Ai Wei Wei Pins

The week after July 4^th was rather quiet.  The express busses were empty and many people in my life—friends, managers and the like—were out of town for a few extra days.  This and the fog made my time way out here in the outer Sunset rather drab.  I went to Max’s 540 twice this week to see if Joe the bartender was working.  He wasn’t but I did get to see the A’s play against the Giants.  I also went to the art galleries downtown for a belated First Thursday Art Walk.  I ended up with some Ai Wei Wei pins one of which I bequeathed to a friend who works at Visuvio.

I also went to East Bay Bike Party.  I was careful to send out messages to all of my cycling friends about the event.  There were these two people I had met at SF Bike Party, a couple of Twitter friends, a coworker and even a friend that I know via the old fashioned telephone.  Maybe someday I will even use Face Book.  I had intended to attend Oaklavia on the twelfth but couldn’t get my head together enough for a trip to Oakland.

On Saturday the parents went away for two weeks to Canada and gave me a lot of chores to do.  I had to water plants and take trash out.  I had to look forward to going to the DMV of all places.  Most of all I would have space to myself.

While over the last few months on Sunday had been going to Marin, I had been thinking about going elsewhere.  I noted that in time I might be able to visit to other parts of the Bay Area like Silicon Valley or Alameda.  I have been looking over Craigslist for a cheap foldie to look at and both of these places have come up at least once.  I am partial to Palo Alto because of its proximity to the 101.

I wanted to go on the 13^th of July but Sunday Streets was in the Richmond.  However, I got a message from a twitter friend that he was on Arguello.  I was at Park Chow reading the paper and had anticipated going.  I decided to quit reading and met him and his wife at Velo Rouge.  As we rode through Sunday Streets I noted that the venue wasn’t as big as the year before.  I heard that the businesses had complained about it.  However, there was still a farmer’s market.

We climbed into the Presidio and descended to the Main Post.  I was amazed as I passed the speedometer on my way down Arguello Boulevard—I had topped 35 mph.  We locked up and walked around Off the Grid which is basically a food truck event.  It is well named because all of the tents and trucks were using gas generators.  We ate lunch and tried out the selection of drinks and ice cream.  We even visited a doughnut truck where I think the girl behind the counter may have been checking me out.

We then went to the visitor center and children’s museum.  We saw a great exhibit about an artist named Blair who did early Alice in Wonderland sketches.  I took a picture of the bike path there.  From there we looked for and found the Goldsworthy sculpture in the parking lots.  I struck up a conversation with the docent program intern talking at length about about Ai Wei Wei and the Haines gallery.

After this we got the bikes and looked at the Ecology trail on the south side of the park but we ended up climbing Arguello instead.  We split up at California where it was pretty obvious that Sunday Streets had already been mostly broken down.

This is an occasional series chronicling my life. I started writing this Notebook Analysis on 070714.  This series is meant to be contemporaneous piece developed as an agglomeration of my notebook pages. In each of these posts I used my notes to develop my recent thoughts.

Dislocation and Living Memory

While recovering from hardship I reflect upon a certain dislocation stemming from my recall of past events.  It is a situation where my concept of someone or something is interrupted by a lack or loss.  This kind of feeling is a bit like an empty space on a wall which used to hold a painting or a piece of furniture that was recently moved to reveal depressions in the carpet.  However, I have begun to realize that this dislocation is accompanied by what I have come to term living memories.

This phenomenon is different from dislocation in that the memories are tied to a real person that is still alive and acting autonomously.  I find that these two phenomena, dislocation and living memory, are often tied to one another when a living person’s absence has moved on to occupy another location.  In the course of living my life I have experienced these phenomena concurrently and am struck by how hard it can be to identify what exactly existed within these empty spaces.  I find this is made even harder when the artifacts to which these memories are tied are in flux or are absent as well.

I think that these phenomena pertain specifically to the process behind the documentation of infrastructure which I do both in my free time and professionally.  It is a process as marked by absence and confusion as it is by hard copies and facts.  I find that I am constantly asking myself how I know something is true or why something is the way it is.  What strikes me as most profound in all of this is in the way that I so often know nothing about the events that swirl about me.

I have concluded that documentation is essentially the contemplation of self.  In the process of deciding what is really going on around me both as an individual as well as a professional I am constantly confronting how little I actually know.  I have found that it is in this realization that I actually come to understand the phenomenon which I am studying.  Each element in any complex is often so unique in its function and use that a researcher can only arrive at understanding through an intimate examination.

I have learned that this process of understanding is incredibly dependent upon the researcher’s ability to stop focusing on the big picture since the nitty-gritty can be so complex.  Hence, one must not dwell too long on the scale or extent of, for instance, any particular databases primary key and instead dwell upon what events caused the primary key to come into existence in the first place.  Likewise, one must spend less time focusing on, say, one particular unit of measure since at any scale space or place may change the meaning of those units.

As our lives grow longer our personal relationships become more diffuse and complex

This is an occasional series chronicling my life. I started writing this Notebook Analysis on 062914.  This series is meant to be contemporaneous piece developed as an agglomeration of my notebook pages. In each of these posts I used my notes to develop my recent thoughts.

I Explored Corte Madera

I wrote on the 29^th of June that I had been trying to get to Marin for a few weeks at that point and finally managed to do so on the day that I wrote this.  I had awoken at around 830 and organized my stuff and had a bite to eat.  I went to the park and stopped at the waterfall.  I then rode past the hospice and to the bridge.  There I saw Cary and thanked him for putting me in touch with Tim.  I took a photo of Hawk Hill from the Bridge and sent it to Twitter.  I then rode through Sausalito to Starbuck for coffee.

Later I wrote that I left Sausalito and traveled parking lots to the Bay Model and then bake path on Bridgeway.  I took my time to Saratoga where I wandered off alone.  I took Lomita to the 101.  I explored Corta Madera and took photos of the crossing there.  I came back through to Miller.  I got photos of a crossing there too.  I then rode to Ross and hung out behind the park.  I thought I was alone but a girl walked by.

I went to San Anselmo and tweeted at a café.  I then climbed all the way up the dirt path to the spot where Shaun and I had climbed a month before.  I almost died from exhaustion.  It was hot and dry and I was out of energy.  I finished my water and sent messages.  On the way down I spoke to some mountain bikers and they indicated I could go through Tamarancho with no problems but it was a fee area.  I went down to Cascade and had water and caught my breath at the park. I rode through Fairfax, San Anselmo, San Rafael and through the tunnel to Larkspur.  I boarded the boat and had a bag of Chex Mix.  I updated my Facebook account when I got home.

This is an occasional series chronicling my life. I started writing this Notebook Analysis on 062914.  This series is meant to be contemporaneous piece developed as an agglomeration of my notebook pages. In each of these posts I used my notes to develop my recent thoughts.

Officially a Memo Post

Over the last month or so I have been becoming more responsible—going to the doctor for instance or adding more Kale to my diet.  I have also been looking at foldable bikes to help with my obsession with bike and pedestrian infrastructure.  While I go to Bike Party often I also went to the Really Big Bike Party and have met a number of new and old friends doing so and we keep in touch via social media.  Meanwhile, I have been learning a lot about my calling in Geography.  Specifically I can now call myself an expert in linear referencing and even had the pleasure of getting on a conference call with my old boss—a man from whom I learned everything.  However, I must admit the job is as rewarding as it is demanding.

This post is officially a memo post so I will give a few excerpts of my adventures over the past several months.  In one post that I wrote I went to I went to Rainbow with Kathryn and we also went to Tour de Fat together.  There was one specific moment at the Buffalo Paddock that I will recall with fondness.

Last year, I went to OR and visited my brother Joe and my parents and I stayed in a A Little Double Wide and upon my return I had a lot of trouble getting into the swing of things.  Also, a few months later I got honked at on International BL.  In another post I went to see Bing Ma Yong, which was special because I got to re-experience with my mom something that we had done in both Toronto and Xi’an, China where my mother visited me while I was abroad for school.

During this same period I also hung out with my family and some friends.  For instance, I participated in Bike To Work Day with some friends from work and at the end of the day we went to a cool restaurant.  I also went for a walk in the park with Nicole.  I also must note that I wrote a number of posts about work—this one was about linear referencing.  The most exciting post by far thought was when I went to see the cast of Children’s Hospital at Cobbs.

This is an occasional series chronicling my life. I started writing this Notebook Analysis on 062314.  This series is meant to be contemporaneous piece developed as an agglomeration of my notebook pages. In each of these posts I used my notes to develop my recent thoughts.

An Ominous Dislocation

As I am certain you already know, I been write a lot in general but I lately I have found that my notebook especially good for getting my mind straight.  Lately I have been writing to cope with a big letdown and this in turn has caused me to assess how much I can reveal about my struggles to those around me.  Of course I have failed in my recovery at times but I have begun to draw comfort from the prospect of how reaching out may mean getting my hand slapped.

I have noted an ominous dislocation in the back of my mind through all of this.  Probing it I have begun to notice that this dislocation comes from the realization that certain things I had always just assumed were there have moved or were never there in the first place.  However, it would seem that this is simply an illusion since my concept is only one person’s.

I have read a lot of Science Fiction in my life and have begun to see how the metaphors these story arcs make relate to this dislocation.  Take for example time travel about which I have read plenty.  One of my favorite of these is PK Dick’s A Little Something For Us Tempunauts.  I like the piece because it proposes the time loop as a phenomenon nearly impossible to understand by anyone except the person to which it happens.

The metaphor, as I see it, is that history and the past change because of the way that they relate to epistemology.  For instance, we experience life as a stream and accrue ideas and concepts from without.  As the stream changes, we change and so does our concept of reality.  This metaphor carries over nicely to what I have been terming dislocation.

This is an occasional series chronicling my life. I started writing this Notebook Analysis on 060414.  This series is meant to be contemporaneous piece developed as an agglomeration of my notebook pages. In each of these posts I used my notes to develop my recent thoughts.