the everyday adventures of sabrina

via andrewsullivan (yaaay, am so glad he’s back from vacation, i enjoy reading his blog so much), a bit of a heartwarming example of anti-gay hate at the RNC … okay, maybe a bit more than an bit; i hope you’ll excuse me:

This escalating situation reminds me of a statement of a World War II journalist by the name of Dorothy Thompson who wrote for the Saturday Evening Post in Europe during the pre-World War II years when Hitler was building up his armies and starting to take ground. In an address she delivered in Toronto in 1941 she said this: Before this epic is over, every living human being will have chosen. Every living human being will have lined up with Hitler or against him. Every living human being either will have opposed this onslaught or supported it, for if he tries to make no choice that in itself will be a choice. If he takes no side, he is on Hitler’s side. If he does not act, that is an act—for Hitler.

May I take the liberty of reading this statement again and changing just a few words, applying it to what I fear we face today? Before this era is over, every living human being will have chosen. Every living human being will have lined up in support of the family or against it. Every living human being will have either opposed the onslaught against the family or supported it, for if he tries to make no choice that in itself will be a choice. If we do not act in behalf of the family, that is itself an act of opposition to the family.

…

I found myself reading the latest edition of one of the nation’s most popular news magazines. One of the major articles was about gay “marriage.” There were several statements that stood out for me in a dramatic and terrifying way, but one of the most sobering features of the entire article was a picture of two handsome, young men, getting “married.” What distressed me most was the fact that they were both holding an infant “daughter” – twin girls they had adopted. I was, frankly, heartsick. What kind of chance do those girls have being raised in that kind of setting? What will their understanding of men and women, marriage and families be? Is there any chance that, as adults, they could expect to marry and enjoy a healthy relationship with a man, including rearing children together? In addition, there were alarming concepts about “family” presented throughout the article – concepts that even questioned the validity of heterosexual families.

this sort of attitude both angers and utterly baffles me. there are some things that i go beyond not agreeing with, to just not understanding. it is beyond my comprehension to think why someone would consider someone else less than a human being with all the rights and privileges bestowed upon themselves for any reason that has anything to do with their physical or philosophical self (save obviously antisocial or criminal behavior, such as being a genocidal fuckhead). i can’t even argue the point effectively, because i just can’t understand the rationale behind the other point of view. it is, quite literally, two plus two equals five to me.

I am not subhuman. I inherently possess every right to live my life and pursue my happiness and every single civil right given any citizen under the United States Constitution, and I have every reason under the sun to exercise them as I so choose. I categorically reject the idea that I am necessarily differently favored in the eyes of the law due to sexual orientation equally as I categorically reject the idea that I am necessarily differently favored in the eyes of the law due to the color of my skin. I am a human and I demand to be publicly recognized as such.

there is, however, at least one portion of the speech with which i can agree:

It actually bolsters our faith to know that were not the only ones who believe a certain way or are concerned about certain kinds of issues.

yes, it does. and i have faith that, much like how many of the current school-age generation can’t understand the idea of a Jim Crow car (if indeed they know what one was), when today’s children grow up, their children will not understand why people of this age would think that just because of one’s sexuality, they would not be capable of having loving, stable familial relationships including the bearing or raising of children in those families. the fight may still be going on, but eventually such bigoted mindsets will succumb to entropy, and the world will be one step closer to the kind place i wish it was today.

andrew sullivan is back from vacation.

yaaaaay!

i am a rock star, in one little boy’s head.

recently, i took a vacation, and as part of it (the fun bit), i stayed for five days with my friend kim and her family. kim and her husband kevin have two sons: kelson, the elder, who is around 11, and kyle, who is around 8. the kids’ ages are plus-or-minus two years, i’m really an awful guesser of ages. at any rate, kelson likes roller coasters and kyle is still fond of carousels, so that’s the age differential there.

so this time i was down there strictly for vacation, with no grown-up activities like a soapmaker’s gathering to distract me, and the boys were very excited about this. as soon as i showed up, there were things to show me and things to do. and, since they’re a family of indians fans, and i happened to be there during the white sox-indians series, there were ball games to be watched and taunts to be exchanged over that.

both boys are big gamers. kelson plays a lot of ps/2, and wanted to show me all the cool tricks in the new spiderman game. he tried to get me to play, but i’m not a big console gamer, and the only ps/2 game they had that i was familiar at all with was Gran Turissimo 3 — not to be confused with the only other ps/2 game i’m familiar with, which they did not have, Grand Theft Auto 3. i felt moderately bad, as it turns out that i’m so out of practice with ps/2, and my wrists so abominably picky, that i can’t play GT3 anymore longer than ten minutes or so without my hands absolutely killing me. this did not stop kelson from spending hours playing GT3 for me, unlocking various cars and games and winning money to mod the cars, so that i could play with all the cool gadgets.

meanwhile, kyle wanted to show me The Sims.

in The Sims, he had created a little world, with a little blonde SimSabrina, who goes about her life every day wearing purple pants and a halter top. SimSabrina is lives in a large mansion with a butler and a maid. she has a large estate with fanciful outbuildings, and the house is accessorized with things that only a young boy would pick out, such as a crystal death’s head skull and a buried treasure chest. SimSabrina has so much cash that the game’s money display simply reads all nines, and it does not go down when she buys things such as forty dollar cat treats.

i was ridiculously pleased to observe that, all material wealth aside, SimSabrina still fixes her own plate and carries it to the table at meal times, and then loads the dishwasher before going to bed.

when i asked what SimSabrina does for a job, kyle stared at me like i was crazy, and said that she was a rich rock star and didn’t have to work.

“what does she do all day?” i asked, genuinely baffled.

“she takes vacations.” and he proceeded to demonstrate, taking little SimSabrina on a camping trip, hailing a taxi in her purple pants and halter top and heading to the campgrounds where, so far as i could tell, SimSabrina interacted with no one.

her social meter on the game consistently read low, in need of friends. poor SimSabrina was so alone that the high point in her life was when we went to the pet store and bought her a black-and-white cat, and named it George. this was at my urging, because while i am able to tolerate disparities from reality such as rock stardom and idle wealth, the idea of not having a cat is foreign, and wrong.

then SimSabrina took another vacation.

how pleased am i to get a comment, after emailing someone for new hair stylist advice — someone that i personally think is always very cute and trendily well-groomed, not to mention self-possessed and confident — that “You have more style than I do”?

very, very pleased indeed. i don’t agree (faded t-shirts and jeans are comfy and well-suited for crawling around datacenters, but they do not get featured in vogue very often), but i am delighted nonetheless. we love patty, we love patty, we love patty!

which segues gleefully but neatly into today’s dilemma, which is: if i am going to spend some money, do i go to a good salon — because i want something new and interesting done with my hair, and maybe a facial or something; i’m feeling frisky — or do i go out and go clothes shopping?

i was leaning towards shopping for a while, because clothes shopping is fun and i particularly enjoy my walking shopping trips up from my place to water tower and back, but otoh, badly in need of different-slash-better hair. and the hair situation (blonde grown out by about four inches because i promised mesaret i’d stop fucking with it; blue and red fading; length that uncomfortable stage between ‘needs a haircut’ and ‘is obviously growing it out because otherwise there’s just no other excuse’; condition okay but could use some assistance) has been bugging me for several weeks now. and also, if i’m successful at losing any weight, it seems stupid to buy stuff i’ll just end up donating to the brown elephant in six months.

Have I mentioned how very, very much I hate last-minute changes to incredibly difficult bureaucratic manoeuvres? On top of awkward everything else to do with this project thus far?

Changes, okay. Eleventh-hour extreme modifications result in NIQUI HACK KILL DEATH MAIM SMASH DESTROY.

forgot to weight myself before going downstairs to work out this morning … ordinarily would have done it before so that any water i drink doesn’t count, but i didn’t drink much water so i just weighed myself when i got back upstairs afterwards.

192.5.

i’m glad that today isn’t my official weigh-in day so that i don’t have to believe it. my scale’s a little wonky, so i usually weigh myself three times and see if it can agree with itself twice out of those three times. today it thought 192.5 all three times.

even if it is for real, i’m sure it’s just water-related, and not actual weight. and even though i’m busily talking myself down, i know it’s going to be disappointing to have the scale reflect more realistic numbers in the future.

still. that’s the lowest that scale has read since october, when i hit 194.5 (and was pretty joyful about it, until an offhand comment a friend made about us being the fat ladies really killed me… i was so upset about that, you have no idea — 194.5 was my new low in FOREVER (and it was a believable weigh-in, not like this one), and it was that evening that she made that remark. way to make a fuckton of work seem useless. oh well.)

slacked too much this morning, am now late. should go finish getting ready for work. nonetheless… hmm.

did manage to hold out against the maddening desire for snackysnacks last night. after the snackysnack craze passed, came the sugarlust. i’m not kidding, it was bad. i don’t normally crave candy or stuff like that (although i do occasionally hunt and kill some doritos or some cookies), but last night was bad. i ended up having a single piece of chocolate from the now-off-limits emergency stash in my freezer, and some pink grapefruit green tea. the tea actually helped, i think, it mellowed out the chocolate sweetness, and, you know i really like tea so it’s always kind of a treat to try a new kind and have it turn out to be yummy. but man, yesterday was bad. i don’t know what the hell was the matter with me, but it was freakish and strange.

i’m really sorry for flooding the friends pages of those people reading this via niquiblog on livejournal, with all the old postings. i was starting to convert the old entries and found a bug in it, so it wasn’t marking things with the proper date in my blosxom entries cache, and i swear i thought i disabled all the postings before i left the house this afternoon, but obviously i didn’t, because they all came back en masse.

bah. sorry!

maybe it was that crack yesterday about not sitting around eating entire bags of potato chips and staring at the walls, but my *god* do i want some sort of crunchy snack product. RIGHT NOW.

found (a variant on) this while googling for cook times for a beef roast.

Preheat oven to 500°F.
Pat beef roast down with garlic powder, thyme, basil, oregano, black pepper, and liberal amounts of nutmeg. Set roast in pan such that fat is on top, to baste meat while cooking. (Okay, I’ll grant you that it’s nice that, on Atkins, I don’t have to spaz about fat on meat…)

Bake for twenty minutes at 500°F, then reduce heat to 350°F and continue baking. Bake roast for thirty-five minutes per pound (including the initial twenty minutes).

Not bad. Not great, but okay. Would have been better had I cooked it more rare, but I haven’t made a roast in ages and I got the internal temp wrong. Alas.

the scale actually went up half a pound from yesterday, this morning. *shakes fist at it* yes, yes, i know you’re not supposed to weigh yourself daily, but you see, i’m a terrible creature of habit and if i don’t do it daily, i forget for weeks at a time. it’s because i want to weigh myself before i have any food or drink in the morning, and if i get up and have a glass of water before i remember, then i’m screwed. so. daily. yeah. but only weekly counts towards progress, so technically i’m not up anything, see. ;)

calculating my bmi: 36.6. this is dolefully told me as “clinically obese with high health risk.” yes, once more i find reason to disagree with blanket weight statements. is my weight putting extra work on my heart, lungs, etc.? yes, of course. am i an utter couch potato who can’t walk two blocks without gasping for air? uh, no. i’ll grant you i’ve been slacking for the past couple of months, haven’t ridden my bike to work in at least that long, but i am /not/ completely sedentary. my blood pressure is utterly normal. my doctor does not lecture me, presumably because he doesn’t find much reason to do so. i often walk places, which is a really nice thing about living downtown — if i want to go shopping, i can just walk to wherever i want to go. (well, unless i have to go to target. and even that will be resolved in october!) i don’t sit around eating entire bags of potato chips and staring at the wall. so why do you jerks continually insist that i must be?

i wish that weight-loss people would quit dictating with such an obnoxious air of superiority that fat == unhealthy, sedentary slob. some of us are just blessed with slow metabolisms, okay? now shut up already.

so here’s a mystery: how come there’s apparently no information on the web about the Chicago main U.S. Post Office?

i was talking with blair on irc about construction and happened to mention that my favorite ikea-in-chicago plan i’d heard bandied about only to be dropped was the idea of installing them in the old post office. to which blair responded with “old post office?”

baffled by this and unable to think that blair (who had just trumped my own knowledge of the road construction at roosevelt and clark, which is in the neighborhood where i live and which he lives far from) didn’t know about the old post office/new post office, i started googling. first i tried ‘chicago post office,’ then ‘chicago new post office,’ then all kinds of other things. eventually i was searching on specific years and things, and really, nothing more helpful turned up than a report from the GAO on why the post office construction project overran its budget badly (hint: it’s hard to build buildings over the top of active railroad lines. and you really ought to know how large of a building your project requires before you start.).

so now i’m on a mission to find some sort of information on it, just to prove that there must be some, somewhere.

honestly, it’s the post office! and it was a big mess! and the old one looks way cooler than the old one! these are all fine reasons for there to be lots of sites about it on the web. so where are they all hiding?

* niqui is *so* *glad* she has this copy of Cosmopolitan to impart groundbreaking fashion advice to her: “Excess caffeine, nicotine, and alcohol disturb your sleep and contribute to a sallow, washed-out appearance!”
HOORAY!!!
* twork channels mick jagger: well tha’s the ‘ole point, i’nnit?
also, according to cosmo, boxers are for high school students and briefs are for the … what was it, again? “skeevy.” but boxer-briefs are for real men.
* niqui is glad she has cosmo to tell her her opinions.
* twork does wonder why niqui is reading cosmo.
* twork was pretty sure niqui was already chock full of opinions.
* niqui is offended to learn that having hot pink in one’s hair is ’skanky,’ and thus by association niqui is.
three cheers for skank!
ooooh. there’s a survey in back. they invite my feedback!
bah! they do not give me free space to write in.
they want your feedback, not your opinions!
cosmo:/dev/opinion is read-only!
* niqui was sorely mistaken about how interesting she thought she might find cosmo. i thought it was at least supposed to be slightly mature. it’s actually really sophomoric. i guess i can maybe excuse letters to the editor referring to things as ‘the mark of skankdom,’ but i really think that a professional fashion journalist might be able to find better phrasing.
well, consider the subject. we don’t exactly expect pullitzer-level reporting on the sports page either.
also, someone give paris hilton a fucking cheeseburger.

a few months ago i was randomly buying stuff online and ran across a ridiculously discounted subscription to cosmopolitan. since at that time i was rediscovering the joys of dressing in other ways than my ubiquitous baggy geek t-shirt + jeans, i thought it might be useful to subscribe to a fairly well-circulated fashion magazine so i can keep up with the joneses (at least in my head). and, if nothing else, there’s always the quiz.

how wrong i was.

my first issue came just before i went to defcon, so i slipped it in my carry-on. fortunately, my outward flight went smoothly and i spent the time reading novels. unfortunately, my return flight was Hell, and while i was stuck on the plane, on the tarmac, for three hours, with electronic devices — such as my e-book reading Clié — forbidden, all i had was that issue of cosmo.

in about ten minutes i was ready to start hacking people to death with the little fly-away subscription cards that fell out of it, just to have something to do other than read the magazine.

it truly is the most awful rag. i thought that cosmo was well-read because it was … hmm. because it was classy? it’s not classy. it’s not sophisticated. and it wouldn’t know elegant if elegance served it a cocktail. the only thing that saves it from being absolutely tacky is the fact that it reads like it’s written by fourteen year old girls who just don’t know any better.

also, those hot-pink zebra print stilettos on page 107 are in no way hot.

for a very long time i’ve specifically avoided the atkins diet. i am really, really skeptical of atkins.

1. i’m not vegetarian (although i do like tofu and sometimes make things with tvp or use meat-replacement products for variety), i eat meat … but, goddamn, that’s a lot of meat. i mean, seriously.
2. i don’t see how it can possibly be healthy and sustainable to eliminate half of the food pyramid. i mean, sugar, white flour, okay, but … all of it? what did brown rice or sweet corn ever do to you?!
3. i really like fruit. like, i eat apples all the time. apples are my friends. without my friends, i’m lonely and sad!
4. i don’t believe that carbohydrates are inherently evil. and the low-carb craze drives me batshit. low-carb beer is just WRONG!

nonetheless, i’ve decided — many long years after first hearing about it, when my doctor recommended it to me in ‘98 — to give it a try.

why? well, that’s simple enough: nothing else works well either. so i have nothing to lose anymore … well, except the funding that will go toward the massive grocery bills that accompany eating this much meat and cheese. that’s one good thing you can definitely say about carbs: they’re cheap. no one ever sold steaks in a jewel 10¢ sale next to the ramen noodles.

so here’s the deal. i committed to doing atkins for a month to see what happens. if it doesn’t work, fine, i’ll go back to what i was doing before and be happy because i can have beer again. if it does work, fine, i’ll decide whether to continue or not at the end of september… maybe it’ll work fine but i’ll hate it, so i’ll stop; maybe it’ll turn out that secretly i’m channelling piratedan and eating plate after plate of animal protein is exactly what i always wanted to do. who knows.

sw: 218
cw: 199.5
gw: 150

cross your fingers and wish me the fortitude to eat this frigging much meat.

funny shit here.

i think i know why the a/c is broken.

it probably has something to do with all that ice and condensation on the side of the chiller, around the coolant intake pipe.

unfortunately i only discovered the ice and condensation after it was well into becoming water, and soaked through the cardboard box of laundry detergent i keep tucked away in the little space between the door and the chiller.

well, i asked the building to have maintenance stop by tomorrow to check it out. i guess that’s good timing. or something.

this morning started out like yesterday afternoon: surprisingly, much better.

see, i often find that once i’m resigned to a course of action, the tension — or, at least, a lot of it — surrounding that choice slides away. for example, i was really angry and irritable about mirapoint, until i decided that it was inevitable and i might as well just deal with it. now, i’m fairly laid-back about it … or as laid-back as i’m going to get considering it’s just problem after problem. in effect, mirapoint has slipped from being “this hateful thing being pushed down our throats” back to the “all computers and OSes are insecure, they are all buggy, and they all suck” category with all the rest of the crap i have to deal with all the time. it actually helped a lot to just give in.

so, when max related the straw that broke the camel’s back yesterday, in a fit of pique i made my “this place has one year” declaration (although, in fairness, that was something i’d been turning around in my head previously, so it wasn’t like i came up with it on the spot), and then i actually put it in words, thus committing myself to a plan of action, … well, after that i felt much better.

maybe it’s something like being externally removed from a bad situation. now that i know i don’t have to deal with things that irritate me, i’m free to not be irritated by them.

then i get in to work today, and things started out well enough, but then bob asked me to make a managerial decision (because both max and becky are out sick, so there were no more chiefs, and only two indians — and as bob says, “It wasn’t like there was a choice. blair would have laughed and then booted me out of the office.”). it was a kind of awkward call to be asked to make in any circumstance — “i know half your team is out sick and you’re all way behind, but these people are even more behind so can you help them out so that they’re only moderately fucked instead of totally?” — but this was, i knew, going to aggravate max when he heard about it.

sure enough:

* mutch expects to be the victim of a coup
mutch needs more drugs
true
As far as I’m concerned Becky is the stand-in mutch for today and tomorrow, (sorry)

i have told max and told him, a thousand times, that i have less than zero interest in his job. i won’t take an advancement opportunity at the expense of my friends. but he persists in making these remarks all … the … time. it makes me crazy. and it’s really upsetting because it makes it seem that max doesn’t think that i’m actually telling the truth. so not only am i a political climber, i’m a backstabbing one. marvellous.

what’s more, i don’t know why so many people think that management is so fucking fabulous everyone wants to do it. listen: i did it before; it sucked; now i just want to be a system administrator. because i like being a system administrator. being a system administrator does not suck. being a system administrator is often fun. being a system administrator > being a manager. okay? is it clear yet?

i feel caught up in the tension between max’s unjustifiably low opinion of his job performance and bob thinking that since i’m organized, i’m really keen. if only one of them was pressuring me, i could probably deal with it. but both sides at once is really wearing.

and i really don’t understand why no one feels that it’s okay to exploit me for my organizational skills without promoting me into management. hey! i’m an employee! i’m supposed to have skills that differ from other people’s, so that i am useful to the organization as something other than a warm body! thus, it’s okay to ask me to do things that no one else can or wants to do! if max doesn’t want to deal with sales people and i don’t mind, why the fuck should he deal with them? why does it seem that people, including max, think it’s a black mark against him somehow when i do things like deal with the puremessage people? i mean, if he’s delegating efficiently, that’s good management! he’s supposed to do that!

so. yes. cheerfully optimistic this morning. by mid-afternoon, just as cranky as ever.

plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. story of my life.