Exploration of perspective.

So a friend of mine works at a nearby college and we met for coffee today at the Venetian Canal. In the process of discussing all sorts of different topics, one avenue that was proposed involved starting a resource center – much like the tutoring center I worked at for SNHU – at this school. While there’s no way of knowing for sure if would work, I’m pretty excited about the possibility. I’ve gotten in touch with my old tutoring center and begun setting up conversations about what goes into starting one. From there, if all the lights are green, we start trying to make this work. And that would mean a lot of changes, hopefully massively for the better, for myself.

At work today I saw a guy wearing a t-shirt from the Longhorn Steakhouse. Just a normal, everyday shirt with whatever the latest catch-phrase for the company printed on the back. But this one caught my eye and made me smile.

“Let’m eat steak!”

While there’s no solid correlation, the first thing this quote brought to mind was the Marie Antoinette quote, “let them eat cake,” to protesting peasants demanding access to ovens. Ovens were a right of the aristocracy of course (;)). However, the statement to “let them eat cake” was not one of civil rights of any sort. Cake, as far as I understand, was not the sweet, puffy, bready stuff covered in frosting we know today. It was the charred, burnt, carbonized bits of whatever had been cooked which were now scrapped off the bottom of the oven. These bits had become “caked” on and thus what Marie was saying was not a good thing, but a nasty insult.

That said, if the connection between Marie Antoinette and the Longhorn Steakhouse marketing department holds, I’m not sure if we should trust steaks coming from Longhorn. There might be some *bottom of the barrel* quality about them making eating their steaks not something good, but something to be dreaded and with disgust.

Way to go marketing agencies that don’t know history.

A new discovery via a friend of a friend. Ollie – a party friend of Aaron’s – exposed the existence of a incredibly interesting artist who works for the Boston Museum of Science. As far as I know, Paul Laffoley’s workshop is somewhere within the MoS offices. Furthermore, Ollie’s plans on visiting Laffoley now have me included. I am terribly interested in Laffoley’s work for reasons difficult to fully explain but I will try to get some pictures up so you have an idea. They are full of layered symbols both in word and sign. They are embroidered with hypercubes and mobius strips and probably any number of mathematically interesting figures.

Another part of my interest in Laffoley is that Ollie first mentioned only the title of one of his works. The Metatron. This immediately leapt out at me because Metatron is also the name of the angel in Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy book “The Amber Spyglass” who is the right hand of the Authority (ie god, but it’s more complicated than that). I further find out that Metatron is supposedly the angel of death, the “active” angel of god, and the being that lead the Isrealites out of Egypt found in the book of Exodus. This is all according to Hebrew mythology, Cabbalah I believe. I’ll have to look that up again.

So my next question would be: What do Phillip Pullman and Paul Laffoley have in common (if anything of course), and how have their influences shaped what they put out as art?

I’ve been having a problem lately at work. Waking up. No, I don’t mean waking up from sleep, but from a definite stupor. At work every now and then, and with growing frequency, I feel like I suddenly become acutely aware that I am chopping lettuce or what not. The feeling is akin to waking up in a place other than your bed after having partied a little to hard the night before, trying to sort out where you are and where your shirt is. In this case, I’m not really looking for my shirt, but why I’m wearing an apron. And why am I risking my safety for someone else’s dinner? Didn’t I go through this already?

I take this whole thing to be a bad sign. If I’m starting to “wake up” so to speak from what I’m doing and not understand why I’m even there, my time is coming to a close. Unless they make drastic changes at work, I’ll be gone before it snows. Even looking at the practical side, I should find a way out. It’s not helping me move on with my life. I barely make enough money to get by. My sanity is in danger every moment I am there. And I can’t make plans due to lack of time, knowledge of when I’ll get out, or even lack of money. This isn’t good.

I was headed to work today, slightly late. Again.

En route I get a call from Scott, my coworker. He tells me that he caught whatever it was that I had for a cold last week and now has to call in sick. He asks if there is any way that I could cover his shift today (I guess thinking that I wasn’t working – Tuesdays are usually off for me). I couldn’t help but laugh of course, because I was already half-way there. But here was someone asking me if I could continue walking the direction I was *as a favor*. So with the Anelects of Confucious in my pocket I proceed to sit down in the park and relax for a bit. A small 30 minute break just sitting, reading, and watching. I love doing that. Particularly when I’m supposed to be somewhere else.

This time, I got the best of every world. Walking into work half an hour late isn’t good, but today – particularly because I was expecting to be slightly late anyway – I became the hero. I wasn’t late! I was saving the day! My presence was a godsend, not an irresponsible gesture of futility. That made me feel good about the day.

However, I overstepped my hero status when I was asked to fill in for Brian, another coworker scheduled to come in for the afternoon shift. With my head full of grandeur and amazingness, I said of course – and accepted my boss’s present of a free dinner for being such a good sport about the whole thing. I mean – for all they know, I did have the day off. It wasn’t bad exactly that I stayed. More that it was so bloody long, and the shift I took over was an incredibly boring one. So I was extra weary by the time I got out.

And of course it was raining.

So Ben, my roommate, picked me up.

But now I’m on the opening stretch of a five day work week preceded by only one day off (which in itself was both incredibly bad and amazingly good). Next week is looking pretty busy, not least of all is going to see Mark Z Danielewski down in Boston come Tuesday! I’ll be sure to post more on that, with pictures if possible.

I have no idea what this is about. Maybe a marketing ploy, maybe something else entirely. I’ll have to look it up when I have more time. Mark Danielewski’s “The Fifty Year Sword” only has something like 1000 English copies (true?) available anywhere and goes for a minimum of $86 at last bid on eBay. If you get it elsewhere you’re looking at $500-$750, but you’re going to get a signed copy for that price. What’s up with this? What is it?

I don’t know much yet.

• OR is nothing like HoL.
• The very construction of the book is disorienting. You read it from both sides simultaneously, with a definite effort (so far) to make parallel statements between Sam and Hailey (the main characters) despite being 100 years apart chronologically.
• Hailey uses plant names in her writing. Sam uses animals.
• I have no idea what the multiple references to “90 (or whatever number) go” means.[Update: My best guess is that it means number of people who died. But why?]
• As Krystal pointed out, Hailey defitely appears to have been raped early on. This is a cause of huge tensions later on.
• Mark Z Danielewski is a genius, completely insane, or both.

And for the most part that’s all I have so far. It’s amazing to see the book. It almost makes HoL feel “normal”. Not that HoL is or ever could be normal, but this is taking whatever Danielewski is trying to communicate to a whole other level. No one can accuse him of being stagnant and repetitive. At least not yet.

Today was not a good day. At least it wasn’t up until around 6ish. It really began yesterday, after a full day of work. The normal Friday work day, me rolling in at 9:12am when I should have been there 9am sharp. A day of me working the frylaters instead of the giant kettle because they want all us “lifers” to be fully cross-trained to best utilize our time. So it goes.

After that long day I get back to find Aaron planning a largish party consisting of up to fifteen psytrance buddies. Oh, and maybe my ex-girlfriend Heather too. We proceed to repurchase all the alcohol that his parent’s decided would be a good idea to throw away (still not entirely clear as to why they threw it away) at Shawna & Josh’s wedding… which then seemed like a bad idea. It dawned on me after the fact that the money (about $80) owed to me was not really supposed to be spent on money to supply Aaron with booze for his party, but for *my* bar. So things might get a little confrontative soon, but that’s how it goes sometimes and that’s life.

About an hour later, Aaron announces that Heather is here. Not a group of people, just her. I didn’t think this would be a big problem, and particularly not in a large group where one voice can be ignored pretty easily, but no. So for another hour, maybe two, it’s me, Aaron, and Heather in the apartment with myself feeling more and more uncomfortable. Eventually I shut myself in my room and even when the rest of the psyravers came I still wouldn’t come out. Perhaps it looked childish, but I felt so uncomfortable that even under the film of alcohol and dopamine I felt trapped. Perhaps that’s what did it. Not only was I warned a couple hours ahead of time that Heather might be coming over, I had no way of avoiding or escaping the situation except through various sedatives like alcohol in massive quantities. So now Aaron had made me a prisoner of my apartment, Heather acting more like someone who lived there than I was, and myself not wanting to bog Krystal down with more worry than she needed – thus I was miserable with no escape. Moreover, the longer I stayed in my room, the more rediculous I would have felt had I attempted to emerge and be social. Suddenly I’m the odd one who has to explain what I’ve been up to. It turns out that Aaron did that for me – apparently I was just “really f*cked up” and so wasn’t able to do much more than blink. The rest of the guests had no concept of why this would be an uncomfortable situation for me.

At some point I must have passed out, fully dressed and lights on, because it was suddenly four AM and the whole group of psyravers were getting home from their shindig (psyforia, mentioned in one of my last blogs). I was awake long enough to get undressed and turn the light out, then pass out again until 8:10am. Work at 9am. Again.

This brings us to today, Saturday. My main gripe against work is that I’m working with a non-cohesive and non-communicative “team” which is given a list of tasks every day and must complete them all, or no one goes home. Or, better said, only if you’ve made secret previously agreed on arrangements can you go home. Today was worse than others for a couple of reasons.

Aspect one: Management is enforcing cross-training like I mentioned earlier. This isn’t a bad thing for anywhere, but for what I do it means risking getting burnt by oil, chopping a finger off, or making more salsa than most people eat in a lifetime. I think kitchen work just isn’t for me – unfortunately I keep doing it. The other part of this cross-training is that I just don’t see myself there much longer, and it all seems silly to make sure I know all this stuff when I don’t think I’ll be there long enough to really make it worth while. Might as well keep me doing one thing that I can do quickly and effectively until I’m not there any more.

Aspect two: People leaving early. This so called “team” is only marginally one. We’re a team in so much as we all have to work from the same list and must coordinate who is doing what. We’re not a team in so much as people leave according to deals with management that the rest of us aren’t aware of. We rarely help each other out (though that is getting better lately). And half of us don’t have English as a first language. Sometimes communication is so hard that absolutely nothing can get done and I get frustrated as hell – tomorrow is my usual day to work with only non-English speakers. Bloody hell.

By the time I was finished work which went 1.5 hours past when expected due to the above problems, I was really late for a cookout with Krystal (I ended up getting next to no food – it’s always the case) and even at that when I got home I couldn’t get in the shower for 30 minutes because of Aaron’s friends. This last one is only a coincidence that is unfortunate but not anyone’s fault. However it was just the last thing in a long string of circumstances that really pissed me off!

PS.Things did get better after that. I received Mark Danielewski’s new book “Only Revolutions” in the mail today, one for me and one for Krystal. That made things a little better. Followed by a good time at Cooper and Reeders and then B&N reading “Only Revolutions”. Krystal and I are going to have a blast with trying to figure out what Danielewski is trying to do with this one… if you’ve ever read “House of Leaves” you’ll know what I’m talking about.

I used to be pretty excited every time there was a party to go to. Not just any party of course, but for anyone who didn’t know, I was one of those ravers. Not really hardcore, but I spent way more than I should have on gas and plane tickets just to get to them. I bounced my way through many a dancefloor to a large number of DJs. It’s been fun and I defitely don’t think I’m done doing it. However, something I wasn’t expecting happened to me last Tuesday.

Charles Feelgood was spinning at WB’s here in Manchester. I’ve only been a couple of times, and aside from the crowd being not my usual (to uppity and clubby for my tastes) it has been a pretty good time. However, this time, I couldn’t dance. I didn’t have a scrap of energy that I could devote to bouncing for either the opening DJ (who I liked very much the last time) or Feelgood himself. Maybe it was what they were playing. Maybe it was that I was still slightly getting over a cold. But dancing suddenly became the last thing I wanted to do that night, and WB’s was the last place I wanted to be.

So now a few days later and I’m presented with going down to Psyforia in Boston. It’s a psytrance party and while I’m not as into psytrance as many other types of electronic dance music, I’m sure it wouldn’t be bad. But here’s where I’m slightly confused about my own impulses: I don’t want to go. This isn’t just a feeling of not wanting to spend money or feeling lazy/sick/tired. This is something inside me saying no to the party itself. I almost don’t know what to make of it.

Except for one part. I know that there is a lot more to life than parties, and I have in my life a certain someone who is known to throw the phrase “don’t f*ck around” out when it comes to parties of any sort. What he means is that if you don’t come and come now then you are not doing what you should be and that despite anything else, the party and the music is all important. I used to buy that. It used to motivate me. Now it just pisses me off. I can’t really explain the difference, except to point to experiences like when I tried to dance for Feelgood. I don’t know what I’m missing either. It was perhaps a month ago that I had a good time at the Listen party thrown by Columns of Knowledge. It deserves some more thought, and my first reaction is that it’s simply the kind of music being played. Maybe I’m just that much not into psytrance. It would break Aaron’s heart I think, but that’s just the way I am.

PS. Donald Glaude is coming to Hartford on Sept 29. That is something that I bet I could work up the energy for. Glaude never dissappoints me. And I’ve seen him all over the country.

I’ve begun several of these things. Hopefully this will serve the same role as my little black notebooks… inspirational and motivating. My intentions here will be to try to cultivate my own writing, to try to solidify my own theories on every little thing my mind can handle, and to chart my own progress through life – in whatever form that takes. Thus far I have been fairly erratic in my lifestyle. My next move should be the zen paradox of holding still while moving fast – the changing changelessness. Vague I know, but meaningful at least to me, and for now that’s all that matters. Structure comes with content, and I have none of that yet.