boo recommends 3.

sexy people
Pictures of people from previous decades are almost as funny to me as videos of people falling down. "sexy people" finds a place on my list because unlike people falling down, the only victim on display is pride.

asking for help
It's taken me a while to learn this one, but sometimes it's better to request assistance than to do foolish things like: scale the shelves at the grocery store to grab something out of reach or apply for jobs on the same job boards that everybody else uses without first talking to people you know who can personally deliver your resume to their bosses. I won't go into a treatise on altruism here; I'll just say that people seem to like to help even if I don't often seem to like to accept it.

chard
The John C. Reilly of cruciferous vegetables, chard falls between its better-known siblings, spinach and beets. Like Reilly, chard often plays a supporting role to starring ingredients such as tofu or exotic miniature chickens. Unlike Reilly, it comes in a variety of colors.

caffeinated punctuation
Now that I'm unemployed, I choose to demarcate my time with coffee -- my morning is em dash trips to the french press, my afternoon is a hazy ellipsis of slow sips on lukewarm cups at one coffeeshop or another.

dear old love
bite-sized catharsis.

what pedestrianization means to me.

In re-reading my last post, I noticed that while I explained that the challenges I faced as a pedestrian in DC colored my overall perception of that city, I didn't explain how or why that was the case.

In the last four years or so, walking has emerged as my primary mode of transport. In fact, the best thing I could say about my most recent job was that it was close enough that I could easily walk there from my apartment (red flag: I preferred ten minutes of walking through slush to 8 hours of sitting at that desk). My favorite times to walk, however, are on the weekends. I like to wake up early and walk to the grocery store and wait outside with the other insomniacs until the store opens its doors. After that, I like to run errands ("walk errands"?)--the bank, the dry cleaners, the post office. I'm privileged enough to live close to these quotidian outposts, and I try to take advantage of their proximity whenever possible. Walking from place to place gives me a sense of the goings-on in my neighborhood better than if I'd chosen to view things through my car windshield.

Boston is home to many people who travel mostly by bike, and its suburbs and exurbs are saturated with people who rely on their cars and the Mass Pike to get around. I own a car but choose not to use it very often. Driving a car seems wasteful and indulgent to me, a way of prioritizing my own personal comfort/convenience over the interests of my immediate neighborhood and the global environment. And I choose not to bike because, frankly, it freaks me out.

And so, I walk. When I lived in DC, I would walk to school. For my first year, I lived in Adams Morgan, a lively neighborhood of ethnic restaurants, colorfully painted houses and highly unsavory frat bars. The walk from my apartment to school guided me over half-puked congealed pizza on the sidewalks lining Adams Morgan, down the hill next to the hotel where President Reagan was shot in 1981, through Dupont Circle (arguably the gayest, but not nearly the queerest, neighborhood in the city), alongside part of Embassy Row, and then through the two halves of Georgetown bisected by Wisconsin Avenue. I would arrive at school sweaty and incredulous that so much history could be packed into just a few miles beyond my home. And yet, my description of landmarks obscures the realities of my walk -- the dodging of cars' failures to yield, the blaring horns, the buses near-misses. I was a regular Frogger out there trying to cross my own personal highway. DC's broad streets and ill-timed walk signals created traffic hazards at nearly every corner between my origin and destination.

Walking around a neighborhood or city tells you something about the civic and personal relationships contained within that space. In her book, the Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs emphasizes the importance of sidewalks in building and sustaining neighbhorhoods. In her view, sidewalks generate and maintain trust by facilitating heterophilious interactions, a key attribute of a strong network. The more a community can support its pedestrians, the safer and more enriching that community can be, whether or not its sidewalks are paved with congealed cheese.

hopeful urban streets.

This week, my hometown city was besieged by millions of people who wanted to feed off the collective energy of the Obama juggernaut. Even if they didn't have a chance of getting closer than two miles to his dreamy aura, people traveled down pikes and through tunnels just to be there. With DC in the spotlight these past few days, I've been thinking a lot about my experiences in that city.

In the accumulation of twenty years I've spent living there, (until I was 18 and then for two years of graduate school), only eight of those years were ruled by a non-bastard president (namely: Clinton: 1992-90). I wonder now, as I'm living 500 miles away and Obama has finally moved into the White House, if the energy of that urban space has changed in any way. Has the influx of new blood actually altered its path through the city's arteries? As the city exudes a collective sigh, and more oxygen is released into the atmosphere, do residents think more clearly? Can they exercise more efficiently? Will their matches light faster when they strike them against the box?

During my most recent DC term (2006-2008), there were days that I felt actually beaten down by the city. It was more than a feeling of displacement or misunderstanding. I felt an active force pushing against me, pushing me out of the way, a profound sense of not fitting in. While many laud DC's layout, I felt continually challenged as a pedestrian in that city. The abundance of tourists and out-of-state temporary residents on the roads and the confusion of congested corridors, resulted in constant flouting of laws designed to protect those of us who often crossed intersections on two feet. The daily feeling of nearly being run over was not simply a metaphor.

Like so many others, though, I have hope that things will change, and I have no doubt that Obama's deep respect for collectivism will leak out of the White House and stain the DC streets a better hue.

140 characters of resistance.

It's not hard for me to admit when I'm wrong. In fact, I suffer from a chronic lack of confidence in my opinions, so believing I'm wrong is actually my default setting. With that said, I want to admit on these pages that I was wrong about Twitter and its usefulness in my life.

I started out using Twitter for purely academic purposes; I was conducting research for a paper about how the 2008 presidential candidates were using Twitter to communicate to their "followers." At the time, Twitter bored me. I didn't get it. I didn't think the candidates were using it in any particularly interesting way; it was as if they'd simply been handed a "Politics Web 2.0" starter kit and Twitter fit nicely in the Microblogging compartment. My guess at the time was that voters who were aware of and using Twitter didn't need to hear from Hillary Clinton that she'd be making a speech at their local Barnes and Noble that day; they probably already knew. Of course, this was just a hunch, and while many innovative research papers have been predicated on a mere hunch over the years, this paper in particular needed some quantifiable data to back up my theories, so instead, I looked at how often (and to how many followers) the candidates tweeted.

After I finished writing the paper, I still saw no use for Twitter.... and then a funny thing happened: people I really like started to use it. All of a sudden, I used Twitter all the time! I didn't always post what I was doing (after all, I hold fast to my contention that my friends can't possibly care about the contents of my breakfast), but I sure started reading it a lot more often. I even signed up to receive tweets on my cell phone so that I could hear up-to-the-minute news from my friends as they walked through their lives in boston and DC.

So, I would like to admit that I was wrong. Like many things in our lives -- especially communication technologies -- a narrative needs to exist for why we should incorporate a new habit, some compelling reason to nudge us in another direction. For a long time, that narrative just didn't speak to me.... and then one day it did.

(I would also like to take this time to state for the record that I think Twitter will be dead within six months, or at least left in a shallow roadside grave once a better / shinier new technology comes around.)

http://twitter.com/boobasket

boobasket@friendster, r.i.p.

What happens when a social network dies?

I recently decided to take my Friendster profile off life support, to put its pathetic, outdated self out of its misery once and for all.

Before I pulled the plug, I took a tour of my long history on that site. I saw testimonials written by people I'd dated years ago and no longer cared to contact, and pictures of myself before I'd welcomed my two gray hairs. Along the way, I also realized that my number of friends had dwindled; roughly 1/3 of my former connections had committed Friendster suicide. I Ebenezer-Scrooged for a few more minutes before deciding I really needed to fulfill my mission.

So then, why did I hesitate before hitting "delete"? Just moments earlier, I'd been so ready to pull the trigger! I guess my hesitation stemmed from a sad recognition that I'd once invested so much energy in building an online community that could eventually and organically stop growing, not unlike the people who comprised it. I hadn't taken full stock of the contingencies of the social network. It all felt so pointless.

The truth is that networks, of any sort, stay vital through the addition of nodes and the strands that connect them. This is not to say that networks with stale content hold no value; it's just that the value shifts. The surplus of energy that was once created by the members of the network (think: a whole greater than the sum of its parts) ceases to grow and instead gives way to a new purpose. The decaying social network is now more of a snapshot of what used to be - every profile frozen in place. Where Friendster was once a sustainable neighborhood of tin can walkie-talkies, it now appears instead like a museum exhibit buried under dust and quaintly lacking the shiny applications of Facebook. People still visit museums, and for good reason, but it's a different type of activity from plugging into a community that breathes on its own.

And so it goes...So long, Friendster, you gateway drug, you.

the daily boo.

This past week, I spent 40 hours sitting at a desk, looking at a corporate computer and wishing I had access to a personalized little literary gem called my Google Reader page.

Google Reader is probably Nicholas Negroponte's worst nightmare about the emergence of digital media, but it's my most wonderful dream fulfilled. He worried that technology would enable people to choose to hear only the voices with which they agreed rather than the assortment of attitudes and tastes one finds scattered unfiltered throughout the media. An enormous echo chamber without dissent, the Internet would reify people's opinions, not challenge them. As a result, the chasm between us would grow as our disparate ideas hardened into distinct truths and we replaced plurality with complacency.

The way I see it, Google Reader helps me keep my life in order. While I'm sitting in my overly air-conditioned office, toiling over marketing collateral and remembering wistfully the endless hours I used to spend in coffeeshops, my Reader is slowly accumulating and filtering terabytes of information so that today, my first weekend day as an employed person, I can return to my Google Reader page and see an aggregate of the news and updates I missed while at work.

More to the point, Google Reader doesn't, by necessity, estrange me from the thoughts and ideas of those different from me; it brings me closer to them. As always, the problem isn't the technology itself. We shouldn't shun tools that allow us to customize what we see and hear. The problem is that sometimes we take the easy way out. We cover our ears when someone disagrees with us. And in this age, technology affords us not only the means to find people who think like we do, but also the ability to tune out those who don't. So, it seems to me we need to shift our focus from whipping ourselves into a centripetal ball of tightly held opinions to remembering that evolution relies on diversity.

To that end, why can't my Google Reader page make recommendations for sites I should visit that aren't similar to those I already read? Why not look at my list and say, "boo reads Talking Points Memo; maybe she'd also enjoy National Review"?... Okay, "enjoy" might be a bit generous, but you hear what I'm saying, right? After all, you probably already agree with me.

material life, accumulated.

There's nothing like carrying all of your belongings up a few flights of stairs to get you thinking about the place that *stuff* holds in your life.

Since I never really unpacked much of the stuff I moved down from Boston 2 years ago, sifting through my various boxes has thrown me full-force into a wall of complex emotions. To name a few: frustration, relief, glee, shame, and wonder.

Frankly, I'm somewhat shocked that this exercise produced any reaction in me other than mere exhaustion. I've never been all that tethered to things. I would much rather sacrifice nostalgia for convenience and buy everything I need off Craigslist than carefully port my furniture from apartment to apartment as I move up and down the east coast. Since I do move so often, I don't hold on to much that doesn't yield a particular sentimental or utilitarian value.

And yet! This moving process hasn't been without its own redeeming attributes. I've:

• found lost keys to locked boxes of things I thought I'd eventually have to blow up with a stick of dynamite, wile e. coyote style.

• read many, many old letters--byproducts of my 16-year relationship with the united states postal service--and taken note of some of the ways in which my friendships have changed through the years.

• remembered that I am a hopeless paper packrat. I just can't/don't throw out bank statements, insurance policies that have long since expired, or receipts for items I've since sold (on Craigslist). I live as if I'm one step away from a life audit wherein I'd be asked for documented proof of my participation in the capitalist juggernaut. It's such a dumb (and heavy) approach to self-organization.