Struggling against the almighty tides of eventuality

In order to appease all of my reader, I’m writing up another blog post.  Really, I should be doing it to appease myself, but whatever.  I’ve written up, or at least started, a couple posts which I think should be interesting.  However, in an attempt to only come out with (relatively) quality work, I’m trying to edit them a bit before posting.  I think I’ll give you a hard deadline (and myself as well); I’ll post them by Monday night: one post on me complaining about myself, and one post on me complaining about militant/hardcore atheists.  Aren’t you terrifically excited?  I know I am.

Speaking of being all atwitter, it seems that they‘ve gotten around to providing a feature a lot of programs already gave: lists.  Most people are excited, I know that some people aren’t.  Of course, there’s a valid point: some people are using lists to correct for a flaw inherent in their own system.  Information overload occurs for them because they don’t know when to stop clicking the damn “follow” button, or how to prune people that add nothing to their view of the global conversation.  Here’s a free “Pro Tip”: don’t follow someone back just cause they followed you; statistically speaking, they’re probably a boring self-absorbed asshole (but then, likely so are you).

I think there are other possibilities for twitter lists, though.  I only follow 80 people at the moment, and I have 9 lists.  I view it as a way to figure out more interesting people to follow.  When twitter nerfed the ability to see all replies (even if you’re not following the user being replied to) in your timeline however many moons ago that was, I was pretty pissed.  I was just about as pissed as one can be about a free service that impacts virtually nothing in one’s real life.  It removed a function of “serendipitous discovery,” or whatever phrase proponents assigned to it.  I think this goes at least a little of the way towards mending that bridge.

Take a look at it from this angle: I follow a wide smattering of people because, like most humans, I find multiple topics interesting.  Someone who follows me might share one of those interests, but probably not more than 3.  With lists, they can see who I’ve grouped together as also sharing that interest.  For instance, I have a list for linguistics, and a list of people doing work with PostgreSQL.  The two lists have absolutely no one in common, but they’re both interests that someone following me might share.  Now, rather than either clicking through my following list to find similarly interesting people, or just giving up entirely on finding interesting people (the more likely course), people can have a cherry-picked list prepared for them before they even arrive.

Of course, the feature is far from perfect.  The navigation through lists is shoddy (every page seems to have a different set of links to different functions), and it’s not easy to find users in your following list without just clicking through every page (which, even with my small number of followees, is annoying).  I’d also like to see a way to provide a brief description for a list, for those situations when it’s not entirely clear, nor could it be made clear in a brief URL-like description, why these people are grouped together.  I have a list of people I’ve actually met in meat space, but I couldn’t figure out a good way to say that succinctly for my list name.  A brief description field would be awesome to clarify that, so you wouldn’t have to wade through my bizarre version of comedic naming to “get it.”

Of course, I’m sure it won’t be long before I find that most people are using it to make worthless lists and somehow spamming becomes a problem.

I’m staring down the nearly-empty aisle of trees; they’ve nothing but the morning mist keeping them company.  Soon it’ll be too cold for those mists: I can already feel the summer dying, deep in my bones.  Each moment is a step closer to the frigid winter, when Mother Nature’s nurturing warm embrace turns into an icy grip, crushing what it once created.

I know it’s all a cycle; you don’t have to tell me that.  Some day, a season or two down, from those dead things will spring new life.  But still and still, I can’t help but feel those last gasps of the life that is now.  It still struggles, against the almighty tides of eventuality, to hang on to whatever purchase it has for just a moment longer.  I watch as a leaf drifts, almost casually, down to the dirt.

Weeping willows at their height have no tears like an oak in the fall.

Autumn Oak - Click through to purchase a print

I don’t know about you, but there are times when words just get stuck in my mind.  It’s pretty much the same idea as getting a song stuck in there, a phrase or two endlessly repeating, only it’s just one word: the sound of someone saying it, the way it’s written.  For me, the word usually just pops into my head, I guess something could trigger it though the source never seems clear, and it typically sticks there because, in spite of seeming/being very common, I can’t quite remember the meaning.  It stays in there, thumping against my skull until I happen to remember what it means or I can look it up.  The clearest occurrence I can remember was related to “misogynist.”  It bugged me all day.

Sometimes, though, it’s a completely different story.  Sometimes, a word gets caught up inside a deeper web woven throughout my brain.  A long time ago, someone taught me what “catharsis” meant.  I didn’t really get it at the time, but now it feels like it’s related to damn well near everything.  It is the peak of a story, the point at which all the building emotional tension reaches its climax, or essentially an emotional orgasm.  Technically, it could also be a medical term related to purging…other things.  I’m not talking about that one.

These days, I never seem to get much by way of catharsis.  Of course, to have a really strong emotional release, you have to have a build-up of emotions.  Working a boring job programming, what release could I possibly need?  Strangely enough, I still have plenty of tension in my life.  It seems the response to any time I get slightly worked up, though, is to try shutting me down before I go critical.  But damn it, sometimes I need to go critical so I can live the rest of my life normally.

If we never experience any emotional release, we have only a steady buildup of tension that grants us no reprieve in our waking hours, and then slowly encroaches even on the brief respite our sleep gives us.  Eventually, it all bubbles over in a violent outburst at some minor infraction.  This is not healthy.

I feel like this lack of catharsis is part of the puzzle of why I’ve been so creatively stunted for the past few years.  Artists live off of the emotional release their works grants.  Of course, they have to pour a bit of their own soul into their creations, or their work is at best an academic exercise.  A key ingredient, that bit of soul I’d have to pour out onto the page or into the music I play, is what I’ve been attempting at others’ behest to cut out of my life.  In addition to the perilous outcome for anyone I mentioned previously, I also have the removal of one of my more unique qualities.

I like being able to keep calm in stressful situations; it’s a useful skill.  But, every so often, I’m just going to have to be able to blow off steam.  I need these moments of catharsis, or I’ll just be killing myself slowly, one little piece of my soul at a time.

So, I have mentioned my “partner” before in the scant few posts I’ve had thus far.  I should clarify this by saying that, yes, I do mean this in the semi-politically-correct sense of he’s my long-term significant other.  Allow me further clarifying leeway in stating that I hate this term to describe our relationship.  It feels like a watered-down version of a real term of endearment.  I’d be (marginally) less uncomfortable sticking to “boyfriend,” though there seems to be some consensus that “boyfriend” denotes something less serious.

In the heterosexual world, there’s clearly delineated levels of a relationship: dating, boyfriend/girlfriend, engaged, and married.  Due to the fact that people get married faster than they switch toothbrushes these days, they’re watering down their own meaning of the last two, but I digress.  For gay couples, it just stops after the boyfriend or girlfriend stage.  We’ve been left to come up with our own terms for what follows, given that marriage between us is being treated as a bigger threat to the institution as a whole than people getting married before they’ve decided to which college they’re going.  “This long-distance marriage thing just isn’t going to work out, you’re going to the University of Pittsburgh and I’m going to the University of Philadelphia.”

This isn’t to say I want to be able to call him my husband, or for him to call me that.  I’m aware of where the term comes from, and it just doesn’t seem appropriate in this day and age.  So, where does that leave me?  Well, I use, with great disdain, “partner.”  We’re not in a business together, we don’t chase down criminals together; we share a home, a bed, and our lives.  Companion seems better, though it has an unfortunate feeling (to my mind), that one person is the dominant entity in the relationship.

Honestly, I try to avoid labeling things like this anyway, as I feel it’s like trying to catch the wind and stick it in a bottle, to contain it in something less than it already is.  Unfortunately, it becomes a problem when communicating the idea to others.  So here I am: stuck, trying to label something I don’t want to label; hating the terms I’ve been given, and thinking I should come up with a new one; and terrified of coming up with something absolutely, unequivocally awful like “brights.”

So, I took today and cleaned a bit around my apartment.  I figure this is a necessary first step to packing for the new house.  Plus, as I mentioned previously, my place was kind of a wreck.  Well, it’s still a wreck, but it’s less of one.  I have yet to do my dishes or scrub the bathroom clean, but after that my place’ll be clean enough that I wouldn’t mind having guests (hint, hint).

In the meantime, I’m just trying to force myself to blog a bit more.  Real creativity can’t be forced, but the pipes through which my creative juices flow have been somewhat clogged, and I think they need to be blown out.  It’ll be an arduous process, but hopefully a worthwhile one.

The Baltimore Marathon was today.  I stood outside and watched people running (and eventually walking) by; apparently my neighborhood was at mile 23 of 26.  I watched this for 3 hours.  I was informed there were over 20,000 people signed up to punish themselves.  At first I had to imagine it was for some noble cause, but apparently the cause was “running until your shirt chafes your nipples off and you bleed down your torso.”  Seriously, that shit is gross.

In addition, these people would not stop for an ambulance that was headed to the hospital up the street.  They kept flowing around it, adding to the clusterfuck of the lone police officer attempting to shepherd it through, clearing out the cars (who’d been waiting for upwards of an hour and a half at the light).  All in all, it was pretty retarded.  Later runners, who were presumably later because they were less willing to run all that distance, actually let the next two ambulances through without much fuss.  I have to wonder if the upswing in ambulances was due to people passing the hell out after running so far.

All in all, it was a fairly interesting day, dull though it sounds when typed out.  I talked to a couple complete strangers, made some single-serving friends.  I used to do that every so often, but it’s been years.  It’s best to think of this as baby steps, small movements towards waking myself up from the self-induced intellectual coma in which I’ve found myself.

Well, it’s been a long few weeks.  Fortunately the Joint Commission has come and gone.  Our office still stands, a magnificant vortex into which all hope and joy may be sucked.  I don’t think it’d be nearly so bad, if we had windows, or maybe didn’t have pipes that made rather graphic attempts to mate with the wall every so often.  Seriously, these things get an air bubble in them and all of a sudden we hear cheesy synthesizer music.

Such is the joy of working in a mechanical room.

I had fully intended to make a big celebration of the whole ordeal, since the NIH managed to cruise through nearly unscathed with a 99% approval rating from the JC, but sadly, it was not to be.  My suggestions of good times and good drinks were met with scorn and derision.  Oh well, screw you guys, I can party all by myself.

Except that didn’t really work either.

As it turns out, me and everyone else on the home front were a little too tired to party, and by tired I’m also inferring a bit cranky.  So, no drinks and merriment were to be had last night.  Well, drinks were had, less merriment.  Ah, well.  There’s always the next survey, in 3 years.

I’m trying to figure out, in the meantime, what is so offputting about my invitations to hang out.  Half the time it seems like people think I’m joking, and the other half people think I am the joke.  It’s not quite clear to me what, exactly, so diminishes my going-out worthiness.  I do realize I get a bit rowdy after a few drinks, but isn’t that the point of said few drinks?

Maybe I’m just over-analytical of the situation.  Perhaps I just associate with lame people.  Unfortunately, “birds of a feather” and all that shit seems to suggest I’m likewise lame.  Well, fuck, could someone just come out and explain to me, in clear and simple terms, what I do, or don’t do, that makes me so lame?  It’s pretty damn obvious my name was off the distribution list for the social interaction manual.

I realize, of course, this sounds overly wangsty of me.  People shouldn’t measure themselves by others, I shouldn’t care what other people think, you should be your own man, blah blah blah.  I don’t really care at this point, I just think it would be awesome if I had some people I could easily hang out with.  Every so often I scroll through my contacts looking for someone that would take the offer to hang out.  I tend to get to the last entry, my landlord, without ever landing on a single name, and I don’t think said 80-year-old landlord is up for going to the discoteca.

At this point, I typically read through the whole entry, select it all and delete it, cause it’s so much whining.  Honestly, I don’t care anymore.  If you’ve read this far, congratulations, you’ve wasted some time you’ll never get back.  However, I should also point out that I have beer, and I have Nintendo.  Good times could be had here, random Internet person.  My place is a wreck and my partner will have a conniption if I randomly had random people over at random, but hey, it’s all good (randomly? no, that doesn’t work).  But then, nobody even reads this damn thing anyway.

Well, shit.

I can’t pinpoint exactly when it happened, but I’ve become dull.  There’s no real good way around that fact, since it’s the pure and unadulterated truth.  At some point I stopped being interesting in any way.  It’s not that I don’t think interesting things, or want to do interesting things, it’s more that these things never quite make it out of my head.

At one point, I was daring (take with a grain of salt, this was on the Internet): I wrote what I thought, and screw what anyone else thought.  I was going to school, and learning more every day in spite of myself.  I hated just about everyone, and it apparently showed quite clearly.

Over time, however, I grew more and more cautious.  What would happen if my boss were to read what nasty things I wrote?  What if I complained about my partner (as in life) and he read it?  What if, worst of all, my mother read it (she’s very sensitive)?  All these things weighed down until only the most bland of ideas and thoughts actually made it from my brain to the screen in front of your face.

I can’t really promise myself that I’ll fix that.  It certainly won’t happen overnight.  This blog is ultimately my attempt, though, an attempt to overcome the stage fright of the world wide web, where all our words are catalogued forever on some hardware in a warehouse in California.  Someone might someday come down the line and say “oh my goodness you were so [angsty/retarded/mean/gay],” but I guess I’ll just have to deal with that.  The fact that no one will now can’t be counted as an accomplishment: no one would simply because no one cares.

Of course, no one will care about this post, either, but I’m trying not to give too much of a shit.  It’s not really working out well, so far, but I’m giving it a go.

Fuck. That. Shit.

So, I’m trying to get back to this whole harp thing, you know, playing music.  I periodically get an itch to go back to my former glory days when I was actually a pretty talented motherfucker.  Well, I probably won’t ever be quite where I was, but I’d like to think that maybe I can get back at least a little of what I’ve lost.  I actually managed to stuff Handel’s B flat Concerto in my head and in my fingers for all of a week or so this summer.  Of course, it was quite far from performance-ready, and has since largely gone away again, but it gave me hope.

I’ll probably stow away the Handel for a while; for now, I’m setting my sights on another piece.  This one I already learned in college, but I enjoyed it and I think re-learning something is almost as good as learning something completely new when you’re at the terrible level I’m at now.  The piece is Benjamin Britten’s Suite for Harp, and here’s a (link to a, wordpress is sucking) video of Catrin Finch playing the first movement: Music!

It certainly won’t be anywhere near that level for a while, but I hope to keep plugging away at it and get pretty decent.  The other movements are also pretty tricky though, so it’ll take a while.  The patience to learn a piece is the main thing I’ve got to get back, the skills will come with time.

At least, that’s what I’m hoping.

I’m laying here, tugging at my brain, trying to pull it out of the sludge that doesn’t seem to stop coating it in ever more thick layers these days.  Something breaks free.  It’s just another piece of flaking paint covering the walls of my so-called life.

Back in the day, I was filled with promise, or so they would say.  I guess they say that about everyone.  Of course, I believed them.  I was one of the smartest people I knew, and I was barely even giving it a good-faith effort.  I’ve lost all my faith now.

Sometimes I feel a slight glimmer of hope, underneath all this crushing tide of sameness forever washing over me.  Sometimes, I think of what might be, if I can break free of the mire.  I’ve wanted to fly for years.  The runway’s always over the next hill.  I can see it, before the next wave rushes over my head again.

Some day, some day, and it’s always some day, I’ll do it.  I’ll take off, and fly away and never come back to this dreadful place…this dreadful place here inside myself.  My soul is atrophied, but maybe all it needs is a little fresh air, up in the sky.  It’s always some day.  But not tomorrow; tomorrow will be the same day.