Category: Personal

Gah

Ok, today is officially the “Day of One-Word Post Titles”.

Heading up to school for the first day of classes soon. You’d think, this being my third semester and all, that I would not be so nervous at the start of the semester anymore. You’d be wrong.

This Time Last Year

This Saturday, last January, was new student orientation at school. Looking back, I notice I was pretty heavily poli-blogging in January of 05; I didn’t even mention school until after the first week of classes. Considering how nervous I was about going back to school, I’m surprised I didn’t say more about it.

I’m looking forward to the start of classes & seeing my friends again. I’m a bit nervous about how well the internship & school will mix; in particular, the 4 hour night class in San Francisco after a full day’s work in San Jose is going to be a major drag. I do have the option to drop that course and take it over the summer instead, but I’m not going to make any decisions until after week 1 is over & I have a better sense for how demanding my other courses will be.

New Terrace Setup

Apropos of my last post bemoaning how hard it is to find stuff when I shop, I actually did find some chairs and a table for the terrace when I was out on Tuesday.
It’s a bit too cold to sit outside right now, but once Spring comes this ought to be a nice place to drink a cup of coffee in the mornings. If I can get the wifi to work out there, even better.

A Great Mystery

I have an old text file knocking around on my drive with a collection of quotes that I found interesting. Here’s an apt one, although unfortunately I did not save the name ofthe person who wrote it:

It is a great mystery of late-stage capitalism that, in a marketplace of hypothetically unlimited choices, consumers should all want the same things.

Despite my having hung onto this quote, I actually think that the opposite is true. Everyone wants different things. Retail stores, however, try to persuade us
that we all want the same things. Especially the larger ones. Stores, that is.

Case in point: there’s a few things I’ve needed to buy for the apartment. Nothing particularly wild or unusual: More clothes hangers. A new sugar bowl to replace the one I broke. A couple of baking pans to replace ones that have rusted out. In short, standard household items. Here in the SF Bay Area, with stores of all sorts in every direction, getting this stuff should be a matter of a couple hours, tops.

But it’s not. Take the sugar bowl I broke a few months ago