It has recently come to my attention that I wasted my childhood reading the classics and creating various entrepreneurial ventures (most notably The Do-Fun-Stuff Club and Scrambled Factory, among others) instead of doing important things like watching movies and playing command-line games.
I know who Luke’s father is, and I know what Soylent Green is, but that’s not because I’ve ever seen Star Wars or Soylent Green. I played MYST right when it came out and I “I am rubber, you are glue”-ed my way through Monkey Island but that does nothing for my geek cred.
Help me catch up: What movies must I see? What games must I play?
Submit your suggestions here: http://culturalliteracy.slinkset.com
(If you don’t want to register, you can leave your ideas here in the comments, but SlinkSet lets you vote up/down suggestions, which would be helpful.)
Once I collect your ideas, I’ll make an action plan and explore them all. I promise.
Special thanks to Tony for inspiring my Cultural Literacy Project.
by Marina Martin
in Groan
Rumor has it there’s a pill on the horizon that makes your body think you just exercised, causing you to lose weight.
I like that our bodies are largely a reflection of our dedication and commitment to our own health. If I pig out for a week (or, more likely, spend a week straight drinking at Seattle tech events), I have to jump up and down to get my jeans to zip, which at least keeps me partially in check. (I recognize this and am careful never to own pants larger than a size four.) Last week I biked home five blocks from yoga class and could barely make it, which was a kick in the head that I am no longer the fit chick who spent 90 (productive) minutes a day at the gym.
Now it is a question of my personal integrity and dedication to my health: will I return to my fit chick habits, or will I allow myself to deterioriate?
It makes biological sense that size is tied to our perception of beauty – we want a healthy mate to make healthy babies, and a larger person is probably not healthy. Since I cannot have and do not want any babies, I like to think it’s not just about “health” as an abstract term. When I’m consistently eating right and hitting the pavement for a run, sure, I’m thin. But I also need less caffeine. My mind is clearer. I get (even) more done. My libido quadruples. I sleep hours less a night. My neck doesn’t hurt. I’m happier, and calmer.
Will a pill give me all that? No. (Well, perhaps a hefty cocktail of pills could – ha.) And I wouldn’t want it too. It may, technically, be “efficient,” but at far too high a cost, personally and societally. If I want benefits, I want to earn them.
(Final note: I really do understand that some people have medical conditions that affect their size. But it’s a very small percentage of people, and, to be frank, nature is also giving a warning sign here that your system’s not working quite right.)
I have a love-hate relationship with memes.
I love them because I love anything even remotely resembling a survey. I live to check the boxes next to my top three interests on warranty registration cards.
I hate them because I rarely read other people’s responses – the joy for me is in filling out the form itself, not in reading the responses. I do not want to be known as a meme sharer.
All that said, I recently saw a meme I just couldn’t resist, which is odd because it has zero questions for me to answer yet the results are amusing enough to interest me in reading other responses.
Here’s how it works: Google “[your first name] needs” and share the first 10 results.
Mine:
by Marina Martin
in Groan
Finally, a way to flush your money down the toilet without wasting water!
(Seriously… why would someone buy carbon credits? Do people need another way to feel like they can change the world from their couch? I would be happy to be proven wrong. I fear I am right.)
When I tried to delete my Twitter feed from Jaiku today, I got this message:
Did Jaiku always have a bird in their error messages?
by Marina Martin
in Groan
I don’t care if Merriam-Webster says it is, this is NOT A WORD.
Damon and I are moving into a new house this week. This continues my life-long trend of never living in the same place for more than nine months, but it marks the first time in my adult life that I am moving within the same state. (In fact, the new house is a whopping 2.5 blocks away from the old one.)
I love moving. Few things make me happier. Being able to sort, purge, and reorganize my things is a wonderful, cleansing experience. A new house is bursting with untapped potential.
Normally, a move is also an emotional “reboot” of sorts for me. It’s a chance to identify some aspects of my personality/life that could use improvement and decide to change them for the better.
Committing to change while in the same environment is far more challenging than starting on the right foot in a new one. I am truly lucky and honored to have an amazing group of friends that have stuck with me through thick and thin for more than a decade now. They know my history, the experiences I’ve had, and the mistakes I’ve made, and can make educated guesses as to how I would react in future situations.
This can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. If I reacted to a situation one way once, it may be assumed I will react to that situation the same way again. Since everyone’s expecting that reaction the second time around, it isn’t always clear that I in fact have free will and can choose to react in a completely different (and ideally better) way.
A silly example to make my point: Say your close friend was in love with a man who died in a sky-diving accident. Out of support for her, and because you care, you would probably alter your future interactions with her in a subtle way. If there is a feature film involving sky-diving, you would not invite her or mention it. You would hesitate to introduce her to your new friend who also happens to be an avid sky-diver. If a sky-diving report came on the news, you would hurriedly change the channel.
Perhaps she would really like that feature film. Perhaps she would fall in love with your sky-diving friend and have a great marriage. Perhaps the news segment following the sky-diving interview would be deeply meaningful to her in some way. Maybe, subtly, unintentionally, you are holding back her personal growth, even though you’re trying to protect her. Maybe what she really needs to do is go sky-diving!
In a new environment that is free of those assumptions, it’s a lot easier to make the better choice. Hence my love of new environments 
That said, 2.5 blocks is more of a restart than a reboot. (Pause for laughter at my clever Apache joke.) It has surprised pretty much everyone that knows me that I really haven’t even considered leaving Seattle yet. (See above!) There are a combination of factors at play into this new feeling of settledness, including a number of significant mistakes that I made last year that I very actively never want to make again. However, a key factor not to be overlooked is: I think I rather like the current incarnation of Marina Martin. (Crazy!)
Still, some life-enhancing changes are in order:
- Going back to being vegan. I had quite the year off the vegan wagon, kicked off by a nice hunk of raw horse on a conveyor belt in Tokyo. I always self-identified as one willing to try almost anything once, and never having eaten a hamburger in my life somehow discredited me. I tried anything anyone put in front of me, and for the most part enjoyed the taste. (Exceptions: ostrich and goat.)
I will miss salmon, mozzarella cheese, and Jack in the Box double-bacon cheeseburger ciabatta sandwiches. I will not miss the runny nose I get every time I eat animal products, cholesterol, the sky-high blood sugars that inexplicably followed a can of tuna fish, or the sluggishness that I never felt when I avoided animal products like the plague. (I will continue to make an exception for Guinness, which is filtered using an ingredient from fish bladders, because, well, it’s Guinness!)
- Getting back into exercising. I used to work with a trainer five days a week and do serious cardio seven days a week. Now I get winded going up the driveway. Not cool. This has a four-part action plan: buying a TreadDesk so I can walk all day long while working instead of sitting down; ramping my running back up with the Couch to 5K Running Program; hiring a trainer again; and incorporating some basic sit-ups/push-ups/etc. into my daily routine checklist.
- Natural cleaning products. Always meant to start doing this, never quite got around to it. Now that environmentally-friendly cleaning products are a requirement of our lease, it should be an easy switch.
- Composting. Another thing I always meant to do. The City of Seattle sells composting cones which look simple enough to use. Now let’s see if we actually use them.
- Hiring a cleaning person. I love to clean and have always found it too difficult to justify hiring someone else to do it, especially because it’s hard to live up to my impossible-to-live-up-to standards. However, I have no shortage of work right now, and those extra hours a week are more important than ever, so I’m going to see if I can give up some control in this area in exchange for a greater gain.
