Juan Es Alto

This isn't really a product review website. Or an advice column. Or a film or book review site. Or a consumer advocacy space, or an auction site or a reference resource or a news aggregator or a travel journal or a community bulletin board or... well, it isn't actually any of the things you can find on the web that we'd think of as "useful" in any traditional sense. Pretty much rules out most of the non-traditional senses as well, if I'm being honest.

Man, I forgot where I was going with that. Which I guess is as close as we get to a mission statement around here.

Oh, I remember! I was about to talk about my experience with a very particular commercial product. I'm not sure if I want to mention it by name because, things being what they are as far as the capitalist internet goes, entering characters in a certain order that conforms to the name of a major corporate-branded product of any kind will absolutely draw the passive, data-collecting attention of that company's net-scouring aggregating metrics-gathering software. I think I've unwittingly opted in to more than enough targeted advertising, thanks very much. Most of it, unironically, from Target.

You have to have noticed, for several years now, that something as seemingly benign as a google search for anything results in the sudden appearance of banner ads on just about any website that HAS banner ads (up to and including things like facebook) featuring exactly the thing you were searching for. Using Expedia to find flights to Oregon results in Hotels.com banners letting you know where to find great rates on rooms conveniently located near PDX. When I was shopping for the Mini I now drive, unavoidably using the internet to solve the twin problems of getting the best deal possible while willfully exacerbating my already crippling social anxiety, ads for Mini Cooper cars followed me around for months, which is absurd on the face of it. I'm not sure how everyone else works, but after just buying a car, I'm NEVER EVER in the market for another in the months immediately following, let alone one exactly like the one I just bought. Maybe I'm misreading it, though. Maybe the ads are meant to be somewhat aspirational, like trying to spur me to the point of economic success where I can afford to go on the type of car-buying spree where you buy one relatively inexpensive very tiny effeminate car at a time over the course of most of a year. It's a bewildering way to advertise. The only thing a Mini has in common with the type of car a rich person might drive is their relatively appalling reliability rating and the difficulty in finding shops capable/willing to service them outside of the dealership.

OK, so now I realize that in the course of trying not to name-check the thing I wanted to talk about, I've named like seven other things that can now be traced to this blog post. Somewhere servers a quietly humming along, in the way servers do not actually hum, or ding or tick or go "a-ha!" in any way that might betray achievement or success. They just sit there, both passive and impassive, hoovering up fragments of text strings to squirrel away into a data matrix that one day may or may not be deployed to sell you that thing again, or something else like it or to compile a consumer profile to determine the extent to which you are a threat. All without so much as a blinking light to betray a nanosecond's struggle with the question of whether it should.

Oh I guess I'll just say, I'm learning Spanish. Using Rosetta Stone. That's what I've been up to this week. It's a fairly addictively accessible. As much of a challenge as it can be to absorb a new language at 42, when most of my brain plasticity has been reduced to just kind of a gross, literal, physical descriptive fact, I've been fairly regimented in my approach. It helps that I a) already have some experience in failing to learn a Romance language with seven years of partially recalled French there just enough to get in the way, and b) have lived in Southern California mostly all of my life, so immersion learning is never more than a bus ride away. Finally, a chance to make eavesdropping on buses a positive experience, beyond just testing out the limits of the ever-changing state anti-stalking ordinances.

I'm trying not to neglect my kids or my work, but I'm fairly into my lessons. I've got that obnoxious learner's sanctimony really working for me at the moment. Learning Spanish has become something of a raison d'être for me in the short term. Being middle aged makes it hard, yes, but it also affords me the wisdom to know that this heady feeling of new empowerment is dangerously false and I should wait a while before trying to roll out my newfound skill set on perfect strangers. It's probably the only lesson that remains from back when I picked up my tae kwon do yellow belt.