2000-07-06 :: 02:15:32

note loathing a full month's delay, transitioning secrets

[ Written on 07/03/00 ]

Soundtrack: J-Live, "The Best Part" - CD-R burned for me by Adam; The Beatles, "The Beatles Anthology Vol. I" [Disc 1]

Almost a month without an entry. Was it an interesting time, or not? I originally didn't punctuate that with a question mark, but rather a period. My finger just hit the period, then I tried to go with that idea, but it was rather horrible. I almost feel like the fact that I did the period thing unintentionally is a bad sign from the subconscious, but I'll go on anyway.

The problem is that I have these experiences and then never get around to writing them up. Then when I look back on my furiously scribbled notes I feel like they wouldn't be worth elaborating. Then I know the memories will fade quickly, like the rawness of a dream captured in shorthand after the alarm goes off that becomes painfully vague when you try to remember it a few months later (what the hell is that word I wrote there?). Then I want to write them up again in the name of some 'posterity' ideal, but I am paralyzed by having too much about which to write. Let's see if I can find some kind of compromise in there somewhere.

It's tough to write when listening to J-Live, though. It's tough to do anything listening to him, actually, as his lyrics are so banging I keep stopping to try to figure them all out. Lately all I want to hear is hip-hop, as rock just seems tired and overdone right now. Maybe it's just summer making me beat-happy. With The Roots show down, I eagerly await the Spitkicker tour, especially since Adam hasn't led me astray yet.

So the summer, what is happening with it, anyway? It's nearly halfway done.

I said I got a job; the first thing I took notes on was my interview for it. They asked me what my greatest achievement was, and I asked if it had to be on my r�sum�, to which they said "No." Pausing, I thought briefly, then decided [and articulated] that while it wasn't so much an achievement as something to constantly work at achieving, my greatest achievement was trying to be a "good" person: a good son, brother, business partner, student, and so on, and having done my part so far. They asked me how I defined success, and more directly, what I would like to see when I am looking back on my life in my old age. "Well, I would like to be successful in business, well-off, but quietly well-off, with my privacy. I would want my family around me, and my friends, and to have done a good job as a parent. And I would want to never be too set in my ways, like my law professor. I would want to remember that the people I deal with are individuals, because it gets hard to avoid grouping and lumping as time goes on. That was something I learned in his class, when thinking about the role of the judge."

That parent thing set off Buck (the interviewer), who seized on it and asked me what makes a good parent (!). You may imagine that a nineteen year old (at the time) with no known descendants probably has little field expertise (yep), but I mustered an answer based on my upbringing and my feelings on the matter, because at this time I feel like I can honestly begin to point fingers at my parents (and frankly, I think they did a pretty damn good job). It seems like a fine idea to document this answer above the rest for possible later reference. A good parent loves their kids and makes sure they know it, is authoritative (not authoritarian or permissive), makes the kids a priority and demonstrates it to them (I mentioned seeing a Tom Cruise article recently where he discussed how he will not sign autographs when out with his children), and doesn't try to make up for lack of involvement with so-called "quality time." It has to be a first-degree relationship, not one augmented by a nanny -- you be the one helping with the science fair backboard and making pumpkinseed cookies with them on Halloween. And you let them know that you will always talk to them about anything. Buck told me my answers reminded him of John Wooden, the winningest NCAA basketball coach of all time, which I took as a complement and a good sign of being hired. (Later I found out that the company founders are very big on Wooden. But you knew I was hired, so I've killed the suspense already.) He added that Wooden said to be a good parent one should love one's spouse. I considered that and agreed; it was a solid original answer with a lot of truth behind it, especially because it isn't a concept directly linked to children, like those about which I prattled. The parent question was the one I liked most because it wasn't the typical bullshit question, i.e. "What's your biggest weakness?" Yawn. Please. (Not that one of the interviewers -- who ended up being my boss-boss -- didn't ask that, but anyway.)

"But anyway" is such a throwaway ending to a sentence. It's up there with "and whatnot." Perhaps my most egregious lazy ending is "etc." I abuse "etc." a great deal, often when I don't feel like pushing my brain to expound on the subject further than it already has. "The interpretations will be lost if I try to go further, I cannot capture what I am trying to say in words" I tell myself. Bullshit. I should just cut off the sentence and leave it amputated instead of cobbling that lousy three letter bit onto it.

Outside of that, I am going to stop looking at my notes for a moment. I've thought about where I am (probably partly birthday related, partly just where I am in life) and I realize that the frustration I feel is probably the fact that this is a time of transition and I am not quite sure how to sail these seas. I think the problem is that a lot of it is [unfortunately] experience-centric and that means that I'll just have to keep getting my hands dirty and my mind overworked before I get it right. I am hopeful that there will be an integration, one that will let me know when to think and when to just understand why I feel a certain way and let go and not waste energy/time.

So what about my birthday? I'm the big 2-0. How big is it, really? If we didn't have a decimal system, if we had eight fingers instead of ten, I suppose sixteen would be a much more traumatic birthday. (Well, sixteen is anyway, but that isn't the point.) But I do feel older. What would I want to tell a four-year-old, and what would I want to ask a 75-year-old? When I was getting my driver's license renewed, two little girls (one 3.5, the other 4) were sitting near me, and showed me their DMV coloring books, colored far outside the lines in clipboard-attached pen. I talked to them for a bit (the four-year-old was mixing Spanish and English, so I just nodded a lot), and I felt my age. I could see that the Spanish-speaker (Stephanie) was going to be a flirty little heartbreaker; she was kissing everything in sight, including the other girl, who looked like a prettier version of the Pepsi girl with her giant brown eyes. She was more polite and demure. Those two were the centers of the social circle, but there were also a few Filipino children on the periphery. The youngest one of them was always crying, one was chubby and a silent observer, one was a skinny rail whose gender I couldn't easily discern. The last one was quietly wandering around the first two girls as they colored, destined for bookishness. The Pepsi girl, Kaitlynn, had a younger sister (I think it was Alexandra) of about one year who kept climbing back relentlessly into her stroller, and upon success, her mother would lift her out again and the toddler would repeat the challenge. I was really amused by how much energy and patience she had for the same physical task. I started sounding like my Dad: "Boy, I wish I had that much energy." How silly is that, when I am not even that old? When I look back on this, I am going to feel very foolish.

I suppose a related quote to all of this transition/age talk is one that I've been dispensing lately. Alex Garland's (author of The Beach, one of my all-time favorite books) second book, The Tessaract opens with the following quote: "The larger the searchlight, the larger the circumference of the unknown" - Dick Taylor. Another good one, by the author himself: "We can see the thing unraveled, but not the thing itself."

I am not in the mood to post this right now; there's too much to add and make more cohesive. I'll edit and add stuff tomorrow.

[ Going to read Cardozo's The Nature of the Judicial System before I sack out @ 3:50AM ]

[ Momentary edits on 07/04/00 @ 2:10AM before sleep ]

[ Entry resumed on 07/05/00 @ 10:20PM with additional edits above ]

That is somewhat more satisfying. When I am not writing here I often think about how I could be writing here. I construct better sentences in my mind than ever grace these pages. Words combining just as my consciousness departs are lost because I can't move my hands. I wanted to write about Ocean City's disturbing opposites, the beautiful beach, sky, and weather versus the crass tourist population and the money-magnet traps that seem photocopied along the boardwalk (incidentally, I found out that the entire block we were near was owned by a single individual). I wanted to go on talking about Pa�l's and my slightly polluted stroll down the boardwalk in the middle of the night that culminated in an impromptu sing-along with a street guitarist and how that made me feel. Unfortunately when the moment has lost its immediacy it no longer seems worth discussing. What does that mean, if anything?

Jordan (12:17:24 AM): do you ever have the problem where as soon as what you want to write about is no longer immediate it no longer seems important enough to write about

Kate (12:18:01 AM): thpt. it doesn't have to be a journal entry. that's far too constricting. better to think about what you really want to remember, and write about that....and it doesnt matter if it's a diary entry or just a regular web page or what.
Kate (12:18:14 AM): when that happens, i don't write it.
Kate (12:18:28 AM): it means it wasn't worth writing as it was.

Jordan (12:18:34 AM): well i always have that problem
Jordan (12:18:40 AM): nah, it's too little time
Jordan (12:18:45 AM): i have great notes
Jordan (12:18:51 AM): scribbled on sheets of orange scrap paper

Kate (12:20:03 AM): the filtering process.

Jordan (12:23:07 AM): ?
Jordan (12:23:09 AM): go on

Kate (12:25:41 AM): people who have a forum for writing, or a need to write, or an audience, will be constantly (even subconsciously) looking for subject material. so you have gathered your potential subject material, but not all of it is worth communicating...some of it's best left as your poetic memory secrets or whatever....sacred to yourself, in a way. other things are for sharing because they'll also mean something to other people, or affect other people, etc.

So did Alice1 run out of things to convey, or is she really dead? Did Mungleford die bitter and leave his child fatherless? Or did he survive his divorce and find that his survey to meet women worked out and in his joy he forgot his diary? Did JoeyD get sick of writing to amuse us and move on, or is he another body on the diary pyre? Where did the old Virgin go and will she ever get laid? Did you notice that she did post pics and would you like to volunteer to assist her like I would? All those diaries for which I don't have the password, how will I ever know what happened to them? How very "Being John Malkovich" all of this is.

I bring that up because it's in my notes, next to words like "meta" and "brilliance." Look, I can't escape. Help. Right above it is "Hard disks!" because Pa�l (with whom I saw the film) had several hard disk platters from old computers (imagine thicker, slightly wider, metal CD's) that were recovered when his roommates destroyed a computer of said antiquity as an end-of-year celebration. Does it bother you how fleeting all of these digital words and lives are? I thumbed those cold, dented, slightly bent up disks, imagining what data they once stored.

Now that I think about it again, maybe my lack of writing is that apathy of which Pa�l thinks I need more. Or maybe it's apathy in the wrong direction, guided towards the wrong target. Or maybe it is what Samir was talking about when he said that ten years down the line from where I am now, he had just stopped thinking so much about the "big questions" that used to keep him up late at night. I remember at one point during our post-polysci dinner I said "I'm a man, what the fuck do I know?" and Samir said "That's a first line to a book if I ever heard one." Joseph agreed, but it's going to have to be the second-to-last sentence of this entry.

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On 06/21/00 I wrote in photoplay.