The Log – 2002 Edition, #1

Yeah, so there he is. I think this should be his headshot, but I bet he won’t agree with me. Hi there, studmuffin.

Anyway, check out my Manhattan at night on March 11th pictures, complete with reference photo from that morning. Amazing shots, if I do say so myself, and, even though you have to suffer through low quality images, I thought you might be interested in seeing the haunting effects that the lights had. In a lot of ways, they were hard to look at because of what they represented. Very nice tribute, tho, IMO.

All hail retired porn stars and wannabe gangsters!

“As for your Darwinism thoughts, I offer this: Darwin posited that the creature most fit to survive would be the one that got to procreate and continue the species. That means two things–first, if you are indeed surviving and thriving, you must be part of that group most fit to survive. Second, if you ARE in that “fit-to-survive” group, you should be having lots and lots of sex, not necessarily to continue the species, but to /practice/ continuing the species.

Of course, some scholars (myself included) would argue that human civilization was, at its inception, designed to thwart the then-undiscovered theory of “survival of the fittest” and that it’s succeeded famously. Now what we have, these scholars would argue, is a society that nurtures the weakest links, in an effort to equalize the populace. In an unfortunate turn of events, though, the weakest links in the chain had developed their own survival method long before society grew up to protect them. This survival method was to have tons of equally-weak offspring and know that, through the law of averages, some of them would survive. Bad news for society, now that we’re keeping these weak links alive through societally-implemented safeguards.”

Why the hell do I write this stuff? Damn. This was time this morning that I could have been sleeping or working on Venture or even working out.

We shot our fight scene yesterday, first of all. Seven hours of pain and suffering, as well as a few kicks and punches (that caused the pain, really) were what it cost us. Now we edit and edit hard. I’m hoping that we can manage a few effects, but this rests heavily on the goodwill and willingness of Allan.
Also this weekend, Mike and I made it out to Culture Club (the most accessable, least-pretentious club in New York) with Melody, Julie and her friend from Florida (whose name I forget at the moment) and it was a good time. It’s always a good time when we go out with the girls.

Anyway, all-in-all, it was a good weekend, even though after the fighting yesterday I was basically useless.

I’ve paid attention to the activities of New York women since I’ve moved here, and I’ve reached certain conclusions. The pertinent conclusion here is that New York women ain’t into me. Why, then, am I going on a date (for what it’s worth) tonight with someone I’m certain can’t stay interested in me for more than a few minutes?

Okay, well, it’s been hours and hours and I don’t care about this thread anymore. But I think the answer is that I try hard to make each decision based on all the information–not just some of it. So I go out. And I try to have fun. Maybe this girl won’t even hate me. We can hope.

In other news, I fixed my door today, but the door itself is still all fucked up. Maybe it’s time for a new door. Can I do that?

In related news, there are (and will continue to be, really) minor changes around the site. I haven’t pointed them out so much, but some are major (and were difficult) like the framed board and the spin-off of the Venture site and some are minor, like the ongoing changes to the main page. Feedback is always appreciated, of course.

there are things that I try to remember that I want to put on my web page next time I’m updating. these are things that i almost always forget. This morning, for example, I was thinking about things that I was going to do today, and, while I knew that my website was down, I knew that as soon as it went back up, I would want to have an update ready because it’d had been some days again, and I hate that. Maybe it’s time to get some wireless plan together that would allow me to dial in to an ISP and use my PC on the fly. We’ll see. That’s not really the problem, though—the problem is lack of time/inclination when I’m in front of my PC and I know it. Also, I don’t have anything interesting to report, complain about, or even rant about when I do sit down to work. Ah well, the trials of being me. Anyway, Kurt’s two weeks here are almost up. They’ve been fun and relatively productive, and lead me to know that it is still important to me to work with talented and dedicated people.
I’m in the process of learning about text bubbles and the like in Illustrator10 so i can finish the edits to Venture, issue one. It’s about that time, I think, for this thing to be out of my pipeline and into someone else’s world.

On my mind recently has been the fluid nature of friendship. I find myself increasingly wondering if the weirdness of friendship is a construct of the adult world or just a naturally-evolving organism that has never reared its mysterious head to me before. I look upon my friendships, both past and present, and I wonder what connects them all. I also wonder if by plotting the points at which people decided that I no longer fit into their lives I could learn some greater truth about myself. I think that in a lot of ways, the people that choose to be around me shape my consciousness, and as much as I would like to believe that I choose the people with whom I am close, I have the creeping—and ever-present—suspicion that the facts are really exactly the opposite of that. Now, rationalism tells me that one’s friends can only choose one 50% of the time, because in every relationship there are two people (in great relationships there can be three or more, but this isn’t the place for that kind of talk), and each has to choose the other as s friend. By choose, I don’t mean to say that the decision is always (or even often) an active one—no, most of the time I think it’s passive on both accounts. Friendships seem forged by the ease of conversation, the comfort-levels of the silences, and the confluences of habits and entertainment. There are people in my life with whom friendship comes so easily that I can hardly define what keeps us together so tightly. There are people with whom I used to get along who have chosen to leave my circle and left me confounded. I can’t remember ever choosing to erase someone from my list of friends, so I can’t understand the motivation for doing it, but I can only guess that maybe I did some unspeakable act or something that I wasn’t aware of. It’s this kind of thing that makes me wonder. There was a time a little more than a year ago when some of my oldest friends decided (some independently, even) that they didn’t want my company anymore, and then dropped me from their lists. This has happened one time again, this time on a much smaller and less important scale, since then, and somehow, it bothered me anyway. I think part of it is that someone with whom I was friends for ten years can never really be someone I don’t care about, and I will always be happy for their successes, and, should the time come that they want me as a friend again, I know we can manage it. It’s the newer people, the ones I don’t know as well or care as much about, that stick to me at the moment. I think it’s because I’m not used to not caring if someone wants me as a friend or not, but since these people are newer in my life, I’m much more likely to chalk them up to people who were too shallow (or unwilling) to consider me as a real friend. Some, maybe, were misfires—people that I couldn’t have gotten along with anyway, for any length of time, and were thus doomed to fall away. But they’re not all like that. Also, what of the people that I have fallen out of touch with over time due to the distance of space and time? I wonder what effort and imagination that kind of relationship requires, and what it would mean to try to maintain some kind of link across the ether. I think, in this case, specifically of friends now abroad whom I have no idea how next I’ll see. Also in this category are the people that I’ve lost, having met them on trips and lost them to the sheer size of the United States.

So what’s to be done? Awareness is the best defense, I think. There’s nothing else I can do, really—I can just be aware of what’s going on in my head and in my life and try to reconcile the two to the best of my ability.

I also notice, reading one of the few things that I have written by my dad, how strikingly similar my writing style is to the way his was. It makes me wish I had more of his missives. I wonder if writing style (or feel for the language or something) is genetic somehow. That’s a rant for another day.

And this is my friend Paula in Australia on her graduation day. I knew that if I didn’t put the thing about the board in the headline, no one would notice. It’s a little late for congratulations (this stuff all happened a couple of weeks ago), but I’ll say it anyway–congrats!

As the week begins (and the Patriots try to stay ahead in the superbowl), I consider the things that have to be on my list of things to do. There will have to be writing (Venture, Oral Pleasures, Bickford, and DSF) at the top of the list–maybe the only thing on my list. That seems like a lot of writing. If I wasn’t so tired, I’d start that list tonight.

Anyway, I’ve had a good time this weekend (despite being an insensitive ass and bringing up the topic of relationships and women around Drew’s ex-girlfriend while we were out drinking), but the whole time there has been this pall over my mind as I wonder about the break-in and what I’m going to do to make sure that it doesn’t happen again. One thing? Renter’s insurance. If I had an internet connection here, I’d be researching it right now. Another? I’m going to put the lock back on my house myself. And something else, but I don’t know what it is right now.