It’s been pouring since around 11 this morning. I’ve spent most of the day doing, well, nothing. I made some biscuits from scratch… had some soup… downloaded the Spore Creature Creator… watched some movies… it’s such a nice break. I even stepped outside in my rain boots to take some rainy day photos, but then the rain came down a little more heavily and the thunder and lightning started, so I opted to head back in the house. But I got this image of a gray, gray, wet day.

And this leaf struck me as pretty, though I couldn’t get close enough to get a better photo and without toppling over and getting soaked… so I did a little image enhancing to make it appear as lovely as it did to my eye in real life.

…on my Flickr-mood/related self-confidence:

Today and yesterday were accurate. Unfortunately, these results aren’t updated until 9pm each night, so I can’t even jokingly use them as a horoscope.

Mind you, I’m joking about all of this. I just like graphs and charts and random representations of data. Maybe that’s why I love GraphJam so much - the marriage of pop culture to data presentation. Like this one:

more graph humor and song chart memes

Yeah, Blondie.

And now, I really really must sleep.

So I have this nifty plugin installed in WordPress that automatically filters comment spam from the blog. Honestly, I get more comment spam than actual comments - and that’s sort of OK and expected. This isn’t Dooce (as in, not crazily popular - or at all) and I’m well aware of that.

The comment spam I get is pretty entertaining. Today’s selection was “Shakira porn shakira hips don’t lie naked porn video.” Please. At least keep it current. Or marginally modern. (Hey - let me drop some really hip and timely references to Paris & Nicole fighting or to the whole file sharing/Napster thing so I can be equally on the ball!!)

I had a shitty-ass day. Non-stop crappy nonsense that added up (along with hormonal ickiness and such) to major stress and me sitting in my car when I got off the train, resting my head on the steering wheel, breathing deeply and trying not to cry out of sheer frustration that the day was not yet over. But then I got home, ate some leftovers, and baked some brownies (Ghirardelli, from a mix) and had a hot brownie and mint chocolate chip ice cream sundae. All better.

Also nice was opening up my email to see a request from an academic who’s making a documentary and requested permission to use some of my photos of the Schuylkill River in Philly (which he found on Flickr) in the documentary. No money, of course, but photo credit and a copy of the DVD if the photos are used in the film. That’s pretty cool. I’ll take it.

And now it’s late and I should be getting to bed. The stress tension in my shoulders and neck never quite went away, so I’m going to have a rough time of it tomorrow morning.

I’m struck with a sudden desire to watch the old Adam West/Burt Ward “Batman.” The TV episodes haven’t made it onto DVD (legal fun - Wikipedia has a nice summary) but the MOVIE sure did! And I’ve got it right here - shark repellant batspray, (Lee Meriwether (not Julie Newmar or Eartha Kitt) and all. So I think I’ll watch that tonight.

To counter last night’s sad sack of a post, allow me to share some entertaining things. Rightfully, and to match the taxonomy and structure I’ve set forth thus far, this post should be called, “Easily Entertained, volume #” - but nah. I like the Riddler reference a bit better. So, here’s some random stuff:

• One of my favorite enjoyable fun reads (that is to day, not horribly mentally taxing, but definitely not a waste of your time) from Mr. Neil Gaiman is up on the internets for free for one month. THIRTY DAYS. You can download the PDF and read it. He and his publisher (HarperCollins) did this a few months back with another one of his books and saw a bit of a jump in sales, esp. in independent bookstores, if I recall correctly. This time, it’s his book Neverwhere. So… check it out if you’d like to read a bit of non-dragon fantasy fiction about London and people and relationships and puns. It’s one of those books I could read over and over again. Just fun.

• If you’re in the northern New Jersey area and have access to a car and are craving some delicious diner food, by all means get yourself over to Tops Diner in East Newark, NJ. I went after work tonight with a friend from work and we stuffed ourselves silly… after spending about 15 minutes just staring at the menu. I must reiterate that my heart belongs to the Tick-Tock diner. They’ve got the sweet potato fries, the strangely surly service and shiny chrome that gives it authentic Jersey diner flair… but Tops Diner is surprisingly upscale (I use the term in the diner sense), offering things like eggs Benedict with crab cakes instead of Canadian bacon. The decor is more modern and sleeker, and the menu is twice as expansive. So, yeah. Consider it for your next northern NJ diner run.
• The Shape of Song. This is just geeky fun. The structure of songs is such that elements repeat - choruses, motifs, etc. This site provides a visual representation of various songs submitted - check out the simplicity of the well-known X-Files theme song by Mark Snow, the minimal roadbumps of Nine Inch Nails’ Closer, anything from Radiohead and Pachelbel’s canon. Pretty.
  

  The diagrams in The Shape of Song display musical form as a sequence of translucent arches. Each arch connects two repeated, identical passages of a composition. By using repeated passages as signposts, the diagram illustrates the deep structure of the composition.

• My Moo stickerbook arrived yesterday (@ right). Moo is a UK-based company who’s partnered with Flickr to create these cute little sticker books from your Flickr photostream. You select a bunch of photos and they print them up in a cute match-book style sticker book. I was like a little kid when I got the envelope. I’m all excited about where to put my new stickers.
• Quick Sarah Palin round-up. I’m not watching the speech tonight (no cable) and I don’t want to listen, so I’ll hear all about it tomorrow morning on NPR. In the meantime, here are some posts I’ve found interesting (and/or entertaining): (1) What a librarian has to say about Mrs. Palin, (2) a post from This Recording which I should not even try to describe, (3) a piece from an Alaska native in The New Republic called, “Palin? Really?” (4) a little piece about Palin’s kids’ names (5) and something a bit less tabloid-ey from the NYT. There’s tons more, but that would just feel wrong.
• It’s going to be almost 90 degrees in NJ tomorrow and Friday - and raining on Friday and Saturday. I want fall to get here already. I want more than just the falling leaves with their colors changing (which is sort of happening already) but also the cool weather. That’s what I want. I also wanted to find and post a clip from the Family Guy episode with the leafers descending upon Rhode Island, but I couldn’t find it on YouTube or Hulu. Oh well.

The little iPod auto kit I have for my car busted last week (the plastic casing on the end of the cable split open and the wires started fraying, thus leaving the iPod unable to connect with the auxiliary audio input in my car - the aux input being a nice feature on the Mazda3). I ordered another auto kit - the exact same thing - from J&R Music World via Amazon. It arrived today, but what was in the package was NOT what I received last time. It lacks the second cable that leads into the AUX jack, so someone somewhere screwed up. Either at Belkin or at J&R.

So that sucks. I’ve already spent over a week without good music in my car, and I’m not about to spend hours burning CDs. I sent a detailed email to the folks at J&R and asked them how to resolve this, going so far as to provide them with the order information from the last time I ordered this exact item… a mere four months ago in May. We shall see. It was packaged in one of those impossible to open blister packs and I had to essentially destroy the package to get inside and find out the cable wasn’t there. Ugh.

What also sucks is how busy I was today and how busy I’ll be tomorrow. I don’t want to dwell on it. I ate lunch at my desk in under 5 minutes. It was that kind of day. That’s something I can normally handle, but my emotional immune system is down already from feeling stressed over the upset in my home life, over finances and thinking about impending apartment-hunting, impending responsibility for being at my friends’ side during the birth of their child (which is not bad stress, but I feel the pressure now - she could go at any moment!), and feeling generally lost in terms of some large scale changes that have been taking place lately and how those have affected my life. Sigh.

When I get on this roll, the negative thoughts just start going and building on each other to almost laughable proportions. I’m unable to laugh at them for a long time, but for the present I have to take myself aside and say, “All right. STOP IT. Just STOP IT. RIGHT NOW. Today was a good Flickr day. 54 views, bitch!”

I do that. Except for the last part about Flickr. I was just throwing that in for lame comic effect. The rest of it - the “STOP IT” part? I do that.

Today’s negative thoughts included one particularly lengthy and insane meditation (I have to note that it’s insane before I start typing it) on how/why it is that so many of my acquaintances and friends are attractive, wondering if it’s possible that they’re my friends and keep me around because having me around heightens their attractiveness even more… for the contrast I provide. I proceeded to decide (here’s where I get really horrible and insane) that liking me or enjoying my company has nothing to do with it because I tend to be a miserable wretch about 56% of the time (down from 78% this time last year and 100% the year before) so it must be because I serve some purpose or provide some purely utilitarian function, whether it’s my plainness and non-threatening nature, my random knowledge, my general reliability or the fact that I’m not pure evil.

Ah, well. Re-hashing this is fruitless and quite silly. But the good thing is that it’s out of my head. I can read it and recognize just how redonkulous it is, then pick up a book and let it all go… with a big old sigh and an “ADIOS!”

I’ll keep it short. I still have cleaning to do. And work tomorrow. Tuesdays that feel like Mondays are the ultimate festival of suck. So much so that they deserve a banner:

Again, some days are just a festival of suck. Tuesdays after a three-day weekend fit the bill. Also, days that are full of meetings and which leave me with 30 minutes to reply to all email. Also, days when I’m running on less than optimal sleep. And the first day back after being out on vacation.

Back to the Flickr obsession. Yes. I find myself checking my Flickr photostream several times a day (or an hour) to see how many views my photostream and individual images have had, and to look at my stats graph to see if I’ve come anywhere near my all-time high of 62 views in one day.

I know there are people who get a LOT more. I know it. But that’s a number I was very proud of. As much as I was proud of yesterday’s 53 views. Today’s count of 13 left me feeling a little low. And the fact that I’m experiencing an emotional correlation to that graph is a bit pathetic. Submitted for your approval, my Flickr stats graph which pretty much corresponds with my emotional state over the last week:

Sing it with me, “Rollercoaster… of mumble*… rollercoaster! Woo-hoo-hoo!”  (* because “love” doesn’t quite work here…)

Yes, I’m spending far too much time looking at pictures, tagging them, titling them, digitally enhancing them with Photoshop and Picnik (a fairly snazzy free web-based photo editing app - they partner with Flickr) to play up textures, colors, etc. I’m spending time doing that. Time I should be spending cleaning, running on the treadmill, etc.

Though, truth be told, I HAVE been doing a lot of cleaning, and I have been getting a lot of reading done to prepare for the labor assistant duty coming up soon. And the time I’ve had has been at odd hours not well-suited to going running. Excuses, excuses, but they’re valid for the time being.

Tonight, I am calling it. I’m closing the Flickr browser window. And Google Reader. And then this one. Then iTunes will be closed. And I’ll shut down the computer. Off. All the way. No more until tomorrow night. Discipline, bitches. That’s what I have to practice.

If you’ll recall, I was loathe to join Facebook but finally gave in - to peer pressure from two people whose opinions I value highly… so, whatever. Now I have connections to various people of varying levels of closeness and whatnot. This is fine. I’ve been using Facebook as a place to display my newfound Flickr addiction (obsessively checking my Flickr stats to see which photos are getting the most views… it’s a little sad and a little sick). But that’s another story altogether.

Today’s story is about me being cynical and bitter. Not horribly so. Not even comically so, perhaps. Or not. You decide. Here’s the short story and why the hell it has anything to do with Facebook.

I received a message today via Facebook from a person I knew in high school (and elementary school before then) and who found me on Facebook and requested my Facebook friendship (I feel the need to designate that as its own special flavor). The message (twelve years after high school graduation) was three lines long. The construction:

A greeting, then “Are you married? Any babies?”, and a closing.

This is a sweet and lovely person. She recently had a child and sounds happy. I really would love it if I could just instantly reply, without thinking twice, “Great to hear from you! Congratulations! No marriage and no babies for me, but I’m happy all the same!” to subtly respond to why, at the age of 30, I haven’t found a mate to entrap in marriage and why I haven’t birthed young to propagate our already overpopulated species. Nope.

I have to go through this cynical and, admittedly, downright nasty thought process and get all defensive, practically bristling at the fact that it’s the FIRST THING someone asks. “Are you married? Any babies?”

NO and NO. How about asking, “How are you?” and leaving it open-ended? It’s just a more proper way to handle it, really. What if I were unable to have a baby for any number of reasons? What if I were a lesbian? What if I’d just miscarried or gone through a divorce? Why is the ball-and-chain/baby question first and foremost on most women’s minds? When I say I don’t have either, I almost always see eyebrows and eyes soften and hear the utterance of a sad, sympathetic little “Oh.” (Yes, even when they write - I imagine it then by reading between the lines). Then they ask me if I’m planning on it. Why must people assume that all uterus-equipped bipeds are just floating along until they can jump on the birthing bandwagon?

Mind you, I don’t feel there’s anything innately wrong with jumping on the birthing bandwagon. It’s a personal choice, much like almost everything else in life. My dear friend will be having her baby in just a couple of weeks and I will be in attendance at this birth, acting as her doula. I’m highly supportive of this - it’s what she and her husband want and it will bring them a new shared happiness. That, as they say, is a beautiful thing. Another dear friend just let us know that she’s expecting her second child; she’s always wanted to be a mother, and this is natural and right — for her.

For me, right now, in my current life situation and relationship status and thoughts and beliefs, marriage and motherhood are two things that don’t cross my mind at all… even when I’m talking to my friend about her pregnancy and her child. That maternal instinct that some women have or that kicks in when they get to be my age? Nope. Hasn’t happened. I look at babies and think they’re lovely and cute and a wonder… but I don’t have the stirrings and urges that make me think I want to experience that personally. I just don’t.

The only thing that’s made me change my song from “NO. ABSOLUTELY NOT. NEVER.” is that I can’t account for one big variable. The other person. At this point, I seem well on my way to a firmly established spinsterhood, chock-full of fun hobbies, wonderful friends, and no breastfeeding. But I will allow for the 1.3333% chance that I’ll meet someone, and that that someone will be amazing, that we’ll decide that we really like each other in some overlapping period of time, and perhaps decide that we could put up with each other for another 40+ years. If that was the case and this person was suitably amazing and made me want to engage in this redonkulous science experiment starring me as the petri dish… there might be a chance.

But the point is that I dislike myself for being incapable of reacting to that question without anger or annoyance or a defensive attitude or a lengthy blog post to make me feel better for having bitten my tongue and written back, “Congrats. No marriage or kids for me. How are you enjoying motherhood?”

If the post title compels you to start singing that song by the Killers, by all means, do so. Yesterday was chockablock full of things to do. First, at 11 am, I helped a climbing friend move back onto her college campus; she recently had ankle surgery and is on crutches, so a helping hand was needed. I got sweaty very quickly; it was humid and we got everything moved out of the house, into cars, out of cars, and into the dorm in 2 hours and 15 minutes. Intense.

Then I went down to Princeton to meet up with my friend Sara to pick up something she was holding for me (technically, for my mother - but I was happy to play liaison) and then hang out for a bit. We wandered around the Princeton University campus for a while. It’s lovely. Quite lovely. Drew University in Madison, NJ, also has a lovely tree-filled campus, but Princeton kicks its ass with architecture (in some cases, Gothic - which is gorgeous) and sculptures on the grounds. See below for photographic evidence of the sculpture and the architecture:

"Big Figures" by Madgalena Abakanowicz

Alexander Hall at Princeton University

While in Princeton, I also had some delicious gelato - a scoop each of roasted cashew, Anjou pear and SWEET BASIL. They were all quite good - the flavors were amazing and unexpected (esp. sweet basil). The consistency, while good, didn’t quite measure up to the awesomeness of the gelato I had at the Capogiro Gelato Artisans locations in Philadelphia.

Around dinnertime, my brother joined us since he lives about 10 minutes outside of Princeton. So we went and had some Indian food for dinner, along with a fairly tasty Shiraz - Fools Bay Dusty’s Desire Shiraz from the university liquor store across the street. BYOB is nice.

We walked around a bit to make sure we were all OK to drive… stopped and had tea at a Starbucks… and then went on our merry ways. I got home around 10:30, so it was a fairly long day.

And today is all about cleaning. More purging of stuff. I’ve got two more boxes of books for Goodwill, as well as two bags of clothing… and possibly a whole pile of CDs. We shall see how inspired I am to simply throw shit out. I am quite a packrat, so I know the dangers of deliberating too much over whether or not to keep things. Most times, I just have to tell myself, “NO!” and chuck it.

In the long run, it will make it much easier for me to load a moving truck in the coming months (a search on Craigslist today yielded some decent results, so I just have to prepare myself for “comfortable financial readiness” so I can afford to buy any missing niceties and not screw myself by biting off more than I can chew - as I’ve done in the past).

I do so love my books. I took some photos of my shelves because they make me happy.