motormouth's bloglife 1995
blogging beginnings
blogging beginnings
04/1995
20 Questions with Motormouth
(Some might find this a bit self-centered. Considering that in my job I listen to 60 people talk about their problems every day, I think I'm entitled... :-)
# First things first: When were you born?
November 23rd. When I was born, my parents brought me home from the hospital on Thanksgiving day.
# What year?
Let's put it this way: I went straight to college after high school, graduated in 4 1/2 years and have been out in the workforce since March of '94.
# Close enough. Read anything good lately?
Yes, most recently The Three Musketeers. Prior to that, Microserfs by Douglas Coupland, and while on vacation I read Geek Love by Katherine Dunn.
# Quite a selection. What's your favorite genre?
EDITED, sorry!
# Do you keep a journal?
Back then I did -- there are six volumes from high school in my nightstand.
# And now?
I don't know -- I try to, but always manage to get caught up in other things.
# Did you make a 1995 New Year's resolution?
Yes: to be kind.
# How's it coming along?
Pretty well. Somtimes its more challenging than others...
# What's the most luxurious thing you own?
A monogrammed satin pillowcase.
# Monogrammed with what?
My initials: MEB# Why do you go by Motormouth?
Because nobody spells my real name correctly.
# Come on...
No, I'm serious. When I was growing up, the high point of Easter was seeing how Nana had butchered my name that year.
# What was the worst?
The year I got the chocolate egg with "Marylin" scripted across the top.
# What do you consider your greatest accomplishment?
Doing my laundry and putting it away tonight. Accomplishments don't count once they're two hours old.
# Your biggest regret is...
Naming my cat "OJ". It actually stands for Odysseus Joseph, but try explaining that in these times...
# Did you have pets as a child?
Yes, three Shetland sheepdogs and various carnival-trophy goldfish.
# Those goldfish will teach a kid about mortality real quick.
I remember getting ready for bed one night and noticing that Oscar wasn't in his bowl. Mom and I looked and looked, but he was nowhere to be found. Two months later, I noticed him on the floor at the foot of my bed, staring up at me with his big blue eye.
# Gruesome!
You're telling me. I'll never forget it.
# Lynn, thanks for your time. Let's close with your personal philosophy.
"Everything in moderation," with the occasional exception of exercise and booze.
06/1995
Geekfest in a Cleanroom -- my evening with Douglas Coupland
attended: June 21, 1995
I am standing outside the Tech Museum in downtown San Jose, which smells worse than I remember from my not-so-long-ago SJSU days. There are about 15 of us milling around, including my buddy Jim, who proposed we check out this event of nerddom at its finest.
The doors will open at 6:00 and we will be ushered in to the main room of the museum to wait for Douglas Coupland, author of _Generation X_ and the new _Microserfs_.
Now, I tried to read _Gen X_ last year at the suggestion of a buddy I worked with at Adobe Systems. "Lynn, you'll love it!" he insisted.
I got to page 56. It was too true to life and it was just too painful. The part that really got me was when gray-fabric-covered cubicles were described as "veal-fattening pens." Ouch.
So, anyway, about 10 minutes before 6:00, a museum official comes outside and hands everybody a clean-room bunny suit, which we (like sheep) proceed to slip into. Within minutes we resembled a Michelin Man reunion.
This would definitely _not_ be a normal evening.
Once we got inside (after paying our $6 admission fee), we were handed moist towelettes emblazoned with "microserfs". The towelettes proclaimed that they were ideal for removing nasal encrustations from computer monitors. This being allergy season, I appreciated the gift.
We were also offered latex gloves. I put mine on with a "snap" and turned to Jim.
"Heheheh, Mike and I are going to have some fun tonight!"
Jim sympathized with my absent boyfriend.
We got some wine from the open bar and snagged seats in the second row. A TV screen blared images of commercials I remembered from when I was 4 years old.
Two guys were already there, sitting in the middle of the row. They hijacked my (well, Jim's, actually) notebook and proceeded to describe the scene, inferring that I was on my fifth glass of blush wine. Like I would really ever stoop to drink *blush* wine.
One of them (an Apple employee) described the Devo image currently playing, which involved Tokyo City 1988 and cross-eyed Asian women.
Jim and I wandered a bit more, until we found ourselves face-to-face with the Doug-man himself. A reporter to his left looked annoyed when one of the "party guests" starts discussing the merits of older Lego sets with Douglas. Jim piped up that things just weren't the same after Lego came out with the people with painted faces. Doug concurred. I told him about my feelings about veal-fattening pens. He seemed pleased.
Douglas Coupland is *very* mild-mannered, to the point of almost being creepy. He stood out against the sea of white (remember, we were all in clean suits -- some guy even brought his own!) in a staid grey suit which buttoned to his chest.
His talk began at 7:20, and he read three "ultra-shorts" to us. The first one was called "The Whole World and One Entire Life Inside of One Day," and it blew my mind. He wrote it in the Bahamas, and the premise revolved around how he would be judged if his entire life were judged by this one day he'd spent there. He described his encounters with an ocean "charged with angelfish," and with a woman who looked at the stars every night because her son was in America at college and "the only common ground they had was the sky." The best part of the story, though, was when he started addressing a lover as "you," because "we all have a 'you' in our life."
The ultra-short resolved with his decision that "the sun will not be judged for falling, as I will judge myself," and just for a moment I wished that I could climb inside his head and share his thought process.
The second ultra-short, "Power Failure," dealt with "pre-television notions of 'identity'." The third was in the genre of an Itchy and Scratchy cartoon, which led into his movie (the reason we were all gathered together in clean suits).
The 25 minute film, The Last Laugh, was "the result of lots of ideas and not very much money." Broken up into three parts, the first was Part One: Mind. After asking us to please spread the rumor that in Pulp Fiction, Glenn Close played The Gimp, the film began.
Part One: Mind dealt with the identity/life crisis brought upon us by Television (it seems appropriate to capitalize that). "Not having a life is so common, it's become the norm." Television is "information crack," which gets us hooked and makes us crave even more of it. Doug believes that the dominant activities 20 years from now will be "going shopping and going to jail." He's a bit pessimistic, perhaps...
Part Two: Body discussed the mind/body relationship: People have become their own focus group (Jim nudged me at that. "Write that one down"). Douglas had his body composition measured a while ago and the caliper-bearer looked at him in horror. "You're a thin fat person!"
"I'm skinny, and what I have isn't even meat," he complained.
The cannibals in the room left in disgust.
Part K (sound it out): Soul got even more philosophical. Bulk memory has erased history as bulk shopping has erased regular shopping. The future lies on the other side of that cartoon hole in the ground. Because of technology, we're no longer condemned to repeat a cycle of mistakes.
"It takes a lot of work to be an individual."
After the film, Jim and I joined the line to get autographs. He'd brought three copies of _microserfs_ for Douglas to sign. I prepared a clean steno sheet and the folded clean suit I snagged from a box at the entrance. While waiting, three nerds behind us discussed the realtive goodness of Great America. They concurred that Days of Thunder sucks. Don't waste your time. They also bemoaned the fact that the Whizzer is gone ("just because some people died on it...") and has been reassembled in Japan.
After half an hour, Jim reached His Couplandness and got his three copies signed. Someone cut in front of me to say goodbye to Douglas, which I allowed (must have been the wine...).
When I finally reached him, I handed him my steno pad with the clean sheet of paper. He withdrew a rubber stamp with red ink, and stamped:
To my close personal friend:
Date:
Location:
...then filled in the blanks and scrawled a big "Doug" below. After that was done, I withdrew the folded clean suit and asked him to sign it to "You, because I was really moved by that line in your first ultra-short, about how everybody has a 'you' in their life."
He signed as I was speaking, but when I finished my sentence he paused for a moment, as though surprised that I (or anyone) had derived meaning from that statement. As I turned to leave, I heard him whisper, "Wow."
He'd signed it to "You!"
As I left, my allergies started up again. I grabbed some emergency towelettes and left the building.
07/1995
State of the World, and other Inanity
I'm getting *really* tired of this United Nations vs. the Serbs battle. They're threating air strikes against the Serbs again, which is striking fear into the hearts of those UN peacekeepers (who, in their baby-blue helmets, look barely adequate to stage an effective pillow fight, let alone ensure peace to the long- suffering muslims...). B. B-Ghali and his Gorazde band need to come up with something a little more threatening than "OK, Serbs, you better cut it out. We're getting really really miffed and just might actually finally do something about it."
The thing that amazes me about the minority Serb forces is that they've managed to gain control of 30 percent of Croatia and 70 percent of Bosnia, while armed with nothing but Yugoslav weapons. Their guns are certainly more reliable than their Yugos were! Too bad it isn't the other way around...
* * * * * BONEHEAD OF THE MONTH: Judge Albert Mestemaker, of the Hamilton County (Ohio) Municipal Court. After convicting Scott Hancock of punching his live-in girlfriend in the mouth, Mestemaker sentenced Hancock to marry the woman.
"I believe strongly in family values," Mestemaker said after sentencing.
He believes that domestic violence is less likely to occur between married people than between unmarried people living together.
I guess Mestemaker didn't read the news brief about Dale McDowell from the same issue of the Merc: 24 hours after his release from prison (where he was serving time on domestic violence charges), McDowell was arrested when police found his wife's murdered body in the trunk of the car he drove to pick up his son from day care.
So, what did I do after reading July 15th's paper? I went to church... to be a bridesmaid for a girlfriend of mine.
Swell...
08/1995
Negative Advertising: Are we all... Sex-crazed???
I exercise often, and like to read as I do (helps take the mind off the pain). Lately, my literary companions have been various Internet magazines because I want to show the men with bulging muscles and tight tank tops just what a geek I am.
Anyway, I was on the recumbant bike this evening with a free copy of Internet World, a MecklerMedia publication that I'd scammed from their ad rep at COMDEX. The previous magazine I'd gone through was Internet Underground, which blows doors off of Wired.
The same did not hold for Internet World (IW as it is now and ever shall be), so after the industry news section in the front I turned my attention to the advertising.
I wish I hadn't.
Long-standing Internet users be warned: According to Internet companies that advertise, your future infobahn carpoolers are sex-crazed.
The first ad that caught my eye was full page and printed on heavier cardstock. The advertiser was Prodigy, which I remember seeing when I was in fourth grade. A woman who wasn't even born when I was in fourth grade is featured, wearing a denim jacket, tight jeans and a come-access-me-now pout. She is leaned over a purple convertible sportscar.
The copy is a quote set in 40 pt. Helvetica:
"Let's just say I don't hang out in the Knitting Forum."
Below this, a burst tells us that "'Loni' got into Prodigy Pseudo Chat on Wednesday, 9:37 P.M. "
(Men: Do you really think that women named "Loni" even exist? If so, I have a green card to sell you.)
It seems that this sexual advertising is getting worse before getting better. Other ads I've seen (in sources other than IW) have included a woman, backside to the camera in a Melissa Etheridge-bluejeans-and-nothing-else pose with two floppy disks in each back pocket. Another often-used image is "attractive woman as guide to the Internet" (which will be further discussed in part three: Coddling).
I know that there's sex on the Internet. When I was in tech support, customers would ask me to add erotica newsgroups to our USENET feed. Some of the titles were hair-curlingly repulsive.
But do we really need to sell the Internet as sexy? Should the person who would be lured by Loni's testimonial really be allowed to partake in the forum? Do they have anything to offer other than net.harrassment and "me too"'s?
While I find all attempts of net.censorship reprehensible, and would happily give Senator Exon a blow to the head (though judging from his soundbites someone already has), I am concerned that online services or any service provider are resorting first to what should be the final resort!
If people aren't turned on to information, they won't offer much to the Internet community other than their own gratification. And I'm not interested in reading anything typed with only one hand.
10/2005
That's life...
My man Lamar is officially over and done. Sigh. Fortunately, Pat Buchanan, professional hate-monger, is out of it too, so that takes a bit of the sting out of not-so-super Tuesday.
I've been feeling rather dead lately. I gave notice at my job last Friday, and my coworkers have been talking to me about how much they'll miss me. The going-away party is next Wednesday and will be absolutely no-holds-barred. I think it will be a Wake.
I am starting my new job on March 25, so I'll have some spare time in the interim. I'm accompanying my boyfriend to Las Vegas for three days, so I'll get to lounge by the pool at Bally's while he's learning about automatic transmissions. I think I'm getting the better part of the deal. :-)
So how have I been spending my last days at my place of employment? Well, I gave a seminar about business opportunities on the WWW last night. I bought the refreshments as well. Oh, and I've been catching up on my newsgroups -- so much happens on misc.kids.pregnancy and ba.internet that it's hard not to read them at least 15 times a day.