This is an old-fashioned personal website, studded with old projects and ideas: a wild warren of weirdness, a den of perpetual vanity in varying ages of decay. There's a lot to see here, and lots of ways to get lost. To start out or to start over, I recommend clicking a letter in the alphabet bar to the right.
The Alphabet Julen is an index of sorts to both the site and to me; as indices go, it's a miserable failure, being neither complete nor comprehensive. As designed vanity, however, it's nearly perfect. These are the most recent entries:
Auctions
The curious thing about auctions (at least the ones I attend!) is how your frame of refence changes - all of a sudden, things you'd spend 30 bucks for in a store aren't worth upping your bid to $12, and things you'd never normally consider buying become attractive at $1. Among the highlights of my auction career: a Villeroy and Bosch coffee set I got for $5, 2 sets of garden racks I see in super chi-chi magazines for $30, a pair of demonic plastic light-up easter bunnies for $2, and assorted bits and pieces of glass.
Orchids
Orchids are not disposable plants; if you take care of them (i.e. soak them regularly and make sure they are well-potted), they'll bloom over and over again for you. They're odd and they are beautiful - and sometimes beautiful because they're odd.
Punctuation, Air
I was mock-using the air quotes one day when it occured to me that there was some serious punctuation bias going on. Why not air parentheses? Air exclamation marks? Air tildes? So I started creating those too. And I recently found myself using air parentheses in a non mock way. Oh, the shame!
Organizer-in-Chief
When you work for a small start-up/post start-up company, you have (by necessity) to wear many hats. I used to refer to myself snarkily as MoraleGirl when I was organizing lunches, robot death matches, and fomenting office entertainment in the old building. I've since promoted myself to Organizer-in-Chief (with a side of the Exit Fairy - even though I have no access to it, myself, I tell people how to get on the alumni mailing list when they depart).
Inner Monologue (formerly On My Mind)
I needed someplace to write down those little observations that weren't rants or raves or could stand on their own. So On My Mind was born. One might presume that since I've posted nothing there for well over a year several distinct times, there's been nothing on my mind in the past few years. Oh, would that were true!
More: Inner Monologue
Exquisite Corpse
A digital version of the classic surreal game where you fold a paper into four or more sections, and each person fills out a section knowing only a tiny fraction of what happened earlier. When you unfold the whole sheet you have a wacky and wonderful drawing.
More: My Exquisite Corpse
Zorro
Zorro fascinates me - not for the actors who played him, who have largely been inadquate to what Zorro is (Anthony Hopkins' riff on the character, while atraditional, was one of the most interesting: A Zorro who has met failure and loss and despair.), but for the story and the way the story has been told dozens of times over the past eighty years.
More: On My Mind: July 18, 1998
Zoos
Among their attendant joys, Australian zoos allow you to hold koala bears. Koalas grab onto you, digging their claws into your shoulders, and dripping stale eucalyptus drool all over. The animals are small and compact and heavy, and would like to think of you as a tree.
Zither
I have always wanted to own a zither. I'd just have it hanging on my wall. Every once in a while, at a gathering at chez J, I'd scare my guests by wandering over and rubbing the strings contemplatively. Some days I'd even move to take it down before taking mercy on my guests.
Zippy the Pinhead
The weird thing is: whenever I do a "links like this" search on julen.net, the one site that always appears in that list is the Zippy the Pinhead site. I'm not sure why, but I've got five bucks on the Pinhead angle.
