Oprah Winfrey Hits Campaign Trail for Obama – New York Times. Oprah’s a little egomaniacal. And with all this bad press regarding her school for girls in Africa, do you really want someone who’s so obsessed with their own image coming out for you in your campaign? Not that I want to go into war with Pakistan or Iran or anything, but come on.

Okay, I feel really geeky for getting so excited, but they’re coming out with HTML 5! Ahh, I can’t wait. The <nav> tags and whatnot are pretty nifty, but the video-audio support sounds awesome. I’ve been working on using a shared Flash file to post some music on my site, but if this works out, maybe I can go another way. Ever since embedding Windows Media Players and others became impossible, it’s been too annoying to work on. But who knows?

Notes on Design » Blog Archive » CSS3: The Future of Web Design, Indeed

Oh my god, I love you, W3. Finally! Column layouts? That is super cool. Now it’s just up to the browsers to display CSS correctly. We’ll see how that works out. Safari 3 just learned how to display some basic Table tags. They may have some catching up to do.

Exceptyou.org is a new campaign to get the 18-24 demographic mobilized toward election reform, particularly ending the electoral college part of the process. I think it’s a great, smart campaign, and I hope it works.

Tina Dupuy: American Apparel Lost Its Way:

‘Gross’ meaning the cult of personality of the founder Dov Charney. He is a now slightly under 40 hipster that wears his sexuality (literally) on his sleeve. Think Angelina Jolie pre Brad Pitt…only very oily, hairy, and male. He famously started masturbating during an interview with Jane Magazine, boasts about sleeping with employees and is solely responsible for those saucy advertisements.

I’ve never liked the ad campaigns for AA. It’s not that I am afraid of sexy images of 15 year old girls. It’s just that you can only be so edgy until you fall off into parody. It’s like, okay, we get it – you’re a pervert – is that all you got? I like my perverts to have some depth (see: J. Edgar Hoover).

Your feelings on it would depend on whether you view Hugh Hefner as a stud or as a one trick pony.

Yess. I’m so tired of seeing these ads every damn day in the windows of the American Apparel on the same block as my office and also on the backs of various local publications like Village Voice and L Magazine. Keep your legs together, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you.

So I was thinking about the fact that I never seem able to express the proper amount of joy and congratulations when someone I know is about to have a baby.

For the past year or so, I have been surrounded by pregnant women. It started with my cousin giving birth to her second daughter, who turned one this past February. I wasn’t really around as much as I had been during the first pregnancy since I’m 3000 miles away in college and working part time, not to mention my freelance jobs here and there. I don’t even remember if I sent a card or what. I do remember receiving the It’s a Girl! announcement, which I already knew, with a professional photographed picture of the little one. She was (is) beautiful and I showed it to everyone I knew. But in person, attending her Brit Bat (naming ceremony which is the Jewish equivalent to a baptism), I don’t know if I really was all that enthusiastic. Or rather, as enthusiastic outwardly as I was inwardly.

The next pregnancy was that of my British Lit professor. She was really great and I found myself on more than one occasion running into her and having conversations with her. She’d reference the baby and I’d ask a question or too, but all in all, I don’t think I ever said anything to the effect of “congratulations.” I don’t know why or why not. The class did end before she was near giving birth, so maybe that was part of it.

Shortly after that, I found out that my boss and his girlfriend, who also works where we work, were having a baby. I was truly happy for them. At first I think I was a little surprised and it didn’t really sink in until the Monday after I found out and I could congratulate them both. But I felt awkward about it nonetheless. And guilty that I hadn’t immediately been like, “Oh my god, congratulations!” Even after giving them a baby present, I felt a little weird when they were thanking me. I don’t know…I was totally happy for them (the baby is beautiful by the way…I mean really. Not even lying because she’s a baby, but because she really is beautiful), but I felt like I just wasn’t expressing it properly.

And now my creative writing instructor is about to have her second daughter and I realize that I don’t think I ever congratulated her or gave her well wishes. She will be on leave for the next couple of weeks and I won’t see her until after she gives birth. But I can’t believe I never actually said anything. I thought it and expressed interest/conversed about her pregnancy, but I never actually was like, “Good luck” or “Hope all goes well!” What is wrong with me? I feel so guilty…

And then it came to me that it must have to do with my total fear of pregnancy. I mean, a greater fear than death, here. For a number of reasons really– (lack of) preparedness, the responsibility, the permanency (once a parent, you’re a parent for the rest of your life). It’s completely frightening, and I doubt I’ll ever be ready to be or maybe ever be a parent. Afterall, with my health issues, it’s quite likely that I’ll find out down the line that I’m unable to have a child. But nonetheless…

Then the analogy came to me. It is like being in a field and you see some terrifying animal coming at you and you know you are done for. It’s running at you and you want to run away, but you are glued to the spot and attempting to escape would be futile anyhow. But at the same time, while standing there, you can admire the animal. For its beauty, its grace, its precision. It is like a cheetah– the cheetah is so awesomely fast but graceful, but at the same time, it will pounce on you and eat out your insides. That is what pregnancy is like to me– a cheetah. A cheetah that I can admire from a distance, but is terrifying when seen up close and in action.

Call me neurotic, but I thought it was a pretty interesting analogy.

It is a trifold illness and it happens to me every month.

1. I see kids/babies on the street and I start thinking, “They’re so cute. I want one.” I’ll come across my baby pictures and think to myself, “I want to have my own baby.” Oh my god, no I don’t!
2. I feel the need to clean and organize everything. They call this nesting. I actually like this one aspect since it compels me to clean my apartment and I can rely on the fact that my apartment will be spotless at least once a month.
3. Then there’s the actual need to go out and reproduce. I mean, how horrible is this? It is practically a disease, these female hormones. It sucks to be a girl. Actually witnessing myself feeling this way and it just happens. Awful. Terrible.

Debuted on the TODAY show. The video is so bad and the song is only eh. And why are they just hanging out with each other in bras and skirts. And in Posh’s case, some kind of weird bondage lingerie. And why do they walk in looking all smug and smiling and they’re not even acknowledging each other. So weird.

Nice.