Month: November 2002

– alignment test (for later – it’s too long for right now – oh, and thanks, Shanda!)

only a brief comment, at this point. while the cute & flirty description feels alien to me, I do have one little bit of stereotypically feminine behavior that might be worth mentioning in this context, which oddly enough stems from a stereotypically masculine perspective (?). I don’t like admitting that I don’t know something. not a pretty attitude, I know. in writing, esp. in email, I can ask for help and not feel like I’m abasing myself. okay, so that’s extreme, but you get the idea.

in person and on the phone, I sometimes (often?) take the stance of playing dumb, going all the way to “I don’t know anything” when I need to ask for help. with most people, it only works once per subject, but usually that’s all I need. and oddly enough, it usually does work, although listening to C deal with people on the phone, it might not work as well as a more self-confident stance. he’s astoundingly effective dealing with people on the phone, much more so than I am.

is playing dumb a girly tactic? if one assumes the other part of girly, that is, not feminine but immature, childish or childlike. a girl, after all, is not an adult female, but a child female. and children are “dumb” (at least when it comes to having specific knowledge) by default.

– Weblogs, 25 years into the future: “Ironically the cult’s website doesn’t validate.”
– Eroding personal time (my own $0.02: I think what is, or could be, happening here is that the boundary between work and notWork (as my personal email sig says) is becoming more & more porous, as the Web makes it possible to (a) take care of personal stuff from work – not that I ever would, of course and (b) handle work stuff from home. either direction is a little threatening.)
– Briefing for a descent into heck (but I like being called an ink-stained wretch!)

so maybe this would be a good place to expand a little on being thankful for the Internet.

first of all, my job, which I love, wouldn’t even exist without the Internet. what would I be doing otherwise? I’m not entirely sure…in 1998, when I first started to discover the Web, and first started writing for it, I was working as an administrative assistant. I’d been thinking about going into grantwriting, and I might’ve thought about print design as well, given how things turned out. but with the Web, I was able to learn on my own, and (this is important) from the Web itself – and besides, I may have been way behind the early adopters, but way behind could be defined in months or years instead of decades.

and that’s been important all along – I’ve bought books, but learned nearly as much from all the various Internet sources, not just Web sites, but also e-mail lists. I’d be lost, frankly, without the Digital Eve (was Webgrrls) list, the css-discuss list, the uwebdev list, the webaim list…. those last three, I discovered just this year!

the Internet is also my backup brain [© the Negrinos, apparently :)] – not just the actively chronicled bits here, but also the vast mass of knowledge embedded in the weblogs I read, including/especially the group weblogs Boing Boing and MetaFilter, and of course Google. and I can participate in the creation of that brain (giving a little CSS help, just today!), too.

but it’s more than just informative knowledge…it’s people that I only “know” (a whole other topic, that question of knowing people through their web writing) because of what they write in this medium, and knowing them has enriched my life in a personal way, made me think about things, given me a way to articulate what I’ve thought and felt.

and the (so far, disappointly few) people I once knew in person, and have reconnected with through weblogs (or whatever).

aside: people I’d like to see ‘blogging: Kat, Tom W., Matt R., Thao, Greyson. not that my saying it will make it so.

oh, and the funnies. and paying my bills. and ordering computer bits. and checking my bank account. and working from home.

so when I think about the Internet, I feel excited, happy, and, well, thankful.

we will be making it a quiet thanksgiving this year – just the two of us & a bit of dinner (what, we still haven’t decided – there will be grocery shopping).

I’ve been considering what I’m thankful for this year….

I’m thankful most of all for the presence in my life of the wonderful, smart, funny, thoughtful human being with whom I share my life, space, and 3 beautiful cats. It hasn’t always been an easy year for us, but I’m thankful that we’re still working on our life together. I’m thankful for his parents, too. (I know what it’s like to have loved ones with horrible/insane families, and I cherish C’s parents immensely.)

I’m thankful that we found a house that we could call our own, and that the credit union made it possible for us to do that.

I’m thankful for the passage of time, which has allowed me to revisit the sorrows and pains of the past, and gauge them as get-over-able.

I’m thankful for my great boss and for my amazing assistant, who I hope is helping me to become a great boss someday.

I’m thankful for the Internet. No, really. A lot of insightful, fun, and memorable experiences this year came to my world through the magic shiny box, and I was introduced and re-introduced to some wonderful and interesting people. (there is a whole post about this topic hiding in here, which I may or may not expand on.)

this is, of course by the very nature of the thing, a woefully incomplete list.

this morning I overslept. my alarm went off, just like always, and I dozed a little while listening to KIRO…woke back up an hour later. too late to actually dress & shower before heading on my way. I suppose I could’ve made it, just barely, with C driving hell fast to meet the van, but it just didn’t seem worth it. so we got bagels and coffee and he drove me up; I was only a half-hour late, and in much better sorts besides. it was a good day.

I’m still working out what I need to do for sleep in my current situation.

I’m following the various discussions following the Girlism post. (Shirley [brain fart: that would be Shelley] links to many responses) I first saw it linked from Dave Winer, who, for all his other charms, I don’t really trust in matters gender-related [doh! got interrupted & accidentally hit publish instead of just post – and didn’t realize it until much, much later. my apologies], and it immediately rubbed me entirely the wrong way. From Shelley:

In my computer technology field, which is one of the most heavily male-dominated professions, I have never once seen a woman use flirting, begging, winking, stomping their feet, showing off their long legs, dressing sexy, or anything of this nature to get their way. If anything, women are less likely to display emotion on the job in my field than the men. Why? Because of statements such as these, saying that there is a double double standard and that women are using ‘girly’ ways to succeed.

And in the female-dominated workplaces that I’ve been in (library, non-profits, community college), I’ve never seen that either – “girlism” would’ve been ignored, ridiculed, or gossipped about by most of the (mostly middle-aged) women that I’ve worked with over the last 10 years. Sometimes there’s a certain additional forgiveness of bursts of emotion, the crying Shelley talks about later in the same entry, but not always.

there’s a deeper thought fighting to be expressed here, and I can’t quite get at it…and I really, really, really don’t want to overgeneralize, which I think happens quite easily in these discussions. (as always, I feel the most resonance with what Dorothea says, although this time she doesn’t actually say what I want to say, merely something I can get behind.)

addendum: and what is it with Dave W. & Shelley P.? every time something interesting gets going with either of them (esp. in the comments on Shelley’s site), the other seems to come crashing in as a great mass of negative energy. to both, I’d commend Mark Pilgrim’s posting “A Thousand Battles.”

– Nomad histories 001: Hong Kong
– plumbing discussion board (yes, really)

on Friday I finally caught the Buffy episode where Joyce dies. amazing TV.

on the surface, I was reminded of when Dizzy’s adopted kids’ mom died. but what made me weep – sob, really – was just thinking of my father’s death. it feels like there’s a short circuit in my brain, whenever I see anything about parental death, if I’m in anything resembling a safe environment, I just fall apart. and I can’t help but see it as a disability; it’s not like I’m thinking about him all the time, just when I am reminded, it opens up this hole inside of me, which I fall into.

which always leaves for me two questions:

1) what does it mean for the rest of my life? am I being silently handicapped by these emotions I haven’t entirely processed?
2) what should I do? (or should I do anything? therapy? group therapy? more writing?)

I’m torn – on the one hand, I want to understand this emotional response and figure out what it means. on the other hand, I’m inclined to think that it’s pointless (and maybe even self-indulgent) to dwell on it.

(update: strangely, shortly after writing this, I read Dave Winer’s ruminations on his father’s illness & his own heart disease, and the lovely piece he linked to about the poet Beatrice Hawley. read the poetry. oh, and K? stop smoking already.)

we’re both fascinated by quirky tarot decks. (I have 3? 4? and used to read back in high school.) today’s nifty set (courtesy Boing Boing): Playtarot, made with photos of playmobile!

– National Institute of Standards and Technology, Reference for constants, units and uncertainty (a reference for uncertainty?!)

– protest against skateboard ban by park architect (Ed Bacon, father of Kevin & author of Design of Cities)

I originally saw this on Matt Haughey’s site, and I liked what he had to say about it.