Those who wait

Patience is a trait I've learned a long time ago. when you cant afford to get what you want, you make due with what you've got.You also learn to look at the world with attention, as opportunities abound, for those who take the time to notice.

For instance, I have recently begun a job search, very laid-back like, applying to whatever looked mildly interesting. Barely twenty-four hours in, I already had a few contacts and one interview, with some letting me know in forty-eights hours the result. Another twenty-four, and if I had been available for e meeting, I might well have been offered a position already. I do have that meeting set up for next Monday, but it already looks promising, with the quite likely position offer before noon. At a better salary than I'm making now, benefits and so forth. So, a win already. And I'm still looking.

Another example: about a month ago, I lost my keys. Now, its not a lot of keys, but it was an annoyance, as the set contained the one copy of the key we'd need to get into the building in case of a power failure, and the two keys that open a lock I got and only used once, so annoyance all around. We looked and looked, tried to think about where they could have gotten, blamed it one the cats roughhousing, and left it at that.

Then tonight, as I'm picking up the laundry, they tumble out of the load.

Yet another: on that keyring I carried a small pocketknife. Nothing particularly fancy or expensive, but rather useful and convenient. I used it nearly everyday at work, till I lost it one day. Again, looked and looked, couldn't find the damn thing and considered it and annoying loss. Last week, given that the time was right, I did some cleanup of the walk-in, and t was lying there on the floor.

Loss is one thing, this one is one of opportunity; on Monday, after the interview, I was walking around downtown, looking at picking up a couple of Terry Pratchetts and the new Swans album, a good thing to listen to before the show on Friday. After breaking fats at Ye Olde Orchard (at three PM), my partner points out a little hat, a yidlid, looking for a good home. Now I'm not a religious man, but I certainly understand the memes and powers associated with symbols, so I picked it up. It will probably join an eclectic assortment of occult and religious artifacts, both bought and found, in my Cabinet of Shadows.

I could have panicked, and freaked out, and have caused myself unnecessary stress about the losts. I could torture myself for having picked up, or not having picked up the kippah, as an object of personal devotion and obedience that did not belong to me. But that sort of guilt has no power over me, just like I strive to not let that over which I have no control have any hold on my peace.

My peace is of my own making, just as my drive is to look forward; it does not prevent from looking up or down or sideways. You never know what you'll miss otherwise.

The long road to somewhere

The one thing that makes people wary and anxious about change, is that most significant change takes time, and most people are constrained by time so that they need anything to be done now, right now, in the exact way that they want it to happen.

But the universe doesn't work that way. The universe doesn't get bogged down in minutia, the fate of a single speck of dust is not on high priority when dealing with cosmic objects the size of supernovas.

When I returned to work, there was never any intent for me to stay there long. The game plan was to return to active duty, get through the summer, and then move on to the next step. I didn't want to start a new job while I was moving, there's enough stress to deal with on one front, I don't need to expand it.Now that the move is done, and the summer is over, its time for me to look for my next step.

Its sort of interesting, because the majority of my close circle is out of work and searching, all in the span of a month. Sometimes change just slams into you; other times, you can see it coming from a mile away, if your eyes are open to the signs all around you. Like how the work environment has become more and more poisoned, how coworkers are leaving, through choice or circumstances... and then you find out that your boss has put out recruitment notices for your position. Sure, I could see it as him finally seeing that one person cant do all that work by himself...

But I'm not blind, or stupid. I can read the signs on the wall.

So the search has begun. At this time, I have applied to a few jobs, and I've already gotten three calls and an interview. Its been less than twenty-four hours. It is quite possible that I'll have a new job by the end of the week, if history serves me right. And I'm still working, so I don't have to worry too much about the income, for now. Sure, I may find out that I'm let go tomorrow. But honestly, that doesn't bother or scare me at all.

If anything, fear has left the building.

Good luck world, I'm out and about, and I just don't give a fuck about your expectations.

Work In Progress

Its been over a month now and time is starting to sink in. Moving to a new place, especially when you've taken the opportunity to ditch the less-than-satisfactory accumulated furniture, can certainly mean that you're living in a messy and less than organized space for a time. Without some of the required furniture, unpacking can be rather partial for quite a long time; but that's the game you have to play when you decide to upgrade.

Its a weird thing to do, upgrading, when you've spent years scrounging, fixing up, and just generally making due with whatever you could get your hands on. Why buy bookshelves, when you can just pick some up in the alley, paint them up and line them up against the wall, stacked with anything made out of paper with printed ink? Why spend the dough on a dresser when you can fix that thrift up, and dump your stacks of t-shirts in it?

Well, its a simple shift really, its when you start seeing the need for a coherent whole, instead of just a practical hodgepodge. Its actually a nice thing to have your bookshelves in a sort of logical sequence, where they are all pretty much the same size, or a matching set, where looking at them does not require you to squint your eyes to fuzz over the sight of them and shrug and give up. Its like moving on from wearing things that are "clean" to things that "match". Because all too often, things that match just work much better than just relying on things that work.

Up the benchmark as it is.

So after months of having not touched anything, of having packed it up, and at this point, having pretty much all of it just stacked up pelle-mele in the office, its time for a creative workspace to emerge. There are things that defy creativity; yes, it is possible to just write stuff up sitting on a busted box half a mile under the earth in a coal mine, but just because you can doesn't mean you should.

No matter how mentally strong you are, your environment does have an effect on your creative output, or even more to the point, on your creative drive. If you are of the creative type, and your life sucks, your work situation is precarious and your living arrangements are somewhat shifty, you tend to be highly motivated to run creative output marathons, where the least amount of tools are required to get the most amount out, because your motivation is so high up that you just have to express it or your head will explode.

But once all of that stabilize, you end up with the return of the pendulum, as the accumulated security of your existence will bog down the creative process. You tend to become focused maintaining the stuff you've accumulated, instead of making something new. And all that stuff piled up around you will act as miles and miles of intellectual speed bumps, slowing down the creative race to a snail's pace. Its not that you no longer get ideas, its that its become too cumbersome to actually act upon them.

But I have had enough of this shyte. Today is the day where I confront the procrastinating urge, and turn it into a proactive kick-in-the-ass for the artistic lunatic that lurks within.

I'm not claiming that there's a genius inside; but if I dont look for it and exercise my media muscles, I'll be thinking that TV writers are pretty damn good at their jobs pretty soon... and I dont know if I can live with myself accepting such mediocrity as a valid philosophy.

Here's to Chaos! Hail Eris!

Get'er done

Five years. That's how long I had stayed at the previous location. And the previous one was something of the same order. I haven't moved a lot in the last ten years or so, probably because I had moved so much in the previous six. It gets to you after a while. While the place might not be fantastic, you make due with it, adapt to it's limitations, even tho, deep down, you really need to move on. All kinds of reasons pop up for not doing it, like jobs, lack of money, the perennial "well, its not so bad", which sounds like the kind of excuses one come up with to stick with an abusive relationship.

But I'm not codependent, I'm just a procrastinator, with the attention span of a Corvid (Ooh! Shiny!)

So the new place got selected, we dealt with the fun bit of getting a truck and a crew together. We started out by looking up the truck, a nasty business, as in this neck of the woods, its mass moving time, which means increasing fees and depleting availability the closer you get to the moving date. Mover are considered, and rejected, given the rates they charge. We settled on renting a cube, and it was a scramble. Dropping the heavy deposit and locking the credit card was making the whole process a squeeze, but you just gotta roll with it. We posted a call for help to friends, and while some answered positively, a few turned it down, with good reasons (like that they had committed to help someone else move already), and some did not even answer. But in the end, we got a crew.

Because my employer owns a shop that does deliveries, I figured, what the hell, why not ask him for a truck? And he agreed. So back to scrambling to cancel the rental in time, to avoid penalties. And then scramble for boxes for the packing process early on, as the mountain of boxes kept mounting, and still there seemed to be more to pack away. I though that a culling was in order, but you can only cull so much, and after a while, you have to readjust your priorities and you just end up dumping stuff in boxes, to be dealt with later.

I kept reminding my employer about the truck, but he wasn't setting things up with precision, which is a pain in the ass when you're trying to set things up like, say, a schedule, or your drivers. On the eve of the move, I ask him again about the truck, at which point he asks me "what day I'm moving again?" He had it set that I was moving a day later than reality, so the wait for the arrangement to go through was actually the most stressful part of the whole ordeal. When I hear back from him, I get to find out that I was getting the twelve-feet cube, not the sixteen that I had expected. Okay, pain it the ass, but can deal. Call the drivers and get things organized.

The next day starts early. Seven in the morning early. Mostly because there are still things to be packed away, some cleaning needs to be done, the usual moving chaos. While we are packing the two vans, the movers show up for the new tenant. Woopie! Now that it matters much, as we have already set room aside for them to move her stuff in anyways, but someone will have to stay to make sure that nothing shifty takes place. And it does. While we were out, the movers tried to dig into my tool box without asking, at which point our watchdog wailed into them. Considering that a good proportion of movers are ex-cons, let that be a warning for those who were thinking of dealing with them.

The vans packed, a crew is left behind to continue with the process, while we get the truck and dump the first van's load. We have to search around for awhile to figure out who to talk to, only to find out that we're actually getting a twenty-feet truck, which is awesome. And to highlight my status in the company, the boss came out of a meeting to wish me good luck and to see how things were going. The truck finally arriving, the driver takes it up and returns to the old apartment, while I go with the van to the new place to unload. While there is an elevator here, its moving time for several people, so we pretty much elect to bring the boxes up three flights of stairs by hand, which is a long and tedious process.

We return to the old place, and continue loading the truck. The fridge and stove we dumped in the alley earlier we already picked up by scrap metal men, or used appliance shops looking for free stuff. Either way, its a good thing. By seven thirty, we are done loading, the old place has been sweeped through to make sure nothing's been left behind, and away we go! Given that its been a long day already, we elect to park the vehicles and go for our well-deserved dinner. Conveniently, there's a decent bbq chicken place just up the street, at a reasonable price.

After dinner, we return to the apt, where we are joined by Kate and Dom for the big push. Its nine pm already and we have both a truck full of furniture and boxes, plus a van full to unload. Luckily, we now have the elevator to ourselves. Along with a pair of dollies, its makes the process a lot less tedious and more efficient. It still takes us till well past midnight to finish up, but eventually, everything's unloaded. The truck gets returned at something like one-thirty AM, so that by the time we're back home, we're bushed. Especially since that both me and Natasha had to get up to work in the morning. Yay us!

According to my buddy Dang, this was one of the smoothest and least troublesome move he's been involved in. I just was happy to be done with the whole process. I am thankful for all of those who have helped us, if only by providing good vibes, as every little bit helps.

the dark assembly and spooky boogie night: playlist 06-10-2010

A promoter had booked the venue some months back, but seem to have forgotten that you also have to advertise to get people to show up. The audience was very slim indeed, but since it was "punk", it didn't have too much of an impact (I hope) on our usual audience. But still, four bands for six bucks, and they couldn't get enough people to show up to count on one hand...

imaginary steps - when i'm gone
bauhaus - man with x-ray eyes (live)
joy division - passover
the cure - fascination street
siouxie and the banshees - israel
sisters of mercy - alice
der blutharsch - untitled
sol invictus - the killing tide
southern death cult - the crypt
birthday party - release the bats
the cramps - the mad daddy
queen adreena - pretty like drugs
killing joke - the fall of because
einsturzende neubauten - haus der luge
angels of light - all souls rising
tiger lilies - start a fire
christian death - the angel (cruciform)
howden/wakeford - the wormwood season
portishead - hunter
novy svet - traicon
nick cave and the bad seeds - jack the ripper
coil - love's secret domain
pimentola - psychopompos
akira - tetsuo

Thanks to Wax for giving up his spot to let me sling my mud. I'll just have to put a decent band together to make up for it :D

Moving pains

I've moved between apartments before. I've been in tight spots.t with very little to  I've been stuck having to move with little to no notice. Its a tough spot to go through, but you go through it, and move on.

But as you move along in the world, as you move up, it gets more complicated; for one thing, you most likely accumulate more stuff. That has its own baggage. But you also most likely hook up and then its not one person dealing with a move, its two (or more.)

While having someone else in your life allows one to increase one's strengths, it also adds up to your weaknesses, in a geometric rate; they dont add up as a standard addition, they more like expand by the power of the number of participants. The growth is exponential.

The difficulty is further increased by emotional and intellectual differences, that have little to do with intelligence; they have more to do with one's perceptive filters and problem solving approaches. In most cases, the buck stops at the problem itself, seen in a way that expands it through a nasty system of parasitic dependency, inflating it to the point that it blocks any sort of light shinning through. In my case, I tend to see a problem as a group of circumstantial facts, which when analyzed, present their own weaknesses, cracking the walls of perceptions and allowing one to get a proper perspective on the situation at hand. Once that is achieved, the rest is to pick a path and follow through till resolution.

All that being said, while we are ahead on the organizing and packing, with a little over two weeks to go, some elements are popping up to throw a few wrenches in the machine, and there's the ghost screech of trouble ahead. Often, the problem lies in transportation, or lack thereof. It is very hard to move from one dwelling to another if you do not have some sort of vehicle. That got solved last week, when we secured a truck. The problem that then occurred, was that we had to clear out several pieces of furniture; the solution was to call up the Salvation's Army to schedule a pickup, but they didn't have a free spot till August. Not good. Others were just as problematic. So I cut the middleman, and put out an ad, offering it all for free. Surprisingly, I have received about a dozen messages, and there's already some pieces gone, with more to go.

But the big itch, the true wrench in the cogs, it that while we have the truck from noon to five thirty, we only have access to the apartment at four. And so far, its possible that we might need to make two trips.

So I have to roll with it and think fast. Do we go for extra transport? Do we look at temporary storage? Or do we get the time frame changed? How about all of the above?

So tomorrow is going to require a lot of phone calls. And maybe a little bit of begging for favors.

But I'll pull us through. Even if its going to be a close shave.

You can rely on old men to make a mess

Having been a pretty steady renter for many years, two properties in a row, the time had come to pack up and move. However, circumstances were that we had already renewed the lease, so due ti territorial regulations, a 90 period is required to be given for the lease to be terminated. At the time, this made it For August 1rst.

Given that most leases terminate on July 1rst and the mad scramble would take place on that day, we felt pretty comfortable with our schedule, as we wouldn't have to fight it out with other movers, and we wouldn't have to get gouged by professionals, cashing in on the money pot. Our new place was also happy to have us moving in a little later than everybody else, as that meant less pressure and more convenience for everybody involved.

But then, things got old-man complicated. As in, every time we spoke, the current landlord changed his needs/requirements. You could smell the building up panic. Pushing back the moving date one day, taking it back another; increasing rent, decreasing rent... messy, messy times.

So this morning, I got another visit from him, and now, we have to move out for the 1rst of July. We now have three weeks to wrap things up, gather a crew, figure out if we get a truck (with any luck), or do we hire professionals, deal with the extra furniture... on the other hand, we dont have to pay for the July rent at this current place. Oh, and I still have to clean up and finish the bathroom.

So, apparently, there was a tectonic shift in the last year that's reflecting on pretty much all areas of our lives. Its crazy, its messy, but it seems to be going in the right direction.

Onward and upward!