random miscellany

town pride! in case you were unaware, naperville is the best place ever to live. (well, obviously, because i'm here! ;) ). and for the record, that's not just my unsubstantiated opinion. nope, once again, naperville made the top 100 places to live list. woo-hoo!

on other notes, since i got a few questions about it, just an fyi. if you saw my away message this weekend (it said i Y rajiv bahl. real women wear rajivbahl or nothing at all. "honey, my order hasn't come in yet, so i guess i'll just have to sleep naked.") it was a joke!! but, the inspiration for it was amusing. my friend (rajiv) has a website. and his website has promotional clothing items on it, and as i was browsing the store -- i realized they sold thongs with his name emblazoned upon them and was, suitably amused by that fact. ps: i ordered one (i had to! the hillarity was simply too much to pass up!)

on the topic of away messages though -- have you ever realized what a huge role they play in our day to day lives? i'm not even really an AIM junkie (i was cured this past year -- now even though my sn is signed on all day, i'm really only usually on in the evenings) and i still acknowledge how important they are. my friend mandy and i decided to try and experiment this summer. we both tried to exploit the power of our away messages, we wanted to see how much value people really placed upon them. so we posted very provocative (dan - that's your word! deja vu, mrs. billone, john) statements on them and just sat back and waited to see people's reactions. at first, no one said anything. then, i started getting cell phone calls, emails, tons of IMs, all wanting to know "WTF is up with ur away message, serena?." people started asking if they were the person i was writing to (you weren't. the person i was writing to doesn't read this or even go online). it just amused me to no avail the amount of attention a single line of text could garner. mandy had fairly the same response. moral of the story? i don't know. i just thought it was an interesting phenomena.

i'm off to run before work!

Y, serena