Not A Dollarshort

Please Hammer don't.

The stomach churn of the inevitable:

It's the sort of feeling you get while watching a biopic on MC Hammer; he's bought one too many gold chains and he's still adding people to his posse and all you can think is "this isn't going to turn out well."

If you can make it there...

It's a saddening commentary that most of my questions about New York City posed to our favorite New Yorker begin with a "You know that scene in Crocodile Dundee?" or end "you, know, like the Huxtables' neighborhood?"

Because I've never traveled to New York and because my impression of the city is heavily influenced by film, I'm totally ignorant about what makes up the real city. Mention downtown and the image of dozens of nyloned, sneakered feet walking down the street pops into my mind. The subway system? Well, to me it's a hybrid of a Run DMC video and the hellish place in Ghost where Patrick Swayze learns to move objects from a very angry Vincent Schiavelli (of course, the quintessential angry New Yorker ghost).

Coming to America. Ghostbusters. Trading Places. Big Business. Working Girl. Crocodile Dundee.

Compiling the list of films that scream "New York", I realize that not only is my perception of New York skewed by movies, but it's skewed by particularly mediocre or downright awful 1980s movies (Ghostbusters excepted, however). This, most likely explains why my free association of the term New York conjures up the image of shoulder pads and white Reeboks.

All of these films reveal that I'm just as clueless about contemporary New York as that middle-American who asks me where I keep my surfboard, when's my yoga class, and whether or not I know Jeff Spicoli.

Still, the tackiness of those 80s movies is balanced by other representations -- the magic of a Woody Allen movie, Moonstruck, and dare I say, The Godfather. My film choices are obvious, yes. But what's the point of offering sweeping romantic generalizations based on obscure choices?

I want to be a part of the Castorini family in Brooklyn. I want to have our very own bread shop (that, of course, has been in the family for generations). I want Gershwin to swell as I self-deprecate. I want to eat an orange from a fruit stand.

To me, living in New York equates with living in a movie.

I want to live in a movie.

In Take the Cannoli, Sarah Vowell writes about her obsession with The Godfather and her trip to Sicily to visit the village of Corleone. When she is treated as an outsider, she has an epiphany:

"How had it never hit me before? The whole point of The Godfather is not to trust anyone outside your family... If I were a character in the film at all, I'd be on of those pain-in-the-ass innocent bystanders in the restaurant where Michael murders Sollozzo. I'm the tuba player in Moe Green's casino. I'm that kid who rides his bike past Michael and Kay on Kay's street in New Hampshire who yells hello and neither Michael nor Kay say hello back."

The truth is, in New York, I'd be the tuba player in Moe Green's band. I'm a Californian by birth and residence, someone who is about as cosmopolitan as a nylon fanny pack. I've managed to spend my first twenty-five years in California isolation -- unaware that Boston is in fact above New York City and that New Jersey isn't "near Michigan or something."

It's sad because it's true.

In about a month, Ben and I will set out on our first trek across America. We're going to right geographic assumption wrongs and along the way visit Chicago, Cleveland, Boston, Providence, Washington D.C, Charlotte and of course, New York City.

Our ultimate goal is to see if we should leave California and experience life on the other coast -- preferably in a city that we don't have too many incorrect film-based preconceptions about.

Perhaps we'll settle in Boston.

After all, it would be good to hang with the boys in Southie.

My dad did offer to hire a clown.

Today, I celebrated my twenty-fifth birthday at my childhood home in Los Angeles. It was a significant birthday not simply because I am now adult enough to be rental-car worthy, but because it will most likely be the last birthday I will ever spend in the house where I grew up.

My grandparents' house has sold and we're in the process of tossing, packing and scavenging the various mementos collected over thirty-five years on St. Johnswood Drive. My mother has assigned me personal tasks: clean out my Barbie drawer, sort through my old baby clothes and take what I may want for a future offspring, sort through my old toys and board games and pick one or two to represent my childhood, etc...

And all along, as I do this, I keep on seeing this chart in my head where there are sets of twenty-five blocks and this set, labeled "childhood (natural and oddly extended)", is now so completed.

I was speaking with my aunt tonight and mentioned that "a whole lot of people have lived in the house at one point or another -- much more than the usual American family." My aunt agreed and then began the roll call: my grandparents, her and her first husband, my uncle and his first wife, my parents, my great-grandfather and me.

The apron strings in our family are made of barbed wire.

So, the task of packing up my belongings and saying goodbye to this house is a monumental task. To put in perspective the importance of this house, consider that I lived here from my birth to age thirteen. One house in thirteen years. From age thirteen to age twenty-five, I have lived in ten different homes in various Bay Area cities -- none of which I felt the same sense of home as I do with my grandparents' house.

And then, when I think that in less than three days I'm going to walk out of this house forever, I can't help but feel that weird feeling in my throat -- the one that comes from suppressed sobs.

Blah, blah, melodramatic poop.

If I was ever on Jeopardy!, my dream category would be "Things that make Mena cry." (With, of course, the $500 question: "What are dog food commercials with old dogs climbing stairs?")

But, back to the birthday. We moved up our trip to Los Angeles so we could celebrate my actual birthday at the house. I figured I deserved one last childhood regression. So, I gave in and let my mom do my hair, asked my grandmother to make one of my favorite meals (pork chops, dumplings, cabbage and noodles in butter and breaded cauliflower) and ate a rum cake from the Italian pastry shop that my family has been shopping from for years.

And then, I brought out the old photo albums. At this time, I realized (a bit too late) that I can be babied but can no longer be a baby.

And just when I think I'm going to end this with a "life's short and then you die," I force myself to come up with some sort of optimistic ending that says something about the great journey ahead:

I can rent cars now!

IBoom.

For the past couple weeks, the fan of my iBook would start to make a relatively loud whirring sound after a fairly short duration of use; this sound had occurred before, but I had blamed it on poor ventilation (it would be on my lap while I sat on the couch). After looking at some Apple discussion forums, I realized that others were having the same problem and it wasn't that big of a deal.

Then, yesterday extremely erratic lines and colors started to appear on the screen. They would intensify, and then basically freeze the screen, so that nothing was visible. I restarted, and after a disk check, it booted properly. And then it happened again, about 10 minutes later.

Out of about 6 or 7 unsuccessful reboots, we were finally able to get into the system. We backed up my essential data to Ben's computer, then Ben called AppleCare. At that point, I was not in the mood to speak with customer support since I have some sort of irrational opinion that things like this shouldn't happen. They told him to remove the third-party RAM (he did). Didn't help. Then they told him to remove the battery and adapter, and reset the "power manager". Then they tried resetting the PRAM, which didn't work (it only restarted twice, whereas it was supposed to reset as long as the keys were pressed). Then they tried to boot into Open Firmware, but the screen stayed black. We tried booting normally, and the screen came on, but the lines appeared almost right away now, and moving the screen on its hinges didn't help. Overall, the customer support person was as helpful as he could possibly be.

They concluded that it was a problem with the logic board (maybe Video RAM) or the cable that attaches the logic board to the LCD, which sometimes comes loose, particularly on laptops or other computers where the monitor moves around (like the LCD iMacs).

So, they're sending me a box to ship the iBook to Houston for repairs and I'm back on my desktop -- which thankfully, has most of the current applications that I've been using on my iBook (Chimera, NetNewsWire, Photoshop 7), and more importantly Jaguar. After importing my mailboxes, I wasn't really up to installing a slew of applications.

So what went wrong? I'm not quite sure. I know that the whirring began after I installed Jaguar. Perhaps Quartz Extreme and the increased use of my graphic card caused the fan to work overtime, and something got shifted when I would nudge the computer to stop whirring. Note that I never shook the computer -- I would just press a bit on the bottom of the case and it would stop.

Other people with similar problems.

Cuts And Caps.

he gorgeous Briar Press, a resource for printers and enthusiasts, offers free downloadable "cuts and caps" for use in "print, web, or even letterpress projects." Some particularly nice ones are Catchwords, Bird Header, M Franklin, and Leaf. Link via Typographica

Credentials.

Yeah, the dog is cute and all, but you've got to love the photo on that credential badge.