music: Top Shelf- “The Thunder Sessions” 6/21/2007
Something is keeping me awake deep into the night on this Independence Day and I’m not able to put my finger on exactly what it is. I’ve been in a reflective phase for the past couple weeks, more so than usual, and tonight i’ve thinking about how and where I’ve spent July 4th in recent years. Last year I was the sole occupant of a hostel in Cuyahoga Valley National Park, sleeping alone in a room meant for 12, with the Camry parked outside filled to the brim with all my worldly possessions. The year before that I flying through fireworks on an airplane headed for Sydney, Australia. Three years ago I was camped out at the High Sierra Music Festival. I could keep tracing back: celebrations on the Charles River in Boston, the shores of Lake Amy Belle, all the way back to an olive green convertible in Fox Point, WI dressed in my little league uniform and eating ice cream for breakfast. The larger point is that for whatever reason, right now I’m currently very aware of how things have changed around me over the course of the last 28 years. I can’t say for certain how I have changed (although I know I have); I have no perspective on myself. But from where I sit right now, using the not-so-arbitrary temporal marker of our nation’s birthday, I can see very clearly just how much the world around me has changed.
Where I sit right now is, of course, in front of a laptop screen. This is a reset, a homebase, something that has not changed a great deal over the years, and a quick scroll through this little weblog I’ve been pounding out for the past four years will stand as ample evidence. In terms of blogging I’ve been diligent. I’ve just done some digging myself, and find it remarkable that I can track most of the environmental changes I’ve undergone in the past four years right here. Reading posts from months past, like any proper historical document, take me back to a time long gone, a time where I was living in a very different place, struggling with very different things. In reading back some of the first entries here I’m reminded that I started this weblog in the summer of 2003 as a way to keep my writing sharp, to allow communication between the people in my life and the contents of my mind, and more practically, to chronicle my journey through graduate school and my career teaching. Now, four years later, I’m still practicing this reflective exercise in completely different environmental circumstances and this now familiar exercise, as a result, has changed.
These are days full of transition, days demanding some mental energy and processing. I recently took a trip back to Boston to watch my former students graduate, visit friends, and revisit a former phase of life (most of which can be read about here). The trip was indeed overwhelming, mostly in positive ways, because it brought transition into such dramatic focus for me. Like the haunting story “A Christmas Carol” (another horribly reflective day for me, incidently), I was reminded of my recent past, and my present by contrast. The future remains a bit more elusive.
These changes, these thoughts, haven’t been shared here as of late. I’ve been conscious of it. That the gnomes toiling endlessly in the underground bunkers of Anize HQ can’t seem to get blog comments working without spammers blasting us results in a monologue of sorts, which is less interesting to me. Moreover, Anizers across the board are much less prolific than we were in years past. But there has been a more personal shift. That I took the year off from classroom teaching (and that I moved clear across the country) might start to explain the dip in blogging over the past year. My time in California has been one of the most extroverted years of my life, a rediscovering of myself as a social creature, which might start to explain why I don’t feel the need to check in with myself and this computer screen on such a regular basis anymore. But more than that, I think I am beginning to reconsider the byline written directly above. This year has not been without its struggles, but since moving out to San Francisco I have not struggled nearly as much as I have in years past. Or maybe I have struggled, and haven’t experienced it as such a struggle. Regardless, despite the lack of perceived struggle, I can say that I have progressed in amazing ways. Frederick Douglass isn’t to be thrown out completely here, but I’m addressing the rest of the world in a fundamentally different way than I was in the summer of 2003.
Right now I find myself once again at a pivot point. It’s not nearly as dramatic a pivot point as July of 2006, or July of 2004, or July of 2003 (read all about it) but it’s a point worth documenting here at the very least. I’ve been out in California for about a year now, and it’s been a year without a winter. If I care to look up past the familiar soft white glow in front of me I’d realize that I live in a different room, in a different building, with different roommates, in a different city. This has been a year of meeting new wonderful people, hiking camp counselor style in a National Park, not making a lot of money, making music I’m starting to be more and more proud of, and reconnecting with old friends in anew context. I have technically had a job for the past year but I feel like I’ve been on vacation since moving out here. The time has flown, and blissfully so for the most part. But this July, instead of heading off on some foolish adventure as I have done for the past three years, I’ve elected to push the wanderlust aside and stick around with no real agenda. With such a gap in activity, and with a lot of my people cleared out (or clearing out) on adventures of their own, my month with not much to do is becoming a reframing and repositioning. Once August hits my life in San Francisco will shift again, possibly in dramatic ways: MIssa Toss will come out of early retirement. But even Missa Toss has his transitions to work through, and things will not look the same as they once did. That I’m determined to see through. So because of all this, and despite my original purposes for writing here, The ritual of sitting down in front of my computer and documenting my thoughts for public viewing will go through a couple changes as well. They already have.
I’m not signing off. The documentarian in me wouldn’t allow it, and I find this to be an incredibly valuable outlet when I need it. But like everything else around me, things here are changing. Maybe that’s why I’ve kept myself up far too late tonight: to remember that things are in transition, that I’ve grown quite different, possibly away, from the person who started this weblog four summers ago, and that I need to take a moment and recognize just that.
music: Grateful Dead- Europe ‘72 d.2
July 1, 2006 was a day long in the making for me. I’d been scheming about packing up everything I owned and driving from Boston all the way to the Pacific ocean since I returned from a three week trip in Dinosaur National Monument three summers ago, since I started graduate school, since I started this weblog. And now that it’s done, and now that I’m down from the high country and the long walk between Sequoia and Yosemite is behind me as well, I’m able to put two enormous checks on the life list. Life since July has been dynamic, challenging, rewarding, and vital. The place in which I find myself currently is completely staggering as well-there are warm, sunny days and cool, foggy nights, I zip around town on my bicycle, moving from the beach (5 minutes from my doorstep) to coffee shops, dinner parties, bocce tournaments in the park, and free concerts at very regular intervals. I am reconnecting with old and new friends, sometimes even running into friends I haven’t spoken to in over 5 years just by chance. And the ‘job’ i’ve taken is equally as appropriate: my office is a National Park and my duty is to take school groups around sharing an appreciation for the natural world and certain scientific knowledge. I am living a life low on obligation and responsibility, and high on hedonism and experience. I also am allowing myself to linger in transition, not make any large life decisions or movements (other than a solo cross country move, of course) and unencumber myself to enjoy life more and worry about it less. There is a little voice in my head that quietly reminds me from time to time that there are greater things to which I will eventually dedicate myself, but for the time being I’m having quite a time. I also think that certain decisions upcoming will be more permanent and have a greater impact on the trajectory of how I spend my time on this planet, so between a very serious and dedicated life of service as a teacher and those decisions yet-to-come, I’m finding my groove. Even my migraines have all but stopped.
Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy?
It is quite real, I must assure myself from time to time. But I am still enjoying a bit of a honeymoon period in which I have the flexibility and financial cushion to not buckle down out here and dig in. But there will be a point sometime soon where I’ll have to confront reality on a much more mundane scale, where I’ll have to start making enough money to support me and my few extravagances (which means actually working), where I’ll have to start making those tough decisions and stop acting from such a…selfish? standpoint. My time in San Francisco has been exclusively that of the wayward traveller, the hiker and adventurer. It just may be sustainable to do that but chances are greater that at some point the grind will catch up to me. But it hasn’t yet, and that’s just fine.
California is a place of extremes. The tallest mountain in the lower 48, the lowest and hottest valley, the largest trees in the world…oceans and volcanos, earthquakes and traffic, wide open spaces and multicultural centers…this is a place like no other. And it’s strange to think that I live here. Maybe this is one of the places where it’s OK to mingle fantasy with reality to a degree. It is noticably different from Boston and the East Coast, but how far will that carry? I’m curious to find out. I’m out here for the forseeable future, the pace and focus of my life has changed a great deal, and although I terribly miss some things about who I was a few months ago I am very glad for the change.
Open your eyes, look up to the skies, and see.
And on that note, I’ve noticed that my activity here has lessened as of late. It could be a function of this life shift, that maybe the weblog was meant to be a document of my thoughts during graduate school and teaching, and now that my environment is quite different this isn’t as immediately relevant to my day-to-day. Sometimes I feel like Bobby (with whom I apparently share a city now) about this whole business. While it’s good to keep in the practice of writing I find myself with less and less that is worth saying publicly (or less and less desire to say things publicly). Like my realtime experience, I think virtual Taus on the Internet might need some refocusing and adjusting. And like the currents i’m currently riding, I’ll wait to see what happens, what I’m feeling like in the near future, what will inevitably motivate me one way or another. But in the meantime I’m having fun with it and surely am not stressing over it.
Any way the wind blows, doesn’t really matter to me.
music: The Beatles- Rubber Soul
The internet gnomes working in the dungeons of anize.org HQ have been on paid leave, it seems. At least, they aren’t covering my slips of the keyboard. I’ve been getting hammered with spam and tried to set up some filters to keep the viagra and online poker ads out but in doing so I think I messed up the ability for anyone to comment. Which is pretty negative; this soapbox of mine isn’t nearly as fun if people don’t shout back. I’m not into censorship at all, but that’s not the case here at all. It’s just the end result.
The photo gallery has been down too, I understand. Weeds are growing all over this little plot of virtual real estate, and I don’t have the knowhow to do anything about it. Until the cavalry arrives we’ll all have to sit tight. And I’ll have to get up on my soapbox and shout into the anonymous receptive silence of the internet.
music: Digable Planets- Reachin’
Weblogs make for great soapboxes, sure, but as with any medium of idea or creativity, things are better when ideas are exchanged. Unfortunately our little corner of the World Wide Web was drowning in comment spam. The obscene quantity of these less-than-meaningful advertisements for this and that caused blog commenting to be shut down for a little bit. Thanks to the man behind the curtain, blog comments are back, and with it returns the possibility for conversation. The soapbox effectively becomes a coffee shop. I enjoy my soapbox, yes, but at a certain point it’s the equivalent of talking to myself in a soundproof room with a one-way glass window looking in. Possibly interesting for the casual passer-by, but it doesn’t do as much for me.
Comments are back. You, whomever you may be, please feel free to comment away. Unless you are spam-bot in which case you can go get fitted for a restraining bolt or something. Welcome back to the anize.org coffee house. please make a contribution. I’m counting on the good citizens of the World Wide Web to temper my nonsense with a little of their own.
music: Charlie Hunter Quartet- Natty Dread
Blogging is becoming a hot topic in the news, and being one guilty of such a histrionic endeavour, I’m taking a particular interest in how weblogs are affecting how people (including me) live their lives. So much so that I’m going to devote a category of entries to the self-referential topic. I think that writing about it here risks an endless recursion, philosophically speaking, but whatever.
I was confronted with an audience this weekend. I became hyperaware that people read this thing because they brought it up in conversation to my face numerous times, and it was more than tmo saying that “I read it on your blog.” Which is fine and good, I guess; writing publicly was and is a conscious choice on my part. But to have a realtime conversation about this forum sort of disrupts the code of anonymity that I as writer and you (yes, you. Good evening.) as reader adopt given the media involved. Most of these conversations were between me and people I know: those in the anize circle, my mom and sister, my friends. To those who know me already, this weblog is a tool of some sort of substantial communication, a portal letting them peek into some of my thoughts and allowing them to develop a more robust picture of just who this David Taus is. I initially started with that hope and intention, and to that end things have been successful. But things have sprug from that into unexpected directions. To those that have not met me in person or know me only incidently, I can only guess that this light reading here is nothing more than biography, nonfiction in the most consumable and immediate published form to date.
Because of a self-aware entry I did a couple weeks ago, I found myself in a conversation this past Saturday with someone whom I had never met face to face before. At some point in the conversation she alluded to something about me that I can only imagine she read here, and I didn’t quite know how to handle it. Not that it was uncomfortable or even awkward, because it was neither of these, but more that I just didn’t know how to handle it. It is unfamiliar interpersonal territory to have some relative stranger know things about you that are normally reserved for a closer circle of friends. This is the nature of putting oneself out there for public examination, I guess. I am not afraid. In some ways it can be good, allowing a quick bypass of small talk and facilitating more substantial conversation. In a lot of ways, though, it is an unexplored social phenomenon whose implications have not had time to be played out. We humans have operated socially for so long off secondhand opinions and information about others (“I asked my friend what their friend was like…”) but now that we can get it straight from the source the rules of the social getting-to-know-you game are being upended in favor of something much more reliable and direct. I’m left wondering what conclusions a stranger I might meet draws about me based solely on the content of this website, how much I was researched, and to what extent the other would allow me to know what they think they know about me.
Luckily the person with whom I was speaking this weekend is an overwhelmingly positive human being which made the whole experience strangely flattering as well as intruiging. At one point, after getting a look that said something like “I know about you more than you realized, and I can empathize” I said something about her having an unfair advantage over me in this conversation, as I had not read up on her thoughts beforehand. Part of me would have liked nothing more than to pick through her brain at my own leisure, more of me thought the better of it. And on purely clinical grounds, a small slice of me was left wondering how that sort of insight affects interpersonal interactions and social tendencies. (That it is possible, even likely, that she is reading this at this moment adds an impossibly delightful twist to the whole situation.)
The media has started to pick up on the blogging phenomenon. It’s an amazing cultural practice; never before have so many had access to such intimite information, and never before have so many been willing to put that information out there for public consumption. It might even be a powerful enough force to change people’s actual behaviors when not mucking about in cyberspace. This from this week’s New York Times Magazine (p. 24):
As weblogs proliferate…the boundaries between public and private are being transformed. Unconstrained by jourrnalistic conventions, bloggers are blurring the lines between public events and ordinary social interactions and changing the way we date, work, teach, and live. And as blogs contine to proliferate, citizens will have to develop new understandings about what parts of our lives are on and off the record.
Blogs are not going away any time soon. I’m curious to ride the blog wave for a while and see what happens with what I decide to put out there. It’s clear to me, however, that deciding to take on a project like a weblog demands a certain set of parameters to be set by its author. Those parameters can be as narrow or as wide as one wants, but they must be clear. For my own sake, I am in the process or reconsidering just what I want to have happen with this enormous amount of virtually unedited written word. I do know this: I am more than comfortable putting some of my thoughts out on the table in plain view, knowing my audience ranges from family members to friends of friends to complete strangers to students of mine. I am incredibly aware of my own parameters in using this forum, I am incredibly aware of how I do and do not censor myself, I am now more than ever incredibly aware that there is an audience, that people (you included) are reading. Every word is intentional, every step deliberate. While this is a healthy picture of who I am and what I’m about, it is nowhere near the whole picture. To have had an actual source of human feedback about what is written here is more than a psychological curiousity, it is a reminder about the nature of this specific undertaking.
My musings on this topic are overwhelmingly intellectual, and I’m willing to use myself as subject in my own experiment. I’m more than happy to give you material for research. I’m more than happy to give you the interpersonal advantage should we ever meet. The only thing I ask of you, though, is that you are aware that what you know about me from your internet research is not the whole story. Apologies if this spoils your biographical eye. I’ll stop this and leave you to your own judgements, which you are more than entitled to have.
Ok ok ok ok. Enough of this mirrorgazing. Next time: something more straightforward and unpointed. Good evening.
music: Willy Porter- Falling Forward
Ever since I went home last week for Thanksgiving I’ve been thinking about who reads this stuff here. I know that some specific people tune in on a somewhat frequent basis and take in this drivel, but I’d imagine that a few unexpected folks have grazed upon the anize.org collection of navel contemplation. Possibly (hopefully?) people that I have never met and don’t know exist. It made me consider my own narcissism, think about why I decide to write here. Why not just in a word processor document saved to my hard drive? Why not in a little lined book kept in my sock drawer? Why not in chalk on the street? A chalkboard in some classroom in Boston? On the bathroom stall at the local pub?
A friend had a comment about blogs this past weekend: “They’re brutally public.” That’s the point, I suppose. I’m writing here because on some level I expect it to be read by other people. I write stuff here because I want to make my often-masked thoughts available. (Some of them, at least.) It’s better than talking to myself. At least I have the illusion of having someone listen this way. These are solitary, misanthropic days and blogging is an indicator of just how far the themes of postmodern life have come. I think, too, that the dialogue within anize is a good thing, although the org-anize’ers have been reticent as of late. And hopefully I have something of some value to contribute to this mess of a social experiment we call the internet.
In the end, though, I think we can chalk blogging up to vouyerism. Right in front of evesdropping, right behind reality television. We all like to stick our noses in others’ business when given the chance, especially when we can do it anonymously and without the knowledge of our subjects. So to that end, down comes the fourth wall. Briefly.
Good evening.
Hey, you. I picture you out there, mucking about in cyberspace, sitting slackjawed and drooling in front of your computer screen. You’ve gotten enough out of me. What have YOU been up to? What have YOU been thinking about? I’m a peeping tom, you see, trying to catch a brief but delicious glimpse of some other life. Hopefully that doesn’t make you too uncomfortable.
music: Townhall- The New Song
At long last, anize.org has a photo gallery. It can be found at http://gallery.anize.org. I just finished posting two galleries. The first is the long-awaited photos from AJM and my summer road trip, and the second contains pictures from Phish’s Coventry festival. There will be much, much more to come, I’m sure. For the time being, though, I’m just glad our summer pics are now available for public viewing. It was great to go through all these and revisit the tales from the Asphalt River this summer. Enjoy…
music: Steve Kimock Band- 3/28/03, Madison, WI
This whole blogging phenomenon has been criticized as being a teenaged phenomenon. And by-and-large, it is. but as DFC has pointed out, more reputable and established citizens than the angry teenager keep weblogs. And just so I can feel better about myself, let’s add one more to the list: Neil Gaiman. A writer of no ill-repute. Somehow that makes me feel better about all this typing I do. And piques my interest as to what Mr. Gaiman, the mind behind The King of Dreams, has to say about the world…
music: Nick Drake- Pink Moon
I’va always had a propensity to organize, document, and catalog things in my life. I think about my binders of baseball cards meticulously organized by team alphebetically, and players within each team alphabetically, the books I just won’t get rid of, my box of college work…the list (a well-organized list, to be sure) goes on. I think I get it from mom, who has made a career out of doing just that. There’s something genetic at work: collect and save.
It’s not stuff that I’m after. That was a big hump to get over, but I’ve been in the process of shedding extraneous material possessions over the past couple of years. It’s a good practice, but something rubs me the wrong way every time I discard that pencil box I’ve been carrying around for all these years. I’ve learned to do it anyway. This past December saw a purging of epic proportions back in Milwaukee. But what remained was carefully orgainzed and cataloged. Old work, old pictures, items that capture a very specific place and time. I’m glad that I have them around still-they trigger memories that otherwise would have gotten lost in the cognitive shuffle.
I think the goal in all this organizing and cataloging of artifacts from my past is the attempt to capture my thoughts and position in the world at that very moment. There have been several ways in which I documented my thoughts over the years, some more successful than others. I have kept various notebooks of various sizes, some reserved for late night broodings and others pocket sized for quick and regular access. I have shoeboxes full of old pictures. Here in Boston, the pictures date back to about 1983. I carried a dictophone for the better part of two years and have cassette tapes full of sound clips: ambient noise, street performers, confesstion-style testimonials, snippets of conversations. And I suppose that the final link in this chain of documenting my thoughts is this here weblog.
One thing I’ve never been too good at is taking pictures. Mom does it with religious fervor when the kids are in town; Grandma D. also is quite a shutterbug. It’s always been such a hassle, though. And expensive. As a result, I don’t have many pictures that I have taken myself, and those pictures I do have leave gaping holes in the fossil record of my past. Yet, I enjoy looking at old pictures and using photography as a medium of documentation. It is accessible, distributable, and the like. I take pictures of funny things, though: I think I have a picture of every room I have lived in since sophomore year of college (they all look surprisingly similar).
I’m not entirely sure why, but I spent my birthday money on a digital camera. It arrived today, and now, for the first time in years, I have a camera again. I got it because I knew that I would have to do some documenation for teaching in the near future, as well as some press work for the recently revived Live Live website, but other than that, I’m not sure how I will go about documenting my life with the thing. Taking pictures feels almost unnatural to me, like writing with my right hand. I don’t like how cameras intrude into the natural flow of an activity. Given my genetic inheritance, I’ll probably get over that at some point. Especially now that I have this tool of documentation.
I’m still not quite adept at handling the thing and getting quality results. Again I am reminded: I may know a thing or two, but I’m no 1ey The genius of digital is that I don’t have to worry about wasting film and can experiment as much as I please.
I think that the process of organizing and cataloging, and even collecting, has become that much easier now that we can use computers to do it. Not only does it make things like alphebetizing by hand completely obsolete, it is also makes tangible objects obsolete. That I can fit hundreds of thousands of pictures and sound clips onto this computer without sacrificing physical space is a feat, something that might just make the process of documenting my thoughts that much more viable.
Some pictures from inside my room: January 21, 2004
Guitar and Books
Flower
Whiteboard
Buttpack
music: Sound Tribe Sector 9- 10/31/00
I just finished reading an extraordinary article about blogging and feel the need now to justify (or at least more thoroughly explain) myself. Indeed, blogging has become a phenomenon among the younger members of our society, a phenomenon worthy of some real attention for various reasons. So I will indulge for a bit and meditate on this blog thing, here at post #100. It’s only fitting.
The article focuses on the high school aged bloggers of the world, explaining the weblog or online journal as a cross-breed of the instant messenger and reality-television type vouyerism. To a lot of teenagers, it seems, blogging is a social phenomenon. Teens know that their friends and classmates are reading. teens use their blogs to fill various social functions, from announcing parties to bitching about this and that to an extension of therapy. Blogs range from one line rants to full-on, uncensored descriptions of the most deep-down private thoughts a young person might have. All in all, an intruiging psychological and sociological study, to be sure. The internet, as tmo would say, is a strange place.
And here I find myself composing an entry that will be posted on a blog of my own. The plot thickens.
My knee-jerk reaction is that I’m nothing like these kids described in the article. I’m not announcing any parties, I’m not bitching about this and that, I’m not disclosing my inner life to the extent that I wouldn’t want my parents to read this (in fact, I encouraged mom to read). What am I doing, then? I think that I’m processing, thinking out loud to nobody and everybody about whatever happens to be weighing on my mind on a given day. Admittedly, it’s been a positive exercise. Writing about what I’ve been thinking about has helped me mentally navigate and frame my world in a very healthy way, and has brought a level of reflection back to my life that was absent for some years.
Why not write in a book and keep it in a sock drawer, then? I used to do that. Why did I stop? Why, now, am I writing things that I know people will read, that deep down I want people to read? This, after all, is the essence of the blog-we write because we know there is an audience. If there were no audience, or we didn’t care about writing for them, we would still be writing in books and keeping them in our sock drawers. The answer, for me, has to do with giving people access to my thoughts. I’ve sometimes been accused of being a bit inaccessible, of being hard to read, and I think that I started this thing in the hopes that people could more easily gain access to my thinking if they wanted to.
And at the same time, I think I’ve been so diligent about writing because there has been nobody here late at night to talk to. I’ve been doing this during my time in grad school, a decidedly lonely period. I’ve noticed that when I’ve had good and positive interactions with people in my world, I’m less inclined to write here. Writing in a private way but so others can read it gives me the feeling that there is still a social context late at night when I can’t do any more schoolwork and everyone else is asleep. Much in the same way, I think, that television makes people feel less lonely. Maybe this is my television, since I haven’t really watched the box in over 7 years. Maybe the blog is following in the footsteps of reality television, contributing to our society’s peeping tom fetish, and I am just a part of that trend. Maybe.
Still, I would like to believe that there is something qualitatively different between me and the teenaged bloggers referred to in that article. For one, I am 25 and in graduate school. I also write in complete sentences. I strive for some substantive content, for expanding my personal experience to more general themes that any passerby might be interested in reading about. Beyond that, though, I’m not sure that much is different between the twentysomething intellectuals of anize.org and the teenaged bloggers of livejournal, except that in my peer group, I am the exception. When some of my friends find out that I keep a weblog, they laugh a little. It is something that my generation missed by a couple years, much in the same way that we missed instant messaging.
Sometimes I think that it is rather odd that I’m so prolific online. I would like to believe that we anize’ers really do have something to say, that we can contribute original and substantive content to the onslaught of information, that we can counterbalance the terabytes of absolute shit that is out there, but it may not be so. We may be guilty of the same things these teenagers are guilty of, except at a more highbrow intellectual level. The contemplation of one’s navel can take many forms.
Will I stop blogging? Probably not. Will I consider my purposes in writing more in the future? Yes. Am I ashamed of all this? Not really. Has this been an important reality check? Absolutely. Sometimes I forget that what I type here, by myself, usually deep into the night, is transmitted to the world, and therefore becomes part of a larger social context. Nothing exists in isolation. I am not excluded from the implications of that article. The trick is to figure out exactly where this piece fits, and then what to do with it. After 100 posts, it seems that I’m not there yet. Ever onwards. To struggle is to progress.
music: Keller Williams- Laugh
I had a visit with tmo this afternoon. We talked about stuff, but most of the time he just said, “yeah, I read it on your blog.” So now I guess I don’t have to talk to anyone anymore. Happy reading, everyone.
As an offshoot…
Picture it: the Anize.org T-Shirts. The front is “anize.org” and the back is “(I read it on your blog.)”
music: Phish 8/14/98- Lemonwheel Soundcheck
The seemingly isolated thoughts and events of one’s life inevitably form context, a reference point from which one’s life can be understood more clearly. More than that though: a soil in which one grows, full of nutrients and pollutants, specific compounds and other characteristics that make that individual absolutely unique. This blog certainly does not coincide with the beginning of its author, and thus I feel it importnant to provide some context for what is to transpire here. That may also help me get some things straight as far as what I am to use this blog for anyway.
There is no way to include everything, of course, but I hope to get enough in here as is needed for the forlorn stranger to start reading comfortably, with some sort of idea as to where I am coming from.
Past. Graduated college in May 2001 with a BA in psychology. Moved to Boston, MA and found myself in a big yellow house with some mighty fine individuals, including fellow anizer tmo. It was a place of incredible growth and learning and above all challenge. While the Chowdahaus started as a summer layover, it turned into a lifestyle. There was much to learn from each member of Chowdahaus, as well as just living in such a place. In the fall of 2001 I moved out of my hole in the attic, and spent a year in Allston being poor and working with mentally retarded and autistic adults, then moved back to Chowdahaus in the fall of 2002, only to be evicted two months later (through no fault of my own, I might add) and move next door with Peet and Tim. It was a holding pattern of sorts, a stable ground from which to worry about other things. i’d switched to research work at Children’s Hospital, which meant I was no longer poor. All the while, I’d been cultivating a little project called Live Live, a radio program on a community radio station dedicated to the community that exists around live music. Most of my free time went into Live Live, as well as applying for graduate programs in teacher education.
Present. With the limited perspective I have on my current situation, it’s hard to say for sure what is happening right now. I can supply the facts: I moved from Jamaica Plain to Cambridge, have moved in with an assortment of people I hadn’t met previously, and am preparing for a yearlong master’s program in teacher education at Harvard. I just returned from two weeks of rafting and backpacking in Colorado and Utah, and even more recently from a music festival in Forksville, PA (Both the festival and the sojourn West deserve their own entries). In the interest of being up-to-the-minute, I just returned from my first Ultimate Frisbee summer league game. My current tasks are to settle into my new living situation, figure out what to do with my car, prepare for the start of graduate school, and enjoy my final days of freedom. Now that I think about it there is much to do. I have two weeks.
Future. Who can say? I know that I will be in Boston for the next year, and that if all goes according to plan I will earn a Masters in education and a teaching credential. Chances are after that I’ll teach high school biology for a spell. Possibly for a long while. It’s impossible to say definitively. I’m living the sort of life right now where my options are wide open and the only force pushing and pulling on me is me. Which is interesting.
So there’s a little context. Hardly a context worthy of much, more like a ten second rough outline done in hasty pencil srokes. But it’s something, some sort of framework. It makes me think about my audience, because clearly when one decides to keep a weblog, one is aware that other people will be reading it. If not, one would just write it all down in a small book, probably lined, possibly equipped with lock and key, and keep it in their underwear drawer. The amazing thing about the internet is that an audience is practically limitless and entirely uncontrolable. So to those that know me, certain points of context are unnecessay because they make up some part of my context. To others, a whole lot more context is needed for any degree of understanding. While here I am trying to provide a context out of preceived obligation to an audience I will probably never fully meet, I wonder if any more than this feeble attempt is really necessary. Let’s examine the title of this entry: latin for “in the middle.” A literary technique in which the reader is thrown directly into the action without explanation of context, and they are left to connect past, present, and future by themselves. Stories are carefully crafted things, lives generally are not. As such, I think I’ll leave the rest of the context to future entries.
I’m more than ready to move on from contemplating the nature of blogging and to externalize the content to other spheres. So this entry on this first day, hopefully, has gotten it all out of my system. All part of breaking the ice. To take on this project thinking it will encompass everything is silly. By its very nature, the blog is a public document and involves some degree of self-censorship. But for what it is, for whatever it will be, context will come. And hopefully, with it, understanding for all involved.
_music: Sound Tribe Sector 9 8/25/01- Oakland, CA_
The first step is always the hardest.
…there.
Now that ol’ man inertia is on my side, I can get down to business here. First order of business is to figure out excatly how I want to use this great tool that DFC has provided. Like many things in my life, I’m still not completely sure, but if old patterns hold: jump in headfirst and see what happens. Deal with things as they arise. Act first, ask later.
The first step was the hardest, in some internal way. Not the movement of fingers across keys, but the decision to go ahead with this. Whatever this is. Now and henceforth it’s all just a matter of finding the flow and riding it.
More to come before this day is through, i’m sure…
