intellectual properties

QOTD: traveling through the world

“Traveling through the world produces a marvelous clarity in the judgment of men. We are all of us confined and enclosed within ourselves, and see no farther than the end of our nose. This great world is a mirror where we must see ourselves in order to know ourselves. There are so many different tempers, so many different points of view, judgments, opinions, laws and customs to teach us to judge wisely on our own, and to teach our judgment to recognize its imperfection and natural weakness.”
– Michel de Montaigne

burning man 2010 (or: eat pray love on the playa)

“I have sometimes imagined that everything in the world is exactly where it’s supposed to be, all in their places, all the way down to the smallest things that we usually deem insignificant. Like that rock on the sidewalk in front of the grocery store on the corner. And if you kicked it—that rock—if you disrupted its place, it might leave a little rock sized hole of nothing, into which the world would collapse like water swirling down a drain.

But that’s not right. Things move. Everything moves. And the world never fails to swoop in and fill the place you thought was empty. The empty world is always full. Look around. Look again.

If you are lucky enough, in autumn, to see a leaf—when does it give?—falling from a tree, to witness its graceful descent to the grass in its entirety, and if you watch it close—don’t blink—it will occur to you that it’s absolutely fucking impossible. None of this is possible. And yet here we are, tenaciously, impossibly. You can dwell on the flowers. You can dwell on the rain. But if you do, if you make the crucial mistake of choosing this or that, you will have missed the greatest fact. That the orange flowers and the blue rain are mad for one another—raving lovers—grasping at each other, achingly, to close the space between.”  ~ BHJ

~photo by john curley~

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introduction
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as i noted in the prologue, my burning man this year was going to be different for multiple reasons, the 2 major ones being 1. jay wasn’t going and 2. i really, really, really needed a decompression chamber.

a bit more on #2: it seems i am a highly strung person. i am anxious. i get stressed over little things. i can’t sleep, and then i sleep for days. i have anxiety/panic attacks. i obsess over details. i keep meticulous lists. this has been helpful for my day job (which benefits from me being this way, and i excel at my duties), but not good for my overall being, and in the past year or so this has become literally painful, manifesting itself in my body and resulting in what is now almost a year-long chronic pain in my upper-back/shoulders/neck, most likely caused by anxiety and stress and has been non-responsive to all the other treatments i’ve tried, from muscle relaxers to chiro to acupuncture to rolfing (and in fact typing up this summary took longer than expected because whenever i type for more than 5-10 minutes straight, the pain comes back and i’ve only been able to write in spurts).

as anyone who has ever been to burning man knows, it’s not generally a relaxing experience and people need days, if not weeks, to recover. first, if you’re going with any organized group, there is planning stress from the 10,000,000 emails from your campmates. yes, this is necessary if you want to create a kick-ass village with kitchens and showers and art cars and sound systems and lighting in the middle of the desert. but knowing what you are creating doesn’t make it any less stressful, IMO. in fact, probably more stressful than say, planning an event at work, because in this case you actually CARE.

also, i am not a “joiner”, and i don’t much care for rituals, ceremonies and the like, which makes me going to Burning Man seem even more ridiculous, because, as the BBC recently pointed out, it’s one of the largest secular rituals in the US at this point.

and then, there is being there. the weather. the full days of WOOOOO! the long nights of WOOOOO! the dozens of miles walked/danced/biked every day, back and forth, around and around the circus. so much time when you have absolute freedom! the lack of sleep and nutrients. the dehydration. the exhaustion.

i did not need that right now. i needed to RELAX. and so my burning man experience this year was, as nicoco pointed out one morning, more like being on a cruise ship. i did work when it was needed and what i could, but then i laid around a lot in my beach chair, finishing reading Eat Pray Love and writing in my journal. i sat around Center Camp, sipping coffee and watching people. i went to bed when i felt like it. lots of caffeine aside, i did not do any drugs (i’m sort of a tweaker already while totally sober; drugs usually only amplify this in an uncomfortable way and i’m better off just not even going there). i didn’t even drink all of the champagne i took with me, and not once did i really feel intoxicated.

the link to Eat Pray Love: i started reading this book while traveling in south america. i won’t go into the details of the book but will say that reading this after dealing with this stress-pain issue for a year and then 1. traveling to south america and then coming back to work for a week and 2. going by myself to burning man did provide excellent context for reading a novel about a 30-something woman’s self-healing journey after a period of overwhelming, disabling stress.

i did have many issues with the assumptions and context of the novel (many of which are detailed in this Bitch Mag article: “Eat Pray Spend” and so i will let that article serve as a proxy for all my other thoughts about 1st-world consumer appropriation of other cultural rituals and the current problems with the “Sex and the City” feminism that seems to be popular these days), probably more than the average american woman who doesn’t live in San Francisco surrounded by self-affirming cultural appropriators who spend tons of time and money going to ashrams and yoga and dance-meditation and ceremonies of various sorts and get off on depriving themselves doing herbal juice fasts, and so her “journey” wasn’t this crazy unique story to me – it was a longer version of what people i know do all the time. but the writing was good, while i didn’t really care much about her own personal story of transformation, i found the stories about the other people and cultural situation she encountered to be entertaining and thought provoking, and a few of the ideas really stuck with me and are embedded in the text below.

mostly: i found myself in my own version of Eat Pray Love on the Playa. i was alone, independent, self-reliant, and i was, for most of the time (exceptions, of course), alternately conscious of my intention to relax/detox and choosing my actions/thoughts accordingly, and then really zenned out. i mean, as much as i could, i emptied my mind, stopped caring about who/what/where/when, and completely checked out. in a place where Active Participation is strongly encouraged, this seemed at first a bit odd, and it took a couple of days to adjust and not be enveloped by the excited mania that was going on around me. but it was what i needed, and when i returned, i was in such a state of relaxation that it was unfamiliar. i was calm.

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the journals

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below are the journals i hand-wrote while on the playa, with some text/post-script added.

(if you just want to see more photos, steph goralnick’s are by far my favorite).

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last weekend in september

Amy, originally uploaded by Benjamin Chun.

it was 100 degrees. we went hiking.

love/hate for the equinox

happy Equinox, everyone! and a special one at that: a full harvest moon tonight to light up your life.

it has now been almost 14 months that i have been a carless commuter, 6 of which i have had no choice but to bicycle, as my bus route was cancelled.   i love bike commuting. LOVE IT. but sometimes i have to remind myself to love it.  sometimes when i crawl out of bed, after a not-so-good night’s sleep, to face a foggy, windy morning, the last thing i want to do is get on my bike and ride a 25 minutes to WORK.  this seems to be particularly harder the last couple of weeks, but i’ve been actively reminding myself to ENJOY THIS. enjoy the fresh air on my skin, the endorphins and adrenaline, the little things like the smell of freshly cut grass or wet eucalyptus leaves, even on the foggiest/mistiest/windiest of mornings.

generally, Autumn is my favorite time of year.  back when i was a child in the midwest, it signified several things: 1. going back to school (which i liked), 2. my birthday (10/1), 3. halloween, my favorite holiday, and 4. leaves changing color and crunchy leaf piles.

now, here in the Bay Area, it means 1. my birthday, 2. halloween, my favorite holiday, and 3. WARM DAYS and SUNSHINE after a cold foggy summer.  but it also means: 4. days get shorter, 5. Daylight Savings Time is coming soon, and 6. eventually, RAIN.

4 and 5 and 6 are making it difficult to love the equinox/first day of Autumn this year, as a bike commuter. biking in the dark and rain is not fun, no matter how hardcore you are. but still: I <3 AUTUMN and i intend to make the most of every last luscious sunny afternoon until the darkness descends.

QOTD – teetering on tomorrow

“I think a lot of the problems we’ve been experiencing come from the fact that no one embraces the miracle and amazement of the present. So many people—steampunks, fundamentalists, hippies, neocons, anti-immigration advocates—feel like there was a better time to live in. They think the present is degraded, faded, and drab. That our world has lost some sort of “spark” or “basic value system” that, if you so much as skim history, you’ll find was never there. Even during the time of the Greeks, there were masses of people lamenting the passing of some sort of “golden age.” But I’d never go back and live in any other time than teetering on tomorrow; this is the greatest time to be alive.” — Patton Oswalt

cultural nostalgia is destructive.

the “good old days” were not as good as you selectively remember them.

the only time to live is now.

carpe diem.

black rock city, sept 2, 2010

Satellite Photo taken of Black Rock City Sept 2, 2010 taken by GeoEye

click through to view full size. pretty awesome.

the paralysis of choice

i am often totally – literally – paralyzed by choice.  jay goes crazy that i take so long reading labels in grocery store aisles.  i spend forever deciding between garments in stores.  i will, literally, stand, unmoving, in a department store or grocery store aisle or sit unmoving on my car while i mentally try to come to some decision. i find this happening more and more as i get older, and i am unclear as to whether this is me having too many preferences, always looking for the perfect thing in a sea of items, or whether modern consumer culture has thrust upon me this plethora of information i am mentally ill-equipped to deal with. this makes me feel, again, literally, retarded. i know it used to be referred to as the paradox of choice, but i feel it has now, in 2010, become more like paralysis for some of us.

this 24-minute TED talk discusses Choice, particularly the American valuation of Choice.  is limitless choice good for us? does being an “individual” chooser create stress – and, sometimes, as she gives a very emotional example of, guilt – in our lives? is more choice always better? how do different cultures feel about the modern cornucopia of choices?

Sheena Iyengar studies how we make choices — and how we feel about the choices we make. At TEDGlobal, she talks about both trivial choices (Coke v. Pepsi) and profound ones, and shares her groundbreaking research that has uncovered some surprising attitudes about our decisions.

an embedded sidetopic here is something that i have become acutely aware of especially while living in San Francisco: if you have so many choices/options/variations, suddenly minutiae become important, and thus create distinctions  where none previously existed, and people get really obsessed about these distinctions, to the point that their preferences become part of their identity, and create factions that, to the outsider, are invisible.  you got X brand of organic free-range sustainably farmed ice cream and not Y brand?!  that’s not 1/2 step dnb, that’s 1/4 step dnb!  AH!

so much more to say on this topic but i am le tired.

via promise @ my little pail

2 quick thoughts on art

i spend a lot of time around art and artists, and viewing/contemplating/deconstructing art (visual 2D/3D, audio/music, and fashion), and have recently found myself repeating these two things:

sometimes the point of art is to not have a point.

and especially

just because i recognize that something is artistically good doesn’t mean that i like it.

9/11

this may be simple, but all i know is that while some are burning korans and attacking muslim cab drivers and supporting the arrest of anyone who seems Other, i am doing everything i can to create peace in this world. no hate, no bigotry, no prejudice, no war, no “we are right and they are wrong”. only love and compassion will get us where we want to be. there is no other way. there just isn’t.

Life: Read This Every Day

source: http://www.elementsofstyleblog.com/2010/09/read-this-everyday.html