Pre-jet lagged

I never sleep well the night before flying and I seem to enjoy procrastinating, so now it's 5:00 am and I'm not packed and every dish in the house is dirty. And, I forgot about garbage day. And, while putting the (potted) xmas tree outside, I flung mud all over my bathroom (by which I mean bathing room). The upside here is that I'm all pre-adjusted to CA time, except if I don't sleep on the plane, I'll be a major mess tomorrow.

Let's see . . . I went to Amsterdam a while ago to see some sort of art opening. There's a German guy who runs a really, really tiny night shop out of just a shop window display. It's one of those life-as-art projects, where it's art because it's just a bit odd, and the artist embodies it. He was having a small showing of another artist in the shop. The other artist does nothing but pictures of sausages. He handed out tiny real sausages to everyone present. I read the program notes and they were truly insane and mentioned something called the "wurst club." It's a real club. I joined it and got a membership certificate which is actually a watercolor painting of a bunch of sausages. I'm the 6th vegetarian to join.

The next weekend, I went to Amsterdam again to go to STEIM's open weekend. They had a bunch of interactive toy instruments out for folks to play with. They were cool. then some STEIM folks improvised. I went and got my haircut. I really like my hair cutter (Cuts and Curls) because they never argue with me or try to talk me out of things. I say, "make it short and square" and the guy just nods and does it. He talked me into buying some product. I haven't gotten the hang of using it yet. I look like some sort of cross between an overly-enthusiatic-for-the-wax teen boy or the covermodel for the Amsterdam Gay Guide.

On Monday, I went again to Amsterdam to go to something called "Upgrade." There were two guys speaking about degradable art and then a couple of guys played sounds and fed them to a video projector via a video aD converter. Destruction of stuff, like data or old photos is fine, I mean, if folks don't want it anymore, it has to go someplace. But shredding old slides isn't really getting rid of them. It's just breaking them up so nobody can use them. In once sense they're destroyed, but in another they're not. Somebody with way too much time could probably reconstruct them. What's more, the amount of space they take up has not diminished. They have not transformed, only been broken into pieces. Degradable art is not biodegradable art. Contrary to audience suggestion, shredding computers is not a good idea. Our leftover technological scraps from forgotten tools and memories are toxic. They might be broken into bits, but those bits will stay around forever, unusable.

Maybe I should go pack or do the dishes or something. I wish my laundry were dry. I've been adding labels to my oldest posts and eventually hope to tag everything I've ever written here. It seems to be screwing up the feed on lj. Sorry.

Oh yeah, I'll be in CA starting tomorrow until Jan 4th.