I received the following e-mail from one of Swarthmore’s über-gays yesterday:

In a way, I think it manages to encapsulate quite nicely most of my problems with being gay at Swarthmore. Namely:

1. The tendency to over-analyze almost everything; see also, the “gender free orgasm” workshop that was part of the Sager Symposium two years ago.
2. The fact that there are groups on campus that honestly think it’s okay to spend administration money on organizing meetings telling students where to find kinky queer sex.

Don’t get me wrong: I respect a person’s right to engage in whatever kind of sex they want, kinky or otherwise; I just fail to see the need to hold a meeting to discuss it. My general opinion on the subject is, if you’re considering going to this meeting, you probably (a) already know what kinky queer sex is, and (b) already know where to find it. I have no doubt that students at Oxford are having exactly as much, if not more, kinky queer sex as Swarthmore students, and yet they don’t feel compelled to caucus on the subject. So, I ask again: what, exactly, is the point of this little get-together, other than to out fellow kinky queer sex enthusiasts to each other, making future Paces parties that much more horrific?

Also, where the fuck did anyone get the idea that it’s okay to have “Do YOU want to learn about kinky queer sex?” be the subject line of an e-mail? My parents would probably have stopped paying my tuition if that notification had popped up while they were around.

My parents have started using BitTorrent to download and watch episodes of Friday Night Lights, since they’re unable to watch it live because of their reluctance to pay for anything other than basic cable. As occasionally happens with BitTorrent, the most recent episode they were trying to download became corrupted and refuses to play after the first three seconds. I found myself, therefore, in the position of having to explain this phenomenon to my mother by e-mail:

— It’s corrupted. You’ll just have to redownload it.
— What do you mean “it’s corrupted”?
— It got messed up while it was downloading. There’s nothing you can do about it.
— But, what do you mean, “corrupted”? Why did it happen?
— I don’t know. Just delete the file and try redownloading it.

It occurred to me, after a few more volleys, that explaining the inexplicable corruption of BitTorrent downloads to my parents must be a lot like the experience of Louis Pasteur trying to explain to the people of the 19th century how microscopic germs caused their milk and wine to go bad. Corruption just isn’t something we’re built to understand, unless we have a vast conceptual framework explaining, scientifically, the full chain of causality between a well-ordered bottle of milk/AVI of Friday Night Lights and curdling/a kernel panic.

Since migrating the last parts of my Gmail account into MobileMe, I’ve been spending what little free time I have rereading old e-mail. And I have to say, it’s fascinating. A few things I’ve learned about myself through old e-mail:

• The oldest message in my Gmail account (though by no means the oldest e-mail I’ve sent or received) is a message my middle school Spanish teacher forwarded me with the subject “Words women use… men don’t understand!!” This, of course, is further validation that everyone in my life knew I was gay before I did. Moreover, the person she received the e-mail from — an assistant principal at my school — included a personal note when she forwarded the message: “I can’t believe I’m at work this morning!! My nephew and his bride were at my house until 2:00 this morning. I am still drunk I think!!” Quality role models.
• I sent a number of e-mails regarding an upstairs toilet in my parents’ house that, apparently, made a “really loud whining noise.” I can’t imagine why this was such a huge part of my life, but it even appeared in my 15th-to-16th birthday FutureMe letter to myself.
• Speaking of FutureMe, I found it (and a ton of other links that I liked to e-mail around) on this website FAZED that used to be relevant before all the other link-sharing websites (eg. Digg) became a “thing.” High on my personal list of other websites that used to be the shit and are now totally inconsequential: Plastic and everything2.
• Someone I think I went on a date with in 2005 — and who I also exchanged a number of very lengthy e-mails with, on the subjects of: Best Buy, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (the movie), and Ben Folds — recently resurfaced, in the form of a close friend running into him again. Small world. Also, I signed one of my e-mails to him as “One whose eyebrows wave every which direction,” which, huh?
• A lot of people used to get very upset with me for not replying to e-mails promptly enough. For that matter, they still do.
• Lurking in the not-so-distant past was a message asking me out on a date with the subject line “wraps for dinner?” which sounds sexy but totally wasn’t. Bonus points for anyone who remembers the failed relationship in question.
• Oh, and there was this old photo that I found back when I worked at FAU scanning books that I e-mailed to myself, which remains one of my favorite images:

Any further e-mail gems will be posted as they come up.

One of my ongoing projects for the last year and a half has been figuring out how best to export my tens of thousands of old messages in Gmail, and import them into my MobileMe account.

At first, I tried what seemed to be the most straightforward approach: since IMAP allows you to interact with mailboxes in different accounts and on different servers as if they’re local, I added both accounts (MobileMe and Gmail) to Apple Mail and  just dragged thousands of messages at once between folders. (Gmail labels are represented, in Mail.app, as folders.) This had a number of functional problems:

1. The nature of Gmail labels makes it such that duplicate messages were an inevitability. I used Gmail solely for a number of years, and got in the habit of using labels as they’re “intended” to be used — meaning, assigning multiple labels to the same message based on contextual relevance. Attempting to apply that fundamentally good idea anywhere outside of Gmail results in chaos.
2. The nature of Gmail’s threaded conversations creates a problem re: received and sent messages. Different mail clients handle Gmail’s threaded conversations and labels differently; based on my recollections from the last time I tried, Mail.app doesn’t include messages you send in the folder-label view, but instead only puts them in the Sent folder.
3. Dragging and dropping several gigs of mail at once is a useful visual analogy, but it reduces too many complicated (and bandwidth-intensive) processes into one step. In order for a copy like that to work, mail has to (1) be saved from Gmail to my computer, (2) copied from the local copy of Gmail to the local copy of MobileMe, and (3) uploaded from the local copy of MobileMe to the server. Drag-and-drop, in Mail.app, seemed to copy batches of mail into a cache of some variety, and then upload those batches directly to MobileMe. The end result was an unreliable transfer — a lot of messages were missing.

After letting the project rest for a few months, I decided to try it again last night. There were a few steps:

1. In the Gmail web interface, sort through all your relevant mail to ensure that it’s properly labeled. I could have transferred all my messages en masse, but since I value organization and only really want about half of my labels anyway, it was worth taking the time to label everything correctly. N.B. — This included, for me, labeling messages in Sent Mail; some of them were already labeled, since they were parts of conversations, but some messages I’d sent but hadn’t received threaded replies to were in Sent Mail unlabeled.
2. Add your Gmail account into Mozilla Thunderbird, with the default settings.
3. Click “All Mail” in the Thunderbird sidebar and let it “think” for a while. Thunderbird first downloads message headers and then, if it’s left idle for long enough, seems to actually download and index some of the messages themselves. The best way to ensure that it downloads everything in Gmail is to click “All Mail” and just wait for a while.
4. Once Thunderbird is idle, click the little computer icon in the bottom left hand corner to set Thunderbird to Work Offline. It’ll prompt you about whether you want it to save your messages for offline use — you do! If you only want to save certain folders, you can go into the Work Offline preferences and uncheck the folders you don’t want saved, but for simplicity’s sake, I left everything selected and let my computer download overnight.
5. In my case, Thunderbird seemed to get stuck on a particular label-folder a few times. I resolved this by quitting and reopening the app, and repeating the Work Offline process until it was offline and the app was idle (the cog in the top right corner stops spinning).
6. After quitting Thunderbird, open Mail.app and select “Import Mailboxes” from the File menu. Select “Thunderbird.” Navigate to your Thunderbird profile folder (typically in ~/Library/Thunderbird/, where ~/ is your Home folder) and click Continue. Check only those label-folders that you want to import — leaving everything checked off yields double-imports. Click Continue again and let Mail.app think for a while. N.B. — Thunderbird puts your sent messages in the label-folder that the conversation is a part of, so you don’t need to worry about importing the Sent Mail mailbox.
7. Once your imported mailboxes appear in the sidebar of Mail.app, navigate to the folder you want to copy to MobileMe, and, one folder at a time, move the contents to a folder listed under the name of your MobileMe account. I found that using the secondary-click “Copy To” option worked a little better than just drag-and-drop, which hung the app for some reason.
8. The Mail Activity window can give you a good idea of the progress of the upload, which can take any amount of time depending on how much stuff you’re uploading. But, assuming it doesn’t stop or freeze entirely, your mail will all end up stored remotely in MobileMe.

There are, of course, some drawbacks to this method:

1. Any unlabeled messages are excluded. If you import all your mail without labels from Thunderbird (using the /Gmail/[All Mail] mailbox that appears in the import window), this isn’t a problem, but if you choose to maintain your label structure, everything you want imported needs to have a label attached to it.
2. Your sent messages (as part of conversations or on their own) are going to appear in a folder that, by MobileMe conventions, shouldn’t contain sent messages. This doesn’t pose any kind of problem for viewing or searching your mail, and I find that it makes for a more intuitive mail-viewing experience, but it’s not technically “right.”

But, other than those two, this method has worked flawlessly for me. It’s circuitous, and I’m sure someone could find a better way to do it, but in terms of achieving the objective of moving messages from Gmail to MobileMe (or any other e-mail provider, for that matter), it works. And that’s what counts.

One of the aspects of online sociology that most interests me is the anonymity/troll effect, wherein otherwise (outwardly) reasonable people become complete assholes on the internet because they can hide behind a handle and not share their real name or contact information. This seems to suggest that people are, at their cores, ignoble savages, restrained only by the seeming Leviathan of tact, courtesy, and accumulated folkways that we’ve picked up after years of painstaking habituation.

Or, more bluntly: people are, fundamentally, all complete dicks, and only superficially aren’t.

Anyway, as someone who used to play World of Warcraft, the troll effect is something I’ve experienced firsthand on a number of occasions. But, lately, I’ve realized that there’s another side to the anonymity effect: the internet is also great for those conversations you can’t manage to have in person; see also, “The Talk.”

A friend recently e-mailed me a copy of her Talk with a newly-acquired boyfriend, which apparently took place over AIM. Following the transcript, she wrote, “This whole conversation happened online because that’s the only place he really feels comfortable talking… which is really weird for me.” And, come to think about it, it would be really weird to have, as a 21 year old, a serious and emotional conversation via gchat.

But that doesn’t mean that my natural inclinations don’t lean in that direction. As I wrote about in “The Talk,” I loathe having emotionally-charged conversations in person, for reasons that I can’t quite determine. For a while, I’ve been brushing it off as me being fundamentally uncomfortable with emotions, period, but I think a more nuanced understanding is needed: it’s not that I’m afraid of telling people how I feel; it’s that I’m afraid of telling them that in person. Or, put another way, I don’t think that I’d have failed three nights in a row to initiate The Talk if I were willing to have it over Messenger.

This all seems to ring a little childish, though. The first guy I was ever involved with, my freshman year of high school when I was the ripe age of 15, was a relationship that took place primarily over MSN Messenger. (This, I think, was mostly because neither of us could drive.) And, it turns out, emoticons are a poor substitute for emotions, as I no longer speak with the guy in question, and am actually repulsed that I came in physical contact with him every time he shows up in my Facebook News Feed. (He may have been defrienestrated. Not certain.) I proceeded to make the emoticon-for-emotions mixup again my junior year of high school. And each time, I had to relearn the painful truth that feeling something in ASCII and feeling something in person are very different concepts.

Now, though, I’m left wondering whether the “weirdness” that both my friend and I feel re: the prospect of The Talk over IM is residual skepticism left over from the heady days of chat rooms, Napster, and AltaVista, or something objectively wrong with that idea. What, in the end, is actually the problem with having The Talk online? Isn’t good communication still functional, relationship-ey communication if it’s happening over the internet?

Yeah, I’m not convinced either. But I’m not sure why.

Since bidding a fond farewell to the Apple Store last Friday (until next June, anyway), I’ve managed to occupy myself with two principal activities: baking, and perfecting my “breakup” playlist. Both are extremely delicate tasks.

As for the first, the whole project was spawned by a bunch of bananas I had sitting around that were about to go bad. Not wanting to throw them out, I found a Food Network recipe for banana bread and had at it. Having never baked anything before on my own in my entire life, the extremely positive reception of the banana bread at work started something of a frenzy. (In retrospect, I think that I could have served dog food on a plate, and my coworkers would have received it equally positively; everyone at Apple likes free food.) A week later, I’ve made the banana bread twice, a batch of good-but-not-amazing oatmeal raisin cookies, and a red velvet cake that tasted incredible but looked like a huge pile of crap. Baking, it turns out, is awesome.

The second occupation — the breakup playlist — has been an ongoing project of mine for the last five or six years. My stress-reducing activity of choice is reorganizing my iTunes library, so making playlists is something I do fairly often. And while I’ve never had a breakup dramatic enough to actually warrant an all-night bout of crying and playing the Virgin Suicides soundtrack on repeat, the breakup playlist has always struck me as a staple of every functional music library.

This time around, I set myself a few ground rules — all songs have to be lyrically linked to relationships or breaking up; no artist may appear more than once — and put together an entirely new playlist. The full version (available for download at the bottom of the entry) is 30 tracks, but here are the 10 highlights:

“Dry Your Eyes” — The Streets
“Don’t Turn Around” — Ace of Base
“Crown of Love” — Arcade Fire
“My Interpretation” — MIKA
“Before He Cheats” — Carrie Underwood
“Don’t Speak” — No Doubt
“She’s A Rejector” — Of Montreal
“Irreplaceable” — Beyoncé
“How’s It Going To Be” — Third Eye Blind
“Your Ex-Lover Is Dead” — Stars

I originally had planned on structuring this playlist around the five stages of grief/loss, but that ended up being sort of disjointed. (Feel free to reorganize the playlist according to that, if you want. I’d be curious to see if anyone can make it work.) Ultimately, I think I captured what I’d be thinking — and the order in which I’d be thinking it — pretty well. Thoughts and additions are, of course, appreciated.

Download! (244MB)

I think almost everything that needs to be said about Ke$ha’s debut album, Animal, is said by its cover. (This, of course, being some twisted meta-comment about superficiality, but I’m going to set that aside for a moment and pretend that I’m not going that deep into textual analysis of an artist whose lyrics include “ain’t got a care in the world, but got plenty of beer” and ” err’body getting crunk (crunk) / boys try’na touch my junk (junk)”.)

For me, at least, the connection (visually) to Santogold’s self-titled debut is all too obvious. Whereas Santogold seems to be saying that she’s so filled with pop music that it quite literally came bursting out of her (in the form of gold glitter) and onto the record, Ke$ha looks more like she spent the hours of 3.00 to 4.00 in the morning bent over a toilet, vomiting up catchy synths and vapid lyrics. She’s done bad, and she knows it. There’s no apology for the shameless pop of this album, nor any illusions of self-styled grandeur (a la Lady GaGa) — Ke$ha’s album is a story of partying until you’re sick: nothing more, nothing less.

And you know, it’s still not half bad.

To anyone who reads this site via an RSS reader (ie. Google Reader), my most sincere apologies for the last entry showing up with the NSFW imagery not safely placed behind a “read more” link — I had no idea that Wordpress would fail me so spectacularly.

As compensation, here’s just about the most manly thing I can possibly imagine:

Again, sorry.