complete as the air.

I made a deal with a dear long distance friend of mine this New Year’s Eve that I would toast him at midnight if he would toast me. As the venue I was at was ten minutes late with the midnight, and I didn’t have anything to toast with anyway, I instead made a post to him in reparation right before bed.

This was my reply:

“That’s really sweet, if slightly creepy. You were toasted at the Radegast Beer Hall in Brooklyn by about twenty people in a rolling, gregarious mood. The majority were men. Tequila had occurred prior. It went, word for word, like this:

VS: And to Jane with an H!
Tim: Who the heck is Jane with an H?
VS: She’s a good friend of mine.
Tom: Why should we toast her?
VS: Because she’s my friend.
Danny: But why should we TOAST her?
VS: Sigh. She has breasts.
All: To Jhayne!

What can I say, I know how to work a crowd.”

It’s nice to feel so appreciated.

meme: inport support {now it’s your turn}


Me and Marissa, July 2007, by Lung

The ever groshing Meredith Yayanos (and now Alice and Sara) tagged me in the 16 Random Things meme, “Once you’ve been tagged, you have to write a note with sixteen random things, shortcomings, facts, habits or goals about you. At the end choose sixteen people to be tagged, listing their names and why you chose them. You have to tag the person who tagged you.” I’m no good at this sort of meme, but I love rock star Mer (and Alice and Sara) with the warmth of six suns, so for her I will try.

1. “Even your voice has changed,” he said, looking at me, hearing the wounded strawberry tears that caught all the way up from my heart to my tongue and out into the air. The freeway was so familiar I felt I could have drawn it in my sleep, divided the roads into lanes with a cunning accuracy I didn’t understand I had. It was like the promised land, green signs marking exits as well as the graves of so many dreams. “I’m not sure what it is, but you sound softer, like you’re an entirely different person here.” “I am,” I replied, “too full of history to burn.”

2. I used to write fortunes, love letters, and wishes in spidery black ink on the dried leaves I found fallen under trees in the fall and let them go in the wind to fly without watching to see where they might land. They weren’t for me, they were for other people to find.

3. Perhaps if I killed him, he would live on as a ghost, feather light and improperly dead. I woke up earlier this week, wishing I could secretly stab him in the heart with rusty kitchen scissors and open him up like he did to me with his fingers. The only thing that keeps me clear is that I don’t think his murder would change anything. You can’t erase memory like a stain. It would just mean a little less money coming in around my birthday.

4. When she speaks on the phone, I know my place is to quietly do nothing more than make encouraging noises in the appropriate gaps and pauses. She is like a colouring book with everything but the eyes filled in with religious illumination, as if someone spent thirty years merely shading in her skin. I love her, so I don’t mind. Maybe someday it will be my turn to talk.

5. There is a pile of books in my room which do not belong to me. They are borrowed books that represent less what I would choose to read and more what people think I should. From top to bottom they are: Blade Runner: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Mistress of the Empire, The Complete Robot, The War of Flowers, How To Not Get Rich, (which I never read), So Far From God, A Little Larger Than The Known Universe, What Colour Is Your Parachute, (which I also never read), His Dark Materials, and Brandjam. Some of these books have been with me for years, yet I refuse to incorporate them in with my own books, believing somehow, tenuously, that they will eventually be given back to their respective owners.

6. I loved him like no one else I had ever met in my life, but recently it eased back and closed over. All it took was sleeping in his bed, knowing it wasn’t mine, then driving away the next day. Now I’m absolutely stone terrified I will never care about anyone like that again.

7. For no particular reason, somewhere in my room is a birthday candle I kept from my third birthday cake.

8. Reading back entries into my journal can be like reliving the relationships I wrote about. When I started this journal, I had no idea what it would be like to have such a static essence of memory waiting at my fingertips. People I can talk blithely about now, or some that I mention not at all, are waiting for me there, frozen in time instead of (decently?) dissolved like jet streams. There is nothing in my life that can compare. My valued moments, they are not trapped in objects, they are there, freely available for the whole world to read. How I felt when that one danced or when that one cheated on me. It’s unreal, the immediacy. Photographs are not the same.

9. Sometimes horrible pop music is just going to happen in my house. Life isn’t all gamelan, mystery, poetry or jazz. Occasionally it is Blackstreet’s No Diggety on repeat for an hour. I’m not sorry.

10. “Will you sleep with me later if I ask you to?” He looks at me, blinks a moment, and grins. (We’ve only just met, though we’ve known each other on-line for years.) For a moment it’s like I’ve kissed him, then he ignores my question as if I never asked it, because it didn’t need to be said, and reaches out his hand. The girl next to him look confused, uncertain if she heard what she thinks she did, my words a spectre in the tiny industrial kitchen.

11. I dislike religion and ritualistic behavior. It is fine and wonderful and inspiring that people like to make themselves meaningful, that people try to be more than themselves, but to require emblematic props to do it offends me somehow, as if intelligent people should know better, should know they do not require symbols to attain self worth. (Also, I will judge you if you actually believe in astrology of any kind. Quietly, but it will be there. You! The offended one. Half a point. Docked.)

12. The last time I was sick, it was because of him. We had quarelled. I had walked home. It was freezing. Standing within his gravity again was sensory overload. Had it really almost been an entire year? My hands shaking as we said hello. Watching him stand at the podium, I tried to pretend I was a solid being, but my eyes tripped, caught by the enigmatic living miracle of his face. He still had me on a string. I didn’t want even a week to go by without a hello, but after the last time we’d seen each other he wouldn’t even answer the phone when I called. Instead I had to crash his party, all cameras and politicians, as if I was welcome, as if it were planned instead of a lucky accident of bus arrival.

13. If there is a book in the lavatory, it’s because I like to read while I brush my teeth.

14. Though Marissa, (who I later renamed Mishka, which stuck), and I were ten when we met, neither one of us had pierced ears. Mine because my parents thought it was cruel to do to a baby, her because her parents treated it as a coming of age. From this, I couldn’t have cared less while she could not wait for her sixteenth birthday. As it approached, she was practically vibrating with excitement about how she was finally going to get it done, so for her birthday party, I gathered all of our mutual friends together at the mall downtown to get our ears pierced with her in solidarity. (This took some managing, as one of the boys we knew, Charles, had a highly evangelical mother, who thought this was a terrible sin somehow). After an hour of waiting for her and calling her in vain, we finally got a hold of her. She couldn’t make it and had completely forgotten to tell us to call it off. Rolling our eyes, the group of us went through with one ear of the procedure anyway, with the intention to do the other one with her later. About a month after this, she went off with her mother one afternoon and had them done alone at a tattoo parlour, forgetting again about our group effort-in-waiting. As a result, I still only have my left ear pierced. For all I know, so does everyone else involved.

15. “When my husband came back from Iraq,” she said, and it struck me as it has before, completely new again, “I am in a foreign country”. Curled on the bed with my friends, it was easy to forget, the same way it didn’t occur to me later while I was away on my trip. Even when guns were involved. Too much about the USA will always feel implicitly like the word belonging.

16. I will not tag anyone in a meme. It is far too interesting to see who will pick it up for themselves without prompting.*

Where it’s gone from here: Ben Peek, Duncan Shields, Sarah Edwards-Noelle.

Wrenching news.

PingMag, the Tokyo based magazine about “Design and Making Things”, is shutting down

I’ve been an almost daily reader of PingMag for at least two years, thrilled to have found a site so consistently fascinating. I’m more than sad they had to throw in the towel, I’m actually somewhat shocked. From their site:

Dear PingMag readers,

It’s the last day of 2008, and we have a sad announcement to make.

From today, PingMag will be taking an extended hiatus, and will not be updated for the foreseeable future.

PingMag has been running for 3 and a half years now, and over that time literally millions of you, from every single corner of the planet, have visited, read our articles, left comments, linked to us on your blogs, sent us letters of support – some of you have even flown to Tokyo to join us!

We are eternally grateful for your fantastic support over the years.

It is only because of you all that we have managed to keep PingMag going this long, and with every article – and there have been around 1000 of them! – we have made new friends, and found new, exciting people and places here in Japan and all over the world.

Thank you! Thank you for all your love and good will. We can only offer our sincerest apologies that we are unable to continue returning your fantastic generosity.

As well as you our readers, so many of you have actually contributed to PingMag, in so many different ways. It isn’t possible for me to thank everyone personally here, but many of you are credited in the about page, and anyone who we’ve missed, our apologies! Every contribution, however big or small, has made PingMag what it is, and you will always be a precious member of the team.

The world is facing tough times right now, and many of you may have uncertain months ahead. Wherever you are and whatever your circumstances, we wish you all the very best of luck, and look forward to being able to meet again, we hope, at some point in the future.

All the very best wishes from Tokyo,

Tom, and the entire PingMag team.

at least someone gave me a rose today, so that’s okay

In the hopes of impressing my office enough to finally garner full employee status and get new health plan discounted glasses, I spent a significant amount of my holiday signed in to work remotely, meticulously going through everything I could think of, so all our files would be perfectly updated for the coming year, with no more clients slipping through the cracks or being misplaced due to spelling mistakes. (The number of people who sign up with commas for periods in their e-mail addresses is simply ridiculous). I signed in when I got up and again after dinner almost every day of the holiday, without fail. “Notice what a shiny, industrious little go getter you’ve got on your hands,” I hoped. “See how I’ve gone through the worst of our dreary lists with a fine tooth comb, straightening everything up!” Even through the weekend, it turns out, because who pays attention to what day it is when on holiday, when what I really wanted to be doing was deleriously playing out in the snow.

Guess what backfired.

I filed my hours today and got a letter back, “Can you account for these hours?” Bafflement turned to shock turned to hurt when the term “honor system” was mentioned. I immediately saw what the problem was: Holidays are for Days You Do Not Have To Pay Your Employees. Apparently we were only ever meant to check in, not actively seek out what else we could manage to do, so now not only did it turn out that I worked those weekends for free, my employers might be questioning my work ethic! I don’t know if there’s any office accusation as depressing. Bah. Argh. Hate. I’m not one of those flaky “my word is my bond” types, but damn do I hate being even slightly accused of being a liar. I still occasionally feel terrible about how I misremembered who was in a story about spilling coffee on William Gibson from when I was fifteen. That’s how much it galls me. Going back on Monday is not going to be fun.

I’m still glad about what I accomplished, but now, instead of being pleased to be back, I’m simply morose.

a bit of random curiosity

Something I only noticed recently about Canada, in that way where one realizes things about home only when one is away, is that we’re incredibly soft with our Metric System. Our highway signs are in kilometers, but we typically measure height in feet and inches and weight in pounds. Though I was raised with only metric in my textbooks, my units of measurement are as follow: millimeter, centimeter, inch, foot, meter, yard, kilometer, mile.

Is this just a Canadian thing?

meme: continuing the time machine

Warren started a good New Year’s tradition last year, asking his readers to post a new photo of themselves along with a message to their future selves. I took part and promptly forgot about it, until he posted again this year, reminding everyone to “Go back and look. Drop a message back there to your past self, and let them know how things went.”.

Looking back was a profoundly odd experience, both distant and intimate, and my post felt incredibly difficult to answer, as well as follow up. It is generally the difficult things, however, which are later the most worthwhile, so I took part again, and expect to keep doing so for as many years as I remember.

This is my letter for this year, to the Jhayne of 2010:

You just took this picture with the camera that Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer’s photographer gave you to use in lieu of your dead one. It’s been that kind of year. Hold onto the wonder of that, hold onto that progress and use it to the last possible drop.

Unfortunately, when you took this picture you had to hold the lens on by hand because the bouncer who searched your bag last night dropped it onto cement and cracked the lens. It’s been that kind of year too.

Other things have happened which have been just as unexpected in both directions. You broke off with That 1 Guy, but met David, and have been trying to make a life with him to some stable success.

You traveled more this year than you have since you were a child, and for the first time you revisited every place you’ve called home: Vancouver, Montreal, Toronto, L.A., and San Fransisco. (The friends you made in those places are important. Keep in touch. Send those packages you’ve been thinking about, it’s never too late.)

This upcoming year, you’re going to start selling prints and get more serious about creating. You’ve been supporting David, and that’s been taking a lot out of you, but once he gets a job, insist on that time for yourself. Insist that you keep up the 365 with no slacking. I want you to write more as well, to stay up late and pound on the keys about something you care about, and see if you can’t post every day, too.

That said, I want you outside more, too. You live in Vancouver, it’s got trees and things, you might as well go visit them once and awhile. I know you want to spend all your time working to pull yourself out of debt, but there are other priorities too, and you’ve well discovered that keeping up the network will net you enough travel to keep you from going completely crazy, so don’t worry about it so much. Find more interesting things to be concerned about. The more you go outside, the more you meet people, the more likely you are to fall in love. You miss being in love, I know, because I’m you and it aches inside like an essential part of your life has been scraped hollow.

Also, go to New York. You know why. And get your driver’s licence. And your passport. There are people who have said they will pay for it. Stop feeling too indebted and bloody well take them up on it, or I’ll come over there and thrash you, see if I don’t.

ps. learn to code, too, and get that website happening. a huge chunk of your life is on hold because you don’t know how to make what you need.