Abuliac

Welcoming the New Year

Since this year is the Year of the Dog (by the Chinese calendar), there are apparently special traditions to go along with welcoming it. Of course, I realize that Chinese New Year isn't till the end of January. However, I can't really argue with hundreds of years of Slavic tradition to greet Chinese animals accordingly (as mixed up as culture is already).

• So tonight, before the midnight toast, take a red apple and make a while holding it. Cut it in half and save two seeds from the center, which you must then eat at the stroke of midnight.


• If there is any meat at your celebration that is on bone (chicken, buffalo wings, ribs, etc), eat some meat off the bone. Save the bone when you are done and keep it all year for luck. If you ever have difficult times, you must find the bone again, hold it, and concentrate on things going well.


• And of course... since it's a fire dog, wear something red and/or fiery... at least at the moment you meet the New Year.

Now, I'm not saying I believe all this will work. I just find comfort in certain crazy little traditions that make an event extra-special... that add a tiny bit of magic to it all.

I send out wishes for a wonderful New Year's eve, filled with merriment and a smidgen of magic.

Fitness: Success!

While the red and green hues of Christmas season are usually a signal for expanding bellies, I've used this break as a whipping-myself-into-shape season.

I was entered (notice passive tense) into a 6K on Thanksgiving day and was disappointed with myself when 10 year-olds and 70 year-olds were passing me.

Fast forward to today: I just ran 4 miles without stopping. For most "fit" runners, that might not sound like a lot, but I'm more of a short-distance runner. (You know, the kind that only runs away from creepy sounds in a forest at night.) I'm still a slow runner (~9:40 mi/min) but at least I'm getting some stamina!

Some cool fitness calculators:
Pace Calculator --> how slowly did I run?
Target Heart Rate
Body Fat Percentage Calculator --> make sure you have inches/cm set correctly for your tape measurements or you'll get 47% body fat setting like I did...
Ideal Weight Calculator --> what others think you should weigh... huh?
Ideal Body Weight --> a less biased, range-producing calculator
BMI & Calories Burned Calculator --> interesting tool that tells you how much you're burning per day doing nothing, working out, and what your nutritional intake should be

decisions...decisions...

If you ever need help making a decision, now you can turn to a Yahoo Widget: DecisionSupport. It's more of a Magic 8-Ball, but when you need an unbiased opinion on whether those jeans make you look fat, now you've got it!

I've been trying to set up my mom's computer to be most functional for her (she's a newbie to the internet world). She often checks for the weather and her horoscope, so I figured I'd make her desktop more useful with some widgets...

...and found some less-than useful widgets... For example, if you're a fan of Lost, you'll recognize the numbers "4 8 15 16 23 42". Well, now you can have your very own lost widget that will force you to enter those numbers every 108 minutes... or else. A waste of time by its very function.

Desktop Curiosity

Have you ever wondered what other people stare at on their desktops?

The thought popped up when my boyfriend told me that he'd made my photograph of clouds over water the backgroud on his work computer. "It's very calming," he said. I was flattered, but that also reminded me of an incident when my ex found out that his father had pictures of me on his desktop, which cycled through every day or so. Understandably, I that made me uncomfortable... and since (like many) I try to mask awkwardness with humor, I made some jokes, which aforementioned ex did not appreciate... and consequently became an ex.

So today, I came across a collection of desktops at LifeHack's Desktop Show and Tell. Because people can explain the various gadgets on their computer, I've gotten lots of ideas about functions to install on my laptop when I get back to school. It's interesting to see the various ways people organize their lives, from the simplistic to the gadget-ridden, the mundane to the beautiful, the organized to the oddly functional, from the relaxing to the dizzying.

Feeling voyeuristic?

Running Resource

I've started running again... but again is relative, because I've always been a sprinter and now I'm running longer distances. Even at the height of my track & field obsession, I got winded after any more than a mile. This week I started out running 2 miles a day... and today, I nearly hit 3 miles without stopping and could have gone further! Maybe I should have done this training before the 6K in Florida.

MapMyRun is a useful tool to see just how far and how fast you ran, along with other interesting tools.

A fun tip: You can make a cool bookmark by cutting the corner off an envelope!

a present for a masochist...

My mother has used an epilator for a long time... and had been trying to convert me from shaving for a while, but my stubbornness made her give up.

Epilation is the process of removing unwanted hairs completely, including the root (e.g. waxing, electrolysis, etc) in contrast to depilation, which removes hair only above the skin (e.g. shaving, creams like Nair, etc).

When I came home a few days ago, I saw her epilator (a small machine, with spinning disks designed to grab onto hair and rip it out) and felt an urge to try it. Perhaps it was a desire to emulate my mother... or it may have just been boredom. I sat down on the floor, rolled up my pant-leg, and turned on this funky-looking machine. The spinning disks look much like spinning blades, so I was afraid to bring it close to my leg at first... but I thought about the thousands of times I'd watched my mother epilating (that sounds dirty, but isn't) and decided to be brave.

It stung at first... as much as a bee sting! But then there was another... and another.... and eventually, the stings dulled to pinches... and the pinches became little pricks... and after a few minutes, I barely felt the pain. You have to go over the same spot many times to get all the hairs (since the disks only catch a few hairs at a time)...

So why would anyone want to rip out their hair, you ask? Because it doesn't grow back for weeks! But for me, I tried solely out of curiosity... and am actually slightly disappointed that it will take a while for me to be able to do it again...

Even after I finished both legs (it took almost an hour!) I found myself hunting for hairs... I wanted to find more... I decided to be daring and epilated my whole foot, toes and all! It was much more painful there, because the skin is thinner, but I enjoyed the power my new little machine gave me.

When my mom got home and I relayed my triumph over pain and hesitation, she went over to her closet to reveal a brand new epilator, just for me! (She'd apparently been saving one for me, in case this day ever came).

I'm intrigued and excited... and my next conquest will be the underarms... (the directions condone it and I'm up for the challenge).

Weekend Photograph: clouds at sunset....

On my drive home, I happened to be going over a long bridge at sunset... and there happened to be a scenic look-out spot... and I happened to have my camera with me... and there happened to be one of the most beautiful cloud formations over the water...

I couldn't help but appreciate the coincidences...

design difficulties...

I just realized that my blog design doesn't really work with Internet Explorer (I'm a Firefox user, so I was oblivious). I'll work on it... later..

2 minutes later: Now it works. I'm confused.

If you use Internet Explorer... or any other non-Firefoxy browser, let me know if you see the column on the side... or if the design looks o.k. in general.

A Love Sonnet (XVII) by Pablo Neruda

I don't love you as if you were the salt-rose, topaz,
or arrow of carnations that propagate fire:
I love you as certain dark things are loved,
secretly, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that never blooms
yet carries within itself the light of hidden flowers,
and thanks to your love, darkly in my body
lives the dense fragrance that rises from the earth.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where,
I love you simply, without complexities or pride:
I love you in this way because I don't know any other way of loving

than this, in which there is no I, nor you,
so close that your hand upon my chest is my hand,
so close that when I fall asleep it is your eyes that close.

on pain reception...

Pain reception and perception by microscopic neurons that create the slightest and worst of our hurts...

What is the point of the pain receptors that deliver the sensation of itch?

I understand the need for other types of pain receptors. Heat can damage tissue. Injured tissue should report to the brain of its soreness. But itch is counterintuitive. You're told NOT to scratch an itch. Wikipedia claims that there is a protective measure to itchiness in telling animals to remove parasites from their body. I admit that there is an evolutionary advantage there, but there are other ways to report such information without possibly causing the creature to damage itself. When a mosquito bites you, you want to scrape at it to make the unpleasant feeling go away and end up making it worse, even infecting the bite.

Itchiness causes tissue damage... so why would your body tell you to damage yourself? There has to be a more effective way...

On digital money and photography...

We are moving closer and closer to an immaterial, abstract world with nothing physical to show for our memories, experiences, or even hard work.

Example 1: Money
In the beginning, we (as a race) bartered with actual products, e.g. chickens, chopped wood, milk. When we needed rice, we would exchange something else for it or provide a service. Then came a more generalized form of payment that could be traded for anything (It was too hard to find exactly what someone else wanted, so we needed something standard).

So came the exchange for gold. Gold was precious and had (and has) meaning in most cultures. Then the gold became to heavy to lug around. We created slips of paper that promised the gold being delivered at a later time... which later turned into just paper that stood for the gold (which "money" was for a long time).

Now... the paper money is just that: paper money. It has a vague sense of standing for some value, which changes over time (inflation) so there isn't even a standing worth to it. Not only that, but we have these abstract notions of banking and credit cards, where money disappears (no longer tangible) but you still "have" it and can "use" it. I won't even go into the whole idea of investing in stocks to multiply these imaginary, abstract dollars.

The point is that millionaires will probably never in their lives SEE the money they "own". It will be "wrapped up" in the market, or "held" by some bank (which really loans it out to other people and pays them interest in return). The only people now who pay cash for houses are probably criminals (who may also be the only ones to store their paper money in their homes).

We function as a society on this abstract concept of money, rarely actually seeing it anymore. Credit cards (and even the new PayPass) are taking over the need to carry around any physical representation of wealth.

Example 2: Photography
As technology becomes more advanced, we get further and further away from the art of capturing and recording light as it fell on a certain place at a certain time. Instead, we have become obsessed with "capturing memories" for the sake of being able to see ourselves, perhaps, as others see us. We take pictures to be able to say, "I did that. I was there. I was alive at that moment."

With digital photography, we don't even get physical proof in our hands of our memories; we get images upon a screen -- pixels of light. We cycle through the photos -- laughing, smiling, or cringing -- and perhaps share them electronically with some friends, who may also laugh, smile, or cringe. We now choose what to print, or whether to print the photos, if in the past, everything you "shot" became material, now we choose to throw away memories that we don't like, or ones in which we didn't look as young, or thing, or attractive enough as we'd like to have looked.

On the other hand, the general practice of sharing online photo albums with everyone has created the new problem of not knowing who or when or why will look through your photographs. Recently browsing through scandalous photos of fellow coeds, I wondered how many of these Ivy-leaguers will go on to have political or legislative careers, where some of these photos could easily be used as blackmail. And now, there is no restriction as to who can see these digital pictures, reproducing them onto their own computers.

In the past, we shared those scandalous pictures with a few close friends, reminiscing, giggling, and then hiding them back into inside jacket pockets. Now, our most embarrassing moments may be recorded by anyone with a photo-capable phone or digital camera and quickly shared with all of cyberspace.

Talk about the power of the digital!