Green Day!

About a year or so ago my doctor told me to lose 30 lbs. I love the completely unselfconscious way doctors manage to say something that is already perfectly obvious, and then make no effort to actually help.

My first thought was to write some software that would create perfectly balanced lists of foods, with associated quantities, that would meet all my nutritional needs and keep me at a particular caloric intake. The way I envisioned it, I'd have a massive database of available foods, and have the software operate on my favorites. I figured this would allow me to eat the foods I loved, and still get a perfect nutrition.

So I wrote the tool, and it worked just fine. I designed plenty of ingredient lists that provided perfect nutrition for someone of my age, gender, and caloric needs.

There were various problems. For one thing, I hated it. Yes, the food was healthy, but it was sort of depressing to think of maintaining myself on that kind of food forever and ever. It was basically a lifelong commitment, if I wanted to lose the weight and keep it off.

I tried a couple of solutions. One involved an attempt to eliminate eating entirely. I would simply blend the foods into one giant drink, and get it out of the way in 5 minutes. Presto! No more mealtimes to worry about, and my nutritional needs were met better than 99.9998% of the people on the planet.

Yuck!

Eventually that system broke down, and I devised an entirely new approach. Instead of concerning myself with the ideal nutrition, I would try a calorie-counting approach. The only problem with counting calories is that it's not really possible. You just can't make good estimates of how many calories are in a piece of food. If you weigh the ingredients individually, you can do it. But for prepared foods, forget it.

But I got this great idea, that I didn't really need to calculate how many calories I was eating in a given day, if I could instead measure the result of those calories. In other words, if I just weighed myself in the mornings, I could see how the calories from the previous day had effected me.

It wasn't a perfect measurement. There would be more water or less water, stuff in the bowels, and whatnot. But if I didn't worry about the day-to-day accuracy so much, and only thought about the accuracy of the measurement on average, then in fact it was dead on target!

I also realized that this was fine, because it was not the day-to-day accuracy, but only the average accuracy, that really mattered. After all, I didn't care about losing weight on any particular day, I only cared about losing weight over time. If I had a system that averaged out to dead accuracy, that was good enough!

So, this was a much easier proposition. Unlike calories, my weight was easy to calculate, and I already had the device that would do it.

I also got the great idea that the 180 lbs recommended by the doctor was really just a meaningless number. There was no way for me to get there immediately; so it made no sense to try for it. All I really cared about was being on a trajectory of weight-loss; in other words I just wanted to lose some amount - any amount - relative to what I'd weighed in the most recent past.

So I set up a constantly moving target, very close to my actual weight. The target would go down at a rate of speed that was healthy and realistic. I started it off at 1 lb per week.

So my initial target was essentially the same as my actual weight. And every week, my target went down by 1 lb. Meanwhile, every morning I'd weigh myself, and thus indirectly count calories for the previous day.

If my weight was below my target, that meant I was losing weight too rapidly; and therefore I should eat whatever I wanted for that day. Yay! No need for endless willpower!

If, on the other hand, my weight was above my target, that meant I hadn't lost enough weight the previous day, and I needed to engage in diet behavior; which for me meant lots of salads. Vegetables are notoriously low calorie.

The beautiful thing about this diet was that it operated on average. I didn't have to do impossible calculations, and I didn't even need a perfectly accurate scale. If I followed the rules, even inaccurate measurements would average out to more and more accurate results. I loved this aspect because it had the same almost magical properties that I loved so much about calculus, and about those neat scientific experiments I'd done from books when I was a kid.

So, with no thanks to my doctor, over the past year I've managed to lose very nearly the amount he recommended. As of this morning, I'm down to 183.6 lbs, a 28.2 lbs loss.

I also lost the weight very slowly, which is exactly how you're supposed to lose weight. One of the other beautiful ideas about this diet is that you can actually control how much weight you lose over time. I started off at a pound a week; then switched to a pound every 10 days. When I do get down to 180 lbs sometime this February, my plan is to switch to a pound a month. I don't know of any other diet that offers that level of ability to slow down weight loss. The other diets seem to be all about losing dangerous amounts of fat in the least amount of time possible. Bad scene. I don't want to be thin, if that means my organs will all be damaged, and I'll realize no health benefit from the weight loss.

Anyway, so this morning I was not expecting to find myself below my target. I'd had a pretty luxurious lunch with a friend yesterday, including mushroom pasta and crab dumplings, and I'd expected today to be a diet day. But no! I'd lost weight after all, and today is a non-diet day.

Lately I've been feeling more and more as though I don't need to go out and binge on delicious foods on my non-diet days. I think I may be losing my taste for overeating. This morning, for example, when I think about what I want to do with my glorious non-diet day, I find myself considering really very sensible options. I'm not sure if that's a result of habits built up from being on this diet, or not. It does seem to be happening though.

We'll see. Anyway I'm pretty pleased with all this. I love feeling like I've cracked the technology.

Gaston Lagaffe

Spending Summers in France as a kid, I got to know the Gaston Lagaffe comic strips. They've never been translated into English, but it's still possible to follow along by looking at the pictures.

Gaston works in an office as a paper-pusher, but he has absolutely no interest in that. Instead of working, he constantly engages in pet projects that are very creative, but that completely ignore the requirements of his job, or the safety of others (and himself).

I love Gaston! He's so enthusiastic about his projects, and his projects are all fascinating, over-the-top conceptions that violate cultural conformity.

And yet ultimately, he's a Frenchman. Since I was an American kid in France, it was easy for me to spot his French traits. His taste in clothes and food always seemed very French to me. He's not a rebel per se. He's just very enthusiastic about everything.

His lack of concern for safety most often manifests as putting his coworkers in immediate danger, for example, blowing up part of the building. But that aspect of his personality is also fairly directly assessed as stupidity in the strip. In one single-panel story, we see Gaston at the beach, paddling out to sea on a raft. In the foreground, one of his coworkers holds a camera, saying to another coworker, "I told him I wanted a picture of him at the horizon... and he went!"

I have about six books of Gaston, that I bought long ago on one of my visits. There are 19 in all. They can't be found on http://amazon.com, probably because they've never been translated. But they can be found on http://amazon.fr! So I recently found them and ordered the remaining ones. They're €10 each, plus shipping. So it's not exactly cheap. But I got them, and I can't wait to read them!

It's not the first time I've wanted a book that could only be ordered from Europe. When Ann Hutchinson Guest first published her Advanced Labanotation series of books, I had to go to http://amazon.co.uk to get them. I don't know why Amazon would have different items available in different countries. The UK site is especially odd, since there's no language barrier, either in the site itself or in the products they sell. But now that Google Translate will automatically convert any web page to English for me, there's even less of a reason. I just visited http://amazon.cn, with no problem. Chrome detected the language, and converted it to English almost instantaneously. Sadly, the login credentials are not always the same, from site to site. The Chinese site wanted me to set up a whole new account.

Anyway, Gaston Lagaffe is great. It brings back lots of memories from my childhood. I don't recommend spending the money for the books, unless you can read French. But if you come over for a visit, I'd be happy to show off my collection.

Phil Ochs

Phil Ochs's birthday was this past Wednesday. He would've been 72 years old. He hung himself with a belt in 1976. One of my family stories is that my dad tried to talk him out of it.

I listened to his music all the time when I was growing up. I loved his protest songs, they seemed so hard-hitting and pertinent. Songs like "The Ballad Of William Worthy" was one of his story-telling songs, where he just basically took a current news story, and told it like it was. Then, songs like "Here's To The State Of Mississippi", while not about current news stories, were just as hard-hitting and pointed.

But he also wrote songs about other things that moved him. They weren't all fiery, angry protests. When Woody Guthrie died, he wrote "Bound For Glory". And after Kennedy's assassination, he wrote "That Was The President".

He also wrote funny songs, like "Draft Dodger's Rag", "Outside Of A Small Circle Of Friends", and "Love Me I'm A Liberal", that were still political, but were more rowdy and something you might sing while holding a beer and dancing on a table.

After his first three albums though, I think it really started to get to him that Bob Dylan was so much more successful, and respected so much more as a poet than he was. But I don't think Phil Ochs really understood what poetry was all about. I think he thought of poetry as something that relied on obscure imagery and indecipherable metaphors.

So, when he started to shift his music to be more along the lines of what he considered poetic, the result seemed to be that his songs stopped making any sense. I still loved listening to them, but I didn't understand a lot of them anymore. Songs like "Crucifixion" were lovely to listen to, but that's all. They didn't speak to me on any other level. Clearly it was a song about Jesus and Christianity. But it seemed to be using too many flowery images, without clarifying what it really meant, and not even making the flowery imagery very beautiful. I much preferred his earlier songs about Christianity, such as "The Ballad Of The Carpenter" or "Canons Of Christianity", which made so much sense to me.

Another later song of his that I didn't really understand was "When In Rome" (and part 2). I could appreciate it on some level, but like "Crucifixion", a lot of the song just passed by me without registering, even after many listenings.

Not all of his songs from that period were inscrutable. I could still relate to plenty of them, and I loved songs like "The Ballad Of Joe Hill", "The War Is Over", and "Jim Dean Of Indiana".

Some of his later songs are very directly depressed and defeated. These also tend to be in line with his earliest work, clear and less flowery. Songs like "Rehearsals For Retirement" are very dark. One of these songs is the final track of his final album, which I'd never heard growing up. But years later, when I finally did hear it, I almost couldn't bear to listen to any more of his music. It was called "No More Songs". It was devastating.

Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if he'd been able to get the right meds for his bipolar disorder, or whatever it was. I imagine him being like Dylan - still around, still making music today. Still relevant. And I imagine him having a lot to say about current events, and things like the Occupy movement. I don't think anyone in our pop-culture today ever made any sense out of the Occupy movement. But I think Phil Ochs would have been able to do it really well. He'd have been right there in Zuccotti Park, making up songs, and telling it like it was, and being a voice for a movement that ultimately never did find its own voice. Or at least, hasn't yet.

Learning To Walk

A lot has changed since my last Labanotation post.

For one thing, I've been focusing on the chapter on directional stepping. My approach is first to cover the direction symbols alone, and how they can be used to express different steps. Then in subsequent chapters, I plan to introduce new symbols that modify the direction symbols, in order to express a greater and greater variety of different steps. Eventually I'd cover the whole topic.

Unfortunately this has turned out to be a controversial decision. Direction symbols alone are able to express just a small handful of basic dance steps; and my tutor, Ilene, is concerned that dancers will be misled into thinking that Labanotation can't express any other types of steps. She insists that the only way to go, is to teach all the ways of notating steps at once.

I understand where she's coming from; but the obvious solution seems to be to just alert the reader to the fact that the direction symbols only explain a few different steps, and that additional steps will be explained in subsequent chapters. I'm not sure what else I'd need to do beyond that, to make sure people didn't get confused.

But she feels it's very important, so we argue about it.

Meanwhile, I've decided to use the Blender open source 3D animation software tool to create diagrams for my whole Labanotation text. The only problem being, Blender is hugely, insanely complicated! So I've essentially spent the past couple of weeks learning how to use Blender to place realistic human characters into still poses and animations.

Just today, I finally started to get something resembling a person taking a single step. This is the culmination of weeks of labor: a 2-second video of someone standing on a bare platform, and taking a single step forward.

What a sense of elation! As I edited the animation over several hours, I felt more and more like I really had a hold on the situation, and was really able to control exactly what this person was doing, to get her to step the way I wanted.

I've tried to learn Blender before; but it's always been so complicated, I just had no idea where to begin, or what to do, or how to approach the topic. But this time around, it's all been so obvious. Of course I would need to read such-and-such a chapter in so-and-so's book. Naturally I would need to do that, because of this-and-that type of problem I confronted, in producing a diagram for my Labanotation text!

Writing a text about Labanotation is really the ideal circumstance in which to learn Blender. Everyone should do it that way. In order to make the diagrams I need for my chapter, I'm constantly running into problems, and having to learn all sorts of Blender material in order to solve them. It's quite an immersion course. Meanwhile, since I'm writing a text about dance, or at least about something else that's about dance, I'm dealing with subtleties of human movement that I wouldn't encounter if I were just trying to make a funny animated movie. All the little details of a given movement suddenly take on an added significance, because they illustrate several paragraphs of text, in which I try to make complex notational ideas clear to a lay reader.

It's so nice also, to be totally captivated by a topic of exploration again. At the beginning of this year, I'd decided to cut out all my pursuits, and leave absolutely nothing between myself and my perceptive senses. I felt that I'd been hiding behind my enthusiasms; and I didn't want to let myself off the hook anymore. So I cut them out. It turned out to be a horrifying exploration of depression and emotional free-fall. But you know what I say - when life hands you depression and emotional free-fall, make lemonade!

Those were rough months. I really felt like I came right up against the bare metal of my existence; or nearer to it than I had in years and years. And when it was over, it took awhile for any topic of study to captivate my attention the way it had before. Of course there was still Labanotation itself; but that was less a labor of love than it was a labor of love/hate. I did it, but it was always just rough and painful, because of the controversies I created among the people I spoke to in the community, and because of my own struggle to understand the material I needed to write about.

But Blender now, has no such ambivalence attached. Not only is it incredibly fun to learn and play with, but it's going to absolutely revolutionize everything I'm doing with Labanotation. Instead of stale line drawings, poorly and laboriously done, I will now be able to illustrate all the diverse Labanotation concepts with highly accurate, rendered 3D images of people in the poses I've arranged, depicting the notation I've diagrammed. Animated videos will accompany textual explanations in ways that no other Labanotation text has ever approached. Readers coming to Labanotation for the first time will discover that the biggest problem they face will be deciding which wonderful creative choreographic idea they want to write down first.

It's quite something. I'm very much enjoying this whole process.

Home Infrastructure

Lena's friend Emily recently decided to try a career in home organization. I think she's considering trying something else now, but she's definitely very very good at home organization. I suspect she'll be good at whatever she tries.

She came over recently to continue working on my apartment. Lately that has meant the she's been going through boxes and boxes of ancient papers, and creating a filing system for me. What a nightmare. But she's just so perky and nonjudgmental about it, that I can just about manage to be in the same room while she's working on it, without panicking the whole time.

I'm not typically a panic-ridden person. But I do have longstanding difficulties cleaning up my living area, that date back to childhood, issues with my mom, and so on. In the past few years, I've been making huge leaps and bounds with keeping the place cleaner, but not to the point where I can maintain my own living space without help.

So, I have a housekeeper named Erin who comes every week; and I hired Emily to help me figure out where everything really belongs. Interestingly enough, I found both Erin and Emily through Lena. Lena seems to be really helpful in lots of ways, now that I think about it. Finding hacker spaces, finding people to help with my home, etcetera etcetera etcetera.

So Emily was here recently, and there are several parts of the apartment that have really needed some attention for a long time. For one thing, my bed is a big oaken thing with drawers on either side, and a long storage space directly under the mattress, accessible from a little door at the foot of the bed. The problem with the long storage space is that anything that goes in there, doesn't have a convenient way to come out again. The stuff at the back, in particular, is really just in there. So I've kept the whole space empty, hollow, and wasted.

Another problem has been the towel rod in the bathroom. The two little metal catches are screwed into the wall just fine; but the actual rod-holders that attach to those catches, and the rods that go between the holders, had long since fallen off and been stowed away behind the toilet. So typically, I'd just drape the towels where I could; or lately they'd just lay on the floor till I needed them again. Yes, it's humiliating. I'm a travesty. Whatever.

The bathroom in general was just not well organized. There wasn't anyplace to put anything, but there were a lot of things that needed places to be. I tend to buy soap and shampoo and toilet paper in bulk; and they'd just sit under the sink, in a pile, gradually spreading out faster than I used them up.

So, this time around, Emily suggested that I commit to solving each of those problems before she returns this Saturday.

And I did! Well, two out of three. And the third is on the way!

First, I made a trip to Home Depot and The Container Store. I took josette with me for moral support and to help carry things. We got the special hex wrench that I needed in order to fasten the towel rack back where it was supposed to be. That's all it would have taken this whole time; but it took till now for me to actually go and buy the tool.

At The Container Store, we also picked up materials to build a shelf on the inside part of the bathroom door. Another brilliant Emily idea (ABEI)! All of a sudden, the room that was too small for shelves of any kind, would now have a nearly full-sized shelf. I got the Elfa system, which is so overpriced that the company executives should really be ashamed of themselves, or at least be punished in some sort of disincentivizing way.

So, the bathroom is now turbo-powered. I installed the shelf, and it's perfect - aside from the space it takes up. And the towel rack now proudly totes two towels, and looks like it's raring for more.

The storage space under the bed is another story, but I think I've got it figured. I'm going to sew a length of rope into a bed sheet, and place the bed sheet beneath any boxes I want to store down there. That way, when I want to get access to the boxes again, I just pull the rope, the bed sheet slides out, and the boxes slide out along with it. When I want to put the boxes away again, I just put a box on the sheet, and push it in, add the next box, push it in, and so on, and they drag the bed sheet with them all the way to the far end.

But I haven't done that yet.

So yeah. Towel rack. Door shelves. Emily. The apartment gradually progresses. Someone recently came over and said, "oooh, I like this place!" Check one item off the list of things I never thought would happen.

Lena's Engagement

Yesterday I had a late dinner with Lena at her apartment. I got some fancy takeout and lugged it uptown, and it turned out to be way too much food. But it was a green day for both of us, which is a whole 'nother blog post unto itself; so lots of excellent food was, almost literally, just what the doctor ordered.

She was also nervous about her impending marriage. What had started out as the very practical idea of marrying one of her lovers for the favorable legal benefits, had turned out to mean much more to her, and also to some members of their respective families and friends. And she had a lot of ambivalence about this, especially since most of the married people she knew had also gotten married for the favorable legal benefits, rather than out of a true desire to spend their lives together. What was all this emotional stuff doing, getting in the way of her participation in a standard, practical element of her immediate culture?

The stress of it was having some commonly recognizable stress-related symptoms, such as not eating enough; another reason to bring her yummy delectables, though I didn't know about the stress until after I'd already brought the food. Happy coincidence.

But it wasn't sad stress - she was stressed by the happiness and excitement of marrying someone she really loved, and how much she was looking forward to it, both for the marriage itself, and the fun adultery play it would allow her to engage in with her other lovers. (All of which would be thoroughly approved of by her husband, but that too is a whole 'nother blog post).

So I got to spend the evening with one of the most happily stressed out people I'd ever encountered. Maybe it was just because I don't spend too much time with engaged people in general; but even among the group of such people I think this must be a particularly special case, since the whole engagement had started out as - at least by intention - a merely ordinary decision based on the merits; and both the happiness and the resulting stress had been just a pleasant (?) surprise.

On a completely different topic, Lena, who is one of the few people I've told about this blog, also told me at one point in the evening that she had considered asking me that day, whether blogging had changed the way I narrate my life to myself; and I joked that if she had asked me, my response would have been, "well, it will now!"

Here's the real answer. Yes it does. And that's why I started writing it. I wanted to write something that would be very personally revealing, about the thoughts and experiences that I find so fascinating in my own life, but that are so difficult to hold onto, as time passes and leaves those moments behind. And what I found is that, while I'm able to do that to some extent, there's also a lot that I'm not able to write about. I don't like saying negative things about people, for example, and so when I have something negative to say about someone, I tend to leave their name out of the post. And I don't feel the same desire to write about negative feelings and experiences, that I do to write about the things I find great and fascinating, or that I'm enthusiastic about. And so when I think back over my recent past, about what to put in each new post, I think about my life in those particular terms; and that tends to color my sense of those events. I see the moments of my life more in terms of how positive and interesting they are, rather than just as a set of particularities that occurred in my life.

Another part of the answer is that blogging has also changed the way I think about all my New York friends. When I was in California, almost every day I had a new experience with someone I rarely got to see, in a situation I rarely got to be in; but in New York, all my experiences tend to be, to some extent, repetitious. This may just be because in New York I have a group of friends that isn't in massive fluctuation, and so I tend to see the same people again and again. Or it may be that I just personally seem to prefer a more repetitious existence. I don't know. It's certainly not a difference between New York and California, except to the extent that I live here and not there. If I lived there, I'd have a different group of friends, but I'd have the same social patterns as I do here. In fact I did live there, and that's exactly what happened. So, writing this blog has made me aware that instead of writing about entirely new experiences each time, these posts may collectively start to reveal more and more about the particular people I know; both about their personalities and their identities. And that's something I hadn't anticipated. So yes, to that extent this too changes the way I narrate my own life to myself, because it's created an informational tension that I feel compelled to consider when composing each post.

Decorations

My friend Naima is full of ideas. A couple days ago she decorated my ceiling. Actually she decorated my ceiling last year; but I left that decoration up all year, and then a couple days ago she augmented it with a new layer.

The original layer was a bunch of red and green shiny Christmas balls. She hung a couple dozen of those on individual strings taped to my ceiling. Lots of climbing and un-climbing of the ladder. She did it because I'd mentioned to her that it was something I'd always wanted.

Actually I hadn't always wanted it. And here's the story about that. Once upon a time, I was not afraid of heights. I used to enjoy leaning over the edges of cliffs, bridges, tall buildings, just to see if I could see straight down to the ground, where the itty bitty people were moving so slowly.

But one day, I went with my dad to visit my grandma in Florida, and he took me parasailing. I forget who advised me on it, but someone told me to tell the parasailing people to let out all the rope, and let me go as high as I could get. So that's what I told the parasailing people, and that's what they did to me.

No one seemed to noticed that I was hanging completely limp in the harness, staring down at pure death from 1200 feet up. I guess the idea of installing an intercom system on those contraptions hadn't occurred to anyone; but I would have liked to have found a button up there on my harness somewhere, that I could push and say, "OK, I've had enough now. I'd like to come back down quickly please."

But no. They left me up there for a good long time. I had plenty of time to think things over. What it would look like from this height, to see someone hit the water after falling from this height. How long the rope was, and how the whole long length of it had to be good and strong, in order to stay attached to both me and the boat at the same time. How small the parasail was, and how it could easily separate from my little harness, and fly off, leaving me to move in a straight line 1200 feet closer to the center of the earth.

After that experience, I developed a whole new set of sensations when looking down from high places. For one thing, I started to feel like I couldn't be sure of my balance, and I might just pitch over the edge of whatever I was looking down from. Even if there was a good solid guard railing, it seemed as though I could definitely just pitch over the edge without realizing it.

I also noticed that it seemed as though my glasses might fall off, because of tilting my head down to look at the ground. It didn't matter that I could violently shake my head without the glasses coming off (I would test this periodically); if I was looking down from a height, I became certain that my glasses would fall off.

These feelings, along with the fear of dying, started to happen at lower and lower altitudes, until even standing on a chair or a stool would do it to me. It was a slow process, but a few years after my parasailing experience, I couldn't tolerate any elevation above the ground at all.

At around that time, my friend July asked me to clean the Christmas balls that hung on individual strings in the hallway of her house. She lived in a San Francisco collective, called The Purple Rose, and there was a hallway right outside the kitchen. The kitchen was used to cook for 15 or 20 people each day, and the grease vapor would billow out the door and along the ceiling, and over time would coat the Christmas ball strings with grease. One of the household chores was to wipe the grease off the strings.

So once when I was visiting, July asked me to do it, and I agreed, in spite of knowing full well that I'd be terrified. I took the ladder, and got started. Now, I could make it up the latter to to the top. I wasn't paralyzed by the fear. I just had all these emotions and sensations whirling through me while I did it. But just going up the ladder wasn't enough to do the job. From the top of the ladder, I could reach maybe a dozen or so Christmas balls, and wipe their strings clean. But there were maybe 100 or more up there. So I had to do it, then climb down the ladder, move the ladder, climb up it again, and clean the next set. I had to do that over and over and over again. Up the ladder... down the ladder... up the ladder... down the ladder.

The thing is, after the first few times up and down the ladder, it did start to get easier. Eventually it was really just normal. I wasn't thrilled about going up and down the ladder, but neither did it cause those whirling sensations to the same degree as it had.

After that, it's not so much that I was cured. But I noticed that the sensation of being afraid of heights just seemed less. I didn't mind as much, looking down from high places. And the fear and whirling sensations continued to diminish over the course of several months, until I wasn't scared of heights at all anymore. And I went back to my old ways of enjoying looking down from bridges and cliffs and buildings, to see the tiny people far below.

I was so grateful to July for asking me to clean those Christmas balls! And I felt like I really understood a lot more about being afraid of heights, and about how to cure such things. The whole experience really enriched me. I thought very affectionately of those Christmas balls hanging in the hallway of the Purple Rose.

So it was years again after that, that I mentioned to Naima my desire to have Christmas balls hanging from my ceiling. I don't think I even told her the significance they had for me. It was just a passing remark I made. I didn't expect her to actually do anything about it.

But Naima is full of ideas. One day a year ago she sequestered me in my bedroom with strict instructions not to come out. I never felt so trapped in a small space in my life. But no, I didn't develop claustrophobia - though that would've been funny. No, I just watched a movie and lounged in bed for awhile, and then she said I could come out again; and lo and behold! My ceiling was covered with Christmas balls hanging down from strings, just like at the Purple Rose!

It was lovely, and meant so much to me, both because of her wonderful expression of friendship, and because of what Christmas balls hanging from the ceiling signified in my life. The struggle, the healing, the learning; not to mention the reminder of my friendship with July, who is someone who also has a lot of ideas.

Then a couple of days ago, Naima came over, dropping little hints, like "where do you keep your ladder?" And "do you have any clear tape? I want to use it later."

Anyone with half a brain would pick up on that kind of hint, I'm sure, especially since she'd done the exact same routine the year before. But not me! I was talking a mile a minute about Labanotation, and paused only long enough to say, "sure, the ladder's in the vestibule. There's tape on the table over there."

Later that day, Slim came over, and Will cooked the four of us some chicken. Naima had also baked us all a cake, so it was party time. Then Naima sacked out in my bed while Slim and Will and I hung out. And after that it was late, so I sacked out in my bed too.

At some point I woke up to the sounds of her leaving. "Wussup?" I grumbled, half-asleep, into my pillow. "Just going to the bathroom," she said.

But she lied! Well, she probably did go to the bathroom, but then she grabbed the ladder, grabbed the tape, grabbed a big bag of silver christmas trees, and paper snowflake cut-outs that she'd made herself, while I had dreams of sugar-plums in the next room.

When I got up in the morning, Naima had sacked out again, this time on the couch; and at first I didn't notice anything. My first half hour of wakefulness usually only distinguishes itself from sleep by the fact that I'm walking around.

But she woke up shortly thereafter and told me to look up; and then I noticed! It was so nice, all over again. The balls and trees and snowflakes were beautiful. It was a lovely present.

Naima always does things like that for her friends, and as far as I know, no one has ever done anything like it for her. I do other cool things for her; but I don't come up with huge surprises like that. I keep telling her there has to be a way to turn that kind of ability into a career of some kind.

Animal Crossing

After I left my parents' place, I stopped off to spend a day in Providence where my friend July lives with her husband Dennis. July and I dated long ago, and even though I don't see her very often, she's definitely way up in the rankings of my very best friends. I tend to like people who have a 'heart of gold', but her heart goes well beyond that.

So we were hanging out, playing on her Wii, while Dennis was out with his two kids from a previous marriage, celebrating the eldest's birthday. Later on they came by for dinner and cake (Dennis is a really good cook), but right then July and I had the house to ourselves.

She showed me her dance game, explaining that she really knew she didn't look exactly like the sexy cartoon person on the screen whose moves she imitated, but that it totally felt like she did. She danced around for awhile, and I watched, and I could see how she did make all the same moves, but they weren't quite right. The cartoon character had a much more flexible spine, and had much better control over her torso and pelvis, so that while July got a lot of the arm and leg movements right, her pelvis and torso could only essentially arch or not arch, and not much of either. But still - it was dance, and it was exercise, and she did very well. When she invited me to try it, I immediately declined. I may love dance notation, but as a dancer I'm fit only to laugh at.

We also played Wii bowling, and I showed her the hundred pin variant. She'd never played it with the ball on manual control, so she kept dropping the ball too soon or too late, which gave me plenty of opportunity to make jokes. But she never got discouraged, and ended up playing well. Neither of us got a strike though.

We also played ping-pong, which I won handily. She wanted to do sword fighting, and complained that I only chose games that she wasn't good at. I told her it was easy - I just waited for her to suggest something, and then I'd pick something else, thus maintaining my superiority.

It was all playful banter. Recently - well, several months ago - Dennis's kids had given her a copy of Animal Crossing: City Folk, and she hadn't played it at all, beyond creating a character and walking around a little. Since they were coming over later, she was a little embarrassed that they'd realize she hadn't touched their gift since they gave it to her.

I first played Animal Crossing when another ex-girlfriend of mine, Alexandra, brought her daughter Leocadia over to my parents house one day for a visit, and Leocadia had a copy. This was years ago. She introduced me to it, and I thought it was beautiful! The plants were pretty, and really all the images had a discrete cuteness all their own, that I found very appealing. I loved the idea of walking around this made-up world, looking at the pretty things.

So now at July's house, I wanted to play, and she was happy about that because it meant that her step-kids might not realize she hadn't played it since they gave it to her.

So I started it up. Her character had sleep bubbles coming off of her from being unplayed for so long, and her hair was messed up. She also had exited the game improperly, and so the hedgehog character popped out of the ground and gave me about a 5 minute lecture on how to exit the game properly.

After that I checked out my inventory. There was nothing. I had a house with a candle and a radio. And roaches, which I proceeded to step on. There was nothing in my pockets.

I went over to Tom Nook's store, and discovered that I hadn't even met all the townspeople yet; so I ran around for awhile and did that. Then Tom Nook hired me to do some errands, which I did; and then I bought a fishing rod, net, and watering can.

I ran around town for a bit, catching fish and insects, and harvesting pears, and making donations to the museum, and selling things to Tom Nook.

It's a nice town. I got stung by bees a couple of times, but fortunately I had purchased some medicine as well, which fixed me right up. Meanwhile, Tom Nook's store was right next to the Town Hall, which is always convenient; and the museum was not too far away either.

July sat with me and watched, getting more and more horrified all the time. She kept saying things like, "but what's the point of the game? What are you supposed to do?"

I explained that you had to pay off your mortgage and upgrade your house; and do favors for the townspeople to stay on their good sides; and earn money by selling things and making investments; and stock the museum full of insects and dinosaur bones and fish and paintings; and donate to the town fund so the town could have nice events.

July was like, "Aaaaaugh! That's the way my life is right now! Why would I ever play this game! This is horrible! I already have to go to work and pay off my mortgage and deal with the neighbors, and do all that other crap. What the hell kind of game is that!"

So I kept playing, and she kept being freaked out about it.

Actually, Animal Crossing is disturbing on a number of levels. For one thing, the game characters periodically nag you to get all your friends to play. Which I guess is not surprising; except that the typical audience for this game is little kids who have no defenses. So it amounts to very aggressive hard-sell marketing tactics used against small, innocent children, in a way that grown-ups are not likely to detect, unless they've been playing the game themselves for awhile, too.

Another thing about the game is that it really is all about how to be a model citizen, without in any way questioning what that might mean. So, you give charitable donations, help out your neighbors, all the while nursing your own finances and being very acquisitive, decorating and enlarging your home over and over again. And you do all this while being a quiet, obedient person who goes along with whatever anyone else says to you, or risk their wrath. Their wrath, by the way, is expressed in subtle insults, cold shoulders, and by ignoring you or even moving away to a different town.

It's an ugly game.

I actually used to play it a lot with Lauren for awhile, after she got her Wii. I'd asked her specifically to get that game, because of my fond memories of Leocadia. So, Lauren and I each had our own character in the game, and we'd play whenever I came over.

What happened was, Lauren quickly developed a very strict approach to the whole Animal Crossing world. For one thing, she didn't care what any of the neighbors though of her. She wasn't interested in them at all. What she cared about was money, and lots of it. She also cared about maintaining the town so its grass was always well tended. In Animal Crossing, if you don't tend the grass, it wears away until you're left with just raw dirt. To keep the grass green, you have to plant flowers, and keep the flowers watered, and avoid running too much over the ground with your feet.

So Lauren set up pathways through the town, leading to all the different places one might want to go; and she planted flowers along the pathways; and set up rules that we weren't allowed to run on the bare grass, but only along the paths, unless we were specifically looking for buried treasure, or harvesting fruit from the trees.

Every time she logged in, she'd buy out Tom Nook's supply of flowers, and plant them around town; and water all the flowers that needed it (they turn brown before it's too late to save them); and she'd stick to her paths; and she'd harvest all the fruit from the trees (she'd filled the town with peach trees, worth 500 bells a piece, instead of just 100 for the pears).

Pretty soon Lauren had paid off her house, run out of upgrades, and was well on the way to having millions of bells in her bank account.

But the game got to be very dull. Once we were restricted to running only along the paths, and there was such wealth growing on all the trees, and there was nothing left to buy, and nothing left to donate to the museum, it turned out there was not much left to do. So she and I both lost interest and stopped playing so much.

I'm not really sure it would have been any different if she'd focused more attention on staying on the good side of her neighbors. She would have just been running around talking to all of them, sending them letters and presents, and visiting them in their homes. Where does that really lead?

At a deeper level, there's a more fundamental question that has always intrigued me. What sort of game could successfully model real life, either at the personal level or the societal level? I've often thought I'd like to design a board game that would model capitalism, and show it going through the various processes that capitalism is prone to. I think such a game would be like my argument to people, in favor of more and better social programs, and whatnot. I could just play that game with my libertarian friends, and watch them get frustrated with the inequalities their free market ideologies would lead to, and watch them gradually come around to implementing various social programs and taxes and whatnot.

At least, that would be the hope. But it's very difficult to come up with a real model of capitalist society, that libertarians would agree was accurate, and that would still be simple enough to play as a game.

Meanwhile, my dad is a Marxist theorist, with strong ideas about all of this stuff, and I've sometimes tried to work out a ruleset for such a game with him. But he's so into the complexities of social theory, that the whole concept of trying to simplify it into a playable game is not so appealing to him. So our conversations about it have never led to an actual playable game. But I haven't given up.

Animal Crossing, on the other hand, represents sort of the opposite of what I'd be aiming for. In Animal Crossing, the situation is really locked up, and can never change. There's always Tom Nook's store, and there are always the institutions and structures and natural behaviors of the surrounding environment; and the neighbors have a fixed range of behaviors. So it's not really surprising that Lauren was able to essentially crush the game. If I developed a 'society' game, I'd want it to be flexible enough all of those fixed ideas would really be mutable. Not unlike Nomic; but with more structure built in from the start.

So yeah. I hung out with July and played some Wii, and we had a lovely time, and a lovely birthday with her husband and step-kids. But they did notice that she hadn't played the Animal Crossing they'd given her. They spotted it right off, when they saw she was still running errands for Tom Nook.

Friendship And Family

Among some of my friends, I have a reputation as being highly accepting of other people. They see that I have a broad array of friends from different backgrounds, with different qualities, some of whom value certain things higher than anything else, others of whom value other things higher than anything else. Some of my friends think I'm so accepting, that they can't understand why I'd waste my time being friends with some of those other friends. Some of my friends think I'm so accepting, that they can't understand how I manage to fit all the people in my life that I do, without cracking under the strain.

Other friends of mine don't think I'm so accepting, but they believe I do have certain qualities that might seem to be accepting. These friends hear me rant and rail against one thing and another, and hear me pass my judgments; and they don't perceive me to be accepting at all. But they do see how my particular type of judgments would allow for a wide array of different types of friendships.

So for example, I'm judgmental towards people who are mean or dishonest. In fact those are really my central requirements for deciding whether to reject someone - are they mean or dishonest? If they are, then I don't want to have them as friends.

The result of that, however, is that I can be friends with atheists, religious people, criminals, corporate types, dreamers, and so on. There are honest, non-mean people in all cultures and all walks of life. So, I'm still quite a judgmental person, but not in such a way that my sphere of acquaintance would be limited to looking a certain way or sharing any particular obvious qualities.

So, there's that. But when I go to visit my family on Thanksgiving, I discover an entirely different kind of judgment. There are deep antagonisms I feel towards every member of my family, each having to do with our own unique history, and my experience growing up.

There's a certain amount of variability. Sometimes I don't just get mad at everyone; I'll be relatively outwardly calm, and I'll manage to engage in watching movies or eating meals, and I'll listen to the family news, and give news about the people I'm in touch with.

But, even just being in the same room with any of them; hearing the way their glass sounds as it touches the table; hearing the sound of their shoes or socks or slippers or bare feet as they walk in their particular way, just reveals some aspect of their personality that jangles all my nerves. There's Marie, fingering her way through all the forks in the drawer, because she can't get a grip on one of them easily, and she figures that just fingering her way through all of them will result in one of them fitting into her hand the way she wants. She won't take the time to look at the forks, and bring her thumb and forefinger over to one of them, so as to grasp it and pick it up; she'll just finger them all, making the noise of someone who doesn't care who else knows her approach to getting a fork. And I'm the same way! I hear in her lazy fumbling, my own lazy fumbling when I'm home in my safe environment. I go through the forks in the exact same way, using the same technique because I too can't seem to bring my attention around to whatever I'm actually doing, and I can't be bothered to give a moment's thought to how to pick up a fork; but instead I stubbornly insist on thinking about whatever topic happens to be in my mind at the time; and these stupid forks are just intentionally trying to distract me from all that, and I'll be damned if I'm going to give in to their childish cry for attention.

And I wonder, would I be the same kind of parent she was, lazily pursuing my own intentions, my own artistic activities or any other project I cared about, determined to ignore my children's pleas for attention and affection?

Or there's Mike, trying to use the new netflix account I set up for him, trying to use the roku interface, and having no idea what to click on, or how to navigate; and I'm explaining it over and over, and getting more agitated the whole time, because I've never been able to teach him anything about computers, no matter how hard I tried, dating back to the days of the 386; and instead it's always been other people who've been able to pierce his veil of ignorance, and help him understand what an icon was, and how to click on it; and now one of his students, whose praises he sings endlessly, helps him with computer problems all the time. And I still can't even show him how to pick a movie on netflix. But he'll patiently talk to me about Rawls and social theory and economics and political philosophy, never getting frustrated in spite of the fact that I get distracted, and lose the thread of what he's saying, and can't really catch up, and just don't seem to be very much of a thinker at all, in spite of growing up under his care, and being taught so much as a child, playing together, and hearing his many lessons about what it meant to be an intellectual; and reading such difficult books at such a young age.

Or there's Letty, now with her own children whose childhood I've missed too much of already; and she very judgmental herself, and who I gave up on finally last year because she didn't want me to invite a lot of people over to hang out and enjoy each other's company, and then complained to me in front of the kids about how I was afraid of not forming a connection with them while they were young. It makes me just want to forget that she and the rest of them exist at all, and pretend that that part of my life is just empty and void; I have no sister, I have no niece or nephew, I haven't alienated them and lost the possibility of real closeness, I haven't gradually become the strange uncle who doesn't say much and who isn't really fun.

I have no high ground with any of them. Just these resentful emotions I can't seem to shake, even though every one of them would rather be close and affectionate with me, than have these strange resentments and judgments. But I just can't get over it.

So, some of my friends think I'm very accepting; and some think I'm pretty judgmental about certain things; but very few of my friends know much of my family context, or the petty judgments that overwhelm me and inhabit so much of my consciousness, so much of the time.

Arduino Odd Couple

I recently got an arduino. An arduino is a simple CPU on a circuit board with various inputs and outputs that you can connect wires to, and a simple operating system that lets you control how its inputs and outputs should behave.

In other words, if you build a machine of some kind, the arduino lets you control it with software, instead of having to design complex electronic circuits. Software is better because it's easier to change and develop than real circuitry. Arduino makes everyone an inventor.

My friend Tony came over a couple days ago, to explain the arduino and how it works, and to lead Will and me in a 'hello world' arduino programming project.

It was so great! First of all, the software installed on my desktop computer without too much of a fuss. Then when I connected the arduino via a USB cable, and ran the 'arduino' developer tool, everything just worked! I could edit code and run it on the arduino with a single step. Just edit and click. Boom!

A few months ago, I tried to start writing android apps, and the experience was utterly different. The android development environment was very difficult to set up, and then each app had to be organized in a very constrained way, and the whole thing was just really uphill all the time. With arduino, I had a working application within minutes. Albeit, just a blinking LED.

Having an arduino, and knowing that programming it is as easy as pie, I'm starting to daydream about what kinds of inventions I may want to make. Nowadays there's really no limit to the type of machine anyone can construct. Retail fabricators will make any metal parts I want, all I have to do is send them the 3D specifications, which are easy enough to create on my computer using free software. The question is, what do I want to make?

For years I've dreamed of building a lockpicking device. Back at Google, there were all sorts of employee social groups, and I helped found one for lockpicking. We'd meet up once a week, and pick locks from a big heavy box of them I kept by my desk. It was fun! The principles of lockpicking are fairly easy to grasp, and I always thought an automatic picker would be a straightforward design project. And I don't mean that weird contraption that just drums the pins until the cylinder turns. I mean a real picker that actually picks the pins themselves.

So, that would be a cool project. Or I could do a more traditional (in hacker circles) project like a 3D printer or a CNC device. Those are very cool, and there is definitely room for new designs and new ideas, like a clay pummeling device, that would reproduce 3D objects in clay.

Or I could do some variant of a pick-and-place machine, which would build electronic circuits. I love that idea because, if combined with a 3D printer, it has the potential to be a truly self-replicating machine, that could take raw input materials and just output a fully constructed copy of itself.

But those are big projects, and I've only just started out. So then I think, maybe I should begin with a small project. Of course, my initial intention is to go through all the sample projects that came with the arduino, and build them each in turn, and play around with making changes and whatnot. But even after that, a relatively small project might be best.

So then I start thinking about what kind of small projects to do. Sew LEDs into my clothes, and have the arduino light me up in lovely moving patterns? Make a hat that squirms around on my head? A mapping device that measures the dimensions of any room it's in, and feeds the data back to my computer?

I just don't know. But the daydreaming process is so pleasant and enjoyable!

By contrast, when I ran to my roommate Will and told him how excited I was about the arduino, he said, "I think arduino is silly. You should be programming the raw microcontroller."

Huh? Did my dear friend Will just seriously suggest that I take a plain CPU - not even a motherboard, but just the chip itself - and try to program it with no operating system running on it, and no computer attached? Yep. That's what he suggested.

I told him, "why do you suppose we aren't doing that already? There are all sorts of microcontrollers we could harvest from junk devices here in the house. Why haven't we been harvesting and programming them all this while? Isn't it because its really really really really hard and something only insane, freaky, gifted people would do?"

That's Will though. He'll make these pronouncements as if they make sense. In some cases he really is joking, but in other cases he's not. And unfortunately, it means that all his suggestions have to be either taken with a grain of salt, or else scrutinized really carefully. I mean, he could never program a raw microcontroller. It's completely beyond either of our skill levels.

I remember one time I was considering getting a hard drive, or more RAM, or something like that for my desktop system, and I asked him what he thought I should get. He said, "I'd wait on it if I were you. The technology's going to get much faster."

It sounded like it made so much sense. Until I thought about it. Oh! Of course the technology is improving. If I wait to buy the thing I want, it'll still be the case that I could wait for a faster version. Will wasn't advocating waiting for a particular iteration of the technology that he expected to arrive soon - he was advocating permanently waiting. When I realized this, I started calling him on those kinds of pronouncements, and he'd then respond by saying something like, "yes, I don't think it's ever a good idea to buy more RAM. You do it when you have no choice. If you have any choice at all, you shouldn't do it."

So, there's clearly a philosophy at work. But it's not the philosophy of helping me get the best product on the market. It's more of a philosophy of nay-saying every idea that isn't his own. He suggested I not get RAM because he himself had no immediate need of RAM, and that was how he assessed my request for advice. He thought the arduino was silly because he himself had no immediate plans for it.

He's not always that way. Sometimes I'm able to sort of wrangle him into considering a project as something actually worth participating in. And then he's great! He has ideas, he solves problems, and acts like a normal creative person. But he apparently sees everyone else as if they're just himself, in a different location. I'm overstating it, but that's how it appears sometimes. I wish he could have an attitude more along the lines of, "I don't know what you're working on or why it's good, but I'd love to participate and find out!"

Fans And Radiators

Every Winter, my roommate's room is nice and toasty, while mine is cold and unpleasant. Both of us have a radiator, but Will is a fixer and I am not.

I actually have two adjoining rooms, and the radiator is in one of them - the bedroom. So even when I manage to have a relatively warm bedroom, my living room is always cold.

Last year I noticed that there were actual gaps in the brickwork of one of the windows in my living room. I could feel the cold air hissing in against the palm of my hand. I plugged the holes with tissue paper, and taped plastic over the whole window, and that actually helped a little. But not much.

This year I decided to just look at what Will did in his room, and try to do it myself. So it turns out he has a big fan, bungied right to the radiator. It blows through the pipes, and sends an enormous emanation of hot air throughout the room.

I happen to have a big, powerful fan too. So I set it up and aimed it at the radiator, and right away my bedroom filled up with hot air, and was very comfortable. If it got too hot, I'd just turn off the fan. It worked like a charm. For the bedroom.

The living room, however, stayed cold. It was kind of impressive. The door between the bedroom and the living room is always open, and I could step from the cold air into the hot air, and back again. It was like there was an invisible wall keeping the hot air in the bedroom.

Will doesn't have a second room, so I asked him what he recommended. He said I should buy a box fan and mount it at the top of my door frame, and blow it out into the living room.

I didn't like the sound of that though. I envisioned wires trailing everywhere, and being unable to close the door, and possibly having the fan fall on my head some day.

But I did have another fan, a smaller one. So I set it up on the bedroom floor, and had it blow out into the living room.

The living room just got colder and colder, and the bedroom stayed nice and toasty. It seemed even toastier, actually. When I asked Will about it, he gave me a funny look, and said something along the lines of, "why are you using the fan to blow all the cold air off the bedroom floor and into the living room?"

He told me to put the fan on the living room floor instead, and have it blow into the bedroom. So I did. A little while later, both rooms were nice and toasty. Even the bathroom adjoining the living room warmed up; and that bathroom was well known as a cold, arctic land in the Winter.

What is it that defines a person's creativity? I know I'm an inventive person, with plenty of creative spark. I'm always coming up with cool stuff of one kind or another. And yet something as simple as the flow of hot air through an apartment, did not inspire me at all. Even when I was cold and uncomfortable, I just didn't care to imagine what the radiator was doing, and how to make it do it better.

My roommate, on the other hand, is constantly thinking about things like that. Keeping his room warm in the Winter and cool in the Summer is just one trivial example. Before Hurricane Sandy, he rigged up a connection between a double-A battery pack and a USB cable, so we could keep our phones and tablets charged during the power outage. He's modified, to one degree or other, virtually every tool or device he owns, not to mention the furniture. Everyone goes to him when they have hardware problems.

But Will wouldn't invent any of the things I create. When I was inventing my board game, he had a very tough time connecting to the ideas surrounding it or the problems confronting it, and really only expressed a mild interest out of friendship.

Or when I was developing any of the various dietary systems I've come up with, he had no interest in any of that, and even recoiled in horror at some of the ideas. They just didn't inspire him at all. But for me, they were wonderful playgrounds!

Or my work with Labanotation. Will has absolutely no interest in trying to explain complex ideas to other people. The idea of trying to write a text showing people how to use Labanotation is something very alien to him. I'm not even sure how he perceives my work in that area. Maybe he sees it as some kind of odd tick. I go in my room and twitch around on the keyboard, about Labanotation.

But so yeah. Ingenuity. Creativity. We're all so different in the things that inspire us; and that inspiration colors absolutely everything we perceive in the world. Will and I live in the same house, but we each see a completely different world around us.

When I was inventing my board game, and people started to play it and ask me what it was called, I couldn't tell them. I couldn't come up with a good name. But I asked Will about it, and he came up with a perfect name for it. He called it "crumble". And that name connects to a lot of the ideas that inspired it, that are woven all through its ruleset. Even though Will didn't connect to the problems involved in coming up with that ruleset, he did connect to the static ideas that ultimately came to be represented by the game. And he was able to synthesize those ideas into a name that captured exactly what I needed it to say.

Ingenuity. Creativity. We all live our lives surrounded by genius. But because any genius has a unique inspiration, it can be hard for us to see it in others sometimes. It's tempting to think of just ourselves as the smart ones, and everyone else as morons. I know a lot of people in retail who have succumbed to that belief. And in many sad cases, it's also tempting to think of everyone else as the smart ones, and only ourselves as the pathetic, uninspired worms. I know plenty of people who see themselves that way as well. I've dated plenty of people who saw themselves that way.

It's tragic. But the truth that I've come to in my wanderings, is that we really are all of us brilliantly inspired with creativity. If we think we encounter someone who isn't, it's just because we're not encountering them in their private, safe space. In one way or another, everyone is Henry Darger. Some of us just manage to be Darger in public.

Hurricane Sandy

Power came back on at about 4:30 AM, and I woke up about 15 minutes later. I'd slept in socks, a t-shirt, my winter coat, and two pairs of pajama pants. According to Will's thermometer, the house was about 60 degrees Fahrenheit last night.

I woke up to familiar rumbles that I don't usually pay much attention to, like the little grinding rumble of the tiny fridge in the living room. As I opened my eyes I could see the little LEDs on the bedroom computer, the Ethernet hub, the Roku, and the speaker volume control knob. The radiator was still silent though.

I went out to the dining room and checked the wall clock. It read about 8:40. The power had stopped at about 8:25, so that's how I knew the power had come on 15 minutes before I'd gotten up.

I put in my contact lenses and booted up my computer. First order of business: sight.

I weighed myself and entered the data into my spreadsheet. Sandy had put about 5 lbs on me, from all the bags of chips, the soda, the bread, the nuts, the canned soups, and other grossness. It's hard to diet during a hurricane.

I came back from Brooklyn last night. Took the shuttle bus from Jay Street in Brooklyn to the Lower East Side. The lights were all on, the stores were open - many of them - and people were out and about. As I walked down along The Bowery, passed Houston, and then turned West, everything was still up and running. I passed a pizza joint with people inside, passionately downing large delicious slices of pizza, and thought, should I? I know there's no power near my apartment... should I?

But I didn't. I kept walking. As I approached Broadway I could see the lights and activity come to a sudden halt. It was night time already, and there were just no lights at all across Broadway. No traffic lights, no nothing. It surprised me, because I knew that a lot of little stores had been opening up and running on candle power or generators before I'd left.

I entered the dark zone, and put on my headlamp. Before I'd gone to Lauren's house I'd thought to myself, "should I bring this? Am I really going to need it? I know Lauren's got power, her whole neighborhood's got power. What's the point?" But I brought it anyway, just because it seemed prudent to carry my emergency equipment with me.

Now I was realizing what my intelligence had failed to tell me: I would quite possibly be returning home with the power still out, and I might need the headlamp to navigate the streets.

The headlamp made all the difference. Stumbling towards home in the dark would not have been fun - I know, because I stumbled towards home for about a block before putting the headlamp on. But as I walked, I noticed that there were indeed other lights to be seen. I passed people walking the other direction, who held flashlights. Sometimes a cyclist would pass, with a pedal-driven light blinking on their bike. And a very few windows were lit up, some with candles, some with actual power, though I had no idea where they were getting it from.

One restaurant, deep in the dark zone, had big signs that said "WE'RE OPEN". It was one of those super fancy SoHo restaurants where the quality go. Inside it was business as usual; TV producers discussing deals they were working on, while sniffing their wine glass and eating raw oysters.

I got the place to make me some salmon and veggies to go, and took it home to my apartment.

Will wasn't there. He'd gone to get food in Brooklyn, and was planning to get home in about an hour and a half or so. The apartment was desolate. It hadn't been that cold inside when I'd left. The lack of light felt oppressive. Lauren had lent me her little battery operated lantern, and I set it up on a bookshelf, and that was almost like having power back; but not really.

Lauren hadn't slept much the night before. She'd been up most of the night checking the news stories about communities in Staten Island and Coney Island that were experiencing horrible conditions. When I called josette as I walked home that next evening (cell phone service working again, yay), I found out that josette had been equally concerned and disturbed over the fate of those communities.

I hadn't been as affected as they were about it. I knew the situation was pretty devastating for a lot of people. Homes destroyed, people killed. Meanwhile I was surrounded by my dear possessions, reading my kindle, playing games on my cell phone, and eating gourmet take-out. I think it was the gourmet take-out that did it. I suddenly felt very guilty to have it so good right now, while whole communities had been destroyed by the hurricane, and seemed to be getting very little assistance from the government that was nevertheless tending to my neighborhood quite attentively.

I also happen to be reading "Solo", by Rana DasGupta, and I was up to the part about World War II, where there was a lot of civil strife in Bulgaria, followed by fascism, followed by communism, and the main character is buffeted around and has to watch all his friends and family go through a lot of hardships, while also going through a lot of hardships himself. Actually, it's a really good book. I recommend it.

But the book, and the fact that there were such horrors going on just a few miles from my home, sort of hit me suddenly. And I thought of the US government at its various levels, and how it had responded to the emergency. On the one hand, I thought, it's all so disingenuous; a lot of the governmental and private organizations responding to the hurricane couldn't care less about the people affected; they just wanted to get things running again so they wouldn't lose another $50,000,000,000 in 4 days. It was all about the money to them. And President Obama even said, the focus was on getting the economy back up in the region.

And on the other hand, at least in this novel I'm reading, the fascists and the communists are portrayed as being utterly indifferent to human life, and concerned only with doctrine and with the absolute appearance of a loyalty they don't feel in the slightest.

I'm not pro-capitalist. The Democrats and Republicans are both far too right-wing for my tastes. But sitting there in my room yesterday, I could see how to some extent, there was a real distinction to be drawn between what we have here currently, and what we'd have in an authoritarian situation.

I'd like to figure out a system that would be better than what we've got. What system, other than the market and greed, would motivate the government and other large organizations, to help people better than they were helped during Hurricane Sandy?

I've thought a fair bit about what kind of system of government I would set up if I could. I almost look at it like creating a game, where the people playing might be trying to cheat; and the rules of the game have to take account of that, and lead all the players inexorably towards the best possible decisions.

That's pretty vague. But I didn't say I'd actually solved the problem. Recently my dad recommended the book, "Rawls", by Samuel Freeman. I'd read the biographical portions, and realized that political philosophy is not the study of how wheelers and dealers trick each other and horse-trade in order to be powerful politicians. Political philosophy is about fundamental questions that any system of government needs to address; like, "what is justice?"

It's a very different approach to the problem of government than what I had taken. I'd been more concerned with protecting government from anyone attempting to gain too much individual power. In the approach I'd taken, people were involved in government at such an indirect level, that no single person, or even large group, would be able to influence its workings to any appreciable degree. Government would have a relationship to individuals, not unlike the relationship of the brain to its individual cells.

But reading about Rawls, this no longer seemed like such a straightforward proposition. My conception of the governing brain didn't take into account any concept of justice. And reading "Solo", I could see how a government that was too indifferent to the individual, might lead to other kinds of problems.

So I don't know. But living through Hurricane Sandy, and knowing that this is really very likely to happen again on a regular basis, I think the problem of government is quite relevant to what's going on; and it's being driven home to the people in Staten Island and Coney Island and elsewhere; and it seems as though it'll be driven home to a lot more people as well, before long. Anyone who suddenly finds themselves bereft of everything they'd thought was secure - or at least, relatively secure - will have to be thinking very closely about the way their government responds to such things, and why.

Secret Turns

I don't want to turn this into a Labanotation blog, so I have to really rein myself in. Left unchecked, I could probably blog about Labanotation every single day.

The day before yesterday I had my weekly Labanotation lesson with Ilene Fox, the former Executive Director of the Dance Notation Bureau in New York. When she first started tutoring me we did our lessons in person, but she just lives that far away as to make it too inconvenient, especially lugging all the Labanotation books with me. So we do the lessons by phone. At first we weren't sure if that would even be possible, because we needed to draw diagrams together, and demonstrate movements; but actually it works out pretty well. When we need to draw something, we just share documents online, and that gives us pretty much a real-time view of what each other is drawing.

So, Wednesday we were doing our lesson, and at a certain point I realized that I had completed all the research I needed in order to write up the first major chapter of my Labanotation text. Oh yeah - I'm writing a Labanotation text. Basically a textbook-style explanation of how to use all it's myriad elements. It's an immense task, I've been working on it for years, and I've still only just barely scratched the surface.

So, I recently concluded that I had to make directional gesture one of the first, primary topics covered. I had resisted the idea, because I couldn't see a way to explain directional gesture without getting into all kinds of discussions about locomotion and other topics, which would lead to just a big mess. If I was going to cover directional notation, I wanted to do it clean.

But I'd concluded that I couldn't avoid it, because directional gesture really is central to Labanotation, and it just can't be put off. So I'd been agonizing over how to cover the topic in a clean way, without bringing in tons of extraneous details from all over Labanotation.

I knew that I couldn't do directional gesture without also covering the crosses of axes - at least some of them - because the crosses of axes determined where up, front, left, right, and so on all actually were. Can't do much directional gesturing if you don't know where the directions are. So I knew I had to explain that topic. And even though crosses of axes are also related to locomotion, I figured I would just have to cover the crosses of axes again when it came time to talk about locomotion. There just wasn't going to be a way to avoid that; and for that matter, I'd have to cover directional gesture itself again at that time anyway. So it didn't bother me that much. Locomotion in Labanotation is just a totally special-case topic. A lot of stuff was going to need to be re-explained when it came time to cover it.

So for directional gesture I'd need to cover the crosses of axes, but to cover the crosses of axes I needed to explain the front symbols. Front symbols were needed because they were always used to express where to read the front of the performer. A number of crosses of axes derived their conception of front directly from the most recent front symbols. So I had to drag front symbols in as well.

But there I was stuck, because the only way I knew of to change a performer's front, and thus invoke a front symbol, was to make that performer turn or pivot on stage, or do some other kind of locomotion. So there was locomotion again, sticking it's nose in! Or it's feet, more precisely.

Trying to explain how to notate gesture in Labanotation, without making reference to locomotion, is a really tough nut to crack, it turns out. Though a very important one.

But! I totally won, because I remembered the secret turn symbols. Secret turn symbols exist specifically to allow the notator to express a change of front, without actually moving the performer on stage. They're not used often, but they exist, and they were just what I needed.

It was perfect! I had figured out how to explain directional gesture, and none of my dependencies required any sort of explanation of locomotion. Not only that, but I'd managed to restrict the number of dependencies to just three - crosses of axes, front symbols, and secret turns.

That was all months ago, actually. After that I started organizing the research, which meant going through Ann Hutchinson's Labanotation book, and her nine red books, and gathering together all the information about each of those topics.

Secret turns were actually the easiest of them, followed by front symbols. The thorny one was the crosses of axes, and that's what Ilene and I had been talking about for several lessons before the one on Wednesday, and on Wednesday as well. But finally! We had reached the end of that topic. That's when I realized that there was nothing standing in my way anymore. I could write up what I'd learned, and it would represent the first really significant progress I'd make in creating this larger text.

I'm pretty enthusiastic about it. I'm already almost done with the chapter on secret turns. Like I said, that was always the easiest of the topics; but still. A nice step forward.

Comic Con

I went to Comic Con with Naima on Sunday. Actually I went alone while she was home doing her costume (Fiona dressed as Poison Ivy), and met up with her there.

It was rough. I went last year too, and my main objection to the whole thing is that it looks like a trade show. It was just like when I used to work at startups, and they'd send me to trade shows, and there would be these huge booths set up for all the big companies, each one trying to outdo the others, and the little ones all vying covetously for bigger and better booth locations. And all the high-tech geeks milling around, trying out the fancy new gadgets that hadn't hit the market yet, or that were hitting the market right at that moment in a precisely coordinated 'launch' event, timed to correspond with whichever particular trade show it was.

That's what Comic Con is. Same thing. Big booths everywhere, with the major brands all out in force pretending to connect with a fan base they only want to exploit.

The only reason I attended again this year was to see the "Artist's Row" - a special part of the convention area, segregated off from the main area, where actual real artists who have been working on their actual real art, get to set up really tiny booths and show off their unknown works to people who care about that sort of thing.

At least, that's how it was last year. The artists were there, doing their own self-published stuff, or working with a really small publisher to get their stuff out. It was great! All different styles of art were represented; all different levels of talent; all different ambitions for success.

This year, on the other hand.... no. The 'Artist's Row' was just a place for the famous successful artists who had already gotten picked up by the big companies, to sit around and be admired. I'm sure the fans loved it, but I was non-plussed. Where were the little people who worked so hard in the face of obscurity? Where were the artists who were also fans? Gone.

When I met up with Naima, her primary ambition was to meet Ross Campbell, author of 'Wet Moon' and 'The Abandoned'. Really lovely stuff. I've read it too. So we navigated through the thronging hordes to his table and she spoke to him for awhile. He remembered her because she'd done a costume of one of his characters awhile back, and put the photos on deviantart; and he's seen them and posted a comment about how much he liked her rendition. So they bonded over that.

It was a pleasant exchange, and I got to talk to him too. It turns out there will be no sequel to "The Abandoned" because of intellectual property issues that seem unlikely to be resolved. Too bad.

So that was one good experience; and it was also nice to see the various costumes that some of the people wore. Some of them had a lot of thought and ingenuity put into them.

But at bottom, it was just a trade show. Ross Campbell asked me how I was liking the show, and I told him how disappointed I was, and how my whole appreciation for that kind of event was centered around unknown artists showing off the stuff they were working on.

He confirmed that Comic Con was not the place to go for that, and said he preferred the quieter events too. He suggested that the smaller cons would probably have a lot more of what I was looking for.

So yeah. Big revelation. The enormous corporate-sponsored convention is going to be too corporate. I should've put it together before ever attending the first time; but my brain can be slow on occasion, particularly when it comes to anticipating the cultural aspects of something I haven't experienced yet. I know a lot of people who would have immediately and correctly assessed Comic Con without ever having attended. Oh well. My naïveté is also a great strength, so I won't beat myself up too bad about it.

But I think I'll be looking more towards smaller conventions from now on.

The Beard

For awhile now, I've had a pretty big beard, but a couple of days ago I shaved it completely off, not just with clippers, but with an actual razor; and I bought an electric shaver (foil, not rotary) to use from now on.

The whole time with the beard, was really my first experience. I've gone unshaven before, but I've never actually been bearded until a bunch of months ago, when I really stopped shaving, and would do things like let the barber trim it for me. The first time he tipped my head all the way back and started in with the scissors, I was like, "whoa! You mean this is what happens?" I really wasn't expecting it.

I felt pretty comfortable with a beard. It covered up my face. Instead of all my crazy facial expressions, people just saw... a beard. Instead of judging me by the way I was looking at them, people judged me by... the beard. Growing up, I never had the kind of hair I could hide behind, but if I'd had it, I would have hid behind it. The hair would have been like the tall legs of Mommy that I used to put between me and strangers when I was little. I never had that kind of hair; but now, I had... the beard.

It completely changed my interactions with the world. That's really not surprising, since I essentially had an entirely new face, and it stands to reason that when people meet for the very first time, for example as they pass each other on the street, they respond to the face and the rest of the initial appearance, more than any particular inner quality.

With the beard, I sometimes noticed a woman checkin' me out. I'd never noticed that before. And sometimes someone would give me a smile as we passed each other. That was also new. I had always been more used to the other person getting an annoyed expression, and keeping their eyes aimed elsewhere.

What can I say. There are only a few possibilities here, for the clean-shaven Zack. First, I could be so devastatingly gorgeous that women are too bowled over to look directly at me. Second, I could be simply ugly, to the extent that they want nothing to do with me. Or third, my face could just naturally express itself in ways that people find creepy or lascivious, or in some other way unpleasant.

Traditionally, I've taken door number three. And while the many people who love me tell me there's nothing creepy about me, I have indeed gotten that kind of feedback from people who didn't love me, from time to time over the years. Apparently I do creep certain people out.

The beard wiped that entire identity away, apparently. Suddenly I was just... that good looking guy with the beard.

Before the beard, I also always used to wear my glasses. The glasses were a permanent fixture. They went on in the morning and came off at night, and had rimless frames that allowed them to seem to merge like alien technology with my face.

Every once in awhile someone would tell me they wanted to see me without the glasses, and they'd be very enthusiastic about it. Then I'd take the glasses off, and they'd get this disappointed look, and say something like, "oh... ok, put them on again." For me, this tended to confirm my door-number-three hypothesis.

But I've never been overly awed by negative opinions of me. I was the kid who got picked on in school, and I learned fairly early that the only opinion that matters about me is my own. So the whole door-number-three thing isn't really this great millstone, though definitely I would have preferred door number one (devastatingly gorgeous).

In any case, negative opinions about me are not so hard to take. I wouldn't keep a beard or keep a pair of eyeglasses, just so I'd be less disturbing to anyone. So actually, around the time I started growing the beard, I also got rid of my glasses, and replaced them with contact lenses.

That was a great, great decision. I don't think I ever consciously realized that a big piece of equipment sitting on my face was not likely to work very well. But it's true. Contact lenses are so much more like having my own eyes just work right. Glasses always distorted the world, ignored my peripheral vision, changed the colors of things, and sometimes even reflected the sunlight directly onto my retina off the edges of the lenses, causing pain and perhaps damage. I'm very happy with the contacts, and I don't really plan to go back.

It's actually funny too, because Kar loves men with beards and men with glasses; and I've always worn glasses, and she's always been all sparkly-eyed about me and my glasses; but on this last visit to San Francisco I had the beard but no glasses, and it was kind of like turning my face upside down for her - all of a sudden she was sparkly-eyed about the beard, but there were no glasses. At one point during the visit, she told me how shocked she was that she'd been able to accept me without the glasses; and that she didn't think she could've done it if I hadn't also had the beard. (of course she could've - she loves me deeply - but that's what she said)

So a couple of days ago when I finally shaved off the beard, I realized I not only didn't have the beard, but I didn't have the glasses either. My entire set of defensive armor against actually being seen, had been wiped out in one blow. Nothing stood between me and the yawning maw of door number three.

In fact, it was really the first time I'd been able to even see my own face in the mirror without glasses, since I was a little kid. Permanent fixture, remember? If I took off the glasses, my whole head would just look blurry, like a big pink puffball, with brown on top, in the mirror. But now with the contacts and the clean-shaven face, I could actually see myself at last.

I'm pretty! OK, not devastatingly gorgeous, and I think even I can see some of those creepy facial expressions from door number three. But actually it's a half-way decent face! I was surprised. I never would have suspected that I might actually look human with all the coverings removed. I'd figured me for maybe a Steve Buscemi look, at best. He's not actually bad looking, but he sure plays some funny looking people. I figured that was me. Donny, from 'The Big Lebowski'; or Carl Showalter from 'Fargo'. But it was nice to look in the mirror and not have the sense that people would run screaming, or cross to the other side of the street, or do something else weird.

So that's the story of the beard.

French Again

Yesterday I had an appointment to visit the Consulat général de France à New York. I actually arranged the appointment a couple of months ago, before my trip to San Francisco, to renew my French passport. This is something that's been weighing on me for years, because the passport expired long, long ago, and I was really scared it was too late to get it renewed. I thought the French government might be like, "too late! We don't want you any more."

There was also the problem of gathering together sufficient identification to satisfy the requirements. I didn't have much. Just the passport and a few scraps. I had my American passport, and other American documents; but not much French stuff. When I made the appointment, I expected to get a big explanation about how I didn't have nearly enough material to move forwards, and to come back when I had more material.

Instead, it was so great! It turned out that one of the scraps in my folder was actually a card that had been issued by the consulate itself long ago; and they were able to accept some of my American ID cards as well.

So they actually printed out my French birth certificate (certifying that I was born in America), and gave it to me. Hot diggity! They also gave me a new consulate ID card. And they said they'd get my passport to me in about 10 days. No need to make another appointment. All I have to do is walk in and pick it up.

It's such a weight off my mind. For years I've been kinda sorta avoiding this whole problem, because I was scared of how it would turn out. And now, abracadabra, it's as good as done.

When I left San Francisco, I actually considered moving to Google's Paris office instead of the New York office. Ultimately I decided I wanted to be close to my parents, who were getting older, and my sister, who was raising her own young kids. But I gave a lot of thought to going to Paris instead.

In Paris, I would have been within a metro ride of a dozen of my cousins; and within a convenient train ride of over a hundred more. I also would have had the freedom to travel anywhere else in the European Union; to improve my ability with the French language; and to get real health care for the first time in my life.

Sometimes I regret not going to Paris. It would have been an amazing adventure. But the whole passport issue weighed on me very much then too; and I was just scared to deal with it. And of course, I really did want to be closer to my own immediate family. But sometimes I think about what might have been. And dealing with this passport stuff yesterday has dredged a lot of those feelings up again.

So.... what made me make the appointment now, at long last? Why not when I had actually been considering moving to France? Why not before then? All I can think of is that maybe I finally just felt comfortable enough with myself to confront it at last. And that really fits my sense of the situation pretty well.

Hacker Spaces

The first hacker space I visited was Noisebridge in San Francisco. It was started by a bunch of like-minded people, including my old roommate from before I moved back to New York City. A couple visits ago, he took me to it and showed me around. It was incredible. Thousands of square feet, crammed with all kinds of equipment, books, materials, and a bunch of hardware hackers, hacking around on stuff.

It was also an anarchic do-ocracy, open to the public, and full of neat ideals. A lot of Occupy people connected very strongly with Noisebridge, and even sort of took it over for a time. At least that's how it seemed.

But I was blown away by the whole concept, and was very sad to live in New York and not San Francisco anymore, because only San Francisco had Noisebridge. But as soon as I started raving to my friends about hacker spaces, a lot of them were like, "oh yeah, hacker spaces exist. They're really cool. You don't know about them? They're great! You should go to one of the ones in New York City. There are plenty of them there."

So I was happy again, and I started researching hacker spaces in my town. Unfortunately, they were all kind of far away, and the one I visited that seemed like the best option, was not nearly as big as Noisebridge, and had not nearly the same amount of geeky features. So I abandoned the idea, and thought about maybe setting up a personal hacker space in my apartment. After all, why not?

But that didn't really come to pass. Then last night my ex-girlfriend Lena came over for dinner. Lena always knows lots of things I don't know, in fact she gets paid to know things I don't know. So we were hanging out and I mentioned that I was considering getting a sewing machine, because Kar had used a sewing machine in San Francisco, and it had been really cool, and I'd been able to figure out which sewing machine I wanted for myself, by talking to her about hers (I chose the Brother CS6000i by the way).

At first we started talking about whether a sewing machine required having a large pile of supplementary materials, special scissors, bolts of cloth, and what-have-you, in order to really be useful; but then Lena said, "why don't you just go to the new hacker space over by Union Square! They have sewing machines!"

Boing-ng-ng-ng-ng! went my head. Lo and behold, Hack Manhattan has a place within walking distance of my house. I jumped online, joined their mailing list, created an account on their wiki, introduced myself to all of them, and scheduled time to go visit their space twice in the next two weeks. All within five minutes of learning about them. I was very excited.

Of course, the truth is, I'm not much of a hardware hacker. I don't know electronics, nor am I particularly fluent in designing objects for 3D printing. Yes, I built my own book cases and large impressive work table; but that's just wood and screws and measuring devices. And yes, I'd love to make some weird-ass clothes; but that hasn't happened yet.

So inevitably since last night I've started wondering, do I want to pay the rather high monthly fee for membership in a hacker space, even a really convenient one that has cool hackers in it? It would absolutely be worth it if I were going to spend many hours there and do lots of cool hacks. But if I'm just going to drop in once in awhile and not really do much of anything, then I'd say it wouldn't be worth it.

But I really want to try. Hardware hacking is basically something everyone should be able to do. We should all understand basic electronics, and the fundamentals of engineering. We live in a world literally crawling with invented machines. We should understand this stuff. So, any future course of my life should most certainly include a significant portion of study in this area, regardless of anything else I want to do, or any career I choose to pursue.

So, I'm leaning in that direction. We'll see how I feel after I actually visit the place and see what it's like.

But yeah. Dinner with Lena. We had sushi and swapped stories about romance and body modification. She seemed happier than I'd seen her in a long time. It was a very pleasing hangout.