DID YOU KNOW? You can become a premium member of Dictionary.com for the low yearly price of only $19.95, offering you access to, among other things, audio pronunciations and fun word games.
So my cousin Sarah was once talking about this dive bar in Los Angeles, where she appears on the wall in a Mexican wrestler mask as part of a photographic tribute to The Last Supper, and how they had parties in the bar for a week prior to its opening, because it's a dive bar, and they wanted it to look like it people had been drinking in it for a long time, so they had to make it smell like cheap beer and get the floor all sticky. I guess that's what I'm trying to do here, before I take this blog public.
But, anyway, I'm really proud of this one observation I made about a month ago, and it's kind of the reason that I started blogging again. It made me feel really clever, and also it's something that I can never communicate verbally because I never feel comfortable pronouncing deus ex machina. It's probably one of the three most clever things I've ever devised.
The most clever thing I've ever said was this one time Ruth and I were walking down Amherst Alley, and an African-American policeman on a bicycle went by. I said:
"Hey, it's a Bop! ... I mean, bike cop. Not black cop."
Nobody will ever find that as funny as I find it. Anyway, my clever thing for this week: did you ever notice that 28 Days Later is one of the most Republican-friendly movies ever made? Here's my basis for this judgment:
1. The "rage virus outbreak" that wipes out 99.9% of the population of England is because of hippie animal rights activists being stupid.
2. The hero of the movie is a guy that awakens from a coma, presumably left for dead for at least 28 days. I mean, Terry Schiavo didn't happen until after the movie came out, but I think it's totally prescient.
3. The military is always the deus ex machina that saves the protagonists. They would have all been eaten by rage zombies if they didn't hear that one radio signal that the military was sending out. Okay, so then the military kind of sucks for a while, and is corrupt, and indirectly causes the death of most of the survivors, but that would have happened anyway. And then at the end of the movie, what comes to save the three people in England that survive? An AMERICAN air force plane, obviously symbolizing the US military's dominance over England.
At least, that was the ending I saw. I heard that the other ones are really dark and the little girl grows devil wings and eats France, or something.
30 December 2007
22 December 2007
...but I'm not a victim, I grow from it, and I learn.
DID YOU KNOW? I think Stuart Murdoch, the lead singer of Belle & Sebastian, sounds a lot like Nico.
Yeah, before you worry too much, the titles of this entry and the previous entry form a complete Tyra Banks quote.
I think I've been talking to myself a lot recently. Like, a lot. Like, I've always talked to myself, but recently my conversations have gotten increasingly bizarre, vulgar, and, most disturbingly, public. I mean, bizarre and vulgar, I can really deal with, but when I'm standing in the middle of a Farmer's Market muttering, "I need to find a really nice butternut squash this evening." I mean, it's a good thing I live in Berkeley, because that kind of think would probably get me shot anywhere else in the country.
And I think it's because I don't have a blog anymore. I mean, a blog is just talking to myself, except other people read it, and then I get excited because I feel relevant. So it's actually even better. I need to find a really nice butternut squash this evening. Anyway, there have also been a lot of amazingly bloggable things in my life since I last recorded my life on the internet: going to the world championships of roller derby, baking my own bread, and trying to break into my apartment building while wearing pink pants and a 4-inch-high mohawk.
I've actually been trying to start a blog all semester, after finding out that I could obtain webspace for free through Berkeley's open computing facility. But this requires looking at their online schedule, going to a random lounge on campus, entering a crowded computer lab, hoping that an OCF worker decided to show up for their shift, and awkwardly shouting, "Is anyone here from OCF?" In the middle of a computer lab. In the middle of the day. I mean, I don't have a lot of shame, but after three unsuccessful attempts, I was done with that.
Seriously, I miss free webspace, though. If I'm ever lucky enough to get pictures on this blog, they'll still be hosted in my MIT webspace.
Anyway, like I usually do when I try things and they fail, I decided to just use the free Google equivalent of whatever I needed. Which, in this case, is blogspot. Which, I mean, okay, I really miss Movable Type, and I don't like having "blogspot.com" in my URL, because I am kind of a professional blogger and it just seems amateurish, but, seriously, I'm a grad student; like I'm going to pay someone to host turkeyvsspam.com just so my grandmother can see that I went to the world championships of roller derby.
And on that happy note, there are only two rules for Turkey vs. Spam.
1. No angst.
2. Nothing my grandmother would be ashamed to read.
So, let me know how I'm doing with that, okay?
Yeah, before you worry too much, the titles of this entry and the previous entry form a complete Tyra Banks quote.
I think I've been talking to myself a lot recently. Like, a lot. Like, I've always talked to myself, but recently my conversations have gotten increasingly bizarre, vulgar, and, most disturbingly, public. I mean, bizarre and vulgar, I can really deal with, but when I'm standing in the middle of a Farmer's Market muttering, "I need to find a really nice butternut squash this evening." I mean, it's a good thing I live in Berkeley, because that kind of think would probably get me shot anywhere else in the country.
And I think it's because I don't have a blog anymore. I mean, a blog is just talking to myself, except other people read it, and then I get excited because I feel relevant. So it's actually even better. I need to find a really nice butternut squash this evening. Anyway, there have also been a lot of amazingly bloggable things in my life since I last recorded my life on the internet: going to the world championships of roller derby, baking my own bread, and trying to break into my apartment building while wearing pink pants and a 4-inch-high mohawk.
I've actually been trying to start a blog all semester, after finding out that I could obtain webspace for free through Berkeley's open computing facility. But this requires looking at their online schedule, going to a random lounge on campus, entering a crowded computer lab, hoping that an OCF worker decided to show up for their shift, and awkwardly shouting, "Is anyone here from OCF?" In the middle of a computer lab. In the middle of the day. I mean, I don't have a lot of shame, but after three unsuccessful attempts, I was done with that.
Seriously, I miss free webspace, though. If I'm ever lucky enough to get pictures on this blog, they'll still be hosted in my MIT webspace.
Anyway, like I usually do when I try things and they fail, I decided to just use the free Google equivalent of whatever I needed. Which, in this case, is blogspot. Which, I mean, okay, I really miss Movable Type, and I don't like having "blogspot.com" in my URL, because I am kind of a professional blogger and it just seems amateurish, but, seriously, I'm a grad student; like I'm going to pay someone to host turkeyvsspam.com just so my grandmother can see that I went to the world championships of roller derby.
And on that happy note, there are only two rules for Turkey vs. Spam.
1. No angst.
2. Nothing my grandmother would be ashamed to read.
So, let me know how I'm doing with that, okay?
You have no idea what I've been through...
DID YOU KNOW? Aretha Franklin won the Grammy Award for Best R&B Female Vocal Performance in each of the first eight years it was offered.
So this would be my fourth blog, I guess.
It all started at a 5,000-watt radio station in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. The year was 2003, Xanga was at perhaps its peak of popularity among Middle America, and teen angst was at an all-time high. I like to think that I'm the person who first coined the term "xangst," but that's like how I also think I'm the person who first discovered the minor seventh chord and the person who first invented taco salad.
Since I care about nothing more than what other people think of me, I started my own xanga as a campaign to impose my musical taste upon the world. Despite the semi-pretentious title, the entries are fairly without angst; I basically just used it as a list of songs that I liked, and updated it whenever I felt like it. The length of the entries as a function of time is kind of a Gaussian distribution--I started off with short, daily updates of about one sentence, describing the most exciting aspect of a particular song. By the middle of 2005, these had kind of inflated into paragraph-long diatribes explaining why you, personally, sucked as a person if you didn't think Under Pressure was the greatest song released in 1982, culminating in a review of "Dogs" by Pink Floyd where I derisively called Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here, and The Wall the "sacred triumvirate" of Pink Floyd albums, which is really obnoxious, in addition to being a mixed metaphor. Then xanga put in an automatic hit counter and I realized that I was getting, on average, one hit per day, so I kind of mellowed out and eased back into the one-line format. I still update it, and I think one person other than me still reads it, but I could be wrong. Anyway, I still go back and read old entries, not only because I am in love with the sound of my own voice, but because it's kind of a cool lens through which to view the evolution of my musical taste and also my maturation into an adult, or whatever I am right now.
I'm often in the right place at the right time--I mean, compared to achieving things through actual hard work--so it was no surprise that Mitra was able to score me what might still be the world's sweetest job: getting paid by the MIT admissions office to write a blog about my own life, three times a week. Thus Turkey vs. Spam was born, one of six or seven student admissions blogs launched in the summer of 2005. It was the first year that the admissions office had started transitioning to a blog-oriented interface, and so none of us really had any idea what we were doing. As I often do, I started with the hypothesis that I was the most awesome person who had ever lived, and that just blogging about my life would entice prospective students to come to my chosen university. Just so they could be closer to me. While people like Mollie wasted their blog entries doing silly things like answering questions about MIT and describing general institute requirements, I got paid ten dollars an hour to offer unsolicited commentary on Project Runway, write fan fiction about Parafilm, and post pictures of my own facial hair. I got paid to do that. Really. Anyway, Mollie ended up being the world's most popular blogger, and I only ended up with one or two really good stalkers over the two years. Still, Turkey vs. Spam chronicled some of my greatest moments as a human being: running the Boston Marathon, working in Germany for a summer, and traveling 17 hours then impersonating a member of the press to see a statue of Freddie Mercury, so it's still valuable to me.
Sadly, I kind of lost interest in it once the format of the MIT admissions site changed, and once I wasn't allowed to call it Turkey vs. Spam anymore. The blog used to be its own nice little green page, not unlike the one you're looking at right now, and you used to be able to easily browse it entry-by-entry. In September 2006, they changed the format of all the admissions blogs to a more homogeneous system, where blog entries were not so much indexed by blogger as by category of entry, probably so that prospective students could more easily find answers to their questions. In my opinion, it didn't end up mattering much, because every single MITblog entry still gets at least four comments from Azerbaijani kids asking if their TOEFL score is high enough to get them into MIT, but whatever. I'm probably just bitter because my admissions blog, which I got paid by MIT to write, was now about MIT instead of about my facial hair. And that sucked.
But there was one good thing about the later years of Turkey vs. Spam. Dr. Sigrid Berka, director of the MIT international program that sent me to Germany, once googled herself and found out that I was talking about her and her magic internship-finding boots. She thought it was wunderbar that I was blogging about being in Germany, and so, the following summer, she offered me the second-sweetest job offer I have ever received. The chance to go back to Europe, travel through France, Germany, Spain, and Italy, meet up with this year's crop of interns, take pictures of them, do video interviews, and blog about it, so MISTI would have some material to use for building their new website. Free airfare and a $6,000 stipend, and anything I didn't use would become my salary for the summer. So that's how I furnished my apartment in Berkeley, and that's also how we got Sam Maurer, MISTI Reporter in Europe, a chronicle of the most stressful six weeks of my entire life. I don't even want to go into detail here about getting lost for an entire day in the Alps or sleeping on the streets of Aix-en-Provence, guarding my $1500 MacBook. You can check out the blog if you're really that interested in my suffering. But I will say that the MISTIblog consists of 70 pages of single-spaced text, describing 45 days and 5,000 miles of train travel. It is by far the longest, most detailed report on anything I have ever written. If I had formatted it like a lab report for chemical engineering, with all the pictures, and all the captions, and double-spaced, and chapter titles, it would be over 250 pages long.
The MISTIblog also unique in that it kind of contains my entire life, really. I guess it's kind of like my magnum opus, kind of my ninth symphony, except the themes are all culturally insensitive jokes and scientific misunderstandings and the episodes are all bad mixed metaphors and needlessly obscure pop culture references. Every thought I have ever had, about anything, is in there, somehow, as I talk about Annick and how she juliennes mice to find out how whiskers work, or the world's fastest moving sidewalk, or a particularly delicious döner that I had in Berlin.
So, if my entire life is already contained on the internet, why start another blog?
Well, in the words of my TV ex-boyfriend Alton Brown, that's another show.
So this would be my fourth blog, I guess.
It all started at a 5,000-watt radio station in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. The year was 2003, Xanga was at perhaps its peak of popularity among Middle America, and teen angst was at an all-time high. I like to think that I'm the person who first coined the term "xangst," but that's like how I also think I'm the person who first discovered the minor seventh chord and the person who first invented taco salad.
Since I care about nothing more than what other people think of me, I started my own xanga as a campaign to impose my musical taste upon the world. Despite the semi-pretentious title, the entries are fairly without angst; I basically just used it as a list of songs that I liked, and updated it whenever I felt like it. The length of the entries as a function of time is kind of a Gaussian distribution--I started off with short, daily updates of about one sentence, describing the most exciting aspect of a particular song. By the middle of 2005, these had kind of inflated into paragraph-long diatribes explaining why you, personally, sucked as a person if you didn't think Under Pressure was the greatest song released in 1982, culminating in a review of "Dogs" by Pink Floyd where I derisively called Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here, and The Wall the "sacred triumvirate" of Pink Floyd albums, which is really obnoxious, in addition to being a mixed metaphor. Then xanga put in an automatic hit counter and I realized that I was getting, on average, one hit per day, so I kind of mellowed out and eased back into the one-line format. I still update it, and I think one person other than me still reads it, but I could be wrong. Anyway, I still go back and read old entries, not only because I am in love with the sound of my own voice, but because it's kind of a cool lens through which to view the evolution of my musical taste and also my maturation into an adult, or whatever I am right now.
I'm often in the right place at the right time--I mean, compared to achieving things through actual hard work--so it was no surprise that Mitra was able to score me what might still be the world's sweetest job: getting paid by the MIT admissions office to write a blog about my own life, three times a week. Thus Turkey vs. Spam was born, one of six or seven student admissions blogs launched in the summer of 2005. It was the first year that the admissions office had started transitioning to a blog-oriented interface, and so none of us really had any idea what we were doing. As I often do, I started with the hypothesis that I was the most awesome person who had ever lived, and that just blogging about my life would entice prospective students to come to my chosen university. Just so they could be closer to me. While people like Mollie wasted their blog entries doing silly things like answering questions about MIT and describing general institute requirements, I got paid ten dollars an hour to offer unsolicited commentary on Project Runway, write fan fiction about Parafilm, and post pictures of my own facial hair. I got paid to do that. Really. Anyway, Mollie ended up being the world's most popular blogger, and I only ended up with one or two really good stalkers over the two years. Still, Turkey vs. Spam chronicled some of my greatest moments as a human being: running the Boston Marathon, working in Germany for a summer, and traveling 17 hours then impersonating a member of the press to see a statue of Freddie Mercury, so it's still valuable to me.
Sadly, I kind of lost interest in it once the format of the MIT admissions site changed, and once I wasn't allowed to call it Turkey vs. Spam anymore. The blog used to be its own nice little green page, not unlike the one you're looking at right now, and you used to be able to easily browse it entry-by-entry. In September 2006, they changed the format of all the admissions blogs to a more homogeneous system, where blog entries were not so much indexed by blogger as by category of entry, probably so that prospective students could more easily find answers to their questions. In my opinion, it didn't end up mattering much, because every single MITblog entry still gets at least four comments from Azerbaijani kids asking if their TOEFL score is high enough to get them into MIT, but whatever. I'm probably just bitter because my admissions blog, which I got paid by MIT to write, was now about MIT instead of about my facial hair. And that sucked.
But there was one good thing about the later years of Turkey vs. Spam. Dr. Sigrid Berka, director of the MIT international program that sent me to Germany, once googled herself and found out that I was talking about her and her magic internship-finding boots. She thought it was wunderbar that I was blogging about being in Germany, and so, the following summer, she offered me the second-sweetest job offer I have ever received. The chance to go back to Europe, travel through France, Germany, Spain, and Italy, meet up with this year's crop of interns, take pictures of them, do video interviews, and blog about it, so MISTI would have some material to use for building their new website. Free airfare and a $6,000 stipend, and anything I didn't use would become my salary for the summer. So that's how I furnished my apartment in Berkeley, and that's also how we got Sam Maurer, MISTI Reporter in Europe, a chronicle of the most stressful six weeks of my entire life. I don't even want to go into detail here about getting lost for an entire day in the Alps or sleeping on the streets of Aix-en-Provence, guarding my $1500 MacBook. You can check out the blog if you're really that interested in my suffering. But I will say that the MISTIblog consists of 70 pages of single-spaced text, describing 45 days and 5,000 miles of train travel. It is by far the longest, most detailed report on anything I have ever written. If I had formatted it like a lab report for chemical engineering, with all the pictures, and all the captions, and double-spaced, and chapter titles, it would be over 250 pages long.
The MISTIblog also unique in that it kind of contains my entire life, really. I guess it's kind of like my magnum opus, kind of my ninth symphony, except the themes are all culturally insensitive jokes and scientific misunderstandings and the episodes are all bad mixed metaphors and needlessly obscure pop culture references. Every thought I have ever had, about anything, is in there, somehow, as I talk about Annick and how she juliennes mice to find out how whiskers work, or the world's fastest moving sidewalk, or a particularly delicious döner that I had in Berlin.
So, if my entire life is already contained on the internet, why start another blog?
Well, in the words of my TV ex-boyfriend Alton Brown, that's another show.
18 December 2007
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
