Restraint

Wind and Cities (or: this is not a tour diary)

August 28, 2010 – 10:28 pm

In Chicago. Spent the day wandering the city (including a fantastic two hours as part of an architecture walking tour), and have been left with tired feet and a heavy heart.

Being in the United States is rough at the best of times, and seeing just how many mentally ill, homeless, hungry people there are in this city gets to me. It’s so fucking brutal.

The tour’s coming to an end, which is of course bittersweet. I’m looking forward to seeing the people (and kittens) in Ottawa that I love and miss, but there’s a lot about the city that leaves me raw when I think about it. Homesickness, without any city that makes me feel like I’m home.

Going to go out to Neo tonight. We’ll see if my sorrows float.

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Are we there yet?

March 25, 2010 – 10:46 am

+ I ate delicious barbeque for a week while I was in Texas!
- However, I might have broken my wrist there.
+ …while I was riding a mechanical bull.
- …because of an Irishman who thinks he’s HILARIOUS.
- Irishmen.
+ Audra has been staying with me at my apartment for the last week since I got back, and it has been the best week I’ve had in a long, long time.
+ I will be taking over a larger 1-bedroom apartment in my building at the end of the month!
+ This means I will have room to get a portable dishwasher. Oh sweet jesus yes.
+ I’m doing some really awesome UI/Wordpress stuff at work for the new website.
+ A lot of people are going to be using it after it launches.
- A very heavy speaker fell off a shelf and onto my face on Tuesday.
- Percocet seems to serve only to make me nauseous and useless.
± The combination of facial abrasions, fat lip, and splinted wrist appears to encourage strangers to be very, very nice to me.
+ Booking for the bigass autumn tour is going well.
- I need more downtime.

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07/14/1978 – 03/02/2006

March 3, 2010 – 3:02 am

Squid

You will find me if you want me in the garden
unless it’s pouring down with rain
You will find me if you want me in the garden
unless it’s pouring down with rain
You will find me if you want me in the garden
unless it’s pouring down with rain
You will find me if you want me in the garden
unless it’s pouring down with rain
You will find me waiting for spring and summer
You will find me waiting for the fall
You will find me waiting for the apples to ripen
You will find me waiting for them to fall
You will find me by the banks of all four rivers
You will find me at the spring of conciousness
You will find me if you want me in the garden
unless it’s pouring down with rain
You will find me if you want me in the garden
unless it’s pouring down with rain
You will find me if you want me in the garden
unless it’s pouring down with rain
You will find me if you want me in the garden
unless it’s pouring down with rain

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37.5 million seconds

March 1, 2010 – 3:26 am

A little over a year and a month ago, I got a message titled “BFF 4 EVER” from an audrawilliams. She thought we’d get along, she said.

oh hai

After discovering that we worked across the street from each other, we met for lunch the next day, and spent a good two or three hours talking about politics, music, childhood.

Two months after that, we were presenting together at Podcamp in Toronto, and it wasn’t very long after that she found a ridiculous kitten to keep me company in my new apartment.

blinky

She’s smart, accomplished, hilarious, and so stunningly beautiful that I can’t really wrap my head around it. In the short time that I’ve known her, she has introduced me to incredible people, helped me tackle a lot of very daunting problems, caused an international incident, helped shape the progressive political dialogue in Canada through her work with the NDP, and impacted my life in more ways than I could ever expect to have words for.

She accomplished something really amazing today, and while I’ll leave it to her to decide if she wants to talk about it, I could not be more proud of her.

Congratulations, Audra. You’re incredible, you make the lives of everyone close to you better, and everyone who loves you knows they’re lucky to know you.

audra and jairus

I love you so much.

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On masculinity

January 24, 2010 – 8:34 pm

I wrote this reply to a question posed on LiveJournal asking about the contemporary definitions of masculinity, and what (if anything) separates the masculine from the feminine. No one responded over there, so I’m reposting it here, because I’m interested in other people’s thoughts on the subject.

Do not reply to this post to argue about feminism.

…

I suspect that there’s a lot to be said on this topic with regards to fatherhood, but I don’t have any experience in that area to draw on.

There are a few different questions here, I think.

1: What is the contemporary definition of masculine?
2: Can you construct a contemporary definition of masculine, using positive traits that are exclusive to men?
3: What traits should be deferred to men so as to consider those traits exclusively masculine?

The answer to the first question isn’t terribly flattering, and the nature of the second question makes it impossible to answer without being sexist (as it is equivalent to asking “what positive traits do women lack?”).

Personally, I don’t agree that a trait can only be ascribed to one or not the other in order for it to be masculine/feminine, because the context of the male experience and the female experience are so different that a trait (let’s say, promiscuity, or humility) is not the same thing for a man that it is for a woman. Saying that humility is a masculine trait might be positive, because to be humble men may have to recognize their own male privilege. Saying that humility is a feminine trait might be negative, because it’s morally elevating a symptom of oppression.

This article is interesting, I think. It makes a lot of positive “men are” declarations about men that would be totally unremarkable status quo statements if said about women, (A man doesn’t point out that he did the dishes. A man looks out for children. Makes them stand behind him. A man can tell you he was wrong. That he did wrong. That he planned to.) and a number of fairly provocative statements that I don’t think translate as easily, for better or for worse. (Maybe he never has, and maybe he never will, but a man figures he can knock someone, somewhere, on his ass. A man knows how to lose an afternoon. Drinking, playing Grand Theft Auto, driving aimlessly, shooting pool. A man fantasizes that kung fu lives deep inside him somewhere. A man knows how to sneak a look at cleavage and doesn’t care if he gets busted once in a while.)

Personally, I don’t think contemporary society is terribly interested in buying into the idea of positive masculinity. It’s dangerous to say “this is male, this is good” if you’re adverse to the idea of inferring something bad about being not-male.

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Redux

January 4, 2010 – 4:20 am

I’ve been staring at the insides of my eyelides for hours, and work starts too soon. Winter robs me of sleep and sanity.

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I see you.

November 19, 2009 – 7:38 pm

Is there any place as universally disliked as a hospital? Sure, no one loves a dentist’s office, but the pathos of an intensive care waiting room can’t be compared to anything else.

The last time I was in an ICU, I wasn’t visiting. I woke up with no idea where I was, or how I had gotten there. Now, I can’t help but feel helpless when I hear the machines and smell disinfectant. I was not prepared for how shaken the visit left me.

…

Back in the real world, I’m slowly getting decisions made for the next iteration of my work’s website. Our daily traffic numbers are six digits long, so I’m taking my time with these.

  • Which microformats do we want to markup our existing content with? hCard is a gimme, but what about hAtom for press releases? Do we want hCalendar for the schedule of events, or even hResume for biography pages? (And how much work is it going to be to microformat-enable fifteen years worth of content?)
  • Frameworks! We’re happily invested with jQuery as our JS framework of choice, but do we want or need a framework for CSS development? Typography and print? Wordpress theme development? Maybe even a fluid grid system? For my last project (which launches today, in fact) I used Tripoli, Carrington, and 960 — and while Carrington was amazing (and 960 was pretty good), I’m concerned by the lack of development on Tripoli. The typography is great, but I hate using dead projects. Maybe I should fork it.
  • Do I care if our site validates? CSS 2.1, or should I say fuck it and jump right to 3.0? (Seriously, CSS 2.1 is for suckers.)

I really love nerdy problems.

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2-(3-[4-(3-chlorophenyl)piperazin-1-yl]propyl) – [1,2,4]triazolo[4,3-a]pyridin-3(2H)-one

September 10, 2009 – 1:00 am

(One of) my therapist(s) has recommended that I keep a private daily journal, as well as an ongoing ‘worry list’ in point form. I have not been very successful with either task.

Right now, I am worried about:

  • Not being able to fall asleep
  • Falling asleep and getting too little sleep to function well tomorrow
  • Falling asleep with the help of a sleeping pill and being too chemically hungover to wake up in the morning
  • An early-morning meeting at work
  • Money to pay for:
    • Various outstanding bills related to moving
    • New hard drives (and a new media server to put them in) to replace the ones that have been failing (with data loss) over the last two months
    • The trip to NYC I took last weekend
    • Expenses incurred returning home by bus as a result of the (borrowed, ten year old) car blowing a gasket in upstate New York
    • A trip to Albany this weekend to go pick up the soon-to-be-repaired car and bring it back to Ottawa
    • Whatever part of the massive car repair bill the owner of the car doesn’t feel like paying
  • If I’m going to lose 4 1/2 weeks saved vacation time due to sick leave / insurance issues at work
  • Not being able to do an Ad·ver·sary (or Cyanotic, or…) tour in the next 12 months due to a lack of vacation time
  • How a number of different people (and animals) that I love are doing
  • Not having nearly enough time.

Hoping for a quiet day and a quieter evening, tomorrow.

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Things that make you go blog

July 28, 2009 – 11:33 pm

Things that make me sad:

  • Not having support you need from friends
  • Discussing power and gender
  • Staying up all night (because you can’t sleep)
  • Not having what you need to cook what you want
  • Really missing the cats you lived with

Things that make me happy:

  • Connecting with people you should have met a long time ago
  • Discussing politics and strategy
  • Staying up all night (because you don’t want to sleep)
  • Breaking in new dishes with delivery pizza
  • Finalizing plans to pick up new kittens
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status++

July 5, 2009 – 10:57 pm

+ I am posting this from in my new place in Chinatown.
+ My new apartment is two floors above someone amazing who I love.
- She has terrible wireless!
+ I got a free a mug with a kitten on it from the people who moved out!
+ Also a couch and TV stand!
- My TV just might be too epic to fit through the stairs.
+ I played an awesome set at Festival Kinetik in Montreal back in May, without a single on-stage reboot.
+ I also released the Ad·ver·sary remix disc!
+ I have some good ideas for the next Ad·ver·sary record.
+ They involve coal miners.
+ I have been practising for my Bluesfest show with Peter Murphy.
+ I also played an awesome show with Cyanotic at Zaphods.
-  …but I couldn’t join them for the whole tour due to work/sick/more.
± I then spent at least twenty hours watching Ken Burns documentaries in a haze of sickness.
- I have been too stressed and busy to write much lately.
+ I am going to order pizza.
+ It is going to be delicious.

Addendum:
+ It was delicious.

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