{"id":202,"date":"2000-07-19T17:00:00","date_gmt":"2000-07-19T17:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/2000\/07\/19\/the_ugly_truth\/"},"modified":"2024-12-01T19:56:09","modified_gmt":"2024-12-02T03:56:09","slug":"the_ugly_truth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/2000\/07\/19\/the_ugly_truth\/","title":{"rendered":"The Ugly Truth"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Despite what you may think,<\/strong> things are not very glamorous here in the <a href=\"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/img\/varet.jpg\">Rumpus Room<\/a>. After reading <a href=\"http:\/\/www.psionic.nu\/2000_07_16_psionicarchive.htm#495743\" name=\"Psionic\">Tim&#8217;s theory<\/a> that we designers work in incredibly pristine areas, and then going to look at the impossibly sexy <a title=\"Honey, I shrunk the supercomputer\" href=\"http:\/\/www.apple.com\/powermaccube\/\">Apple G4 Cube<\/a>, I took a look at myself and my desk. This is the sad truth about why I don&#8217;t want a webcam recording me (not for the squeamish):<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>I sit here in boxer shorts, black socks, and a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.hanes.com\/home\/0.html\">Hanes<\/a> t-shirt, because I never bothered to put other clothes back on after stripping off my office wear today. My eyes were hurting, so I\u2019m wearing my glasses which are held together with a dab of hot glue in one of the hinges. sexy!<\/li>\n<li>I am slaving away at my old and dusty PowerMac 6500, which rises out of a heap of junk on my desk. I have just enough room to place a glass of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.coke.com\">Coke<\/a> and a plate of cheese and crackers to have for dinner while I work. The pile of junk includes a stack of bills I am ignoring, marked-up proofs of a few jobs I\u2019m doing, bunches of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.polaroid.com\">Polaroids<\/a>, all the mail I\u2019ve gotten in the last two months, and nail clippers to use during long downloads. sleek!<\/li>\n<li>I have a stool made from a bicycle seat next to my desk chair. The stool prevents me from walking over the weak spot in the floor that is about to collapse, because I don&#8217;t want to step in the dirt floor below the rotting plywood. Glamorous!<\/li>\n<li>I look over the top of the laptop I use for all of my porno&#8230;er, journal-writing, and I see a pile of previously worn pants and shorts growing on top of my dresser. This is next to the pile of dirty laundry on the floor, which sits there because I haven&#8217;t removed last week&#8217;s clean laundry from the laundry bag yet. That is sitting in the middle of the TV-watching area, by the Chinese take-out menus. sophisticated!<\/li>\n<li>I can hear the whispers of the dust bunnies as they grow in size, strength, and number. Send help if you I ever disappear altogether. Swanky!<\/li>\n<li>And I don&#8217;t even want to get started on the biological disaster area that is my kitchen.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><!-- <img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/img\/combover.jpg\" width=\"125\" height=\"139\" align=\"right\" hspace=\"3\" vspace=\"3\" \/>In other news, my friend Dave sent me a recent <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sears.com\">Sears<\/a> portrait of him with his two brothers \u2014 Michael, the shiksa-marrier with the heart of gold, and Ira, the medical student we suspect of being a gold-digger. I asked Dave about the weird dark spot on his head that I noticed, and he responded with this delightful anecdote:\n\n\n<blockquote>The splotch is a bet I have with Michelle [his girlfriend] (she started it, honest!): $100 that I won't grow in a comb-over. It was my idea to shave everything else as usual, but grow in a strip along the left side of my head that will eventually grow long enough to cover my embarrassing bald spot. I\u2019m about 3 weeks in, and reaction is confused, for the most part. Mikey is very angry and wants to pay me the $100 now to shave it off \u2014 there were some very tense moments leading up to the photo session, because I refused to cut it off. In the end, I assured him I could <a href=\"http:\/\/www.adobe.com\/products\/photoshop\/main.html\">Photoshop<\/a> it out and make sears-quality prints for everyone. (I won't take his money, of course, although I have considered taking it and letting him know that it will finance a new tattoo, so maybe he'll finally understand that I\u2019m a big boy and know what I\u2019m doing). Daisy [another friend of ours] is preparing to start a collection and match anyone who offers me the $$$ to stop to keep me going. I get stares on the T and walking down the street, but for now I think it's kind of funny. I\u2019m sure I'll get bored long before it goes all the way across and drop it.<\/blockquote>\n\n --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Despite what you may think, things are not very glamorous here in the Rumpus Room. After reading Tim&#8217;s theory that we designers work in incredibly pristine areas, and then going to look at the impossibly sexy Apple G4 Cube, I took a look at myself and my desk. This is the sad truth about why &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/2000\/07\/19\/the_ugly_truth\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;The Ugly Truth&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-202","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ultrapersonal"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/202","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=202"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/202\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":77436,"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/202\/revisions\/77436"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=202"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=202"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=202"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}