skin deep change

my blogmate and i are always talking about how we should probably update our filterless profile a little bit in order to better reflect our cultural evolution. i, for one, am dragging my feet, largely due to laziness, but also because deep down i know that these changes are mostly cosmetic. while i've softened my position on camisoles and pointy shoes (to the extent that i actually wear them from time to time) i don't think things have changed that much. another fall in hyde park- when over pumpkin lattes we (okay i) gaze at the fleece-vest-wearing shaggy-haired boys- no doubt the future urban planners and comp lit professors of america. yet again i'm a slave to post-season baseball in spite of my lack of regular season commitment. i've acquired a few cds, some of them good, developing my love of "bubble-popping" (thanks blogmate) euro-trash music, and am only occasionally able to distinguish between the good 80s music that i was too unsophisticated to appreciate the first time around and the new stuff that sounds just like it. and though i still haven't managed to go to the map room or get back to cleo's i'm adding the bungalow lounge to my to-do list of bars, at least while they're serving pumpkin martinis. i guess the problem with cataloging my progress is having to face my lack thereof.

screening for creepies

when i was just getting to know my good blogmate (she'd correctly surmised that i had no idea how to drive in a snow storm and was riding home with me) she told me about a benign but weird guy from work who'd apparently misinterpreted her friendliness as romantic interest and started calling her at home. "i've never been good at screening for creepies," she said, in explanation for how she'd allowed such a thing to happen.

given my heinous run of bad dates you'd think that i'd be better at screening for creepies, but it seems that i've allowed the infiltration of a similarly benign, though decidedly weirder creepy.

by the time his e-mail came i was getting pretty used to hearing from random, long-lost friends. it was in the weeks following katrina and the "oh my god is your family OK?" shout-out was getting pretty routine.

the back story is that jb is a friend of a friend who i dated for something like 3 weeks my freshman year of college (yes, 10 years ago). by "dated," i mean got drunk and kissed at a series of parties before figuring out that he was a weirdo at which point i stopped returning his phone calls. he was very nice, pretty cute, and i think very smart (physics major, which at the time impressed me) but something about him was really off.

so 10 years later he sends a random, "hey i hope you don't think this is weird but blah blah hurricane, blah blah saw our mutual friend at the high school reunion and i just thought i'd see what you were up to" email. a quick background check (i.e. called our mutual friend) confirmed that he was just as weird as ever, so after appropriate delay (3 or 4 days) i wrote back a cordial, "hey, family is fine, i live in chicago, how are you?" sort of thing. he then came back with a much longer email in which he revealed that 1) he really is a weirdo an 2) he's still an undergrad. with that, i put an end to the interaction (mentally), deleted the email, and left it at that.

a week later it came- ANOTHER email. this one a "hey, just wanted to make sure you weren't not answering because i sounded weird- sometimes i come off weird in emails, by the way i'm coming to chicago soon do you want to get together?" had he been more specific about when he was coming i might have found the energy to fabricate a specific excuse, but under the circumstances it seemed meaner to throw a blanket, "gee, sorry, i'm really busy," than to yet again ignore the email and hope that he'd go away.

fortunatley he doesn't seem to have picked any serious creepy, stalker-ish attributes and i suspect that this little episode has come to a close... but it's left me asking myself a couple of questions:
#1) how did i let this happen?
#2) how can anyone be so awkward over email?

for the former, i have to be honest with myself and admit that 1) i was flattered (initially) and 2) i was secretly hoping that he'd shed his creepy tendencies in college and become a nice, cute, smart guy.

the latter is more troubling. i have contended, both on this blog and in my frequent and adamant refusals to go online for dating purposes, that ANYONE can project a cool persona over email. i myself often suggest online that i am witty, calm, and collected when, in fact, i possess none of these attributes. that this guy not only fails to supress his weirdness, but suggests that his emails exaggerate it is pretty concerning. sometimes honesty just isn't the best policy.

ten things i hate about france

i suspect that it's misuse of the blog (disrespectful maybe) for me to dump out two weeks worth of accumulated observations and rants, mostly for the purpose of distracting myself from the unsavory thing that seems to be happening to my computer. as much of an internet junkie as i've become since my acquisition of DSL, i'm fairly uptight when it comes to downloading stuff, and am at a loss to explain why i've suddenly been invaded by some kind of nasty virus that in one feld swoop deleted half of my pictures (moments after i'd completed the laborious task of reorganizing them). i've been sitting here for the last two hours, agonizingly watching norton do his thing, and need to think about something else.

without further ado:

#1) bats
#2) stinky cheese
#3) public bathrooms
#4) the way that train platforms, underground walkways, and even secluded historical monuments all smell like public bathrooms
#5) lack of water pressure
#6) bunking with my grandmother (never in my life have i ever heard anyone snore so loud)

actually- i can't even come up with ten things. i'm a hopeless francophile and might as well admit it.

how to succeed in business (without really trying)

today over lunch at work, a group of co-workers and i couldn't help but shift our conversation to the new student worker, and her apparent lack of disregard for basic rules when trying to make a good first impression. in the last two weeks we've seen her ignore her main responsibilities, lie about completing assigned basic tasks ("did you look up that report?" "umm, i don't know." "can you go look it up and get back to us?" "ok [disappears for five minutes]." "well, do you have the report?" "what?" etc.), leave important meetings and march back in twenty minutes later with a mouth full of very crunchy food...

i take the position that it is not difficult to at least look like you care at work. i took the liberty at lunch of starting a brief list of ways to feign interest and competence:

1) head control: nod slowly and meaningfully at key points during meetings. avoid eye contact with the speaker, squinting a little to indicate concentration, until a key point has been finished and you are sure you will not be asked to answer a question or take on a new project. seek out eye contact and look like you've just understood something very clearly when a superior's pet teaching principles are made; then speed your meaningful nod just a teeny bit.
2) if you are falling asleep and you're being watched, start dutifully writing down a list... of something. groceries, errands, anything. take frequent breaks like you're taking notes on the conversation. you can, of course, take notes on your actual job, but it's not necessary.
3) if having trouble maintaining a look of interest, maintain eye contact with your co-workers' more stylish shoes, and make mental notes of who might have new footwear you can complement them on later. if your co-workers' shoes are boring, consider buying new shoes yourself and admiring your own feet.
4) if, god forbid, you are asked to report on a project's status, take a deep breath and then do not slow down. say everything you can in one breath as fast as you can, leaving no breaks for someone to correct you, ask you a question or assign you more work. if you have no idea how to explain something, look your boss in the eye and say "i think we all expected this;" if you don't have hard data conclude "the trends are stable;" if you didn't finish an assigned task, tell them "i need to follow up on this to be absolutely sure."

what else? everyone's job is unique, but i think most rules apply to all jobs. can anyone help my poor student? add to the filterless school of fake?

the honorable mention for best effort goes to...

next year i'm skipping marathon season and heading straight for the wild scallion urban adventure race. i think my training is well started.

my day started out innocently enough, with a plan to head to little italy to cheer on my good friend dwtacc at mile 18 of the chicago marathon. i was all armed with mp3 player, water bottle, asics, and a pancake breakfast so i could run her in the last 8 miles. i made it successfully to downtown via metra and out to taylor on the blue line, and found out from the starbucks-sponsored pacing info station that she had just passed the halfway mark. knowing i had plenty of time to catch her, i relaxed and watched such notable passers-by as kermit the frog, a few elvises, a farmer chasing his cow... but by the time i'd heard dj buono play his third round of the same motivational italian techno (blogmate, he totally has the same cd you just bought me!), and i still hadn't seen dwtacc, i headed back to starbucks to find out where she was... and they said she'd passed me an hour ago.

feeling deflated since i'd been planning for months to run her in, i trudged back to the el, and called mb and another friend to commiserate. they assured me that i could get the blue line back in time to catch her big finish. just as i stepped onto the train, though, my friend called me back to announce that according to the starbucks(tm) pacing system, dwtacc's pace had dropped off and i could catch her in the south loop if i ran. so i got off the train at halsted and started hauling through the industrial southwest downtown as fast as my legs could carry me, dodging buses, tired marathoners wrapped in foil, loiterers at the greyhound station, all while switching phone calls between mb and my friend who were glued to the pacing screens on their computers. just as i got to the finish line, mb called to tell me that the computer said she wasn't past 24.8 yet, so i could get her for the last mile. feeling inspired once again, i took off down south michigan weaving around police barriers to try and find her... until mb called me two minutes later with "yeah, never mind... she finished five minutes ago." doh.

from this attempt i conclude the following:

1) does the wild scallion include a segment of jumping curbs and police barriers while talking on a cell phone? 'cause someone should want me on their team. i ruled.
2) if starbucks is the new sponsor of the race pacing system, i think this is another reason to prefer caribou.

happy birthday, dwtacc. sorry, girl. it wasn't for lack of trying.

blog-iversary: a year in review

so i honestly thought when i proposed starting a blog to my good friend, that there was NO WAY it would last more than three posts, or that anyone but us would read it, or that there would be things funny enough to warrant review. and it might not actually be that funny. but in honor of the one-year birthday of filterless, a few memorable lines (to us, anyway...)

1) only people with socially stigmatizing diseases get to live fun lives.

2) i had no idea you could have an awkward silence all by yourself.

3) lesson#3: kick self for not liking the guy who tried to make the 3rd date a weekend in napa

4) i have mixed feelings on a one-street ghetto. how can something both be an oxymoron but also true?

5) i've spent the last 2 days laid up in bed, dying a slow painful death of what i can only imagine is tuberculosis.

6) whatever the reason that rcfog didn't immediately (or in the face of my amazing persistence) succumb to my adorable charm, i'm sure that i might be in more favorable standing had i not hit the bottle quite so hard. it's hard to know when alcohol switches from social lubricant to enough rope to hang yourself.

7) i feel like there's a lesson in here somewhere, but i think i'm just too hungover to see it.

8) the journey of a thousand miles begins with one plastic penis

9) i am anxiously waiting to accompany my blogmate to unitarian service, because i heard the classical music is good, and because i have a theory that unitarians are skinnier than average but have more-frequent-than-average receding hairlines and evanston-professor's-wife-ness, and i feel it's my job to scope the place for men for my blogmate while she gets her religion on.

10) in the spitty, foggy haze that characterized my drive to work this morning, double non-fat latte in hand as a monday morning self-indulgence, i got cut off by "mac dog 1," as designated by the license plate of the big-ass black sedan, driven by what i can only presume was a big ass.

11) how many adjectives do you take in your coffee? the issue at hand: whether schmoofy lattes are rendered socially acceptable when they are seasonal. is it somehow OK to order a nonfat decaf pumpkin spice latte because of its association with autumn and halloween? clearly, ordering a soy halfcaf sugar free vanilla double latte is just annoying.

une fille et son blog

as we near the one year mark, we're pushing our blog to the limit, this time with a live, transatlantic broadcast. once again, i've decided to spend my precious weeks of vacation kickin' it with my french peeps. if you're constructing an image of me as a chique parisian sipping espresso in a cafe, thoughtfully jotting down poetic musings about life along side of the seine, think again. my blogmate and i have done the math, and in the end, the best we can figure is that life in rural france is not unlike life in rural wisconsin, complete with monster truck rallies (even if no one would come with me last year) and above-ground swimming pools. i'm fairly certain that the french even have party-barge equivalents, although theirs tend to cruise down canals of more historic importance, complete with dilapidated (but fully operational) locks. while the annual family stroll down one of said canals, marvelling not only at their 300 year old stone work, but also at the elite party-barge occupants isn't on my short list of favorite french countryside pastimes, here are a few that make the cut:
#1: sheep shearing as a spectator sport - i'm SOL this year as it's too cold for scheduled de-wooling
#2: calf/lamb birthing, also as spectator sport
#3: assorted berry-picking
#4: sleeping until noon and blaming it on jet-lag
#5: inept tennis playing on the court that doubles as the school playground and site of the annual town bonfire
#6: tearing through town (population 200) with the windows down with the music thumping, drawing the locals from their houses so they can stare at me in slack-jawed amazement
#7: capitalizing on french etiquette - drop by to see anyone and you're guaranteed a cup of coffee
#8: political sparring with my uncles who hold me personally responsible for george bush's existence - i come from a long ine of registered socialists
#9: remastering the french keyboard
#10: pre-dinner apperitif with strange, yummy liquors and tasty snacks

you're getting exhausted just reading about it aren't you. i'd complain but instead i just say c'est la vie...