FJ!!

"Threat", London, Nokia Lumia 800, 2012

Another weeknight, another meet-up. Mozilla's Mobile Madness, in a bar near Old Street. I work near the Old Street roundabout now, the "Silicon Roundabout" as it is called in the press because of the start-ups and co-working spaces like TechHub, so I am close to the events.

Familiar faces. Awesome food. Just exchanging tidbits and ideas and gossip and whachooworkinon? with people I have gotten to know over the last 4 years. Tech people hanging, but without that underlying MY STARTUP WILL MAKE THE MONEYBOMB GO OFF vibe you get on the West Coast so much. We all do stuff and we like it and we want to pay the rent.

"42 (working the outtakes)", London, Leica C-LIX 3, 2012

"42 (outtakes)", London, Leica C-LIX 3, 2012

"42 / For The Record / Favorite Cardigan", London, Leica C-LUX 3, 2012

I never let myself be photographed much for a long time. So on a day like today I think I should record where I am.

It didn't hurt, but it did sting, to read these. You mean this heart will never shut up its melancholia and need? And my last move, well, yeah...

"My London Days", London, iPod Touch, 2012

"My London Days", London, iPod Touch, 2012

My days are about waking up late, doing another call for this interview process, going to the gym, doing some work on personal projects (one to make my portfolio look great for the tablet era), fielding recruiter emails and calls and sending CVs, travelling to speak to other potential gigs. I study my graphic design books, I show up on a Saturday in a pub because a tech luminary asked so I could give input as a designer to people making technology tools.

This afternoon I went into town because J, whom I mentioned before in locked entries but I am now very close friends with, lovingly over brunch Saturday tried to give me advice that I needed to tone down the black / goth / military thing for work when I originally wanted to whine at him my last suit was ripped and I needed a new one. He indeed does work as a TV reporter for a travel show on upper-cable for which he carefully manages his appearance, he did train as a fashion journalist, and he is indeed very immersed into British culture. He has also, of course, never actually seen me in work drag, the few fitted shirts I have, the layering of colored polos, but yes, black or dark blue jeans and pants. He tried to show me pages from Vanity Fair and I tuned out when the words "for this season" hit my ears, I do not spend money on seasons or trends. But he knows this shit and he wanted me to come across less threatening for better work success, so he shows me models with my coloring wearing wearing desert tones over muted reds. Tans, beige, ugh, such nothing colors. Yeah of course the guy looks good and soft--and I realize what we are going for here is 'laid-back but not hipster Creative Director'.

(Incidentally, twice now men who were originally attracted to me because of my whole intensity and perceived aggression vibe later turn around and want to make me over to appear less so, either through a new look or getting to photograph me for profile shots demanding the whole session I look softer. I don't look soft, kids. You want me to look soft, make me fall in love with you or bring me kittens.)

So there I was in town, buying brown trousers and remembering the mini meltdown I had when he kept trying to convince me I needed khakis and I told him I do not wear light-colored trousers because I am a klutz and they show stains within seconds on me and I frequently sit on the floor because I often need to sit down wherever I am and I am not buying light colored trousers. I find having my taste in clothes questioned hugely distressing, for some reason, but he's right, and when I glared at him when he mentioned I should become less clumsy, he changed the subject and put the magazines away. But I remembered the stores he recommended and 5 days later here I am compromising on two brown trousers, dark- and milk-chocolate brown, single-ply sweaters in heather gray and cobalt blue, tan and gray cardigans. What I really wanted was made-to-measure hidden-placket french-cuff razor-sharp cut shirts in solid single dark jewel colors, and black, oh god why do I not have a black dress shirt any more?, but well, there I was, following advice.

Because I have another set of people to meet tomorrow, deep in the bowels of a Large Corporation in Slough, which is basically the same as going miles into North New Jersey office park, in the afternoon, and meeting with a crazy start-up tomorrow morning and I probably should be asleep. A day of consulting is confirmed for Friday, and probably 3 weeks of work starting Monday, filling in some time and bank accounts while real jobs settle down.

I am keeping the boots, though. I am so not switching to 'desert boots', wishy washy I-am-not-a-shoe I-am-not-a-boot half-breeds. If I have to go for lighter colored shoes with the new clothes, I will just switch to proper desert boots: tan canvas combats as worn in the Middle-Eastern sandpits.

"Our Future Is Spotless Gleaming", Madrid, Leica C-LUX 3, 2012

Madonna has been described as "trying too hard" from when she was writhing on a street, singing she would do anything because she had no shame, for the video of her first hit, "Burning Up" in, oh, what, 1982? She was "trying too hard" with the underwear, she was "trying too hard" with the Marilyn, she was "trying too hard" with the burning crosses, she was definitely "trying too hard" with the Sex, the Gaultier, the fetish, the Evita, etc, etc. Still being told she is "trying too hard"--30 years later.

If Madonna isn't being told she is "trying too hard", it's not a Madonna product. It's like telling Hello Kitty it's being "too cute". The woman is driven.

The Guardian is right about MDNA, btw: the singles are incredibly safe, but genius in context of the whole album, and it has some bonkers gorgeous moments. I'll take it over the throwback of the Rolling Stones or leftover-Beatles elevator music or Kate Bush blanding-down any day for at least trying to be part of now.

Goodnight, Mara. Thank you.

Frickin hard to pose after a workout and shoot with an iPhone. Terrible camera movement because I was so shaky.

Ok, so last night. You know, it would have been easier for me to ask and have scanned in a copy of my witness statement, except that though the policeman says he wants it to be in my words, it doesn't at all read like something mine after it went through his narrating machine. I don't use designations like Male 1, Male 2, and Male 3 a lot, and somehow some Britishisms slipped into that story I doubt I ever came up with myself in that reception area I was sitting.

After some drinks for my brunch-buddy's birthday in one of the big noisy bars in Soho, the gay center here in London, I walked to Piccadilly Circus (basically a big complicated round-about with an island with a very big fountain in the middle, absolute magnet for tourists). I was walking to a bus because these days I prefer the bus over the Tube because I can be online in the bus and sometimes I like the long journey. I was about to cross the middle island when I hear two men shout at each other, 12 yards away. They assume threatening postures, fronting that they will fight. One backs off a little, the other follows, the first finds courage and puts up his dukes, but by now they are in the fucking middle of one of the busiest intersections in London. Alas, while fronting bought the first some time and actually make the second re-evaluate, the first turns tail and runs, and thus is lost: he is followed by the second and a pack of his buddies.

They run across the street to the north side of Regent Street, among the pillars, but then I see the first run back to the circus, crossing the lanes with impunity, followed by the swarm. He does not run well, and in the lane right before the island, the man closest, I believe the second male, trips him, kicks him when he is down. The swarm follows and move past the man on the ground, beating him, one with a bottle. Realize this is an insanely busy place, and we are all watching this unfold, me still carrying my messenger bag with all my equipment. This is happening 5 meters away from me. I know someone, and thus I, have to step in to stop this, but this is a group, and they are vicious. In seconds since tripping the swarm has moved on and as the voctim tries to stand up, one kid from the swarm takes a few steps back and hits him again over the head with a bottle.

At this point a man closer and braver than I started walking into them, yelling, as do I from a further distance, and the kid with the bottle looks up; I see a look in his eye like he does not understand why we would object to him beating this man, as if some calculable wrong had been done to him that had to be avenged. He breaks off, and the victim tries to stand up again. He drops. He tries to get up, by that time I am next to him and know, with my exhaustive medical training consisting basically what I have seen on medical dramas, that this guy needs to not move until the pros have shown. I walk to the victim. Young guys, tourists, are swarming with phones held up to video.
--"Call!..." -- I almost say 911, and know that is the wrong number (though I think it actually works). My brain remembers "112! Call a fucking ambulance," I am now screaming. The boys laugh, telling me they are too busy filming now, and one says "He was looking for a fight all night", while I see the victim sink into an increasing pool of blood. I grab my own phone, as I get on my knees to hold the victim down. He needs to stay there, in the middle of this street. I fumble with this fucking touch phone, too much ambient noise, and I get through, but I look up at the people gathering around and someone says "I called, I called, they are coming!" I cut the call off and put my phone away, I will feel it buzzing twice, and indeed the voicemail left was from emergency services following up on the aborted call I find out when I check once this is all over. I figured dispatch would know what was up by now.

The victim cries in pain, his eyes are glassy. A woman kneels next to me on his other side, she has a walkie-talkie and calls for the first-aid box. Somehow it appears next to her, but I can tell she is not emergency services of any kind. While we wait, and tell Alex--he could tell us that, and "No speak English"--that everything will be fine, but you need to stay right where you are, honey, I find out she, Emma, is the manager of a bar accoss the street, and had seen him go down. I use my handkerchief first to stem the bleeding, a futile gesture but all I can think of doing, she hands me a gauze from the box as she puts gloves on and I realize perhaps I should have waited for glov--whatever. I hold the gauze, it soaks but not quickly. We see the gash on his forehead, we tell him to stay awake, we try languages but all the language I know are of nations that would speak English anyway. He starts pointing at his leg in pain, crying out worse as time goes by, we stay to dissuade him from moving. I try to clean his face a little and give up.

The police is suddenly all around me, standing as we three are down on the asphalt. One manages to find someone who identifies herself as a "brain nurse", she shines a flashlight in Alex' eyes and then declares him to be ok to wait for the ambulance, and then leaves in her impeccable toilette. Emma and curse about where that fucking ambulance is as Alex points to his leg and wails, I see a grazed patch on his jeans and blood on his knee, the police seems to, well, I don't know what, but there are many. I feel useless but I stay next to him. The police guy bends over and asks "Poland?" and Alex says "Hungarian." Finally. I stand and look in the crowd "Anyone speak Hungarian?" Nothing of course. Ambulance appears, finally, finally, and the two female techs wheel a stretcher out. I ask if they need help getting him on, they say they can't allow that and make noises about how Alex will need to stand up to get on the stretcher. I tell them that is no way no how happening. They kneel next to him, I back off. Real help is here. I tell them about the knee, they cut the jeans leg open while Alex is close to panic from the scissors, we soothe him and when the trouser leg falls away I see the knee is swelling big.

I stand and really back off, in a strange zone between gawker, and well, nothing else really, I am now a gawker too. Something about the stretcher seems to come apart in pieces and be assembled under Alex as some form of big portable respirator appears, from the things the nurses say it seems to be some from of painkiller. I walk away and see a guy giving a statement to the police, I overhear he saw a lot. I ask the first cop on the scene if he needs me for anything, he asks for all my contact info, which later, through a sea of un-communication between the cops becomes a request to give a statement at the station. Sure. Takes forever, and the guy who had been giving the statement who has now also been asked to come into the station and I chat about what happened. We hear Alex is doing ok in that ambulance that seems to not go anywhere forever. I later tell the other witness, now in the back of a police van, that while the US does scoop-and-run emergency services, Europe generally tries to stabilize and treat as much as they can at the place of calamity.

While we wait on the Circus a man with an American accent approaches us, tells us he couldn't believe how long it took for cops to appear. He saw it all too and tried to find a police person but saw none for minutes; in Times Square they would have been on this in seconds. Yeah, well, I ask him, do you see a lot of police here in general? He realizes no, not like in the US.
-- "They do a lot after the fact with CCTV here," I say, and I hear from the cops soon after that they expect to have good footage, enough to identify suspects. Indeed, when I have traveled to the station by ratty-looking police van, joked with my fellow witness how plenty of American would really not fit in the tiny secured partition in the back we were looking at from the middle seats, and gone through the supremely inefficient process of recalling the events while policeman asks questions and takes notes, transcribes into the computer, reads the statement back to me so I can correct moments, events, and sentences, and then prints it twice so I can correct more before I sign, that the video checked has already been good enough to let one apprehended suspect go. It was during lulls and waiting in taking the statement that I tweeted / facebooked the updates. And yes, I did literally have blood on my hands, that I washed off at the station. It's ok; while the sight of a lot of my own blood can make me faint, I'm not scared of someone else's. I remember thinking he wasn't bleeding out, that he wasn't bleeding that much from the swelling gash after I compressed it, but oh how bright red the blood was on the street after he had been scooped into the ambulance and I stood waiting to go to the station.

This all happened at ten, and somewhere around midnight I walk out of the station. The constable, who had been really professional and approachable without being overly friendly or casual, apologized but his bus had been taken by another team so he could not drive me. I tell him it's ok, I'll take the tube home, and outside chance upon the other witness. We joke a little and I go home. At which point I realize I have left my bag with all the big electronics at the station. I call non-emergency, they put me through to the station, the operator checks the room and tells me she found it, I plead to collect it tomorrow since I am almost home and so tired. Not a problem, but it is why I couldn't write this up last night for you.

Well, now you know. As the policewoman today at the station said as she pulled my satchel from the evidence bag they had put it in--which I laughed at--before giving it to me, "this really is the safest place you could have left that bag!"

"Real men do / don't...", or any gender-policing variant thereof, is a triggering sentence for me. And directing it, even as a quip, to me will make me rant at you, wonder why you would use such noxious and vile phrase that upon even the most cursory examination is so obviously devoid of any actual meaning except divisive tribalism, and think way less of you.

Seriously. I am not kidding. I have a serious history with it.

So what's life like right now:

Weekend trips to places. Like 6 time zones, or Edinburgh, or Arnhem. The latter two I pay with the miles I get from using my American Express British Airways card for everything at Tesco.

Many evenings booked with dinners. Which means working out in the morning, so cold and dark and hard to get out of bed, and very small food when I am not out.

Work's in an interesting place of where we need to go and what we need to do, and what we are allowed to do. Lost of questions and doubts I have to answer and soothe.

I am still enthralled with PostSecret, and allcapsanimals--I think I even made that LJ feed, or was it hungoverowls? I love them both.

I still hate Sunday night. Especially on winter Sunday nights.

"The Sunset", London, Leica C-LUX 3, 2012

"The Sunset", London, Leica C-LUX 3, 2012

"The Sunset", London, Leica C-LUX 3, 2012

I knew she had taken up knitting, and spinning wool. But I was not quite prepared, when I entered her living room, to see quite what a wool factory it had become, spinning wheel and all. I sit down and we have pizza and we talk about the year. This was a few weeks ago, an evening with a friend I met through social media circles here in London. She has had a rough year, she has been let down by many agencies who are supposed to help families with special needs children like being on the autism scale, but she slips through the criteria left and right and ends up having to manage the systems, schooling, housing, benefits that disappear, alone. She doesn't show if it is getting her down, but she took up wool, the spinning of fleece, knitting chunky thick open sweaters and dresses. She got the fleece and was offered the use of the wheel and instruction with it, now she is delving into how to dye naturally.

A show on TV about how to do a Victorian Christmas. Churn the butter, make your own medicines. We watch, fascinated by how much work it is. But now she, a social media teacher and networker, now has her hands-on hobby. I have my baking, also suddenly comong out of nowhere. We feel it around us, people suddenly taking up hobbies of real actual skills. Survival skills, useful skills. A friend in San Antonio, TX, quilting.

-- "I never thought of it that way, but I was having this conversation with a collapsonomicist at one of the events a month or so ago, and I realized I would be completely useless in a post-computing society. Nobody needs people making wireframes or user journeys when we need to skin rabbits for protein." We laugh. And now I am wondering if I could use my skills to make hunting for rabbits nicer. But the job of survival doesn't really need gamification, does it? She spins wool and tells me, earnestly, as we reminisce about growing up, how she wonders if East Germany, her native land, really would have opted to dissolve into Germany if they had known what being capitalist was actually really like. Both her local TV and the broadcasts they all watched illegally from West Germany were competing propaganda, in a way. "Dallas" really is not how people live.

Yesterday, on Twitter, the two friends I will later meet for tea, both mention how they are hoping 2012 will be their break out of the holding pattern they have felt they were in since 2009. Treading water.
-- "We were shell-shocked, then, I think, by 2008," I say, while discussing it with one of the two before the other arrives soaking wet from watching the New Year's Parade in the rain. She agrees. She was. But she is starting a new venture now. The tech circles are humming people are working again, but I sense unease, shifts in jobs, freelancing, insecurity, downgrades. She asks me what I hope for in 2012. I tell her my story about the bad interviews, and how I have no realistic ones right now, no vision. Just to keep working, keep improving, be ready for a chance if I would even recognize it. Am I thriving? Would I recognize it if I was in a world that has such a different level of optimism than it did 4 years ago? How many children on food stamps in the US?

Two pieces of writing, inter-related, are on my mind. One about how to handle being the disappearing middle class, with some historical pointers about how the middle class has, indeed disappeared before, and what a coping strategy entails. The analysis of how the middle class is structured to act feels very British in a way, very appearances, but was shockingly familiar to how I wanted to live my life: not budgeting, comfortable, not doing anything crazy. And here he describes how he's handling falling out of it, and his answer is: stop appearances on every level. Find what is important for you and pursue that, and realize how much of what you otherwise do is about fitting in in ways nobody apreciates. But we are social animals, we want to belong, and we want to not feel left behind. Sociology teaches us that you can be happy with a current reward but discontent creeps in when you see someone else have more. His recipe to deal is: understand that anxiety, and curb it. It will drive you into poverty now.

Another article, from purejuice, basically going over the same topic but from a 'reading craft bloggers' point of view. Again, the resurgence of making things with your hands, survival skills, barterable skills. (Sometimes I think that when the apocalypse happens the fact that I can remember how to configure TCP/IP on Windows 95 will be of more use than how I know how to arrange 200 topics into a website.) The craftafarians sometimes really are about ritual work and self-sufficiency, but the ones purejuice's eye looks at here are the ones who take the utility out of crafting and turn it into a form of consumerism barely disguised as virtue. And it's the same analysis: what is real, what will actually serve you when the world changes and your finances and chances and futures shift? Not an acorn muffin pan, unless it is an investment into your acorn muffin business.

A friend of mine is de-cluttering. (I am casting a critical eye on to some of my books myself, seeing if I can make my load lighter. This after I have only acquired, through gifts, 3 or so nooks since I moved here.) He is painfully attached to all his books, but realizes many must go, many other shelves of things and knick-knacks must go, he must make it easier to move because after 10 years of living on an isolated number of acres outside of town, he has to be around people again, he needs communities and contacts and making his sports easier. His partner seems to be bewildered by the change, the perseverance, but we all know my friend is methodical once something needs to be done.

We've lived in a bubble of credit, structured to make us borrow ourselves rich while paying a top layer of capitalists for the experience, and the bill has come due. We do not really know all that well what the adjustment looks like for us. I am sheltering myself in the arms of the periphery of the tech world emanating from Silicon Valley and its enthusiasts that seem to not be noticing a downturn of any kind. But I am doing it in one of the most expensive cities in the world, where the choice of point to take in the triangle defined by corners of no space, long commute, and pay tons of money, seems to always be less comfortable than anything my upbringing has put in front of me as desirable.

Am I keeping up with the Joneses by choosing to live here? I had visions of what my future would be once, and one of them, of living in a small space in Europe again, came true. But I do not know how I feel about it. Sometimes being good at making the most of small spaces feels like a skill akin to being good at keeping yourself entertained because you have no friends, a skill I once also needed. Are we all thriving? I think our reach into meaningful crafts, in making and combining, is our path to it. Getting ready for change, for what is next, paring down what we own and using it as a process of finding out what we are so we can focus on what will make us happy. We can't putter around like we did any more, we have to be nimble and light and prepared, and know what we will spend resources on because we think it is important, and what can be left behind or done cheaper because it has no meaning. It's not competitive frugality. It's about not tolerating waste.