Whitey the WonderDog

My great friend and mentor Whitey passed away.  My remembrance is officially here:

http://www.sleepwaking.com/index.php/2009/02/19/whitey-the-wonderdog/

Happy Trails

Well, I finally did it . . . I installed WordPress on my own website . . . so, feel free to head over to Sleepwaking website (www.sleepwaking.com) to see loads of content and I may even keep it up to date!!

Feeling the Palin

I have never been interested in politics until this year.  Accordingly, I had the popcorn ready and settled down to watch the Biden/Palin debate.  My prediction was that Palin would have at least two OMG moments; I was counting on it.  Here folksy wisdom careening into political blunder was going to be my entertainment. Instead, she did a reasonable job considering that she is essentially out of her league.

I really enjoy the use of Twitter and other technologies to parse debate transcripts.  I tend to notice that Republicans use “fight”, “fear”, and other emotionally-charged words more frequently than Democrats, at least since I started paying attention.  That’s no suprise I suppose since we all know Republicans have been wildly successfuly with the use of emotional appeal, which is, after all, a logical fallacy.  But I don’t blame Republicans.  I blame people for responding.  If we don’t buy the b.s. they’re selling, then they’ll come up with a new product.  How’s that for a free-market economy?

But, back to the debate.  I wouldn’t say that Palin performed well, but she didn’t screw up.  She repeated the phrases she had been taught, and glued the canned text together with her brand of straight talk.  But how can we fail to notice that when the necessity of diplomacy in foreign policy is debated, that Joe Biden spoke of actual countries and actual areas of contention that need diplomacy; whereas, Palin spoke about overcoming the challenges of being part of a diverse family.  While the ability to navigate family life is in fact part of life’s great journey, it’s a poor choice as analogy for international politics.

Oh.  And did I mention I’m from Alaska?  I lived in Palmer for several years; just a hop, skip, and a jump from Wasilla.  Dude.  She’s from Wasilla, Alaska.  And yes, while my appeal to geographic origin is a logical fallacy as well, the difference is that I’m right.

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Poem for the Day

Cowboy’s Big Speech Halfway Through the Novel
by Will T.
 
I live my life knowin’ time is precious.
An’ I wake up ever day knowin’ what has to be done.
Some might say that’s simple,
but I think it robs the devil of his due.

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Second Life

After reading about millenials in the workplace (http://personalbrandingblog.wordpress.com/2008/08/20/millennials-are-taking-over-the-workplace-is-hr-prepared/) and the use of Second Life as a recruiting tool, I had a mini-epiphany.  The big problem with my job wasn’t that I hated being a Director, it was that the fun disappeared.  You can spank my ass and call me Sally for a job title; but, if I’m having fun I’m there.  I believe that in the bigger picture of the IT landscape, the overlap between work and fun (i.e. passionate engagement) is blurring.  In fact, it HAS to blur.

In jobs that feature information as the primary entity for manipulation, it makes sense that the tools and communication channels available for working with that information follow the same radical transformation as the wider cultural landscape.  And just because I’m in my 40s doesn’t mean that I have to feel disconnected from the phenomenon. 

I recall that one of the reasons I went into computers was seeing the toll that physical labor took on my father and other people I worked with on Alaska’s oil pipeline.  I figured being a “computer guy” would age-proof my career (always assuming my brain hung in there).  And why would I want to hang in there?  Because it’s a fun, challenging job that encourages creative thinking while compensating decently.

So, as I begin my journey away from my job as a Director back to Architect, I am enjoying the re-engagement with tech feeds, geek news, and all the “fun stuff” I had left behind.  I’m no genius, or even a great programmer . . .but I am passionate, love to learn from my betters, and I’m pretty decent at aggregating all the tech activity into meaningful chunks that relate to business initatives.  And so, after many years of always trying to do whatever it is that I don’t already know, I realize that there really is something to knowing your place and playing to your strengths. 

Feels like a second life indeed.

Rediscovering the Geek Within

I recently rediscovered the geek within.  What does this entail?  First, it implies that you wander away from the inner geek.  You perhaps think management, or even directorship, is your path to freedom.

 

Then, you have an epiphany.  For me it was something like, “hey, I’m in an abusuve relationship with my company.”  You realize that upper management is the equivalent of agreeing to putting on shackles for a pay increase.  In return for breaking out of the geek pay ceiling, you agree to basically become a whipping boy or girl.  You won’t likely be empowered to drive change, but you’ll be browbeat constantly about the lack of change while your budget and your powers are diminished.

 

So, having the epiphany, you’ll realize that you can return to your passion, creativity, and having cool junk in your cube.  You CAN go home.  Just click your heels together, wish real hard, and you’ll find that companies are almost never tired of people with the actual skills to do the actual job so actual money can be made.

 

And all the while, you can have your Nunzilla on display proudly; you can tickle your Dwight Shrute bobble-head and engage in active relaxation, knowing that the work you are doing is more productive and more fun than your boss.

www.sleepwaking.com

Potato or Potatoe [dream]

Potato God worship

1:20pm, Friday, 4-19-2002

In this dream, Al Gore is giving an informal speech to some folks, including myself, at a library (not recognizable as one I have been in). In the course of his talk, he trys to quote Edison. He flubs the quote and his audience is laughing because even though he did not deliver the quote, people recognize that the quote he is reaching for isn’t actually from Edison anyhow. [This reminds me of the whole spelling of potato issue which plagued him for so long.]

Anyhow, Gore is making a joke about flubbing the quote as he walks across the library toward the card catalog so he can find reference to look up the quote. The card catalog is not where he expects to find it and he says something about how the audience rearranged the library while he was gone. “Did you guys short-sheet my bed while you were at it?”, he jokes. The audience laughs, and his self-deprication comes across as quite charming.

Gore can’t find the quote in the reference work, so he paraphrases it. The gist of the quote is that is has to do with an experiment involving agitating electrons and noticing that the electrons take the path of least resistance in their movement to fill the container they are held within [This is like stuff I read in "The Arrow of Time" for research]. Then, I say: “Some Chinese guy noticed that same phenomenon while watching a waterfall thousands of years ago; that’s the East versus the West for you.” [Obviously, the waterfall has more to do with fluidity and gravity, but the similiary had to do with element taking easiest, or most obvious path based on physical laws].]

I immediately feel bad because my statement is interpreted as a slam on Gore that ties in with audience first laughing at him for flubbing the quote. I didn’t mean to demean his comparison or use of the metaphor, I merely meant to disparage the use of habit in forming perceptions in America and how that leads us to proving the obvious only via technology sometimes. Or, at the very least, preferring to use technology metaphors instead of natural ones.

The whole concept of this dream seems to tie in with how I have always gotten into trouble by using the second person form of speech, and my tendency to generalize a topic beyond it’s current context, and in the end I seem to be disparaging the person I am talking with (the “you”) while to my mind I’ve moved to another level of abstraction. And this tendency in general, which has been justified via intellectualization, seems to tie in with the fact that I joined in the joking about Gore being stupid back in the day. And now, I seem to realize a) that I did not know him at all, and b) that alternate spellings are okay and valid. As a matter of fact, the more I study portuguese, the worse my English spelling becomes as I re-map my brain.

p.s. uhh . . . turns out that was Dan Quale, not Gore

Some themes:
Language
Social embarrassment
Judging others
Quoting Sources
Technology verus Nature

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Dumbo’s Mommy [dream]

The dream factory pumps ‘em out

4/9/2002

I was on the phone flirting with some unidentified woman (after phone conversation with Noemi about meeting for tutoring, but we didn’t flirt). As I am chatting on the phone I notice outside that there is a momma elephant and her baby in a pen on the far side of the property. It’s a fairly desert-like, or savanna type, landscape (reflecting AZ?). I step outside to let the dog (what dog?) out. I watch the mama elephant leading the baby elephant around the pen. It looks like she is teaching him or entertaining him, perhaps like me with the dog. So, I move closer to watch them.

Then, the momma starts showing the baby how to gather grapes and lay them out in a single layer. I get the impression that within this dream that this is a normal task that the momma elephant is trained to do. However, she deviates from the “normal” method because she is teaching the baby elephant how to lay the grapes out on a blanketed surface. And then, instead of crushing the grapes normally, the momma elephant starts to maul the grapes with extraordinary violence! I was appalled at the hatred flashing in her eyes. And I remember how the little baby elephant couldn’t even get a single drop of the grape juice because the blanket was absorbing all the grape juice. Then, the momma elephant tried to kill her own baby. An odd, merciful (in her mind) attempt to save her baby from living an imprisoned life. There was a race in the dream between me deciding to try and intervene to save the baby (with its bulging terrified eyes), and my hesitation because I was thinking that it would be impossible for her to be strangling the baby since elephants do not have fingers. Then, I woke up to urinate. I was suprised that it was not yet past midnight.

Some themes:
Conscious dreamer versus dream content (like the Invisible Man dream)
Freedom/Imprisonment
Ejaculation
Nuturing baby
Faceless communication

Human Sundial [dream]

Time passes through our bodies?

4/8/2002

This was an apocalypse dream. The sky was full of black and gold patterns over a dark world. Centered in the swirling mass of the sky was a cloudy shape that someone in dream suggested was shaped like an anus. Anyhow, the cloud boiled more and more furiously, and darker. Finally, a shattering yellow light shot out of the apeture in the sky and destroyed the world; not like a bomb, but like a sonic sound wave. I remember that buildings were still standing but leaning and pockmarked, totally blasted to the edge of their structural integrity.

I remember talking to a survivor. He was a complete asshole. He seemed to take my ideas about rebuilding civilization seriously, but when he thought I was out of earshot he made a disparaging remark. Then, without his having a clue, I pulled him down to the ground from my hiding spot crouched behind something and pressed a straw against his neck as if it were a knife to show I could have killed him. I had him dig a shallow, body-shaped depression (like body outlines in “Death to Smoochy” which I saw a few days ago). Even though he was digging a shallow hole shaped to his body, he didn’t seem to have any idea that I might do something bad to him.

Then, I had him lay face down in the depression. It fit his body pretty well so that the top of the back of his head and shoulders were even with the top of the shallow hole (grave? like in the Jack Nicholson dream?). I marked lines on the man’s back to measure the progress of the new, diseased sun of the apocalyptic world so I could begin to understand how our world had changed. Whenever the guy started to become conscious, I would smack the back of his head with a hammer, he would fall forward unconscious, and I would continue to track the yellow and black sunbeams along the marks I had made in his back like some weird sundial.

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Invisible Man [dream]

Can’t we all be friends?

2/21/2002

In this dream, I am living in an Apartment with LK. I keep getting phone messages from strange woman that I do not know. At one point KH comes into the room, yet she is Hawaiian or Asian for some reason. LK’s bedroom smells so bad that she wants to move out of the apartment. I am explicitly not invited to move into new apartment, so in a fit of anger I go out and buy a motorcycle. Then, I leave town on motorcycle when I catch her kissing another guy.

Then, the dream shifts dramatcially to a cab ride through Anchorage. The passenger in the cab is a prominent black man (a celebrity), and the driver is also black and he is more of a tour guide than cab driver at the moment. The driver drives the taxi through impossibly narrow alleys into streets that do not actually exist in Anchorage, yet I can tell that the ride is taking place in Spenard district. The driver points out the dingy home of some famous Black-American.

The taxi goes another couple of blocks on Minnesota and turns into another insanely narrow side street. Cab parks in covered driveway by poor house. Driver explains that this is was the home of famous writer that has since passed away (which is interesting because I had just heard about the 50th anniversary of Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man” on NPR the day before).

There is a bunch of furniture under the covered driveway area. The funiture is all collectible and antique; stuff that the deceased writer got at a speakeasy (huh?). It is a shame because the furniture is warped and peeling due to inadequate cover. The covering is clearly a poor attempt by an underfunded agency making a token attempt to preserve a bit of history, and it clearly deserves more than this horrific neglect.

The celebrity from the cab suddenly picks up a warped and bent coffee table, lets out a mighty roar, and crashes through the locked door of the abandoned home. Then I (or the cabbie rather, in a point-of-view fashion), run after the man.

The initial room of the home is too big for the actual home’s external dimensions. It is full of locker banks and looks like a forgotten locker room in in some ancient high school. The floor is covered in a foot of smelly, green water and water drips from spots in the collapsing ceiling. The celebrity is yelling and running through the poorly lit, wet, and bloated hallways, his feet splashing in the muck and kicking up the smell of must and decay. The cabbie (me) is racing after him wildly.

At the end of a hallway, the black celebrity falls into a giant milkshake container. He is thrashing around as the blade is lowered into the container to mix the white, frothy milk and the rich, dark chocolate. I begin to rearrange the dream in a semi-lucid state so that the man escapes the blades, dripping with milk, his skin momentarily liquid white. But the dream wants him to get blended and chopped, so he keeps appearing back in the blender. The dream wants him mixed, but I don’t. Due to the exertion from rearranging the dream events, I wake up.

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