Dopp Juice Archive

What color would you say my eyes are?

My driver’s license says “brown,” but it’s a lie. My mother taught me my eyes were “hazel,” but over the years I’ve learned that “hazel” just means “a hard color to describe in one word” and actually carries no consistency across faces. One of my close friends in high school gave up on trying to answer this question and just started calling me “the girl with kaleidescope eyes.” But let’s not cop out here. I’ll give you a hint: my eyes are green and amber with red flecks and brown highlights.

I make an effort to look people in the eye when I talk to them, and I’ve been noticing lately, that I’m not so alone in my kaledescopiness. I’m seeing my own eyes show up on more and more people, and more often than not on creative professionals — those rebellious independent folk who create their own careers and answer first to themselves. So I’m now asserting a theory: green/amber/red/brown kaleidescope eyes are a sign of a creative, ambitious individual who probably has issues with authority.

This theory will likely be proven absurd and fall by the wayside, as my silly theories often die. (For years, I’ve been trying to prove that everybody named Amy is a lesbian and that no one actually lives in Montana.) But, regardless, I am collecting evidence now. If you have some, please send it my way.

I am determined to make today beautiful. You should help me.

First, go to They’re Beautiful and send a random friend flowers for free.

Then, go to Orisinal and play the bumblebee game.

Then, go to the Jackson Pollock website and click around.

Then, go to CSS Zen Garden, click the links on the right, and geek out about how beautiful standardized code can be.

Then, go to GoodGraffiti.org and muse on the controversial awesomeness of guerrilla art.

Then, go to StoryPeople, browse for a story that makes your chest melt, click “Send eGreeting” in the left-hand menu, and create a free card for a random friend (but not the one you sent flowers too — someone different this time).

Then, go to the Snowsuit Effort and look at faces being real.

Then, go to SSAHN and look at faces being art.

Then, go to the Writ Workshop and read some fresh poetry by an emerging writer.

Then, look at the Flickr tag group for Harajuku.

Then go to ScrapBlog and make a page about what you’ve appreciated today.

Dear Google,I hear you just unveiled a new Payment Processing System the other day. And like everything you build, it’s simple and user-friendly. Online stores integrate it as a payment option, and then we, the consumers, only have to enter our credit card numbers once — for you — and all participating websites immediately become a one-click checkout for us. ::wince::I love you. I hate you. I lovehate you.You’re so good at what you do. I hear nothing but good things about how friendly and creative you are, and how well you treat your employees. You offer so much free stuff to the web community. You revolutionized advertisements to be less invasive to users and more accessible to small businesses. You help us find things at the speed of ethernet. You’re really awesome. Thank you so much for all you’ve done.Except that now you know everything about all of us and that scares the heck out of me. And now you just want all of our credit cards. And I can just hear you saying, “Really, for a company that already knows all of the websites you’ve ever visited and everything you’ve ever written in an email, is that so much to ask?”I hate to be a doomsayer here, Google, but I’m seeing the makings for an information age apocolypse with this kind of power isolated in one place. Would you just stop already? Quit while you’re ahead and still appreciated? Let someone else compete with PayPal? And what’s next? Are you going to archive our phone conversations with the new internet phone technologies? Are you going to record our street conversations when you install wireless internet across San Francisco? Are your Google Maps satellite systems going to zoom in on us in our backyards and display our actions in realtime? Do you really need to push these limits?I love you, and I don’t want to hate you. So knock it off already!Signed,Your friendly local Gmail user and hourly Google searcher