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skepparkrans
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read my profile
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Name: Z.P. Cress
Country: United States
State: Texas
Metro: Bryan
Birthday: 1/17/1984
Gender: Male
Interests: my guinea pig Zoë, finding the perfect scandinavian indiepop sound, beer, knitting, pipefish, seahorses, unicorns
Expertise: sexual selection of pipefishes
Occupation: Education/training
Industry: Research
Message: message me
AIM:  ukulele chango
Member Since:
9/20/2005
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| Nobody reads this anymore, save a few. The state of blogging, as it is now known, is far different than that of yesteryear. Al Gore invented the internet, and I invented blogging. Indulge me in this post.
Dateline: 1999: Freshman and sophomore in highschool. I've been hardcoding a blog site, then known as an e/n site, on angelfire for a while. I basically wrote about my daily life and that's about it. I got picked up by West Beach, a Canadian youth culture / rave scene website. I was their American Teen Culture representative. At this point, most of my readers were from British Columbia, Florida, and South Africa. I had lots of readers who visited my site while at work in some offices in the South African government. Either that, or a lot of my readers had some way of fooling my IP trackers. I maintained this site for a while until shit went down with the kids from sloncha.com and dville.org. These were the "popular guys" from my highschool (sloncha.com being my class, dville.org being the class behind us). From what I've heard, they're still "popular" and "making money", but let's be honest. Who's more successful?
Dateline: 2001: Junior and senior in highschool. Bob and I start eat-club.com to document our weekly visits to the Waffle House with other friends of ours. We even had t-shirts. At this point, most of our readers were people we knew as well as random people trafficked from other big e/n sites at the time, including, but not limited to glimpse.org (still fucking exists!), stileproject.com, (still exists, but is now just a porn linking site), lotion.org (long since defunct), mija.nu, which was then a healthy-looking 15 year old girl with a webcam and some low-cut tops, and is now loverenee.com, a seemingly anorexic camwhore with fake tits for pay, and finally lameking.net (still exists!) Many of these sites may be pissant blogs these days, but back in the day... Back in the day, brothers and sisters, they were hot. They were e/n sites. There was no blogosphere in those days.
Dateline: 2003: Freshman and sophomore in college. I posted on twolv.com, hosted by my buddy Travis. We blogged together. It was good.
Dateline: 2004: Sophomore in college until grad school. I moved to livejournal. I kept a livejournal for a month or so. I then moved to xanga. I've been on xanga ever since. I've had several xanga sites. Had to shut a few down and set up new ones due to ex-girlfriends and moms finding them. Protip: don't say anything in your blog you wouldn't want an ex-girlfriend or your mom to read.
Dateline: 2007: Ok, I know it's not 2007 yet,
but there are only 39 days until it is. Blogging is not what it used to be. Someone writing what they had for
lunch used to be totally interesting and new, but now, shit, now it's
bad enough to merit a book by Maggie Mason of mightygirl.com, a bigtimer in modern blogging. Many of you may also know her friend Heather Armstrong of dooce.com,
which I've consistently read since 2003. Click her name for her
fucking wikipedia, and the other link for her blog. If by some chance
you read this, Heather, I love you.
It also seems these days that blogs have to be about something,
like politics or news or business or whatever. You hear about them on
CNN and The Daily Show and FOX News (if you're an idiot), among
others. They've become an incredibly mainstream source of quick news
and opinions, which I love, but I don't think it holds a place for me
anymore.
I'm seriously considering
either shutting this xanga site down or just not posting anymore. It's been a wild ride and I've loved every minute of it. I'm now considering writing a memoir/autobiography/novel during my spare time. I'm a 22 year old biology grad student and I just don't fit in the blogosphere (Christ, I hate that word) anymore. Hemingway and Steinbeck and Kerouac didn't have blogs. They sat down at a typewriter and published their zany stories in book form. In the next few weeks I may go on a road trip with a former Hell's Angel and a dwarf to Illinois. There's a book right there. Don't steal my idea, jerks.
I love you all. Thanks for the fun. I only wish my old sites were still up somewhere to be read. I'd give anything (not anything, but maybe $10) to be able to read the things I wrote as a 15 year old who figured out html on his own.
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| Saturday's Halloween party went off without a hitch. I went as a luchador, one of those masked Mexican wrestlers. My stage name was El Moleculero. It's a really good joke if you speak Spanish fluently. I had El Moleculero written on my shirt, but of course everybody thought I was Nacho Libre because, hey, that movie invented the sport of lucha libre. Heather and I had a good discussion about it. She said that well, I looked like Nacho Libre. Let me just say this: if a movie was made about Babe Ruth and I dressed up as Nolan Ryan, it would be no more reasonable to assume that I was going as Babe Ruth as it is to assume I was going as Nacho Libre. Despite this, it was indeed a good party. Much booze was drunk and many soaked in the lovely hot tub under the stars of Wellborn, Texas.
Drunk as a past participle just bothers me. I want to say dranken. Drunk, to me, sounds as though it should only be used as an adjective describing someone who has dranken a lot.
I told myself that once I moved into this apartment, I was staying put until I leave College Station. No more moving! I've already decided to break that pledge. It sucks riding my bike in the rain because no buses come here and there's no point in driving to a parking lot that's just as far from my building as my apartment is. Another reason I want to move is that there's absolutely no way I can host friends over for dinner parties and get-togethers in this place. There's just no place to sit. This apartment is technically pretty large, but the way everything is shaped (such as my pentagonal, but not equilateral living room) it's hard to arrange furniture in any way that promotes flow. I think I may move back to the Courtyard. They had free cable (with HBO!) and internet.
I got some shark at HEB today. I think I may either teriyaki it or taco it. Only time will tell. | | |
| I got back from Querétaro yesterday afternoon. It was a pretty
nice little trip. My talk went well for the most part.
There were very few geneticists there, so I actually got several good
questions. The accoustics were shitty, so I could barely hear
them, plus they were in soft-spoken Spanish, so I was barely able to
bumble my way through answering them. Gil helped me out with one
question. I was thoroughly embarassed, but everyone was really
nice to me about it. People even came up to me after the talk and
told me felicidades and that
they were impressed with my Spanish. Another guy knew absolutely
nothing about molecular genetics techniques and asked me to compile a
bibliography for him that would explain how to do things like
PCR. On one hand, it's nice to think people are impressed with
what I do. On the other hand, I wanted to say, "Google it like
the rest of us."
Querétaro is an insanely lovely city. My stars! It reminded
me a bit of Toledo, Spain. Very colonial. Tiny narrow
streets, 15th century architecture, and lots of people were dressed so
nicely. The odd thing is that Querétaro's per capita income is
less than those of border towns, but the quality of living is just so
much higher. I have photos of the trip on facebook and here in my xanga photos if you're
interested. I've never uploaded any photos to xanga before. I don't like the way they manage photos, but oh well.
Speaking of quality of living, mine has gotten much much better after I
started drinking coffee again. I get to work by 9 every morning
(instead of 10:30 or later) and am generally in a good mood.
Favorite souvenier I get every time I go to Mexico: diarrhea.
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| Finally a new post! This is just for you, Trenton W. Strong.
I want to go to sleep and wake up with a degree. Seriously.
I knew grad school was going to be hard, but god damn. Even if I
worked 27 hours every day, 12 days a week, I wouldn't finish everything
I need to finish. I've talked to more senior grad students both
at A&M and at other schools about this, and they said it's normal
and everyone feels that way. This is somewhat comforting, but I
still can't help but feel guilty when I don't complete a project for
class or don't meet my week's goals in the lab.
Next week I'm going to give a talk at the Congreso Nacional de Ictiología entitled Variación en marcadores microsatelitales en Xiphophorus. (Variation in microsatellite markers in Xiphophorus).
Should be a blast. I'm more nervous than a whore in church.
Tomorrow I'm going to practice giving the presentation in English at my
lab meeting and on Friday I'm going to give it in Spanish at a party at
my boss's house. I've been working on this damn presentation so
much that I've neglected to work on both my lecture for the class I
teach tomorrow and this week's animation project.
Animation is another story. At the beginning of the semester, the
TA told us that viz class was like a car driving and
accelerating. If you don't keep up every single day, that car is
going to get far far ahead of you quickly. I feel like that car
has made it all the way to California and I fell off in Snook,
TX. I could catch up, but I have a broken leg and a rusty
bicycle. I told this to the TA and he told me I wouldn't be held
to the same standard as the rest of the class (a given, I
thought). This is comforting, but even if I'm only expected to do
a tenth as well as the worst student in the class, I'd still scrape by
with a C. I probably won't even be able to start the next project
what with the conference in Mexico and all.
What should I be for Halloween?
Bonus: Click here to see all my animation projects so far.
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| Happy peanuts soar
Over chocolate-covered mountaintops
And waterfalls of caramel
Prancing nougat in the meadow
Sings a song of satisfaction
To the world
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