Reviewing something current: This is My Jam

Here’s what this one is about. I just want you to like this site, this product.

I’ve used it for just over a week now. I’d like to give you a nutshell, and then explain my experience of it. Hopefully that will support me in explaining why I want you to use it.

The nutshell

The concept: Tumblr, but just for music. Industry experts can correct me.

Signup: Easy, as usual. Link your social profiles, emails etc. Follow people you know who are on there, expand as your other friends join.

You start on the “My Jam” page. You have the option to search for a jam, and your search gives results from soundcloud and youtube. Once you choose your jam and optionally add a little comment, it is set for a week.

There’s some design options for you people who care about that stuff. I don’t think they’re that complex, more a kind of flavours thing.

Embed-on-request rights are respected. As a consumer of a service, I assume the provider(s) of that service are vigilant to protect me from inadvertent rights misuse. I’ll happily discuss that (1) in the comments should anyone be interested.

Your jam and those of your follows are displayed in reverse chronological order on the site home page. If you click the play button on an individual jam you will start the list playing in reverse order until the one week event horizon is reached.

Developing of your network occurs virally, and through the discovery tools. I’ll discuss them under:

My experience of it

The social discovery tools are very interesting – I’ve just linked through to my last.fm profile, which should give me some crunchy recommendations for random follows.

Social Recomendations are categorised three ways that I’ve found so far:

Derived from my jams – I’m introduced to people who are jamming similarly.

Trending jammers – not necessarily so fond of that.

Friend-of-friend recommendations via likes – I saw a jammer (into the lingo already!) recommended as “most liked by your follows”.

If you want things to change on your jam, throw down some records

It’s ok to change one’s jam anytime – you’ll remove your previous one, so you won’t be spamming in terms of “post count”. I’m not sure if I’d get annoyed at someone who continually threw out new tunes. Sure they’d stay at the top of the list, but if they were sharing good songs I’d go with it.

Your playlist isn’t evolving the way you’d like? Add people to it. Prune it. Throw out tracks. Most importantly: Respond to the community you’ve created.

I don’t use TiMJ constantly – I check in on it. I give the people on it time to surprise me. My favourite kinds of surprises are new songs, which is

Why I Want You To Join

The limitation – music only – is where the victory lies.  It’s a perfect answer to my issues around sociality – sometimes words don’t work at all for me, but sound always does.

Yep, it’s all about me

It’s good therapeutic practise to ask for what you want, in an honest and respectful way. Anyhow,

Bowtie it with a story seanfish

Someone laid down a remix of Blue Jay Way, which I liked.(2)

I threw out Fiona Apple singing Across the Universe.

Someone #2 shared “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away” by Eddie Vedder (which wasn’t to my taste).

Someone #3 rolled out “Creep” by Radiohead – the acoustic version, which I “liked” and love,

@wilwheaton stepped up with Massive Attack – Protection, and

I got all the squee

This is My Jam.

(1) At nauseating length.

(2) In airquotes and simultaneously not in airquotes. Please view this as standard practise.

Why I desperately want the National Government to love me, sex me up.

I have a need for attention and validation, as I have mentioned before.

I manage to moderate this day to day so that begging doesn’t take place, but being shown an absolute disregard for my worth as a person can just push me over the edge.

Treat me badly, and I’ll be yours forever. This government treating me – us all, really – extremely badly indeed. The best kind of bad is when lies are involved – and the best kind of lies are ones delivered despite all evidence to the contrary. Oh god does this government make me hot.

I’m just putting on my gimp mask.* This might get uncomfortably personal for some of you.**

I’m reminded of a close family member I caught giving my name to the police for traffic violations whilst disqualified.

The first time I was really a little annoyed. The person pleaded with me to let them pay the fines  to make amends.

The second time hurt, as did the mention I found on my police file of domestic disturbance I was apparently active in at that person’s house. Which I’d never visited.

Because I so desperately want to be loved, I still tried to repair that relationship*** – as if it was on me to do so at all.

The first forays were responded to with outright lies. Yes, this person agreed they had done so before. They nonetheless felt I was unreasonable in asserting they were by far the most likely culprit. Surely, they said, many people in the world have my full name and birth date at close recall.

We did better later – up to a point. Wrongs were acknowledged. I had to ask, how do I know this won’t happen again?

“I have my license back. I don’t need to.”

Good one.****

That’s how it is with this government. Each time they’re caught they lie until put on the spot. When they’re honest, it’s worse.

I’m not asking for much. I’m very eager to please. I just want John Key to look me in the eye while he fucks me.

* I do not own a gimp mask.

** It sure is for me. Jokes! Not.

*** I still am, by the way, and will always be.

**** I might be an emotional victim, but I’ve now got a note asking police to check for a fish tattoo on my right arm should anyone give my name without ID.

graffiti

Never a truer word said.

Remember last post? Oh those good old days of clarity. If only the sporting life were my concern this week.

Some undue mental energy has become bound around currently-unshiftable work issues. I’m meditating, and consulting with appropriate channels. I am engaging with my support community, and not letting my negatives define me.

As far as the remaining task of self-management; I’m a big believer in the art of applying minimum effort at the right moment as a path to success – it allows room for more right moments to be found. There’s also that cheesy metaphor about the glass jar, the rocks of varying sizes and the sand.

The sand is where my comfort lies right now. Some larger rocks are sitting still, but I’m gaining traction on stones and pebbles.

Monday was a glory – I got to do the real stuff, and stand in front of a group of very intelligent and capable seniors and tell them all about ebooks. Will write about said in eLibrarylife  soon enough. I spent the afternoon handling real books. Weird.

Tuesday was getting little things done with a series of wonderful moments interspersed. I’ll discuss the excellent talk from Netsafe on cyberbullying (statistics! Joy!) over on the other blog to which I sporadically contribute at a later point.

As Tuesday is  band practise, I’ve arranged to leave a little earlier and make up time later in the week. This lets me get in before Northern stops moving and gives me a couple of great hours to enjoy the town.

I was in the mood for walking, so made my way down Queen Street.

I discovered an amazing trio jamming at the bottom of Vulcan Lane. Their music sounded like it was from Sesame Street.

Electric bass, tin drum and didgeridoo at Vulcan Lane

I turned, looking for refreshment. Rakinos suited my need to change from professional person to Bohemian, so I sat at one of the terrace tables to enjoy the sunshine and the cup.

I was trying unsuccessfully to wrangle my phone when a lady asked if she could share the table. She was smoking, I wasn’t – I could hardly object. Bronwyn, a Bohemian herself, was in her young sixties. She introduced herself by showing her business card. Her title: Artiste.

We talked of the education system, locations of opression, and the need for all citizens of good standing to understand the concept embodied in the song Gaudeamus Igitur.

I then went up to Albert Park for a short but enjoyable meditation.

Dinner was Double Cheese Pancake from No. 1 Pancake! (their apostrophe), my first time. It was… light and bland, but fried. Oh my poor arteries. Good thing my day was spent walking up hill and down dale.

After dinner – music practise. Lots of fun as we were exploring something new and different.

I got home just in time to kiss Sal goodnight – I’m never ready to sleep the minute I get in, and she was ready for an early one.

Today was spent just sifting through the sand. Some grains were moved. That’s a positive, right?

Confessions of a…

Just like that, things snap into place.

Work has moved into some very interesting phases, and my hamster of a mind has a number of very satisfying hamster wheels to run in at present. Sometimes the wheels even move forward. This is the art of public service.

On the personal front, the work done in therapy on mindfulness have culminated in a series of useful decisions about how to manage being me. A bit of a deep hack with a few helpful kicks up the arse by kind onlookers.

There is still – and may always be – work to go, but the next steps are clear in my own journey. As always – finding ways to be more comfortable and open about who I am.

So here’s this year’s one. I am, as I was discussing with a friend on the twits today, a flirtaholic.

This is because:

1) My mother.

2) My father.

3) I genuinely like women and enjoy life when I can have lighthearted jocularity of a grown-up nature with them.

4) And some men. Whatevs.

Not such a hard thing to state, actually.

How does my wife deal with it? She knows who’s boss. I tell her I am very lucky very often.

All is well in the world.

I’ve thrown this one out before, but it seems appropriate.

In your dreams, seanfish.

 

The Mojo Mathers incident: Look at the the process, not the person

So, this afternoon I tweeted about the Mojo Mathers situation in Parliament. I was annoyed that a lot of the talk was directed at the personalities, and not enough at the mechanisms

Brief recap: Mathers is a deaf MP. She requested communication support from the Speaker, a position currently held by one Dr. Lockwood Smith, erstwhile television gameshow host and former marine biologist. Dr. Smith’s response was to require Ms. Mathers to pay for the specialist, disability-related support services out of her general MP’s support service fund.

Personalities: Yes, Dr. Smith is a dyed-in-the-wool social conservative. I’m quite sure he’s a sympathetic man, but it’s far too easy to imagine he’s just ignorant that differently abled people have problems of any real significance.

Right there’s my first problem. Is it that easy? This is a highly educated and very experienced public figure.

Before I move on, I also want to make this very clear: I believe a terrible thing occurred. If MPs have a capped personal support fund, it is inappropriate for a deaf person to effectively have $30,000 less than any other MP just to function as an equal.

Here’s the thing. What really happened is this:

• Mathers asks Speaker for support
• Speaker seeks advice
• Advice given based on best interpretation of standing orders
• Speaker passes on advice

Thaaaat’s all folks. Lockwood Smith may or may not be any number of unPC things, but the role of the Speaker as she is played is  as a functionary rather than an idealist. It’s a neutral role. Might there be improvements made on the Westminster model? I’m not clever enough to say. Should civil servants advise with passion? I think so, and I think this could have happened here. Other solutions could have been sought.

Is Mojo Mathers going to get her support? Yes, and I would hazard a guess from the speaker’s office. Should there be no way for the current standing orders to designate an existing appropriation for the activity, it is perfectly possible to introduce new standing orders.

Not that it wasn’t just darling of that nice Mr. Key to (wildly inappropriately) offer to pay for the service from government coffers.

State of the Nation Address

OK, so here it is.

Sometimes I am near the world, some times I… wander off a ways. #blogjune pretty much pushed the limit as far as my need for intimate communication goes at the age of then 40 and counting.

That’s, the age. As for the stage; I’m easy with it – a good course of group therapy (DBT, do it if you’re a bit stuffed up eh) and an increasing engagement with meditation may have helped.

That’s not to say I’ve thrived; but I haven’t suffered every single minute, nor have I felt an excessive amount of genuine concern – I say excessive, because being bipolar gives two sets of circumstances to manage against, and two different lenses through wish to interpret.

Better yet – therapy helps us to move from the poles and create a middle. Sometimes it feels less exciting than a good dose of hypomania – more’s the pity. Weaning one’s self of “excitement” is a hard sell, but I’ve learnt to do at least a few things for the pure wonderment, and a few for their pure necessity. Both are good for the soul, and better than all the pizazz in the world.

Not that I’m not still a song and dance man – so to those of you who are sometimes commenters – please nag me to do some rehearsal for my upcoming gig. Then the ball will be in my court. It might be a little bit exciting.

I’m butthurt about New Zealand on Air

This is the second time I’ve used the word “butthurt” today. OK, that time was the third. Today, and ever.

I think it’s a terrible word, but I seem to be committed to it now.now.

What I’m butthurt (4) about is this strange, circular story that’s come out about NZ on Air today. Here is my reading of the elements:

• TV3 airs a social issues documentary (about childhood poverty, containing as far as I know no party political bias) close to the election
• No members of the public complain
• No political parties complain (unless you see the below as backroom finagling… but surely not!)
• No members of the electoral commission complain
• Subsequently, the Prime Minister’s electorate secretary, Stephen McElrea uses his position on the board of NZ on Air to prompt the board to:
  • Write a formal letter to the Broadcasting Minister saying that, quote “we feel that we have been dropped in it”
  • Make strong represenations of concern to TV3 to said dropping sensation
  • Seek legal counsel as to whether it would not be better to amend the broadcast covenant so that programmes about political issues not be screened during the election

So… couldn’t that last part conceivably include the news? I mean… isn’t that full of political hot topics, particularly around election season?

Oh wait, I forgot this is New Zealand. Our election coverage is easily sidetracked by nonsense about who had lunch with who. Sweet Valley High anyone?

What, apart from being “dropped in it”, is NZ on Air’s concern again? Ah that’s right, they feel the broadcast “calls into question our political impartiality”.

They’ve certainly put that particular question to rest.

I’m completely b…

othered.

Balm for the restive souls out there

Because friends have expressed concern:

• My understanding of the mechanisms and origins of my social anxiety has been in place for a long time; discovering a new, useful label for those processes has given me a new language to explore that, but has not altered my approach to life – merely confirmed it.
• I knew my brother needed to talk about those issues (not the first time he’s raised them), and knew if he got distressed it would be distressing to me. I knew that he would get distressed. I chose to navigate through that distress with him in full awareness of the consequences.
• Irregardless of the aforementioned: I am incredibly grateful to have friends who show care and concern. I am only strong enough to turn the harm from my family situation into joy, love and giving because of them.

To quote the good blue Doctor:

I am disappointed, Veidt. Very disappointed. Reconstructing myself after the subtraction of my intrinsic field was the first trick I learnt.

Your traumatic stress disorder is in the post (trigger warning)

I’ve been watching a new twitter buddy pour her heart out over the last few days or so. Some real nasty stuff happened to her and she’s apparently feeling a need to get it all out there.

I’m not sure what made her start talking at this time in this way, but I get the motive. Some traumas are such that they visit us afresh throughout our lives.

After this weekend, I’m really starting to realise that the anxiety part of my experience comes from a post-traumatic stress disorder – which my wife immediately said “Bingo!” to, and looked relieved when I mentioned it. I didn’t really experience anxiety in its own terms until my mood disorder became managed. Prior to my thirtieth year I spent much of my time naturally (oh alright, and sometimes artificially) high as a kite or flat numb. I can tell you looking back that my anxiety affected my actions, but I certainly didn’t feel it the way I did post-diagnosis; I just assumed that was part and parcel of my bipolar. I’m starting to suspect that a predisposition towards bipolar cycles was exacerbated by the trauma – essentially fantasy and numbness became my ways of escape.

Over the last few years I’ve really been able to start dealing with this part of my illness, and it’s still the hardest part to talk about. I can tell you about being “nuts” and even turn it into a fun story; I am able to tell only trusted people when I’m feeling my trauma near the surface, and even then I can get five sentences out before a panic attack intervenes.

Well, I’m over doing that, but I’m also over being in stuck in hall-of-mirrors type looped thoughts, so I’ve come here to share. Welcome to my expurgation.

The hard part is – and the reason why I can’t even say five words to close friends without freaking sometimes – a large part of my trauma came out of a culture of verbal attack in my family. My native expectation is that people will use my words against me. If you want a reason for discourse analysis overdose, you have it right there. I can literally (when in a bad space) wear myself out analysing a conversation (or my increasingly fractured recall of it) until I don’t know what’s true and what’s not.

A culture of physical attack is the other precondition. My parents were semiregularly physically violent to my brother and I as well as each other – although with wooden coathangers, for example, semiregularly is more than enough. My brother’s choice to protect me from them and the world, however, was to very frequently subject me to attacks I – much smaller and never interested in fighting – had no defence against. His theory was that he needed to educate me about the world, and help me develop an ability to protect myself. Suffice to say, he overdid it, although he and I are in agreement as to the validity of his original intentions. We have spent decades unable to be in the same room, and I’m so grateful I get to see how he’s a different person in his love for my nephews, and in the brotherly bond we share.

He needed to have a talk about what has been happening between him and mum recently – she’s started getting all over him about his parenting. For some purposes he and I are the only people we have with whom we can talk about this stuff and not have to explain a lot of uncomfortable things. Unfortunately we needed to work through a gob of our personal stuff to get there – so he basically hassled and pushed me until I stood up for myself, and while he didn’t directly threaten me with violence he described a lot of his past fights to remind me of his capacity to harm. As my protective big brother he needed to check he’d done his work well. He did. He’s one of the few people who can genuinely faze me, and when he did so I let him know in no uncertain terms, and that I wasn’t going to put up with it.

Here’s the thing. He and I got through it. The trauma we created together was mutual, and protected us (because it was in our shared control) from the more incomprehensible situation of realising that, unlike us, our friends were growing up trusted their parents. That we were the different, and not in a good way, ones. We both wish we’d found other ways to survive – but we’ve both worked not to hand the destructiveness on. We needed to connect, so we revisited that trauma until we could connect as the adults we are now. We had a really good talk and agreed that people who had a zero for two track record in terms of producing offspring able to function socially without serious therapy and/or medications of various sorts had no right to go commenting on the parenting of others. Indeed, after examining the whole situation we came to the happy notion that while we loved her and cherished her, on this account mum could in fact “go to fuck”.*

Now, a few days later, I’m experiencing a boomerang effect. All of my trauma – and there’s decades, because I sought retraumatising situations after I escaped (literally) from home – have come out to visit; I knew when I blurted out my ‘stuff”‘ to a friend who really has her own ‘stuff’ to be worried about following a meeting today. I’m sharing here to keep ahead of the nightmares I have at these times. Constant nightmares when I’m is the mechanism that keeps me in insomnia. Having had an unprecedented run of weeks without, I’m damned if I’m going back. Facing and embracing the darkness is the only reliable method I’ve found, although music and meditation sure help.

Apart from those tools, my close friends, my wife and family – all of them I’m really thankful for this wonderful world where people like me (us) can share who we are.

I’ve been looking for new approaches to community recently, and I ran across a podcast by American comedian Paul Gilmartin called the Mental Illness Happy Hour. In this week’s episode, Lee Thorn talked about his PTSD with the host and his son Jesse, another great podcaster. It really, really helped.

*That act of public inappropriateness is dedicated to the baby in this inspiring blogpost.