i now have dreads...
though i still don't have any new pictures.

i got spanked, figuratively, by S. last week.

"in your picture on tribe you have short hair, red sheets and a cat. you have long hair, leopard sheets and no cat. that's false advertising!"

the thing is, i'm really bad at taking pictures, or getting people to take them of me -- i tend to just get into what i'm doing and don't think about photos unless i get nailed with a flash. which is fairly often, but it's only occasionally that someone sends me a copy or a link. i have a couple of good pictures in my profile from more recent, but the cow chaps shots tend to get slapped down by TOS pretty quickly, and others are already being used by others as their avatars.

so. i'm gonna try to update my picture soon. no promises though.

as an alternative i guess i can always cut my hair, buy new sheets and abduct a siamese...

was especially thick, sweeping across the city, obliterating a wide swath of the skyline... plowing its way downtown... i could imagine the buildings smashed and pushed off into the bay. off to one side, though, there was a doorway that opened into the heavens, light streaming out (or maybe darkness being sucked in -- like "light"bulbs -- haven't you heard, they are actually shadow absorbers that suck in the dark until they're full and must be replaced)...

that view from our balcony pushed through to last night after trapeze class, looking out at the lights splattered across the bay from a hot bath on K's back porch. and it's so special, to be in that place that exists beyond the time spent as lovers, when your bodies know the comfort of each other and relax into close contact, without needing to pick up a frenzied pace and devour one another. and we always have great bath discussions, while our muscles quietly ease out the tension from the day's aerial work of climbing, pulling and stretching.

i realized however, while i was laughing to her about my recent lack of flirting ability (from the last post), that i felt a vacuum in a place below that; that the emptiness originated somewhere else -- i've been losing my connection with metaphor.

***

i love the ability to "change frames"; to be able to shapeshift my viewpoint into a completely different, movable lens for viewing the world. i learned the skill pretty early; i was brought up by a pack of wild chemists whose altar lay at the steps of the scientific method, and communication was mostly for exchanging facts and ideas, though i had a vivid and zany imagination. i was a "different" kid all around, and it took me a while to learn how to connect with those around me -- and to do it i learned essentially how to leave my body for an instant and step somewhere else -- often "entering" into theirs, to experience the word from their eyes and ears and noses and elbows... but i was also able to stretch into different places, some of which were off in different realities (for example, imagining a place where gravity was bipolor, and it and color were one and the same thing; green objects had immense gravitational pull, while pink would repel), and some of which were unfamiliar landscapes created from different views of the everyday.

metaphor i think is my key to that place, and makes everything possible -- just like mapping from cartesian to polar coordinates makes many trigonometric explorations much faster and easier to complete, metaphors link disparate points into a consistent, malleable whole.* they are what allow newness to originate from the familiar.


***

i think the point of all of this is, i haven't been reading what feeds me. i haven't been exploring exciting new music to find the little hidden doors and tunnels that lie in the quiet passages. and i haven't been having enough (though my life has certainly not been devoid of) discussions that become fuel and construction materials for creating new worlds to interact with, the source of my creativity.

i think i can work with that. it's about time i picked up a new book, new music is always called for, and i have many beautiful and creative friends.


---


* btw, fuck merriam-webster for their dictionary entry for "metaphor":

Text: an elaborate or fanciful way of expressing something <"it's raining cats and dogs" is just a colorful metaphor and not a meteorological announcement>

which would also, it seems, put any old SUV advertisement in the same class as klab.lv/users/honeybee/415871.html

i love the english language -- likely mostly because i'm not especially good with any others (i've always been able to pick up enough to get by when traveling in other countries, but still end up spending a lot of time waving my hands expressively and making odd faces to get an idea across). i spent a great deal of time in college hanging out in coffee shops, drinking caffeine and beer until 2 am, reading novels and jotting on notepads, in sketchbooks, or whatever i happened to find lying around the apartment. fact of the matter, though, none of it was any good.

then somewhere in the middle there the internet became this crazy beast that moved ideas, pictures and sounds around; just about everyone i knew was putting together a home page, making lists of their favorite albums, sharing fuzzy pictures of their hamsters... and i found two things that gave me an outlet where i found i could express myself in a way that was much more creative and less whiny coffee house poetry crap: IRC and email.

IRC was just a silly blow-off and fuck around thing for me at first; i'd dig around mostly in philosophically-oriented chat rooms and just be a total goofball. later i ended up using it as a way to keep the impatient part of my brain busy while working on long coding projects -- kind of a brain release valve.

email, though, brought me something else -- the one-on-one conversations, without needing to make it out to the mailbox and wait an indeterminate time for a response, actually shaped the way i wrote (and still do) immensely. and i discovered some email lists (my favorite being a collaborative dada email list) that allowed for more thought-out interaction than IRC, but still allowed a bunch of people to jump in and play. best of all, though, was a relatively narrow audience. that gave me focus and direction, and allowed all the buzzing thoughts about all the possible things to write about to quiet and a stream of consciousness to emerge from the chaos.

email is still one of my favorite ways of communication, because of that gentle direction, and the flow it offers.

blogging scares the literary fuck out of me.
it's difficult because it's so goddamn open-ended, and i'm a perfectionist, and... well, ok. i get pretty self-conscious about my writing, and it's a lot harder to accept that i can't just show it to one person at a time and burn everything if it's not received well.

fuck it, though. writing's not something you get better at by avoiding new formats.

***

thursday i was feeling kinda bummed; at work we're entering into a bit of a crunch period (OS distribution releases do that every once in a while), my dating life's been... (hmm...) slacking... and the san francisco fall weather is been starting to kick in. so it hit me that piercing my nipples would be a great way to beat the blues before they get a hold.

i had tickets to a premier showing of "good night, and good luck." at 7:30 and had promised one to my roommate, Mary. so even though i rushed home after work and started to get things in order, there just wasn't going to be enough time.

so friday late in the workday i called Leila (one of my favoritest people in the world who i never manage to keep in close contact with, and who i'd played the moral support and beverage bitch roles for when she went in for her first tattoo) and asked if she'd meet up with me at body manipulations. she had to make some calls and delay dinner plans, but she said she would.

i made it down to 16th and guerrero a little early and stopped into a coffee shop to use the ATM, and (hey why not?) pick up a mocha, then continued down to the piercing shop; leila found me on the way.

at this point, i'd like to offer to anyone with similar plans: don't drink coffee before you go. coffee jitters make it hard to stay still when you're getting marked and poked with a sharp needle.

the piercing itself actually went fine, although as you might expect, having a hole put in your nipples, at least in my case, HURTS LIKE A MOTHERFUCKER. additionally, while the piercer was able to do my first nipple with forceps to get things done quickly and well aligned, i've got super small nipples, and she wasn't able to get a good grip on the second one, and had to do it freehanded -- which was ok, but instead of it being OWOWOW ok we're done, it was OWOWOW uh OWFUCK ok is that...? OW ok now we're done.

(i gotta give it to Carrie though; she did a really good job & i'd certainly recommend her).

Leila and i stopped for some indian food to celebrate, then she left to catch up with some friends; i decided to stay in and nurse my nipples for the evening.

***

saturday i went out running some errands, bouncing around the upper haight, stopped into work for a few hours (that crunch thing again) and then came home just in time for dinner with Rena and Maer. we had soup, drank a bit of wine, and then went out to the synergenesis party at cellspace. i'll leave out details, but it was a really fun event (though i didn't know as many people as i seem to at most cellspace events; seems they've had to be much more careful about capacity, so tons of people were turned away at the door). finally crashed out around 7.

***

sunday i stopped into work for a few hours, then off to decompression around 4:30. happily the woman at the ticket booth was understanding of my stopping in at work and not having a chance to change before arriving at the party (don't exactly know how the co-workers would respond to me showing up in the cow chaps, don't exactly want to find out). found my way to the nexus bus for the costume change, and promptly lost my cell phone.

it was a really fun party, and i saw tons of people that i love... but i realized -- i've almost totally and completely forgotten how to flirt.

i don't know how or when it happened. but it seems like not so long ago, it'd just flow (i mean, i'm often a bit shy, sure, but generally warm up well)... there in the middle of decompression, with so many beautiful playful people, it was obvious to me that i've let the art escape me -- which isn't to say i didn't have fantastic interactions -- i totally did; i had a blast, and loved spending time with friends and meeting new people. but none of that sweet fun silly playful charged banter.

so, has this happened to anyone else? anyone have tips on waking up the flirtation center of the brain?

***

(after decompression, i got a ride home and crashed out hard; after such a weekend, it took a number of false starts to pull my sorry ass out of bed, but somehow made it through my monday).

it's always a bit of a jolt to my system to come back to work on mondays and squish my brain back into kernel hacking mode (i work for a group that does linux clustering software). today's requiring even more squish than usual.

it was a good weekend.

friday night i decided to step out of my project focus and let that part of my mind have a bit of a rest; went with Kat (close friend / trapeze partner) to see "eat cake in the bathroom" / "skooled" at counterpulse, which i really enjoyed. the aerial bits especially in "eat cake" looked absolutely fun, the cast was very cute and fun to watch, the costumes were very very silly and -- while not super focused -- some great dialogue and physical humour. it also got me thinking a lot more about doing rope work (and possibly actually installing a rope in my apartment; the ceilings are decently high, just not sure if there are any decent beams in my ceiling for mounting).

Kat was heading to a party in the east bay, so i went home, had a few G&T's and a bit later found my way to 1015.

1015 has gotten better over the past few years, but it's still not a place i generally choose if there's anything else going on, unless i personally know some of the DJ's spinning on a given night and wanna give my support. friday there just wasn't anything else i knew of going on. i didn't stay too long.


***


saturday, late morning, squat n gobble for breakfast, and after a bit off to the love parade. it was better than i'd expected, really -- and i found jens peter's bus on my way in, and hung out with the crew there (hadn't realized how much i'd missed spending time with them) for most of the day. ran into a number of people i haven't seen in quite a while; prudence, shag, raj, among others. and found a bunch of folks from nexus, the crew i camped with at burningman.

later we went to (a different) tim's house, downed some thai food and increased levels of intoxication. then cabbed it out to the evil breaks party.

it was *packed*. we almost ended up leaving for another party, cuz there were 10 of us and they'd shut down the door until some of the crowd cleared out. it was nice to see pyrokitten and kevin, and grig, and a few more random people from different worlds there...

the party was hot, stuffy and it was hard to move through the crowd, but the dark breaks were fantastic. after a while though, i was feeling pretty claustrophobic, and it seems that a few friends were feeling the same way, so 4 of us ended up leaving. i'd been hoping to catch the sunrise over the bay, but realized when we got out that it was only 3, and my companions were mostly fading by the minute. i got out of the cab with N. (it turns out she only lives about a block from me) and had to tell her as i walked her to her door that i'd developed a pretty big crush.

of course, it turns out that she's somewhat involved with Tim #1 (which hadn't been quite obvious before). but it was still really nice to feel that crushy energy and the aliveness that comes with it, even if it doesn't go anywhere.

i stayed up for a while talking with mary. i have some of the best fecking roommates on the planet.


***

sunday, i woke up late, my body telling me that it was very important that i fill it with large amounts of fat and salt. so rena and i ended up heading down to the pork store for breakfast. it was wonderful.

i caught a nap later, and then kicked a bit back into project space, working on an LCD controller circuit design

<excessivegeek>

i've got some acx705akm Sony color LCD modules that are stellar; had 'em for about a year, and have yet to integrate them into any designs, because they don't have integrated controllers, and the market-available controllers are BGA and a pain in the ass to work with (and from some basic searching super hard to find in single quantities). and this makes for the perfect opportunity to learn VHDL. so far simulations look pretty good; i've got the HSYNC and VSYNC bits done, some basic color test pattern generation bits, and the powerup/powerdown signal sequencing stuff. just need to finish the clock generation, test the synthesized version, and then replace the color test pattern bits with SRAM access bits. i'm actually pretty surprised with how easy VHDL is, although i'm sure it'll be a while before i learn how to decently optimize designs...

</excessivegeek>

i overheard Mark (bazantarman)'s voice in the kitchen, and came out to visit (i've really missed Mark since he, then i, moved out of IK). Wendy and Gene stopped by a bit later, we had some pretty massive nachos, and talked about horoscopes, faith, human nature, ... standard philosophical fare, but still always fun to kick around with friends.

everyone else left, and rena and i ended up staying up until 2:30 or so talking about childhood, crushes, friends, plans for dinners, ... (did i mention i have the best fecking roomates?)

***

this morning, up about 8:30 (usually don't really need to get moving until about an hour later) to get to the DMV to finally get my true real motorcycle license. appointments really are key to keep from floating around like a disembodied soul for a few hours; everything went pretty smoothly until i got to work and looked through the paperwork to find that somehow along the way i'd picked up a "corrective lens" restriction.

i don't wear glasses/contacts and have 20/20 vision. sigh. so looks like i'm going to be a disembodied soul after all -- they don't have appointments open until at least thursday, and those ones are at pretty awful times.