So excited!

Three Great Things:

1) just came back from my favorite first date in weeks.

2) bike modification plans which involve both hacksaws and fiddly gear messing around.

3) new job on Tuesday.


Two Not-So-Great Things:

1) Eyeballs have been hurting all night. (dialogue from date, her: "are you asian?" me: "no, I just, squint a lot." We were both grinning, so this exchange was not weird.)

2) $16 to last me until my first paycheck.

Sitting in a coffee house with a few other laptop homeless, trying to deflect this black-hair-swept-in-front-of-face girl's look-smile-lookaway tactics.

I've decided I'm only going to wear one shirt forever. I don't like any of my others.

I wish I had one pair of pants I could wear forever too.

I would just write on myself when I needed a change of look.

Also, thinking of getting a tattoo on my calf reading:

Look At My Awesome CALF TATTOO

I bet that would be hilarious. Especially if the tattoo was too big, so I had to put it on both legs, so they read:

Look             At My
Aweso          me CA
LF TA            TTOO

I'm going on my first group ride tomorrow.  Pretty excited.  I think we're going about 13 miles West to the Silver Comet trail, possibly stopping off to swim in a river, and then heading back by around 10am.

Met up with some people at the Drum Circle.


( More pictures... )

I'm at the Performer offices, finishing up my last review.  Not really sure where to go with it.  The first half of the album is good, the second half is worse than bad - annoying.

It's been a challenge learning how to review things - we generally don't, in the humanities.  I'm not sure what the hell criticism is, but it's definitely not review.  It's sometimes laughable how little we care whether a work is "good" or "bad."

I'm not hungover, just the sleepiest I've been in a few months.  I think, last time I was this sleepy, I had just wandered off a 13 hour nightbus ride into Cappadocia.  I stumbled around town, half-heartedly looking for cheap hostels, but eventually just got a bunk at the first place I smelt still cooking breakfast.  It turned out to cost almost twice as much as I expected to pay, which wiped out my cash for the four days I had planned to stay in town.  I ended up eating bread and cheap local watermelon the entire time I was in Cappadocia.

So, that's how sleepy I am. 

On the other hand, I got to see Liars play at The EARL last night, had some unexpected company later, and got a somewhat optimistic reply from a for-pay writing job this morning.

Other important news: being drunk, on the internet, leads me to sign up for tree planting and camping trips.

Oh, also, interesting: 

"Using public anonymous data from the 1990 census, Latanya Sweeney found that 87 percent of the population in the United States, 216 million of 248 million, could likely be uniquely identified by their five-digit ZIP code, combined with their gender and date of birth. About half of the U.S. population is likely identifiable by gender, date of birth and the city, town or municipality in which the person resides. Expanding the geographic scope to an entire county reduces that to a still-significant 18 percent. 'In general,' the researchers wrote, 'few characteristics are needed to uniquely identify a person.'" 

From Bruce Schneier's Anonymity and the Netflix Dataset

Here's something that's been bothering me about the NOLA volunteer effort:

I've been working on rebuilding a ruined two-story house for the past four days, along with about eight other Oglethorpe students. Hands On New Orleans is involved in a lot of these projects - many of our materials are donated by corporations, and all of our labor is provided by volunteers, so the total cost of rebuilding or gutting a house is usually about a tenth of what a home owner would normally pay. Still, for a house like the one we've been working on, reconstruction takes about a year, and costs around $19,000 (which the home owner pays).

These houses are usually in the sort of area I'd describe as "ghetto", so it's pretty normal to see homeless people walk by the house or stop to chat with the volunteers. Talking to New Orlean's homeless, it's easy compare their homelessness with the thousands of people displaced by hurricane Katrina. In the case of the evacuees, volunteer organizations treat their homelessness as unnatural, an injustice to be remedied.

By working with a volunteer organization, I'm reinforcing the belief that one sort of homelessness deserves a greater effort than another, more historically accepted homelessness.

-

That's not the only thing bothering me about volunteering down here, but most of my other issues are with my own motivation as a volunteer, rather than the values that the entire effort reinforces. From what I can tell, Common Ground places almost equal amounts of focus behind resettling New Orleans homeowners, and addressing the larger issues of the city's economic injustices.

-

Also, that Kimya Dawson concert - fucking amazing. I forgot a camera, but a friend's got a few million pictures, which I'll eventually post here.

( Pictures from this last week... )

I'm putting together another dayinmylife. Some sample pictures inside.

When I was going to school at UGA, I spent more time tracing my circuit board with UV-reactive paint than I did in class. And the bulk of my social interaction was divided between swapping movies and comics through Direct Connect, and walking with a girl who (I now realize) had a very unfortunate crush on me. I purposefully went to meals when I knew the fewest people would be eating, and I walked the long way between classes for the same reason.

I don't think that I'm too much different now than I was five years ago, but it appears that online tests feel differently.

(I want to be in New Orleans right now. My whole apartment smells like that girl, and it's giving me a headache. Or I just need coffee. Whatever. Walking time.)

I was taking pictures/taping at the train station near my school a few minutes ago.  A guy came up and told me I wasn't allowed to do that.  I said what, and he said take pictures in the train station.  I asked him why and he said because of 9/11.  I asked him what 9/11 had to do with it, and he said because of the bombs.

The funny thing about this whole exchange:  the guy who told me to stop taking pictures didn't work for MARTA.  He was just some random guy, and he thought he was doing me a favor by keeping me out of trouble. 

After WWII, this Italian guy/gal whose name I forget wrote a description of the steps a country takes toward facism.  I'm not sure which phase it was, but at some point, vaguely defined laws and fear of trespassing them do more to control a populace than any physical police force.  So that's great.

(It should be noted that I've had similar experiences everywhere I've traveled - in Japan, it was almost a way of life)

PS:  I'm trying to think of some way to cite Blood Magic: The Anthropology of Menstruation in the bibliography for this paper I'm writing.

Excerpted from the wikipedia entry on Irukandji Syndrome:

The severity of pain is apparent in a Discovery Channel show on Carukia barnesi when two researchers (Jamie Seymour and Teresa Carrette) are stung. Even under the "maximum dose of morphine" Teresa remarked that she "wished she could rip her skin off", and is later seen writhing uncontrollably from the pain, while lying on her hospital bed. In a particularly disturbing shot, we see Teresa's feet contorting and digging into the bed. When the camera pulls out to a wide shot, she is rubbing her face, her body is contorting in agony, and her legs are rapidly sliding and kicking around on the bed. Jamie, at his worst, is also seen writhing in pain, curled up like a ball and barely able to speak. Jamie said he wished that he was stung by Chironex fleckeri instead since "the pain goes away in 20 minutes or you die".

Reading Fitzgerald's short stories makes me angry.

This is a picture of me wrastling the cat:



This is a picture from one of my parties a few months ago:



I'm gonna have another one in about two weeks.  Friday or Saturday.  If you're reading this, you're invited.  And, if you reply or email me your facebook, I will send you an invitation.  (In a few days, when I manage to create the event).

"Shhhhh - this is a library"

Not that I hate being American, America, etc - but, when I'm quietly working on a paper, and the library is suddenly filled with a million idiot babbling Southern Californians, that's when this American thing becomes a little embarrassing.  I mean-

"Guys, try to stay quiet, people are working here"

-I mean, I'm all for talking.  Talking is great.  But at some point Americans, or perhaps only American college students from Southern California, switched from "talking" to "babbling".  "Babble" is a form of communication, but it is a communication whose only purpose is to convey the sense that the person using it is the sort of person who talks.  Much like the tweeting of birds, or the mating calls of bullfrogs.

"Guys -"

It is a stream of noise meant to establish the importance and vitality of the person speaking.  The content of the words they speak is basically unimportant.

"shhhhhhhhhhhhhh - Guys!"

They might as well be saying "look at me look at me look at me look at me this is my sweatshirt this is my team this is my college I have money my hair costs money I am in England this is me this is me this is me I need to check my email email how do I sign on why don't these keyboards work right my hands my hands my hair my hair sweatshirt".

I'm not implying that students in other countries don't say stupid shit - I've heard plenty of it, here and everywhere else.  But at least they're quiet about it.  Sometimes they realize they've said something stupid, and they apologize, or at least blush.

"These computers don't have USB ports?  How am I supposed to plug this in?  Why don't they have USB ports here?"
"Dude!"
"I mean this is fucked.  Seriously man what the fuck?"
"Will, Nathan, could you two keep it down?"
"Oh.  Sorry."
"My bad."

I'm not going to be the only one forced to hear this bullshit.

Dear World:

Please update lj more.

Yours,
A Very Bored Ben