Today’s the day! Tomorrow we’ll be in the new place, but between now and then is going to be just a little bit busy.

Not dead yet! Moving has begun in earnest, and there’s a rhythmic shift between packing, moving, cleaning, and cramming all of the things that usually comprise my normal life into whatever time is leftover. The trashmen just came and collected the last load of moving rubbish, and what’s left now is coming with us.

Tomh, that pinnacle of awesomeness, and his pickup truck spent most of Sunday with us as we ferried books and furniture to the basement of the new place. Varia reports here. We can’t move in until midweek, but the more things that lurk in the basement means the less things here. And it’s emptying rapidly. Just a few more days and I’ll finally be able to answer “What have you been up to?” with something besides “moving.”

I am addicted to Wild Oats take-out sushi. It’s so fresh; I can grab it as the sushi chef puts it in the case, and so incredibly tasty. I’ve got it bad.

Packing is kicking into high gear as things start to disappear into boxes. The studio and the back room are completely packed up, and I’ve moved my base of operations into the skeletal living room. I’m well past the “occasionally used or looked at” portion of our household, and into the “use a lot, but hopefully not before Thursday” things now. The kitchen will be packed up over the weekend, which gives me a great excuse to get more take-out sushi.

Weird artifacts of the past five years have been surfacing as I’ve gotten deeper into things; a small and entirely unmethodical archaeological dig on my life. I’ve let a lot of stuff go, either to the trash or to Goodwill, and I’m sure I’m going to have some sort of guilt over the things that made the cut. I’d like to be a monk or a packrat, but it’s just not possible to keep everything or get rid of everything right now. I’m living quite firmly in the Grey Belt between Black and White.

I complained last year about the lack of mail annotation, sighed deeply and got on with things. This morning I found out about two little Mail.app plugins, Mail Tags and Mail Act-On, and I am smiling. Mail Tags adds the ability to assign metadata to a mail entry (also Spotlight searhable, might I add) and Mail Act-On makes it so you can mark up a mail message with hot keys. They both work within the Rules paradigm of rules, so I can, for example, take messages about Dan’s Chocolates as they come into the inbox, flag them, set a due date of today + 2, and then create a smart mailbox to catch overdue messages. If they need some special explanation, I can add it in as a comment.

This doesn’t replace my Tinderbox Project Organizer by any stretch of the imagination, but if used well it could be a strong supporting player. Since every element in my project tracker has an ID, being able to tag relevant mails with that ID would be a real time saver if I need to go back and reconstruct a “what was I thinking?” moment.

In summary, yay.

So Pat Robertson has caused quite a stir with his vitriol against Venezuela’s president Hugo Chavez. He went as far as calling for his assassination, and has been backpedalling as fast as humanly possible. I found this quote to be quite inspiring:

It really could mean a number of things. Maybe the special forces can take Chavez out for ice cream? Take him out to a dinner and a show? Maybe the ballet? If they do, I hope they bring flowers and don’t go dutch.

Next time I move, I’m going to limit myself to what can fit wrapped up in a handkerchief tied to a stick. This time I’m stuck with a freakish lot of boxes and thanking myself for the foresight to buy collapsable shelving.

I’ve been busy in the studio lately; lots of stuff boiling and bubbling. Until I’m totally moved things are going to slow down, as things are starting to get stuck in boxes. There’s not much of a studio anymore, just stacks of things.

Today seemed a good time to post Slipstream, which seems to be the spiritual inheritor of Twisty Passages with a shot of Daft Punk and a pinch of mad vibraphonist. It’s bouncy and swirly, and perhaps just a teensy bit fun.

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V and I went down to the Ritz Carlton for afternoon tea. It was very fancy, indeed. Bone china and a harpist*, that kind of stuff. I had a crisis of a sort when I wanted more tea and was tempted to pour it myself. I restrained myself, and a few seconds later the waiter came, picked up the teapot and poured tea into my cup.

Whilst preparing for elbow brushing with the aristoi, I went through a lot of clothes in the closet, as my current functional biker clothes don’t quite meet muster. I was horrified to find that my waist had shrunk another inch (the weight has migrated somewhere else, apparently), making every single pair of pants — which were already loose — practically gargantuan. Unless I get very large very quickly, it’s going to be a scramble for Pants That Fit come autumn.

On the subway ride home, I heard two girls talking about a friend of theirs making pancakes laced with garlic to confound a crypto-vampire.

*For the record, the harpist at one point played Wind Beneath My Wings.

I’m going up, I’m going down, I’m going nowhere! I had to ride downtown to do some work this afternoon, which included taking a few pictures. When I got there, I realized that I’d left an important component of the camera at home. Oops! So, nothing to do but pedal home, pick it up, and ride back. The loop between home and cubicle and back is a bit under 12 miles; I ended up doing it twice today.

Coming home the second time, I stopped by Harvard Square to kick back and kill time. I was fortunate enough to run across Jill “Chilly” Kurtz from Caged Heat jamming near the Co-op. She and her drummer were having an absolute blast as they hammered out bluesy rock, and the audience gathered around was completely into it. I bought a CD, which is appropriately rocking.

And now a carefree evening, featuring take-out sandwiches and old movies.

I have a block of wood in my closet. It’s not the best piece of wood; it’s got a crack along one face, and it’s knotted all over. About half the edges are frayed and splintery. If I had to guess, it was a leftover end from a building project, discarded in the street until it was picked up in the rain, making its way into my closet.

It used to mean something to me, and it means something else now, though I’m not entirely sure what yet. What I do know is that I want to take this block of wood and make it as beautiful as I can, and I want to learn to listen well enough so that I can learn from the wood how to do this.

I have sandpaper and a great deal of patience.

A byproduct of constant information inflow is that now and then something will bump against my mind and get me thinking about something very much tangental to the experience of the now. Occasionally this causes problems, but just as often it creates some pleasant synchronicities.

Today’s conceptual outfielder is competition, and whether it’s good or not. My inner Socrates wants to go straight to the “what exactly is competition? If we can’t define it, how can we know it’s good?” My inner Socrates also has a wicked smile knowing that if somehow we get through that question he’s going to be lurking in the alley around the corner with a tire iron emblazoned with WHAT IS GOODNESS? I tend to ignore my inner Socrates as I value both my sanity and my kneecaps.

He does have a point, though, enough to do a little rummaging through root words to see how the word came to be. We start with the latin petare, “to desire, reach towards, make for.” Smack on a con- suffix and we get competare, which actively is defined as “to meet, coincide, agree, face death together.” When we twist that into a noun, competitio, we see “rivalry” pop up, along with “agreement” and “judicial demand.” It makes me wish I had a day and a copy of the Oxford Latin Dictionary to do a bit more etymological poking, but it’s informative up to this point. One can’t seemingly have a competition without two distinct participants to be involved in the meeting, agreement, or rivalry.

For me, the key of competition lies in the root word, petare. It’s about the motion, the striving for something, making for something. One just does that with another or a group of others, or it could be argued against a shadow opponent (such as one’s idealized self). There’s not a vast amount of information about winning, or winning gracefully. Of course, knowing the achievement-oriented focus of Roman culture, I’m not going to read anything into that lest vigilante historians and linguists take an example from old Socrates.

For me, however, it’s the act of striving that does it. I do not relish victory, but rather competition.

I’d wager that for many people (the Romans probably included) that competition and victory are tightly entwined as concepts. If you can’t or don’t want to win, you don’t strive; if you don’t win, what’s the point? I don’t remember when exactly they became disentangled for me, but it has, and it probably has something to do with years of music school. I’m no slacker, and I think my competitive streak has done nothing if increase over the years, but my thirst for victory remains faint.

A second byproduct of constant information inflow and subsequent processing across a long period of time is that one constantly realizes that one knows much less than one thinks. I’m barely able to speak cogently for myself, let alone the internet or the blogosphere, or humanity in general. As much as I’d like to take my own thinking and lay it out as some sort of imperative for others, I just can’t. I’m much more comfortable playing with ideas than laying out edicts. There’s all sorts of related questions; cooperation versus competition, the value of competition in society, and so forth. My short answer to these questions is “it depends, but let’s talk about it over lunch.”

Socrates, in his alley, lowers his tire iron and smiles.

Yesterday was too hot to do anything. I took two very long naps and had takeout sushi, and that was about it.

Except for running in the morning. With more than a little cajoling from Varia, Chava and just about everyone else I know, I’m back in training for a half-marathon in November, with a conservative training plan. I’m starting slow, and unknowingly I chose to do my first long run on the hottest day of the summer. but I’m back in the game, and that’s a good feeling.

I spent some time tonight working in the studio on a new track, Tine. Material is being gathered for the upcoming release, and I’m happy with how it’s all coming along.

Beth was working late tonight, so I stopped by Davis Square on the way back from the downtown cubicle to meet up for a roast beef sandwich (Did you know that there is such a thing as fried roast beef? You do now!). As I greeted her, she said “Jeffrey, you look so Somerville.” As I looked at myself, shorts and t-shirt, tousled and dyed hair, messenger bag slung over my shoulder and helmet in my hand, I was forced to agree.

Right now, not working nonstop is nothing short of idyllic. I met up with Beth for a picnic lunch, and spent the a few hours in the afternoon writing very silly music indeed.