Patrick – Page 16 – decode•it

Fortune Cookies

Digital Impermanence.

The other night I was staring at the fridge and figured it was time for a change. Whatever fridge I’ve had in the various places I’ve called home in the last few years has been covered with an ever‐increasing number of fortune cookie fortunes.

But I’m also working to shed what it is I carry around with me—funny how a shed is also something you put in the back of your yard and fill with stuff—yet even in this mindset I thought perhaps there was a way to keep the fortunes and get rid of the fortunes at the same time.

There is a component of Buddhism referring to the impermanence of all things—temporal things, whether material or mental, are compounded objects in a continuous change of condition, subject to decline and destruction. Basically—things are, and then they aren’t, and that’s how it all goes, and it is our own interpretations of these events which “make” us feel badly or goodly about the whole process.

With that in mind I decided to incorporate the text from the fortunes into a widget on my blog. If everything is working correctly, and everything is, you’ll see a random fortune displayed in the top right corner above my Twitter and Instagram icons each time you load a page or refresh the current one. There are several fortunes to enter in, but as I do, I’m throwing away each one as its paper state expires and its new digital state continues on.

And it turns out it is also ridiculously easy to program this all. I was planning on making an evening of it, but it’s three lines of code and a link to a file containing all the text from the fortune cookies. I’ve spent more time writing this post than I did coding the functionality I’m describing in it.

Plus now there’s more room on the fridge for stuff.

Looking‐Glass

The only way out is through.

So strange—here I am again, enjoying a quiet drink, listening to Missy Elliot, and writing in my blog. Fun fact: the term blog is a portmanteau—I love getting to use the word portmanteau—of web log coined in the early days of the internet. Another fun fact: the term portmanteau was first used to represent the packing together of the sounds from existing words to create new words in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking‐Glass.

Back to why this is so strange—and this I realize is on the heels of my post decrying the phrase this time last year, but, nonetheless—and I love getting to use the word nonetheless—around this time last year, I was also enjoying a quiet drink, listening to Missy Elliot, and writing in my blog.

But I wasn’t—I’ve checked just now. The post I’m thinking about, where I reference drinking and Missy Elliot is from… the end of May. May 30th. I’m off by three months. I had myself going there for a little bit. It was nice—

I woke this morning to a txt from myself, and I love getting those because it means there’s something fun waiting for me from my past self who for whatever reason felt I wasn’t going to be able to remember whatever amazing thing I realized in the night and didn’t trust to not forget while I slept. And if the previous sentence is any indication how my waking mind functions I totally get why I do this. There have been times in the night when I’m not sure I’m awake or sleeping. It used to terrify me, but now I just go with it—I look at it as an opportunity to interact with myself in a new way. These are the times when I’ll write the most notes and then find them the next morning and try to figure out what they mean, but this time I sent a txt. Check your phone it said.

So I did. And I found a series of pictures, starting with the featured picture for this post—a shot of pots and pans sitting on the stove. Then I remembered. I was making a snack in the middle of the night, at 2:46AM according to the tag on the picture. I was waiting for the water to boil in the pot on the near‐left burner. There was nothing else for me to do, so I remember watching the pot intently, knowing there was no explainable mechanism for my gaze to prevent it from boiling. The camera’s perspective at this point is that of my own—I’m going to watch this pot boil. And it’s going to be amazing. Yes—it’s all coming back to me…

I can’t help but notice other things in this view. I’ve aligned the handles of the pots without realizing it. Each glass lid is reflecting in a different way the same light from the hood above the stove. Then all I see are the round forms—circles everywhere set off against the hard lines of the stove itself and the counter edges. The composition is pleasing, so I take a picture of it with my cameraphone.

The resultant image is flat by comparison. Something’s been lost. It’s just not as good as it was when I was looking at it through my own eyes compared to the camera’s. I don’t see the circles any more. The pleasing circular forms contrasted with sharp edges are just pots and pans on a stove. What happened?

When I was in Berlin I found myself getting frustrated with photography, as I often do lately, as it’s taken me some time to figure out what it is I’m actually seeing in an image making me want to capture it. What I’ve found is I’m capturing too much of an image rather than the small element that consciously or subconsciously caught my eye. I’d see a building and think it was beautiful and take its picture, but then I’d look down at the image and it wasn’t beautiful anymore. Why?

Back at the stove—waiting for the water to boil—I must have figured it out, because following the picture of the pots on the stove were a series of more pictures of the same thing, pots on a stove, but from different perspectives.

What I think my past self was trying to tell me was it wasn’t the entity of the scene of the pots on the stove I was finding pleaseing—it was many elements from many different perspectives I was taking in all at once to arrive at the final picture I was finding pleasing. My initial photograph I interpreted too literally, as I did with far too many scenes in Berlin, seeing it as a singularity, failing to see the so many parts making up a moment, failing to see just what it was I was actually seeing.

Take this view of some of my desk, for example…

I like something about this view, but as photograph it’s not really showing what it is I like because that’s lost in the everything else about the picture.

But if I get in close…

It’s the way my keys are sitting, the texture of the chain and Jenga block, the light reflecting off the worn carabiner. Suddenly the picture is more interesting, to me at least. It feels more like a picture I would take. And suddenly I feel better for having travelled thousands of kilometres to take pictures of signs, smashed televisions, and pavement. It’s the details where I find the beauty of life. Sometimes the big picture is just too big for me to know where to look, and that runs in stark contrast to when all I can see is the big picture.

Thinking back to the moment at the stove, I now remember all of this. I have my punctum back—the detail of a photograph which connects it to the viewer. I’m quietly happy. The water boils. And I’ve remembered why I take pictures.

February 28.25th

What a difference a day makes.

In an earlier post I remarked on the primness of the year 2017—and as I was setting up this post I had to go back and check to see when the last prime year was. Turns out it’s 2011.

I thought about the year 2011—thought about what I was up to then, what I was trying to accomplish, and if I ended up getting anywhere with it all. The answer: not really. And as I added up the years and years since then, the answer to the question of how things are going is consistent: not really.

Take today for example—March 1st, or as I like to think of it a year after a leap year, Feburary 28.25. I mean, we can’t call it that, well we could, but it would wreck a few heads, but the point stands—from now until 2020 each year will be accumulating just under an extra quarter of a day until we arrive at the magical and slightly silly day of February 29th. We do this because even though a year is exactly a year long and a day is exactly a day long the number of days occurring in our year don’t divide neatly into our year, so when you express a year as a number of days that number is 365.2422 days. And I wouldn’t even get into how the length of our day is actually 23 hours, 56 minutes, and 4 seconds—but it seems I already just did.

The only reason I’m thinking of any of this is because I was cleaning out old emails from last year, and I saw I’d sent in my applications for school on February 29th of last year. The phrase this time last year started rattling around in my head, and I realized that’s a phrase that gets thrown around a lot, and it gets less and less accurate as you scale it up. This time yesterday is an easy time to dial back to. This time last week—fine. This time last month, well some months have 31, 30, 29, or 28 days. Are we talking a numerical date? Usually. On the 12th of this month, this time last month would be the 12th of the previous month. It’s not actually a month’s time that’s past, since an actual month is a variable and imaginary unit of time, but convention dictates we usually understand this fudging of accuracy for the sake of understanding.

This time last year though—already there are problems. It’s March 1st now, but this time last year, if we’re being true to fact, it was February 29th, because that’s the day after February 28th. If we want to say this time last year and be correct, we’d have to wait until it was March 2nd. But what sort of sense would that make? Likely as much sense as they thought spring starting in April did about 500 years ago when they realized the calendar had drifted by several days over hundreds of years—that’s when they figured out the need for leap years.

So now I’m thinking of all those news items and trivia posts—the this time last year ones—and realizing they’re all wrong because it wasn’t this time last year, not actually. Figuratively, yes. Again, for all intents and purposes we sort of get away with referring back to what we all kind of think happened around a particular time. But then it gets even sillier when you dive into the worlds of this time five years ago, this time 100 years ago, or this time 1000 years ago. I sometimes see articles on Wikipedia starting with On this day in 752 BC… and I immediately think—Nupe. No way that March 1st is anywhere near this March 1st.

This chaos in time is why I enjoy graffiti. Much like the passage of time—a curious illusion of gravity—graffiti cannot be reconciled into something defined and tidy, and I think that’s why some people don’t like it, but it’s exactly the reason I love it. Graffiti is the slightly less than a quarter day your perfectly created—or so you thought—calendar cannot reconcile. It sits there reminding you life’s clockwork isn’t always well‐fitted gears and springs ticking away the same perfect intervals. Sometimes the gears grind. Sometimes the motion is erratic. Tell me you’ve never felt a little over‐wound before and let’s see if I believe you…

The graffiti for this post is from a section of the Berlin Wall running through Mauerpark (Wall Park) and contains one of the larger sections of the still intact wall—the park itself is made up of land previously used as part of the infamous death strip between East and West Berlin. The day I visited the park I could smell and hear the paint as artists continued to spray away at the remains of a wall built by clockmakers gone mad. The sun was out, and the dogs were running and barking in the hunde area. It was a beautiful day.

Eisenstein called the distinction between past, present, and future a stubbornly persistent illusion. And it is through this idea I start to see despite our precise atomic clocks tracking each second accurate to millions of years, all we are actually tracking are moments relative to other moments—all we are tracking with any certainty is what’s happening now, a baseline to carry this moment into the next. This time last year as a concept is a symptom of this persistent illusion of time. It’s our own language alerting us to the strangeness that is our perception of time, a consequence created by the Earth’s motion through space.

Happy February 28.25th.

Back from Beartown

But pardon me while I geek‐out a little…

One of the things I knew I wanted to do in Berlin—along with all the things I didn’t know I wanted to do until I found myself doing them—was find a particular place I remember seeing in the movie Hanna and then walk around in its creepy orangeness. Yes—I find transportation infrastructure fascinating and, many times, beautiful. Form and function collide, and in this case, it was the heavy columns, low ceilings, and clusters of black pod lights I remember creating a suddenly empty place in busy Berlin where the baddies beat up Eric Bana.

But first I had to find the place, and all I had to go on was the sense from the movie this location was part of a subway station—a fair sense since heavy columns and low ceilings are usually holding up and underneath subways. And it turns out I was half‐right: I needed to find the Messedamm Underpass, not part of a subway station, but an underground pedestrian crossing area at Messedamm & Neue Kantstraße near the western-most point on the ringbahn—Berlin’s circular rail line—sometimes referred to as the Hundekopf due to its shape being more that of a dog’s head in profile rather than a circle. Messedamm is across town from where I’m staying, but I figure what better way to see some more of the city than to view it from an elevated train.

Turns out this rail line was also built in conjunction with a freight line, so the views I ended up seeing were mostly that of industrial parks, factories, big box stores, parking lots, other train stations, exit ramps, and rubble—all interesting in their own right, but made all the more dreary in the unwavering greyness of the what I’m told is the standard Berlin winter: perceptual overcast. I didn’t see the sun for a week and a half, and all the snow I ever saw fit into a single photograph.

However, back on the Dog’s Head, I reach my station, Westkreuz, leave the train, start walking vaguely in the direction I think I’m supposed to be going in, and then find a hint I’m getting closer, despite still not knowing exactly how to find what I’m looking for.

Just follow the orange tiles…

…and the colour‐coordinated graffiti. I also love graffiti.

I’m suddenly perplexed when the tunnel I’m in immediately heads up and I’m behind this subtle building, the Internationales Congress Centrum Berlin, one of the largest convention centres in the world, built in 1979, and currently closed while undergoing asbestos removal.

But—I see a flash of orange tile by a set of descending stairs, and as I walk down them, as I walk by the skaters whose wheels are echoing off the walls in a perfectly eerie way, just like in the movie, just before Bana realizes he’s had it, the sound of the city fades, and I find myself in the middle of the silence of the underpass on a grey Saturday afternoon.

I am happy in this moment.

In my next post it will be back to Iceland, back to where my trip starts, but for now it will be back to work for me starting tomorrow. And it might be, if all goes well, one of my last days as a pack leader. A new position where I work was created while I was away—I applied for it today.

If I get it I’ll be managing the inventory of the entire warehouse as well as all the pack teams rather than just my own. I’ll be working to solve the problems I run into regularly in my current job so they won’t be problems later. It’s my favourite kind of work—making the future better.

And I am happy in this moment.

Letters From Reykyavik

via Berlin

My plan for this and several posts to follow was to include some pictures from my trip so far, but despite living in an ever‐increasingly interconnected world I’m having trouble getting the little collection of technology I brought with me—an iPad, a digital camera, a mobile phone, and a wireless adapter—to talk to each other in a way my blog will understand. It’s stressing me out, and stress is baggage you’re not meant to pack on holiday.

One of the images I was able to transfer over is this one particular street sign from downtown Reykjavik. When I look at English and most French words I’m immediately struck by the meaning of the characters, but with Icelandic, in its otherness, the graphic nature of the type stands out first, and there was something immensely pleasing about the balance of these characters together.

This runs in stark contrast to the at times relentless flow of letters making up German words. They have a different otherness to them, a different weight and form for the letters as they are piled up beside each other. When I was in Italy there was enough sameness sneaking through from French I didn’t have the same experience of being a foreigner in my own alphabet—I’m delighted by the surreality of how quickly such familiar symbols become so unintelligible with only subtle changes in their configuration.

I love words and language, and this holiday away from Canada I knew would also be a holiday away from English—and I’m finding I love just as much being surrounded by shapes and sounds I don’t know.

I’m also finding out just how much French I actually know—a pleasant surprise, although not all together useful when I default to it when German is spoken.