I was just thinking about the right to time. Not the right to have a quantity of time, but the right of knowledge of time. Everything runs on a clock, things are time obsessed. Time is such a useful piece of information. What time is it…
In what instances are people deprived of the right to know what time it is?
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Well paint me glowing and give me a halo because I just sweated the devil out of myself on the way to work. The temperature is weird outside. Muggy, about to rain, warmer, but also windy so chilly in some places. You think you are cold but suddenly you are on the bus and your shirt is stuck to you.
Today is my first day of observation work. I hope the weather is nicer to me as I will be spending a lot of time outside taking pictures and notes. I will go to Akihabara this afternoon and work until maybe 8 or 9pm.
To mark the beginning of my adventures, I bought a new Moleskine for note taking. It is the squared reporter`s notebook style so it flips open from bottom to top instead of right to left. I think it`s just the sexiest thing.
I am excited for this work, but also nervous. As an observer, I need to turn down the volume of the me, me, me voice in my head. This is not about analyzing and relating and generalizing, but just about observing. It must also be away from myself, my ego, my perceptions. It is difficult to forget about yourself but I have been practicing. I find the best way to practice is to pretend I have just awoken from a coma and have no recollection of who I am, nor the drive to distinguish myself as an individual and search for who I am. I spend the time just watching.
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I am not going to say bored because I don`t feel bored with my work of course :) …but I am reading and reading and reading and I feel saturated at the moment. My eyes are glossing over, getting watery. I am sighing every 5 minutes. I need a break, need something light but I don`t know what yet. I guess I could take a walk somewhere. I was trying to play Cat`s Cradle by myself but I don`t know if that is possible. So I tried to invent a new form of looped string manipulation but it is pretty hard. It`s time that I learn the protocols for distracting people from their work. I think people need distractions (preferably non-Internet ones) every few hours, whether related to other work or not. *YAWN* ok my eyes are glossing over writing this so it`s obviously not an effective use of my time. Later-
UPDATE: I am excited again and I want this guy`s job. (After this one of course).
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A little about my workplace. It is a big rectangular building on a hill. There are maybe, 10 floors? I can`t remember exactly. On my floor, the hallways are very nondescript. Grey / white floors and walls. Few signs or colours. But they are wide hallways and they stretch on for a very long time. My new game is to see how long I can walk with my eyes close. It seems to be a reflex to open them, to see how far I have walked or how much I`ve angled off from my intended straight line. Maybe by next winter I will be able to walk to the end without opening my eyes. This is practice for sleepwalking.
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(Related back to my own self of course.)
The other day I read this chapter from Geography and Technology by Matthew Zook, Martin Dodge, Yuko Aoyama, and Anthony Townsend: “New Digital Geographies: Information, Communication, and Place”. They talk about the initial utopian vision of the Internet as seamless and uniform connectivity all over the world – something surpassing space and geography. In reality how people connect and what they connect for has been dependent on financial and cultural factors. Differences in accessibility and use among countries, cities, neighborhoods, and people has created a form of digital geography which is very interesting to study.
I recommend reading the chapter…right now I am going to continue talking about myself as I always do. I read this and something struck me. Here I have access to the same content online that I did when I was in Vancouver. Content that is produced mostly in various parts of the US or Europe…far from Vancouver. But now that I am here, I feel so far away from it. I feel like besides having travelled far, shifted days, changed time zones, and become an alien, I`ve also entered another info-sphere. What mattered and what was interesting to me before has changed. It`s not that I am getting my content from Japanese sites because I cannot read the majority of them, it`s more like…
…it is like when you are at a party and you`ve been sitting at this one spot on a couch for a long long time. Overall, you are enjoying the going-ons around you and the conversation, but you are starting to nod off from the sitting and the alcohol consumed. You decide that it`s time to move around. You get up and walk to the kitchen where people are laughing. You missed the joke so, still standing, you focus your attention back to the area around the couch you were sitting on, this time with a different perspective. Party geography would be interesting to study.
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