I am single. Incredibly single. Painfully single. So single that I sometimes consider rubbing up against people on the bus just to have some amount of human contact. But recently I realized something that made me not worry about it so much. There is an underlying logic to my singleness. It's actually quite simple, and looking back it helps explain an awful lot of my past life. It all basically boils down to one thing: I am an intellectual slut.
Allow me to explain. A normal, or "physical", slut is someone who will give away some amount of their body (i.e. love you long time) for free. If you are lucky enough to encounter a physical slut, you can partake of her physicality without worrying about anchoring yourself down with any kind of commitment to said slut. An intellectual slut, on the other hand, is someone who shares their mind or personality with you for free. An intellectual slut will entertain you with their brain in the same way that a physical slut will entertain you with their body. Intellectual sluttiness is probably just as common as physical sluttiness, yet people are less conscious of it, which is why you don't get arrested for paying someone to have a vigorous half-hour chat with you.
I recently realized that I, too, am an intellectual slut. It all became clear to me at a party while I was watching a friend of mine chat up a girl. I immediately wrote off this girl as being way too hot to have any redeeming personality traits. But my friend was having pretty good luck chatting her up, because he was getting her to talk about what she did for a living, and what she thought about politics, and whatever the hell else SHE felt like talking about. He was totally giving her an intellectually stimulating conversation for no charge, and she spent the whole night metaphorically staring at his mental cleavage.
There is nothing new about this technique. Cavemen probably used it to lull cavewomen into a false sense of security before they clubbed them on the head and dragged them back to their one-bedroom studio caves. The point is, guys like me and my delusionally optimistic friend basically have no other tricks up our sleeves. We can be witty, we can be charming, we can try to make you feel like you've got something interesting to say. If that's not enough for you, we're boned.
I'll let my friend off the hook for a moment and speak for myself. I'm not good-looking, I'm not athletic, and I'm not rich. I realize that the only thing a woman could possibly respond to is my personality, so I lay it on pretty thick. I basically tell as many jokes as I can and try to show her what a clever and witty guy I am. But here's the horrible truth that I only recently figured out: women don't give a crap if the guy they date is clever and witty. It's like 50th on their dating priority list, right after "has original teeth" and "doesn't steal from my purse". A woman can get her intellectual fix from a guy like my chatty friend, and then go home with a guy who can benchpress 300 pounds and will almost definitely cheat on her (why cheat? because he can, that's why). This works for her because of the aforementioned intellectual sluttiness. We're giving it away for free, and it's hard know when to quit. What am I gonna do, turn off my personality? How can I tell if she's interested or if she's just amused? You expect me to stop when the pretty girl is smiling at me? The whole setup is perfect from her end, and kind of horrible from mine. She gets the best of both worlds: she can have her cake and not have to eat it too.
So, here's my new plan for meeting women: don't be interesting or amusing in ANY WAY until they have proven conclusively that they are interested in dating me. There's no way this plan can fail...
Sunday, November 23, 2008
Sunday, November 9, 2008
I have nothing to say to any of you
I am reminded of a conversation I had with a classmate on Halloween afternoon. I was in my friend Meg's office, playing with her dog, whom she had dressed up like a monster. I forget the dog's name... Scruffy or something. Anyway, another guy in the office, Marty, was talking aloud to himself about some program he was working on and he said "GRR! I don't get it, this doesn't make any sense!" Just to be silly, I say "It's a dog wearing a costume, Marty... it's not that complicated." This got a few laughs from Meg and others in the room, but the best reaction was from Marty himself, who said "Whoa, that was pretty good Mike... I've never heard you say anything funny before."
Not to be immodest, but I was completely floored by that remark. I tell jokes constantly, and sure they're not all gems, but at least I'm trying. Then I realized what was going on. Marty's not in the group that I mentally label as "my kind of person." There are two kinds of people in this world (oh boy, you just know something profound is coming up next!): my kind of person, and everyone else. I can identify my kind of person almost immediately. They're usually huge nerds, but not always. They like most of the same TV shows that I do, especially the cartoons. But the real distinguishing -- nay, defining -- characteristic of "my kind of person" is whether or not they will be receptive to my kind of jokes.
Marty doesn't fall into that category. I fundamentally don't understand how the humor center of his brain works. There's some overlap between mine and his, but it's incredibly hit-and-miss, as with all of the non-my-kind-of-persons. Hence the cause of his remark and the reason why I rarely talk to Marty: I cannot, with any degree of reliability, make Marty laugh.
Not to sound cold, but I have almost no use for such people. Maybe I'm desperate for attention, maybe I have an underdeveloped sense of showmanship, but if I can't make a person laugh then I don't really want to talk to them at all. I honestly get bored with any conversation that's not littered with jokes. If you were to ask everyone I've ever met to describe me, most of the responses would fall into one of two categories: 1) "Oh, you mean that red haired guy? I've talked to him like once, I don't really know him." and 2) "Oh Mike? Yeah I know him, he's hilarious! He does this awesome impression of Dr. Zoidberg..." (people in Category 2 tend to gush... it's embarassing, really).
Sadly, most of the world is in Category 1. If I have decided you fall into Category 1, I will make almost no effort to talk to you, and may even actively avoid you. Most of my relatives are in Category 1. My housemate is in Category 1. My grad school advisor is in Category 1. You see how I'm surrounded by these people. I honestly feel kind of uncomfortable talking to them. If you put me in a room with them, I'll barely talk at all, and if I do it'll be completely serious. I become a totally different person because I know that all my attempts at humor will fall on deaf ears. I'm serious, polite, and probably incredibly bland and uninteresting. I'd honestly rather be alone. Much of the reason why I hated working at Google so much was because I was surrounded by non-my-kind-of-people. I just sat at my desk, purposely ate lunch by myself (which was hard because Googlers are notoriously sociable), and counted the days.
One large chunk of Category 1 is women. Very very few women have a sense of humor that is Mike-compatible. A more objective way to say that is "I don't have any idea what women find funny." The few exceptions are my female friends, and they're my friends for exactly that reason. I would happily marry most of them. I get very attached to the people who fit squarely into Category 2, and on any given night I would rather be sitting in a room full of them than anywhere else. We don't even have to be doing anything in particular... just put us in a room and fun will ensue.
The incident with Marty represented one of the occasional freak cross-overs, when Category 1 and Category 2 briefly coincide. I had shaken Marty's mental image of me as serious, bland, uninteresting guy, because up until then that was who I had been around him at all times. Granted, I don't think I shook it very much. I don't expect to be invited to his wedding (and not just because of the fact that he and Chris can't get married now that Prop 8 passed). But who knows, I might get a couple more chuckles out of him before I graduate. It will probably be as big of a surprise to him as to me.
Not to be immodest, but I was completely floored by that remark. I tell jokes constantly, and sure they're not all gems, but at least I'm trying. Then I realized what was going on. Marty's not in the group that I mentally label as "my kind of person." There are two kinds of people in this world (oh boy, you just know something profound is coming up next!): my kind of person, and everyone else. I can identify my kind of person almost immediately. They're usually huge nerds, but not always. They like most of the same TV shows that I do, especially the cartoons. But the real distinguishing -- nay, defining -- characteristic of "my kind of person" is whether or not they will be receptive to my kind of jokes.
Marty doesn't fall into that category. I fundamentally don't understand how the humor center of his brain works. There's some overlap between mine and his, but it's incredibly hit-and-miss, as with all of the non-my-kind-of-persons. Hence the cause of his remark and the reason why I rarely talk to Marty: I cannot, with any degree of reliability, make Marty laugh.
Not to sound cold, but I have almost no use for such people. Maybe I'm desperate for attention, maybe I have an underdeveloped sense of showmanship, but if I can't make a person laugh then I don't really want to talk to them at all. I honestly get bored with any conversation that's not littered with jokes. If you were to ask everyone I've ever met to describe me, most of the responses would fall into one of two categories: 1) "Oh, you mean that red haired guy? I've talked to him like once, I don't really know him." and 2) "Oh Mike? Yeah I know him, he's hilarious! He does this awesome impression of Dr. Zoidberg..." (people in Category 2 tend to gush... it's embarassing, really).
Sadly, most of the world is in Category 1. If I have decided you fall into Category 1, I will make almost no effort to talk to you, and may even actively avoid you. Most of my relatives are in Category 1. My housemate is in Category 1. My grad school advisor is in Category 1. You see how I'm surrounded by these people. I honestly feel kind of uncomfortable talking to them. If you put me in a room with them, I'll barely talk at all, and if I do it'll be completely serious. I become a totally different person because I know that all my attempts at humor will fall on deaf ears. I'm serious, polite, and probably incredibly bland and uninteresting. I'd honestly rather be alone. Much of the reason why I hated working at Google so much was because I was surrounded by non-my-kind-of-people. I just sat at my desk, purposely ate lunch by myself (which was hard because Googlers are notoriously sociable), and counted the days.
One large chunk of Category 1 is women. Very very few women have a sense of humor that is Mike-compatible. A more objective way to say that is "I don't have any idea what women find funny." The few exceptions are my female friends, and they're my friends for exactly that reason. I would happily marry most of them. I get very attached to the people who fit squarely into Category 2, and on any given night I would rather be sitting in a room full of them than anywhere else. We don't even have to be doing anything in particular... just put us in a room and fun will ensue.
The incident with Marty represented one of the occasional freak cross-overs, when Category 1 and Category 2 briefly coincide. I had shaken Marty's mental image of me as serious, bland, uninteresting guy, because up until then that was who I had been around him at all times. Granted, I don't think I shook it very much. I don't expect to be invited to his wedding (and not just because of the fact that he and Chris can't get married now that Prop 8 passed). But who knows, I might get a couple more chuckles out of him before I graduate. It will probably be as big of a surprise to him as to me.
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
Mike's Awkward Adventures #1
I started to drive to school today, and headed for the interstate because it's quicker than going the other way. Normally there's not very much traffic on the 805 at that time of day. This is partly because there's never a whole lot of traffic heading north, and partly because I leave for school at around noon. Anyway, today I am heading into the 805 onramp and the right-hand lane is pretty full... like so full that there wasn't a whole lot of room to merge. So I basically had to drive kind of aggressively and squeeze in front of someone. He was kind of a jerk about it too, not wanting to let me in and flashing his lights at me and everything. Once I finally get in the right lane, I notice the guy in front of me is flashing his lights too. That seemed kind of weird, but not so weird as the high concentration of motorcycle cops in front of us and behind us. This whole lane was acting strangely... everyone flashing their lights and none of them going the full speed limit, even though all the other lanes were zooming by us.
That's when I saw the hearse. Just behind the cavalcade of motorcycle cops was a lovely all-white hearse, followed by a lovely all-white limo, followed by several other cars, all flashing their lights. Then me. With a groan I looked into my rearview mirror, only to see several more cars flashing their lights, followed by another cavalcade of motorcycle cops.
I had aggressively merged my way into a funeral procession, and had split them right down the middle. As soon as I realized this, I looked for a way to jump out of that lane, but the traffic to my left had become too heavy. I thought about just getting off at the next random exit, but mine was only a little ways away. So we continued in this way: a police escort, the deceased, some mourners, me, additional mourners, additional police.... we continued in this way for about 3 miles. I briefly wondered if maybe I should start flashing my lights just to try to fit in with the crowd, but I decided against it for two reasons. First, if they knew I wasn't part of their group then they'd be even more pissed at me for being a poser. Second, if they DIDN'T know I wasn't part of their group, they'd get worried when I eventually took the wrong exit and got the hell out of there.
So finally I found a space in the lane to my left and got out of line, but my trouble was not over yet. I was still about even with the middle of the funeral procession, but now the speed of the traffic in front of me was not any faster than the speed of the procession. The procession was like 15 cars long, so I had to jump about 7 cars' lengths forward to get around them. This would have been fine had we not been only about half a mile away from my exit by then. So basically I had a moving screen on my right, I was pinned in by the traffic in front of me, and I had to exit in about 30 seconds. I calculated that if I gunned the engine then I might be able to zip left, go around the car in front of me, zip back right, race forward to pass the procession, zip right and just make the exit... assuming I was driving a Ferrari and not my old busted Corolla with the check engine light on.
So, I just bit my lip and did the only thing that I could think of. I turned on my signal and AGGRESSIVELY MERGED BACK INTO THE FUNERAL PROCESSION, then out onto the offramp. I take comfort in the knowledge that the spirit of the deceased was probably watching me go through all of this, and understood what was going on from my point of view. That way he'll only think I'm an idiot and not a jerk, and probably won't haunt me.
That's when I saw the hearse. Just behind the cavalcade of motorcycle cops was a lovely all-white hearse, followed by a lovely all-white limo, followed by several other cars, all flashing their lights. Then me. With a groan I looked into my rearview mirror, only to see several more cars flashing their lights, followed by another cavalcade of motorcycle cops.
I had aggressively merged my way into a funeral procession, and had split them right down the middle. As soon as I realized this, I looked for a way to jump out of that lane, but the traffic to my left had become too heavy. I thought about just getting off at the next random exit, but mine was only a little ways away. So we continued in this way: a police escort, the deceased, some mourners, me, additional mourners, additional police.... we continued in this way for about 3 miles. I briefly wondered if maybe I should start flashing my lights just to try to fit in with the crowd, but I decided against it for two reasons. First, if they knew I wasn't part of their group then they'd be even more pissed at me for being a poser. Second, if they DIDN'T know I wasn't part of their group, they'd get worried when I eventually took the wrong exit and got the hell out of there.
So finally I found a space in the lane to my left and got out of line, but my trouble was not over yet. I was still about even with the middle of the funeral procession, but now the speed of the traffic in front of me was not any faster than the speed of the procession. The procession was like 15 cars long, so I had to jump about 7 cars' lengths forward to get around them. This would have been fine had we not been only about half a mile away from my exit by then. So basically I had a moving screen on my right, I was pinned in by the traffic in front of me, and I had to exit in about 30 seconds. I calculated that if I gunned the engine then I might be able to zip left, go around the car in front of me, zip back right, race forward to pass the procession, zip right and just make the exit... assuming I was driving a Ferrari and not my old busted Corolla with the check engine light on.
So, I just bit my lip and did the only thing that I could think of. I turned on my signal and AGGRESSIVELY MERGED BACK INTO THE FUNERAL PROCESSION, then out onto the offramp. I take comfort in the knowledge that the spirit of the deceased was probably watching me go through all of this, and understood what was going on from my point of view. That way he'll only think I'm an idiot and not a jerk, and probably won't haunt me.
Tuesday, September 23, 2008
Six more weeks of winter
Well, it happened. I suppose it was only a matter of time. Given the past history I should've expected it, but I have this annoying habit of trying not to think ill of people. I just generally tend to believe that the people I know are basically good, and that they are trying their best and any mistakes they make are the result of bad circumstances. But sometimes you meet someone who is just sort of incorrigible and never quite fixes their own problems and never quite changes in the ways they need to. And then you have to see their balls.
I got back from my trip to Pasadena this morning, and dropped my crap off at home and went in to work. After a long day I came home at 11ish and saw my housemate and exchanged some smalltalk about my trip. She went to bed almost immediately because she has a fairly normal schedule now. I'm not sure if Boyfriend was already in her bedroom at that point, or if he somehow arrived later after she had gone to bed. Anyway, at about midnight I go downstairs and have a snack and watch an episode of the Simpsons (they'll have to respect me after I get that Harvard diploma!) I turn the lights off and head back upstairs and her bedroom door opens right as I reach the top. This leaves me face-to-face with a completely naked Brazilian man, who is too surprised to react for about 3 seconds.
To be fair, I was too surprised to react either. I was pretty sure that this was not a situation that you can get through by pretending everything's cool and making smalltalk. This would have been especially awkward since he's a chronic hand-shaker... every conversation we've had started with a handshake. I'm no homophobe, but that still doesn't stop me from having a strict "don't touch any naked dudes" rule. Besides, there were no lights on and I'm not gonna risk reaching towards him in the dark...
So, smalltalk is clearly out... maybe I could break the ice with a joke? "How's it hanging?" No, too obvious... and the double meaning might not work for a non-native English speaker. "Cold out tonight, eh?" Nah, he'd probably kick my ass, and I really don't wanna be beaten up by a naked dude. "Oh JP it's you! I didn't recognize your penis without Barbara's mouth on it." Ok ok, too far. Maybe a joke is not the right way to go either.
Luckily I was spared from having to think of an appropriate response because the spell of shock and em-bare-ass-ment broke and he quickly shut the door. In times like this, I call upon my superhuman ability to be good-natured about things. This skill was passed down to me from my parents and from their parents before them. It must be some sort of mid-western thing, but my folks have the ability to put a positive spin on anything if they are sufficiently motivated. This generally occurs when a family member does something shameful and they have to explain the situation to someone else. If, for example, my uncle was arrested for trying to kill himself by auto-erotic asphyxiation, they'd just chuckle and say something like "Well, boys will be boys. We all have our flaws, and I'm sure he learned a valuable lesson." It's like one part denial, one part relentless optimism. Anyway, I too have this power. After Naked Boyfriend covered his shame, I tried my best to think of the whole thing as a funny goof-up and chuckled about it just loud enough that they could probably hear me through the door (but not so loud that he would think I was mocking his junk... that would be a terrible breach of Dude Etiquette).
So, tomorrow will be delightfully awkward, and then I'm sure things will be back to normal. I pray to holy jesus that tonight does not represent the new "normal".
I got back from my trip to Pasadena this morning, and dropped my crap off at home and went in to work. After a long day I came home at 11ish and saw my housemate and exchanged some smalltalk about my trip. She went to bed almost immediately because she has a fairly normal schedule now. I'm not sure if Boyfriend was already in her bedroom at that point, or if he somehow arrived later after she had gone to bed. Anyway, at about midnight I go downstairs and have a snack and watch an episode of the Simpsons (they'll have to respect me after I get that Harvard diploma!) I turn the lights off and head back upstairs and her bedroom door opens right as I reach the top. This leaves me face-to-face with a completely naked Brazilian man, who is too surprised to react for about 3 seconds.
To be fair, I was too surprised to react either. I was pretty sure that this was not a situation that you can get through by pretending everything's cool and making smalltalk. This would have been especially awkward since he's a chronic hand-shaker... every conversation we've had started with a handshake. I'm no homophobe, but that still doesn't stop me from having a strict "don't touch any naked dudes" rule. Besides, there were no lights on and I'm not gonna risk reaching towards him in the dark...
So, smalltalk is clearly out... maybe I could break the ice with a joke? "How's it hanging?" No, too obvious... and the double meaning might not work for a non-native English speaker. "Cold out tonight, eh?" Nah, he'd probably kick my ass, and I really don't wanna be beaten up by a naked dude. "Oh JP it's you! I didn't recognize your penis without Barbara's mouth on it." Ok ok, too far. Maybe a joke is not the right way to go either.
Luckily I was spared from having to think of an appropriate response because the spell of shock and em-bare-ass-ment broke and he quickly shut the door. In times like this, I call upon my superhuman ability to be good-natured about things. This skill was passed down to me from my parents and from their parents before them. It must be some sort of mid-western thing, but my folks have the ability to put a positive spin on anything if they are sufficiently motivated. This generally occurs when a family member does something shameful and they have to explain the situation to someone else. If, for example, my uncle was arrested for trying to kill himself by auto-erotic asphyxiation, they'd just chuckle and say something like "Well, boys will be boys. We all have our flaws, and I'm sure he learned a valuable lesson." It's like one part denial, one part relentless optimism. Anyway, I too have this power. After Naked Boyfriend covered his shame, I tried my best to think of the whole thing as a funny goof-up and chuckled about it just loud enough that they could probably hear me through the door (but not so loud that he would think I was mocking his junk... that would be a terrible breach of Dude Etiquette).
So, tomorrow will be delightfully awkward, and then I'm sure things will be back to normal. I pray to holy jesus that tonight does not represent the new "normal".
Monday, September 22, 2008
And she's off...
Lately I am reminded of something I heard Jerry Seinfeld say when I went to see him perform live in Tucson. After his standup, he allowed some questions from the audience. One guy asked him what his favorite thing was about having children. His reply was "just chasing them."
My niece is nearly 2 years old now, and she can walk. This means that watching the baby is no longer the responsibility of her parents, but the responsibility of everyone in the building. A kid that young you can't just leave alone, unless she's sleeping. And any time she's not sleeping she's zooming around, often in circles through the whole house. That means the job of watching her continually passes to the nearest person who has line-of-sight, often as many as 10 times per minute. If you're not actively playing with her, you are usually witness to seeing her run around and around some part of the house, possibly the chair you are sitting in. If you are actively playing with her, you'd better have a short attention span because you might be doing the same jump-out-from-behind-the-couch-and-scare-her routine for a good long while. Settle in, grab a drink.
On my latest visit to my parents' house, my brother and his wife and baby were there as well. Everyone was staying in the same house and there's not enough bedrooms, so I was set up on an air mattress in the dining room. One of baby's favorite games is to fall down face-first onto the air mattress. Then I jump onto the part next to her and it bounces her way up in the air and she laughs and screams. Again, if I'm not careful, this could go on for days. Well as it turns out, baby loves this game way too much to actually wait for me to get up in the morning before she starts playing. This would not be a problem except that she figured out how to open the folding doors that lead into the dining room. Sunday morning for me began when something small and giggly landed on my feet. It went from sleepytime to playtime pretty quickly after that.
My mom has gone completely baby-crazy. Well, she went baby-crazy about 2 years ago, but it's been escalating ever since. This is the first baby girl in the family since... her, I guess. My mom is doing everything she can to encourage my brother/sister/niece to visit, as often as possible. Her latest scheme is to allow them to leave some of the baby's stuff at her house even when the baby is not there. So there is a full-size crib, changing table, and assload of toys that live at my mom's house now. I'm sure my brother and sister appreciate this, but I think maybe they're also using it as a clever way to dump off unwanted baby crap. I'll give you an example. My mom bought the baby this little toy dog that you can pull by the leash and it has wheels and rolls along, and the rolling activates the voice chip inside and it makes doggie noises at you. Baby dragged it around for about 30 seconds before it capsized, at which point she immediately and finally got bored with it and didn't touch it again. There were many attempts to get her to play with it some more, but they were all for naught. After a few minutes of this, mommy exercised her newly-gained toy-dumping powers and said "Oh boy, doggie is fun isn't he? We'll have so much fun playing with him next time we visit Grandma, won't we?" Ba-da-bing, ba-da-boom, one less piece of baby crap! A surreptitious parental high-five followed.
I'm not gonna gush about how cute the baby is, but I will say one thing. They got her some shoes that have little squeakers in them. I challenge anyone not to smile when a baby toddles up to you for a hug, huge smile on her face, making squeaky noises with every awkward step.
My niece is nearly 2 years old now, and she can walk. This means that watching the baby is no longer the responsibility of her parents, but the responsibility of everyone in the building. A kid that young you can't just leave alone, unless she's sleeping. And any time she's not sleeping she's zooming around, often in circles through the whole house. That means the job of watching her continually passes to the nearest person who has line-of-sight, often as many as 10 times per minute. If you're not actively playing with her, you are usually witness to seeing her run around and around some part of the house, possibly the chair you are sitting in. If you are actively playing with her, you'd better have a short attention span because you might be doing the same jump-out-from-behind-the-couch-and-scare-her routine for a good long while. Settle in, grab a drink.
On my latest visit to my parents' house, my brother and his wife and baby were there as well. Everyone was staying in the same house and there's not enough bedrooms, so I was set up on an air mattress in the dining room. One of baby's favorite games is to fall down face-first onto the air mattress. Then I jump onto the part next to her and it bounces her way up in the air and she laughs and screams. Again, if I'm not careful, this could go on for days. Well as it turns out, baby loves this game way too much to actually wait for me to get up in the morning before she starts playing. This would not be a problem except that she figured out how to open the folding doors that lead into the dining room. Sunday morning for me began when something small and giggly landed on my feet. It went from sleepytime to playtime pretty quickly after that.
My mom has gone completely baby-crazy. Well, she went baby-crazy about 2 years ago, but it's been escalating ever since. This is the first baby girl in the family since... her, I guess. My mom is doing everything she can to encourage my brother/sister/niece to visit, as often as possible. Her latest scheme is to allow them to leave some of the baby's stuff at her house even when the baby is not there. So there is a full-size crib, changing table, and assload of toys that live at my mom's house now. I'm sure my brother and sister appreciate this, but I think maybe they're also using it as a clever way to dump off unwanted baby crap. I'll give you an example. My mom bought the baby this little toy dog that you can pull by the leash and it has wheels and rolls along, and the rolling activates the voice chip inside and it makes doggie noises at you. Baby dragged it around for about 30 seconds before it capsized, at which point she immediately and finally got bored with it and didn't touch it again. There were many attempts to get her to play with it some more, but they were all for naught. After a few minutes of this, mommy exercised her newly-gained toy-dumping powers and said "Oh boy, doggie is fun isn't he? We'll have so much fun playing with him next time we visit Grandma, won't we?" Ba-da-bing, ba-da-boom, one less piece of baby crap! A surreptitious parental high-five followed.
I'm not gonna gush about how cute the baby is, but I will say one thing. They got her some shoes that have little squeakers in them. I challenge anyone not to smile when a baby toddles up to you for a hug, huge smile on her face, making squeaky noises with every awkward step.
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
Shmesearch
I'm almost there. After only 3 grueling years, I'm just one week away from not earning a Master's Degree. It's so close that I can practically not taste it.
You see, on the path to get a PhD, you have to pass a couple of milestones. One of them is called the "Research Exam". It's a giant paper survey in which you read a million billion gazillion pavillion cotillion research papers and then write them up succinctly in 9000 words or less. I've spent most of the summer doing mine. Last summer I worked at Google and made ridiculous money. Just thought I'd mention.
Anyway, the Research Exam is somewhat special. Though it's tons of work, after you finish it you have the option of getting a Master's Degree on the way to your PhD*.
(* Offer not valid for losers who decided to get a Master's Degree first before going to get their PhD because they couldn't get in anywhere good and didn't wanna go get a real job instead)
So even though I don't get a Master's Degree, I still have to do the freaking Research Exam. A pessimist would say I get no reward for all my hard work. An optimist would say that I got my reward 3 years ago, and have been able to enjoy it this whole time (I asked an optimist and he assured me this is what he would say). I prefer to think of it in another way: after I complete my Research Exam, the university will travel backward in time and award it to me 3 years ago. This way I still get something for my effort, and it only violates causality a little bit.
Most students you talk to about the Research Exam are very casual about it. "Oh yeah, it's just a giant book report. It's a lot of work, but it's easy." But of course, Professors like to "motivate you to do your best," which is secret code for "spur you into action through fear and intimidation." So my advisor is making my exam sound much more important than anyone else seems to think it is. From hearing him talk, the exam will foreshadow my entire future research career, and that of all my descendants. Its impact will echo throughout time and space, and a couple other dimensions we haven't discovered yet. It will cause the creation or destruction of countless alien worlds, and single-handedly determine who wins the final battle between good and evil. So my slides need to be really REALLY good.
The biggest beef I have with it is just that I've done nothing else this whole summer. I wake up in the morning and spend all day working on my exam, then I go home and sleep and wake up the next day and work on my exam. I constantly worry that the result I turn in is garbage, and that my advisor will tell me that I'm not cut out to be a researcher. More and more I have daydreams where I'm in my Research Exam presentation and at the end they tell me that everything I've done is worthless and just start laughing at my complete ineptitude, and then I start cussing everyone out and run out of the room and leave the state and start my life over as a potato farmer. I've never seen a potato in the wild before, but I bet I could take it.
Your reward for reading through this far is that I will now pelt you with a plethora of potato puns:
I'm going to try to grow the world's smallest potatoes, one millionth the normal size...
I'll call them mu-taters.
Or I could arrange them all in a grid and only sell them line by line...
Then they'd be row-taters.
Or maybe I could just put little pairs of glasses on them...
Then they'd be spec-taters.
Then I could start them on the path to becoming doctors...
And I'd have a bunch of pre-med-itaters.
At their interviews they'd need nice clothes, so I'd buy them expensive jeans...
So they'd be levi-taters.
Some I would treat as royalty, but the rest would just be common-taters.
If I got lonely some nights then the unlucky ones would become dick-taters (They'll get it right in the eyes!)
But don't worry, I'd treat those ones especially well. I'd take them all on a cruise...
On my dick-tater-ship.
You see, on the path to get a PhD, you have to pass a couple of milestones. One of them is called the "Research Exam". It's a giant paper survey in which you read a million billion gazillion pavillion cotillion research papers and then write them up succinctly in 9000 words or less. I've spent most of the summer doing mine. Last summer I worked at Google and made ridiculous money. Just thought I'd mention.
Anyway, the Research Exam is somewhat special. Though it's tons of work, after you finish it you have the option of getting a Master's Degree on the way to your PhD*.
(* Offer not valid for losers who decided to get a Master's Degree first before going to get their PhD because they couldn't get in anywhere good and didn't wanna go get a real job instead)
So even though I don't get a Master's Degree, I still have to do the freaking Research Exam. A pessimist would say I get no reward for all my hard work. An optimist would say that I got my reward 3 years ago, and have been able to enjoy it this whole time (I asked an optimist and he assured me this is what he would say). I prefer to think of it in another way: after I complete my Research Exam, the university will travel backward in time and award it to me 3 years ago. This way I still get something for my effort, and it only violates causality a little bit.
Most students you talk to about the Research Exam are very casual about it. "Oh yeah, it's just a giant book report. It's a lot of work, but it's easy." But of course, Professors like to "motivate you to do your best," which is secret code for "spur you into action through fear and intimidation." So my advisor is making my exam sound much more important than anyone else seems to think it is. From hearing him talk, the exam will foreshadow my entire future research career, and that of all my descendants. Its impact will echo throughout time and space, and a couple other dimensions we haven't discovered yet. It will cause the creation or destruction of countless alien worlds, and single-handedly determine who wins the final battle between good and evil. So my slides need to be really REALLY good.
The biggest beef I have with it is just that I've done nothing else this whole summer. I wake up in the morning and spend all day working on my exam, then I go home and sleep and wake up the next day and work on my exam. I constantly worry that the result I turn in is garbage, and that my advisor will tell me that I'm not cut out to be a researcher. More and more I have daydreams where I'm in my Research Exam presentation and at the end they tell me that everything I've done is worthless and just start laughing at my complete ineptitude, and then I start cussing everyone out and run out of the room and leave the state and start my life over as a potato farmer. I've never seen a potato in the wild before, but I bet I could take it.
Your reward for reading through this far is that I will now pelt you with a plethora of potato puns:
I'm going to try to grow the world's smallest potatoes, one millionth the normal size...
I'll call them mu-taters.
Or I could arrange them all in a grid and only sell them line by line...
Then they'd be row-taters.
Or maybe I could just put little pairs of glasses on them...
Then they'd be spec-taters.
Then I could start them on the path to becoming doctors...
And I'd have a bunch of pre-med-itaters.
At their interviews they'd need nice clothes, so I'd buy them expensive jeans...
So they'd be levi-taters.
Some I would treat as royalty, but the rest would just be common-taters.
If I got lonely some nights then the unlucky ones would become dick-taters (They'll get it right in the eyes!)
But don't worry, I'd treat those ones especially well. I'd take them all on a cruise...
On my dick-tater-ship.
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
Dude, put some freaking pants on
It's gone too far this time. Allow me to explain.
I do not live alone. I rent a room out of a nice lady's condo. It's not big, but at least it's far from campus. She's in her late 30's and she's Italian, but she's been in America for quite a while. She was married but is now divorced, and when I met her she was dating her ex-husband again. After she remembered what a douchebag he is and dumped him, she dated a couple random dudes but never for very long.
That's when she met him. I can only imagine it was at a bar or a club, because that's where she goes looking. Let me begin by saying he's an incredibly nice guy and he's never done me a bit of harm. We're not really friends but I'm not friends with most people. We're friendly towards each other, is a good way to describe our interactions. Henceforth, he shall be referred to only as Boyfriend.
Anyway, now that the disclaimer is out of the way, I can point out how ridiculous the whole situation is. It basically boils down to 2 things; 1) he's Brazilian so he doesn't speak English very well, and 2) he's waaaaaaaaaaay younger than her. She totally goes for the spicy foreign types... most of the dudes she dated after hubby were like totally ripped latin men. He's no different; he's clearly in good shape and apparently he's a really good soccer player (really? a Brazilian who's good at soccer? no shit!). I mentioned that he was way younger than her... I'm not a very good judge of age, but I had him pegged at like 29. He looked pretty darn young, so I figured he couldn't be very much older than I was. She's around 38. So yes, I know it's a terrible stereotype to apply to someone, but he is totally a spicy foreign boytoy. There's just no other way to look at it. They're both nice people, but this is totally a cougar-poolboy situation.
Anyway, before long he's over all the time. Now, he's a nice guy, but between the language barrier and the fact that they are trying to kiss and snuggle every freaking second of the day, my interactions with him were awkward at best. I tend to have a late schedule, and when I would come home at like 9 or 10pm they would be on the couch snuggling watching TV. Every day. Our living room isn't really big enough that you can do two things in it at the same time, especially if one of them is watch TV, and especially if the people watching TV really want to be left alone right now. It got to the point that I would walk in the front door, say hi, go up to my room and stay there til they went to bed.
This wasn't a big deal because she worked normal hours so she couldn't stay up late most nights. So I had the downstairs to myself after about 10. I'm a nightowl anyway, so this suited me fine.
Then she lost her job. She works in marketing, and her company downsized. Thus beginneth the long long long period of idleness in which she sleeps in every day and stays up late every night. So, she essentially adopted exactly my schedule. This means that there's NO time of day when she's not in the house and I am, and there's NO time of day when she's asleep and I'm not. I essentially had no alone time in my own house anymore, which is something I need. I need to be around people, but I also NEED MY ALONE TIME. I could only be alone in my room, which gets really old after a while.
Meanwhile, Boyfriend gets a job as a delivery boy. The boytoy actually gets a job with the word 'boy' in it. The irony is not lost on me. But the life of a delivery boy is not too demanding, so his presence at my house is not diminished in any significant degree. So now they're both free all day, presumably screwing constantly, and staying up until 2am when they retire to their bedroom to screw loudly to cap off a long day of screwing.
So, fine. They're enjoying themselves, she's unemployed, and very half-assedly looking for work. I'm not a fan of hearing loud screwing all the time, but at least they're not rubbing it in my face. Then our house's dress code got more casual. I didn't receive the memo, but apparently we implemented a 'shirt-optional' policy. And it only applied to Boyfriend. Not that I particularly want to walk around with my shirt off, but I didn't because it's really douche-baggy to regularly expose the people around you to your own partial nudity. It's douchebaggy either way; if you're ripped then you're clearly showing off, and if you're not then nobody wants to see your pale nasty body. So I would come home sometimes and they would be on the couch, and he'd be shirtless.
This just started happening, out of the blue. When you walk into a room and two people are on a couch snuggling and one is shirtless, you've walked into a situation where you're not especially welcome. It doesn't even matter which person is shirtless. I'm pretty sure the first time this happened I didn't do more than a triple-take. I played it off as if it was nothing. Because I didn't know what else to do, and my default reaction is tolerance. That may have been my biggest mistake, because it set precedent. More and more often, I'd find Boyfriend shirtless in my house. My comfort level at home is skyrocketing.
Though she was unemployed, that didn't stop my housemate from taking a trip to Italy. I think she had planned it before she lost her job, and the tickets were non-refundable. It kinda made sense. Anyway, she went and didn't take him along. I was in charge of the dog, which is always much more annoying than I think it will be. Here's the fun part that I found out after she left. Boyfriend is going to help take care of the dog, and so she gave him a key to the house. You cannot understand how creepy it was to come home one day and FIND HIM ALL ALONE IN MY FUCKING HOUSE, FUCKING SHIRTLESS AND FUCKING WATCHING THE FUCKING TV!!!
Again, I played it off like it was nothing, but I was really weirded out for a second. But since she wasn't there, I got a lovely opportunity to talk to him all by myself. Oh goodie. We sat around watching TV for a coupla minutes, making small talk. He knew I went to school and started asking me about it. I tried my best to describe what I do to a layman who doesn't speak English very well. I told him I'd been in college for like 8 years or something, and got the appropriate 'wow'. Little did I know, this would soon lead to awesomeness.
After I mentioned the 8 years in college, he asked me how old I was. I think I was probably 26 at the time, and said so. Then I realized that this was my opportunity to see exactly how much of a cradle-robber my housemate was, so I asked him back. "Oh me? I'm 22." Twenty-fucking-two!!!! HE WAS 4 YEARS YOUNGER THAN ME!!! I had a really really really hard time not laughing or smiling or acting shocked. Maybe I'm a bastard, but I just thought this was the greatest news ever. It just made the situation so much more cheap and tawdry. Frankly, it was delicious.
We're getting near the end of the story, but there's 2 more important points to make. My housemate took another vacation to Italy (in which she again gave Boyfriend a key). She got back late at night so I didn't see her the night she got back. But I saw her the next day, as I'm leaving for school. She had a great trip, and oh Mike thanks for walking Austin, and it's so good to be home, and so good to see Boyfriend again, and they had a nice romantic evening last night, and they were so happy to see each other again and Boyfriend got a bit overwhelmed and proposed and NOW WE'RE ENGAGED!!!!!!
Whoa. I don't care what anyone says, it takes stones to propose to a divorcee who's 16 years older than you. Stones, or a complete lack of sense. The two are not mutually exclusive.
Anyway, not much has changed since the engagement. He wants to finish school before they get married, so it's kind of a long-term engagement. Things went back to the old status quo.
Until TONIGHT. This prompted the blog post, and explains the title. Maybe you can guess what happened. It's not much of a stretch, given the rest of this story.
I come home tonight, they're in the living room, kinda look like they're about to go upstairs. I see Boyfriend wearing a t-shirt and absolutely no evidence of pants. He acted pretty casual about it (well why not, he's a casual guy, right?) so I am guessing he at least had something covering his twig-n-berries. But it did not protrude down below his shirt. That's not a good look for a man, just on general principles.
If we ever get to a situation where it's speedo only, I might have to say something.
I do not live alone. I rent a room out of a nice lady's condo. It's not big, but at least it's far from campus. She's in her late 30's and she's Italian, but she's been in America for quite a while. She was married but is now divorced, and when I met her she was dating her ex-husband again. After she remembered what a douchebag he is and dumped him, she dated a couple random dudes but never for very long.
That's when she met him. I can only imagine it was at a bar or a club, because that's where she goes looking. Let me begin by saying he's an incredibly nice guy and he's never done me a bit of harm. We're not really friends but I'm not friends with most people. We're friendly towards each other, is a good way to describe our interactions. Henceforth, he shall be referred to only as Boyfriend.
Anyway, now that the disclaimer is out of the way, I can point out how ridiculous the whole situation is. It basically boils down to 2 things; 1) he's Brazilian so he doesn't speak English very well, and 2) he's waaaaaaaaaaay younger than her. She totally goes for the spicy foreign types... most of the dudes she dated after hubby were like totally ripped latin men. He's no different; he's clearly in good shape and apparently he's a really good soccer player (really? a Brazilian who's good at soccer? no shit!). I mentioned that he was way younger than her... I'm not a very good judge of age, but I had him pegged at like 29. He looked pretty darn young, so I figured he couldn't be very much older than I was. She's around 38. So yes, I know it's a terrible stereotype to apply to someone, but he is totally a spicy foreign boytoy. There's just no other way to look at it. They're both nice people, but this is totally a cougar-poolboy situation.
Anyway, before long he's over all the time. Now, he's a nice guy, but between the language barrier and the fact that they are trying to kiss and snuggle every freaking second of the day, my interactions with him were awkward at best. I tend to have a late schedule, and when I would come home at like 9 or 10pm they would be on the couch snuggling watching TV. Every day. Our living room isn't really big enough that you can do two things in it at the same time, especially if one of them is watch TV, and especially if the people watching TV really want to be left alone right now. It got to the point that I would walk in the front door, say hi, go up to my room and stay there til they went to bed.
This wasn't a big deal because she worked normal hours so she couldn't stay up late most nights. So I had the downstairs to myself after about 10. I'm a nightowl anyway, so this suited me fine.
Then she lost her job. She works in marketing, and her company downsized. Thus beginneth the long long long period of idleness in which she sleeps in every day and stays up late every night. So, she essentially adopted exactly my schedule. This means that there's NO time of day when she's not in the house and I am, and there's NO time of day when she's asleep and I'm not. I essentially had no alone time in my own house anymore, which is something I need. I need to be around people, but I also NEED MY ALONE TIME. I could only be alone in my room, which gets really old after a while.
Meanwhile, Boyfriend gets a job as a delivery boy. The boytoy actually gets a job with the word 'boy' in it. The irony is not lost on me. But the life of a delivery boy is not too demanding, so his presence at my house is not diminished in any significant degree. So now they're both free all day, presumably screwing constantly, and staying up until 2am when they retire to their bedroom to screw loudly to cap off a long day of screwing.
So, fine. They're enjoying themselves, she's unemployed, and very half-assedly looking for work. I'm not a fan of hearing loud screwing all the time, but at least they're not rubbing it in my face. Then our house's dress code got more casual. I didn't receive the memo, but apparently we implemented a 'shirt-optional' policy. And it only applied to Boyfriend. Not that I particularly want to walk around with my shirt off, but I didn't because it's really douche-baggy to regularly expose the people around you to your own partial nudity. It's douchebaggy either way; if you're ripped then you're clearly showing off, and if you're not then nobody wants to see your pale nasty body. So I would come home sometimes and they would be on the couch, and he'd be shirtless.
This just started happening, out of the blue. When you walk into a room and two people are on a couch snuggling and one is shirtless, you've walked into a situation where you're not especially welcome. It doesn't even matter which person is shirtless. I'm pretty sure the first time this happened I didn't do more than a triple-take. I played it off as if it was nothing. Because I didn't know what else to do, and my default reaction is tolerance. That may have been my biggest mistake, because it set precedent. More and more often, I'd find Boyfriend shirtless in my house. My comfort level at home is skyrocketing.
Though she was unemployed, that didn't stop my housemate from taking a trip to Italy. I think she had planned it before she lost her job, and the tickets were non-refundable. It kinda made sense. Anyway, she went and didn't take him along. I was in charge of the dog, which is always much more annoying than I think it will be. Here's the fun part that I found out after she left. Boyfriend is going to help take care of the dog, and so she gave him a key to the house. You cannot understand how creepy it was to come home one day and FIND HIM ALL ALONE IN MY FUCKING HOUSE, FUCKING SHIRTLESS AND FUCKING WATCHING THE FUCKING TV!!!
Again, I played it off like it was nothing, but I was really weirded out for a second. But since she wasn't there, I got a lovely opportunity to talk to him all by myself. Oh goodie. We sat around watching TV for a coupla minutes, making small talk. He knew I went to school and started asking me about it. I tried my best to describe what I do to a layman who doesn't speak English very well. I told him I'd been in college for like 8 years or something, and got the appropriate 'wow'. Little did I know, this would soon lead to awesomeness.
After I mentioned the 8 years in college, he asked me how old I was. I think I was probably 26 at the time, and said so. Then I realized that this was my opportunity to see exactly how much of a cradle-robber my housemate was, so I asked him back. "Oh me? I'm 22." Twenty-fucking-two!!!! HE WAS 4 YEARS YOUNGER THAN ME!!! I had a really really really hard time not laughing or smiling or acting shocked. Maybe I'm a bastard, but I just thought this was the greatest news ever. It just made the situation so much more cheap and tawdry. Frankly, it was delicious.
We're getting near the end of the story, but there's 2 more important points to make. My housemate took another vacation to Italy (in which she again gave Boyfriend a key). She got back late at night so I didn't see her the night she got back. But I saw her the next day, as I'm leaving for school. She had a great trip, and oh Mike thanks for walking Austin, and it's so good to be home, and so good to see Boyfriend again, and they had a nice romantic evening last night, and they were so happy to see each other again and Boyfriend got a bit overwhelmed and proposed and NOW WE'RE ENGAGED!!!!!!
Whoa. I don't care what anyone says, it takes stones to propose to a divorcee who's 16 years older than you. Stones, or a complete lack of sense. The two are not mutually exclusive.
Anyway, not much has changed since the engagement. He wants to finish school before they get married, so it's kind of a long-term engagement. Things went back to the old status quo.
Until TONIGHT. This prompted the blog post, and explains the title. Maybe you can guess what happened. It's not much of a stretch, given the rest of this story.
I come home tonight, they're in the living room, kinda look like they're about to go upstairs. I see Boyfriend wearing a t-shirt and absolutely no evidence of pants. He acted pretty casual about it (well why not, he's a casual guy, right?) so I am guessing he at least had something covering his twig-n-berries. But it did not protrude down below his shirt. That's not a good look for a man, just on general principles.
If we ever get to a situation where it's speedo only, I might have to say something.
Monday, August 11, 2008
Life Lesson #5432
If thy dog hath diarrhea, leavest not thy dog alone for 8 straight hours whilst ye goeth to the racetrack.
Wednesday, August 6, 2008
Wordulence
I've found a wonderful new way to distract myself from whatever the hell it is I do. It all happened when my friend Meg showed me this game on Facebook that she plays called "Who's Got the Biggest Brain?" It's a flash game that makes you do a few timed tasks and it scores you in terms of how heavy your brain must be, based on your performance. Meg, apparently, has a large brain. More importantly, Meg is determined to make her brain grow larger than her advisor, who is currently beating her high score. Nothing can make you focus on a task like spite... uh, I mean, like having a concrete goal in mind. Anyway, I played this game a few times and I did ok. My brain is medium sized. But at the top of the game screen there's link to go to the other fun games made by the same company. One of them caught my eye: "Word Challenge". Just the title makes you tingle a little bit, doesn't it? Nah, me neither. But I do like word games, so I clicked on it.
Turns out it's a game very similar to Text Twist but legally distinct in two important ways. First of all, after each puzzle, if you get the 6-letter word, you go to a bonus round where the word is the first name of one of your buddies on Facebook. Never have I wished to be a hermit more in my entire life. I've got Facebook friends I've never even met before... how am I supposed to know their names, much less unscramble them from a bunch of random letters? It's giving me all kinds of completely unwarranted hostility towards my friends with unusual names. I'm all for diversity and whatnot, but it doesn't stop me from cursing every time I have to unscramble "Ganesh" or "Sujata" or "Pedram".
The other important difference is that if you get a word that has 4 or more letters, you get some extra time. It's this feature, more than anything, that will ensure my eventual death by starvation sitting in front of my keyboard. Think about it; if you're good, it rewards you by letting you play longer. And like anything, the more you play, the better you get. It sounds harmless, but in actuality it's a devious plan to get nerds like me hooked so that we never ever stop playing Word Challenge. Oh, what's that? You're not convinced? Let me tell you a story...
When I first started playing, I was doing okay, and I could occasionally get the 6-letter word, and I could usually get the Bonus Round too (f***ing Ganesh!!!) and after a few good games I got my score up to about 10000. (I know you have no frame of reference for how good that score is, which is why I'm telling this story. Keep your pants on.) I thought I was doing pretty well, and I was pleased with my performance. If only they measured it in terms of brain size, I was sure they would be telling me that my brain would need a wheelbarrow to help me cart it around. Then I looked at the high score list. It only shows you the scores from your other Facebook buddies who also play the game. At the time, I only had one buddy who was playing, and it was a girl I had met in passing last summer when I was at Google.
I looked at her score. I blinked. I looked at it again. She had 39000 points. I blinked again. This can't be right. I refresh the game to make sure there's no error. It's still there: 39000. This person (who is both an undergrad and a GIRL!) that I didn't really even know had beaten the crap out of my best score, and she did it before I even started playing. Clearly, this could not stand. I made it my mission to beat her score and claim my rightful place at the top of the nerd... uh, I mean Word Challenge hall of fame.
The next few days were not very productive, work-wise. Mostly, I sat in my office at my laptop, typing frantically and cursing at the screen at regular intervals. But my score steadily rose. First I got up to 15000, then 18000. After one epic game I managed to squeak out 20000 points. Another thing you should know at this point is that you don't get very many points per word. So getting a score of 20000 takes about 15 minutes of solid, stressful, clock-racing vigor. But I was determined. I would practice and practice and waste as much of my time as it took to beat that bitch. (Yes, in my mind she had slighted me greatly by daring to take my seat at the top. Even now I'm pretty sure she doesn't even know I was competing with her... her score hasn't changed since I started. It's entirely possible she quit the game before I ever played.)
And then it happened. After one game that must have last 45 minutes (even though you only start with 2 minutes on the clock) I managed to get over 30000 points. I still had a way to go but now it seemed inevitable. I was going to beat her, it was just a matter of time. A couple more days and I got a few more 30000+ scores, but not quite enough. At this point I decided I could rejoin the world a bit. Get some work done, shower, eat, etc. All that unimportant stuff. I was taking a break from work sometime in the afternoon and I decided to play Word Challenge (you know, for a change). I wasn't really in competition mode, I just wanted to kill a few minutes while I ran some tests. So I load it up and start playing.... and pretty soon I'm up to 20000 and I have most of my 2 minutes left. Then I get up to 30000 and I have about 1 minute left. Then I get up to 35000 and I have about 45 seconds left (you should be getting an idea of how far one can stretch these precious seconds). And finally it happens; I get 39000 and I've still got 20 seconds left. I inch my way closer to her score, hundred by hundred, and then KABOOM! My icon and hers swap places on the right-hand side of the screen, signifying that I, Michael, son of Lawrence, have beaten her best score in Word Challenge!! I was so overwhelmed that I stopped paying attention to the game, and only got about another thousand before I ran out of time. My final score was around 41000 points. I had done it. I had beaten that smug, self-righteous skank (ok, ok, so I only imagined that she was smug and mocking me and telling me I had tiny inferior genitals... you gotta hate your enemy or else your victory means nothing) at her own game! I could now retire in peace, knowing that I was the best wordmonkey in the world (where "the world" = "all of my facebook friends who played the game" = "one of my facebook friends").
I think it would be fair at this point to say I got a bit smug. I had worked hard to get that score, and I knew it was impressive because I had just impressed the hell out of myself. I wanted my friends to know exactly how lucky they were to know me, and to be able to bask in the awesomeness of my score. The game has an "invite" feature, so I invited a couple of my friends who I know like word puzzles. It was a dick move, but I basically wanted them to play a few times, get the idea that it would require a ridiculous amount of work to get a score as high as mine, and quit with a mixture of respect and disgust. But I didn't count on Brian.
Brian values his time as little as I do mine. And he likes word puzzles. That's why I invited him. I also really wanted something to lord over him, because he's annoyingly smart (most of my friends are annoying and/or smart). He started playing, and he pretty quickly got a respectable score, around 15000. The game also has a challenge feature where one person challenges another to beat his score. The challenger plays a round of the game and the opponent tries to beat his score. So just for fun I challenged Brian to a couple games and soundly beat the pants off him. My ego, uh, I mean brain, was now so enormous that it required several large office blocks just to house its operating manual.
But Brian persevered. His scores kept rising... 20000, 25000. And there was one embarassing challenge where I didn't do very well, and Brian actually BEAT ME! Oh, the shame of it all! But it was okay, it was just a challenge. I still had my precious High Score to lord over him. He'll never be able to take that away from me....
Well, unless you're a member of a typical TV audience you can see what's coming here. Brian beat my f***ing score. He got something like 45000. It was so on. I began neglecting work like there was no tomorrow! Just playing and playing and playing until my back was all hunched and my eyes didn't need to blink anymore. I began rearranging letters everywhere I looked. I couldn't read the newpaper without finding several 4-letter words in each sentence. I got my score up to something like 50000. Ha! Beat that, Brian!!
Hold on, hold on... I didn't mean it! It was just a taunt! Holy crap?!?! How did you get 60000 points?? I feel I should mention that when the game tells you your score, it also tells you what occupation has the same wordiness level that you do. So when you do pretty well you get "student" or "librarian" or "poet". Above 40000 is well into "Anagram Cyborg" country. The picture that goes along with it is William Shakespeare with bionic implants. That's me, baby. If you take this telescope and look out past Venus you can just see my brain orbiting the sun. I had to get it off-planet because it weighs half as much as Jupiter. The latency's a bitch, but the throughput is excellent.
But I beat Brian's score, and for the first time I was engaged in an active Word Challenge war. I got up to 75000. And then the next day I got 80000. Brian starting catching up and made it to 70000. But he started getting busy with school, so he didn't have as much time to play. Also, I think he was just getting bored with it. So I was playing much more than he was, and my score steadily rose. And he stayed at 70000.
When I'm old and I look back on my life and I wonder what it is that I did that in some way has made the world a better place or has been a boon to humanity, I generally imagine it will have something to do with my work in Computer Science. Maybe I'll come up with an important theorem, or invent a cool new programming language. Maybe I'll work on an important piece of software that everyone uses, or start a company that becomes world-famous. But now I know that none of these things will ever come close to my Word Challenge high score. Tonight I
played a couple games and the last one scored 242000. I may never have children, but I can rest easy knowing that my brain-progeny will outlive me, and serve as a shining example to future generations.
I am Mike, and I like to play word games. Fear me!
(Brian is still at 70000, what a pussy)
(Update: Brian 100000, Mike 450000)
Turns out it's a game very similar to Text Twist but legally distinct in two important ways. First of all, after each puzzle, if you get the 6-letter word, you go to a bonus round where the word is the first name of one of your buddies on Facebook. Never have I wished to be a hermit more in my entire life. I've got Facebook friends I've never even met before... how am I supposed to know their names, much less unscramble them from a bunch of random letters? It's giving me all kinds of completely unwarranted hostility towards my friends with unusual names. I'm all for diversity and whatnot, but it doesn't stop me from cursing every time I have to unscramble "Ganesh" or "Sujata" or "Pedram".
The other important difference is that if you get a word that has 4 or more letters, you get some extra time. It's this feature, more than anything, that will ensure my eventual death by starvation sitting in front of my keyboard. Think about it; if you're good, it rewards you by letting you play longer. And like anything, the more you play, the better you get. It sounds harmless, but in actuality it's a devious plan to get nerds like me hooked so that we never ever stop playing Word Challenge. Oh, what's that? You're not convinced? Let me tell you a story...
When I first started playing, I was doing okay, and I could occasionally get the 6-letter word, and I could usually get the Bonus Round too (f***ing Ganesh!!!) and after a few good games I got my score up to about 10000. (I know you have no frame of reference for how good that score is, which is why I'm telling this story. Keep your pants on.) I thought I was doing pretty well, and I was pleased with my performance. If only they measured it in terms of brain size, I was sure they would be telling me that my brain would need a wheelbarrow to help me cart it around. Then I looked at the high score list. It only shows you the scores from your other Facebook buddies who also play the game. At the time, I only had one buddy who was playing, and it was a girl I had met in passing last summer when I was at Google.
I looked at her score. I blinked. I looked at it again. She had 39000 points. I blinked again. This can't be right. I refresh the game to make sure there's no error. It's still there: 39000. This person (who is both an undergrad and a GIRL!) that I didn't really even know had beaten the crap out of my best score, and she did it before I even started playing. Clearly, this could not stand. I made it my mission to beat her score and claim my rightful place at the top of the nerd... uh, I mean Word Challenge hall of fame.
The next few days were not very productive, work-wise. Mostly, I sat in my office at my laptop, typing frantically and cursing at the screen at regular intervals. But my score steadily rose. First I got up to 15000, then 18000. After one epic game I managed to squeak out 20000 points. Another thing you should know at this point is that you don't get very many points per word. So getting a score of 20000 takes about 15 minutes of solid, stressful, clock-racing vigor. But I was determined. I would practice and practice and waste as much of my time as it took to beat that bitch. (Yes, in my mind she had slighted me greatly by daring to take my seat at the top. Even now I'm pretty sure she doesn't even know I was competing with her... her score hasn't changed since I started. It's entirely possible she quit the game before I ever played.)
And then it happened. After one game that must have last 45 minutes (even though you only start with 2 minutes on the clock) I managed to get over 30000 points. I still had a way to go but now it seemed inevitable. I was going to beat her, it was just a matter of time. A couple more days and I got a few more 30000+ scores, but not quite enough. At this point I decided I could rejoin the world a bit. Get some work done, shower, eat, etc. All that unimportant stuff. I was taking a break from work sometime in the afternoon and I decided to play Word Challenge (you know, for a change). I wasn't really in competition mode, I just wanted to kill a few minutes while I ran some tests. So I load it up and start playing.... and pretty soon I'm up to 20000 and I have most of my 2 minutes left. Then I get up to 30000 and I have about 1 minute left. Then I get up to 35000 and I have about 45 seconds left (you should be getting an idea of how far one can stretch these precious seconds). And finally it happens; I get 39000 and I've still got 20 seconds left. I inch my way closer to her score, hundred by hundred, and then KABOOM! My icon and hers swap places on the right-hand side of the screen, signifying that I, Michael, son of Lawrence, have beaten her best score in Word Challenge!! I was so overwhelmed that I stopped paying attention to the game, and only got about another thousand before I ran out of time. My final score was around 41000 points. I had done it. I had beaten that smug, self-righteous skank (ok, ok, so I only imagined that she was smug and mocking me and telling me I had tiny inferior genitals... you gotta hate your enemy or else your victory means nothing) at her own game! I could now retire in peace, knowing that I was the best wordmonkey in the world (where "the world" = "all of my facebook friends who played the game" = "one of my facebook friends").
I think it would be fair at this point to say I got a bit smug. I had worked hard to get that score, and I knew it was impressive because I had just impressed the hell out of myself. I wanted my friends to know exactly how lucky they were to know me, and to be able to bask in the awesomeness of my score. The game has an "invite" feature, so I invited a couple of my friends who I know like word puzzles. It was a dick move, but I basically wanted them to play a few times, get the idea that it would require a ridiculous amount of work to get a score as high as mine, and quit with a mixture of respect and disgust. But I didn't count on Brian.
Brian values his time as little as I do mine. And he likes word puzzles. That's why I invited him. I also really wanted something to lord over him, because he's annoyingly smart (most of my friends are annoying and/or smart). He started playing, and he pretty quickly got a respectable score, around 15000. The game also has a challenge feature where one person challenges another to beat his score. The challenger plays a round of the game and the opponent tries to beat his score. So just for fun I challenged Brian to a couple games and soundly beat the pants off him. My ego, uh, I mean brain, was now so enormous that it required several large office blocks just to house its operating manual.
But Brian persevered. His scores kept rising... 20000, 25000. And there was one embarassing challenge where I didn't do very well, and Brian actually BEAT ME! Oh, the shame of it all! But it was okay, it was just a challenge. I still had my precious High Score to lord over him. He'll never be able to take that away from me....
Well, unless you're a member of a typical TV audience you can see what's coming here. Brian beat my f***ing score. He got something like 45000. It was so on. I began neglecting work like there was no tomorrow! Just playing and playing and playing until my back was all hunched and my eyes didn't need to blink anymore. I began rearranging letters everywhere I looked. I couldn't read the newpaper without finding several 4-letter words in each sentence. I got my score up to something like 50000. Ha! Beat that, Brian!!
Hold on, hold on... I didn't mean it! It was just a taunt! Holy crap?!?! How did you get 60000 points?? I feel I should mention that when the game tells you your score, it also tells you what occupation has the same wordiness level that you do. So when you do pretty well you get "student" or "librarian" or "poet". Above 40000 is well into "Anagram Cyborg" country. The picture that goes along with it is William Shakespeare with bionic implants. That's me, baby. If you take this telescope and look out past Venus you can just see my brain orbiting the sun. I had to get it off-planet because it weighs half as much as Jupiter. The latency's a bitch, but the throughput is excellent.
But I beat Brian's score, and for the first time I was engaged in an active Word Challenge war. I got up to 75000. And then the next day I got 80000. Brian starting catching up and made it to 70000. But he started getting busy with school, so he didn't have as much time to play. Also, I think he was just getting bored with it. So I was playing much more than he was, and my score steadily rose. And he stayed at 70000.
When I'm old and I look back on my life and I wonder what it is that I did that in some way has made the world a better place or has been a boon to humanity, I generally imagine it will have something to do with my work in Computer Science. Maybe I'll come up with an important theorem, or invent a cool new programming language. Maybe I'll work on an important piece of software that everyone uses, or start a company that becomes world-famous. But now I know that none of these things will ever come close to my Word Challenge high score. Tonight I
played a couple games and the last one scored 242000. I may never have children, but I can rest easy knowing that my brain-progeny will outlive me, and serve as a shining example to future generations.
I am Mike, and I like to play word games. Fear me!
(Brian is still at 70000, what a pussy)
(Update: Brian 100000, Mike 450000)
Monday, July 28, 2008
Vlad is Risen
Well I'll be a monkey's uncle! (Oh, hey... I should probably stop saying that now that I have a niece...) But anyway, you'll never guess what fairly obvious life lesson I just learned. Here it is, presented in a special font and everything:
If thou wishest thine car to run, taketh it to the freaking dealer.
I have to say, the dealer was actually able to slightly reduce my cynicism about auto mechanics. They fixed everything that was wrong with my car. I know this, because if there had been anything else even remotely wrong with it, they would have found it and charged me for it. They even changed my oil and, get this, washed my car! My car hasn't been washed in the 3 years since I bought it. Actually, "bought" might not be the most appropriate word. It'd be more accurate to say I "traded some perfectly good money for it". But anyway, the check engine light is off for the first time since the trading of the money. Oh, it hasn't been on the whole time. But it did go on the day after I got the car, which was simultaneously the most portentous and the most accurate omen I have ever witnessed. I have now far exceeded the cost of the car just making repairs. It would literally have been more profitable for me to buy my car, throw it off a bridge, then buy another more expensive car.
I think my favorite part of all these repairs is the huge dent I've single-handedly made in the Toyota reputation, at least among my friends. I gripe to someone about having my car in the shop, and they'll naturally ask "what kind of car is it?" and then I say Corolla and smirk at their disbelief. "What?? I thought Toyotas would just run forever!" That's true, assuming the used car dealer you bought it from didn't decide to take your car's engine, swap most of it out for lawn mower parts, bury them in the sand for 1000 years, dig them up, piss on them, and put them back in your car. I can only assume this is what happened, because I didn't see it in person. But when you buy a car from Crazy Vaclav's Previously Owned Automotors you expect that kind of personal touch.
Anyway, it's running fine now, and I'm sure this will be the very last blog post about my car....
I think my favorite part of all these repairs is the huge dent I've single-handedly made in the Toyota reputation, at least among my friends. I gripe to someone about having my car in the shop, and they'll naturally ask "what kind of car is it?" and then I say Corolla and smirk at their disbelief. "What?? I thought Toyotas would just run forever!" That's true, assuming the used car dealer you bought it from didn't decide to take your car's engine, swap most of it out for lawn mower parts, bury them in the sand for 1000 years, dig them up, piss on them, and put them back in your car. I can only assume this is what happened, because I didn't see it in person. But when you buy a car from Crazy Vaclav's Previously Owned Automotors you expect that kind of personal touch.
Anyway, it's running fine now, and I'm sure this will be the very last blog post about my car....
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
Vlad is Sick
My car is in the shop again. The key word in that last sentence was 'again'. I think the thing that irritates me most about it is that I can't even enjoy complaining about it. When you complain about something, all you want out of people is for them to say "dude, that sucks". What you DON'T want them to do is start making 'helpful' suggestions. When I say "man, my f-ing car is in the shop again" the correct response is not "oh? what's wrong with it?" First of all, and I can't stress this enough, I DON'T KNOW WHAT'S WRONG WITH IT! I'm not a mechanic and neither are you. The two weeks you spent in Driver's Ed and the three story's worth of anecdotes you've heard about other people's cars did not adequately prepare you to diagnose my car based on my description of the problem, which will invariably be "m'car done stopped runnin' so good, a'reckon". And yes, I know you know the best mechanic in town. Please, give me his number, I'm totally paying attention right now.
On the plus side, my latest mechanic's name was "Richard Carver". That's almost worth the expense.
On the plus side, my latest mechanic's name was "Richard Carver". That's almost worth the expense.
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