Processing…Processing…[Life invalid]

You capture a piece of yourself and you try to hold it in your hand without destroying it but you find that’s just not possible. The second we try to secure ourselves is the moment we begin to crush our own wings. That’s the scary thing about life. We just have to let it flutter around and maybe that means only being able to appreciate the beauty of something for a brief moment but trying to hold onto it makes things worse.

Life is organic and wild. I’m sure there’s some kind of complicated algorithm to it but I just know I’ll never figure it out in my lifetime so I’ll just have to chalk it up to being to unpredictable to my insignificant human logic.

Sometimes when the I’m overloaded with things to process I go into my stages of “loops” in which I continually cycle my thought processes over and over again until I start to filter through some clarity. In these cycles are all ranges of scenarios, emotions, and possibilities. I go through the worst case, the best case, the most unrealistic case, and the emotional impact on all ranges of emotions from elated to suicidal. This is how I composite life and I’m not so sure it’s that healthy.

Like I said, it’s like I’m trying to take too much control of my own life. It was how I was raised. You plan for the worse, expect the best, and somehow your plans for life just roll out accordingly but as I’ve learned, this is not reality. It may have worked for the previous generation but it doesn’t seem to work for this one... Things move too fast, information inflation changes our perspective not on a yearly or monthly basis but I’d say hourly.

Because so many things have changed so quickly in my life in the past two months, I’ve found that I’ve been every which way lost. I can’t simply return to how things were and yet I’m not prone to cower in my own sense of self destruction either. I have to figure out who I am sans the dream of the girl I used to be or tried to be.

I need a sabbatical, a way to change my perspective and look at everything differently. Nothing fits here anymore and continuing to go through the motions just make me drift further into the darkness of my mind. I’m a little mad that I can’t return to my place, especially here in the meta but my RL requires a lot of reworking first.

All my loops have returned a [Life Invalid] response and I need a serious reboot before I crash into a permanent blue screen.

Winnie vs. Taint


I'm an Aunt, originally uploaded by alachia.

Earlier this month, my brother, Taint, and Tivi got a Morkie puppy. Her name is Winnie as in the Pooh. What I love the most about her isn't the fact that she's adorable as hell or that she's super smart or that she has a ton of character for such a small puppy. I think she's awesomesauce because she's accomplished something very few living creatures can do, wear my brother down. lol.

All while growing up (my brother and I are 5 1/2 yrs apart), I had to take care of my brother a lot and entertain him. He'd never run out of energy just like the damn Energizer bunny. Going, going, going, going. I suppose if it was present time, they'd have drowned him in Ritalin but nah, he was just one of those kids who could never sit still and never tired out.

And now Winnie is his payback. mwahahaha. I love it. Right now she's sleeping in small spurts which is the cutest thing ever. But when she wakes up, it's like a nuclear explosion. She hops, darts, and runs around like crazy like in those puppy commercials. Add in the fact that she's fearless (even my Qtpi didn't phase her) and my brother has his hands full.

He's bitching a lot now though because all these strangers try to pet her and touch her while they are outside. I'm like "dude, have you seen your puppy? What person is going to resist petting her? That's why they call these types of dogs chic magnets."
He was like, "man, if I had known this, I'd have picked up a puppy a long time ago." [Insert Tivi /slap here]

The Perfect Facebook Life

Maybe my mother was right, I just drown myself in negativity too much. Just decide to be happy and you will be? Can it really be that simple? Am I really skilled enough to delude my own mind? Do I want to be deluded?

I don’t know. The way I see it, my mom and dad simply can’t handle a grey world. Like most of the people in my RL, they appreciate the ideology of black and white. It is so ingrained in them that they stake a lot of claim on happiness based off of the integrity of those belief systems. And they are so faithful to it, that for people like my parents, it’s hard for them to see you as being able to be happy or have a good full-filling life any other way.

For them, I gave up the perfect Facebook life right? All those things other people look to see in your profile to gauge whether or not you’re okay, successful, and happy... I had those checked. It’s surprising though, how little those profiles really tell you. I found out yesterday that someone else in my meta world is going through something similar. I was like, seriously? I never would have guessed. His life seemed so together, his relationship appeared so solid from the outside. It’s an incredibly fragile thread we weave through the ideology of happiness it seems. One slight tug and we find out how insecure it all really is.

Human connections are all held together like this though which is why it’s hard to find truly strong ones. Most people don’t realize it’s all faking. We do it so that we can be perceived as normal so we can keep functioning as a society. I mean, if I did what I wanted and didn’t put up the pretenses, I’d end up alienating myself into pure seclusion. And that’s the biggest difference between RL and the Meta for me at the moment.

It’s funny, they all made fun of my meta family and friends. Even this weekend, I was on my laptop quite a bit and my mother was like “so... you’re on your computer all the time then? That’s not good for you.” (funny thing I wasn’t even socializing online, I was trying to format and install Win 7) But she thinks Internet friends are bad because they aren’t real and my brother thinks they are imaginary. They belittle the meta existence because they don’t see the tangible value in it. “What good are people you can’t have in your real life” they ask.

What I find absolutely ironic is that it was my RL connections that faltered to reach me during all this. It is by no means their fault because I tend to be self-isolating and I tend to push people away. I don’t blame them for my solitary state. I know half of them really do care about me in their own way but none of my RL connections could figure out how to interface with me. And of course the other half are just gawking at me from a distance like a bad traffic accident.

Surprisingly, it was actually the meta family I built, people I have never met in real life, who figured out how to break through my isolating barriers. They know my medium of thought and what tethers to follow me back through. And even though I can’t yet figure out how to respond appropriately yet, they did reach me and I was profoundly effected. They were the ones who didn’t try to fix me or judge me but kept sharing, kept letting me know they were still there waiting with open jacks for whenever I’m ready to reconnect.

And here’s the thing that someone dear to me always says, “The world if flat.” We don’t live in a world anymore where virtual can’t be reality anyhow. If we just look at the twittersphere of our gaming network, it’s staggering to see how many people now maintain RL connections with each other. Just three years ago, most of them were complete strangers, then they became meta friends through the podcasting community or WoW, and now they can meet up and go out to lunch like it was nothing. It’s incredible how fluid ties formulated online can translate into the RL because of how pure they start.

I’m sure some people would scoff but it is the seemingly insignificant and small points of connections sometimes that return us to feeling human and to help us figure out better how to rejoin the flow of living. Maybe not everyone can get how sharing a song, poem or posting a picture online is really connecting but I find it much more powerful and intimate than a hug. I know I can’t stay virtual forever, I’ll have to resolve the RL soon and stop hiding. But no one will ever be able to convince me of the lack of value in the meta now.

Unbranding my iTunes


Itunes "Create mp3 version", originally uploaded by alachia.

So iTunes feels it needs to brand the owners of music. It irks me to no end like the annoying mom who sends her kids to camp with every sleeping bag and piece of underwear labeled with their last name in black sharpie. As if music should ever really be owned but that’s a whole other fundamental issue I’m sure I’ll rant about later.

I think there’s a way to compensate artists and still share music through micro-transactions as I’ve said before. Metadata about the creator of all appreciated art will become increasingly valid and valuable in the future as we evolve more digitally.

I recently discovered via @strumpet101 that some music I shared with her had my RL identity tagged to it. This isn’t a huge problem to the few people I share music with because I really do trust a lot of my close bindpoint family. However, this becomes a huge problem for me when that music gets shared via them to other people.

My RL identity and privacy are major concerns for me not just on a personal level but on the future integrity of the world I’ve come to love (oh sweet metaverse). I’ve been following a lot on the progress of identity in the meta and am closely observing the culture of change towards transparency. I see this is a big problem for the our online culture if we aren’t allowed to keep a lot of this in big wide grey areas. I think for it to fundamentally flip one way or another would be a bad thing.

Anyhow, I looked at a few articles regarding stripping away the “purchased by” and “account info” meta data branded by iTunes on all my paid songs (http://www.wmatomp3-converter.com/guide/Remove-personal-info-from-itunes-plus-downloads.html). They are all annoying ways to strip the data off, who want to have to re-import using AAC??

So the other day, I was tethering through iTunes functionalities and found this “Create mp3 version” option. You just select the song or songs in your library and hit “create mp3 version” and wallaaah!!!!! Then you just grab the mp3 version from the folder and share that instead of the invasive m4a file.

A Long Time Ago, Today


A Long Time Ago, Today, originally uploaded by alachia.

I found a box labeled "memories".. so you can imagine my organizing efforts came screeching to a halt. It's interesting reading shit you wrote over a decade ago.

I notice some fundamental shifts in my thought pattern when I entered grad school compared to early college. I think it showed that I was coming into serious conflict at the time with my life choices.

I found it actually comforting to read my thoughts and realize I had always been at conflict with myself for a long time. It helps me in my resolve that something was never in sync with my life no matter how much I tried.

I'll share some of the journal pages later.

Sunrise Again

Today was one of those annoyingly hard days. So I’m externalizing, compartmentalizing. I spent a lot of time peering into windows and glimpses of other people’s lives and guessing what their evening was like.

It’s fun to wave and smile at people sitting and talking to each other on their balconies. It’s wonderful, you know. I realized how simple little things like smiling and waving really do make you feel more human. And although I know it’s superficial and maybe even synthetic, it’s just cool that total strangers can /wave in RL too!

I had to go to the permit office again and waited two hours to see someone only to find out that I needed to go to another building entirely. Oddly enough, I wouldn’t say that two hours was a complete waste. There were these two men sitting next to me and they had this enormous chat the entire time and of course, with my stalker genes, I was intrigued. (Mark was sitting on the other side of the two so I didn’t get to ask him for a picture of his sneakers)

One of the men was the client and the other was probably the contractor he hired. From the looks of the plans and paper work he had, he’s planning on building a Filipino Asian Mart in South Austin. He started out by explaining why he wanted to name it Filipino and Asian because of the diversity of the market food that would be available beyond the specific country specifics.

Apparently, his wife is Filipino because I heard him say, “You think that marrying an Asian woman is nice because they’re supposed to be so gentle and nice but she’s Filipino and has that Spanish blood in her.” The other guy then made a joke about the guy being funny and how it shouldn’t be allowed to drink this early in the morning.

This lead into a conversation about how the contractor guy was sober for two years now and that he was actually in the middle of a divorce. He said that him finally getting sober made him realize that his relationship was too silent. He said they were still good friend though and that he sees his son every day and is thankful for the clean separation. I remember he turned to the guy and said, “yeah, I waited to years after I got sober to make sure I was thinking level headed. But life’s too short and we weren’t happy.”

I thought the whole conversation was surreal. The client went on to talk about what he’d do if this venture is successful. He said he’s actually a song writer and performer and has some hits in Europe apparently. I could tell that this was his real passion in life but obviously he realistically couldn’t pursue with the family to think about etc. He talked about how expensive it was to produce a CD etc and promote it.

Apparently he knew a lot of famous people like Michael Stipe from REM who he asked to join his band a long time ago. Stipe declined at the time because he was too shy, go figure. They remained acquaintances though and that’s how this guy got some songs in Europe and hung out with REM when they headlined Austin City Music Festival. He mentioned that he had a studio at his house where he can jam out from time to time with local musicians.

I actually think I found the guy on youtube because he mentioned he had jammed out with this famous guitarist named Tolo. He said that you could see all these youtube videos of Tolo jamming with all these famous people and then in with the mix is a video of the guy playing in this man’s living room. So I used my google skills and found a guitarist named Tolo Martin and sure enough, I found a video of him playing guitars with this guy on his living room couch.

So to Mr. Craig Franklin, here’s to your Asian Mart and musical career... it was nice stalking you.