DYP! base camp

The members of DYP! have been summoned for further training at the GibbsCorp Int'l corporate headquarters, which supersedes all external commitments for the greater good of the body politic. They will be dispersed back into the wider world at the soonest possible opportunity, once governing standards have been re-established and the revised mission statement submitted to the committee of the whole for final approval.

reading
How I became a nun / César Aira
weather
here: rain ; there: snow

confidential cables

Merry merry and all that. The annual holiday cards were squeezed into the season, a method of procrastinating from an over-scheduled and overwrought month.

Christmases past have produced cards that were high-effort and glamorous. This year the production focused on high-effort and dingy. Why not spend the same amount of time on fewer cards, and make those cards look care-worn and old?

This year represents eight or maybe nine years of holiday card production. Only the past six have been memorable, but the earlier efforts get points for enthusiasm. The most recent three were documented on DYP: the luminaria of 2009/10; origami cranes in 2008/09; and mobiles featuring the fifties family Gibbs in 2007/08.

It was actually a question of significant consideration whether the cards were going to be produced this year. Time was lacking and inspiration hadn't paid a visit, until it did, in the 'leaked diplomatic cables' released into the world. I love the idea of 'diplomatic cables', especially so-called even when they are just garden variety snarky emails. I love the predecessor, the 'diplomatic pouch.'

Originally, the cards were going to be diplomatic pouches. But that was too much effort. Researching cables -- telegrams -- though: that was fun and easy, and what better combination is there than fun and easy? And telegrams information proved plentiful in the research stage.

Research sites for telegrams: basic how to | pdf template | fonts

Then there was the envelope. Telegram envelopes are decidedly unexciting. The first thought was to use brown paper envelopes, which have a charm all their own, but then I discovered the British Postal Museum. Totally adorable. Wonderful pdf downloads.

While my anglophilia has paled to the point that sending actual British telegrams wasn't an attractive option, the lure of the Ocean Penny Postage Envelope:
"Britain! From thee the world expects an ocean penny postage to make her children one fraternity"
was too strong a lure to resist. And it roughly fit the artificial aging through using tea-dying theme.

And so all of the envelopes and telegrams were pdf'd, printed, tea-dyed, trimmed, folded, and posted. Stay warm and conquer the world!

hair of the dog

She sat in the diner, taking up an entire booth, looking out the window and ignoring the cup of tepid coffee in front of her. The waitress hadn't been interested enough to come back and take her order, and she wasn't feeling aggressive or assertive enough to flag down some service, especially not for food for which she had no appetite.

The diner was mostly clean, mostly well kept. There wasn't too much crud built up around the ketchup bottle, the spots on the silverware were minimal, the rag used by the busboy to wipe down the tables didn't seem to be growing anything. Granted, that was a pretty low bar, given that they used a chlorine tablet solution to wipe down the table, and any bug that could grow in a chlorine infused rag probably was capable of killing them all, atomic bomb style, but, just to be safe she felt best ignoring the menu, and especially avoiding the various pies and cakes and puddings of indeterminate age and lineage.

She had come to the diner full of purpose and ambition, her head filled with the bright complementary colors of midcentury American paintings by Hopper, but she knew it was an act, a front, and she was too tired and too poor an actress to live up to her role in the painting. So she looked out the window onto the gray street filled with cars which all looked improbably alike and she thought of champagne and crepes and chocolate mousse and espresso and brandy, she thought of the glow of polished wood and the heft of china, she thought of strongly steeped tea on damp autumn afternoons, she thought of the longing she had felt to escape from a world of ketchup on scrambled eggs and artificial maple syrup for pancakes, she thought of rare steak and raw fish and then she smelled the homefries and the coleslaw and the hamburger from the next table over, and she knew she had no home, in either world, that she could claim neither the diner nor the private chef, and so she left a dollar and some change on the table and began to walk.

She hadn't exactly hitchhiked into town, nor had she taken the bus; there had just been an unlikely combination of waiting for buses and being offered lifts that had eventually led her here. She hadn't chosen the town, she hadn't even bothered looking at a regional map; but as the land flattened out and in the center grew a courthouse, a gazebo, a diner, she thought it signaled as anonymously an American place to be reborn as anywhere else.

She was quite certain whom she was destined to become, and suddenly realized that a midwestern small town might not offer countless opportunities for self invention, especially if she refused to use her credit card or savings account to pad out the first few weeks until she knew how to introduce herself.

Perhaps she hadn't thought this through particularly well, although the flowcharts and diagrams and decision trees had been clear enough in their options and outcomes, and when she had confirmed their decision by using her great aunt's tarot card and then finalized the decision by consulting a palm reader all of the answers and sages had agreed, unanimously, without any fudging or caging or gray areas. Go. Go now. Take nothing. Disappear.

It had made sense, but none of them had been helpful in the what next category. Was it okay to use her social security number and find work, or was it to be a cash only operation? Did her new self find the idea of turning tricks to pay the rent morally repugnant or fiscally prudent? Should she keep her name or change her name? Where should she sleep at night?

In the glowing vistas of American coincidences, at this moment of existential indeterminacy, was supposed to appear a Humphrey Bogart character, a high school flame, or a wise woman of the world with a yen for mothering, or she was supposed to discover a wealthy eccentric who needed a bookkeeper or a gardener. Instead she found the local church, discovered that the offices were closed for budgetary reasons, found the Salvation Army, discovered that Anytown, USA had neither a homeless shelter nor a soup kitchen, and decided to kill time by finding out which store in town had the cheapest toothbrush for sale, and if any of the stores were hiring.

She started walking, clockwise, around the town square, expanding outward a block for each circumference walked, and at the end of an hour had covered the four block deep by six block long city center, had priced toothbrushes at the grocery store, the convenience store at the gas station, the pharmacy, and the dime store, and has discovered that the only place hiring help was McDonald's, for the 5am to 8.30am opening shift. She wasn't a morning person, she could have just as easily worked at a McDonald's closer to her home if that had been her goal, and she was ethically and politically opposed to factory farming and fast food dietary creations, but she accepted the job figuring it at least left plenty of open hours for finding some other form of employment that didn't leave her hair reeking of grease and cause her stomach to churn and heave.

That first night she discovered that small midwestern towns often don't have motels, and that being motel-less and car-less and homeless shelter-less wasn't a great way to arrive fresh and enthusiastic for the 5am shift, and then she discovered that no one on the 5am shift gave a damn, anyway, and then she went to the library after work and fell asleep at a wooden table while pretending to read an Agatha Christie novel. She knew she should be using this time to research rooms for rent or to find out about apartments or at least scout for protected hideaways in the parks or look for a better job, but all she wanted was to leave this empty shell of a town and go back somewhere civilized.

She didn't care about failing her final class in the Sociology of the American Forgotten Class, she didn't care about being kicked out of the MFA program for failing to complete her final thesis project, she never wanted to leave the city again, even if it meant marrying her insipid but employed fiancé and working as a hack writer for women's magazines. She could do it.

But she couldn't, really. She had no wallet, no phone, no internet connection. Stupidly, all of her phone numbers existed only as memories on the phone itself, not in her head, and her internet passwords were all on autofill, she had no idea how to hack into her own account. This town wasn't on the bus or train line, nor had she the funds to buy a ticket, even if it were.

Suburban survival skills was not supposed to be an element of her thesis; it had been more or less thrust upon her by that leering, manipulative dean of the program, and she was done. Totally, completely done. She decided to hitchhike back out of town, assuming that any direction would at least be away from the present situation, not thinking that it was likely to tie her permanently to the drifter's underbelly of America, and that when she finally returned home, fourteen months later, her fiancé would have married a girl from work in a whirlwind romance, her MFA program been closed due to financial fraud and bankruptcy, and herself too out of the know and without references to be offered a job at a women's magazine.

By that point, having mastered the art of the library nap and developed a knack for locating cash jobs, she stepped into the New York Public Library, picked up a copy of an out of date newspaper, and slept, certain something would appear in the evening, if not this evening, then tomorrow. There was always something.

---

reading
in prep for the upcoming season of familial contact, books on family psychology

weather
twelve degrees. Really. Fahrenheit.
that's -11.111111111 Celsius, if you were wondering.
(It's 12 degrees C in Dallas.)

ampersand variations

The Ligature Project : two publications with internal ampersand variations from recent studio work :
{An Exact Collection of Many Wonderful Prophesies | 1689}

From ligatures

{Cressener | A Demonstration of the First Principles of the Protestant Applications of the Apocalypse | 1690}

From ligatures

intermezzo

Mid-December intermission.

The pond has a skimming of ice; snow tires appointments are made; humidifiers do their best; leaked cables are read; airline tickets are booked; and deadlines of all sorts are met.

Stay warm and check back next week.

shamanism

"Here, put on this headdress, no, they aren't teeth, no, you don't look ridiculous."

The headdress was heavy without being large, not covering the head as much as perching precariously on the crown, held in place by weight rather than any design to mold to the contours of the skull. There was a necklace as well, not so much a matching necklace as a thematically consistent necklace, whose beads and baubles and things which sure as hell looked like teeth hanging, draped, over my shoulders, and in one hand a wooden model of a hand, disturbingly lifelike, in the other a sharp carving of an animal, in bone or ivory, which my hand restlessly turned over and over, tracing the edges, physically uncomfortable holding a fake hand beneath the weight of a headdress and necklace.

This was not my idea of a good time. Suddenly feathers appeared, balanced on my knees, placed in the palm of the wooden hand, and the feathers were just too much, too much drama, too much costume, too much prop, and it was all I could do to not start laughing then and there. It would have been beyond rude, callous and patronizing to have laughed, especially when there was an audience, and they were hanging on to the performance as if they were on the stage, were the focus of the eerie yellow glow of the shaman's eyes, rather than me, who had not actually intended to be in that particular audience, but had been misdirected by the woman with a clipboard in the corridor.

The lecture had just been getting underway, and when you're running late there's that sensation of all eyes watching you arrive, find a seat, try not to be annoying in addition to late, and when I realized this was a shamanism lecture instead of a statistics lecture, it was only the horror of being watched by so many pairs of eyes as I would have to repeat and reverse the arrival process, in full view of the class and the shaman, and my neck burned just thinking about the snorts and snide glances as I left, but there was nothing else to be done, I needed the statistics lecture if I was going to fulfill the graduation requirements, and I had driven to this rundown state college for that particular statistics lecture, even though it meant taking time off of work and driving an hour. Good manners and embarrassment were not going to intimidate me into staying in my seat.

Those glowing yellow eyes could, though. There was something beyond creepy in that stare, and the panic that I felt on realizing this was the wrong auditorium was nothing to the panic I felt when the shaman's gaze locked with mine, and an assistant dutifully appeared to escort me to the stage.

Of course I hate stages. Everybody rational hates stages. They are an open platform at the focal point of a room where everyone can pick apart each and every one of your flaws under the harsh spotlights and the creaky sound system makes everyone sound like Godzilla with a cold in the Bronx. The last time I had to present a paper at a conference, on using statistical sampling in geospatial modeling for generating train tables, not only did I drop my lecture notes, hopelessly scrambling them, and knock over the glass of water on the podium, but after stuttering to an incoherent conclusion some twenty minutes later, I tripped on the stairs in my eagerness to leave the stage, and then had the mortification of having to be called back to the stage for the obligatory question and answer period.

Without enduring more such conferences I would never make tenure, but the fallout of that conference had been two canceled job interviews, so sitting in the fascinated gaze of 400 students while a wierd shaman holds all of us firmly in place was not my idea of a good time.

If it was, I would have studied anthropology, or dropped out altogether and bought a VW bus and traveled to the shamans for some on site research, and I'm sure it works for them, but it just isn't my thing. Which I don't mean disrespectfully, but I had a roommate once who was into that stuff, kept a rawhide drum and smoked most any organic matter that could be put into a pipe or rolled, and after finals I thought he was offering me pot but it turned out to be peyote and I haven't touched anything stronger than sparkling water since. I don't know if I was awake or asleep and hallucinating or dreaming or maybe all four, but my entire visual field didn't return to normal for three days and my ears were still hearing ghost echoes a week later. The next week I submitted my intent to continue to the doctorate degree paperwork to the head of the department, secure I was following the right path, and my roommate officially withdrew from the college to focus on ascending to the higher plane.

Shamanism, spirits, altered reality, that's just not my world. Even as a kid I was freaked out by communion, that body and blood just way too much information to share after a bowl of Cheerio's, and that people heard the voice of god I thought was paddling a bit too close to the waters of schizophrenia. Not that I'm an atheist, just not into the altered reality of incense, in whatever form it's provided.

And now here's the shaman, wafting incense around me in what must be the four cardinal directions, then I realize that a compass has been carefully drawn in chalk around the base of the chair that I'm seated in, and the chair is one of those steel office chairs covered in lime green leather substitute, which is totally inappropriate for a chalk circle and the incense and the headdress and necklace and fake hand and ivory carving and feathers.

Just as I'm about to sneeze from all the incense, the shaman puts it away and starts staring at me again, then at a point just over my head, and her gaze goes out of focus and she starts moving her center of balance back and forth on her feet, and all I can think is -- this little old lady with yellow eyes is having a heart attack or a stroke in front of 400 of us, and we think it's a trance so what are we going to do, let her fall and moan and not even call an ambulance because that's what these crazy liberal arts majors want to watch?

Except then I realize that it's me on the floor, that I've fallen from the office chair with the lime green upholstery and the headdress shot across the stage and I'm holding on to the wooden hand like I'm five years old and having a tooth pulled at the dentist, and the edges of the carved bone are biting so deeply into my palm as to draw blood, and the room is totally utterly silent, the students watching in rapt fascination as I come out of what seems to have been a moaning, shivering, screaming fit of some type on the stage, which caused my fall.

The shaman isn't rocking or moaning any more, not chanting or waving anything around, just watches me, intently with those yellow eyes as my body stops jerking and shivering and the moaning subsides. I sit up, dazed, and her assistant helps me back into the chair, takes away the necklace and pries the hand out of my grip, but the shaman signals for me to keep the carved ivory piece as I leave the stage, my legs still weak.

The students obviously don't know whether to hoot and holler or to applaud or to take notes, but they look at me with awe and fear, not quite meeting my eyes, as I stumble back to my seat. The shaman left the stage, disappearing through a back door, and assistants clean up the accessories from the demonstration, as the students realize the lecture is over and leave the room, subdued.

I'm not quite sure what to do. I could still make the second statistics lecture I'm scheduled to attend, but it just doesn't seem appropriate or worthwhile. I'm not hungry or thirsty, it seems impossible that I will every feel hungry or thirsty again. I don't feel happy or sad, and I know there are things I was meant to be doing this afternoon, but I can't understand why, or their importance. I make my way back to the parking lot, the sun weak through the clouds, and decide to leave the car behind, there, in commuter lot 30B, and just walk, walk south maybe, then east, and just keep going, until I know what I'm meant to be doing.

---

reading
In praise of shadows / Tanizaki

weather
in years past, this storm storm storm would have all been snow :
that counts as a statement of optimism.