say bye-bye '07

Just wanted to wish my readers, faithful or sporadic, the very best of all you all want in 2008.

Happy New Year!

(And the year end wrap-up will continue tomorrow. I promise, I haven't forgotten about it.)

xoxo

charity, again

A friend told me a story yesterday about how, because her husband won a large amount of money in fantasy football (?), she was able to give some for Christmas presents to a couple of teenage girls of her acquaintance who were living in tough circumstances and otherwise wouldn't have had much of a holiday. And how she felt that karma had paid her back, because through someone else's kindness to her, she recouped much of that money. I was going to say that was one of the more satisfying types of charity, when you hear about someone whose situation touches you and you're able to spontaneously do something about it.

Except then I started thinking about my own experience in this realm. Several years ago I had a (not close) younger friend. She worked for a non-profit; her girlfriend, with whom she lived, taught martial arts or something. They were not rolling in the proverbial dough by any means. And they had this fabulous cat. This cat was Mr Personality. Everyone loved this cat.

Well, one day the cat escaped from the house and got hit by a car, suffering some major, though thankfully non-fatal, injuries. The cat's owner was giving a bunch of us at an event an update on how the cat was doing, and she started talking about the incredible vet bills they had and how they had no idea how they were going to pay them off. It was the holidays. Everyone loved that cat. We felt bad. So a couple of us spontaneously sent our friend fairly large checks afterwards to help with the vet bills.

Nice, right? Warm and fuzzy, right? Good karma, right?

Then, six or nine months later, the friend bought a very cute, fairly expensive, and brand new car. And I really thought, WTF? You have no qualms about accepting money from your friends to pay your vet bills, but you also have no qualms about taking on that large a car payment, so really, how broke are you? I knew then, and I know now, that that was a really petty thought and totally opposite to any charitable impulse. I tried really hard to just let it go and be satisfied that what I had done was a good thing and my own choice.

But it's just another example of how charity is not a simple thing. For most of us. I guess.

xoxo

where'd that come from?

I had something a little...bemusing...happen to me today. You ever have someone you know well act in a way--whether good, bad, or neutral--that is so unexpected, so apart from their usual behavior, that you think, "Wait. Did you swap brains with someone today?"

As background, this is someone I am in a professional relationship with. We've known each other for over twenty years. We really like and really respect each other and have always had a fantastic working relationship. As further background, this person is about to go away for a month to a somewhat dangerous foreign country. (Yeah, don't ask me why. If I had the money to finance such an undertaking, it'd be five star resorts, not third world nations, but it takes all kinds.)

I stopped by his office on my way out today to say "Happy New Year!" and "Don't get malaria!" and "No, I'm sure wearing your Red Sox hat won't totally make you look like an American who ought to be kidnapped!" and other such pre-vacation sentiments, and completely unexpectedly, he put his arms out and gave me a big hug and a kiss on the cheek with the "Happy New Year"s. Now, in our over twenty years of acquaintance, I think I may possibly have gotten one hug before, at my mom's wake, but wakes are just a huge blur of people hugging and patting you, so I couldn't even swear to that. This man is not a hugger.

It wasn't weird or unpleasant or anything like that. It was nice. *I* am a hugger. (Consider yourself warned.) It was just so "where'd that come from?"

Maybe deep down he is worried about tropical diseases, plane crashes, and ransom notes. Latent fear of death makes people do strange things.

xoxo

best of '07, DVD version

So, I went back on Netflix and looked at what I rated highest over the course of the past year, which I think will probably give a fairer "best of" than the vagaries of my imperfect memory. Without further ado, the best malevolent rentals, in backwards chronological order:

1.) The Sopranos, season 6, parts 1 and 2

2.) Saved!

3.) Pan's Labyrinth

4.) Little Miss Sunshine

5.) The Wire, season 3

and another special honorable mention to 28 Weeks Later, which is not a rental and which I still haven't finished watching. But it's good! Really good!

xoxo

more accountability

I must confess that while I did not meet my goal of exercising every day between Nov 20-whatever and Christmas, I did do pretty damn well. So much so that despite the ridiculous amount of food in my workplace over that period, I think I successfully kept from adding any more winter fat. I don't think I lost any, but I feel like I held my own.

However, I now have not done anything physical since December 23, and that despite getting the new yoga mat for Christmas that I'd asked my son for. I am, therefore, publicly making known my intention to start back with the fitness initiative. Starting...now!

xoxo

best of '07, movie version

My favorite movies of 2007, in no particular order:

Gone, Baby, Gone

Eastern Promises

This is England

With an honorable mention to 28 Weeks Later, which might seriously have made it into the top three if only I had ever yet made it to the end of the DVD without falling asleep. (Watching zombie movies in bed knocks me out. Go figure.) But the action sequence at the beginning of that movie? Just fabulous.

And, okay, if forced to make a choice, I'd go with This is England as my top pick, if only because it successfully deposited me into a whole nother world I knew nothing about.

xoxo

the present Santa didn't bring

When my mom died, we gave away some of her clothes and such and threw away some others, and I appropriated the things I wanted (the famous Calphalon wok!), but we didn't really do a whole cleanout of everything. It was a bad year and my dad and I were both overwhelmed.

I kinda sorta realized today that the reason that huge box tucked away in one of the closets that said KitchenAid on it was so heavy was that it in fact contained a never-used 5 quart professional series mixer in Imperial Gray. Never used. Are you kidding me? Where did it come from? Did we buy it for her for some occasion or other? Why did she never use it? (The answer to that one is actually easy. I'm sure she was saving it for when her other mixer broke. Which, let that be a lesson to you. Use your shit and don't save it, or you may die before it ever comes out of the box.)

So, yeah, I regifted it to myself for Christmas. Ho ho ho.

Feliz Navidad, blog readers. I hope Santa brings you whatever would be your equivalent of an Imperial Gray KitchenAid on the awesomeness scale.

xoxo

more andrea advice

1.) Attempting to do yoga while the cat is awake is probably a bad bad idea. Actually, it's definitely a bad idea. Unless, of course, you find having your exposed armpits kneaded on a pleasant experience.

2.) If you run a red light because you are in such a hurry to get into the effing Walmart parking lot, you are probably taking the last minute Christmas shopping a little bit too seriously. Please refrain from endangering my, and your own, life. The cheap poorly-made Chinese merchandise will still be there in ninety seconds. I promise.

3.) Just assume--if you're a woman of childbearing age, that is--that you'll get your period for every major holiday, every vacation, and every time you want to have sex with someone you haven't seen for a long time, whether it's actually due or not. This will not save you from being incredibly irritated when it happens, but it'll save you from being surprised.

xoxo

everything has one drawback

I love google. Google is absolutely one of the best inventions of my lifetime. Right up there with the gift bags, even. But it, like very other freaking thing in life, does have a drawback.

I really really wanted to play Name That Lyric with you all when "if you ever need anything, please don't hesitate to ask someone else first" popped up on shuffle on the iPod. But you just can't play that game over the computer anymore because it takes like 6 seconds to google any damn quote or lyric. That's very sad. The lyric, however, still fills me with the kind of glee that clever writing always does. So that's not very sad.

I'm supposed to be baking right now. Do you see anything going into my oven? No, you do not.

Blogging is another of the best inventions of my lifetime. It enables one to totally procrastinate while convincing oneself that one is doing something productive. If by "one" we mean me.

And, no, I have not been hitting the Kahlua or the eggnog. That may or may not be sad.

Um, merry day before the day before Christmas Eve.

xoxo

gen gap, again

We have a fairly new receptionist in my office, a wee young thing of twenty or so. She has a baby. She goes to college at night. She's hard-working and bright--she learned more about how to do her job in her first two weeks of employment than the fruitloop who had her job before her learned in a year and a half, I swear. And the other day she held court on what women over forty are no longer allowed to do.

Now, I'll qualify by saying I was not there for this conversation. (I heard it secondhand from our nurse practitioner, whose response during it was something along the lines of, "okay, you need to stop talking now.") I'll also qualify it by saying that apparently the object of the rant was her own mother, and I guess we all know that at that age you're still trying to adjust to your parents as being actual human beings. But, be that as it may, things that women over the age of forty should not do include donning a bathing suit at the beach and wearing any skirt that comes above the knee.

Ah, youth.

xoxo

word of advice

I was going to go into detail about the cell phone conversation(s) I overheard today, but I figured I already did Felons on Public Transit this week, and it'll be hard to top that one for a while.

So I'll just say this. If you are, apparently, just out of a halfway house and attending multiple "meetings" a day, and you do indeed wish to be successful at the whole sobriety thing, it might behoove you to not tell four different people four different stories about what you're planning on doing tonight in four separate cell conversations in the space of, oh, seven minutes. And, um, yeah, seek help for your borderline personality disorder or whatthefuckever causes you to lie so very, very much.

I mean, c'mon now. Four different versions? That's Lie Overkill.

xoxo

wrap it up

I was thinking today about how much I used to hate gift wrapping prior to the advent of the gift bag. When I was in my teens or early 20s, before the gift bag became ubiquitous, Christmas Eve day would usually find me behind closed doors, surrounded by every single gift I'd bought, struggling to wrap my way through the pile at the very last possible moment. And the chances of your getting a rectangular-shaped gift from me were probably pretty high, because if I looked at something and thought, "Man, that'd be a bitch to wrap," chances were I wasn't going to buy it.

Part of my problem with this, as with so very many things, was that my mom (i.e. the down-market Martha Stewart, before the real Martha Stewart ever became who she was) made present wrapping into some kind of origami-based art form, with perfect color coordination, homemade bows, the whole works. Any sad gift wrapping attempt of mine only served to show you can't compete with perfection, eh?

Gift bags made the whole question moot, because any idiot with no hand-eye coordination at all, can smother something in pretty colored tissue paper and plop it in a bag. C'mon now. It's just one more example of how, nostalgia be damned, it's so much better to live in 2007. In 1977, people smoked everywhere, no one picked up their dog's poop off the street, you couldn't defrost frozen chicken in 15 minutes, and wrapping something oval was a nightmare. I'm sure the progress we've made technologically and societally far outweighs blights like SUVs, one mailbox for the whole street, and Tila Tequila. Right? Right?!?

xoxo

oh, and an update

Remember when I told the story about D's case manager? If not, too bad. I'm too lazy to figure out how to link to it. Well, today was their big Christmas shopping date, and apparently, it went off without a hitch. I can't even tell you how pleased I am with that.

No, they didn't go to the mall and spend three hours, but he managed to go to Target, buy my present, and even notice on the way past the game department that they had the computer game he wanted in stock just in case I hadn't bought it already. This all makes me a happy girl.

xoxo

the prison bus

On days that I go to work mid-morning (like yesterday) and take the bus (like yesterday), I've noticed an additional demographic besides your usual midday riders--retail employees going to work, moms with young children, and old people doing their errands. No, round about 10:30 in the morning, your happy MBTA passengers also include a bunch of guys going either to the courthouse or to their probation officers. This leads to some interesting overheard conversations.

A couple weeks ago I heard a spirited discussion of which local jails had the best amenities and most pleasant staff, and therefore were totally worth doing your whole time in, rather than getting probation, which is a big pain in the ass. The guys involved in that particular conversation were about my kid's age, so I was just kind of listening with vague amusement. Guys in their late teens and early twenties are, by and large, immature morons, and these ones seemed not overly bright, but I'm fairly sure that eventually the excess testosterone will peter out and they'll learn to stop doing whatever keeps landing them in jail for a couple months.

Yesterday, though. Two guys on the bus, discussing all the prison fights they've been in. Things I learned, which may be important to me later, though I kind of doubt it: you really can't get a bad beat down in Middleton, because the cells are so small that even if ten of your enemies come after you, only two or three can fit in your cell at one time. South Bay, however, is a different story. And, oh, yeah, if you jump off your top bunk onto someone, it may take three days for all the blood to get cleaned up off all the surfaces it splatters onto.

So, what was disturbing to me about this particular conversation, besides, y'know, the obvious, and the fact that they weren't in the least bit shy about having it in a public place, is that the guys involved were my age. Or older. Um, that's not excess testosterone, that's just...violent fuckedupedness that apparently ain't changing any time soon.

I suggest house arrest. Ankle bracelets. No taking the bus.

xoxo

scattered klutziness with periods of incoordination

I've only been up for an hour, but I've already managed to fall on my ass while squatting down on my haunches to look under the daybed and inexplicably spill half a cup of coffee all over the counter and kitchen floor.

There's a lot of ice outside. Just sayin'. If you don't hear from me for a couple weeks, just assume subdural hematoma or two broken typing wrists.

xoxo

"I Am Legend"

Saw it last night. Now I very much want to go read the original novel, because I'd always heard it referred to (in the spec fic literary circles I used to dabble in) as one of the classic vampire stories of all time, yet in the movie the monsters are very much depicted as more "28 Days/Weeks Later" style zombies.

I was saying last night that I wonder if in fact the infected humans in the book are portrayed the same way they are in the movie--lightning-fast, hyperviolent, blood-thirsty creatures--that they never used to be called "zombies" in discussions of the book because that conception of a zombie, as opposed to slow lumbering creatures that just maybe wanted to eat your brain, is quite a modern one.

I'm sorry. That's probably a really boring discussion to anyone who's not really interested in the horror genre. So, anyway! Fun, scary, and surprisingly touching movie, and Will Smith as usual rocks. We also thought the ending was less "Hollywood" than we were expecting for a big holiday blockbuster.

xoxo

and one more thing

Just because I thought I'd go for the vaguely mean-spirited trifecta.

There's this house near my work which has had, for at least the past 15 years, a big Christmas display with, um, religious overtones. I mean to say, they hang a huge banner with a Christian catchphrase on it on the side of their house amongst the colored lights.

So when I was leaving work at 4:15 this afternoon, twenty hours or so after it finished snowing, I noticed that they hadn't even made a cursory attempt at clearing their sidewalks. This meant pedestrians had to trudge through ten or so inches of snow or walk out into a very busy main street to pass. And I was really kind of wishing I had a can of spray paint.

Because it would have been just so sweet to struggle up through their side yard and deface their little Christian banner with the message "JESUS WANTS YOU TO SHOVEL".

Wouldn't it? Because, seriously, Jesus would want them to shovel.

xoxo

whose mailbox is it, anyway?

Speaking of snow. We have this weird thing on my street wherein the mailboxes for all the houses are down at the bottom of the hill, i.e. almost in front of my house. This makes no sense to me, since it is not a condo complex of any sort, but apparently, postal regulations are such that if your street didn't exist prior to 1980-something, they don't need to deliver to each house individually. Who knew?

And I was just saying to someone today that I was shocked when my next door neighbor cleaned off and around the mailboxes yesterday, because 95% of all snowstorms, someone from my house does it. (The other 5% of the time, the people who did it yesterday do it.) And I realized that I'm always sort of very vaguely resentful of that. That mailbox "belongs" to everyone on the street, and yet the people up the hill or across the street never ever think to come clean it when they're out shoveling/plowing. And yet they would be oh-so-sad if the mailbox didn't get cleaned off and thus the mailman did not deliver.

Now, seriously, this is a very small peeve. I'm not filled with burning hatred towards my neighbors because of it. But it makes me think about all those things other people take care of for us that we perhaps don't even notice, or take for granted if we do. I think I'm going to figure out one of those things in my own life and make sure I thank the person who's been doing it.

xoxo

winter effen wonderland, part whatever

So how's everyone? Did you make it home last night? Did you have fun shoveling? Did you have to get up really really early this morning so you could make it to work on time? Isn't winter just your favorite of all possible seasons?

My day/week/year is brightened, however, by the news that my favorite pitchers of all time, Roger Clemens and Eric Gagne, are big cheaters. I can't even tell you how gratifying that is, nor do I want to delve into the disturbing psychological reasons that is so. What's the German word for that, again?

xoxo

in today's Globe

I almost put an ellipsis in there and then I stopped myself. Just thought you'd all want to know that. Before I actually go accomplish something today, and I swear to god I will, I have to talk about a couple of things in today's paper.

In a snarky review of some mother-daughter pageant reality show (and, seriously, why do you need to snark when you can just give that description of what it is? c'mon now), the author makes some fun of one of the contestants listing her hobbies as shopping and working out. Hey, those are two of my hobbies as well, and I don't think that makes me any more shallow or stupid than the average person. It's that kind of snobbery that makes people feel like they ought to say they spend their time going to the opera or studying Portuguese when obviously they don't.

Our second news item was a story on Youk's fiancee. She once dated Ben Affleck. Then she was briefly married to someone who owned a car dealership. Now she's with a pro baseball player. Is it wrong of me to read this list of facts and think "golddigger"? Okay, maybe I am more shallow than the average person. Especially since when I was looking at her photo I was thinking, "Really? Ben Affleck thought she was good-looking enough to date after J Lo?"

Over n out.

xoxo

vegansexual

Have you heard about this? People who don't eat meat who only sleep with other people who also don't eat meat are now calling themslves vegansexual. I think my eyes just rolled so far back in my head I saw my optic nerve.

Go ahead. Google it. I dare you. You'll find gems like (paraphrasing) "I couldn't be intimate with someone whose body is made up of dead animals." Wow, my optic nerve is looking pretty hot. Has it lost weight?

I guess the question that begs asking is whether vegans swallow. I mean, even if their partner's body isn't composed of dead animals who died solely for their selfish and immoral appetites, that's still animal protein.

Why, yes, I am procrastinating on finishing that paperwork. Why do you ask?

xoxo

ellipsis abuse

I'll knock it off. I promise.

xoxo

just another ten pages...

or so.

I'm helping D fill out some paperwork that the Commonwealth has requested and, I swear to god, I am having a huge anxiety attack. I don't know what exactly I think is going to happen to us if I do this wrong or miss a question or whatever. As far as I can tell, they'll just send it back and ask for more info. But dealing with faceless bureaucracy and filling out many, many page forms in which there are numerous questions that don't seem pertinent or answerable makes me break out in hives.

I know you feel really bad for me.

xoxo

music to...

(I promise this will be my last music or iPod related entry for a while. I'm sure it's just as annoying as when I go on about baseball for too many entries in a row. Speaking of which! Milwaukee Brewers fans? I give you...Eric Gagne. You poor bastards.)

Anyway, we were also listening to Johnny Cash's version of "Hurt" yesterday and I mentioned that when I make up my playlist--and I will--of music to slit your wrists to, that'll definitely be on it. It was suggested to me that having such a playlist was perhaps in poor taste. Perhaps. But certainly I, of all people, am not mocking anyone's suicidal ideation. Clearly. It's just that, as I believe I've mentioned before, I occasionally need to listen to, wallow in even, a whole bunch of really dark, really bleak music because it paradoxically makes me feel much better. "Hurt" is a very dark, bleak song in and of itself, but the Cash version with him singing in that beautiful quavery old man's voice over the stark acoustic guitar, how can that not make you feel like you're being punched in the heart?

So, number two on the music to... playlist has got to be "Fell on Black Days" by Soundgarden, which I am also sure I have mentioned my lurve for. As well as my absolute lurve for Chris Cornell's voice. As I was messing about online this afternoon, I happened to look at Mr Cornell's wikipedia entry. Apparently, and I had no idea about this before (and being that it's wikipedia who knows if it's actually completely true?), but he was so deeply depressed as a young man that he at one point didn't leave his house for a whole year. Yeah, well, that may or may not remind me of someone whom I love dearly, but nevertheless it does make perfect sense to me. If I consider what I'd put on that playlist, it's pretty much all been written by people with histories of serious clinical depression. The essential bleakness that makes me feel both like I'm being punched in the heart and yet paradoxically better only comes from other people whose serotonin levels have been severely fucked at some point too. There's something in me that recognizes it. (And, yes, I do realize I sound like a complete douche saying that, thanks.)

But I contrast this to, say, "Can't Stand Losing You" by the Police, with its glib and manipulative suicide threat, and I think, yeah, that's a supposed depression song written by someone who has never actually been seriously depressed a day in their life.

xoxo

best hypothetical celebrity day evah

So, tripleindemnity and I were listening to Oasis yesterday and I was reminiscing about how my friend L and I tried to go see them a few years ago, but the concert was cancelled. And I was hella disappointed, not just because I love Oasis--though I do love Oasis--but because I'd really been hoping to see Liam and Noel break out into a fistfight on stage or start throwing things at one another or what-have-you. (The next concert L and I went to after that was Tori Amos, which was awesome, but which just didn't contain the same possibility of mayhem.) Anyway, this led into a story about Mr Indemnity's brother meeting Liam and Noel. Mr Indemnity's brother, as I may have mentioned before, is a musician in NYC and thus gets to hobnob with a bunch of household-type names. I get a kick out of hearing these stories. Hanging with Oasis. Playing poker with Drew Barrymore. Sean Lennon's real estate habits. Etc.

I was thinking I might just enjoy playing poker with Drew Barrymore. In fact, my best hypothetical celebrity day evah might start with poker with Drew, then watching Noel and Liam get trashed and start wrestling on the coffee table. After that Anthony Kiedis could drop by to have his way with me. Flea could wait outside and practice the bass or something, and then when Anthony and I were done, all three of us could go bowling and get new tattoos.

Admit it, it sounds fabulous.

xoxo

deep iPod thoughts

Okay! Enough with the navel-gazing. Let's talk about important shit like, for instance, my beautiful, beautiful new iPod. I've been transferring CDs for the past three days and I'm now at the point where deciding what makes the cut and what doesn't is getting hard. If I haven't listened to it in this millennium, does that mean it doesn't deserve to go on the iPod? And how many different versions of the same song by the same artist is overkill? (I kind of like that if I play my songs alphabetically, I can listen to "Stan" by Eminem three times in a row without hitting the back arrow. Shut up.)

I also am bemused by what my iPod assures me my album genres are. The Clash, Cracker, Mission of Burma, Morphine, Offspring, RHCP, and The White Stripes are Alternative/Punk but Nirvana, Oasis, The Police, The Pretenders, Soundgarden, Squeeze, and Talking Heads are Rock. Really? NIN is Electronica/Dance. Sarah McLachlan is Rock, Tori Amos is Alternative, and KT Tunstall is Pop. Again, really? Robert Rich is Electronica, but Steve Roach is New Age. It's all very, very confusing.

But Johnny Cash is still country. So that's okay then.

And, in related news, I've found the left earbud stays in much less easily than the right. If this means my freaking ear canals are asymmetric, I don't want to know. There's only so much body hatred one woman can deal with.

xoxo

are you a good person?

(FYI--this is triggered by my last blog post, my bringing up of my "moral failings," and a little sidebar conversation I had about it.)

If you were to ask me, "Andrea, are you a good person?" and the definition of that was not a bad person, my answer would be "yeah, pretty much." I try my best to follow my own moral code in the ways that are important to me. I try to treat my family and my friends and my patients with kindness and respect and consideration and acceptance. I try to take good care of them in whatever ways I can see they need or want. (Sometimes I guess wrong.) I try hard not to be selfish, without going too far in the opposite direction and becoming a martyr, which is just as bad. I try to keep people's confidences, listen when they want to talk, and mind my business if they don't. I try not to lose my temper (not always successfully) and I try not to be a miserable cunt (also not always successfully.) I don't lie for nefarious purposes.

But if you were to ask me, "Andrea, are you a good person?" and the definition of that was you do good things that are hard for you, my answer would be "not so much." The whole tithing thing in "The Year of Living Biblically" is a perfect example of that. (I will say that A.J. Jacobs, the author, also found it awfully tough.) I am in awe that some people really do give ten percent of their income to charity. The amount of discipline and sacrifice involved in that blows me away. And what I see as one of my moral failings is that I'm not even close to being able to sacrifice monetarily or effortfully in that way for charity for strangers. I'll give my money and my time to the people I care about because it *doesn't* feel like a sacrifice. It feels good and right and natural. I am too selfish and too spoiled to sacrifice for strangers. Buying an overpriced (product)Red sweatshirt at the Gap so you can feel self-righteous that you're helping the poor while whipping out your credit card isn't charity. Going to parties that raise money for a cause or participating in charity fun runs and bike-a-thons with your friends isn't charity either. Those things are doing stuff you'd want to do anyway and then patting yourself on the back about how philanthropic you are.

Okay, maybe it's somehow better than buying a non-charity overpriced sweatshirt, going to a party whose only aim is getting people drunk or laid, or participating in athletic events just for fun. But it isn't what I'd call true charity. True charity means doing something someone needs even at a cost to yourself and doing it anonymously (if possible) or at least without self-congratulations. And, to me, true charity is something that people are really "good" as opposed to people who are--like me--simply "not bad" do.

I've got a long way to go in my selfish and spoiled life before I'm good.

xoxo

"The Year of Living Biblically"

Great book. I laughed, I cried...

No, actually, I just laughed. And learned a bunch of stuff I didn't know. And whizzed through the book in one night. And heard about a couple of movements that I was unaware of, or only vaguely aware of, but which will, I'm sure, lead to googling and possibly future blog topics. (That's a teaser!)

I will say, here and now, that the book kicked in some guilt about what I'd consider one of my bigger moral failings, namely that I don't give enough to charity. I have a lot of mental excuses about money being relatively tight (though, obviously, much less so over the past couple months) but obviously I'm spending money on things I "need" like $2o camis and $11 cases of iced tea, when I could be giving it to people who really are in need.

xoxo

things that annoy me: consumer edition

1.) The fact that supermarkets only put Snapple on sale in the summer. The weather gets chilly and I have to pay full price for iced tea? Why? People drink cold refreshing beverages all year. Drinking Snapple in December is no more incongruous than drinking Coke, beer, or, for that matter, ice water.

2.) That something like a Jockey-for-Her cami, made of probably $1.50 worth of synthetic material, but essential for wearing under my sweaters, costs over twenty bucks. I have come to terms with fifty+ dollar bras, being as I am a weird size, and god bless Wacoal for making 'em. There's some structural engineering going on there, as well as some aesthetics. But a little rectangular bit of Tactel with straps attached? Highway robbery.

3.) Friggin' iPod earbuds. I'm sure they stay put in somebody's ears, but I would not be that somebody. Thing is, I knew this before I broke down and bought the iPod and yet I hoped against hope it would miraculously not be true.

xoxo

pretzel girl speaks

I keep saying, like for 5 years now, that I'm going to start doing yoga. But then every place I want to take a class doesn't have a beginners class at a time I can go, and it's too far, or it's too cold out, and it's expensive, and blah blah blah. So finally I broke down and bought a book with a CD and flashcards to try it at home. I actually looked at DVDs, but seriously? So many of them looked so cheesy just from the cover photos that I figured I'd just find them annoying.

The actual book/CD I finally chose was "yin" yoga, which is a very slow discipline. You hold each pose for 5 whole minutes, which works, supposedly, on your connective tissue. Which makes perfect sense to me, because that's the whole principle behind the myofascial work I learned in school: when you want to change the fascia, you're working very slowly and not forcing anything. You're hanging out and waiting for the tissue to change beneath your hands, as the fascia "melts" and loosens. A subset of my classmates hated that class, because they were too impatient/aggressive/inattentive/easily bored to just hang out and wait for the change. I loved it. So, temperamentally, I figured the yin yoga would work for me. I also know I have some fascial restriction in a spiral pattern from my left neck/shoulder down to my right hip, so I figured working on that couldn't hurt.

Well, basically, all the poses in the book/CD are focusing on your hips, low back, sacral, pelvic area, and particularly opening the psoas, so the fascia in my shoulder is shit out of luck. But I did it for the first time yesterday and, man, did I feel good afterward. If not necessarily during, when there were moments of "you want me to do what?" But even this morning, walking down the stairs, I could feel how open my hips and pelvic area were. It was like I'd gotten a massage yesterday. Cool stuff.

I have to tell you though, the instructor/writer is all about the Eastern medicine and the chakras, and in between the Western medicine explanations of what you're stretching, he says things like, "opening your first and second chakras will help you to better accept pleasure and pain." Alrighty then. Just another reason to plow on, huh?

xoxo

in the interest of full disclosure

I screwed up my resolution and didn't exercise on Saturday. Just because I went out to see Beowulf in IMAX directly from work. That was more important than the state of my fat ass, right? Right? I mean, Neil Gaiman, c'mon.

Okay, enough of the lame excuses, and onto movie reviewage. I give it two thumbs up. I thought the beginning was somewhat slow, but the last 2/3rds picked up appreciably. And it's probably worth bothering to see in 3-D, if that's an option for you, if for the dragon fight alone. My inner 14-year-old boy was sated, 'k?

xoxo

addiction

The other night we were watching an episode of "True Life"--which is, if you've never seen it, a pretty good show despite being on MTv--about oxycontin addicts. It was an old episode, from 2001, and I found myself disappointed at the end, wishing there was follow-up telling us where the people profiled were now five or six years later, who was alive and who was dead, who was still using, who was clean.

In particular, there was a young man from Maine who had started using as soon as he went away to college and over four years progressed to IV use. He seemed to be a nice kid, with a really supportive and concerned mom and sister. He went to a rehab center where they did "rapid detox" where they put you under anaesthesia and give you a drug that blocks your opiate receptors and when you wake up several hours later, you supposedly aren't physically addicted anymore. Then you go through a month of intensive counseling to work on how and why you started using and how to keep from going back, etc. At the end of the program, they showed him three months after rehab. He was working construction, not using, living at home, but basically not socializing at all because all his friends and acquaintances used drugs and he couldn't be around them. I was really rooting for him to make it. But it underscored for me what I really don't understand about addiction.

In my family there is a lot of alcoholism, on both sides. There are also--as you know, Bob--a lot of mood disorders. The two things go together, both people self-medicating their depression and anxiety with booze and the fact that the two traits are genetically linked. What we don't seem to have, though, are addictive personalities. If you know me personally, you probably know my joke about how I *know* I don't have one--I won't repeat it here. And my dad was (I guess, in rehab-speak, is) an alcoholic, though he hasn't had a drink in over thirty years. He was a very functional alcoholic; when his boss took him aside and told him his drinking was starting to affect his job, that's the day he decided to quit. And he was physically addicted. He had to go to detox and he had the hallucinations, the whole thing. But once he got out, he just never drank again. No AA, no relapsing. He even went back to his part-time second job, bar tending for my uncle for years and years, which is, I guess, a huge no-no for people "in recovery."

I could tell you other stories like that about other close family members, but it's the same point: physical addiction, can't handle alcohol on a physical level, can't drink moderately like a regular person, but no apparent addictive personality. When they wise up and realize it's a problem, they just quit and that's that. None of this relapsing and/or making their whole life about *not* drinking that seems par for the course in everything you see and hear about addicts.

So, I guess what I don't understand is this. I believe alcoholism and drug addiction are diseases. I've seen for myself that inability to physically process alcohol like normal people do. But is the psychological addiction, the addictive personality, also a disease? A separate disease or part of the same disease? Why should the young man in Maine who isn't physically addicted to opiates any more and who wants to stay clean and have a normal happy life and who has a nice family who loves him not be able to stay off the drugs?

Well, I mean, I hope he did.

xoxo

rowwrrr

D had a doctor's appointment yesterday and we met up with his case manager L there. She is always trying to get him to go places or do things with her, to work on the social anxiety/agoraphobia thing, and he always politely declines. Well, yesterday, we had been talking in the appointment about exercise--D saying he might start lifting again, since he's got weights at home--and afterwards L said, "D, would you ever want to go for a walk around your neighborhood with me?" (Her sister lives near us and she told us when we first met her not to be surprised if we saw her around our way, that she often walked by our street.)

D, of course said "no" and I said, "I think he's afraid of running into someone he knows, L." She was like, "Why?!? Do you think they would know who I am?" I said, "Yeah, they'd just think L was your older girlfriend. That would have to up your street cred."

And then she said, deadpan, "And, not for nothing, but I am hot." We were dying. I said, "Yeah. What's that word? Cougar?" and she rowwrr'd. D was just smirking at us and shaking his head like: And I'm the one who's supposed to be mentally ill here?

My Skills and Dynamics teacher, the one who had such a stick up her ass regarding therapeutic boundaries, would have said this whole conversation was *highly* inappropriate. But I'll say this--D did later make a commitment to go Christmas shopping with L so he could buy my present, which is fabulous. I think the Commonwealth is damn lucky to have her working for them and we're damn lucky to have had her assigned to us.

xoxo

and as an extra bonus bit of cardio

When I came downstairs a little bit ago after finishing working out, my dad was freaking because he had just let Evil Kitty in and she had brought with her a bird. A live bird. Which was now flying around the downstairs of my house.

Cue ten minutes of chasing it around the kitchen, dining room, and living room with a towel until I was finally able to grab it and liberate it out the front door.

So today it was 55 minutes of grueling cardio, suckas.

xoxo

45 minutes!

of grueling cardio, suckahs. It took a lot of (post)punk to get me through that. But, yes, day one was a success.

(I'll also note that no one is stepping up to the plate and volunteering to go bowling with me. I think this is a sad replay of last year's kickboxing debacle, by which I mean to say, as nicely as is possible, you all suck.)

Now, for some substance and actual content: I finally finished reading Atonement, a book I only bought because the trailer for the film has been played before every single movie I've gone to for the last three months. Now, without spoiling either the book or the movie--should it actually follow the book--all I can say is I was pleasantly shocked and shockingly pleased at the ending, in which it becomes clear that what you've assumed is true or what you assumed you've been reading is in fact something different. I don't know how they'll have filmed it to carry off the same structure. It seems like one of those literary techniques that is elegant on the page but would seem lame dramatized. But now I suppose I'll have to go see it and find out.

Plus, of course, Kiera Knightly, so yeah.

xoxo

it's a new dawn, it's a new day...

This really isn't so much of a rant as it is a long expression of befuddlement. I'm still kind of processing the whole "bad parent! bad parent!" thing I observed on the internet, and I realize that one of the things that befuddles me the most is how much parenting of small children has changed, not only since I was a small child, but even since D was. Listening to what some people today apparently think is essential for normal child development makes me wonder how any of us ever learned to read and write, get along with others, or prepare to live in society.

I heard a whole bunch o' stuff about how "kindergarten is the new first grade" and how children must be in preschool by the time they're three or they'll be at a horrible disadvantage in life. Okay. Lemme say this. I am so old that not only wasn't kindergarten the equivilent of first grade in my day, it wasn't even mandatory. And I, like many of my contemporaries, did not go. I remember my first day of first grade (at age 5 years, 9 months), wherein Sister Linda had on the bulletin board fall leaves made of construction paper with our names printed on them and the first order of business on entering was to see if you could find your own name. It wasn't expected that you could. Any reading ability at all put you ahead of the game. And despite that shocking fact, we all became literate. Many of us even went to college. Amazing, no? Must have been the Schoolhouse Rock. (G'head, sing "Conjunction Junction," you know you want to.)

I also heard a bunch of stuff about it being "high time" that a first grader was involved in afterschool activities, that it was borderline neglect if they weren't in Brownies and soccer and dance class. Well, lemme see. I will admit I was a Brownie and then a Girl Scout until it became hopelessly uncool. I don't think it did anything for my social, intellectual, or spiritual development per se, though we did have the Menstruation Film there, thank god, or when I got my first period in 5th fucking grade, I'd have thought I was dying. Otherwise, it was a pretty useless waste of a couple afternoons a month. There was also at some point candlepin bowling league (couldn't bowl then, can't bowl now, though, goddamn, if any of you all ever want to go bowling, say the word, because it sounds like a hoot!), some basic swimming and dancing at the Y, and a brief, brief stab at guitar lessons, which my parents were not very supportive of, it being a known fact that no one in our family has any musical talent at all. And they conflicted with Saturday morning cartoons, so you know there was no long-term in it for me.

But, y'know, I was deeply introverted, then as now, and seriously, after school and having to deal with people all day, I was exhausted. Mostly I wanted to just go home and watch "Match Game," or play Barbies with my cousin who lived downstairs, or read my library books, or walk to the Dairy Queen with Debbie L. What happens with kids like me these days? Is the theory that if you force them to constantly be involved with other people in groups and goal-oriented activities that you will remake their natural personalities and they won't be people who like to be alone or with just another person or two, thinking and reading and using their imaginations? And even if that works, is that really what's best for society? Don't you all need people like me? Where's the next generation of overly-analytical bloggers coming from, I ask you. Sigh.

So, yeah. It's a whole new world out there. And I remain perplexed.

xoxo

so many, many thoughts

Lots I want to blog about, but I think I shall do it thusly: group the shorter entries into this post and then do the big rant as a topic all its own. Let's get started then!

1.) Eunice Kennedy Shriver. There was a story on the early news this morning about Ms Shriver being in MGH over the past week, probably prompted by some digging around as to why Maria and the Governator were in town for the Celts game on Friday. The news bit showed Ms Shriver receiving some award or other in the not-so-distant past--a tiny, tiny, emaciated woman in a sequined gown with a wild blondish shoulder-length bob framing a face so wrinkled you could barely make out her facial features. Now I really don't mean to be mean, but the effect was like nothing so much as if someone had unwrapped a mummy, stuck it in a cocktail dress, and plopped a wig on its head. First of all, you people have more money than God: buy the poor woman a fucking case of Ensure, okay? Secondly, this should be a cautionary tale to all of us about the importance of sunscreen. Seriously, she's only four or five years older than my dad and she looked about 116.

2.) The Police. Tripleindemnity and I mock Sting endlessly for a wide variety of things: Tantric sex, the lameosity of his solo career, the fact that on the reunion tour he apparently was no longer able to hit any of his high notes, the incident when tripleindemnity's bro played on a bill with Sting Jr. that proved--to me anyway--that Sting Sr. is, personality-wise, a self-important douche, and (finally) the fact that one of Eddy's life aims is to "have Christmas with Sting and Trudie Styler!" is one of the funniest Ab Fab jokes ever. Yes, I am aware that the mockery of a couple of middle-aged Massachusetts peasants/music fans probably makes Sting weep as he dives in his piles o' cash. Nevertheless, despite all the mockery, tripleindemnity recently gifted me with a two-disc Police CD, enabling me in my recent music nostalgiafest in which it is still 1981. (I swear, it'll pass soon.) I was listening to this CD today, and again, all Sting-bashing aside, I must say that The Police were an awesome band. Those songs hold up, sounding as good as they did 25 years ago. If you were to hear them on the radio today, they'd sound fresh and modern. I think there are two interrelated reasons for that (besides the fact that, yeah I know, the 80s nostalgiafest is not just going on in my head): no one else sounds like them and they were not endlessly copied by other, lesser bands.

3.) Exercise. Now that I'm back more or less working five days at the hospital, weight gain seems inevitable. There is nothing to eat in that cafeteria that isn't carbs and grease, plus there is always a crapload of food in the office itself, especially once holiday season rolls around. I've decided the only way I can possibly combat that is to exercise every day from now through Christmas, and I'm asking you guys to please hold me accountable. I do a lot better when someone's holding me accountable. Gracias.

4.) Chav. I learned a new word this weekend! Do you know what a chav, a chavette, or chavvy is? A chav is, apparently, a British species of white trash. Go look it up in the urban dictionary for further clarification, if you'd like. I loved the description of a chavette (female chav, of course) wearing a hairstyle called "the Croyden facelift"--i.e. a ponytail or bun so tightly pulled back that she has a permanent look of surprise. This is paired, apparently, with accessories like huge hoop earrings and a pram full of at least two crying babies which she is swearing at. And it occurs to me that I see women with that exact same hairdo and jewelry, (and poorly taken-care-of babies) just about every day here in greater Boston. Which leads me to wonder: how exactly do *poor people* trends spread? The teenage moms at the welfare office in Croyden UK or in Salem MA are not picking up that look from the pages of Vogue, TV shows, or even rap videos. So how do they dress and groom exactly alike with the Atlantic Ocean between them? It is a puzzlement.

xoxo

you named your kid *what*?

I had a little girl in work the other day who was named Dezirea...pronounced like the (real, actual) name Desiree. I have no idea if this was a conscious choice in creative spelling or whether mom had just never seen the name in print and took her best shot. I also have no idea which of those possibilities is sadder.

But the atrocity of this pales next to my two favorite patient-name stories. There was the family in which the two brothers were called Harley and Bud. It makes me sad to this day that their mom never (as far as I know!) gave them a little sister Marlboro. And then there's my very very favorite: a baby girl named Nautica. She's just lucky she wasn't a boy, or her name would've been MembersOnly. Or, possibly, North Face.

Okay, I'll stop now.

xoxo

is there something wrong...

with someone who, watching a Court TV show about a maximum security facility for juvenile offenders, hears a bit wherein a very agitated young man is being cajoled by a negotiator to give up a possible weapon with the promise of a phone call to his mom, and bursts into tears on her living room sofa?

Yeah! That's what I thought too!

Jesus he'p me.

xoxo

because I was prodded

It was brought up to me that I never discussed going to Alibi for my birthday. That would be a conscious decision. I'm afraid I've been putting forth the impression that I am a lush, which would be highly inaccurate.

But, if you must know, I did have some pomegranate martini thingies at Alibi. I did also sit on an extremely lovely leather sofa while surrounded by jail bars at Alibi. None of these facts caused me to get into any trouble whatsoever, surprising or disappointing as that may be to any of you all.

Happy Thanksgiving.

xoxo

in praise of napping

Seriously, I think I've done this blog before, but goddamn. There is very little I find more pleasurable in life. In fact, if I were ever to finish filling out my complete profile on here, I might just list napping as my number one interest.

Now, if you need an excuse, you could always have sex beforehand, or you could flip on a game or put on a DVD for an "accidental" nap. But the best napping, IMO, is climbing under the nice toasty covers purposefully in the middle of the day with the unapologetic intention to sleep. Ahhhh.

I had an interesting dream whilst napping today, though. I dreamt that someone called me while I was sleeping, but when I tried to access the voicemail on my cell, Sprint had changed the interface completely and the menus on my phone didn't do what they were supposed to do any more. So I had to listen to the messages on the XM radio. Because XM and Sprint had merged.

I guess that's the one downside to napping. You remember your dreams and then you bore your friends recounting them.

xoxo

judgmental judgers who judge

One of the things that has come to my attention in the dozen or so years that I've been on the internet is just how free and happy people are not only to judge other people's behavior and choices, but to loudly and publicly announce these judgements, as if how anyone else lives their life is any of their business. And I'm not even talking big sticky social/moral issues, like deciding for other people that they can't have an abortion or marry their (gay) boyfriend--I'm talking about not agreeing with other people's parenting or relationship or financial or, for god's sake, fashion decisions and feeling this means you have a right to comment on them.

I mean, we all make many many conscious and unconscious judgments every freaking day. And we all have our little pet peeves that make crazy with brief irrational hatreds, right? (Move *into* the train, just move into the fucking train, you goddamn fucking morons, or go back to Iowa or, possibly, Sudbury where you belong, 'k?) But here's the difference. Most of us in real life keep our little judgments and irrational prejudices and opinions to ourselves unless we are asked. Is it just the anonymity of the online experience that makes people feel free to tell other people that their choices, or other people's choices, are wrong?

Or does this go on in real life too, and I am insulated from it for the most part because I don't gossip?

xoxo

chem question

(You know I like to put these questions forth to you, my lovely blog readers, because I trust your intelligence and knowledge implicitly, right?)

As I was discussing with tripleindemnity, I am thinking about making cranberry sauce from scratch for Thanksgiving. Why is another great question, because my family likes the crap in the can, but again, that's neither here nor there. My real question is thus:

I looked up how to do this in How to Cook Everything, my fall-back resource for instructions and recipes for basic things that I don't know how to do or make. It said to use 1 1/2 cups sugar, or 2 cups sugar if you want it thicker. So am I right to deduce from this that there is something in the chemical properties of the sugar that makes the sauce gel, and that it would be impossible to substitute splenda for some or all of it?

xoxo

it occurs to me...

that I could have just combined the previous two entries, because all available evidence points to A-Rod liking bleached-blond, fake-boobed women who either a.) wear inappropriate clothing or b.) take it off for money. Ah, when blog topics collide.

But that's neither here nor there. I just really wanted to report back that not only did my friend G send me an actual card in the mail (as, you may remember, I had suspected was in the works) but also enclosed a DVD copy of Psycho Beach Party.

As they say: squeeeeeeeee!

You can bet I'll be back with a review.

xoxo

I am divided

Today's little news item that made me go "hmmmm" is the one about the girl (excuse me, woman) who was kicked off and/or made to change clothes on Southwest Airlines last summer because she was too skimpily clad and is now cashing in on her ten minutes of fame by posing for Playboy. I really don't know how I feel about this.

On the one hand, I certainly don't think posing nude is disgraceful, shameful, or any other -ful. And, you know, I am not now, nor have I ever been, rolling in the dough, so if the opportunity to make a big chunk of change in some way which was neither illegal nor contrary to my morals or sense of self, I certainly would take it, and can't fault anyone for doing the same.

On the other hand, she works at Hooters. And has implants and bleached blond hair. Which are, you know, cardinal signs of being a useless douche.

So, yeah. Divided.

xoxo

crossing my fingers

I hope hope hope the news pans out and A-Rod stays with the Yankees where his prima donna, divisive, poor sportsmanship-like, choker ass belongs. That would make my Thanksgiving.

Hell, it would make me happy all the way through New Year's.

xoxo

virtual andrea

I spent hours yesterday--hours!--on this site where I could make a cartoon Andrea which could then be used to print cards and invitations and stickers, etc., (for money) or to make e-cards (for free), and I was very pleased with the result. It really does look like a cartoon Andrea, complete with ponytail, huge purse, cuffed jeans, sunglasses, and even Evil Kitty as my familiar. What I really wanted to do was to make it as an avatar for my blog, but apparently to do that you need to request it from them and they set it up so it links back to them to raise money for breast cancer and you need to tell them what size it's supposed to be and blah blah and it sounds very complex, far more complex than I can probably deal with.

So! In case I never actually get it up and working as a blog illustration, but you want to see what I'd look like as a cartoon, lemme know and I'll send you an e-card!

xoxo

rejection

Several different conversations I've had lately have left me thinking about rejection. Specifically, that our responses to perceived rejection, real or imaginary, our experiences with rejection, and/or our fears of rejection inform most of our dealings with other people and much of our everyday behavior.

My own lil cross to bear in this department is the marked tendency to reject people first before they can reject me. I've struggled with this for a long time, and while the self-awareness involved in knowing that it's my default setting is, I guess, a step in the right direction, it doesn't mean that I don't slip right back into the behavior pattern if I'm not watching myself carefully. What's even sadder is seeing echoes of it in my kid, whether from inherited temperament or learned behavior or, most likely, that murky stew of both.

One of my closest friends is my exact opposite in this. Wherein, if I think someone may possibly not like me, my reaction is to think "god, what a [insert your favorite insult here]" and to think I wouldn't want a person like that as a friend, so there. Her reaction if she thinks someone doesn't like her is to wonder obsessively what she's done to make them not like her and what she can do to reverse the tide. I'm not sure which of us is actually more fucked in the head, but I'm pretty certain that I don't need a PhD in psychology to decide neither of us handles this particularly well. Heh.

And then we won't even discuss how I've managed to make it into my 40s without ever actually being dumped, because of a.) preemptive dumping or b.) hooking up with people whose dysfunction in this area is to just behave really really badly when they want out, so that they never have to be the bad guy by being the one to leave. Or c.) both.

I dunno. Being a human being is an interesting condition.

xoxo

ssssslick!

So, when someone sends you an e-mail the week before your birthday that says, "Sweetie darling! Could you send me your address when you get a moment?" do you think that possibly means they are sending you an actual real paper b-day card that requires stamps and a trip to the mailbox, instead of a lame-ass e-mail one like you made and sent to them from the comfort of your living room sofa?

My friends are the best.

Even if they're not real good with the whole cloak n' dagger stuff.

xoxo

my salad

I'm sitting here eating a huge steak tip salad full of feta-y goodness, with pita bread on the side, and thinking about what it represents.

First of all, it represents my complete moral weakness and lack of strength of character, since it's drug company swag, and I know that the fact that our [name deleted] rep has the advertising budget to casually and spontaneously drop by with a $75 lunch for eight people, only three of whom can actually write prescriptions, is part of the reason that meds cost so much and little old ladies eat cat food and families with no insurance lose their houses trying to pay for their drugs. Some little old woman is probably eating Friskies right now just because I'm chowing down a free salad. When, god knows, I could afford to buy my own lunch. And I don't need this huge mess of 800-calorie feta-y goodness at noon anyway.

But, damn, who passes up free food? Especially when it's free yummy food. A person with much stronger moral fiber than me, apparently.

Secondly, it represents what I would miss most, culinarily-speaking, were I ever to move away. Which I won't. But if I ever did--like say if I ever became fabulously rich and was able to buy property on some Caribbean island, or better yet, an island, and spend 11 months a year there, coming back to New England only in October so I could hike in the foliage--I would need to send my staff on my private jet back to eastern Massachusetts at least once a month to procure me a steak tip or chicken kabob salad. Because I don't think if you venture beyond the Land of the Greek Sub Shop, such things really exist.

Which is a shame. Feta-y goodness should belong to all the world's citizens. As long as, like, they pay for it themselves.

xoxo

more updatery

It occurs to me that as much as blogging is by definition the ultimate in self-absorption, writing updates to previous blog entries--as if anyone is carefully remembering what you've written before and waiting breathlessly to hear what happened next--is self-absorption squared. Nevertheless I shall proceed.

1.) I forgot to tell you all, but my ex won his election last week, the smear campaign being apparently unsuccessful. It does my heart good to see voters considering the issues, instead of the gossip. Or maybe the losing candidates just really sucked.

2.) My Superior Immune System is letting me down. I didn't start back on the vitamin C drops quickly enough and I have a tiny, tiny cold.

3.) The Red Sox are still world champions, Eric Gagne remains dead to me, and I ain't getting any younger.

Carry on.

xoxo

in which I almost remove a digit

So, my best friend L was coming over today for dinner and a massage. While at the supermarket this morning buying a shitload of groceries, I decided to buy flowers too, so the table would look nice. They had sunflowers. I love sunflowers. Sunflowers have long stems. I needed to trim them to fit into the vase. You see where this story is going, right?

Yeah, somehow I managed to slip with the knife, which was really too dull for the job, but plenty sharp enough to take a shallow but quarter-inch-wide section of skin off my left index finger. "Motherfucker!" I yelled. Then I spent--I'm not exaggerating--an hour and a half attempting to get it to stop bleeding. I tried direct pressure, lots of direct pressure. I tried bandaids...I bled through three. I tried liquid bandage, which apparently doesn't work too well when you're spurting blood.

L called me to tell me she was leaving Worcester. "I'm having a big problem," I said. "I cut my finger and it won't stop bleeding." "Ohmygod, do you think you need stitches?" "No, no, it's not deep, it's just the top layer of skin, it's very vascular. I just wanted to let you know in case you get here and there's no food cooking." "We can go out for dinner. But leave me a note on the door if you decide to go to the hospital."

Finally I got some tissue to adhere to the cut (like when you nick yourself shaving?) and wrapped the whole finger so tightly in so much waterproof tape that no blood could leak out through it and that basically the circulation to the whole finger was, like, compromised. This enabled me to make salad, dressing, and meatballs without bleeding into any of it. And by the time L arrived, I was able to take the whole mess off without the bleeding starting up again. (In fact, I even eventually was able to give her her massage without incident.)

But I will say this. This is what I get for using the words "bleeding" and "seeping" in a figurative sense in e-mail yesterday.

Or maybe they just need to keep me away from sharp objects.

xoxo

ho ho ho

I just realized yesterday, in a work conversation about "wait, is anyone seeing patients the day after Thanksgiving?," that that's in two weeks. Holy crap. Thanksgiving is on the earliest possible day this year.

Which means many of my neighbors are going to have their Christmas lights firmly affixed to their houses on November 23. Now, I have no problem with Christmas lights per se. They're pretty and colorful and festive. I have a bit more problem with giant inflatable Santas and such, but as much as they offend my retinas, they make the little kids happy, so that's cool. I do, however, have a problem with all this decorating happening in mid-November and then the lights coming off the house on December 26. We're not celebrating the freaking shopping season, we're celebrating Christmas. Which has twelve days.

Excuse me while I drag my Luddite-holiday ass off to grumble with the other crotchedy and out-of-step purists.

xoxo

germophobia...

and related matters!

So, yesterday, there was a story on my AOL welcome screen (shut up) about the resurgence of bedbugs. Being as full of poor judgment as the next person, I clicked on the link. Then, being also as suggestible as the next person, I sat there in my office and scratched my way through the article.

Now, I already knew about the resurgence of bedbugs, since round about Labor Day when all the students were moving back into town, there was an article in the Globe about picking up furniture that people left on the sidewalk that mentioned it in a cautionary way. Since even back when I was a poor student, I only took my secondhand cast-off furniture from people I knew, and I am even less likely to be trawling Brighton Ave for other people's sofas today, this was a matter of idle interest only. But, according to yesterday's article, I should be AFRAID! VERY AFRAID! Bedbugs are everywhere, including, I guess, reputable hotel chains. The writer suggested keeping one's luggage on the metal luggage rack only and--get this--bringing a flashlight to inspect behind and under the hotel mattress before you sleep in it.

I'm sorry. If the day comes that I really feel I need to travel with a flashlight and flip over the boxspring before unpacking, I will just fucking stay home, preferably in a hermetically sealed plastic bubble. Do you remember the big expose on 20-20(or one of those shows) a few years ago about hotel bedspreads which are changed, like, never, and which your handy-dandy black light tests show to be full, just chock full, of other people's old bodily fluids? Well, lemme say this. Both before and after this helpful information from ABC News, I have sat my nekkid butt on many, many Hampton Inn and Marriott bedspreads and lived to tell about it. In fact, it probably helped contribute to my Superior Immune System. For all you know. You are not going to catch anything from a hotel bedspread, even if a lonely CPA from Cincinnati despoiled it while watching cable porn three weeks ago. It's just gross, not dangerous. So don't think about it, and you'll be fine. I promise.

And that was actually one of the points of the bedbug article, after they finished whipping up the hysteria. Bedbugs don't carry any diseases. They're a nuisance, not a health hazard. But since we're living in a first world country and no longer used to dealing with even the most benign of vermin, the idea of bedbugs is enough to send people on their vacations with flashlights and a thin edge of hysteria.

In another example of this, in the book Home Comforts, the author, who is certifiably a complete germophobe whacko, imparts with a palpable shudder the information that dust mites are arachnoids. The idea that there are microscopic *spiders* living in your sheets is supposed to make you swear that, yes, yes, you will wash your bedding in hot water 4x a week and vacuum every single fucking day. In fact, dust mites are not a problem unless you or a family member have dust allergies or asthma, and the fact that they are microscopic spiders doesn't change that. If you find the idea that they're arachnoids gross, don't think about it. It seriously will be a lot easier than treating your bedroom like it's an operating theater requiring sterile conditions.

And, finally, I find the bedbug article to be yet another example of how the single most important mission of the American media--it's mission statement, you might say--is to instill paranoia. If Muslim terrorists or global warming don't get you, then it's going to be the meteor that's passing too close in 20-whatever or the e.coli in your hamburger or something toxic imported from China or maybe the fact that you're too obese or not obese enough. Meanwhile, mind the bedbugs and the dust mites and the hotel bedspreads, and don't think too hard about the fact that we all die of something sometime.

xoxo

quick update

I have a longer topic I need to address with you all, but until I get the time to do that properly, just a little follow-up from a previous topic:

I saw Mr Muscular Hispanic Bobbypinned Mechanic again! He was wearing a bronze metallic leather jacket. So now I'm forced to revise my assumption from "huge endowment" to "gay." Possibly gay with a huge endowment, of course.

Which, you know, would make him quite the popular muscular bobbypinned mechanic. So, cheers.

(Did you ever stop to think what fantasy life I'd make up for *you* if I saw you out and about in public? If so, were you skeered? Just a little?)

xoxo

pandora

Do you use this?

Today at work I had a 4 1/2-hour long, mind-numbingly boring task I just had to sit down and plow through and I knew there was no way I was going to make it through without music. Unfortunately, I had none with me. So, I figured, okay, yeah, let's mess about with some internet radio.

Pandora, in case you don't use it, uses the music genome project to personalize what it plays for you. You start by telling it some artists, songs, or genres you like as a starting point, and then you vote yay or nay on the songs as they come up to tweak it, etc. But what's really cool (to me, anyway) is that when a song comes up, you can click on "why is this recommended for me?" and it will tell you what "genes" are in the songs you like that are also in this selection. I thought it would be sort of simplistic: "subtle punk roots" or "electric instrumentation" are kind of self-evident. But apparently I also like extensive vamping and minor key tonality. Amongst other things. None of which I have ever heard of or have any clue about.

I may just become obsessed with this. Maybe my apparently instinctive love for minor key tonality explains why I cannot listen to country music. Or something. I'm sure it explains something.

xoxo

misc.

1.) Gone, Baby, Gone is a very good movie, if soul-suckingly grim. Casey Affleck's performance is amazing. No more nepotism cracks from me. Plus, the moral question the movie leaves in your mind, namely what if you do what you really think is the right thing and you are disastrously wrong?, is an interesting and important one to consider.

2.) Spent the day today with my friend S. Massages, hot tubbing, and Thai food are, all things considered, a damn good way to spend a Monday. And lots of good talk, of course. Which leads to #...

3.) More thoughts on aging! S recently turned 45 as well. We were discussing our disgruntlement with the whole concept and she said, "...and I'm almost 50." I was like, wait, no, 45 is 45, not almost 50. Though turning 45 will effectively put an end to my saying I'm in my early 40s. Sigh. But, no, I refuse to admit to being almost 50.

xoxo

today's epiphany

Warning: this post concerns some upsetting imagery, heh, and may be somewhat disjointed, because I don't really have time to shape it properly. I just need to get the thoughts on electronic paper before they're gone.

I was lying in bed early this morning pondering why the Johnny Rotten Nipplegate image Tripleindemnity placed in my head required so much brain bleach to remove. (WTF do you think about when you're awake way early because of the time change?) Let me be clear about this: I may be a prude, but I don't particularly want to see anyone, male or female, young or old, pretty or nonpretty, pinching their own nipples on network TV, or really, anywhere. It's just not an exhibition I personally need to be a part of. But part of the true revulsion that occurred in my poor squicked psyche was due to Tripleindemnity's description of Mr Rotten as old, bloated, fat, and in need of dentistry as he pinched his own nipples on network TV. That behavior, as aesthetically upsetting as it is, is far less aesthetically upsetting when it's done by young slinky heroin-addicted punks than by their decrepit 30 year older selves.

So. You know (or you should, peasants) my birthday will soon be upon us. It's one of those birthdays with a five in it, which is almost as horrifying as a birthday with a 0 on the end. And you know, if you've been following along, that I've been having pangs about growing older. Part of it has been wrapped up in the certainty that I am losing my looks, which somewhat confused me, since it's not as if I was ever one of those women who was beautiful, and therefore had her whole identity invested in that. I was cute and, for a brief period in my midtwenties, I was pretty. But mostly, I was, well, fairly sexalicious.

And my epiphany, which god knows, is so simple that I feel like a moron for not being able to put my finger on it sooner, is that what my identity is wrapped up in is being a sexual person. Sexually desirable, if not pretty, and possessed of a strong sex drive, even when I'm not acting upon it, and just, yeah, a sexual person. Someone who may or may not be reading this blog entry and who may or may not remember making the comment, once looked over and said to me, "You just exude sexuality," and I did, when he was around, anyway, and it was one of the nicest, sincerest compliments I ever got. And the second part of the epiphany is that I have internalized at a gut level--though I reject it on an intellectual level--the prevailing cultural idea that exuding sexuality is at best vaguely ridiculous and at worst fucking gross when you are no longer the young, pretty, slinky thing you once were. And if an important part of my self-identity is vaguely ridiculous or fucking gross, where am I?

Seriously, we all know there was a point at which scrawny ugly but sexalicious Mick Jagger screwing everything that crossed his path slipped from admirable to ewww. And, I think I may have mentioned here or elsewhere, Paula Deen, cooking show host and inventor of the best. cake. ever., is pilloried all over the internet for her bawdy Southern grandma persona because it just squicks people out no end that a fat (if exquisitely well-groomed and very attractive) old woman still likes sex and likes to talk about it, joke about it, and flirt. I guess the only way to be a socially acceptable sexalicious old person is to be completely discreet about it and never let any of it out except behind closed doors with whatever partner you've managed to snag with, I dunno, your other admirable qualities.

I'm not fucking ready for that.

So, yeah, I remain resentful of aging. Goddamn it.

(Old women should probably stop swearing so much too, huh?)

xoxo

spoiled American gits

So, I'm watching reruns of House Hunters which should really be called Spoiled American Gits, if there were any truth-in-television-show-names laws at all. Here's a couple in Minnesota with a baby under a year old walking into a prospective home and looking at the "sunroom" which is the size of my dining room and living room put together. "Oh, honey! This could be the baby's playroom!"

No, you stoopid spoiled American git, your baby does not need a "playroom" the size of many people's studio apartments.

They go upstairs and look at the bedrooms and bathrooms. "Do you think all the baby's things will fit in this room, snookums?"

How many "things" does a friggin six-month-old have, other than what goes in the ginormous playroom? Need lots of closet space so his Hugo Boss suits don't get crushed, do we?

And the master bath is a sad disappointment. "It looks ::sniff:: like the bathroom in a camper, doesn't it?"

It doesn't have double sinks. Spoiled American Gits don't use the same sinks as their spouses these days, you know. You may stick your parts in their orifices and vice versa, but you wouldn't want to spit toothpaste in the same basin they do.

Nevertheless, this is the house the Spoiled American Gits decide to buy. In the follow-up visit, x months later, they have repainted the red walls in the kitchen--the only thing that gave their McMansion any character at all--off white.

Not only are they Spoiled American Gits, they are tasteless douches. I worry for that baby.

xoxo

Halloween recap

cutest trick-or-treater: the toddler ballerina who walked right into my house when I opened the door, pointed at the bowl of candy saying "uh! uh!", and tried her best to refuse to leave even after I put some in the bag her mom was holding. I think she was holding out for the whole bowl. Or maybe she just liked my hallway.

best costume seen in downtown Salem: two dudes dressed up as trees in outfits made of...actual trees. Impressive.

best use of cleavage to confuse door-to-door salesmen: I'm claiming this one for myself. When someone was at the door yesterday at 6 pm, I was convinced it was my first trick-or-treater of the night. Alas, it was the Verizon FIOS guy trying to convince me to buy his product. (I guess the weekly fucking junk mail they send me wasn't invasive enough. Bastards!) Unfortunately for him, I was already in my costume, lowcut as it was, with my fake tattoos accentuating the boobage, and while he was trying his best to explain to me how much money I'd be saving, he couldn't quite keep his eyes on my face. He tried, but he just couldn't. I think it threw him off his sales pitch.

That's all I've got.

xoxo

...is fundamental

I just watched Alvin Poissant being interviewed on the local news about the new book he wrote with Bill Cosby, entitled Come On People. Apparently the book deals with problems in the black community such as absentee fathers, low self-esteem, and the devaluation of education.

I have no opinion on the merits of said book, but I do have one suggestion. If you want to talk about the importance of education, you might just want to put a comma somewhere in that title. Because otherwise? Dude. You're just advocating bukkake.

Happy Halloween!

xoxo

book review time!

I just finished Killing Yourself to Live by Chuck Klosterman (not to be confused with Chuck Palahniuk, not one of whose books I have ever been able to finish, and oh yeah, I hate Fight Club the movie too, so there). But back to Mr Klosterman. While some of the lines in the book made me laugh out loud, chortle even, I was somewhat disappointed in the book. Part of it may well be that the back cover lead me to believe the book was about one thing when it was actually about something else. And part of it may be that, for a music critic, Mr Klosterman appears to have, well, suspect taste. But people who know the complete lyrics to "Hotel California" shouldn't throw stones, eh?, and it's really not fair to judge someone's writing negatively because you're kind of thunderstruck that they like KISS and admit it in public.

So I'll say this: even though this book is more about Mr Klosterman's complex relationships with various women than it is his road trip to visit the sites of various famous rock star deaths, anyone who keeps a never-unwrapped CD of The Best of Peter, Paul, and Mary next to used copy of Husker Du's Zen Arcade in the hopes that they'll "slowly fuse into a Pixies' B-side collection" probably deserves your book-buying dollar. Especially since you could whip through this book in three hours if you're stuck in an airport or something.

xoxo

rosewater mango martinis & world championships

Yesterday was a lovely day with a little unpleasantness between the bookends of very good stuff.

You know the right side bookend: baseball lurrrrve rewarded. The left side bookend was a party thrown by one of my massage school classmates, a reunion of sorts. A good half of my class showed up. And, as always when I see or speak to a friend from school, I am struck with how very much I miss them all, goddammit. It's kind of funny how much we bonded with each other, unless you realize what our massage school experience was--the same people together in all the same classes for a year and a half, during which we were constantly touching each other.

Now, you don't go to massage school unless you like touching other people. Or, if you do, you don't stay long. A certain tactile predilection is necessary. But there's also somewhat of a necessary predilection for empathy, an awareness of other people's energies, a basic kindness. The vast majority of my classmates have, I guess I'd say, good hearts and they know how to use them. (Yeah, yeah, I know, I'm malevolent, not Mother Theresa. But there's a bad penny in every change jar.) So, for a group of people who were together a lot for a year and a half, there was very little draaaama and much love. I miss 'em, and that's not just the rosewater mango martinis talking, 'cause I'm all sobered up now.

(In a related tangent, a friend who will remain nameless told me the other day that he was thinking of writing to this woman on JDate but hesitated because she was the manager of a massage clinic, until he remembered, oh, yeah, I know Andrea and she's not a New Age fruit loop who lives on wheat grass juice and asks to balance your chakras. Heh.)

The unpleasantness is that, upon arriving home from the party and preparing to watch the end of the game, my dad said something craptastic to me, solely because he was upset I went out two nights in a row. (You can't fucking make this shit up. Oy.) Usually I'm really good with ignoring shitty remarks that people make because of their own issues--if there's one good thing with living through one's offspring's puberty, it's that it'll teach you that skill--but maybe because I'd come home in such a happy mood or maybe because I had the slight buzz going, I let it bother me. It made watching the Sox win slightly less fun than it should have been.

It was still fun, though.

I only wish I'd bought a sofa, eh?

xoxo

more baseball luv

Maybe even lurrrrvvvve.

Did you see Dice-K get that hit last night? "Way to help yourself out, Dice-K!" I yelled at the TV. I also told Manny Del Carmen that that stuff on his chin looks like nothing so much as pubic hair, asked Mr Ramirez how his oblique's doing for the first time in a couple weeks, told Tim McCarver to shut up about 6,747 times, and when he wouldn't, mocked 2/3 of what he said, and on commercial break, kept seeing some chick running into a car. All in all, it was a satisfying night of baseball.

The hard pear/apple cider we were drinking didn't hurt, either. Mmmm, cider.

When this is all over and done with, it's going to be such a let-down.

xoxo

cake!

I made a Double Chocolate Gooey Butter cake last night--Paula Deen recipe--and can I just say? Best. Cake. Evah.

Of course, nothing made with two sticks of butter, a package of cream cheese, and 2/3 of a box of powdered sugar can be, by definition, bad. Add in chocolate and, you know. (I'll note that the actual recipe calls for a whole box of sugar, but that's too too even for me.) It's chocolate cheesecake on crack. It's diabetes on a plate. It's an extra three miles.

It's good.

xoxo

here's the thing...

Did you ever notice how you start to pick the speech patterns of people you're around all the time? One of the doctors I've worked with a long time always says "here's the thing..." as he's walking up to tell you something job-related, and I find myself frequently wanting to start out blog entries that way. He also often says, in a completely sardonic way, "People are no damn good!" when somebody screws something up or a patient is late or whatever. I find myself saying that a lot too, often to people who have no idea that it's a joke.

When my son (and his friends) were in high school, they had this way of saying "Are you SERious?" to express perfect and complete scorn and disgust. (It was all in how you pronounced the "serious".) I like to say that one too. But unfortunately, I can't do it as well as they did, 16 year-old boys being all about the scorn and disgust as they are.

And, to prove it doesn't go in all one direction, one of my friends, not so long ago, used the phrase "'n shit" in either a blog reply or an e-mail. I laughed really really hard. Because, y'know, that's a sign you've been hanging around me way too much ('n shit).

xoxo