Let's Not Shit Ourselves (To Love And To Be Loved)

I spent most of the day over in New Haven at Chris and Aleksandra's.

On my way home, I was listening to Lifted Or The Story Is In The Soil, Keep Your Ear To The Ground.

Let's get one thing out of the way - I think Conor Oberst is an absolutely brilliant man.  Maybe I identify with Bright Eyes because I started listening to them on a very, very formative couple of days in my life traveling alone from Illinois to Connecticut over 19 hours in November of 2005.  I listened to Digital Ash In A Digital Urn and I'm Wide Awake It's Morning repeatedly; for the entire trip, as I recall.

Hopefully you can appreciate that this music strikes a chord with me.

But tonight as I was returning to Oxford from New Haven, I was listening to the last track on the album, Let's Not Shit Ourselves (To Love And To Be Loved), which is a long, epically beautiful, exultant, scream of defiance in the face of everything that sucks in the world.  Tonight it just hit me, and reminded me of all the reasons why I've always just wanted to sing at the top of my lungs and create music.  And I had this moment where I just felt to my core that that's what I ought to be doing.  And what I'm not quite doing.  And what I'm not quite pursuing.  Right then I found myself - 15 seconds left to the song - suddenly crying my eyes out as I drove into my parents' driveway.  I couldn't even tell why, exactly.  Maybe for loss of time, or regret, or beauty, or maybe just for the sudden clarity.  Or maybe hope that I still have a chance to do what I really want to be doing.  I was just... sorta overwhelmed.

Tonight I want to sing, and I'm writing this so that I'll remember it.  I want to scream bloody defiance and joy at a world which, often, seems intent on presuming the worst of itself.  I want to bring our faults to the light so we can see them for what they are.

That's what I want deep down.  I want to sing - literally and metaphorically.

Everyone has an opinion.

My brother and I watched Untitled last night.  It was an excellent film, but there was one quote that stuck out to me, made by the aging composer Morton Cabot (played by Ben Hammer).  It was - intentionally and quite brilliantly - the only line of dialogue from the entire movie worth taking to heart.  I had to search around for the exact words.

Mr. Cabot was attending a performance of one of his own pieces, and some jackass came up to him and started art-snobbing, telling him how much he disliked it.  After shooing the guy away negligently, Cabot states, "Everyone has an opinion.  An artist must find meaning... in the process."  That ellipsis folds away some other stuff, but that's the gist.  And it's as good a piece of advice as you're going to hear.  And something I think I'd do well to take to heart.

I'm very concerned with perception, and always have been.  I think I ought to be a little more concerned with my own meaning in things.  Everything exists in a context, and it's the interplay between that context and someone's work which we all tend to find exciting.  That said, context and opinion are fickle, and if you rely on them to lend meaning to things you've created, one, it seems less likely that you're producing something endowed with grand ideas, and two, you're also likely to be disappointed most of the time.  Because most people won't like what you do, or will simply be indifferent.

So find meaning in the process.  Of life, of creation, of travel, of music, whatever.  You'll be happier for the effort.

Tour De Grave and the Tour De Front Door Locking Mechanisms That Don't Function

This morning was the Tour De Grave through Cambridge, Somerville, Arlington, Medford, and Charlestown.  It was a bit chilly, but a lovely ride overall.  I think we visited maybe... 10 burying grounds and cemeteries?  Something like that.  It was a good twenty mile ride, I think.  I brought trail mix which included candy corn.  I'm quite happy about this.

After the Tour, Daniel and I went to The Border Cafe in Harvard Square to stuff our faces with calories.  It was absolutely delicious.  The margarita helped.  Upon leaving the Border, I biked myself home around 4:30 or so, stumbled around for a few, and then took a nap until 6:00 PM.  I was awoken by my downstairs neighbor blasting shitty techno/dance.

Around 6:45, I finally got ahold of my brother, and went out to meet him at the Fort Point Arts Community Gallery down by the waterfront, where he and Zack were hanging their show.  They'd apparently been there all day, and by the time I got there, it was looking great.  When they finished up, we got everything out to the car, locked the gallery, and attempted to go lock the door to the building itself.

... This is when the problem started.  The damn key just wouldn't lock the door.  It fit in the lock, it turned, but... nothing happened.  We called the building management company several times and they gave us the run around.  We talked to a few tenants who happened to be coming or going, and their keys wouldn't lock it either.  Eventually, we told the maintenance people (who still hadn't shown up), that we had to leave, and they finally took responsibility.

Later, as we were having dinner and Sapporo in Chinatown, the maintenance dude called my brother back and quizzed him about the door, to which he repeated everything and said, "And I'm not there anymore."  To which the guy was like, "But... I'm not there either!"  To which my brother pointed out that he should probably remedy that, given that it's his damn building.  The guy eventually resigned himself to shutting off Three's Company and hauling himself down to the building.  Presumably.

It's been a long, but great day, over all.  Sleep time.

Organization and Role Models, of a sort

I spent the better part of this morning/afternoon kinda... organizing.  And doing laundry.

I started writing down thoughts on my whiteboard about what I'd like to be doing with my time.  Like... if I could do anything.  Which, I guess, I can.  I have a color system:

- Orange: Major goals
- Green: Chores
- Blue: Scheduled events/appointments
- Brown: Things standing in the way of orange items.
- Red: For the love of God, do this now.

The colors - save red - are more or less arbitrary, but help me keep it all straight in my head.

It seems useful to throw the orange items up on the board and see if they stick.  It's hard to say until I spend some time considering them as my goals.

This evening, I biked down to JP with Daniel, where we met up with Annalisa and Jeff for dinner at... Wonderspice?  Was that the name?  Tasty foods, excellent company.  Following that, we all pedaled our way over to Bikes Not Bombs, for a presentation by Russ and Laura of the Path Less Pedaled (http://pathlesspedaled.com).  Really inspiring.  As a result - and I had been thinking this before, but didn't really realize it was a "goal" - I'm going to be adding another orange item to my list:

- Shed excess objects.

I really have too much crap in my life, and I really don't need most of it. I think there's many things that, perhaps, I go store at my parents' house rather than sell off, but I'd really like to simplify this mess.  I'd like to get to the point where everything that I bother to own has a clear purpose.  I'm not going to get to the point where I can just hop on a bike with my four panniers of stuff and take off, but I could at least stand to get to the point where I can walk through my apartment without tripping over something.

Something to think about.

Thursday run

Went for a short run this morning around Davis/Porter.  Wasn't really feeling in a groove, but am glad I got out anyway.  Run was approximately 2.8 miles, with a short walk through Porter in the middle somewhere.

The route looked like this:

Try'n beat the rain

I went over to Noteflight land today for a few hours this morning.  I think I accidentally turned off my alarm, as I didn't wake up until 9:10 or so, and had to hustle to get there at 10:00.  Ended up walking in the door at 10:09 (I looked at my watch).  Not bad, given that I'd been asleep an hour earlier.

Around 2:00 PM, after some tasty Lemon Grass Tofu from Thailand Cafe, I picked up my stuff and biked myself home along a meandering route through Cambridgeport.  Once home, I spent some more time on a few Noteflightly things, and then... reactivated my World of Warcraft account for a bit of relaxation.

Bwahaha.

Good times.  Jason and I wandered around for a while tonight.  It really is a pretty relaxing, well made game.  As always, I can't imagine that I'll be playing it all that often, but it's fun to come back to sometimes.

Otherwise, a pretty uneventful day.  Not bad.

Dado time?

So.

I woke up wicked late today, after attempting to wake up around 8:00 AM and failing miserably.  I woke up, read a chapter from the second book of David Eddings' Mallorean, and then went back to sleep until 10:30 listening to the White Stripes' Icky Thump while a crew was busy putting a new roof on the apartment building right over my head.

It wasn't the most restful sleep, but it was really, really comfortable.  Ahh, free time.

So around 12:30 I finally made it out of the apartment and rode myself down here to Dado-land.  There was coffee.  There is currently a sandwich.  There was some desktop cleaning.  Funny how that rarely involves cleaning a physical object anymore.

Man, tasty sandwich.

And now what is there, you might ask?  It's okay.  Don't feel bad; I've been getting that question constantly for the past two months or so.

And it's a good question.  What is there now, anyway?

I've got a few things on my mind, none of which have manifested themselves into a concerted effort yet.

Is it okay that I'm still thinking of this as a staycation?  I wonder how long it'll be before staycation finds its way into the dictionary.  I wonder how long it'll be before I stop thinking of this as a break.

I've been saying for a while now that I want to go back and learn - more thoroughly - many of the things that I was supposed to have gotten awesome at over the past two years of taking classes and lessons at NEC.  If you didn't know, I'm not taking any classes this year, despite deciding that I wasn't going to be working.  One might think taking more classes might make sense, given the lack of employment.  But that wasn't really the point.  The point was to free myself up to figure out what's important without making any assumptions about it before I had a chance to actually do it.

Apparently there's a lot of social stuff that's really important, because I've found that since I left Allurent, I've got more events on my plate (read: whiteboard) than ever before.  Where does all this stuff come from that it springs, fully formed, into being just in time to give me something to do almost every day?

So I'm hoping that I can start to wrangle my thoughts into a coherent plan in the coming weeks, amidst all this other stuffage.

For now, though, here I am at 3:00 PM on a Tuesday, chilling in Dado with a late lunch and all these other funny, remote and/or non-9-to-5 people.

Whew.  Feels good, so far.  Now to make it feel like it makes sense.