Author: Aaron Weber

On Pronounciation

SUSE LINUX Enterprise Server is often abbreviated “SLES.” This should be pronounced “Sless,” as in “SLES is More.” Do not pronounce it “Slez” as though it were a short form of Slesbian, presumably meaning a SLES system administrator. First, it sounds like an insensitive schoolyard taunt. Second, it distracts me from whatever you’re talking about and makes me wonder about how one ought to pronounce abbreviations. Then I wonder what kind of reject marketing campaigns you could come up with based on those pronounciations. For example, “SLES is more,” or “Get more with SLES” or “I’m a SLESbian and I’m proud.” No, I don’t think any of them would work. The first two are lame, and the third is so tasteless and insensitive it would offend anyone within a hundred yards of it. Then I wonder about the implications of making a joke about how it’s pronounced, and if that’s a violation of various rules of conduct in the office. Then I wonder what you were saying because it’s several minutes later. So, say “sless” or “enterprise server nine” and let’s get on with the rest of the meeting. What was that again? I couldn’t hear you through the static on the phone.

And when I say fall apart

Earlier, I posted about trouble and beauty and it didn’t necessarily make a lot of sense. I didn’t mean to say that Kitty is totally losing it, because she’s not. I didn’t mean to say that beauty is only there when people suffer. Just that sometimes when people go through rough spots, and you’ve been reading their blogs, or looking at their art, you can see it reflected there in a particularly touching way. A particular beauty that disappears with the return to happiness and normalcy.

It shows up in disease-recovery blogs that get less interesting as people get better. It shows up in the funny ones, where people work out their demons through ranting and self-destructive hijinks, and then get their shit together and suddenly they’re not as acerbic or funny any more. It shows up in rock bands that quit taking drugs and start pacing themselves and decide they want to live past the age of thirty, and totally aren’t as cool anymore. It shows up in my own life, because I’m not as driven and upset and lonely as I was when I first got to Boston and would stay at work for thirty hours straight and go home and laugh because I was way too tired to sleep.

It’s not always there, of course. There’s plenty of depressed or angry or upset or drug-addled people that are boring and horrible when they’re low. Just look at LiveJournal or, god forbid, Xanga. And I don’t mean to say that creative output is worse when the creator feels better– I’ve been reading Kitty for years now and she’s great all the time. But a week or two ago, I knew she was upset. She posted pictures that remind me about how visiting home turns the familiar into the strange, and day to day life sometimes seems confusing and it made me want to cry because it reminded me about going home and things feeling inexplicably weird, or walking down the street and feeling like there’s something huge I’m just not getting.

And when people get better and that odd shine goes away, and they’re back to normal, they feel better. It’s just not as intense, and the blog readers, well, they were there for the intensity in many cases. I feel guilty for missing that intensity in blogs. I know I feel stupid for missing it in my own life. I miss being depressed sometimes, because it gave me a clearer sense of who I was. I was a person with a mental illness trying to get through the day, not some fucking yuppie who’s medicated away his emotions and is incapable of feeling empathy for anyone, not even kittens.

Anyway. I don’t mean to patronize or imply that things are, in fact, always beautiful when they are damaged, broken, or falling apart, or even when they’re in rough seas. Just that sometimes, beauty shows itself off in a new light when the world around it gets ugly.

Whine

I had a bottle of wine last night called Solaris. Now, of course, when you search for “Solaris Wine” you end up with a nice little page of information about running WINE on Solaris. That’s not terribly surprising. I was amused to find that if you use the Sun search tool, you’ll end up with the actual beverage information in 9th place.

The wine itself was not at all like the operating system. The operating system is complex, expensive, requires fancy hardware, and tends to be a sort of indigo-purple color. The beverage was yellow-green, citrusy, and inexpensive, and it required only a screwpull– I don’t think it would be unreasonable to drink it from tumblers, although swilling it straight from the bottle would be a little much.

Trivializing the Suffering of Millions

As Bookdwarf says, I can be terribly insensitive and sometimes trivialize horrible things like, oh, the Soviet prison system. But today I want to talk to you about something really serious: eating disorders. You may know that they affect millions of women and increasing numbers of men. But did you know that even animals can get eating disorders? It’s true. I should know, I have a bulimic cat.

Hey, if trivializing the suffering of millions is wrong, then I don’t want to be right.