I want to write a letter

I want to write a letter to a friend of mine. He lives in Canada and I haven't seen him since we met: it's been almost two years. We met at a summer camp and while we've both returned to the camp, it's been different sessions so we haven't seen each other. Somehow though we're still in contact.

I've made plenty of other camp friends over the years of course, but I haven't consistently stayed in as close contact with pretty much anybody else except this one, crazy redhead I met on a bus to Leavenworth in July of 2007. I'm a pro-penpaller, but very few people have the same drive towards stamps and letters that I do, so it most always ends up being very one-sided conversations. Which, now that I think about it, has been the case here as well. I've only received one physical reply from Gabe, but where I send letters, he emails or Facebooks me so there's still the transmission of ideas.

The point I'm getting to is that we were talking about this the other night, and letters really are something that you treasure.

He said something that really made me think as well. It's mind boggling to think that someone's hand wrote the words you're reading and then traveled however many miles to get to you. Sure it's amazing that you can send the same amount of information in under 5 minutes, but the fact that the wrinkled piece of paper you hold in your hands traveled all that way to get to you makes it so much more special.

With how little we physically write anymore - I know plenty of college students who complain about cramped hands right after finals/midterms - taking the time to actually write a letter shows you care above and beyond. It conveys something about your personality by lacking the impersonal uniformity of type.

So the imperfections make us special and make the people we interact with feel better about it.

So then, what of perfection? Often, it takes so much more effort, but it lacks the personality, and it's the personality that enables us to connect. And like the hokey pokey, that's what it's all about.

A Sudden Exodus

For those friends who I speak to fairly often (or who happened to see my Facebook status), you know that I recently found myself sans-roommate.

Yesterday, I met Luke's parents for the first time as they came in to clear out all his stuff. They were surprisingly efficient in their packing/cleaning ability. It took all of half an hour for them to get everything in boxes and out to the car. They were really nice, and my only sorrow is to not have met them under better circumstances.

I don't really know what Luke's situation is, and don't really feel like it's my place to air his personal problems for the world even if I did know, but regardless, he does not feel up to finishing this quarter, and I sincerely hope he's doing alright.

So now I find myself alone in one of the larger (if awkwardly shaped) rooms here in Nash Hall, or at least until I hear otherwise from the Housing Administration. I'm not sure how I feel about this.

On the one hand, I like having this space to myself. I really feel like I can make it mine now.



I've rearranged the room to open up some space, and give myself a little more bed room to make myself comfortable as well. The only thing I feel like I'm missing is color and furniture. I need more posters, and maybe some shelves or something.

On the other hand, I'm a social person, so having someone in the room, even if we never really talked is comforting to me. This idea of potentially being alone, while not scary per se, is mildly distressing. I've gotten used to that other presence.

My friends have varying opinions.

One thinks I should have sleepovers. That sounds fun, but with who? The girls I spend time with, well they outnumber me, so I usually go to their rooms. The guys I hang out with, oh, that's right, I don't really hang out with any guys (Kellen is an exception since I know and see him most of the time through Dani).

Dani's first thought was that I need to find a boyfriend. Which, while that is an amusing thought, since y'know, I have a room to myself and no one to answer to for being up late so to speak... I'm not really looking right now. I just don't feel like I'm in a place where I really need to find and be in a relationship. I'm happy and admittedly still dealing with some of the aftereffects of the last relationship I was in (as short lived as that was). I have yet to find closure, and I don't think it would be fair to bring that with me and make it a burden on anyone I meet who's worth the effort.

Still, with this new found freedom I'm a bit lost. Any suggestions?

Space Administration

I'm currently fascinated by a small facet of my nanotexts class.

Earlier this quarter we discussed the idea of moving our classroom from its current space (Old Main 482) to a room more conducive to the technological integration our specific class is geared toward.

A part of requesting this classroom change is talking with the Space Administration here at Western.



As far as I know, we have yet to receive any kind of response.

Despite that though, I think we're still half expecting to get approval to move rooms at some point.

The point I'm trying to make though is that in a way we are at odds with the Space Administration (insert non-existant hyperlink to Space Administration here).

The black box that you see Prof Pritchard (is it weird that I think of him as Tony or Nanotext?) moving is one of those lectern-speaker boxes made available (apparently by the Space Administration) for Professors to lecture from.

That I know of, no professors use this box at all. And yet somehow it still finds its way on top of the table at the start of every class.

I've taken this almost ritual moving of the black box from the table to the floor at the beginning of every class to represent a kind of symbolic sticking it to the SA.

We shall not use your box. We do not believe in your ideals. Give us our space! By moving this simple box, we represent our solidarity in defying the SA. And yet, it's an empty gesture, because here we are, still finding ourselves in OM-482.

I keep getting lost

Maybe I need to print off a copy of the syllabus, but I can never seem to keep track of which book I'm supposed to be reading for my Lit class. So this weekend, I looked up what book I'm supposed to be on by Monday, and have been working on reading everything previous that I haven't read yet.

The books are pretty hard to follow, because they don't exactly follow a linear path, so it's been rather intensive reading. They're making me think however.

For example, Radical Alterity has made me wonder about the nature of cameras and photography, more so since my friend and future roommate, Kellen has been dragging me to the crew team's Regattas of late (see earlier post) and making me what he calls his "sherpa." Really, the job is nothing more than a glorified pack-mule position, but it gets me out of the dorm and near something interesting. Kellen has an enchanting way of talking about anything that interests him that vaguely reminds me of my stepdad. And he explains everything very well, so I've learned more about different SLR settings and modes and different lenses than I probably ever would owning any myself.

My point being, the alterity of Baudrillard has invaded my life and I can no more than look at a camera without pondering its ability to capture a moment, and separate it from what we call the time stream. It's akin to taking a single sentence out of the context of the conversation going on. It makes sense in its own way, but it's also transformed into a separate thing. And as we've talked about in class, who is really taking the picture? The tool the camera or the tool the person (sorry, Kellen, I couldn't help myself and had to throw a jibe in there somewhere).

I learned from my Cinema class that lenses differ from the human eye in that they can isolate and magnify an image, where we could no more make a single object the sole focus of our vision than we could zoom in on the trees across the bay. But these tools allow it, and in doing so, separate us it seems from our humanity, or at least the natural exhibitions of our humanity.

And in The Ticket That Exploded, I see parallels of that. It's a little more disjointed perhaps, and the storytelling involved is completely different, but there remains that sense of otherness. That something we express and accept as normal is merely the surface. Which, admittedly, as a sci-fi cut-up, makes sense.

Burroughs populates his Dreaming with fantastical, homoerotic creations perpetuating what so far has been a world with some kind of dark ulterior motive. Someone or someones are in control and it doesn't seem to be Mr. Lee, who strikes me as being our "good guy," though I don't doubt that archetype is relative in this case.

Day 33: On Words

If you repeat a word again and again, it loses it's meaning.
heartbreak. heartbreak? is that spelled right? Heartbreak. AUGH.
A Softer World

I stumbled upon this webcomic while on plurk just now. Someone posted a link to a different posting by this website, and I happened to peruse through the archives until I came across this particular gem.

It reminds me of something we used to do in my journalism class in high school. Those of us who designed pages and covered the whole layout aspect of publishing the school paper often found ourselves searching for an appropriate font to help tell the story. This wasn't always the case, because we were taught well that too many novelty fonts are a bad thing.

Personally I still cringe when I see more than three fonts on a flyer or poster without a very good visual context to put them in. But anyways, when we did do this, we would highlight the text, and then click in Adobe InDesign's font bar and scroll through all the fonts one at a time, only pausing long enough to see if it matched the story we were trying to tell.

After about the twentieth font, the word or name (names were especially bad) we were looking at would start to blur together. And even those of us who'd been designing for years would start to question and second guess. That word can't be spelled right. It looks wrong. AAAgggghhhh!

And then there would be heads pounding against walls as the rest of us rushed in to save the poor designer from the offending word and to have them check it online and in their notes.

Okay, so I hyperbolized that last detail, but you get my point, something about seeing the same word over and over in so many ways without changing anything more than how it looked made it start to look wrong. The word began to lose meaning, and with that, all semblance of being a real word.

So I ask, what makes a word? What gives it meaning and provides the thought behind it? When it comes down to it, print is just smudges of ink on paper (or in the case of this blog post, pixels on the screen). There must be some social aspect that binds the idea to the word. Otherwise when we see a word over and over, or say it over and over like in the webcomic I started with, it wouldn't lose it's meaning.

I'm hoping to start a dialogue with this, so please feel free to comment. I'd prefer if you did so at my blog, and not on Facebook, but I welcome whatever feedback I can get.