Hyperland

Claustrophobia for Toddlers

"Claustrophobia for Toddlers", an experimental poem [Interweaving text and video, for one example, as a form of hypertext]

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ

abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz

ABC-DEF-GHI-JKL-MNO-PQR-STU-VWX-YZ

a-b-c-d-e-f-g-h-i-j-k-l-m-n-o-p-q-r-s-t-u-v-w-x-y-z

A--B--C--D--E--F--G--H--I--J--K--L--M--N--O--P--Q--R--S--T--U--V--W--X--Y--Z

a--b--c--d--e--f--g--h--i--j--k--l--m--n--o--p--q--r--s--t--u--v--w--x--y--z

A---B---C---D---E---F---G---H---I---J---K---L---M---N---O---P---Q---R---S---T---U---V---W---X---Y---Z

a---b---c---d---e---f---g---h---i---j---k---l---m---n---o---p---q---r---s---t---u---v---w---x---y---z

December 8, 1995

I was working on the final edits of my first book of poems and short stories being published next year with my literary agent Emily. I was my agent's house for the night, making the finishing touches in her San Francisco apartment in Van Ness, which also had a nice view of the concrete buildings. It was a pretty swinging pad for a bachelorette, considering that she also lives with two other women, Lindsey and Keli, who seem to be lovers of their own dimension, despite having separate rooms.

I saw them kissing at one point when I walked in the kitchen to refill my glass with water when Lindsey finished straining the pasta before making a quick run towards Keli's red glossy lips and interlocking a kiss with lips puckered at the ready, showing the appreciation and mutual respect sharing cooking duties, creating an intimate environment of pleasure and calmness for tonight's dinner. They were cooking spaghetti and they asked Emily if I could be invited over for dinner, since she pays most of the rent.

Dinners were not like this before. Back then, the majority of the cooking was spent over fighting about which technique was best to cut the onions, for example. Keli would always cut her onions horziontally, but Lindsey preferred to cut it vertically because it was obviously a safer technique than Keli's.

Emily says yes and we both go back to her bedroom, where During the editing of the book, she made a comment on my poem that was posted on the world wide web. We always get into a conversation about my poem every time I'm with her.

A majority of my poems were published in literary magazines, local and major newspapers, and even on the World Wide Web, which was pretty sweet cause I got a ton of phone calls from old college professors, friends, ex-boyfriends and girlfriends I dated in high school and college, something I didn't think would come back to haunt me, and even an employee from a publishing company that caught his interests in my work and through that connection, Emily heard about my poem after some gossip about Notorious B.I.G. and his acceptance speech while the employees ate their alphabet soup, which reminded Emily to seek me out.

It was so trippy to see one of my own works on the world wide web, especially when nobody other than my close friends and a couple of my family members read my work, especially my cousin Joey, who was one of the first people who called me about the poem he saw on the internet. He's a total nerd about everything that's technology based related, from repairing a Super Nintendo, which he spruced up the A/V input on my at one point, setting up the internet in my house, and even fixing my father's 27" Magnavox television screen that he won on a game show sometime in the 80s that broke during game 6 of the World Series when the crowd started booing at David Justice. My dad was the cause for breaking the television set when he threw an unopened beer can at the television set, causing the T.V. to break, thus blacking out the screen for about an hour or so. The living room became dead silent for a couple of seconds, until Joey got the television working and was treated to the 9th inning.

My phone number was posted on the website that featured my poem, which I was okay with that after I got the call from the publisher at first, but became a bit unease when the ex's started calling, but became a more paranoid when I was left with some disturbing calls on my answering machine saying that he knew the meaning of life and would precede to hang up immediately. I answered the unknown caller a couple of times, but was treated to the sounds of my dial-up modem while I was starting up AOL. I don't understand why this happens every time I try to phone someone up. Maybe I should cut my phone line and stick with email so I get creepers calling me anymore. Not sure if the Do Not Call list is working for me though.

At one point, I heard him crying while he was trying to give me a sequence of random letters, which after three minutes of hearing this, I wrote all of the letters down on my notepad, which I've been taking notes for anything obscure. For some weird reason, I also heard this song in another phone call after a couple seconds of silence. I recall hearing it on the radio at one point, but I forget the title of the song. But still, it was pretty eerie getting unwanted phone calls from some wacko who thinks it's appropriate to make phone calls on a stranger.

At some point during the editing, Emily brings up my poem, "Claustrophobia for Toddlers". She always brings up that title and tells me I have some hilarious titles for my other works. I make a grimace face every time someone tells me the titles I make up sound ridiculous. Then again, Pootie Tang sounds a bit silly for a story about four kids going on an adventure to find a dead body of some young kid in the summer of 1959. I just thought there should have been an alternative version of Stand by Me where the kid doesn't brandish a gun, but rather he pulls out a banana that has become so blacken, yet it does not yield any rotten smell. It's just black and nothing else.

"Now come on," with a sarcastic, child-like voice, "I don't understand what's your obsession with the alphabet and Sesame Street. They're like, so elementary--so grade school--so--"

"--educational, innocent, and fun," I say in a serious, rushing tone,"now can we just get done with damn editing and I'll be on my way." He knew what her rhetorical spout was gonna be when the poem was ever gonna be mentioned.

Emily stops, stares at the pages, her face looking a bit down with a pen in her hand between her index and middle finger like a seesaw and hitting the pages as she looks at me and says, "Okay, I'm sorry about poking at your work, it's just that . . ."

"What?" with a curious, yet suspicious gesture of voice.

"I honestly think that poem seems--weird and honestly, a bit stupid, in a way."

I pause for a few seconds, having the urge to punch her in the face. I start to bite my lower lip and make a fist with the my right hand, ready to punch her at anytime. I seriously don't give a shit anymore about whether or not I hit a girl, she's just getting on my nerves and I can't tolerate stupidity like this from her mouth. I mean seriously, what the hell has been going in life life lately? I'm about to have my first book published, I've been getting phone calls endlessly, from ex's to some stalker who won't stop bothering me, and now this?

I try my best to calm down as my face starts to turn red, sweat coming from my forehead, pouring down like tears of a baby whose face becomes red, crying profusely because his mother stopped holding him in her arms, rocking him his narcissistic crying attention to comfort. In my case, it was myself not trying to get angry at Emily, which reminded that I was a guest at her place and that their roommates invited me to dinner.

Bibliography

Okay, who needs a bibliography when I'm doing a research paper on hypertext. It's already intertextualized into this research paper. Like so what?

Well here's a video of a kitty being surprised by its owner to confuse you even more:

Final Proposal and Paper: Interactive Fiction

For my final project, I've been thinking of creating a a Choose Your Own Adventure/Gamebook novel in a physical format.

Examples:

Another idea somewhat deviates from the first idea, but the 'Choose Your Own Adventure' book would be in the form of a text adventure.

Little bonus:

Some inspiration from Kermit and Joey. Maybe I can bring in some--Cookie Monster--typography and locative--Cookie Monster--media into one. Or something else nice and green.

Progress of Final Projects: Interactive Fiction, Locative Arts, Etc.

So I'm getting started with my research by looking up articles about locative media on JSTOR. I pulled an article called Locative Arts by Drew Hemment, which details some of locative media works from 2003 to 2004, featuring the ideas of location based games from Blast Theory, GPS Drawing from Jeremy Wood, and other artists that involve using location, physical environment, and much more to the umbrella term of locative media.

From what I got out of this article, the basis of annotating space is the main function for locative media/art for what it is. It's the idea that artists create markings in physical or virtual space in order to comment about the functions of life, or whatever one wishes to believe in the paradigm of thinking about location-based arts.

Making a Toaster from Scratch

Something I found while watching the Colbert Report.

Maybe with all of the unrecycled electronic material we have piling in landfills in foreign countries like the Philippines, India, or China for example, there's a possibility to create any sort of common household product found in an American home.

The Sun Shines West on My Mark

Listening to shuffled music on BART

November 10, 2011

BART has its destination planned for me and everyone else, where everyone and I didn't need to move in order to drift to our destination, rather the train makes planned stops only this 710 foot snake can.[1] Whenever I get on the train, I usually take the end cars, which are either the A2, C1, or C2 vehicles. They're the cars that likely have the hard ground floors and visually appealing seats compared to the ones with the black streaks on the top of the seats. They are also the vehicles that operate as leader and trail cars, however the way the consist is in or outbound.

On this commute, I prepared my experiment and journey by putting on my headphones without starting the music player. I recorded a portion of my journey, although I didn't actually record the whole trip because recording time was limited, including battery life, I started recording when I was coming up to the Pleasant Hill BART station and going from thereon. I recorded the video with my Black Flip UltraHD video camera and in order to get the audio, I placed the left side of my headphone onto the microphone receiver, giving some feedback on what I'm currently listening to. In theory, I thought the microphone would perfectly pick up what's being outputted in the headphones and nothing else. Stupid me, the amplitude is much higher and expanded than my headphones.

The first song is an intelligible titled song, as punctuations translated the Japanese characters that the computer from the movie soundtrack to Ponyo. As the first song began, I pressed the shuffle button, leading to the random play of other songs. An audiobook of David Foster Wallace's The Broom of the System comes next. Out of lite bewilderment, I forgot that the majority of the music I put in my smartphone is filled with the whole DFW audiobook. It's rewarding to hear the book, but not in this particular fashion. I stopped recording, but I kept the audio playing, hoping to hear an actual song, but I was pretty disappointed in not making an appropriate playlist excluding non-music audio.

I'm starting to love riding the BART train every chance I get because it helps me relax and think before I go out in the world, where I begin my daily regimen of school lectures, buying lunch with whatever money I have in my wallet, walking around campus, drifting, or just relaxing in the lounge, especially when no one is taking space on the couch[2]. I thank Yellow BART Snake whenever I get off at Daly City, knowing that I'll be traveling with Mr. Snake back to where I start my commute every morning[3].

Marking my Territory
Another mini-experiment I took on was to mark my territory everywhere I walked for every minute that passed. The basic premise is that I walked around a certain location, (this time, it was around the SF campus) and for every minute that passed, I would write the time, with chalk on the outside pavement (or anything writable on chalk). One exception where I didn't write was when I was inside the building or near by the side of them. I didn't want to vandalize buildings that was owned by the state. And as for the last project, I simply did not want to get caught, basically going incognito in a public environment, which is certainly why some minutes I skipped through.

I had no principle in direction, but rather it was the familiarity of my surroundings and the playfulness of tagging your mark with the box of colorful chalk I had in my left hand and pulling my phone out of my right rocket to check whether a minute has passed.
Michael was here at 12:53, this is where I started drifting around the campus.
M was here at 12:54, I started to walk down the stairs, leading to the Humanities building.
Michael was here at 12:55, I walked up towards the path of the Humanities building.
Michael was here at 12:56Michael was here at 12:57, the ground didn't seem to be writable with my chalk, so I wrote on the bench instead. It was petty tough to write the letters as fast as possible. I believe it took me an estimated 55 seconds before another minute passed. As my hands became more chalkier, the screen as well.12:58, as I finished writing on the bench at 12:57, another minute passed by, so I immediately wrote to the nearest concrete ground that looked writable.Michael was here at 12:59; I had an urge to walk up the long concrete stairs leading to the exits of the third floor, but I also knew there would be writable walls on the side of the stairs. Now I skipped two minutes because I was in the Student Union, finding my way out and hopefully finding a seclusive spot to write the next time, which can be seen below. Michael was here at 1:02; I always came to this spot hidden behind trees and bushes that's near the GYM and right across the ATM machines. This area includes a water/bird? fountain, carved wooden benches without removing its bark, and a chair that looks fit for a king. Michael was here at 1:03
Michael stops at 1:06 :). Now the fun part started where I traced all of my marks, starting from the 1:05 mark and going backwards to the start. It felt like a scavenger hunt, trying to remember back my past footsteps.

And a little bonus...

I honestly had no idea what I was going to do after I drew what is now a grid. Something in my mind wondered if this looks like a game of 5x5 Tic-Tac-Toe or Dots and Boxes, which unfortunately, should not have its lines drawn. Maybe I'm used to seeing the checkerboard pattern whenever I enter one of the school buildings and I tend to think I'm playing the horse in chess, making 'L' patterns whenever I'm walking over the tiles.

Something in me always wanted to skip and hop on tile flooring, especially ones designed to form check board patterns. For many years, I've always been conscious of never stepping on the cracks of pavements because I feel like the cracks will open up and eat me alive; only to bring myself back to reality, that I'm walking on nothing else than concrete, nothing is going to eat me alive, and the only thing I need to worry about is finding time to think about how to present my work orally.

Footnotes:

[1] - This is according to Wikipedia, where the longest BART trains stretches to 710 feet on the 700 foot platform(s), giving people seconds to welcome themselves into the void of empty seats that one can choose to sit or to a plethora of the deadpan to sleepy faces of rush hour morning, filling most of the seating and you, the commuter have to find a seat before you have to suffer the consequences of standing for almost an hour, while you try to hold onto railing that you can't reach for an hour's sake until the Embarcadero station comes and the masses of East Bay commuters trample on the streets of downtown San Francisco. I just lay in wait, until its my turn to stomp on San Francisco concrete, as my shoes nap on the hard ground or soft, yet dirty-looking carpet and wake up when I get up.

[2] - Thank goodness there's a couch in the CIA lounge. It's nice that I can walk in, simply crash and take a quick nap if I only slept for three or four hours in bed or an hour, when I rarely sleep on the floor in my computer room because I'm procrastinating on my essay. I'm hoping this won't happen again when I do my final essay for this class.

[3] - Although the train is not yellow nor it's not an actual snake as I like to NOT imagine,. It's that I associate the trains in-name-only due to the BART maps showing the Pittsburg/Bay Point line being that color. If you check the map with the colorful lines connecting and bending around cities and towns densely populated above this footnote, it's the trail that snakes go back and forth to pick up and drop off people.

As for giving the train a personal name (Yellow BART Snake), it's just a pun of identifying intimate objects as people. Yellow being the first name, BART is the middle, and Snake is its last name. I might even go a bit far as to say that they are like my transitional objects, or security blankets whenever I come to the drudgery of what is commuting to the shuttle or bus in order to get on campus. I'm glad that commuters can at least get comfortable to experience the trauma of commuting to work and doing what is essentially nothing pleasing in your own blue/white collar jobs, something I will have to face when I graduate school.

I had this dream where psychogeography was dogging me and I flew up in the air in my car, looking down on Interstate 80, but man, that pizza is whack!

Every time I get into a discussion with someone at SF State about why I need to get home as soon as possible whenever it dawns or I look at the clock behind the room, with a worried face, turning my head back and forth, I always tell them I live in Martinez. If they don't know where Martinez is, I tell them it's in the East Bay. When one person I spoke to didn't know where the East Bay was, I told him it was on the eastern side of San Francisco, but then again, he was from New York and never ventured out of SF. Well I can't blame the kid, since he moved out from the Midwest and wanted to study in New York. He did like the SFSU website compared to the one he was applying for.

There are times when I'm not aware of the time that passes by when I start my commute from the North Concord/Martinez BART station and end at Daly City station. I pass the time by reading any textbooks or novels at my leisure, but recently, I've been carrying headphones with me, since I'm utilizing the MP3 feature on my smartphone, listening to list of songs multiple hours, it's fun. Whenever a sun refracts on the window across the seat adjacent to the doors, I quickly scroll the list to a cello piece that represents a soothing start to my day, waiting patiently to get out of the train and into my mediated life.

I recall my first time ever[1] taking BART to get to school. I was so nervous of riding alone, that having no one else watch you, instead of watching yourself from child nappers or people who are thinking of stealing your backpack, started to make my stomach churn, especially when I didn't eat breakfast at all. I would do that every morning, but that time, it got much worse as the day went by.

The only thing I did to entertain myself was looking outside of the window. Cars and a multitude of foliage and shrubs whiz pass the speed of the train, making our surroundings like peering inside a paper green snake lantern, the sun trying to make its way to shine out of the tunnel that goes to the underground railroad to San Francisco.

Urban Dreamscape: SF

Footnotes

[1] - It was also my first time ever being all alone taking BART. It would usually be my family or rarely, a friend taking BART with me because when I was 19, my mom would be very cautious of my safety whenever I'm outside the house without being with her. Hearing experiences from my mom about taking BART, she told stories about her sitting next to a bum who probably was digging in a trash can, looking for food, with the likely chance of using the BART ride as an excuse to take a long nap. I'm hoping that she didn't encounter the guy/girl leaning her head on her shoulder, as she would probably be weirded out and getting out of her seat that's stained as a shade of gray according to the average curvature of a person's body in the San Francisco Bay Area, which they should be considering replacing the seats as soon as possible, for the fact some fecal matter and skin-borne bacteria is on those cloth seats.