To Quote Both Bronte And Skunks

Once there were two skunks named Out and In.
Whenever Out was Out, In was In
And whenever Out was In, In was Out...

Now that I am not at Tryst, I wish I were at Tryst. Actually, I don't, because Tryst is the sort of place where you have to wait 1/2 hour to get a glass of water, and by then you've already gotten up and gone to the counter yourself and just taken one.

But I wish I were somewhere.

Do you remember that sentence, from Jane Eyre? The one where she tires of her routine of eight years in a single afternoon? I feel a little like that. It's not that I'm tired of my job, because I love my job. It's not that I'm tired of doing Ashtanga every morning, because I love that too. But I'm starting to feel like I come home every evening and watch Hulu and eat dinner and check my Google Reader and go to bed. That's what I'm tired of.

(That whole thing about my "not having an evening routine" isn't true, btw. I come home. I shower, cook dinner, eat while watching Hulu, check the internets, maybe play some Super Famicom, and go to bed. That is teh lame.)

So I need somewhere to go.

Actually, finding somewhere to go is the easy part. Tomorrow Dalton Conley is giving a talk at Politics and Prose about his book Elsewhere, USA and I will go there. Today I went to Tryst and to the Farmers' Market and to the zoo. I also did two loads of laundry, one load of dishes, cooked meals for the entire week, packaged them in bento, and baked a loaf of bread. And wrote a short story and three blog posts. And hung out in Idle Time Books for a while.

Okay, let me rephrase this:

I need somewhere to go where I have to talk to other people. ^__^

Every time I go to Tryst or wherever I do kinda hope I will maybe talk to someone. If I didn't, I wouldn't bother putting on lip gloss or brushing my hair. But I don't know how to gracefully jump the chasm from "sitting next to six other people on a ratty coffeehouse sofa" to "starting a conversation that is enticing enough to draw their gaze away from their laptops, and to ensure that gaze is interested rather than murderous."

So--before you all jump with the suggestion--I spent some time this afternoon flipping through Meetup.com. Whenever I found a meetup group that looked interesting (like the cooking ones) I checked the stats on the previous meetups. There weren't a lot of repeat visitors. People would come to one meetup only and then quit the group. That didn't bode well for the success of the enterprise.

Still, I signed up to receive messages from a cooking group and a Scrabble group (Scrabble is fun, and more importantly, free), and tried to find a writing group but most of those seemed to be out of commission. (That was the other weird phenomena of Meetup.com. Groups would form, have three meetings, and die.) And then I thought about groups I would like to start, including:

• A cooking group which didn't require a $75 per-meeting fee; maybe one more like a potluck group where people brought dishes and talked about how they were made and then we talked about how they tasted and offered suggestions, or maybe a group where everyone learned how to cook by all trying to make the same recipe and comparing results

• A group for people who still play Super Famicom ^__^

• A group for people who want to listen to This American Life together on Saturday mornings and talk about it and maybe there would be food too

As you can see this is an impressive list.

Sigh. I still haven't put that "yoga happy hour" sign up on the wall of my Ashtanga studio. That might be an easy next step.

And I am going to hear Dalton Conley tomorrow. If all else, his book is about how we don't talk to one another anymore. ^__^

My Facebook 25 (Yes, I finally wrote one.)

1. I love living in DC, more than any other place I've lived so far. Every morning I walk to work and look at the architecture and the sky and think about how lucky I am to be living here.

2. Yes, I walk to work every morning. 1.7 miles. 3900 steps. Rain or shine.

3. And back again, too.

4. I'm also that annoying person who packs her lunch every day.

5. I'm very happy being a vegetarian but I don't believe that my choice is any more "moral" than being a non-vegetarian. There are too many factors involved and there are as many abused, suffering migrant workers as there are factory farm animals.

6. The Sunday farmers' market is my church. The first time I went there, I was overwhelmed with the sense of being in a holy place. I know that sounds ridiculous, but there's something very awesome (in the original sense of the word) by being surrounded by locally-grown vegetables.

7. The last time I was at the farmers' market I was looking at a basket of parsnips and I had the sudden thought that life was too short for me to learn to cook every single vegetable in the world. That was sad.

8. New topic: I have a secret crush on Ira Glass. I listen to an episode of This American Life nearly every day. I was devastated when I found out he was married.

9. I just don't think the British version of The Office is funny. I've tried to watch it several times.

10. I still play Super Famicom games.

11. I really like comics, probably more than I should. At one time I was part of a For Better Or For Worse online forum. We spent most of our time talking about how awful Anthony was. Right now the two comic strips I follow most closely are Questionable Content and 9 Chickweed Lane.

13. I want to eat at The Grill from Ipanema mostly because it has great lighting.

14. Celebrities who have recently appeared in my dreams: Salman Rushdie, Hugh Laurie, Amitabh Bachchan, Steve Lawrence. (Unfortunately NOT Ira Glass.)

15. The two most important things in my life are my job and my Ashtanga practice.

16. The above is probably the most honest statement on this list. I mean, everything on the list is true, but... 15's the bare-naked one.

17. Sometimes I worry with Ashtanga that my diligence outweighs my natural ability. Then I consider that nobody got anywhere without practicing.

18. I am SO GRATEFUL that my parents taught me how to practice. It is a skill that has paid off a billion-fold.

19. I'm so jealous that there was no YouTube around when I was a kid, because I taught myself how to play all kinds of video game theme music on the piano. At one point I could play the entire 15-minute "Final Fantasy VI End Sequence."

20. I carry a copy of The English Patient around with me when I travel. I've read and reread that book nearly 20 times and I always find something new in it.

21. In fact, I have a good copy, which I keep at home, and a travel copy, which travels.

22. I make to-do lists for everything. I have a to-do list for today. This is on the list.

23. When I was a starving graduate student, a few people gave me unexpected gifts which really helped me out. I sent thanks at the time, but now want to repay them and don't know how to do it without seeming tit-for-tat. Probably that means I need to pay it forward.

24. I spent way too much time writing this list. It actually went through three separate drafts. And, as a result, I'm late to the game. Meh.

25. I've really loved reading everything everyone else has written, and actually have been going on to Facebook in the hopes of reading more of these. (This from a person who, otherwise, barely looks at Facebook anymore.) So if you haven't done one, SUFFER THROUGH IT!

Stupid Facebook

Have spent the past 45 minutes trying to write out that "25 Things" meme on Facebook.

The group is too mixed. I've got friends, relatives, classmates, and colleagues all tumbling over each other, and here I am tagged on all sides by people who want me to reveal twenty-five of my secrets!

I tried twice to come up with something satisfactory, but both times it came out fake--and worse, self-conscious. Which is not an image I can very well present to friends, relatives, classmates, and colleagues.

Facebook drives me bat-crazy. Even if it weren't full of zombies and invites to events happening four states away, it's an exercise in image management to an audience so disparate that I am uncomfortable putting up much more than my picture and some very basic info. I'm hesitant even to put my workplace up on the Fbook, for fear of stalkers, revenge-seekers, and the like. (And I love my workplace!)

This is a long-short apology for this not-a-real-post, because I spent my evening trying to write up 25 "secrets." Bleh. More to come later, I promise!

This Is Not How The Internet Works, People

An email was sent to everyone in our theatre department today.

It came from the design faculty, and it expressed their concerns that students were taking pictures of fellow students joking around in costume and posting them on Facebook. Or -- even worse -- taking pictures of students during a rehearsal and posting those pictures on Facebook.

The email claimed that "if you do a Google search on the names of our designers, the Facebook images will turn up before the designers' official websites and portfolios, and future employers will judge our designers based on badly-photographed, unfinished work."

In short, cease and desist.

Except... that's not how Facebook works.

Anyone with half a brain has a "friends-only" Facebook profile, so the only people who see their photos are people to whom they have granted access.

Additionally, the photos are only tagged by the names of the people in the pictures. (People who post cast pictures on Facebook are generally too insensitive to remember to credit the costume designer.) Which means that, already, the pictures are two steps removed; first, they are hidden behind a friendwall, and secondly, they are completely detached from the names of any designers.

Lastly: have Facebook pictures started to appear at the top of Google searches? Ever willing to sacrifice myself for science, I decided to run a test to find out.

I googled a few of our designers' names, doing both a "general" and an "image"-based search. I didn't find a single Facebook image. I didn't find links to people's Facebook profiles.

Then I ran a search for the titles of a few of our recent plays. I ran searches for the title plus the name of our university. I even ran searches including actors' names, to see if it would dig up a Facebook tag.

I could not find a single Facebook picture in any of these searches.

Which makes me wonder what the fuss is all about.