Why so slow?

Because it is too difficult to speak about this in the first person (although, today, I definitely think I COULD), I would like to point you to a truly amazing talk by Dr. Virginia Valian, a psychology professor at Hunter College, most well known for her work on gender inequality in the workplace. The title of her talk is: Why so slow? The Advancement of women and looks at the following questions:

1. How come so few women occupy positions of power and prestige both in the professions and in Academia?
2. How come even when women and men start off equal in the workplace (both in terms of qualifications and pay), they tend to grow more and more unequal in time?
3. How come professional women tend to benefit less from their qualifications than their male counterparts? Why the same qualifications seem to help men more than they seem to help women?

Here's the presentation abstract:

Why do so few women occupy positions of power and prestige in every field? To achieve parity we have to know what the problems are as well as what the problems are not. The data show that there has been progress but that a stubborn problem remains: advancement is slower for women than for men in every profession. That stubborn problem is not (or not solely) due to too few women in the pipeline, inequitable childcare arrangements, or women's "choosing" to leave the professions. Rather, the ubiquity of women's slow advancement requires a general explanation through the concepts of gender schemas and the accumulation of advantage. Gender schemas lead both men and women to see men as more competent and able than women, to respond more favorably to male than female leaders, and to attend and defer more to men than to women. Many of the cases in which a woman is disadvantaged are of small scale. The notion of the accumulation of advantage demonstrates how even small-scale disadvantages can mount up over time. The gender schemas analysis allows us to devise appropriate remedies at the institutional level and at more individual levels.

The presentation was sponsonsored by The MIT School of Engineering.
The lecture is about an hour and 30 minutes long. You would also need to download RealPlayer to view it.

What type of blogger are you?

As the cartoon is in Russian, here goes my amateurish translation.

What type of blogger are you?


Then, going clockwise left to right (thank you for pointing out the obvious: you don't read comic strips going clockwise!):

Adolescent blogger: My dad is an idiot.
20-year-old blogger: My girlfriend is an idiot.
Office blogger: My boss is an idiot.
Political blogger: My president is an idiot.
Media blogger: The editor of my favorite magazine is an idiot.
Anti-blogger: All bloggers, except for myself, are idiots.

via System Administrator (who's seriously getting all kinds of good publicity via this blog) via fishki (wtf?!)

A reminder and a request

The reminder: For those of you living in Sofia, Joy Ito's talk is today at 17.30 at Hall 65 at Sofia University.

The request: Could someone please put a sock on your head and come kidnap me from the office so that I can attend as well. My desk is next to Var's and looks NOTHING like his:


Thank you in advance.

Don't tell me to chill. YOU chill.

Dude! You tore me up into pieces! And then I didn't have time to respond as work got in the way of blogging. What is a girl to do?! Also, I am sick and tired. And, pretty much delirious. 38.2C makes me feel like I've reached menopause...hot and cold waves running through my shaky bones.

I will write more about the freakin' ad tomorrow or...whenever. Just before I go, however:

1. I know the ad is not the end of the world as we know it. That doesn't mean I shouldn't be bothered by it.
2. I know the ad perfectly caters to a certain demographic. 14-year-old horny boys masturbating to the latest Victoria's Secret catalogue are not the ones who buy Macs, though. Bad business decision!!!
3. I GET the analogy! It's so obvious and uncreative, how could anyone miss it?!

All I was saying was that:

1. The analogy is not an obvious one. Woman==movie? What?!
2. The ad is based on stereotypical and...well, wrong notions of what computer users are like these days.
3. The ad is a poor use of judgment on Apple's ad-execs. Did you see how slutty the model girl was acting?! And did you see the smirk on the Mac-guy's face as he was calling her 'professional'?!!?! It is completely against Apple's corporate culture and a big disappointment, as such.

Oh, and PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE watch the video before you tell me to chill, ok? Seeing how shocking the appearance and demeanor of the ditzy model-girl are, is really important to this conversation.

Feminist or Just Angry?!

For someone who does not or has never owned a Mac-product, I am a pretty big fan of Mac. I love everything they produce. I love Mac so much that, in fact, I should probably be getting a sales commission for the gazillion conversations I have had with people, trying to convert them from PC. Mac products are easy and cute. What else can I say.

However, I just watched their latest ad (new for me, anyhow) and, to be be honest, I threw up in my mouth a little bit.


So the Mac and the PC compare the movies they have created. The i-movie happens to be Gisele Bundchen (totally fucking hot, naturally). The PC-movie is some man dressed as a woman.

No no no no NO!
SO WRONG! On SO MANY levels!

Being a woman who works for a tech-company and loves/lives/breathes technology, I seriously want to scream after seeing this. I hate the fact that technology and everything that goes along with it is always implicitly or explicitly gendered: men know computers, women don't; men LIKE gadgets, women don't; both computers in this ad are guys, the women are the product of men.

I KNOW what you're going to say: it's supposed to be funny. Or, what's even worse: somebody will pull out some madeup statistics about gender-differences in technology purchases or something.

These are things that I KNOW will come up and will gladly address when people bring them up. Not now though because, to paraphrase Steve Colbert, at this particular moment I can't really tell whether I am being a feminist or I'm just FUCKING ANGRY.

Газарски beat

Last night I went to a hiphop party at an old industrial building. The club was called Dauhaus and the invite promised an explosion of something-or-other. It was a bizzarre experience in many ways but also, I think, very much representative of the state of Bulgarian hiphop at the moment: smokey, young, enthused, and in dire need of financing. I left the place taking one of the only TWO glasses at the club and today I feel like a total asshole, biting the hand that fed me.

These boys are good.

Are you gonna go my way?!

My current mission at work is to get people excited about Halloween. I had this awesome idea to have a dress-up day at the office where we could all go about our business but do so in costume. We are a firm of dorks, you know, I thought that the only reason nobody had already suggested that was because people were too busy geeking away.

So, I talked to several people in my department, my boss AND the Human Resource executive and my idea has been met with just about the same amount of enthusiasm I exhibit when offered a big fat bloody piece of meat: EEEEEWWWWWWW! When asked why not, people gave me all kinds of unreasonable, totally made-up justifications. Like:

- People on the street would stare.
Dude! We could totally dress up in the bathroom!!!

- That's so childish!
Well...a little bit. But that's A GOOD THING!

- I don't own a costume.
BUT you could make your own!!!

- I have no costume ideas.
That SO stopped being an excuse like 7 or 8 years ago.

- I hate Halloween.
Ah!

The Professor always wondered about my own Halloween aversion. And, quite frankly, my own excuses were never much better than the ones I listed above. But I did dress up a couple of times and actually realized that the whole thing is quite fun.



For example, I once was Lenny Kravitz in his afro days, which are clearly his better days. On that particular day not only did I get a chance to wear a fro, but also made sure my cocktails were strangely colored, watched The Shining and ate an obscene amount of candy. If there's anything wrong with that, well, sue me!

In all seriousness, having already converted to Halloweenism, I still continue to wonder why Bulgarians are so actively against it.

Drink-and-blog

The pace of my social life has picked up yet again in the last couple of weeks. There were birthday parties (Number 1 and Number 2), dinners, unmentioned bar-hops and the like. What has not always been made explicit but has hardly gone unnoticed is my tendency to drink-and-blog. A scary thing, when you think about it. Especially if, like me, you have a hard time keeping your mouth shut to begin with.

It's OK, I told myself. I will simply go back and delete all drunk posts so far. Or, I will rephrase things to make me seem less like a vodka-maniac. Because, you see, I am really not THAT much into drinking. I mean, I don't drink THAT often. I simply happen to enjoy talking about it. Then, again, I AM my mother's daughter, who, upon finding out that Prof. Grady was vegetarian hurried to ask: Oh my! But he does drink alcohol, right?!!?!!!

So, to make the long story short, I have decided to keep all the drunk posts intact. Also, rather than be embarrassed about them, I have decided to celebrate various drunk practices by asking you to tell your funniest drunk stories. No sex and violence please. Just some good ole public humiliation, if possible.

For inspiration, I am leaving you with a photo of my dear friend Vladi who, not unlike yours truly, is a drink-and-call kind of girl.


Two weeks in a row, the two of us go out, drink up, and call Mar to tell him that:

Wearesodrunkandhavingsomuchfunandheshouldbetherewithusand
isheonthephonebecausewecan'treallyhearanythingbutfeltlikecallinganywayand
whereismynextdrinkmotherfucker.

Birthday recap

We rang the buzzer and he opened the door and was very sleepy but was greeted by a group of friendly faces and an ice-cream cake with 27 lit candles on it and a bottle of champaigne and some organic yogurt and an ipod bursting at the seams with good music and sprite and grapefruit-juice and some old-school firecrackers and one drunk dude who got even drunker and the rain was falling and it was cold but cosy and sweet.

And there was so much love and laughter in our tiny little kitchen that we almost didn't notice when it got late and when it got early and then we only had time for a a little bit of sleep and we had to get up and go to work and pretend we are responsible adults who can make important decisions and care about long-term consequences.



Happy birthday, Mar!

No comment

Surprise in the making

My roommate Mar's birthday is tomorrow. We are having a surprise birthday party for him at midnight. My part in the whole thing was to make sure he was home. As of now, he basically knows that something is happening LATE tonight. And that's it. He doesn't know who is involved, or where or when. As any birthday boy would do, he's locked himself up in his room and is prepping for his conference presentation.

I am totally taking advantage of the fact that his wireless is out of whack to tell you the following: I am about to piss my pants as I have never ever in my life participated in a surprise party!

Things that are going through my mind as we speak: good thing I vacuumed the kitchen floor yesterday; what if Mar falls asleep before everyone shows up? what if I fall asleep? what if people get lost on their way here? what if nobody shows up? what if they bring bad cake?!!!! how do I keep myself awake? how do I make my camera batteries charge faster? when do we yell surprise?! our apartment is small. way too small to host a real party. should I dress up? my workout pants are dressy enough, no?! should I go tell him that nobody's coming over to make sure he's REALLY surprised?!

Whoever put me in charge of this surprise business is an evil, evil, evil person. I don't do surprise very well.

Nostalgic

I really miss *spark-online.

P.

Best Princess In the City

As I get in my cab, the driver goes:

Driver: Bummer!
Me: Excuse me?
Driver: Sorry, I was hoping to go for a sandwich, just when you got in.
Me: Oh! No worries. I could have a sandwich myself.

We pull over, he stops the meter and we go into this little hole in the wall place on Dondukov and Veslets (I think) where they make the best sandwiches (принцеси, to be precise) in the entire city. Don't go looking for them, I mean, it's cheap sandwiches I'm talking about. BUT definitely check them out if you're in the vicinity and need a quick-fix.

On a different note, I KNOW it was a little reckless to go get a bite with my taxi driver. He could have raped and chopped me up into pieces. For all I know, however, finding that sandwich place, made it all worthwhile.

Healthy relationships 101

Prof. Grady and I are both people of strong opinions. Just to give you an idea, here's three things we've recently argued about:

- Is it rude to write email while talking on Skype. I think, emailing someone else is totally unacceptable. I mean, are you talking to me or what?! According to the professor, it is no big deal at all. It's not any different than doing the dishes or doing other seemingly innocent task while talking. ESPECIALLY, when you have a busy day ahead of you and really need to get stuff done as efficiently as possible.

- My explaining things by saying 'it's a Bulgarian thing' and insisting he won't understand. He really strongly dislikes me saying that. He's originally from California, has lived on the East Coast, survived Central Pennsylvania, got photographed in China and hiked in Mexico. He's only been to Bulgaria once and can count to 1000 and is actually moving here pretty soon. So...he adjusts pretty well. It's a Bulgarian thing definitely does not fly well with him.

- Whether he should wear a knit turtle-neck. Professor thinks: pretentous. Methinks: so sexy I can't even begin to tell you.

All three topics are still up for debate. I'm truly curious what you guys think.

Mooooooooooom!!!

Maaaaaaaaaaaaaaa! Look! I am on DETSKAZAKUSKA.

You see, Carlos telling a story about me, makes me feel like my favorite superhero (i.e. spiderman) has come to greet me in real life.

As I have mentioned before, Carlos is one of the reasons why I started fooling around with this website-madness.

Thank god, we have both come a long way...

Collections?! Fuck that shit!

I have already had a little bit to drink, so be warned that this will not be the best you've seen of me. I just feel that I MUST write this tonight or else it will all be gone and the story will never be told.

The thing is that Peio and I attended this Storytellers' League tonight. It's basically, a storytelling contest organized by Saachi & Saachi-Bulgaria. They announce a topic in advance. Then, every month, people get together at this club and volunteers have 5 minutes to tell their story on the predetermined subject. Awesome idea! Totally awesome judges! Great prices! A wonderful project all around.

Peio and I were both there for the first time. We had not prepared stories to tell. I personally found out what the topic was only after I got there. BUT, you see, we each had a couple of drinks and decided it would be a great idea to tell a story of our own. A 'He said, she said' LIVE, of sorts. Due to various circumstances, we did not make it to the finals. Peio blames it on the alcohol. I....well, I am not THAT nice and blame the judges :P

Either way, we thought it would be fun to tell our story in a way we know best: through our weblogs. The topic: COLLECTIONS.

Peio started the story by describing a big glass bowl in some single guy's apartment. The bowl contains all kinds of female paraphenalia: rings, hair-bands, bracelets, rings. According to him, the bowl contains objects that women like to 'forget' at guys' apartments after having spent the night there.

You must read Peio's entry on the subject, to figure out what he has to say about that. The point of THIS entry, however, is to present a female take on the topic.

Now, I hope I am not breaking any big news to you boys, but the thing is...women do not FORGET their stuff. We LOVE our STUFF. We know what we have on us at any point in time. Rings, bracelets, necklaces, uhmmm...underwear...see, it's all been thought about! Leaving it, forgetting it, or losing it is usually not even an option. In other words, if we leave stuff behind, it is because we WANT to leave it there.

So, back to the bowl, methinks its a wonderful visualization of the following guiding principle that women follow as they approach a man: I MUST GIVE IT A TRY. The strain of thought goes something like this:

Who knows what's going to happen?! Who knows where this might lead me?! It would be awesome if this guys turns out to be the REAL THING. But who cares if it does not work?! All that I have invested in this particular relationship, at this particular point in time, is a freakin' bobbypin!

Oh! Oh! Yeah...but women are more romantic than men! Oh! Oh! But women only go home with a guy because they have feelings for him! Oh! Oh! BUT women are loving and nurturing...Oh! Oh!...

FUCK THAT SHIT!

You fuckin' rock my socks!

It is totally official: I have the best readership EVER!

Thank you all for the comments and suggestions!!!

As a self-respectful dork, I have already compiled an excel spreadsheet with all your suggestgions and am already getting ready to break the law and start downloading me some music!!!!!

In the meantime, I must tell you that I am on my way to do something totally mean and revengeful...Spite and revenge are not emotions I usually subscribe to, you know. But I need to do it. And you should trust my reasons for doing it.

Other than that, I successfully passed my trial period and as of today, I am officially a proud employee of the best IT company in Bulgaria. Go team! :D

The morning walk mix

Here's my 'Morning Walk Mix' this week and the reasons why each song is on the list:

1. Bob Dylan: Don't think twice, it's all right
Because it used to make me cry but it doesn't anymore. It reminds me that bad times are followed by good times. And good times are followed by even better times.

2. Busta Rhymes and the Ying Yang Twins: Wait [The Whisper Song] Remix
Because it is terribly sexist and I love it anyway. Oh my god! It's so embarrassing to admit I love this song!

3. Coldplay ft. Richard Ashcroft: Bittersweet Symphony [live at Live8]
Because, like the Coldplay dude says, this is probably one of the best songs ever written.

4. David Bowie: Changes
Because it makes me feel like I'm the star of a 70's sitcom and I should be wearing bell-bottoms. Dude! Totally!

5. Duran Duran: Hungry Like the Wolf
Because I was too young to fully appreciate them when they were actually popular and only now am I starting to realize how much I've missed out.

6. Frou Frou: Must be dreaming
Loving this song for the same reason people love every Frou Frou song: the sexy female vocals

7. Lisa Loeb: Stay
Because Lisa is as cute as a button. I still get confused by the way she pronounces 'naive' though. Explain, someone...? Please?

8. The Magnetic Fields: I can't touch you anymore
Because with the right amount of alcohol, any Magnetic Fields song sounds autobiographical.

9. Matchbox Twenty: Unwell
God knows I have no idea why I like this song. Most of the time, I actually don't.

10. Oasis: Wonderwall
Because I've always been a not-so-secret Oasis fan. Brows and vandalism and all.

11. Sonic Youth: Renegade Princess
Because...HAVE YOU NOT HEARD THE SONG?!

12. Ani diFranco: Wishin' and Hopin'
Because it is sweet and romantic. And what could beat that?!

What are YOU listening to these days, that you find especially appropriate for YOUR morning walk to work? Give me more than just titles. Give me REASONS!!!

Totally doing somebody else's job

Still sleepy, tired, and terribly dehydrated from attending an awesome birthday party on Friday (happy birthday, d!), so this will be a short one.

I was just flipping through the latest issue of EDNO Magazine and also recovering from their latest party (also Friday; yes, it was a very tough night and an even tougher morning-after, thank you for asking), when I got overcome by this sudden urge to tell everyone I know and their mother, that the magazine and all its incarnations are pretty fuckin' awesome and you should definitely check them out if you haven't done that yet. EDNO is progressive and not afraid to make unpopular political statements. It is consistently supportive of young Bulgarian talent and exhibits the work of some of the best artists all around. Not to mention the fashion editorials. ;)

I don't know about you, but it makes ME so insanely happy to know that somebody gets great pleasure from their work and really, truly cares about whatever it is that they do. It almost does not matter what IT is. And I am aware that I am totally doing some PR-person's dirty work by writing about the magazine here, but I honestly, couldn't care less about that.

I am sooo telling you to go buy it!