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Tuesday, May 11, 2010 . Last updated one minute ago

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THIS EMAIL BROUGHT TO YOU BY NIPPLE CREAM

By Jessi Hamel - Purple & Gray

5.1.2010

A few years ago, I used my Gmail account to write an email to a compassionate friend after a boy broke my heart. The ads the email thread generated were surprising. One was for a doctor specializing in heart disease. Another was for a pill to treat heartburn. Nice try Google, I thought. If only mending a broken heart was that easy.

I wondered if any of my friends and fellow Gmail users had experienced similar Google ad fails. One recounted the story of a contentious email thread between him and his girlfriend. What started out as a friendly exchange quickly devolved into a relationship squabble. And the ad alongside the messages? It was for nipple cream.

His story brought up a lot more questions than it answered. How did this come up without the word “nipple” appearing anywhere in the emails? Do men even use nipple cream? Was it the erotic kind that comes in various flavors? Because hey, maybe it wasn't so bad of an ad after all. You could use it to spice up your relationship, maybe help you avoid emails like that again.

After the heartburn ads showed up, I started paying more attention to the ads in my mailbox. Each email received offered a new puzzle: what words in the email might have prompted the specific ads? And every time the ad-generating algorithm got it completely wrong, by say, reading a metaphor literally, it was strangely gratifying. Stupid Google. Ha!

So I was disappointed to find out that starting early this year, Google stopped posting links based on the content of individual emails. Suddenly the triggers for certain ads became more difficult to pin down. Now Gmail—according to their website—chooses ads “based on another recent message on the same page of your inbox.” Cont., Pg. 4

DICTIONARY

A Love Letter

By Richard Chiem - Purple & Gray

5.4.2010

The following is a creative non-fiction piece, a love note, and it's real. This was my actual love note I used a year ago, to court my now ex-girlfriend and afterward, we shared a wonderful relationship together. Before this note, we were only strangers.

Rebecca reid farnsworth// noun// archaic// friendship takes time to overcome and the planet is playing favorites again. Affection is sinking like a stone somewhere not an ocean and the boy closes his eyes for you. Man is young again. The earth is thinking. A girl is taking off all of her clothes and swimming in the great lake where there is simplicity: silver cedars and white moon and no one is watching, but giraffes in the dark, just like in the Jack Gilbert poem, the forgotten dialect of the heart, his favorite poem. Giraffes in the boy’s head and surrounding the general vicinity. The earth is thinking. White poppies. Becca is good and gradual and gorgeous, and she likes to wear yellow. She likes being human. Why can’t they all be like her? The boy is thinking. The earth is asking this question softly, and the scientists are answering, plate tectonics. The science of how the earth behaves, when she is in our lake, and the quiet there is hard to describe. But listen. Birds glow. Becca is swimming.

Synonyms for rebecca reid farnsworth// Stella. Abednego. Honey. Circumference. To know what it is to know. To be honest. To see the ocean at night. Thank you. To have heartburn and like it. What is your favorite color?

2nd definition:

Today I am going to the museum of contemporary arts and no one can stop me. Today I am in my bedroom and enjoying how the light is, my shadows like fish on the walls and the man who calls himself Julian Casablanca is singing under control. His voice lifts memories of the 80s television show, The Wonder Years and Becca is jamming and dancing with herself. You remind me of drums, and drums are awesome. This is all your fault. The beautiful city is all your fault and for you I am going bananas. Both the fruit and behavior. The split and the word, how I choose to begin. Cheers.

If the ocean could speak I would say,

We should do this again sometime.

A LETTER HOME

By G. Walker - Purple & Gray

5.4.2010

Dear Home,

Whenever I am away from you I begin to think of you as sort of human, extant - a noun with thoughts and feelings and above all, associations. Therefore, I’ve decided to write to you about the great Other that you will never know - that is, anything that is not you as defined by my emotional recognition of your place. You, strange though it may sound, have no true existence. There’s not even a word for you in French. You can and will and have been many different locations; you have been a thin walled tract house built circa 1953 in Carmichael, California. You have been a clapboard Victorian bedecked in mold that, in my two year old memory, was blue though in reality was yellow. You have been a cottage-cheese ceilinged apartment in Los Angeles, a few doors down from Gramma Shirley with pickled eggs and bacon and “hobo coffee.” You have had a lush garden, a rooftop view, a designated parking space, a claw foot tub and bars on your windows. You are a storybook. You are a story about what your walls have looked like - true - but maybe even more accurately, you are a story of what I have done when away from those walls. I have never told you about these adventures that have defined you so explicitly and sensually. Until now - I am going to take you on a train ride from your current locus in Oakland, California, to Denver, Colorado. I think this will be of particular interest to you as you have never known yourself to be a transitive (or even an intransitive) verb the likes of your distant cousin “traveling.”

It began in the cool, though clear, Sacramento morning when we set out for the train station. At 11:30 pm the night before we had dragged our tired asses to my mom’s house, having left right from work an hour and a half before. In the morning Mom drove us to the station after a big potato breakfast at the Tower Café (no Italian Scramble, “all out” at 8:30 am).

Cont., Essays