home! I was in KC this weekend, watching football and playing cards with the fam. it was a good visit. i missed marc, i got home and he was waiting for me and we're having a nice quiet evening together.

for anyone who cares, i'm on twitter now. i can't decide if i want to integrate this with lj or not, i'm still deciding if i like it, but...

http://www.twitter.com/spacefem

so, i don't know if it'll really be the biggest financial crisis since the great depression or we're all going to die or what... either way, the best part of any political crisis is overhearing the statements by my insanely over-conservative coworkers.

today's winning comment (and I overheard this from a real person, not making it up): "I can't believe the feds can't help but throw more of our money at another problem. So wall street is tanking? Why do they deserve our money? I say let the economy collapse, maybe it'll finally teach them a lesson!"

I thought of asking the guy what he thought the "economy" was. he works for the same company I do, so I'm not sure he's thought about where money to buy airplanes comes from (the economy), what keeps his savings account from being worth more than a loaf of bread (the economy), why his house is still worth more than what he paid for it (e... yeah) but I just let it go.

this weekend i did race for the cure. i'm so out of shape. i didn't so much race, sort of did the walk/jog thing, it took me about 45 minutes to do the 5K. and I was sore all weekend. I should get back into running but it's tough.

then it was the chili cookoff, so there were infinity booths of chili samples right outside our apartment, so we did that.

went home and watched blair witch project, in the afternoon with the lights on because i can never decide if i like scary movies or not. it's supposed to be really freaking scary? not so much... 90% of it is not scary at all. the last 30 seconds are really scary, okay. i've been looking for movies to show during my halloween party. there's going to be music on, obviously, and the movies are going to be like visualizations, in the background, giving the TV something to do. so i'm trying to find stuff with good images. so far i've got silent hill. and maybe 28 days later... but even that's got way too many scenes of happy family driving through the countryside.

this morning i woke up, stumbled to the bathroom in a very "uhgodmonday" kinda way, turned on the shower, took off my clothes, looked at myself in the mirror a bit and felt water splashing on my legs. that reminded me that the shower was on. I turned around and walk towards it and started getting wet, then I stopped walking and thought about my situation for a minute. something was wrong. yeah, i was exhausted. no, something else. oh yeah. i'm outside the shower, but i'm getting wet. i'm supposed to only get wet inside the shower.

our hose broke. but it took forever for me to realize it. so the bathroom was wet by then, too. i skipped the shower, got coffee and went to work. egads.

The opening paragraph on spacefem.com used to tell people to sign the guestbook... it doesn't anymore. i think guestbooks aren't cool. one of those internet things that we'll just have to remember, like spinning e-mail icons and tiled backgrounds. someday there's going to be a cool museum about what websites used to look like.

I also finished my meme that converts your name into a dewey decimal system subject.

the rest of the weekend was typical going out to clubs! we hit three bars last night... finns for people-watching ridiculousness, morts for sitting and doing nothing, indigo for dancing and being in a very crowded place. it was a good group of us neighbors. i did not get crazy drunk like I did friday night. also this'll sound crazy but marc and I were out together in a group for the first time in probably months. Between him working, DJing, and us just having different crowds of friends sometimes, I don't remember the last time we were out together. Part of the issues is that we're scene whores... we like having different groups of friends, and both think if you put your stock in one group too much, they'll go away. That happened to me my first year in Wichita. I spent time with friendly coupled coworkers, then they had babies and vanished off the face of the earth. Social circle destruction. So now if different groups of people are having gatherings, I hit one and Marc hits another so we can stay covered. But last night he didn't have a DJ gig and there was nothing interesting happening outside of old town, so we were out together. dancing and talking and making fun of everybody.

I'm mentoring some high school kids in a robotics competition. The point of the competition is to get them excited about engineering, science, technology, that sort of thing, plus they get to work with us and learn about design processes and all that.

Today was the kickoff where all the schools get together and learn what the contest is... it wasn't good. It was at 9 am, so of course I was still feeling hungover. It started with 45 minutes of powerpoint slides about corporate sponsors, with speeches from some area engineers about how important our industries are. Pretty much every speech started with something along the lines of, "My name's ___ and I've worked at ___ since 1982. Engineering is an i n c r e d i b l y exciting career."

There were some important breakout sessions where kids learned about what would be in the robot kits and how to program the stuff, but there was also way too much buildup and stupidity and "everyone applaud for [insert old white guy here] who helped put this all together!". AND THEN, an hour and a half after the event started, they showed us what the contest would be.

but by the end of it all, even I didn't want to be an engineer. AND I AM ONE. I mean, who's idea is it to drain the excitement out of building robots? that in itself is a challenge, I think. maybe next time we can talk about the chemical signature of a van gogh painting, so we kill appreciation for art, too?

At the high school I'm at, two of the mentors are dads with kids in the class, and then there's me... trying not to noticeably roll my eyes too much. I really want to help them understand that engineering is not about sucking the life out of you... but today the other side had way more evidence.

Tags: engineering

having real-life friends read my journal is cool, because they always know what's going on in my life, and hey more readers, right? the downside is that it takes away some potentially real life conversation starters.

Me: I had a really insightful thought about polar bears today.
Them: I know. I read it in your journal.
Me: Oh. Sure.
Them: It's okay though, I mean, did you have any other thoughts?
...
Me: I'm pretty much at one a day.

capitalism has been making me nervous lately.

these guys at the top of companies... they take risks, they make the company a lot of money, the company gives them a huge bonus. millions. repeat. that happens for a few years. then what happens? the system crumbles, it turns out the guy had bad ideas, the company goes bankrupt, everyone's out of work, anyone who the company borrowed money from just has to eat it.

but the one who made all the decisions has made $80 million in the last five years. so where's the lesson learned, for him?

Wall street learns these little lessons all the time... like how a .com with no business plan won't magically make money just because it's on the internet. Or now, how you shouldn't invest in a hedge fund because you can't look clearly about how much risk is in there. But there never seems to be a sense of, "Maybe we shouldn't try so hard to find the magic 'get rich' button every decade, because we always get burned."

And what really sucks is that other countries are starting to see the patterns in America, how we reward ruthlessness. They don't want to put anything into our economy because they're realizing that we're crazy. So where does that leave us, in the global economy? Suddenly kind of left out? I got an awesome e-mail forward about how WE'RE AMERICA and we need to tell Saudi Arabia that they can have $10 a barrel for oil, take it or leave it! I'm not kidding. I didn't know how to reply to that one... how to explain to the person who hit "fwd" that Saudi Arabia would definitely leave it. they. don't. need. us. we can drill offshore, onshore, and in between and we won't have oil to last a year or so, the way we go through it. Hell, the execs would just sell it to China anyway. Because they'd may more than $10 a barrel. Again with the rewards.

I tell myself that America has the same great things it always had going for it... lots of land, lots of people, infrastructure, determination. I relate to it, in that way. I have this idea in the back of my mind that no matter how weird things get for me, personally, I'm going to do well, because I'm a smart resourceful girl. I did well on standardized tests. Graduated college in a crap economy and was fine. Just trust your gut and it'll all come out okay. And turn the damn news off. okay.

a lady I used to work with sent me an e-vite to a mary kay party. in case you're new to this journal, my battle with middle class women and "selling you shit" parties has been a ongoing, troubling theme. I felt like they were bullshit, then I realized I was sure they were bullshit, and now I feel no shame in saying so. But it's taken years.

before we get to this though, can I express how inappropriate it is to give someone's e-mail address to e-vite? Or any other site, for that matter? Never type someone's e-mail address into any website. Ughrgh!

So I didn't respond, and Thursday at work she calls me. Mind you, this is not a friend of mine, she's never invited me to anything else, we haven't spoken since she had twins and left the office.

Her: I didn't hear back from you about the party Friday! Will you be joining us?

Me: No, I'm sorry, I'm not going to make it.

Her: Oh that's too bad! Do you have other plans?

Me: No, I sure don't. I just hate makeup. yeah, I could have lied to be polite. but why?

Her: (laughs nervously) Oh. Well it's not just makeup, there are lots of skincare products, a spa line, you might really enjoy it.

Me: You know, it's amazing, I'm not interested in any of that. Lotions. Soaps. I can't stand it at all. at this point, I'm doing my stepford wife impression because I think the irony is amusing.

Her: Well the holidays are coming up you know! Do you have any hard-to-shop-for people on your Christmas list?

Me, and at this point I cannot freaking believe we're still talking: I wouldn't buy the stuff for them either. In fact I can't think of a single thing that would motivate me to support any part of the idea of buying it.

Her: Okay, well, take care then I guess!

Me: Well you too! Thanks for calling!

I know you're thinking that this conversation was over-dramatized for the internet. It's not. This is exactly what I said, and exactly how long it took her to leave me the frack alone. I think I'm going to start my own line of hostess gifts... big ceramic middle fingers you can send to people when you're tired of buying all their crap. Lotions? Seriously? It's amazing how pleasantly moisturized I feel with the stuff that's $2.50 from Target. But she just kept asking questions! Whyyyy!

so last week's forum upgrade has given me a steady load of after work activities for the past few days. interestingly enough, i've gotten some good responses to the template-y phpbb3 skin, now that i just changed out some images to make it a little more spacefemmy. so i'm kinda curious about what other people think.

here's my website: http://www.spacefem.com/

here's the forum: http://www.spacefem.com/forum/

do you think I should keep making the forum look more like the website, or make the website look like the forum? oh, and if you're my forum member, your opinion doesn't count quite as much because you're biased towards The Way Things Used To Be. I'm loving you all but I'm really posting this to get some less partial opinions from people who don't visit the site a lot.