Archive for category matt’s life

Date: May 27th, 2009
Cate: matt's life

matt at sasquatch ’09

Spoiler alert – there will be no psychedelic notebook pages this time around – I took it easy. This year was fun, in a more sedate, sunburned way. Let’s take a look at how my weekend went:

Day One

  • The Gaslight Anthem
  • Doves
  • Passion Pit - I remember not liking them as much as I expected to.
  • M. Ward - not really the type of music I listen to, but good music.
  • Shearwater – I only heard a little bit of their performance, but I really liked what I heard.
  • Tim & Eric - terrible. not funny at all. non-stop scatological and misogynistic jokes just don’t sit well with me, I guess, along with making fun of people that are mentally challenged.
  • The Decemberists - good, as always, their set consisted of playing straight through their new album (The Hazards Of Love) in its entirety.
  • Yeah Yeah Yeahs - loved these guys, even though it’s probably not something I would generally choose to listen to, the lead singer was spunky and everyone was talented. Also, there was a huge inflated eyeball floating above the players for their entire performance.
  • Crystal Castles - disappointing! They sound so good on the album, but live, the female singer’s voice was terrible, just a bunch of screams… the music was otherwise good (if a bit screechy, poorly mixed perhaps) but I expected a lot more from these people.

Day Two

  • The Red Wine Boys - I only caught the end, but it was a comedic duo whose performance involved a lot of wine. Also, they get points for lots of audience interaction.
  • Aziz Ansari - clever and funny, probably the best comedian I saw, apart from the Whitest Kids on the next day.
  • Zach Galifianakis - he’s funny, and he plays piano. what’s not to like?
  • TV On The Radio - I only saw the end of this show, and I liked what I heard.
  • Nine Inch Nails - Great stuff, although I started getting bored when the songs got less pounding. Trent Reznor continues to know exactly what he’s doing, and it’s always impressive, inspiring even, to watch a master at work. I’m not generally a huge NIN fan (apart from the Year Zero album, which I really liked) but I definitely enjoyed the show.
  • Natalie Portman’s Shaved Head - After I left NIN, I headed over to see Deadmau5, and caught the end of NPSH, which has an awesome name, and almost seemed like a jazzy jam band that had thrown in a couple of synthesizers. Good stuff.
  • Deadmau5 - certainly the best electronic show I saw this year. Not as good as Ghostland Observatory last year, but easily better then the Crystal Castles. I slipped through the crowd until I was right up front, jumping around and getting pushed in all directions, soaked in sweat, dancing until I was exhausted. It’s kind of a fun experience to be in, but I got tired, the music wasn’t doing it for me, so I left a bit early to go back to camp and eat.

Day Three

  • Santigold - I didn’t get to see these people, but I heard them on my way into the venue, and they sounded intriguing, so I’ll have to look them up later.
  • Whitest Kids U’Know - just as funny in person as they are in their online sketches.
  • Monotonix - This was the most incredible performance I saw this year, period. Basically, it involved three Israeli guys, skinny, mustachioed and hairy, beating the shit out of their instruments, and spending all their time in the audience, not on stage, while still managing to continue playing. Just to give you an idea about the extremes they went to, I arrived at the stage just as the lead singer climbed on top of the bass drum – and the bass drum was being held up by the audience, about a dozen feet away from the stage. And that was nothing. Throughout their set, they had the audience carry them and their instruments all over the grounds, continuing to play – at one point, the lead singer crowd-surfed his way all the way to the opposite end of the field, climbed up on the rigging for the sound booth (about 20 feet up in the air, maybe), and announced to the crowd that he was going to count to 4, and then jump down, and they were going to catch him – and he wasn’t lying. I was incredibly impressed with Monotonix – to be honest, the music wasn’t my favorite, but it didn’t matter.
  • Silversun Pickups - talented group, to be sure, but I realize that I don’t like them nearly as much as a lot of other people seem to… there wasn’t really anything unique or appealing to latch onto, they were just a good band.
  • Girl Talk - when I first heard Girl Talk, I didn’t know the circumstances behind the creation of his music – that it’s all one big long mashup mix. Now, knowing that, I enjoyed the hell out of the show – there was some great stuff, and the crowd loved it. Speaking of which, he dealt with the issue of watching a single DJ triggering samples on a mixer board being a little boring by populating the stage entirely with party people – people in costume, people shirtless, everyone dancing. At one point, they passed an enormous inflated while out to the crowd – it was about 2/3 the size of the stage itself, which was awesome.
  • Tobacco - Cool electronic stuff, although I don’t think I had taken enough drugs to appreciate it properly – other people, however, seemed to have taken exactly (or perhaps more) then enough. The music was pretty interesting, coupled with the visuals – an ongoing video remix of old horror video, apparently from inside an elaborate haunted house event.
  • Chromeo - I’m not usually a fan of DJ sets, since it’s kind of like listening to the radio: every once in a while you hear songs you like, but a lot of the time you end up just waiting for the current song to be over so you can get to another one that you like. Chromeo was a good DJ, but I wasn’t very into it.

So in conclusion, I would recommend checking out Girl Talk, Monotonix, Santigold, Shearwater, and The Decemberists.

It took me all day Tuesday to sort of get back up to speed with not camping and not listening to music constantly, but now I’m feeling pretty good. I picked up some aloe vera cream stuff which will probably not have any actual effect on my sunburns, but the psychological reassurance is worth it.

Date: April 4th, 2009
Cate: matt's life

disney classics worth watching

It’s kind of weird how much of my childhood movie-watching experience involved Disney – well, maybe not weird logisticly, but interesting to think about. Wikipedia chronicles the classic ‘cannon’ Disney films, and I thought I’d look through them and pick some favorites, in chronological order, along with the bits that I like the most.

  • Pinocchio – The part where they go to Pleasure Island is the best, where they get to do all the stuff that adults would normally try to discourage them from doing – drinking, smoking, gamling, and… wait for it… hanging around playing pool. Their punishment manifests in a somewhat scene of transformation from little boys into donkeys. That’s really the coolest part of the film.
  • Fantasia - The last act, Night on Bald Mountain, where the demon thing (whose name is ’Chernabog’) rises from the volcano and summons all the spirits and everything into a big spirtal around him – man that part was cool. The mushroom dance in the nutcracker part is cool too.
  • Dumbo - Sure, the crows are totally caricatures and arguably racist depictions, but whatever. That part is still my favortite, and the part where Dumbo actually flies during the performance and puts out fires with his trunk is good.
  • Peter Pan – Captain Hook is never not good, and the proximity of his crocodilian stalker never fails to inspire hilarity. The other best part is another scene that’s raised accusations of racism – the ‘What Made The Red Man Red?’ song sequence. Not only is it a great song (another one I’m considering remixing) but it follows the well-known oral tradition of the youth asking the elders questions about their history, and receiving answers in the form of stories that happened in the past, which explain the state of the present.
  • Sleeping Beauty - When the witch turns into the huge dragon at the end of the movie. Mom claims that part used to scare me, but I’m not convinced. Also, her raven minion is named Diablo.
  • One Hundred and One Dalmations - The standout scene is, of course, the ‘Cruela De Vil’ song – and the fact that the main villain’s name is basicly ‘Cruel Devil’ and her henchmen are the ‘Bad Ones’.
  • The Sword in the Stone - Probably one of my top 5 favorite Disney movies. I can’t even pick out any particular good parts – Merlin’s fight with Mim is pretty memorable, though. But the dialouge especially is super standout good.
  • The Jungle Book - This is right when Disney died, unfortunately. It’s got its own issues with racist depictions – if you squint and turn your head a little, you’ll see that the monkeys are black jass enthusiasts who dance to jungle rythems and want to become human. There’s some good stuff in there, though – ‘The Bare Necessities’, the afore-mentioned ‘I wanna be like you’, and ‘That’s what friends are for’. Kaa is like a sneak-preview of Hiss, the snake second-in-command from Robin Hood.
  • Robin Hood - another one of my top favorites. Okay, okay, it’s totally a furry movie, I know – but that’s more of a credit then a opportunity for modern criticism, that they managed to take a story about humans and anthroporphize animals to assist the process of defining the archetypcal characteristics – the clever one is a fox, the royalty are lions, the snake is sneaky, the hen is motherly, et cetera.
  • The Great Mouse Detective - It’s like Sherlock Holmes, except set from the perspective of members of Rodentia. The villain Ratigan’s werewolf-like transformation from mob boss faux-mouse to mostrous sewer rat while sillhoueted against the night sky, perched atop the hands of Big Ben, high above London – that’s epic-scale animation. Of course there are plenty of puns for fans of Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories as well. I kind of want to mark this as a turning point in Disney films – this seems like the start of a new age for the studio, although I don’t really know what to attribute that to.
We start to run out of really good stuff somewhere around there, although Aladdin, Lion King, and Mulan (maybe even the emporer’s new groove) are all pretty good. I have this theory that with the exception of Mulan, Disney movies stopped being good after The Hunchback of Notre Dame.
Anyway, after looking back through this, I’m pretty sure Sword in the Stone, Robin Hood, and Peter Pan are in a three-way tie for my all-time favorites, followed closely by The Great Mouse Detective and Jungle Book. Hmmm, this has been a fun trip down memory lane.
Date: March 22nd, 2009
Cate: matt's life, society + culture, things to think about

Masculinity FAIL

Okay, so the whole point of the Mortality Blog is that I have less then 80 years to live, and I think there’s a few things that I’ve run up against in my life that might be good for other people to see my thoughts on.

That said – how do I put this? I experienced an intriguing conflict of interests today. It’s a pretty stellar example of something that I’ve really only had the privilege of being exposed to a few times – a girl more or less explicitly asking me to sleep with her. In this case, it was someone attractive, someone smart and funny and cute and all that, but a girl nonetheless – and despite being comfortable in my relative lack of interest in that sort of thing, I realized that I felt bad, in a ‘I’m letting someone down’ sort of ‘not meeting expectations’ sort of way. Which is total bullshit – how many times have I protested that responsibility can only be accepted, not assigned, and that I feel that I’m under no circumstances obligated to follow cultural conventions regarding romance?

And yet – not saying, “Yes!” felt bad. In my head, I know that it wouldn’t have gone well – it would’ve just been disappointing to both of us. And yet there’s this sort of distinctly masculine cultural responsibility that I found myself aware of, where a guy is supposed to sleep with a girl especially if she really wants it. And I was failing at that duty.

It’s times like this that make some of my gay friend’s humorous accusations that I’m a straight man with a penis fetish seem just a little bit accurate – there are plenty of girls with whom I would gladly flirt if only there wasn’t this more or less inescapable reality of a vagina laying in wait. It seemed like a lot to explain to this particular girl, considering my general reluctance to bring this sort of thing up due to my cultural obligation aversion, but it was striking – how many times do I actually have reason to momentarily regret my sexual tastes? Not very often.

Anyway, it seemed interesting, and like I said, if anyone feels like taking a peek into my head, this is the sort of stuff that tumbles around like a wet load of clothes in a dryer.

Date: January 28th, 2009
Cate: dreams
1 msg

police, unlicensed guns and firebombs in my dreams

I don’t remember all of it, but here’s what I do remember: I was on my way up a windind road to a church. There was a residential community situated amongst the hilly area surrounding a higher bluff, and that’s where the church was – very dramatic. Everything was sort of quasi-wild-west, broken down, chipping and fading paint, boards and bricks sort of looking. I don’t know why I was going to the church – and in fact, once I got there, it was time for me to go home. It was getting dark, and it was cold, so I walked hurridly down the sloping lanes, twisting my way through the hills towards the highway below.

Then, in front of me, I noticed a man, standing, staring back behind me. I realized that his face was lit by an orange glow, and as I came closer to him, I glanced back over my shoulder, and saw a gout of flame. The church was on fire! It was on fire, and it was throwing this orange light everywhere. I commented to the stranger that it was weird that it was burning so brightly, and he pointed to the moon – which was huge, and a deep reddish orange as well.

I continued down to the freeway, realizing that it was too late to get home the way I’d planned (whatever that was) and I’d have to choose between walking one direction along the highway back to the city, or across the highway and up to a camping station where I could rent a cabin for the night. However, as I reached the bottom I noticed that the man from before was following me – a little freaked out, I kept me hand on the knife in my pocket as I continued along the highway. Eventually, as I came around a bend I saw red and blue lights flashing – an abulance, and some police cars. Someone had been hurt. I run to see what’s happened, and so does the silent stranger – it’s a heavyset man, soaked in blood, lying on the ground. He looks familiar, but I can’t think where I know him from. The man I met before is inconsolable, however – he obviously knew the victim. He crouches and cradles the man’s head in his hands – and then looks up at me.

Nightmareishly (although in my dream I wasn’t at all scared) his face starts to bleed, red fluid squirting from his eyes, and nose, and mouth, running out of his ears, from underneath his fingernails, and everywhere else, I assume. He dies horribly in front of me, lying in a spreading puddle of blood, draped across the body of the other man.

I don’t know how I get home (to my parents’ house, not the HoytHouse) – but I’m pretty shaken up my the whole experience.

The next day, my family is standing outside their house, watching my brother James ride up and down the street on his little razor scooter – and somehow we’re all holding pistols. Dad has a shoulder holster, and he asks me if I’ve found a good holster for mine yet. I show him my leather hip holster, and he approves. Just then, a female police officer appears, and asks James to see his firearm permit. He doesn’t have one, of course. Next she asks to see mine – I obligingly reach into my back pocket for my wallet, and start flipping through the cards. After I’ve gone through one stack of cards without coming up with it, she gets impatient, grabs my arms, and starts pulling me over towards her car, parked across the street. I protest, trying to pull away, which of course counts as resistance, and she slaps a pair of handcuffs around my wrists. She throws me into the car (into the driver’s seat, for some reason) as I try to explain that if she would just look in my wallet, which is now lying on the sidewalk, she would find the card.

She walks back across the street, but rather then looking at my wallet, she takes my whole family inside, then walks right back to me. She tells me to start the car, but I can’t drive it – the front passanger-side wheel is completely busted. The tread is torn off, the little pole that sticks into the middle of the wheel to turn it isn’t even inserted correctly. The hub cap is lying in front of the car. She’s pissed, and goes back inside my house – I manage to open the car door, and circle around to look at the tire. I try to put the peices back together, when suddenly my mom is there – “Why are you helping her?” she asks. I try to explain that I’m attempting to expediate my release, when the police woman comes back outside – but before she reaches the car, a couple of young black guys skate up on their roller blades.

“Is this po-lice bitch giving you trouble, dog?” asks one, circling around. “This is how you deal with the po-lice.”

Abruptly, he pulls out a huge handgun, with some sort of attachment on the bottom of the grip resembling the battery on a cordless power drill, and plugs the officer with several rounds.

“Yeah, bitch, that’s what you get! You’re free now, dog!” he yells to me, skating past her body and collecting the handcuff keyes, then throwing them, along with the weird gun, into my lap. It goes off and fire a bullet into the dashboard of the police car.

So now I’m sitting in a beat-up police car with my mom, with a murder weapon in my lap and my own pistol still holstered at my waist, and a dead police office lying in the street. An ambulance pulls up (just like in Grand Theft Auto, they always seem to know when someone is dead) and the attendant walks cautiously up to the window of the car – I hold both my hands high in the air, and tell him to take the gun off of my lap, and out of my hip holster. He looks scared of me.

 

So that’s how that dream went. Big and long. Totally referencial too – I was recently chased by a slightly unreasonable cop, I’ve fired a gun before, used a power-drill with a battery attachment like that, I’ve dreamt about the landscape around the crumbling town in the hills and the freeway below before (which would’ve eventually linked into my underground open-car mass transit startion and the secret underground enterance / LARPing dungeon that leads into OMSI) – and I have a knife in my pocket. It was like an adventure. Some of my dreams are almost fairly straight forward ‘what if’ senarios, where I sort of put myself in a situation then work out how I’d respond to it. Is that escapist, or something else? When we get truly immersive virtual reality, I hope there’s a ‘lucid dream simulator’ feature.

Date: January 16th, 2009
Cate: matt's life, society + culture, things to think about

when did this storm begin?

Blog title is a song reference, see Shiny Toy Guns’ latest album ‘Year of Poisen’, track 1. This is probably one of the first blog posts I’ve written that I’ve (briefly) considered keeping to myself – it’s really just me talking about me, but I figure that you, my friends, are probably nearly as interested in me as I am, and that complete strangers certainly don’t have anything to lose. It’s kind of rambling, as usual.

So – after reading an incredibly good book (Spanking Shakespeare by Jake Wizner) I’m thinking about typical highschool experiences, and how I missed out on some major classics: drinking, drugs, parties, and dating. Or rather, I’m wondering, did I miss out?

Obviously, since highschool, I feel like I’ve more then caught up – and while I rarely regret any past actions, I do wonder a bit about how I might be different if I’d been exposed to some of that stuff before college – or, honestly, before working at CMD, ha ha. I mean, if I’d had a date to the prom, smoked some weed in the parking lot before we went in, spiked the punch or whatever, laughed at whoever was crowed prom king, then drove up to Mt Tabor to fuck around and drink tequila, where would that leave me today? Socially, things never really lined up – I was too nervous about the repercussions of being gay in highschool to ever really persue any romantic interest, and all my friends were straight, anyway. Well, not that a lot has changed since then – my sexual preference is pretty low-key, and my sparse encounters with the ‘gay scene’ have been disapointing. Most of my friends are pretty straight, and I don’t even remember who ‘knows’, ha ha, which might be because I just don’t care, or perhaps because it almost always sounds forced to me – like I’m trying to come out of the closet, when I don’t think that should even be necessary.

But what if I’d had all that stereotypical stuff – maybe not even a boyfriend, just a somewhat gay friend, a fuck buddy, perhaps, who I went to dances with and got super drunk with? It feels like it would’ve been totally out of character – but honestly I’d always wanted to get a taste of that sort of lifestyle, but wasn’t ever really assertive enough to seek it out. Now I wonder if my parent’s hypothetical “you’re not old enough to be doing that” response might’ve been right? I’m egotistical to think that i have a fairly supreme outlook on life and people and things in general – would I have developed it if I’d partied my way through senior year and into college? I don’t know, it’s like there’s a weird parallel universe version of me, who’s probably pretty simliar, but not quite the same as the me that’s writing this. I don’t believe in the theory about alternate universes constantly fractalling out every time a choice is made, but it’s an appealing concept. I’m attracted to that idea of there being more of me, ha ha.

The reason that this has relevance and isn’t just fanciful speculation is that it has bearing on how I make decissions today, and in the future. Should I be more adventurous? (another music reference, whee!) I might just feel this way because of the group of people I hang out with, but getting drunk, high, sleeping with guys, and living in a house with some friends and owning all this stuff just seems like a normal thing to do – it’s not really an accomplishment. All of these things were sort of milestones, in my mind, and yet they’re pedestrian to people a few years older then me. They would’ve been pedestrian to people a few years younger, even. So is that something that I’m concerned about? Reaching sort of cultural milestones, being recgonized for ‘being ahead’ by my peers?

I think it’s one of those rare occasions where peer pressure, societal pressure, cultural expectations, and maybe even basic animal instinct slip through my otherwise expertly maintained self-confidence – not even to the point where it degrades the trust I have for myself, but at least to the point where I occasionally question it. Why don’t I have a boyfriend? Why didn’t I try harder to stay at CMD? When I think about stuff like that, I can’t help thinking back to being younger, to a few of my brief often nerve-wracking encounters with girls, and my petty little spats with teachers – I’ve always been mulish about submitting to authority, especially if doing so would make me uncomfortable, or if I perceive that I’m being coerced into a decision. I’ve always second-guessed myself like crazy when it comes to starting and maintaining relationships – my ideals, my hunches, and vauge notions of cultural expectations all collide and leave me fumbling for the right thing to say, or the right move to make. And yet, despite all that, it doesn’t really bother me. I mean, thinking about it at this moment, it certainly seems like a big systemic problem in my life, but an hour from now it’ll be completely gone from my mind – I won’t lose any sleep over it.

Actually, the swing between not caring and caring, frank examination and frank indeference, is probably worth thinking about as well. Am I not interested in striking up a romantic relationship because I already lead a fulfilling life, or have I convinced myself that my life is fulfilling because I never had what I would consider a real ‘going out on dates’ relationship, and I’m 22? That sounds like the sort of thing that cultural expectations would interject into my thought process, and there is the overwhelming evidence that the subject only rarely surfaces in my near-nightly introspective pondering (again, is it because I have trouble sleeping, or a cause of my trouble sleeping?) and if I hardly ever devote much thought to it, can it really be that important to me? I think more about dying then I do about dating, and I try to think about dying as little as possible due to my fear of mortality (which this mortality blog refers to.)

 

… after writing all this, I kind of wonder what my motivation is. Do I have a somewhat compulsive desire to inform my fellow members of humanity that I’m gay, haven’t had a real date in forever, didn’t drink or smoke at all until I started working at CMD, and et cetera? Are these really all important factors that contribute to Matt Lohkamp? They must be – I mean, they seem kind of tame, but I’ve pretty explicitly identified them as important to me, what with all this thought I’m putting into them. My guess would be that it’s cathartic more then anything else – that was such a freaking good book I just read, and the main character sort of got his whole screwed up life together at the end, and now I kind of wonder if I’m in the process of doing that too. Well, my life isn’t exactly screwed up, though. Actually, it’s probably a sort of preliminary life story telling – I would’ve discussed any of this with anyone, if that conversation had happened, but if it does now, it’ll be easier because I’ve essentially already talked it out pretty thoroughly. I actually do that quite a bit – carry on long hypothetical conversations with myself, or play out hypothetical events, all in my head, and I’m honestly not sure if doing that ahead of time helps me any when the situations or conversation actually occurs – it’s more likely that it just calms me down if I’m nervous about something.

To end, I’m going to tell a story about one of my first almost-girlfriends, one of the crazy ones. We walked down the dark path to the beach, where the ocean crashed invisibly against the sand, and we huddled together next to a driftwood log. In between french kissing, she told me that she saw ghosts, and spirits, and angels, and devils. I felt incredibly akward, because I didn’t believe in any of that stuff (despite the fact that we were both currently attending a christian church camp.) She went on about how demons had come after her while she was talking to her counselor, and they had held hands and prayed, and a white sheet had fallen around them that protected them from their supernatural assailents. I wasn’t really sure if I wanted to kiss more, or maybe try having sex (I might’ve been a virgin at that point, I don’t remember), or if I wanted to seriously debate the existence of angels. I wasn’t brave enough to make any sort of sexual moves, or to do the conversation thing (she was a cool person to hang out with, appart from the semi-girlfriend thing, and this new supernatural revelation) so I opted for more kissing. A year or two later I told her I was gay, and she told me that she was bi.

Good story. The character in that book I just finished was supposed to write his memoirs as a senior highschool assignment – and I for sure would like to give that a try. I wonder – would I change the names to protect the innocent?

Date: December 27th, 2008
Cate: dreams, matt's life

why do people in my dreams remember more then me?

So I woke up from a dream, early this morning, and after a bit of thought (and not being able to fall back asleep), here’s what I realized: in the dream, one of the people told me about something that I had forgotten – and after they told me, I remembered it. This is weird to start out with, since the person in the dream was obviously in my own head to begin with – and if they remembered it, why didn’t I? But it was even weirder because this person is a real person that I know, and the even they were referring to involved other people I know, but the actual even itself happened in a different dream that I had a month or so ago! So not only did this person in my head remember more then me, but they remembered my own dreams better then me. What’s up with that?

The only way I could imagine that working is if some portion of my mind was filtering everything else going on and sort of ‘managing’ what showed up in my dream – so that inconsistencies didn’t arrise. In this case, I ‘remembed’ the event, but my dream self hadn’t yet, so it had to be related by the dream version of this other person, and then the ‘manager’ part of my brain allowed my ‘dream self’ to remember it.

Anyway, it was striking and weird and worth relating. And now it’s like 8, and my eyes hurt, and I can’t fall back asleep. I’ve decided to listen to some old ‘classical’ music – Beethoven, Mozart, and Vivaldi to start with.

Date: November 28th, 2008
Cate: matt's life

what have I got to be thankful for?

  • I’m glad I have a nice house to live in, and cool housemates to share it with.
  • It’s cool to have so many good friends.
  • I like my school, and most of the people who attend/teach there.
  • I’ve got a cool family, full of people that I actually look forward to seeing.
  • I’ve got a good career that I enjoy and tends to pay the bills, albeit in a somewhat inconsistent manner at the moment.
  • We recently had one of the coolest elections ever – sex and race made great strides, race moreso then sex, but now that the precedent has been set, I have no doubt that we’ll continue to see non-white people and female people be represented in higher positions of politics and business.
  • Even if my car is fairly shitty, I still really like it.

I wish I had someone to be thankful to – but since God and I aren’t speaking to each other (He started it) I guess I’m just glad in general for all this stuff. Happy Thanksgiving!

Date: November 25th, 2008
Cate: matt's life, society + culture, things to think about
1 msg

why so boring?

Okay, I have an admission to make. You know how whenever anyone asks me what classes I’m taking this term, my stock reply is “boring classes”? That’s a total lie. My ‘Argumentation and Research’ class is fantastic, almost the perfect class – and it manages to maintain that level of approval in the face of it requiring me to write essays that include MLA citations, topic sentances, and thesis statements. As you know, I’m not a big fan of all that – and yet, it barely detracts from the class overall.

We have had some amazingly cool discussions, especially in the past couple of weeks – we talked about eating choices (omnivores v. everyone else), the implications and repercussions of our ‘war on terror’, and now this week about gender and race in politics. Huge discussions! Really good insight. I can’t remember anything in partcular, but I can’t remember much in particular usually, so that’s not really significant – it’s like putting a bunch of good tasting things together in a pot and cooking them until they turn in to something even tastier: stuff is stewing in my head as a result of the past few class discussions.

The only real distractions from the experience have come from one classmate in particular, who is one of those sort of akward people who is sort of constantly disruptive, offensive, and ignorant, but you get the feeling that he has no idea he’s doing it. Lacking in social graces, I guess you could say – and a certain amount of social grace is integral to being respected as a peer, at least as far as I’m concerned. At first I was getting a little annoyed that people were just putting up with him, and not really correcting him when he would shout stuff out in the middle of an otherwise serious discussion, but now, as of week #8, classmates as well as the instructor herself are starting to call him on it. I think the fact that he’s so vocal and tries so hard to participate indicates that he wants to be included as an equal, but before that happens he’s got to work out how to behave, and in that sort of situations he might resent the constant admonishment, but I can’t imagine that he won’t benefit from it.

It’s interesting – I guess I don’t really get enough chance to make intellectually-stimulating conversations in my typical social interaction, which is weird, considering all the smart people I hand out with. It feels like I’ve been starved for it. Maybe we don’t feel the need to be as confrontational or argumentetive around people who are friends, because we’re afraid that we might lose some of that friendship – whereas around strangers, there’s less to hold you back.  I’ve also noticed, on a somewhat personal though probably intriguing note, sexuality notwithstanding, I actually start feeling more attracted to girls if they’re smart and arguing with me – what does that mean, I wonder? Something to think about, for sure.

Date: September 30th, 2008
Cate: dreams, matt's life, things to think about

declarations and faces

Last night I was adrift in a flood of vivid dreams. I didn’t know that they were dreams, but I had complete control over myself – they were a lot like real life. In one, I was sitting at a computer in the public library, along with some friends from CMD – in the ‘conference room’ adjacent, there was a speaker giving a lecture.

We heard him say, “Sometimes little jack and jill have to be told that there just isn’t any money for college, and they’re just going to have to deal with it!”

Thorin, my boss when I was at the agency, objected – “So basicly you’re saying that my upwardly-mobile daughter has no opportunity for vertical growth?”

After their argument somehow got carried out of the conference room and into the main section of the library, everyone was paying attention. After several rounds of accusations and defense, the man said indignantly, “I suppose you want everything to be however you want it, don’t you?”

Before Thorin could answer I jumped up and declared, “We want a life full of comfortabilitity [sic], or none at all!”

Not quite sure what to make of the statement, everyone looked on bemusedly.

Later that day, we went to a party at a huge house – somehow, I found my way back into an unused room, which turned out to be where you had to fight the boss (not Thorin, this was a boss in the video game sense). I don’t remember how I beat him, but I managed it, and then somehow won the right to use that room as my bed room. I moved all my stuff in, set up my bed, then lay down to sleep – but I couldn’t fall asleep. I knew that if I rolled over and looked at the outlet next to my bed, I would see something scary.

Unable to take the suspense, I looked – and there was the boss’ face, instead of the outlet, with cords stuffed in his mouth. As I stared, its eyes suddenly flipped open and stared back at me. Suddenly I was caught by a sort of air-current, like there was a strong win blowing me closer and closer to the face, which was shifting to resemble my own! My vision blurred, there was a roar in my ears, and just before I got too close, I woke up (in my dream), thrashing around in a tangle of sheets. It had only been a dream… within a dream.

So – faces of people I defeated which suck me in, and ‘an uncomfortable life is not worth living’. Weird. The experience with the face felt similar to when I tried Salvia, especially the weird air current / invisible force pushing against me, which was nearly identical. It also felt a little like that Call of Cthulu computer game, the way my vision distorted and sort of pulsated as my attention was fixated on the face.

The computers in the library are probably a childhood throw back of some kind, as I definitly spent time on the library computers when I was a kid, waiting for mom to get off work, or there with my classmates on a school trip. Thorin has a daughter – I guess he would be defensive of her given the opportunity, but I can’t think of anything in particular this relates to. My mispoken sentiment (‘comfortabilitity’ is not a word) isn’t even a true one – I would rather live any life then no life at all, rather be uncomfortable for the rest of my life then lose it. So not sure what that’s about.

Dreams are so much fun.

Date: September 7th, 2008
Cate: dreams, matt's life

don’t play with nuclear reactors.

Last night I dreamt that I was living in a weird little village – mostly basic shacks, quasi-colonial-style houses, lots of dirt and gravel roads, but there were a lot of industrial infrastructure elements too – big pipe junctions, areas where the air was thick with power cables, a field of solar panels outside the village, et cetera.

I was friends with three other kids there, and one day while we were exploring the various buildings of the village, we ran across some sort of huge machine, with knobs and levels and dials and blinking lights, which we decided to play with. We changed the settings to see what would happen – and it started to heat up, setting off alarms, threatening to explode. We quickly changed everything back, and it was okay again.

Then, for some reason, we made it into a game – over the next few days, we would return, and see how close we could let the thing get to overloading without it actually happening. We had no idea what would actually happen if we messed up. We let it get closer and closer, but never too close.

Until the night that I snuck in by myself. I turned everything up to full, then stood watching all the readouts go up, flash red, and the alarms go off. I watched the impending overload entranced – until I snapped out of it as I suddenly realized that it had gone too far, and was past the point of no return!

I ran, taking dark hallways down under the ground, closing big heavy steel-and-concrete doors behind me as I went, trying to find a place to hide, not only from the blast, but from what I’d done. Finally, I hit a dead end – it was a damp room, with loose plastic covering the floor and walls, which were dirt. The room was rocked by what seemed like an earthquake, and I heard a roar as the machine exploded – a tiny puff of smoke woofed out from the crack between the floor and the door.

Everything was quiet. After several minutes, I started retracing my steps, opening door after door, avoiding hanging wires and pipes venting steam, until I reached a door that was melted shut. I found a ladder to crawl up, leading to an access hatch in the solar power field. As I stepped outside, I realized I had come out too soon – towering above me was a growing mushroom cloud, and a fog bank of smoke was climbing the hill towards me. I knew it was too late for me too – I already had radiation poisening, I felt my skin start to itch…

mushroom cloud over city

What is this one – fear of natural disasters? Repressed guilt? I don’t think I feel guilty about anything right now… hmm. Well, other then the things I always feel guilty about, and I think I’ve more or less dismissed them over the years – oh well.

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