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May 25, 2006
Effectively Deaf
FYI for anyone who's been trying to call me over the last few days, I've lost my cel phone. Anyone found it?
Posted by me at 10:44 PM | Comments (0)
May 17, 2006
Dogwood Season (words)
Schools have two autumns. Where everyone else feels the shutting down of things, the small deaths of plants and the departure of birds as summer ends, the life of schools begins to fade at the beginning of summer, at graduation. On campus, cherry blossoms are elegiac; every year the dogwoods flower in late April, and when you see them bloom you know people will be leaving you. The mature shade of summer trees is vapid and bemused at the place's idleness, a death in its own right.
For a while now Columbia has been a maze of foreign trucks bringing tents and bleachers and guard rails to transform its one open space -- between the old and the new library -- into something populable. I never know exactly when graduation is here; it seems to go on for days, with the chairs and tents raised and struck at odd times, and there are parents around and people in fancy dress.
But today was definitely it. Here were the blocked off streets, the carts of refreshments pushed up Broadway by exhausted-looking caterers, the strays in the subway and at the sidewalk restaurant tables in their powder-blue robes and mortarboards, parents taking pictures everywhere.
From a distance today one of those blue robes turned into Elliott -- tall, grave and yet somewhat doofy Elliott from Ohio, from my game design class, walking with a redhead who must have been a sister and with parents in tow. The powder blue made his pale red hair look inappropriately flamboyant for someone so serious. I called out congratulations, and he startled a little. I didn't stop him, though I felt like maybe I should have. We were all supposed to go out for drinks sometime this week, but like so many thrown-together student groups the cameraderie seems less sticky than we thought and discussion of a date has faded out.
Where there's one graduate there are others, so I poked around looking out for some of the rest of our team. Randy and Ben were graduating, too, and I would have liked to have checked in with them. Ben's got what sounds like an excellent job down in Austin, allowing him to transcend the dubious existence of most people I've known in the process of their graduation. Meanwhile Randy, who's got an imagination any smart game producer should really want to snap up before someone else does, didn't have a job last I checked.
Something sick in me wanted to look in these kids' eyes knowing they were about to face the hardest part of life I've known to date, the part which seems to have permanently warped some of the people I know. Just to remember what graduation's like. A little cold dark shiver, and then back to my warm basement lab, the embrace of my grant and my office and my advisor and my department and everything else I won't have to leave for... well, probably another year. Part of me hopes longer.
I'd arrived back on campus well after the ceremony, and there were only a few grads around, doing the last-day things like pushing around rolling bins of their posessions. By tomorrow they'd probably all be gone. It makes more sense for the whole family to fly home together.
I remembered the day I graduated, wearing the orange shalwar kameez and dogwoods in my hair, hugging Michael Moore for speaking truth to the assembled hippie parents and hugging the college president for putting up with me all those years. Pictures indicated Jacob and I went everywhere together that day. My favorite one, though, is the one where I cornered him in my room while we were packing, and there he is with his hair down and no glasses, the way only I used to see him.
What I remember about that day is aching for more time with him, and being rebuffed by Dad, who was eager to get a move on for our last family vacation. Dad looked under the hood of Jacob's old beater car along with Jacob and his dad, too, and frowned at the patch jobs they'd done to keep the thing running. Something about that frown was crushing. Jacob and I were on and off all summer after that, even though I'd thought we shouldn't last past Hampshire. There were no words for that relationship. The frown had plenty of space to come up with its own meanings.
The graduation before that I lost Lauren, one of my best confidantes, and also the older student from Poly who'd led the way to Hampshire. The year before that it was Priya, I think, and who knows who-all else I loved. The year before that was the one Evan and I set off in a marshy green mist the day of graduation to drive all the way across the country together, not knowing what a rough trip it would be even as of that evening when the car threatened to break, not knowing I'd get sick halfway across and alienate the Midwest contingent of my family by blowing off the plane tickets they bought me.
god I'm lucky. So many people I love aren't leaving town this summer, not even Sarah who usually goes to Vermont. The guy I'm interested in made rather deliberate plans not to go away. I'm moving on to campus, and making plans to have parties and regular dates with everyone I know. The campus will be empty, but my life at least will continue with little change. I'll walk around it barefoot the way I used to at Poly in August, when summer classes were done. I'll get to know some classrooms I've never even looked in before. I'll say hi to the maintenance men. The security guards already wave me through even if I don't present my ID.
For the day of graduation, it's always bittersweet being the one who stays. I was one of the only people heading into the library; everyone else was heading out the campus gates. The cafe where I used to find the guy I was crushing on was empty, bereft of voices and of the noisy colors of posters announcing student activities, but then, so were the private-nook carrels on the second floor, and I had reading to do. I must have been the only one with reading still to do. I must have been the only one asking after the reserve books. I think about Ebenezer Scrooge at his boarding school over Christmas, but then, it's not snowing, and the lawns are green and mine.
What's it like not to be that last student?
I don't know, I haven't ever been one of the ones who had to leave campus for good.
Posted by me at 11:39 PM | Comments (0)
May 14, 2006
From The Vaults: Why The Dancing Sausage?
Every now and again someone will ask why this site is named the Dancing Sausage Web Journal. Sometimes they don't, and they just assume it has something to do with an epic wang, or something. There used to be a short explanation on the site; it didn't survive the move from Evan's server, but hey, I actually back things up sometimes...
Here's the original statement about the site, possibly modified once not long after it was named -- I don't think the barm-and-swossidge references were in the first draft.
"The name Dancing Sausage refers to my experience as one of the 600-some-odd people arrested against our constitutional rights on April 15, 2000 at a protest in Washington, DC. As I was processed into jail I felt more like a piece of meat than a citizen. A sausage. I sat in jail for some eight hours, my hands restrained in plastic zip-ties, and all I wanted to do was dance.
It's a more general observation on life, too, I guess. We are nothing but meat, doomed eventually to decay. We move thoughtlessly, but with passion.
The piglet, the stick, the barm-- the swossidge. Juicy, oh so terbel juicy. Ah putcha putcha way."
I should note in choosing the name I was also acutely aware that I didn't want to refer to much of anything else directly. I was so tired of blogs named for song lyrics, even if they were They Might Be Giants quotes. I like that "Dancing Sausage" came out. It could be the name of a pub someplace.
I seem to keep coming back to the same things. Tonight I realized that part of my objection to "space" as it's been discussed in my Digital Geographies and Virtual Space class -- i.e., only the culturally-constructed elements of space -- may in part be traced back to that night sleeping near an open commode on a cold, dirty terrazzo floor with my left wrist zip-tied to my right knee. The rest of it can probably be traced to the first time I saw swing dancers perform an aerial.
Posted by me at 3:35 AM | Comments (2)
May 8, 2006
The Nerd Room
I am having a Moment of Mania.
On the bus home today I returned to a book I picked up around the time I was reading Lyotard -- Matt Hills's Fan Cultures. I had a hunch an idea that had been plaguing me -- that fantasy fans are considered nerds because their interest in magical possibilities contradicts capitalist rationalism -- had surely been covered by someone else, and I was right. Today I went back to see if Hills had anything to say about spaces, as I have a final on them due Tuesday, and found he does. It's something on fan tourism, in which the author talks about going to Vancouver to be closer to X Files zeitgeist.
In it there is, among other things, a funny little passage where Hills calls other scholars on the mat for belittling fan tourism as not even seeking to visit something "real," as opposed to, say, the general, highly mediated tourist fantasy practice of seeing pictures of the Pyramids in a travel agent's office, going to visit them, and taking pictures to bring back to others to prove they'd been there.
All of it got me thinking about how geeks are the ones who supposedly don't understand where the bounds of the "magic circles" of play and fantasy are drawn, and how this has come up prominently as I have begun to ask kids who plays which games, specifically fantasy and sci-fi complex computer games (as opposed to games for the Playstation, XBox, etc).
I promptly concluded that
1) at minimum, I need to present this final wearing my Star Trek uniform jacket, and
2) preferably I should give the listeners a spatialized sense of geekdom.
Initial idea: the Geek Hat, a box lined with geekinalia to be placed over one's head to give one the sense of a cozy geek mindspace. Rejected for reasons of claustrophobia, and also the only things I have which would fit in a head-sized box are Pokemon.
Subsequent idea: Hauling a bunch of geek paraphernalia down to the lab and setting up a simulated Nerd Room. It would have portals to the outside world, from which would issue unkind words about the things within this space. Rejected because aside from the things I could bring into the space, the situation -- the comments in particular -- would have to be simulated, and I'd like this to feel slightly less like installation art.
Current working idea: Set up game playing stations around the EGGPLANT Lab where classmates could play games particular to each group of participants I spoke with. This would mean having a sports-gamer space, a casual-gamer space, and a nongamer space, and having the spaces not meet. Perhaps I could still populate the geek gamer space with my own geek items in an attempt to indicate that a LOT of academic work so far has focused on geek games and geek players, to the detriment of an understanding of the other groups. It's really not ideal to be trying to represent your population with materials from your own life, but there's a little something to it here; I honestly feel like researchers are each blinded by our own perspectives, and the least we can do is explain them as far as we can so people know our shortcomings.
Then I got obsessed with the idea of trying to map out who was popular and who was not in my high school class using Friendster, which proves impossible.
and now I really ought to sleep.
Posted by me at 12:27 AM | Comments (0)
May 7, 2006
I take back any implication that Jon Land is going soft
because his music is fscking rad. I'd known he was working on electronic music while at Hampshire, and I knew he's on and off been a peripheral member of Negativland ("that's the letter U and the numeral 2, and who the hell gives a shit?!"), but I don't think I've heard his stuff before. It's just the kind of electronica/8-bit I've been wanting to listen to lately. Really, really good. Highly recommended to fans of KCRW's Nocturna or Metropolis.
Posted by me at 3:15 PM | Comments (0)
Pokey The Penguin Has A Posse
and We are It (worksafe despite URL). Also, for those of you who haven't been keeping up with the exceedingly sporadic strip lately, there are also animated comics!
Posted by me at 1:34 AM | Comments (0)