30 April 2009

(Sort-of) Real Super Heroes

I am an overweight child of eleven covered by a thin patina of twenty-somethingness. The slightest abrasion could scrape away the exterior of semi-maturity. So when I was informed that Cincinnati has a growing population of masked heroes, that twenty-somethingness film was washed away in a surge of youthful glee.

You know that noise young women make in anime when they’re really excited? I made that noise.

Upon viewing the above, I was overtaken by a deep sense of purpose. My destiny was revealed to me: I must go to them. I must understand them. Who wants to join me on a road trip to meet these super heroes? This is definitely a documentary film waiting to happen.

Recommended reading: Kick-Ass, a fictional comic book series about real life super heroes.

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15 April 2009

I Love This City

I’ve fallen in love with Bellingham.

I’ve been places. I know people here. I carry membership cards for a food co-op, a coffee shop, a hookah bar, a used bookstore. I recognize pretty waitresses and have favorite bartenders and baristas. I knew when shows are, which local bands are worth seeing, when cheap beer night is. I know street names and intersections. I’ve biked from one end of town to the other. Many times. Yes, I can recommend a good burrito place, a superb Thai restaurant, a nice place to go for a bite at 2 o’clock AM. Strangers recognize me by my florescent jacket. When I bike home from work up a hill I’ve come to respect, sometimes a friendly voice calls to me from her front porch. They know my name.

I’ve fallen in love with this city.

» Continue reading “I Love This City”

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13 April 2009

Is Facebook Ruining Your Life(stream)?

Note: This has been cross-posted from one of my other blogs. Yes, I have another blog. No, you can’t see it. It’s private.

If Facebook wants my identity, it’s going to need to make some changes.

OpenID

Have you noticed that a lot of websites are giving users the option of logging in with Facebook Connect? In fact, I just implemented this feature when I switched from Intense Debate to Disqus (for the laymen, these are comment systems). It looks like Facebook is trying to become OpenID. I would much rather Facebook just adopted OpenID instead.

The Feeds Don’t Feed

Facebook seems to be gravitating towards lifestreaming. I have a problem with that. I don’t need Facebook to be a lifestreaming platform because I already have a lifestreaming platform—namely FriendFeed—and unlike Facebook, it plays well with others. Friendfeed works with the feeds that each of my services (YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, et al.) already generate, and from them it creates a new, universal feed (the eponymous “friend feed”). Facebook is simply becoming a redundant service that lacks the oh so necessary RSS or Atom feeds. In other words, there is my entire interconnected internet presence, and then there is a separate Facebook presence, and Facebook keeps these worlds apart. That is a very dated and frustrating way of doing things.

» Continue reading “Is Facebook Ruining Your Life(stream)?”

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Sexual Orientation and Identity

I’m very curious what it’s like for one’s sexual identity to be more central to one’s personal identity. As a non-transgendered heterosexual, my sexual identity is pretty well left alone by the mainstream. Other people don’t really question me about it and I never had to undergo any kind of dramatic ‘coming out’ or self-discovery process, so I haven’t had much impetus to give it a lot of thought. Thus it’s not something I consider very important to my personal identity. Not like my religious views, which very much are central to my personal identity.

» Continue reading “Sexual Orientation and Identity”

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22 March 2009

Action Figure Psychologists

Carissa gave me these killer-cool action figures just because she’s awesome.

Carl Gustav Jung Action Figure
Carl Jung Action Figure

Sigmund Freud Action Figure

Right now they adorn the bookshelf in my living room, right next to a couple dinosaurs.

By the way, Jung comes with a pipe accessory, which Freud assures me is sometimes just a pipe accessory. But we know better.

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21 March 2009

Lifestyle Changes

First and foremost: finals are done! You can’t see it, but I’m doing a little dance right now. It’s the dance I do when finals are done.

I had a really kickass day today. While exploring a park with Glenn Newcomer, we ran into the bartender who served me and some friends at the Green Frog a couple nights ago (and her beautiful dog, Raja). Less than a half hour later at the same park, I ran into one of my all-time favorite professors with her partner and their super-cute baby. After living here for over two years, this kind of thing finally makes me feel connected.

I don’t think I posted this particular announcement on the ol’ blog yet, so I thought I would mention it: I went full vegetarian (meaning giving up fish too) at the beginning of February. People have been mostly supportive and my sister seems pretty happy that she’s not the only vegetarian in the family. I have gotten the loaded “why” a couple times, but nobody seems to want to argue against “I don’t want to hurt animals.” Does a valid argument even exist against this motivation?

» Continue reading “Lifestyle Changes”

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14 March 2009

A Dream: Anima and Alchemy

I had a very interesting dream this morning which seemed ripe with unconscious symbolism. The dream itself is short, but it will require a some background information.

I have a history with the Brown Girl. She is a recurring character in my dreams. She always appears as someone with whom I am intimately connected—e.g. my wife, my girlfriend, my sister. Her actual appearances vary from dream to dream, but she’s always a sort of medium-brown or “mocha” skin tone, something like Native American, Indian, Cambodian, etc. She never looks exactly the same in one dream as she did in another, but I always know when it’s her. She fills the same role. She feels like the same person. Previous dream analyses based on the Jungian system would link her with my anima, the unconscious feminine element of my psyche. In fact, the realization that she was my anima actually occurred in one of my dreams. I shouted “I know who you are now and why you keep showing up! You’re my anima!” She smiled knowingly. Now I can recognize her most of the time, often instantly.

» Continue reading “A Dream: Anima and Alchemy”

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13 March 2009

Languages

As you can imagine (and probably already know), I’ve been giving a lot of thought to life after graduation. I feel less terrified now and more excited. Honestly, one of my biggest worries was that, until grad school, my education would be over. But now I’m just excited about how I’m going to continue self-educating myself.

Language is the subject I’ve been thinking about most. For grad school, I need to be able to demonstrate some proficiency in a language in addition to English. I also want to be able to converse with people in other cultures because, if you haven’t noticed, I really want to travel. So I came up with the following list of what languages, in no order, I’m most interested in learning. Keep in mind that I’m not expecting real fluency in any of these. I’d rather know a little bit of a few languages than a lot of just two.

» Continue reading “Languages”

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9 March 2009

Fruits of My Internetting

How do I respond to being overstressed? Apparently, I lock myself in my room and Internet for hours. But you know what? I learned a lot today. So you don’t have to spend those same hours, here are the highlights:

Use a Plus Sign to Make Google Search for the Friggin Thing You Told it To
No, I didn’t mean “text,” you jerk, I meant “texter!” Why won’t you listen to me? What works: +texter

Texter
If you code at all, or simply type the same things over and over again. I use it for a lot of common HTML tags now, and it has taken a lot of pain out of blogging. Just make sure to turn auto-spell-correcting off. I hate that.

» Continue reading “Fruits of My Internetting”

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12 November 2008

2 Hrs * 10 Yrs = Mastery

Several months ago I read some words online saying that, with two hours of practice every day for ten years, we can master virtually any skill. Sure, it’s really just a contemporary rewording of the old-as-dirt axiom “practice makes perfect.” But its definite numbers (two hours, ten years) make it seem more concrete, and thus more attainable. Since then, I’ve been trying to decide what I would devote that much of my life to. Fiction writing? Freerunning?

If you’ve been around me at all since I read this, I’ve probably asked you this question: What would you choose to master with two hours every day for ten years? Here’s a bigger question I keep asking myself: why am I not doing this yet? Maybe I just want to be semi-competent at too many things to focus so much time on any one of them. In the words of the great Robert A. Heinlein, “Specialization is for insects.”

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