I’m diving back into regular blogging, and what better day to do so than on Blog Day 2007? I really dig the notion of a day dedicated to exploring blogs of people who are quite different from ourselves, so I’ll be sharing 5 blogs I enjoy that are outside my usual reading range.

iCiNG
iCiNG is the fashion blog of Gala Darling, a globe trotter based in Australia and originally from New Zealand. I’m not generally a fashion enthusiast, but Gala’s excitement is contagious. (Plus I have a weakness for pink-haired beauties.) She has become the most unlikely addition to my daily reads, so where better to start this list?

Baghdad Burning
Riverbend is a an Iraqi woman who blogs about the politics and personal events taking place in occupied Iraq. I began reading her blog a couple years ago and have kept up with her accounts of life within Baghdad with great interest. Her updates have become infrequent and she may have left the country, but she has offered a rare look into a devastated place.

Rural Pinoy Biker
I enjoy biking and foreign lands, but I didn’t expect to be drawn into “a Pinoy biker’s Philipine rural adventures”. The author’s joy in biking is immediately apparent and has brought up my own fond memories of biking.

Fish Feet
Fish Feet is a sharp and accessible science blog that focuses on “evolution, biodiversity, palaeontology, conservation and current controversies”. Sarda Sahney’s insights and commentary are always a highlight of my daily science reading.

Lucid Nutrition
Briana Franco writes a wonderful food blog that showcases recipes, social issues, information and other nourishing content. I’m looking forward to trying out Veggie Enchiladas Verdes.

Thanks to I Quit for Lijit for the heads up on Blog Day.

I’ve been tangled up in leaving a job, moving, cleaning my old apartment and getting ready for my return to university these past couple weeks. I should be returning to a more normal schedule very soon.

I always feel drained and unhappy when I haven’t been writing and keeping up with all day. This time has been especially bad, as the frustrations involved with moving have added to the sense of being disconnected from what is most important to me. It’s feeling good to be sliding back into normalcy of lifting weights, reading inspiring writing, and hitting the keys.

I’ve launched ApolloLemmon.com, the nexus of my life online. There you’ll find an aggregation of blog entries, links, recommendations, and other bits from my life. If nothing else, do take a look at the links, because I post the best of what I discover online there.

Now I’ll enjoy a weekend in St. Margaret’s Bay with my girlfriend Gwen.

Stars‘ focus to human drama and deep hope have left me madly in love since I first discovered the band several years ago. Set Yourself On Fire, their last album, was my favourite of 2005 and their new release is a contender for this year.

In Our Bedroom After The War is a refinement of the rich songcraft Stars have honed on previous releases. Vocally focused, musically expansive and lyrically sparse and narrative, these songs are as dramatic, head-sticking and emotional as any the band has released, marking their best work to date, a real achievement after their incredible last effort.

In part, the album focuses on the hope we can have after disaster. The title track bares that optimism in the face of strife, whether personal or of the greater world, and demonstrates the band’s unflinching facing of the best and worst of us. Passion, caring, destitution, despair, “life and love and death and sex” are distilled here in the glowing and aching songs. Free from irony, and brimming with earnestness, this is rare music. It captures all the lowness and greatness of our lives with a beauty that is inhabited with such obvious passion that I can’t help but be moved with each listen. So rarely is this attitude found at all, but when injected into some of the finest music being made today, it’s a real treasure.

Here’s the video for the album’s first single, “Take Me To The Riot”.

Forget your name, forget your fear.

The data we can collect from our lives is increasing exponentially and a new lifestyle of Lifelogging is emerging. Ubiquitous recordings of many individuals’ lives are being willfully created, archiving what they see, what they hear, how they move, their relationships, their biological indicators and countless other facets of their lives. While most of this is surface data, when it is combined with blogging and other interpretive records of experiences a robust model of a person could emerge.

The value of including lifelogging in our lives has potential to be immense. Medical use alone could improve our lives greatly, allowing doctors greater access to various symptoms of pathologies. Having an aid to our natural memory would be welcome, especially to those suffering memory loss. Parsing the data could even provide us with recommendations for where to eat, reminders of friends we have been neglecting and a host of other life-enhancing features. It’s a transhumanist dream becoming a reality.

But there are negative potentials in this emerging field. The line between the private and public spheres is already blurring, and details we may not want known could spread. As we record ourselves and others record us a certain level of dishonesty and unhealthy reserve could emerge as a protection against being outed as less perfect than we’d like the world to believe. Conversely, many of us may end up using lifelogging to prop up our notions of narrow identity, just as blogging does for so many.

And just what data is valuable to us? Our natural memory parses out information that our brains deem unnecessary and this certainly helps us in our daily lives. When we can record information our brains would normally discard, how do we filter out what is useful at any given time? Much like the with internet as a whole, the navigation and organization of our life data is going to be critical in making lifelogging a seamless tool.

If we can cultivate transparency and use this technology to examine our lives well, this could be a great leap in our understanding of our selves. We could hope that it even allows us to step back and look at all we can objectify about what we think of as ourselves. Our bodies, our thoughts, our feelings, all of the things we identify with are objects arising in our Self. And objects always change. We will see a record of changing objects and nothing more. We can keep pealing back the onion layers of our identities but we are always, first, foremost, and in essence, awareness. And awareness sees but is never seen.

Voyeurism finds its way into every corner of our world, even slipping into our pockets. Projects like Face Your Pockets! and The Items We Carry are looking into what we keep on our persons and maybe prompting us to explore the utility, clutter and art of what we carry.

I decided to take part in The Items We Carry to catalog what I have with me and examine why. Most of what I have are utilitarian tools, owing to my minimalist bent. Everything with me has some practical purpose and is in the smallest package I can afford and find, from the classy Jimi wallet to my iRiver media player. I travel happily light. You can click on the image below to see my Flickr-tagged items.

I’m increasingly interested in how I can create an aesthetic theme in the items I carry. Crafting some overall impression conveyed by what I have interests me surprisingly much. How can we alter the identities we walk around with so that it better realizes potential both in actions and communication? How can we express freedom, responsibility and other intangible traits outwardly? Is there a fashion for liberation, an aesthetic of care? If there is, how do we create it?

Wendesday night was my first experience of Halifax’s Shambhala Centre, the culmination of my sangha selection deliberations. I decided to attend the weekly open house and Gwen came along.

The centre itself is beautiful, with a small pond in front and an elaborate but welcoming aesthetic inside. The room for meditation instruction, where Gwen and I went first, was filled with so many varieties of meditation cushions that I couldn’t count them all. The main ceremony room was filled with the beautiful and rich trappings of Tibetan Buddhism.

The open house was a simple introduction to Buddhism, first with meditation instruction in breath focus and walking meditation and then with a talk explaining the basics of Buddhism and Shambhala. The two instructors were very warm and seemed well versed in the tradition and practices. I immediately had a sense of casualness and a genuine atmosphere of welcome. The group in attendance was small, tilted toward the feminine and a mix of ages.

I’ve dipped my toes in the water of Shambhala and so far I’m happy with what I’ve found. I plan to attend this week’s open house and explore more of what the centre offers. While I haven’t yet delved into the other offerings of the centre, I’m feeling optimistic that this will become a vital support for my practice.