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Category Archives: personal

Public but personal blog.

I’m becoming the person my geek friends hate.

This morning Lee Spector, best-quality-finest-kind artificial intelligence professor at Hampshire, sent out a note requesting that alumns working in technology drop him a line. Apparently, the college wants to list its techie alumns on its website in order to convince the young people they are trying to lure into wasting four years that Hampshire is […]

Sucks To Be You, Andrews!

So yesterday James asks me why my blog is blue and white… knowing full well it wasn’t, I duly freaked out. Turns out all my files were moved to yada, and thus into the maw of my formerly dormant Moveable Type blog. So here we are, in a sterile layout I won’t stick with if […]

From The Vaults: The Heart’s Dandelions

(This has another part somewhere. Check the archives for the bit about opals.) My roommate came back from vacation outraged about a friend of hers, a boy who had been to her parents’ at Thanksgiving and had apparently been flirting with two of her other friends… had actually gone so far, in fact, as to […]

Detritus: New Year Inside A Cloud

Really, that’s not a comment on my mental state — I’m at my dad’s house in the foothills, and the house is literally engulfed in a cloud. If my dad walks out to the garage, it gets hard to see him. When I look out the front window, I can’t see the street below. The […]

Americorps: ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US

No joke. Not only has John McCain endorsed a huge, semi-militarized, FIVE-FOLD expansion of AmeriCorps, as Jen pointed out, but the President has already initiated an expansion of the program into the hands of the new Office of Homeland Security. This may have been made independently of McCain’s bill, or not; I asked the press […]

From The Vaults: Remembrance of Martín Espada’s Class

…one time we were sitting in class and we hear this dreadful cheer from some not-far-distant football game and Martin looks to us wryly and says, a la stenography instructor, “Yes, young people, this is fascism” then, in his normal “I’d-read-for-PBS-pledge-breaks-but-I’m-just-too-cool” voice: “You know they’d do anything they were asked right now… Yes, kill the […]

Detritus: What’s Shakin’?

No, seriously — would someone tell me please? We seem to have had an earthquake here in New York again, at about quarter to two this morning. Either that or they finally blew something else up. I can’t stand it. This is the worst possible place to be in the case of an earthquake. All […]

My CCS Div I, Continued: Sociolinguistics of Like

My boss Abby asks me today if I’m a Valley Girl. Yes, I say, and then reconsider, and say No. There are reasons to say Yes, most of them simply linguistic. A former Humboldt County-area boyfriend of mine, visiting my hometown for the first time, remarked with alarm that I turned into a Valley Girl […]

Magical Thinking In The Modern Technolgical Age

The communications karma gnomes have been particularly capricious in the last few days. Today they caused Galataea, my computer, my beautiful blue second mind, to have a catastrophic grand mal seizure resulting in an hour of blankscreen and a mangled article pitch. Yesterday, they tweaked my cel phone so that it rang all squeaky and […]

Squirrels Are Metaphors For People

The guy who is fixing the house came by to bang the storm windows outside off early this morning. As a result, squirrels have taken up residence in the sash gutter of my bedroom window.