Here's something that might not be obvious. I've had advisors, I've had teachers, I've had bosses, other types of people in positions of authority over me in one way or another. Some were cool, some were cool-challenged. Some of them I wanted to be friends with, but most of them I just wanted to be friendly with.

So do You see what I'm saying?*

Ha.

* I know You might not. I hate being explicit. What I'm saying is, since I also don't like being TOO cryptic, is that I don't trust friendliness from people I have authority over in one way or another. It is probably sincere but it might not be driven by my personal characteristics. So (just to flog the dead dog) as long as I have authority over You I won't be the one initiating purely social interactions. Blah.

[[Ed. note: If You understood what I meant without the *, let me know, I can tailor these entries to the acuity of my Audience.]]

Do I really want to consider applying for the Chair position at UiT? Whoa.

Seriously, I think I was safer driving with my cellie in hand than I am with the headpiece thing. Then I knew I was doing something dangerous and that prompted hypervigilance. And short exchanges. Now I just focus on the conversation. This is why I shouldn't really ever talk on the phone.

Now I'm wondering if this lack of multitasking facility is a byproduct of age.

Today for my history of feminism class I have to read a few papers about feminism within a psychoanalytic framework. They are durned near impossible to get through. Here's hoping the discussion makes at least a little bit more sense.

I have been thinking a lot about microexpressions and how biofeedback affects my experience of my own emotions. Most of the time when I smile it's a smile that has an element of detached irony, as if experiencing happiness itself were something mockable, and I can feel the change from a distanced smile to a true smile in my facial muscles*. I wonder what it means** that I am usually detached from my experience in this way. And I wonder if I would be happier if I could train myself to exhibit an unadulterated smile instead of my typical knowing smirk. If I could experience emotion with a little less cognition, a little less as an observer and a little more as an actor.

It's strange because my emotional expression in general is pretty spontaneous. I just spontaneously express detached emotion. Ha.

* I can demonstrate this for You if You ask

** I don't actually wonder what it means

This was the thought du jour in today's Social Studies (Globe and Mail).

"If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas."

- George Bernard Shaw

I can't decide whether this is deep or really not. What I mean is, I think this sounds deeper on first contact than it really is. It's really just saying that concrete, material things are zero-sum and non-material things are non-material. Wow. Matter has stable mass. Wow.

This brings to mind a game my wondercousin Ian thought up that no one would play with him but me. The game is called "guess what I'm thinking of" and You play by one person thinking about a thing and the other asking "is it ....?" until it's right. We've only ever begun a game once, about a year and a half ago. I think about that once in a while.

It's that ideal time of year when water bottles can be driven around town and remain in the car overnight without detriment to the water within.

One of my secretaries has this uncanny ability to respond to my questions in a way that necessitates a follow-up question from me. Like, I'll ask a question (X or Y?) indicating the consequences of each answer, and she will answer the question but not indicate in any way her intention to implement the follow-through. Which means that I have to write to her again, saying "OK, so X, now will You do Z, as I suggested would be necessary if X?" It's unbelievably frustrating, as a communication tic, over a longer period of time.

In my fervor of cleaning this week I think I chucked some foodwares that had an expiration date of late April, because I thought we were in early May.

There are a couple of problems with me actually creating a 500-word entry here today.

1. I don't think I have word-count function.
2. It's 1:36am and I sort of want to go to sleep. I still have to make my bed, yo, I did laundry today.
3. It has been difficult for me to think of a topic upon which I could elaborate for 500 words without actually, You know, going public with my thoughts. This blogging thing is all well and good while I can keep it cryptic, abstract, and essentially uninterpretable by strangers/acquaintances, but expressing a real, coherent, considered thesis to anyone skulking about is probably not something I want to be a part of. Again, many people want to be the American Idol, I want anything but. I can create little exercises for myself to self-express to larger communities, but they are exercises and only demonstrate that I *can* do it when I force myself, not that it suddenly becomes natural/desirable.

Anyway, the only topic I could think of that I would be willing to go on and on about is how much I hate using PCs compared to my Macintosh. I know no one calls them Macintoshes anymore. It's strange.

So, here's the beginning of a list, and I'll probably add to it over the coming days. Who knows, I might even get to 500 words.

- the applications I am currently using sometimes show up in the bottom toolbar or whatever You PC users call it (I would like to call it a "dock") and sometimes they don't. They just aren't there even though an application is open. Especially (not always!!) when the window is open but hidden somewhere behind other windows on the desktop, i.e. when that would most come in handy. WTF?
- firefox is unbelievably slow
- I keep getting these messages popping up about how my computer might not be secure. Or that my some virus thing or other is/isn't active. Jeeeeezus. Who wants to have to deal with that shit all day?
- I hate having to use control as my function key because control is my function key FOR OTHER THINGS
- I hate that I got used to using control and now I'm dysfunctional on Mac keyboards!! aaahhh!!
- I hate the stupid trackpad responding to my fingers lingering over it and taking me unexpected and unintended places.
- I hate the inbuilt photo-organizing software being such utter fantastical crap.
- the fact that I have to go through a process of clicking and waiting and waiting and waiting to put this computer to sleep, rather than just closing it.. of course, that is somewhat better than the narcolepsy suffered by the PC in my office. THAT can get REALLY irritating.

Anyway, while I go to sleep/think more about these things, I recommend to You fmylife.com, a website that will either make You feel better or not.

Ph made a resolution to write 500 words a day in his blog. I can't imagine writing 500 words in my blog even once. Maybe that'll be a good goal for this weekend, along with calculating my taxes. Swell times all around.