Month: June 2005

I got towels for my birthday. Towels and a t-shirt and some books.

Last night was weird. Legitimately strange moments of recognition occurred at Ross’s birthday BBQ. Not only was Sonny in attendance, the first time I’ve seen him after he left my teenaged self abandoned in the far off wastes of Burnaby approximately seven years ago, apparently I should say hello to the entire readership of GothicBC as this is one of the journals fed through there. Hi! I wasn’t aware that you folk were watching this or that my journal was on any other website. *waves* Pleasure to meet you, I’m sure.

*hides*

Also notable was Steve, the Baron Steffano, being too floridly drunk to call me names, (if anyone has that man’s e-mail address, it would be appreciated, as I don’t know if the one I have from a half decade back still works), and a moment of pure dumbstruck when Tyler arrived and asked who invited me.

Before the BBQ, I had a morning job interview at Rocky Mountain Chocolate. They liked me so much that I apparently get to make my own shift schedule. I start Friday at six-thirty. I think this is going to become a Tuesday and Thursday evening job, honing my retail-ness and chocolate eatery to a knife sharp edge.

I’m trying to be surprised a little at this week, nothing painful has happened, nothing too bad. Everything of note has been uplifting and a turn for the better. I’ve been able to clear every hurdle and land two jobs in the process. I’m embracing this change, though it might be only that the universe is old and had to take a break from screwing me. I imagine an older man taking a cigarette break in front of a television showing war explosions, the heavens outside the window all multi-coloured dust clouds and black suited angels counting grains of sand. Entropy kicking back with a martini, looking over and thinking, “She’s a damned fine gel but I’ll get to her later”. (For some reason, I imagine Entropy as Welsh).

In between the interview and the BBQ, I had a phonecall from circus-folk and lindy hoppers, (an unstoppable team, I suspect), to come join them on their pubcrawl. Mistakingly assuming such people are sane, I called around eleven p.m. from the BBQ only to discover that the crawl went apparently from noon until 6 p.m., early on purpose precisely so they would be drunk all day in preparation for the swing dancing that was to go until five in the morning. I am intensely sorry I could not afford the cover charge. There isn’t an angle from which that doesn’t look like something I would enjoy.

article link from domystic

Link
June 23, 2005

The Defense Department began working yesterday with a private marketing firm to create a database of high school students ages 16 to 18 and all college students… The new database will include personal information including birth dates, Social Security numbers, e-mail addresses, grade-point averages, ethnicity and what subjects the students are studying. The data will be managed by BeNow Inc. of Wakefield, Mass., one of many marketing firms that use computers to analyze large amounts of data.

…”The purpose of the system . . . is to provide a single central facility within the Department of Defense to compile, process and distribute files of individuals who meet age and minimum school requirements for military service,” according to the official notice of the program.

…Under the new system, additional data will be collected from commercial data brokers, state drivers’ license records and other sources, including information already held by the military. “Using multiple sources allows the compilation of a more complete list of eligible candidates to join the military,” according to written statements provided by Pentagon spokeswoman Lt. Col. Ellen Krenke in response to questions.

…The Pentagon’s statements added that anyone can “opt out” of the system by providing detailed personal information that will be kept in a separate “suppression file.” That file will be matched with the full database regularly.

…Officials at BeNow did not return several messages seeking comment. The company’s Web site does not have a published privacy policy, nor does it list either a chief privacy officer or security officer on its executive team.

According to the Federal Register notice, the data will be open to “those who require the records in the performance of their official duties.” It said the data would be protected by passwords. The system also gives the Pentagon the right, without notifying citizens, to share the data for numerous uses outside the military, including with law enforcement, state tax authorities and Congress.

Yeah yeah yeah I need a music box


Roadkill redux
Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

Work is a cool white room with a ticking clock. The light is pale, blocked by thick curtains that look like they were whitewashed by professionals going for some industrial chic. The bars on the windows are also white, as are the lighting fixtures. The floor is scuffed cement painted pale yellow and chilly in the summer heat. Along one wall are a short row of wooden supply shelves, papers and binder books filling every nook. I sit facing a computer in an L of desks put together in a corner of the foyer, with a phone to my right and a fax machine and copier behind me on a pink trestle table. It is pleasant, familiar through the conglomerated memory of a hundred offices. There is even a tall tropical plant in dubious health and a corkboard covered in pictures cut from magazines.

This morning I was upstairs sitting cross-legged on a chest high pile of foam sheets putting slips of information paper in with packaged silk duvets with my boss, Linda. She’s a lovely young woman, only 29, and engaged to be married. She’s incredibly well traveled, growing up first in China, then New York, then Madrid, and traveling every year. We talked about photography and where she used to live, education and thinking ahead. I’m young, but I think we get along. Now we’re eating ice-cream from the Casa Gelato across the street. It’s lunch-time, and I should find my sandwich.

for goldilocks, an entry of three bears

I was waiting for a grand proclamation, a visitation of word to download some meaning into the withering hardware. I was waiting to want you, to let the barrier blocks fall so that I might stand free of them and that other person. I was waiting to understand the fundamental attachments that I formed in my absence.

I’m beginning to.

Under the main process, there’s wheels spinning, creating thread out of the morass of fluff that passes for thought in my brain. You helped me by being angry at me, upset that my twists have always ended positive, that every fairy tale disaster has been paid off with joy. You echoed years in that voice, a handful of fingers all pointing accusatory. I remembered being younger, shorter, less prone to speech yet talking in a rare moment of surety with someone who used to be my friend. “You just have to wait the right away, there’s a presence of mind and a shut-down. You can’t help me, like I can’t help you right now, but we’ll get there. We’ll find it by walking into it, like we need our eyes closed to walk into a wall.”

You don’t remind me of him, he hurt me later, crossed lines that grown men should not with little girls, but rather of what I said. What I began to try to say again, with as little eloquence as years ago, I’m sure, to you in the kitchen. That there’s ways and then there’s ways. There’s action in inaction and misery as debt. I don’t know how to convey how I know things, and I’m sorry. I want you to know how to survive in joy, but I don’t carry the work with me as you do.

I was twenty minutes late for work today.

The minimum wage in 1938 was 25c, a number inconceivable now. I was considering it yesterday as I finally walked up to the shop for groceries. The street is lined with windows and nowhere on any of the numbered price tags could there be a number less than five dollars. Industrialization has created a world with such mythical numbers, you read of billions of dollars being dropped on a project. How is it that exists? Digital editors are sitting in darkened rooms with sickly green text scrolling past. Math as myth. Arithmetic the new alchemy? When pennies can add up into a heavier weight than an office building, I wonder. Pennies are the small change that isn’t worth picking up from the sidewalk. It’s a copper gleam embedded in every intersection. Even in Hollywood, where there’s glitter in the very pavement, I could see them there, pressed in by countless daily tires. I remember children being impressed by the colour, the metal the colour of fallen leaves. I had a penny collection, I started my bank account with one. One Hundred and Eight Dollars, counted out cent by cent into little brown paper rolls printed in blue with FIFTY CENTS. Sadly, the attraction has darkened to a commodity wholesale, every celebrity a symmetrical face, a stamped out piece of Too Little To Count, in spite of the newspaper obsession. I still pick up pennies, and I look at the Queen, thinking of wishes and luck, and I question, “How could anyone count out a million in these?”.

To out-weigh the cost of making it, it has to run 24/7

“Built by Krupp, seen here crossing a federal highway in Germany en route to its destination (an open-pit coal mine), it is cheaper to move the thing like this, than to construct or re-assemble on-site.The mover stands at over 311 feet tall and is over 705 feet long. It weighs over 45,500 tons (yes that’s 45 thousand tons!) Cost $100 million USD, took 5 years to design & manufacture and 5 years to assemble. It only requires 5 people to operate it. The Bucket Wheel is over 70 feet in diameter with 20 buckets, each of which can hold over 530 cubic feet of material. A 6-foot man can stand up inside one of the buckets. It moves on 12 crawlers (each is 12 feet wide, 7′-10″ high and 46 feet long).There are 8 crawlers in front and 4 in back. It has a maximum speed of 1 mile in 3 hours (1/3 mile/hour). It can remove over 76,455 cubic meters (100,000 large dump trucks at 40Yds. each of overburden per day).”

others of this family found http://mining-technology.com/

because I missed him

Persepolis burnt me to the ground, dark gray marble eyes leading me like paths and stairs to a treasury trap of words. I felt bare, richly carved with splendid relief, “Five years is a rock hewn tomb, too long to be without the silk cotton of skin.” His hair curled as inscriptions do, written to ward off misfortune. “I enjoy the silence,” he said, and he laughed, lambent pearl. My heart was caught in the light of it, a hidden thing suddenly unshadowed, becoming a lantern to hold in my hand. A wet red ruby to guide me to Thoth.

“What is the geography here?” He asked and gestured, his hands describing the arc of mythical heroes. “It is tumbled land, fit for caves and caverns. Happy alone.”

I’m staying in tonight. I have been moving too often for sleep to find me and I wish to be claimed for decency’s sake. Whatever strange endorphin level I have arrived at, it’s not feeling anymore like home.