I thought that my novel had stagnated off to a line a month, a cohesive paragraph every season, but every time I find myself drifting off in class, I start working on that instead. It’s just enough to get me through calculating marginal revenues and molecular geometries. And my weekends, which used to be my most productive days, are simply days where I have to find things to fill the hours of empty time. Today, for instance, I opened up Photoshop this afternoon, and just half an hour ago, I came out of it with a mostly finished family tree for my story. What’s the benefit of that? Well, I can’t be devious about creating story lines — and I have been extremely devious recently — if I keep going into a fantasy cliche about creating ageless characters and that jazz. Nope, everyone dies. Don’t take that literally, but expect it. I don’t write your granny’s fiction.
Part of the reason that I’ve overloaded myself with five generations of fictional characters is that I’m surprisingly finding out that there’s not much for me to do in the gaps between meals and trips to various locations around campus, to break the boredom. All in the company of friends, of course. So I’ve watched at least ten movies in the past two weeks (Across The Universe, which the Beatles geek in me highly approves of, Everything Is Illuminated, which left out the juicy historical parts of the book much to my disappointment, and The Hours, which was a beautiful adaption from the novel are the new ones — as well as The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, Spirited Away, and Howl’s Moving Castle), and I don’t see myself breaking that cycle until I can find a better hobby. I think it’s time for me to get over my fear of playing piano in the lobby. Stupid acoustics!
And then of course, there is my excessive music listening. Ever since I started using Last.FM, I’ve been hypersensitive to the fact that I name my songs a bit differently than what Last.FM deems proper. I run into some problems when I listen to songs from musicals and movies soundtracks, particularly Evita and Gladiator, because surprise, surprise, these happen to also be the names of bands. But if I’m looking for a song on my playlist, it makes a lot more sense for me to look for “Evita” and “Gladiator” than “Andrew Lloyd Webber” and “Hans Zimmer/Lisa Gerrard.” It is both hilarious and frustrating to see fans of the bands comment that the “Artist - Song Title” format is absolute, because as much as I want to try to resolve the situation, only one side really ends up benefiting. I am aware of the fact that Evita (the musical) was not in fact the artist who created the soundtrack, or that Gladiator (the movie) did not provide that haunting instrumentation, but it’s not a crime to tweak with reality. At the very least, it’s a pardonable offense. I’m just trying to listen to my music!
I realize that I overreacted a bit about the hurricane last week, and I have come completely full circle this week, after talking with my dad almost every day and looking at pictures of the roof damage, which was not at all what I thought it would be. Call me obsessive, but I like keeping an eye on things at home. Or maybe two, if I’m too busy running into thing with my elbows or somehow compressing my arm into an eternal state of soreness. Thankfully, Friendswood is still protected by the mysterious Quaker charms set into the ground one hundred and fifty years ago, and, I suppose, the ducks near the Clear Brook baseball field (whom I shall call the sacred ducks of Raucous, god of chaos and vicious animals). Lord knows they’d attack anything, up to and including natural phenomena. Stupid ducks.
Still, the buzz about Ike has died down in Austin, and the predominant thing that has people irked (except me — my episodes of annoyance are late by a margin of five to one-hundred and fifty years) is the new Facebook design. All I have to say is, honestly people, it’s not that big of a deal. The site’s function has been improved, it’s still pretty reliable, and it doesn’t look worse. In fact, I’ll even say that it looks better than the old design. This, for me, is the definition of a successful redesign.
What has to be understood is that allowing both the old design and the new design to coexist on different pages would be disastrous. This isn’t MySpace, and thank goodness it isn’t. Who would ever want Facebook to look like that garish, bygone wreck? And because the new design is an improvement over the old, and so much work went into it, why would anyone want to go back? I understand that familiarity is an issue, but Facebook provided a lengthy beta period for people to get acquainted with the design. The reason that I’m not flipping out about it? I’m used to redesigns. They happen all the time, and the only way that a layout ever gets preserved on the internet is being stored in a folder at the back of someone’s server (guilty) or the WayBack Machine. Having gone through so many redesigns of my own, it takes me very little time to get used to a new design. I look through pages, I look at the underbelly, get knee-deep in CSS, and learn to appreciate the work that went into creating a layout that is both new but familiar. And I think that Facebook’s team has succeeded at that. It’s similar enough to the old layout for it to be adopted quickly (anything else would be suicide), and it doesn’t suck. That’s the gist of my argument.
Keep an eye out for these changes:
- Wider layout: Or, as far as I can tell, it looks wider. Also, those weird side borders are gone, so the layout is more open.
- Better organization: I have had no trouble finding the things I need with the new layout, which is why I adopted it so early. Also, I love that cute little navigation bar. SUCH A TINY NAVIGATION BAR.
- Tabbed profiles: This isn’t actually a bad thing, but it could be made better if the Info page was given precedence over the Wall page. I think more people would be interested in reading about a person than reading their conversations with other people. The tabs are a plus and establish a sort of consistency throughout pages. It may also be a precaution against individual pages becoming ridiculously long. Like mine would if I started listing all of the songs I’ve completely fallen in love with over the last month. That list would be fantastic.
- Other fancy profile things: Yay for the status bar and the links above it! Very cool, convenient, and well done!
So please don’t tell me you’re going to stop using Facebook because the site looks different. Now, if it looked anything like this, I would probably rather pay a visit to the sacred ducks of Raucous than adopt the new design. Because that? That is not a design. That is pain, delivered straight to my eyes, via funny tables and bright colors.
After a day and a half of fevered hurricane coverage, I finally heard back from my dad who evacuated to Missouri City (near Sugar Land) with Sandy, and the news isn’t so good. We suffered some roof damage in the game room (my dad gave me some figures like 4’ x 12’, and such) and my mom’s bathroom (both upstairs). In the latter, the room was a disaster area because sheetrock from the ceiling and insulation absolutely littered the floor. The lawn is, apparently, a sea of shingles. But, on the bright side, we suffered water damage only from the leaking roof, which means the carpet in the gameroom got a bit wet, and so did my dad’s room underneath it, but I don’t think that’s too serious. Every other room is perfectly intact. My dad told me that Sandy’s room is like a fortress, which I’m sure she was proud to hear (we converted our open patio to a room where Sandy could sit outside without getting wet or getting too hot — other than the fact that Sandy gets the tiles muddy on a daily basis, it’s not a bad little place).
I’m not sure how this news has hit me. I was absolutely convinced that our house would make it out of the hurricane intact because the majority of damage was around the coastal areas and downtown Houston. I assumed we would therefore be safe from the storm surge, which was correct, but I didn’t count on the hurricane-force winds bearing down on our house. The house is the tallest on our street, and sticks out a little bit before the cul-de-sac at the end of the street. And in this crude Tower of Babel sort of way, my house was probably one of the few houses in our neighborhood to suffer damage at all, let alone damage of this sort. My dad told me that the house might be unlivable for a little while, simply because the upstairs is such a mess, which means that I’ll be stuck in Austin for quite a while longer. I had previously hoped that, if the hurricane left everything alone, I could come back next weekend — I had even been planning to come back this weekend, but that didn’t work at all. At the very least, I’ll be back in two weeks, but what to? The charity of someone else’s house? Our old house in Webster? But not mine, because of an unfortunate accident?
I think one of the worst parts about this is that I’m terribly homesick and I don’t have a home to home to, not for some time. I could blame building standards and so many other things, but ultimately I can’t say anything because you can’t prevent or avoid a hurricane, let alone one the size of Ike. For now, I’m just happy that my dad and my dog are alright and back home trying to clean up the mess. Maybe I’ll see them before long. I’ve been hoping oh so many hours of the day that I will.
Additional hurricane coverage
Thank goodness the Houston Chronicle and ABC 13 (KTRK) are taking leading roles in covering this disaster. CNN (which posted an article just before the hurricane hit about the destruction of Galveston in 1900, as if expecting that same result for 2008 — which I think is in tremendously bad taste) and Fox (which erroneously reported that Hurricane Ike had been upgraded to a Category 4) have been nothing but disappointing.
