morganaberserker

I've decided to go a month without my car: two weeks down, two to go. Miles on bike: 134. Well, there was one rather large exception - Ryan and I went to Half Moon Bay, oh! and we carpooled to Oakland to see The Decemberists last week. But our rules say if you can't use Sacramento RT or just plain bike there we are allowed to drive, so those types of trips are well within bounds. We consider it our version of "going to the country," as it were.

I am surprised at the things that have to change when I don't have my car. For example, I'm rather impulsive when it comes to shopping and eating. Frequently I decide instantly that I want that one sandwich from that one place for lunch so, of course, I drive out and get it. Not without your car you won't! Damn! All of a sudden baby shower gifts that are usually just a quick car ride away take a bit of planning, let alone the time it now takes to get there and back. I can't just drive out and look for a new summer top on a whim. I didn't realize just how much I would do these kinds of things until I had to think about the energy involved in getting there under my own power.

It has forced a shift in my thinking, if I decide that I really do want that thing - which most of the time my lazy works for me in these situations, and I find that it's really not all that important after all - I am much more inclined to stay closer to home, looking for local shops and markets. Usually that would be very expensive, but with the economy with the way it is right now it's actually feasible, and in the long run less impulsive (read: wasted) spending might offset the higher priced items.

It's been an interesting experiment so far, and as long as my legs hold up, I think I'll try and keep it going because, frankly, it has been nowhere near as hard as I thought it would be. Thankfully, I live in a neighborhood that allows for this type of experiment, but really, anyone could take those short car trips and transfer them to a bike, it's just one step at a time.

Those of you who do not know me all that well might not know that I can be quite competitive -or maybe you do and I don't hid it nearly as well as I think. I have pledged to myself to go at least on week without my car - and might extend it to one month to actually be an ambitious goal - so I've been biking to work all week. On my way to work this morning a guy kitted out with the snazzy bike, fancy shoes and full lycra ensemble zoomed past me. Pffpt, I can totally keep up with this guy... so I kick in the after burners - i.e. my powerful muscley legs - and not only catch him, but zoom past him, shouting back at him "How does it feel to be bested by a girl in yoga pants and ballet flats?!"

Ok, so that didn't happen at all. In my mind it did, and it was awesome. What really happened was I just tried to pace him, my legs ached soon in and I succeeded only in not losing him from my line of site - probably mostly due to the stop lights along H St. Le sigh. Not that I want to be a hard core lycra-wearing bike junky, but damn I'd be fun to show one up now and again. Maybe three weeks more of biking will do it?

This chick makes me smile.

So Ryan and I have made it safely home from a trek across the Atlantic late last night. I will be posting pictures and highlights and such, but for now I have 4 pages a day to write for the next week at least, so that beats out long blogging for the moment. Until then, here's a neat trick for finding your very own NPR moniker - although good luck beating Kai Ryssdal... so awesome.

Here’s how it works: You take your middle initial and insert it somewhere into your first name. Then you add on the smallest foreign town you’ve ever visited.

I end up with Imona Collodi. I'm sure there is a more obscure foreign town I've been too, but unfortunately my brain is a sieve and names fall right out.

via Lianablog

Ryan and I just got back from a matinee showing of Avenue Q; it was cute but completely overshadowed by a very normal looking man on our walk home telling us to "get the fuck out of my stomach." Pure awesome.

Place a crazy LED light up toy near the power strip she frequently plugs and unplugs her computer into. Wait for her to give a good yank to loosen the cord and simultaneously set off said crazy LED toy. Laugh at her as she thinks she has just started an out of control electrical chain of events that lead to the house in ashes. Holy crap.

(Morgan actually quite enjoys referring to herself in the third person - who knew?)

There is a great cafeteria, for lack of a better term, of Asain foods above Hi-Mart, an Asian grocery store in downtown Vancouver. Most prominent are the Chinese, Korean, and Japanese stalls, but I haven't hit a bad one yet. This sign says "Sorry you cannot order and have this now." I love it.

That was my lunch - all I know was I ordered No. 22, with spicy broth. It had octopus in it, and it is surprisingly good.

So on my latest flight to Canada to date, and I get stopped at the border. Apparently someone has decided that for my whopping 40 days a year in Canada I now need a student visa. I think this guy just had a bug up his ass. It's close to 1 AM and he doesn't even tell me that I'm will be getting pulled over. I go along my merry way, and they call me back... whoops, almost missed ya - go to your right.

Blah blah blah*, you owe $120 for a student visa - we've decided not to keep you over night, but you have to come back tomorrow to be legal. Uhm, no. I'm paying money to be on this course, and I cannot miss it because someone has decided they want to squeeze money out of me. Blah, blah, blah*, ok, fine, we can do it for you now. Oh, really? Great. Oh, your school isn't in our system? Weird.... 20 more minutes.

So all that bureaucratic B.S. I can tolerate marginally, and even though my research and my school and my peers have told me I don't need this type of visa, maybe Canada is strapped for cash and they need my 110 American bucks; whatever. Not exactly thrilled to be doing this at 1: 30 AM with an exam in 7 hrs, but fine, do what you think needs to be done. What comes next just pissed me off, holy crap. I go to the cashier to pay my fees, first she has to go to 3 different people to find out how to do this - another 10 minutes - then she over charges me. Whoops! I'm not the person who usually does this, but I'll make sure they credit you when they get back in the morning. Dandy, just dandy. Oh, and with her most righteous tone and snotty attitude (granted, I wasn't roses, but I'm tired and broke and don't want to deal with this at what is now approaching 2 AM) she informs me it's illegal to have "See ID" written on your card and don't get "snappy" with a vendor who refuses to take your card. AAARGH.

So it's 2:30 AM, and that is the most shittily written blog/rant, but I am worked up, and needed to share to unwind enough to get the lovely 4 hrs sleep I might get before taking an exam tomorrow morning.

*Insert long, condescending customs agent conversations here...

Ok so try not to smile when you watch this, hell try not to shake you're own tail feathers... (this made my morning for some reason today.)



(via Boing Boing)

Me and Mark Twain: window peekers.

Tea, blankets, rain and books; perfect day.

The other day on NPR (yes, yes, my life has come to stories about stories I've heard on NPR) they featured a book of six word stories. Some of these were very powerful, some were funny, and some were flat, but all of them were striking on some way or another. So, striking in fact that they have inspired me to give it a stab.

Now, let me preface by getting a little personal than backing out a bit. My lack of blogging has much to do with my budding internal life, and I'm sure you want to be subjected to my inner whiney, insecure teenager as much as I want to subject you to it. Sure I can write about the minutia of my day, but frankly, my blogging skills will only make it more boring. Some have a beautiful ability for making mundane intriguing. Me? Not so much. Anyway, back to the budding internal life, as I've hinted at before, this course that I am on has rocked quite a few different boats in my world, so I am quite wrapped up in playing in the wake, so to speak; but, again, details are neither interesting nor appropriate here. So, here's an alternative: six word stories of my day/mood/thought. They probably won't really make sense to anyone but me, but hopefully they will be at least interesting enough to keep your attention, and I can give those of you who are interest in my play at least an esoteric narration of sorts ... so today, I'll keep it light:

Wandering womb? Nope - a wandering gut.

And for the heck of it, one more:

Turing inside out. Becoming something new.

I strive to stay away from the emotional vomiting that tends to happen on many personal blogs, but when that's the stage of your life... I'd rather not have a big blank spot when I look back at this time in my life, so I've gotta do it somehow... let's see how long this form lasts.

Huzzah! Sally Potter has a new film coming out hopefully within the next year. Looks intriguing. It stars Jude Law in a cross dressing role and it is most likely about my favorite subject: gender roles. It also stars Dame Judi Dench, Steve Buscemi, Eddie Izzard, John Leguizamo and Dianne Wiest. Good stuff!

Potter is one of my favorite directors. Films you might have seen? Orlando is her most famous (starring Tilda Swinton, only the best actress ever; really, it's true, IMDB will tell you so, if it doesn't, it's lying.) She also did The Tango Lesson which I enjoyed, and most recently Yes which is a great film. (There's another one in there The Man Who Cried, which I honestly didn't connect to, but I'd give it a second chance.) She can take a very overdone subject - an adulterer in Yesfor example, and make it into something quite intriguing. I'm looking forward the new one.

I've been trying to get back on the movie bandwagon as of late, and recently saw The Reader; I'm ashamed to admit it, but it got me, it got be bad. I realize it is an overwrought love story drama put under the guise of one of those "Holocaust" films, i.e., it's very serious, and needs to be given it's proper respect. Now really, falling madly in love and then finding out she's done the worst thing you could imagine being a post WWII German - working as a guard at an internment camp - sounds like lots and lots of staging to me. But I'll be damned, I loved it. Despite the fact that they were in Germany and spoke English with random accents, despite the fact they are German and only read great novels according to the American cannon, and even despite the fact that it is so hopelessly off the romantically ridiculous Richter Scale it's laughable, I freaking loved it.

I also saw Doubt, and I wish I could say the same. This too is a "very serious" film - although oddly enough, the director, John Patrick Shanley also wrote and directed Joe Versus the Volcano, hunh. The cinematography was amazingly well done, and hits all the details that The Reader misses (for example, Meryl Streep does an amazingly subtle Irish American/Boston accent that adds so much to her character.) However, it suffers from what many adaptations suffer from: it has to put so much material into so little time, the characters become flat, one-dimensional beings that make it hard for you to identify with or care about. It seems there is a very rich pool of backstory and character development in the original play it was adapted from, but it just didn't make the cut. Too bad.

Ok, my little stint as film critic is over. G'night!

... clarity in writing is invaluable. OK, this is common knowledge and should be commonly practiced, but it's not (I certainly haven't achieved my Concise Writing badge, but at least I'm trying). But knowing and experiencing are, as we also know, very different things.

I've spent a fair amount of my time reading modern and postmodern literature and theory, so I'm used to seeing convoluted writing that is meant to blur lines and confuse brains; but it is clear in its intension and I can forgive its complexity. For example, Derrida weaves his theorydifférrance into his text to illustrate his points about the lack of meaning in text. He writes his theory, and so has inspired a plethora of artists and theorists to do the same. A lot of it is intellectual puff and purposefully complicated, but it's done with attention and purpose, and I can respect that (that, and dammit, I've had to decipher a lot of that, and I can't have worked that hard only to be told there is no point in it...).

But after having tried to unlock the finer mysteries of the nervous system for the last hour and a half and only making my way through 3 pages of text, I want to tear my eyeballs out. Thoughts like, "I'm not stupid, I know a lot of this already, what's my problem, why don't I get it?!" filled my brian. Finally, in a desperate grab for clarity, I went to another anatomy book (always have more than one anatomy book, they tell me - now I know why) and low and behold: understanding! Beautiful, enlightening, soul-lifting understanding! What crappy anatomy book #1 was trying so painfully and circuitously trying to explain was concisely described in miracle anatomy book #2!

Same subject, same vocabulary, and one works and the other is a slow path to insanity. Where is the quality control? Dear anatomy textbook publishers: Just because you are an anatomy book doesn't mean that writing and editing are any less important. /Off soapbox.

Yup: heard rats in the kitchen wall; my massage appointment was not today as I thought it was; found out my favorite coffee shop is no longer; and well, meh, just one of those days.

This helps:

The Small Sh*t, by Not An Airplane (A local band that you should know about, even if you're not local, but then again, I'm just smitten with them, so it could be me).

I'm not afraid to fly
But I am afraid to land
I'm afraid to have my feet on the ground again

I've been over this city at night
I've seen that you are all just blinking lights
I don't want to go back to being in your sight

I'm not afraid to cry
I'm afraid to understand
Why it is I feel this way again

I'm not afraid to fly
But I am afraid to land
I'm afraid to have my feet on the ground again

I'm not afraid of the small shit
But I am afraid to go back to it
I prefer feeling alive
Then feeling just to live
I prefer feeling alive
Then feeling just to live

I'm not afraid of the small shit
But I am afraid to go back to it
I prefer feeling alive
Then feeling just to live
I prefer feeling alive
Then feeling just to live

Some rail on Apple for being a "monoculture" (ahem), but damn if I'm impressed with them. Sure, they are almost prohibitively expensive and pull bullshite maneuvers when it comes to exclusivity, but, hey, at least they are more or less up front about it (more so than can be said for many other companies).

Let me tell you why I'm impressed. My laptop's battery recently decided to take a turn for the worse; I could literally watch the battery charge drop 76%.... 74%.... 70% in less than 5 minutes, if I got an hours use out of it, it was good. This sudden drop in juice concerned me, that, coupled with the fact that the latch hasn't been working properly for months, pushed me to make an appointment at my local Apple store.

Barring the fact that I stupidly scheduled the appointment for 5:20 on a Friday afternoon (to be fair, I'm usually working during rush hours, so I forget that there is such a thing...), it was a breeze. In and out of the store in less than a half and hour. He checked out my cycles (heh, what a euphemism that is), told me the battery was a bit off, even for a year or so of use, and besides a brief moment of concern when he made a comment liking batteries being like car tires - "they aren't covered under a warranty the same way as the rest of the car" - he quickly and silently popped in a new battery, did his testing and, poof! I was on my way, without owing a dime. He even popped open the case and fixed the latch for me. Sweet deal, thanks Andy O. You rock.

So yes, they are pricey, and you can't always do the fixing yourself, but damn, if it's that easy, I'll take it. And pay for it too.

Ahh... I've just finished my 2008 clean up. I've entered in the last of last year's receipts, finished up my payroll books and put away my 2008 appointment book. I'm as organized as I'm going to get before I have to yank it all out again to do taxes. Hell, I even wiped my computer clean with a fresh OS to start 2009... not that that will keep me organized, mind you, but it feels nice for now. This might be the start of a new yearly ritual, actually.

This year is the first full year I've been in my own studio, and you know what? it's not a bad gig after all. I'm still at the larger studio I've been at for the last few years, but that is waning and definitely not my main source of living cash. Working for myself and being able to actually make a living doing it is quite a cool thing. Reviewing my schedule and income in 2008 confirmed that I am good at what I do, and that there is no reason to strap myself to a desk job (just yet anyway, hopefully, "in this economy" won't affect me too greatly. So far, so good).

I recently met up with an old friend I haven't seen in quite a while, and of course what follows is the standard idle chit-chat catch up of what are you doing/where are you working/ still dating so-and-so these days? talk. She mentioned that she's in a job that she likes, but doesn't love and it works "for now," and she congratulated me on my work. At that moment I realized I am no longer in that time-filler job. I actually love what I do, and trust me, I never thought I'd be a person who loves her job. I"m lazy. Quite lazy, I didn't think I'd ever like working for a living. But I'm not working - I'm playing (most of the time - I'd still give up 4 days a week of work to sit on a beach with a book all day...).

It's a neat mindset to begin the new year with. Let's hope the enthusiasm keeps rolling in.... good luck in 2009!

From the Sacramento Bee:

Obama lacks magic want for Sacramento-area economy

The day after Barack Obama was elected president, at least 33 more bankruptcies were filed in Sacramento. Foreclosures continued their assault on the region's housing market. And California's unemployment rate was still more than 7 percent.

In other words, for all of Obama's campaign talk about using the power of the government to revive the economy, it's a near certainty that he'll be unable to reverse the downturn quickly.

Ok, seriously? What editor let this slip? I don't think I can say it any better than as Ryan so poignantly put it: "Wait, I'm confused. So we DIDN'T elect a magical subprime-fixing unicorn? Fuck me!"


Full article here.