* echelonwatch : watching the watchers divestment : a semi-new campus activist tactic ('member apartheid?) san francisco late night coalition : i'm a SoMa resident who'd rather go to a wee club than 1015 but dammit if i'm going to let them take huge rooms full of people sweating happily to bad house music away from me. well, they could take it away from me, personally, but not the people who are gyrating enthusiastically to cliched rhythms. they should be able to keep 1015. and the EndUp and etc. etc. [converging responsibility : broadcast and the internet in developing countries : conference] "While in some parts of the world a radio is most often seen as an accessory for an automobile, in large parts of the South, it is the only communication device that most people have access to." In Sri Lanka, for example, only one person in 500 has access to the Internet, but virtually everyone listens to the radio. All of South Asia, with 23% of the world's population, has only 1% of the world's Internet users. [c. wong] "i'm glad we first met while dancing" [a. bandele] "we will owe nothing that we cannot repay." [j. mateo] "stop watching the devil's visuals" [p. agre] "knowledge lives in communities, not individuals." [b. huang] "one of the paradoxes of ethnicity is that it's only when with your own kind that you can forget about being ethnic." [the return of the hidden persuaders : salon.com] To hear Dr. Cohen (president of PsychoLogics) tell it, brands actually act as teeny-weeny-therapists -- enhancing our self esteem, curing us of infantile hang-ups, helping us manage conflicts between pleasure and guilt. "Brands assist people in their day-to-day functioning," he says. "That's not something I invented. Brands are already used by the consumer in that way. The question is, which brand gets to own it, and make better use of it?" To illustrate what he is talking about, Cohen mentions one of his current clients, Poland Spring Water. "I can use my Poland Spring Water to quench my thirst," he says. "But I may unconsciously use it as a cleansing ritual -- and as a result, feel cleaner, purer inside -- doesn't that help me in my day-to-day living? It's almost like good therapy."	d e c e m b e r . 28 . 1 9 9 9 (4:44 pm, san francisco) | piroshkis listening to : go sailor, ursula 1000, ana d, tom waits, buena vista social club [on hiatus from my stero to my mom's dismay : bing crosby christmas cd. although i have to say, in all fairness to bing, i prefer him to the spiffed up versions of carols that dominated the airways on friday and saturday. give me old school oh holy night over some beats remix of grandma got run over by a reindeer] update : 3 weeks ago i was a small kiddo with indeterminate-colored hair. now i am a small kiddo with shorter indeterminate-colored hair whose illtempered kitty has come to live with her and whose parents are in town. i delved into the underworld of dot com culture (as if working for one doesn't already give me e-cooties) by attending the company holiday party. decent food. open bar. people came decked out like it was the prom (taffeta poofy full length skirts. now when the hell did they come back and whose idea was it?) , people danced like it was junior high. the most disturbing part wasn't the ceo's pep talk "the short saga of snowball.com" (p.s. snowball just filed for its IPO. go read vanity fair for a swank debunking of the whole fad. yes krispy kreme plans to file) but the next morning when i loitered behind two employees raving about what a kick-ass time they had had. ooh. it just makes my scalp itch. i like who i work with. i don't mind what i do (though it gets mindless some days). i'm just not cut out for the New! Improved! internet where marketing and sales get more spotlight and resources than content. link lists are now paid advertisements and webrings are "affiliates" glued together with a common ad banner server. a pre new year's resolution : from this day forth i will no longer patronize e-commerce sites that advertise 1)on TV 2)on billboards that crashland in greater numbers everyday alongside 101, 80 and walls near my apartment 3)in mainstream (i.e. not Wired) mags. 4)on the radio yesterday : on my home from skipping to the post office, i stopped at the rainbow grocery outlet. the man in front of me in line had wisely brought a couple of duffel bags to ferry his groceries home [it's an urban market, the shopping carts stay inside the store. it took a few embarrassing attempts to ram the cart through before this suburban bred girl understood]. his groceries consisted of over 30 frozen piroshkis, a few tubs of macaroni salad, cookies, cereal and a lot of soda. i think these days you can tell more about a person by what they get at the grocery than what they're wearing [exhibit a : the new york times convened a group of designers and other fashion-ahem-forward types (hilfiger, blass)to look at snapshots of nyc pedestrians and guess their lives. generally they were way off. partly because they assumed neat meant well-off and had a hard time imagining that people could not live in the upper east/west side or soho.] i imagined this guy lived alone and ate alone - had a routine that maybe included the gym to work off some of the piroshki grease. he didn't seem lonely necessarily, but the thought of planning each meal as a discrete snack for oneself (i'd end up eating a lot of trader joe's frozen things - although i did make pesto yesterday - actually the basil was from trader joe's too) got me thinking about what it means to live in a city. my roommate is back east for the holidays and padding about the apartment by my lonesome i find it plausible that someone might live for years by herself. going to work in the morning, exchanging light-hearted banter and chocolates with coworkers through out the day, returning home with a movie and some groceries. it would not be a thrilling life. but i could imagine it... and this from the neediest girl alive. what kind of inward folding does adult life generate? christmas inventory : last year i sent out 'holiday scraps of paper' from korea - having run out of actual holiday cards early on, and brought home assorted cute trinkets for the states-bound kiddies [hello kitty handtowels. a lot of stationary.] when i was younger, i used to write my friends from summer camp/school about all the awesome and totally lame gifts i had gotten. [i'm not sure if i actually wrote like that. i suspect "lame" is a recent acquisition.] this year i made holiday postcards. i'm proud of them - as messy as most of them are. but since they were postcards, i didn't have much room to write on them. so i'll do my christmas inventory here. 2 cds. a desk. a cabinet. toys for the illtempered cat who is nothing like a welltempered clavier. a walkman. some cash. really, though, all i wanted to say is that my desk that looks like the metreon. it's nothing but stainless steel tubing and green hued frosted glass. my dad noticed the resemblance after coming into the metreon from the yerba buena side, and i could only concur. i didn't intend the resemblance, i didn't get a wood desk b/c i didn't want my room to look like a lumber yard (i have a bigass loft bed). instead i have the metreon. it's OK. it's less crowded in my desk, so far. [what your clothes make of you : nytimes : amy m. spindler] The clothes we select for ourselves are a better indicator of who we think we are than our faces or our bodies, which we didn't choose. Clothes are our one chance to right whatever physical wrongs God has imposed on us. They can be a mirror of what's inside, or a veneer of camouflage against a world that judges quickly on surfaces, or a map to display your aspirations. You are what you wear, but that turns out to be as complex as you are. d e c e m b e r . 6 . 1 9 9 9 (11:25 pm, san francisco) | after rain reading : after rain, by william trevor it reminds me of the dubliners and joycian epiphanies. my life, i think, might have once been arranged like this collection of stories. one quiet lesson strung after another, until i woke up sometime sophomore year a threadbare spool. i avoid epiphanies nowadays. they are sneaky bastards, and don't do you a lick of good in the end. // i keep hollering at the sky. hollering things like "I LIKE THIS SKY!" and pointing to any number of cloud formations -- checkerboard stratus, pinkwashed cirrus, two lines of cumulus rushing past a hill like two arms outstreched to grab you. a gray afternoon after thanksgiving the sky decided to clear up a bit directly above the city, and driving down I-80 east bay side, san francisco looked like shangri-la, with angel fluff filtering golden light down the chosen people. you tired of my paeans to this place? not i. i grinned n' hollered halfway to work this morning, mums and english ivy plants jouncing doggedly in the back seat, and later on, on my way to the restroom and hikicks in the handicapped stall, i touched the glass window and twittered at the tide coming in. // lying on the carpet after our third or fourth serving of thanksgiving dinner we came to one of those conversations that only happen after your third or fourth serving - a discussion of what generation we were. i've been told by c that i couldn't possibly be gen x, not with my platinum visa or my G3 powerbook, but then cosmopolitan pronounced gen x anyone born between 1961 and 1981. i tend to believe gen x encompasses only those people who graduated from college into a shitty shitty job market. but the roommate protested "the internet generation" (or as is plastered all over work - "gen i") as a label -- it seemed to her better suited for people currently in college and younger. so all we were left with were news events -- the challenger, the fall of the berlin wall, the end of the cold war. all so technocapitalist. but these events reverberated for a massload of people, not just some few stragglers born at the end of the disco decade. so, no name for us yet. p. s. it's bullshit that a previous generation had it better, than i or you or she was supposed to be born another time, when flowers danced. i got tired of hearing that the hippies had it better, or the beats, or the flappers, and decided to make this time my own.	home now *10.31.99 *11.03.99 *11.13.99 *11.19.99 *11.25.99 - 12.3.99 and then weblog