Yoel · Writes · Things

Caitlin posted pictures from her recent trip to New York on Facebook a few days ago, and among them was photo of an American Apparel rummage sale:

Transcribed almost directly, my thoughts immediately upon viewing the image went something like this:

An American Apparel rummage sale?  That sounds like it’s right up my alley.  Well, actually, no, I don’t know how comfortable I’d be rummaging around in bins of neon clothing with a bunch of dirty Williamsburg hipsters.  All the hipsters are probably being judgmental and thinking that about each other, though.  Or do hipsters even recognize their collective dirtiness ?  Are they that self-aware?  Even if they were, would that still stop them from rummaging?  Maybe.  They’d all probably just stand around the edges of the rummage sale furtively looking at each other.  Wait, I don’t even think hipsters wear American Apparel anymore — it’s too mainstream.  What the fuck’s a rummage sale anyway?  New York is weird.  I’m hungry.  Where are the pita chips?

No wonder I can never fall asleep at night.  I just have too much bullshit floating around in my brain.

Originally published at yoyoel.com. You can comment here or there.

As I’ve documented a number of times, male Apple employees seem to fall into two categories: gay, or so metrosexual they’re virtually indistinguishable from gay.  This is extremely frustrating for those of us who have gotten past the whole sexual-indeterminacy thing and are looking for someone to shamelessly drool over in the workplace.  The following is my attempt to unravel the madness, cobbled together in like 10 minutes in Microsoft Excel, of all things:

This, of course, resolves nothing.  Which has left me with no other option than to resort to the old standby of:

Cute coworkers are still coworkers, and are therefore completely off limits.

Problem solved, o workplace crush.  Albeit a little disappointingly.

Originally published at yoyoel.com. You can comment here or there.

Some of the reasons I haven’t put up a substantive post in the last few days:

• Working at Apple every day since the iPhone 3GS launch, which in and of itself was quite an event and involved: arriving at the Aventura Mall at 5:30 in the morning (an hour away from my house), getting accosted by a rent-a-cop who accused me of forging my Apple name tag in an attempt to skip the line, cheering and clapping for a crowd of somewhat bemused and insufficiently caffeinated customers, and then selling like six million phones.
• Speaking of the iPhone 3GS: getting one.
• Marathoning my way through the first season of True Blood again.  I’d almost forgotten: how prominently Bill’s chest hair is featured (which explains the enthusiasm of all my friends to the idea of dressing me up as him earlier this year); how every single word that comes out of Lafayette’s mouth (including, but not limited to: “shit,” “bitch,” “hooker,” and “Jason Stackhouse”) is like fifteen times sassier than anything anyone else has ever said on TV, RuPaul included; and how totally, unbelievably dirty the show is.
• Anxiously refreshing the iTunes Store waiting for an update to BeeJive to finally show up and do what instant messaging should have done on the iPhone a year ago, by which I mean: C’MON ALREADY PUSH NOTIFICATIONS.

Update:

Originally published at yoyoel.com. You can comment here or there.

A brief rundown of things that have occupied my thoughts when I’ve been unable to sleep lately:

I’m becoming increasingly frustrated with Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain” for creating an unresolvable circular problematic.  On one hand, if you think the song is about you and you’re not actually vain, the song is creating the very behavior that it critiques.  But on the other, if the song actually is about you and you willfully ignore it in an effort to consciously quell your vain impulses, it denies you the ability to rectify your latent but unrecognized vanity.  Curse you, Carly fucking Simon, curse you.

What is it, exactly, that makes hibachi so completely disgusting?  I was more or less forced to go to Benihana for dinner a few days ago, and after yet another miserable experience, I’ve been trying to sort out the real issue.  The food itself isn’t particularly objectionable — it’s chicken (or whatever other meat you select) with salt and oil and a metric shit-ton of sesame seeds, which isn’t that exciting but whatever — and despite the irritation of having pieces of zucchini flung at my face (needless to say, I’ve never caught one in my mouth), I don’t mind the show aspect too much.  So all that’s left is that indelible greasy feeling that sitting next to what amounts to a table-sized frying pan leaves on you.  You feel oily, you smell like sauteed chicken, your clothes smell like sauteed chicken, the woman with collagen lips sitting across from you at the table smells like sauteed chicken, and you walk away from the whole experience with a profound desire to scrub your face with the most noxious chemical possible in the hopes that somehow, some day, you’ll be rid of the lingering essence of hibachi.

When will my mother finally accept that the Roth family in fact does need cell phones?  It was bad enough when she and my father decided to share one cell phone, becoming the prototypical elderly Boca couple except that they’re not elderly so what’s the fucking problem?!, but this afternoon, as I sat at my computer trying to figure out how, exactly AT&T was shafting me this month, she became irritated and proclaimed, “You know, we don’t need phones at all.  Cancel everything.”  I wanted to ask whether I should make it a point to run over the mailbox on my way to the AT&T store to “cancel everything,” to achieve the complete back-to-the-basics-incommunicado-isolationist schtick, but thought better of it.

Originally published at yoyoel.com. You can comment here or there.

I’ve always enjoyed dabbling in The Sims.  Since the first game’s release, I’ve made it a point to periodically check in on the series, see what’s new, and enjoy playing with the dollhouse I never had as a child.  So, out of boredom, I installed The Sims 3 a few days ago to try it out.  And I’m honestly a little bit disturbed.

The new personality engine is smart.  And not just kind-of-clever-but-still-only-capable-of-putting-out-three-character-types smart, but really, surprisingly, occasionally frighteningly smart.  Let’s take the doppelgänger I made of myself in the game, Leon.  After fussing with the appearance for longer than was probably necessary (nose size and hair were the two sticking points, and the hair is still more Robert Pattinson than Yoel Roth, but whatever), I got to pick five dominant personality traits that would define my Sim.  And they were:

• Perfectionist
• Snob
• Genius (I couldn’t resist, especially given my line of work)
• Neurotic
• Great kisser (or so I’ve been told; and now you know)

I dropped my Sim into a house and, with minimal guidance, sat back and watched what happened.

And what happened is: Leon started acting like me.  He would start worrying at random moments about not completely closing a faucet in the bathroom.  While cooking, he would constantly fear fire.  He became inordinately stressed out by household dirt.  Regardless of what people would say or do to him, he would never become particularly angry or upset — just increasingly stressed.  And, most surprisingly, he turned gay.

I’ve always been pleasantly surprised by The Sims‘ handling of same-sex relationships, but I’ve never quite figured out how the game manages them internally.  In The Sims 2, you had the ability to create same-sex couples in the family creator, which would establish a monogamous unit that operated more or less like a straight couple.  (My favorite Sims that time around were a lesbian couple.)  And I’m pretty sure that you’ve always had the ability to flirt with the same sex in an attempt to “forcibly” (read: by means of heavy player micromanagement) establish a same-sex relationship.  But I’d never before had the game actually create a gay couple of its own volition.

Within five minutes of arriving at a public space, my Sim met Jared.  As they were chatting, I noticed that one of Leon’s short-term goals involved finding out if Jared was single.  When the conversation moved from the park in town to my Sim’s home, a new goal popped up: a first kiss… with Jared.  Over two or three Sim days — and again, without much encouragement from me — my Sim found himself with a boyfriend.

This blew my mind.  First of all, kudos to Electronic Arts for taking a progressive but entirely logical stance towards same-sex relationships in The Sims 3.  But second, how exactly did my Sim end up being gay?  I see two possibilities:

1. A random number generator somewhere rolled the dice and decided that Sim-Leon would be gay.  This could be made even more elegant internally if real-world demographics on the prevalence of gay males in the population were used to create those probabilities.
2. The confluence of the five personality traits I selected somehow added up to “gay.”

To be honest, I don’t know which is more convincing.  On one hand, the random-number-generator explanation is the simplest and, at face value, probably the most likely.  But on the other, what’s the chance that the very first Sim I make, with the intention of mimicking myself, would end up being gay?  The odds are against it, to say the least.

But if The Sims actually does have some internal mechanism for translating arbitrary personality attributes into sexualities, that’s kind of problematic in its own right.  What do the traits “snob” and “perfectionist” tell us about what Electronic Arts thinks a gay man is?  I’d be curious to know what went into creating what can’t be called anything other than a gayness algorithm.  At the very least, it’s a fascinating bit of machine intelligence.

Originally published at yoyoel.com. You can comment here or there.

In a conversation with one of my managers at work today, I found myself using the phrase “on our side of the family” to (politely) inquire as to the sexual orientation of one of our peers.  It represented a bit of a landmark moment for me: never before have I felt comfortable using some queeny expression to dance around the subject of someone being gay.  It’s all so handkerchief-in-the-back-pocket 1970s queer that I’m not sure I can handle it.  I can only hope it doesn’t escalate into calling people “sweetie” or referring to Madonna as “the queen.”  In the event that it does, I hereby grant any of you permission to kill me.

Relatedly, I’ve also (apparently) become a lot worse at correctly identifying my coworkers by their respective sexualities.  The problem, I think, is that working at Apple for so long has trained me to actively convince myself that everyone is heterosexual until proven otherwise, because the company is full of highly metrosexual people who send my gaydar spinning so quickly that I need the iPhone Compass application to get it in order again.  Even people who are most obviously on my side of the family had me wondering whether I was just imagining things; I missed an entire intra-Apple Store relationship, and like 70 percent of the management team.

The other outing procedure at work is, of course, the outing of World of Warcraft players.  This is a somewhat more formalized process.

Employee 1: “For the Horde!”
Employee 2: “Fuck that!  Alliance!”
Employee 1: “You play?!”
Employee 2: “Yeah man!”
Employee 1: “Cool!”
Employee 1: “Time to take another appointment.”
Employee 2: “Yeah.  Fuck the Genius Bar.”
Employee 1: “Word.”

Originally published at yoyoel.com. You can comment here or there.

I realize that making fun of USA Today for publishing bullshit is the same brand of déclassé assholery as pushing someone in a wheelchair down a flight of stairs, but I couldn’t resist sharing this particular bit of journalistic brilliance:

What a shockingly astute piece of economic analysis!  There appears to be some stupid motherfucking ceiling in the way of the economy!  Quick — someone call Ben Bernanke and share the news!

But is anyone really surprised?  Of course it would be the nation’s most widely circulated newspaper (2.1 million copies, if you can believe it) that finally figured out the real problem at work here.  The recession is no match for the quick wits of USA Today’s editorial staff.  Let’s knock down this ceiling and get on with our lives already.

Oh, and special kudos to Google News for placing that article well above the fold on my homepage (and universally above nonsense from the dimwits at other publications, like The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal).  Whatever that ranking algorithm is, it’s working.

Originally published at yoyoel.com. You can comment here or there.

The big buzzword at Swarthmore this year was “blog.”  Or, more specifically, “really preachy and tedious blogs about the troubles and triumphs of the marginalized group du jour.”  But however much some student blogs make me want to bash my skull in, there’s an awful lot of fantastic content being written by Swarthmore students that, for whatever reason, is overlooked.  (Possibly because it’s not being linked around in the echo chamber of on-campus student group mailing lists, but that’s a topic for another post.)

In any event, here are a four of the more noteworthy ones:

• Lord of the Fjord — Penned by my former editor-in-chief at The Phoenix, Mara Revkin is using her blog to chronicle her trips to Jordan and Oman while on a Fulbright.  Beyond just being good writing, I also learned from the very first post that Oman has fjords, which is completely awesome and is now my favorite “did you know..?” to share with almost everyone.
• BLAINE.BLOG — More of a tumblog-styled deal, Blaine O’Neill’s blog posts (or reposts, I’m not sure) a lot of visually arresting/compelling pictures, videos, and links.  While blogs that repost things from elsewhere on the internet are a dime a dozen, this one stands out from the rest.
• Farce, Fodder, and Foodstuffs — To be honest, I don’t know shit about food, beyond what I’ve learned by watching Top Chef and No Reservations.  Alex Weintraub, on the other hand, does know shit about food, and blogs about it (and other various things) pretty articulately.  And while I never thought I’d find myself subscribing to a blog that posts recipes, it’s worth it.
• The Swatorialist — For a college filled with exceptionally dumpy individuals (acceptable fashion choices include: neon pink pants on men, crocheted mousey-looking oversized sweaters on women, and the all-sweatpants-all-the-time look on anyone), Swarthmore has also managed to churn out one pretty great fashion blogger: Ming Cai.  While my idea of a fashion blog would be making fun of the ridiculous shit that hipsters/wannabe hipsters/otherwise stylistically challenged people wear at Swarthmore, Ming’s a little less bitter about it, and it’s probably for the better.

Originally published at yoyoel.com. You can comment here or there.

All joking in my last post aside, the big question in my mind for the last few days has been: how much is a new device going to cost, should one come out?  And Phil Schiller was pretty clear during the not-Jobsnote: it’s $99*, $199*, and $299*.  But what the fuck do the asterisks mean?

Requires new two-year AT&T wireless service contract, sold separately to qualified customers; credit check required; must be 18 or older. For non-qualified customers, including existing AT&T customers who want to upgrade from another phone or replace an iPhone 3G, the price with a new two-year agreement is $499 (8GB), $599 (16GB), or $699 (32GB). [source]

This is kind of a big deal.  Anyone who bought an iPhone 3G last July is going to be paying, as far as I can tell from the Apple website, the full purchase price of the device.

I’d guess that the internet is going to explode over this in t-minus two or three hours.

Originally published at yoyoel.com. You can comment here or there.

The setting: My kitchen, this morning, circa 9:30am

The characters: Me, bagel, coffee, iPod, Apple track jacket, keys, and package of gum in hand; my mother, anxious look on face; Washington Mutual, by proxy.

My mother: We got a call earlier today for “Yohan Roth” asking about fraudulent activity on your credit card.

Me: Unh?

My mother: Do you even have a credit card?

Me: No.

My mother: They left a number.

The number: HI THANK YOU FOR CALLING THE FRAUD LINE.

Me, internally: Unh?

The number: WE ARE CALLING FOR YOLHAIM ROTH. IF THIS IS YOLHAIM ROTH, PRESS 1.

Me: 1

The number: PLEASE VERIFY THE FOLLOWING TRANSACTION. ZERO DOLLARS AND ZERO CENTS, ON OR AROUND SATURDAY JUNE 6. PRESS ONE IF THIS IS AUTHORIZED.

Me: 1

The number: THANK YOU. GOODBYE.

As best I’ve been able to determine, Washington Mutual called my parents at 8:00 in the morning on a Sunday to confirm a transaction that apparently happened some time in the last few days and involved absolutely no money changing hands. Either the person trying to steal my identity is a moron, or my bank is the most inept financial institution in the world this side of the central bank of Zimbabwe. (At least I don’t think Washington Mutual is responsible for 516 quintillion percent inflation rates, but who knows.) Regardless, WaMu is getting a visit tomorrow wherein I’ll be demanding the contents of my account in cash so I can go next door to deposit it at Bank of America via the spiffy cash deposit feature of the ATM.

Originally published at yoyoel.com. You can comment here or there.

One of the things I’ve learned working at Apple is that there’s always a right way and a wrong way to say something.  And after entire shifts of having to tell customers that their iPhones show liquid damage and are out of warranty, I’ve gotten pretty good at differentiating between the two.

The same is true online.  For instance, one of this year’s sources of intense controversy at Swarthmore, the blog Womyn of Color Blogging, recently shut its doors following a series of comments that the blog’s author perceived as gratuitously hurtful.  Whether or not that’s the case, and whether or not I agree with the author’s decision (I don’t; the best way to validate a troll is to throw in the towel), anything the commenter was trying to say has been lost because (s)he failed to articulate it in a constructive manner.

Particularly when sensitive issues — like out-of-warranty iPhones or body image — come up, it’s easy to take an otherwise objective conversation personally.  It’s difficult to ferret out the nuggets of truth in argument from beneath the layers of emotion.  And throughout the life of Womyn of Color Blogging, that was the case.  The author, whatever her intentions, took every opportunity to make reasonable discussions into personal attacks (the now-infamous “fuck you list,” which I think is also a Lily Allen song, comes to mind), and her readers, for their part, either chirped in with “you go girl”s or, on the opposite end, wrote insulting poetry.  Neither of these things are productive.

For the record, I agree with the gist of what the commenter was saying.  I think the concept of medical “fatphobia” is a delusion.  I think that making obesity into a social rallying cry is dangerous and unproductive.  But I also think that I haven’t done a particularly good job of separating my emotions from a discussion of the topic.  So I’m going to take this opportunity, as Womyn of Color Blogging takes what I hope will turn into a hiatus rather than a full stop, to right those wrongs and quote my sister (a nutritional epidemiologist) on the subject:

1. Obesity is a strong risk factor for type 2 diabetes. Period. That doesn’t mean that only fat people get diabetes or that every fat person will get diabetes. Complex diseases such as heart disease and diabetes are never predictable by a single factor. But it does mean that fat people are much more likely to develop diabetes. Biological explanations include hormonal and inflammatory toxicity to pancreatic beta cells and beta cell exhaustion (due to the need to excrete larger and larger amounts of insulin in order to regulate the glucose level of a larger body).

2. Diabetes is a strong risk factor for numerous medical conditions, particularly those involving both small and large arteries — e.g., eye disease, heart disease, and stroke. High glucose levels are toxic to the epithelial cells that line arteries. Even individuals with well-controlled diabetes have a lifespan that is up to a decade shorter than their non-diabetic counterparts. So at least indirectly, obesity is linked to serious health issues.

3. The literature is less one-sided on whether obesity is also directly associated with heart disease and other health conditions, after controlling for diabetes. At least in my studies, physical inactivity and nutrition appear to play a larger role. That being said, I wouldn’t rule out (or in) a direct link yet.

4. There are, of course, some studies that counter #1 and #2 above. But in epidemiology, there are almost always contradicting studies and focusing on those rather than the larger body of knowledge is like ignoring the forest for a single tree. It’s bad science, and more often, bad publicity in mainstream media. I’ve produced studies with counterintuitive results and they should be published and considered, but never used as the sole basis for counterintuitive medical advice.

5. Yes, some studies have suggested that obese individuals have better survival after a heart attack [a response to this]. That may be because thinness in a hospital setting often implies the existence of other chronic medical problems or smoking. Or, it could be a real effect due to hormonal or inflammatory differences. Regardless, read between the lines: survival after a heart attack is relatively low anyways and obesity, either directly or indirectly, increases your risk of having a first heart attack. So personally, I’d prefer the thin and no heart attack approach.

5. Weight has a large genetic determinant, and based on metabolism or psychology or what-have-you it is certainly much more difficult for some people to become or stay thin. That being said, there are many studies that indicate that obese individuals who lose weight DO also shed much of their excess risk of diabetes and other conditions along with the weight. So weight loss through (reasonable) diet and exercise is still medically sound advice, even if it’s offensive to some people.

That, incidentally, is what this discussion should have looked like from the beginning.  It’s just been so long since anyone involved has (a) researched their arguments, or (b) stopped being self-righteous for long enough to actually make a reasonable argument that, when we’re confronted with one, we don’t know what to do with ourselves.  So, in the spirit of conversation, let’s all try to suck a little bit less when it comes to articulating what we mean.  That, at the very least, is what this blog business should be about.

Originally published at yoyoel.com. You can comment here or there.

Give or take three weeks ago, I noticed that my beloved Timbuk2 messenger bag had a small tear in the lining of the laptop compartment. Expecting nothing to come of it, I asked, via Twitter (@timbuk2), what my repair options might be. Within 24 hours, I had a response, telling me to submit photos of the “injury” to Timbuk2’s customer service address. A few hours later, I had a reply to my e-mail, informing me that the tear was completely covered under my bag’s warranty, and that I should mail it in to receive store credit in the amount of my bag’s original purchase price.

As someone unaccustomed to not being completely shafted by any large company in a customer service situation, this blew my mind in about six different ways.  Not only was Timbuk2 taking responsibility for a two year old, very-much-used product, but they were going a step beyond just sewing up the tear and actually offered to let me buy a new bag of my choosing.

Which I, of course, did.

Considering a story very similar to mine was published on The Consumerist this afternoon, I’m sure that I’m not the only one who has been totally blown away by Timbuk2’s commitment not only to their products, but to keeping their customers happy.  Beyond just their bags, which are fantastic in terms of construction and features, this is what really justifies the price.  Paying a premium, in this instance, has completely paid off.

Originally published at yoyoel.com. You can comment here or there.

Two semi-related questions about the future of this blog:

Question 1: Should I link my Twitter (@yoyoel) with my LiveJournal? On one hand, having a daily digest of everything I tweet could be (a) interesting for me to have saved somewhere, and (b) at least slightly amusing, because I like to think that my Twitter is at least as interesting as the other crap I post here. But on the other, I feel like there's this widespread antipathy towards LiveJournalers who repost their tweets because, uh, if we cared about your Twitter we'd have followed you already.

Question 2: It seems like, whenever I get bored, I end up reexamining the LiveJournal-vs-a-real-blog issue. My LiveJournal has been around for just under six years (I made it on June 16th of 2003) and has seen 2,104 entries, which I'd like to think is a pretty decent run. And overall, it's been a good time; LiveJournal has a lot of features that make blogs feel more social and less like standing on a soapbox, preaching to no one. Also, the fact that I can choose to filter certain posts and only make them visible to people I specifically allow to see them lets me blog about things that I otherwise couldn't (well, shouldn't, I guess) make visible to the general public.

But LiveJournal has always been restrictive. The free/paid account divide never really affected me, because I've almost always had a paid account; but since that goodness went away, I've been struck with how limited the template system is and how arbitrarily the site takes away features that seem like no-brainers (like the ability to embed photos or have your comments page look the same as the rest of your journal). There are ways to work around everything, which is what has kept me on the site for so long, but there are, I think, better options out there.

So here's the real question: should I take the plunge and register yoyoel.com and spend this summer designing and setting up a real blog? My instincts are telling me that I should, particularly before I go to England. But, you know, I really like LiveJournal.

Anyway, I'd love to hear your thoughts on either issue.

Reasons why Glee might be the next great show:

• It's pop culture references are on the same level of hilarious subtlety as Ugly Betty in its first (most successful) season.
• Even the characters that are overused stereotypes manage not to be totally frustrating.
• Any show whose first five minutes have a character saying "Please! This is Marc Jacobs' new collection!" before being thrown in a dumpster is at least slightly endearing.
• Man can these motherfuckers sing. The cast's rendition of "Don't Stop Believin'" is quickly becoming one of my new favorite songs.
• It features the amazing Jayma Mays, who played the hugely psychotic Charlie on Ugly Betty, in an awesome and equally neurotic role.
• Its pilot was a slick and overall solid package, on par with some of the best pilots I've seen (Veronica Mars, Grey's Anatomy) and worlds better than some of the weaker ones (The Office [US] and House and its stupid color effects stick out in my mind).

Reasons why Glee might be a huge failure:

• It seems like it's trying to do a little too much at once. Admittedly, a lot of pilots fall into this trap, but I hope the show narrows down its dramatic points to five or so per episode, instead of the ten million it introduced this time around.
• If the singing fails to be as catchy as it was this time, there's a lot of potential for people who generally don't give a shit about showtunes to lose interest really quickly.
• If the dialogue keeps its at-times corny, hackneyed edge.
• If FOX goes about its usual pattern of dangling amazing shows in front of viewers, failing to market and schedule them effectively, and then snatching them away, ie. Firefly.

In the mean time, though, I'm anxiously awaiting the second episode.

The dilemma: Facebook has become borderline unusable. I spend a majority of my time on the site blocking people or applications from my News Feed, in the vain hope that some time between now and next week I'll manage to distill down the amount of bullshit on my screen to even somewhat manageable levels. If useful content actually exists -- and I'm not convinced that it does anymore, even by the most liberal definition of "useful" -- finding it has become close to impossible. Moreover, people abuse the traditional avenues for useful content (eg. sending a string of increasingly hysterical messages to attendees of events in the days/hours/minutes/seconds leading up to whatever it is that I made the mistake of RSVPing to), making it even more difficult to distill the good from the bad.

The alternatives:

• Fuck this social networking bullshit. As most people who have deleted (or rather, deactivated, because a Facebook can never die) a Facebook can attest, two things are true of the experience: (1) deactivated Facebooks have a tendency to be swiftly reactivated; and (2) as soon as you're off Facebook, there is inevitably something absolutely crucial that can only be seen or investigated via Facebook, see also (1). Clearly I can't leave Facebook.
• Fix Facebook. MySpace, the veritable hoopty of social networking sites, is in a constant state of disrepair, a product of its own popularity and mismanagement. Things on MySpace are so thoroughly broken that people no longer expect them to be fixed; the biweekly changes to the site (most recently, to its Events system that created a weird bifurcated event inbox that is as bewildering as it is useless) no longer faze users, because, hey, it can't get worse, can it? Facebook, on the other hand, is constantly rolling out new "improvements" designed to give users things they didn't ask for and don't need. For instance, I now get a pop-up for every new notification that arrives, in addition to an e-mail notice and the usual badging of the notification area at the bottom of the screen. But the things that actually need to be fixed -- for instance, more robust News Feed filtering and the excision of all the aneurism-inducing quiz applications -- remain untouched. Clearly Facebook isn't about to fix itself.
• Use "something else" as a primary social networking tool. This, of course, is what led to Facebook's rise to prominence in the first place. MySpace, after years of neglect, had become so slow and bloated that, as soon as the comparatively sleek Facebook came onto the scene, it began hemorrhaging users until only poor sad bisexual emo people and struggling indie musicians were left. So, what's the new Facebook? The problem is: there isn't. For all its hype, Twitter is neither robust enough (140-character microblogging isn't even kind of the same thing as Facebook) nor reliable enough (as the constant and now memetic "fail whale" phenomenon can attest) to pose an actual threat. (Oh, and I'm convinced that they're going to run out of money and stop being able to feed the hamsters that power the servers some time soon.) LinkedIn is too "networking" and not enough "social." Loopt is downright creepy. And however much it tries to limp on, MySpace is both too full of pedophiles and too systematically dysfunctional to ever stage a comeback. Clearly there's no suitable alternative, at least not yet.

The solution: Put your head between your knees, swat Mafia Wars invitations away like flies, and hope like hell that Mark Zuckerberg's minions pull their collective heads out of their asses sometime soon and fix the trainwreck that has become Facebook. Making Facebook into a platform opened the Pandora's box of bullshit applications, and Facebook's developers have merely stood back and watched the carnage unfold. That kind of laissez-faire approach can't stand. And it's only a matter of time before Facebook destroys itself, unless someone (presumably, the people behind the site) steps in to stop it. Facebook needs a Superman. Or, in the short term, it needs to bring down the hammer on applications.

I had a really weird musical upbringing. My father listens only to songs composed or recorded before 1975, with the exception of -- and herein I paused for like ten minutes to try to think of something -- AC/DC, and even that's iffy. My mother listens exclusively to classical music. If it involves anything more electric than the dehumidifier inside a piano, she's not interested. And my sisters, at least in my formative years, listened to a kind of strange combination of grunge rock, industrial techno, and Madonna.

So it's not really surprising that, during the first ten or twelve years of my life, I had pretty strange (or at least, age-inappropriate) musical tastes. The first album I can remember listening to in its entirety (and liking) was REM's "Out Of Time." The second was either Nirvana's "Nevermind" or "Pretty Hate Machine" by Nine Inch Nails. (I was one year old when "Pretty Hate Machine" was released.) I knew, and still know, all the lyrics to "Papa Don't Preach" from Madonna's "True Blue" after listening to it every day on the way to my sisters' swimming lessons. And when ska became a big deal the first time around, some time around when I was nine, I was there, borrowing my sisters' copies of "Let's Face It" by The Mighty Mighty Bosstones and "Turn the Radio Off" by Reel Big Fish.

I've since managed to round out my music collection to include more than gay pop and music to slit one's wrists to, but in the last couple of weeks, I've been revisiting a lot of songs from the 90s that, for whatever reason, had slipped my mind and my iTunes library. A few of the more important ones:

"Missing", by Everything But The Girl. Any of the 4,000 "club remixes" available on iTunes can apply, too. Some time after 93.1 in Florida stopped being classical music, but shortly before it turned into hard rock, this song (along with "Rapture" by iiO) played every five minutes. "And I miss you / like the deserts miss the rain" has forever been burnt into my brain.

"Two Princes", by Spin Doctors. I feel like this song epitomizes that brand of semi-wholesome 90s pop rock that all basically sounds the same (see also: "Tubthumping" by Chumbawumba, "Run Around" by Blues Traveler, and that one song by Eagle Eye Cherry). Also, they sang it on Sesame Street, which adds about three million awesome points into the equation.

"How's It Going to Be", by Third Eye Blind. I don't know why exactly it happened, but some time around when I arrived at Swarthmore, "Jumper" became a big deal. It wasn't possible to enter a dorm room of anyone in my social circle without hearing it. (Drunken sing-along also acceptable and often encouraged.) And since a decent part of 3EB's self-titled album is $1.29 per track on iTunes, I have to assume that this isn't an isolated situation. So I have to ask: (a) when did we decide that 3EB is the alt rock band from the 90s that it's okay to like in the 2000s; and (b) how is it possible that one album contains so many of the songs that comprised "103.1-THE-BUZZ-FLORIDA'S-NEW-ROCK-ALTERNATIVE"'s playlist for most of 1998?

"I Wish", by Skee-Lo. At least for me, Skee-Lo is such a special kind of wanker that, even though his genre is ostensibly hip-hop, he's so unassuming and honestly irrelevant to 90s rap at large that I have no qualms with including him in a round-up of mainstream 90s rock. If you haven't listened to this song in like ten years -- and let's be honest, I hadn't either -- give it a try now. You'll be amazed by how easily the lyrics come to you (because somewhere, deep down, you still know them all) and also by how it's still a really, really terrible song.

"Jump Around", by House Of Pain. If there's any one song that can single-handedly declare itself to be "that song" that was on every single 90s teen movie soundtrack as the party song (I had to think a lot about what song might be it for the 2000s, and while I'm still not sure, it's either "Milkshake" by Kelis or "Paper Planes" by M.I.A.), this is it. Hearing like two seconds of that godawful shrill synthesizer that's the dominant tonal component of the song is enough to either overwhelm me with nostalgia for times when Macauly Culkin wasn't totally creepy (I'm thinking of him here in Richie Rich, a movie that in one fell swoop made an entire generation feel bad about being middle class), or with the desire to delete this track forever from my computer. But, you know, whatever works.

A few days ago, I got to talking to susancalvin about some of the topics she heard about at the fancy social media conference that Google sent her to last week. Among them was the issue of symmetrical and asymmetrical "Friending" -- or, less technically, whether being Friends with someone requires mutuality (ie. Facebook) or not (ie. LiveJournal, Twitter). But where the issue really gets interesting is when you allow for more than just a "yes" or "no" answer to the mutuality question.

Moreso than any other platform I've encountered, I think that Facebook does this really well. In your profile's privacy settings, you can configure who sees what boxes on your profile, what items within those boxes, what entries on your Wall, and even how you appear in search results. You can filter things by network (for instance, I can allow people from work to see my Apple corporate e-mail address, but not people from Swarthmore), by custom groups of people, or by n degrees of separation (for instance, friends, or friends of friends).

Beyond that, I can also filter the content that I receive from other people. For instance, it was pretty common practice at Swarthmore before the 2008 election to hide a certain person whom I will refer to only as Shmichael Shmay from your News Feed, so as not to be bombarded by overly enthusiastic political link posting. In addition to just filtering out people I never, ever care about (customers at Apple who Friend me, people I met once at a party, people who went to my high school but I don't really know, people who went to my high school who I did really know but don't want to know anymore, etc), I've also created a group titled "People I actually give a shit about," populated only with people whose statuses, photos, quizzes, and linked items I'd like to see on a regular basis. This filters down my 680-strong list of Facebook acquaintances to a much more manageable size -- say, 200.

But what I really find so interesting about Facebook's approach is that it makes all this filtering completely transparent to the other party involved. Facebook's asymmetry is passive-aggressive. Without comparing my view of someone to someone else's, it's impossible to discern whether or not I'm looking at a restricted version of their profile. Which, when people completely exclude portions of their profile from everyone's view, becomes confusing, because you don't know whether or not you're being filtered or just getting the same pared-down profile that everyone else gets.

And then there's Facebook's ultimate bitch-slap, the Block List. As I discovered when I used it for the first time (on David; reserve judgement, please), it's supposed to make you completely invisible to the blocked party, to the point where even if they specifically search for you, they are left unaware of your profile's existence.

Of course your profile isn't gone, and more importantly, your ties to their profile aren't gone, either. For instance, pictures with both me and David in them are still tagged with both of us, but his name is no longer a clickable link. (This, presumably, is because I've been retributively Blocked.) So you can be in this weird situation where Facebook is doing its best to maintain the sheen of privacy and separation (by hiding someone in your search results) but gets stuck because it's close to impossible to totally disentangle people on social networking sites.

Ultimately, I'm not sure what to make of the situation. I like the ability to restrict what people see on my profile in a fairly granular manner -- this, of course, being the last option at my disposal should my mother give in to her Israeli friends' demands and join Facebook -- but I'm not sure that giving the other party no indication that they're being filtered is a reasonable way to go about things. When people have a mental image of what a complete social networking profile is, seeing chunks of it missing when you view a Friend's Facebook page is a tacit insult. And I don't know that that's a tenable way to handle asymmetry in social networks.