Category: Deeds

Three anecdotes:

On the way to work the other day I saw a very pale girl with very long purple hair and a tiny tiny black dress walking up the street. I wanted to stare but the light turned green. I wondered where she was going.

At work I saw a red bumper sticker that said “If this sticker is blue you’re driving too fast.” Get it? It’s a joke about the Doppler effect. See, if you approach the sticker at close to the speed of light, it causes the red wavelengths reflected from the sticker to appear blue, so if it’s blue, you’re going about a hundred eighty thousand miles an hour too fast, and… let’s just say I work near MIT.

Last night at around ten I was on Mass Ave and I pulled up next to a man and a woman on heavily-customized Harley Davidson motorcycles. I said nice bike, and the guy looked over at my scooter and said “… thank you.” The woman looked over and laughed and then we all laughed and she said “that is a nice bike.” I said, “It works.” They roared ahead but of course we were all in traffic so I kept up with them all the way from Harvard to Porter, the three of us taking up both lanes.

That’s pretty much the highlights of the week there.

Sometimes, in difficult circumstances, people are at their best. Something bad happens and people rise to the occasion. They suffer, but they overcome, and it is a tale of triumph and beauty. Other times, people suffer and overcome, and it’s not beautiful at all. It just sucks. They don’t see things in a new way, they don’t learn an important lesson, the stress doesn’t inspire them to new heights of creative achievement or heroic endurance. They keep plugging away until they drop, and then they rest a little, and they get back up and plug away some more. We all know there’s no point to anyone pushing this rock up this hill, but what the fuck else are we going to do? You can’t just leave it there and go back to bed. Can you?

I guess what I’m trying to say is that every day for awhile now I’ve been waking up and wishing I hadn’t. And every day I get up, with more or less prodding from my girlfriend and the hungry cats. And every night I lie in bed and try to make my mind shut the hell up and it won’t. I’ve been playing World of Warcraft, and it’s not that I enjoy it all that much, but it makes everything else go away for awhile.

I guess what I’m trying to say is, I hate this feeling, and it’s not inspiring, and it’s not pretty, and I’m not overcoming or triumphing. I’m just slogging through and I’m fucking sick of it. Eventually it will go away and I’ll feel better. And then eventually it will come back. Things will go on like this for fifty or sixty years, and then I’ll die, and someone else will have to deal with the design-win pipeline spreadsheet and the hosting invoices and the cat hair clogging the radiators. Circle of life.

or I’ll go blind…

Oh, sure, there’s warning signs your kid might be using drugs but what do I do if I love a country that I suspect might be, you know, becoming kind of totalitarian? Is there a checklist of warning signs of totalitarianism? Apparently not so much. Fascism, though, yes. I want to know what people thought in 1939 in Germany. I want to know, at what point do you stop saying “It’s not so bad yet, this can be changed” and start saying “oh shit, it’s way too late.”

I got an email today on the college alumni list about a woman who has been denied re-entry to the US for no apparent reason. Daily Kos has more. Now, the thing is, there might be some legitimate paperwork screwup. She wasn’t bundled off to Gitmo or anything, and maybe in a few weeks this’l all be sorted out. Still, it’s a hell of a way to treat a legal resident who’s just gone home to visit family across the border.

And it really seems to me like the US is going off the deep end with its xenophobia– this, the vigilante border patrols… how can we reverse this trend and make the country what it can be? Is it still possible to reverse? At what point do people start to wonder where it all went wrong?

This weekend the Times had an article on DHEA, which is apparently some dangerous and too-effective hormone precursor similar to the now-banned “andro.” The gist of the article is that DHEA, too, should be banned, but isn’t, due to political wrangling. Obviously I ran out and grabbed some. We’ll see how it works beginning next week when I return from a week of usability testing in Salt Lake City.

I’m back from a week in San Pedro, Ambergris Caye (“key”), Belize (formerly British Honduras). Bookdwarf will be posting some pics later. I did not see the native manatee (or dugong), although I did manage to interact with some North American specimens of that shy and quiet sea cow. Details to follow.

Classy .

I still get a lot of search strings for the phrase “Conan, What is Good In Life” so I guess it’s fitting that today I wrote up a plan for world domination. It’s really quite simple, only five pages or so.

For what it’s worth, Conan’s view of what is good in life is “to crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentations of their women.” In contrast, my view of world domination begins with community outreach teams identifying, engaging, and recruiting thought leaders.

This is something like the difference between the US and EU ethics rules. European labor laws specify that your boss isn’t allowed to spy on you, so European divisions don’t have to sign the complicated code of business ethics that our company has for US divisions. However, they still have to obey the rules of general human decency and ethics, though– I think the ethics rules are also generalized in EU labor regulations, or something. US teams sign the code of business ethics and as far as I know obey it to the letter. But hey, I’m in marketing, it’s kind of my job to ignore whatever general rules of human decency aren’t actually spelled out in the rules.

Other excitement: Several of us in the office got together and bought a gallon of chowder to go from Legal Seafood. It came in a giant bag. It was a giant bag of chowder. It looked hideous but it was delicious and high in cholesterol.

The City of Somerville has declared an indefinite state of emergency. It’s like martial law, except it only applies to parking rules.

Good: One church refuses to marry anyone until gay people can marry equally. They are encouraging all heterosexual couples to postpone marriage until marriage is free for everyone. (Well, they say they will encourage all of the average of five straight couples that get married in that church each year…) It’s a step.

Bad: One village in Acheh is apparently just… gone: all but one of the houses is and around 80% of the people have completely vanished. The house in best shape has only two walls standing; the rest are brae foundations. And the inhabitants? They haven’t even found bodies.

And Bookdwarf pointed me to the fake news: Armstrong Williams, when he appeared with Cheney to complain about biased, unethical media coverage was actually a paid shill for the administration. Now, while it might sound like a great idea to get paid by two people for doing one job, it’s usually too good to be true. In fact, it’s probably right there in the contract or rule book– it certainly is in my case. You know, the employee handbook. The one they gave you when you got hired? You didn’t read your contract or terms of employment or any of the company policies did you? No, you didn’t. I bet you didn’t even sign up for the 401(k) and stuck with the default health insureance. Dumbass. You’re too stupid to live, let alone be a journalist.

American Death Squads in Iraq. Every day brings a new low.

The Dakar Rally 2005 begins on January 1st, this time in Barcelona. Sixteen days, six and a half thousand miles by car, truck, or motorcycle, on roads, mountains, forests, and deserts, through Spain, Morocco, Mauritania, and Senegal. And for significant portions of the race, the route doesn’t provide much evidence when you leave it: they post the coordinates of checkpoints, and contestants are expected to navigate from one to the next. Even with a GPS, people tend to get lost. Two of the eight American competitors are from my area. Total competitors: 230 bikes, 165 cars, 70 trucks. And a lot of support vehicles.