting to have some leads, such as a Center for Well-Being that works on health promotion projects using technology in south San Diego.
Of course, sometimes, when I have these very basic realizations, the kind that I should've had years ago, I feel like an even worse failure. Better late than never, I hope.
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November 18th, 2009
| 10:01 am - Fort Hood - PTSD vs. Islam
I've noticed an interesting controversy in the news media/blogosphere regarding the incident at Fort Hood where Nidal Hasan, "a gunman, trained as a psychiatrist," as one New York Times article called him, opened fire on his colleagues. It appears that the army PR folks are offering the line that it was not Hasan's Islamic faith that led him to murder, but rather post-traumatic stress disorder, stemming from repeatedly listening to the memories of horrific experiences of those he counseling.
While I think that those bloggers who argue that this strategy of blaming PTSD is a way to quash backlash against muslims are onto something, they to often make two problematic assertions. First, that it really was Hasan's faith that led him to murder, and second, that giving counseling to those with PTSD cannot cause PTSD.
I'm skeptical about both of these claims. First, BEING A MUSLIM DOES NOT MAKE YOU A MURDERER. And second, regardless of whether Hasan had PTSD symptoms stemming from counseling soldiers, after two and a half years of reading accounts of post-traumatic stress, I think I pretty safely say that PTSD alone does not make people into murderers, at least not the kind that would pre-meditate a large-scale attack on their workplace. It does make people anxious, angry, and easy to snap into rage or violence as a defense mechanism when provoked, leading many sufferers to avoid human contact because they are afraid that they will not be able to control their actions. To say that PTSD caused Hasan's actions does a great disservice to all people diagnosed with PTSD by implying that they have a disorder that can make them into mass murderers, a stigma which they surely do not need.
Why PTSD? Why not say he was schizophrenic or sociopathic or anything else? PTSD is too often becoming a default excuse for any "bad behavior" on the part of anyone in the military, as though everyone who joins is perfectly sane and only their experiences drive them crazy.
Hasan was crazy. His faith gave him something to attach his crazy to, but it didn't cause anything. If he had PTSD, this was not what led to his actions either. For the military to associate his actions with PTSD as a way of drawing attention away from his religion is simply to substitute the stigmatization of one population with that of another. Neither Islam nor PTSD deserves to bear the blame for the violent actions of one individual.
Does anyone else think that this might be evidence that, as a society, we may have seen the end of the conceptions of individuals as liberal humanist subjects, responsible for their own behavior?
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November 11th, 2009
| 08:03 pm - veterans day
Today I have been celebrating veterans day/working on my qualifying paper by reading political theorist Jenny Edkins' book Trauma and the Memory of Politics. She argues that traumatic events reveal to us that the social order is a myth, that we, as a society, do not even have language to express the horror experienced by some of our members when this myth is revealed to them.
“What the state attempts in contrast is a normalization or medicalization of survivors…The aim is recovery, of the reinsertion of survivors into structures of power. Survivors are helped to verbalize and narrate what has happened to them; they receive counseling to help them accommodate once more to the social order and re-form relationships of trust. In the case of the military these days, those suffering from symptoms of traumatic stress are treated swiftly with the aim of being returned to active service within a matter of hours or days. If this fails, then the status of victim of post-traumatic stress disorder serves to render the survivor more or less harmless to existing power structures. In contemporary culture victimhood offers sympathy and pity in return for the surrender of any political voice” (9).
She is left deeply critical of both the medicalization of traumatic responses and attempts to create historic narratives out of traumatic experiences, as two ways that institutions of power can force one interpretation of events--further silencing those who already have a difficult time speaking about what happened, while maintaining the illusion of social order.
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November 9th, 2009
| 09:35 pm - not to jinx it but
Things are looking up.
Appearance:
This whole short orange hair look--while shocking to those who've known me only for the past 8 years or so--makes me feel like I've finally taken the costume off. My confidence must be showing, because I've gotten more unsolicited positive attention in the past 3 months than in the past 3 years it seems.
Teaching:
I love teaching freshman. I love helping them figure out how to go from reading high school textbooks (for "facts) to academic articles (for arguments). I love trying to convince them that the purpose of university is not to get a job, but to learn how to ask, and answer, interesting questions. I love working to dismantle the ideas they have about what it means for societies to be developed, for people to be intelligent, and such, by trying to get them to think concretely about what those terms mean and how they are measured and to what purpose.
Social Life:
On Mondays I usually go to dance class with my friend Krystal. On Thursday I go to hula hoop class with my friend Cyn, and then afterwards we make dinner. On the weekends there is either dancing at a club or some neat party somewhere, both of which offer opportunities for joyful embodiment and interesting folk. I have friends, such as Cyn and Matt, who not only like to make things, but make me feel whole and "normal." At school I have a couple friends--such as Tom and Brad--who really push me to grow intellectually. Things with Chuk are going really well--even after I was on the verge of hating him earlier this summer. Now we can have adventures, communicate easily, and still seem to be giving one another the right amount of space.
Professional:
Had an amazing time at the 4S conference. Gave a paper that was "well received"--two people I had never met approached me later in the conference to tell me how much they liked it! Networked like a fiend with scholars whose work I genuinely admire. Reconnected with a bunch of friends from other UCs who had attended the Cal.STS retreat in June. Got a free ticket to the banquet and saw a respectable scholar give an achievement award dressed as Dr. Frankenfurter. Got a hot tip on a couple contacts with access to an amazing archive that I am stoked to check out. Overall, feeling psyched to dive headfirst into my work, this field.
Romantic:
Various encounters of all manner--ranging from a so-far platonic suitor who's pretty much declared his adoration of me to random hook-ups to an on-going relationship with someone in an open relationship. I am not worrying about whether or not I will find love. I am not wanting to have someone for the sake of it. I feel very free to choose.
School:
Made big conceptual strides on my first qual paper last week and am now (here's the part I really don't want to jinx) confident that I'll be able to write it this quarter, giving me winter break to reward myself by working on the co-op book and visit friends in the Bay Area.
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October 21st, 2009
| 09:06 am - autism and vaccines
Oh! So this is why people think vaccines cause autism. Or at least Dr. Shiv Chopra, "Health Canada whistle blower" and author of Corrupt to the Core:
3. That it is these amino acids which after being absorbed into the blood stream are reconstituted into one's own proteins and it is these proteins which distinguishes every being of existence into self and non-self.
4. That any interference or tampering with these laws of existence can bring calamity to the being in which it occurs such as by causing auto-immune conditions like autism, etc.
So let me get this straight: Apparently autism, which is most saliently a problem with theory of mind in which the autistic person is unable to empathize or infer emotional states from the actions of others--understanding the non-self in terms of the understanding of the self--can all be traced back to foreign amino acids being absorbed into one's own proteins, thereby disturbing our molecular understanding of self and non-self. Therefore, autism is an auto-immune disorder, a failure to prevent the non-self from becoming the self, thereby precluding the possibility of meaningful others. Which manifests itself in social and psychological behavior.
WHAT??
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October 16th, 2009
| 05:46 pm - brief update
apologies for the radio silence, but I haven't had much to say recently except "my, that was a lovely party," "that young man was very nice but..." and "omg I don't understand how to pass my quals. I should probably go kill myself." None of which, I'm sure, you want to hear about.
But things are starting to balance out a little. I had a nice meeting with a professor who, unlike my advisor, was able to give me some realistic ideas about how to do my quals. It was as though I had been thrown into the middle of the ocean, my advisor had thrown me a raft and told me how to paddle, and this other prof pointed off towards the island in the distance, not too far, and not unlike a place I would like to be.
So I have some purpose in my work.
And in my social life, things are going well. I have been in SD long enough now that almost anywhere I go I run into someone I'm happy to see. I have a lover, or maybe I'll say a friend with benefits, which works well to scratch that itch. I am learning to hula hoop dance. My hair is orange. I've mostly stopped wearing my glasses. If only I weren't so damn ambitious, things would probably be fine fine fine.
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October 13th, 2009
| 09:24 am - problem framing, not problem solving
From Simon Penny, artist, writer, theorist, at UC Irvine's Arts Computation Engineering dept:
The Parable of the Locksmith
During the renovation of buildings for the ACE program, a man was sent to fix a problem with a door. When I encountered him he was enlarging a hole in a the door with a grinder so the lock would latch. I looked at the door and noted that that door was not latching because the screws holding the hinges to the door-frame had corroded and the door had dropped. I pointed this out to him, and suggested that he replace the screws in the hinges. He looked at me with pathetic incomprehension and said “I’m a lock guy, I’m not a door guy”. There is an appalling profundity in this response. It succinctly captures the kind of narrow thinking which ACE works against. In institutions of higher learning, emphasis is commonly placed on ‘problem solving’ as if problems were self-evidently lying about just waiting to be picked up. But in order to be solved, a problem must first be identified and framed. In the real world, problems seldom observe disciplinary borders. 'Problem framing' requires a kind of intellectual process which is diametrically opposed to ‘problem solving’. It requires the ability to grapple with incongruities and incompatibilities and discontinuities. In my opinion, we are good at teaching the deductive processes of problem solving, but this only permits students to solved already framed 'textbook' problems. Self evidently, it is more important to ask the right question than to get the right answer. Except in isolated and informal pockets, we seem to be bad at teaching the process of asking the right question. At ACE, we try to ask the right questions.
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October 7th, 2009
| 09:47 pm - Twilight Sleep
for Brad
In her book The Body Electric: How Strange Machines Built the Modern American Carolyn Thomas de la Pena writes that while researching Twilight Sleep, the first method of pain relief widely used in childbirth in this county, she noticed some interesting rhetoric on the part of its consumer advocates.
What particularly intrigued me, however, was the reasoning many gave for advocating its use: its attendant drugs, scopolamine and morphine, were necessary to render bodies natural. To arrive at this conclusion, women, primarily of the middle and upper classes, compared themselves to Native American women, whom they believed experienced painless childbirth. By casting these women as "natural" because of their premodern lifestyle and by arguing, mistakenly, that they experienced little, if any, labor pain, American women were able to conclude that "natural" birth should be pain free. Only modern habits, many reasoned, produced pain. As a result of this correlation, they were able to argue that drugs were "natural" because drugs returned the body to its intended state. (p. xii)
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September 19th, 2009
| 11:03 am - epic paragraph
"Community seems a by-product of the development of machines. At first machines functioned as stand-alone tools under supervision by a single human operator. Then machines increasingly functioned in an ensemble. While the first machines were isolated work tolls, they soon became parts of a larger assembly, with railroads, fuel distribution, and highway systems being the obvious examples. The spread of the machine as an assemblage reached into the sphere of human society with radio networks and television networks and now satellite networks. The linked machines plug into the networks with the computer as the controller switch. The result is a networked grid encompassing the earth and giving humans access to nature. Control over nature comes through a combination of human and machine networks guided by computers."
- Michael Heim, Virtual Realism, p 41.
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September 14th, 2009
| 07:36 pm - lessons from this year's burn
1) I am a cat, and I think I know now what kind. I have always said that I am looking for a home, for community. At Burning Man I had the best, most loving home and community among my campmates at Camp Here, and yet I was still strongly compelled to go exploring, volunteer at Media Mecca, talk to strangers. I am an indoor/outdoor cat: the kind of person who needs a home base from which to wander, but gets fidgety and obnoxious--scratching and caterwauling--if kept in beyond her will. I have my favorite people and I expect them to be where I left them, and will take time warming up to strangers in my home, even after cuddling up to strangers on the street. As long as I have a home, I can be nomad.
2) Like a cat, I am not always such a good communicator about what I want. I do not like being in a group of more than six or seven people, and would prefer an even smaller one. Several times on the playa I just wanted to be around one or two people--especially people I did not already know well--in order to get to know them, but I was not brave enough to say, "I'd like to get to know you one-on-one, may I steal you away?" I think maybe if I had they would've been flattered and even if they had not want to come with me right then, they would've have appreciated my interest in them and found time for me later. As it was, I just felt frustrated that I could never seem to interact with people in the way I wanted, and often felt guilty for wanting to abandon the group.
3) I am best in groups when I have an activity. I can run a project, host a party, network myself and others, get things built or cleaned or organized, and will be very happy to do it. But I am terrible at waiting for things to happen and uncomfortable leading when I haven't explicitly been given the right. In those moments, I should probably either offer to lead, leave, or otherwise occupy myself.
4) I have no one driving passion. I am interested in lots and lots of things and as long as I am Getting Something Done and it is not too boring for too long, I am fairly happy. I am happiest, though, when I am getting things done that I believe other people care about. I think this would probably be the case almost no matter what field I was in.
5) I want Burning Man to be a kind of home for me--a place where there is always a project I can help with, people around that I love, and new people and spaces and experiences to discover. Where else could I visit so many of my friends--dispersed around the world as we are--in such a free place, where we are not so weighed down by obligations and time constraints, where we can be like children at play, having adventures sometimes, and sometimes leaving one another to our own devices, assured that for at least one week we will operate at that strange, unstructured pace that lets every moment of synchronicity feel like magic, and every moment of disconnect feel like, an insightful question about what the playa wants from us.
6) I want it to be a place to remind that there is no failure as long as you keep building, asking, listening, trying, discovering, learning. It's not about hope, it's about working to know what you are so you can be the best possible for the other 51 weeks a year, and come back even better.
I did not have my perfect burn. but this year was better than last, and next, I'm sure, will be even better than this.
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August 13th, 2009
| 10:29 am - it's summer/co-op book
Which means that I am primarily reading books, taking notes, eating dinner with friends, and going dancing. Summer is apparently also when my hormones go berzerk, because all I *really* want to do is roll around under a shady tree.
One really wonderful thing to have happened, though, is that I had a major conceptual break through on the co-op book. Yeah, the co-op book. The last times I tried writing it, I could not deal with it being, you know, a memoir. Frankly I disliked myself too much to have faith that my own experiences and voice could carry an entire book. So I started visiting co-ops around the country, read about the history of communes in America, interviewed former housemates, tried to start a group blog, and even tried writing it as fiction--all just to find a way to make it about something other than me.
A couple months ago I realized that it was going to loom over me and make me second guess any career path I followed until I finished it. Because the answer to the question, what do you want to do? what are you passionate about? Is, in large part, finishing this book. It's not an academic book and I don't want it to be one.
So I printed out everything I had written that lived in a file folder called "co-op book", and it turned out to be a big old stack, probably between 90 and 120 pages. Later, I made an index of all of these documents and how long they were. After that I sat down one night and thought about what I had and thought "A book only needs a few chapters. If I wanted 8 chapters, what would they be and what order would they go in" and voila! I discovered that I already had drafts of 5 and a half of those chapters.
I have NEVER been close to seeing the entire project before. I actually know what I have to do in order to complete it. It feels amazing.
So now I am editing the book from start to finish--I'm halfway through the second chapter. I have two full chapters left to write, plus a prologue and an epilogue. I can do it!
It's my story, for sure, but I've made my peace with that. My plan is to post everything online, and then continue to collect comments from the 50 or so of old housemates that I am still in contact with via facebook, etc. I'm hoping the comments will include other versions of the stories, commentary, similar experiences, things that happened after I left, etc. I am hoping to interlace my chapters with the comics and the commentary from my housemates. When that's all collected, that's what I want to go into a book. This is how I will honor the multiplicity of perspectives in the co-op, as well as how I will assuage my guilt at indulging in the memoir genre.
And, of course, the research into other co-ops will not be for naught. It will definitely inform how I write the prologue and epilogue and provide a wider context for my experiences.
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July 26th, 2009
| 11:06 pm
Part 1:
My parents live in a four-bedroom house. The two bedrooms on the end of the hallways (upstairs and downstairs are the same layout) have closets that run the length of the room, covered by mirrored folding doors. The two bedrooms that branch off to the right as you go down each hallway have walk-in closets. All of the closets have both poles for hanging clothes as well as substantial shelving units.
My mother's clothes, shoes, and purses take up every available inch of all four closets, as well as a two sizable dressers and a tall, utilitarian free-standing shelving unit in the office (upstairs side bedroom). She also has a fair number of jackets and exercise shoes in the closet in the entry way as well as in one that my father built outside of his workroom. My father had to build himself a closet in the upstairs hallway for his own clothes. Another hallway closet he built into the hallway downstairs is full of bedclothes and things wrapped and piled in ways that have always discouraged me from exploring much. My brother, who lives in the downstairs side bedroom, keeps his clothes in a dresser and on the floor.
( Read more... )
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| 05:25 pm - rochester
was unnerving and painful in making me deal with the same old shit, but also useful in reminding me of what's important, like the love of people who have known me forever and, for better or worse, as well as the fact that I have committed myself to finding my own way, far, far away from them. Which is to say that I pain I feel in Rochester is only worth it in that it both reminds me of what I've escaped, but also what I am.
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July 17th, 2009
| 03:26 pm - My House
The following is a transcript of a performance I did at a Seattle storytelling event called A Guide to Visitors in 2005 or 2006. I am starting to have the courage to look at my old co-op book notes and stories and came across this one in one of my notebooks. It's not the best of them, but it is nice and self-contained, and touches on a lot of things I've been thinking about lately.
When I was in middle school, I got into Aldous Huxley the way most kids that age get into teen idols. In the novel past Brave New World, I discovered that despite whatever the book jacket said, most had plots that were just devices to get varied people together to have a series of philosophical conversations. So at that tender age, I began to devise how some day I would have a big house of my own with lots of fascinating people to talk to all day.
I began to plot out a dream commune, an urban space above a communally owned coffeeshop/bookstore/performance space. As I met interesting people over the next couple years, I would add their names to the guest list.
But as time passed my goal shifted to getting out of upstate New York. When the envelope came telling me that I got into Berkeley, I was ecstatic to finally have my chance to get far away and start anew.
Once in Berkeley I lived in the dorms, like most freshman. There I began to hear rumors of co-ops—huge houses where students could live cheaply if they were willing to tolerate filth, sharing, and the occasional crazy. It didn't sound like my commune dream, but I was intrigued.
I joined the student agnostic club (yes, we had one), where I met a guy named Ed who lived in a co-op. He agreed to give me a tour.
So that Saturday I trekked from my dorm to the co-op, a big white building four stories tall, non-descript except for two large green hand prints with swirly designs painted on either side of the fire escape. Inside, the carpet was dingy and the walls were covered with patched up Keith Haring murals. Ed introduced me to people and they all seemed nonchalant, unenthusiastic. The rooms I saw were also unimpressive—boxes with old wood furniture, graffiti on the underside of the bunk bed.
I left a little disillusioned, but ended up applying anyway. Housing was a huge issue in Berkeley, and co-ops were still better than apartment hunting.
I ended up getting a spot in a co-op the next fall and even though the nonprofit that owned the co-ops had 22 properties around campus, by some fate I ended up in the one with the green hand prints.
My first semester was nightmarish. I had a pothead roommate who would hotbox the room and whose drug dealer boyfriend lived with us for a month. She put her posters everywhere, including six feet of Bob Marley perpetually smoking a blunt over my bunk bed.
But the next semester by some grace I got a single room. The co-op housed 63 people and about half the rooms were singles, awarded based on seniority, so getting one after one semester was a big deal. Other houses had great amenities—hot tub, gym, bay view—but my own room? I would never be able to give that up. The house and I were stuck with each other.
My first year I learned to play dominoes from an ex-Marine from Dallas. The Ex-Marine, given his experience with the world, was more quick to pick up on the eccentricities of our living situation that those of us more directly from the dorms. We he'd see people doing something just a little too resourceful, he'd say, "That's hella co-opy." For example, getting a lid from a bulk container of grain and using it for a plate at dinner when the rest were being used? Hella co-opy.
But as resourceful as we were, we were not necessarily responsible. Most people came to the co-ops because they were cheaper than apartments and didn't do credit checks, not because they were in search of utopian communal life. We each had 5 hours worth of chores per week that we were contractually obligated to do to keep the house running. But that left space for gray area where anything not explicitly detailed as a "workshift" because lost in the category of "not my shift." Post-party puke on the stairs? Not my shift. A carton of 60 eggs left out in the kitchen for no apparent reason? Not my shift.
A friend once told me that with control comes responsibility. I became a manager in my co-op, coordinating the labor, and did what I could to make the house as utopian as possible. I tried, at least.
I did love the house, despite the dirt and the chaos. As a student, nothing compared to staying up until 2 in the morning, trying to think of something profound to say about Joyce and after finishing the paper, coming downstairs to find people hanging out, to talk with them and re-establish my humanity after racking my brains on the computer. We never solved world hunger or anything, but we had fun. There is nothing quite like always having people around who want to talk with you. It's a drug.
After college I moved to Seattle because the co-op was for students only. I moved up with two friends and lived with them and the architecture student sister of one of them. As circumstances had it, the friends left town within a year and I was left in a 4-bedroom house with the sister, who never spoke to me, slammed the door when she came home, and labeled her food. After three years of having 22 choices of cereal, sharing homemade hummus out of a gallon sized bin, eaten with tortilla chips stored in a garbage bag, and baking 15 pounds of tofu for dinner, those labels just killed me.
It felt like the height of isolation, mine versus yours. I used to eat dinner with 30 people—and I was eating my own food alone.
In Seattle, I rediscovered the solitude of my childhood—but this time, in the techno-city, I found that people defined their tribes online, with MySpace and OkCupid, choosing friends based on similarities. But for me, if I'm typing, it's still solitude.
Unlike a frat, we had no choice who ended up in the co-op. We had to learn how to live with 62 other people that we saw every day. We had to develop real social skills, the kind where you learn how to get along with people unlike yourself. In the "real world," we learn how to better weed out the different—find better match percentages and shared interests on our profiles. I get teased by friends for talking to "annoying people," for getting cornered, but I don't mind giving people a little human contact when they need it.
And just so I'd never forget that we are all beings who need one another to be who we are, I got those green hands tattooed on my back, to support me and to remind me.
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July 7th, 2009
| 05:49 pm - Summer days
My advisor diagnosed me with an acute case of denial regarding my qualifying exams yesterday morning. It has been a major problem for me for a while now that I have been substituting enthusiasm regarding my dissertation topic for enthusiasm regarding the theories and methods of my field. Hence, frequent desires to leave academia for journalism, where getting the story is enough.
But with a fire lit under my ass by way of a directive to spend the week seriously thinking about what kind of scholar I want to be and what kind of scholars I want as my intellectual community, followed by the email delivery of a bibliography to my advisor at the beginning of next week, I am making progress.
What I think has lain under all of my various interests is a deep concern with American worship of technology--as source of identity, as way to create community, as solvent to all manner of ills. My advisor agreed that a qual paper that could be titled something like "Technology and Care in American Culture" would be a perfectly good, orienting kind of thing for me to do. And the best part is that I think I could actually get very into a topic like this, that it makes me smile to think that I would be an expert in this area...unlike a lot of things which people have suggested to me which make me feel sort of resigned and frustrated. The second qual paper, informed by the lessons of the first, will hopefully adapt earlier work I've done specifically on trauma or mental illness or something, but if not, then so be it. I have not yet been happy with one of those papers as I wrote them.
And so I have spent the past couple days reading through key texts and anthologies (David Nye's The American Technological Sublime; Lisa Rosner ed. The Technological Fix: How People Use Technology to Create and Solve Problems; S. Vaidhyanathan and Carolyn de la Pena eds. Rewiring the "Nation": The Place of Technology in American Studies so far). I expect to keep doing pretty much exactly this for the next month, with a bit of paid research for another prof thrown in for good measure. It's kind of exciting to have a whole month to hone my mind on one body of literature...without even having to write a 20 page paper in 3 days at the end of it (hopefully write the 20 pages little by little as I go). No trip plans, not even little ones, but hopefully time for lovely summer study breaks, preferably involving parks, art, bicycles, music, food, and hopefully friends.
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July 5th, 2009
| 08:28 pm - fireworks and the state
On September 1, 1753, the anniversary of the king's coronation, the city of Paris set off fireworks at the Pont-Royal. The display was not as spectacular as the fireworks celebrating the king's marriage, or as the legendary fireworks in honor of the dauphin's birth, but it was impressive nevertheless. They had mounted golden sunwheels on the masts of the ships. From the bridge itself so-called fire bulls spewed showers of burning stars into the river. And while from every side came the deafening roar of petards exploding and of firecrackers skipping across the cobblestones, rockets rose into the sky and painted white lilies against the black firmament. Thronging the bridge and the quays along both banks of the river, a crowd of many thousands accompanied the spectacle with ah's and oh's and even some "long live" 's--although the king had ascended his throne more than thirty-eight years before and the high point of his popularity was long since behind him. Fireworks can do that.--Perfume by Patrick Suskind, pp. 37-38
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June 26th, 2009
| 07:49 am - on italy, academia, and co-ops
Jetlag and anxiety are an evil combination.
The rest of the conference went pretty well. In spite of horrible jetlag which made it very difficult to continue taking notes past a certain point in each day, I did manage to record all of the talks that will be very useful for my research and took notes afterwards on all the useful informal conversations that I had with people during breaks.
On Tuesday evening ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) ancientbrass came down from Switzerland and we spent Wednesday doing touristy things in the lovely Verbania region--including walking through the Villa Taranta botanical gardens and a ferry tour of several of the islands in Lago Maggiore.
Thursday i woke up at 5 am to i could catch the 1 hour shuttle to Malpensa/Milan airport, fly to JFK, then fly to SFO, take BART to Civic center, and then finally the bus to stellarbaby and Steve's apartment, 24 hours of travel. They fed me and gave me sherry and a futon to sleep on while telling me stories.
But for all this niceness, I am still freaking out. Meeting and introducing myself lots of people on this trip--therapists, engineers, researchers, social workers, and nurses at the conference, but also ancient brass, who is a musician and instrument-maker, and people on the airplanes, including a teacher, a model, and an MTV sales rep--brought me back to that old useless feeling.
I hate to admit this, but as fascinating as I find my academic work, I don't feel that it is my passion. Or at least, it doesn't fulfill me in the way that a passion should. I enjoy researching, reading, writing, teaching, but somehow, at least from where I stand, they aren't adding up in a satisfying way at the moment.
I have been asking myself what my dreams are and for several months I have not been able to remember. I always wanted to be a writer, and, I'm on a good path towards that. And yet, it's not enough. This morning, waking up stateside, I remembered that my most frequent dream since high school has been to manage a cooperative or other communal residence AND write. I think that this sort of interaction is what is really missing in my life: being able to make a meaningful contribution to the lives of people around me in an immediate way. I let the co-op dinner club that I organized all the year before slide away after many of my friends moved away, and rather than starting it up again this academic year, I got a boyfriend. But for me, a boyfriend is not an equal trade with a community.
I guess I've always known as a person that no one thing would ever satisfy me completely: my interests are too broad and undisciplined, my emotional needs too unstable and complex. Grad school has perhaps only made these problems more deeply entrenched. I like to imagine that if I'd only committed myself to something practical--being a therapist, a lawyer, a web designer, something respectable, skill-based, useful--I would be over these feelings, but I suspect that's not true. I suspect I'd still wonder about the other choices I could've made.
So I guess the good news is, maybe I don't need to start over, maybe I can continue to do what I'm doing and just supplement it with more of the things that I need, find ways to be useful to more people in ways that I care about.
I will come back to this later. As stupid as it feels to continue having existential crises on and off for a decade, going into my late 20s, as long as I remain productive at school, for now it can't hurt to spend some time every so often checking in with the anxiety, ask why it's still hanging around, and try to figure out what I might be able to do to appease it for a while.
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June 20th, 2009
| 08:27 pm - italia - note
just a quick note to say that i made it to my hostel in spite of a crazy thunderstorm soaking me all the way from the bus stop to the hostel, hidden on a hilltop through a passage of winding cobbled streets.
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so far
wednesday i arrived in milano malpensa airport, where i was picked up by my friend tommaso, and had a lovely stop at a roadside Auto Grill, which has food, coffee, and souvenirs. we had a lovely conversation about the shortcomings of semiotics during our long drive back to parma. tommaso's girlfriend ottavia made us risotto and then i look a nap while they and their friend gabriella smoked and talked in ottavias apartment on the edge of town. i got up for tea, but then crashed again. in the evening we went to a Movida, which is a street fest where they close the street, play music, serve food and drinks. they told me it was an effort to revitalize the older, working class part of town. we ran into many of their friends and i learned to drink spritz, which is sparkling white wine, soda, and an orange liqueur called aperol. we had pizza with ottavia's cousin tomas and his new wife, then walked to the Duomo, a big and very old church
thursday tommaso took me on a walking tour of parma, starting with his old place of work, the casa della musica, a sort of cultural center for music with a nice music library, then across the street to the new casa del suono, house of sound, where they were promoting an exhibit (though perhaps it is permanent?) of culture and technology, with gramophones, very early portable record players, a fascist radio (Radiorurale), a very early coin-operated music player, and other such treasures of communication technology. We grabbed a frozen cappuchino, then wandered, through markets and plazas, into a church called steccato and one across the street. amazing illusory ceilings, all the indulgence of the church in the what 17th century, i think. i was so in love with all the scooters and the bicycles--amsterdam style, like mine! all over town bleechers had been erected for town events, the upcoming concert by patti smith and the ongoing poesia festival. in the evening we went to vigheffio, which is a mental hospital farm in the countryside where young people from parma go to drink and mingle with the patients on lawn furniture. then we joined ottavia at her parent's place in a little town called Medesano where she is baking cookies for her new business.
Friday tommaso and i had a nice breakfast in parma then took the train to bologna. i bought a new outfit from some hippies at the montagnola outdoor market. we visited the sala barsa library, which is a very modern library with very interested architecture and educational projects that was once a stock exchange. i bought a tomato to eat plain from a vendor. we had gelato at the oldest gelateria in bologna, where i tasted white chocolate, strawberry, and a flavor called dolce emma which was honey and fig. we walked through a park where we watched people feeding turtles and catfish, then went back to montagnola where the hippies said their was a party. many, many people were gathered and we watched some parkour of sorts for a while, before catching a sleepy trainride back to parma.
today we went to the mall so i could buy an outlet adapter at MediaWorld (i think it was called that) helped ottavio with her cookies, then grabbed a pizza in tommaso's hometown of noceto (which translates to 'walnut wood'), which is famous for its rugby team. then i caught the train , first to milano, where i was totally convinced that i would miss my train or get on the wrong one or both, due to being given bad information in a kiosk, combined with getting a late start out of parma. but thankfully it all worked out and i had a lovely ride through northern italy, lush and european. and now i am warm in the hostel, having changed my clothes, borrowed needle and thread from the lovely lady paola at the desk in order to fix the gaping hole in my luggage.
my sleep was a total mess last night, my nerves were shot, to the point where i was ready to cry for need of cartharsis this afternoon. but i reminded myself to 'be here' and it helped immensely.
and now for some rest. tomorrow my first big adventure as an anthropologist of technology begins!
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June 6th, 2009
| 11:13 pm - Addicted to Love-Hunting
The following is a confession, though it is not exactly a secret. The fact that I have met men online for purposes romantic will not come as a shock to those who know me, though they may be a little surprised to learn just how extensive my involvement in this strange practice has been. Yes, friends, my search for love has been long, deliberate, disappointing, and largely virtual. I cannot bring myself to guess how many encounters there have been in total, but if you are so inclined you are welcome to keep tally as you read on. I write this story, at age 27, rather cynical about the whole thing, wishing I could replace the vast majority of these encounters with long walks alone, books read, or comics drawn—you know, experiences I could actually share with other people rather than shameful little rendezvous. I hope, at least, that they are amusing to an outsider.
( You might actually be in this story, but if so, then you're anonymous. Unless you are Alex, who is always an obvious character in my stories anyway. )
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June 3rd, 2009
| 12:33 am - i spent the weekend in seattle
I went to visit my last great unconsummated flame. I didn't tell anyone else in the city that I was coming up. I wanted to be able to give myself entirely to what might happen without the burden of obligations. Sometimes, I guess, you have to do these sorts of things because the crazy feeling of throwing yourself into them--the text messages, the emails, the late night phone conversations, the rashly bought plane tickets--are good distraction from the break up which is, of course, much, much more real.
( and here's how that went... )
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