thinking of buying a used 2001-2 toyota prius (~9-10k) for next year. it's a hybrid car. is anyone knowledgeable in this stuff? should i just buy a traditional car?

ode to mom

Not a good mood day. Not in the least.

They say you'd never want to marry someone who's mean to his mother. First time I heard that, I laughed it off and shuddered inside. And then there was a time when I made a conscious effort never to hang up the phone or let the vitriol spill out. And these days, I've just given up. Now, I love my mother. She's a wonderful person. But here's the rub... Some people talk things out. My family prefers a less placid way of settling disagreements. It's like an Italian family on Red Bull and without much of the smiling.

Can't we revise the sentence to read: Never marry a man who's mean to his mother, unless his family is inherently dysfunctional? For instance, "Will Hunting" -- good guy, but he's probably more confrontational with the parents, no? I mean, we all know how great Trey was to his mom, and Charlotte still divorced him.

Anyhow, the reason I bring this up is that my dear mother (who reads this, I suppose), abruptly ended a phone call with me, adding, "Have fun with your friends and your journal and your life." And it's far too great a task to explain the meaning of passive-aggressive to her, but come to think of it, it sounds like something I'd say.

Aside from that, Life just isn't very pleasant. But the weather couldn't be better.
Just seems like time is going fast, I just don't know where it's going.

revolving doors...

I have become fairly indiscriminate about the diet talk. There's so much to say. Life, now, is kind of like Space Mountain with the lights turned on. And all the magic behind eating Enteman's cookies are lost by virtue of my current fixation on the "Nutrition Information" box. Anyhow, story after story is generated, and my friends and labmates have duly listened to my calamitous diet experiences. But today today, at dinner, I realized that I have gone too far. I was called (1) substanceless and (2) on the verge of turning into one of those phony LA people whose sole fascination in life is dieting.

I tend to think that one should always have at least two amusing anecdotes to tell at any given point. So, when you see that random somebody, you can give them a life update in the form of an entertaining story. The only trouble comes when the story is stale, as the revolving door for life anecdotes moves fairly fast, even in the summer. I think my screenwriting/diet one-two punch has run it's course. So, now I need two new talking points. Ideas, with corresponding conversational points:
-learning about my roots, understanding my parents better (6/10)
-writing arts articles, interviewing B-list celebrities (7/10)
-making new acquaintances only to run social experiments (9/10)
-take dancing lessons, learn foxtrot, etc. (6-8/10, depends if I suck)
-have fun on match.com (10/10, disaster guaranteed)
-go to republican meetups to better understand the red states (7/10)
-get a psychologist for kicks, the Robin Williams type (8/10)
-take etiquitte lessons (6/10)
These topics, coming to a soiree near you

On a side note, I'll never really see Paul Wolfowitz in quite the same light. (He does a fun thing with saliva and his hair).

Is it wrong for people to wear shirts from sporting events that they never were a part of? A marathon, a crew race, a tennis tourney. My take is no. A shirt does not a trophy make. And furthermore, I figure having to keep saying, "Actually, my dad gave it to me" is punishment enough.

Diamond: Tilted Square

So, no matter how hard I try, I am simply inept at the game "Taboo." It's a bit of a pride issue by this point, because I've applied myself on countless occasions, and all to no avail. I'm not much for crosswords either, but I'd just feel like a conspiracy theorist-type if I mastered crosswords anyway. Regardless, I'm not one for synonyms. Can we all just decide to consider that a good thing? Precise diction is the goal, anyway.

I bought myself some Monoxodil today from CVS (not to be confused with nonoxynol) for my balding head. It's strange, about a year or two ago, the hairwomen started to recommend products for my hair. At first it was thinning. Now it's a precious resource. So, the last time I went to the hairwoman, she told me that I should use generic Rogaine (i.e. monoxodil) as it's mainly preventative, and I'm nearing that point where it could be too late. Moral: nobody wants a bald screenwriter either.

Oh, and if predictions are worth anying:
Iraq + 1-2 years + civil unrest = military coup, Pakistan style.
And then you really will have an overtly anti-American government funneling oil into bombs. (And sidenote, you go John Kerry for not crossing picket lines today.)

Spent the day craigslisting people so I can find an apartment in LA in the fall. I try to seem as normal as possible. Clean. Nonsmoker. Low maintenance. Quiet. Studious. Yes, I just thought of the generic international student and described him. And beyond that, cut it down from the bulky "devdoot" all the way down to "dev" for that faux-american flair.

It's mamo's birthday today, so happy birthday.

I'm doing research this summer.

It's odd to still be on campus now.
I mean, summers at MIT ordinarily suck. They just suck that extra mile when your friends are gone and most of the people left are barely acquaintances. Whenever anyone sees you, they can't help but blurt out "what are you still doing here?" as if I missed the pink slip.

Farenheit squeaked $2M past White Chicks with $21.8M in their opening weekends. Sadly, "Tupac: Resurrection" has now been dethroned as the top-selling documentary ever. So now, I guess I'm waiting for the Bill O'Reiley documentary. And frankly, I'll see that one on opening day too.

Finally, I'm done with Drudge Report. Maybe I've just seen enough of the "Join the conservative book club" banner ad. Maybe I'm sick of stories that blatantly attempt to dethrone thos like Bubba & Hillary, Al Franken, & Kerry. So, I've decided to read Gawker instead.

Oh, I guess Iraq Sovereignty was just transferred. Hahahahaha. Let the games begin...

(I read a long, boring blog yesterday and made a pact with myself to remain terse.)

torpor at baker desk

Writers I've decided to hate: A.O. Scott, David Amsden, Robert Novak
Writers I've decided to like: Maureen Dowd, Kenneth Turan, Anthony Lane

AO is the NY Times co-critic with a penchant for touchy feely reviews that are so routinely ambivalent that they are essentially valueless. Amsden is the fresh 23-year-old that everyone is calling the voice of the hipster literati -- I think I'm just jealous of him, but his writing has the novelty halflife of a stick of juicy fruit. Finally, Bob Novak is a dick who outs undercover CIA agents for political reasons.

(Maureen is a goddess. Kenneth is always right. And Anthony is funny, though also sometimes amorphous.)

So, my weekends are spent in the main lobby of my dorm, letting people in and out of the dorm. It's my insurance money as I look forward to my impoverished grad student future. It's stale and boring, and I just sit and watch movies, do computational labwork, and IM people on perhaps the only pleasant days to be in Massachusetts.

I had cereal today for the first time in 5 years. With nonfat milk. And let me say, nonfat milk is among the worst of beverages. You know how drinking water is better than drinking very dilute punch or lemonade without the sugar? It's like milk without the milk. And beyond this, it has the consistency of dilute white paint. Felt like adding some corstarch. But them's carbs there.

In boredom, I watched "The Hours" this morning. For me, it's up there with "Good Will Hunting," only with stifled tears. And when the movie was done, I watched it with Nicole & Julianne & Meryl's commentaries. And then I watched it with the director & writer's commentaries. And then, I felt I needed therapy and that the world was shit. I'm mellow again, after realizing that I'm no longer a student, and thus ineligible for free therapy.

But, if I may, the single scene that sums up the movie:
"I think I'm only staying alive to satisfy you"
"That is what we do. That is what people do. They stay alive for each other."

dreaming of michael...

So, I saw the Michael Moore movie today. And I had carefully embargoed my expectations going into this. As always, I was delighted that someone made the movie and that people were watching it. It's just that Moore's "method" sometimes begets more questions than answers -- well that and rapidfire statistics. For instance, in "Bowling...", I liked the Charleton Heston interview and I detested the Dick Clarke chase -- why? where was he going with this? how does this have to do with the movie? what was the movie about?

Anyhow, with a good deal of enthusiasm and a little relief too, it's a good movie. Of course he bites off more than he can chew, and of course there are undertapped issues, but he does a good job. And frankly, Kerry could use the swing voters.

My only qualms is that he doesn't at all address issues in foreign policy -- to Moore, it seems, foreign policy is driven almost exclusively by the Carslyle group. Heh, it seems that Moore has presented, to put it Michiko style, a pastiche of the current arsenal Bush Books. (On a side note, he doesn't stray much from the topic of the film -- this is focused Bush bashing at its most entertaining.)

Aside from this, I'm rather surprised that my parents were kind of pleased at the whole screenwriting thing. My mother actually liked the Dancetroupe review, or at least the word choice behind it. There you go, kids: it pays to study just a lil' for the GRE's.

Finally, a group question. How many grams of protein do you need in your diet to exercise regularly? I'm talking lower limit here.

Oh, and I'm thinking of starting up a little book club in the area. Mainly out of boredom and initiative to read more. Less Dan Brown and more Kundera, probably. And if that makes me an intellectual cliche, stick in some Jay McInerny to make it all around cliche.

Baked Scrod, explained

Just saw "Sneakers" tonight -- good formula movie. Maybe it wasn't so formula in 1993, but even so, some resounding believability issues:
1. Just because they say they're NSA does that mean they're NSA?
2. If the Russians offer you asylum, take it dammit.
3. No, you moron, the answering machine doesn't have the chip in it, he took it already.
4. Robert Redford doesn't die in movies, not that I can think of.

And so, I'm left thinking, has the world and our collective consciousness advanced so much in the last 11 years that this movie has become cliche? Are we all just better equipped to be criminals?

In related news, I got chosen to go to an AFI Screenwriter's Workshop in July. So, I'll be in LA in late July, trying to sell my genre-transgressing screenplay about god knows what. And by then, maybe I won't be that "fat writer in LA" that nobody wants? The catch behind the workshop is that the screenplay has to (at least marginally) be about science.

The benefit is that I get to meet agents and industry folks -- something I'd otherwise spend years trying to do as some bigshot's laundryman. For a lot of people, that's how they make it big. And I'm not taking Kato Kalin-big, I'm talking off-the-radar-indie-flick big. Unless you're Julia Roberts' loser Camera-3-mic-operator husband.

Done. So there you go. I've gone from being in Boston, where I was an intellectual cliche, to Los Angeles, where I'm just cliche all around.

Fun fact of the day: Scrod is not a single fish. Proper scrod is baby cod, back when cod fishing was illegal and so they called the young cod by a different name. However, by now, scrod is one of several fishes that are they just can't identify sometimes, among them cod.

Finally, to the fourteen year old cousin -- I love you, just stay away from the xanga diction.

the cushizzle?

Today I ran into an old, expired friend. Hard, for me, is to avoid staring at someone that I don't know but have heard of. So to pull off the "I don't know you" glance -- well shucks, that's just immeasurably harder. But you know what I discovered today? I'm damn good at it. And that makes me an asshole.

And on that note, I checked out this expired friend's website, wherein I found this:
"DEVDOOT MAJUMDAR: This is the guy that turned my social standards upside down. I didn't know I could talk for 9 hrs straight over and over and over. The only problem is he turned out to be the biggest asshole in the universe. Don't expect to see this man in the future."

Aside from that, there's the diet! I've decided to diet like it's my bar mitzvah tomorrow. As a result, my diet now has fiber issues. Buying some celery tomorrow.

Finally, there is a disturbing trend occuring in middle-class neighborhoods everywhere. In attempting to be cool like "G-UNIT," children have taken to speaking in ebonic. My 14-year-old nerd-aspirant of a cousin has taken to dropping the occasional "heezy." Not so good. Disconcerting. And just plain not funny. I thought it was just his attempt at fitting in, which makes sense and is kind of okay. But he forwarded an email from his friends, and they're all doing this half-ebonic, half-asian-girl-xanga writing that juxtaposes "2dai" with "shizzle." Just pretty much makes me lose faith in this cousin of mine.

another blog.

There comes a point in life when superimposability is the only thing you remember. You remember your 20's. You remember your college days. Sure, you might remember the day that they made fun of the fact that you didn't wear boxers in junior high, but aside from a few calamitous moments, all is forgotten.

That's where the blog steps in. Summertime for me has always been a haze. A time of labwork, a time of new bad habits, a lazy time -- but there are no predominant memories, just general vibes. So, either my summers just suck hardcore or I don't really do anything productive enough to remember.

Anyhow, I bought devdoot.com to do this again. It's a nice release. It's a nice audit on my various projects. And well, it's a nice way to keep in touch with people without spamming them. So there you go, another blog from another self-infatuated neophyte.

Best,
devdooT