I wrote this about a week ago, by the posting application was glitchy...

Seattle is where I grew up, and it is a very nice city indeed. I almost forgot how nice it really is. Also there's lots of cool new buildings now. I am told that I must go see the new library. I like the city at night, under the soft glow of artificial lights.
My friends have an apartment on Capitol Hill. They're right in the thick of things, just up the street from all the hip bistros and boutiques, and a short walk to downtown.
My friend B is having a birthday tomorrow, a major reason for my being here. He's a talented musician, but don't take my word for it, decide for yourself here. We're going to do some recording soon. He wants me to talk and talk (I'm good at that) to get some good voice samples to build a music piece around. Last night we'd stayed up late talking about my more frustrating experiences with activism (file under "yuppies yuppify all that they touch") and starting from the conclusion that grassroots organizing needs to bankroll itself in a way the allocates funds to the most deserving people (otherwise the more affluent among our groups will always set the agenda, arrogantly I might add) - starting from that premise, how could actually actualize such a thing. We think that combining the job description of concert promoter with community organizer could be a step toward making that happen, at least in a way that works for me personally. It's been really nice to chat politics with him, he's got intellectual prowess to match mine and we have fruitful conversations. We both agree that the state of America political discourse tends to veer toward dismal, and would both like to build a career for ourselves out of doing something to fix that. I think something very interesting will come out of this.

Road trip to Seattle

Rollerblades, check. Books, check. Classy clothes, check. I'm going back to my hometown. On-the-road blogging coming soon. Titanium Expose by Sonic Youth is the recommended song you should download and listen to right now, especially if you've never heard it before this. Haiti on my mind. Excited to travel, to live intensely.

Beware the dipshit squad

'cause they're a bunch of real dipshits, y'know?

I'm back

Computer was on the fritz, then distracted by the holidays.... I stopped blogging for a while. now I'm back. I've been indoors for a few months now and I'm getting settled in to the amenities and starting to build up a daily routine, learning to have more self-discipline about practicing my creative work consistently. On an ideal morning I wake up in time to watch news in Japanese and Korean and the "venerable" Taiwanese kids show called Fruity Pie, and it's, well, fruity. Then I go ride my bike on to the wharf and have a morning journal writing with the seagulls and barking sea lions that lay about on the horizontal rafters under the blacktop, they've built big fenced-off holes in the surface so you can look down and see them all arfing away at each other, occasionally exhibiting acrobatic swimming maneuvers. Writing, drawing, playing piano and juggling, those are all things I want to do consistently every day.

Kompoz, musicianlink, and Virtual Sound Exchange by the Deep Listening Institute are projects for facilitating musical collaboration over the internet. I look forward to trying out some of these apps with my friends.

I had a business meeting with some friends a few weeks ago. They want to start a restaurant / social center. They have good ideas but most of them are contingent upon "well do this as soon as we have a lot of money" but the part about how we're going to make that money seems a little more vague. Some intermediate business operation that can start turning over cash right away needs to be implemented before we can fund our more pie-in-the-sky concepts. So I came up with something that I could do with people I know that would start making money right away:

Band-O-Gram!, the rock and roll singing telegram company. (more later)

I'm making a life project of learning foreign languages. So far I've been focused on Spanish, Japanese, French, Korean, and Arabic. I have collaged my walls text in many languages. Yes, it is possible to learn all of them at once. There's lot of great places on the web to do so, and I'll be review them in future blog entries. Santa Cruz is a tourism-based economy with 3,000,000 visitors to the Beach Boardwalk every year. If you listen downtown, you can hear people speaking many languages. Someday I'll be fluent enough to work as a translator/tourguide for these people.

I'm really intrigued by this article about the alternative reality games that Trent Reznor and game-organizing firm 42-Entertainment has built around his album Year Zero. I like how the narrative of the album is made to include the participation of the fanbase in the form of a puzzle solving exercise - the websites allow for a group-collaborative information exchange that maximizes the intellectual capital of the group, leading to a rapid solving of problems. This one wins the Encyclopedia Brown geekdom award for mystery-solving inventiveness.

The simulated stock portfolio has turned a steady profit, now at +2.47%, confirming my suspicion that betting on the markets is no rocket science.