The Mono
2004 Archive
That stands for monologue, or monotone, or monoatomic, depending on what's going on at the moment. If you want to know what's going on in the garden, head over to the Barefoot Gardener. This is everything else.
Real honest-to-god rants are elsewhere.
November 24, 2004 - This doesn't feel like California. It's too cold.
The root beer has been sitting in a corner of what is normally one of the warmest rooms in the house... it's been sitting at room temp for three days without carbonating any more at all. Normally after three days, total, it's about ready to bite your head off... this stuff is at eight days and counting, has weak carbonation, and is cold enough at room temp to stop the yeast. Which is good, I suppose -- except that I want a tad more fizz than we have at the moment. Maybe it's time to play with heat mats...
That's the last time I use old yeast for a batch. I'm not sure it'll ever populate quite enough.
It's not just the beer, either... I've been freezing for days. We've had highs in the high 50's, lows around 40, and with a drafty uninsulated house with the heat turned off during the day... well. I like heat better than cold anyway, so I tend to be more comfortable in the summer than winter. But this is insane. It's not the biting cold of the north, but up there they have double-glazing and insulation and heat. 55 in your living quarters is always uncomfortable, whatever the temperature is outside.
November 23, 2004 - The sky is falling, but at least I'll have pie.
I'm thinking about moving to LiveJournal. I've irrationally detested it for years, and I'm still not sure I want to be sucked in. But I made the mistake of checking Jack's LJ (particularly while he's in CT for the holiday), and I realized that the friends page that gives all the current posts of friends was really handy, and that almost everybody I know is on LJ, and their emoticons have a very wide and intriguing range of emotions...
Sigh. I might hate myself if I do, but the very fact that I have no solid reason for hating LJ means that I have no arguments to counter an urge to get an account. And there are a bunch of reasons to do so. I mean, the fact that it's not as configurable style-wise as my webpage notwithstanding, there aren't very many negatives to the way LJ is set up.
I think most of why I hate it is that it's cliqueish. It's difficult to discover the real name behind a given handle (or the handle of a person you know, unless you can ask them individually) so there's no way to search for friends. If an entry mentions "darkmoon_357", how does one find out who that is? Even the person's own LJ page (if it exists) doesn't give you any more than the chance to guess at who it might be, if you even know them. I'd get tired, very quickly, of asking my friends, "who's darkmoon_357, anyway?" over and over and over.
I suspect the worst part was that, way back when it first started up, it felt like LJ had stolen my friends from me. I wasn't part of it, and therefore I wasn't on the great chain of friends lists... so finding out that 1) a given friend had an LJ and 2) what the screen name was didn't come naturally. This was compounded severely by the fact that once they got LJ, they stopped calling me or otherwise communicating. I mean, they said what they needed to on LJ... anyone who wanted to know what was going on in their lives already knew, since everybody reads their LJ page. Right?
So most of my friends dropped off the face of the earth, yet when I did see them, they all assumed I knew that they had gotten into the military, or had a new SO, or moved to Canada. It was the most frustrating thing in the world, and drove me to swear off LJ. It eats lives and people, absorbs them until nothing is visible from the outside anymore.
Unfortunately, having all my friends there is a big reason to get an account. And if I get an account, I'll most likely move the Mono there -- what's the point to having my blog somewhere else entirely, where nobody's going to read it? So I'm going to muck around in my mom's account (even she has one) to see what the back end is like, and if it's tolerable I may ask for an account of my own.
Sigh. At least, if the sky is bound to fall and my soul is going to be sucked in by LJ, I will have pie. The first pumpkin pie of the season is in the oven right now... the crust was a stone bitch tonight for some unknowable reason, but it should still come out as kickass as ever. I make crusts so good the first time I ate one from this recipe, red flags went off -- this is pastry! Forbidden! Butter crusts, not shortbread-sandy like storebought but light and firm. Pumpkin pie filling that we finally named Gingerbread Pumpkin Pie, because of the copious amounts of molasses and ginger in it. I know it's good because I have at least two friends who, no matter how often I see them the rest of the year, will always make a point of coming over during the holidays just to grab some pie. Or beg me to make them one.
It feels good to have the secret to an addictive substance.
Time to pull out the pie and go to bed... if I'm going to keep waking up after 7 hours of sleep, I can at least make sure I get up at an hour when I might catch Jack on the east coast.
November 22, 2004 - I hate chemical sensitivity. I seem to have discovered a wonderful new chemical that gives me neurotic tendencies for days, and doesn't even give me warning when I encounter it. And since I don't know when I run across it until later, I have no idea what it is.
I've only run into it in two places: our Safeway grocery was having its floors redone and got me a while ago (I don't shop there anymore), and sometime this last week I got another dose of it. I suspect another Safeway out of the area -- the one that sold me the chocolate bars. I was noting that their floors seemed to be what our store was putting in.... sigh.
So I'm not doing any of the things I'm supposed to be doing; being cold seems to make things worse, and so does looking at the garden (I guess because of all the things that need to be done out there...?) so I've been inside all weekend, canning and chatting on Lily.
For what it's worth, I've put up 22 jars of three different kinds of soup now, and I have a ten-bean soup to make tonight. So at least I'm being constructive. I need that soup for the holidays, when I'll be working (like a dog, come the week before Christmas) and will need allergy-safe cheap food. I can even bring jars of soup to work -- take the lid off and microwave, then eat out of the jar. Useful.
I love my pressure canner. One of the best gifts I've ever gotten.
Jack seems to be doing well in CT for Thanksgiving, and has even found a library to get some net time. Maybe by the time he comes back he'll be de-stressed.
I could use some of that de-stressing... various things, most recently the chemical reaction, have made sure I can't sleep well. Me being tired is a bad thing. Me being exhausted just in time to start working hard the day after Thanksgiving is really not happy.
I'm sure I'll manage. And the money will soothe many of my ills.
November 19, 2004 - It's been a day. Earlier this evening I stopped by Safeway and bought two of the giant Hershey milk chocolate bars for $3. I have one left. It's been that sort of day.
So I was supposed to go to Friday Night Waltz with Celeste. Haven't seen her in months, thought it would be a great thing to do together. Sure. I can't get a hold of her all day, not unusual, I look up the address and go myself; I'll meet her there. Then I forget my phone and lose 20 minutes going back for it. Then traffic is hideous -- the tunnel is backed up past Orinda BART, and the Nimitz is a crawl. Lots of stupid drivers, too.
I get to Alameda at last, yay. I drive all the way to the other end before realizing that the grand edifice I had thought might be the place was actually a high school (not a courthouse or huge museum) that was across from the Vet building, my target. End result: 30 minutes late. Okay.
Let me just add that Union City now has a rival for Most Hated City. Alameda at night is the darkest city I've ever seen, and is in the top three for worst signage. Trying to peer through the trees to even see what kind of building is beyond the sidewalk is difficult, and forget getting street numbers. Or even street names...
Half-hour late, no big deal, there's supposed to be a two-hour lesson before dancing. I haven't danced ballroom in twelve years, so I need that basic lesson. By the end of the first hour, I had learned enough that I could trip over my own feet, and the lesson was over (where was the second hour?). Then we were turned loose on the main floor, watching people dance three times as fast as we had been and making it look effortless.
Where was Celeste? She had overslept by six hours when her SO didn't come home, and had woken up five minutes before the event started. With two hours of homework to do.
I watched two dances and went out to the car to cry myself sick. I'm not usually that mercurial, but the hassles of getting there and the sheer frustration of being told essentially "it's very simple" while I felt like the least coordinated person ever really got to me. With no moral support. After a few minutes I called Celeste and trekked back to San Ramon, grabbing my chocolate on the way -- I was cold, whether as a cause or an effect, and chocolate is warming. It's good moral support all on its own, too.
We chatted, she took advantage of my CD collection, we went to dinner, I came home feeling much better... Celeste tells me that what I got tonight was not normal for Friday Night Waltz, and offered to carpool to Palo Alto in a couple of weeks for another one. I'll bite... but I'd love to get together with her before then to try and coordinate my feet with someone other than another rank newbie.
Once home, I found two bits of mail on my laptop. One was a new card for my credit line -- maybe this one will keep the signature for a while before it gets worn off again -- and the other was a square package in mailing plastic.
From England.
I looked at it and smiled. Gary must have sent it airmail to get it here in four days, but it was just what I needed to brighten my day: a DVD of The Wizard of Speed and Time. Unofficial, of course, ripped from the laserdisc and distributed with Mike's blessing, but a much much better copy than my fourth-generation ten-year-old VHS tape. Crystal clear, full sound..... YAY!
Green power saves the day again. Now I can show it to all my friends.
Two-thirty... time for bed. I'm ready to pack this day up and have it go away.
November 15, 2004 - Politics are over, for now, and I feel like it's safe to touch my website again. For a while it felt like everything was about the election, and it was infecting even non-political sites... I have no particular desire for this space to be political, so I decided that if I didn't have anything non-political to say, I wouldn't put it here.
A couple of months later...
A lot has happened, and very little has changed. I'm back to gardening again, though it's not yet all-consuming (wait until I try to control the weeds), I haven't gone back to reading pol blogs yet, I've dropped off a couple of job apps and fallen into apparent limbo in my current part-time position, and I've ordered new glasses which will hopefully get rid of my eyestrain. That's the bitch of having your eyes slowly improve, I guess.
So it's been eventful and noneventful. I'm kind of marking time until Thanksgiving, when Sunvalley will presumably hire me back for traffic control at the mall; when I dropped off the app, Dae muttered something to the effect of "we'll call you when we get confirmation from the General Manager that we'll have the traffic control positions." I almost laughed outright: we had many thousands of cars pass through that poor little four-way-stop last season, and traffic control was the only thing that kept it from backing up all the way to the Benicia Bridge to the north and Walnut Creek to the south. Beyond that, last year I was the first traffic control in memory to get written compliments from customers -- it's unheard of. I suspect that if they had had any doubts about whether the program was worth the money, the comment cards and general smoothness dispelled them.
If there is a program (ha) Director Collins as much as guaranteed me a spot; I know how, I do it well, and I'm reliable. Not to mention the fact that I'm a sucker, which resulted in my paycheck getting a substantial chunk of overtime pay last time -- on a part-time job. So much for Christmas week.
I'm looking forward to this. I must be a masochist, but I enjoy standing out there for eight hours directing traffic. Give me music, and I'll dance, too. That seemed to cheer up all the people driving in the rain and cold trying to get all their holiday shopping done.
On the home front, we got another rat yesterday. The two original rats, Giles and Richard (full name Richardrichardmayhewdick) are getting elderly, we thought they should have a companion in case one of them dies before the other. They're like the odd couple, very fond of each other, and there's not much that's lonelier than a single rat.
To that end, back in April we got Abe. Then we discovered that the older guys had mites. After six weeks of mite treatments, Abe had matured, and we discovered he's an only child -- he feels threatened by other rats, won't have anything to do with them, and in fact puffs up to the size of a football and savages them with his teeth. He's such a well-handled and social rat we hadn't expected it.
So he's in his own cage, taken out regularly so he doesn't get bored... but that left us where we started. So after the latest treatment for mites (having squirrels nesting in the attic will do that) we went off yesterday and got Pete.
He's mouse-sized, definitely a baby. All white, with a dark grey half-mask on the right side and a slight smudge on his left ear -- he looks a little like a pirate, so Nick dubbed him Pirate Pete. He doesn't have the personality of a pirate, of course; like all the others from the reptile shop, he's well-handled, gentle, and curious. Pete himself seems pretty quiet, actually -- while not exactly timid, he isn't as hyper as Abe has always been. That should make things easier when we need to introduce him to the senior rats, who are much more mellow.
At least if anyone gets mites again, we can treat them at home without having to spend a fortune at the vet. I've maxed out my available funds on vet visits lately, mostly for Giles' respiratory infections ($130 just for an emergency vet visit at 3 am, not to mention the rest) and not having to pay $25 per rat per shot plus the visit fees, three rounds every time, is a great relief. I guess being a gardener came in handy; I said to myself, well, ear mites and garden mites are all suffocated by oil... So we grabbed a couple of bottles of mineral oil, a bottle of baby shampoo, and proceeded to cover each rat in oil. Wrapping them in an oily towel seemed to keep them quiet after the initial oiling, so that we could keep it on for fifteen minutes. Then we lathered them up with baby shampoo and rinsed them in the sink. The second time around, we did it twice to make sure we got all the oil off, and they were still a bit streaky... Mineral oil wasn't going to hurt them as they washed it off themselves, though, which took a few days.
Two rounds of that seems to have been fully effective, surprisingly. I was ready to go for a third time, but we haven't seen any sign of reinfestation two weeks later, and we would. So we seem to have a winner -- a bit stressful perhaps, but so are the shots and the vet visits, and this is a lot less stressful for my wallet.
I hope we don't have to do this again; my dad and I are going to seal up the attic soon so that the squirrels can't get in, and that should get rid of the source of the mites. At least the little buggers don't like people.
September 28, 2004 - I was frying garlic, realized the little cast-iron pan was getting too hot, and added water (yeah, I know). I stood back, then turned off the flame -- and as I did, I saw the orange lick of flame that was about to become a grease fire, now averted. Just don't tell my mom, OK?
It's been a long break; there was the craziness around the start of the school year, then I upgraded both operating systems (courtesy of a new hard drive my brother bought for my birthday -- 40M is quite luxurious compared to 10) and then had trouble getting all my toys to work again. The wireless still isn't working, as the drivers don't appear to exist yet, and our own efforts to compile new ones haven't worked so far.
Monkeypickle is, however, up and running, so while it still isn't quite finished I have my crazy little editor back again. I figured I would come back and rant about various things, though just what I can't think of at the moment.
Okay, maybe I'll just bitch about the tedium of frying up two or three cloves each of seven different types of garlic. They must all be kept separate and labeled... and they seem to take forever to cook. Sigh. All this is because my gardening efforts last season netted me garlic that ranged from extremely hot to nuclear, and is physically painful to taste raw. I'm no shrinking violet, either -- these things are powerful, even the mild-mannered Chet's. So I decided to cook them before tasting them. Then I get to plant the best-tasting ones over the next few days.
Bastard. Just spattered a little hot oil on my thumb. Oh, well, all in a good cause... at least the mosquitoes won't bother me tonight.
We have thirty-five days to go before the election, and I find myself looking forward to having my life back. I don't read the blogs all day, but I spend more time than I think on them, and quite a bit of my time thinking is devoted to politics of various stripes. I have to remind myself every do often that there's a world outside of politics, where I can run an informal Monarch butterfly hatchery and play board games with friends. It'll only get worse, as I expect to be called up for at least Clerk duty and probably Inspector for the election again, and that'll have me looking over a polling place and winding up to run it. By 10PM I won't know which way is up, and coming home to the precinct counts is always surreal.
Just the thought that there is an end to this election cycle is strange; it's been going on for over a year now for anyone who followed the primaries. Yet by Thanksgiving we will have settled into the leaders we've elected for ourselves, and we won't have looked at polling numbers for weeks. Odd thought.
But for now it's the mad dash to can all the Bartlett pears I can get my hands on before they vanish, and get the winter garden up and running. It's a bit refreshing to focus on gardening again, as the disappointments out there drove me elsewhere for the last few weeks. But it's time to start anew, again, and try my hand at broccoli.
I do have a very part-time job with a community center, cleaning up after weddings and meetings. It's a bit tedious, perhaps, but at $12 an hour it pays well. I'm not averse to tedium so long as I can play music, and I've started bringing a discman for the 2-3 hour cleaning (particularly mopping the main floor, which takes at least a half-hour by itself). My only wish is for more hours, and we'll see how next month's schedule shapes up... I've been waiting for Joe to start interviews at the comic book shop, but he's still knee-deep in resumes. I keep feeling that I need another job, but Thanksgiving weekend keeps looming at me with Sunvalley traffic control, and I'm not sure I can find a part-time job that won't want me more during the holidays. I never thought I'd say it, but traffic control is more important to me than most other prospective jobs, so if necessary I'd drop the other for Sunvalley. I'm just a freak who loves that job, I guess.
Okay, tasting accomplished; we'll see whether my stomach will ever forgive me after eating another half a raw clove (the Siciliano was soooo bland I couldn't believe it and had to try it raw). Italian Easy Peel wins over Silverwhite, because IEP is, well, easy to peel. Flavor was about the same. I now have my five eating varieties, and will keep a small stock reserve of a couple of others just 'cause.
Did you know there were even nine kinds of garlic? For many of you, I'm sure that's about as far as you want to go into the garden, so we'll veer back. But if you ever want to try a black tomato, or nuclear garlic, let me know.
August 13, 2004, part II - When it rains, it pours, right?
Short musing: how do you discuss politics with a friend, and still stay friends... if you're not of the same persuasion?
What I've really been meaning to post about is school, though. I got a bad shock a few days ago when my financial aid letter came through -- I'm not eligible for the Pell grant I had last year. My expected family contribution (EFC) is $4,000+ this year... I made about $1,500 last year total, so where they think I'm going to get an extra $2,500 is beyond me. That threw me a real curve, one that was thoroughly unwelcome.
Turns out I filled out an extra form this year detailing how much money my parents paid for me last year (about $13,000). I hate living off of them, and the grant was one of the thing that eased the burden on them. However, the financial aid people seem to feel that since I have someone I can beg for money from, they can throw all my expenses on my benefactor. Lovely.
Sure, it was charity from the government. Yes, I have someone who can pay my bills -- but my parents aren't rich, and they're spending $13,000 on basic expenses for me (food, medical, etc). Why not just get a job and stop taking handouts? Two reasons: 1) I was hoping to go almost full-time with science classes, which takes a hell of a lot of time and energy, with a class schedule that is amenable only to some part-time jobs; remember, I have no choice as to when to take either bio or chem... they're set in stone with only two sections each, and only one of the four total is in the evening. Reason 2: I was disabled for so many years I'm very paranoid about working a job.
Those who have never been chronically ill may not understand where I'm coming from. When your body breaks down, it's hard to accept you can't do everything you used to be able to. You keep trying, and you keep getting burned -- or worse yet, it makes you sicker. After a few years, you're convinced you'll never be able to be productive again, particularly if you have the sort of illness that permanently disables most of its victims. If you recover after that, especially on a long slow recovery, it's another hard adjustment.... it constantly feels like you shouldn't be able to do what you're doing, that you'll crash again, that this is wrong and you'll pay for it later. It's conditioning, pure and simple... complicated by the fact that with CFS, there is no way to measure recovery objectively. No T-cell counts, no heart rate improvement, no tests at all except what you feel, which has no warnings before you overextend yourself.
I have worked one job in the last five years, not counting contract web design. Before last winter, my only memories of work were from when I was sick, in varying degrees; the best I felt was in college ten years ago, and my memories of my previous life are not very clear at all. Most of what I remember of working was retail and security, both of which were miserable and the latter of which was my last job before total physical collapse. It was painful physically and emotionally, exhausting and desperate and tainted with my hindsight of how sick I was getting.
I'm much better than I was even in college, now, much healthier physically. The holiday job I had was horribly strenuous and I did it pretty easily, even a month of increasingly stressful and constant work. I came out of it needing to rest for a couple of weeks, then I was fine. So if I can handle ten days of twelve-hour constant aerobic workouts, that means I'm ready to work, right?
I wish it were that simple. I'm still not convinced I can handle school easily, particularly after the semester of abject hell this spring, so I'm very cautious about taking on too much. Adding in work to that -- honestly, it frightens me. The thought that I could end up like I was three years ago, barely able to drag myself to class, paralyzes me.... it's much less likely now, and I'm stronger than I expect, but the memory is so vivid. I don't want to burn out, have to drop everything, and lie in bed while the world goes on without me again.
So my first reaction to the letter was fear, then desperation, then depression. No money to pay off my debts, accrued over several years; I don't make enough freelancing to even pay my minimums. No money for study sessions at Denny's. No money to even replace my threadbare clothes -- my jeans are wearing thin again, and my thrift-store shirts are giving up the ghost after a hard life. It appalls me that new white button-down shirts cost $20-$25 each, when I'm agonizing over the fact that the best local thrift store has doubled their prices to $6. I get some money from my parents, but I'd love to be able to buy something new other than my two pairs of yearly jeans, some socks, and underwear.
Okay, so I'll have to work. Swallow the panic, figure I'll manage as I always seem to do. After all, after everything I've been through, having to take on work and school simultaneously is just one more obstacle to break down and conquer, right? I'm strong enough to do this.
Next is the logistical problem. Work where? There are a few places hiring; I'm half tempted to apply at Orchard again... I still shop there despite the fact that I used to work there. I feel like I'm drawn there for the same reasons a battered wife goes back -- it's a familiar hell, at least. I know what to expect. What else? Anything but food service. Retail? I swore I'd never go back.... The customers used to drive me batshit crazy in the days of working at OSH; I hated the clueless idiots who came in without any idea what to do with plants, and wouldn't listen to me even when they asked my advice. I hated the public at large. Some people are suited to dealing with the public, and I determined I wasn't one of them.
But I've realized something in the last week. Do I hate dealing with the public? I don't know. That person that worked at OSH doesn't exist anymore. People think I'm exaggerating the impact this illness had on me, but I'm not kidding -- I went through an identity crisis and came out very different. I have a different attitude, priorities, empathy, different likes and dislikes. I have more patience. So I honestly have no idea how well I would work at a retail job, even the same one I had before. It's weird, really; I thought I was done with discovering my new favorite color, my preference for music, my hobbies and interests. Now I have to find out all over again what work I'm suited to, with damn few reference points.
All I know is that I'd like to have the same holiday job I did last year. I can't believe I loved a traffic-control job at an insane four-way stop, in holiday traffic, often in the rain. But I want to do it again. They've promised higher wages (I'll believe it when I see it) and rain boots (a little more likely). Maybe more hires so that we have enough people to cover all the shifts. That all starts at Thanksgiving, so I need a job between now and then...
Maybe I'm ready. I can do this. I can live a normal life and not collapse, not drive myself into the ground again. Hey, it might even be fun.
August 13, 2004 - This will be a long one; I have a couple of things on my mind this Friday.
Thing number one, as it's shorter: gay marriage. Everybody on the damn planet has weighed in on this one, so I won't go into it. I just want to ask a question which, no matter how much I read about the opposition, I can't find the answer to:
If gays are asking for civil marriage -- go into the courthouse, do a blood test, get a form signed, you're wed -- what the hell is the problem? People keep talking about the dilution/undermining/perversion of marriage, like it's some sacred thing... and with church marriages, it is. The only things that church and legal marriage have in common are 1) name and 2) civil benefits. So okay, change the name, and you've just got the benefits (in theory, anyway, we won't address the fact that the IRS sneers at civil unions). Quite a lot of the opposition still goes ballistic. No attachment to church, no smear on sacred matrimony, nothing to make God strike us all down for twisting the sacred soul-binding rites that we all seem to have made marriage into over these last few centuries. Again, what the hell is the problem?
For the love of Pete, if you're just against homosexuals being accepted in society, just say so! Call it the bigotry it is, and leave visitation and inheritance rights out of it -- that'll clear up the whole issue.
Second snark: an article in the paper. I'm going to play a little trick here....
What is conservatism all about? Regardless of whether the particular issue is race, agriculture, housing, or a thousand other things, conservatism is about the government telling people what to do in their lives and work.
Most of the conservatives who are for ordering other people around know as little as Laura Bush. But they don't have to know.
It has been said that knowledge is power but, politically, power trumps knowledge.
[...]
Nowhere does power trump knowledge more than when those with a particular preconception are in charge of handing out money. Foundations can back any fashionable notion that strikes their fancy, whether in art or environmentalism or anywhere else, and what anybody else believes -- or even proves -- doesn't matter.
The very process of acquiring knowledge requires money and those who hand out the money can decide whose studies they will finance and whose studies they won't, just as the media will decide whose results they will publicize and whose they won't. There are many kinds of power.
Like swallows heading for Capistrano, conservatives are drawn toward those institutions where they have the power to impose their beliefs and ignore any knowledge that says otherwise. Such institutions are usually dominated by the right.
Only belatedly have people with other ideas begun to challenge the conservative dominance in these institutions. Among the fiercest battlegrounds are the courts. Here anyone who challenges the conservative dominance is certain to be not merely criticized but targeted for a whole campaign of smears, a process that put a new verb in our language, "to Cheney."
The right understands that power trumps knowledge. The question is whether the rest of us will realize that too -- and try to keep such power from becoming or remaining a monopoly of the right.
We don't need limousine conservatives telling farmers how to farm, builders how to build, and everybody else how to live their lives. That power is too dangerous to let it trump knowledge.
Did you, those people of a leftist persuasion, find yourselves nodding along? It sounds good, doesn't it, backing up all the reports of conservative bias and powermongering we've been slamming up against for the last few years... Let me bring you in on a secret.
That was an edited, slightly altered Thomas Sowell. Edited in that I took out most of his specific examples (the education system, farming, etc) and left in his broader conceptual paragraphs. The altered part is that he was originally talking about liberals. I put "Laura Bush" in place of Theresa Kerry, Cheney in place of Bork, and swapped the leftist/rightist terminology.
Interesting, yes? I hadn't realized anyone on the right was making this argument; I usually hear the "intellect/evidence/knowledge loses to hunger for power" argument from the left, pointing to things like the scientists being ignored in favor of pseudoscience, and the intellect vs. morals viewpoints of the two parties. That I could take a conservative column and alter it so easily to say the opposite says to me that our concerns are similar, but our perceptions of the situation are different.
I'm not saying Sowell has a "purple hair problem" (though he hasn't seemed entirely rational at other times). I'm not going to be knee-jerk and suggest he drank the conservative kool-aid. I do think, however, that people on both sides feel threatened by the other, and there's a great lack of communication and understanding which might lessen those fears. Maybe it's time for moderates to open ears and minds a little, and talk to the people on the other side of the fence... strip out the labels and take a look at the rest of the picture.
August 6, 2004 - Things are picking up again. Registration for school caught me off-guard; I'm still hoping I can get into the severely impacted chem and bio classes this semester (only 50+ slots, each, for basic chem and for basic bio?) but I had a brainstorm and registered for the English class I dropped last semester. That way I need only one of the two science classes to be in good shape... and I did check the English teacher this time, he's not insane. So I'm waiting, somewhat nervous, for the 19th so that I can start camping in the classrooms.
Ah, for a governor who's not allergic to taxes -- though I'm not sure such a creature exists. The Governator may be a moderate, but his backstabbing the Lege didn't come as any real surprise.... I knew he was a Repub long before, when he revealed his tax allergy (seems to run in the breed for the most part). I was actually a little surprised that he managed to stay nonpartisan for so long.
Rumor has it that the new budget has a little more money for community colleges... if it allows DVC to hire more than five chem teachers, I'm all for it. Forty sections of English 126 alone, two sections of basic chem. Madness. We need more money in the system, and we're running out of places to get it.
I've been working over the new monitor to get it up this month, and realized last night that this editor my brother wrote, though incomplete, is like an extension of my brain. I've tweaked it a little and come up with something that is almost seamless -- I'm lacking a couple of features that he hasn't implemented yet, but on the whole it's smoother than TextPad, my mainstay for years. Writing Mono entries doesn't bring out the full power of it like the Monitor does... and now even a Bright Ideas issue with all its little bits is a pleasure to work on.
I remember last semester when I switched away from Word/OpenOffice to HTML for my labs, because the word processor "autowash" was driving me absolutely bonkers. The character after a period is not always capitalized (as in Dr.), and I go buggy if you change my HCl to Hcl. I know word processors mean well, but when you can't type whatever you want without the auto-editing (some of which you can't turn off!) and when the processor itself loses track of where the superscript ends and the subscript begins, it's become too good for its own good. Feature-creep has also made OO quite bloated; it takes forever to bring up sometimes.
"Autowash" was my friend Emmett's term, taken from The Fifth Element. Lelu got shoved in the closet at one point, and the shower in the closet (autowash) started cleaning her whether she liked it or not. Corbin told her the name of the thing after she came out, and ever after, in her limited vocabulary, anything that worked like it had a mind of its own and wouldn't be dissuaded was called "autowash". I think it fits Word's peccadilloes perfectly.
The Rat Mahal is almost done, but I killed my hand again. Heaven only knows what Dr. Jane is going to say about it tomorrow -- probably mutter at me about overdoing things.
July 29, 2004 - Hand is still sore. Sigh.
I've been pretty busy, though, keeping up with the Democratic National Convention and all; I guess being a wonk takes more time than I thought. I just finished my radio-stint, after listening to the last speeches and analysis; tomorrow I get to catch up on the blogs and life gets back to normal.
What made me realize I really needed to post here, though, had nothing to do with the DNC or news... at least the current headlines. I went to the comic book shop here (Flying Colors, for any geeks out there; Joe helped to start Free Comic Book Day, and had a cameo in the free Archie comic this year) and as soon as I walked in I went, "Oh, wow." I recognized the music immediately: The Brazilian, one of Genesis' few instrumentals. Joe told me he had been playing the whole Invisible Touch CD, and that he was a huge Genesis fan.... much bigger than I am, as it turns out, but we still chatted a while.
So when I was running errands later, I took a little time before the DNC coverage started up to pop out Boingo and plug in Invisible Touch, which was riding around in my trunk. Sang along with the title track, skipped the next, and came across Land of Confusion. I still have the MTV video play in my head when I hear it; I grew up with MTV when it was really good, when Genesis and Peter Gabriel and Talking Heads were making great music and videos, and as a result if you say "A-Ha" to me I smile.
I love Land of Confusion, but I realized today that I can't listen to it without crying now. It isn't just that I woke up with it running in my head, out of the blue, on a warm late-summer day -- the day I padded down to where my dad was installing the new kitchen floor and he told me gruffly, "The World Trade Center is gone." It isn't just that it came into my mind so appropriately that day for the first time in years.... or that I listened to that album for the week following as we heard about all the chaos at Ground Zero.
It's the lyrics. I've ranted about how the horror of our present government has seeped into my brain, and I use the word horror quite delibereately; my reactions to national news range from suppressed fury, to deep depression, to shock, and the whole picture leaves me deeply disturbed. With most people I can disagree civilly about fundamental issues and approaches, which may go as far as deep dislike of their actions but doesn't haunt my dreams (Schwarzenegger and even Reagan come to mind). But the implications to what's been happening, especially over the last year, have been horrifying.
I can't say that Land of Confusion is 100% spot on, but from "I can hear the marching feet" (from marches to possible riots to the FBI knocking on doors these days) to "Did you read the news today" (the pervasive fear in our society, verging on paranoia)... Not much love to go 'round, no, not among us as Americans, bitterly partisan, nor between us and our former allies, and not with the Islamists converting more young men by the day. "Superman, where are you now/Everything's gone wrong somehow..." A war cannot be won by "best case scenarios" and optimism, as even the people at the top are starting to realize.
The line that choked me was the final verse, "I won't be comin' home tonight/My generation will put it right." All those soldiers, all those young men and women who wanted money for college or someplace to belong, who even just joined the Guard for a little cash and the chance to serve their country... Nine hundred and seven pairs of boots. Wards full of the injured. They didn't start this, but they are determined to do their best to help in setting it right -- and it makes me just furious that the people at the top are not giving them what they need (spare parts, body armor, bullets for God's sake!) to make sure they will come home.
Many others have already vented so much steam about this it could heat a skyscraper... I wouldn't add much by repeating it. I've already listened to Danny Elfman's "War Again": "Don't you know we got smart bombs, it's a good thing that our bombs are clever/Don't you know that the smart bombs are so clever, they only kill bad people now." It's a shame that our kids are dumb, hell... It's a shame that our Prez is dumb, but our bombs are smart, what a lucky thing.
Listening to the chorus, I realized I was passing the memorial that named Monument Boulevard out here, and quietly saluted the engraving of the soldier standing with his rifle. To hell with all those conservatives who say that liberals hate the troops, don't support them, don't respect them. Propaganda, all of it; I know of very few people who hate the folks who serve in the military. The vast majority of us love them, worry about them, and want them safe; not put in harm's way without good reason, and when we have to send them, we need to back them up with the full support of the nation behind them. That means funding, equipment, strategy, good pay, good care, benefits for them and their families. None of this bullshit about cutting hazard pay, cutting VA care, misspending the allocation so badly we only use 2% of the billions available and short them necessary equipment while corporations grow fat on cost-plus contracts, and the mercenaries we end up hiring put the troops at risk. Just another item of lip service from our friends in Washington.
This has turned into a rant, and I apologize, but it will stay here... it's not really structured enough to be a rant essay, and I need to go sleep. I just had to say that that one song I grew up with affects me more deeply now than it ever has before. I hope that by next year, the nightmare will be over, and I can listen to it without tears running down my face.
July 26, 2004 - Well, looks like I have a bit more time to post here.... I've been working on constructing a new rat cage (my dad calls it the Rat Mahal), and that's required so much plier-work over the last few days I've ruined my right hand. It's still useful in some respects, but making a fist is beyond me, and the knuckles are really sore. Sigh. So I can type, but I can't work pliers, pruners, or probably even a scrub brush (there goes cleaning the bathroom).
I'm not single-handed, fortunately; though my right is definitely my primary hand, I can do a lot with the left (even write shakily). That may not sound very unusual, but the fact is that artists and other fine-motor-control people tend to have such a primary dominance that the off hand can be all of useless beyond a general holding device. I realized that in high school, and over the years I've made a point of using my left hand.... helped by the occasional wonky bone in my right wrist. So I'm not ambidexterous, but I'm not helpless either.
And I can always type -- the advantage to non-touch typing is that if I really had to, I could type entirely with my left hand. Granted, I'm much more familiar with only right hand (I tend to hold my sandwich with the left).... but if I ever break my right hand, I won't be down to hunt-and-peck. Not quite, anyway.
Pity most keyboards are right-hand oriented. Bad for mouse-keyboard combos too, unless you use your left hand for mousing.
July 23, 2004 - Quote of the Day, courtesy of David Lazarus:
In any case, Nelson added, it's not like customers' power bills would be lower if PG&E stopped handing out millions in bonuses.
"It's the profits of the company," he said. "We earned it."
And where do profits come from, little boy?
There's been a lot of talk lately on Washington Monthly's Political Animal about the role of comments on blogs. Even out of the five blogs I read, I see quite a bit of variation: from Michael Froomkin, who participates actively in the small threads of comments he gets on Discourse.net... to Kevin Drum, who runs Political Animal and allows comments, but doesn't participate much... to Talking Points Memo, which has no comment sections at all. The Daily Kos allows diaries -- mini-blogs -- to members. They're all very different approaches.
As Kevin said, size has a lot to do with it. The more readers you have, the lower the signal-to-noise ratio gets in comments, and the more trolls you collect. Thus Froomkin has quite a few insightful comments and only one well-known resident troll; Discourse averages about three comments per thread. Contrast that with Political Animal, averaging about 150 comments per thread, and you get much less substance, a lot more tangents and irrelevancies, and quite a few trolls who change their screen names. If TPM were to have comments, I'm sure there would be upward of 400 comments per thread with about 10 of them being useful.
That's the logistical argument. One thing I didn't see Kevin address, however, is the preference angle. There are different desires behind commented vs. uncommented blogs... I chose uncommented not because I expected to be overwhelmed with people throwing in tangents and flamebait (I don't delude myself into thinking anyone actually reads this), but because the monologue suits my needs. I don't do LiveJournal... I refuse to read any regularly because it feels like a life-sucking cult of sorts (no offense to my friends on it, I think they know what I mean), and I don't really need people chipping in with sympathy or agreement or counterarguments and whatever.
One could argue that it's egocentric to stand on a soapbox without feedback, or that I'm just afraid I wouldn't get any comments and realize what a loser I am... and I won't deny the possibility of either. I just don't crave commentary on what I have to say.
Just another perspective on a small curiosity of the internet.
June 25, 2004 - It's up. It's live. Finally.
There are a few holes, sure, and some things I need to tweak or add. Mostly images. But most of it's up and running, I have a working 404 and an under construction page, all the directories seem to be there, and I haven't seen any broken images on the latest pass. Let me know if I'm wrong.
This one will be a bit more up to date, at least in the forseeable future; I like posting my thoughts here, and that means I actually think about the site. That and I don't mind looking at it now, both behind the scenes and from the front. No more tables, no more rough edges. That was half the reason I didn't keep the old one updated -- dealing with it made me acutely aware of how much I wanted to get rid of the old look, and the new one wasn't ready yet. It's barely ready now... but it will do.
I need to go to bed (again?) but all this has reawakened an interest in the site. Since my garden is now almost to the waiting stage, I'll have a bit more time, particularly during the middle of the day when walking barefoot on the bare dirt means dropping my body temperature way too far. Ever drunk a hot coffee on a hot afternoon and felt cooler? Same idea. Except I get really cold doing that.
So, anyway, it's good to be up. Enjoy the place. And check the titles of some of the pages -- what the browser window or your favorites say may surprise you.
June 23, 2004 - So much for going to bed at a decent hour; it's past two again. Six months after the last post here, and I'm still up late.
It was worth it, though. I finally came to the conclusion that I wasn't going to complete the Chinese dragon before the end of the decade (it's taken two years already, as I never work on it consistently), and that meant no second stylesheet for the site. Yet. I do, however, want the damn update to happen, as it's been in the works for longer than I can remember and the old site makes me blush.
So I caulked up a few holes, made a pledge to fill in web pages every few days (I can hope) and decided to take the thing live ASAP. Not tonight, obviously, but I did manage to get the Links page working, one of my biggest priorities. It's a lot of work doing those links pages, and I still have to compile the links for Barefoot. But I can do that after sending it live.
My next feat? Redirects. I need to make sure that people who are linked in to my old site don't get my (nifty) 404 too often, and that means using Apache's RedirectMatch to read their minds -- or URLs -- and send them where they need to go. So I need to find all the analogs for the old pages and send people to the new ones. That'll take a few hours, then hopefully I can send it live and start the scramble to fill in the holes before they overflow with bodies stamped "404".
I may not be an active freelance web designer anymore, but I still get to deal with the mess that is my site. When I'm not getting paid, suddenly I have other stuff to spend my time on. Maybe now that I have all this time (school's out) I can light a fire under myself again and find the fun in creating pages... that would get the place fixed up really fast. I have this nifty editor, after all, and I've always liked web design.
Time to go to bed, for now. By the time anyone reads this, it will not be the latest news.
January 4, 2004 - not that it still is, but I am stubbornly refusing to acknowledge that it's well past two in the morning.
I'm annoyed with my canner. First I get only three jars of soup to seal (out of nine, three already being rebatches), and decide to start the thing up again at about midnight. Then I have to turn it off again because it's leaking steam. Let it cool, reseat the lid, screw it down, get it going... another hour gone. I'll be up 'till four at this rate.
Oh, well, at least Nick will have the chance to try some of the veggie soup from one of the jars that didn't seal. It's a tomato-based soup with veggies and beans, and a touch of herbs; I think he'll like it.
So far as I can determine, the reason they didn't seal is that they bubbled up from under the caps. Must have been a rapid pressure change, though I can't figure out when... even so, I'll start letting the canner cool a bit farther before removing the lid, even if the dial does say zero pressure.
Sigh. I can't even take a nap, as I have to listen for the canner. Ah, well, I don't have to be anywhere tomorrow morning, for a change.
January 1, 2004 - The start of a new year... the ducks aren't roasting quite yet, but they will in a couple of hours. I'm hoping I'll get a chance to try out the Polder thermometer (we used it to test the goose, but that was all); I want to get familiar with it.
I'm itching to can more soup. The first thing to go into the pressure canner (Gramma's Brown Stew) came out beautifully despite the multiple restarts, and we need more soup on hand for Nick, now that he's actually given me an idea what he wants. Tomato- and veggie-based soups, I can do that... now if only I wouldn't be bumping elbows with my mom making New Year's ducks.
I want to bake, too. Cookies. I didn't have a chance to get ready for Christmas this year, and I'm ready to have it now, but New Year's is in the way. I guess I can wait till tomorrow to play Christmas music, bake peppernuts, and break out a little fruitcake. I need to make a pie for Celeste, too - she said she has a gift for me and all she wants is some of our pumpkin pie. Sometimes it's the little things...