balding angrily

I spent today in a wheelchair; my company sponsored my time, giving money to a local charity. I’ll post the name of the charity when I can find it. The event is designed to make architects aware of the specific challenges of the wheelchair-bound.

I knew it was going to be difficult, in general terms. Therefore, I’ll focus on a specific.

When did we become so lazy and/or absent-minded that we need a device to close a door for us? I can think of only one place where a door closer is appropriate - at a door that closes in the event of a fire.

You might say, “But Alex, what about at shop entrances? Isn’t that a matter of security? Aren’t automatically closing and locking doors appropriate there?”

No. No they’re not. If we have become so averse to turning around to close the door behind us, we deserve to have our shit stolen. If we have trained generations of people that the door will close itself, then it is our own damn fault. If our national security is at risk because someone forgot to close the damn door, we were never really secure.

You might say, “But Alex, what about doors into bathrooms? Surely, we need to protect the public from seeing dirty bathrooms and/or male body parts.”

No. No we don’t. Again, if you can’t turn around to close a door, you deserve to have your wang looked upon. And again, if, as a society, we have become so lazy that we’re not training people to close doors, we deserve an unwelcome peepshow.

Swinging doors are cloves of garlic to a person in a wheelchair - if a person in a wheelchair is a vampire. Door closers are prickly spines on that garlic - if garlic had prickly spines. Do this. Pick up one of those hand-held counters popular with amusement park line attendants. Carry it around with you one day and click it every time you go through a swinging door. Click it twice if the door has a closer. Fuck it; forget the counter. Just count how many times you have to open a swinging door in a day.

Imagine the number you get is the amount of times you spilled hot coffee on yourself. You would be justifiably afraid of coffee. But you can’t give up coffee, and you can’t NOT spill coffee on yourself. In order to function, every day is a constant barrage of messing your shirt and burning your nipples.

By the end of the day, I feared doors. I feared leaving my cubicle to go to the bathroom. I feared my daily [walk] to Starbuck’s. I feared going to the kitchenette to get a glass of water. I preferred gas pains and a screaming bladder to negotiating the path to the bathroom. I preferred the dull boredom of my computer screen to turning around in my cramped cubicle to look out the window.

But don’t let me discourage you from doing a similar exercise, especially for charity. I’ll do it again next year if only to remind myself how the smallest things can be huge for someone else.

Remember when I wrote about the ThoughtPhone? Remember when Crumpet used that as an art project?

The thing is both gadgets and inner space turn me on. Whenever I come across an article about nano-technology, viruses engineered to produce nano-wires, cybernetics, and other such-like things, I read that article - assuming there are bright colors in the accompanying illustrations.

I’m convinced that in the near future there will be an implanted personal media player - a tiny chip somewhere on one’s body that one can control with thoughts - that feeds information directly to the mind. Think of it as the tiniest iPod underneath the skin. Instead of earphones, the device would excite the correct nerve endings to give a person the sensation of listening to a Brandenburg Concerto. Instead of watching a movie, the device would excite a different set of nerve endings giving a person the sensation of watching Raising Arizona. And that person would start, stop, fast forward, and reverse the movie or music with his thoughts.

I know I’m not using the correct terminology, but hopefully you get the idea. It’d be a harmless mini-Matrix that a person could turn on and off at will.*

There is a company that will soon begin marketing a $300 “brain mouse.” According to the blogs, after an hour of using the “brain mouse,” users can decrease reaction speed by 60% in a video game. It works by reading brain activity and eye movement. My ThoughtPhone and iPod Implant will be here soon.

I’ve told Jerry many, many, many times that if I become paralyzed or otherwise bedridden, it will be his duty to keep me up-to-the-minute in music consuming technology. I want an iPod Implant in my comatose body. I want to be fed a steady stream of classical music, electronic music, and music created by whichever manufactured pop icon is popular at the time. You can talk to me while I’m comatose, but more often than not I’ll probably be ignoring you in favor of my iPod Implant.

*I’m not convinced that an immersive, interactive environment is something I would like. I’m cool with only sights and sounds.

Finally! An opportunity to exploit the youth in my life. My sister-in-law recently granted her daughter (my niece) the ability to text. They have controls over her texting schedule and content, but my niece took full advantage of her new abilities over the weekend. I sat next her a little bit and looked over her shoulder.

It’s old hat to bemoan the illiteracy of youth; so, I won’t go there. I’m fascinated and a little excited at the prospect that they are creating a language. After reading some letters by Thomas Jefferson, I have to acknowledge that we have changed English over the past 250 years. I see texting shorthand as just a continuation of that. In other words, it is my burden to learn what “k y r u so drty” means; it’s not their burden to conform to my outdated concepts of grammar, spelling, and punctuation.

Anyway, she texted me this morning.

Spunky Youth: Am i ur fav
Me: Favorite what? Human? Female? Child under 14? Dark-haired wanderer? And under what criteria are you wanting to be judged? Textual? Hyper-textual? Contextual? Spiritual?
Spunky Youth: Huh
Me: You’re the one who asked if you were my favorite. I’m just trying to ascertain the parameters before I render my verdict.
Spunky Youth: Oh i mean ur favorite person sence im so lovly
Me: You are very lovely; I’ll give you that. However. Connecting your inherent loveliness to some judgment of your overall quality as a human? That’s an incredibly troublesome jump in logic.
Spunky Youth: Huh please dont use big words with me
Me: No big words? Hm. Can’t do that. But I do have to go to work. Ask your mom or dad or teacher what I said.
Spunky Youth: K byese bye
Me: Good day, young lady. Make sure it is a glorious day full of vim and verve.
Spunky Youth: um back 2 u

It was a nice way to start the week.

I like this line from Mary Schmich’s “Wear Sunscreen,” later turned into Baz Luhrman’s “Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen)”:

Don’t worry about the future. Or worry, but know that worrying is as affective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing bubble gum. The real troubles in your life are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind, the kind that blindside you at 4 pm on some idle Tuesday.

I’m rarely able to follow this advice about not worrying, but Mary knows this. Since I graduated college, the worries that blindside me come in the middle of the night. At one time I had a problem with anxiety attacks; I seem to have outgrown those, but I’m still open to 3 am internal wake-up calls. I’m at peace with my worrying nature, but it makes for some sleepless nights that affect Jerry.

Last night was one of those nights, and because it was Friday night I felt free to burden Jerry with my depressed, verbal hand-wringings. I’m worried about my career path as usual. You know that I’m unhappy in architecture, but I’ve been successful enough in stifling my unhappiness or looking on the brighter side so that I can go to work and function. The unhappiness came back, but after a workout and a desk cleaning, I’m feeling better this morning.

Anyway, I’ve also figured out that I’m incredibly swayed by caffeine; my body chemistry is fucked. I can avoid exercise for a week, have a café mocha at 7:00, and my body will go into a full scale revolution.

*another random reference

Let me tell you something about the past, about bringing high school into the present. The past doesn’t change, and when we look at it too hard, we revert back. We assume the roles we played in it.

I was in a group that rewarded cleverness. We tried to out-do each other with our vocabularies. We talked about our favorite words like others talked about TV. We stressed words like eschew as a way to both let the others know we knew the word and let each other know how silly (but not really) we were for using it in conversation. Back then it made us insufferable, but that bent or weakness for cleverness or self-conscious irony continues in my writing and conversation. I’ve given up trying to not be clever or ironic. I love clever.

I was also not as smart as the other people in our group. This didn’t matter to them, but it mattered to me. I’m sickly competitive that way. I always felt like I had to prove to my friends that I could be as literate as them. When passing notes between classes, I felt inferior to them - that I didn’t put my words together as well as them - that I hadn’t been simple enough.

More than that, I yearned for their approval and seethed when I felt I didn’t get it. That also continues. Hopefully, I successfully masquerade that as shtick.

Getting in contact with those people has brought all that back, and I’m once again paranoid that the English major, the author, the one of us who read 5 books a week is judging me. Yes, I know she isn’t. Yes, I know she’s way moved on, that she has a life divorced from the past.

Fucking high school. I loved it, and it did a number on me - in a good way.

I’m taking an American Literature class. It’s a community college course, lasts only 11 weeks, and the readings for it are easy enough. The teacher is my age and somewhat frustrating in that he is easily derailed by off-topic lobs thrown by a New York Geriatric that sits in the back.

I’ll call him Professor X because it makes me think that he might have super powers.

Professor X: So, Jefferson and Hamilton had this contentious relationship…they still wanted a Union, but they wanted it in different ways.
NY Geriatric: Why did Hamilton get his head on the $10 bill and Jefferson’s on a nickel?
Professor X: …
Class: …
NY Geriatric: I guess that shows who won THAT fight.
Professor X: Actually, they came to a compromise…
NY Geriatric: I guess they were never married.
Professor X: …
NY Geriatric: They would’ve learned to compromise.
Professor X: This is off the subject, but you know that Jefferson actually had quite a few relationships…
NY Geriatric: Did he have a dog?
Me: If you don’t shut the fuck up, I’m going to beat you with your dentures.

So, besides class, I’m still in a funk about the Aptitude Testing. I feel upside-down…both trapped and with too many possibilities. When I think about scenarios to get out of my situation, my mind races, and I lose sleep. I’m impatient with myself for being so flimsy and frozen.

So, yeah. I’m already sick of Gillespie.

I spent the last two days in small offices at small desks learning what makes me tick. Before I invest a lot of money in re-educating myself for a change in career, I wanted to spend some time and a smaller amount of money understanding my suitability to different professions. My worst fear is that I would spend 2-3 years in school and many thousands of dollars only to learn that I don’t like teaching…or whichever profession I choose.

This two-day experience was designed to learn my aptitudes - my inherent strengths, those things that, if used in my job, would give me a sense of worthiness. That’s the theory anyway.

Not that I doubt that theory. It’s just that it’s a theory, and one of the things I found out about myself is that I don’t do abstract analysis. In other words, ephemeral, non-structure-based concepts elude me. I excel at structural analysis. In other words, my bag is pulling apart concrete concepts based on things that can be seen and touched, 3D things. Not that I need to see something, but I can easily imagine a 3D, touchable, structured thing. I’ll get to why that pisses me off at the end.

Here are some highlights to the testing:

• I picked up tiny paper clip-sized pins from a tray and put them in small holes.
• I picked up the same pins and transferred them from one set of holes into another set of holes using a tweezer while a woman with a stopwatch observed, making me feel like a trained monkey.
• I arranged on a dry-erase board little hexagon tiles with words like “cow, milk, farm, eco-system, natural resource, wheat, grain” written on them while the same woman with a stopwatch observed. With my arms, bent at a simian angle, moving rapidly in front of me, and hunched over the dry-erase board, I looked like a trained monkey.
• I held a board with a tiny hole in it at arms-length and pulled it to my face while concentrating on another board held by the same woman with the stopwatch. Her board had an X on it, and I had to keep my eye on the center of the X while she held the board at different areas on her body. At one point she held the X over her crotch.
• I was given the question, “If you woke up one day to find that you didn’t have to ever sleep again and that neither did anyone else, what would you do with your time? What would you encourage other people to do?” I had to think up as many ideas as I could in a short amount of time. Since I was writing fast and coming up with ideas off the top of my head, one of my ideas was, “Wear pink underwear - the kind with little frills.” Then I got embarrassed and wrote, “Not because I’m a sicko or anything - just because, you know, I have all this time. Why not try something new?”

From these and other tests, the woman with the stopwatch determined that I excel at structural analysis, that I’m an excellent brainstormer, and that I catch on to patterns quickly.

She suggested that if I teach, I should teach higher education or prep school kids. She seemed to think that I would get very impatient in a classroom with children that didn’t get a concept fast enough. She said that I’d be great one-on-one with a kid that wasn’t getting a concept, but not a whole group of kids.

And I suck at moving pins from one set of holes to another set of holes. I can understand this - what with my fat, hairy fingers and all.

The list of possible professions in which I would use all my aptitudes was long, but this structural analysis thing seemed to be really important. Also, I need a combination of working by myself and with other people. And when I am doing something routine, my ideaphoria, or brainstorming, aptitude kicks in and my mind starts to wander. I’m a daydreamer.

Given all this and more, apparently I make a perfect architect. Fuck you, Stopwatch Lady.

Gimme-gimme _more. Gimme _more. Gimme-gimme _MORE.

Say what you want about this week’s Britney/VMA/Chris Crocker hubub; her robots can create an insidious brain-worm. Given this particular one is tied to a moment of infamy, I say she’s already made her comeback.

Chicago is…

It’s New York City without the people spitting on you. It’s my new favorite city. We stayed near Rush and State, the center of the hip-and-cool-party-people night-life. The weather was beautiful. Birds were singing, police gave out candy instead of tickets, and pan-handlers smelled like flowers. When we got back, I was ready to pack everything and move up there.

We had a waiter that told racist jokes. We had a cabby that got all scrunchy when we wanted to pay with a credit card. We had a tour guide that took us aside and told us in a hushed voice all the latest hot gossip about Frank Lloyd Wright. Jen-An regaled us with poop stories. Owen didn’t know how to lay on the beach and waste away. He got flustered and had to “do something.” I met some fellow Filmspotters, and ate a Mediterranean mound of chicken wrapped in phyllo. We got in-room massages in which I learned that my hands and forearms are the most intimate places on my body a person can touch.

And we ate Riesens along with lots and lots of other good foods.

Buy my shit. I want an iPhone.

It’ll be here on Thursday.  All my dreams will come true, and I’ll be the most popular boy on campus.  Passers-by will throw sex at me.  I will never get sick again.  If I had cancer, it’d be cured.

Jen-An, Owen, Jerry and I went to Chicago last week. The highlight of my time in Chicago was fulfilling a lifelong dream of mine. Family Guy stole my dream and made it a parody, so you may already know where this is going. I wanted to sit in front of Georges Seurat’s masterwork at The Art Institute and listen to The Dream Academy.

In Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, I identified with Cameron. I never wanted to be Ferris. I wanted to be - and be with - Cameron. He wasn’t my first movie crush, but he was important. The scene where the camera switches between Cameron’s eyes and those of the little girl in Sunday Afternoon on the Isle of La Grande Jatte was powerful for 14-year old me. I understood the longing in that exchange.

A little later, I started exploring Sondheim and rented the PBS performance of Mandy Patinkin in Sunday in the Park with George. I didn’t know it was about Georges Seurat’s famous painting until the end of Act I or that it was a multi-Tony-nominated musical; I thought I was making a discovery. The story is about the character of Seurat who isolates himself in pursuit of his art. That’s what I got out of it anyway.

Again, there’s that theme of loneliness with this painting. As a lonely little fella, I connected with this painting.

It’s breath-taking in person, and I nearly cried sitting there looking at it. I feel like Seurat painted it just for me, and I’m sure I’m not the only one. I’m sure I’m not the only one who feels like that scene is Ferris Bueller’s Day Off was filmed just for me. Or that “Sunday,” the song from Sunday in the Park with George, was written just for me. Or that Seth MacFarlane and Co. wrote the parody in Family Guy just for me.

I’m sure that these things are loved by many, many, many people. How Eleanor Rigby of us.