Month: June 2004

Shaving like a gay man

We watch a lot of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy on Bra­vo. Not so much late­ly, as we’ve been pret­ty busy, but TiVo keeps us in the loop. Any­how, I have tak­en spe­cial note of the part where the gay guys scream and shud­der when the straight guy shaves. It seems they want us to shave with the hair, not against it. And slow­ly.

So I resolved the try it. My nor­mal shav­ing tech­nique is to not. Shave, that is. Hence the beard. But now that I am work­ing, and should look halfway respectable, I’ve begun to take it up again (no, I still have the beard, but now I’m shav­ing the non-beard parts on a more reg­u­lar basis). I must con­fess that my shav­ing would send the gay guys into con­nip­tions: fast, against the grain, with lit­tle regard for my safe­ty or com­fort.

I am try­ing the gay way now, and I must say, I am hav­ing mixed results. Shav­ing slow­ly gives me the hee­bies, I can feel each hair rasp­ing across the blade and it does­n’t feel good. And shav­ing in the direc­tion of the hair is nice and smooth, but does not give me a clean shave. I am always left with a short stub­ble that you can’t real­ly see, but you can def­i­nite­ly feel. (My beard is fair­ly light, so since there isn’t a lot of face and neck stroking going on at work, I can prob­a­bly get by with this amount of stub­ble.)

Any advice out there? I’m using three blades already, though I haven’t changed the blade recent­ly. I’ll try that next.

The family that eats strange meat together…

I was born an Argen­tine, and some­where on my pass­port (the expired Argen­tine one) it says in fine print that I must eat meat, or I’ll lose my cit­i­zen­ship. Argen­tines eat a lot of meat, and when it comes to the cow, they eat most of that, too. Empanadas (rough­ly trans­late as meat turnovers), blood sausage, beef kid­neys, sweet­breads, stew, matam­bre (stuffed beef roll), and bone mar­row on a crack­er. Among oth­ers.

Tiffany, bless her, is a Mid­west­ern girl when it comes to beef. She grew up with steak, usu­al­ly on the grill, with some kind of sauce. On one of her first trips to meet my par­ents, she was offered the afore­men­tioned bone mar­row on a crack­er. To her cred­it, she tried very hard to like it.

This all came to mind when, yes­ter­day, I got her to try a lit­tle of the chick­en liv­er that came with the whole chick­en we were roast­ing. She knew she would­n’t like it, and I knew she would­n’t like it, but I like liv­er so much that I thought maybe she should try this par­tic­u­lar bit of liv­er, and I can only imag­ine that she likes me so much that she thought maybe she would try this par­tic­u­lar piece of liv­er. She bit it off and chewed and smiled and I came back inside. And a few sec­onds lat­er she rushed in and spat it out into the sink.

I do love her so. She does­n’t need to eat all the strange meat I do.

I can always eat liv­er with her moth­er (or my fam­i­ly, but that’s a giv­en).

Freedom will… um… uh…

Con­di Rice gave George Bush a note today dur­ing a NATO meet­ing that said the Iraq han­dover had gone as planned, two days ear­ly. George Bush wrote at the top of the note:

Free­dom will rain rein reign

Jon Stew­art called it the world’s first “sneak retreat.” I find myself won­der­ing if the Iraqis know that Bush has just hung them out to dry. When peo­ple die in Iraq from now on, the Bush Admin­is­tra­tion can say, and you can bet they will say, that it’s not their fault, because the coun­try is being run by the Iraqis now.

Caller ID says it’s from Iraq, best not answer the phone, George.

SaverLab

Coolest thing I’ve found recent­ly. Saver­Lab is a lit­tle, free pro­gram that lets you run a Mac OS X screen­saver in a win­dow, like an appli­ca­tion. For a lit­tle over a year now, I’ve been run­ning a screen­saver over the Inter­net for our par­ents. They con­nect with their Mac OS X com­put­ers and select our screen­saver, it down­loads pic­tures of Aidan to their machines, and when they start their screen­savers they get Aidan! When I update pic­tures, it auto­mat­i­cal­ly updates their com­put­ers, so they get only the most recent pic­tures of Aidan.

Very cool.

What Saver­Lab lets me do is have a win­dow run­ning that shows all those pic­tures of Aidan. I don’t have to put my com­put­er to sleep to see them, I just have to look in the cor­ner. I like it. A lot.

Just a sec: editing my own post for slanderous insensitivity

Please wait while I edit a pre­vi­ous post for slan­der­ous insen­si­tiv­i­ty.

But real­ly. I post­ed about an expe­ri­ence I had today, at work. The Inter­net is rife with exam­ples of peo­ple get­ting fired (extreme result, yes) for post­ing about work on their blogs. For the most part they either work(ed) for huge, mono­lith­ic, head-up-their-butt com­pa­nies (see: guy who got fired by Microsoft for post­ing pho­tos of their load­ing dock), or they total­ly rip on their boss and their boss’ dog Fluffy.

I had an expe­ri­ence where some­one I think is rep­re­sen­ta­tive of much of the coun­try made a com­ment I just could not believe, it was so dumb. I wrote a post that explained the cir­cum­stances, the com­ment, and my reac­tion to it.

My orig­i­nal post did not hide the fact that I worked, and that this expe­ri­ence took place at work, and while this was not with­in my work con­text, nor with the clien­tele I work with… well, I can see that as a rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the place I work (you all read ear­li­er posts in this blog, right? Is it too late to be vague now?) I should maybe just shut the hell up. After all, a poten­tial client might see me rip­ping on some poor inno­cent I met in the com­pa­ny cafe­te­ria, and decide they don’t want to take the same risk, tak­ing their busi­ness else­where. I can under­stand that this would be a bad out­come, which is why I edit­ed the post in ques­tion to remove any trace of my work envi­ron­ment. I just abstract­ed it all to pieces. I hope it still makes sense.

And yet.

Stu­pid peo­ple deserve to be called on being stu­pid, although not in a slan­der­ous way (unless they are our #$@!%!! Pres­i­dent).

I’m a real­ly nice, rea­son­able guy.

I spend almost half my wak­ing hours at work, and I’m not sup­posed to blog about it?!!

There are prob­a­bly bet­ter things to do, I just have to find them.

Plant a money tree!

This entry was orig­i­nal­ly post­ed with a lot more detail. Then Tiffany read it, and sug­gest­ed I might want to be fuzzi­er about who, what, when and where with regards to my employ­er. Read about my thoughts on this here. On to the post.

Tiffany and I have a lot of mon­ey in invest­ments. We were pret­ty ded­i­cat­ed investors before we had Aidan (well, before we got preg­nant, in any case) and we hope to get back to it, but the very least we alsways made sure we did was ful­ly fund our employ­er con­tri­bu­tion retire­ment funds. We put in $x per month, and our employ­ers put in $2x, or $1.8x or some­thing. I mean real­ly, it’s free, before-tax mon­ey. Like plant­i­ng a mon­ey tree.

Today I heard some­one, in all seri­ous­ness, sug­gest that because her broth­er lost all his mon­ey by putting it in stock options at the com­pa­ny he worked for (which tanked), “this is like, no bet­ter than play­ing the slots, right?” She was seri­ous, and I don’t think she’s chang­ing her mind. To her, invest­ing means tak­ing a huge gam­ble with all your mon­ey. If that’s the only expe­ri­ence she has, of course she’s going to sock it all away under the mat­tress.

I am seri­ous­ly wor­ried about my gen­er­a­tion when we get to retire­ment age. I know I’ll be fine, but I think the vast major­i­ty of peo­ple my age will be S.O.L. Which does­n’t mean Sure Of Liq­uid­i­ty.

So Reagan died

Not sure how I feel about Ronald Rea­gan dying this week­end. Okay, that’s not true. I know how I feel, I’m just not sure how much of it is seem­ly to tell.

I’m relieved for his fam­i­ly, who can final­ly rest after hav­ing to watch him dete­ri­o­rate so slow­ly and painful­ly. I’m sad that some­one has died, just in gen­er­al terms. But the best thing I can say about Ronald Rea­gan him­self is that, at least he did­n’t blow us all to Hell. Though I do believe he cer­tain­ly came close. Clos­er than any­one, except pos­si­bly George W. Bush, but the jury is still out on that one.

I was 10 years old when Jim­my Carter lost to “Mr. Ray­gun” as I used to write it. I did­n’t like his pol­i­tics then, and I can hon­est­ly say I nev­er did warm to him. But (hey, here’s anoth­er nice thing I can say about him!) he nev­er polar­ized the nation the way George Bush has.

Rest in Peace.

Cover of the San Jose Mercury News is awesome

Yes, it is in regard to Rea­gan’s death, and yes, they had ten years to put it togeth­er, but this is the kind of gut­sy design that stokes my fire. It is hard to imag­ine, when you see the whole broad­sheet like this, but this is a news­pa­per, folks. Fold­ed in the mid­dle, sold on the street, I think this is real­ly cool. Kudos to the folks behind this design.

Found via [News­de­sign­er]

merca10606t.jpg

Okay, now I’m really employed

So, it took a while, and I’m told the hold up was the hol­i­day week­end, but I ma now the proud own­er of a start­ing date for my new job. Thurs­day. Human Resources at my new employ­er, Creighton Uni­ver­si­ty, took their sweet time with my back­ground check. Maybe it was my life over­seas, Madrid and Athens are both pret­ty hot but­ton top­ics right now. Maybe it was my draft card, after all. Or maybe it was some thor­ough (read uncon­cerned) employ­ee dot­ting his t’s and cross­ing his i’s.

In any case, I report to work at 8:00 am. I may not have a desk, I prob­a­bly won’t have a com­put­er, but I already have work to do (and sur­pris­ing­ly, I have been think­ing about it).

It feels good to be mak­ing mon­ey again, though that sounds so scrab­bling­ly crass. It may also feel good to be doing some­thing again, but I’ll have to wait and see. Employ­ment for the sake of being employed (or more poet­i­cal­ly, for the sake of feel­ing use­ful) has nev­er been my strong suit.