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The Moon.

The Moon. Ink on paper. I’m pretty proud of this one.

Ink

 

Sacramento Valley Sparks

Yesterday I braved the heat to go a Sacramento Valley Sparks event. It was my first experience with the burner community and it was awesome! There was food, some really interesting people and music including my friend’s band Blaquelisted. They had a gypsy clothing exchange where you could borrow dress up clothes. There was an amazing collaborative art project I got to participate in and a really cool Burning Man shelter. All in all a great day!

A Disgusting Sentiment

Have you ever been in a moment when something someone says is an absolutely disgusting sentiment? And it’s not a stranger, or some random asshole you can write off. Maybe it was meant to funny, but the whole room has only one tired, uncomfortable laugh. I don’t find myself getting offended at people’s words very often anymore but that comment I found sexist and repugnant. It was anything but funny. It was a revelation of the quality of their character and I found it to be lacking.

This person isn’t charming. They are at best socially awkward. Part of me wanted to make excuses: a lack of social awareness, a lack of comedic timing, a complete and total unawareness that half their audience was women and that you could safely assume at least half of the people in the room would either be uncomfortable or most likely offended. But it’s not excusable for a grown man to make a comment so derogatory and offensive, I’d expect to hear it on the X-Box Live network from a 14 year old boy. If he was wondering why he held no appeal to the opposite sex, I’m sure having no respect for their entire gender is on the list of reasons.

When I interact with a man like this, I can’t help but respect my Fella more. My Fella deeply respects women. I think the greatest example of a feminist man is one who can be friends and carry on meaningful conversations with women and who can make them laugh without being offensive. The funny thing is, my Fella makes jokes all the time that could be taken out of context and interpreted as offensive. But he doesn’t offend people the vast majority of he time. This got me thinking about why that is. Why is it offensive when one person makes a derogatory joke and hilarious when my guy cracks a joke about an equally taboo subject?

I think the difference is satire. Where as my Fella would make a theoretically offensive joke, the punchline is the ridiculousness of sexism, racism, homophobia, etc. Then someone else makes a joke by saying something offensive, but you believe they truly think that way.  The difference is night and day. Just like how I want to spend the rest of my days with my fella, politically incorrect and all but I never really want to hear this other man’s opinion on anything ever again.

Home

We’re home! After a brutally exhausting move we’re in our new ditty domicile.  The walls are up and painted. Vinyl peal and stick tiles have been laid. All our furniture is here, the old place has been cleared and cleaned and a five by ten storage unit is now filled with a variety of possessions we will be keeping or haven’t had the time to deal with.

I look and feel like I’ve been jumped and beat up but I’m so happy to finally be at our new home. I wish I had photos to share now but the place isn’t 100% done. We still need to finish the path, the interior trim, add shelves, hang art and get the last boxes unpacked. In the meantime, here’s a sketch of the final layout:

I am an Asshole

I’ve been throwing a lot of stuff away lately. A lot of absolute garbage that totally had to go but it still bothers me. I make a lot of fucking trash. And after however many trips to the communal dumpster I realize once again: I’m a fucking asshole.

I can’t play ignorant about this. I know what I’m doing isn’t good. It’s not good for me, or the planet. I’m It’s wasteful. But I do it almost everyday and I keep making the same choices that are just wrong. What the hell is up with that?

It’s like I’m a politician turned environmentalist whose carbon footprint is bigger than the average coal plant. I’m a complete ass hat. I’m not really a hippie. I just play one on TV.

The Candle Problem

This is a few years old but I wanted to share because the information is so valuable.

Home

She’s still being converted into more luxurious accommodations but here she is:

We will be adding the following lux touches: drywall and more insulation, a gorgeous window (found on craigslist for $40) to the south wall, laminate flooring, combination ventilation fan and heater, built in shelving and even electricity! We still have a month until we move in to get it all done.

Ten-Fold

I’m about to downsize my living space by ten-fold. Ten-fold. I need to let that sink in for a bit.

Right now I’m living in a very spacious two bedroom apartment of about 1300 square feet. It was never meant to be for just us. We had a roommate but that ended abruptly. For a while we were going to get a new roommate, then decided my costuming gig was going to be the new roommate but ultimately neither of those options were going to be enough to make up for how stupid big this place is. And I’ve grown weary of fighting back the angry hordes of spiders that threaten to consume these halls. I’m still a bit sad to leave. We’ve had many great parties and made a lot of good memories here. But it’s times to move on.

Our new place will be about 120 square feet without a kitchen or bathroom in the building, but access to on a kitchen and bathroom on the property. It’s just a quick walk past the ducks and chicken.

Both my fella and I have known we’ve needed to make a change. There are a lot of reasons why: Our environmental impact, transitioning to a more frugal lifestyle, learning simplicity and downsizing our massive (but not atypical for our American culture) acumulation of stuff. Our long term goal is to get raw land and build a small house on it and add on over time. We’ve also toyed with the idea of establishing some sort of intentional community. Or maybe just convincing some of our friends to buy adjacent plots. The drastic change to our cost of living will finally allow us to save for land and whatever crunchy granola hippie type stuff we want to do.

This experience we hope will answer a lot of questions we have before making the leap to a homestead or an intentional community. Can we stand to live in such tight quarters? How will living unconventionally on a property with six adults with big personalities and a toddler work out? Could we do that under more rural/isolated conditions? Is the work of growing our food something we will find rewarding? Can we decrease our energy usage enough to live on solar or other renewable energy? I have so many questions I could just keep going on.

I’m so excited about this change in our lives. It will truly be an adventure! It’s time to see if I can give up the normal suburban lifestyle like I’ve been dreaming the past eight years.
-Strangerock signing off

Trimming the Fat

(posted today, written yesterday)

Today my fella Rick and I started the process of ridding ourselves of our material posesions in preparation for a dramatic change in our lifestyle. Yesterday was a day of high anxiety, ending on a high note with the comfort of bad wine, good conversation and truly great friends.

As for trimming the fat, we started sorting through the many board games we own. We definitely suckers for games, especially fantasy games. Lately we’ve been playing a lot of Castle Ravenloft. It’s an excellent game. Really it is many games built into one game system and it’s not terribly hard to pick up. I highly recommend it. We got rid of quite a few games without feeling like we’re sacrificing anything. A lot of our favorites don’t take up much room or like Castle Ravenloft they pack a lot of gameplay per inch cubed.

Today we started on books and DVDs. We sorted out a couple boxes worth and took them to Dimple Records to sell. It took the poor clerk ages to sort and price through it. We walked away with something like $80-90. That was pretty awesome. Of the DVDs we kept, we put them in binders and got rid of the plastic cases. There’s a few box sets we like too much to get rid of like the bluray extended edition of the Lord of the Rings series.  What used to take up four shelves on our mediastand now takes up about one. So I guess we should probably get rid of the mediastand too.

There’s a lot of stuff left. We own a ton of entertainment. Anything we won’t really miss will be sold or donated. Something about us both being nerds has led us to accumulate a lot of stuff, but going through it all really makes us think about what of it really matters.

Where we’re potentially moving is small. Very small. We’re not even sure if we’ll be moving but if it’s happening its going to happen quick so we need to prepare. Much of our stuff will go in storage.

I’m having a hard time figuring out how it’ll all fit together. Right now I feel like anything could happen, which is a bit of an anxious feeling. But I feel like anything is possible right now.

I’m also feeling gratitude towards the awesome friends we have in our life. Without them, we’d be truly lost. I can’t say today was boring and now with my head still spinning I wonder what tomorrow will bring.