I don't know if this is going to work...

I'm at a concert in Seattle right now. The band is the Senate. I'm pretty sure they're my favorite local band.

Later that night...
Hey! It did post a video from my phone. The quality is about as crappy as you'd expect, but it worked. Hmm, this means I can blog mobiley (mobily?) now. I'm not sure that's a good thing.

Were The World Mine

My thoughts on Were the World Mine
In case you can't read my handwriting:

Yesterday, when Josh from my English class posted links on Plurk and Facebook about Were the World Mine, I decided I had to see it. There are few enough quality films with openly gay protagonists that actually have a relevant, interesting plot. I liked it to say the very least, but less so for the basic storyline so much as the interruption of Status Q the actions of Timothy cause.

Based on A Midsummer Night's Dream, Timothy quite literally takes on the role of Robin Goodfellow, creating a mixed up world where the lines of love are redrawn according to his whim. In that respect, the story of the film is very much based off the story of the play the characters in the film are participating in.

Puck has always been known as a character of chaos and trickery. And we are but mortals subject to the will of those above us, so when we suddenly find ourselves in that position, of having that power, we become the anti-person.

Timothy makes the star rugby player fall in love with him, but in doing so alienates and aggravates his community.

Movies like this make me sad. Yes, there was a happy ending, but it comes across as contrived to me. I always wince at the smiles and the kiss at the end. It's unrealistic and creates an illusion of possibility. There are no magical love flowers in real life.

A sunflower in a cornfield

On some level, I've always been uncomfortable interacting with other gay men. By and large I think it has to do with intimidation. Most of the queer community is far more open to new and different things than the rest of our heteronormative society.

I'm all for that, and have even been told that I'm open with myself and sharing who I am more so than most. But I'm not used to being surrounded with it. So it's a stark and scary difference when I cross that threshold.

I've been pretty isolated from what we call the gay community, mostly because I've lived a pretty sheltered, suburban life in general. And I think the fact that having never experienced the queer community combined with never having experienced any kind of hardship for my sexuality puts me in a limbo of sorts. I'm dancing in that greygoo (not Grace) between the alternatives. I don't mind this. I don't usually think about it actually. But so much of what defines the queer community is that solidarity. They (We?) are united because we aren't the same as "normal" society, and we're treated differently for it. I have a hard time identifying with that.

I'm hopelessly oblivious to homophobia in part because of my personality. Stress and negative emotions don't last for very long. I'm too much the optimist to both notice and care when insults are thrown my way. There was this one time in high school where I was wearing my ocean shirt, and as some jock-type and his girlfriend walked past me in the hallway, the guy said "Nice puppets, fag." The first thing to go through my mind was that they weren't puppets. They were Beanie Babies. People laugh at that story because I'm offended at probably the least offensive part of what that guy said, but that's truly how I think.

And in this way, I'm not really all that unique, but I think without meaning to I defy Status Q because of it. I don't follow what is expected. I revel in observing controlled chaos, not for the chaos' sake but for the reactions people have. Puck, Loki, Eros, Mercury, Anansi: so often they're tricksters causing mischief and mayhem, but usually only as it serves their purposes. It's not madness for the sake of madness but a message or a show of power.

There is always something to be learned in the patterns that show up among the seemingly random.

A blog post via:

ishy29: http://www.plurk.com/p/ya8ff
Tuchiya Ayame: http://www.plurk.com/p/y98fp
kylel: http://www.plurk.com/p/y8qrc
DTz: http://www.plurk.com/p/y7lbb
starrag: http://www.plurk.com/p/yb3ur
wriver: http://www.plurk.com/p/x55rl

Plurk as a medium for communication is both a blessing and a curse, for in it there is the blessing of anonymity and the ability to communicate without the necessity of spoken words, but with anonymity comes the potential for the loss of self.

In each book we've read in Nanotexts, at some point or another, the question of identity has come up.

Casares. The fugitive is faced with the idea that everything he has done, everything he has created for Faustine, before Morel and the other mysterious inhabitants of the island, the recordings of Morel's invention. When they appear and disappear, he knows not if they are real or hallucinations caused by the island. Plurk records us, captures the moments of our lives online in a static timeline. Up up down down left right left right B A enter and soon we find ourselves dancing around each other.

What are our thoughts if words are but a disease? Part of how we define ourselves is by our minds. Burroughs. How much of who we are is ourselves, and how much is what we plurk? How easily do we identify ourselves through the medium of people lurking? Plurk further cuts up our conversations, breaking them down into bite sized components, micro blogs of information.

For many of us, I think our plurk identity has become as separate as a parapersonality, and for some, it's even spawned more. Our mind, our lucidity and thought have and can separate from our body via plurk. Plurk extends our thoughts, allows us to compile and compress data into 140 characters or less. A picture is worth 1000 words, but a link can be worth tenfold that. Plurk is the closest yet we've been able to achieve the metanovel of Postsingularity.

But as with any new technology, Plurk suffers its drawbacks. We are limited by words and what we can find. It's a two dimensional tool. For as much quality, thought provoking information that is shared, 5 more pieces of irrelevancy are to be found, but that's simply the nature of the superorganism. As with the regular organism, so much of the parts must spend themselves maintaining a status quo in order for the greater experiences to come about. Big Pig is the beezies and the orphidnet. The Queen City is the hive and the people in the city. The Hand is its agents and enemies as one. So then, our timelines are both the individual plurks, and the conversations as well as the greater trends those messages follow.

Tired

I have half a blog post written in my head/on paper, but it's getting kind of really late for me, and I don't think I'm awake enough to coherently do justice to the ideas like I wish to, so instead of working on that post here, I'm posting this short message explaining why I don't have anything of substance in this space just yet.

Be warned though, I'm working on it and want to take my time to do this right. Just like I commented on Low's blog, I tend to lose myself in my typing. Which probably explains the vaguely stream-of-thought-style randomness that makes up most of my widdershin writings. I want to try and focus myself a little bit more here so that you, readers, whomever you may be, can hopefully take more out of this.

So thank you for your patience, and goodnight.

Cycles from Celebrities

I went to Canada this past weekend,clubbing with my girls. It was a relatively uneventful experience, the usual college student in a foreign country that has a lower drinking age than home.

I went to Canada this past weekend,clubbing with my girls. It was a relatively uneventful experience, the usual college student in a foreign country that has a lower drinking age than home. Which isn't to say we went to drink. No, it's all about the dancing.

Anyways, one thing I encountered at the club, other than cute guys, alcoholic drinks and sweaty people, was a dance remix of the Beyoncé song, Single Ladies. In truth, the song - or rather, the video made me think about Nanotexts.

This happens to me from time to time. I take a class or read a book and learn something, and then I start to see those concepts everywhere. Much like the Jim Carrey movie and its basis on the 23 Enigma only with far less of an esoteric aspect. Most people would just call it good retention or being able to apply what I've learned to real life situations.

What caught me about the Beyoncé video was that in order to create a danceable beat from a pop song, whatever DJ that had mixed it had done a cut-up, which consequently was something I learned about when we were reading William S. Burroughs. Go check out the wikipedia link in 23 Enigma again. I doubt the fact that it was Burroughs who coined the term has anything to do with, well, anything, but it's an interesting coincidence regardless. A random cut-up at a dance club made me think about writing a blog post for my English class, that then made me research that mental phenomenon wherein you feel like there is a recurrence of words/ideas/numbers in your life, which leads me directly back to the source of my knowledge of cut-ups.

Life is very much circular, much like how Tony in class and on plurk, brought our talk back to Feynman's treatise on the small.

And in this way, our lives are cut-ups, cyclical, repetitious. Déjà vu is not a creation of the unconscious or the supernatural, it is the recognition of the patterns our wetware has been programmed to look for. We look back and see and apply to what is before us.

People say that if we don't learn from history, we are doomed to repeat it. That may be well and true for the large scale cycles of humanity, but on the individual level, such learning happens all the time. It's how we learn to walk, to speak, to avoid the bee that stings.