In which things are brought up to date

Cold (11°C) and grey and rainy. Blah. Writing at home while waiting for the washing machine to finish its cycle, then to Rose Street this afternoon.

The Münstermeister called last Thursday, while I was packing for my trip to London: They have withdrawn the offer of full-time employment, because he doesn't have a budget for my salary. They are pleased with my work and do wish to continue the present 20-hours-a-week arrangement; however, they appreciate that I cannot live on that and would fully understand if I should prefer to take a different full-time job elsewhere.

I am flabbergasted that such a budgeting failure can apparently occur out of the blue, and somewhat shocked at the laxness it implies. What if I had signed that first contract and loaded my stuff on the moving van? They would presumably have cancelled the contract under the "probation period" clause and left me adrift there. Nice.

I don't know what to say about this. I had come to accept the idea of moving away, and have broken ties commercially with G and U (other than finishing a current competition and ... but I am getting ahead of myself). And I was even looking forward to proper employment again, with coffee breaks and paid holidays and the whole damned thing. I shall polish my resumé and try elsewhere.

M2 gave me a homework assignment when we met in Second Life on that Thursday evening: to daydream a little about what I want my life (and myself) to be, bearing in mind both my fiftieth birthday and the withdrawal of the job offer. I'm sorry to confess that I didn't do it, I spent my time eating and drinking and watching TV (spits on the ground) and hanging out with family instead. But it will be done. Oscar gave me a book for my birthday, "Walking in this world: practical strategies for creativity," and BB another, "How to see yourself as you really are" by the Dalai Lama or his ghostwriters (alpacas, perhaps). I shall take these as the well-intended friendly nudges they are, and try to shape Version Two of myself for the next fifty years.

Funny how habits can depend on context and environment. In my normal life I am surrounded by music: iPod, internet radio, CD player etc. In England, there was no music and I didn't miss it at all. In London last week, I very quickly got used to watching an hour or two of TV every day (evenings mostly). Back home, it hasn't occurred to me to switch my TV on.

The architects have been selected for yet another competition, a multi-storey parking garage. Hooray! I am fascinated by garages and parking lots and the like, and my final-year thesis project was just such a building. I will do this competition with/for G and U. The deadline is in October, so there should be plenty of time to get it sorted out.

Nothing compares 2 U

If people still know the-artist-once-again-known-as Prince in a hundred years, this song will be among the reasons why. The cover version by Sinéad O'Connor shuffled up from the depths onto my iPod today and reminded me in a rush of emotion of the first time I heard it.

In the winter of 1990 I was working at a Great Big Computer Company in Sprawlville, commuting to and from London every day — except when train strikes or boozing with the lads prohibited this. On one such occasion, I camped at Smiler's house after a particularly intense beer-and-curry session. It had been a very late night and I had had far too much to drink, so I was dog-tired and still half-drunk as we got into his car to drive to work the next day. Smiler pulled up at a tobacconist and went inside to get his fix. As he closed the car door, this song came on the radio.

It was the first time I'd heard it, and in my weakened condition the song — and Sinéad's delivery — just devastated me. By the time he returned the tears were rolling down my cheeks and I was literally struck dumb. I could not have spoken a word to save my life.

Smiler earned big karma points and my undying respect and gratitude for what happened next: He saw nothing, heard nothing and said nothing, neither then nor ever after. He even stopped for gas on the way to the office (though the tank was three-quarters full) to give me a few more minutes to pull myself together.

This may not seem like a big deal to some of you, but seen within the yobbish cultural ideal of The Lad which reigned in England at the time it was an act of singular generosity and kindness, a demonstration of true greatness of spirit. English humour has always been based on cruelty and insult, and within that culture reputation and popularity were held to be zero-sum games: I can only improve my standing with the Lads by damaging yours. He could have shot up in the pecking order by cutting me off at the knees that day, and others of my so-called friends would have done so without hesitation. "Well, it's jus' a larf, innit? Can't you take a joke?"

Shabbat shalom, my dears; and wherever you are, Smiler: thank you.

What now?

Being a short exercise in self-flagellation

Blogging in the not-so-new office, on my own on a partly-sunny day, Beethoven's 6th Symphony (filtered through Liszt) is playing quietly, throat and lungs behaving only moderately badly.

G and U invited me to move my office here should I wish to do so, and I am thinking of taking up the offer. Several reasons: first, the one or two cappuccinos I drink here are healthier than the half-litre of filter coffee that I would drink at home; it would give me a guaranteed minimum of 2 x 8 minutes' walk every day, which I sometimes don't manage otherwise; thirdly, the discipline of coming here to work, and really working when here, would be very good; but mainly because my landlady has given me notice to quit. (Yes, not even the scare last summer could make me pay my rent regularly. Am I not the biggest idiot alive?) I am looking for a much smaller apartment to save on rent, so moving my office here would be a sound first step.

Discipline would be a fine thing too. I charged 55 hours to the Münsters for January, eleven half-days, in practical terms a quarter-time job. What sort of arsefoolishness is that? Do I expect to keep this job with that piddling pittance of work? To put things in perspective, I spent nearly three times that long lollygagging about in Second Life last month. I haven't touched my own database since before Christmas, customers and partners are beginning to grumble and whine.

The plan for February is to find a new small apartment ASAP, do 120 100 hours work on the Münsters' translation and 50 hours on my own database, and get caught up on taxes for 2007. SL can have what is left; how annoying that I should have just yesterday been offered a Second Job there, but it's highly unlikely to pay an hourly rate that is comparable to what I can earn from the Münsters or even from McDonalds.

So I sit here and wonder in more practical terms, how to move my office here. What is "my office"? Four dictionaries and a computer, really; the translation needs nothing more now that we have access to the Internets here. If I were to do this sensibly, I could get by with hardly any new investment at all: I could use this current (office) computer's keyboard, monitor and mouse with Alberich, carrying him back and forth (because I would still need to send and receive e-mail at home, and no other machine there can run SL. Priorities again, bah). The second-most cost effective step would be to buy another Mac Mini and leave it here, still using the existing KVM setup. Probably the least cost-effective step would be to buy a new laptop as I fantasized before Christmas, when I thought I'd be earning 5000 Euros a month from the Münsters (an impossible dream, I now realize, given that my brain starts dribbling out through my earholes after about five hours' translating; but the real obstacle was and remains my laziness and rabbit-in-the-headlights hysterical frozen-stiff panicking).

Make it so. I shall arise now, and go to the local Mac dealer, and a KVM adaptor buy there, and try carrying Alberich back and forth for a week or so. We shall see.

With that in mind, dear friends there may be some interruptions in blogging and commenting (as there were during the last few months, I know)—and should be some interruptions in SLing—in the weeks to come.

And finally here's Régis Debray writing on "the material forms in which [ideas] were transmitted" in the New Left Review, in which he suggests a new way of looking at historical, cultural, time:

First, what we may call the logosphere: that long period stretching from the invention of writing (and of clay tablets, papyrus, parchment scrolls) to the coming of the printing press. The age of the logos, but also that of theology, in which writing is, first and foremost, the inscription of the word of God, the ‘sacred carving’ of the hieroglyph. God dictates, man transcribes—in the Bible or the Koran—and dictates in his turn. Reading is done aloud, in company; man’s task is not to invent but to transmit received truths.

A second period, the graphosphere, runs from 1448 to around 1968: from the Gutenberg Revolution to the rise of TV. The age of reason and of the book, of the newspaper and political party. The poet or artist emerges as guarantor of truth, invention flourishes amid an abundance of written references; the image is subordinate to the text. The third, still expanding today, is the era of the videosphere: the age of the image, in which the book is knocked off its pedestal and the visible triumphs over the great invisibles—God, History, Progress—of the previous epochs. […]

Yet although these three regimes succeed each other in historical time, each asserting its own predominant forms and modes, it should go without saying that any one of us contains all the ages at once. Inside each of us there lies a calligraphic East, a printed Europe, a widescreen America; and the continents negotiate within us without losing their respective place. Each one of us is, simultaneously, God, Reason and Emotion; theocrat, ideocrat, videocrat; saint, hero and star. We dream of ourselves as standing outside time; we think about our century; we wonder what to do with our evening.

Love that last sentence; how true, how sadly true. Even if you don't want to read the (long, slightly pompous) article, do please follow the link and scroll down to the bottom, and have a close look at the comparative table there (from which the tripartite examples of the last paragraph are taken). I found it fascinating.

Shabbat shalom, my dearies. Enjoy the weekend.

Home

There is a tide in the affairs of men, which taken at the flood leads on to fortune; miss it and you're left up to your knees in sticky mud, watching the sail disappear below the horizon as gulls gyre and squawk above you.

My mood returning home today is very different from the happiness of my last southbound trainblog post. I am going to miss Ingrid and Hamburg, and I fear that the comforts of my own bed and kitchen will be pale substitutes.

Damn.

Odd

It feels odd to be on my own again, to spend a day without talking to anyone—face-to-face, that is, e-mail and telephone don't count; to be hearing German instead of Spanish or English; to be sitting instead of walking; to be in a city which is known to me, with no immediate prospect of leaving it; to be listening to traffic noises instead of the wind and birdsong; to have nowhere to go.

It feels odd to see around me normal people going about their dailynesses with the usual blend of self-absorbtion and blithe oh-the-unimportance-of-it-all, rather than the purposeful directedness of the pilgrims (whom we were not).

It feels odd to have to think about w*rk again, suddenly to have deadlines and targets instead of leisure and a very active kind of slothfulness.

It feels odd to be in the well-known squalor and disarray of my own home, the home of my making, rather than the clean, pretty and comfortable hotels (and L's apartment) of weeks past.

I am not particularly happy here.

Worn down to a kind of calm

... is my mood at present. The compiled database application still doesn't run, I still can't format the C: drive, I still can't find a way to get the Windows XP Installer to use any hard disk other than D: (the drive that the computer booted from), and I still can't find any useful advice or tips on dealing with these problems. Even Google crapped out on the mysterious Error -199.

[Updated: I still can't format C: but at least I found a very helpful step-by-step guide to installing WinXP in "interactive mode" which does actually allow me to choose which disk I want it installed on.]

Of course, obviously, this is the last possible weekend to prepare the Hobbyist CDs for production to have them in the shops on March 1st. Well, whose fault is that? I've been procrastinating about this for weeks. It would still have gone wrong had I tried a fortnight ago, but I might have had a chance at solving the problems.

In closely related news I am getting pretty tired of all the whining and complaining around here. My negativism begins to bore me, and I'm sure that it palls on you too. My apologies. It's time for a change of tune.

In unrelated news I just stepped onto the balcony to blow the dustbunnies out of the carcase of the PC (I'd opened it up to check whether the second drive was mounted as a slave, which might have been the reason for the non-formatting), and noticed that the temperature has reached (dropped down to) the freezing point. We may be in for another few weeks of winter.

Something about being outside reminded me of the plastic bag scene from American Beauty (if you've seen the film, you'll know exactly what I'm referring to) and so I looked it up on YouTube. It's much shorter than I remembered, unless this clip has been edited; in my memory the bag flies around for several wonderful minutes. The song in the background is "Any other name" by Thomas Newman, and it's now on my iPod. Enjoy.



And just by the way, I was listening to the soundtrack and thought "this sounds sorta like Six feet under," so I looked that up on IMDB too. Guess who wrote (some of) the theme music to 6FU? Thomas Newman. Small world, eh?

The third of the third

It's 11am and I have just sat down with a cup of coffee to read e-mail (the architects are away in deepest Bavaria meeting the town council), and the first on the list was from U (the architect): an abusive and insulting cry of rage that "nothing works" - but of course without mentioning any specifics of what might be wrong. I was in the office all day while these drawings were being printed out; U looked at them at the time - she plotted them herself - and had there really been any errors, they could have been corrected there and then had she mentioned them. She further ranted about my being "away" and that this was unacceptable. It's true, I was not in the office: she wrote the mail at 23:30, having herself told me at 19:30 to go home.

I guess that the problem is not in the submission drawings, but in the rough-cut "next stage" drawings: quite simply increased in scale from 1:100 (a person is as large as your thumbnail) to 1:50 (a person is as large as your thumb) and given a new border, but without new or improved content. These were done at her command in the last hour before I went home, and were explicitly desired as prototypes to demonstrate how the view might look on paper. (These are huge drawings, up to 180*94cm.) U saw them as rough prints and approved them. I presume now that she is angry and disappointed because this hour of work did not bring the six (!) drawings up to the same quality as the ground floor plan - which took a week of work to complete. I find this to be unrealistic and unreasonable, but what do I know? I'm only the flunky.

This is typical of U's attitude in the office: everything that goes wrong is entirely my fault. Example: a bad (non-workable) detail which she suggested, was drawn into the plans by myself. Now that she sees that the detail is bad, there is "a problem in my drawings". Example: a piece of Windows software refuses to use the printer which we configure in the Print Options page, but will only use the printer that was default at the time it was installed. "You must have done something wrong."

I shall have to start looking for other sources of income, because the situation is clearly not going to change. Poor G; I would feel guilty about leaving him in the lurch, and would miss working with him, but he made his bed and must lie in it.

I had actually set out to write a happy piece about snow (still falling in March!) and the holiday spirit, and seeing a wonderful film with Slim, but this has seriously spoiled my mood.

[Updated after midnight] I have just indulged for the first time in a group sit (synchronized meditation around the world) and very nice it was too. I smiled with my eyes closed, to think of all of us, all thinking of each other. And also came to terms with my image of myself as a warthog among butterflies: I imagined the scene from the point of view of a butterfly watching the warthog and saying to itself "look at him splashing in the mud, damn that must be fun".

I wanted to post this fragment of a conversation about the film (highly recommended by the way):

Slim: So why did Daniel run away from Lena, if he loved her?

Udge: Fear.

Slim: ... of failure?

Udge: No, rather fear of success. Fear of the changes that happiness might bring.

Slim: You're talking about yourself, right?

This week's flowers

kw8_tulips3
Originally uploaded by udge.

Spring is nearly here, it's tulip time - even if these came from a hothouse in Holland or Egypt. I haven't had flowers on my desk at home for quite a while, it hasn't seemed worthwhile with the amount of time I've spent working elsewhere, but today I decided to give myself a little present, to cheer myself up a bit.

I do need some cheering up today.

As I said elsewhere: Sometimes (like today) I read your comments and feel like a warthog among butterflies: you're all so pretty, and the flying looks so effortless, but however high I jump, I always land back in the mud.