"Rhodochrosite is an excellent stone for love and relationships. It is also
wonderful for those that don't feel love or loved… connected to Scorpio." OMG!!!!
A homeless man once reported to a photographer I dated many years ago that a camera lens was like a woman’s girl-parts: it was the most important element and demanded to be cherished and respected. Maybe also he was trying to differentiate cross-dressing cammy-ras from actual cammy-ras. Not quite sure about his train of thought there but he concluded by noting that Leica lenses were by far the best girl-parts in the business. The video footage of this homeless man’s knowledge-dropping struck me, not only for its poetic lunacy, but also because prior to that I’d never heard of Leica.
So Leica’s got a digital SLR and one of my favorite features of Flickr is that you can sniff around and see actual pictures that actual humans are taking with actual cammyras. So, for example, I ama-churlish-ly shoot with a Nikon D70, a camera that the makers of comparison charts refer to as pro-sumer (professional / consumer hybrid (hybrid vigor!)) digital SLR (single lens reflex, which according to me means it has a cylindrical lens that you can put your mitts on and focus yourself and stuff).
I moseyed on over to Flickr and used their camera finder tool to discover actual pictures shot with this camera. Unfortunately, the photographers’ permissions do not permit me to post the ones I liked best within my blog, but here are links to two that caught my eye:
I’m not sure if it’s my eyeballs, but I’m not dazzled by any of the photographs. If the most interesting photographs across all Flickr users by the Leica are less compelling to me than photos that I’ve taken with my Nikon, then that’s probably a strong signal that I should stick with my current machine.
Yes? No? Maybe?
Anyhoo this entire line of thinking is entirely academic given my impecunity and larger fish that beg a fryin’.
If I were priceline or Travelocity or Mobissimo or Expedia I’d be eyeballin’ Google Maps with a bit of trepidation. What’s to stop them from adding cheapest and quickest airfare routes between destination A and destination B?
Google Maps is already the death knell of HopStop.
I had an eight hour conversation yesterday with an M&A veteran who has made me question my desire to become a scholar.
“Don’t confuse your unhappiness with being a major with a lack of desire to fight the battle. You have passion for the war. This is a good thing. But you are meant to be a general.”
Oh, ouch! The truth. How often have I considered the people above me on the food chain to be total morons? “I could run this business better than they can,” I would tell myself, scanning their grammatical errors on a powerpoint and critiquing their presentation skills let alone ability to select an outfit.
“Your subject matter expertise in internet technologies, your intelligence, your presence, your credentials: you would have venture capital and private equity firms slaughtering each other trying to get you.”
I like how this sounds, I think. Suddenly the infinity pool, the last-minute trip to Zanzibar, the closet dripping with haber-dashingly badass suits reappear on the set of What Anittah’s Life Could Look Like. I did always like badinaging with c-levels over dinner. There always has been a part of me that very much enjoys the politicking that happens amongst smart, confident people in the upper echelons of corporate America.
But it was taking me too long to get there, and I was exhausted by the politicking amongst all the mediocre, one-dimensional people on the B-list.
“This PhD business is just a cop-out. Go get a JD/MBA, and only from Harvard or Stanford. You’ll have three summers to intern. Do one at Kleiner Perkins, one in M&A at Goldman — and demand M&A, none of that other bullsh– and maybe at a law firm working on a deal one summer to see that side of things. Work for five years in M&A and mark my words, you’ll be a general. You will be the CEO or, worst-case scenario, a chief strategy officer. Or if you prefer, you’ll be a vc or at a private equity company and you’ll tell your portfolio how to run their businesses. Believe me, if you were running [large .com], you’d have done a much better job than [well-known CEO]. And I’d say that in front of [person in question]; [he/she] is a friend of mine.
“You have what it takes. You are smart and passionate with presence and credibility. You care deeply about the war. And let me tell you something else –”
Good God, there’s more? I think, scrambling in my head and fighting the idea of having to take the damned LSAT and GMAT –
“No one who has been truly successful has been without insecurity. Self-contentment is the enemy of productivity and drive.”
This is not a conversation that my personal coach would be happy about, I think to myself, taking a hungry gulp of my Egyptian lemonade.
===
A few years ago I was on a sixth or seventh date with a very curious human being. He was one of those people that I had to date from a cultural-anthropology perspective. I collected data and played the part that he clearly wanted me to play: that of an insipid and happy white woman with blonde hair. And it was very clear that actual talking would not be on the agenda: he spent tens of thousands of dollars on a sound system in order to listen to pop music. Audiophilic for Casey Kasem’s Top 40? Really?
One night, as usual and per his request, I’d worn the kind of outfit that, as I glided through the dining room, made men stop mid-sentence or -chew despite the searing glances from their companions. An entire table of bankers went silent as I walked by. During dinner in our snuggly corner booth, I’m in character and giggling at one of his inanities.
“Oh, you’re such a happy little thing,” the set of beautiful new teeth that he paid dearly for said to me.
Oh my God, I thought to myself. This man has no idea who I am. He’s been completely snowed into thinking that the woman he’s requested I be is actually me.
===
Writes Ann Foerst, former theologian and research scientist at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab, in the May-June 2008 Spirituality & Health’s “The Real Reason For Sex“:
… what makes humans unique among living creatures is that we are constantly telling stories about who we are, what we’re doing, and what we should be doing.
===
Have I not worked incredibly hard and travelled this far on my journey to get out of the business of aligning my activities towards the goals and interests of the Other?
Is not the whole point of guild membership the ability and freedom to pursue a course of action and line of inquiry that is relatively unfettered by the needs of outside parties?
“Oh, I have no doubt that if you go into academia, you’ll have a flurry of productivity and become the president of a top university if you want by the age of fifty. But you will grow bored. Universities are very slow to change, and you are temperamentally impatient. But the other path means that by the age of fifty you’ll be worth $100MM. Mark my words.”
I’ve been looking for an answer / in every drop of wine / and the whiskey shines like gold / but there’s no way / it could ever keep my heart from feeling lonely all the time / oh mama I don’t want to go insane
===
Being confronted with a difficult juncture such as the one that, prior to yesterday, I was unawares existed, makes me feel like this:
===
This from my old man this morning: “There was this farmer, see, and I always liked how straight his rows here. Always admired that, corn neat and orderly far as the eye — anyway. So I asked him how he did it, and he says, he says, ‘Well, I just look off into the distance at a far tree, and I point my tractor in that direction. And if I do that, I won’t be able to help it, I’ll stay on course, and my rows’ll be straight.’”
===
For those of us with zscores > three, paths forged by those who have come before are unlikely to suffice, yes? And anyway: I have been in the service of other people my entire life. Meeting their needs. Being who they want me to be. This happy little thing is tired of it.
Anittah, Are You Being Served?
If I decide to chase a hundred-million-dollar-dream, the likelihood of me serving me gets closer and closer to zero.
My first inclination is a deep feeling of ambivalence, of not being sure if I would even feel sad if he were to die. In a way it would be a nice closure, at last, for an abrupt ending for which I never received a reason, even a lame one.
But this can’t be right, can it? What kind of a crum-dum isn’t sure whether or not she cares if a man she once thought she loved croaks from cancer?
Maybe I am that crum-dum. Only one way to find out.
I get out my list of events and assign two numbers to each entry: one number for giddiness and one number for grumpiness. I try to keep to a max value of 1 for either column, but, let’s be honest:
I am female
This is my chart and I am the boss
As I think of the values, I try and think, “How did I feel at the time the event happened?”
So, here I am with my table of data. I consider normalizing any event that contains a rating (giddy or grumpy) >1 such that the max value = 1.
“No,” I decide. “Hormones is hormones.”
What I never consider is simply adding the positive column and comparing its sum to the negative column. That would just be silly.
I know myself well enough to know that additional data points shape all previous data points. Which is to say, memories of the first date were that much brighter after the second date, which had a (+,-) of (0.6, 0). It’s as if each new event were squares of colored cellophane stacked on a light box, and as the relationship unfolded, so too did the cumulative hue of affection.
“Let’s get down to brass tacks,” I tell myself. I’m in the office, off the clock, and it’s late enough that the building’s air conditioning has clicked off. I’m undaunted. I’ve got feelings to crunch.
So, here’s the question. I know the cumulative affection rating is not simply additive. The most recent event is the event that has the most powerful impact on the running “How do I feel about this person?”
But how much more important (in terms of overall affection) is the most recent event versus all the events that have preceded it?
It’s exponential, I decide. I click over and look for basic parabola equations. (Remember those?) I find a Wikipedia entry on exponential weighting and find a smoothing function. “Could this be what I need?” I wonder.
What I want is an equation that describes this … (may or may not be continued)
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