Moon Over Corridor

There is a man on a ladder next to my cubicle wall. He is visible from the knees up, his head has disappeared into a hole in the ceiling, and he is unknowingly and unabashedly brandishing his ass. His pockets are overflowing with tools, and although the thin blue t-shirt enveloping his corpulent form is tucked well into his jeans, the jeans hang brazenly at half mast, and were the shirt not tucked in, I'd be completely put off my chicken casserole. How this t-shirt remains tucked in is an utter mystery of physics, but his upstretched shoulders have pulled it taut around his large and unwelcome buttocks - twin blue moons, as it were, shining above me, and it frankly makes me want to poke him with a pencil. God knows what he's looking at in the ceiling. He's doing something incredibly frustrating up there. Oh. Oh my. Folks, he's given himself a wedgy with his shirt. A world first, you heard it here. Perhaps the t-shirt wraps around like a diaper or something, this entire situation seems impossible - how do the jeans stay up? How does the t-shirt stay in? Where is Richard Feynman when we need him? His buddy on the ground, standing a few feet away and calling out advice to his headless colleague, is either oblivious that his friend is dangerously skirting the hemline of decency (and the coefficient of friction), or hopes that someone other than him will give his friend a belt.

Fifteen Minutes Of Defamer

I am a big nerd with no life, so when Gizmodo sent me a comments invitation today, in response to a brilliantly hilarious comment I sent in, it marked the high point of my 30.8 years on Earth. Pulitzer should be calling any day now. In other news, the security guard downstairs has a Playboy rather carelessly hidden beneath the clipboard on his desk - the 'OY' peeking out is unmistakably the Playboy font, and the phrase 'arilyn 50 years later' in the corner sort of gives it away. I'm writing a strongly worded letter to the building management right now. I wonder how many of the people entering the building realize they're waving their RFID cards within inches of nudity. And, for that matter, stupidity.

The Golden Globes

I think Philip Seymour Hoffman should have given his acceptance speech as Truman Capote. That would have been hilarious. I also think that the blond haired guy who accepted some award for Brokeback Mountain once played the Russian pilot in that 80's movie with John Travolta, in which the Soviets create a facsimile middle-American town in the middle of Russia. The pilot's the guy who flies in cargo loads of 'compact dicks', and ribbed condoms, and says 'the ladies, they think I'm quite a guy'. I'm quite sure it was him. Burp. I don't know why I feel so weird and jiggy tonight. It's one of the few moments I've had in years in which I haven't had a woman somewhere on the radar. Very weird. Like a cowboy - lonely, but free. Perhaps more like a cow. Waiting to be tipped. I'm privy to this experience because the ladies I attract are invariably of wild and wayward hearts; nowadays when I hang up the phone or send an email - especially email - I partly assume I'm never going to hear from the person again. Makes for a nice surprise when they do call back. I've wondered if I do this - attract women with the stability of a starlet - because I know subconsciously that they'll leave. There's nothing scarier than a relationship, where you suddenly have to consider this other person when you want to take off to Australia for a year. Ah poop, I'm bringing myself down. Okay, bedtime kids, no more blogging. That means both of you - thanks for coming by.

This One's For the Nerdies

Sorry, nothing about women today (or maybe there will be, I'm not telling). I like to read the gadget blog Gizmodo, and they often review digital cameras. One thing they've never mentioned, and that for some reason no one talks about in camera reviews, is that more megapixels may worsen the picture. The common assumption is that the more megapixels in a digital camera the better. This is only true to a point. There are two kinds of digital camera chips in the consumer market - the small kind, found in all the compact point-and-shoots, and the big kind, found in SLRs. A big chip is always better than a small chip, because the individual light sensors (pixels) are farther apart, and therefore don't produce as much digital noise as they do when crammed together on a smaller chip. This means that beyond a certain point - 5 megapixels is my guess - more megapixels will add a lot more digital noise to the picture, which eliminates the effect of the higher resolution. This is why the Nikon D70, which is a 6-megapixel SLR, will produce a better image than an 8 megapixel Sony point and shoot. It uses a bigger and better CCD chip, so the 6 million pixel sensors have more room to breathe, don't crowd each other, and produce less noise. This is also why film was better for fine art photo students - you could start with whatever cheap camera you had and still produce images as good as a professional if you were talented and skilled, provided you used professional film and had a decent lens - the camera was just a box that held the lens and film in place. Money had little to do with the quality of your work. But the cost of entry into digital photography is much higher - the film is built into the camera as the CCD chip, so the better that chip the better your images will be. Takes some of the fun out of it, I think. That's one effect digital has had in general - everything costs money now, and the quality of the work you can produce depends quite a bit on how much money you have to spend - either on hardware or software. This is why everyone rampantly steals shares software like Photoshop and Final Cut Pro - it's the only way to learn the skills when you don't have a job as an apprentice. Luckily the Open Source software movement is beginning to provide free alternatives to such things, but using it often requires some expertise with computers and software, or at least with unix. In the analog world, instead of stealing a professional whiz-bang camera the photography student just had to become expert with aperture and shutter speed and the technical aspects of producing a photograph; now, instead of stealing a professional whiz-bang software package, he has to become a programmer. But most people don't - they just steal the professional software.

Morse Code In a Bottle

The problem with being an extrovert is that without human contact I fall to pieces. I start pining after the girls on magazine covers and in the Victoria's Secret catalogs that arrive daily in my mailbox for some unknown but happy reason. I send out emails, leave phone messages, pout, sigh audibly, mumble, forget to wear pants to work - every form of covert S.O.S. I can broadcast without physically harming myself. Even this blog is a sort of message in a bottle. Alright, boo hoo me, here's some stuff about nerd sex. I discovered once that if you're on a date who knows morse code - even just S.O.S. - it can raise the evening to new heights of eroticism. It turns out that the morse code for S.O.S - dot dot dot dash dash dash dot dot dot - is in 12/8, and tapping it out on someone's arm, lip, use your imagination, just does something special to the mind and loins. Particularly if you instead tap out S.S.O - dot dot dot dot dot dot dash dash dash (and keep repeating it of course). Dorky, yes, but the most erotic girls I've ever met have been complete dorks. There's nothing quite like a day of Scrabble in bed. Though that's a guess.

A Moment of Journalese

When life gets me down, there's nothing like a blog entry to put the spring back in my step and the zip back in my zippers. Come on friends, we're off to Jake Miles Land. A few months ago in my online dating spree, someone's profile said not to bother writing if you have delusions of grandeur. I wrote anyway - frankly, I wish my delusions were of nothing but grandeur; it's my delusions of mediocrity that are in the way. Some people, myself included, expend so much energy making ourselves miserable sometimes, and then wonder why we're miserable. Sabotaging relationships, sabotaging jobs, sabotaging submarines, what have you. It's amazing the planet's still spinning with all the subterfuge we engage in. Though I don't know if it's such a bad thing - smoking and drinking are the same thing; it's human nature to enjoy making our lives more difficult than necessary, just for the challenge. Self-sabotage is lots of fun. I can only think of one person I know who does not passive aggressively undermine her own efforts in order to reinforce a hopeless perspective on life. This girl is extraordinary; she always reminds me of Dolly Parton in personality - always upbeat, smart and sassy, doesn't take the world's crap lying down. Her cousin's the same way - maybe these things are genetic. But take this morning. I completely forgot that this morning of all mornings was my code review at work. This is a meeting involving about 20 people billing very high hourly rates, including the chief architect of the department, all discussing the pros and cons of my design and implementation decisions as my code is projected on a big screen at the front of the room. Rewinding about 8 hours, my friend - the kickass one who reminds me of Dolly Parton - calls while I'm taking a much-needed nap and announces that she's been dumped. Of all the people on the planet, she should not be dumped. I launch out of bed (launch is a strong word - I sleep another half hour and then roll like a lemming out of bed), get in a cab across town and we drink the night away at good old Rudy's bar, and actually manage to get the entire bar dancing at one point (my favorite pasttime when at Rudy's), including my friend herself, who doesn't dance under any circumstances. Hours later - my watch was broken - I crash into bed back at home, a job well done and a friend's heart saved from self-destruction. If only the same were true of my career. Having now slept much later than I should have given my corporate obligations, as I showered this morning I didn't realize I was already five minutes late for this massive and expensive code review. This code review was sort of a crystallization of my character in this workplace. I blew into the room a half hour late, immediately picked up the pointer and fielded questions with what I think was great cogency, and learned that before I'd arrived the consensus had been extremely positive, and that the quality of my work had pretty much spoken for itself. But I know that my showing up late trumps everything - no one cares about your brain, they care about whether you show respect for the system. There's nothing quite like feeling like an asshole first thing in the morning, except feeling like an asshole the rest of the day. I must curb this pattern.

Studs, Sluts, and Resistance

In matters of art and sex, the people of the world seem to object most to a lack of resistance. When we go to a play, we want to see people yell and scream and spin themselves into a tizzy before breaking down and weeping. If they started weeping when the curtain went up and just kept crying for two hours, we'd feel bored and cheated. Even the yelling and screaming would be pretty boring after a few minutes, which is partly why creating good theater is so difficult. The same goes for sex. The world cries 'slut' when a woman sleeps around, but a guy who does the same is a stud and pretty proud of it. Some women have expressed bafflement over this apparent hypocrisy, calling it a double standard born of misogyny. It is a double standard of course - it's THE double standard - but it's indigenous to the human race, and has nothing to do with misogyny. There's no mystery about it - getting sex for a woman is much easier than it is for a (straight) man, and people generally have an innate distaste for a short circuit. Society looks down on prostitution and porn because they create a path of no resistance, and theoretically shunt the development of a more intelligent, creative and resilient species. We tacitly laud the playboy for getting lots of action because he's probably had to improve upon himself to do it, by becoming charming, creative, rich, powerful - his getting action means the species is getting smarter. The woman who does the same is branded Slut because she's supposedly letting her standards spin down the drain, and should her activities beget children, they'd do nothing for the advance of the species. It's the same reaction we have to a movie with a cop-out ending - it's giving it up too easily. Countless stories and the entire battle of the sexes are based on this inherent imbalance in a woman's heart - the desire to have sex with a man and the desire to hold out. Though society expends tremendous energy reinforcing these opposed instincts, I believe that they are inborn, and actually the catalyst for just about everything the human race has ever done since we stood upright in the field. It may not make a woman any happier to be able to get sex whenever she wants, because she has millions of years of evolution in her brain giving her a general distaste for unattractive idiots. Putting out for a Neanderthal one night might feel icky in the morning. She is by nature a discerning lover, and the species owes all of its growth for the last 150,000 years to her innate sense of taste. This role of woman as editor is the one fundamental rule of the game, and as in any game, when you sidestep the rules, the world cries foul. As for men, we have taste as well of course, and my experience is that it's when a man becomes more discerning that he becomes more attractive to women - we always want what we can't have (an instinct that itself is probably rooted in our inherent desire to advance the species). With respect to sex, overall men are less discerning than women when it comes to the mind and heart, which in the dating game has much more to do fundamentally with evaluating how the person would behave as a parent. So perhaps the difference in how men and women view sex, particularly how readily they're each willing to engage in it, has to do fundamentally with how the two sexes view the prospect of parenthood, or even whether sex is connected with parenthood at all in their minds - I know it doesn't cross my mind other than to prevent it at all costs. I'm not sure quite where I'm going with this, but when I think of a 'Sex In The City' woman, I think of someone who is promiscuous, but also someone who is jaded, who demonstrates little belief in future happiness and lives for immediate pleasures - not of someone who wants to become a mother.

Back In Neverland

It's strange, the things we do on January 3rd. Despite a gnawing pang in my chest, I just cancelled my Onion personals gold membership, meaning that after January 8th I won't be able to see other member's faces on the site, only their hands and feet. It's odd how I came to this decision. I cancelled the Onion personals account after first getting fed up with my Vonage voicemail account, then looking at cell phone plans and realizing they're still all too expensive to be worth it. And after first coming into work after a two-week vacation, in the rain, and sitting for two hours in a cubicle that might as well be on the Moon for the amount of transactional stroking I get on a daily basis (see Eric Berne's Games People Play, but come back). So cancelling my membership on a personals site is counterintuitive - I'm bored, I'm lonely, my mom tells me I'm attractive - I should want to flirt with bored, lonely, attractive girls. But, more powerfully, I also wanted to feel as if I was in control of something. I couldn't switch from Vonage to a cell phone because the cell phone is too expensive. So, stuck, I cancelled the Onion personals. Many people break up with their boyfriend/girlfriend/husband/wife/therapist for the same reason - to have some kind of control over something when they feel out of control or trapped. In the episode of The Sopranos when Tony fires his therapist, he does so directly after his wife announces she's leaving him. He lost control on one side, he seized it on the other. This pattern also inspires myriad purchases and financial decisions made by anyone above the poverty line. We don't need cell phones. We don't need iPods. We don't need electric toothbrushes. These things give us a momentary feeling of control and separation - some sense that we are not another blob of goo in the general working class petri dish. Cult marketing feeds into this, like Macs and iPods and Hummers. I write software for a living, and though I find computer science quite stimulating at times, I do it largely for the false sense of control it gives me - I do this, the computer does that. I picked up software as a hobby when I was upset and lonely as a kid. Luckily it's lucrative, but at the core the computer doesn't break my heart, doesn't make me confront my sense of isolation (ironically), keeps my brain spinning fast enough and broadly enough to give it a sense of purpose, lets me solve problems. It almost never becomes emotionally overwhelming. Cause when software says "it's not you, it's me" (i.e. doesn't work), life isn't pretty. The majority of people on the planet play some version of either 'waiting for Santa Clause' or 'waiting for rigor mortis to set in' (Games People Play again). Me too - at times I play both. Our country's economy is founded in these games and it's hard to climb out without a broadened perspective. Fueling these games is the bread and butter of the marketing and entertainment worlds - so many commericals end with an actor leaving a cubicled office. All the Sprint commericals do this. The Truman Show was about a guy escaping a big cubicle. The majority of movies feature people escaping from something, because so many people in this country feel caged. That movie Office Space, where he unbolts the walls of his cubicle and lets them fall to the floor, is wildly popular in IT circles; it's bang-on. The most common phrase in movie dialogue is "let's get out of here" (see my brother - my source for all compelling, untraceable trivia). I was reading a book last night called "Fortune's Formula", about how Claude Shannon and a couple other guys from MIT and Bell Labs cracked Vegas and the stock market by applying Shannon's Information Theory to gambling, and as I read one section, detailing the transactions that led to a big stock market coup, I realized that, to misquote the CEO of Geritol in the movie "Quiz Show", at one point I didn't care about the dazzling display of intellectual ability - I was lying in bed, had to go to work the next morning for the first time in two weeks, and for a few minutes, I just wanted to watch the money.