The party was a mechanism; a means to an end. The idea for gathering is always an excuse, a surface illusion, to allow for the great game of social evolution. There was the usual posing, posturing, self-marketing—all in the interest of validation or procreation or any number of excuses for donning that carefully crafted character of self and finding an audience.

            This was before the road, the surf, the fires, the endings.

            They—fifty or so odd people—were in a spacious studio apartment above a karaoke bar in Waverly Heights, on the south side of Portland. Jaime had come at the behest of a friend who had promptly been distracted by one of the ‘shiny people’ and disappeared. At this the aversion to others had kicked in and he promptly found a clear space of wall to occupy, close to the drinks.

            He was tall and lean, with thick brown hair that fell just over his eye line. The other partygoers let him be, which gave Jaime ample time to consider the problematic logic that always led him to this spot. He felt disillusioned towards the interactions others cherished, but secretly he yearned to experience them.  In actuality he felt something much more akin to inverse disillusionment, where he was fully aware that everyone else functioned correctly and he was the exception, unable to join their world.

            Regardless, Jaime was simply playing the role of Jaime. Standing alone, judging, was where he usually found himself in social situations, and his friends had come to expect it of him. Jaime wasn’t avoiding others, he was surviving. He was The Survivor. This wasn't a nickname—though it was a nickname—so much as it was an unspoken label that anyone who knew enough of his background kept in their head, ready to defer to anytime some of his strange or anti-social behavior started up.

            Tonight, however, Jaime inexplicably decided that he wanted to switch roles. This was a test; if everyone is simply running their part, what was stopping anyone from re-auditioning on the fly? He gave it a shot—straightening his posture, letting the hint of a smile rest on his mouth… A brief, soft buzz filled his head, then passed, and he felt something change internally, as if his expectations for the night had been reconstructed.

            Twenty minutes later Jaime was no longer stuck to the wall but was, instead, on the floor, focused on one of the shiny people—a tall girl with long, straight black hair, wide, engaging eyes and a terrific poker face, refusing to belie any emotional response. Her name was Sarah.

            Things were going well. Sarah was 21, she had been born in Twin Falls, Idaho but moved with her parents to Portland when she was three; she was close to her mother, not to her father... it was the usual sort of introductory conversation that Jaime was familiar with. He avoided his own back story prompts as long as he could, but finally had to give in to the inevitable and stepped into another role that he was familiar with—that of storyteller.

            The truth about Jaime was that he had survived a series of bizarre tragedies throughout his childhood. Everyone around him seemed ready, eager to die, even if they were unaware of it. A fire had killed his parents when he was a toddler, but he miraculously and inexplicably had survived. The house collapsed around his room, which had been saved by a well-placed support beam. The firefighters couldn’t begin to explain how he had escaped death from smoke inhalation. Since then, he had endured the following, which comprised some but not all of his misfortune:

1.      Car Accident (minor), Age 5.

One death reported, driver in other vehicle, heart attack, deemed responsible for collision.

2.      Drowning, Age 7.

Life guard used CPR for three and a half minutes before breathing resumed.

3.      Escaped Bear, Age 11.

Two maulings reported. Faulty zoo cage lock deemed responsible.

4.      Car Accident (major), Age 13.

Three deaths reported, including Jaime's Aunt. Jaime sustained a broken collar bone.

5.      Collapsed Airport Terminal, Age 17.

Seventeen deaths reported. Jaime's plane docked fifteen minutes before the accident.

6.      Heartbreak, Age 19.

Jaime had attached a rope to his ceiling fan, which proved too weak and gave out underneath his weight.

7.      Drowning, Age 23.

Whitewater Rafting in Colorado, his kayak had overturned and pinned Jaime underwater. He struck a rock and was knocked clear, allowing him to make it to safety before losing consciousness.

            Jaime, now 26, morbidly liked this mental list. It gave him a map, a system to work from, and off of this he had decided that he should be safe from tragedy for another five years.

            Sarah found his story fascinating. This wasn't unusual, it had happened on more than a few occasions since adolescence. People were usually struck by the uniqueness of his background.

            "How much of it do you remember," she asked him, "Like, really remember?" Downstairs someone was singing an off-key rendition of Take on Me.
            "Well, there are blurry parts," he admitted, "I was pretty young for most of them." The truth was Jaime remembered very little of any of them. He had developed a knack for willfully expunging unpleasant memories from his mind.
            "When I was six I was lost in a department store," Sarah shared. Jaime's pulse quickened. This was new. "My mother had stopped to look at something and I just kept walking. She found me, eventually, but not before another man had. He asked if I needed help and then told me my mother was waiting for me at the car. He sounded sincere. I followed him."
            Jaime was captivated. The rest of the room seemed to melt away.
            Sarah continued, "When my mother caught up with us she was frantic. We were just heading out the door of the department store, and the man had started to pick up his pace. When my mother saw us, she started screaming at him, hysterical. This caught a lot of attention. The man panicked, pulled a gun out from underneath his coat, and shot my mother. He then dropped the gun and ran, leaving me behind." Sarah paused, methodically, as if she liked to gauge her audience's response here. Jaime, unlike most people, didn’t look uncomfortable. "It seems that he had recently lost his own daughter and had snapped. My mother was in the hospital for three weeks, and her right arm, where the bullet hit, was always kind of useless after that. When the man was finally caught he had someone else’s little girl…I was very lucky.”
            Her true story—not her surface story—told, Sarah seemed to glow. Jaime became aware that his heart was pounding.

            Sarah moved in closer. "Can I tell you something else?"
            Jaime nods.
            "Last I had heard, the man responsible was up for parole. He's been in jail for fourteen years, but even back then there was some sympathy that he was out of his mind in grief. I always wanted to forget the whole thing, personally. My mother likes to keep a watchful eye on her misery, however, and feels the need to keep me informed."
            She moved even closer now, whispering, her lips brushed right up against his ear. He found himself lost in her perfume, fighting to pay full attention to her own catalog of despair. Her sorrow washed over him, drawing him in deeper with every word.
            "I don't actually know anyone at this party," Sarah confided. She sounded concerned, Jaime noticed, over something so trivial. He met her eyes, making contact, seeking to reassure her. Instead, he found a hint of tightly controlled panic. Of desperation.
            "Do you see that man by the door?"
            Jaime, aware of the room once more, searched and found him: A man in his forties, slightly disheveled, stood right in front of the entrance. His eyes were locked in their direction.

            They were somewhere west of Lincoln, north of Denver when the humming began.
            Sarah was driving. Jaime slouched in the passenger seat, doing it again; hands balled into fists and pressed to his temples, eyes closed, gently biting his top lip, brow furrowed, left leg slack, right one tapping.
            The humming was coming from him.
            This was just another highway on their path to nowhere. Grasslands stretched all around them, forever, nothing but greens and golden browns and occasionally spots of red and purple as flower beds blurred past on the road shoulders. It was hideous.
            Jaime stopped humming and opened his eyes, wide--an act that coincided with a dramatic intake of air through the nostrils, a straightening of the legs and elevation added to his posture. He liked to act as though he had just quickly surfaced from a deep sleep and was now here, in the moment again, refreshed and possessing of a new understanding of the world. Sarah hated when he did this, thought briefly of swerving across I-80 into oblivion, indeed jerked the wheel ever so slightly, then, thinking better, she quickly adjusted, pacified.
            Jaime, now returned to this world, gave her a look.
            "Mouse," she offered.
            Jaime shrugged, accepting, and surveyed the world outside the window. It was grassy, he decided, and moving by much too fast. He resumed rubbing his temples, but this time he was not in a trance.
            "Where did you go this time?"
            "I... it's relative. Forward. Forward, I think."
            "I see." Lying piece of shit. "But, like, as in The Future, right?"
            Jaime just cleared his throat.
            "...so forward, then."
            "Forward... Forward... Friction..." Jaime grimaced. Desperately he pulled open the glovebox and rifled through, searching, until he found an expired bottle of aspirin, pulled the top off, tilted the bottle and tapped the side until two pills fell into his hand. He popped them into his mouth and looked around, slowly realizing the error of his choice. "Water?"
            "No water, James. I've been driving since Omaha."
            James. She was mad at him again, he could tell. She thought she was subtle when she called him by the wrong name, as if she could disassociate him from his own temporal identity. Not likely. He started to bite down, but Sarah stopped him.
            "You can't chew those."
            "Why not?"
            "I don't know, you just can't. They need to dissolve inside you, you won't absorb the medicine or something."
            It didn't matter. Jaime was salivating by this point, and in another few moments he could just swallow the annoying pills. He did it. Sarah watched him.
            "Gross," she said. Eyes back on the road. "Where are we going?"
            "I saw the Salt Flats." An acidity rose in his throat, burning. They had been driving without a destination for weeks.
            "...and?"
            "You know 'And'." There was a shuffling sound inside of Jaime's head. "I just lost something."
            "I'm sorry," Sarah said. She was, although less so every time she had to say it.
            Jaime laughed, cold and brief. "Hey, can't say it matters to me." He closed his eyes again, began to hum.
            "What are you doing? You said you would drive soon."
            "I will. I just want to take something with me."
            Sarah surveyed the Nebraskan countryside. It was still just grass. She didn't understand why he would want this. Any of this.
            "I understand," she lied.

I've slowly been drawn back into the online world as of late. My new time-sucking pursuit seems to be... productivity? Huh.

Now, I don't mean I'm actually accomplishing anything. What I do mean is that thanks to blogs like Lifehacker I've been sucked into this bizarre world of shortcuts, tweaks, lists and organizers.

Some of these steps have been completely natural--Google has owned my soul through GMail and Google Docs for a while now (more recently: GCalendar and Google Reader), so an installation of Google Gears to synch all of this offline just made sense. Of course, that's not what actually happened; Google Gears has--instead of offloading my Google reliance--served as nothing more than a new desktop widget to flood with 'always online'-reliant content.

Yeah--it's a little backwards.

My computer hasn't been updated much since 2002. It's a 1.8GHz Sony Vaio, and other than a replaced DVD-RW drive (that was dead for three years or so until this last Holiday run) and a lowend GeForce4 card about a year after purchase everything running on it is stock. It's more or less been collecting dust in my apartment all year until about a month ago, when I finally gave it a much needed tune-up: Freed up a reasonable amount of space, updated the antivirus software, cleaned up the registry and defragged the thing for the first time in...a while. I was shcoked to see what it was like to be able and switch windows without dealing with a 10-15sec lag.

And then, I got greedy.

It's a good thing, really--the productivity I put into getting my Vaio off of life support spilled off into other ventures, leading me to re-install the drivers on my M-Audio USB Hub and capture some audio off of my guitar for the first time in two years. I also finally took the time to migrate my old MySpace blogs over to this site and kickstart these posts again. I then one-upped myself on the pc front and cleaned up my Launch Programs, the desktop and my Programs menu. And now that I'm slightly back in the game, I've come to a few conclusions:

1. Cataloguing Programs have a long way to go.

I keep hearing great things about Delicious Library, but since it's Mac only I haven't been able to check it out. I have tried, however, Griffith, Libra and 2-3 other Archiving programs, and have been nothing but frustrated. Griffith works the best so far, allowing you to pull up DVD information from 17 media sites (imdb, anidb, wikipedia, etc), but after sticking in information from 25 or so of my movies I became frustrated at what it didn't do: It doesn't pull up or allow you to specify a genre (I.E. Sci-Fi, Action, Foreign...), it doesn't allow you to create sub-links between related discs (Sequels with titles independant of the original, tv shows) and, more baffling, it balks at the idea of alphabetizing. It seriously wants to organize everything based on when it was scanned in. Now, if I was John Cusack and shooting to arrange my 600+ DVD's auto-biographically, this would easily be the program for me.

Unfortunately, this is not the case.

The others I tried all had similar issues. While some offered novel imaging options (creating a virtual bookshelf to select movies), they would always lack some fundamental feature such as connecting to IMDB to pull up information.

I've never been a very organized person, but the idea of this struck me as something very useful. Despite the time it would take me to key in every one of my movies, it would give me a way to keep track of what I've already bought and--more importantly--give me an easy way to scan what I have if I'd like to watch a movie. I don't re-watch my movies enough to have warranted their purchase in the first place, but I think if I was able to hop on and key in a few phrases (Supervillain, Freeze Ray, Musical) and have some suggestions tossed my way, I think I'd feel like watching these movies more often. As it is, when presented with a few too many choices I almost always shrug and say 'fuck it'.

2. The 'little' programs go a long way.

I installed a few programs recently that I never thought I'd actually use but have been nothing but impressed with. The first was called RocketDock, and it essentially mimics the Mac OS X launch bar. There's an auto-hiding drop-down bar at the top of my screen now that lets me launch FireFox/MyDocuments/Control Panel/Word/etc. Not a huge thing--but quick, aesthetically awesome and frees up desktop space. I'm simply more likely to click on one of those icons than I am to navigate the Start menu.

Also installed recently is Launchy. Launchy was one I strongly thought would never amount to anything, but I've been shocked at how useful it is. Launchy is simply a quicklauncher for all sorts of files--executables, docuements, webpages, media...It uses almost no memory and is always waiting in the background. All I have to do is press Alt-Space and it pops up. Some of the uses are a little redundant (I can type in 'fox -- forums.schoolinsummertime.com' to launch a specific webpage. Or I could just, y'know, type in the fucking webpage), but coupled with a few extra programs, it revives some things I've been completely neglecting.

3. Twitter is The Devil.

Twitter is an idea that makes me feel very, very uneasy. I like to ramble, so blogging is the sort of thing that appeals to me right away. But when I first began posting I had no idea what the point of it all was--it seemed like an online journal that was open for the world to see. Something about the general, open idea of the Blog seemed like it was loaded with potential, but I wasn't quite sure how that was to be realized. I think it's come around, now, as a 'respectable' medium for information to traverse. Online blogs about any and every topic are reinventing the idea of print media. It's been attempted before--with digital magazines and e-zines (two separate entities: One, trying to present essentially a page-by-page recreation of a print mag, the other trying to streamline content), but never as succesfully as in recent years. Personal blogs--including this one--are still largely pointless. But tech blogs, entertainment blogs, etc are huge commodities right now.

This comes back to Twitter, now--I promise.

That same uneasy feeling I had that blogs were a useful tool not quite fully utilized is the same sort of feeling I get with something like Twitter. I really like the idea of twitter--it's a streamlined (sorry for the quick 2nd offense, my thesaurus is a bit rusty tonight) social networking interface that has the same functionality on any beat-up cell phone as it does on the pc. It's the sort of tool that is open to a wide variety of possibility, keeping users connected at a nearly unprecedented level. Just as social networking sites have taken the simple idea of a bulletin board and tweaked it to new levels, I feel like Twitter has the potential to essentially become Text Messaging 2.0.

But.

Twitter is suffering pangs of misdirection. At this time, I've only seen a few instances where it seemed like people were earnestly able to use it to help be productive. Nearly every other instance seems to have users who maintain a 'current mood' log, give constant updates no one cares to read or--as I've done with mine--restricted Twitter's functionality to 'Drunk Dialing 2.0'.

Drunk Twittering is just cool. It's like drunkenly calling yourself and leaving little magical pearls of nonsense to find. My last real Twitter post was: "Jo doesn't believe in my Urines! Fire!". I have absolutely no idea what was going on there!

Back on task: For the immediate future, I think the next logical step is Group Twittering. An example: If you have a project for work you could set up a Twitter and each member would have access to suggestions, comments, questions...that would almost immediately be forwarded on to each other member of the team. Each member would be able to customize how they receive these items--be it in an e-mail or texted right to their phone. For the longer term, I think Twitter could serve well as a template for Cell Phone Companies to work with to bring Social Networking to the mobile world. These are specific, short burst messages that have customizeable options and give the user the ability to direct them at an individual user or topic. There's got to be a way to take this basic idea and expand it to involve group messaging, photo's, etc... Honestly, if a company started up a program like this that let users 'twit' to one another as much as they'd like for one small fee, it could be huge. The Mobile World's MySpace.

Now--and this is where everything comes, well, not full-circle, but back to an earlier point--I stopped twittering about as soon as I began. Again--I sense that the idea they have has incredible potential beyond stupid little messages, but for right now I just don't really have any reason to use it. A big part of this, however, is that if I want to 'twit' from my computer I have to bother to log in to the website and post. Likewise, from the cell I have to care enough to draft up a text message (which I hate, oddly enough) and send it off. With Launchy, though... Now I can just Alt-Space and type 'Twit -- Message goes here' and it immediately gets posted, thanks to a program called cURL. This sort of instant-gratification leads me to believe my Twitter days might not be over.

Lastly, another site that has interactivity with Twitter is Remember The Milk. RTM is a personalized task manager that can be pulled up from any cell phone, synched with gCal, taken offline, etc... Not the sort of thing I would normally use, but I do like the idea of--rather than text messaging or self-twittering reminders--I can text/twitter RTM with tasks I need to complete. These would start off as basic descriptions of the task, but once I get to a computer I can customize the timeline, steps and progress of each one. Normally, something like this would immediately fall by the wayside. But, I've started entering my work schedule/commitments into gCal and with RTM I have an easy method to customize those events into a step-by-step schedule I can access. For example: I'm moving this weekend. I can gCal 'Moving Day' and even put in a few specific time goals to meet. With RTM, though, I can create a checklist (Replace Lights, Lock Closet, Drop Off Keys) to follow up on via my cell, even after my computer has been disassembled and the internet is shut off. Could be handy.

The thing of this all is, I've spent hours looking into the options of productivity. All of this time could have been spent, well, doing something. Hence the title. It's a paradox, but I think the thing of it is once you've slowed down to look into these things you can make up that loss time fairly quickly once you integrate them into your daily use. I'm not sure if there's any truth to that thought

I guess I'll have to twitter it over, later.

Again, just putzing around here (month vs agenda(Would I ever even need a calendar function on here?)):

 

 

 

vs:

 

 

Some images:


The above is a picture from New Year's 2006/2007. I found a link to a site that translates your images into 'old-timey' photos. I only tried a handful, but this one probably had the best result.

I am so sick of comparing media sites. There were some basic flash mp3 players, but I think this is more along the lines of what I'm planning to use:





The picture is one I snapped in London. The music is all stuff I recorded in 2006.

PS: The size is custom and a little stretched. The default had super small icons.

Testing... now.

 
Comic-Con Dr. Horrible Panel 3/5 from hacksaway on Vimeo.

A. I've moved over most of the MySpace Posts. There's close to one hundred posts on this site now, and by and large the bulk of them are from 2005-2006.

B. Later, I plan to implement (for my benefit) some sort of Task Widget that'll let me keep track of what I'd like to do with this site and visually show me how much (or little) of that I've actually accomplished. I've been gung-ho for the past week or so on productivity, but the never-ending step one for anything has been to determine how much effort is going to go into getting from Point A to Point D.

C. A site re-design will be necessary, soon. Hopefully The M&M's will be interested in lending me a hand with this. I've got a good grasp on Phase 1 (a self-updating blog site), but the next step is going to be to step up content, sectionalize and to establish an interface for maneuvering between the different sections. I've been hitting a lot of the various tech blogs out there, and I realize how easy it is for content to get buried. It's all well and good to keep newer posts on top and expect that anyone who cares to follow what's going on will RSS it up, but I've also been shocked at the lack of customization and segmentation for some of these. It only seems perfectly natural to me that people would like to fine-tune their information intake. And if they're new to your site--they may very well be interested in past posts that are buried under piles of information they're not interested in.

Not trying to do anything too crazy or ambitious here, yet. This is by and large a tool for me to try and stay organized right now--and to kill time. I loathe time. If this springs into a multi-user operation--that would be excellent. Right now my top goal involves it being a multi-single-user operation--wasteful blogs, written projects and music, from one source: this guy.

At odds: I'd like to make sure that each set of posts can follow a unique visual aesthetic that keeps them herded into neat packs--IE if the site were to get a section for music posts, it would be a removed set of pages from the main site. But, I also have seen sites where there are multiple worthwhile sections that are so far removed frome each other that they get completely overlooked. An example: asofterworld.com has the web'comic' and the Overqualified section. Each are worthwhile and stand on their own, but they also stay so far apart from one another that there's never a reason (or an opportunity) to jump from one to the next. Explosm does this, too--Cyanide & Happiness is so far removed from the rest of the site that it might as well be the only thing they put up.

I think there's an advertising mindset here, about reiteration and the constant reaffirmation of established content. Also: I like rambling. It's cool--in the HWaC Site Upheaval of 2010 this will be one of the first things to go.

 

 

Michaell and Maya were married on July 26th. As of this posting, they're on their honeymoon. Below is the Toast I gave them as Best Man. Note that it's not a transcript, but instead what I wrote down at 4 AM the day of the Wedding. If I get a copy, I'll try to put up a video post of the actual end result, of which I omitted several of the following comments in a fit of on-the-fly self-censorship.

I am so bored. I have no excuse, and will make no attempt at one. I went to London and would like to post on it soon.

Two poems:

“An end to all things”

 

Tall, like Tamarack Pines

Swaying to music, unheard

She sighs.

 

An end to all things.

“Monster”

 

For years I led her around:

my blind girlfriend

Desperately trying to decide how

best to break it off, without becoming

the Monster.

In the end, the solution was simple.

Two steps to the left

and a word:

“Green!”

The bus did the rest.