intellectual properties

Summer 2009: in bits and pieces

i haven’t done a ‘this is what i’ve been up to’ bulleted post since the end of may, which means this one covers June, July, and August. wow. so i guest that makes this a “Summer 2009″ who/what/where/when summary. much of this has already been referenced in singular posts or tweeted, but if i don’t summarize like this i lose track.

after the beautiful zimtrix wedding came JUNE:

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QOTD

“Liking existence is the only honest basis for your self approval. The most important thing for you to do is see that in hoping to be affected by other things as fully as possible, you become more yourself.”

~Eli Siegel

bewitched

in Miranda Caroligne, 08.29.09.
photo by Kyle H Hailey.
more here.

bike effects

as noted, since August 1 i have not had a car for commuting to work, and though i got lazy last week and rode the bus a few days, i try to ride my bike as much as possible during this season of Light and Dryness and relative Warmth. once autumn darkness and rains come, i think the bus will be ridden most of the time.

i’ve got my commute path down and it’s nice and easy, but i’m trying not to become too
complacent or overconfident riding the bike. i have a tendency to space out, and do things like write draft blog posts in my head. not recommended. currently, there is construction around one block of my usual route, and yesterday morning, taking the detour i almost bit it on some non-functional-but-still-embedded-in-the-cement train tracks. i mean, i came really close to wiping out, and THANK SOMEONE i didn’t, because there was a taco truck right behind me and a semi coming the other way. yeesh. i know – hit the tracks at 90 degrees.  but when they just randomly appear from out of the pavement right in front of you, you don’t have a choice about the angle. you just have to quickly recalibrate to not wipe out.

anyway, onto the taboo blogging subject: weight! since i started biking, at least 8 miles a day if i just go to work and back, sometimes 10-12 if i have appts/errands, i’ve gained 10 lbs. i am not making this up or exaggerating. i stepped on the scale this morning – it does not lie, and neither do the pants i brought to wear at work that are now so tight through the thighs they are uncomfortable. i’d like to think it’s all muscle, but i know it’s not, because i am not getting SMALLER/leaner, i am getting bigger. and i got a belly. and a concerning number of my clothes are not fitting well or looking good. and since people are always insisting that women don’t “bulk up” from traditional exercise, i can only assume that my increased dimensions are not muscle. it’s fat.

i’m not looking for advice here, i know what the problem is and how to fix it. first, biking makes me hungrier than i usually am, and then i eat more calories than i burn because by the end of the day i am STARVING. so i need to eat more regularly and front load so i don’t eat such huge dinners. second, going to the gym is now way out of the way via bike, and i am no longer doing all the strength training and seriously sweaty cardio sessions i was before, and i just need to suck it up and get back to the gym again. i also know i’m not alone and this is a common problem with people trying to manage their weight. in fact, this problem was just discussed again in the paper yesterday: Experts: For losing weight, diet beats exercise.

before y’all start kvetching about how i’m “thin enough already”, i was not necessarily *trying* to lose weight with the bike commuting, although i might have been hoping to, but i was CERTAINLY not expecting to gain it either. it’s just sort of weird and counter-intuitive to think that once i became carless and started riding my bike all over the place, i gained weight. and no matter what anyone else thinks about my body-image, that i do not like. i am definitely not going to stop riding my bike (or eating when i’m hungry), but riding my bike AND going to the gym is just….kind of a pain in the ass. and time. and right now (until after labor day anyway), my calendar is BOOKED. so for now, until i find a way to make this all work, the biking and eating and the gym and the commuting and the time, i’m just trying to adjust to and accept my slightly bigger self (and adjust my wardrobe as well). i’m not-so-secretly hoping that this is just a short period of physical adjustment – that my increased appetite v. metabolism will eventually level out and if i get back to the gym 2-3 days a week for extra weight/cardio, by the time we go to europe (21 days!!) i’ll be able to fit back into my pants again.

for the record:

maybe not where you live, but this is highly unusual.

mark morford: the life lessons of burning man

reposting:

Get real. Burning Man is a completely outrageous, multimillion dollar, for-profit, impossibly unsustainable theatrical megaproduction. This is, in part, why we love it. Tickets are $300 and it costs many hundreds if not thousands more in gear, supplies, transport to attend, and while you can get there and do it on a grimy hippie sort’ve budget if you leech on your friends just right, it’s basically a very expensive, meta-bohemian, chemically enhanced anti-vacation. It’s all a grand and ridiculous and temporary illusion, not at all meant to be transposed on a livable sphere.

Or is it? You may not be able to take the pseudo-economy and the neo-pagan society back with you, but what you can transpose, of course, is the sense of awe. The fearlessness. The creative wonder. You can bring back confidence. Abandon. Fierce joy. Really, what more could you ask for?

read in full: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2009/08/28/notes082809.DTL&nl=fix

five years in a row has indeed instilled in me this sense of awe/joy/abandon/creativity/wonder in my daily life (although it ebbs and flows). case in point: bringing these life lessons home from the playa and applying them to Our Daily Lives, the Stay Behind team has many devious plans for this coming Week Without Burners in SF, definitely not limited to Balsa Man. this is the whole point, right? take the class, apply it to Real Life? consider this year Burning Man Practicum.

the oggler inside

a woman appeared in front of me, walking down the side of a road without a sidewalk, in a neighborhood where no woman in a skirt and heels should be walking, in a direction that made no sense, slender and with style, and as i approached from behind, i thought to myself, “well hello there….”

she was pretty from the front, too.

burning man 2008: american dreams

this post has been sitting in draft since september 16, 2008, and i have kept revisiting it, trying to finish, trying to think of what to say, so this is pretty fragmented and definitely incomplete.  now that we are definitely NOT going to burning man this year and pretty much everyone we know who is going is leaving for BM 2009 within the next 5-7 days, i think i’ve reached a time limit and feel like i should say something about last year. it did happen.

.::.

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add to the list of things that can blow your mind: sesame street

last night on PBS there was a special about Sesame Street and their global productions.

i had no idea they produced localized versions all around the world, especially in war-torn and developing countries, places where poverty and racism and disease run rampant. and when i say localized, i don’t mean that Big Bird gets dubbed over and everything looks the same.  i mean that they send in teams to develop and film on-site, using local children, local music, local language, different puppets that reflect their surroundings, and, in addition to the Alphabet and 1-2-3′s, focus the content on what’s most important to teach the children where they are: the puppets on Sesame Street in Bangladesh discuss unexploded ordnance, in Kosovo the Serbian and Albanian puppets broach topics of racism, nationalism and genocide, and one of the puppets on the South African version had HIV and talked about her mother dying of AIDS, which caused a national controversy here in the U.S.

watching how hard the producers worked to develop these localized versions for these children who in many cases have no other means of education, sometimes putting themselves in very uncomfortable positions (getting the Serbs and the Albanians to be in one room together proved to be monumental) and even in the middle of conflicts and wars, all to try to get positive, educational television to children  was really perspective-shifting. i never really even thought about how Sesame Street in the U.S. was revolutionary in the early 1970s, having a completely integrated cast and discussion topics like racism and sexism (in 2-4 year old terms), but UXO? AIDS? genocide? wow. kudos to PBS for funding these kinds of efforts and for realizing that, in some places, the children really are the only future some communities have, and reaching them, teaching them, is honestly of global importance.

There are several things that we hope that people take from the film. Number one is reflected in a quote that Anu Gupta of Sesame Workshop said: “Children are not born haters, they are taught to hate.” We were so surprised to find three- and four-year-old Serbians and Albanians in Kosovo talking about each other with distrust and hatred.

supperclub hearbeat fashions

i modeled for my amazing friend Gia @ Galareh Designs in a burning man fundraiser fashion show for the Heartbeat Amplifier art project this past wednesday night @ supperclubSF:
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