jazzfish | Journal

Going through my books, because it's been a couple years since my last serious purge. Pick up The Fortunate Fall. Note that it's under the author's deadname. Ponder what to do about that: sticky-label on the spine? Shelve it under R?

Open it up. Note that my copy is signed (under the author's deadname). Flip through. Read two and a half pages. Realise I've just booksniped myself. Put it firmly back on the shelf.

Next up, I guess. I was gonna read some of my unreads to see if they're worth keeping / hauling but sometimes the bookshelf speaks.

(I believe Cameron Reed's second novel will be out this fall. FINALLY. I am excited.)

Just finished Michael Swanwick's The Iron Dragon's Daughter. It's ... the trappings are I guess "industrial fantasy." I think Abby described it as nihilistic. I can see where she was coming from but to me it's more about, mm. The process of outgrowing nihilism, maybe.

DONNY: Are these the nazis?
WALTER: No, Donny, these men are nihilists. There's nothing to be frightened of.

Currently reading the sequel, The Dragons of Babel, which starts off in the same nihilistic vein but quickly takes a turn for the at least somewhat more cheerful. I remember liking this one an awful lot when I read it. Looking forward to the third volume after this.

I'm home. I'm pretty well caught up on classwork; mostly what remains is a big group project and a final exam. And I need to finish writing the final report on my practicum. Weird to think this will all be in the rearview in three and a half weeks.

I'm still jobhunting, which remains a reliable depression trigger. Not worth talking about other than to note it's ongoing, on all counts.

Mr Tuppert has decided that what is best in life is to demand scritches/pets from the cat-mat next to the laptop spot on the table, while I'm eating and reading ye internette. Sometimes he also gets brushed, which he generally ... somewhere between tolerates and enjoys. Eventually he decides that he's had enough company and isn't it time for me to go be somewhere that's not in his space? He expresses this through the medium of lightly biting my hand. Not ideal but one works with what one has. Treats can redirect him away from being cranky, but that is not really a road I want to go down.

For now I keep sending out resumes. If I continue to get no bites by the end of the month I will have to regroup. In the meanwhile it's threatening to be early summer out there. Things as they currently are aren't so bad.

I'm in Minneapolis with Steph and two round cats, and the sun is shining.

I flew through Saskatoon this time, for reasons that escape me but probably had to do with it being half the price of a direct flight. The flight to Saskatoon was pretty full; Sask-Mpls had somewhere under forty people (I counted), on a 32x6-seat plane.

Having no one else in your row in economy feels positively luxurious.

I've some homework to do today, and some to do in the next few days. I promised to make banana bread today as well. Mostly I'm enjoying the sunshine and the company.

LUCAS: You know, I think things are gonna be alright now, Joe.
JOE: Oh? And what makes you think that?
LUCAS: Who knows where thoughts come from? They just appear.
--Empire Records

Okay well that was extremely not fun and I am gonna vote for not doing it again, as soon as I figure out what it was and how to not do it.

Three weeks? Two and a half. Whatever. I spent another week or so recovering from covid. I honestly don't know if I'm fully recovered even yet: Shortness Of Breath is still a thing. As is Tires Easily, but, well. I spent the entirety of last week and probably a little more in a depressive episode. Bit of chicken and egg there, or vicious cycle maybe. Lots of sitting on the couch not doing anything, including classwork (finished the assignment by yelling at myself a lot, and I'm not particularly happy with it but at least it's done).

Putting Myself Out There is, it turns out, a reliable depression trigger. Dating, brand-new social situations, writing submissions... and jobhunting is perhaps the worst case for this. Against my best efforts I absorbed a lot of "if you don't support yourself then no one will ever love you" messages growning up. So jobhunting is just a desperate quest for external validation with extra steps. Jobhunting while not having a job, and in a brand-new-to-me field while the economy circles the drain, is just depression-fuel icing on the depression-fuel cake.

I try the normal things and mostly they're just more difficult and less fulfilling. Got a little sun, until it started clouding and raining in the middle of the week. Staying on top of ishes / apartment-tidying was more or less a lost cause. I went out to role-playing on Saturday but that didn't shake it either. It lifted, more or less, Saturday night or Sunday, and on Sunday I went over to Noel's for a full day of boardgaming and that was actually quite good.

My depression is very clearly situational and triggered, so I keep thinking I can manage it by managing my situations. That's of course not possible, not fully. And when it hits me it knocks me out -so- hard. Once job etc is sorted I am gonna have to look into pharmaceutical intervention.

Need to take my last midterm tomorrow; been reviewing notes etc today EDIT or I could just knock it out right now, that was not too terrible /EDIT. Need to wrap up the practicum stuff as well but there's no huge rush on that. Maybe this coming week.

Bah.

I have Returned, and it is Good. Got in around ten-thirty Monday night; had a good sit on the couch with Mr Tuppert, who missed me, and then crashed. I tried to crash "pretty hard" but kept being ... it's not 'woken up' if you haven't fallen asleep, 'disturbed' I guess. Got around seven hours sleep all told.

To the extent I had a Game Of The Week I guess it was 18India, an 18xx game where one has a hand of shares one can buy (some randomly dealt, some drafted) rather than all shares being available at all times. The game's doing some other neat things as well, with trains and gauge changes and track-laying. I played once and thought I liked it, then played a variant and thought I hated it. Turned out, when I played the base game again, that what I hated was in fact the variant, and the base game is more to my taste.

I also played a lot of Free Ride, a train game that I'd been thinking of as Friedemann Friese's Ticket To Ride but which Daniel Karp pointed out is more accurately Friedemann's Transamerica. I'd played once a few years ago and enjoyed it well enough but had trouble figuring out where the various European cities were on the uniformly-coloured map. Last year Friedemann came out with a USA version which a) is a more familiar map and b) colour-codes the cities into regions, so it's much easier to play. It's a good game. I'll likely be picking up one or both versions at some point.

And two games of Moon Colony Bloodbath, a sort of shared-event-deck-builder. You're nominally trying to build your moon colony, but really you're trying to have yours not be the moon colony that totally collapses due to bad luck and robot rampages. It's enjoyable but to me it feels like the gaming equivalent of empty calories. Everyone does their own thing, someone wins, shake hands and sure may as well play again. Then again this is how I felt about Dominion (same designer) way back when, and gamers do love them some Dominion, so there's clearly a market for that sort of thing.

Sometimes there are people that one just clicks with. For me at the Gathering that's the Massachusetts folks, who I originally thought of as "the 18xxers" and now only somewhat less accurately consider "Joe R--'s Discord". I don't really know what it is: mindset, outlook, humor, something. But I have a good time with them, and I feel ... better able to relax around them, or something. Always a pleasure.

Steph arrived on Friday evening, so I shifted from 'gaming' to 'tourist/date' for the last few days. That was good: relaxing, after a week of Peopling, and comforting, and all such good things. We hit up an indie new/used bookstore on Saturday, of the "three levels and a maze of bookcases" variety. On Sunday we went down to the falls and wandered around.

We both flew out of Buffalo, which extended the goodbye a bit, and that was the right call too.

Once more I have brought the plague back from Niagara. Sunday after touristing I started feeling a bit feverish, but tried to blame it on Too Much Sun. Monday, travel-day, the feverish remained along with clogged sinuses, which is No Way to travel by air. When it hadn't improved any by Tuesday I went ahead and tested and yep, two lines, though the one was faint and incomplete.

It's not as bad as last time. Yesterday I was more muzzy-headed than I think I was, but I think that has passed. The chest cough that started up yesterday has gotten slightly more serious. To the left, the sinus stuff may be letting up (or I may just be drugging myself more effectively), and I'm not noticing any taste deficiencies.

I have nowhere I need to be for another week at least, and only the one class. As things go this is about the best time to be laid up. Mr Tuppert approves of the increase in couch time as well.

When I'm traveling I bring a travel electric kettle, because I hate when my tea tastes like hotel coffee. I don't bring loose tea and a teaball, or even disposable teabags, because that's too much mess/hassle for a temporary space.

Instead I drink bag tea. Usually Stash Double Bergamot Earl Grey, though this time it's Bigelow Constant Comment because I haven't had that in at least a decade.

Today I realised: I drink flavoured tea when I'm traveling because the questionable flavouring masks the sense that the tea itself just isn't that good.

Better than No Tea, though.

>INVENTORY

You are carrying:
No tea

>TAKE TEA

No tea: dropped.

--Adams/Meretzky, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

In the event I made it through customs easily. My customs agent was a dead ringer for grumpy John Cena. He asked for my citizenship (US) and passport. and then glared at the passport and his comupter screen for about thirty seconds. I had enough time to start getting nervous and also to notice that his biceps were the size of my head before he handed my passport back without a word. I'll count that a win.

I'm in Niagara, at the Gathering, saying hi to folks and playing a bunch of games. There's sufficient variety and sufficiently pleasant social that even when I get stuck in a 2.5-hour game that is emphatically Not For Me it's still a decent time. And it's good to see people I know and who know me, and to feel, well. At home, maybe.

They've been issuing special black badges for folks who've been to at least twenty of these since before I started coming (which was I think number 24 or 25). Last year or this they started giving 'grey' badges to people who've been to at least ten, and I was a little startled to realise that yep, that's me. I'm pretty bad at recognising when I've become A Regular at a thing. In my head I'm stuck as The New Guy, there's plenty of folks who've been around longer than I have.

It's Sunday night. Four and a half more days of gaming and Gathering, and then Steph gets here for two and a half days or so, and then homeward. I do miss my kitten. I don't miss the rest of home, not yet, but I can see that from here. For now, things are good. I appreciate that.

Well. I just had the fastest checkin / security experience I've ever had at YVR: no one in line ahead of me to check in, two slightly slow people in the fast line at security. I think the time from stepping off the train to thru security was on the order of ten minutes, and most of that was walking from one end of the domestic terminal to the other and back again.

The gate isn't empty, but it's not as crowded as I expect the Toronto redeye to be. I'm okay with that.

What are you reading now?

Just started Melissa Scott's Dreamships, about which I know pretty much nothing except that Steph is a fan of Scott's work. (I think I read one or two of hers before moving here but they did not survive the Great Cross-Country Purge.) It's enjoyable so far.

What did you just finish reading?

For some reason I had a strong desire to read Gene Wolfe's four-volume crypto-Catholic generation-ship epic Book Of The Long Sun. I think this is somehow only my second reread; might be my third. I can confirm that the crypto-Catholicism is ... not really all that crypto. On the other hand the ending of "and then a bunch of us got on the lander and went down to the planet, and it turned out the Pope had been a vampire from the neighbouring Vampire Planet all along, the end" is more telegraphed than I remember. Though it helps if you remember the Pope really is a vampire from a previous read. (Er. Spoilers for a thirty-year-old tetrology, I suppose, though honestly if you're paying attention you find out the Pope is a vampire early in the second or third book.)

These are very Wolfean books, by which I mean they excel at doing the thing where something happens that means one thing to the characters in the book and quite another to the reader. They also have an awful lot of scenes of the main character explaining things to other people, which is less fun. But they're good, and there's not much out there like them.

Before that, Martha Wells's Books of the Raksura. I like these a little less on this read, I think. Partly it's that they're overflowing with characters that I have difficulty telling apart. Partly it's that they lean into the fantasy trope of The Evil Race. The final duology tries to undermine that, with the hybrid queen whose name escapes me but who is trying so hard... but then Wells brings in the groundling race who've decided that killing everyone else is fine if it means it kills off all the evil Fell as well. They're still enjoyable, they still have great characters with complex and real-feeling relationships. Just ... not quite as solid as I'd like.

What do you think you'll read next?

Beats me. Something else in ebook, since I only brought one paper book (Wells's City Of Bone). When I get home I may read Wolfe's Book of the Short Sun, the sequel trilogy. Or I may not; I remember it as being extremely depressing, mostly because it's narrated by someone who's not sure who he is and is extremely depressed about it.

Practicum complete. It hit me harder than expected at the end of last week. Plenty of possible reasons. Biggest, I think, was "this was supposed to be a pathway to a Real Job and it was instead a dead end," and there's not anything I can do about that. So that set off ... not really a full-blown depressive episode, I don't think. A sort of low-key moodiness. Days later I'm still sad that it couldn't work out but not overwhelmingly so.

On Friday I returned to Whistler for the fifth(!) and final round on my tattoo. I'm quite happy with it. It's larger and brighter than I'd expected it to be, but I'm okay with that. And it does look good. Red maple on the outside of the calf, aspen on the inside, both in full fall foliage, with a kudzu vine twining around the leg. This last session finished up the maple and a couple of last kudzu leaves. It hurt like hell for a couple of days; now it's just itchy. And a bit startling, whenever I look down.

After some thought I'm anxious about going to Niagara, but I'm not, for the most part, scared. I'm angry, and it's easy for that to sink into, well, depressive fatalism, because there's not anything I can do about it. I try to talk to folks who can keep my perspective grounded in reality. That seems to help somewhat.

I feel like the horrific ICE news stories are radicalizing me in a similar fashion to Abu Ghraib twenty-one years ago. I'm mostly okay with that. Just need to figure out a useful way to point it this time.

There's a bit in The Good Place where Chidi tells Eleanor about the idea that toddler-mentality is (I'm paraphrasing, probably badly) "me not you" and a more mature line of thought is "us not them". I feel like the great lefty/progressive project is to move beyond even that, to break down the divide of 'them'.

Six years ago a fellow named Frank Wilhoit coined a phrase that's been called Wilhoit's Law: Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: there must be in-groups whom the law protectes but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect. This pithy expression wasn't the point of his comment; that was a later bit, that I've been thinking on a lot lately. The core proposition of anti-conservatism requires no supplementation and no exegesis. It is as sufficient as it is necessary. What you see is what you get: The law cannot protect anyone unless it binds everyone; and it cannot bind anyone unless it protects everyone.

Tomorrow I wrap up a homework assignment, do a bunch of dishes, pack, and then head out for nearly two weeks. I'm gonna miss Mr Tuppert. He's been mostly friendly and affectionate the past couple of days.

Perhaps I'll have some answers when I come back.

Cripes, it's been a month. I knew I'd been doing poorly but hadn't realised it was quite that poorly.

I've been telling myself I've just been head-down on my practicum, which is true but not ... not an answer, not a reason, not complete. I've been head-down on my practicum, working full-time while also taking an advanced-level class (Databases 2, aka "big databases and how they store geographic data"), and that's a decent amount of work output. The practicum has taken particular effort to Keep Going, for reasons I'm not wholly clear on but which therapy has given me at least some insights into.

But everything has just been Difficult and I would rather sit on the couch and Not Think about any of it. I need to start looking for a job, which means I need to figure out where I'm looking for a job, since the BC Public Service is not even considering hiring anyone at all until probably July at the earliest. Add to that all the nonsensical horror / horrific nonsense from Down South and, well. Much easier to hide in front of the television.

So, this is the last week of my practicum. I'm making cookies to bring in to the office tomorrow, partly because I haven't done any baking for work at all and partly because making cookies is making a thing and that at least feels like ... progress, or accomplishment.

I'm pleased with what I've gotten done for the practicum. I spent the last three months creating new fire-centre maps of the Provincial radio repeaters, so that folks going out into the field will be better able to tell which repeater they're supposed to be talking to. It's not nearly as much as I'd wanted to do, or expected to do; institutional barriers and my own inexperience both worked against me there. But it's a start, and what I've got will be helpful.

It's also been feeling pointless, and it took me til today in counseling to work out why: not pointless in the sense of "the work is pointless busywork that no one will use," the way too much of my work for the last twenty years has been, but rather in the sense of "i will likely never see these people again." I'd wanted my practicum to be a first step towards BC government employment, and that's not happening, or if it is it's not for quite some time. So: marking time, staying apart, not getting involved, same military-brat playbook I've always run when it's spring and we're moving this summer.

I am proud of the PDF maps, though. Eventually they'll be up on the Provincial radio system website, and I'll put up a link then.

The Databases course is done (88%, coincidentally the same grade I got in DB1 under Stupid Rob). The only coursework I have left is Management Issues In GIS, aka "how to deploy an enterprise GIS system," and a final recorded-presentation and written-report on the practicum.

And then I'm done with schoolwork, again. I don't know what happens after that, other than "I look for a job in what seems likely to be an abysmal economy." I'm pretty deeply worried about that part but on the other hand there is literally nothing more I can do about it, so, shrug-emoji.

I'm going back to Niagara in a little over a week. I'm also nervous about that: making a land crossing in upstate New York with an X-gender passport does not thrill me with anticipation. I guess I can continue to be a useful coal-mine-canary: if I, a pale-skinned US citizen, get any trouble, that ought to indicate something.

I'm letting several folks, on both sides of the border, know when I'm crossing, and will ping them again once I'm through. I wish I thought I were being paranoid.

I love you. Stay safe and take care of each other.

SATURDAY MORNING: Ahh, it's starting to be light out, soon I won't need the sunlamp any more.

SUNDAY MORNING: Ugh where is the sunlight what is going ON

Which is to say: blargh rant DST rant blargh, though the onset of the spring rainy season (as distinct from the winter overcast season) doesn't help matters.

Yesterday morning I made pancakes for breakfast, and English muffins to turn into frozen breakfast sandwiches today. Mr Tuppert was annoyed at me for spending so much time in the kitchen, so after that I got my book and hung out on the couch. He came to sit on my legs for awhile. Eventually he got bitey, and I told him he was being cranky and he should go eat something, and he did and then came back and we deniably-snuggled some more.

I'd finished my tea, and the outside was dark with rainygrey. Other than that it was pretty much a perfect hour or two.

The afternoon was spent in running around to various gaming things, and that was good as well.

I'm concerned about my job prospects, and about the general state of the world, and I've been engaging in a nontrivial amount of basic escapism to cope. Need to remember to take more time in deliberately engaging in things that make me happy, and not just that I enjoy.

"Society has to work, it has to feed people, it has to keep them reasonably healthy, it has to keep functioning over time and in emergencies."
--Graydon Saunders, Safely You Deliver (Commonweal 3)

Part of why I like the Commonweal books is that they're a fantasy about a functional democratic society, one that has taken "everyone or no one" as a fundamental principle.

"The Bad Old Days worked. People had kids, it kept going. It was generally horrible, but it was a society, it existed to make whatever sorcerer was in charge of it happy. The people who founded the Commonweal were determined not to have that society, they needed something else that would work, and they knew they didn’t know how. All they knew is that no one was going to have any inherent authority, something stronger than 'no slaves', and sorcerers weren’t going to be in charge of anything."
--ibid.

One can of course substitute "billionaire" for "sorcerer" as desired.

"Half a thousand years, and yet ye will not fall."
...
"All things come in time to die. The Line says 'united we fall'."
--ibid.

About a quarter of the second book (A Succession of Bad Days) is concerned with building a canal, one that will take thousands of people from "probably starving" to "belts tightened but mostly making it through this winter and next". There's general agreement that this needs doing, and now rather than in five years, and ... it gets done. There's no argument about whether the twice-displaced in the Folded Hills 'deserve' it, or about whether to put the Creeks into a lean winter, food-wise.

"Everything is tradeoffs. The Commonweal decided, when it was coming into being, that it was going to do at least so well for everyone, or die trying. It's not dead yet."
--ibid.

It's a good time to remember that kind of society is something that can at least be conceived of.

I desire that the enemies of the Commonweal should cease to oppose our polity, our comity, and our unity; that none should seek hereafter to make all joy and goodness arise from merciless obedience; that none should possess the might or strength to make rule of their preference.

I would it be that these things shall come to be by no harsher means, by no less mighty means, than the apprehension of facts and the disdain of fearfulness that is the best and greatest means by which anything might come to be in the world.

And yet these things shall come to pass.
--Graydon Saunders, A Mist of Grit and Splinters (Commonweal 5)

Well that was exciting.

My first thought was the (small child? large dog?) upstairs being especially stompy. Felt like it was hitting the whole apartment, though. It kept going and thought "Oh. This must be an earthquake." Mr Tuppert jumped off the chair and ran, stopping in mid-run to look back at me kind of freaked out. I was about to get up and ... I dunno, stand in a doorway? Leave the building? when it stopped.

First earthquake I've ever been through. Looks like it was northwest of me, "22 km north of Sechelt", 5.1 Richter.

Neat but not something I really feel compelled to repeat.

Well. After that I had a nasty breakdown last week. I'm, hm. I won't say I'm fine now, but I'm certainly out of the worst of it and I seem to be doing alright. It was a particularly nasty combination of acute depression (state of the US, digging into some rough stuff in counseling) and difficulties in keeping going on practicum stuff. The acute depression passed eventually as these things do, and I managed to drag myself out of the avoidant part of 'difficulty keeping going on the thing i'm supposed to be doing,' so that's all for the good.

Registered for my last class this morning. Bit of drama in that; I went to confirm the amount I owed and they'd stuck a $4900 "Technology International Fees" in there. Spent a couple of hours trying to figure out what that was, including an hour on hold. It got mysteriously removed about ten minutes before they connected me with someone who said they'd mistakenly applied it to all student accounts. Frustrating to have wasted my time chasing it down, but at least it wasn't a real thing. Four more months, and this will all be over with. Need to figure out what comes next, I guess.

I've made a space on the table for Mr Tuppert to sit next to me while I'm working, in the hope that he'll stop biting me for attention. This ... sometimes works. In general we're getting along better. He'll come sit with me when I watch TV at lunchtime as long as I put a blanket down for him to sit on, etc. I'm glad he's here.

I watched the first two seasons of Black Lightning, and now I'm watching Arrowverse again in half-season increments (because they put the crossovers in the middle of the seasons). Black Lightning takes itself pretty seriously, but it's about Black issues so it's got a good reason to. Arrow just takes itself more seriously than it needs to. As I recall this season of Flash is angsty as well (I got about three episodes in before Erin gave up). Looking forward to Legends, and Supergirl, to break that up somewhat.

Weird to think that I'm already halfway through my one course for the term. But the midterm went up on Friday, and I just wrapped it. Feeling reasonably good about it. No doubt there were a couple questions I missed, and a couple where I overthought the question and will have gotten "wrong." C'est la guerre.

Looking at the schedule, it looks like I'll have a couple of weeks between winter and spring term this year. Eh. I guess it'll be nice to have the course complete before the end of my practicum, and not have to worry about any coursework while I'm wrapping that up and putting together my presentation.

The practicum itself has been more frustrating than I'd hoped. The data I'm looking to read and update is stored in a Microsoft Power App, and I have yet to figure out if there's any API access so I can talk to it in ways other than "Excel import/export". So I may be spending the next month or so making something that looks pretty and is only incrementally better than the existing static PDF. Argh and oh well. Useful reminder of what working in real systems is like.

I'm doing ... okay? Remarkably okay, I think. I have things I want to do, and the ability to do some of them. I don't know what happens to me in six months and that's worrisome. I do know I run out of money in two months and will need to raid my retirement fund again, and that's more worrisome, but at least the money's there -to- raid. For now.

Practicum has begun. I'm in the office for at least my first full week. Will see how telework shapes up after that.

MONDAY (office mostly empty): ugh, commute, office, blecch, rather be at home with my cat and my normal surroundings

TUESDAY (office maybe a quarter full): okay, the motorised sit/stand desk is nice, and the two monitors will make life better. And it's nice to have a couple other folks around. I am probably happier and more productive with a day or two a week in office.

WEDNESDAY, after an hour (office 3/4 full): CRIPES THERE ARE WAY TOO MANY PEOPLE HERE I DO NOT WANT TO TALK OR INTERACT WITH ANYONE JUST GO AWAY WHY AM I NOT AT HOME

... apparently I have preferences.

2024 was, in a lot of ways, 2023 redux. Not super surprising, I guess.

( another year in the rear view )

Any summary of the events of 2024 is necessarily overshadowed by: a week ago Erin broke up with me. Details don't matter; I made a couple of choices that hurt her, and she decided she was done. To me it feels a little shocking and somewhat ... not inevitable, but maybe right. We'd been struggling with keeping the relationship at a level where 'good' encompassed more time than 'work' for a long time, compounded by at least somewhat divergent ideas of what the relationship entailed, or should entail, or something.

I spent last Sunday in a daze of sadness and semifunctionality, and was well cared for. Since then ... I don't really know? Absorbing, adjusting. I don't think I'm shutting down or shutting up. Ask me again in a week, maybe.

We're still friends, still talking. Remains to be seen where that will land, I guess. At this point I'm used to exes' pronouncements of "we'll still be friends" turning into radio silence, so I'm hopeful but not wholly optimistic.

(Comments off; sympathy and well-wishes are taken as given, and I'm not particularly up to pretending to be a social human around it.)

[David Lynch] was a boomer who made his name by being weird and transgressive, and instead of using that as a license to behave like an asshole at all times, he was fundamentally full of joy and a profound love of his craft. He wasn't afraid of being earnest or uncool, of looking at the brokenness of the world and sitting with your sadness about it. And he felt no obligation to explain himself or suit his work to any tastes, high or low."
--Abigail Nussbaum, "Lynch"

In the late nineties, Jonathan had the entire run of Twin Peaks on VHS, and he and I watched it over the course of a few months. It's stuck with me in a way that a lot of what I watched in college didn't. Slow, meandering, confusing, incredibly visual: the only thing I'd seen even vaguely like it before was 2001. And Twin Peaks had a much broader range of human experiences and emotions to support and magnify its surreality and paranormality. I'm not sure I'd rewatch it; I'm not sure I'd recommend it to anyone else. But it certainly changed me.

Around the same time I watched Blue Velvet and Fire Walk With Me and Lost Highway (at least twice), and understood more or less none of them. With Lost Highway at least I quite enjoyed being swept away in the strangeness of it all. I never got around to seeing Mulholland Falls, or the Twin Peaks revival series. A few years ago I watched about half of Dune but stalled out after the massacre. Mostly I've enjoyed the existence of David Lynch, for being so very much who he is, and having such a strong sense of artistic (and personal?) vision.

So it goes.

INTERVIEWER: Elaborate on that.
DAVID LYNCH: No.

I'm personally unfamiliar with the word 'practicum' so I've been describing it as "an unpaid internship."

Noel just pointed out that it's actually worse than an unpaid internship: I'm paying for the privilege of providing unpaid labour. And since I'm not a wet-behind-the-ears college student, they'll be getting a decent amount of actual labour out of the process.

Sigh. At least there's the credential at the end of it.

(Starts Monday, with a week of actually-in-office.)

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Adventures in Mamboland

"Jazz Fish, a saxophone playing wanderer, finds himself in Mamboland at a critical phase in his life." --Howie Green, on his book Jazz Fish Zen

Yeah. That sounds about right.

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Words are inadequate

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Journal

bookbookbook

i've made enough of my own mistakes on my own

HELLO DYING I AM DAD

waving and/or drowning

and the hunter home from the hill

tea!

gathering successfully

travel and books

there's a hole inside my head where all the thoughts hang out

making cookies and thinking too much

slow but moving

and from the horns of unicorns, lord, safely you deliver

a quake!

ongoing

GIS continueth

office: opinions are mixed

other than that, mrs lincoln

and beggars have their pride, as someone once sang

"how's annie?"

argh

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