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I stumbled into work about twenty minutes early yesterday, and Gallery Man asked what’s up, and I answered quickly, with a single word, shit, which is the sort of answer that Gallery Man can accept in stride as part of the pulse of things. Then I felt bad because The Boss was sitting over in the cafe. I don’t know if he heard me but when he saw me I asked how I was doing, and I said I was great, which was perfectly true. When I’d answered shit, I was thinking about how my morning started hearing that we were pulling out of our embassies and missions in Saudi Arabia, and an analyst was condemning our reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan as a clear failure because they don’t exist and we are so far repeating this performance in Iraq, while Israel and Palestine are at each other’s throats all the more this week, which doesn’t bother me so much as our nation piling new fuck-ups on its plate.

If you aren’t sufficiently quesy about our neglect of world affairs, the New York Times has a piece on the other Dangerous Lunatic World Leader, from which I’ll cobble together:

Stalin and Mao were revered for their perfect grasp of dialectical materialism, an omnipotent science that made them omnipotent too. Kim Jong Il and his late father, Kim Il Sung, are revered, like the monarchs they more closely resemble, for their perfect embodiment of national virtues.

Chief among these virtues is “sobak ham,” a hard-to-translate Korean term that corresponds closely to the word spontaneity in its Marxist-Leninist sense. The Soviets considered the spontaneity of the common people, especially their tendency to violence, to be a dangerous force unless tempered with political consciousness. In North Korea, the people’s spontaneity is seen as one of the country’s greatest strengths.

North Korean novels and movies often show the hero casting off the restraints of his book learning in a fit of wild, sometimes suicidal rage against the Japanese or American enemy. The central villain of Han Sorya’s novella “Jackals” (1951), the country’s most enduring work of fiction, tells of an American child who beats a Korean boy so brutally that he ends up in a hospital — where he is murdered by the American’s missionary parents.

This propaganda appears to be effective even among North Koreans opposed to the rule of Kim Jong Il. When I visited a resettlement center for refugees near Seoul last year, many of those to whom I was introduced as an American recoiled in terror or glared at me in hatred.

I’ve been thinking of plenty of interesting ways to improve my own position in an American context, but it seems far more valuable to improve the situation outside of my prosperous, fat and happy nation. I need to see if there’s anyone lobbying to make sure Congress and George budget money to make Afghanistan a better place – the Afghans need the money far more than the Iraqis, who have oil money and a tradition of economic prosperity. If these people exist, maybe I can help get people to write letters to pressure appropriate congressional representatives where such pressure is due.

More immediately, I need to fix out my sleep schedule, which seems to run from 3-5AM towards noon at this point, which saps productive hours ringing the 3-11PM working shifts to which I’ve been exclusively assigned. But first, I think I’ll head towards work and stop for a Vienna Beef hot dog along the way. Yum.

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Speaking of the Onion, “Hostel-Dwelling Swede Getting Laid Big-Time” is perhaps the most hilarious article I’ve read in a long time. There is an added bonus, for me, to have an appreciation of hostel-dwelling. But the Swedish accent is wonderful too!

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Thanks to Todd for pointing out an article in the Chronicle, about how the porn industry is finding ways to profit from file swapping. A few delicious quotes:

“The lesson I suggest (the recording industry) learn from the porn industry is: How do you use free to promote paid?”

“The adult industry is leading the way in peer-to-peer and begining to monetize it instead of fighting customers,” Hunter said. “Any smart merchant can’t look at a mall filled with 200 million people and not look at the opportunities to set up a kiosk.”

“It’s the sharing philosophy that the adult industry has had for a long time,” Hymes said. “It’s a fascinating industry, so rampantly and relentlessly capitalistic.”

I think it is interesting from a sociological point of view. The pornographers are ruthless capitalists always eager to innovate and find new ways to make a buck. I think they have to have this mentality because they’re taking a product that isn’t very difficult to produce, and marketing it in a culture that tends to frown on the marketing of said product. So they have to put all the more thought in to innovating ways to capture customers’ attention and make money.

The recording industry, on the other hand, knows they’ve got a sweet deal, that is socially acceptable, so instead of rampant opportunistic capitalism, they opt for consolidation into large, stable oligarchies. Innovation is a threat to an industry that is quite satisfied with the status quo, and is really freaked out about the implication that their entire industry may be made redundant by new technology.

Which may even be the case. If small-time pornographers can earn business by giving away teasers in order to attract sales, why shouldn’t the music industry devolve in to small-time content producers and promoters who give away some tunes in order to attract sales? Something interesting to watch, from a distance.

Meanwhile, Jon points out a New York Times Headline that sounds like something from The Onion.

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Milly just moved in with me and Dan to sublet for the summer, while Dan will be leaving next month to spend the summer in Tokyo. She and Seth, her boyfriend, are over, and everyone is playing with their laptops. ikea mentions on IRC that she’s going out for ice cream, and we think that’s a great idea. Dan has a pile of five-year-old coupons for 50 cents off of Blizzards at the Dairy Queen, a block a way, so we troop off to Dairy Queen to get our ice cream. This conversation took place on the way back:

Milly: This is fun!
Danny: This is cold!
Danny: And evil!
Danny: But at least we got to subvert the dominant paradigm.
Seth: Did you say “subvert the dominant paradigm?”
Danny: Yes, I did.
Seth: I have a tee-shirt that says that.
Danny: Hrmm, I wonder why I said that.
Seth: I’m wearing that shirt!
Danny: Yes, you are.

If it weren’t for the extreme geekiness of this evening, I’d never have bothered to relay this story. (As we left the house we were estimating the number of computers stored within, and I remarked that I felt like I was living in ACM. On our way, I shared an e-mail I received on my hiptop from my Japanese pen-pal about her recent adoption of Linux.)

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> I know what you mean. As a Chinese American, I was
> brought up with 2 different cultures and it is quite
> confusing. […]

One of my favorite words is DIASPORA. It originally means “to scatter” but it has acquired the meaning of a culture that is built of multiple cultures, but doesn’t really fit in to any parent culture.

When adults who speak different languages are stuck together in a situation where they have no common language, they stumble along and try to build a language together. This rough language is called a PIDGIN, and works as far as helping these unfortunate people to communicate with each other on a basic level, but it is not a proper, well-formed natural human language. If these people stick together long enough and breed, their children hear this PIDGIN, and using their instincts for language acquisition they normalize the grammar rules and flesh the PIDGIN out into a proper human language, which is called a CREOLE.

For you, your culture might seem like a harsh pidgin, with rules from different places that clash with each other and don’t sound right. I’d like to think that your children will take that from you and grow that into a smoother creole culture that they feel comfortable with, and that might provide some comfort to you, in your own confusion.

If you get a chance, Wyclef Jean has a song in Haitian Creole called “Jaspora” which I take to mean “Diaspora” … Haitian Creole is a mix of French and the African languages that the slaves who were brought to Haiti spoke. Wyclef himself tells the story in his music of moving from Haiti, which is already a carnival of cultures, to New York, which is even more of a carnival, so if he starts singing about cultural DIASPORA you know he knows something about it.

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Vik got to town to collect some stuff from the apartment. Vik was Dan’s roommate, who has since returned to Cincinnati to look for work. He met me at the Green Street Cafe where I like to sit with my laptop, and relax in a nice space with free wireless ethernet access.

Since I now had money to spend, I figured I’d buy Vik a beer. We went a few doors down to Murphy’s, which had good $2 pints available. We were only going for a round, but one round turned into four. I think Vik ended up buying most of the beer.

One of the big incentives for us was that you don’t often find yourself relaxing in a bar with a number of attractive young women. We also got along in terms of interesting conversation too.

I spied a young lady wearing fishnets, with little pieces of candy taped to her body. We made eye contact and she explained that for a dollar I could have a piece of candy, and I got to remove it with my teeth. Was it for charity? Well, she’s getting married.

Now, I don’t quite understand why selling pieces of candy for a dollar is important for getting married. I guess it wasn’t the money so much as a bachelorette party sort of thing to do. At any rate, it seemed like a good deal to me, so I slipped a dollar in her palm and got my candy. Her friend captured the moment with a Canon digital camera, so I asked her to email the image to me. The candy was yummy too.

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Here’s an interesting thought that compares modern bloggers to the warez couriers of the BBS age. Thanks to my feed aggregator, I can 3-day warez this meme to you. I’m not in it for the ratios though.

I have been watching the blog phenomenon from a bit of a distance – I’ve been doing online journalling forever, in Internet years. Now all the kids have these crazy terms like “backtracks” and “blogrolls” and there was even some embedded reporter who started a blog and blog-ified everything to be hip. For example, he was no longer posting humble photos on web pages, he was photoblogging! Wooh! (Gag me!)

So, I’ve purposely avoided overly-bloggifying my humble web log. (A “blog” is a contraction of “web log” which is a term I adopted myself.) You won’t find “backtracks” here, which is where a blog site lists URLs that link to a particular post in some sort of point-whoring contest. You wont find “feedback forums” with floating heads of friends and bored strangers dissecting the minutea of my life, and I try to avoid the sort of post which basically amounts to “Woah, this link is the coolest thing ever I’ve seen in the past five minutes of web browsing!” (“Holy poop my ass is numb someone please come over and beat me until I get off the computer and interact with some real people!”)

But if someone wants to riff off one of my posts, I now have these little bylines to each post’s anchor. Citations are great, in my opinion, if they act as footnotes to original thoughts or otherwise provide a jumping-off point for discussion on a topic. If a reader has something to add, they can drop me a line.

Back to the aforementioned interesting thought which inspired this little rant, I find myself asking what my role in the, ahem, blogsphere is, in the context of the “blogger as courier” metaphor. And I guess what I am is a shareware author tinkering about as a hobbyist, trying to create the occasional interesting bit of software, or in this case, memes, that I can share with the community. Since I’m a low-budget hobbyist who is more interested in creation than self-promotion, I eschew the whole “warez trader” mentality of trying to be the first to post links out.

Of course, I’m not even focusing on memes so much, just trying to flex my muscles, because I enjoy the activity, and I have the vague idea that I could develop the skill into something marketable. I’m just playing, trying to come up with the occasional interesting thought. In the meme-coder realm of the blogsphere, I’m one of the older guys who isn’t into the hip, new scene, but instead puttering away on low-key “demo” releases.

I should try and break into the publishing biz sometime.

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Another beautiful Spring morning. Well, it was overcast and chilly when I hustled off to work. The birds were all around, singing at each other. I got to Sam’s and there was a husky, Asian-looking waiter with glasses hustling sluggishly about. Since I was already running late, and Sam’s was running a little slower than usual, I was also a few minutes late to work. No great problem.

It was my colleague’s last day, and there was excellent music in the CD player, so even though business was slow, as usual, things were still pretty upbeat.

I was scheduled to work ’til 3, and around 2:30 I saw a guy walking around outside and I noticed that the lighting was brighter than it had been: the sun had come out. I ran out into the street and spun around with my arms out wide! Sun! How wonderful! How warm! I turned around and looked up at the sky and I understood why people like to believe in God; I nearly shook my first at the sky and yelled “way to go, Dude!”

Around that time one of our regulars came in for his iced tea. He would be at the movie theater in the next hour with the local science fiction club, for the opening of the new X-Men movie, where they would solicit the patrons for donations to the American Cancer Society. Another ray of sunshine.

As I waited for the next shift to come in, the CD started playing “Moondance” which is just a spectacular song. As I was already in a great mood I was put in mind of another time when I was in a great mood. It was an evening when I was driving Jessica home, and I found the same song on the radio. We were very close to the house, so I cranked the radio up loud, slowed the car, and just to make sure we got to hear the whole thing, I drove the long way around the block. When Jessica caught on that I had driven the long way around to time the song out, she approved vigorously, and we both grooved together in a shared moment before we got out, and I saw her to her car, in which she drove home.

Any every time I touch you
You just tremble inside
No matter how much you want me that,
You can’t hide!

Can’t I just have one more moondance with you,
my love?

One of the better memories.

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I got enough in tips last night that I was able to afford a lavish breakfast of eggs, toast, bacon, and a large orange juice at Sam’s this morning, before working the morning shift. It was a slow day this morning, which is just as well since I’d only slept perhaps two hours between closing the place last night and opening it this morning.

The weather has turned warm, but not yet hot, with that edge of humidity that feels like the atmosphere is caressing you when you step outside. It is wonderful, wonderful weather. As I hustled along towards downtown this morning all the colors seemed especially vibrant, the whole world seemed completely beautiful. I saw a couple of rabbits posing like statues in someone’s shrubbery. Last night as I was walking home I’d seen a big ugly possum hustling its way in the opposite direction on the far side of University. They’re ugly critters but I thought it was beautiful in its purposefulness – wherever that creature was headed it was determined to get there.

I swear the Spring is so beautiful that I will do the irresponsible thing and blow some of my tax refund on a new digital camera when it arrives. I can feel boastful like this because I got paid today – the first full-time check since August! Man, it is has been a while, and it feels damned good. I took the check down to the bank and opened a checking account, which will come with a Visa check card, so I can go online in a few weeks and order my new toy if the world is still beautiful and requires photography.

For the moment, though, my funds aren’t available ’til Friday, so I borrowed another Food Stamp off Dan. We then went off to the Baskin Robbins which was giving out free ice cream this evening. Standing in line, I observed the young people around us, and it must have been the tacky “MUCK FICHIGAN” shirt that brought me around to the vibe that here I was surrounded by American youth of the Midwestern United States: specifically, Illinoisians. And I felt this sort of Universal identification with all the other crowds of youth around the world who get together on a Spring evening to await something good, like free ice cream.

You could say that operating on caffeine in lieu of sleep makes me more corny. I wouldn’t disagree.

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The skinny blond bearded guy on the bike with the hat like my old one smiled at me as I crossed the street in the rain, next to DCL. It was Jon, of all people, who lived in Allen Hall. We had a mutual friend to talk about, which we did at the Red Herring, where he treated me to some vegetarian lunch, since he’s recently collected on some loans, and I can’t refuse a free lunch just now.

He’s one of the many friends I still have in town who have never left. His excuse is that his girlfriend had to stay for school, and he was offered a good deal to work off a Master’s degree he’d never considered earning, so it worked out. Of course, he’s recently broken up with the girl, but he’s nearly got a Master’s degree to show for it, and a job after graduation for a year, and especially in this economy, that’s not at all shabby.

There’s been quite a few folks who seem a little surprised to hear of me working in a coffee shop – is the job market so bad? Are you looking for computer work? My answer tends to come out along the lines that sitting in a chair behind a computer all day for work is not the most desirable condition for me, because my hobbies tend to involve sitting down, with a computer, a book, a newspaper, or a movie. I’m something of a loner in my natural state, so any service job where I get to riff off people all day, is a healthy counterpoint to my naturally quiet state when I get home, and being on my feet is also a good physical balance to my sedentary proclivities.

On the other hand, you can’t beat the money in technology, and I figure I’m going to spend at least some time on it as a hobby, some consulting, and the occasional full-time job. (After the tech bubble, it is hard to assume that any tech work is anything but a conditional situation: even the University has support staff positions they’ll have to cut, atop their current hiring freeze.) I tend to see myself jumping head-first into the rat race once I have a family coming along, at which point I should be grateful to sit in a chair behind a computer and deal with someone else’s problems, and balance that with plenty of human interaction and physical activity back at the casa.

Ideally, for my single life, I think I’d like a half-time tech job, rounded out with service work or volunteer activities, as a perfect balance between cognition and daily interaction, with good money to boot. Nice work when you can get it, but it is a rarity indeed. I’d like to think that this model would work well for tech companies, because really, there’s only so many hours in a week in which most of us can apply our brains to a particular problem, so if you can get two folks to tag-team on a particular problem for the price of one …

But that’s not an experiment that I’m in any position to conduct, right now.

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Easter was good. Grandma hasn’t been following the web log, and none of us bothered to tell her that I was in Illinois, and she was sitting on the porch when I walked up, completely surprised, invoking the names of a few deities in a long hug. It felt darn good and I’m soo glad the ol’ lady doesn’t ask too many questions, because the whole element of surprise thing came off so fantastically.

Janice is doing fantastic. Sue is in a database course, and she popped out some notes for me that were written in formal logic. At first, I couldn’t decipher them, but after staring for a few minutes my brain went back to the appropriate Computer Science course and I found myself translating “Well, I think that’s ‘Universe’ … or ‘subset,’ so that says ‘not,’ and that’s ‘or,’ and ‘and,’ I think, so, we’re negating that for every element …” I was able to read the statement, though it made no sense to me. Once I was able to remember the symbols for Sue though, she had some handy notes for puzzling out her notes.

Everybody just seems better. Maybe it is the Spring weather. I think maybe these are also just more sober times and maybe the People are putting more effort into their Selves. Or maybe I’m just projecting. At any rate, it was great to munch on ham, and eggs, and desserts, and jelly beans and other candies, and to do it at home. Especially since I’ve been moving fairly constantly since I started my traveling last September.

Uncle John took my baht to exchange on his own time. He gave me a little over twice the value, an even $100, with the understanding that he knows what it is like to not have money. At ten dollars a day ’til pay day, $100 is just what I had budgeted in my mind. On the one hand, that’s a little high, but then on the other hand, I’ve started gearing up on some deferred maintenance items, like a toenail clippers, and a haircut, because there is money in the pipeline, at long last. (Not to mention the tax refund …)

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Mary asked me what about me had changed as a result of my trip around the world. You know how you look up at the stars of the Cosmos in a dark, country sky? And you think about the uncountable numbers of stars in the sky, light shining from millions of years in the past, and you just can’t get a grasp on it, so you let it slide? Well, now I see our humble little planet in that way, only I can’t let it slide.

Our own little human world is so big, and vast, just the human part! The part that speaks a thousand different languages, and lives anywhere from hunting in the forest to scavenging from Tokyo convenience stores. Walking, running, subways, minibuses, broken-down old cars, city buses, interurbans, shinkansen, airplanes, ferries, Porsches. Most people are very poor, and a few of us are quite wealthy, and the spread in between is such that it is nearly impossible for anyone near either end of the economic scale to understand the lifestyle of those opposite.

But unlike the vastness of the Cosmos, we can’t let the vastness of the human world slide. We are all human. None of us should be going without food, none of us should be unable to find a place to sleep at night, anyone of us should be able to be treated for medical problems.

We need to learn to communicate with each other … all these languages! We should each learn a few, make friends with people whose existence and culture are far away from our own. An American in the car suburbs of California ought to be able to dig the lifestyle of a Bushman, who ought to be able to dig the lifestyle of a service worker in Italy, who ought to be able to dig that a kid in Afghanistan balances selling newspapers on the streets to support his family with getting to school to realize his dream of literacy, and that kid ought to be able to chat with a technology worker in Tokyo.

And these days, the world just seems blurry to me. I walk around America digging it like it was another foreign country, even though it is also my home, the place where people share my cultural heritage and speak the same language, the place where I am most readily understood and understand without great difficulty. But I don’t know what I want. I’m floating along. A few years ago when I was floating along in the dot-com bubble, living large on the well-paid tech frontier, the idea was pretty clear: work hard, live life, get rich. Recently it has been seek work, get afloat, look forward to paying off debts.

But I still live life. I can’t go without my daily trip to a coffee shop to read the paper. And even if I’m poor I still tip better than most. You gotta have your Confucian rituals and personal code of honor. And even if I lose these bits of my lifestyle, there will be other things that I will find in my shrinking Universe to call my own, to mark my Self.

Work went pretty well today. Then I grabbed myself a haircut, at long last. I bought some soap, I called Rachel while walking down Green Street to check up on her.

And then I got an e-mail from dad.

We don’t communicate so well, so regularly. We have so much in common but we live different lives, far apart.

Grandma had surgery. They pulled out a tumor. But she has more. Six months left to what has been a long, healthy life, with three kids and four grandchildren. Dad’s coming through on his way from Colorado in early May. Maybe I can ride up to Michigan with him.

At first, I was glad that fate had brought me to the Midwest at this time. Then I thought of the scheduling challenges at the job. It is a decent job, but nothing I wouldn’t easily sacrifice if it came to that. The student employees peel away in May, and another full-timer is leaving next week to help her mom raise a new baby. I got frustrated and upset that now I finally have a job, I may have to screw the boss over.

But I know things will work out, one way or another. I’ve got to keep on surfing along the currents of fate in any case, its not like any of us have so much choice about the fundamental things of life anyway. We’ll all do what we have to.

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