Dream, 8/11/15

Originally posted on Facebook.

While lying in bed preparing to get up and face the day, I remembered a dream I had last night and felt compelled not only to write it down but to share it with my friends. (I'm sharing with my Facebook Friends but thinking of the friends in my dream, my friends and comrades in Oakland.)

TFW your tech work needs a trigger warning

It happens sometimes. I do web work and other kinds of tech support for community organizations, some of whom I work with outside of paid work. Working at this intersection of technology, my activism and my communities means I get shaken up at unexpected times.

Today I was working on a plan for a new website for the Audre Lorde Project, an organization I've worked with both professionally and politically for more than a decade now. I was checking out their site analytics to get a sense of what their site traffic might indicate about who's coming to the site, and for what.

I pulled up a report of their site traffic over the past year and saw two huge spikes. I started looking into the first one.

Swan Lake

This past week I saw a pair of trumpeter swans a'swimming on Swan Lake in Wyoming.

Since identifying the lake as a destination on our hike, Tchaikovsky's Swan's Theme has been firmly lodged in my brain. When we reached Swan Lake itself I dramatically sang what I knew of it from the shore, one of my companions helpfully picking up the tune, my arms spread wide, for once not really caring whether I disturbed the people or creatures around me. (And hey, it's important to scare off the bears!) I even made a fair attempt at a lesser-known section that leads up to the repetition of the leitmotif.

A few moments later an older white couple walked over to us, one of them smiling and then enthusiastically thanking us for our performance and appreciating that we managed to stay on tune. She laughingly claimed that the pair of swans across the lake, which I actually hadn't seen before I began singing, beat their wings against the water to applaud us as we sang. (I later joked that they were probably beating their wings in frustration, thinking "goddamn it can people stop singing that fucking song at us already?!?")

I'm fairly certain that out of our group of four in which I was the only non-white person, this woman did not expect me to be the one who'd first encountered Swan Lake when learning an adaptation of the theme during piano lessons at age 6 or so; the one who is probably most personally sad about Tchaikovsky's life trajectory and deeply moved by his music in that light; or the one who would, upon returning to reliable and secure wifi, download a good recording of "Swan Lake," listen to it incessantly, marvel at the Swan dancing en pointe in YouTube videos, and tell their partner happily of their newfound appreciation of ballet after having stuck primarily to non-ballet classical music and opera for the past three decades and that they'll go to the ballet with her more enthusiastically than expected after all.

Site under construction

LOL, couldn't resist the throwback title.

Welp, the old version of jackalop.es got hacked a while back, as WordPress sites are wont to do in my experience... So luckily while helping out at the Intro to Backdrop training at BADCamp last week I got the opportunity to set up a new website using Backdrop, my favorite CMS. Exciting to have a Backdrop site all of my own to mess around with now! (Funny, I never really considered setting a Drupal site up for myself...)

Things are a bit of a mess right now; lots of broken images and embedded videos and WordPress-specific things that no longer work. I'll gradually be getting this place in shape. And who knows, maybe I'll start posting again, even!

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