rant

Chrissake. I should be able to stupid trust [wheeze] my stupid brain [wheeze]to keep me alive while I sleep.

That one thing that happened:

It makes more sense from the standpoint of an impartial observer.

TV

I love TV! It's like having a roomate with a closed head injury.

Muzio Clementi unplugged

Szokoly's recording of the 6 Progressive Sonatinas [op 36] confronts the music world with these shocking revelations:

#1: You are not the only person in the world who has heard the sonatinas.

#2: The sonatinas are not the exclusive property of the Suzuki method of piano study.

#3: A grown-up named Bholslav Szokoly plays the sonatinas for his job.

and I saw the movie Osama

Any time I am romantically involved with a man, I steal his pyjamas. And then when the man is gone and I'm going out to get a burrito, I pull the toggles on the fubu hoodie around my face and put on the boy pyjamas and swagger down Vernor looking tres menacing in the dark.

also I am reading a book by

John Irving, because each and every girl I am friends with has a book by this man in her bedroom. Down to the last girl. So I want to understand the magic ["Hilary, there's no *magic* in the book!" Sharon]. The first page is about a young man's complex relationship with his mother. I'm really more of a Harry Potter person.

so anyway

[yawn].I am going to do something very interesting with my hair.

...

Given her static position on the big white couch, you would never have guessed that Hilary was headed for trouble.

"and now that I'm back, I have a few things to say"

mumbled Hilary in the big house: "First of all, must I chose between my dignity and an idiotic stuffed sheep in every scene?".

I guess that I just got

homesick.

...

Every morning at the 7-eleven, immovable blocks of people loiter in the aisle by my chocolate chocolate chip muffin. For a long time I though that they were blind and deaf.

coordinates

vector: eclaircissement fading into the dull forever.

position: supine [relative to grid]

reading: Textual Dynamics of the Professions .

Eds: Bazerman and Paradis

Notes: "Abrupt ending--consider adding the phrase or maybe we're just bitter ". [my italics, in margins of Fahnestock and Secor]

coffee

The bitter thoughts that prey on her on the porch in the sun /which highlights a shimmering layer of dust.

Woot!

Everyone has either :

a) a website, or

b) a grade that reflects the quality of their written work in Advanced Expository Writing, not your personal issues or concurrent preparation for the MCAT.

Time to go home and uncork a bottle of wavy watermelon detangler.

shame

Read a differing version of the frame and story.

O indistinct and unpronounceable god-slash-s-es.

Tonight I will sleep like a floating hoverlink at bottom=0.

"Quiet! I'm trying to finish my zen circle".

Ask Shashi how this zen circle magically drew itself while Hilary lay on the floor of the lab at 12:45 pm feeling her bracelet.

One wonders if the same phenomenon will work on my students' papers.

What is it about a computer screen after hours that makes people evolve verbal tics and pant about word choice to their absent students?

Ever since she first encountered the palace at 4am in an architectural theory book her mind redrew the palace wherever she looked.

Everything: now 20% more confusing.

"and ton-i-i-ght, it's just me and the toolbar": Hilary campily sang. It was a natural outcome of having heard the phrase it's like the song goes too many times.

What's this?:

Yes, this is an array: an array of error messages .

"So I'm taking the English department digital camera with me to Brazil", said Vicki, which made me seethe because I am not allowed to take that camera to floor 1.

"And I noticed all of these photos of like"--

"pylons. For a second I was like, what is Ovais doing with the CLA website? And then I started to suspect".

so there she was doing the usual again /

with the zip drive functioning as a hair tie holder.

...

Unwilling to append and I spend the night in a design lab to her self-description at this time, Hilary made up a new CSS style called "drunk margins".

He gnawed on her like a crust of bread.
The percolator chanted/ soap decanted/ the
sea creatures flickered and died.

this line is under construction.
Her feet scratched a blue note to the beat of her sobs on the floor.

# :

snowy night before thanksgiving in the car.

filter="alpha(opacity="+ieop+")" :

Light and particles absorbed by readme.txt.

off on a technicality

frozen java

So the people have to click on the content to make it change, sighed Hilary. Is that such a crime?

low country.

...

It took nothing more than a momentary encounter with Wavy Watermelon detangler to spark in Hilary the grand idea of using boys for sex.

woot!

Owain on 7/27.

the palace at 4 am

self-portrait.

dear Sarah,

If I ever got married on the weekend of July 15, people would be walking around my bachelor party wearing a t-shirt that says:


Is all.

may contain wheat

Idea for photoblog: wide-angle views of bathroom floors I have collapsed on.

"It was the groundbreaking debut of peer-reviewed articles onscreen".

The way things work:

the internet is a series of tubes

Hilary unlaced her muddy shoes on the front porch. One year ago she would even have come back after class to get dressed for tonight, but, this morning, what she had come back for is the green notebook full of pseudocode.

They washed off their feet with the garden hose. Hilary shook the leaves and twigs out of her hair and put away the cold bowl of sprouts, but the rest was silence.

...

"As I was returning from interviewing Faber, I took a shortcut through the tech lab and was startled, halfway through the darkened lab, to find Ryan McDougall {a communication specialist who works in the lab} working in Photoshop with all the lights in the lab turned off. When I asked him why the lights were out, he said that:

one. I don't know, maybe it helps me see the screen a little better. but two, it keeps people from bothering me trying to get into the lab."

Datacloud, "Interface Overflow:

release notes

"What are these images next to our schedule of research activities?"

"Placeholders."

"What are you going to replace them with?"

"Orange cones".

Pause. Notes shuffle.

"What size cones?"

sprawl

shuttling back and forth between floors 9 and 10, Hilary marveled at the number of prerequisites it takes to make coffee.

last night in the lab

The people were going home. Hilary untied the scarf from her zigzaggy hair and retied it around the zip drive. There, she said, unwrapping a pack of smarties to the tune of the most ancient prayer in the world.

an open letter:

and/or

(and) the sound of an invisible door closing on the horizon

(or) a discarded bread crust

Another reason to support women in computing:

commercial ties

"This is a hell of a time to be engaged in a commercial transaction", Hilary thought, coins trailing behind her on the marble floor.

the hours start dragging me away

Daydream:

The Shetlander hotel owners from Goffman's (1957) anthropology flourish a tray of baklava for some Briton guests, then flourish (just as elegantly) back through the kitchen doors to slop boiled baklava ends into bowls and bowls while the worker's socks steam over the kettle as in days of yore.

under construction

Pardon our dust as we hack the blogger template.

"Sharon, whatever I know about that was told to me in confidence".

His ugly oatmeal face reminds me of the quakers, who are renowned for their honesty in business.

Device drivers allow more documents, ie problems, to appear on your desktop at a faster rate.

dissoi logoi

"Are you a knower of things Hilary", said Sharon. "And what are the things with which you know?"

...and I keep finding their scowls in the tile pattern.

How touch-sensitive monitor screens break: a common scenario

I like to watch my stack of assignment sheets blow down the alley or contemplate the keypad on a cellular phone.

What I really dislike is overfilled kitchen trash bags though, and the limp trashbag next to it on the floor.

at parashakthi

This week I discovered a correlary to the "dress down" rule for intimidating situations {see September 2005}:

Feign ignorance.

"Om what?", Hilary naively said: no, sorry, I am completely unaware of the fact that shiva's name is gracefully intertwined with my awareness. Yes, please futher explain this concept to me. And can I eat those?

Nightmare in the 9th Floor Lab:

Attack of the Unlabeled Floppies.

Woo-HOO!

Grades are done.

the point of the fact is that

deep down, everyone is afraid of becoming that weird girl down the hall.

Zillions of what? she warily asked.

lines for an imaginary poem

The one god has blotted out the bad birds with your hair. Another god

smears the words of prayer, leaving contrails of blood and dust.

Hmmm....

Writing down: My measurements {in the margins of CCCC proposal}.

Writing up {on post-its}: HTML specs for "map" tags, link to "Mapping the Resistance" article from CCC and hand drawn maps to braid salons in Ann Arbor, E. Lansing and Windsor.

Ecohazards caused by tanning oil: 1

Meanwhile, back on the mattress:

Listening to a passepied by Debussy, she watches the unevenly matched blinds as though they are a silent film.

reading "The Age of Innocence" during finals:

"Hold on", my hand flies up, palm out:

"Newland just ran into May's cousin the eccentric countess Ellen Olenska in Newport".

Long pause.

"Now", I face my student, gingerly placing the bookmark in the book, "what brings you into the office here today?".

night

click here.

unsolved mysteries

So anyway,

it strikes me as extremely funny

that one of the worst things that has happened in my life happened at Panera.

Installing Extensions for Firefox on a Linux Desktop

If you arrived at this post from a Google Search, first of all, stay cool: A crowbar will not help you install the Web Developer extension for firefox.

Breathe in. Affirm: An invisible firefox process is running on my system. Breathe out. Breathe in. The invisible process is blocking the extension from being installed. Breathe out.

Slowly open your eyes and start your terminal in a mindfully alert frame of mind. Kill all firefox processes. Now, run firefox. Behold: the power of...froggle.

still life with contrast.

Click here to read the inspiration behind this cartoon.

freehand turkey with caption

Blog 2.0

To commemorate one year of blogging, I am pleased to announce the merger of Blogger and Me with Hilary's Interesting Sketch Diary.

Behold the power of slack...okay, after I eat this muffin.

technically naieve

"We-e-ll", she naively thought {with the beginner's mind of a first-time Windows user}, "this is probably a good time for me to learn patience. So, instead of beating the desk with my fists, I'll simply use the time to click on "Windows Media Player" and listen to some music while waiting for my Word file to unfreeze".

...

And then I answered my cell from a table on the eastside, smearing butter and stuffing from the rotisserie hen into my keypad.

Hello? I said, picking at the bird. Hold on. Let me switch to a headset. I need my hands to eat.

"Nested tables" sounds like something that lives under the deck in the country : Look, Emmit, we got to get rid of those tables before they start to nest.

2

Second time this year:

Had vivid dream about talking to god in which god is represented as a mallard duck. Why? "You never listen to me anyway", god explains.

a lot of times

when I talk it feels like a paper airplane that has crash-landed.

hinduism is the linux of religions.

poem

her crescent smile hovered by the refrigerator

everything is illuminated

Everyone has exactly one light, she said, arching her ice-blue feet. Which they cup their hands over or hold up for people who are groping for something that got lost in the dark.

Now...I have zero interest in walking around tormenting others with my inner light.

saturday morning

Hilary curled into a tight ball on her mattress, remembering the hue of wrong wrong wrong on all the faces.

7:29 pm ubuntu linux screenshot:

Now everyone go home.

2:14 p.m.

BreezyBadger prompts simple network information. I walk unproblematically over to C&IT for this.

Thirty minutes later,C&IT magically appears in the Writing Center for the first time in history:

("Did you come here to help me?" "Actually, I was wondering if I could, um, you know, watch".)

11:50 pm

Windows XP apparently has built-in GPS beeper (comes up with the command "sudo". That is very wrong).

11:45pm on:

GRUB suffers mild stroke and "loses" innumerable big objects: namely itself, linux and Windows XP.

10:52 a.m: a tense moment

Warm boot launches Windows XP and Realplayer starts playing a song onstensibly titled "ISO-UBUNTU". Dialog box prompts me to adjust volume and bass.

9: 52 a.m. : Writing Center Opens

"It's Ubuntu day", says Sharon, propping the door open with an edge. "I am who I am because of who you all are, and, right now, we're all out of pens".

9:39 a.m.

Look! Sharon and Hilary are installing Linux Ubuntu 5.10 at the Writing Center.

We've got Linux Ubuntu 5.10 installation disks, half a pack of skittles and some white text on a black background that looks important.

Sharon and Hilary are currently:

Happy.

As the installation progresses, check back for up-to-the minute info on how Sharon and Hilary feel.

Installing wireless internet on SuSE linux 10.0

If you linked to this post from a google search, get ahold of yourself.

Instead of harming yourself and others with an ice pick, why not check out out AndrewD18's handy guide?

Note: You will need the proprietary installation CD (for Linksys), the SuSE kernel-source and your own bag of skittles.

an open letter:

Anonymous stalker:

Thank you for the asynchronous kiss. It has been a long time since I have had one of those.

Hilary

learning curve

This morning OpenOffice learned to critique, not criticize.

...

Running: Linux Suse {default OS}
Installed: Slackware 10.2

ow:

my soul hurts from hating the suburbs every morning.

file conversion

Obviously, said Technologically Savvy Student, Seely-Brown and Duguid were not using linux.

Hilary paused to secretly write "switch to linux" on her memo pad:

"Yes, thank you. So you see how conversation stops when someone offers a hard-and-fast answer. Your essay works in roughly the same way: you run out of material when the research questions are strictly factual.

So be sure that your overarching question is open-ended. Now for example, can somebody please tell me: what is linux?"

*

The oversize snowflakes remind me of handprints searching for concrete.

whatever.

www.blackboard.com launches its open-architexture initiative.

how I talked myself into writing the proposal:

The sun chips will still be here for after.
An ant carrying muddy snow on its back.
I will hurt you if you do not write it.
You can change out of that orange shirt and the striped pants when it is written.

CSS paranoia:

Fear that the web space will display as "ectoplasm" because you failed to specify a default white background.

the horrible truth:

The brown rice things did not appear via spontaneous generation.

My Day

To do:
Research @ KP library. (Priority A)
Make 1 javascript object (“Featured Courses”) (Priority A)
Service learning website: Draft flowchart
Update QE reading list
MA essay: proposal (Priority A)
Read: stuff. (Priority A)

Take that, ubiquitous template.

extensible markup

And the second we got up from the table he was walking away with one hand and text messaging her with the other.

Waaaait a second, Hilary reflected: there is no text messaging in this story, which had been retold so many times that Hilary's mind had started automatically updating the software.

homesick.

Location: "God loves the blues" billboard at St. James (nine and woodward).

Theme of fashion: Fly girl from early nineties music video

{fair aisle legwarmers;
short pleated skirt;
candy necklace
and blue hoodie (tres fuzzy!)}.

Current Affirmations:
An inside-out hoodie does not "pull everything together".

poem

oh my god, why am I dressed in this manner?

um, no.

So what I am going to do is: said Hilary quickly, is print off these transparencies, then installaphpserveronthemacsinthe9thfloorlab and then sit down and have my coffee. Is that cool with you?

That's fine, said pseudonymous technical support. Except the part about the php server.

office hours

preppie (warning: nauseatingly self-congratulatory)

This week I used my Friday office hours to prep for next Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings like the fictional reformed worker in books about productivity.

For some time, now:

"The part of me that cares has been worn out", I thought, kneeing a laundry basket up into the car.

current affirmations

I have reached a point of life where it is time to be less omniscient about Michigan geography.

and what was it

about the blank white wall that made Hilary stop, her scarf intelligently streaming down the alley? The maze is hard to solve. Tears and snot froze on her cuff.

...

The door slammed on her boucle scarf and Hilary was shut into the wide open afternoon.

my outfit

Theme of fashion: sugar plum fairy

Point of fashion: fairy skirt

Accented with: Oversize hoodie with paint splotches (for contrast)

Shoes: lace-up ankle boots

giant props to Boston Legal

for the "autistic lawyer" episode that aired last night (Tuesday, January 17).

Onscreen, my people have finally evolved out of their pyjamas.

narrow streets

My parents' neighborhood is so monocultural I feel like I'm living in fucking japan.

current stats

Mode of living: urban exile
Coordinates: Lochaven and Greer
Traffic violation: pro left
Cost of ticket: 35 dollars

Cultural differences

Detroit
Policeman: "By the way, your license is suspended for a unpaid ticket. You might want to take care of that or whatever. Because some cop with too much time on their hands might decide to arrest you and impound your car".

West Bloomfield
Policeman: "Were you aware that your license is suspended?"
Hilary: "Oh. Ok. Thanks for letting me know".
Policeman: "Because--"
Hilary: "I know. Some cop with too much time on their hands might decide to arrest me and impound my car".
Policeman: "Are you mouthing off to me"?

Two days later....
Eventual cost of ticket+license reinstatement+impound: 644.40

and suddenly I have nothing

to write about. Maybe I'll post a .wav file of the coffee percolating in isolation.

nothing gorgeous happens

here

....

Hilary isn't adjusting to suburban life quite as we had hoped.

3. Reinstated my borrowing priveledges at Kresge-Purdy. Yay!

current affirmations

I will not cite the four noble truths as evidence during an argument with my parents.

task list

What I've accomplished so far today:

1. Started new parking colony in Rakham
2. Broadcasted coffee stain on overhead projector:
"Furthermore, essays do not occur in nature. They were invented at a point in time by a specific guy named Montaigne".

...

To me, dharma means not getting assassinated.

my french fries at the cafe tasted like cold iron bars.

walking to dinner

My office burst into the wide open alley. When we walked by the ACLU building Austin hollaed and clapped, and the shadows cast by green desk lamps bent to peer down.

National Delurking Week:

You know what to do. Let the healing begin.

office meditation

Zen practices that you can do at work:

1. Washing transparencies
2. Arranging a paperclip into various postures: the TA", the "overhead projector" and the "student sleeping on desk"
3. Office hours : so empty that you can hear a coffee stain seep through the freshly printed handouts.

the weather

reminds me of a day that made me so angry, I stormed outside and assaulted the inside of my car with a vaccuum.

Natural selection

Notice that the suburbs are arranged to necessitate, even promote, drunk driving.

Idea for Logo Hoodie:

"Comp. people are cool for three reasons".

me=loser

I looked at the sign that said "Daily workouts: ten dollars" and thought "you've got to be kidding me". Then I ate a bear claw.