Our Descent Into Madness

Tomorrow, my younger brother and I begin a journey to Ghana to join a distant relative of ours who runs a music program there. From what I understand (and it’s not much!), he provides free lessons to the local children throughout the year, and invites around 20 college students from the U.S. to participate for 3-4 weeks in the summer. We’ll spend the majority of our time hand drumming, which is something I’ve never done.

We’re staying in a very rural village on the coast, which we’ll have to hike into. As you might have guessed by now, I will not be blogging during this time.

I have no idea what to expect from this trip, from Ghana, from this program. Undoubtedly, I’ll have much more to say when I’m back. In the meantime, keep Daisy company for me and join us in celebration of the completion of our second year here at Our Descent Into Madness! Our first post was July 14, 2006. It was about Hufu, The Healthy Human Flesh Alternative.

Love the next few weeks of your summer, and I’ll see ya early August.

~Emily

I’m going with my girlfriend and her family to their woodland cabin for the weekend, so Emily will have to hold the fort down alone for a few days. Happy 4th to our stateside readers — I hope we all get to see some lovely fireworks and enjoy some (vegetarian) barbecues.

– Daisy

Oh, what a rut we’ve been in here.

We’ve been preparing like crazy for our upcoming art festival — three days of desert camping and collaboration with somewhere between 30 and 200 of our closest friends. I’m not being facetious, they are our closest friends. And like last year, we’ll have no clear picture of what the turnout will be until people get there. This is further complicated by the fact that people come and go throughout the event.

It’s this weekend. Tomorrow we’re going out into the desert for even more preparation; we’ll be outside out the reach of the internet. We’ll be back early next week, probably Monday, depending how long cleaning up takes.

Among the other things that have kept us from blogging, Emily’s been occupied by some family obligations. Unrelatedly, my mom is about to leave the country with her partner — we’ll be house-sitting for them for the next few weeks. They have a bountiful garden for us to take care of. Sunflowers, roses, poppies, pumpkins, carrot flowers. Several fruit trees, and a grape vine that looks like it might bear fruit this year. Also lettuce, broccoli, thyme, rosemary, lavender, mint. We’ll be in charge of watering, pruning, picking, and helping the climbing plants up their terraces.

We’re leaving tomorrow to attend The Art of Community Southwest, a three-day conference about intentional community. We’re very excited! It came to our attention some months ago when it was mentioned over at Laird’s Commentary On Community And Consensus, so we’ve had plenty of time to look forward to it. Emily and I are going with my girlfriend, Jessie, and our friend Brenden. We’re staying in a hotel and everything. And the workshops look fascinating — I don’t know how we’ll ever choose which to attend.

I’m sure we will have our laptops with us and at least some internet access, but you can expect the trend of spotty posting to continue through Sunday. You can also expect some interesting posts on the things we’ll be learning about and conversations we’ll be having: sustainability, consensus, co-housing, co-creation, and more.

On a different note, I am completely freaking out about watching the Lost season finale tonight. Eep!

So we’re suddenly on summer vacation, i.e. reunited with each other. We’ve been spending all our time and more capering in the immanent world.

My dear brother gave me a typewriter. It’s fairly new — early 1980s — but what a different experience from the computer keyboard! The sound. The violent physical jolt of the carriage, the motion of the hammers as they swing. It’s electric, but infinitely more mechanical than the one I’m typing from now, the flat grid of buttons on my MacBook. It makes noise whenever its on, even when one isn’t typing — a heaving, buzzing sound, vaguely like breathing.

The typewriter can correct mistakes; there’s the option to switch from the black ribbon to a white one. And it has a little bell that sounds at the end of a line. (These things may well be standard and unremarkable; I know almost nothing about typewriters, except that my parents used them all through college, and that I want to find an Underwood some day, because they’re beautiful.)

Unrelatedly, check out this link Emily sent me. Print your own beautiful, (allegedly) functional 35mm pinhole camera! They look amazing. I will do the project and report back.

Emily here.

It seems I haven’t posted in who-knows-how-long due to family visits and the preoccupation of a new apartment/moving in and out of the dorm. However, I have been keeping tabs on some neat things noted during brief, periodic internet check-ins. So, if I had been posting regularly throughout the week, these are some of the things I may have drawn attention to, in quick-link form (via Boing Boing unless otherwise stated):

David Byrne turns entire building into musical instrument.

Ceramic ray guns.

The Offline Oracle, via Craft.

Global map of social-networking sites and their use.

Hopefully, blogging on my part will resume some semblance of regularity in coming days.

Oh, and another thing. Not until yesterday did I believe it was possible to truly fall in love with a piece of furniture (clearly I’ve been spending way too much time with one of my aunts, who is in the life-long process of continually renovating and redecorating her apartment). But then I saw this on display somewhere in SoHo, and whoa, were my preconceptions shattered. The picture, of course, does not do this item justice–at all. First of all, that wardrobe is BIG. My head wasn’t that much higher than the handles, standing next to it, on the other side of a glass barrier. And it’s wide. I just want to crawl up inside of it and make it my home.

I can’t stop thinking about it.

Of course, it’s so expensive that the price is available only on request, and therefore, it and I will never co-habitate. I guess I’ll see you in a parallel dreamworld, then, my whimsical Wonka-Seuss furniture friend…

:(

What is it about blogging under the influence that’s such great fun? I’ve blogged while intoxicated by at least three different substances, and for some reason it’s been uniformly great.

I write to you today high as a kite on hydrocodone. I had a filling done earlier this week and, like my forebears in times now past, clenched and ground my teeth in my sleep in response. This resulted in a strange scene around two o’clock this morning: me, insane on the bathroom floor, and my girlfriend on the phone with my mother.

What strange and horrible pain. It was much, much worse than the dental agonies I survived during the saga of my wisdom teeth a few months ago. I have a pretty high tolerance for pain, but this I felt I could not bear. It made me cry. When have I ever cried because of a physical sensation? Not since childhood, I’m sure. Five push-pin piercings, a homemade tattoo, a parlor tattoo, wisdom teeth growing in and getting yanked out… None of it coming anywhere close to this. On the pain scale of one to ten, I think this was an eleven.

At my mother’s advice, I took 800 milligrams of ibuprofen, and my girlfriend put ice cubes into a ziplock bag, wrapped the bag in a shirt. Even the full force of the ibuprofen only reduce the pain from “completely unbearable” to “very bad,” from eleven to perhaps seven, maybe six. Somehow, with the ice against my face, I managed to capture some snatches of sleep.

I woke up at 6:30, took another 800. At nine o’clock I awoke again — by this time I had decided against school — and felt my teeth starting to work themselves up to that fever-pitch again. The pain was in full force more than an hour before I was due for another dose.

Some time and many tears later, my mother had made me a dentist appointment, and my father had brought me the hydrocodone left over from the wisdom teeth procedure. I have never been so grateful for analgesics.

The dentist concluded that nothing was wrong with the tooth or the filling, just my anxious jaw clamping down on itself. Got a temporary night-guard — a plastic contraption that prevents you from putting too much pressure on your teeth — and instructions to take the hydrocodone as needed, and to call if I develop acute pain on the recently filled tooth, or swelling, or a fever.

And that’s how I got here. The pills make everything pillow-soft. The many tracks of my brain have been closed; I focus only on one thing at a time. I don’t know that I’ve ever read blogs so carefully, so diligently, collecting every precious word in the one operational facility of my conscious mind. I read every single post on Boing Boing today, every single word.

This is the first guest-post from our friend Brenden. Our idea was to have him post an anecdote about once a week, because such funny things happen to him, and he’s a good story-teller. However, we’re not sure yet whether this is the right medium for Brenden, nor are we sure whether this is appropriate for Our Descent. So consider this a trial run. Feel free to tell us if you want more of this, or if you’d prefer we not do this again.
– Daisy

Hi palaroos. This is the the famed Brendenator. I live on campus at the state university. Unfortunately. Unfortunately not because I dislike learning, or being mentally active in anyway, but for some reason not being able to brush my teeth without the smell of my Army Seargeant neighbors drunken vomit doesn’t appeal to me for some reason unknown. I am a Piano Performance major, so spend nearly all my time doing music related activities. For some reason, people think its a good idea to say ridiculous things to me in the early hours of the morning as I tiredly venture on a walk to my theory lecture. For example, I am not really a smoker, but I enjoy cigarettes, so sometimes I have one. This happened to be one of those times. I was on the way to my theory class when I was approached by an athletic looking chap and his posse of rugby type long boarders (not uncommon). The alpha male approached me and said oh so creatively, “Smoking kills doode.” Don’t get me wrong, I am all about confronting the opposition when the are supporting the puritanarchy and such things, but I had done more practicing than sleeping, and I was just smoking a god damn cigarette, and obviously as far as I could tell had the facial expression somewhat similar to an angry rhinoceros, so obviously the stupidity of this individual to approach me as such indicated the usual level of surprising stupidity I find on my campus. I unintentionally replied, “So does time pal, and yours is running out.” This sort of oblivious misjudgment of my temperament is quite common. The purpose of this story is an introduction to future posts of things such as this as they occur. It is a little difficult to re-trace the past like I just have with the unsurmountable amount of unspeakably ridiculous instances that occur involving my life on an hourly basis. So in the future I plan to relay the happenings of this parrallel universe I find myself in as soon as they happen, for your entertainment of coarse. Internet-tainment. Ha. Intertainment. Ha ha. Thus is my purpose in life, to intertain others. At my sanity’s expense. Which makes it all the better. As for now, goodbye blogosphere, and get ready to BRENDENATE.

It’s probably apparent to all that our posting has been on the low end lately. Emily and I are both somewhat overwhelmed right now, but don’t think we’d let that interfere with the state of the blog! We’ve asked our good friend Isabel, who did a great job covering our bottoms while we were in Belize, to come on as a guest-blogger for awhile. We’re confident she’ll turn out very interesting posts, supplementing our modest output. My girlfriend, Jessie, also might join us for a post or several, in her various areas of expertise.

And we might be having periodic posting from our friend the Brendenator. On that last front, consider yourselves warned.

Emily and I have been happily reunited with each other and our friend Brenden, so blogging is likely to continue to be quite light for the next few days.

I’ve had another post stewing for my Many-Headed Goddess series, but I’m starting to think I probably won’t write it. It would be about discovering the specifics of one’s own sexuality beyond basic gender issues, about uncovering kinks, I guess, opening more closets. But I don’t think I’m ready to write that one yet. So maybe later, maybe never.