Notes from Underground: Vibration spanning the decades (New Years Weekend 2010/2011)

2010/11Last New Year’s Eve, the card for the “final outcome” in my Tarot reading was Temperance, which represents vibration.*   And what a coincidence: guess what tonight’s psytrance party is called?

It’s been a long decade.  Ten years ago, things were spiralling down: the dot-com crash, a stolen presidential election, with Enron and 9/11 fast approaching.   The ten years since then have been pretty depressing, watching our economy and civil liberties go down the drain as the rich white guys in charge struggle to keep everybody else down and the plutocracy gets greedier and greedier.  I’m sooooo ready to put the Awful Aughts to rest and start moving forward.

First though, let’s take a few moments to remember that there was plenty of good stuff over the last decade too.

At the societal level, the last couple of years have included the emergence of social networks, choosing hope over fear (at least partially),  reenergized womanist, mujerist, feminist, and anti-racist activists, Wikileaks, and an emerging coalition that’s neocons’ worst nightmare and the future of civil liberties.    So the trend is positive — and momentum is building.

And at the personal level, all I can say is … wow.

For most of the decade, D and I were in a two-city relationship.  Don’t get me wrong, it was a great two-city relationship: we saw each other a lot, did plenty of fun things, and it gave us the space to develope some very deep friendships that might not have happened otherwise.  But still.  Eight years was more than enough.  Suffice it to say that I like it even better when we’re hanging out together more regularly.   Thinking back on the all the great times we’ve had on New Year’s Eves in the past, things are even better between us now.  She’s the anomaly for me.

Professsionally, it’s astonishing how much I’ve evolved since 2001.  Back then I was a software engineer, architect, and CTO — a technologist.   Since then my interests have broadened to activism, security, privacy, voting rights, blogging, asset-based thinking, narratology, diversity, intersectionality, standpoint theories and situated knowledges, oppression theory, action research, and hot pink beanbag chairs.  And it’s worked out pretty well for me.  I’ve identified a scientific revolution in progress, given keynotes, been on a National Academies/CSTB pane, organized workshops and conferences, been quoted in the Times and WashPo and CNN and Wired, and had front-page stories on top-10 blogs in the progressive, black, and feminist blogospheres.   Like I said, wow.

For a while, 2010 was shaping up to be an anti-climactic end to the decade.  Despite the high hopes of a year ago, Qwork fizzled in a very disappointing way and has been on hiatus since the summer.   And the Computers, Freedom, and Privacy conference wasn’t what I had hoped for either — despite heroic efforts by my co-chairs. In retrospect, all my fears that I had overcommitted proved to be accurate. Sigh. I hate it when that happens.

Fortunately things turned a lot more positive in the second half of the year, with the help of some sweet Kona sunsets, plenty of psytrance and networking, a healthy dose of grassroots activism, and of course National Novel Writing Month. Our thinking on Tales from the Net continues to evolve, and D (who wrote a novel of her own as well as a couple of short stories) had a real conceptual breakthough last week. So once again there’s momentum going into the next year.  Yay!

There’s a lot more to reflect on about the year and the decade, and a whole bunch of posts I want to write: the Web 2.0 bubble, feminist/womanist/mujerist alternatives to Facebook and YCombinator, Wikileaks, #mooreandme, resistance to the TSA, and suggestions for white guys. Oh well, there’ll be time for all that next year.  For now, it’s time to think about  having a good time this weekend — and how I’m going to make 2011 even better.

Resolutions — and Vibration

Last year, I put a lot of thought into resolutions for the new year and the new decade, and came up with a list I was pretty happy with:

  • choosing desire over fear
  • trusting my intuition
  • trying not to analyze things too much
  • falling through the limitations of intelligence into pure and simple creativity
  • bringing inner ecstasy back into my consciousness
  • having more art, beauty, and fun in our lives
  • spending more time with women — and in particular the women I love and the goddesses I know

On the whole I think I did a pretty good job on these in 2010 (although of course there’s plenty of room for improvement), and they certainly made my life a lot better. So I’m going to roll those over, and once again resolve to do all those things in the upcoming year and decade.

And here are my new resolutions for 2011 — at least tentatively**

  • get more sleep. ever since our Hawaii vacation, it’s been clear what I need to do to sleep better; I just need to do it 🙂
  • spend more time on Dreamwidth, If We Ran the World, in chat, and other diversity-social media — and less on Facebook and Hacker News
  • finish and publish g0ddesses.net and Tales from the Net
  • bring a better balance of femininity, flounciness, and flirtation into my life
  • (maybe one or two more, still getting feedback)

If I can do as good a job on these as I did on my resolutions in 2010, it should be a heck of a good year 🙂

Vibration, spanning the decades

Vibration Celebration featuring Penta New Years Eve 2010Tonight, it’s Dissolve , Leohawk, Psynthetic, Megadrop, and PENTA … w00t! I remember seeing PENTA as the sun came up in the Mojave Desert several years ago, and of course we’ve seen Liam Shy of Dissolve on Pink Saturdays and NYEs.  It’s a perfect opportunity to continue to make progress on a lot of my 2010/11 resolutions, although don’t think it’ll help all that much with “get more sleep” :-)    It’ll be a time for seduction, fantasy, and reality, hanging out with friends (and thinking good thoughts about the ones who aren’t there), and a chance to reflect the texture of the kee g0ddesses.net’ scene that’s set at a psytrance party on New Year’s Eve.

And when midnight strikes, I’ll once again be dancing with D, thinking of all the past midnights we’ve been together. Oooh!

Happy 2011 everybody. Vibrate well!

jon

* as well as “radiant energy, tempering of experience, balance, and learning to transfer the life force from the imagination (moon) to the conscious (sun) — another stage on the fool’s journey to mastery”

** my personal rule for New Year’s Resolutions is not to finalize them until the end of January, so they’re subject to change