Business Plan

I may not be white, but I am male, age 18-24. And as a member of this demographic, what I have to say is important -- more important than the rest of you, but less important than the nascar view of the world. Anyhow, there is no Ally Macbeal DVD box set, and for all the corporate majordomos reading this -- deliver.

Unrelated, but I find that as I grow older, there are no more english essays to proofread for other people. At this age, the only reading I seem to be useful for is application letters. And slowly, I get a glimpse into the restrained emotions of being a 12th-grade english teacher, who has to politely navigate ineptly written letters of flowery emotions and big ideas.

I feel like most people don't know how to sell themselves in a way that's authentic, humorous, modest, and shining. But... I can. So, here's the business plan -- for all those high school kids who can't sell themselves well, we'll start a company and write the essays for them! And for all the kids who have to write recommendation letters for themselves because nobody gives a damn about them, we'll write them too! As a master of the creative mistruth (rib incident), I feel that I can really capture that whole air of reality without letting on that Bobby is only fictionally an AIDS counselor who serves underpriviliged neighborhoods and also, during his summers, immunizes prostitutes in Laos. Yes, yes, it will make me the next Mark Cuban.

Ah, also unrelated, but this whole Halloween thing -- not feeling it. Did it for the candy in my polished little suburb of cryptkeeping 90-year-olds. College -- there was mild dressing up, but it was really just an excuse to throw a party. But now, I'm getting the feeling that Halloween is just an excuse for repressed people to dress up all crrraaazy. And on that note, I'm game to dress up as CFP if anyone wants to be YFP. And with that dorky joke, I'm out like the fat kid in dodgeball. (the dodgeball line -- it's over. too popular. time for some new metaphors, people?)

soy, nonfat, extra-hot, with vanilla please?

The Times called us "the latte generation" today. Yeah, I can deal with that.

If there is something disctinctive to Americans, it's our ability to really deliver a biting criticism with no immediate sensation but a bitter aftertase. An ingrained passive-aggressive behavior comes down to a nicely phrased sentence that bites you in the ass only after you start thinking about it. Like, "I'm loving the work you're doing, but you might consider coming in during the weekend?" Basically, unlike the rest of the world, Americans are tender jackasses. I like to think of the moment when Jerry Maguire gets fired in the noisy restaurant so he can't fillibuster his way out of being fired when I think of this.

The problem with being disguising criticism in pleasant conversation, however, is that you have odd people who I just don't get. They're either super-dumb or super-cruel, and they'll just spill out something like, "Gee, you must work real quick because I never see you working" or "Wow, do you always eat that much?"

And you're left thinking, am I supposed to take this the Jerry Maguire way? Or is this guy really that tactless? Neither. It's society -- we live in a world where candid observation of facial blemishes or frugality or work habits or life habits -- well they just don't fly. So, is it my fault for running an occasional social experiment? No, let's do as the seventh grade english class does and blame society.

easy going dev is born... ?

Just kills me whenever I've got one of those questions in my head -- one of those fundamental chicken and egg questions about existence. I'll go to google search it, and the hits include every single ministry of religion with an online presence. Well, first are the religious answers to "deep scientific questions," then come the bloggers who "woke up and started thinking about why...", and then come the legitimate sites.

So here we go. I was just wondering about the evolution of amino acids as life's building blocks. Dorky? yes. But now I just feel trite after a proselytizing google search.

I've decided it's high time to be easy going. This is easy going week. I will be kind, aloof, forgiving, frothy... all that stuff. There is just too much whining going on in the world. So, the gloves are coming off and I'm going to start telling people not to sweat the small stuff. Right, one of those types.

I've decided that the sign of really having made it in the world is when you're getting constantly called by fact checkers from eminent publications. You see, in print journalism, an interview with Time Magazine is only the first round. Then, the fact checkers call you and have you elaborate until your words glisten with the reporter's saliva. Or not. Anyhow, in my quest to become famous, I have created yet another roadblock.

Finally, I found an airy, adjective-heavy blog today and it got me a little scared. As a result, this post was intended to be short and deflowered (get it? like no adjectives, but you have that whole double entendre thing going!). Didn't happen.

Berkeley for the weekend, to retain my standing with Mamo & Jeremy -- had a wonderful time. Incidentally, it sparked the fight among fights with my mother, who enjoys citing this very blog when trying to conjure up salacious material on my life for use in the never-ending "you are irresponsible" debates. Well, I assure you all, evidence of prominent moments of irresponsibility is one thing I am never in short supply of. The point of this paragraph was that Berkeley was fun, and made me slightly smarmier, hence the need for "easy going dev."

quoted

nice, predictable, appropriate, and from ejc:

Q: How many Bush administration officials does it take to change a light bulb?

A: None. There's nothing wrong with that light bulb. There is no need to change anything. We made the right decision and nothing has happened to change our minds. People who criticize this light bulb now, just because it doesn't work anymore, supported us when we first screwed it in, and when these flip-floppers insist on saying that it is burned out, they are merely giving aid and encouragement to the Forces of Darkness.
-- John Cleese

ba-dum-ching

and the sox won.
and tonight will be eventful, if not entirely satisfying. and probably long.

the local newscasts are all running with the "stormtrack" and "stormcaster" logos, as it is drizzling in LA today. literally drizzling, and it's ruining everything. outdoor patios everywhere are soaked.

i took some precautionary measures this morning -- the unibrow was beginning again. and for all of of you of any eastern persuasian whatsoever, do yourself a favor and nip the unibrow in the bud, especially if you are female. this is, of course, void for asian people, who never grow hair.

my crosslinking reaction did not work. i am mopey.

fun with high expectations

A nice downer to jolt an otherwise pleasant morning in LA, brought to you by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. For all you aspiring scientists, I present to you the HHMI "deletion" test:
"Would the world be very different if we eliminated all of your work?" (link)

13 words that seem to encumber the next 6? 10? 30? years of my life, anyhow. I like to reserve the "world is affected" talk for the nobel laureates, but apparently, it applies to all of us.

And though most of us are immune, with only a nascent, pinnacle-deprived undergraduate career, the deletion test will soon become a benchmark. How perfectly uplifting.

I will be heading up to Frisco this weekend, to visit Jeremy & Mamo to ensure that I am still better friends with each of them myself than they are to one another. I've suffered enough third wheel battles to surrender this one, though they are roommates.

google'd out of a first impression

Increasingly, as I grow older, I have become more conscious of the perils of a bad first impression. So, I’ll product my hair, I’ll dryclean my shirts, and hell, I’ll even have a fortune cookie conversation or two in order to make a good first impression. These are the affectations required in life. After all, we must all get married – and that itself is a chaotic process – if Sally doesn’t like you, then she can’t then introduce you to her friend’s friend’s cousin who is perfect for you. It’s like the Stata Center reasoning for life processes (you have to bump into people for great science to proceed.)

So, if I have suddenly become conscious of first impressions, why am I so slovenly with the google hits? These days, a big part of the first impression comes a la google. Now, to be frank, I am extremely googleable. I can be stalked, phone numbers can be unearthed, and pictures and blind date articles can be found. This is a good thing if one’s impression of you is inconsequential. But, the more I think about it – now, everytime I send an email to someone random, I am attaching access to my entire life.

Bottom line: to all of you who were meticulously careful about what was on the web about you, my congratulations. It’s better to be a mystery than a loudmouth, a loser, an asshole, an inarticulate abuser of SAT words, a man who enjoys beginning sentences with „Life is...“, an immodestly insecure whiner, and so on and so forth. Well, enough of that, google cannot be undone, and I live in total exhibitionism.

As an aside, I thought the Mary Cheney shoutout was careless. But the whiplash Mr. Kerry got for doing so was also careless. What he should have done, and indeed what Mr. Bush would have done, would be to have a third party organization do the namecalling for him. Silly democrats, always trying to be sleazy, but still losing to the republicans.

And finally, Jon Stewart made me smile yesterday. I’m a fan of the Carvelle/Novak version of Crossfire, though.

someone needs to help me

I need to identify this song.

It is the best, most uplifting song I've heard in some time. Unfortunately, it does not have lyrics. Please help... please.

(Heard it in an episode of Harvey Birdman)

scatalogical humor today

I have this issue. I try to wake up by 5am, go to the gym, and then go to work. It's a pleasant concept for me -- walks like discipline, smells like discipline... Only I will never be that lord of discipline with the seven habits. So here's the issue -- if I do wake up and do the early morning gym thing, my productivity is all but constipated by 4pm, when I am ubertired.

And then I did some math. It turns out we have to be awake for 20 hours a day, and that's with the liberal 8 hours of sleep. That just seems like too much. I can handle a 20 hour marathon of Law & Order (and probably a 40-hour marathon of Star Trek), just not a 20-hour marathon of my life. Either it's too boring or too involved, or somehow both. In either case, I need a daily 4pm enema, it seems, to pick me up.

I revisited the "South Park" movie last night. It seemed a lot more inspired than it did the last time I saw it. And oddly contemporary, what with the renewed global interested in Sadaam.

I think my complaint of the day is that I've met too many good-natured people here. Too many happy-ish, serene, even-tempered, judiciously critical folks. When you feel like the only spoiled brat in the crowd, it all feels so much more artificial than it needs to.

Nothing of import.

Fun with evil.

My subscription to the NY Times began today. If you tell them you're a student and enrolled in a class, they charge you $2 a week (if you're in LA) for a M-F subscription. I feel like that's worth it, as far as grad student luxuries go.

So the debate. Well, this was less boring to me than it was last week. I really wanted more cheap shots. Rephrase. I really wanted to hear A SINGLE CHEAP SHOT. For instance Bush, who couldn't shut up about how education was the remedy to all economic illnesses could have at least been made to acknowledge that his education was about as forged as his national guard service. Oh well, it was boring. I'll listen to Jon Stewart for the cheap shots, I guess.

Oooh, and Bill O'Reilley in trouble. Nothing makes me happier. Nothing.

my general joyousness absent today

It's that time of year again. Jeopardy is preempted by (ugh) football. Rear windows require defrosting without a moment's notice. And the gloom of dusk hits you even before you begin your evening commute. Can't even watch a freeway sunset.

Anyhow, so I was having an especially bad day yesterday, realizing that adjust to the feeling of life passing me by in an entirely new campus. In college, I had my vantage points, and I wasn't yet a crusty graduate student. But here, people only get beautifuler and beautifuler, as I grow older and balder.

But on the bright side, you only really generate pithy commentaries on the human condition when you're not worrying about the bright side of everything. Content people don't pontificate, it's just the mildly discontent ones that generate... well, blogs.

So it was that I was talking to a good friend last night, when I solipcistically mentioned that happiness is a placebo, to which she replied, "Dev, you ARE depressed." So... I will take small comfort with the news that Kerry is doing better in the polls, that "Tanner on Tanner" doesn't entirely suck and there's hope yet for Cynthia Nixon's career, and that the verb "blandish" is now in my arsenal of words to occasionally misuse.

Alright, time for a fun day at the shop.

too much political turmoil in my head, sorry

So, I watched just a smidgen of the veep debate. And in his factual zealotry, Cheney says "just check factcheck.com -- you'll find the truth there." Well, it's really factcheck.org, so today I went to see what the .com was, and I found it super amusing.

To me, as I think of friday, Bush's campaign is the ugly font campaign. It's like the group of kids in 6th-ish grade who don't yet know how to use fonts correctly, so they fill their projects with too many fonts, and ugly ones at that. (I was one of those kids). I think of Karen Hughes and Karl Rove and the others, and they aren't really concenred with font-conscious voters, because the font-conscious voters drink lattes and drive volvos. But in any case, that's the substanceless side of this election.

New idea for a reality TV show: follow around the US Trade Representative as he plunders the world for trade deals.

Alright, this is a new low as far as posting to this blog goes. On a personal note, I was talking severa; friends about this "Huckabees" movie, and we're all in agreement: YOU DO NOT CALL ANY MOVIE AN EXISTENTIAL COMEDY. You alienate normal people and you alienate your pseudointellectuals.

And so on that note, I need to find just the right flavor of pseudointellectuals to make friends with. And with that preposition, I end this entry.

Oh dear...

Uh oh.

Working on smalltalk technique. That's my goal for the month of October. I need to work on my hopeless nod and smile routine everytime someone mentions sports. Because sports are manly. And someday, I too will be manly. Real manly. Swing voter manly.

I think I'm going to empty my bank account today for the irony of it all. The roommate has frozen his credit cards and I respect that. I, however, am in the mood for a Targe(t) shopping spree.

The thing about living out here is that it always rounds down to 70. I think the weather for the entire time I've been here has been no higher than 74 and no lower than 66. It hasn't rained once, and well, the smog makes for better sunsets anyway. So it's delightful.

I went out tonight with a "COLUMBIA" shirt on, which elicited many responses, ranging from "Oh, I want to go there for grad school" to "You rock, did you know '____'" -- the response to which was of course, "No, I went elsewhere."

I met a good assortment of History graduate students a few nights ago. I've always assumed that I'd rather be in that circle -- that I could perhaps relate better to the lives of history graduate students than those in science. After all, those of us in science only pretend -- we're all aspirants of one thing or another. Anyhow, moral of the story is that I was quite the pontificator. To the grad student studying the history of pysochoanalysis, I could only speak of Freud and Jung. To this history of medieval economics, I could only mention how much I thought serfdom would suck. Slowly, it dawned on me that I really can't BS with the best of them, and that spending extendended periods of time with historyfolk really lead to senseless pontification on my behalf.

Anyhow, life in my new lab has started up, and I'm learning about quantum dots. Most exciting. Hope all's well with everyone.

What did you think I was going to write about today?

I saw a movie called "Friday Night Lights" a week ago in some sort of preview screening. Roommate Ned likened it to living through multiple car crashes. Sports movies, unfortunately, have that whole Sunday afternoon timbre to them, and to compensate they try to pack such films with "emotion" and sound effects of bones breaking. For a movie like "Mighty Ducks," well we were young and we ate the emotion up. But now, I don't want to see emotion out of guys as big as Jim Belushi.

Anyhow, as I watched the debates last night, it was perhaps the most suspenseful TV I've ever seen, barring some early childhood X-files scenes. Now, I've never been a diehard Kerry fan, he's more of a means to an end. But, the flipper did good -- made me proud to be a part-time Massachusettian. Not entirely clear why he chose to tell a story about the French Prime Minister, but hey, we were already a nation divided.

And so, as I spent the hour after the debate flipping from network to network, I was dreadfully disappointed that the punditry either decided not to comment on "who won" (nobody did, according to them, as there were no knockouts). Well, Kerry did good. And Bush came off as defensive, repetitive, angry, and clinically inarticulate. What's more, the media decided to compliment Bush for his ability to cite the names of foreign leaders. Did they miss his pronunciation of Vladamir? Regardless, it was suspenseful but satisfying.

And that's about it. I had my first day of classes, and I'm paralyzed by the thought that I really have to produce good work for the next six years. It's not about grades anymore, it's really about churning out good ideas and skillful research. So, bottom line, time to get on top of my game.

That about does it. No more sports metaphors for a week.