Archive for May, 2009
Posted by Re in Culture, Technology, tags: choices, Culture, email, family, friends, phone, products, Technology, text, voicemail
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/02/fashion/02voicemail.html?pagewanted=1
This article reminded me to check the messages that I’ve been putting off since the beginning of April.
While I do agree that voicemail is annoying and I would rather not have to listen to it, there is a specific reason most of the time when I put off listening to my messages. There is one specific person who always leaves voicemails that make me cry. Once there’s a message from this person, I will put off listening until another one that could have content comes in. In April, this person left a message, and the next two messages were left by my grandparents. I called my family back and told them that I hadn’t listened to the messages yet, but what did they need?
Just now, I finally checked the messages. It turns out the message I had been avoiding listening to was just a couple seconds of silence, and then a click. How was I to know?
After listening to the messages from my family, I went back and listened to all the messages I had saved. There was a comical one from a friend, many cute ones from my significant other, and birthday wishes from both friends and family. There was even an adorable message from my two-year-old sister, where I could hear my mom in the background saying things for her to repear. These saved messages remind me why I used to love getting voicemails.
In the article listed above, mention is made of products designed to transform voice messages into text. For messages that are simply about the transferral of information, this would be a lovely innovation. My emails go to my phone already, so I would be able to easily address the problems at hand. However, reading a message from my mother’s cell phone that says “Hi Re, Love you Re, Bye Re” would not have nearly the same effect as hearing my baby sister’s voice. There’s a reason I have these messages saved, and that’s to listen to the voices of people I care about when I’m feeling down. For the past two months I’ve been unable to do this because I was afraid of that one message. I actually forgot about all the wonderful messages I had saved.
So, while voice-to-text services would be great in some situations, the majority of the voicemails I receive are these fun ones. I like the idea, but am unsure of practicality.
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I know I just graduated. I know I’m only nineteen. I know. But a lot can happen in a year. Looking back, I’m a totally different person now, in a number of ways of course. The one that struck me just now is the way I portray myself.
I used to be a mall-rat, I wore bright clothes, I was bubbly and at the same time vaguely emo. Sometimes I was described as a raver, not because I did drugs (I didn’t) but because of the bright colors and outlandish styles I would sport. I wore cute floofy skirts and way too much plastic jewelry. I remember a specific day where I chose to wear a striped polo shirt and jeans my senior year. I had none of my normal bright makeup on, no plastic stars around my neck. About halfway through the day one of my ‘good friends’ (because everyone was a good friend in high school) asked me what was wrong with me and what I was wearing. It wasn’t in a mean way, and it turns out a lot of people were confused by my choice out attire. Now, I’m reminded of a certain video by Ze Frank that I will link to later when I’m at a computer instead of on my blackberry. I had build up a personal brand, and now I was deviating from this. I had created a theme that people expected me to stick to and I was breaking free of it. The people around me kept me stuck in that niche of who I was, as I returned to my previous style the following day.
When I went off to college, I had a new place to start. I was able to create a more sophisticated portrayal of myself, and seem more presentable to the world. My style no longer screamed “stupid bubbly teenage girl” and instead begged for respect, or at least I would like to think so. About halfway through my second semester, I began to miss my old style. I didn’t expect to go back into it, but I wanted to inforporate pieces of it into the brand I’ve created for myself. Now I’m trying to figure out how to do this without being overwhelming.
A friend who knew me in high school and has actually watched the progression commented on it the other day. He said that I’ve gotten more sophisticated and I can’t pull off huge sparkly pink star earrings anymore. I’m kind of sad, partially because I’m afraid he’s right, and partially because I feel like it’s another example of being kept in a theme by outside forces. Besides, a lesbian who’s name I can’t remember and who I met once – at the mall whilst mallratting no less – gave me those earrings. I at least want to be able to wear them so that I can tell that story.
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Posted by Re in Fashion, tags: artsyfartsy, awake, blue, clothes, dress, emotive, hat, long post, missing people, moving, outdoors, outfit, outside, phone calls, posed, procrastination, relatives, sleep, social media, story
Sometimes I tell myself about all the things I need to do. I look anywhere other than my computer screen and see all the things piled around me waiting to be done. My room needs work, I need to sew, I need to do this or that. Then I turn back to my computer and read blogs like hipsterrunoff dot com and wonder what I’m doing with my life. I go on twitter and complain about how lonely I feel, and I get frustrated thinking about how I really just wish my boyfriend would call me.
Today he called me around 9:30. He hasn’t called me in a couple days, he’s been busy or something. I guess I mean, people get busy, whatevs. I’ve called him a couple times but he’s always like, yo I’ll call you back. Today when I talked to him he fell asleep on the phone. He does this sometimes and it pisses me off. Then I stay up later and later, telling myself I’ll get something productive done but really just wasting time on facebook and tumblr and twitter and hro. I stay up waiting for him to wake up and call me back, but he never does. Sometimes the next day I find out he woke up but didn’t call back because he didn’t want to wake me up, but I wasn’t asleep in the first place.
I live in the middle of nowhere right now. I’m an hour and a half away from the nearest non-relative person I know. So it’s not like I can distract myself by going out with my friends like I used to do. I also can’t get myself to go to sleep for some reason. So I dress up and go in my bathroom and take pictures. That’s not what happened with this one though, this one I took friday night at TJ’s house. you can see it on lookbook too.
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It’s always interesting when someone you don’t expect to hear from contacts you. Especially when it happens twice in one day, and especially when it’s a family friend.
I’ve recently added a lot of my family and family friends to my social networks. It’s confusing because it’s not like there are things that I’m actively hiding from them, my profiles have always been open, but they just never happened to be priveledged to the information previously. So I get concerned emails, IMs, texts. I guess I never really noticed how much of an angsty bitch I can be on the internet. When I get frustrated, the first thing I do is send out angry tweets on my personal account. Now that there are people following me aside from my “peers,” or maybe now that my “peer group” is evolving into a more sophisticated group of people, I have to be more concious of how I portray myself via the intertubes. I even feel weird typing “via the intertubes,” I feel like I should be classy and say something like “through the virtual network of communication manifested on the world wide web.”
I think I’ll put my personal twitter on private. In addition to things like this (which I don’t have a problem with!), more people are following this account whom I do not know personally (which I do have a problem with).
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Posted by Re in Fashion, tags: aesthetic, artsyfartsy, awake, bathroom, black, buttons, clothes, dress, emotive, jumper, outfit, pigtails, posed, red, sad, sewing, shoes, sleep, synthetic, thrift
So I made this jumper. It’s black and it has buttons made from real shells. My friend Meg says it’s cute, but I’ve never worn it. My friend TJ says it’s not. He just has something against jumpers, or overalls, or cute things, I guess. I’m sitting in his office right now. There are also things like crayons and legos in here, so I guess it’s a playroom too. There used to be pokemon toys but I stole them all and now they’re in my room. He’s fighting on the couch with Justine. She called him a little sorority bitch. See on lookbook.
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