Confessions of an IT Dude’s Worst Nightmare

Up until Tuesday, I had been using the same set of 4 passwords for anything that required passwords for the past 10 years. Yes, 10 years. And yes, I should know better. Like any good little former-spk employee, I know my personal passwords (or, even better, passphrases) should be over eight characters, not based on real words, and include numbers and special characters. Oh, and be different for every service. I know this, but I still let it go for so long. I know maybe a handful of people who had these passwords and did, on occasion, access accounts of mine. Specifically email accounts. Which, given the people in question, didn’t really bother me. But that time has passed.

Now, if I could just remember my new eleventybillion passwords/passphrases!

Lost in Translation

Recently, Jake and I watched Paris Je t’aime. While most of it was very good (and some of it quite bad), the last short elevated the entire movie. 14ème Arrondissement is so unexpectedly heartbreaking because it peels back what feels to be a universal experience when you are in a really horrible place and then are reborn in a very beautiful one.

My first vacation alone, and my first overseas trip, was to Paris. It was so very like what the character, Carol, goes through in the movie that it nearly made me cry. Her horrible French accent, solitary existence amidst so much activity and final revelation should resonate so deeply with many people. It also reinforced why independent travel was so necessary to shape who I am now. Without the solitary trips to Paris, Spain, and Thailand (which true, I had company on, but was really a journey I was on alone), I wouldn’t be the person I am now.

You want to know who you really are? Go somewhere alone where you know no one, and the language isn’t your native one. Do it now. I’ll wait.

It Makes Me Sad …

I love my family, but it makes me sad that (at least) one of them is voting for McCain. And Palin. It would be one thing to vote for someone because they are Republican, but to vote for a.) a man who actively penalizes the poor through policy and b.) a woman who panders to beer-commercial versions of the lives they think they live (but really do not) is heartbreaking.

My family is political. Three of the four grandmothers I knew growing up (two grandmothers, one great-grandmother) participated actively in campaigns, social causes and the like. When I was growing up, political discussion was often the only topic at the dinner table (especially during the holidays). My brothers and I were taught the value of our rights and the importance of civic duty. Still, when someone in your family puts aside the values they were raised with (respecting the fundemental rights of others, helping the less fortunate, and common sense) and replace them with party-line politics, it makes me feel like that upbringing was vastly different for me than them.

I wish I could reason with these loved ones, but the discussions often devolve into FoxNews soundbites and slogans. I wish they could understand how terrified I am by another 4 years of this madness. I wish they could understand how hurt I am by the promotion of Sarah Palin as a feminist, “just one of the girls,” role model. I wish I could sit down and help them understand that McCain’s war service has nothing to do with his service in our government, and putting the vocation of solider ahead of the vocation of United States citizen is just about the least American thing you could do.

Even more, I wish I could understand why they don’t want to vote for Obama. Or maybe I don’t. Because maybe I’m afraid knowing that answer might just mean I don’t want that loved one as a family member any more.

Watch this:

Oddly Private

I feel oddly private lately. Maybe it’s just a lull in my normal energy levels, or maybe it’s something else. Whatever the cause, the need to socialize, party, blog, email — none of them really seem to need attention. Things are brewing, strange and life-changing things, and I don’t feel like it’s time to discuss them yet.

Anyone know a good printer that doesn’t charge an arm and a leg?

A Modest Proposal

We discussed travel this weekend, after watching Paris J’taime and decrying the fact we’ve never been to Europe together. Once the dollar is a bit stronger (and hopefully in the mid-winter or early spring), here’s the route we discussed:

1. Fly into Paris, spend a couple days showing Jake the sights he missed.

2. Train down to Granada, see the Alhambra.

3. Trip down to Gibralter, cross into Morocco.

4. Drive down to Marrakesh for a couple days.

5. Head back into Spain, train into Barcelona.

6. Spend a few days in Barcelona before tripping up into Marseille.

7. Train or fly over to Venice, spend a day or two there.

8. Train down to Rome, spend a few days there. Fly back to SF from Rome.

Gimmie gimmie gimmie

If …

I hate PETA. I hate when they use Westboro Baptist Church tactics that just encourage people to wear those retarded “People for the Eating of Tasty Animals” shirts. I hate that they support the objectification of women in order to discourage the debasement of animals. 

But.

If you eat meat, and you do not know where your meat comes from, how that meat is raised, and how the animals are slaughtered …

If you turn your nose up at Chinatown markets as inhumane, but enjoy your pasta carbonera a couple blocks away …

If you practice willful ignorance about what a huge sacrifice it is that a living thing has to die to make you a tasty meal …

If you lack the basic decency to take responsibility for these things, then I have less respect for you than the people who’ve been caught doing things like this. Because every dollar you blindly spend for a grossly overportioned slab of meat supports this industry. And Jesus fucking Christ, how can your joke t-shirts and offhanded comments about how tasty bacon is justify some hillbilly fuck shoving a cane up a living creature’s vagina for fun?

And another …

When I was riding a train from Figueres to Barcelona

I was listening to this

And feeling you thinking about me, even though we’d never met.

Moments

I wake up from a bad nightmare, and you — you pull me back from the edge. When you leave the bed in the morning to get ready, I roll into your spot because it’s the most comfortable feeling in the world.

You come in a little later, and sit on the edge of the bed to put your shoes on to go. I rest my head on your wide, strong back, and wrap my arms around you.

And that’s when this song plays on the radio and things get a little fuzzy …

The Book of Love by The Magnetic Fields

Sometimes I Wonder …

If the advent of “just google it!” has irrevocably changed the nature of learning. On one hand, the free access to information is completely empowering. On the other, it means you don’t ask a person for the information. You ask the void. Though the void is populated by people, what do we lose in the subtle interchange of a verbal answer? We should lose some of the bad things — the rewriting of the answer based on bias and cultural value. But do we really? Or are they there, harder to spot in the black on white answers that the browser returns to us?

The same thought occurs about meeting friends and lovers online. The best thing I ever did was to meet Jake face-to-face after a short period of emailing. I’ve been caught off-guard before at how adept some people are at hiding behind the screen the Internet affords them, and it’s strange to think about the rippling rammifications of that as time goes on. What I mean to say, of course, is that I’d like to see your eyes when you’re lying to me.

Words …

I recently came across these words and felt moved. Maybe you will too …

 

It’s nice when grown people whisper to each other under the covers. Their ecstasy is more leaf-sigh than bray and the body is the vehicle, not the point. They reach, grown people, for something beyond, way beyond and way, way down underneath tissue. They are remembering while they whisper the carnival dolls they won and the Baltimore boats they never sailed on. The pears they let hang on the limb because if they plucked them, they would be gone from there and who else would see that ripeness if they took it away for themselves? How could anybody passing by see them and imagine for themselves what the flavor would be like? Breathing and murmuring under covers both of them have washed and hung out on the line, in a bed they chose together and kept together nevermind one leg was propped on a 1916 dictionary, and the mattress, curved like a preacher’s palm asking for witnesses in His name’s sake, enclosed them each and every night and muffled their whispering, old-time love. They are under the covers because they don’t have to look at themselves anymore; there is no stud’s eye, no chippie glance to undo them. They are inward toward the other, bound and joined by carnival dolls and the steamers that sailed from ports they never saw. That is what is beneath their undercover whispers.

But there is another part, not so secret. The part that touches fingers when one passes the cup and saucer to the other. The part that closes her neckline snap while waiting for the trolley; and brushes lint from his blue serge suit when they come out of the movie house into the sunlight.

We envy them their public love. Some have only known it in secret, shared it in secret and longed, aw longed to show it - to be able to say out loud what they have no need to say at all: That I have loved you, surrender my whole self reckless to you. That I want you to love me back and show it to me. That I love the way you hold me, how close you let me be to you. I like your fingers on and on, lifting, turning. I have watched your face for a long time now, and missed your eyes when you went away from me. Talking to you and hearing you answer- that’s the kick.

But I can’t say that aloud; I can’t tell anyone that I have been waiting for this all my life and that being chosen to wait is the reason I can. If I were able I’d say it. Say make me, remake me. You are free to do it and I am free to let you because look, look. Look where your hands are. Now.

~ toni morrison