Economic language and iPod cases

So I went downtown yesterday.

The strength of the American consumer is supposedly what drives this economy. If the crowds at the Apple Store on Powell were any indication, the American consumer remains quite strong. I mean, I totally saw the American consumer bench like 13 MacBooks. It was sweet. And the American consumer looked confident, too. I bet the consumer I saw yesterday would have no doubts about approaching the hottest hottie in the club.

The rhetorical strategy (locution? metaphor?) that politicians and the press have decided to beat to death during the current crisis is the making of comparisons between “Wall Street” and “Main Street.”

Says Pelosi, “We must insulate Main Street from Wall Street and keep people in their homes.”
Says Obama, “We have to make sure that whatever plan our government comes up with works not just for Wall Street, but for Main Street.” 
Says Ron Paul, “This is Wall Street in big trouble and sucking in Main Street, now, and dumping all the bills on Main Street.”

Hopefully they’ll figure out how to mix up their language a bit before this one gets as grating as “blood and treasure” did during the Surge debate. And is “Main Street” really the appropriate contrast to Wall Street at this point? Aren’t most Americans pretty disconnected from the classical Main Street of soda fountains and general stores? We need something that recognizes the greater influence of the suburbs. Something like, “Wall Street vs. Red Cedar Lane.”

Anyway, I was in the Apple Store because I wanted to acquire a new armband-capable case for my iPod. The one that fell apart last week is the second one to die. And it turned out, that despite two large walls of cases for portable Apple devices, plus a stockroom full of surely a fair number more, they did not have a case that would suit my needs. You see, I have an older iPod. It was purchased all the way back in January of 2007.

So I bought a 1 GB Shuffle, which is only cost about $15 more than a armband-capable case would have anyway. Hopefully it will last longer than my last Shuffle, which quit connecting to the laptop about two months after purchase. I brought it into the Genius Bar and was told that nothing could be done for it, given that the docking plug looked like it had been corroded due to moisture. Apparently taking your Shuffle out in the rain is not recommended.

When I am dictator…

…my first act will be to outlaw the Charlie’s Angels pose.

Sudden intimacy

1. NW flight 354 leaves at 3:54 p.m.

2. Even though I aim to be an unsentimental, future-minded cosmopolitan, I still feel a twinge of a sadness when I consider that the hometown brand, Northwest Airlines, will soon be only a memory.

3. Aisle seat. Pros: Easy exit, not flanked on both sides. Cons: Elbows get bumped when the cart comes by, nothing to lean against, have to get up if the center or window seat needs to use the lavatory. The last con can place limits on the duration of your naps.

4. The game will kill my battery, I don’t feel like writing any more, and the captain says that we’ll soon be descending, so I put away my laptop and start to space out.

I look around. “The loneliness” has waxed and waned in seemingly random fashion over the years. It’s been showing up more regularly these days, and it seems to be spiking in this moment. My eyes are grabbed by anything you might call classically feminine. I catch myself staring at the curve of a hip that is hinted at by the jeans of the woman in the aisle. The suggested form of her torso sets my heart racing. The woman in the center seat, while repositioning herself, bumps me with her elbow. I get a little electric surge from this touch.

Oh, how embarrassing to be set off so easily, to be given a significant jolt by this minor and accidental contact. At least, I think I’m supposed to be ashamed of being like this—that it’s unseemly to have, and even worse to reveal, these aches. But fuck it, it’s real, and it’s a big deal. My perpetually relationshipped acquaintances have told me not to idealize their state, and I’ve thought that some of their reasons for this position are valid, but I think that they should then not idealize the single state in return. It frustrates me when they seem to not grasp what loneliness feels like, or how crazy-making it can be. It’s survivable, but it doesn’t feel very healthy.

It’s late, the lights are dim, and I’m resting my head against the seat in front of me. The woman in the center seat is slouching and has her legs up, so that her shins are pressed against her seat-in-front, and so that her knees are at eye level when I turn my head to the right. Again, my attention is drawn to anything about her that differs from its male counterpart. The leg, much more slender than mine, that is just below eye level. I’ve noticed, lately, that the things women do to themselves in the name of beauty, once seeming just frivolous and bizarre, have become so attractive to me. The painted toenails at the end of these legs.

I sit back again. She turns to me and expresses surprise at the fullness of the flight. I respond that, actually, I’ve taken this flight many times, and it seems just as full as always. Underneath her comment was the assumption that we all live in City A, and are coming back from a visit to City B. I note that I actually live and City B, and am heading for a visit to City A. She notes that at one point, she also lived in City B. We discuss neighborhoods we both know. She asks after, and I answer with, the purpose of my visit to City A.

The conversation fades. She starts it again by saying she’s “bummed.” A friend had emailed her about the latest incident in his decaying marriage. This incident had involved a strange sort of violence, which she described to me. She is bummed because for years she thought that he was entirely the innocent party in this troubled marriage, but today, in the new email, the friend revealed that the violence was his wife’s response upon finding him texting with another woman.

I ask why she moved from City B to City A. She sighs and replies that it was to be near her husband. She elaborates. When she was away this week, she was asking herself if she really missed him. She went to a party and mentioned to someone her surprise that of all the men in City B, she married him. He’s put on a lot of weight in the last two years. He plays video games all the time. If he wants to avoid surgery for a health problem, he needs to do these exercises. He keeps saying he’s going to do the exercises, but then he never does. If she had to do it again, she wouldn’t get married, just stay committed “without the paper.”

When I was your age, we had to transport our TCP packets by hand, uphill, both ways

I’m back in Mpls, surfing the web from my parents’ house for the weekend. “Man, this internet connection is crazy slow,” I think. So I run the Speakeasy speed test to the Chicago server, expecting a result of around 200 kbps. And yet,

1.3 Mb downstream, .7 Mb upstream.

Methinks my frame of reference has changed a bit.

A coffeehouse, a right-branching NP, and some eye contact

I, in a sense, played hooky today. It was only hooky-in-a-sense, or a sad excuse for hooky, because I’ll be going in to do an experiment tomorrow. I’ll be doing an experiment tomorrow because it will be my last chance to do one for ~3 weeks, because on Monday our lab is getting shut down for ~3 weeks. Fortunately, the lab getting shut down is not my fault, nor is it the fault of any other human, so far as anyone can determine. Fortunately after those ~3 weeks, we should be back up and running, no harm, no foul.

So the morning started with my attempt to attend the summer picnic on Angel Island that The Aviator’s Medical Institute was hosting today. Because I was too lazy to plan, and because the F-Market always takes longer than you think it will, I arrived at Pier 41 at 9:55 a.m., which ended up being not early enough to catch the 9:45 a.m. ferry. Upon seeing that the next ferry on weekdays is at 1:20, I realized I would be skipping the company picnic.

Unfortunately, I realized this after I had thrown away my Muni transfer. I checked my wallet pockets and realized that I did not have another $1.50, so I went looking for a business where I could break my $10 bill by purchasing a product I desired. I found a Starbucks.

Item 1: When I am in a Starbucks and am feeling frivolous and gay, I tend to indulge in a Grande Mocha Frappuccino. Lately I have been trying to reduce the number of calories I consume, and as such, I have started ordering on these occasions the Light variety of this drink, without whip. All fine and good, right? But there is a problem! The problem comes when I try to convey my desires to the barista. Since I am a native speaker of English, it is my instinct to place adjectives before the nouns they modify. So when I want to add a new modifier, “Light,” to the phrase “Mocha Frappuccino,” I want really badly to place that modifier first. I yearn, my friends, to order a “Light Mocha Frappuccino.” And so that’s typically what I ask for.

But the baristas do not like this! Nowhere in the city do they tolerate this! As you likely know, it is Starbucks SOP to confirm the customer’s order by repeating it back to him or her. When I order a “Venti Coffee,” the barista will repeat “Venti Coffee” back to me. But they do not say “Light Mocha Frappuccino” back to me. Instead, they say, with politely didactic intonation, “Mocha Frappuccino Light.” And if you look up at the menu, it does say “Mocha Frappuccino Light.” WTF? That’s such a fucking unnatural-sounding construction. Why, Starbucks, why? Why do you insist on this awkward word order? I mean, it’s not as if, when I desire the aspartame-sweetened take on Coca-Cola, I am expected to ask for a “Coke Diet.”

I’ve even tried to remember to use the baristas’ preferred word order, in the spirit of “when in Rome,” but I must be incapable of doing so, as I continue to make this mistake almost every time I indulge in a frivolous Starbucks moment.

Item 2: I picked up my drink. I realized that because I now had no place to be for several hours, I could, if I wanted, idle in the café. I looked around the room and suddenly found my eyes to be in contact with an attractive young woman who was sitting in the corner and working on what appeared to be homework. The eye contact lasted, I believe, several hundred ms, and after being broken by a saccade or two it was restored for another couple hundred ms. I saw that there was an empty table next to the young woman. I started to walk over there, thinking, “Ah hell, maybe I should go sit by her and talk to her. Isn’t that what I’m supposed to do in these situations?”

I stood a foot from the empty table for about two seconds. I almost sat down. Then I thought the better of it, spun around, and headed to a nice isolated table outside.

Accidental learning via Wikipedia: Banned

Perhaps it would be fun to log some of the “random” things I learn while browsing Wikipedia. Today’s lesson: A commercial airline can be banned from entering the airspace of the entire European Union. This is done if your airline is “operating below essential safety levels.” So it’s perhaps a bit different from getting banned from a blog or from all Woolworth’s (can’t find a relevant YouTube clip, unfortunately).

Most of the airlines on the list are based in African countries. Also included are air carriers based in Central Asia, North Korea, and Indonesia. Every airline regulated by the relevant Indonesian authorities is banned from EU airspace, in fact.

Path taken: DC-9, UM Airlines, List of air carriers banned in the European Union.

Discovery!

If one climbs into bed 7 hours before one’s alarm clock is set to ring, and further, if one falls asleep relatively quickly after doing so, one will wake up feeling relatively refreshed and energetic, even before one ingests one’s daily dose of caffeine (n = 1).