"The Industry" and Me

Things have been interesting--imagine that! Interesting, and not entirely bad.

Not entirely bad, in part, because I asked my boss if I could work a day from home every week, and, shock of shocks, he said yes. It feels as though the tediousness of my workweek just halved. But maybe I'll get over it. Maybe, during my 4 days at the office, the dullness of this space will seem all the duller. Yet one day at home means better coffee, better food, and above all, more sleep. Not even I can put a negative spin on more sleep.

M. and I have been going to the party at that bar, almost every Sunday night. For better or for worse, we're becoming a part of the scene. Probably for the worse. Too much Chimay, etc. M. has scored himself a DJ gig next month, but, goddamn it, I think we've gotten me trapped in a hosting gig. Hosting. I am the most socially inept person on the planet; how am I supposed to host an "industry" party? How am I to show up on a Sunday night, all smiles and legs, and chat up producers, models, fashion designers, alleged attempted murderers(!!!!!!), bodyguards, singers, photographers, pinup girls, drug dealers, and whoever the fuck else passes as "industry," and, most difficult of all, pretend to be interested in--nay, enraptured by--what they are saying? I am a nerd. A misanthropic nerd. I don't even blowdry my hair. I do not belong here.

Speaking of "the industry," Rockstar Friend invited us to go with him to the Philippines later this year. A friend of his, so he says, owns two houses in the environs of Angeles City.

So we did a little research on Angeles City. I emphasize the "little": I typed "Angeles City" into Google, and clicked on the first hit. Don't follow any of the links on the page, unless you are interested in learning more about sex tourism. Yep, apparently Angeles City is "the best vacation destination for single men," and it's tough to find any information for the non-sex-tourist. Hey, Rockstar Friend--what does your friend do for a living, again?

Is Our Lushes Learning? (Answer: No)

Two Sundays ago, M. and I went out to a nearby bar. M. has been cultivating a business friendship with one of this city's better-known scenester DJs, whose girlfriend hosts a night at this particular place. M. wants to play a monthly deejaying gig at that bar, and she asked him to come along on Sunday so they could discuss it.

Our night went something like this:

11pm -- Leave apartment for bar. "Let's aim to leave by midnight," says M.

11:10pm -- First round of beer. "I only want one drink," says M.

11:45pm -- Second round of beer. It's Chimay, about 9% alcohol."If you're getting yourself another beer, I'll have one, too," says I.

12am -- Conversation with DJ and his girlfriend. DJ gives us complementary glasses of premium scotch whiskey.

12:30am -- Third round of beer. "Sure, why not," says M.

1am -- Fourth round of beer.

1:10am -- DJ's girlfriend cajoles our drunken selves into letting her take lewd pictures of us. (Said photos, regrettably, are now posted on Internet.)

1:15am -- "Uh, I think it's time to go," says M., and I agree.

1:16am -- As we walk out the door, our flatmate Sam walks in. "I'm staying for ten more minutes," announces M. "Ten more minutes, what's the difference?" says I.

1:17am -- Fifth round of beer. Dance, dance, dance.

1:45am -- Last call! Sixth round of beer.

1:50am -- Say goodbye to DJ and girlfriend; meander home singing "Whiskey You're the Devil"

2am -- ???

3am -- Sleep?

7am -- Wake up, simultaneously inebriated and hung over. Exhausted, too. Off to work with me! Narrowly avoid countless bicycle accidents on the way to the train, and so on.

"Never Again!" we vowed.

Well, apparently all the beer and whiskey has destroyed whatever learning capacity we once had, because last night unfolded in the exact same way. One welcome exception was the absence of lewd photos. One unwelcome exception was the result of the DJ's keeping us there after hours: our night didn't end until 4:15. After less than three hours of sleep, I woke up both hung over and unpleasantly drunk. Biking to work was a slow, swervy, terrifying ordeal; and when I sweated, I sweated Chimay.

All of which is a long way of complaining that I feel like crap. And I'm too stupid to do work right now, but not, apparently, too stupid to blog. Or am I? Eh, too late.

Now, July 4 photos.

Now, For Some Perspective

M. and I were biking to work on Tuesday morning. I was in a hurry, not wanting to miss the train, so I raced down the street on my highest gear, blowing through stop signs like a lunatic. Because I am one, apparently. M. trailed about a block behind me, trying to keep up with my insane maneuverings. (Well, I'm not that crazy: I do look both ways before passing through them, even if I pass through even when I see a car or two.)

So there I was, biking at top speed to catch the second yellow light, when I heard the absolute worst noise I could ever imagine, like the death-yelp of someone being eaten alive by a land-dwelling shark. It took me about a second, in my underslept, bleary state, to register that the sound was coming from roughly a block behind me. In other words, from where my boyfriend was. "Fuck!" I screamed, and, for a few horrible moments, I wondered if I'd killed M. with my reckless resolve to get to the train on time At All Costs.

Wheeling my bike around, I saw M. bent over, screaming and staggering to the opposite curb. His bicycle and the stuff in his backpack were strewn out in the middle of the road, and a man was running to his side. I rode over in a hurry. He was still moaning and screaming, bent over, clasping his arm and gasping for breath.

I guess my first thought should have been to call 911; and if I'd seen blood, I probably would have; but instead I asked, "What happened?"

"He biked into my car door," said the man, who then sat down beside M. and began rubbing his back.

"Don't touch me!" M. spat, amid his wheezing. And, to me: "This wouldn't have happened if you didn't insist on hurrying to the train." Ah, anger--that's when I figured that he'd probably be all right, though, I admit, the possibility crossed my mind that he'd die cursing me.

Luckily, we live in a city, and a city filled with goddamn hippies to boot, so soon we were surrounded with good Samaritans wielding cell phones, eager to help out by moving M.'s things to the sidewalk and calling the ambulance. The police were there in minutes, and the paramedics arrived shortly thereafter.

Upon which there ensued an exciting drama centering around the question of whether or not M. would need an ambulance. M. was too much in pain and too incoherent to decide one way or the other. "I don't need an ambulance," he would protest, and then the paramedics would protest that he was not fit to decide. I would try to talk to him: "Do you want an ambulance? I can drive you to the ER if you give me a few minutes to rent a car," and he would say, "yes, rent a car." Then a gaggle of unhelpful cops would insert themselves between us and ask me, "what's his phone number?", "what's his address?", "what happened?"; and they were redundant to boot; why did four of them need to ask me the same questions? From the top of my eye, over a mass of people, I noticed the paramedics strapping M. onto a board.

"I don't think he wants to go in the ambulance!" I yelled, at the top of my lungs--which is, in my case, not terribly loud.

"Why not? He's obviously hurt," said one cop.

"I can drive him to the ER in a few minutes. His head and spine seem fine, and he doesn't have health insurance," I explained.

"This is SF," the cop countered. "They have provisions for that."

Maybe, but I remember the time when my ex-flatmate Chris 1 got in a terrible bike accident when he was uninsured. He paid several thousand dollars for the ambulance trip alone, and M. does not have several thousand dollars.

"M.!" I screamed over the cops' heads. "Do you want to go in the ambulance, or do you want me to drive you?"

He reached up, with his functional hand, and started removing the straps the paramedics had secured him with. "You changed your mind?" They seemed baffled. "Yeah, she's driving me in a zipcar."

So, to shorten a long and not-particularly-exciting story, I biked like hell back to the apartment, rented a car in half a minute (thanks, zipcar!), sprinted to the zipcar lot a block and a half away, and was back at M.'s side within five minutes of leaving it. I drove him to the ER, thereby saving us thousands of dollars, and waited in the "family room" at the General Hospital while the doctors determined that all of M.'s bones were fine. He was lucky; he got away with nothing but tissue damage, and he was out of the ER in an amazing two hours, x-rays included.

And for me, anyway, the rest of the day was almost pleasant. It was 75 degrees and sunny in the city; I used a sick day to make sure M. was all right; I bought him brunch and we napped all day. Yesterday, for July 4, we went to a barbeque on someone's back porch, drank mojitos, and followed it up with a few hours of watching illegal fireworks in the park.

If M. had not been wearing a helmet, or if he'd struck the door at the same moment as another car was driving by, I'd be dealing with a dead or maimed boyfriend right now--so all things considered, we're doing pretty well.

The Mittens Affair

I'm reposting something I posted a long time ago, because (1) I'm lazy, (2) I have to work, (3) I'm too tired to come up with anything original, and (4), because I ran into the subject of the subsequent post yesterday. I was eating lunch in the courtyard--with my hands, because I'm a disgusting, uncivilized creature--and someone blond and bearded walked toward me.

He waved. "Hi--is that you, Penitent?" he said.

"Yes...?"

"Do you remember me? From a long, long time ago? Anyway, I just wanted to say hi. I just graduated, and I thought it was so strange that I saw you right before leaving."

Oh, yeah--suddenly, I recognized him:

---

There was a particular period of time near the beginning of my Junior year, when I worked in the Media center of the University Library, during which all the University's forces of Disquiet seemed to be assaulting me at once. There was the shadowy character who derived some enjoyment from speaking to me in affected foreign accents and thereby pretending to be different people in turn; there was the persistent Argentine law student and the desperate Ph.D. candidate in Electrical Engineering, and there was the day that two separate people asked to watch Home Alone within one minute of each other.

But certainly the most memorable of these incidents was the one involving the Nightmare on Elm Street boxed set, a freshman studying philosophy, and a pair of mittens.

Every night I worked for a couple of weeks, a gang of three geeky-looking boys had been coming into the Media department asking for successive installments in the Nightmare on Elm Street series. One was tall and pale, dressed all in black, with white-blond hair and blond eyelashes. The other two were smaller and dark-haired; one wore thick-rimmed, black-framed glasses. Since I found it notable that anyone would care to watch all six of these movies, I began to recognize the boys and chuckled to myself every time they left with yet another Freddy Kreuger movie.

One night, as I handed Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare over the counter to the boys, I was met with a fit of hysterical giggling that I couldn't explain, but I had the distinct feeling that it had something to do with me. I narrowed my eyes at the boys as I asked for an ID card, but their giggling didn't stop. They left with the movie and I continued about my business (probably: working a crossword puzzle clipped from the student newspaper), but at some point I looked up and noticed that one of the little bastards, the tall blond one, was skulking about suspiciously and with no apparent purpose.

"Do you need anything?" I asked rudely in that brusque tone I had cultivated exclusively for library clientele.

The guy moved up to the counter. "I have a question," he asked.

"Yes?"

"Do you like mittens?"

This was not a question I had expected. I blinked.

"What?"

"Do you, like, mittens?" His tone was matter-of-fact, as though he were repeating a routine query that I was so deaf as to mishear.

"I...I don't think I have any particularly strong feelings about mittens, one way or the other," I finally said, extremely wary.

The strange boy nodded. "Okay," he said, and, evidently satisfied, walked out and away.

---

He returned, though, over the following weeks: sometimes alone, sometimes snickering with his conspirators. "So, have you thought about it: do you like mittens?" he persisted. I began to expect his visit. Often he would come in without his friends and, apparently, without intending to check out DVDs at all.

One night I took note of the name on his ID card and searched for him in the University directory. Therein I made the discovery that he was a freshman, a philosophy major, and a resident of a dormitory in which my acquaintance "Laura" worked as a Resident Assistant. The next time I saw Laura I told her about her resident's strange behavior and asked if she could provide an explanation.

"He's a little weird," she said. "Maybe he likes you."

She informed Mittens Boy of our little discussion. Mittens Boy, in turn, told me that she had told him. I told Laura that Mittens Boy had told me that she had told him. So it goes.

---

A lull in the Mittens Affair. And breaking the lull: a party at the co-op in which I lived for three of the four years of my undergraduate career.

It was a good party, I think, or at least a decent one. The party itself, though, is irrelevant to the story at hand. What is not irrelevant is what followed the party--I returned to my room only to find, resting atop my pillow, a pair of blue woolen mittens.

I was actually afraid. To this point I had presumed Mittens Boy to be essentially harmless: a little quirky, perhaps a little creepy, but not worrisomely so. Breaking into my room, though? I felt a bit discomposed. Running to find Laura, I brought her so she could see the unwanted gift. "Did you tell Mittens Boy where to find me?" I asked.

She thought the whole thing was very funny. (I admit that, abstractly, it was.) She claimed no part in the prank. "You keeping the mittens?" she wanted to know. "They're nice mittens."

I told her she could have them.

---

Some time later, yet another night in the basement of the library, Mittens Boy stood in line behind the counter. When he came to the front he was smirking.

"What."

"I heard some creep broke into your room and left a pair of mittens on your bed," he said.

"It's true," I responded. "What kind of a creep would do something like that? Someone really fucking creepy, that's for sure."

He laughed.

"You are very creepy," I insisted redundantly.

He laughed again, and left.

I went to Florence soon thereafter, and didn't see much of Mittens Boy after that.

An Interlude for Navel-Gazing and Self-Diagnosis

Here I interrupt the scheduled programming (proceeding apace, as it was) to explain my absence.

True, there's been work. Lots of tedious, tedious work.

It's also true that M. has exercised eminent domain on my laptop for the sacred, o'erweening cause of Making Party Flyers On Photoshop.

But mostly, there's been the crazy.

A few weeks ago, for instance, the left side of my torso was going through spells of numbness. I convinced myself I had either a brain tumor or Huntington's Disease, wondered how I'd react when the doctor gave me the news--wondered how I ought to spend the last few months/years of my life. The numbness is mostly gone now; I believe the correct diagnosis is "crazy."

Not enough? My existing pathologies are getting worse. Social anxiety rules my life, more or less. Increasingly these days, I think of the bewildering array of people I might encounter Out There and decide I'm better off staying home. And away from the phone. Away from the email account. Away from the blog, even.

The social anxiety is clear. Upon reading the DSM-IV criteria for Avoidant Personality Disorder, it's pretty clear I have that, too-- I think I satisfy every criterion. That's not new, though; all that's new is my self-diagnosis. But since I'm already self-diagnosing, I think I'm moderately depressed as well. And this is new.

I kind of hate fun these days. Isn't that what depression is? "Let us go to a mind-bogglingly fun event," says M. "Holy God, I'd rather die," says I. "Let us be friends," writes potentially cool burlesque dancer in an email. "Eh," says I, and ignore it. Old friends write me emails and I've ignored every one. I think my job is hugely responsible for my unhappiness, but inertia keeps me from looking for another. I paid hundreds of dollars for an online class but haven't had the motivation to fax in the first homework assigment, even though I've completed it. For at least six months I've been wearing borrowed contact lenses with mildly incorrect prescriptions because it's too much trouble to make myself an appointment. The list goes on and on.

One frustrating trouble with social anxiety is that it's a huge obstacle to seeking treatment for itself. "It's easy to find a good, affordable therapist," my friend Zoe told me. "Just call around, and negotiate for prices." Negotiate for prices? If I could do such a thing, I wouldn't need the treatment to begin with.

I need a therapist, I probably need drugs, and I certainly need a new job. These are requisite for not feeling like crap, I think.

Then, there's the boyfriend. Dating (and living with) a workaholic statistician has been hard; dating with a workaholic statistician who is also a Ph.D. student may prove even harder. Yet I cannot imagine that either scenario could bring me any closer to madness than the experience of living with that very same workaholic while he's on a six-month rampage of wanton irresponsibility. And what makes it especially pernicious to this melancholic, perenially exhausted social retard has been the dedication with which he pursues his goal of being manically irresponsible. This is not someone who takes partying lightly. Partying is a serious affair, something to monopolize his (and my?) time and money. I daresay I am not built for this, and Depressive Penitent in particular is built for just its opposite. Depressive Penitent wants to sit in a chair with a glass of wine and some Borges stories. She wants to watch hours and hours of Nick Cave videos with big headphones blocking out all the ambient noises. If she must leave her apartment, she'd prefer to make her way to a good friend's place and sip Belgian beer while watching something directed by Kurosawa or Werner Herzog. Hell, she'd be reasonably content studying calculus. But raucous hipster parties populated by tactically bisexual, strategically anorexic fashion girls with enough black or blond hair dye to muddy the whole Pacific? A million times, no! In reality, though, it's been more like: a million times.

I have the pictures to prove it, but uploading them would be too exhausting.

On Friday M. is throwing another party. It should be a big one, but we'll see. This time M. will be a tactical bisexual, and for the night I'll be officially disowned. The bar prefers gay DJs, see. Couples are no fun anyway. He won't be pretending to be bisexual, at any rate: he is bisexual. Or was. Or is. Or was. I don't know, it's so dizzying; if only I got the sense that anything was real. I'm not mad, or I am, or I'm not. Who knows? Not I, certainly.

I do intend to come back and write about my trip east. It was absurd, really, and was responsible either for driving me batshit insane or for helpfully convincing me that I had already gone batshit insane. Either way, interesting!

Don't worry, though, it's all relative. What's insane for me may be a fucking success story for some folk. Besides, I'm drinking lots of German beer as I type and it's making me frightfully dour.

Eastward Part 1: An Accidental Afternoon

Our vacation began, as you can probably guess, with a hangover, three hours of sleep between the two of us, and one rather large mishap. We made the best of it, though.

The shuttle came for us at 3:50AM. We'd been awake for about 20 minutes, horrified to find ourselves still drunk and in the early stages of hung over. We sloppily finished packing (forgetting items like toothbrushes, of course), dressed (also sloppily), staggered outside, and, zombie-like, handed our suitcases to the driver.

When the driver dropped us off at the airport, he asked, "where are you going?"

"DC," one of us mumbled.

His smile twisted into a grimace. He shivered and spat, "I hate that city. A hellhole. Absolute worst place in the world." Then we tipped him, and he wished us a good trip to said hellhole.

No restaurants were open in the airport, M. was surly, and everything befuddled us. Yet somehow, we managed to maneuver through the lines, find coffee, and board our plane for Salt Lake City. I hate flying, but this flight was genuinely pleasant. There was nary a jot of turbulence; the sky was vast and clear. The long, slow descent into the airport, over the lake with all its salt and botulism, was like landing on another planet. In a good way.

Hungry and with some time to kill, we sat down for some pizza and a beer. Unfortunately, our exhaustion was such that we saw no problem with watching the clock on M.'s laptop, still stuck in Pacific time. So we missed our connecting flight. It turned out that the next plane for DC was leaving in seven hours.

But as I said, we made the most of it. At an airport bar, we downed several of these beers before deciding to take advantage of a free tour of the Temple Square courtesy of Utah, Salt Lake City, and the Mormon Church. A kindly old couple drove us there, telling us about their time as missionaries in Pakistan many decades ago. They dropped us off in front of the Temple Square, where our tour guides, two awkward, nauseatingly friendly twenty-year-old girls dressed like latter-day Puritans, met us and introduced themselves. One of them was East Asian and spoke very limited English. The other was gangly, long-haired, and slightly bucktoothed--a prototypical American country girl.

"So, you're traveling together?" she asked.

"Yes."

"How nice! Are you friends, or are you brother and sister?"

We looked at each other. "I guess we are friends."

It was a short guided tour past dioramas and through the Tabernacle Choir space, but above all it was evangelism. We sat in a room that was like a planetarium where a gigantic white Jesus statue boomed, from a speaker somewhere, that he is the center of the Universe. As we walked around, the tour guides got their evangelism on, hard-core.

"Do you have a Book of Mormon?" one girl asked M.

"I probably have one somewhere," he said. "My dad's side of the family is Mormon."

"Have you read it?"

"I've looked at it."

"Well, promise me you'll read it, and then you'll see that it contains truth."

We actually did want to see the house of Brigham Young, M.'s ancestor, as well as the genealogy library, but there was no time. We went back to the street, where a van picked us up, along with a lesbian couple. They looked shellshocked, and were.

We introduced ourselves, and it turned out that, remarkably, they came from our city. From our very own neighborhood. In fact, they lived on our street, only a few blocks away.

"This shit is scary," the chubby one whispered, all wide-eyed. "We couldn't stand it. We went to the closest bar. It was in a hotel. We had drink quotas." She seemed legitimately surprised and horrified, like someone who walked into an ice cream store and found instead the Heart of Darkness. Did they not know where they were? M. and I had every expectation of being evangelized to. That girl was not the world's brightest bulb, but her girlfriend seemed all right.

At the airport we sat down for another meal and a beer, and, believe it or not, we almost missed our flight again. But the airline bent their rules for us, and soon we were on our way to DC.

Eastward, Ho

My week-long sabbatical from the Internet was bizarre, disorienting, akin to losing one of my senses.

I turned twenty-four. I "celebrated" with an aggressively lackluster night out with M. and Zoe, then spent all of the next day working on boring things.

I went to this restaurant for the first time and liked it. A drunken M. told me I should be taking Wellbutrin.

I got myself into a nasty bike accident on the way to the train; good thing for that clunky helmet. Crossed an intersection at a trillion mph trying to make it past a yellow light; a cab cut me off; still hoping to make the light, I pulled a rather risky move and caught my wheel in a rail track, hit the ground in a serious way. My helmet whacked against the pavement and one of my palms was subjected to a deep scrape. I still have shoulder and neck pain from that incident, plus a broken backpack and a cut-up palm. Awesome. I should probably learn not to barrel down busy streets as fast as I can, but I hate slowness so much--

Since M. isn't taking classes until September, he's become a manic party-planner and promoter. Now he wants to make money from it. He's been doing little else. An unfortunate side-effect of this social-mania has been his newfound obsession with social networking sites, Myspace especially. He treats the incredibly silly business of "getting more friends on Myspace" as a job. For instance: "I can't go to bed until I have ten more friends." Or, "I can't help with dinner because I need to make a party flyer." For a while, he spent all his time looking for hot girls on Myspace to be his friends because, he explained, convincing people that hot girls will be at a party is the best way of advertising it. Like the sleazy clubs in Tijuana, I said (ladies free!). Either I'm substantially less patient than I was a year ago, or M. has become substantially more infuriating. I vote for the latter. As well as the former.

There will be a giant party-to-end-all-parties in early June, a birthday celebration of sorts for Rockstar Friend. Rockstar Friend's band will be playing. And M. will be DJing. Sam will be DJing. One of M. and Rockstar Friend's ex-bandmates will be DJing. Three big local DJs will also be there, as well as some supposedly big blogger from the East coast. And all of this will happen, God help me, on a Sunday, which will also be, since the world hates me, the night after I fly back from ten days' "vacation"* on the East coast. (As soon as we land on that Saturday, we will go see Rockstar Friend's band play at a venue, followed by a party at an after-hours club where M. and Sam will be spinning.)

My flight leaves at six tomorrow morning, it is ten thirty already, and I haven't even thought about packing yet. M. is meanwhile busily Myspacing and party-planning. Christ.

I'll be back once all this insanity is over. Unless, of course, I first burst into flames, which seems increasingly likely.

* I put that in quotation marks because it will be the least relaxing vacation I can imagine. It involves early mornings and late nights, as well as ostensible telecommuting and not-particularly-laid-back cities (DC and NY). Moreover, in NY, we will be staying with one of M.'s friends with whom I have an ugly history and who does not particularly like me. She is close friends with M.'s ex-girlfriend, whom I will probably meet and spend some time with. And so on. Pant; die.

Whiskey You're the Devil

I'm not pleased with the seemingly exponential acceleration of time. There is so much to do, and the last few years have gone where, exactly?

I've been entertaining the notion of taking a one-week hiatus from l'Internet. Beginning tomorrow, tentatively. Clearly I can't abandon email if I am to remain a vaguely productive member of society, but even excepting email, this would be much, much tougher than Sober Month. If I'm feeling particularly radical, maybe I'll take a break from news entirely and abstain from The Economist, too. Perhaps it will be good for me.

Similarly, M. is trying to give up whiskey after waking up on Saturday morning, hung over and having little recollection of what went on the previous night. "The last thing I remember, we were standing at the bar with the DJ and his girlfriend, and then he handed me another Maker's Mark. What happened after that? How did we get home?"

Blacking out is scary. I did it exactly once my senior year of college, roughly a week before I broke up with my then-boyfriend. According to observers I was uncharacteristically loose-lipped, spilling my own secrets as well as somebody else's. Ever since, I've worked hard to avoid such alcohol-induced amnesia, and succeeded. Whiskey causes M. to black out quite frequently, which is, frankly, grounds for concern. So I welcome his decision to avoid the stuff, even if I'm skeptical that he'll succeed.

Here are some unrelated photos.


These are carnitas sopes:

I recently signed up for a car share service and first used it on Sunday, when we drove to one of the peninsular suburbs partly in order to buy pet supplies but mostly as an excuse to eat these exquisite plates of fatty awesomeness. We'd been in withdrawal for more than a year, sadly. The secret to these particular specimens is their crusts, which are made of a thick corn meal that is doubtless held together with plenty of tasty, tasty lard. M. and I order it with spoonfuls of hot salsa, but even that's not masochistic enough for us, so we brought a raw habanero pepper to dice and add on top of them, too.


Here is a plaster goat that Sam's girlfriend gave to us for safekeeping while she searches for an apartment. The (dumber) cat was terribly frightened of it at first and hid downstairs, cringing, for hours.


M.'s shitty phone finally died over the weekend, leaving this artistic-looking pattern permanently on its screen:


A few weekends ago, when the weather was perfect, M. and I went with his dad and stepmom to see this exhibit at one of the city's big museums. The coffee in the cafe was crap, but I rather liked the design of the cafe itself:

The Facebookization of Lameness

Like 99% of people my age, I have a profile on Facebook. I think it's pretty stupid and use it for absolutely nothing besides stalking people I haven't seen in ages (I mean, "keeping track of old friends"), but for that reason alone it's quite useful.

I discovered another use for it yesterday, when it informed me that my ex-boyfriend A., whom I dated for five and a half years, had "de-friended" me. I was aware that my brother plays stupid de-friending games with his zillion underage Myspace ex-girlfriends, but I had assumed that adults who don't still live with their parents don't do that sort of thing. The only person I know who has been de-friended was Zoe, who slept with a crazy acquaintance's boyfriend without knowing they were still together. A crazy acquaintance. Removing someone from a friend list in a social networking site seems a petty, ineffective, and especially silly way of registering one's displeasure.

Thus my ex-boyfriend joins the ranks of my brother's Myspace harem and Zoe's cuckoo acquaintance. The best part is that I don't even know what I did to deserve the dreaded/farcical de-friending treatment. No idea. I have exchanged a few brief emails with him recently, perfectly cordial ones, and that is all. Synopsis: devoid of context, childish, and lame.

---

The weekend was brutal. I almost vomited in the train this morning, but barely managed to suppress it. Maybe I'll write about le weekend later, but now I need to do unimaginably boring things on the computer.

More Fun With Linguistics

Continuing with the "I'm too tired to write anything vaguely coherent" theme, here's a gee-whiz map showing what parts of the country use what generic term for soft drinks:

It's funny how there are a few islands of "soda" in the Midwestern sea of "pop." I always wondered why M. said "soda" when every other Midwesterner I've known said "pop," but now I can see that eastern Wisconsin, for whatever reason, differs from the rest of the region (save parts of Missouri and Illinois).

I wonder if there's a map showing whether people call a dollar bill a "single." Or whether someone is likely to refer to Interstate 5 as "the 5." (Is that unique to Southern California?) These are all extremely important matters, I know.

Languages

If you were lucky enough to catch last night's inebriated anti-fun rant, you might guess that I've spent the day drowsy, resentful, and brain-dead. And you'd be right. I am not nearly sharp enough to function passably on three hours of sleep, even if I define "functioning" as "being able to write in a personal blog that hardly anyone reads." Not a particularly high bar, to be sure.

So instead, a few factoids from the exciting world of ethnic/linguistic geography.

- Papua New Guinea alone has at least 830 distinct languages.

- The Lemba tribe of southern Zimbabwe is descended from the Cohen tribe of Israel.

- Maltese is kind of a fusion between Arabic and Italian.

- Hindi and Urdu are close to being the same language, though written in Sanskrit and Arabic characters respectively. The language spoken in most Bollywood films is supposedly closer to Urdu than it is to official Hindi.

- Indonesia chose a version of Malay as its official language because it was easy to learn, not because any significant percentage of Indonesians actually spoke it--they didn't. Javanese was actually the largest language group in Indonesia, but the government considered it unworkable because it was a difficult language to learn.

- Don't be surprised if any of these factoids are somewhat incorrect. I am in no condition for fact-checking.

Bastards

The weather in the city has been perfect, maybe a little above perfect. Last night, instead of eating out, blogging, learning calculus, cooking, reading, harassing cats, or stalking my brother on Myspace, I sat on the porch with M., eating bread with cheese, olives, and duck pate as slowly as possible like a goddamn French person. The difference being that the French probably don't do so while watching South Park on their laptops, but perhaps I underestimate them.

It was all very relaxing. What was very much not relaxing was being awoken at 4am from a deep sleep by the sound of jackhammers--at 4am!--pounding at the sidewalk outside the building. Actually, since I was still delirious from deep sleep, my first thought was something more like "artillery! I'm going to die!" or "North Korea!" or "wailing and gnashing of teeth!", but regardless, it was certainly enough to jolt me awake. It turned out to be the gas and electric company. They jackhammered away for at least half an hour. Isn't there a law against pseudo-governmental monopolies wielding jackhammers in residential neighborhoods at 4am?

Also not relaxing was M.'s bending his bicycle wheel this morning. Now we are condemned to take the rail to work, which is far and away inferior to cycling.

Jaws

Several years ago, when I had my wisdom teeth removed, the orthodontist looked through the x-ray machine--or whatever it was; I could be wrong from all that valium--and told me that I had a bad left jaw. "You may not notice it now," he said, "but one day your jaw will start hurting, and you'll live with that chronic pain for the rest of your life."

"The rest of my life? Won't there be something you can do about it?"

"Well, there's radical surgery--but that's risky, and probably not worth it."

Two weeks ago, I woke up with pain in my left jaw. I'm worried because it hasn't gotten much better. Chewing hurts. I can't touch the top molars to the bottom ones without pain. I wonder, is this where the lifelong chronic pain begins?

139

This post will be as brainless as possible. And that's a promise.

In other words, it will be one of those lame "list of things about me" posts that conveniently requires little thought, effort, or structure, while still sucking up a big chunk of time that could otherwise be used for, say, work or study.

Let the laziness begin.

1. I have no piercings or tattoos.
2. I am 1/8 Chinese and 3/8 "latina," whatever that means.
3. My mother's maiden name would be Li if her grandmother had not been bullied by her racist parents into rejecting her husband's conspicuous foreign surname. (Her family disowned her anyway.)
4. I loathe the feeling of heaters and of clothes fresh out of the dryer.
5. I still have dozens of chicken pox scars.
6. My dad grew up Mormon.
7. I really have no idea what he thinks of religion, but he seems to tolerate my mom's evangelism. He won't go to church, though.
8. My paternal grandmother sued my dad's younger brother for all he was worth. He was so
infuriated that he cut off all contact from the family, to the point that I don't know the name of my only female cousin on my dad's side, and we haven't seen her brothers since they (and I) were little kids.
9. I have never broken or sprained a bone or joint.
10. I have never really "dated" like normal people and I don't think I would be very good at it.
11. My latent OCD emerges when it comes to food.
12. I use my hands to dismember dishes containing questionable ingredients; I admit I am completely disgusting. In particular, I painstakingly remove fat and gristle from meat. (And onions from everything.)
13. I was an Ayn Rand nut in high school.
14. I'm not at all anymore.
15. I'm squishily a libertarian, though. More or less. I think some of the hardcore ones are loony, though.
16. I think my addiction to political news is an illness.
17. I think price theory is fun.
18. I worry that I'll never do anything about my social anxiety disorder because doing so would probably mean going to a psychiatrist and otherwise talking to people.
19. I think grammar, syntax, spelling--all those boring things about language--are fun.
20. I dated my first boyfriend for five and a half years.
21. Two weeks after I broke up with him, I started dating my current boyfriend.
22. I hate people who block the escalator when I'm trying to walk up.
23. I always walk up the escalator, quickly.
24. I have an excellent sense of direction.
25. I always plan walking, driving, or biking routes on the maps that are always in my head.
26. I once considered myself a patient person, but I don't anymore.
27. I think that the question of whether or not I get along with another person is nearly independent of taste or common interest; I almost see it as a "chemical" thing analogous to sexual attraction.
28. Sometimes I wear sunglasses only to avoid having to figure out whether or not to make eye contact with people I pass on the street. Believe it or not, this causes a lot of stress for me.
29. Talking on the phone is enormously stressful, too. I avoid phone calls to the point of handicap.
30. I rarely wear high heels, but I can walk in them when I need to.
31. I was hostile towards the color pink as a child. Reactionary, even.
32. I was also one of those kids who violently abused Barbie dolls and petulantly refused to accept them as gifts.
33. I was a complete loudmouth until puberty.
34. My shoes (today) are all white and fasten with velcro.
35. I'm enormously happy that my boyfriend is not a romantic.
36. In the first grade I nearly gave my teacher a heart attack when I caught a gopher snake during recess and brought it back to my desk. I became righteously angry when she dared to suggest that I had no way of telling whether it was poisonous or not: of course I did.
37. Relatively speaking, I think I peaked in elementary school.
38. I got sick from bad mayonnaise in the 4th grade and haven't been able to touch the stuff since.
39. My dad built the house I grew up in, with help from my grandfather and one of my mom's brothers.
40. I am not a fan of the marijuana.
41. I think the drug war is a disgrace and that most (if not all) drugs should be legal.
42. Flying scares the shit out of me.
43. I recognize this is irrational, however, and don't let it govern my traveling decisions.
44. I can't sleep without earplugs.
45. I also wear one of those dorky sleep masks.
46. I was creepily obsessed with Pink Floyd in early high school.
47. I think I desperately needed obsessions back then because I had no social life.
48. As a freshman I used to keep a journal in which I wrote "letters" addressed to Roger Waters of Pink Floyd.
49. I used to hide my CDs and tastes in music in the same way that my peers would hide their drugs and birth control.
50. My parents met on a blind date.
51. My mom didn't speak much English at the time.
52. I have eight uncles and one aunt by blood.
53. My mom's youngest brother is gay and my grandmother copes with the fact by pretending it isn't true.
54. My mom didn't tell me my uncle was gay until I was, oh, twenty? Not that I hadn't figured it out a long, long time ago.
55. I stopped believing in Santa Claus in first grade, but I kept pretending I believed in him (and the Easter Bunny) until the sixth grade so as not to spoil my mom's illusions.
56. I would be surprised if any of my elementary school teachers did not remember me, even today.
57. I hate shopping for shoes.
58. I get most of my clothes from a thrift store a block from my apartment.
59. The movie The Santa Clause used to give me nightmares.
60. So did Mrs. Doubtfire.
61. I almost cried when Gene Siskel died of brain cancer. I was in eighth grade at the time.
62. I hate to cry in front of other people and very, very rarely do.
63. The one person I had a "fling" with at the beginning of college ended up leaving school for a while in order to spend time in jail for drunk driving.
64. I like to forget about those embarrassing two months.
65. Everyone in my freshman dorm thought I was a snobby bitch. Apparently it didn't occur to anyone that I was just plain shy.
66. Freshman year was probably my worst.
67. I missed one final exam that year because I had to go to the ER as a result of a problem that I had a roughly 0.001 % chance of developing. Maybe less.
68. Once, I missed a final exam because I was under the impression that it was actually being held the following day, so I slept in that morning on purpose.
69. I grew up bilingual.

Here I am with my brother, back when we were cute, bilingual, and living in a trailer on the homestead.

70. I don't think I'm particularly bilingual anymore.
71. Sometimes I wonder whether I would never have been accepted to my alma mater if not for affirmative action.
72. I don't own a televison or want one.
73. I would like to have a projector in order to watch movies, though.
74. Paper mail stresses me out and I tend to ignore it. Late fees for medical bills, etc. often result.
75. I always carry a water bottle.
76. I enjoy punishing myself with spicy peppers.
77. I hate bell peppers, however.
78. I frequently make enemies by accident.
79. Lately I've begun to seriously doubt the idea of "free will."
80. This doubt is kind of upsetting to me.
81. If I could do it over, I would have studied something far more technical in college.
82. I am a chronic procrastinator.
83. I am chronically a few minutes late to just about everything.
84. Hardly a day goes by that I don't need to run somewhere. Usually in order to catch public transportation.
85. I am tired of most of the music in my itunes library, since I listen to it all day at work.
86. Some of the songs currently on my playlist are:
- "Mutiny in Heaven" (The Birthday Party)
- "Baby's on Fire" (Brian Eno)
- "Is This Thing On?" (!!!)
- "Pepper-Tree" (Cocteau Twins)
- "Diplo Rhythm" (Diplo)
- "I Love a Man in Uniform" (Gang of Four)
- "And I Was a Boy from School" (Hot Chip)
- "Gimme Danger" (Iggy and the Stooges)
- "Computer Love" (Kraftwerk)
- "Someone Great" (LCD Soundsystem)
- "Chelsea Hotel" (Leonard Cohen)
- "The Mystery of Love" (Marianne Faithfull)
- "Lose My Breath" (My Bloody Valentine)
- "The Ballad of Robert Moore and Betty Coltrane" (Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds)
- "In Every Dream Home a Heartache" (Roxy Music)
- "I'll Be by Your Side" (Sally Shapiro)
- "This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody)" (Talking Heads)
87. I love sushi, especially the weird stuff that most people steer clear of.
88. I spend an absurd portion of my income on food. Maybe as much as half.
89. I own a credit card, but I have never used it because I don't trust myself to pay the bills on time.
90. The last time I cut my hair above my shoulders, I was in third grade. I kind of want shorter hair now, but I don't like the idea of visiting a hair salon.
91. I clip my keys to my belt so I don't lose them.
92. I spend more than two hours every day commuting to work and back.
93. The first time my boyfriend heard of me, his friend was describing me to him as "a girl who dresses like a kid in a JC-Penney ad." In the context of making fun of me, presumably. This was five or six years ago, and I don't dress like that anymore.
94. I have a bad hay allergy. Being around hay makes me miserable.
95. I have been writing about myself on the Internet, on and off, since 2000.
96. I was far more public about it in 2000 than I am now. (For example, I attached my full name to my website.)
97. My best friend from elementary school and my best friend from high school are both cancer survivors.
98. I don't talk to my elementary school best friend anymore.
99. The high school best friend is very close with my ex-boyfriend these days, which can make talking to her rather awkward. We exchange emails on occasion, but I haven't seen her for years.
100. Once, when she was angry at me, she convinced my ex-boyfriend that I was bulimic, even though that was not remotely true. An "intervention" ensued. This, in retrospect, is kind of hilarious.
101. I don't think I want kids.
102. I spend far too much time reading kooks' websites. It's really hard to stop. My "favorites" are the unapologetic misogynists and the Biblical hyper-literalists who believe, for example, that no woman should ever work outside the home or attend college. There's actually quite a bit of overlap there, but probably not in ways that either side would readily admit.
103. I'm a big fan of David Lynch.
104. Once during finals I watched the entire second season of Twin Peaks at the library instead
of studying.
105. In ninth grade, when I read A Tale of Two Cities, I developed a bizarre lit-crush on the pathetic character Sydney Carton.
106. The only vacations I ever took as a child were road/camping trips, with the exception of trips to Mexico to see family.
107. I have a vague memory of riding in a plane to Mexico when I was nine months old. I am not sure whether the memory is false. (The second time I rode in a plane, I was sixteen: not easily mistaken.)
108. Many of my memories from childhood and adolescence are still very, very vivid.
109. The most vivid memories are visual/spatial ones, e.g., where in a class I was sitting and who was sitting around me.
110. In high school I always performed well on multiple choice history exams because I could remember the location of the information within the text and then picture what the answer was.
110a. Relatedly, I have difficulty processing auditory information unless I write it down. A corollary: I am notoriously bad at understanding song lyrics, and when I sing along to them, I do so in gibberish.
111. My long-term memory seems to be far better than my short-term memory.
112. I did acid a few days before graduating from college. My experience was 100% positive.
113. Being disoriented is upsetting to me. I tend to avoid elevators because they make me disoriented.
114. In elementary school I was the district-wide long jump champion for two years in a row.
115. I was also widely recognized as the most athletic girl in school.
116. I hate watching sports.
117. My ex-boyfriend is unhealthily obsessed with pro basketball. I don't think he ever realized what a turn-off that was.
118. I wake up less than half an hour before leaving the apartment every morning.
119. I have never blow dried my hair. I don't think I would even know how.
120. I cannot begin to describe how much I despise all things cutesy.
121. Couples baby-talking each other make me want to vomit.
122. Frankly, it bothers me when people baby-talk babies, too.
123. I lost all contact with most people from my past when I stopped signing on to aim.
124. I routinely stalk people on the Internet, however.
125. I think I'm pretty good at it.
126. Perhaps I'd make a decent private detective?
127. I bike dangerously fast through the city sometimes, passing cars left and right. I probably shouldn't, but moving slowly would drive me crazy. At least I wear a helmet.
128. I'm almost always tired.
129. I like drinking Clamato, preferably with lime and habanero salsa.
130. I never needed braces. My teeth grew in remarkably straight all by themselves.
131. I suspect I am genetically programmed to reject religion.
132. I've sunbathed topless in Europe. (I'm not terribly shy about nudity, so long as I'm not alone.)
133. As a passenger, I get carsick if I don't watch the road, and I compulsively check over my shoulder every time the driver changes lanes.
134. I keep my nails short and don't paint them. I don't really wear makeup, either.
135. I think feet are disgusting. I kind of wish no one wore sandals. This is one of many aversions that I share with my boyfriend.
136. Never again do I want to live in my hometown.
137. No one I know in real life knows I have this blog, and I'd like to keep it that way.
138. I liked my old blog better.
139. I think I'm done with this list. Arbitrarily it ends at item #139.

Sober Month Is Dead; Long Live Sober Month

My married flatmates are breaking the lease and moving away soon; apparently our after-midnight carryings-on are too crazy for them. I rather enjoy their company (childish tantrum aside), but so it goes. When we do find another flatmate, he or she will be my tenth in less than two years. I wonder, is this normal for city folk?

---

Sober Month died on May Day. I celebrated, appropriately enough, by drinking vodka.

On Tuesday, M. and I got home at 11pm. Fifteen minutes later, we flagged a cab to a DJ set/dance party in the rather creepy warehouse district where these things usually take place. Our cabbie complained about boorish, fratty baseball fans, and then, without any transition at all, regaled us with a story about being threatened at gunpoint by a couple of thugs downtown. Note to self: even if desperate, never work as a cab driver.

I have never been to a show at this particular venue without M. drinking too much whiskey and doing something completely ridiculous.

First, there was the time that he took off his shoe and handed it to the DJ, over the DJ table, for an autograph. After the show, he wrote his email address on a ten-dollar bill and gave it to the DJ, asking him to spin a party at our apartment. (By the way, the DJ in question is widely recognized as a joke.)

Then, there was the time that the stage was roped off but M. decided to dance on it anyway. When the DJ flipped out and an army of security guards swooped down on us, M. was so infuriated that he quit the dance floor and stood outside, chain-smoking and talking shit about the DJ. Later, M. spotted the DJ fleeing the venue and promptly rushed over to block his path. My first thought was: my God, a fist fight? I watched as the DJ--a small, effete man whom M. positively dwarfed--cringed with fright and summoned security. As it turned out, M. merely griped over the roped-off stage, but his body language looked mighty aggressive at the time.

This time, M. decided it was a good idea to lean into the ticket booth and swipe the venue's stamp pad on our way out the door. Apparently the whiskey told him to do it. We were in bed by 3am. Waking up was brutal.

---

I finished the project, but the project finished off my brain. Writing, even in a blog post, suddenly seems close to impossible.

Screw transitions. Here are some pictures of an America-themed barbecue that my soon-to-be-ex-flatmates arranged for the benefit of their French visitors.

A giant platter of freedom fries:


Burgers and beer-cooked sausages:


A very special hat:


Bad beer and good beer, none of which I touched as it was still Sober Month at the time:


This is not from the barbecue; it is a gratuitous picture of cats:

Birth/School/Work/Death

I have been on the "home stretch" of this cursed project for about a week now. When I'm truly done with it, I will print out every one of its cutesy, punny pages, light them on fire, and then dance upon their ashes.

It is therapeutic to express anger toward inanimate objects.

There's yet another show tonight, set to last far into the AM. Sober Month is over; God help me.

A Tantrum

Last night's show was good fun, and didn't go as late as I thought it would. And when M. offered to buy me a glass of million-dollar concert whiskey, I declined because Sober Month isn't over yet. "Sure it's over, I already sent in the May rent check," he said. "I follow the spirit of the law, you follow the letter of the law. I'm more of a Christian, you're a Jew."

"Fine. But I'm not drinking."

The lead singer of the band was a spastic, 'fro-sporting, incredibly entertaining performer who reminded me of a cross between Jim Morrison and Mickey Aval0n, if that makes any sense. Or even if it doesn't. I think it was the first time since my freshman year of college that I danced without the aid of alcohol.

Then we returned home at midnight to a rather unfortunate incident. Sam's new girlfriend yelled at M., something about a burrito. M. yelled back. Apparently this was enough to awaken and utterly infuriate our French flatmate, who advertised her displeasure by slamming her door a number of times, hitting cushions as loudly as she could on the couch downstairs, and then stalking upstairs to do a load of laundry and make as much noise as was humanly possible in the process.

There's probably nothing in the world that M. disrespects more than passive aggression, and causing him to disrespect you is the best way to ensure that he makes your life miserable. So his response to our flatmate's temper tantrum was first to laugh, then to (drunkenly) talk about how babyish he finds her, and then to desire to keep her up later by watching South Park until 1am in our room next door.

I hate this crap, and should have nothing to do with it, but I'm sure I'm already presumed guilty through association. Because M. and I are the same, or something. Coming home tonight will doubtless be interesting.

Sunday

Some guy yelled at me on the street because I didn't respond to him the first time. Charming.

We're going to a show tonight. This will be a bad idea.

Awkward Social Gathering, Version 49012.5

My boyfriend takes party-planning very seriously, so when they don't go as planned, he tends to stew. He distracts himself for days analyzing what went wrong, pinning blame accordingly. For instance, few people danced at our last one because Sam brought in a third DJ who played nothing but un-danceable music-snob techno fare. M. considers this a disaster.

"Disaster" is too strong, but I do prefer dance parties. This is half because I like to dance, and half because dancing gives me an excuse to avoid awkward conversation. If someone tries to talk to me, I can say, "I can't talk, I'm dancing." If the room is littered with acquaintances with whom I ought to make small-talk, I can get away with a quick "hi" without seeming completely rude.

At the party last Saturday, I tried to dance, but felt a little awkward when everyone else chose instead to hover around at a six-foot radius and gawk. Later in the evening, a couple of jaw-droppingly intoxicated second-rate hipsters with questionable hygeine gyrated forth, asking me to dance with/kiss/date them. When I pointed out my boyfriend behind the turntables, two of these guys actually brought me their own girlfriends as some kind of evidence in their favor. Wha? This actually happens to me often. Do I systematically attract swingers, or do they systematically swing at everybody?

As the clock struck four I longed for bed, but was instead held hostage by one of the two hipster-swingers and his meandering, utterly nonsensical, yet weirdly insistent attempts at drunken conversation. Could I please sit down and talk to him, since he was having such a bad day? Reluctantly, I stayed and tried to make sense of his bizarre ravings about the "cuteness" of my boyfriend's name, an obscure indie band I'd never heard of, his girlfriend, and, you know, life. The zenith/nadir came when he decided to coo me a "free form" love poem to the tune of a song M. was playing a few feet away. After hearing three clumsy similes for my eyes I'd had more than enough, so I stood up and hid behind the DJ table.

On another note, I am proud of myself for not having vomited, passed out, or otherwise truly hurt myself with alcohol since 2007 began. Moreover, I have succeeded in keeping April a sober month (with the planned exception of the party). Self, hurrah!

I took pictures.

Here is our fridge stocked with cheap hipster-scum beer:


Here is Sam playing a pre-party game of ghost pool:


M. plays ghost pool with Sam, watched by creepy Chinese propaganda:


I don't know any of the people in this picture. The guy in black with the mysterious facial trauma was one of the swingers, but not the "free-form poetry" guy:


And here's a pile of random hipsters I don't know.


M. thinks we ought to slap a cover charge on all these goddamned strangers next time.

In case you were wondering, today was a beautiful Saturday and I spent it doing work.

Gender and Writing

Via Andrew Sullivan, this website uses an algorithm to predict whether text was written by a man or a woman.

I fed it three blog entries. The first was deemed overwhelmingly female, the second overwhelmingly male, and the third just barely female.

I gave it a piece on Sputnik and DARPA that I wrote for work, for which I was determined to be very male. Then I gave it a paragraph on the health risks of trans fats, which was apparently very female. A term paper on neoconservatism was slightly female. Another term paper, on intelligence reform, was way, way male.

Looking at the keywords, it seems that the algorithm is designed to detect gendered topics rather than the sex of the writer. Or perhaps to detect the sex of the writer through the gender of the topic. Pronouns like I, me, your, she, hers, we, and myself are supposedly female--so if you're writing mostly about yourself and other people, you're a girl. (Livejournal is overwhelmingly female, I hear.) So is "was," which might be used to talk about recent events. Prepositions like "with," "where" and "when" are female, too. (E.g., "I was with so-and-so when we ran into so-and-so in the bar where I met so-and-so.")

The male keywords contain more spatial prepositions (below, above, at, to, around) and present forms of be (are, is). Non-gendered and indefinite pronouns--like it, what, who, these, and many--are male as well. Articles (a, the) too. So if you write about objects and the concrete realities of the world as it is now, you're a guy.

I may be completely wrong, but suspect that if this algorithm works on most people, it's because of topics. You're not going to find much room for "I" "me," "hers," or "myself" in a paper about intelligence reform.

---

I think that something profoundly stupid will happen this weekend. Maybe several somethings.