Probability that I'm male: 99%

Actuality: I'm female.

I think it was the Newegg, Slashdot, and BoingBoing that did it. Geeks are male, dontchaknow.

Oh gloriosky, I can buy the book as an ebook, online, as of tomorrow. I won't say where, lest that be interpreted as shilling, but OH MY, ebooks are making headway when books just out are available in e format.

I always prefer my trilogies as ebooks :)

I wasn't watching the girls -- I was watching the GUY. I have embraced my inner dirty-old-lady. Who is he?

If you're poor enough, you can't afford processed food. I buy rolled oats, beans, peanut butter, and rice from my health food coop, bake my own bread, and, as others have suggested, make huge pots of bean soup and freeze it in meal-size portions. I'm also experimenting with baking the bread as rolls, so I can just store bags of rolls in the freezer and defrost a roll when I need it.

I have to be careful with the fruits and vegetables, however. I can afford only the cheapest, commonest kinds, on sale.

My biggest indulgence is King Arthur White Whole Wheat flour, which I mix with supermarket white bread flour.

The court ladies of Japan's early Heian period shaved off their eyebrows. They would either pencil in perfect arches way above the natural position OR they would add forehead smudges, in black paint, also way above the natural position.

You can see pictures of Heian robes and makeup at

http://www.clotheslinejournal.com/heian.html.

BTW, they also blackened their teeth.

Perhaps you should go for a look of glorious artificiality, like the Heian court ladies. You could set a style!

I try to keep the Buddhist precepts. I don't lie.

However, it seems to be accepted that interviewees WILL lie. If you tell the truth about yourself (and you do have faults; you're human) you're assumed to minimizing a problem that is much worse than you will admit. If you say, "I'm sometimes at a loss when dealing with angry people," that's understood as "I'm so grotesquely clumsy in interpersonal interactions that no one can stand me."

So if you don't want to lie, and hate lying by omission, you're going to be feeling awkward and clumsy during the interview, and rejected for that reason.

Is it really true that employers want charming liars with no conscience? People who can lie with panache?

I #@$%@# hate the whole #$%@#$% interview process.

Can we have a killfile function? So that if one commenter is consistently a waste of space, we never have to see him/her/it again?

Cory, MEGO. I won't read paragraphs that long and dense. Was that the point?

It could be that the upstairs neighbor is unreasonably noisy ... or it could be that the LW is too sensitive. We aren't there, so we can't tell.

Many years ago, I visited a friend who had a lovely apartment in Chicago. It had one big drawback, she told me; the upstairs neighbors were incredibly noisy. So, we're talking and she interrupts me: "Do you hear that? There they go again!"

I could hear a faint scratching above me. I wouldn't even have noticed it if she hadn't called my attention to it.

It could be that they *were* too noisy at times, that she had grown sensitive, and now everything set her off. Dunno. From what I heard then, I could only conclude that she was being unreasonable.

Years ago, an environmentalist friend visited, read the ingredients list on the shampoo bottle, and said, "How can you put that STUFF on your hair?" So I went to the health food store and bought a bottle of something that was guaranteed to be safe, environmental, and full of herbal extracts.

I developed eczema on every bit of skin that the shampoo had touched. Now I buy the cheapest supermarket shampoo, which doesn't give me itchy pustule-covered skin.

I once had a boring job. Sorting and filing. Boring. I remembered how boring meditation retreats could be, and how helpful in relaxing and slowing down, and decided to treat the boring job as a retreat. Breath goes in and out. Papers go into the sorter. A, C, E. Breath goes in and out. Papers. Breath.

Can you practice being bored at meditation retreats, and then extend this to the meeting retreats?

I don't have a boring job now, but I practice being bored when I'm stuck behind people in traffic or in a supermarket aisle.

"Classes, lectures, speeches, and meetings are some of the primary ways that ideas are conveyed, discussed, and evaluated."

Yes, and they are DAMN SLOW if you're a fast reader and used to absorbing ideas at reading speed. Given a choice between ten minutes watching an interview online or two minutes to read the transcript, I'll pick the transcript every time. Heck, one minute to skim the transcript if the interview is superficial.

The LW might be happier telecommuting.

Hmmm. I don't think Microsoft Reader was the early entrant. Surely that had to be the readers for PalmOS. Mobipocket, the predecessor to eReader, Plucker, iSilo. Peanut Press, which sold books for the Palm PDAs, was the earliest successful ebookstore, I believe. (Me, I've been reading ebooks since 2003, as well as helping Distributed Proofreaders make free ebooks.)

But I could be wrong. I started reading on a Palm PDA.

The net enables impulse bookbuying at 2 AM, when my defenses are down ... alas!

But on the whole, it allows me to do comparison shopping, save the links, and ponder the purchase. When I look for a specific want or need, I'm not as exposed to other temptations.