So people who know me well know that I am often quite anxious. Some things are worse than others, obviously, but generally I am nervous about stuff like telephones, strangers, eating in public, crowds, and loud noises. I also have a standard evil internal voice that chants a litany of “no one wants to see the fat girl” excuses. (Hello world who does not know me in person — I have a big butt and I cannot lie!)

So anyway, not to delve into self-psychoanalysis, but the result of all these anxieties and phobias and stuff is that sometimes I don’t go out and do things I should or want to do, because I’m just feeling a little ishy. Yes, I should get over it, but sometimes I don’t.

Unless I’m on my bike.

A couple of weeks ago I came into possession of a bicycle. It had been at least a decade, if not more, since I had been on a bike, and I felt rather suspicious of it honestly. Balancing, pedaling, gear shifting, braking, not running over small children — it’s a lot to pick up again! As it turns out, though, remembering how to ride a bike is much like.. riding a bicycle. (Hmm.)

Vancouver is blessed with some excellent bike lanes, as well as a long meandering urban coastline. And riding.. well, not to be cliche, but my troubles get left behind. Sure, I’m riding a department store bike that I borrowed from someone’s mom and an upcycled snowboarding helmet. (Always a helmet. The last thing I need is for history to record that I died because I was clumsy.) But once I’m on the road, I don’t even think about it.

And I like being on the move, going places, traveling distances that I wouldn’t want to do on foot. As a non-driver, it’s pretty exciting. And perhaps I am just lightheaded from this morning’s ride, but I sense a certain camaraderie between us cycling folks. I feel very much like Mr. Burns behind the wheel of a car: “Out of my way! I’m a motorist!” I have a little bell that I ring insouciantly at slow walkers and hobos.

For some reason when I’m riding I don’t care about the usual stuff. It doesn’t matter, because I’m on a mission here, toots, and I don’t have time to roll around worrying about telephones and strangers and whether my underwear is riding up the back of my pants. I’m just another schmuck on a bike, and it is okay by me.

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Further to the Facebook post from last week, OpenBook is showing exactly what kind of stuff is inadvertently available to the public through Facebook profiles.

Starry Night in Wonderbread.

So, I would like it noted for the record that I hated Facebook before it was cool. Sure, when I first signed up back in the day I had fun for about 48 hours tracking down old friends and boys I used to have crushes on. (Oh Mr. MSP, you know who you are, and fate is so fickle.) Shortly after that, though, I began to question what “friend” really meant in the scope of Facebook. It’s not so much “friend”, really, as it is “person who can confirm I existed at some point”.

In the end I decided that I couldn’t be bothered to friend people out of politeness. I am infinitely considerate of people’s feelings all day long in real life to the point where it occasionally makes me batty. When I’m on the internet, however, I have the freedom to be an egocentric, cliquish boob, and by god it’s worked for me so far. Up until recently I still dabbled in Facebook enough to connect with actual friends and family though, and definitely enough to learn to hate Farmville.

My dislike of Facebook is kind of odd, because I am clearly a big social media nerd. Frankly the idea of collecting all my public information from across the Internet into one Central Repository of Jessica is very appealing to me. My internal OCD information designer fitfully twitches every time I think of all the little pieces of social networking I have spread unevenly over the Internet, and all the cool things that could be done with that data.

Unfortunately, more and more it seems clear that any central collection of this stuff should be done either by a very open source-y kind of project, or by each individual themselves (as with my lifestream). You just can’t trust a company to sit on a huge source of marketable data like that and NOT eventually try and sell it. Given a list of your interests, family and friends, employment and education history, things you “Like” from around the internet, other sites you log in to, games you play, and soon (I hear) where you physically are in the world at any given time.. well.. which private corporation wouldn’t try and monetize that at the risk of a little privacy loss? Really.

I saw a tweet the other day that felt that telling people you shut down your Facebook account now is as pretentious as saying you don’t own a TV. So let me be frank: I own a TV. In fact, I own a big honking TV, and I use it to watch America’s Next Top Model (unironically!) without hesitation. I have no hipster wanker ground to stand on here. I just think Facebook is kinda evil, and I generally try to not help evil make huge piles of cash.

Links of Facebook Dislike:

• Top Ten Reasons You Should Quit Facebook
• Facebook’s Eroding Privacy Policy: a timeline
• Facebook Has Gone Rogue
• How to Permanently Delete a Facebook Account

PS: Whew, this whole “try and write 3-4 times a week” thing is tough.

My Saturday afternoon? Oh, you know, the usual. Drinking a glass of wine, singing Lady Gaga really loudly at the cats, waiting for things to die in my kitchen.

In a fit of intrepidity*, I figured the beautiful sunny weather deserved an outing. And of course since the best outings end in deliciousness, I decided on a mission to hop on the seabus and head across the water to the farmers’ market at the quay. Once there all the seafood stood out, so fate demanded that I make paella! (Even I cannot ruin a dish with sausage and chicken and seafood.)

I had actually already placed my order at the seafood stand for the least expensive prawns, some white Thai thingies, when I spotted a pile of THE stereotypical paella prawns. The red ones with all the little wavy bits, right? They’re more expensive, but what the hell. I am teaching myself to cook — let’s play connoisseur. I quickly changed my order.

The fellow behind the counter had put about two of them in the bag when I realized that they were moving. He looked at me. “They’re still alive. Very fresh.” I made a squeaky noise and tried to nod authoritatively while the prawns waved their tiny eyestalks at me.

We had a little staring competition on the ferry back home, the prawns and I. I would peer at them, looking for some sentient sign of a will to live, while they shook their antennae. By the time the boat had arrived at the harbour, I had worked myself into a PETA-like frenzy. I’m not a killer! I know I had intended to buy 15 dollars worth of rustic Spanish flavors, but instead what I had bought was a chance to earn some karma and do the right thing, by god.

I almost did it, too, except I felt quite unsure as to where the prawns came from originally and how they would fare being unceremoniously dumped in the ocean at the ferry station in the middle of the very much working Vancouver harbour. Also, there was the teensy little issue of my paella and it’s potential deliciousness.

So now I have a bag of crustaceans dying in my kitchen. I tried to Google humane ways to kill them but all I could find were references to District 9, and although I’m sympathetic to their plight I’m not ready to set up a segregated zone for prawns in my home. (And really, my cats have a pretty hardline, snacky stance on rogue seafood.) I am reminded of Sigourney Weaver’s apartment in Ghostbusters — my fridge too has become a possible portal of evil. Well, maybe not evil. I’m pretty sure it’s judging me though, the jerk.

I love prawns. I’ve eaten them a million different ways, including flash fried. In fact, I enjoy dead animal meat of all kinds, but I fully admit to being a shallow consumer who prefers to not see what the food was doing before it arrives at my table covered in sauce. But for what it’s worth, I’m sorry, little prawns. The food chain is a bitch sometimes.

* According to the internet, intrepidity is a real word! I’m pleased to have learned that — it’s terribly fun to say.

Edited to add: I wrote this over the weekend. The prawns were, for the record, delicious. =d

Not to get all authoritative on y’all, but back when I started weblogging there were 50-ish self-labeled bloggers in the English speaking world. When we updated our site we would ping Weblogs.com, and a month’s worth of updated blogs could fit on one long page. (We also had to carry our own packets uphill through the snow. Both ways.)

The format was a lot different, too. Blog entries were usually really short, and they were focused around links and link commentary, usually in a chronological order. I still have very old archives online in this format, like this one. (Ooh, nice pink design, Jessica.) I think nowadays blogs — mine included — are less centered around links, and most folks post longer content rather than 2 or 3 shorter items.

Skip ahead a decade, and we have the Northern Voice conference, attended this year by over 500 Pacific Northwest “personal bloggers”. I went to one of the two days, and it was kind of a cool metric for me on how much the blogging phenomenon has spread and changed, and how there’s still more to come.

Putting a dancing banana on ChatRoutlette at Northern Voice 2010.

Putting a dancing banana on ChatRoutlette at Northern Voice 2010.

The conference itself was a blast. There were a number of good local panelists. There isn’t a lot of the old wild west left in the Internet nowadays, so I particularly enjoyed a panel on Chatroulette where we interrupted some poor fellow’s … personal time by showing a guy in a banana suit dancing to the Peanut Butter and Jelly song. I marched out and bought a NV t-shirt immediately afterward, because really what more could I have asked for?

I heard a great number of people argue that everyone is a unique and special snowflake who has a place in personal blog publishing. That’s a fine message, and it’s one I agree with on a macro scale. However.. just because people should post, it doesn’t mean they should necessarily be read. And that’s kind of the grey area or “Step 2″ (Step 3 being, of course, “Profit!”) that I felt missing at NV.

There was lots of practical information in relation to content — how to publish it online, protect it legally, use it as a personal networking tool — but the talk about the actual content itself seemed to just fall between “your unique voice is important” and “don’t tweet about what you had for lunch”. Granted, it’s not like there’s any definitive answer to “how I content?”, but generally people write personal blogs because they want to be read on some scale, and people are read because they write interesting stuff. How do you write interesting stuff? That’s kind of the magic of it all.

Anyway, I had a good time at Northern Voice and it’d be fun to go again next year. Amusingly enough I almost didn’t make it at all due to a big panic spazz the morning of the event. (Strangers make me nervous.) “I’m not a real blogger, and I don’t belong there,” I whined piteously to Adrian. “I’m just some crazy lady who figured out how to buy a domain.” As it turns out though, I am in fact a unique and special snowflake who figured out how to buy a domain, thank you very much, and if you don’t like it you can go make your own blog about it. Now that I’d read.

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Links:

• My friend and me vs. My friend and I. I always get this confused, but I found this page to be quite helpful.
• I was rereading some of my very old posts, and realized that I have STILL not seen Incubus, the 1965 horror film starring William Shatner and filmed entirely in Esperanto.
• The top 7 “whoops, I’m evil” moments in video games