Category: ultrapersonal

Oh Coney, My Coney

The start of Summer always makes me long for Coney Island, especially now that it’s so far away and I’ll probably never see it again before it finally gives in to all the pressure and becomes something else.

Wonder Wheel

But there’s so much to love. If you haven’t been there it may be hard to see past the decay and appreciate the real charm that comes from the liveliness of the place, and the visible signs of a long, colorful history. I’ve always had trouble putting my finger on my love for the place, although it’s such a goldmine of lettering and kitsch that it’s easy to understand what first sucked me in. But it’s always been more, somehow, too.

Coney Island Dream from Joshua Brown on Vimeo.

[Coney Island Dream from Joshua Brown on Vimeo.]

Shoot the Freak

Let me pass

passport photos

New passport photos, at last all sorted. Hilariously, there’s a place down the street form the studio that does them. Well, it wouldn’t have helped to get them last week since I’m still waiting for a paycheck deposit so I can end in the fees for the new passport anyway. And then I just start hoping this all gets fixed before I have to fly to the Netherlands to teach at the end of May.

Oh, and don’t get even GET ME STARTED on the headaches that are going to be involved with securing a visa renewal by December. I’m going to be nagging a lot of people all summer long if that shit’s going to happen.

Bitch, please

You’ll have to pardon the whining, but sometimes a guy just needs to let it all out, OK? Here, in no particular order, is a brief list of bad things that happened yesterday:

  • Woke up to an email informing me that a collection agency that is annoyed about my insolvency is escalating things to the lawyer level. (Thanks, freelance clients who didn’t pay invoices for months at a time while I was looking for steady work.)
  • Left my US checkbook at home so I couldn’t throw a sacrificial pittance at them to get them off my back for now.
  • Did not wake up to discover that large fees for other freelance work had finally been deposited in my bank account
  • The new glasses I ordered last week did not show up at the optician, like they were supposed to, so I’m still stuck wearing the old pair held together by messy gobs of Krazy Glue.
  • The optometrist checking the fit of my contacts informed me I have crusty eyelashes.
  • Fontlab crashed a bunch of times, but that’s a daily occurrence.
  • I finally did my taxes, even though I was pretty sure I didn’t have enough money to pay them. (I don’t, because of those invoices that haven’t been paid yet.)
  • But I couldn’t even finish preparing my return because TurboTax refused to let me enter credit card information that’s not tied to a US address.
  • I got a photo for my emergency new passport, but it’s not the size that the US requires, so I have to run around and find another place that takes a proper set instead of using one of the stupid booths.
  • I already whined about how I have to have my passport replaced, but that’s still making me mad.
  • I was finally informed that the mysterious kidney problem that my doctor has been trying to identify is acute interstitial nephritis. I can’t feel anything going wrong, but apparently it can become suddenly life-threatening.
  • That means I have to switch from my regular meds (which always leads to days of feeling shitty), and take a ridiculously huge stack of other ones to deal with the kidney thing and then manage all the side effects that are likely to happen.
  • I will probably be suffering from severe indigestion, weight gain, and acne for the next few weeks, as if I wasn’t self-conscious enough already.
  • Got stressed about today’s deadline for an ATypI proposal, an indefinite but urgent deadline for stuff I have to write about another ATypI thing, the presentation I’m giving CSM next week, a regular client’s ongoing needs which they never plan far enough in advance and hence are always rush jobs, and the massive family if Indic typefaces I’m still trying to finish for my full-time job (the success of which will determine if I get another job by the time my visa runs out).
  • My Gujarati is not progressing well, and that pissed me off.
  • There was probably some other shit that went wrong, too, but I can’t remember it now. It was a really bad day.

Thankfully, Ian made me a nice cuppa tea and some dinner while we had a productive, encouraging chat about upcoming projects for The Colour Grey, so really helped me relax before I came home and fell asleep. (And sleep is good because that’ss when things go away for a few hours and I like that.)

Snaps

Passport 100415

Today’s passport photo, capturing 39 1/2 years or so of stress and strain. Of course, there’s always some kind of TREMENDOUS HASSLE lurking in the background every time I need to take another damned one of these, and today is no different. I don’t even have the consolation prize of good drama or anything, just another round of unexpected bureaucratic hassle. I love living over here, but all the passport and visa and tax and money issues give the whole experience a never-ending tinge of stress, and I’ll be happy one day when it all settles down.

But for now I have to go find someplace that takes the kind of passport photo which is valid for US passports, which naturally have totally different specs than any photo booth available in the UK, so that I can then go to the US Embassy — who are currently in possession of my passport, claiming it’s too damaged to have new pages added to it — and get an early renewal, which means I’ll also be saddled with the hideous new chip-enabled passport, for the low, low price of $100 — which I’ll have to scrape together somehow. After that, I’ll have to find out how to transfer my UK visa into the new passport, which will no doubt involve more photos and more outrageous charges. Another day, another emergency, another fee.

Tweetless

Screw it. I tried to work out a system for integrating my Twitter posts with the posts here, but it just wasn’t working. It was hard to set up just right, a pain to mess with all my RSS feeds, and the whole thing kept breaking anyway. It just wasn’t worth the hassle of getting it right, and I just don’t have the time to deal.

Even worse, the whole attempt did nothing but encourage a growing bad habit of ignoring this site and spreading my wisecracks around elsewhere. There are a number of things that bug me about places like Twitter of Facebook becoming de facto repositories for my online activity, which is why I was trying to integrate my postings a little better. For one thing, I like having all of my stuff on my site, where it can be managed and archived on — or deleted form — my server. It’s not just that I’m a bit of a nerdy control freak about my data, but after years of cultivating this space, I don’t want to surrender my online presence to the vagaries, presentation, and terms and conditions of another environment.

The thing is, though: all the action is over there now. The age of blogging as I once knew it is pretty much over, and online social interaction happen less and less across a ragtag network of personal sites, and more and more in sprawling social networks with a pretty tight control over how things work. This is hardly a recent development. Rather, it’s been deteriorating for quite some time. The barrier for entry is much lower on social networking sites, so of course people flock to them. And it’s easier to devote your energy to sites where content arises out of smaller, easier contributions from a larger group of people, rather than spending time writing, reflecting, or preparing visuals on your own site, and then trying to draw people to it to comment and interact. The ups and downs of my posting habits certainly prove that.

But I still believing in having my own place here, just as I’ve had for over a decade now. Facebook and Twitter and Tumblr and Thingbox and whatnot maybe the village squares where I lounge and chat with pals, but this is still my home, and still the longest-running single thing that I’ve accomplished. I don’t want to give up just yet and fully turn myself over to the wide open spaces of those other sites.

I want you to join me here, and I want to keep finding reasons to keep this going.

Woe = me

Doesn't anybody want me?

It’s not that bad, I swear, but a guy’s gotta let off some steam now and then, right? Of course, those long, mopey periods of repeated blows to my self-confidence are punctuated by enough lucidity to realize that even when I catch someone’s eye, I’m often on the other side of the equation feeling a lack of true zing!, so I can’t even complain about the total unfairness of it all. Nevertheless, it’s been a while since there has been any real promise of anything, any glimmer of substantial mutual interest of any kind, and the dwindling prospects have been wearing me down lately.

I try to remind myself, though, that those romance comics always ended on an up note, so we’ll see. As ever.

The little things

Extrapolating from current data, it looks like 2010 be the year I sell off all my worldly goods in a vain attempt to pay bills, but still manage to starve myself. Alone.

Still, there are a handful of things that buoy my spirits in these trying times (or at least this week): reading Jane Austen, the reappearance of Cadbury Mini Eggs, the impending climax of Dollhouse, the Stern family’s annual newsletter, grapes, and slow but steady progress on my Tamil typeface.

Post-Christmas

Well, it was nice enough for work to issue my January paycheck a week early so I could make it through Christmas. Still, looking at my budget projections for the next month, my only chance for solvency for the next five weeks is to eliminate entertainment, train tickets to work, and food. Time to see what else I can sell on eBay, it seems.

Happy New Year!