Rebirth

Out of the desert, and into the fire...

Tinkered with the formatting somewhat to make the layout somewhat more mine. Two years of Deep Springs responsibility fostering, and here I am full circle amidst yet another small-hours code hacking binge.

Thoughts of focus are getting to me. I feel much more spaced out these days. I've resolved that I'm going to pile on the responsibilities and activities until kingdom come and then see if that helps. I think one simple reason I was able to be so damn productive at Deep Springs was that I simply had to do a whole lot of things. 8 hours of sleep is too much. Things are fuzzier now. Still reflect upon Deep Springs on a daily basis, though often it's part of a larger euro/americana thought.

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Going skiing with the bros in Chamonix the first full week of 2005. Olof will be taking it easy, but Martin and I will be hitting up some guided off-piste hotness.

Hoping to go to Egypt or Turkey over easter break. There are a number of eastern-Egyptian resort destinations that offer dirt-cheap flights from Sweden...and I plan to look into the possibility of escaping said destinations. (I see a picture of a resort oasis with beautiful beaches surrounded by desert and majestic mountains in the background, and my first thought is to wonder what the view is like from that peak over there). Getting up to Luxor and then bumbling down along the Nile would be a great way to work off the winter. Desert heat. Mmm.

One thought to the next: it's dark. as. hell. Still a month to go until the equinox, and the sun sets by 3pm. I'm surprised that the vikings et al. didn't have a better understanding of the roundness of the earth (they may very well have), and that the whole 15th century post-classical christian flat-earth theory wasn't shot down my northern european astronomy. Then again, they were pagans.

Next. Ivan Illich on the subject of language and homo monolinguis. Interesting to think that the idea of fixed language is as recent as the late 15th century, defined under Queen Isabella as a way to ease her rule of her subjects by standardizing the language of the kingdom. That explains the naivety of 20th century lingual determinism that has inspired such wonderful bureaucracy in France and Sweden. The unfolding information age is directly challenging that rigidity with the anglification of all things remotely connected to the internet. homo polylinguis is being reborn. Freedom of information is defeating the institutionalization of language. It only took 500 years. Illich would be pround.

While on the topic of Illich, a peice on the early Mechanical Arts of Hugh of St. Victor, as discussed by Illich in his Conversations with Ivan Illich CBC series. If anybody wants a cassette tape copy, hit me up.

Next. Time is a freight train, now more than ever. My vectors are more closely constrained now than ever before, and it's starting to boil down to a simple question of ballistics. Need to do as much tinkering as possible before that trigger goes. Focus.

Back to traveling: to pay for all this I'm hopefully hooking up a translation gig in the coming weeks. Translating IT-project outlines from Swedish to English for a software firm that outsources Swedish contracts to a bunch of English-speaking programmers in the Balkans. It's the perfect gig for me since it's only in need of a functional translation for the programmers to read. Good scratch. Other planned destinations: Rome, Iceland.

Trying to hook up a summer job on Iceland, working with Ossur, the worlds second largest prosthetics company. My hopes assume that they speak English at the workplace amoung other things, and I have no idea if it'll work out, but it would be the hotness.

Now for some uber-mumbling:
There's something very unsettling to me about getting haircuts. I'm getting annoyed by my moppy hair again for the thirty-nth time, but getting a haircut seems to drastic and irrational. I don't know how people do it all the time. Yeah, it's time. Country roads...take me home....to the place....I belong? Getting tired of making new friends. Hung out with Kevin in Stockholm this past weekend, and that was great. Old times. But friendship often feels so banal these days. Well, not with old (pre-Lund) acquaintances. Most of my friends in Lund are little more than study partners. I party with them, and other people, a lot, but I feel less and less desire to 'socialize'. I've sort of forgotten why I do it. A laugh. (a kiss). a thought. yet so often so banal. I often feel like there are more important things I could be doing. Someone needs to remind me why we're here. More important things. focus. Perhaps it's focus in the first place that distracting me. In some ways yes, but at the same time that's not what keeps me in bed in the morning. sure am mumbling. sorry. bedtime. thoughts on Illich and language as poverty next time.