Notebook Options: Managing Oneself.

Notebook Options: 200 Characters.

Data and Counterparts.

Today I signed up for Twitter and Blip.fm, two Web 2.0 sites you might have heard of.

Really I'm not constructed for character limits and rounded edges and whatever, but it looks fun and maybe I could find something out about myself.

You know what. I miss whatever came first on the internet more than I'm excited for what's coming next. The leap from no internet to email and websites was much more exciting than the leap to superfast connections and colorful graphics and instant content is and will be.

Now I check my email to see if I have a Facebook message which has supplanted email as some fucked up de facto online communication medium. Information gets repeated to the point of ludicrous redundancy and really I don't mind for the sake of the work but for the information everywhere it gets in my teeth and on my clothes and it frustrates me.

I'm acting and talking as if the internet has something to teach me about my life and all life. Does it? I mean, it very well could. I don't know.

I really really believe there's a message in all of this and I'm trying to figure out what it is.

Living with Cold..

What cold.

In desperate climate my ligaments freeze,
in forlorn displeasure I fall to my knees,
in terrible height the gale sails through the tress,
it collects autumn's entrails, it decimates leaves,
glossing my eyeballs, at last each one sees
a girl materializing amidst the breeze.

Though! I am certainly not tired of this weather. I figure it's going to be hot quite a bit in the summer especially if I'm in locations without air conditioning...

but enough times during the day the hypercold temperatures hovering outside exit my consciousness to make room for more important business, whatever that is, until I'm ready to leave the building and I see my coat and scarf and hat and am reminded why I have them. Though it's a ritual to put all of it on, it's not something I ever mind doing.

Today should be a good day. The winter should help me forget about the clear skies.

Said the man to the mouse, "Could you scroll slower than 1000 lines per second, please?"

There's no music I want to listen to. This is unfortunate for my last.fm play counts which I must keep up with, but there's nothing I can do about it directly. I flip through collections of Calvin & Hobbes or The Far Side and despite the fact that there are thousands of panels and strips and I can't remember the majority through brainstorming, I know every comic and am not surprised whatever comes on the next page; in the same way, though I have over a thousand albums listed in my library I can't remember many and intensely know all of them, the words that follow. It seems I'm always on the Ls when I'm looking at the Ls, there's no word I haven't seen before, there are albums I haven't listened to in years, EPs I've only downloaded and haven't gotten around to the actual listening of. Obscure live sets. Now they all start with the letter H, because I'm there. I start something, double-clicking. I can't get more than twenty seconds in before I feel distaste and either press stop or, more likely, double-click on another album because the mouse has less distance to cover, but then it's the same problem over again. It repeats itself, I've heard all these beginnings before, I'm deeply familiar with the first two seconds of every album in the library. Isn't it too predictable and modern to say that digitizing music cheapens the experience, or that when there's not a jewel case and album art physically being held the music loses something. Maybe that's too, oh, I don't know. I don't think I believe that.

More likely it seems to me that because I have to do nothing in terms of conscious choice I end up with too many options and dislike all of them for being so cheap. I remember back when I was twelve waiting around to record songs off of the radio onto cassettes because downloading Napster was illegal and unethical. Once I even bought an entire soundtrack just to get ahold of one particular track. I hadn't and haven't seen the movie it's from.

In fact, it's always seemed to me more enjoyable to hear a favourite song on the radio rather than playing it yourself from whatever method you wish. I sure don't know the rationale behind that one, but I have a few guesses.

Maybe I need to back off. What if I started listening to CDs through the computer? CDs I own, and instead of just scrolling and clicking I actually insert the physical disc and take it out when I'm finished. D'y'think some kind of "there's only one thing you can listen to at any one time" paradigm would be reinforced, and I'd be all musical again?

But there I go, acting as if there's a step I need to be artistic again. I haven't stopped being artistic, surely. Perhaps I'm more aware of my lack of intense listenings, active, seizuresque. That doesn't happen as much anymore...

Maybe I should move on to something else. Should I pick up a martial art? Should I memorize poetry? Should I practice writing without anaphora? Should I rehearse meta? I need my keyboard fixed.

This semester will be interesting regardless. Surely scrolling through the blurred nameless wastes of album titles is interesting, in a way, ironically maybe?

I have secret weapons.