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about
- Heather Rasley is an online community manager and customer support manager. In her previous life, she was an editor. Sometimes she makes stuff. For a few years, she lived in Sweden. Now she calls Brooklyn home. Hello!
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Loved Songs
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Mixes
- 16 plays / Created Apr 03, 12
- 12 plays / Created Feb 22, 12
- 25 plays / Created Jan 18, 12
- 8 plays / Created Jan 12, 12
- 21 plays / Created Apr 28, 11
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Posts
Normally, I’m not a fan of San Francisco weather. But, today, I can deal with the fact that this difference in temperature awaits me:
I’ll be in SF from March 17 (tonight) to March 31. If you’re around and want to say hi, give me a poke: heather dot rasley at gmail
My Swedish was never great when I lived in Sweden, so it’s odd that, a year after moving away, and without any use for it, I think in Swedish sometimes.
Usually it’s one word in a sentence that’s shorter or easier or just plain nicer to say in Swedish.
“Cucumber”? Nah. Gurka.
“Cinnamon”? Nice word, but kanel gets the job done faster.
Glad Påsk! is what I’d prefer to wish you over “Happy Easter!”
Most of my stand-in words have to do with food. For one, they’re easy, and something you learn early on. Probably, though, they stick with me because I used to write grocery lists in Swedish (most of the time) when I was there, and because something about the grocery shopping experience made me less likely to force a switch into English.
A grocery store is a grocery store wherever (even if their layout is way different and they don’t have any peanut butter). It’s comfortable. Also, if you know you’ll be going to a particular shop regularly, you’re motivated to stick with the language to create as little friction as possible with its employees. Another bit that made grocery stores feel “safe” for speaking Swedish: checkout cashiers don’t engage in small talk there, so it’s relatively certain that you’ll have a pretty easy interaction when it’s time to leave.
Now I’m learning Russian from a workbook and occasionally brushing up on French with Duolingo. Already, I’m tempted to replace “knock-knock” with the newly-learned and very cute тук-тук. This could get complicated.
Creeps are everywhere, but in San Francisco the variety of creeps makes it hard to have a settled method for dealing with them …
San Francisco is a city in which we are besieged from both sides: the infinitesimal middle class here contends with rich creeps and poor creeps. For every meth-addicted jerk-victim spraying spittle and salacious slurs at commuting women, there is an ostentatious startup scion hijacking a social situation and crashing it into the ground with his self-aggrandizing prattle. While the schizophrenic is defecating on the children’s playground, the high-flying narcissist at the bar waylays five adults with an unsought lecture on the intricacies of his moral hobbies.
Basically.
You know that this guy is writing from a position of extreme privilege when you hit “When people come over for dinner, I pull out my extendable dining room table” in the first graph.
I think what we have here is a working definition of an asshole — a person who demands that all social interaction happen on their terms.
I left Gothenburg, Sweden, for New York one year ago today. Still here.
Human beings ask for things of each other because we are limited, fallible creatures. We give to each other mostly because it is right to give but also because we recognize in ourselves the same limitations that compels others to ask us for help. Sometimes the things that we are asked for are little things, like our time, our full attention, our regard. We extend them, not in spite of their inefficiency but because of their inefficiency, because the purpose of human effort is to become more human; it is not to save more time for the least human parts of our lives.
from “sometimes the punishment is being the person who deserves the punishment” — a response to Nick Bilton’s NYT piece, “Disruptions: Digital Era Redefining Etiquette”Not exactly news: “Silicon Valley Poverty Is Often Ignored By The Tech Hub’s Elite”
We tend to attribute quality work to those we see all the time and with whom we discuss work performance and accomplishments.
This belief may be especially strong at tech companies, whose heady early days of creative innovation suggested that living at the office with your young peers produced the fastest results. What we tend to forget is that many unsuccessful tech companies also started that way, and that even the successful ones eventually had to grow beyond the boundaries of a group of friends pulling all-nighters of inventive exploration, getting a new platform or search architecture to work.
- Loop made with Figure + vocals. #weirdkids
(No streaming audio available)28 plays - New little loop for #weirdkids. Made with Figure.
(No streaming audio available)22 plays - a loop i made for #weirdkids, now with vocals
(No streaming audio available)29 plays - I messed around with this in May 2012 and probably won’t mess around with it again, so here you are. Remix of sorts on top of extremely slowed down “Okay Cupid” by Kitty Pryde.
(No streaming audio available)36 plays - 0 plays
