Super Swiss Army knife to the rescue

I feel like documenting the instances in which my small, pink Swiss Army knife has come in handy. A gift from my dad, I love it to pieces and it resides on my key chain. As a result, it's with me nearly everywhere I go (except for vacations that require flights. I couldn't bear to lose it in my luggage and I can't exactly waltz blithely onto a plane with a knife, even a small one, in my pocket).

Of course, I can't recall specific dates or instances of usage in the past (except one time in undergrad when I randomly got a glass shard stuck in my palm waiting for my class to meet at Spurlock and used the tweezers to extract it.) From now on, more specific documentation!

June 4, 2009: Used the knife's screwdriver tool to open many compartments of a friend's iMac in order to extract the hard drive. Did not complete the extraction with the screwdriver attachment, but it went a long way towards accomplishing this, considering relative lack of appropriately-headed screwdrivers (are star-headed screws new?).

June 11, 2009: Approached by boyfriend's former lab boss who inquired if we had any sharp implements with either of us for the purpose of unthreadifying his blazer. My scissor attachment was chipperly produced and the offending thread perched on his shoulder was removed so that the prof, newly natty, could enjoy an important dinner with wife et. al.

Grad school vocab

one more grad school word, that I've looked up a bunch of times before but always forget:

hermeneutic: interpretive, explanatory, to make clear

I want a girl with a short skirt and a grad school vocab

So, this week, I learned three words. The first two were dropped in class and one was in my readings. The neat thing about classroom technology: I could bring up dictionary.com right there and then and discover what the words meant. Pretty cool.

Didactic: 1. intended for instruction; instructive: didactic poetry. 2. inclined to teach or lecture others too much: a boring, didactic speaker.

Hagiography: a biography that idealizes or idolizes the person (especially a person who is a saint)

Reify: to convert into or regard as a concrete thing: to reify a concept.

Sarcastic Rants

1. Apparently I missed the memo where all females (regardless of social status, mental capacity, or fabric choice) must stuff their pant-legs into their winter boots. Yes folks, that includes sweatpants, which I must say makes for a really pulled-together look, what with the lank fabric spilling irregularly out of its boot-top casing and all.

2. I don't have forms for a reason. Nope. They're not to guarantee that the right piece of info gets connected to another correct piece of info. In fact, they're completely to be ignored. I never spend time getting those just right so that people can fill them out correctly and make my job a little easier and more direct when I have to process the info. And I most certainly would never have to call a form-filler-outer and request that he use the correct form that I nicely prepared and sent to him over a month ago. And even if I did have to make a call, no form-filler-outer that I know would ever act like he couldn't be bothered. Not once! Never!

my blood pressure can't take this. Let's just hope the graph of the function of approaching insanity is asymptotic and not heading directly for an intercept with the point of insanity with all the steadiness and irreversibility of a freight train.

Rock the vote?

Lucasfilm - taking advantage of the electoral season with its merchandising! Somehow, I don't think that helped us very much... though I am highly interested. Especially in the R2-D2/C-3PO ticket: These ARE the droids you're looking for!

Star Wars election

I'd like to see University administration crack down on a partisan bumper sticker and/or button of that nature.

DFW

I'm just... can't-even-pony-up-the-energy-or-focus-to-work bummed. I haven't even really begun to sort through what it means that David Foster Wallace has died, apparently by his own hand. The word "sad" just doesn't begin to cover it. It's grotesque, it's such a waste, such broad possibility collapsed into a tiny speck and then crushed or winked out, gone. Empty. It makes me wonder if there's any weird correlation that two of my favorite authors have been suicides. There have been reports surfacing, that his father has indicated that DFW had a long-term history with depression and a relatively short-term difficulty with treating and managing this depression. This seems particularly sad to me since it reveals a little more clearly the struggle against the depression, and what we now know to be the loss of the battle. Though, I suppose some see suicide as a way to regain control, and in that sense, that type of death is a sort of victory (or, as Foster Wallace more or less put it in a short story, as a sort of birthday present). Put in less confrontational terms, suicide is at least thought to be an end to the pain caused by existence. I don't know. It bothers me. It... weighs on me.

What does this immediately mean to me? After blowing through the majority of his body of work in one sequence of book after book, I have had DFW on my mind in a back-burner kind of way, consistently checking every now and then to see if he's written something new, either traipsing through the bookstores, or searching on-line for news of a new release. So...it will be a process of erasing that feedback loop from my brain. No more timer going off in the back of my mind - "time to check on DFW." I had even been thinking about his work over the weekend (I didn't find out about his death until Monday morning), considering using one of his books as a foundation for an assignment for an electronic publications course I'm taking. I had sort of ruled it out though, given the complexity of his work and my desire to make my life as simple as possible regarding these assignments. Now... it just feels macabre and opportunistic to use his work, even though he was one of my favorite authors.

So horribly sad and disturbing. According to NPR's somewhat chilling article, "When someone very gifted kills themselves, it's like the best student dropping out of high school. There's the tragedy, but it's set in a particular and personal fear: What are they seeing that we don't?"

A decent tribute and re-print of a telling interview circa the release of Infinte Jest is to be found here, on the Chicago Tribune site.

A rather lovely memoir from a former student of Foster Wallace's.

OH NOES!

I didn't even know this website existed until today (icanhasforce.com). Thanks to Ranjit B for making his profile pic refer to this site!

"God, this is cold"

Dateline: July 13, undisclosed Lake Michigan beach front in Chicago

The shivering t-shirt-clad kid floating a few feet away from me in Lake Michigan was right. Granted, at the time he was being splashed and friendly attempts at capsizing him were being made, but his proclamation was just as true for myself, who moved slowly in waist-high 68° (if clear) water. At the time it struck me that he might have just submitted his entry for the Understatement of the Year award, but perhaps it would be better stated that he was serving as a spokesman for that (isolated moment in) time, voicing at calm decibels the thought that kept shrieking through everyone's head as they stepped into the water or, the poor souls, ventured deeper still. I wasn't brave enough to completely duck under the water - maybe I'll save that for later in the summer.

One thing that Lake Michigan certainly has going for it is its clarity. For many reasons that I won't go into here, I'm not generally a fan of what I call "live water," that is, water that is not chlorinated to the point of eye-stinging sterility and predictability, water that contains living...stuff, for lack of a better word. Why bother with water at all, then? Simply, I love to swim, and I do like the idea of ocean beaches and of frolicking in their waves. I just also have to swallow an irrational fear along with it as a sidecar. In any case, lakes also fall under the category of "live water." As with oceans, I am much happier and find it much easier to deal with this fear if I can see the floor of whatever body of water I happen to be in at the time. One still encounters random flotsam, to be sure - threads of algae or other unidentified flora passing by and bearing far too close a resemblance to mucus. Quick and jerky reflexes take over when unscheduled points of contact occur between this mucus-y biological effluvia and any given appendage of mine. Fortunately, no one was hurt as I interacted directly with triggers of paranoia and overall creep-outitutde. Perhaps I can successfully reintroduce myself to the native environment again later.

Wall-E

***slight spoiler alert***
Wall-E was definitely a touching movie, and I could go on about that, but I won't spoil any major plot points here. It's my new favorite Pixar film, and you should just go see it. When you do, be on the lookout for several references to other sci-fi movies. The easiest one to figure out is the 2001 reference, but apparently there is a reference to Alien as well (Sigourney Weaver voices a ship's computer). Another thought that struck me was how cute Wall-E was, moving around with a chipper and exploratory attitude, occasionally bleeping to himself - it all was vaguely reminiscent of R2-D2 from Star Wars. And now that I've seen who voiced Wall-E, the R2-D2 connection is even stronger and concrete. Ben Burtt, sound editor and (digitally modified/enhanced) voice of R2-D2 of all the Star Wars films, also voiced Wall-E. Interestingly, this particular sci-fi connection/reference has not been mentioned in the reviews I've read.

Also, stick around for the closing credits. Pixar used the history and development of human art (from cave paintings to Van Gogh-ish post-impressionism) as highly stylized environments in which the restoration story continues after the close of the movie proper. Beautiful.

Summer Reading

If you're looking for some recommendations on a new author to try this summer, here are two links to help you in your search.

1.
The site: http://www.gnooks.com/trip.php
How it works: You type in the name of three authors whose work you enjoy. This site will crunch some kind of algorithm and spit out an author recommendation.
Results: For fun (i.e., not for serious), I typed in Samuel Beckett, Arthur Golden, and Anthony Bourdain. Mind you, I only enjoy the work of one of those authors. Anyway, the algorithm spit out "Barbara Ehrenreich" of Nickel and Dimed fame. I have no idea if that's a legit or meaningful recommendation, but given that I dislike two of those three authors, perhaps I should steer clear of that book.

2.
The site: http://www.literature-map.com/
How it works: You plug in the name of one of your favorite authors. This site shows you a mapping of supposedly similar authors whose work you might enjoy. Your plugged-in author name appears at the center of the map and other authors fill the surrounding space. I think there is an implied relationship between the relative spatial closeness of any given authors whose names appear on the map.
Results: I've not tried it out myself (as in, I've yet to take the site up on a recommendation and read a recommended author to evaluate for similarity to the original author I provided). I can tell you that one of my sample authors did turn up several names of other authors whose work I've also read and enjoyed. I just don't know how directly similar I would call them, necessarily.

bleh

Did I mention I hate my job? I could elaborate, but why bother.

my second earthquake experienced from a bed

By now you've probably heard about (or felt directly) the earthquake that happened not too far from here during the wee small hours of the morning. I had been dreaming when I got jolted to an awake and upright position at 4:37 am by the grinding noise and not-quite-but-nearly violent shaking of my bed. I was not afraid during the earthquake itself, just alert. Alert to what, I'm not sure, since I certainly took no immediate action - I considered moving to a doorway and I guess I would have if the shaking had become much worse. It didn't, so I stayed right where I was until the shaking stopped. I got up to check on some things in the apartment once it was over - no perceptible damage, but then I don't have anything hanging on the walls. A glance outside didn't indicate any anomalies in the terrain, and the train whose whistle I heard as it passed the crossing didn't seem to have any difficulties moving by. I heard a couple of people in other apartments up and about, and at that odd hour I supposed it must have been for the same reason as I was. I only got a little frightened after the fact, scared that maybe those shakes were just the pre-cursor to a larger quake. That and I had no one to compare notes with at the time, so it was a little disorienting as I slipped back toward drowsiness to think that maybe I'd dreamed it, or that I hadn't dreamed it but that it was caused by supernatural forces. (It was 4:37 in the morning, forgive me for being not at my most logical. Plus, I was primed by a conversation I'd had earlier that night, and by a recollection of a story told to me a long time ago).

Anyway, although this was definitely the stronger of the two earthquakes I've experienced, it was not my first. Back in June of 2004 (06/28/04), I was reading in bed a little after 1 in the morning. I felt a slight rolling or undulating movement underneath me and saw some hangers swinging in my closet. A did-I-really-feel-that? kind of thing, very mild in comparison to today's event. Perhaps the fact that I'd been through one before contributed to my lack of fear and confusion upon being awakened today?

"published" on schmap

One of my pictures from my 2006 trip to France has been used in schmap.com's most recent edition of its guide to Paris. It happens to be one of the ones I took when I was at the Paris Sewer Museum.

Alinea news

As some of you may know, I've been rather obsessed with the restaurant Alinea in the past (see blog posts for 3/14/07 and 3/29/07). News came to me through the grapevine that chef Grant Achatz will be publishing a cookbook for Alinea in Fall 2008. I've done a little research and it appears that individuals who pre-order will be issued a signed copy of the book and given early access to a website, "Mosaic," this May that includes behind-the-scenes info and videos.

Alinea's own site to publicize the cookbook
Chicagoist's notice of the cookbook
Amazon.com sells it more cheaply, but you'll have to wait until you get to book to be able to access the website (and no signature from the chef)

Chicago 3/20/08

I don't have much to report from the few days I took off during Spring Break. However, one highlight was definitely the day-trip to Chicago - I finally drove in downtown traffic (albeit briefly), during the tail-end of the morning rush hour, even. We were on our way to park downtown before our excursions to the Lakeview area and Shedd Aquarium. So. Lake Shore Drive? Check.

Part of the purpose of the trip to Chicago was to accompany a friend on his apartment search. I gleaned some useful information from the meeting with the leasing agent (who, in theory, is tasked with helping renters find an acceptable apartment). While this particular leasing agent was a bit too pushy and a bit too concerned with his own agenda (increasing his commission being the likely prime motivator), he did seem knowledgeable about the Lakeview neighborhood and the rental market. If I were to move to an unfamiliar area, I'm not sure that I would use a service such as that, but I'm not sure that I wouldn't either. The thought of one of the alternatives (walking around a neighborhood approximately 3-4 weeks before you plan to move and checking for "Now Leasing" signs) is intimidating and strikes me as risky. But I guess it's one way to go about it, and in any case the appropriate lead time seems to be about 3-4 weeks no matter how you search (unlike C-U, which has such a long lead time).

After the somewhat intimidating apartment search (by the way, rent is egregiously expensive in Chicago), we relaxed by visiting Shedd Aquarium. I'm not entirely sure when it was that I last visited Shedd, but I know it was during elementary school (third, fourth, or fifth grade). The Aquarium has changed considerably since then (though in truth I barely remember it from the first time I was there). I particularly liked to see the sea dragons that floated along sleepily. Also of note was a fish in the wave pool who kept getting sucked backwards in the pre-wave surge and who seemed to enjoy it since he rode the wave beneath the surface and would swim back immediately to where he could get sucked back to start the whole cycle over again. We watched as a long and thin blue monitor lizard was able to hide himself nearly completely (and somewhat unsettlingly) under a rock in the water feature of his terrarium, with only his snout poking out of a small access point to air between the water surface, the rock, and the "land." We also saw a sea turtle try in vain to free himself from a coral reef that he had managed to get his front flipper stuck in, while a large fish pecked at the turtle's hind flipper. The turtle looked so resigned to his fate, barely moving as he tried, seemingly feebly, to pull back out of the reef. At first, he twitched each time the fish nipped at his flipper, but then he stopped reacting to it at all. In any case, it was approaching closing time, so I hope a worker was able to extricate him from the coral. Although that last bit sounds a bit harrowing, the visit was quite relaxing, the brightly- (or not so brightly-) colored fish floating smoothly through the water. The otters, though not slow-moving, were quite fun to watch as they were clearly relaxed - playfully darting around their habitat, skimming along the water on their backs or rubbing their cheeks with their paws. The always-smiling beluga whales levitated in place directly in front of the viewing glass panes, the slight murk of their tank water adding to the ambiance of the serene and other-wordly experience. They would turn away and shortly disappear into the darker, more distant water as though into a fog.

that's right. purple.

I had no idea I lived in a world in which purple carrots exist. This place just got a lot cooler in my estimation.

like UIUC? like McSweeney's?

Do you like the "Dispatches from Adjunct Faculty at a Large State University" column from McSweeney's Internet Tendency? Do you have ties to UIUC? If so, you're about to like the column a whole bunch more since it has been revealed that those two entities actually intersect. Woot.

must have slipped my mind

I accomplished none of these goals for last year. And yet, I'm not too broken up about it. :)

WTF

Word to the wise - if maintenance people aren't bright enough to get their key to work in your lock, the property managers will re-key your apartment and then bill *you* for it. This doesn't go over very well with me. Maybe it's because the maintenance people were only coming to my place in order to fix a bathroom fan - a non-essential piece of equipment that I certainly don't think is worth the $80+ they are charging me for the re-key (a re-key that I didn't need because obviously I was able to work the darn lock just fine because I had to get into my apartment somehow every day, didn't I?). And the best part is that the new lock still requires the same jimmy-ing to get into because it's winter and the wind blows on my door and the property management people apparently couldn't be bothered to install storm doors.

Happy Valentine's Day

1. Conversation hearts now include candies that only reflect parts of speech such as conjunctions ("and") and prepositions ("to"). Not sure how useful that is, in the context of conversation hearts.

2. A special Valentine's Day edition of the guess-what-this-image-is game. Enjoy!

3.12.08 amendment: this is a strawberry, dudes.