Entries Tagged 'By Request' ↓
December 5th, 2009 — By Request
These five questions come from connikins over on Livejournal. As they are nice small questions (rather than Things that take me a few hundred words and therefore a period of weeks to cover), they jump the queue. To hell with continuity. According to the rules I am supposed to ask five questions of anyone who asks me to. I kind of hope nobody does.
1. If none of the clothing in your wardrobe was allowed to be black (or a dark enough shade that it is pretty much indistinguishable from black), what colour would your wardrobe predominantly be?
Grey. Wearing white stresses me out and no other colour is sufficiently neutral. I really dislike wearing blue, and while green is my favourite colour (and I like wearing it) I think it would be a bit too weird for me to wear mostly green most of the time.
2. Are you a music elitist? How do you deal with other people having vastly different music tastes to you?
I don't think I'm a music elitist at all. I used to be. I looked down my nose at music that I didn't get anything out of, especially anything I could decry as shallow and packaged. A few additional years have improved my ability to tell the difference between my subjective opinion and objective truth, as well as teaching me to appreciate a wider variety of sounds and styles.
I tend to be really happy when people that I admire or get along with share my taste in music, and a little bit sad when they don't, but people whose tastes are vastly different to mine are fine by me. There are certain things we are unlikely to be able to share, that's all.
While I am given to saying things like "anybody who doesn't like The National has something wrong with them", the defect I refer to is "being insufficiently identical to me". That is really not something I can hold against anybody.
The other day at work I saw a guy trying to buy Britney Spears tickets on eBay. I knew he had seen her perform recently, and said something like "more Britney tickets, huh?" He braced for ridicule - and, indeed, someone nearby overheard and began to make fun of him - but I had just been making conversation. As I said at the time, if one of my favourite artists was playing in Melbourne you can bet I'd be after tickets.
3. If you only knew a person in passing, what do you primarily judge their personality on? (eg. How they dress, how they talk?) How do you judge if they're worth knowing or not?
That's a hard question to answer, although it's something I actually think about a fair bit.
Part of the problem is that I really don't tend to "judge" people, or categorise them as "worth knowing/not worth knowing". If I observe someone behaving in a way that I find really unpleasant I'm likely to divert my attentions elsewhere, and if it turns out that their interests and values lack any appreciable common ground with mine I will probably not pursue closer acquaintanceship, but I really appreciate the opportunities I get to interact with people who aren't necessarily "my type of person". (This is one of the reasons I like my current workplace so much.)
The thing is that I love people. I really like the way my initial sense of somebody gradually fills out and changes as I get to know them better. I'm rarely surprised by people, because I don't have a fixed idea of who they are supposed to be; I just accept that everything fits into their personal timeline, which I will never see all of. Stuff that I don't understand makes sense with context that I don't have, and every new bit of information leads to greater understanding.
I've wandered a fair way from the question, I know. It's very difficult to put my finger on what it is that attracts my interest. Part of it is an intuitive sense of commonality, I think; I've lost count of the number of times I've felt drawn to somebody, only to find out (days, weeks, months or years later) that we share a predilection or a perspective or a particular kind of formative experience. Another part of it is individuality; even complete strangers sometimes give off such a strong vibe of being themselves that I practically want to follow them home and listen to them tell their life story.
Back to the question again! I suspect that my strongest sense of someone's personality, especially if I know them only in passing, comes from non-verbal cues. Body language, facial expressions, small reactions to things going on around them. That doesn't tend to affect whether I want to know them or not, though, it just affects the ways I might interact with them.
4. Is insomnius a reference to having insomnia?
Sort of. When I was signing up for my Livejournal account a few years ago my sleeping patterns were in much worse shape than they are now. 'Insomnius' as a handle wasn't a direct reference to insomnia, but it was a collection of sounds that seemed to fit pretty well with the person I felt like at the time. I'm sure my general lack of sleep had something to do with that.
Since then I have used it for pretty much everything online, and for me it has become quite removed from any meaning other than 'me'. I get a bit surprised when people connect it with insomnia. Sometimes I wonder if I should use something else, but as a signifier it has become about as strong as my given name (which I would also struggle to change). Besides, having trouble sleeping seems likely to be a feature of my life for some time yet.
5. Do you remember that time you put the spoon in the cup?
Like it was yesterday. Oh, man. Good times.
November 28th, 2009 — By Request
This topic is one of five given to me by sylver_spiders on Livejournal. Feel free to request topics from me in a comment.
Materialism turns out to be a really hard thing for me to write about. I don't want to write about "what people do", and how far away from it I feel. I don't want to write about "what I used to do", and what it meant, and "what I do now", and what that means.
It goes without saying that I have bypassed 'materialism' the philosophical position and gone straight for 'materialism' as a near-enough synonym for 'consumerism', or Having Stuff and Thinking That Is Important.
I have Stuff. I have much more stuff than I need, and I find this state of affairs oppressive. Only inertia and exhaustion keep me from initiating a grand purge, and I am headed for the same end result by a more gradual path. I will happily do without or make do rather than Get More Stuff, and I tend to sit on the idea of new purchases for weeks or months before I go ahead with them.
One of the things I loved about travelling was the absence of unnecessary Stuff. I effectively owned only as much as I could carry with me, and during that time I never once missed anything I didn't have. Of course, in everyday life one does not have the excitement of travel to fill the gaps left by those absent possessions ... but there are better solutions than using the accumulation of Stuff as a distraction from ennui or boredom.
Perhaps it's bizarre for someone who owns two computers and an array of other first-world luxuries to claim any sort of distance from materialism. I am certainly no renunciate, but the possessions I have and value are not symbols or ends in themselves; their value lies in the life they enable me to lead. I take as much pleasure in acquiring something that perfectly fills the niche I have for it as I do in ridding myself of something that is unnecessary.
In my ideal world I have very little Stuff, but every item is Exactly Right.
What I find difficult to express is the fact that I would be quite happy to continue as I am (albeit perhaps with most of that extraneous Stuff re-homed) and never upgrade any of the cheap-and-homely things that do everything I need them to do. I would be surprised, because I enjoy the process of coming across Exactly Right Things, considering them, and making them part of my life, but I would not be unhappy.
More broadly, I am indifferent to the accumulation of wealth beyond a certain point. Being able to support myself is important to me, and I would like to see more of the world and have some degree of financial security in the future, but I lack the disposition to live beyond my means and the kind of aspirations that would drive me to constantly increase said means. Sometimes I feel uncomfortable about this because it seems that a different attitude is expected of me.
Currently I work part-time (as dictated by my health) and can still quite trivially cover expenses, put away savings, and snaffle the odd Exactly Right Thing when it comes along.
I do not wish for anything more.
(Addendum: I should note that living in the Digital Age™ and in a place where I can borrow and rent things makes this work for me. I consume vast quantities of words and music, and a lesser but not insignificant quantity of pictures both static and moving, and if their delivery and storage were not so blissfully simple and efficient I would probably have a much more conflicted attitude to my Stuff. As it is, I can keep physical instances of the things that are truly special to me and still have easy access to other things I like. It is magical.)
November 14th, 2009 — By Request, Personal
This topic is one of five given to me by sylver_spiders on Livejournal. Feel free to request topics from me in a comment.
I suspect that I started calling to social activities "adventures" to take the edge off the stress of organising them. I am not a take-charge-and-organise person by nature; I have a strong preference for being a follower, or at most proposing amendments to plans that are mostly complete. In the last several years, however, circumstances have tended to demand that I either step up and organise things myself or accept that I will not see most of my friends.
At any rate, my socially-retarded self of a few years ago quailed at the thought of asking questions like "would you like to come out for dinner?" of anyone but very close friends, but could manage suggesting a "food adventure" to just about anybody. As the trend caught on it became even easier, because "adventure" was a generally understood and accepted social shorthand. I don't need to use the term this way nowadays, but it was really useful at the time.
One of the things I liked (and like) most about adventures is the implication that anything is possible. (A few years ago I went on innumerable supermarket adventures, which were always much more fun than simply going to the supermarket.) There is also a sense that very little planning or responsibility has to be involved, and that any participants in an adventure are prepared to simply see what happens. If I "organise" an adventure these days it is usually an attempt to welcome disparate people to join me in doing something fun, without feeling like I have to be personally responsible for each person having an excellent time and everyone present getting along really well.
In the last eighteen months or so, adventures have taken on an additional, personal meaning for me. Because my activities have been quite severely curtailed, many of the everyday things that used to be a matter of routine have become more difficult, sometimes assuming epic proportions. That could have left me feeling overwhelmed by unmanageable tasks (and sometimes, to be honest, it does), but my self-imposed conditioning means I can see just about anything I do as an adventure of sorts. And that makes life seem pretty okay, even when it isn't.
November 3rd, 2009 — By Request
conrad_zaar over at Livejournal gave me five things to write about, as mandated by one of the few blog-memes I always enjoy both reading and writing. I am posting each Thing separately, because I am being baroque and wordy and a single post would be far too unwieldy.
(Anyone who wants to join in the fun can post a comment. I'll give you five words/phrases to write about.)
Nethack was my introduction to the world of roguelike games. It made me the ASCII purist I am today. It kept me in QWERTY training after I had switched to Dvorak for all of my personal keyboard use, allowing me to remain generally employable. Thanks to Nethack I spent hours upon hours engrossed in terminal screens and Usenet discussions, as well as developing a persistent tendency to see the emoticon :D as a dragon standing next to a newt.
So it's a pity that I don't like it very much any more.
Nethack had (and has) a lot going for it. It's a ridiculously complex game that requires strategy, tactics and luck; it's a mélange of fantasy references, silly in-jokes and puns; it offers various different playing experiences, both built into the game and added by the playing community in the form of voluntary "conduct" challenges.
Its arbitrary lethality was one of the things I liked most about it, especially at first. While still mostly unspoiled I would blunder about happily, discovering new and strange things and (more often than not) getting killed by them. In a normal game this would have boosted me along some sort of learning curve, but a combination of my own lack of application and Nethack's deliberate, obstructive difficulty meant that I never really got anywhere until I had accumulated information from lurking on rec.games.roguelike.nethack for a while.
Unfortunately, once I was spoiled enough to progress further in the game I discovered that the rest of it was actually quite dull. It's an unfortunate and perhaps ironic fact that the really challenging, difficult part of Nethack is the part that everyone has to play, and only relative experts ever get as far as the easy part. Once I had ascended once I could have tried again with a different character type or extra conducts … but I had no desire to play through a boring game again, even (or perhaps especially) in a more difficult mode. Even the early levels are pretty boring if one is playing through them prudently with the aim of getting further.
I still have quite a lot of affection for Nethack. I like its silly item interactions, its funny messages, and its bewildering array of ways to die. It's just that an occasional reference is more than enough to satisfy my appetite. If I want to play a roguelike that is actually fun and challenging I will play Crawl every time.
September 24th, 2009 — By Request
conrad_zaar over at Livejournal gave me five things to write about, as mandated by one of the few blog-memes I always enjoy both reading and writing. I am posting each Thing separately, because I am being baroque and wordy and a single post would be far too unwieldy.
(Anyone who wants to join in the fun can post a comment. I'll give you five words/phrases to write about.)
I have written plenty of poems, but never poetry. Something makes me shy away from using the word to refer to anything that I have made myself. While I think poetry can be found in more places than poems, I will restrict myself to the obvious for this post. Goodness knows it takes me long enough to write these things without trying to make them comprehensive.
I tend to treat poetry more like music than literature. What I want from it is a sense of truth, or resonance; I want to read poetry that taps into my subconscious and expresses things that I have never quite succeeded in expressing myself, or creates a pattern of sound in my mind as surely as the latest catchy pop song to embed itself there. An analytical, critical approach to poetry never suited me.
As a result, poetry that I love tends to come from the 20th century and be fairly informal in tone. Allen Ginsberg reliably captures my imagination (and Howl never fails to take my breath away), Kerouac and Bukowski have their moments, and one of the most recent poems to touch me was Robert Bruce's poem about writers. (I have, however, also loved Eliot and Yeats, and I am sure there are vast unexplored fields of poetry where I would fall again and again, if I only ventured there.)
The poet I love the most is e.e. cummings. I was first caught by anyone lived in a pretty how town in high school with its seemingly-nonsensical content and delicious word choices. From there I followed him through sonnets and typographical experiments, despair and joy, love and play, and found little to dislike and much to love. A folder of 4KB text files of cummings' poems has followed me from computer to computer over the last ten years. I think it would be fair to say that he is my John Darnielle of poetry. I wish I knew where my book of his poems had gone.
I am not a subscriber to the school of thought that says song lyrics can be poems. Poetry, maybe, but only in that broader sense which I am determined not to address in this post. Matt Berninger of The National summed up my feelings on treating song lyrics as poems beautifully in a Daytrotter interview a couple of years ago, saying they would be "like a dress without the girl".
While I was travelling in Sweden I bought a copy of Stephen Fry's The Ode Less Travelled. Mr Fry and I have very different tastes in poetry, as it turns out, but his focus on forms and his sternness about sitting down and working on something were very useful to me. I write poems very rarely, partly because I only ever do it to capture a moment or a feeling that I have been unable to express in any other way; the exercises in The Ode Less Travelled took me well out of my comfort zone and encouraged me to appreciate poetry for a wider range of reasons.
That being said, the essence of my relationship with poetry has remained the same. I am fascinated by the challenge a sestina represents, for instance, and suitably impressed by those who have completed one, but no amount of respect for craftsmanship can replace the giddiness of falling in love with a poem.
