I have moved seven times in as many years. I can definitively say that moving…sucks. The feat I am going to attempt tomorrow will begin at 8am. It will include heavy lifting, yelling at my unorganized roomates and general stress on several levels. I am truly excited.

I’ve noticed that I am going grey. I can only imagine that the last week-and-a-half (which has included finding a new apartment, doing repairs on old apartment and paying for new apartment) will soon make me look older. Maybe in a good way, like Richard Gere or something.

Luckily, I have not let this debacle get in the way of watching Project Runway, which is just FABULOUS.

I enjoy hesitating, but tomorrow will be a day of doing or dying. Tomorrow I conquer, dragging my roomates kicking and screaming if I have to. For I will not be held back, nor will I accept anything but my full deposit back from my Polish landlord (who kicked us out of the old apartment…whole other headache).

Recognize

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I recently have become interested in poetry. Before, I thought it was an ineffective way to put an opinon across. Yet, now I consider poetics more effective than standard descriptive writing.

For this week’s posting I attempted to write a poem. However, during the week I realized something about myself: I’m a really bad poet. Nevertheless, I’d like to share a piece of writing.

SAN FRANCISCO

This poem was found written on a paper bag
by Richard Brautigan in a laundromat in San
Francisco. The author is unknown.

By accident, you put
Your money in my
Machine (#4)
By accident, I put
My money in another
Machine (#6)
On purpose, I put
Your clothes in the
Empty machine full
Of water and no
Clothes

It was lonely.

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Travelling the world, dining with kings and queens, leading the free world; he cares not for these things:

Bush’s best moment in office? Reeling in big perch

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A new book called Hello, I’m Special: How Individuality Became the New Conformity practices performs the trend that it isolates. Turning ideas on their heads by way of social critique and then slapping a seemingly paradoxical title on the corresponding book seems to be the norm these days. Writing a book of this nature carries the message, one hopes, that this is new and unique and you should read it, but the formula says otherwise. Often times book titles or concepts are dreamed up by a publishing company and then a stooge writer is found to fill it up with the hollow prose you would expect.

This book, however, at least brings up an interesting phenomenon that I think should be on everyone’s mind. Individualism is barely larger than an embryo in the scope of human history, an age disproportionate to the enormity of its implications. In some ways you could view our inability to properly organize around it as the source of most modern problems.

Sure it’s better than serfdom and it’s sparked cultural revolutions that brought about greater civil rights, but as far as I can tell, the lasting effects will be empowering ad campaigns all salivating to rent your sense of self to you for exorbitant sums.

Maybe I’m Special is a sign that yes, we get it, now we can move on. I don’t know about you, but it’s pretty lonely being so goddamned special all the time. There’s gotta be a juicy sweet spot between capitalist isolationism and fascistic anonymity.

What comes after the individual? Can we be unique snowflakes and part of something greater?

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When I was in New York last November, I went to a dorkbot meeting in SoHo (South of Houston). I got there late and the small presentation room had already filled up. I grabbed a folding chair that made it impossible to settle in quietly and as the discussions progressed, more late-comers had backed up into the entry hallway.

The first presenter — whom I interrupted — was enthusiastic but boring and had some box that lit up and spewed sound if tilted a certain way. It kept accidentally going off during his talk.

The second presenter was Jonah Brucker-Cohen, a Ph.D. candidate at Trinity in Dublin. He calls what he does ‘network subversion,’ but what it amounts to is creating consequences — often physical ones — for network services. 

Some examples were a hand crank used to download a website, a jackhammer that pounded a wall anytime that someone visited his site, and a fleet of radio controlled police cars that got movement commands from information that the FBI monitors.

The jarringness of these demonstrations illuminated the deep passivity that I, and I think most people, take towards the internet and technology in general. In many cases we act as if the net is not really there. A day spent on the web, shopping and looking up information, is one wasted, while spending a day going to shops and the library, is actually accomplishing something. Many of the consequences of these two activities are the same but what’s missing from the first example is a movement through physical space, with physical consequences. Perhaps this predicts not a shift from the physical to the virtual, but a melding of the two.

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