Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

meta

Mmm, Zeitgeist

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As someone who has been doing this for more than half a decade, the only thing that amazes me more than the utter ubiquity of blogging is the utter proliferation of blogging trends and tools.

A newer trend in blogging (at least to me, anyhow) is the use of a blog to assemble a well researched academic text. There are two excellent examples i’ve been keeping up with daily. The first, The Long Tail, is (in short) about the 80/20 rule, based on a Wired Article i very much enjoyed. On the second, The Music of Rufus Wainwright, composer and professor Roger Bourland invites discussion of topics ranging from form and phrase structure to the challenges of accurate transcription – all from his forthcoming book examining Rufus’s music in a classical light.

In the tools category, Blogger now fluently accepts phone-posts directly from your cell with no setup required. You simply email a text message or picture mail from your phone to go@blogger.com – blogger sets up a randomly named blogspot page to receive your messages (identified via your phone # and/or phone email) until you claim it and (potentially) assign further messages to another blog. As you’ve seen from my recent posts, it can even upload your pictures via FTP. Read more at Go Blogger. Currently supports posts from Verizon, AT&T, Cingular, Sprint, or T-Mobile.

In a blogging world of academic tomes and phone posts and the dreaded LJ-meets-Facebook bohemeth that is Myspace it boggles my mind to think that five years ago i was the only boy on the internet singing songs specifically to be published on my blog.

Blank States and Blank Slates

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Days keep fading into one another the way they did in high school, with nothing to mark the progress. Do you know why i can’t remember high school? Because i only have songs as signposts – no conveniently cryptic blog to inform me of my feelings.

That’s how i feel about the last year and a half. Yes, the blog is here, and it does its job of marking some of the months that have passed. Others? I can’t even tell how i got to here from September. In September it was my birthday and i was in New York and seeing everyone i know and drinking way too much wine, and here i am two months to the day.

It might have to do with my cell phone. I “lost” it just after my birthday weekend, taking with it connections to friends old and newly acquired. For a few days it was liberating – no vibrating outreach to be beholden to. The newness wore off shortly, and suddenly i felt trapped, as if i couldn’t speak to anyone outside of my co-workers or Elise. I watched their emails pass by with me on carbon copy as if on the seeing-through side of a one-way mirror, ever observing and never responding.

Or maybe it doesn’t have to do with my cell phone. Maybe it has to do with my stupid resolution a year and a half ago to spend a year only caring about work and staying happy with Elise and monitoring my budget and playing City of Heroes, and now that i’ve quit the latter and achieved equillibrium on the middle two i find that all i know how to do is first thing first thing first thing. Even when i am at home. Sometimes when i am asleep.

It’s not such a bad thing to know how to do at the age of twenty-four. I draw a melange of amaze/amuse -ment from my co-workers and superiors in my zeal for things, my “cools!” and “sounds funs!”

If only they knew; the things in that building really are the cools and sounds funs right now. And, that is how you lose two months of time without really trying.

AotWME pt2: Interlude

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(And, i’m up here writing about him on my blog, which would seem lame on top of being passive aggressive except for i was, you know, at the forefront of blogging culture and have had this site for, like, eight decades in blog years. But, for a second i was just thinking “i’m up here writing about him on my blog” and i just shuddered, but then i thought “well, at least it’s not on my livejournal,” and then i felt a little bit better.)

Happy Birthday To This

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I have been blogging for over a fifth of my life.

Purely as a statement, it’s meaningless. Abstract. People will tell you that you’ll be asleep for a third of your life, or waiting in line for a seventh of it, but you won’t suddenly re-evaluate the way you’ve been living your life. People don’t find god in an attempt to save themselves from a seventh-of-a-life of waiting in line.

I have been writing this personal web log for five years. I turn twenty-four in less than a month. I have been blogging for over a fifth of my life.

That’s a little more succinct. It works in numbers that you may be able to grasp – you know what “five years” feels like, and you either remember what it was like to be twenty-four or you can imagine what you want to be doing when you will be.

Or maybe you can’t do either. Perhaps you’ve never done anything for five whole years – not live in one place, or date one person Perhaps twenty-four is just another meaningless milestone in the blithe fiction that is your imagined future – so you can’t relate to that either.

Also, there are the concepts of “personal web log” and “blogging.” What do they even mean?

I have been writing this personal web log (an internet-based, sometimes diary-like, irregularly updated collection of thoughts, feelings, links, pictures, music, and other online errata) for five years (one year longer than a US president’s single term in office, half of a decade, less than a third of the the time The Simpsons has been on the air). I turn twenty-four (twice as old as a twelve-year-old, one year shy of a quarter century, three years younger than Joplin, Hendrix, and Cobain were when they died) in less than a month. I have been blogging (“blog” n., short for “web log,” thus “blogging,” v., the act of creating and maintaining a blog) for over a fifth of my life.

Is that explanation thourough enough? How else can I more succinctly quantify this peculiar obsession to you? It is at once less and more than keeping a diary, more and less than a simple concatenation of thoughts I have and pages I view. It started out as a place to say something without editing, but soon evolved into a more oblique window into my life complete with its own voyeristic audience of hundreds. Sometime after that it became about documenting moments in time, snapshot stories of misadventures freed from the banality that surrounded them.

All of this attempted definition begs the question: what is it now? And: how can I hope to quantify something that I can’t even define? This is no longer my occupation, or my pre-occupation. Sometimes I only write once in a month, and other times I have a week’s worth of sentiments tied together with a common string. In the past this was the central repository for all internet statements, the me-archive. Now I sometimes want to publish a thought or a piece of writing that has no place here.

Ulimately, I have run out of pithy, charming, defining things to say on August 26th. August 26th now looms less as a day of celebration, and more of a mandatory mark on my calendar to remind me to remember, and to try to remind you, what this means to me. The date has become less like the birthday of a child over whom I dote and obsess and more akin to the wedding anniversary of a second-cousin – to whom I periodically send a card.

In either case, I thank you so much for being an inexorable, impossible-to-define part of this half-decade-passed … for being the eyes and ears receiving these words and sounds … for being a friend, even if you are a silent one. I may not be able to articulate my definition of what you’ve been consuming, but it couldn’t be whatever it is without you to observe it.

So, thank you. And, Happy Birthday To This.

Thoughts Right Now

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Do you remember when i would just sit in my horrid little apartment sophomore year, just banging out as many posts as i had thoughts? Today i feel like that, only less horrid. I cleaned. I bought groceries. I took that pile of books to the used bookstore. I have every right in the world to sit and transcribe thoughts until sundown, at which point i’m going to a BYOB Mexican restaurant to drink margaritas on a work-night against my better judgment.

Anywho, allow me to digress to the though i came here to transcribe: I sometimes wonder what my co-workers do when they go home.

I mean, we see what i’m doing right now, and it’s not all that impressive, but it’s something. Some of them have children, so that pretty much explains what they’re up to. The rest? Some like sports, some go to gyms, some engage in serial home-repair. One creates terrific bead work that i’m going to make a website for sooner or later. Aside from her, though, rarely do i hear about anyone’s personal projects (aside from buying tickets, or getting in shape, or putting up gold-plated gutters).

Surely they must have projects – we are all comm people, after all – defined by our interest in devouring a enormous subset of all things, and governed by secret wishes to be star reporters or gossip rousers. Surely they must have a novel in draft form, or an article, or an experiment in social engineering. Something.

I try to ferret something out of them, but they are either entirely inscrutable or they really do just hang out and watch television every night. It’s hard for me to imagine it – being defined just by what i do during the day. It seems like a horrid fate.

We all know about my songwriting habit, and my blogging hobby, but in the last few weeks i’ve been working just as much on two others, one of which is arranging music. When you arrange a song, you have to listen to it many, many, many times. You have to listen for pitches and rhythms, tonality and feel. Sometimes you have to listen at half speed, or with a section looped indefinitely. You have to listen until your brain and fingers have absorbed the sound, and can recreate it in standard notation, however inefficient it seems at the time.

Before i ever knew about a cappella music or polyphony or even, hell, arranging, i used to arrange Tori Amos songs for guitar. I didn’t really understand what i was teaching myself at the time – i would just sit with the sheet music in my lap and slowly transcribe it into a single staff of guitar tab. Sometimes it was physically unplayable, but my software would still play it, allowing me to hear what six separate guitarists playing one string each could make of a Tori song.

At the time i barely could read music, let alone transcribe pitches and rhythms by ear. Over half a decade later I just listen to “Since U Been Gone” more than 200 times and somehow, after more than a dozen hours of magical effort, i have an arrangement.

When they return my question, volleying: well, what’s your hobby, that always sounds so insubstantial. And, right now, it is. But, by god, the TrebleMakers will perform it live at a cappella fest 2005 or lose their voices trying, and then it will be real and alive and in the air, and i’ll know just why i spent a whole week of my live living, breathing, and singing every element of that damn song.

As for my other hobby, you can have a hint: inebriated cinema. I dare not say any more, because i… erm… have to go and fix the broken thing that Gina just found.