Thursday, June 25, 2009

Why I will always find Alaberi endlessly endearing...

[Setting: Alaberi is about to sleep over at my place having flown in from the opposite coast.]

Alaberi: I wanted to travel light so could I borrow some pajamas?

Me: Sure, no prob.

Alaberi: And can I use your toothpaste?

Me: Yep.

Alaberi: And moisturizer?

Me: Sure.

Alaberi: And...and...<in a small sheepish voice>...do you have a stuffed animal I could cuddle with?

Me: WHAT?! WAIT, WHAT DID YOU WANT?! ALABERI, YOU ARE A GROWN WOMAN!!!!!!!!

Alaberi: But I know you have a bunch imprisoned in your closet... <Alaberi calls out in the direction of my closet> I'm here to free you! You're free! You're free!

Wednesday, June 24, 2009

If I could just hold you in my arms forever...

Rarely do I lust over a bag, but clearly, this is no ordinary bag.



The Campo, JCrew $298.

There's something so sensually sumptuous about this smooth oiled leather that is just begging to be touched and caressed and worn over time into an even more beautiful color depth and patina.

And the shape is just so alluringly pot-bellied. At once boho and preppy, American and Italian, a bag for the ages!

Monday, June 22, 2009

From Homeless to Harvard


I'm not sure what to make of this incredible story about Khadijah Williams, a homeless 18 year old girl who grew up on skid row and was raised by a single mother who had her at age 14. Williams overcame seemingly insurmountable odds (she has "attended" 12 schools in 12 years--and that's "attended" in the loosest sense of the word) to end up accepted at Harvard College in the Fall.

Obviously it's great and amazing.

But I'm worred about a couple things.

First, I'm worried about bootstrap-pulling ideologues who may point to Khadijah to prove their delusion that poor people are poor because they just don't work hard enough. Look at Khadijah--if you just try hard like her, you too can succeed.

That's poppycock. Khadijah is an incredible individual with exceptional talent and the good fortune to have counselors and teachers who supported and believed in her potential. Khadijah was also lucky in that her mother, however homeless and indigent, never smoked, drank or did drugs. Hopefully this exception will not be abused as the rule.

Second, I'm worried about Khadijah. Among all the cultural differences she will have to adjust to, there is a greater shock that she's in for--her pride. Khadijah has always been proud of the fact that she is, in her own words, in the 99th percentile. She has found esteem in her academic abilities and significance in her scores.

But what happens when she's surrounded by people just as smart, or smarter, than her? How will her ego survive being in the 50th percentile of the ivory tower? I hope that she will learn how to find worth, significance and esteem in something more abiding and less relative than achievement.

After all she's been through, I hope she does not go from the oppression of poverty to the oppression of a culture of overachievement. For that would truly be jumping out of the pot and into the fire.

Saturday, June 20, 2009

Deep Cleansing Breath

I feel like I've just done the blog equivalent of yoga.

Took a deep breath in and...

Exhaled all the old blogs that weren't posting much:
  • Not So Angry Asian Woman

  • The Seoul Diaries

  • Infinity8Ball

  • My Friend since 2nd Grade

  • Photographer Deviant


  • And inhaled more blogs (and sites) that were posting plenty:
  • Wade's World

  • Following the Light

  • Las Recessionistas

  • We Need to Be Friends in Real Life

  • Eye Candy

  • Not Paid to Look Good

  • Gawker

  • Brain Rot

  • ATL

  • Kristof

  • NY

  • LA

  • DC

  • SF

  • SJ


  • May the joy of blogging abound in guilty and not-so-guilty pleasures for the harmonious entertainment of all mankind.

    Namaste.

    Friday, June 19, 2009

    The Killing Fields

    I'm on a murder spree and it feels too good to stop.

    The words of an old granny talking about disinheriting her thankless relatives in John Grisham's The Rainmaker comes to mind: "Cut, cut, cut!"

    I'm purging the fat, cutting the grease, bleeding the bulge...

    I'm taking more blogs off my blogroll.

    Next up: bloggers that have not posted more than 2 entries per month, on average, for the last six months (Dec-May).

    Wednesday, June 17, 2009

    The Sound of Blogs Dying

    A few weeks back I was thinking about how personal blogs were a dying breed and then came accross this article a few days later in the NYTimes which confirmed my suspicions.

    Blogs are dead and dying.

    And it's time to purge my blogroll. In the next few days I'm going to remove all blogs from my sidebar that haven't posted in the last 6 months. (Post now! It's not too late to save yourself!)

    And despite the odds, I'm gonna try my darndest to find new ones. (Cuz I need entertainment at work!)
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

    Blogs Falling in an Empty Forest

    By DOUGLAS QUENQUA

    “HI, I’m Judy Nichols. Welcome to my rant.”

    Thus was born Rantings of a Crazed Soccer Mom, the blog of a stay-at-home mother and murder-mystery writer from Wilmington, N.C. Mrs. Nichols, 52, put up her first post in late 2004, serving up a litany of gripes about the Bush administration and people who thought they had “a monopoly on morality.” After urging her readers to vote for John Kerry, she closed with a flourish: “Practice compassionate regime change.”

    The post generated no comments.

    Today, Mrs. Nichols speaks about her blog as if it were a diet or half-finished novel. “I’m going to get back to it,” she swears. Her last entry, in December of last year, was curt and none too profound. “Books make great gifts,” she began, breaking a silence of nearly a month.

    Like Mrs. Nichols, many people start blogs with lofty aspirations — to build an audience and leave their day job, to land a book deal, or simply to share their genius with the world. Getting started is easy, since all it takes to maintain a blog is a little time and inspiration. So why do blogs have a higher failure rate than restaurants?

    According to a 2008 survey by Technorati, which runs a search engine for blogs, only 7.4 million out of the 133 million blogs the company tracks had been updated in the past 120 days. That translates to 95 percent of blogs being essentially abandoned, left to lie fallow on the Web, where they become public remnants of a dream — or at least an ambition — unfulfilled.

    Judging from conversations with retired bloggers, many of the orphans were cast aside by people who had assumed that once they started blogging, the world would beat a path to their digital door.

    “I was always hoping more people would read it, and it would get a lot of comments,” Mrs. Nichols said recently by telephone, sounding a little betrayed. “Every once in a while I would see this thing on TV about some mommy blogger making $4,000 a month, and thought, ‘I would like that.’ ”

    Not all fallow blogs die from lack of reader interest. Some bloggers find themselves too busy — what with, say, homework and swim practice, or perhaps even housework and parenting. Others graduate to more immediate formats, like Twitter and Facebook. And a few — gasp — actually decide to reclaim some smidgen of personal privacy.

    “Before you could be anonymous, and now you can’t,” said Nancy Sun, a 26-year-old New Yorker who abandoned her first blog after experiencing the dark side of minor Internet notoriety. She had started it in 1999, back when blogging was in its infancy and she did not have to worry too hard about posting her raw feelings for a guy she barely knew.

    Ms. Sun’s posts to her blog — www.cromulent.org, named for a fake word from “The Simpsons” — were long and artful. She quickly attracted a large audience and, in 2001, was nominated for the “best online diary” award at the South by Southwest media powwow.

    But then she began getting e-mail messages from strangers who had seen her at parties. A journalist from Philadelphia wanted to profile her. Her friends began reading her blog and drawing conclusions — wrong ones — about her feelings toward them. Ms. Sun found it all very unnerving, and by 2004 she stopped blogging altogether.

    “The Internet is different now,” she said over a cup of tea in Midtown. “I was too Web 1.0. You want to be anonymous, you want to write, like, long entries, and no one wants to read that stuff.”
    Richard Jalichandra, chief executive of Technorati, said that at any given time there are 7 million to 10 million active blogs on the Internet, but “it’s probably between 50,000 and 100,000 blogs that are generating most of the page views.” He added, “There’s a joke within the blogging community that most blogs have an audience of one.”

    That’s a serious letdown from the hype that greeted blogs when they first became popular. No longer would writers toil in anonymity or suffer the indignities of the publishing industry, we were told. Finally the world of ideas would be democratized! This was the catnip that intoxicated Mrs. Nichols. “That was when people were starting to talk about blogs and how anyone could, if not get famous, get their opinions out there and get them read,” she recalled. “I just wanted to post something interesting and get people talking, but mostly it was just my sister commenting.”
    Many people who think blogging is a fast path to financial independence also find themselves discouraged. Matt Goodman, an advertising executive in Atlanta, had no trouble attracting an audience to his self-explanatory site, Things My Dog Ate, which included tales of his foxhound, Watson, eating remote controls, a wig and a $400 pair of Prada shoes.

    “I did some Craigslist postings to advertise it, and I very quickly got an audience of about 50,000 viewers a month,” he said. That led to some small advertising deals, including one with PetSmart and another with a company that made dog-proof cellphone chargers. Mr. Goodman posted a video of his dog failing to destroy one.

    “I guess the charger wasn’t very popular,” he said. “I think I made about $20” from readers clicking on the ads. He last updated the site in November.

    Mr. Jalichandra of Technorati — a blogger himself — also points out that some retired bloggers have merely found new platforms. “Some of that activity has gone to Facebook and MySpace, and obviously Twitter is a new phenomenon,” he said.

    Others simply tire of telling their stories. “Stephanie,” a semi-anonymous 17-year-old with a precocious knowledge of designers and a sharp sense of humor, abandoned her blog, Fashion Robot, about a week before it got a shoutout in the “blog watch” column of The Wall Street Journal last December. Her final post, simply titled “The End,” said she just didn’t feel like blogging any more. She declined an e-mail request for an interview, saying she was no longer interested in publicity.

    As for Ms. Sun of Cromulent.org, she has made peace with being public. She has a new blog, SaladDays.org, where she keeps her posts short and jaunty, not personally revealing; mostly, she offers up health and diet tips, with the occasional quote from Simone de Beauvoir.

    What is she after this time around? In person, she was noncommittal, but that night she sent a follow-up e-mail message.

    “To be honest, I would love a book deal to come out of my blog,” she wrote. “Or I would love for Salad Days to give me a means to be financially independent to continue pursuing and sharing what I love with the world.”

    Tuesday, June 16, 2009

    I Left My Lens in San Francisco

    The more time that goes by, the more I don't believe this actually happened to me two Fridays ago, but it did.

    The most bizarre thing.

    I was stopping by my local Walgreens after work to pick up some prescriptions and right as I passed by the face creams and hot wax aisle, I was fiddling with my left contact lens and--poof--I lost contact with my contact.

    It just fell, into seeming nothingness. I didn't even hear it hit the ground.

    And then ensued the humiliating and frantic search in which I crawled on the ground, groping like a blindman, patted myself down and felt myself up repeatedly, and ran into some coworkers who were buying Nair.

    And finally, thirty minutes older, defeated and perplexed, I left Walgreens with a heavy heart and one contact lens lighter. I give up!!! (And I really mean it this time!)

    I rode the BART home and bemoaned the seemingly arbitrary meaninglessness of God's ways to my longsuffering spouse.

    While I was still moping around, licking my existential wounds, said spouse came bounding up the stairs with a small transparent object perched on his index finger. "Is this your contact lens?" he asked with innocence.

    "WHAT? WHERE DID YOU FIND IT?! WHAT?!"

    He said he found it on the staircase, right in the spotlight created by the overhead track light.

    As I tried on the long lost contact lens, the one I had given up for dead, I blubbered about the impossibility of it all...but I rode BART...but I patted and frisked myself silly in the store...but I turned all my pockets upside down and shook out my loafers...but, but, but...that's impossible!

    How did my little lens survive all that jostling, the walk to the underground train, the car ride home, and finally, to land in that most perfect of places (despite all the foot traffic)--right. under. the spotlight.

    When I was younger I read an account by Elizabeth Elliot about an even more fantastic contact lens redemption. Some woman had gone rock climbing and at the top of a sheer cliff she lost a contact lens. But when she had made her descent, she saw the most amazing thing at the foot of the mountain:

    An ant was carrying her contact lens towards her.

    All these years I dismissed Ms. Elliot's account as hyperbole...but now...maybe I see things more clearly...?

    Monday, June 15, 2009

    The Highest Hottie in the Land

    Say what you will about Governor Palin...

    But it is pretty darn uncontested that she is the hottest highest-ranking female politician in the US (and maybe even the G20! Angela Merkel, I'm looking at you).

    Who even comes close on a federal or state level? Sorry Hillary.

    Of course politician wives are commonly very hot (hello Carla Bruni), but when it comes to the woman wearing the pants (or sitting in the seat) the pickings are slim.

    So congrats to Palin. You may never be president, but you are some serious political eye-candy.