best use of the same lyric for more than 1 continuous minute

Ted Leo & the Pharmacists : "Little Dawn"

a telephone conversation with my dad and what matt thought I was talking about

Me: You hit a wall?
Matt: Her dad was in a car crash! Oh no!
Me: You broke it?
Matt: He has a broken bone (oh no) but is otherwise okay.
Me: Can you get a new one?
Matt: Oh, actually he broke a piece of the car, then.
Me: Did you win?
Matt: What the hell?
Me: I guess that makes sense. Of course he beat you if you had a broken racquet.
Matt: Does tennis have walls?



Actually he was playing racquetball.

you don't have to go to college

A lot of things have been going on.

1. I am probably going to New Mexico this summer for an internship at Sandia National Lab.

2. I just recently heard about Camp Wellstone and associated projects, and I want to do something related to that.

3. Last night I saw Moolaade, and then I talked about it in mixed (male/female) company. I came out of the film angry - angry that tradition sometimes has more weight than the real harm it does to real people. I was angry that every step on the way to making women count as much as men has been a fight. I generalized this one extreme example of subjugation to the entire struggle. And when I talked about that with this group, some of them commented that I shouldn't judge other cultures, that maybe traditions ought to be respected. But for me, when women's humanity is abridged, negated, ignored, or conveniently forgotten it's personal. I don't have to be there and have it happen to me - I am a woman, and I feel it. Some women don't have that reaction. Like men, they're free to talk about respecting traditions. I can't do that, because when I think about what happens to women in the name of tradition I feel as though I have been attacked and my country is under siege. I'm not ready to hold a reasoned discussion about respecting diverse cultures, I'm ready to bite and scratch like an animal. Maybe that's wrong and we ought to humor people who think women don't deserve to be counted as half of humanity. I don't care.

There are a lot of other things that make this list. People who think women are the property of their husbands, who punish women for the sexual response that men have to them, who keep women under house arrest as a matter of course, who want to limit contraception and abortion in order to remove any control women have over their own bodies - I won't accept that this kind of bigotry deserves a reasoned response.

I had a similar reaction when in November all those states passed anti-gay amendments. I've got a bisexual friend who's practically part of my family, and I spent quite a while with an itchy punching-hand. That's my friend, my household, that they're saying isn't capable of the same kind of love as everyone else. Punch punch punch.

4. Square envelopes require an extra 12 cents of postage.

5. I like giving out presents but I don't like the commercialization of this holiday. But I like its decorations, food, and rituals at the same time as I don't care for the tradition it stands for. I like having something pretty and celebratory to look at and do in the winter, because winter is cold and depressing. Celebrations really need a group of people to agree that there is a substantial reason to celebrate, though, or they flop. I'm one of the people that would contribute to such a flop. I think New Year's is much more worthy of celebration. But everyone celebrates Christmas - if I want to see my family, that's the party I have to go to. I can't just invent my own holiday, because of the celebration-requires-people rule. But I don't feel honest participating in this one, since I was one of those kids for whome the pledge of allegiance went "one nation, under hmmm." I am conflicted about Christmas.

6. Recently I've been tempted to go hang out with Unitarians, except that they seem to require that you think spirituality is important and good for you, and spirituality may or may not mean belief in something that is outside of what science can ever tell us about the world. Seems like a lot of the time they do think there's some sort of driving force to the universe, and we ought to do something like worship about it, and I don't think that. But I like their politics, I like to sing songs, and I like having friends. I like learning about religions, but I certainly don't like learning about them with the assumption that eventually I'll get one, and I'm afraid that Unitarians think I ought to have some Beliefs. I don't want Beliefs, I just want to hang out with a community that maybe sometimes talks about their values (and whose values are kind of similar to mine).

7. Finals week ended. I am going to clean off my desk, finish my thesis, and study for the qual during winter break.

8. What can I do as a volunteer now to get moderate-liberal ideas a foothold in mainstream people? Everyone's talking about 2006, but between now and then we need to convince people that Social Security is not broken, that people deserve old age and unemployment insurance, that the minimum wage should be raised . . . . that the platform we're going to run on in 2006 has merit and they should vote for it. How do I do that? How do I make myself an example, a missionary of progressivism?

9. I like cooking and I like vegetables. What's the best vegetarian cookbook ever?

10. Oh, a while ago we had Thanksgiving at my house. It was nice, there was a lot of food and everybody liked it. Matt's family and mine hung out for a while, and we were all social. This is nicer than traveling to someone else's party.

who knows, who knows (maybe I'll return)

I saw Arun's new band, the Opportunists, play last night. It was apparently their second show ever, and it is going to be cool to have this band in town. At the same show I saw Boy Skout, who are fron San Francisco. I think I want their lead singer's haircut, and besides that they played some good songs. I wrote my email address on a signup thing for the Women's Booking Collective, which I guess does what the Fanclub Collective does in Ithaca except with more focus on girl bands (Boy Skout was all girls), and without guys in the membership (which I don't think I'm in favor of, but that's the j.c thing all over again). Maybe they ought to be more like the League of Women Voters.

I am looking forward to it, but I wonder if I am radical enough to hang with all these rail-thin, wild-haired, ambiguously oriented, painfully hip chicks. When it comes to music I'm not terribly DIY-oriented - I still can't even play one song on a guitar passably and I'm shy when it comes to hanging out with people who can.

I need some cabinet-level advisors, for real

What should I get from Amazon?

what's been up.

Ever lie down for a nap and then wake up a little later with your heart beating extra loudly? That happens to me sometimes - maybe I dream about running, or rollercoasters, or bike crashes. I never remember it, but I can tell Matt does it too.

I've been getting political as a way of procrastinating. I wrote a letter to Dick Durbin on Monday, because he made some remarks about opposing the FMA without actually opposing the substance of the law. Yeah, it's a political election-year distraction and that's disrespectful to the Constitution. But most importantly it's an attempt to write discrimination into the Constitution and permanently limit one group's rights but not another's. Durbin actually implies that, if some court tried to force states to recognize other states' gay marriages, he might support an amendment like this. Not cool.

Also I learned to knit on Tuesday. Made a washcloth/pot-holder with bumpy stripes for practice. Now I'm making another one, which has bumpy squares. It's silly to pick up such a time-consming hobby when I have so little time, I know. But the bumpy squares one looks really cool.

Lastly, I'm reading part of A People's History of the United States, because P. had it and wasn't reading it. I'm only reading part because I started in the middle - I'm mostly curious about the political history of the 20th century.

Adventures in the head of the midwestern chef

Other people may call Iowa the Hawkeye state, but when I was learning US geography it occurred to me that the states in the north-south column that includes Iowa and Minnesota look collectively like a chef. Iowa even has a nose. So that's where I went this weekend. Matt and I entered Iowa just north of the nose and drove across the face to the eye region, where Fred and Melissa live. Then we had adventures!

Ni hao ma?

Since Monday, I've been spending my afternoons in Chinese class. It's awesome. Today I learned how to say "this" and "that", as well as "car", "book", and some other things. I can ask how your older brother is, and whether he is tall. I even have a Chinese name - the TAs made them up for everyone. They're going to be very good at making up names by the time they have kids. Mine is Ke1 kai3xin1 (the numbers mean tones, all y'all who don't know pinyin). The problem is, we haven't really covered the x sound yet, and it's a really hard sound for me to make. So I actually don't know how to say my own name. I do know that xin1 means "heart". So my name is something something heart.

With everything I've learned in the past three days (I can make up my own sentences already), I'm not looking forward to missing Friday through Wednesday. At least they're being nice about me making up what I miss, and they seem to always be having office hours.

science to shape the future of the army

That's a pretty weird logo they've got there. But hey, they give me grants.

Thailand to separatists: "La la la we can't hear you ransacking our stuff"

I think it's funny how this BBC story quotes Thailand's deputy prime minister saying that this group of Muslim separatists are just "trying" to create sectarian conflict with T-land's majority Buddhists.
1. I bet it's hard to get a hardcore Buddhist to fight with you.
2. But if the Muslims are ransacking stuff, haven't they already created sectarian conflict?

written on

I've been through a few involuntary changes this week. For one, I wake up too early, all by myself (note that this is being written at 8am on a Sunday). Also, I suddenly want to read a lot of books again.

That second one is only kind of involuntary. I read the book that instigated it, Written on the Body, under my own power. But I didn't anticipate its effects. First I tried to get Matt to read it, to no avail. He doesn't really read books. To me that's similar to not liking meals. I just don't get it. Now I wonder: is there something like Pitchfork but for books? Does it have a message board? I also like talking about books.

For what it's worth, I've also been thinking a lot about the difference between contentment and happiness, and it's brought me nothing but trouble.

seven with one blow

This morning I spotted an ant on the kitchen floor. I followed it to the corner, where I discovered more than one ant on the floor. This discovery sparked a wave of destruction unprecedented in my interactions with insects.

I swept up the raisin that was the goal of the ant-caravan, which pretty much guaranteed they would eventually disperse, but that wasn't enough to satisfy my need for vengeance against the crunchy little invaders. Matt set up a few traps, and I laid out a perimeter of ground chile peppers. Ants became Palestinians, confined to the corner by a demilitarized zone of delicious barbecue flavor for us, chemical burns for them. (This works reasonably well, by the way. Determined ants will cross it, but they won't make their little caravans across it or anything.) We put on our fightin' shoes and executed surgical strikes against any ants that escaped the border of their new territory. When it seemed like more ants were leaving than were coming in, Matt settled down to play Zelda and I left for work. The whole thing took about an hour.

salon.mom

Salon's "life" section, which is really just thinly disguised "light things for women to read," has recently gone into pregnancy overdrive. (How come I read it in the first place? A girl can only study so much.) But now, every single article is moms this, babies that. Is it suddenly the style for everyone of medium-professional age to plop one out? Have reasonably smart liberal women become just a chorus of biological alarms going off in unison? I feel like my aversion to the floppy, swelling, morning-sick glory of motherhood is 30 years behind the times. It was all right to not want children in the past, but now if you're a feminist you have to have both kids and a career, and when it comes down to it you have to choose your earth-mother roots above your man-impersonating professional life. What am I supposed to do, just skip straight to McSweeney's for the next nine months and hope the moms get over themselves?

you can leave your friends behind

I think part of the reason nobody danced at Friday's party was that we had too many chairs. A successful dancing party requires the right density of people, but there is also a chair threshold. When you have too many chairs, people feel out of place dancing in front of people who are sitting down. That's something that can be corrected, though - and soon, because Matt's going to get a graduation party one of these days.

Pinky's move-out has made me really want to put up some posters. When it was super full in here, it was hard to notice that the walls were bare because everything else was cluttered. Now it looks like the ceilings are really high, just because the walls are empty.

I am about to practice a little guitar, and I think I've begin to understand why it's kind of hard for me - I know how to make chords, and I know how to play a single note, but I can't translate between the two or play notes that fit in a certain key. Oh yeah, and my fingers still get tangled up a lot.

I'm looking forward to getting that gamecube we just bought on ebay. It should come in the mail relatively soon - say in a week or two. Just in time for finals to be over. This summer is going to be awesome, what with having a gamecube and throwing parties and Matt not taking classes and me learning Chinese and doing a lot of kuk sool.

counterproductive

Last night I swam for half an hour before kuk sool practice, because of that thing where you have to work out for more than half an hour in order to actually burn any fat. So going to practice after that was interesting but good, and I think I'll do that again. The bad news is, I had an ice cream cone immediately following practice.

I don't feel like I'm very good at studying.

quick fix

I've noticed that sometimes when I load this page I get a bunch of junk characters where posts ought to be. I'll check that out, but for now you should know that if you reload it everything seems to be fine.

communicative funk

I'm feeling cramped, tired, bored, resentful, and restless. I wish I could go on vacation from being obligated to be polite and responsible. I had a mostly good weekend with a few ambiguous parts - but the ambiguous parts were flattering. I feel guilty because of the nature of my resentments. I'm not going to get into it.

guy who got a headache and accidentally saves the world

I read a notesfile post today from a girl who saw a guy have a seizure on the street. He fell down and apparently got injured pretty badly. She went to an apartment building and called 911, which was good, but her next comments completely floored me: apparently, she is so afraid of strangers that she wouldn't go near one even if he was all bloody from seizing and then hitting his head on the sidewalk. Maybe it's my lifelong first aid training talking, but I just can't understand that reaction. It's not like cracking your head open and getting all bloody is something you can fake in order to do something malicious to your rescuer. Your head's busted! You're no threat to anyone! They will be able to tell if your head isn't really busted! I mean, she apparently doesn't have any training, but there were people there who did and who started taking care of the guy. She could at least go ask if they needed her to go get anything.

I had a taiji breakthrough yesterday. I think I finally got the legs right in standing meditation. It's a lot harder if I do it the right way. But a neat thing happened: my legs' "tired" response somehow got cut off from my brain's "want to stop" response. I got pretty tired, but found that I wanted to keep at it. After a while I quit anyway, which was wise - even the little bit of standing I did totally used up my legs, and I was a big wimp at kuk sool practice. I'm trying to make a habit of doing this more frequently, so maybe that won't happen so much in the future. Taiji is the most expensive thing I do besides school, and I spend the least amount of time on it. Not good.

my DJ

I have this idea that I kind of like, in which I blog as though I am the guy in this McSweeney's story and I have a DJ who follows me around exhorting everyone to get down. On one hand, it'd be fun to have a DJ, even if he's not real. On the other hand, that's kind of copying. Maybe I'll come up with some other kind of cool theme to do.

p.s. As of this posting, that link is actually broken, but hopefully mcswy will fix it.

lower than Lo again

Adventures at the library today: after a couple of months of asking around I found out where UIUC keeps old technical reports, like to the NSA and stuff. In a corner of the basement of the engineering library, I dug up one of two precious (to me, anyway) copies of "On the theory of randomly spaced antenna arrays." It's beat up. It looks almost archaeological. It was written on a typewriter! So I take its yellowed, scribbled-on self upstairs to the desk and they say, "Um, I'd better look up how to check this out to you. Where did you get this, anyway?" I felt kind of like Indiana Jones. I'll post a picture.

np: Rooks - "Down"