9 posts tagged “neuroses”
For those of you who cared (apparently, a fair few of you did -- thank you to everyone for their advice), I wanted to let you know that, while I was on the road to making the same decision myself, Steve Jobs went ahead and pulled the trigger for me this afternoon. I had played with Beep's iPhone a ton and had grown to love it, and Wendy and I went to visit the AT&T store yesterday and were completely charmed by the friendliness and (so novel!) helpfulness of the staff. I watched the announcement of all the new features in real time (thanks MacRumors, I thought I had hit the geek glass ceiling), and then the last nail in the coffin landed: $199 for the 8GB iPhone. I have between now and July 11 to get out of my contract with Sprint. I can't even begin to tell you how excited I am.
Lately, a singular obsession has gripped my psyche: I'm shopping for a smartphone.
I fought it for a long time, but the facts added up to this: I own a small business, and need to get my email a lot. On top of that, when we migrate to the City this summer, it would be nice to be able to read blogs and things on the subway. With my guilt ostensibly assuaged, I began doing the research. I decided to write this post in the hopes that someone will care enough to steer me a bit (other than Brian; more on this later).
I was able to narrow it down to four immediately. Because my needs are relatively simple, I restricted myself to the four phones Sprint has listed on their website. I don't feel any compelling need to change carriers as, despite the fairly wretched service I've had from Sprint historically, I don't think any of the others are that much better. In my experience, no one is unconditionally happy with their phone service. One possibility would make me consider changing my carrier; more on this later.
I dismissed the Blackberry 8830 out of hand, as it is not only the biggest one but also the highest in price. Portability is a big deal with me, I don't want to have to deal with this big clunky thing. I have to narrow it down somehow, so I'm letting these relatively minor points break the deal in this case.
Next up, the Palm Centro. It was an ad for this phone that got me started in earnest a few days ago, and at first glance it's not a bad choice. First, it costs only $100, which is indisputably a plus. It's essentially a smaller Treo, which is nice, as a Treo is bigger than I'm interested in, and it supports Gmail syncing, which is a necessity for me. There are a few problems. Reviews indicate that the main concern in the design stages was to make a smaller, more accessible smartphone, and that things like sound quality suffered. Also the keyboard seems a bit crowded, and when the phone rings, there's a touchscreen option for answering, a prospect that terrifies me endlessly, lest my pocket should answer a call for me. I've had this happen countless times with the Treo at work, and it's an annoyance that I could do without.
The Blackberry Pearl seems a good option, as it's basically a Blackberry but smaller, and Google offers a package to sync your Google calendar to your Blackberry. The major downside here is that, in order to get the phone so small, they crammed two letters onto each key. This feels like it could get really confusing and frustrating, really fast. Other than that, I have to say this thing is goddamn pretty. I'm leaning this way.
The one I've spent the least time looking at is the Moto Q 9c. From what I've seen, it has no discernible benefits over the Pearl outside of the full keyboard, which makes it wider. I haven't done as much reading on this one, though, so I might change my mind.
Unfortunately, any one of these phones would be settling, because, god help me, I really want an iPhone.
Beep has been trying to get me on the iPhone train since even before its release, and shortly thereafter it became clear why. I mean, the thing is almost perfect for me. It does everything I need, has great sound quality for calls, unprecedented wireless access, and is a perfect size. Any website you try looks great on it, and we've all seen how seamless the iPhone-specific Facebook interface is, but I have to say that when I saw the Unified Interface that Google offers, my heart just about melted.
The problem? Certainly not changing my carrier, which, as I've already described, I don't feel one way or the other about. I would have to get Wendy to load up and change with me, since we're on a family plan, but since she has her eye on the Centro, also available for AT&T, this could be easy. The problem unfortunately is that the iPhone is 100% touchscreen, and this bugs the hell out of me.
Aside from the unintentional phone answering thing, which I guess I could just add to the neuroses pile, I do an awful lot of texting, and I am actually getting this thing for the sake of remote email access. The few times I've tried the iPhone, I have gotten quickly frustrated by the typing mechanism - owing to the proximity of the letters, pressing down with enough force to elicit a response hurts your accuracy. I mean, I guess thousands of people have learned to deal with this, but I'm not convinced it's the right choice for someone whose main need for the phone is typing. But hell, I love this thing so much otherwise.
Recent news that you could get the iPhone for as little as $199 when you sign a new contract with AT&T is further complicating matters.
Please, someone make this decision for me.
Happy Fall! This is my favorite time of year, for reasons I have never fully addressed; perhaps this can be the subject of another post. No matter, we have more pressing issues at hand. It is time for me to lay my cards on the table: here's what I ended up reading this summer.
As some of you may remember, on May 22 I responded to the Question of the Day by constructing a summer reading list for myself. What you may not know, unless you are unfortunate enough to live with me, is that I adopted, in my trademark reasonless manner, an almost cultish rigidity to this list. Strange, then, that I didn't actually manage to read very much of it. There are a few reasons for this.
First, I foolishly forgot to calculate Harry Potter into my original list. This meant allowing not only a week for the new book, but the week preceding it for re-reading The Half-Blood Prince. This didn't take too much of a bite out of my time as did various other bizarre flights of fancy (I was suddenly and inexorably gripped with a desire to re-read Fight Club, of all things) and a general complete lack of time to read. Here, then, is how my summer reading shamefully came down:
Children of Men - turned out to be ridiculously
boring next to the movie, which is fucking brilliant. Took forever to get
through.
Slaughterhouse-Five - just as amazing
as I remembered; inspired a breif desire to read nothing but Vonnegut,
which I suppressed in the interest of sticking to The List
The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat
- started reading, but found it to be too dry to read in one go. The cases
being unrelated, I decided I would read it intermittenly with other reading.
Really fascinating, though, I'm still making it through.
J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club
Back Talk
Special Topics in Calamity Physics -
I've been stuck on this for over month, just broke page 200. I can only
speculate at the reasons for this giving me so much trouble, but I suspect
it has to do with the effect that The Man Who/Back Talk/The Bible had on
my momentum
The Bible - Slow going. Extremely slow
going.
It seems, in addition to identifying trends, the Times is good for delicious recipes.
I came across a piece last week that peeked my interest greatly. The recipe, by Mark Bittman, who is my new favorite person, is a shrimp ragu centering on the idea that shrimp shells are full of flavor, and tossing them out is a big mistake. Unfortunately, cooking shrimp in the shells causes major annoyance when it comes time to, you know, eat them. The solution here is to boil the shells in water to create a stock, and then use that to make the sauce.
(I stupidly forgot to grab the permalink to this piece all last week, but here it is in the archive. You have to pay for it now, which sucks. My fault, guys.)
When I first found this piece, I watched the accompanying instructional video about 40 times, the first handful of which I did on an empty stomach, both a terrible and unavoidable decision. I was sufficiently affected and decided to give it a try. I usually don't follow recipes, but in this case the dish looked delish, so I ran with it. Last Tuesday I resolved to undertake the endeavor. Wendy had returned that day from a harrowing trip to LA and it seemed an appropriate time, despite Wendy's assertion that "You don't have to make me a fancy ragu."
The first problem was buying shrimp. I went to the supermarket after work, having no knowledge of the whereabouts of my local fish market, and completely dispossessed of the desire to wander the streets of Albany looking for one. The recipe calls for shrimp "as fresh as you can get them," but I'm not some wide-eyed innocent; I know that, at the supermarket, they just open up the bags of frozen shrimp and put them out with the fresh fish. This is a concession I had decided to make. It is my cross to bear.
This, sadly, turned out to be just the beginning of the thing. The extent of my knowledge about shrimp, outside of this article about the shells, comes from an episode of Good Eats I caught one time like two years ago. I meant to cook something with shrimp ever since, but never got around to it. So there I was, faced with different sized shrimp, sure, but also shrimp that were differentiated using some bizarre numbering system (fractions? does anyone know what these mean?) for which I was not prepared. I picked ones that looked like they were the same size as the ones in the video. The kid working the fish counter then informed me that the shrimp on display are slightly more frozen than the ones in the bags, and I should get those. I felt so guilty, and decided, if I ever meet Mark Bittman, I'm not going to tell him.
After the selection process, the hardest part was over. This is an impressive looking meal that is dead easy to make. I shelled the shrimp and boiled the shells for like ten minutes with cayenne pepper and salt. Meanwhile, I started the skillet with olive oil (basis for life) and onions. Chopping onions is a huge problem for me, as I apparently have sensitive eyes, but Wendy uncovered a secret: if you light candles around where you're chopping, it cuts down on the effect. Where did she get this information? You guessed it: Martha Stewart.
My one major deviation from the original recipe was the omission of carrots. I hate carrots in cooking. In fact, when someone has one of those bags of carrots, I'll always want to eat one, and then when I do, I end up thinking, "Why am I doing this? It tastes like crunchy water." I subbed in an orange bell pepper to maintain the color, and it gave the sauce a sort of crisp sweetness that was great. From there it was just a matter of combining everything. I added a cup of the stock (and froze the rest for making risotto next week, you damn well better believe), diced tomatoes, fresh oregano. Then I chopped up most of the shrimp, which creates sort of a paste-like situation which will be the bulk of the sauce. Everything gets fried for just like ten minutes, then I added the remaining whole shrimp, which acts as sort of a garnish.
The problem with this particular meal was two-fold: one, Stephanie came over, and, being a strict vegetarian, doesn't eat shrimp, and two, the whole time I was cooking, she and Wendy were watching Top Chef. But, no pressure, of course.
I ended up improvising Stephanie's portion of pasta with a bunch of butter, some lemon pepper, and wheat germ. Steph and Wendy are crazy for wheat germ. They have a hand motion for it. I was impressed with my own minimalism, but Steph ended up going to the kitchen for some "more spicing." I can't blame her, I had enormous guilt about her dish as it was.
I hope it won't sound immodest to say that the meal was excellent, and I hope it won't come as a surprise to anyone that it was really not that good for lunch the next day.
The second issue weighing heavily on my mind today is that which is shared by millions of crazy people the world over: Harry Potter mania.
I love the Harry Potter books, in that way that I love things, wherein explanation is completely unnecessary. They're fun. Rowling isn't, by any stretch, an especially elegant writer, but the stories are intricate and beautifully constructed and totally engaging, which is more than enough for me. The prospect of reading them to my kids is a thought I cannot wait to make a reality.
The hysteria over the ending (and the New York Times' apparent disregard for, you know, childhood) is something of a point of annoyance for me. With Half-Blood Prince, some jerk who undoubtedly hates Christmas posted the ending two days after its release in a bulletin on the MySpace. I promised him I would kick him in the nuts the next time I saw him. To think that just knowing the facts of the ending is the only reason for reading a book is beyond confounding for me; if I wanted that, I could just wait till Monday morning and ask any eight-year-old on the street.
My problem is precisely underlined here. By Monday morning, every eight-year-old on the street, along with about a million other people, will know the ultimate outcome of the Harry Potter story. It's like walking through a minefield. Being a decidedly slow reader, I'm worried that I won't get through the book before I accidentally find out the ending, as happened last time. I have to say, devastated as I will surely be after the book (if not Harry, somebody's going to die, we know this much for sure), it would be incomparably worse to have this information ahead of time. What's the point of reading, then? Then this event that I've been waiting for for a year (or, six years, come to that) will be completely ruined.
My answer is to get Wendy to drop off a copy for me at my parents' house, so that I can try to finish it during Karsa. High-school Harith would have been delighted to know I was turning this mandated seclusion to my advantage.
That I can't go to the release is something of a disappointment. This being only the third release since I started reading the series, I missed the fifth because I hadn't gotten through the first four books yet, the sixth because I had to work at Borders the following morning, and now this one for Karsa. It's not the end of the world, but it's a piece of pop culture I would have liked to experience. As is evidenced by my affinity for opening-night movies, I love crowds and I love chaos.
Wendy wanted to go to the release event at the library, so I told her she didn't have to deliver my copy until tomorrow morning. Then the clock will start ticking.
I hope she brings it tonight, anyway.
Who are the last five people you called on your cell phone?
I'm ripping off Mackey for the format of this entry, completely. In backwards order, from most recent, which was last night around 11:00.
Katie: called to talk about a menial problem. She didn't answer; I presume she was in bed. Wendy and I figured out a resolution that I think will work.
My Uncle Haitham: to thank him for taking Wendy and I out for dinner on Saturday when we were in the City. I didn't get that part of the conversation out for a solid five minutes, though, since as soon as he answered the phone he launched into an explanation of a problem he had with his printer earlier in the day, and how he was going to call me about it, but it ended up working itself out. He seemed surprised at my reason for calling. He said Wendy was nice.
Bessam: started a new job on Monday. Called to see how it was going. He said fine.
Krakat: was the only one to show up to the Open Mic, god love him, but I had already left. He texted to find out what the deal was, I called and told him to come hang out with me at Marshall's while Wendy tried on dresses. He declined.
Michael: three years ago, I got a bunch of people to chip in to get Wendy a guitar. She has yet to learn to play it. Michael is starting to give private lessons, so I called to get Wendy signed up. She's starting on Tuesday. I'm sure she'll blog about it.
In doing this, I noticed the following: the last five people I called are also the last five people I talked to, period. Why doesn't anyone ever call me? Am I incessantly calling people that don't actually want to talk to me? Does this dress make me look fat?
The New York Times has unleashed upon us yet another in their growing collection of fake non-trends. I'm not the only one who's noticed that the Times has a penchant for declaring something to be a "new trend" when it is either a) not new at all, or b) not substantial enough to be considered a trend.
I've just finished reading an article that ran yesterday, and which I've been trying to get through since, dealing with the importance of personal narratives on personality. I had hoped that this would provide some sort of justification for the relentless self-analysis in which I engage, and, by extension, be the impetus for yet another blog about blogging, which is always fun. Unfortunately, the Times does its usual thing where it takes something that everyone knows, ties some weird lopsided study to it, and makes an overwrought announcement. In this case, the announcement is that people's lives are informed by their past experiences, and how they remember them. I can barely process this incredible shock.
The thing is, the thesis never really sits up straight in its chair. Is it that your memories are a contributing factor to your personality, or that your personality affects how you process memories? It says that perky people will put a positive spin on bad memories, and "those with mood problems" tend to focus on bad details. This is common sense- anyone will tell you this was the case without having read a study. If you have something new to add, I'd love to hear it.
This seems at first glance more like non-news than non-trend, but there is definitely an air of a larger movement (that the Times doesn't seem to know how to turn off) caused by the presence of a number of studies, implying that this is some hot new corner of psychology that nobody knows about.
The few potentially interesting and unusual aspects of the article, like the effect of experiencing memories in the third person, aren't ever fully explored. Nowhere is this clearer than the zero-hour mention of Joan Didion watching someone play her on stage. The first taste of really interesting analysis comes in the last paragraph, in the form of a quote that's supposed to tie everything up.
Another ridiculously ill-defined trend, this one being predicted, sprang up in yesterday's issue: 3-D is the next step in the evolution of cinema.One of the most important parts of my childhood, Tintin, is being adapted into three big-budget films, and they are going to be filmed in 3-D, which the Times reports is going to be the wave of the future. They even quote Jeffery Katzenberg as saying that consumers are going to own their own personal 3-D glasses -- no, not someday -- in two years.
It's almost like, around the Times offices, this is like a competition or a fun drinking game or something.
I have to say, I'm still pretty psyched about Tintin, though.
In 5 words or less, who are you?
Submitted by dejablu503.
"Man, he is neurotic."
Books: Show us your summer reading list.
Submitted by marvel is my pen name.
Following is a list of books I'm planning on reading. I may or may not get to them all this summer, but this is what I have on tap, anyway:
- PD James, Children of Men - currently reading
- Joseph Campbell, The Hero With A Thousand Faces - currently out of the Albany Public Library. Clock ticking, will probably end up just buying it.
- Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five
- Sylvia Plath, Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams
- Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policeman's Union
- Alex Richards, Back Talk
- Julie Powell, Julie and Julia
- Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat
- Naguib Mahfouz, The Cairo Trilogy
- Marisha Pessl, Special Topics in Calamity Physics
As always, the Bible is on my reading list, and falling fast. I just have to sit down and do that one of these days.
