Funtoosh!

For the last three months, the only thing keeping me going has been the possibility of moving into a recently vacated position at work. This position would give me work that’s actually challenging and interesting, and it would come with a pay raise of ~20%. It would also, unlike my current position, provide experience that I could parlay into a better job in a better location in the future.

Since I’ve been covering most of this position’s responsibilities, I thought I at least had a shot at being named the successor. I knew there was a good chance of a political problem standing in my way, but I tried not to think much about that.

The search for candidates is finally about to get underway. This morning, I discovered that the person running the search, to whom I’d already declared my intention to apply for the position, plans to ask me to sit on the search committee.

And there goes any likelihood of my getting the job. Funtoosh!

So here I am, fortunately still numb but starting to feel the despair creeping in. I haven’t been seriously job hunting, since my experience here has been limited and non-transferable and–here’s the biggie–I can’t afford the mega-bucks cost of a national job search and I sure as hell couldn’t pay for a cross-country move.

Le frickin’ sigh.

Being fairly bereft of cheer, I decided to count my blessings. I soon realized that was defeating the purpose, so instead I turned to making a list of things that make me happy.

The list is totally stream-of-consciousness. Sometimes I note a very specific moment in a work that gives me pleasure as a whole, sometimes I note the work itself. This is not comprehensive, it’s just the first 100 things that came to mind. I tried to avoid artificiality as much as possible, but as I neared the end and became aware of how many slots I had left I imagine some crept in.

Click through if you’re interested.

(more…)

So a couple of weeks ago I met somebody in a chat room, and he came over for some fairly specialized fun. He seemed to enjoy it, he hung around for an hour after we wrapped up, he called me twice on his way back to St. Louis and again once he got there.

He had to go out of the country for work, but he called before he left and again–this last Wednesday–when he got back. We agreed to meet again today. We were going to make firm plans Thursday night, but he got caught up in work stuff.

Last night, I was in the same chat room. He PMed me, and I figured we would make final plans for today.

We exchanged pleasantries, then he asked what sort of fairly specialized fun I had in mind for today. I started typing up a scenario, and just as I hit “Send” he piped in with this: “I just looked at your profile, and I got really turned off.”

You know how sometimes a cartoon character gets hit in the head by a brick and his head starts swiveling around rapidly on his neck? Yeah. After meeting me in person, spending an evening together, and deciding he wanted more, now he sees a fuzzy JPEG and gets put off his feed? It’s even more risible when you realize it’s the exact same fucking fuzzy JPEG that intrigued him in the first place.

(Lest you think this fuzzy JPEG might depict something questionable that would belatedly stir his conscience, you have to realize that most of you have seen the exact same picture. My profile pic there is the same one I use on MySpace and Facebook is also the most recent picture I’ve posted here. It’s me standing in a t-shirt and jeans.)

So I said “Oh” and he said “Sorry, I guess I’m just picky” and I said “No worries” and cursed at the screen.

Really, what the fuck?

(Actually, I guess the fuck is that he really enjoyed the specialized fun I provided but didn’t so much care for my doughiness, that he’d spent the last couple of weeks weighing that which he dug against that which disgusted him, and he finally and belatedly came down on the side of listening to his inner repulsion. Somehow that is not a comforting thought.)

Fucking tricks. Unfortunately, living here, it’s a choice betwixt nothing but tricks, monastic celibacy, or a sham relationship with a wall-eyed Deliverance banjo player. Actually, that lwould really be more like having a frequently returning trick with a veneer of respectability, so it might not really count as an option.

Update: Ah. I think I figured out why this was such a punch in the gut. I was focusing on the obviously strange bit, the seeming hypocrisy of rejecting a person based on a picture after you’ve met them in the flesh. I think that added some extra rancid flavor, but in analyzing the situation I boneheadedly overlooked the bit that’s not strange or rare at all.

Basically, I think the most ouchy bit might be that he “went there” in saying he wasn’t interested in another visit. He didn’t politely demur, didn’t use the universal code of saying “maybe we can get together sometime later”, didn’t even use the straightforward but polite “I just don’t think we click”. No, he stepped into the forbidden zone and said, actual quotation here, “I just looked at your profile and it turned me off.” That’s bad ju-ju, man.

You just don’t say, “Sorry, but you’re too ugly for me”; it’s not on, not at all. There’s a well-established, well-known form to these things. You use a euphemism like “I don’t think we really clicked” and the recipient gets the picture without losing face. To eschew that convention is not only willfully insulting, it suggests outright contempt.

Salting the wound, dude’s a linguist. I’m pretty sure he has a good handle on how interactions of this kind work and are received.

I actually feel sick over this. How stupid is that?

I was just clearing out the comment queue and discovered that my very own most recent comment had been snatched up by the spam filter. There’s probably a metaphor for something there.

Haven’t written much of late, largely because the things that have been most heavily on my mind are things it would be risky to say in public. Not bad stuff about the local situation, just less-than-salutary stuff about some things big and general.

Taking the day off, and I’m finishing up Dexter. Just started the episode “Seeing Red”.

The arc of the season has been focused on the Ice Cream Truck Killer, whose MO includes complete exsanguination of his corpses. There’ve been at least 6 known victims, all found drained of blood but with no traces of blood at the scene.

This episode begins with the discovery of a hotel room filled with blood–at least six humans’ worth–but no bodies in sight. Suddenly everybody’s, “WTF? Blood but no bodies? And nobody heard six people being brutally slaughtered, or saw any corpses being hauled down the elevator? How could this have possibly happened?”

I hate it when they make the characters as stupid as they (mistakenly, arrogantly) think the audience is.

I was doing so well.

For like four days I was just cruising along, tum te tum, feeling not bad at all. A few times I think I was even genuinely happy, or at least content.

And then a few minutes ago I remembered how much I suck. At, like, everything, or at least at the things that are meaningful to me.

Grr.

I finally bought a new router last week, and I finally set it up today. With that in place, I finally set up my old desktop to play on-demand video from Netflix.

(Note: using an HDTV as a computer monitor really friggin’ rocks, at least for watching video. My desktop has, since I bought the TV as a one-year-in-the-godforsaken-wilderness consolation present, functioned as my little video jukebox.)

The Netflix service has a little app that checks connection speed before it decides which of three available feeds to push through. I refreshed multiple times and was never able to get better than the lowest-resolution feed. Grr.

On the plus side, Netflix offers unlimited streamed video with any subscription better than the one-disc-at-a-time tier. This is nice, and after browsing the titles available and seeing how acceptable the lowest-quality video is, I’m almost willing to declare physical-media recordings dead, or at least dead to me.

I’m watching the first season of Dexter right now and really liking it.

It’s amazing, really, how a mere twelve years ago the best you could expect from streaming video was a postage-stamp-sized image blistered with pixellation that would stutter and sputter for most of it’s 30-second run time. Now you can watch a full hour of smooth video without a single rebuffering method, and even at the lowest resolution it fills a 40″ display with no noticeable pixellation (but a tolerable amount of fuzziness–I very much wish my connection wasn’t bottom-tier).

Check out the latest entry on famed screenwriter Ken Levine’s blog. Make sure you don’t skip the paragraph beginning “These people go to a remote tropical island “. Realize it’s one of the most insightful things you’ve ever read,

Be honest: Had that ever occurred to you?

Compulsory attendance at a lecture benefits neither the audience nor the presenter.

It didn’t help that communications were broken from the outset. I was invited to speak before a group; when I showed up, I discovered that my presentation was but the first piece of business on a full agenda. I had a minimum 30 minutes of material prepared, chunked such that it couldn’t be shortened on the fly, and the chairperson started pointedly looking at his watch five minutes in.

The biggest killer, though, was that the attendees were required to attend. This guaranteed that the majority had no interest whatsoever in my material; the minority that might have been interested were stifled by the dead air exhaled by their peers.

That group-dynamics tendency is the biggest reason that compulsory lectures are usually worthless unless delivered by an unusually charismatic presenter. The (often subtle) visual and auditory signals generated by the disinterested have an inhibiting effect on those who might otherwise become engaged. I’m fairly certain I’ve seen solid research supporting this.

Contrast this to the presentation I gave last week. That one was requested by an ad-hoc group interested in hearing short lectures from people around campus. Only four students showed up, but one of them was genuinely interested in the topic and the others were willing to give me a shot. Five minutes in, three of the four were actively engaged and questions were popping up right and left. I had pretty much the same 30 minutes of material, but we ran over the allotted hour and (unfortunately) left students standing in the hall waiting for us to clear out. That was a good’n.

Over at RealClimate, there’s a post up dismantling the facade of credibility erected around the latest climate-change denialist PR event, that being a gathering of demagogues and shills masquerading as a scientific conference. It’s a very calm and reasoned reaction, much gentler than the blackguards at the Heartland Institute deserve.

Of course, sadly, it won’t do a bit of good. The Heartland Institute weren’t trying to fool scientists and laypeople interested in science, so they haven’t even tried. The event is just a bit of theater directed at the ever-credulous media, the dittoheads, and a public that largely can’t distinguish science from scientism.

Le bloody sigh.