Tag Archives: new media

eating crappy chocolate

I’ve been casually working along this weekend. Not finishing anything but making sure I don’t have anything that hasn’t been looked at. Right now my weirdest assignment (a web presentation) is staying weird because of my topic. It’s not going to be very academic I don’t think, even though it’s referring to a lot of sort-of academic work. The problem is that it’s a static webpage presentation, which isn’t how anyone would present this kind of information these days. It reminds me of the project we did for Benedetti’s New Media class years ago.

I’ve really been loving this baseball postseason. The Giants are such a scrapheap team with great pitching. The Rangers are this anonymous team plus Cliff Lee. It’s just a good story all around. Supposedly it’s been terrible for the TV ratings, but fuck TV ratings. I just like baseball. And this has been way better than just seeing the Yankees and Phillies again (sorry Doc).

I feel a little bad about cheering for the Giants since I don’t have a problem with the Dodgers either. I cheer for them against most teams. My best-broken-in baseball hat is my Dodgers cap. And it’s supposed to be a Red Sox vs. Yankees style rivalry that I’m playing both sides of here. Whatever. I told my mom who was playing in the World Series and she immediately said she was cheering for San Francisco. She’s more a fan of the city than of the team.

Thirty-three days till 中国. And the cold wet uninsulated 四川 winter. And Holly. And being very happy.

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the outermost layer

I had my interview with MCC today about going to Cairo. It went twice as long as we’d sort of scheduled but that was fine. There were lots of questions about stuff. We sidetracked off into new media for a while which was fun. And about my blog specifically, not that the HR people read it and had objections but about what I’d be doing with it. They’ve had issues in MCC Egypt with writing by the workers provoking situations, so now anything going out “representing MCC” has to go through the Country Reps. If they take me, it looks like a certain organizational name will be redacted from these pages, so I can continue to cuss and link to questionable content.

I was stumped on the question “What do you think might be your biggest disappointment with the Cairo assignment?” How does a person answer that? She saw I was floundering and moved to “Well, what’s your biggest disappointment from China?” and I talked a little bit about the trained monkeys phenomenon, but also about how that wasn’t as big a deal for me as it was for people who were actually teachers.

Anyway, I did my best. They got to meet me, see what I’m like and stuff. If I go, I won’t be allowed to have a beard. Or a shaved head. Because of the greater levels of meaning those things carry in Cairene society. Apparently no one there likes ambiguity in any form. You’re supposed to look like what you’re supposed to look like. And bearded guys are clerics.

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