Personal

The stuff about me and my life. The “diary” side of blogging.

I don’t ‘forward’!

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I get a lot of things sent to me by the people I know, and that have my e-mail address. Some (many) annoy me, but at times I get sent stuff that I actually like, or find amusing, or some such.

Going through and cleaning up my hard drive after upgrading my system, I figured that a blog would be good way to keep all these things around in a central place…so, that’s what I’ve done! There’s only a couple things up there now (and they’re both pretty long), but more will appear as I keep digging through all the stuff I’ve got scattered around my drives.

So without further ado — I don’t ‘forward’!

Even cops get to play sometimes

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Every morning on my way to work, I walk out my door and head about five blocks down 8th avenue to my usual bus stop. Once a week, when I need to pick up my paycheck, I cut through the Freeway Park next to the Convention Center and head into downtown to the Today’s offices.

Since I had a paycheck waiting for me today, that was my route. Once I turned into the park entrance, though, I was a little concerned, as there was a small group of five police officers, all on their patrol bikes, grouped around the top of the staircase I normally head down. It didn’t look like anything was really happening, though, so I just kept going on my merry little way. Just before I got to the top of the stairs, one of the officers turned his bike around, carefully took aim — and started to attempt to ride his bike down the staircase, egged on by the other four officers he’d just been talking with, and another officer already at the bottom of the staircase.

He paused at the first landing long enough for me to walk by, then started working his way down again, only to take a tumble off his bike about halfway down. Fortunately, the next officer, already starting to ride down the stairs on his bike, managed to both avoid the one who’d just fallen off his bike and was laughing and trying to disentangle himself from the spokes, and keep going down without taking a spill. “It’s not as easy as it looks!” said the officer waiting at the bottom of the stairs, as we watched a couple more start to bump their way down.

Must’ve been a slow morning.

Man I wish I’d had my camera with me.

So it’s been a year

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I’d like to come up with something amazingly deep and profound to say, but for one reason or another, it’s just not in me. Besides, plenty of other people have worthwhile things to say.

I think part of my little bout of writer’s block is just that the entire situation is frustrating. One year ago, something huge and immensely terrifying happened. In the year since then, however, a multitude of other, smaller, less immediately noticeable things have happened (usually in the name of ‘patriotism’), that added up scare me as much as (and quite possibly more than) the attacks themselves. It’s a different kind of scare, but it’s a scare, nothenless. Awareness of this side of things does seem to be growing, though, which is good.

I guess, most of what I’d really want to say I’ve said already, either in some of my rants over the past year or in the links I’ve chosen to highlight in this blog (the majority of which, unfortunately, still reside in limbo).

I dunno. I’m rambling. Caught between wanting to say something, and not really having anything of real import to say.

What kind of God…?

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Thinking about the upcoming one year anniversary of Sept. 11th, Dave had this to say:

A common theme — what kind of God lets this happen. I answer that with another question. What kind of a country is so selfish that it doesn’t see that 9-11 was [the] tiniest big tragedy viewed from a global perspective. What about famine in Africa? What about AIDS? They wonder at the spiritual vision of a person who jumps from the World Trade Center to certain death, but don’t wonder about the millions of people who do the same thing with tobacco? It’s out of balance. We’re out of balance. 9-11 was, IMHO, a small upheaval in getting to some kind of equilibrium in how the U.S. participates in the world, both from the U.S. perspective, and the world’s perspective. That we got so much sympathy says how big the human heart is. That there wasn’t more celebrating in the streets of world capitals says that they forgive us for our selfish attitude, which is back in force as if 9-11 never happened.

So what was the lesson of 9-11 that the U.S. has failed to learn? I think it’s that God doesn’t think we’re as important as we do. The concept of national security is obsolete. We can’t close our borders. We live on this planet with everyone else. Global warming, AIDS, terrorism, all penetrate all borders. New York is a world city. The last gasps of isolationism will be snuffed out by more humiliation, until we get the truth, we aren’t above the rest of the world, but we are part of it.

Amen.

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Don’t hold back!

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Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, “who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?” Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of the Universe. Your playing small doesn’t serve the world. There’s nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do…we were born to make manifest the Universe that is within us. And as we let our light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we’re liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

— Marianne Williamson, Return to Love (via Unamerican)

Bumbershoot ’02

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It’s taken me a couple days to get to this, and it’s not going to be nearly as long as last year’s opus — but I did get to spend last Saturday out at this year’s [Bumbershoot1. Unfortunately, I could only hit one day this year, so I decided to go Saturday, as it seemed to have the best lineup of artists I knew I wanted to see.

I started the day by walking down to the Seattle Center from my apartment. I’d originally planned on taking the monorail from Westlake Center, but the day was nice enough that I figured I’d just go ahead and walk it. Jimi Hendrix MarionetteWhen I got to the entrance, there was a street performer who had a boombox playing Jimi Hendrix tunes, and a (I believe) homemade Jimi marionette doing a really impressive show. I grabbed my ticket, and wandered in to explore what this year had to offer.

The new pavillionI was supposed to meet Chad at the Flag Pavillion at 2pm, so I started by heading that direction. Unfortunately, as it turns out, there is no Flag Pavillion anymore! A new pavillion has been built, that had been designated the “Tiki Terrace” and “Lagoon Lounge”. Made it fairly difficult to find Chad, so I just kept up my wandering, figuring we’d run into each other eventually. The new building’s pretty nice, though…not quite finished yet, but it’s close.

Zambola drums and dancersWhile I was down by the new pavillion, one of the frequent mini-parades through the grounds was getting started, led off by the Zambola drum and dance troupe. I have no idea if any of them were professionals or not — I kind of got the impression that they were all doing it just because they really enjoyed it — but it was a lot of fun (and not to shabby to look at, either!).

A balancing actA lot of the fun of wandering the grounds is the multitudes of smaller acts, street performers that have come in and set up shop somewhere on the grounds. There were a couple guys with a juggling act that had just found an audience volunteer — a 9-year old girl who was having a blast being the center of the show for a few minutes. After dressing her up in a clip-on tie and bowler (so that she’d look “just like her dad”), they had her hold onto a couple posts, and set two spinning balls balancing on them…and she was a star!

The stamenphoneIn one of the less-packed areas of the grounds, I came across a really fascinating performer. He was standing on a box, playing a truly unusual instrument that had a very ethereal, resonating sound to it. Turns out that he’d created the instrument himself after seeing it in a dream, and taught himself how to play it, after welding it together from a lot of metal bars and a couple extra large steel salad bowls. Really interesting stuff (and I just found the artist’s website, including an article where about halfway through he discusses the creation of the Stamenphone).

Si*séEventually I wandered over to the Rhythm Stage and sat down to watch Si*Sé, a ‘latin/electronica’ band that I ended up really liking (enough to pick up their CD later on in the night, even). While I was enjoying them, who should walk up, but Chad Aimee, Chad and Martyand not just Chad, but Aimee and Marty, too! Very cool — so now that we’d found each other, the four of us wandered around for the next few hours.

We wandered the grounds for a bit, then headed into the stadium to snag a place on the floor to see Ani DiFranco perform. Chad, Marty and I pretty much stayed about halfway back, while Aimee bounced around, doing her best to get a better view of Ani during the show. The stadium floorAni did a pretty good job, though apparently she wasn’t too thrilled about being stuck in “that damn stadium”…still, the audience loved her, and she put on a good show.

After Ani we had a couple hours to kill before seeing Concrete Blonde (my primary reason for choosing Saturday over the rest of the weekend), so it was off to wandering again. KateWe ran into Kate and a friend of hers for a few minutes at one point — it was great to see her again! We all talked for a few minutes, then she and her friend headed off to get something cool to drink. Chad, Marty and I spent a fair amount of the next hour people watching while Aimee dove into (seemingly) every booth we passed to see what they had available…certainly not a problem, though, we weren’t exactly in a hurry to get anywhere. Besides, standing in one place for a while makes it easy to run into friends — Jory and Adri like Jory and Adri, who were down for the weekend. That was kind of funny — the last time I’d seen them was last Bumbershoot, when they were down for their honeymoon!

Aimee at one point had to run off to get money out of an ATM, and after waiting fo a while, Chad and I decided that we really didn’t want to miss the Concrete Blonde show, and left Marty to wait for Aimee while we headed into Key Arena. We found my friend Laura and her friend Renee in there, and so the four of us stuck together during the Concrete Blonde show — which was flat-out incredible. After having listened to Concrete Blonde for years, it’s so great to be able to see them live — especially since this was the second time in a year I’ve been able to do so! Both shows have been incredible, and I’m definitely looking forward to any more I can catch.

The Space Needle at nightAfter Concrete Blonde, we all split up — Laura and Renee went off to find food, Chad headed home, and I headed into the Wherehouse booth to pick up Si*Sé’s CD. I also on a whim picked up a CD by Blackalicious, a hip-hop group that had played earlier that I hadn’t been able to see, but had heard a lot of good things about, so I figured it was worth a shot. Then I started working my way home…and managed to catch just the tail end of a performance by Jason Webley, one of my favorite local artists that I’ve found yet (though I’ve not been able to catch any of his shows). He’s got a new CD out, so I picked that up also, and then — finally — made it out the gates, and walked my skinny lil’ butt home.

All in all, a very good day. It’s a bummer that I wasn’t able to go for the full weekend again, as I did last year, but hey — there’s always next year, right?

Geek mode on!

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I didn’t want to say anything about this too soon — I tend to get a little too excited about things before they’re actually happening — but now that i’ve been at it for almost a full week, I figured I’d actually say something about it.

Life at work has taken a definite turn for the better!

Last week I was about ready to turn in my resignation and ask my temp agency to find me another posting. While the work hasn’t been bad, there have been two main annoyances that have been getting to me. First off, the pay is a lot lower than I’d like it to be, and secondly, since I’ve just been your basic bindery monkey (binding books, cutting paper, laminating, drilling holes, etc.), not only was I not learning anything new, but I wasn’t even using the knowledge I had. Not something that’s likely to keep me interested for very long, and I’d pretty much reached the end of my rope. So on Wednesday, I was on my way to the boss’s office to talk to him about this and see if there was anything that could be done about either (or preferably both) of these situations.

On my way there, I got pulled aside, and asked if I knew anything about HTML. Since I’ve been playing with this website since about 1995 I was pretty cofindent in telling them that I had some idea of how it worked…and suddenly, I was a lot less interested in whining to my boss.

Since this last Monday, I’ve been neck-deep in HTML, CSS, and XML, working on helping to code the pages for a web-based job submission tool being built by Xerox for use within Microsoft for sending jobs to the Xerox print shops. They’ve given me a week or two to ‘prove myself’ so that they could be sure that I actually was able to contribute to the project and wasn’t just talking out of my rear when I said that I was good with HTML, and then we get to start negotiating a raise. This doesn’t look like it’ll be too hard to do, as I’ve made a lot of progress over the past four days with the two pages that I was given to start with.

One fun side effect of diving into the world of code has been that it’s kicked me back into full-on geek mode. I’ve had a few things bouncing around that I’ve wated to work on here on my site, but I just hadn’t gotten around to getting started. Now that geek mode is back in gear, I’ll be diving back into those projects. Should be interesting to see how this goes….

Tongue tied

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Grrrrr…at 29 years of age, I really should be able to deal with talking to someone of the opposite sex without getting entirely tongue tied, shouldn’t I?

Bleah.

Okies.

So after I get done watching the movie tonight, as I’m leaving the theater I notice that downtown seems really busy for 9pm at night, even on a Saturday night. I decided to wander down and see what’s going on, and realize that there’s a parade going down the streets of downtown! I was still pretty clueless as to just what was going on, so I asked a security guard who was standing around, and it turns out that it was the opening parade for Seafair, a local summer celebration.

I hang around for a couple minutes to do some people watching, when a girl walking by catches my eye. Probably about 5’8″ or so, brown wavy hair in a ponytail, wearing a very nice black velvet ‘goth’-style dress. She was looking around for a way to get across the street — not likely at that point, as the parade still had a way to go, according to the security guards. We got started talking as she tried to figure out how to get to the bus she was hoping to catch, and ended up chatting for a block or two as I started to head home and she found her way to another bus. Cool cool — nice to actually strike up a conversation with an attractive girl that I see for once!

I get home, shave and change, and head up to meet Rick for drinks up at the Barca Lounge, right next door to the Vogue. As a surprise, he’d gotten ahold of Candice and Chad, and the four of us hung out there for a while, then headed down to the IHOP that’s just a few blocks away for munchies. We get there, sit down, and are sitting there talking, when who should walk in and sit directly across the aisle from us but the girl I’d been talking to earlier!

I saw her sit down, and when the converation lulled at our table for a moment, asked if she’d found her way to where she was going. She hadn’t seen me yet, so this caught her a little off guard, but then she started laughing — apparently she’d been randomly running into people all day long. A little while later after heading to the restroom, I introduced myself to her, and found out that her name is Sabine.

And…here’s where the grumbling comes in. Put me in a DJ booth and I can chat and flirt with anyone who comes by. Get me in the real world, actually trying to talk to someone that I find attractive…and I stumble all over myself. Can’t think of what to say next or how to keep a conversation going, can’t seem to string together three words without stuttering, sentences just trail off into nowhere as I lose my train of thought…argh! No matter what, I always come out of it feeling like a complete idiot.

In any case, I think I survived — Chad, Candice, and Rick all got up to head home for the night, and I hung around to talk with Sabine for another few minutes. That didn’t last too long, however, as she was meeting someone else for coffee, and he (a nice enough seeming guy named Justin) showed up not too long afterwards, so I went ahead and made my exit. On the bright side, she didn’t seem too put off by any of my stumbling, and said that she occasionally hits IHOP in the evenings…with any luck, I may run into her again — and maybe even remember how to construct an entire sentence!

(sigh)

I can hope, right?

I was on TV – in Alaska!

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My friend Laura just told me that apparently, I was on TV tonight! It seems that Fox 4‘s nightly news was doing a story on teen dance clubs, and used some old footage from Gig’s. We’re guessing it was from the closing night’s TchKung! show, as apparently I had mud smeared across my face — something TchKung! is known for.

Unfortunately, as she didn’t know the story was going to be on, she didn’t get it recorded. I’m thinking about trying to contact Fox 4 to see if I can get a copy of the report, but their website currently has a note saying that “We will unveil a site that will dazzle and amaze in late spring 2001” — somehow, I think they missed that particular deadline. By any chance, would anyone who stops by here have an idea on how to get ahold of the footage? Lemme know!