+ I (finally) have an easy-to-access turntable set up in my house.
+ I (finally) am listening to Jesu on vinyl.
- I bought a Behringer preamp and now I pick up Chinese radio stations.
- I don’t speak Chinese.
+ My work will be sending me to several months of paid full-time French school.
± English has been failing me quite a bit recently.
- I haven’t been writing very much at all.
- I’m realizing that while working hard to keep calm and still over the past year or three, I’ve also been quieting a lot of anxiety and negativity that has been waiting for an exit.
- I do not sleep enough.
- I do not tidy enough.
- I am stressed about money.
+ I’m slowly correcting a year-long drift in my job responsibilities, moving it out of web development and back into web communications.
- However, transitioning between the two means I have the responsibilities of both but with the same amount of hours in a day.
+ I am giving a presentation at PodCamp in Toronto next weekend.
+ It will be awesome.
+ I make great websites.
+ Also flyers.
+ I think I’ve figured out the packaging for the Ad·ver·sary remix album.
- I haven’t figured out the name of it yet. Or the tracklist. Or who’s mastering it.
+ The remixes are fucking great.
+ I am still listening to Jesu on vinyl.
About
restraint.org is a loose collection of writing, links, ravings, photos, news, fiction, and bad poetry by Jairus Khan. This website has been here (off and on) for ten years or so, and was around in various other forms for three or four years before that.
I spend most of my off-hours working (in Ottawa, Canada) to promote underground arts and media, and trying to keep independent music from being smothered by an anachronism popularly known as ‘the industry’. I DJ weekly, promote concerts/festivals regularly, make beep-beep noises in an industrial-metal band, and release CC-licensed albums for my industrial-slash-experimental-electronic project Ad·ver·sary, which sounds something like robots fucking to My Bloody Valentine.
When I’m not working with, promoting, listening to, or writing music, I design very angry websites, flyers, book jackets, and the sort for various arts projects. I supplement my music/design income (roughly enough to buy a pocketful of buttons a month) by developing counter-hacking courses and moonlighting as a web coordinator for the man.
I also bake very tasty cookies.
2 Comments
If you need help with French, I’m always down; when I was in high school, I came in 9th overall in a provincial spelling & grammar contest. :)
/bragging
Wild Geese
by Mary Oliver
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.