a stream

The school district received a herd of ponies. I was supposed to catalog them, barcode them, and figure out a good protocol for checking them out to students.

They were all in an old corral out in the desert, and seemed wild and restless, as if perhaps they had just been captured and swept in from that desert and we hadn’t exactly been told the truth about their (lack of) training. Also, it didn’t seem like anyone was taking care of them out there so it was maybe going to fall to me to feed them, scrape out their hooves, and do whatever else needs to be done for horses. I don’t know anything about horses.

I felt I needed to learn all the proper descriptive terms for horse coloration so I could create accurate descriptions in the MARC records, but I was afraid to admit my lack of knowledge of horse culture to anyone. I’d never even ridden a horse.

I remember thinking I would probably put the barcodes on their saddles, until I realized that horses only wear saddles when a human is riding or about to ride on them. I was reluctant to brand the barcodes on them, and it would be tedious work to get the symbology and coding correct each time.

Years ago I was driving around out in some rural area and I turned a corner on a lane and in front of me were two pickup trucks, engines running but stopped in the middle of the road while going opposite directions. The drivers were chatting with each other through their windows, and had been for who knows how long. I want to say one truck was brown and the other tan or grey with some white or turquoise trim, but I can’t truly remember. Their colorings definitely weren’t entirely un-horseish, though.

In the pastures parallel to where the trucks were idling, two horses stood on either side of a fence. They were doing that thing horses sometimes do where they stand next to each other but face opposite directions, their tails occasionally flipping a little bit in each others' faces. Like idling engines.

Two trucks and two horses, opposite but parallel. Perfect composition if I could pull it off. It might have even been the golden hour; let’s go ahead and say the lighting was good. I was too afraid of what the drivers might say or do about a random city kid in a tiny Japanese car taking their picture. They just as likely might not have even noticed if I had stopped and taken the picture, though.

Encountering horses in the human world often just makes me feel sad, guilty, a little bit afraid, and like maybe what I should do is sneak back at night and set them all free. I’m occasionally concerned that if I get too close they might bite me, kick me, or trample me, and I’d deserve it for standing there gawking at them or otherwise being complicit in the nonsense. A horse certainly doesn’t owe me anything. But in actuality I understand they are mostly too broken to ever attempt such things against a strange human.

I said “herd” above because it sounded better to me, but in the dream it was definitely first described to me as a “set” of ponies. Catalog our new set of 40 ponies and prepare them for checkout.

I’d settled on a 1 week check out period per student. They could walk or ride the ponies home from the school, but I wasn’t sure how they were going to be able to take enough hay home to feed the pony for a week. We’d need horse carts, or a delivery truck.

At one point a vice-superintendent and a district PR person videocalled me at the corral to check in on “where we were at” in getting the ponies ready and out to students. It was a district priority.

My wife’s cousin’s horses were being ridden around in circles by my nieces, my kids, and some other cousin kids. Everyone needed multiple turns. I was informed that one of the horses was called Dreamer. Right as I was told this I noticed an insect crawling around the edge of Dreamer’s deep, brown eye, accentuating the misty, faraway look I saw there. However faraway and inscrutable that look, I intuited that the dreams that Dreamer dreamed behind those eyes were reasonable and close, centered in the here and now: I think that Dreamer longed to stop walking around in circles in the heat. I think this dreamful creature, itself fulfilling the dreams of so many cabin children with its steady legs and unfathomable eyes, actually just wanted to eat some fucking grass. It was growing all around the edges of the riding ring, and Dreamer kept breaking the circle to go snag some bites of green stuff, before being pulled back into semi-compliance by the child at the reigns.

I could be wrong about all of this, though; I don’t know anything about horses.

Standalone post link: A Horse Called Dreamer

I’ve been here before. It’s a cycle for me. The compulsion to exist on social media, followed soon after by silence. I’ve posted variations on this dilemma before. I’ve almost posted on it many times more.

I want and need to just live my life, do my things, think my thoughts, and not be performative about any of it. I despise so much in life that is performative, and I want not to contribute to it. I don’t want to be that person, although I probably still am.

But then, I do want to share and bring to light cool things. People have good ideas, they’ve made interesting or useful things, they need to be supported.

And I want to sort-of connect with people in my weird, limited ways. I usually fail or fear doing this in person. The asynchronicity of some social media platforms is everything to me. I’m not that interested in chat or video calls. I don’t want to get together with you. I just want to share stuff, see other people share stuff, maybe have some sort of time-delayed conversations. I should start writing letters. Or a blog. That’s it.

And yes, wanting to be performative after all. Wanting to make art, or at least something kind of interesting, out of the details of my life, to share my thoughts and perspective.

Is that a performance? A curation? Something always has to be left out.

--

I recently re-read Ross Gay’s Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, and right now I’m listening to the audio of his Book of Delights. I’m fairly inspired by how he is working his way through this. I love how he pays attention / gives attention to so many regular, mundane things. I want to do more of that in my writing, and photography/video, whatever I choose to mess around with and share.

Standalone post link: On Whether To Share Things

For nearly the past two months I’ve been tracking all my reading updates just in a OneNote page. Transferring it here for transparency/accountability, or just some form of conspicuousness. Think I’m about to go onto Goodreads and log all of this, get caught up, be a social human of some sort, &c. Maybe I’ll post specific things about some of these books on here as well if I have time and inclination.

Saturday, July 25, 2020

• Started reading Like a Love Story by Abdi Nazemian

Friday, July 24, 2020

• Read New Kid by Jerry Craft

Wednesday, July 22, 2020

• Started reading The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin

Saturday, July 18, 2020

• Started listening to The Book of Delights by Ross Gay
• Finished reading Library of Small Catastrophes by Allison C. Rollins

Thursday, July 16, 2020

• Started reading Hainish Novels & Stories, Volume I (LoA) by Ursula Le Guin
• Read Rocannon’s World by Ursula Le Guin (in above omnibus edition)

Sunday, July 12, 2020

• Tried to figure out what to write or do to the copy of Letter to a Future Lover that I’ve had all through the quarantine and need to finally take back to the library now.
• Reread Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude by Ross Gay

Saturday, July 11, 2020

• Started reading Library of Small Catastrophes by Allison C. Rollins
• Ordered a bunch of poetry anthologies to read

Friday, July 10, 2020

• Finished reading Astro Poets: Your Guides to the Zodiac by Alex Dimitrov & Dorothea Lasky

Wednesday, July 8, 2020

• Started reading with kids The Last (Endling, #1) by Katherine Applegate

Monday, July 6, 2020

• Read Woke: A Young Poet’s Call to Justice by Mahogany L. Browne with Elizabeth Acevedo and Olivia Gatwood, illustrated by Theodore Taylor III
• Restarted reading Astro Poets: Your Guides to the Zodiac by Alex Dimitrov & Dorothea Lasky

Sunday, July 5, 2020

• Read This Book Is Anti-Racist by Tiffany Jewell, illustrated by Aurelia Durand

Saturday, July 4, 2020

• Finished reading Clap When You Land by Elizabeth Acevedo
• Read Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You by Jason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi

Sunday, June 28, 2020

• Finished reading Black Leopard, Red Wolf by Marlon James
• Started reading Clap When You Land by Elizabeth Acevedo

Saturday, June 20, 2020

• Started reading Resist by Veronica Chambers [DNF]
• Still reading Black Leopard, Red Wolf by Marlon James

Saturday, June 13, 2020

• Finished reading Homie: Poems by Danez Smith
• Still reading Black Leopard, Red Wolf by Marlon James

Monday, June 8, 2020

• Started reading Homie: Poems by Danez Smith
• Started reading Poetry (June 2020) [DNF]
• Still reading Black Leopard, Red Wolf by Marlon James

Sunday, June 7, 2020

• Read Heartbeat by Evan Turk
• Read The Storyteller by Evan Turk
• Read You Are Home: An Ode to the National Parks by Evan Turk
• Read If I Was the Sunshine by Julie Fogliano, illustrated by Loren Long
• Read A House that Once Was by Julie Fogliano, illustrated by Lane Smith
• Read Just in Case You Want to Fly by Julie Fogliano, illustrated by Christian Robinson
• Read When’s My Birthday? by Julie Fogliano, illustrated by Christian Robinson
• Read How to Read a Book by Kwame Alexander, illustrated by Melissa Sweet
• Read Beneath the Bed and other Scary Stories by Max Brallier, illustrated by Letizia Rubegni

Saturday, June 6, 2020

• Read Intersection Allies: We Make Room for All by Chelsea Johnson, LaToya Council, and Carolyn Choi, illustrations by Ashley Seil Smith
• Read Not My Idea: A Book About Whiteness by Anastasia Higginbotham
• Read Death Is Stupid by Anastasia Higginbotham
• Read The Nightlife of Jacuzzi Gaskett by Brontez Purnell, illustrated by Elise R. Peterson

Standalone post link: Books Read in June-July 2020

My kids and I have been casually talking about turning our yard into an orchard, and re-reading this book in my backyard today inspires me to get completely serious about it. Impossible to read these poems and not want to start growing stuff.

Read the title poem from the collection Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude by Ross Gay.

Check out Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude from a Salt Lake County Library like I did once or twice before I finally bought it.

Standalone post link: Reading: Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude

Been thinking a lot about curation, both professionally and personally. Where, when, how, whether to do it.

I’ve been in a holding pattern about sharing things for a long time now - I have digital and physical notebooks full of things to potentially share (good and helpful things, I believe), but it seems too big a deal to share them. There are too many options, each with benefits and drawbacks, each with different audiences, or in some cases no audience at all.

Started playing hard with Pinterest at work last week as a potential way out of this, then promptly took vacation time and went camping out of cell range for several days. Now I’m having second thoughts about what I was starting to build there. Then third thoughts, that I should do more, and do it in more places.

Pinterest? Wakelet? Tweet threads? Some Google Doc? Destiny Discover Collections? My own website? My district library website? My district edtech website? Just leave it alone since my district has another new main webpage that kind of curates a little bit of what I was thinking but that I’m not involved in? Yes to all?

Do I go to where the most people are, even if it doesn’t always make the most organizational sense, or I don’t like the way it looks or works? Do I just use whatever platform is easy or makes the most sense to me? Do I belligerently insist on my own platform and expect people to come to me if they come at all? Do I let it go? Most other people don’t have this pressure to curate and share; maybe I shouldn’t either, and maybe it’s not even helpful or a good idea. Maybe it’s not actually my job. Guess I’m still kind of a mess, mentally uncurated.

Hey, take my little survey and let me know your dream curatorial format/platform, if there were no rules for any of us. I’ll share the results. (I first made this to get input from my co-workers.)

Standalone post link: The Opposite of Curation Isn't A Mess But Silence

Standalone post link: Working Conditions

Arrangement by William Whiting. Photo by me.

Quarantine is magic.

Standalone post link: mlp:qim

I had a dream that I listened to this song on a different streaming platform and the guitar solos were missing from the track. I feverishly scoured the internet trying to find the original version with the guitar solos and figure out what was happening. Tabs kept closing on me and websites glitched into oblivion. I wasn’t sure if the streaming platform or record label had demanded their removal, or if she had somehow become ashamed of them and self-censored, or if it was the Mandela effect, or some other kind of weird conspiracy, but I was going to somehow get to the bottom of this cosmic scandal against musicianship and bring the lost guitar solos back to light.

The next day I had to listen to the song several times on different platforms just to be reassured that the guitar solos had not actually disappeared, but still remained on the track in their fulness.

Standalone post link: It's a Moot Point

In the past month I’ve found myself paralyzed in regards to social media, both personally and professionally. Whenever I peak into my feeds I’ve been easily overwhelmed by the content I see: deluges of RESOURCES FOR “ONLINE LEARNING¹,” endless interludes of stay-at-home inanities and banalities, and then literal death and suffering, since underneath all of this inconvenience, opportunism, and political posturing it turns out there is an actual tragic pandemic that is taking lives.

I haven’t known how to contribute to this world, and ultimately decided the best way to contribute would be to just stay quiet. Or maybe I just choked and failed by dropping out of this resource-sharing, curating, connecting game at the very moment when it was suddenly THE THING TO DO.

–

A couple of Sundays ago the weather was wonderful and I tried to get my kids to go outside with me on a walk or a hike or even just a drive, and they didn’t want to do it (this was the third day in a row I had invited them on such an excursion), so ultimately I went on a drive by myself. I headed east of Salt Lake for a particular side canyon dirt road I know that isn’t too high in elevation and that I had always found pretty much deserted when I visited in the past. I wanted to be able to socially isolate, and ever hopeful, scope it out to see if the snow had melted enough for a hike there with my kids on another day. When I arrived, the parking on the side of the road was full. There were far more people there at that moment than the collective number of all the people I had ever seen in all my previous visits to this place over the past 15+ years. Families and groups of people were out walking up and down this dirt road, with unleashed dogs running everywhere. One walking person, whose dog had just run in front of the car in front of me, almost getting hit and causing all traffic on the road to just stop for an awkwardly long period of time, loudly complained into my open window, “I don’t know why everyone wants to drive down this road TODAY!” just as a cyclist zoomed in between us and all the cars, dogs, and walkers as well. It was jarring and I felt exposed, and although technically I guess everyone was maybe keeping the 6 feet rule beyond their own families and groups it felt like the exact opposite of social distancing. I realized I had made a mistake and should have just stayed home, sat in my backyard or at my desk with the window open. I’m privileged to have these things, especially right now.

–

Turns out my 7yo daughter, the one we generally think of as the big extrovert in a mostly introvert family, hates video calls. She doesn’t want to be seen on them, whether it is with her grandparents, her cousins, or her teacher and classmates. She doesn’t want to converse with people. She finally got a little used to them by doing one with her brother from different rooms of our house. She spent the entire time just making goofy faces and noises at him until he laughed. (Didn’t take long because she is really funny, to be honest.) The next week after that she did join in a chat with her cousins, but never showed herself on screen. At one point in the chat she went outside on our old trampoline and put down the tablet with her microphone muted and the camera facing the sky, lay down next to it, and just listened to the chat. At another point she employed a small bunny rabbit puppet as a bonkers surrogate that would jump sideways into view and hop around in front of her brother’s face making ridiculous noises.

–

A curious thing I’ve noticed about myself is that the social networks I’m most consistently active on are those where I don’t actually know anyone or interact with them in any kind of way beyond following, reading, or maybe “liking” their posts. During this time of my social media confusion and my silence on Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads, and other places where I actually know some people, I’ve still been faithfully logging and reviewing the movies I watch on Letterboxd, where I know no one (except one old co-worker who doesn’t post excessively) and get very little response from my posts. I continue to faithfully scrobble all my music listening on last.fm, where I likewise know no one and interact with virtually no one.

A few months ago I spent a fair amount of time thinking about what I might post on this very website and started adding things here semi-consistently, but I was barely sharing it out at all anywhere else. It was kind of my secret spot. Then I shared a couple of things on twitter and facebook and soon after that I heard from a some people face-to-face that they had looked at the site. I got weirded out and my enthusiasm strangely waned. I mean, theoretically a primary reason to have a website and share things on it is at the very least with the intention or hope that other people might look at it, right?

–

Two weeks after it was expected, my 9yo son still hasn’t finished the first main lesson page² he was supposed to do at home. These pages are a combination of art and writing created by students on lusciously thick 11x17 paper, collected throughout the year, then sewnbound by the teacher and presented back to the student in a collection at the end of the school year. For the time being, we were to take a picture of the finished page and email it to his teacher. I believe this is the only assignment of this distance learning period for which she has requested such evidence of it being completed.

He colored the borders and drew the art on the top half of the page. He drafted the 5-sentence paragraph on the process of turning wool into cloth in his writing notebook, with only a single spelling error—sheer for shear—which he quickly corrected and added to his personal dictionary as per teacher instructions. He carefully wrote the first sentence of that paragraph in cursive on the lesson page. It was pretty much lunchtime, and he took a break for a minute “to imagine.” A week later he was still imagining.

–

I thought that sharing lots of digital resources was kind of my thing. I thought that communicating and connecting with people mainly online was kind of my thing. Turns out, maybe I was wrong. Maybe I’m not actually that good at it. Maybe I don’t actually like it or want it. Yet I keep thinking about it. I don’t quite know my path forward, but I’m going to start by posting this, finally, and then just maybe start sharing things again without overthinking? Yeah, right.

–

TL;DR- I was into social distancing and digital learning before they were cool, but now you all have come and ruined my scene.

Or maybe I’m losing my edge.³

⁴

Standalone post link: A Break for a Minute to Imagine

It’s actually kind of inspiring how bad this film is.

I watched this in scattered 15-20 minute increments over the course of four or five days, due to either getting bored or falling asleep at each attempt to continue. I nevertheless kept coming back out of some stubborn need to see it through. When I found myself inexplicably awake at 5:30 this Saturday morning after having fallen asleep to it yet again the night before, I couldn’t think of anything else to do, so I loaded it up and re-watched the last few minutes of it.

I’m convinced now there is a purposefulness and assuredness to its badness, a kind of punk obstinacy against making a good or entertaining film. It also seems a possibility that the whole film exists simply as an extended setup to tell the sick and clever “Doppler Effect” joke. And to just try out a lot of different things cinematically. Now that I think more on the film, there are many other jokes or situations that potentially could have been really humorous, but did not strike me as humorous as I was watching. Perhaps the bad acting and awkwardness serves the same disorienting purpose that noise/feedback/atonality serve in no wave, punk, and other experimental music?

The reason this film’s badness inspires me, or I should say gives me hope, is for my own creative life and for other creators: it is perhaps the best example I have encountered lately that one can make a thing that might be objectively awful, but come out from it having learned and grown, and proceed to make much stronger work in the future. Everything I saw and loved in Jarmusch’s later films (the humor, the obsession with music, the poetry, the awkwardly long, quiet, intimate takes) is already here in this film, but obscured. It is as if for his subsequent films he just had to learn to adjust and recalibrate settings to allow the humor and emotion to come into clearer focus. Or maybe he just needed a better lead actor, to be honest.

In the end I’m quite glad that I persisted in watching this seemingly terrible film and took some moments to think and write about it.

Watched in part for the Film School Drop Outs Challenge of 2017-2018 that I am still slowly, stubbornly, thoroughly working my way through in 2020. Week 34 - Revision (2017) - Movement - No Wave (1976-1985)

(First posted on letterboxd: https://letterboxd.com/jdwhiting/film/permanent-vacation/)

Standalone post link: I Watched Permanent Vacation, 1980