"These people...they'll need copy editors, won't they?"
"These people...they'll need copy editors, won't they?"
In any case, my high-school rival had just been hired as a freelance theater critic. As he was leaving, I slid up next to a coworker and pointed him out. "Hey, remember how I told you about my high-school rival?" I whispered. "That's him. Everything I said about him was true."
I soon left the office to work from home for the rest of the day, or so I said. In reality, I went over to my old rival's parents' house, where he was staying for a time. I noticed my name on a to-do list with a checkmark next to it, written on a giant sheet of graph paper, and I said, "Hey, that's cool—I've been writing my to-do list on graph paper, too!" (In this future, I had been.) We talked for a bit; then my brother came by, and I experienced a momentary problem of audience, as I'd wanted to talk to each of them separately.
Nonetheless, I ended up talking to both of them, and it's what they agreed on that's important: I needed a new job, one that wasn't just slave labor for someone else's interests. I needed to follow my original, true purpose, and do something greater with my life.
"Yes," I said. "I know. But it's difficult, you know? It's not as easy as you make it sound, especially not to find a new job in my field at this time."
Then I had to leave; my ship had to travel a very specific route to get back to the state we'd arrived from, as it was sort of a pirate vessel, in that we were deliberately bending the rules of interstate commerce to get to where we were going. You couldn't go through certain states (Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas) in the wrong order, and none of them could be your final destination, else your flight lost its free, unquestioned status. The pilots were vets and knew what they were doing; it was a little like redeeming box tops for rebates or something, you had to follow all the rules just right. So we got going...
...and then I was in a warehouse, with many white-painted steel fire stairs going up and down and boxes of old notecards and things everywhere—such was the current state of the ol' college newspaper office. I saw some old art-notecards addressed to me, complimenting me on a job well done in some distant epoch.
My mother and I were going to go shopping among some pallets of pirated cheap movies that had arrived there, but the guy wanted to sell us a Blu-ray disc for $35; when we balked, he pulled the plastic shrink-wrap flat and we saw it was actually marked $65. Then I realized the whole thing was just a scam to get the most money possible for these discs, which were really worth maybe $5 at most. We moved on—
—and then I saw someone who shouldn't have been in that realm, resembling the character Devon Banks from 30 Rock, and I raced to catch up with him. I thought this warehouse was inescapable, but it turned out that a piece of colorfully chalked plywood, part of an old theater set by its appearance, was in fact an exit to this realm's "backstage." Those in the know could hold a mirror up to it at the correct angle and view the resulting image, which would resolve itself into wire frames against a black background—a portal. Only the bearer of the mirror could see into it at the proper angle to conjure the portal—but someone else, I thought, could grab on and be pulled through once it had opened. So I leaped after him as he sunk into the plywood—
—and reappeared on a nearby street, in the midst of a scrubby sort of winter, with a bit of snow on the ground; it looked a lot like the Grove looks right now. I walked through Girl Scout territory and flashed them all the three-finger honor sign to guarantee my safe passage; as in Sin City's Old Town, they were very careful about who walked their streets. When I came near the open door to a warehouse, a woman came up to ask whether I was there to pick up my son, and I tried to shake the fog from my head, because obviously, that's what I had to be there to do, pick him up on time. So I went in to get him—
—and then I was omniscient, thinking about the way people lived in this future. There were some stand-alone family homes, updated to run on the new fuel (my old rival's parents had gotten upset when they thought I'd left the furnace running too hot after cooking my meal) and reflect the new way of living, with multilevel floors and built-in carpeted lounge seating. But a lot of families lived like this one lesbian couple I knew, who had a little daughter about my son's age (3 to 4ish). They lived in what was known as a Gutièrre home, which was really just a garage door, perhaps surrounded by a decorative line of brick, set into the side of a warehouse. Inside was a ground-floor studio apartment, cold and subject to exhaust and ventilation problems. Families had almost no children's toys, or at least this one didn't, and they made all of their meals in the microwave. The meals stacked easily; an adult ration of pasta (supposedly pappardelle with cream sauce, peas, and mushrooms) was the same width and length as the child's ration, but twice as tall. This was their life, lived in what amounted to a dingy garage. Almost everyone lived that way...
I awoke with Blue Öyster Cult's "Shooting Shark" lingering in my head.
There is now a yellow, diamond-shaped "NOT A THROUGH STREET" sign affixed to a telephone pole just past the entrance to eastbound S. 14th Street (what little is left of it). This sign, unfortunately, is well above eye level even for passengers in a large pickup truck or SUV, as my brother and I discovered during our reconnaisance of the area last week.
But I suppose marginal progress has been made.
⋅ Our names both start with the letter M.
⋅ I'm a limeonaire. He claims to be a humannaire.
⋅ I own epigrammatic.org. He owns (but hasn't yet used) ecopathic.com.
⋅ I'm on MetaFilter. He's on MetaFilter.
Well, of course I want to opt out of placement of cookies by advertisers. That sounds great! So I visited the Network Advertising Initiative site linked to try to do just that. And—sigh—of course there's a catch. It turns out that in order to opt out of placement of Facebook advertising cookies by more than two of the sites listed, I have to enable placement of cookies by third parties in Firefox across the board.
Um, no. I'm guessing there are many reasons why they chose to set up an opt-out system this way—and I don't purport to know any of them for sure. But this strikes me as a rather clumsy solution.
The best part? When I went back to the Facebook Site Governance note to comment on the issue, I found that despite the note supposedly being open for comment until November 5, I could read others' comments, but not leave any of my own. Awesome.
P.S. Facebook, "opt-out" is not a verb. "Opt out" would be the correct spelling; the hyphenated form finds more proper use as either an adjective or adverb.
Or, as a very smart friend rephrased it: "It was the rubber, not the band."
That's a nice response, and does promise some action; I'll have to go check out the area again to see whether the specified progress has been made. In any case, the highway lights she mentions definitely do not adequately light the area in question, especially not on an overcast, rainy night. And I never did hear back from any of the others I copied on the letter.
(As previously conceived here.)
To further clarify what those opinions might be, I've gone through my Twitter feed and compiled a list of 10 biases I think my posts there exemplify.
I've long liked the idea of creating a personal statement of bias. Full disclosure. 'Cause in the world to come, that is your raiment, not some trumped-up, imagined objectivity. There's a reason people mock Objectivists. Why shouldn't they also mock journalists who pretend to have achieved such distance from their citizenship? Not even the Society of Professional Journalists' Code of Ethics demands that journalists do things like abstain from voting.
I made a rather clumsy attempt at something like this back in college, with significantly less than stunning results. ("Irascible ranting" is probably the best way to describe it.) More recently (and more lucidly), I also wrote this on the subject.
The list I compiled this week isn't a mea culpa; actually, some of the items may be reminiscent of the tack taken by the would-be job-seeker who, upon being asked the classic question about "your worst workplace mistake," turns the question around: "Well, there was this one time when I was overly zealous in defending the personal liberties of my fellow Americans..." It makes me wonder whether I'm even thinking about the question the right way. But the list I came up with is more subtle and more encompassing, I think, than a rote recounting of positions on an arbitrary checklist of contentious "issues."
On to the biases.
