October
So, ah, it's October, time for the approximately-monthly post.
Um, to get the embarrassing part over with straight away, I was in the paper a little while back. It's sort of bizarre. The conversation with the journalist began on online social networks and managing online friendships, but then I mentioned defriending, which evidently was a new concept, and eventually that became the topic of the article. So it's weird cos I feel the article ends up painting me as this nice girl who has more online friends than she knows what to do with and so is trying to politely get rid of some of them, which, well, no. But I do think the journalist did a good job covering the basic concept of managing friending online, inasmuch as you can for a mass-audience living section feature on a Saturday, so, yeah, all well and good. The print edition has a pic of me striding purposefully and utterly, hopelessly dorkily up a pathway. I had to walk that pathway several times (after several sat-down pics not working so well). Overall, an interesting experience. I'd been interviewed for the paper before but never one of the primary interviewees for a feature. I do wish I'd got in for something I'm, you know, actually *doing* and proud of but heck. It was a fun glimpse into a world, and has made all manner of people come out of the woodwork and friend-request me on every social networking site known to man - except, oddly, Friendster, which is the only site I talked about that made it into the article.
Ah, Friendster. May you die your inevitable death only after you've lived long enough to maybe shame MySpace into getting rid of those infernal blinkie ads. My money for the emergent social networking platform is Facebook, simply because it's managed to be both comfortable for and relevant to a broad generational swath of people, and because it hooks everyone while they're in college. It's weird, though, because my Facebook account has a very "this is my professional self interfacing with students and fellow staff" vibe that, if Facebook gets more traction outside universities now that it's opened up, might feel a little stifling. Ah well. It's the only social networking site I could imagine my mom joining, and until people like my mom (net-savvy but far more mature than the Friendster demographic) feel comfortable in a social network, the network is hobbled by all the people left out of it. Livejournal, while not strictly *about* "social networking" is still the best at this kind of cross-generational, cross-social-group connectivity.
A couple weekends ago, I had an absolutely amazing time at the Honk! Festival in my lovely new-again neighborhood of davis_square. Honk is basically activist-y, socially-conscious fun festive street brass band music. Those of you who know about my lifelong Balkan music & dance obsession will know that dancing in the streets surrounded by brass bands is sort of one of my favorite things ever in life. So yeah, utterly fantastic. A few of my friends from camp are in one of the bands that came up from Brooklyn, so it was a bonus to get to visit with them, and through them get to hang out more with the bands over the whole weekend. It also, being a fun public festival with a social justice bent, was a great way to have tons of mini impromptu reunions with friends and collaborators from the past. It made me very much miss my old life in the beloved community of the Boston Global Action Network. I never feel more alive than when I'm part of a group of people dancing their hearts out to music by people playing right from their souls. Yeah, it's kinda wow.
Speaking of missing my old life, though... I've been thinking hard about whether my current directions - and certain decisions about lack-of-directions - are stearing me to the right places or not. I think I may be putting too much stock in trying to become part of some exclusive club of people who, say, get their graduate degrees at fancy places that I may be able to get into, but may not necessarily even *want* nevermind really be able to afford - both monetarily or in the costs of lifestyle and time it takes to live in that world. I often think that I never used to care about that kind of status or see it as in any way necessary to overall success before I started working at H******, and that if I only took a long enough breather away from that world, it would all melt away again into the bs and dust I know it is. Except... that I still have this whole "fear of economic insecurity" thing, and... Well, I don't really feel like a long rant about social class and upward mobility and the globalizing eonomy, but, screw it, I don't really know if I can do the ratrace thing even if it turns out it's what I *do* need.
I'm feeling pretty used up and demoralized as much more of a general state of being than I'm comfortable with. Sure, there are plenty of things I'm pretty excited about. I'm doing plenty of nice fun stuff. But I feel like I'm in a serious life rut that's just going nowhere and I'm not going to be happier until I figure out what I need to shake loose and how and why. I know that part of it is work - my job is fun and exciting and has a very high cool factor, but I'm not certain I'm doing work that's meaningful to me anymore. And in any case, especially with graduate-education plans all up in the air, what's more important is figuring out what's going to be satisfyingly meaningful-yet-paying-enough work for the future.
I'm actually in general feeling an odd wave of sheer nostalgia for 2002/2003. I miss that time, even though I have no desire to relive it. Even though I was more depressed about a lot of things (and, just plain depressed), and even though for a large part of it I was stressed by unemployment, I was in some key ways more hopeful then than I necessarily am now. I had faith things would get better. Now it's late 2006 and things *are* better but, is this all there is? I don't want to keep the patterns I have now for my whole life. I work late too often, and I run around the rest of my life feeling stupid from busyness, lack of sleep, juggling too many other commitments, and eating crappy prepackaged food. I too often wind up just crashing on the weekend, instead of going out to friends' houses for potlucks and whatnots. I know I need downtime and that that's healthy. But at turningpoints like this, I feel that I need a lot more time for reflection than I'm going to get. I want to pause my responsibilities for just one week and take it to relax and figure out what I might know about what I want that may be hiding just below the surface. I want time to write again, if I even remember how. I want time to actually practice my drum this year instead of shoving it into the closet. I want to work on the cool projects I've lined up all on my own... and I don't want to ditch the activist and havurah communities I'm part of even though responsibilities in either instance currently sadly feel more like chores than I'd prefer.
I'm doing what I can I guess. I joined a gym in large part so I can take a weekly African dance class and then go use the hot tub (Healthworks in Porter, which I was a member of back in 2001-2002 and still love ten times more than the H gym). My mood is vastly better in any week where I not only get to dance, but get to dance *hard*. And barring a weekly Honkfest, or dropping out and becoming a dance gypsy, there's just not enough of that kind of dance even available around here. Contra isn't aerobic enough. Walking to work isn't aerobic enough. It's weird, but if I don't have the chance to burn and burn energy til hours later maybe I might not have anymore... I don't have any energy at all. I don't think I was meant to live a first-world, modern life, sitting at a desk in an office in order to have a job that even tries to make ends meet or allow me an intellectual outlet. Except for that whole enjoying having rights even though I'm female and bi and Jewish thing. I don't want to drop out and move to some organic farm or something. I have work to do - not job work, but social justice calling work - and I don't think I can do that by going agrarian, etc. But, but but. Maybe I'm not meant for a larger city like Boston after all. Or maybe I should just stop hanging around so many high-achievers.
In last-snippet-for-now news, I finally fake-cleaned my room by shoving lots of boxes into the closet. Now it's freaking me out with its hugeness and clean-ness. Seriously. Bring the mess back, it was cozy... I need a rug or something, stat. But I'm damn lucky to have a room as comfortable and large and accomodating as this. I just need to make it homier very soon.
I've been as usual surfing all your journals, mostly but not always on weekends. I have a few windows with about twenty tabs each from the past couple weeks... Hopefully I'll get to commenting on all those tabs before they're entirely irrelevant. Happy weeks, all.
Um, to get the embarrassing part over with straight away, I was in the paper a little while back. It's sort of bizarre. The conversation with the journalist began on online social networks and managing online friendships, but then I mentioned defriending, which evidently was a new concept, and eventually that became the topic of the article. So it's weird cos I feel the article ends up painting me as this nice girl who has more online friends than she knows what to do with and so is trying to politely get rid of some of them, which, well, no. But I do think the journalist did a good job covering the basic concept of managing friending online, inasmuch as you can for a mass-audience living section feature on a Saturday, so, yeah, all well and good. The print edition has a pic of me striding purposefully and utterly, hopelessly dorkily up a pathway. I had to walk that pathway several times (after several sat-down pics not working so well). Overall, an interesting experience. I'd been interviewed for the paper before but never one of the primary interviewees for a feature. I do wish I'd got in for something I'm, you know, actually *doing* and proud of but heck. It was a fun glimpse into a world, and has made all manner of people come out of the woodwork and friend-request me on every social networking site known to man - except, oddly, Friendster, which is the only site I talked about that made it into the article.
Ah, Friendster. May you die your inevitable death only after you've lived long enough to maybe shame MySpace into getting rid of those infernal blinkie ads. My money for the emergent social networking platform is Facebook, simply because it's managed to be both comfortable for and relevant to a broad generational swath of people, and because it hooks everyone while they're in college. It's weird, though, because my Facebook account has a very "this is my professional self interfacing with students and fellow staff" vibe that, if Facebook gets more traction outside universities now that it's opened up, might feel a little stifling. Ah well. It's the only social networking site I could imagine my mom joining, and until people like my mom (net-savvy but far more mature than the Friendster demographic) feel comfortable in a social network, the network is hobbled by all the people left out of it. Livejournal, while not strictly *about* "social networking" is still the best at this kind of cross-generational, cross-social-group connectivity.
A couple weekends ago, I had an absolutely amazing time at the Honk! Festival in my lovely new-again neighborhood of davis_square. Honk is basically activist-y, socially-conscious fun festive street brass band music. Those of you who know about my lifelong Balkan music & dance obsession will know that dancing in the streets surrounded by brass bands is sort of one of my favorite things ever in life. So yeah, utterly fantastic. A few of my friends from camp are in one of the bands that came up from Brooklyn, so it was a bonus to get to visit with them, and through them get to hang out more with the bands over the whole weekend. It also, being a fun public festival with a social justice bent, was a great way to have tons of mini impromptu reunions with friends and collaborators from the past. It made me very much miss my old life in the beloved community of the Boston Global Action Network. I never feel more alive than when I'm part of a group of people dancing their hearts out to music by people playing right from their souls. Yeah, it's kinda wow.
Speaking of missing my old life, though... I've been thinking hard about whether my current directions - and certain decisions about lack-of-directions - are stearing me to the right places or not. I think I may be putting too much stock in trying to become part of some exclusive club of people who, say, get their graduate degrees at fancy places that I may be able to get into, but may not necessarily even *want* nevermind really be able to afford - both monetarily or in the costs of lifestyle and time it takes to live in that world. I often think that I never used to care about that kind of status or see it as in any way necessary to overall success before I started working at H******, and that if I only took a long enough breather away from that world, it would all melt away again into the bs and dust I know it is. Except... that I still have this whole "fear of economic insecurity" thing, and... Well, I don't really feel like a long rant about social class and upward mobility and the globalizing eonomy, but, screw it, I don't really know if I can do the ratrace thing even if it turns out it's what I *do* need.
I'm feeling pretty used up and demoralized as much more of a general state of being than I'm comfortable with. Sure, there are plenty of things I'm pretty excited about. I'm doing plenty of nice fun stuff. But I feel like I'm in a serious life rut that's just going nowhere and I'm not going to be happier until I figure out what I need to shake loose and how and why. I know that part of it is work - my job is fun and exciting and has a very high cool factor, but I'm not certain I'm doing work that's meaningful to me anymore. And in any case, especially with graduate-education plans all up in the air, what's more important is figuring out what's going to be satisfyingly meaningful-yet-paying-enough work for the future.
I'm actually in general feeling an odd wave of sheer nostalgia for 2002/2003. I miss that time, even though I have no desire to relive it. Even though I was more depressed about a lot of things (and, just plain depressed), and even though for a large part of it I was stressed by unemployment, I was in some key ways more hopeful then than I necessarily am now. I had faith things would get better. Now it's late 2006 and things *are* better but, is this all there is? I don't want to keep the patterns I have now for my whole life. I work late too often, and I run around the rest of my life feeling stupid from busyness, lack of sleep, juggling too many other commitments, and eating crappy prepackaged food. I too often wind up just crashing on the weekend, instead of going out to friends' houses for potlucks and whatnots. I know I need downtime and that that's healthy. But at turningpoints like this, I feel that I need a lot more time for reflection than I'm going to get. I want to pause my responsibilities for just one week and take it to relax and figure out what I might know about what I want that may be hiding just below the surface. I want time to write again, if I even remember how. I want time to actually practice my drum this year instead of shoving it into the closet. I want to work on the cool projects I've lined up all on my own... and I don't want to ditch the activist and havurah communities I'm part of even though responsibilities in either instance currently sadly feel more like chores than I'd prefer.
I'm doing what I can I guess. I joined a gym in large part so I can take a weekly African dance class and then go use the hot tub (Healthworks in Porter, which I was a member of back in 2001-2002 and still love ten times more than the H gym). My mood is vastly better in any week where I not only get to dance, but get to dance *hard*. And barring a weekly Honkfest, or dropping out and becoming a dance gypsy, there's just not enough of that kind of dance even available around here. Contra isn't aerobic enough. Walking to work isn't aerobic enough. It's weird, but if I don't have the chance to burn and burn energy til hours later maybe I might not have anymore... I don't have any energy at all. I don't think I was meant to live a first-world, modern life, sitting at a desk in an office in order to have a job that even tries to make ends meet or allow me an intellectual outlet. Except for that whole enjoying having rights even though I'm female and bi and Jewish thing. I don't want to drop out and move to some organic farm or something. I have work to do - not job work, but social justice calling work - and I don't think I can do that by going agrarian, etc. But, but but. Maybe I'm not meant for a larger city like Boston after all. Or maybe I should just stop hanging around so many high-achievers.
In last-snippet-for-now news, I finally fake-cleaned my room by shoving lots of boxes into the closet. Now it's freaking me out with its hugeness and clean-ness. Seriously. Bring the mess back, it was cozy... I need a rug or something, stat. But I'm damn lucky to have a room as comfortable and large and accomodating as this. I just need to make it homier very soon.
I've been as usual surfing all your journals, mostly but not always on weekends. I have a few windows with about twenty tabs each from the past couple weeks... Hopefully I'll get to commenting on all those tabs before they're entirely irrelevant. Happy weeks, all.