Spring officially begins at 11:05 a.m. local time (1:05 p.m. Eastern).
Update: Tigers lose in 11-innings to the lowly Royals. D'oh! I hope the rest of the season turns out better.
Houston: My Kind of City
This article makes me want to move to Houston. The article, I think, accurately portrays the city as one of opportunity and growth. And even though I was only in Houston for a few days, it impressed me much more than other "trendy" cities I've visited.
The article makes a similar point:
Ultimately, it’s a question of defining what makes a city great. Many city planners today focus largely on aesthetics, the arts, and the perception of being “cool.” Academics and many economic-development experts link urban success to cities’ appeal to the “creative class” of college-educated young people. In this calculus, the traditional practice of gauging a city’s success by studying patterns of population or employment growth, or noting the opportunities available for working-class or middle-class families to flourish, rarely registers as important. One prominent academic, Rutgers University’s Paul Gottlieb, has even offered an elegant formula for what he calls “growth without growth”—focusing on increasing per-capita incomes without expanding either population or employment. Indeed, Gottlieb suggests that successful post-industrial cities might well do best if they actually “minimize” the influx of new people and jobs.
Such an approach may work, at least superficially, in an attractive older city such as Chicago, New York, or Boston, but it’s an unlikely model for most cities in a country where the population is expected to reach 420 million by 2050. Growth-without-growth cities might be great to visit, and they might prove exciting homes for the restless young or the rich, but it is doubtful that they can create the jobs or the housing for more than a small portion of our future urban population. For these and other reasons, the Houston model of the opportunity city—welcoming new jobs and new families—may prove far more relevant to the American future.
Marathon Girl and I spent several days in the Houston area four years ago and loved it. In the next five years -- before our kids are too old -- we'd both like to move out of Utah and establish roots elsewhere. Ever since our trip to Houston, that city has always been in the forefront of our minds as a good area to move to. (Followed by Denver, Phoenix, and Seattle.)
No one knows what the future holds but I wouldn't mind becoming a Texan if the oppurtunity presented itself.
To Blog or not to Blog, That Is the Question
After reading my post on job satisfaction, Littlest Bird emailed and asked why I hadn’t blogged more about being unemployed, looking for work, and the entire job search process back in November.
Here’s why: Blogging under your own name is VERY different than blogging anonymously. Anyone who knows your name can find your website with a few clicks of the mouse. It’s made even easier when you have unique name like mine.
The day after parting ways with my old job I started sending out resumes and queering friends and family about any writing-related jobs they might know about. Within 48 hours I noticed an uptick in Google and Yahoo queries for my name – most of which could be traced back to potential employers. It was amazing to watch how many potential employers were spending anywhere from one minute to 20 minutes on my website.
This, in and of itself, wasn’t a bad thing. I haven’t posted anything that would make an employer think twice about hiring me or calling me into an interview. (At least I don’t think I have.) And where I was mostly applying for writing-related jobs the fact that this website generally highlights some of my more creative writing efforts tends to be a good thing. Additionally, there’s a hidden URL on this website that contains my professional writing portfolio. (Don’t bother searching for it. It’s password protected.)
Based on the number of interviews and job offers I had from employers who ended up on my website (both the public and password protected section), I’d say the website was by far more of a positive than a negative. I even had one employer bring up the password protected and public part of this website during an interview and we talked about some of the documents and blog entries I had written. (He made an attractive job offer the next day.)
Yet this website could have just as easily been a negative. For example, the last thing I wanted was potential employers to know how good or poorly the job search was going. I didn’t want someone to come to the site and see that I had multiple offers and decide not to even call and see if I was interested in working for them or, conversely, see that the job hunt was going bad use that as leverage to lowball any salary or benefit things if a job offer was extended.
I’m also under the opinion whether your blogging anonymously or under your real name, what you write about and say about others says a lot about you so I generally try to blog and post things that I wouldn’t have a problem with sharing with a stadium filled with people I don’t know. It’s not that I care what people think about me, rather, I believe that if you wouldn’t spread malicious gossip or say certain things when actual people are present, you should have the same decorum on your website or blog.
It’s not that I didn’t want to blog about it -- I just thought it wasn’t in my best interest to keep those thoughts and feelings private. And, yes, I did keep a detailed account of that time. However those are safely stored in my journal to which only Marathon Girl has access.
Everyone else can read about it after I’m dead. :-)
LOST: Meet Kevin Johnson
My favorite part “Meet Kevin Johnson” was the episode’s irony. It was chalk full or irony. This is what I picked up on:
• In this episode Michael pawns Jin’s watch for a gun and bullets to kill himself. It was this same watch that Jin tried to kill Michael for on the island.
• Michael killed Ana Lucia and Libby (accidently) in order to get Walt back from the Others. In this episode we see that loses his son after he tells Walt what he did.
• Ben says that Charles Widmore doesn’t have a conscious, yet we’ve seen how Ben doesn’t have a problem killing others – including his own father.
• My personal favorite ironic moment was when Sayid turn Michael over to the boat’s captain because Michael is working for Ben. Yet we know in the future, Sayid will be working for Ben and carrying out assignations.
I also thought the song that was playing on the radio when Michael tried to kill himself the first time sounded kind of happy and cheerful but I didn’t recognize the song or pick up on the words. Anyone have any insight to that?
Since a mass slaughter appears to have begun on the island, it makes me wonder how many people actually survive. A few episodes back Hurley was visited by a mysterious man who wanted to know if there were other survivors. Maybe what he was really asking was not who survived the 815 plane crash but the mass killings that took place on the island. Maybe that’s why Kate ended up with Aaron.
And if Rousseau is dead, I’m going to be mighty upset. (Karl on the other hand, I really don’t care much about.) She’s one of my favorite characters even though we don’t know that much about her. And I was really hoping that before the series ended, we’d see a flashback on her to know how she came to the island, how she lost her daughter, etc. Okay we don’t know if she and Karl are really dead but I doubt they’ll be up and walking in the next episode. And thanks to the writer’s strike, we have to wait five weeks to get any sort of answer.
Interview with Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse
For all the LOST fans out there, UnderGroundOnline has a fairly in-depth interview with Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse. Lots of juicy tidbits about tonights episode, where the series is headed, and some insight into writing the show. Some tidbits:
UGO: Is the narrative structure going to change, yet again, from on island present with flash forwards to something else entirely?
CARLTON: Well this season is really about connecting the dots between what you saw in the finale last year, which was Jack and Kate's flash-forward, and the events on the island that were sort of catalyzed by the arrival of the helicopter. We're going to put some of those pieces together this season. We can't say much about what the format and structure of next season will be like because I think it would spoil the ending of this season. As this season gets closer to the end it is going to become more than apparent where the story wants to go next.
***
UGO: When was the decision to use time travel in the story made?
DAMON: It's been in the DNA of the show since the very beginning. Obviously, one thing the flash backs and the flash forwards provide you with is the idea of time travel. You're bouncing around in time and events from the past are seemingly influencing the present, but it's not a traditional time travel story until we started talking about what the hatch was there for, and what this electromagnetic energy that the hatch is trying to contain is and what would be the effect of that hatch going away, otherwise known as the purple sky event. And it was sort of those conversations which obviously happened way back in season one when Locke and Boone found the hatch that were the early precursors of time travel. I will say, though, that the first significant event in the show where we were thinking in the back of our minds that this is going to require a story telling element that isn't traditional narrative, is the discovery of Adam and Eve in the caves.
You can read the entire interview here.
Book Review: The Road by Cormac McCarthy
With all the other writing I’m doing, I never have time to write reviews of the books I read. I will try to do better. Please note I’ve changed from four star reviews to five star reviews so they match up with my ratings at GoodReads. (And if you like books, get your butt over to goodreads.com, set up an account, and start sharing your thoughts about books you love and hate with friends. You can also see what books I’ve read so far this year, what I’m currently reading, and what’s on my shelf to read.)
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
Generally I find books that win prestigious prizes either 1) boring and/or 2) a bunch of literary drivel. The only reason I bothered to read Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for fiction) was because it came recommended by a friend whose opinion I trust.
I’m glad I did. This book had me riveted from beginning to end.
The book is about a father and young son who journey through a post-apocalyptic world (North America?) trying to survive in a world that is seemingly without plant or animal life of any kind. Cities are empty. Food is scarce. The only other people are those who are also trying to survive. The survivors they encounter will do anything to keep surviving.
Even without learning the names of a single character, where they are traveling to (the California coast?), and what caused the world as we know it to end (nuclear war?), McCarthy creates vivid portraits of two people trying to survive in a dangerous and dreary world. The father’s constant pursuit of finding a better place – one where they can survive – is driven by his love for his son and the hopes that his son can, one day, have a better life. In a world where everyone else has lost their humanity, the father does his best to keep some sort of civilized quality to their meager existence.
McCarthy’s writing is short and to the point but carries a strong poetic quality to it. He’s also able to paint a picture of a truly lifeless world in such a way that’s very haunting. Two months after I read it, I still think back to certain passages where he described the dead world and shudder. And even though the book paints a bleak portrait of humanity’s future, it does leave the reader with home that life will continue despite the awful world the characters find themselves in.
If you want a well-written, moving book without the literary pretense that comes with most award-winning books, then you’ll enjoy The Road.
Five stars (out of five) for a page-turning and unforgettable book.
Overcoming a Technology Gap: Texting
I’ve overcome a technology gap: I’ve learned how to text. Were I about five or ten years younger no doubt I’d have mastered this long ago or been ostracized for not knowing how. But when bought my first cell phone back in 2001, they were mainly used for – get this – phone calls. Now they’ve morphed into amazing communication devices. And though I like some of the extra gadgets on my cell phone like the camera and occasionally use them, texting has been one of those things that eluded me until last week.
It started when my brother (10 years younger) sent me a text from New York telling me that he and his buddies were going be in the audience for an episode of The Late Show. I wanted to text him back and tell him I wasn’t going to watch unless he or one of his friends did something stupid to get on camera.
Of course writing my thoughts out in a text one letter at time (the only way I knew how to do it) would take forever. And I didn’t have the time because I was at work and in the middle of project. So I handed the cell phone to the company’s receptionist and asked to type the response to my brother. Her hands flew in a furry over the keys and in about 15 seconds had typed out the response I requested.
“It’s amazing how fast you can type that out,” I said.
It’s easy when you have predictive text,” she said.
“Predictive text?” I said feeling like an idiot.
The receptionist them explained how it worked and then showed me how to do it. I went back to my office and quickly composed a text to Marathon Girl telling her I was going to be a little late coming home. Since I never text, Marathon Girl immediately called after reading the message and asked if I was mad at her.
“Why do you think I’m mad at you?” I said.
“You sent me a text message instead of calling,” she said.
“I’m not mad,” I said excitedly, “I just learned how to text.” And spent the next five minutes explaining to her how easy it was to send text messages using predictive text. To prove the point I sent her some loving text messages after our call ended.
I have no plans to text on a regular basis or become one of those people where it’s the preferred method of communication. But should that be the best way to send someone a message, it’s nice to know I can do it.
No doubt this will come in handy when I need to get hold of my kids once they have their own cell phones – if it’s still the preferred method of communication.
LOST: Ji Yeon
Dear writers of LOST (especially Drew Goddard and Christina M. Kim):
You probably think you’re really clever by putting a flashforward and a flashback in the same episode. I know you were trying to make it seem that Jin was on his way to the hospital to be with Sun. I know you were trying to build tension in the show and make the surprise ending (Jin is dead!) even more of a bombshell. Well, it worked. However, it came with a price: It made the entire audience feel like a bunch of dupes.
Flashback and flashforwards are a great storytelling technique. However, they’re only effective when they help us understand the motivations, character, and personality of a character better or fill in some vital part of the story. For example, the flashbacks in the episode “The Other Woman” we learned a little more about Juliet’s connection to Godwin, their history, and that she doesn’t mind sleeping with married men. However, what made her flashback really interesting was what it revealed about Ben. We all knew he was narcissistic and evil but that flashback showed us just what a creep he is while setting the stage for a future showdown between Ben and Jack.
Jin’s flashback in “Ji Yeon” didn’t reveal anything about Jin that we didn’t already know. Instead, it served only one purpose: To confuse and misdirect the viewer. The entire flashback was completely unnecessary especially when there were better ways to hide Jin’s fate until the end of the episode. Since we knew Sun’s scenes took place off the island, you could have made her even more delusional and had her calling out for Jin more or asking where he was. Or, you could have focused more on making the doctors seem like they were going to steal her baby. Either way it would have made the same tension you were trying to achieve with the lame flashback.
Aside from that one mistake you crafted a powerful story. You introduced just enough of Michael to make us all wonder why he’s working for Ben. The interaction between Sun and Jin on the island after he learned about the affair was great and felt real. And the scene at Jin’s gravesite at the end was wonderful and touching end to the episode. (Of course we’re all wondering what happened!)
In the future, please refrain from making LOST fans feel like dupes. It’s not that we don’t mind being confused for most of an episode. Rather, at the end of the ride, we don’t want to feel like we were suckered into getting emotionally involved in something that really had nothing to do with the actual story.
Looking forward to future episodes.
Sincerely,
Abel
Satisfaction
Go_Go Yubari was recently approached by a large company that was interested in employing her. They whisked her off to a big city and wined and dined her in order to persuade her to come join their team. Despite their persuasive sales pitch, she decided to stay where she was at because, in part, the proposed employment reminded her of an old job and the long hours and stress that accompanied it.
After parting ways with a well-paying but highly stressful job back in November, I applaud her choice. There’s so much more to a job than money, fancy titles, and the strings those usually accompany those two things. It’s not that I don’t find compensation or what I do for a living isn’t important. I do have a family support and life’s more enjoyable knowing you can make a mortgage payment and put food on the table. And writing makes me happy. I would perform much better at a job that required lots of writing as opposed to doing something else.
In addition to the above, a good job has always had three other important elements: 1) One that allows me to come home in a relatively stress free 80 percent of the time, 2) one that allows me to spend time with Marathon Girl and the kids and 3) doesn’t deplete my (creative) energy so I can write books after the kids are in bed.
When I set off on a job hunt back in November, I hoped that I could find a job that met all the criteria. Five weeks into my search, I ended up with three solid job offers. All paid very well and involved writing. So the determining factor was how well the job would allow me to accomplish the things I wanted to do after I came for from work. Like Go_Go Yubari, one of the offers reminded me too much of my old job in all the wrong ways. I turned it down. Two jobs left. My gut kept telling me which one to take. And since my gut feelings have never turned out to be wrong, I took the one I felt good about the first time I interviewed with the company.
I’ve been at my new job about four months. The family is clothed, fed, and has a roof over their head. There’s no worries about finances. I’m doing more writing with this new company than I ever did with my previous employer and seeing more results from my efforts. I usually have a good two to three hours to spend with the kids after work. And despite all the writing I accomplish during business hours, I’ve managed to make tons of progress on my second book after I kiss the kids goodnight. In the last two weeks, I’ve complete four chapters – about the same amount I was able to accomplish in a previous year with at my old job. Last night I went on a writing tear and wrote two thirds of another chapter in just under two hours.
Yeah, I made the right choice.
Why-oming
It takes a lot to make me laugh. That being said, a satirical piece in The New Yorker about rich investors buying Wyoming for the purpose of renovating it had me in stitches. An excerpt:
I feel sorry for people who still think of their places in terms of square feet. My partner, Scott, and I recently purchased Wyoming, which we are in the process of having renovated, and, yes, I do know the square footage (something like two trillion seven hundred and thirty billion square feet, give or take). But that’s just not a very practical type of measurement when we’re dealing with all the plumbers and contractors and security staff and reporters and other non-wealthy service personnel we have to give instructions to. Nowadays, everybody involved in redoing substantial properties like ours uses Global Transverse Mercator Units (GTMUs), which you get off a satellite feed. GTMUs, we’ve found, are much more accurate for detail work like wainscoting, and are able to deal with vast alkali flats and so on, too.
Basically, we are looking at this purchase as a tear-down. There’s really not a lot here you’d want to keep, except one or two of the Wind River Mountains and some old nineteen-twenties Park Service structures in Yellowstone. Scott and I bought for the location—it’s convenient to anywhere, really, if you think about it—and for the simplicity of line. We wanted someplace rectangular, a much easier configuration from a design point of view, and we won’t have to fuss with panhandles and changeable riverine property lines where we’re going to get into disputes with the landowner next door. Spare us the headaches, please! We’ve had plenty already, with the former occupants (thank heavens they’re gone) and all the junk they left behind—the old broken-down pickup trucks, houses, eyesore water towers, uranium mines, the University of Wyoming, Yellowtail Dam, Casper.
Maybe it’s because I lived in Wyoming for two years that I found it so funny. My hat is off to the writer Ian Frazier. He did his homework. He described the state perfectly.
You can the entire article here.