Andrew W. Ishak | Ph.D. candidate in Communication Studies, University of Texas at Austin » Communication

This new WordPress theme gives me the ab…

Andrew — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 15:09:20 +0000

This new WordPress theme gives me the ability to post links and stuff from the home page. I’ll test it out by linking to one of my favorite recipe blogs: http://www.norecipes.com/

Yum

Andrew — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 20:57:00 +0000

Annual Easter tradition (we celebrate this Sunday):

3:56:57 PM Andrew: bro
3:57:03 PM Andrew: what are wrapping in bacon this year
3:57:16 PM Andrew: turkey and havarti was good
3:57:19 PM Nader: Evie

Like Father Like Daughter

Andrew — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 04:22:00 +0000

What a crazy month*1.333

Andrew — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 03:55:00 +0000

Here’s a recap of the last 40 days:

Blake and Stacy’s wedding weekend – Awesome
Wedding planning and packing – Awesome
Driving from San Jose to Austin – Awesome
Pre-wedding things – Awesome
Rehearsal dinner – Awesome
Our wedding day – Awesome
2-day honeymoon in San Diego – Awesome
Our condo – Awesome
People in the comm studies doctorate program – Awesome
School so far – Awesome
Work so far – Pretty awesome (hey, work can never be awesome)
Coptic group at UT – Awesome
BBQ – Awesome
Heather – Really awesome
Humidity – Eh…

You Got Herbed.

Andrew — Wed, 04 Jul 2007 04:21:00 +0000

And this is why I hate Arabic television in our house:

Andrew: What are you guys doing for the Fourth of July?
Mom (completely serious): Wait just one second, they’re talking about parsley.

K.I.T. Have a Good Summer!

Andrew — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 05:28:00 +0000

That’s “Keep In Touch, Have a Good Summer” if no one’s ever signed your junior high yearbook before. Maybe you already knew that, but think about what “Keep in Touch” means. Many people use it as a throwaway line when they know they won’t see someone in a while, much like the way we use “Have a Safe Flight” before someone takes a trip.

Regardless of what “Keep in Touch” means to you, there is no doubt that the methods of keeping in touch with a friend have increased dramatically in the last 10 years due to the internet and social networking and cell phones and all that fancy stuff that Al Gore invented. Because of this, I argue that the amount of legitimate excuses for not keeping in touch has run on an asymptotic path during the last decade (non math majors: it’s pretty much close to zero now).

I spent some time today with my good friend Kim, and I am sometimes amazed that we have kept in touch as well as we do. After being decent enough friends in high school, Kim and I have seen each other only 5 times in the last 7 years (she lived in Washington and Turkey and I lived in California and Texas), yet we make sure to make semi-regular phone calls to each other, calls that have become as frequent as bi-weekly as our cell phone plans have become a little better. (Here’s a photo album from Kim’s visit to Davis in 2003.)

The reason Kim was in the area is because she is heading back to Turkey again this week to be closer to her boyfriend, who is in the midst of a PhD program there. Kim and I were talking today in the car about how we can still maintain regular contact without using expensive international cell phone services. Well, even though she is living in the wood age (she has 4 MySpace friends), we came up with a bunch of alternatives, including Skype, instant messaging, e-mail (which we used when she was in Turkey the first time), and messaging on Facebook. I’m trying to get Kim to change to G-mail so we can catch each other on G-chat while checking e-mail once in a while. Pretty simple, right?

Back to “Keep in Touch”. I’m looking at my junior high yearbook and literally 75% of girls wrote either “K.I.T.” or “Andrew you are weird.” I am completely not joking about this. And speaking of junior high, there were pretty much only three widespread, convenient ways to keep in touch in the mid-90s. You could a) call someone on their house phone, b) send them a postal letter or note, or c) talk face-to-face. Remember the days when you would call your friend at their house and say: “Hi is Indupreet home?” and Indupreet’s mom would respond: “Sorry, Indupreet is at SAT class, do you have a message for him?”

But of course, Indupreet wouldn’t always call me back right after SAT class because sometimes his mom didn’t even relay the message. Really, if you wanted to contact Indupreet, or let’s say Sandeep or Chittij (I had a lot of Indian friends growing up), the most efficient way was sometimes PHYSICALLY GOING TO THEIR HOME AND TALKING TO THEM. It’s a novel idea, I know; once in a while I even got invited inside for some palak paneer and a game of Contra.

And I’m telling you this because: we live in 2007 and there is no excuse for not keeping in touch with people who you want to keep in touch with. There are so many strong options for doing so that you would have to be actively negligent of a relationship to not keep in contact with someone.

And I will say this flat out: if someone does not keep in contact with you, it means they do not want to keep in contact. Period. Dot. Small round subscript punctuation mark. It’s too damn easy to communicate now for someone to claim that they have been too busy to reach you. We have cell phones, e-mail, and social networking, and despite how fashionable it is to complain about your cell phone provider, they are all very reliable methods of communication. Most of the time, “I have been too busy” either means “I wasn’t that interested in contacting you right now” or “I forgot.” I forget a lot, and I’ll tell you when I do. But I hope that I have never been too busy to call a good friend back or send a quick e-mail. You know e-mails are free, right?

So today I salute people like Kim who still keep in touch because she obviously thinks that I am a person worth keeping in touch with, and that’s worth at least a salute in this widely-read blog that has a readership of 11 people in over 2 countries. So keep in touch and have a good summer, hope we don’t get Mr. Lattuada for math next year, peace sign, happy face, home phone number, Andrew.

Or Just Say You Gotta Blast a Dookie

Andrew — Mon, 18 Jun 2007 05:41:00 +0000

I’d like to think I’m a pretty helpful person, and I hope that we can all benefit from my personal experiences from time to time. Take last Thursday for example: I had back-to-back meetings at work, but I had to use the restroom as the first meeting was wrapping up. How would one appropriately excuse him or herself in a situation like this? Easy, really. Just fill in this sentence:

I have to _______ before the next meeting.

Your choices are:

create some worklogs
streamline the back-end
synergize channel flow
check on my deliverables
get the numbers out (numbers 1 and 2 at least)
optimize legacy portals
recontextualize integrated content
visit corpoorate

You’re welcome.

Extreme Normalcy, Brah!

Andrew — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 22:23:00 +0000

Hey, what’s the best way to make people think you’re interesting? Maybe do interesting things? Have something interesting to say? Use the word “interesting” when describing yourself? What if you use “interesting” in five straight questions?

No, I have a better idea: tell everyone how extreme your everyday situations are. Next time you get less than 8 hours of sleep, let me know about it; it’s so interesting, right? Or when you sit in traffic on the way to my house, tell me how crazy traffic was. Was it the craziest traffic ever!? Really!? Exciting! Extreme Sitting in Traffic! SITLMAO!

Hey remember in college when you studied soooo much for that test? You couldn’t even take a break to eat lunch! Because you were studying so much! Make sure to tell that story next time we get together so that we will all be aware of how unique you are. I never studied, not even for a second! And I totally baced that test (it’s like acing a test but getting a B)! Look at the both of us: we both totally beat the system in our own unique way.

But wait. What if, say, you eat so much–but you’re so skinny!–that you were about to burst at the seams, like that dude in the old Kirby GameBoy commercial? What if it’s just not enough to tell me that you “ate a lot of food”?

Use the phrase “you don’t understand.” As in, “No, you don’t understand, I eat so much, it’s ridiculous. You Don’t Understand, Andrew.”

You’re right. I don’t understand–I cannot comprehend the idea of eating a lot, as I am not like you, but rather a casing of organic material wrapped around a hyperalloy endoskeleton, sent from the future to protect a rebellious child and his mother. I have so many questions. Why do you cry?

(On a side note, I’m noticing that it’s only small guys, really small girls, and big guys who talk about how much they eat. I’ve never met a girl on the thicker side who boasts about her eating abilities. Except me.)

My friend Taryn tells me about her friend who exaggerates everything so negatively that she doesn’t value any of his complaints anymore. It’s like the boy who cried wolf, but in this case the wolf is how you much you just paid for gas and no one really cares.

But seriously, I just paid like 60 bucks for gas. No, seriously. Forget it, you don’t understand.

Allergies: Still Not as Bad as Killer Bees

Andrew — Tue, 08 May 2007 16:51:00 +0000

Isn’t there some old adage that says you can always talk about the weather? Think back to the last time you were seated on an airplane next to someone you’ve never met. Really think about it. Assuming they are not holding a framed lithograph of BBMak, you can only be sure that you have two things in common: you’re both flying to New Jersey, and you both live on planet Earth. And because you both live on planet Earth, something else you have in common is that you are both experiencing the current weather.

That’s why you can always talk about much it’s raining or how hot it is. It’s pretty much the only thing you can talk to anyone about at anytime. You can even talk about it at a funeral, and it would be considered polite conversation—unless of course you said something like: “Hey how ‘bout this heat? It’s making Jeff’s rotten corpse smell terrible.”

Most of the time, though, it’s a safe area of conversation. Maybe a little boring to most people, but safe nonetheless.

So yes, it’s been hot around these parts the last few days. It was around 90 yesterday in Cupertino AND in the Sunset District. And apparently, very dry heat and the surrounding grassy hills join forces to administer the repeated slaps to the face collectively known as severe allergy symptoms. They are not going away any time soon either, so go to Target and get your generic loratidine as soon as you can.

SLAP. (I sneezed.)

No Sexy Magazine

Andrew — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 07:38:00 +0000

(I wrote this last week and I never got around to posting it.)

I just had a really arduous conversation in a Persian/Middle Eastern grocery store, and I’m pretty sure the difficulty had nothing to do with language.

I took a mid-morning walk down Stevens Creek Boulevard, and I stopped at M&M Food Mart to check out their selection of pickles and feta cheese (Easter is right around the corner!). I was not planning on buying anything until I saw a few Middle Eastern magazines with Nicole Kidman on the cover. No, I don’t really spend any of my spare time reading about Nicole Kidman, but Heather does, and I thought it would be interesting to read through an Americanized Arab celebrity magazine with her. Because of the high price (Seven bucks!), I wanted to make absolutely sure that I was getting a true People-type magazine, and not 90 pages about hair or pants or some other magazine theme that no one cares about except for SuperCuts.

So I asked the clerk about the shrink-wrapped mag, and I really don’t think he could get past the fact that I was a 24 year-old male. I did enjoy his accent though:

Me: Hi! (pointing) Are those magazines about celebrities? What’s the title? (I am Egyptian, yes, but I can’t read Arabic).

Clerk: No no. Those are for woman.

Me: I know, I’m getting it as a gift for someone.

Clerk: It’s woman magazine. For woman.

Me: I know, I’m getting it for a woman. So what does this title say?

Clerk: (sigh) It’s not…It’s not sexy magazine. It’s stuff…has stuff for woman. (And he says this next part in a friendly way) Not for you.

Me: Okay…can you tell me what the name of the magazine is?

Clerk: No! It’s not sexy magazine!

At this point, I really didn’t want a Middle Eastern Cosmo/Seventeen-type collection of the following articles:

“60 Things That Will Drive Him Magnoon in Bed!”
“Get That Sharm El-Sheikh Figure By June!”
“Spring Break on the Sinai Peninsula!”
“How to Dress Hella Halwa! Hollaaaaaaaa!”

So I decided not to waste my money, said “thank you” and walked out of the store.

It was not sexy magazine.