delicious

I really like the idea of del.icio.us though I'm finding it slightly more troublesome to make good use of it.

I suggest that if you're curious, you read the del.icio.us about page. Basically, it's this system to make bookmarks, but the bookmarks are out in this sort of public collection of bookmarks, and so people can see your bookmarks and they have this tag system for categorization and so forth.

My del.icio.us is so far mostly populated with blogs of people of varying degrees of related to me, which may prove a needless and problematic categorization system, and a bunch of news sites I read for work. It is interesting though to browse bookmarks of other people.

obligation

How is it that a person can be made to feel obligated to their peers to update a blog constantly? I find the notion kind of absurd, and I very much like to think that I do not write these things for the sake of people reading, but primarly for the sake of myself.

I understand that this is perhaps a bit of a self-absorbed position to take, but, let me tell you, if somebody were to voice a complaint that I hadn't updated recently enough, having been maybe only a week since the last update, I'd probably be pretty annoyed. I mean, I'd absolutely be annoyed if I said in advance I was leaving, or something, but that obviously isn't what I'm talking about. I mean, suppose I just stopped for a week? What then? Nothing, I should hope.

I realize I am often as guilty as anybody of being overly apologetic, but I feel that certainly in the case of maintaining some personal weblog, it's just silly to feel obligated to people to update. Readers have done nothing for me, and in turn do not feel as I must do anything for readers.

slipping away

Is it strange of me to find the idea of leaving town forever kind of interesting? I mean, I'm not on the lam here trying to evade the feds or child support payments or anything like that. I don't need to disappear completely at all. Though reading about how it might be done was certainly edifying. I think the only thing I'd even begin to consider applying to my own life though is the bit on "dropping off the grid".

Apparently Wired ran a piece a couple years ago about how to achieve different levels of invisibility and while a few of them seem like easy enough and good ideas to adopt in the interest of improved privacy, they don't, for me, really address the idea of packing up and severing ties to people and a place.

I guess a lot of it is that I don't really want to sever ties completely with anybody. Maybe it's cowardice or some other weakness but I don't think I can honestly say that I'm mentally prepared to truly turn my back on somebody forever. But, that's not something I should really be worried about either, I think. For example, take my exit from my hometown of Harvard, MA. I suppose technically I did leave for a few months before finishing high school, but that was only 4 months, and when I came back, not much had changed. All the people I knew before were still there, and while in some ways slightly different, for the most part, were all still the same.

The end of the Summer before my freshman year of college though, people started heading out to school, all before I did on account of the somewhat frustrating quarter system we adhere to, and I felt as if I was saying real goodbyes. I haven't really been back much since, either. My family all moved away that year, and since we no longer have a home there, we don't go back much. I went back a couple times after starting College, to visit friends who were still there, but I stopped seeing most of the people I knew from school. A small group of good friends is all that I kept in real touch with, and now, they too have all moved away from Harvard.

It was weird, the weekend after the fourth of July, we drove by our old house in Harvard so my sister could pick up this guitar we'd left in storage. After we grabbed the guitar, and saw my the house occupied by yet another family of strangers (it looked less and less like the house I remember), we did a quick drive through the center of town. The high school had a bunch of work done on it, and so looked very different as we drove by. It created for me this very strange sense of being somewhere entirely new, because so little looked familiar.

But I've completely sidetracked myself. Well, not entirely, I suppose, as at the end of this year, I imagine I'm going to be in a similar situation again. I'm going to be packing my things, and hopefully pursuing gainful employment somewhere else new. I wonder who I'm going to make an effort to keep in touch with, who will make an effort to keep in touch with me, or if I might just consider moving without telling anybody, then getting back in touch a year down the line having completely relocated myself?

I feel like I only ever think about this when I get sort of frustrated with how things are going and I feel trapped or something. I wonder if ever I'll get to a point where I'm just so fed up I start packing up. But that's what's strange - I'm really having a great time this Summer. But in spite of that, I have these daydreams of just driving off. Well, actually, more like hopping on a bus, retreiving a car under false pretenses and then driving off, but, close enough.

common sense isn't

So I was browsing around technorati and I came across this one blog called Dooce which I found kind of interesting, mostly because it sort of puzzles me that there are people like her and Kottke who can and do appear to live by blogging alone. But, that is besides the point.

So anyway apparently this Dooce character is a bit of an internet celebrity and so she linked to some piece the BBC had put online about her, in which she offered 4 tips for blogging. Summarized, they are:

1. Blog anonymously if you want to blog freely
2. If you choose to ignore #1, don't ever ever write something about somebody you wouldn't tell them to their face
3. If you make an email address available, people will send mean things to it, this is a given.
4. Good writing is not a prerequisite, just be honest and "have soul"

The first three seem like common sense to me, and though the fourth is certainly a nice thing to say, I think there is some sort of lower bound because at some point things become almost if not entirely unintelligible. Common sense though they may be, however, I think I've at one time or another managed to ignore them to bad effect.

It's tricky though, to stick to these simple guidlines. For me, at least, it is tricky because I am not ever vigilant in constantly checking to make sure I haven't said something to somebody that might get passed along some grapefine and ultimately come back to haunt me. And so while I certainly do find it at least somewhat enjoyable to spend a few minutes checking the blogs of people I know and reading about what they're up to, and from time to time writing something and letting people who know me what I'm up to, at times it can be a source of anxiety. I might ponder the interpretations of what I've said or misinterpret somebody else's remark and then get all caught up in thinking about who's talking about who and what do they mean.

Or it might just be that there will be some time period when many people will suddenly stop and just drop out of contact. I'll start speculating as to what they're up to, or if there's some other reason. I think there's never actually been a situation where I was ultimately proven right with my wild speculation, but this lack of reinforcement has not yet stopped me.

Oh well. One of these days I'll figure out how not to get so carried away with thinking about trivial things.

food and drink

While I was getting this free haircut yesterday, the guy handed me a copy of the June Esquire Magazine because we were waiting for the intimidating Kristof guy to come back and continue his teaching on my head. Anyway, I was flipping through it and in this one article, which was some list of "things we are pretty sure will remain healthy for the next few years", said that procrastinating and lying are bad for your health. The reasoning behind it being that apparently the anxiety from having these nagging thoughts from procrastination, and the guilt from being deceptive both detract from one's health.

A quick google search found this article about how feeling guilty about doing things will lead to decreased immune system strength. Also linked was an article about how being more stressed will slow the healing process. This is all nothing particularly new though, as I imagine most people are at least vaguely familiar with the notion that being extra stressed will make your immune response poorer.

Wait nevermind. I'm just going to stop here rather than go on making assumptions about the people around me. I'll just work on absolving myself of guilt in the name of good health.

the written word

Entirely coincidentally, I've been writing a bunch of letters recently. Some to people for whom writing a letter is actually the best way to keep in touch with them, and some to people who I continue to be in touch with electronically on a much more frequent basis.

It's strange how writing a letter has affected my communications with those people I can more quickly and easily keep in touch with via email or instant messaging. In a way it reminds me of a situation one might expect to find in some sitcom, wherein one character leaves voicemail or something for another, then encounters said person before the voicemail is received, and the awkwardness of the situation causes hilarity to ensue, provided the writers of the show are good enough.

Anyhow, letters seem like if they were the only means of communication, they'd be just fine. There wouldn't be nearly as much room for error in terms of accidentally redacting what I say because if I must, I can always just wait for a full round of letters to complete before writing more. There is, I suppose, room for some confusion were I to write more letters to somebody before receiving a reply, though I think I've only been on the receiving end of that situation, not being the most prolific letter writer I know.

When you introduce email and instant messaging though, it gets tricky. I don't remember precisely what I said in all these written letters I sent and so I am a little more reluctant to continue other correspondence because I am too worried about possibly rendering myself incorrect or something like that. Worse still is that these people continue communicating to me electronically because I believe that for all of the letters I mailed out, I am the one initiating the written correspondence, and thus they are as of yet unaware.

Oh well, we shall see. Most of these should be pretty quick, and really, putting the rest of my communication on hold on account of these letters in limbo is foolish.

job search

I was playing around with some news aggregation software at work to expedite the process of finding and filtering relevant articles out for updating our sites, and I saw this link to some article about blogs and job searching. Being that I will almost certainly be looking for a job this coming year, with my disinclination towards further schooling at present, I find it somewhat worrying that I am writing in this blog about this article. (Jul 14: another article)

A cursory google search for my name indicates that my older blogger account, not this one, shows up, along with my blog from as far back as early high school. There used to be another blog that I even maintained a bit up until recently, but in an attack of paranoia I have since replaced it with a blank placeholder. When I get some more time I'll go through and systematically remove myself from things like the google cache. Sorry to disappoint the residents of 5345 #1 who were reading it, I hope you all read to your satisfaction already.

Would the things I said in high school be a liability to me? Maybe, but probably not. Would the things I said in the last year on the now unavailable blog be? Probably yes, I think. Will this one too come to be so anxiety laden when I try to update that it too will be abandoned? I guess time will tell on that one. Whatever the case, I've now divested myself entirely of any sort of continuing attachment to the old blogs and the blogger account with which they are associated. I'll not delete them for my own archival's sake, but no more for the public eye.

King of eating

The face off:
Takeru "the Tsunami" Kobayashi

vs.
Sonya "the Black Widow" Thomas

Excellence...

He's a phenomenon.

So sad I woke up too late to go and actually attend.

But I can't forget my girl, Sonya Thomas, "the Black Widow"!

climate change

As the people I know here at Columbia have already expounded on to me, I will now mostly repeat things I have been told.

There seems to be a lot more pressure to look better here, than there is in Chicago. But I suspect it's not really only a difference of cities, or regions, but also a different of schools. I'm told, and for the most part believe, that the difference is even more dramatic still if I were to compare the UofC with NYU.

The bottom line here being that I think if somebody asked me if I thought people looked better here or at Chicago, I'd say here. It's hard to explain, but there is definitely a stronger cultural influence that I feel I experience and the pressure is to look better. Going around looking slovenly as I so often do at Chicago is something I think I might be able to do a little here, but I'd quickly be made to feel like I was doing something wrong.

Well, it's not really that bad, but all the same, presumably there is some social phenomenon at work here to account for how it is that all these not-ugly people accumulate away from Chicago.

Somebody's probably going to pounce on me for not really thinking this through much before hitting that "publish" button.