$disanpoter

curious L goes to school!

so i've pasted a VERY rough draft of my personal statement for my application below. if any of your are
a. feeling altruistic
b. in need of procrastination
c. motivated by a perverse desire to laugh at me

and would like to give me some feedback on the general ideas or efficacy of it. that would be much much much appreciated.

who wants to be a recommender!?

Numerous opportunities are currently available to participate in the thrilling and rewarding experience of providing me with a stellar recommendation (and let's be honest, who wouldn't jump at the opportunity to dream up glowing commendations of yours truly. stress on dream). The ideal candidate will possess excellent communication skills, imagination, and extensive experience in making sense out of disanpoter burblings. Potential benefits include:

• my eternal gratitude
• feeling useful
• polishing up that poly-syllabic vocabulary of yours
• resurrection of fond memories rife with the ridiculous of modern experience and the challenge of repackaging them as purposeful anecdotes illustrating my unique appropriateness for the given position/program.
• did i mention, my eternal gratitude?

Requirements for these opportunities are brief yet stringent upheld:

• deep understanding and knowledge of candidate (that would be me), gained either through intense exposure over a limited period of time or sustained exposure over many years.
• ability to compose grammatical, informative sentences and accumulate them in traditional letter form.
• experience ranking soft-skills
• knowledge of at least one of the following information delivery methods: postal mail or fax

Interested parties should contact me for further details and project availability. Failure to respond to this posting does not preclude qualified candidates from being contacted.

Thank you for your interest.

A Convenient Task

Building on the Lenten post about giving up convenient disposable products, here's something super convenient we can do to push forward environmental issues and ensure the government does more to protect it: follow this link http://algore.com/cards.html and add your voice.

I know that many of us are tempted to place other issues above this one, myself included, and being educated, reasoning, relatively careful citizens might think to ourselves the environment is important, but it's so much more important that those government resources go to health care or stopping the war or better education or countering discrimination, but the thing is all those reasons require resources and all those needs increase in their demand on our resources as our habitat falters. A failing earth means more illness, more natural disasters, higher costs of living. It increases the strain on our healthcare systems; it creates scarcity - and with scarcity comes increase in conflict. Extremism, religious or societal, emerges from scarcity and general hardship. Monies given to disaster relief are monies that don't go to each of those societal issues we consider so vital to our lives as members of a forward looking (hopefully) nation.

It's not just about being green. It's not just about being more comfortably and less hot 50 years from now. It's not just about being environmentally responsible. It's about all the environmental, medical, societal and civil ramifications that will follow at the heals of the damage we're causing to our earth, our home.

Protect what you believe in. Protect the world. seriously.

give up waste

my mother had an inconvenient truth and so we started watching it, which just reminded me how central this issue is to all other global, political, social issues we face today and how much i care.

tonight i feel that it's not enough that i try not to waste too much, that i live in a city where i don't have to drive, that i try to avoid taking my groceries and purchases home in plastic bags, that i ask for ceramic dishes over paper when eating out, that i opt for electronic communication over paper - it's simply not enough. we must do more. we must implement sustainable life changes.

though i no longer consider myself catholic, i still appreciate this time of year as an opportunity to consider the impact of our lives on the world and people around us. one can abstain from almost anything for 40 days. instead of giving up something i enjoy this year; i'm going to give up convenience by:

• carrying my own pair of chopstick/utensils for eating out
• carrying an extra foldable bag in my purse for incidental purchases
• planning ahead to avoid multiple trips the employ gas-consuming vehicles
• reusing paper i must take on in creative ways
• chosing environmentally sound products and packaging over traditional alternatives
• and generally trying each day to remain aware of how i can reduce my personal toll on the environment
• -oh and requesting take out/delivery places not to include plates and napkins.

also, because i'm asking you all to consider pledging your participation, each of you who responds to this with a pledge to participate will receive from me a complimentary pair of bamboo chopsticks to use and a handbound notebook made of recycled papers.

who

so, events of the week have precipitated a return to the question: what sort of person do i need to be with (when i am with a person - no need to be with someone suggested here).

as you all know me well, how about chiming in? pretty please. i'll set out some of my thoughts later, after the requisite walk through the woods with den mutter -  but here are some preliminaries:

the person i stay with needs to be...

• someone who challenges me (without consciously trying or setting about to)
• someone who is challenged by me and likes that (without me having to try)
• someone whose judgment i can depend on
• someone whose emotional health is mature
• someone whose ego needs no babysitting or coddling
• someone who is not arrogant or cocky

would you kindly unplug me?

I'm sitting in the RHC at the moment. i was just a moment ago accosting a grad student with a book called "Sold America" to see if perhaps she'd be interested in borrowing some of my books, since i 'just happen' to have some similar ones - 'Selling Mrs Consumer" and "Consuming Kids." Then, during this exchange, i overheard a fellow RHC patron ask another "can you unplug me?"

he was, of course, referring to the power supply cord to his laptop - three connectors removed from his person and yet in the contemporary vernacular a completely legitimate use of the accusative pronominal form. sorry. didn't mean to get all obfuscative on your collective asses, but ... well, temptation abounds in word play.

anyway. it just pinged my brain in a couple places (oh - and there's another interesting aberration, using ping to get someone's attention. byron pinged me via email - as in that was the subject of an email he sent when i didn't respond in quite the timely fashion - and i had just similarly sent a semantic ping to someone who wasn't responding in a chat. maybe that's a techie thing though...), but returning to my brain, hearing the expression raised my interest first on the linguistic level and then on the popCulture/popPsychological level.

On the one hand it's interesting that we can use such an extreme grammatical variation without feeling some sense of thought-incompleteness - consider: "can you unplug that cord for me?" ; "can you unplug the cord to my laptop" ; or even "can you please unplug my laptop?" versus "can you unplug me?" All the others indicate ownership secondarily, accurately representing the object of the requested action as something close to the physical object of the action. (we are not actually unplugged in this request; the power cord is. and even though this request came from a guy; it was clear he wasn't talking about having the other party wrap her hand 'round and tug at anything attached to his body)

i can't explain it well, but it's not just an odd extension of what constitutes one's person semantically; it's correspondingly odd syntactically for having reduced what generally requires either an additional modifier attached to the action's objects to a structure that has no object modifiers. it's completely reductive; there is no lingering reference to the original object under question. and it's not really as usual as it might seem. when i tried to think of other cases, none was so dramatic in substituting owner for object. like "hit me up..." or "hit me" there is usually some kind of object class being given to the user -erm i mean the speaker... - another card, another beer, another (actually those are the only two i can think of) - but it's still ending directly with the user in a way that is not the case when the substituted object is a possession of technological form. these two, for instance would be rendered explicitly along the lines of "hand me another beer," "give me another card." For both the implicit and explicit varieties the case is the same here. It's the genitive case which in english can drop the preposition when placed be for the direct object (ie give me ___ vs give ___ to me). The same cannot be said for unplug me. aha. i've figured it out. in fact, this aberration represents the expansion of this rule to 'for.'  So y'all - if you think of any idioms with implied 'to's and 'for's (not to be confused with 'two by fours'), comment them will ya? muchos danke

thats all. i just think it's amusing, and yet telling, that we've come to so lackadaisically  refer to our possessions as legitimate extensions of our selves.