as i continue to enjoy a satisfying, if not silly e-relationship with someone who i hope will became my next conquest in the online dating game (should we ever be able to coordinate schedules and go out on a second date), i continue to ponder the way information is shared and misinterpreted in this day and age.
one of my big gripes with the internet dating scene has always been that seemingly anyone can perpetuate the illusion of being funny, charismatic and well-adjusted, given enough time and help from dictionary.com. that's not entirely true - i'm constantly impressed at how many creepy, inarticulate and/or error-laden messages i receive. but it may well be that even those people have managed to incrementally improve their images by putting their misguided, maladjusted thoughts on paper. the point is, we're all able to up the ante a little while under the protective cloak of digital communication. if you don't believe me come buy me a beer and you'll find out that i'm substantially less articulate in person than i am on this blog.
the pitfalls, i'm sure you all know, are numerous. messages that we thought were funny, coy, or sarcastic are often received as being snide, cryptic, or just plain mean. and then of course there's the whole problem of accidental recipients. a word of advice, my friends: after you stop seeing someone, no matter how amicable the separation, take him off your phone contact list that very minute, before you have a chance to do something stupid or careless, like, say, inadavertently send him a "happy thanksgiving from the alamo" text message. also, no matter how annoying you think cutesy IM symbols are, the occasional, strategically placed smiley face goes a long way.
perhaps the reason that i hold out some hope for the boy-du-jour is that we seem to have similar thresholds for e-cynicism. it's nice when your sarcasm is well received, especially when you're giving up some of your best material.
if this seems contrived and icky to you may i suggest that we're not really doing so much better when we're up close and personal. my blogmate and i look alike to the extent that we are both tall, brown-haired, white girls, but i really think the physical similarities end there. and while we have the same job, so do 5 other people in our office. i understand that to many of our coworkers we really are interchangeable, but you'd think after a year and half we'd at least be recognizable as two separate people. this argument seems to be lost on our secretary, who continues to page one of us looking for the other, puts our mail in the other's box, and today had this conversation with me.
me: hi, it's jo-na.
secretary: hi jo-na. what can i do for you?
me: you paged me, i'm returning your call.
secretary: why did i call you?
me: i think you wanted to talk about the meal vouchers.
secretary: oh, i talked to jo-na already, she told me what you need.
me: but i'm jo-na.
secretary: oh.
me: did you talk to my blogmate?
secretary: probably.
live or across a screen, we're all just data points.
Tuesday, November 27, 2007
happy belated ribs-giving
i hope you all had a nice and food-ful holiday weekend, wherever you were. i celebrated my triumphant first-annual moving-the-holidays-for-my-personal-convenience, as mb and i were successfully able to convince both sets of parents to join us in chicago for thanksgiving rather than embarking on the usual drive all over wisconsin. for the record, there are excellent deals on hotel rooms around thanksgiving, should the need ever arise for you. we gave thanks for our health and safe travels, for brett favre's record-breaking season, for the nightly free happy hour drinks at our parents' hotel, and for thanksgiving dinner held at restaurants (weber grill) that serve both delicious turkey dinners as well as the traditional baby-back ribs that i'm sure our forefathers would have eaten had they had a good dry rub.
over dinners and drinks, our conversation turned to the myriad of excellent but fake stories debunked on snopes.com -- i really think that something about those stories is so compelling that it's really hard for any of us to believe that they're false. mb was patiently explaining to his parents that no, starbucks is not refusing to send coffee to the soldiers in iraq, and no, microsoft is not sending out huge rebate checks for sending around junk email, and to soften the blow, told them that lots of us have fallen prey to myths. but as he opened with "this is not a true story, but it's funny and [my blogmate] was very sad to discover it's a myth:" and proceeded to tell the penguin story. my mother hung on almost every word... except the several parts where he said it wasn't a true story. "wait - which aquarium was this at? how old was the child? how did he get the penguin in his backpack? what did the aquarium do?"
so it turns out that penguins are just so lovable that we can't believe that a precocious little child-of-a-friend-of-a-friend didn't steal one from the shedd. not so with senior citizens... nobody at the dinner table was willing to believe my story about the stds going around the villages retirement community in florida.
over dinners and drinks, our conversation turned to the myriad of excellent but fake stories debunked on snopes.com -- i really think that something about those stories is so compelling that it's really hard for any of us to believe that they're false. mb was patiently explaining to his parents that no, starbucks is not refusing to send coffee to the soldiers in iraq, and no, microsoft is not sending out huge rebate checks for sending around junk email, and to soften the blow, told them that lots of us have fallen prey to myths. but as he opened with "this is not a true story, but it's funny and [my blogmate] was very sad to discover it's a myth:" and proceeded to tell the penguin story. my mother hung on almost every word... except the several parts where he said it wasn't a true story. "wait - which aquarium was this at? how old was the child? how did he get the penguin in his backpack? what did the aquarium do?"
so it turns out that penguins are just so lovable that we can't believe that a precocious little child-of-a-friend-of-a-friend didn't steal one from the shedd. not so with senior citizens... nobody at the dinner table was willing to believe my story about the stds going around the villages retirement community in florida.
Friday, November 16, 2007
good clean fun
i don't usually send out mass junk emails, but as i gleefully sent the sneezing baby panda youtube link to everyone i know this morning it became quite obvious to me that one of two things is going on: 1) i have gone soft in my old age or 2) i'm a sea of contradictions. evidence: the last time i sent out a youtube link to everyone i know it was dick in a box.
don't get me wrong. i think there's a time and place for poor taste... usually concentrated in my daily 30 minute fix of the family guy. that said, i'm growing quite weary of the standard, "family centered" sitcoms which, under a very thin veil of propriety, are chock-full of crass humor not really appropriate for families. it goes like this: our morbidly obese hero siddles up the bar with his shifty friends and through a series of winks and nudges conveys a sentiment to the tune of, "hey, it's my birthday today, and you know what that means... it's the one day of the year that my ordinarily frigid (but disproportionately thin, attractive, and stylish) wife releases her inner porn star."
so i guess it's no wonder that i've started to appreciate things that, while funny, truly are benign. hence my love of the sneezing panda, and of penguin in the backpack story. from the moment i heard it i LOVED the story of the 4 year old smuggling the penguin home from the aquarium, and delightedly repeated it to everyone i knew, never for a moment suspecting that it was urban legend. now i am heartbroken, jaded, and sad. i really enjoyed having such a funny story to tell that was appropriate for all audiences, that offended no one, and always made people laugh. i suppose i could continue telling it, but it's just not the same. this demoralzing event has left me so cynical, in fact, that i even have to question the sneezing panda. is it all just a contrived hoax, slipped into youtube to sucker gullible types like myself?
while i remain indignant about the factitious penguin story, and am tickled pink to have been shown the sneezing panda video, i do feel compelled to announce my steadfast belief that no woman actually named her twin babies lemonjello and orangejello. no fewer than 10 people have told me that they personally encountered these infants. this, my friends, really is urban legend. it's a story told coast to coast, that, if true, would certainly bump lemonjello and orangejello above jacob and emily as the most popular baby names in america. i don't buy it.
don't get me wrong. i think there's a time and place for poor taste... usually concentrated in my daily 30 minute fix of the family guy. that said, i'm growing quite weary of the standard, "family centered" sitcoms which, under a very thin veil of propriety, are chock-full of crass humor not really appropriate for families. it goes like this: our morbidly obese hero siddles up the bar with his shifty friends and through a series of winks and nudges conveys a sentiment to the tune of, "hey, it's my birthday today, and you know what that means... it's the one day of the year that my ordinarily frigid (but disproportionately thin, attractive, and stylish) wife releases her inner porn star."
so i guess it's no wonder that i've started to appreciate things that, while funny, truly are benign. hence my love of the sneezing panda, and of penguin in the backpack story. from the moment i heard it i LOVED the story of the 4 year old smuggling the penguin home from the aquarium, and delightedly repeated it to everyone i knew, never for a moment suspecting that it was urban legend. now i am heartbroken, jaded, and sad. i really enjoyed having such a funny story to tell that was appropriate for all audiences, that offended no one, and always made people laugh. i suppose i could continue telling it, but it's just not the same. this demoralzing event has left me so cynical, in fact, that i even have to question the sneezing panda. is it all just a contrived hoax, slipped into youtube to sucker gullible types like myself?
while i remain indignant about the factitious penguin story, and am tickled pink to have been shown the sneezing panda video, i do feel compelled to announce my steadfast belief that no woman actually named her twin babies lemonjello and orangejello. no fewer than 10 people have told me that they personally encountered these infants. this, my friends, really is urban legend. it's a story told coast to coast, that, if true, would certainly bump lemonjello and orangejello above jacob and emily as the most popular baby names in america. i don't buy it.
Monday, November 12, 2007
out in the open
now that you've all been made aware of the existence of the secret blog, i'll tell you that my anemic blog participation has been largely due to the fact that everything that happens to me is too boring or inappropriate for public blogging. as such you've all been buffered from most of my grad-school related rants, as well the awkward, but ultimately un-interesting play-by-plays of my current round of internet dating. you can thank my good blogmate for that one - she's really taking one for the team.
that said, the harris school of puplic policy really does deserve to be mocked in a public forum. as our sociologist laureat recently put it, "while it's true that medical residency is, in many ways, like high school, harris actually is high school." lucky for me i already have friends and self-esteem (internet dating not withstanding) and as such was not as hurt as some of my classmates upon the discovery of the underground, by-invitation-only party scene... policy students gone wild, if you will. apparently there's a subset of our 120 student cohort that has taken to raucous kickball playing and drinking, but unless you're in the M.P.P 2009 group on facebook you're not actually invited to the "oh my god dude, i got so wasted" festivities held at jimmy's woodlawn tap and other fine hyde park establishments. unfortunately for the cool kids, facebook isn't nearly as anonymous as even the more public filterless blog, and as it turns out, these clandestine get-togethers aren't really much of a secret, as anyone who wants to can find out all about them and even pull up the pictures. don't let on that you know about it though, lest you get chided by the group's alpha girl (known previously to me only as the girl who actually interrupted econ class to ask "what's a widget?") - "oh, those were for our eyes only."
as it turns out, the internet has many functions beyond its use as a not-so-secret slam book and a torture weapon for single 30 year old women. i learned this last week, when a round of pre-blind-date non-sexual foreplay emails in which we dared each other to drink more honestly made me feel much less nervous about the whole thing.
score one for cyberspace.
that said, the harris school of puplic policy really does deserve to be mocked in a public forum. as our sociologist laureat recently put it, "while it's true that medical residency is, in many ways, like high school, harris actually is high school." lucky for me i already have friends and self-esteem (internet dating not withstanding) and as such was not as hurt as some of my classmates upon the discovery of the underground, by-invitation-only party scene... policy students gone wild, if you will. apparently there's a subset of our 120 student cohort that has taken to raucous kickball playing and drinking, but unless you're in the M.P.P 2009 group on facebook you're not actually invited to the "oh my god dude, i got so wasted" festivities held at jimmy's woodlawn tap and other fine hyde park establishments. unfortunately for the cool kids, facebook isn't nearly as anonymous as even the more public filterless blog, and as it turns out, these clandestine get-togethers aren't really much of a secret, as anyone who wants to can find out all about them and even pull up the pictures. don't let on that you know about it though, lest you get chided by the group's alpha girl (known previously to me only as the girl who actually interrupted econ class to ask "what's a widget?") - "oh, those were for our eyes only."
as it turns out, the internet has many functions beyond its use as a not-so-secret slam book and a torture weapon for single 30 year old women. i learned this last week, when a round of pre-blind-date non-sexual foreplay emails in which we dared each other to drink more honestly made me feel much less nervous about the whole thing.
score one for cyberspace.
Friday, November 09, 2007
all in your head?
in the almost three years that my blogmate and i have been writing this blog, we've had periods of being more or less prolific, more or less funny, more or less sarcastic... and probably more or less cryptic. sometimes things happen that, although we've de-identified ourselves to some extent, we just feel like don't have their proper place on the internet. so they pop up in passing references, or in, say, a couple of weeks of blog silence. (apparently we're about to start fixing said blog-silence with a new guest blogger feature... speaking of which, where is our guest blogger, anyway? all this excitement and no material?)
the weird thing is that when you write a blog with someone else, particularly someone that you know well enough to share the stories that don't feature prominently here, it seems like the stories take on a blog-like life of their own. all of the secret stories, no matter how boring or neurotic or inappropriate, start with "so, the secret blog in my head goes like this: 'my usually quiet blogmate was unusually quiet that day...'" it's a weird way of taking a step back from a situation, i suppose. but it sure beats stories that begin "let me tell you about my crazy family THIS time..."
i can't tell if this is a good thing or a bad thing, but it also has the unintended effect of making everything feel like we're on the wonder years or chasing amy or one of those shows/movies with voice-over internal dialogue. now i want to know where my theme music is. i think art paul schlosser's "pink pants" or maybe "have a peanut butter sandwich" would work great.
the weird thing is that when you write a blog with someone else, particularly someone that you know well enough to share the stories that don't feature prominently here, it seems like the stories take on a blog-like life of their own. all of the secret stories, no matter how boring or neurotic or inappropriate, start with "so, the secret blog in my head goes like this: 'my usually quiet blogmate was unusually quiet that day...'" it's a weird way of taking a step back from a situation, i suppose. but it sure beats stories that begin "let me tell you about my crazy family THIS time..."
i can't tell if this is a good thing or a bad thing, but it also has the unintended effect of making everything feel like we're on the wonder years or chasing amy or one of those shows/movies with voice-over internal dialogue. now i want to know where my theme music is. i think art paul schlosser's "pink pants" or maybe "have a peanut butter sandwich" would work great.
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