My College Application Essay

I was digging through old files, and found the essay I wrote when I was applying for admission to UC Santa Cruz. I was a student at Cabrillo College, a community college in the area. I had been studying for around 3 years after dropping out of high school at the age of 15.

I didn't look to anybody for advice about writing college essays. Nobody proofread it. I cringe at some of the writing, but overall I think it's pretty good. Or, at least it's me.

Presented with only minor typographical corrections and without many regrets:

An unending flow of questions and concerns punctuated my breathing as I made my way to school on my first day in the tenth grade. I found myself traveling not by a conventional youth method (bicycling, skateboarding, etc) but as a small part in a gigantic rolling ball of confusion.

My biggest concerns were based on peer approval, and at the time it would seem that even succeeding in wearing the right color socks would be enough to make my day a good one. I started the tenth grade as I had started every other year of my public education career, but in short time I made many changes to the physical and mental realities in my life. Through an ongoing exercise of introspection, I came to know myself more honestly than I ever had before, and, using this is a catalyst for change, altered my priorities and left high school for higher education at Cabrillo College.

Before that major turning point, I had spent most of my free time worrying what other people thought of me. I daydreamed about befriending the right person, and having my dull, meaningless life magically transformed into one of meaning, excitement, and most importantly, popularity. I considered myself cursed; every time I even began to become friends with someone, he would inevitably abandon me at the request of his more important friends. Evidently, they saw me as some kind of social leper, with a disease so potent, that if contracted, could reduce each of their lives to the same ruined shambles mine lay in. Indeed, my social standing seemed irreparable, and after countless iterations of this same scenario, I had all but resigned to being content with a life of melancholy.

In my loneliness, I looked to my hobby of computers as an escape, as I had done throughout my childhood. Even at the onset of my computer days, when playing video games was the extent to which I used them, the computer was always responsive to to my loving [key]strokes. As the years passed, and the methods with which I communicated to the computer became less exciting, I would supplement my arsenal of computer skills with something new to hold my interest. By the tenth grade, I had learned to write my own computer programs, was somewhat familiar with the hardware (machinery) side of the hobby, and had even started making use of the computer facilities at UCSC. The multi-user social computer environment at UCSC was especially fascinating for me, because I could practice social skills with which I had remained deficient in the real world.

In the first month of the tenth grade, I had become friends with someone who had just returned from a year of studying in Finland. He had been an acquaintance before he left, but we'd never had anything much in common. While staying in Finland, he had become involved in the punk-rock music scene, and when he returned to the United States, he introduced me to some of the music he had started listening to. He gave me a tape on which he'd compiled several songs by four classic punk-rock bands: NoMeansNo, DOA, The Misfits, and the Dead Kennedys. I listened to the tape once and was not impressed; the songs were loud, obnoxious, and seemed void of any musical value.

I listened again though, and yet again, and each time I listened I heard something new from the music that appealed to my ears and mind. The noise had actually started to sound like music and as my mind caught up with the tempo, I was able to make out some of the words. The messages that came through the words were like aural candy for my ears! Finally I had found a breed of music that was expressing what I had always felt in my heart. As if they had used my life as a model, the lyrics confirmed to me the hardships of growing up and living in an often emotionally callous society. Inspired by this small collection of songs, I began to feverishly search for more of the same. To say that punk-rock music played a vital part in the transformation of my insecure, self loathing mind into a thinking, optimistic one would be an understatement. Using the spirit of punk-rock music as a road atlas to my own mind, I began the life-long journey toward fulfillment and happiness, stopping only for sightseeing along the way.

With a new self respect and dedication to self improvement, I made the decision that acceptance by my high school peers was insignificant, and accepting myself was what mattered in the long run. Pessimistic about the chances of making good friends in high school, I looked to expand on the small group of older friends I'd made through the University's computer system. In this endeavor I was quite successful and started spending most of my spare time with friends at least four years my senior. Noticing that my friends were mostly college aged, and being very advanced in my studies, I decided it would be in my best interest to leave Santa Cruz High School and enroll at Cabrillo Community College.

At the present time, two and a half years later, I think that my decision to move on to college was perhaps the wisest decision I've ever made. At Cabrillo College, I've been able to study subjects unavailable in high school and have made many new friends while becoming more and more involved with the computer community at UCSC. For the last few years I've been involved with an organization at UCSC called COAC (Council for Open Access Computing, which works to make computer facilities on campus available to the general student populace), of which I was recently elected to the executive committee. While my computer interests have continued to grow, I've also found new interest in many fields, including art, politics, and philosophy. When I consider where I might be today had I not been inspired to pursue happiness in the ways I've narrated in this essay, I grimace at the frustration I would likely be experiencing. I am relieved but not surprised that the choices I made turned out for the best, and would certainly offer them as options for others in situations similar to the one I was in.

The essay worked. Or they let me in anyway. I graduated from UC Santa Cruz in 1995 at the age of 20.

I'll Take The Thigh Massage

Taking a stand on new TSA policies that require passengers to choose between x-ray body scans or invasive pat-downs involving genital contact:

 

TechCrunch's New Logo

Aol has wasted no time in rebranding their new property.

Careless Love

I went to music school a few years ago, and earned a second BA degree. Anybody who has been through any music school knows that it's hard. Especially if you're not particularly talented going in. So I learned a lot, but still came out the other end relatively incapable.

But, as all good education does, it put the ability to learn in me. Some of the tools and disciplines I learned for studying music and practicing, I try to apply from time to time in order to keep my musical mind growing, and to keep my facility with these tools in some order.

My ear training instructor, David Xiques, taught us a form of movable-do solfa, the syllables most people are familiar with because of their famous use in the musical "The Sound Of Music." Using these syllables allows me to look at any (simple) piece of music, identify the key, and sing out the melody with relative ease. As my ability progresses, I should be able to read more complicated pieces, and eventually have a good shot and hearing the melodies without applying solfa mnemonics to them.

Let's take a look at a simple folk song I found in a library book. "Careless Love" is apparently a well-known song to some people, but it is new to me.

My first step is to identify the key of the piece. In this case it's E Major. So the E (the bottom line of the staff) is the "Do" in this key. I will often start by singing a scale in the key, just to get my brain "in the key."

Now, I can take a look at the song and try to make a slow reading of the melody with my solfa technique. Notice that I stumble and feel out the pitches sometimes, especially where you see accidentals (the ♯ and ♮ symbols alter the pitch slightly). Solfa has names for all these accidental notes, but I only know a few of them, and don't use them correctly. Still, it helps me to utter something while squeaking past those spots.

Careless Love: Sung With Solfa

Once I've practiced singing through a few times with solfa, I try to read the actual words. Sometimes I have to switch back to solfa momentarily to get the "scale" back in my head. The song is still very sterile and unemotive. I'm pretty much just trying to get the right notes out.

Careless Love: Simple With Lyrics

Having the basic pitches down frees me up to start concentrating on the style I want to present the song in. Instead of the rote "on the beat" guitar strumming, I decide to give it a little strumming rhythm. I am also able to start loosening up my singing style because I'm not painstakingly seeking the correct pitch for every note.

Careless Love: An Acceptable Performance

At this point I've got a pretty decent understanding of the song, and I can play and sing it a nearly entertaining fashion. So I decide to start fooling around with it. Once I know the actual notes, I can take liberties and substitute other notes which are not technically in the original song, but which still work harmonically.

Careless Love: Personalized With My Style

I hope this serves as an interesting example of how a simple song can be dissected and, with the help of movable-do solfa, understood and performed with increasing artistry.

The Comforts Of Home

We've been casually browsing open houses for a few weeks. We're not sure if or when we'll be buying a place, but the process of visiting and evaluating the pluses and minuses of places is giving us a better understanding of what we value in a home.

One of the things that is so engaging about open houses is you never know what you'll find on the inside. The outsides of homes, especially here in the northeast of the United States, vary little compared to what you find within.

The goal for sellers is to spruce up their home so that you feel at home the second you walk in the door. To achieve this, some agents even bake cookies before the open house in order to give the home that "deliciously comfortable" aroma.

But nothing screams "buy this house" quite like a latex rubber glove dangling off the bathtub faucet.

Iran Is On Facebook

Today we receive news of Barack Obama's dramatic shift in policy towards the nation of Iran, recording and sending a video appeal to the people and government, hoping for a more diplomatic relationship in the future.

Few people realize the extent to which modern technology has played a role in this softening of stances. Punk It Up recently uncovered evidence that Iran has been using the popular Facebook web application to learn more about both its allies and opponents.

Rumors are circulating that Iran has also gotten back in touch with several grade school friends with whom it had considered a long-term friendship impossible. Here's to technology!

Employees Must Wash Hands

Am I the only one neurotic enough to be turned off when I see those signs in restaurant bathrooms stating that employees must wash their hands before returning to work? The last thing I want to be reminded of as I fumble for the door knob with my hand wrapped in thick paper towels, is that the short-order cook makes his way in and out of this filthy place several times per day between shifts of handling the raw tomatoes and onions.

As a germ-phobic customer who's about to eat here, what I really want to see is:

"Employees must sanitize hands using the sterile sink that is not separated from the kitchen by several feces-laden doorknobs."

What's worse is when these signs are up, but soap and paper towels are absent. Nice move, restaurant. This means:

"Employees must take a shit, lightly rinse their hands with water, dry their hands by wiping on their washed-weekly work pants, and touch the feces-laden door knob before returning to work."

Who's hungry for take-out?

The Spice Of life

I've always been a food spicer. Always salt (if you can call it a spice), and sometimes its counterpart black pepper, but especially any of the various red peppers, hot sauces and salsas. I'm especially inclined to cover my pizza with the flaky red pepper seeds and skins that are so common to many Italian and pizza restaurants.

But since I tried the pizza at Emma's in Cambridge's Kendall Square, I've been a little bit obsessed with black pepper. Their pizza is excellent, and among the usual condiments on every table is a shaker dispenser of black pepper. This isn't your typical diner pepper shaker: this is a large container such as you might use for sprinkling parmesan. For some reason I thought I'd branch out and sprinkle some onto a piece of the plain cheese pie.

The results were amazing. Their pepper was ground into large, extremely aromatic chunks. My eyes (nostrils really, I guess) were opened to this spice as they never had been before. Ground black pepper, and lots of it, is excellent on cheese pizza.

I tried it out myself the next time we brought home a $5 Large Cheese from Dial-A-Pizza. Their value pies actually range from quite excellent to depressingly bland, depending on the day or possibly the mood of the cooks. In any case, it made a good test bed on which to unleash my oft-neglected grinder.

I covered a piece with a much finer grain of specks than I'd have liked. But my grinder didn't seem capable of producing the kind of chunks I was hoping for. Even though it sported some kind of brute adjustment, the largest specks were still far too small. The result tasted "OK," but lacked the magic. It could be I needed to get better pepper corns, too.

At some point last week, I noticed that the pepper grains were coming out a little bigger. Also, the grinder was harder to turn. Maybe I had stumbled across a patch of more rigid corns, although I did observe the machine getting nearly empty. I labored away and noticed larger black chunks appearing on my food. I shrugged; it did seemed better than before.

This morning while eating an excellent breakfast of blueberry pancakes and scrambled eggs, I treated myself to some more of these beautiful black grindings. This time it was impossibly hard, however. I looked down at my food with a tad bit more focus and observed that the pepper chunks looked more like thin shards than the chaotic, craggy chunks you'd expect from demolishing a hard, dry berry.

I intuited something appalling, and opened my grinder to confirm the worry. A large piece of plastic, whose purpose was unclear, must have broken off inside the machine and had been resting on top of the pile of pepper corns. When the plastic reached the bottom, it succumbed to the grinder's teeth just as the berries did, mixing in the appearance of larger chunks of pepper while giving a decent elevation to my daily intake of hardened black plastic.

I have been feeling a little bit sick the past few days, and I can't help but wonder if it's related to my diet. Still, the eggs looked good under all that plastic, and I figured it wasn't anything I hadn't eaten before. But hopefully that's the last plastic pepper I have for a long time.

Drug Party México

Mexico has apparently stolen all of the innovative liberal thought that used to reside within the boundaries of the United States. Vicente Fox, the conservative President of Mexico, is apparently planning to sign the bill that would legalize personal use of most of the evil narcotics that in this country will earn you a long-term prison sentence, and possibly seizure of your personal property.

"The list of illegal drugs approved for personal consumption by Mexico's Congress last week is enough to make one dizzy — or worse." Cocaine. Heroin. LSD. Marijuana. PCP. Opium. Synthetic opiates. Mescaline. Peyote. Psilocybin mushrooms. Amphetamines. Methamphetamines.

It's high time somebody taught the United States a lesson about "drug wars." You don't win by fighting the victims.

Update: Fox wussed out.

Rock My Funky Tax Holiday

You know those stupid yet sometimes illuminating web memes that people contagiously follow, answering questions like "ten things you don't know about me" and putting them on their blog before tagging the next person? I've never participated in one of those but here's one thing you may not know about me:

I always file taxes on the last possible day.

I know this comes as a surprise to some of you, because you view me as this eccentric yet organized individual. Bzzt! Organization to me means putting everything made of paper into a giant pile in my office which will be periodically rummaged through when an important document is needed, but otherwise untouched until "Sorting Day," an unofficial holiday in my life which usually falls on April 14th, but sometimes gets stretched out to the 15th or even 16th.

This year, Sorting Day would fall on either today or tomorrow. The "bonus weekend days" before tax deadline. I file on the last day, but usually have enough wisdom to know that shit is going to hit the fan big time if I attempt to also do the sorting on the deadline date. So in a typical year I would be digging through that paper pile right now.

But normally I didn't live in Massachusetts! Welcome to freaky eff-the-rest-of-the-country pilgrimsville. Thanks to our state's fine Patriot's Day holiday (in honor of the Battle of Lexington and Concord), we're being given an extra day to file taxes this year. Shit like this never happened in California. It's the distinct scent of government palm greasing in the air. Massachusetts just gets its way more than California, even though we are a pinko liberal commie state just like ya'll.

To make things even sweeter, all the states around us who don't even celebrate Patriot's Day (Maine also does) get a free ride on our wacky holiday. Because Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, Vermont and the District of Columbia are all send their tax returns to our Andover, MA IRS processing center, they're not obliged to file until Tuesday, either.

Thus setting a new record: Sorting Day 2006 falls on April 17th! Booyeah!

Technorati Tags: taxes, massachusetts, holidays, california

Eye/Hand

Have you seen the "Eye/Hand" Flickr feed? This is my favorite, and by that I mean my first and only favorite Flickr feed. I just haven't been that in to Flickr. Blah blah blah. Pictures of people you met at parties who didn't know your geeky ass was gonna spray them all over the internet. Hang up the phone!

But Eye/Hand is special. This feed has a simple barrier of entry. You take a picture of yourself, and you draw it. Judging by the entries so far, it doesn't matter if you draw it on paper and scan it, or draw it in a computer program, it just has to be a hand-done thing.

Most of these are really awesome. I am accumulating all kinds of social speculation about society based on these drawings. For instance, women tend to draw themselves fatter than they really are. Men tend to draw themselves more angular, and perhaps even as distorted caricatures, than they really are.

What I really don't dig are the ones that come up and it's so clear that somebody traced it, I'm like "fuck that! you traced it!" Sure, art is art. Blah blah blah. But if you traced it, it looks so much like the original that it's no fun. It's like when you see Belle and Sebastian perform, and it sounds just like the record. No fun! So I really grimace when I see the loser "perfection" drawings show up. But I really grin when I see the wacky disproportionate "true players" images show up. If this is what Flickr is all about, then Flickr is all right.

Web Diaries

It's lucky for us that the term "Weblog" caught on. Because, as much as we may be annoyed by the prevalence of the common abbreviation "blog," we'd be frickin' ridiculous if we talked about our "b'diaries" all day long.

Snowy Somerville

In keeping with the trend for crazy weather, it snowed here yesterday! And not just a little teeny weeny bit of snow. We were walking in a winter wonderland! (Actually, I didn't leave the house, except to step out on the deck and catch some flakes).

And flakey they were! It was as if somebody had slaughtered a million chickens in heaven and just let their feathers quietly float down to earth. Isn't that romantic?

I like how the presence of snowflakes turns even our rather dull back-porch view of the Foodmaster and neighbors' houses into a picturesque scene. Now it's 58 degrees and sunny. Go figure.

Candlepin Bowling

Moving to the Boston area involves a bit of culture shock for a California boy. Things that you wouldn't necessarily find out about on a short vacation here bubble to the surface as you wander around and chat with the natives.

One of the most mind-bending encounters I had early on in my residence here was the realization that when people refer to "bowling," they are as likely as not speaking of "Candlepin," rather than the variety the rest of the country is more accustomed to.

Candlepin bowling is just like regular bowling, except it's hard.

That's the two-second summary, but there's a bit more to it. The rules of the game are more or less familiar to anybody who's bowled in their lives, but the ball is much smaller and the pins are much narrower. While I unfortunately have no photos to illustrate the differences, those people on Flickr who think it's fun to share every little visual detail of their life with the world are happy to oblige.

My ten-second summary: Candlepin is like regular bowling, except the ball is small, the pins are narrow, and when you knock something down, it stays put until your frame is over. You can then use this "fallen wood" to strategically knock over other pins that are still standing. Sounds easy, right?

I finally got a chance to play last night, when our neighbor invited us out to Lanes and Games (worst website ever). Walking into Lanes and Games is like walking into any huge bowling alley. There's the pro shop. The lounge. The video arcade. The pool tables. Then you realize that all the bowling lanes are Candlepin, and it starts to get surreal! People are treating this sport like it actually exists! In fact, people are good at it!

Lanes and Games is a two-story bowling alley, big enough to be huge without the second story. The entire bottom floor is (I think) Candlepin bowling, while the second story is mostly regular bowling with a few lanes of Candlepin. So the percentage of Candlepin lanes is a bit more than 50%.

By the way, they call regular bowling "Ten-Pin," which is a name somebody must have come up while extremely drunk or extremely dumb, because there are also ten pins in Candlepin. If it was up to me I would call regular bowling "easy bowl." Since this is my blog, it is up to me!

The first thing you notice when playing a game of Candlepin is that the ball is very small. The lane return is just like an easy bowl lane return except the profile is much slimmer. Overall the appearance of Candlepin is much more elegant, despite the raucous action on the lanes. It was interesting to play Candlepin in the proximity of easy bowl because the speed of Candlepin made the easy bowl look ridiculously slow-motion.

The second thing you notice about Candlepin is that it's hard. You palm this little ball, make your approach sort of like easy bowl, then release the ball while twisting your wrist in an uncoordinated manner so as to hurl the ball directly into the gutter. If you've ever played Skee-Ball, Candlepin is somewhat similar. Now imagine rolling a Skee-Ball to the far end of a bowling lane. This is where it gets hard. When you do manage to hit a pin, the narrow profile can make the whole event much less eventful than with easy bowl. Unless you smack the pin into a chaotic frenzy, it's liable to just fall over, punching a hole in the triangle of arranged pins. When by chance a pin falls in front of a bunch of other pins, it offers a rare chance for a novice "home run." I like to call this "the bulldozer." People much more entitled to come up with Candlepin terminology have apparently settled on the term "barn door." You can learn more of their charming terminology on the International Candlepin Bowling Association website. My impression in this case is that "International" means "New England and Eastern Canada." The site also includes an "official rules" type document, which includes provisions for magical things that can apparently happen in Candlepin games:

8. PIN DOWNED, THEN STAND UP: If a downed pin is caused to stand erect again in the playing area, it shall be judged as down and shall remain on the lane to be played as wood. From: http://www.bowlCandlepin.com/Rules.pdf

To sum up the difficulty of Candlepin, I will announce now that my final score in my first game was 39. Yes, they score Candlepin essentially the same as regular bowling: a perfect game is 300. Getting back to the "Candlepin is hard" summary, I will point out that while perfect games in bowling are fairly common, there has never been a perfect games in Candlepin. You just don't get too used to seeing all the pins go down. The best Candlepin game ever played only added up to 245. That's still a lot better than 39, but it's no perfect game!

We ended up playing two games. On my second try, I broke 50! Not a bad improvement. We all had better second games, but were a bit demoralized and decided to try a game of easy bowl to get our spirits back.

2-Second summary of easy bowl: It's like Candlepin, only it's easy to aim, and when you hit any pin, they all fall down.

We only played one game of easy bowl, but even after a maybe 4 years since I last played, I managed a 150+ game. Thank god for easy bowl!

I'm intrigued by Candlepin, and I would like to play again. Fortunately, they hide these bowling alleys around every corner in these parts. Not only do the big bowling alleys have them, they are present in quaint little neighborhood settings such as Sacco's Bowl Haven in Davis Square, where they proudly declare "We've got small balls, but we're big on fun."

Over in Boston proper, a bar called the Milky Way in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood offers karaoke, cushy couches, and Candlepin all huddled together in a hipster-bar environment. We went here once to meet some friends, and I was mighty jealous of the Candlepin players.

Next time you're in New England, give Candlepin a try. It's fun! And it's American, yet it's foreign. At least to most of us.

Tasty Nor'Easter

Speaking of the Northeast, there's a little phenomenon going on up here involving orange and purple. This is nothing new for those who have lived here all their lives, but for California boys like myself, it may come as a surprise to learn that Dunkin' Donuts is the Starbucks of the Northeast!

Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of Starbucks here. It's just that, instead of seeing them every block, you see them maybe only every 5 or 6 blocks. Seemingly more prevalent than the naughty coffee goddess are location after location of gaudy orange and purple Dunkin' Donuts signs. I find it kind of charming in a, "God I'm glad to be inundated with the presence a completely different chain" kind of way.

There's something less sickening about the Dunkin' Donuts impact on the region. It seems to be embraced more universally than Starbucks is in the West. For instance, I was reading through the latest issue of Boston's Weekly Dig, which includes a reader's poll type "Best Of the Area" feature this week. Included are all the usual categories one sees in these types of things: Best Burger, Best Haircut, Best Pub, Best Dunkin' Donuts?

Dunkin' Donuts is more than a store, my friends. Dunkin' Donuts is a frickin' genre! The winner of this year's "Best Dunkin' Donuts" award is the 750 Washington Street location, where apparently an employee named Claudia is known to shake her booty to dance music while expressing her "love of the Rolling Stones and America in general."

The Rolling Stones and Dunkin' Donuts pretty much sums up America, 'round these parts.

Nasty Nor'Easter

At this point the few of you who are still subscribed to this blog are probably scratching your head and wondering, "punk it up? who is this?" I apologize for the month-plus delay in shouting the news from the Nasty Nor'East. I've been swamped with work and other obligations, and furthermore I've completely slacked in my Foodmaster sign-shooting duties.

While "Nasty Nor'Easter" sounds like the stage name of somebody opening up for Li'l Kim, it's actually a weather term, heard this morning on the local news.

Shit howdy! I kid you not, as I finished typing the above paragraph, the dang Nasty Nor'Easter cut the power for one second - long enough for my Mac to power off. Amazingly, my blog editor (MarsEdit) does autosaving and miraculously kept the above intact.

Anyway, I guess a Nasty Nor'Easter is what you call it when winds up to 50MPH accompany non-stop rain, and the power goes out for one second at a time. Isn't that fun? I'm heading to MicroCenter to get a UPS today, if this is how things are gonna be. Actually, I think only the term "Nor'Easter" is official weatherese, but a search for "Nasty Nor'Easter" in Google reveals that it has been used by at least 600 other people. Even "nor'easter" is cool by itself. How many "official" terms have you seen that include apostrophic contractions?

All in all, this storm isn't bad. I'm not leaving the house or nothing, I mean except to get my UPS, but it's not bad. At least I'm still able to type and publish this, despite the one second power outage. When you won't hear from me is when the cheerful morning shows announce the arrival of the "Nasty Bitch-Ass Fo-Shizzle Nor'Eastin' Mutherfu'er." I'll be hiding in the bas'ment.

Welcome to Hotel Turkey Breast

New FoodMaster specials

Remember when I blogged about the cool movies being projected onto the back wall of the FoodMaster in our backyard? No? Well get the hell back into the archives and find it! I think it's on livejournal.

I took this photo a few days ago from our back deck. The neighbors downstairs have installed a local area FM transmitter on the laptop playing the DVD, so they can listen in silence at any time of the night. The project is not even noticeable from our house unless we go to the window and look out.

Black Person iPod

iPod nano is about to rock my world. But I was a little taken aback by this invoice email from Apple:

 Item Product   Product Description       Total   Total   Unit       Extended
      Number                              Ordered Shipped Price      Price 
 001  PA107LL/A IPOD NANO 4G BLACK PERSON 1       1       249.00     249.00
                SerialNo.: ( XXXXXXXXXXXX )

Black Person iPod? Racist - isn't it?

Shake Your Punk Ass

If you've ever wondered what I would look like in a mini-skirt, dancing insanely to KISS ... it's time you found out:

Thanks (?) to iTunes and Cingular (archive.org hosting of original http://makemedance.com).

Foodmaster Food Pyramid

The Foodmaster has a pretty high-tech receipt printing system, for such an overall low-tech (and some might say low-brow) grocery store. In addition to printing out an itemized list of everything you just bought, the Foodmaster receipt printing system separates them all by category. This is sort of like how some credit card statements break down what you bought into handy groups. At the Foodmaster, this means that as you're leaving the store, you can reflect on the weight of your alcohol purchases compared to everything else.

Of course, the Foodmaster's high-tech system doesn't make things too complicated. At first, I thought there were actually only four categories in place: meat, grocery, produce, and beer. If that isn't an advertisement for America then I don't know what is. Whoever came up with these categories obviously thought that wine was just a glorified, purple beer. "BEER - Napa Ridge Cab" and "BEER - R.R. Chardonnay" mark recent receipts.

As a vegetarian, I'm fortunate that my white-trash neighborhood supermarket is hip enough to stock at least a few veggie-boy feel-good necessities. Walking out the market door one evening I glanced down at my receipt. "I bought meat?" Sure enough, there it was on my receipt, "MEAT - Smart Dogs" and "MEAT - LOL Swiss Cheese." The LOL stands for "Land-O-Lakes," but in this context, it sounds like the store is having a fun internet chat with me ... "MEAT - Laugh Out Loud! Haha I'm fucking with you, I'm going to put swiss cheese in the meat section!"

I imagined some poor stock boy laboriously deciding which of these four food groups to classify newly stocked products in. I imagined him staring deeply at the tofu dogs for a minute or two before finally deciding that anything shaped like a hot dog is more meat than grocery. And cheese, it comes from an animal. Meat comes from an animal. Case closed.

Then I noticed that there are more categories than just the "Big 4" outlined above. There are actually tons of categories. I don't know if I've even exhausted them all, because they're so random and pointless. There's the "DELI" category, into which a package of ordinary water crackers falls (even though it was boxed and cellophane-wrapped just like any other "grocery" product). Then there's the DAIRY ... why didn't the fucking cheese end up in dairy? Dairy is apparently reserved for liquid dairy. Solid dairy is meat, and frozen dairy has its own category as well: "FROZEN FOOD." Well this little beauty of a category is helpful. I'm glad to know that frozen peas, ice cream, and a frozen side of ribs all belong to the same organization.

That's all for now, I'm off to enjoy a nice glass of room-temperature purple beer, some swiss cheese meat, and crackers fresh from the factory, via the deli, but shelved on the other side of the store from the deli.

Thanks for making life interesting, Foodmaster.