Tag: mrs dalloway

Scratch

Matthew EilarLeave a comment

Up late talking to my brother last night means up late this morning. On time, though.

Got to work and felt the crackling nerves of energy and excess brainpower. I feel like I’m a school of fish and a fishing boat at the same time. The net is in the water, and as my fish swim round and round, I’m cutting off a channel through which to flee. Cutting off dumb web browsing. Cutting off most social media. Trying to stay off my phone. Cutting out inspirational reading. I left myself options for distraction, but they are primary materials. It’s hard enough—sometimes it feels like I can get my phone out and have my Reddit client open and in front of my face before I’ve had a conscious thought about it. But it meant that I spent some time job hunting, and reading Mrs. Dalloway, and writing.

If you start playing this and think you hate it, please stick with it until 1:36.

I did spend some time listening to Steve Reich’s Four Sections. I was a Reich hater because I didn’t like how popular he was, until I was a Reich fan for the same reason that he became popular, but most of that is on the strength of Music for 18 Musicians, which I am a superfan of. I’ve always meant to listen through a Reich boxed set that I got my hands on, but it was only a couple of nights ago that I put it on to go to sleep to. One of the most bittersweet experiences I have on a regular basis is of drifting to sleep to glorious, sublime music and having the conflicting desires to surrender to the experience and also wanting to know what I’m listening to. I did a thing I hadn’t done in a while: opened up JSTOR and just browsed around for what I could find on the piece and Reich’s music in general, and downloaded a couple things to read later. It is far outside normal habit now, and I was happy that I was able to chase an instinct to just learn about something because I wanted to. It felt like reconnecting with a dormant part of myself, but not any feeling of regression.

I also spent a lot of time reading this piece on the legacy of the New Republic. This is a classic example of something that I already kind of don’t care about thinking about and shouldn’t, but at the same time, I love reading clear opinionated arguments.

Work was whatever. I played computer teacher and introduced 5th graders to a visual programming language for kids called Scratch. It was interesting to see the breakdown of interest. There was a small number of kids that were so resistant to the structure of the activity that they didn’t even sit down with the computer to try. There were a larger number of kids that did sit down and did try to follow along, and found it difficult to get the concept of the programming blocks or the causality of the blocks to the action that resulted. Another large group of kids understood how the blocks corresponded to the sprite characters, and found one annoying thing to do with it (which was annoying, but also totally how you learn how to do things, and I was happy to see it). And then there was another very small group that understood right away what the possibilities of this program is, were already thinking of the cartoons they could make or the puppets they could make say dirty things, or games they could create. It was incredible to see that some kids really didn’t get it, and others really did. I wondered what kind of kid I would have been. I usually had no patience for systems that I didn’t understand right away. At the same time, there’s a decent chance that I would have understood this right away. It’s impossible to tell. I remember a similar type of programming that we did with Apple Hypercard, but I never had that much time to work with those computers.

I talked with a lonely 6 year old girl. I see myself in lonely children.

After work, I ran home and changed in and out the door in like 180 seconds. I headed over to the Academy Theater, where there was a special screening of the documentary Keep on Keepin’ On. It’s a very sweet movie about 94 year old jazz trumpet legend Clark Terry and his 23 year old piano protege. It was wonderful just to be let into the life of this incredible man with such a history and such a firsthand connection to the musical tradition.

I watched the movie with ex-coworked KK and her boyfriend, G, who I had never met. After the movie, we caught up a little bit, and I got my first chance to summarize where I’ve been since I’d last seen her in December. January has turned out to be quite a month for me, with a lot of change and a lot more coming down the pipeline. I was sharing about this Artist’s Way group I’m trying to get started—the response hasn’t been overwhelming, but it has been whelming and I’m pretty confident that I’ll be able to get the group going—and both of them expressed some interest. It was validating, and I’m very excited to move on, feel like I’m going forward.

sensibility

Matthew EilarLeave a comment

It turns out that there was a coda to last night that I couldn’t have known about before I posted. My brother called me out of the blue. This has only happened once or twice before ever. One of my big goals for the new year was to work on my relationship with my siblings, and so his decision to initiate really made me feel good.

What did not feel good this morning were the many beers I had last night. I don’t know what the connection between the pneumonia and general bad health is, but I’ve been dealing with unpredictable and gnarly acid reflux, which was super unwelcome this morning because I had made plans to meet A for coffee and breakfast.

I met A as she was starting to date one of my friends from college. Sometimes I get a really strong sense of a person, a feeling that I will click with someone. about a month and a half ago, she messaged me out of the blue to tell me about some things she had tried after a conversation we had, which made me feel very happy—that kind of happy you feel for being yourself and for making something good happen in the world and for being the right energy that somebody needed at one time.

I had a great time talking to her. I’m a sucker for good conversation, and I love when it flows easily and everyone in it is both eager to share and delighted to listen.

One thing that’s been sticking with me all day is something she said about the way that she lived in college. She said that some of her friends thought it was weird that she seemed to be putting down roots in the town she went to school in. She explained to me that she never wanted to live like she was holding something back, even if that meant that leaving was more painful. It’s not the way that is first nature for me to live—one of the great freedoms of my life right now is my anonymity, as well as one of my great lonelinesses. But in the moment of that conversation, I felt like it was closer to the way that I want to live now.

After finishing up, I came home to nap for a couple of hours and try and catch up a little bit on sleep debt. When I woke up, I freshened up the house and got ready for having S over with a friend of hers from high school over. After I finished with the Charliework, I started to make some more progress through Mrs. Dalloway.

S and her friend came over. I had never met her friend before, so it was nice to practice breaking in with another person before, and I felt like I was myself. I wish I could cut my glibness and cheapness like 18%, but they are my armor against awkward silences, which I hate even more. We made a trip out to Fred Meyer to get ingredients for dinner and something to drink, and made a more than edible dinner of pork chops, green beans, chard, and salad. It was nice to be social all day but with energy level at a simmer. I’m trying to just roll with how indoor cat I’ve been for this month, but I guess the winter weather had to affect behavior at some point.

We continued the evening with Sense and Sensibility, which I had never seen and have never read. I enjoyed it, and had no desire to pick it apart any more than that.

Made my way through the first two sections of Mrs. Dalloway, then called it a night. I think I may play Pokemon; FireRed until I fall asleep, but I have terrible luck with the game. Twice now I’ve fucked up saving on the emulator and lost like 3 total hours of game play.

1.9.15

Matthew EilarLeave a comment

i had a golden opportunity to catch up on sleep that I threw away happily to see my friend S, who is visiting for a conference. i waded through morning traffic to get to powells to finally sell all those books that i maniacleaned (I got 50 bucks for them, not too shabby. it was pretty depressing to see so many books I liked that they didn’t need to buy/there was no market for though). it was my first time seeing her for probably over a year, so things were a lot different but one of the reasons I love her so much is that we always pick right back up where we left off and she is one of the world’s least demanding human beings and ch/illest because she’s a super introvert, so leave her alone for a few minutes and she’s already found something awesome to do, and yet she’s always game when I have the hankering to do something I’d like.

she helped me acquire my copy of As You Like It, which I had been needing to prepare for a social gathering I’m hosting next month (more on that another day), a copy of Mrs. Dalloway to mark up (more coming below), and a new journal, which I’m starting before finishing the old one but it feels like time. after putzing around for a little while—it’s a mistake to be a bookish person and go to a bookstore with another bookish person, because we both just want to wander around like zombies and get lost in our own particularities—we hit up a little breakfast deli to catch up.

the crucible that forged our friendship was that we both happened to be complete shitty pile of goop messes at the same time, and so way before I had the vocabulary to describe what the friendship was, there was a safety that I found in her to express some of my insecurities and vulnerabilities. every once in awhile, i’ll be caught off guard by something she reads in me and realize that it’s something she remembers from a conversation where i’ve said something more private and more exposed than I meant to.

we talked a little bit about personality types, and how much we love them, our own version of pseudo/quasi-scientific horoscopes and how much we want them to be true but how they can’t possibly be. talking through our meyer-briggs brought to the forefront one of those ways in which growing and becoming more ourselves reveals that we are more different people from each other than ever before in our friendship. i’ve tried to embrace my social and extroverted self pretty hard this last year, and she’s a superintrovert. listening to her talk about herself makes me realize that her potential for world domination and cold, grinding dominance through superiority is much higher than I ever gave her credit for.

2015-01-08 11.45.55-1

when i got back home to take a breather before work, I took a second to label the spines of my collection of journals, diaries, workbooks, and planners going back to 2002, when I was a 12 year old. none of them are particularly comprehensive; the ones from about 2010 or so are more complete chronicles of time, but it’s incredible how many important things never got covered. I’ve been working on being someone that’s more comfortable showing my mess & edges & roughness & harshness & humanity to the world, and that’s part of the reason that I wanted to experiment with journaling out in the open, online in 2015. moving my daily journal online and off paper opened up some room for me to start something that I’ve been wanting for so long, a real artist’s journal. the second one from the bottom in the stack above is where my earliest poems, songs, sketches, stories are, and one thing I missed so much from it was the lack of lines. for whatever reason, i’ve always been good about journaling with lined paper, but its impossible for me to muse or brainstorm or collect the soup with lines on the page. we’ll see how long this lasts; one reason that there’s a weird chronological overlap in the top three books is because they each started as something else before drifting back to being a daily diary.

I love having the books around. they can puncture the clever rearranging the past that we all do to create and preserve our worldtrack, but at the same time, the most heinous and stupid and sad things i’ve ever thought are all there. conspicuous sadness is often there. conspicuous happiness never is.

i fucked off at work and cracked into Mrs. Dalloway. last year, i read fewer books than the year before that, but had a couple of very intense reading experiences, the most memorable of which was an excruciatingly slow read of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. i love technology and new technology. i love the ease and convenience of ebooks. i love the way that they are always with me, and i especially love the way that they facilitate real engagement with some supertomes, like Dumas’ Le Comte or Infinite Jest, that read a lot better when you can easily access notes. but.

even so.

i read a lot better with pen or pencil and copious notes. i’ve been trying to resist this truth ever since my first high school english class. i hate rereading copies with annotations, i kind of hate “hurting” my books, i almost always hate at least 20% of my thoughts a day after writing them in the margins (a hard-won reduction from the 100% in my high-school copy of A Midsummer Night’s Dream which I burned in shame). but reading with a pencil focuses my insight, in makes me slow down, it rewards me for discovering beautiful turns of phrase, sentences that don’t open themselves up with just a quick skim. i’ve been thinking all day of Woolf’s description of clock bells as “leaden circles dissolved in the air,” and I never would have focused on that particular description if I hadn’t first been looking for anything first. i had made my way about 30 pages in, but decided to just start over now that I had my own copy.

the rest of the workday passed.

I listened several times to the Byrd’s “Eight Miles High,” and was pointed by music history both to the orientalism of indian-inspired psychedelic rock and Coltrane. it’s just about time for a deep dive, I think.

i took 12 kids at the end of the day to a University of Portland Pilots basketball game. we all had a lot of fun, but there was something irritating that happened at the end that got me steamed, and forced me to stay an extra hour late on top of the late schedule, so I didn’t leave work until about 9:45pm and very grumpy.

I finished up the day with a visit to Dot’s and catching up with HaRT, who I hadn’t seen for almost a month. we talked and bullshitted and discussed online dating strategy, which seems to be an evergreen topic of conversation that I have with anybody that’s not paired up right now.

I started watching Friends as a mindgame to see if me watching a few episodes around the house while L was around would be enough for her to feel like she didn’t need to watch the whole thing again. Unfortunately, it’s kind of caught, so I’m not sure that what i did was any better, especially since my whole motivation was to not hear that fucking theme song a thousand times over. I’m guessing I have a few more episodes in my future.