“I don’t care for Paris.”
January 15, 2010
“You can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another. There’s nothing to that.”
Café Aroma in Yangon, Myanmar
Almost a year ago, my life took a five-week detour to Southeast Asia. The blog basically took a hiatus for five weeks and restarted with my only mention of the trip being a post about a dream I later had about Fiji. I had posted plenty on the band’s travel blog, and I returned with little else to say about the experience. As indicated many times, I do not romanticize travel and I look forward to the day when I’m too much of a curmudgeon to step on a plane. While I’m neither a tourist nor an adventurer, I did have a wonderful trip and brought back two truly personally fulfilling moments. The first I chronicled here, and the second happened while perusing the shops near my hotel in Yangon, Myanmar.
Untitled impressionist painting. Author unknown.
After hitting up the bookstores and a few clothing shops, I came across a small shop selling original art works. I greeted whom I thought to be owner, a young woman, and browsed for a few minutes. As I thumbed through some miniature pieces, the young woman approached, pointed at the collection and quietly said “impressionist.” When I asked if they were her works, she said no and said she studied with a local artist, and that the paintings were his work. She told me she had no paintings for sale, but her preferred style was realism. We chatted for a few moments about art styles and I drew upon my limited knowledge of art history to make conversation. She seemed happy to share what she knew, and I later wondered how often she had the opportunity to discuss art with someone besides her teacher. I browsed for a bit longer before eventually coming across one striking piece whose color scheme made it stand out from the others. I bought the piece for the marked price—five dollars—and would later regret both not buying more and not paying more.
I met a lot of people on my trip, and I regret that I only really connected with a handful. I set foot in cities I never would have ever thought to visit, yet it didn’t change that it was always my foot. That fact did not necessarily take away from the trip as much as it affirmed that I was looking for the same things abroad that I looked for on a daily basis—meaningful connections, coffee shops, and spacious bathrooms.
“If you went there the way you feel now it would be exactly the same.”
-Jake Barnes
“When people think you’re dying, they really, really listen to you, instead of just…”
December 14, 2009
Have I seen this place before?
I chilled in the cleverly named Ugly Mug before a lax Wednesday night gig at Burdigala Wines. In spite of their following the PDX coffee shop paradigm to a tee (chalkboard menu, Stumptown coffee, secondhand furniture, local artwork, microbrew, kooky color scheme, free Wi-Fi, vegan menu, *yaaaaaaawwwwn*), I had a pleasant stay. I was there for nearly two hours and didn’t see one Mac (well, except mine). They are nice enough to provide power strips for laptop users, which, in my experience, is a sign of cafempathy. They did get into the spirit of the season with a community diorama auction, with proceeds going to a local charity. In this season, and particularly in this day and age, it’s nice to little snatches of humanity as we gradually lose touch with physical community. Of course, it’s also difficult to build a diorama as a Facebook group.
Dioramas: because anything that ends in "o rama" must be awesome.
As I sit back and proofread my latest stroll through blogsville, I realize two things. First, I need to stop making up words and use a thesaurus. Secondly, it doesn’t take a college level of critical analysis to realize that my “reviews” are short on criticism and long on complain-ism. This would trouble me more if it weren’t for the fact that this is a blog, which is essentially a web surfer’s license to rant. I recently read William Deresiewicz’ article “Faux Friendship,” which examines the new phenomenon of the social network “friend.” While I do not necessarily fall in line with Deresiewicz’ nostalgia for old world friendship, his article confronts one of the most common misconceptions about the world of Web 2.0. Web 2.0 does not foster collaboration, it fosters self-obsession with collaboration and correspondence as mere byproducts.
Hm, I think I think this post got derailed a bit. Look, a new Coupland book!
As a Facebook “user” with my privacy settings set to ultra-paranoid, it’s been some time since I’ve actually logged in and participated in any real facility. The heyday of my Facebook activity was when I was actually having face-to-face contact with most of the people I was “friended” with (to differentiate from “friends with”). I’ve found that my Facebook interactions merely reflect my actual interactions, in the sense that the only people I send messages to are people I would otherwise be communicating with personally. What is sad is that if it weren’t for the convenience of Facebook, email, or text messages, I might actually be calling them.
Coffee & cake at the Ugly Mug
Unfortunately, the issue of self-obsession goes far beyond our social networking habits. Now Google and Yahoo are returning Twitter and MySpace feeds as search results, under the guise of “real-time” search. I’m reminded of an in-class exercise in which students dissected the Google privacy policy, uncovering the not-so-subtle way that the information age erodes privacy standards under the guise of “improving service.” I don’t believe search engines are out to get us, we’re out to get ourselves, literally. Real-time search gives our information age data-diet what it’s been craving the most—a healthy dose of “us.”
Of course, I could make the same excuse for self-obsession that I made for friendship. As the world changes, it’s no stretch that the words that describe it would change along with it. Perhaps “selfishness” needs redefinition. How about selffriendness?
“…instead of just waiting for their turn to speak.”
Home is where the hotte is.
December 3, 2009
I hope someone got a bonus for coming up with "Hotte Latte"
So I returned home for the holidays to make the discovery that yet another bikini coffee hut has emerged in Lakewood with the addition conversion of Hotte Latte (KD’z Espresso) on Gravelly Lake Dr. This now makes two on a less than half-mile stretch of Gravelly Lake Drive, and four in a 1.5 mile radius. Classy!
While I’ve been a coffee shop bum for a good portion of my life, I’ve been a bookstore bum for significantly longer. My bookstore loitering goes back to elementary school, when I used to hang around the B. Dalton Bookstore in the Lakewood Mall where my mom worked in the evening. When B. Dalton–and eventually the Lakewood Mall–went the way of the dodo, I eventually migrated my loitering to the hip and happening new Barnes & Noble (now with free WiFi!) in the late ’90s.
The store. The myth. The legend.
The Lakewood Barnes and Noble was officially my very first coffee shop, and I’ve been a loyal patron since it absorbed the Lakewood Mall B. Dalton bookstore. Actually, I wouldn’t say “patron” as much as “cousin.” I can point out where the humor section was located spanning back five store re-designs, and recall the day I discovered the magic of cinnamon twists. It’s also where I fell in love with graphic novels, bought countless Christmas gifts, reunited with long lost friends classmates, and was the site of the first and only time I ever asked anyone on a date (asked a barista out for coffee).
Lately I’ve branched out to check out some Lakewood’s other coffee offerings. I had initially not given Forza a fighting chance. In the last ten years they’ve thrived and expanded in the greater Puget Sound area. I’ve only had a chance to stop by their Bridgeport Way location for a cup o’ joe on the way out of town, and I was intrigued by their “relaxed atmosphere of dark African mahogany wood, Italian
All that and flat panel tvs? Now they're just showing off.
porcelain tiled floors and comfortable chairs near a warm fireplace.” I didn’t stay, but if I did I imagine it would be like like an afternoon of light coffee and masterpiece theatre. I’ve not decided whether or not the knowledge that there are nearly two dozen afro-mahoga-Italia-porcea-firepla- comfy-chair locations makes it lose a bit of it’s luster. Then again, as we all know I’m not above being reined in by marketing.
If you’re feeling at all generous this holiday season, please consider a donation to the support the families of the rather horrific incident of violence at a Lakewood-area Forza. This kind of thing shouldn’t happen anywhere, let alone a coffee shop.
“Let’s get ‘er done!”
September 25, 2009
Continued reminders of what two posts on my blog have generated the most traffic. Of course, given the cultural milestone we reached today, I shouldn’t be surprised.
Statistical proof of my contributions to the intellectual backslide of our society.
“We’re talking about a society in which the name Newton is now more often associated with a fig-filled dessert than the scientist who revolutionized modern thought.”
-Howard Thurston, Biologist.
What good have I done today?
August 17, 2009
Hm? Has it been a week or two? I hadn’t noticed…
I admit, I’m a creature of habit & routine. Unfortunately that habit and routine regularly consists of wasting time and procrastination, which I’ve noticed complicates the addition of other items to the routine. Despite sloth coming in a close second to gluttony as my most routine deadly sin (narrowly edging out blogging), it is undeniably the most damaging to some of my more ambitious plans of writing a novel, practicing music more, and developing a metric time system.
I’ve been thinking about routine a lot lately since I caught wind of a rather famous routine practiced by none other than the man himself, Benjamin Franklin. If his list of accomplishments is any indication, the man certainly kept busy, and this list provides a little glimpse of how he could be so on top of things. The dude was a machine:
"The precept of Order requiring that every part of my business should have its allotted time, one page in my little book contained the following scheme of employment for the twenty-four hours of a natural day."
So, for the record: yes I have gotten up this morning with three hours to spare before I need to leave for work. Yes, it hurts. I’m at the moment on the “rise, wash, and address Powerful Goodness” step. I haven’t figured out how to address powerful goodness yet, but I’ll do something. Actually, my teenage brother let me know a couple days ago that after running out of things to do one evening, he decided to “put things in their places.” When I asked how that went, he replied that it was “pretty fun.” I didn’t question any further.
Well, I guess if he can do it, there are no excuses for me. This week I’ll be making a special effort to fallow the Benjamin Routine to the best of my ability and see where it gets me. I had actually planned this a few days ago, intending not to blog again until I took some action to on this matter. It took a few days, but I made it. I’ll check back in from time to time this week (either during “prosecute the present study” or “examination of the day”) and let you know how things are going.
“I have all the money I’ll need for the rest of my life, provided I die tomorrow at 4:37 PM.”
-Jack, the Knave of Hearts
Morning in Paradise.
July 12, 2009
A familiar part of the morning routine.
Despite the complete lack of behavioral evidence to support this claim, I am a morning person. Early mornings have a way of making the world seem simpler and so much less crowded. The root of this simplicity is routine, and nothing simplifies life more than a routine. Years ago I worked nights at a grocery store, and ever since then I have longed for that sense of routine that had me driving home before most people had left the house and leaving the house after most business had closed for the day. It sounds harsh, but I was pleased to review an old blog post—one of my first—and read the following:
“…its just the same as any full timer only I sleep when they work and vice versa. I love my job though, and not everyone can say that.”
These days, I don’t have a routine and my life is hardly simple, but I am thrilled to say that I have come full circle and I still love my job(s). I do miss really enjoying mornings though, and since I woke up before 11:00 AM on a Sunday, I felt I needed to be rewarded for that.
It appears someone else did too.
I took the opportunity to check out Paradise Café for the first time, and walked away with a cup of coffee that may as well have been my gold star for getting my lazy self out of bed. As a first impression, Paradise Café respects a desire for good coffee experience, serving locally roasted Nor’west Coffee. Tucked into
Paradise Cafe endorses the $2 bill and the $1 coin.
a corner on Main St. at the edge of downtown, they’re easy to overlook but hard to forget once you’ve been there. If you’re a coffee novice, they’ll give you a solid cup o’ joe. For the connoisseur, they’ve got an assortment of loose leaf teas and press pours brewed to order. As an additional treat, I received a $1 coin and a $2 bill in change. Don’t take my word for it. Take a look at their menu and drop in sometime.
At the moment, the owners are considering extending Paradise Café hours to 7:00 or 8:00 PM and seeking feedback on the idea. If there’s anything driving me nuts about Vancouver Cafés, it’s that I’m hard-pressed to find one open past 5:00. If they extend their hours, they’ll certainly have my patronage. I mean, heck, they’ve even got free WiFi…
If the whole world moved to their favorite vacation spots, then the whole world would live in Hawaii and Italy and Cleveland.
-Floyd
I’m my own grandpa’
July 4, 2009
“…and just like for an instant, all his life is just folding in on itself and it’s obvious to him that time is a lie.”
Sippin' Rogue at the Terrace.
A year ago when I was blasting off fireworks with siblings that were strangers to me merely three years ago, I figured it wouldn’t be possible for another Independence Day to live up that one. Never again would I have such a unique combination of family, friends, fireworks, and spirits.
Cafe Flame Lily, which I broke into.
A year later, well, it still seems pretty impossible. I certainly would have never thought I’d come close though. I woke up today on a sofa in Tacoma, Washington. I ended the day sipping a mini Afritini at Café Flame Lily, an African Cuisine Restaurant that I broke into.* I also had dinner with the mayor of Lake Oswego and enjoyed some fantastic food expertly prepared and served by the staff of Terrace Kitchen. We swapped crazy family stories sipped Arnold Palmers (iced tea and lemonade), and enjoyed a panoramic view of a dozen fireworks shows in Portland and various surrounding areas.
All because I decided to attend a jazz jam session at Proper Eats on Thursday night. Causality is a crazy thing.
I’d love to elaborate, but it’s damned late. Happy Fourth, y’all.
*for the record, I did not actually commit breaking and entering.
Oh yeah. Tell me about your terabytes, baby.
July 2, 2009
According to NaBloPoMo, it is National Blog posting Month, a “fitting occasion for posting regularly to your blog on the topics that interest you.” Since I am an irritable tech curmudgeon , I will take this moment to share what an irritatingly obnoxious idea it is to encourage people with the overdeveloped sense of self importance to post every day for a month, particularly when there are organizations working very hard to archive all this crap that we’re spewing into the collective eConsciousness.
The camera which recorded the plenary session on data storage. I took a picture of it in an existential moment.
A few months back I attended the Sixth Media in Transition Conference at MIT where the plenary session “Institutional Perspectives on Storage” primarily consisted of the panelists, archivists from various European organizations, getting off on how much storage space they had to offer. My favorite contribution came from Richard Wright, an archivist from the BBC who not only pointed out that they had the least amount of space to offer because they only archived items of value, but also shared that as the amount of space we have for storage has increased exponentially, the durability and reliability of the medium decreased exponentially. This is why we have stone tablets with three digits on them that are thousands of years old, but have to buy a new flash drive every other month or so.
I also admired Wright because he was brazen enough to not only illustrate a file corruption example using an image of Steamboat Willie, but also add the caption “Used Without Permission.” Wright has certainly got some balls bollocks going up against Disney, but perhaps the BBC is full of hardcore badasses cheeky bastards, and the archivists are the cheekiest. I don’t know what I’m talking about. Lets move on.
The issue of archival stayed with us well into the session on information sharing. In response to a fascinating presentation by Alison Byerly entitled What Not to Save: The Future of Ephemera, I formulated what some tweeters would call the “Scrooge McDuck Theory of History.” This was partly a mistake, since I only likened obsession with saving ridiculous amounts of useless data to Scrooge McDuck swimming in a pool of more money than he could ever spend. My real point was the fact regardless of the effort we put into archiving damn near everything, historians 10,100, and 1000 years down the road will be obsessed with whatever we don’t save anyways.
So yes, I refuse to support this silly cause, and it is only by mere coincidence that I have now posted every day in July. All two of them.
What’s the point? We all gonna die anyways.
-Meatwad
I dub thee…
July 1, 2009
Yes friends, it’s official. I’ve coughed up $15, and now my little corner of the interweb may be found at juliosus.com, from this day forward.I intend to celebrate by breaking a bottle of champagne on my monitor.
As you may or may not know, I began this crazy little blogging adventure four years and a month ago, working the night shift at Safeway in the summer between undergrad and grad school. I actually had full intentions of quitting, but I heard a statistic that the vast majority of blogs receive little attention and go the way of the dodo. Since nothing irritates me more than following the crowd, I cherished in my low numbers and kept up my blogging to spite both the trend and myself. Much to my bemusement, I’m still at it. I’d like to quit, but now that Twitter is the thing to do and blogging is sooooooo last year, I’m even more proud to stick my domain name flag in the ground and keep shouting nonsense into the abyss. Bring it, fool.
In the spirit of this occasion, I figured it would be best to re-visit the disclaimer which I carefully articulated on old Extroverted Introversion back in February 2006. Some of the info is outdated, so I’ve made a few corrections. For the most part, it still rings true.
Disclaimer.
I hear that part of the reason people chose to have blogs is so they can keep people updated on their personal activities, provide some kind of social commentary, or serve some greater universal entertainment purpose. I would like to take this opportunity to re-assert the following:
1) My life is boring. It consists of playing the bass, studying working, being very poor, reading, sleeping, and the occasional social activity. Most of my posts are derived from how boring my life is. If something interesting does happen to me I do not hesitate to mention it. If my life seems to be full of exiting or interesting events, I’m probably making some of them up (but not the Red Power Ranger post. That one was real).
2) I do not feel obligated to offer social commentary. If I do provide it, I take no responsibility for my opinions. The opinions stated in this blog do not necessarily represent those of the owner, moderator, and sole contributor of this blog, because even I don’t really listen to what I’m saying.
3) I do not find myself particularly entertaining. If I entertain you by means of blog, that is not my intention. Being un-entertaining is also not my intention. I do not intend to invoke any manner of emotional response (including no response) from the reader. If the reader is entertained, I am surprised.
4) If my blog causes dizziness, headaches, loose stools, dementia, upset stomach, loss of motor skills, convulsion, hives, drymouth, unproductivity, drowsiness, conception, sudden loss of sex drive, seizures, shortness of breath, restlessness, scorching of the colon, decapitation, increased sex drive, depression, spontaneous combustion, or unexpected temporal displacement, I will take credit, but no responsibility.
Why you gotta’ bring up old stuff?
-Riley Freeman
Mom, you really know how to hydrate a pizza.
June 26, 2009
San Francisco Airport - Free coffee courtesy of hotels.com
Woke up in Palm Springs at 4:30 AM to catch a flight. Used the wireless internet to prepare a blog post about a Canadian show that ran its course in 2008 that I’m catching up with through online streaming video. Forgot my Lakewood shuttle reservation and pulled it from my email using my mobile phone (fortunately the terminal had a USB wall charger for free use). Landed in San Francisco at 8:30 AM, where I plugged into the wireless network using a Boingo subscription I picked up five months ago in New York. Tried to catch a friend in San Francisco whose number I didn’t have, so I tossed him a facebook message and found out he was back in Boston, which reminded me that I needed to update a document from a a tech conference which I had left on a 2 gig Mini card back in Palm Springs. My flight was late so I called my fiancee, who I missed terribly. I then napped for an hour on the floor.
Caught my flight at 11:47 AM and, upon reaching cruising altitude, watched a video game review (produced by a British-born Australian) which I had downloaded several hours prior. Was delayed in catching my shuttle since my carry-on luggage was checked when an elderly gentleman took the last overhead bin with a box containing a set of digital picture frames. After another short nap, I would be further delayed when the descending escalator in the terminal wouldn’t allow me to reach floor 3 of the parking garage, and a malfunctioning GPS system held up my shuttle. Somehow I was able to get back to my mother’s home in Tacoma by 5:30 PM where I prepared a frozen pizza before watching ’90s cartoon on reruns YouTube with my brother. Finished up by buying a 2002 comic using a borrowed Barnes & Noble membership accessed via cell phone number.
Just another run-of-the-mill 21st century day.
