¤ jetless heights

makin’ tea in your underwear

+ Sun, February 13

My Life, The Unordered List

11:11 PM  ×  3 Comments  ×  0 Trackbacks

+ Fri, February  4

Kid A

The best way to listen to Kid A is walking home at 3AM on headphones when the air is cold enough to bite but not sting.  All is quiet, delicate and sparse.

It’s been a terribly taxing two weeks.  My work is complete, my projects are in and my points are made.  Here’s to relaxing weekends.

4:06 AM  ×  5 Comments  ×  0 Trackbacks

+ Mon, January 10

On Order

When things get quiet around here it’s because of one of two things: I’m just in a general writing lull which occurs after bursts of heavy writing or I’ve got a large post in mind that must be written but is not done bouncing around yet.  The recent quietness is the latter, not the former.

This past winter break was one of the best I’ve had in recent years.  Very reflective, very nicely paced—a good point to step back, observe and realign.

I remember three years ago, being up late one weekend night, talking with friends.  I remember going to the bathroom, finding an ant in the sink and killing it without pausing to think.  Now, I’m no vegetarian but then again, I’m not particularly violent or hateful, it was just a bug in the wrong place at the wrong time.  In any event, I remember just standing there and for whatever reason thinking about what had just happened.  “All I did was squish it and now it’s dead…”  It’s an odd thing: apply a little pressure, end an autonomous creature.

At the time I was taking a heavy courseload focused on order and logic and all.  Analysis, Chemistry, Latin, Analytic English.  That in mind, it’s not surprising to know that I thought about that ant in terms of its order and my finger as an act of disorder.  After all, the only thing keeping it alive was the order and functioning of its organs, intricate and breathtaking as they were.  Disrupt that order and suddenly life wafts out of that broken body unable to return.  All because of a little disorder.  Odd, that.

Break out of that bathroom scene.  We’ve all heard of the eventual heat death of the universe promised to us.  The gradual rise in entropy that’s guaranteed to consume everything.  Think also of the way a gas will fill a room in a random pattern.  The air you breathe is a random collection of a huge number of gases and no matter how many times you breathe will you ever draw a breathe of pure oxygen.  Randomness, entropy, chaos—it’s everywhere in our non-biological world.

How is it, then, that our biological lives do nothing but strive towards order?  Our bodies exist as a testament to that drive, organs compartmentalized away, linked in terms of function.  Kidneys filtering out the nasties, purifying our juices, muscles arrayed in impossibly tight bundles, neurons shooting in unfathomably complex patterns so powerful that they allow a hunk of carbon, calcium and sodium to stand up and proclaim itself “Me”.  Order, functions, rationality.  The biological refute of the chaotic cosmos.  What gives?

Three years later and I still have no clue.  I don’t know how that happened, but I know it’s interesting and very, very real.  At the time though, I thought this was a very original idea.  I certainly hadn’t heard it spelled out before and it just hit me after crushing that silly little ant in my bathroom sink one night at 1:30.

Back to today and this break though.  The first book I absorbed over break was Pirsig’s Lila and, needless to say, I loved it wildly.  The real world applications of the beautiful view I found so enthralling in his first work—very interesting for me right now.

To skip over any number of important details, I’ll cut to one of the central points.  Within Lila, he makes note of being able to divide existence into a few categories: the inorganic world, the biological world, the social world and the intellectual world.  He described each of these levels as each containing a certain quality in and of themselves and how in large part each of these levels does a large part to overcome boundaries created by its preceding level.  The social world overcoming the biological, the biological overcoming the inorganic—click!  Right there, there it is.  The biological over the inorganic.

That little ant comes into focus once again.  There’s a certain wonder in the inorganic world (see Modest Mouse’s “So Much Beauty In Dirt”), but look at how much of the biological world is an attempt to overcome that.  How each of us constantly command trillions of lifeless atoms to continue our lives.  Look at how much of the social realm is in effort to overcome the biological terms of quality.  You know biological terms of quality: sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll.  Socially, we limit these sources of pleasure because what kind of evolving society would be possible from a bunch of toked out addicts screwing their lives away?  And if the social level never blooms, how would the intellectual realm find safe harbor to shoot up and blossom?  We’ve got society around us to keep us sheltered and protected from the dangers of life.  I doubt Kant would have found time to write had he spent his life making sure there was no wolf stalking him behind the next tree over.

Reading Lila, thinking back to that bathroom epiphany, the realization “so much for genuinely original ideas…” sets in.  But that’s alright.  I’ve got something new to think about.

1:49 AM  ×  4 Comments  ×  0 Trackbacks

+ Mon, December 20

Zilch

You know the season has changed in Michigan when you can think back two weeks to 50° weather and yet your current conditions can be represented by the weighty number of nada:

0°

An Update, A Day Later

Heat wave

A Second Update, 24 Hours More

Predictions perfectly realized, inch per hour, white out.  Full frontal blizzard.

Blizzard

2:20 AM  ×  9 Comments  ×  0 Trackbacks

+ Sun, October 24

How To Make A Purchase At The Mall

My AlchemyTV DVR arrived last week and despite slightly crappy software, it is Good.  Why buy another appliance when I have almost everything I need sitting in front of me at this very moment?  All was good and well until I went to attach my GameCube via the input ports on the card.  Mini-stereo only?  No prob, I’ve got an RCA to Mini-stereo cable.  Wait, male plugs?  But the GameCube also has male plugs!

In this time of need, the blinding light of RadioShack shone upon my connection disjunction.  But that meant a trip to The Mall and The Mall is not a happy place.

I lost any and all desire to set foot in that godawful expanse of a building a decade ago.  Funny that this just so happens to roughly correspond with the disappearance of KBToys.  Go figure.  Since then, set foot in it I have, each time with thoughts turned squarely on getting out in hasty fashion.  Today’s trip was a good exercise in tactics developed for this goal.

Please note though, this is no guide for shopping at the mall.  For me, that’s near blasphemy.  That said, how to.

Obviously, you must know what’s in your mall and where in there it is.  If you’re going to get in and out as quickly as you can, you need to know where the closest door to your targeted store is and you need to park as close as you can to that door.  If your local mall has a site, they very likely have an online map, such as this handy one at my local consumer quagmire.  RadioShack.  Next to Sears.  Door located nearby.  Good, good, good.

In choosing the store though, you must know for sure that they have it.  You might want to call them in order to verify you’re going there for a good reason.  Knowing that I just needed two male-to-male RCA converters, RadioShack was the guaranteed store.  They have converters for everything, I doubt it’s even possible to name two devices that can’t be connected with the wonderful toys they have in that fantastic store.  Good techies go to the RadioShack in the sky when they die.

In getting to the mall, you must find the little known entrance.  The one where there are no cars and no traffic jams ever.  For Briarwood, there’s a small street off of State called Mall Drive, and – despite the name – no one takes it.  This is the entrance of choice.  Find your door and park.  Do not purposefully drive the wrong way down the parking lot aisles.  This labels you an Idiot Excelsius.  If you must turn 135° to get into the parking spot, you’ve already failed.

My largest beef with the mall is simply getting around within it.  By and large, the people in the barely ambulating crowds seem wholly unable to propel themselves forward in a line at a pace faster than a foot-dragging kid, cranky off the come-down of a sugar high.  This says nothing of the sudden stop-and-turn-fullcirlce motion many enjoy, nor of the immediate decision to turn-45°-and-plow,-people-on-the-sides-be-damned.  As if this wasn’t bad enough, now there are those evil kiosks in the middle.

Never make eye contact with kiosk workers.  They will feed on your soul.

In a store, you have safety in numbers.  If you don’t make a purchase, chances are the person next to you will, so the employees won’t hound you to make the sale.  At a kiosk, you are all of the customers at once.  If they don’t make the sale to you, they don’t make the sale to anyone.  You are their everything and they will get you.  Never make eye contact with kiosk workers.  They will feed on your soul.

If by this point you have made it through this gauntlet of consumer horror and arrived at your store, you have a moment to breath.  Find what it is you’re looking for and buy it, all the while relishing in your relative safety.  Then, deep breathe, jump back out there and battle back to the car and then again, out the safe exit and you’re scott-free.  Congratulations, you made it once again and are now ahead two male-to-male RCA adapters!

Of course, though, if said mall has one of these in it, well, then everything is entirely different.

2:02 PM  ×  7 Comments  ×  0 Trackbacks

+ Wed, October 20

No Voices-In-My-Head Cracks, Please

I’m taking a linguistics class this semester and last night, while reading in bed and slowly fading out of consciousness, something I read got me thinking about that voice in your head.  The one you hear when you read to yourself or think a thought in words - not that other one I’m expecting you all to make jokes about in the comments.  What voice is that?  Why does it feel like you hear it when you’re obviously not and why am I calling it a voice?  How is it able to play back music, drum kits and guitar parts included, when there’s absolutely no way you could possibly make that noise with your body?

If there’s a term for this, or any information online about this that you know of, I’d love to hear it.  Has  anyone ever even studied this really?  Weird stuff.

10:30 AM  ×  7 Comments  ×  0 Trackbacks

+ Sun, October 17

Reconsideration

As I believe many of you remember and have occasionally brought up, I used to write a lot more than I have been.  That was another time though, another place.  I was a very different person when I started writing online, the composition of you all - the audience - has changed wildly in the last few years, my thoughts on what’s even acceptable for public display have become incredibly more conservative than they were.

But through this, and maybe because of this, I find myself writing much less than I’d like.  4 months in and I’ve averaged 1.75 posts a week.  There was a period of time where I was averaging 1.75 posts a day.

Starting over online was partially an effort in redefining my voice.  A sort of balancing act against a time when I was too candid online and definitely strained a relation or two.  While this is too withstrained, I hold firm in saying that there are many things which have no right being on display in such a public and eternal venue.  Sorry kids, but you’re not going to find details of your daddy’s college escapades in cached copies of the pages here.  I’ll tell you when you’re older.

This is a debate everyone involved in writing online must engage themselves at some point.  You never know what future employer, current employer, ex or longlost friend is Googling you and you never know what trail of yours they’ll find.  What are you comfortable with Old Lady Doris down the road knowing?

Obviously, I am not satisfied with the balance I’ve struck.  This itself is a push towards correction, where I offer you insight into what I’m considering.  I have offered few to no details of who I am and what I think in these past four months and that’s a problem.  This is the site of Phil Dokas, and so far Phil Dokas has been hiding behind the curtains.

1:11 AM  ×  8 Comments  ×  0 Trackbacks

+ Thu, August 12

How Not To Stave Off Boredom

When one is at work and slightly bored, the mind is want to wander.  Lollygagging, dilly-dallying, boondoggling and other such acts of puttering and dawdling are not uncommon outlets for rogue energy and creativity.  Magnets however are not — and should not be — viable means of output.

Especially not neodymium magnets.

For instance, taking a stack of 1/4” magnets, placing one behind your lower lip and six outside your lip may seem like a wonderfully amusing gag (especially when suspending a multiplicity of screwdrivers on said setup), but the truth of the matter is that this brings more pain than one might anticipate.  Furthermore, earrings — not such a good idea.

You see, fair reader, opposites attract and they do so most certainly when one is discussing opposite ends of highly polarized magnets.  The gentle flesh of one’s earlobe is no decent barrier to this brand of potent love.

The next time you are sitting bored with a stack of magnets, take heed: they are a beauty better seen than touched.

3:05 PM  ×  6 Comments  ×  0 Trackbacks

+ Sat, July 24

Daring

Phil in the Daring Fireball T

My Daring Fireball T-shirt arrived today.  It’s quite daring.  Like a fireball.

6:45 PM  ×  9 Comments  ×  0 Trackbacks