dannyman.toldme.com

One constant has been loneliness. On the one hand, this is my fault, because my natural tendency is to ignore other people for the fascinating isolation of my own mind. Despite my best efforts, I don’t have an innate sense of self-image, of self-perception from the outside. For this reason, I find Ego Cultivation to be an endlessly fascinating challenge of a hobby. What to say, what to wear, how to act, it can all be a great kick to get those things right. But the second I switch off or start neglecting these balls I’m juggling, they all fall on the floor, and I revert to my naturally quiet self.

This makes me a bit schizophrenic, perhaps. Both identities are me: the quiet geek lost in his own thoughts, and the happy jester who wants to put a smile on everyone’s face, and be loved for it. It is the quiet geek I care about, and the jester is left to take a beating by the public just as he receives accolades. Since the jester is an external ego, I really don’t mind what animosity gets spilled on it. That stuff washes off. On the other hand, the jester is a derivation of the inner geek, so if people like the jester, and I have the time, I share a little more of the inner personality lurking behind.

When I get to walking, in the quiet solitude of nature, I am most naturally in geek form: quiet and thoughtful, less concerned with my impression on the world because I feel connected to it. I think the word solitude in that last sentence is key here: in a world where most of us are caught up in the internal combustion joyride from one dark air-conditioned chamber to the next, us walkers are few and far between. I think that maybe most people are more lonely than they like to admit: I used to hurry home for the satisfying social stimulation of the television. I liken this to a sugary cereal, which while delicious at the moment, doesn’t really leave much nourishment.

My mom brought me up on Cheerios and low-fat milk. She bought wheat bread because the digestive challenge is healthier. Now I have forsaken the hyperactive diet of sugar-coated human experience on TV for the harsh, thick dietary loaf of the ancestors. When my ancestors walked around, they weren’t alone in doing so. Everyone was hanging around outdoors, and greetings and gossip would pass. In my age, I am alone with my thoughts, my geek and my jester. I can take notes to exchange words with people around the world when I make it home.

A trade-off, a deal I have no choice in striking, because I live in the world I was born into, and I can no longer stomach commercials.

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“That is a long way to walk,” she said.

I nodded and smiled, about five or six miles, round trip. Not really a lot. But I know where she’s coming from. We are bipedal hominids, born to walk, but we grow up indoors, watching TV in an air-conditioned room, and at the age of sixteen we are handed the keys to the car.

She asked how I’d gotten to walking so much.

I said that when I’d moved to California, I had to drive everywhere. I got fat, because I’d lost what little exercise I had been accustomed to in my life: walking to the L, often through harsh weather. There was no L in California. I felt unhealthy.

So I moved. I took an apartment close enough to work and walked or rode my bicycle to work. Over time, and a few different jobs, I came to rely on walking, biking, and whatever public transit was available. I came to love walking, as a sweet, slow experience of the outside world that was an excellent complement to whatever it was that I did in the dark, air-conditioned indoors of my employer. Walking gave me a space to myself, to think, and to feel a connection to the beauty of the world – trees, flowers, squirrels, fellow walkers, and all the infrastructure of the human world that I could observe carefully from the outside.

We’d gotten on the subject of walking because she wanted to know how I’d gotten around during my travels. Planes, trains, and my own two feet. I was pleased that just as I walked around this town now, I had also walked around towns in different countries all over the world. Walking was one of my constants, which is important to a life that feels more variable than most.

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Today, before work, I started catching up with my checkbook. I cancelled my Discover Card, paid Dan some rent money, and back-ordered 401k statements. I had nearly $2,000 amassed in my account before I went and started writing checks with it. So it goes. I’m guessing my net worth is roughly -$6,000.

There’s a trendycoolretro thrift shop next door to the cafe, so before work I bought two shirts. One is lime green and has crazy patterns on it and cost me four or five dollars, and the other is black and groovy and cost $1 and has that thrift-store smell.

Yum!

But I really need some pants. I’m down to one operational pair.

After work, I dropped by Mike & Molly’s and had myself a Kenyan beer. It was tasty.

And now, discipline willing, I can transcibe more of the Thailand journal.

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PRIN — the tailor for a cat you know — it is — fact which will become dearer than former if a cat has clothes on

Don’t you doubt? “Although I want to dress with dress extravagant with my cat, doesn’t a cat dislike having” clothes on?
It is impossible that continue for time long to be sure, and you continue dressing a cat. But about [ to which you dress a cat and take a commemorative photo on special days, such as a birthday of a cat, ] is OK.

You need to dress a cat. And you will say to a cat together with a family. “It has changed just for a moment”. [ “it being very dear” or ] You will pass pleasant one time.

2. If a family and a cat become fortunate, you will take a commemorative photo! Therefore, please photo your cat lovelily with much trouble.

3. If it finishes taking a photograph, you will make it remove clothes from a cat immediately. You will say then, without forgetting the language of gratitude to a cat. “– be flooded — a way — good — having done one’s best — ! — ”

http://www.petoffice.co.jp/catprin/english/

Priceless.

UPDATE: Times have changed, and PRIN has a new web site, and improved translations:

1. Dress her up. Cheer or yell, do whatever you like to enjoy the moment with your family.

2. After you are enough with your joy, take a photo! Take some poses and leave her some cute photos!

3. Remove her clothes and give her a hub, say “Thank you!”

I think this is good advice, especially the third point, even if you don’t have a cat.

Now, I’m all for nonsensical Engrish, or just plain weird, but PRIN doesn’t stop with selling cat clothes in Japan. Nooo, that would be to easy. Take a stroll, if you will, into:

CAT TOWN

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I have been contemplating the idea of setting up a “feedback forum” type of thing for the log … make it more bloggy. If you, the reader, have any feelings in this matter, or ideas of how you’d like to see such a thing implemented, drop an e-mail on me. I never get any sort of feedback any more. Boo hoo!

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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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