The Space Between: Miscellany ARCHIVES
31 March 2008
From Stewart Brand's How Buildings Learn, a manifesto, of sorts, on user-centered architecture: Home can be about architecture or a place in geography; or it can be about the sense of permanence we come to know through habit: an article...
31 January 2008
Since these ramblings are actually time-sensitive, I'll resist the urge to let simmer. I think I've watched most of tonight's debate by now, albeit in clips and bits from CNN's website, and had a couple of thoughts to get off...
23 January 2008
I heard a song by Uncle Earl that's haunting me. It's called "One True". The verses are happy and rolling and describe a charmed life... which seems not unrelated to ours in happy families, fancy colleges, generous friends, and of...
23 December 2007
Hawaii is noisy. Noisy, noisy, noisy. Winds sweep the palm fronds just outside this house until. Just before dawn, a veritable din of birdsong swells such that it's impossible to distinguish any one call. "I wake up when the...
12 February 2007
I'm missing some minutes. It's a strange concept to have lived and acted and spoken and gestured, yet not remember a whit of it. I have no memory of the two or five minutes right around midday on Saturday. Apparently...
05 February 2007
I was gone for a while, but I'm actually all warmed up for this blogging thing. Check out The Miseducation of Mosh, an experiment in narcissism-by-consent created by Frank (meet Frank Harris) and well-commented-upon by my friends. Here's an excerpt:Raise...
05 February 2007
A few weeks ago, I skimmed a thread on a cycling email list about a women's bike skills class hosted by a local bike coalition. Then I watched it slip benignly and steadily into doom. It began with a few...
09 August 2006
Dinner started with a great, chunky salad but ended with peanut butter and jelly sandwich on toast. This is mostly my fault: at lunchtime today, a coworker asked whether it was harder to give up garlic or cheese and we...
16 June 2006
Having decided that it was excessive, but needing a bike I could lock up outside the grocery store or library or ditch on the ground at ultimate practice, I bought a steel-framed fixed-gear beater from a girl messenger. I even...
17 May 2006
In high school I tutored a couple of Korean brothers who'd moved to the States months before. The district had recently downsized much of the ESL program; the boys' excellent grades to date plunked them in advanced classes in everything...
08 May 2006
While exploring the reborn urban miracle that is FreshDirect, I discovered that one can even buy wine online. FreshDirect's associated wine seller, Best Cellars, has a really neat classification system for wines. "Fresh", "soft", "luscious", "juicy", "smooth", "big" are actually...
20 April 2006
The most tenable scenario has the two front-runners, John McCain and Hillary Clinton—both of whom Bloomberg respects and neither of whom he is likely to challenge—defeated in the primaries by polarizing right- and left-wing candidates, leaving the rational center wide...
18 April 2006
I'm eating takeout from Pump Energy Food. Its full name, I've discovered via moments-ago Googling, is The Pump - Energy Food (A Physical Fitness Restaurant). The title itself makes you think of sweaty gym socks, middle school volleyball class, and...
07 April 2006
"Please respond with a little about yourself and if you like, a link to your friendster or myspace page." —http://nyc.craigslist.org/brk/roo/...
30 March 2006
The cashier at the Union Square Whole Foods picks up your bunch of rosemary and looks at you with a blank stare: "What's this?" Jarring not only because , but because I wasn't buying rosemary in the 'Alto. In summerland,...
10 March 2006
DSC02301 Originally uploaded by bees. I went to a geek-a-thon last week, where it was someone's great idea to take dozens of photos of people at really, really close range. Some are recognizable only via glasses; mine turned out...
01 March 2006
function KeepCount() { var NewCount = 0 if (document.onlyhuman.sleep.checked) {NewCount = NewCount + 1} if (document.onlyhuman.work.checked) {NewCount = NewCount + 1} if (document.onlyhuman.friends.checked) {NewCount = NewCount + 1} if (document.onlyhuman.training.checked) {NewCount = NewCount + 1} if (NewCount == 4)...
27 February 2006
Are you really moving? Yep. You'd best believe it. As much as I love the Bay Area, it's time for a change of pace. I get to work for a West Coast style company (incidentally, that means the sweatshirts/jeans/clogs are...
30 January 2006
Managed to miss Wan’s birthday while being within 5 miles of the festivities, all because I phoned her on the day after. People who live in Boston shouldn’t celebrate their birthdays in New York without telling other people. Geez. Saw...
29 December 2005
I'm the last food purist you'll ever meet, so here's a plain old accounting of what I cooked a pot of on a rainy December afternoon. It starts off as a gumbo learned from a Louisiana-born friend at a...
29 December 2005
My high school friends are awesome, and will be living in awesome, and awesomely visitable, locales over the next year: Guyana, Kenya. I've been enticed enough to want to milk all I can out of vacation days, so I'm back...
21 December 2005
Red Sox icon Johnny Damon has jumped ship to the Yankees. I guess disaster was to be expected after general manager Theo Epstein's departure. But... c'mon, Damon leaving the Red Sox?! The Boston Globe reports this in a surprisingly deadpan...
18 December 2005
I went on and on about the breathtaking geology we'd encountered in Iceland. "But it rained and rained and rained," I lamented wryly. "Actually, I think that's our third trip together in a row where it's rained." "You know," she...
26 November 2005
I'm so late to the party, but I confess: I'm a Grey's Anatomy fan. I watch it regularly. Every week. Each episode after the next. Only twice before in my life have I thusly been TV's bitch — first, Gilmore...
15 October 2005
The tail end of a tenderloin is perfect for this dish. Here's why: it's a leanish, still tender cut, but imperfectly shaped and thus unusable in steak form. A 600 gram (1.3 pounds) tail end of tenderloin is our principal...
11 October 2005
Okay, Roger, you asked for it:so I'm making dinner for people in a couple weeks (we have a standing sunday dinner, and it's not my turn yet, but it will be), and I was thinking about making beef stroganoff. and...
07 October 2005
I'm at the clean-up point in one of my projects at work, where the dreamy fun is all used up and you're tidying up a seemingly endless roster of little details. By 4:30 my contacts started yelping in protest of...
04 October 2005
Having schlepped up to San Francisco for various funtimes every weekend of the past month, I decided to stay home and accomplish these provincial victories: Made artichoke-garlic bread for Susie's birthday. Ate artichoke-garlic bread for Susie's birthday. Looking for something...
27 September 2005
This post is brought to you by Basic Juice, who started the shebang, and my friend Janet at Escaping Words, who nagged tagged me. 1. O dolce vino We the uninitiated tend not to drink wine because it's always a...
05 September 2005
Nine hours until the real world strikes. If anyone has advice on HMOs versus PPOs, you can weigh in right about now....
30 July 2005
I'm in one of those strange news vacuums particular to travel or vacation. I basically give one glance at Le Monde headlines one my way past newsstands, swap chitchat with my classmates before class, and have some TV on as...
03 July 2005
I read books in binges. One summer in high school I binged on Wharton, conveniently located at the end of a long and tall bank of books at the public library, and finished the high by going to extreme measures...
01 June 2005
Last July, the day before I was slated to begin work a 20-minute commute away, my burgundy 1989 Camry squealed to a metal-on-metal end. Apparently everything in my power steering setup needed replacement, to the Bay Area tune of nine...
02 May 2005
I need to get out of the funk and into the groove. I mean, Saturday night it was all about the funk and the blues and the swing already, so I should have filled my quota and move on. For...
25 April 2005
Me: Oh, last night at dinner I heard about an Earth Systems professor whose two chocolate labs had just had a litter of nine puppies. NINE! Isn't that a lot of puppies? Nine puppies is a lot of puppies. Oh,...
25 April 2005
Due to complicated logistical proceedings I wound up with my bike on campus and my self off campus. And so I started off on this morning of no classes on the leisurely 25-minute walk toward school. But before I got...
20 April 2005
This is a little out of hand... Two days after the new Pope was chosen, Greg Tobin's Holy Father: Pope Benedict XVI, Pontiff for a New Era ranks 22nd on the Barnes & Noble site. He totally had the contract...
14 April 2005
I turned around to pass on some handouts in AnthSci class the other day and a scowling girl snatched them from me. After the 3rd set of handouts were raped from my hands with the same dour expression, I'd started...
06 April 2005
I was trying to open a can of Pringles the other day and the pop didn't work. Instead the papery foil tab separated from the plastic coating with a squeal, forcing me to liberate the plastic with a quick stab...
13 March 2005
A couple of weeks ago I stumbled across a set of "classes" posted on a veteran photographer's website. I'll dig up the link in a couple of days, but in the meantime, here's what I got on a short walk...
03 March 2004
Co-op living, backpacking, general outdoorsing, eating vegan food sometimesing, composting. And yet incredible amounts of my time are spent shopping. It's not strolling through the wide plazas of Stanford Shopping Center to Nieman Marcus and beyond, but I am consumed...
26 November 2003
Regularly-timed holiday cards never work, since the first week of December far too fraught with final papers, projects, and exams for such a piddling task as holiday cards; upon return to hometown, exhausted from the end-of-term onslaught, you're spending every...
04 August 2003
After spending a full month bemoaning the lack of a fitting equivalent to San Francisco's KFOG (ha, ha, station namer), I found 103.3. WPRB, Princeton (University)'s student radio station, embodies eclectic while mostly maintaining a sense of melody and song...
13 May 2003
In March of 1980, near the end of the school year but only three weeks after our arrival in Toronto, I was enrolled in Charles H. Best Elementary. Thus begins the second paragraph of "Tapka," the featured fiction piece by...
26 March 2003
It's both aggravating and comforting to see what we call the Stanford Bubble—that three-dimensional halo of awe and protection and naïveté—travel with us all the way to San Francisco. Last Thursday, I was part of a direct action group which...
15 January 2003
date what I wore what I asked for what he did feb 2002 paint-splattered orange pants and grungy white polypro shirt to fix flat tire told me he could sell me the inner tube, then show me how to...
04 January 2003
That Central Time update that didn't happen last spring? I'm making up for it now. Heard a succession of stories about my connecting flight out of Chicago involving weather delays, an unwieldy mess left by the Ohio State football team...
03 January 2003
In true Edison fashion, Farz and I went to Dunkin' Donuts (a new one very close by on Inman, and it's open 'round the clock!) around 10pm tonight. Between then and 1am, eight or nine pairs or trios of folk...
30 December 2002
On my penchant for holding on to apple cores long after most of the flesh is gone so that I can take tiny, tiny nibbles until some task absolutely demands the use of both of my hands: Roger: "You might...
26 December 2002
I love airplane turbulence. I've been content enough with my handful of fun stomach-sinks in the past, but what a guy named Adam Greenfield underwent makes me want to drool: "Flying out of Incheon today, on our way back to...
16 December 2002
I tripped on the garage stairs on my way back from dropping Albert off at a choir thing tonight. It was more of a stumble, really; I easily caught myself on the doorknob at the top. The stairs were just...
05 December 2002
Found this quote in the Introsems brochure today: "I must study politics and war that my sons may have the liberty to study mathematics and philosophyÂ… in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, and music."...
20 November 2002
Am I (A) incurably pathetic or (B) a heartless person for using ultimate tournaments as starting points for counting months? ...though, come to think of it, I used to measure time according to Hawkeye layouts....
07 November 2002
Rain! It's the first time since May, and what an inauguration to the wet season it is—slated to continue until the weekend, with a chance of thunder on Friday!...
30 October 2002
Had a most comically tragic half-hour this evening. Biking through White Plaza on my way back from Green to dinner, there were about four bikes and three pedestrians trying to get through the same space at the same time. In...
15 October 2002
Last night, while I was rather dopily cleaning up DArray at Sweet Hall, I took a break to fill up my water bottle at the bathrooms. Opening the door unleashed a strong, strong smell of the three-weeks-on-the-trail sort, at which...
20 September 2002
I spent most of this past week either painting the Dire Wolf kitchen or packing and moving my own stuff. My clothes and books went to Syn Wednesday with Suzie's help, my random stuff yesterday afternoon with Betsy's, and my...
31 August 2002
I am out of touch with the world at the moment, at least by any instantaneous means. In typical collegiate squalor, here is no dial tone at Dire Wolf right now—we'd been forgetting to give to phone bills to Rob,...
28 August 2002
I've been chugging cold water all morning at the rate of a liter every 45 minutes, which is doing a reasonably good job of keeping me awake. Poor little spoiled me is hurting after averaging only six or so hours...
23 August 2002
I'd been wanting to watch The Red Violin for years and finally got around to it tonight. Magnificent. Funny—in true weblog style, I wanted to link the title in the previous paragraph to the movie's site. But, being of 1999...
22 August 2002
A stupid, stupid thing to do is to try to beat a yellow while on a bike with no lights. It had only just turned yellow on my way out of the Terman Library/Park complex after ultimate last night, I...
09 August 2002
All time low: updating from work, quick-and-dirty, more later. Grumble: a surcharge for using my debit card at a gas station. Current food obsession: frozen green beans from Trader Joe's for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. In Meyer Library: the new...
05 August 2002
A really fantastic use for those years and years of piano lessons is being able to play music that is roiling and tortured, but legitimized enough by its "classical" label that nobody will tell you to shut up in the...
04 August 2002
Observation: I am the only one in the house with a bed that doesn't fit two people....
02 August 2002
I sort of had a cell phone in high school. My parents would make me take one of theirs whenever I went out; their motives were largely based on its usefulness as a homing device. I grew to mildly loathe...
30 July 2002
I have a new item for my gear wish list: a Leatherman. Really dull blades and a corkscrew bent to an uncomfortable degree were annoying but tolerable drawbacks to my very old Swiss Army knife; last Friday night, however, I...
30 July 2002
Yesterday evening, I mentioned going to University Avenue to drop off some film, but Serra suggested that I hold on to it and bring it to Wal-mart to take advantage of their $4 developing. She'd been headed there, anyway, on...
25 July 2002
I read quickly, too quickly for my own good. In the fourth grade I raced through reading passages and accumulated smiley-faced stickers on the inside of my manila folder as if they were status symbols, and now I take a...
13 July 2002
Happiness is me leaning over the kitchen sink, sucking the last juicy bits off of the two mangos (from the entire box that Serra scored at this morning's farmer's market for $3) that I froze for future smoothing making and...
13 July 2002
Addendum: this smoothie has an interesting consistency, more like pudding than smoothie. All that's in it is two mangoes, three small sweet bananas (another of Serra's produce purchases), and about a half-cup of 2% milk. Still tastes absolutely great, though....
12 July 2002
I've just had the strangest, randomest, and wonderfulest 12 or so hours. Last night, for once, I did not get sucked into the bookstore or the library after work, and instead came straight home. The Thursday night plan, for which...
11 July 2002
Haven't had very coherent thoughts lately, so maybe I'll just start listing the projects I've assigned for myself: Do something about Dire Wolf's yard. It's gonna be an interesting challenge because whatever we (one of my housemates, Serra, is in...
08 July 2002
I noticed that four out of my last five updates where whines in some manifestation or other. So sorry, dear reader, that I haven't been able to write about anything remotely nicer. My existence has basically boiled down to working,...
04 July 2002
Small victory: four of us were standing outside the kitchen this midmorning, in the sunny area by the back door, when the answering machine suddenly picked up. It's been doing that for the past couple of days—and no one seems...
03 July 2002
Roger complains that the first sentence of this morning's blabber was grammatically torturous. And so it was. Here's a revision: There is a machine. The machine is loud. The machine is across the street. It comes on early in the...
02 July 2002
Something that living on the second floor of a modernly (okay, that might not be a word) soundproof house on a little bit of a hill set sixty feet back from the street in a ten-ish-year-old neighborhood is that construction,...
28 June 2002
Tortillas are a whole lot nicer when they're heated to the point of being crispily browned, but this causes a problem in eating it 'cause its contents reach a temperature far beyond comfortable. Letting the thing cool isn't an easy...
24 June 2002
I got out of work today for the first time ever around 5:45 (my boss was nice and at a loss for things for me to do, so he told me to go home fifteen minutes early =), and made...
23 June 2002
Yay! Mission [quasi] accomplished! Ladies and germs, I now have an internet connection from the house! The mitigating factor, though, is that I'm outside. Yup. Sitting right on the ledge above the cellar steps, which actually is a pretty nice...
23 June 2002
So. I'm all unpacked. Shortly after 10 last night I walked in to find that everybody had already so kindly shifted my junk from the living room to mine. Two of my housemates were in and seemed really nice, but...
22 June 2002
Deep thought: Sometimes I wish I could leave people IMs while they're offline and have them reach their intended recipients as soon as they signed online, kind of like *66. Then I realized that that would be email. So then...
22 June 2002
While I was cleaning up my room yesterday, it suddenly struck me that I don't know where I really live. Meenal said a couple of days ago, "It's like you live in California and you come back here for visits."...
17 June 2002
When I got to Newark International Airport, it was warmish and drizzly. I'd forgotten how much I missed having tomaneuver around puddles. The drizzle perhaps made everything seem more verdant than ever. Even the weeds are green around here. Of...
13 June 2002
I'm supposed to be on a yearbook marathon, but the packing thing has been much too tempting. All the cool kids are doing it. Also, I'm irritable because I can't remember my fonts and my Photoshop keyboard shortcuts. Now, to...
07 June 2002
I'm so excited by what I'm eating right now. There was about a fifth of a jar of peanut butter left over from our last SOOP trip that had been sitting in my room since we got back from it,...
29 May 2002
I'm not sure whether this is a large-state phenomenon or merely one characteristic of different people I've met here, but it seems like Californians are a lot less wary of driving long distances. A long weekend excursion to, say, Joshua...
27 May 2002
The Greeks were scientists while the Romans were engineers. Greek society lasted longer. Today, we are a society of engineers, of application rather than science for science's sake. Where does that leave us?...
06 May 2002
Yeah! We beat the Tarts in both games, 11-8 and 11-9, and the last point was secured by a pass off an unbelievable face/body catch/save (I don't know what else to term it) by Kathy. Thus ends our season. Good...
04 May 2002
Last night was the first time I'd heard of the term "1.5th generation immigrant," and it seems to fit my situation perfectly. If I were in a mopey, pensive mood, I'd talk about it. But thinking's bad for you, so,...
26 April 2002
Weird day. I had a few hours of classes and rehearsal, took care of errands, and then had dinner in the courtyard. Food, without exception, tastes better outdoors—even if, as in this case, "outdoors" denotes the jumble of weeds and...
25 April 2002
All hell is breaking loose at the junction of the West Wing and its perpendicular: it's Karan's birthday and the by-now-traditional cake and shower are being administered. I was about to eagerly drop my backpack to aid in the drenching,...
17 March 2002
There's something I'd like to mull over outside my head, but I can't, so I won't. What spectacular logic on my part! Today was St. Patrick's Day; Tory ended up with a green velvet scarf-cum-turban on her head to avoid...
16 March 2002
Today's been wonderfully stagnant. I've really needed this. "This" consisting of waking up at 9am, and having spent about 80% of the time between then and now idling away the hours online. It's ironic, how much I've been looking forward...
08 March 2002
Lecture was good today. That's right, there was only one—just CS at 2:15 on Fridays. Now that the last assignment's been given, lectures are more overview-of-possible-future-branches than anything necessary for the final. Perversely, I'm much more interested in this stuff...
05 March 2002
I'm quite proud, probably inordinately so, of today post-meridian accomplishment. I'd planned to work on my program between my noon and 3pm classes, but mysteriously picked up a flat tire on the way back from ling seminar. After eating lunch,...
04 March 2002
People who can discuss their inner questions in written form make me a bit envious. Well, I think I respect them more than I envy them. I'm an avoidist, myself. To compound that hurdle, I never know who my audience...
04 March 2002
I woke up early, around 8:30, today. I've been getting rather satisfactory amounts of sleep at the expense of being on top of my work. While nothing major other than a CS program for Wednesday is due this week, the...
25 February 2002
In the vein of Floovie and Karla's profiles, some notes and improvements for next quarter. Because I am anticipating its sweet relaxation that much already. Work somewhere other than my room, without the ethernet cable plugged in. I'm sure you...
21 February 2002
My custom is to timestamp each update when I begin it; only if I remember when I'm done writing do I adjust the time to reflect the finishing time. That explains why the previous update is marked with Tuesday's date,...
10 January 2002
Wanna hear something funny? I've swallowed my right contact lens. Suzie came over last night and made fun of me for having Snood's icon on my desktop, then proceeded to play the game herself for a long, long period of...
03 January 2002
I should probably be yelling at myself because I haven't updated in so long. I've run out of words, I think, or am too caught up in the epic, nightly whirlwinds of hanging out to have much time to think....
27 November 2001
Ditto to the concerns about jeopardizing memories. Thus far, I've always had those fears in the wakes of wonderful experiences (SCA, Habitat) as I ponder how to perpetuate them without mindless replication (SCA, Habitat: rounds two). I think January 2001...
25 November 2001
I remember being jealous of a few people last year who seemed to lead "the golden life." Now, I must retract that. I probably made too many assumptions because they were stronger and didn't complain about their problems. I've been...
16 November 2001
Guess I'd make a rather shabby prophet. I actually wasted a full additional hour before rushing over to medieval women lecture. Fortunately, it was a guest lecture, which means decreased demand for student involvement. I really liked Nicholas Watson's emphasis...
05 November 2001
This afternoon, as I was organizing my desktop and drawers, I happened upon a box of loose binder clips. Being really bored, I built a sculpture out of them: three large clips are attached to each other so that the...
13 October 2001
Large nonprofit organizations have been on my mind for the past couple of days. The larger they get, the greater percentage of their effort and resources must be directed toward the administration and management of those efforts and resources. Yes,...
08 October 2001
Things have been progessing at a pretty good clip lately, as you may have discerned from the five-day lapse since my last update. I think I've figured out how much work I have (not too much) and what it need...