a stream

Coming out of social media retirement to tell you about the Tandoori Chicken Tin I had for lunch today from O’Falafel Etc. Wish I had taken a photo of this dish, because the picture on their website doesn’t do justice to the masterpiece of fresh take-out I received.

If I had taken a picture, what you would see is this yummy grilled chicken (just a little bit spicy) mixed with grilled onions and zucchini in a pink, creamy sauce (I think pink from paprika and maybe tomato), served over the most beautiful yellow long grain basmati-ish rice, with a fresh green salad, a cucumber-yogurt-salsa-type thing, a creamy green cilantro salad dressing, and an optional spicy salsa. I think it might be something like harissa but they just call it “the spicy sauce.” I like to just mix it all up together in the tin. One of the best lunches I’ve had in a long time, sitting alone in my car in the parking lot of Fairmont Park chowing it down.

Some meme I saw a local business share on Instagram one time said that one of the best things you can do for businesses (besides buying their stuff, of course) is post good things about them, so this is me trying to start doing that. I’ve liked O’Falafel for quite a while, but I’ve only ever tried three or four things from their extensive menu; those three things have been so good that I generally just want to get one of them again. My other favorites besides the tandoori tin are the falafel sandwich and the smothered chicken shawarma tin.

Standalone post link: ''ofalafeltandooritin''

Kicking myself because I just missed being able to buy/download this collection from Nyege Nyege (now it is 666 Euros to buy and it can’t be streamed.)

But I found a decent mixtape based on the collection on Soundcloud.

Only problems are:

1. I’m not really supporting the label or the artists by listening to it this way
2. I don’t really know which artist or track I’m hearing at any given time to go seek it out

It is certainly an electrifying listen, though. Think I’ll be digging through more of this label and related artists for the next while.

Standalone post link: Listening: L'Esprit de Nyege 2020

Started reading The Selected Works of Audre Lorde last night. Wow.

Think I’ll have more to share later once I have read more and thought through it more.

I’ve been wrestling with the words of a certain dead Mormon apostle in my head today, and for reasons not entirely clear to me yet I’m tempted to put him and Lorde in a dialogue with each other. If that goes anywhere I’ll share it here.

Standalone post link: Reading: The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

Making some little moves again on my website in prep to possibly come out of social media retirement.

Been like a year - remains to be seen whether I can finally dissuade myself from getting distracted, disheartened, disinterested, dispirited, or otherwise discouraged.

Maybe I need to disco for it.

Yeah, I did that.

Standalone post link: ''makingmoves-disco''

I watched Born in Flames (1983), written, directed, and edited by Lizzie Borden.

(Actually mainly just testing to see how this post looks in micro.blog and on my website without a title. But I did watch this movie last night.)

Standalone post link: ''borninflames''

I watched the movie Soul last night, and I loved it.

Loved this movie, with one complaint: it really was a missed opportunity to not get an actual jazz or jazz-adjacent musician to do all of the soundtrack. The Reznor and Ross pieces were nice and quite serviceable, but when I imagine what Flying Lotus, Kamasi Washington, or someone/anyone in jazz might have done instead I start to get a little angry about it. I’m therefore taking off 1/2 star for the failure to fully commit to jazz.

https://letterboxd.com/jdwhiting/film/soul-2020/

Standalone post link: ''soul''

Here are some of the things I’m working on and thinking about now…

• Finishing up a two-week winter break where I truly didn’t think much about work and just spent time with my family.

• Despite the break, something I was focusing on at work and will again is the development and curation of our school district’s Sora/OverDrive collection of ebooks and audiobooks. You need to be a student or staff member to access these, but you can see some examples of what we are doing here.

• Reading whatever I want, and tracking it faithfully on Goodreads again. Maybe I will start sharing things about my reading on this site and other social media as well.

• Watching movies again. About to do a deep dive into New Korean Cinema. (I track my movie-watching on Letterboxd.)

• Pondering making a concerted re-entry into social media and updating this site for the first time in months, starting with this ‘now’ update. I feel like, if nothing else, I should be sharing more things that I like, do, read, see, eat, etc., so that I can give a little more promotion to businesses, artists, creators, authors, etc. I’ve gotten as shy online as I have always been in person, and I’m ready to push back.

This page was last updated on January 3, 2021. See my prior ‘now’ updates here.

Credit for the ‘now’ page concept goes to Derek Sivers. I had envisioned a page of this sort for my new website, but my concept was vague and I didn’t have a clear way forward until I happened upon someone with a ‘now’ page and followed the trail back to the source. I think you should make one too.

Standalone post link: Now (January 3, 2021)

Did I somehow call forth the winds and fires by listening to this album so fervently last week?

I was just excited about fall, and autumnal black metal…

And despite my one percent superstition about this, I’m listening to it again - the present storms demand this fury.

https://thetruepanopticon.bandcamp.com/album/autumn-eternal

Standalone post link: ''autumneternal''

The school district received a herd of ponies. I was supposed to catalog them, barcode them, and figure out a good protocol for checking them out to students.

They were all in an old corral out in the desert, and seemed wild and restless, as if perhaps they had just been captured and swept in from that desert and we hadn’t exactly been told the truth about their (lack of) training. Also, it didn’t seem like anyone was taking care of them out there so it was maybe going to fall to me to feed them, scrape out their hooves, and do whatever else needs to be done for horses. I don’t know anything about horses.

I felt I needed to learn all the proper descriptive terms for horse coloration so I could create accurate descriptions in the MARC records, but I was afraid to admit my lack of knowledge of horse culture to anyone. I’d never even ridden a horse.

I remember thinking I would probably put the barcodes on their saddles, until I realized that horses only wear saddles when a human is riding or about to ride on them. I was reluctant to brand the barcodes on them, and it would be tedious work to get the symbology and coding correct each time.

Years ago I was driving around out in some rural area and I turned a corner on a lane and in front of me were two pickup trucks, engines running but stopped in the middle of the road while going opposite directions. The drivers were chatting with each other through their windows, and had been for who knows how long. I want to say one truck was brown and the other tan or grey with some white or turquoise trim, but I can’t truly remember. Their colorings definitely weren’t entirely un-horseish, though.

In the pastures parallel to where the trucks were idling, two horses stood on either side of a fence. They were doing that thing horses sometimes do where they stand next to each other but face opposite directions, their tails occasionally flipping a little bit in each others' faces. Like idling engines.

Two trucks and two horses, opposite but parallel. Perfect composition if I could pull it off. It might have even been the golden hour; let’s go ahead and say the lighting was good. I was too afraid of what the drivers might say or do about a random city kid in a tiny Japanese car taking their picture. They just as likely might not have even noticed if I had stopped and taken the picture, though.

Encountering horses in the human world often just makes me feel sad, guilty, a little bit afraid, and like maybe what I should do is sneak back at night and set them all free. I’m occasionally concerned that if I get too close they might bite me, kick me, or trample me, and I’d deserve it for standing there gawking at them or otherwise being complicit in the nonsense. A horse certainly doesn’t owe me anything. But in actuality I understand they are mostly too broken to ever attempt such things against a strange human.

I said “herd” above because it sounded better to me, but in the dream it was definitely first described to me as a “set” of ponies. Catalog our new set of 40 ponies and prepare them for checkout.

I’d settled on a 1 week check out period per student. They could walk or ride the ponies home from the school, but I wasn’t sure how they were going to be able to take enough hay home to feed the pony for a week. We’d need horse carts, or a delivery truck.

At one point a vice-superintendent and a district PR person videocalled me at the corral to check in on “where we were at” in getting the ponies ready and out to students. It was a district priority.

My wife’s cousin’s horses were being ridden around in circles by my nieces, my kids, and some other cousin kids. Everyone needed multiple turns. I was informed that one of the horses was called Dreamer. Right as I was told this I noticed an insect crawling around the edge of Dreamer’s deep, brown eye, accentuating the misty, faraway look I saw there. However faraway and inscrutable that look, I intuited that the dreams that Dreamer dreamed behind those eyes were reasonable and close, centered in the here and now: I think that Dreamer longed to stop walking around in circles in the heat. I think this dreamful creature, itself fulfilling the dreams of so many cabin children with its steady legs and unfathomable eyes, actually just wanted to eat some fucking grass. It was growing all around the edges of the riding ring, and Dreamer kept breaking the circle to go snag some bites of green stuff, before being pulled back into semi-compliance by the child at the reigns.

I could be wrong about all of this, though; I don’t know anything about horses.

Standalone post link: A Horse Called Dreamer

I’ve been here before. It’s a cycle for me. The compulsion to exist on social media, followed soon after by silence. I’ve posted variations on this dilemma before. I’ve almost posted on it many times more.

I want and need to just live my life, do my things, think my thoughts, and not be performative about any of it. I despise so much in life that is performative, and I want not to contribute to it. I don’t want to be that person, although I probably still am.

But then, I do want to share and bring to light cool things. People have good ideas, they’ve made interesting or useful things, they need to be supported.

And I want to sort-of connect with people in my weird, limited ways. I usually fail or fear doing this in person. The asynchronicity of some social media platforms is everything to me. I’m not that interested in chat or video calls. I don’t want to get together with you. I just want to share stuff, see other people share stuff, maybe have some sort of time-delayed conversations. I should start writing letters. Or a blog. That’s it.

And yes, wanting to be performative after all. Wanting to make art, or at least something kind of interesting, out of the details of my life, to share my thoughts and perspective.

Is that a performance? A curation? Something always has to be left out.

--

I recently re-read Ross Gay’s Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, and right now I’m listening to the audio of his Book of Delights. I’m fairly inspired by how he is working his way through this. I love how he pays attention / gives attention to so many regular, mundane things. I want to do more of that in my writing, and photography/video, whatever I choose to mess around with and share.

Standalone post link: On Whether To Share Things