Some Words

Also, I mentioned Amina a while back, and there is a nice little video of them on YouTube. It even starts out with the piece that stuck with me the most.

Because it’s from a television performance the sound is better than a lot of the stuff on YT.

A friend of mine named Alison, once went off on how she never sees asian guys with white women. She felt this was a double standard. You see white guys with asian women fairly frequently. Now, since I’ve moved to Minneapolis, I’ve seen plenty of asian men and white women together, so if it ever was a thing I don’t think it is one anymore. But that didn’t stop me from laughing when I saw How to Date a White Woman: A Practical Guide for Asian Men.

This article about a cave painting is just neat. I don’t know that I’d hang it on my wall, or even notice it if I walked through the cave, but it’s still impressive. I wonder what was used for ink.

Last night was pretty impressive. I tried to bike home in the rain after work. I made it a few blocks and realized that my breaks were so wet that I could not stop. There are several hills, and a good chunk of Hennepin Ave. on my way home. I decided to get a bus.

When I got home I found out that I had left the window open with the fan on. I had meant to clean up the previous day, but had not. So now there are a bunch of we clothes and papers drying off in my room. I don’t think anything particularly important was damaged, though several paper CD cases will never be the same. I’m just left with a stupid feeling.

The funny part is the fact that OS X has those damn little widgets, one of them tracks the weather forecast. All I’d need to do would be to press F8 and I could have seen this coming. All the nifty computer stuff in the world cannot compensate for my own stupidity.

When I was a kid I watched a lot of cartoons. In cartoons the food was drawn differently. I recall watching shows where people would take big bites of what looked like insanely tender meat. This meat seemed like it had gravy built into the very structure of its cells. The bread in these cartoons also always looked really good. These foods seemed better than what was available in the real world. The cartoon characters would tear into it like it was the best food in the universe. I wanted it.

This was dangerous. While I’ve never found meat that worked like it did in the cartoons I did find something close to it in the bread world. When I moved to Minneapolis that put me near several asian markets. This in turn meant I had access to steamed buns. The dough was just about what I imagined it would be as a child, and there would be something in the middle that made the bun more interesting than simple sweet bread.

And so it was, until recently. Over the past few months the damn things have become my normal breakfast food. There are worse things to go nuts about, but I can’t avoid the knowing look of the Asian market owners when I come in for more. They recognize me now. I come in all the time, and while buy things besides the steamed buns I always have steamed buns as well. I imagine the look I get is much akin to the look a coke dealer gives a client. I’m getting sized up for how long I can go before I burn out. How much red bean paste can I handle before I give out? How many bags before my friends find me glassy eyed on a couch with a little purple taro steamed bun falling from my fingers?

Colin and I went down to Northfield to watch one of our friends graduate today. It was a weird feeling. I hadn’t been back in a while. I’ve felt for some time like I get in the way of other people’s college experience. Having an alum around, even if he’s just passing through, somehow makes the whole thing some how less than. It’s not good to feel like one of those people who hang on to college and won’t let go. The other thing I realized was of how many great people I’d lost touch with. There were several graduates I just didn’t know if I should say hello to. I aired on the side of silence.

Three students spoke, and two of them were great. The second of the three though made me a bit uncomfortable. He was an English major, and his grammar was spotty. I know that spoken English has different standards, but these were just scary constructions. I was indignant until I realized I had little room to talk. It was probably just a case of nerves. However, I will not forgive the metaphors. There was something about people jumping onto their vectors and riding them into the rest of their lives. I don’t remember exactly. I’m trying to wipe it from my memory. Something else about needing to move on because they had consumed the whole of Carleton. I don’t know. I would guess that would guess that would cause some indigestion. Also, leave some for the people who didn’t graduate yet.

A while back I wrote a few comedy articles for Yeti that focused on politics. In one of them I made a jab at Ann Coulter. If I remember correctly, I called her a mantis woman and had a scene of her devouring some people. I liked that. I thought it touched a little on her strange relations with feminism. But after reading this little jab by Andrew Sullivan I stand exposed as the amateur that I am. Nested in that paragraph is on of the best single sentence takedowns I’ve ever seen.

Kelli and I are looking for an apartment right now. That means I’m spending an embarassing amount of time on various web sites looking at pictures of hallways and such. This lead me to a rental company with several buildings in the Wedge area of Minneapolis, which is pretty much exactly where I want to be. I went to their website, which said it was newly redesigned, and which I would charitably describe as “four minutes in notepad, just learned header and alignment tags.” Despite this I followed a few links, as the prices were good. Suddenly I felt that something was wrong. The site stored its images on Angelfire. I went back and realized that about half the site was on Angelfire. I then decided not to rent from them. This might not have been fair, but if a company can’t be bothered to get their DNS in order, I’m not inspired to trust them.

I went out to water the plants today, and found the the squirrels had mauled the tomoto plants. They had torn them apart for the core, which I assume they ate. It was a sad moment for me, which renewed my desire to see these squirrels done away with. I had nursed that tomato plant through the entire winter, and it had started to really come back, to look solid and healthy again.

Mark’s latest plan was to get a ferret and turn it loose in the woodwork. We didn’t know how long a ferret would take to finish off the squirrels, but we knew it would make for a fantasticaly uncomfortable moment when our landlord showed the apartment.

“What’s that sound?”
“Oh, that’s Maurice, he lives in the walls… and he’s getting hungry.”

We wouldn’t even have to tell them it was a ferret. Sadly neither of us was willing to become a dirty hippy, which is a known ferret owning requirement.

For many reasons this makes me very happy.

Us per usual I am days late in seeing this in my rss feed. So many text adventures, so little time.

I woke up today with my limbs tired, my knees feel viscous and everything else is heavy.

Then I open up the browser to check a few things before doing some writing. Lots of stuff going on. First off there’s an article on the hundreds of little ways that the DMCA helps to keep the future from happening. And there was this earlier in the week, basically because miniature useless crap is cool.

Gizmodo also linked Jesus. That may become my gift for friends that I give when I’m stumped. I feel that those should be used to make communion waffers. Hell, I’m Jewish, but I might start going to church if it meant I got to watch people try to stuff down a giant pancake with only a little sip of wine to help. Maybe that’s cruel…

Around this time last year I ordered Lifemanship for a friend’s birthday. I also got some other stuff for my girlfriend’s birthday. After the order went in I was told that it would take a few weeks to track a copy down, even though the original page said three to four days. This delayed the entire order, as I had opted for free shipping. Ok, fine. I told the girlfriend and friend that there would be a delay. After a few weeks I was told that it would be a few weeks before they could get a copy. Alright… Then, after a few more weeks I was told it would be a few more weeks. I bought other gifts and cancelled the whole thing. It was months before I ordered from Amazon again. So, as if to commemorate the anniversary, what did I get via email one year later? Amazon.com wants me to know that they have Lifemanship! They think that I would like it based on past purchases…