July 27, 2009

spare thoughts

rereading Julie+Julia, it's weird how much of this whole blogging thing is about externalizing one's interiorities, and taking one's voice (issues of occupancy aside), wrapping it in CSS+(X)HTML and simply shouting it into a void. I guess it's not that surprising that someone else's exposed insides might attract comparison and identification and occasional connections, but it doesn't make it any less wondrous.

twitter's been even stranger, that way. I don't hold back about anything which seems foolhardy given that it's #3 hit for my name but I think it's just that I'm tired of lying about it, maybe. Either way, it is what it is, and as inconvenient as it would be to get disowned ahead of schedule, it's slowly become something I am less petrified by and approaching some level of readiness for, which is all sorts of fucked.

shymalan-esque twist on above: the baby. I could probably get by without the adults, but I can already tell that bowing out of babytron's life is going to wreck me. We get along, and I like being an uncle, to some extent. Better get quality time in while I can, then.

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July 07, 2009

highly concise desert island albums

thor is applying for the red bull music academy, and says

they ask questions like "list your favorite 10 albums and tell us why" and give maybe 15 lines for that


this works out to 1.5 lines per album so I thought I would give it a shot. Thirty words, including album names. Here goes:
  1. Radiohead — OK Computer: first album I received, and one that sparked a lifelong love of music.
  2. Okkervil River — Black Sheep Boy: inherently nerdy (named after a Russian short story), nobody else has been quite so able to gutpunch me in the emotions.
  3. Wrens — The Meadowlands: I moved to the suburbs at 18, and despaired in the manner of teens believing they were inimitable. I was wrong, because they'd been there, too, and made an album that saw me into my 20s.
  4. The National — Boxer: is it weird that they make me nostalgic for a life I never led?
  5. Joanna Newsom — Ys: behind the endlessly divisive voice lies inventive compositions rooted in the music of ages paired with lyrics depicting tales more vibrant than any Disney joint.
  6. ...and you will know us by the trail of dead — Source Tags and Codes: one verse sealed it: what is forgiveness / just a dream / what is forgiveness / everything"
  7. Bjork — Homogenic Live: Joga was made for orchestras.
  8. Mogwai — Government Commissions 1996-2003: cheating, sort of, but this is the only way to get Like Herod and Helicon I on one album.
  9. Autechre — tri repetae: I found this years ago at the local library, and it was my gateway drug into IDM.
  10. Sigur Ros — Agaetis Byrjun: a man plays guitar with a bow, and another sings with the voice of a whale. 900 pairs of cheeks in the Chan Centre find themselves moistened.

anyway, there's that: poorly thrown together, but mostly remarkable as a piece of writing not rooted in AUGH I HATE EVERYONE, nor one excessively dissected before being put up for the world.

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July 03, 2009

home and in a daze forever

Recent advice, summarized: Write your way out of a thinking block—because you'll never *think* your way out of a writing block.
Merlin Mann

with the above in mind, here goes:

It's hard to move between two contradictory ideas of normal, and as much as the commute between works out as the overlap between both circles in this Venn Diagram (leave it at two, for now), it too becomes its own grind, and the days when I don't have to deal with the transition (either way) are few and far between.
Wednesday morning I woke up on a couch at the Ubyssey house, saw nobody awake (but remembered our breakfast plans) and so read Infinite Jest until things picked up. Someone else saw me doing so, and grabbed Anathem and we sat on the couch occasionally touching but worlds away, buried in words and shrouded in silence.
Later that day, I spent a solid hour doing it again, but in a room full of people who'd seen me reading before breakfast and thought, "I haven't done that for a while. Why not?"

[cont.'d, some days later]

I got through 150-odd pages of Infinite Jest (which is manages to satisfy and tantalize simultaneously; get wrapped up in the joys of constructions and realize that the plot beckons farther down the rabbit hole.) which I haven't been able to replicate, either in state of mind or in circumstance— it feels, most days, like my time in the house is regarded as pretty much up for grabs, and so any time spent in relative stillness is due for usage.

A couple weeks ago, I got pulled away from rather a lengthy and difficuly round of photo editing (cloning a shirt down to cover an expanse of belly unbecoming of grad photos is a huge pain in the ass.) to stand around in the back lawn and hold pieces of lumber. As "it'll only take ten minutes" turned to forty with no end in sight, I pointed out that I had work to do, and that it was paid, and I needed to get it done.

There was an eventual point to this, rooted in displeasure and the awkward relationships of parents and adult children (rendered stranger through living together, cultural assimilation differences, and my constant and low-level dread about being outed/disowned ahead of schedule) but it seems needless to hash it out when all it's going to do is infuriate and then sadden (in that order.)

Instead I'm going to hit the button and walk away, deep breathing before thinking is buried in body-tasking; practice for all the things I'm going to leave one day.

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July 01, 2009

unfortunate observation

I wasn't home for 38 hours, and then I was, and then everything either of my parents said to me was an imperative.

I was wondering why the time away felt so much like a vacation, and now I have my answer.

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not this, not now, not again.

[sigh]

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