every day i go through a little dance with myself in order to find the motivation to work on the things i really want to be doing right now even though i know i should also be spending more time focusing on making money.

i have spent a good bit of time in these past few months sticking my tongue out at the whole “making money” thing, and i think i’ve just about got the nyah, nyah bug out of my system. i can acknowledge that my current patterns are unsustainable (and waiting for an unknown uncle to bequeath me a castle is always best as fallback-plan rather than centerpiece-of-financial-portfolio), and that i don’t seem all that driven to find short-term work in portland for some reason, so i had kind of given myself an end-of-year deadline on deciding whether i am going to stay or move.

in that spirit, and with the “make money” script running as well, the other day i started applying for holiday work around town, but then i realized that i am going to be in florida for nearly a week in november, and i am most likely going back again for christmas, and there is really nothing on my calendar in portland for december other than “become progressively annoyed with the rain.” so…

i made the decision that i really should just give my notice on my apartment, move out at the end of the month, and pursue living arrangements that do not require me to pay rent until such time that i have secured gainful employment.

that decision made me feel good, but there remains a playful “i see your bluff, and i call” twinkle in my eye that the nyah, nyah bug has made difficult to see, and the fact that i am feeling about ready to lay down this hand does not at all mean that i am second guessing my game.

this summer has been very, very, good for me, and i am not so much walking away from the paths i have been teaching myself to walk as i am taking the time to prune and weed the garden that i am learning to plant as i go. that is the dance of finding motivation that began this post. it takes energy each day, but at some point, one message i always come to is “write more,” “write anything,” “write every single day.”

i was remembering this message this morning when kevin says to twitter he says:

WTF am I thinking?? I just signed up for NaNoWriMo. http://www.nanowrimo.org/

and i says right back:

@kmakice WTF are you thinking, indeed?! I’M the one who should do that! In fact this is the first year i’m not too overcommitted. hmmm…

NaNoWriMo, you see, for those of you who have not followed the link yet, is a brilliant project wherein some folks try to get you to commit to writing a novel over the course of the month of November. NaNoWriMo is funspeak for “National Novel Writing Month”, and i realized when i was thinking about it today that the idea is really the same as the idea behind the one hour essay project: use the power of a community of accountability to get people to write stuff they already want to write anyway but usually make excuses about. NaNoWriMo is just on a way bigger scale and has a way better name. but NatEsWriHo doesn’t really roll off the tongue very well, so i think i can be forgiven.

anyway, the actual commitment is to write 50,000 words of fiction between November 1 and November 30, and i have thought about doing it for many years, but i always felt like grad school or work or the fact that i was out of the country and changing where i slept every few days were sufficient excuses to defer. today, however, i woke up saying to myself “you are going to keep working on your own projects for the rest of november” and “write more” so when kevin reminded me about NaNoWriMo and i realized that it was indeed november 1, it kinda felt like the universe could not possibly have hit me on the head with a bigger stick.

so what can i say?
i listened.
i have officially pledged to write myself a novel this month.
and move out.
and keep working on a web project with a friend of mine.
and go to florida for my mother’s ordination.
and enjoy some birthdays and turkey days with the fine, fine folk here in stumptown.
because of all the things that have kept me pulling for a reason to stay for a while, they are the only ones that ever really mattered, and i will miss them deeply and visit whenever i can.

so here’s to friends, freedom, and fifty-thousand fucking words.

because if i write a novel this month i will not even care if pirates ransack all of my possessions and leave me penniless on the plank.
i will do a swan dive and swim across the sea because i will be just that cool.

ahoy.

because perhaps an online record should begin, no? considering we both aspire to full disclosure? ;)

other folks, please feel free to toss in any change your pockets care to share.

an excerpt from prometheus rising, by robert anton wilson, which i finally finished this morning after a multi-month hiatus:

Intelligence is the capacity to receive, decode, and transmit information efficiently. Stupidity is blockage of this process at any point. Bigotry, ideologies etc. block the ability to receive; robotic reality tunnels block the ability to decode or integrate new signals; censorship blocks transmission.
If intelligence could be increased, obviously solutions could be found more quickly to the various Doomsday scenarios threatening us.
If each scientist working on the energy-resources problem could double or triple his or her intelligence, work that would require 20 years might be done in six.
If human stupidity in general decreased, there would be less opposition to original thinking and new approaches to our old problems, less censorship and less bigotry.
If stupidity decreased, less money would be wasted on vast organized imbecilities such as the Arms Race, and more would be available for life enhancing projects.
There is nothing rationally desirable that cannot be achieved sooner if rationality itself increases. This is virtually a tautology, but we must consider the corollary:
Work to achieve Intelligence Intensification is work to achieve all our other sane and worthwhile goals.
Maurice Nicholl, physician, psychiatrist, student of Jung, Gurdjieff and Esoteric Christianity, wrote that “the only purpose in work on consciousness is to decrease the amount of violence in the world.” This is Public Health Problem Number One in the nuclear age, the age of overkill.
We are not talking about mere increase in linear IQ - third-circuit semantic cleverness. We are talking of also the kinds of right-brain intelligence that Nicholl acquired from Jungian neurogenetic research and Gurdjieff’s meta-programming techniques. We are talking of, say, Beethoven’s intelligence, which so disturbed Lenin, who could not bear to listen to the Appassionata (Sonata 23) because it made him “want to weep and pat people on the head, and we mustn’t pat them on the head, we must hit them on the head, hit them hard, and make them obey.” More of Beethoven’s intelligence is needed, desperately, to create a signal that the current Lenins cannot ignore, that will make them weep, and stop hitting heads.

tonight, many of my friends are at sugar hill, a contra dance weekend just outside of bloomington that i attended for four years, and organized for two. it’s one of those things that, when you’re doing it, you can’t imagine not doing it, but i am learning that the worst part about living in portland is that flights in and out are expensive, so i couldn’t make the trip this year.

i’m thinking of everyone, though, and i hope the dance tonight was awesome, the stars were out for nightswimming, and tomorrow shines clear and not too humid. i’ll be there in the future whenever i can.

i know i make a lot of references to stuff i want to post about but don’t, and you may or may not know that i think and scribble about many things that i don’t even manage to refer to obliquely in what survives the grueling gauntlet of distraction to make it into post form, but, fwiw, if you want a fun introduction to one of the concepts (arguably The concept) that drives the distribution of my interests across the worlds of design, the internet, cognitive science, developmental psychology, consciousness, mysticism, drugs, public health, and politics, have a listen to this radiolab episode on emergence.

it’s an hour long, but do what i do: listen while you wash the dishes. or eat. or put together a jigsaw puzzle of warholesque popart lips. ok maybe that last one’s not on your list, but tif and i had fun at the toy store the other day, so the gauntlet lengthens. :)

and sign up for their podcast while you’re at it, eh? folks do a damn fine bit of radio programming. even if the ideas aren’t new to you, i bet it’ll make you smile, and think a bit, and maybe ask me a question. and thus the march of progress continues. ;)

here’s a fun chain of events for ya:

my mom emailed me an announcement that this american life is hiring a web director. and i consider myself qualified and available. whoa!

thinking about applying to work for an organization like TAL is an interesting mind game, because apart from a desire to sound sincere and professional without geeking out and being like “OMG!! i listen to your show all the time!! i even have the juice glasses!!”, there is also the consideration that actually? geeking out a little bit is probably advisable. because not only are they hiring you to be a web geek, but the whole culture of the show is geeky. i mean, if they interviewed someone who was talking about how it felt to apply to work for people she admired and she didn’t admit to freaking out a little bit? i don’t think they would believe her. ira would be like “come on… wasn’t it just a little weird? wasn’t it kind of like not wanting to wear the band shirt to the concert because that is totally lame but still thinking about the fact that you weren’t going to wear the band shirt, and being kind of proud that you were cool enough that you didn’t need to show off like that, and so you hoped that would somehow get across?”

and yeah, it is kind of like that. where does he come up with these questions?! ;)

but whatever, the mind shows its propensity to dizzy itself, and it is far too easy to get wrapped up in overthinking such matters.
i’ll just write them an honest letter and see what happens.
wish me luck!

in the meantime, however, i searched my blog for posts wherein i might have mentioned the show in the natural course of conversation. it has happened several times, actually, which does far more to show that i actually consider the show to be a part of my life than any assertions i could make at this point, so score one for blogging!

two of the mentions, however, were in unfinished draft form, and that got me thinking. the first post was about habeas corpus, and the date suggests that it was actually the first draft i posted after writing a REALLY LONG rant about a variety of things, including the decision that i should publish my drafts somewhere on the public record, if not on my main page.

well, that was a noble aspiration, and reading the habeas corpus post reminded me of why. i have this funny habit, you see, of almost finishing posts and then stopping because i can’t get the conclusion quite right. it’s really quite ridiculous, but it is the only way i have found to get myself to cross the hump of starting to write something without having to worry about perfecting it on the first pass. one of the reasons that the one hour essay project is such a compelling idea in my world is that i tend to bite off way more than i can chew in most of my writing. i want to somehow connect every idea i have to some larger law of the universe and also throw in an entertaining childhood anecdote, an obscure pop culture reference, and a puppy. such neatly bundled packages take time, however, and i simply can’t do that for every blog post i dream up, as much as i may wish otherwise. instead of just posting half-formed ideas or trying to chop things into smaller pieces, however, i end up with lots of posts about fluffy stuff, and a mess of unfinished posts that i can’t bear to delete, but also almost never get around to finishing.

SO. the one hour essay project is actually an attempt at the cutting things into smaller pieces approach, and i hereby redeclare my intentions to post all my drafts, which i had stopped doing at some point while traveling. you can read them via the blither and blather link in the header, or by clicking on drafts in my fancy tagcloud. i think that i will also make a little “current drafts” list in the sidebar, because that would be sweet, and make it easier for me to remember to edit them.

and to close, for those of you intrigued by my references to TAL posts, i offer the following reference list:

• a random mention of how i am trying to arrange the world so that i can listen to the show more often (before i discovered the joy of the podcast);
• an unfinished post about habeas corpus, inspired by an episode on guantanamo bay;
• a draft i found and wrote the last few sentences of today, about the role of faith in inspiring us to embrace change rather than resist it, inspired by an episode about the rev. carlton pearson, a pentecostal preacher in oklahoma who has decided that he doesn’t believe in hell;
• my confession that i might get cable just to be able to watch the new tv show (i didn’t, but now it’s on itunes, too!!).

here’s to life in progress.

i started a little side project this month called “The One Hour Essay Project.”

it’s goal is to provide a structured space wherein people can spend one hour a month writing their response to a shared prompt, and then benefit from the feedback and discussion that is generated by others’ essays and comments. the essays are posted anonymously, and the short time limit is intended to both keep people from worrying about getting things perfect and make it easy to scrounge up time to participate.

i thought of the idea because i had too many things on my list of stuff i wanted to blog about, and never enough time to tackle the ones that i thought deserved the most attention. because you notice that most of the posts that get through are about food or random activities, right? ;)

anyway, it’s just getting started, and there’s a lot i want to to with the site, but the first batch of essays is up at: http://www.onehouressayproject.com if you want to drop by and check ‘em out. i won’t tell you which one i am. :)

i’m not sure yet how i’m going to handle recruitment and registration. it seems like there is an upper limit to how many essays are absorbable, but we might be able to break it into clusters or something… the response this month was already more overwhelming than i had anticipated, and only half of the people who replied ended up submitting, so i’m blessed with a healthy batch of guinea pigs, and i’m excited to see where it leads. drop a comment if you’re burning to play along and i’ll see what i can do. :)

i’m not in west virginia right now, nor will i be in san francisco next weekend, nor will i be in tahoe the week after that.

those parts of the skeleton kind of collapsed.

shrug

reconstruction in progress.

but there IS a harry potter party next weekend. we’re having a wake! we just don’t know who it’s for…

busy times since my last post. my mom just left this morning after a visit of a week and a half, and we spent some time romping around oregon and some time just hanging out in my apartment, which was nice. my unexpected unemployment was a boon for the visit, as it felt pretty much like a bonus vacation in my own town.

during one particularly memorable trip around the city we ended up down on the banks of the willamette, talking to a guy who had constructed a hurdle course for himself out of driftwood, and watching the boats go by. i walked down to see what the hurdle guy was up to and he chatted with us between circuits until we eventually had a whole conversation going about life, literature, and the similarities between the south and italy, which i found very amusing. i poked around on the bank as my mom and he chatted their own topics, and i ended up taking on a small cleanup project because i was overwhelmed by the amount of plastic that was washing up on the shore. but that’s a whole nother post. i think i’m making an art project out of it.

for this post, i will just say that i ended up wading in the river up to my waist and failing to keep my skirt dry, which also meant that i failed to keep my cell phone dry, though i didn’t realize this until we started walking back to the MAX and i was feeling around in my pockets to assess the damage. my phone ended up fritzing out a bit as a result, and for three days went into “car kit” mode, which the internet tells me is a secret LG code for “damn fool got this phone Wet - not covered by warranty!” it also meant that i could only talk on it with a headset, which was pretty damn annoying because i don’t have one. so i spent a few days in text only mode.

eventually it dried out and started working again, but the battery now runs down very quickly and it still seems a little flaky, so it seems the time has come to explore new candidates for cellular companionship. it’s kind of funny seeing as i had been considering hopping on the iphone train as a celebration of my new employment, but then decided against it as a recognition of my new unemployment and the fact that my phone worked just fine, so now i don’t know how to interpret the signs. when i told all this to erik, he said “visual voicemail!!” but i am resisting such temptations, at least for the moment…

anyway, that was a bit more detail than necessary, but moral of the story is: good week! sorry if you couldn’t call me!

on sunday i turned 28 years old, and my mom and i took a lovely daytrip through nearby outdoor oregon. we drove up the gorge and hiked the little 2 mile loop at waclella falls, which was bustling yet agreeably less overcrowded than multnomah falls, and quite enjoyable - an easy yet engaging meander through the gorge that leads to a booming faucet of a waterfall. waclella pours forth from the cliffs into a deep, luminescent pool: large enough to feel somewhat imposing yet with enough of a rocky rim to allow you to get in close, breathe in the spray, and lose some time in the thundering stillness. thanks to mikey mike for the tip, received on saturday as we helped to celebrate sue’s promotion to the role of stay-at-home mom. yay sue and verl and full summer weekends!

after the falls, we kept driving east to hood river and watched the windsurfers for a bit, then came back via mt. hood, stopping for some roadside cherries and driving up to the timberline lodge above govt. camp for the views. the day was obligingly clear, unlike last time i drove through the forest, and hood showed itself off quite nicely. my camera battery was dead but my mom took some pictures. i’m trying to talk her into putting them on flickr, and i’ll let you know if i succeed.

in other birthday news, i would like to officially welcome brandon bartee to the world, and say that being born on a sunday, july 1 at roughly 11 at night is a pretty good deal, or at least it’s worked out well for me so far, and i’m honored to share such statistics with the first child of one of my dearest friends. it’s a crazy but beautiful place you got yourself into, kid, and i hope i get the chance to help you figure some of it out. :)

first off, it’s kind of fun to have your birthday smack dab in the midst of a season of barbecues, fireworks, and strawberries, so live it up!! this year, you should probably just focus on not letting the fireworks freak you out, since you’ll get them on your half birthday as well (don’t worry, i don’t expect you to do the math yet, i’ll just tell you - your half birthday is new year’s day!) so i advise learning to embrace them. it’ll suck for a while to have your birthday in the middle of the summer because a lot of your friends will be on vacation, but trust me, it’ll all even out. your parents have a full six months to recover from christmas and you get solid summer and winter gift seasons, so it’s a pretty good deal.

i told your mom i would look up the story of canada day, which actually occurs on our birthday, and for some reason i had this idea that it had only happened since the 80’s, even though canada is older than that. turns out it has only been called canada day since 1982, before which it was known as dominion day, and not that widely celebrated. apparently the alliterative appeal did not outweigh the awkwardness of cheering on the idea of dominion, so better to have the holiday only one letter away from a popular brand of ginger ale. this is actually a rather telling illustration of the difference between our nation and our neighbors to the north. i imagine that americans would get a kick out of a holiday called dominion day.

instead, however, we have plain ol’ independence day, and that will always overshadow your birthday in good ways and bad. people will already be committed to parties on the nearby weekends, but there will also often be a long weekend, and sometimes you can get bigger parties out of combining the two, which is a score.

on the whole i think it’s good to be prompted to contemplate our country’s growth so close on the heels of contemplating our own, but i also think it’s good to not cram too many topics into one blog post, so this morning i will end my birthday missive and leave us each to our own pursuits. you take milk; i’ll get strawberries.

well, i didn’t know what it was going to be like to come home from bonnaroo, collapse on the floor, and wake up to the reality of not having guaranteed gainful employment.

now that it has happened, lemme tell ya: it is bliss.

i got home so late on tuesday that some would call it wednesday, missed the chance to take the light rail from the airport so had to spring for a cab, enjoyed the door-to-door service, performed aforementioned collapse onto the floor, and embarked upon the rest of my week with no schedule to keep but my own.

for the past two days i have slept, unpacked, cleaned the house, cooked what could be salvaged from the fridge (an adventure which included the preparation of what is possibly the best tomato sauce i have ever had the privilege of bringing into the world), listened to music, walked around town, talked to friends, sorted through bills, and charted the first steps along the path towards the next income horizon.

i will save the details for another post because i’m making a website that will explain the idea more fully than i care to right now, but here’re the basics: i’m making lunches. for the people in the office where i used to work. and it’s hella fun. there are few things in this world i love more than playing with food, and right now i’m looking at a world where i get up, take care of myself, find and test recipes, assemble menus, play on my computer, make people happy and healthy, and spend the rest of my time as i wish.

feels good, people. feels good. now we just need to see if i get enough takers to pay the bills for a while.

happy official summer while we wait.

today i got some news that is very likely going to sound a lot more out of the blue to you than it does to me, but that’s just because the situation has been so weird and wishy washy that it hasn’t seemed worth writing about it.

now here it is, though, and no sense beating around the bush: my job is ending in two weeks.

as my supervisor was kind enough to state very clearly, this decision is not at all a reflection upon my performance over the last few months. it just turns out that shifting the design culture of a large company from the inside out requires quite a bit of a political maneuvering, we hit a few snags that were a bit larger than anticipated at this stage of the game, and, well, i’m the temporary contractor who wasn’t really planning to stay with the company that long anyway, so it makes sense that i’m the first (and hopefully only) casualty of budgeting rearrangements.

honestly, a lot of me feels relieved. i first heard that this might be possible about a month ago, but it was always at some unknown future point and it was never clear how real the threat was and it was impossible to really do anything with the news other than use it as ulcer fuel or ignore it, and so i did my darndest to do the latter as much as possible. but it still took its toll, as there is only so much patience i can muster for showing up at work and not really knowing if there is anything to do other than watch meetings be postponed and stretch simple tasks out over several days to fill the time. especially when i can think of lots of other things i want to be doing.

which leads well into the next reason i am not devastated by the development.

one of the major questions that i hoped to answer by taking this job was that of whether i am in a headspace for longterm full-time employment right now, and the past three months have provided quite a bit of useful data that has begun to suggest an answer quite a bit earlier than i anticipated. i have learned that there is a lot to be excited about in the professional design world right now, and i enjoy being a part of the conversation about where things are going. at the same time, however, i have learned that i still basically think of myself as a student, that i have Lots of stuff i want to work on for my own reasons that have nothing to do with any company that i know of at the moment, that the travel bug has not left my system, and that i am increasingly convinced of the merits of finding ways to work for myself.

with all that crystallizing in my head, i was honestly starting to get a bit antsy, and once it became clear that it was possible the job might not last the full 9 months after all? well, let’s just say i had no difficulty coming up with ideas of what i might like to do.

the anxiety, as usual, will hinge on money. the last month of my travels and the first month of my move and transition to employment put me once again in the red, and i had been employing a strategic approach to paying that back over time because i thought that my income was assured for a while. so it’s frustrating to have to deal with that. but not unmanageable. and i am hereby stamped as genius for adhering to my policy of sinking money into camping gear instead of furniture in an attempt to limit the number of things i will have to store, sell, or give away before i am able to uproot myself again.

on that note, look at what else i did today!

those wheels are tiffanie’s bike, which she lent me, and which i will now perhaps return. the thing that should jump out at you about the fact that you see those wheels is not really the bike, however, it is the fact that my new tent? it’s like one big window. this is nice in circumstances such as the present where it is pitched inside where there is little crosswind and you are still inside a sleeping bag for some reason. it is also nice, however, when it is inside your backpack weighing securely under 5 lbs. even with the rainfly and footprint, or when it is pitched outside in the summer and you want to separate yourself from bugs but not from breeze or scenery. and summer is the season which is about to be upon us. and did i mention that i might have more free time?

so yeah. options abound. and it is somewhat symbolic to me that i decided (and it was a somewhat spontaneous decision as well) to go ahead and buy the tent today of all days, with timing such that i was actually in the process of erecting the last major component of my bare bones self-sufficiency kit right when my phone rang with news to suggest that i might not want to buy the few pieces of furniture that i had decided to splurge for after all. i might have hesitated tomorrow, and i have many days ahead of me to decide if i want to trade it in for the other tent i was considering that is a fair bit cheaper. but today? today i just kept clicking the poles into place. i felt the metal bend, watched the fabric billow and tighten, listened to the silence on the phone and the buzz of the world out the window, and said: “oh. ok. how much time do i have?”

so here come an interesting two weeks, folks. on we go.