So I’m sitting in my CS 142 class today and during a lull in the lecture, my good friend pulled out his netbook and tried to check something on the internet. Well, sort of. See, the CS department's wireless went down today during that class, so he was marooned without email in the middle of a lecture. i shook my head and silently berated the foolish CS techs who had allowed such an elementary slip up in the Normal Workings of the Universe to take place. later, as I was walking across campus, I whipped out my iPod touch and decided to check my email. Sort of. See, i got through the whipping part okay, but then I realized that I'd need to first authenticate and by the time I got done authenticating, I'd probably be next to a different building and a different network and then I'd just have to do it all over again. "Not worth it," I said to myself. Later on in the day, I went to "getdropbox.com" and downloaded a file that currently is synced to a shared folder on the computer at home. Sort of. See, I had turned my computer off inadvertently before the syncing was complete, so the folders were named correctly, but the whole project was not in there. "Stupid computers and their slow connection speeds," I thought. "Why couldn't it have uploaded faster?"
So I’ve decided that I’m rapidly becoming a technology brat.
Despite my best efforts to maintain my own naiveté, I'm becoming the faceless, technology consuming, non-appreciative, self-entitled, THEM (related very closely to those girls in high school who complained because their brand new BMWs were the wrong color). I hated those girls. They didn't appreciate the wonder of the German engineering they were given. Heck, they didn't understand how many hours of working at a minimum-wage job it would take to pay off a brand new BMW ($40,000 / $6.50 an hour = 6,153 hours... that's 769 days of 8 hours a day or a little over 2 years. Oh, and that's without taxes. Take THAT, you crappy BMW-driving girls.).
Anyway. My point: Technology is A-Mazing. I don't even know what the heck authentication IS and here I am complaining about having to do it TWICE so I can check email... while walking... on a device the size of an index card. What is wrong with me? I remember a day on my mission when I was riding on a bus in downtown Toronto. The advertisements were all about a new phone that could play mp3s. "Holy heck," I thought. "What is this world coming to?! I've never even owned a cell phone and now you can put music on them?" When I got home and got my first cell phone, I specifically looked for one that could play music and i was not disappointed. But now, I've gone on to greener pastures and I have a BETTER phone with TWICE the memory of the first one. Most of the time, I don't even register that I'm plugging my head phones into my phone. Let me repeat that: MY PHONE. Yeah, and my phone doesn't even have wires that connect it to the wall; it works by sending digital signals through the air where they mysteriously are picked up a by a "cell site" and then transmitted on wires made of glass that's spun finer than my hair to another wireless site where it's broadcast to just one of the thousands of phones in the area and the person on the other end doesn't even have to shout. I mean, come ON! That's incredible.
But no, I'm turning into a technology brat. I roll my eyes when wireless networks mysteriously shut down and think of nasty things I could say to the techs that are running them. To be perfectly frank, the wireless network in question is probably maintained by guys not much older than me that know about 1% more than I do on the subject of "authentication" ("Okay, all you need to know for this job is that when this error comes up, just push cancel cuz it's no big deal. But when THIS error comes up, order pizza, cuz you're going to be here a while fielding angry phone calls."). I try to keep a sense of wonder about me, but darn it, sometimes I just want to take the technology for granted.
Technology is definitely a part of my generation. It’s not even something that’s a part of my sister’s generation (the lost Facebookers, as they’re called). I talked with my mom yesterday about the potential problems that one might encounter because pictures of previous boy/girl friends are posted on Facebook. I explained to my mom that Facebook stalking, while it is an approved form of communication in many circles, is not "acceptable" because it's "creepy." So even if you do happen to Facebook stalk a girl you met the other night at a party, you're not allowed to use that material in making judgments because (a) it would be creepy if the girl found out that you'd been doing that and (b) people in real life are often very different than their Facebook status updates. Isn't that a weird conversation to have with your mother? but it's very definitely a big part of my life now. I not only have to maintain my good name in real life, but I also have to maintain a good online presence. If you google "Jonathan Urie," the first thing that comes up is my Facebook page (the second thing is a review for the CD Reflections of Light, a new age piano cd composed and recorded by Jonathan Urie of Canada, but that's beside the point).
But I still am a little old-fashioned, I think. I don't know, maybe my kids will roll their eyes at me someday because I didn't propose to their mother over text messaging, but that's how I am. I enjoy a good face-to-face. I'm the kind of guy that wants to hear directly from a girl that she's got a boyfriend. As far as I'm concerned, Facebook isn't a legitimate source of 'real' information. You can be anyone you want there.
But anonymity has its advantages. For example, have you heard of zazzle.com? Quick summation: zazzle.com uses a new screen-printing process called dye sublimation and as a result, can put just about any design, picture, graphic, or whatever on anything else. So, you can design your own custom stuff! And if you want to buy one, you can buy just one if you want to. There's no minimum bulk order that you have to make. You just upload your design and in a couple of days, you can be riding on a skate board that has your face on the bottom. But wait, it gets better: you can post these products in your own personal little store (zazzle.com/jonathanurie if you don't believe me) and when people buy them, you can set how much of a royalty fee you want. It's a minimum of 15% (I think) for each product, but that means that if someone buys your $20 shirt from your store, you get 2 dollars. The customer gets the designs they want, the creator gets a stall at the global bazaar that they can link to (see above), and if you can pull it off, you can buy two 99 cent chicken sandwiches at Wendy's every time someone buys your shirt. Am I Abercrombie? No. But I sell shirts that are just as cool and they're guaranteed to be more unique. I sell what I want to sell, you buy what you want to buy and the economic wheels keep on turning (Okay, maybe not all of my designs are as cool as Abercrombie's, but I'm a one-man show and Abercrombie has all of China designing for them).
I recently watched a video by the author of The World is Flat and he painted quite the economic landscape for people. Suddenly, the world's marketplace is no longer tilted in favor of the United States! Suddenly, we have to compete with China! Indians (in India) are taking our telemarketer jobs! Doctors in Bangladesh are reading our x-rays! Watching him, I realized how very easily national policies can turn to protectionism as a way of keeping competitors out of the way. But for some reason, I didn't get quite that feeling as I watched him speak. As he spoke of this "flattening" of the world, i couldn't help but think of my little corner of the zazzle.com domain where MY STUFF was being sold to whoever wanted to buy it. Maybe I'm naive, but I got a little giddy just thinking about it.
I, Jonathan Urie, am now in direct competition with Xiao Chen Xu of China for that computer programming job, but I'm also competing against Abercrombie and Hollister and Mossimo and a bunch of others that are in the same clothing market as I am now. Sure, my market share isn't that great (something on the order of .0000001% as of yesterday's newspaper), but that's beside the point. The real giddiness-inducing part of all of this is that I can be whoever I want to be. ME. Yep, that's right, I don't have an office, I don't have a team of designers, but I am clothing designer. I can compete with the Big Guys. Shoot, I don't even have to become a Big Guy: all it takes is an army of zazzlers and suddenly, you realize that the shirt you bought the other day for $40 is not the best deal. And each one of the zazzlers goes out and buys 2 99 cent chicken sandwiches and everyone's happier. I know I'm being a little over simplistic in all of this, but I like to err on the side of dreaming big.
So I will continue to fight my growing tendency to be a technology brat, but at the same time, I'm going to continue to pay my dues to the zazzler militia and who knows, maybe one day I'll go to Wendy's and buy a regular burger.
Monday, September 21, 2009
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
Topic sentences are like practicing scales on a piano:
they’re good for you, but no one really wants to do them. There are a lot of things that fall in this category, now that I think about it. Early morning exercise, healthy portions of food, doctor’s appointments, homework, braces, shots, fillings, going to bed on time—in fact, now that I ponder this more, it seems that everything that has to do with health falls into this category. But that is neither here nor there. I’m going to try again.
My internet has been acting up lately and as a result, I’ve found myself waiting around for things to load a lot more than usual. Back in the day, when my family owned a Mac and a modem, I figured out that it took about an hour to load a single movie trailer. The way that I usually did it was to click the trailer that I wanted and then go do something else constructive like mow the lawn. After an hour, I’d come in and it would be almost loaded. It was a great system. The advent of high-speed internet sort of ruined all of that. But the skills that I learned as a lad while using dial-up internet have stuck with me and even in the midst of slow internet connections, I can find joy and fulfillment.
My mother is one who is very good at finding joy and fulfillment in the midst of trying situations. This month’s home teaching message was about the influence of righteous women in our lives and as I was preparing the lesson with my companion, I was reminded of all that my mom taught me about finding joy (or at least tolerance) in trying situations. My mom was wonderful at always being level and always I griped a lot as a kid about waiting, walking, and other stuff like that and so one of her sayings that she would share with a smile was “tired and hungry ain’t no excuse” used most often on family road trips and in airports. There was never a choice in our family after Mom asked us to do stuff. She often would allow as how we always had a choice when doing things: we could do it with a smile or with a frown. The thing would always get done, but sometimes I’d be a little worse for wear.
I made a commercial at work today. I’m a trainer for the Office of Information Technology, which means that I get to teach classes about computer software. Mostly, I teach the Adobe products and Microsoft Office. Our office has recently extended our services to all students in addition to faculty and staff, but the problem is that no one knows about it yet. So, I decided that it would be cool to make some cool commercials and get the bookstore to play them (there were others involved in the brainstorming of this, but whatever). My first one that I made was a sped up version of me making a t-shirt with a grunged-out look in Adobe Illustrator. It turned out really well, so I decided to make another one today involving Photoshop. The basic idea that I wanted to go for was that Photoshop could do anything that you wanted it to and so I decided to do a quick montage of one or two click fixes or dramatic reconstructions. That way, the audience would be able to see the beginning, or the “before” if you will, and then jump right to the “after” in just a couple of seconds. I decided to use a swaggering funk-sounding piece of music that I got from a stock music site. I think that it turned out really nice. One of my favorite things in the world is when music matches up with content just right. It remains to be seen if these commercials will ever make it to the bookstore, but I have hope.
I’m trying to love Accounting 210. Really, I am. Today I took my third quiz for the class and got a 10 out of 10. I am quite proud of this and hope that the trend will continue, but I am not completely positive that this will be the case. I took Accounting 20 last fall semester and after successfully navigating the first few quizzes, I got a little casual about the class and the effort that I would need to put in in order to keep my grade healthy. Sure enough, about two days after the add/drop deadline, I waited until too late to start the lesson that was due that night and ended up getting a terrible score for that day’s quiz. “Fine,” I thought. “I’ll just give myself a day to psych myself up for the next one and I’ll be fine.” I turned out that the next quiz was due the day after the one I had bombed and because of my further procrastination, I did pretty much the same thing the next time around. I tried my darndest to keep ahead of the curve, but from then on out, it was as though the accounting gods were against me. I had displeased them from the beginning and they were slow to hear my cries for mercy. At the end of that semester, I took great pleasure in the fact that I would never have to take another accounting class… and then I decided to go into Information Systems and learned that Accounting 200 was required in order to apply for the major. So here I am and I’ve decided to stay WELL ahead of the curve and not offend the Accounting gods as I did before. I’m doing well so far, but the add/drop deadline is coming up in two days and then we shall see how much I’ve learned from previous experience. Attitude is key, so I am trying my best to talk up the class and the major to everyone that I talk to. Hopefully the Accounting gods will have mercy on me as I bring more college student fodder to them.
Of all of the styles of Ballroom Dance, Latin dancing is by far the most satisfying for both the dancer and the watcher. In my opinion, a good samba will beat a good waltz any day. Now, the waltz may be technically more difficult, but the added clout of audience appeal pushes it over the edge in my book. When I first started dancing at BYU, I remember quite clearly going to a dance lab where the Gold II Latin students performed a samba that literally stunned me. Looking at it now, they probably weren’t that great, but looking at them made me want to learn how to do just what they had done. I started out, as everyone does, by taking Social Dance 180 and was puzzled by the fact that we weren’t doing any of the cool dances that I had seen at the dance lab. We started by working on American Foxtrot. I quickly discovered that although it wasn’t as flashy as the samba that I had seen, it was still plenty tough to learn. Leading came pretty naturally and most of the girls that I met while dancing said that I was one of the best leaders in the class. Taking confidence from this, I started taking International Latin classes, where I got my first taste of the samba. To my surprise, the samba I learned sucked in comparison to the samba that I had seen at the dance lab. All we did was bounce to the beat of one---a-two-and—one---a-two-and… the entire dance. Despite this, I pressed onwards and soon entered the world of open competitions where you compete in ballroom dance events and enlist the services of coaches in order to get choreography. It was there that I finally found the samba that I was looking for. It turned out that the bouncing that we did in the beginning class was just to get us to use what is called “foot rise.” When you have foot rise and rise to your toes, if you can absorb the movement into your body while keeping your head level, the movement is transferred to your hips, giving you the hip action that makes samba so awesome to watch. So that’s pretty much how I got hooked on latin dance.
When I hear NPR’s All Things Considered or Morning Edition, I think of Farenheit cologne and the smell of steam. When I was just a little boy, I remember very vividly waking up early and going into my parents room while they were getting ready for the day. I would snuggle down into the warm, newly-vacated covers and listen to NPR while my dad was in the shower. All Things Considered had a very distinct pattern that it would follow every morning. They would start their music and read through the headlines just in time for the music to stop, whereupon Robert Seagull, one of the reporters, would say “the news is next.” He said it every day the exact same way. About 10 minutes into the show, the shower would turn off and my dad would emerge a few minutes later to finish getting ready in the vanity area. I would usually be back asleep at this point, but the opening of the shower door would wake me up and I would see the clouds of steam coming out from the shower area. My dad likes hot showers. As predictable as Robert Seagull’s “the news is next” was the next part of the ritual when my dad would do his hair. I can’t really describe it, but he had a certain flip to the comb that he would use to get his hair just right. To this day, I have not been able to get my hair looking as immaculate as my dad. He would then get his suit on and tie his tie on and although he had a mirror right there, he would always close his eyes while tying his tie into his characteristic double Windsor knot. Right before the final push through and pull down, you bring the big part of the tie around behind the knot and I remember very specifically that he would accent the motion of bringing the tie around. I have the same accent, I’ve noticed. Finally, my dad would give himself a spritz of Farenheit cologne by Christian Dior and turn off the radio. That was the morning ritual and now whenever I hear “the news is next,” I can immediately feel myself back in my parents’ bed watching my dad tie his tie with his eyes closed while listening to Robert Seagull.
My internet has been acting up lately and as a result, I’ve found myself waiting around for things to load a lot more than usual. Back in the day, when my family owned a Mac and a modem, I figured out that it took about an hour to load a single movie trailer. The way that I usually did it was to click the trailer that I wanted and then go do something else constructive like mow the lawn. After an hour, I’d come in and it would be almost loaded. It was a great system. The advent of high-speed internet sort of ruined all of that. But the skills that I learned as a lad while using dial-up internet have stuck with me and even in the midst of slow internet connections, I can find joy and fulfillment.
My mother is one who is very good at finding joy and fulfillment in the midst of trying situations. This month’s home teaching message was about the influence of righteous women in our lives and as I was preparing the lesson with my companion, I was reminded of all that my mom taught me about finding joy (or at least tolerance) in trying situations. My mom was wonderful at always being level and always I griped a lot as a kid about waiting, walking, and other stuff like that and so one of her sayings that she would share with a smile was “tired and hungry ain’t no excuse” used most often on family road trips and in airports. There was never a choice in our family after Mom asked us to do stuff. She often would allow as how we always had a choice when doing things: we could do it with a smile or with a frown. The thing would always get done, but sometimes I’d be a little worse for wear.
I made a commercial at work today. I’m a trainer for the Office of Information Technology, which means that I get to teach classes about computer software. Mostly, I teach the Adobe products and Microsoft Office. Our office has recently extended our services to all students in addition to faculty and staff, but the problem is that no one knows about it yet. So, I decided that it would be cool to make some cool commercials and get the bookstore to play them (there were others involved in the brainstorming of this, but whatever). My first one that I made was a sped up version of me making a t-shirt with a grunged-out look in Adobe Illustrator. It turned out really well, so I decided to make another one today involving Photoshop. The basic idea that I wanted to go for was that Photoshop could do anything that you wanted it to and so I decided to do a quick montage of one or two click fixes or dramatic reconstructions. That way, the audience would be able to see the beginning, or the “before” if you will, and then jump right to the “after” in just a couple of seconds. I decided to use a swaggering funk-sounding piece of music that I got from a stock music site. I think that it turned out really nice. One of my favorite things in the world is when music matches up with content just right. It remains to be seen if these commercials will ever make it to the bookstore, but I have hope.
I’m trying to love Accounting 210. Really, I am. Today I took my third quiz for the class and got a 10 out of 10. I am quite proud of this and hope that the trend will continue, but I am not completely positive that this will be the case. I took Accounting 20 last fall semester and after successfully navigating the first few quizzes, I got a little casual about the class and the effort that I would need to put in in order to keep my grade healthy. Sure enough, about two days after the add/drop deadline, I waited until too late to start the lesson that was due that night and ended up getting a terrible score for that day’s quiz. “Fine,” I thought. “I’ll just give myself a day to psych myself up for the next one and I’ll be fine.” I turned out that the next quiz was due the day after the one I had bombed and because of my further procrastination, I did pretty much the same thing the next time around. I tried my darndest to keep ahead of the curve, but from then on out, it was as though the accounting gods were against me. I had displeased them from the beginning and they were slow to hear my cries for mercy. At the end of that semester, I took great pleasure in the fact that I would never have to take another accounting class… and then I decided to go into Information Systems and learned that Accounting 200 was required in order to apply for the major. So here I am and I’ve decided to stay WELL ahead of the curve and not offend the Accounting gods as I did before. I’m doing well so far, but the add/drop deadline is coming up in two days and then we shall see how much I’ve learned from previous experience. Attitude is key, so I am trying my best to talk up the class and the major to everyone that I talk to. Hopefully the Accounting gods will have mercy on me as I bring more college student fodder to them.
Of all of the styles of Ballroom Dance, Latin dancing is by far the most satisfying for both the dancer and the watcher. In my opinion, a good samba will beat a good waltz any day. Now, the waltz may be technically more difficult, but the added clout of audience appeal pushes it over the edge in my book. When I first started dancing at BYU, I remember quite clearly going to a dance lab where the Gold II Latin students performed a samba that literally stunned me. Looking at it now, they probably weren’t that great, but looking at them made me want to learn how to do just what they had done. I started out, as everyone does, by taking Social Dance 180 and was puzzled by the fact that we weren’t doing any of the cool dances that I had seen at the dance lab. We started by working on American Foxtrot. I quickly discovered that although it wasn’t as flashy as the samba that I had seen, it was still plenty tough to learn. Leading came pretty naturally and most of the girls that I met while dancing said that I was one of the best leaders in the class. Taking confidence from this, I started taking International Latin classes, where I got my first taste of the samba. To my surprise, the samba I learned sucked in comparison to the samba that I had seen at the dance lab. All we did was bounce to the beat of one---a-two-and—one---a-two-and… the entire dance. Despite this, I pressed onwards and soon entered the world of open competitions where you compete in ballroom dance events and enlist the services of coaches in order to get choreography. It was there that I finally found the samba that I was looking for. It turned out that the bouncing that we did in the beginning class was just to get us to use what is called “foot rise.” When you have foot rise and rise to your toes, if you can absorb the movement into your body while keeping your head level, the movement is transferred to your hips, giving you the hip action that makes samba so awesome to watch. So that’s pretty much how I got hooked on latin dance.
When I hear NPR’s All Things Considered or Morning Edition, I think of Farenheit cologne and the smell of steam. When I was just a little boy, I remember very vividly waking up early and going into my parents room while they were getting ready for the day. I would snuggle down into the warm, newly-vacated covers and listen to NPR while my dad was in the shower. All Things Considered had a very distinct pattern that it would follow every morning. They would start their music and read through the headlines just in time for the music to stop, whereupon Robert Seagull, one of the reporters, would say “the news is next.” He said it every day the exact same way. About 10 minutes into the show, the shower would turn off and my dad would emerge a few minutes later to finish getting ready in the vanity area. I would usually be back asleep at this point, but the opening of the shower door would wake me up and I would see the clouds of steam coming out from the shower area. My dad likes hot showers. As predictable as Robert Seagull’s “the news is next” was the next part of the ritual when my dad would do his hair. I can’t really describe it, but he had a certain flip to the comb that he would use to get his hair just right. To this day, I have not been able to get my hair looking as immaculate as my dad. He would then get his suit on and tie his tie on and although he had a mirror right there, he would always close his eyes while tying his tie into his characteristic double Windsor knot. Right before the final push through and pull down, you bring the big part of the tie around behind the knot and I remember very specifically that he would accent the motion of bringing the tie around. I have the same accent, I’ve noticed. Finally, my dad would give himself a spritz of Farenheit cologne by Christian Dior and turn off the radio. That was the morning ritual and now whenever I hear “the news is next,” I can immediately feel myself back in my parents’ bed watching my dad tie his tie with his eyes closed while listening to Robert Seagull.
Monday, September 7, 2009
How's THIS for Communication?
As I sit here, I can hear screams of either outrage or delight—I can’t tell which (fortunes of being in a girls’ apartment). I am lying on a couch propped up with a pillow with my laptop warmly charging on my lap. Really warmly. Truth be told, it’s a good feeling having my laptop right on top of my quads; I can feel them slowly unwinding themselves after a long day of cleaning and climbing, and melon ball. It really makes me want to just want to close this laptop and go to sleep for about 3 hours. But procrastination is the thief of impromptu naps, so I will continue to let my legs unwind as I try to think of things to write about.
This morning, I got up early to find my roommates cleaning the kitchen. The kitchen has been getting gradually worse and worse over the last few weeks and because of the “Collective Action Problem” (it’s a political science thing. I used to be one of those, you know.)we have allowed ourselves to gradually devolve into lower and lower standards of cleanliness. About two days ago, my new roommate Bruce confronted the rest of us who have been living there for about a year now, and suggested that a) we should do something about the cleanliness of the apartment and b) maybe we should create a chore chart that we could share around. Now, you must realize that my apartment has had a Sixth Man for the past year or so. The sixth guy of our apartment has always been the outsider. He’s always been somewhat different from the rest of us. He’s always been the one to point out cleanliness problems. He’s always the one to move at the end of a semester. First it was Kevin, who, ironically enough organized the apartment contracts and invited us all to be a part of the original group. I didn’t know what the term “passive aggressive” meant until I met Kevin. He was a business entrepreneurial major and had taken some sort of Management Communications class in which he had read leadership books and healthy communication books and books about connecting with people, but when he talked to you, you always felt vaguely like a test case that he was running for a class. At one point, when the cleanliness of our apartment began its inevitable Collective Action Problem-driven nosedive, without consulting any of the rest of us, he put up a chore chart and assigned everyone a spot on the rotating schedule. The rest of the guys (me included) universally, unanimously, and silently rebelled and the apartment seemed to grow marginally worse for a while. I guess the chore chart wasn’t really a bad idea, per se, but when I saw it hanging unheralded, unannounced, and un-discussed on the fridge, I wondered how all those management techniques he learned in his classes hadn’t sunk in. Or maybe they sank in too deeply and he had begun laboring under the false premise that he was the one to fix the problem of our apartment’s cleanliness. Oddly enough, it was only after Kevin took down his failed chore chart that our standard of living began to pick up. Kevin moved out after winter semester and is still rather unmissed.
So now Bruce (our current and potential Sixth Man) was suggesting a chore chart, completely oblivious to the previous history that the rest of us had been a part of. We all exchanged silent looks and there seemed to be a small discussion amongst the five of us as to what the outcome of this particular commentary on cleanliness was going to be. During this discussion of significant looks, I made the point that the apartment was kind of a mess, to which Lenny responded that “on principle, we can’t cave to this guy!” All of this, was bandied about for a couple of seconds and then Cory said that we were planning on cleaning early tomorrow morning and from then on out, perhaps we might just make sure that we each clean our own things. By the time I got up at nine, most of the exciting stuff had been done, supervised by Bruce. Oddly enough, apparently he wasn’t responsible for any of the messes and therefore didn’t feel the need to contribute. All in all, I’d say it turned out much better than the previous encounter we had with our other Sixth Man—clean apartment, no cleaning chore chart, and relatively little animosity in the apartment. Sort of.
Okay, my laptop is really hot now. I’m going to put it on a pillow and hope it doesn’t burn through to my legs before I’m done with this essay. I shifted my body weight just now, and I’m realizing that everything hurts from the activities of today. My forearms are completely dead from rock climbing this morning and as a consequence, I’m having a hard time putting spacing and capitalizations in properly. Like that last word, for example: I spelled it “propoerly” and the computer corrected itself without my help. Heck, If I hadn’t have looked up, I might have missed that particular unsung hero of modern technology. Do you remember how you used to have to use spell check back in the day? Like, back in the 1890’s? Me too. Back then, I was working on a Mac Power PC (I’ve always been confused by that particular combination of titles) and I used to have this theory that the computer had it in for me. See, when I’d type out my papers for Mrs. Miller-Tart in 4th grade, no matter how many times I checked my work, there would always be an error. Always. It got to the point where I wasn’t even mad about it anymore; it just Was. If spell check had stayed around in that form, I think that I would have been much more in touch with my Qi and the Tao. But no, I remember when Word started underlining things and suddenly, it wasn’t enough for spelling errors to just Be. They had to be corrected and brought in line with the rest of the paper. No stand outs anymore. No more little but of humanity in the paper that showed Mrs. Miller-Tart that a human being had written this paper. Maybe I want my teachers to know that I had climbed strenuously before typing the paper. Maybe the As it is, I can now have 43% functionality in my hands and forearms, and the computer automatically capitalizes every sentence I don’t start propeorly. And in the case of words like the one at the end of that last sentence, if I stubbornly insist on misspelling things, it will underline everything that It doesn’t approve of in red or green. It’s like Christmas whenever I type with post-climbing hands. Climbing was good today, though. Oh boy, it was good. A bunch of us went up to Rock Canyon and roped Tinkertoys. The rule of the land is that whoever sets up the permanent bolts on a climb gets to name the climb. Hence, we climbed on a set called Tinkertoys. I climbed a 5-9 (about middling difficulty for someone with the right equipment) and absolutely sucked at it. I ended up using the rope way more than I should have, fell a bunch, got stuck on a couple of parts just because my sequence was wrong. Rookie crap, basically. I distracted myself for a while by helping some of the beginners we had brought along, but I was still irritated by the fact that I hadn’t really “climbed” the climb. Cory told me that he wanted me to do it again. This time, he would belay for me and he wanted me to think “smooth.” I’m not sure if you’ve ever done rock climbing before, but it is not a muscle-y sport. Most of the work is done with your legs and if you try to do pull ups all day, you’ll get burned out really fast. Most climbers are lanky little guys or lanky big guys who rely more on balance than anything else. So Cory told me “smooth” and that’s how I tried to be. I still burned out my arms (a sure sign of not enough leg usage), but the climbing was technically about 8 times better than I had done it before. It didn’t even matter that I totally screwed up the other 5-9 we did—I had conquered the first one and that was satisfying to me. They’re an interesting bunch, climbers: there aren’t a lot of socially acceptable sports where one is faced with death and nothing is thought of it. When you belay for someone, you literally hold their life in your hands. I think that that’s the reason that climbers are such a cool group of people to be with. Granted, I haven’t met a lot of them, but from what I’ve seen, they live in the moment and work with what they’ve got. Maybe my spell check’s lack of Qi and Tao will be balanced by my climbing.
So that’s that. My laptop is about to melt this pillow and I feel that I’m close enough to my goal to call it a day. Mayhap I will talk about Melon Ball another day.
This morning, I got up early to find my roommates cleaning the kitchen. The kitchen has been getting gradually worse and worse over the last few weeks and because of the “Collective Action Problem” (it’s a political science thing. I used to be one of those, you know.)we have allowed ourselves to gradually devolve into lower and lower standards of cleanliness. About two days ago, my new roommate Bruce confronted the rest of us who have been living there for about a year now, and suggested that a) we should do something about the cleanliness of the apartment and b) maybe we should create a chore chart that we could share around. Now, you must realize that my apartment has had a Sixth Man for the past year or so. The sixth guy of our apartment has always been the outsider. He’s always been somewhat different from the rest of us. He’s always been the one to point out cleanliness problems. He’s always the one to move at the end of a semester. First it was Kevin, who, ironically enough organized the apartment contracts and invited us all to be a part of the original group. I didn’t know what the term “passive aggressive” meant until I met Kevin. He was a business entrepreneurial major and had taken some sort of Management Communications class in which he had read leadership books and healthy communication books and books about connecting with people, but when he talked to you, you always felt vaguely like a test case that he was running for a class. At one point, when the cleanliness of our apartment began its inevitable Collective Action Problem-driven nosedive, without consulting any of the rest of us, he put up a chore chart and assigned everyone a spot on the rotating schedule. The rest of the guys (me included) universally, unanimously, and silently rebelled and the apartment seemed to grow marginally worse for a while. I guess the chore chart wasn’t really a bad idea, per se, but when I saw it hanging unheralded, unannounced, and un-discussed on the fridge, I wondered how all those management techniques he learned in his classes hadn’t sunk in. Or maybe they sank in too deeply and he had begun laboring under the false premise that he was the one to fix the problem of our apartment’s cleanliness. Oddly enough, it was only after Kevin took down his failed chore chart that our standard of living began to pick up. Kevin moved out after winter semester and is still rather unmissed.
So now Bruce (our current and potential Sixth Man) was suggesting a chore chart, completely oblivious to the previous history that the rest of us had been a part of. We all exchanged silent looks and there seemed to be a small discussion amongst the five of us as to what the outcome of this particular commentary on cleanliness was going to be. During this discussion of significant looks, I made the point that the apartment was kind of a mess, to which Lenny responded that “on principle, we can’t cave to this guy!” All of this, was bandied about for a couple of seconds and then Cory said that we were planning on cleaning early tomorrow morning and from then on out, perhaps we might just make sure that we each clean our own things. By the time I got up at nine, most of the exciting stuff had been done, supervised by Bruce. Oddly enough, apparently he wasn’t responsible for any of the messes and therefore didn’t feel the need to contribute. All in all, I’d say it turned out much better than the previous encounter we had with our other Sixth Man—clean apartment, no cleaning chore chart, and relatively little animosity in the apartment. Sort of.
Okay, my laptop is really hot now. I’m going to put it on a pillow and hope it doesn’t burn through to my legs before I’m done with this essay. I shifted my body weight just now, and I’m realizing that everything hurts from the activities of today. My forearms are completely dead from rock climbing this morning and as a consequence, I’m having a hard time putting spacing and capitalizations in properly. Like that last word, for example: I spelled it “propoerly” and the computer corrected itself without my help. Heck, If I hadn’t have looked up, I might have missed that particular unsung hero of modern technology. Do you remember how you used to have to use spell check back in the day? Like, back in the 1890’s? Me too. Back then, I was working on a Mac Power PC (I’ve always been confused by that particular combination of titles) and I used to have this theory that the computer had it in for me. See, when I’d type out my papers for Mrs. Miller-Tart in 4th grade, no matter how many times I checked my work, there would always be an error. Always. It got to the point where I wasn’t even mad about it anymore; it just Was. If spell check had stayed around in that form, I think that I would have been much more in touch with my Qi and the Tao. But no, I remember when Word started underlining things and suddenly, it wasn’t enough for spelling errors to just Be. They had to be corrected and brought in line with the rest of the paper. No stand outs anymore. No more little but of humanity in the paper that showed Mrs. Miller-Tart that a human being had written this paper. Maybe I want my teachers to know that I had climbed strenuously before typing the paper. Maybe the As it is, I can now have 43% functionality in my hands and forearms, and the computer automatically capitalizes every sentence I don’t start propeorly. And in the case of words like the one at the end of that last sentence, if I stubbornly insist on misspelling things, it will underline everything that It doesn’t approve of in red or green. It’s like Christmas whenever I type with post-climbing hands. Climbing was good today, though. Oh boy, it was good. A bunch of us went up to Rock Canyon and roped Tinkertoys. The rule of the land is that whoever sets up the permanent bolts on a climb gets to name the climb. Hence, we climbed on a set called Tinkertoys. I climbed a 5-9 (about middling difficulty for someone with the right equipment) and absolutely sucked at it. I ended up using the rope way more than I should have, fell a bunch, got stuck on a couple of parts just because my sequence was wrong. Rookie crap, basically. I distracted myself for a while by helping some of the beginners we had brought along, but I was still irritated by the fact that I hadn’t really “climbed” the climb. Cory told me that he wanted me to do it again. This time, he would belay for me and he wanted me to think “smooth.” I’m not sure if you’ve ever done rock climbing before, but it is not a muscle-y sport. Most of the work is done with your legs and if you try to do pull ups all day, you’ll get burned out really fast. Most climbers are lanky little guys or lanky big guys who rely more on balance than anything else. So Cory told me “smooth” and that’s how I tried to be. I still burned out my arms (a sure sign of not enough leg usage), but the climbing was technically about 8 times better than I had done it before. It didn’t even matter that I totally screwed up the other 5-9 we did—I had conquered the first one and that was satisfying to me. They’re an interesting bunch, climbers: there aren’t a lot of socially acceptable sports where one is faced with death and nothing is thought of it. When you belay for someone, you literally hold their life in your hands. I think that that’s the reason that climbers are such a cool group of people to be with. Granted, I haven’t met a lot of them, but from what I’ve seen, they live in the moment and work with what they’ve got. Maybe my spell check’s lack of Qi and Tao will be balanced by my climbing.
So that’s that. My laptop is about to melt this pillow and I feel that I’m close enough to my goal to call it a day. Mayhap I will talk about Melon Ball another day.
Friday, September 4, 2009
Thursday, August 14, 2008
yes, it's 2:30 am.
Well, I'm in the process of moving out... I'm leaving for Vegas tomorrow and as a result of the fact that I won't be back in time for check outs, I have to pack everything up tonight. In my search through everything in my apartment, I discovered my camera (!) and for celebration purposes, I"m uploading a video and a warning sign to my blog.
Monday, July 28, 2008
A good thought
"Fight on, my men," says Sir Andrew Barton,
"I am hurt, but I am not slain;
I'll lay me down and bleed a while,
And then I'll rise and fight again.
"I am hurt, but I am not slain;
I'll lay me down and bleed a while,
And then I'll rise and fight again.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)