Obsidian Noise

Monday December 10, 2012.

I had a lunch meeting downtown today, down on 18th over between 5th and 6th, a Japanese place called Ootoya. The meeting was for 11:30, same time as they open. It went well and the food was excellent. Here’s what I ordered:

$18 but worth it. The steak tasted buttery and was perfectly tender. Simple bites went right through the meat and the combination of side dishes made everything perfect.

The highlight though was neither the food nor the company. While eating, an old Japanese man walked in and I recognized his face instantly, though it took me a few seconds to place it properly. I grabbed one picture of him, though this obviously didn’t turn out very well with my head in the way:

That guy with the gray hair sitting over in the corner is actually this guy:

 Yamada Sensei, who I think is the highest ranking Aikido master in the US, but in any case is the head of the US Aikido association and runs the school here in NYC, which was just a block away from where we were eating.

The people I was with were impressed that I recognized him and as I called up pictures on my phone for them to compare with the guy sitting behind us, it was all nicely confirmed. I probably should have said something to the guy, or bowed or something.

I miss that martial art. It’s gentle but powerful, it’s sensible and relaxing to practice. It’s less athletic than what I like these days, but I bet some day I’ll be back in the dojo rolling around instead of punching people’s lights out.

Back uptown and it’s raining, the start of the first week with no boss in the office. We’ll see how this goes.

Today is a different kind of day, a mark on history that will stand out. Today is the last day in the office. Not mine, but my boss’s. Curiously, it feels like my last day too. The office he’s occupied since I first began here is empty now, and the feeling is difficult to describe.

He was a founding member of my organization, though he began as a mere project manager like myself and worked his way up to director level. His departure announcement shocked everyone. Everyone expected him to take the place over when our executive director retires (late 60s now), and that would have been great. But he preempted that possibility by taking another job in town, his first outside the academy in his whole life.

It’s been a complicated week with everyone trying to work as usual while knowing the entire place is going to be very different without him there. In my own office suite, there is no longer any senior management present. We manage ourselves, and for the short term, that’s what it will be like.

I would like to say some things to him but haven’t found the space or words. He’s been a great coworker and I’ve learned more from him than any other– my own vocabularies in this field have largely come from him, and the way I approach the subject is heavily influenced by what I’ve learned and gleamed from him.

Tonight there’s a going away party at school here, and then a dinner with some of us afterward, and I’m really looking forward to it. I haven’t decided if I’ll speak at the going away party yet.

Tomorrow will be a work morning and day for me, and then I need to get to a wedding in Flushing, my second one there, interestingly it’ll be at the same venue as the last one, and my date will also be the same. That should be pretty fun. Sunday I’m going to our executive director’s house to talk about my work and watch a football game. Some others will be there, too.

I have lots to reflect on and need to make time to do so– some of these passing events are bigger and more important than I’m letting myself realize. And oh how many times has this happened…

Thursday, Dec. 6, 2012.

Another long day yesterday. It’s been a long week of long days. I have 32 vacation days saved up now.

At 4p I found myself in a cafe with a project partner and close friend who I’ve traveled with extensively in the global south. Good guy, smart guy, honest guy. We were there to catch up about some Big Data projects being paid for by Washington and he invited an IBM analyst to join us, someone going for a masters now after 20 years of business development for Big Blue. It was a good conversation with lots of interest from all. Lots of ideas, lots of possibilities. As we spoke, another colleague happened by (the cafe was attached to a one of the schools here), a lecturer in the conflict program and former tank commander in Israel. We talked about predictive modeling and sensor mechanisms and how to create better sensors out of human beings and how to process human information in the way we’re now processing big data. Very eye opening and interesting.

I always get the sense the tank commander is still trying to get an accurate read of us. His questions are always a little more probing than you’d expect, though we’re used to that now.

Directly from that I went to train and by the time I got home it was close to 9:45p. I ate, showered, and slept by 1a. At 8a when my alarm went off, it took everything I had to get up. I’m still slightly out of it– it’s the feeling of waking up after 4 hours of sleep, but I actually got 7 hours. Not sure what’s up with that. I’m pretty sore, upper and lower body, which I like. I probably just need to recover more.

I skipped jam last night, partly because of the other things I had going on, and partly because I just wasn’t in the mood. Not sure what’s up with that, either.

I had an extraordinary meeting yesterday morning with a group at a conflict center here in my city. They’re actively studying and responding to conflict scenarios of huge variety–  international to organizational– and they were interested to discuss tools and technologies that could be developed to accomplish different kinds of prevention or mediation. It was a great conversation, I had plenty of things to show and they had plenty of interested questions. I hope all of that goes forward smoothly, I’d love to work more closely with that entire organization.

I had to run a table at an event last night, from 3-6p, and after an already full day it took all I had to stay enthusiastic and engaged with whomever stopped by. I was there to answer questions about simulated environments and human learning and training, and it was about 3 straight hours of that. By the end my voice was hoarse and I was weary and wired out. My suit was drooping on me like a manifestation of my state of mind, and I clacked home on the 1.

Once there and fed, I revisited some of the early Hypocrisy albums. What a great fuckin band. For a trio, the amount of sound and brutality they produce is staggering. They use a similar set of effects on their guitars on almost all of their albums to date and you can identify it in seconds after listening. The first solid album of theirs that I listened to, the one that set them permanently in my mind, was The Fourth Dimension from 1994. It was a major turning point for them after four years of work together– their creative fuel changed from the anti-religious and demon-infused songs that were popular in the early 90s, to whole thematic albums about alien abductions, mysterious viruses, robot army takeovers, the enslavement of the human race, and other science fiction dystopias.

Of their many incredible songs, there was one that was on my shortlist for years, called “New World” off the “The Arrival” album from 2004. It has this smashing chorus that’s delivered in blocks of sound, violently with full stops between chunks. Here are the words to that one, but it’s really the sound that’s important, and particularly that smashing chorus. Try to check it out if you can.

5. New World

Can’t you see them coming?
Cannot see their sense of me
All of them decide
Our ups, downs, and misery

Addicted to fleshly skin
Enough for me to take it in
Two worlds collide
One with all the… one with all!

This is the way we serve
It’s deadly when it’s being wiped away
Both too precious to behold
and praise the new…

[Chorus]
The new world is here to wipe out our lives
The new world we can’t survive
The new world left God in everything and everyone
The new world does not include us

Everyone will feel a need to pleasure
To wicked the future race
There will be no more beliefs
All religion will be known
All religious ways
Losing their ability
They’ll erase all our memories

No more scriptures
No more lies
No more fucking lies!

This is the way we serve
It’s deadly when it’s being wiped away
Both too precious to behold
and praise the new…

[Chorus]
The new world is here to wipe out our lives
The new world we can’t survive
The new world left God in everything and everyone
The new world does not include us

God, in decay, still making all the rules
Earth, finally, forgot the tombs
Hell Is where I’ll be
After my eyes can see
Preceding our, we are the misery!

Hate throughout the end of genocide
Smell of burning flesh inside all, everyone!
Death is coming down, now when we will survive
We’re gonna die!
[Chorus 2x]
The new world is here to wipe out our lives
The new world we can’t survive
The new world left God in everything and everyone
The new world does not include us

Awesome.

Monday Dec. 3, 2012. I had a busy weekend, mostly writing, and I tried some cooking that required paying attention. And I trained like a motherfucker.

After a few false starts at my stand-up desk in the living room, I ended up rearranging some things to create a good writing environment. I moved the big computer into Hollow Way Studio at a desk in there and brought the coffee machine in so that the smell of its action could linger as I worked. I played music quietly from the built-in speakers of the iMac and I brought the good LED reading lamp in from the living room which created a nice spotlight for me. Overall everything worked and I was in the zone quickly and stayed there for extended periods.

When you write, you reach a point where it’s all out and you can’t continue. The “it” is gas: creative gas, eyeball gas, posture gas. Once reaching that point, I walked to my favorite supermarket and grabbed a few things to take in before training. While collecting my goodies I ran into a professor friend and we chatted, arms full, next to the giant tubs of olives, about the zeitgeist of higher education. That was nice because I’d been writing all day and found the right words came quickly and easily.

I was asked to run a table at an outreach event tomorrow. I hate that shit. I will sit there and answer questions that people might have about simulations and human learning. Chances are no one will have any questions and they’ll expect me to just tell them things about it. Fuck that. Dang.

Quick week with good training and good eating. I feel healthy and strong, and I feel excited to keep working on my projects, even though the future of my mainstay employment is uncertain. Maybe a major shift in employment status is just want I’ve needed to launch into the next thing, something that otherwise might never reach takeoff were it not for the urgent push from the tough consequences of standing idly by.

Reach your potential. Everyone can, but few people do. Push yourself in the ways that move you forward, the good challenges, the ones that set you apart from the fuckface humdrum. You have better things to do, and there are bigger and more important things to accomplish. Think about your life projects and love them, bring them all the way up and out. They are nothing less than your progeny. Don’t return to dust dust without doing the thing that outlives you. We need that from you.

It’s a great feeling, but is accompanied by a feeling of always being just shy of the ideal amount of sleep. When you have red eyes, people make assumptions. I don’t usually care. But I could probably use more sleep.

The shifts at work continue and it’s still all quite uneasy on a daily basis. I’m glad I have my other stuff, but the daily atmosphere of uncertainty is getting to people around me. I can feel it, too. The laughs aren’t the same. Some people wear the worry on their faces– those with kids and so on.

Others, like me, are frustrated because the weakness of the organization overall is clearer than ever, and the weakest part is the lack of adaptability. It’s been lead by people from the parent organization, the only directors it’s ever had from its inception. The inertial mass of changing anything there is enormous. People don’t feel hope of that happening, and that’s what led to the exodus, including of the person who was presumed to move into director-level work in the near future. When he resigned a couple weeks ago, it was clear things weren’t going to be good. We’ll see what happens.

It would be nice if there was a program that could capture the battle of writing across documents, such as tracking time spent, revisions made, etc. and then tell you, from the collection of things you’ve written over the years, which ones were hardest. It would tell you by staining them with digital versions of what hard work looks like: blood, sweat and tears. Go to the red part of the folder, see what things look like down there. Then the wrinkly parts– check em out. Remember those things…

Uptown downtown, lefttown right,
Who’s your momma, who’s your pappa,
… fight, fight…

flight.

Snowing and raining. I feel good today, mostly from great training last night. I’m sore as a motherfucker and it’s good.

There’s a movement in higher education away from the “Sage on the Stage” and towards “Guide on the Side” method of instruction. The way some people talk about “lecture” you’d think it was actually evil, maybe some kind of dictator-driven tyranny of communication.

I hate this argument. Yes, there are boring lectures and they suck. Yes, for some things, other ways of teaching and communicating are better. But there are times when the Sage on the Stage is best. Indeed, there are times when a good lecture can even be artful and beautiful, a deep expression and sharing of self that can lead to an educational outcome that’s unparalleled. It can motivate, but most of all the good lecture can open the mind, truly, by the connectedness that can occur between Sage and Student.

Sometimes learners are too distracted with how much they want to suddenly know, and what they think “knowing” is and how to do it,  to actually know anything. By equating “learning” with a “download” analogy of knowledge and thought, people will lose something of immense importance for the survival of humanity.

We need to listen attentively to people who have solved great problems, grown influential new ideas or, through their work, changed the way we perceive. That person might not be a charismatic speaker, but the need doesn’t change. It’s up to us, the learners, to attend to what they say. Their legitimacy comes from their actual contributions in whatever form, and we can disagree on those kinds of things and choose who we should or shouldn’t listen to. But that choice can’t come from how engaging the lecture is– the lecture is just a person speaking. Rather, it must come from the ideas that are present, and the processes being described, the person speaking.

Such as the way the most popular movies require the attention span of mere adolescents lest they become “too slow” and “boring” despite the ideas, the implications or the art of the film, if lectures are viewed similarly, we lose something great. It’s the same as the lost skill of reading, now in favor of clips, snippets and bullets. The point is it’s not the same. The bulleted version does not contain the same meanings as the full essay. The two are not the same. The summary is not the story. The conclusion is not the argument. You can’t condense a person into a snippet. If we train a new generation of learners to view information in this way, people will get lost along the way.

One of the most relaxing holidays in a while. I liked it so much I stayed home from work today, and now feel guilty about it.

I drank a lot over the holiday, mostly Jack Daniels. No particular reason for the brand choice, but possibly leftover influence of a Motorhead documentary I watched a couple months ago. Lemmy drinks almost a liter of Jack per day, always mixed with coke, and watching him full up his glasses over and over was nearly hypnotizing. For me, drinking 4 straight days was too much. I’m that kind of person who is either drinking till getting buzzed or more, or not drinking at all. When training seriously I stay on the ‘not at all’ side, and the exceptions are usually birthdays or holidays. After these last few days, I’ve lost a lot of water and I feel unbalanced. I will train tonight for the first time since last Wednesday and need it badly.

Onwards with the writing– it’s getting grueling and brutal and painful and I hate it but I do it.

Catch you all after the holiday and I hope it’s great for everyone.