Enthusiastically Ambiverted Hopepunk
General ramblings connected to my personal life and activities.
May just seems to be birthday central in my life, doesn’t it? I was born on the 3rd, my brother on the 4th, and my long-time closest friend Royce Williams has his birthday on the 5th!
As he’s a whole whopping two days younger than me, today is his 30th. Happy Birthday, Royce!
Today’s my little brother Kevin’s birthday — yup, we were born three years and one day apart. So…
Happy Birthday Kevin! I know you’re out somewhere between Africa and Alaska, but welcome to being 27!
(When did my little brother get to be 27???)
Well, I’m still here and kicking around, so it seems I didn’t go up in a fiery explosion in the ritual of Carousel. Frankly, I’m relieved — I’ve always said I wanted to go out with a bang, but not that literally.
Incidentally, for those who I may have entirely lost with my birthday post, I highly suggest you check out the movie Logan’s Run. Classic sci-fi.
Anyway, overall a good day yesterday. Wandered around town for a bit with Prairie, and went down to see X-Men 2 midway through the day. Very, very cool — I’ve never been a huge comic person, but I’ve read enough about the X-Men over the years to be very impressed with how they’re handling the movies. Accessible and fun action-adventure flicks for the masses, with a lot of intelligent nods to the fans and creative ties to established comic book canon while creating a new storyline. All in all, lots of fun.
Spent the evening hanging out with Chad and Prairie at the Bad JuJu Lounge and bouncing around at the Vogue. I’d tried to get ahold of Rick and Candice too, but never reached them. Was a little bit of a bummer, but the three of us had fun. I just got a call from Rick, though — he’s collecting Chad and heading this way, and we’re going to go find something to do for the afternoon. Woohoo! Off to go play…
Last Day: Taurus 3’s, Year of the City 2003: Carousel begins…
Carousel was developed as a means for Body Retirement. When a person reaches their 30^th^ Birthday, their face begins to show signs of ‘aging’. They may notice some wrinkles under their eyes, they may notice that their eyesight is not as good as it once was. Also, they may begin to develop white hairs on the head, or worse — loss of hair (known as balding).
This is your body telling you that it’s time to transfer yourself into a new, fresh body — a baby’s body. A body that will take you through another 30 years.
Baby bodies are provided through ‘seed mothering’ — from the female citizens of our society. After being delivered, these babies are taken in by our nuturing Mother Computer and are then given the ‘souls’ of those Last Dayer’s who were able to reach Life Renewal on Carrousel.
When your lifeclock in the palm of your left hand begins to blink, your time is up in your present body. Upon blinking, proceed to our Headquartes on Nolan Street, 7th Floor, Room 1976.
There, you will be given proper ceremonial garb and final instructions for participating in Life-Renewal on Carousel.
Remember, the higher you are able to ‘fly’ while the Carousel turns, the greater your Renewal chances. Don’t let the fear of knowing that your old body will explode into a fiery pulp as you try to reach these heights hinder your efforts, or you may not make it to the Renewal Stage.
Carousel is meant to be an enjoyable, life-renewable experience. As you’re out there standing with your fellow ‘Renewer’s’, and with all your friends watching and shouting from the stands, by keeping a positive outlook on the process…
…YOU WILL BE RENEWED
CalPundit made a proposal over the weekend that I absolutely love: teach history backwards.
[History] is a subject that I talk about frequently with my mother (an actual teacher, mind you), trying to figure out why it’s such a disliked subject. After all, we like history, but surveys routinely show that it’s the least liked subject, ranking even below obvious suspects like math and spelling.
Why is it so disliked? Who knows, really, but it’s probably because it seems so remote from normal life. It’s pretty hard, after all, for most teenagers to get very enthused about a long-ago debate over the Missouri Compromise that has only the most tenuous connection to the present day.
So in the true spirit of blogging (especially weekend blogging!), here’s my dumb amateur idea about how to teach history: do it backward.
It’s hard for kids to get interested in century old debates without knowing all the context around them, but they might very well be interested in current day events. So why not start now and explain the events that got us here? War on terrorism? Sure, let’s teach it, and that leads us backward to a discussion of how the current state of affairs is the successor to the bipolar world that came apart in 1989. And that leads back to the Cold War, and that leads back to World War II, etc.
In other words, invert cause and effect. Try to get them wondering about the causes of things they already know about, and then use this curiosity to lead them inexorably backward through history.
I have to say, I think this would be such a good approach. History never really caught my attention in high school — in the words of a tongue-in-cheek quote I found somewhere, “You meet all these interesting people, but they’re all dead.” I’m not sure I could have pinned down exactly why at the time, but the perceived lack of relevancy to anything I dealt with on a day to day basis, or expected to deal with in the future, certainly makes sense. Math, much as I hated it, I knew I’d have to deal with throughout my life, and the same with much of the sciences — they were obviously useful subjects. History, at least the way it was presented to me then, wasn’t.
Of course, that mindset has changed drastically over the intervening years, and now I find historical subjects fascinating — enough so that one of the many ideas I sometimes turn over in my head for when I can finagle the time and money to get into school again is exploring becoming a history teacher.
If I ever travel down that particular road, you can bet I’ll see what I can do with this approach. Start with the recent history that ties into current events, then explore the underlying causes of those. From there, work backwards — create that obvious, active link between today’s events and those of the past. While many history teachers have the quote, “Those who do not study the past are doomed to repeat it,” somewhere in their classrooms, I think that an approach like this would actually do more to prove that quote than the current approach does.
(via Atrios)
Had a very pleasant weekend visiting Prairie’s friend Beth in Vancouver, WA, and Prairie’s mom in Woodland. It rained a lot Saturday, but Sunday was an absolutely gorgeous early summer day, and I got a few decent pictures — one of which is the newest entry to WüdiVisions.
I was planning on getting a bit more up here tonight, but I ended up spending about two hours on the phone doing pesudo-tech support helping a friend get MovableType installed on their Mac. Not what I’d planned for the evening, but we got it running in the end, so all’s good.
More when I’m not about to pass out in my chair…
Prompted by Kasia (via Robert), I realized that I don’t have any sort of “about me” info here. Guess it’s time to rectify that, huh?
Michael David Hanscom, nicknamed “Woody” (or “Wüdi”, or many variations of either of those). Resident of Seattle, Washington, USA, since June of 2001, after living the majority of my life prior to that in Anchorage, Alaska.
A long-time Mac fanatic, I’ve been through seven or eight different types of Macintosh computer over the years, and currently have four lying around my apartment in various states (only two of which are actually mine, and only one of those is actually functional).
Off-work time is spent either here at my computers, or wandering around Seattle. I can often be found at the goth/industrial club The Vogue on Saturday nights. I’ll be easy to find if you stop by — I’m the one dressed in black.
There’s the basics, at least. Still curious? Anxious for more? Glutton for punishment?
Born May 3^rd^, 1973, at 5:01pm in Indianapolis, Indiana (just in case anyone wants to do a star chart). The first two years of my life were spent bouncing around the Lower 48, until the Air Force decided to exile my father to the frozen wasteland of Fairbanks, Alaska. My brother Kevin was born three years and one day after I was, on May 4^th^, 1976, and not too long after that the military took some small amount of pity on us and relocated us to the not-quite-as-frozen wasteland of Anchorage, Alaska.
While I’m sure my parents would find plenty of quite valid reasons to disagree with me on this, I find most of my life prior to graduation from High School rather unworthy of recounting. Being of above-average intelligence, and correspondingly below-average in social skills, I spent many of my early years as the sterotypical “geek”. Constantly losing myself either in books, computers, or my own too-vivid imagination, the day-to-day perils of the real world intruded into my private little bubble far too infrequently. Friends were few and far between, though the friendships I did form in those years have been lasting — for example, exhibit A: Royce Williams.
Some time after I graduated high school, I had something of a moment of clarity and realized that not only did I have a personality, but it was actually a fairly personable one! The next decade was something of a rollercoaster, as I came out of my shell and attempted to pack all the social experiences and experimenting that I had missed in the prior years into as little time as possible. Some of those experiments worked better than others, but overall, I think I came out fairly healthy in the long run.
Much of my social experimenting came about, initially, thanks to my little brother. Having come from an extremely musical family, I was somewhat fascinated with DJ’ing. My brother’s alternative high school was in need of a DJ for a school dance, and with a recommendation from him, they gave me a chance. I packed up my home stereo, hauled it into their cafeteria, and spent a highly enjoyable evening “ghetto DJing” — no mixing, nothing fancy, not even able to fade between tracks, just switching from “input A” to “input B” when it was time to switch songs.
I loved every minute of it. Apparently they did too, as they asked me back, not only the next time, but for the majority of the dances for the next two years, until Kevin graduated.
From there, I talked my way into a gig at one dance club, then another, then another, eventually spending roughly eight years as something of a “personality” in Anchorage (more details can be found on my DJ Wüdi page).
Along with DJ’ing, my circles of friends and acquaintences grew nearly exponentially. Close friends were still fairly rare, but I stopped being afraid to meet and talk to new people. I moved out of my parent’s house when I was 18, have been on my own since then, and until I moved to Seattle, always had anywhere from one to three official roommates — unofficial roommates sometimes hit the double digits, especially during the height of my DJ days!
Some of the less sucessful social experiments included a two-year stint experimenting with illegal hallucinogens. The three “big” drugs in Alaska have traditionally been pot, mushrooms, and acid (though I understand that’s recently been supplanted by ecstacy). Every time I tried pot it bored me (I got hungry, stupid, and wanted to take a nap), two of the three times I tried mushrooms I just got snippy and went to sleep it off — but for one reason or another, I found a friend in acid. I spent about two years dropping acid on a semi-regular basis, until I eventually got tired of it and, after a weekend that included one day of acid and one day of mushrooms, I quit, and have now been clean for, oh, I’m not even sure — five years? Six?
In retrospect, while much of that period was a lot of fun, and I can’t say that I regret doing it, I am glad that it’s over and done with. The real world is quite entertaining and bizarre enough on its own, without anything else in my system making it even wierder.
As the years in Anchorage wore on, I became more and more dissatisfied. The drive to get out and live somewhere else got stronger and stronger, until I finally decided that I’d had more than enough, and in the spring of 2001 finally started making arrangements to leave state. I trashed, gave away, or sold off most of my belongings, bought my ticket, said my goodbyes, and moved down here to Seattle. Since then, I’ve been working on establishing myself here — first making sure I was settled and wasn’t going to have to slink back to Anchorage with my tail between my legs, then starting to explore more of the town and see what I could find. Coming up on my 2-year anniversary of having escaped Alaska, I’m quite happy I did. It’s a very different world out here — but I’m glad this is where I am.
And now? Life goes on…
Midway through the day today, I got some very nice comments from D and Kirsten. It was too busy at work for me to respond at the time, it was exactly the pick-up I needed in the midst of a crazy day at work. You’re both wonderful!
Turns out that the whole shebang was started over at snazzykat‘s place. Quite cool for her to get something like this started!
And in the sprit of the thing, something I’m happy about in my life. Actually, these days, that’s not too hard to do.
An ever expanding circle of friends, some of whom I’ve met, and some of whom I’ve yet to meet. A job that — finally! — I’m enjoying, even when it does get pretty crazy. Days like today, when the Seattle rain finally blows away and we get a gorgeous, warm, sunny day. Finally finding a design for my website that actually has some small amount of visual appeal to it, instead of being trapped in multitudes of blue boxes! Lots, lots more too…
Well, okay — since you asked…
You know, that’s enough embarassing myself for the moment. Time to stop before I dig myself any deeper. ;)
Had a very pleasant weekend — just staying at home and relaxing for most of it, but yesterday evening spent a good few hours visiting with Miranda, who had come out to visit. She and her friend Ryan had spent Friday with Ryan’s frend Marty down in Vancouver, WA, and then the three of them came up to Seattle on Saturday evening so that Miranda and I could visit. Was a lot of fun — I keep telling her we’ve got to get together more often than just once a year! ;)
Much of the fun of the evening was meeting Ryan and Marty. Miranda and I had made plans to go out to a couple of the clubs here while she was in town, and as the two that I know best are Neighbors and the Vogue, those were our destinations for the night. While I didn’t have any worries about Miranda fitting in at my usual haunts, it was a little entertaining shepherding Ryan and Marty along with us — cowboy hats, while not completly out of place at Neighbors, aren’t often seen in the goth/industrial domain of the Vogue!
Still, they’re both good guys, and it made for a fun evening. Trish, one of the people I’ve met at the Vogue came up and talked with Marty for a while after checking with me first to make sure it’d be okay, since I was obviously with the two of them. Her first question ‐ “So, do you feel a little out of place here?” As it turns out, they’d been a bit worried at first, but quickly realized that they were perfectly safe, and nobody was going to screw with them. Didn’t surprise me, of course, but it was fun to watch the initial reactions.
All in all, a very fun evening — a little drinking, a little dancing, and a lot of catching up, until they had to head back down to Vancouver to sleep and prepare for the drive back home today.
Always good to see old friends again. Now, who’s next to visit Seattle? ;)