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