From: uwalert@washington.edu
Subject: UW Alert
Date: July 2, 2009 5:01:58 PM PDT
To: [me]
Dear Jessie Hirsch,
Armed robbery on Brooklyn and 50th. Two armed suspects heading south to
Campus Parkway. Stay alert
I’m still on the mailing list for the University of Washington alert service. This is a recent innovation– I think it was implemented last year, but I can’t remember exactly. Sometimes I get e-mail/SMS messages that alert me to a hazmat spill in some chemistry building, and other times, I get one like the above.
What a great way to mobilize eyes! I could go on for hours mocking the UW about various things, having spent 5 years there as a disgruntled student, but I will not mock them about this. There is something terrifying and wonderful about the thought of 45k+ students all getting the same important information at once.
So, around 5pm, Brooklyn and 50th was probably packed as usual with UW students looking for dinner. I like to imagine the armed suspects making for Campus Parkway (?!) when all of a sudden cell phones ring all around, everyone pulls them out, and the armed suspects filled with sudden, violent terror.
You should probably buy this photograph! It is awesome!
I just got the 20×200 update in my inbox and saw this and thought… well, I don’t have the time to put what I actually thought into words, but this photo basically sums up Independence Day for me.
I would also like to know how Mike Sinclair shot this, because the depth of field is huge and it almost looks like an illustration…
First things first: a cat video. (The footage is from this past week, taken while cat sitting for some friends.)
Second things second: tomorrow is the first day of summer quarter, in which I will be taking a business class (”Interpersonal Communication in the Workplace”) and finishing up some incomplete classes from last quarter. I won’t go into what happened, but … last quarter was pretty bad. I still think I will come out with a 4.0, once I get the work turned in, but… what possesses me to allow myself to get into situations like that? Where there’s so much work to be done, and not enough time to do it? I went into this Medical Assisting program thinking that since I’d been through hell and back my first time in college, this would be a piece of cake, but it hasn’t been. I’m glad I’ve been working hard the whole time.
During spring break, I thought a lot about WTF I am doing in general, and came to the realization that this blog is nothing special, and I’m okay with that. I thought when I started it that it would end up being special somehow, but… it’s mostly just a confessional, a place to dredge up the sad things in my life and mull them over and bare my revelations for any random person to see. This is not a bad thing ultimately, but it’s not what I had hoped to create. In any case, I feel like I have a more realistic view of what this blog is and is not, and I’ve though about how I might make up for the things it is not through other types of writing and creativity.
At the very least, it is a public record, written in realtime, of the things I’m feeling and thinking– and as much as bloggers are made fun of for being self-serving, short on discretion, full of bullshit and delusions of grandeur– I don’t really mind being grouped with them. N00b writers are given a voice, and what do you expect to come out? Melodious poetry? No, it’s just normal things that people think and feel. (Anyway, the best thing about blogs that displease you is that you don’t have to read them.)
It is in my nature to be self-disparaging and to not take myself seriously, but I have made an effort to be somewhat serious when writing here. I do need to talk about things that are important to me, and I can do it here as a near-monologue. If a bot indexes this site and helps someone finds something useful, so much the better. My best friend Jen over at Miniature Wonderments, who has such a soulful, uncynical, unapologetic way of writing, has been writing about her experience with cancer a bit, and connecting with people that way. I think people like her make the best types of bloggers, because she does not give a flying fuck about being Internet Cool. There are so many ways to be a self-absorbed asshole online (as there are in real life), but she doesn’t spend enough time online to even know about most of them. It makes her so innocent! I love it.
I went to Lake Chelan with family the weekend before last, and took this photo in Stevens Pass on the way home:
“Somebody shoot me” is a pretty strange English colloquialism. I don’t like it much, but I find myself saying it, and I need to know 1) where it originated, and 2) how to translate it into Mandarin, Hindi, Spanish, Arabic, Russian, and Portuguese. My google-fu is so weak right now, heading as I am into the last week of the quarter (neurons a-weeping), that I can not find out the answers to any of these questions on my own.
It occurs to me that I could get this information from a Mechanical Turk. I guess it’s time to think about how much I’m willing to pay for the goods.
You know, I was actually going to write about a homework problem here, but by the time I finished typing the post’s title, I was already distracted. Who says bloggers are useless as cats? (I’ll give you a hint– it’s a friend of the family named Arch.)
Last week I made another bathroom sign, this one specifically for the men’s lavatory:
I was looking through the Flickr Commons for something (which I could not find), but ended up finding another thing which is so much better:
I mean, let’s be honest here. The photo above is probably one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen. The experimentee even reminds me of Jack Nicholson in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (post Shock Shop, pre-lobotomy). Look through the whole set if you want to see some seriously weird shit. And as far as it being creepy to apply electrical stimulation to facial muscles… well yeah, it looks pretty bad, but I’ve had a TENS unit used on me during physical therapy sessions, and it doesn’t hurt– it’s actually pretty hilarious. Compared to other things people were doing to each other at that time for the sake of medical research, I think this is rather innocuous.
Now that I know something like a TENS unit can be used to stimulate facial muscles, I may have to buy one and do a whole series of photographs of my friends. That doesn’t count as human experimentation, does it? I mean… maybe I should have people sign a release first.
One of the cool things about Richard is that he doesn’t need a TENS unit to individually control his facial muscles.
I just took reference video of myself singing a song that I want to cover on guitar, so that when I finally learn to sing it well, I can look back and feel impressed with myself for no longer butchering[1] it.
Anyway, I just watched it, and discovered something bizarre… I have the facial mannerisms that I remember my dad having while he sang and played the guitar! We make the same singing faces!
I guess humans learn facial expression by mimicking others, but it’s truly strange how accurate the imitation is, when we are not learning consciously OR observing ourselves in the mirror in order to make corrections. This might explain why I confused beginning adult ballet instructors with my “style”, when I had never taken ballet class before– I just used to watch lots of ballet on TV when I was really little. I had a graceful and precise style, without having learned this by watching myself practice in mirrored walls. Does this method of learning work better if you’re really little? Does it mean that you’re a very visual learner if it is so effective?
I think I learned Dead Sad Face from my mom, Pissed & Bored Face and Contemptuous Face from Alison, and Fidgety & Self-Conscious Singing Face from my dad. (My dad also taught me Helplessly Laughing Your Ass Off Face which is usually accompanied by vigorous Slapping Of the Knee (or punching the nearest person repeatedly, but I think that was my own invention)).
I learned Twitchy Eye Face and Serious Phone Support Face from Richard, but those don’t happen automatically… yet.
This is my mischief face (I’m on the left)– I made that one up myself early on! Jess, Errin, Anna, December 10 1981, Photographer unknown
[1]Is it weird that I use “butcher” to mean “do something horribly”, but “slaughter” to mean “do something really well”? Does “I slaughtered that test” sound positive to anyone but myself…?
Man… MAN. There is so much I need to write about, but it requires serious thinking, and all my thinks are going towards finishing up the quarter right now.
But I am inviting you to enjoy a moment of Tubish[1][2] Beauty by gazing at this lovely free background that my sharp-as-a-tack friend Ballookey created. Check this!
Prints are for sale at Imagekind. I BOUGHT ONE TODAY, and if you buy one today, your wall may ultimately look as awesome as mine, but it won’t be TOTALLY as awesome in all respects, because my wall will have received this poster BEFORE yours did, and have all kinds of seniority. (Also, does your wall have yellowing green-blue floral curlicue wallpaper from the 80s? I didn’t think so. And do you haphazardly mix up clauses and alternate lowercase and ALL CAPS while writing like someone sprung a 52-card pickup on your ass? Nah, only me and my grams do that.)
[1]That’s my awesome new synonym for “internetty”. [2]No, Richard, if it sounded like “tub” it would have two Bs– “tubbish”.
I’ve been reading this collection of Bradbury short stories. Last night I read one called “The Murderer”. I believe it was written some time shortly before 1952. It’s about a guy who’s being committed for “murdering” electronics, and his interview with the psychiatrist includes this:
“Suppose you tell me when you first began to hate the telephone.”
…”Uncle of mine called it the Ghost Machine. Voices without bodies. Scared the living hell out of me. Later in life I was never comfortable. Seemed to me a phone was an impersonal instrument. If it felt like it, it let your personality go through its wires. If it didn’t want to, it just drained your personality away until what slipped through at the other end was some cold fish of a voice all steel, copper, plastic, no warmth, no reality. It’s easy to say the wrong thing on telephones; the telephone changes your meaning on you. First thing you know, you’ve made an enemy. Then, of course, the telephone’s such a convenient thing; it just sits there and demands you call someone who doesn’t want to be called. Friends were always calling, calling, calling me. Hell, I hadn’t any time of my own. …my horror chamber of a radio wrist watch on which my friends and wife phoned every five minutes. What is there about such ‘conveniences’ that makes them so temptingly convenient? The average man thinks, Here I am, time on my hands, so why not just buzz old Joe up, eh? ‘Hello, hello!’ I love my friends, my wife, humanity, very much, but when one minute my wife calls to say, ‘Where are you now dear?’ and a friend calls and says, ‘Got the best off-color joke to tell you. Seems there was a guy—’ And a stranger calls and cries out, ‘This is the Find-Fax Poll. What gum are you chewing at this very instant!’ Well!”
I don’t imagine I’m the first person to read this story in the last few years and laugh her ass off, thinking of twitter, facebook, myspace, dodgeball… and well, what started off with the car phone, I guess. (Or the fully portable mobile phone, the “radio wrist watch”!)
“It’s easy to say the wrong thing on telephones; the telephone changes your meaning on you. First thing you know, you’ve made an enemy.” IRC, anyone? O prescient sci-fi writers!
Are you pretty sure that people at work don’t wash their hands after going to the bathroom and touching their bits? That’s gross. You should print this out and put it up. (I licensed it Creative Commons because I am such a big a fan of asepsis.)
