How do I not post this video?

Wazzup with zee cupcakes?

You may have noticed, if you subscribe to my Google Reader shared items, that I’ve been sharing a lot of cupcake pics. This is because Seppo and I are making cupcakes for Holly & Mack’s wedding next year!

I’m so happy & excited, yet terrified now because my last few batches have been utter crap. But I’m a scientist at heart and I’m applying the scientific method to cull down to the best process and recipe that I can learn. So far, I only know what doesn’t work.

Hopefully, I will made a few batches in the very near future that taste and look kick-ass, at which point I will post them to the food blog. Nothing has been that great so far.

Dun dun dun.

The weight of responsibility

I’ve been furiously searching for a name for my soon-to-be nephew. My older brother called me the other day and asked for help. I love looking at name origins in general (goes along with my interest in etymology as well as my interest in cultural self-identity), so it’s not a task I am not excited about — I am!

But man! It’s hard. I have two requirements from the big bro:

• It must be unique, but not so unusual or wacky that it’ll be a constant source of teasing for the kid.
• It must sound “strong”.

I’ve already had a list rejected outright, except one name, which made the cut. In addition, the ladies of the family (the mom-to-be, my sister, my mom) all are interested in a name with a biblical link of some sort. My brother is like, “Eh,” about the idea, but he’s not against it.

So I’ve been trying to do modern variations on some of the lesser known biblical names, but it’s really hard. I’ve been using the following to websites as my primary resources in research:

• Baby Name Wizard’s NameVoyager (associated blog here)
• Nymbler (this is also associated with the same person as the above websites)

I have come to the amateurish conclusion that the letters p, t, k, m, n, and x (when not at the beginning) are “strong-sounding” letters and that the letters h, l, j, r, b, and s are not, where “strong-sounding” is extremely subjective.

And no, I’m not thinking of your name and judging you or anything like that. 🙂 I’m sure whatever you think I am thinking of your name, I have never thought it.

Anticipation

Warning: lame blog entry coming.

I’m really excited about Rock Band for the XBox360 and Gilmore Girls – The Complete Series Collection coming out. Both are coming out in November. Arg, it’s only August!

I figure Rock Band can be our Christmas gift to ourselves. For the dvd collection, I am thinking that it’ll be the reward for another successful NaNoWriMo. Because these things come out in November, I will most likely not be able to enjoy them until December, since every minute I am at home and awake will be spent on writing. Hmm. I’ll have to figure out a good schedule to keep things sane. It’s also possible that I might push off NaNoWriMo this year for another month entirely. We’ll see how it goes. I really want to spend a lot more time this round on plotting and setting, and polishing the core story so that it stands up well and has a good pace.

Bye bye Bro-die

We took the little brother to the airport this morning. I was about to write that he’s in the air now, but having just rechecked the flight status, I can only say that he’s probably sitting on the runway in the plane.

He visited for three weeks. I wish it had been longer. He’s a good kid. He did all the work I asked him to, without audible (heh) complaint: help around the household, go with me to my work and help around, assist with camping supplies/setup/food/cleanup, walk the dog with me, etc.

I think we had some really good conversations. I got to know him more, not just as a little tiny tot in my head that I see for a few days every year, but the real teen-aged kid that he is. It was really, really nice.

I got to show him around to some of my friends’ companies and give him some exposure to things he might think are interesting, for now or for later when he thinks back on it. I got to spend time with him and discuss politics, current events, music, animals, and any number of other ordinary things, which to me was extraordinary because this is exactly the kind of run-of-the-mill ordinary interaction that I have never really had with him in the past.

And he’s got a wacky sense of humor. 🙂

Thanks to all my friends who were kind to him and showed him around! You guys rock!

I miss him already.

Whoosh!

I’m thinking it’ll be awesome to combine one of these dual-flushing toilets [video link — warning: autostarting video] and one of these grey water reuse systems [Thanks for the link, Holly!] to reduce water waste at home.

Sorry to blog about toilets.

Guest Brogger

Get it? Bro-gger. My brother will guest blog. 😀 Ok, Little Brother, heretofore referred to as LB, I want you to write a couple of sentences about what we did everyday you’ve been here. Everything from here on will be written by the LB.

Saturday, June 30th: Uh…… *Searches deep into mind* Got on the plane, got off the plane. Ate somewhere. Did something. Got renamed to Manuel Labhor. Ate with strangers that my sister apparently knows at a Japanese place, which had some rather interesting curry. O_o.

Sunday, July First: Went to help make sammiches for the poor. Uh… hmm… The civic broke down 3 blocks away from the prison cell home. My sister also made some cupcakes that were honestly TERRIBLE,(cough) I THINK SHE’S TRYING TO KILL ME. (cough).

Monday, July 2nd: Tried to play Arkham Horror by myself. Two hours later, my head was pretty much fully recovered. Resorted to StarCraft (yaaay). Saw Ratatouille and swore to get a small mouse and teach it to cook, along with a small monkey to ride horseback on my chihuahua with chainmail and a knife. What?

Tuesday, July 3rd: Ate Belgian waffles. :D. Passed out after continuous beatings. Ate some Korean BBQ with some other strangers O_o.

Seppo made some brownehs after this conversation:

Seppo: So I guess we need to get some cake.
Sis: … But I didn’t want cake, I wanted brownehs…
Seppo: ZOMG (horrified gasp)

Narrator: So the three set off to bake teh brownehs and fulfill teh wishehs of teh sis. By teh three, I mean one baked em and teh other two helped eat em.

Wednesday, July 4th: Went to the rotunda and listened and ate ice cream, and met with those strangers again and saw the Transformers movie, and came out the theater with some extra corny jokes in our heads. Saw mediocre fireworks and ate brownehs and mo ice cremies.

Thursday, July 5th: Went to work with sis, which meant reproducing bugs via childlabor @ $5 an hour (under the minimum wage >:o) watered plants. exciting.

Friday, July 6th: Uh… LOOK KIRBY! (>”)> <(")> <("<) Saturday, July 7th: Helped Seppo with the car. Sunday, July 8th: Worked on weeding the yard for $3/hr… for 1 hour… Monday, July 9th: Work. Tuesday, July 10th: Work. Went to feed some stranger’s cats. Wednesday, July 11th: Work… Went to a fire show. But not JUST a fire show! Oh no, it was a..(drumroll).. HORRIBLE fire show. Thursday, July 12th: Stayed “home” and did nothing… Nuthin. A stranger disguised as a cousin came here today. Friday, July 13th: Went foodshoppin in teh morning, ate at Dreamworks(r), went to feed those cats again, which I then found out that I had a horrible reaction to, stopped at Safeway to grab some Claritin(r) D(tm), got some Beard Papa’s and went to Malibu Grand Prix, and went home. Went to the campsite and after 90 minutes of a bitter battle fought tooth and nail with the tent, we got it up. Dinner was great chicken and potatoes and corn, and smores. Was a costume thing going on? ‘Cause there was this guy in a hockey mask running around with a red chainsaw and machete. Does this happen a lot? And I wonder, how did he get such a perfect shade of red? Saturday, July 14th: Woke up (due to Mobi) after not so great sleep (due to Mobi). Ate smores for breakfast, while sis broke the code of humanity by eating instant ramen for breakfast. More strangers invaded our area, along with bready goodness. And some “bold grown-up cheesy potato chips” which tasted more like “shy adolescent bland food-substitute recycled waste”… not that I know what that tastes like… Learned that, according to Apples-to-apples, that elephants are indeed soft. Take THAT wikipedia! Had stew and rubber-like bread for dinner. Sunday, July 15th: Woke up (due to Mobi) after Mobi-induced sleep. Ate and left the site. Stepped inside house door and collapsed after watching Meerkat Manor (woot!). Monday, July 16th: Woke up with a head that hurt for some reason, sat on the couch. Worked on some stuff for my sis’s new T60. Tueday, July 17th: Work. Now I’m writing this… thing…

I’m dumb, and my butt smells, like a butt…

— Sis

(bonus ficticious(tm) points for whoever gets the reference)

My bro

He smells funny. Please put that in there for me.

— Seppo.

My little bro, born in Philadelphia, raised near Atlanta, GA took the accent test. These were his results:

What American accent do you have? (Best version so far) Midland (“Midland” is not necessarily the same thing as “Midwest”) The default, lowest-common-denominator American accent that newscasters try to imitate. Since it’s a neutral accent, just because you have a Midland accent doesn’t mean you’re from the Midland.

Click Here to Take This Quiz Brought to you by YouThink.com quizzes and personality tests.

My results were entirely consistent with my former accent test results:

What American accent do you have? (Best version so far) Mid Atlantic Also known as a “Philadelphia accent” but also heard in south Jersey, Baltimore, and thereabouts.

Click Here to Take This Quiz Brought to you by YouThink.com quizzes and personality tests.

I am going to try to have him guest-blog sometime before he leaves. Heh.

Tagline

[14:36] eingybear: i think i finally have a tagline for my website.
[14:36] eingybear: “The perfect is the enemy of the good.” — Voltaire
[14:37] eingybear: i think this theme has really shown itself in my life in various different ways in the recent years.
[14:38] helava: Ha! That quote is PERFECT!
[14:38] helava: <- unwittingly ironic
[14:38] eingybear: ROFL!
[14:39] helava: Man, I wish I had been intentionally ironic. That would have been better.
[14:39] helava: hehehe
[14:39] eingybear: 😀
[14:39] eingybear: I’m totally going to blog this conversation.

Being communiflexible

I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about how I present myself, both in my personal life and in my professional life.

It is more important to me that I convey the correct impression of me to others than always being myself. Did that sound contradictory? Probably. But they are very different things to me.

Here is an example. If I had things 100% my way and I cared more about being me as I perceive myself than how I communicate with others, I’d probably never use a smiley face in my writing; I’d never hug people upon greeting them and saying goodbye; I’d go months or possibly years without calling up friends that I love.

Hmm. I didn’t mean to make myself and my impulses sound so antisocial.

What do I mean? “I’d probably never use a smiley face in my writing.” I only began to use smilies because I realized that it wasn’t clear to many other people when I was making a joke. However, my natural inclination is to be dry, and dryness and inclusion of smilies in writing are really natural enemies. But living life and interacting with people, it was more important to me not to deliver the line, but to connect with people and make sure they are getting my intention which is to be in on the joke together. Not making it clear to someone that you are joking simply acts, albeit unintentionally, to exclude the person you are joking with, instead of creating rapport in a shared view.

When I’m composing an email to a colleague, I make sure to use their “language”. If this is a person who is very direct and succinct in their communication, I keep my email the same way because I’m sure they don’t want to have their time wasted. If they are someone who prefaces their email with thanks and sorries, I make sure to do the same if I’m asking them to do something for me, because it says to me that those interactions matter to them. If a person’s email has exclamations and smilies, even if it’s for work, I’ll try to echo them to some degree so they understand that I am not depressed or angry about what I am communicating to them.

People may be reading other people’s words but often apply their own voice on the words they are reading. If they think the words/tone echo how they’d speak if they were pissed off or trying to be insulting, then even if there is not a single word in your writing that sounds like that, they will most likely walk away from the experience with a negative impression of the communication. If they think the words/tone felt flakey and too bubbly, they will walk away from the experience thinking that the person who wrote them can’t be taken seriously, even if all the writer wanted to do was soften up their communication.

So in order to communicate to my coworkers that I’m a responsible, unstressed, communicative, hardworking, serious-yet-casual person, I might write five different emails in a day that sound very different in tone. But hopefully, they all have a very similar picture in mind of who I am.

“I’d never hug people upon greeting them and saying goodbye.” And it’s true. I only ever feel like hugging Seppo, my mom, my nieces, and my little brother. Ok, I wanted to hug my extended family members when I met them. I guess I mean that most of the time, I wouldn’t want to. There are a few heart-felt exceptions, like a real hello or a real goodbye of someone I care about. To me, it’s something I only want to do (when it’s not Seppo) when I’m overwhelmed with emotion.

But you know what? I hug people all the time now. Why? Because I know what it means to the people I care about in my life. It’s not aloofness or lack of affection that keeps me from wanting to hug people, it’s just that I’d rather just wave hi or bye, and save the hugs for when it’s really significant. But to many others, not hugging is off-putting, and makes them feel like I perceive a gulf between us that I don’t in fact perceive. My hugging them gives them the proper impression of how I feel about them, even though I wouldn’t choose to express myself that way, if I didn’t think it’d hurt feelings. Because it’s important to me not to hurt my friends’ feelings and also to let them know I do value them and feel a great amount of affection and love for them, I hug them. Because then, they hear the love in a language they understand, even if I speak it awkwardly and would prefer to speak my own language. But if I spoke my own physical language all the time, most of my friends would not understand me.

I suppose the other dimension of this non-hugging thing is that people think of you in a certain way when you say that you are not a hugger. The assumption is made that you are cold, that you have issues with physical affection, that you must not be loving. These are all things that I think are completely untrue of me, so I feel like I need to portray myself externally to society as I see myself internally.

I think the whole “calling thing” is pretty much the same as the hugging thing.

Being communiflexible (totally a made up word) seems fairly obvious to me. It’s the concept of being able to tell your friends certain things in a certain tone, but not just general acquaintances. It’s the same concept, but extended a little further.

I feel like I should have something at the end of this post that really ties things together and crystalizes my thoughts perfectly.

But I don’t. 😀 Oh noes! Smiley!