The Past Three Months, Q2, 2016

This post is sort of a follow on, now that I've arrived at a more stable schedule. In part, this is also to encourage accountability from myself in terms of what I've been dealing with and working on?

I'm also going to get into some of my reticence and a sense of the ambiguity of full, un-censored disclosure in a later post, but for right now, I want to establish a format where I post one of these every quarter or so and update goals or just explain why updating here has been erratic or what exactly is going on?

First off, it is probably fair to address the fact that this blog's url is "urbanengineering" and is written by an erratically employed Engineer with Engineer in Training (EIT) Licensure in the state of Illinois.

However, (yechh pardon the grammar choice) this blog rarely deals with specific engineering or science topics and is more a repository for fiction or writing projects that don't fit anywhere else and sometimes has more to do with philosophy and culture.

I have a plan for creating another blog, possibly in Fall or Winter of 2016 that is going to deal more directly with science and philosophy of technology, but this project is strictly in the planning stages and might be deferred to my "hold" or "wait" lists until 2017, depending on how or if my employment situation changes?

All that having been gotten out of the way, the past few months have been busy adjusting to a new schedule, getting research reading in order for the rest of the summer (maybe even the Fall) and doing planning and initial note taking for some fiction stories. Rest of my time is divided between looking at employment, interviewing for jobs and trying to bootstrap a chunk of my old thinking on real world testing of emerging machine cognition theory into something more complete?

I may get to that in a future post here, but for right now, that is what I've been working on. You can get a closer look at some of my more recent thinking by following me on twitter @GregStaskowski or search for most of my previous work just by typing in "gjsengineer" into the search engine of your choice?

I don't expect this blog to have a significant audience anytime real soon, but for those of you who do check in from time to time, I expect my posting frequency to go up possibly targeting five to ten posts a month depending on what specific posts seem most useful or relevant?

"Happy Trailz"

So, what have I done for you lately? 1

Answer, not much.

My problem in writing when I'm trying to build something entirely new is I eventually reach a point of compounding and stacking unrealistic expectations and anxiety where I go from "trying to write" to "now it is impossible to write" and there is no way to make progress whatsoever.

This leads to a very simple and specific outcome where I need to stop hammering on myself, step back from the computer, close the awful thing down and then find something, anything, else to do, for two to three weeks until this amorphous, soul destroying negative feedback loop has effectively dissipated and I can try to get back to work.

So, how was your end of May?

I did end up doing quite a few things I really like that had absolutely nothing to do with real specific work. These included.

1. Hiking the Green Bay trail in the Chicago Far North and just generally doing my bohemian dropout routine. Took pictures and explored quite a bit, finding really nice comfortable libraries I like and just getting exercise and thinking.

2. Found a number of fun used book and record stories in various strategic and useful places.

3. Spent some time at the Chicago Botanic Gardens which always hugely relaxes me even when I get to hike back to the Metra train station in the rain, which somehow was still pretty fun.

I admittedly should have said something before now, but if you keep up with me on twitter, I think I made the point that I needed a vacation and I took one? 

Chicago and a sense of "Place", Part 1

Lately, I've been hunting for novels and books that address more of a sense of "place" just related to Chicago as a city? I have a short list of books I think start to make use of Chicago as a "place?" I will have to read those books and see if my preconceptions match up?

I bring up this sense of ambiguity because there really is a tremendous amount of activity that goes on in Chicago and regionally, but the Midwest still seems to remain a "backwater" in American intellectual life? It seems to me that people start here in various ways but rarely do they stay in Chicago? I don't know how accurate that supposition is?

What I'm trying to articulate is the strange sort of dissonance in the "language of place" when it comes to Chicago? For example, it is very easy to just say to someone, in a first meeting, if they aren't from Chicago, "well, I live in Chicago, or I am from Chicago" and that won't really be questioned? But if you try saying something that simplistic to an actual Chicago native, immediately "Well, where did you grow up? Suburbs, Uptown, Wicker Park.. So where did you go to High School?"

There is this very detailled exchange that happens and the "suburbs" doesn't "count" to the Chicago native. New York City and L.A. just don't have the same sort of very granular identification of origin and "place" that Chicago does? Which is interesting, because traditionally, the roll of large American cities involves the re-creation and reinvention of personal identity and community? Or, I'm generalizing but trying to explain some of what I have observed?

Partly, Chicago and the surrounding sprawl are large enough but also contained enough that a sort of interesting anthropological and infrastructure study of economics and social life isn't as murderously complex as it would be in the two or three largest American cities?

Stay tuned, I want to think about this more.