Journal perfessor multigeek's Journal: Perspective 6
The quiet days continue.
Well, as has been known to happen before, as I've relaxed for a few days I've gotten sick. It's kind of funny that I sort of forget that I'm running on adrenalin the rest of the time so that when I let down my guard my body says, enough! and proceeds to happily (it almost seems that way) collapse.
Which, in truth, is fine.
So, other than a few billable hours downtown and a drink with a friend the night before last, I continue to hang out around my suddenly larger apartment and clean, do laundry, read, and mostly, sleep. I eat soothing foods (oatmeal, apple sauce, soup) and not much of it. Occasionally I down a pitcher of water, drink some weak tea, have some fresh fruit. All very nice and, let's face it, far more different from my usual habits then it should be.
[Someday I'll get around to writing something about the odd macho of the American upwardly mobile professions. The bleary eyes, neglected relationships, gulping of caffeine, and general contempt for one's life as badges of honor. To which I say I don't need no stinkin' badges.
Someday; just as soon as I finish my glass of Coke and am done with ten hours of staring at one template.
So, that's what I'm not doing this week.]
I spent the awake portion of this afternoon reading Angela's Ashes. Suddenly my concerns don't seem so very immediate. Much harder to be upset about one's finances (while munching a mini peach raspberry pie from the farmer's market) when one is reading about people who aspire to owning an entire egg.
I've long found it easier to just buy clothes (at usually about one fifth of retail) when I see them rather then to wait until I needed a particular thing and pay five times as much. Also, I tend to trash my clothes (my work does that) but then keep the stained/slightly torn clothes for use painting, gardening, whatever. This, at least is my rather tepid excuse for why, with most of my clothes and linens thrown together to finally sort and wash them, I have a pile about seven feet by five feet by three feet tall. And that's *after* several loads.
Now Frank McCourt talks plenty about the lack of food, the humiliations, his father's drinking, and so on. And in all of this the state of their clothes and their lack of bedding take a pretty tertiary role. But it does come clear that he had, usually, one outfit to his name and never the once had a complete set of bedding to share with his family.
The gap is so immense that it's hard to connect it to my own life. After all, I slept on a concrete floor with nothing but coats for bedding for about two months in college and I had a great time.
As always, I find that the truest definition of luxury is not what one owns, or even what one uses, but what one believes one has ready access to. Like the person burning money to light a cigar, the true luxury is, well, immaterial, encompassed not in the effectiveness or esthetic pleasure of using a long, large, cinder-dropping piece of paper to do what a match would do better, but in the knowledge that one can. Profligacy not as foolishness but as establisher of conviction. A sort of visual aide to reenforce to the burner that the resources truly are there. An exorcism of the cackling, insinuating demon, Scarcity.
Which takes me back to reading Ashes. Do you know what the most consistent effect reading this book had on me, from when I started it mid-afternoon to when I finished it this evening? It made me want to go out and start scrambling for a conventional job. It all made the idea of willingly living poor for the sake of something as abstruse as founding a publishing business seem like the worst sort of insanity. It made me want to run in the direction of certainty as fast as my pounding legs could carry me. Which is, of course, the worst sort of irony as these days a "proper" salaried job, let alone one built around those freshly carved and already cracking graven idols, company stock, or at best a 401k, is nowhere near the bastion of safety that we were all lead to believe.
After all, the place I most wanted to work, given its decades of stability and deeply protected culture, was Time Magazine. The last I heard the "tough, no-nonsense" guy brought in by the AOL folks to strip the operations department was himself frantically sending out resumes and hiding in his office to smoke near-heroic amounts of pot.
So here I sit, after it all, post-book, post analysis, just as uncertain as ever. Which I might as well take as it's own sort of warped certainty.
Out for the night,
Rustin
(Note: I wrote this Wednesday night but couldn't log into /. to post it.. First time I've ever seen /. seeming not to function. A friend couldn't even reach /. in terminal mode. I'm still curious about that.)
Well, as has been known to happen before, as I've relaxed for a few days I've gotten sick. It's kind of funny that I sort of forget that I'm running on adrenalin the rest of the time so that when I let down my guard my body says, enough! and proceeds to happily (it almost seems that way) collapse.
Which, in truth, is fine.
So, other than a few billable hours downtown and a drink with a friend the night before last, I continue to hang out around my suddenly larger apartment and clean, do laundry, read, and mostly, sleep. I eat soothing foods (oatmeal, apple sauce, soup) and not much of it. Occasionally I down a pitcher of water, drink some weak tea, have some fresh fruit. All very nice and, let's face it, far more different from my usual habits then it should be.
[Someday I'll get around to writing something about the odd macho of the American upwardly mobile professions. The bleary eyes, neglected relationships, gulping of caffeine, and general contempt for one's life as badges of honor. To which I say I don't need no stinkin' badges.
Someday; just as soon as I finish my glass of Coke and am done with ten hours of staring at one template.
So, that's what I'm not doing this week.]
I spent the awake portion of this afternoon reading Angela's Ashes. Suddenly my concerns don't seem so very immediate. Much harder to be upset about one's finances (while munching a mini peach raspberry pie from the farmer's market) when one is reading about people who aspire to owning an entire egg.
I've long found it easier to just buy clothes (at usually about one fifth of retail) when I see them rather then to wait until I needed a particular thing and pay five times as much. Also, I tend to trash my clothes (my work does that) but then keep the stained/slightly torn clothes for use painting, gardening, whatever. This, at least is my rather tepid excuse for why, with most of my clothes and linens thrown together to finally sort and wash them, I have a pile about seven feet by five feet by three feet tall. And that's *after* several loads.
Now Frank McCourt talks plenty about the lack of food, the humiliations, his father's drinking, and so on. And in all of this the state of their clothes and their lack of bedding take a pretty tertiary role. But it does come clear that he had, usually, one outfit to his name and never the once had a complete set of bedding to share with his family.
The gap is so immense that it's hard to connect it to my own life. After all, I slept on a concrete floor with nothing but coats for bedding for about two months in college and I had a great time.
As always, I find that the truest definition of luxury is not what one owns, or even what one uses, but what one believes one has ready access to. Like the person burning money to light a cigar, the true luxury is, well, immaterial, encompassed not in the effectiveness or esthetic pleasure of using a long, large, cinder-dropping piece of paper to do what a match would do better, but in the knowledge that one can. Profligacy not as foolishness but as establisher of conviction. A sort of visual aide to reenforce to the burner that the resources truly are there. An exorcism of the cackling, insinuating demon, Scarcity.
Which takes me back to reading Ashes. Do you know what the most consistent effect reading this book had on me, from when I started it mid-afternoon to when I finished it this evening? It made me want to go out and start scrambling for a conventional job. It all made the idea of willingly living poor for the sake of something as abstruse as founding a publishing business seem like the worst sort of insanity. It made me want to run in the direction of certainty as fast as my pounding legs could carry me. Which is, of course, the worst sort of irony as these days a "proper" salaried job, let alone one built around those freshly carved and already cracking graven idols, company stock, or at best a 401k, is nowhere near the bastion of safety that we were all lead to believe.
After all, the place I most wanted to work, given its decades of stability and deeply protected culture, was Time Magazine. The last I heard the "tough, no-nonsense" guy brought in by the AOL folks to strip the operations department was himself frantically sending out resumes and hiding in his office to smoke near-heroic amounts of pot.
So here I sit, after it all, post-book, post analysis, just as uncertain as ever. Which I might as well take as it's own sort of warped certainty.
Out for the night,
Rustin
(Note: I wrote this Wednesday night but couldn't log into
Painting... (Score:1)
Also, please further elaborate on the 1/5th retail thing.
Thank you and happy thursday
Re:Painting... (Score:1)
Um. Uh. Hmm. Well, Um. Can we just pretend that you didn't ask that? Hm. I guess not.
I'm sitting here thirty five hundred miles from the person who keeps asking the probing questions so why is my heart beating?
Okay, briefly. Did you see my post about lighting techniques? I commented on painting my bathroom to optimize for unusual light sources. Well, I kinda, well, not fibbed, Just oversimplified a bit. Okay, well actually, it took about four months and maybe fifty layers and because it's designed to change color as it ages (things like copper powders mixed in in ways that they're slowly oxidizing) I won't probably ever see it stabilize as it's not designed to settle down for at least twenty years.
The painting I do changes in medium just about every time and it's all explorations of perception and texture and color. And if it's translucent I use it. Let's just say that the first time somebody explained Joseph Albers to me I just sat there for a while and gaped.
So I tend to do things like layering many coats of varnish to get effects that are superficially "quoting" things like wood grain or metal but actually have almost invisible layers of other surfaces and shapes just barely present within them.
It's all about the world you just barely see. The image that's only visible in the corner of your eye. And I've been doing this on and off since I was a kid (you wouldn't believe the time I spent optimizing formulations of Elmer's glue and various kinds of dusts and powders) and I've worked pretty hard to preserve what I've only recently even been willing to label my "plausible deniability" that this is anything more than pretty colors.
So that's what I do.
I'm gonna run away now and you'll have to wait for comments on shopping for another time.
Rustin
Re:Painting... (Score:1)
I did read your post about tron related lighting. Some good ideas, that I hope will be used in non-tron related ways as well. Though it would not be something I would do, I guess that some pople are into movies that much (I have a collegue who has a room dedicated to Star Wars memorabilia). Your post made me want to burn things in the process of experimenting with rubbing alcohol lanterns.
Art is a terribly personal thing, it has a way of capturing a part of the artist and holding it for everyone to see. One of my definitions of art is that it is a visual representation of emotion.
surfaces. Not surfaces. (Score:1)
Another part of the bathroom redo is that I sanded down the laundry bin, which is one of those steel, deco-looking built-in ones from the fifties, until *almost* all of the paint was gone and only a little bit of rust was left (I'm giving the short form, but we'll leave it at that for now) and then irregularly laid on coats of marine spar varnish which I then covered in conventional furniture varnish as I found the marine stuff felt and looked too soft. Little by little the whole thing is rusting just a bit and I'm trying to decide when I'm going to sand it all back down and put it in some final form.
For years, most of my playing around has been with various transitory gardens and fishtanks (I use plastic sweater boxes from Bed, Bath & Beyond or Lechters for the fish tanks) so all this metal stuff has been a minor sideshow.
As for the alcohol lamp possibilities, as I said, you can fool around with a total investment of about a dollar. Go, have fun! Tell us what you come up with.
Hm. "Us".
Isn't it odd that we don't know whether or not we are the only two people reading these entries? It seems that you and I have gotten very personal in this past few weeks (in that unique fractional, Internet way) and yet we have no way (short of hacking
It feels to me like we're talking in a quiet room together and we don't even know if there is a party going on around us.
I'm not used to this. Somehow the political stuff from my childhood and the spook stuff from my youth has always been very present in my mind and I've kept far away from "talking aloud in public spaces". I've even resisted getting a cordless phone because after all, who knows who's listening in? This whole journal thing, and frankly, my dynamic with you, brings out an odd combination of liberating openness and awkward nakedness. Every time that I post I'm off kilter.
It feels good. I'm very glad that I found this place and it's important to me that you did too.
Rustin
Re:"Us" (Score:1)
As to the intimate conversation going on amist the party...I made the decision in a previous journal to only put my true self, no facades, on this online forum. Of course I'm not going to be putting my home address, phone and name on here, or even just first name (it's unique and one google search and you could find out everything) [Side note: do you ever run a google search on your name just to see what comes up? It's pretty interesting sometimes.] Though I hold tight to numbers and letters that make up this info, my thoughts are fair game for all to see, whether they are just passing by or feel like joining in on the conversation.
Re:Painting... (Score:1)
Now, first of all, tell me about what you do. Oils, huh? What is your focus? What got you into it? Has living in such an image-saturated city affected your work?
At some time you'll have to post a list of good places to buy supplies in LA, especially since in a few months I should be dropping by there and helping my half-sister and her husband redo their garage/studio/guest house. Even if I don't do anything fancy, I'ld love to sit down my nephew and see what he's up for.
Getting things for WAY below retail. Well, this is a combination of a few things. First of all, I'm pretty up at this point on the thrift shops that get stuff from the truly wealthy and enough years of exposure to such things means that I'm pretty good at picking out the Hugo Boss Shirt among the GAP ones, even though the Boss shirt will still be the same ten to thirty dollars.
Secondly, I coordinate moves. It used to be for companies but now for estates, so, since I'm supposed to be getting rid of this stuff and there are always folk being invited to take a thing or two, when asked, I choose carefully, choosing the vintage watch over the new sneakers.
Thirdly, while this is not as true as it used to be, New York is an amazing place to dumpster dive. Space is worth a lot more then a tax deduction, so sometimes when an apartment or office is vacated in a hurry the tenant leaves stuff behind that the landlord just bags (if that) and throws in a sidewalk bin. This is supplemented by the classic time/money equation of the person who drops X item in the rain and decides to chuck it and do without/buy another rather than show up for work all dirty and/or muddy. My favorite scarf and my favorite tweed jacket for years were both things I found muddy and wet, brought home, dried out, had dry cleaned, and used for years (I eventually had the jacket's lining replaced and wore it yet longer).
Lastly, and related to the first, I make a point to drop by promising apartment sales a few times a year with plenty of cash. If I see something I like I minimally bargain, and grab.
Of course the key to all of the above is combining an experienced eye (which I got from my clotheshorse stepfather, being very aware of nuance and subtle distinctions anyway, and being a comparatively middle class kid in seven years in rich kid private schools with two more of the same in a rich kid's college) and a willing to commit *right then*. You see something good, you buy it. Never come back tomorrow as the better it is, the less likely it is to be there later. Now, in New York, the enabler for this is that I usually carry a big messenger bag, mostly empty. Such bags are thought of as moderately hip dot-commer type gear but mine actually gets used, so if I see something I like, I buy it right then even if it means carrying three shirts and a pair of shoes around through two drop-bys, a meeting, and four hours at a client. I've also been known to call somebody to reschedule and right then buy something big and cab it back to my place. Carpe shopping.
Off to (wow) a wedding,
Rustin