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Self-Portrait Tuesday

There is such a thing as self-portrait tuesday. I didn’t make it up as an excuse to post “pix” of me posing for a silly internet contest that a friend interrupted and made cooler and more posse-like. I put this up here, cause, well, I ain’t gonna look this good forever. Tomorrow I turn twenty-three.

Twenty-three. Nothing important. Hump number. Odd, not even. Obstinately indivisible by anything but itself and one. Not between anything; just older. Twenty-three Skidoo. Psalm 23. Michael Jordan. The human genome and its 23 pairs. In mathematics, “The Birthday Paradox” — given a group of 23 or more randomly chosen people, the probability is more than 50% that at least two of them will have the same birthday (ask my good friend Emily). On a standard QWERTY keyboard, the 23rd letter W is right below and between 2 and 3. Alright, alright, this’s just getting ridiculous.

Twenty-three: not as boring as I thought. I might even have fun this year.

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Returning Books

I’m finished. Done for. Through.

More Than Human was a good book. I can understand why it came recommended. Mating Mind, while also a good book (I’m guessing) did not come as a recommendation. It came as a lucky charm. I didn’t read it all the way through, cause that book already gave me what I needed a long while ago. And it did that by granting me just enough smarts and insight to influence human events.

Whoa… wait, what? That’s right—influence human events. Not Machiavellian machinations, but memes between me and she-who-knows. Powerful transmissions between us transmuted into something else. Our brains interfaced on a level commensurate with the venerable 28.8 modem at first, and then we upgraded to wireless ISDN. Which—granted—isn’t the best service but if you live in Belize who’s going to complain? This’d be fine if I could read her blog (and by blog I mean mind) across town. But wireless service isn’t that great in Belize.

To stretch an already thin metaphor across a perilously dumb (Central American?) chasm, we file-shared. We traded ideas. We’d sit around going “Oh, have you heard of this?” “Do you know about that?” “How about other thing?” It got to the point where our… our “pings” were just… what’s true computer jargon for ‘clogging up the hard drive till you just really have to defrag cause you’re unwilling to delete all those really good, but infrequently-listened-to electronic/ambient tracks?’ That. We had that. Then I started reading “The Mating Mind,” synthesized it with my own experience, and wrote out what is I daresay a rather entertaining little essay. Proud of that.

Call it a confirmation bias, but it changed the whole tone and our… our talking, it took on a different character. Less communicating and more communication. Actually received a genuine transmission in the form of a book—sure you could guess which one by now. And I read it. And I’m done with it. I liked it, I liked what it said about the person on the other end of the line, but it didn’t change the fact that nowadays me and she-who-knows aren’t exactly practicing telegraph operators. So now I’m done, and now what?

Later today I’m returning the Mating Mind back to the library whence it luckily found me. Gluttony is a vice, you know… even for information. And the other book? Well, haven’t figured that out yet. But I’ve been getting an idea. Not on the internet, not in science fiction books loaned to you by nerdy girls, is anybody familiar with real psychic transmissions?

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Consu-totha-mating

Yo! Traffic spike. You gotta know, I seen a lotta people be comin’ here lately from old Consumating.com. Who’s gonna say why. I mean, I could. I could tell all y’all. I could if I wanted fosho.

And why don’t I? Mystery and subtlety aren’t my obsessions lately. I’ve better things to figure out. Makeouts. Masculine identity. Communal living. City living. Financial deterrents. Financial dependence. Desire. Purpose. Choice. Path. Consumating.

One of these things is not like the other…

Consumating.com is a website. The same as MySpace, but tucked away and with a better crowd. No hustlers or 15 year-olds trying to get in. These people don’t dig the scene but they love the music. They’re internet locals. They live there and they know the place. They’ll flirt with you at two o’clock in the morning same as they would at two in the afternoon. The games are good, and the kissing’s great. Conversation’s even better. It’s the bar I never had growing up.

But then again I never been to a bar with a point system. Up front, strait up, above the table, not by the way, point system. Here’s how it works (like you don’t know): two points each thumbs up, one less every thumb down. Gladiatorial life and death has never been so simple. Your profile is there for all to look at (and it looks like everyone’s—no HTML soup to serve your friends). It’s got pictures, it’s got space for a witty l’il quote. So far it’s MySpace without the ugly. But instead of general movies music television schools businesses boring boring you go ahead and outright LABEL yourself with some web2.0y tags. Me, I’m tagged memetics, dinosaurs, pixel_fonts, and abandoned_buildings. I like ’em, and that’s who I am. And the “About Me” section? Who you’d really like to meet? All bullcrap anyway. He who gets his whole personality across when asked those questions doesn’t deserve to be met. An ingenious solution: don’t ask dumb questions; try interesting ones. More opportunities to be clever than you can shake on a pogo stick… That a pogo stick bounces at… That you can bounce a pogo stick to shake… Well, it doesn’t come if you force it.

The point is points. You get ’em when people like you’re answers, when they like your photos, when they like you. You collect points and get ranked against everybody else. Life or death. Being clever is fun. Taking jiveass pictures is fun. Flirting, notepasssing, and rating strangers is fun. Getting more popular is a job—an addictive job.

I wanna be cool like all the other cool people. I don’t wanna play SEO and figure what attitudes provide the most ROI. I wanna kill time, not waste it. I wanna attend Secret Santa consu-meetings and meet worthy people from another world, give worthwhile presents and get worthwhile kisses. But you know what else? I wanna break the triple digits. In the past month I’ve doubled my points. I wanna break 1000th place.

So why couldn’t I just say that up front? I linked to my own page from Consumating. And I did it because it’d be fun, sure. But I did it for points too.

Subtlety can be good. You don’t just walk up and ask a fella for a beer, you say hi and give an interesting perspective and make friends, then you ask for a beer. If it’s a good bar, you might be lucky enough to get that far.

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Notice the New

Please refer to post #35 (the Tragedy of Blogs) and post #55 (Cheating) if you require an explanation as to why I suddenly have all these new entries. I do what I want, people. I’m free.

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Damn You Thingy!

Personification is a dangerous force.

The context isn’t important. But what the hell: I was standing on tiptoes in the hostel’s common room, balanced on one of the the blue wave-print benches I’d grown so used to. Christmas decorations were rising. It was festive, but still a damned hostel. We couldn’t change much about the porthole lights, much as we’d have liked to change them to green and red luminaries of their former yellow selves. Rachel sat at the desk. An English girl of my own age, she no longer stayed at the hostel but still worked there. She was a paradox in pink and black.

Allow me to mention that I love decorating. Wait—that sounds gay. In this sense gay may be taken to mean “something which is overly sentimental or cloying, saccharine; self-indulgently emotional.” It’s the eight-pound heartful of bonbons bought the day before Valentine’s. Even homophiles can agree with this definition on a conditional basis—as we all know, male-female couples are nearly always more gay than gay ones. Anyways, I love decorating… I mean interior design. More on that later. Later later.

So there I was, hanging colored lights over yellow porthole lamps I wished were green porthole lamps and red porthole lamps. And I’ll be a monkey’s gay uncle if the electrical outlet we were trying to use (me an’ Rachel) wasn’t blocked by our silly desk-barrier-thingy.

“Oh, that would be so cool. Oh no… Orin it’s blocked by the thingy!”

“…Damn you, Thingy!!!”

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Reasons Not to Kiss Me

  • I have a thick beard, and it’s getting thicker by the day.
  • I’ve got a sore spot on the bottom left where I bit my lip, and it hasn’t healed yet because I keep sneezing too hard.
  • My teeth are crooked.
  • I only brush once a day.
  • I’ve lost the Burt’s Beez stuff and am back onto the Nivea Lip Care addiction.
  • You might accidentally suck my lips off (you don’t know! it could happen!)
  • People tell me I smell, just in general.
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Addicted to New Music

Oh, by the way, this is all the albums I’ve downloaded in the ten days since I figured out that solid music recommendations + bittorrent = audiophonic bliss:

  • Hot Chip- The Warning
  • Jolie Holland – Springtime Can Kill You
  • Jenny Lewis with the Watson Twins – Rabbit Fur Coat
  • OOIOO – Taiga
  • Jarvis – Jarvis
  • Arctic Monkeys – Whatever People Say
  • Lupe Fiasco – Food & Liquor
  • K-OS – Joyful Rebellion
  • K-Os – Atlantis (Hymns for Disco)
  • Four Tet on the DJ Kicks series
  • Kid Loco/La Corporation on DJ Kicks
  • Kruder & Dorfmeister, Dj Kicks
  • Thievery Corporation, DJ Kicks
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Addicted to New

Dream with my Dad in it… life’s maintenance and an artistic pursuit, the same one day after day. Slapped Dad across the face to elicit a reaction, no reaction but kindness. Wake up and realize it’s a metaphor. Dad is actually Dave my manager (we’ve talked together about our own fathers, not surprising it should show up somewhere). Slap across the face was me deleting a text message that was taking up too much of his mental energy. The daily pursuit is my work at the hostel. My subconscious tells me that I’m getting tired of doing the same activity, day after day. Which is odd since I’ve only been doing it for three weeks.

Maybe not that odd. I realize later today that it would be almost impossible for a person like me to stagnate. I have no tolerance for it, nor any desire to develop a tolerence. Even staying in the same place, the pace of my personal evolution is staggering. It’s hard to even comprehend—and I don’t think I could even understand it if I wasn’t living it. It never slows, always moving like a river. S’been said before: you never have the same brain twice.

Youth. Is it youth? So far this is the oldest I’ve ever been. It’s possible that all this figuring out eventually leads one to find what one likes. And stick to it? Asserted: boredom has lots of antidotes in the 21st century. I make no apologies for our collective generational attention span, in fact I think it’s an asset. If I’m tired of it that means I’ve gotten all I can get.

Unless it’s not just boredom. It could be… me. Ever since I discovered I can manipulate events in the world to meet my goals in it (what, about… junior year?), I’ve sought out new goals. Novelty—the “for the hell of it” factor. Sure most desires are transient. Sure it leads to things you won’t enjoy. But it’s the only way to find more things you will.

And I have no plans to stop. I have all the plans in the world otherwise.

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10 Things I would buy if The Hostel paid me

It’s possible I might get paid to redesign the San Francisco hostel’s website. Money would be good. With that in mind:

  1. food
  2. a circle tattoo
  3. Keith and the Girl Live! California+Boston
  4. cool new thrift store clothes
  5. a monthy bus pass
  6. new socks
  7. new shoes to go with them
  8. a ticket to Palm Springs to visit Homepie
  9. [something I choose not to reveal on a public forum]
  10. true happiness (and more food)
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Hostel Life

I clean. I make beds. I drink beer. I listen to music. I hang out with friends. I hang out with strangers. I get done around 3:00. I read the internet. I watch the internet. I eat free food… I eat as much free food as possible. I do not bathe. I shower. I walk the city streets. I find things. I go to events that I’m lucky enough to notice. I meet cool people around town. I visit them. I go to parties. I meet more people. I cross things off my list. I live, satisfactorily, on volunteer benefits, honest work and the goodwill of a good city.