the Hologram turns 25

Sometimes I get covered with the things that are all over other people's lives and I suddenly find myself there...

I was at brewery today [because it's Wednesday] and missing my lover because he was off doing himself things as he should...and I struck up a conversation with a friend of mine. A friend who, if I were still the sort of girl who were still shopping for lovers I would consider [if only because he smells so good and seems superficially powerful] and I thought to myself about this friend and another friend sitting across the table from us both: are they sleeping together?

It's not as though I am the sort of person who thinks she really has a 6th sense for these things, in fact I've been hoping that they would sleep together for a while, so it could be wishful thinking. Because I like him and I like her and I think that they should each be able to enjoy one another's company [sexually] without the encumbrances of social graces. And I truly was just intoxicated enough [as often I can be on Wednesdays because my lover is off doing himself things and I am free to be as thoroughly silly as I can muster] that I thought I might be good enough friends with this friend of mine [as friends from long ago] to just ask.

"Just as an aside," I began. "Are you two sleeping together?"

"Well, sometimes. Occasionally. VERY rarely," he answered. "Why can you tell?" Which struck me as an odd question. Is this female intuition something that people really put stock in?

"I'm mainly noisy," I responded. "I wouldn't say I'm observant or anything. I just wondered."

And those are all things that are rather true [true enough] for polite brewery conversation with fairly good friends when I am mostly more drunk than they are. Mostly I am intoxicated by the idea of the two of them sleeping together, that is having sex, that is making love, and mostly I hope that it makes them feel good about themselves and each other when they do it.

Do they?

It makes me think back to those days of early love that so easily get eclipsed by really getting to know someone [as in, seeing them when they have food poisoning, or washing their socks]. And it is not as though those things make someone less lovable, but they do make him different in my eyes than he was before [which is an appreciable difference].

Of course, I then have to remember that these two friends of mine probably aren't really on the track for being in love. They probably are fighting against it, or one of them is, or neither is but they assume that the other is...

It's so hard to be young and have feelings for someone, to have obligations for someone. To not know who you are and want to see if what you might be looks good next to what someone else might be.

And it all gives me that obscene surging feeling just below the navel and just above the clitoris.

What exactly does it look like to other people when they see me with my partner? I've been walking around in my recent life not quite knowing people enough to ask them what they think, which is in it's own way liberating because [seriously] who was ever better off for caring what others thought about their major life decisions? But on the other hand it makes one feel isolated from that continuity of self that others can reflect when you forget yourself.

He fills me with this feeling of being comfortable in the way I act myself, in the things I want, in the commitment to decide to want the same things together. Can someone see that when they look?

In a time when my whole life could be on Facebook or YouTube or on some blog somewhere [...] what does it really mean to appear a certain way? I could almost convince myself that I was deconstructed if I really thought any specific way about identity [other than to say it is some sort of hologram].

But I say things like "I love you" which are exactly true...and exactly only possible because of what time and in which place I live [and yet knowing that does not change a thing about how I feel]. Meaning that feeling is it's own bottomless pit of trying to mean something...

I sometimes get to having these conversations with myself [and my future and past selves], and incarnations of my lover, exemplars of my parents and far off ancestors...my unconceived, unborn children. And fantasy is every bit as real as reality even when you know the difference.

Finally, I know that what I am isn't crazy: it's human. And I don't walk around wanting to be enveloped in the fantasies that I lived for as a younger me, but I sometimes wish that I had something solid to stand on. And I wonder if many of the things that the me of today does are to hold onto that fantasy in the same way that the old me thought that sex was love and caressing was intimacy.

The farther that I get from what I was supposed to be the more I realize what I am, and the more I see that what I am is curiously similar to what I was always supposed to be. And it makes the me in the middle, the mistrustful and rebellious me, wonder if I will have to pay later [with the joy of a later me] for the incongruity of these choices and the irreconcilability of self and other. Just as it makes the me of the present resentful of those poorly formed versions of myself who can't believe that anything is "right" or "correct" unless it is painful, lonely and detached from the affection of others.

So the comfort must be the later me [who can only be the projection of the current me]. The me who is just enough of myself to look back over this period of life and see that it served its own purpose and taught me everything that I really needed for the next thing.

And what does she look like?

The sin of thinking it won't happen to you

As I sit here at my desk drafting a letter to my elected officials, with things generally being sort of upside down out there in the US economy [and it's looking like the global economy too], and my general belief that the government hasn't been quite right at any point in my life, I have at times been guilty of fearing that the bottom will soon drop out of everything that I know and we'll all die a horrible, well-deserved death.

Seriously, I spent nearly all of my adolescence either writing about the end of the world or the part just after the end...

These days however, I am feeling pretty smug. Why? Well, as it only just occurred to me, I've recently gotten up on my moral high-horse. I live in a state that is so poor [overall] that our housing prices have not diminished. I'm lucky if I use my car once a week so the gas price increases seem far away. I'm buying local. I'm so used to being broke that even though I now make less than the national average I still can't think of anything I want to spend money on [that I don't already spend my money on]. My electric bill is down to $13/mo...etc.

Life is not so bad. But I still read the news [obsessively] every day [what does it mean when Al Jazeera is going on about how bad the US economy is?] and I realize that for lots of other folks things are looking pretty grim.

What if you've lost your house? What if it costs you so much to drive to work and buy groceries and heat your home now that you can't buy the new Energy star water heater when your old one busts?..in fact you can't buy a water heater at all. What if your kids college money is being eaten by big bank mergers and you realize that they'll have to take a tons of loans in order to make it to university, tons of loans with rising interest rates? [mine just went up...]

For me at least, my main concern has been "when is the bottom going to drop out of this thing so that I can buy a house for what it's actually worth?" I've been thinking to myself "well, I'm doing so many things right, it really sucks for all those other people out there who made bad choices or got duped, but me - I'm doing just fine."

What's wrong with this picture?

Well, other than the fact that everyone else was thinking it right before the recent unpleasantness hit and it didn't save them, nothing. And so it hits me: I'm part of the problem and not so high and mighty as I had been walking around thinking and generally human.

How very disappointing.

I believe I made a pretty classic mistake and one that there seems to be little way of avoiding entirely, but it should serve as an example of what not to do. When the bottom falls out, when the world ends, this little space of respite and solace from the harsh realities of the world will definitely look like a nice place to be [and don't get me wrong, I like it here] but it isn't going to be helpful in the long-run. And the long-run is what we [I] should really be concerned with.

Moral: no one is ever without some responsibility for the state of the lives of others, and no one should ever think that the state of the lives of others cannot be visited upon them despite having done "everything" right. The rain falls on the just and unjust alike.

Sometimes things don't work out

Recently, as in last night at 1:40 MDT, it occurred to me that my writer's block of late has mostly to do with this weblog. There are of course, other factors in play [full-time job, full-time friends, full-time fiance, full-time internet addiction], but mostly the problem is that every time I write I hear someone else's voice reading over my shoulder.

That someone is you [whoever you are]. Who [along with some others] comes to my blog an average of 4 times a day and doesn't stay for very long. I don't blame you for not staying. I haven't been staying here very often myself. I didn't realize that the thought of someone [even someones I don't know and will never know] reading things that I write [when I am mostly fucking around] would cut into my ability to write.

This past weekend, in the absence of man distractions, I found myself having lots of things that I wanted to write about, but I was too out of practice to really get anything down. I think I have to allow myself to go back to paper, or I'm seriously going to never write again. That could potentially quite dangerous.

So maybe I'll not completely abandon this space [I'll not be deleting it] but I think I have to officially go away for a little while.

Z

The less extreme aspects of my life to which I react extremely

I have had cause to think about living today, if only because life ends in death. The father of a close personal friend of my fiance's died over the weekend. Maybe that seems disconnected from me, but it isn't. I'd at least met this man before. Though one does not need necessarily be acquainted with someone to see the hole left by the absence of his life. Of course I didn't know this man at all.

My cousin got married over the weekend [the very same day as the aforementioned death], and I got to watch the woman who was the girl that I knew my whole life say "I do." It was moving in it's own way, if only because I thought of how I soon too will be in the same situation. Seeing my mother after the ceremony was what made me cry. What must it be like to see wedding once you've been married? Once you've been divorced. I've never been married, but it wasn't the wedding that made me emotional [from it I was largely disconnected]. It was thinking about the life-cycle of marriage.

And so it occurs to me once again that all these things I see every day are parts of people's lives. I have a life, and though I am always immersed in it, I rarely stop and see it passing by. Someone was also born on the same day as my cousin's wedding and my fiance's friend's father's death. Someone was probably also separated or divorced. But for me the day was just taking up space. It was a day that was mostly for other people's lives. Almost as if I were visiting.

I go about making my peace with the fact that things end and begin. I find it to be the natural order of things. People are born and people die. If only I could withhold myself from being so shocked by seemingly ordinary things. People's cars overheat and they have to hitchhike. The laminating machine doesn't work. I will sleep alone in my bed tonight through no fault of my own or even anyone else's.

In the grander scheme of things I don't experience much that is worth being truly upset over. Yet I am exceptional at overreacting, blowing things grossly out of proportion and coating all present in my sudden hysteria and worry. Why is it ok with me that people die and not ok with me that we're out of ice cream? I wish I knew why it was only the ordinary things that make my life unmanageable.

I wish that it would all roll off the same way or not roll off at all.

During the artificially illuminated, full expanse of the continual night

I input the data. I dream up how we should order the data. I brought work home with me tonight. In the books [I didn't even know] I've kept little lifemarks [intended to be bookmarks] from the random occurrences of my life. It used to be my job to write down these little lifemarks [signed by author, with postcard postmarked July 2005, with fraternity Rush flyer fall 2002].

And I'm not a library monkey anymore. I've segued into the wave of the future [no longer just a wave = the future]. My television-shopping_mall-typewriter-check_book-stereo-file_cabinet- camera-post_office-card_catalog-music/movie_collection-library- telephone-social_club-photo_album [and more] sits on my desk and I don't notice as my fingers melt into her keys. I don't know how to do much else these days.

I'm not all down on technology anymore. Technology is humanness, and I'm not really all down on humans anymore. I like the human/computer/internet super-organims because it does this, and this, and this, and it's a great adventure every time you trust that your *click* will take you where you thought, where the webdesigner intended. But other things are humanness too, and I get to forgetting them sometimes because of the little white box [I'm on the little white box right now].

I didn't know that I remembered where all of my books had come from. I didn't know that I had learned so much from reading them that I could summarize them years later. I didn't know that I would remember all the books I "borrowed" from people and all the books they've "borrowed" from me. Books...they aren't fundamentally different from ebooks [cuneiform tablets], and I want to feel the paper, but I also want them to last forever. I'm a writer/reader too, and it's not about fame, or money [or the intersection of fame and money], or literary criticism. It's about an idea that follows you from alarm clock to alarm clock, that can't be shaken off until the pen meets the page [the fingers the keys], and the belief that someone somewhere will understand, or care to understand.

But for me, I lately only think to write it all down when I have no one to tell it to. Not to devalue speech, not even to assert that it is ephemeral. But the ideas come out half-thought, half-cocked assemblages of half-baked ideas. And I remember telling my friends not to talk to me so I could write. I remember my dreams of taking a vow of silence, a vow of solitude [like my patron saint] and letting the ideas settle and coalesce into themes I could never have imagined as an oral-ist. After all, I'm not so great on the fly.

My story-telling could only ever live in a text-based world. That is the mark of the shape that the great humanness of technology has left on me and those like me: we love the written word. I don't really worry that my story-telling will die in a hypertext-based world [my readership has never been that wide anyhow]. But there is this phantom part that remembers before the hypertext...I wish I could remember before the text...before the words...

Wherein an adult realizes what "Because I said so" really means

The call signs on radio stations here begin with K. Back home they started with W.

I get to thinking sometimes that there are a lot of things in my life that are here for a reason. For instance: my boss is here to a) teach me to stand up for myself in a nice and professional way [instead of like a 3-year-old child], and to b) remind me what it is that I have decided not to be [for better or for worse]. George W. Bush is here to remind me that a) the opinion of the vast majority of people cannot be trusted, and b) that the opinion of the vast majority of people can change.

This afternoon in the shower I had a conversation with a six-year-old boy [a six-year-old boy in my head] about arbitrariness. These things start out innocently enough.

6-year-old boy: Why do I have to go to bed?
Me: because it's bedtime.
6-year-old boy: But I'm not sleepy
Me: going to bed has nothing to do with being sleepy.

If I were this child [when I was 6 years old] I would then have asked "then why do I have to go to bed" and so I substitute what I would say for what this fictional 6-year-old in my head will have said...while I'm in the shower.

6-year-old boy: Then why do I have to go to bed?
Me: because it's bedtime.
6-year-old boy: That's not fair!
Me: you're right, it's not fair. It's arbitrary. Now go to bed.

The thing about arbitrariness is that there is always some sort of reason that a given condition exists, it's just that it isn't always knowable, explainable or understandable.

Now that I am an adult I get to thinking sometimes that when I had these sorts of conversations with my mother that she should have tried to explain to me why I had to do something. But also now that I am an adult I wonder what she could have said and how hard she would have had to try to make me understand. And also...what would be the point in my understanding if I just had to do what she said anyway?

What would I say to 6-year-old me?

"You have to go to bed so that you will become bored enough that you'll drift off to sleep. And if you go to bed now the chance that you'll be asleep in the next hour is great, because you have the attention span of a 6-year-old. So I'm going to send you to bed now so you can have the optimal amount of sleep before you go to school tomorrow."

6-year-olds, even myself, who manage to understand this statemen still will fail to give a fuck. A 6-year-old is not concerned with getting optimal sleep [which is part of the reason that adults put them to bed instead of allowing them putting themselves to bed]. A 6-year-old wants to run all over the place and be loud and disruptive and do 6-year-old things all the time.

I really can't fault a 6-year-old for this. As a 16-year-old I wasn't that great at allowing myself optimal sleep, but parents have to back off some time, and now that I'm 24 I would still rather be awake than asleep. Hell, I also only recently learned to feed myself when I am hungry, and to stay in bed when I am sick.

Sometimes it is not important to know why, it is just important to do.

The call signs here start with K because in the 1930s the FCC decided that radio stations West of the Mississippi should begin with K while those East should continue [as they always had] to begin with W.

Of course I'm not satisfied with this explanation. Why K and W? Why not E and W [that at least could be said to mean something]? Why not A and B [this would be orderly]? Why not A and Z [this would be logical]? Why not A, G, K, R, W and Z [this is neither orderly nor logical, but it makes as much sense as just K and W]?

Why are there call signs in the first place?

The exist for telling stations apart from one another, they are names. And because they are names they have naming conventions. These conventions don't make them any less arbitrary, and they don't imbue the station with a particularly unique quality simply for existing. That's not the business of names. I have my father's last name because children usually get their father's name, but my parents gave me my first name because they liked it...what is more arbitrary than preference? The point is that I need a name so that someone else can point at me and say I am "this" or I am "that."

Giving a 6-year-old the short answer [Because I said so] or giving them the long answer doesn't change the fact that they are 6 and have to go to bed when they are told. And the short answer and the long answer don't change the fact that the stratigraphy of explanations on any topic rests on something arbitrary.

I used to think [when I was about 10 and feeling like I would really show my mother when I was a grown-up] that I would sit down with my children and tell them all reasons behind why they needed to do things, and because I was so considerate and cared that they understood, they would of course comply.

But that won't happen. Sometimes the only reason that you do something is because you're told, and like it or not, it's the truth about you.

The marriage obscured by the wedding

There are these wedding things, which are necessary to be married, where married is maintaining some union with another human being over a period of time that some other party has witnessed. It is comprised of two or more people, is often between a man and a woman, sometimes results in offspring, and is often expected to last for the length of the committed parties' lives.

The "wedding" and all of it's ethnonymics, boggle the mind of this young woman [anthropologist] approaching the event of marriage in modern America [to say nothing of how her future husband feels because this is not his weblog].

On the one hand, a few brief sketches of marriage and weddings, cross-culturally:

The Oneida commune was a group of men and women all wedded to one another and raising their children in common. An ancient Hebrew man might be required to marry his late brother's childless wife in order to leave a lineage for his brother. The Celts, and modern day Neo-Pagans, could [may] be "handfast" for a year as either a trial marriage or while waiting for a priest. A Nuer man cannot marry unless he has enough cows to convince another man to give his daughter in marriage. The Chamorros young married couple resides with the husband's mother's oldest brother. A Kanuri or L[ater]D[ay]S[aint] wife [once] could have [had] sister wives and one husband. The Yanomamo wives as treaties, and use marriage to form a complex system of tribal allegiances. A catholic woman may become a nun and remain celibate for life, effectively being married to Jesus. The Hawaiian or Egyptian royalty had to marry their siblings. An Inuit widower may marry his deceased wife's sister in order to reproduce. The medieval European woman could expect to never be married if she were raped, having become too soiled, shamed and disgraceful for marriage. A Mosuo woman can have multiple husbands at once.

On the other hand, my image of a traditional American wedding:

A young man and a young woman meet, date. The young man proposes. The young woman's family takes over her life and sinks a small fortune into flowers, churches, dresses, hotel rooms, photography, plane tickets, houseware items, food... Soon after there is a) wedded bliss, or b) divorce. Either there is a) happily ever after, or b) the young couple, unable to assert themselves as to their wants for their wedding, discover that they have no idea who they are or what they want from life. Who is this strange person I have married? And they are back in life [where marriage is not "life" but this little black box of "wedded bliss" that was explained no better than "sex" and "love."]

As it is, I have trouble identifying this [fantasy American] method of union as one that I should embrace [culturally] as my own. But I still want to get married.

And then I remember that there is also the impulse [especially among those who are religious, as I am not] to be married before "God and country." And an impulse among those who are not religious [as I am not] to get married at a court house for less money and a tax break, or to forgo marriage all together and cohabitate [in sin] instead. It can be argued that this last strategy lacks a civil-legitimacy, in that neither partner is able to reap the state programs and rights afforded the married [the tax break, the heath insurance, the right to a loved one's body and possessions after death - all those things denied would-be same-sex spouses].

I get to feeling cultureless quite often, for it is hard to do something as arbitrary as "get married" when you know how varied an act of marriage can be [even discarding the cross-cultural analysis].

We have the option of being monogamous or serially monogamous for our lives. We can have civil unions [by choice or by default], open marriages [for those loathe/unable to commit]. We can get married because the woman is pregnant. We can get married for money, convenience or citizenship. We often are not allowed [by convention or law] to marry someone of another race or religion or socio-economic class than ourself, marry someone of the same sex as ourself, marry our sibling or first cousin, marry more than one person [at a time], marry a non-human.

But I have gotten past much of this already, being in a pre-wedded unit: the betrothed.

So say, you find yourself in a couple [as I do], who understands that marriage is 1 part social encouragement/advantage, 1 part civil legitimacy, 1 part childhood fairy-tale, 1 part choice, and 1 part personal affinity or "love." [I know it sounds un"romantic" but it isn't really]

Once all those ducks are in a row now what? I suppose, in order to form a more perfect union, we should be married, which means having some sort of wedding. Funny, that's just what we have decided to do. But should it be a) traditional [perhaps the more painless choice after all], or b) original and personal.

The idea that a wedding [the ceremony that marks the beginning of a marriage] is supposed to be a reflection of who you are [who you as a couple are] seems at once preposterous and self-defeating. With marriage so often not being entirely about what those getting married really want, why should weddings be about what the wed-ing want? And, furthermore, if the wedding is not completely perfect is then the marriage ill fated?

My cousin is getting married this June and she has opted for a), while I am going with b). I feel as though she has the whole thing laid out for her, which is nice because I can be indecisive, but I also feel as though she is just doing what our family says to make them happy. I think it is nice to have the sort of freedom I now have to construct a wedding that means what it needs to mean for my partner and me, but I wonder why I am always so contrary that I give myself more and more trouble all the time instead of just doing what I am told.

And as for our respective marriages... they have almost nothing to do with our impending weddings.