miscellany

[psocoptera]

File under the ongoing interaction of lj and apa: I have a page to write for the apa, and no clear idea what I want to say in it. So I figured I'd talk about various things here, and see what seemed important.

Paint: I painted my entryway wall (dented, scratched, and smeared trying to get my couch in), and the small dividing wall between the entryway and the kitchen! I am pleased: I think it came out quite good for a first-time painting job, and fairly good overall. It's a fairly pale sky blue - I ended up going one shade lighter than the shade that first caught my eye, and I think it was the right choice for ease of painting over (as we weren't exactly allowed to paint it in the first place), but the small dividing wall is a pretty small area in the living room as a whole and it's slightly washed out for an accent wall. So I think the next-most-saturated one I originally liked would have been fine too, which makes me feel that I have reasonable instincts where paint colors are concerned. (This is only the second paint color I've ever chosen, mind... and the first happened to also be a light blue, in that case a really pale violet-blue for my bedroom. But in fact I have my eyes on greens and oranges for irilyth's house (not in the same room, yeesh!) (if he in fact lets me paint parts of it someday) which wants nice warm colors, so it's not that I want everything to be blue...) Anyways, I had a lot of fun doing the painting, and I will leave you with these two important lessons I learned: #1, the second coat is the trick to avoiding blotchiness and thin spots, and #2, it is surprisingly and unfortunately easy to lose control of the brush and hit the ceiling.

The Web: With their latest letter, my parents attached a jpg of one of those election/civil war maps that's been going around and that you've probably seen a hundred times. When I mentioned to my mom that I wish they wouldn't bother attaching things like that to email, since they're all over the web, she asked me how I would ever find something like that on the web. I made a drawn-out "um" noise and had no idea how to answer. I finally told her that I read a lot of websites and follow a lot of links. I'm not sure if that made any sense to her or not. The conversation just really struck me later as a perfectly-captured generational-gap moment. I suppose it was also a "teachable moment" in that I could have tried to explain about blogs, but it's not really in my interest to do anything that might ever lead her closer to lj, so the opportunity went untaken.

In the same conversation, my mom mentioned that "everyone always asks about your job situation". (This is probably because I've gotten sick of *her* asking about my job situation and have told her I won't discuss it with her, so she has to find proxy ways of asking.) There's something strange about that to me; I strongly got the impression that this was the *only* thing anyone ever asks about me, and, I don't know, I felt like she was sending me a message of "this is the only thing publically important about you". Why doesn't "everyone" want to know what I'm enjoying doing lately? Why is this one aspect so defining?

The Incredibles: I've been claiming since I saw this that I was going to post something about it... but this is not that post. Maybe next time. ::grin::

Comments

[irilyth]

I think the job thing is in part because many people do define themselves (or each other) first by what they do for a living. It's one of the first things people ask when they meet new people, for example.

Part of it may also be unclarity about the situation -- not just the question of what is your job, but the question of are you looking for a job, or are you taking the month/season/year/whatever off, or what.

Another reason "everybody" (whoever that is) keeps asking about it might be because it's something where they might expect there to be news. No one ask me what's up with my job situation, because my job situation is extremely boring. :^) But if I were looking for work, I'd expect get more questions, because more people would expect that there might be new answers.

Or she might just be trying to pester you, and going about it in an indirect way. (grin) But anyway, yeah.

[wayman.livejournal.com]

Hey Josh, what's up with your job situation? :-)

teachable moment

[(Anonymous)]

I really should sit down with my parents and really explain the whole blog thing to them. They know I do one, and I've printed off a few notes for them, but they don't really know about how it works. The map jpgs is a great example; every A-lister in Left Blogovia linked to several of them for a week or so, but unless your parents read those, how would they know? And yes, you could easily explain how to search for those, but not why you would think to do it.

You could just say that you have a clip service that looks for things you might be interested in. That's kind of what it is, anyway. Lots of clip services.

Thanks,
-Vardibidian (http://www.kith.org/vardibidian/journal/).

[glassonion]

Yet another possibility (tm) is that "everybody" also asks about other things, but your mom has decided she knows all about those things already, and has thus taken the liberty of handling that part of the conversation on her own. :>)

[wayman.livejournal.com]

I think the generational gap on Web searching is fascinating, and would love to see more of your thoughts on it in SWAPA if you're still pondering what to write.