Summer time.
It's summertime, and I'm on summer-time. Newton said that time moves in an inscrutable forward direction, and it's up to us to measure it clicking away. Liebniz, however, said that time is a fluid entity, and our measurement of it defines its rate. I'm inclined to believe in the latter definition. For instance, my time here at Explo happens whether I want it to or not. I turn around, I look down and look up, I check my watch and I can practically see the hand flying around. Anna in St. Paul tells me, however, that the days are moseying right along, time moving like sap on a Maple. Are we experiencing the same time? Is it like the inside and outside of a record, moving slower and faster and at the same rate, all at the same time? It makes sense, Minnesota being at the center of the record, and the coasts moving faster, but all at the same time. Maybe that's what's going on....

P.S. I may have made up that stuff about Newton and Leibniz

More Summer Pictures are up.
I'll post some backstory later, but I wanted to let y'all know.

Man oh man, read the news in Spanish, and look at what you get:

I'm scared. I'm very scared.

Hi all,
There's a new (small) set of pictures from my summer job up.
Go see.

This is a hoot. Apparently, this company did a survey of the music to which IT professionals listen, and it fell into categories based on what kind of computer work they were doing. My favorite is the top item; it says lots and lots to me. Also interesting is that I fall somewhere between Linux and Database Admin, which is interesting because I'm a Linux guy whose current job involves database administration. Aaah, it's so nice to see that I fit into the stereotypes. MMmmm, stereotypes. Of course, this survey was done of like 200 students in the UK, so it should be taken with a grain of salt. But what would you be doing reading this without your bag of salt?

• Job: Microsoft-certified professionals

  
  Favoured genre: Mainstream pop
  Top three bands:
  Britney Spears
  Dido
  Beyonce

  
  
  
• Job: Security

  
  Favoured genre: 60s "Alt" Rock
  Top three bands:
  Grateful Dead
  The Doors
  Hendrix

  
  
  
• Job: Linux

  
  Favoured genre: Electro
  Top three bands:
  The Orb
  Underworld
  Kraftwerk

  
  
  
• Job: Developers

  
  Favoured genre: Heavy Metal
  Megadeth
  Iron Maiden
  Slipknot

  
  
  
• Job: Database administrators

  
  Favoured genre: Indie
  The Smiths
  Haven
  Suede

  
  
  
• Job: Project manager

  
  Favoured genre: Rock
  Pink Floyd
  Queen
  Rolling Stones

  
  
  
• Job: CIO/IT director

  
  Favoured genre: Classical
  Mozart
  Handel
  Vivaldi

  
  

So.
Well well well. It's been a while, fair internet. And readers. Friends. Family.
Time stretches out like the rays of sun over water at night in Trinidad.
(do you like the simile?)
Here's another: I work like a king, eat like a dog.
Family motto notwithstanding.
(ask an Anderson, Learned, Greer).
This is a life full of excitement.
(how could you be around 700 high schoolers and not feel energized?)
So much tension, planned and programmed release.
Like bursts of machine gun fire: intense, premeditated.
Music keeps me going.
Ask me for a mix, and ye shall receive.
It's the new Donald.
Tired, happy, warm, content.

computers computers computers computers beers beers kids red tape computers computers computers computers hang out hang out yearn yearn love computers beers kids kids kids kids tired tiired bar bar beers bar computers sleep beers sleep dream love yearn computers computers sleep beers red tape love support beers computers

So Yale..
It certainly is what one would expect, isn't it? Yale. It's big and expensive. These buildings, some built during the Depression when labor what cheap and people had time, reek of having too much money and nothing to do with it. They actually pour acid over new buildings and renovations to make them look more "lived in." That's "kind of freakin' wierd."
My summer job is at Yale. It's called Exploration. It's a summer camp for rich high school kids, where they're taught by college kids (and recent grads) about things, and they get to live on the Yale campus and have sex in bushes. You know, kids will be kids! Ha ha ha! It's indicative of my situation that the song that makes me smile at the end of the day is "A Journey to Reedham," by Squarepusher, off the Big Loada album. If you can get access to a copy of that (IE you're near Paulo Casaes or Taavo Smith), I recommend listening to it. It makes me smile, anyway. Every time.
The East Coast is a real hoot. There are whole cultures here that seem to have missed my portion of the East. Like the culture where it's okay to be an asshole, and a really bad driver. Or where name-dropping gains you social status and admiration, as opposed to the general disdain of your family, friends, and peers. But what would the Ivy League be without name-dropping? I'll leave the bemused, worldy answers to you, my friends. It's to bed I go.

Thoughts

This trip is taking a long time. I remember funny things about it. I
remember the way the louds look in New York, and I realize how
different they are from the wispy, rambling clouds of the Midwest. The
clouds here are thicker, more substantial, they create layers and
layers in the sky, so that you get this great sense of depth. In the
Midwest, you get a sense of the space, but never the depth of the
clouds and the sky.
I remember a lot of things about today, but none of them stand out so
much as to bear description. The old lady who ran the place at the
Potsdam Greyhound Station, carrying her phone around wit her in case
anybody called for a ticket. The dense green landscape of the
Northeast. The gaggle of teenagers talking loudly on their phones to
their friends from Boston, only minutes away. The friendly fellow who
got on just before Lake George, where the moment my cell phone got
reception again, I got a call from Anna in Minnesota. The first time I
had said anything since I got on the bus!
I had to change buses twice to get to Boston, and changed bus lines,
which is confusing. I thought I was riding Greyhound, but I arrived on
Peter Pan. I thought that was a brand of peanut butter. Once in
Boston, I got a call from the person who was going to give me keys.
After taking a cab to her place, I spent another hour or so trying to
get here, where I sit in a friend's apartment, while she's away. I'm
so grateful to have a place to stay after all of today! It's a
wonderful privelage to have good friends, and that's all I can come up
with at this point today.

Moving Again

Here I go!
Tomorrow I go down to New Haven, the armpit of Connecticut, also known
as the home of Yale University, on the next leg of my summer
movings-around. It's funny, logistically, because they (the employers)
want us (the minions) to be in Norwood, Massachusets in the morning
this coming Sunday. I don't know about the other people working this
job, but it's kind of hard for me to get anywhere in Massachusets at
10:00 in the morning, coming from Northern New York. I think of it as
my first test, like I was Indiana Jones in pursuit of the Holy Grail or
something. Except the Holy Grail is actually a dead carcass, and all I
want is money so I can go to France. Only the penitent will pass.
Gee, I already talked about how Potsdam is nice, so what's left to say?
Let's talk about France for a while. Anna's and my plan, in case you
haven't heard, is to live in the south of France, Anna teaches English,
and I write tons of music, and we both tool around and have fun. God
willing, this will become a reality. Every day that it doesn't fold
under and get lost in the abyss of pipe dreams past makes it that much
closer to becoming a real thing. I certainly hope that it becomes a
real thing. The next big obstacle is actually purchasing the ticket,
which will come soon, I hope. I certainly do hope.

Potsdam

Potsdam has this way of sucking you in. Every time I come home, I'm
surprised to see who is still here, who has moved on, who has come back
from moving on. Almost all of my friends, from here or not, are in
some state of life transition right now, but it's interesting to see
how the ones from Potsdam always make sure to stop back before
beginning the next leg of their journey. It's like, we have to make
sure that at least one part of the world remains the same before we go
off to experience something else. This town is the litmus test for the
world.
On the other hand, it's always a little different each time I come
back, in its small way. Cowen's Country Store moved down the street,
into downtown proper. This is a big deal, because I had them pegged
for the kind of people who would run the store in that location until
they died, and be done with it. But no, movers and shakers they are.
The fence at the sorority at the end of the street is down. The music
store has more guitars, Stratocasters all of them, so many
Stratocasters! little things change for me. All the kids at the high
school have familiar last names and faces, but I don't know them at
all.
I ran by the school today, and was comforted that even though there's
not a soul I know attending that school, and my old teachers by and
large have made an exodus since my class left, that things are still
being run as usual. That's why I go back to Potsdam; it's my way to be
sure that, no matter how fucked up my world gets, there's still a frame
of reference, a town with neutral PH, waiting for the next catastrophe
to pass. A glacier could move right over this town, nobody the wiser.
That's why i come home.

Air

The best thing I ever hope for when travelling is an uneventful flight.
It seems like it would be a little greedy to ask for a flight that
lands early, or doesn't have any people on it. I hope for flights
where there won't be too many people scheduled for the flight, so
nobody gets asked to not be on the plane. I hope for a line at the
ticket counter that's small enough so that I don't need to fly to
Newark, New Jersey, instead of Chicago. I hope that, when we get onto
the runway, the plane doesn't turn back around and take us to the
terminal. I hope that when I'm in the air, Northwest's entire computer
system doesn't crash and burn, leaving me to become a frozen carcass in
the Northwest G concourse in Detroit. Unfortunately, all of these
things have happened to me at some point.
Today, it was the ticket counter. Apparently, Northwest thinks its a
sharp idea to replace their human tellers with E-ticket machines. The
problem is, nobody can figure out how to use these machines. Thus, the
lines grow longer as people gradually ascertain that, no, they don't
know the secret Mason handshake, and no, they don't have $3,000 to
donate to the United Way, and that they would rather be in the line
where there's a real, surly, overworked person at the other end. It's
like Big Air is trying to remove some of the last shreds of
accountability from the flying process. This is crap. Already, if the
plane is late, it's nobody's fault. If your flight is cancelled, it's
nobody's fault. If you have to sit on a hot plane for seven hours
while everybody in the cockpit jokes about what a good trick they're
playing fooling everybody into thinking there's actually a problem,
that's nobody's fault. Now, they want to make it so that if you don't
even get your ticket, nobody is to blame but you. It's a brave new
world, folks.
On the plus side, I feel super-secure now that there are two more
securiity guards at the checkpoint. Anyhow, that's all of Donald's
dispatches from the airport. Cheers!

Yes, that's a mohawk. Not a faux-hawk, like some of you believe. The real deal. The point is moot, however, because I cut it off yesterday morning. Reports on my reasoning for cutting it off vary from me being whipped to me being whipped (Anna hates mohawks, it turns out). But I maintain that it was actually my intention all along to simply shave my head, and the mohawk was just a little fun for Grand Ole Days. For those of you who don't live in the twin cities, that's like the county fair, except on the main shopping drag in St. Paul. The city's sweaty, overweight, pale, recently wintered hordes go out into the street to eat things like deep-fried pickles, deep-fried oreos, and deep-fried snickers bars, in addition to drinking beer and listening to bands. It's a hoot. So long story short, even though I had the mohawk for only a day, more people saw me sporting it than will see my shaved head in the next month.

Hi to everybody who is probably looking at this for the first time! I just sent out the one and only mass email I plan on sending out, to inform you all that you should look here for news of me. I realize it's slightly narcissistic to think that people on the internet want to read about my daily exploits, but I don't actually think that they do. This is just for family and friends, and if you're a random internet surfer who happens to like my random spewings, then so be it. That's fine with me.
I'm still working on that photo page; I'll post a link when it's up. For right now, I'm pretty sure the Macalester link on the left still works. Off to dinner..

I look around the room, and see an ever-increasing state of disarray. Indeed, it seems that the move is less far off every day. Like most major life changes, the significance of not permanently residing in this city still eludes me, and probably will continue to do so until well after I move out.
I don't have a desk. I'm typing this on a laptop sitting on top of my other computer, in the corner of a room that bears fewer and fewer fingerprints of my living here. My bookshelf is gone, the books in boxes on the floor. I'm going to mail my computer home in short order. The amp goes to California with a friend for safe-keeping while I'm in France. That's it. The rest fits in my luggage, and goes on the plane.
It's not depressing, really, just kind of increasingly austere. It's as if, instead of making a clean cut with this city, I'm a tooth dangling around in the side of its mouth, kind of hurting and waiting for the courage and the right time to be pulled out completely. I've got to say, though, that the biggest bummer is having to pack up my stereo. What's a music grad with no amplification? At least I've still got my headphones.

What is it about a movie that makes you want to be like the people in the movie for the three or so hours following the movie? So I watched Benny and Joon, and now I've just the urge to, you know, mash potatoes with tennis rackets and iron my grilled cheese sandwiches, like Johnny Depp did in his utter coolness. But after I watch something like Enter the Dragon, all I want to do is kick and punch. So what is it? And why doesn't it stay longer. Like, if I could maintain my kung-fu sensibility for two days after watching The Matrix, I might be able to get some real ass-kickin' done. But three hours is just enough for a sore groin and then bedtime. And you can't just watch a new movie every three hours, because then you've got to spend all that money on renting movies, not to mention that there are only so many Kung-Fu movies out there. And your momentum is ruined by sitting down for an average of 1.5 hours. Maybe I should read a book about Kung-Fu, because that lasts longer. Hmm.

Postscript:
My irony doesn't follow as well on "paper" as it does when I'm talking out loud. Maybe if you could all just imagine me gesticulating wildly, so I don't have to insert images into my text. It ruins the flow.
peace out.
-D

I never thought the pressure to write in this thing would get to me. I guess this is why most people keep their diaries private: to avoid having to impress anybody but themselves. Are other people so much more profound that they can write in a diary all day? Or is it that all diaries are terminally boring? Hmm... This is more of a log, I guess, because it beats writing mass emails. If I were you, the friends and family of mine who ostensibly read this business, I'd prefer not to get unsolicited emails from Donald all the damned time.

Back to diaries, I guess you only hear about the diaries of people who consistently have a lot to say, or are so profoundly bored that they are slowly descending (ascending?) into insanity. Like Antarctic Explorers, or Anne Frank, who was a little of both.

I went and saw Harry Manx last night. For those of you who don't know him (which, unless you're Canadian, is a high probability), he's this blues fellow out of Toronto. He plays one seriously mean guitar. You know how some guitarists are really good at, say, playing solos, and others make the guitar sound like four instruments playing at once? He's in that latter group, like this slidey-blues/indian raga thing. Not to mention that on top of that he actually does play four instruments at once, if you count his voice. He's got the guitar, this floor pedal thing that supplies bass drum sounds when he taps on it, a harmonica, and singin'. He's big in Canada, take that as you will.

Graduation

So I graduated this friday. That was entertaining. The funny thing about
graduation from college, at least my graduation from college, is that
I expected it to be anticlimactic, but it wasn't. It was a big deal. I
suppose that it's a testament to the college that they managed to give a
little weight to the ceremony, but nonetheless, I was impressed.
Of course, navigating a weekend with my parents, Anna's parents, basically
everybody and their mom was a chore requiring little sleep and much in the
way of logistics, but that's what you get. It's funny that during finals
week I slept 8 hours a day, but during senior week, when ostensibly I should
have no work to do, I got 5-6 hours of sleep a night. Maybe it was my
sleep-induced haze that lent gravity to the ceremony.
All that for a piece of paper. It doesn't even say what my majors were. Just

Donald Latif Anderson
Bachelor of Arts

Boy, you'd think that after that kind of courtship I'd be married to the arts,
and not still playing the field. I dunno. I'll be posting pictures of the
ceremony shortly.
-Donald