Christmas Break Brain Dump, Part 2

• If they had an award for the most disheveled member of the Mac cult, I would win it hands down.
• Two muchhhhh cooler Mac insiders adopted me–the stray PC kid whose laptops have been melting down for YEARS-– into the Apple family by bestowing two brand new Mac Products on me in 2010.
• I’m just trying not to embarrass them now.

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• Like take earlier in the week when I went to Skype someone. Had downloaded and used Skype on the Mac before. But this time? No Skype icon.
• No, David and John (obnoxious little brothers), this was not just a case of me absent-mindedly deleting a program.
• It was pure Copperfield disappearing-into-thin-air trickery.
• Some googling later it turns out that on a MAC, when you download a program, it t downloads what less-ignorant people call a “disk image (dmg)” file.
• To a newbie like myself, the disk image looks like a shortcut to a successfully downloaded program.
• But here’s the evil part. When you close out the program, the shortcut disappears.
• Unless…UNLESS….(here’s my Christmas gift solution to my fellow ignorants)…you install it into the Application folder.
• Go ahead laugh at me. Maybe my shame will save someone else.

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• To try to save face, I’m going to act like I know something about technology use now.
• Ahem.A tip for those who work for mammoth companies.
• Let’s say you get an email with some helpful information in it. (And by this I do not mean a forward with yet MORE random pictures of Walmart shoppers.) (I’m over that.)
• But let’s say its a legitimately helpful email, one that inspires you, one that makes you–in all your good-heartedness–think “Wow, EVERYONE could benefit from knowing the stuff in this email.”
• Here’s what you do, my dear hero. Before you forward it to the EVERYONE IN THE COMPANY, BEFORE you forward, really quickly run your eyes over the To: line to see if the original email was ALREADY sent to EVERYONE IN THE COMPANY.
• There have been days this year where I’ve received the same message five times from five different people within five minutes. No lie. And who says bureaucracy isn’t efficient?
• There. See? I’m smart too.

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• Last night, Chris Heuertz emailed me a link to his article in the Washington Post. He does some killer work as the up and coming zany Godfather-type for the world’s most vulnerable:
• Here’s something I was glad he said: I was recently with some friends who are deeply concerned about issues of poverty. They were telling me about the glossy catalogues of human need that turn things like freedom into formulas as advertising jingles, “for only $35 you can help get a Cambodian woman out of a brothel.” But when we step back and evaluate these kinds of giving opportunities I’m not so sure they aren’t creating new forms of exploitation and new kinds of commodification. It’s tragic enough that a person’s sexuality has been reduced to something that can be bought and sold, and now to turn their freedom into a commodity as well seems to further diminish their humanity.
• Churches, non-profits, empires of faith take note. Maybe there are lengths we shouldn’t go to. Who knew? =)

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• I thought a movie with the title  Tiny Furniture might be just up my ally.
• The sort of thing that someone who is still best-buds with their inner child might get a kick out of.
• (Also, it won the South by Southwest Film Festival. So it wasn’t ALL about the irresistible appeal of miniature furniture, people.)
• The preview I watched on You Tube was rather clever too, which has sometimes proven to be a promising sign in my previous relationships with Independent Films.
• Based on the Authority of You Tube trailer, it seemed Tiny Furniture might have the weird, uncomfortable attraction of like Reality Bites or the Royal Tenebaums or even Rachel Getting Married–all of which are droll intellectual movies about dysfunctional family.
• But the clincher for me–me, the people-connector–was in the original article that first turned me onto it. Get this. The girl who wrote the movie, Lena Dunham, cast herself as the main character, her real life mom as the main character’s mom, and her real-life sister as the main character’s sister. They even seemed to be sort of perfect actors to play Manhattan-y artsish folk.
• Liking your family enough to write an autobiographical play that stars them is a feat made in an idealist’s heaven.
• Sadly though the movie quickly devolved into a sullen celebration of misery that had me reverting to reruns of the Office within the hour.
• It was my second strike with Independents this month. But that’s how Indies work–you watch five because you know that somewhere the 6th one will be worth the other 5 combined.

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• If the weather holds, I’m going somewhere really cool today.  Somewhere so quirky-cool that I might even go by myself if I can’t find anyone who is willing to lavish the appropriate amount of devotion on said experience by 12:30. To be determined by snow patterns. More later.

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• There is only an hour and forty-ish minutes left in school (I pre-posted this, judgers. Are you kidding me? My kids would burn down the classroom if I was busy bullet-pointing wordpress posts.) I can’t wait. My Merry Christmas starts today.