The Old Curiosity Shop

Taking Over the World

2009-07-11T05:27:20Z

The writer’s block is a frozen mass of um, something that’s solid and really hard to um break down. Yeah. Words. Diamond. Yes. I have a solid diamond writer’s block thing. Shouldn’t I be able to sell it on e-bay?

I have lost the art of conversation.

Thankfully my friends haven’t.

Me: I’m bored.
Azzy: I was bored, so now I'm plotting to take over the world.
It looks like it will take a while.
But if I can find 3 other people with about the same abilities as me who are down with the plan, we can complete phase 1 five years after graduating.
Me: Can I be one of those people?
Azzy: Do you feel like learning how to operate a data center?
And are you roughly guaranteed to have a way to generate 80k/yr in spending capital after graduation?
Those are the current requirements for things to move efficiently.
Me: …are you rejecting me?
Azzy: Kind of?
Quite frankly, you'd be very very useful at around stage 3 or 4
But stage 1 or 2, the endeavor has to be run very tightly, and is based on a bunch of tech you don't know.
Stage 3/4, we need people who can talk to the public, so there you'd be useful.
But stage 1 is just capital generation and research.
(Essentially we [CENSORED])
At around stage 3 things get very complicated, so, almost not even worth talking about it yet.
Me: But that’s where I’m involved. I want to know!
Azzy: Fine. Stage 3 is where we need to get the US gov't to grant us a very small legally independent country.
We basically want to do this based on developing some weapons for which testing them on US soil would be very bad, then do some lobbying saying essentially (but in better words): "We can give you bigger guns, but we need to have an extralegal zone to do it, because law prohibits us."If we ever get to stage 3, I promise I'll explain 4, but if any of this ever comes to pass, I'd rather not have stage 4 written down in chat logs forever, just in case.
Me: I have issues with that!
Azzy: Don't worry. Realistically, I have a good chance of getting 1 and 2 to happen, but not 3.

Censored= Azzy gave me the full details of his plans but asked me not to post these details on my blog.

I think this is the difference between genius and ordinary schmuck. Azzy gets bored and takes over the world. I get bored and I watch j-dramas.

behindpyramids @ 2009-07-02T21:31:00

2009-07-03T02:31:43Z

I will not be defeated by writer's block.

German Correspondence Course

2009-06-01T18:03:46Z

The most successful piece I ever submitted for fiction class was a mock facebook wall I wrote. Naturally some clever fiend just had to say, “Well, I don’t understand the point. Could you just turn in a real facebook wall instead of writing your own? What’s the difference?”

Honestly, the difference is that the real wall conversations are much better. My friends Erica and Alex are doing a German correspondence course via facebook, and every morning I stalk them diligently and spend about fifteen minutes laughing my ass off.

Um, I should probably ask their permission to post this, but that’s extremely awkward so I’m going to be a plagiarist and just post it. (I am going to burn in writer hell, oh my God, but that’s okay, this is so funny I’ll be redeemed for sharing it.)

German Correspondence Course

Alex: Teach me!

Erica: Alright, here's your first handy phrase: "Ich bin ein Berliner." It helps if you look and sound like President Kennedy when you say it.

Alex: My hair waved stiffly, and patriotically, in the wind. My stolen store mannequin was fitted with a blonde Marilyn Monroe wig. My face was dabbed with makeup, to weather it into the face of a veteran boat skipper and Senator. And then I spoke the words of my proud chariot-wielding, sword-riding ancestors:
"Ich bin ein Berliner!"
Thank you, Erica.

Erica: Ok, next phrase is "Wo ist das Hurenhaus?" This means "Where is the bathroom?" An extremely useful phrase when in a foreign country.

Alex: This better not mean something like "whorehouse"...

Alex: In exchange for the wonderful German lessons you have been giving me, I would like to teach you some of the Spanish I am learning.
Today's lesson: "El."
It means, "The."
Good word to know.

Erica: Thank you. I will use this new knowledge to the best of my ability. I realize that I didn't give you a phrase today. To make up for it, here's something a bit longer.

"Du liebes Kind, komm geh’ mit mir!
Gar schöne Spiele, spiel ich mit dir,
Manch bunte Blumen sind an dem Strand,
Meine Mutter hat manch gülden Gewand."

You should approach small children on the street and say this to them.

Alex: Thank you. I tried what you said, but the children could smell me coming and ran before I could shout it to them.
Here's another word in Spanish: "La."
It means, "The." Just like "El." Except they aren't interchangeable. In Spain, if you use "la" when you should have used "el", they'll chop your hands right off. Sometimes they won't stop there. In Mexico, they do worse.
The only way to determine which article to use is to memorize every noun in the language. Every. Single. One.
For tomorrow's lesson, I'm going to have to ask you to purchase a Spanish dictionary.

Erica: You've reminded me, counting is also useful. "Vier" (pronounced "fear") is the number four. I don't want to overwhelm you with too many numbers at once, so we can do the next one tomorrow.

Alex: Vier. Wo ist das hurenhaus?
Having now mastered conversational German, I would like to tackle the written language. Are there any good books you would recommend?

Erica: I'd definitely go for this one.

Me: <3

Erica: Care to join? I'm sure you'd easily be able to catch up to the rest of the students.

Me: How about stand up comedy class instead?

Erica: I can't teach something I have no experience with myself... that would be wrong.

Me: Professors do it all the time.

Erica: Fine, fine.

...Ok, so step one is to stand up in front of a bunch of people. Practice that for homework, and we'll go over step two tomorrow.

I’m off to find a bunch of people to stand up in front of.

Oh yeah. I have deep thoughts on graduation and moving to DC to start my first job, and I'm apparently leaving for China to be a tourist with my mom but my brain has turned into a porous waffle and I can't remember any of them.

Temporary Security

2008-05-10T05:46:57Z

Some days I worry about privacy. The interiority of my life—more than most of my friends, more than most of my relatives, perhaps more than I know about me— is online. There is a blithe blindness in writing publicly. I am not considering the friends of the friends who potentially have access to this, the person who found this on a computer’s browsing history I forgot to delete, or the people who will track me down years from now.

Yet, when I stop to censor myself, to narrow the broad range of topics, to eliminate this or that person from today’s rant because my words may get back to them, it feels as if fetters are locking themselves over my wrist. I don’t want to be prudent; I want to write as if this were a cheap diary with a lock that I hid in my underwear drawer. It is not satisfying otherwise.

Instead I tell myself that there are so many people online, so many things to do, and so little time. I don’t imagine anyone could be particularly interested in stalking me.

So wrote the girl who posted her address online, the suicidal boy who transferred sophomore year, or the high school freshman who described her fantasies about her crush in explicit detail. No one seemed to care in real life, and it seemed impossible that anyone would bother to read them online, so they described their lives in morbid detail.

I read their blogs, waded through pages of bad writing and spelling mistakes written by people I barely knew, because I found it fascinating to watch their masks crumble to pieces on their faces.

Columnists like Anna Quindlen have written articles mourning the disappearance of privacy for the internet generation. I’m not sure how I feel. In high school I shared my blog with school mates. Most of the people I knew well did not read it. Somehow though, I got to know a small circle of people whom I never would have imagined befriending: upperclassmen I was too shy to talk to, underclassmen I had no classes with, people I liked but somehow never saw. I’m still in touch with several of them now. I love hearing from them, I read their updates, and I think about them from time to time. I hope they are doing well.

Sharing blogs with my college friends has allowed us to describe the details of our lives, capture the intensity of our emotions in the moment, or just rant about or day, at our own convenience. The key to relationships is time: time to sit down and talk over lunch, time to check in with each other, and that doesn’t happen often. Being able to read what’s going on in each other’s lives prevents us from falling out of touch when we don’t see each other.

Yet, I am worried about the day I slip up- perhaps I already have- and an employer reads something bad and fires me, or a friend of a friend of a friend that I wrote about somehow gets this address and reads something cruel I wrote about them, years and years ago.

What I really worry about though, is vulnerability. In my last blog a couple people left vitriolic anonymous notes that stung for months afterwards. I worry what I post is too honest, too full of emotion, and I have just sauntered naked across the screen for everyone and their pet elephant. Then one day, when I am comfortably ensconced in my post as mayor of New York, all of this will come out and my career will crash. Or that you, right now, are judging me. Are you the boy who sits next to me in class? Do you laugh when I write about despair because I know nothing about despair?

We are taught not to cry in public when we are small. It is loud, it embarrasses our parents, and it disturbs other people. Rather, we must put our best foot forward, learn to shake hands with a firm grip, and perfect our smile for the camera because the moment we are born we are entered into a grand competition for resources in the world: food, shelter, and the means to obtain more of each.

We are told to practice impression management because it will help us during interviews. We learn to present our best self, gloss over our mistakes and failures, and focus on moments when we have outshone everyone else around us. The result is a toxic cycle where everyone constantly feels outshone and constantly tries to outshine everyone else. People around me still talk about their SAT scores.
“Ooh man, I studied so hard and it paid off. I got a 750 on math.”
“Really? I took it cold and got a perfect score on math.”
“Oh, well, you know I didn’t study that much. Besides, they gave me a scholarship. Pretty awesome.”
“Sadly, I’m not eligible for a scholarship. My family makes too much money.”

Similarly, it becomes natural to snap something sarcastic at someone who hurts our feelings instead of saying: “You hurt my feelings,” because feelings make us vulnerable.

No wonder blogs are so compelling. It’s a relief to know how vulnerable everyone is behind the impervious iron smiles that go up every day. It’s a relief to know that other people are just like you: more vulnerable, fragile and beautiful than you could possibly imagine.

It’s also a relief because now you have blackmail material on them.

I am going friends only this summer for my internship.* Please leave a note if you've been lurking, and you'd like me to friend you.

*Mostly because I have a bad bad feeling that during my last internship my boss could have/maybe/probably did read this.

"They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security."
-Benjamin Franklin