Alewife Bayou: September 1998
all information is global
one september ninety eight noon
I get bored with the way these pages look after about two months. I said I wasn't changing the title page of this site again for at least a year and I meant it, but I might mess around with the others. I dunno. It's not like I don't already have enough to fill my time.
On the subway this morning I had it pounded into my head that we live in the time when all information is global. The Economist showed a picture of anti-US protesters in Sudan (after the bombing). One was holding up a sign with a very convincingly hand-drawn image of Lewinsky, with the caption No War for Monika [sic].
I didn't expect them to know or care.
My friend Eric, who likes The Economist but never has enough time to read it, asked me last night to save him this week's (upcoming) issue. He said he wanted to read what they said about the stock market now (a few weeks ago, they said that the bear market was arriving). I agreed, but I didn't really understand why it was so significant until I read this morning's newspaper headline. Honestly, I was out shopping all yesterday afternoon and I didn't hear one person mention it!
[For those in Australia or who somehow manage to avoid the stock-market hype in this country completely, the market fell off a cliff yesterday -- the Dow dropped 512 points -- erasing a year's worth of gains and then some.]
I am amused. I have a mild dislike for the stock market in general, but I have a much stronger dislike for the way this country has pinned its incomes and hopes to it, built a cult of fortune around it. The only money I have in the stock market is that which I am basically forced to invest in it by my company's pension plans -- and I have kept that as limited as possible.
I realize that it's wrong to be spiteful, but I can't help but hope that this serves as an object lesson to a lot of people. What goes up must, eventually, come down. Damn it.
time management (on the subway)
two september ninety eight eleven a m
I'm pinned beneath my calendar to die.
Awash and choking in a river of task
As day is night is day beneath the sky
And each unmasked reveals another mask.
The planets spin at twice their normal speed.
The stars whir as I wrestle with my stone --
Awash and choking in a river of task
As day is night is day beneath the sky
And each unmasked reveals another mask.
The planets spin at twice their normal speed.
The stars whir as I wrestle with my stone --
Till the buzzer on the door makes me take heed
Of where I am, and how far I have gone.
Of where I am, and how far I have gone.
I note around me all the faceless faces
With eyes unlocked from anything at hand.
Each in their own disastrous secret places.
Each struggling with the clock in their own land.
With eyes unlocked from anything at hand.
Each in their own disastrous secret places.
Each struggling with the clock in their own land.
My stop arrives and so I slip away
To somehow manage to trudge into the day.
To somehow manage to trudge into the day.
it's all the other things
two september ninety eight eleven p m
Feeling a little bit useless. Just tried a number of new ideas for the design of this page and discarded them all, none of the email I was hoping for has arrived (not sure exactly what I was hoping for, but what I got wasn't it), and I'm watching certain tasks backlog on me.
Which is basically the same sort of mood when I woke up this morning.
Of course, in the interim I wrote a very acceptable sonnet, a top-notch mouth organ column, presented (I think) an appearance of competence in front of a room full of strangers, and finally unsnarled the problem which was keeping me from completing my parser code.
I suppose the issue is not the things I manage to do -- I usually do those pretty well -- but all the other things I know I can do well that I don't usually manage to do.
Oh, that was clear as mud. It's obviously time for bed.
when salesmen call at dusk
three september ninety eight one p m
For a list of all the ways technology has failed to improve the quality of life, press 3 now.
--Alice Kahn
--Alice Kahn
Diane Patterson wrote yesterday about telephone solicitors.
She notes that anyone who calls on the personal line for her husband will have to go through her -- she answers that line 99% of the time, and people trying to sell him something will get short shrift. If it's business, then for heaven's sake call him on his business line.
We have a somewhat different solution at our domicile: We don't answer the phone.
The issue is often moot, since I usually connect to the internet within an hour of getting home, and generally don't disconnect until bedtime, which is quite late. We have only one phone line, and my dialer disables Call Waiting, the bane of man's existence, with extreme prejudice ... so that handles those pesky calls neatly.
Still, once in a while I actually read a book or something - or, more likely, am on the computer doing work which doesn't require me to pay for connect time. So the phone is occasionally available. When the salesmen call at dusk -- hey, that sounds like a horror movie! --
SEE the annoyed expressions of the victims!
HEAR the screams of agony!
Are you prepared for ...
WHEN SALESMEN CALL AT DUSK
HEAR the screams of agony!
Are you prepared for ...
WHEN SALESMEN CALL AT DUSK
Ahem.
As I think I was saying, when salesmen call around 6 or 7 p.m., the calls are likely to be for my significant other. (I get phonespam mostly from headhunters, who strike in the daytime; I just ignore their messages on the machine.) The telephone's in her name, so she gets calls from the long-distance companies. She also has an especially excitable credit-card company.
The interesting thing is that these people will refuse to talk to anyone else but the person they want to pitch to, so I have taken to answering the phone. If they use her full name, I know it's a salesbeing. "She's not here. May I take a message?" (She's actually in the other room watching TV.)
They always refuse to leave a message, of course. What could they possibly say that would get her to call them back?
Telemarketers know that people don't like them and don't want to deal with them, and yet their jobs require them to do it. I feel sorry for them. Yet I also can't help wondering why they don't get a better job. I think I'd rather try to go work retail sales in a department store someplace than cold-call people. If someone starts browsing in the shoe department, you can assume they have at least a passing interest in buying some shoes.
While I'm on the subject, I passed by my boss's office today and listened to him deliver a long stream of burning rhetoric into the telephone, ending with the words, "... burn in hell!" This is very unlike him, and anyway he wasn't unhappy-looking; he was grinning.
MIT has been suffering through another round of spam lately -- messages about "Attract Women Eeasily!" [sic] which are trying to sell some pheromone cologne.
We do a lot of spam-fighting, but you can't block everything, you know. Oddly enough, email spam doesn't bother me. I just delete it. (Telephone spam represents more of an intrusion into my life; email spam is beneath my radar.)
Anyway, the spammers foolishly put an 800 number in their message which you could call "to remove yourself permanently from the list," but which, of course, led to their call-directing system and their sales pitch. (Never call the "to remove" number or write to the "to remove" address. This just gets their attention. If you want to get rid of a spammer, trace the name of the real server he's sending from and complain to them.)
First my boss called this number and left the stream of invective. Then he called it again and let their ACD sit in a loop while waiting for him to take action. They all time out eventually and hang up on you, of course, but he was enjoying himself so much that I didn't bother to point that out.
We take our little victories where we can find them.
sleep is suddenly not enticing
four september ninety eight ten a m
A funny thing the last two nights.
Usually, although I don't necessarily want to go to bed because I always have too many things I want to finish, when I do get into the bed I'm thinking like, "ooh, this'll be fun." Sleep itself is not exactly fun -- I mean, maybe it is but I don't remember it so how can I tell? But drifting off slowly to sleep is fun, and the period of groggy half-awake floating in the morning is fun (as I wrote in the Very First Postcard). Moreover, the next morning usually brings responsibilities I don't want to deal with.
The point is that normally when I get into bed I am in no hurry for the next morning to get there. You see? But for the past two nights I've been finding myself thinking like, "Well, guess I'd better go get the sleep part over with ..."
Now, obviously I have no idea what today is going to bring, but yesterday certainly didn't have any fewer responsibilities than usual, nor did I go to bed on Wednesday with the knowledge that something really good was going to happen on Thursday that I just couldn't wait for ... if I were, say, going on vacation on Thursday morning I could understand being impatient with sleep on Wednesday night (actually, in a situation like that I usually can't sleep at all), but there was nothing of the sort. That I know of.
It puzzles me.
Soap Opera
four september ninety eight eleven a m
A few days ago, the mighty Kymm wrote about her soap obsession. Kymm just had a birthday (belated birthday wishes to you, Kymm! Don't think I was being rude, it's just that I have this kind of mental block against birthdays which I'll explain sometime) and ... boy, that parenthesis made this paragraph a mess, didn't it?
A moment of digression.
I edit everything I write. For formal projects I get someone else to edit it too -- but even with casual correspondence, like emails and these postcards, I generally go over what I've written several times and fuss with it. This is why I am much less confident in spoken conversation, and why the vast majority of my interactions with other humans these days are in written words. When I'm talking, I can't edit.
My brain is continually interrupting itself. If I were to actually leave an entry in the form it came out of my brain, you probably wouldn't be able to understand what I wanted to say. I let things stand every now and then for effect -- for example, the ungrammatical phrase "I'm thinking like" which appears twice in the previous entry would normally get changed ... and I left the word "as" out in one of the entries before that, but liked the weird sentence that resulted ...
At any rate, I'm leaving the paragraph above as sort of an albatross for me, and now, we'll begin again.
A few days ago, the mighty Kymm wrote about her soap obsession. She just had a birthday, and apparently received quite a bit of fancy soap -- eight bars. Upon counting what was already lying around, she found that she had, in her words, "forty-seven unsullied bars" of nice, perfumed, very decorative soap.
I use Ivory. I've always used Ivory. If I can't find Ivory, I'll use another simple castile-type soap. I think soap should be fat and lye. The rest is foolishness. I understand perfume; I understand perfumed candles; I don't understand perfumed soaps.
I don't think Kymm is ever really going to use those soaps, and I'll tell you why. My mother is a world-class soap accumulator. Makes Kymm look like a piker.
My mother lives with my stepdad in a moderately large house; they have two double-sink bathrooms for two people. This is a necessity, as the front bathroom is completely overrun with my mother's soaps and bottles of bath beads and bath crystals and shampoos and conditioners and body washes and bath oils and I'm not exaggerating here. My mother's bathroom looks like the display showcase for a Bed And Bath store.
She uses the shampoos and the liquid soaps. She doesn't use any of the bar soaps. They just sit and get dusty. She has some soaps in there that I gave her as presents when I was in elementary school.
I don't give her soap anymore.
I won't be buying Kymm any soap either.
office after hours
five september ninety eight ten p m
I've changed my mind about the elevator in my office building. I just got here and there wasn't another soul in the building and the elevator was sitting on 1. So maybe the resting floor really is 1 and it's just always on 3 because so many people always want to go to 3. Or maybe it doesn't have a resting floor, in which case the law of averages says it's on 3 for the same reasons.
This is a four-story building. I've been here since March and I have only seen one other area of this building besides our cluster of offices one time. There could be Martians on the other three floors for all I know.
It's always interesting being in an office building long after work hours. Even the dedicated hackers aren't here at ten on a Saturday. But since no one ever turns their computers off (for Unix systems that's a bad idea), the hum of equipment is still everywhere. Like the sequence at the beginning of Alien where the ship is all silent and the first things you hear are the sounds of the computers and lights coming on.
Don't look at me that way. I'm only here to get a book I forgot. I needed an excursion in the night air anyway, and I'm leaving again as soon as I post this.
You know, I didn't realize until I was told this morning that Monday was a holiday. I plumb forgot. And no one at work mentioned it.
Off I go into the darkness by foot and subway.
back from the long weekend
eight september ninety eight one a m
Busy day. In addition to spending time at the aquarium, I worked on a site design, pounded some more on The Frustrating CGI project, wrote that late Stay Tuned, and finally finished the rant on the Myers-Briggs personality test that I have been meaning to write for days.
So if you're reading this bright and early on Tuesday morning, there's plenty here to look at. Didn't write my short story or the Millennium Game, but I never get to the bottom of my to-do list anyway, so who's surprised?
Later today, after I've slept and regained my bearings, I'll have some things to say about sea lions, Firesign Theatre, and orgasms, but for now I'm too sleepy.
Hope you all had a nice Labor Day and didn't labor too much.
empty milestones
eight september ninety eight eleven a m
So, let's see.
That McGuire fellow tied Maris' record last night for home runs. I could not care less. I think it's a shame that someone's life suddenly is forced to become structured around breaking a meaningless record from years ago. It's like these people who are trying to get into the Guinness book. Don't they have lives? Is their craving for celebrity that strong?
A friend of mine is twenty-seven today. She wrote me a very brief email: "I'm a cube!" She won't get to be a Platonic solid again until she's sixty-four (when, of course, she is eligible to rent a cottage on the Isle of Wight).
Aussie wrote me about this weekend's Stay Tuned, saying basically that I was giving the populace too much credit for intelligence about pronouncing French names. Probably. This is one of those cases, Aussie, where the Louisiana border makes a difference. We didn't need the big "A + Bear" rebus signs to know how to pronounce "Hebert" (although have them we did - that chain was over here too - and they were a lot of fun, agreed).
And the Firesign Theatre folks are putting out a new radio play for the first time in many years.(Shoes For Industry, which appeared a few years back, was more of a "best of" collection.) I have the article, for the three people who are interested in the details. You know who you are.
I haven't forgotten that I said I'd mention some other things. The day is long. It's only eleven, and the West Coast hasn't even gotten to work yet.
strange hubris
nine september ninety eight one p m
Today I saw a license plate which said "I Was SAVED ... At The Such-and-such Revival!" I have already forgotten the name of the place, which is typical of my brain.
Of course, in Massachusetts there's no place to put such promotional license plates (i.e. ones which aren't official); in some states you can put them on the front of your car, but we require plates on both ends. So the owner had stuck it up in the rear window.
This strikes me as the oddest sentiment -- it's the same impression I get from bumper stickers that say "In case of Rapture this car will be unmanned" or some such. I am not trying to pick on anyone's religion -- in fact, you can have my heartfelt wishes that you're right. If one day there will be a Last Trump and then the process of sorting out what's what begins, I sincerely hope you number among the Good Guys. Honest.
But last I heard, pride was a deadly sin, yes?
Even discounting the ill effects (and ill will engendered by) hubris, it seems to me a strange thing to want a souvenir for. Like saying "I got swept up by the Rapture and all I got was this lousy T-shirt."
four seasons of columbine
ten september ninety eight eleven a m
Well, it's officially fall. Ignore the calendar. Do you know why it's officially fall? Because upon leaving the house this morning, I thought, "Gee, I'd better put something on over this t-shirt."
My clothing is a reliable barometer, since I wear nearly the same thing every day of my life (alas):
The Four Seasons Of Columbine
(cue Vivaldi)
Spring: Flannel shirt, unbuttoned, over t-shirt
Summer: t-shirt
Fall: Flannel shirt back over t-shirt. Partially buttoned if windy.
Winter: Coat worn over dashing fall ensemble while outdoors.
(cue Vivaldi)
Spring: Flannel shirt, unbuttoned, over t-shirt
Summer: t-shirt
Fall: Flannel shirt back over t-shirt. Partially buttoned if windy.
Winter: Coat worn over dashing fall ensemble while outdoors.
I will spare you the usual boring-clothing rant.
At least there are seasons here. In the South, the leaves stay green until the moment they fall off the tree, and you basically go straight from summer to winter and back. Fall lasts about fifteen minutes.
A friend who is also from Louisiana was talking to me about this the other day. We both have this memory of grade school: A teacher putting up cut-outs of orange and red and yellow leaf-shaped things on the bulletin board in September. We knew they were leaves, and we might even have known they were supposed to be fall leaves (after all, there were books with pictures), but we had no counterpart for it in our daily experience. Ditto the cut-outs of snowflakes which went up in December or January. They simply had no basis in reality.
Here, every three months, you get a new season.
Amusingly, Kymm also wrote today about leaving her house and feeling the need to put an extra layer on. If we were animals we'd be growing long coats right about now.
no free web space
ten september ninety eight one p m
All these subjects I want to say things about keep stacking up. I haven't gotten to talk about the sea lions, or the window of orgasms, much less people's responses to the Myers-Briggs rant, because I don't like to make these postcards thirty miles long [Dec 2004: Wasn't my naive optimism cute?], and every time I sit down to write one something else has already started to happen in my head which preempts what was supposed to be here.
Right now I'm annoyed at Geocities, and Tripod too. I'd offer to make Dianne a place on one of my web servers where she could post her journal pages, just so I could avoid one more Geocities site, but I know she wouldn't accept. No one wants to work in someone else's fiefdom.
I really shouldn't go into this, because ultimately it will spiral down into a bitter money rant, and I'll upset some friends.
But as of this precise moment, some pertinent email has put me in a truly foul mood, so with heartfelt apologies to Dianne and lanalee and other friends who are using these services, full speed ahead:
These services offer pages for free. This means they get swamped with people wanting pages, and traffic to get to those pages. This means they will always be slow -- there is no possible way they can load server-power into their equipment room fast enough to compete with demand, and they can't afford to always be upgrading anyway -- because, after all, they don't charge any money for their pages.
The only way they can possibly make money is by posting ads. Which they do. But no user really wants a banner ad on their page -- or, if they do, they'd prefer an ad they were making money from, not the service. So the users disable the ads. So the service keeps figuring out ways to make the ads more disable-proof -- which also means they get more annoying. Oh, and the overhead of making these tricky ads appear also makes the site slower.
The people who use Geocities or Tripod aren't idiots -- they know it's rotten. In fact, they generally hate the service just as much as their readers do, if not more so. But, after all, it's free.
And now here comes the nasty part.
I think Geocities and Tripod were fools to ever offer free web space in the first place. That's a model for disaster. And I think that the people who take such accounts basically get what they pay for, and forfeit any privilege to complain about it.
I am a firm believer in "no free lunch." I expect to pay for email, for web space, web traffic, and web access. And although I don't think Dianne or lanalee are freeloaders -- I think they're just poor, and poverty is not a sin -- I have met some people today who honestly don't understand why everyone in the world can't have free web access. And people like that really annoy me.
In this world you must pay for everything. Sooner or later, one way or another. That's the way it is. Live with it.
Sorry. I'll be in a better mood later today.
Patterns and Climaxes
eleven september ninety eight noon
Well, it was cold enough to keep the windows closed last night, so for the first time in several nights -- like, for the last three weeks -- I wasn't treated to the sound of my neighbors climaxing, sometime around midnight.
It was really very interesting in a perverse kind of way -- I guess no two people sound exactly alike when they're having an orgasm; not quite as individual as fingerprints but close.
Fingerprints (and, yes, I guess orgasms) are the kind of pattern-recognition problems that give computers fidgets. If no two fingerprints look alike, a computer would say, then how do we know they're fingerprints? Where's the common point of reference that will enable me to put these items in the same category together?
We all know what an orgasm sounds like (well, in a female we do; we'll come back to that). If we didn't know what an orgasm sounded like, the sequence in When Harry Met Sally wouldn't be funny -- to name one example.
But since no two people sound exactly the same way, what is it that makes an orgasm recognizable to the ear?
This is frivolity, but it relates to serious stuff. Almost every day I end up writing a program or portion of one where I have to tell a computer "find all the strings of text that look sorta like this." Pattern matching is the single most sophisticated part of the language Perl, for example, and the tools 'awk' and 'sed' which it stole from. These are designed to help computers do things like find all words in a text starting with the letter 'a'.
That's more complicated than you think, because first you have to teach the computer some basics we take for granted -- i.e. What's a "word"? Which of these characters are "letters"? Do I assume that an 'A' is the same as an 'a', or does it make a difference? And you have to tell it this every time -- each time the program runs, you must build the rules from the ground up.
I can teach the program what a "sentence" is (a string of whitespace-separated characters, possibly including line breaks, ending with the character '.') and what a paragraph is, but some tasks are fiendishly complex, like teaching a computer parts of speech. You may not have remembered much of your grammar class, but presumably you can find the nouns in a sentence. A computer can't, not without hard work, a little juryrigging, and a lot of overhead.
Pattern recognition is something you will hear more and more about, as computers increasingly replace human labor for rote-level tasks -- not because of an expensive labor market, but because companies simply can't afford to do it at human speed (slow). The Post Office has some of the best pattern-matching software around right now -- they use it to read your handwriting on the front of the envelopes.
Think about that one for a while. How many ways are there to make an 'A'? How do you teach the computer the underlying core of "a-ness" -- the idea of "two slanty lines meeting at a point, with a horizontal crossbar somewhere along the way"? (The way I make capital A's, they look more like triangles -- crossbar way low.)
But back to orgasms.
One of the surprises of the noises floating in my window was that the man was making just as much noise as the woman was. I realized that although I had a mental picture -- a pattern, if you will -- for "female climax noise" in my head, I didn't have an equivalent male one. There was no there there. And, upon glancing around the media, I realized this wasn't just me. Everyone has a fairly good idea of what a female orgasm sounds like, but not a male one. Are men expected to not make any noise in bed? Is it considered unmasculine somehow? Last porn film I saw, I seem to recall that the guy didn't make any noise at all, not even a grunt. The woman, meanwhile, was somewhere in the unsafe decibels.
Perhaps there's an inequity here we need to work on correcting. More noise from the men! Whoop it up in there! Unleash your inner vocalist!
a trip to freeport
thirteen september ninety eight ten a m
My sinuses have been exploding for the last two or three days and the effect has been to make me not want to do anything but lie around and stare at something passively. Playing computer games, a fairly mindless exercise for the kinds of games I mean, was about the best I could muster.
I'm a little better today thanks to the Miracle Of Drugs -- a statement to keep in mind next time I pull out my anti-drug rant. One stiff twelve-hour decongestant last night and I slept well for the first time since Wednesday. Still, you should take that as a measure of desperation, that I would resort to chemicals.
Meanwhile, the bills have never gone this late in the month without being paid, I have no laundry, and what little activity there has been this weekend has been choreographed -- for, on top of it all, we have out-of-town visitors. Not staying in our house, thank heavens, but we have been spending nearly all our awake time with them.
Yesterday we went to Freeport, mostly to go to the L. L. Bean store. Freeport is in Maine, natch, and is a little over two hours away by car. You might not think a store is worth a two-hour drive, but the Bean store is enormous, open twenty-four hours, and is actually a lot of fun.
I love L. L. Bean. Their clothes last forever and they actually fit me. I am a hard size to fit, which is one reason I don't just buy from their catalog.
I spent a lot of money yesterday. That's what you do when you go there. A saleswoman was talking with another and was overheard to say, "The funniest question a customer ever asked me is whether we were paid on commission. Can you imagine? I laughed and said no. If I were paid on commission, I'd be a millionaire!"
Not quite true, but the store does a huge business, with people visiting it from all over, and the average purchase per person has got to be upwards of $200. I have never walked out of that store with less than $200 of merchandise, and I'm not especially well-off. So multiply $200 by, say, thirty customers an hour (checking out is very efficient there) ... let's call it a six-hour day just to add non-working time and fudge factor. That's thirty-six thousand dollars. Five percent of that is a healthy $1800.
The store is a small part of Bean's business. Bean has such a large shipping operation that it has its own zip code. It's really very impressive for a company that was once one man selling these funny-looking rubber-coated boots he'd invented.
You've probably overdosed on hearing about one particular American and his sex life right about now, so I thought I'd give you a good old success story to cheer you up. There doesn't seem to be a dark side to L. L. Bean that I've been able to find -- the workers are happy, the customers are happy, the town of Freeport has no complaints (except maybe having to deal with all the traffic, but Bean does things like paying for repaving and such, because That's The Way They Do It).
Makes you wonder if it's really that easy to pull off, and if it is, why don't more companies do it?
semi-detached brain
thirteen september ninety eight seven p m
Spoke too soon and too optimistically in the previous postcard.
Had to go out for the Last Meal with our visitors before they began the long and arduous trek to the airport. I excused myself early and took the subway home alone -- I didn't really feel like socializing.
It wasn't a bad feeling exactly, more of a vague detachment, like I was out-of-body. I would rub my arm and it would take a while for the sensation to reach me.
Those seemed like good conditions for sleep, so I slept.
Now I'm awake, my head is throbbing, my eyes burn, and I'm about ready to cry. This is the first time all weekend I've had an opportunity to sit down at the computer and actually Do Stuff, and I am nearly incoherent -- I can't focus enough to pay the bills, let alone work on fiction or The CGI.
It's not fair! Who planned this?
Electioneering
fourteen september ninety eight six p m
So, tomorrow there's an election. A big one -- the Eighth Congressional District seat is open, involving a very large chunk of the greater Boston area, and a lot of people want it. Twelve people, to be precise -- ten Democrats, a Republican, and an independent. It's been a circus.
I do not recall harboring any prior dislike for the crowds of people who campaign on behalf of their candidate. Perhaps mild annoyance at best. However, this year is special, and this year's election has pushed me right over the edge.
I don't like people selling me things anyway. That goes for any commodity -- groceries, insurance, politics, anything at all. I don't like sales pitches. So the campaigners are already off to a bad start with me.
But this year -- they've been coming out en masse with their little signs, blocking intersections and stopping traffic. Our mailbox hasn't gone a day without some leaflet or promo card for one candidate or another. Yea, verily, it doth begin to weary me.
Tonight, though, my dromedary-like spine was nearly fractured by the final straw. I was called by someone stumping for one of the candidates, who asked me point-blank who I was voting for. Not "would you consider voting for my candidate?" but a flat-out request for information.
I held my tongue. I said mildly, "I'd rather not say." She hung up abruptly.
Where I grew up, you didn't ask people who you were voting for. It was supposed to be a big secret. If someone had happened to ask, I wouldn't have been at all surprised to see them run out of town on a rail. We're talking about an etiquette breach that even the most boorish soul would be wary of.
I try to vote regularly. But at the moment these campaigners are making me want to avoid the whole mess. Now, I'm sure many people probably appreciate the information they provide on the candidates, and I'm sure their presence induces people to vote who wouldn't otherwise. But I'm a very "I'll get that information for myself, thanks" kind of person (or hadn't you guessed?)
I personally would rather the candidates were required to do all their campaigning on their own. Yes, it would mean less campaigning -- one person can only do so much, after all -- but that's the point.
Ask me some time about how I feel about campaign finance reform, when you're feeling brave.
how we vote here
fifteen september ninety eight noon
I voted this morning. My polling place is a senior citizens' home, staffed exclusively by residents of same.
Somerville does not use voting machines.
First you give your address, then your name, to the people with the registry book. They check off the box that says you showed up. If it's a primary and you're a Democrat, they give you a pink ballot; if you're a Republican, they give you a blue ballot. I don't know how the independent candidates get classified.
I'm officially Undecided because Louisiana has an open primary and I think all other systems suck. Maybe I want to vote for the Republican this time; maybe the Democrat. Party-only primaries are a good way to perpetuate these two stale parties and a bad way to pursue real democracy. At least as Undecided I get to choose which party to be on a primary-by-primary basis.
You take your ballot and the little sleeve they give you to hide it. You stand at a semi-enclosed wooden carrel and mark your choices in an optical-reader endorsed manner with a black felt-tip pen that lies, without a cap, in the carrel.
You put the ballot in the sleeve and go to the person with an identical registry book. Address first, then name. He checks the box that says you voted. You slide the ballot out of its sleeve into a slot in the Tabulator, the pinnacle of nineteen-sixties technology, which eats it noisily.
In Louisiana even the poor parishes had voting machines. I doubt that Somerville uses this archaic and easily defraudible method of voting (note that I never had to prove my identity) because the town is poor; I suspect they do it because it's always worked, and if it works, they don't change to something better.
That's the New England Way Of Doing Things. It's sometimes good, sometimes bad.
In Cambridge it's bad. They tally ballots by hand there, and are desperately trying to modernize the system -- last time there was a major election it took them nearly a week to report official results.
Showing Intelligence (and meeting it)
sixteen september ninety eight eleven a m
In about half an hour I am going to have lunch with a gentleman whom I consider a friend, but have never met. I'm a little nervous, just like I was nervous when meeting Mary Anne.
Meeting Mary Anne was the first time that I've met someone in the flesh whom I've corresponded with a great deal -- met one of my "online friends" as I say. This will be the second. Five, six, years ago, neither would have happened.
I had a rock-solid policy of not meeting online people face-to-face. I had what I thought were sound reasons. Nonetheless I am happy to let that policy slowly deteriorate. I'm still wary, but the camel's nose is in the tent now, and one of these days I hope to get out to the Seattle area to meet Jane and Anita, and I know that on one of my regular visits to Louisiana I will have to swing into Texas and meet Aussie.
(Dianne, I hate to say it, but I don't think I'll be able to afford to go to Australia any time soon. First class to Australia is running around $12,000 a head -- I know, some friends are flying there at Christmas and they priced it -- and I am not getting on a plane that long without flying first class; I'd be a double amputee when I arrived.)
Where was I? Oh, yes. One of the reasons that my policy has changed is because the vast number of my friends are online friends and I'm tired of not seeing any of them, not hearing any of their voices. It's that "shadows on the wall of the cave" thing again, except that I got tagged for intellectual elitism the last time I used that reference -- grrrr.
(Wasn't everybody forced at gunpoint to read the allegory of the cave in high school? Heck, it even shows up in a They Might Be Giants song. Of course, reviewers deride them as a "look how clever we are" band, which is the same charge that gets thrown at me. So, let me see -- any time I make a literary or classical reference, or use a word like "deride," I'm showing off? Got it.
Can you tell I'm still harboring a little resentment?)
Back to, um, what was it I was talking about?
The most important reason, though, why I now want to meet these people, where before I had been known to occasionally stop talking to someone when they suggested we meet face-to-face, is that I am no longer actively concealing the truth behind Columbine. Before, a lot of people who wanted to meet me were under the impression that I was a sexy female. Where they got "sexy," I don't know. I have always downplayed the attractiveness element in my online descriptions of myself -- my desc on SPR and FurToonia goes so far as to use the word "emaciated," hardly a sexy picture.
My SO thinks it's because intelligence is sexy. Maybe so, but it's also elitist to show any. Apparently.
Sorry. I had a long argument about this online last night, which is why it's fresh in my head.
Anyway, I'm nervous about meeting this gent. Although he knows the truth about me, and is married, and has a completely non-lustful set of motivations, it comes down to intelligence again -- as with most people who like me, he likes me for my mind. That's what's scary, and ultimately it's the only reason still intact for not meeting online friends in person.
Online, all you see is my brain. That's my best side. I worry that, while the spirit is willing, the flesh will inevitably turn out to be something of a disappointment.
knowledge vs intelligence
sixteen september ninety eight two p m
My lunch went well, although I'm sure I talked too much. I always do.
Got an email a short while ago about the difference between intelligence and knowledge, which takes this whole information/elitism thing into a dimension I should have figured out for myself.
The correspondent says that while intelligence is sexy, a lot of knowledge isn't necessarily. She notes that I shouldn't try to conceal my intelligence, but I also shouldn't assume that everyone knows the things I know. Or, for that matter, assume that most people don't know the things I know.
This is an important distinction, but unfortunately not a very useful one for getting rid of the thing that's chafing me, because frankly "intelligence" wasn't ever really the sticking point; "knowledge" was.
Back to the allegory of the cave again. If I make a Plato reference, am I flaunting my knowledge overmuch? Am I making any implicit assumptions, good or bad, about the knowledge of my audience (whoever they may be)?
I say no to the first question. I say yes to the second question, but not in a bad way -- I'm assuming my audience knows enough to catch the reference, which as far as I'm concerned is the polite thing to do.
Would it be more, or less, polite to write at a third-grade level, the way they tell technical writers to do? To me, that's insulting. If you're here and you find these postcards interesting, I assume that you know what words like "flaunting" and "chafing" and "deride" mean; I assume that if you don't know about the allegory of the cave, you can grab the idea from context; I assume you have a brain.
What I don't like is when someone takes my assumption that the reader has a brain and equates it with my being smug about the amount of knowledge I have.
This comes back to geekdom eventually -- I figured this out last night. One of the reasons the accusation in the paragraph above bothers me so much is that it's one of the negative characteristics I associate with the "geek" label -- I know way too many hacker/fan types who are determined to prove that they know more than you on any subject that's important to them. (And no, Anita, they're obviously not all like that, but the stereotype is there, and has some truth to it.)
I think that's entirely too much about the subject, don't you? No more.
bits of mail
sixteen september ninety eight eleven p m
Well, we just got finished writing about Starr, despite our vowing that we wouldn't. Too much came into the mailbox to ignore. [Dec 2004: This is a mouth organ reference.]
Speaking of the mailbox, here are some scraps and bits I keep meaning to mention:
I got a minor trickle of mail about the Myers-Briggs rant ... so far only SR has taken me up on the "try to guess my type" bet (he got two letters of four, but his speculations show he was clearly on the right track; I was reasonably startled by his accuracy and gave him half credit).
In response to the Rapture material, Dan reports that when he lived in the south, his favorite bumper sticker was, "In case of Rapture, can I have your car?"
And lanalee notes that "Louisiana has the most sophisticated voting machines in the country, as well as the most restrictive and detailed laws about voting machines, ballot counting, etc. Three guesses why. :)"
She is probably referring to the fact that election fraud is a common and time-honored sport in that state. So does that mean we're more primitive up here because we're more honest?
falling out of contact
seventeen september ninety eight eleven a m
I saw a young woman on the subway today --
Ooh, fetch me the Geritol -- don't I sound creaky? That's just my weird, sometimes Victorian way of speaking. Given her appearance and props, she was almost certainly a college freshman. At any rate:
I saw a young woman on the subway today who reminded me uncomfortably of a friend of mine. Or, rather, reminded me of the child of a friend of mine. Or, rather, reminded me of the child as she might possibly look today, at college age, since I haven't seen her since she was starting high school.
It's always nasty business to sever ties with someone -- messy -- but it's sometimes even worse to look back and realize that you've fallen out of contact with someone without really intending to, with no culprit at hand except sheer inertia.
I didn't have many close friends in Louisiana, but this girl's mother was one of them. She's the person who, without advance warning, drove a Ryder truck full of everything I owned up to Boston with me, and the person who changed my life on that same trip with a single conversation held in a roadside restaurant over a sleepy breakfast.
And I've barely seen her since then. One problem is that she's not present in an electronic format -- I'm sorry to say that my days of nine-page letters are gone forever; I haven't written any correspondence that isn't email or business in years. (I write an ungodly amount of email, though, so the gene to spout words to someone is obviously still working overtime.)
Her daughter is, though. So if you're Jan Lavigne, and you happen to come across this page while searching for your name, write me and tell me how the family's doing.
And tell your mother I'm finally writing that letter I've put off for so long.
[Dec 2004: It's worth mentioning here that I did eventually renew contact with the Lavignes and since then we have kept in reasonably consistent touch via email.]
short subjects
eighteen september ninety eight eleven a m
Cleaned out my mailbox at work this morning.
I have a habit of keeping emails because they have one URL or command which I know I'll want later. "Later" may have an arbitrarily large value; a timespan of six months to a year between the time I get the information and the time I need it is not unheard of.
Rather than clog my system with these messages and slow down my already-logy mailer, I should just be writing the key scraps down and deleting the mail -- which, today, I have done. This works reasonably well at work, where I have a datebook that never leaves my desk and is used for notes like these -- even though it's a calendar, I don't actually use it to schedule anything!
But at home, being a writer by avocation, my office is full -- literally overflowing -- with scraps and bits of paper, drafts, clippings, notes, sketches, et cetera. Writing something down there just makes it easier to lose.
Fortunately the Mac (at work it's Unix; home is a Mac; the PC is just to play games) has a program called Stickies, which is like virtual sticky notes for the screen. It's been around a while -- it comes with the OS. When I first saw it, I thought it was a silly, useless idea. I don't think that anymore.
I hear tell that some bright people here have come up with an X version (that is, a graphical Unix version) of the same sort of thing. I need to look into that.
This is all just to dispel any lingering idea you may have that my brain is organized.
- - -
Legislative matters: This site will be moving soon. Shouldn't affect you, but if you see a "lapse in service" (as they say in ISP-speak), you'll know why.
My current provider has clamped down with an iron fist on incoming email, indiscriminately preventing entire domains from reaching me. If you have hotmail or rocketmail, and it bounced when you wrote me, that's why. That goes for the mouth organ domain too -- same people.
It's unacceptable and thus it's time to migrate.
- - -
Having had my tantrum, I am amused by the number of people who have since then quietly, carefully, whispered to me in email: "Psst. Can you tell me what the allegory of the cave is?"
Plato wrote of a man who had spent his whole life in a cave, and for whatever reason you choose, was unable to leave it. (This is a thought experiment. Make something up.) This man had never directly experienced the world outside that cave. All he hears of the world outside are the distorted sounds that pass through the cave mouth; all he sees of the world outside are the shadows cast from the cave mouth onto the wall.
The man clearly has no basis for any sort of idea about what lies outside the cave ... yet he is certain to have one, and a very curious mental picture it must be.
Sometimes, when I have constructed what I think is a theory about the way the world works, I have to remind myself to consider whether I'm seeing the reality, or just its shadows.
Several times I have explained this reference recently and the other person has replied, "Oh, it's like the old tale of the blind men and the elephant" (where each man is touching a different part of the elephant and reaching a wildly incorrect conclusion about what he's touching). And so it is. But that amuses me as well, since I was forced to read the Plato item in high school and thought everyone else was as well, but I thought the story of the elephant was fairly obscure, and would never have used it as a reference ...
Maybe I'm just seeing shadows again.
agreement isn't normality
nineteen september ninety eight one p m
Last night we were in the grocery store and the man in front of us was making the following purchases:
- four one-gallon jugs of spring water
- a half-gallon container of mayonnaise
and nothing else.
We got into the car and my co-conspirator said to me, "Did you see the person in front of us?"
I said "Looks like a fun night ahead, huh?"
She giggled. "Oh, good! I'm so glad it's not just me."
"Yes," I said, "but remember you're talking to another deviant. Just because I was thinking the same thing doesn't mean you're normal."
- - -
This site is being moved today. It will take a while for the domain to change; the site should be continuous, but email may have gaps. If you're curious to see which site you're connecting to, go to either the Alewife Bayou top page or the inu.org top page and 'view source' -- there'll be a tag in the header which says New Site Copy.
- - -
I had something else I wanted to write about which Kymm inspired, but I'm going to wait until after the move to write about it.
stored babble
twenty-one september ninety eight four p m
Not to worry -- my big mouth and I haven't vanished. The silence of several days is because the site was in the process of being juggled. I hate adding new material while two sets of pages are live, because keeping them in synch is a true pain. But now I have redirects - although the domain name isn't moved yet, if you go to one of the top pages on the old site, or talk to Heliotrope on the old site, it drops you on the new one. (You're on the new one. Know how I can tell? Because this postcard doesn't exist on the old one.)
I may have deserted my old provider in the nick of time. I am departing for what you might call political reasons -- an aspect of their way of doing business made me unhappy -- but I note that for the last few days, they have been getting a lot slower and the site was refusing to respond regularly. Can't have that!
But let's talk about something else. I have a fair amount of stored babble here ...
A new hamburger joint has opened near where I work. Not the healthiest thing in the world, but I get starved for new places to go that are withing walking distance, and the novelty hasn't worn off yet. Also, they're cheap -- a decent hamburger (I will not eat the McDonalds ilk), fries, and a drink for five-fifty is quite a bargain in the Land Of Overpriced Food!
Intellectual elitism time: Their sign says "Try Our Hardy Chili" and it bothers/amuses me every time I see it. Maybe their chili is durable, but I imagine they probably mean "hearty." Should I correct them? I haven't worked up the nerve to. They probably think I'm a freak anyway -- I don't know what it is but I always get these looks from people who work behind-counter style jobs (coffee place, diner, burger joint, bookstore, etc). I don't do anything, honest!
Today I experienced the Door Issue again -- two doors, both working, heavy traffic in both directions, and everyone wants to go through the same door. Since writing the original Door Rant, I have even abandoned the left-right portion of the crusade. I don't care which direction goes through which door, but for heaven's sake, at least try the other door.
The Infinite Corridor is a straight stretch of hall a quarter-mile long. It is the heart and soul of The Institvte. Traffic on the Infinite Corridor is a real problem now that the students are back. Every year starts with an influx of new students who don't understand The Rules Of The Road -- they walk three abreast slowly, jabbering to each other, oblivious to the fact that traffic is backing up behind them like on a freeway. They do not understand the cardinal rule: Allow Room To Pass.
I walk three to five times as fast as the average human. No, I'm not in a hurry; that's just the speed I walk. Please get out of my way -- it's nothing personal.
I'm going through my yearly period of aggravation with the students. Of course I know the students are our reason for being here, but goodness, it's so much more peaceful when they're not around!
Of course, in the students' defense, they're entitled to be edgy and nervous - they've bitten off a big job. The Institvte is a grueling and Darwinian place. I wouldn't have gone here. Not that I'd have been able to get in.
lapse of millennial confidence
noon eight twenty-two september ninety
The web ring may be a tad mixed-up for a day or two. If you want to visit those sites you can always get a list -- the list command should work ok from anywhere. My fault. After taking great pains to make sure there wouldn't be a "lapse in service," I scuttled my own boat by sending everyone bad replacement HTML.
I suddenly am feeling a lapse of confidence that this nation will weather the year 2000 problem. Remember, even if all the computers are working, there's the danger that we will all panic and act weirdly -- something humans have a history of doing.
Does that make sense? Let me try again. I've been assured that my bank has everything under control, that there won't be a problem. I'm not sure how much I believe them, but even if they do have their computers working, if a huge number of people get nervous and withdraw their money in the last week of 1999, there'll be a panic - and the result will be just as bad as if the bank's computers failed: The bank will surely be trashed and some people will lose their money.
Even aware people who are thinking ahead can abet the problem. Suppose I'm worried that some systems will fail, and I think I'd maybe better withdraw a small stash of cash in December '99, just in case I need it ... this, by the by, is actual advice that many of the Y2K sites will give you. Very good forethought, advance preparation, yada yada. Except that if even twenty percent of us all withdraw that cushion money in December it'll still be a bank run.
Of course if I don't withdraw the money, I may be up a tree in January '00. You can't win.
There are actually two issues here: One is the computer failures. The other is that many of the vital systems in this country are spread thinly, designed on the principle that everyone isn't going to turn on their A/C or withdraw their money or flush their toilets at the same time.
None of this is why my confidence is failing today, however.
I subscribed, until about half an hour ago, to a mailing list from a guy named Ed Yardeni. Dr. Ed is a bright guy -- a very prominent economist and Person Who Knows His Stuff. He puts out regular bulletins on Y2K and its effect on the economy. This mailing list is supposed to be one-way -- but Dr. Ed's an economist, not a server admin, and he made a common mistake -- he didn't block list recipients from being able to post to the broadcast address. What that means is that anyone could write back a casual comment to that address - and it would go out to the list's subscribers, like it or not. Thousands of them.
So a couple of people inadvertently sent their discussion of Dr. Ed's latest comments to the whole list. Only two or three messages, but the sudden receipt of someone else's idle conversation caused a lot of subscribers to panic -- What is all this stuff I'm getting? I can't handle traffic like this! I must unsubscribe, quickly!
Of course, they then each sent a message saying "Unsubscribe me now!" To the broadcast address. Which not only doesn't unsubscribe you (the address to do administrative things is always a separate address from the broadcast address), but also spams the list. I received over 200 messages this morning before I finally gave up on waiting for the confusion to die down and unsubscribed. The proper way.
Oh, yes, but being a person with insider knowledge, I had an unfair advantage, right? I knew the magic voodoo incantation for unsubscribing, that no human could be expected to know.
Wrong. I went to the web site and read the information on "How To Unsubscribe."
What worries me is that these are not the clueless masses. These people are financiers and doctors and lawyers and engineers and defense contractors. These are the trained professionals, in highly skilled professions, many at the top of their field. And they can't avoid panicking over a stupid mailing list long enough to Read The Directions.
I'll be hiding under my bed at the end of 1999, if anyone is looking for me.
annoyed and not annoyed
twenty-two september ninety eight nine p m
Well, I'm annoyed and I'm not annoyed.
Moving these sites has proven to be a real pain, with the provider messing up my rather specific needs every step of the way. That's annoying.
On the other hand, the caution for people in the web ring seems to have been unnecessary, as they managed to figure out my stupidity and correct for it. That's counter-annoying.
On the third hand, I am still receiving spam from Dr. Ed's list, even after unsubscribing this morning. The unsubscribe request, you see, apparently isn't processed automatically -- Dr. Ed does it by hand. And Dr. Ed has been conspicuously absent all day. That's annoying.
Hmm. Well, I'm not going to be able to focus on writing. Should I use the escapist female activity or the escapist male activity to pass the remainder of the evening?
... I think I'll go play a computer game that involves shooting things.
You decide which form of escapism that is. I have my conclusions, but I'm not telling.
disgustingly unproductive
twenty-three september ninety eight noon
This is developing into a disgustingly unproductive day in the middle of a disgustingly unproductive week. Oh, sure, I moved two web sites, but that was involuntary -- an emergency response. I am feeling very unmotivated.
Fortunately my workload is piling up to critical mass, which means that within a few days the guilt will be so overpowering that I have no choice but to get industrious.
Finding the energy is never the problem, as you know if you've read one of these "postcards" when they stretch into 1000-word territory by accident. The problem is that I only want to get industrious about the things I want to work on, and at the moment that's a very narrow set, excluding many of my own projects and all of my job.
Don't tell me the week's only half over. I have the gift of second sight:
Tonight mouth organ must be written; that takes a whole night. Tomorrow I have committed to go see the recut Touch Of Evil because, you see, we never leave the house because I spend too much time on the computer. This weekend I'll have to work on another web project that's looking like a sinking ship and which I'm regretting my commitment to. And during the daytime on the next two days, I have to actually work on the things they pay me for.
Furthermore there's some domestic friction about sex and attention in general. Defendant does not deny the charges. I do things with her and I keep thinking "I could be sitting at the computer writing right now," which is just plain wrong and I know it. At any rate, some of the weekend will undoubtedly be spoken for by my just sitting around and lavishing attention on someone's body.
That leaves Friday and maybe Sunday night to: finish two image morphs I want to work on, try again to finish the CGI from hell, try to do another CGI for lanalee, and see if I can't salvage this Diner story I've started and given up twice. Note that all of the things in this paragraph are actually recreational activities! They may not sound like it to you, but they're what I do for fun.
I accused her of not knowing how to have fun. That's unfair. What I really mean, of course, is that she doesn't have many solo recreational activities.
I have plenty of solo activities. In fact, as you no doubt were already aware with your outside perspective, I have the opposite problem: I am trying to do too much. My optional activities are claiming my life.
- - -
All the things I could do for the remainder of the day -- before having to go home and conjure up a sex column -- I don't want to do any of them.
I want to go outside and take a long walk by the Charles River in the first of the new fall winds. I want to breathe deeply. I want to go home and get my camera and take photos of the ducks from the Weeks Footbridge.
It used to be that I didn't want to work on work. At the moment, I don't particularly want to work on play, either.
late-breaking urinary news
twenty-three september ninety eight eleven p m
News from the late-night micturition front.
So today, you may have noted, the mighty Kymm provided us all with this lovely and tasteful URL:
On The Go
I sent this via email to several friends who I hoped would not think me too odd. I did not send it randomly to Dr. Adrian in Barbados ... but nonetheless, with his finely honed telepathic abilities, he sensed the topic. Out of the blue, a few minutes ago, ICQ brought me this.
The net has changed our lives in so many ways.
[Dec 2004: Alas, both of those links are now long dead. Both had to do, if I recall correctly, with gadgets that were supposed to allow women to use male urinals.]
danish to manson to starr
twenty-four september ninety eight eleven a m
I want a Danish. I didn't have breakfast; I usually don't because my stomach wakes up after I do, and all I can stand first thing in the morning is coffee. But my stomach is up early, and it wants a big sticky gooey sugary pastry. Preferably one with a tangy filling for contrast. Lemon.
I want a lemon Danish.
It may be the cold weather, which always boosts my appetite. Last night I brought out the blanket. My significant other uses a blanket basically year-round -- no matter how hot the weather, she'll get cold while she sleeps -- but mine comes out only as weather permits. I like having covers with some weight to them, actually, but I greatly dislike sweating in bed.
These two blankets (why do we each have a separate blanket? Because we fidget and the blankets are small) are old and ratty and at their best -- meaning they're about to fall apart. I love my blanket, but not as much as the cat does. This morning, when he could finally get into the bedroom (this is the Other Cat, not Inu herself), he immediately went to the blanket and walked out a spot for himself and curled up in it emphatically. I bet I'll find him in exactly that position when I get home this evening.
- - -
Reading Entertainment Weekly on the subway, my weekly dose of fluff and gloss. It notes that at the MTV Video Music Awards (heaven help us), actress Rose McGowan, who is apparently dating Marilyn Manson, arrived wearing nothing but a leopard-print thong and a sort of fishnet drape which covered the front of her body only -- and not especially well. Her response, though, was surprisingly frank: trying to be more shocking than Manson makes its demands. "There's not a lot of options besides nudity at this point," she noted.
Manson was dressed comparatively demurely, in a shiny gray suit, also leopard-spotted, with a huge red fake-fur collar. Very Elton John. Although, you know, Manson's actually been stealing from David Bowie lately. All the reviewers of his new CD say so ... so I decided I had to succumb to pressure.
Yes. I bought a Marilyn Manson CD.
And you know what? They're right. I understand his previous stuff didn't sound like this, but Mechanical Animals is mostly taken right from Bowie's heavy drug-rock period. The big difference is that Bowie never used this underpinning of loud white noise and fuzz and burned-out junk -- sort of like glam meets grunge.
Actually the glam is more up my alley than the grunge. It's a good album but I can only listen to it one track at a time -- the relentless noise and the heavy depression gets to me after a while. But there is something here. This is not just a shock-rock stunt.
- - -
Actually the most entertaining thing in this EW is where they review the Starr report as if it were a novel. They give it an A-, ultimately concluding it's multi-genred satire.
Apparently it rates better when taken as a novel than as a porn site -- as mouth organ reported last week, my friends Jane and Jim reviewed it as such on their site, and concluded that it failed to deliver the goods.
i am exceedingly angry
twenty-four september ninety eight eleven p m
I am exceedingly angry. My provider (the same soon-to-be-obsolete provider who has blocked about half my email from reaching me and has not yet told me of this) today lost a day's worth of email. Poof. Gone forever.
That's not a problem so much -- accidents happen, although one wonders why the most recent backup they had was from late August -- but again they haven't informed their customers! I lost a day of mail, but I check mine every day. Some customers may have lost several weeks' worth. Have they mentioned it? No.
The only reason I know about it is because I have an unusual setup and I am smarter than your average bear about these things, having been on the opposite site of the server a few times myself. But surely they can't be hoping no one will notice?
I say again: I cannot leave them fast enough. The web sites already have; now hopefully my email will move quickly enough that they won't win a war of attrition against my regular correspondents.
Meanwhile I am taking drastic measures. If you've tried to write me and I haven't replied, I probably didn't get it. I usually send some kind of acknowledgement.
Until this changeover is complete, please feel free to send mail to [Dec 2004: alternate address removed], which is on another provider and considerably more reliable at present.
Meanwhile I shall content myself by planning the nasty letter I am going to write these people when I say goodbye.
while you were out
twenty-eight september ninety eight midnight
If you're on the webring or know the magic IP number, then you're wondering why I haven't written in a few days, and you're also noticing some changes around here at the bayou.
If you get in via www.inu.org, then you're reading this one or more days after the fact, since at the time I type this, 'www.inu.org' doesn't exist. The IP number [Dec 2004: deleted] exists, and that's where we are now.
My old provider is no longer inu.org, since InterNIC has updated their master record, and what InterNIC says, goes. But my new provider goofed up the configuration on their end ... so right now nobody is inu.org.
(mouth organ, thank heavens, came over without a hitch. If there's a lapse here, I get my friends mildly annoyed; if there's a lapse there, I lose readers.)
Anyway ... if it isn't corrected by the end of today, I'll be giving them nasty phone calls. Do be patient.
Also -- and I apologize for all this -- email may be persnickety at any inu.org addresses (still) ... and two links in the Thinking Aloud ring are broken, despite the week's advance warning I gave them. I've sent another round of email to them.
Meanwhile, it's safe to say that my internet existence has been somewhat disrupted. But I haven't been idle. I have replaced Heliotrope with a much spiffier new version that does a lot more of the persnickety file maintenance stuff for me, like knowing when to create new directories. Now it really is zero-maintenance (she says, before the whole thing crashes around her head).
You'll note that there are more and better ways to see back postcards now as well, should you be so inclined.
I had to reread all the old postcards this weekend, in order to put them in the new format. I noticed a few things:
1. Any comments about the design of this site are doomed to be obsolete as soon as I make them. In four months I've changed the way this area looks four times.
2. In the last couple of months, I've been mentioning my significant other mostly by using circumlocutions like "significant other." I picked up the idea somewhere that I was avoiding mentioning her name - a point of style I thought I had set for myself, and was trying to conform to. But there's [REDACTED], mentioned by name in one of the very first entries, way back in June, and a couple of times since then. Go figure.
3. (In general) I'm not the most consistent person on earth.
But you knew that. Emerson! Emerson!
mushroom hair
twenty-eight september ninety eight noon
My hair is beginning to look mushroomlike.
I bet you think I'm fixated on my hair -- well, maybe a little. I'm not especially vain; it's just that I've got so few good features, I feel kinda unhappy when I think they're not up to potential.
I have good eyes, good legs, and good hair -- but only the first is foolproof. I don't get to show off my legs much, and when I do, they're generally fishbelly white (since I don't get to show them off much ...) And my hair could be really amazing with the right cut ... and since we've already discussed the Great Haircut Dilemma ad nauseum, no more of that.
The rest of my body is functional, durable, and useful, and I have no complaints with it, but it does fail certain aesthetic standards. Given that I live with someone who is constantly aching in various places, I suppose I'd rather have everything be working properly than look pretty -- but one does get wistful on occasion.
Anyway. My hair passes through five stages.
1. Very short.
2. Mushroomlike: It grows faster on top than on the sides, or maybe these hair people cut it shorter on the sides, so now I have this big brioche on my head. If it were Lyle Lovett-style I might be able to pull it off, but it isn't -- it's completely poofy.
3. Elfin. Looks good again for a month or two.
4. Shaggy. This is the do-or-die time, when it's long enough to have a mind of its own, but not long enough to look like I'm growing it out.
5. Long.
1. Very short.
2. Mushroomlike: It grows faster on top than on the sides, or maybe these hair people cut it shorter on the sides, so now I have this big brioche on my head. If it were Lyle Lovett-style I might be able to pull it off, but it isn't -- it's completely poofy.
3. Elfin. Looks good again for a month or two.
4. Shaggy. This is the do-or-die time, when it's long enough to have a mind of its own, but not long enough to look like I'm growing it out.
5. Long.
I ordered a catalog of wigs in the mail. They're very reasonably priced. I'm seriously considering getting a wig. That way when I want to be this long-haired femme I can, and I don't have to worry about trying to get someone to cut my hair girlishly or what my co-workers will say.
There is, however, a part of my brain which keeps telling me that's a cowardly approach to take.
i'm getting too annoyed
twenty-nine september ninety eight eleven a m
Hope everyone's back now. All systems are up and running and email to the usual address should reach me just fine.
I think I've discovered why Americans don't like being aware of newslike events. It depresses them. Americans hate being depressed.
There are plenty of cultures which adore depression. The French smoke long brown cigarettes and muse existentially about how tragic and pointless life is. The Jewish diaspora collectively feels that angst is a very important part of life. The English take all of life in with a uniform sort of stoic tolerance. Many Slavic nationalities take it on faith that misery is the normal state of things.
Of course, in the case of the latter, conditions in their home countries are miserable -- of the states which cut loose from the Soviet Union, only the three little Baltic states up by Finland are having any kind of prosperity -- but it becomes so ingrained that it's hard to shake. I have a Romanian emigre as co-worker. She's doing well -- very prosperously, by my trailer-park standards -- but is possibly the single most fatalistic person I have ever met.
It's not that none of these cultures is capable of cutting loose or experiencing joy, it's just that those are considered brief and rare interludes in an otherwise nasty existence.
We Americans, on the other hand, are brought up to expect jam yesterday, jam today, and jam tomorrow. Is it better to live insisting on a perpetually rosy outlook? Or, as some Europeans would insist, are we just deceiving ourselves and setting ourselves up for our extremely high national psychoanalysis bills? Do the French even believe in psychologists?
What prompted this musing is that every time I read the newspaper I get really unhappy about something. Realizing this is doing me no good: I am unhappier about the fact that the newspaper consistently makes me cranky than I am about any of the bad news items themselves.
Yesterday I randomly picked up a section of The Wall Street Journal to read while I ate my lunch. I saw a story about how pesticide manufacturers have resumed testing their products on humans, saying that the new toxicity regulations make it necessary (the government says that's not true). Yes, humans are being given small doses of pesticides -- and some humans are apparently stupid enough to do it. The ones mentioned in the article were formulations of good old malathion and diazinon, the pair I refer to as The Ortho Twins.
You know, I read today that the grain surplus is so bad in this country, and the market so diminished by the Asian crisis, that the price per bushel for corn or wheat (corn's at about $1.75) is well below the lowest possible cost to produce the stuff. Farmers are guaranteed a loss. Why do we need pesticides in the first place? Let the bugs eat some of it. What the heck.
Then I read that one particular brand of birth control pill -- made by Ortho -- is outselling all the others, with a 12% market share. Why? Because this birth-control pill is the only one which is legally allowed to say that it helps fight acne.
All birth-control pills do, of course; estrogen does the trick. But somehow Ortho finagled approval to make this pitch, and with ads targeted directly at insecure teenage girls ("Can a birth-control pill help clear up your skin?") the results have been spectacular. Medical folks tell stories about girls coming in and requesting this brand by name, even when a different pill with a different dosage level would be better for their needs.
This is not what we need. But it also shouldn't annoy me as much as it does.
I worry that I'm getting so annoyed about everything I read in the papers that I'm going to burn out my annoyance muscles prematurely.
On the other hand, maybe that would be nice. Then I could go out and play in the wind, blissful.
i seldom dream of trains
thirty september ninety eight noon
Today is payday. Time for a Real Lunch. I am so tired of fast food that it's becoming difficult to find a place where I'm willing to eat lunch.
Last night I dreamed I was standing on a platform in an empty train station in the middle of the night. There was no schedule and I had no idea which train to take. So I decided to just get on the first train going in my direction.
There was no one else in my car of the train. The conductor came along, and I found that all my money was missing. I had only coins. It had been there before ...
They stopped the train and put me out. Standing on the rails, watching the lights of the train recede into the darkness.
I walked to the next station -- or maybe it was the one I had come from. It was the Fordham Road station. Why hadn't I seen the sign before? I was obviously trying to go to New York.
The driver of the next train seemed to know me. He let me on and greeted me warmly. His name was Daniel Boulud [the real D.B. is a famous chef in NYC] and he looked just like the French actor Richard Bohringer.
We began the long underground section leading into Grand Central ... then the train turned, as if we were being shunted off into another tunnel. Then we stopped. Daniel explained that there was blockage on the line. No one knew what to do.
Eventually I left the train and went out into the tunnel. I moved conduits and debris from in front of the train, working in the beam of its huge headlight. The conduits hissed steam and were covered with black oily muck which got all over me.
Back on the train, everyone congratulated me as if I had done something heroic.
We ran out of fuel as we pulled up to the platform. Daniel was philosophical about this.
If I had to guess, I'd say my brain was sweeping out the debris of all my internet-related angst from last week. I do feel better now.
I wrote a Circular Cruise about Yom Kippur this morning. I suspect SR is orthodox enough that he won't be reading it today; nonetheless, it's dedicated to him.
05 April 2026 (Last updated 06 April 2026)