And tomorrow, deep in the pixel trenches, we peasants will still toil on.
Category: Angst
When Leigh sent me my copies of The Little Book [etc], she addressed me as “Catfish,” with reason, and which I liked. That probably contributed to my writing Kentucky over a year ago. I was looking for a penny to pick up today, and read that again, and was glad that it had come true after all.
I’ve been here for a week! This morning Holly made baby pancakes (which she called something much nicer that I can’t remember) and we ate them on the back porch, and the rest of the house failed to vote me out. I’m glad. This is a pretty great house!
I’ve been to Battersea Park repeatedly, and to the Science and Natural History Museums, and on a Tube Walk (pictures), and today I tried to go to a scheduled pickup Frisbee game at Hyde Park but it turned out not to exist. But still! I navigated to Hyde Park and back all by myself! I also managed to get to Victoria Station and back, twice, to pick up and drop off Caitlan when she visited.
Keen-eyed readers of this blog will note that normally I don’t go outside that much in a month, and will probably guess further that I am deliberately overcompensating to fight culture shock / homesickness / loneliness et cetera. Good guess, keen readers. But it’s working! And given my only other experience outside the country, I think overcompensation is entirely in order.
London is awfully big, but awfully neat too.
Update 03.07.2007 1243 hrs: Pikelets! They were called pikelets.
American Airlines has thoughtfully applied so much pressure to my suitcase that not only did the Listerine, face wash, et cetera stored in the outer pocket burst from their bottles, they also burst the sealed plastic bag in which all said bottles were stowed. Thankfully, the third level of containment (the plastic pocket lining) held, and my clothing and board games did not get a thorough shampooing.
The reason I found this out today is because I have only just received the bag, which was lost when I arrived at the airport two and a half days ago. I put this down to good plane karma. I will elaborate.
Before I left, I spent hours researching the layout of my plane online, finding which seats had an extra inch of leg room, which had DC power outlets under the seats, etc. For the seven-hour flight over the pond, I selected 26B, an aisle seat with only one person who would have to crawl out past me and an Empower outlet right underneath.
Five minutes after settling into this seat and ramming my carry-on into the overhead compartment that was supposed to carry the lifejackets, the nice old lady next to me asked if I could do her a favor. Her friend had been supposed to sit next to her, you see, and they somehow got moved, and would I possibly consider switching with her?
Was her friend’s seat on an aisle? Oh yes, the lady assured me. Oh well, I thought.
It wasn’t. But it was only one seat in and there was an outlet under it. The gentleman next to me quirked an eyebrow. Had they asked me to switch seats, he inquired? Why yes, sir, they had. Would I believe that he, too, had a friend who was supposed to sit next to him? (Said friend, overjoyed, gave me a high five.)
This is how I ended up in the most central seat of the plane, sans outlet, unable to find anywhere to put my knees. Good thing I don’t have mild claustrophobia when I can’t move my legs! Oh wait!
I lived, anyway, and staggered off the plane with numb legs after only taking twenty minutes to find the carry-on the flight crew had spirited away to first class. My luggage had a better seat than me.
And yes, I consider my losing the small checked bag a mild repayment for the ordeal, because the large and much more important bag made it through just fine. I doubt I will care so much about my luggage on the way home, though. I have reserved a seat with one extra inch of leg room, and any nice ladies next to me can just fuck off and die.
Holy. If you’re on the Interweb, you’ve heard about the Wikipedia guy who said he was a professor and deleted everybody’s stuff and nobody could argue with him because he was an editor? But then, no, he was a liar and a college dropout and a tool? Right.
I went to school with that guy.
I wonder why that wasn’t in the alumni magazine. KENTUCKY.
Also: WIKIPEDIA.
- Do you own enough shit?
- Of course you don’t. Get some more! This is easy, because of Capitalism.
- GOTO 1
- Uh oh, it’s time to move! You’d better pack all that up, drive it around, and carry it up stairs. But your fleshy man-body is weak! What will you do?
Hire professionalsAsk your friends for help, but pay them what you would pay professionals- Ask your friends for help, on Valentine’s Day, in eight-degree weather, and repay them with Mexican food that you didn’t even buy, your girlfriend did
- Wow, you’re kind of a bastard! But at least all your shit is moved now.
- Wait! You still have more shit to move! How did that happen? You’d better stay up until 3 am. You can move the rest tomorrow! I mean today!
- GOTO 4
Thanks to Maria’s parents Mike and Susie, Scott, DC and Beth. We owe you guys a hell of a lot more than those enchiladas.
I know everything about Portland because I have been here for a week
So I understand why people like me like Portland, and part of it is that it really wants you to like it. It wants that so bad. It got itself a giant bookstore and really good pizza, and it rounded the edges off all the public iconography. It combined low but steady pedestrian traffic with worthwhile public transportation. It cleaned up the litter and slathered itself in wifi! It put flowers on its manhole covers just for you.
And the only real negative I’ve got to answer that is that it seems a hell of a lot like bait? I suppose that’s habitual post-hipster paranoia, but seriously, I’m waiting for the catch to spring. Maybe it’s just that if you live here you forget what black people look like. This place is whiter than a snow leopard eating ice cream off my butt.
Responses to my last post, saved from the feed:
Ben: “All this copyright nonsense gets worse, eventually spiralling into ‘The War on Information’.”
Josh: “Assuming that your parents are baby boomers, your parents’ generation were unique, the only generation in history to have been able to consume without responsibility. Unfortunately, it’s unlikely that any future generation will have that opportunity.”
Kevan: “I’m not sure how bad a thing it necessarily is, but the next generation being able to dig through their parents’ online diaries and data shadows is going to be quite big and strange. Reading unguarded entries about what their parents really thought of you when you were young, stocking up on ‘if you did this when you were my age, why can’t I do it now?’ ammunition, and being able to stalk some of your crushes or bullying-targets all the way back to birth.”
Catherine: “Also, the increasing dichotomy between rural and urban cultures. People from, say, Seattle can be a mite uncomfortable in rural Georgia. People from, say, Atlanta are often a mite uncomfortable in rural Georgia.”
All thoughtful, all excellent. Catherine’s response is closest to my own worries: that we will allocate greater bandwidth to strident, divisive, polemical speech than to speech that crosses boundaries. I’m not arguing for censorship of radicalism here–my own brand of radicalism is specifically anti-censorship–but warning against the rapid propagation of our trust networks through people who will tell us only what we want to hear. When you can find a thousand people who agree with you more easily than you can find one dissenter, you are on the road to becoming an instrument.
Exhibit One: the semiotic gutting of phrases like “since 9/11”
I think it’s widely accepted that my parents’ generation, or at least quite a lot of them, participated in a sexual and chemical revolution that they enjoyed at the time without foreseeing its consequences–STDs, a wasteful drug war, the embourgeoisment of all their good music, and a lot of boring retrospective movies. Hideous design themes. The backswing of the Eighties. I could go on.
Not that there weren’t benefits, of course, and I’m glad I was born after they became widespread. I think I’m well-suited for my own generation’s information revolution. But is any revolution on this scale without cost? What are we not foreseeing?
Guess who’s a big old jackass! The guy who washes his pants with his paycheck in the pocket. Why, that’s me!
That said, my current system of payment involves my issuing an electronic invoice, their cutting a check a week later, sending that check on a week-long 740-mile journey in a check-shaped envelope with a transparent window, and having me physically carry said check five blocks to the same bank every damn week. You’d think a company that is made of Internet could streamline this process somehow! I’m not denying my own culpability here, but that doesn’t mean I can’t call shenanigans on the system. The McDonald’s next door offers direct deposit, and my last employer required it, and my current employer should at least make it an option.
Update 1337 hrs: Spookily, right after I posted this, my boss called me to say that a) I’m now in the corporate bonus pool, despite being a consultant, and b) I just got a significant raise. All complaints withdrawn! Forever! Probably not forever.