OK, renewed my understanding of why I hate facebook:

1: logged in for first time in months (years?) and was greeted mostly by pictures of, like, my college friend's wife who hates me's hometown (?) friend's neighbor's landscaping. Not exaggerating- real example- that's the first thing I saw. In that sequence, my interest level had plummeted to "statistically insignificant" by "C's wife". This kind of waste of my time and attention irritates me to what I acknowledge is probably a more-than-average degree.

2: which reminds me how selfish and impatient I am, & makes me realize how little I like (or care about) humanity in the abstract (other than those in need). I don't enjoy this.

3: the new layout looks like a 13 year old's myspace circa 2007. IT HURTS MY EYES.

Dear no one in particular: I KNOW I DON'T HAVE AN IPHONE AND SO MAYBE THERE'S SOMETHING I DON'T KNOW, BUT HOW MUCH TIME CAN IT POSSIBLY TAKE FOR ONE TO EMAIL SOMEONE ELSE A PHOTO TAKEN ON IPHONE??? WHERE DOES IT FALL ON THE SPECTRUM OF DIFFICULTY, BETWEEN "SNEEZING" AND "IRONMAN TRIATHLON"? IF YOU HAVE A SECRET REASON NOT TO SHARE IT, LET ME KNOW IT, INSTEAD OF TROTTING OUT ONE NONSENSICAL EXCUSE AFTER ANOTHER, UNBIDDEN. xo, me

Zooey Deschanel! I love her! You know what would be refreshing though? A "relatably" "plain" female comedy protagonist who's actually plain - like all the ordinary-looking men who always get hired to play comic leads - instead of a gorgeous woman being forced to act "adorably" zany or klutzy as a substitute for plainness/to make her less threatening to everyone. Zooey is Snow White; you gotta be kidding me. Katherine Heigl bumping into things while wearing $900 shoes at her $20,000/year entry-level "glamorous" publishing job doesn't make me exclaim "Oh, she's just like me!" All it does is insult everyone involved.

Also there are at least 2 Happy Endings people in this promo, one a HE series regular. lol wut

Will we ever say the words we're feeling, reach down underneath and tear down all the walls? Will we ever have our happy ending or will we forever only be pretending? Keeping secrets safe, every move we make seems like no one's letting go. And it's such a shame 'cause if you feel the same how am I supposed to know? - beautiful song akshully - I didn't know Finn had it in him either. (I know I know)

The roof-raiser very fine too.

TEX!!!!!!!!!!!!

EP! No matter how many times it happens it's still always a little disconcerting to see someone you know on tv. It's so weird.

What's better than a guy who can dance, really.

Everybody back up off my George. Every last one of you has had similar beef at your job at some point and if you say you haven't you're a liar. People holding him (& similar) to a different standard purely because of the $ size of his contract are being too illogical to deserve a response.

We all know how much I love talking to people, but that at this point in history anyone should ever not be able to make any kind of reservation for anything online is just silly.

I feel such fondness and (possibly a wee bit misandrist) wonderment when men express any interest or concern about this kind of thing.  D once mentioned offhand that he and J (both men) had recently talked at length about how hard it must be to be a woman in this culture (in context of being judged/valued, still, preponderantly as physical objects, including by each other, IIRC) and (though I previously wouldn't have thought it possible) it made me respect and like them even more.

I do understand and am... sympathetic? empathic, at least, toward blindness to one's own privileges, having had my own revealed to me (and with luck I'm probably not done).  Funny thing about that though...at least for me, I never really 'get it' by someone yelling at me about it, including in a form like that post.  I never really 'get it' until it affects someone I love, or I'm personally switched out to the other side of it, however blessedly briefly.  This is why I was so pleased to hear that the most unrepentant, vocal, extreme misogynist I've ever known, P.G., recently had a daughter.  (OK, fine, it wasn't so much "pleased" as "HA! That'll show him!"  I wasn't proud of it.)  If that doesn't change his heart, nothing will.

These things always remind of T.S., a trust-fund main line WASP and "friend" (I put it in quotes because at the time we were interacting with him, at most, maybe once or twice a year, but heard that he had described us to a mutual acquaintance as two of his best friends [?!]), once shouting at me & a not-white friend on the street about how "insane" it was that "the Puerto Ricans get a parade and a whole day.  I wanna know, where's my parade?  How come there's no White Man Day?"  Oh but T., there is, and it's called "every day of every year", including the day of the Puerto Rican Day Parade.  So much so that right now I can't even think of an example of a way you could be momentarily switched out and have someone say the equivalent to you and you would actually get how insane your demand sounds; I can't think of a place where you would be sufficiently disadvantaged to ever get the idea.  (I was going to say "go live in South Korea and be prejudiced against for jobs, salary, general social treatment, etc. in favor of native citizens for a while and then imagine how you'd feel one of them demanded to know why there wasn't a Korean People Day" , but that totally wouldn't work because that culture is as prejudiced in favor of white people as any other given place... my US-born & -raised, Ivy-educated, English lit-degree holding friend of Korean ancestry* went to teach English at a school in Seoul for the summer, and in the teacher-assignment lottery for a classroom of 30, when provided teacher bios & photos and asked to list in order their top 3 choices of teachers, the parents unanimously listed the one white but FRENCH! as in French FROM FRANCE & had never lived in an anglophone nation! person as their #1 choice. I love my people.)  I'll never forget my first visit to Hawaii, less for its natural beauty than for the un-commented-upon, apparent total acceptance as ordinary of its residents' utterly unquestionably American and yet mostly and multi Asian/hapa/etc.-ness making me realize that in some way, mostly without knowing it, I had never in my life totally exhaled before then.  (Not even - maybe especially not even, due to sub-/un-conscious dashed expectations - in my one visit to Korea as a child, during which I might have felt like even more of a zoo animal than I did at 'home', though obviously for different reasons.)  I don't mean "poor me" - the advantages and gifts in my life, including, sometimes, of being one or another kind of minority, have mostly so greatly outweighed the 'negatives' as to practically evaporate them - but. 

Am I allowed to say "white people"?  Reactions have varied.

*is not me.  Really is a friend who is a separate person

I am in a mood

Nobody believes my complaints about everybody on Entourage constantly, excessively addressing each other by name, so I sampled a random episode ("Manic Monday") and here was the count:

Ari 19 (!)
Vince/Vinny 7
Amanda 6
Eric/E 6
Lloyd 5
Rob 4
Babs 3
Johnny/Drama 3
Turtle 2

I bet anything this episode actually contained statistically aberrantly FEW instances for the 3 entourage members (and for Vince). YES THEY HAVE CUTE NICKNAMES - WE GET IT - NOW PLEASE BEHAVE NATURALLY.

That's FIFTY-FIVE name mentions in 22 minutes. I challenge anyone to secretly keep track of people addressing each other by name during 22 minutes of normal real-life conversation. If it happens more than 5 times, I will eat my hat.

I did start noticing that they have this problem on FRINGE too, especially with Walter.

funny as always but voilà the bare foot that broke this camel's back.  The prevalence of this faux-casual, reverse-snob visual staple has driven me off the site.  I know this sounds hysterical and irrational.  I'm allowed. I have a terrible crick in my neck.

I have now repeatedly seen the words "pedal" and "petal" spelled "peddle" (and in one case had a waiter explain, with undisguised incredulity at my stupidity, what a [petal] was, the meaning not being obvious from context). I have yet to see the word "peddle" spelled "peddle". #isabitch

The final frame is exactly what has always driven me crazy about the Barneys warehouse sale (or Saks 12/26 shoe sale). I don't care if something is 90% off -- if the price is now $1199, THAT STILL LEAVES ME WITH $1199 LESS IN MY POSSESSION (setting aside for the moment the fabulous shoes also coming into said possession). NOBODY HANDED ME $10,791 IN CASH, which is what some people seem sincerely to believe (or at least feel).

Is it something in the water?

Granted, uselessly small sample size, and I don't at all assert that this univ. affirmative is convertible -- I know personally that it's not -- but I find it intriguing that all 3 people I've ever known who take every opportunity to "casually" interject in conversation how smart they are, all grew up in Southern California, in the beach towns south of Los Angeles.

This morning's example - in discussion of weather, this person (an adult) said "Oh, yeah, I was really good at weather in school. But then, I was always the smartest person in my science classes, so."

Another person, I had to stop spending time with because it was simply too exhausting to attempt to have a "conversation" with her, my every statement being met with some example of how the way she had once handled a similar situation was so much smarter, or her pet phrase which was "everyone always says I'm too smart for my own good" followed by a "hee hee" and rueful "oh that scamp" head shake.

I probably have a northeast / puritanical bias against speaking well of oneself, and maybe it says more about me than them that I don't like being around these people.

{Positivity fail}

In response to involuntarily seeing a 'news article' headline online about Kim Kardashian, in less than 5 seconds I came up with 8 people I know who more deserve to be famous and heard than she. The world remains unfair.

The funny thing is - little does she know that this particular type of rudeness is much more common than she probably thinks... amirite burgle? (please just let me look at the @#%^* jewelry) If I do anything short of immediately participating in their dogged Exotic Otherification of me, *I* am the rude, snobbish, unsociable one. Yup. Win-win: get treated like a zoo animal AND abused for demurring (however politely).

(Somebody needs more sleep)

Wow, are we Americans ever loud. WHY MUST EVERYONE SHOUT? ARE WE ALL DEAF? MUST EVERYONE ON THE TRAIN HEAR OUR PRIVATE CONVERSATIONS?
/blame the grumps on jetlag

Knowing how to ask a question in another language turns out to be of limited utility when you discover you don't know enough of it to understand the response.

This trip threatens to full-blow my interest in art nouveau/Secession/Jugendstil into an obsession. Moser marquetry: love the use of natural grain to evoke fabric pattern

The land of Strauss and in every store etc. they're blasting, like, Livin' on a Prayer. This is depressing.

Eta this souvenir shop is blasting a "song" that consists of heavy sampling of "I Wanna Dance with Somebody", a tuneless bass thump, a woman occasionally singing random words, and a guy yelling "let's go, let's go" in a way that gives me strong urge to find and ponsch him. It's less a song and more an assaultive audio gallimaufry. Abominable

Peeve of the day

Super-faithful covers, down to every melisma and chorus variation. This is proportionally more irritating the better and/or more-successful the original. Naked grab for attention and cash, with zero artistic value added. Not that the music business is the least exploitative one on earth to begin with, but I think this might be especially vexing because it dims the specialness of the original.

terrible standup comic-y sounding moment, but it's a serious question: why do they bother advertising airfare sales with one-way quotes? Do they really think large numbers of us are going to be tricked by the one-way number into accidentally buying a RT ticket that costs twice as much, without noticing? Or are there really that many people who only want to go one way to begin with -- or will suddenly decide to do so because of the sale? What is the real likelihood that people are going to say, "Oh, hey look, it's only $398 ONE WAY to Stockholm. I guess I'll just move there"?

Judgy Parker moment: I think it's personality-revealing when a person ostentatiously tucks hair behind an ear repeatedly -- or holds a cell phone -- with the opposite-side hand.
I obviously need a wee break from this place / change of scenery.

Some people think being assertive and just plain being a jerk are the same thing. It's possible to be the former without being the latter. How does one nicely inform people of this apparently overlooked fact?

I wish I were planning to watch the World Cup so that I could now NOT watch it in protest against the Thomas Paine-quoting ad currently in heavy rotation. Comparing soccer to THE EFFING AMERICAN REVOLUTION, or any war? Trivializing patriotism and the literal sacrifice of life which is still going on, the eternal human epidemic, constantly, all over the world? They've *GOT* to be kidding. That profoundly offends me. I am disgusted and outraged.