Yo' Mama Jokes

I hate 'Yo Mama' jokes. With a burny, fiery passion. I find them juvenile and pointless when injected into typical conversation. Horrid things designed to insult others nonsensically through the random application of negative attributes onto the woman who bore you.

I don't know many people who actually take them seriously and get offended. I don't take them seriously (I mean, really? Yo' mama so fat she has her own zipcode. Really?) I object to them on principle. There's no need to insult people at all, let alone their mothers. I'm also sure there's some sort of feminist-esque objection I could raise that would require brainstretching for me to concoct since I am not all up on the women's studies terminology. After all, I did CS and Theatre in college and was surrounded by boys who wouldn't know what feminism was if you slapped them with a fish and women so saturated by the emotional outbursts of men that I don't think their worldviews leaned towards patriarchy so much as hippy communes. So yes. Effort that I'm unwilling to expend.

Yo' mama jokes. Immature, ridiculous, and... and... oh wait...

I have a confession. A confession of pure hypocrisy. To be fair, though, I learned the song in Girl Scouts round about middleschool from the farmkids. Either that or I learned it at Biblecamp because I seem to remember actually KNOWING the music to this one.

Enjoy:

"Your mama don't wear no socks (uh huh)
I saw when she took 'em off
She threw them in the treeeeeees
Now the dogs refuse to pee!

CHORUS:
They gone, gone, gone, gone
They gone, gone, gone, gone

Your mama don't wear no socks (uh huh)
I saw when she took 'em off
She threw them in the skyyyyyyy
Now Superman refuses to fly!

CHORUS

Your mama don't wear no socks (uh huh)
I saw when she took 'em off
She threw them on the floooooooooor
Now the cockroaches moved next door!

CHORUS

Your mama don't wear no socks (uh huh)
I saw when she took 'em off.
She threw them in the siiiiiiiiink
Now the water ain't fit to drink!

CHORUS

Your mama don't wear no socks (uh huh)
I saw when she took 'em off
She threw them in the beeeeeeeed
Now poor old Pop is dead!

CHORUS (x2)

*bows* Thank you, thank you. I'm sure there were more verses, but those are the only ones I can remember.

Annnddd, ahha! Here are some examples of the song. It's interesting to see how the song permuted on its way to me learning it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWyYon0LcPI

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ceDvGX5QYBc

((Now I remember Princess Pat and CityGirls/CountryGirls and all the others. *sighs* I miss going to summer camp.))

Hermit Rant: Friendship Reacquisition

I have a huge contrary streak that kicks in whenever people bug me to do things, pay attention to them, help them immediately, spend time with them, and generally try to guilt me into various actions. I get angry, evasive and begin to show avoidance behavior. My initial response to any request is a vehement "no" and the more someone tries to convince me, the more obstinate I become. This particular contrary streak has found its way into all corners of my life from writing essays for college, keeping my poor acne-prone face clear, being friends with fringe elements from high-school, finishing important projects properly, and volunteering emotions to friends.

As a personality trait, however, this contrary streak isn't all that bad. It provides some positive results. I finished my degree in a male-dominated field, held out for a job I would enjoy, weathered rough relationship patches with friends, have a high tolerance for hard-to-relate-to people, and I have been known to push myself physically and emotionally past my limits simply because I had to prove to myself that I could.

Additionally, I find it fun to play catch-up with old high-school friends who know what I'm talking about when I reminisce. I have been found by old friends a surprising number of times over the last year or so because of Facebook, the internet, and friends keeping in touch with friends.

Combine these and I have a dilemma. I love seeing old high school friends, even ones who haven't spoken, contacted, or otherwise been in my life for over six years. I will make time to catch up, spend time with them, and enjoy their company.

Except- I hate being bugged to continually do things with this category of people. My contrary nature kicks in and I begin to resent all manner of 'fun'. Irrationally and involuntarily, I yearn to cut off all contact. Invitations to go to parties, hiking, and other entertainments are relegated to very low priority. Communication creeps to the minimum and I have to remind myself to be patient when I get into conversations that inevitably end with a, "Do you want to _blank_ on _day_?"

These are not exactly onerous activities. Still, I resent being asked to do them and fret about the guilt in saying I'm too busy to participate. I have my weeks plotted out, more or less, and I rarely have an evening to spare and, as such, I am jealous of my free time. Regardless, I also believe that time can be found if the person in question is important enough to me. This, then, starts up the guilt that I'm a horrible person because I am unwilling to magically conjure up time to spend with someone who wants to spend time with me. The inequality in the relationship grates against me and only encourages me to distance myself. I rationalize that people cannot just drop yourself into someone else's life and expect to suddenly be bosom pals. Resentment grows.

I then begin to question myself.

* Am I being irrational or is my rationalization valid?
* Am I allergic to fun?
* Am I misanthropic because I do not want to return overtures of friendship?
* Am I resisting simply because adding a new social dynamic represents uncomfortable change?
* Am I submarining a possible close friendship on the basis of selfish inconvenience?
* Do I not have any more brainspace to archive friend-data? (It certainly feels like that, sometimes)
* Do I not respect these people because they are pursuing so strongly?
* Am I kidding myself in really finding these people interesting or am I just being polite?
* Does my reluctance stem from not considering these people to be part of my friend group?
* Am I putting up with legitimately poor behavior because I do not want to deal with the fallout of issuing a rejection?

All of these questions, however, boil down to whether or not I am justified in saying "no" or if I am a horrible person.

I do not cut off all contact immediately and retreat into hermitage with a copy of World of Warcraft, a bucket of salt-water taffy and a twenty-four pack of ginger ale for the simple fact that these people enjoy my company and I enjoy theirs. At the same time, I resent my perceptions of being pestered, pressured, and guilted into doing activities when, where, and with whom. I get frustrated and angry even when the invitations are offered in good faith and the resulting activities are fun, social, and ostensibly 'good for me'.

As my less-than-smooth face and my limp senior thesis can attest, resenting what's good for me can have long-term results. My lesson partially learned and understanding as much as I do about my contrariness, these negative results are one of the reasons I'm so willing to question myself on why I'm resisting.

Honestly, however, I just want to rant up one side of this blog and down the other. Being pestered pisses me off. It's days like this when I get all misanthropic and want to cuss at everyone who walks by. People suck, I want to be a hermit.

Bigoted? Intolerant?

I was struck, hard, by one particular sentence in this article over on Witchvox. By way of explanation, I read a small, eclectic array of religious blogs, ranging from Christian, to Pagan and Wiccan, to Muslim, to athiest and others. Just because I am a Christian doesn't mean I can't appreciate the life-loving sentiments of Heartsong's Hymnal or the painful finding-yourself testimonials in the articles written by Witchvox teens. There are alot of leadership and growth and spiritual health practices that cross religious lines in eerie ways, showing that worship has borrowed from itself for so many centuries and that people are so predictable (psychohistory, anyone?) that some of the traditional trappings of religion are really the bonds formed through community. The same bonds that we have shed with the idea that they're 'religion' and religion is bad. Our communities, and our lives, are poorer for it.

Regardless of my justification - edging towards rationalization - of reading a myriad of religious blogs outside of my own practices, the article I mentioned previously struck me as bitter. The author was burned and burned hard and I have nothing but good wishes for them. Like all good articles, this one made me think. One particular sentence, however, made me think alot. I even got around to asking religious questions of those I know can handle religious discussions. The sentence that settles wrong with me on a very fundamental level is:

"Jesus is the only way, truth, and light, and no one gets to the Father but through him". Say what you want, but that is an intolerant and bigoted belief.

Let me see if I can pinpoint why this sentiment and understanding bothers me so much. Quoted here, it's slightly out of context. That's okay. I'm not really wanting to put it back in context, because the context isn't what bothered me.

No, what sits wrong with me is the underlying idea that, "I believe I'm right." is somehow intolerant. Not even doing anything about it. Just walking up to someone and saying, "I believe I'm right. I believe you're wrong." A statement, to the person who says it, of incontrovertable fact.

Tolerance, as defined by Websters, is: "a: sympathy or indulgence for beliefs or practices differing from or conflicting with one's own b: the act of allowing something"

Alright then. So I tell someone I think they're wrong. Is that me being intolerant? Or is it intolerant on the part of the person who I'm telling if they shut me down completely and get pissed off that I've 'infringed upon their rights as a human being' by telling them that I really do think they're wrong.

I don't have a right to be right. Neither do you.

It could easily cross into intolerance (and downright harassment) on my part if I insist on giving you the 'you're wrong' speech long after you've told me to knock it off. But me telling you that that's what I believe? No. No, I don't think that's intolerant.

I think I should cut this short before I go on several tangental rants about religion, but that's all my argument is. Telling someone they're wrong isn't intolerant. If it is, we're all intolerant, insensitive, and doomed to horrible existences.

One metal emoticon

Today I ran across something that caught my attention and rearranged a small corner of the mind. It might not seem like much, but in this article about World of Warcraft on the topic of Arthas and his cameos (An article hilarious in its own right) I tripped over something the blogger just dropped in the middle of a sentence.

"I don’t complain too hard, ’cause, be honest, he’s fricking \m/, but the man does appear to have an awful lot of time on his hands."

The little \m/ in the sentence stands for the word 'metal' (which is how my brain interpreted it) or 'hardcore' or 'awesome' or some mixture of all three. Using the symbol, which represents throwing the horns, suddenly imbues the word with sub-meanings that incorporate bad-assery, death and destruction, coffee, and just general all-around coolness to the nth degree. It's just like saying, "That's so metal!" Only somehow more because it adds a layer of meaning by using an emoticon that invokes not only the word but all the imagery associated with it and the emoticon behind it.

Also, this is just my interpretation of the slangy pictogram. It might have completely different connotations to someone else while still getting the basic meaning of, "Hell yes!" tucked into the descriptor.

It's fascinating to see the weird spiraling evolutions that the internet comes up with. It's amazing just how large of a cross-section it would take to be able to understand even half of the references tucked into casual internet prose like references to Greek mythology that were all the rage a hundred or more years ago. I suppose it's much the same, though. If Jupiter and Juno were the shared experience in the education of a generation, then references for the elite would pepper anything written for that demographic. My shared education, to use the same terminology, ends with me smiling over quotes from Princess Bride, Hitchhiker's Guide, and Tolkien.

So, I suggest that with everyday people writing for everyday people, the language of the in-crowd incorporates the audience in a way that writing didn't necessarily used to. Theoretically, anyone can have a blog that can be read by anyone. Since everyone is encouraged to write by the presence of the internet as forum for mass expression the in-crowd is no longer just the elite taught to read and given a shared vocabulary through classical literature. I know share experiences with everyone else who knows anything about Chuck Norris, +9 ogre-slaying knives, and walruses who miss their buckets. I 'get' the references to philosophers and algorithms, but my odds of coming across them in the casual essays (What are bloggers but self-published essayists?) in my feed is slim to none. The way people write is changing and not just in a shift from formal-to-informal. It's a more subtle shift into a very personal way of narrating thoughts and ideas with a mass audience in mind.

When I write, it's my opinion in my blog with references to my experiences to explain my position. My voice is clear, my frame of reference is easily studied for bias. I throw out my view of the world and expect to find people who both agree and disagree. Eventually. The Internet can see this and pass judgement and give me instant (or not so instant) feedback. So when I exercise my shared experience within my writing, it necessarily forms a tenuous connection. I'm understood on a level above the words I choose.

I'm sure there's been eras in the past where opinions expressed where done so as personal essays with strong voice that were subsequently thrown upon the mercy of peers. However, I don't think anything in the past can rival the scope of today's written communication. The symbol \m/ is just a single example in a huge sample that someone I've never heard of and will never meet has an experience that parallels mine enough that I can understand a normally meaningless symbol and be amused. I don't think that would be possible without the shift in writing style and tone that blogging encourages or without the platform of the internet to provide the shared experience of its very own culture.

Why grad school was not for me

I like to stay in touch with the extremely limited population of women in Computer Science at my alma mater, being a woman who graduated CS. Every once and a while, we do stuff together. This time, it was tea. During tea we were chattering away about academic life, since most of the people who went were students and HAVE no other life, I was struck by the different experiences that everyone else was having and the ones I was having as a member of industry. This has made me reflect on my decision to not go to grad school and instead dig for employment.

It took me 9 months to find a job. There's a story behind that, but bottom line is that I finally found one and for the last 10 months I've been happily sitting at a computer and programming.

The grad students I was talking with? They were impassioned, all fired up for their chosen disciplines and extremely intelligent. They had brains full of thoughts that will eventually translate lead to concrete advances in their fields.

Eventually.

Maybe it's just me, but I drove myself nuts in college. At the end I was jaded enough to decide that a third of my professors didn't know the first thing about teaching and another third didn't care enough about their subjects to impart anything of value. My favorite teachers were the in-the-thick-of-it teachers who had opportunities for learning coming out their ears instead of the ones with dusty theories lurking in our 'required' reading. By the time I got out of college - five years and two degrees later - I was fired up to go out and DO something with what I'd learned.

It just struck me how sheltered these thirty-something, extremely talented students were when it came to the outside world. It was like they lived in a bubble of academia and anything that didn't enter and rub up against their shins like a purring cat didn't get any notice at all. What was most terrifying was one of their comments, "Most people don't know what they want to focus on when they go to grad school." So... passion but no focus and no idea what you want to do with it? It sounds to me like they were allowing academia to babysit them until they were ready to come out of their cocoons.

Of course, I'm flaunting my immaturity here. I wouldn't have been able to hack grad school. My senior thesis was a sad display of constructive criticism laced with bitterness at the pitfalls of my own education. I went out and got a job because I wasn't impassioned enough about anything I was doing when I graduated to ever want to touch it academically ever again. I wanted a job that wasn't popping popcorn, an income that could handle car insurance and an apartment with a washing machine. Now, though, I'm seeing why I was so adverse to academia.

All the opportunities I thought I had when I graduated followed paths that my interests had diverged from long ago.

Now that I'm set loose upon the world I've found that I'm a programmer, but... that's not my life. I dream in code when there's a sticky problem that I'm obsessing over, but I just as often write short stories, design graphics for websites, and go hiking. By the time I finished schooling, I just didn't care about the direction that my education had been taking me. I had started school optimistic, but the more I'd learned the more rigid the curriculum had gotten until I wasn't even vaguely pointed in the right direction. At the time, trying again from a different angle wasn't an option. My backlash against my own education was to abandon it for the realities of business and industry.

I've moved on. I've gradually discovered over the course of the past year that while I may have a job in my field, it's not who I am. It's something I do, it's something I enjoy doing, and it's something I've decided is interesting and dynamic enough to keep my attention. But it's not my box.

I could never have gone to grad school in CS because it is an interest and not a passion. I might have been able to go for Theatre, but even with the love I have for the discipline it would have been even worse because it was a degree I took to cling to something familiar. Forcing myself to continue in either field would have placed me in a definition that I would have apathetically accepted and quietly resented without consciously acknowledging it.

Now, however, I'm seeing more realities. There's no syllabus now, nothing holding me anywhere beyond a love of where I am and who I'm with.

College was nice. Safe. It was comforting struggling towards something you knew everyone else was struggling for. There was a network of authority figures to tell you 'hey, good job' even when your good job was just waking up in the morning. That's no longer the reality I live. There's now a heady sense of independence that I would have been unable to find if I'd continued schooling immediately after graduation from CS. It's not the right choice for everyone, but it was for me.

That and it's delightful to say, "I've reached my goal, time for a new goal."

Yet Another Blog

I've several of these blogs floating around, but since I'm posting more and more on Blogger, I figure I should at least have a presence here.

So. Here's my token blog. Yay. *waves tiny flag*