(no subject)
earlier today, i added university of chicago to my interests list. because it's friday night, which should mean something but doesn't, i was a little more bored than usual, so i started looking through the live journals of people with university of chicago on their lists. i was expecting to find at least a few readable ones, or some people i know, or some readable ones by people i know. i thought that was reasonable, because it wasn't like searching shame, which might be entertaining, but probably more frightening. i mean, i just got finished spending 4 years there and liking it, and even still liking it. and i like me, so maybe, i thought, other people who are "interested" in it are likeable.
i was wrong.
there were 177 people with that as an interest, including me. as far as i can tell, they all suck in a really uninteresting way. to be fair to those with names starting with l and over, i only got through the ks. (which was more than half, even though k is only the 11th letter. i think n=177 is enough to declare a non-normal distribution. so fake and nonsensical user names have that in common with given and surnames. interesting.) first i started by reading the actual journal entries, but that was taking a lot of time and was mostly too painful, so i switched to just looking at what music they were listening to, which wasn't very effective because most people didn't list it most of the time. finally, i just looked at the profile pages, mostly at the interests. see, i know that that doesn't necessarily correlate with interesting writing, but it was all i had left. and anyway, i only ruled people out with that. if their interests were free of awful things, then i would proceed to being put off by their actual writings. god, it was such a disappointing process, because i had such high hopes for each new person, even to the last. i thought for a second about taking it off my interests list, but then i realized i'm just not interested in people who are interested in university of chicago, or who list it as an interest on livejournal.com. maybe there's hope for l-z. enough.
i was reading summary judgement on slate today, and saw that "the cat in the hat" has even worse and funnier blurbs than "gigli". the ones quoted: "cat shit" (simple, but to the point), "a vulgar, uninspired lump of poisoned eye candy" (my favorite! by a.o. scott in the ny times, of course), and "82 of the most wretched minutes ever imprinted on celluloid" (hyperbole?).
i was wrong.
there were 177 people with that as an interest, including me. as far as i can tell, they all suck in a really uninteresting way. to be fair to those with names starting with l and over, i only got through the ks. (which was more than half, even though k is only the 11th letter. i think n=177 is enough to declare a non-normal distribution. so fake and nonsensical user names have that in common with given and surnames. interesting.) first i started by reading the actual journal entries, but that was taking a lot of time and was mostly too painful, so i switched to just looking at what music they were listening to, which wasn't very effective because most people didn't list it most of the time. finally, i just looked at the profile pages, mostly at the interests. see, i know that that doesn't necessarily correlate with interesting writing, but it was all i had left. and anyway, i only ruled people out with that. if their interests were free of awful things, then i would proceed to being put off by their actual writings. god, it was such a disappointing process, because i had such high hopes for each new person, even to the last. i thought for a second about taking it off my interests list, but then i realized i'm just not interested in people who are interested in university of chicago, or who list it as an interest on livejournal.com. maybe there's hope for l-z. enough.
i was reading summary judgement on slate today, and saw that "the cat in the hat" has even worse and funnier blurbs than "gigli". the ones quoted: "cat shit" (simple, but to the point), "a vulgar, uninspired lump of poisoned eye candy" (my favorite! by a.o. scott in the ny times, of course), and "82 of the most wretched minutes ever imprinted on celluloid" (hyperbole?).