| VERY LIMITED FACEBOOK & TWITTER |
[Apr. 3rd, 2012|03:00 am] |
I would consider opening a Facebook account so that I can learn how FB works. Same with a Twitter account, which I assume you can use from a standard PC, because I am not buying a fancy cell phone. Once I learned how to use them and the quirks of message coding for them, I would delete my accounts.
The above would be only so I can add social networking savvy to a resume. Seems like everyone these days wants employees to be adept with social networks. At east know what they all are. I'm just not interested, and wouldn't participate unless using a company account as part of the job.
If a prospective employer demands my user name and password so he or she can read my blog posts to determine my trustworthiness, I will respectfully refuse. They can read this journal. All my posts, except for three since I started in June 2000, are public. Employer demands for access to social networking accounts is a recent trend that might be illegal. It shows a serious lack of trust by a prospective employer. If they are worried I will gripe about the company and working conditions they might as well put a wire on me and eavesdrop on my conversations. I'd more likely gripe directly to my wife or one trusted friend or relative than blog it to the entire world.
But don't hold your breath waiting for me to book my face or start tweeting. |
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| (no subject) |
[Mar. 23rd, 2012|03:56 am] |
First post of 2012. Posted only nine entries in 2011. Not important any more to have a "blog," like it was in 2000 and 2001.
I am out of touch on the social networking scene. Good for me to learn all the different ones, at least read other peoples to know how the sites work, so I don't look to potential employers like I stepped out of a time machine from 1974. I've been a bit of a luddite with the techie stuff, to my detriment. Not that I'll run out and buy a cell phone. I barely get enough worthwhile phone calls on the home "land line" to justify having it. Cetrainly won't be buying one of those I-phones, Droids or whatever that does everything but drive the car for me. No money for them or the service plans to run all the doodadery. Not that it wouldn't be fun to play with. I'm thinking I might ask a friend to show me how to "text" and send one from his phone to my wife's phone, just so I can say I know how. And also to play with some of the doodadery so I can say I know how.
I have so far refused to do the facebook thing. I calculated that roughly 12.07 percent of t he world's population is on facebook, that's about one-eighth of us, based on the latest tally of users, 845 million, and the world population now at 7 billion. Plus, I still am concerned about my privacy after having read some articles about facebook and privacy concerns raised by users.
But maybe I will. But I will use it for serious commenting on issues of the day -- a real blog -- and for marketing my poetry and mabe photography.
Speaking of photography, I am financially limited to using point and shoot digital right now. My first P&S cam, the Kodak, partly crapped out early last year; I can't set functions because I can't see the settings on the "live view" screen any more. I finally figured out howto set and keep settings on the Pentax P&S digital so I should be getting better pix. I haven't downloaded any yet. It's a very frustrating camera. Too much gadgetry, which drains battery power quickly. (The trade-off is batteries recharge quickly in the charger.) The view screen in back is lousy outdoors, compared to the Kodak, particularly on sunny days. I can barely see anything even if I shield the thing.
So here's what I decided to do: EXPERIMENT WITH INTUITIVE PHOTOGRAPHY. Just aim in the general direction if I can't make out anything on the live view screen and shoot. Try it on all optical zoom settings. Might be fun.
So that's this Be's life at the moment.
Still having a hell of a time even finding jobs to apply for. I do think age discrimination is sneaking in there when I do apply. When I apply for copy editor jobs at daily papers that are advertising open positions, I think my years of experiment now are working against me. (Fools!) I wonder if they are doing the math and calculating I am an old fart who might retire in a year. Yeah, right. Not saying outright this is the case, but I was damn good at it for nearly 11 years, and now I can't get a the time of day, even from my hometown newspaper, which is where I most want to work if I am to return to the news business.
This is not a complaint.
These are late-night thoughts that will end now as I go to bed. LEaving them as "first thought, best thought," unedited and un spell-checked, on purpose. |
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| CLEANIG UP CLUTTER IN HOUSE AND MIND |
[Dec. 16th, 2011|02:27 am] |
| [ | When I wrote this I felt like ... |
| |  bored | ] |
Last week I tore up and tossed out out-take prints from photography school photo assignments. Carried around 20 years. School was huge waste of a year. Disappointment with the place set in within first month. First year was basics, of lighting and studio, with very little time to actually set up lights and learn the studio. I don't work well with having to set up, shoot the assignment whil still figuring out starnge equipment and then break it all down again for the next person to set up. I shot a lot of shit and the results showed in damn near zero aesthetic inspiration. I already had cut up and thrown out many of the finished assignments last yer for the same reason. Too fucking depressing to look at them and remember how energy-suffocating it was.
Also lst week I tossed out newspapers from the week of 9/11, both New York Times and Seattle papers. Included coveted New York City late editions of N.Y. Times 9/12/2001. Too much physical and mental clutter to hold on to these relics. Move on, I say.
Also took another big box of albums to Value Village. Starting another one. Hopefull will send off a total of 150-200 albums in these boxes. Will have paed collection by a third over this year as a result. I see the materialism of the days when money was flush and I had to round out my collections of certain artists instead of setting money aside in savings. Now I can't stand most of the stuff I've been tossing and admit I didn't like much of it after I brought the albums home. It's still hard to detach. I tend to live in he musical past mainly high school and Jr. college days 1967-72. But I'm finding it's boring. I'd rather have a couple of singles on singles rather than on an album with a lot of tracks that are OK but not that great. In some cases a greatest hits album is all I need of an artist. Others I'm keeping albums because they are rarities from the 60s and not out on CD (or out on CD but have great cover art best viewed on a large vinyl album cover). Also took a stack of books and a grocery bag of casettes and CDs.
I don't regret any of my decisions to unattach and let go of this stuff. I no longer want to pack and move lots of shit I won't read, look at or play. I don't miss any of this now-gone stuff. Say goodbye, move on, no regrets.
After more photo prints go, I will start going through old negative and slides that are collecting dust and are mostly dull crap, especially slides when I had ideas about hooking up with a stock photo agency. Agencies wanted photographers to shoot thousands of photos a year of all types of subjects in the film days. I wasn't goig to come close with my budget for film and developing. They still want it in the digital age and I could provide it, but the market is saturated with cameras in everything from cellphones to toasters. I feel like I am one more dinosaur from the days when quality meant more than quantity.
This post is first of mine since about Sept. 1st. Length makes up for it in quantity. But lack of enthusiam drains the quality.
That is all untill who knows when or if ... |
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| New poem finished 9/1/11; ©2011 by me |
[Sep. 1st, 2011|04:20 pm] |
A Theological Puzzle
In grade school Sister said hate only the devil
and Dylan said hate only hatred.
Jesus said love your enemies, love everybody.
Does this mean don’t demonize Satan, the father of demons?
I wonder what Buddha would do if faced with this.
The sages of God can make life so difficult.
© by Jim Bacon, 2011
(LJ did not give me the option of Rich Text this time. Last entry it defaulted to HTML even though it always defaulted to Rich Text, my preference, for years.) |
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| "Connect the synchronistic dots of fate" and watch how your lifepicture shapes up. |
[Aug. 29th, 2011|03:21 am] |
"Connect the synchronistic dots of fate."
— An old, forgotten "personal philosophy" I made up and wrote at the end of my LiveJournal post of October 4th, 2001. I later changed the last word to "life." because "fate" can imply unintended accidents and coincidence, whereas "synchronistic" is about "meaningful coincidence" that might very well be the "Universe" sending a person in a new new direction on the lifejourney. It's a cosmic thing.
I've been looking for a post I am sure I made after 9/11 about a list Clear Channel sent to its radio station of 150 songs to avoid so as not to inspire or further piss off future terrorists. One of the songs on the list was "Imagine" by John Lennon. It was a pathetic list and captured the paranoia and fear and over-caution people were feeling after the terorist attacks. I said so then and I repeat it now. I haven't found the post yet. If I don't I will do a web search and see if a link still exists to the original list.
MOVING ON. OFF TO RECORD SIDE ONE OF A NEW MIX TAPE, LETTING THE THEME REVEAL ITSELF AS IT WISHES AND AT ITS OWN PACE. ACTUALLY RE-RECORDING; THEME WASN'T READ YET AND I TRIED TO FORCE THE ISSUE.
gOOd niGHt. |
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| A poet who know zit ... |
[Aug. 18th, 2011|07:14 pm] |
Working on editing more of my poetry. Writing and editing of same gives me great joy. I appreciate my creative spark and expression of unique voice in words.
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| lightNing souL thunDer rOll |
[Jul. 22nd, 2011|01:20 am] |
Amusing
Am using
A muse, sing
Her body eclectic
Inspiring, enlightening
lightning soul
thunder roll
across your gentle anger ...
Spontaneous wordplay I wrote — 1999, I think — in a pocket notebook of thoughts and verse and addresses and Miss Ellany. I'm pretty sure I wrote it about TV Goddess, a kindred soul of Great Creative Awakening and clearer of lingering patches of two-decade-long consciousness fog. It made more sense then, in my Springtime of Awareness, when tentative blossoms of Self-Expression Flowers of shyly poked out of buds of Possibility bushes.
(Am I having a 1966 flashback? Did I set the timer on the Wayback Machine to a 1959 beatnik coffeehouse?)
Green is her favo-rite co-lor, she sez. Heart chakra.
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| A-buzz with excitement — a new phase in this Beeee's life? |
[Jul. 22nd, 2011|12:36 am] |
I'm feeling excitement and bubbling energy of possibilities for the future ...
A living in the present moment sense of possibilities.
Twenty years ago I checked into art schools and colleges in Minnesota looking for photography programs. One school was in Minneapolis, but I don't remember the name of it. It was either associated with or physically within shouting distance of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. Tuition was $10,000 a year in 1991, money I didn't have and I didn't want to accrue 40-grand or more in student loans in my early 40s. But the course offerings sounded exciting and diverse, including, I guess you could call them socialogical or multi-cultural studies of "Third World" peoples. The art part would have exposed me to techniques I knew virtually nothing about and might have stunk at, but would have been fun to explore.
(My favorite painting at MIA is called "Portrait of a Boy" by James Read (1856). Click on the title to see it. Then get up and walk around the computer and watch his eyes follow you; even the whole body seems to turn and follow. (Especially noticeable at full size in the museum whether you are right next to it or across the room.) Here's your Halloween card, folks.)
I eventually settled on a photography school in Spokane, Washington, considered by people I trusted as the second best photography school on the west coast. I moved back to my home state and wasted a year at the school. The best teachers had recently either retired or died, and the program quality sank.
I still think of that art school in Minneapolis. I wrote tonight to the museum telling my story and asking if they knew what the school might be.
I've been feeling unsure of the future, but excited about possibilities. I hung out with Disney Channel online today and actually watched a couple of full episodes of shows. I realized I enjoyed it and all the cool graphics and design of the website. I've been kind of cynical about watching videos online, but tonight I was thinking if I had to return to school to update my skills, I'd love to learn serious web design and all the associated software and dood-dads (and doo-moms) associated with it. I still prefer to watch TV shows and movies on televisions and theater screens and not a computer screen, but I think putting this together would be extremely fun and I could make a decent living with it.
I've always in my career and in college had a knack for computers and getting "behind the scenes" as it were, to learn and know how the system below the surface works. In college I ended up with a typesetting job and got to learn the "secret" parts of the system that we used to produce the school paper. In professional life I knew the ins and outs of the software and overall editing/pagination systems at all papers but one.
What's been shifting, and this is a spiritual shift expressing in reopened-mind attitudes, is negative thoughts and feelings of "not good enough"-ness. I've had a heck of a time finding sterady, full-time work in the last 4½ years since the daily newspaper I worked at for 10½ years went out of business. It was good, steady, stable work, but I grew complacent and basically zoned out. I'm tired of that and have been refocusing, making myself stay open to synchronicities, those "accidental" encounters and happenings of life that lead to new adventures and insights.
My pastor's "talk" at church Sunday was "Work is Love Made Visible." In it she said that if working, love what you're doing. If you're unemployed then your work is to find a job if that's what you want, and to love looking for work. I decided to treat my job search as a treasure hunt. I'm staying open to synchronistic "clues" to the treasure. I need to find a new job that pays at least $800 a week. I love my part-time bookstore job, but it comes nowhere close to paying down bills that stacked up during the last 4½ years when I was either looking for work or recovering from a serious health problem that led me to quit a good full-time job in 2009. I don't know where I'll end up, but I'm going to stop worrying and let the Chi, the Tao energy flow, guide me, and if I get stuck, to reveal the aforementioned clues to the next place to look. Because I got insanely frustrated and bogged down when I was on unemployment, looking for jobs and finding good-paying work that I was only marginally qualified for. I often found myself applying for jobs that met the quota of "contacts" -- I could do the work, probably, and I would have taken one of those jobs had one been offered to me, but it didn't feel right applying for them. But I needed the unemployment check. That's the wrong energy for trying to find work.
I'm searching under some restrictions: One is the mortgage. The house was on the market twice and got no offers. And either I or my wife might get a job in a new city first and have to pay rent on top of that. But I decided that if it is "meant to be" to leave Seattle, then all of that will be taken care of, someone will be moved to buy the house and either both of us will find excellent jobs in the same new place or one of us will be earning double what she is now or I was in January 2007 and for four months in 2008-09.
I don't know if anyone bothers to read anymore what I write here, but I don't care. I wanted to go public and express this, to put it out into the energy of the universe. Admittedly I've toyed often with the thought of hitting the delete button on this LJ after 11 years.
In early 2005 I opened a fortune cookie and the message was, "You've got a way with words. Maximize on it." It struck me as a command. I've made excuses and put it off since then, Today I feel very expressive and creative and adept with wors. I'm just going to write them down and express myself. If it means a new career as a writer or public speaker or radio personality, or famous poet, great. I'm "letting go" of attachments to "I can't" and "I haven't a clue what to do so why should I try" thoughts. As my pastor said, "Do what you love and the money will follow." She was quoting from a book and said you don't even need to read the book, the title says it all.
Moving forward in the adventure ... good night. |
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| Repriorities |
[Jun. 16th, 2011|02:23 pm] |
Packing up albums for thrift store, books too. Focusing on collecting 45 rpm singles now, like when I first started collecting records 50 years ago. Gone off my "FM-rock" phase back to AM nostalgia. A mystique about looking at an unadorned single lying there in a simple paper sleeve with only the label's name, song title and artist name; no cover art and no liner notes except songwriting credits. Mystique of this unadorned object, this thing, that when played on a phonograph all of a sudden out comes The Beatles singing "All You Need is Love" or Wilson Pickett singing "Mustang Sally."
Hard to clean up the clutter in the house. But it must be done. Cluttered house reflects a cluttered mind. On the other handf, clutter also can reflect an eclectic, free-thinking, mind where an excessively neat house can reflect a neurotic, excessively worried, mind.
Enough philosophy.
First journal post here since February 24th. Limited writing to comments elsewhere, even that skimpy.
Yesterday was 11th anniversary of my first post here. I forgot until today. Back then it was exciting, sending words out into the spaces between the cybers. Now everone is doing it and its a loud, cacophony of opinion, often worth empahsizing the phony after reading them. Perhaps as you do now about mine. Here is what I wrote, spontaneous one take, complete:
TAKE 1 I'm looking for youth among the bootleg-whiskey tunes of Bob Dylan, pulling back visions of long nights alone in my room where I scratched out bad verse in notebooks trying to paint Van Gogh masterpieces with words but making only paint-by-number splotches.
Pulling back visions of long nights under the Watergate raincloud at Sad-Eyed Charlie's house, comparing notes on "The Young and the Restless" as our own soap opera unspooled.
Me and Charlie and Quiet Steve discussing magic of Dylan and Woody, Phil Ochs and Pete Seeger. Breathing in the soul of America through "The Anthology of American Folk Music." — 2 a.m. meditations on the meaning of Highway Blues dissolving as Joke-A-Minute Jimmy crashes the service, Mr. Mile-A-Minute Mouth prattling like a farty, cologne-reeked uncle who spoils your sister's wedding.
OK, youth had its old-man moments.
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| Bye, bye, Anonymous |
[Feb. 24th, 2011|01:25 am] |
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For what it's worth, I just disabled anonymous comments. All I've been getting lately is auto-generated spammy shit. First time in 10 and a half years of this journal that I restricted comments. |
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jimmiebeeee's journal