May 31, 2017

dream log

I got an email from an old friend regarding a request for marriage to her friend Vaim Nevrutu. I agreed, sight unseen, because it sounded like a fun time. A few weeks later we headed out on a train trip to meet up with the betrothed. He was nice & clean cut and showed me the wedding invites that at first i mistook for some Airbnb party. Everyone I recognized on the guest list worked at Tumblr though. The train took us all (there were a bunch of us on vacation) to a house in the desert where we watched TV, talked and tried not to step on Ginger. My sister let me pick out a dress from her closet -- none of the white ones fit me though. My friend let me borrow her makeup and said i was lucky I had such nice strawberry blonde hair as it framed my face just so. I did look nice. Later i caught sight of myself in the mirror and something horrid had happened. It looked as though someone had given me a bowl cut with a long back - like a bowl mullet. It was intense. Vaim liked me anyway though i could never exactly work out how I felt about him. He was excited and I was ... talking myself into how anulments were perfectly normal and in fact expected, if it didn't work out how i wanted.

May 30, 2017

we used to all

What was it like. To be alone in this world before. Before the nets came to our houses on the backs of copper cables, warbling chromatic chimes that rang out our anonymous intentions.

To sit on in the airport concourse alone, with only your thoughts and the realities of what is before you, suggestions of what isn't come only from the depths of your own ponderous mind.

How dark and deep seduction must have felt, just you and no one else but those strange burning sensations, the few short brushes of their hand, grasping for purchase on a shared arm rest.

No where to go but further into yourself, or, if you're lucky, the heavy tome you brought with you for moments such as this when the brutal force of other pounded into your own imagined solitude, from the inside of your temples, out.

There was no way of knowing of any beings other than those that you did encounter. The encountering itself was magical. That you should find someone who made you feel such unknown depths. That they should in fact exist, this thing you didn't know existed but that your deep dark soul had hoped, so unknowingly, for. And now it's here at your elbow, by happenstance. As luck would have it.

We used to all be lucky.

May 26, 2017

dream log

too good to retell. but I'll do it anyway, for science.

It was based in a school classroom. I got abandoned there with you. we hadn't ever really talked but it was interesting to get to know you. fun, almost. we spent the night under old blankets that smelled musty. it was cold and i was glad you stayed.

I didn't leave but just woke up, alone

May 24, 2017

dream log

I was back in NYC and Liz was visiting from Houston. We were hanging out and then we got word that her husband, who is secretly (?) Croatian had been in Dubrovnik visiting family when the bombing started. We didn't know if it was ok it not but Liz was pregnant so there was at least that and I thought this is what it's like to be in a WWII romantic drama.

There was more to it that involved books by JJ and other stories but i can't remember it right now and probably won't ever.

It's funny though, I still remember that unwritten dream from half a decade ago where we ended up making pipe cleaner art in my aunt + uncle's ranch house. Yours was very good and you left before i got a chance to make mine and then i helped my uncle put up Christmas lights indoors with one of those utility company basket robots that you raise and lower while riding it. Then a storm came and we camped out in the van to avoid the lightning.

May 14, 2017

bothersome bugs

there's a bug that's been bothering me.  i fixed it, i solved the problem on Thursday but today, Sunday it's still nagging at me.  At this point i'm not really sure what it is about the bug that's digging into my subconscious so hard. I can explain why it happened, the fix that I put in place feels a bit hacky but works. Why is it still bothering me?

I can't help but wonder if it is / was my initial reaction to the problem that's a bother. When I first saw the bug happen, I shrugged it off. It happened again, but I wasn't able to figure out a pattern as to when it triggered.

It took a third time to see it before I acknowledged that there was in fact a problem, however small, with the code. This disbelief in what I had seen with my own eyes bugs me. I can't get over how willing I was to just let it slide.  I figured out a replication case, which was key to solving the problem: Knowing the preconditions for occurrence.

Yet what was it about me that made me think that I didn't need to dig into it? That it wasn't a real problem? Why was this a non-problem problem? I mean no, it didn't affect the functioality, just the visual appearance.  It wasn't obvious what made it happen.

The deeper problem was with the fix. Did I fix it right? What else am I missing about the situation? clearly i was wrong at the outset about it, what else might i be wrong about? i know why he fix worked, i think, but was it the right fix? is there not a more elegant way to solve the problem?

the issue was that there's a flag that gets flipped when an element is moused over or moused out. in react you use a flag to communicate this state change to the drawing engine.  when i clicked on a button, it dispatched a view redraw without triggering the 'mouse out' action so on the next drawing pass, the 'isHovered' flag was still set.  when i activated a second flag (turning off my mic for example) then the notification that's supposed to pop up when you hover over an element showed up, but it showed up without triggering the layout code that dynamically centers it over the element beneath it.  so there are really 2 problems that i'm trying to solve. one that the notification was showing up when the target item wasn't hovered (which i figured out what was going on and fixed). the other, unanswered question, is why the dynamic centering code wasn't being called. (it's done dynamically because the width of the element is calculated via the view engine aka CSS, and is dependent on the length of the text in the element, which is variable. by waiting until the element has been rendered and then using the total rendered bounds to calculate placement you can get it to hover precisely over the midpoint of the anchoring artifact)

here's some guesses: the element did not recenter because the props didn't change -- since the isHovered was flagged to true at both the inception of the item and when the variable that displays the item was switched to true, checking if the 'show' element has been updated misses the case where the show was on at the beginning.

in other words there still is a bug in my code, i've just removed the cases where it can get triggered. is that why it's been bothering me?

who knows.

May 12, 2017

now

i realize now that you deleted my number long ago. i don't know why it never occurred to me until now but having the optionality of contact so available has been part of the process of never letting go. i'm going to delete it, i will, i tell myself, knowing that even if it were to disappear into the ether as it is about to, i swear it, that there will still be your instagram and your twitter feed and all the other ways of contact that exist, in the world.  maybe i should shut things down and block it off but just the thought of severage brings the echo of deep, unmitigated sobs.  the hurt is still there. the hurt is deep. the world is big but it is not so big as one in which to lose you. knowing this gives me some amount of comfort, however painful.  it is deep and it is strong and that is all that i have ever wanted but it is empty and hollow and rings when you touch it with a deep and brassy pitch.

we will all die, some day, darling isn't this a thing that you know, deep in your bones.  why are we marked out to suffer.  why.

the answer lies but in another universe. and i but wish to follow. there is no happiness in the present only deep and unreal, regret.

May 10, 2017

I drank too much last night

I drank too much last night but I finally came out and told someone about the art projects that I've done recently. It's funny to me how easy the project was to do (in Portuguese you'd say to mount): no funding or promotion required, you just do it.

One was an interactive photo exhibit posted to my OKCupid profile. The photos were screenshots of selfies in the Edit mode of Instagram. They didn't get posted to IG, rather just used as a staging ground. I then arranged them in OKC with a caption, and took a video recording flipping through them; I then posted the video of the IG selfie screenshots posted to OKC to IG. Net response to the question posed through the photos on OKC was zero. As an experiment to provoke interesting dialogue I mostly consider it a failure, but as a piece it feels complete and true. At any rate it's published and completed. Titled: What Do You Think Your Face Says?

The other is an on going performance piece that involves some audience participation. I go to stand up comedy every Sunday. It's mostly an exploration of what happens when you lean in and show up at a small community show every week. Are the jokes still funny? I also go because I messaged one of the hosts on OKC and invited him along as my date. He's there every week so it's like a standing appointment with a man that I'm seeing, technically but not actually; his lack of responses to my subsequent online messages have shown him to be definitely uninterested. This piece is evolving, I'm considering inviting friends along, one at a time, to see the show with me, thus subjecting the piece to an expression of what dating in the Internet age is like, irony being that none of them, other than the poor host fellow, will have been sourced from the actual Internet though to him maybe it will look that way.

I call this piece "Dating in the Age of the Internet".

May 8, 2017

superpower

Y'all I have a super power. I don't like to talk about it a lot because it feels rude to tell people about something they probably don't share. Also it's hard to talk about because I don't really know how it works, it just does.

My superpower is that I can get a taxi cab almost any time that I need one. Walking out of an apartment complex, overloaded with dog toys and boom there's a taxi cab unloading right in front of me. New Years Eve in NYC, everyone's complaining about Uber surge pricing so I put out my hand and *boom* there's a fucking cab.

It happened just this past Friday. It was just past midnight in SF and I'm walking around Upper Haight with a friend, complaining about how much public transit late at night in SF is a smelly trash heap of unwashed bums and mourning the fact that my phone died when boom. There but by the grace of my miraculous cab fetching superpowers there's a taxi coming up the street with its light on.

I guess you all should be grateful that Travis Kalamazoo didn't have this power cuz then you'd all be stuck in a world without an app.

There's some limitations to it tho. I only get one chance at the cab. Like Friday, if I had hesitated that cab would have been gone and no new cab would have come in its place. Even the greatest powers have limits. It happened once that I was with a bunch of ppl trying to get somewhere and a cab appears and I'm like yo do we get it and we didn't because they had already requested a car and some people don't take changes in plans lightly so the cab rolled and then there were nothing but occupied cabs on Broadway for 10 minutes straight as we waited for this designated cab to make its way through rush hour traffic to pick us up.

Maybe I'm wrong though maybe every body has this super power it's just unexpressed or unused because they don't have a great need. One way to find out is to try it, like I do, all the time.

May 3, 2017

grafiti

There's something absolutely beautiful about grafitti. Random citizens spend money (or steal) bottles of vibrantly colored liquid, and then wait until dark to create beautiful, cryptic messages and territory markers across their neighborhoods. Sometimes multiple people team up to create huge murals. They risk arrest, discovery by rival gangs, jail time, death.

And for what? These things take time. They take a monstrous amount of planning. They're against the law, largely. High risk so what's the motivation?

Therein lies the beauty. Whatever force, or motivating impulse, to be seen, to express, to make, that is beautiful.

Nothing further.

May 2, 2017

morning thoughts

i told my friend elizabeth that i would mail her a book. i have not mailed the book yet because i'm having trouble letting go of it.  it's one of my absolute favorites - Jane Jacob's Economy of Cities.  I went to the bookstore yesterday though and got them to order me a copy, so it, in theory, should be easier to part with.

thinking about mailing the book, though, it felt irresponsible to send it off without adding a word or note about what about the book makes it so incredibly good.

Jane Jacobs is one of those rare writers that I absolutely admire.  That I want to emulate.  She's a smart visionary who's observant and well spoken.  She's not afraid to speculate or craft alternate theories for reality that are grounded very much in acute, acurate observations of the world we live in.  Her writing reveals how much attention she pays to the world.  It's rare to find an author who's so just flat out observant and curious about the reasons why things work the way they do.

I love Jane because her writing is feminist just by the nature of her being.  Reading Jane is to step into the observant world of a woman; she sees things differently than men because her position in life is not that of a man.  Her work is stronger because of her viewpoint.  She writes like a woman: clearly, richly, observantly, clairvoyantly.

I think Houston is a great place to be and be reading Jane Jacobs.  Houston, in my not unbiased opinion, is one of the most vibrantly exciting metropolises in the United States right now.  It's got growth and verve and the right amount of rooty space and lack of media coverage that really lets weird, quirky, projects and experiments grow into life.  I'm excited for Houston; I'm envious in some small way that you are there and are deeply embedded into the community that I left behind.

I'm sending you Jane because I want to see her come alive in Houston, through you and maybe through the people that you know.  She's right about how cities work, about how communities grow, about what makes a fun and vibrant economy.  It's my hope for Houston that it can be all of these things (more so than it already is!)

That's a lot of hope to put on you; to put on a yellow-jacketed book.  I hope you're forgive my audacity at hoping to make you into a vessel.  There are much broader and grander things in your life than this small book.  If it is useful, please disregard my grand ambitions and know only that I truly, deeply believe that this book is worthwhile, that it is right; that its lens for looking at the world are truly transformative.  Because if she is right about how cities form, and how technology disrupts then we, as people, can make better decisions about how to stay prosperous, how to be a booming and generous economy.



On second thought, maybe this book doesn't need an intro.

us

‪some days I remember the lies you told me and i laugh at both of us‬ ‪at me, for wanting so badly to believe you‬ ‪at you, for having t...