Bloggy

school is hard waah.

What's life like in: Florida? North Carolina? Texas? I think I am about to find out.

Here's a story that ran (two years ago!) in Portland's alternative weekly paper, the Willamette Week about joblessness in Portland . I found it this morning after typing in "Portland Oregon job market" to Google, and up it came. It made me cry. It made me laugh, and sigh, and ultimately made me decide that if I haven't heard from a school by May 1, then I am out of here. I am not playing this game any more. This morning I awoke frustrated yet again with my lack of paychecks and zero benefits and what seems to be a cycle of let downs and a spiral down toward poverty, and not much change in the future. I'm done with being optimistic. It could have been because last night B and I got into it--he's lent me $1,000 over the past 2 months and is irked that he can't pay off his credit cards like he wants to because he gives me all his money. I can't blame him. The article backs up what I have been hearing all along. People come to Portland because it's...

I have a couple classmates in statistics who are from Kuwait. I realized how little I know about Kuwait. Ali is in his mid 20s, and he's studying engineering here so he can go back and get a good job in Kuwait, for Cisco Systems. Cisco employs many people in his family, including cousins and older brother. Ali will be way ahead of the competition because he's learning English, and he says he's way ahead of any American competition because he speaks Arabic. That's why his parents are paying thousands to send him here for school. His other cousin is also in my class. I asked if he can swim in the Persian Gulf--he says you can, it gets about 130 degrees in the summer there, so it should be refreshing, except that it's really polluted with oil from the war 14 years ago. Alcohol is not sold anywhere, and no one eats pork. He wears the traditional white dress type uniform thing, just to keep cool. He says the speed limits are rarely enforced, and drivers routinely go 160...

Here's Ryan explaining something fascinating to us last weekend at the Bonfire grill in Portland. He and Jeannette were visiting from Seattle, and had lots of exciting stories of job hunting and settling in to a new town!

I had to ask the same thing. Definition of a Hipster (from where else? The Hipster Handbook): "One who possesses tastes, social attitudes, and opinions deemed cool by the cool. (Note: it is no longer recommended that one use the term "cool"; a Hipster would instead say "deck.") The Hipster walks among the masses in daily life but is not a part of them and shuns or reduces to kitsch anything held dear by the mainstream. A Hipster ideally possesses no more than 2% body fat." Hipsters in my neighborhood may have: skinny jeans tucked into their high, tight boots women: long stringy hair, or short dark pointy hair like mine men: messy messy hair, the greasier the better plastic '80s jewelry thread bare t-shirts tattoos, for sure dresses And pants at the same time Anywhere else I think a hipster would look out of place and outrageously cool, but here in Portland, everyone looks like this, and it's kinda silly. It's that whole counterculture becomes...

I wrote this little gem in about 4 hours on Monday, including interviews at the school. Portland has decided to pay for all eleventh graders in the district to take the ACT (kinda like the SAT) as a way to encourage going to college. I just thought it was interesting--I've never taken the SAT or ACT, and here I am working on my second Bachelor's degree (I hope). I got around it by attending community college first, where they rely on your grades OR SAT/ACT score. Same thing when transfering to a university. I always relied on my grades, which were pretty high back then, instead of my test scores. But I have always been kind of curious...

This is the results of my 4th haircut within 3 months. It's short, yes, but it's more hipster than Nancy Pelosi, so I am ok with that. And no, I didn't start smoking, it's a prop! I didn't know what a hipster was until I came to Portland, but now I look just like one.

I'd hoped to spark commentary from posting the sex offender link, or maybe some back and forth arguments left in the comment section. Instead, I got concerned emails from friends and family wondering if I could really think that . The men are disgusting, no doubt about that. A normal guy on a first date with a girl his age most likely wouldn't bring a dildo--the fact that these old geezers did... I won't even go there. The main beef I have is the way the stories are reported. Who decides how much is too much? The news, desperate for ratings--or the cops? If it continues, will not getting humiliated on TV become a social incentive to behave? Is it already? I can see it now: fewer cops, more TV cameras. In the same vein, there's Megans law, which in California you can go to the website and simply punch in your zip codes and get pictures and addresses of registered sex offenders nearby. It's scary how common they are. But it's not just sex crimes that do it. In the...

http://www.kptv.com/news/10953282/detail.html check it out, I think it's nuts!

Geez, by the looks of things lately all I think about is hair. Not true! Since introducing TV to our house last month, I've quickly realized why it left in the first place. Besides 24, which is addicting, (though clearly representative of Fox's conservative take on the war and terrorism in general), I am kind of sickened by what I found on the evening news. No surprise, on Fox. I've hated TV news since I realized that every time I watched it, it felt like the world was caving in, and there was no hope for humanity. Now, I see it as just another entertainment business, perhaps one measly step above supermarket tabloids. But, this new segment on Fox 12 called Cyber Sting is just plain scary and wrong. The sheriff has partnered up with some detectives and Fox 12, to go online pretending to be young girls. These "girls" find men, flirt with them, then set up a sting when they try to meet. Last night they arrested a 26-year old male college student as he arrived at wha...