Signs my future is doomed.

Reasons that I'm convinced I am headed for senility, or Alzheimers, or Huntingtons, or some kind of mad cow disease:

Google Thinks I'm an Old Man

So I have my preferences.  If you have spent time with me socially, you've probably heard me proclaim my preference for "old man bars." 

Last night David and I were watching 30 Rock, and Liz Lemon, during her search for her new best friend, realized she needed to go to someplace where people with similar interests to her would hang out.  She goes to the bathroom of a local Barnes & Noble.  David lovingly patted my arm.

Time for cookie pants!

So yesterday morning I received an email from Google outlining its new privacy policy.  Unlike most of you, I read it.  And honestly, I don't see what the fuss is about.  It's only sharing information about you amongst the Google products you use, which they kinda already did.  I use a lot of Google products.  This doesn't particularly bother me.  They're not sharing outside of Google.  And I keep denying them my phone number or the ability to make a public profile to a minimum of hassle.

So, here's the fun part.  If you go exploring into your account, you can find exactly who Google thinks you are, based on your searches and preferences, right here.

The conclusion? 

Google thinks I'm a 65+ year old man.

The power of shy

Time's cover for next week catches up with the newest journalistic trend of investigating those quiet people who don't want to go out for happy hour with you:

All Goya with a Touch of Picasso

RAG Week, Galway, Ireland
March 2004

I am in the middle of a bar hop during Ireland's Raise-A-Grand Week, in which all the pubs open early and close late.  (Also, something about charity.)  I am the caboose in the Lady Train that is winding/pushing its way through the crowded pub, when I am stopped by a young man on a bar stool.  "Excuse me," he says.  "I just wanted to stop you and tell you that you're lovely-"  I made motions to continue moving towards the back of the pub where my friends gathered.  "No!  Wait.  I didn't want to come out here tonight, I just broke up with my girlfriend, but my lads made me, and I'm so glad they did,   because you're lovely, and-" he pauses and gestures me closer for effect, "- I would tell a girl that I loved her to get in her pants, but I wouldn't tell her she was lovely."

 507 Main, Belmar, NJ
August 2005
It's the summer, it's last call, and I'm out in Belmar, which means I'm looking around for my friends while avoiding eye contact with anybody else.  A young man saunters up to me.

"Excuse me, but you have a boyfriend, don't you?"

I size him up.  "Yes," I lie.

"I could tell.  But I have to tell you....[pauses for effect]....I'm better than your boyfriend."

"Oh?" I said.

"Yeah....I work at Z100."

I immediately perked up.  "Are you Greg T the Frat Boy?!"  (Sorry for the geographic-centered humor there but I assure you that was a hoot for those who ever listened to Z100 in the morning in the late 1990s.)

Imagine Jenny McCarthy As Your Masseuse, But Like, Not Really

I have to apologize for the serious lack of posts in Ye Ole Famous Last Word(e).  I'd tell you that I was busy dealing with the holidays, with my cluster headaches, with desperation apartment cleanings, with finding a new job (mission accomplished!) and finding my own replacement, but really, I hit a major writer's block and all of the above are just excuses.

I tried to break the spell, truly, I did.  There are 27 different drafted posts in my folder right now, of which three are maybe decent, but I kept opening them up, staring at them, typing a sentence, and then opening up Imgur in a new browser tab instead. 

"Katie," I told myself.  "You need to relax." 

So I did what any other downtrodden urbanite would do: I dialed up my regular masseuse and requested a massage in the immediate future.

Unfortunately, Marcus, former masseuse to the Women's Olympic Soccer team, was not available. 

And thus my trauma begins.

So I made an appointment at a small salon near our apartment and walked over.  I sat myself next to another woman in the reception area and continued A Dance with Dragons until a very small, skinny man with a mustache came out and immediately triggered my NOPE NOPE NOPE alarm.

In case you haven't noticed, my Photoshop skills are slowly but steadily coming along.

 He started looking on the list for his next client. Not me, not me, not me, I thought.

AOL is the post-Singled Out Jenny McCarthy of the tech world

Yesterday I was at a meeting on innovation (what kind and for whom shall remain nameless), for which a former executive of AOL was a featured speaker.

And in like, a non-ironic sense.

With this one fact we have all of the critical differences between my generation and the one before me when it comes to anything related to the internet and technology.

When businessmen-of-a-certain-age hear former executive of AOL, they think of AOL's soaring success as a new business.  They think of how they were the revolutionary force, getting the average middle-income home up and online.

When someone my age hears AOL and innovation together, they snicker.

Let's be honest: if you know someone who still uses an .aol email address, you know one other thing about that person, and that's that they don't actually "use" their .aol email address.  "Here's my email," they say to you, anxiously peering over their glasses at the paper as they scribble it down. "DSmthdoglvr2834209380@aol.com....or was that DSmthdoglvr283420988?  I'll check at home and let you know."

But they never do, because they've forgotten their password.  And once that hurdle has been cleared, there's too much spam in their inbox and they hurry offline to avoid AOL's featured web performance of Nickleback, the AOL of rock/pop bands.

I remember reading an interview with Andrew Breitbart in GQ, who was talking about what it's like to have ADD and be on the computer:

I've got maybe four or five instant messenger conversations going on at the same time. I've got about five or six tabs in Firefox going. I'm probably talking on my cell phone while I'm monitoring my Fantasy baseball team, knowing the pitch count of the Milwaukee Brewers/Cincinnati Reds game.

Once again, generational differences.  I am 29 years old.  I may not have clinical ADD, but to paraphrase the Bloggess, I'm easily distracted and I have an internet connection, and that's basically the same thing.  Right now I'm writing this post, while watching a documentary on North Korean gymnastics, while on gchat, while researching the connection between "More than a Feeling," the Pixies and "Smells Like Teen Spirit."  I can't tell you how many tabs I have open in Firefox because then I'd have to shift over and I don't feel like doing that, but be assured that it's way more than five.  I don't even have my music on, because I can hear David's from the next room. And all this is completely normal.  

"But Katie," you may say.  "That's your leisure time.  Andrew Breitbart has a site thousands of people read a day, whereas your work day consists of trying to pretend that your legendary research skills are something more than the ability to access Google. And let's not pretend that anyone besides the four of us read this site."  

Well, touche, readers, I say.  But if I may expand on that thought (and I will), I'd like to point out that Andrew Breitbart is a total asshat.  But also, what he points to as ADD looks to someone my age as normal bordering on focused.

What amazes me is how quickly we are approaching the point where executives will be people who were raised on the internet.  The little tricks that my generation has used throughout our interactions with our parents, teachers and bosses since we were 14 (the computer ate my homework) just isn't going to cut it.  Things move fast.  Mark Zuckerberg no longer stands for innovation.  Facebook is the old.  Google isn't even the new.   

But remember when we all had AOL accounts?  I think back now to how eager I was to sign up for my screen name, and how  many of those free month discs we went through in my home.  Hell, most of my good friendships to this day were probably solidified through endless hours of aim conversations.   I still use that same AOL screenname as my sign-in and tag for most of my internet interactions.  But what if I had the same reaction to AOL when I was 14 as I did to Facebook at 21, or Twitter today?  I'd be a pretty isolated, sad case.  So maybe I should just hop on board and accept the inevitable.

Or maybe not.

Holiday Bits and Pieces

So I haven't been posting much lately, and I apologize for that.  I'm having a hard time shaking off the holiday cobwebs.  However, here's a collection of bits and pieces that I couldn't quite flesh into full posts, but, now that I'm A Blogger, I have a compulsive need to share:

• I've been spending an increasing amount of my time daydreaming about what I would do if I won the lottery.  Won it big-time, like $170 million.  These dreams have gone past the point where I have been planning which friends I would hire as personal assistants, at what salary, and how I would have to get a good tax attorney to review all the scholarships I would create.  This is all well and good, except I just got alarmed thinking that I was really behind on what I had to today and then I realized that I was thinking of my imaginary "buy 5 houses" list and not my real work one.  
• Speaking of winning the lottery, my million dollar idea, which you are not to steal: Congressional Guess Who.  TELL ME THAT WOULDN'T GO OVER BIG WITH THE HILL NERDS.  Think about it: Do you have inappropriate relationships with people outside of your marriage?  Are you from New York?  Is it with your staff?   Do you like to tickle?  YOU'RE ERIC!  Copyright pending.
• Sub-point: I plan on learning to properly use the free Photoshop-type software I downloaded just to try to get that game to happen.  It will be my  holiday gift to you all.
• Speaking of which, this will be David and my first Christmas together, and people have been asking if we're going to get a tree.  "I want to get a Charlie Brown Christmas tree," I always answer, which serves the joint purpose of 1) answering the question and 2) screening the person, because if he doesn't know what I'm talking about, then I know to stay the hell away from that jerk.
•  And for another nice transition, I saw my old D.A.R.E. officer, who was way past inappropriately drunk, out at the bar over Thanksgiving.  I'm not sure what to do with that information (and that is far from the whole story), but I thought you should all know.
• There are two young women in my office who have done nothing for the last two months but talk about the calories they consume each day.  I need to stop this and I do not know how.  Please feel free to leave your ideas, because if I have to listen to one more rendition of "I'm having salad for lunch, just the lettuce, no dressing," I will scream, and this office already thinks I'm awkward.
• Speaking of which, on Monday two women in my office were talking about what to do with leftover turkey.  They were standing in the middle of a narrow hallway, which means I had to basically walk through them to get to my desk.  I felt the need to contribute, so like a 3 year old with Aspberger's, I enthusiastically yelled, "REUBENS!"  There was silence for a good 5 seconds.  
• It's after Thanksgiving, which means I can now troll you all with this little thought: I feel it in my fingers, I feel it in my toes...

Things I Wish I Could Do That Would Make Me Infinitely Cooler

Last weekend I roasted my first turkey. Or rather, I roasted a turkey for the first time. My first turkey was probably something like 25 years ago at this point.

But I digress.

While the turkey is certainly a notch in my cooking belt, and removing the neck and giblets is a notch that I'd prefer not to think about again, it doesn't make me cooler in any real, any cool, sense of the word. 

Not in the way being able to climb a mountain would.  And I'm not talking like this:

Climb every mountain....get it?!

I'm talking like this:

Or even just like this:

I'll settle for not being a Scientologist.

Other things that would make me instantly and infinitely cooler:

I Question My Maturity

ONE
This is currently my office desktop background:

TWO
We just received an email announcing that our normal staff meeting on Monday will be pushed back an hour.  My first thought was, "Hey, that's a perfect time for sticking some Baileys in my coffee."  I can not even currently drink caffeine or alcohol so I do not know where that thought came from.  Or rather, I do, I'd just rather conquer only one demon at a time.

mmmm....Makers.

THREE

Comcast for some reason  insisted on not taking a former roommate's name off of the bill, even though we both repeatedly called in and complained.  When I closed the account, they overbilled me for the final month and actually sent me a check, with the envelope addressed to me and sent to my address, but with the check made out to her.  Real Transcript from online chat as follows:

Interactive Chat with Comcast     
Katie: well, my SSN wasn't on the account, that would be ****  
Ruel: ah, and may I inquire into your relationship with her?  
Katie: well, that seems like a personal question now, doesn't it Ruel?

An Open Letter to My Officemate: I don't like you.

Dear Officemate,

I don't like you.

For a while I thought I just didn't know you.  There you sat, sometimes chatty but mostly quiet. We said good morning to each other and made bland remarks about the office temperature (usually too cold).

But you've worn out my last nerve, officemate.

I hate your stupid polite telephone laugh, exactly three syllables long each time.  Do laughs even have syllables?  The fact that I'm questioning this makes me hate you all the more.

I see you checking my computer screen and judging whether or not it is directly work-related.  And don't think I don't see you checking your Netflix queue.  Your double-screen placement isn't nearly as good as mine.

Officemate, you think you're so superior.  You with your organized  box of work shoes under your desk and your collection of extra umbrellas in case any of the higher-ups need one during a rainy day.  Kiss ass.

And dammit, I can hear you smugly eating your salad at me.  I don't care about your nutritionally-savvy lunch choices, nor does it impress me that I have never seen you buy a lunch.  Ooooh look at you with your organized mornings spent both ironing and getting your lunch together.  Ooooh look at you, getting to work "on time" and then "staying late."  I know your game, officemate, and I'm still leaving at 5. 

Oh, and how about that time I was sick, and you were the only one-- the only one!!-- in the office who didn't ask how I was feeling when I returned.  Like you didn't even know I was gone!  I'll remember that slight the next time you're out sick, officemate, and you'll see how YOU like it.

Not that you're ever out sick. 

I want the book back I lent you.

Most sincerely,
Your Disgruntled Officemate

Day-dreaming Gets Me Through the Day

Katie is gracefully ceding her forum to me today (see her master plan for internet domination here) so I can broadcast on a subject near and dear to my heart: the importance of having a rich fantasy life.

I have a new angle on this joke that is so adorable, it might just be acute.

I basically have the sense of humor of an 80-year old dork.

Have you heard the one about the chicken?

You may say to yourself, "My God! What have I done!?"

Okay, I'll let you in on a not-really-a-secret: I hate being online.  Don't get me wrong, I love being on the internet, secretly, stealthily searching through all the news, blogs, and pictures without leaving a trace of myself.  I don't Facebook.  I don't tweet.  I certainly never blogged.  And I'm not saying this with pride.  I could tell you that there was this big academic reason about sense of self, of seperation from a cyber existence.  I could preach about privacy.  I could just say that Facebook is creepy (which it is, but so am I).

Kerry: do you have facebook?
Me: haha no
Kerry: me neither
Me: i boycott that stuff
Kerry: it's stupid, i don't get it
Me: i do, however, know maggie's passsword
Kerry: i do, however, know theresa's