i am writing this post at dusk in central park, during a 6 hour break between two AV gigs. i was planning to stay in the city all weekend, but the friend i was going to stay with is sick so i'm catching the red eye commuter train home tonight.
i have books to read and music and podcasts to listen to, but i haven't really felt like engaging with any of it. i've been kind of overstimulated lately, with each day mostly filled with one or more things i have to do, almost back to back. i guess my nervous system saw an opportunity for a break and said, let's just sit in the grass and watch lights turn on in all the buildings.
here are some things i observed today:
- baby rats hopping and frolicking in the grass. they were so spritely and springy!
- a busking man singing 1920s or 30s lounge music, karaoke style. he had the voice of a professional singer, perhaps that was his job once? he had all of the right vibrato accents and everything. except he looked like a really normal guy with long white hair and a beard and a baseball cap. if you asked me to picture the person who that voice was coming out of, i would have thought of that hologram character from star trek: deep space nine.
- a guy sitting nestled in a crook between large stones, so he was mostly hidden from view, playing a harmonica to himself.
- yucca trees blooming.
well, i guess for a journal entry, i usually write about current life events, so here are some of those.
we played a show last week, locally in new haven! it took me about a week, but i got a blog post up about it, with some documentation!
i have been doing more random gigs during what are usually my three days off per week. last weekend, i helped dog sit thor (the studio dog at my work) while my employers took their kid to his "school of rock" recital concert, which ended with me staying late because there was a bonfire after. i ate a very withered boca burger (apparently a type of veggie burger).
i went to see bread and puppet by myself yesterday because andrei is in maine with family. it was fun but i was feeling a bit under the weather so that part was not fun. and i was dealing with last minute work arrangements due to my weekend plans getting canceled, so i had to look at my phone a few times during the beginning to respond to things. i felt really bad because normally i would never look at my phone during a live performance. it was a large crowd so i don't think anyone was offended but when i see people on their phones at shows i judge them hard. maybe they all have work emergencies too and i should give them the benefit of the doubt. at least until i see an tiktok video or something on there.
i discovered that some of the fabrication orders that were done for my work before i started there had some errors in them. that was a bit stressful because i have barely had this job long enough to learn the technical processes they use for making artworks, and i'm already shifting to developing and improving those processes. this is a bit vague but it's really complicated to try to explain what we actually do at my job. to try to describe it quickly, it's a bit like silkscreen printing but 3d, with four foot long toothed aluminum trowels that apply layers of paint that get sanded down through each other to generate patterns. and the metal trowels sometimes get attached to a 10 foot tall mechanical jig that moves across the painting in various waveforms. in a weird way, it's similar to video synthesis. so i feel like i'm in a unique position to understand and help with the process, and i do enjoy it, but it also requires a lot of brain usage and sometimes that leaves me feeling quite drained.
despite seeming to have little mental energy left after work, i somehow got obsessively sucked into this project of getting the audio from my computer to play in multiple rooms of my house, as closely synced with each other as possible, using raspberry pi computers. and also to not break anything the pi's were already doing audio-wise (i use them as remote controllable media players). this sounds simple but it took me two evenings. i learned some new stuff though (example: audio works differently on raspbian lite vs the version with gui tools installed!)
i questioned whether it was worth replacing the timing belt on my car (a model from 2005) for the second time. after seeing the prices of newer vehicles right now (even ones up to 10 years old!), i decided to go ahead with it. hopefully my decision will turn out to be good and i can keep this car running a bit longer with no major problems! i hope that within a few years i'll be able to afford a hybrid, but for now, tough guy (my subaru outback station wagon): i'm counting on you!
i've got one more AV gig this week, and three(!) next week. then, i think my busy september will be over. when i don't have time for more frequent updates here, they turn into these long rants. oh well! till next time...
photo is of the set for the bread and puppet show.
