Recently in Social Phenomena Category

I wrote on twitter about being shy. Here's a bit of expounding:

Before yesterday I wouldn't have added you as a contact unless I knew you personally or overcame the supreme sense of hesitation after seeing that you added me and thought why on earth would this person do that? When I was actively doing Illustration Friday I loved the comments, but it was so hard for me to leave one on somebody else's site. I've always been the girl who sits at the side of the pool splashing her feet while you were out there playing marco polo or whatever. I hate making the first move and for that matter so does JM--it's a wonder we'll celebrate our tenth anniversary soon.

Anyway, yesterday I had a beer and threw caution to the wind. I started adding people left and right to my twitter and flickr accounts. I even left a message or two. Maybe only one, not two. Am I too weird? It's taken a while, but I think I'm finally getting the gist of this internet life-thing. Toes in, next the whole foot.

From the fine folks at Mattel, the matador Barbie®!

[Link via Scribbling Woman.]

Does this mean we can look forward to Cockfight Ken® and Bearbaiting Skipper®? This is going to be the best Christmas ever!

As I edge up to the ripeness that is 35, I have been wondering if is time to refine my skin-care regimen. This is easier than it sounds, since my "regimen" consists of scrubbing my face with a shower glove and borderline-fancy soap. Almost any change that doesn't involve rubbing my face with a Microplane would be a refinement.

But I can't do it. Every attempt I have made to look into the subject of skin care is hampered by my resistance to the undertone of desperation in the advertising, by the absurd prices, and by the patently silly names. So pervasive is the implied female fear of aging that I was pleasantly surprised to realize PrescriptivesLast Chance URL is their clearinghouse for discontinued items, not the name of a night cream.

(To blatantly steal a joke from quote Matthew Baldwin Jeezum crow, lookit all these links. What is this, Memepool? I mean: Memepool?")

The new downstairs neighbor has an electric bass. He plays practices for several hours a day, and into the night and early morning. Although he turns the volume down gradually as the night wears on, the clumsy haphazard vibrations travel up from his amp, spreading as they rise to shake my apartment floors. In the living room, I can feel the bass thumping up through the soles of my feet when standing and through my bum when sitting on the futon. Worse, though, is the unsavory Magic Fingers effect it gives the entire bedroom, changing the ambience from luxurious little chamber to sleazy motel.

Although I find this tedious, inconvenient, and nerve-wracking (maybe my reaction will improve when his playing practicing does), I know he is being reasonable (or nearly so) about his volume, and I havet felt moved to discuss it with him.

This evening, I was getting some static on my half-assed rabbit-ears TV reception, which is piped through my stereo, so I was treated not only to the pervasive thrumming from downstairs but also the occasional blast of friendly-fire static from my own speakers. Correcting the rabbit ears took several minutes of fiddling and a good bit of Nancy-Drew-style invectiveWell, my word ---- Goshdarnit, stay put), so it only gradually dawned on me that each wave of static was met with a caesura from downstairs. Indeed, unless my ears deceived me, during sustained bursts of static I heard something very like the sound of an amp switching channels. By the time I fixed my reception, he had evidently given up and unplugged.

I have no plan to use this knowledge, but I am wondering: if I were to engage in an experiment, would this be more like a Pavlovian bell or a Skinner Box?

update: Since the experiment is based not on positive reinforcement but on aversion conditioning, it would be more like the Little Albert experiment. Of course.