The Sense of Wonder

After finishing Deep Space Nine the other day, I proposed to a few friends that "What You Leave Behind" is essentially the end of Star Trek, or more specifically, a hypothetical series trilogy starting with TOS (and its films), continuing on to TNG, and ending with DS9. I thought that DS9 matured the themes of the Original Series and brought them to a sort of sublime conclusion, and that all other Star Trek that came afterwards were real "spin offs" insofar as they branched out or diverged from what I now consider a thematic arc across TOS-TNG-DS9. I think this might only work if you divorce yourself of the notion of a Roddenberry "vision" that must be or was always at play, and that divorced from "what Gene wanted," TOS-TNG-DS9 was about how hubris meets sacrifice, how history and empire are made of small people acting out roles larger than they can comprehend or accept, and that at the end, space is and never was "home," no matter how hard we tried to make it.

Or maybe WYLB was just a real, legit "ending" -- an ending that surpassed the attempts to "end" the previous series, for whatever their motivations. I liked how O'Brien takes his annoying-ass family back to Earth, how Sisko "dies" and literally leaves this mortal plane, how Odo and Kira shed no tears as they say goodbye. None of this bringing Spock back to life, none of this fuzzy poker playing ending where we assume the adventure continues: people finally have to deal with loss. But maybe what made DS9 for me was the episode "Waltz," where a hallucinating Dukat breaks down in front of his hostage Sisko that he should have killed all the Bajorans during his time as leader of the occupation, Sisko sneaks up behind him as he rants, smacks him in the back of the head with a metal bar, and then grits this line through his teeth. "And that's why you're not an evil man," before he runs off to escape.

I said all of that to distract you and myself from the crushing truth that winter will soon be upon Gambier, and I the winter-weary type in summer, will soon find I can only have so much fun throwing my cat into the snow to see what she'll do. I suspect that Irene will probably be okay as she's got fur.

On The Move

I'm probably flying over Ohio right now, heading home to California. I've got mixed feelings about Mt. Vernon and Gambier, a lot of which I've chalked up to learning how to be middle class, for realz this time. That is, having professional relationships, chatting in sitting rooms, and never seeing the kind of semi-bohemian lifestyle that I led for eight years ever again. Now people buy houses and go antiquing to fill them with stuff; they don't scrounge around the Internet to pick up milk crates and pressed-wood furniture just to have a kitchen table, or find a terrible but sturdy piece of wood and cover it with an equally-terrible table cloth because, well, you accepted your fate. The stories we tell about our furniture are different now.

And I hesitate to use "we" here, but I suspect I can't fight this tide, as the pull of class (the reality of class) melts me both physically and mentally into a gigantic grilled cheese of terrible food metaphors about selling out. God that was so bad, I'm going to end this paragraph prematurely.

I say this as if there's a "real" to be kept, when this may be fate of sorts. Granted too I'm lucky, considering how the economy has been treating others like me, but you never really get a sense of those sociological concepts like assimilation or socialization until you actually take historical stock of them. I don't have the confidence of Bourdieu to say I can see this dispassionately -- I'd say I'm at the Camus stage of the "French philosophical stages of acceptance" -- but I can't avoid the trajectory my family has taken from living 10 or more to a house to all my aunts and uncles (and my mom) stepping so far away from the immigrant life.

If I'm throwing loaded dice in some terrible crapshoot of fate, I wonder if it's Marshall Berman's maelstrom of change or some appalling American Beauty/Donny Darko/bullshit white person problem suburbia ass leakage that I'll be losing with. Either way, it's dissatisfaction, but one is solved by obsessive changes while the other is only solved by rebellious teenagers (I hate those things).

One thing is certain, I will refuse to tuck my polo shirts in on the weekends. Occupy my pants!

For Spammers, I Give No Quarter

I'm taking a break from a desperate moment of dissertation writing, having been drawn out by spammers spamming spam on the comments. Look, I know no one says a darn thing to me on this blog, but come on, do you really think that you're going to get someone to click on your links from here?

I think I just tried to apologize to them. Bad writing! Bad!

In other news, mom and Al were here this weekend and a good time was had by all. I would say, however, a better time will be had by me as I've got a pyrex full of shrimp stir-fry, a pot of chicken curry, a quarter-bag of beef jerky, and a half-loaf of pan de leche. This, my friends, is bachelor food supplemented by home cooking -- and it is good.

As Promised, Lifestyles of the Loan Borrowing and Lazy

So here we are, face to face, a couple of readers and I. As you can see to your left, my bedroom is hard to take a picture of. Compared to how I'd been living for the past maybe twenty years or so, this bedroom layout is completely different: no computer whatsoever. Basically, I come in here to sleep and change my clothes, which makes it infinitely less stressful on me. Still, if I could get in here at a decent hour, I might sleep in the first place. Note too that I've not graduated too far past "collegiate" tastes in furniture here, in part because furniture is fucking expensive.

Now, dear reader, we're in the living room. Downstairs in my old apartment, Andrew and Emily lived in this room. I've opted to make it a place to waste my time. While it might look comfortable, those couches are a perfect combination of all-right looks and borderline comfort -- you can only sit on them so long because they're not very forgiving on the butt. But they're brown, and stuff matches in there. I actually built the room around those two damn couches.

Oh damn, what the heck is that? It's an actual live TV. Seen only faintly is the HTPC on the bottom, along with the receiver for the speakers. All that stuff was a luxury purchase, mainly to keep me off of my main comp and therefore less likely to stay up to the wee hours of the night reading about Icelandic cuisine on wikipedia. A fairly expensive way to overcome one's internet addiction, but I figure it's still cheaper than detox and recovery.

Ahh the kitchen. It's kind of gigantic and I love it. The island/bench was here when I got the apartment and I have every intention of stealing it when I leave. What you don't see to their fullest extent are all the kitchen things I bought off of my friend Julia. I think I can fairly say that every man should have three ladles, each of different sizes and weights.

The bathroom, or, where the existing furniture dictated the color of the stuff I ended up buying for the place, which was actually limited to a blue and white bathroom rug you don't see here; and the white mat near the shower. That mat, by the way, is very plush. It's like Tempur-Pedic for the showering set, and since I shower, I'm a member! I would hope you are too.

I realize now that the only place missing is the office.

Well, and there you go. That's a dissertation face.

Neuroses of Living Solo

I think I have carpal tunnel syndrome. When I'm in bed, my entire left arm feels like someone's crushing it. Welcome to repetitive stress injuries, Ossy Bossy! So here I am, trying to affect good typing form on my I netvertible in public no less. Still, the people watching from this Au Bon Pan window is exceptional.

I'm trying to get work done here not because I should really try to get my shit finished, but rather to save on electricity. In fact, I'm going to have to sleep relatively early or at least work by candlelight on this tiny thing of a computer. All this reminds me of eight years ago when I first came to Providence from Conn and my roommates hadn't yet moved into the house I was staying at. I was convinced I was going to starve, go bankrupt, or both if I didn't eat anything but cheap pasta and canned tuna. Something about being accountable for an entire apartment seems to engender my most miserly of tendencies.

I say this just as I've sunk cash into a home theater PC, along with a very meticulously selected flat screen TV, which since I've spent time and money into researching and building the damn things I have to be neurotic in making sure they're protected AND making sure they're not gulping my power. So I got one of these things and it better work as advertised. Each day it takes for the thing to arrive I die a little inside, mostly in the form of electricity. In addition, the motherboard I used can't take my TV tuner and the wireless keyboard I got for the HTPC has a defective trackpad, but the cost of returning both would exceed the $30 rebate I'm about to get. I could go on, but writing all this crap down makes me realize how absolutely dumb this is.

In better news, I got up at 9AM today because the FedEx dude came early and delivered my two area rugs that match my placemats. Now I have two giant placemats on the floor. The one in the kitchen actually distracts you long enough so you don't notice that the floor is sloping pretty severely towards the middle from both ends. Anyway, for the most part, the rugs "complete" the rooms, so I'll get pictures up of the kitchen and AV room up soon.

Now here's the part where I try to sound either smart or funny. Let's do funny. Au Bon Pain is playing the We Are The World sequel. This is now the center of Hell. I forgot that Justin Bieber opened this song. Couldn't they get Nicole Richie? Also, damn, this version does not hold up over time, and it's been what, 8 months? How's that for topical humor? It's a good thing I don't do this for a living or else I'd have to go back to graduate school or something.

Episode 8: A New Home

Last night I didn't sleep much. I was up constructing a home theater computer, an endeavor akin to writing a dissertation in that in both, fingers become raw. i was troubleshooting for most of the evening since this was the first PC (second overall) I've built with off-brand parts and leftovers from my main comp. Needless to say, I ran into some problems around 3-4AM when the thing wouldn't post, and then the most expensive part of the machine -- the bluetooth keyboard -- decided that it really preferred typing over being part-mouse.

In part I was awake because I was having materialist fits the night before after failing miserably to buy some furniture on craigslist. I was stood up so to speak by a lady who was selling a TV stand  and didn't show up, and then I couldn't get anyone to help me pick up a coffee table in Lincoln. I had to call her back to cancel the pickup, but accidentally called a woman in Warwick about a TV stand that I had decided I didn't want. Telling her husband the sad story of my supposedly cancelled trip to Lincoln, he offered to deliver it to me. Now I was stuck with furniture I wasn't all that enthused about. I had weird bit of adult-style frustration that I was bending over backwards to save $5 or $10 and had come away with nothing for the effort. Mad at myself for being so frustrated, I figured that I could do one on over the universe and build something instead of waiting for it to give me pressed wood at a killer discount.

With the problems the HTPC was giving me, I didn't get a whole lot of sleep before I had planned to jump on a garage sale around the corner and pick up a coffee table. I was reminded of the time we set up a garage sale for my grandparents in Carson City. Before we knew it, old ladies were waiting like stalkers in their cars parked across the street from my grandparents' house. I decided I was going to be an old lady; I was going to passive-aggressively stare at the people setting up and feel like some sort of hitman, but one that assassinates underpriced housewares.

I did come away with a small coffee table that looked pretty 70s, if placed in the right context (I guess we could say that about a lot of things), and my friend Francisco did thankfully come to help me move the TV stand up the stairs. A few minutes with a hacksaw later, and I had "modded" the TV stand to fit the HTPC and I had a coffee table that looks (to me at least) like I'm in the basement listening to early Chicago. I then very, very slowly moved a good majority of my things from my room to up here, including my bed, from which I am now blogging this very blog blogstastically.

I took my first shower up here tonight too. Remind me to CLR the shower head, lest I keep getting spritzed directly in the left eye every time I turn to grab the soap. National Grid, you done good.

Update on Gas 'Plosion Aversion Calamity Fist Breaker

It's about midnight and I decided to check on the work outside because I heard the beeping-beep-beeps of a truck backing up. "Maybe it's them leaving!" I thought. Well, it turns out that they look pretty much done out there and that they were using a bigger Nat'l Grid truck to compress some asphalt/tarmac where they had dug a hole on the other side of the street. So the truck would drive forward, put the truck in reverse, then drive forward again. Over and over. After each round, the workers would reshape the black rocks into a pile and the truck would go over it again. A Providence Police officer stood by with his hands in his pockets, moving to pick up a shovel leaning on a tree and place it on the wall over on the neighbor's property.