sunday night: i leave dinner at justin’s to find my car’s driver’s side mirror on the ground, clearly shorn from its home in a somewhat violent manner.
the car in the next space over doesn’t seem to show signs of responsibility, but it’s dark and hard to tell.
justin and i stand in the parking lot for a minute playing jigsaw puzzle and trying to decide whether we could think of anything clever to do, and then i just shrug and toss it into the car.
i need to go to the shop anyway for a tuneup and oil change, but it sucks to have more damage to add to the mix.
so blah.

i also come home to find that my internet is inexplicably down. the router, which lives in my neighbor’s side of the house (too much of a tangent; just trust me), is not broadcasting it’s signal, though david assures me that the dsl is working juts fine.
that sucks.
i decide to go to sleep and hope that it’s better by itself in the morning.

yesterday i wake up at some reasonable hour, planning to go to work for a while before fencing. instead, it turns out to be a slug day, which is my trial name for a kind of day that i have now and then wherein, despite all of my thoughts and intentions to the contrary, i find myself unable to rouse myself from absolute lethargy for hours on end. i don’t exactly feel tired. or sick. or… anything. i just don’t move. i have considered on and off over the years that this is a manifestation of depression, or a very poorly developed coping strategy for high levels of stress, or both. but recently i have been somewhat less convinced of this, or at least i have been somewhat less convinced that it is problematic.
it’s true that it’s quite an obstacle to productivity, and that it’s kind of weird, but the experience is also quite rejuvenative.

fixing internet
fencing
long bout
marty meeting
more slug
talking with david
internet broken again

early meeting
erik’s class
sore, stiff, and foggy
much to do

the awe we feel for old craftsmanship
the difficulty of mapping
the ease with which we tackle the parallel tasks in our world

what are we moving on to?
how do the tools i want to build relate?

vs. computational creativity
vs. one-user-at-a-time design

begun by asking:
what are our foundational challenges?
why do so many projects repeat themes? (like streamlining)

history of interest in israeli/palestinian tension
awe at beatboxing
respect for visual storytelling
middle eastern hiphop
emerging thoughts on the convergence of my interests

reading about al-jazeera international in fast company

today has been a convergence day.
by this i mean:
i got up at 8:15
i had a restful yet productive morning, accomplishing a smattering of goals of different stripes:
– ate some breakfast
– had a good shower
– did stretches for my back, which has been hurting more than usual
– read some ambient findability
– succeeded in posting nuggets of ideas without finishing them

then i spent 5 solid hours at work, making a noticeable dent in some piles of crap by enforcing the following rule: work for an hour without allowing yourself to look at gmail or open non-work tabs of the web browser, relax those restrictions for 30 minutes, repeat.

this plan has the potential to be truly revolutionary.

at the end of that stretch of work, i was listening to pablo honey and putting some folders in chronological order, and i had one of those transcendentally awesome moments of feeling like things are falling into line. yesterday i was pretty pissed at myself for slacking so hard on my capstone, and for coming up with all these endless plan-utations about how i might manage my time better and motivate myself more. i get in those moods and i think to myself “fuck it. just shut up and do things. stop using the search for the ideal plan as an excuse for not trying Any plan for longer than a day.”
i get to that point too often without it sinking in, so i’m just about ready for the meta “fuck it,” because spending too much time thinking about thinking less is just ridiculous.
yesterday night, though, for whatever reason, i hit on a slightly different angle. instead of asking “what do i need to do differently?” i asked “what do i need in order to give something my best?”
and the answer i got was: i need to feel like i’m a part of a culture of excellence.
this surprised me a little, but it really hit home.
if i think about all of the times in my life when i have really hit a groove and done my best, it is not when i get the most sleep or eat the most broccoli, it’s when i feel like i’m working with people who care about kicking ass for the beauty of it.

[going home, java program to fiddle with for infovis, sticking to plans that have yet to be described in this post, but which relate to it in spirit…]

af, pg 15 made me think about it again – “findability is at the center of a quiet revolution in how we define authority, allocate trust, and make decisions. we won’t forget the past, but we will reinvent the future.” (dan dennett’s comment about how “changing the future” is such a funny turn of phrase)
it’s more a call to make the internet better than it is to be afraid of where it’s going
what is it that we’re figuring out and opening up that makes this so compelling to me?

findability reduces the need for one-stop diversification
so will the appeal of big clearinghouses diminish with the rise of the global microbrand?
or will the clearinghouses just change into the portals that make things findable?
i’m leaning towards the latter, but what would the former look like, in extremis?

some general thoughts and my desire to build and articulate my generation’s version
the idea that it is in the same brain vein as the human rights/personal responsibility debate