burning like matchsticks in the face of the darkness

Friday

I downloaded Firefox 2.0.0.4 on my work computer.
I'm not sure how I feel about the glossy gray rounded edge style.
It gives me the red-underline spellcheck in all windows where there's a composing box, which is neat.
I'm really not sure how I feel about the fact that the close tab is on the active tab itself, not off at the end -- so you can't just quickly click closed a lot of them (unless you start at the far right end).
Also interesting (and kind of annoying), only a limited number of tabs are shown, so you have to use the drop-down menu at the end of the bar to select other ones -- though this does mean you can actually read the titles of your open tabs (the ones that are showing) which ultimately makes navigation easier.

In other news: I am tempted to switch to S2 so for the ease of seeing what other tags an entry has when viewing by tag [I also really like the sidebar of tiered tags -- as seen on emotionalperil, marginalia, nikitangel, etc.,], but I hate S2 on principle, and it's so unwieldy.  Okay, my S1 mainpage ("lastn") style is tweaked from one that someone had already customized, but still, not that hard -- whereas S2 so often feels non-intuitive to me.  *growls*

[I also continue to be annoyed by people who force their styles on the comment page.  I have my flist set to give me ?style=mine, but when I'm browsing other journals, or visiting from Message Center or Memories, I have it inflicted on me.  Yes, I know there are GreaseMonkey scripts for that.  But still.]

And so often I'm browsing journals of people who do have S2 and it makes me sad that their entries aren't (consistently) tagged.  Hi, "cataloguer at heart" = no lie.

/complaint (for the moment, on that topic, anyway)

***

The book my mom's boss is co-writing, turns out they don't need the References, which is good news for her in that she doesn't have to format them, but this makes the baby jesus me cry 'cause it's a nonfiction book, how can you not include References?  And it's easy to list them all in the back, so it's not like they're gonna infringe on your reading experience.  Are people really gonna be intimidated by the presence of superscript numerals?  Oh the irony that the title is: "Come on, People! On the Path from Victims to Victors."

I felt tired after dinner (had kinda napped on the train ride home) but obviously 7:30pm is a bit early to go to bed -- especially when you're sleeping on the living room couch.

Excluding West Wing at work, this is the most tv I've watched in I don't know how long.

We watched Jeopardy (trivia learned: W. H. Harrison was the first POTUS to die in office).

My brother channel-surfed during the commercial breaks, so we watched a large chunk of The Simpsons -- "Eight Misbehavin' " [11.07] -- and some snippets Malcolm in the Middle -- "Secret Boyfriend" [7.06].

I was frequently like dead from laughter at The Simpsons.  For shame.  Hi, that show is not allowed to be that funny.

Malcolm in the Middle had a character who struck me as a Topanga knock-off, and my brother said I should know the actress, and indeed, it was Hayden Panettiere.

A couple minutes before 8:00 it was pointed out that Smackdown would be on soon.  Aww, father-daughter bonding.  ( Read more... )

I also saw more commercials than I have in ages. ( Read more... )

Saturday

My great-aunt Grace died early in June, and we went down to Falmouth for the Memorial Mass.  ( Read more... )

I finally went to Keegan's to get my watchband fixed/replaced. I also stopped by the library -- in part because I was purposely postponing going home to where OriginalRoomie's high-energy chatty family would be waiting.

I was wearing my light blue shirt, Beth said it was a great color on me, was in fact my color.  I tend to prefer darker colors, but I can see that.  (And she didn't ask me if I'd lost weight!  Which, okay, is Marcia's schtick, but still.  I don't actually have weight issues, but I get so tired of the idea that looking good clearly equals looking thinner.)  She said, "You look great -- better than you ever have before.  Whatever you're doing must agree with you."

I told her I was learning ASL, and she said she'd learned some way back in the day but forgotten most of it now.  But she signed that sentence, which I was impressed by.

I really should check out Simmons' night school program.  She said she thought if I went into librarianship I should become an academic librarian -- academic or some specialty like business, law, medical library.  People tell me this, and I'm honestly not sure it's true, but I haven't hashed out exactly what "being a librarian" would look like for me ideally, so I just nod at people.
She said she can see me running my own library (♥!) and if I ever need reference letters, let them know :)

I forget how it came up, but my dad and I finally looked up "que sera sera."  Was nice to know that we're right that in Spanish it would be "Lo que será, será.

There has been some minor controversy about the reputed language of the song title. The phrase "Que sera, sera" was an alteration by the songwriters of a quasi-Italian phrase, "Che sara, sara," a fictional family motto in the 1954 film The Barefoot Contessa. It is not Spanish, Italian, or French (but is acceptable in spoken Portuguese). The correct Spanish, Italian, French and Portuguese renderings of the phrase are: 
* Portuguese: O que será, será
* Spanish: Lo que será, será
* Italian: Quello che sarà, sarà
* French: Ce qui sera, sera.
-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Que_sera_sera#Trivia

I saw Mrs. Leary on my way back to the train, and she mentioned Glasgow.  I'd heard about London, but Glasgow was news to me.  Sigh.  Last time I flew overseas people worried (it was summer of 2003, so people were still recovering from 9/11; I memoried this entry as "i'm not afraid of flying overseas even with a war") and I'm not enjoying starting to have these conversations again.

OriginalRoomie's family was actually not overwhelming (and they did dishes and bought lots of food including booze and ice cream).

My "For the Next X: A Benefit CD for RAINN" arrived, and I am underwhelmed.  Anyone want it?

Sunday

I thought my string of dreams of destruction was over, but this morning I had an extended dream which was not only full of destruction but also actually hit me on an emotional level, as the previous string of dreams hadn't.

As I walked to the laundromat, a car drove by and a guy in it yelled, "Happy Canada Day."

OriginalRoomie's mom's chattiness is starting to grate on me.

However, she asked about where to go to get a new parking pass.  I hadn't realized mine expired Jan. 1 rather than 12 months after I got it, so that was good.  I have definitely been loaning them to visitors, though, and no one has told me they've gotten a ticket.

And they keep washing our dishes, so I can't complain too much.

Do I want to even have a birthday party this year?  I'm already planning to party two weekends in a row, and the Saturday that looks like it'll work better for more people is the date of the CWM benefit concert.

Monday

I slept for ~9 hours.  Rock.

OriginalRoomie's mom gave me a heart-shaped throw pillow with an American flag design.  Um, okay.  Last time she gave me a couple of nice gold-and-black ones.

I did a couple errands and went to the gym.
I was kinda tired, so I started in the weight room, did a few of the machines.
I decided to try the the StairMaster.  Intensity ranges from 1 (lowest) to 20 (highest).  I started at 1, which felt obscenely slow, and ended up spending most of my time at 7 (my average was 6.3).
I am not a fan of the machine.  I kept stepping too far forward and thus smushing my shoe, and I felt like I had to keep watching the stairs because if I wasn't I would get off rhythm and that would be bad.  I also felt like I was being bad to my back, like I was leaning down funny or something, but I couldn't figure out how to do it right.
I had plugged in 20minutes (Fat Burner program, 'cause why not), but I stopped at 10min 'cause I didn't feel like dying.
workout summary: 41 flights of stairs, 0.84miles

I stopped by the office to see if Katie had killed herself from boredom yet :) and chatted with her and Greg for an hour or two.
Katie said her mom has been stressing for the past 8 weeks trying to find a dress to wear to her cousin's wedding.  This led to conversations about how when it's your own kid's wedding, and I insisted that my parents were not of that sort, was like, "They will wear clothes..." though this then prompted ideas (which I did not voice) about having a nude wedding.  Which then reminded me of a recent conversation with Katie about a wedding one of her roommates is going to which will have a pig roast.  I'm a vegetarian so of course I'm opposed to this in principle, but I also thought it would be such a great visual to have a giant pig roasting on a spit.  Katie was joking about going dressed in tattered clothes with a nametag saying "Simon" and going off to die in the bushes.

I felt like I should go clothes shopping but was really not excited about that.  Meh.  Tomorrow will be more productive.

I saw Katherine from CHPC on my way out of the T station.  She's reading Jasper Fforde, on her son's recommendation.  Yay.
I hadn't realized they lived right on Curtis St. so close to Davis Square (for some reason I thought they lived up toward Medford).

What is up with our disappearing trash barrels?  I know we started out with 3 (I recall boggling that we filled them up since there were only 5 of us living in bathe house, and my family of 4 growing up would fill up one trash bag maybe 3/4 of the way each week) but we've had 2 for a while now, but tonight we were down to 1. [Edit: Turns out DownstairsNeighbors are moving to a place closer to the Square, but I think all the trash barrels pre-dated them anyway, so that doesn't help.]

I do not react well to people fussing over me -- which I think is a control freak thing.
OriginalRoomie's grandma was moving stuff in the fridge so I could fit my stuff in when I came back with groceries, and I was like, "No, it's fine, I'll make it fit, don't worry about it {flaps hands}."

Hi, it's my birthday in a week.  Craziness.

Yesterday my brother had a doctor's appointment in Cambridge so he called me to join me for lunch.  I literally spent the duration of my lunch hour on the phone with him trying to get him to the b-school.  I don't drive, so I hadn't realized how many one ways there are (including JFK St. between the Square and Eliot St.).  And then he had to find parking ('cause the HBS lot is $9).  But he did finally make it and got to meet a bunch of the people I work with.

He was telling me about the "new Ivies" -- which he had heard about 'cause his school (RPI) is mentioned.  We agreed that it's ridiculous.  It's such a non-story.  The opening says: A generation ago, elite schools were a clearly defined group: the eight schools in the Ivy League, along with such academic powerhouses as [list of 4]. Smaller liberal-arts colleges—like [list of 5]—were the destinations of choice for top students who preferred a more intimate campus. But in the past few decades, the number of college-bound students has skyrocketed, and so has the number of world-class schools.  It continues: The bottom line: that one "perfect" school need not break a student's heart. The colleges on the following list—the "New Ivies"—are beneficiaries of the boom in top students.  So despite positing their list as the "new Ivies," they're starting from an acknowledged premise that it was never just the Ivies.  Plus, while I'm sure applications have skyrocketed (as they have everywhere; that college admissions are increasingly competitive is news to no one, right?) it's not like these are schools are hidden treasures or anything.  The vast majority of them are well-known and have been for quite some time.  I totally endorse teaching kids that the places held up as dream colleges are not necessarily the best fit for everyone and that you can get a stellar education lots of places, but the idea of "new Ivies" just seems to be buying into the same old idea of there being a small set of "worthy" Institutes of Higher Learning.

While I was waiting for Jonah outside Davis T Station last night, this guy (shepherding a bunch of college students to a barbecue, I think) was talking about a 100-mile run in Vermont (which he plans to do, despite not having run more than 42 miles at a stretch before).  The women he was talking to pointed out that (1) that's like four marathons, (2) this is New England, so that's like an entire state (like Vermont, for example); he said it's a loop you do four times, and one of them joked that yeah, you just circle Rhode Island.  I was telling Jonah about this, and the guy had mentioned it being 16 hours, and Jonah and I did the math and that's ~6mph, aka a consistent 10-minute mile (that thing I do on the treadmill and wanna die after a half an hour).  I am comforted that the website posits this as a near record.  Jonah also pointed out that that means running at least part of it not during daylight.

Anyway, we had dinner at Rudy's Cafe and Tequila Bar (about which the Internet says things like, "The only tequila bar with a children's menu").  It was nicer inside than I had expected, though noisy.  The woman who seated us put us in a booth near the back despite the fact that there were two-person tables more in the center of the hub, for which I was grateful.  I got a strawberry daiquiri and Jonah got a peach daiquiri, and we both agreed that mine was better :)  I was meh on the food as I accidentally ordered not what I had intended to, but I ended up not being all that hungry, so it was okay.  I also learned that "fried ice cream" is better than I would have expected.

Today's amusement was Eric stumbling over saying "smoke detector" and saying "firefuck."

My mom e-mailed me this Boston Globe article saying:

Thought of you. 

You know, if graduate work terrifies (or bores) you – a librarian wouldn't be a bad job for someone who loves The Story. 
On the other hand, HBS has better pay and benefits.

Despite not having been since Friday, the elliptical (interval program as per usual) actually felt fairly easy and indeed I made really good time.

10:49min - 1mi
21:40min - 2mi
30min - 2.78mi
35min - 3.14mi

On Mad Money (this is my 27th time gymming it up at HBS, over the course of two months, and it only today occurred to me that yes, there's an obvious reason that the TVs are on channels like CNBC) today Cramer was talking about how eBay and Yahoo! should merge, and he suggested a couple names, but I can follow the bottom of the screen synopsis text better than I can the delayed closed-captioning, so what I saw were the name suggestions supposedly from the staff, which included "eBahoo" and "YaBa" (there was another one I can't remember).

I went to the weight room and did 4 sets of 12 reps of 8lbs.  I feel like I should figure out some sort of more sustained strength-training program, but for now I'm content to just do this light thing following cardio.

On the radio was a catchy song I quite liked with the line "the gods are crazy," and Googling indicates this is a Paris Hilton song.  I feel sullied and unusual.

I made spinach&strawberry salad for dinner.  I also tried the sundried tomato havarti I'd bought on a whim, which is kind of jarring in this context.  May use it with crackers this Saturday, though.  Y'all are invited to watch Monty Python's Life of Brian and possibly play games as well at my apartment this Saturday beginning at 7pm.

(Whee, Google alerts! -- thanks to Greenie for the pointer.  ::is egotistical::)

Okay, bed at a sane time tonight.

Edit: Except, apparently I can't fall asleep? Unfair.

Terry(?) was concerned about my commute, but it's not like I'm on the parade marathon route.
    http://www.boston.com/marathon/stories/2004/where_to_watch.htm
    http://www.boston.com/sports/marathon/map_interactive/

My commuter rail was much emptier than usual (I had a three-seater all to myself) and my Red Line was about as crowded as usual (I got to sit down after a stop or two).  Coming home, Red Line was per usual and commuter rail was emptier (I scored a single-seater).  Amanda said the buses were running on Saturday schedule, which was frustrating for her.

So quiet today.

UnitHead on Amanda taking care of some life insurance thing of his: "The only reason it has any priority is in case my plane crashes on the way to Ireland."
This made me very much want to go to Ireland for some reason unbeknownst to me.

Also: Easter jellybeans?  I have gotten spoiled like whoa with Jelly Bellys.  They do grow on one, though.  (I've gotta stop consuming so much sugar at work, though.  I think it contributes to my end-of-day crashing.)  Eric actually got Jelly Bellys for Easter (though apparently not the best flavors).

Eric says he's too lazy to grocery shop/cook.  I'm almost too lazy to go out to eat (You want me to select a restaurant?  And then select from a menu?).  Plus of course it pains me to spend money, so going out to eat like he does would be anathema for me.  Buying lunch twice last week was pushing it for me.

Bevy of posts coming... probably tomorrow.  I wanna go run a couple errands and then watch my tape of last week's CSI and Without a Trace.  Have been reminded recently that not only am I fonder of authorial intent than is popular, but I skew away from post-structuralism/post-modernism and towards a belief in absolutes (I am Text Girl, I am Truth Girl, this surprises no one) even while I am so all about complexities and spectrums in many areas.