Your Plastic Pal

Slept a little. Ate a little. Feeling a little better.

Now have a scary chunk of stuff to do in order not to crash and burn.

Off to it.

Incessant schedule.

Starvation diet.

Wild uncertainty.

Falling apart one day at a time.

Lately I've been doing a new job at work, which means my days tend to start before 8, end after 6, deal with insane stress as myriad toothpick-and-string systems collide, and learn the frenzied damage-control techniques we use to keep it from falling apart.

Lately I've been eating a lot less than I need, as all-plant and Passover-friendly (Ashkenazic variation) have a narrow intersection with "convenience", though I've had a lot of help with preparing stuff in advance.

The festival's this weekend - http://torontovocalartsfestival.com - and it's pretty exciting to see it happening, though my organizational involvement in it is late in the game.

Worth posting this to let people know I'm alive, while it's still the case!

Tune in to Breakfast Television on City TV in Toronto - http://www.ustream.tv/channel/breakfast-television - at 7:40 AM tomorrow! Countermeasure will be singing live.

On air.

On TV!

What.

I was traumatized to see a line through the name of a friend's journal when I linked to it in a comment on a friend's post the other day.

I inquired about this development, and was greeted with something in the vein of a shrug.

It's really weird to think about how much I take for granted the archiving of information about our online identities. I know that data mining and identity theft are constant kobolds in the super dungeon explore of our online experience. Plus, comment spam.

But I'm immensely thankful that Deniz' journal is still up and readable. It's not like she's still here - I can't read new entries, thoughts on Corey Konieczka's or Vlaada Chvatil's game design, invectives about Twilight or Game of Thrones, or emergent patterns of sapience in information flows between multi-core tablets. I'll never know what Deniz would have thought about Countermeasure, or whether she'd have auditioned or enjoyed this music without all the Exeter baggage. But the person she was until 2005, the things she thought and wrote (in enormous quantity) and her points of connection to my life are still there.

It's not just watching the footprints stop, in this case. It's seeing the whole trail washed away.

I have a predisposition toward nostalgia, I guess. I have trouble throwing things out, and I'm trying to cure that. But text? Text stored on servers? Particularly decentralized servers, where new space is cheaper than the paper it would take to write those words down? That's the past now. It keeps us honest. It reassures us that things did happen in the way they did. Yes, it prevents us from reinventing ourselves daily, something upon which I place a pretty high premium (and I feel fairly artificial when I don't). But memory is fickle and treacherous. Documentation, while often embarrassing and frustrating, is true. And this reinvention is really only valuable when it gets you somewhere truer.

The old Robin Hood show from the '80s had a quote that appears all over my 1991 high school yearbook. "Either we face the ghosts of the past or we become ghosts ourselves." I saw much of that show but not that episode. I assume they were swordfighting actual ghosts. I take it to mean, in an allegorical sense, that if we don't look at the stupid things we've done, we turn into repetitive clichés.

Reading this post, it probably looks like a bunch of stupid, introspective, self-obsessed posts I've already written. Fair point. But if I *want*, I can at least go back and reread those other posts and realize how stupid, introspective and self-obsessed they seem. Isn't that a kind of progress?

Ewan, ever the poet, responded to my victory shout with the mot juste: "Ikea is the Guitar Hero of Carpentry."

I just had to throw up the horns.

So it's been two weeks, really maybe three, since the Beginning of the Move from where I was at to at where I now dwell, which is not wholly coincidentally in the eventual company of andmiss. Something like five and a half years ago, had I known this, my eyes would have gone quite motherf**king wide and my jaw would have dropped like a texas leaguer in the bottom half of a home game at the Rogers Sky Centre Dome.

But here I am, born to be kings.

(I read a whole whack of achewood this weekend, and it stayed good.)

I haven't put away every box yet, and at the old place there's a little bit of cleaning and taking-out-of-things that has to happen before everything is all sorted. But I've moved. Today was a big piece: construction of a pair of 80x202x28cm Billy Bookcases, to hold all the things that were in boxes. And the filling of said bookcases - well, also the filling of the places where clothes go at, on account of the clothes are put away too. Really I just need to do some dishes, lock my bike up and maybe unpack another dozen boxes of miscellany before I can deem myself "settled proper like".

But here I am.

I'm sharing a space in a different sort of way than I have in the past. Principally, this is an arrangement wherein we both pay reasonable amount of rent and need to travel the absolute minimum distance to shout at/hit/lounge around with one another. It's also a way we can both see the cat. It is also also a way to have my TV set up so that a number of couches converge upon it, thereby facilitating the playing of multiple video games with multiple people, or watching a movie or two or such, or just generally being social while being at home.

It's a geographical arrangement whereby I can get coffee at no less than five different places without walking more than three blocks, or bank at any of three different institutions within a single block.

And I can fall out of bed and onto the subway.

So the only real downsides are huge windows, and distance from the old roommate - a good friend, and a presence I'll miss.

It's going to be the future any day now. In the future, I'll be at a wedding in California, I'll be back at work, I'll be back in the choir with such as alienne4 and yuriko and even chanteuse11 as of very recently, and I'll be trying to figure out just what on earth to do next.

Then again, I barely know what to do now.

Unpack, really. Unpack and move forward.

Some upgrades to the Countermeasure website last night/this morning.

Check it out! Let me know what you think!

Had an actually nice cruise, which was undertaken as an opportunity to see the branch of the extended family what lives in Florida, and Indiana and such.

Be a part of the little kid cousins' lives, and such.

I do need to revisit David Foster Wallace's essay on the subject. While I had a generally good time, and was not filled with existential despair, I did have to spend basically a ton of energy combatting the urge to microanalyse the bits of the experience that are at a "war effort" level of dehumanizing monstrousness.

I can sort of do that now, because I did my best to pay attention to that stuff without digging too deeply into it at the time.

Important to keep in mind: these cousins (and associated uncle, aunt) are not folks with whom I can reasonably talk about politics or philosophy. We stick to things like family, entertainment, recreation, as otherwise the questions will create the kind of tension that would have ended all efforts at communication or familial connection. I made the mistake of raising the issue of American news media at our last get together. I won't make that mistake again.

In the meantime, I got some sun, snorkeled, zip-lined and generally saw a part of the world in which I'd never really spent any time. And also a part of the family for which the same applies. It was well worth it.

Tomorrow I begin Python Class, so I'm not right back at school yet.

Am I seriously waking up at 6:20am to go running?

Really?

I think so.

I updated the Countermeasure site and I updated my Criticism blog. Still haven't worked on my tech and philosophy blog, nor my podcast which has no less than THREE episodes in the can waiting for postproduction.

But I did record some awesome VO tracks for Countermeasure with yuriko this weekend. And I played boardgames for three consecutive days -- Small World on Thursday, Carcassone and Seven Wonders on Friday, and a trifecta of Kaiju World Wars, Pergamon and Yomi on Saturday.

Obviously this doesn't mean I've painted, built or played with any miniatures in months. I have to start learning to keep promises to myself.

It's here!

Episode 18!

Super great fun that may bring you to tears!

And when you finish with that one, check out the main page for Episode 19!

Turned off Facebook for a bit.

Can't stand frustrating people because of things outside of my control.

May be back. May not.