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Found a great (if depressing) article on how frequently health insurance companies cancel policies. In summary, the CEO of Assurant said they only cancel policies of "less than one-half of one percent of people we cover." Which sounds nice and rare and not at all evil... except the conditional probability of losing coverage is actually much, much higher. How much higher? If you file an expensive claim that costs the insurance company most or more than the money you've put into the system, there's about a 10% chance of having your policy canceled. If you're very unlucky and become extremely, desperately sick... you have a 50% chance of losing coverage.
To break down the numbers (taken from U.S. Department of Health & Human Services): more than 85% of the insured population pay in more (usually a lot more) than they take out. 10% pay in approximately what they get out, and only 1% of people get really fucking sick and end up costing the insurance company a lot of money. Those policies are exactly the ones that the insurance companies are most motivated to cancel. So if 1% of the population is really sick and insurance companies only cancel policies on really sick people, then 0.5% of the total population means half of the really sick people are going to lose their coverage.
In personal terms, this woman with health insurance was diagnosed with cancer and told "sooner or later the insurance companies would force you onto Medicaid – either by means of making you unemployable and broke, or by means of you being uninsured and going through any and all assets you have paying medical bills until you are broke and sick enough that you can’t work, and end up on Medicaid."
I don't have a solution, but things are clearly fucked up.
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My favorite sense is sight, but my best sense is smell. This usually doesn't work to my advantage, as it means I'm bothered by smells no one else even notices. I always end up taking out the garbage or cleaning the drains because it stinks to me and not Marc. One time, our cat Olly left a dead bird under our couch and for days I complained about a mysterious rotting odor. Marc kept saying I was imagining it. Eventually the smell become unbearable, and I prowled around the room, sniffing at different elevations, until on hands and knees I stuck my nose inches away from the dead sparrow.
It also becomes increasingly easier to smell particular scents after repeated exposure (as long as they're intermittent and not constant), which is unfortunate if the smell is unpleasant. For instance, I became hypersensitive to the smell of my flatmate when I lived in Tasmania. At first, his damp wool smell was mild. Over time it bothered me more and more, and toward the end of our shared living arrangement I could tell if he had recently been in a room by odor alone.
Although sight is my favorite sense, I don't have good vision. Marc and I were at the "Your Body" exhibit at the Pacific Science Center recently, where you're encouraged to test various physical attributes such as balance, dexterity, or endurance. We were standing in front of a eye chart, and I was delighted to see that I could read reasonably far down the chart. "I guess my eyes aren't as bad as I thought," I said.
"You're supposed to do it with one eye closed," Marc said. As I was trying that out, he added, "While standing at that podium. The one that's 18 feet away."
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Right now in World of Warcraft it's "Children's Week", the yearly event where players are encouraged to visit one of the capital city orphanages and take an AI orphan sight-seeing. They pester you for ice cream and say "Are we there yet?", and it's all pretty cute.
So I was in Thunder Bluff last night, getting Cairne's hoofprint for my orphan as a keepsake, and there was a guy there begging for gold. I ignored him, but he started following me.
Him: where did u get orfan
Me: the orphan store
Him: how u buy?
Me: candy
I kept going, and the beggar followed me.
Him: he won't talk to me
I realized the guy had been trying to click on my orphan and give him candy. (For those who don't play WoW, that's not possible. You can't interact with other player's pets or anything like that - and this guy was a level 37 hunter, so he should have known better.)
Me: are you trying to steal my orphan away?
Him: he won't take it
Me: i don't think you'd be a very good role model
Me: although you could teach him how to support himself by begging for gold
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Well I'm back at work after almost three weeks of quasi-vacation. I've been working desultorily from home on learning ActionScript/Flash, and went in to the office a few times when the buses weren't snowed in, but mostly I've been reading vast quantities of science fiction while drinking hot cocoa with my feet on the radiator. It was nice while it lasted, but I'm glad to be working again.
As I may have mentioned previously, the project that our team is working on is a greenhouse gas tracking-and-reporting web application. During the last 7 months, a contractor took care of the Flash graphs and charts embedded in the app which visualize progress toward carbon-reduction goals, business-as-usual estimates, and emissions from previous years. Then...he quit. It was slightly drama-riffic actually. He came in one day pissed about not being offered a full time job, shouted at my boss to fuck off, then left. It was kinda like the quitting scene in Half Baked.
Anyway, I inherited the contractor's codebase after he quit, since I was the only one in our group willing to learn Flash. I've been doing online tutorials for the last few weeks - the language itself isn't complicated and I wasn't very concerned about syntax issues - but today was the first time I really tackled the contractor's code. I spent the entire day immersed, digging through his ActionScript piecing together how one of the graphs works.
For those programmers on my flist, you already know how it is reading and fixing someone else's code, so I don't have to try to explain this particular challenge. For those who don't know anything about programming... coding is intensely creative and there are a myriad of possible solutions to a given problem. How you break down the specific problem into smaller problems is a matter of both skill and style. It's also amazingly personal; programmers have their own "voice" and I can almost always tell within a few lines which member of our team wrote a given section. Reading someone else's code is like wearing someone else's shoes: perfectly molded to another person's feet, the shoes feel awkward and rub you in weird places, and even though they do the job of keeping your feet dry they just don't feel right. Also, the more the other person's feet resemble yours, the less uncomfortable the shoes are. Similarly, when someone thinks like you, their code is far easier to read and digest.
Our dear departed contractor, sadly to say, does not think at all like me, so it'll be challenging to find the bugs I need to fix during the next few weeks.
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I've written before about my hatred for Christmas but things seem to be improving now that my family has accepted that I really truly don't want gifts. The only present Marc and I got was a donation in our name to the Arbor Day Foundation (a tree-planting organization).
My younger sister, who is midway through a year of teaching English in Korea, sent the family a care package full of Korean snack foods. Her years working as librarian and archivist means that she doesn't just jam a bunch of stuff in a shoebox, like I would; instead she numbered each item in the box and included a neatly printed key describing each type of food, her personal experience eating it, and how to open the packaging.
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Last week, an ex-coworker of mine gave me his first-gen iPhone after he bought a 3G one. I spent about 2 hours figuring out how to unlock it so that I could keep my T-mobile account, and jailbreak it so that I could run 3rd-party apps, but I never did find a reliable hack to get around iTunes. I just want to view my phone as a drive, why is that so wrong?
Taken with the phone camera on my couch:
Also, my ringtone is the rogue stealth sound (from WoW).
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| |
Obama |
McCain |
| If you make |
you'd save |
you'd save |
| less than $19,000 |
$567 |
$21 |
| $19,000-$37,600 |
$892 |
$118 |
| $37,600-$66,400 |
$1118 |
$325 |
| $66,400-$111,600 |
$1264 |
$994 |
| $111,600-$161,000 |
$2135 |
$2584 |
| $161,000-$227,000 |
$2796 |
$4437 |
| Top 5% of earners |
you'd pay an extra |
you'd save |
| $227,000-$603,400 |
$121 |
$8159 |
| $603,400-$2.87 million |
$93,709 |
$48,862 |
| more than $2.87 million |
$542,882 |
$290,708 |
*Source: TaxPolicyCenter.org
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| Dating Strengths | Dating Weaknesses |
|---|
1. Sense of Humor - 85.7%
2. Confidence - 77.8%
3. Appearance - 75%
4. Optimism - 71.4%
5. Financial Situation - 69.2%
| 1. Vanity - 66.7%
2. Arrogance - 62.5%
|
| Dating Strengths Explained |
|---|
Sense of Humor - Men are attracted to people with a good sense of humor. Be sure to put yours on display!
Confidence - You are sure of yourself and confident of your abilities. Displays of confidence go a long way when attracting a date.
Appearance - Despite what some will say, appearance matters in dating. You get high marks on appearance. Just make sure you balance it out with other qualities.
Optimism - People are drawn to your positive outlook. Your optimism attracts others to you.
Financial Situation - You've got your financial situation under control, which is a very desirable quality. Be careful to avoid men who are only interested in your money.
| | Dating Weaknesses Explained |
|---|
Vanity - Learn to put a lower priority on looks. Appearance is, of course, important, but vanity is undesireable. The only people you will attract are the superficial.
Arrogance - You are a bit full of yourself. You need to practice a little humility now and then, as arrogance can be a turn-off.
| | Take the Dating Diversions Latest Online Dating Quiz |
This test is slightly skewed toward suburban attainment values though - for the financial stability questions it asks whether or not I own my own car, and whether I live in a house or apartment. I can only imagine I lost points for being an urban non-car-owning-apartment-dweller. My sister would be gleeful to see my "dating weaknesses" support what she has been telling me for years.
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Grr I should know better than to read the forums at MSN. Especially the responses to such a potentially inflammatory question as "can men and women be friends?"
It's a mix of people saying, yes, yes they can, and men (pretty much only men) saying no, because women are useless for anything but sex. I would never date a man who think men and women can't be friends, because that puts him firmly in that second group of jerks who are unable to see women as people. How are we going to have an actual relationship if all you can see is our gender roles?
Also people who say, "Did you see When Harry Met Sally?" as though referencing a MOVIE proves anything, bah.
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We're releasing R1 of the carbon tracking website this week and we're all getting punchy from excess caffeine and all the long hours we've been putting in during crunch time. From an IM conversation with my coworker Missy:
missy: Palin = (female)Bush
missy: Like that? I casted him
missy: We can also make a wife array for polygamists
missy: Wife[ ] JoesWifes = { }
And during testing:
Missy: I blame Adam for finding the bug.
Beck: It's Schrodinger's bug, it doesn't exist until you observe it.
Aaron: Damn Adam and his quantum testing.
That's the same Aaron who was my boss back at Autoscan, by the way. He was hired a month ago. Good thing too; he had been working for a company that treated him like a code monkey. "The bright spark is about to be extinguished from my eyes," he told me over dinner. I passed his resume to our dev lead the next day.
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Over the last six months, I've moved twice. Almost directly after my last real entry, Marc and I moved from Tacoma to downtown Bellevue, where we lived in a dilapidated quasi-mansion for three months. Our rent was practically nothing because the house was being sold as a tear-down. Although we had to deal with periodic walk throughs by potential buyers who made catty remarks about our decor, the house had a working hot tub in its giant sunroom, a two-car garage, and I could walk to work. When the house finally sold, the new owner told us she'd give us $100 for every day we moved out earlier than our lease (which was set to expire three weeks later). Marc and I poured over Craigslist, finding a townhouse in the University District of Seattle. I love love love our new apartment. Will post pics at some point.
Work news...I've gained an instant collection of friends with the people on my team. I guess that happens when you spend 9 or 10 hours a day working together, and then several hours afterward raiding on World of Warcraft. My troll rogue is now level 68, and when I was extended an offer letter - to move me from contract to salaried, with an accompanying payraise - I was told by by boss that the offer was contingent on me reaching level 70 in the next two weeks. (I THINK he was kidding.)
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I'm two and a half weeks into my new job, which is AWESOME. The company is of the "work hard, play hard" mentality, meaning we code like hell, take a two-hour lunch, code like hell, do a few rounds of Wii bowling...and so on. Last Friday after lunch, our team took some of our fun money - every team gets an expense account to spend on whatever they want, which is usually beer - and went shopping to replace the toy helicopter that had gotten destroyed in a Nerf gun versus helicopter battle earlier that week. The official why-you-want-to-work-here page describes employees as being “smart, hip, social, hard-working, upwardly mobile, confident, competitive, entrepreneurial urbanites”, which is a pretty fair assessment. Everyone is mostly young and cool in a geeky way. I've already borrowed two science-fiction books and lent out a couple myself - always a good sign.
Last Friday night, I went to a house party with my friend Descie, who just got back from teaching English in China. Des hangs out with a big group of people whom her sister refers to as "her musician friends" (in a somewhat disapproving tone of voice), and their bands were all playing at a big house in the Greenlake area of Seattle. The music was pretty bad, but there was a keg and I had earplugs. Descie and I ended up sleeping on a neighbor's floor, in a dirty hippie house. I hung out with Descie again last night, at a bar where another one of her musician friends was playing. It was fun, but I caught the last bus out of Seattle then had to walk home from downtown Tacoma at 1am.
Also, since I no longer have to look corporate at work, I dyed my hair purple last weekend:
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In my last post, I mentioned that I had grown disillusioned with my job as a software developer for Morpho. I still love the work itself, but the brutal 16-hour days and the increasing bitchiness of the team I work with has given me an impending sense of dread on Sunday nights. I've been fielding calls from recruiters for the last two weeks, and had an interview last Friday and another one Tuesday.
The first was in downtown Seattle, at a company that writes bank software. The location was ideal, but their offices were small and drearily lit with pulsating overhead fluorescents. Also, the manager seemed to admire 8-to-5ers for their consistency - and that's just not me. They offered me a position a few days later, but I turned them down.
The second interview was with a sub-contractor for Microsoft, in downtown Bellevue. (For those who don't live in the Puget Sound area, Bellevue is considered a "nouveau riche" city, really an overgrown suburb about 20 minutes east of Seattle.) Shallow as it sounds, I was immediately impressed with their offices, which are housed in one of those new glass skyscrapers that are being put up all over downtown Bellevue. There's a Starbucks and a bar in the lobby, and a giant fire pit surrounded by squashy couches. The offices were dim, with real lights and views of Lake Washington. When I described it to Marc over dinner, he said, "It's like they designed it specifically for you." Right now the company has several projects for the Clinton Global Initiative to track emissions, model ways to reduce pollution, and help computers use less energy. Directly after my interview concluded, I was offered a job. "So, you want to work here?" I thought he was kidding at first.
After talking things over with Marc, and my aunts, and my mom... and a few more people, including my friend Mike at Morpho... I accepted the offer. It's scary. It will also be a long commute, until we find an apartment in Seattle. But ultimately, this seems like a better situation. The work sounds interesting and useful, the pay is considerably higher - to the point where I've clearly been getting ripped off these last 2 years - and it's nice to leave Morpho before I actively hate it. Since I'll be taking the train, even the commute will be a good opportunity to catch up on my leisure reading (although from prior experience I know that it isn't an acceptable long-term arrangement). I just keep looking around Morpho and thinking, "Aww, I'll miss that, and this...and him, and her..."
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My boyfriend Marc got a new job working as a design engineer for Paccar in Kirkland. He's taking the train to work right now, but that's a two-hour commute. We're looking into relocating to Seattle, which means that I would want to find a job in Seattle as well. This coincides nicely with my disillusionment at Morpho. I put my resume up on Monster.com last Tuesday night, and by the following morning had already had four recruiters calling with lists of possible jobs. It's good to be in a high-demand field. I'm not sure what I'm going to do though...so far, none of the positions have been thrilling, although they do pay considerably more.
Last weekend, Kelly and I went snowboarding up on Crystal Mountain. Afterwards, we recuperated back at her house with her boyfriend and a couple of his friends playing Trivial Pursuit. Now, I suck at Trivial Pursuit. I don't know trivial things and it pisses me off to lose at boardgames (my sister can attest to this). I didn't watch enough TV as a child, sports are excruciatingly boring, I don't see that many movies, and my recollection of history is disgracefully spotty. The only category I can regularly score points in is "Science and Technology", but only on the actual science questions - about half are just history questions in disguise, like "What year did Whatsisface invent Whosit?" That's rarely relevant to an understanding of the topic! What I would like to see is "Trivial Pursuit for Nerds", with the type of science/math/literature questions you see on introductory classes in those topics. Things that an average educated person would know.
Sample questions:
What is the shape of the Milky Way galaxy?
What are the pores on plant leaves called?
Name a member of the subphylum Chelicerata.
How old is Earth?
What is Heisenburg's Uncertainty Principal?
Name the element with the symbol Pb.
Kinetic energy is...?
What is Avogadro's number?
This would be so fun to play at family gatherings. We all have the schooling to make this fun, I think:
Dad and grandmother: BS in Chemistry
Little brother: halfway through a BS in Mathematics
Little sister: finishing up a Masters in History
Three of my aunts and myself: BS in Computer Science
Another aunt: multiple Masters in History and Literature
Marc: BS in Engineering
Uncle: BS in Accounting
In other news, my family wants to start up a commune. I can't imagine living in a closed environment with all of them again, so I will not be participating, assuming it actually happens.
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This weekend I helped my friend Kelly set up her Google homepage. She picked the "tea house" theme, which features a little cartoon fox going about its day. For those who haven't played with this feature, Google themes constantly change depending on the local time and weather conditions, with special changes for holidays. I think Kelly really likes it. After I left, she kept messaging me saying, "The fox is picking oranges" or "Now the fox is eating and a turtle is watching him." I ended up changing to this theme too.
Oh, and I found possibly the greatest website in the world: DamnInteresting.com. It's full of fun facts, like did you know skunk cabbage generates its own heat, getting as high as 35 C even in freezing cold weather? Or a fire has been burning under a town in Pennsylvania since the 1960s? While burning garbage, a group of workers accidentally ignited a vein of coal, which started a fire underground that nobody could extinguish. The town was finally evacuated twenty years later, when a little boy nearly fell into a sinkhole that would have burned him to death, if his cousin hadn't been there to pull him to safety.
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On this website, I found this image.
Photoshopped:
Original:
There is another incredible transformation here, where you can see how her waist is made smaller, her boobs bigger, and all her pores erased. This is why I don't read women's magazines - I really don't think it's healthy to compare yourself to the top 10% most beautiful people who have also been photoshopped to make them appear flawless. It just leads to discontent. Ditto for men reading magazines like Stuff or Maxim, all it does it give you expectations that have no possibility of being fulfilled in reality.
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The World Economic Forum's recent Global Competitiveness Report ranks the United States 34th out of 131 for health and primary education (tied with Montenegro) and 75th in macroeconomic stability, just behind Venezuela and Suriname. Australia is 17th and 34th, respectively. We are, however, 1st in innovation and market size.
In other news, I have a 8:15am daily meeting for the next month, during a "critical stage" of a project our team is working on. Boo! I think getting up so early is going to seriously hinder my productivity.
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What's in your fridge? This picture is my typical fridge contents, minus the blueberry beer - which Marc bought on impulse because it was so cheap - and the roasted garlic dip.
I was thinking today that my perfect fridge would be about the same height, but half the deepness. You can notice in the picture that all my food is lined up right at the front of the shelves, with big empty areas behind. The only thing that's ever back there is scary abandoned jars or packets of hot-sauce. Maybe some pickles or something. Anyway, I would like to buy a shallow, energy-efficient fridge, but my (admittedly brief) googling turned up nada. Am I a freak? Does the entire market for shallow fridges consist of...me? I guess the only problem would be pizza boxes, or if you're someone who buys multiple gallons of milk at a time.
Everyone should take pictures of their fridge too, and post it on their lj. Like one of those meme things.
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It's started raining again. In the Pacific Northwest, that means 8 more months of gray skies and constant drizzle. This morning, I put my black hoodie under a leather jacket to wear on the walk to and from work. The hoodie is covered in homemade patches, with studs lining the hood and pockets; Eli dubbed it the "disreputable hoodie" after we singed it by drying it on the radiator. Anyway, I haven't worn it for awhile because it IS disreputable, and I've kind of grown out of that style. Putting it on again made me feel...I'm not sure how to describe it. Sort of tough, and careless? Like I was cocooned from the elements, perfectly snug and dry, and who gives a fuck how it looks.
 The people up the street from us live in an unremarkable Victorian-style house, with vaguely menacing signs - decorated with smiley faces - in their yard that warn the area is under constant surveillance. They put a bench near the sidewalk with a sign indicating it was not to be sat on, and glued fake flowers to the severely pruned tree in front of their house in place of leaves. This summer, leaves started to sprout from the stubby little proto-branches that were left, and I remember walking by and being like, "Good job tree, way to overcome all obstacles." The next week, the leaves had been cut off, and the tree trunk was PAINTED BROWN. They painted the tree trunk brown, and spray-painted the grass at the roots green. Since then, they've nailed dozens of wind chimes, frolicking plastic squirrels, and other trinkets to this tree. The picture makes the end result look pretty, which I guess in a sick way it is. I'm so curious about the people who live there. This could be ironic, or instead the result of someone's extreme fetish for order and tidiness. They also have plastic deer posed all over their lawn, which just last week was replaced partially with Astroturf...
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Apparently this is stop-motion animation drawn on the walls of an abandoned building:
Awesome Stop Motion Wall Animation - Watch more free videos
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A few weekends ago, Marc, my old boss Aaron and I went bar hopping in downtown Seattle. Marc and I met Aaron at a fancy Martini bar in Belltown; he had just signed up with couchsurfing.com and was hanging out with a whole gaggle of Europeans he had met on the site. He was also already drunk. We hadn't eaten, so we dragged Aaron away and down the street, in search of a sushi bar. Luckily in Belltown there is one on every block. However, every restaurant we stopped by had a waiting list, and so we kept walking until we were at Pike Place Market. We ended up eating at a very good, mysteriously empty sushi bar off Post Alley, after which we stopped off at a pub for drinks. As I was waiting for my second mojito, I told the bartender that my first had been the best mojito of my life. He winked at me, "I hear that a lot ...about other things." We left that bar and kept walking, heading back towards Belltown. We went into a bar called Twist, which had ridiculous prices and bartenders wearing three-piece suits. I'm surprised they let us in; we seemed like the shortest and most causally dressed people there. Aaron said, "They say height is positively correlated with success...." When I got up to go to the bathroom, I realised I was drunk. And the bathroom, incongruously, was layered in graffiti. Two girls were talking loudly from their stalls: "I can't believe I'm already so wasted!" After finishing our overpriced drinks, we walked back to the Martini bar where we had met Aaron. I guess the Europeans he had been hanging out with earlier had made a huge scene about the tip - which, for a party of 8, gets automatically folded into the bill - and had demanded to see a manager for a refund. The waitress, as she brought up our drinks, recognised Aaron and told him how she couldn't believe that they flipped out over what amounted to $1.40. My drink consisted of hot pepper vodka, chocolate liquor, and sweet cream. I mistook the garnish for a dollop of chocolate, and slurped it up, only to discover it was a chilli pepper. The rest of my memories of that bar involve my mouth burning horribly. (Actually, since then I haven't been able to deal with spicy food. We went out for Indian food last Sunday, and Marc was shocked when I ordered the Eggplant Bhurta mild. He accused me of "having changed.") We finished up the night at a seedy Chinese restaurant doing karaoke and eating crab ragoon.
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So does this outfit match? It's a grey jacket, brown pants, white shirt, and grey/brown tanktop. Too many different neutrals, yes/no? PS I bought a digital camera (for $20!)
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| 2007-08-03 23:03 |
| recap |
| Public |
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Quick recap of the last month:
I broke my toe (ouch) but it's better now (yay). I dropped a heavy glass bottle of kombucha on my bare foot.
An older guy got fired last week, right in the middle of the day, after which all the developers huddled together in whispered conversations about job security. Our boss called us in for an impromptu meeting to reassure us that we weren't next - apparently the firing came after a bad performance review and 6 months of waiting fruitlessly for things to improve - then asked us, "Is there anything else you guys want to bring up?" After a long awkward silence, one of the programmers - a young Indian guy right out of college - said "I've never seen anyone get fired before. It gives me twinkies in my stomach." He stopped, realized he meant 'butterflies' then said, "See, I'm so nervous that I got the words mixed up."
Since then, the teasing at work has moved from jokes about clumsiness and "bones made of chalk" (references to my broken toe) to substituting 'twinkies' for random terms. An improvement, from my perspective.
Marc and I picked blackberries (which grow wild everywhere this time of year) and made cobbler. We also had a fight about cleanliness and who does more chores yesterday, after he asked me to take out the recycling and I tried to make him do it. I said I had swept the stairs and cleaned the windows already, and he countered by saying that he did the dishes and mopped the floors. He started pointing at stuff lying around, saying "Your mess, your mess..." and I went through the pile on our coffee table: "Race-car Aerodynamics, an ECU, a letter from your sister, a 1985 Corolla manual..."
"Bad luck," he said, "that's all your junk."
I said, "I guess this is just one of those times in a relationship in which neither partner will be convinced that I'm the one who cleans the most."
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I had the Fourth of July off work (yay for middle-of-the-week holidays), and spent the day at my parents' house. My dad always gets ridiculously excited at the prospect of making explosions - my mom refers to the Fourth as "Phillip Day" - but I've never really liked this holiday. Most of my memories of the Fourth are being an unwilling participant in "firecracker baseball" and "firecracker dodgeball" (games my dad invented), and locking myself in my room trying to read.
This year, I was given the grand plant tour right when I arrived at my parents' house. My dad is the kind of guy who will stop his car on the freeway if he sees a particularly striking flower, and run out and shake its seeds into a plastic bag to plant later. He and my mom have also gone to sites slated for development and dug up all the baby trees and shrubs that they could fit in their VW Fox. Anyway, there were plenty of plants for him to point out, and as we walked around I filled up my own plastic bag with seeds shaken from poppies and other flowers. I'm going to toss handfuls over the wild parts of our yard.
I spent a while trying to convince my aunts to read The Omnivore's Dilemma - I think everyone should read this book - by giving a "brief" synopsis that became an huge rant about agriculture and sustainable farming. Marc arrived and lit a few fireworks off with my dad, while my mom and I picked a bunch of artichoke, yellow squash, and raspberries for me to take home. When we got back, the streets by our house were packed with hundreds of people watching the big firework show over the Puget Sound, and lighting off their own fireworks in the parking lot of the cathedral beside us.
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My boyfriend Marc had a cold two weeks ago. He doesn't get sick very often, and when he does he usually refuses to take medicine or miss work. This time, he did put in a few half-days at the shop, and otherwise laid around on the couch being grumpy and watching Star Trek reruns on his laptop.
Anyway, I realised he had infected me with his cold last Monday, when I started to get a sore throat after a going-away dinner for my friend Descie (she's moving to China for a year!). Marc said, "You better write your will, because if this knocked me out, it's going to kill you." We had an argument over immune systems and relative pain thresholds. My belief is that his refusal to pamper himself in any way during an illness actually backfires, causing him to stay sicker longer. And even though he thinks his pain threshold is higher than mine, I think I'm just more willing to talk about my pain than he is.
At any rate, I spent the last week dizzy and headachey, and although I didn't miss any work I didn't get very much done. Which sucks, because I have a major release of a software product that has to be out in the next couple days.
Friday night I was gloating because I felt better - I had gotten over the cold in half the time it took Marc. I caught a ride up to Bellingham to visit my friend Mary, and helped her build a tottering bookcase out of crates and particle boards. On Sunday, Kelly and I went to the Taste of Tacoma, which is a fair held at Point Defiance park. All the local restaurants set up booths and hand out free samples, and local wineries do wine tasting in a beautiful rose garden.
This week I have to finish my software release, because for the next two weeks I get to go to company-paid classes on SQL Reporting and Analysing Services. It'll be nice to be in school again.
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What Does 200 Calories Look Like?
On a related note, MoneyBlog looks at not just calories, but cost per calorie. The cheapest calories are corn, oil, sugar, and other yellow and brown foods. The most expensive calories are fruits and vegetables.
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A close friend of mine works in a warehouse. She studied hard to finish high school and got a job packaging medical supplies shortly after graduation. She makes a solid income, enough to afford a mortgage on a new house in the suburbs. The problem is this: she hates her job. She hates the mandatory overtime, the exhausting labour, the strictly regimented hours. She wants to find a new job that is more creative, more flexible...and that pays more. She's willing to go to college - in fact, she just rearranged her schedule so that she could fit in classes. What sort of jobs would you guys recommend? The problem is she doesn't have any sort of great passion that could be funneled into a career.
On a related note, today I was reading a NY Times article on social class in America. In one section, you input your profession, annual salary, savings, and education to learn your class percentile.
My result puts me squarely in the middle class. Maybe financially that's true, but to me the term "middle class" has associations that I can't apply to myself, whereas I would readily apply that label to my friend mentioned above. Although her job is working-class, her lifestyle and aspirations align with the middle class more than mine. I don't know how I'd label myself. My parents are working class intellectuals (ex-hippies) and I think my values come more from their example than the amount of money I make.
Conversely, PBS's "reveal your social class" quiz - which focuses on personal taste instead of earnings - tells me I'm supposedly "an individual with breeding" but that I "seem to like a lot of things from other classes too." Again, I suspect that's a result of growing up poor but cultured.
How do you guys rank? Do you think class is separate from income?
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This MSN "news" article makes me sputter with rage.
For those who hate to click, the article - ominously titled "It's the end of the world as we know it" - details the forced breeding plan of Peter Costello, Australian Treasurer, who is concerned that the human race is going to disappear. Well, it's not really about forced breeding, but about how to encourage women to have more babies ("One for dad, one for mum, and one for the country," as Costello says), but in my mind the latter goal is dangerously close to the former.
Right now there are more people alive then there EVER has been before. I won't get into the environmental issues associated with overpopulation because - well, because I could rant about that for long enough that I would lose my audience. But suffice to say that there are many bad things happening that are compounded (if not caused outright) by the fact that there are six fucking billion people eating and shitting and throwing plastic bags into the ocean and grinding up trees to make beauty bark for their suburban lawns - Sorry. I said I wasn't going to rant, but I get very worked up about this subject.
Anyway, I think there are too many people alive right now, and I would rather see the population slowly subside rather than crash abruptly due to famine or plague. The idea that we can have a continually expanding population is ridiculous, although all modern economics is based off this assumption. What I hope for is a slowly declining world population, which then stabilizes around a smaller total (say, 4 billion, which is the number of people alive when my parents were kids).
I found this quote from the article especially aggravating:
"Europe by the end of this century will be a continent after the neutron bomb. The grand buildings will still be standing, but the people who built them will be gone"
- in light of the fact that when those buildings were constructed, the world population was probably HALF what it is now. I mean, think about that: when my grandparents were in their twenties, there was approximately 3 billion people on the planet. The human race wasn't dying out then and it sure as hell isn't dying out now.
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