badgerbag: messy, surly, full of books: invented memory meme
Invent a memory of me and post it in the comments. It can be anything you want, so long as it's something that's never happened. Then post this in your journal so that people can invent memories for you.
Crap. Since when did my signature on this blog say joshua instead of j? Apparently ever since I imported it to MT. Oh, well.
Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. Oz has spoken!
Since I was up until two or three in the morning yesterday, futzing around with BlogLatin tonight I'm going to hit the sack early...at midnight. Gah! It's already midnight?
Check out BlogLatin for some hot translating action! Come on, you know you want it!
since I just "got tasked" with writing the meeting minutes for a meeting that happened yesterday to which I wasn't even invited. I don't know whether my boss figures I'm telepathic, capable of inventing a time-machine, or maybe I'll just fly out faster than light, overtake the image from the meeting and use my super-vision to read everybody's lips and take notes...
I may have been complaining recently about my brains turning to mush, but I'm still apparently the only person in a room full of my colleagues who can remember what we all agreed on in a meeting that happened two weeks ago.
Of course, I could be making it all up, and they wouldn't know the difference...
Dammit. I hate rejection. Yeah, yeah, so does everybody else, I know, but just because I'm not Daffy Duck and recognize that pain hurts other people too doesn't mean that my pain isn't particularly unpleasant to me.
One of my eh matches, with whom I had been having a pretty good correspondence (or so I thought), just closed communication with me, canned reason: to pursue a relationship with someone else.
Since I'm in the mood to quote cartoons and comics:
Your loss, toots.
I've created an RPG Wiki as a place to store stuff about my RPG rules and campaign settings. I decided that updating individual HTML pages was too much of a pain, so I wasn't keeping things up-to-date and they were becoming scattered over various notebooks and scraps of paper. I'm hoping that by creating this wiki I'll be encouraged to keep it all together, neatly indexed (the whole point of a wiki) and easy to back up and to print out handouts.
yahadee-a-dee-a-dee-a-dee-a-dee-a-dee-a-dum...
Just out of curiosity I took the match attraction test as a man attracted to men. According to match, I like pretty boys and hunks. I dunno...which is Pfirsig Rommel?
I found it a lot trickier to take this way, in that I spent more time thinking about the choices and worrying about whether I was second-guessing myself. Do I find that man attractive, or do I just think I ought to. Wait, did I rate that same guy as unattractive before?
With women it was much more straightforward (no pun): her, her, her, not her, her...
Argh. The cable guy showed up (early, at least) to look at the cable modem, check the wires, check the basement, and announce that the problem is on the outside and they'll have to get a crew to come fix it, maybe tomorrow. At least they don't need access to the apartment, so I don't have to be home.
So I'm back at Borders, eking out the last of yesterday's TMobile daypass.
to the Internet. My cable modem went out Thursday, and by Friday night I was jonesin' pretty bad (despite having surfed some while at work). Not being able to check my email or read my blogs was making me an unhappy camper. The cable guy can't come out to check it until Sunday. I did get service again for about two hours late Friday night, and in relief I spent it IMing with badger and downloading four versions of If I Were A Bell from iTunes (I've always wanted to make a mix of nothing but a single jazz standard done by a bunch of artists), but it was gone again this morning. Currently I'm shelling out dinero to TMobile so I can surf at Borders. The only cafe that I know of with free wifi is downtown, and I'm not quite ready to travel a half-hour to avoid paying the TMobile piper.
I just figured out that the open-source firmware replacement for my Jukebox can autocreate playlists from directories. Sweet. Now I can shuffle through, say, my entire Jazz collection.
I like shuffle, because for me it makes the songs seem fresher; I get so used to the pattern of transitions in an album that even when I think I'm listening it just sort of glides right over me. When each new song is a surprise, it really brings it to my attention. But unlike the radio, the songs are all good--or at least good enough that I don't delete them as a waste of space, and none of them get played so much that I never want to hear them again as long as I live (my attitude towards almost all of the Beatles by now).
Now I'm off to really take a look at iTunes for the first time. Wish me luck; I may never return with my sanity and my wallet intact....
Although the match physical attraction test was fun to take, and I recommend that everyone give it a try (you don't need to be a member, you just need a throw-away email address to give them), attraction to a photograph isn't the same thing as attraction to a person. For more on that, this article talks about some interesting studies:
ARTICLE: Physical beauty involves more than good looks
Actually, taking the personal attraction test was pretty interesting, in that it revealed things to me about my preferences that I didn't know, besides confirming things that I did. The revelations basically fell into two categories: commonalities of which I was unaware, and how my preferences compare with the larger population. A lot of the test involves being shown a bunch of pictures of faces and selecting which ones you find most attractive, with pictures being replaced as you do so; it goes by pretty quickly, but I'm pretty sure that some of them are photoshopped to give them different hairstyles, glasses or not, change the complexion, presumably to focus in on what it is you're really selecting for. So, for instance, it turns out that I really like brown eyes. I sort of knew this, in that I knew that I liked certain ethnicities that typically have brown eyes (asian, latino), but apparently without my being conscious of it, I also had a strong propensity to select caucasian women with brown eyes. Yet if I were asked in the abstract what my favorite eye-color was, I'd have said green. Another interesting thing is that apparently I picked many more women as attractive than does the average man, but at the same time I'm quite picky in that the women I did find attractive strongly correlated with a very small set of features: sharp, narrow chins, wide and angular diamond or heart-shaped faces, full lips, and a few others (like brown eyes). Very Mediterranean looking. Maybe it's my Sephardic blood (of which I have none).
The other category was where my preferences fell compared to other men; only about 30% shared my tastes, and only about 9% (I think) shared them strongly. One thing that I found striking is that the woman that I found most attractive in the whole set was considered least universally attractive to most men (among the category of African-American women). Other men are weird.
- I'm definitely not ready for a woman who has a "personal FUN relationship with God."
- Why does Match keep warning me about women with prominent Adam's apples and big hands with bony wrists?
- The new match physical attraction test is a great time saver; now match can tell me that all the women will find me physically unappealing before they do.
- poor sean, who accidentally coded himself as a woman seeking a man. No wonder he hasn't been active in three months...
My sleep specialist gave me some samples of a nasal spray and a decongestant to try, to see if I can get my airways clear enough that I can bear to wear the CPAP machine through the night. Here's hoping...
I do have something to add.
For what it's worth, I've experienced some of the same changes that Erin O'Connor laments myself. Despite the fact that I still probably peg the needle on the tolerance for long, difficult reading scale (as calibrated for the average American reader, anyway), more and more I find myself needing to set aside substantial chunks of time in an environment with a good deal of peace and quiet if I'm to make headway in long and difficult books. I don't know whether it's exposure to that newfangled modern media with all its flashing blinkenlights and the noise and the dizziness and the glaven, or just age (or maybe age plus chronic lack of sleep), but my ability to switch on and off intense concentration and plunge right back into something complex in the brief moments available, and despite distractions in the environment, is pretty much gone. In college I could pause and resume heavy reading pretty much at will: in the elevator, standing in line in the cafeteria, at the beginning of class while the instructor shuffled papers and poured a drink of water (or was it vodka? At the time it never crossed my mind, but now I think it would explain a lot about certain lecturers). I never scaled badgerian heights of reading while, say, brushing my teeth or while inadvertently applying extra-strength capsaicin cream to my nether regions, but my ability to push and pop reading, discussions, etc. to my mental stack was noted among my friends. When asked to "hold that thought" I really could hold that thought for days, and then resume, reminding everyone of what the last thing each person had said in our previous discussion. I'd have made a good continuity girl.
I can still sort of perform this feat at work, recapping decisions made and arguments offered at meetings, but my brains take more wracking, and there are more lacunae. Is it modern culture finally getting to me? It would almost be comforting...it would be nice to think that I'm being compensated with increased technological aptitude or something in return for my brains turning to mush.
Critical Mass: Attention deficit and the modern intellect
English teachers know her claims about our collective degraded relationship to language to be true. They see it in their students, who object to reading long things, who object to reading hard things, who never think to look up words or ideas they don't know, who struggle not only to perceive linguistic nuance but also to keep track of plot twists and character names, who cannot independently picture character and scene inside their heads, who cannot grasp the rhyme or reason of verse that is not free verse. English teachers also--if they are honest--see the decaying of attention in themselves. The compulsive scanning and clicking rhythms of reading on the web become their norm for reading generally; they find themselves becoming impatient skimmers where once they would have carefully read and absorbed each word. Likewise, the use of the "quick email check" to kill time and fill gaps in concentration both expresses and causes their own altered relationship to concentrated reading and dedicated study.
Nothing to add, but I thought I'd point it out to badger, since I don't know if she reads Critical Mass
Conversation w/K this evening. She calls, crying, on her cell phone--first time we've really talked in a couple of months. Wants to know if J had "taken custody" of me. Try to explain, nicely, that since last time we talked she was going off about how angry and disappointed she was with her friends who weren't telling J what a bastard he was being and how he should go crawling back to her that I figured that she was mad at me and I'd just wait until she got over it. (Of course, K never gets over a mad, she just files it away...) So quick catch up: status quo hasn't changed a bit. J still being hateful. For instance, he sent her an email wishing her a happy birthday. The bastard. He did it just to hurt her. Tricksy hobbitses, pretend they want to be our friendses, but we know better yes we do my precious pain...
She's decided she wants to go to the con that we've gone to the past three summers (where J has been a guest and will be a guest this year again); she has friends she only sees there, fair enough. She tells him this, and he says ok, he's fine with that. Who does he think he is? She wasn't asking permission! Oh, but could he get her a guest pass to save her money? What does he mean he was thinking of bringing his girlfriend. He can't do that! Not with K bringing their kid along! He promised that he'd keep girlfriend away from "family" things. Just another in the endless list of broken promises. She misses him so much.
Me, I'm going to see if I can arrange to be on the other side of the country while this con is going on.
eHarmony that is. It's another online dating site, but with a much more elaborate procedure than the others I've looked at. Basically you take this whole long personality test that tries to categorize you along 19 dimensions and then the site's software (designed by a psychologist with a PhD oooooooooh, impressive) selects matches for you only out of those who are (in some sense) compatible with your personality (both affinities and complementary characteristics). Plus, it's about 50% more expensive than the others.
It's probably not a worse way of matching than based on similar answers to a narrower range of questions, and the higher price may actually make it more likely that the people trying it are interested in making a go of it. One clever (in terms of giving you the illusion of forward progress, not necessarily in terms of making a match) thing they do is make part of the process a structured back-and-forth. I.e. they inform you of a potential match. The next step (unless you just skip over it to direct emailing) is you send them three questions out of a list of about 20, they answer them and send you back three questions for you to answer; after that you send them a list of ten "musts" and ten "can't stands" and you get to see their ten musts and must nots. Musts are things like: "I must have a partner who is good at talking and listening", "I must have someone who is comfortable giving and receiving affection". Again, it's from a list of thirty or so potential requirements. "Can't Stands" are things like "I can't stand someone who has a devious nature and is mean to others" or "I can't stand someone who believes that any particular ethnic group to which they belong is superior to the rest of humanity."
So with their set-up, there's a bit of back and forth before you're actually communicating via email, which (at least for me so far) makes me feel like I'm making progress getting to know these women...on the other hand, the computer nerd in me says "yeah, yeah, just filling out the damn forms all at once would be more efficient." I guess one thing that this lets you do is tailor your questions a bit more to their profile; if she's already made it clear in her self-description that she's a bookworm, no sense in asking her how many books she reads per year: a) 0-3, b) 3-7, c) 8-12) d) more than 12. (Yes, that's an actual example).
So far I've only got to the open emailing stage with one woman, and that's because her sub ran out and she skipped over the rest of the steps to tell me her email addy if I wanted to write her outside the service. I think the answer is no, btw.