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[Carlos del Vaca]

Seriously, though, I forgot that much beer?

Was it crappy beer? Easy to forget that, at least for me. A while back I was rummaging through the fridge and went "Why is there a Heineken in here?!?"

[theinevitable]

Feeling real weird about this "everyone thinks you're gay" thing, you guys.

This group of cute women in my program were SHOCKED that I do not date dudes. What?

Then they started listing the things that made them think this, and, damn... I guess fuck acting "straight." I'm not going to stop talking about feelings, or stop talking excitedly about the things I'm excited about, or stop telling funny stories with funny voices and facial expressions.

Also enjoyable that they said I must be gay because I am not openly trying to fuck any of them.
First: oh, you can't tell that I'm trying to sleep with you?
second: wait, is every other guy trying to sleep with you every minute of every day?

They also mentioned my common conversation topics. I guess in trying to avoid talking to cute girls about d&d, anime, and computer programming I somehow turned into a guy who talks about clothes, cooking, and feelings. Yeesh.

And to be clear, these were not some lame homophobic boring girls. I think that's part of it. They were like "oh, Dan might not be stereotypically gay, but you can totally tell that he likes guys." Even the lesbian girl thought this.

Come on people. Hove some dignity.

(Clearly I need to find some way to show interest in women a little more openly, because apparently I am succeeding too well at trying not to stare at their chest/butt. Even before this conversation it has become apparent to me that women cannot tell when I am interested in them, even when I think we are flirting.)

[theinevitable]

Also, there are fuck*ng enormous flies all over my house, and I can't help but think this is related to our landlord putting out penistraps but not telling us where they are.

[pmcd9]

You can tell them that even though you're gay you would still put it in their butt in a pinch.

[theinevitable]

Yeah, I mentioned this to another friend in the program and she said "oh, when I saw 4 cute girls following you around at every school event, it did not occur to me that they could think you were gay. I thought it was pretty clear what was going on."

I did decide that I was going to hit on one of them a little obviously. That went OK.

[side_show]

Maybe it's the c*ck traps all over your apartment that makes ladies think this? 

[wombat]

Maybe it's the c*ck traps all over your apartment that makes ladies think this?

If the board crashes and never comes back right now, at least we know we went out on a high point.

[theinevitable]

Related to penis traps:

My friend was recently very confused, and making me confused, because we were chatting and she said she couldn't understand what I'm learning about in class. I was a little concerned that she did not know what the "Great Recession" was.

And then we figured out that she had installed a silly browser extension that changes various economics buzzwords to "snake people" phrases (like about how it is only natural to eat inferior people, etc), and every time I typed "great recession" she was seeing "The Time of Great Shedding."

[theinevitable]

Thinking about the whole "you don't act interested when you talk to women" thing, I realized that at some point I stopped trying to be funny when I talk to girls I like. WTF? I can give a presentation in front of 30 people and have them laughing, but when I go on a date I'm like "so, what do you do? Oh, that sounds interesting." Lighten up, dude.

[theinevitable]

The thing I worried about all summer happened: they hired a new guy who is actually a data person, and he came into the meeting Monday and started asking questions that made it apparent that I did several things wrong all summer. He knows his shit and it was horrifying. I knew I didn't know what I was doing, but nobody was answering my questions so I just kept going.

Well, OK, I did the statistics and stuff right. It was more about the sources I used and things like that. Still a lot of work to redo.

I am going to look at this as, I get to keep getting paid a ridiculous amount of money to practice my data skillz.

[theinevitable]

I'm glad because I talked to my dad and mentioned this, and his advice was basically what I am already doing-- mention to the guy that I'm glad he caught those errors, and try to hoover up as much of his brain as I can.

[KeithHernandez]

Yo man, I can do those things.  Those ones about the words and acronyms I don't understand.

[theinevitable]

Really I just need to find a way to get a focused workflow going. Right now it's a lot of

• Stare at excel sheet.
• Take sip of coffee
• Type something.
• Take sip of coffee.
• stare at sheet.
• hit enter

With a lot of interspersed "look to see if anyone has emailed or texted me" and that kind of crap. I may need to start doing work in a lead-lined room, "self-control" isn't cutting it. (Although I just spent a solid hour solving this programming puzzle without thinking about looking at my phone or even looking at the clock, so clearly the control can be there when it wants to be.)

I think this job has also taught me a lot about excel. Fixing this error on the stuff I did early in the summer is painful, but as I move towards the late-summer sheets it's more of a "paste the correct data into the input column and watch everything fix itself." That is satisfying.

[wombat]

I don't understand how that isn't a focussed workflow. There is no "post on messageboard" or "check twitter" anywhere in it so what is the problem?

[theinevitable]

Writing a paper where I have to pick a neighborhood to do a short profile of. I picked the Tenderloin, in San Francisco.

...the way people write about poor neighborhoods is totally fucked. This is obviously a neighborhood with major problems, but every single article I have read from SF Chronicle has made weird, flippant jokes about "crackheads" and bum fights and Thunderbird. "no, the new museum in the Tenderloin is not a used syringe museum." What the fuck? Even articles about good things happening (new public school, immigrant businesses thriving, whatever) have to make some little aside comment about homeless people peeing on the sidewalk.

...until the last 7 years, when suddenly they want to talk about how "gritty" and "authentic" it is, and how tech companies are really cleaning up the neighborhood. Article calling hipster residents "urban pioneers" right next to articles about the immigrants, day laborers, and kids who have been there all along. Can you be a "pioneer" in one of the densest neighborhoods in one of the densest cities in the US? I guess only if the people who were there before aren't "people," right?

I am all for not sugar-coating it. It's a dangerous neighborhood with open-air drug dealing, lots of violent crime, and yeah there are homeless people sleeping on the sidewalks. But the tone is just too flipping much.