feather2pixels

God dammit, I totally lost a blog post. The gist of it was that I had the most action-packed weekend in recent memory.

Critical Mass wasn’t quite rained out on Friday, but I would say that the mass wasn’t quite critical enough. I got there (The Ferry Building at 18:30 on the final Friday of each month) late and joined a group of maybe twenty other stragglers for a subcritical mass. Subcritical Mass was in some ways more fun but noteably more dangerous than real Critical Mass–there aren’t enough bodies to stop traffic and at one point a Honda Prelude came within a foot of hitting me head on at forty-five miles per hour as we biked the wrong way down Folsom Street. We finally found the main group, but it didn’t really have enough people to form a collective conscious. Instead we were a bunch of indecisive assholes, tentative at every intersection, and I biked home to work on feather2pixels.com.

So: feather2pixels.com: check it out. I guess this is my best stab at a first draft. Everything you need, nothing you don’t. Not that anyone needs any of this crap. I feel good about the modest format, though even this laughably little took me months to program. I can’t escape computers.

So after blowing $10 on a misloaded film cartridge, the old Polish dude at Action Camera in West Portal showed me how to properly load my new Polaroid on Saturday morning. After producing a few successful shots, I say “I can’t believe I waited till I was twenty-seven to pick one of these up.” Every frame looks like it was taken in in 1976!

That night, after finding my favorite Dylan album on vinyl, I made it back to the Exploratorium for a sound festival, which was a little disappointing by Exploratorium standards, but I saw some old friends and I felt very cool to be known at the greatest science museum in the world. A pepperoni and mushroom pizza with a pitcher of Bud was enjoyed afterwards at Vincent’s.

Sunday started with a surprisingly solid breakfast in North Beach followed by a hike in the Marin Headlands. I’ve never actually hiked there, but the hills smelled strongly of Calfornia and the Pacific was sparkly from the summit. There are endless clusters of abandoned forts up there, decaying in the caustic fog sixty years after the Japanese didn’t invade. A murder of crows kept their eyes on us as we climbed through the ruins and wished that I had bothered to bring along my new camera.

This is Sarah:

After three unsuccessful attempts to find Rocky II at area video stores, I met Krisitin at the Sunset Baskin Robbins. We settled for the original, which wasn’t really a bad thing. And there you go: an exhausting, exhilarating, perfect week. A model for what I want out of life.

Well, feather2pixel tip-riders, it’s vacation time. Thank god for that. Actually, the party kind of started on Friday. I gave every member of the Instrumentation class a pop quiz stapled to a $1 scratcher (or as Dirty Jay calls them: Vallejo City Bonds) and we were off to the races. This was question number two:

Given an instantaneous, sustained Vin that occurs at t=3 in the form ΔV(t)=2cos(ωt), please sketch a portrait of the instructor below:

Click here for a collage of the highly disturbing results.

I will come clean and admit that it’s actually Sunday night–the party’s been on for quite a while. If you want to call it that. Mostly, I have been catching up on some much-needed rest. I don’t remember the last time I slept in.

Some mildly interesting things happened this weekend. The most unexpected of them happened yesterday in the middle of the night. I was stumbling down Valencia street and who did I run into on the corner of 22nd, but Williams the Border Collie. Williams was a co-worker of mine at the Exploratorium for a year and a half. She was the warmhearted Field Trip Explainer. We rode bikes together and generally got on well. After the work year ended, though, nobody ever heard a peep from her, despite several months of voicemails. After a while, I didn’t know what to think and kind of gave up. I was a little pissed.

But there she was before my eyes. It’s extremely hard to get Williams’ attention, but when you do, you get a lot. I don’t think I have ever met a more compassionate person.   Her face lit up and she walked home with me. We sat on my porch, talking for a while and it made me feel a little crestfallen to think that so much has changed for both of us since we last spoke. The world of Field Trip Explaining feels like a long lost childhood.  We walked to a cab at the corner of Mission and I told her I missed her. I do. Right before getting in, she gave me a big hug and you know what? It’s been a long time since I got a real hug.  It’s something I don’t think about that much.  I think really needed it. Thanks Williams.

I am starting a new online journal. Let’s get a few things squared away:

A. Motivation
The only way that the stupid shit happening to me makes any sense whatsoever is allegorically. Trust me, I have been trying to deal at face value with the basic structure of my life for a few months now and it’s been a minor disaster. That shit is for the birds. And I am no bird. I have hair all over my body, give birth to live young and nourish them with my milk. The life of the mammal is shrouded in metaphor.

B. Fuck You
Just like you, I believe that publishing a personal journal on the internet means that, at best, you are a narcissistic loser and, at worst…well, there really is no lower limit is there? Anyways, fuck you I don’t care what you think about me. Don’t get me wrong, if you find me creative and charming that’s exactly what I am going for. If not, though, go dot-com your asshole to a tree.

A lot of stuff has happened to me in the last few months. After living together for 3+ years, me and The Rascal broke up and I moved to a 4br in the Mission district. I got a full time job teaching electrical engineering to college seniors on the shores of San Pablo Bay. Lastly, I spent the summer back in Berkeley, doting on a mysterious woman who let me down. Maybe some sort of chaos is a better characterization than “minor disaster.” I prefer the one that makes me appear more victimized.

The mysterious woman was alluring from a distance. Here is a list of things we did and didn’t have in common:

In Common:

• Both honest more in writing than in person.
• Both took French.
• Both twenty-seven and on the verge.
• Both work well with people professionally.

Not in Common:

• I project what I feel, she feels what she projects.
• The word “hella.”
• I let people in, she ins people let.

We had an amazing elixir summer but in the end she broke things off with me hella quick after a Friday night in the Marina. Was it Al Green who had his baby change the lock to her heart on a Tuesday while he was at work? I know how that guy feels. Actually, that’s bullshit–nevermind her heart, I didn’t even have the key to her front porch. And I constantly wonder how I ever felt so close to someone so opaque. Because I wasn’t. OK, since my new online journal is already at risk of boring my one reader back to craigslist’s casual encounters, I will just say that my biggest problem for now is that I am confused about what it means to touch someone. I don’t even know if I want anyone touching me for a while. In other words, nothing good ever happens when you go out in the Marina.

The job is as ridiculous as it sounds. If you return to feather2pixels.com, you will understand.

My bedroom still resembles the storage unit that preceded it as the place I keep my stuff, but you could make a decent argument that my house is sitting on the best block in the entire city. It’s right off the BART station and there is a lot of foot traffic. That’s what makes the Mission awesome–people’s lives here are happening on the streets. It seems like the type of place where you get into a band because your neighbor had a CD on the other night, not beacue you read a review online. As for the hipsters, they are harmless really. I actually think it’s quite charming how so many of them are mediocre, making up for it with some kind of creative energy. I can deny it all I want but I fit right in.