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Weeknotes 26-19: porchfest

Yippee I got my photos back!!!! They estimated a week for turnaround and it was like 4 days, I dropped off my film at Hunts before even leaving the country and I still haven’t gotten it back lmao……… UPDATE: I got them back on saturday lol, okay time to write my vacation post!!!!!!!

Played all of Time Flies for work game club, really nice game!!!! We had a lot of discussion about the classic “time vs money” thing in games, as the game is only like two hours long but 15 dollars. Which of course the main argument here is “a movie in theaters is also 2 hours and 15 dollars” and also, imo, “a thing is worth what you’ll pay for it”. And it was worth it I think, great little game n_n

Went on another date and it was soooooooo awkward. I truly feel cursed with either dates that I feel go really well and then when I ask about a second one I get a “you’re soooo cool and awesome but I’m looking for something else sorry” or dates that are kinda awkward but then they say they want a second one and I’m like “okay sure maybe you’re just nervous” and then the second one is also awkward -_-

Porchfest was on saturday which is when a ton of local bands play on porches around somerville, sooooo cool and fun every year, though it was pouring rain all day which made it less fun. The last band we stumbled across was probably my favorite! Though honestly it’s as much about the music as it is about the Vibe of the entire day, just crazy amounts of people walking around and filling the streets even on a day as rainy as that one, soooo so cool. A big example why I love living in a city and could never imagine living anywhere else tbh

I love this section from calcvol4, she truly gets it

I think it was me who brought the conversation back to motor vehicles. I insisted that a car was not a means of transport at all, or at least that its actual function was something else. Afterall, weren’t our vehicles first and foremost a form of protection? I could hear how it sounded—as if I were now entitled to all sorts of opinions about cars just because I had sat behind the wheel once, but I felt compelled to explain what I meant. Had the family car not prevailed precisely as the institution of family was beginning to crumble? Suddenly every family had to have a car: the patriarch at the wheel, the mother beside him, the children tumbling about in the back seat, and thus the fragile nuclear family traveled around inside its own protective box. As if the family unit could be held together simply by packing it into a metal tin and setting it in motion. The patriarch had become invisible, he had become a wage earner, absent from the family all day, but when he was off work, they all got into the car and no one could doubt who was the head of the household. But by then, it was already too late. The family was changing, and soon the whole thing collapsed.

I could tell that no one really understood where I was going with this, so now I turned my attention to all the cars that drove around with just one person inside them. The urge to sit in one’s own vehicle. A person enclosed in a capsule. Wasn’t that the same thing? Isn’t that what we do nowadays: We do not stick together, we sit there, separated and uneasy, individuals without direction, selves at risk of crumbling, and so everyone must have a car. A self-car. A thin shell, but a shell nonetheless. A contraption for those with insecure identities who crave a more robust armor than that which is built from within. People think that the car is a means of transport, I argued, but it is not the engine that gives the car its value. If that were the case, people would never accept the hassle of owning one: the costs, the risk of being killed or injured or causing accidents, the endless traffic jams and parking problems and visits to the mechanic. We would not put ourselves through all that if it were simply a matter of transport. It is the body of the car we need, I said, not the engine. The engine is just an excuse. We claim that we need the car to get from A to B. In reality, we need it to hold ourselves together.

Just kinda always thinking about this, the entitlement that the vast majority of car-drivers have. I think about this every time I see a car with blacked-out tinted windows, the only real reason to ever do that is to cut yourself off from the world around you, never allowing yourself eye contact with the pedestrians you’re cutting off in a crosswalk, or bikers you’re right-hooking. I have to imagine so much of that entitlement subconsiously comes from people seeing the car as a sense of identity

Things I’ve been into this week!!!