on thursday of this coming week, i am going to pack up my car and go to san jose for the night, where i will have the pleasure of staying with two friends who moved out here recently from bloomington (where they had come for school, from portland), which will be really fun, because i haven’t seen them in a very long time, and i like them, so that is sad.

on friday, i am going to get up early and drive to ogden, UT, where i will have the pleasure of seeing three friends from burning man, and i will also enjoy the chance to sleep somewhere other than in the backseat of my car, which i have done many times over the course of the past few years while driving between CA and CO, and it is starting to get old, particularly in the winter.

on saturday i will make my way to boulder, where i will visit the ever-hospitable bourlands, and work with matthew on moving my kwerk prototype to the next level. we will also probably cook some tasty foods, and prepare ourselves mentally and materially for the trek that we will both be undertaking in the week to follow.

sometime late in the day on monday, according to my current best predictions, i will resume driving eastward, probably pushing through to chicagoland with one powernap stop somewhere in iowa, once the sun is up on tuesday. i don’t know where i will stop in chicagoland yet, but i hope it involves pizza.

on wednesday i will continue east to pittsburgh, where i will meet up with friends, sleep until thursday, and then make a large amount of stew, to be stored in ziploc bags until sunday night, when it will be consumed by hungry people who are camping in the snow.

from friday through monday i will be here, along with roughly 30 of my favorite people from across the midwest, and somewhere on the order of 150 strangers, many of whom are doing awesome things like constructing a giant flaming simon game, which i will definitely play. i <3 simon.

on tuesday i will pivot and return west, this time on a slightly more southerly route, which will take me through bloomington, where i will sort through and purge/reclaim a middling amount of stuff that a very lovely friend has been storing for me now for over a year, and, through the graces of the fates, have the chance to hear malcolm dalglish and co. perform the third iteration of ‘the welcome table‘, as well as celebrate the 40th birthday of one of my favorite former professors, whom i am now fortunate enough to count as a friend.

i will also see kevin and talk about games and robots, and hopefully see many other people whom i love and have not seen for a while. and eat esan thai and aver’s. and go contra dancing. and generally give bloomington a big hug.

then i will go back to colorado and see my dad and some other friends in the vicinity of colorado springs.

then i will come back to california, where i will dive fully into the final preparations for the MAPS conference i am assisting with in san jose in mid-april. i am so excited about this event that i have not yet been able to put my thoughts into blog-ready words. i predict this will change in march.

and that is as far into the future as i am currently inclined to outline here.

i will post adjustments and photographic annotations as the story unfolds, as well as muse on other things that are in the works, like kwerk and my novel and work options for the summer, as opportunity and inspiration permit.

now that you know my itinerary, if you’re going to stalk me, you must bring your own mug and sunglasses, and gas money would go a long way towards earning my trust. games and snacks would get you bonus points, but if they are lame games, or poison snacks, you’ll be disqualified, so choose wisely, like indiana jones when he had to pick out the holy grail.

here’s a hint: i am not a carpenter, but my uncle is, and i am still rarely impressed by bling.

So go listen to some music and drink some cider and make snow angels, if you are fortunate enough to have the cooperation of mother nature to that end.

Yo ho ho.

<3 Kynthia

(click below to download — I will take the music down in ONE WEEK (tick, tock))

Part One
Part Two

[hanging out in the Springs and Boulder]

1. Up Up Up Up Up Up - Ani DiFranco
2. Disappearin’ Ink - Stephen Brunette
3. Chicka Chicka Boom Boom
4. The Cartoon Song - Jack

[off to San Diego, at last!]

5. Fidelity - Regina Spektor
6. Say You Will - Kanye West
7. Packt Like Sardines in a Crushd Tin Box - Radiohead
8. Naked As We Came - Iron & Wine
9. Theme from Battlestar Galactica (2007)
10. Will You Be There - Michael Jackson
11. Pizzahut Tacobell - Das Racist (Guy Michael-Barletta Remix)
12. Ain’t No Rest for the Wicked - Cage the Elephant
13. L O S T
14. In or Out - Ani DiFranco

[brief northern interlude/water, wine, and a wedding]

15. Me Gustas Tu - Manu Chao
16. Comes Love - Billie Holiday

[the twin spirits of crisis and opportunity nudge me away from San Diego sooner than expected]

17. Apres Moi - Regina Spektor
18. Chicago - Sufjan Stevens
19. Born of a Button - Erik Pukinskis
20. Evolve - Ani DiFranco
21. All I Want - Joni Mitchell

[wherein I was saved from a foul mood in Black Rock City by an unexpected meeting and had the chance to see the city through virgin eyes]

22. God Only Knows - The Beach Boys (Aeroplane Remix)

[soaking in hot water, pine trees, starlight, and slide guitar]

23. On the Radio - Regina Spektor
24. Hummingbird - Wilco
25. The Sailor’s Grave on the Prairie - Leo Kottke
26. White Summer/Black Mountain Side - Led Zeppelin

[writing 50,000 words]

27. Violin Concerto in E Minor Op. 64/Allegro molto appassionato - Itzhak Perlman/Daniel Barenboim (Felix Mendelssohn/Sergey Prokofiev)

[the hanged/burning man means surrendering to flow]

28. Teardrop (Theme from House, M.D.) - Massive Attack
29. Wishful Thinking - Wilco
30. Birds - Kate Nash

i figure it’s way more fun for all of us than if i try to write a straight holiday letter, and way more durable than tissue-paper snowflakes.

since i missed last year, this post is actually a bonus edition of sorts - the songs below are for 2008, and 2009 is still coming.

i felt compelled to complete last year before moving on to this year, because as it turns out, i really enjoy the process of making these mixes, and i also enjoy having them around to listen to as a memory device. it’s like looking at old pictures, but pictures that i can dance to, or sing along with while driving. so i’d rather not be missing a year, when i look back on the series later.

speaking of driving: i spent a lot of time in the car in 2008, and my musical experience was therefore heavily skewed in favor of what happened to be in the car with me. i bought my current car at the end of 2007 from a friend of mine who had installed a stereo system that plugs into an ipod, and he left an ipod attached, so i kind of inherited a random sample of someone else’s music collection, and a fair number of songs came from my exploration therein.

the basic arc of my year went like this:

• i rang in the new year in florida, where my mom was serving as the interim minister for the UU church in west palm beach. i had arrived there shortly before christmas, after driving from LA to Bloomington in 40 hours (30 driving, 10 sleeping), and then relying upon wonderful friends to forgive me for missing a party the night before, shove food in my mouth, load me into a car, and take me to the indy airport in time to make my flight. i was very, very tired.
• from mid-january to july, i was in bloomington, where i couchsurfed and housesat and finagled enough web work out of my old job at IU to get by while trying to teach myself to spin other webs of my own. i also went to bonnaroo for the third time, and i was a volunteer for the pod program, which means i got to get in early AND for free, which was fun.
• for most of july i was on the road, first to colorado by myself, and then to california with erik, because erik is awesome and agreed to fly out to visit his brother in boulder and then join me. we took our time and wound through new mexico and arizona, and then went to vegas, where we won tickets to the dance show at the tropicana. it was a trip.
• i spent august in san diego, los angeles, and black rock city, where i ran the cafe kitchen for the first time, and introduced my dad to burning man.
• in september, i drove back to bloomington for lotus.
• in october, i returned to colorado, where i continued to finagle web work (now, with telecommuting!), reconnected with my dad, visited the bourlands in boulder a lot, thought about kwerk, and used netflix to catch up on tv shows i had been ignoring for 5 years — turns out, the part of me that went to film school is still in there somewhere, and it likes tv now!

i was in colorado until early 2009, but for now, we are only concerned with 2008.

basically, these are the songs that spoke to me, for one reason or another, over the course of that year. i listened, and sometimes sang along or spoke back, and as a result, the moment or moments that make up those musical conversations are saved as a sort of montage in my mind. when i hear the songs, i see the memories, like when you smell cinnamon rolls and remember grandma’s house. or maybe the mall. depending on how suburban your upbringing, and the ethnicity and domesticity of your grandmother.

in other words, if i were to make a movie telling the story of my year, this would be the soundtrack, and i leave it to you to imagine the actual plot.

or, you know, you can ask me about it sometime, and buy me a beer.
:)

the songs have been zipped into three bundles to maximize your download experience.

they are presented in roughly the order of the memories they trigger, with certain adjustments made for the sake of pleasant song transitions, and they are intended to be listened to in sequence. at least once. :)

the next course will be served once 2009 has ceased providing fresh ingredients.

the musical substance of this course will be removed when the next course arrives, though the menu will remain for your reference, and you are encouraged to purchase the songs you like best directly from their deserving creators, one of whom (see track 26) happens to be my father.

the third bundle is kind of a bonus bundle, and can be seen as separate from the rest of the mix - track 30 is 30 minutes long, and is an example of binaural entrainment, which means that it will induce brainwave patterns that are consistent with meditative states if you listen to it with stereo headphones, and will simply sound like rain if you don’t.

it’s great for power naps.

track 31 is included because it is what the car ipod would play whenever it reset, so i heard the first few bars a lot, and it amuses me to preserve that memory, and it amuses me even more to do so by placing it after the meditation track, because i kind of think of meditation as pushing the reset button for my brain.

as a bonus, beck is also way better with stereo headphones, so positive reinforcement wins!
:)

bon apetit.

Part One

1. Dani California - Red Hot Chili Peppers
2. Gamemaster - Paul Oakenfold
3. Looking at the World from the Bottom of a Well - Mike Doughty
4. God Put a Smile Upon Your Face - Coldplay
5. Cha Cha - Balkan Beat Box
6. Frank Sinatra - Cake
7. Little Plastic Castle - Ani DiFranco
8. Marching Bands of Manhattan - Death Cab for Cutie
9. Dead - They Might Be Giants
10. Wonderboy - Tenacious D
11. Snow ((Hey, Oh)) - Red Hot Chili Peppers
12. U Can’t Hold No Groove - Victor Wooten
13. Yeah. - Jake Shimabakuro
14. Think About the Way - Ice MC
15. She’s Electric - Oasis

Part Two

16. I Fought in a War - Belle and Sebastian
17. Fixing Her Hair - Ani DiFranco
18. Seek Up - Dave Matthews and Tim Reynolds
19. Cast No Shadow - Oasis
20. Magic Trick - M Ward
21. Horn Into - Modest Mouse
22. The World at Large - Modest Mouse
23. Float On - Modest Mouse
24. Ocean Breathes Salty - Modest Mouse
25. No Surprises - Radiohead
26. My Guitar Went to Burnin’ Man - Stephen Brunette
27. My Old Man Boogie - The Reverend Peyton’s Big Damn Band
28. Choose Life - PF Project featuring Ewan McGregor
29. Extraordinary Machine - Fiona Apple

Part Three

30. The Dive - Centerpoint Research Institute
31. Loser - Beck

i went to burning man!

for my third pilgrimage to black rock city, i agreed to run the kitchen for the golden cafe, which i also did last year, but this year i was excited because more people signed up to help cook, and i had more experience, including the experience of already acquiring equipment, which meant that part would hopefully be easier this time around.

i was basically responsible for:
- making sure that all of the basic equipment was purchased/borrowed/found and transported to the playa somehow;
- making sure that someone signed up to cook for each slot on the meal plan, or signing up myself, or letting lucifer buy MREs;
- making sure that each person who signed up to cook understood that they were responsible for either purchasing and transporting their own food, or giving me a list;
- making three supper club menus that were separate from the meal plan;
- recruiting people to help me cook on supper club nights (TWR);
- purchasing the food i needed for supper club and the food that other people asked me to get;
- transporting all the food i bought;
- making sure there was enough cooler/refrigerator space for all the food throughout the week;
- organizing the kitchen somewhat so that it could be used by many different people without driving them (or me) completely insane;
- communicating with the power and trash teams throughout the week;
- encouraging camp members and random passersby to wash dishes even though it was a disgusting job in an environment without running water or drains;
- making creative use of leftovers and unused/forgotten food so that food waste was minimized as much as possible;
- overseeing cleanup, packing, and distribution of leftovers and equipment;
- transporting my own share of the leftovers and equipment home to sit in a dusty pile until i get around to sorting through it (current progress ~ 40%);
- making notes about what to do better next year (current progress (~ 10%);
- vowing to do everything differently if i’m ever crazy enough to do such a job again.

considering that this list should probably be split between 3-4 people for maximum efficiency and enjoyment, things went quite well, though some concessions were made in the form of crazy supper club menu items that very few people even knew i was considering. i decided that going the safe route at the last minute was preferable, seeing as that way i got to do some other things, too, like climb on the giant monkey bars on our corner, or spin on the teeter-totter of death next door, or go all the way out to the giant slide. this year was a year of playground equipment, and i rather enjoyed that trend.

purchasing and transport were way easier this year, but seeing as how last year i almost had a nervous breakdown in the week before the burn, and ended up going way over budget because i had to rent a hotel room to hold all the stuff i was buying and then rent a van to transport it, the bar to beat was not very high.

the worst thing on playa this year was that my back really hurt the whole week, and that made it harder to want to do other things when i wasn’t cooking, which kind of sucked. i did manage to get out several times, and i saw the big sights, and i made new friends, so all was well. one morning, a friend of the camp even stopped by on his way to volunteer at the heebie jeebie healers, and i got a reiki session without having to wait in line, so that was awesome. that was thursday morning, and the night before, an experienced line cook had sauntered in to help with supper club just as i was about to pull my hair out, so i didn’t have to grate any cheese, and then i had excellent company wandering around the city til dawn, so the universe provides. :)

and as for the kitchen, all three nights of supper club were very well received, so that was quite rewarding. i did, in fact, not overcook the lamb, and neither did i make the sea cucumbers, which was the name i came up with for cucumbers that i cored, stuffed with crab/seaweed salad, chilled, sliced, and flash fried. at one point, i also tried wrapping them in nori, but it didn’t really like to stick, so i ditched that step. i think it would work better with a layer of sticky rice, and i might try the whole thing again sometime, when not in the desert. more disappointing was the loss of the cheddar-apple ties, which were cool little apple and cheddar sandwiches that i wrapped in pie crust and grilled. i was stressing out that night, and we already had grilled cheesecake for dessert, so hassling with pie crust seemed silly.

in the end, i had a lot of fun, enjoyed some excellent food, and met many amazing and generous people, which is always the biggest joy of burning man. i was considering that i would not be in the country for burning man 2010, but now i think i will be, but i will not be running the cafe kitchen again, which will doubtless be a bit sad, but also very liberating. one of our most awesome new camp members - tigerlily - has agreed to take on the infrastructure portion of the kitchen alone, which means the meal plan and potential supper club portions will be handled separately, which is smart. i might be convinced to cook one meal, but as of now, i believe that my main focus is going to be the creation of a wandering employment agency and impromptu soup kitchen. the theme next year is ‘metropolis’ and i figure any real city needs social services. :)

i do no real planning for burning man until after president’s day, however, as a personal concession to sanity.

so more thoughts there after the year turns over, yes?

in the meantime, i’ll keep trying to clear the brush of these WHYB.FB backstories…

(more…)

since my last entry in this blog, i have begun using facebook, extensively, and i find that it has in some ways replaced my blogging, because it is good for me to be encouraged to be pithy, and the reward in terms of feeling more connected to so many people in so many different spheres of my life is addictive.

somehow, in the past year, facebook has managed to swallow up so much of the general population that it’s network now includes: the more computer savvy members of my extended family, in both colorado and florida, which means many cousins whom i see once every couple of years, if i’m lucky; most of my friends from highschool and college, including people whom i have not really seen or heard from since, but liked at the time, and now i really appreciate having a window onto where their lives have led; designers and techie people whom i have met and/or worked with since going to grad school, and who are now dispersed; bloomington townies i knew and loved before ever going to IU, and have been anchored by since; and various other people i met while traveling in the UK, living in portland, becoming involved with burning man, and generally circling the western 2/3 of this country for the last two years, while keeping as many tops spinning as possible in order to figure out what the hell to do next.

that’s quite a list, when it comes down to it, and it makes facebook by far the easiest way for me to keep up with the world right now. better than email, better than the phone, better than christmas letters, better than blog posts that i always Wish i could find time to write but then never do…

facebook is like just being able to think of the title of a blog post, and then not actually having to say anything else about it, unless people prompt you, which is a really nice option for my brain. :)

and i do like the freedom to write more than a 140 character twitter update, and attach pictures and links, though as with any new freedom, a learning period wherein we all must learn what it means to be judicious with our powers is part of the deal.

i still like twitter, and i should use it more, but it only includes the hci/techie circle i mentioned above, and celebrities and companies and news sources, which is nice, but not nice enough to win over facebook, when i’m pressed for time.

when i explain twitter to people, i call it a virtual water cooler, and i think that facebook status updates have really grown into the potential of that concept. it’s like a network of water coolers, with one in every building of your life, from which you draw not water, but random sequences of interesting tidbits of news and commentary, from everyone you have ever known.

and friends who don’t know each other - who live in different countries even! - can meet through your comments!

and we are forced to choose which sorts of conversations we WANT to carry on this publicly, and which to have more privately — how much do we talk about what we Really did last weekend? or what we think about our boss? or who we are going to vote for? or what we think about our neighbors?

and what does our willingness or reluctance to be transparent about these things say about us?

it is fascinating.

and i am thrilled to be able to witness it, much less shape it.

it is an example of why i continue to err more on the side of technophilia than technophobia.

so…

find me on facebook if you want, k?
:)

i logged on here because i was reading old blog posts, and realizing how long it has really been since i wrote, and how i do enjoy the record of my life and thoughts that my blog provides me, regardless of whether other people enjoy reading it, so i should do my best to avoid letting the gaps get too large.

and i don’t know about you, but when i have trains of thought like that, i find it best to follow them through, which in this case, meant just hit “write post” and see what happens.

and now it seems that i have written a post about facebook, which is fine.
it really is the best answer to “so, where’ve you been?” when it comes to the part of me that lives in the blogosphere, so it’s as good a place to start as any. :)

it’s characteristically not pithy, however, so i’ll just have to come back later with updates about, you know, the part of me that lives in the real world. ;)

i know i say ‘i’ll say this later’ a lot, but eventually, i might just surprise us all.

one potential benefit of winning nanowrimo this year is that it will make a daily writing habit easier, so i just have to structure my time, and that’s kind of my focus right now with kwerk, so ding! winner!

oh, yeah! i just won nanowrimo! :)

remember two years ago when i first tried it and failed miserably after a week or so of nervous effort, and then went on a trip to florida wherein i barely wrote at all?

don’t worry, i don’t really remember it, either.

but i really did blog more in those days, didn’t i?
huh…

anyway, i’m kind of in shock about it this time, because it was too easy, and that means that i really have no excuse to not write a novel…

but that’s another post, too.

hasta.

i quit my job in san diego, and i’m moving north to santa cruz.
i’ll most likely be there until the end of the year, but i don’t really know for certain, because i’m not really going to finish planning that part until after burning man.

i know!
you didn’t even know i had a job!
and if you did, it’s probably because you were otherwise privy to some of my first month and a half in san diego, wherein i was agonizing about money, because gainful employment in any capacity was starting to feel dangerously elusive, and i had to admit that picking myself up and moving across the country to a town where i knew only a handful of people and had no plan for survival beyond the promise of some design brainstorming with erik and the horizon of my initial two-month sublease, IN THE MIDDLE OF A RECESSION, was maybe a little bit less than the smartest plan i could have come up with.

[see post title]

but then, just as i was investigating escape routes, i landed a nearly full-time job with a tiny little research chemical supply house, doing what was supposed to be mostly office work with a touch of web design, but ended up being mostly web design with a touch of office work. the pay was not really fair for the work i was doing, and the amount of time it took, particularly when i included the commute, was really making it difficult to continue to work on other projects i actually cared about, so i was feeling wary, like a horse who let herself get saddled because there were apples involved, but now she isn’t so sure she likes the look of this trail…

but i told myself there was no reason to bolt - it was time to knuckle down, and quit whining, and be grateful to have a job at all. i had a lot i wanted to do, but what i needed most was the chance to relax into having a routine for a while, because my nerves were beginning to fray from the uncertainty of being on the road so long, and my health was beginning to suffer.

so i found a neat house with nice artsy folks and a dog and a big yard and a room for rent, and i focused on the positive sides of my new job (the people were friendly, and troubleshooting their website was educational, and the agreement was only until december, so i wasn’t too worried about them expecting me to stay for all time), and i tried to enjoy the summer. i went to the beach, and a padres game, and turned 30, and began making plans to get certified to teach english abroad. a month passed, and over the weekend of the 4th, i traveled north to wine country for an old friend’s wedding.

the wedding gave me the chance to tell the “so, what are you doing?” story about 100 times, and meet some new friends, and spend a few mornings walking along dirt roads in a pine-scented valley that began each day blanketed in fog. it grounded me sufficiently that when i got back, sticking with my job seemed ridiculous and cowardly, and i resolved to just quit before burning man, instead of risking being fired when i asked for the time off, which was my ingenious current plan.

that same weekend, my mother’s partner went into the hospital.
his kidneys have been failing, and this time they found out that he is going to require a whole new level of home care. :(
right now my mom has some time off to be able to get used to the transition, but in the fall it will suck, and if i were to come and help with the cooking and stuff it would be a tremendous help, and i could live rent-free, and look for a part-time job in santa cruz, and have time to work on kwerk, and a kitchen full of food to play with.

and, as a complete bonus, i had been handed a pretty much fault-free way to quit my job, with no need to wait until burning man.
i could just walk away.

it was crazy, and since i know that i am susceptible to looking for excuses to do crazy things sometimes, i wanted to think it over, but it just felt like the right thing to do on a lot of levels, and when i told all of this to erik after he picked me up from the airport, the first thing he said was: funny thing, but this month is going to be crazy with sprout robot, so if you want part-time work during the transition, i could find stuff for you to do, and pay you a fair wage, so that would mean you would have another month of work, really, even if you quit tomorrow.

and that pretty much sealed it.

so here i am.

the last few weeks have been a wild ride, but i still feel good about the decision.

this week, i am trying to spend as much time as i can helping with sprout robot, and also deciding whether i have enough room in my car for the things i had with me plus the things erik has been kindly storing for me since last august, because if i don’t, i need a trailer.

i am leaving town at the end of the week.

as of today, i have one month, exactly, to ensure that all the bits and pieces are in place such that a kitchen will be equipped to feed 50 people for a week in the middle of the nevada desert.

i am frightened at times, but the wind on my back feels good.

the whole idea of this is actually kind of baffling now, but this was 1997, and most people didn’t have laptops, and some people didn’t even have a computer at all, so you didn’t always get to turn your papers in digitally. you actually had to, like, print things out, and find a stapler. but my freshman year at NYU they were trying out this new thing by having ‘computer sections’ of writing workshop. we met in a computer lab, and turned in our papers via email. we also did things like chat together in class about something we read.

it was all meant to be very cutting edge, and, in what i suppose was a foreshadowing of my future interest in hci, i thought it was exciting enough that i wanted to sign up for it, even though it meant going to class at 8:30 in the morning. i had just finished going to highschool for four years, after all, and i had to get there at 7:15, so 8:30 sounded quite reasonable. after a full year of staying up until 3 in the morning on a regular basis, and almost never getting more than 6 hours of sleep a night, i changed my tune, but in the narrow window between eras, i signed up for andrew hess’s section of writing workshop, and it changed me. for the first time in my life, i had a teacher who saw right through my bullshit, and tore my writing apart, and challenged me to really think about what i was saying instead of just babbling because it was easy for me to babble, like i’m doing in this blog post.

la la la la.

it was hard, and it scared me a little, and if i ever get my act together and actually write something that makes me proud, it will be partly because of andrew hess, and i will say so in the acknowledgements.

anyway, one of the things that andrew did was ask us to write something that he called a ‘metatext’ after each of our papers. the idea was to give us a place where we could express our thoughts on how the paper went - did we like it? did we leave something out? what hung us up? what did we know was confusing?

this practice raised the caliber of andrew’s editorial comments to a whole new level, because he knew what we already knew, and this experience felt to me like fresh air was finally being let into a room that had grown very stale and stifling, and it made me rather giddy.

one of the things that the metatext helped me with was being comfortable leaving things alone even when i didn’t feel like they were finished yet. i have a very hard time with drafts. i try to make things fit together from the beginning. and i fail. because that’s not how writing works, really. you need to test things. see how they feel. rework them and move them around. i resist this, because my thoughts? they are messy. and it’s hard for me to explain them. and no matter how many times i learn the lesson that it’s faster and more rewarding to just let myself say them a hundred different ways and then pick the ones that work best, i still feel bad about asking other people to sort through my muck, and nervous about going on the record with things that i don’t really mean.

i’m saying all this not because i’m feeling particularly narcissistic this evening, but because it’s a pretty good description of the core of my dilemma with blogging. i was thinking about it as i was writing the last post about kwerk because i kept getting stuck, and it made me nervous, and i remembered andrew hess, and writing workshop, and metatexts, and i thought: maybe i should start writing metaposts? separate places where i let myself ramble about what i think the post did pretty well, and how it compares to the form of the idea that i’m trying to find a way to express, and what i think i might do to make it better.

it seems worth a try, a least.

i can hide the metaposts after the jump, or something. maybe find a plugin that lets me attach notes. then people with interest in such things can read them, and the main posts might get leaner, as a result.

i’ll go write a metapost for the kwerk post now, and try it out.

i thought that this was going to be the metapost, but then i decided to tell stories instead. :)

so andrew, if you ever read this - thank you. i will have you know that you also made me very sensitive to the fact that czechoslovakia no longer exists, and i hope that the past ten years have treated you well. i am trying to focus on kwerk, and finding ways to make money in the meantime, but i am also starting to write a short story - pretty heady sci-fi - and when i finish, i will seek you out, and send you a copy, and if you have the time and interest to tear it apart, it would be a tremendous honor.

each color corresponds to a different way of looking at the world.

green is the color of foundation and structure - of plans, logistics, and routines; the rhythm of physical existence.
red is the color of action - of work, economics, and ‘progress’; the creation of material things that didn’t previously exist.
yellow is the color of reason - of science, logic, and formal language; the development and articulation of ideas.
blue is the color of intuition - of memory, emotion, and art; the sense of connection to something beyond the self.

i am happiest when swimming in blue, comfortable with yellow for sport, alarmingly reluctant to devote time to red until the last possible minute, and nearly totally oblivious to green when it is not being actively enforced by other people.

if that makes sense, you actually know quite a bit about me now.

there are four colors for the same basic reason that there are four elements, and four suits in a deck of cards, and four continuums of the myers-briggs personality survey; fourness just seems to keep popping up when people go about trying to subdivide the human experience into meaningful chunks. there are lots of theories about why, and i am devoting a good amount of yellow time to studying them, but that is not the focus of this post. on the whole, the crosscultural persistence of the meme is enough to capture my attention, and when it comes to the initial decisions about how to structure kwerk, i am inclined to respect my elders.

playing kwerk is about learning to think in four colors, as if your life is one of those video games where your character has different health bars, and you go around collecting items or playing minigames or talking to tree sprites in order to build up the different bars. thus, you prepare yourself for the different sorts of challenges that present themselves as the story unfolds, and you improve your chances for success.

to get started in kwerk, you color code your actions and your goals, and then you log what you spend your time doing. over time, you get a color distribution of your life that is increasingly informative. it’s kind of like using quicken to keep track of how you spend your money in order to help you figure out your budget, except it’s keeping track of how you spend your time in order to help you figure out your dreams.

kwerk is a game that i am inventing for myself, to incentivize red and green activity that i tend to procrastinate or ignore completely, and to reward myself for blue and yellow activity that i tend to dismiss as easy and therefore undervalue.

on the whole, kwerk is a tool for cultivating balance.
and it’s a game because i see no reason that such pursuits should not be fun.

right now, kwerk exists mostly in my mind, but bit by bit, conversation by conversation, it is taking root in more minds and sending out fragile little shoots that we can see and touch and nurture and name.

it’s kind of exciting. :)

so… an online version is the goal.
hopefully by the end of the year.
who wants to play?

more broadly, i suppose, who’s still reading this blog?

and what should i talk about next?

metapost, after the jump, for the intrepid amongst ye…
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