Guessing someone’s age is always a touchy subject, especially when they’re over 30. Guess someone’s age to be over 40 and you’re dead. Consequently, whenever I make a guess about how old someone is, I keep my real answer to myself. I find it’s better to let them say it, that way I can gush that they look great. Given the risks in knowing out loud someone’s age, it’s much more fun to figure out what era’s a building’s from.

When I saw ThePete‘s tweet and later his post about the building pictured above (at 13th St & 8th Ave), I guessed it was built in the 1970′s, a definite design period for ugly buildings. Having grown up in San Diego, I’ve seen my fair share of 1970′s architecture, much of still around even with all the new development county-wide over the past few decades. It’s just a hunch.

The difference between this NYC building & the ones in San Diego is that the San Diego buildings from the 1970′s remind me of people with excessive suntans whereas this mirrored building definitely has an East Coast pallor (not accounting for summertime complexions). However, there’s something still pretty scary about being close to leather or downright pasty. Unlike people, the buildings don’t really stand to get offended or hurt. The architects might. That is, if we’re lucky enough to talk about their buildings within earshot at a cocktail party.

*51 as of this posting

Brian, one of my East Coast blog friends, mentioned this morning waking up from a nightmare where someone tries to mug him. At least it’s one where he tries to go down fighting. For me, it brought to mind the Cure’s “Close to Me,” but I also remembered a few nightmares of my own.

When I was around four or five years old, I went with my father on Disneyworld’s Haunted Mansion ride. I don’t remember details about what I saw. All I remember was that I was scared, crying, and hugging my father. For several years after that, I had many dreams where I was on the ride, but the details kept getting more and more embellished with every dream. I don’t know if hands sticking out of a door nailed shut was an original feature, but I frequently saw it. Later on, I saw a gigantic, glowing spiderweb. I never saw any spider, but I was fascinated by how big and bright it was. When I was in the fifth grade and there was a family trip to Disneyland, I had to go on the Haunted Mansion ride. This time, to my eleven year old mind, it was fun, but cheesy. I never had the dreams again, but I would always remember them. All those years I think my mind was just trying to make sense of it all.

When I was in my mid-twenties, I dreamed that I witnessed a gay bashing. Some poor man was chased by another with a pipe and I horrified. I was frozen and all I could do was scream. However, there was no sound and I woke up trying to make noise out of a muted cry. I was in my fundamentalist period at the time, and I now see it as a manifestation of internalized homophobia.

Thankfully, I’ve never had a dream about my head on the door. That would have been too freaky.

I’ve been interacting with Chris, Brian, and Fredo through the blogosphere for the past two years, which has also taken to Twitterville (for Brian and Fredo) and Facebook. I’ve met all three of these guys in person in a one year period, and I look forward to more blog correspondence in the future.

With Joshua Minton, I found a friend who was putting forth his BFA creative writing afterlife on his blog. He put his fiction, poetry, rants, and articles out there. Actually, it was one of his articles on Every Writer’s Resource that got me in touch with him. While there isn’t a high level of blog banter and interaction going on between us, I read his Online Pulpit regularly and I have the upmost respect for him.

There are a couple of other bloggers I’ve met in that period, but those mentioned above have been a more significant part of my experience with ShindoTV and the blogosphere.

In the latter part of 2008, I started attending the local blog and Twitter meetups. On the surface, they were parties with lots of alcohol, but I’ve been making some new friends and some online contacts. One such friend is Melodie, who has shown up in some posts as a recurring character, and Rich, aka richandcreamy, who has been commenting on my blog lately. Along with developing some real time friendships, I hope to develop some good blog friendships amongs some of the local bloggers as well this year.

I’ve come across some interesting blogs out there as random people out there started following me on Twitter. Scott Campbell is a writer out in New York City with a quirky blog name, ThePete, which provides a lot of pointed commentary and discusses various projects. Another’s a more anonymous blogger, One Mean MFA, who’s currently working on the graduate creative writing degree and posts on teaching and the writing life. I’m following both of them for sure.

Then there are people I meet briefly and they move to other towns. Tamika‘s one such person and I’ve gotten to know her a bit more through all the Facebook witticisms and her blog. We’ll hang out a bit whether she visits San Diego in the future or if I head out to visit Dallas. I look forward to chatting it up in real time again, but I’m tuning in to the Gran Diva in the mean time.

I may come across some cool people to add to this community this year. Also, I hope that those I met also continue to enhance my blogging experience and I theirs. As for me, no flight plan, no problem. Here’s to seeing where this blog takes me in 2009.

Read with caution. You don’t want your boss to peek over your shoulder and see you looking at this.

First, I posted some things on Twitter, which found their way onto Facebook as my statuses:

• I had this weird dream I was a student in a class with Tim Gunn and he took off all his clothes while he was teaching.
• Now I know I’ve watched too much Project Runway. Strange thing in the dream was that no one was phased by his disrobing.

Then, I saw Danny’s Facebook status. I commented, and here is the banter that followed:

Danny is still creeped out from his ‘invasion of the body snatchers’-like nightmare but is amused by the idea of dreaming it in an xxx-rated version the next time ;-}. 7:52am

shindo: Invasion of the Body Snatches has a nice porn ring to it. There’s also some fetish-y thing to it. Someone has to have their body snatched and someone wants to do the snatching. Maybe I’m thinking too much in dom/sub terms.

Hopefully, this wasn’t too traumatic to read.

All pics photographed with my handy, dandy iPhone.

Bank of America Plaza, taken from a nearby high-rise.

Not dove love at all. These pigeons are fighting with the fattest one over food he has in his beak.

In the afternoon, I ducked into Pasha‘s, a new Turkish restaurant in Hillcrest, to get away from the traffic. I ordered this tasty lunch and the Ayran, a yogurt drink. Not my usual fare.

Earlier yesterday evening, I was at the Kinko’s in Hazard Center making photo copies of these lovely images, which will soon appear in Resplendence. I guess I could photograph all the drawings myself, but I’m not a good art reproduction photographer. I just want things to look good when the series launches in September. Now, all I need to do is copy the color images, scan them all, and I will be set.

I’ve been enjoying my iPhone, doing almost everything but talk. Actually, that’s not completely true, but I’m not having a gabfest either. I’ve had fun with the camera, taken plenty of advantage of the data feature such as Internet anywhere (almost), keeping up with Twitter (through Twitterific), and keeping myself out of e-mail bankruptcy. Plus, ya gotta love the klunky Facebook app.

I’ve been teaching over the summer. I just finished teaching a paragraph skills course at the urban college, and I will finish teaching at the language school this week. I’m tired, but I don’t have much of a chance to breathe, as faculty development is this week at two community colleges where I teach and school starts next week. For the most part part, I think I’ve started a pretty good habit of keeping confidentiality with the classes, even if some situations make great stories or seem blog-worthy.

Overall, it’s better this way. I do have opinions on all kinds of things and sometimes it’s easier to simply rant them out here because I’m much more of a reserved person in real life. Perhaps it’s better if that real life personality translated to my online self. But, disclosure is so much fun!

In any case, I don’t want to be that teacher whose blog gets used against them in a student grievance, nor do I want some boss to punish me for what I really think. Plus, I’ve already expressed my fear, anger, and frustration sometime ago about this and that’s enough.

Now onto something lighter. In a comment to my last post, Chris encouraged me to jump on the 12 of 12 meme. I’ve been doing pretty good about avoiding memes and getting friends into them. I’ve more or less come to the conclusion that friends don’t let friends do memes. God knows how much of this crap I’ve gotten in my inbox over the years before the memes mutated to the blogosphere. Also, I haven’t circulated the hot YouTubers vids; they have enough help without me. Chris Crocker and Barats and Bereta are going to have to find some other people to do their dirty work for them. 12 of 12, though, seems like there’s no harm, just taking 12 photos on the 12th of each month.

12 photos in one day for me is nothing. Anyone who’s a contact of mine on Flickr can attest to that. I have days of photo overload. All I’ll say right now is I’ll think about it. Mokusatsu*

*What Japan said in response to the Potsdam Declaration, which has often been interpreted as “We are ignoring surrender,” though some have suggested that this actually meant “We are considering surrender.”

Brian mentions this plug-in for the WordPress admin pages. It completely changes the appearance. See and compare with the standard WordPress admin page (this is from another one I’m working on):

It goes beyond just being so purdy. I also have ease of posting:

I can still see where to click for all my other site maintenance needs (the main ones, anyway). I don’t have to click here or there to find it.

As for another plug-in, Akismet, I found it useful afterall. I got me some spam!

However, it doesn’t look like it tastes good stirfried with noodles, vegetables, and soysauce. No yakisoba with this spam.

Brian, Fredo, and I are still working out a plan to meet up. Wednesday sounds like it will be the day for sure, but the details definitely have to be worked out.

I’ll take plenty of pictures everyday. I’ll post some here, but you can definitely see them on Flickr. I’ll also have a video camera handy, but I’m not guaranteeing anything here.

The only bummer is I won’t be able to catch a Blowoff event. Perhaps I’ll plan my next trip around it.

I fly out tonight. Stay tuned…

A lot of my frustration with Microsoft’s finest creation stems from my experience with the software during my first week of school. At the college in the desert/mountains, the composition classes have one hour of computer lab time and they’re in these brand new classrooms with state of the art PC’s. Last semester (before the new building was completed), my class met for their lab in the library, and those computers were polished white iMacs (circa 1999-2002, the cathode ray tube variety). All of my students (and yours truly) hated those antiquated devices (which were updated with Panther, but incredibly slow. The spinning rainbow wheel was a common occurrence). Even though I’m not a PC person, I feel the new computers are a vast improvement. Of course, they come equipped with Office 2007.

Since I teach English, I naturally have them use Microsoft Word for their in-lab writing assignments. I suspect all of them were familiar with some previous version of the word processsing program. Before my encounter with the new Word, my most recent experience was with Office 2004. Two weeks ago, I plunked Office 2008 into my new MacBook, but that did not prepare me for its PC-based sibling.

Unfamiliarity with the program didn’t make the lab an easy one, especially since I had students create writing samples during that first day.

The interface was the thing that confused all of us. Office’s website calls it “Fluent User Interface,” but it was a foreign language for all of us. Certain formatting features (new ones) are laid out in a way for the user to easily click on them to use, but this does very little good if you don’t need them right away. For some simpler functions, they weren’t so readily available like on the older versions. Mac’s Office 2008 retains this older interface and integrates it with the new interface. However, Office 2007 goes for something newer and flashier. It took one of my students to figure this out, and she told me to click the “medallion”* on the upper left hand corner and comes the functions to save, print, and some of the other basic ones we all love.

Once we all understood these things about Office 2007, things are easier. I’m sure there’s some more learning we will all do as the semester comes along. There are a few other computer issues I can think of, but that’s for another time. Sometime down the road, I should call the school’s IT department and arrange for someone to come to the lab as a guest speaker.

As I played around with Word 2007 today, I have to say it grew on me. One of the coolest features I discovered was that files can be published as blog entries. Strangely enough, this feature isn’t available in Mac’s Word 2008. Yes, I am eating some earlier words. Perhaps I’ll say more as I become more and more familiar with the program.

*my little term for the Microsoft crest that adorns the upper left hand corner of the Office 2007 program window.