jessamyn

There are 269 posts tagged jessamyn (this is page 28 of 39).

class and classy

It used to be a running joke in college that anyone who called anything “classy” was automatically bestowing sort of the opposite adjective to it; that classy was a word used by a person who had no class. Or used by us trying to be ironic.

I’ve been thinking about class a lot in the past few weeks. We just had our town meeting on Tuesday. I took a few photos. I like living in Vermont because there’s more of a sense that we’re in this together, whatever “this” happens to be. As of a few months ago, Randolph started charging people to drop off recycling at the transfer station. We’ve always paid for trash but recycling was free. I thought this was as it should be, small financial incentives to do the right thing. On the other hand, it was costing the town to get rid of the recycling and the so-called “tipping fees” were actually subsidizing the recycling program as recycling got more expensive to process. There was some discussion of this including one lady who said that she took a bag of recycling and it cost “only fifty cents” the easy implication being if you were going to not recycle over a mere fifty cents, there was something pretty well wrong with you. I think this ignores what it’s like to really live on a tight budget or make tough choices about where your money goes (for the record, I do neither, this is a bit of an intellectual exercise for me) and I have to admit that I’ve been letting my recycling pile up, which is ridiculous.

There was also some back and forth about the Randolph Food Shelf which was asking for something like $1500 this year to help with expenses. A young woman who was pretty new to town meeting was surprised to see people walking out of the food shelf with cakes because, well, she was on a budget and she wasn’t buying cake. She asked about it. There followed a long discussion of how the food shelf system works (cakes are day old, or donated) and who it serves (anyone who says they need it, no questions asked) and it seemed like most people in town were okay with the whole system. In a town of about 4800 people, 350 people had used the food shelf at some point in the last year. Ten percent of Vermonters have used a food shelf at some time. It didn’t look like the food shelf was going to have a difficult time getting their money. Good.

I’ve been travelling a lot on planes lately which is getting more unpleasant as the airlines find ways to save costs. I’m not complaining as much as stating a fact. I’m aware I can stay home. One day, perhaps I will. In addition to charging for checked bags, United now calls the first ten or so rows in the non-first class part of the plane “premium” seating (since they have a few inches of extra legroom) and tries to charge you more to sit in them. It’s not unusual to see a plane taking off with ten empty rows and everyone else smushed into the back part of the plane. After takeoff, people try to move into better seats and they’re rebuffed. Air travel has always come with severe class distinctions: from the order of loading the plane, to the silly curtain in-between first and second class, to additional bathrooms for first class travellers with severe exhortations from the flight attendants to only use your own bathrooms.

The stewardesses on my last flight — as I was smooshed in the back somewhere, but I don’t care too much since I’m short and can pretty much fit anywhere — actually told people it wasn’t fair for them to move forward since other people had paid extra to sit in those special seats. Ignoring the obvious “Well, who created this stupid system?” follow-up question. Then they said something about not using the forward rest rooms because of “safety.” Since it’s pretty well illegal for us to ignore anything they say because of “safety” this is a nice way to make weird arbitrary distinctions and make them unarguable. And yes I know you’re not supposed to gather by the cockpit, but as far as I know, there are no safety ramifications for a non-first class passenger to pee or not pee in a first class toilet. Are there?

Of course, people who can afford air travel in the US are often already in a privileged class, so it’s amusing to get this object lessons in how it feels to be someone who gets things denied to them just because of how much money you have, or are willing to spend. I’m glad I can take it or leave it.

a few people I met, remet, or just enjoyed seeing in SFO

Hey, that photo that I put up yesterday was on Serious Eats, check me out! It may also interest you to know that MetaFilter was one of Time magazine’s top blogs and that I was interviewed for an article on Ask MetaFilter that was in Slate this week. Here’s another AskMeFi story you might like.

The big difference between hanging out up in Vermont and hanging out in San Francisco is that most of the people I met or hung out with have URLs I can point people to that are live active websites. Most of my friends here have websites that are sort of functional. I am somewhere in the middle. Here are some URLs that go to people that I met.

  • Peter – his website has been the same pretty much since I’ve known him but now he’s married and has a kid.
  • George – actually a lady, she is looking for work after doing cool things at Flickr for a long time.
  • Mike – I sort of met at SXSW and now we’re twitter buddies enough so that when I had a few free hours I could tweet “you free?” and he was like “sure” and we chitchatted about drupal and web nonsense and it was totally fun.
  • Judith – my long time friend and owner of Lyle, who always shows me a good time.
  • Bryan – probably the person I’ve known online the longest without actually meeting. His indy junior map graced my travel page for a while. Now I use DOPPLR.
  • Courtney – I met her briefly at Burning Man but got to eat burritos with her She created the cloud bed, she is a genius.
  • Liz – is at the Berkeley ischool, we talked about library stuff. She knows my friend Aaron.
  • Mike – used to work at Adaptive Path with a bunch of people I know, we yammered on for a long time about… transportation systems.
  • Mike – another Mike who, towards the end of the party when I finally said who I was, said “oh, from MetaFilter?”
  • Erika – went to Dartmouth and is taller in real life than she seems in her headshots.
  • Molly – I met again at SXSW this year and we talked about academia and Princeton and pneumatic tubes.
  • Jennifer – gave us a sober ride home from the party for which I am eternally grateful.
  • Yorvit and Roswell – part of the household that took me home when I was trapped at the airport and fed me snacks and watched the Oscars with me. Wonderful folks, maybe without websites?

That’s who I know off the top of my head. I figured I’d drop this all here in case people were curious.

noisy

while some merely see a dried beef tendon...

I have this idea in my head that the city is noisy and my place in Vermont is not. This is probably true in a general average sense, but I stayed on Vermont avenue in a third floor apartment and it was pretty silent except for the ocean-like noise of distant traffic. Today, because there was a snowstorm over the last few days, Terry the roof guy is here taking snow off the roof any way he knows how. So, my little treehouse is all BANG BANG CRASH CRASH as snow and ice get broken up and hurled a few stories to the ground. Like me, Terry doesn’t get started too early, so this is mostly fine.

This photo is a beef tendon that was in the pet food store near where my friend Judith lives. I’ll do a longer bla bla “what I did and who I did it with” post about my trip to San Fran, but I liked this photo and my alteration of it. When I go to San Francisco I get to hang out with people who laugh at all my stupid nerdish injokes (“oh hey they said Craigslist at the Oscars!”) and always have the “hang with friends or stay in?” option in a more real way than I do here where sometimes friends are not an option due to the short number of people who are a reasonable drive from here.

Every time I visit the city I feel like it’s a bit of an interview process where the question in the back of my mind is “would I want to live here again?” I’m still at the “not really, no thanks” point but I can feel that tipping ever so slightly towards “not yet”

the year of saying yes

Lake party

Jim and I took a quickie side trip to Burlington because he had never been there. Since I’m not much of a shopper or a money-spender we drove down to the lake to just look at it. Turns out it was frozen sufficiently hard that people were out messing about on the icy surface — skating, sliding, photographing, walking pets, kicking ice. It was a festive and sort of surreal mood. We walked around on it. I, of course, took a few photos.

Yet another of my unstated resolutions is to try to get around my normal cynical overthinking brain and try to say yes to stuff more often. Yes to people coming to visit, yes to invitations to do things, yes to couchsurfers dropping in (hi CJ and Alison!), yes to more work (within reason), yes to “can you help me move?” and yes to “would you like dessert?” among other things. I have a tendency to talk myself out of doing new things because I’m actually pretty happy with the old/existing thing. This is a pop culture thing to do apparently, but I like to think I came up with it on my own.

I’m off to San Francisco tomorrow for a quickie meeting and some burrito eating and by the time I get back on Sunday movers should have gotten all of Kate’s stuff out of Casa Highland. Even though Kate’s move makes all the sense in the world, I think we’re all a little in denial of how great it was to have a clubhouse (and a parking space!) in the city. I’ll miss the old place.

empty! full!

EMPTY

Sometimes I think I have a tapeworm, eating like I do. This weekend I helped cook a 5 lb. hunk of lamb, went out for BBQ at Blue Ribbon BBQ and wrapped it all up with a carne asada burrito. It was a delicious meaty weekend which is just what I tend to be looking for at about this time in February. The flip side to this is that I spent the rest of the weekend running up and down stairs carrying heavy objects.

My sister is moving in a few short weeks. I’m that friend who will always help you move. I’m not so great at being the second person hefting the hide-a-bed, but I’m really great at taking whatever shamehole you have been putting off dealing with and turning it into a few labeled boxfulls and a bag of trash. I’m often modest about most of my abilities but I think I excel at this. This weekend I helped deal with Mount Laundry, the Poison Closet, the dreadful Neglected Closet and a few other miscellaneous spaces. Each time I managed to empty something out — I put aside the ticking timer when Kate had a rather strong reaction to the ticking sound, I find its urgency a little motivating — I put a sticker on it as shown above. Apparently the stickers are a little tough to remove, sorry about that.

I drove home to Vermont today with a car full of stuff. One of the magical qualities of my car is that things placed into the back of it simply … disappear. This is good for people who need to get rid of clothes or old computers. This time my sisters’ disappearing stuff is actually mostly winding up in my house. I took home a few bags of clothes (seriously doubling the bulk of my everyday wardrobe), a fold up spare bed, a few things to eBay, a fruity teacup with my birth month on it, a typing table with a little lamp on it, some placemats, some bubblegum and a great big bookshelf. People keep talking about the recession and I know it’s true objectively, but it’s been a bountiful few months for me.

better!

Poutine!
So hey, I went to the doctor. I like living someplace where I can call the doc when I wake up and have an appointment scheduled for after lunch. The doc said my lungs sounded weird so he gave me some antibiotics which seemed to work. I spent some days resting and a weekend boyfriending and then I went to Toronto for the OLA Superconference on Wednesday and got back last night. I had incredible travel karma considering that I flew out of Burlingotn on a day when most flights were cancelled and Vermont got 18 inches of snow. I gave a talk about the digital divide and it went well. I saw a lot of librarians that I know and like from around and did some quality conferencing and couch surfing and meetupping. I also ate enough food to keep me nutrified for another few weeks, so it’s back into the pool tomorrow. I had the chili poutine in this photo, David had the bacon poutine, John had the pulled pork poutine. I like poutine, squeaky cheese and all.

As of now my roof at home appears watertight so I’ve moved out of the living room bed and back into my room. I have developed an attachment to sleeping in the living room — when I lived in the Odd Fellows Hall in Seattle it was my favorite place to sleep — so if you come to visit perhaps I can put you in the silver bed and I’ll sleep out here.

My current projects involve getting a mix CD out the door, trying to learn to use a drain snake, helping my sister move (happy story that, bug her for it if you don’t know it) and getting ready for a quick trip to San Francisco for a steering committee meeting later this month. I have a small flurry of tax forms to dig through real soon now (“a success snowstorm” as Richard Brautigan would say) I think 2008 may have been my most lucrative year ever which is a good news/bad news situation if I’ve ever heard one.

the hazy blur of the brand new day

Usually this space at about this time is the Mystery Hunt wrap up where I talk about all the stuff we did and how we still didn’t come in first place anyhow. This time is no different except I was less helpful than usual. For some reason — planetary alignment, bad juju, overconfidence — instead of being a rock-solid team member for the Codex gang, I was struck down early with “I don’t feel so good.” I headed back to my sister’s house on Saturday evening via a subway ride I barely remember. I helped her move some stuff around at her place (inhaling nasty attic gasses) and then headed speedily and feverishly back to Vermont Sunday evening in order to teach a few in-service classes at the high school on Monday. The puzzle hunt didn’t end until late late Sunday night/Monday morning. We came in second, again. It was not my best planned weekend. As 2009 goes, it’s certainly been the worst.

I taught two classes on Monday which went pretty well and then came home and crashed and have been sleeping pretty much on and off since then, watching my fever eke down from 100.9 to 99.2. It’s now Wednesday lunchtime. I’m mostly awake. At about 9:30 pm last night water started to come through the roof of my bedroom and puddle on the floor. I don’t quite understand the mechanics of ice dams except that they can be relied upon to inflict distress at the least convenient times. I called my landlady, moved my bedding into the living room, and went quickly from the “woe is me” outlook to the “this is so over the top it’s approaching comedy” perspective. As someone said as I was mentioning this in my facebook status “If a raccoon gets in your house, then you’ve got all three acts covered.” Indeed.

I slept through the Inaguration and all of the attendant hubub, though I managed to read Obama’s speech and a lot of running Twitter commentary. I know he’s the president, the rest is details. I know many people are having a worse January than I am. I can feel the dull thuds of the guy knocking the ice off the roof and I’m thinking now might be the time to go down to the post office and see what else has been happening in the world outside of my rainy treehouse.