egocentric + other

last night, when i was all down on the bad stuff cropping up as the evening wore on, i decided to put together some of my favorites photos of.. me! somehow being self-focused was very calming. so i put together this slideshow of egocentric + other. meaning not just me. anyway i got a smile from this.

bike seat stolen, frustration mounting

sigh. i was looking forward to riding my bike, i step up to it, and there's no seat!

now, i should've expected this would happen, but i'm new to city biking. i had been parking my bike in a visible place near the bart, and not in the bart, as when i got to 24th and mission in the morning all the spots inside were usually full. and i hate taking my bike to berkeley.

but today my luck ran out. seat gone.

on the plus side, a wonderfully nice guy came outside, noticed that my seat was gone, and started talking to me about my loss, and what i can do in the future. namely, he showed me his pike, and the pinhead components he uses to lock all the bike parts that are attached to your frame. pinhead locks, for instance, attach your seat to your frame with a mechanism that has only 1 key, and cannot be readily removed. learn more here.

so tomorrow (or someday soon) i'm going to go and get a new seat and get pinhead components to secure it to my frame. woo!

ps i was going to include a picture of sad omar with his seatless bike i just learned that my camera's battery is dead. the night gets better and better!

pps it just did! i went to load picasa so i could find a stock 'omar sad' image (i'm loaded with those) and i got the error "The application failed to initialize properly. (0xc0000005). Click on OK to terminate the application." argh!

ppps: UPDATE this was not in the original post, but i had to add it. i was about to go to bed when someone i've invested with messaged me to tell me about a potentially large, difficult issue with the business. you know what they say: when it rains, it pores. good night!

i hate capital one (but not enough to call)

capital one is doing this ingeniously fiendish thing: they upgraded my card recently to some new rewards card and sent me lots of information about the card, in the mail. but now they are calling me to tell me about it.

imagine getting such a call from a real person. you'd be pretty pissed. but, they don't use a real person, they use an automated voice. if you're interested, you can press numbers and learn more and likely finally end up at a person. but who wants to wait when all you want to do is scream at them and tell them not to do this?

so instead, i just hang up. angry. but not as angry as if it were a human. and i think i heard more than i would've heard had it been a human (if it were a human i'd just get really angry and stop listening).

so good work capital one. bastards.

sadness on the 101

today while driving down on the 101 i was listening to npr. at first, the california report mentioned the sf bay oil spill, and all the sick birds and destruction. this made me really teary eyed. then, in a separate segment, they spoke with women who had returned from serving in iraq. at one point they talked with a mother and her children, who essentially indicated that the mother had become more detached and distant. she had missed her son change during puberty. this made me even more sad. i got all teary eyed, doubly so.

i don't usually break up so easily. maybe it was the early morning drive. but i was so sad.

now i'm in vegas, contemplating gambling these worries away. but sleep might win out over gambling.

morning bikerides

lately i've been waking up early and riding around the neighborhood. biking casually. upright, decidedly slowing myself down as the wind batters my slim body and my ears cool in the morning dew.

anyway, today i rode around the bernal area just south of caesar chavez, in san francisco. well, i also ended up in soma, but my pics are largely from bernal:



how invigorating, this ride in the morning. i've felt lost lately, and the morning rides make me feel found, somewhat.

janus at the de young

last night we went to the de young for their weekly friday night party. while browsing the collection, we came upon a wonderful depiction of janus, the roman god of beginnings and endings. above you see one face of janus. in this depiction, it's an outward face. now below, i give you the profile, and then the "back"


this work really resonated with me because it got me thinking about how we're all, in a way, two-faced, or perhaps of multiple minds. not necessarily in a bad way. i recall reading about people who would lose control of one of their hands, or say things aloud that they thought they didn't mean. the author of the book (i can't remember which book it was) discussed how certain centers of our brain seem to win out over other centers -- like when you reflexively react to something but then restrain yourself almost immediately upon receiving further information. the two janus faces got me thinking that the thoughts we inhibit subconsciously, and consciously, might be far more complicated than a reflex, but rather an entire train of thought that is suppressed, for some reason. there is a face to that thought. the encasing of the head on one side in this depiction emphasizes this enclosure, and the interior mirror helps us see what is inside there, as it's usually obscured.