Cornell's new password policy is 4NNoy1ng^10


So the whole law school thing is beginning to feel real finally. I went up to Ithaca this weekend and found this great little one bedroom apartment in a very convenient location on State - right next to a bus stop, actually. In fact, I've barely moved from where I was in undergrad; my landlord said his tenants do their laundry in the Valentine facilty because it's so convenient. I'm hyped about having my own place. For the first time I'm living with just me myself and I. No more roommates fussing about dirty dishes if I have a busy week. No more turning the TV volume way down low because the housemate is asleep. No more trying to get roommate permission if I want to have somebody come over. It's great!! And it's a partially furnished apartment; specifically there's a double bed which looks in pretty good shape. Since the bed was the most expensive piece of furniture (I'm dumping my current mattress in the trash on the way out - it was a freebie and isn't worth paying to move) I'm feeling pretty well set up. And the current tenant may be willing to part with his futon and coffee table cheap, I'm told, which would be great, since they are also fairly nice pieces.

I also went through the process of activating my net ID tonight. Cornell's done changed things quite a bit in the two years I've been gone. For instance, on-campus residences still have "free" internet access, but they are limited to 2 GB of traffic per month. And above that they bill you per MB. Ouch! I mean obviously they're trying to stop the trafficing of copyrighted material, which I can understand. Still, it seems like 2 GB is not that much . . . . even if you downloading a lot of illegal stuff. But I don't really know. Stuff on the cornell network, including email, is not included in that 2 GB.

In order to activate your netID you have to read through their policies, and take a little quiz at the end. Apparently Cornell owns their email infrastructure now, and they put out this spiel that they respect the rights of all individuals, but they also have to comply with the law, and while they will not monitor your traffic w/o reason, they also will not guaranty the privacy of whatever is on their system, including emails.

It was interesting though - you could tell that the policy probably had two main parties giving very vehement input about it: the laywers and the tech guys. Or at least their university equivalents. Because the whole 2 GB thing, and Cornell's other warnings, is clearly aimed at curbing pirating. However, there is another section of the policy that basically makes failing to adequately secure your computer as bad an offense as pirating things. I can understand the logic in that - failing to adequately protect against viruses endangers the whole network, not just one dumb user.

Still, I think they took the adequately securing your system thing one step too far with their new netID password policy. The rules are something as follows:

**Must include at least 3 of the 4 following things: Upper case, lowercase, symbol, number and be at least 8 characters long
**Must not have in any part of it your netID or ANY word which would appear in the dictionary
** simple L33T (or however you spell that) substitutions are insufficient.

They suggest taking the first letters of the words in a line from a poem and then mixing it up for instance. Now, while I grant that many people are not as secure as they should be w/ their tasswords, and that by adhering to the above rules it certainly seems like you would get pretty darn secure passwords, it seems a bit overboard. I mean, I had to type my password down in a file anyway, to make sure I could remember what it was after I set it! Now that's not particularly secure, is it?

And the simple l33t substitutions not working gets me too. As an example, I tried something similar to, oh, let's say "har3mRy&". And that was not secure enough. However when I changed the word to something like h4r3m&ry and that was okay. ("Harem" btw. I'm not fluent in l33t - I don't think that's even how you spell it actually it looks wrong.)

I mean, okay, so you can write computer programs to count on the leet substitutions I guess . . . but I was just thinking yeesh, if I had read this policy as a freshmen I think I would have been so intimidated I never would have touched a computer.

Anyway, I am very glad I'm not living on campus after all, because the whole 2GB thing really turns me off.

"I cannot in good conscience support such discrimination."

So I told my landlady almost a month ago that I would be moving out on July 2nd - well over a month's notice. Now there's no lease on this apartment - there's not even a written agreement. Everything is verbal. She has a 2nd floor apartment and a 3rd floor apartment, but she essentially rents each room separately. My housemate Brenda has been here about 4 years and had 3 or 4 roommates. I myself found the place by checking postings on craigslist. Zophie, the landlady, is a nice older lady, and I've enjoyed living here, so I offered to help them find a renter by posting the room on craigslist. They agreed.

I had oringally posted the ad with Brenda's email and Zophie's number, but since most people seemed to be emailing Brenda (who wasn't communicating with Zophie) rather than calling, and Zophie was annoyed with Brenda for other reasons, Zophie requested that I take Brenda's email off the posting and just put up the phone number for herself and her son's cell.

Well, since there's no lease and it's not like Brenda is responsible for the 2nd 1/2 of the rent if the room doesn't get rented, I figured that was pretty reasonable. So I did so. But I guess people were still responding to the old posting w/ Brenda's email, or else she'd already arranged things, because Thursday night a very nice black lady comes and looks at the apartment. She had made the contact through Brenda, who apparently hadn't informed Zophie. So the potential renter sees Zophie in the yard as she comes up and introduces herself.

The next morning as I'm getting ready for work, Zophie and her son come up to talk to me. Brenda had already left for work. Basically Zophie expressed her frustration with Brenda, saying that it was not Brenda's place to rent, and no matter how nice that "colored" lady was, she wasn't going to rent to her. So far I just figured Zophie's reason was because she was upset Brenda hadn't gone through her, which I could understand. But then Zophie launches into this discussion about how it's her apartment and she wants to rent, and how these two "colored" girls at one point came and looked at the apartment, and they said they liked it and they wanted it, and Zophie was like "what going to do?" and so "I double the rent." And apparently after Zophie doubled the rent on the girls, they *still* wanted the apartment. So Zophie told them it wasn't going to be ready or something, in order to not have to rent to them.

At a couple points Zophie's son tried to interrupt her, and say something more vague, like "It's just better if mother chooses, because there are all kinds of people who might rent."

Anyway nothing much happened of the conversation; I told them I would repost the ad that day on my lunch break. But the more I thought about the conversation the more it bothered me. I mean, was there really any other way to interpret what she was saying? Her first statement about not renting to the "colored" lady that came thursday to look at the apartment I could excuse away as being annoyance with Brenda rather than prejudice, but there doesn't seem to be any other way to explain the doubling the rent story.

So I wrote Zophie a brief note, saying that due to her two statements ...........and....... I felt that she was discriminating against African Americans, and that such discrimination was against the law, and that I was under no obligation to help her, and could not in good conscience support such discrimination, and therefore I would not be posting the ad online. I dropped the note in Zophie's mailbox immediately before leaving for the weekend - I admit I was a bit of a chicken and didn't want to confront or be confronted by Zophie.

I've had pangs of doubt this weekend when I think about it, a little anxiety in wondering about Zophie's reaction, I guess because I just don't want to believe what I heard. I want to have misinterpreted something. But I don't think I did. The only explanation I can come up with for Zophie's behaviour relies on another ethnic type-casting on my part: Zophie is a Polish immigrant, still speaks with a very heavy accent, so perhaps in Poland their population is not as heterogenous and therefore they weren't taught that racial prejudices are bad.

I feel a little embarrassed about that explanation - as reasonable as it seems - because it seems like what I'm trying to do is say "she's not really an American, American's aren't bigoted like that." Which as much as we'd like it to be true, isn't entirely true. I can think of born-and-bred red blood Americans at home who make the comment "There are blacks, and then there are niggers." Which I suppose is a rather offensive way of trying to say that it's about how somebody acts (and maybe dresses) rather than the color of the skin . . . but it still has some racial prejudice in there.

So yeah, sort of a rather unpleasant look at the problems still facing our country today.

"Can I have a beer? It's for my hair."

That has to be one of the oddest requests I've ever gotten - Brenda wanted to use one of my old Oktoberfests (I've got 2 left that have been in the back of the fridge since I burned out on the brew last fall). She claims they're great for her hair - but it has to be flat and stale, so she opened it up and left it on the counter until morning. *shakes head*

Ah, good ol' Sam Adams. Soooo much better on tap though than in a bottle. You can't really get it in mid-Missouri. When I ask, they think I'm crazy.

And that actually is just serving as a poor bridge to talking about my visit home.

Which was quite nice. I got a lot of nephew time in . My sister picked me up at the airport, and then she and my nephew Noah and I headed over to the hospital to see my brother-in-law, who had a diabetic episode the weekend before and had been admitted. So that afternoon my sister and her husband were talking a lot with the doctor, learning the nitty gritty about his condition, and learning how to give Matt his insulin shots - this is the first he's learned he's diabetic. I'm not crazy about needles, and Noah the 2 1/2 year old has a lot of energy and can be a bit disturbing, so Noah and I wandered the hospital while Matt was learning about his disease.

It was fun actually. It's the first time I've had a chance to spend one-on-one time with Noah when there weren't other sisters around oohing and ahhing. My old children's museum training kicked in. We were nominally looking for the mythical "children's table of toys" in the ER, but we never got there. Noah enjoyed pressing the button in the elevator (just the one, not all of them), and we wandered into the cafeteria and "counted" the cars in this painting on the wall, and I got him to "count" in Chinese with me. I use quoatations because he hasn't gotten one-to-one correspondence down, to use the lingo. In other words, he just knows numbers as this sequence of words, he doesn't really understand that "one" means one thing. But that's normal at his age. So he picked up the sequence of words in Chinese pretty darn well - he mimiced my tones perfectly w/o a pause. He did have trouble with the word for 5, which is "wooo". He couldn't purse his lips to get the "ooo" sound.

We had fun crawling around and looking under chairs in the deserted waiting room - Noah discovered that when he peeked under one chair, he could see me peeking under the other chair at the end of the row, and that made him giggle. And we played with hopping and jumping a bit instead of walking. His coordination isn't that good yet. Later after my parents got there, all of us went out to the hospital's rock garden, and while they all sat on benches and talked, Noah and I played some more. He was scrambling around a bit on the rocks - well not really scrambling, but slowly picking his way across. I was 1/2 afraid his mother was going to be like "Cecelia, you shouldn't let him do that" but perhaps I'm just paranoid. I was ready to catch him if need be. in fact up in the hall I had a nice catch; I was sitting on the floor spread-eagled, and Noah came toward me, only he didn't realize my leg was in the way and tripped. But I neatly caught him before he fell.

I like horseplaying a bit with him - very gently, since he is still a toddler. But I think it's an important part of every child's development. I think especially with the first child parents tend to be afraid to do stuff, because they're afraid they child is so delicate and are terrified of him getting hurt. Not my sister so much - Noah has a knack for getting places he shouldn't and so she knows he's a tough little guy. But like parents I saw at the children's museum. It's so important for a child to be able to explore, learn, and yes, maybe get a little hurt. It's vital to letting them grow up with a sense of self-confidence and self-reliance. When a parent is hovering over them every second, "no honey you might hurt yourself", they lose a lot of opportunity. I mean of course I'm not advocating carelessness either - it's good to let your child try, while being close by to help if it gets too bad. It's a balance, of course. :-D

And to top it all off, Noah has learned my name, sort of. I told my sisters that they should call me "Aunt Celia" to their sons, instead of "Cecelia" which is a bit too much to handle. Noah has trouble with "L" sounds anyway, so it comes out this warbled "Seya" but that's good enough for me. ;-)

Alex is adorable too, and I don't mean to give him the short shift, but this is really long already, so I'll have to leave gushing about him for another time.

"It's not how long you've been gone, it's how many kitchens you've organized in between."

One time when I was still living at home, one of my sisters was visiting and had trouble remembering where to put away a certain pot. I gave her a hard time saying that she hadn't been away for that many years. And she joked, "It's not how long you've been gone, it's how many kitchens you've organized in between." I'm beginning to be that way myself. I walked into my Mom's kitchen last night intending to grab a paper towel, and had to pause for a moment to remember where she kept them. (On the inside door of the cabinet below the sink.) I've learned the pot-and-pan layout for essentially 6 different kitchens since the last time I was living at home full time, so I guess that's my excuse.

Mom and Dad are not the type of people to keep things the same, so over the years there have been a number of changes around the home farm. But this time around the changes are the most drastic. The 50 year old house, built my grandfather, is not in good shape. For one thing the brick foundation has been buckling for years, causing water problems in the basement and ruining the carpet in the 1/2 that was finished down there. The time had come for extreme majors, so this winter my parents tore out all the wall paneling and carpet, and a foundation recovery crew came in and braced the foundation with large steel plates. The plates are connected to a rod which extends 10 feet away from the house and has another large steel plate on the end, so that if the wall wants to buckle it has to pull 10 feet of dirt with it. The plates are placed at frequent intervals all around the wall. Pealing away the paneling and carpet revealed to the naked eye just how bad the buckling and cracks were, and it's pretty scary. But it should hold now.

However, when the basement was finished it had one bedroom and what was essentially Mom's work room, with the sewing machine, her office space, and the piano. Dad said we went from 1800 feet of finished space to 1200 feet. So they sent off to the auction two sets of bedroom furniture (including "mine") and kept what they felt was the best set. One of the upstairs bedrooms has become Mom's office and sewing space, and the piano has gone into the living room. So my bedroom is the only guest bedroom now with this bed that's not my bed, and the baby crib is set up in one corner, and there's no dresser at all, and there's an extra mattress leaning against the wall. Meanwhile a section of the ceiling in that room, which has been buckling for my entire life (it's this ancient weird paneling ceiling) is now at an almost alarming angle. I suppose the worst that will happen if the paneling falls down is a bunch of insulation dumping on the bed - it's not the actual ceiling structure that's the problem. But still.

And the big project for the summer is helping my dad finish the addition to the house. They've already gotten someone to pour the concrete foundation for it; we're trying to get the shingle siding off the side of the house and the floor laid on the foundation, and then when the professional finally gets here in July, all he has to do is the difficult stuff like building the walls and making them fit tightly against the old house. Until the addition is finished, the mess inside the house won't get sorted out.

And there are two big trees that we've lost, the first because of the work they did on the foundation, and the second because of the addition to the house. One was the old tire swing tree, and one was the old regular swing tree. We used to have 6 trees and one cherry tree in our yard; this latest chopping brings us down to 2 trees and the cherry tree. Luckily so far the treehouse tree has remained intact. Mom and Dad have planted more trees, but it will be a long time before they're as big as the 4 that we lost, and I would be very sad if the grandchildren had no trees to climb, since that was one of my favorite childhood activities.

So with the huge upheaval that's going on around here, my whole long post a week or so ago about being the one to redo my room is largely irrelevant. They didn't touch the posters on the wall but they changed all the furniture - and just about everything else in the house! It's kind of amusing actually.

The one nice thing is that having the piano upstairs makes it easier to just randomly sit down and play. Well not easier so much - it wasn't much effort to go downstairs, although it would be now since they closed up the spiral staircase so you'd have to go the long way around through the back steps - but just more inviting. And Mom and Dad enjoy hearing me play, even though I make a lot of mistakes. They don't really get to hear anyone use the piano except when I come home. I mean, all of my sisters and I can play the piano, but I'm the only one that really has much downtime when I'm here. When the other three come they are coming for a more specific reason, and they don't usually spend the night, since they live close enough to just go home. So they never really get around to sitting down and playing. And Mom can play, but she doesn't have much time, and if she does, it's never when Dad's around to hear it.

In fact I think I'll go play now - or at least right after I shower.

Heehee, this is actually the best one of these I've seen yet for Missouri. I like the fact that "float trip" is number 1 . . . the number of people that I've had to explain what a float trip is! It's one of the few speech habits that is as thoroughly engrained now as it was before I left for college. Perhaps because there's no northeastern equivalent. It's not necessarily rafting, and "canoe trip" is too boy-scoutish for the typical float trip experience.

1.Everyone in your family has been on a "Float trip." Even better, we used to take family float trips. With the extended family. Aunts uncles cousins and all - and we're a big German family.
2. "Vacation" means driving to Silver Dollar City, Worlds of Fun or Six Flags.
3. Down south to you means Arkansas.
4. The phrase, "I'm going to the Lake this weekend," can mean only one thing. Lake of the Ozarks.
5. You know what "Party Cove" is. (If you know where, you are a boating party animal)
6. You think Missouri is pronounced with an "ah" at the end. Okay, I'm beginning to think they must teach this one at MU or something cuz it's always on this list but my classmates didn't call it that growing up . . . unless you're doing a cheer at an MU sports event.
7. You know in your heart that Mizzou can beat Nebraska in football. And they did in 2004, at home, for the first time in I think 25 years!
8. You think I-44 is spelled "foarty-foar." (St. Louis Only)
9. You'll pay for your kids to go to college unless they want to go to KU. I'm proud to say I was born and raised on Tiger basketball . . . Tigers eat Jayhawks for dinner!
10. You know that Concordia is halfway between Kansas City and Columbia, and Columbia is halfway between St. Louis and Kansas City, and Warrenton outlet mall is halfway between Columbia and St. Louis. And they're all along the I-70 corridor as you cross the state.)
11. You can't think of anything better than sitting on the porch in the middle of the summer during a thunderstorm.
12. You know that Harry S. Truman, Walt Disney and Mark Twain are all from Missouri. Their pictures were on my wall with a map of Missouri freshman year of college.
13. You know what "cow tipping" or "Possum Kicking" is.
14. You think "frog gigging" should be an Olympic sport. Uh, I don't know what this is.
15. You think Imo's is larger than Pizza Hut. Well let's not get carried away . . .
16. You can tell the difference between a horse and a cow from a distance.
17. You don't put too much effort into hairstyles due to wind and weather. Hee hee, that's my excuse.
18. There's a tornado warning and the whole town is outside watching for it.
19. The local gas station sells live bait.
20. Little smokies are something you serve on special occasions. Again with the not-knowing.
21 All your radio preset buttons are country. Damn straight skippy!! Every radio station from Rhode Island to Ithaca on preset . . .
22. You know enough to get your driving done early on Sundays before the Sunday drivers come out. Yeah, but I'll take the old ladies on their way to church over Mass-holes any day. And that's a Massachussetts joke, not a Catholic joke!!
23. You actually get these jokes and pass them on to other friends from Missouri.

"That's got to be the most advanced burger order ever."


I had a pretty good weekend, actually. Rob came down and we decided to do a bit of NYC touristy things. It was nice because instead of exhausting ourselves we just did a couple things each day. Saturday we slept in late, and went into the city in the afternoon. We took the Staten Island Ferry out across to get a good view of the Statue of Liberty - which was all the better because it was *free*. And then we went up to Hard Rock Cafe and ate an early dinner. The food was pretty good and surprisingly not that overpriced. I mean, it is NYC, so when you take that into account, it really wasn't more than a dollar or two more than what I'd expect at any restaurant. The waiter was very accomodating in trying to get whatever we wanted, which was good because I was essentially trying to create a bacon mushroom swiss cheeseburger even though it wasn't on the menu. They had a bacon cheeseburger though and "add mushrooms" was one of the options at the top of the burger section, so it wasn't that bad, except for the sauce. I couldn't think what kind of sauce it is they usually put on those - its reddish, something horseraddish maybe? And the waiter clearly had no idea what I was trying to describe. So it came out "okay, add mushrooms, and then just mayo on the side, with lettuce but no tomato", (except probably less succinct). Rob was laughing out loud at me, and the waiter joked "that's the most advanced burger order ever." Good thing all three of us had sense of humor! :-)

After that we went into FAO Schwartz and were completely amazed at the stuff you can get there. For instance, a life size giraffe stuffed toy or a life-size elephant stuffed toy, for around $15,000 each. The kicker was a child-sized Ferrari, with a working gas engine, brakes, suspension, steering, lights-horn-turn signal, and so on, for . . . . . how much do you think? How much??


Answer: $50,000. Ouch! If you spend that much on your kid when he's 7, what are you going to spend on him when he's 17??? So it was an interesting day.

Chrysler and ESB
Then on Sunday we got up early and took an 8am train into the city to beat the lines to the Empire State Building. Our plan worked perfectly. We got there about 9:30am, and the we only waited 20 minutes or so to get to the top. There was a bit of a bottleneck towards the front of the line, because they take these geeky pictures of you next to this ESB backdrop - and everybody has to take one. The catch is when you come down from the observation deck, they try to get you to buy the photos. I don't understand the point, really - you get much cooler photos for free from the top if you bring your own camera. But they insist that every group gets their photo taken. Apparently someone in front of us tried to argue, because the camera lady said in a loud threatening voice worthy of a cop show, "Everyone gets their picture taken!" The "Or you're gonna get some @$$ whupping" hung unsaid but understood.

It was a beautiful day to go to the top of the observatory. It was a little hazy in the distance, but we could still see 15-20 miles, or so the board said at the bottom. The sun was bright and hot, but luckily since it was early in the day not too hot. I'd been up with my parents in March, but today was a lot better day for it. I kind of pointed out a few landmarks to Rob, and chuckled to myself at two woman who were trying to convince each other they knew what they were talking about but obviously didn't, since they had 5th Ave going up the west side of Central Park instead of the East side. Rob was mostly just interested in the view; this was his top thing-to-do in New York (aside from all those comedy shows we can't get tix to), so he enjoyed it. And took lots of pictures.

It was wierd though; when we got home and downloaded the pictures from his camera, it kind of made me a little sick to look at all those ugly buildings stretching out into oblivion. The shots with the Chrysler building in it were good - the Chrysler building is one of the few truly beautiful buildings in NYC, in my opinion. Much cooler than the ESB for looks. But you can't go up it, and it doesn't have an open air deck at the top either, so the ESB is a better destination. I commented to Rob about how it kind of turned my stomach to see all those buildings in the photos, and he was like "Yeah, it doesn't really look breathtaking the way it does when you're there. It just kind of looks ugly." I guess it's because we've all seen plenty of pictures taken from way up high, so looking at them doesn't impress us; we just see what there is to be seen. When you're way up high though, it's just cool to be high in the air, particularly in the open air.

So then we walked down in search of this little place fairly close to the ESB that supposedly had bubble tea and dumplings. I was hyped, because I've really been wanting good zhaozi - dumplings or potstickers, as they are apparently called in the US. (For a long time after I came back from China I didn't know the English word for them.) I was a bit curious how good it would turn out - it was called Rickshaw, which I thought was a bit of a bad sign, since rickshaws are an Indian thing generally speaking. I mean, there were these things in Beijing that we called rickshaws for lack of another term; instead of two wheels and a guy running they had three wheels, with the guy pedaling to power the rig. But anyway, the place turned out to be clean and have decent dumplings, but no bubble tea. They did however have green tea milkshakes - very happa, as El would say.

(Which most people reading this will get why, but just in case, "happa" signifies something like "mixed breed", and many Asians - not Asian Americans but East Asians - are lactose intolerant. Dairy products simply aren't a part of the diet the way they are in the West. When did you last see cheese in a traditional Chinese dish? So a green tea milkshake is kind of weird.)

So after the ESP and the dumplings, we came home, and packed up some of my stuff into Rob's car. And that was the weekend. It was pretty nice.

What a week at work!! One of the other paras is on vacation for two weeks, and she happens to be on the firm's biggest case, and there happen to be two depositions in that case next week. So I'm filling in for her while she's gone. Aiya. I was on cruise control, prepared for a slow month until the end of the job, and then I took this on. The associate on this case seems to non-stop have things for me to do, none of which are remotely hard, all of which involve organizing the evidence / exhibits we're going to use in the case. But they are time-consuming, and he asks for one thing after another so I'm constantly on the go. It's nice because it takes up the time - but this afternoon it sucked. The office clears out very early on Friday (normal closing time is 6:30 but starting in may the office is often almost cleared by 5:30 of attorneys. Today by 5pm John was the only attorney left, and we'd gotten the go-ahead from the last partner that the paras could leave if John didn't need us. *sigh* unfortunately, he chose that time to come up with a horde of documents that had just been emailed to him which we needed to print out, assemble, and send off to be bates-stamped (stamped with serial numbers, each page a unique #) to be returned Monday first thing. This wouldn't have been an issue except for the problems with our copier / printer, and the fact that the paras have ancient computers. So it took us right up to 6:30pm to get all of that done, and that was all 3 paras working. Then John was like "okay I'm leaving, make sure you finish looking through those documents." He didn't say it that way, he said basically that he'd verified we had all the documents assembled that we needed for the depo, but he wanted me to go through the outline and be sure.

On a Friday at closing time. *groan* I mean I knew prior that I'd had to do this . . . in fact I'd had all day theoretically to do that which is probably what he was thinking. But in practical terms it hadn't happened because of the other things he was asking me for, and because I couldn't start organizing / verifying things until he had finished looking through them, and he hadn't finished until mid-afternoon, and then he popped this other project on me.

So that sucked.

But I didn't stay. Everybody else left, and twenty minutes later i was like "screw that, I'll come in early on monday and finish up". My mind wasn't in it . . . I had to check the set against Les's outline (the partner hadnling the depo) and his outline is not . . . well . . . sometimes it takes some deciphering to figure out which document he's referencing. And this is stuff I'll have to know, because it's my job during the depo to pull the documents and hand the off to the attorneys at the appropriate junctures (yes, this is my job, strictly organizing except for the rare spot of research) So anyway, whether or not John told me to do this, i was going to have to do it. but I just didn't feel like doing it tonight. I wasn't focusing on what I was reading in the outline, and I was in a hurry, and I could tell it was kind of pointless to bother.

But I'm going to have to get to work at like 8 at the latest on Monday. *groans*

Oh well, I'll skip the make-up and hair routine and nap on the train on the way in.

I love the way Home Depot smells - which I guess can be more accurately stated as I love the way freshly cut wood smells. I'm packing up my apartment already, so I went by there today to get some duct tape. Incidentally, which section would you put duct tape in? I walked in, looked at the signs - "Garden" "Hardware" "Tools" and thought "huh. It could be in anyone of those. It's duct tape." So I just asked - apparently the Home Depot people get around this difficulty by putting it in several sections. (And for anyone who feels like arguing about placing duct tape in "tools", remember MacGyver?)

Anyway, I'm on a tangent. I was trying to say just how much I like Home Depot. I just walk around and look at the paint and the garden tools and dream of vegetable gardens and a house I can redecorate. Something about that Home Depot smell just makes me feel happy. As Rob put it "It's the smell of productivity." But a nice kind of productivity - the fixing up your own little spot of land type.

And that got me thinking about Rob and I. For all the things we don't have in common, on a not-so-basic level our dreams are very similar. We both like Home Depot because we're both the type of people who dream about a place of our own, with some space and some privacy, that we can fix up, mow the grass around, and just generally do all those nice home-owner-y type things. In some respects it might be a little surprising that such an image is appealing to me, because all growing up I dreamed of traveling the world. At graduation my sister said something about being surprised, because she hadn't seen me as the settling down type, but when she saw me with Rob it just seemed to fit. The thing is traveling is a lot nicer when you know that eventually there's somewhere familiar and comfortable and happy to return to and feel you belong.

And so I was thinking about relationships in general, and I thought about how everybody focuses on "oh, I want to be with someone that shares my interests" but that it's actually pretty important to be with someone who shares your dreams. I think that's something most people realize sooner or later, but because it's not the thing we tend to focus on, sometimes people get blindsided by it. I think sometimes, when relationships just aren't working out, and people are saying "Why?? What's wrong? We seem to fit so well!" it's just that their dreams don't line up, even if their interests do. Someone who is most interested in being a social climber, for instance, will eventually feel held back by someone who doesn't share their taste for society; someone devoted to putting family first can get burned if their partner is someone who wants a career most of all. And someone who's just in it for fun can really hurt someone who wants something serious.

And when I'm talking about Rob and I having the same dream of a house, I guess it goes w/o saying that I'm talking about the large, general concept here more than the specifics. Because I might want a bright yellow kitchen like the one I grew up with, and Rob might hate yellow with a vengeance, and obviously that's something we'll have to work out. But the point is that on a more fundamental level we're looking for the same things out of life: someone to settle down and make a life with forever, a place to call our own that involves a decent # of trees between us and the road and a nice chunk of land, friends that we can chill with over a fire and a drink, careers that challenge us and have some personal meaning to us but which don't consume our lives, and a basement to pursue hobbies like building models and making pottery.

And that, I think, is more key to our relationship succeeding than having common interests. I mean I suppose if you define "interests" in a broad way it encompasses what I said above, but I meant more specific interests. Like, Rob always gets a laugh out of a good Adult Swim show, while I'm more inclined to feel West Wing's intelligently witty barbs are a dependable source of amusement. Rob can take really artistic, fantastic pictures with his digital camera while I'm lucky if I take one decent picture out of 50. He likes golf, which I find kind of boring, and I like basketball, which he finds quite boring. We can sort of meet in the middle on football, although I will always be more of a sports fan than he is.

I'm focusing here on the differences, and of course there are interests we can share. But there are few interests in which we both are equally enthusiastic. Swing dancing is about the only one I can think of, and even there there's differences in our approach to it. But it doesn't really matter, because our interests overlap enough that we can find things we both enjoy doing, and we each try new things because of the other person. At the same time we each have room to be our own person, and to sustain lives outside each other. If we shared all the same interests we might be constantly together, forgetting that we had other friends or people we cared about, but instead we can maintain this healthy balance. Ahh, there it is - balance, CC's favorite life philosophy. ^_~ You knew it was coming, right?

In everything from our height to our approach to life, we balance each other.

I've kind of strayed from the point of dreams being more important than interests, but I guess what I've just been trying to say is that loving someone isn't just about finding that person who likes all the same things as you and thinks just like you.

It isn't as simple as simply "sharing the same dreams" either, of course. It's a mix of these things and more. But when talking about long-term relationships, having a shared dream of what you want from life goes a lot farther than liking the same TV shows.

So I'm really glad I'm with someone who knows exactly how I feel when I walk into a Home Depot.