A friend who works in the government can’t receive profanity-laced emails. Recent hubbub at The Bank has resulted in a crackdown on the use of sarcasm and four letter words in email communications. In order to demonstrate my commitment to the franchise, I created an Outlook email inbox rule:

Tools > Rules Wizard > New

Apply this rule after the message arrives with

“fuck” or “shit” or “damn” or “asshole” or “fucked” or “fucker” or “dammit” or “cunt” or “sex” or “tits” or “dildo” or “pussy” or “nigger” or “kike” or “gook” or “chink” or “spic”

in the subject or body reply using

Subject: Your message was not delivered

Thank you for your message.

Please note that due to content that may be construed as objectionable, your email was not delivered. You are welcome to revise the content and re-send at your convenience.

Your sensitivity to the importance of maintaining a respectful work environment is very much appreciated.

Kind regards,

ANP
Capitalist
The Bank

and move it to the ‘xxx’ folder

Orchestral bubbles in the baff queen Ellen Allien is spinning at Hiro tomorrow night in NYC. I’ll be refondling kind rekindling fond memories with former bankers tomorrow night and unable to attend, but luckily she’s in Chicago on Sunday night at SmartBar, 3730 North Clark. Who knows, maybe I’ll need to rock out on Sunday night and regress a li’l.

Previous post about Ellen Allien

In the late nineties, indignant ANP used her HP DeskJet 292C (purchased from now-defunct iconomy.com) to print self-righteous stickers.

I stuck one or two on cars that I spotted improperly parked in reserved spaces, generally right in front of Payne-Whitney gym. (Irony!)

My older sister sent me (via her fiance) a link to a blog describing how some Latvians have kicked this up a notch:

(translated from the original Latvian)

Ragged Edge > Media Circus Blog > Signs of the Times?
Adverbox > Disabled people awareness
Coolz0r > Marketing Thoughts > Your spine or mine

I opened a rubbermaid container ferreted from my spare bedroom’s closet. In it I’ve found many relics from my undergraduate years, the “gladdest years of life, how swiftly are thee gliding by, o how does time so quickly fly”.

I don’t know if I wrote this or if someone else did and I found it amusing enough to keep, but, regard! I give to you a piece of ephemera filed in my “Kiosks I’d Like To See (but never will)” folder.

bulletin *77
policies and procedures for id replacement

for your protection and the protection of others, yale university takes very seriously instances of lost or stolen ids. if you suspect that your id has been misplaced, now is the time to act. university policy mandates the cancellation of stray ids or ids without owners; your id may have already been rendered inactive. visit our headquarters, located in hendrie hall on elm street, to receive your new id. in the event of theft, make immediate report of your stolen id to campus police, including a description of your id with an accurate notation of its most salient features. university policy holds, of necessity, particularly rigid definitions concerning theft. remember, your id is your own; do not lend your id to either friends or roommates. most mortals are not prepared for universal access; your id might provide entrance to domains for which your friends/roommates are not psychologically prepared. in recent years, the university had developed a hi-tech system for monitoring id activations or “id sightings” if youw ill. if you lose track of your id, ct state law requires we track it for you (see bulletin *75 for similar superego regulation).

please, keep an eye on your id.

Max Dana, wherever you are, is this your handiwork??

You look great for a woman about to turn forty-five.

(Taken from TokyoShoes.com.)

I hope when I’m your age I’m a

1. size four
2. white woman with
3. blonde hair,
4. an underling who sasses back and
5. a Jewish boyfriend that I met on the internet

just like you.

Bring me a print-out of this post to remind me about your birfday gift.

You look great, toots!

(One out of five ain’t bad.)

A coworker sent me the Forbes.com article yesterday regarding career women, and how they are more likely to cheat on you and dump you if you make less than they do. I thought the article had some good points. I did not disagree with it.

Cue the whiny bitches.

There is nothing I despise more than the middling knee-jerk faux intellectual responses from graduates of third rate liberal arts institutions, very few of whom are actually career women I am sure.

Now let’s talk about this. I have a career. It’s a good one. I do rather well at it. I lurfe it. I make good money.

Let’s think about many career women. What drives them? It’s not like career men, who make money because they want to ultimately lure a woman. Women aren’t looking to their careers as a means to an end (e.g., man). Women who are more likely to devote considerable amounts of energy and time to developing a career are more likely to be overachievers in other aspects of their lives as well.

Is this a big secret? No. But let’s continue digging to get at first principles.

- Woman overachieves in her career
- Woman overachives in life
- Woman looks to trade up in title, pay, etc.
- Woman wants better handbag, car, house, shoes
- Woman wants to trade up on her man as well

I’m sorry, this is somehow shocking and newsworthy? The article had zero revelations if you ask me. And why is this all so obvious, so ‘no duh’?

What kind of person is always so restlessly seeking to trade up and overachieve in all aspects of her life?

What qualities do many overachievers share? Could it be, oh, I don’t know, that they are fundamentally unhappy with themselves and incorrectly seek happiness in externals?

Could it be that no matter how big their house is or how wonderful their husband is, they will never realize and appreciate their lives to the fullest and will thus always be miserable and always anxiously seeking the next big thing?

None of this comes as a surprise to me. I’m so bored with it already that the only reason I blogged about it today was all the hubbub surrounding it.

It’s obvious to me. The only problem with the article is that it should have been entitled, “Don’t marry an unhappy woman. If a woman is unhappy with herself, she will never be happy with you, or her career, or her car. She will always be looking for the keys to her happiness outside of herself.

No duh.

Last night it became evident to me why I didn’t want to buy a laptop. As the minutes ticked by, the warm rectangle of white MacBook lurfe resting happily on my bed where I should have been sleeping, it was obvious that

I cannot unplug
Some jerk in the building has really fast wireless
It’s three a.m.
I cannot unplug

As soon as I woke up this morning I checked gmail, sent a couple IMs, etc.

Ugh.

• The MacBook is amazing
• iSight is hella fun
• I wish I could send video to someone who doesn’t have iSight; is there a way?
• The newest features on iPhoto rock

I think my MacBook might be more powerful than my iMac. I think I may have to bite the bullet and transfer my life to my MacBook and per the recos of my friends turn my iMac into a music server / internet station.

Can I handle such change??

Fun with iPhoto’s ‘Antique’ feature:

After being mired in corporate politics for months, I’d forgotten that I love online marketing. I love it. It touches the same part of my brain that seeks answers to

How do humans organize and retain information?
How do humans relate to their world?
How do humans connect to one another?
How do humans create meaning?

I’m reminded of the .com I worked for. I remember circulating a zine-style impassioned flyer to the twenty odd employees that worked there at the time. We were leveraging the concepts of artificial intelligence to create a human-mapped web, I thought!

Okay, here’s the basics. You’ll understand it now – since it’s 2006 – but you have to remember, I started there in September of 2000. Surfer 1.0. Not ready for a web app 2.0.

Blink was an online site where you could store and sort your bookmarks. (My public links are here; I’ve had an account for six years now.) You’d categorize them into various folders, and this way, it was kind of like a human edited neural network thingy. By creating relationships between websites (“X” and “A” are websites both located in the “Dog Toys” folder, for example) we had human editors trolling the web. We had the public library where you could surf other people’s link collections (I stumbled upon a fascinating collection by a man in the process of becoming a woman … think AOL search logs).

The problem (and my former boss wrote about this much more eloquently) was that this was a web 2.0 application and the market was surfer 1.0. Hello, disconnect. There weren’t content-monetizing solutions such as Adsense, and we shouldn’t have done the ‘folder’ thing – tagging is much easier, and much more effective (I mean, a site like “Bust” can be ecards, activities, and shopping all in one. Oh, and content too).

But who had heard of tagging in 2000? I’ll admit I was befuddled by gmail’s organization scheme when I first got a gmail account in the fall of 2004. !

How does this relate to today? I’m sitting in the audience of a thing, listening to a well-known industry type do her thing, and my brain suddenly kicks into turbocharge remembering all the cool things I had wanted for that .com, and thinking of all the cool ways that we could do things that much better at The Bank.

Now granted, back-end operations and internal politics and the fact that I cannot be a capitalist any more than 35-45 hours a week without going insane will certainly damper my enthusiasm soon enough. But for now, with the Chicago sun on my face on the banks of this oddly emerald green river, I’m feeling excited about the possibilities of the web, and how it can be used to connect humans to one another.

And maybe, just maybe, how it can connect humans to themselves.

As John R Chang likes to say, “For that which makes us human.”

Why does a nice hotel room paid for by the company always make me feel like an adult?

Michigan Avenue reminds me of Nevskiy Prospekt, in a way.

Migraines are the worst.

What is it about polished granite and “luxury” appointments including cushy white bathrobes (that aren’t even that soft) that make me feel grown-up on the inside?

Insert commentary connecting therapy and real estate here.

I guess I am turning thirty this year.

I guess I am an adult.

I want babies.

Wait. Write book first. Then breed.

Good thing I have friends with parent blogs so I can learn from their experiences. It takes a village.

I don’t think I ever had a false start when I was a trackstar. There’s a first time for everything.

Damn this MacBook is the shiznit.

I’m sick of hearing about Harry’s Water Taxi Beach too, but after the Jetta crawled around the seedy underbelly of LIC past rusting hunks of meddle (a.k.a seedy gawking blue collar men) and rusting hunks of metal (a.k.a. industrial blight) through a weed-infested ferry parking lot into …

A wonderfully relaxing afternoon on the “beach”!

We made Harry open up at three instead of his usual four and couldn’t play beach volleyball since a Democratic fundraiser peopled by grammas in outfits from Dress Barn were idling in the normal beach volleyball area. Yes, hot dogs are three bucks a pop and a can of soda will cost you $1.50. But it’s ridiculously pleasant. And any place that can get a bunch of bankers smiling simultaneously

(at anything other than extracting money from consumers by exploiting their alienation-from-self which results in rampant durable goods acquisition in an attempt to fill the psychic hole)

gets the thumbs up from ANP.

I’d be down to check this place out again and again and again. Why is it that I predict taking Wednesday afternoon conference calls from a towel splayed out on imported sands of LIC?!

Pictures courtesy Rachel. Full collection here.

–

Happy birthday Rachel!!!!!

This post, printed out on an office printer, good for a trip to Pylones followed by consumption of Mott’s Applesauce in a post-refurbished Father Demos Square.

–

Off to Chicargo to see transvestites shimmy at my older sister’s batchelorette party. !