theopsys

I've been waiting all day for the hot water to come on again. It's funny, because many a time in the process of taking a shower, I've thought to myself, "What if this water was not warm?" Cold water in the summer is refreshment; hot water in the winter is survival, especially for people like me, whose hands and feet are perpetually on the verge of chilly. There are things I need to be doing, but not having showered for going on two days now (I briefly scrubbed my essential areas with soap and cold water yesterday) makes it hard to leave the house. I don't smell so bad that I can't interact with people, but I just don't feel ready to go anywhere. I don't have a problem with not going anywhere and not doing anything, it's just that the rest of the world has expectations. In this period of demobilization, I sprawled like a cat on the roof deck, stared at the sky, and watched the passing of airplanes. Being on a roof deck is the closest thing I've found to leaving the city. Up there, the sky dominates your field of vision and the sounds from below are buffered into background music. An urban beach, I thought, complete with the occassional breeze.

I started to imagine someone sitting next to me. Then, inevitably, I started imagining what we might talk about, and how I might run out of witty things to say. Why I expect to be able to foresee such things, good or bad, is beyond me, but it remains in my consciousness nonetheless, like a residual fragment of DNA that no longer serves a useful function. Being able to see so many possibilities simultaneously might be a good trait to have if it actually allowed for predicting the future, but who really wants that kind of knowledge? Too much knowledge after all only fosters the illusion that we have any sort of control.

I happened upon the fringes of the photoblogging community today. By "fringes" I don't mean the out-of-the-mainstream photobloggers; what I mean is that, because this community exists on the Web, it is by default part of a massive network of photobloggers. By "massive," I mean that if I followed the string of links connecting each of them I would never reach the end. It's like standing on a giant ring whose ever greater expansion means only that the amount of blackness in the center, the unexplored territory so-to-speak, gets that much deeper and darker. Every time I come upon one of these types of networks, whether its Xanga or Friendster or mySpace (Facebook, thank God, is limited to college students and graduates), I'm reminded of the first time I ever saw the fractal representations of the Mandelbrot set. Self-similar and at the same time infinitely complex, is perhaps the most accurate way to describe the behavior of these networks that pop up so frequently on the Internet. The networks are self-similar in that the members present themselves through similar means--profiles, pictures, etc.--thus creating patterns of behavior; the infinite complexity, on the other hand, manifests itself through a) the sheer number of possible connections that could exist among members and b) the inherent complexity of human creativity. This, as I will explain at some later date, has great consequence for those of us hoping to be designers...

The words most likely to hold sway,
And cause all life's twists to come unwound,
Are those I find so hard to say
To you;
My silence is my logic unbound.

my hand, slow as its motion was,
lulled you, but not the time, to sleep;
if only my desire could keep
the earth from doing as it does.

Measure, cut, measure, cut, measure, cut, glue, glue, hold, glue, observe--ad infinitum. The process is tedious, which is not to be confused with slow. Slow means an opportunity to take time, to enjoy; tedious means it can never go quickly enough. Tedious also means there must at some point be a finished product (otherwise, why the endless hours of menial taskwork?); slow, on the other hand, implies a conscious rebellion against the stricture of the deadline. It's obvious which of these paths might be more fulfilling, but tedium is the status quo. Going slow will only garner glances from the teachers come Final Critique. "Another incomplete project?" their eyes will say. The question is whether you can shrug off the look and move forward, confident that it is for lack of time and not for lack of ability that you didn't finish.

We're both grown.
The difference is her laugh--
It shakes the air around, suggests
The wisdom of a child, and
Makes me think the older I've become
The more I've regressed

People say things, but how do we know whether they are speaking their own mind, or repeating something that was said to them? In one case, it is an honest opinion, based on actual experience; in the other, it's just a rumor, a repetition. Unfortunately, I think it is through the second method that a lot of information is passed on, all under the guise of knowledge. This is not so bad when the situation is clearly objective. If someone tells me a watermelon will shatter if I drop it from a ten story building, I'm inclined to believe them; there's no reason why 9.999999999999999999 times out of ten it won't happen. If someone tells me I'm "better off" with college degree, my first inclination is to trust that notion, because it's rather hard to swim against the tide of culture, but deep down I doubt that notion. Yet, begin to question these things and suddenly you've got people defending the System, as if the System was paying their salary. Ironically, these same people will complain about the System as much, if not more, than the person who questions its validity on a fundamental basis. You simply can't trust the statistics of ambiguity and speculation if you want to challenge the System. Yes, people with a college degree are "more likely" to achieve a certain "standard of living"; they might, in fact, be "much, much, much more likely" to achieve a "higher standard of living." But all these standards are defined within the context of the System. No one can prove the validity of the System beyond a reasonable doubt, and the only reason anyone would attempt to do such a thing would be to justify being stuck in it. The only thing you can fully justify is that which you create yourself.

the problem with her beauty is
that i look at her as if looking
through glass

and so i do not touch
and by not touching i do not feel
and so my hands are empty still

Dropping out is not a bad thing, if you're dropping out of a rut.

She spoke so candidly about her sex life, as if I was not a man, but a bathroom mirror. She had finally discovered the power of sex, and spoke about it with a hint of awe and misunderstanding. Having broken up with the boy not so long ago, she doubted the possibility of being able to recreate such an intense physical connection. It was precisely her asexual nature that had allowed me to forget our own brief encounter so many months before. Now, there was no reason not to lust for her entirely. The last barrier to her soul had been thrown open, to reveal not a wise soul, but the pounding heart of an animal. She was no longer the enigma I had imagined.

the first one was yoko
the second was ono
two halves of a beatle am i

I did not choose to be born; yet I was born.
I did not choose to be born as such; yet I was born as such.
I was born without a say; but I will not die without a say.

So many bands have released greatest hits albums and retrospectives lately that I'm beginning to think the end of the world is approaching.

Today I said some things which I shouldn't have said. For this I am sorry.