Month: August 2024

Take the 49 indeed

Posted on by Liz

Tonight on the bus I met a really nice lady named Lulu who was reading a Mayan/ English phrase book and had some stunning eye makeup. We chatted about antifascist things and she was telling me stories about the 60s and I dunno, hanging out with Jefferson Airplane and all that sort of thing and I guess she taught herself some Mayan back then because of trying to work at a fancy bookstore where they didn’t hire her but did give her a free book on Mayan?! The one that the Mexican government published in the 1930s. I can’t remember all the things we talked about and have forgotten interesting details like the name of the specific bookstore, but I did give her a tiny zine while also saying with regret that I have no time to a) actually learn Mayan b) come to a labor organizing thing in North Beach of Mayan and Mam speaking restaurant workers! So maybe we will meet again. I thought of inviting her to the Soiree (since she had a walker, she would fit right in) but she was on her way to the labor thing. I also felt a nice feeling like OK maybe when I am 75 I will be riding the bus still with all my flamboyance and reading interesting books and meeting people. I hope so!

Onward to my event which was the “Wine and Chocolate Soiree” fundraiser (a criperati thing) where I got to have nice conversations with some of my friends who work for that org while drinking champagne and dipping tiny creampuffs and chunks of poundcake into a chocolate fountain in the Green Room above the opera house. THAT IS JUST HOW THEY ROLL. once a year they splash out and have a little gala. Maybe nonprofits get to rent it cheap. So I’m hanging out with Vince and his friend Ben and they told me about an accessible “ninja” course they made at some school in atherton (?) and then we were coming up with the best ideas for a wheelchair driven remotely with a glow in the dark life size Halloween lawn decor skeleton and a sign that says STILL WAITING FOR UNIVERSAL HEALTH CARE or whatever, that we would drive around town. Vince said to look up something from brooklyn called Devil Baby where they haad some sort of prank stroller where you go look in and YAAAAAAAH DEVIL BABY pops out. OK!!! Time for another glass of free champagne!

Then this lady comes up to me and goes Oh is that a Pansy Division tshirt! Yes it is. Oh I played with them once! Oh really what was your band. Well do you know who I am, I’m J* L*R*y! I started laughing uproariously! I am sure my face was doing many strange things that I had zero control over.

Anyway, I blurted, Oh, that’s so highlarious!!! Because, I’m like, a micro niche famous hoax identity debunker! Hahahaha!

I was treated to some backstory which I mostly knew anyway because I do have a little side hobby sometimes of being interested in people’s (literary/blog) hoax identities!

So, that happened….

A few creampuffs later I dipped to return to the 49 bus stop where unfortunately a man was laughing to himself insanely with his pants down, jerking it in the middle of Van Ness and MacAlister right across from City Hall. I had some conflicted thought such as, well, he is just a sad and unhinged person who really doesn’t seem to know much about what is up, and he isn’t like, LOOKING at anyone, hes just like staring off into space in the other direction and guffawing? But I don’t really want to ride the BUS with him tho? I decided it would not help to go to a different stop and I’d just be rolling the dice for something weirder and more bad to happen! So he got on the bus near the back, and I got on with the ramp at the front, and I kept an eye peeled and sat on my folding cane in case I needed to physically block anyone, and all was well (he got off at 16th and the rest of the bus was peaceful)

The end!

My lists and systems

Posted on by Liz

As I wrestle with my own tendency to goblin mode I have come up with a few systems that may finally be sticking longer than a month or two. It’s been going for 3 years, in fact!! This system is a combination of day planner, a check list on custom printed post-it notes, Google Calendar(s), and a github project board.

The custom printed post-its are crucial to get me to do the basic human tasks one should do in the morning. Yes it’s a little embarrassing that I need a checklist to tell me to floss and put on deodorant and take my meds. But it’s been incredibly helpful! The checklist is roughly in the order that I actually do things. It has blank space to write extra items. A stack of post-its from Vistaprint is something like 10 bucks, and now that I have refined the list to a consistently useful form, I print more at once.

The day planner is a 12-month spiral bound notebook from Rifle Paper Co, and I’ve been using this type for the last two years. It’s not something I normally care around with me – it lives on my desk or the spot I sit on the couch in the morning. Every day gets a new post-it checklist.

So first thing in the morning I can look at my planner, start a new daily post-it checklist, transfer anything I didn’t do from yesterday to today’s post-it, and start checking and syncing things i need to do written on the planner to the stuff that’s in my google calendar.

That already sounds overly complicated but it works ok!

I have at least 3 google calendars I have to make sure are all synced. The 2 contract work ones are hooked into my main (personal) one. But I have to make sure all that stuff is represented in the weekly planner.

The next step is to look at the giant project board. Anything that I think needs to be done I slam into a new github issue and put it into a column like today, tomorrow, next up, backlog. There is also a column for repeating and in progress. Issues have tags, so I can filter on different contracting jobs or look at only creative or domestic tasks.

This board is hard to keep in check. Every day I need to make sure that I clear “today” to a reasonable amount of tasks, and that “tomorrow” has not filled up with 30 things.

It is SO MUCH better though than having 100 tabs open plus a giant email inbox full of things I need to pay attention to.

I have a time tracker, Tmetric, hooked up to the github project board. So, when I sit down to work on a contract job I hit “start” on it and when I switch tasks I hit stop. In practice, I have to correct this tracker a couple of times a day when I forget to manage it. But it helps me track my hours and also to see interesting facts like, Oh, hmm, I spend like 2 hours a day doing domestic chores.

I am never going to do all the things I think of doing.

So, re-prioritizing every few days or at LEAST every week is incredibly important.

It isn’t perfect but it’s helping me a lot!

It also sounds like a lot of overhead, but it is normally 15 minutes to an hour a day, spread out over the entire day, and it’s INCREDIBILY WORTH IT. Because I am getting more shit done and it is more often (alas not always) the correct shit to not fail/disappoint other people or myself.

Elements of this system:

– Routine stuff checklist
– Physical object planner
– Daily sync of checklist, planner, calendar, and project board
– Time tracker on the github board, mainly for consulting work
– Frequent (at least weekly, ideally, daily) comb through of project board to re-prioritize, check of what’s stuck in “in progress”, etc.
– Daily translation of things in inbox to project board tasks
– Sunday evening calendar/planner sync is critical for starting my work week right

It does strike me this is the sort of system everyone was trying to drum into me during my entire junior high/high school existence, but that I absolutely did not master and that I experienced only as horrible torture. Like, I think I spent much of middle school with a weird little planner book that I was forced to get every teacher to initial at the end of every period, and then my parents had to sign it too every night because I would forget stuff. Did i have my book? no. did i have the worksheet? no. did i have the permission slip or wahtever the fuck? no. did i have my 3 week progress report or 6 week report card signed off on by a parent and returned for a grade? No, i forgot it, and fuck you all very much for the useless “study skills” class and endless school psychologists and unhelpful underachieving gifted child label/damage.

Oh, well!!!!! Apparently in my 50s I have finally learned.

drawing of an owl with paper and pen that says make a list

Bathtubs and books, hippies

Posted on by Liz

I had a relaxing and luxurious bath this morning in our new clawfoot tub, which is blowing our minds after some years of only having a shower in the house. While I was in there I read a good way into a book someone left on our sidewalk bench, Polaroids from the Dead by Douglas Coupland. I liked the title and was curious what Mr. “Gen X” inventor had to say. (For accompaniment, I put on Lou Reed’s album Transformer.) So far, Polaroids strikes me as mostly accurate in mood and content. I moved to the Bay Area in 1990 so it was all very familiar. It did feel a little more like the late 80s but still, accurate.

Part of the mood that I enjoyed was that it conveyed our (us being people roughly of my age in 1991 or so) attitude towards hippies and the 70s, which was that they seemed to have had all the fun and excitement but that there was a little left for us; they would kindly sell us blotter acid, and we could still go see them in concert.

I thought less about California in the 90s while reading this book and more about Austin in the 80s. I lived in or hung out at various co-ops (and yes it was pretty much exactly like the movie Slacker which captured the vibe perfectly (ofc I knew half the people in there) in that it was possible to live on your part time minimum wage job and go to school and fuck around doing art and music or whatever. ) So tempting to keep nesting parentheses, but no.

Here’s me with a guy I briefly “dated” (if you can call it that) from Arrakis Co-op and then a little after I moved into 21st Street Co-op in late 1986 or early 1987. He was a Deadhead and very nice, and had cases and cases of taped Dead concerts carefully labelled & often with very lovely art and handwritten liner notes. (I remember being impressed with this and also with how he would diligently do all his engineering homework, then hit the bong with equal diligence afterward.) But my point is that hippie culture was not at all dead in 1987, or 1990. It was alive and kicking. I was so relieved that I hadn’t missed my chance after all to experience it.

two white young people, me in sleeveless crop top, guy with mullet in a Woodstock tshirt

There was a guy who would come by the Loud Suite (where I lived at first in 21st St) named Motorcycle Michael, who had long white guy dreads done up in a crocheted hat, drove a van, and always wore pretty much the same outfit made of that gorgeous oaxacan or guatemalan woven cloth and a tie died tshirt. He seemed to be the most obvious dealer hanging out there and I don’t think I bought anything from him (I did not need to ; see above photo of me; do you think I got free bong hits or??! It didn’t even occur to me, and besides, I had no money) It did not have any sort of creepy feel (Drug dealer or pusher hanging out with teenage students) but rather, a sort of benevolent uncle and friend vibe. (Trust me I have seen the creepy, gross, skeevy ones and know; or maybe i just am overly impressed with any older guy who was decent enough not to hit on me) Like, his life was bopping around between Mexico and all over Texas maybe, living in his van, hanging out with people who were pretty chill, listening to good music, being super generous with his time and energy, telling funny stories, helping people out, going to Dead concerts. He was part of the culture! I heard a while back through a co-op FB group that he died, and then I just looked him up again and found this interesting memoriam.

Pic below of Loud Suite life:

several young people sitting on dilapidated couches, looking happy

Lest you all think of me as a drug addled fool, I can reassure you I was not much into excess, was a complete lightweight, would cut blotter acid into quarters, etc. etc. (We won’t even talk about where the other drugs like X came from, *cough* *Rice chemistry students*) It was occasional! And social! I swear! Anyway, I still graduated and I appear to have a reasonable amount of brain cells left.

A more wholesome photo, of a bunch of us cooking in the industrial kitchen – I learned to cook here, and was dinner cook (for 100 people) and menu planner for many years. Here, Ethan, Paul Macafee, Karen, Mike LeFebre, and I are drinking Old Milwaukee and cooking dinner. Ok, mostly wholesome. I blame Paul for the cheap gross beer choice.

several young people gathered around a giant bowl of steaming food. they are drinking old milwaukee beers

ANYWAY. Because of prepping to go see The Way to Eden in Star Trek Live tonight we watched the original episode yesterday and laughed our asses off at the space hippie children! (Their drug use is implied only, but their vibe is impeccable!) Star Trek tried hard to come to grips with how the future might see hippies. Were they wrong?!

There were really lovely hippietastic moments I remember, like about 40 people from the co-op all tripping and going to see Koyaanisqatsi together. It was fine! We were a lovely social amoeba moving across the town and into the movie theater! The point was not the drugs so much as it was being gorgeously social and also experiencing and creating music and culture together!

I have forgotten my point. I have more to say about hippies, drugs, and the internet, which we all talked about at DWeb Camp and which I kind of go into in my long poem “Whole Earth Catalog”. But here, I think my point was that I have found it funny and a little sad sometimes to see people now worrying that they missed raves, or grunge, or riot grrrl, or zines, or whatever, and then I absolutely fucking love it when they realize they can JUST DO THOSE THINGS. Nothing is stopping you! You are in history, too! You can make an entire scene happen, and also, whatever else you are doing now, someone is going to look back on with fondness and longing, in some way that you are not even aware of as a Thing! You are in your own Thing right now!!!!!

Generous with their links

Posted on by Liz

In what may have been the heyday of independent blogging, just as it turned to eyeball grabbing ad fodder, I remember my blog being reviewed by someone who described me as “generous with her links”.

This struck me as shocking on a couple of levels.

I realized they thought of my linking out as generous because I’m referring traffic outside of my own domain; the SEO strategies of the time probably recommended that you link only to your own site, directing readers to hit more of your pages, making you look more important to paying advertisers.

Needless to say (as you can tell from my own lack of fame, fortune, and ambition) I was not “optimizing” anything. Mostly I was just flinging posts into the public void out of being a compulsive diarist and having some ideals around women’s writing being mostly private, in diaries and letters, for most of history & wondering what would happen if we all split the world open by writing about our lives as part of public discourse.

younger liz peering over sunglasses wearing a beanie hat with the blue, white, and orange Blogger logo

Monetization aside, the good angle on the generous nature of linking would be the sense of taking the time and energy to add depth, to help the reader discover interesting things, like footnotes and appendices that knit information together and expand our minds – but that isn’t what the reviewer meant.

The whole point of the web is links! Creating a meaningfully interlinked body of knowledge and text! Consider Ted Nelson! And Vannevar Bush! Bring back the thinkertoys! But also just consult your own common sense and conscience!

If I remembered where that review appeared, I’d link to it!

white woman with a wry expression wearing a tshirt that reads "no one cares about your blog"

Reclaiming our brunchlord glory

Posted on by Liz

It’s new notebook day! Always lovely even if you haven’t finished the new notebook (though I have!) to start afresh, to make resolutions, to number the pages and have an aspirational Index page, and best of all to feel the infinite possibilities of the fresh start and the blank book! Uncontaminated by to-do lists and projects undone – anything could happen!

It’s been a while since I’ve posted a bad invention; I’ve had some in the meantime which have already been forgotten and will never be documented – so here is something equally trivial and silly!

Danny was telling me on the drive up to DWeb Camp in some conversational tangent about the word “brunchlords” which apparently one journalist at TechDirt has been trying to make a Thing. And he is the only person to really use that word, and Danny was trying to explain to me the nebulous and complex idea it represented which he had a disconnect with in several ways, but I won’t go into that because I got at least some of the basic idea of what techdirt guy meant by brunchlords, but I barely even CARE because I instantly felt that running down the concept of brunch was homophobic and so it must be reclaimed, ASAP!

** vague handwaving ** (I gather it is highly derogatory! On my casual skim of a few paragraphs of exactly one article, because I can’t be BOTHERED, I got a good definition of it though: “utterly incompetent trust fund failsons” and somehow they RUIN TECH. )

(insert even more vague memory of Danny carefully explaining if, rhetorically you wanted to convey some particular idea, you were doing it wrong if you put that idea, and brunch, together, and also the idea that “brunch” represents impossibly wealthy elitism is ridiculous!)

Now, I obviously don’t love utterly incompetent trust fund failsons, but I don’t see why they get to have all the good things in life.

Rather than simply say, “Stop trying to make Brunchlord a THING, it’s not a thing!” … We need to reclaim brunchlords, including both lording and brunch!

I object! Brunch is wonderful! Hating brunch is like hating kittens, or sunsets, or walks along the beach, or queer flamboyance!

According to ME, a brunchlord is someone who is a joyous organizer of friend groups. A brunchlord has probably been up late, doing something fun! Brunchlords know where the most delicious breakfasty and also lunchy food is, whether it’s in their own kitchen or at a cafe where you stand in line with other hung over goofballs enjoying the (late) morning air and then spend $25 on lemon ricotta french toast with a side of candied bacon, or korean fried chicken on a waffle!

Why would you hate the flamboyant, decadent brunchlords, who can be any of the genders! A brunchlord may have bedhead, and their last night’s eyeliner may be smeared down their face, but they always look amazing! They want to take you out, and take care of you, maybe in a sunny parklet, and connect NIGHT with DAY!

In tech, the brunchlord is anti-utilitarian. They know how to embellish things, know how to add a little extra joy into an experience or into a piece of software, and will always make space to hang out and gossip. They aren’t just like, work work work, ship ship ship, all the fucking time! No!

In tech journalism, a brunchlord will do that interview with you…. AT BRUNCH. They will even buy you brunch. That’s how it works! If you aren’t buying someone brunch, how are you even tech journalisting? (Sad oatmeal, solo, over zoom…)

Well, anyway.

Reclaim brunchlords! Enjoy life a little!! Embrace brunch, and lords, at least metaphorically in an egalitarian and anarchist way! Go forth!