Tag: work

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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.

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Matthew EilarLeave a comment

Wednesday

Long day at work. In the evening headed out to a birthday gathering at a bar for one of my school friends. I had a good time. Went to sleep watching The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.

Thursday

Shorter workday, but felt longer because we were shorthanded.

We were out for recess, and there is this girl, Marigold, a third-grader, that has near-potato levels of coordination and body strength. She is an avatar of childhood anxiety, and mostly quietly goes about her business like Eeyore. This recess, she decided that she was going to join the kids that like to sit on top of a monkey bars set that looks like this:

freestanding-360-circle-overhead-monkey-bars-Playground-Equipment-1367085899She was standing on the little ladder and trying to pull herself up, but she didn’t really have the strength, and she didn’t have enough practice at the monkey bars and wouldn’t trust her own footholds when she found them. She did this for like 50 minutes. At this point, some of the other kids were getting pointedly cruel to her because she was blocking the steps, and she was starting to feel excluded.

At the end of the hour, the next time that I passed by, she asked me for a boost. I usually just say no, but she was trying and struggling so much, I wanted her to have that feeling of victory. I gave her a boost up so that she could try and sit on the top.

Which turned out to be a huge mistake.

She wasn’t coordinated enough to find a good place to put her sitbones, so she ended up just straddling one of the bars which started to hurt her. This surprised her enough to make her remember that she has a severe fear of heights, and she started to have a panic attack meltdown, screaming at the top of her lungs for me to get her down.

I have some strength, but not enough to just lift her off of monkeybars that are 6 or 7 feet off the ground. Now I start to get a little anxious, because the last thing that I want is for her to fall off and hit her head on a pole on the way down. Most kids have a primal, animal self-preservation instinct that gives them greater strength and balance to get down, but I’ve seen Marigold faceplant into sand after being afraid to jump off of a 3 foot balance beam, so I’m starting to sweat.

Now, with the world’s worst timing, another kid that I’ve been working with a lot this week, Evan, comes over. Evan is a 4th grader with anger problems and the biggest streak of stubbornness I’ve ever seen. He loves to “little lawyer” to death (“Butthole is an inappropriate word to be saying around the club.” How is that inappropriate? But isn’t a bad word. Hole isn’t a bad word. I’m just saying “but” then “hole.” How is that against the rules?), has a really morbid sense of humor, and wants to join the military so that he can learn how to kill people. All that being said, he’s a very sweet kid, and often has a big heart.

This was the worst time for his sweetness to come out. He comes up to Marigold and starts screaming banal motivational phrases like “You can do it!” My only option was to get her to focus on me, get her breathing to slow, and tell her how to move so that she could get herself down, but the second Evan came over, she lost focus and started panicking again. That meant that I needed for Evan to just go away, but then he got butthurt that I wasn’t just praising him for doing a good deed. I had to put on my quiet Batman voice and say, really quietly, Evan, I asked you to go. You need to go away right now.

After getting her attention back on me again, I was able to help her hop down. Lest it seem otherwise, I have a lot of compassion for this girl. But after she was back on the ground, I knew I was going to think twice about helping another kid reach their goals. Too risky.

When I got home, I made some dinner, salad, butternut squash, potatoes.

After dinner, I headed out to an underground room on Belmont where some acquaintances were DJing house music. Out of an hour or so, I got about 10 self-consciousness free minutes of dancing, which isn’t a bad ratio for me. I dragged my roommate Natalie Colen out with me, Jesus Christ was there, and a bunch of people that I knew on sight at Reed. Small town.

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Friday

I spent the morning working with J Lo to clean out the kitchen at our facility. We got approval to get the kitchen remodeled, and it’s been a nightmare for as long as I’ve worked there, and I didn’t want to feel guilty if there was some horrendous shit in the cabinets and there was some kind of inspection. Later in the morning, we went to Wal-Mart to pick up a furniture donation, and it was nice to get some car time to talk casually and informally.

I shared that I had had a moment this week where I was helping a kid with social skills while at the same time being so aware of how I should take my own advice and connect the dots in my own life. There is a boy named Josiah, around 9 or 10, that I work with. He has a brother that’s older than him by only around a year. These two boys bring a cloud of wild and positive energy wherever they go, bouncing off the walls but with such good spirits that you want to let them enjoy themselves. Josiah’s parents work hard and work a lot. A lot of families in Camas are really into sports and dads take a lot of time to coach their kids and work on early sports skills. I don’t think Josiah or his brother have a lot of that time, and so they rarely join in the more formal sports games on the playground, the boys that self-organize into football or soccer or basketball games.

I was working in the gym on Wednesday, and I saw Josiah hanging around the periphery of the basketball game that was in progress. Josiah wanted to join in, but was really unsure of himself. He kept calling out to some of the kids he knew that were playing, and asking for permission to join and play. These kids would look towards him, but they were mostly focused on the game and just kind of shrugged. I could see that Jacob was reading that look as rejection, and he came over to me very upset and saying that the kids playing were excluding him. I helped him see that these kids were not excluding him, that from their perspective, anybody could join and and come and play just by playing, and no one person in the game could give the permission he was looking for. I told him that the only way to join in was to go after the ball every time, to play when he got possession.

It made me think of the places in my own life where I feel on the periphery, waiting for that invitation to join in, when really the only action to take is to act. I’ve also been thinking of the kids that were already playing. None of them was particularly friendly to Josiah, and it would not have hurt them to find some way to bring him into the game. At the same time, I can’t bring myself to blame any of the kids for not knowing to take ownership of the whole game like that yet. I don’t think I have that kind of compassion yet for the people who are in the same position in relation to myself in my own life, in the things that I want to become a part of.

The rest of the day came and went. I texted around looking for evening plans, and decided to join Jesus Christ for dinner and hanging out with some of his friends. The plan was to go dancing, but by the time they were done pregaming, it was near midnight and just too late for me to start something like that, so I called it an early night and went to sleep.

Saturday

I spent the next day lazing. After waking up, I fucked around for a little bit, then went outside to catch some of the beautiful sun and start working on my lovely summer bronze. In the evening, I headed out with Jesus Christ to a Third Angle concert at the art museum of weird and difficult experimental classical music, and I was grateful to have him along as a a friend that’s also into shit like that. After a nightcap, I dropped him off and once again just headed in to get some sleep.

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Wednesday

I’ve had so many days recently that were hard because work was hard, that they’re boring to write about and boring to read about and I’ve come to think of them in my head as Schmuck Days. Wednesday was a Schmuck Day.

On Wednesday evening, however, I had a great experience. I was relaxing, and searching around for something to watch. Last Saturday, I had such a great time watching Frida, that it made me aware of how thirsty my spirit is for stories and myths about artists and how they exist in the world. I decided on a whim to watch The Artist is Present, the documentary about the MOMA retrospective exhibition of Marina Abramovic. From her website:

THE MOUNTING OF THE RETROSPECTIVE AND ITS THREE-MONTH EXHIBITION AT MOMA IS THE NARRATIVE SPINE OF MARINA ABRAMOVIĆ THE ARTIST IS PRESENT, AND OVER THE COURSE OF THE FILM, WE RETURN AGAIN AND AGAIN TO THE MUSEUM. THERE, AS THE “SET” IS BUILT FOR THE NEW WORK THAT WILL BE THE CENTERPIECE OF SHOW, MARINA SKETCHES HER AMBITIOUS PLANS: ALL DAY, EVERY DAY, FROM EARLY MARCH UNTIL THE END OF MAY, 2010, SHE WILL SIT AT A TABLE IN THE MUSEUM’S ATRIUM, IN WHAT SHE DESCRIBES AS A “SQUARE OF LIGHT.” MEMBERS OF THE AUDIENCE WILL BE INVITED TO JOIN HER, ONE AT A TIME, AT THE OPPOSITE END OF THE TABLE. THERE WILL BE NO TALKING, NO TOUCHING, NO OVERT COMMUNICATION OF ANY KIND. HER OBJECTIVE IS TO ACHIEVE A LUMINOUS STATE OF BEING AND THEN TRANSMIT IT­­––TO ENGAGE IN WHAT SHE CALLS “AN ENERGY DIALOGUE” WITH THE AUDIENCE.

THE PIECE, APTLY ENTITLED THE ARTIST IS PRESENT, WILL BE THE LONGEST-DURATION SOLO WORK OF MARINA’S CAREER, AND BY FAR THE MOST PHYSICALLY AND EMOTIONALLY DEMANDING SHE HAS EVER ATTEMPTED. WHEN SHE CONCEIVED IT, SHE SAYS, SHE KNEW INSTANTLY THAT IT WAS THE RIGHT PIECE BECAUSE THE MERE THOUGHT OF IT “MADE ME NAUSEOUS.” THE WORK’S SIMPLICITY AND PURITY HAS THE POTENTIAL TO CRYSTALLIZE ALL THAT IS BEST ABOUT HER ART, BUT IT ALSO DEMANDS THAT MARINA RETURN TO HER ROOTS––AND FORGO THE OVERT THEATRICALITY THAT HAS CHARACTERIZED MANY OF HER RECENT PERFORMANCE PIECES. PERHAPS MORE THAN ANY PERFORMANCE SHE HAS DONE BEFORE, THE ARTIST IS PRESENT HAS THE POWER TO FULFILL MARINA’S OWN DICTUM ABOUT LONG-DURATIONAL WORK, IN WHICH, SHE SAYS, “PERFORMANCE BECOMES LIFE ITSELF.”

I had heard about the piece, and the film, when they came out in 2010/2012, but hadn’t gotten around to seeing them. I was so blown away by her spirit, her belief in herself, her joy for life, her complete melding of performance and life. Her work also explores themes like radical vulnerability, trust in others, inner stillness, and cultivating a life presence that intersects with other things that I’ve been exploring, like mindfulness meditation and the work of the western Buddhist writer Alan Watts. I felt myself really appreciative of Marina’s work because of my own practice that I’m trying to cultivate. I’ve become comfortable with the physical actions of sitting and contemplating, of shutting out external stimuli, however it is very difficult for me to shut down the background chatter of insecurity, self-criticism, and perfectionism. One of the many geniuses of her MOMA piece, or at least the facet that connected with me, was that she created physical conditions—sitting still and blank for 12 hours at a time for three months—in which one needed cultivate that inner blankness simply to survive. I found it very inspiring.

I used to make fun of performance art, as our culture does. My stereotype of it was Maureen in Rent, terrible, stupid performances that were cheap, pseudo-profound, annoying. One of the biggest changes that’s happened in my life so far is that when I was a young teenager, I was obsessed with the question “What is art?,” and had such strong (and wrongheaded) opinions about what was and wasn’t art. Hint: if it made me think too hard and made me feel weird, it probably wasn’t art. I remember a seed being planted that took many years to take root: a reprint in an art book I used to look at in high school of Nan Goldin’s Nan one month after being battered. The photo is like a snapshot, the photographer gazing into the camera with old bruises in the face and an eye still red from burst blood vessels. At the time, I remember being fascinated and repulsed by the ugliness of it. I could not understand why someone would display something so ugly, especially of their own body. I owe so much to that art room, the photo books there. What I’ve come to understand is that performance art uses as its canvas human experience and human emotional reactions. It is no more complicated than that. People often do not like having their reactions manipulated, and for that reason alone the form is always going to be controversial.

Back to The Artist is Present. I found a couple of biographical points very interesting. First is that the young Marina that let the public come up and cut her with scalpels in a piece if they chose, and rode in a van for five years begging for gasoline and money for groceries is clearly not the older performer that dresses in haute couture and has a team of security people that facilitate her performances. That difference is not commented upon. I don’t think she has to answer for them, but it did make me think that any of the voices represented in the film that rejected her work as just cheap provocation would not appreciate the evolution and negotiation of her work as she’s aged.

Second, she had a long relationship with a fellow performance artist, Ulay, and it was incredible to me that these two performers that practiced radical, violent vulnerability with each other still managed to break each other’s hearts.

This movie energized me after a Schmuck Day, and I’m going to be thinking about it for a long time.

Thursday

Thursday started off weird. I was going to start work late, so I had a lazy morning. The landlord was over to do some repairs to the downstairs bathroom, but our house looks like real people live in it so that wasn’t bad or weird. I got into a tense conversation with Luke Skywalker that came out of real feelings, but was mostly caused by my sunday night attack of lonelybrain that I’m still trying to beat back.

I was in charge of taking care of four kids all day that were taking part in a performance for a big annual fundraiser at work. The kids were fine, the performance was real rough, and overall it was a long day.

Friday

Today was a work day, where we were closed for after-school programs, but all working in the building. We spent all day sorting through and reorganizing our storage and supplies, which we’ve needed to do for a long time. We got so much done, and our hoarder boss was pretty chill about it, for the most part, and only got micromanagey about keeping garbage at the end of the day when most of the stuff was gone or away.

Quiet evening at home felt like the right call tonight.