330 posts tagged “mobile”

Just woke up from an nightmare, at four in the morning; and it was in the middle of a sleep cycle, which means my body keeps trying to fall back asleep and re-enter the bad dream, so I thought I'd get up instead and start my day extra-early today. Sigh. Something about a...summer camp in England or something like that, definitely my first trip ever to England. And it was the last day of the camp, and I was getting ready to head to the airport, when all of a sudden the camp leaders kidnap everyone and start up with a series of brutalities -- killings, torture, rape, etc -- done for no particular reason at all, just like is often the case with my nightmares. (Like many Americans, since 9/11 I have had a regular series of nightmares about arbitrary fascist states, about a group of people who decide one day out of the blue to become inhuman monsters simply because they could.) And you couldn't make escape plans either, because random people from the camp kept switching over to the side of the fascists, so you never knew when one of the people in your planning group would turn out to be a traitor. And then at a certain point, I remember the camp coup leaders saying they needed to talk with me in the other room in just a bit; and in that bizarre logic of nightmares, I knew that meant they were about to kill me, that they knew their coup was just about to get quashed and so had decided to take everyone out before that happened. And then I woke up. Ugh.

So what to do at four in the morning when you're rattled by a nightmare? Hmm. Maybe I'll go over to Camfrog and see if there are any weird naked girls up in the middle of the night. Yes, I think that's what I'll do.

4 a.m. Nightmare.

Just starting my morning errands, slapped on my iPod, and what should come up on the shuffle but Jens Lekman, immediately making my day a little brighter. Oh, Jens, you and your rainbow kisses make any day a little nicer! Won't you be my nerdy awkward indie-rock sexually ambiguous boyfriend?

Oh, Jens Lekman, you make everything more sunshiny!

It occurred to me this week, that 2008 is officially the 20th anniversary of the last time I switched hairstyles; and the reason it occurred to me, of course, is that it was recently time for a haircut for me, a time when I'm reminded more and more that the hairstyle I originally picked when young and cute and with a full head of hair doesn't work so well anymore, now that I'm older and have a thinning, receding hairline. (After all, the last time I changed hairstyles, fucking REAGAN was still in office.) So anyway, I decided to go for a new look this week and see what I think, the "Tasteful Gay Middle-Ager In Boystown" look, aka the haircut all middle-agers with receding hairlines get when they want to ackwloedge said receding hairline instead of continuing to hide it with greater and greater failure. Anyway, so I'll live with this for a few weeks and see what I think; I don't know WHAT to think of it at this point, to tell you the truth.

Ladies and gentlemen, The New Hairstyle.

Part 732 of my ongoing series, "Weird Random Crap Spotted In The Alley Behind My Building:" Abandoned ping-pong table.

Random shit in my alley: Abandoned ping-pong table.

I admit it, it's been yet another frustrating week, in a summer full of them; a week where I didn't get as many book reviews posted as I wanted, didn't bicycle as much as I wanted, didn't get nearly the amount of stuff done that I had planned on, and fell deeply behind again on my email, after finally after months starting to actually get caught up. And in fact it's been this way for me ever since my Mac G3 died a couple of months ago, forcing me to put CCLaP's publishing program and virtual photography gallery on hold, because of all my old publishing software being on that G3 and all disappearing when the G3 crashed. And I know -why- I've been so lethargic since then, too, because that was a legitimately profound setback to my plans -- it's going to cost several thousand dollars to replace that software, plus I need a new computer to run it which is several thousand more dollars, not to mention that I'm going to have to start from scratch again even at that point, in that all the old files I had been working on had been on that G3 too, which means they disappeared too when the G3 crashed. And that has me profoundly discouraged these days from getting anything in my life done at all, because I just keep thinking to myself, "Ah, what's the point? What's the point of even trying, when I'm constantly one step away from yet another disaster that will put an end to that too?" And so I exercise less, smoke too much pot, stay at home too much, and get even less done than before. And the whole thing becomes this giant vicious cycle.

But here I am at a neighborhood cafe on a Sunday morning, going through my weekly review as part of the "Getting Things Done" time-management system that I've been using in my life for about four years now, feeling better about things; and this of course is part of the point of doing a weekly review in the first place, is to simply set aside a bit of contemplative time and examine what exactly you did get done last week, what you hope to get done next week, and to simply realize that you have your life under greater control than you maybe sometimes want to admit to yourself (er, that is, if you really are keeping up on your GTD each day like you're supposed to). I always feel better about my life after my Sunday-morning weekly review; I feel not so out-of-sorts, like I have a greater handle over everything that's going on in my life.

I just finished up this great little book called "The Faith Between Us," a series of essays by two friends (one Catholic, one Jewish) about what it's like to be hipster doofuses in the 2000s and deeply religious at the same time; it's a great little book, to tell you the truth, and my review of it will be getting posted at CCLaP later this week. Anyway, one of the things the Catholic guy talks about in the book is the way he deeply desired to become a priest when a teen, and how a big motivation behind it was a yearning to be what what the German Romantic artists of the 1800s secularly called the "beautiful soul" -- the person who is completely consistent and at peace in mind, body, and spirit, the person who never falters, never gives in to temptation, who is never boastful nor pretentious nor petty nor insulting. And reading that, it made me realize that this is a big goal in my own life these days, a thing I am constantly striving for; to never be overwhelmed or stymied by whatever life has to hurtle at me, but rather to roll with the punches and remain optimistic and happy. And as cheesy as it sounds to say this, by the way, partly this desire has been motivated by the behavior of Barack Obama in the last couple of months, a man I'm coming to admire more and more with each passing week; I think it's astounding, for example, how well he's been able to keep his cool in public the last couple of weeks, between that New Yorker cover and Jesse Jackson calling for Obama's nuts on a plate. That's the kind of person I want to be too, the kind of person who can have ludicrously awful things happen around them but still keep their cool, still stay optimistic and positive and never drag themselves down to the level of the shit causing them problems; there are a LOT of people who wish they were more like this, frankly, which I think explains a lot about why so many people have gotten so excited by Obama's campaign, despite the fact that we barely understand what he plans on actually doing once in the White House, and also why people generally had such a bad reaction to that New Yorker cover in the first place.

Anyway, just some random thoughts passing through my brain on a Sunday morning; and now I better get going, cause I've still got a lot on my plate for today. Here's hoping that next week goes better than the last, or at least that I'm able to handle it all a little better.

It's been another frustrating week; but tomorrow's another Monday.

Wow, I got a whole lot done today, about 150 percent more than I usually do on any given day. I'm just now, in fact, running my last errand of the day, on foot this time so I can get caught up on some of my podcasts, and on this warm great happy successful evening feeling extra-tight with the Buena Park/Lakeview neighborhood where I live, something I'm always disposed to feel on warm evenings while walking through the neighborhood, especially strong tonight while feeling productove and in a good mood. This is truly one of the great urban spaces of the planet, definitely in the top-50 of all big-city neighborhoods around the globe; I'm very glad I have a chance to live here myself, for barely any money, versus maybe a nicer place in a city or neighborhood I can't stand. That's what none of those suburban-style city-planners of the '80s and '90s never got, which is why their plans were all such disasters (you know, the ones who argued that the way to save crumbling urban areas was to build massive, expensive, corporate-friendly "marquee spaces" in these cities' downtowns, convincing suburbanities to drive into the city on a regular basis, "naturally" convincing some of those people to actually move into the city after getting down there and seeing what's available. My absolute favorite thing about living my neighborhood is the evenings like tonight -- where I take a low-priority walk for no particularly important reason, taking my time and wallowing in all the everyday details of it all, the landscaped curves and bicycling cuties, all the groups sitting around tables at outdoor sidewalk cafes. Walking down the street, imagining being a citizen here a hundred years ago, taking the exact same route, seeing many of the exact same buildings. That's what keeps me happy as an urban citizen, not some overmarketed big-box mall or museum or mall or wharf or mall or whatever other "destination event" you want to mention.

Anyway, my two cents for tonight, right before hitting home. Here's hoping more days soon go as well as today's. See you.

I'm really grokking my neighborhood this evening.

I know, I'm continuing to do a lousy job of posting here at least once a day, right? Sigh. Okay, so before I get to reading here at the cafe, I'll write something. I'm at Intelligentsia today, in the heart of upper Lakeview, which always reminds me of that funky, crunchy time of urbanism in the 1970s, the rise of such smaller second-tier cities as Denver and Minneapolis, with lots of wood and lots of attics and lots of Cooper Black typeface every time you turn your head. That's the same time period the Lakeview neighborhood was gentrified, making it still retain a strong amount of that '70s Mork-and-Mindy, Mary Tyler Moore feel; hipster kids are highly tempted to dismiss the entire neighborhood as old-fashioned, firmly middle-class, not something as "authentic" as an -actual- shitty neighborhood like Pilsen or whatever, but I've always liked Lakeview precisely for embodying that first wave of postmodern urbanism, back when no one else wanted to, which basically involved taking the crumbling Victorian mansions in the area and converting them all into funky businesses and lofts, a time and look I remember fondly from my old childhood vacations to places like Denver and Nashville.

Anyway, so I'm down in such a neighborhood right now, about to get my hundred pages of reading a day done (today being hari Kunzru's "Transmission"), then a trip to the Lincoln/Belmont library to pick up a copy of "Tropic of Cancer," then to my place for hopefully a whole afternoon of Second Life and finally fucking working on my fucking cursed fucking ignored prefab company there, Fabb (fabbhomes.blogspot.com). We'll see!

Upper Lakeview: My '70s urban dreams come to life.

I've said before, how one of the signs it seems of the growing global designation of "creative class" is one's comfort with leaving a certain amount of daily needed info left in searchable online form, to be instantly looked up using a series of home and work and mobile and vehicle online devices. And that when you do this, at a time specifically when a bunch of shiny, happy, utopian, Web 2.0 people are all wanting to start this hivelike global culture spread instantly by technology in the first place, this is exactly what's going to happen.
And I'm one of those people who chooses to leave an entire section of his personality online, so that it can be heavily influenced by these exact global online media influences I've jist mentioned, Flickr and YouTube and MySpace and iTunes and everything else. When I'm specifically in this mindset, and have my Chicago shades half-closed, I get the same view as from my friends' various places in Frankfurt (I know for a fact, because of waking up to such views in real life), plus views from a lot of windows in London, based on hundreds of images I've seen through contacts at Flickr; plus photos from Sydney, Cape Town, Toronto, Prague, etc etc. All Hail The Singularity -- being crudely first networked together these days not through biological imperative, like Kurzweil argues in his groundbreaking work, but merely through fun, gamelike activities and a simple effort to understand the world better.

When the shades are mostly drawn, it's almost like Frankfurt...or London...or Sydney.

My friend Tom's having a 4th party (on the 5th), at his place near Chicago and Milwaukee; and that's a pain to get to from my place via public transit, so I'm biking on a warm Saturday night instead! Yeehah! I love my occasional excuses to bike on inner-city roads on a Saturday night, and to go pub-pedaling along the way (instead of pub-crawling -- get it?); it makes me feel all cool and urban and creative-class and shit. Oh, and since I have this superduper Nokia N95 on loan right now, I'm even shooting a video of the entire ride too, in the style of the other YouTube video I recently posted. (Oops, sorry, just realized I haven't posted it here yet; I'll do that when I get home tonight.)

Anyway, here I am at the great little tiny residential pub Maeve, on Wrightwood one block east of Southport; it's the halfway point, which I'm using as an excuse to stop and have a cocktail. This officially ends, then, the "pleasant tree-lined lane" part of tonight's trip; the last three miles is on an industial road winding through factories and the like. More later, suckas!

Bicycling to Tom's! For a party! And shooting a video! Yeehah!