I don’t know if I have ever mentioned this anywhere but I have this massive infatuation with most types of modern transportation. And I’m not even sure why.

FLYING! I love flying. Airplanes are like the greatest thing. I’m that person who insists on the window seat, uses up every exposure on her camera within ten minutes of takeoff, and generally geeks out over the entire process. Last time I flew it was probably comical; twentysomething me bouncing around in the seat, in stark contrast to the six year old kid next to me who spent the entire flight quietly reading a novel. I dunno, maybe it’d be different if I had to fly everywhere as part of business trips all the time and I was jaded, but I don’t actually fly very often so I get to geek out over it, thank you very much.

CARS. I love cars. And not so much in the whole sup dawg, pimp-my-ride kind of way either. No, my love of cars is more abstract. I love cars because I love driving and I love driving because unless I win the lottery, it’s the closest I’ll ever get to flying my own plane.

AC on, music cranked to 11, cruisin’ down the freeway. One With My Machine. I don’t care, I’m still free, you can’t take my road from me. That’s what I’m talking about.

Now this little love affair of mine tends to put me at odds with the increasingly common zeitgeist that I should be carpooling or biking or something. Putting aside the fact that I hate bikes for various reasons (Hyperbole and a Half is pretty spot on here), or that carpooling is out because I get nervous when other people are in My Car (perhaps because then I can’t get away with squeakily belting out Poker Face)… I understand the sentiment behind said zeitgeist. But it’s hard for me to get into it when I am so very in love with my 2002 Toyota Corolla which allows me to be blissfully free for ten minutes a day.

See, I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: I’m fine with tree-hugging, so long as I can do it in a specially constructed tree-hugging robot suit with all the extra bells and whistles and lasers and jetpacks.

Basically my idea of the future is nature and fuzzy animals living in harmony with robot suits and lots and lots of mechanical bunnies.

I like my idea of the future.

Also, lemme know if you find any tree-hugging robot suits laying around that are in need of a good home.

“Balance” is an attribute that I find really important to my life.

In wandering through life I have often found that most things do not work best in absolutes, but rather, in a gradient between said absolutes. I think it’s just sort of how I operate: I look for the middle ground. At worst, this makes me a wishywashy fence sitter who can see both sides of nearly every argument, but at best it gives me an interesting and possibly unique view of the world.

I am, in fact, going somewhere with this, and it mostly has to do with my thoughts on technology. I’m a bit of a techno-fiend. I think progress and new inventions are great. I love tech, all tech– old tech and new tech. It speaks volumes to me about optimism, ingenuity, and creativity.

I love when we use technology to figure out how to make something better. (Or how to make a robot suit.)

Anyways.

Sometimes this gives me a bit of a dilemma. Since I love old tech as well as new tech, it’s occasionally hard for me to say farewell to something old in order to embrace something new. We live in an interesting time. There is so much that I’ve seen fall by the wayside over the course of my own short lifespan that thinking back to my childhood is like thinking back to an alien world that somehow managed to get by with landline phones, fax machines, snail mail, and these newfangled things called VCRs.

So I’ve seen a lot of things change in just two and a half decades. As I see things change I pause to kind of contemplate what it means (I was that middle-school kid who actually stopped to think about the impending repercussions of DVD), but then I move on, because that’s life, right? Change and improvements! Awesome!

But occasionally something changes that I’m close to. Like film.

Between my love affair with the darkroom in college (a place to which I’d happily sneak away to after hours, to print my own non-assignment-based pictures) and a year-long stint of working in a One-Hour Photo Lab, I know a lot about film processing. I think it’s a fascinating and amazing process that combines my love of chemistry with my love of art and my love of, well, a lot of things. But who uses film anymore? When I worked in the One-Hour Photo it was a big deal when the percentage of digital orders we processed surpassed that magical 50% mark and usurped traditional film. And that was in… 2006, I think? I sort of don’t want to know how the number looks now.

That’s not to say I’m anti-digital-photography. Au contraire, the digital camera is an awesome technological achievements in and of itself, offering unsurpassed convenience in a variety of ways.

But there is something in that magical darkroom that I don’t want to lose. Just as there is something in my mechanical watch that I don’t want to lose, either.

Or maybe I’m just being a nostalgia geek. That’s possible, too. In the meantime I’ll continue to balance the best of the Old with the best of the New, because I don’t want to limit my love to just the New and Shiny.

@morkuma: “blog about gaga”

The great thing about liking Lady Gaga’s music is that regardless of peoples’ opinion on her I have an awesome excuse to listen to her. If the person I am talking to thinks she is brilliant, I can nod my head and agree, and if the person I am talking to thinks she is terrible and most awful thing ever to happen to the world, then I can remind them that my musical taste is absolutely horrible and that I’m that person who listened to Dragostea din Tei on repeat for about a month. Win/win situation!

@etherjammer: “PokéWat! Gotta time ‘em all!”

Haha, ok, pocket watches. My taste has changed over time, perhaps like it would for a fine wine or something. I used to just want the pretty ones, now I want the vintage ones. My idea of beauty in a watch has shifted from physical beauty to the beauty of design and a mechanical device being able to run for over a hundred years. That said, if you can find one that is beautiful in both ways, please let me know. (So I can cry, because I obviously won’t be able to afford it.)

@Brunty: “you could blog about cake”

Blogging about cake inevitably turns into blogging about Portal. My sister’s birthday was a couple weeks back and she got a plushie companion cube. I was jealous.

Her cake also looked like the one from Portal. It was kind of a Win Birthday all around.

@Faulsey: “Tinned Spaghetti!”

You know what I love?

It doesn’t even taste like spaghetti. Which is possibly why I like it, because I was never the world’s biggest spaghetti fan.

Horrible musical taste, and horrible food taste. I’m on a roll!

@softthistle: “i want you to tell us just how AWESOME you are!”

This is hard, because I have terrible self esteem. Even when things happen that seem to imply that I might be a slightly interesting human being, I counter it with my brand of logic. When I was a little kid, I mean really little (like five or six) I went through this battery of tests and it got me into a school for “gifted kids”. I never quite understood why. I have a distinct memory of telling my parents a few years later that I had no idea why I was going to school with all these smart kids, because “all I can do is read.”

That same sense of uneasiness haunts me today. I’m probably an above average writer, but you know what, SO IS EVERYONE ELSE ON THE INTERNET, at least in my friends’ circle. That’s why they’re blogging. Since I am merely doing something that everyone else can do, it negates any sort of specialness and makes me a pretty average person. So, there you go.

@kerrsplat: “Tesla coil inside a Faraday cage turned into a pocketwatch! Go!”

You guys know me all too well. <3

I wonder if it would even work, though. Well, there's only one way to find out >.>

@demeternoth: “the French football farce.”

I had to google this. I guess the players are revolting or something? (…”revolting” as in the verb, not the adjective.) Well that’s just silly, becauZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ

@EforExtinction: “the beauty of a well-oiled machine?”

So, this thing?

I’m pretty sure I need this in my life, post haste.

@Rilgon: “Ayamiss and how awesome of a wasp she is.”

Rilgon’s wasp is big, orange, huggable, and awesome. It’s also no longer tame-able in game. Apparently Blizzard doesn’t want you to tame something that shares a model with a raid boss. Which is really too bad, because I would like to tame the following creatures please: Shade of Aran, Curator, Nightbane, Void Reaver, XT-002, and Heigan the Unclean.

A Curator mount is fine too.

@scouris: “the current political situation in Cambodia”

I had to wikipedia this. Turns out they have a king, a prime minister, a parliament, political parties, et al. I couldn’t find anything particularly exciting here but maybe I was just looking in the wrong place.

Back in the day, though, they totally had cool wars and stuff.

@Slash2Rustee: “Thoughts and Reflections on Whats eating Gilbert Grape the movie.”

I actually had to watch this movie in tenth grade. I remember all of two things about it: Somehow it tied in with “Of Mice and Men”, and Leonardo diCaprio was in it.

…okay, just wikipedia’d it. Apparently Johnny Depp was in it too? Shows you how much I know about movies. *sobs*

@lufitoom: “Being naked and eating cheetos while playing WoW.”

Man, that would make such a mess! Orange dust would be everywhere. On your keyboard, on your mouse, on you… not sure I wanna try it.

@faeldray: “‘i want you to tell us just how AWESOME you are!’ – seconded!”

Bah, fine, you’re not going to let me get away without doing this, are you??

Okay, the three awesomest things about me:

1.) I taught myself to read and write before I was three years old.
2.) I got 5′s on the two AP English tests. I didn’t study and I was taking the tests the morning after spending the night in the hospital because I had a bad case of influenza or something. I also hadn’t eaten in probably 24 hours. It was great.
3.) I got a 104% on my Algebra II final. (All questions plus the two extra credit questions correct.)

…I really can’t think of anything else about me that is particularly awesome, sorry >.>

Also let it be known that this is probably the only time I will ever talk about supercool things that I did. *retreats back into humility hole*

@Dechion: “How about free energy devices?”

I actually saw a really neat video clip this morning about a fashion designer in New York who is making his own nuclear fusion reactor at home in his spare time. He said his reasoning was trying to discover an efficient new energy source. I dunno, maybe it’s just me, but I think that’s an awesome idea. I’m one of those people that misses the days of anyone just up and inventing the Next Big Thing in their garage. The Wright Brothers did it, The Woz did it, but it doesn’t seem to happen very much anymore. Free energy devices? I’m all for it, and I wanna see it invented by some goggles-wearing geek somewhere.

@Nim_Ankh: “write about how awesome an idea [asking twitter for questions] is.”

I’m a pretty big fan of this idea myself. I’ll have to ask Twitter for blogspiration more frequently.

@Meadhbh: “Bubbles?”

Things I cannot do: Blow bubbles with bubble gum. Every so often I get some bubble gum just so I can try it and see if I’ve stopped failing yet, but it’s all to no avail. I also can’t curl my tongue into a little roll. I heard somewhere that this was actually a genetic issue (which wouldn’t surprise me, since I am basically just a bundle of awkward recessive genes), but then I read something else refuting that, SO I DON’T KNOW WHAT TO BELIEVE ANYMORE.

(As an aside, I swear, 50% of what I learned in high school science classes has since been refuted. Remember back in the day when Biology was simple and you got to do things like play “Evolution: The Board Game”? Don’t get me started on my rant about the poor game design on this, by the way. Because you could only win if you evolved into a human by the end. So if you evolved into a dinosaur halfway through the game you were done, GAME OVER MAN. But at least you get to be a dinosaur, I guess.)

@Doug_Williams: “If you were a hot dog starving in the desert, would you eat yourself?”