It's a strange single world out there

It's not that i thought i wouldn't be single at 25 - hell, i always sort of thought i'd be single at 40 and 60 as well - but the tumultuous ethics of this status have taken a while to emerge for me. Like the unstated truth that while you're kissing one person tonight, you may be sleeping with another another night. And what makes the latter more worthy than the first? How do you cope with the idea that one person you're just getting to know might notice you getting on the train in the morning with someone you're not so much with anymore than you're with anyone else, but who nonetheless happens to be someone you've gotten to know just a tad bit better. It's a strange strange thing, seeing yourself in the midst of a fine netting of connections to other people at various stages of closeness.

and a strange sort of lonely.

Boycott Employee Pricing

Employee-pricing hit the streets this year with a virulence and frenzy that appalled and dismayed me. Beyond my skeptism that the offerings aren't truly 'employee pricing,' the very idea of a company auctioning off an employee benefit as a way to win to bring in customers is borderline unethical in my book. What's next "Buy a car from us, and we'll pay your health insurance for a year!" ? I'd like to live in a country where the response to such gimics wasn't simply disinterest, but a vocal statement from consumers: I won't buy from a company that respects its employees
sos little.

Do Good Things

I've had a brainy day, and i'm psyched about it -or rather i'm psyched about the ideas my brainy day has given me. I've been thinking (plasmating, for those of you familiar with the term) about being more involved in doing good things, but there are just so many on my task list i can't keep up, and somehow they don't seem to be enough, either. What i really want is to fix the world. Help everything in one fell swoop. Yup. Piece-a-Cake.

I know I will get around to some of the more incidental ones. Tracking down some opportunities on New York Cares, sending out my fundraising requests for Minds Matter, setting up a 'donation' sub account in my ING set, wrapping books for public school kids, but still i have this urge to fascillitate the good works of others, and these organizational ideas are what i'm so pleased to have come up with today.
ack. gotta run...

Things that need to be invented...(by someone else)

• personal accessory-refillable, reusable hot and cold packs:
  a contraption that makes use of the chemical properties of easily obtainable ingredients (like banking soda) and keeps them seperate yet contained until the time of use then allows the user to mix them for the desired affect without removing them from the sealed container.
  


• Web Service-Group gift exchange:
  There's always one person when families or friends do gift exchanges who knows who everyone is giving to, including who's giving to them. That's just no fun. This service would generate and track giver-to-givee pairings allowing the person in charge to partake in the true fun of being surprised while still being able to manage the process, ie following up with those who haven't confirmed receipt of their pairing. Though the most obvious use for this is in gift exchanges or secret santa projects, it could be used to manage a variety of similar functions.
  


• 
  PDA
  - object attacher:
  it's all well and good that my pda plays the munsters for me at noon when it's time for me to go to yoga and at 5:30 when it's time to head out for class and at 8pm to remind me to stop off at the grocery, but what i really need is an ancillary program that allows you to attach 'objects' to repeating and non-repeating tasks and events. So that at 8am when it tells me to go to work (yes, my PDA actually beeps to let me know when to leave - and when to make my smoothie), it pops up not just with my agenda for the day, but with a list at the top of things i will need for the day: It's Tuesday morning: take your yoga mat, your text book. It's Wednesday: take your knitting and your tuck-away extra bag.
  
  


• Kara's Invention: tell me what it was again, babe?


• napSpace - service venue
  Some company should create a chain of small venues where you can go during your lunch break and take a nap. You tell the receptionist how long you want to nap and then you don't have to worry about waking up. Premium private rooms could be adjusted for ambient sound and lighting - and shared rooms would offer a choice of preconfigured settings. Resource materials would be available for training your body to make the most of your napping session
  it's true the introduction of such a venue might radically reduce the number of appointments made for certain health treatments (teeth cleaning, etc) as well as lunch-time gym goers, but i think the advantages would be well worth it.

someone said i'm wired! like the magazine woo hoo

(i think maybe they meant weird) - clearly not someone who knows me...;p

Information Fractals

The thing that amazes, inspires - and overwhelms - me about this information age is the seeming infiniteness of the tracts one can make into an area of specialization. When I first started really paying attention to the system formed within and between layers of meanings, back when i got into high school, I didn't fully appreciate this pairing of opposites: how each narrowing of focus is matched with a comparable expansion of details. I thought of literature as a sea of overlapping equations, multi-variable calculus obscured by and made richer with semantic meaning. Symbolism was the first derivative, archetypes the second, and the like. It's not that there isn't truth in the conception of sign systems, but this model unwittingly incorporates successive acts of simplification. Derivative eventually either empty out or devolve into an oscillating pattern. The derivative of x^2 is 2x, 2x is 2, 2 is 0. Sign systems don't. When you isolate a sign system from it's content, it becomes the content and just as meta levels shoot into focus extrapolating from the system as did from the original content. Information seems to be going rapidly towards a point where each level of abstraction of decrease in scope will be met with an increase in information available at that next level. The derivative, being exactly as complex as it's source will generate a subsequent derivative just as complex, ad infinitum. Rather than information following a model of derivatives where each subsequent meta-layer, limited by resouces, is a reduction of forms, information systems will behave like fractal. (i'll try to clean this up later)

Sites

my ultimate site has resurfaced in my thoughts now that i'm going to be getting a computer to replace that stolen laptop...some ideas:

1. structure: calendar of activities as entry point.
   my struggle to structure a working site stems from my awareness of how much of my day to day explorations are lost. I want a site that centers on what i'm up to, not because i think i'm all that great or what i'm doing is all that great, but merely because it's the most efficient way i've come across to keep small thoughts and ideas present enough to touch off future conversations. Far from wanting to share my opinion, I want to discuss my questions and musings and compare them with those of people i respect, my friends - and I want a site format that fascillitates this. Accessing content through a calendar, would create a structure in which people could come along, comment on things they'd been to, not to mention keep me accountable to myself for how i spend my day...it could even become something where other users could have their own calendars and link calendars...
2. side track: multi-book book club.
   i like my book clubs, but they're a bit limited. For quite some time now i've been thinking about ways of organizing reading lists to give them more focus without too much overhead.
   

I keep forgetting I have peanut butter at home. Here i am at work and what i really want is a nice dallop of ultra viscous all-natural peanut butter...inevitably, i'll forget this by the time i get home, only to remember it again tomorrow same time, same irritatingly unhelpful place.

Refrigeration

There's a nice little reflection on technological advances in refrigeration in National Geographic. You should all check it out. Just some food for thought. ;)

key control

Despite more of these really serving as reminders to myself, this especially fits the bill. Consider yourself forewarned. (incidentally, fore- is a rather nice prefix. It's got the ring of antiquity and omnipotence all bundled together. then again, omnipotence has often the ring of antiquity itself, it's hard to distinguish...) This is a programming observation.

I was far from a hard sell on the need for unique keys in data systems. The consistency and precision they enable just made me more comfortable with (my) reality. Recently, however, I've become more consciously aware of the value of iterating through arrays by key rather than by unit. it's a method i've previously used about half the time (which when your programming revolves around processing recordsets) is quite a bit, but never really stopped to think about. It was always the options i used if I was accessessing ancillary data i set up to be controlled by the keys. For instance, if I'd set global values to the name of the key, I'd need the key ($key) to get the global named by that key ($$key). Alternatively or in conjunction, I'd use key control if I was directly manipulating the value of the key in some way. All the while, I inherently understood that key control is just more information rich than item control, but i never thought to strategically use that understanding in my processes. Until now.

If you wondering why you would ever use the more direct access method, it usual comes down to the 'on principle' aversion to an unnecessary extra step, or more frequently, the aversion to extra typing (particularly of special characters like { and [ ).

That's it. I've awoken to the values of key control and it's just plain nice to stumble on a morsel of clarity here and there.

Oh...and logical structures make me happy. When you can step back and appreciate with not a small degree of pleasure the advantages of nested vs sequential if-else clauses, array dimension reversals, and implied parentage, you know there's something wrong with you.

hot-zone tv

home viewing systems that let users, yes 'users' switch on a filter showing 'advertising objects' within the frame and feeds it to a PIP online store for that item. Shows can be longer, advertising less intrusive and more efficient.

katrina and abstinence only

All the discussion and commentary on Katrina and what happened in New Orleans has reminded me of the horror and disgust i felt when i was research health care statistics and ran across an article on how Mississippi, while it continued to have the highest teen pregnancy rate in the country, was only increasing its support of abstinence only sex education in the public school system. It's the same sentiment i felt in Bush's first term when they made abstinence only education a mandate for assisting third-world countries with HIV/AIDS services.

It's just in my gut, plain and simple, sacrificing the health and lives to extend the reach of a personal religious or ideological premise is reprehensible. One simply does not have the right or authority. Of course, my memory of these incidents flooded in so quickly, i now can't remember what about the Katrina discussions triggered it. hmmm...

oppositional positioning

i feel like i should mark in someway 'new' thoughts i have. So many of the things I bother to write here are just recurrances of the same ideas i've been kicking around since high school. This, for example, is just another permutation of the meaning i eventually took away from practicing LD (Lincoln Douglas) debate in the way back when - i'll put a link in to what that meaning was later. This is not a 'new' idea.

This morning on the subway the woman across from me was reading The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How It Has Undermined All Women (ISBN-0743259998), and it got me thinking again about the difficulties involved in being aware of and trying to balance the influence of ideologies and conventions. We all know our brain makes sense of the world by creating models and these models integrate the rationales provided us by the surrounding culture. These systems don't just put a set of thoughts or explanations or assuptions in our heads, though; they shape our construct of reality. Even being aware of them can't neutralize this affect. Not only is it just too much memory management to be constantly correcting for the influences of even one, let alone all, the various value systems acting upon us, but also, in doing this we reinforce the systems as part of our internal constructs.

Of course this is all old hat, part of the foundational theories that stirred the theoretical frenzies of the mid-century liberal movements. This book just revisits the practical difficulties of it and i found myself wondering if it centered its argument for the 'undermining of all women' on this self-defeating element of positioning one's self oppositionally to a given ideology, ie traditional concepts of women and motherhood. As a typical teenage girl, I went through a phase of resisting the idea that i'd ever have 'maternal instinct,' but the fact is i like kids. They're silly, inquisitive, and you get to watch models of reality taking form in their minds like the infamous time-lapse photograph of a flower blooming (personally, i prefer the one of the drop of water, especially playing backwards). Is this maternal? I don't think so, and yet in accepting that i like interacting with kids, i feel like i'm reinforcing an element of gender i truly believe is predominantly cultural in origin. Likewise, in insisting that i don't have a 'maternal' instinct, I predetermine myself to judge my own values according to the very model i don't agree with.

Anyway, that wasn't very well laid out, but seeing the book just reminded me of the general problem of negotiating individuality within a reality so supersaturated with different value systems and how, somewhat ironically, our increased perception of those systems - and their increased number (or perception of an increasing number) - reinforces their influence on our world view and our interpretations of our own actions, even as we attempt to oppose them. [today's episode brought to you by the words 'negotiate,' 'situate,' and 'position' - and by the number 3.]

It left me thinking about ways we can use awareness and still avoid merely taking oppositional stances - ways we can thwart the very constructive influence of these systems, while still making use of their memory and processing efficiencies when they are useful to us (ie when we deliberately make use of stereotyping as an expediant way communicate to a new acquaintance the most relevant aspects of who we are).

excuse

I've been reading Dostoevsky's White Nights. I blame my sudden penchant for paranthetical remarks and circituitous structures entirely on his influence. I promise it will pass. On a side note, I debated marking this as a fabric or a form post, but i think it's more fabric than form even though it influence my sentence structure, because the influences has more to do with the mode involved, the positioning of the writer in regards to the assumed audience rather than the relationships among the structural components. i think...

Interpersonal Relationships

It's been a while, hasn't it? Well, I'm in the process of moving and it's necessarily time consuming. I also have some things on my mind that my emotions have prevented me from expressing articulately and thus from posting, so here's a list of forthcoming (picture the bright golden halo of good intensions over that word) musings, that will undoubtedly (undubitably is just too damn ugly, or maybe just too flacid, a word) be interspersed with other random posts:

• accomodation vs compromise: the difference and the potential impact of that difference on negotiating the needs and desires of involved parties.


• what it means when one person becomes consistently intolerant of another's actions


• face to face interaction: it's benefit, and the cost of avoiding it.


• emotional ownership: more specifically, the damage created when a person does not accept ownership for aspects of their own will/volition...a bit of an extension of the 'want' musing.


• nice vs good:

pleasant sounding, aren't they?

In the interest of avoid more rhetorical devices i'm concluding this post.

Stages

Morning

Stage 1: Shake the mouse until the screen comes on. approx. 1 min
Stage 2: Put on light sweater that came with me to work. 1 min
Stage 3: Cycle through blogs, personal email folders etc checking for changes. 5 min
Stage 4: Try to figure out what i was working on yesterday and pull together plan for work today. 30 min-45 min.
Stage 5: Put on heavy sweater that stay in my 'officle'. 2 min - must be found first.
Stage 6: Work... 30-45 min.
Stage 7: Put on space heater. 1 min.
Stage 8: Work, while remebering the things i need to do at lunch. 15-20 min.
Stage 9: Turn off space heater, go to lunch.

Afternoon:

Stage 1: Put on light sweater that returned with me from lunch.

Stage 2: Get coffee.

Stage 3: Work

Stage 4: Put on heavy sweater, get more coffee

Stage 5: Work

Stage 6: Turn on space heater, get coffee

Stage 7: Work

Stage 8: Attempt to move space heater even closer without setting chair on fire...

Repeat 7,8 indefinitely