the reality tunnel

My friend Nathan forwarded me this message. It’s hard to be reminded of all the need in the world, which I think becomes more apparent around the holidays.  I find I always catch myself doing some kind of triage - in a world of finite resources, is it fair that people coming from mostly backgrounds of privilege and imprisoned for political action or members of the independent music scene can so easy to leverage digital networks to drum up grassroots financial support while others stay completely off the radar for people’s holiday charity?  But this kind of thinking is completely assy and ultimately infinitely regressive.  In a world of finite resources, it seems you can only help where you can, everywhere you can.

J. Robbins–whose name you know if you were ever a fan of Jawbox,  Burning Airlines, or the dozens of records he produced–needs our  help. His infant son, Cal, has been diagnosed Spinal Muscular Atrophy, which is usually fatal before the age of two. Paying for the treatments Cal needs are not covered by J’s insurance and are very expensive. Please consider donating at the link below. Merry Christmas everybody, and thanks for being so good to rivulets this past year.

Remember: Jesus doesn’t care about shopping.

Link

Towards the end of brunch at Mary’s Corinna and Riley showed up with a copy of the NY Times.  As the year comes to a close, I was once again reminded of how there seems to be a crazy consciousness of “prison issues” in the media in the last year.  I don’t quite understand it, and I can only attribute it to the reality that so many people are incarcerated in the US that it’s something that has come to touch many people’s lives and cannot be ignored.

The Right Has a Jailhouse Conversion

For Young Offenders, Justice as Impoverished as Africa

So the last minute letter writing/knitting event didn’t go so well.  It was basically just me and Shannon hanging out, knitting, and telling stories, which was fine.  Doing the research for the event, I learned a lot more about the Finelight’s development plans, the connectedness of the individuals driving the development, and the rapid pace of the plans.  If you’re interested in sorting through a big stack of articles about the brief history of these really serious chnages, I’d be happy to share.  I’ve also uploaded the handout that I made with the addresses of some of the stakeholders in the development project.  Link

In the end, I got a tiny bit of mitten knitting done, and wrote this letter to the HT.:

Mayor Mark Kruzan may remain optimistic about the future of Finelight’s development plans on Kirkwood, but the actions of the business community and city government in the last year leave me with nothing but a sense of dread.  Whether the final reality for Bloomington will be Finelight’s “plan A” or “plan B”, the city has already been adversely affected by these plans.  We can see this both in the loss of Ladyman’s, a longstanding and singular community nexus that brought Bloomingtonians together across divisions of class, race, lifestyle, and generation, and the pending temporary displacement of some of the Shalom Center’s essential community services.

Many of the proposed timelines for development at the corner of Kirkwood and Washington move at an alarming pace.  Whether it is the patrons of Ladyman’s, those who receive services from the Shalom Center, or, quite possibly, users of public transportation in Bloomington, many in our community have been or will be affected by these decisions.  It is disrespectful and irresponsible to proceed at a pace at which it seems impossible to acknowledge and accommodate the realities of all whose lives will be changed by development in Bloomington.  We have already felt the weight of what can be lost or changed by decisions.  What will the community, as a whole, gain or have constructed by Finelight’s plans?  Have the proposal’s supporters in the city government, business community, and local media been able to answer this fundamental question?

Even though both Ladyman’s and the Shalom Center have received support or offers of support from the city in an attempt to soften the impact of development decisions, within the current structure of political and economic power in Bloomington, those institutions are at the mercy of the decisions of others, and as an extension of that, so are the people served by those institutions.  As people living in Bloomington, we must ask ourselves, do we want to live in a community where priceless assets such as Ladyman’s or the Shalom Center must constantly maneuver to accommodate forces shaping our community, or where they are the institutions that drive changes in our community?  At the very least, can their voices and needs, can all of our voices and needs, play an equal part in shaping the future of Bloomington?

The Herald Times’ December 19 opinion piece about Finelight’s plans spoke of the contributions of Bloomington’s “mostly younger, mostly creative-class” population to local business and to the community as a whole.  To hinge the benefits of such a group of people solely on Finelight’s ability or inability to construct a new headquarters in downtown Bloomington seems exaggerated.  Certainly, this allegedly beneficial population shares a great deal in common with the university community, a population that, for better and for worse, will not be leaving Bloomington any time soon.  In the end, though, even as a member of the much heralded and accommodated “mostly younger, mostly creative-class” segment of Bloomington’s population, I don’t want to see this community transformed to so exclusively facilitate my livelihood or lifestyle or that of people like me.  Even in the cafe’s absence, we would do well not to forget the reality that Ladyman’s so clearly exposed - that as Bloomingtonians, our lives are much closer than our apparent divisions, and that if we are to prosper, we should prosper together.

set list:

• research
• lightning strikes
• untitled (it’s new)
• death at an early age
• this is where we’re from
• new song
• human contradiction i
• human contradiction ii

Update: I’ve uploaded the slideshow that we projected for this show. Link

Crafting Community: An Evening of Knitting and/or Letter Writing
Friday, December 22
Boxcar Books and Community Center [310A S. Washington St.]
7-9pm

Bloomington is changing in terms of the structural landscape of the city, the demographics of it’s inhabitants, and the development and political decisions that face the community. Despite opportunities for public review, many of the decisions being made that affect the community as a whole, feel completely out of the hands of most people. We grumble, gossip, and debate but do our words and concerns change anything?

The idea is simple - people can get together around a simple activity like knitting and talk about their perceptions, feelings, and ideas about the things that are affecting us as we live in Bloomington. We can share information about the things that are happening around us and use our shared information and perspective to solidify our individual feelings and opinions. Then, through writing letters to the editors of local media, politicians, city officials, developers, and business owners, we can share our voices with those who make sweeping decisions around the city of Bloomington. We hope that our voices can help shape the decisions being made, but if they can’t, at least no one can claim that the decisions were made ignorant of the impact that they would have on the city’s residents.

I’m thinking that this Friday’s topic of letter writing will be the closing of Ladyman’s Cafe and the plans for Finelight’s development of the cafe’s former location. Please bring any news articles, planning documents, press releases or other information that you would like to share with others.

This event is open to everyone in the Bloomington community. You can come to knit, to write letters, or just hang out.  Hopefully we can all take a few moments to let the rants and conversations many have had over the past few weeks coalesce and turn them into clear expressions of anger, frustration, or hope that can be shared with others in Bloomington.

Take care,
Geoff

• Mass inventory edit feature to Boxcar inventory.  This would allow user to change inventory details for multiple inventory entries all at once. Essentially this would allow you to change everything that you can in the inventory edit form.
• Barcode-based inventory entry
• Integrate POS and inventory
• Make pages card catalog/inventory electronic

a common question that i have is when various places are open around bloomington, so i’m going to keep a running list here

• opportunity house - M-Sa  9a-2p
• goodwill (both east and west side locations) - M-Sa 9a-9p

The warm weather the last few days has been really amazing.   It seems like people were on the streets late into the night last night, just enjoying the warmth of the air.  I rode through campus and people were walking through the night gabbing loudly on cell phones as they walked, a combination of giddy excitement for those who had completed their finals and concern for those who hadn’t.  It gave me that strange meloncholy feeling that I remembered from when I was in school at the end of terms when you would have this fast transition around campus between frantic activity and a lonely desolation.  The nice thing about living in a small town is that people are instantly recognizeable, even from a distance, and as I was headed back towards Boxcar, I saw the outline of Tyson wizzing around the block on a skateboard, his motion relaxed and fluid.

I stopped at the post office and saw the lady who usually sleeps there resting, as usual, by standing up and letting the weight of her upper body fall on her shopping cart.  As I entered the post office, I noticed a sign on the door reporting that later in the week, the lobby would start closing at 8:00PM and reopen at 3:00AM.  Surely this is a measure to keep people experiencing homelessness from sleeping in the lobby.  It’s sad  because I always thought it was a nice arrangement, how the post office unknowingly offered shelter to people from the rain or cold in a way that used no additional resources, and for some, seemed to work better for their lives than a formal shelter ever could.  I guess those days are over, and I hope that it stays warm long enough for people to find a new lobby somewhere.

I’ve ben thinking a lot about wireless networks and building community wireless networks lately.  I installed OpenWRT on a WRT54G, injected DC into the ethernet cable, and built an outdoor enclosure at my friend’s house.  I was looking at different enclosures and the ones at the hardware store and cost $25.  So, I looked around the house and stumbled upon the ubiquitous fish tub as a solution.  Then today, when I was digging around for antenna designs, I came upon this outdoor AP design that uses the fish tub too!  It got me stoked to feel like people can come up with the same DIY solution independently of each other.

Link