Sweet, sweet freedom.

Nah.

It was fun, the whole thing. I got worn out, but I’m glad the German came for a visit. Ten days is long to be a host/guide. Next time, for whoever that might be, I’ll convince them to do a couple days in DC or Philly in the middle so I can get a break. Also, more care needed to clear co-guests. Skinny Italy basically wrecked the second half of this visit, unfortunately.

Yesterday I worked all day and met the German and Skinny Italy for dinner around 6p.

“Ver do you want to go? I vill treat you for zee final dinna!”

Easy choice for me: Giant Burritos.

I have a favorite place, practically literally a hole in the wall (I swear to your god it actually has holes in the wall) that serves burritos so big they last two days and are exquisitely delicious. The chicken they prepare is crispy yet juicy, and the full combo of sauce and bread is in perfect proportion. Best $9 you’ll ever spend, guaranteed. I’ve yet hear a single person say otherwise, and I’m batting 1000% on this one so far.

I invited another coworker to join to relieve some of the difficulty of navigating Skinny Italy’s accidental fantastically annoying ongoing commentary. And it worked! They chatted so I could mostly debrief with the German about her trip and her impressions of NYC and had a great time doing so.

We ate, the girls finishing about 1/3 of their food footballs and me finishing all of mine, and then we walked over for digestion coffees on Bway and then over to Riverside Drive for a stroll. No lightening bugs yet, but all the other ingredients of a good last evening in NYC were there for my guests. The air was warm but not sticky, the breeze was steady and refreshing, the moon was nearly full. A few people were out and as it got dark, it got increasingly lovely. We walked slowly and then sat up on the wall along Riverside Park and talked about NYC and what it’s like.

Eventually we walked back to campus and I went back to work while they headed home (it was about 10p) and it was then that I said my goodbyes to them both because today I’m at work and tonight I have a thing, possibly a date.

Date?

I’m not sure. I was invited to go to David Burke Kitchen by a girl I’ve chatted with a few times. We talked about food and this was insisted upon and now we’re going to see if she knows what she’s talking about. I have my doubts, but I’m game.

I’m not a foodie and I hope it’s not too expensive because it’ll really be wasted on me. Here’s the scoop on me: I like coffee and raw almonds, pancakes and oatmeal, scrambled eggs and toast with jam, and pizza is my favorite food overall. Hamburgers are a close second. I like guacamole and sushi and yakitori and other BBQ and I like adding chocolate nibs to things. Most other things are below these favorites, and usually much more expensive.

For instance, a reporter friend of mine from China took me to the “best French restaurant in NYC”, a place called Bouley over in TriBeCa. The inside was extremely decorative, almost like the set of a play. People were all clinky and shimmery and I could see why I was asked to dress nicely. It was as you’d imagine, you know, almost cartoonish.

The food was good. It was fine. But was that little plate of shrimpy, vegetabley, saucey, crispy slushy stuff truly worth twelve large pizzas? Not in this or any other universe. Maybe it would taste great on TOP of a pizza…

If people have to be trained appreciate the genius of Bouley, or any other “gourmet”, then it should be avoided. It’s a farce, another thing weak people can use to pretend they matter more. Not that senses shouldn’t be trained– they should be! But not on something so inconsequential, for fuck’s sake. It’s food. Berries and breadcrumbs being ground into mushy saliva paste and into your poop shoot. Most other art is different. But even the most superiorly decorative and “geniously” combined dishes don’t make you think new things, gain perspective, or generate new ideas. Food doesn’t shake your certainties about life and purpose and leave you scrambling to figure something out. Food is nutrition. Some is delicious, some sucks, and our taste senses are easily tricked by a few simple chemicals. So eat what you like, and appreciate things that taste good to you, but don’t get carried away. A perfect apple pie you make at home is no less delicious than the $45 cherrie flame bleu chantra la la la at that place from the TV show. Trust your senses, not your egos and beliefs. Chances are you’ve been duped. You can beat that crap out of your life. Experts fail double blind wine tastings where the $20/bottle beats the $180/bottle all the time. It’s basically at chance levels most of the time. Put Bouley corn up against Cafe Habana corn in a double blind and see who wins.

So David Burke Kitchen tonight. Date or not, I’ll take pictures.

My interesting story from yesterday requires more thought. It’s tricky.

Movie and story to come.

Social Sapping

Off and about, the days shoot by, taking and manipulating energies with it. For me, social energy is a mysterious cycle of joy and strain. I seek the positive balance and have never figured out how. It’s entirely person-dependent. With some, there’s no issue of balance at all. That’s rare, though. For just about everyone else, even close friends, my tank hits E, for escape, after a few hours, depending on other things. But enough. Here’s how it’s been.

Friday during the day, while I worked, while I had my time away from The German, her friend from Italy, a skinny chick with big sunglasses and gold buckles on her handbag, arrived from her current city, Toronto, to visit. They knew each other from Bangladesh days when they were both doing import/export about 5 years ago. Since the German would be up east on the continent, they decided to rendezvous at my place. I said it was OK, unsure of what was to come.

I instructed The German to take her friend to meet me at Dinosaur BBQ around 6p that night, Friday night, and that I’d go there straight from work. During the day I had enticed three curious coworkers enough to join.

When we (my coworkers and I) arrived, the German and Skinny Italy were at the bar area sipping pina coladas, happily. I ordered a pitcher of beer and the first round of sampler platters, and thus began a long evening of consumption.

It was fun and fine and we drank and chatted and shared and laughed. After a couple hours and reaching and overreaching our capacities as eaters and drinkers we headed out to the water. The sun had already set, but the sky was beautiful, a rosy pink behind crisp clouds swirling below a deep, darkening blue sky. We stood and chatted, leaning over metal railings made for elbows and looked at the water and the bridge and the lights as they appeared in the high-rises on the opposite shore, over in Jersey and all agreed it was a great night.

We walked north and east, back towards bway and to the subway, and along the way lost two people to the best grocery store in the city. OK later, guys.

That left four of us heading up that road under the old gorgeous bridge, the one with Riverside Drive on top, the one with the diamond shapes in the struts and ties. We walked up past a nightclub called Phuket. Suggestive?  We continued to the Scary Stairs, a giant staircase that heads up and into a gigantic wall, 30 meters high of solid granite.

The scary stairs smell like piss. The scary stairs have one big turn that you can’t see around. The scary stairs usually have mysterious bags left on them. The scary stairs induce sweat, even in winter. We got to the top and the three girls were chatting away. Before I knew it, the four of us were headed up to my place.

We walked in and people made themselves comfortable very quickly, thankfully, the chairs and couch and table. I had beer and Conchasa from Brazil and everyone wanted to try it. I put on soft proto punk rock from the late 60s, The Modern Lovers. The Seeds. The Kinks. Doctors of Madness. The Monks. They were into it all, or at least pretended to be.

Time went on and I knew we’d end up having a foursome.

Riiiiiight.

Skinny Italy began to become sincerely irritating to me.  She had a habit of repeating back everything I said immediately after I said it, and then making comments that didn’t mean anything, or need to be said at all. This happened many times over the next few days. An example that comes to mind:

Me: “So, these cobble stones are the originals, it turns out that they don’t move at all once they’re in place. The only reason they were covered up in NYC was for the skinny car wheels when the Model T came out.”   

Skinny Italy: “Oh I love cobble stones. They’re so flat, you know? They have these edges, like, with corners. My grandmother really liked cobble stones. I’ve always liked them very much. Some people hate them, and I never understood why. I never got that. Why don’t people like cobble stones. I love them.” 

It sounds innocuous, but over time…

Me: “That building, the one with the gold statue on top,  is the Municipal Building.” 

Skinny Italy: “Oh, I love those. They’re so big. Toronto has one. I like Municipal building doors. A guy I dated, Mikail, he liked them. We used to see them. Some people hate them and I’m like, why? I love them? I don’t believe in criticizing them. We have them too. They’re so great.”

No hatred. Just exhaustion.

It was my first time having three girls over at once. It seems like we should at least have had a naked pillow fight or something. But Skinny Italy wrecked the mood constantly. “Oh I like guitar music. Some people hate it but I like it. It sounds so good, why do people hate it. I never understood that. I’m against it because I really like guitars and their music, it’s so nice. A guy I dated liked guitars too so we both did at that time. We used to say how much we liked it.”

The next day we did SoHo and Meatpacking and shopped. I got a new shirt that I’m wearing right now from a store called The Earnest Sewn.

(I’ve learned that when you find a collar shit that fits nicely, you should just get it. Now I have five collar shirts, so no repeats within a week at work. That’s nice).

Then we went to East Village and the German got a cool jacket on St. Marks place. I kept wanting to run into my ex, who lives near there, so she could see that I’m not just staying home alone all the time. I wonder if she’d be happy about that, or unhappy about that. Whenever I start to wonder about those kinds of things I have to make myself stop because it still hurts sometimes.

We next walked north until we reached Curry Hill and had a huge vegetarian Indian feast at a favorite restaurant of mine called Vatan. We left and walked over to K-town to have a look, up through Bryant Park and past Macy’s and then west to the 1 train and headed home. I was exhausted and peopled out. When we got home they wanted drinks and stories but I was spent. I said I needed to do some things and went in my room and closed the door, took a shower and was in bed by 12a. Whew.

Sunday: Chinatown, walk to Brooklyn Bridge and over to the Dumbo area for cafes and galleries and to sit in a park. Much sun. Much chitchat. Much tuning out.

I mean, I really was having a fine time, not especially fun but it was bearable. But I was getting really worn down by exposure– to people, and specifically to the same people for so long. I really had a bad inner attitude by about lunch and I had to try hard to hide it. People shouldn’t spend too much time around me because I’ll get increasingly distant in interaction. Eventually, whenever the Skinny Italian would say something, I just wouldn’t respond. Sometimes she’d ask a question and I wouldn’t even answer. I felt like such a shithead but I couldn’t control it. I’m just not able to spend day after day after day socializing. In a platoon, it’s fine. You’re doing stuff that doesn’t involve chitchat. Everyone equally does not wish to make small talk. But in a group of people chatting for the sake of it, the energy that it takes me to fake enjoyment eventually runs out and I get pissy. Very few people don’t cause this within me, it’s been that way always.  I knew it would be hard to explain if either of them had asked about my mood. Eventually I said I needed to go do some work and please keep exploring Dumbo and I’ll catch them before bed later.

I made my escape up on the Jay St. stop and took an F to Broadway Lafayette and…

once off the train and over on Prince St, I had a strange experience. I need to describe it. But I can’t right now because I’m out of time. Continued tomorrow!

Tomorrow I’m a free man.

Have a great Monday.

Dasht Isht Gooten! Gooten!

Ever been here?

To this vantage point, I mean.

It’s the top of the Rockefeller building in midtown. Being a tour guide in your own city is a good way to actually see your own city. What happened in this case was that my neighbor, who runs this place, “Top of the Rock”, gave me two tickets after I mentioned I had a guest visiting the US for the first time. We skipped lines and everything. Neato.

We headed in around 9:30a so there weren’t many people and the weather seemed to know we were coming.

From there it was over to see these kinds of things:

which I loved.

But The Croft was not into at all.

“Vat isht de point of all of de lines? I don’t untershdandt it. Seems like someone had too much free time.”

From there it continued. We looked at an exhibit on language. An artist had created a giant mural that looked like engineering plans with numbers and some charts and paragraphs. When you looked closely you could see that the words were just wavy lines, not real language, but perhaps some kind of evocation of language or the idea of printed words. I thought it looked neat. I wouldn’t pretend to understand its message or significance, but I thought it looked interesting and I liked it. The Croft absolutely hated it, to the point of almost being upset by it.

“Zee? Do you zee? Vat isht de point of dat?”

Alrighty then. Onwards! (Onwards? Please onwards?)

At the Pollock installation she threw her hands up in disgust and walked in another direction.

Oookaaaay. How about this?

“Vat isht disht jomble of messes? From disht kindergaaten?”

I didn’t harp on it. The German doesn’t like modern art. She doesn’t understand its function, and she’s easily terrified by darker things, which is a little amusing given how serious she is.

We saw an incredible exhibit on the Quay Brothers– all the dark and eeriness– and…

She couldn’t handle it.

Next.

We ate there in the Moma Cafe, which she loved. Once sitting out on the terrace overlooking the little Moma park, she kind of spang back to life and we had an intense conversation about cooking. And how badly she wants to open a pastry shop in Rio.

For the honest record, that makes four women I know who dream of opening a cafe or pastry shop or the like. Which one will be the one who makes their dream real? They all waste most of their time and it makes you want to wake them up, forcibly.  Maybe one can snap out of it.

We strolled around that area and up to the park and then over to the train to head all the way up to Fort Tryon Park– a beautiful, interesting place on the northern most tip of Manhattan.

It has rolling sidewalks through beautiful lawns, flower gardens and paths that overlook the Hudson from way up, and it’s home to an affiliate of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a medieval museum called The Cloisters.

The German loved it completely.

Whew.

We headed up and in and played around with photography and chanted fake Buddhist hymns and forgot about the Brothers Quay and abstract expressionism and instead just joked around got yelled at by security for chanting. It was great.

We stayed until closing and then strolled out, pretty tired out from another long day, day 5, a good day, a mixed day, a walkabout day.

More to come. Posts this weekend.

Day-3 of Guiding

“Zis is vat zee Brazilians drink when zey vant to be a little beet vaysted .”

The harsh German accent is everywhere in my head these days. It’s been 30 hours of 1-1 time and the “w’s” have taken major casualties.

You can practically hear the semi colons floating around the apartment, sharpening the edges of everything.

The German, aka Laura Croft, has been so fun to have around. She’s harsh and serious, a kickboxer in her 20s, and now in her 30s she’s a straight up corporate elite with 10 years in at Siemens Corporation at the VP level. For example, they flew her here for her own vacation.

She’s as insider as you can get and it’s been a great look into the real world of the corporate state. I’ll go nose-to-nose with anyone about my views. I have German spies embedded.

Day-3 was a blast. I finished up at work and came home to find The Croft passed out on her makeshift bed in Hollow Way. I didn’t see her note saying she was taking a nap and had begun at 4:40. I got home at 5 and woke her up.
“Come on, let’s go walk around the neighborhood, you haven’t seen north yet!”

“Vat? I have just shtarted zee sleeping. But I vill run first. I zink I vill be back in 1 hour so zen we can go.”

German assertions do not get questioned. Boom, she was out the door for a run (slightly and concerningly impulsively) and I didn’t even tell her where to go. She came back 57 minutes later, panting and sweating, looking aggressive.

“It vas very goot. Goot running place here, yah?”

Ya.

The maiden exposure of my kitchen to the food of old Deutschland.  It was really simple to make. I found it surprising and humorous that kraut truly is such a prominent aspect of the German diet. I thought she was joking at first.

I mean… kraut. Like the derogatory name used by my beloved Devil Dogs to describe the Germans in WWII. Krauts!

It’s shredded cabbage. Only.

As weird and plain as it sounds, I suppose cabbage isn’t uncommon in the world. It’s big in South Korea, for example. But at least there it’s dossied up a bit with all those chilis and spices. But the Plain Jane German kraut… was…

…surprisingly, with the Weiss beer and sausages,  perfect. 

I now feel like designing a strong automobile.

So I’m eating pretty well, which doesn’t always happen when hosting foreign visitors. I’d say the first 1/3 of this friendly little job is going well. I could do this monthly at least, especially now that my place is little more amenable to visitors.

Incidentally,

my entire living room has changed.

I have mixed feelings about it all– the whole domestication thing took me by surprise. I never wanted a TV space and couch. Yet, here’s how my New York experience has turned. The road it has gone down. The sure pathway to de-testicalization. I have taken the first couple steps. Welcome.

OK, it’s not that bad, right? A litte conventional, but there’s still plenty of me in there. It’s not girly at least. I mean, look at those fuckin’ speakers, right?

Work.

Modeling complex phenomenon. Computationally. It’s tough.

Things are moving forward and the agent-based system is getting interesting to work with, and requires long days of high concentration and hope. I’ll update about all of that soon– I’m half a step behind about 10 things right now.

And I still need to edit the movie of FF town. Don’t give up. I been busy.

Enjoy Wednesday and I’ll check in again soon.

Day-2 of Guiding.

Roughly 24 hours of active guiding broken into 2 12-hour days. We covered significant ground, probably too much too fast. I kept us moving along. Campus. Cathedrals. Grant’s Tomb. Central Park, and over to Columbus Circle. Down through midtown, over to Rock. Over to Highline and down to the Village. Down to Seaport, across to Battery. Ferry. Back. Film in Bryant. Around. Rest. Repeat. Go. Go. German food at home. Kraut included.

I have many pictures.

I set up a bed in Hollow Way that seems to be working so far. I’m lucky it’s cooled down because there’s no AC in there and the street sounds loud when the window is open. But so far so good.

Now I’m in the office and she’s somewhere doing something in the city. I’m unsure when guide duty will resume. I can’t go out every night and I hope after these two full days of tralomping, she’s OK on her own.

All this will get proper treatment soon, in the form of pictures, mostly, perhaps tomorrow I can begin that. Bare with me it’ll be worth it. I seen some shit.

Day-1of guiding. Was great.

I will describe with pictures when I don’t have a weird German looking over my shoulder every second.

Went for strike training in the park with a friend last night. The skeeters were out but more tame than last week. The “annoying kids” factor was also quite low.

The park I’ve been training in was built on top of a water treatment plant. That might sound unappealing, but it’s actually quite nice. A full-size turf football field, soccer fields, rows of basketball and tennis courts, jungle gyms, ice hockey rink and indoor/outdoor pools. I’m lucky it’s just a couple blocks away.

In addition to being quite nice, it is unequivocally weird.

The entire complex is on top of the Hudson River. You have to take one of two bridges to get there and if you look over the sides you’ll see water. Occasionally it smells like sewage, corresponding to when they release treated water from the holding tanks back into the river. In a couple different places within the complex you can see giant smoke stacks reaching out from what appears to be grassy ground, but is in reality the grassy roof of a giant machine.

There are community gardens there, which look extremely nice, right next to rows of basketball courts where large men sweat on each other and curse, and both seem out of place completely, nicely. You see odd things in there. You see kids making out on astroturf…  next to old men sitting with their canes on benches, watching nothing. You see aggressive young men always on the brink of a fight, and groups of young women always on the brink of doing step dance, next to old hispanics picnicking on the concrete. The skeeters are big and sneaky. And you almost always see unexpected things:

Walking past the soccer fields on the way out last night, I noticed there was a baby stroller with a bunny in it. No big whoop. It’s just The Isle of Weird.

—————————————–

It’s going to be a great weekend. Tonight some promised catching up with coworkers at a favorite punk rock bar, and that won’t go too late so I can get home and do something that I don’t know yet.  Tomorrow I’ll work on Project 2.3 and play Civilization V for a couple hours. Early Sunday morning a German friend who lives in Rio is arriving and will stay for 10 days. I took Monday off which will allow me to be a proper guide for two full days to start and I can’t wait.

Starting Monday, my training begins again and the late night drinking stops for a while and I’m psyched to bite down and go 100%. I’ve never been stronger and fiercer or hornier or faster or angrier.

Solus. Furious & Curious.

The jam in Hollow Way was long, slow and loud. There was a bottle of Jonny Walker Black on the floor. Five interested souls communicated with analogue sounds being sent through high powered amplifiers, and the mood was somber.

One of us, over there in the corner, a coworker by day and cojammer by night, well, was fired from his job earlier in the day. The mail we all received from senior management was terse: “So-and-so is no longer working at <place of business> effective immediately. Replacements are being sought.”

No further details at that time. But the details did emerge eventually. They came out after subjection a couple hours of high distortion guitar. There was nothing serious at hand, no criminality, no egregious assholeness; it came down to a social media policy that was violated. The reason it was fireable was because it was the second time. In fact, he had been suspended just two months prior for the same thing. The notice of termination came from the highest level of our institution, and the legal team representing it. No recourse this time. Done deal.

He has a kid entering first grade this year. Damn.

We didn’t discuss it at jam other than to hear the story.

I passed him this morning at the farmer’s market, and he was with his wife. He was grinning like a guilty kid.

Things will be fine.

Agent.

The problem with a systems map, even if it shows causal chains, is that it’s missing an important deterministic aspect:

Dynamics.

A map is a frozen moment in time. Reality is moving.

All things are under the constant causal pressure of other things. This doesn’t change.

Forces act on everything, always.

Us. Them. The rock in the corner. Constant.

There are ways of adding dynamic modeling to causal maps. One way is to incorporate computationally based agents. They behave according to rules given to them. By way of its own definition, an agent cannot operate outside of its rules.

Agents react to each other. In a swarm, their behavior as a group can be infinitely complex, despite each autonomous agent being governed by even the fewest of rules. As a group, agents can display high intelligence. Slime mold cells are governed by a couple rules each. As a collective, they solve complex problems, such as mazes:

The movement of a wave. A sound of some thing. Everything is a product of some change being caused by forces exerting influence. You are never not under the influence of a force. Nothing ever is.

The agent “acts” according to those forces acting on it. To accurately know the agent necessarily means knowing the forces.

Changing the agent means altering the forces. This can be done by a) knowing them and affecting them, b) not knowing them but applying an additional force to the agent and looking for causal effect.

Some forces exert more influence than others.

Identify those strong causal forces, they are leverage points. Altering the leverage points creates causal cascades through the system.

The core of the system is the agent. An agent is an energy balance.

All forces act on the balance, creating a surplus or deficit.

The energies matter. They define the agent.

To be continued.