Goodbye Gaelen

Well, Gaelen and I finally officially stopped dating. It's very sad, but it's remarkably friendly. That's about the best we could've hoped for, I think. She's really good at remaining friends with past partners, so I'm hoping that we can keep a friendship alive. I look forward to that, despite missing her terribly.

I think she'll probably start dating Ed pretty quickly. That's scary 'cause a rebound relationship is a bad way to start, plus I suspect he won't want her to see me. If so I'll honor that desire, though it'll break my heart to completely lose my friendship with her.

I have been wrestling with this situation for two weeks now. There's lots to say but none of it really needs to be said; I've worked through it with close friends, and with Gaelen. I'm really busy; big Kazum shows coming up over the next two weekends. So I'm mostly distracted from loneliness. Plus, the benefit of Gaelen not spending time at my place is that she's left no absence behind. I'm sure it's a lot more lonely for her, 'cause I was always at her place and now I'm not.

I'm really glad that we dated, and I'll always treasure the memories and the feelings that we created together. I hope that we can remain close.

I sure do miss her. But I've got lots to do, so I'm gonna go get started on some things. First, a new kitten - we lost Abu over the weekend and poor O'Malley is perishing miserably from loneliness. Me, too... I hate losing a pet.

So, I'm off to check out a 4-month-old kitten!

The Economics of Traffic

The Economics of Traffic

The other day I was stuck in traffic coming down 26 into downtown Portland. There are 3 lanes, and immediately after my favorite tunnel in the whole world, they split. The left lane heads north, and it's usually not too backed up. The middle lane heads into downtown Portland, and it's usually the fastest lane. The thrice-cursed, deeply-dreaded right lane heads south, and it's almost always the lane I need to be in.
So, one of my biggest pet peeves has long been people who crowd into the faster-moving lane to get ahead of everyone else, then cut back in near their exit. I'll call 'em SJDs... Selfish Jerk Drivers. That's more polite than the words I generally think of when I see them. Anyway, cutting ahead via the faster lane is the road equivalent to going to the front of the line at a theater and cutting in front of someone, with the defense, "They're stupid to stand there and wait. Smart people don't wait behind all the stupid people." But in a theater line you aren't protected from the social disapproval of cutting in line. In a car you only have 3 or 4 seconds of potential eye-contact with the people you're cutting in front of.

I make the drive into Portland from Beaverton a lot. *sigh* An awful lot. When I have to do it during trafficky times I get lots of time to contemplate the ethics and efficiencies of traffic. I recently discovered some things that I hadn't realized before.
There are two societal goals in traffic. One is to get as many vehicles through the choke-points as efficiently as possible. (I'll refer to all vehicles as "cars" from here on out 'cause it's shorter to type.)
The other goal is to not force some drivers to pay a disproportionate "stuck in traffic" tax. That's what cutting in line does, by the way... the SJD gets through quickly by giving his Stuck Time to everyone he cuts in front of. This seems like a minor burden... he saves ten minutes of waiting and each person he cuts in front of only increases their wait time by a few seconds. Problem is, there are dozens of them, so the sum Stuck Time stays the same. And the more SJDs who cut in line, the more all those waiting folks' Stuck Time skyrockets. It's super-frustrating to watch car after car cut in front of your line after you've been sitting in the right lane for the last mile (it's No Lane Change for about half a mile, but the Selfish Jerk Drivers ignore that).
So, should all drivers sit in the slow lane when they know they're gonna have to be in that lane eventually? I used to think so, but then I analyzed further! Yeah, I know, not so exciting. It's a long, boring drive. I can't imagine this is interesting to anyone who isn't actually stuck in traffic.

The whole traffic problem is created by choke-points. Too many cars need to get through a choke-point, and that backs things up.

So, if you can avoid a choke-point, go for it! If you have a way to bypass the part where everyone has to slow down and wait, you're helping the situation without simply discarding your Stuck Time onto someone who isn't as inconsiderate as you are. In the case of 26-into-Portland, there's a good way to do this. Take the center lane, and instead of flying your SJD colors at the road-split, stay center. You can then get back into the same lane you were in after a few turns, and you aren't contributing to the choke-point, you're sailing past it. Yay!
Unfortunately, that's really the only ethical way to help out. :( If you have to take the choke-point, your most ethical choice is to get into the correct lane quickly and accept your Stuck Time so that all the cars you pass don't inherit it from you.
I've read studies talking about how it's more efficient to wait to merge until the last second, which makes sense in theory but doesn't really work that way in practice, 'cause the SJDs rush to the front and then cut in.
Because I deal with this so frequently, it's a big issue for me. If I'm in a car that speeds ahead and then cuts into traffic, I become most irate with the driver. If I don't absolutely have to get somewhere quickly, I'll make them drop me off and I'll find my own way to where I'm going, rather than be a passenger in a SJD car. If I was at a theater and a buddy dragged me to the front of the line with him while he cut, I'd refuse to participate. Being a passenger in a SJD car makes it harder to refuse, but it's important to me so I make a big deal of it.
If you've actually read through this (what's wrong with you, anyway? This is super-boring!) then you're now aware of the impact of pulling a SJD around me. It drastically lowers my opinion of people when they do it. :)

(Facebook Note from 4/09/2009)

Kazum photo shoot w/ Andy Batt

Instead of practice yesterday we went to Andy Batt's studio and he shot bunches and bunches of pictures. It was great.

We've done a shoot with Andy before, when we were catering to silhouettes. This time we were costumed & made-up - Uli's makeup took over 3 hours. We're really excited about the pictures. I'll link up to some on my blog as soon as Andy puts some proofs up on the web.

Melissa came and helped us stay on track. She also gave us cues and feedback like, "Straighten your legs and point your toes" and "Arms up higher on the left." It was very useful 'cause the photographer is all wrapped up in shooting plus he doesn't know the stuff we do, and Melissa does.

It was great to see my hobbit. She's due in 2 months now and she's enormous (for Melissa). I held her in a cradle and I could certainly feel the ~30 lbs of extra weight. Keep in mind that Melissa is 90 lbs regularly, so 30 lbs is an increase of 1/3 her body weight.

We finally wrapped up at around 1:00 am. It was a long & gruelling shoot, but very enjoyable and exciting.

Today there were a bunch of complex adjustments waiting for me to make to the Invoice. *sigh* I like resolving tangles and I enjoy doing this stuff, but I'm kinda burned out on it. Yesterday was full of heavy intensity with Invoice stuff, too. I wanna put it to bed for another month.

Looking forward to my Benjaminions tonight. They'll wanna play games but I really want to do something active and more interdependant. Hm.

I responded to 2 iHeart posts today that triggered my sensitivities. One was a lady from IL who met a dude in CA and moved there to marry him. Almost immediately after getting pregant she divorced him and (here's the sensitive part) moved back to IL. So her son's growing up with minimal contact from his dad.

She got all kinds of kudos and support from iHeart folks, which is great! But I hate the way most online communities blow sunshine up the poster's arse. In an effort to be nice and friendly and supportive, people tend to reinforce the poster's viewpoint heavily, and support them in villainizing whomever they're venting about. I hate that dynamic. I think it sucks for people to hear nonstop "You did great and the other person is a shmuck." It makes me wonder how many kids don't see their parents because well-meaning folks who've only heard one side of a story posted a bunch of "good for you for moving!" posts. :(

The other post was similar. A guy with 2 kids in Colorado divorced his abusive wife, and moved to Oregon "to get away from her". Apparently she'd hound him ferociously if he stayed within easy parenting distance. *sigh* Methinks that's self-serving BS, personally. Even if it wasn't, though, the kids are more important and now they don't have a mother anymore 'cause dad felt entitled to put half a continent between them and their mother.

The purpose of his post was to ask for advice on fighting a custody battle across state lines. My advice to him was to stop fighting and move back to Colorado so that his kids can have 2 parents instead of 1. I doubt it'll be well received, but I do hope that it serves 2 purposes. #1, most importantly, I hope that it breaks through the "poor me she's so horrible she deserves whatever I do to her" thinking that utterly ignores the impact on the kids. #2, I hope that other readers might shake off the "everyone here is perfect but victimized" mentality that iHeart and nearly every other non-recovery-based forum subscribes to so heavily. That part ain't helping.

Okay, 'nuff blogging. Back to the Invoice.

Economic struggles

So many people are looking for work. People are getting laid off everywhere. It's pretty scary. Alex looked for work for 5 months in Portland and he simply couldn't find anything other than single-digit weekly hours at Hollywood Video... ridiculous. It's pretty scary stuff.

I don't pretend that I fully appreciate how scary it is - I've still got full-time employment. I'm in a precarious position, though. I bill the client each month and I'm keenly aware of how much they pay my company (who then pays me). The client has been downsizing and laying off. It wouldn't be very surprising if they laid off my position. My company would find another position for me... probably manning a phone somewhere. That's a horrible job, and it would include a serious pay-cut. Normally I wouldn't even consider working a phone, but things are pretty terrifying. Am I gonna be desperately hoping to get hired as a short-order cook or a gas-jockey in 2 months?

And yet, I can't help but be amazed at how overpriveliged everyone is that I see complaining about the job market. People smoke cigarrettes and drink beer while complaining loudly about how poor they are. We go out and pay for dinner at a restaurant so that we can whine about not being able to afford to eat. We're so used to a luxury-ridden lifestyle that we feel honestly impoverished when we can only afford the "bare minimums of survival" - things like a car with insurance, a nice place to live with internet & phone & cable, enough spare cash to go out to eat when we don't feel like making food from scratch. We buy drinks and smokes and go out with our friends. We live a lifestyle that's pampered and luxurious in a world where the average lifestyle is far below all but the truly poor Americans - the folk whom none of us actually know or associate with. We are convinced that our woes eclipse anyone else's woes - yet we can afford so much more than so many. It's eerie.

Part of me is glad that America's economy is tanking. I'm glad that people are actually learning what it means to not have enough. When people are forced to make sacrifices in order to meet their basic needs, they learn just how much they've been taking for granted for so long. I think that's wonderful. But I also think that we won't learn for long. If our economy bounces back so that we can afford almost anything we want, we'll quickly forget the lean times when we actually had to be strict with the money we blew.

Anyway, the moaning I hear is about "I can't afford to maintain my excessive and luxurious lifestyle" even though it's never actually presented that way. And while everyone's primary complaint is about how they can't afford as many luxuries as they used to afford... we're okay. Maybe it's best to let our economy continue to suffer.

But then I look at situations like Alex's. He earnestly & honestly looked for work for a really long time. He wasn't picky; he took what he could get. He worked as a video store clerk for months.

Still, he afforded whatever he wanted. Drinks, going out with friends to have fun, breakfast at a cafe whenever he felt the urge. Of course, he had money tucked away 'cause he's smart like that, plus his normal financial footprint is remarkably small. If he was a hand-to-mouth kind of person like most of us, he'd have been in serious financial dire straits.

I'm conflicted. I feel really bad for those who are struggling to make ends meet, even though "making ends meet" involves all kinds of luxury. At the same time, I'm disgusted by a society where "making ends meet" includes a well-tuned vehicle, dozens of square feet of living area, recreational chemicals, paying other people for the luxury of prepared food we don't have to clean up, cell phones, internet access, cable TV, and all of the other "basic necessities" that our society convinces us we're entitled to as a bottom-line standard of living.

I don't want to put my things in storage and live from my van again. I don't want to worry about taking care of my cats, how I'm going to visit my kids, and feel the mounting pressure of child support & student loan payments accumulating while I try to scrape together money for food. But I'm simultaneously amazed at how I can go out with friends and buy a few drinks and something to eat. And instead of saving money for a rainy day, I live hand-to-mouth, just like almost everyone else I know. We're so used to having a supply of money, that we can't seem to prepare for it to dry up even when we can see it drying up for others all around us.

One thing I've been really grateful for is that I don't have anyone to bail me out. I know a few people who claim to be experiencing terrible financial stress, but they have a parent or relative who will step in and pay for their vital things like rent or a car payment. They don't really have to be self-sufficient; when the really important things are threatened they know that someone else will save them. So they continue to spend money as they wish (cutting back here & there with much loud vocalizing about how much they're sacrificing) and then when "there just isn't enough left to pay for the important things" they call for help and they get bailed out.

I dislike that very much, and I hope I can avoid providing that for my kids & loved ones. I mean, I'll give people a place to crash, and I'll help them get on their feet. I simply won't give them money for that purpose. Giving money to people is a cruel thing to do. It never helps them - it simply bails them out and releases them from the obligation to take care of their own damn messes.

Despite having such snooty, lofty ideals, if my mom was wealthy I'd appeal to her frequently for money. I've got nowhere near enough self-control to limit my own reliance on others. That's why I'm glad nobody's around who can bail me out by throwing money at me. :)

Seattle Moisture Festival & Chautauqua Benefit

The weekend before last, we all piled into a rented minivan and drove up to Seattle.

Alex postponed moving until after the Seattle trip. Naia accompanied us as our makeup artist as well as Alex's main squeeze, and Daniel also accompanied us as our Kazum understudy. Miranda drove up separately because she was meeting her roommates in Canada after the performances.

After a grueling practice just before the weekend, one of the vertebrae in my lower back had slipped out of alignment. It was painful now & then, but mostly it simply made it so that I couldn't bear any kind of weight. We had to cancel our Clowns without Borders show on Friday night. :( I visited a chiropractor friend of Kazum's and he realigned it, but it slipped out again as I drove home. Alex put it back in that night, and again the next morning. As we drove it slid out again, and Alex put it back in once more. I was pretty worried 'cause if it wasn't okay, I couldn't perform at all and the whole trip would be pointless.

One of our contacts from the Seattle Zoo festival is named Jake. He was dating our other contact (Leslie) but she's since moved to the east coast. That's good; I had a major crush on her and it was nice not to have to deal with that. Jake's a great guy and he opened his house to us. Well, his landlord's house, but still.

We had an evening practice and my back felt pretty okay. It didn't act up the whole rest of the weekend, which was awesome.

On Saturday night we assembled at Hale's Palladium for the show. It's a converted warehouse attached to a brewery, which is a pretty darn cool venue. There were lots of people there, including the delightfully skilled duo Ricochet, who we had seen at OCF. Cohdi sat and chatted with us for a while. He's an aerialist, meaning that he's in exquisite shape. Laura, his partner, didn't hang out with us but I think she's just not particularly outgoing. She wasn't stand-offish or anything. They do some of the best theatrical performing I've seen, with wonderful facial expressions, gestures and body language. Their show was spectacular.

It was fun to hang around with the performers, though I felt a bit like an outsider 'cause I knew so few of them. But the routine went very well, nobody got hurt, and we had a delightful show.

Gaelen was having a really tough time at home, though... she was really lonely and sad 'cause Alex had moved out and was gonna head straight to southern Oregon upon his return. I was tied up with performance stuff so I couldn't really talk to her much. But she got through it.

After the show Jake and his landlord (Bart) took us out on the town. We filled up the first bar that we tried, but fit more comfortably in the 2nd. Both Miranda & Uli agreed to some simple stunting at the bar, which was much fun. When the place closed down at 2 am, Jake and Bart invited us to their warehouse that they'd converted into a modern-day forge. I jogged to the forge and hung out atop some train cars out front, which I've always wanted to do. Everybody reconvened and the party continued.

The workshop was filled with fascinating things, including a 20-ton punch press that Bart used to flatten and shape hot metal. I used to run a 40-ton punch press at ProForm in Logan, and it was nostalgic to see the huge prehistoric green bulk.

Miranda found cool headgear, and we all decked ourselves out a fair bit with the stuff that was lying around the shop. Russ had a vicious-looking Samurai headpiece that he mocked with goofy faces the way he's fated to do. We all grabbed various props and posed as Naia took many pictures of us posing all around the forge area. I have a CD of pics; I need to get them uploaded.

Since Bart had seen us perform and I assured him I was familiar with the equipment, he let me and Alex climb up on the punch press for pictures. It was way fun. We did some stunting pics, too. There were some unposed pictures that were adorable as well. I held Miranda in a stand for way too long, leaving my arms numb & weak so that when I shrugged her down she hit too hard... it was lame. But she was okay quickly, which I'm very happy about.

Jake and Bart were pretty excited to have fancy-makeup'd acrobats pulling an impromptu photo shoot in their forge. I could tell that Jake was into Miranda & Uli and I was pulling for him (with Miranda, who's available) but I didn't want to flub things up by trying to be a wingman. So I (mostly) didn't say or do anything to "help" him.

We all went back to the house and piled into various beds. Daniel & I got up early in the morning and got breakfast makings. We tried to produce scrambled eggs, toast & veggies, but it wasn't as well executed as we'd hoped. Alex got up and mostly saved us, and everyone was very appreciative, but me & Daniel aren't the best choices for producing yummy food that everyone likes.

Then we relocated back to the venue for the Chautauqua benefit show. Again, the show went very well and it was delightful to hang around with the other performers. Russ & Daniel hooked up with some pals to go to a dance event, and we dropped Miranda off at the house where Jake had (quite eagerly) volunteered to let her crash another night before heading north. I hope that she hooked up with Jake, but when I've asked her about she's been (predictably) quite close-mouthed. *snort* I'll find out. Oh, yes.

Then those of us who remained (Naia, Uli, Alex and I) drove back to Portland. Well, first Alex had the ego-crunching experience of accidentally letting the van drift into a parking sign as we pulled out of the venue's parking spot. The driver's-side front quarter-panel crumpled like tin foil. But our insurance covered it. I felt bad for Alex, though.

It was a great way to spend Alex's last weekend in Portland. It was sad to bid him farewell but we've had weeks to prepare for his absence and we'll be okay. I sure miss him, though. Especially at Gaelen's place. The lack of his presence is keenly felt, there.

As I write about the trip I feel lots of nostalgia. It was our last event with Alex as part of Kazum, and my last few hours spent with my best friend. But I can't help but feel more happy than sad. :)