Wind up, wind down

Andreas makes stuff. Recently, he started making little thingies just for me, including the script for the rotating quotes at the top of these pages, as well as Embed Quicktime because I don’t like vPIP (and frankly, neither does he). We like open source software with no tricky addendums in licensing agreements, and even though I’m hardly a programmer, I like simple code that supports only the basic functions I need. I won’t pretend it isn’t also extremely hot to have personally applicable tools made on request by the man you love.

The switch to hosting videos on my DreamHost server instead of public free hosts like blip.tv was an easy decision. Though I will continue to reference blip.tv when I teach, I will be honest about my dissatisfaction with their advertisers and their subsequent content. Their flash player interface is also atrocious, but that’s the least of my concerns. I get that not everyone lives and breathes Quicktime. I also get that most people don’t leave a free service behind because they run too many ads for the pornographic, union-busting American Apparel. I leave my old videos as they were, links intact, but I can’t imagine I’ll ever actually utilize the ever-expanding service again, despite having real respect for and friendly relationships with its founders.

Lately I’ve had so much to say but am painfully incapable of articulating my fears about our imbalanced world. Instead I make videos about transit and power plants and travel and hope that all of that means something to someone. A college mentor once told me that I have”an unusually strong sense of justice,” and if nothing else, that’s been the theme of my life lately, if not always. While I strive to be less hard on myself, I also get so worked up about word choice that I can’t even write a fucking blog post without anxiety.

Good thing everything is deletable. I’ve taken down old videos along the way, some sort of cardinal sin according to videoblogging gatekeepers. Somewhere between thinking many of those people are overprivileged, irrelevant fellatiators and simply not agreeing with that kind of rule system, I felt great relief in removing some old content from my own video archive. Things become obsolete, were perhaps never interesting at all, and I’ll sustain my identity through my own personal media any way I want.

Dear friends are moving back from the west coast. They are sometimes the closest we come to having a community as many people I know wander through life without grounding or direction. My two best friends will make six-figure salaries upon receipt of their respective graduate degrees this May. I suspect I’ll be making something close to the difference between them. One will take me on a fake honeymoon in early summer. He says it’s the least he can do. Our mothers worked together before our births. When we were sixteen, he called me crying because he had to come out to someone. Now we call and make noises at each other in place of using words.

My parents don’t read anything I write, published or otherwise, but I’m still not sure I can blog about them. My father called me on my birthday, sobbing about how much he misses me, but I haven’t heard from him since. I was also given a birthday cake, the candles later, and only my partner ate it with me while everyone else rushed off to church. There, a woman played Silent Night on the harmonica while people held up glow sticks in place of the candles the fire marshal has banned. No one understood my immediate correlation with late ’90s Midwestern raves. I always feel alone for the holidays.

I fell asleep early on New Year’s Eve, the most anticlimactic holiday of the year, followed closely by the Fourth of July. I’ve been reading old journals, which has been strange and causing unsettled dreams. My best writing came in my worst times, and I loathe what that implies. Caucusing isn’t democratic since you stand in a room full of known parties with no secret ballots. But everyone loves a spectacle.