My Suburban Destiny

I think people are sick of hearing about my meetup adventures. So I blog about it instead.

It’s kind of like a part time job. The project got started when I figured I could use some leadership experience. It’s been a good way to be a leader with a little L.

Languages. Icelandic attracts intense, intelligent people on a mission. Swedish attracts everyone, but they’re too cool to be obsessive about learning it. Norwegian attracts people who have relatives in Norway, but are more into the food and ski-ing than the language. 100+ people and events with 2 to 9 people almost every other day.

Problem groups. The Mongolian group is going to take off…any day now, but it hasn’t yet. The constructed language group couldn’t get off the ground and I ended it. There is something wrong with the category “constructed language” as a special interest group. In retrospect I think it was a poorly chosen category– too narrow, no natural event formats that follow.

Up and coming I posted a literary Science Fiction book club on meetup and bam! In two days I’m up to about 9 people. I hope to fix some of the organizational issues that I saw in the past book club groups I’ve been to. Lemme list them:

1- It takes a long time to get the book. If the book is chosen a week before the event, I won’t be able to find the book.
2- It takes time to read the book. Odds of finishing = time / (boringness + pages + seriousness)
3- People who propose a book– sometimes don’t show at the book club
4- Books are chosen hastily
5- If you don’t like the choice, your recourse is to find another book club
6- People like to read a narrow sort of books. While it is nice to get kicked out of your normal genre occasionally, it gets tiresome to always be reading a book that was specifically written to appeal to someone else.

Solution
1- Pick the books far in advance
2- The book group should be based on a set of similar books, i.e. books are chosen from a particular pool, eg. historical fiction
3- Let readers pick one of two.
4- Set the a minimum pages read and set it at about 200 pages
5- Be geographically stable, i.e. always at the same metro stop, same house, same restaurant or bar
6- The organizer should make sure there is some discussion of the book, even if it only holds up for five minutes

My solution will work for a meetup book club because a meetup is all self selected people. I don’t think my proposed solutions would help an affinity book club, like say one based on church membership.

Sunday, I decided I should put more money in the stock market, since it is on sale. Buy low (i.e. when you’re depressed) and sell high (when you are strung out on cold medicine and prescription drugs–Suburban Destiny is against narcotics.)

This morning, the papers talk about how the super-duper massive bail out, or mega-shareholder subsidy was supposed to be a done deal. Knowing full well that ruin-the-country and raise taxes Republicans would have to raise taxes to cover this, I figured it would be most prudent to have one hand out for a bailout in preparation for the other hand being hoovered of it’s cash.

By mid-day, the deal to drown Republican lobbyists with enough cash to suffocate them was off and the market fell 7%. In one day! That is as much motion as you normally see in the market in a whole year!

So I was very worried that I had just bought hours before the largest one day drop in my memory. Fortunately, eTrade, who drags their ass when you ask them to make a trade, didn’t finish my trade until after the 7% drop. Phew.

This story will warm my heart when the market drops the next 7%.

Renting in NoVa is cheaper than buying, still.  For example, if I could find a roomate to pay $800 a month and if I kept paying my modest $1200 a month, I could rent for $2000 a month a three bedroom house on Quincy Street in Arlington or 5 bedrooms in Dale City in Woodbridge.  Fairfax and Alexandria must be 4 BRs for $2000.

With my handy “reality check” spreadsheet, it says $2,000  a month is the same as buying a house for $235,000– taxes and condo fees really take their bite.

Homesdatabase.com and Redfin say that while those 3BR houses exist in that price range, they’re not in walking distance to the metro, at least not in Arlington, while there are tons of 3BR houses renting for $1500 to $2000 in walking distance to the metro.  Also, many of these sub $235,000 bargains are in low price hot spots, which often are low price on account of them being magnets for social problems.

Super commuters in Dumfries can buy a 5BR houses for $2000 a month, but why when you can rent a 4BR for $1600?  And you can buy a 4BR duplex near Huntington metro for about $2000 a month, too.

Conclusion: Renting, despite the big drop in prices is still cheaper than buying.  If you have a roomate that you can tollerate, than buying is flushing money down the toilet.

When is anyone going to put a proposition like this on the VA ballots?

I think…I’m not 100% sure because I’m tweaking the lists from Teach Yourself Icelandic, which appears to be a British publication.

a = a, ah
á = ow
e = e, eh
é = ye
i = i, ih
í = ea
u = approximate, uh
ú = oo
y  = ih (same as i)
ý = ea  (same as ‘i)
æ = i, aye (long i, the sort you get when the word ends in e, like in hide)
ö = approximate, uh, but a deep in the throat sort of uh
ei = a (long a, the sort you get when the word ends in e, like came)
ey = same as ei
au = approximately, uh-y.  Starts with same sound as ö

9 people!  Wow, I thought the group was big when it had four people at an event.  Anyhow, incredibly enthusiastic crowd today, lots of talented “amateur” linguists.  We studied Icelandic, people spoke Russian and German to prove they could, worked out that indeed some in some dialects of English we do indeed pronounce an audible h after the w in words like “where”– I’d always thought the “w” and “wh” were spelling artifacts, like the “c” and “ck”

Afterwards I went to listen to Nordic Rock at St Ex.  I read Andres Ond, (Donald Duck) on the metro there, at the bar and back.  No one showed to that event despite sending an invitation to over 100 people (!).  

Still, I’m chuffed with my progress so far.  I’m learning so many Scandinavian words that I could follow the short German conversation at the table today.   And that doesn’t even seem fair, cause I haven’t been studying German at all.

Meetup travails. I missed a meetup that I’m the group organizer for.  Everything that could go wrong did- I didn’t show, the person who suggested the time and place didn’t show, only one showed, everyone else that could have shown, as far as I know, didn’t show.  I sent an apology to the one person who did show and they took offense at the content of my apology.  So much for attempts at diplomacy.  Makes me want to end my two newest meetup groups and focus on the ones I have going already.

Parenting. My son made his mom blow her top when she visits to pick him up.  He’s got a tin ear for diplomacy.  When someone is yelling at you for whining about how rough life is at Dad’s place, responding with additional complains is not a good idea.  And his mom, who doesn’t generally let him play computer games at all, is not going to be sympathetic to my son’s complain that I am too restrictive about how much time he spends playing games.   The other popular arguments are food (my son wants to eat competitively, but Dad says it’s better for the health to eat at meal time, not just because someone else is eating), and walking speed, which my son may or may not have a point.  It just that if a child harps on an issue for long, all of a sudden you don’t want to ever give in on it lest he move on to another issue where he thinks he might be able to use the same technique.

I keep trotting out my argument that when he gives up on trying to keep in emotions in check, people will stop listening to the content of his message, “I want this, I want that” and switch to listening only to the method of communication, “screaming + wild claims + crying + insults + whining” etc.  Anyhow, I can’t tell if he gets it or if he does, it’s like he’s incapable of using any understanding about the dynamics of dealing with people.

Which isn’t to say he was a monster over the weekend, it was pretty typical behavior mixed in with just plain bad behavior.  You’d think the rational child wouldn’t engage if bad behavior if they could clearly see that it doesn’t get them what they want and co-operation with the powers that be will get them a lot further.

Computers as a discouraging hobby. My home brew computer no longer boots.  The boot drive was too small.  Never, never, never use a 20GB drive as a boot drive, it needs to be at least double that.  I tried to copy it onto another drive.  The windows operating system provides no help for such a scenario, so it is very tricky and time consuming.  Is drive cloning an unimaginable scenario? Well, given how often Microsoft’s own documentation says “back everything up”, you’d think drive cloning would be a routine activity.  Now my machine can see a drive is attached, but will not boot to any operating system on any drive I attach.  In fact, the  “black screen of the deadly blinking underscore” is the same behavior you get when you try to boot with no drive attached at all!  So that took away about half a day of time I could have spent doing something of more social value.

What Is Love, Haddaway.  Love Song, by the cure is pretty unreadable but sounds good.  Friday I’m in Love, the Cure again, is entirely readable.

If love impairs the ability to write readable lyrics, than we can infer Friday I’m in Love in insincere.

Work.  Too much of it.

Play.  I’m overcommitting myself.

Study. If you study enough words, eventually the words start to echo in your head hours later and you have no idea what they mean.

Gym.  I gotta figure out how to there there more often during the week.

Wealth. I haven’t checked by stock account in months.  I have no idea what my 401K is invested in.  I hope it doesn’t default to baseball cards or foreclosed mortgage mutual funds.

Hair.  I need to cut it.

Status.  I am updating my status.

Health.  Shoulder hurts, not sure what I did to it.

Music. 3 good German bands: L’âme Immortelle, Untoten, Blutengel, Deine Lakaien (mostly English).  1 Good Italian: Helalyn Flowers.  2 Good US bands: Emelie Autumn, Abney Park.  I like the Swedish band Basshunter, but they are just fun pop.  Zombie Girl is better music than the not-so-serious albumn theme implies.  I wish Last.FM had a better selection of Mongolian Pop, I guess I’ll have to get those tunes from youtube, much slower way to discover music.

Actually not too often, but it has happened once.  I am currently studying too many languages again: Icelandic, Swedish, Norwegian, Mongolian and Danish in that order of intensity.  And it is an exponential curve, too, lots of effort expended on Icelandic, I’m still in the materials gathering stage for Mongolian and Danish.

A popular question at meetups is, “Why study language X?”  Icelandic is nice because it is closer to English than it looks, I’m more likely to succeed in learning it, it should take less time.  Having a healthy pop music industry, comic books, pop literature help too.  I like Mongolian because I’d like to learn a non-Indo European language before I die.  Mongolian dairy cuisine is a good reason to study Mongolian, too.

What is not a good reason to study any of these languages? National pride and xeno-animosity.  A person or two has joined my meetups looking to study a language because it isn’t a langauge of US minorities.  Aside from being reprehensible, it is ironically not true.  People studying Swedish in the US reflect the typical demographics of the US and of Sweden, which is now a multi-ethnic society.

Ethnocentrists can take their retroactive ideology and language purity conlang projects and stay at home.