In which we use an AI to analyze my writing.
I went to genderanalyzer.com and typed in my URL and clicked the Analyze button and waited patiently. It said, “We think http://goblinbox.com is written by a woman (67%).”
Only sixty-seven percent?
Hmm.
In which I think “artisanal” is a wholly silly word.
Once upon a time, everybody made their own breads and cheeses (or at least personally knew the person who made the breads and cheeses they ate), and I imagine these products were earthy and rustic and “artisanal” and at least edible if not actually delicious. Yay.
Then came the Industrial Revolution and specialization and factories, and cheap, plentiful, uniform breads and cheeses came to be, and there was much rejoicing because making bread every goddamned week probably got really old and anyone who has ever been around homemade cheese-making knows it’s totally smelly and that’s even when you don’t actually own the cows and/or goats the milk came from.
Today when I walked from work down to the post office to see if I’d gotten anything interesting in the mail I passed all these cute little stores packed with “artisanal” breads and cheeses and salamis and olives and things, and it struck me as being kinda funny that we now go out of our way to buy bumpy, floury, expensive, stinky foods, and that it’s a sign of affluence to have the time and money to be able to pay top dollar for the fruits of peasants’ labor.
It may be that our great-great-great grandmothers wish they could reincorporate just long enough to smack us upside our trendy little heads.
In which if you want more ammunition to use against me in our upcoming argument about what a dork I am, here it is!
Winter
It’s 14°F. I am seriously NOT DIGGING IT.
Bindu isn’t digging it, either: she was right up on my right heel most of the way around the block this morning, choosing to hurry rather than sniff every single possible location of dog pee.
Xmas
I have less than half of my gift shopping done. I have no wrapping done. I have not mailed my gift exchange package. I have not put up my little string of Christmas lights around the window in my bedroom.
I am feeling a little bit behind on the whole thing.
Most of my social life takes place on Twitter. I admit it: I love Twitter.
Someone called @SexToySean is now following me, and his icon is a picture of a confusing and possibly terrifying dildo with a feathery-looking appendage I would want nowhere near any body part featuring a high density of nerve endings.
Language
Thanks to my ol’ buddy Buzz, I now have a Rosetta Stone disc. Let’s see if I learn some French!
The Economy
I was all bummed at my last job because I kept expecting the place to close down on me any day but they didn’t and I was lucky enough to be able to change jobs.
….aaaaaaaaand now my new job has let two people go in the past month. I have no idea if my job’s in danger or if they’re just pruning, but, well, yeah.
Cursing
Cursing is becoming utterly commonplace. I curse at work. I curse online. I even came across a tag at respected online mag Wired.com featuring the word “bullshit” right in it.
I should probably be worried that cursing is taking over the adjective’s rightful place in language, but it’s just so fucking fun to swear all the time.
My Lunch
Yes, my lunch! You know you wanna see it. And here it is!:
In which ABSOLUTELY NOTHING HAPPENS.
Okay, so, like, last night at work it was all exciting because there was an HVAC crisis in a server room in Spokane. I had to talk with three engineers over IM and dispatch an HVAC guy and everything. Whee!
Then I went home. I did not have dinner. I did not watch a movie. I SLEPT FOR ELEVEN HOURS.
Then I got up, had breakfast, made lunch, and came back to work.
In which I have a fairly rotten cold. And a lot of fun, too, but the fun sure ain’t helping my cold any.
Thursday, I was pretty much wrecked at work because I’d decided to party the night before, but it turns out that I’m actually even better at phone-based IT work when I’m exhausted: it makes me talk – and think – more slowly and most customers really respond well to me when I’m half crippled.
The Dog Park and Two Bars
Friday, Bindu and I went to the dog park with our new friends J– and Turbo. Here is a fuzzy picture of Bindu and a couple of random Labs:
I met the cutest two-year-old English bulldog bitch in the entire world. The thing was built like a flat-faced toad, was totally friendly, and had the most hilarious underbite ever. I laughed every time she looked at me.
After that, J– and I went to the pub and had sweet potato fries (after intense deliberation I have decided that I do not like them) and built this awesome fire and talked our faces off and OMFG ARE WE HILARIOUS:
Then we went to the Red Monkey and hung out with Becca and Adam. I took this picture of my drinkin’ buddies shortly after we’d entered the “You are so cool, I fuckin’ love you, man!” phase of our evening:
We went to after hours at J–‘s house on Stateline when the bar closed. I slept on the couch; J– slept on the floor because some other dude had passed out in his bed.
Around eleven the next morning I went home and slept in my own bed until I had to get ready for the gig. I coughed for, oh, about three hours straight. Stupid cold. Stupid girl who stays out all night with a cold!
The Gig!
Saturday night was the Mega Jam Blues Slam at the Kennewick Jack*son’s:
There were four bands. The Coyote Kings went on second; I fronted their last 3 songs for them. I had the dance floor COMPLETELY PACKED while I was onstage, and did a little “Lemmie get a hell yeah!” “HELL YEAH!” thing with the audience that really amused me. The crowd was really superlative and the joint was packed. This pic was taken while we performed a cover of Delbert Mcclinton’s Shaky Ground:
I’ve been coughing my face off for a week now, so I’m relieved I only did a few songs; I don’t think the voice would have lasted much longer than that.
Walking around the venue after getting off stage was fun because most of the people in the crowd were blues society members; one entire table actually started clapping when I walked by, and a couple other people just full-on hugged me. I gave out a lot of business cards and decided that I need to buy one of these and get a bunch of old live cassette tape recordings into MP3 format so people can have more free downloads.
There was supposed to be a jam at the end of the evening, but there were two more bands doing sets after ours and most of the Kings just didn’t want to hang out. Since Becca and I had ridden to Kennewick with Rocket and S–, we went with them over to cute little biker bar Dax’s in Richland and listened to a set from the Seattle rockabilly band, Guns n Rosetti. Then we went home because no one – the bass player, the drummer, myself – was really interested in going all the way back over for the jam… I wanted to go, sure, but mainly I was congested and tired and needed to go home to bed since I had to work the next day.
Sundays are mellow.
That next day is today. I’m at work. The volume is really low and frankly I’m wondering if I’m going to get rescheduled or simply laid off or what. Anyway. Behold the office Xmas tree:
I wish I could get sushi for lunch, but I think they’re closed on Sundays.
There’s something deeply satisfying about just getting drunk with people and hanging out; my only regret is that this week’s opportunity to do so coincided with so much snot. Snot, snot, snot. I’m snot-locked.
In other words, I’ve had a lot of fun. But I also have a deep, wracking cough that probably wouldn’t sound like this if I’d not done the drinking/smoking/standing outside in the cold/staying up all night bit. I believe that barring a call from Mick Jagger wanting to party on his Lear jet I’ll just go ahead and take the next week off and act like a mundane: bed rest, herbal tea, dog cuddles, and no staying up all night again until the cough is gone.
In which I decide that in a perfect world I’d be a professional student. And then I complain.
Following are the things I have considered studying – in the past two weeks alone – if only I had the required time and/or money:
Astronomy. There’s a cool online course I want to take; it costs a couple hundred bucks and starts in a month or two. Why? Because all of my astronomy has come from reading hard sci-fi.
French. I hate that I have only one language. I hate that I only get about half of Eddie Izzard’s standup when he suddenly and inexplicably switches to French. Yes, Spanish would be a more functional choice considering where I live, but I actually know more French.
Piano. Because I should be writing original material and my nails are too long to play guitar.
Opera. Because it’s been twenty years since my last classical voice lesson and I think it would be fun. And hard. And fun! And it’s mostly in Italian and German!
Networking. Not because I feel compelled to study networking for its own sake, but because I keep thinking I should get my CCNA or MCSE or something in order to widen my employment opportunities (read: maek moar munny).
History. Wouldn’t it be great to take a history-of-the-world class again? Just for the hell of it?
I just wanna know things.
The things that are easy to know I simply look up. The things that are slightly more complex I learn from people in regular daily interactions. The things I really want to know, however, are more complex than ten minutes of face time and require some sort of formal structure.
Enter my nemesises nemesii: time and money.
I just want to learn. I don’t learn on a daily basis any more. How crap is that?
Some people solved the stay-in-school-forever thing by becoming professors. That had been a plan of mine at one point – before I got distracted by poverty, two re-locations, and a disastrous marriage – I was going to get my PhD in Lit (or history! or philosophy! or music! who cares!) and eventually teach just so I could stay in university forever.
Now I owe so much on my compounded student loans I couldn’t in good conscience ever go back to school again; I doubt I’ll ever fully pay off what I already owe, and I’d certainly be unlikely to live long enough to pay off another twenty to sixty grand additionally.
[BEGIN RANT] In all seriousness, they never should have loaned me all that money in the first place! Holy shit! How the hell is any 18-year-old supposed to figure out how not to live on credit when all they do is teach you that it’s okay to live on credit? I moved out at 17, got my own place, signed my name a few places, and ended up with a bunch of what was effectively free stuff: free classes, free books, free room and board, free mad money. All I had to do was go to class! Yeah!
Well, five years later I couldn’t answer my phone because of the collections calls. Who gives an 18-year-old with no income student loans and credit cards?
I realize I’m arguing against my own college attendance, here. I could never have paid for the schooling I did get without going into massive debt: I grok that. And clearly I’m not scholarship material or I’d have gotten scholarships, yes? School costs money.
I’ve been out of school for a long time and I still owe over forty grand for student loans. It pisses me off that it was so easy to get so much money when I was too young to understand that it would stick with me forever. [/END RANT]
Yeah, so, maybe I’ll buy a keyboard and take some piano lessons.
Or maybe I’ll take the SAO Short Course.
Or maybe I’ll just buckle down and throw money at books and tests until I have a piece of paper that says I can subnet in my head and pull CAT5 from switch to workstation.
[BEGIN RE-RANT] Actually, I forgot: I was scholarship material. Oregon State offered me a partial scholarship in opera but for some reason I didn’t take it and went to my local community college instead.
Oh, yeah, I didn’t take it because I was provincial. I stayed in Gresham and turned into a stoner. MHCC let me audition for a scholarship, too, so for the first year I was enrolled there I only borrowed half the money it cost to attend.
I might actually regret not going to Oregon State, now that I think about it. I wonder what would have been different if I’d gone to college at a state school on an opera scholarship?[/END RE-RANT]
In other words: if I had ample resources, I’d be doing something other than what I’m doing. Money, as little as I regard it in my day-to-day life, actually owns me. I am money’s bitch.
I live in an attic because of money. I work a day job because of money. My entire life actually revolves around money – obtaining it, hoarding it, spending it – and I don’t even like the stuff. I’m lying in this bed I made, this bed of debt. (Note to self: never ever ever get married again ever ever EVER.)
You know what’s fucked up, my babies? That I am old enough to say – and genuinely mean – the following:
YOU WILL NEVER REGRET THE THINGS YOU DID.
YOU’LL REGRET THE THINGS YOU DIDN’T DO.
Just you wait. You too will wake up forty-something one day, and believe me: your dick will fall off. THAT’S how weird it is.
In which it was too much to hope I could go two entire winters without catching something.
When my alarm went off at nine this morning, I didn’t notice that I felt bad or anything, but I did pass right the fuck back out until 11:30. Hard. Like, lights-out.
I got up and had breakfast and packed my lunch. And then it started: the dry cough, the achiness, the itchy lungs. By noon, I was huddled under two blankets and dreading the heat loss of getting dressed.
Now I’m at work and I’m cold and my chest hurts and I want to go to sleep. I think I’m running a low fever. I’m so sleepy.
I have about an hour to decide if I’m going to stay and finish my shift or not; after that I’d have a hard time getting anyone to cover me.
This cloud’s silver lining may be called Relaunch Operation: Quit Smoking Already You Silly Bimbo, though, so that’s good.
Update: I’m going home until six.
In which I share a little something I’ve been thinking about.
I try to shield myself from too much media (because American media is, as you know, ON FUCKING CRACK) but one can’t be alive and totally ignorant of the issues. One does, after all, read the New York Times and listen to NPR on occasion.
In spite of myself, I’ve come to note that the nation’s health care discussion contains all these frightened, angry, negative words and phrases: Death panels. Loss of life. Quality of life. Spending. Cost. Rationing.
The dialog contains nearly circular discussion: “What if I or my loved one needs care but is denied?” followed by “Well we can’t spend infinite amounts of money on everybody, especially when quality of life is taken into consideration!” followed by “WHO EXACTLY IS QUALIFIED TO DETERMINE QUALITY OF LIFE?!”
Everyone seems to have missed the underlying issue here. There is no infinite amount of spending to protect against. The unspoken assumption is that all people, especially those who can’t pay for health care out of their own pockets, will inevitably choose in every circumstance to spend every penny they can.
That’s just not true.
There was a caller on Talk of the Nation this morning (“It’s Not Whether We Ration Health Care, But How”) who said that his elderly father declined a valve replacement surgery because it would probably only extend his life a year and would require six months to recover from. We’ve all heard stories of people halting or declining treatment for themselves or their family members because they knew that heroic measures wouldn’t provide a desirable outcome. It happens all the time.
Expensive, heroic surgeries and treatment modalities tend to be painful, debilitating, and require long recovery times. I submit that most people aren’t gluttons for pain and trauma, and that most of our national dialog on health care is riddled with insurance horror stories about individuals who were denied life-saving treatment they actually needed. The story of the health care end-user who just spends millions just for fun is, I submit, wholly imaginary.
Therefore, if we adjust our thinking away from this imaginary spender, we have less to protect from and therefore less to legislate about. Let’s let people decide what they need, and make sure they get it. Let’s not make them accept things they don’t want to accept.
Problem solved.
Anyway.
In which my fucking browser ate my post so I had to write the whole thing all over again! Gah! So NOW this post is totally an exercise in Weird Tense. It’s a good thing I majored in Literature, y’all, or we’d never make it through this.
Yeah, so I’d started out today’s missive with something about this morning’s yoga class and how after only going twice I can touch my toes again, and how I paid for the rest of the sessions to make myself keep going.
And then I told you (again, but you forgave me) that I bought a yoga mat, and that it will be here Tuesday, and you were all happy for me and my yoga class.
Then I said something about how every time I want to write a blog post, all I can think about is stuff I’ve seen online, and how I’m not really doing anything IRL but working and sleeping. And then I cleverly said something about how I should get excited and make things so everyone would know that I know all about the Internet’s meme-of-the-week and I thereby retained my geek cred, which is totally important since obviously that’s all I have.
Then I cleverly segued into something along the lines of how much I love the Internet because it’s so awesomesauce and I was all ‘and here’s a story to prove it,’ and I went on to tell you about how last week someone on Twitter – where my entire social life takes place – linked to these totally fantastic posters some guy had designed for IYA09, and I told you about how I’d left a comment on the post – because hello! did you see those posters?! how could I not comment? – and that that’s what got me an email this week letting me know that the posters were now available for purchase.
Then this morning, Keef (the humanoid who has awesomely been hosting my site for free for about a geological age) hit me up on IM to discuss some server stuff, and I asked him if he’d seen the posters, and he hadn’t, so then I linked him, and then he had, and he allowed as to how wouldn’t they be great screenprints, and I totally agreed, and then it evolved into him emailing the artist to see if he, the artist, was interested in actual honest-to-God screenprinting, not that giclée stuff, which basically means “ink jet” anyway, and the artist said he’d already been asked several times if the posters would be available in that format, and it turns out that Keef totally does screenprinting, and so there you go.
Point being, I didn’t actually get excited and make anything myself, but I know people – online – who totally do that shit all the time.
And I watched CERN’s tweets as they spun up the LHC, and hung out at a live talk about Drake’s Equation at Astronomy.fm (during the moments I was blowing off the Tedious Data Entry Project I’m involved in at work) and so basically, other than going to yoga class and smiling at a bunch of strangers and being reminded yet again of my total and complete lack of muscle strength, I’ve really basically just had my head up the Internet’s arse all day.
Oh, did I mention that I love the Internet?
I did?
VSCO
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4 random books from my Library!
