This year, our boss decided to give annual bonuses at the end of the fiscal year instead of at Christmas. It was a bit of a pseudo-profit sharing sort of deal, but never mind that. It's really not the point. The point is that I was able to look into a few worthy non-profits that were not taking advantage of the holiday season to get in my face for donations.
That said, there were a few lucky candidates in my junk mail at just the right time. CARE, in particular, hit me with a good one. I'd actually been wondering if any of all that money going to Africa lately was actually addressing an issue that's been particularly disturbing to me since I was horrified to learn about it over a decade ago - female genital mutilation, also known as female circumcision, clitorectomy, female cuttng, FGM, FGC, etc.
It's just about the worst thing I can imagine. I would be disturbed enough to know that this exists as a method of torture (which I'm sure it does), but in reality, it is equated to male circumcision in Muslim African communities and is performed on young girls, ages 4-12. Given that I even take issue with male circumcision, I find this practice on women to be absolutely outrageous and the vilest expression of the monotheistic and/or patriarchal need to control female power. (On the other hand, I'm not sure what the excuse is for male circumcision...but if the theories are correct, women end up being the victims of that practice, as well.)
In any case, any global non-profit that focuses on empowering women and children is a-okay by me. As a side note, Bono doesn't talk about it, but George W. will not give international aid to organizations that educate women about abortion. Therefore, women also lose all kinds of opportunities for birth control and proper health care. Two words. Planned Parenthood. Despite my latest radical rant that the pill might have made me less of a woman - perhaps by controlling my hormones and therefore controlling my moods, sex drive, and other natural instincts - I suspect that birth control is still probably a good idea. The Democrats are trying to help. Thank you.
My coworkers were afraid to ask me about these today. I wear these bruises like badges of honor, and they just think someone's beating me up. You know, if someone you care about is actually covered in bruises, maybe you SHOULD ask. Either there's a good reason (I.E. kung fu class) or there's a real problem.
Me: Why use words when I can let my fists do the talking?
You: What, is this some sort of relic from your backwoods, North Carolina, redneck upbringing?
Me: Quit with your dixie-bashing, or I'll have to kick your ass.
You: (blank stare)
Me: I'm just yankin' yer chain. Me? Big fan of words. I'll give you a dozen reasons why your prejudice against the South is uncalled for before I have to kick your ass.
You: Like you could kick my ass.
Me: (blank stare)
You: So...um...why kung fu, then?
Me: The short answer is I traded in smoking for exercise on my birthday this year. The kung fu studio is right around the corner from my place in SF.
You: There's a long answer?
Me: Yeah.
You: (blank stare)
Me: I guess I just like waking up sore and bruised in the morning.
You: You and me both.
Me: And now I have something to talk to my massage therapist about. He's studied kung fu for, like, 20 years.
You: You have a masseur?
Me: Oh yeah.
You: Nice. No more awkward naked silences, then?
Me: I wouldn't go that far.
You: Still not a very long story.
Me: Well, I guess there's one other reason I might like kung fu.
I've found myself recently with a lot more time to engage in 'research' for work. We're currently adding a good number of 'web 2.0' features into our video portal application, so as the product manager, it's my responsibility to keep up on this stuff. This means keeping up with new tools and technologies, going to obnoxious conferences, and reading the very occasional (yawn) academic study on how users are using the read/write web. (Thanks JoSS...and this time I'm not talking about Joss Whedon...and I am being sarcastic.)
I also feel justified in spending more of my time actually using these technologies. I'm at work now writing a blog entry. Never in a million years would I have been able to justify that to myself before I was on this project. The happy result for you, dear (non-existent) reader, is that I've stepped things up a bit on my site
First of all, I corrected some things on my blog that I realized really annoy me on other sites. I removed the frame-based redirect. You don't see www.earthlyworld.com in the address field anymore. Instead, you can now actually bookmark pages that you browse to from my site. I know, what a novel idea. Also, given that I have not brought myself to switch over to one of Blogger's new templates, I have had to manually tweak and maintain a lot of layout crap on my page. I'm happy to say that (I'm pretty sure) this page looks about the same in all browsers now. Also, big news, when you link to an individual post, it aligns properly with the top of the page now. That was bugging the hell out of me. It shoulda been an easy fix, but, for some reason, it was not.
I've also widened the main table so that I can fit larger pictures in my posts, as well as squeeze a bunch of crap over on the right side. Flickr badge, embedded veoh player (which I'm not thrilled with), delicious bookmarks, RSS feeds, and more to come. Let's see how messy I can make it.
Social bookmarking is actually a new thing for me. I use .mac, so I can sync my personal bookmarks across all my machines without making them public. However, the delicious badge has provided an awesome way for me to update my site with stuff that's meaningful (to me and hopefully others) on a daily basis. I've also realized how responsible social bookmarking can actually help get information out to other people. We may think of it as simply sharing the things we're interested in with other people, but it's also a method of promoting ideas and information - a lazy form of activism, I suppose.
There are some things I'm doing that I won't link to from here. I have a facebook account now in addition to my myspace account. Our lead developer was sick and tired of hearing me talk about myspace when discussing social networking on the web, so I decided to move over. I actually think facebook is very cool - much cleaner - and there are a ton of applications you can plug in to your profile page. However, the fact is that no one I know (except one guy I went to film school with) is there. Every god damn body is on myspace.
Box.net is one of my new favorites, too. I don't really have an application for it on my blog, but it sure has made some work stuff convenient. I'm just using the free account right now, so it's not secure, but, hey, such is life and web 2.0.
My next challenge is to figure out how to consolidate all my tags and labels. I was playing with swicki last night, but it's too manual. You have to enter your tags in two places for it to work. I gotta make it easy. In the past, I've really enjoyed manually tweaking stuff to make it work, but nowadays, I just want to make it easy. Evidence shows that I'll actually update content more often when it's easy to do.
I'm happy to report, dear reader, that Santa Cruz did not entice me to stay longer than it took me to buy a t-shirt, take a picture, and eat a burger. However, I was surprised to realize that Santa Cruz is only ten minutes away from me doing this:
That's my foot in a real river. Again, I had to ask myself, "When was the last time I did this?" This time, I couldn't remember. Not since Asheville, and Asheville doesn't even have these:
I'm speaking of the redwoods, not Jim, but speaking of Jim, we ended up in the Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park because Jim claimed he'd never seen a redwood before. Upon seeing one, however, he noted that, in fact, he had seen them before in New Zealand. Did you know they took California Redwoods over to New Zealand? Fascinating.
When I have moments of wondering where all the time went and what the hell I'm doing on this planet, I tend to look backwards for some meaningful thread that connects what seem to be incongruous stages of my life. The other day, a friend of mine sent me a link to a poll aimed at determining the most annoying liberal arts school. Bard (and every other school I applied to) was, of course, on the list. It inspired me to dig up a link to the speech that Salman Rushdie gave at my graduation. Here's an excerpt from the end:
It is men and women who have made the world, and they have made it in spite of their gods. The message of the myths is not the one the gods would have us learn - that we should behave ourselves and know our place - but its exact opposite. It is that we must be guided by our natures. Our worst natures can, it’s true, be arrogant, venal, corrupt, or selfish; but in our best selves, we - that is, you - can and will be joyous, adventurous, cheeky, creative, inquisitive, demanding, competitive, loving, and defiant.
The whole speech can be found here. I was impressed to see that this posting of the speech was very recent. I was also impressed to see that the speech didn't make me feel nostalgic or regretful. It continues to inspire me. I'll admit that the fact that this speech was written for me and less then 200 other people gives it some additional weight. I place a lot of importance on personal connections to things.
Speaking of which, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs' Is Is EP was released today. You'll recognize the songs from shows. So they're not all brand spanking new songs. When's the last time you released a record, huh?
Mom and Jim came to visit us in San Francisco this weekend, so we left the Mission for the first time in a while to go somewhere other than Oakland, Japantown or the Mel's on Geary. (That's the best one, in case you were wondering.) I think it's been almost two years since I've been to the beach, and I've never been to Sausalito...until yesterday. I can't say that Sausalito was very exciting; although, it is nice to get out of San Francisco, look back across the bay and say, 'Wow, what a beautiful city.' But, hey, I can do that when I drive home from Oakland. Check out our latest flickr photos. Here are a couple of my faves:
As a sidenote, I finally went to Napa Valley a few weeks ago. Some girls I work with at our largest client company took me out on the Wine Train. It just never seemed like a good idea before to drive 40 miles to drink a bunch of wine and drive home, but it turned out great. The ladies also gave me an Apple TV. I never thought a customer would ever wine me, dine me, and give me gifts. Clearly, I treat customers better than my own family or friends.
Tomorrow, Mom, Jim, and I are going to Santa Cruz where I haven't been since, oh, I don't know, '03? Should I hope to be reminded of why I never go there, or should I hope to be shocked at what I've been missing for all these years? So conflicted...
I know it, shut up. Nick Zinner qualifies as one of my top ten favorite people on the planet, so I'm letting you know that Yeah Yeah Yeahs has a new EP coming out later this month. And here's a video to tide us over. It's no Y Control, but it'll do. (Have you seen that video?)
I'm just finding out about this, too, so don't feel bad.
