self express express

a few things.

Things.

You know how sometimes Things keep coming across your view of the world? We call them coincidences but they always feel like an inevitable amount of magic.

Like that odd fascination with seeing the clock, once a day, lined up as 12:34 and then you email me and the timestamp receipt is that, just

12:34.

Or how I get into a weird, random obsessive hole about a particular elliptic curve thing, like really go superficially obsessive, only to see it pop up again and again later when following an intuition about what's going to be on the table at the lightning summit next week. Bam. Recognition, in the most small of random ways.

Or how all those, my, personality tests say "sexual". Scorpio the house of fantasy and sexual energy, enneagram two with a three wing, sexual variant.

What does it mean?

It's a struggle to see yourself.

The thing I like most about personality tests isn't so much what it says about me, rather, I love the foiling that it provides. The ability to see other people, with my own possible blindspots pointed out, a template to hold up and see the edges through. They're fun in the aggregate, in the lines, in the spaces between you and other people that they create or reveal.

It's not 'other people' in the conjunctive though, other people in the specific, the interactional. Talking to someone and realizing how the lines of difference move through a conversation, through an outlook, a perspective. Where the branches lie, between you and I, and where they're the same and how where you end up at the end of that conversation is a much different place than where you started out and where you would have ended up on your own.

Is that a sexual thing, to be into finding branching lines of difference? Into digging into the ins and the minutiae of existence, at the boundary lines between people?

Something in this interpretation lends itself to communality, to interaction. Can you be sexual in a box, population one? You can logic in a box, you can stoic in a box, you can fantasy in a box, sure, but can you sexual in a box?

Can you? Can you?

And then Reading through 'other people's' blog posts looking for the difference. The spark, the feeling, the what is it that there is here that there is not elsewhere. Because,

there is a thing.

There is a thing here that stands to be delineated and wondering, to myself:

Does 'sexual' define the difference?

vittgenstein

i feel this strange pull toward wittgenstein, an increasing curiosity, largely inspired by the inability to find the book of his that i bought in portland earlier this year.

i need to read wittgenstein.  i know nothing about wittgenstein, only that i must read him. i must read him, i must. i know that he tweeted. i know that he has only one full book. i know that he is quoted on the wikipedia article for occam's razor.

i have so many books to read. so many blog posts to write. but i need to know this man. i need to know what he thought.

i need to know why i can't stop thinking about him.

birthdays and such

I'm going to be an aunt (soon!) and I've been getting high a lot more lately and somehow these two things converged on birthdays and family and I realized that birthdays are a celebration of a new person joining the family and

I think to fully appreciate how novel this is you have to understand how much I've always (always!) struggled with what my birthday meant, exactly. I have a weird relationship with birthdays, my own especially. It's never felt entirely healthy. The weirdness isn't necessarily related to aging (though truthfully I do try to hide my age from co-workers and professional people now because other people's ageism isn't something I want to have to deal with).  I am nebulous number of years old!

I mean, you can celebrate a birthday without a number. The number has never been that important to me. I usually tell myself that I'm older than I actually am.  I've done this since I was 8 or 9, at least, if not earlier. This is mostly because I was the second child and there's always your older sibling there, doing the things that you're 'not old enough' for yet. It's so easy to lie to yourself, to say that you're older. When I was 25, I told myself I was 27. At 28 I was already 30.  Now I'm 30 for real, in clock time, and I don't even know what age is any more. I know I'm young, but not as young as I used to be.

No, my problem with birthdays was always with what it meant, exactly. Why it was special. Was I special? Did it make me a special person that day? But why? I knew what time I was born, and one year, in 3rd grade, waited with anticipation for the clock to hit the time (13:13). When the moment arrived, I stood up on my chair and announced it's my birthday!

My teacher told me to sit down.

Some people wear crowns on their birthdays and have whole weeks where they treat themselves to cake and self-indulgence. As I've gotten older, I hide my birthday now. Jealously guarding the actual date and time like a well-kept secret that I secretly wish someone else would also remember.

One year, in college, I opened up a bar tab for a bunch of friends and paid for everyone to get drunk at my expense at a fancy cocktail place in downtown Austin.  Being small-time wealthy for a college student was fun because I could do things like that but in terms of meaning, it didn't mean anything. I haven't done it again.

What is a birthday? Why do we celebrate them? In America, the land of the individual, they seem, at least in the communities I grew up on, focused on the individual. A celebration of their existence. But now, that my sister is pregnant and I'm about to see a birthday happen, in almost real-time, I've realized that birthdays aren't about the individual. They don't make sense as an individual's celebration, because it isn't something for you, personally, to celebrate. It's a celebration of the day that you became family. That you gained a family, that a family welcomed a new member.

Honestly, I'd never really understood wedding celebrations before now either. But it makes sense. There's only a few times that a family gains a new member. Families, for better or worse, really are secret societies with very strict member requirements. Birthdays are your initiation into the clan, so are weddings.  I see people talk a lot about how family is the friends that you make and the community that you build, and I do believe that's true but how do you celebrate 'births' in that family? Do you? You probably do, but just not in a way that any one explicitly recognizes. Do you change your birthdate, when you create a new family?

So why celebrate your birthday with friends, when the real celebration should be with your family? Maybe that's how we bridge the gap between birth family and made family -- we celebrate our birthdate with the people that we see as our present family. And that is special, you know.

Killing Your Babies

I've been wanting to write an Erlang serial port library for a very very long time now.  I've probably talked about it, at this point, more than it will take me to *actually* write the thing.  But I've been stymied (forever it feels like) by mental blocks and knowledge-gap blocks and the general dis-ease of not knowing where to begin.

I was fortunate enough to be able to attend !!con this past Sunday.  (!!con is a weekend conference that features short, 10 minute talks on things you find fascinating in programming.)  Watching people talk about the things in programming that they had been geeking out about lately made me start thinking about what it was that I wanted to present about next year.  And I realized it was the serial port project I've been avoiding for years now.

So today, I booted up an AWS instance and downloaded the source tree and started compiling the Debian sources. One of the current Recurse Center batchees stopped by to say hello, and I outright asked them if they knew anything about kernel modules -- turns out the answer was very much yes!

In less than 20 minutes we had a "hello world" working kernel module! Pris (the Recurser who was helping out) asked me what it was that I was trying to do with a kernel module -- and when I explained the bigger project (getting Erlang interop-ing with C code), Pris explained that since I was using serial, there was no need to write a kernel module -- I could just write "plain" C code as my driver for an Erlang API.  And actually, a project that does exactly this already exist, and if I wanted to I could probably just use them.

Boy do I feel silly for telling so many people about how I was going to write a kernel module.  And even more silly for avoiding setting up a VM that could do kernel things on it. (I thought it would be hard!)

I'm not as motivated to write all this code as I was, but I might do it anyway because I am still curious about how the serial API works.

I've been carrying this project idea around with me for such a long time; it's nice to have killed so many hangups and misconceptions about the amount of work that would be required all in one go.  This project seems so much more tractable now.  More importantly, it's amazing how much mental energy has been freed up from worrying about how hard this would be to finish, or if it would even ever be finished.  Guilt and unfulfilled desire finally deflated into an actual, tangible body of work that I know how to start.  Or not, since it kind of already exists.

I just wish I hadn't deleted all that Erlang code a few weeks back.  Oh well. :)

Best chips ever.

I found what I'm giving away for Halloween!  Maybe. If I can keep my hands off them.

Degas' Obsession - MASP II

Edgar Degas was obsessed with the female form. This much was obvious just from the few works that they had from him at MASP. I would go further and say that more specifically, Edgar Degas was obsessed with the form of the female back.

Bending, leaning women fill Degas' frames, each one showing off a brilliant, muscular back. The focal point, they are often offset by heavy outlines, low cut ballerina leotards, or illuminated by bright colors. The faces of his subjects are often positioned away from the artist, with unfocused gazes or looking into the distance. Like all men with obsessions, he's not interested in the personailities of his subjects, but merely the object of his obsession: the various forms that a female back can take.

Some of his paintings do not show a woman's back, but her bosom. Though in these images the women are typically in the act of bending over or down, thrusting out their chests as they do. One could use these to question my hypothesis, claiming that he was just as obsessed with bosoms, as when a chest is thrust out in this manner it shows off these assets as well, so to speak. I acknowledge this interpretation, but would suggest that the manner in which the women are pushing out their bosoms and leaning down is, in fact, the best way to display a human back, adding muscle definition as you extend out the spinal column. It's a lot like bending over in a yoga sun saluation - you're extending and working out your back muscles by pushing your scapula forward and pulling your shoulder blades back. Degas paints women in this manner because it's merely another perspective of a woman's back - that from the front. Like a burlesque dancer that merely hints at what's under her corset, Degas' front facing subjects are seductive suggestions of what they would look like from behind.

So why ballerinas and bathing women? Because ballerinas and women in the act of bending over to wash are the few or only examples in Degas' time that you would have of women in the act of displaying their backs. Ballerinas, like modern yogis, bend and extend their backs, displaying them in leotards with low cut backs that would have been hard to find in other situations. Similarly, women who are seated and washing their feet are the best exposition of a woman's naked back.

No one at MASP seems to have figured this out - in their exhibition on Obsessão da Forma, his sculpture of woman bathing was positioned so that we could see her front bent over a wash basin: her detailed, perfectly scuplted back was facing away from the viewer, towards the center of the collection of sculptures.

What do you think?

Humans repeat themselves

It's true. We're not as original as we like to think that we are. This fact pursues me constantly, often with debilitating effects.

Understanding that it is something that I am constantly trying to get away from, it should come as no surprise that I saw the theme of repetition in Snow Crash. (Yes, I finally got around to reading it. What one 5 hour search of every bookstore in the Atlanta Airport was unable to satisfy was finally encountered hundreds of miles away in an Arkansas library.)

The 'discovery', however, that I have made about human beings is that we are utterly and inescapably captivated by new technologies. The creation of a new form of expressing or transmitting information is particularly susceptible to inspire new forms of ridiculousness and quasi-religious devotion.

We, humans, believe that knowledge is power. We, as humans, are seduced by anything powerful (or apparently powerful). Therefore, it makes sense that we would be seduced by the means of transmitting information.

What I'm (slowly and grandiosely) getting to, is that the creation of the written language and the religious devotion and veneration that the written alphabet created in humans (in the alphabet's early creation, that is) can be paralleled with our current fascination with the internet and the "collective consciousness" that search engines produce.

What's Snow Crash have to do with any of this? Snow Crash centers on the Sumerians, a culture (tribe, clan?) of people from the BCs that created one of the first alphabets. It wasn't the alphabest, but they managed to communicate any sort of information via clay tablets.

But they didn't just write things down: they wrote on the bricks they used to build, they wrote down incantations that they believed had mystical powers - they believed that words, especially the written word, had some magical power. That words were able to communicate certain things to the brain and to reach some place that other means of conversation (I'm guessing the visual or auditory sort?) were not able.

Couple this Sumerian alphabet-worship with our current fascination with Google or anything "computer intelligent", and my point begins to become clear. (Goodness, i"m bad at laying things out. They should all just be self evident!)

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/09/opinion/09lanier.html?_r=1&th&emc=th

What does Sumerian obsession with alphabest and our current day obsession with social media and the hivemind have to do with each other? Nothing, other than the fact that they're merely humans doing what we always do - finding awe in the power of knowledge and our tendency to edify and deify that knowledge just for knowledge's sake.

Weird. Slightly obvious. Still cool.

sexual parity, Tucker Max and the deconstruction of the social myth

i have recently become mildly obsessed with gender roles and sexuality. my favorite book to date on the issue: tucker max's i hope they serve beer in hell. definitely a great first-hand account of the male perspective of sexual relationships in the twenty first century.

some explanation of the tucker max character is in order. tucker max bangs chicks. tucker max does not bang the most beautiful chicks (or usually not, from what i can tell). tucker max tries, at all costs, to avoid 'ugly' chicks. tucker max gets drunk a lot. tucker max is known by his friends for his comedic aptitude, typically which is created by being the loudest, most aggressive person involved in a conversation. or yelling match, take your pick. tucker max considers himself to pertain to the top 5% of intellectuals. in the book, no exact numbers are given, but tucker max thinks that tucker max is one smart cookie. (note: this commentary on tucker max's intellectual prowess is not intended to make a judgement or assessment of the actual intellect of tucker max, in fact i would argue that actual intellect is of far less import than the perception of our own intelligence that we hold. merely, i hope only to illustrate the 'mental model', so to speak, of the Mr. Max persona, specifically as he views himself.) from what i can gather, tucker max has a retinue of girls who consider him to be available for 'sexual' adventures whenever.

tucker max would call himself a macho. mysogynist, i don't know. nor do i really care. point is, tucker max is a male who enjoys sex with women.

so it's funny, when he comes to the realization at one point that one of the girls from his regular 'retinue' (my word, not his), could in fact be doing the same thing he does with girls. what does he do when discovers the potential for double dealing with women? what tucker max does: gets drunk. but the drunk mess that tucker max describes in this passage is not the tucker max of reckless abandon, but a man who is struggling to deal with the implications of gender equity. women may use men as much as they use us. it's a fair trade. and this realization, for tucker max, renders him incapable of enjoying it. to quote the man himself: "My worldview was immediately and permanently altered. It was like the first time you turn on a black light in a hotel room and see cum stains covering every surface: for better or for worse, your world is never the same."

this experience officially, from my analysis, marks the creation a jaded being. meaning, specifically, that the pleasure and excitement tucker found in conquering the unknown women he met in bars became less of a pleasure and more of a self-serving habit. not that his previous actions were not in the least self-serving, but they weren't a habit. they were an adventure, a tryst. "[W]omen were doing the same thing to me that I was doing to them, except I didn't even know they were doing it. For the entirety of my life up to that point I thought I had the upper hand, that I was the player and not the playee when in fact, I was possibly just another chump. The illusion of control was shattered." Knowing that he was just in actor in a game, being acted upon as well as acting upon others, took away the mystery of the hunt.

feminine equality destroys the myth of the chase. and as tucker max can attest to, the loss of that "illusion of control" is devastating to the male psyche, at least in matters of sexual games.

is there a road out of this world of equity that is equitable? can we reinstate mystery without reinstating gender roles? were gender roles ever such a thing to be banished in the first place, or was it necessary to deconstruct them before we could have mutual respect at a societal level? or is what tucker max experienced something that every man and woman will eventually have to come to accept?

tucker doesn't seem to think that it should. in the post script to his realization, he urges his fellow male readers not to dwell on this. "Don't think about this for too long fellas. ... Just move on." Not that Tucker can return to his innocence, but he wishes that he can bury it under the rug. [One could argue with Tucker as to the wisdom of sharing this revelation with his readers (why destroy the illusion of others?), but concealing this story would stray from tucker max's tell all philosophy of revealing the gritty details of his life to his audience.] To hear him tell it, it seems that he is recommending we all return to the state of ignorant bliss. But can we ever really return back to a point of unknowing?

the conclusion that i draw from tucker max's experience is that the sexual freedom of women has, via the destruction of the masculine myth of control, increased the occurrence of jadedness in our culture.

we know what pleasure is. we are aware of pain. we are aware that we are only one out of millions, that the women that we pursue (or men) are using us as much as we are using them. thanks to the internet, advances in microbiology, neuroscience, and physics, and the increasing permissiveness of our society, we are slowly destroying the mystery that remains for us to uncover. our destruction of myths, not only in the realms of gender, but in all aspects of our construction of reality.

i keep flashing back to a book i read while in 7th grade about a young brain damaged girl that is transferred into the body of a monkey. (i can't find it on google). rendered a spectator to the fate of her species, she watches as human civilization breaks down and destroys itself. in final acts of desperation, droves of humans would link hands and walk into the sea. eventually, the protagonist's mother joins one of these sea-faring expeditions.

is jaded merely the first stop on our train to societal despair? what kind of extremism becomes permissible when the mystery is gone? what is our quest to destroy mystery and myths doing to our psyche? how does this affect our ability to find satisfaction in our daily lives?