mimi smartypants
Seriously, though: what's with the penguins?

a one-way ticket to Chiba City

LINK IT UP, MAKE A SCENE, LET THEM KNOW WHAT YOU REALLY MEAN

Personal submarines. A personal submarine would make it way too tempting to stage your own disaster movie.

I am begging you. Read this great ABC book.

David Hahn built his own breeder reactor. (Coincidentally, building a breeder reactor was one of the items on this year's famous University of Chicago scavenger hunt list.) I think. I don't feel like reading the whole thing.) (Actually, the “Find” command says no, but I am sticking to my story and to the link. Maybe it was the previous year.)

New musical find: Vitesse. It is really quite derivative, but in the most pleasant of ways, and especially so if you have a touch of the poppy goth synthy emo in your soul. Put on your mopey hat and download this song.

The real-time water level in Wamberal Lagoon. It is not very interesting. But I found it.

Baudrillard quotation appropriate to scenester “culture”: “A mediated and imploded society in which the power to act is transformed into the power to appear.” Because you know, it is better to look good than to feel good.

HELLO, HUMAN RESOURCES

Oh joy. Someone who works for me has resigned, to go seek her fortune in another city, and on the one hand I am all happy for her big Life Adventure and I hope I was a supportive-looking Boss Lady as I sat there in my office with her, cheerleading and telling her how much she will be missed. Inside, however, I pretty much had a constant “oh shit” monologue going because I HATE interviewing and hiring and all the paperwork and stress that goes with it. And interviewing is next-to-impossible if you are a obsessive-compulsive postmodern ouroboros like me, because:

a. The person who you are interviewing is, by definition, being fake and trying to present him or herself in the best possible light.

b. When interviewing someone, you yourself are being fake because you are trying to look like you know what you are doing, and like you are a proper grown-up with the authority to hire and fire and decide the career portion of someone's fate.

c. Both of you know this. Neither of you can drop the façade.

d. The interview will inevitably happen when you are hungover or tired or so obsessed with some weird thing, like researching the etymology of the word “robot” (note: it's Slavic! And a neologism!), that it will make you kind of googly-eyed and unable to properly concentrate on the task at hand.

It's like when you are dancing in some less-than-ideal social setting like a wedding, and maybe you are drunk enough to dance but not in the right mental space where you can just totally freak out and throw down and not care what people think, but yet you know how people dance when they are self-conscious about dancing (read: they dance crappy and they are not attractive), so you have to pretend like you don't notice anyone looking at you, in order to appear carefree and sexy, which just deepens that horrible, horrible loop, and hopefully that New Order song will end soon (oh god is it the extended remix?) so you can just fuck off to the bar and get another gin and tonic.

Anyway, I know the economy is in the toilet but don't go writing me asking me for a job because that just cannot happen. You would have to learn my real name, you would have to know what I look like, and because you read this site you would know way too much and would be able to use it against me. Can you imagine me giving you an assignment? I say, “Please get this done now,” and you sit there smirking and thinking, “Whatever, you business-travel-masturbating, gummi-worm-snacking, too-many-words-writing drunken ho bag. Yeah, I'll get right on that.” Very Bad Scene, for you to work for me.

Last night was a total wash. I was sad and cranky when I got home, and almost felt like I was coming down with something, so frowny was my mouth and so achy were my joints. I made an effort for a little while, screwing around online and eating leftover pizza (and I learned something: two minutes is too long in the microwave for one piece of pizza. The cheese was boiling.) Around 8:30, however, I couldn't take it any more and crawled into bed, emergency shutdown mode, before my thoughts could get any darker or before I could break out the wine and start writing juvenile pitiful prose or stream-of-consciousness e-mails to baffled friends. Or worse.

When I was about to microwave the pizza I noticed that there are these MICROWAVE INSTRUCTIONS printed on the inside of the microwave door. I never noticed them before. So I was reading the inside of the microwave door, which tells you how you can actually microwave based on a food (“object”) paradigm rather than a time-based or how-hot-you-want-it (“subject”) paradigm—there were all these “codes” listed (press 1 for coffee, 2 for reheated pasta, etc). Also, my microwave has a “child lock” feature that I never knew about. Apparently I can lock children into my microwave oven. Or wait, probably instead it is used to lock children OUT of my microwave oven. I find this a bit useless. If I cannot trust my hypothetical child not to microwave the cat, even though I have clearly instructed him or her not to microwave the cat, perhaps I have bigger problems on my hands which cannot be solved through technology. And any kid who is so devious as to continue with the quest to microwave the cat, despite my edicts and despite my child lockingness, can probably climb up on a chair and read the instructions on how to disable the child lock.

AN ANECDOTE OFFERED FREE OF CHARGE

I do not personally recall this, but there is some family story about how I was taken to DisneyWorld at age four or so, and because I was a small pigtailed sensitive soul my parents carefully explained that much of the freaky shit at DisneyWorld, such as animatronic pirates etc, was not real. This was one of the mantras of the day, in fact, whenever things threatened to get too freaky for me: “It's okay, it's not real.” (I don't want to give the impression that I was continually traumatized as a child or anything; I am sure there are bits of DisneyWorld I enjoyed. I remember nothing about it, though, while I do remember other parts of being four years old, so maybe it really is some sort of terrible repressed memory.) Anyway, my mother carefully explained the not-real parts of DisneyWorld, and the childhood anecdote continues thus: as we were leaving it started to rain and I turned to my dad in the parking lot and asked, “Is this rain real?” I hereby bequeath (bequeath!) (sorry, but when I use certain words that make me wriggle with excitement to type them I have to do that parenthetical echolalia thing) this anecdote to anyone who is writing some sort of Baudrillardian thesis on DisneyWorld or media or virtual reality.

MORE VIRTUALITY

I like playing with Amazon.com's “recommendations” and seeing what sort of person they think I am. BECAUSE OBVIOUSLY WE ARE OUR MEDIA. (You know I am kidding, right?) According to Amazon, I need to snatch up that Interpol album. (I had no idea I was that trendy.) However, I also am the sort of person who listens to Outkast and Haydn. I should be reading poetry, cyberpunk, Nicholson Baker, and Evelyn Waugh. This sort of fake consumerist way of constructing a personality is so interesting to me, and even though I am not a programmer, I loved reading about Item-to-Item Collaborative Filtering. Applicable to other consumer areas? “You once ordered a grilled cheese, you might like our quesedillas?”

I can hear the privacy paranoids squawking already. I remember telling certain people about TiVo (I admit to having become a sort of TiVo evangelist), and a few said, “But I heard that then 'They' know what you watch.” (Note: Not really true—the TiVo's hard drive “knows,” of course, but the TiVo company can't track individual preferences.) My response to that, frankly, is kind of a shrug. (1) I don't consider information like what television I watch to be all that private. Sure, it technically is nobody's business, but I think there is enough serious privacy erosion (hidden cameras, phone tapping) going on in the world already that we have to choose our battles. (2) If someone wants to make a certain entertainment option interactive (especially in a nonconsumerist way, like the ability to skip commercials), and very specific to me, I say GO FOR IT. How many times have I been hungover on the couch watching some silly television program like the World's Strongest Man competition and thought: I REALLY WISH THOSE GUYS WOULD JUST STRIP OUT OF THEIR SPANDEX SHORTS AND MAKE WITH THE HOT SWEATY MAN-TO-MAN ACTION ALREADY? Or how about hearing Picard say: “Geordi! To the locker room!” (3) Worrying that “ohmygod someone is profiling my likes and dislikes” gives the marketers way too much power. They can't force you to buy anything, you know. They can't even force you to like anything. So Amazon thinks that because I am in a certain age group and like a certain type of new-wavy music that I will like Interpol. So what? I might, I might not. I say: Marketers, do your worst. Go ahead and try to market to me. I tune out 99% of your messages anyway.

—mimi smartypants refuses and resists a little more quietly than the rest of you.