post the eighty-ninth

One of the houses I clean at work isn't air-conditioned. (Actually, several houses are like that, but I've chosen to focus on one in particular.) The house has a swamp cooler, which does a tremendous job at cooling the building, so long as you're standing directly underneath the swamp cooler. Since most places in the house can't be accurately described as "directly underneath the swamp cooler" (except for a certain chair that I make a point of sitting in when I'm winding up the cord to my vacuum), being in that house is generally a less than pleasant experience.

I'm not quite sure how swamp coolers work, but I know that they manage to make the inside of the building they are trying to cool very humid, a feat which is especially impressive in Utah. Forget buying a humidifier. Just install a swamp cooler in your building and you're set. It has the benefit of also making your house slightly cooler (but only in the same sense that cerulean is slightly bluer than teal).

While vacuuming the aforementioned house, I walked into a room with a particular smell in it. My memory is particularly sensitive to smells - certain smells are associated powerfully with various events in my life. Sometimes it works the other way - I was sitting on my couch this morning while waiting for dimmi to come and visit me, and I could have sworn that I smelled Petra. (It's a good smell, Petra. Don't worry.) This immediately invoked a whole series of tender memories that I had to quickly turn to my book to suppress, lest I get caught up in half an hour of reminiscing. At any rate, this particular smell recalled memories, but it wasn't a strong or recognizable enough scent that I could place the memories. I just had vague recollections of something pleasant in my past. For a fleeting moment, I saw myself in front of a TV with my family while watching a movie, but I couldn't get any more than that.

I left the room and tended to other things in the house for a few minutes. In time, I came back to the room, only to smell the same odor. This time, however, I noticed a few broken-down cardboard boxes leaning against a desk. Immediately, the smell made sense. I was smelling slightly wet cardboard (from the swamp cooler, which was making everything humid). The memory made sense, too. The missing element from my memory was pizza, which we were all eating out of the delivery box. The pizza, containing moisture, had made the cardboard in the boxes damp, creating a similar smell to the one I was currently experiencing.

Apparently I associate the smell of slightly damp cardboard with memories of eating pizza as a child. I just keep learning interesting things at this job.

post the eighty-eighth

She left this morning. 6:40. I drove her up to her grandparents' house and left her there last night so they could take her up to the airport. She's gone, and for a whole year.

Stick with me here. I have a point to this besides the whining you might expect from me.

I'm finding myself in a period of major change in my life, and it's coming a year earlier than I thought it would. It's come as a big surprise to me. I didn't think all of my friends would be disappearing and the like until I actually left town and went out to seek my fortune in the lone and dreary world. It turns out this process has started this summer, albeit slowly. I have to admit that I should have seen this coming. I knew my friends would slowly disappear on me when the summer started. One of my roommates left for Washington, D.C. after fall semester. Another left for Chicago after winter term. Robert Poste left for an internship after spring term. And now Petra's gone off to Indonesia. Looking into the future, I see that a lot of the people I associate with now are going to be leaving within a month.

Here's why this is such a worrisome thing for me. I came back to Provo last summer because the girl I was dating at the time was coming back from a program in Nauvoo and I preferred being with her to working at home. Unforseen to me, though, we broke up about a week before I left to come back to Provo. My reason for coming back now gone, I set about creating a new reason for me to be in Provo in the summer. A friend of mine had introduced me to the 100 Hour Board in March, and so I decided to take another look at it. I enjoyed it so much (it being one of the few things that I did at the time) that I decided to read the entire archives until I found how to become a writer. I did, and I succeeded. Once accepted as a writer, I decided that this coming year would be the Year of the Board for me.

It has been the Year of the Board. Most of the people I closely associate with are people that I met through the Board (or its cousin, Blue Beta). I don't spend all of my spare time answering questions like I used to, but I do spend a great deal of my spare time with the people. There were a lot of new people to deal with at first, which worried me. I have a hard time with new people, since I'm terrified of making a poor first impression. (In my defense, I'm startlingly good at making a poor first impression. I'm amazed people stick with me sometimes.) However, slowly but surely, I found a crowd of people that I fit in well with. Strangely enough, a lot of them belong to what I had dubbed the "poetry crowd," whom I thought I would never have anything to do with. Go figure.

The group I really like spending time with are mostly what you might call intellectuals. I can make jokes about John Updike with them and not have to provide background explanation. It's really nice, and I really like being with them. The only snag is that nearly all of them are graduating or have already graduated and are going back to grad school in the fall. That's a drag for me, since I've worked so hard to build up this new corps of friends, most of whom will be abandoning me within a month, have they not left already.

Mind you, I don't have all that much to complain about. My roommates are coming back in September. I still have people here in Provo that I like being with. Perhaps most of all, I'm still living in a country where people speak my language and share my culture (sorry, dear Petra). Still, I wasn't expecting this paradigm shift to come for another year. If this year is like this, I can't even begin to imagine what next year is going to be like.

Life is change, though. Pity I didn't know that when I signed up. I hate change, good for me though it may be.

post the eighty-seventh

Lately it seems like most of my posts have been stories from work related to poor English usage. In that tradition, I present this post.


An actual and not made up conversation I overheard from two guys at work:


GUY 1: I would describe that with a word like "luscious" or "voluptuous."
GUY 2: "Voluptuous?"
GUY 1: Yeah, "voluptuous."
GUY 2: Don't you mean "volumptuous?"
GUY 1: Um...maybe.
GUY 2: I'm pretty sure you mean "volumptuous."
GUY 1: Oh, okay. I always mess up words like that.

In case you were curious, a Google search for "volumptuous" turns up 21,000 hits, although it asks you first if you were meant "voluptuous," which turns up 5,170,000 hits.

post the eighty-sixth

From an actual sign that I saw while eating at Panda Express yesterday:

Panda Values

• Proactive
• Respect/Win-Win
• Growth
• Great Operations
• Giving

I had to take a couple of looks at this sign to make sure I was reading it correctly. Almost every item on this list is phrased differently. Do the powers that be at Panda Express have no respect for stylistic conformity? It still confuses me looking at this. Did they not have an editor, or even just a regular person, read this first?

That said, the food was really good. I really like their orange chicken.

post the eighty-fifth

I just recently came into two new albums that are both fantastic. It's very rare that I end up getting two new albums at the same time that are both so incredible. (The last time this happened was probably when I bought Radiohead's OK Computer and Beck's Odelay on the same day, although I might be making that memory up.) On Saturday, I bought Sufjan Stevens' The Avalanche, while Petra bought Thom Yorke's The Eraser. We made a trade, and I think both of us came off better for it.

I don't know how familiar you are with these two artists, so I'll just sum them up a bit for you. Thom Yorke is the lead singer of Radiohead. This is his first solo album. It's a piece of electronic genius, in my opinion. I've been listening to it nearly nonstop for the last 24 hours. It's marvelous. I highly recommend it if you like electronica at all. For that matter, if you like Radiohead at all, you really ought to listen to this album. You won't be disappointed, trust me.

On the other hand, we have Sufjan Stevens. His is a sort of folksy sound that is a bit trickier to describe. It has elements of country in it, but also of alt-rock. It's also extremely good. He jokingly started a project a few years ago of writing an album about every one of the fifty states. He's written two so far - one about Michigan, and one about Illinois. This album is a series of outtakes and extras from his Illinois album. I was hesitant about buying an album of songs that he made the decision to cut already, but it turns out that they're all very good. I've been very impressed with it. It's not just anywhere you can turn to hear a song all about two-time presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson. I've been very pleased about it.

I only rarely bother to post music reviews on this blog, but these two CDs have been in my head so much recently that I couldn't help myself. Enjoy them, please.

post the eighty-fourth

I had the chance to go to a funeral yesterday morning. A woman my family knows back at home died this last week of a prolonged battle with leukemia. She was only 26. I didn't know her at all, really, but since my family couldn't come out here (this woman died in Utah, where I'm at, and my family is in Oregon), they sent me as an envoy.

I've only been to two other funerals in my life, and both came when I was much younger, so I didn't really understand much of what was going on in either of them. My great-grandfather died when I was about ten. I remember going to that funeral, but mostly remembering that the service took a really long time. I also remember there being cookies afterward and eating them while talking to my cousin. I went to another funeral when I was about fourteen. Strangely enough, this person had also died of leukemia, although he died at the age of ten. I remember this boy's uncle giving a really nice eulogy and crying a lot at the end, but not much else.

This funeral turned out to be a very different experience for me. The LDS perspective on funerals is unlike what you'll find in most other places. Clearly it's a time to grieve and to mourn the passing of a friend, but there's an eternal perspective that you don't really find anywhere else. The back of the program for the service had the words from the song "Families Can Be Together Forever," which, if you're not familiar with it, go like this:

I have a family here on earth
They are so good to me
I want to share my life with them through all eternity
Families can be together forever
Through Heavenly Father's plan
I always want to be with my own family
And the Lord has shown me how I can
The Lord has shown me how I can.

They're really nice words, and I thought they were appropriate for such an occasion. I think that most people believe that death, while an unpleasant thing, is merely another step we have to take in life. We'll meet up with the departed later. The perspective was nice.

The thing that most struck me, though, was seeing a bunch of little kids running around during the service. My sister and I showed up a bit late for the service, since we got confused with the no directions that we received. (Even in Utah, where the addresses are listed with a coordinate system, one can get lost. Trust me.) Being late, we sat in the overflow section of the chapel, which opened up into a large gym. Several young children, all of whom were under the age of two, were running around in this gym entertaining themselves. Various people were speaking about the woman who had died and were tearing up, but I couldn't help but watch these little kids innocently amuse themselves. One boy in particular was crawling enthusiastically around some chairs, smiling and waving at people as he passed by. He eventually got up and started running, still waving and smiling periodically. I thought it was really neat to see life come full circle. On the one hand, there was a woman who had just left this mortal coil and was finished with her journey here. On the other hand, there was this little boy who was still relatively new here and was really enthusiastic about life.

The whole experience gave me a nice perspective on life. We're all at different stages, of course, and it was nice to see that all at once. I don't know if I'm doing a good job communicating exactly what I felt, but I can say that I felt pretty good walking out of that chapel. Who would have imagined that a funeral service would give me a boost like that?

post the eighty-third

This job has turned out to give me way more amusing stories and anecdotes than I had anticipated. I'm really excited about it. This story is actually true and not made up in the slightest.

My co-workers and I were all filling out our time cards at the start of work when in walked our newest co-worker, who promptly said, "Is anyone else feeling languid today?" Languid, of course, isn't the sort of word one uses on a regular basis, but it's a word that I understand, and so responded by saying that yes, it was a hot day and I was feeling tired and sluggish myself.

The mere fact that I responded to this question unleashed an avalanche of comments from those with whom I work. Angry Girl immediately responded by saying, "You know that word?" Several others echoed with similar sentiments. Apparently it genuinely surprised these people that I would know a word like languid. The young man who initially said the word (we'll call him "Bryce") got defensive and said, "You speak English, don't you?" Things only got nastier from there. Angry Girl was insistent that while she spoke English, she wouldn't use weird words like languid in conversation. This went back and forth for some time, so I decided to excuse myself from the room, barely containing my laughter at the whole situation. Honestly.

Bryce, incidentally, was also blown away that I would be reading a book like Anna Karenina. I'm getting the impression more and more that I don't quite fit in with the people I work with. As long as they keep giving me entertaining stories, though, I'll continue to stay on.

post the eighty-second

I've started a project recently to read classic novels that I should have read ages ago. I've done fairly well for myself in the last few weeks, I think. Granted, I'm no Petra, but I've read plenty, and I'm feeling good about myself. My reading has been skewed slightly toward recent American fiction (in fact, skewed toward Kurt Vonnegut), but I'm making progress. Soon, I will have read every significant book ever written, and I'll be a fantastic conversationalist.

However, the problem with this is that I tend to read these books while at work. My job has me cleaning some houses owned by the university. I actually like the job - it's simple and physical work, which I really like. The snag, though, is that I have four hours to finish cleaning these four houses, and it only takes me two and a half hours (and that's if I go slow). I've taken to bringing my books to work so I'll have something to do. Yes, I could probably find something else to do with my time (such as cleaning other things), but the person who trained me also reads during our down time, so I don't feel terribly bad about it. We head to our first house at about 4:20 and finish cleaning it by 4:45 or so. We leave for our second house at 5:30, so I usually have forty-five minutes to read in that house. It isn't air-conditioned, though, so it tends to get warm and musty (as we're in the basement when we read, since it's slightly cooler than the upstairs). Almost without fail, I fall asleep while reading.

You're probably wondering why I think this is a bad thing. After all, what's the problem with a job where one can read and fall asleep and still manage to get paid? I'm certainly not complaining about that. My problem lies in the plotlines of these books I'm trying to read while I'm falling asleep. Take today, for instance. I was reading Anna Karenina, which, although long, has the redeeming aspect of a very slow plot. I was trudging through the fourth hundred pages when, true to form, I started to nod off. However, I didn't quite fall asleep. I was still somewhat awake, although I was falling asleep every few seconds. I just didn't quite realize that I was asleep. (I'm sure all of you can relate to this. It's that state between awake and asleep where things start to get weird. You'll see where this is headed.) During this twenty minutes, the plot started to change radically. I was reading about a horse race, when, suddenly, sharks started to manifest themselves in the story. I'm not terribly familiar with Russian literature and themes - my experience is entirely limited to Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, also a good read - but I really wasn't expecting sharks. The characters started to become a lot more assertive, too. In fact, they were bordering on belligerent. They would yell at each other a lot, which was out of character for most of them. I would shake my head a bit and re-read passages, only to find that these characters had apparently changed their minds and retracted their earlier statements, becoming tamer and more docile, as Tolstoy had intended.

Such capriciousness on the part of these characters made for a difficult and confusing read for me. I put the book down at 5:25 and headed over to our second house. By the time I opened the book again at 6:40, the plot had reverted to its initial form. The characters were dignified and calm. There were no sharks to be heard of. Everything was as it should have been.

I'm tempted to go back and read that section again to see what on earth it's actually about, but I really just want to finish this book so I can be done with it and move on to the new stack of books I got today. Maybe I should find a less comfortable place to read at work so the plotlines of my books don't change on me again. Then again, those fifty pages were probably the most entertaining of the 450 I've read so far.

post the eighty-first

Things that are hot: female tennis players in skirts. Mmm-hmm.

Oh man, I love Wimbledon.

post the eightieth

The title is not a typo. Post the seventy-ninth does not exist.

I had a request to show Run Lola Run for Indie Movie Night tomorrow, so I needed to get up to the Orem Public Library to get it (as that's the one place around here that I know carries it). For those of you not familiar with the Provo-Orem area, it's about ten minutes from my apartment by car. However, I am currently without car, as my sister uses it to get to and from work. My place of employment is close enough that I can walk without too much trouble at all. Generally I wait until my sister gets home from work to run errands like this, but today I was feeling adventurous. Robert Poste just moved out and left his bike with me for the summer. I thought it might be fun to take a bike ride up to the library. The weather was nice, and the library wasn't that far away.

As it turns out, I made a huge mistake.

When I was in Japan, I rode my bike all the time. It got to the point where I could ride for long distances without much of a problem at all. I foolishly assumed that I could still do that. Clearly, such was not true. Not only was that two years ago, but it was also in a place that had an elevation of maybe a hundred feet above sea level or so. Biking up a huge hill in a town that is right at the foothills of mountains is an entirely different experience, and I found that out in a hurry. I was breathing pretty heavily within a few blocks, and that was before I even got to the giant hill. I kept focused on the top, telling myself that it was only a little further. Not much further. You can do it. Just a little bit more, that's all. As long as I kept moving, I was in fine shape.

The problem came right at the top of the hill - right when I thought I'd made it through the worst of the ride. There was a stoplight right at the top, and I had the misfortune of hitting it at a red light. I stopped and took what felt a like a welcome break. No sooner had I stopped than my head got really light. A purplish film fell over my eyes, and everything got really faint and hard to see. I've only felt like that once before, and that was when I fainted just after getting a flu shot. (That's a story for a different day.) I knew something nasty was going to happen if I didn't sit down, and soon. As soon as I got off my bike to sit down, however, the light turned green. I got across the street as quickly as I could so I could throw the bike to the ground and collapse for a bit. This created a conflict for me. Exhaustion and light-headedness were telling me to lay down; however, a swiftly growing sense of nausea was telling me to get up quick so I could throw up. The light head, I decided, could wait a bit, as I scrambled to my knees so I could deal with the nausea first.

After throwing up, briefly, I sat on my knees and looked up for a moment, taking in my surroundings. I had chosen the intersection of two of the largest streets in the area to vomit, and, what's more, I had done so right in front of a mall. On my right, there was a young girl, maybe six years old, looking at me with a look of curiosity and horror from the window of an SUV. While I felt a little bad for her, I felt much better for having dealt with that nausea. Wow.

The rest of the trip was uneventful, really. I made it to the library perfectly fine, if not a little sweaty and out of breath. Master Fob was there to help me choose some books to read over the next few weeks. The movie I wanted was there. The most amazing part was the ride home. While getting to the library took me nearly an hour, the ride home was a paltry twenty minutes. My guess is that there was some sort of rift in the space-time continuum that made the ride to the library miles and miles longer somehow. Orem is a funny place.

So there you have it. Come and see Run Lola Run tomorrow at my place. 9:15. Email me if you need directions. And Katya, you'd better appreciate this movie, or else this whole trip will have been in vain.

post the seventy-eighth

Yes, it's extremely early in the morning. I've already stayed up far later than I wanted to, so I don't feel bad about spending a little more time awake to post on my blog. (No, it doesn't make any sense. No, I don't care what you think about that.) I was having a really good day today, but came home to find that a deadline for my class was a full week earlier than I'd anticipated. I spent the next hour and a half working frantically to catch up to it. I'll spend a fair amount of tomorrow working on it as well. Ick. I really wish I'd looked ahead at the calendar, but some of the blame has to be placed on the course administrators for not keeping me up to date. They changed some other deadlines on me, which really made things confusing for the rest of the term. Honestly. I'm so glad this class is almost over.

The real reason I decided to post this late, however, was that I checked my Yahoo! mail in an effort to find something to distract me from the insanity of this deadline I was working against. I'm a committed Gmail user (as all sane people with email accounts should be), and thus only check my Yahoo! mail once every week or two. I have my half.com account wired through there, so I check periodically to see if I've sold any books or anything. (I hadn't.) What I saw when I opened the account surprised me.

Wow. I didn't even bother checking to see what sort of spam I'd managed to collect in the week or so since I last checked it. I only rarely get any sort of spam with Gmail, and what little I get is immediately destroyed by my Gmail filters. It's a wonderful thing. I still have over 40 invites if anyone wants them.

I'm pleased that I managed to get that image cropped so nicely, and even more pleased that I managed to edit out my first name in the "Welcome!" message. I would have been going out of my mind with excitement had I been able to switch my first name with "Optimistic," but, alas, it was not to be (at least, not at three in the morning).

post the seventy-seventh

From 1 Samuel 8:10-13, with my emphasis:

10 And Samuel told all the words of the Lord unto the people that asked of him a king.

11 And he said, This will be the manner of the king that shall reign over you: He will take your sons, and appoint them for himself, for his chariots, and to be his horsemen; and some shall run before his chariots.

12 And he will appoint him captains over thousands, and captains over fifties; and will set them to ear his ground, and to reap his harvest, and to make his instruments of war, and instruments of his chariots.

13 And he will take your daughters to be confectionaries, and to be cooks, and to be bakers.

Give me a king.

post the seventy-sixth

I have a lot of thoughts milling about in my head, but none of them are quite detailed enough to merit an entire blog post. I'm just going to go ahead and spill them all out in a big, non-linear mass. Enjoy.

I'm pretty sure the girl at work still hates me, but that's quite irrelevant now, because we don't work together anymore. Also, it seems like she hates other people just as much as me. She yelled at a guy during break for trying to read a headline of her newspaper over her shoulder. I was really pleased that I was able to snag a Dr. Pepper from her earlier that day, though. I don't even like Dr. Pepper - it just made me happy that I got it rather than her. No, that's not her picture in the previous post. I just found it off some psychology site defining anger.

Russian's turning out to be a lot harder than I'd thought, and as such, I'm finding myself losing a bit of motivation to learn it. I just have so many other things I want to do with my time. I'm trying, though. I appreciate everyone who's trying to keep me motivated. Katya, if you're reading this, rest assured that I'm still in. I've just been busy.

I just read Cat's Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut. It started off really strange, but I really liked it by the end. It's a very clever book. If you haven't read it, I highly recommend it. Just give it some time. I know the beginning is weird. I'm now in the middle of Catch-22, and I think I'm going to read the new Simon Schama book next. I just need to have those done by the time Petra gets back into town so I can give her the Schama book back. Looks like I'm going to be a little busy.

Also, my garbage disposal finally got fixed. That's a good thing. I can now make actual food and not have to worry about where I can wash out the dishes. I'm excited.

Not least of all, I miss Petra, but I won't bore anyone else by writing a whole post about it. Also, she'd think I was out of my mind for writing so much about her.

post the seventy-fifth

I worry a lot about people not liking me.

Granted, it usually turns out to be my imagination. I worry a lot, and so I'm really good at creating signs that people don't like me in my mind, like people giving me nasty looks or not responding to comments that I think are funny. People tell me not to worry. I still do, of course, but it always turns out to be moot. I even worry that I've horribly offended old and trusted friends sometimes. Those generally turn out to be wrong, too, but it doesn't stop me from worrying, either.

This was different.

I was at work this last week, and as I'm still fairly new, I was assigned to work with someone. She was helpful on Friday, showing me around the place and telling me everything I had to do. I brought music with me on Monday, so she and I didn't speak much (i.e., at all). By Wednesday, it was apparent that she'd had enough. She seemed irritated with me most of the day. Having had this experience many times previously, I assumed that I was just imagining it and did my best to ignore it. However, it quickly became very clear that she meant business. I was standing around at one point, trying to figure out what I needed to do next, when she snapped at me, saying, "Figure it out! I'm not going to tell you every little thing you have to do!"

I hadn't asked her anything about what I needed to do, as I was pretty clear on that. I wasn't even aware that we were having a disagreement until just then. She continued to be in a pretty nasty mood toward me for the rest of the day. I have no idea what I did. She just snapped at me any time I spoke to her (which was, admittedly, not very much). I just stuck to my music and elected not to speak to anyone else.

She's been much more civil to me since then, but I'm still mystified as to what happened on Wednesday. I'm so used to just imagining that people don't like me that I had no idea what to do when someone actually was angry with me. I guess I'll just go ahead and retreat into my overactive imagination, taking comfort in the fact that people don't actually hate my guts. At least, I think they don't.

(sweats nervously)

post the seventy-fourth

I found yet another perk of being a writer for the 100 Hour Board tonight. My contact mistakenly wasn't able to record the season finale of 24, so Uffish Thought and I pulled some strings and managed to get invited to a huge 24 party hosted by one Jono of Divine Comedy. I also ended up getting some free food from Cafe Rio out of the deal. Pretty sweet, if you ask me.

I had actually intended to blog about the etiquette of the cellular phone in my previous post, but was prevented from doing so by a sudden attack of gratitude for everything I'd ever received. Rest assured that such a wave of gratitude isn't going to strike me now. I'm doing my best to think selfish thoughts so I won't be distracted.

So the cell phone. I blogged about this some time ago, but feel that I have more to say on the subject. It's interesting, but we have a peculiar set of social rules accompanying cell phones that seem to supercede normal social norms. At least, so it seems. For instance, I've always felt it rude when people answer their cell phone when it rings in public. It seems rude and unfeeling to me when someone interrupts a conversation with me to take a call that could easily be returned in a few minutes. After all, cell phones are designed to record who called, what their number is, and when the call was received. You don't even need to redial the number; rather, you can simply call them back with the push of a button. It's wonderful. Wonderful enough that it makes it terribly easy to be rude to people standing next to you in favor of those on your phone. How lovely.

But is that really all that rude? Don't we do the same thing when people call us at home (at least, those of us that still have a home phone)? I know I've interrupted conversations with people in my apartment when the phone has rung. I don't even think I excused myself to take the call. Yet no one I know of has ever been offended that I took a call while speaking with them. No one seems to mind if I answer the door if it knocks. What makes a cell phone so much ruder than a home phone? Is it the fact that you can carry the annoyance wherever you go? Are we simply conditioned to accept inconveniences when we're at home, but refuse to tolerate them in other places? That seems a bit counterintuitive; after all, we should be least likely to tolerate interruptions when we're at home and at our leisure.

I don't claim to know the answer. I just follow along with everyone else. I get annoyed at cell phones like others do. It almost feels like the trendy thing to do. My mom and my sister, two of the last few remaining people on Earth without cell phones, caved in and joined the wireless army a couple of days ago. I doubt it will be too long before I give in myself. I keep telling myself that I'll be a considerate cell phone user and never do anything to inconvenience my fellow man, but that remains to be seen. I'll probably catch myself doing something annoying that I told myself I'd never do, like talking loudly about my prostate problems while on my way to class.

Actually, if I end up with prostate problems at age 23, I feel like I'll have earned the right to talk about them as loudly as I want, wherever I want.

post the seventy-third

That's what you get for trusting others, I suppose. Rest assured that I'm always going to sign out whenever I use any program on Petra's computer. You can [sic] trust anyone these days. Honestly.

So it's definitely summer here where I am. The weather is warming up a lot. I find that I have less and less motivation to leave my air-conditioned apartment. When I do, I find that I'm hurrying as quickly as I can to another air-conditioned building. There's really no reason to be anywhere that isn't air-conditioned, if you ask me.

I actually wasn't planning on blogging about this, but I think I'm going to go with this, now. I live in a very materialistically spoiled society. I don't even recognize it most of the time. I'm able to get most anything I want whenever I want it. That excludes a job, mind you, as I only just found one yesterday after weeks of searching, but the more I think about it, if finding a summer job is the worst of my problems, I definitely lead a comfortable life. It's really quite amazing. I have more than enough to eat. I have part of a cake left over from my movie night last night (thank you, SkyBluePink). My air-conditioning works wonderfully. I have clean water to drink and to bathe in. I have more than enough clothes. I have electricity to power all of my toys and entertainment devices. I have my very own computer. Life is really good. I forget just how good it is, sometimes. I get really caught up in the little things that go wrong in my life and manage to forget just how many blessings I really have. I'm one of the privileged rich, as compared to most of the rest of the world. That's easy to forget, and I think it's something that we as Americans do a lot. Why think about how terrible things are in other countries? It's just depressing. Better to ignore and and hope that it takes care of itself.

I don't mean to imply that you, the readers of this blog, are terrible people for not doing more to change the great inequality in this world. I'm certainly no better. I don't go out of my way to change the world. I'm more than happy to sit here in my ivory tower and enjoy my tomato soup. It's just that every once in a while (and probably less often than I need to) I stop and reflect on how wonderful my life really is. I invite the rest of you to do the same. It'll be good for you.

Wow. I really wasn't planning on writing about that. How weird. Apparently that had been on my mind lately.

post the seventy-second and three-fifths

I have a few things to say, as a sort of public service annoucement:

That Optimistic, he's so hot right now. He sure wishes his air conditioning would start working.

That Petra, she smells fabulous. It's true.

That dome, it done been blown. Welcome to Earf.

Today's post is brought to you by the letter F. "F" is the first letter of "forget." Did you know, kids, that when using other people's computers, you should never forget to sign out?

post the seventy-second

Wikipedia.

If you haven't checked this out, you really ought to. It's an amazing thing, and by all accounts, it really shouldn't work as well as it does. For those of you unfamiliar with it (does anyone on Earth not know what Wikipedia is, though?), it's an online encyclopedia that anyone can edit. If, when you're reading one of the articles, you find an error, factual, stylistic, or otherwise, you can edit it out and change it to your liking. Legions of web surfers edit these articles every day and have created a truly impressive array of information for anyone to use.

How on earth does this work, though? Why is anyone motivated to update correct information that millions of other people are going to use for free? They won't receive any recognition for their work. They certainly aren't being paid. Is it altruism or insanity that motivates us to keep this updated so constantly?

For me, at least, it isn't either of those so much as an insistence on correctness. If I see a grammatical error in an article, I stop what I'm doing and fix it. I'm even willing to interrupt my train of thought to squelch out an inaccuracy. Factual errors are treated with similar prejudice. I can't stand them. I even wrote a whole article (on the Shakhty Trial of 1928) when I saw that it didn't exist. I wasn't doing it so that others could read it and learn all about the Shakhty Trial. Other people weren't anywhere near my mind when I wrote it. Rather, I wrote it so that I would know that I had written an article on Wikipedia. Maybe there is a certain amount of credence to the motivation of self-aggrandization, even if it is anonymous.

At any rate, I really get a kick out of reading Wikipedia articles. They're all written such that most nouns are linked to other articles. (In keeping with this theme, I linked the number 53 to the corresponding article in my piece on the Shakhty Trial.) Once you get past the annoyance of every other word being blue and underlined, it's actually rather convenient. Once I've exhausted my supply of online reading sources (blogs, Blue Beta, the 100 Hour Board, and McSweeney's), I generally turn to Wikipedia to keep me entertained. I read about the Lotus Sutra and the Buddhist doctrine of upaya (expedient means - you really ought to read it) this morning. Yesterday I read at length about Japanese phonology. The amazing thing about it was that I got there from an article about the Nintendo game Perfect Dark. Wikipedia is wonderful. You can end up almost anywhere from any given article, provided you click on enough links.

I doubt any of this is new material for most of you reading this blog. I've just been really excited about Wikipedia of late and wanted to share it with everyone. Feel free to regard me as a complete nerd for reading it in my spare time. I really enjoy it. I just may go back and read some more about Buddhism right now.

post the seventy-first

Like many of my peers, I'm a fan of the Fox show 24. I blame my roommate, Angry Block - I initially had no intention of ever watching the show (although I did end up getting involved in the show Alias for the sake of a now ex-girlfriend), but he insisted that our whole apartment watch the first season, which he had purchased on DVD. We obliged, and were immediately sucked in. The other three of us resolved that we wouldn't watch any more of it, as it took up so much time. Watching a whole season of 24 in a month takes a lot more time than if you watch it over five months (five times as much, as it turns out).

Season five started this January. Angry Block parked in front of the TV that first night, absolutely riveted. Remembering how much time I had lost during the month of November, I stayed as far away as I could. However, the next evening (it was a special two-day event for the premiere), Uffish Thought invited Angry Block and I over to watch it with her. This put me in a bit of a bind; I don't mind saying no to Angry Block, since he's a really good friend, but I feel a bit worse turning down someone I'm not quite as close to. Begrudgingly, I said yes. I brought my Soviet history textbook with me and went to go watch the episode.

Predictably, I was hooked. The show just felt so real to me. The episode in question showed an airport being held hostage, and Jack Bauer had to sneak in and save the day by shooting all kinds of people. It was pretty cool. I was so involved with the show that I came home and pulled up CNN.com, fully expecting to see updates on the terrorist situation at Ontario Aiport. It gets inside my head. It's amazing.

Let me be clear, though. I don't think I'm quite as into the show as I'm making myself sound here. I like the show, of course - I think it's interesting, otherwise I wouldn't watch it - but it doesn't have the power over me that it does over other people I know. I watch it mostly so I can fit into my society. I know lots of other people that watch the show, and thus watching it myself gives me a sense of connection to them. It's strange, because I generally end up watching the show alone. It's an interesting society we live in where we can feel connected as we grow further apart. Go figure. An author years ago wrote about the "culture of sight and sound" created in America. We have a shared identity because we have all seen and heard the same things. The example he used in the book was that of Life magazine, but I think it applies just as readily to television. I have the same reactions to a show like 24 that anyone else in the country would. I haven't met these people, but I can connect with them through the show. The U.S. Army unwittingly made use of this idea during WWII. Sometimes German soldiers would sneak into American ranks unknown to others. To weed them out, sometimes commanding officers would ask soldiers questions like, "Who is Mickey Mouse's girlfriend?" Any American would know the answer without any hesitation. Germans, by and large, would not. The image of Mickey Mouse unifies us as a country - perhaps as much as, or even more than, images like the flag and the bald eagle.

Maybe I'm just doing my patriotic duty by watching 24, then. I can't hardly be considered an American if I don't know everything Jack Bauer did last week and if I don't consider Miles to be a complete idiot (and don't worry, I do; I was shouting and screaming at the TV when he called President Logan and said he would intervene with the recording).

In other, unrelated news, I changed the title of the blog. I'd been meaning to use the word "Optimystique" for some time now. The blog title just seemed appropriate. Also, this week's installation of Indie Movie Night will take place tomorrow (5/10) night at 9:15. Come and see Lost in Translation with us. Email me if you need directions.

post the seventieth

Last night marked the beginning of the second year of the summer indie movie night here. I'd forgotten just how much fun it was. We watched New York Doll, which was wonderful. I think what made it even better, though was having so many people over here. I love inviting people over and hosting parties, and will be more than happy to have excuses to do so this summer. Last year's indie movie night had a regular attendance of six or so. We had somewhere around fifteen last night, and there were a lot of people that didn't come. It was awesome. I don't even really care if I'm not the center of attention or anything. I just like having people over and seeing everyone have a good time. It's great.

For those of you who missed it last night, you are welcome - nay, implored - to come next week. We'll be watching Lost in Translation and having a similarly good time. If we're lucky, Skybluepink may even bring another torte. She makes a mean torte.