Category Archive

“If you see a man and woman walking into a hotel with a bottle of wine, and it’s 9:00 on a Friday night – does that mean she’s probably a prostitute?

I was really stressing over the thought of moving in with strangers, so I just booked a dorm single as my summer housing. It’s around $200 more per month than a sublet would be. But I’ll be able to walk to work and Barack’s crib is literally 3 blocks away.

I’m already applying for summer internships. There’s one technology-focused program that I’m applying to where you can choose from a list of organizations that will host. Many of these organizations start off by saying something about being pro-Democracy but upon closer inspection, about a third of the descriptions sneak in words like “limited government,” “individualism,” and “free enterprise.” Yikes.

I am boycotting Facebook today. I am so sick of every single person’s status encouraging people to get out and vote. Yes, because one of your loser friends is going to see and say “Huh, I guess maybe I should vote?” And through some magical reasoning, that person will already be registered to vote, even though they weren’t planning on it today. I changed my facebook status to say “…thinks your FB status is totally going to make someone vote today” or something like that. Some of my “friends” are confused/not happy about that comment. Oh well. Cynics have no friends.

Also? I don’t think Obama is going to win. Of course, I hope I am wrong about that. Even though I am all about creating positive social change, and believe I will do it, what I learned from trying to teach people about diversity & social justice is that  the country is full of idiots and fucktards. And that is why I believe McCain will win.

That said, I’m glad Howard Zinn came out and said Obama doesn’t represent any fundamental change, and he will not fulfill that change. Too bad he also said you should still vote for O regardless.

Look at me, I’m using the internet to complain about people on the internet who are talking about voting. Meanwhile I am talking about voting too.

Let’s kill ourselves now.

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Originally uploaded by oh_hello

Last night I finally checked out the World War II Veterans Association bar, which is a well known hipster hangout. But construction workers are still welcome!

Today I got the keys to my new apartment in Providence and we moved a car full of boxes in. The apartment is older than my current one but it has central air conditioning, a dishwasher, and washer/dryer – things that I don’t have right now and they seem like such a luxury! The stove is so old that it’s brown & orange and has an analog clock, but it’s full sized which means my baking pans don’t have to touch the sides of the oven like they do now.

It’s in a converted warehouse. When we saw the photo on Craigslist, we saw this:

It looked dated, like in a 1980’s way and I assumed it was a sliding glass door or something boring. But then we saw it in person, and pulled back the curtains and it took my breath away. (Sorry, my cell phone doesn’t have a setting for backlighting)

Our bedroom also has one of those windows. The previous tenants had those sheers hung up with flimsy tension rods, and they were draped in a way where you can tell they never opened them. After we moved our boxes in, I had to take at least one of them down because it looked so ugly.

The giant arched brick does a great job of distracting me from the up-close and personal view of the highway outside. Now, any ideas on better window curtain options to show off those windows?

“University of Massachusetts president Jack M. Wilson, after pressure by a state lawmaker, recommended that the UMass board of trustees strip Robert Mugabe of a doctor of laws degree he received at UMass-Amherst in 1986. It would be the first time the board has revoked an honorary degree.”

Very cool!

*update*

From the St. Louis Post Dispatch blog:

“This makes Washington University’s problems with protests of plans to award an honorary degree Friday to Phyllis Schlafly pale by comparison. Whatever you might think about Mrs. Schlafly, she’s no Robert Mugabe.”

eh?

Last night I had a dream that I was spinning yarn, first on a spindle and then a spinning wheel.  Where did that come from?

After getting past the colonial & revolutionary historical periods (which I find really boring), I’m finally getting to the good parts of A People’s History. Two things that kept me awake last night:

“Control in modern times requires more than force, more than law. It requires that a population dangerously concentrated in cities and factories, whose lives are filled with cause for rebellion, be taught that all is right as it is. And so, the schools, churches, the popular literature taught that to be rich was a sign of superiority, to be poor a sign of personal failure, and that the only way upward for a poor person was to climb into the ranks of the rich by extraordinary effort and extraordinary luck.”

He’s talking about the 1880’s and 1890’s! I also thought this passage, on the same page as the previous paragraph, was also really interesting:

“Carnegie gave money to colleges and to libraries. Johns Hopkins was founded by a millionaire merchant, and millionaires Cornelius Vanderbilt, Ezra Cornell, James Duke, and Leland Stanford created universities in their own names. These educational institutions did not encourage dissent; they trained the middlemen in the American system-the teachers, doctors, lawyers, administrators, engineers, technicians, politicians–those who would be paid to keep the system going, to be loyal buffers against trouble.”

Two years since I graduated college and I’m finally doing some book learning.