constant narrator

These last few months have had me designing a stock trading application for a major trading house.  To design this I spend my day looking at stock trading applications and financial tools online, which means I’ve had a very close (and mandatory) look at the recent financial meltdown, as well as the long run-up to it.  There has been a lot of election news interspersed with it and this, combined with my political junkie tendencies, has led to an ever-heightened feelings of fear, anger, incapacitation and sick glee at the rapid downward spiral of Things in General.

It has interfered with my sleep.

I went to Seattle a few weeks ago to see a play written and put on by an old friend and  to see my best friend play a noise show.  Steeping in all this creativity really put a point on it that I haven’t been doing shit but working and steeping in wretched political and financial news these last 9 months and that it’s no way to go through life.   I’m feeling rusty in doing community work and art.  So, I’m starting small.

My not-so evil scheme: register voters at the coffee shop next door.

Yes, that’s right, I sacrifice an hour each Tuesday and Thursday drinking tea, flirting with the cute staff and reading the paper, all while pestering every single person who goes into Progress about registering.  Oh, if all things were this easy.  So far I’ve registered 14 people.   For whatever reason, this has made me feel a lot better about this crappy election.  It’s nonpartisan, I’m not asking for money, it falls in line with my Iowan small-d democracy beliefs and I don’t have to deal with any nutjobs at campaign headquarters, which my braver and stronger friend is doing.

It won’t save the world, but I’m sleeping better.

I went to see the Laura Dunn documentary The Unforeseen tonight at the Alamo. I’ve been wanting to see it and with M out of town I took myself on a movie date and went on my own. It was a little slow out of the gate, but the cinematography made up for it. It’s sad, uplifting, completely depressing and moving. It’s haunting, really. I was so at a loss when I left the theatre that I drove to Lady Bird Lake and walked out over the water on the pedestrian bridge and watched the sun set to get myself collected.

There were so many people on the bridge. Many sat with their friends, laughing in the warm wind. I watched the cars go by on the Lamar bridge and thought about how much I hate driving. I thought about the project I’m currently working on and how it has little redeeming social value. I thought about how I’m not volunteering for anything lately and how that makes me feel crappy. I felt overwhelmed and buffeted. And then I remembered the game I played with my brother on Monday, the problem/obstacle/solution game. So I played it with myself and came up with some solutions to feeling crappy. Here are some I came up with that I’d like to try:

* ride my bike more
* volunteer to help Project Transitions with their terrible web site so they can get more donations and better help their clients
* insulate and weather-proof my house
* work for better transit solutions in Austin (the new light rail proposal was unveiled today)
* win the Texas Lottery and buy a huge tract of land over the Edwards aquifer and make a nature preserve out of it

That last one will take a bit of luck. Oh, and me buying a lotto ticket.

I attended a preconference seminar with Peter Morville today at the IA Summit. The summit starts tomorrow. I’ve met a lot of interesting people already. Kia is here and it’s been wonderful hanging out with her. She is speaking during Sunday’s session. We went to the mixer this evening and then went with a new friend Alla to Versailles, a famous Cuban restaurant in Little Havana. We drank strong sangria, I ate a lot of seafood and then we went to the Cuban bakery next door where I got the craziest Cuban-tiramisu thing. Nom nom nom.

Miami is strange. It meets my stereotypical expectations in some ways and is delightfully surprising in others. There are palm trees, tourist crap and gleaming white buildings. There are also tons of people speaking Spanish, but not Texan/Mexican Spanish. Caribbean Spanish. And there there is the Creole, which is so unlike Louisiana Creole that I actually giggled with joy when I first heard it. It bubbles and is full of Haitian French and African nuances. It’s gorgeous, and those that can speak it seem to have a lightness to them that the rest of the Miamians don’t have.

I’m staying downtown in a hotel by the conference center, so I know this is nothing like the Miami that locals know. It was nice to go farther out into a neighborhood tonight. Kia is threatening to take me to South Beach, which should be, um, something.

I’m sitting, listening to NPR and the results of the Iowa caucuses. I have goosebumps. Historic, awesome, amazing.

I had an idea Obama was going to take the highly erratic Iowa caucuses after my Christmas visit to my 97 year old grandfather at a nursing home in Clarksville, Iowa. Population: 900. He had just been relating a story of an acquaintance he visited in St. Louis in 1953 who hated blacks (a puzzlement for him, then and now). This story came about because we were looking at a picture book from this trip and there were some African-Americans in the background of a photo.

A moment later, I started hearing the loud conversation (not so much with the good hearing in nursing homes) between a daughter and her elderly father. They were discussing the upcoming caucuses. The daughter was going on about Obama, how she liked his ideas about health care and education, how lovely his family seemed and how much she liked his wife. Never once did she mention his race or any qualms about his electability. At that point I was struck by how much has changed in 50 years; that a man could openly express his hatred for people of color in polite company in 1953 (and likely expect company) and that in 2007 this white woman in a small, conservative all-German town is psyched about voting for a black man for president with her elderly father agreeing with her.

At that point I realized Obama could win it. And if he can win in Iowa, he could win in anywhere but the deepest Southern state. And while Obama is not my first choice (that would be Bill Richardson), that he is competitive is a huge leap for this country.

I’m so delighted! Go Iowa! I’m proud of you, my little frozen homeland.

After many misfires, we finally acquired bikes for both of us. M at a bike store and I at the Prenzlauer Berg flea market in MauerPark on Sunday. Yesterday was the first day it wasn’t wet in a while so we went on a long jaunt into Mitte and stumbled into the dark heart of tourist Berlin. Souvenir shops! At least they are on cobblestone street and not in stripmalls. We found the Lustgarten, which had been transformed into a gallery by the addition of huge statues of nude women and men with a trend toward gigantic muscular asses. One such ass got slapped by an elderly Spaniard whose wife chuckled at him. The exhibit ruined any feeling of wanting to laze about in the grass, however, so we moved along after listening to the 6 o’clock bells from the Berliner Dome.

From the Lustgarten we rode west down the Spree across the museum island (Museuminsel) and then onto this long, lovely paved path through the midst of all the crazy modernist state architecture. I took a lot of pictures and told myself I was on a scouting mission for Kia, since her pictures would be so much more lovely. We took pictures of each other in the future before the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (The House of World Cultures).

Truly we are moving at the speed of light.

It was getting dark so we set into the Tiergarten and ran into the Licht Berlin exhibit. Licht Berlin was a two week exhibit of light art meant for nighttime meandering. It was a bit underwhelming, especially after witnessing some of the wonderful light/electric art at Burning Man, but it made for a nice bike ride because Tiergarten is really dark at night so it was spooky and you could follow the lights through the trees. After that we rode past the Brandenburg Gate which was surrounded by tents and crews cleaning up from the Berlin Marathon (40,000 runners we were told) which had run the day before.

I was getting cold and hungry so we consulted the bike map and found our way to Oranienstr. in Kreuzberg were we found a nice Italian place called Ossesa. The waitstaff was incredibly friendly and it actually had a non-smoking room upstairs where we could look out over the street and spy into people’s apartments. This town believes in delicious and cheap half-liters of wine. I am so behind that.