If you’ve seen Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, then you probably have some idea of what kind of results a YouTube search for “paging Mr. Herman” will yield. What I wasn’t able to anticipate, however, is the treasure trove of “related videos” that would show up as well. Behold:
Forgive me. I was going to say that I’ve been busy, but the fact is that I’ve been busier and still found time to post something up in this website.
So what have I been up to, anyway? A lot of things, I guess. Allow me to enumerate.
1. Work. It’s a fact. I’ve been working. Same job at the hedge fund. It’s good, but my departure from said job is imminent. See #2.
2. Getting into grad school. Also a fact. After several weeks of compulsive email checking and checking those cursed forums on The Grad Cafe, the letter finally came. This fall, I will be enrolling in the Ph.D. program in sociology at the University of Chicago. I’m pretty excited about this.
3. Watching bad, bad movies. Jon-the-Roommate convinced us to go see National Treasure: Book of Assclownery one fateful Friday night, and I still haven’t forgiven him. In retribution, I (somehow) convinced him to pay real, legal tender to see 27 Dresses the next week. As we sat watching ”The Twenty” before the movie, group after group of single women filed into the theatre, and Jon knew what he was in for. I laughed and laughed. Even though I had to sit through this god-awful chick flick too, knowing I had suckered Jon into coming along somehow made it worth my troubles. But man, was that movie terrible.
And then there are the movies I’ve watched at home. A sampling:
Employee of the Month . This is that movie where Jessica Simpson or whatever her name is inexplicably does it with whoever is crowned “Employee of the Month” at the local Wal-Mart. Lucky for us viewers, that employee happens to be the hunky Dane Cook, not one of those old-ass greeter dudes at the front door. As you might imagine, the whole situation gets pretty crazy, and at some point it almost looks like he might possibly not get the girl. Then he gets her anyway.
Although this movie sucked, I found myself “lol-ing” now and again, in spite of Jon’s scornful glances.
Wild Hogs. Okay, we only watched the second half, but man… seriously? Did we really watch this? I guess John Travolta wanted to… diversify his roles, but his overacting as the high-strung jobless dude is just embarrassing. Tim Allen is much better, and that’s sayin’ something. Because he was bad, too.
Meatballs. This movie is actually pretty awesome. This may be Bill Murray’s first “Bill Murray Inspirational Speech,” too (“It just doesn’t matter!”). And the rag-tag summer camp versus rich kid camp competition at the end is a classic matchup. All this movie lacks is Corey Feldman. For that, you need to watch Meatballs 4.
Beerfest. Another pretty awesome movie. Inspiring, even. Just thinking about this movie makes me too stupid to write anything witty or even sensible, but that’s the joy in it. Want stupid fun? See Beerfest.
In the Good Movie Department, we also saw The Bank Job this weekend. They say it’s “based on a true story,” but as far as I’m concerned, that probably means that there was really a bank, and someone once had a job. I don’t much care about the authenticity of the plot, though. It was just a good crime story. And I like me a good crime story.
In a demonstration that even the greatest technical minds have yet to create an algorithm that accounts for irony, the following links have recently shown up on my Gmail sidebar:
Take the Free CatAge Test
Get free cat health advice and learn how old your cat really is.
www.CatAge.com
Cat Urine Behavior
problems? Products and advice that really work at CatFaeries.com
www.CatFaeries.com
Expert Cat Sitting – NYC
Experienced cat sitters available for regular & last-minute needs.
www.TwoDogsAndAGoat.com
Palm-Meow, Inc
cat retirement/boarding – Florida Tropical Paradise for Your Cat
www.palm-meow.com
I have also been corresponding with a friend who is looking for a job, which has resulted in many links offering resume and cover letter help.
All of this points to one sad fact: Google thinks I am an unemployed cat lady.
For Nick:
In trying to describe my new job to someone yesterday, I told him that “it’s a lot like sociology, with less interesting questions.” The more I think about it, the more I think that pretty much sums it up. Not necessarily in a bad way, mind you. Let me explain.
Yesterday I spent several hours pulling hundreds of addresses out of a database, cleaning up the data for a batch geocoder, plotting these points on a map, then checking the mean distances of these points with another set of points I had already derived.
Thanks to all of this work, I can now tell you what proportion of our employees live within 1 mile of an Equinox Fitness Club.
See? Complex problem solving, multiple layers of analysis, less-than-riveting questions.
The thing is, I don’t particularly mind this. First, there is a difference between dull and unimportant. The work I do has very real implications, and I know this. But more importantly, the bulk of my time is not spent pondering the dullness of the question; it is spent finding answers. And as dull as many of these questions might seem compared to the Grand Questions of the World, they are never easy. The company dress code might be lax, the rhetoric might be hip and fun, but the methodology is muthafuckin’ rigorous. There will be no slacking. Guessing is okay, but only if it’s the “best unbiased estimate” you can muster. When it comes to data analysis, they mean business.
I shouldn’t be surprised that a company that made its fortunes building hypercomplex algorithms to beat the stock markets would be so quantitatively driven in other ways. What’s surprising is the degree to which this ethos permeates everything that happens there. Even the company’s interior aesthetic, as designed by architect Steven Holl, emphasizes the presence of order in what looks to be random. Over a staircase on my floor hangs a 9-foot-tall tapestry depicting pi to the nth decimal place. You cannot walk to the coffee maker and back without seeing something to remind you that there truly is order in the universe.
Astronomers look for this order in the stars. Geneticists find it in chromosomes. I search for it in the average employee’s mean proximity to high end health clubs. So what?