Archive for March, 2008

besides trying to weave through tourist traffic to the mall and ramming my shoulder hard into an SUV’s sideview mirror while biking, going to the kite festival was a pretty good time. i felt very ‘god bless america’ afterwards.

plus my favorite phallic symbol

and if you’re feeling lonely, this dude wants to help.

pohanka autos

eastern motors

thank god this week is over.

a big project at work–one that has been causing a lot of stress, lost sleep, and fewer blog posts–has finally come to an end (just in time for us to start thinking about the next big project). because i was getting particularly snippy, a coworker made this door handle hanging thingie to help me ward off obnoxious office visitors:

what does “munching on gradbook” mean? i don’t know myself, but it sounds dirty. and i guess the stock image of angry asian girl is supposed to be me. ::shrug::

all the dc blogs are talking about it, so i might as well tell my friends living around the country: this could possibly be the worst weekend to be a dc resident.

what do flowering trees, runners, kites, and baseball have in common?

the four are relentlessly converging upon dc saturday and sunday, ensuring a traffic nightmare and overall discomfort for residents all over the district.

cherry blossom festival: starts saturday
national marathon: saturday, 7am
smithsonian kite festival: saturday, 10am-4pm
nationals games in brand new stadium: exhibition game, saturday, 6pm; home opener, sunday, 8:05pm

it’s going to mean a lot of suburban yuppies coming into the city and clogging up the streets. it means road closures. it means chaos. it means two of my flag football games on saturday were cancelled. luckily, it also means tourists coming from far and wide, paying our sales tax and funding district public works, so i guess i shouldn’t complain too much.

anyway, i’ll probably go to the kite festival and see if any of the cherry blossoms have bloomed yet. maybe show off my photography skills (or lack thereof) on this blog later. probably not though. stay tuned.

kat, the girlfriend of my coworker, adam, is an artist.

i don’t know much about art criticism, but when it comes to what i consider good (beautiful) art, i take after what u.s. supreme court justice potter stewart once said: i know it when i see it.

now i don’t mean to compare kat’s paintings with porn, but i love the two above images as much as some skeezballs like grainy, illegally downloaded action–and without the shame.

seriously though, once you get over the assault of color, you can start to notice the detail. there is clearly artistry involved and “nature” is a theme in her other works (birds! plants! fish!). but once you find the tentacles and red blood cells (and other homages to science, i’m guessing related to her human development degree), can you really blame the geek in me for liking this?

in any case, i’m a fan, and i hope i can get in on the ground floor of her work. you see, lots of people read this blog, and i have this big empty white wall…

bus fares are getting cheaper, at least so it seems.

boltbus (run by greyhound) has fares that start at $1 (one-way?). it uses an auction-like system, charging more as the bus becomes fuller. if you get in early, you pay $1; if the bus is half full, maybe $10 (totally making numbers up).

megabus has something similar going on–not that i can tell since their site’s overloaded and nonworking at this time.
to make a long story short, i want to go to NYC–especially between May 30 and June 5, when tickets are free. can this be true?

a slightly rambling “explanation” of the dearth of women at the top of fortune 500 companies.

i agree with the assertion that the feminist movement is backsliding (in comparison to, say, the anti-racist movement, if there’s such a thing). actually i’ve been saying it all along, but whatever.

Key indicators such as pay, board seats, and corporate-officer posts all reflect a leveling off or drop in recent years. Although the gap between men’s and women’s pay narrowed significantly through the 1980s, gains since then have been partly erased by a drop every few years. In 2006, women over the age of 25 earned 78.7 cents for every dollar earned by men, according to the most recent statistics from the U.S. Labor Department. That’s a decline from 2005’s figure of 79.4 cents on the dollar and also represents only about a 5-cent increase since 1991.

feel free to read the 2 paragraphs after that one to get more depressed.

what’s going on here? the story offers a couple answers: plain ol sexism and sexual harassment, women’s rejection that there’s even a problem, and some point about the way women display their looks and sexuality (i’ll be honest, i didn’t really know what the author was trying to say–are we supposed to be hot or ugly? i need to find out b/c i’m picking my outfit for tomorrow).

but the most striking takeaway from the piece was that women–for a host of reasons–aren’t very interested in playing the cutthroat game involved in corporate management. they reject the idea, and consequently rarely rise to the top of it–explaining the pitiful lack of female leadership in fortune 500 companies.

“Women go into top jobs thinking that hierarchy is foolishness: Let’s clean this up. And we lose.”

i’m not sure i feel comfortable endorsing this (victim blaming?), but all the competitiveness supposedly necessary to succeed reminds me of middle school girls vying for power and status. if only women could apply those lessons to their careers, all our problems would be solved.

so a couple posts back, i asked why someone would go to an art show where all the prints on display are also on the artist’s blog. the answer, obviously, is not to see the art, but rather, be seen preening and posing near the art.

imagine a room full of people who really, really want to be photographed by a the eminent fashion chronicler of our time. they look just like the photos on the wall—which *NEWSFLASH* is exactly why you won’t be photographed any time soon. why would he want to take pics of an outfit he’s already seen?

for the record, i wore an off-the-rack number—complete with ratty nine west loafers and tights, classy horizontal-stripe jcrew turtleneck (my favorite cotton/polyester blend), and an itchy black wool french connection dress.

i got some pics of the guy and some quasi beautiful people. that’s right buddy. i’m taking a pic of your overtanned, surprisingly small-statured existence.

i’m not going to post any more pics of the people there (that’s exactly what they want), but you can bet there were plenty of pocket squares, fake glasses, berets, and ironically mismatched prints.

i will, however, post pictures of these business cards i gathered from the floor of the stairwell.

if you can’t read the tag line, it says, “moving forward by thinking backwards.” what does this mean? what does this guy do? the answer is nothing, on both counts. these are fake business cards for a man who has no real job, who apparently runs an “online magazine” (read: half-ass blog) that was created because he was “all to [sic] tired of magazines that deal with celebrities and socialites alike to whom are interesting in their own right but in my eyes aren’t the ones that need the limelight 24/7.” huh? i repeat: found these on the floor.