It has been a very peculiar week and i’m still scratching my head. Life has its balances though. Pay the consequences for foolish actions, repent and be selfless for a moment and get repaid in intriguing ways.

People always talk about living in historical moments. They’re talking about historical on a more monumental scale. I’m always stunned when i’m living through a period that i know that i’ll never forget much of the absurdity of it. Normally, it’s my own doing… normally, i create my own adventures. But this week… this week has been an act of gravity, force, fate and synchronicity.

So strange. Ah yes, Scorpio is transforming into Sagittarius. Let water become fire!

Safeway. I’m buying salad materials with a friend to make dinner. He’s off in another aisle. A woman stops me, tells me she likes my hair. I blush and respond with a mumble of thank you. She asks me if i work in Oakland. I respond no, i don’t live in the East Bay; i live in the city.. i’m just visiting a friend. She expresses disappointment and says that she’s looking for a job and when she finds individual looking people, she asks where the work, in the hopes that she can find a good place. I say that i’m sorry, still too dorky and caught off-guard to actually communicate meaningfully. She says that she used to live in SF for a year and NY before that. I say that i just moved here from out east and spent a chunk of my last year in NYC. She noted that she actually lived in Buffalo, worked for Righteous Babe. I told her that i ran a website for many years of Ani’s lyrics. I told her that i worked for V-Day. She told me that she was in New College’s production of V-Day. I told her that i saw that production. I introduced myself, she did in return. And then something clicked in her head. She recalled my website, knew that i was into girls, knew a few other things and then reported that her friend was in love with me. The blushing, dorkiness and mumbling returned. And i nervously said goodbye and shuffled off with my friend, too uncertain of the appropriate response to that interaction.

::sigh:: As i grow older, i get less capable of dealing with situations that catch me off guard with any level of grace. My complete dorkiness emerges.

second, admitting that i made up the word suckage, except that it seems to be common vernacular. Or at least results in 19,200 Google finds. As if that defines common… well….

*ANYHOW* So, i’ve been a bad blogger. Ack. (But i’m not a blogger…. more on that in a moment.) I’ve been dreadfully busy, overworked, stretched thin and otherwise feeling like my brain has been split into a million pieces, isn’t operating efficiently, critically or otherwise providing useful thoughts. Lately, i’ve been “blogging” in my notebook because i can’t deal with the issues of presenting things publicly. (More on that in a moment too…)

Anyhow, i’ve decided that it’s time to pour my rambles into my blog. But this means that i’m going to be a bad citizen and confuse your RSS feeds. Because i’m going to put things up in the date range that they belong in. But, you can feel free to ignore them. Most of them are danah rambles anyhow.

Do not let anyone tell you that Canada is not a foreign country. Not only does the Mountain Dew not have any caffeine in it, but you need a passport to get there now. Of course, i had to learn this the hard way. They changed the rule 3 weeks ago (with all of the increased insanity in the airports). Needless to say, i did not have my passport.

So i flew to Buffalo.

I was intent on driving up, but when i rolled my luggage to the car rental place, i learned that they didn’t have any cars. At this point, i broke. I mean, completely broke. I started crying; i just couldn’t stop. I was exhausted and stressed and overwhelmed. So i cried. I talked to all of the agents, called the bus terminal, called my brother. No idea of what to do. I kept crying. Finally, the guy from Hertz gave me keys, feeling sorry for him. Bless the guy from Hertz. But he told me i couldn’t leave until i stopped crying. I never really stopped, but he let me go anyhow.

The nice thing about going through Buffalo is that i got to see my brother. Although it was only 12 hours, it was well worth it. The bad thing is that i got sick.

Anyhow, obviously there are more adventures in the 3 conference tour. But details are for later… post sleep.

When i was writing my Master’s thesis, i listened to one album perpetually. I had just had most of my CD collection stolen when i went away to the woods to write. The CD player there didn’t play burnt CDs so i listened to Son Kite’s “Minilogues” for a week solid. And somehow, i continued listening to it for the rest of my thesis writing. A full summer of the same CD on repeat.

Thus, when i went to listen to them spin this weekend, i was totally taken aback by how quickly my mind reverted to thesis mode, simply by hearing them spin. In a matter of moments after they hit the stage, i was working through various problems in my thesis, trying to solve missing components. Very strange audio association…

While Berkeley is far more like Brown than MIT could ever dream to be, one thing drives me batty: there is way too much of the Northern California process, self analysis shit in the classroom. I just sat through 2 one-hour classes where over half of each class was devoted to process, analysis of the professors (section) or self-analysis by the professors (lecture). We’re no longer in the first week of school so i have *no* patience for this.

I’m also having a really really hard time dealing with the slowness of speech of most professors. Out of all of my professors, one of them is a New Yorker/total East Coaster. He talks as fast i do, makes no apologies for it and demands that you keep up just by his assertive manner of speaking. It’s odd how refreshing this is for me. (And added bonus is that while he can do the whole post-structuralist speak, he keeps it to a minimum instead of trying to validate his existence through incomprehensible combinations of discourse words.)

As most of my SF friends are actually natives of the East Coast, i forget how much the slow-paced, process-centric Californian tendencies drive me up the wall. I just want to plow through the material. If i don’t get something in the first round, i’d rather repeat it than think that a slow version will allow for better comprehension. That never works for me and by going slow, my mind wanders.

I think i need more sleep.

Now that i’m back in school, i’m going to be chewing on a lot of different ideas. I will probably post some of them here, although they will be very informal and not completely thought through. Still, it’s always good to have to put things down to really question what i’m thinking…

OMG. I’m back in school. I actually went to classes today. -bounce- I forgot how much i adore being in school. Also, i’ve been practicing new meditation techniques in class every time my mind wanders. And i decided to sit in the front row of every class. I’m determined to actually stay focused on school this time and not get destracted by all of the funny fairie adventures that run throgh my head.

The first class was a discussion of how we categorize information. It involved lots of Lakoff and i was actually able to recall Aronson’s “Social Animal” to argue that people will constantly adjust current infromation in order to fit their early categorization schemes (rather than adjusting those).

The second class concerned legal issues around digital information. I had a hard time not going meta on this class because the teacher’s style was sooo similar to the prof that i had back at the Berkman Institute and it made me wonder if all law professors teach in the same fashion (just as they learn to write opinions in the same fashion as law clerks).

Tomorrow should be the interesting day though as i’m hoping to get into an anthropology class. Time to catch up on all of that theory that i’ve been inadequately acquiring through scanned readings.

Going to the desert is always an extremely intense experience for me. There is nothing like spending a week in an extremely hostile environment to shake everything up. So, needless to say, the desert taught me a few lessons. I’m now back and processing.

To back up… Burning Man is an annual festival held in Black Rock City (Nevada). 30,000+ people trek to the desert to build a community, construct large art projects and party. By Saturday, hedonism is at an all time high, in preparation for burning the man, a large glowing structure at the center of the city. On Sunday, repentence is had as people burn away the year’s sorrows at the mausoleum (called the Temple of Honor this year).

I am in awe with the creation of the city and the community. In theory, there is a balance between construction and destruction, as everything created is burnt or torn down… leave no trace. Unfortunately, a rush of people come towards the end of the week to party and help destroy. It feels so odd since these people are not the same as those who help create. As a result, i always feel myself going from awe to irritation.

I remember standing at the Burn last year listening as folks on my left yelled slurs at the girls in their drunken frenzy while those on my right repeated their vows of love over and over again in their ecstasy-driven cuddle puddle.

This year, i went at the absolute beginning of the week, in part for personal reasons and in part to watch the community evolve from an anthropological perspective. I vowed to leave when i had enough, when i was losing track of the beauty of it all. And thus, i came home early, on the day of the Burn.

[more personal reflections inside]

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OK, i’m notorious at getting myself way too committed for my own good, but this (pointing to “right now”), this is out of hand.

Lesson for self in the future (publicly said to make it stick)… It is irresponsible to try to work for a non-profit, a startup and be a graduate student simulantaneously. Plus do my research and write a paper. Plus think that i can also plan for Burning Man. [And we’ll ignore the fact that i also tried to move, help run a conference, and speak at a conference in the same 2 month period as trying to juggle all of the above.]

I’ve never been so far behind on my email. And i’ve been non-existent to my friends, my family and my health. ::sigh::

….

So stepping back from my own whirlwind, San Francisco terrifies me. There are too many interesting people, interesting projects and interesting things going on to be able to juggle everything that i would like to do. To make matters worse, people have a whole different concept of commitment out here that drives me batty.

Normally, when i commit to something, i commit to it fully. When i overcommit, i flake on the social and personal parts of my life (not always the best move). But when i promise something will get done, i hate it when i can’t come through.

In San Francisco, people seem to overcommit naturally, yet they have no qualms about flaking on commitments. So weird.