wedded

Samantha and I got married on Saturday. Samantha is so wonderful and I feel so lucky to have her as a partner. Everything was beautiful. All the loose ends I was had gotten myself so worked up about completely ceased to be important as we walked up the surprisingly dark path through the woods into the beautiful glow of the chapel spilling over with our loving family members. The party turned out great and we both had a really good time. I'm so ridiculously happy right now I could fall over. I cannot wait until our honeymoon. In about two weeks, we are making a road trip to Marfa and it will be great to spend some focused, alone time with Sam in the desert. I wish we were there now. I'm so excited and hopeful about our future. Samantha and I are such a great team I can't wait to see what we come up with.

pick up stich

This is appearently a new trend in street art its pretty wonderful. Seeing all this colorful, swirly yarn adorning lamp posts and street signs and bike racks like in the image below reminds me of a few silly-surreal music videos from Michel Gondry director of films like Be Kind Rewind and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.


More knitted street installations in Chicago from the Microfiber Miltia

more than a warlock

Sam and I are both very excited about tonight's presentation by Super Size Me filmmaker Morgan Spurlock at UNT. I like Spurlock and his Michael Moore-esque style of Direct Cinema and also his sweet biker mustache. I really enjoyed Super Size Me and 30 Days, the doc/reality show he produced for FX (canceled after its third season as of this month), and so when we found out some organization was screening his newest documentary, Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden, we decided to check it out. I had heard some interviews with Spurlock on NPR about this project and honestly it sounded pretty crappy.

It seemed at the time like one of those super-ambitious, globe trotting sophomore projects that filmmakers often undertake to prove themselves after having a successful first film. So going into it I had pretty low expectations. It felt like sort of a mash-up of several cultural tolerance themed episodes of 30 Days and Farenheight 9/11 with its efforts to point out the hypocrisy of the past 50 years of US foreign policy especially where the Middle East is concerned. All in all it was pretty good albeit spending a lot of time to get to the pretty obvious message that terrorists are extremists and do not represent all Afghanis/Muslims/Arabs/etc. Similarly the distinction was made by many of the men-on-the-street interviewed that the people of the USA are fine folks despite the actions of the US government. This is pretty much the theme of every episode of 30 Days and its a message that needs to be hammered home these days - people are all basically the same and have similar goals: to live a peaceful life, take care of their kids and hope they have a better life than their parents.

plunderphonic party music

I am so old now. Keeping up with new music often feels like chore. Goddamn it I know what genres I like and what bands I like and I only want to hear more of that. I frequently catch myself settling into the comfortable zone of music I listened to either in high school (grunge and indie hip hop mostly) or the stuff I would spin during my brief tenure as a college radio DJ (instrumental hip hop, indie rock, downtempo beats). Finding new stuff for me lately has mostly consisted of realizing a favorite released a new album (usually a few months after it hits the street). I only mention this because I used to spend hours and hours researching music, finding new artists, investigating their influences and oh lord, the downloading! Now I can rarely find the patience for such efforts. Which is why when I find something new and interesting, I feel the need to TELL EVERYONE and listen to it until I'm so tired of it I want to puke.
Today's find is GIRLTALK (which as a further illustration of my elderlyhood, I first heard about this guy on NPR yesterday). Girltalk is a one-man mash-up machine. Mash-ups are nothing new. DJs have been playing Metal guitar solos on top of whatever gut-twisting shout-rap of the moment for what seems like ages. GirlTalk refines the mash-up into an esoteric orgy of musical excess spanning four decades. I want to develop a smug sample naming drinking game and get drunk on my own self satisfaction. The component parts are so well-layered and linked and the juxtaposed bits, especially the 80's pop and 90's hip hop shit makes my little short attention span heart flutter with refreshed Adderall beats. Oh Girltalk you know what white males, aged 18-28 really want.

Check out GirlTalk's myspace and listen to the whole album for zero dollars.

the pacific northwest gains another mark in its column

Sam's graduation is in sight and my head is swimming with the possibilities ahead of us. Soon we'll be a young married couple looking to enter into a serious and possibly long-term relationship with a city other than Denton. I love Austin, but I feel like if we move straight back to Austin, we'll never want to leave again and I think it would be really great to live somewhere else for a little while. I am basically looking for a cool, mid-sized metropolitan, liberal-leaning, eco-conscious city near some water with great public services, parks and libraries and a killer film, music, and art scene where the summertime high temperatures are well under triple digits. So basically I'm looking for Austin in some other bio-region. Which is why I keep coming back to cities like Portland and Seattle.

At the same time, I haven't been to all the cool places in the US so I'm trying not to be biased and am gradually investigating other cities. I've been working at launching our Nashville destination at work lately and it looks pretty cool, I've got to say. It definitely requires some first-hand investigation. In my online research though I discovered this list of Allergy Capitols which is pretty disheartening and also somewhat confusing. Sam suffers from terrible allergy problems and so too does The Baron whose red allergy eyes make him look even more hangdog. When we visit Austin, Sam and I both have to bulk up on allergy medication several days in advance to prepare for the pollen and mold spore onslaught that inevitably befalls us. Since moving to North Texas, I've noticed a marked improvement in my allergy-related ailments. Austin ranks 41 in the list (where the most pollen-dense city is #1) but DFW ranks #27 which seems counterintuitive to me given my aforementioned decreased allergy difficulties in our current locale. Then again Denton is a solid hour away from Dallas and its possible that air quality plays into the ranking as well. Nashville is ranked #26 and I have no idea what that means given the other data. What I do know is that at the very bottom, #100 is Portland, OR - by no means perfect, but it certainly adds to my enthusiasm for that much touted hipster paradise.

75 Down

Heinlein said it best: A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

Popular Mechanics - 100 Skills Every Man Should Know (2008)

Never Again

Words and phrases that have well worn out their welcome in the media over the past few weeks:
Any rhetorical combination of the terms "Wall Street" and "Main Street"
"Hockey Mom"
"Maverick"
"Crisis"
"Bail Out"

itching

Me thinks its getting close to time for me to update this old blog's site design. I've been in an internet fugue state for the past six or so hours browsing through various design-y sites initially to seek out wedding-related gift inspiration. When I came to I found myself drooling over the sites at minimalsites.com. We had a big training/info symposium at work and among the talks I attended was one on the use of the grid given by one of the guys that worked on the igougo site re-design. I love grids. They are simplicity and order incarnate and it throws my swimming brain a buoy. So anyway I think I might hunt and peck through these uberminimal sites and assemble all of my favorite bits and pieces into a new layout for this mess I call a blog.

everyone is stupid and none of this matters

I'm sure I'm not the first person to make this comment, but this presidential election cycle is driving me stark raving mad. Every time I turn on NPR my body jolts upright, I convulse uncontrollably and I start to whistle like a teapot. Everything about the McCain/Palin ticket makes me angry. The media coverage of the duo makes me angry. The short attention span of the eligible voters whose voices strike my ears make me want to scream and shout and ultimately weep. I want to rant on for many paragraphs, but at this moment my seething venomous bile is boiling over so nothing I might come up would be very poignant, so I will conclude this little note with a bumper sticker-like slogan which I feel sort of sums everything up tidily: Everyone is stupid and none of this matters.

cry break

While stuck in the inexplicable traffic we encountered on our way home from the airport on Sunday, we tuned into one of my favorite NPR shows, Radio Lab. The theme of the program was "pop music" and one of the segments focused on the universality of some forms of music. Country music by the likes of Dolly Parton and Don Williams is being received with great acclaim in places as unlikely as Zimbabwe, Thailand, and South Africa. Don WIlliams is apparently packing stadiums in Africa.

Aaron Fox, an anthropologist of music at Columbia University and author of "Real Country: Music And Language In Working-Class Culture," suggests that Country music is gaining fans in these non-Appalachian locales because the story that the genre carries. His thesis is that Country arose in the US around the peak of industrialization as a response to increasing urbanization - that the guitar pickin' and twanging vocals embody the loss of and the idealization of rural life. As populations the world over move from villages to cities, the story of Country music gains resonance. Fox also suggests that common tropes of the genre, such as use of the pedal steel guitar and the familiar yodeling "cry-break" both which musically emulate the sounds of human weeping add to the universal appeal of Country music.
I couldn't help but draw the parallel between this notion behind Country music and the tale of Adam and Eve being evicted from Paradise. Both represent sort of artifacts of a major transition in human culture, with the story of Adam and Eve being an allegorical retelling of the shift from nomadic subsistence foraging and hunting to permanent agricultural settlements and the story of Country being a more literal description of the shift to urbanization and industrialization.

balm of hurt minds

Sleep has been so evasive for Sam and I over the past few days and weeks. Well its always pretty difficult for Samantha to master sleep but lately I've been tired pretty much all the time. I've got to get ahead of my sleep woes. I get to work and after about an hour, I am falling asleep at my desk. I am running on caffeine and exhaustion and its making me pretty unpleasant.

beer frenzy

I was cleaning out the closet in our guest room to begin making room for our future foreign exchange student and realized I have grain to make two batches of totally summer-worthy beer. Its year-old grain, which is pretty old as grain goes so I decided to brew it up more an experiment than anything else. However, the liquid yeast I had bought to go along with this grain has long since expired and trashed several fridge-cleanings ago but I happened to have some dry beer yeast on hand. So last weekend I brewed up a five gallon batch of honey wheat. I don't have the yeast appropriate for the Koslch I have grain for so I am trying to figure out a way to get some cheap dry ale yeast for it without having to pay a ton for shipping. Austin Homebrew Supply sells the yeast I need for about two bucks, but shipping is a flat $7 so I am doing my best to resist buying more crap to justify the shipping. I think I am going to send AHS a money order and a self-addressed stamped envelope and hope that they'll just dump the yeast packet in it and send it on its way back to me... I must use maximum restraint on beer brewing.

squirrels in love

Sam & I put up our wedding website (or wedsite if you will) so folks who get our save-the-date cards can rsvp there and get more info about our various goings-on. If you haven't already, be sure to RSVP.

my command interface

I've been using my iGoogle homepage as a gathering place for all my various to-do-list keepers together with my gmail, my google notebook and twitter. I don't know why it hadn't occurred to me until this instant to try to find a little app to do blog posts with. After about 15 seconds of searching I came up with this one that I am using now. Here's to hoping it works.

turn your pockets out toward the future

I spend a lot of my time thinking about garbage, about waste. The waste byproducts of our culture - the partially consumed foods, the superfluous packaging, the disposable consumer goods, the plastic everything - are going to be the most lasting remnant of our civilization. As we speak millions of tons of this archaeological gold is being entombed in landfills across the continent, preserved for millennia in mausoleums that will eventually piled to the max and abandoned to disappear into the landscape as grassy hillsides secretly seething with toxic viscera. That sounds pretty dramatic and well, it is.

I'm no patron saint of trash, I throw stuff away into the garbage bin thats collected weekly and spirited away to its hiding place. But the sad fact is that there is no "away." The stuff that we cast off, even the most seemingly biodegradable stuff, the food waste and paper, doesn't go away. It doesn't break down because it just gets buried where it never gets access to the air or sunlight. And those plucky microbes that do most of the dirty work of decomposition can't survive in the toxic dirt that surrounds our trash. And if your leftover french fries and Jimmy Carter era New York Times are so perfectly mummified, then imagine the time capsule that is the cheap styrofoam cup or the plastic grocery bag.

I mean for most of the folks that might stumble upon this blog, this is not news, but I mention this because of the psychological effect that trash has on me. The ghosts of ziploc bags haunt me. Am I the only one? Is it my Catholic/White/Western guilt? When I was a child, before I had any notion of pollution or environmental degradation, smokestacks made me weep. Somewhat later, after I'd gotten my Captain Planet certificate of indoctrination, passing through Baytown, an oil refining town outside of Houston, on a family vacation was to me a nightmarish vision of the future. Jobs and money and life experience have mellowed me out a little, but even today, landfills make me want to cry like a TV Indian.

I wish I close my mind and go with the ecologically friendly flow a lot of the time, but every damn thing thats supposed to assist in being more kind to the Earth seems to carry with it so much problematic baggage and really is just another form of throwing stuff out of sight and out of mind. My organic baby spinach comes in a corn plastic or bio-plastic container. When I first discovered this I was delighted because I abhor plastic waste most of all and this new stuff, unlike its petroleum based counterpart, would break down into nothingness after time. Only it won't ever do that in a land fill. Its marked with the PLA "7" of death for recycling, meaning "other" which generally translates to un-recyclable as is the case in our fair city. To top it off, the production of corn is like the most wasteful agricultural endeavor ever ("Endeavor Ever" is the name of my new band's new hit single by the way).

I started writing this post because I became enamored of the idea of municipal composting while taking my daily walk break at work. Boulder, CO, a notoriously environmentally conscious city, has recently authorized a new program to pick up food waste and the like in a special container that will skip the landfill in favor of the compost heap. Again, on the face this sounds like an awesome idea, but it too is fraught with its own set of problems from extra costs to the cancellation of other useful services, to bear dangers.

So what the fuck?

Being a green consumer is hard. You really have to watch out and be constantly mindful about not only where shit came from but where its going when you are done with it. Plus this level of mindfulness is pretty much a luxury afforded to me by my economic and social status which is a real bummer, when you think about it. I look forward to a time when all this crap becomes totally effortless and we all look back on this period in our history and let out a sigh of relief that we managed to get over such terrible, wasteful behavior. Oh and all of our food will be in pill form and we will all wear our pockets turned out as will be the fashion of the time.

update or whatever

I've been in my new gig for travelocity for about six weeks now but haven't said too much about it - by which of course I've made no mention at all... In January, I quit working for infowars (sort of quit anyway - I still do the occasional banner ad for them and update their online store from time to time) and took a job working for travelocity about three weeks later. Of course at the instant I began the new job, my car capsized and left me scrambling for transportation. I didn't feel like relying on Sam's vehicle for my daily commute so I decided to take some of the money from my recently closed savings account and buy a gently used car. I settled on a Toyota Matrix and found one on craigslist that was in my price range and bought it after struggling to obtain the cash necessary from my own bank and ultimately having to temporarily borrow the money from my parents who were able to wire me the dough... Anyway so six weeks later, I'm comfortably stabilized in the blissful monotony of my new job editing photos for a really neat marketing project. Its low pressure and my work ceases to hover over me after I leave the office (unless I bring the office home by telecommuting which I have chosen to do once a week). After many frustrating emails I was able to tap into the company's internal myspacesque social networking site and get setup with a carpool of two other guys that live a few blocks from me in Denton. Ride sharing is awesome because under other circumstances falling asleep while driving during one's daily commute is generally frowned upon.

The Stuff of Nightmares

I've been reading a lot of gardening/small farm blogs lately to hopefully help fill in some gaps in my knowledge as we get closer and closer to the spring growing season. One of the blogs I've been reading, Garden Punks, turned me on to this great little short film called The Story of Stuff. It made me feel terrible. Not the most glowing of reviews for such a thing but I encourage you to watch it (download free from their website or check it out on Google video) because it really shines a light on what goes into all of those iPods and laptops and everything else that we buy.

It made me feel especially bad about working at a job that sells the very same sort of inexpensive electronic gadgetry with a built-in expiration date discussed in the documentary. It made me want to recommit myself to trying to not buy stuff as much as possible and to generally avoid stores that aren't second hand shops.

I mean I know this will be a challenge. Overcoming my own desires will be the most difficult obstacle. Surpassing my need for instant gratification and my tendency to connect new ideas and projects with a shopping list will be a real challenge. I'm about to start gardening again and I know that I will have to strain to rein in my tendency to buy a bunch of crap and tools that I might need to aid in my efforts (damn it, I really wanted that soil block maker). The truth is that we as a culture are raised to have this compulsion (I guess it is sort of what our entire economy is fundamentally based on) and it is going to be no easy thing to get over. In the past, one might have turned to a neighbor or a friend to borrow and share things like tools, baby, but I don't feel like I have such a resource. Certainly its not present enough to trump "buy it" on my general list of options. What a gargantuan task it seems like to undertake to reduce my consumption. What an even greater task it would be to convince the mass of people, who are unconcerned with the effects of their consumption, to stop buying so much junk. I just have to remember to be thoughtful and do what I can every day and not become driven to apathy by guilt because once in a while I do buy something that isn't completely sustainable.

file under futurism

So as my termination date for my previous job approaches I am trying to get more into / out of my soon-to-be-primary employment running various online outlets for a local entrepreneur who sells "home automation" equipment on the side. I've been doing this work from home until recently my employer decided to open a storefront and office and so now I am commuting like a sucker to the next DFW tendril-stop to work among shelves full of these gadgets. For the first time ever today though I actually handled some and brought them home to try out. I could not believe how excited I got about some wireless light switches and a couple of other gimmicks. I now fully understand why my employer is doing well enough to open a store - these gadgets are terribly amusing. Mind you, I feel fairly sure that I have a tendency toward these kinds of toys as they take their place in our bedroom among the remote-controlled ceiling fan and the Roomba robot vacuum.


For me these sorts of devices straddle the line between truly useful and pretty silly. I generally tend to be against so-called "time-saving devices" but I think what I like about stuff like the Roomba and these remote controlled lights is how it hearkens back to what the future looked like half a century ago. I mean sure we are all now suffering like mad at the havoc wreaked by the futuristic science of that era - post WWII industrial science was hard at work cramming plastics and synthetics and all manner of would-be pollutants down our (grand)parents' throats - but there is also something charming about the optimism of that predicted future.

Space is the place

Growing up, our family home seemed like a pack-rat death trap akin to those rooms with the compressing walls a la Indiana Jones. Every inch of open space felt like precious and scarce realty when there was so much stuff crowding in around me. My mother, God bless her, has trouble letting go of things, to put it succinctly, and as a result took every opportunity to populate every corner of the house with furniture and surfaces for collecting masses of boxes and papers and miscellaneous junk. I rebelled against this claustrophobic environment and when I moved out of my parents' house I declared that I would live like a nomad carrying only the most minimal of possessions. My first apartment was a testament to this ideal and my huge room was spartan and minimalist and empty (also I hadn't been on my own long enough to accrue that many possessions). I became enamored with the idea of living in a loft or warehouse that was simply an enclosure of walls around free and open space.

My ideal has changed slightly somewhat as I have garnered more furniture and sentimental objects and tools and what have you. Samantha and I live in a 800 square foot 1950's bungalow with sparse and tiny closets and it seems like it has become a constant struggle to figure out what to do with all of our stuff. I'm not suddenly advocating clutter and packing your home to the ceiling, but now the prospect of loft-living gives me a little shiver. I see now that I could not escape my upbringing. I share the same propensity for collecting as my mother in a lot of ways and now I fear that living in a large space may only be an invitation to fill it up with art supplies and home-brewing equipment and what not. Furthermore I now see tighter spaces as more efficient and environmentally friendly. A smaller interior space forces one to take more frequent advantage of the open spaces outside. In our small home, our backyard and nearby parks have become our huge open living room and play area.

So I have been trying to convince Samantha to make our first home (that we own as marrieds) a sweet & tiny 350 square foot minihome - a sort of modern & modular take on the mobile home.

Living in such a tiny space means there is simply no room for clutter. An arrant article of clothing here or a disorganized paper pile there and within no time a space that small will begin to feel like its closing in. We'd have to get rid of three quarters of our furniture and 90% of our other possessions which is awesome. Like my mother must, I feel a pang every time I consider having to part company with a record or a milk crate of vhs tapes and constricting my space from the start (rather than with gradually encroaching possessions) seems like a shortcut to a more bearable lightness of being.

making friends is easy

Samantha and I have been living in Denton for something like 18 months now and we are suffering from a terrible dearth of friends. We have a couple of really great, similarly-minded compatriots nearby but they are pretty much it for us. I'm still pretty introverted and am not inclined to actively seeking new friends and since I've been working from home (at a job that is actually located 200 miles away) since we moved, I haven't had many opportunities to meet people at work, the way I've sometimes managed to make new friends back in Austin.

We want to try to join more local groups in an effort to meet people, but the problem we keep running into is that while we definitely want to meet people who share similar interests to us, we are so frequently irritated by people in the various subcultures where our interests lie. I'm a vegetarian and enjoy cooking, but the vegans in the vegan club irritate me. Samantha is very interested in womens' issues, but the campus feminist group rubs her the wrong way. The art groups are populated by elderly ladies and the groups dedicated to environmental issues is made up primarily of guilty suburban moms.

To combat this feeling we've tried hosting a few vegetarian potlucks at our house, hoping that we could create an event that would be welcoming to people like us. Since we don't really have a base of friends to build on, we've relied primarily on impersonal fliers and web communications to spread the word and while we have met a handful of totally nice folks, it wasn't quite the response we were looking for. Its also incredibly disheartening (and a little embarrassing) when 50 fliers and non-stop craigslist posting results in only one guest showing up to your shindig.

It would be great if I could meet some nice folks in my new job endeavors outside of the home, but I'm not holding my hopes too high on that score. My new plan is to just get more involved with groups that I can stomach and host stuff outside of our home and perhaps a little more neutral, since I can entirely understand that going to any kind of gathering at a stranger's home can be sort of intimidating. Or maybe I'm going about this entirely wrong. The biggest problem is that I've never been faced with this situation before at all. I've never been tasked with seeking out new friends. My friends are either people I've known since I was six years old or that I've met while working. I'm not even sure I have the social skills necessary to undertake this challenge.

New Year Order

Another new year is upon me and I am readying myself for a lot of change this year. I'm going to be changing jobs around and doing a bit of personal inventory so I can figure out what it is I want to do with my life. I am very excited and looking forward to new challenges. I have a few goals and resolutions, but I think if enumerate them here, there will be a record of my attempts and it will be all the more sad if I can't pull it all off... For example in this new year I will not make a common resolution of mine to blog more frequently. These announcements from me in the past have never worked out and the post containing my resolution always seems to be left alone for months on this site, gathering dust and drawing attention to how difficult it is for me to stick to my plans. This all being said, I am transforming this site back into its original bloggyness (it went through a brief incarnation as the site for a now-defunct plan of mine to host a sort of intellectual variety show - needless to say the interest in such a thing was minimal), though I obviously can't guarantee that it will be populated with thoughtful insights and well reasoned arguments.

So here is to the new year -may we all manage to harness even a little of its vast hope and promise and make our love and talent manifest in the coming months.