Category Archives: My Human Emotions

My pyrokinesis training at The Shop goes well

After 3 or 4 sessions, I’m starting to get into the groove with neurofeedback. We’ve been mostly working on one or two areas of focus so far, and the “reward” headspace is starting to become familiar, when I manage to get there. I can’t really describe that state of being very easily. It’s much more nebulous and indistinct than the headspace from, say, threshold-dose MDMA or a light D/S scene. At least for now, it is. The ultimate goal is to become so familiar with that state that I can very nearly wear it as a second skin, or better yet, that it’s indistinguishable from my own.

This is a results screenshot from the end of the last session I did. I don’t have the ‘before’ screenshot to compare, but there were a lot more mountains and a lot less gently rolling slopes. The bottom view is probably the clearest of how things progressed over the 8-9 minute session. I was in a foul, foul mood when I arrived (so much so that I very nearly cancelled), but despite my own anger and scepticism I found myself thinking much more clearly as the hour went on.

I’m still looking for appropriate music to make a DVD with, knowing that whatever music I choose will be forever associated with the training. Current thinking is Synaesthesia or Rapoon.

My life still sucks

Dear Diary,

So one of my favourite artists (that I met at Maschinenfest and gave my demo to) just released a new album. This album is on one of my favourite labels (one of the labels that was supposed to release my album, in fact), and is a fairly high-profile release.

This would usually be a good thing. Unfortunately, the first 45 seconds or so of one of the tracks on this album are exactly the same as the first 45 seconds of one of my songs (my best song, in fact).

I emailed the act and the label, and according to the people who wrote the album, we just happened to sample the same sounds from the same place and arrange them in the same order. An “unhappy coincidence”, as one of them put it.

I dug up the extremely-early-and-rough version of my song to see exactly where each of the sounds came from (this song in particular is a collage built almost entirely out of samples), and it would seem that it’s theoretically possible that they went through the same creative process as I did in selecting/assembling the sounds.

Honestly, at this point I don’t even care if they ripped it off on purpose, if it was cosmic synchronicity at work, or if they heard the track and then subconsciously rebuilt it. The most frustrating thing about this is that there’s no way I can release it now. Everyone knows I’m a fan of the artists involved, and everyone knows I listen to everything the label releases. If I put out the track on an album tomorrow, everyone who buys it will think that I’m ripping them off.

I’m so tired of music bullshit already, and I don’t even have a fucking album out.

mania, anxiety and paranoia

Today was my first real neurofeedback session, now that all of the personality tests and 18-point EEG readings are out of the way. We’ve identified a few brain patterns that aren’t what they should be, and we’re going to be focusing on the more emotional areas first. I think it was the ratio of gamma-to-theta waves, but I could be mistaken.

The process itself is deceptively simple: You’re hooked to an EEG, you sit at a computer, and you play with a program. In today’s session, the software we used had science-y looking realtime readouts around the sides of the screen, and in the centre a video was playing. It was a generic meditation/relaxation DVD, with babbling brooks and new age music and whatever else. On the readouts beside it, you could see each of the brainwaves that were being monitored, and how far away from the target range they are. If you’re not hitting the target, the video window gets smaller and smaller, and the sound starts cutting out. The closer you get to the target, the larger the video is, and the better you can hear everything. If you’re hitting the target perfectly, the video plays perfectly.

You have to figure out how to put your brain in the space it’s supposed to be, and then try to keep it there. If you overanalyze what you’re doing, you’ll lose it. If you trance out, you’ll lose it. There’s a very fine balance that you have to find, and it wasn’t easy at all.

It’s also a total mindfuck to participate in an exercise where you’re concentrating on thinking, and you witness an immediate reaction in the physical world; it feels a lot like you imagine telekinesis might.

The session was fairly short today, I was only able to get in 20 minutes or so before I started to become mentally exhausted, and my performance started to bomb. It’s a very odd kind of fatigue, and not one that I really have words for. I’ve been warned that when a lot of work is done on these specific brain pattens, I might become unusually emotional, or start mentally stepping through old and unpleasant memories. What fun that sounds like!

Anyway.

Wednesday is the next one, and I’m thinking about burning my own DVDs to use. Maybe Brian Eno or some Coil, with vidcaps from milkdrop or something similar.

This is a pretty spooky process, in truth. I’m not saying that so I can collect internet reassurances or show the world how spookproof Jairus is (or isn’t), but rather so I can understand it myself. I don’t scare easy; I might freak out, panic, worry, or lose my shit, but those are familiar emotions, and this one isn’t.

…

Let the night be too dark for me to see
into the future. Let what will be, be.

Trip Report

After much travel chaos, I’m home safe and sound after Web Directions North.

I’ve been to a number of conferences, but I don’t remember the last one that I enjoyed as much as this. There were a lot of great sessions, like Cameron Adams‘ full-day JavaScript workshop, and Brian Fling‘s Mobile Web presentation (did you know more people have access to the web via a mobile than people who have access via a desktop?), but the huge take-away for me was Andy Clarke‘s full-day workshop, “Transcending CSS”.

I wasn’t expecting much out of the CSS workshop, honestly, because there isn’t too much about CSS that I don’t already understand — but Andy’s workshop focused on thinking differently about using CSS, and composing meaningful markup. We spent a lot of time reviewing traditional web design workflow, and why/how to move to more progressive, browser-oriented techniques, and somewhere between the two topics I realized why I’ve had such design ennui when it comes to my own projects.

When I was younger and much more prolific (in my design prime, so to speak), I didn’t know nearly as much about web design, or html/css as I do now. I didn’t really know how difficult a design would be to markup or implement, and I never stopped to consider how I was going to manage the content itself once the code was done. I’d design the site in Photoshop, and I’d start hacking together code to try to get it to look right in a browser. Along the way, I’d run into a problem getting the design to display faithfully — maybe a limitation of HTML or CSS, maybe a gap in my own knowledge, maybe a weird IE rendering bug — and I’d have to find a way around the issue, which generally involved modifications to the design or rewriting most of the code.

This would happen a lot (just how often depended on how complex the site was, but a dozen times or so per site is a safe estimate), and each time this happened, the design and code evolved further away from the original concept. In other words, problem solving had become part of the creative process, and my design was being informed not just by my own ideas, but also by the limitations of browser rendering engines.

This doesn’t happen anymore for my personal sites. When I design a site in Photoshop, I’ve got a solid understanding of what is and is not possible. When I run into implementation problems, my understanding of XHTML/CSS is such that I can almost always solve them, and I end up with a fully validated design that looks exactly like the Photoshop. And that’s a great thing, if you’re a consultant and you have client sign-off on a mockup, but I’ve realized that this has robbed my sites of the things that keep me interested in them. My creative process for personal sites ends at Photoshop, now, and doesn’t carry any further than that.

I believe design is problem solving, not art. When I design a site and there’s no creative problem-solving process involved, I end up with something that I think is very pretty, but completely lifeless and boring, and I abandon it immediately.

The trick is now to translate this new knowledge into a new creative process.

…

Personal epiphanies aside, it was incredible to spend a week chatting, learning, (and drinking) with so many people whose work I’ve followed (or idolized) over the years, like Dave Shea, Matt Webb, or Jeffrey Zeldman. (It was like a Maschinenfest for web geeks, in that sense.)

Twelve or thirteen years ago (half a lifetime away), when I was a Very Small Jairus, and first trying to learn learn HTML, I didn’t understand how any of it was put together. The markup part was easy (I was a fairly competent C++ programmer, writing System 7 apps), but the design element of it was frustrating and confusing. How come the page didn’t look the same on Windows as it did on MacOS? Why doesn’t this tag do the same thing on two different browsers? I didn’t get it.

There were six or seven big names on the web at the time, and I emailed them all. I told them that I was trying to learn HTML, none of it made any sense to me, and (heh) could I please rip off their websites to build my own so that I could figure out how the fuck any of it worked.

The only person who emailed me back was Jeffrey Zeldman, and he said “Of course you can — go ahead and rip the code off, that’s what it’s there for”. And I did, and I ended up making my first website based off of the code and layout of his site. And honestly, if he had never emailed me back, I don’t know if I would have kept bashing my head against the keyboard until everything started to make sense; so it was very important to me that I had the chance this week to thank him in person for this, and I did.

…

I’ve been posting a lot of photos from this trip to my Flickr account, but the photo I posted earlier from the top of Blackcomb is the only Whistler photo I’m going to put online. The vastness and scale of the mountains are awe-inspiring, and it’s completely impossible to capture that in film. I took dozens of photos, but on a computer screen they’re just a bunch of snow covered rocks, and not the mountains that I spent two days on.

Is your favourite TV sport the High Jump?

Went in for my first session with the psychologist today, spending the whole time running through those behavioural psychology tests everyone’s done a hundred times. (Are you easily distracted from tasks? Do you have more trouble sleeping lately? Do you feel like someone is putting thoughts in your head?)

A lot of these were more interesting than I expected, and they ended up in a nice chart mapping out which parts of my brain are presumed to have more activity, based on some magic set of rules I didn’t see. The results seemed to make sense, which is encouraging.

With that said, it was troubling to answer some of the questions, because the honest answer (and the answer I’ve been living for two years or so) is so far removed from what I’ve answered every other time I’ve done these tests over the years, and equally removed from my own perception of who Jairus is. Jairus isn’t someone who prefers avoiding crowds, or gets upset easily. Jairus doesn’t stay up at night worrying about things he can’t control.

…or at least, Jairus didn’t, for most of his life. This just brings into focus how far away I am from who I used to be, and who I want to be.

peace through superior somatosensory cortices

I’m not happy. I haven’t been happy for quite some time. This should not come as any surprise to long-term readers of this space.

In my ongoing quest for emotional peace, I will be starting a type of therapy known as neurotherapy (or alternatively, neuro-biofeedback). The basic idea is simple: To allow for conscious control of brainwave activity, to maximize, minimize, or normalize alpha/theta/beta waves as is appropriate.

This is done by monitoring EEG patterns in realtime with a computer (and a clinical psychologist), and interacting with the computer through a game (or a puzzle, or a task) so that when the desired brainwave changes happen, you get closer to winning the game (or solving the puzzle). Through operant conditioning, the more I play, the more time I spend at these states, and the easier it is to maintain these states when I’m not playing.

In short, the goal is to hack my brain so that I’m able to think and feel the way I want to think and feel.

I’m going to be keeping a log of the sessions, cognitive changes I notice, and my emotional state in general. This will also include a not-insignificant amount of personal information, memories of teenaged depression, why Effexor is the devil, and so on.

I don’t want to dump this on people who’re expecting old cartoons, dorky humor, and pictures of my cat. So, if you’d like to be on the filter for this, let me know. All comments are screened.

Otherwise, we will soon return to our regularly scheduled programming.

4W/6E

While I was there, I lived for the quiet moments of shared space with other people, but now I mostly remember the sounds and the smells — like how the floor would go dark and quiet after lockup, and what the wooden spoons they used to give you with ice cream would taste like.

You couldn’t keep them, of course. Too many girls had driven splinters into their arms, and so the orderlies made sure they were all collected after we finished eating.

When they’d let us, we’d go to the games room to play pool and listen to music. We only had a few tapes, and we played them over and over until they were so worn and thin it sounded like we were underwater. Whenever I hear any of that music today — Fixed, Unplugged in New York — I’m always amazed at how crisp and full it sounds.

…

Hurry home, Spring.

Exmas

Skip this post if you don’t like reading about religion.

…

I’m not a big fan of the holiday season, as I might’ve maybe mentioned. Once or twice.

I’m not religious. I’ll see my mom on Christmas Eve, but I don’t have a tree at home, and I don’t often give gifts. I do observe the winter solstice, but it’s much more of an observation than it is a celebration, and my head isn’t in the game as much as it was when I was younger and wiser. I was, however, raised Roman Catholic, and as a child I was deeply religious. I attended Catholic school, weekly mass, and received the sacraments; Confirmation, the Eucharist, the Sacrament of Penance… I sang in the Church Choir, and I was an Altar Boy. (I hear they’re called Altar Servers now, but we didn’t let girls in the club back then.)

Anyway.

All of this to say that I have a fairly solid understanding of Catholicism, and although it seems I’m in the minority in this, my experiences with it were very positive.

To be clear, I’m not saying Catholicism itself is positive, or making any statement about religion proper, just my own experience with it.

I was lucky enough to have churches and schools full of priests and teachers who were mostly bright and caring. Most importantly, they placed a sharp focus on deriving moral direction from the bible itself, rather than any overarching Church dogma. It’s a cliche, but it almost always came down to the question, “what would Jesus do?”

…and the thing about JC (we go way back) is that he’s a really great person to draw lessons from, and if most Christians paid any attention to what he said, the world would be a much better place. None of the hot-topic religious issues in public debate today (abortion, ‘the gay’, etc) get more than a dozen lines in the bible. No one cares about them. Jesus certainly doesn’t care about them. There are thousands and thousands of verses and sermons on peacemaking, community and forgiveness, but the most clear message in all of the bible is on poverty. When a rich man asked Jesus what he needed to do to get into heaven, Jesus told him that rich people don’t go to heaven, so he needed to sell all his worldly shit and give the money to the homeless.

Anyway.

All of this to say that this is the only time of year in which the public celebration of a religious holiday actually makes me angry. You’ve got families spending thousands of dollars on themselves and their friends in the spirit of giving, hyperextended retail hours, credit limit raises and extra loans — millions of Canadians showing their holiday spirit by buying, buying, buying.

If you’re celebrating Christmas this year, try giving to the people you won’t see every day, who aren’t your family or coworkers or friends you get drunk with. There are a lot of very, very cold people downtown who could use a coffee, a hot meal, or some warm gloves and thermal socks.

It’s the Christian thing to do.

And if, like me, you’re not Christian, then you shouldn’t need a 2,000 year old dead guy to tell you it’s the right thing to do.

softer, lesser, slower, weaker

I took a sick day today. I’m feeling pretty icky, but mostly I’ve just got the winter blues, and I wasn’t up to a Monday morning.

I feel like shit whining about how I feel like shit, especially since I’m well aware how heavily the season is weighing on my mood. I know that it’s exaggerated, and that if it were bright and sunny I wouldn’t really feel this way, but that doesn’t change what it’s like inside my own skin.

…

I’m not going to be heading out on the Chemlab tour with Cyanotic. The details of why aren’t really important, but mostly it just didn’t make for good logistics.

I’d like to take some of my vacation time and travel somewhere, commitment-free. Nowhere fancy or far away, just somewhere where I won’t be DJing, playing, working, or doing anything out of obligation. A week in Toronto, Montreal or Vancouver, to drink coffee, explore the streets at night, and wrap myself in the anonymity that comes with being a stranger in a big city.

I do have friends and family in all of these places, but I’m not sure that my navel-gazing would make for good company. I’m also not sure where I stand with a lot of these people — not for any reason other than the erosion that silence and distance work on relationships — and I don’t want to impose my yearly existential crisis on anyone else.

…

I don’t talk much about why this time of year upsets me so much, or about the place that it puts me in.

A year or three ago, I wrote my excessively wordy LJ bio:

“I would tell you of my childhood, but I remember very little. I lived with my mother, and I was sixteen before I saw both of my parents in the same room together. I remember moving, always moving. I remember being kidnapped when I was eight, and a Christmas that the Hell’s Angels gave us a tree and gifts when we didn’t have money for food, much less toys […]

Mostly I remember a sense of profound sadness; A feeling that above all, life is about survival, and little else.”

That’s what Christmas reminds me of, and that’s how winter makes me feel. I was always profoundly aware every Christmas just how poor we were, and how hard my mother worked to bring my brother and I that single day of toys, smiles, and happiness. She’d do everything she could to get us whatever it was we’d been dreaming of all year (which was almost certainly video games), and more often than not she’d succeed — but it wasn’t what she gave us that was depressing, it was the struggle itself. It brought into sharp focus just how little life cares for fairness, how naive the idea of karma really was.

When I was a very, very young child, it was Kelvin, my grandfather, who would take me fishing, or to a new movie, or to the arcade. He wasn’t related to me by blood, but he was my grandfather, and I loved him as much as I loved my mother.

He died on Christmas day when I was eight. My mother didn’t tell me until Boxing Day, and I vividly remember how numbing the news was. I didn’t feel shocked, or sad, or much of anything at all. I didn’t cry when she told me, or at his funeral, and in all truth and honesty I don’t remember crying again until I was fourteen and I found a hidden folder of stories and comics on a friend’s computer, each one making fun of me in a different way: My hair, my nose, my teeth, my voice, my everything.

I do have good memories of Christmas — staying up all night and all day with Josh playing our new Nintendo 64, seeing the little furry ball of kitten that my mother surprised me with, sitting on the porch with Tracy Page and smoking cigarettes, watching the snow fall — but they’re few, far between, and hopelessly outnumbered.

Now I try to spend Christmas with friends, in a quiet, safe space; but Christmas is just one day in a long winter.

…

This is why I travel so much during winter, in spite of how unhappy the cold makes me. When I’m writing in an empty Toronto cafe with the wind pounding at the door, or walking down St. Catherine between giant snowflakes, that’s my insulation. My quiet, safe space. It’s not fair to expect my friends and family to shore me up emotionally every day until the sun comes back.

Restraint

I can’t sleep. My body, stubbornly refusing to accept that it must be at work by 7AM, is staging a rebellion.

That’s fine. It’ll pay for it tomorrow.

I’ve been looking over my old design directory, at all of the sites I’ve built and abandoned over the years, and they all feel like they were built by strangers much more dedicated and talented than I am.

Years ago, I asked my closest friends for advice: Given a choice between music, design, and writing, which should I focus on? In what medium did I do the best work? Universally, my friends replied: Writing first, design second, and music last.

I chose music, as it turns out, and I’ve been very happy with the results. In retrospect, I’m sure part of my motivation for choosing it was that everyone ranked it last. Looking back over these old sites, however, I’m not sure I made the right choice.

Did I really design all these things? One after the other after the other? How the hell did I do that?

And what the hell am I doing now?

quelle horreur

Ah, Montreal. You are like the sexy leather-clad mistress whom I take home for a night of unspeakable indulgences, only to wake and find you setting my couch on fire to rid it of evil spirits.

I spent some time there with my family this weekend, which is always an interesting and unnerving experience. Most of the family there are the immigrants: aunts, uncles, and their children, and are your typical Arab stereotypes. Pitbulls, Versace, Ferraris. However, my little brother has also recently moved to Montreal from LA in an attempt to go straight, and is not your typical Arab stereotype:

We couldn’t have been out for more than an hour or two when he got into a fight with three huge french-speaking Mexicans. Bottles broken over heads, knives pulled, teeth lost, and so on. To his credit, he didn’t start it, nor did he stab anyone this time.

Things calmed down a little after that, but really only a little. Aside from an hour spent watching a mindblowing surprise fireworks show downtown (who knew they could make explosions shaped like cubes?), the weekend was mostly dominated by chaos, confusion, and excess. One of my cousins called me this morning to let me know that my brother ended up in jail a few hours after I left. Aside from a kicked-in police car window, details are pretty sketchy, and no one knows exactly what happened, or where he went after he was released.

Family aside, I got to see Yann and Guilliame perform as Memmaker, which was excellent; we’ll be bringing them to town to play soon. I also got to spin an impromptu tag-team set with Yann at Saphir which was a lot of fun, and also resulted in a booking for a rave sometime next month. There are a lot of Montreal DJs who’re interested in playing Ottawa at some point, maybe we’ll see about having a Cultural Exchange night.

…

The house is coming along well, although the pace of the move is much slower than I’d like. I should be borrowing Charles’ father’s truck sometime soon to get the rest of the big pieces from the old house, and it should be all downhill after that.

It is, even in it’s unfinished and cluttered state, beautiful. I would buy it tomorrow if it were for sale. And if it were sold at about a third of it’s actual value so that I could afford it.

…

Instead of banknotes, today’s pictures are of the castle on Kaya street in Turkey where my father’s side of the family grew up. (It has since been taken over by the Turkish government, and turned into a museum and movie set.)



In the summer, the entire family would sleep outside on this roof.


This was my grandmother’s room and bedset. She left it when they moved, and they have maintained it for the last 40 years.


One of the guest rooms.

Sacred Gardens

It used to be that warm air and the sound of the city were why I was outside, but now they’re reminders, not reasons.

As soon as I sat on the park bench, my fingers reached for a pack of Players (light, regular) that I haven’t carried in eight years. I don’t even have a pocket there anymore. I could smell them, though. A crisp licorice smell that my brain refused to accept wasn’t real. (Just reach into your pocket, they’re right there.)

Things are so different now, and I don’t like the territory.

I don’t have the friends I used to have. I’m not the friend they used to have, either. We’ve all been slowly replaced by new people who just happen to talk the same way, and wear the same skin. The same with my brother. No matter how hard we’ve tried, we can’t find common ground where we need to anymore, and I can’t pretend I’m okay with the way he does things. I can’t put into words how much I miss our relationship. I wish we were still ten and playing nintendo.

I miss my private passions. There’s nothing I do for me anymore that brings me the same quiet joy. I don’t colour my hair differently every week. I don’t explore mainframes or telephone exchanges every night. I don’t go looking for faeries and magic in the woods every summer. DJing sometimes comes close, but not often. Not often enough, at least.

I don’t know where to go from here.

The empty streets at night used to be holy, and I’ve lost my faith.

Jairus Kaya

I’ve been spending some time with my family from my father’s side, recently. Mostly siblings and cousins, mostly around my age. It’s fairly stressful for everyone involved, I think. We were never taught how to trust each other.

…

I keep writing and erasing things. I don’t know how to divorce the people from the circumstances.

Everything you never wanted to know about living on the street

Two years ago, I made a post on an internet forum about homelessness, offering to answer questions on the subject, given that the overwhelming majority of people on the forum (like the overwhelming majority of people in the real world) were fairly misinformed on the subject.

Much to my surprise, this thread quickly became very active and popular. People asked questions and instead of arguing, they paid attention to the answers. Leslie and Charles joined to talk about their experiences and field questions, and there was a surprising amount of press involved in the whole thing. (Several times over the next year, I would find threads and forums elsewhere where libertarians and other such creatures attempted to discredit my opinions and experiences.)

Countless people posted or messaged to say that they had gone out of their way to give money to a person they usually walk by, bought a street kid mittens and a meal, or volunteered at a soup kitchen. Posts by activists and advocates on the internet are a dime a dozen, but this one actually made a difference to a few cold and hungry people around the world. I didn’t think much about it when I started the thread, but by the end of it I was floored at the impact it had on people.

Every now and then, I’ll get an email or message out of the blue from someone who read the thread. Today is one of those days.

While wandering around in the forums, I stumbled upon a thread asking about homeless people. In this thread, someone linked to another one in the archives. I’m sure you know what I’m about to say; it was yours.

Now, if it had just been a good read, I wouldn’t bother you. Good threads aren’t hard to find. But your thread didn’t entertain me, it changed me. I know it sounds cheesy, like something you’d hear on an infomercial about a revolutionary abs machine, but it’s true.

I’ve taken the Montreal Subway for 5 years now, and I’ve always looked at the homeless people with, at best, disgust, and at worst, hatred. Even worse, I don’t know why. I guess I was convinced that being homeless was a result of laziness… Deep inside, I knew it wasn’t, but I didn’t care enough to look for another reason, so I convinced myself it was.

Your thread from 2005 really opened my eyes, and will definitely change the way I look at homeless people, and more importantly, act with them. I thought you deserved to know that I feel like you enlightened me, like I’m sure you did for a lot of people here.

Thank you for teaching things you don’t learn in school.

755

Jairus’s Space Journal of the Future, Stardate 60586.4.

One of my students (the kind who is always looking to impress) did some self-assigned ‘homework’ and took it upon himself to thoroughly Google me.

…which, rather surprisingly, only left him with the impression that I’m very well-known in my field, and that I write insane music.

This will do.

I made my way down to another “best of” diner today, and had some delicious Alberta buffalo. The diner itself was all fucked up and weirdly modern-retro, if that makes any sense at all. I’ve never seen a greasy spoon so completely polished and money-soaked.

I then proceeded to get stranded outside on the side of the street for an hour, dialing and redialing the cab number I had, only to be met with the unforgiving tones of a busy signal. I still can’t feel my feet.

…in other news, I had lunch in this beautiful indoor garden with a pond full of Koi. Calgary’s got this downtown dealie they call “+15” (the first time I saw the signs I thought it was an ad for a RPG store), where all the buildings downtown provide 2nd floor pedestrian access and glass bridges from building to building. This building in particular had dedicated its entire 2nd floor to this garden. A tropical oasis, in the middle of corporate Calgary.

This is a weird little town, and everything in it reminds me of things I really don’t want to be reminded of. Is it time to come home yet?

white cowboys, red meat, and coloured help

Some content, perhaps.

The trip started well. I touched down around noon after a slightly-delayed (but mostly boring) flight, and proceeded directly to pay Telus far too much money for wireless access that consisted of a “System error, try again later” page. (This is what happens when you forget to setup your ICMP VPN tunnel before you leave home.)

The hotel is alright, but the internet costs more than Telus’s, and the food is seven kinds of terrible. I have vowed to never eat here again, regardless of how convenient it is.

So, in search of delicious diner food, I scanned the ‘best of’ list of the local alterna-weekly (which has a 2/3 page ad for a darkrave/powernoise party “dedicated entirely to the harshest beats” on the evening I’m leaving), and found a seemingly delicious diner. Upon arriving at said delicious diner, however, I discovered a hole in the wall with a lineup of trendy indie rockers half-way down the block.

I then cheesed it to a nearby brew pub, which had burgers of such deliciousness as to defy description.

The first day of class went mostly okay today, although there are some technical issues to be worked out with the PCs. And they forgot to order the courseware for one of the students. Also they forgot mine.

I have discovered that my anti-discrimination hat, while indeed having the reverse effect here in Albertaland, does not cause nearly as much scorn and malice as learning that I’m from Ottawa does. I get the impression that they believe me to be some sort of comically evil landlord tax-man, delivered straight from the belly of the beast so that I can garnish their wages more effectively. Or something. I couldn’t really understand what they were trying to communicate through all the talk about oil revenue and housing booms.

In the end, I built a bridge of trust through the time-tested tradition of trash-talking Toronto, and was accepted into their tribe. We then engaged in celebratory ritual consumption of sate chicken at a Vietnamese submarine shop(!) downtown.

Now, to numb my mind with hotel television.

what?

Today’s LiveJournal interest explained: Qualia.

Qualia is the experience of something. Look at this:

You are seeing red in front of you. You are having an experience of redness. What does that mean, exactly? Is this the same experience other people have when they look at it? Why can’t you describe the experience of redness? That is qualia. Qualia is a very slippery thing, but it exists. It is a product that exists entirely within the conscious mind, but it is a product with real properties.

The classic thought experiment is as follows:

Mary was born and raised in a black and white room. All her books are black and white, her clothes are black and white, her skin is black and white (because of magic light bulbs), and her only view of the outside world is through a black and white TV. However, Mary is a brilliant woman, and a scientist. Not just any scientist, mind you, but a scientist who studies colour. She knows everything there is to know about the physics of colour, she’s interviewed countless people over the phone about their subjective experiences with colour, she knows what neurons talk to other neurons when people are exposed to colour, she knows what colours are complimentary and what colours clash — she’s just never seen colour.

But when we bring a red apple into the room, Mary will say ‘holy fuck’. We’ve taught Mary something. We’ve taught her the experience of redness.

If Mary knew everything there was to know about the physical properties of colour, but she still learned something new when we gave her an apple, then what she learned cannot be described or explained through physical means. Which means that physicalism (the belief that all things which exist have physical properties) is clearly wrong, and a non-physical property (the qualia of redness) caused a physical reaction (Holy fuck!)

Consider: If we had painted the apple blue before we give it to her, is it possible she would have said “You tried to fool me, this is blue”?

Qualia fucks me up.

silent, still

A city frozen
under stars and amber lights
dreams of wind and earth

where stillness serves to lift the burden
of concrete spirits
and sleeping streets sink into brief respite

the sharp air bringing such a hush upon the world
even the birds refuse to break the peace

in this, all things agree

the snow is a blanket of silver dust on the world
the moon a bright cut across velvet sky.

Do you sleep soundly?

I’ve written a few times about my childhood, but I can never find the words to convey the feeling of fragility and conflict that was a part of every day, every activity, every material possession. I am my father’s son, and this relation alone is enough to ensure I always sit with my back to a wall. I don’t think anyone who hasn’t lived so close to violence can understand.

When I was young, I lived for a time with my father and his family in Montreal. There was an ongoing power struggle between my father, and the other organized crime figures in the area. Several of my father’s friends and family had suffered kidnappings, brutal attacks, and countless acts of property damage, in an attempt to persuade my father to back off. My father has never backed off.

I was placed in the care of my aunt and uncle, and their two daughters. I was given a nice room, a comfortable bed, and more than enough books to read. We had private security, an alarm system, and a police trained german shepard.

I had only been there a week or so when my uncle came in my room to pick a suit jacket from the closet, as he did every morning, and found the cuffs to every jacket had been cut off, neatly folded, and placed in the pocket of the jacket, which was then buttoned closed. There were probably about twenty jackets in the closet, which opened up right next to the nighttable of my bed.

I was flown to Halifax shortly after.

Manifestus

I used to think it was that I was getting older. I thought that, with the ‘gift’ of age and experience, came a certain hardening of the skin, a lessening of tolerance for seemingly juvenile actions, and so on.

Today, however, I learned something.

I was sitting in a car that would not start. Inside the house next to the car were two people who I had given a place to stay, free food, furniture, and much more. Both of these people had quite literally moved out under cover of night — from different houses, in different cities — to avoid paying me rent. One of them had snuck out leaving a phone bill of close to two thousand dollars in collect long-distance calls from prison, in addition to spraypainted walls, and many more gifts in kind.

In this car which would not start, outside a house of people who collectively owe me thousands upon thousands of dollars, to return to a home where I do not have heat or hot water; this is where I learned something.

I will never be able to surround myself with people who will do for me what I would do for them.

I used to believe differently, that the people I had chosen to spend my time with had the same views on friendship and community that I do. That they, too, believed in social responsibility, trust, respect.

They don’t.

Or rather, if they do believe in these things, these beliefs are not nearly important enough for them to be able to act in line with them. The two possibilities are functionally identical, and I’m not going to bother drawing a distinction between them.

…

After our heat was shut off here a few weeks ago, I had a very good conversation with my very good friend Charles. The conversation can be summed up very simply:

“How can I make significantly more money and accrue significantly less expenses than I am making and accruing now?”

During the course of this conversation, we realized that we had been having conversations on this topic, off and on, for about seven years; it seems plain to me that if you’re continuing to have financial issues of this caliber after seven years and several significant increases in workload and pay, chances are that the problem has to do with you.

With this in mind, I have taken a lot of time lately to think about my financial situation over the years, and why I keep ending up where I am. In this time, I’ve been increasingly distant to my friends and family — for this, I apologize, but it needed to be done — but after spending a lot of time examining things, I discovered something very alarming.

Without exception, every single time that I have had significant income and reduced financially to the point where I literally cannot afford a cup of coffee, I have been fucked over by someone. From the first time in 1998 to the last two years of nearly constant abuse and non-payment from the people we’ve been renting the upstairs to (The greater part of $10K).

I can count the number of people I have lived with on one hand who have always paid their share in full on time, or made alternative arrangements before money was due.

…

I wish this were an entry regarding rent and roommates. Then, the solution would be simple: get out of the landlord business. And I have. But the landlord business isn’t what this post is about, and it isn’t what the problems I’m having are about.

The landlord business is a not a problem, it is a symptom. The treatment I have received by the people I have been living with is symptomatic of the treatment I have received by the people in my life.

With very nearly no exceptions, every single person that I have spent a lot of my life with has betrayed my trust, or crossed a mutually-understood boundary of responsibility and/or respect. The only names I have been able to come up with are Leslie, Venk, Suzanne, Charles, and Tony Christofaro. Five people, two of which I have not spent significant time with in a while. If we’ve spent a lot of time together, and your name isn’t on the list, it’s not by omission.

These aren’t small things I’m overreacting to, either. These are things like hanging out with someone who has beaten the shit out of my girlfriend, or neglecting to mention to me that the person I live with is going to skip out on rent and leave me holding a lease.

…

I’m going somewhere with all of this.

Given that there is a strong pool of evidence to suggest that many of my financial woes would be cured by not trusting anyone with or allowing anyone access to my living space, and given that even my closest friends and family have done and continue to do things that I have a great deal of difficulty reconciling with a working relationship, the logical conclusion is that I should live (mostly) alone, and not involve myself in friendly relations. (There is a second option — lowering my standards — but I have tried this, ending only in resentment and misery.)

I am very seriously considering doing just this. Living (mostly) alone, and not spending time with anyone at all. Just writing, designing, working, playing games, spending time with the woman I’m going to marry. It sounds like a very nice life. Especially the having-hot-water-to-take-a-shower-with part.

I recognize that we’re all human, and we all have faults. I, having more than most, understand this. I know that a lot of people try their best to be a good friend/roommate/whatever, and that any failings they may have are being addressed in some personal discipline of self-improvement or whatever. I, too, try to be a better person each day than I was the last – but I do not have the emotional (or financial) fortitude to spend any more of my time being fucked by people who’re trying and failing to get their shit together.

…

I will not live for friends, family, or community that does not return – at the very least – their mutually agreed obligations. This is no hyperbole; when I take home $3500 in a month and spend $3200 on other people’s rent and bills, I am literally living for other people, and with that said, I don’t consider social and personal obligations any less important or binding than financial ones. The inverse is true, if anything.

So if we don’t talk again anytime soon, or I turn down that coffee date, you know why. It’s nothing personal, but it’s time for me to stop pretending that the people around me are something that they’re not.