So, I am stealing a moment between bill paying and dream making to say hello to the few faithful readers of Not Wholesome, formerly known as satoroams. My friend Patrice asked me the other day how I find the time to blog. Really the time rarely exists as a given although Chicago winter months and long periods of time away from your partner are certainly conducive factors (and why last month was so wholesomely full)

I have been back from NYC for a week now and I wish I was able to write about my time there when it was fresh in my mind. I had so many interesting conversations and some with folks I had only known online. I love that moment of transition from knowing someone only virtually or through their text and then having the opportunity to physically interface.

One of the most pleasant surprises was meeting with Yochai Benkler. Not only did I find someone who sports one of the coolest beards ever, but was quite taken by the fact that we were talking traditional anthropology (Mauss, Kula ring etc) in light of hackers and non-economic forms of production and exchange. Sigh, if he were only at U of C, I would try to get him on my dissertation committee. He offered me some good ideas for my work and now I am more or less happily writing away on them. All of his works are available online and for anyone interested in information enclosures, the commons, IP, and free software, do check out his work, it is pristine, sharp, solid, and well written.

Otherwise, I have been back in Chicago, burrowing busy like an underground mole not seeing much of the beautful spring weather we are having as I try to get a handle on a paper on hacker ethics that went from manageable 20 pages to more monstrous 35. I need to put a lid on it.

SOSHI met with the Provost and various Deans and unfortunately it went as expected, though some progress is being made as the issue is on the table, circulating the halls of U of C. Some of us wrote a letter of response which I will soon post to the blog.

Last night I was fortunate enough to be invited to a seder at the House of Golub. It was Micah’s first seder and it was like my 8th though my first in like 15+ years. I used to celebrate passover at my best friend’s house. Yael Reinhold, in San Juan, PR. They held a sort of extravagant event with 50 people spread across the rooftop of an old 16th century colonial building, lights twinkling and swaying against the light tradewinds and the twinkling stars. I loved the stories and feeling part of something larger, my parents even attending which made it extra nice (my dad is Jewish, my mother is not). The evening lasted for a long time from more somber prayer to festive eating. I liked staying up late, taking some illicit swigs of the wine, and running around the rooftop. I only had one bad experience, when I was 7 when their faifthful dog Linguini, a Hotdog breed of canine, decided to scratch me across my cheek leaving me with 4 deeply scratch marks across my face. Ouch is what I recall.

Well, I better retire before my face finds my keyboard as a comforting pillow in lieu of a much better pillow on my bed…

I am going east tomorrow Penguin Day to facilitate a rountable not on the mating practices of our fine feathered friends but on non-profits and open source software. I then pop through NYC where I used to live and I do hope the spring weather keeps up. I love NYC in the spring: it surprisingly just smells good.

I have been meaning to give props to the
design master who developed the Not Wholesome chicken to your right. He is also the fine creator behind the Tighty Whitey Tee which even some of the bravest souls dare not wear for some strange reason.

Also, I have been doing some new blog reading, like those of Yari a fellow anthropologist of the Caribbean style, from PR and doing her fieldwork in Gaudelope. Idyllic. Then there is Unreasonables now from Italy, the author of which is an IRC partner in crime. I partner way too much on IRC these days… Oh well, offline I go and out east,

Adios

My silence, my silence, the sound of silence. Sigh. I am silent on the blog because I am so frantic and frenetic, and hectic and ballistic in the real world. I have had a total of 8 deadlines this month, deadlines which are my “lifelines” for next year or my career so they are stressful in this like visceral way that gets me working all day long in a way that is just simply Ludicrous.

Today I walked into a coffee shop and there was some folk music playing and for a moment, I simply froze into a state of self-realization: the pace, the melody of the music, making me so realize how utterly frantic my life has been. I got bummed right then knowing that I have been going at a pace too fast for truly enjoying a song and friends, basically living in a way that is not sustainable.

SOSHI has taken a lot of my time, but it has been well worth it. Many folks are working at this and we are building a good base of support and we have nearly 1000 Signatures on our petition, which is really great.

Apparently, though the adminstration thinks that only a handful of students, like me, are concerned. Whatever. Well it is more complicated than that but I am too tired to write about it. After March 1st I hope the pace calms down, so that the biella, who is like a chicken with her head cut off, running wildly, (though mostly at her computer), will become a chicken with her head in place so that I can write something more sensible, more interesting….

It is so ugli, I mean ugli that I have yet to catch up wtih my bog. I have about 10 subjects I want to write about from Cheney, to Bakhtin, to my grandfather, to the boat I used to live on, to many other delights. But this has been the month of the endless series of deadlines, I think around 7 or 8 and more keep coming. It is like I am on the high seas of grants and applications and avast! more stormy deadlines rock my ship.

In the meantime, to cool myself down I purchased a piece of Ugli Fruit to eat, a seemingly genetically engineered mutation grown only in Jamiaca that is a mix of tangerine, grapefruit, and seville orange. Ahh the wonders of bio-technolgy and global food market, combined to bring me the ugli and I am *sure* bringing economic equity to the Jamaican people…..

Who scripts our lives? In high school, one of my favorite books was

I think a good portion of my energies are spent trying to converge my very firm belief that we really don’t have much control over our lives (and it is the great American myth to think that we can and do) with acting in the world as such and feeling good about it. Instead of management, control, direction, I strive for release, acceptance, spontaneity, mindfullness. But I usually fail and just the fact that I am on an academic path already indicates that, as well, us academics are notoriously controlling types.

There are little moments and ways that one can assert control and I guess that is why I love email. Someone writes to you and you reply at your own time and pace. Sometimes I spit it out a reply fast as fire other times I sit on it and move like molasses.

With the phone there is no such luxury and anyone who knows me well knows that I am not a “phone person.” I no longer go out of my way to make phone calls and in general they represent one huge source of anxiety in my life as bearer of bad news especially in the last year and a half.

I think one of the worst moments was when my mom called me after trying to dial the phone for 5 hours. And this was not a “circuits are busy” problem but a problem with her not being able to see and just trying over and over again to get the numbers right and hit them in the right spot. Since that day, my already tenuous relationship with the phone turned downright sour.

And unfortunately since then I tense when the phone rings expecting to hear some bad news which seems to happen at least once a month with either news from my sister that my mom is missing or my mom recounting a lousy story of someone trying to mug her or swindle her because people can tell she can’t really see well and that she is frail and sometimes confused. Apparently in the fall some mugger pushed her down and tried to take her purse but she, face down, and stubborn as a mule, held on. I have no idea how. She weighs 100 pounds and is mostly skin and bones at this point.

This makes me mad to no ends as it should though as my I first wrote, I still need to release, release, release because sooner or later, I will self-cannibalize with those feelings… Release though is not so easy in those circumstances.

Today she told me about her new medicine which cost her $ 110 (after insurance) for 10 days. That mind you, is only one pill a day and she is supposed to take two, so yeah you figure the math, it is, as an economist might say, a buttload of money.

That is what drives me crazy by the pharmaceutical industry. They feed off of people’s misery and hope. My mom keeps wondering if someone can cure “her brain,” whether there is some operation that will make her see again, whether a new drug can help her. Somehow she retains hope despite knowing that basically part of her brain is dying. When she raises hope I don’t slap it down nor do I feed it too much. I just try to take it as it comes.

Pharmaceutical are the great cannibalizers I feel of people’s hopes and fears yet they claimthey charge such high prices to match their high R and D investments. Fine if they could really back that up. They are not legally required to release numbers of investment to compare with profit. Although based on net profits of billions, they seem to be faring ok. So basically we are taking their word for it. Their word. Heh.

But if you want to learn more about the good practices of a Corporate Citizen read away.

I have been running around Chicago the last two days on buses, trains, and in cars, doing a million and one things so that I can get on with what I really want to do.. Today and this weekend I hope to get to that.

I have to say though, there is something that I love about moving around from place to place one mode of transportation to the next. My mind wanders as much as I do physically wondering about all sorts of things, an endless string of judgements and ideas, most of them worthless, filling my mind. I admire, wonder, loathe, and desire. I want to ask many questions but I can only ask myself. Here is a short sampling of a longer menu of random thoughts.

1. If you want to feel space indoors, go to Union Station’smain room. Even when it is gray outside, the light pours in, the wood benches beckon for you to join them, and the serenity of this otherwise bustling train station is ironically thick. It reminds me of the NYC public library in midtown. Spacious, quiet, expansive. There is no such library in the U of C which is a shame.

2. I hate the American Express ads draped all over Union Station’s main walls. You start to think, how can I rip them down, who made the decision to get them up there? Who gets the money? Is this the only reason that the room I love so is so well kept is thanks to the corporate (wolly) mammoths? Can google answer my questions? Apparently not.

3. I have been reading “The Elements of Style” and apparently I use my commas all wrong. Wow. Years of incorrect comma application. I felt so silly and wondered if I could get out of my habituated ways.

4. Why do older couples (post 40 it seems but especially post 60) never seem to hold hands and you know be “lovvvvy dovvy” in any way? It is a bad example, you know, for us younger folks like me. What does it say about love, and lust
and infatuation?

4. Late in the day, I spotted one such hand holding older couple. It resparked my faith, I am not sure in what, but in something. I mean for all I know the lack of any physical display is a sign of solidity but really I just need to ask. But first I need to find out a way to ask that is not rude. Any suggestions? I do really want to know.

I think everyone who blogs should from time to time record thier trains of thoughts and lay it out there bare and rough as they are…

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I used to do a lot of yoga in SF. It is somewhat inescapeable. Sort of like the afternoon fog. I really don’t like it because it hurts and usually a lot but I gave it a shot a number of times this week and surprisingly it was more soothing. Perhaps my classes in SF were too agro-Intense and now everything else in comparison seems like a walk in the park.

I actually like that method of short term extermity (run the marathon and then just do 10K,s sort of thing) so that your normal routine seems not so harsh, right?

Ahh Chicago

So I am not your traditional blogger, not that there really is a traditional blog, now is there? However, let’s say I don’t link as much as others and I foray into the entrails of my personal life a bit more than most other blogs that I read and link to. In part, I do this because I feel like other have a handle on the linking and since they are doing such a fine job of it why bother to repeat?

But in the last few days as I have struggled to keep awake (the snow in Chicago or something has made me really sleepy), I have come across some really cool and interesting sites and articles on our such fine and wonderful Web so here they are for your enjoyment and New Year’s edification:

1. First, a really great Overview of Free and Open Source Software from our pals at Grok Law. In my opinion you can never have a glut of general overviews and reviews if they really are general, expansive, informative, and pleasant to read.

2. Rabble has pointed out one of the most sublime looking of blogs. Damn, she’s got game in the aesthetics department. This sounds a bit chesse-odd-ball-ish but her site gives me this calm sense of pleasure it is so pretty. It does on the web what gardens do for me in the real world.

3. So, so, so, let me tell you, this Debian compilation meta blog is an anthropologist’s wet dream. However, my fieldwork dream is pretty much over so I won’t comb it as regularly as I would have had it been around in the past but wow, what a wonderful idea to congeal, to cement, to link the disparate members of the Free Software project together. I guess GNOME has had its own meta-community blog for a while now.

4. Good writing. What makes a good writer? I don’t know the answer but some folks have been looking at whether blogging improves writing. In my case, I think absolutely. I used to write a personal journal and without the audience, without knowing that my words were enjoined to perform at some level, I wrote a lot of wet, soppy, mopey… trash. It was thick, ugly, muddy, fuddled and befuddled as I knew only I would read it. Though, I have to admit some days I do miss writing the marshy stuff from time to time, which is why some of the mushy slop makes it into my blog from time to time.