Escaping the Trunk

Today, I turned 26. I celebrated by teaching outdoors. (One of my students even brought me cake!) Death Ray is making a barbecue chicken pizza (with bacon!) together, and we also have the entire second season of Fullmetal Alchemist to watch.

25 was a good year. Here are some of the things I did:

• Set up this website (with Rachel’s patient assistance) after years of depending on subdomains. Sometimes I miss the community (actually, I miss it a lot) but there’s something to be said for spending more time outside an f-list, away from the wank. This isn’t to say I miss out on -fails like Amazon and Race, but I hear about them through different sources without my natural, acquisitive “must check all available links!” impulse kicking in.
• Attended my first NIN show.
• Learnt some Japanese.
• Visited Japan. Learnt that I am a bad traveller, or at least a persnickety one. I attribute this to my not having travelled very much beforehand, and therefore not having really accumulated the coping skills necessary for being lost somewhere totally foreign. (I did, however, stumble into tucked-away jazz clubs, give chocolate to middle-aged men whose names I didn’t know, and share a bath with a family whose portrait I later took to cap off their summer vacation.)
• Discovered that in many ways, the hardest thing to accept about my relationship with Death Ray is that he consistently tolerates this behaviour, without erupting into accusation or abandonment. I keep expecting him to act like other men. He persists in not doing so.
• Deepened my friendships with Dave, Peter, and Karl. I have a home here, now, one that exists outside my marriage (though as a result of it). I feel like I’m part of something where (for some bizarre reason) just being myself is enough.
• Wrote most of a Master’s thesis on anime, fandom, and cyborg theory.
• Became a teacher. I’m surprised at how much I enjoy it. Probably no one else is, though. I have a tendency to lecture.
• Chose a living space with my partner. Despite having lived together for roughly four years, this is the first time we’ve actually managed to select a spot together. Circumstances conspired against us, previously. I enjoy our current location a great deal moreso than our previous one: it is safer and more densely-packed, with all the things I imagined myself living close to when I imagined living in a global city. I feel like a grown-up.
• Was lucky enough to have some stories published.
• Decided to apply for this program in foresight. (Wish me luck.)

For 26, I’d like to finish up my thesis (obviously), publish more stories, exercise more, and continue my current trend of feeling more like myself. I noticed this year at Ad Astra that, as a panelist, I was tapping into an identity that I’d forgotten I once had. I felt at home — not at the con, but in my own skin. This feeling had eluded me for a long time. I hadn’t understood how long, or how much I needed it, until that moment. Now I don’t want to lose it, this sense of having caught up to myself. I want to be more genuine. I want to be myself.

Finally.

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I’m busy, today. However, I may Twitter in frustration, as I install plugins here and build a website elsewhere (more on that, later). I also have some school administration stuff to attend to (documents to request, phone calls to make).

But first, I must buy presents.

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For your listening pleasure:

That’s Steve Reich, courtesy of Karl Schroeder, who I woke up for crépes on Saturday, and who is an expert in obscure and improbable rocketry.

Other discussions included, in no particular order:

• Racefail 09
• Paranoia Agent
• The Shine Anthology
• Mushishi
• Twitter
• This MDES programme
• The Fleet Foxes
• Kings, and why you should be watching it, already

And also my career(s). Which tomorrow will involve filling out forms, building websites, and doing re-writes. And thinking about robots, the aesthetics of optimism, and the most efficient use of locative tagging and UAV’s.

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Further to Mr. Stross’ point about the future collapsing wave-like into the present, this evening I used Google Video Chat to talk to Boston for free, at which point my interlocutor said, slowly drawing his spoon free of his mouth, “You know, every day, we’re waking up in the world we read about in books as children.”

“That’s true, we are.”

“I want to cover this wall in screens. I want to talk to everyone in those screens.”

“Like The Family,” I said, referencing Bradbury.

“I mean, I carry my life with me in this little piece of metal. Everything’s there.”

“Hey, at least you haven’t implanted something that’s bound to leak out inside you,” I said, referencing Gibson.

“…That’s what she said.”

(This is exactly why we’re friends. That right there. Well, that, and a bunch of other things. But you get the gist.) 

But it does make me think — depending on how many little windows there are, I could organize dinner parties across time zones. I could have my boys with me again, from Seattle to New York and all points in between. The interface is that simple. My camera and mic are that good. I’d just have to make sure that my meal was relatively un-messy, so as to avoid strategically-crippling spills. The more I think about this, the more desperately I want it, especially as American Thanksgiving draws near. 

Where was this feature on election night?

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