thisCassandra

Freegans

I learned about Freegans today, people who have jobs, but for political reasons scavenge everything, even food, from the garbage of other people.

Their motto: We won't buy your crap, but we'll eat your scrap.

I love this idea. I would give them some of the surplus stuff I have if they asked, and I wouldn't even ask them to dumpster dive...I wonder if they're handy.

Maybe they barter...

Trigonometry, Calculus, Thermodynamics, English and Painting

In a right triangle it is possible to determine any of the other angles: where A is an acute angle and hypotenuse is the long side of the triangle,

Sin A = length of opposite side over length of hypotenuse,

Cosine A = length of adjacent side over length of hypotenuse,

Tangent A  = length of opposite side over length of adjacent side.

I've been feeling a bit mournful about the lack of a relationship with higher math in my life, and have decided that I need to relearn geometric relationships first, then algebra, then trigonometry, then calculus - differential and integral - the study of the rates of change.

I do have a bit of spare time these days, and could maybe work on it for fifteen or so minutes a day.

From calculus I can learn to differentiate between good and evil and to integrate my new knowledge into my world. Critical faculty courtesy of Sir Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Legend has it that an apple played an important role is Sir Isaac's life, and an apple played an important role in at least one other legend of knowledge.

One of my favourite things to do when I was studying engineering was to make up silly equations. I haven't made up any silly equations for a long, long time, but I recall that one of the last was related to Newton's Law of Cooling (which states that the rate of cooling of a body is directly proportional to the difference in temperature between the body and the ambient temperature - but this is thermodynamics, not, strictly speaking, math): the rate of change of boredom is inversely proportional to the difference between the threshold boredom level and the ambient boredom level.

I get pretty excited when I think of relearning my math, but I think that I should wait until after the painting course is over. After all, the limit of dv/dt, where d is the rate of change, v = ability to learn new things and t = time, approaches 0 as t approaches 0. It is a direct proportionality.

I should have got a degree in math, but by the time I transfered out of engineering (to English - alpha order) my love of math was worn out of me.

For me dl/dt = m, where l = love, t = studying engineering and m = math, approaches 0 as t approaches infinity.

Maybe I should find some way to combine the math with the art: create a form of expression called art-metic. Many artists have successfully combined language and art, so why ever not? Interesting...

The picture demonstrates what I am currently learning in the painting class: discords. The colour of the wood table is a broken orange and is a bit darker than the blue cup, but being close in tone they shimmer a bit. I like these colours together I like it a lot. I bet there's an equation to be made here.

Transformative Thoughts

When I arrived at my mother's house today, I saw that she had one of those walkers with wheels and a chair and a shopping basket that she has borrowed from the VON. She'll keep it until she gets one of her own. She said, "I need it for walking to the store. I can't walk a block without stopping to rest anymore."

I had an emotional reaction to hearing this, and, when she went into another room, I cried, and, when she came back, I hugged her. I remember how pure and uncomplicated my love for her was when I was a young-un, and I felt that purity, that simplicity, for a few moments today, but I want my love for her to be pure and uncomplicated again. I want to be able to hold that to me ever.

My mother is my love of the day.

My mother and I lunched at the Shalin Noodle House this afternoon, and there was a young man with a shaved head and trendy glasses and a camo t-shirt at the next table, talking loudly with his friends. He said of his look that he was emulating an underwater researcher, e.g., Jacques Cousteau.

Other parts of his conversation were interesting as well. He spoke, at one point, of going to a show of a photo essay which documented the transformation of a F-M transsexual, from shots of the bio-grl to shots of the F-M (former bio-grl) and another person naked and lying on railway tracks and writing in Sharpie on one anothers' bodies. Sounds powerful. I didn't ask where it was showing. I wish I did.

He said, in part, "There's all these photos of this person at stages of their change, starting out being female, and throughout loses tits and gains a beard. At the end, it's a person with a beard and no tits and no dick. Presurgery."

Interesting. I'd never really thought about how the differences in direction of transition would manifest. People going the other way, those presurgery bodies with tits and dick, get far more attention: she-males, the popular fetish object. He-females doesn't work as well as a word or as a fetish object.

I heard that when asked about how difficult/painful the M-F surgery was, our friend Ayanna said, "Having hernia surgery was worse." Hmm.

In my painting class (and outside) I spend a lot of time working on my colour wheel. In the art history class we're looking at Buddhist art, and discuss the wheel of Karma, the idea that people continually go through the same stuff, over and over through lifetimes, until they get it.

I'm not really getting what I think I'm supposed to be getting in the colour class, so the discussion of the wheel is somehow fitting: I continually work on my colour wheel, and I'll stop when I get it. Let me off this colour wheel of Karma. Please.

Though I think I might be getting close.

Camera upgrade: the Lumix DMC-LZ3 does not record audio, so I've traded for a Lumix DMC-FX01 which does, and it's a teeny tiny thing. Smaller than a deck of cards. It has a Leica lens (yay) which has a range of wide angle to zoom. It uses a lithium ion battery pack (boo) which is currently charging up. It'll be ready soon and I'll be able to play.

New technology can be an amazing source of fun. I now have the technology to make little videos (with audio) and post them to YouTube. Big fun.

The First Step In the Journey of A Thousand Renovations

Howie, my plumber, finished setting up the washer and dryer, so the laundry room is now officially upstairs; I have done a load of washing and am now trying the dryer.

This washer is front-loading and seems to use almost no water at all. My new washer and dryer are beautiful. The insides are stainless steel, so highly polished that you could put on makeup in there.

The next step in the journey of a thousand renos is to get rid of the old washer and dryer, and then move the fridge into the space where they were. Make the main floor more usable, so spend more time downstairs.

All things move given time. I am always awestruck when I realize how long it takes to know how to live in a space, where things should be, and what needs to be changed. Because I am not one of those people who knows right away how things ought to be, change grows from having information. It's an organic process that comes out of an understanding how things function and how they need to be to work.

I am thinking of hosting an artist run centre called "Art Farm". Its motto will be "Art Farm - Growing Artists Organically". The organization will be called the Art Farm, and thisCastle will be the Art Barn.

One of the things that the Art Farm will do is to run regular artist & writer salons. Art Farm would be a place to meet other artists/writers and see/hear their work, and to show/read one's own work.

We used to do potluck salons once in a while, but they were at a different location each time and petered out. I met Jeannie (fabric artist, also my real estate agent) and Henri (photographer) and Haruko (painter and installation artist) and Gu Xiong (painter and print-maker) at the one that we held at the Friendly Grocery (one of the homes I shared with Rob/Bob (my ex)). There was also another painter from Mainland China, Sam Lam I think his name was, who painted amazing huge classical paintings. No starving artist, he, his car was a late model Mercedes. He wanted to buy the untitled book that I showed, but I was not prepared to sell it that evening. I might sell it now if someone asked me for it.

I'd like the Art Farm to have a permanent place, a salon similar to the one that Gertrude and Alice had, where artists/writers can gather. I'm not sure I'll be able to do it, because it may require a hostess who is much more social than I am. Someone who is better able to draw people out regardless of their own personal reactions to the people. A diplomat and/or a tactician.

Art Farm is a stop on the journey of a thousand renos, but not a goal.

NB. I found this article, dated 09 Sept 1983, when I was cleaning the garage. It was in a pile of papers I'd kept for some reason or another. For some reason the absurdity of the story fascinated me: an exotic dancer named Phoenix, dating two men, one with one arm and the other with one leg. Yay whoopee! Hot stuff.

Truth, not fiction.

Conditions Intolerable

During my road trip I was drinking double americanos and not even consciously registering the buzz. Then when I got back to my real life I noticed that I was growing ever more edgy around people, and decided it was time to stop taking caffeine even in tea. So sometime last week I started drinking only water and decaf tea and herbal tea, and I have to say I find it much easier to get along with people. I am not nearly as intolerant as I was.

My new motto: "I'm only intolerant when conditions are intolerable".

D. Hardwick said this me today: "A relationship between individual equals is unstable and not possible". He got this gem from a post-Confucian Chinese philosopher named Xun Zi, who believed that humans are innately selfish and evil, and that morality is a social construct that requires the rule of law to be maintained and enforced.

I kind of agree that humans are innately selfish and evil, but I thought I was being pessimistic. Maybe I am just more Chinese in my thought processes than I thought.

But how different is this idea of innate evil from that of original sin? Not much at all really, except that for Felix Culpa to occur, there needs be a flawed human tempted by something even more flawed. The responsibility lies equally with the true actor, which is the serpent, and the temptee, though the temptee takes the fall. The Xun Zi idea just assumes that humans are flawed and they are naturally nasty. Everyone is capable of climbing, everyone is capable of falling. No villains and no victims. We are all culpable.

Born nasty and capable of becoming better...The glass is filling up.