Define "okay"

I'm always curious as to how individuals are feeling when, after asking them "how are you?", they answer "okay." Does that mean "I'm feelin' pretty good," or "I feel down, but trying to feel better," or "This is as good as it gets for me"? On a scale of "crappy" to "great," I think "okay" falls somewhere between "alright" and "fine." When people say they're "okay" I always feel like asking them, "What can I do to help you feel better?" However, what if "okay" to them is actually "pretty darn good"? So, I don't ask, and I hope that on their scale of "crappy" to "great," "okay" sits somewhere on the better end of the scale.

Scale of "How are you?" answers according to my measurements:
crappy - alright - okay - fine - good - great

Living a vicarious dance life

Our t.v. broke about a month ago, which was a good thing. However, there is one show I get quite a kick out of watching, and that is So You Think You Can Dance? So, we found an internet site where footage of Fox 5 from Las Vegas was streaming live. This allowed us to watch the show, albeit from 11pm to 1am. Our friends heard our plight and, being fans of the show themselves, gave us a small television the previous owner of their house left behind. We had not yet broke out the new-used television until last night. And boy, did I appreciate going to bed around 11pm.

The English language

I often find grammar/spelling mistakes in published books. I understand it's hard to edit the whole thing perfectly and when the rule is a bit foggy, it can be rough. One example of a foggy rule is how to deal with quotations marks with commas, semi colons, colons, and periods. I won't write all the ins and outs of it, but the reason periods came to be inside quotation marks is due to the fact that when movable type was used, printers would put the period inside of the quotations so the metal that made up the physical period would not get bent during the printing process. If it was inside of the quotations, it was protected, and wouldn't get destroyed. Anyhow, here are some other interesting grammar/spelling things I've discovered as of late.
Barbecue can also be spelled barbeque.
Cancelled can also be spelled canceled.
Personal names that end with a s should add a 's to the end, but last names should not (e.g. Charles's vs. Hess').
And did you know that the period is not always supposed to go after the parentheses?

How would you spend your one phone call?

I have received not one but two messages on my office voicemail from inmates calling from the County Jail. And I work as an analyst for a research consulting company.

C. Automobeele

I read a car magazine called Automobile. For those of you who read that last sentence and thought, "how boring..." I will concur that some car material is banal, e.g., "The DOHC, 2.0-liter four-cylinder engine is 53 pounds lighter than it's competition." Still, there's some good stuff. Take Ezra Dyer's material. He came to write for Automobile after sending a non-solicited article to the magazine's headquarters. He's got great lines. When describing the Jaguar XKR's and Porsche 911's small back seats respectively he says, "...in a pinch, Biff and Tiff can fit in the back for a short run down to the club," and "The Carrera's rear seats actually angle forward, which is only ideal if you carpool with Quasimodo." Another example is Jean Jennings, the magazine's current pres. When she got a chance to drive the new Audi R8, she decided to take her 83 year old mother along and she "settled back and enjoyed this rare ride in the middle of the day, in the middle of a work week, in a spaceship." Some of my best memories involve a car - riding around ritzy neighborhoods with my mom looking at big houses, driving to Loa Utah with my brother, watching the RPMs go down as my sister pressed on the gas peddle when we drove the roads of Wisconsin, and sliding out on a Wasatch road as my dad turned hard knowing that he was free of his worries for at least that one moment. True, cars are basically machines that get us to and from places. But the fact that I'm having a hard time thinking about how I eventually need to part with the horribly impractical vehicle I own tells me there's more to it than that, at least for me.

The Jungle

I've been a bit anxious today concerning starting a blog. Will what I write be clever? Will people read my blog? What should I write about? What should I not write about? What pictures should I post? Then I decided that one should not worry so much about something that goes by the name of "blog," and so here's my post, a bit of a book review.

I just concluded Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. I didn't really know all that much about the book, except that it brought to the public the fact that rat feces were being packed with meat and sold for food. Come to find out, its a novel about a Lithuanian immigrant family trying to survive in the meat district. Indeed, I was shocked by the fact that rat poison was swept into the pickled meat products along with other things not fit for human consumption, but what affected me most was reading about how the strain of just trying to survive took a toll on the souls of the family. I was job searching right after grad school, and boy did it take a toll! I can't imagine what working from dawn to dusk everyday just to make enough money to pay for the "new" house that is already falling apart and the adulterated food that certainly isn't providing enough calories is like. The book was interesting, and on a Likert scale from 1 to 7, I'd rate it a 5. The end was a bit disappointing because 1) the style of the writing switched from political novel to political pamphlet and 2) I felt like there was no closure. But that could have certainly been the author's wish. It seems when books have zero to some closure, readers tend to think about them a bit more. And I've definitely thought a lot about the book.

And it begins

Wecome, I'm glad you've made it here to see that I'm finished being a passive observer of blogs. My habit of hopping from one blog to the next, reading posts, looking at pictures, and sometimes (very rarely) leaving comments is over. And so it begins, I've joined the fray. This should be a grand time. Join me...