Grr. I was all happy, because I was doing an easy transcription job involving ophthalmology, which is always fun. The sun was shining, the interviewee was talking nice and slowly, using lots of juicy medical words like acanthamoeba and fusarium; I had my left foot on the foot pedal and my right foot under the chin of a dozing cat (who got stung in the face by a wasp yesterday, poor beast, but without apparent ill effect except for a little red welt above his lip). Then the doorbell rang. Or, rather, clunked, since the chime fell out of it several months ago. It was the handyman, here to repair the doorbell and the hall light fixture and the hole next to the radiator and the missing caulk around the bathtub, before the apartment gets inspected by the Housing Department on Monday. I shuffle the cat and his food and water and litter into the bedroom and the dude says, "I'll be right back." So I'm sitting here, bereft of cat (he yowled for a while but now he seems content enough), distracted and peevish, staring at the ladder and drill in my hallway. I can't find the missing doorbell chime, the handyman's been gone over an hour, and I still haven't gotten back to work. I guess I'd better, though. Flargh blargh.
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04:45:24 PM,Friday 18 July 2008
Near the end of this, we found ourselves spontaneously singing in unison: "It's raining goats! Hallelujah! It's raining goats! A-goats!"
K stops, looks at me, and says evenly, "There could not be any better indication of why you are the only woman for me."
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11:32:01 PM,Thursday 17 July 2008
My CART gear:
Photo by K.
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03:07:40 PM,Thursday 17 July 2008
The Periodic Table of Videos! Completely freaking adorable. Also awesome.
via Red Ferret.
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09:56:29 AM,Wednesday 16 July 2008
Blogging to you live from Sunny Brooklyn, using Stolen wireless and my Tablet's Pen recognition software while waiting for ASL class. Hex, that's actually Pretty good, One wrong word and Some Capitalization errors. Considering my handwriting, I'm impasses. Um... impressed. Okay. So it ain't perfect. Still assail. And all, rather. Eh.
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05:54:02 PM,Tuesday 15 July 2008
Those new limited-edition Cheesy Cheddar BBQ Cheetos are EVIL tasty. Holy flargh.
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01:41:42 PM,Tuesday 15 July 2008
This, from Obama, was well said, and needed saying:
"We live in a global economy. And, you know, I don't understand when people are going around worrying about, "We need to have English-only." They want to pass a law, "We want English-only."
Now, I agree that immigrants should learn English. I agree with that. But understand this. Instead of worrying about whether immigrants can learn English -- they'll learn English -- you need to make sure your child can speak Spanish. You should be thinking about, how can your child become bilingual? We should have every child speaking more than one language.
You know, it's embarrassing -- it's embarrassing when Europeans come over here, they all speak English, they speak French, they speak German. And then we go over to Europe, and all we can say, "Merci beaucoup." Right?
You know, no, I'm serious about this. We should understand that our young people, if you have a foreign language, that is a powerful tool to get a job. You are so much more employable. You can be part of international business. So we should be emphasizing foreign languages in our schools from an early age, because children will actually learn a foreign language easier when they're 5, or 6, or 7 than when they're 46, like me."
As a monolingual Yank whose parents speak six languages between them, I'd love to see the public educational system revised to start kids off learning new languages right from kindergarten. I don't think the zeitgeist supports it, though, and I doubt it's the sort of thing he'd throw his back into once elected, but still. Good on him for saying so.
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11:06:26 AM,Tuesday 15 July 2008
Also in insanely exciting Flickr news, someone has scanned and uploaded pages from Usborne's The Detective's Handbook, which I was obsessed with as a kid. I wanted to be a detective so, so badly. Then I realized I had a dreadful memory for numbers and faces, a galumphing tread, couldn't lie to save my life, and was almost entirely oblivious to the world around me. Sigh.
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10:04:25 AM,Monday 14 July 2008
I don't brag all that often, but my girlfriend has been taking pictures around the city lately, and some of them are pretty damn kickass. Her Flickr page can be found here. (This is mainly for the benefit of my father, because I think he lost his email password and I know he reads my blog. But if any of the rest of you don't yet know about her page and you have a fondness for the startling juxtapositions of building styles you can find in this town when you look at it right and for strange and wonderful architectural details, go check it out.)
Here's one she took during our jaunt in Midtown today:
K: Feta Bruschetta. Feta Bruschetta. I think that might have to be my stripper name.
M: Can I blog that?
K: Oh, all right. But don't say stripper. Say burlesque dancer. No, say exotic dance technician.
M: Awesome.
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11:12:36 AM,Sunday 13 July 2008
I just bought 144 sticky starfish. The cat has made us crazy.
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09:11:10 PM,Thursday 10 July 2008
Please clear up any misconceptions I have on this, because I am quite honestly not as well-informed as I should be, but in terms of political integrity, it seems to me like an analogy could be drawn between the FISA bill and the Employee Non-Discrimination Act, introduced in late 2007. ENDA was an act intended to outlaw workplace discrimination against GLBT employees, but the T (transgender) part was seen as too controversial and the act was put forward as a law that applied only to sexual orientation but not gender identity. This caused a severe schism in the GLBT community, with some saying that gender identity was too controversial and was bound to prevent the bill's passage, and that the gay community had waited too long and worked too hard to let it get bogged down in details like transgender protection, and others saying that the transgendered employees were far more likely to be victimized in the workplace than gay ones, so the bill was more important to their livelihood than anyone else's, and that they had always been at the forefront of the battle for equal rights and too frequently the first to be jettisoned when the politics got tricky. I sided with the latter group. Representative Barney Frank, who I've admired for many years, sided with the first group. So did the Human Rights Campaign, incidentally, and I got into a spirited debate with one of their sidewalk canvassers about this, but that's another story. Frank was vilified by many people in the GLBT community as a selfish sellout, and he lost a lot of support and goodwill. I understood where he was coming from, and resisted the urge to vent my spleen at him. I disagreed with him. I thought he was making the wrong decision, both politically and morally, but I still respected him, and if I had lived in his jurisdiction, I would still have voted for his reelection.
With respect to the FISA issue, Obama voted for the amendment to deny immunity to the telecom companies. The Amendment was voted down, and now he'll be voting for FISA as a whole, even though that means the immunity will be granted. On his blog he says, "The ability to monitor and track individuals who want to attack the United States is a vital counter-terrorism tool, and I'm persuaded that it is necessary to keep the American people safe -- particularly since certain electronic surveillance orders will begin to expire later this summer." I think he overstates this issue, but I can think of both political and rational reasons why he might say this and, possibly, why he might believe what he says. It's not enough to make me withhold my support from him. I've got a lot more to think about with respect to this issue, but this is where I am right now.
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07:00:50 PM,Wednesday 9 July 2008
The other day in the subway I saw a middle-aged white guy in a Mac t-shirt walking along with his thumb stuck in a copy of Anathem. I sidled up to him and said, "Excuse me," in what I thought was a friendly manner, but the guy jumped a foot in the air and gave a little shriek. "Sorry for startling you," I said, "But I was wondering if there were any more where you got that one," indicating the book. "No! No!" he said emphatically and scrambled off double time away from me. Oh well.
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05:55:09 PM,Monday 7 July 2008
I had so much fun with the synesthesia meme, I wanted to start another interactive mix game going. I love hearing songs juxtaposed into conversations with each other, whether by taking something in the previous song and riffing on it, or commenting snarkily on it, or just picking up its mood and spinning it into something new. I've made a Muxtape called "Blogmass", (login name and password: blogmass). As far as I'm concerned, anyone who sees this post is eligible to play -- and send your friends over too, if they're interested. I started off with a track I found a while back on another blog. It's a cover of a song whose original I haven't heard, by two very famous figures whose music I'm almost completely ignorant of. Maybe I'm a noob, but I really like it. So someone upload a song to answer it. If you enjoy it or can't stand it or are bored to tears by it, or if you've thought of a clever way to link it to something else, upload your reply in mp3 form. No rules, except that no one should answer their own song. I'm curious to see what we wind up with.
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04:30:50 PM,Monday 7 July 2008
Last night I saw Thurgood. It was excellent. Today I gave Obama $100. We're about to go out into the close, overcast day and get the makings of a big old fry-up for breakfast. Happy Fourth!
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01:44:50 PM,Friday 4 July 2008
You can't have eudaimonia without good habits, man. I realize this. I've got a good life, and I'm pretty happy in a free-floating way: enough to eat, a limitless city, a place to retreat to, and a girl to curl up with at night -- but I'll never be eudaimonia happy until I'm able to control my habits. It's the hardest damn thing.
Here's a list of the things I already reliably do every day:
Check (and mostly answer) my email
Get through my RSS reader and blog trackers
Wash the dishes
Clean the cat box
Read printed text (most days)
Feed myself
Shower (most days)
Here's a list of things I'd do every day if I had the self-discipline of a godlike superbeing:
Everything in the previous list
Practice at least one of my instruments, if not all three
Practice ASL
Practice steno, both speed and dictionary building
Learn Python incrementally but steadily and start working on Plover in earnest
Work out 30 minutes a day, incorporating both cardiovascular and strength training
Cook meals from scratch regularly without using processed ingredients
Gather background material for Mold and Gammon (My poor scrapped NaNo Novel; someday I actually want to write the thing)
I'm laughing bitterly just thinking about it. But nothing ventured, et cetera. I've registered four calendars on Everyday Systems's HabitCal: Fingerspell, CCP, Twist, and Pushups. Every day that I complete a quiz of any length at my current speed level on ASLPro's Fingerspell site, every day I practice one of the 5-minute takes from my RMR CDs, every day I complete my allotted portion of pushups according to Hundredpushups.com (using hand weights as pushup bars since it's too hard on my wrists to do them the normal way), and every day (I blush to write it) I spaz around like an idiot on my Twist Board for the duration of even one mp3 of my choice, I'll give myself a green square. I'm intrigued by the ShovelGlove, also from Everyday Systems, but I'm going to try to keep to these ludicrously easy goals for at least a month before I purchase any new equipment. We'll see how it goes.
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05:16:49 PM,Thursday 3 July 2008
This is brilliant. Also gorgeous. Via Sola.
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03:43:17 PM,Wednesday 2 July 2008
