cinderelly schminderelly

I'm not really sure what to make of this: The Glass Slipper Project.

It seems like it's great that they're going out and helping disadvantaged kids to be able to have outrageously expensive prom dresses, and given that they're apparently doing it by soliciting donations of used dresses it seems like this is a great thing to do. Because, to me at least, it seems kind of silly to hold on to that very expensive dress that was worn only a handful of times at best. Though, perhaps I'm not the most qualified to make that call, given that I've never purchased one.

But at the same time, TGSP will go out and purchase dresses when there is a shortfall in donations, and it seems a little peculiar to me that all this money would go towards buying these expensive dresses rather than buying books or computers or something for their schools. I mean, maybe books and computers aren't really any better as charitable donation-funded purchases go, but presumably there's something better than prom dresses, right?

Maybe I just don't like the whole prom tradition, but that's neither here nor there.

cowardice

This weekend I was supposed to get a lot of things done, but I've been putting them off because I am reluctant to actually follow through with the plans I made. I don't know if it's really out of being craven, or more that I'm just being kind of selfish and using other people as an excuse. It's pretend selflessness really.

I guess there's still a day left for me to try to build up the nerve to follow through, but, every day is worse than the next and the longer I wait the worse it will be later. I'm not even sure why it was that I made these plans, though I think at this point I'm just rationalizing backing out.

wasting time

I did a lot of things today, that for whatever reason, as I sit here and kill about thirty minutes waiting for the next woot to be put up, are coming to mind. I got trapped in an elevator, that one sort of sticks out. I fessed to having created a totally fictional internet persona that I had used to preserve anonymity to the few people left I was using it to interact with. I had a lengthy email conversation with somebody I haven't spoken to in two years, and had barely even met in the first place. I got a letter written weeks ago, only just today.

Have you ever been trapped in an elevator? I was going to leave work, and go home and pick up some sidewalk chalk in preparation for a somewhat malicious prank I have considered participating in. I walked out of the office at around 5:30, and pressed the down button at the elevator. I work on the 10th floor, for reference.

The elevator got there, and two people were in there already. The buttons for one and four had been pressed. Seeing this, I just stepped all the way in, and turned to face the door and wait. The door closed, the elevator jerked momentarily, and then stopped.

For the next 45 minutes, I was stuck in the elevator, but really, for the whole time, I just didn't care. I was annoyed that I was going to be stuck there. One of the people in the elevator was this guy with only one good eye, and I don't know if it was because we were stuck or what, but he had this weird way of talking in a sort of rushed and repetitious way. The other person was this woman who as soon as we stopped started calling all these friends and family. I just sat down and started reading. Well, not immediately, first we pushed a lot of buttons, and in pushing the alarm button a lot eventually the super or something showed up, and he apparently knew the guy in the elevator with me, and so they were talking, and he was like "I'm gonna stay here until you guys get out, so, just hold on." One of my coworkers came over to see what the commotion was about and asked if I was in there and if I was ok and how I was doing. In general, there was so much comforting or whatever going on, and I wasn't really sure why. I was just bored, and annoyed that I was going to get home that much later as a consequence. I never really felt particularly panicked or anything like that. Should I have? I imagine if there were more people in there, I would just get more annoyed, though I suppose at some point there might have been enough people that it would be beyond my theorized comfort zone.

I don't know. All things considered, it was kind of weird to just get stuck there for 45 minutes. If it weren't for all the yelling, I think I would have gotten quite a lot of reading done.

A couple days ago, I ran into this person who I did Habitat for Humanity with for a week in New Oreleans. I haven't really talked to her almost at all since then, but apparently she's been in NYC all Summer. This one particular day, she happened to be outside the 116th and Broadway gates to Columbia. I was going to cross the street to pick up a Village Voice before getting on the subway for work. I happened to run into her, and then today I was engaged in an active email conversation. It's sort of weird running into people like that. I actually ran into three UChicago people on that one day. That too was pretty strange. Anyway, that was weird. Maybe I'll take her up on trying to do something before she heads out of town next week.

About a year and a half ago, I made up a person. I created an aim account, livejournal page, gmail account, and so forth. Actually the gmail account was preceded by a yahoo mail account, but, whatever. With this person, I started fostering internet friendships with people who are basically complete strangers to me. Most of the people I initially reached out to, I've since completely fallen out of touch with again, but as of today there were still two people who I infrequently talked with. So at work, I was thinking about it, and I thought I didn't really have any reason to keep it up any more, and things would be so much easier if I sort of collapsed these two distinct internet personas into one. And so, I did. It was a great feeling of relief, suddenly not having this double life. Though, I didn't really follow through by waiting to hear what they thought of it. I assume there won't be any fallout for having been somewhat deceived all this time, but, really, I don't know. Worst case, I figure I'll just finish dropping out of touch with people who I'd already nearly done that with.

Oh well. It's about one now, so, hopefully I'll get around to writing a reply to this letter I got today, weeks after it was written. The author left the country so it's no big rush on my part, as they won't get the letter for a while no matter what.

This whole entry seems to be so filled with mindless drivel. I suppose it's mostly for my own sake that I should commit to some storage that I might see it a long time from now.

Google Talk

Oh snap Google has entered the IM fray with Google Talk. It's using the Jabber protocol which is pretty cool. They've got their own client if you're on windows, and if you are ok with a slight functionality hit, you can use it with gaim or something. Of course, if you're like me, you can use it with Adium (because other OSX chat clients suck [*cough*ichat*cough {not actually sucky, I just find it really frustrating}]).

Anyhow, it seems cool, even if I can't get it to play nice with Adium for myself. I intend to waste a lot of time at work tomorrow playing with the google client and with gaim though. It seems you need a gmail account, or at least a google account or something though, but as far as I can tell, they're just giving those away at this point. If not, they're still giving everybody and their brother invites to burn though.

mandatory fun

I find the phrase “mandatory fun” to be most amusing.  Fun, to me, seems like the kind of thing that it would be rather difficult to demand.  The very act of declaring fun mandatory, in fact, seems like it would make whatever activity that is being performed, less fun because of the pressure to be having fun, or whatever else.  

Maybe it’s just that it calls to my mind the vague memory of a Calvin and Hobbes strip, in which Calvin and Hobbes are on vacation, I forget if it’s the end of the Summer or maybe just a snow day or something, and Calvin is absolutely determined to have lots of fun in his day off.  So he goes running around and they do all this stuff and he’s always pressuring Hobbes to hurry up and the like so they can go do more “fun” things, but because it’s all so forced, it just ends up with them saying “having so much fun is hard work” or something like that.  Maybe Hobbes just asks “are we having fun yet?”  This description is not going to do it justice, though perhaps it’s adequate to make clear which strip I’m thinking of, at least.  

It’d be funny if there was a game called mandatory fun.  Then there could be something like the rules of mandatory fun.  The first rule of mandatory fun is that you must have fun. If you’re not having fun, you’re not obeying the rules and will be penalized.  Ok I’m beginning to tire of the phrase mandatory fun, shame that I burned myself out on it so quickly like that.  Next I’ll have to work on burning myself out on a phrase that more people find objectionable, like “hookers and blow.”  

Though, that people should find it objectionable perhaps carries some of the appeal.  Why I should feel like I gain from other people being uncomfortable with my use of the phrase “hookers and blow” does give me a little bit of pause though.

Oh well.  The weekend was fun, and lots of people who I haven’t seen the whole Summer are coming back into town, and so I expect that my last month here in this city will be a fun one.  I’m going to have to be careful in my strict rationing of time in the pursuit of mandatory fun though.

what's in a name?

So somebody asked me wherefore art I pantsfarm... well, actually, not so much, but I did get asked where the term came from.

One answer is like this: I was in China last Summer, and while I spent a Summer there, I saw a lot of things. One thing that really stuck with me, and I regret not having gotten a picture of was this garment factory. It was this hellish warehouse-like structure, in which there were endless rows of seamstresses, pumping out the pants. And so, just like that, I thought, "hey, pants farm." The thing about this answer, is that it is completely and absolutely false. I never saw any such thing, nor did I even think of the idea of a farm of pants until after I had already come up with the phrase.

What happened in truth was that Mike who hasn't updated since he's been back had a blog back in the day he called "rant farm". He took it down for much the same reasons I've since gone back and destroyed evidence of some of my older blogs having ever existed, that is, fear that somebody might read it and hold it against him. So when I was thinking about names for this one, I remembered liking the way the phrase "rant farm" rolled off my tongue, and thought to replicate it with a similar sounding choice of words. Pants came to mind, because many phrases that involve pants are funny, and in fact, the mere mention of pants is sometimes enough to send me into fits of laughter. When I thought "pants farm" the idea of a farm of pants struck me as utterly hilarious, and so I typed it in.

Ok that's true, but there's more to it yet. In reality, I spent a long time (probably at least 20 minutes) sitting at the choose-a-name prompt typing in different ideas and filling out that annoying CAPTCHA thingy and after a while I just got frustrated, and decided to use a nonsense phrase, which led into the above detailed train of thought.

email sleuth

I think it kind of amusing that I have gone from finding email addresses of people for one job, to finding email addresses for my current job. I suspect I could do it much faster if I just called up the phone numbers I'm so often given along with a name and company to look up, but I really don't like calling up strangers so I can ask them to give me their email address.

Instead, I like to hone my internet detective skills and see how many of them I can get without touching the phone at all. So far, I feel I've done pretty well. I'd estimate at least 85% found without calls, at least among the ones I ultimately ended up getting. If there was a higher rate of call return, the percentage would be lower, but it seems that many people don't really pay any mind to the voicemails left by interns calling up out of the blue to ask for contact information.

Wired Article: Even Geeks Need a Breather

"Modern technology makes long-distance relationships viable in ways previous generations can only envy. And yet having the ability to communicate constantly leads to the expectation of constant communication."

edit: haha better get me a jerk-o-meter.

The rain strikes the surface of the sea, yet even the fish don't know it's raining.

Some passages from "South of the Border, West of the Sun" by Haruki Murakami.

This one is from the end of Chapter Four.

"College transported me to a new town, where I tried, one more time, to reinvent myself. Becoming someone new, I could correct the errors of my past. At first I was optimistic: I could pull it off. But in the end, no matter where I went, I could never change. Over and over I made the same mistake, hurt other people, and hurt myself in the bargain.

Just after I turned twenty, this thought hit me: Maybe I've lost the chance to ever be a decent human being. The mistakes I'd committed -- maybe they were part of my very makeup, an inescapable part of my being. I'd hit rock bottom and I knew it."

The next one comes in a few pages from the close of the book in Chapter Fifteen.

"I always feel like I'm struggling to become someone else. Like I'm trying to find a new place, grab hold of a new life, a new personality. I guess it's part of growing up, yet it's also an attempt to reinvent myself. By becoming a different me, I could free myself of everything. I seriously believed I could escape myself -- as long as I made the effort. But I always hit a dead end. No matter where I go, I still end up me. What's missing never changes. The scenery may change, but I'm still the same old incomplete person. The same missing elements torture me with a hunger that I can never satisfy. I guess that lack itself is as close as I'll come to defining myself. For your sake, I'd like to become a new person. It may not be easy, but if I give it my best shot, perhaps I can manage to change. The truth is, though, if put in the same situation again, I might very well do the same thing all over. I might very well hurt you all over again. I can't promise anything. That's what I meant when I said I had no right. I just don't have the confidence to win over that force in me."

And finally, there was this one, which was in the same conversation as the last one, but from the other participant.

"I used to have dreams too, you know. But somewhere along the line they disappeared. Before I met you. I killed them. I crushed them and threw them away. Like some internal organ you no longer need and you rip out of your body. I don't' know whether that was the right thing to do. But it was the only thing I could do at the time.... Sometimes I have this dream. The same dream over and over. Someone is carrying something in both hands, and comes up to me and says, 'Here, you've forgotten something.' I've been very happy living with you. I've wanted for nothing and never had any complaints. Still, something is chasing me. I wake up in the middle of the night, covered in sweat. I'm being chased by what I threw away. You think you're the only one being chased, but you're wrong. You're not the only one who's thrown away something, who's lost something."

Ok and actually I really liked the closing lines of the book too.

Both elbows on the table, I covered my face with my palms.

Inside that darkness, I saw rain falling on the sea. Rain softly falling on a vast sea, with no one there to see it. The rain strikes the surface of the sea, yet even the fish don't know it's raining.

Until someone came and lightly rested a hand on my shoulder, my thoughts were of the sea.

Tipping

When I was in China, I didn't tip anybody for anything. It's just not how it's done. Apparently, there isn't really much in the way of tipping, per se, for restaurant service in Europe these days, in that there's just a fixed percentage tacked on to the meal, called the service charge or something like that.

I was reading this piece in the Times and apparently this really fancy place in NY has also adopted this practice, and then goes on to suggest that we Americans should do away with tipping all together, like much of the rest of the world apparently has.

So I was curious after reading this, about how to tip correctly, elsewhere, and I found this eHow thing and there's all sorts of weird tipping practices out there. I guess some of them make sense, but, at the same time, tipping has become this inherently included thing, and it's not like there is any special work that is done to earn it. You remember that rant that Mr. Pink gives in Reservoir Dogs? There's some merit to that line of thinking.

I have no real original thoughts on this subject. The Times and Reservoir Dogs pretty much sums up the entirety of things I have thought about it.

k5 article

"To summarize, whereas western gamers are supposed to kill out of pre-programmed reflex, acting as our well-trained lab mouse would after playing shoot `em ups too long, oddly enough Asian gamers seem to prefer to kill for the good old values like justice and property rights."

or not to be?

So I was clicking around through lists on Amazon when I stumble across this book called "...Or Not to Be : A Collection of Suicide Notes" and it struck me as very peculiar. Apparently the author makes some claim about suicide notes being a literary form of its own that deserves special consideration as such.

For some reason, probably twisted in some way, I imagine the situation of a person sitting at some desk meticulously crafting an amazingly well written suicide note to be funny. Why invest so much effort for some note that will be almost certainly overshadowed by the attempt itself. Invest is a poor choice of words I think as it probably entails the expectation of later reward, which is pretty silly when you're dead. I don't know, would I try to write it well, or even at all? It's a weird thing to think about, so I won't sit here and speculate about what kinds of things I'd want to include were I composing a note of my own.

Fall Lineup

When you write a letter, do you typically type it out, edit and revise it until finely honed, then finally transcribe it by hand to the page to send? Personally, and I suspect it shows, I do not. I simply take up a pen, grab some paper, and start writing what comes to mind. This undoubtedly results in a letter that is far from perfect, or even good, writing. There are probably countless grammatical problems, and even some spelling errors here and there I suspect.

I don't feel particularly concerned about presenting myself through a written letter in a way that must always be the best possible. But why am I so willing to accept low quality letter writing while being so much more demanding in other activities? If I were writing a paper, I would type it up, and revise heavily, because I'd want to present the best work that I could. When writing a letter, it too will be subject to the scrutiny of at least one other person, and so why does it not merit the same consideration?

Oh well. I was looking up the broadcast TV lineup for the coming Fall and it's going to be pretty tricky. I don't usually manage to watch TV as it's broadcast anyway, opting instead to watch it later when I have time, but even still, there's a lot of shows that I'd like to keep watching, and a couple shows that I'm interested in trying out to start watching.

Of course, TV is a pretty lousy way for me to spend my time, and at this rate, if I keep trying to follow more and more series, I'm going to find myself watching a relatively quite large amount of TV. I suspect it'll be pretty interesting to see how this year plays out with Alias and the OC in the same timeslot. I also wonder how Freddie Prinze Jr. got his own sitcom.

Too bad I don't get cable. Weeds looks like it might be pretty amusing.