Archive for the ‘i hate technology’ Category

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Posting about Facebook on Facebook.

2012/03/22

B! deactivated his Facebook profile a few days ago, if nobody’s noticed. I hate it when people deactivate their Facebook profiles, and always feel irrationally responsible when someone does so. The fact that I have Defriend Finder doesn’t help matters any. At any rate, I knew he’d deactivated practically before he’d hit “confirm”.

Rather peeved, I asked him, “So does this mean I’m single on Facebook?”

He didn’t think it was very funny. He may even have found it slightly creepy. I, however, think it’s hilarious. Single on Facebook! What a concept! I’d go ahead and change my relationship status, but that would probably be kind of alarming… to those of us who are on Facebook, anyway.

Posted in anecdotal, i hate technology | 3 Comments »

Unsent Tweets (geekery, etc)

2012/02/13

@FCPX: You are bizarre. I see certain arguments for you, I suppose, but if I can’t open a 6.0.6 XML I’m totally calling BS.

@Pinterest: Why don’t you let me message other users? And how many people are actually following me, anyway? Profile says 78, Boards say 125.

@AVIDMC5: I know you’re supposed to be better than this. Show me your power.

Posted in anecdotal, i hate technology, progress? | Leave a Comment »

Free Advice: Pinterest edition

2012/02/08

I have this picture of how I used to look. I’m wearing cutoff jeans, a sports bra, and a bike helmet, and I’m fist-pounding the sky on a bridge over Storrow Drive. You can see each and every one of my ribs. It’s online somewhere I’m sure, but I’m too lazy to go find. Anyway, this look is probably not healthy. It’s probably what the tabloids like to call “scary skinny”. But I didn’t WORK for that body – I just purged myself into it. It actually got awkward – people would see me eating whatever I was eating and ask me how I did it, how did I stay so thin? “Bulimia” was always on the tip of my tongue as an answer (I’m nothing if not direct) but a polite smile and a nod would usually suffice.

These days, nobody’s asking me how I did it.

And so I’m going to the gym.

I was kind of all whatever about having to actually EXERCISE my way into a body that didn’t make me want to self-immolate, until I saw this image on Pinterest. “YOU EARN YOUR BODY”, it says, in boldface white-on-black, and underneath are a series of resolutions ending with the vow: “I will earn my body”. And this? This totally threw me.

I realized, suddenly, that this body has always been a “thing” to me, something Other, and whatever it looked like was not good enough. Whatever it FELT like was not good enough. In fact, whatever it felt like was usually pretty bad. But now, now that I’ve kind of made this commitment to work myself back, I wonder if maybe, finally, I’ll feel at home in this body. I wonder if one day I’ll have a body I’m proud to earn.

Posted in eatin', free advice, i hate technology, progress? | 1 Comment »

it’s kind of miraculous that I’m even alive.

2012/01/24

I’m not really an app junkie, not that you’d know it from looking at my iPhone. I have apps for everything: sending a FedEx, making a Skype call, simulating the sound of an audience laughing, and buying expensive video equipment. But, I mean, the only apps that I actually USE are Facebook, Twitter, and Zynga Poker. I keep the rest around “for fun” – aka “for when I’m bored”.

Predictably, the other day, I was bored. I was also bored of my apps. So I decided to install a NEW app, one to help me on my way back to skinny jeans. It’s called “Lose It!” (exclamation mark intended) and it’s essentially a digital version of the little calorie notebook I kept in high school except ten times more awesome. It knows the nutrient stats for eating three and a half swedish fish, for example, and how many calories are in one ounce of Triscuits. This is beneficial in two ways: 1) fuels my odd penchant for metrics /and/ 2) accommodates my strange eating habits.

However, I’m beginning to see the dark side of “Lose It!” as well. It’s one thing to be like, oh yeah, OK, today I ate a hamburger, some nachos, a stick of celery and three glasses of red wine, but it’s quite another to see it all there totaled up for you – HAMBURGER (FAST FOOD) NACHOS (FAST FOOD) RED WINE 18oz – and be like, that’s what fueled my body today. Well, sweet.

If America runs on Dunkin’, I must run on saturated fat. Or alcohol fumes. One or the other.

 

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Posted in eatin', i hate technology | 1 Comment »

Lost Weekend

2012/01/21

Most people think of a lost weekend as a drinking binge. Something hedonistic, something wild. But a lost weekend can happen with depression, too, and it’s a lot less fun than you think. I know, how fun could it be, right? It’s depression! But trust me, it’s less fun than that.

I’m tempted to start at the very beginning – the trigger, in shrinkspeak – but I won’t. Let’s just say that a confluence of unfortunate circumstance caused me to retire at 9:30 Thursday evening and not emerge until 8 on Friday night. That’s how I deal, sometimes. Sleeping. I managed to stay up for a few hours, long enough to watch a movie, before trudging back to bed to read Mashable on my iPhone. I didn’t want to sit up, even, all my limbs were heavy and my chest felt like a lead brick. So I lay there, pinned, until I fell asleep.

I guess it’s Saturday now, and I’m up. We can thank the quasi-anorexic in me for that – I only got out of bed so I could go to the gym. But then I ran some errands and installed a new hard drive in B!’s MacBook. I did these things because they are What I’m Supposed To Do, they are supposed to Make Me Feel Better. And I guess they have, kind of. But when things are as they are, all we can do is keep trying… and wait for the storm to lift.

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Posted in Depression, i hate technology | Leave a Comment »

Has conflicting feelings about Pinterest.

2011/12/21

I want to love Pinterest. And I do. I mean, lots of pictures of pretty things, LOLcats that really do make me LOL, and the occasional (but increasingly frequent) Bible quotation against a pastoral / beach-themed background. Luscious recipe hints aside thinspo underwear models. Who can’t identify with a lusting for both?

But what’s been getting me about Pinterest lately are all these “bucket list” pins. “Throw a dart on a map and travel wherever it lands” or “Own a Cadillac”. “Meet Taylor Swift”. Not that there’s ANYTHING wrong with wanting these things, working for these things, or hoping for these things, it’s just… a little…

Well, let’s face it. My bucket list is like, “Have a clean kitchen floor for more than 2 days running”. “Own a doublewide, because a house is totally out of the question”. “Wear matching blacks”. Not exactly what one might call “aspirational”, but, sometimes, just as unattainable. It makes me kind of sad and nostalgic, these wishes from girls out there in foreverland, dreaming of things I realize I will likely never have, and it makes me think about how I used to frame the world. Perhaps, how we all once framed it. Full of opportunity and ripe for the picking.

What happened, and when did it become so? And why did we think we were ever so entitled in the first place?

Posted in I enjoy being a girl, i hate technology, money, progress? | 1 Comment »

Needs an upgrade?

2011/12/02

I’m really in a quandary. I have this broken-ass old iPhone 3G. Yes 3G. I’m probably the last person on the planet to still be using one of these things, and I’ve been planning to upgrade for the better part of 6 months. The home button is sticky. It doesn’t mute ringtones anymore. Last weekend, I dropped it facedown on a granite floor. The pixels are bleeding out and dying. BUT IT STILL TETHERS.

So what do I do? Do I upgrade, and forsake the mobile bliss of the tether? Or do I stick it out until the phone finally kicks it completely? I’d really miss using Facebook on my laptop in my car – you don’t know nirvana until you’ve logged into your bank account while traveling at 80mph in the passenger seat. Comments and thoughts are much appreciated.

 

Posted in city livin', i hate technology, progress? | 3 Comments »

Hates being reminded.

2011/09/07

Although I’ve never had any cash to speak of, I’ve always been incredibly interested in finance. I had a subscription to Money magazine when I was making Burger King wages on my first doc job, and I aspire to one day put my knowledge of mutual funds to good solid use. With the start of my production company, I got even more religious about tracking spending and fell in love with mint.com.

Mint.com! You’re totally free! You have unlimited categories! You generate your own reports! YOU ARE SO MUCH BETTER THAN QUICKEN!

At least, that’s what I thought. Mint.com starts off easy, like a waltz. One-two-three, ONE-two three, one-two-three, ONE-two three, and you’re halfway across the dance floor when it accidentally steps on your dress. And, instead of apologizing, it tells you you’ve been charged an ATM fee of $2.00.

Next thing you know, it’s telling you all KINDS of crap you don’t want to hear at ALL kinds of inopportune times. Just after my computer dies is not the time to let me know that my credit card bill is overdue, and if I think I’ve been tightening my belt by not going out to dinner, please do NOT lecture me about how I’m overspending on groceries. It’s gotten kind of depressing over there at Mint.com, really, and I’ve stopped coming around so much.

Mint.com, you are on notice. I’m totally turning off push notifications.

 

Posted in anecdotal, i hate technology, money | 1 Comment »

Dear The Internet, Thanks for Nothing.

2011/07/27

So B! and I have officially become slave nursemaids to our eldest cat, That Jake. We are giving him liquid antibiotics four times daily, injecting SQ fluid once nightly, and generally monitoring his progress while he recovers from what sounds like some kind of liver failure. He explains it very well on his Facebook page, a few scrolls down… I don’t really understand it, though. That Jake is so damn smart.

Bottom line is that we have to do all this crap, and we don’t know how, and that doctor at the hospital last Friday only showed us once and I was too scared to watch. And I feel all the time like I’m doing everything WRONG, because he practically foams at the mouth every time we give him an antibiotic (which, remember, is 4x/day), and you can just imagine how he feels about my piercing him with a hollow needle. Every night. For the next eight nights. He’d yowl in the most pitiful way, we’d force in a meager .5ml, and he’d squirm his way out of our grasp. The whole thing leaves me lightheaded, honestly – I seriously hate needles.

In despair one night, I turned to the only teacher I could find that didn’t charge an exam fee: The Internet.

The problem is, The Internet is a liar.

Like seriously? LOOK at this cat.

THAT DUDE IS ONE-HANDING IT! Like, he’s not even holding the cat DOWN! Wtf, Jake would be out of there so fast, and he’d probably take a couple of your fingers and half your shirt with him.

That’s just the kind of badass he is. And he reminds us. Every. Night.

Posted in i hate technology, jake, money, worst week ever | 1 Comment »

Somewhere inside, I’m just a long-haired dude with a bag of chips in one hand and a 2-liter Mountain Dew in the other.

2011/02/21

I mean, I could update you guys about a lot of things. I could give you the over/under on all the tablets coming to market, and might, meanwhile, expound upon the relative merits of converting to ProRes 422 when using Final Cut Pro. I’m eagerly awaiting the maturity of HTML5. I own four 1-TB hard drives.

Ask Katsumi – I wasn’t born this geeky. When he first met me, at 22, I’d literally just learned how to type. I remember pecking out whole papers in the computer lab at college because I didn’t realize you could save your file to a floppy disc. FLOPPY DISC. I didn’t learn about technology until I absolutely had to – I had no head for it, I thought, it had no soul.

My first gig with Pusser provided impetus for the honing of my secretarial skills, and then, suddenly finding myself the PA at a high-end post-production facility, I had to learn everything else fairly quickly. It’s still a matter of some pride that I know how to daisy-chain three HDCam decks so they’ll all dub at once. By the time I went back to Pusser in 2008, I was configuring the fiber-channel storage for our Avid system and honing our workflow for a straight line from production to online.

I’d be lying if I said that Katsu had nothing to do with this transformation – I turned to him whenever I needed IT support, which was often, and relied on him to guide me through the bits and bytes of day-to-day business. But now there is no Katsu. I mean, that’s not totally true, I definitely texted him and was like “WTF is HTML5″ before I got all about HTML5, but still. You can’t lean on your estranged spouse the way you leaned on your husband. And, you know, that’s cool. I like to stand on my own two feet.

But what I’d REALLY like is one of these. Techporn. What a feeling.

Posted in how i am awesome, i hate technology, progress?, work | Leave a Comment »

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