I was IMing with a friend this morning when he sent me the following message:

you make these announcements every once in a while–“I deleted all my email!” “I threw away your contact information!” “I stopped reading your blog!”–in such a way as to prove that you are an incredibly wired person who really enjoys messing with the wired world.

At first, i was like hrmfpt! And then i pouted. All because i knew that there was a grain of truth to that. It made me think through a bit of my own behavior. I’ve always loved inserting uncertainty into my wired life. When i first got a pager, i made it very clear both through my behavior and my statements that i was not on beck and call. I leave my mobile on vibrate purposely to ignore any calls that might come through when my purse is across the room. I have email auto-check turned off so that i have to manually ask for more email. I like the fact that my spam filter keeps messing up. I love the fact that if you IM me, it might go to my phone or it might go to my computer and i might or might not get it.

I have information control issues. Worse, i have information overload guilt issues. After opening up my RSS reader to 1600 unread blogs, i just deleted them. I couldn’t deal with the overhead of knowing that i’d never get through all of them. I refuse to check my voice mail because it tells me that there are 14 messages; that’s just far too many. I stopped reading messages that went via YASNS 6 months ago because Orkut overloaded me.

People often ask me what the best way to contact me is. Inside, i laugh. I don’t really want to be easily reachable always. I have communication mood swings. One of my favorite bad habits that most of my friends despise is that i become unwilling to deal with the phone. Thus, when people call me, i answer and hand the phone over to whoever is with me to talk.

It’s weird. I’m obsessively accountable to certain people. But when i don’t feel the internal requirement/responsibility to be accountable to someone, i swing to the opposite end of the spectrum. It’s not really flakiness because if i promise that i will respond, i will. It’s a peculiar lack of willingness to have my energy controlled externally when it doesn’t have to be that way.

I used to beg forgiveness and vow that i’d get better about communications. I stopped three years ago when a friend pointed out that i promised the improvement every six months and continued to get worse. He was right. So i stopped thinking that i’d improve and accepted the fact that i wouldn’t.

Reflecting on my communication quirks makes me realize how much i identify with my cat. [Self-reflective moment brought on by Day 3 of extreme jetlag combined with terrible cold.]

Wal-Mart is one of the few common features of every small town in the States. There are hundreds of them on I-80 alone (having used their immense parking lots to turn around a 17ft Uhaul towing a car last year). Over and over again, i heard locals defend the Wal-Marts as a cheap option for getting access to needed goods. There was often slippage in their arguments, as they would tell me that it’s now the only option since the introduction of the Wal-Mart meant the closing of every possible competitor.

Wal-Mart makes billions of dollars every year. But at such an aweful expense. Check out these statistics (thanks Chloe!!).

Here’s a sample (but read the full list):

$420,750: Annual cost to U.S. taxpayers of a single 200-employee Wal-Mart store, because of support required for underpaid workers — including subsidized school lunches, food stamps, housing credits, tax credits, energy assistance, and health care

45%: Proportion of her entire annual wage that a single Wal-Mart employee might have to pay out-of-pocket before collecting any benefits from the company-sponsored health plan

In London, i went to the Dali exhibit. At the entrance, they had hundreds of “wacky” quotes by Dali about sex, his philosophy (and his belief that philosophy doesn’t exist), art and everything you could imagine. I came across one that made me immediately think of a few of the copyright crusaders that i know, so i thought i’d share:

Ideas are made to be copied. I have enough ideas to sell them on. I prefer that they are stolen so that i don’t have to actually use them myself.

It’s from an interview where he’s being asked about his art, copies and the public.

Apparently, i was in the SF Chronicle last week. Sadly, i missed this fact, being offline and all. (Does anyone have a copy??)

I think that there’s something very karmic about how i attend conferences, meet interesting people and end up saying silly things in the press right before finals every semester… when i’m unable to respond to any of the email.

Anyhow, what a silly looking picture of me. What on earth is happening to my lips? Ah, fuzz…

Ah, it’s so good to be home. There’s internet and a kitty cat and loving roommates. I will say that there’s nothing like traveling abroad to make me appreciate all of the goodness in my life. I even found myself singing Grand Canyon on the way home.

i love my country
by which i mean
i am indebted joyfully
to all the people throughout its history
who have fought the government to make right

Running away for a bit makes me turn back and see all of the myopia and screwups of this country from a different perspective. I get to remember that i love the land, that i love (many of) the people… i could do without the government and without a certain self-centered element. But, by and large, going away lets me remember the good parts. I’ve been on the road for a month – three different countries, many different cities.

Oh, and CHI was … interesting. So many good people and that it was definitely worth the adventure. It just took me a day without Internet to remember that nothing mattered but the people. And i got to see a few museums and go shopping in London. This kind of reprieve always does feel good even if the guilt of work hangs over my head. I did make up for it all by meeting with another blogging researcher in London and then managing to attend a “dinner” (where dinner==pub) of all bloggers – that was a hoot.

Anyhow, i’m back to the internet. Just in time for finals and extended chaos. Must make it to summer… must make it to summer…

Attending computer conferences with no working WiFi is painful (more precisely: limited DHCP). Staying at hotels without Internet (and no working Earthlink accounts) is painful. The combination means that i’m offline this week. Expect no response. Fucking CHI.

Mouse embryo made without father

This research is going to be absolutely politically problematic. I love it. (The hypothesis that i’ve heard wrt to human research is that it’s probably possible to create embryos with two mothers.) Note how often the researchers try to talk about all of the reasons why people shouldn’t be worried about human research in this vain. This only further convinces me that there are political problems because people can’t handle this possibility.