home about | services artwork blog

dixieland online

Wednesday, March 30, 2005



"Dixieland Gumbo"
I found this station about 2 months ago and my wife listens to it religiously. It's a great station, but for the occasional swing stuff that's not quite New Orleans. Most of this stuff is pretty good, "dixieland" in the new orleans sense, but there is some of the later dixieland revival stuff to bear with.
download an m3u for this station




"Jazz Jambalaya"
This station... listening to it is like being at the Chalmette Crawfish Festival. It's mostly guitar/piano/saxophone "jazz/blues" stuff. We all know that real jazz is trumpets and trombones. It's possible you'll hear Dr. John or The Meters on this station, but it's more likely that you'll run into the gamut of interlopers playing covers of Dr. John or the Meters than anything. And Zydeco. I hate zydeco. Maybe you'll get lucky and hear a zydeco cover version of that "Sea Cruise" song. If you want to relive your childhood at small festivals in southern louisiana, you can start here.
download an m3u for this station




"New Orleans Jazz"
"Traditional jazz in the New Orleans style. Music from the 20s and the revival in the 40s." I like this stuff, the jazz that sounds like you're watching Steamboat Willie. What i like about it is that most of it is instrumental, there isn't some white guy from Tennessee crooning about sweepin' his darlin Clementine off her feet. This station is pretty lo-fi, broadcasting at 24 kbps. But with jazz this old, honestly, this is the way it's supposed to sound. None of it was recorded that great in the first place so there's not a lot of difference.
download an m3u for this station


Live365 pushes their VIP service pretty thoroughly between songs, but i don't have much problem tuning it out. It's no where near as pervasive as the advertising on commercial radio, and ALL of the ads are for their own services. Whatever.




WWOZ Radio in New Orleans

This is the live webcast of WWOZ in nola, so it's pretty good quality. The music is much more varied than the specialized Live 365 stations, so it might be rather hit or miss as far as tastes are concerned. On top of that you also have to bear with the weather reports telling you that while it's still cold as hell where you are (at least, where i am), it's 77 degrees in new orleans. But, it's a professional station with a professional staff so i think it's legitimate to expect a little more from them.


Allmusic.com has a lot of good commentary about New Orleans Jazz and its derivatives. Read up.



On a separate note, we ordered some CDM Coffee & Chicory monday morning from an online store called New Orleans Showcase. We chose standard ground shipping, and got it today, two days later. Yay! "Chicory is the root of the endive plant. Endive is a type of lettuce. The root of the plant is roasted and ground. It is added to the coffee to soften the bitter edge of the dark roasted coffee." At $3.75 a pound and shipped in 2 days, it's well worth the effort. I recommend you order a bunch to offset the $6 shipping cost.

posted by j. Permanent Link 0 comments

piet mondrian

I started this entry several weeks ago and never posted it because i find that i don't have that much to say about mondrian. This is what i've got:


i was thinking that perhaps the logical thing for me to do would be to find a bunch of works by mondrian next. not because i'm necessarily all that fond of mondrian, honestly, but because of the amount of search engine hits i get based on my mondrian page. it's not intended to be misleading, the search engines find what they will. but i figured it was appropriate none the less.

i have to admit that i like mondrian more now than i did after going to the guggenheim and seeing a bunch of his stuff there. some of it is really just not that captivating. seriously. but these i like:



Broadway Boogie Woogie

Who remembers Maze Craze from the Atari 2600?



Composition 10




Composition with Blue, Yellow, Black and Red



Composition with Gray and Light Brown

I don't care for the mustard color of this piece much, but the blues and greys are nice. I like the fact that this piece is more amorphous without such a heavy grid-structure, but i don't like that it looks like the black lines weren't painted last. Letting the "humanness" come through in the work is one thing, but it looks sloppy.



Composition with Red, Yellow, and Blue

Really, when you think of Mondrian in your head, isn't this what you see?



Gray Tree



Line and Color



New York City



Vertical With Blue

posted by j. Permanent Link 0 comments

scroll update

Tuesday, March 29, 2005

i updated the flash scrolling file so that the scroll background bar now acts as a button as well. It works by determining the y position of the mouse, relative to the y position of the scrollbar, and incrementally moving... everything.

Click here to view the swf.
Right click here and choose "Save Target As" to save the .fla

This is not exciting stuff, except that it all works flawlessly.

posted by j. Permanent Link 0 comments

hacked!.html

i was transferring a few files from the server and found this page. my site was hacked a while back and every page was replaced by something completely off the wall. in the case of the homepage: EMBRYO TRANSFER SERVICES. For horses.

The booking i.e. “Reservation Fee” is $2,000.00 which covers an unlimited number of flushes and the transfer of as many embryos as required to establish a single, successful pregnancy. The balance of $3,000.00 is due when we pronounce the recipient mare 30 days pregnant.
Unfortunately, this was the only one i saved.

posted by j. Permanent Link 1 comments

old friends

Monday, March 28, 2005



an old friend of mine emailed me last week to say hello. i haven't talked to him since i lived in Baton Rouge, going to LSU, trying to hold my mind together. that was in 1994/95. he's part of an extended group of friends that i spent my post high-school years with and we always got along really well. i've kept in touch with many of my good friends, but he and i lost touch. i heard lots of stories about him the first few years that i lived here, each increasingly more strange. but as he distanced himself from others in our group, i always kind of imagined that i wasn't really a part of that separation. i was grand-fathered in, so to speak, since i was gone when things happened. so i was very pleased to see him write me from out of the blue.

it made me think, too, that in a general sense, it's nice to hear from people who you've been away from for a long time.

it reminds me that about 2 years or so ago, i got a call from a guy that i'd gone to grammar school with, brian. this was something of a different story than last week's email, as brian and i had been good friends when we were kids, but, you know, friendships exist on a much different level when you're 12 than when you're 20. so he called me, explained that he'd gotten my number from my dad (Van Pelt isn't the most common name, as you might imagine), and proceeded with the catching-up conversation that typically follows. we wound up chatting for about forty minutes about whatever i was doing; his becoming an accountant after a few years of under-achieving, which surprised me; and how he'd also called another good friend of ours, John, who he had a great conversation with, and possibly even hung out with once, then never heard from again. Hahah. He gave me his number, which i figured i wouldn't call given the fact that i typically hate phones, and he gave me his email address that i considered i might use, since i favor the harmless, nonconfrontation aspect of writing. don't we all? then my computer freaked out, i formatted it to teach it a lesson, and it reciprocated by taking all of my email and contacts down with it. bye brian.


there's a part of me that is averse to doing things like contacting old friends. there is a certain point at which i think of nostalgia as becoming a negative thing. nostalgia can too easily become longing for the past, i think. my personal set of insecurities, i think, require a limit on how much i can think about the past without becoming a victim to it. realistically, it's all probably a very healthy reaction to the fact that, after 10 years, i still miss my home and my family. but wanting things that you do not have can be misconstrued as being unhappy with the things that you do have. these aren't ideas that i welcome, obviously.

that being said...

my younger brother and i used to send each other these emails in which we'd end with an obscure memory from our childhood. the idea stemmed from a night that we spent somewhat out of our minds, running around Hammond, La. with a few friends, one of which happens to have emailed me last week. anyway, during the ride back to Baton Rouge, my brother and i rode in the backseat. we were quiet for a while, listening to Janes Addiction or whatever they were playing up front, until i turned to him and asked him what he was thinking about. he told me a story from our childhood, which reminded me of countless things, which reminded him of countless other things, which became this onslaught of shared memories that i've never come close to since. we don't do the memory emails anymore. so it goes.

anyway, tangents be damned, i got an email from an old friend last week and i was pleased.

posted by j. Permanent Link 0 comments

complex flash scrolling

Thursday, March 24, 2005

i was working on scrolling in Flash yesterday... for a long time. i have a movieclip that varies in height, scrolling behind a header graphic that varies in height. there are a lot of variables to consider and i was having a bit of trouble getting it to work right without using any static values. i finally got it all working about 1/2 hour before it was time to go.


Click here to view the swf.
Right click here and choose "Save Target As" to save the .fla

i created this basic version that contains all of the elements that i had to use. all of the static variables in the movie are on frame one, little else is hard-coded. change the amount of scroll by changing "windowHeight". i tried to put lots of comments and i generally make my variable names fairly descriptive (instead of var i,k,l,b;), so it shouldn't be too much trouble dissecting how it all works.

Pretty soon i'll be working on making the background bar an active button as well. I'll update when it's done. Use the comments for any questions on the .fla file.

posted by j. Permanent Link 0 comments

-time

There are days when everything that i say is funny. My wit is alive and complete and i can do no wrong, and so i just keep talking. You know those days, right? There are also days when creativity is turned on like a faucet, where i can just sit down to work and it all comes naturally. The same happens with music. It's not necessarily the days that i can hear music in my head, because that's pretty constant. It's the days where it's like i can feel music ready to come out and i just need the time to turn on my equipment and start playing.


(this would make a great painting)

Time is always the hard part. I get home from work and my wife leaves. I spend my evening hours hanging out with the kids, putting graham down for his afternoon nap, cooking dinner, reading bedtime stories, and usually watching The Cosby show with elli up in there somewhere. (The Cosby show is like The Meters of TV... child-friendly adult entertainment!)

I'm not complaining. I'm pretty proud of the time i've put into raising my kids thus far, and i really appreciate that i have so much time to spend with them. It's not all giggles by any means, but it'll prove itself to have been rewarding.

It is difficult, though, to maintain a healthy diet of creativity. On these days when i feel musically productive on the inside, or i really feel the desire to paint, draw, design, write code or whatever else, i miss having the time to be alone and work. I realized a while back that creative productivity, at least for me, is directly proportional to loneliness. I think most "epiphanies" are had in the times when we're trying most to occupy our minds. Combine loneliness with the need for something larger than ourselves and a philosophy is born.

And the next free moment i get must be dedicated to finishing rebuilding the upstairs bedroom.

posted by j. Permanent Link 0 comments

d & d

Wednesday, March 23, 2005

Army frowns on Dungeons and Dragons
IDF says players are detached from reality and automatically given a low security clearance

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles//0,7340,L-3052074,00.html

posted by j. Permanent Link 0 comments

BBC Voice

Tuesday, March 22, 2005



I generally listen to NPR on the way to/from work, mostly because i hate commercial radio, but also because 20 minutes isn't a lot of time to find a CD i feel like listening to and hear any significant amount of it. Which can probably be read as "i am lazy and it's easier to just hit the first preset button on the radio."

There are some good shows on NPR, and it's generally my only source of news, since reading cnn.com is more like reading a tabloid. But there are times when i have to turn off the radio because i get so damn annoyed listening to the hosts or correspondents speak. They do this thing I call 'bbc voice' because bbc announcers are particularly prone to it. It's like, when they end their sentences, they raise the pitch of their voice, then hold the last syllable, as they drop the tone down dramatically. It's like we need to know this is not a question, this is the end of a sen t e n c e. It drives me crazy that they do this; the unconventional tonal fluctuations in their voices just sounds unnatural and contrived. It's obviously a trained technique, which baffles me. I don't see what purpose it serves conversationally. It may even be that they do it just to bother me.

posted by j. Permanent Link 1 comments

Gran Turismo 4 LAN Settings

Sunday, March 20, 2005

My friend and i were trying to set up a LAN based game for the first time yesterday and had a ridiculously hard time of it. We're both pretty well experienced with basic networking, and we've played our share of games online, so we figured it would be pretty simple. But no. So i did what any rational person would do-- i googled "Gran Turismo 4" lan +"how to".



Most of the information i found through various forums suggested using specific IP addresses to try to connect directly to the other PS2, and most of what i read centered on using a 'crossover cable' to connect two PS2s rather than using a router. Who has a crossover cable?

The problem is that the game comes with no instructions on how to set LAN games up; you have to figure it out on your own. What we eventully figured out was that it wasn't an IP issue, which is good because the game gives you no way to see other machines that are hooked up. It was a matter of establishing a host for the game. Really, it's pretty simple, and even obvious. It would've taken 2 minutes with a little direction, so here goes. This is exactly what we did:

  • Connect all PS2s to the router and turn them on.
  • Choose a machine to be the host machine.
  • On the host machine, go to Options > Arcade Mode > LAN Settings. Change Host to"yes", change number of players to the appropriate number, and change Network Traffic to light. Hit OK.
  • On the host machine, go to Options > Arcade Mode > Course Registration to add tracks. (It defaults to only like 8 tracks available to race. I believe you can only have 30 open at a time.)
  • Everyone should go to Arcade Mode, enter Multi-LAN Race, and choose a network configuration. If you don't have a config set up, what worked for us was to leave Hardware Settings as default, set Authentication to "no," set Use DHCP to "yes" (should be default), Use Auto DNS to "yes" (also default). Hit OK.
  • Once everyone has a working network config file, all players should connect. The host should connect LAST.
  • Once the host connects everyone should progress from the "Waiting For Connection" screen onto a screen with the choice of tracks.


A few things to keep in mind...
  • this is simply what worked for us, you may have special circumstances that make your network settings different. If so, keep trying till you find something that works. Please don't email me asking me to help troubleshoot your network.
  • the only cars available in lan mode are the cars that you put into your favorites list in arcade mode. i recommend that you fill up your favorites before anything else (it doesn't allow more than 30, which is a bunch of crap). Remember to save the game after you add cars to your favorites before you enter LAN mode. Otherwise you'll lose them because...
  • we found no way to exit out of lan mode other than to reboot the machine
  • when you reboot the machine, i believe that the LAN Settings remain the same unless you go to the LAN Settings screen, in which case they'll return to default and you'll have to reset them.



i dont know how Sony and Polyphony Digital expect a group of 12 year old kids to figure all this out. the terrible flow of setting up a lan game, and the lack of structure and documentation, are really pretty lame on their part. i hope i'm able to help some people get past the learning curve.


I picked up some pointers here. Hopefully all you lovely search engine bots will pick up this post quickly and life will be a bit easier for everyone. Everywhere. Ever.


I learned a few new things and made a few corrections/alterations to this post. If you have any pointers that i've missed, or have a correction for something i've mis-stated, leave it in the comments for others.

posted by j. Permanent Link 8 comments

GT4 photo mode

Friday, March 18, 2005

Kim and elli went out of town this weekend to go see kim's mom in DC, so i'm taking the opportunity to geek out in front of the tv while graham sleeps and play some GT4. I also have to do some drywall upstairs, but whatever. I'll get to that. I was going to get some of that done while graham took his first nap, but instead i had to help with some problems with my Flash application for work. Nothing like working on a day off.

Graham's not really old enough to care about the tv, so my plan was to watch movies and basketball all weekend whenever i wasn't playing gt4 or drywalling. BUT, apparently my stupid little laptop can't handle 700k avi files. They all skip. Stupid Lappy486. I've got about a dozen bball games that i downloaded that i can't watch. Blech.

So yesterday, after i dropped kim and elli off at the airport, i went to walmart and bought a 128MB flash drive for the express purpose of taking transferring GT4 screenshots from the PS2 to the computer. When i got the game a few weeks ago, i was trying to figure out what car to start the game with and i went into the Volkswagen garage and, shit!, no Jetta. But what is a "Bora"? Apparently, Bora is what the rest of the world calls a Jetta. I bought a silver one, to replace the Jetta i just gave up (5 year lease ended). Granted, my jetta wasn't a 4WD with a 6 cylinder engine. But it is now!

The results of my dorkiness so far:














Too bad i never broke 150mph in my jetta. You know, it's interesting that they included such a low key aspect into this game, but it's nice to see a video game that actually comes with a creative side to it.

posted by j. Permanent Link 0 comments

basic flash text editing example

Wednesday, March 16, 2005


Click here to view the swf.
Right click here and choose "Save Target As" to save the .fla

In my search i didn't see anything really basic out there, so i put together this quick little text editing example. It's nothing but bold, italic, and underline buttons, but you can see how it applies to the text. I think that for the most part you figure if you can get how these buttons work, you can extend that to other editing functions.

The thing that threw me at first was that i assumed that if you made an input textfield .html=true, that it would be as simple as adding <b> tags around the selected substring and the textfield would render it correctly. But this is flash, nothing is that easy. What you you have to is apply .bold=true to the textFormat of the selected text.

BUT!

Just like a textfield has a .text property, it's also got an .htmlText property that reflects the textFormat of the string. When you look at the swf, you'll see the html output in the textarea below the input textbox. The html isn't pretty (it uses freakin font tags!), and it does things like "<b>dfa</b><b><i>sdfa</i></b><b>sd</b>" But you figure, however you're using the html it creates, you can create functions to strip out unwanted tags before the code is ever used.

posted by j. Permanent Link 0 comments

sophrosyne.net redesigned

Tuesday, March 15, 2005



I redesigned sophrosyne.net to coordinate with the graphics of the new EP and update the content a bit. I decided not to use flash for the redesign. Even though the old soph site was some of the cooler flash work that i've done, it's just such a pain in the ass to update. I also added a link to soutrane's website where the CDs are available for purchase. Check out the redesign and let me know what you think.

Also, in my post about being reviewed in The Wire i mentioned that my CD was one of only a few they chose to review. Turns out that that wasn't right. They reviewed two of the other CDs Soutrane sent, Field of Sound and Mobile Sound Unit. Both are primarily John McCoy projects-- Field of Sound is he and Jason Wietlispach (aka "Capn Reverb," who runs Soutrane Records) and MSU is all John. I haven't read the review, but apparently it was quite glowing. I don't know if this says anything about my coming review or not. But i'm getting a little anxious. Though not much.

Apparently the BBC contacted Capn Reverb and asked him to send them Field of Sound and Mobile Sound Unit CDs in response to the review. He's just going to send them a stack of stuff from the latest bunch of releases. We'll see what comes of that. While we're at it, we should send a stack of CDs to NPR's All Songs Considered. I'd thought about doing that in the past, but the timing seems good now. John and i also talked about sending a few things to Pitchfork, but you never know if that's a good idea or not. They don't seem like they're quite the bastards that they used to be, but that doesn't mean that they're not still bastards. Influential bastards.

posted by j. Permanent Link 1 comments

damian loeb

Tuesday, March 08, 2005

my friend Adny and i used to spend hours a day searching images.google for goofy pictures. we both amassed collections of images that numbered in the thousands. i plan to post some of the best here eventually. trust me that this is a day you should look forward to.

so one day, Adny randomly found the site of a this guy, Damian Loeb, who is best friends with Moby. his site, therefore, is full of images of moby doing mostly inconsequential things. honestly, it's a nice glimpse into the life of a star at the height of his fame living a life that is seemingly normal. though they do go to a lot of high scale parties. and hang out with david bowie.



today i searched for and found the site again, but this time i spent a bunch of time looking at Damian's artwork-- and liked it a lot. his work reminds me of why i should get into painting with oils. it also reminds me that i should stop screwing around with my talent and either do something with it or shut up. but that's a tangent.



what i like about his work is that, for the most part, the scenes he depicts are places that we can all imagine ourselves. his subjects are people, but it's generally people in a rather anonymous sense, possibly anyone. it's your neighbors, the people you know. it's your friends and you recognize them, even though you can't see their faces. it's the car your parents had as a child, your brother riding by on his bike. it's the place that you used to hang out at on the weekends, wondering who that person across the room was.



his technique of painting images from photographs is nothing new, but what he does with it that i really appreciate is the blurs, the motion, and the depth of field, things that are really intimidating to try to recreate, especially with such a sense of realism. i've always really loved the shapes and colors that are created in the lack of definition, an aspect of seeing that we're not really aware of until the image is frozen. a perfect example is in the girl's hair in the image above, the bright shapes where the sunlight passes through.

go to his site and check out his work.

posted by j. Permanent Link 0 comments

flash text editing

Monday, March 07, 2005

i've been playing around with adding small amounts of text-editing capabilities in Flash but came across something rather annoying, but also very obvious. say you've got an input textfield, and you enter a bunch of text, and you click on a button to make the text that you've selected bold. when you click on the button, it removes focus from the textfield, and therefore there is no longer any selected text to make bold.

the first example that i found seemed to point in the direction of using onEnterFrame functions in a movieclip that basically continuously set a variable with the selection params. but i hate using onEnterFrame. I don't know why, it just doesn't seem right to me. I can see if you're doing a full-on text editor why you wouldn't want to do it this way, just because of code-redundancy, but the simple solution i found was this: use an on(rollover) function to record the parameters of the selection first. the user obviously has to rollover the button before clicking it, and the rollover doesn't remove focus. yay!

by the way, i found this text editor by josh dura in my search for flash based text-editors. it's pretty code-intensive and way more involved than anything we need in EZVersion, but there it is.

posted by j. Permanent Link 0 comments

built to grind

Friday, March 04, 2005



The Independent Truck company has put out this book, Built to Grind - 25 Years of Hardcore Skateboarding. (Trucks are basically skateboard axles.) You can find a flash presentation, narrated by Steve Alba, highlighting some of the pictures and talking a bit about skateboarding's history and personalities, here. Yes, it's freakin msnbc, but what are you gonna do?



My brothers and i all skated for a long time. We were always the kids who had the ramps, and there was a catwalk (an pedestrian alley) next to our house that was perfect for setting up our launch ramps and skating all day every day. It was my older brother who really seemed to be the driving force behind making skating cool in my neighborhood. He was the one that stole the wood, built the ramps, learned the new tricks first, and brought the music home. His real talent, though, was his ability to trade anything he had for anything that you had that he wanted. People figured if he had it it was cool and you needed it. You needed his deck more than you needed your deck and wheels. My talent seemed to be the one who could filter out the good music that he brought home from the bad. My younger brother... i don't know, donald, what was your contribution to our little skate scene?



I think my brothers and i all still own skateboards, and i doubt any of us touch them more than once a year. At the last apt. i lived in before we bought our house, the 16 year old girl who lived downstairs skated, even had a mini-half in the backyard. I lived there for 2 years and didn't skate that ramp once. Mostly because it was too narrow. Every so often, though, i'd pull my board out and do a few ollies just to maintain the status of my legend.

When i was 16 or 17 i hurt my knee somehow, probably on a messed up invert (trick involving a quick one-handed handstand) or something. I limped for two months and my knee would just give out every so often, especially on stairs. But i never did see a doctor about it. I'm 30 now and i'm still paying for it. Yay skateboarding!

posted by j. Permanent Link 0 comments

jibbi

Thursday, March 03, 2005


Around my house it's not called "basketball," it's called "jibbi." More on that in a minute.

NBA.com redesigned their site this week, which, really, it was definately time for a redesign. The redesign is pretty nice, though they didn't really make many changes. More of a (really nice) facelift and not much else. It's kind of a shame, because there are definately a few places where the official nba site is being beaten in quality by the other two major nba resources, Sports Illustrated (who also recently redesigned) and ESPN.

Sports Illustrated has a really nice photo section with large, high quality photos that beat nba.com's hands down. NBA.com's photo's are small and are displayed in an awkward flash interface. The buttons are below the images and jump around depending on the height of the image. This takes your attention away from the images, not the best user interface.

ESPN.com has something that's really quite nice called "ESPN Motion". Embedded video right there on the homepage (for free!). And every other page as well. It's ubiquitous! It's a nice feature.

Now, whoever begins offering streamed games, they'll get my vote. For now, we have to settle for second best, which is this site. Yay nba games!




jibbi

Jibbi Jibbs is the name of the player i created in NBA Live 2003 from ea sports. He carried over to NBA Live 2004, then to Tiger Woods 04 where you could make these really detailed characters. It was then that jibbi showed his pimp side. So anyway, when my daughter was very young, whenever she saw the game on, she'd ask "who'zat?" "who'zat?" So i'd tell her the player names. "That was mike bibby." "that was peja." "That was jibbi jibbs, elli," i'd tell her. So eventually when she'd see it on, she'd say "jibbi!" And thus basketball became "jibbi!"

-jibbi jibbs

posted by j. Permanent Link 0 comments

wisconsinites

Wednesday, March 02, 2005

When i first moved to milwaukee, and this seems to be true for the other people that i've known and spoken to who have moved here from out of state, the first thing that i noticed was how inhospitable the people are. Kim and i didn't have a car for a while when i was first here, but it was ok because she was in school and i worked close to the apartment. We lived on milwaukee's east side, near uwm, where everything is relatively tight knit and you can walk most places. I noticed as i walked past people that, as they pass you on the sidewalk, rather than greeting you, they do this thing where they look down and around until they're almost next to you, then they look up. It's like there's a critical point at which, upon approaching someone, before you pass them, you can look straight ahead again without the possibility of making eye-contact. And people in milwaukee all have this point memorized. I have lived here since 1995-- i have this point memorized.

People here are rude. When i was first here i rebelled against the people on the streets. I nodded, smiled, said 'hello.' Few people respond with an awkward 'hello,' obviously not having expected it. Most people, believe it or not, completely ignore you and continue on as if you didn't exist. This is infuriating. I don't know how long it takes, but you reach this point where you just get fed up with the other people not responding, and you stop being nice. Every so often i try to remind myself to say 'hi,' but mostly i don't.

Today as i walked into the parking garage there was a group of people a few steps ahead of me, two women and a man. The man held the door for the two women, then walked in letting the door close behind himself. He did this twice. Aren't people here taught to hold doors open for strangers? Why is it that people here have no manners? My friends and i have theorized that it has something to do with the cold, that people are so isolated inside of their homes during the endless winter that they're just not socialized like we were. But that's trivial. People here just don't act as if they're neighbors with each other, other people don't matter. Don't talk to other people in line in the grocery. Don't start casual conversations with strangers on the street. Don't smile and say "how ya doin'?" Look to the right, look at the ground, fidget a bit... and look up... now.



i have to get out of here.

posted by j. Permanent Link 3 comments