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Matthew EilarLeave a comment

On a Thursday

I started my day running late, pissed at myself for setting my alarms too early. At work, I’m able to keep mostly to myself. There are a lot of new staff in the building, like rain on parched earth, but it’s been  so long since we’ve been adequately staffed that I have to try and remember what I do when it’s like this. During my lunch break, I go on a run to Walgreen’s to pick up some new pens (my all time favorite are these Pentel EnerGels, but I’ve been making do with Pilot Precise V5s).

During the workday, I was mostly fine and focused on the day at hand. I’ve been doing Planet Earth based activities for 4th and 5th graders on Thursdays, so that meant I had some time to learn about deserts in the morning.

While I was cleaning up in my room, I listened to an On Being interview with Maria Popova from Brain Pickings. Brain Pickings is one of those things that is new to me as of this year that has really enriched my life. It gives me a little hope that I’m not the only weirdo that has this well of deep questioning and radical sincerity that I can’t get rid of yet can’t figure out how to do anything with yet, like a Superfund site. Popova on success:

I am going to side with Thoreau. And he said something like, if the day and night are such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers, it’s more elastic and more starry and more immortal, that is your success. And for me, that’s pretty much it — waking up and being excited and curiously restless to face the day ahead, and being very present with that day, and then going to bed feeling like it actually happened, that the day was lived. I mean, there’s nothing more than that, really.

The weather was gorgeous in Washington, which meant that we went outside for an hour. I had gotten talked to by my boss about cellphone usage during work (something I’m really not proud of), so I reached back to 2004 and made myself a hipster PDA to use (#pinterestbeforepinterest). While outside, I had some time while the kids were mostly playing by themselves to make a small sketch of the playground:

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I’m not very good or practised at visual art or drawing, but it’s little things like this that keep me going. Taking every micro-opportunity to turn something mundane or some mundane experience into an artwork is a core part of my aspirational values, and I’m always happy when I can live up to that standard.

Later in the day, I ran my crew of 9 to 11 year old junior programmers, as we tried to make a simple game in the MIT kid’s programming language Scratch. They are incredible kids, and there are two boys that have been doing Scratch games and videos for a long time that are so creative and mentally flexible while working on their projects that I feel privileged to be able to be around them and watch them work.

After work, I arrived home while it was still light out. I had been feeling guilty about not doing enough yardwork to the point where it is stressing out one of my roommates. The grass had already been mowed, so I decided to do some of the finish work, cleaning out some of the beds and weeding. It ended up being very relaxing and a nice way to end the day.

After eating, I had a very nice and unexpected long video chat with my sister. If you get me talking long enough, I will eventually circle around to a gibberish of frustration and overflowing of feelings that doesn’t really make sense and is probably pretty boring, an all around not cute display of Young Werther like hysteria*:

Anyway, she was pretty patient and indulged me, and is an allaround Good Egg.

Watched some more Chef’s Table. Still couldn’t fall asleep, so listened to the new album Never Were the Way She Was by Colin Stetson and Sarah Neufield. It’s an instrumental album, violin, saxophone, and electronics. It ranges from moody pieces, to incredible reedy noise, to joyful, ecstatic, Steve Reich-like shifting patterns:

I’ve been intrigued by Stetson since New History Warfare: Vol 2, but this is him in just as experimental a mode but with so much more lightness and fun. I’m loving this album.

It didn’t make me fall asleep, though.

I had to cue up the latest Bad Plus album, Inevitable Western.

It kills me that their originals are way more hit or miss for me than their covers. I’ve also been listening a lot to their newly released collaboration, Brand New Day, with the singer Donna Lewis, which is fantastic. I particularly love this cover of the new-to-me David Bowie song “Bring Me the Disco King.”

And, finally, sleep.

*Goethe: “It must be bad, if not everybody was to have a time in his life, when he felt as though Werther had been written exclusively for him.”

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Matthew EilarLeave a comment

Thursday

I spent my morning writing and reading and me-timing. I unplugged my headphones from my phone when I got to work, and when I next tried to plug them in, I realized that the headphone jack was fucked. I listen on my phone so much that it felt like a real loss of something. Everything has a workaround, and I had been thinking about ways to try and leave my ears open when I walk and I’m out in the world (if I have solitary time like that, it’s nearly impossible for me to resist listening to podcasts, and I worry that the chatty flow of interesting information, while amazing, also mitigates some of the imagination-stimulating properties of alone time). It still sucks to not have a choice. Between this and the damage to my car from a couple of weeks ago, I worry that I’m going to hit a period where it seems like Everything Is Breaking And I Have No Plans For Replacing Them.

Maybe this is why balance is overrated. Maybe this is why balance is overrated?

I ran some errands in the afternoon. For my hour with the fourth graders, we played this fairly fun, but chaotic and tiring (for me, that is. The kids seem to be into it.) game, so I was running low on energy. The next hour, however, perked me back up, because I was running a computer skills program. We are working on a project where we are creating a simple game using the kids visual programming language Scratch. I love teaching this program: it puts me in a room with the kids that are actually curious and enthusiastic about something that I share, and I love helping with their problems. I love their problems. Despite all the talk of digital natives, kids don’t know shit about computers, and its fun to teach them basic thing like how to save something or reopen old projects.

I was jonesing for spaghetti for some reason, so I stopped by the grocery store to get some missing ingredients. When I got home, my roommates were out or asleep, so I made my pasta. When it was finished, I offered some to Luke Skywalker, and we ate and watched the newest episode of Mad Men. 

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The first season is so fascinated by Don Draper, such a believer in his talents and his creative vision and insights that we become believers too. We have gotten in on the ground floor for this guy who is going to sell all the sugar water, elect all the presidents, define cool. Then the show never gave him that moment. At this point, most of the show is Don-Draper-knocked-off-his-game, not the cool Don that gave the show its early heat. Last season, I had to accept that the show had moved on, and decide to just take the show as it is. For that reason, the show hasn’t been super great (except for the generally excellent writing and acting), but hasn’t disappointed either. I kind of have a 5th season of LOST feeling about it: even if the last four episodes are fantastic, the last two seasons of the show have been so mediocre that I don’t think the show is ever going to deliver on the promise of its first season.

The light goes out, cycle completes. Dreams have been cinematic for the last few nights.

Friday

I woke up early on Friday morning to get to an all day training. I usually look forward to trainings, because I like breaks from routine. By the end of the day, I usually want to murder someone. I know this, and I still look forward to training days.

I stopped for muffin and coffee at the 7-Eleven, and say hi to the woman that owns it, who always seems to smile and remember me when I come into the store. She looks at me like a mother looks at her son. I imagine that she doesn’t like selling me cigarettes. Until this very moment, I hadn’t questioned that maybe that’s a projection, or that maybe I look at her like a son does to his mother.

I arrive at our location in Sellwood. We get trained on how to use an Epi-Pen. Awkward icebreakers are mercifully fewer than usual. Over time, I have become less game for icebreakers, and less generous with my sincerity. Withholding doesn’t feel great either, but I have a lot of suppressed irritation. Nobody is proud of their work, which encourages isolation, because nobody except your co-workers will understand exactly what you do to make do given what you have to work with.

I spend most of the time during the training writing in my journal. I do a little time travel, and start to write down—in as much detail as I had the discipline for—an interaction I had with an upset boy who’s parents are going through a rough divorce. It was a good exercise, and I try and write down his dialogue, which I very rarely try and capture. It made me think about how dull my memory is for the language of conversation, and how impatient I can get when I just try and get it down and not take the time to turn the words over in my head until they seem like they could plausibly come from the boy’s mouth.

We lunched at a Vietnamese fusion bistro, and I had excellent food and a very good sesame ball.

The second half of the day was even stupider than the first, though shorter. Thank the lord. The maintenance crew did a full vehicle audit while we were doing morning training, and a lot of concerning things were found. It’s good that they were found, but I am very not shocked (look at my face to see how shocked I am) that some stupid, dumb, easy, things were really bad, like the van that was almost completely out of oil. Its a weird, broken place right now and all I want to do is leave.

When I got home, I dozed before Hunter Thompson’s going away party. Before leaving, I played a bizarre game called Frog Fractions which is a very meta indie game that I enjoyed a lot. I probably wouldn’t have played it if it had been described to me ahead of time, but I’m very glad that I did.

It was a very nice and sweet going away. There were many people there, and I had a few nice moments where it felt like I was mingling and having a good time. I realized about an hour in that my batteries were running down fast, and I needed to flee, so I hopped a ride back home and spent the rest of the evening playing games and watching tv and relaxing.