* niqui ponders run.
<niqui> the next run in the queue is a ridiculous 20 minute uninterrupted run.
<niqui> like, this whole time it’s been intervals, warm up, jog walk jog walk jog, cool down
<niqui> it started out with 60 seconds of jogging, 90 seconds of walking, alternated for 20 minutes. the last one was 8 mins run, 5 mins walk, 8 mins run.
<niqui> but this one is just warm up, 20 minute jog, cool down.
<wasy> this all sounds pretty ridiculous
<niqui> then the next one goes back to intervals again
<niqui> but this one’s going to be haaaaaard. i mean. 20 minutes.
<niqui> and there’s this one ugly hill on the lake front path, where it goes under the street that leads to the adler planetarium
<niqui> it’s just a short hill on the shedd side, but on the harbor side, it’s a long incline way way back up to street level
<niqui> and i am always whipped by the time i run all the way around the shedd and then up that damn hill
<wasy> maybe you should just go on a nice, relaxing bike ride down the expressway instead. beats running!
<not_wasy> won’t have to do it twice
<niqui> the 8 minute run goes all that way and a little longer, maybe half the way from “solidarity dr,” which is a stupid street name, (roughly 1300 s) to waldron
<niqui> so at the end of that stupid hill i won’t even be halfway through my run, i’ll still have to head down probably past 18th st most of the way to mccormick before i turn around and head back
* niqui eyes the map. hm. if i do do that 20 minute run, i’ll basically be jogging two miles straight.
<niqui> that is pretty badass of me, considering i couldn’t even run all the way around the back of the shedd when i started out
<wasy> this is all crazy talk
<niqui> you’re just jealous of my newfound badassitude
<niqui> best of all, i still look like a schlump, so it’s *stealth* badassitude. i’m practically a ninja.
<wasy> will niqui be going on the reality tv show for people who want to be ninjas?
<niqui> no, going on tv is antithetical to my schlumpy stealth ninja philosophy.
<wasy> ninjaqui?
<niqui> NO ONE MUST KNOW ABOUT NINJAQUI.
* niqui dresses in all black, jogs silently back into the shadows to lurk ominously
It seems pretty typical for a job interview process to go like this:
Step 1: Employer receives CV. Employer drinks enough caffeine to decide that CV is not completely awful.
Step 2: First pass: HR tries to make sure candidate has a heartbeat and is not a zombie.
Step 3: Second stage: phone screen. Actual sysadmin calls to make sure candidate is not entirely full of shit.
Step 4: Candidate gets to go to actual face-to-face interview! Once, twice, or possibly many times, depending on how dedicated employer is to exhausting candidate’s interview wardrobe.
Step 5: PROFIT.
So you’ll note that very early on in this process, the use of a telephone is indicated. You’d think it wouldn’t really be much of a problem, because phones are, like, old, and stuff, and they just work, and stuff. And maybe that would be the case if I had a real phone. But I don’t. I am the one out of four Americans who has given up her landline and has only a mobile phone, because I’m only one person and how many phones do I need? (Especially because I kind of hate using the phone a little. I never was one of those people who sat around for hours and just chatted.) I haven’t had a real phone as a matter of course for few years. I had one in my old apartment at Printer’s Square, because I had to have one for the door intercom buzzer to let people in, and I had one in my apartment in Wicker Park because I thought pizza delivery people would push back (prank caller!) if I gave an 847 number — which was clearly just me being old and paranoid, nobody cares about area codes anymore. But in my place now, I just have the mobile. And even though sometimes service is spotty in my apartment, it doesn’t really matter much to me because I do all my social outing arranging via text, basically, and about the only time I use phones is if I have to call customer service for something. And I have Skype for that.
Except now, you see, it’s the end of my delicious, delicious summer vacation and I have to go back to being a grown-up now, which means hunting for a job. (I loved you, summer vacation. You were so awesome. Let’s do it again sometime!) And what does Step 2 of interviewing involve? THE PHONE! continue reading…
This was easily my favorite essay for my writing class this quarter, chiefly because I got to stick my nose in to two great loves: architecture, and trains. It’s about Chicago Union Station, and that means it’s all about COOL STUFF. Well, except the food court. Food court people are scary, man.
Here’s another of my essays for class. This one, I kind of dug a little bit. It’s a short story, set in a bar, with a couple of guys talking. I slam the Cubs once, but, hey, it was in the well-intended service of historical accuracy, baby!
I don’t think I’m very good at writing short stories — for starters, this is 3,462 words, which is roughly 2000 more than the assignment called for. So I missed on the “short” part, but it is technically still a story. Though I’m not convinced it’s much of one. But that’s okay, I’m not very practiced at writing fiction. As a matter of fact, I think the last time I wrote any fiction was one time like eight years ago I was goofing off and a friend was refusing to tell me why he dropped out of college, so I started writing this epic tale of battles on the quads with vicious squirrels terrorizing undergrads, and fires and explosions and, you know, all those good things that pretty much never actually happen in real life at the University of Chicago, except for the squirrels. I kind of wish I still had a copy of that one, actually, I remember it fairly fondly. Stupid jerkface transient medium of e-mail. SQUIRRELS ARE FUNNY! GIVE ME MY STORY BACK, MAGIC INTARWEBS!
…Ahem. Anyways. Without Further Ado, I present: “The Strange Case of the Goat and the Paperboy.”
continue reading…
This is the essay I wrote for my writing course this quarter. You know, the essay I hated with the firey intensity of a hundred thousand burning suns? …which is pretty silly to say, since it’s about a sunrise. Ha, I made a funny!
1157 words. 1158 self-doubts. Roughly.
So this quarter of school has been sort of a let down. By “let down,” I mean “trainwreck,” and by “sort of,” I mean “of epic proportions.” Next week is the last week of the quarter, and I’m really looking forward to it, because it’ll mean the end of me wanting to crawl under my bed and die rather than show up to class. continue reading…
In February 2004, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom told the city-county clerk to start issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples. I was using LiveJournal at the time, and someone on my friends list there pointed out a place where you could order up flowers to be sent to a couple waiting in line to be married. Because I’m a big sappy sap who likes sappy gestures of sappiness, I sent flowers.
In April, I got a thank you: the florists who actually handled the flowers that I ordered sent me a postcard with a thank you on it, signed by the shop staff.
I’ve had that postcard on my fridge, through all my apartments to the present, since then. It’s sort of been a little reminder that sometimes, happy things happen.
So, this past Wednesday, six years and a few months after the 2004 shindig and its subsequent reversal and annulment of all marriages thus performed, and a few years past when the state of California started allowing gay marriage after a judicial decision that was later hamstrung by an amendment to the state Constitution, the US District Court for Northern California issued a ruling on Perry v. Schwarzenegger. That case was a challenge to the constitutional amendment, popularly known as “Prop 8,” which restricted marriage to only between a man and a woman, which passed in the 2008 election.
Ordinarily I could care less about California state politics, on account of I don’t live there and never intend to do so, and also because California is probably going to fall into the ocean any day now under the weight of all its wacky hijinks, but of course gay marriage is one of my personal political issues that I care deeply about, and this ruling has ramifications for the entire nation. As for why I find marriage equality to be necessary, not just “civil unions,” see Project 1138: 1,138 benefits and protections afforded to “married” citizens by the government of the United States, as reported by the General Accounting Office (GAO). So I paid attention, and naturally I was dead chuffed that it was decided in favor of my side of the argument, which is that insofar as the government recognizes marriages, it is required under the law to be equally available to people whether they wish to marry a person of the opposite or the same gender.
(I’ll acknowledge the libertarian contracts-for-everything-wheeee! viewpoint here by noting that the government has the option of simply de-coupling all its marriage-conferred privileges and responsibilities from the category of marriage; i.e., stop recognizing “marriages” and treat people as individuals and treat contract-bound entities as entities regardless of the name slapped on the contract. I don’t really have a horse in that race, but I’ll note that I prefer recognition of marriage because it’s a convenient shorthand that everyone recognizes, no one is seriously going to start introducing themselves with “Hi, I’m Sally, and this is my governmentally-recognized legal partner, Joe,” and a $25 marriage license doesn’t put an undue financial burden on individuals to obtain the contract rights that hiring a private lawyer to draw up documents does. But anyways.)
I’m not a lawyer, or a law student, or a constitutional expert, or even an unpaid intern for any of the preceding. I’m just an armchair hobbyist who reads lots of things for fun. But here’s my reasoning as to why I’m pleased with Perry v. Schwarzenegger in three short bullet points:
- Amendment XIV to the Constitution of the United States reads, in part, “No state shall make or enforce any law which shall … deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
- The Prop 8 amendment to California’s constitution makes a distinction between two classes of citizen, on the basis of an immutable and irrelevant personal characteristic, and denies privileges based on this distinction.
- This amendment loses the slapfight between state and federal constitutions, and it can therefore fuck right off.
I do find the examination sort of entertaining. Rather than applying strict scrutiny, henceforth referred to as “the hard one,” the judge found that prop 8 fails even a rational basis examination, “the easy one,” where you have to find that there’s a rational reason behind the law. It’s like, I don’t have to prove that you can’t run a marathon, because you can’t even tie your running shoes without falling over. Walker said, “As presently explained in detail, the Equal Protection Clause renders Proposition 8 unconstitutional under any standard of review. Accordingly, the court need not address the question whether laws classifying on the basis of sexual orientation should be subject to a heightened standard of review.” I will use my vast and encompassing command of legalese to translate for you: “Dudes, I didn’t even have to try hard to find the fault with your argument, it was right there in big blinking letters. Great big pink blinking homo letters with glitter on, as a matter of fact. Try harder next time. Love, Judge Walker.”
I sent some strangers flowers to celebrate their wedding in 2004, and here’s hoping that soon, they finally get to really enjoy them, with love from Chicago.
- teeheehee. My grandma confesses to switching to watching Sox games when the Cubs get "disgusting." She's a sensible lady! #
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- If you love me, help me stuff the ballot box for Uff-Da and Coffee Stout. :) <3 http://is.gd/dYQDq #
- Haha. Uptown residents throwing a party tonight to celebrate Schiller retiring from aldermanic incompetence. Nice. #
- The only time I've actually been hit by a car was by a taxi reversing down a one-way street: didn't see that one coming, either. Literally. #
- It's funny because, with the amt of jaywalking I do, I don't expect impending doom by auto to loom when I'm in the crosswalk w/the light. #
- Almost got pasted by a completely oblivious moron behind the wheel of a PT Luser as she blew the red light at 8th St while I crossed State. #
- The trouble with sorting through books and culling things to get rid of is, then you have boxes of books to cart out to the donation center. #
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- Ok! I am off to the Sox game. Think I'll take Multnomah with — electric blue mohair, sitting in full sun, what could go wrong? #
- How much do I love that the Hyperbole and a Half strip ("Clean ALL the things?") keeps getting referenced by folks on my twitter feed? <3 #
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- I mean, surely that has as much chance as my Cook County President platform, which is simply, "I Am Not Todd Stroger Jr." #
- I wonder if I could get elected mayor on a "I promise to do everything I can to find a way to weasel out of the parking meter sale" ticket. #
- So, yeah, this week can basically just DIAF. #
- And in other news, I helped a newbie classmate from school set up his DNS. Even slackers like me do work on sysadmin day! #
- Finished my 3-ply Wensleydale. Turned out more a fingering weight than laceweight, but I think it still turned out all right. #
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- Grump. #
- I have the music from the mall car chase in the Blues Brothers stuck in my head. #
- Also, a real "convenience" charge would pay for me to have a chance to kneecap a ticketmaster executive. I'd find that very convenient. #
- Ticket price: $9.50. Ticketmaster facility charge: $2.50. Ticketmaster convenience charge: $4.35. Taxes: $0.22. Only 75% markup – bargain! #
- Why is my new favorite sports bra only in stock in colors guaranteed to show under light-colored T-shirts? I call boobie conspiracy. #
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- This creepy dog-faced singing man is creepy, and creeps me out with his creepiness. http://is.gd/dPhvP #
- http://learnyourdamnhomophones.com/ Warning: contains lots of extremely embittered swearing. Thus, likely written by a HS English teacher. #
- Called to volunteer for K'zoo burst oil pipeline cleanup. I am on a list! http://is.gd/dOKsx #
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- Totally yummy veg dinner tonight, yet am still not convinced about swiss chard. I like easier vegetables, like baby carrots. #
- Hm. Hungry. Too hot to cook, but already had hummos & eggplant dip on pita for lunch. Need more cold food options. #
- Not to give you the impression that I am *not* a fabulously good driver, of course, because I am. Mad skill *and* elegance behind the wheel! #
- Sweet. I have a 5-year good driver discount with my car insurance. See, it pays to have a car that you never drive anywhere! #
- Drawing a total blank of what a "music-friendly" description of a running skirt means. No pocket or ipod whatever, just "music-friendly." #
- It's warm out there. It gets downright hot if you go for a half hour run on the lakefront. *pant* *pant* *drip sweat* *pant* #
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- Many bunnies in the park in the early morning. Hooray for bunnies! #
- Got up at 4:30, rode my bike to the lakefront to watch the sunrise this morning. #
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- It's been a long time since I've walked out of a movie and wanted to walk right back in and watch it again. #
- Inception. ZOMG. #
- I need to fake tan the hell out of my upper arms; the trucker tan stops being funny at cap sleeves. http://tweetphoto.com/34928567 #
- Waiting for @aseretsi to get to my place! I painted my toenails metallic purple; feel badass. #
- Super Breakout for tweakers: http://wonderfl.net/c/tNGi/fullscreen #
- In fact, that puzzle took so long to solve I can't even remember what quest I was on that started me down that path. #
- Man, the Dwarvish War Uniform adventure on KoL sure takes a lot of effort… and math. #
- Insert clever lede about the Blue Line and water here. Duck tours on the Ike? http://is.gd/dH6Da #
- Well, in fairness, the complex *is* called *River* City. http://is.gd/dGNbk #
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