you ain’t fucked up enuf

Just in case you're out there thinking you've got a good groove going, with powerful entries on how fucked-up your parents made you, and cute, sarcastic rants: you lose.

I also wonder if anyone cares how I got my pseudonym. It's the way I spelled my real name when I was 3-ish, and just learning to read. Miniscule amounts of digging should get you to my real name, if you care.

yami · 5:50 · 31 Jul 2020 · #
Filed under: Links

nose-pennywhistle

This guy (no, not the columnist, silly) is my uncle. What they failed to mention is that not only does he play four or five musical instruments, he plays most of them with his nose. And here I've never even mastered the nose flute, let alone the nose-pennywhistle. Inadequacy, plain and simple.

yami · 3:16 · 31 Jul 2020 · #
Filed under: Links

reviewed

It seems time for the standard blort on What People Have Said About Me and My Buddy Blog. I requested a review last night from the Weblog Review, and they finished it impressively fast. The verdict: dull layout, dull at first, but the entries grow on you. Entirely accurate, I think, plus it inspired this revolutionary hypothesis: spelling errors irk me in inverse proportion to how much the writer praises and/or agrees with me.

I was so hoping for an irritated, sarcastic review that compares my site to lava lamps or 14 year old anorexic girls. Ah well.

Much more entertaining was Vlad's guestbook entry: "I can see the kind of arrogance in your attitude that I have been unsuccessfully trying to get rid of for years." Blogging, of course, is an inherently arrogant hobby. I'm probably hopeless, and I hope you filthy peons can adequately bask in the paltry glow of my grandeur as-it-stands.

yami · 4:58 · 30 Jul 2020 · #
Filed under: Meta

leftover stuff

Today's empty apartment finds: ice cube trays, pots and pans, and a letter from Timothy's father expressing his disappointment in his son. Someone has apparently taken all of Daddy's money and flunked out of school with it. We all had a good chuckle over that one.

Meanwhile, I think I may copy isomorphisms and start keeping track of all you participating minions in some kind of competitive way. I'll need a script for it, though, since I'm a lazy bum. This will take time and momentum. I'm basically just drooling to myself right now, but it'll happen by next year, I swear, probably.

I've been genuinely tired for the past three days of oven-scrubbing. Not exhausted, and not always sleepy, but tired. Tired enough that the half-hour between closing my eyes and falling asleep has become not only my favorite part of the day (it's always been that) but my favorite fantasy object during the rest of the day. I've been having fantasies about fantasizing, imagining the heavy pull of my eyelids as I let my mind wander around *insert topic here* *probably kinky sex with cleaning equipment*. In fact, I'm having these fantasies now, in between sentences. I think that means I should go to bed. My posts will probably be longer and more unified once I'm settled in Denmark, as I'm working straight through until the day my plane leaves, and still have to pack.

I think I might have forgotten to mention that I'm going to Denmark next Thursday, for a semester abroad at the University of Copenhagen. I speak hardly a lick of Danish, but most classes are offered in English and I'll have three weeks to learn how to order beer before school actually starts. So, yeah. I'm excited.

Good night.

yami · 4:15 · 29 Jul 2020 · #
Filed under: Diary

an audience at last!

Holy shit! Someone actually reads this thing! The good Lord Tychonievich also remembers Red Pop. Thank goodness it's not just me going nuts, I've managed to drag someone else along with me.

My first actual response to a random query. It feels like some sort of milestone, a mark of maturity for the journal I started three weeks ago because it seemed like a good idea at the time. I feel as though I ought to have some sort of explanation - or at least an intended audience - but I don't. I'm not writing this purely for myself - I've got a perfectly good notebook I can use for that. I suppose I'm in it partly for the ego trip, and partly for the connecting with random people aspect, and partly for other reasons I can't think of right now, and just because it's fun. And mostly for the small army of minions. Everyone wants minions.

I think that before I go any further in my Pretentious Intellectual Development (read: stuff that doesn't require calculus), I should seriously sit down and think about whether or not the unexamined life is really worth living. And to a certain extent, I think it probably is - deep philosophical investigations into the ultimate sources of ethics are time-consuming, and generally I don't find them very rewarding. The world would probably be better off if I took that time and spent it tutoring disadvantaged sixth-graders or something.

Also, a plug for the vacant lot, because I liked it. The people over there are one or more of the following: hip, intelligent, witty, insane.

Two of my coworkers went to the University of Iowa because it's such a great a party school. I wanted to smack them, or at least say something super-geeky about physics and how real parties have a two-story plywood structure and custom laser effects, but they wouldn't stop talking long enough to get a hand in edgewise. Tomorrow, I'll just stick my head in the oven until I'm high as a kite on EZ-Off, and it should be more tolerable. Thank god for the other sarcastic bitch on the crew, and the random middle-aged man, and the cute painter boy who occasionally comes in after us. It's too bad my geekschool flirting skills don't seem to transfer to normal society.

yami · 6:06 · 28 Jul 2020 · #
Filed under: Personal, Meta

Red Pop

I've lost something called Red Pop. I remember being fabulously excited, back in high school, because there was a product that was pop, and that was red, and so they had just called it Red Pop, and they sold it at Hy-Vee. I didn't really bother buying any for myself, of course, since I'm not a big fan of the "red" flavor - I prefer clear, purple or brown pops. But, it came up in conversation (the pop-vs.-soda debate again) and when I went to look for a bottle, it was gone. Vanished, and not even a memorial web page. I'm beginning to think I completely made it up. But I *swear* an acquaintance of mine had scanned in the logo... Mike Campbell, are you out there? Bueller?

Anyway. It strikes me that the pop-vs-soda thing is really my token effort at resisting California idiom. I make a point of using "pop" more often than I ever did when I lived in Iowa, but the rest of my midwestern twang is softening just a little, I think. My friends here have commented on my excessive use of the word "dude" and I've even caught myself calling something "rad" without thinking about it... yikes! My project for tomorrow, while I'm cleaning ovens, is to pay particular attention to the quality of my vowels, and see if I notice anything interesting about them. Round about 3 in the afternoon, I'll start wishing I had some formal linguistic/phonological training, and piss the hell out of all my coworkers somehow whining about how Caltech doesn't offer any interesting hum classes. Or else I'll be gritting my teeth wishing Phil would shut up. I went to high school with Phil. He's one of those congenial, congenitally annoying people, who speak loudly and often, and are nice enough that you feel guilty for disliking them. But most of the time he'll be vacuuming things, and that vacuum cleaner is blessedly loud.

And I read straight through a good book today - The Fishermen by Hans Kirk. It follows a group of super-pious fishermen who move to the other side of Jutland, where the fishing is better but the people aren't nearly so puritanical, and the subsequent culture clash. It was an actual, compelling, and subtle portrayal of fundamentalists, which is rare in most of what I read. Plus, he used a rather interesting stylistic device, by doing away with quotation marks. Dialogue was just stuck into the flow of the text, supposedly to "facilitate transitions between characters' thoughts and speech and to increase the distance between author and reader by creating a type of objectivity in which the narrator disappears behind the characters and their collective group," according to the translator's introduction. I'm still trying to figure out what the last part of that actually means, but the trick did seem to put the characters' speech on the same level as their actions, somehow reminding me of an old man wagging his finger and saying "do as I say, not as I do." Which of course was a constant thread throughout the book. I'm glad I don't have to write a paper on it, though.

yami · 6:20 · 26 Jul 2020 · #
Filed under: Literature, English, Crap

Dehydrated Agnostic

Jul 23, 2020 16:17 from EarthQuaker
To know something is to hold it in the palm of your mind, to capture its
essence thoroughly and powerfully. To know that
God exists is to close off options for an all powerful God, including his final
prerogative not to be. The only respectful position a Christian can take,
then, is to acknowledge that God might not be, but to believe in him
nonetheless. Anything else appropriates more authority to one's self than is
proper for a creation.
[Atheism Agnosticism Et Al> msg #20201 (20 remaining)] Read cmd ->

I might have to try this one on the next Jehovah's Witness who comes to my door. I actually take the inverse position - I acknowledge that there might be a god, but disbelieve it nonetheless. Which, of course, I arrived at by just asking myself "Why am I here?" and immediately answering "I don't know." Blammo, instant agnostic, just heat and serve.

Meanwhile, the smell of Formula 409 and EZ-Off is still leaking from my fingers. I'm on oven duty for the rest of the week, joy oh joy! At least my supervisor's cute, and one of the other girls in my group... heh. Simple pleasures. Also, Kool-Aid. I passed by the Kool-Aid display in the grocery store after work, and couldn't resist buying four packets. It's so brightly colored! Shiny! And they've got super space rocket-berry flavors! Yeah!

yami · 23:20 · 24 Jul 2020 · #
Filed under: Personal

I’m a Poser

Crap. I should be sleeping right now. I have to go learn how to properly clean empty apartments tomorrow, which means I have to actually wake up before noon. But, in my habitual random-guestbook-signage, I ran into the same rant, twice. Three times, actually, if you count someone quoting the tail end of it. Here is the original post. For reference, here's the part that got to me:

I've come to realise that the quality, if it can be called that, I deplore most in others is not conformity, but fakery. Your typical 'conformist' might eat in McDonalds, wear Nike trainers and listen to bubblegum pop, but at least he or she is not pretending to be anything other than what they are. Then you have the people who are exactly the same as that, but choose to adopt an 'alternative' image in order to demonstrate that they are somehow 'better' than those around them. Superior in some way. People who want the best of both worlds; to be simultaneously trendy and subversive. To be a rock guru, but still look and act like a teenybopper. To be against capitalism, but still able to wear their favourite designer labels. To be one thing when it's convenient, and to set this image aside when it's not. ... ... ... ...
Why do people feel they have to brand themselves with stock labels? Why can't they just be what they really are?

Now for the bold-faced manifesto: you don't always have to be yourself, or even know who you are. What really caught me about all of her examples of fakery, was that they could be easily placed into a context of personal growth. A teenybopper who's starting to get into alternative music, and prattles to all her friends about it. Someone just starting to think about the downsides of capitalism, who doesn't know exactly how his/her own habits contribute to the system, or how to change them. Eventually, they might change their views to resolve whatever cognitive dissonance they find. Or they might revert back to straight-shot conformity. Either way, they've had the chance to explore something new, and that's a Good Thing.
Case in point: my own brief fling with designer jeans. This was going from relative innocence (I was in grade school at the time) to conformity, to apathy, but the principles are basically the same. I wanted to wear designer jeans because I thought it would make me look cool, and be superior in some way, and maybe more kids would like me. You know. So I did my damndest to dress all trendy, while still being able to snap back to Fashionless Egghead whenever it was convenient. Hells yeah, I was faking it. The phase lasted for almost two years, but I never really got used to it, and eventually realized that it just wasn't me. But, in the process I learned a couple things about wearing clothes that actually match. Multiple lessons learned, end of story. The moral: sometimes you just have to try an image on, walk around in it for a while, and see if it fits.

That's it. No more reading blogs at bedtime. This is ridiculous. If I read it over tomorrow and still agree with anything I said, and can remember what I meant by it, I might try and clarify some. Good night.

yami · 9:29 · 24 Jul 2020 · #
Filed under: I Hate Everything

socks

I love socks. They're one of the most fun articles of clothing still in common use (the codpiece would have given them a run for their money, though). If you're wearing something informal enough to require socks (and these so-called "trouser socks" are the same thing as pantyhose, to my mind, so they don't count - no heft to them at all) then no one will question your judgement if your socks don't match your pants. This gives you plenty of leeway to wear socks with colors and patterns that would be absurd on a larger piece of fabric. What's even better is to wear two mismatching socks, giving you twice as much space to play with even though you have to mess with people trying to tell you your socks don't match. Duh.
So I bought four new pairs of nice patterned socks today, on clearance. My feet are happy just thinking about it.

Also, I suddenly feel compelled to justify my use of Verdana on this site. I think it's trendy for a reason, really, though I tried initially to avoid it. It's just that Tahoma looks terrible in large point, and Lucida Console is well-nigh illegible at the small sizes I need if I wanna be really pretentious. And, well, I'm just a one-font kinda gal, ya know?

yami · 8:05 · 24 Jul 2020 · #
Filed under: Personal, Design

fake personal ads

Writing fake personal ads (on free services, natch) has been an occasional hobby of mine for a while now, ever since a friend of mine did it on a dare and got back some completely hilarious responses. I've gotten my fair share of gems, too, of course: "I'd love to sizzle in your love grease" as well as a long poem about "spunky ferret love juice." When writing the latest one, I phrased it so any mildly clever 80 year old man named Morris would think I was looking for smutty stories in my mailbox. I've only gotten one so far - a rape fantasy, with lots and lots of exclamation points and loosely transcribed grunts. Completely horrible. So I replied, in a rather smutty style I might add, and offered to become his pen-pal sex slave if he'd only improve his writing. He hasn't written back. I'm terribly hurt. *stifles a sob on a black lace handkerchief*

For those of you playing along at home: in my experience, the best way to get a really good crop of funny responses to your fake ad is to mention some specific object as a trigger. This works best if you do it in an unconventional setting - eg, "float away with me on a sea of used french fry grease" rather than "I like french fries."

My thumb hurts. I'm probably going to get carpal tunnel and die. Good night.

yami · 7:40 · 23 Jul 2020 · #
Filed under: Crap