Oh, Vegas. I went to Vegas with a bunch of girlfriends to celebrate one’s birthday. It was a complete trip. I left LA on Friday with a plane full of wannabe-celebrities including far too many models. The guy behind me in the Southwest line was rattling on and on on his phone about getting limos for this and tickets for that and making himself sound really self-important for one of the models in hearing range. She realized this and was rolling her eyes at this guy the whole time. Finally, she started talking to a perfectly normal looking guy, much to his shock. It’s Southwest. What multi-millionnaire flies Southwest to look important? Anyhow…

Got on the plane. The guy next to me shared his goal: to get as inebriated as possible without getting incarcerated. Of course, he didn’t use 5 syllable words. I was amused. I practice yoga breathing to remember that i was going to Vegas for my friends, not because i liked Vegas. Of course, framing it as an anthropological exercise *really* helped.

So, i spent a lot of time people watching and talking to folks. I watched a woman try to pick up 4 different johns of exactly the same time. One gave her a room key. I was impressed. He was nervous. I watched a pimp-daddy wedding party and a lot of midwesterners on their big vacation. The best were the kids – they were sooo in awe of the dazzle of Vegas – big eyes, lots of pointing. I was staying in the Luxor and the deck outside of my room looked down on the whole scene. Great for people watching. Another one of our party was in the same zone, finding out about teen curfews and culture growing up here. Perfect, considering the recent NYTimes article on American Dreamers: the Lure of Las Vegas. It really is a good people-watching town.

And it really is where regular America comes together in weird ways. Although i was not on a specific voting mission, i had quite a few political conversations by engaging people about the Patriot Act and the various anecdotes i heard about all Vegas visitors from the holidays being considered terrorist suspects. I used that to launch into discussions about where the country is going, what it means to have freedom. This was particularly easy given that in the land of sin, people are all about maximizing their freedoms and even the local papers/news covering Reagan’s death were talking about how much more conservative the Republican party is now. I love getting reactions equivalent to: “Huh. I hadn’t thought of it that way before…” Oh so much fun. Changing political views one person at a time.

So, i officially took an internship for the summer yesterday. I will be working for Blogger (Google). I’m still figuring out what i will be doing, but it’s a great way to build on the new blogging ethnography that i’ve been doing. And i’m *SUPER* psyched.

Over the last two months, i did a lot of thinking about my life, reflecting on the last semester. I was running on speed mode and i paid a price for it. By the time i hit Tokyo, i was having blackouts every day from the lack of muscles in my back causing my fractured neck to spasm and crush those little discs. I was taking more Aleve than vitamins. Not good. My body was a wreck.

I looked around at the people who were also on the speed-track with me. They too were a physical wreck. It was a scary scary thing to realize that i was going to kill myself if i kept this up. Furthermore, i realized that i wasn’t being nearly as productive as i used to be because i was always exhausted and caffeine/sugar-cracked-out in order to keep going. I had no focus, no sanity, etc.

When i thought about what i needed to do, i realized that the most important thing to do would be to focus on one thing, do it well, but calm the fuck down and focus on getting healthy again. I decided that i needed to stay home in San Francisco for the summer. Nothing was more appealing than a 9-5 (a.k.a. 10-8) schedule.

When Google approached me, i felt as though somewhere in the universe, someone was prepared to help me get my shit together. A research project directly in line with what i love with a team full of the coolest, kindest folks at a company with massage therapists, a fully-functional physical therapy-style gym, physical therapists, pilates, organic food, etc. and a pay that will let me survive grad school. My biggest concern was having to drive, but Google even solved that, offering a shuttle from Glen Park.

I am so beyond thankful.

I’m pretty used to spam, but i also track it pretty vigilantly. I have a unique email address given to each company on the web and most of them i never send anything from. Some have ended up on spam lists for different reasons. Cheap Tickets sold my address within a month. Some get distributed because of invitation policies. I stoppped reading email to my LinkedIn address because someone with a virus problem managed to send that into spamming hell.

But today, a new entry into my spamming world emerged. United.

Email addresses that are used by companies that will then send my address to others (i.e. YASNS) are human readable. They have the company name in them so that the recipient will get a clue and realize that this is a site-specific address. Not all do. But the ones given to companies like United (receipt-only) have coded numbers in them to track them over time and place. My coded United email started getting spam today. As a Unix email reader, i have never experienced a virus. I can’t conceptualize any other way in which that email address was acquired by anyone. Fascinating. Absolutely fascinating. I guess they really are going bankrupt.

We’ve all heard the rhetoric about how blogging is an equal-access opportunity for publication because many services are free. Yet, embedded in the creation of those services are a lot of assumptions about money and time and how people spend these precious items. Nothing made me more pleased after re-installing Shrook than seeing Quinn calling folks out on these assumptions, particularly as services begin to charge and the pundits start heckling people for bitching about the cost.

Just think… $60 will pay for a full year of education for a student via the Goma Student Fund. Money is *very* relative.

Please digitally wave to Dana H. Boyd, a molecular geneticist and Harvard prof who does fun work on membrane protein structures. He’s really cool and i think it’s a riot that we have similar names and that Google is working to turn us into one.

Of course, there’s a reason that Google thinks we’re one… folks keep referencing me using his name. My first name really does have an ‘h’ at the end of it (not a middle initial). Removing that ‘h’ means that you’re referencing him, not me. Also, the reason that ‘h’ is there is because it balances the ‘d’ – there really are no capital letters in my name. Really. Yet, while the capitalization bugs me, the loss of an ‘h’ just feels disrespectful, as though it’s calling someone else into being other than me. At least it’s good to know that person and to know that he’s a good one. ::wave::

It has been a most wonderfully relaxing and chill week. My mom came into town and we wandered north to land of spas and wine and olive oil. It was true mother/daughter bonding time in a way that neither of us ever remembered doing before. If anyone ever needs a break from the chaos of the city, northern California is wonderful. Of course, we ended our little journey by spooking ourselves out at Bodega Bay where The Birds was filmed. ::gulp:: Gotta love Hitchcock!

I’ve also been on a hiking and dancing kick – making up for the laziness of months spent in front of a computer. It feels *so* good to get out, bounce around, relax, be goofy and chill out before admitting to summer responsibilities and intellectual challenges.

Oh, and i actually read a book! One that had (almost) nothing to do with work. I read Pattern Recognition because everyone kept telling me about the apophenia. I love the idea of being allergic to brands and i’m so sad that she lost that at the end.

And i saw a movie! I saw Super Size Me. I have to admit that i ended up craving McDs afterwards which made me feel *super* guilty. This is why i want brand allergies. I understand intellectually how badly i treat my body, but i really am a sucker for the blazing colors, fake smells and immediate feedback of cravings appeased. Ah yes, my weaknesses…

To answer Mena’s question about blog/author limits and the new licensing scheme:

I have an installation of MT that i use to help non-profits and/or small groups maintain blogs. They aren’t technical enough to run their own blogs and, at the time, other services didn’t provide the necessary functions.

I also have a friend who used his MT installation to pull friends off of Blogger and LiveJournal so that they could have trackbacks, comments and RSS amongst them.

Finally, for the class that i was TAing this semester, we had all students get on MT to blog assignments. We created an installation that hosts 40+ students. I realize that there’s an undiscussed educational license, but the hassle of going through that probably would’ve mean that i wouldn’t have chosen MT for the class. And getting a school stricken with Schwarzenegger syndrome to pay for software for a class is nowhere near easy.

All of the groups that i’m involved in would be completely screwed by the new scheme. My friend and i would be seen as sysadmins or service providers, even though what we are doing is simply supporting our friends/students who are not technical enough, not motivated enough to do this on their own. The folks we are supporting aren’t really bloggers, not in the sense that we normally talk about. Getting many of them to engage in this process has been difficult. There’s no way that they will pay for a service and there’s no way that i could afford ramping up to the next pricing level to continue supporting them. I also feel terrible because i can’t volunteer to continue helping people start out blogging.

For now, we’re just not upgrading while we consider what should be done. But i will definitely say that this pricing scheme does not make sense when trying to get the new/non-technical folks blogging. Furthermore, i’m a bit saddened that there’s no non-profit status in the license because this screws me in a different direction.

::wiping sweat off brow::

What a two weeks it has been. Over 100 pages of text have been written: 2 long essays, 1 ethnography write-up, 1 workshop proposal, 1 panel proposal. 30 students x 3 papers each graded. A conference was hosted. And a slew of odds and ends – interviews, edits, and the like.

Important lessons learned:

Caffeine does not overcome hallucinations. The only thing that remedies hallucinations is sleep. This is quite frustrating when sleep is not really in the deck of cards. Of course, there’s something utterly fun about trying to write text when the text you are writing does not stay still, but floats around the screen. Very hypertextual.

Meatless chicken patties rock. I once lived on ramen soup for 10 days (the 8 for $1 kind – i had no money). To this day, i cannot eat ramen. This time, i lived on meatless chicken patties and burritos. Much better.

A cigarette break is not a celebration. There is nothing more depressing than completing a long essay and having only a cigarette break before moving on to the next one. Celebration is part of the key to relief.

Laptops are not the same as cats. Day 4, i decided that there was no reason to shower or leave my bed. I had 17 books piled on the bed and a stack of papers 8 inches deep. I left the bed to urinate, smoke and eat chicken patties. At the end of the night, i ducked under my covers, not removing any of the items on my bed. On Day 5, i woke up hugging and petting my laptop; i must have mistaked it for Marble. I sat back up in bed and began writing again. Marble meowed.

Blogs are a bigger distraction than IM. You cannot tell blogs to make you feel guilty for looking at them; you can tell friends to make you go back to work, or, because you are screaching at high pitches, they’ll run away. I uninstalled Shrook.

Self-reflection is a recursive curse. My advisor foolishly assigned me to write a self-reflective and reflexive write-up. A person analytic by nature should not turn their power inward; it becomes dangerous. I understand how Moby Dick was written. If you start down the path of description, you hit a point of recursion and it’s turtles all the way down. Why do you never hear reports of anthropologists going insane?

Personal libraries are key. My room looks like the result of a battleground between the Papers and the Books. I’m not sure who won, but there are many casualties. Thank goodness i have a ridiculously sized book collection and a fast internet connection to more references – i never had to leave my room!

Intellectual engagement != working. But boy can you justify it as such. Blessed be my friends who came to check in and brought me external stimulii upon which to thrust my spiraling brain. Somehow, the best conversations about philosophy, politics and religion always happen during finals. There’s something about feeling like you’re thinking intensely so it must be the same as finals to feel refreshed.

No qualitative analysis tool meets my needs. I tried every qual analysis/coding tool i could find for the Mac and was sorely disappointed. My mind is too hypertextual to handle the structure of these tools and yet my memory is not good enough to let me store everything internally. Mucho frustration.

Mountain Dew loves me: they re-released my beloved Tangerine. Last fall, when i learned that Mountain Dew was going to stop distributing the tangerine stuff (orange MD), i had my corner deli order me a few cases; they ran out before finals. When i went to the grocery store this week, i found out that they re-released the tangerine stuff.. and in 2 litre bottles!

Blessed be my mother. My mother is coming in 36 hours to wisk me away to hot tubs, massages, wine and all of the other pleasantries of a spa. For the last two weeks, whenever i felt exhausted and upset, i envisioned my mom arriving for many days of relaxation. Ahhh….

Sleep is not just for the weak. Or else i am weak… because gosh darnit i need it. G’nite.

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