“personal”

What with my mom’s brief written appearance on the local newspaper, my little sis’s short stint at jail (long story—funny, if looked at from the right angle and distance), and my oneesan’s mini-interview at Univision, I sure have one famous, versatile family ;).

A week ago I learned two friends are coming from the US this July 21: that means empty cases. Two happy days later and hundreds of dollars less: 38 books on shipping parcels from Amazon. Book shopping is a pleasure in and of itself (I’m rarely this happy!), and hereforward’s my list (which is quite an intimate thing to share—it’s the perfect psychological text, if you know how to read it).

Pagina numero 3 del Publico de hoy: mi mama! Cosette es hija de una amiga de mi mama y le pidio entrevistarla. La entrevista fue por telefono y por falta de tiempo ya no alcanzo a pasar la version que mi mama pulio despues por escrito, quedaron muchas cosas por decir y muchas se dijeron mal. Pero bueno, por otra parte hasta vino un fotografo a la casa. Notese mi influencia en las quejas sobre Ciberia y sobre la portada.

It’s strange. I just started getting some good momentum coding and designing when my family (save my dad, who has to work) together with my grandfather are off to Vallarta. Quite frankly, I would much rather code away and read UI patterns (it’s just that I don’t want to rest now, I want to code!), but this is the perfect opportunity to get that biography and I know I’ll regret it if I miss it (my grandfather is 84 after all). Oh well, 5 days of sand and beaches shouldn’t be too harmful. So goodbye, for a while (there won’t be web where we’re staying).

I almost forgot to tell you! A couple of days ago I spent some time with my most-admired 84-year-old maternal grandfather, Luis, and the very first thing he said to me was (translated, of course): “Do you remember that you once told me you wanted to write my life? I’ve been thinking about that lately, and, well, would you still be willing to write my life if I told it?”

“Yes!” I shouted, of course. And so we’re now waiting for our schedules to coincide (he’s a very busy man). The plan is for me to (video)tape several interviews of him about his life, give them some form, and produce a booklet out of my notes. It sounds most challenging and fun. If all goes well, you’ll soon be able to read here how it came to be that a lice once saved my grandfather’s vision (true story).

How Vanessa-Mae-ish of me!

I’ll be the first to acknowledge its silliness but who cares, I’m just wowed. I finally downloaded the entire 50GB 6-seasons 127-episode Gilmore Girls^WP series. Frankly, when I begun this I was not (yet) a gilmore-zealot, my point in downloading it was rather to test the limits of my current technology—and, of course, to smugly marvel at how much these limits have receded. I remember when 5mb made for a humongous download. It was something akin to those news one often hears about some university or other breaking some telecommunication’s limit or other (Gazillion Number of Terabytes Per Second Achieved at Gung Ho University). I was merely exploring the digital frontier of the amateurishly possible.

But that was then. I only just watched the first season (~20 hours) with my sisters and loved it. I’m a fan. The “intricate, extremely fast-paced dialogue, with numerous modern pop culture references, along with many other references to politics and high culture.”^WP was the initial hook for me but the more I immersed myself into the series the more I was surprised. The show is really girly, really, really different to me, to my everyday experience, to what I’ve lived. And yet I really like it. I think I would be one happy girl (or daughter or mom)—and it’s starting to rub off on me. I’m starting to talk fast and witty (that was a joke), empathy has gone thru the roof, I understand so much more why my mother acts like she does sometimes, Rory has rekindled my geek, bookworm, naive-I-want-to-learn-everything pride, and last night I caught myself speaking like Lorelai. It’s a shame isn’t it? Life’s so short and we’re so fixed in our roles.

And this train of thought has led me to ponder just to what extent we (as in we) are social constructions. It’s a cliche that Shakespeare invented the modern introspecting human and I recently read some lines

that, bizarre though they felt at the moment, are looking truer with every minute. I wonder, to the chagrin of some feminists I know, up to what extent is gender a social construction?

You can laugh (and I do), but I feel much more feminine and talkative since I watched GGs, and years of Friends have deeply influenced who I am and how I want to live, and I just read about this guy who thinks that Seinfield has simply made him a funnier person. Maybe, and this is a big maybe, one part of the holding power of TV in particular, and fiction in general, is that it allows us some degree of flexibility in choosing what constructions we want our selves to be molded with. Granted, usually we simply reinforce our worn ways, but at times, like this one, there are nice surprises.

Out of college but still smack in the very-naive-but-pretentious-worldviews phase.

Tio Tani [por telefono]: Oye char, y tienen luz?
Yo: Ehh… si tio. Claro. Por que? Se le fue la luz? ... Usted tiene en su casa?
Tio Tani: Poca.
Yo: ?

Mi tio tiene esquizofrenia y le cuesta mucho trabajo hilvanar sus ideas con coherencia. Ocasionalmente dice cosas tan incongruentes que son chistosisimas.

Grr… I hate looking for new domain names. Everything’s already taken and when it’s not, it’s because some arcane country code top level domain rules that won’t let you get it.

Case in point: my quest for a shorter domain for Imagery (elzr.com/imagery seems unfair now that it receives far, far more visits than this very blog). Sean was kind (and fast) enough the other day to grab imgry.com and imag3ry.com but, I don’t know, they are simply not that satisfying. So my first stab at it was trying to pull a ma.gnolia.com, to no avail (magery.com, agery.com, gery.com, ery.com, ery.com—all taken). Then I tried a del.icio.us, again to no avail (it turns out there’s no .ry code and .ru would have been nice but image.ru, which sounds pleasantly japanesy to me, is already taken). And then it hit me, straight from high above I swear: ima.ge/ry! It was free, it was cool, it was weird: my quest was over—it should have been over. But it turns out the damn .ge is only available to Georgian residents! Grr…

On a related domain pet-peeving note: since 1997 you can’t buy a something.mx domain (you have to get a second-level domain, like .com.mx, .gob.mx, etc). Why? Go figure. I can buy something.us (U.S.), something.am (Armenia), or something.tw (Taiwan) but not the one from my country. Grr…

2,151 persons visited Imagery 2 days ago, 6,790 visited yesterday, 3,655 have visited it today (as of this very moment). It made it to the del.icio.us homepage. It made it to LifeHacker. Blogs in 22 languages have talked about it.

It’s been overwhelming. I’m compulsively refreshing my stat counter every 20 seconds. I feel so tiny, so standalone everytime it hits me that as I go to the bathroom 30 more people, somewhere in the world, have tried the website. But that the world is a weird, humongous place you knew, what has baffled me as I obsessively researched where everyone was coming from was what a surreal, boundless nonplace the web is. These last two days have shown me a dazzling array of bizarre organisms—mashups, filters, feeds, composites, parasites, symbiots, recomposites, bots, leeches, scams, automators—that thrive on the web, underneath the hood.

Oh, and one more thing: the sheer, brutal, speed of it all. It took two days and one email to Emily Chang (Thanks Sean!) to go from a pretty much forgotten website to this.

The present’s baffling.