No line on the horizon

On rainy days at the beach, I always wait for the moment that the water turns the same color as the sky, so that it looks like the sea goes on and on forever, and the waves are just a reflection of the clouds.

It's unsettling when it does this, but also beautiful.

Looking for a lost kamikaze

My 99-year-old great-uncle has some fantastic war stories. One of my summer projects is to film him telling them, and then edit that film into some coherent account of his World War II adventures. While serving as a gun captain in the Pacific aboard the USS Oconto, my great uncle gave the order to shoot down a kamikaze bomber, and then lead the retrieval team to rescue the pilot. Seventy years later, he is still talking about how he wishes he'd learned this man's name and kept in touch with him! So part of my project is to try and figure out who this mysterious pilot was and what happened to him after the war.

What I know about this guy:

1. He was from Tokyo, but studied engineering for four years at Northwestern.

2. When the war started, he returned to Japan and enlisted in the air force.

3. Where he trained and was deployed as a kamikaze pilot.

4. He was gunned down and taken prisoner on the USS Oconto, off the coast of Biak in the Dutch East Indies, in mid-1944 (April or July).

5. The ship took him first to Saipan, where they were told they did not have room for another POW.

6. They then took him to Tinian, where they turned him over to the POW camp there.

I have every conceivable bit of information I would need to find this guy's name, except the national archives website is so hard to use and it is impossible to get through their phone system to talk to a real person. I've talked to the archives office at Northwestern, which didn't find anything (It's all sorted by names, and if you don't have a name you can't find a name.)

Any suggestions on what to try next?

Today, for lunch, I pretended I was in kindergarden.

I made myself a PB&J sandwich and cut it in half diagonally. I sliced up a peach. I took one of the glasses we use when there are little kids visiting and poured myself a cub of milk.

It was delicious.

Also,

It is disgustingly hot outside, I refuse to leave the house.

Saying have a nice day but meaning fuck you.

I really want to master this skill.

Dear you,

Why would you send a bitchy letter at 2 AM when you "just haven't been in a good mood for much of today," when you could just as easily send it the next morning when all your energy is not going towards being a fun-killing plot nazi? It was all I could do to not respond to your condescending piece of Bawww and Whining with some condescension of my own.

No love,

Me.

I don't remember what I was doing online at eleven...

But it certainly wasn't this.

While I was never exactly "well-supervised" in my online privileges, I like to think my parents knew what I was up to for the most part. I got my first (and so far, only, since we've switched to Bellsouth) AOL screen name when I was nine, and I remember mostly using my connection to

1. Look up Pokemon stuff.
2. Troll Neopets (in the most innocent sense of the word "troll).
3. Read Digimon fanfiction.

By the time I was eleven, I'm pretty sure I was using it to.

1. Troll Neopets (still in the most innocent sense of the word).
2. Obsess about Star Wars.
3. Sneak into boards.theforce.net under-age and write shitty star wars Fanfic.

I don't think that parents need to be "helicopters" monitoring every second of their children's online time, but I do think they should be aware of what their kids are up to. In the case of "Jessi Slaughter," her parents were clearly not only clueless but also oblivious - where does an eleven year old learn to talk like that?

The other thing is that these kids place a huge emphasis on being "e-famous." When I was eleven, there was no such thing. Blog was a neologism, webcams were $100, "YouTube" hadn't been invented yet, and we were all on dial-up. Giving someone your AIM SN was a big deal: it meant that no matter "who" you became, they'd still be able to contact you.

We were sort of like the dream-hackers from Inception, but instead of layering on dreams, we were layering on identities and shedding them like snakeskin when they were all used up. A friend of mine admits to pretending to be three sisters sharing an account on Neopets, chalking it up to being "a lonely only child." I would usually claim to be twelve, which I found people would typically take more seriously than my actual age (somewhere between nine and eleven) but would still allow for the occasional moronic jag or horrendous spelling mistake. We made user names, sock puppets (back when they were called sock puppets and not mules), more user names... It was easy to abandon one, pick up another, and the social circles were small enough that even on the same site, no one would ever realize you were someone else - you might not even ever encounter someone who knew your other self, and even if you did, they'd never know.

This was a more innocent time to internet. Your mistakes could be erased just by changing your username. We were warned to never give out personal information, so we didn't - instead we made up varied and vast alternate personas and explored who we were and who we wanted to be. No one was counting how many "friends" we had, how many "view" our profile had accrued, or how many "comments" we'd racked up.

And then came Myspace. Originally, when I joined, it was mostly used by high schoolers as a way to communicate (and also stalk that cute boy in your algebra class.) By their official rules, you must be fourteen to join "social networking sites" like Myspace and Facebook. Most parents don't know these rules, and most kids don't follow them. In this late day and age, Myspace is populated by "scene" kids - rich suburban kids deeply steeped in self-isolation, listening to shitty electropop, dying their hair neon colors, and painting their nails "black as their souls" while they carve their favorite bands names into their arms. T

hese are the same kids who get into trouble on Stickam, who inspire the ire of the so-called "internet hate machine." Their focus on "e-fame" starting in their early tweens, combined with the amount of personal information they disclose through their nicknames, their photos, and their videos, builds a paper trail that most of us weren't ready to handle at that age. I'm not saying Ms. Slaughter can't re-invent herself, but it will be harder for her to abandon her old net presence since she's made such a racket.

At age eighteen, I use the internet to:

1. Research useless information, read People, and lurk on reputable news websites.
2. Browse Facebook.
3. Waste time on Gaia/TVTropes/Various webcomics.

America, what are you doing to your youth?

Didn't own a webcam until late 2008 and has probably only used it three times since,

Leez.

PS. This week, Onemanga shut down its servers and Hulu announced that they're turning into a pay site. It's the end of an era, ladies and gents.

Update:

No bruise.

My day is going to be spent calling the Northwestern U. office of Alumni trying to track down the name of a kamikaze pilot my Great Uncle met during World War II.

prediction:

Tomorrow morning I will have a huge bruise in addition to a scrape on my forearm.

I'll keep you posted.

Seen on the beach:

A morbidly obese man and his two kids who were following in dad's footsteps. The nine year old boy looked like he needed a training bra.

:|

These people are disgusting.

I'll just leave these articles about "celebrities" behaving badly here.

At the low end of the "horrifying" meter, Bristol Palin and Levi Johnston Want Full-Season TV Deal. Uhhhhh... are you guys high?

And at the totally opposite end of the spectrum, the nuclear bomb formerly known as Mel Gibson continues to explode in slow motion, and things are still picking up, according to this piece: Mel Gibson's Alleged Triple-Murder-Suicide Plot Revealed. Really, I don't know how much of what's been said is and isn't true, but the tapes themselves are pretty damning, even if this turns out to be a fabrication. The guy seems like he's gone off the deep-end, and needs psychiatric evaluation, followed by being committed to an inpatient facility or doing jail time. Either way he gets locked up.

And I'm not even going to start on Lindsay Lohan.

I needed this four years ago.

Chemistry made easy.

Swimmer's Itch

Once, my dad told me that you get itchy when you swim in the ocean because of little tiny baby jellyfish, and some of them can slip in through your pores and grow inside your bloodstream.

It terrified me for the longest time.

Ongoing quest

I have an ongoing desire to acquire t-shirts with rocketships on them. Having accomplished my previous goal, I am setting a new one.

http://www.threadless.com/product/2324/Spaceboy

This! Isn't it so neat?

Forget tech support.

I have (temporarily) restored my rebelious iphone to working order by throwing it at the floor in frustration and then plugging it in. FEAR ME, TECHNOLOGY.

This isn't the first time I've fixed an Apple product through abuse, though. My iBook used to have the occasional difficulty booting that was fixed by turning it over, banging on the bottom, and hitting restart. My theory is that the boot error is caused by something being slightly out of place and if you get lucky, it goes back into place.

So we'll see how long the phone lasts this time. I don't trust it as far as I can throw it and should probably buy a refurbished 3G or 3Gs before school starts.

I always wondered what the girl's whispered bit is in this song.

Apparently it's:

"i've heard of ghosts,
good ghosts
who wander the battle fields at night
guiding soldiers out of danger
you can see them almost everywhere (?)
always warning of stray bullets
and lurking enemies
...if i was such a ghost,
i would stay so close to you,
you could feel my breath on your cheek"

For some reason I really like this. :) (But we all knew I'm a Decemberists fangirl already, right?)

This post is not about you.

I am glad that your schedule has cleared up and you have more free time to do silly online things. I would love to be friends with you again. However, please do not IM me to complain about your mother/school/work/your loser drug addict boyfriend/your health, because I spent a year as your emotional dumpground trying to talk you through things that I really have no experience with, and I don't know if I can do it again. Just because I can listen doesn't mean I necessarily want to.

In short:

Friends yay.

Your personal free psychologist nay.

No one in YA Fiction has a memory longer than four years.

So I've been reading Robin Wasserman's Skinned series for what amounts to no good reason other than the cover art being a ripoff of Scott Westerfield's far superior Uglies. And while it does share similarities with that series, primarily in that they are both dystopian speculative sci-fi where society is far too superficial for its own good, while I was reading it, I couldn't help but shake that I'd read this before. Somewhere not Uglies. Somewhere far more innocent.

And then it hit me. I'd read this same premise some ten years ago at Camp Ramah, only then it involved chimpanzees instead of robots and far less sex and drug use. It was called Eva, and at the time I thought it was pretty awesome. Actually, it probably is still pretty awesome, because it was written in 1989 and contained pretty much every concept contained in Skinned, but with a protagonist who didn't make me want to claw my eyes out.

(Note to YA authors: If you are going to make us spend five hundred pages inside a character's head, at least make them someone likable. STEPHANIE MEYER ARE YOU LISTENING TO ME?)

The setting of Skinned is ripped, in parts, from both M.T. Anderson's Feed (another one of my favorite books from middle school) and Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake (A great, if grown up, novel). It almost seems like Wasserman read a lot of dystopian lit in developing her books, but forgot to add any touches to make it her own.

Oh. Wait.

She replaced the monkeys with robots. Because everything's better with robots.

The plot is essentially a pastiche of the aforementioned Eva and Uglies, but with robots. We are introduced to our heroine Lia who, like Eva, has through the power of science been transferred from her ruined-in-a-car-accident flesh and blood human body into a replacement. Cue hospital montages of our heroine learning how to use her new body, feeling angsty about it, and having existential crises over whether or not she is still herself. Our heroine eventually reintegrates into normal society, where she, like Tally, falls in love with a cute-but-not-up-to-standard boy who she eventually manages to betray. She later, like Tally, takes up with a boy who is "one of her kind" and they do daring and crazy things that run counter to the goals of boy number one.

This is not to say that Auden and Riley are exactly exports of David and Zane (David and Zane are far more interesting) - they have some of their plots switched around in terms of who gets severely injured and who our heroine winds up with - but they're still pretty close. One is quirky and impassioned, but imperfect. The other is a handsome daredevil. The difference is that in Uglies, we like these characters because of who they are first, and because our heroine likes them second. The only thing I ever felt for Riley was that he was sort of like Edward Cullen - strong, handsome, immortal, slightly off limits. Our heroine can't get over how perfect and mysterious he is, but we're sort of wary about the guy, not only because of the company he keeps. I eventually got over it, but, I mean... you can sort of tell I favor Zane and his crims, right? He was awesome.

So where does that leave Skinned? It's a pastiche of cliches from all over the dystopian lit genre. It is neither original nor particularly compelling, especially if you've read the source material and know what Wasserman is ripping off. Surely it's better written than the similarly-designed Eragon or Twilight Saga, but in the end it's a cliche that borrows heavily from its predecessors and puts too much riding on the back of a whiny, spoiled teenaged protagonist.

Three out of five. I don't feel like I should demand my afternoon back, but don't spend money on this drivel. Find it at the library if you're so curious, but you're better off reading the works it steals from.

When I was a little kid:

Meatloaf tasted better.

Candy bars were bigger.

The stars were closer.

The beach was a lot more fun.

I wonder when things stopped tasting the same, or when I realized I would never be an astronaut, or when someone explained to me that you can't keep building sand castles forever, or else someone will walk past and think you're mentally disabled.

What the hell does building a sand castle have to do with being mentally disabled?

NO ONE IS GETTING REPLACED

This post is mostly inconsequential and bizarre.

Two weeks ago I was driving around Jacksonville catching up with a friend from high school. He was asking me about college and my friends when he suddenly asked, "Did you meet a new gay guy? Did you replace me?"

I thought it was an absolutely ridiculous question. "No, I didn't replace you," I assured him. "What kind of question is that?" I continued thinking it was an absurd question, but the incident passed and we moved on to other topics of conversation.

Today I asked a different friend - "He was worried that I'd replaced him. Do people actually think about this kind of thing, or is he just being neurotic?" I was informed that being replaced was a genuine fear and not just one person being silly. And at first it seemed really strange, but then we (the friend I asked and I) realized that this kind of thinking is generally encouraged by the media - on television shows and in movies, the heroine will have that one token gay friend. This is the only gay friend she is allowed to have, period, and should another gay friend be written in, the other will be written off.

Hence several of my friends confiding their fears of being "replaced."

AMERICA, WHAT ARE YOU DOING TO YOUR YOUTH?

Dear Lady Gaga:

I know you've said you'd rather collapse on stage than break the illusion by drinking water or taking a break, but I'm sure I speak for all your fans when I say I would rather see you drink water or take a break onstage than collapse on it.

Seaweed days

The day after the fourth of July, I saw the first sargasso weed of the season. The first few days it's kind of charming, because it hasn't choked the tideline and doesn't stink yet, but after a while it gets kind of old and gross. But today was the first day.

When I was a little kid, someone told me that sailors used to get lost in the Sargasso Sea, because of the mats of seaweed. They'd think they were near land, when in fact they were in the middle of the Atlantic.

Leez.

Happy fourth. :)

My brother is on his way out of the country, there are rednecks at the pool, and I am going to a barbecue.

All is right in the world, although I have to wonder who the hell sets off fireworks while the sun is still up - doesn't that just waste them?

Leez.

July, July!

This reminds me of a song.

Never seemed so strange. ;)