the diary of antoine roquentin

Yesterday was awesome. I was kind of sleepy when I went to work, but I meandered over to the co-op on my lunch and got some kind of organic mocha. For some reason, I drank it and I didn’t crash like I normally do when I drink caffeine… I guess all this organic crap is actually good for you.

I ended up having this three-hour conversation with my boss about the future of our magazine… we didn’t come to any conclusions, but at least we got it out in the open. The things that I thought were the problems weren’t really the problems, so I know where to focus my efforts.

We’re not alone though… every publishing house and magazine is trying to brace themselves and play their cards so that they are in the right spot once we move into a post-Internet world where the role of print publications is negligible.

I had been looking forward to going to Lipstick all day. It’s the dance-indie-britpop-electropunk night at Old Ironsides. Annie and I had almost gone to it like three years ago, and I wish we really would have… the music they play is just awesome. The first time Susan, Zero, and I went, the night that it caught on fire, they played Elastica, which was awesome. Tonight it was Peaches (I was freaking out and singing along to “Boys Want to Be Her,” I wish Christen could have been there) New Young Pony Club, Death From Above 1979, LCD Soundsystem, Calvin Harris (!!!!), Cut Copy, CSS, Justice, Chromeo, and a bunch more.

We had tons of fun… I dressed up in my tight black jeans/converse/black collar shirt/pinstripe blazer/skinny white tie outfit, and I could have totally swapped in for one of the Interpol bandmembers. I liked the crowd there… there are the hardcore too-skinny fauxbohemians, the rocker kids in skater shoes and hoodies, and the flirting-with-hipsterdom people. I also saw Scott and Homeless Nick.

So, I actually wasn’t disappointed in the night at all. I didn’t even have to give Zero a ride home. And after I got off work I hung around a true love for a while and read this extremely interesting book on design that Zero lent me. It’s a collection of essays, but they do revolve around a single point… that our society is becoming more and more a shopping mall… a landscape dominated by advertising that reduces the meaning of forces that hope to oppose its message to parodies.

Basically, the old thought was that if the design world appropriated the tools of the advertising industry and use them to subvert, a meaningful message will be displayed… but it turned out that the opposite was true. In flirting with this duality, corporate advertising masquerading as art became legitimized, and at this point it’s hard to see what future design has in a world dominated by corporate sponsorship.

Any misgivings can be waived aside with the claim that this state of affairs is now simply inevitable, so we might as well grab the benefits with both hands, and any criticism can be rejected as a point of view that naively fails to understand the financial expediency of culture’s pact with commerce. When Morgan Stanley, sponsor of “Surrealism: Desire Unbound” at the Tate Modern in London, draws a parallel between the way the Surrealists “threw back the boundaries of conventional art by challenging conventional thinking” and its own history of “challenging traditional thinking to help our clients raise their financial aspirations,” such a comparison has long since ceased to strike us as the slightest bit absurd. [p. 17]

Poynor, Rick. Designing Pornotopia: Travels in Visual Culture. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2006.

Categories: Ennui

Hello… I haven’t written in a few days, but I’ve been having loads of fun.

There is something going on with my memory card… don’t trust anything you get off of eBay for like five bucks… but of course I wasn’t following my own advice when I bought it. *drags out memory card reader*

So let’s start with Thursday night. I had planned to go to sleep at about midnight or one, but Zero was texting me about having a midnight picnic. I was totally down for the idea, because earlier that day I had just been very reluctant to leave midtown. It’s starting to become summer… and I am just in love with life. Thursday was the first t-shirt weather balmy day. I don’t know what it is, but on many Sacramento days during the summer the air smells really sweet.

So I get in the car when Susan shows up at my house, and Zero and Titan are also in the car. And I find out that we are going to San Francisco. I was totally down for it, we got orange juice at the AM PM and Susan went over this page of notes that she had written about the band that we are forming. I’m sure that I should’ve written about this a long time ago, a but it was more of a joke than an actual band and now I think we actually really are going to start this joke band. We came up with the name tonight (Saturday), it’s going to be Pute Médical, from this great line in Thomas est Amoreaux where Eva goes “I’m a whore, a medical whore, but a whore nonetheless,” (in French).

The idea sounded great because I had been wanting to do something all day, so we got on the freeway, and it’s song along to terrible songs (basically every hit of the 90s). We spent a bunch of time looking for a porn store because one of us had to get something… at that point it was about one in the morning and then it just hit me: I AM TIRED AND CRANKY.

I tried to play it off and find my second wind, but for a good hour I was in the doldrums. I mean, we were having fun, I was really tired. But by the time we finally got to the grocery store, I was in a really good mood because we were going to Ocean Beach. We loaded up on chips, crackers, hummus, and dip and set off to the beach. The cops told us that we should leave… but they saw the we weren’t homeless and Susan’s Wyoming license plates come in handy for an excuse.

Turned the car around, started down Geary (it’s around 2 a.m. at this point) and I end up falling asleep in the TINY backseat of Susan’s bug with Zero totally in my space and the speaker blaring in my ear (it was my pillow). Not the best time to realize I’m claustrophobic. I stumble out of the car once we get back, look at my phone, and I realize it’s 5 AM. Yeah… work was fun. And I had slept in the car so that took a lot of the edge off. I actually got a lot done at work that day.

This is the only pic I took that night, it was a locker at the grocery store we went to.

On the drive home, I visited Brian at work because I had to pick up a cheese grater at Bed Bath and Beyond (the graters were clearly in the “beyond” section). I got my mom her Mother’s Day card like a million weeks early and Brian and I went outside and talked for awhile. Apparently, Aaron and I are totally going to fuck… which is odd.

He’s in Tijuana doing some kind of community service with people in orphanages and then getting drunk every night… he can drunkenly confess things to Brian all night long, but he really is going to be a bit part in our psychodrama until he comes back here for summer.

So I’m listening to “Glass Slipper” on repeat…second-best Dresden Dolls song ever.

Now I get to write about today! Which you’ve already read! Oh, reverse chronological order…it strikes when you least expect it.

PS: totally in love with psychoanalyst finger puppets. Thank you, Molly. I need to read BoingBoing more…but Valleywag is so titillating!

Categories: Ennui

The first two coats of paint on my masterpiece…it needs a bunch more work.

Andrew called me tonight.

He told me that he’s going on a little vacation to Berkeley for a few days. Apparently he was drunk and read my blog (the April fools post), took it seriously, and didn’t talk to me for a few days.

Susan and I and Titan went out to Beto’s tonight (it’s becoming our hangout for some reason). I just got back, it’s nearly 3 a.m. I watched Your Friends and Neighbors tonight (along with the wonderful Faye Dunaway version of Bonnie and Clyde). YFAN put me in such a mood, but the sheer awesomeness of Bonnie and Clyde made up for it. I LOVE Faye Dunaway. I don’t know what it is about her, she’s just such a great actress. She can be a coldhearted bitch one film and a frail, fragile girl the next film. It’s awesome.

I just can see the sickening cycle of relationships around me…and I have no way to stick a wrench in the works.

In one way, I want to refuse to play my part… but at in the same time I’m rather into someone (to say the least)…which makes this difficult.

I need to get to sleep… I have my huge test tomorrow. I miss sleeping next to someone. But I don’t have my own place. I miss having sleepovers at Christen’s house.

I guess I just have to reconcile myself with the fact that friendship means nothing.

You know what I miss most? Someone that I could let my guard down around.

Categories: Ennui

I did some more homework… the problems where we solve equations containing radicals take a long time but it’s pretty hard to screw them up.

The bad thing is you have to check every single answer, because you could be taking the square of a negative number, which invalidates certain answers. Thankfully, my graphing calculator lets me check the solutions in the original equation without doing the whole problem over again.

After that, I took down my big blank canvas from the wall and started on it. My plan is to try to use some kind of half-assed pontillism to get the effect of a halftone. I did the first layer, which is yellow. I have no clue what look like once I’m done, but I think it will be interesting. Here is my mockup of the painting that I used for color matching:

When I was hanging out with Katie, I got a text message from Andrew saying that he had sent me an e-mail, but the e-mail never went through. So of course I’m ridiculously curious. It probably isn’t anything important.

I think Brian got mad Katie and I didn’t include him in our plans… but it was rather impossible to do that because Katie had to be asleep by like 9 PM and that’s was when Brian was leaving wherever he was.

The acrylics worked great…no horrible fumes, and they just roll right off the brush. I’m a fan.

And cleanup didn’t involve turpentine. Doubleplusgood.

I just found on my desk an ad for some landscaping person that was left on our doorstep. “Our specialized combination of Oriental ancient skills and modern horticulture will make your garden more valuable and more attractive.” I feel like I’m a Southern landowner living in this neighborhood. We even have a gardener.

I’m just in love with being able to express myself again and to dictate into any application. My wrists don’t hurt! W00t.

I can totally convince myself that I don’t have any feelings for Andrew and then he’ll send me a text message with a ;-) (wow, the program transcribed “winky face” as “;-)”) and I melt. Damn it.

In other news, still totally loving the new Cut Copy album. I got past the initial singles and into the meat of the album and it has a similar feel as Bright Like Neon Love…it’s a bit darker, and a different, more feeling of longing. BLNL was very much a “in love during summer in the 80s” album… this seems to be more of a winter-ish album, going to clubs and old hangouts and discovering things you used to love.

I like it.

Anyway, I need to go to sleep.

Categories: Ennui

This is the first post that I have written using the new MacSpeech Dictate. I am dictating directly into the Firefox window, no pesky dictating inside of a virtual machine and copying and pasting.

After the first few sentences, I am very surprised at the absolutely fantastic recognition accuracy. I’m not even using an approved microphone, and it hasn’t made a mistake yet.

I have been waiting for this application for probably two years… ever since I got my Mac Mini. I’m blown away. I have absolutely no excuse to not write.

Thank the Mac gods.

I can now dictate instant messages too… goodbye carpal tunnel!

Goodbye wrist pain.

well, now that I have unlimited writing skills and such, I don’t have a whole lot to say.

I got off of work and went down to naked lounge. I keep expecting to meet somebody there, but I never do. I did, however, run into Annie. I was driving down L Street and I saw her waiting for the bus, so I pulled over and said hi. I gave her my number, I guess she has a new phone.

Last night was rather fun, Susan, Zero and Titan and I went out for drinks. The plan in the beginning was to go out for sake, but after we went to the first place (Mikuni) we walked down to Luigi’s and got pizza. After venturing across the street to get a Sacramento News & Review, we went through the entire paper and there was nothing going on. So, plan B was to go down the Kasbah and have absinthe. it turned out to be really great absinthe too, some French variety of it.

Susan got this drink that she loved, I forgot what it was called, and Titan got an Irish Car Bomb. We had been planning to flip a coin to determine where we were going next, so we flipped the coin (we had added L and R to each side). Left, left, right, left, left, and we were officially nearing the Projects near Broadway…so we vetoed the coin and made a new one with arrows. Around this time, it was about one o’clock in the morning, so we kind of decided to call it a night as we were so out of the grid and the only thing open would be bars.

at the very beginning of the night, I gave Zero his birthday present, which he loved (it was a CosaNostra Pizza shirt from ThinkGeek). On the drive home, we blasted the Labyrinth soundtrack and talked about going to this thing called Jareth’s Ball, which sounds fun.

Work was okay, I completely rewrote the sidebar using conditional PHP statements… which was rather awesome, but a thankless task. There is absolutely nobody online… I should check my phone. Maybe somebody loves me. Nope. No missed calls, no text messages.

Andrew is ignoring me for some reason… I asked some earlier in the week if he wanted to hang out on Friday and he never gave me an answer, which is an implicit “no.”

Also, that random guy with a mohawk didn’t seem amenable. Zero invited me to go hang out with him and Mari, but I’m not a fan of karaoke. I have nothing against it really, but my mother dragged me to it for so many years I just can’t go of my own volition.

I was so angry today because Sprint delayed their wimax network indefinitely… I just felt like the entire technology industry was in some kind of a somnambulant trance, but this voice recognition thing really renews my faith in technology. I’m very surprised at its accuracy… it’s much better than Dragon NaturallySpeaking, even though it uses the same engine. Not running the program in a virtualized operating system probably does a lot to improve performance.

It does lack some necessary features, like a correction mechanism, but they say they are going to add that in the next version. It’s weird to say this, but it doesn’t make enough mistakes for the lack of a correction mechanism to be important.

One thing’s for sure, I definitely need a new headset. The program only gave me two out of five stars for signal-to-noise ratio… that and there are some shorts in the USB cable.

So I camped out at naked lounge for about three hours hoping something would happen, but it didn’t. Brian called me, Sam called me, my mom called me, but nothing materialized. I was going to stop by Brian’s work, but my back was killing me.

I guess something is going on with Johnny, but I am incapable of caring at this juncture. it’s doomed. We all know it. I hear Brian telling me things I told him when I was dating Terry. Yeah, bad signs.

Also, did you guys like my April fools post? I didn’t get any comments, but that comment spam plugin is so damn janky. I’m going to just send the moderation queue to a special folder so that it doesn’t fill up my inbox with spam (which pissed me off).

I don’t know what’s going on with Andrew. We had this really awesome time in the last time we saw each other…maybe ’cause I’d been drinking all night and he downed a bottle of Jägermeister.

We have this whole past and everything… but I don’t know whether that’s good or a liability. I just don’t have the energy to meet new people these days. I got into this awkward conversation with this woman at the downtown Washington Mutual who also had a Vespa. She asked me what my FSM bumpersticker thing was, and I told her it was the Flying Spaghetti Monster. she didn’t know anything about it and was preparing to leave, so I kind of gave up on explaining it and went in to deposit my check.

after I got home, I started watching American Dad… the most recent seasons are actually funny, season one was really disappointing and had only like one funny joke an episode, but I was laughing all the way through this recent episode about George Clooney.

Oh, I forgot to mention Hulu. It was NBC and CBS and all of those networks getting together and realizing they needed something to compete with YouTube (they are not dropping the copyright infringement lawsuit against YouTube, just to clarify). it’s pretty cool… there is a lot of stuff that they got out of their vaults for this. It was in beta for forever, and it actually has content.

Also, all the South Park episodes are online on the official site too. All my reasons for getting cable are gone. I only wanted it for South Park, family Guy, and the Daily Show.

My dad is supposedly coming down next week, but I’ve been hearing that for months so I’m not particularly optimistic. I’m glad that I got him a birthday card… and I just remembered my other grandma’s birthday and I was supposed to send her card. It’s like Saturday or something…fuck, I suck as a grandson.

Also, in my mailbox this week was an invitation to Phi Theta Kappa, which was rather awesome. I guess I have been getting pretty good grades… I can’t remember the last time I got anything lower than a B. I wonder what my final GPA will be.

I really need to do some math homework tonight… let me just finish this episode and I will. :)

And, for Molly, here’s some NYPC lovin’. Here’s the video for The Bomb, more stuff can be found on their MySpace. Of course, their quintessential song is “Ice Cream.”

Categories: Ennui