TV pics

AH-HA!!! The horizontal connector (??) to the yoke wasn't even attached!
Crappy solder job :-p.

I am taking a break

...from doing my work-work to spend some valuable time procrastinating. I like to do this just in case I become too productive, or sometimes even just when I am on the cusp of becoming productive. That way, I fall farther and farther behind and add another heaping spoonful of anxiety to my collection. Cleverly, I then no longer oversleep! ...because I simply cannot sleep due to my mind's unequaled ability to worry about the consequences of not being productive.


I was cleaning my sunglasses with my shirt as I sat at a red light earlier today, and bemoaned the prominence of a number of gouges in the lenses. A few of the most prominent mars were of origin that readily sprang to mind. Several weeks ago I was working on the underside of my truck when I bumped my head into, and then rubbed against, one of the moorings for the sidepanel. My head was just fine, but the right lens of my glasses proudly displayed my lack of preparation for the job.

So as I sat at the light, I was just kicking myself wondering why I had not removed them. For a brief moment I considered the fact that had the glasses not been there, it would have been my eye displaying out-and-out stupidity instead of just poor preperation... but as I envisioned exactly the situation I'd been in, I concluded that due to their in-set placement, my eyes really wouldn't have been in danger. In fact, our human eyes are really fantastically located to make sure we don't accidentally blind ourselves with any objects larger than a finger. (Knock-on-wood, my zero-for-hundreds racquetball-sans-goggles eye-injury tally can attest to that.)

Then two thoughts surfaced to immediately compliment eachother...

1. Thank you, evolution, for not putting my eyes on antennae or something
2. Severely injuring an eye would really suck for mating purposes

Mind you, I meant contemporary mating purposes when I thought that. As in, I imagine a serious eye injury could leave you looking not so aesthetically pleasing to the ladies. But! It then occurred to me that surely those two thoughts are probably quite closely related.

Aesthetics... as I would define it without any knowledge of the real definition, is a quality judgement based purely on visual inspection. I imagine somewhere in man's evolution, more than a few guys/primates had their eyes screwed up due to sheer bad luck AND accessibility of the ocular cavity to that bad luck. And after that? More than a few ladies/lady-primates steered clear of those poor injured souls. Surely, our even-then advanced brains were able to suggest varying probabilities of successful hunts/fights/etc between 2-eyed and less-than-2-eyed folks. Those ladies then relegated those guys to the procreation D.L..

And thus, I claim our human desire for pleasing aesthetics was an evolutionary key! Humans who "didn't look right" would get aesthetically red-flagged with good reason. Is it any surprise that the eyes are so frequently quoted as being one of the most striking features of persons we find attractive?! Our "insensitive" tendencies to find out-of-average individuals ugly, while unfortunate for some, is not something that's been manufactured by Cosmo or Soloflex.

Why can't I focus on WORK!??! AAARRGGHH!

A couple things!

Whoa, I didn't realize there was this much action here as of late. I must check back more often!

Firstly, a news story (on CNN) this morning made me think of a nice Gedankenexperiment to help demonstrate why one person's faith-vs-science is another person's outrage/commonsense/etc.

But I will get back to that later, because that's a much longer post, and I just discovered something I'm much more interested in writing about right now -- my George W. Bush Federal Deficit Enhancement Dividend check (excuse me, "economic stimulus check") is being electronically transferred today, four days early!! Though I don't know why I should be surprised that this cabinet would hemorrhage money out of its coffers before any scheduled decree. (Proof here: http://money.cnn.com/2008/04/24/pf/taxes/Stimulus_checks/index.htm?postversion=2008042512)

That is all. I'm going to go pay some bills now. Whew.

PO-et-TRy

face. hop. shushi shoe. matthew perry is not hot. akon did not get shot. LIAR! bird returns from winter break, i had a spicy steak. mouse. pad. frame doughnut bagel bialy. creamcheese, for which I freeze. curl. rock. i rewear socks. coffee morning.

bleach

I think they added "multiple washes" because after a garment has been washed many times, the fibers are weaker and the dyes are less vibrant, so the same caustic chemicals could potentially do more harm to an older item than a brandy ass arrogant unstoppable new shirt.

A healthy dose of bleach on an old bedsheet could do it in!


Someone doesn't do a lot of laundry...hmmmm

goals

So tonight, in the long and meandering conversation that is Jason and Amanda's relationship, I learned that I have no goals. And not only do I have no goals, but I have no wants. Wants besides "being really great" and "accomplished" and "beauteous." I'm not even sure if I want to have goals. Part of me romanticizes the unknown world of opportunity, the road ahead, the unmet people and the unrealized talents that float amorphously in my vision of the future. And part of me is sure that if I don't get my ass moving on something "significant" than I'll just have wasted my life, feel impoverished of soul and mind and be miserable and die as one of the hapless trillions whose only legacy to mankind are the original atoms they borrowed for their short existence.

Tonight I got myself all purdied up -- yes in a pretty silk dress with black high heels and diamond jewelry. And a side-swept curly, 1940's inspired hairdo. It was the screening party of Helen Hunt's directorial debut, a small budge indie Then She Found Me, starring Bette Midler, Matthew Broderick, Colin Firth and many more. I didn't see the movie, I only get to go to the parties. They were all there, except Colin, the only one I'd actually wanted to see. Sarah Jessica Parker was there as well. And swarms of other famous faces. I didn't talk to to many people. My sister and I ogled and judged as we ate our world famous sushi at the world famous Nobu 57. It wasn't an occasion for interviews, only for views.

I managed break the ice with this one guy, a former screenwriter for Mad About You and Win a Date with Tad Hamilton, who was very nice and smart and I ended up lying to him about where I work. Not because I was outright trying to impress him, but a spy like me must be choosy about revealing herself. But the trouble with lying about what you do, even if the intentions are only to conceal one's shady intentions, is that it always calls attention to what you are not. Calls attention to the disparity between who you are and who you want to be.

I am generally pretty proud of working at In Touch. It's a huge publication: my writing gets read by a minimum of 1.5 million people a week. It's incredibly fun and glamorous and it's trained me well for more than just a career in journalism--opening my eyes to a lot of social dynamics i was retarded about for most of my life. So it's not so much that I'm ashamed, but after the initial satisfaction of impressing someone, I find myself having to defend gossip journalism and my own integrity, and inevitably say "well, obviously I don't want to do this for the rest of my life!"

But for godssssakkesss, what the FUCK do I want to do???!!!

Here are some options: painting, acting, screen writing, more journalism: serious news journalism, investigative reporting? women's magazines? MEN's magazines? Go back to grad school for errr English? Journalism? Art? Film? Public policy? Travel the world? Go to medial school? Be a fashion designer. be a teacher? A college professor? Rock star? Poet? Pornographer?

"I'm every woman. It's all in meeeeeee!"

But if I'm "everything" than I'm not really "anything." Just a dilettante

My new business card should say:

Amanda Mikes

Dilettante

Makes insightful remarks about things she really dosen't know about.
Paints, writes and cooks really well.

Okay this entry is getting postmodern.

{{end}}

How my brain works

As I was sitting on the can the other day, the closest reading material was the back of a bottle of bleach on the counter. I noticed a piece of text under the "Why Use Clorox Splash-less bleach?" section:

Fiber Safe
As safe on fibers as detergent alone after multiple washes.

Now, what is the point of adding "after multiple washes"???

So alls I can do while sitting there for the rest of my... appointment... is try and think of ONE good reason they would include that. Note I said GOOD reason.

This is how my brain works. Or what it spends its time doing, to be specific. To me, adding that extra bit is something of a mea-culpa. All they are doing is adding a condition to a strong statement, implying that they could not (legally?) simply say it's as safe as detergent alone.

My brain's premier explanations include:
-- this bleach is NOT just as safe as detergent on fibers (possibly because a "first dose" of bleach may do much more damage than subsequent doses, and only by referencing the subsequent doses' effects could they say it's no more damaging than detergent)
-- some common-sense-free committee decided that "after multiple washes" made the statement seem stronger because multiple washes is MORE than just one.
-- something else, but I already forgot. Sigh. Such is my brain.