wednesday, august 31, 2005
Collect your own crazy bottles now
Like some demented pharmacist, I collected different kinds of water when I was around eleven years old. I wanted to do experiments like comparing ocean water from different locations, fermenting flower juice, and fooling my little sister. I also bought some litmus paper strips and had a lot of fun with them (the rest are still in my desk). The stained scrap of paper in this picture holds a list:
- N.J. seawater
- LA tap water - preserved for future testing
- rosemary water
- fake milk - why the Tia Maria can smells like talcum powder
- music water - from the fountain outside the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion (I went to the opera a lot when I was eleven)
- watercolor juice - Lizzy refused to drink it
- car water
- jacaranda wine - after squeezing a ton of purple flowers, I was disappointed that the little bottle was only half full and added some balsamic vinegar (hey, it was the right color)
- hawaii pool water
- S.F. seawater - by this time, my family was beginning to think I was a bit weird
A brand consulting company somehow got the notion that Jeweled Platypus is one of the most influential teen blogs in America. LOL! They paid me $60 to blabber about search engine-portals though, which was fun.
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saturday, august 20, 2005
Launching off the handicap ramp
I like USC and its crazy skater boys. The sorority girls can die, though.
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thursday, august 11, 2005
Including inspirational posters
I have a job now - two jobs, in fact. I look forward to being able to buy things online without borrowing my dad’s credit card. You just don’t know how annoying that is! Yeah, having my own money will be nice for my silly independent pride. The other reason: making mom happy (aka getting her off my back).
One job is cashiering at a giant office supply store. The other is cashiering at a university bookstore. It’s quite exciting and glamorous and all that. I guess I could have found a different way to earn a little money that was more in line with my skills and interests, but those jobs are hard to find - at least within a few thousand miles of here.
I have learned a couple things. “Real life” is more like high school than I thought it would be (uh-oh). Also, those little electronic signature boxes need to be redesigned or banished. (I’m disappointed by Emotional Design, by Donald Norman. I don’t need the boxes to be visceral robots. I need them to work. That will make people happy.)
The moment when I realized I couldn’t complain about my jobs on here was weird.
I composed this post on paper. I’m so used to writing on a computer that my handwritten composition is a total mess. Half of it is crossed out at least once, and that’s the second draft.
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monday, august 01, 2005
Thirty books in fourteen pages
This past Christmas, my mom gave me a moleskine and a Fisher space pen. HERE’S A PICTURE OF MY CAT. I mean, once I held the little notebook, I realized I had to fill it up somehow; normal moleskine things wouldn’t work. Sketches were out - I draw about twice a year and enjoy it both times. Written thoughts get typed into TextEdit. To-do lists go on index cards (groan). I had another idea.
One of my “someday” projects is to make a good book tracker app, including metadata for analysis: dates read, number of pages, year created, rating, blah blah blah. But until that happens, this is part of how I fill my moleskine. I give each book half a page and a little box where I draw its cover with colored pencils. So I hate covers like Six Degrees - impossible to draw. King Rat? The Kite Runner? I can do those. Some covers, however, end up looking like crap. That’s OK. It’s just meant to break up the endless blocks of tiny writing where I complain about authors using the word “teeming” eight times in two hundred pages. Example:
[The Island of the Day Before, by Umberto Eco]
Eco is boring and impenetrable, but I needed something to read. Mom lent this to me a long time ago. I liked parts of it - more parts than in Foucault’s Pendulum. Odd, dreamy, allegorical, confused. I liked the bits about Baroque science; reminded me of the Neal Stephenson cycle. But the battles? the Lady? the priests or whatever? Boring!
The reviews are sometimes pretentious and spoilery and that is why I don’t show most of them to people. I like my system, though, because re-reading old pages tells me something about myself mixed in with the books. But if I don’t record things right away, I lose my ideas and sometimes the order I read them in - sometimes even the cover drawing when I have to give back an obscure book. MY NEXT PROJECT IS KNITTING A MOLESKINE-IPOD COZY.
