true story*

"i took a deep breath and listened to the old bray of my heart. i am. i am. i am." - sylvia plath

miscellaneous thoughts to confirm to myself that i exist:

~ best neologism i've heard in the past week: powerpointless

~ coolest trivial fact: chinese is a high context language - there are no cases, no gender, no tenses, no singular or plural, no active or passive, there is just what's there in the here and now. we could probably learn something deep and profound from that. if we weren't so trapped inside of our own low context language.

~ if we did, it would bring new meaning to the phrase, "you had to be there."

~ i finished my knitted scarf (hence the photo above).

~ i grow worse at self-portraits in the mirror instead of better.

~ "governance" is the word of the moment in corporate reorgs today.

~ those who've been on facebook in the past few hours will understand my title.

~ i had to upload a bunch of pix to flickr today that i wouldn't otherwise have uploaded, thanks to blogger's new photo uploader "improvements." i fear they moved those people who worked on buzz over to the blogger team. and it doesn't bode well. can you say rejects from windows vista development?

~ on the other hand, i'm sure the good folks at blogger will fix it and the new photo uploader will be fabulous and that i won't have to manually resize to 800 anymore. (note to blogger: this is a hint.)

~ my new contacts are no longer making me sick, but i can't see anything through them. i haven't decided whether this is a bad thing or not.

~ harmony before honesty? i don't think that would work for me.

~ i cannot believe that my sister has traded in her iPhone for a blackberry. that's an #epicfail by AT&T, as she did it because the coverage in eastern iowa is rubbish. but i still say she's out of the will (thanks for that, liz).

~ oops, this isn't twitter, so i guess the hash tags aren't so effective.

~ however, even an iPhone with no coverage is still far superior to any other phone. because of that hipstamatic photo app mostly. and the sexiness factor.

~ i'm a little worried about husband, he just signed up for his 25-year reunion on facebook. we didn't even know he knew he was on facebook (my sister and i created a profile for him awhile ago because sabin needed more friends for her pets in pet society).

~ i hope my new job description will specify "unlimited thinking" like husband's does. because i can totally do that. true story.

chabuduo is not good enough

dreamy orchids promote the pondering of ponderable thoughts.

on a lazy sunday afternoon, we watched some crap t.v. shows (as one does) where four "known" (kendt) danes with nothing visibly in common each take turns making dinner at their house and entertaining the other three. then, they rate one another and one of them "wins" 10,000 kroner for their favorite charity. and it struck me, as they gave one another ratings of 8 and 9 for what appeared to be quite ordinary food that likely at most deserved a 5 or 6 and referred to one another as "icons" in their fields, when none of them are even remotely approaching icon status, that reality television is wrecking the language(s) (all of them). it's evident in the talent shows as well, where the judges tell everyone they're brilliant and the best they've seen or heard, when they most decidedly were not and that was evident for all to see and hear.

what is this culture of politeness that's driving this? are we really so afraid to call a spade a spade? and what does it do to words like "icon" that they are applied to only marginally famous, deeply insecure people who can't cook or set a proper table? it strips them of meaning is what it does.

yesterday, i learned about a chinese word - chabuduo - which means "almost there" or "good enough." since i had a long drive, i began to speculate as to whether the world is becoming a place where everything is "good enough," or chabuduo, whether it really is or not. i may be thinking of chabuduo in the wrong sense here, as what's underneath the chinese conception of it is a constant search for optimization - making things easier, cheaper and getting more money for them. but maybe i haven't misunderstood, because isn't reality t.v. chabuduo as well? it's definitely easier than making a proper television show, it surely costs less as you can get loads of fame-hungry suckers to participate and you don't have to pay them and thus the production company makes more money on it.

but what are the implications if everyone chooses the easy route, or hides their mistakes, slaps on a coat of paint to cover things up, or gives mediocre efforts top marks? a superficialization (i just made that word up) of culture and a poverty of language is what it seems to be giving us. we don't have any way to express things that are truly brilliant or iconic anymore now that everything is those things, even the things that are chabuduo.

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dear blogger, please finish your tweaking of the photo uploader, it's not working at the moment and i hate having to post using html from flickr. sigh.