Stefanie Says

I carried a watermelon. (I carried a watermelon?)

2010-01-20T23:40:00.000-06:00

What was that I was saying about needing to go on dates in order to gain blog fodder? I'm not sure what I was thinking. Obviously there are plenty of equally ridiculous things I could do in the name of having a story to tell.

Like take up Latin dance, for instance.

What's that? You don't really see me as the Latin dance type? Well, then. That makes two of us. But I've been curious about the Zumba class enthusiastically advertised on flyers at my gym, so the other night I finally cut out of work early to give it a try.

Do you know what Zumba is? I didn't either, so allow me to explain it to you. It is sort of like the cantina at Senor Frog's, except without the giant margaritas. Lively music? Check. Tiny Latin American woman in tight pants shaking her hips in front of a crowd? Check. Bunch of awkward pasty-skinned Midwesterners? Check. Margaritas? Alas, no. Which is unfortunate, really, because I could have used a margarita after that class. Come to think of it, I could have used a margarita before that class. In fact, I'm pretty sure most of the moves in those routines are intended to be done solely under the influence of alcohol. Part of me kept expecting the instructor to come around to each of us, pour a shot down our throats from a big plastic bottle, and shake our head between her hands while blowing an obnoxious whistle. Yes, I've decided right now: that is what Zumba really needs. Tequila poppers. Any Zumba instructors out there? Take note.

Basically, in short, Zumba is another attempt to disguise exercise as fun. And it is fun. If, unlike me, you do not lack basic coordination and rhythm, or possibly even lack a specific pivot point in your pelvis that makes simultaneous hip swaying and booty shaking physically possible. I'm telling you: my body does not move like that. It's as if I'm built like a Barbie doll--my legs and waist bend and rotate on specific trajectories, but try to force my frame to move in a way not allowed by those trajectories, and I remain stiff as a board. (By the way, that is, more than likely, the first and last time I will ever compare my own figure to Barbie's. We may both lack the necessary anatomical structure that makes Zumba moves possible, but I will never topple over from the strain of my impossibly narrow waist and dainty feet being unbalanced against my perky, ample, wedge-shaped bust.)

I knew right from the warm-up that I was in trouble. There is no actual instruction. Our tiny leader simply whistled and pointed when we were to change direction, but in most cases, I hadn't yet gotten the last move down when we moved to the next one, so it's a wonder I never actually trampled my neighbor. I was certain the instructor was going to stop the music and banish me from the class for lack of talent, perhaps even channeling Johnny Castle in the process. "She can't even do the merengue! She can't do it. She CANNOT. DO IT."

After a while it did get a bit easier... and then it got harder, and then I honestly didn't care anymore. I looked ridiculous, I am more than certain, but the room was dark and crowded, and I told myself (whether it was true or not) that no one was focusing on me. I made it through the class, worked up a productive-feeling sweat, and figured, "Well, I tried that, at least... I made it through the whole class, and I didn't even step on anyone once. Let's call that a success, shall we?"

But then last night I did something crazy and unexpected. People, I went again.

This class was with a different instructor. Her routines weren't any easier or harder, necessarily, but one notable difference is she left all of the studio lights on. I still think I prefer the anonymity of the semi-darkness, but I'm also sort of glad the lights gave me a better chance to look around. Because when I glanced at my fellow Zumba-goers, I realized that yes, there were several women inexplicably able to make their pelvis vibrate just like our instructor's did, but there were also plenty of women only slightly more coordinated than I. Plenty of middle-aged suburban women with mom hair and last decade's workout clothes, swaying awkwardly and missing steps, just like me. Suddenly we were all the hapless vacationers at Kellerman's, shuffling our way through Penny's dance class in the community room while she cried, "Come on, ladies! God wouldn't have given you maracas if He didn't want you to SHAKE 'EM!"

Eventually there were brief moments where I forgot that I had no idea what I was doing, took my eyes off the instructor for more than three seconds, and just let my body do what the music was telling it to do. I didn't care that my arms and legs were flailing haphazardly. Like Phoebe jogging through Central Park, I have realized that's the only way dancing is any fun. Usually I confine my ridiculous dancing to the privacy of my empty living room, but it's important to branch out of one's comfort zone now and then, don't you agree?

In other news, I am still without a bathroom sink or fully usable shower. But (BUT!), the tiling in the shower area is finally complete and ready for grouting and sealing, and if all goes as planned, I may be taking a shower in my own home as early as next Monday. Hurrah! The other components of this remodel are another story, and I choose not to dwell on them for fear of sinking into a deep depression over the tiny light at the end of the tunnel that still refuses to flicker into view. A tiled shower is progress! And it looks beautiful to boot. It will all come together eventually. Patience, grasshopper. Indeed.

In other other news, I have a new post up at The Greenists today. This one's about borax. It's a science lesson! It's a cleaning tip! Stop; you're both right! Sounds exciting, doesn't it? You know you want to pop over and read it.

It's been a quiet week in Lake Wo... Wait a minute. This post may ramble on to nowhere, but I still can't use that line.

2010-01-13T10:23:00.000-06:00

I stand by my sensible vow to blog about work only in the most general of terms, but today was one of those frustrating days where the nature of my company's business required me to pretend to be an expert in an area I'm not, which is something I will never be particularly good at or comfortable with. I maintain that my liberal arts education successfully prepared me to bullshit my way through myriad tasks and situations, but sometimes it just seems more appropriate and ethical to say, "Sorry, but no, we don't do that. Seriously, don't hire me for this."

Or maybe I am hiding behind ethics simply because I don't want to do the thing they want to pay me to do. In any given situation, if it's a question of ethics or laziness, there's a good chance the latter is more solidly to blame. Or, equally possible, maybe I am making a big deal out of nothing. Perhaps this is just the way business works. After all, lots of people get paid to lie. Meteorologists, for instance. Nine times out of ten they're just making stuff up, right? Maybe I should be a meteorologist. Would I have to get a helmet-like haircut for that?

At the moment, I couldn't possibly be any less accurate a meteorologist than the ones currently serving the Twin Cities metro area, because every one of them repeatedly assured me that the temperature would reach 30 the past two days, and every one of them was downright wrong. Which wouldn't be so bad had I not BELIEVED them and been so bold as to downgrade from my down jacket back to my flimsy wool pea coat and to leave my hat at home. After nearly two solid weeks of sub-zero temperatures, I should be used to this. Instead, I feel perma-cold.

Even if I'd been out of the country in some balmy locale for the past week, I would still be able to tell that it'd been ridiculously cold for days on end. No one dares get a car wash in weather like this, for fear that the damn thing will freeze solid. Hence, everyone's car becomes so uniformly spattered with road spray that you can barely see its original paint job. Highways and parking lots start to look like suburban subdivisions--just like the cookie cutter houses in those neighborhoods, every car on the road is an only slightly varying shade of beige. As soon as the temperature reaches the mid-30s, there will be lines ten deep at every car wash, not unlike the gas crisis of 1973. Except that people will let their gas-guzzling giant SUVs idle for the duration that they wait in that line, so really, I guess nothing like the gas crisis of 1973 at all.

Moving on. I realize there are few less interesting things to talk about than the weather, but I am a Midwesterner. Talking about the weather is what we do. It ensures we don't have to muster any creativity in our small talk, and it prevents most of us from getting too personal (which makes Midwesterners uncomfortable), too. Besides that, even our esteemed public radio affiliate thinks the weather is news. Just the other day, I heard a thoroughly interesting and enlightening (read: utterly obvious and pointless) story explaining just why driving on every residential street in Minneapolis is like driving on a glacier right now. Really, MPR? When the snow melts a bit and then immediately freezes again, it turns into bumpy mounds of ice? And snow plows aren't designed for solid masses of ice? They can clear piles of snow, but not ice floes? How fascinating! Shocking, really! You learn something new every day.

In truth, I may have been predisposed to annoyance at that particular story solely because it was presented by the reporter who didn't find me charming enough to warrant a second date. I should be over and past that by now, of course, but usually when a dude doesn't like me (or I don't like him) I have only to worry about spotting him in Target. I don't typically have to hear his voice in my car on my commute, reminding me of the rejection, taunting me, if you will. This particular reporter has a specific beat, so when I hear the intro for a story that falls under that topic, I'm at least prepared for the commentator to say, "Here with more on that is Tim Becker." But ice floes in the street are not Tim's beat. What is he doing on my radio so often these days?

I'm not the only one to notice he's been in increased rotation, either. Ever the supportive friend, Carrie said out of the blue one day, "I'm so sick of Tim Becker." It surprised me, because if we're being entirely objective, there's actually nothing wrong with his reporting style, nothing at all unpleasant about his voice. Truly, the man's only offense was his lack of interest in me. But my disappointments are her disappointments, apparently. It's nice to know a friend's got my back. I'm equally grateful to my pal Flurrious, who once wrote, "That MPR reporter was a fool. When we cast your montage, let's find someone ugly to play him." Heh.

Incidentally, I should mention that Tim Becker is, of course, not the reporter's real name. I am not quite foolish enough to type that. I was, however, foolish enough to give the man my blog URL. (It was an experiment, part of a brief period where I decided to do the opposite of what I'd usually do in certain social situations, which unfortunately met with no notable results.) I cannot imagine any reason said reporter would still be checking in here regularly, but if I'm wrong about that, well, hello, Tim. Keep up the good work. How's it going? Call me! (Sigh.)

Maybe I should return to dating again. It has, after all, been a while. I went on fewer dates in 2009 than any year in recent memory, but you know what? I think I was, on the whole, happier in 2009 than in other recent years as well (nonsense with the Buddhist notwithstanding, that is). Could the two be correlated? Perhaps. Still, dates give me stories, and if I had stories, I probably wouldn't subject the Internet to three consecutive paragraphs about the weather. It's food for thought, I suppose.

Of course, before I go on another date, I should probably have a usable shower, because this showering at the gym or trying to get clean hair in my tub really isn't quite working for me. I can't bring myself to get up early enough to mess with a bath or the gym in the a.m., so I've been washing my hair at night and then sleeping on it unstyled, which leads to this misshapen conehead sort of thing in the morning. It's a good look, I tell you. I should take my next Catch dot Mom profile pic right NOW.

And that about catches you up, I think. I am cold, tired, and not-so-recently showered with no definitive remedy to any of those soon in sight. Tell me, what's new with YOU?

All that was missing was a roast duck that smiled at us

2010-01-04T23:45:00.000-06:00

So then. Now that I got that belated New Year's post out of the way, should I belatedly talk about Christmas? Eh. It was same old, same old, really. My grandma is gone, but the KFC legacy inexplicably remains, so although my mother actually made a meal from real ingredients rather than from paper to-go cartons for our Christmas Eve dinner, that meal was still accompanied by chicken and biscuits from KFC. People, I cannot explain my family. But you know what? If I'm being totally honest here, KFC is actually pretty good. I mean, it's fried chicken. And delicious, starchy biscuits. How am I going to argue with that? Also, we had fresh brownies for dessert instead of year-old pie, and my older sister ensured we had red wine that wasn't labeled "serve over ice," so really, I can't complain, I guess. Also, we didn't slide into a ditch and die on our way to or from church during the Christmas Eve sleet storm, so hurrah for that as well. Christmas Eve miracles abound, even aside from that whole Son of Man born of a virgin thing.

As for Christmas Day, now that we no longer have a grandma's house to go to, apparently our new Christmas tradition is a movie and the Chinese buffet, and I have to say, that's not a bad tradition either, if you ask me. In fact, next year, when we drive to Sheboygan in search of an open restaurant for our pre-movie dinner, I am going to cut to the chase and outright suggest we drive directly to the New China Buffet, as we have already done the rounds throughout the city twice, and we already know it is damn near the only place open. I have had better Chinese food, certainly. But I sort of love the low-brow ridiculousness of the all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet--a buffet that includes watered down Americanized versions of all your Chinese favorites, as well as imitation crab leg sushi, pepperoni pizza, and a soft serve ice cream machine from which to self-dispense your dessert. On an ordinary day, it might be my last choice, but on a major holiday? It's got a certain ironic A Christmas Story charm.

I also received several useful and much appreciated presents, including a toaster oven that is approximately half the size of my Saturn but that I need to somehow fit into my kitchen anyway rather than admit to my mother that I didn't confirm the specific model's dimensions before adding it to my Amazon wish list. And I am eagerly awaiting my next journey to a location I've not been before, so I can test out my new GPS unit. I remain disappointed, however, that I haven't been able to locate the Yoda voice the marketing copy promised me I could download. I mean, the standard, built-in, personalityless voice named Megan is fine and all, but I totally wanted to hear Yoda say "In 300 feet, turn right you must," or "Reached your destination you have." Wouldn't that make driving about town that much more fun? Then again, maybe Yoda doesn't dictate precise directions at all. Maybe he just says, "The force is strong with you. Find your own way, you shall." Maybe Megan is my better bet after all.

I know I received other lovely gifts too, but I've almost forgotten about them at the moment, as I barely had time to toss things into various disorganized piles before my friend and tiling savior Andy came in with a vanful of tools and started tearing my house apart. I'm exaggerating. Slightly. The truth is my house is a disaster area at the moment and it's driving me a little bit mad, but I'm well aware it's a disaster very much worth enduring, as at the end of it, I will have a very dusty, cluttered home, but I will also have a brand new bathroom with genuine fully waterproof tiles and no duct tape whatsoever in sight. I cannot wait. Meanwhile, however, I still lack a functioning toilet, so I'm crashing at my pal Carrie's place. It actually worked out pretty well, as she happens to be out of town this week, so I can pretend that I am doing a good deed and house sitting for her rather than just squatting on an available couch like a common vagrant. Yes, she is preventing me from having to both pee and bathe in my basement utility sink, but I am doing her favors as well! I am here to make sure her car still starts in this ridiculous sub-zero cold, and equally important, I am here to keep her cats company, too! I have a lap full of cats at the moment, actually, and a keyboard growing increasingly more dusted with cat hair. Who ARE these furry creatures who want little or nothing to do with me when I come over to visit but who are purring like friendly little outboard motors when they rub up against me now? A few days without their usual human around and look how easily they adjust and make do with whoever feeds them. I've known people like that, actually. (With cats, somehow it seems slightly less cheap.)

All right. I have various other things to ramble on about, including very important questions to help me decide upon various details of my new bathroom's design. But right now, it is getting late, and the lap of cats is making it ever more difficult to type, so such surveying will have to wait for another time, I fear. Can I move, however, with a lap full of cats? Is it rude to disturb them? I feel it may be, but I also feel like, "I'm sorry I'm late, but I had a lap full of cats" is not the sort of excuse that's deemed acceptable at work, so chop-chop, off with you, kitties. Night then.

Shows I've seen in 2010

2010-01-01T22:01:00.016-06:00

The Current's Five-Year Anniversary Party (Lookbook, Mason Jennings, POS, & Solid Gold) - January 29 (First Avenue)
The Avett Brothers - March 5 (First Avenue)
Vampire Weekend - March 22 (First Avenue)
Dan and Matt Wilson - March 26 (Pantages Theatre)
Rogue Valley - April 10 (Fitzgerald Theater)
Owl City - May 1 (State Theatre)
Mumford and Sons - May 25 (Varsity Theater)
Basilica Block Party (Rogue Valley, Spoon, and Weezer) - July 9 (Basilica of St. Mary)
Josh Ritter w/the Minnesota Orchestra - July 15 (Orchestra Hall)
The National - August 6 (First Avenue)
Local Natives - October 1 (First Avenue)
Benefit for Brad Kern (Semisonic, Mason Jennings, Jeremy Messersmith, Twilight Hours, etc.) - October 8 (First Avenue)
Rock of Ages - October 23 (Orpheum Theatre)
Spring Awakening - November 7 (Orpheum Theatre)
Cloud Cult - November 18 (First Avenue)
The New Standards - December 3 (Fitzgerald Theater)

Books I've read in 2010

2010-01-01T22:00:00.006-06:00

* = Loved it
^ = Hated it
~ = Enjoyed it enough to mark in some way, but "love" is such a very strong word
____________________________________

The Thorn Birds by Colleen Mccullough
Stay by Allie Larkin *
Girls in Trucks by Katie Crouch *
Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann ~
The Help by Kathryn Stockett *
Half Empty by David Rakoff *
Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life by Anne Lamott *
The Year of Living Biblically by A.J. Jacobs (via audiobook) *
Forever by Judy Blume
Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer (via audiobook) ~

Movies I've seen in 2010

2010-01-01T21:57:00.030-06:00

* - My thumbs are up
^ - My thumbs are down
~ - At least one thumb is up, but maybe not super-enthusiastically
________________________

January 1 - Son of Rambow (2008)
January 23 - Stop-Loss (2008) *
January 30 - Dancer in the Dark (1999) ^
February 5 - Up (2009) *
February 6 - Zombieland (2009) ~
February 12 - A Serious Man (2009)
February 13 - Bright Star (2009) ~
February 14 - I Hate Valentine's Day (2009) ^
February 14 - Hannah Montana The Movie (2009)
February 26 - Coraline (2009) *
February 27 - Whip It (2009) *
March 13 - The Room (2003) ^^^
March 20 - The American President (1995) *
March 21 - Alice in Wonderland (2010) *
April 2 - The Lost Boys (1987)
April 3 - The Blind Side (2009) *
April 17 - The Impostors (1998)
April 18 - Cold Souls (2009) ^
April 21 - Fresh (2010) *
April 26 - Trampoline (2010) *
April 28 - The Hurt Locker (2009)
May 1 - An Education (2009) *
May 8 - The Cove (2009) *
May 8 - Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (2009) ^
May 29 - 17 Again (2009)
May 30 - Lifeboat (1944) *
June 25 - TiMER (2009) *
June 27 - Crazy Heart (2009) *
July 5 - Adam (2009) *
July 12 - Twilight: Eclipse (2010)
July 24 - Salt (2010)
July 24 - Inception (2010)
July 31 - The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2009) *
August 13 - Valentine's Day (2010)
August 14 - Eat Pray Love (2010) ~
August 15 - Leap Year (2010) ^
August 19 - The Runaways (2010)
August 20 - The Switch (2010)
August 22 - Dakota Skye (2007)
August 22 - Melvin Goes to Dinner (2003) ^
September 4 - Cinema Paradiso (1988) ~
September 5 - Into Temptation (2009)
October 9 - Hot Tub Time Machine (2010) ~
November 12 - Fame (1980)
November 13 - The Experiment (2010)
November 13 - Chevolution (2008)
November 19 - Winter's Bone (2010) *
November 20 - You Will Meet a Tall, Dark Stranger (2010)
November 26 - Mary and Max (2009) *
November 28 - Sex & the City 2 (2010) ^
December 5 - Someone Like You (2001)
December 11 - Rebecca (1940) ~
December 11 - Charade (1963)
December 12 - How to Marry a Millionaire (1953)
December 14 - Parenthood (1989)*
December 16 - Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010) ~
December 25 - How Do You Know (2010)
December 26 - Martian Child (2007) ~
December 27 - Only You (1994)
December 30 - Daybreakers (2009)

In which I try to remember what I did all year, and realize I didn't do much all year

2009-12-31T21:29:00.083-06:00

Well hello and happy new year, friends. Yes, yes, most of you wrote your New Year's posts days or more ago already, and many of you have already pushed 2009 far, far out of your memory, never to be spoken of again. But most of you probably didn't spend the last week embarking on a remodeling project that sucked up all of your free time and physical energy and rendered you temporarily homeless to boot. Remember when I thought I would have ample free evenings between Christmas and New Year's to catch up with my Internet friends? That was hilarious, in retrospect. My best intentions and estimations slay me at times, really.

Hence, my year-end post is late, which is only fitting, given that my annual trip back through my archives proved to me that I spent most of the year feeling behind and out of the loop. I would like to think 2010 will be different, and as such, I am back-dating this post to keep it in 2009, where it belongs. The new year starts with my next post. Meanwhile, here's a recap of what I did in '09.

January: Hopped on a Flurrious bandwagon and proclaimed myself a Spinster Blogger. (Note: I am still waiting for my Prius, as well as my crock pot.) Tried to up my dairy intake via buttercream frosting. Learned that there really is a web site for everything. Graduated from the Arthur Fonzarelli School of Car Repair. Had dinner with an old boyfriend at a Buddhist Center. Told G.W. not to let the door hit him on the way out.

February: Realized that Facebook isn't the place for the over-analytical or paranoid. Watched two lovely friends get engaged. Went on vacation (yay!) with my coworkers (meh).

March: Celebrated National Grammar Day with a grammartini. Proved yet again that my aging Saturn may be invincible. Met Pauly Shore. (Not really.) Observed Library Boy in his natural habitat. Turned 35. Realized that in The Buddhist's case, once a fuckwit, always a fuckwit, unfortunately. Joined the 21st century with a new-to-me laptop (Thanks, Steve!). Spent too much time on Facebook. (Admittedly, that probably happened in every month of 2009, but not every month includes two relevant links.)

April: Was told to steer clear of Aquarius men. Learned that I don't don't like skate wings. Considered marrying yet another inanimate object (this time, an avocado). Asked out a total stranger whose work email address happens to be in the public domain.

May: Went out with the aforementioned total stranger. Got only one story out of it. Took casting and soundtrack suggestions for the movie version of my life. Went all She-Ra with my yard work and broke a shovel. (Also, learned there may be a lawn tools fairy who puts broken shovels back together.) Vowed never to go into my basement again. Had an epic baking fail and an unintentional and almost frightening garden success. Used a camping trip as an excuse to make the same Thoreau joke I made last year, despite it garnering no real laughs the first time I tried.

June: Grew increasingly wary of the mutant space rhubarb. Narrowly escaped the road to alcoholism, despite that road possibly running quite adjacent to the road to plucky hermitude. Proved that 16-months-expired salad dressing won't kill you (but obsessed about it for several paragraphs anyway). Clicked the "Confirm as friend" button at least one time more than necessary. Maintained that holding a not-so-secret appreciation for the ridiculous does not make me unrelateably highbrow. Finally finished the landscaping project I'd rambled about since May.

July: Learned I am a master negotiator. (Or rather, that I could successfully negotiate at least once.) Went to see Garrison Keillor in a sweltering city park. Decided not to ask out every appealing man I see on stage at the Varsity. Tried to explain all of my yard-related mysteries with semi-obscure movie references.

August: Complained about the trials of being a grown-up, and then vanished from the Internet for the remainder of the month. (I'm sure I did lots of other things, too, but if I didn't write it down, it didn't happen, I guess.)

September: Remembered that I DID do worthwhile things in August. Like went on an old-school family road trip, and discovered South Dakota is far more beautiful than I ever knew. Held an impromptu Beatles debate. Spent a fun-filled, hilarious long weekend in California, and came home with the Amish Friendship Cold.

October: Failed to successfully explain why my father needs a gallon of soda at his immediate disposal, nor why he brings his own spoon to restaurants. Made out with an Australian stranger in public. Took trampoline classes! Proposed a Boot Camp for Lost Boys. Got food poisoning. (But didn't write about it. You're welcome.) Went on a Halloween Pedal Pub ride.

November: Tried to make up for my lack of Stefanie Says posts by pointing you to my Greenists posts. (Failed to convince anyone that this was a reasonable trade-off.) Had a perfect, KFC-free Thanksgiving with friends.

December: Bemoaned the recession hitting too close to home. Learned that I still can't be trusted with a damn checkbook, and that my inability to do math may be my bank's primary source of profit. Showed the Internet my ghetto shower. (Again.) Won a small prize for donning a ridiculous (but festive!) getup. Also, finally began my long-postponed bathroom remodel, and used it as an (entirely valid) excuse to continue neglecting the Internet into the early days of 2010.

In all, it was a mostly uneventful year interspersed with many good times with friends but maybe not quite enough adventures and escapades. If the Facebook population is to be trusted (and why wouldn't it be?), 2010 is already off to a more auspicious start, so I am going to try to piggy-back on that optimism and see good things in store for me as well. First up: indoor plumbing and brand new tile. After that: the world! Peace out, 2009. Let's get this new year a-rolling.

You can do it. We can help... you load it into your car, at least.

2009-12-21T00:19:00.002-06:00

OK, this just in, in case you weren't aware. It is now a mere FIVE DAYS until Christmas. I'm not exactly sure how that happened, but I remain convinced that my house is riddled with worm holes or some such thing. Frequent stumbles into time warps are the only explanation for what on earth happened to large chunks of 2009. On a related note, it seems the Internet does not stop just because I'm too busy working, making Christmas treats, or obsessing about bathroom tile. No, I just clicked over to Bloglines for the first time in over a week, and the rest of you have still been busy writing away... It reminds me of that episode of Growing Pains where Mike stayed home from school for a day and had a really obvious epiphany that the programming on television goes on even when he turns the set off, and the day at school went on as normal even though he was not there. It's an obscure reference, I realize, but the Internet taught me that I'm not the only one who thinks of Tom Hanks as Elyse Keaton's alcoholic brother every time I use vanilla extract, so you never know, I guess. Incidentally, I also think of Mike Seaver seeing his dead relative jogging through the kitchen in the middle of the night every time I need to buy buttermilk. (Anyone? No? Moving on then.) My point is I will catch up eventually. I have very little planned socially in the week following Christmas, so I suspect it will be me cozied up with the Internet for at least a few nights there. See you then.

So. What have I been up to lately? Well, I successfully finished on time all but two of the hand-made gifts I'd planned for friends this Christmas. Here are three of them, modeled by their lovely recipients last night.

That picture was taken at my pal Lisa's Christmas party, for which she promised prizes in various holiday spirit categories, much like the Ugly Sweater parties that have become so popular in recent years. Lisa added a similar challenge to the Evite for her last Christmas party, in 2007, and several attendees stepped up to the plate. If you're the sort of person who somehow manages to remember everything I write, perhaps that rings a bell. If not, again, here is the photographic evidence from that event. Me in a ridiculous outfit? Check. But alone in the ridiculousness? Hardly.

(I hate that picture of myself, by the way. Unfortunately, it's the only one I have that serves the purpose at hand.)

This year, however? This year I was THE ONLY ONE TO PARTICIPATE. Apparently in two short years my friends have all gotten too busy or dignified for such nonsense. People, I was just following instructions. The invitation called for holiday flair, and I brought it. I planned ahead, even. I went to freaking eBay, and I bought these silly, festive tights from a shop that I'm pretty sure deals mostly in stripper wear and "I'm a sexy [insert any occupation or person-noun here]" supplies. I bought those tights, and I wore this ridiculous outfit, like I was bound directly for my part-time job at Santa's photo booth at the mall.

I wore that outfit, and I went to the party, and I was THE ONLY ONE not in normal Saturday night gathering attire. (No, red and white striped tights do not fall under the category of "Normal Saturday Night Gathering Attire" for me. Thanks for wondering, though.) It was not unlike the year in college when my friend Sarah had a Halloween party on November 1. It was a mere DAY after Halloween, which was presumably a very logical night for a Halloween party, given that it was a Friday, and Halloween itself did not fall on a weekend. And yet, when we went out to the bars, all the usual Friday night bar-goers in their usual Friday night outfits looked at us as confused and appalled as if we had walked in wearing Halloween costumes in the middle of May. I am prone to finding myself unknowingly inappropriately dressed and out of place, it seems. Perhaps that explains a lot. On the upside, obviously I won a prize last night, given that the competition was so slim. I now have two pretty new bottles of lovely-smelling hand soap to eventually use in my soon-to-be lovely remodeled bathroom. So there is that, anyway.

Speaking of my bathroom, I bought tile today! Lots of tile. So much tile that the helpful young man loading it into my car asked, "How far are you driving with this? I'm thinking maybe you should make two trips." It turns out it's not enough to know confidently that everything you're piling onto the wheeled flatbed cart will easily fit in your compact Saturn SL2. Apparently one needs to consider the total weight of what you're piling on the flatbed cart as well. And apparently a small bathroom's worth of wall and floor tile weighs significantly more than I anticipated, because as we loaded it up, my car was riding lower than if I'd had Gilbert Grape's mother and two clones of her riding in all my passenger seats. Live and learn. Load capacity matters. Who knew? (Well, most of you, I presume.)

Incidentally, can I just say, since I fear I mention companies by name only when I have an angry bone to pick with them (I'm looking at YOU, TCF Bank; you're still ON NOTICE, as our friend Stephen Colbert would say!!) that in my humble experience, the orange-aproned personnel at Home Depot have been a bit unfairly maligned? Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe the Home Depot off Johnson in Minneapolis is a rare bastion of friendliness in an otherwise cold, cruel, orange-aproned world. Still. I have never gone there and not had at least two employees ask me, in a strangely sincere and earnest tone, if there was anything they could help me figure out or find. True, half the time it is a male employee who is hovering precariously on the delicate line between congenial customer service and creepy, inappropriate and awkward flirting. But today it was a 20-something woman who went above and beyond what I would ever expect an orange-aproned employee to do for me. She was the one who crawled into the cave of scaffolding to retrieve 13 packages of white ceramic subway tile for me, and she was the one to whom I first asked, "Do you think this is too much to try to haul in my car?" And instead of giving me a blank look that said, "Why are you asking me that? My job is to sell you the tile; how you get it home is your business," she replied, "What kind of car do you have? I could go Google the load capacity to find out..." Unfortunately, for once Google wasn't all-knowing, and the call she put out on her walkie-talkie ("Does anyone know the load capacity of a Saturn sedan?") didn't yield any solid answers either, and our seemingly sound math of "That's probably not more than 800 pounds of tile, and surely you could cart around four 200-pound humans without any worries" didn't exactly pan out, so I ended up leaving half my tile at the service counter and making a second trip to pick it up. But still! Helpful employees! At Home Depot! In this day and age! You may say it's a Christmas miracle, but I'm telling you, strangely it's somehow par for the course for me.

I would like to think that pleasant experiences like this bode well for the overall spirit of this project and serve as a sign that all will go fast and smooth, according to plan. I am sticking my fingers in my ears and saying "La-la-la, I can't hear you!" every time anyone tells me about their bathroom remodeling nightmares, because I am already dreading the period during which I'll be bathroom-less and I am possibly in denial, truly hoping that period will last for no longer than a week. The end result will be worth the inconvenience, and perhaps living like a resident of a third-world country will be a valuable, humbling experience for me. The baby Jesus didn't have a shower either, did he, but did that stop him from carrying out his duties as Son of Man? It's been a while since Catholic school, but I'm gonna say no.

Maybe I could just tile my whole shower in duct tape and save myself a lot of cash.

2009-12-13T20:55:00.181-06:00

Last night was my company's holiday party, or, as I referred to it earlier today, "a total waste of a shower." I kid. (Mostly.) It was fine. But the aforementioned recession pay cuts and uncertainty of everyone's job security meant that our usual schmancy-ish dinner out was scaled back to a pretty uneventful potluck at the owners' condo. I arrived with my layer bars fashionably late, around 7:50, and we were all essentially herded out by 9:15, meaning I spent only slightly more time at the party than I did in my car driving to and from it. On the up side, I was back on my couch in my yoga pants by 10:30, settled in for some knitting and the requisite holiday viewing of Love Actually, which is a fine way to spend a chilly Saturday, if you ask me. If I can't leave my company's holiday party with a hot Brazilian bespectacled coworker, at least I can watch Laura Linney do so. (Although if I were Laura Linney, you can be damn sure I would have chucked my cell phone far from earshot once the hot bespectacled Brazilian took his shirt off. I'm sure I'm not the only one who wants to reach through the screen and do that for her every time I watch that scene.)

In truth, I don't know why I have such a predisposed aversion to forced socialization with my perfectly nice coworkers and their perfectly nice spouses. Idle small talk has never been my forte, I suppose, and lately it feels that conversationally, I've got nothing. My brain and my free time calendar have been extra busy recently, but not with anything that makes for particularly good stories or party talk. No one wants to hear about my continuing struggle to assemble timely hand-made gifts that aren't worthy of a featured spot on Regretsy. No one wants to hear me fret aloud about my only slightly irrational fear that my aging Saturn as well as every one of my appliances are about to give up the ghost at the exact same time, when I have absolutely no extra money squirreled away to replace these items. And I'm pretty sure no one (except possibly our company's accountant and human resources coordinator, who recently built a house and is still eyeball-deep in such decisions himself) wants to hear me go on about whether I should install a decorative chair rail or an ordinary bullnose as the top row of the new bathroom tile I'm about to have installed and whether the new granite countertop I've ordered for my vanity should have a matching backsplash or not.

This is riveting stuff, I realize, but unfortunately, it is what's consuming the bulk of the idle space in my brain these days. I am not at all looking forward to the week or more period when my home's only bathroom will be torn apart like a war zone, but I am so VERY much looking forward to finally having a bathroom that I'm not embarrassed to have guests use that I can barely contain my excitement about new tile and granite and the like. (This just in: I am old and boring. Is this what middle age feels like?)

Thanksgiving weekend marked the official onset of my long-postponed bathroom remodeling project, otherwise known as "Operation: No More Duct Tape in the Shower." You remember that, don't you? No? To sum up, my shower was, it seems, never meant to be a shower. By which I mean, it was never meant to get wet. Because if it were meant to get wet, the previous owners wouldn't have tiled it with adhesive METAL tiles, given metal's tendency to crack and rust when exposed to prolonged moisture. (You know--like the kind prone to occur in a SHOWER.) They also painted those tiles, which was another awesome and excellent idea, given paint's habit of chipping and peeling off of non-porous surfaces, again, where water is involved.

Those cracked, rusting tiles have been trying their damndest to fall off my walls for the past several years, and when the crack sealer I've continually gunked up in the faux grout lines wouldn't hold them any more, I decided duct tape would temporarily have to do. Which means that my shower has, for the past year and a half, looked something like this. Awesome.

Recession-era paycut or no, it is beyond time to finally remedy this eyesore, so the week after Christmas, one of my handiest and most useful friends will be helping me retile and remodel this monstrosity. Because sometimes things have to get worse before they can get better, however, my shower now currently looks like this:

Or rather, it looks like this... (The goal of the head start on demolition was to find out just what was behind those rusty metal plates and determine how much structural damage would have to be undone before work could proceed. As it turns out, there's not as much water damage beneath the tile as I feared, but leaving it all uncovered would obviously change that right quick.)

This means, of course, that once again, my attempts to eliminate the duct tape from my shower have instead resulted in MORE duct tape (temporarily, thankfully).

What's more unsettling than the duct tape, though, are the exposed wall beams. I may not have the basic structure of my house entirely squared away in my head, but I'm pretty sure that if you follow those wall beams down a few feet, you arrive in my somewhat unfinished basement laundry room. The laundry room, you may recall, is where the largest bug I have ever seen in real life lives, and though I haven't seen Gregor lately, I am convinced that now that the wall beams that go straight into the basement are exposed, I will see him waving his 100 or so legs at me in greeting one morning when I'm least expecting it. Or worse, I will finally see my first [starts with "m" and rhymes with "blouse"] in my home not in my basement or under my stove but peering out at me through that thin layer of plastic when I am wet and naked and ill equipped for rational thought. Because that is what [starts with "m" and rhymes with "twice"] do, obviously. They climb interior wall beams like Spider-Man and seek out areas to drown themselves and terrify me.

This is how my brain works, and this is what I've been obsessed with recently. Ailing appliances, temperamental car parts, bathroom tile, and rodents. Aren't you sorry I don't post more often? I thought so.

I'm well aware Tiny Tim had a tougher row to hoe and a better attitude. What of it?

2009-12-02T23:22:00.003-06:00

OK, seriously. December already? Could someone tell me how exactly that happened? Pipe down, smartasses; you don't actually need to explain the intricacies of the Gregorian calendar to me. Rhetorical questions are still valid ones sometimes, I say.

So it's December, and I'm supposed to be all glowy with the warmth of the damn holiday spirit, but alas, December is stressing me out. Yes, on only the second day. The whole month stretches ahead of me, and yet, all I can think about are the hand-knit gifts that I was going to start IN JULY but that remain only half finished three weeks before Christmas. Or the salted chocolate truffles that I made recently, thinking that they'd be lovely little tokens for my friends and family, but that for some reason have already grown ugly, mottled light spots like year-old Halloween candy. (Not that anyone would know what that looks like, I assume.) So at the moment, my half-finished and failure-ridden home-made gift efforts seem most well suited to the Island of Misfit Toys (and, er, Candy and Scarves). Woe is me and my dashed hopes of from-the-heart thriftiness.

So I have Christmas shopping to do, and in an instance of excellent timing, I was recently told that my company is maybe not doing quite as well as we've been told all year (read: apparently nowhere NEAR as well as we've been told all year), and instead of getting a raise on what was, awesomely coincidentally, my 12-year employment anniversary, I got a 10% pay cut. Hurrah. Mind you, it was not just a "Happy anniversary" prize for me alone. Word is we all got pay cuts. Or, all of us who were lucky enough to keep our jobs (for now). An undisclosed number were actually laid off or had their hours cut instead. Happy holidays!

[Side note/Disclaimer of sorts: I do realize that the previous paragraph falls squarely and solidly in the category of "Things I should not blog about" (i.e., "Things I could get fired for"). At the moment and for the record, I sort of feel it's a fair breech. This is my blog, about my life, which I write on my own time, and this is what's going on in my life right now. I will never, ever mention my company's name in this space, nor give any details identifying enough to reveal said name. So I'm sorry to anyone who someday finds this blog and shouldn't, but at the moment, with all due respect, I say kindly suck it.]

On top of that, I still cannot be trusted with a damn checkbook, and one measly little error has caused me TWO HUNDRED AND EIGHTY DOLLARS in NSF fees. Good grief. As some of you may have seen me complain on Facebook this evening, I am well aware that banks need to find ways to turn a profit, but I would much prefer that TCF Bank find a way to do so without coldly bleeding me dry. Yes, that's right, I said TCF. I have few qualms stating that particular company by name. Because seriously, if you are going to punish me EIGHT TIMES for what was quite obviously one single mistake, I am going to tell the Internet (or at least, my tiny corner of it) how disgruntled I am. I am not the sort of societal and financial delinquent you might see on the likes of the Judge Judy or Jerry Springer show. I am a smart, almost wearyingly responsible girl with her head screwed on nearly entirely straight. Would I keep using my check card if I knew there was actually no money in my account? Of course not. But if my unfortunately erroneous checkbook balance indicates all clear, all systems go, I'm going to carry on as usual, and penalizing me charge by charge while your old school paper notices make their way by Pony Express to my house really does me no good at all.Gah.

Sigh. It's time to stop this futile rant, I realize. Times are lean for all of us. Or, times are lean for most of us. I suspect the president of TCF is still doing just fine. In any case, moving on.

I should note that is it not all tears over banking injustices and tight purse strings around here. I did have a lovely Thanksgiving with some lovely friends. More than two people in attendance confidently proclaimed it the Best Thanksgiving Ever, and I dare say I must agree with them. I mean, no eleven hours on the road round-trip back home, no tense conversation with family members who I love but drive me batty, and no day-old KFC biscuits or year-old apple pie! It was a win-win-win, I say. Seriously, people. Look at this spread! Tell me you don't want to have Thanksgiving with my urban family next year.

Note: Those are prosciutto-wrapped sweet potatoes in the lower-left there, people. Essentially, sweet potatoes wrapped in bacon. I know how much the Internet likes bacon. If you're not sufficiently excited about this buffet line, it's only because I failed to photograph the desserts. Apple pie and pumpkin cheesecake (courtesy of me, and both delicious, if I do say so myself). Mmmm.

On a loosely related note, not that my Thanksgiving Day wardrobe should be of any interest to you, but since I am bragging about things I made, how about I return momentarily to those skirts I mentioned making a few posts back? Shana Who Lacks a Link requested pictures, and while I still have no photos of the skirts in action (or at least, in use), I do have some flat, static, "wowsa, are my hips really that wide?" pics for you...

This is the first skirt I made, which is a lovely albeit a bit cumbersome little wrap dealie-o...

And here is the one I made in the Intermediate/Advanced skirt class, which features both a lining and an invisible (or, nearly invisible) back zipper. In other words, I rock.

That second skirt I decided should be my Thanksgiving skirt, so I actually do have a picture of it in use, albeit a not very helpful and showcasey picture at that. Still. Are you up for a game of "Where's Waldo"? Minus the Waldo and plus a skirt? All right. Here you go then.

Do you see it? If so, good work.

By the way, also in that picture? The Ghost of Thanksgiving Past. Or possibly my pal Carrie's mom's arm, at low shutter speed. You decide.

So then. How was your Thanksgiving? I know it was nearly a full week ago at this point, but dwelling on the past is what I do, folks. Timeliness is not always how I roll. So do tell. Any high points or low points for me?

Elsewhere...

2009-11-22T23:28:00.000-06:00

A couple weeks ago, I drew attention to my lazy blogging of late by saying I'd written only seven posts since July. You know what, though? That was actually a lie. You could say I've been cheating on you. Or rather, cheating on my blog. Or actually, not cheating at all; just spreading the love around. Or something like that. What I'm saying is I have actually written a wee bit more than you've seen here. On Thursday, for instance, I wrote about that PedalPub outing I took on Halloween. Last month, I wrote about how I removed the persistent (albeit unladylike) gym stank from my workout clothes. The month before that, I wrote about the Shampoo Slumber Party my friend Jamie hosted a while back. And in the midst of my South Dakota road trip, from a motel with free Wi-Fi in Wall, South Dakota, I gave the Internet a glimpse into what dinner looks like at this spinster's abode.

So you see? I'm actually about 50% more prolific than I appear initially! (It's a weak claim, but I'll make it anyway. I'll even go so far as to argue this short post--hey, it's a short week!--counts as four, four, FOUR posts in one!)

If you're not already doing so, pop on over to The Greenists every now and then. You never know what (or who!) else you might find there.

Tramampoline!

2009-11-16T22:33:00.166-06:00

So it turns out the best way to make me not write a post for a fortnight is to say I'm going to write more than one post a fortnight. Blah blah fishcakes; whatever dudes; I've been busy. Or possibly I've been staring at Facebook and Craftster and who knows what else instead of Blogger and Bloglines. We all know I can handle only a finite number of Internet addictions at a time. But no! Seriously! I have had all sorts of stuff going on! I made a skirt. (Two of them, even!) I saved 50 starving kids. (Or so the dude at the place where I put in a measly two hours of time volunteering told us.) I helped my pal Carrie repaint her already freshly painted abode. I baked three times in a week. I finished watching the second season of Mad Men. I bought a toilet. Clearly lots of important stuff going on around here.

What I have not been doing is taking any more trampoline classes. My month of classes was up a couple weeks ago, and I decided not to pony up for another month just now. But since I am so good at waiting until something is so far gone that we've all nearly forgotten about it before I tell you about it, how's about I do that Q&A right now? Obviously I'm all about timeliness here. It's a special skill, folks. All right; no it's not. But it's how I roll, people. All things in due time.

So then. You had questions! I have answers. Actually, you didn't even have all that many questions, so I have supplemented some of your fine questions with a few of my own. Feel free to decide amongst yourselves which are which.

Q: Trampoline class?!? I didn't even know that existed! Wherever did you hear about such a thing??
A: Indirectly, through Facebook, of course. (Seriously, where else; am I right?) A seemingly superhuman acquaintance of mine posted an article about parkour (Note: This kind of parkour, not the kind Michael, Dwight, and Andy thought they mastered on The Office recently). That article linked to a video, which linked to an area gymnastics center that offers parkour and free-running classes, where I saw a link for "Adult Fitness" and decided to see where it led. And lo--trampoline classes! Who knew?? For the record, they also have adult circus skills classes, meaning I could finally learn how to twirl around in the air on long velvet sashes, just like Devotchka's burlesque girls. Maybe I'll try that next year.

Q: Is it one big trampoline, or does everyone have their own tiny trampoline? Is it one of those little round ones like my mom had in the 80s? (Do you even know what I’m talking about? A “mini-tramp,” if you will?) If it is one of those little round jobs from the 80s, please lie to us.
A: I DO remember the mini-tramps! I too am a child of the 80s, and my mom bought one of those as well. The mini-tramp did nothing to quell my trampoline fascination, though. Even as a kid, I knew that little, barely bouncy saucer was NOT A REAL TRAMPOLINE. It almost would have been better to have no trampoline at all than a lame, tiny useless excuse for one. The mini-tramp was a tease. (Which I suppose makes sense. Big, legitimate tramps rarely are, right?)

Q: So it's a big trampoline, then?
A: It is. And there are four of them. We take turns, which is fine, really, seeing as after several minutes, I generally need a break. Which brings me to...

Q: Is it good exercise?
A: Given that every part of my body was sore for several days after my first class, I'd say that yes, it is. A good portion of that soreness, however, likely came from the set of (spotter-assisted; I'm no She-Ra) pull-ups that a particularly drill sergeant-like woman (who was not even the instructor!) forces everyone to do before they leave the gym each night. I promise that the pull-up woman isn't the reason I decided not to sign on for more classes in November, but I can't say she helped my sticktoitiveness much.

Q: So, what sort of people take trampoline classes? What was the demographic in that joint?
A: It was actually a wider mix than I expected. Some were former gymnasts; some (like me) spent their childhoods wanting to be gymnasts and simply believe that trampolines always equal fun. Some stumbled across the class in a search for low-impact exercise options. And one guy was a strange, round-bellied, late 40-something in a royal blue sweatsuit and sport goggles. I really wanted him to be sort of awesome. Sadly, he was not.

Q: Have you learned new jumping moves? Do you do flips on it or just jog a little bit? Do you make up routines?
A: Yes, sort of, no, and maybe. There are five ways to jump on a trampoline, so we started by learning all of those. If you're curious about that (and I know you are), you can jump on your feet, seat, front, back, and knees. From there, we learned how to link various moves together, and by week two and three, I did a front flip and a back handspring with a spotter. The instructor flattered me by calling me a natural and a fast learner, but I never did master the easy combination they referred to as "The Kindergarten Routine," so the assisted handspring was a weak victory.

Q: Can I come to your trampoline recital?
A: Unfortunately, I don't think this gym hosts such a thing. If they did, I'm sure it would exclude quitters, so you still couldn't see me. Hence, no.

Q: Do you still want a trampoline in your backyard?
A: Of course I do! Trampolines still aren't free, however, and I'm still a 35-year-old childless woman with neighbors, so I don't think I'll be doing anything about that any time soon.

Q: Are you angling for the Olympic Trampoline Team, because if so, I will see you at the Olympic trials, Missy.
A: No, but I may be hatching a not-so-elaborate plan to run away and join the circus. I have a feeling that in the circus, you're still allowed (and perhaps encouraged) to drink wine and stay up late. If Nadia was any indication, the Olympics require far more discipline than I'm willing to hone. That said, is there really an Olympic Trampoline Team? Because I would much rather watch that than that rhythmic gymnastics nonsense.

Q: So that sounds awesome. Why on earth aren't you in class RIGHT NOW?
A: Well, first of all, because it it not Wednesday. And also because trampoline classes are not free, unfortunately, and because this was one of those pay periods where I paid a few bills, had the crazy and reckless idea to buy groceries, and suddenly had no money left in my checking account at all. Also, since I am collecting reasons and excuses, going to trampoline class involves a bothersome commute down 35W, which is an always annoying stretch of interstate made even more problematic by the array of construction barrels and barricades and constantly shifting exit lanes featured right now. FYI, Minnesota Department of Transportation, I do NOT make a habit of texting, reading, or applying makeup while driving. You really don't need to keep testing me to make sure I'm paying attention, so how about you decide once and for all whether 62 East will be a right or a left exit and just leave it at that, OK? Ahem. I realize this is not L.A. or Atlanta (or for heaven's sake, Baghdad). I could be subjected to far greater trials than a weekly jaunt down 35W. I could also spend my Wednesday nights watching Glee from the comfort of my purple couch and my flannel pajama pants. This month, I choose that.

NaBloNoGo

2009-11-02T20:02:00.005-06:00

Well, would you look at that? It's November 2 already, which means that after three years of perfect attendance, I have blown NaBloPoMo on the VERY FIRST DAY. I'm kidding, obviously. Did you honestly think I was going to do that to myself again this year? If so, you are hilarious. Or possibly, out of touch with reality. Have you not been paying attention to my lazy-ass blogging of late? Seriously: only seven posts since July. SEVEN. Obviously NaNoBloPoMo would be a much more likely calling for me this year.

Mind you, I have been keeping busy. I have been taking skirt-making classes and trampoline classes (whoopsie; I was supposed to write a Q&A about that, wasn't I?), and Saturday I hopped on the nation's only Pedal Pub and had an absurd amount of ridiculous (admittedly tipsy) fun. And here is where I prove what a lousy blogger I really am lately, because ordinarily this is the point where I would insert some pictures documenting the Halloween Pedal Pub excursion around St. Paul, but because I apparently forgot that I have a blog, I neglected to put those pictures on Flickr and instead housed them only in a not-easily-linkable-to-the-world album on Facebook. Hence, those of you who ARE linked to me there will just have to vouch for the hilarious-looking time I had. Everyone else, pretend the people in some of these videos are my friends (Note: They are not) for a general idea of what transpired.

Actually, it is just as well I have no pictures to link to, because I would rather tell you what I am about to tell you accompanied by no photographic evidence to help you speculate. And what I want to tell you is that my still semi-newish friend Melissa is not only kind and funny and an excellent yoga buddy and travel partner (scroll to the third-last paragraph if you're going to click that link); she is also a fine, well-matched wing woman for me. Why? Because Melissa indirectly orchestrated the inclusion of two new-to-us single males in this outing, and when I asked, "Are they cute?" she answered, "One of them is..." Fast-forward to Saturday, when, mid-Pedal Pub crawl I asked her, "So, which friend of [so-and-so]'s did you think was cute?" And she answered, "[Dude I personally thought was decidedly less cute]." And when I said, "That's funny. I thought [taller, nerdier dude] was the cute one," she replied, "I thought you might!" It's important to note that neither one of us actually made any progress with either of these strangers, but the fact that our tastes were actually fairly opposite I think bodes well for competition-free single-girl outings henceforth. Hurrah.

Following the Pedal Pub, I went to my pal Angela's house, for her now traditional Halloween chili. It was delicious as usual, as were the myriad varieties of cornbread on hand. I brought The Pioneer Woman's pumpkin spice muffins (with cream cheese frosting), which were, like all of her recipes, an undisputed hit. As usual, however, the muffins are gone but a half a bowl of frosting remains, and someone really ought to sneak into my house and remove that from my refrigerator before I spread the rest of it on chocolate chips or Triscuits or a flour tortilla, for lack of any more appropriate frosting vehicle on hand. Oof. Help me.

In all, it was a fine Halloween. I think I regained the last of the eight pounds I lost during my recent food poisoning bout (Crap; did I not write about that either? I'm not sure if that makes me a bad blogger or a good one...), and I also have a giant bruise on my left knee that I have little recollection of having acquired (Note: Not just a bruise, but a bruise with a fishnet-stocking patterned scrape atop it. I am not even kidding about that.). Each of those is a small price to pay, however, for a fun afternoon and evening with friends old and new.

So it's November already, and while this year that doesn't mean a post a day from me, I will try to do more than a post a fortnight at least. And I'll get to the trampoline post; I promise. Even not-so-burning questions require answers, I know.

The Boot Camp for Lost Boys

2009-10-25T21:23:00.009-05:00

I live in a city of over 300,000 people, but in a way, none of us really live in the same city. We see our different parts of it, live our different lives in it. We all have personal landmarks, and they're rarely shared, communal ones. Other people don't drive past the Chatterbox on France and think, "That's where I had what I thought was my best date of '08. Man, was I wrong about that." Other people don't see the Figlio billboard and remember their awkward dinner with a burly guy who not only finished a plate of pasta so enormous it could feed a small village but who roughly stopped the waitress from taking his CLEARLY EMPTY plate by spouting through a mouthful of bread, "No! I'm DIPPING!" And I'm guessing (though I could be wrong, of course) that not a lot of other people think, every time they drive past that big house on Emerson, "Heh. I was deflowered there."

I was out with Carrie last night and we found ourselves stopped at the traffic light beside another of my personal landmarks. It was the corner where I had my first (and thus far only) truly angry, yelly, incredulous breakup. Previously, my only reference point for the restaurant on that corner was that it was the venue for my urban family's second annual Easter Orphans and Heathens Brunch. Now it will always be the place where I stood chastising a soulless, unrepentant manchild in the cold while his new girlfriend watched from a bar stool inside.

I'm talking about Jimmy, of course. The pothead. The damn Buddhist. Remember him? Remember what a sweet story it was originally but how spectacularly it went awry?

I still sort of can't believe that happened. It's absurd, really, and as such, I have to laugh at it. Or maybe not laugh, but at least shake my head and roll my eyes. I'm not angry anymore. I knew I wouldn't be. There's no reason to stay upset over losing a person I'm better off without. But I do still think about him. I do wonder what he's doing. And though I'm not hurt anymore, I'm also not perfect, so when I wonder about him, I'll admit that I hope he's not doing well.

It's not [entirely] that I'm bitter. It's that I honestly think the man needs to hit rock bottom. He has been down, yes. He has been broke and destitute. He's even spent the night in a jail cell at least once. But I don't think he's ever really gotten it. I'm not sure he's realized that any of it is his own damn fault. And I don't think it helps that through all of it, he's always had someone saying, "You are awesome, Jimmy. You're a great person." And I think he needs to stop hearing that. Because he is NOT awesome. He is a flake. He is a fuckup. He is a great big irresponsible child. And you know what? Children get reprimanded when their behavior is inappropriate. Children get punished when they misbehave. Jimmy got fired, skipped out on his rent, lied to his friends, and vanished on me, and what was his punishment? Free room and board with a new girlfriend and a free vacation on said new girlfriend's dime.

I really didn't mean to go into so long a rant about someone who's worth so little energy. I didn't mean to launch into a similar rant when Carrie and I pulled up to that stop light last night. But Carrie, no stranger to fuckwits and manchildren herself, didn't stop me. No, instead, she joined right in.

"It's too bad there's not a boot camp for lost boys," she said. It was a flash of brilliance. Yes! A boot camp for lost boys! We can probably all think of a few candidates for new recruits.

"Do you think it would really work as a boot camp, though?" I asked.

Carrie: "What do you mean?"

Me: "Boot camp is a short-term program for immediate results. Lost boys are driven by instant gratification, but they've also got short memory spans. We need to shoot for long-term change. It might need to be a reform school."

Carrie: "Yeah. They need to go AWAY. Maybe for a long while."

Me: "Or at the very least, an ongoing outpatient program."

Carrie: "Like social work. They'd be assigned a case number."

Me: "And a case manager. They'd have to report in on their progress. And the case manager would talk to their friends, too."

Carrie: "And their parents!"

Me: "None of that manipulating and revising history and skewing the story to make themselves the victim. The case manager would need context. She'd talk to the people who actually KNOW the guy so she'd know what's really up."

Carrie: "But the lost boys would have to meet with each other regularly, too, right? Like an AA meeting?"

Me: "Definitely. And they'd go around the circle.... I'm Adam. I'm a lost boy. It's been six weeks since my last irresponsible, capricious act. And a chorus of lost boys would reply, Hi, Adam. Oh! And they'd get chips after each milestone!"

Carrie: "Chips? People in AA get chips?"

Me: "It's like a little medallion to mark an accomplishment. 'One month sober,' 'One year sober.' That sort of thing."

Carrie: "Oh, so they wouldn't cash them in for anything... not like poker chips, or skee ball tickets..."

Me: "Ha! No, but that would be awesome. I applied for six jobs this week. Here is my chip. I would like to trade it in for that bottle of Jaegermeister."

Carrie: "Nooo! We'd have to take their alcohol AWAY, not reward them with it! Their cigarettes, too. Maybe even movies."

Me: "They definitely wouldn't be allowed to watch Swingers or Fight Club or Reservoir Dogs. And nothing that glorifies life as a manchild."

Carrie: "Would there be twelve steps? And the Serenity prayer?"

Me: "They should at least have some sort of creed. I will not be careless with hearts. Or finances."

Carrie: "I will do no irreparable harm to women."

Me: "I will take responsibility for my actions."

Carrie: "We should totally transcribe this conversation and put it on the Internet."

Me: "I'm way ahead of you on that."

Of course, gauging success in the lost boys program might be difficult. An alcoholic measures progress in concrete milestones that are easily quantifiable. "I haven't had a drink in thirty days." That's clear cut. Black and white. But "It's been six months since I frustrated a woman to tears in the privacy of her own bedroom"? "It's been two months since my mother silently wondered to herself where she went wrong with me"? These things are harder to verify. Still, it's an idea whose time has come, I say. Any social workers out there looking for a new project?

Brevity is rarely my strong suit

2009-10-13T19:12:00.008-05:00

So. Wow. I got nothin'. A full week yet again, and no stories for you? Nope. No stories. Only bullets. Here we go.

Saturday I participated in a pub crawl in my neighborhood. Except instead of being called a pub crawl, it was called a pub mosey. I'm still not sure what the difference is between a crawl and a mosey. A mosey would be faster than a crawl, right? I don't think it was any faster, but it did seem more meandery, go-at-your-own-pace than a typical pub crawl. Maybe that's the difference between a crawl and a mosey. Then again, I've never actually participated in an "official" pub crawl, so I may have no idea what I'm talking about and may have based that theory only on the fact that the last crawl I observed whilst out and about involved a "round-up and move on" whistle to keep everybody strictly on task. So maybe I'm just saying the pub mosey was not led by Captain Von Trapp. Is that the difference? Who knows.
I really thought that for once my bullet points of randomness would be short ones. I'll work on that.
Towards the end of said mosey, I may have made out with a stranger. In public. Because I am klassy like that. And also, apparently, 25. Well done, self. If I tell you he was Australian, that makes it all OK, right? Everything sounds charming and intelligent with an Australian accent. That's a written rule, right? Surely the Australian accent forgives all sins.
I realize few things are less interesting than blogging about the weather, but if autumn were a human, I would be filing a Missing Person's Report. We went directly from 80-degree days to furnace-on, sub-40s. It has also snowed two out of the past three days. Snow. In the first half of October. Even for Minnesota, that is absurd, and I am not handling it well. Frankly, I am cranky and depressed and would very much like to hide inside in my yoga pants until the sun comes out again. I am being a petulant four-year-old about it, crying, "No fair" every time I go outside. Fall is my favorite, and early winter is ruining it. Boo.
Goodreads informed me via email today that I have been reading David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas for 83 days now. I should probably notify Goodreads (and my sidebar) that I have actually all but completely abandoned Cloud Atlas because it has all but completely bored me nonstop. Has anyone else actually read that one? Can someone tell me why it's gotten such favorable reviews? Because I have given it more than a fair chance, and it has not delivered. Time to listen to Nancy Pearl and move on.
Yet another long nearly forgotten member the class of '92 has decided to Facebook-friend me. This time it was my first serious crush of high school, the boy I am a little mortified to remember crying over while I listened to Phil Collins's Groovy Kind of Love on constant repeat. What I neglected to mention when I wrote about him in that "Five songs..." post was that I actually ran into him at a bar in our hometown about ten years ago, at which point I laughed about my ridiculous unrequited crush and he countered by asking me out. For real. As in, "You're not getting out of this bar without agreeing to a date with me." His confidence was almost admirable, given that he was, at the time, working at a factory and still living in his parents' house, but shockingly, his brown eyes didn't have the same hold on me anymore. If his Facebook profile is any indication, his brain wouldn't either. You know how sometimes people say things both happen and don't happen for a reason? How maybe sometimes the greatest gift is an unanswered prayer? Without going into too much detail (i.e., without ripping apart his Facebook page), let's just say I'm really glad that one didn't work out. I'm glad that one never became my first love, or my high school sweetheart, or my first husband. I'm glad of that. Really.
Remember how I said I was going to type short bullets? I was lying, obviously.
I noticed in the gym locker room today that my kickboxing instructor has the same weird toe thing that I have. Shockingly, my mental goalie blocked something for once, and I did not actually say, "Hey! We're mutant toe sisters!" I am seemingly the only "regular" in that class whose name she does not know. I've thought perhaps I should remedy that with a casual, "I'm Stefanie, by the way" someday. Having her know me as "Stefanie" would be fine with me. Having her know me as "That crazy girl who was looking at my toes" is not.
Speaking of classes and bearing toes in public, I am taking a trampoline class! I have been to only one at this point, but so far, it is exactly as fun as it sounds. That is, if jumping on a trampoline for an hour a week sounds fun to you (and WHY WOULDN'T IT???). This is actually probably the most interesting thing in this list so far (to me, anyway), and yet, I have no idea what you might want to know about it. Trampoline class questions, anyone? Let's have a Q&A.

Spoonman

2009-10-05T22:11:00.009-05:00

This just in: Did you know there is some sort of very important football contest on your television right now? I may have almost forgotten, but luckily, 37 of my closest Facebook friends have reminded me. And by "closest," I mean geographically closest, because shockingly, the majority of friends NOT located in either Wisconsin or Minnesota haven't weighed in at all. Truth be told, I don't give half a damn about the outcome of this game. My Wisconsin roots tell me to be loyal to Green Bay, but my nearly twelve years in Minnesota make me wonder if I'm supposed to root for them now instead. (Wait a minute. TWELVE? Really?? How in the hell did THAT happen? Here's another "This just in" newsflash: I am OLD.) Neither my Wisconsin roots nor my Minnesota residency can override the fact that I have only a rudimentary understanding of the game, however, and therefore little interest in rooting for either side. I will say this, though: it looks awfully strange to see Brett Favre in purple. I know that at least, anyway.

And thus ends what is likely the first and just as likely the last time you will see me write about football on this blog. You're welcome.

You know who does care about football, though? My dad. I'm sure he is watching Monday Night Football intently this evening, and... Wait. Scratch that. No he's not. He is sitting on his couch with his feet up under the guise of watching the game, but is in fact dozing off with his head back and his mouth open, giant bowl of snacks to his right and giant insulated mug of soda to his left.

And when I say "giant," I do mean GIANT. When I was a kid, my standard-sized dad used to fill a standard-sized glass with Coke and bring it with him into the living room to watch TV. Somewhere around my high school years, he started using the jumbo plastic tumblers stashed in the back of my parents' cupboards, and when I came home for holidays in college, he had upgraded to a large insulated travel mug with a lid and handle. I thought that was perhaps the biggest soda vessel he could find, short of pouring an entire two-liter bottle into one of my mom's mixing bowls or an empty ice cream bucket, but lo, I was wrong. When I came home for Christmas last year, he had somehow, somewhere acquired an insulated travel mug that, were it alive, could have eaten three of his previous insulated travel mugs. I saw this travel mug on the bottom shelf of my parents' refrigerator, where they keep gallon containers of milk and orange juice, and it consumed the same amount of shelf real estate as those gallon containers. I don't know where one would even purchase a travel mug this large, but I suspect is in the same place where one would purchase giant sunglasses and other comically large accessories for parties and practical jokes. Do you remember the episode of Seinfeld where Kramer offered lodging to a group of tiny Japanese businessmen, and they each slept in one of his bureau drawers? If Kramer ran out of drawers but had a travel mug like my father's, I'm pretty sure one of those tiny business men could have slept quite comfortably nestled inside that mug. I think you get my point. The mug is LARGE.

Please don't ask me why my father routinely needs immediate access to a full gallon of soda at a time. I cannot explain that any more than I can explain why he rolls his window down when he pulls his car into the garage, or why he spreads butter on donuts and cinnamon rolls, or why he has upwards of a thousand or more VHS tapes he will never watch again, or why he buys off-brand, nearly expired beef jerky and bagged snacks at the Dollar Store when already he has three full cupboards of uneaten snacks at home. Or why, as I mentioned last week, he brings his own spoon to restaurants. That's right: his own spoon. A few of you asked about that.

I don't have any solid answers about the spoon. Again, I think size has something to do with it. At some point, my father decided that the teaspoons in my parents' silverware set weren't large enough to use for soup or ice cream, so he started using the tablespoon-sized spoons in the next compartment of the drawer instead. That's reasonable enough; even in restaurants, they give you a larger spoon for soup than they do to stir your coffee. But when he decided the tablespoon wasn't large enough either, he upgraded to the serving spoons instead. And obviously once you are used to raising your soup to your mouth nearly a ladle-full at a time, you can't be expected to resort to the tiny soup spoons designed for mere mortals when you dine out, so my dad started carrying one of my mom's metal serving spoons in his jacket pocket at all times. Then he fell in love with all-you-can-eat Chinese buffets, where he'd eat his hot & sour or wonton soup with one of those flat-bottomed, white ceramic spoons. And I guess he decided that a short-handled ceramic spoon would fit better in his pocket than a serving spoon, because now he carries one of those around instead. I'm pretty sure he found his at Goodwill or another thrift store he visits regularly and didn't just pocket one from the Chinese buffet, but obviously the man has some strange quirks; I can't guarantee petty theft isn't one of them.

So it turns out, I guess I can explain the spoon. But I still can't really explain it. I am an intensely logical person, so I want to understand why my aging parents do the very strange things they do, but I know that some things just aren't meant to be understood. I realize that no matter how baffled I am, I have to make peace with it, knowing that one of the great luxuries of growing old is to be able to indulge in your quirks and idiosyncrasies, to be able to thumb your nose at convention and do whatever you damn well please. Really, if we can't have that, there's almost no point in getting old. With that in mind, I could have a lot of fun trying to decide just what sort of crazy old lady I will one day be.

The game is over now, incidentally, and I guess I did have an opinion a little bit, because I was surprised to feel a teensy bit sad when the Packers didn't rally for a last-minute win in the end. So I guess that answers that question, in case there was any doubt. You can take the girl out of Wisconsin, but can't take the Wisconsin out of the girl. Or maybe the gene that favors the Packers is a dominant one. Let's hope some of those other genes aren't.

Take a sad song and make it better

2009-09-30T21:25:00.008-05:00

The radio station I listen to has been celebrating The Beatles all month, in honor of that remastered collection thing that you probably heard about, unless you've been living under a rock or perhaps don't listen to a station that decided to talk about The Beatles all month. Tonight, the whole thing culminated in a countdown of the top 50 Beatles songs, as ranked by listeners. (Or rather, as ranked by the listeners who actually took the time to vote. I did not, but obviously that won't stop me from complaining about the results.) It was a reasonably solid list... not that I am any sort of expert on Beatles discography and therefore qualified to weigh in on this, and maybe the fact that I am not a Beatles expert accounts for my reaction when they played the number 1 song. Hey Jude? Really?? The song that starts out promising enough but then ends with approximately nine and a half gratingly repetitive minutes of "Na, na, na, na-na-na-na! Na-na-na-na! Hey-ay Jude. (JudyJudyJudyJudeJudyJude!)"? That song? Better than all other Beatles songs? OK then.

It occurs to me that my dad once voiced that exact same complaint about Hey Jude, so now of course I am terrified I may be turning into my father. Next thing you know, I'll be driving as if every other car on the road is invisible, bringing my own spoon to restaurants, and spouting off about how that Rush Limbaugh really knows what he's talking about. Yeesh. Perish the thought.

In truth, I don't really have a problem with Hey Jude, but best Beatles song of all? Hardly. Of course, now I have to tell you what IS the best Beatles song, which is bound to be a bad idea, because at least 96% of you will disagree with me, and at least half of that 96% will actually lose respect for me because of my disturbingly bad choice. Or so I've been led to believe the few times this topic has come up in the past. Some people are serious about their Beatles cred. It may be on par with the pop/soda divide.

So I won't tell you what the best Beatles song is. Instead, I will tell you what my favorite Beatles song is. And then I will explain why it is my favorite, in an effort to calm whichever among you will tell me it is not a valid choice.

My favorite Beatles song is Yesterday. Not because it is lovely and sad (though it is) and not because I have a scratchy old version of it on a tape that my little sister once dubbed for me--a version that ends with Paul saying, "Thank you, Ringo; that was wonderful," which for some reason makes me smile. My favorite Beatles song is Yesterday because every time I hear it, I remember winding my way up the narrow staircase that circles the interior of Brunelleschi's dome in Il Duomo, the Florence Cathedral. I remember climbing to the top of that dome during the spring break of my semester abroad, with two German boys walking the steps in front of me, singing Yesterday to amuse themselves. Wait. Were they German? They may not have been German. All I remember is that English was not their first language, and as such, one of them mangled the lyrics into something entirely unrecognizable as English words. I know I have mangled some Spanish over the years; I once tried to sing the Tortilla Song that I learned in high school Spanish to a bartender in Cozumel, and though I was confident I was remembering all the words just right, he had no idea whatsoever what I was singing about. Mangled English I'm less familiar with. It's hard to imagine mangled versions of a language you know well. So when I heard the German teenager singing Yesterday and injecting words that were not words, my ears perked up in confusion and surprise. So did the teenager's friend's, because he whirled around immediately to correct him. "Half the man! Half the man!" he sputtered, one hand pounding the other for emphasis. After that chiding, the poor kid looked like half the man he used to be. But still, he kept on singing.

So when I hear Yesterday, I think of Florence. I think of exploring new places and learning new things and realizing the simultaneous fear and exhilaration of being in another country and knowing there is no one on the planet who knew exactly where I was at any given moment. And I think of those two boys in Brunelleschi's dome and I wonder what lyrics they are mangling these days.

Incidentally, Yesterday came in at #11 on the radio listeners' poll, so obviously I am not the only one for whom that song holds a special place. At #12 was In My Life, which is my second-favorite Beatles song (by a very close margin). I don't have a story to go with that one. I've just always liked it is all.

I wasn't actually planning on talking about the Beatles tonight. I certainly wasn't planning on talking about them for seven paragraphs. No, I was going to talk about my second vacation in the course of a month. Remember? I was so overdue for a vacation that I decided to take two? So last weekend was my long weekend in L.A., where it was ridiculously hot and where I saw more of the highways than of anything else (which, as far as I can tell, is about as accurate a picture of L.A. as one can get), but where I had an excellent time with some excellent friends nonetheless. I went to visit Darren and Heather (who some of you may remember from Look at Me... and Nabbalicious fame). I went with my friend Melissa, who lives in Minneapolis but who I had to meet through another blog friend in California (everybody's favorite tech support and car repair guru, Steve, who is the reason Heather and Darren know Melissa as well). See what a small world it is? Look at the Internet, bringing people together even after their blogs are long defunct. It's almost like... REAL LIFE. Crazy thought.

Anyway, we had a hilarious time. Seriously, I do not remember the last time I laughed so much in a 72-hour span. We went to the observatory in Rebel without a Cause. I saw the beach club that served as 90210's Beverly Hill's Beach Club. (Or was it the beach club that everyone worked at on Saved by the Bell? Were they actually the same beach club? My memory of them is the same.) I had my first In-n-Out burger. I celebrated Guinness's 250th birthday. I lost a bar fight because I had only one arm. We had Darren's famous Cincinnati chili and Roscoe's famous chicken & waffles. We took pictures of creepy statues. And we made more terrible "That's what she said" jokes than Michael Scott has made on all five seasons of The Office thus far. Also, we learned all sorts of interesting things about each other. I learned that Melissa is an exhibitionist and that Heather hates Colonial Williamsburg. (She has a point: Why do Americans need their history safe and spoonfed, like Applebee's and network sitcoms?) In turn, they learned that I spent $18 on a bottle of deodorant, because the Internet told me to.

In short, I had so much fun that I don't even mind coming home with a cold that's left me feeling weak and stuffy for days. I probably picked it up on the plane, but since Heather was sick when we got there and Melissa was sick by the time we left, we've decided we must be passing it along to one another in batches, like Amish Friendship Bread. It is the Amish Friendship Cold. Who wants it next, folks? I've got plenty of germs to share, and plenty of Internet friends I'd love to see. Come on over!

Four things that have made me laugh in the past hour

2009-09-20T20:47:00.005-05:00

Kristabella's comment on -R-'s latest post, in which -R- mentioned preliminary plans for B's first birthday party. (Sidenote #1: How in the H-E-double-hockey-sticks is B nearly a year old already?? Sidenote #2: I totally think a decision on the baked goods is a fully valid starting point for a party theme.) The comment in question? It went something like this:

"You should do our family tradition that we have for 1 year birthdays. You set down a shot glass, a rosary, and a dollar in front of the kid. And then see which one he picks. Shot glass, he’s going to be a drinker. Rosary, he’s going to be a priest/nun. Dollar, he’s going to be rich. I’m pretty sure you can guess which one I picked."

Those of you who have newborns (or are thinking of acquiring newborns), I do expect you to file this idea away (and provide video evidence once you've used it).
The fact that I just saw my neighbor peeing from my kitchen window. You see, the window above my kitchen table provides a pretty direct view into the corner of my neighbors' bathroom, which usually doesn't present any problems, given that I rarely eat at my kitchen table (as you know, spinsters more often eat over their kitchen sink or, in my case, on their living room floor in front of the previous night's rerun of The Daily Show). Tonight, however, I happened to be sitting at my kitchen table, and I happened to glance up from my dinner at the exact same time my neighbor glanced over from his pee stance. (I saw him only from the chest up, but it's pretty clear what he was doing regardless.) We made brief, uncomfortable through-the-window eye contact, and I can't decide if I'm amused or skeeved out by it. No, scratch that. Obviously we must go with amused, if for no other reason than hello, I have meandered through my kitchen naked more times than I should admit, and I should just be glad the eye contact happened now and not on one of those occasions. Hee.
Sizzle's friends and nephew. I'm telling you, cute kid stories almost make me consider possibly wanting one of those. Almost. Luckily, I have the Internet for a near-constant stream of cute kid stories, minus the perpetual drain on my bank account and the inability to sleep in for the next 937 weekends. I slept nine and a half hours last night, and it was fantastic. Garnering cute kid stories by proxy is fine with me, I say.
Barry Manilow's Copa Cabana. A Facebook friend just posted a reasonable question as his status update. "Why do I have Manilow's Copa Cabana in my head?" he wondered. I know not, but it reminded me of the semester I spent in Great Britain, during which there was a Manilow-inspired musical playing in London, meaning that every time I rode the escalators in the Tube stations, I saw "Copacabana" posters all around me. Intermittently throughout the entire semester, I had that damn song in my head, and I don't even know the lyrics. So instead, I made up my own. "COPA! Copa Ca-BANA! I think I will HAVE a BANANA! And then I will go to MONTANA!" Try it. I'm telling you, it's fun! My Facebook friend agrees with me, as he followed up my comment with, "It's time to put ON my paJAMAS!" I could keep this up all night. Or, at least until I run out of "-ana" rhymes. Which might actually be now, come to think of it. All right then. Moving on.

Incidentally, I am supposed to be writing my next post for The Greenists (the blog formerly knowns as Allie's Answers) at the moment. But as usual, I am an award-worthy procrastinator and time-waster. I don't actually know anyone who's giving out awards for procrastination and time wasting, but I trust that if you do, you'll pass along my name, right? Meanwhile, I have to be content with this award, bestowed by the always brilliant Flurrious, who I'm pretty sure in real life is that famous Woman Who Can't Forget, because seriously, how many of you would have remembered that I am the keeper of the semicolon?

Not a lot of you, I would estimate. Flurrious, you crack me up. Which obviously means this post should be titled Five Things that Have Made Me Laugh in the Past Hour, but I have already turned off the numbered list formatting, and surely you can't expect me to go back and mess with Blogger's capricious formatting attributes at this point.

Tell me... what's amusing you today?

September doesn't officially start until after Labor Day anyway, right?

2009-09-13T22:11:00.004-05:00

Just maybe not a full week after Labor Day. Whoopsie. Anyway, hello there. Fancy meeting you here. Wait. Is anyone here? It's entirely possible that after such a long hiatus I am now typing into the text-based equivalent of an empty and echo-y cave. The bad news is, perhaps no one is left to hear me. On the plus side, the acoustics are great!

So then. August happened, and with it came... Man. What the hell did I do for all of August? I know that time speeds up as we get older, but still I would like a recount on this summer's length. Wasn't it June just two days ago? And now it's all leaves changing and spiced pumpkin lattes and skirt and boot season on its way. Madness.

Obviously I could rattle off for you everything I have done in the past month, in inevitably lazy bullet-point format. Frankly, however, August is a blur. I did some stuff. I hung out with some people. I probably had some wine. Most important, I took a vacation! A real one, where I left my house (and hell, the state) for a full week and everything! And it was excellent. I don't know why I don't do that more often. I'm allotted a reasonably adequate number of vacation days, and yet, it had been over three years since I took a solid week of those days at once. That's just wrong, people. WRONG. Must remedy that in all years to come.

You may recall that my plan was an old school family vacation, minus the family. Or rather, with urban family, which if you ask me is a much better way to travel. My pal Carrie and I road tripped it to South Dakota, where they have mountains and rock formations and rattlesnakes, making it feel like an entirely different world that's only one state away.

South Dakota was gorgeous, actually, and if you haven't been there yet, I highly recommend you go. Coming from the east, we made the requisite stops along I-90 at the Corn Palace (the world's largest bird feeder) and Wall Drug on the way out, but I suppose you could skip those trivialities (if you must) and proceed directly to the Badlands. You know, the Badlands! Home to an unspecified number of rattlesnakes that I was convinced would be our undoing. I mean, I suppose I didn't really think a rattlesnake would bite me and I would DIE, but I do admit I was convinced there would at least be a harrowing but ultimately harmless run-in of some sort, not unlike the late night tarantula scare in the motel room when the Brady Bunch went to Hawaii.

Seriously, people, after talking to a NOT HELPFUL friend of Carrie's who had me convinced we would camp in the Badlands only if we had a death wish (his exact words: "They don't call it the GOODlands, you know!"), I was so convinced there would be rattlesnakes at our campsite that I did what any normal person (read: Internet addict who believes Google is the new Magic 8 Ball) would do. I Googled "Badlands camping death." And you know what? No matching suggestions appeared in that little drop-down list as I typed! No valid results returned! Clearly that meant all would be fine, and luckily, Google was right! As far as I'm concerned, the Badlands are full of grasshoppers, prairie dogs, and more than the occasional buffalo, but rattlesnakes? The Badlands are fresh out! Whew.

I was going to do a little photo essay of various highlights of my trip, but you know what? That shit takes time, yo, and if I sidetrack myself with a project like that, I may not hit that "Publish Post" button this week either. So how about you just pop on over to this Flickr set if you feel so inclined, and just imagine my witty commentary interspersed between ten or fifteen hand-picked shots? I mean really; do I have to do everything? Oh. Right. This is my blog. So yes, I suppose I do.

Moving on. Vacation was definitely the highlight of my August, but there were other victories as well. Like my winning a new pair of jeans in Abbersnail's Gap-tastic Pants Party! Whee! If I didn't know any better, I'd think my friends got together and somehow rigged that contest to declare me a winner, just so they could finally see me in something other than the four identical pairs of Mossimo jeans from Target I've been wearing for three years now. I do need a jeans upgrade, I'm well aware, so I entered Abbersnail's contest with the plea, "Help me, Abby-wan. You're my only hope!" And help me she did. Hurrah.

So I have new pants. Or, I will have, once I get myself to a Gap to pick them out. On an entirely different note, what I do NOT have is home-grown tomatoes. Friends, if this one first attempt can be considered a fair measure for future success, I'm going to have to say that gardening is not for me. I am pretty sure tomato season is officially over, and from my stubborn and temperamental stoop-side tomato plants, I got a mere handful of not particularly delicious cherry tomatoes and exactly ZERO beefsteaks. I should have had at least a few, but the damn squirrels got to every one of them just before they were ripe enough to pick. Bastards. When they're not dying in my yard, they're stealing the literal fruits of my labors. (That is, if watering a plant every day can be considered "labor.") So I guess I'll have to continue buying tomatoes like a common 21st-century capitalist. I should have learned years ago that a successful pioneer woman I am not. I've never been a quick study, obviously.

I'm sure other things happened in August, too, but as I said, it's a blur. So that brings us to September, in which, thus far, I have survived a visit from my family, had an uneventful trip to the dentist, went to the quirkiest show I've seen in a long time, and made my first quiche. (Note: I still don't love eggs, but it was delicious.) Oh, and today I took an invigorating late summer bike ride that was altogether lovely and perfect aside from the droves of gnats on a mile or so patch of the river-side trail. I have already showered off the ones that awesomely plastered themselves inside my sports bra, but if I find any in my teeth when I floss tonight, I may be too horrified to bike near a river ever again.

And on that note, I shall leave you, because there's no better way to say "Thanks for reading after I abandoned you for a month" than to end with an image like that. You're welcome.

And what have all of you been up to not-so-recently?

As a matter of fact, I WOULD jump off a bridge, if Flurrious told me to

2009-08-10T21:46:00.005-05:00

No need to send out a search party; I am alive and well. Or, alive, anyway, and mostly well, but feeling persistently disgruntled for possibly no good reason, that being the fact that I am TIRED and life is hard, yo, at least when suddenly forced to live it like a proper grown-up, with a full schedule and commensurate responsibilities and so forth. I told a good friend in an email recently that I was feeling unusually busy lately, and that I've missed my sitting-around time. I really am quite excellent at wasting large chunks of time, and for a while there, I was doing so only at work, not at home. It's good to have a proper work/life balance, after all. My preferred way to restore that balance would have been to free my social schedule and to-do list for a while and hole myself up with two seasons' worth of Mad Men DVDs. The people who direct-deposit my paycheck had other ideas, however, and instead of my scaling back on the off-hours activity, they have upped my 8-to-5 responsibilities significantly. Rather, make that 7-to-5, because it turns out being a responsible, professionally employed grown-up means not just doing valid and work-related activities all day long with no breaks for idle internetting, but also occasionally starting that day at the ungodly hour of 7:00 am. (The horror!) At 7:00 am, I would much prefer to be still soundly sleeping, but in the interest of remaining gainfully employed in a job I occasionally enjoy, I will consent to having pried myself out of bed and be toweling off from a shower right around that hour. Being expected at a meeting 30 minutes from my home at 7:00 am, however? Fully dressed and alert and in business-ready mode? I did not realize that was part of the deal. Oh my.

This is a long and roundabout, excuse-laden way of saying I am tempted to follow Flurrious's lead and give myself official permission to ignore my blog for the remainder of August. Writing here is supposed to be something I do because I enjoy it, not something I do because it is the longest-neglected thing at the bottom of my to-do list. A blog is just a blog, and neglecting it should not instill any particular guilt, but I was raised Catholic; unwarranted guilt is standard operating procedure for me.

Before I vanish again, I suppose could tell you what I've been up to since you heard from me last. Let's see. Well, I enjoyed another summer pilgrimage to the magical Pizza Farm, I made my first flan, I kissed a 27-year-old stranger (for no better reason than that he asked), I unintentionally alienated someone who is supposed to be one of my closest friends, and I came three steps closer to finally finishing a hand-made birthday gift that is now nearly a full year overdue. (Note: I am not necessarily proud of any of these accomplishments, but am significantly less proud of some than of others.) Also, I failed to solidify any actual plans for my upcoming vacation, but there is some benefit and excitement to the fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants mode of leisure travel, so I see no reason fret to any degree about that.

Of course, now that I have given myself permission to check out until Labor Day, I will probably find myself logging in with something amusing-only-to-me to say in less than two days' time. Perhaps I will and perhaps I won't. Midwestern Girl of Mystery; that's me.

Foodstuffs

2009-07-30T22:44:00.006-05:00

I know most of you don't know my good friend Carrie, but is anyone curious how she fared in the Julie & Julia cooking contest I mentioned? She won! Well, she won second place, which is still awesome, of course (she got to take home an excellent set of brand-new cookware), but honestly, I was so shocked she did not win the grand prize that I almost forgot to clap when they announced her name as the runner-up. No, seriously. Whoops. It's times like that when I fear I would be a terrible parent. Or an excellent one, I suppose, depending on your perspective.

I am fairly certain it was the first place winner's sparkling Rachel Ray smile and gaggle of small, seemingly adorable children and not her any-more-stellar-than-Carrie's chicken salad that secured her the grand prize. Which, incidentally, trust me: if the judges had been sitting directly in front of those children, they would not have been deemed so precious. Little treasures, I am sure, but they could not get their high-pitched squeals and their grabby little hands away from me quickly enough. But that is neither here nor there. I wish the winner and her enormous family all the best, and I shall move on before I say anything else that would put me squarely back in that "terrible parent" camp.

After the contest, I got to accompany Carrie to an advance screening of Julie & Julia, which you really must see as soon as you are able, because it is beautiful and charming and might make even the likes of ME think it's a good idea to try my hand at French cooking. (Definitely not aspics or some crazy pastry-wrapped deboned duck, but perhaps a beef stew or pear tart. Maybe.) Meryl Streep is radiant, of course, and Amy Adams is adorable as always, and I almost don't even want to paste in the link for this movie that I just went to find, because I cannot believe Rotten Tomatoes currently deems it worthy of only a 20% rating. 20% means it is "Rotten," and that I simply do not understand. Granted, only five reviews have been counted thus far, but did those five reviewers see the same movie I did?? I'm perplexed.

In other food news, I have a post up at Allie's Answers today. That shouldn't be food news, since my assigned beat on that site is environmentally friendly cleaning products, but rules were meant to be broken and beats were meant to be veered from. Or so I decided after I got a tour and a free meal at a nearby Chipotle recently and felt compelled to write about it. Yes, my guest post is about Chipotle. I should warn you that if you click over, you may be unable to avoid taking yourself to Chipotle for lunch. Don't blame me; blame the accompanying photo Courtney found. Seriously, I need to close that Firefox tab immediately because if I look at that delicious burrito one more time there is no way I'm getting to bed without a snack. Yum.

And finally, this has nothing to do with food, but I found out today that I will be working on a short-term project with a former co-worker for the next two weeks. This project involves pretending I know how to use a tool I last saw three years and probably two software versions ago, but I am a professional! I can DO this, right? Wish me luck. This also means that instead of pulling on a pair of jeans and driving across the suburbs to my very far away office tomorrow morning, I shall be putting on a dress and going downtown! Just like a real grown-up. Actually, this means that my commute will be an awesome 4.1 miles instead of the usual 25, but given that it's 4.1 miles of stop lights and downtown rush hour traffic, I'm unsure whether the time savings will be at all notable. I shall see.

And with that, I should get myself to bed, so that I can actually be a responsible and professional grown-up in the bright and early morning hours. Is it me, or does it feel like Monday was somehow simultaneously just a moment ago and also a hundred years ago right now? This week has been a blur, and I don't even have alcohol or an unusual flurry of activity to blame. Go figure. Happy weekend, all.

Post-lets*

2009-07-26T21:32:00.003-05:00

* (Not to be confused with Post-its, which are both trademarked and not particularly relevant here.)

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Trading Places

Yesterday I started my lawn mower on the FIRST PULL for quite likely the very first time ever. This victory comes on the tails of my excitement over free wine and free concert tickets, and I am convinced it is a sign that good things are afoot. Not just for me, either, but for those around me, too. My pal Carrie is a finalist in a cooking contest this week, and even my friend Eeyore (not his real name, of course, but a nickname given due to the gray rain cloud of misfortune that persistently follows him) is feeling convinced that his luck is turning. More specifically, he is convinced that his bad luck somehow transferred to the roofer who fell off his house while working on it recently. I saw this happen in a movie once, so obviously it must be possible in real life, too. Of course, in the movie, Lindsay Lohan's luck changed for the worse when she kissed a masked stranger, and as Eeyore assures me he did not make out with his roofer, some other mystical switcheroo must have transpired. Regardless, it's a lovely thing to feel the universe is giving me and mine a gentle pat on the shoulder rather than a swift kick in the rear, and I am hoping it means this August will be decidedly less craptastic and sucktacular than usual. One can dream.

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Analog Girl in a Digital World

That cooking contest Carrie's in? It also includes an appearance on the local news tomorrow morning. I'll be at work by the time it airs, so I set my VCR to capture her TV debut. Yes, I said VCR, which I know is a foreign and archaic gadget to most of you but which still works just fine for me. I didn't even realize until recently how few people still use VCRs, so oblivious and ambivalent am I about acquiring new technologies. Tonight, I had dinner with Steve (you know--my laptop benefactor and car repair consultant) and his lovely girlfriend, and she laughed and said, "You're kidding, right?" when I mentioned programming the VCR. No, I was not kidding, though Steve's girlfriend isn't the only one who thinks VCRs have long gone the way of the laserdisc. I texted Carrie earlier to let her know I'd be taping the show, and it turns out "VCR" isn't in the T9 texting dictionary, either. Of course, the T9 texting dictionary is also missing other key words in my lexicon ("fucking" becomes "ducking" and "Stef" becomes "Puff," to name just two key examples), so maybe T9's vocabulary is what's lacking and not my home technology. Or so I shall tell myself while I'm winding my clocks and hand-wringing my laundry.

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Must Love Dogs (or Rather, the Dog Must Love ME)

I am a huge fan neither of children nor of dogs, and yet, I get an instant warm, happy feeling when someone tells me that their child or their dog likes me. Why? I don't know. Because people who do like dogs and children have told me that dogs and children are excellent judges of character and I want to believe that the dog or child is right? Because I believe that if someone's child or dog likes me, that person is more apt to like me as well? I do not know, but there you go. Thing that makes me smile for no real reason #142. "Stuff you never knew about Stefanie for $200, Alex." Moving on now. Right.

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Backhanded Compliments

Tonight when I ordered my tiki drink, the waitress carded me, which isn't so strange, given that lots of places have a "We card everyone" policy. Hence, no commentary was needed, and yet? The waitress looked at my ID, handed it back to me, and said, "You must have really good skin care. You look a lot younger than you are!" Which, OK, thanks. Lovely of you to say so, miss. Except wait a minute. Did you just call me old? I sort of think she did. Sigh.

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I also like "Interplanetary" and "Poughkeepsie," but those are probably harder to work into a name

In the past year or so, I've noticed a number of bands with one word in their name in common become a band-of-the-moment at essentially the same time. Eagles of Death Metal got fairly frequent airplay around the same time as Department of Eagles entered the scene. Ladytron, Lady Sovereign, and Ladyhawke have all had hits in simultaneous rotation. And lately, I thought I'd found another one: Animal Collective showing up at the same time as Cage the Animals. Except I realized this evening that it's not actually Cage the Animals; it's Cage the Elephant. Regardless, if this isn't a deliberate marketing tactic, then perhaps it should be. It seems to be working quite well. I am wondering what the next word to link two or more band names might be. I am sort of hoping for "Yeti." Record executives, take note.

I'm not dead, but apparently I want to talk about what would happen if I were

2009-07-22T21:08:00.009-05:00

Seeing as I'm single, I live alone, and I am occasionally morbid, I sometimes wonder how long it would take for anyone to notice and investigate if I went missing or broke my neck going down my stairs. If it happened on a week night, there is a good chance my boss would notice my absence within a day and track down my sister or my parents to investigate. I say merely "good chance" because my boss and I work in offices that are only approximately 30 feet away from one another, but as neither of us is exactly a wandering social butterfly at work, those 30 feet are apparently an insurmountable distance to cross unless absolutely necessary, and we often go full days without actually seeing each other's face. If I went missing or dead on one of those days, or perhaps over a long weekend, it is a bit unsettling to me to think how long it might go unnoticed. I can't decide if I should feel lucky I do not have any pets, as it ensures no animal (save maybe Samsa) will eat my face off before the medical examiner arrives, or if I should run out and acquire a pet post haste, knowing said pet might be so helpful as to do away with my remains in a tidy manner before any truly vile decomposition sets in.

Luckily, I may not have to worry about any of these scenarios, because lo, I have the Internets. And the Neighborhood Watch Group in my corner of the Internets (by which I mean 3Carnations) totally has my back. It took a mere week of no Internet activity this time for 3Carnations to send me an email making sure I'm still alive. I could survive a week with no food or water lying on my basement floor with a broken neck, right? She could totally have sent help in time? What's that? No? Well then. 3Cs, maybe this is the reason you should join Facebook: the ability to keep closer tabs on me and provide more prompt follow-up in case of my demise.

At any rate, I am fine. I always think I will have more time for blog reading and writing in the summer, given that there is nothing good on TV to distract me, but I forget that in the summer, I am much less averse to leaving my house in the evening hours, what with the lack of total darkness and bitter cold that thwarts any ambition to combat hermitude during winter months.

So I have simply been busy lately. What have I been up to? Well, let's see.

I picked up and thereafter sampled my free wine. I will say, for Chardonnay, it is not half bad. I might even go so far as to say that for Chardonnay, it is delicious. It was also free, and it's hard to argue with that.

Of course, it would have been far too fiscally responsible of me to walk out with my 12 free bottles of white wine without also spending some money on red. The summer wine sale is in progress, and I cannot see my favorites priced at $6, $7, and $8 a bottle and not do some stocking up. I bought six bottles and yet, I sort of want to go back and buy six more. People, there are BARGAINS in store! It pays to buy in bulk! I have never once felt the urge to acquire a Costco or Sam's Club membership in order to stockpile toilet paper or Ramen noodles, but where alcohol is concerned, apparently I am all about economies of scale. My logic knows no bounds. My priorities not remotely flawed.

Moving on. What else has happened recently? Well, it finally rained. It rained right in the middle of the outdoor viewing of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof that I attended, but it rained nonetheless. Also, one (just one!) of my cherry tomatoes has turned nearly red. I think that had more to do with luck or fertilizer than with rain, but the rain is welcome in any case. Neither the rain nor the fertilizer has saved my Big Beef tomatoes, unfortunately. Today, the most promising-looking one of those somehow entirely disappeared. I stared at my tomato plants for a full two minutes pondering its sudden absence. Whatever animal, neighbor, or lawn gnome took off with it was probably watching me, laughing, the whole time.

In more interesting news, I attended four shows in six days. I am totally a Girl About Town. The last of those was a semi-secret, semi-private Jenny Lewis show that I scored free tickets to on my way out of another show. It was sponsored by Target and Converse, meaning it was very corporatey and logo-laden, but we had a lovely time nonetheless. Plus, I got a free girly red martini in a blinking martini glass, and nothing says "Fun" like a blinking martini, no? You like blinking lights, don't you? (Like the one on the waffle iron. Or the little guy on the Don't Walk sign. I may be tired and losing my focus here, but somebody please get that reference.)

Also, I planned two vacations. Actually, not so much "planned" as "committed to." And this may have happened before my last post and I just neglected to mention it until now. I did say I was overdue for a vacation. Apparently my remedy for that is to take two. Hurrah! First up is a week-long road trip to the Badlands, etc. (South Dakota tips, anyone?) Then in September it's a long weekend in L.A. Unlike my last trip out of the state, neither of these will be with my coworkers. Mexico may beat South Dakota on most people's list of hot spots worth visiting, but being able to return from vacation without saying, "Huh. Haven't been in this office for a while, and yet, I just saw YOU yesterday!" ranks pretty high on my list. I can't wait.

And finally, in less exciting news, I have developed an awesome case of insomnia. Oh man, it is the best. Know what's even better than feeling tired and headachey and nauseated all day because you have a hangover? Feeling tired and headachey and nauseated all day without even having had the fun of an irresponsible bender the night before to warrant it. As I type away right now, my head is heavy, my eyelids are drooping, and yet, like magic, I am certain the moment my head hits my pillow, I will be wide awake, ready to tackle all the world's problems (or at least, ponder incessantly the most trivial of my own). If you have any remedies or suggestions for this dilemma, I would love to hear them. Partying like a rock star is one thing. Looking and feeling as though I've partied like one without having done any actual partying is quite another. Yawn.

Just doing my part to give the last Facebook holdouts one more reason to join

2009-07-15T21:42:00.008-05:00

First up, a few updates, because giving you even more information about things you probably weren't riveted by the first time sounds like an excellent idea, no? Some people tell worthwhile, NEW stories! That is not how I roll.

So, shockingly, I have yet to hear anything from the charming Josh Ritter, despite how many times I included his name in that last post for the Google-bots to find. I did not even see any Ritter-related search activity in my referrals list this week. It seems I have overestimated the appeal that vanity-Googling holds for celebrities. Maybe stars really aren't just like us after all.

While Josh Ritter hasn't found his way to my blog in search of a new girlfriend, however, it seems other people think I may be some sort of authority on celebrity relationships. (Hint: I am not.) I do not know if Martin Zellar is still married, nor do I have any idea if Alanis Morissette and Jim Creegan have been romantically linked. (I do know they are both Canadian, but nobody is Googling that today.) I hope those particular searchers found what they were looking for, because I am certain they did not find it here.

In other news, I am pleased to report that the dead squirrel count, for now, still rests at two. I remain suspicious, however, as does my neighbor, who is just as baffled as I am why two squirrels would go belly-up within a ten-foot radius of one another in the same month. His first theory was that some plant in his yard might be poisoning them. This is not the first time he's proven to be a more rational thinker than I am, because my first theory was that my yard is, for some reason, the squirrel population's answer to Topper's House. Poor, down-on-their luck squirrels are coming from all corners of the neighborhood just to off themselves in my yard. Why? I cannot say. But in lieu of my sprinkling squirrel-sized portions of Prozac in the vicinity, I do hope they find an alternate suicide spot soon.

I realize this is an unlikely explanation, of course, but it is no more absurd than the one I came up with the following day. Looking out my kitchen window, I noticed that the rabbit who lives in my yard was eyeing a squirrel with more focused malevolence than seemed normal or warranted, and I decided perhaps Thumper (as the elderly woman next door calls him) was to blame for the squirrel carnage. It's probably ridiculous to theorize that a descendant of the Killer Rabbit of Caerbannog might be living in my backyard, but that explanation would help me feel a bit less guilty about occasionally wanting to pour cement into the two large holes he's dug in my lawn.

Next up, more about my yard. Or rather, the things growing in and near it. (Wait! Where are you going?? I need your help here!) Do you remember how excited I was when I saw little green balls of promise pop up on the tomato plants I bought? I should have known it would not be that easy. Given that nearly every plant that's ever been entrusted to me has at least half-withered under my care, it should have been obvious that my optimism about those tomatoes was entirely premature. Look at my sad tomato plants now! The leaves at the bottom keep turning yellow! The leaves at the top have all but disappeared! People, what has happened to my tomato-related hopes and dreams?!

I have asked my friend Google what causes yellowing of tomato plant leaves, and shockingly, Google was of exactly zero help. Yellow leaves could mean that I am overwatering or that I am underwatering. They could be a sign that the soil doesn't have enough nitrogen, or enough calcium, or that my poor plants have fallen to some insect or disease.

Surely several of you know more about gardening than I do. Tell me, how do I know which is to blame?!? With all of those options, I have no clue how to troubleshoot. I feel like Rick Moranis in Little Shop of Horrors, pleading in song for sickly little Audrey 2 to grow. (Come on, you remember that one: "I've tried you in levels of moisture from desert to mud! I've given you grow-lights and mineral supplements; what do you want from me, blood?!?") I do want results from these tomato plants, but at what price? I draw the line at opening a vein for them.

Of course, with that thought, it suddenly occurs to me that my tomato plants are actually rather close to where the last squirrel was attacked. Maybe these tomato plants ARE blood thirsty. That would solve two mysteries in one! My sometimes flimsy grasp on reality hasn't failed me entirely, however. So who has a more likely explanation for me?

And finally, on a happier, more pleasant note, I am a winner! A few weeks ago, I entered a contest that my favorite liquor store held on their Facebook page. Their fans were to each leave a comment saying what they love about the store, and there would later be a drawing to award someone a free case of Chardonnay. This afternoon, I received an email from the store. Hurrah; I WON! Whee! Ideally, the prize would be a case of Folie à Deux Menage a Trois Red rather than Finnegan's Lake Chardonnay, but winners can't be choosers, after all. (Wait. That's not how the saying goes...) So I will have to have a Chardonnay party. Or, perhaps, all of my friends will be getting Chardonnay for Christmas. Or, you know, I could just accept that it is summer and be a more frequent friend to whites. In any case, there is a lesson here: lead with your strengths and stick with what you know. My gardening attempts = epic fail. With liquor (and Facebook), I win!

And I thought the last one would have made a good imaginary "How we met" story...

2009-07-10T20:18:00.004-05:00

People, I have a situation. It's not a pretty one. I am typing at the moment from a chair in my front yard, not because I enjoy putting myself on display for my neighborhood, all, "Hey, look at me! I am a single woman with nothing better to do on a Friday night than sit outside with a glass of wine and a laptop!" but because I am too horrified to tuck myself away unnoticed in my backyard.

It seems having a squirrel give up the ghost in my backyard wasn't a one-time thing. There must be some sort of anti-squirrel predator or force field in the area between my neighbor's fence and my back walkway, because another dead squirrel is now lying only about five feet away from where the previous one went belly up. This one is on my property, so I don't feel particularly right asking my neighbor to remove it for me. Unfortunately, it's also much more vile than the previous one. Suddenly I'm not sure why I was so terrified to deal with that first squirrel, because I realize now that I would have rather touched that one with my bare hands than scoop the scattered remains of this one up even with a ten-foot-long shovel. I'm really trying to spare you the graphic details. I'm failing, so I'd better just move on.

And oh, look at that. I left my post for five minutes to duck back in my house, and now there is a bug in my wine glass. Fantastic. Bugs in my wine, crows circling overhead, flies swarming in on a revolting target a mere 30 feet away... Perhaps outdoor blogging isn't as appealing as I thought it might be. Think I'll move this party back inside after all.

So then. Focusing on more pleasant thoughts. Last night Josh Ritter was in town, so Carrie and I went to the Varsity Theater to see one of our favorite (Carrie went so far as to say "the original") Boy Meets Guitar. Our pal Lisa was supposed to join us, but unfortunately she had a doctor's appointment earlier in the day that unexpectedly ended with a staple being deliberately put in her head (ouch), and I can't particularly blame her for not feeling up to a concert night after that. (Look at me; I have finally veered away from dead rodents and now I am talking about surgical staples. Aren't you glad you clicked this link in your feed reader today?)

ANYWAY, as usual, Josh did not disappoint. I've already told this story once, but it was two years ago, so allow me to tell you again what's so very special about this boy. The first time I saw him, it was amid a crowd of fewer than 40 people, many of whom had probably wandered into the club having no idea who they were going to see, taking the chance that their $5 cover charge would not be a bust. Lisa and I were there on Carrie's recommendation. She was living in Chicago at the time, and she emailed us to say that a dude worth seeing was coming to our town, and we should go to his show. So we went, and we liked what we heard, and after the show, Josh milled about selling CDs and handing out promotional postcards, so we talked to him for a bit. Despite the small crowd, Josh was thrilled that we were there. "Thank you SO MUCH for coming!" he gushed. "How did you hear about the show?" When we told him our friend in Chicago had recommended it, he wanted to sign a postcard for her. But he didn't just sign it; he thanked her for sending us, and he wrote, "Stefanie is gorgeous, and Lisa is the belle of the ball!" We were both smitten. "I've never been the belle of the ball before!" Lisa said. The boy was just a young pup at the time, but he knew how to charm the ladies.

Since then, I've seen Josh nearly every time he's come to town, and each time, the crowd is larger and more dedicated. He's now successful enough that there are Josh Ritter tribute bands (in Ireland, apparently), but he's still just as grateful someone's there to listen. That wide-eyed enthusiasm hasn't faded; the grin on his face has only grown wider. I suppose it's possible that underneath that stage presence, he is an insufferable diva, a volatile force I would never want to know in person, but I don't want to believe that is the case. As far as I am concerned, he is a nice boy from Idaho who says "Please" and "Thank you," who, despite his success, is still sort of awe-struck that people will actually pay money to come and hear him play, to see him do what presumably he loves best.

It's hard to watch him and not develop a bit of a crush, and Carrie and I are certainly not immune. Last night's show was at the same venue where I met the MPR reporter as a discussion panelist, so Carrie turned to me mid-set and said, "I think you should make a habit of picking up anyone you see on the stage at the Varsity."

It's a compelling suggestion, but somehow I think asking Josh Ritter out for a drink via email might be even less successful than asking an MPR reporter out turned out to be. Of course, I may not actually have to send such an email, as this is the information age, and I have had a blog and a Sitemeter account long enough to know that even on the smallest and least notable of web sites, any words you type about a celebrity do not go unnoticed. No, thanks to Google Alerts and Technorati, Josh Ritter's publicist, or perhaps even Josh Ritter himself, will likely read this within a few short days of my clicking that "Publish Post" button. I sure am glad I talked about inside-out squirrels and head staples in the same post as the lyrical genius of young Mr. Ritter. (Message to Josh: Hi there! Call me!) Sigh.

A meme in two parts, Part the Second

2009-07-08T21:56:00.002-05:00

So hey. Remember this? I never did actually finish that, did I? Does anyone actually care that I didn't finish it? Don't answer that. The old adage says "Better late than never," but in this case, I'm pretty sure "never" would have been just as acceptable as "late." Regardless, here we go!

If you could have a house totally paid for, fully furnished, anywhere in the world, where would you like it to be?
See, this is tough, because I'm more a "see lots of different places" kind of girl than a "vacation in the same place every year" one. Can I get a movable house? Yes! An RV! Can't you see me in a thoroughly obnoxious, tripped-out Winnebago that will take me any place where crossing an ocean is not required? I'd like a driver along with this, however, please. I'm not parallel parking that thing.

If you could go anywhere in the world for the next hour, where would you go?
For only an hour? How about Africa? I would love to see Africa first hand, but I am also not a fan of being hot and dusty and possibly contracting malaria. An hour sounds about right, I think.

What language do you want to learn?
I keep saying I want to take a French class, if for no other reason than to help me pronounce things on menus correctly. I know myself well enough to know I'd likely not have the stick-to-it-iveness to actually become fluent, however. So now I'm just thinking about Ricky's mom in Better Off Dead, and I want to answer, "The language of loooooove." (Lord knows I'm not fluent in that yet, either.)

What is your favorite color?
For what? Accessories? Red. Shirts? Black. Jeans? Very dark blue. Camping gear? Green. (Not really, but I've noticed that my decades-old duffel bag, my fold-up captain's chair, and my sleeping bag are all green, and I have no explanation for that.) Shall I go on? No, I'll stop now. Let's go with red, I guess.

What is your favorite piece of clothing in your wardrobe?
I have said more than once that I might marry my blue yoga pants, so that seems the best answer, I suppose (even if I never actually wear them outside of my house). I really should have bought three pairs of those when I found them. The day they become too threadbare to warrant keeping, I may have to have a memorial service to say farewell.

What is your dream job?
Here is where I prove just what a giant nerd I am, because when I think about places where it would be fun and exciting to work, I always think of Merriam-Webster and the Oxford English Dictionary. Yes, yes, I realize it is probably not all fun and word games and lively discussions about vocabulary and usage, even at the place where dictionaries live and grow, but I want to believe a dictionary company is a magical place anyway, much like how as a kid, I believed that the people who worked in the toy store had the best job ever because obviously they got to play with all the toys. In truth, I have no idea what my dream job is, and I think it's because my dream job is probably something I don't even know is a job. It probably won't show up in any "What Color is Your Parachute"-type quiz.

What is your favorite magazine?
I don't have one, because I almost never read them. If I want to read in bits and pieces, I have the Internet. If I want to read for real, I grab a book. If I don't want to read at all, I turn on the TV. Pretty much the only time I read magazines is on trips, and I realized a few years ago that I don't leave town often enough to warrant letting several issues of a subscription pile up in between trips. This means that when I'm at my parents' house over holiday weekends, I'm forced to read the Us Weeklys that my sister brings along with her as I have no mindless reading material of my own, but that's fine, really. Someone has to witness the fact that stars really are just like us!

If you had £100 now, what would you spend it on?
This is where it becomes obvious that this meme came to us from across the pond, something you might not have suspected earlier given that I took the liberty of changing all instances of "favourite" to "favorite" on my own. According to Monkey, 100 pounds is currently $163 US, which I do have, and will probably spend either on necessary things that cost too much or things I shouldn't buy but want anyway. My favorite liquor store is having their summer sale, and I am contemplating purchasing a full case of my favorite wine for the first time ever. Would buying a case of wine make me a grown-up or a drunkard? Also, would that fall into the "necessary things that cost too much" category or the "things I shouldn't buy but want anyway" one? I had no idea $163 could be so stressful. I have money issues, obviously.

Describe your personal style.
Most of the things in my closet will never go out of style, because they were never actually in style to begin with. I wear a lot of basics. Solid colors. Simple cuts. I prefer to think of this approach as "classic" rather than "fashion challenged," but I'm not the one to judge that, I suppose.

What are you going to do after this?
Go to bed. On time, maybe? How many more questions are there here? Ack. Maybe not.

What are your favorite films?
Do you remember that episode of Friends where Chandler and Joey faced off against Rachel and Monica in a "who knows who best?" trivia game? One question was, "Rachel claims her favorite movie is this." (Answer: Dangerous Liaisons) The next question was, "Her actual favorite movie is..." (Answer: Weekend at Bernie's) I sort of think everyone has a dual answer like that. On the record, I might say The Philadelphia Story or The Sound of Music. Off the record, I totally love Never Been Kissed.

What's your favorite fruit?
OK, I should really know this, but are avocados a vegetable or a fruit? If they're a fruit, then I'll say avocados. If they're a vegetable, then I'll say nectarines, even though I hardly ever buy them because I'm always missing the seemingly only three-hour window during which they're ripe.

What inspires you?
Really, meme? You're going to make me be introspective and thoughtful when you just asked me about fruit and movies? I don't think so. Sorry.

Do you collect anything?
See, now this is just getting tedious. I collect magnets, from every city I visit. My fridge is getting mighty crowded.

Your favorite animal?
I think I might just start deleting questions I don't feel like answering. Like this one, for instance.

What are you currently reading?
I'm about 100 pages into Cloud Atlas, which I would have given up on nearly immediately if not for Nancy Pearl's Rule of 50 prodding me to stick it out a bit longer. (Also, the fact that David Sedaris once recommended this book enthusiastically at a reading I attended, and I don't want to believe David Sedaris could be wrong.) It's finally getting a bit better, but if I ever meet David Mitchell, I will be sure to ask him why he took what might actually be a brilliant book (verdict uncertain at this point) and stuck a dreadfully tedious 40-some page story at the very start of it.

Go to your book shelf, take down the first book with a red spine you see, turn to page 26 and type out the first line:
I am too lazy to do this, so I am going to decide that the orange spine on the copy of The Thorn Birds that has been sitting on my coffee table since my friend Jenny lent it to me a few weeks ago is close enough. In that case, "sails. When the longboat washed ashore on the wild." Fascinating, no? I'm sure if I'd only taken the time to get up and find an actually red spine, the result would have been far more riveting.

By what criteria do you judge a person?
I'm sure all of you assume I am going to say "their grammar," so I might as well say "their grammar." I live to be predictable, obviously.

What skill would you like to acquire immediately?
The skill to get myself to shut down my computer and get to bed at a reasonable hour on every week night? That's not exactly a skill, is it? Still, best work on that.

More proof that I'm probably just well overdue for a proper VACATION.

2009-07-05T21:36:00.006-05:00

Well, I don't know about you, but I thoroughly enjoy this long weekend thing, and I would very much like another, please. In fact, it occurs to me that we may just have found the issue that would get me to cross party lines in the next election. Promise me a standard four-day work week, and you have my vote, madam or sir. (I do realize that this is an unlikely platform, but a girl can dream, can't she?)

Speaking of votes, I finally found out this week how one of the ones I cast eight months ago panned out. I'm pretty sure that when votes were counted by hand and delivered to the precinct reporting place via Pony Express, the results still came in earlier than this, but hooray for democracy however it plays out, I suppose. The important thing is I have two senators again. I would hope this means Amy Klobuchar could take a well-earned day off, but when she chatted with Garrison Keillor on the stage of the Prairie Home Companion 35th anniversary show yesterday afternoon, she explained that it was actually her fifth public appearance of the day. Fifth. As if I didn't have enough reasons already why a life in politics is not the life for me, Senator Klobuchar has given me one more. At noon on this particular Independence Day, I was sitting in a townie bar with three excellent friends, enjoying cheap drinks and free chocolate peanut butter cake (courtesy of the star-spangled bartender who baked it herself in honor of the day's events), while we waited in air-conditioned comfort for the time when the ~~Oklahoma~~ Avon, MN land rush would allow us to claim our spots in the city park for the afternoon's free show. At that same time, my sole senator was marching in one of four parades, waving and kissing babies and sweating in the sun, her criss-crossing journey across the state likely having begun before I even got out of bed that lovely Saturday. Yes, my life is a humble, low profile one with occasional annoyances of the routine sort, but I'll take that over terminally lost summer holidays any day, thanks.

In addition to yesterday's public radio-related day trip, my social calendar for the weekend also included a screening of Food Matters in the parking lot of a local performing arts space and a 35-mile bike ride along Minneapolis's Grand Rounds (interspersed with stops for fresh tilapia tacos and ice cream, of course). Those 35 miles were hard fought, I should mention. A quick tip: if you have not gotten on a bike in over a year, it is maybe not the best idea for your first ride of the season to be a rather long one, accompanied by three friends who either bike to work nearly every day, attend spinning class routinely, or are, as far as you can tell, wired not unlike a tiny, fast-paced, never-tiring robot. Word to the wise, as it were. I'd best get in some more practice miles if I plan to bike with those particular friends any time again soon. Meanwhile, I can finally now sit in one place for more than a half hour and then arise again without any piercing pain in every muscle below my pelvis, so I am thankful for that, anyway.

Aside from the unexpected effort of that bike ride, however, my weekend involved no manual labor whatsoever. (That is, unless you count a few fairly painless loads of laundry and some dishes as well.) The important thing is I did no yard work, digging, or planting, and tackled no other projects or errands either. (I have not even driven my car since Thursday. Let's hope it still starts when I attempt to leave for work tomorrow.) Today was a lovely, largely leisurely day, and it pains me more than a bit to set my 6:30 alarm for tomorrow morning.

And that's about all I've got at the moment. I'm starting to think I should go on a date again one of these days, if for no other reason than the material. I rather enjoy having my evenings taken only by things I want to take them, however. Perhaps I should just fabricate a date story instead? Hmmm.

Three quick things

2009-07-02T09:32:00.003-05:00

I finally got my car's air conditioner fixed... and immediately thereafter, the temperature dropped and has stayed below 72 degrees since. To everyone in the Twin Cities who was tired of that heat wave, you're welcome.
I got a hundred bucks knocked off that AC repair bill pretty much just by asking if they could do better than their seemingly unreasonable labor rate. Who knew I was a master negotiator? Not me! I already bragged about this on Facebook, but I am proud enough that I feel the need to mention it again anyway.

And finally,
I have a post up at Allie's Answers today. You should go read it.

That is all. Carry on. Happy long weekend, if you've got one coming. (My condolences to you if you don't.)

In which I finally show you what I've been babbling about for the past month, and then babble about it some more

2009-06-28T20:34:00.005-05:00

Is it really Sunday night again already? Well crap; how did that happen? I very much enjoyed my long weekend last week; do I really have to wait until next week for another? I do? Damn. Life, she's a cruel and unfair beast sometimes, no?

The good news is that after this weekend, I will no longer be sweating away my Saturdays and Sundays on my yard beautification project. At least, not anymore this year, anyway. My backyard still lacks any welcoming character whatsoever, and my front yard could still use some shade-loving plants in the thus-far neglected areas, but people, I am TIRED of digging and clearing and planting and such, so I have decided that what I've done in the past month and a half is ENOUGH for now.

So then. What have I done? Well, since you asked...

This is what the area in front of my house looked like previously... three sad, random, anemic bushes with nothing but weeds and sparse, half-dead grass in between.

And here is that same area, bushes gone, grass cleared, area edged and newly planted.

Of course, the idea is that those tiny lumps below my window will grow into full-sized shrubs, and the flowers and other foliage in front of them will also expand to nestle up alongside them. These things take time, but here's hoping that time actually improves this landscape rather than diminishes it. The last time I planted a fraction of a paycheck's worth of perennials, only half of them came back the following year. Do you have any advice to help me ensure that these plants don't also vanish underground over the winter or die a similarly untimely death? No, seriously. There are probably tricks and techniques to this sort of thing, right? And yet, the extent of my plant-care knowledge is summed up in that classic Sesame Street clip: Duh, man, plants need water. Beyond that, it's a mystery to me. Is there something else I should be doing, other than watering? Is there a pagan ritual or plant-dance I should know about? I'm willing to try almost anything, so please do fill me in.

While I was already up to my elbows in dirt, I figured I'd do some maintenance on the perennials along the side of my house as well. I dug up the grass and weeds in this area to create this bed a few years ago, but obviously I had no idea what I was doing, because as I said, half of what I planted did not come back, and the other half was not actually organized particularly well. Either the purple salvia I planted has done exceedingly, unexpectedly, mutantly well, or, more likely, I didn't consult the "Estimated height" line on the information card when I bought it, because it had grown far higher than the day lilies I planted behind it, and the whole area was a bit ridiculous-looking, actually. So I spent my vacation day last week moving the day lilies to the front and spent yesterday afternoon planting pink coneflowers in their place. Cross your fingers that those coneflowers actually bloom (and also come back next year), will you? Or, again, fill me in on some trick or ritual, because I'd really rather not revisit this same perennial bed again next year.

While I'm pretending this is an HGTV blog, let's talk about my tomato plants, shall we? I may not have the greenest of thumbs, but I maintain high hopes for these. Here they are huddled up alongside my grill and hose reel, because I lack a proper patio to place them on (and one digging-up-my-yard project was quite enough for one year)...

Yesterday, when I went out to water them, I wondered just when I might start to see something that looks like a tomato on any of the stems, so I crouched down to take a closer look, and lo! Tiny tomatoes! It's like magic! They are a long way off from being edible, of course, but I consider those little green balls tiny hopes and promises anyway.

And let's see. What else did I do with my weekend? Well, Friday night I attended another lovely soiree at my good friend Carrie's place, where both the food and the company were fantastic and yet I neglected to take any pictures to serve as memories or proof.

Last night I decided I needed a evening off, so I made myself a frozen pizza and opened a bottle of wine and watched He's Just Not That into You on DVD. And OK, can I make a confession? I fully realize it was a purportedly terrible movie based on a terrible book. I am well aware that it received almost universally dismal reviews. But you know what? I didn't hate it. In fact, up until the last 15 minutes, I maybe even liked it. I can't say I related to any of the characters specifically (Lord help me, I hope I didn't relate to any of the characters specifically!), but I am wearied enough of dating that I suppose I related to the topics generally, and it was actually refreshing to see a movie that attempted to crush the myths and idealism we single girls have been fed for so long, rather than perpetuating them. That is, until the final 15 minutes, when (sorry; spoiler alert) two of the characters actually get exactly what they want, what they've been told the entire movie they cannot expect, which basically wrapped their stories up into a neat little Hollywood bow just like every other romantic comedy that came before. What's worse is I actually cried at one point near the end, and kept it up almost all the way through to when the credits rolled. Part of me is strangely grateful for the reaction, because I feel so jaded these days that I worry perhaps I'm now made of stone, but even so, I'd like to blame the tears on, I don't know, hormones? Wine? Heat exhaustion? Please do take your pick.

And that's about all that's on my mind lately. I've got a busy week ahead, busy with both fun things (the first trip of the season to the Pizza Farm, as well as a movie screening a friend is hosting in an area parking lot) and also routine, have-to-be-done things (my first haircut since February and another appointment to sit in the Saturn service center lounge for a couple of hours while they finally repair my A/C problem). So while usually I write a Sunday or Monday night post with earnest but ultimately false intentions that I will write another one or two before the week is out, this time I am fairly certain I won't log in again before the holiday weekend, so I wish you a fun and happy one, whatever you have planned.

I've also seen all three High School Musicals. What does THAT say about me?

2009-06-22T20:54:00.005-05:00

It's not that I dislike my job, but more often than not I find myself awfully annoyed by how much work gets in the way of the rest of my life. You know? I'm a busy girl! I've got a yard to pretty up! Friends to see! Concerts to attend! Books to read! A blog to ignore! Not to mention a couch that's almost losing its indentation of my ass, such has been the lack of time I've frittered away on it of late. Don't get me wrong; I'm aware that it's scary out there right now, and I'm thankful to have a job to inconvenience me. But surely I'm not the only gainfully employed one who thinks, every Sunday night, "Can't I please have one more day of weekend? Please?"

There's a scene in the not-very-good film Kate & Leopold in which Meg Ryan is blissfully entwined with Hugh Jackman on her patio. It's a Saturday night, and she asks what time it is, and when he says it's after midnight, she groans, "Ugh. It's Sunday." "But you don't work on Sunday," Hugh says, pointing out that she still has one more day of weekend left. "Yes, but Sunday is the day before the day I work," she replies, "so it gets poisoned."

I can totally relate. Lately I find myself prematurely depressed about the end of the weekend on Friday already. I know realistically that if I didn't have someplace to go every week day, I'd eventually feel directionless and bored. And yet, given the means, I'm quite convinced I could be rather content as a lady of leisure for a rather long time, in fact.

With that in mind, I gave myself a random vacation day today, and I have to say, the pressure to do something notable with vacation days is entirely overrated. I am a big proponent of the random vacation day, and I refuse to chastise myself for not making more of it. After a busy weekend, I was exhausted last night, meaning I got to bed at a reasonable hour and woke up just in time for Ellen. After that, I got sucked into an episode and a half of today's pre-season-premiere marathon of The Secret Life of the American Teenager, which I probably would have watched the whole damn day had Grace not spouted yet another 7th Heaven-esque line about the power of prayer in deciding whether or not to have premarital underaged sex, at which point I remembered just how depressing it is to see Molly Ringwald and Josie Bissett as the parents of TV teenagers on a poorly written show that is simultaneously scandalous and annoyingly wholesome and I decided it really was time to get myself outside to transplant some day lilies.

Can I just say that, while taking a vacation day to do the things you didn't quite get to over the weekend is a fine idea, doing those things when it's nearly 90 degrees outside is maybe not? I realize it is still only June, and it's been, for the most part, a blessedly cool June thus far. But after the past few days, I can confidently say I am done with abysmally hot weather for this year. Should I decide to visit a beach or a water park this summer, I would appreciate an 85+ degree day that day. Until that point, however, pressing the "Hold" button somewhere in the low 70s would be A-OK by me.

So let's see. What else did I do with my impromptu three-day weekend (other than sweat buckets in my perennial beds, that is)? Well, I spent a day on the lawn of The Walker taking in the first big outdoor concert event of the summer. Although I am terrible at estimating the number of anything in large masses, I suspect there were at least 8,000 people at that event, and yet, shockingly, I did not see even ONE past date there. I did go to the event with two men I at one point dated, but that hardly counts as an unexpected run-in, obviously. One of those men was disappointed I didn't have any awkward run-ins. "I wanted to see one o' yer fellas!" he kept saying, in an amusingly uncharacteristic old man redneck tone. I'm sure more than one o' "my fellas" was there somewhere, but for once, I managed not to cross paths with them.

Also, I changed the battery in my trusty(ish) old Saturn (with the help of two boys, admittedly). And just as I was sighing with relief that my car's failure Friday night was just as simple a fix as the battery, the "Service Engine Soon" light came on. I'm still hoping it's just a glitch as it has been the last few times that light appeared and it'll shut off again midway through my commute tomorrow. Given that the practical things in my life have a way of punishing me when I splurge or spend frivolously, however, I remain more than a bit wary. You see, Friday night I went into Target for shower gel, blush, and toothpaste, and I came out with those items plus $109 worth of skirts, capris, and tops. The last time I spontaneously spent over a hundred dollars on clothing, my water heater died the next day. Coincidence? Perhaps. But I'm still terrified to buy anything else nonessential any time soon.

In today's requisite Facebook news, I would like to report that Facebook now thinks I should be friends with The Neighborhood Giant, who I have never searched for on the site and who is not in my address book, proving yet again that Facebook knows more about me than it should and perhaps the conspiracy theorists are right and CIA-type intelligence is behind this presumably harmless social networking diversion after all.

And finally, apropos of nothing and offered only as your interesting bit of trivia for the day, did the rest of you NPR nerds know that Peter Sagal (he of Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me fame) is also a playright? And that his one big chance at a movie deal was for a film he wanted to write about an American girl in Cuba in the 1950s and the effect of the political unrest on her life there? It was a movie that got shelved for years, until, in true Hollywood form, it was reworked and retooled without any input from its original writer, and was eventually released as Dirty Dancing 2: Havana Nights.

Selfishly, what is most disturbing to me about this story is not that Peter Sagal missed his big break and had his hard work turned into one of the most unnecessary and forgettable movie sequels ever made. No, it is that, as Peter relayed the opening portions of this story to Ira Glass on this week's This American Life, I immediately said, "That sounds like Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights." He told a little more of the story, and I said, "That's TOTALLY Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights!" And when he he paused for effect before stating the title under which the film was eventually released, I beat him to the answer by crying out, yet again, "Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights!"

I have a friend who has implied, more than once, that I am apparently unrelatably high-brow. It's a vision of me that I've always found baffling, and as such, I've disputed it repeatedly. With my embarrassing knowledge of this particular film, I think I can solidly rest my case finally.

When I ran spell check on this, Blogger highlighted all instances of "Facebook," and I'm a little shocked how much yellow there was to display.

2009-06-15T21:48:00.006-05:00

I've got a meme to finish, and I should probably do that. I should probably do a lot of things, but as it turns out, I'm much better at saying I should probably do things than I am at actually doing them. Perhaps it's best to embrace this foot-dragging part of my personality already and simply abandon even my smallest and least significant goals. Or perhaps I am just tired (SO TIRED), and low expectations and lethargy are all I've the energy for.

I'm not making any sense, am I? I should probably shut the lid on the laptop and go to bed early, but like I told you: better at saying I should probably do things than I am at actually doing them. Must work on this.

My weekend was exhausting, in the dirty, sweaty, manual labor way rather than the fun but overwhelming social butterfly way. The good news is, I am finally almost (ALMOST!) done with the landscaping project that six weeks ago I thought might take me two weekends. (Ha! I slay me. Obviously I will never learn.) The bad news is, a half a tube or so of Ben-Gay seems like a good idea right now, and yet I don't even want to bother because I wouldn't know where best to slather it. People, my everything hurts. Would a bath in Ben-Gay be unwise?

Incidentally, the other good news about my being almost (ALMOST!) done with this project is that when I am done I will finally stop talking about it. You're welcome in advance, as I'm well aware it is interesting to no one but me. Come to think of it, however, that is not unlike probably a solid 75% of what I write about, so scratch that pseudo-apology; obviously it is worthless.

Moving on. I said last week that I had Facebook stories to share. I am going to stop apologizing for telling Facebook stories as well, as I have realized that whether we like it and admit it or not, Facebook has become so integrated into our lives that it comes up as casually and unintentionally as stories about work or family. I rarely talk about work or my family, so clearly Facebook is simply filling some conversational void. (I'm not proud.) Tonight I had dinner with a friend and I realized, in the middle of a Facebook story, that the people at the next table were talking about Facebook as well. So see? It is NOT JUST ME! Technically, however, none of us were actually talking about Facebook. We were each telling a story in which Facebook was simply the venue. Facebook is a conduit for our daily lives, just like any other place (real or virtual) is. This is an angle that actually hadn't occurred to me before, and I'm sort of working it out as I type, and yet suddenly it makes me feel a whole lot better about the number of comments I make or stories I tell in which the word "Facebook" bears mention. Facebook is just the venue. If it helps, we could say two out of three of these tales took place at the mall.

ANYWAY...

Facebook story the first: Last week, I received a friend request that I sat on for a full three days before begrudgingly clicking "Accept." It was from a former classmate who I have NO good memories of. None. Dude was a smart allecky punk on his good days and an absolute ass on his bad ones. In the eleven years that I knew him, his wiseass remarks weren't directed at me specifically often enough that he's scarred me in any permanent way, though on the rare occasions that I think of him, the first memories that come to mind are ones I did hate him for at the time. The day he pushed me down on the playground and made me tear a hole in the brand new corduroys I'd gotten for Christmas. (They were turquoise with a gray pinstripe checkered pattern, and they were fabulous. It was 1985. Trust me.) The day he stole my stocking cap, and I was too foolish to lie and tell my mother I lost it, which meant she called his mother to complain about him, and I got labeled a tattle tale for a week. Oh, and my personal favorite: the day he gave me the worst nickname I've ever acquired, a nickname I should really have a sense of humor about by now and yet still refuse to share with even my closest friends.

So yeah. Good times. Great guy. I can totally see why he friended me, no?

I almost didn't click that Confirm button. I almost sent him a note to say, "Dude, we were never friends, and I have NO good memories of you. The fact that we went to the same school is not reason enough to link to me." But I didn't. Because really, what is the big deal? The path of least resistance comes to mind. I don't care if he sees anything on my profile, and I don't expect any further direct contact from him to me. I will forget he is there just as I have half the other people I'm linked to, and life will be no different henceforth. But before I commenced the forgetting, obviously I looked at his profile.

During the eleven years of our childhood in which I knew this guy, he made at least two nuns cry. He also inspired one of our CCD teachers to quit her volunteer post, so miserable was the experience for her. And yet, today, the "Religious Views" line on his profile says, "Born-again Christian Believer." He lists the Bible (author: God) among his favorite books. I read his profile and my jaw dropped, and I said (out loud, to the computer screen), "Who ARE you?!?"

So maybe 17 years does make a big difference. Maybe he has changed a bit. Maybe he actually is less of a giant ass by now and would be shocked to learn I remember him as such. Then again, he describes his political views as "Conservative, in the divisive, polarizing kind of way." So nope. Pretty sure I'd still hate that guy.

Do you see now why I pulled these stories out of that meme question deeming them too long to be part of that post? I promise the next two are shorter. That dude got me more worked up than I thought.

Facebook story the second: I told you last week that a new clip had been added to the montage reel of dates past. I did not tell you that I actually ran into that same date a second time a mere four days later. He was at that book club discussion I mentioned, and I wasn't particularly surprised to see him there, given that I saw his name on the list in the related Facebook group months ago now. Still. In a metro area of 3.5 million people? Two run-ins in a week? This is getting a little ridiculous.

More ridiculous, however? The day after that run-in, his face and name showed up in the "Suggestions" box on my Facebook home page. For those of you not yet sucked into this world, the "Suggestions" box highlights people you may know, who you might want to add as a friend. Generally they are people I went to school with, vague acquaintances, or strangers who happen to be friends of my friends. To my knowledge, NEVER has Facebook suggested I be friends with someone I have no linked friends in common with. Not ONLY did it suggest this guy, however, but Facebook also suggested a meMarmony match I emailed with briefly but never dated two years ago, a three-date guy who long time readers with steel trap memories might remember as Boomerang Mike, AND... drumroll please... the damn Traffic Engineer. Facebook should have NO reason whatsoever to know that I know these men. Facebook is messing with me.

It is now entirely past my bed time, and this post has run entirely longer than I intended, but I promise this last one will be quick.

Facebook story the third (and final... for now): I friended my neighbor recently. You know... my super helpful neighbor? The one I have mentioned many times but am too lazy to find a related post to link to? He is the neighbor who snowblows my driveway after blizzards. The one who comes over to start my lawn mower for me when he hears me swearing at it. And the one who fixed the broken shovel that I abandoned in my yard. (OK, that one was recent enough to quickly find the appropriate link.)

I debated the necessity of friending him, but it has already come in handy! No longer do I have to hope he just happens to be in his yard when I need help with something! No! I can pester him directly! Hurrah! I share with you our first Facebook messaging exchange...

From: Stefanie
To: Nice neighbor
Subject: I promise I will not routinely use Facebook for requests such as this.

Hi. OK, I *should* be brave enough to take care of this myself, but I am not. You are far less squeamish than I am, given that I'm pretty sure you hunt and fish and therefore presumably touch dead animals on a regular basis. A squirrel has met his final demise on the grass directly next to your fence and retaining wall. Is there any chance you might be so good as to remove it before other animals start gnawing at its sad, stiff little carcass? If so, that would be awesome.

Poor little guy. Also, ew.

Within 15 minutes, I had this reply...

From: Nice neighbor
To: Stefanie
Subject: RE: I promise I will not routinely use Facebook for requests such as this.

Thanks for the notice. As we speak, it is now boiling in a pot. BTW - Did you want to come over for dinner? ; )

I declined, of course, and I also resisted the urge to invite his poor wife over to my house for dinner instead (only in part because that particular night I happened to be having Ramen noodles, and she may or may not have thought that any better an option than boiled squirrel). But the important part? Dead squirrel gone! Fifteen minutes after I noticed him there! And I didn't have to touch his possibly rabies-infested body myself. Whoo hoo.

Frankly, if that doesn't convince you that Facebook is immeasurably useful, I don't know what will.

A meme in two parts, Part 1

2009-06-11T21:48:00.008-05:00

So. Yeah. It seems I've got nothing. Those who can, do. Those who can't, steal. Actually, lifting a meme from Monkey is hardly stealing. The point of a meme is to repeat it. (Seriously, it is pretty much the definition.) But calling it stealing makes me feel much edgier than I actually am, and considering the riskiest thing I have done this week was to eat salad dressing that expired 16 months ago, I have to take my rebel victories where I can.

So then. A meme. Here we go.

What is your current obsession?
The not-very-interesting and yet oft-talked-about Big Dig in my front yard. Actually, that is a lie. If I were truly obsessed with that landscaping project, I would be taking the initiative to research plants and plans myself, rather than simply slogging through the manual labor and relying on my pal Angela to do the design work and idea-ing. So I guess that leaves me with Facebook? I would hardly call that an obsession, however, as such a treasure trove of absurdity fully warrants frequent mention! Consider the most recent evidence...

OK, here is where I was going to tell you three brief Facebook stories. True to my usual form, however, these brief stories ballooned into a post in and of themself, so I shall table those for another day. Or possibly not post them at all. Perhaps my current obsession is simply blogging about Facebook, as it seems to come up in far more posts than I intend or would like. Maybe my current obsession is worrying about which things I've blogged about too often, as recently I scanned some recent entries and realized I had mentioned the same friend in somewhere around five out of seven consecutive posts, and I worried that either A) the Internet would think I have only one friend, or B) all of the other friends who I DO HAVE (really!) would grow jealous that they are not mentioned as often. Does generally absurdity and overanalysis count as an obsession? Maybe I should just move on to the next question...

What is your weirdest obsession?
I played a card game with my friends' daughter on that recent camping trip, and it reminded me that I'm a little bit obsessive about a neat and tidy discard pile. I can't be the only one who compulsively straightens the cards every time someone carelessly tosses a card haphazardly askew atop the deck, though, right? And besides that, I rarely play cards, so if that is a bizarre obsession, it's not one that comes up too often. So instead, I guess I'll go with my need to look under my bed every night before I can climb into it.

I don't even know what I'm looking for; if someone were hiding under my bed, the half-credit self defense class I took in college surely didn't equip me physically or emotionally to deal with it. Besides that, there are plenty of other nooks and crannies in my house where a potential intruder might hide until I'm asleep, and I don't check all of those... I'll admit that I used to, in my old apartment, however. It was like a checklist I had to complete each night when I got home. When I moved into this house, I quickly decided it was simply too time-consuming to search my entire home for imaginary burglars and rapists every single day. I must have kept the under-bed check as some sort of strange compromise. As a sidenote, if any of you ever do decide to break and enter at my place, I guess I've just told you where is and is not a good place to hide.

What are you wearing today?
What am I wearing, or what was I wearing? To work, I wore a navy blue, ruffle-sleeved t-shirt, one of my four pairs of identical Mossimo jeans, and the red Madden Girl platform wedges that continually infuriate me with their simultaneous shoddy workmanship and impossible cuteness. Damn you, Steve Madden; there is no reconciling the two!

That was several hours ago, however. By now, I have switched to a pair of striped pajama pants (source: Target, obviously) and the t-shirt that I proudly earned after downing ten* murky blue-green Delusions at The Grand Illusion in Eau Claire, a bar of which I have many fond memories but which according to my friend Google, still has no web page of its own. (What the heck, GI? Were you not informed that it is currently 2009, and the Internet, as it turns out, is NOT just a fad?)

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* NOT all in the same night. They implemented a handy coupon/ticket system wherein you collected a card each time you purchased said drink and finally, one happy day, you could walk in with your stack of ten turquoise cards and walk out with a t-shirt featuring a sunglass-wearing Uncle Sam and the tagline "We want YOU to be Deluded!" (Message on the back: "The few, the proud, the deluded.") Ah, college.
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What's for dinner?
I had myself a lovely salad of butter lettuce with chicken, raspberries, pecans, blue cheese, and the aforementioned 16-months-expired dressing. It was a raspberry Cabernet vinaigrette. I'm still alive. So far. If you don't hear from me again, kindly direct the emergency personnel to the condiment shelf in my fridge for the possible source of my demise.

What would you eat for your last meal?
I just misread this as "What DID you eat for your last meal" and I was all set to direct you right back to the lovely salad I just described (which might actually BE my last meal, if 16-months-expired dressing turns out to be something worth worrying about). Since that was NOT, in fact, what the question was asking, however, I will go with a fantastically carb-heavy, nutrient-light combination of mac & cheese, pizza, and mashed potatoes, followed by a brownie and a slice of chocolate chip cheesecake for dessert. And red wine, of course. Obviously red wine.

What's the last thing you bought?
The makings for the aforementioned raspberry and blue cheese salad, along with various other grocery items. Obviously I did not buy dressing, however. Also, I promise the expired dressing will not make an appearance in every remaining question in this post.

What are you listening to right now?
I was listening to The Current, but then they played a Laurie Anderson song that was far too distractingly annoying to peacefully serve as background music, and I had to complain loudly to my radio and then shut it off. Now I am listening to nothing but the taps on my keyboard and the clicking of the unusually noisy lamp timer that I rarely use and should really just unplug by now.

What do you think of the person who tagged you?
Well, she didn't actually tag me, but I think Monkey is smart and witty and delightful, and I long for the day that I manage to escape my family over a holiday weekend and enjoy a drink or three with the Rural Zorro instead. By my estimates based on her vague hints as to her whereabouts, the Monkey homestead is approximately an hour away from my parents' house, and given that there seems to be a blizzard or an ice storm every time I go home, this could be tricky to arrange. Is Christmas or Thanksgiving ever scheduled in August? No? Well, I guess we can always rely on global warming to facilitate this plan. (A bonus to catastrophic climate change! Drinks with Monkey! Hurrah!)

Oh MY but this is a long meme. Is anybody going to keep reading if I keep typing here? Besides that, wasn't I supposed to be in bed two hours ago already, after being out entirely too late for a Wednesday at the Bob Schneider show last night? The answers to those questions are "likely no" and "oof; YES," respectively. How about I split this here and give myself blog material on TWO days instead of just one? Sounds like a plan to me. To be continued, then...

In which I apparently do not know what bullets are for

2009-06-07T21:34:00.008-05:00

You know how every now and then, Stefanie Says unofficially becomes a dating blog? I currently have ZERO interest whatsoever in seeking out dates (I have sort of decided I should perhaps go on a bit of a dating sabbatical until the universe kindly decides to stop fucking with me), and yet, I'm reminded, at times like this, that when I am actively dating, at least I have stories to tell.

Realizing that the bulk of my writing lately has concerned nothing more notable than my baking endeavors, the giant bug in my basement, and the mutant rhubarb in my backyard, I tried to compile a list of things I could perhaps tell you about tonight. Here is what I came up with.

Wine on tap
Facebook - lied to my mother
Books & Bars sex book
Digging
64 degrees in house
Flickr freaks
[Name] (redacted)

Tell me: which (if any) of those would you like to hear more about? What's that? I can't hear you. Pity you're not in my living room right now to weigh in. I guess I will just have to tell you about ALL of them. Lucky you.

Wine on tap - For last weekend's camping trip, I decided to forgo the bulky, inconvenient glass bottles and bring a tasty and economical Black Box instead. For little more than the price of two bottles, I got four bottles' worth of wine, which I figured I would share with fellow campers and have little if any left over. As it turned out, my friend Amy had the same idea, and between her box of wine and the several bottles that other campers offered up on the picnic table at our camp site, I came home with my entire box minus only maybe a glass or three. I have often thought that boxed wine might be a good idea to keep on hand, that if I could pour just one glass from an air-tight vessel that stays fresh for a month or more, I could enjoy wine with dinner whenever the mood strikes, without being tempted to finish the whole bottle in a night or two to avoid waste. As it turns out, wine on tap is not the best idea after all. In fact, it makes it entirely too easy to say, "Hmm. A little wine might be nice right now. Oh look! I have some RIGHT HERE! I don't even have to open a new bottle!" And since the fill level is all neatly tucked away in a bag behind the cover of a cardboard box, I don't have a helpful visual aid to remind me when one glass has somehow become three. Note to self: Wine on tap = NOT such a brilliant plan after all, unless my brilliant plans also include becoming a full-fledged (rather than merely occasional, borderline) wino. (Secondary note: They do not.) Cue the "The more you know" jingle; that's one to grow on, folks.
Facebook - lied to my mother - My mother has been on Facebook for over two weeks now, and still her only friends are my two sisters and me, which only serves to prove my theory that she joined for no other reason than to ~~try to become closer to~~ spy on the three of us. Today is her birthday, so I called her to say hello, and in the course of conversation, she said, "What I don't understand is, why, when I look at [younger sister]'s page, can I see the things her friends posted and the things she's posted, too, but when I look at your page or [older sister]'s, I can see only things your friends posted?" There are several correct answers to this question. "Because I have cruelly blocked you from viewing my status updates and links because I don't want you to know too much about my life or to leave mom-ish comments on my page" is one. "Because you weren't supposed to be smart enough to figure out that you saw anything different on my page vs. anyone else's" is another. Instead, I just said, "I don't know; different settings?" and then quickly changed the subject. Yes, I lied to my mother. On her birthday, no less. I'm sure it's not the first nor the last time Facebook will make me do something I'm not entirely proud of. Let's just move on, shall we?
Books & Bars sex book - I have been meaning to check out the Twin Cities' most irreverent book club for over a year now, and last month, Carrie and I finally went. The book was the one that's been sitting in my sidebar for well over a month now, because despite my being a goody-goody, homework-is-not-optional girl all through my schooling, apparently I have few qualms about showing up for a book discussion only halfway through the assigned reading as an adult. I'm not doing much better this month, as the next event is on Tuesday and I still have well over a hundred pages of Bonk to read yet. I don't read a lot of nonfiction, and Bonk is a particularly unique brand of nonfiction. As I'm reading, I can't help thinking perhaps it's a strange form of erotica that works only on nerds. A science book wouldn't usually remind me that I'm not, shall we say, getting any, and yet last night, before I shut down my computer and went off to bed, I sent Carrie an email to say I was "off to read about sex for a bit and then go to sleep without any, as per usual." I'm more than a little curious to see what sort of discussion this book, um, arouses on Tuesday night. (Come on, I had to go there, right? Cheap joke or not, surely you understand.)
Digging - Because every project I ever initiate inevitably takes at least three times longer than I originally estimated, I am still digging up the five feet or so of lawn in front of my house in preparation for my efforts to plant something more equity-enhancing there. I really don't have anything to say about this; frankly, it was on this list only because when I am fixated on a project, it seems entirely more important and interesting in my head than it is to anyone else. Moving on.
64 degrees in house - I am typing away in my hobo gloves again tonight, because although it is June, it is currently 64 degrees in my house, and because it is June, I refuse to turn on my furnace to do anything about that. I was irked about this for much of the day, until I remembered that I actually much prefer 64 degrees in my house to 94 degrees in here. Unseasonably cold days in so-called summer aren't all bad, I suppose.
Flickr freaks - I've grown accustomed enough to living much of my life online that I don't typically think too much anymore about posting my personal photos to Flickr and leaving them public for the world to see. If strangers really want to view my boring, poorly executed photo sets from trips with my friends, so be it. But when a grown man with a mud-play obsession marks photos of my friend's daughter playing in a mudpit at a state park as a favorite, should I be a bit skeeved out? And when the admin for a "socks and sandals lovers" group asks that I add my "I rock the socks and sandals" pic to their pool, do I oblige and add the photo, or do I write back to explain that I do not, in fact, lack all fashion sense, and I photographed my feet in socks and sandals only because it was too cold that morning for sandals alone but I was too lazy to return to the tent for proper shoes before we commenced a post-breakfast walk? As with so many situations in my life, I have resolved both of these dilemmas by simply ignoring them. I have to say, though: it takes all kinds. Weirdos abound on the Internet, and Flickr is not exempt.
[Name] (redacted) - The montage reel continues, but it's sped up to make a loop almost up to the present. At an event Thursday night, I ran into yet another one-date boy. This time, it was the guy I deemed my best date of '08. I actually sort of expected to run into that one again eventually. As I keep saying, the city is shrinking, and he and I have enough in common that we were bound to cross paths again. I did not expect to see him that night, though, and was inexplicably thrown enough that our polite, perfunctory conversation was definitely far from my best work, banter-wise. People, I feel I've lost my mojo. Or rather, what mojo I at one point had. I am reportedly bright and charming and by some accounts even hilarious when I am not trying. When it actually matters, I become that mousy girl from my graduating class who said probably fewer than 30 words all through high school. (Interesting sidenote: That girl is married. The world is a strange, baffling place sometimes.) I've been wondering if perhaps I should contact The Traffic Engineer again. Maybe another dinner with him would press the Reset button and restore my shaken confidence somehow. That's not particularly fair to The Traffic Engineer, however, and actually doesn't sound like a particularly good time to me, either. So instead I'll just hope, as seems likely, that all things are cyclical, and things will align and be set right again eventually. That or it's time to admit defeat and resign myself to a life of plucky hermitude--a life I actually embrace more often than may be normal.

All right. And I think that about proves why the bulleted post of randomness is not a post I should make a habit of writing. Tell me, what random thoughts would you care to write more about than is necessary today?

In which I turn what could have been comments to your comments into an entire post

2009-06-01T21:45:00.004-05:00

First off, some old business. Allie wanted to see a picture of my mutant flowering space rhubarb. This photo is a bit blurry, given that I took it from my kitchen window because I was too lazy to go back outside, but I hope it shall suffice. Also, I hope I don't regret posting a picture of my garage on the Internet. None of you are going to troll the streets and alleyways of Minneapolis carrying this photo for comparison in the hopes of properly stalking me, right? Good. Didn't think so. Here you go, then.

Note that the wispy white part extending up from the enormous rhubarb leaves is part of the rhubarb plant, not part of the large shrub next to it. It's like something out of a Dr. Seuss book, no? People keep offering me suggestions of all the delicious things I could make from the rogue rhubarb growing freely in my backyard, and yet, a plant that large inexplicably terrifies me. I'm convinced it's best just to leave it alone. If I tamper with it I might anger it, the obvious result of which being that the mutant rhubarb will pull itself out of the ground, creep over to my bedroom window on its roots, and strangle me in my sleep.

Um, I have acknowledged that my imagination is occasionally of the overactive sort, right? Just checking. Let's carry on, shall we?

The second item of old business is the raw food cookies that I mentioned and that several of you were curious about. I know very little about the raw food movement, so if I am wrong on this, feel free to fill me in, but I think that things can be cooked or baked at very low temperatures to... I don't know... meld them in some way, and yet still be considered "raw." Is that true? Or did I possibly just make that up? In any case, the cookies in question were not cookies in any traditional sense, but were small discs embedded with sesame seeds and lightly sweetened possibly with honey. They were far from terrible; I took three or four and ate all of them without complaining. But to call them "cookies"? 'Tis a bit of a stretch. I have no idea if the woman who brought them to that Memorial Day barbecue has children, but if she does, I do feel a bit sorry for them. It's one thing to deprive a child of unlimited cookies for obvious nutritional reasons. It's another thing entirely to deprive them of any concept of what a cookies actually is. Then again, perhaps she's doing them a favor. Someday they will be introduced to a real and proper cookie, and lo! The world of opportunity they'll see before them. It will be a magical day indeed, not unlike the day I realized I did NOT actually hate pizza; I just hated the thin, cardboard crust frozen grocery store pizzas that my mother bought and my father invariably burned. Real pizza was an entirely different matter. I had no idea! For nine years! Rest assured, I've made up for that lost time with ample pizza consumption since.

But back to the raw food "cookies." They were actually more like crackers. And you know what's good with crackers? Cheese! As in, the cheese that the raw cookie bringer couldn't bear to see sharing the same plate. At the party, I actually ate one of those cookies with a small wedge of cheese, and I must say, it was actually pretty tasty. And devious. I'm a rebel, folks, but apparently only in the tamest and least confrontational sense.

Which brings us to new business, of which I have very little, and even if I did have more or it, I lack the energy at the moment to write about it. The camping trip was an excellent one, despite the rain our first night and the unseasonably low temperatures our second one. None of us had a thermometer, but I suspect it dipped to the low 30s (Fahrenheit) by the time I finally gave in and retreated to the imagined warmth of my sleeping bag. My four layers were no match for that weather. Who knew a down parka would be a good idea in nearly June?? At the very least, I wish I'd brought a hat. Note to self: A stocking cap is NEVER a foolish thing to bring camping. It would have been no more foolish than the shorts I optimistically packed and did not need. Lesson learned.

In any case, I didn't sleep particularly well all weekend, and even back at home in my comfortable bed didn't manage to make up for that last night. I had to jerk my head up after nodding off several times at work this afternoon and felt increasingly disoriented and alarmed each time. True, I have been in the same job for a remarkably (some might say depressingly) long time, but as it turns out, I cannot do my job in my sleep. Each time I caught myself nodding off, I worried what I had just errantly clicked or sent. I'd really best head off to bed to avoid a repeat of that tomorrow.

I could win a prize for procrastinating, if I'd just get around to nominating myself for one.

2009-05-28T21:58:00.008-05:00

I am going out of town this weekend, which means that at the moment, I should definitely be packing instead of typing, but apparently I am doing that thing where I say, "Oh, packing won't take any time at all. I just need to throw a few things in a bag... no problem! Fifteen minutes, tops!" I am telling myself this despite knowing full well what happened the last time I said that before packing for a trip... and the time before that... and, hell, EVERY SINGLE TIME I HAVE PACKED FOR A TRIP IN MY WHOLE ENTIRE LIFE. I'm a quick study, I tell you. Isn't there some phrase about a river in Egypt that I could use here? Like everything else in my life, packing takes at least three times as long as I think it will. I know this and yet... la, la, la... all the time in the world. Anyone care to place bets on what time I get to bed tonight?

So where am I going? Ah. Glad you asked. I am going camping, in the woods along the North Shore. I am going to the woods because I want to live deliberately. Or possibly because I want to drink wine around a campfire. You decide. And yes, I used that same joke last fall, but I don't care. As you may know, nerd humor is my favorite kind of humor, and Thoreau doesn't get nearly enough laughs.

The fact that I'm going camping when it's still only May is excellent news, because it means I have plenty of summertime ahead of me during which to forget how much work prepping for, packing for, and unpacking from camping is, so that I can decide it's a good idea to go at least one more time again before fall. This is important because I somehow made it through all of last summer without camping even once, and although I would never claim to be any sort of avid, hard-core outdoorswoman, a full year without one night in a tent still feels in some way wrong, like a cosmic imbalance I need to resolve. So. Perhaps this weekend's trip makes up for no camping last year. If any of my real-life, local friends want to help me check the camping trip off my list for this summer as well, do let me know.

This weekend's trip didn't actually involve any daunting amount of prepping on my part (says the girl who still hasn't even removed her decades-old green duffel bag from its storage spot beneath her bed, much less put anything inside of it). I'm going with a couple of good friends and a gaggle of their friends, and with all the planning in their hands, my own list was pretty brief. Most of the participants I do not know, but I'm sure by association they must be friendly and fabulous, and yet, I'm feeling uncharacteristically insecure about ridiculous things. Like, will the hippies and artists look down on me because the ground beef I bought does not say "grass fed" and "antibiotic free"? And must I remove the zucchini and yellow squash from their plastic wrappers before I go, because zucchini and yellow squash are not supposed to come in plastic wrappers (oh, and also are not supposed to come from Florida, when we have perfectly good zucchini and yellow squash right here)? This is probably more about my own social conscience than the imagined judgment of the hippies and artists I'm going camping with. A little knowledge is a powerful thing, but not as powerful as laziness, and when I want to make one stop on my way home instead of three, factory farm beef and plastic-wrapped veggies is what I get. Horrors. Damn you, SuperTarget, with your low prices and conveniently inclusive array of products and your near-total disregard for the "eat local" movement.

Of course, you might understand my paranoia, given that I heard a friend from this same circle say, at a potluck party recently, "Ooh. Do we really want to put cheese on the same plate as the raw food cookies?" I thought she was kidding. She was not. If the person who brought the offensive dairy items returned to the food table later and wondered (like the mouse in that overrated best seller) who moved her cheese, I have the answer to that. And if the raw food cookie lady is on this weekend's camping trip, well, then I guess that's just more sodium-heavy buttermilk ranch pretzels and sugar-loaded layer bars for me.

Yes, I made layer bars tonight, as well as a batch of cookie dough that I will have to turn into cookies at some point before I leave tomorrow mid-day. That adds two more hash marks in my list of culinary endeavors for the week, bringing my total up to one tiramisu, five baked goods, and one lasagna. Oh, and eighteen eggs. If the cooking tally isn't a new record for me, the egg thing surely is. And only one of those efforts was a total failure. On the up side, it was a failure that helped guarantee no leftover eggs in my fridge. So there is that, anyway.

And with that, I really should think about packing, or at least tossing a few things into a pile near a bag to inspire the idea of packing and get that ball rolling. Happy last days of May, everyone. Can it really be June so soon?

More talk about things that terrify me, but I promise it moves on after that.

2009-05-26T21:00:00.007-05:00

All right. Time to type something new here, because I'm a little worried if I leave that last post in top position any longer, any further comments on it will grow progressively more horrifying, and if anyone has a story to top Sauntering Soul's foot-long rat in the kitchen story, I may never sleep again. Gah.

I have actually been in my basement since the enormous bug-sighting, incidentally, and lived to tell of it. So far. I am reassuring myself with the theory that Samsa has scurried away down the floor drain in search of a better home. I am telling myself this because it is far preferable to the theory that he is hiding out behind my furnace, gathering his strength and growing in size until one day he steps out to greet me eye to eye standing upright on the lower dozen or so of his many legs. Shudder.

Oh my. And now, just as I typed that last paragraph, I heard something that sounded very much like tiny rapid footsteps bolting across the width of my house from somewhere above. Is it possible that was merely a squirrel running across my roof, and I heard it all the way down in my living room, with a half story of house in between me and the outdoors? That has to be possible, because if that scurrying actually happened somewhere within the confines of my home, then I think Jess was right: I may need to move.

And that's about enough of the creepshow that is the upper and lower story of my house for today. Let's shift gears to things that are freakish and terrifying in entirely different ways. Like the fact that my mother has decided to join Facebook, and naturally has tried to friend me. She has been on the site for over a full 24 hours, and yet she has only two friends thus far: my two sisters. I can only assume this means her sole reason for joining is to spy on our lives and leave embarrassing, motherly comments for all our friends to see. People, I am well aware that I am a grown-up and I should no longer harbor any qualms about socializing with my mother. But does that really have to include online socializing? Isn't it enough that I no longer mind being seen with her at a movie theater? Baby steps, I say. Ugh. My mother is on Facebook. I suppose that's one way to get me offline...

Also in the category of freakish and moderately terrifying: I was all ready to show you a picture of the mutant space rhubarb in my backyard, which is currently at least six feet in diameter and has sprouted a bizarre white flowery stalk that extends over halfway up my garage wall. I was going to show you a picture of this, but since I haven't yet installed my camera software on my new-to-me laptop, doing so would involve using that ailing, molasses-slow desktop, and we all remember how cranky that makes me. Besides that, it turns out, flowers on rhubarb aren't such an uncommon phenomenon after all. Who knew? (Answer: Not me.)

The rhubarb, by the way, is either wild or was planted by the previous owner, because I have had nothing to do with its existence whatsoever. And I do mean NOTHING. While searching out that rhubarb flower info, I came across this page on a site dedicated entirely to rhubarb (which does not surprise me, obviously, given that I already know there's a site dedicated entirely to baking a potato; the Internet is a vast and all-encompassing place, of course), which provided all manner of dos and don'ts for growing and caring for rhubarb, but also stated that "For the home gardener, rhubarb will tolerate a fair amount of neglect and still thrive." Word. If only tomatoes were known for being so hardy. I haven't had much luck growing anything on purpose, so perhaps if I wanted tomatoes, I should have had one of you sneak them into my yard when I wasn't looking. Somehow I'm convinced that might have been a better way to ensure success. Time will tell, I suppose.

And speaking of domestic failures, despite my near-perfect track record with all manner of baked goods (well, not ALL manner, but all manner I have attempted thus far, admittedly none of which exceed intermediate baker capabilities), the cinnamon pecan blondies I attempted to make for yesterday's Memorial Day barbecue were an utter disaster. I wasted nearly two hours and four cups of brown sugar trying to get things to melt the way they were supposed to, in such a way that the sugar was still melty enough to stir into a batter but not so melty that its heat actually fried the raw eggs right there in the bowl. Outcome: fail. That is, unless you like fried egg bits in your blondies. Personally, I do not. I can't decide if this means I need to try that recipe once more in the hopes of conquering it (the proverbial third time being a charm) or if I should just tear the page right out of that cookbook and simply pretend it never existed.

This post is more than long and scattered enough already, so I promise I will stop rambling soon, but first I would like to redeem myself by saying that despite the blondie disaster, I actually did come out with a win on both the lasagna and tiramisu I made for foreign movie night on Saturday and the spiced brownies I baked before the blondie mishap yesterday. That is entirely more cooking and baking than I generally like to do in any 48-hour span (I still can't believe my grocery list for the weekend involved buying a carton and a half of eggs; NEVER have I needed 14 eggs at one time and in fact could probably count on two fingers the number of times I've purchased them in a quantity greater than six), and as such, the remainder of this week I will probably subsist entirely on cereal, restaurant meals, and the sorts of packaged convenience foods my friends are so fond of chiding me for purchasing. Tomorrow night I'm getting together with a blog friend who's currently in town. Steve, do me a favor and remind me to eat a vegetable, would you? Thanks.

Maybe the helpful gnome who fixed my shovel does extermination work as well?

2009-05-22T11:30:00.004-05:00

Do you remember all that time and effort I spent last year turning my dirty, cluttered, long-neglected basement into a welcoming and party-friendly rumpus room? Well, I'm glad I enjoyed it while it lasted, because I may never go into my basement again.

This might be a problem, given that my basement is where several very useful things are stored, including my washer and dryer and much of my camping gear, not to mention several key articles of clothing that I have not yet retrieved from my drying racks since the last time I did laundry. These are all problems I will have to work around, however, because a giant bug has taken up residence down there, and I'm pretty sure I would rather just let him have the place than take him on without backup.

Seriously, people, this is no ordinary bug. I cannot squash this bug with my foot, because he may actually be larger than my foot. I've decided to name him Samsa. As in Gregor. Maybe if I'm lucky, he will, like his namesake, recognize the burden he's placed on me and starve himself, and I can have my laundry room back again. Here's hoping.

It's possible, of course, that I'm overreacting, but given that my day started by realizing I was sharing my shower with a spider, it only stands to reason that the added trauma of the enormous bug in my basement the very same day would leave me a bit ill at ease. A spider in the shower, by the way, is horrifying enough when you're wet and naked, but it makes me feel even more vulnerable given that I am essentially blind without my glasses, and since I don’t generally shower in my glasses, I nearly didn't even see the spider spying on me. Shudder.

In a strange way, it is almost (ALMOST) comforting to see other living things in my home. I am lucky enough to have had very few problems with pests indoors; I have lived in that house for over five years and have not once seen a... a... I'm sorry; I can't even type it for fear of jinxing myself and finding one of those small critters that starts with "m" and rhymes with "blouse," so let's just move on, shall we? But since my suspicious nature sometimes makes me take a good thing and twist it into something absurd, I have occasionally wondered if there is some reason my house has so few pests. It's certainly not my fastidious housekeeping, so it must be something in the air. Among the many ridiculous theories my overactive imagination has spun, this canary-in-the-coal-mine correlation between the lack of bugs in my house and the belief that my house might be slowing killing me surely ranks near the top. I may have actually written about this once already, though. Yep. I did. No sense bringing it up yet again.

So I'm trying to put both Samsa and the spider and whatever other unknown stowaways I may be harboring out of my mind by thinking of happier, more positive things. You know, like puppies and rainbows and unicorns, and more importantly, the three-day weekend ahead. A weekend that I will spend largely at home... a home that may either be infested with pests or slowly killing me. This positive thoughts thing isn't exactly working as planned, is it? Tell me, what's terrifying you lately?

Do You Believe in Miracles?*

2009-05-19T19:12:00.009-05:00

So did you guys know that these newfangled laptop things are portable? Totally portable! As in, not only can you take them from your kitchen to your bedroom to your living room, but you can put them in a bag and tote them along with you to use outside your house as well! Miracles!

Yes, yes, this is old news to most of you, of course. Naturally I have seen people typing away on laptops in coffee shops for years now, but I sort of assumed it was one of those things that other people might do but that simply don't apply to me. You know, like rock climbing or ordering a portobello mushroom sandwich.

I'm not actually typing from a coffee shop, but from the guest lounge at the Saturn Service Center, where I decided to stop on my way home tonight because I thought perhaps I hadn't quite spent enough money yet today. As it turns out, I will be parting with only the usual twenty-some dollars for an oil change and not an undetermined amount to fix my air conditioner as well, because the service center goblins are far too busy at the moment to look into the A/C problem and decide how much money to take from me for that repair. Yes, my air conditioner is broken again, and this time, I don't think the Internet can help me fix it myself. I do still think that spending more than $200 for any single repair on my eleven-year-old car will all but guarantee my previously invincible Rubbermaid-on-wheels will die a sudden and tragic death immediately thereafter, and as such, I thought perhaps I could do without the A/C from now on. Alas, two eighty-degree days into the summer and already I have caved. Air conditioning is not optional with a lengthy-ish commute. There are already enough things in life that make me cranky. I don't need a blast furnace in my face every day helping me with that.

Hence, I will likely be making an appointment to diagnose the problem, and will probably be parting with a large sum of money to proceed with the repair after that. Then again, have I forgotten what I learned in the Arthur Fonzarelli school of car maintenance? Perhaps it just needs a good, swift thump with my determined fist. Also, perhaps I should wonder what is going on in my brain this week that made me reference the Fonz in two posts in a row.

But back to the absurd amount of money I spent today. Apparently I will do anything to sleep in an extra half hour and miss a bit of work, because I spent the better part of my morning letting my dentist shoot me up with Novocain and have a power tools party in my mouth. A few weeks ago, I bit down on something very hard and instantly felt I'd done something very wrong to one of my lower back teeth, but in the spirit of ignoring problems in the hopes that they go away on their own, I decided not to worry about it just yet. Sunday night I was reminded that this method of problem solving, while my favorite, isn't exactly foolproof, as a piece of that tooth broke off completely and ended up bobbing around loose in my mouth. I'm falling apart. Excellent. I wonder what part of me I'll lose next. (Fingers crossed that it's the extra padding around my midsection, but I probably don't get to choose, I guess.)

So I've got a temporary crown now, and I need to go back in another two weeks to relive that fun all over again when the permanent crown is ready. All this nuisance comes with a price, of course, and in this case, it is the not-so-bargain price of $940. Hurrah. Tell me, has the Tooth Fairy adjusted her reward rates for inflation since I was a kid? Because I'm sort of considering putting that little broken piece of tooth under my pillow in the hopes that she can help me out with that bill.

For $940 I'm not getting any ordinary crown, of course. My dentist said I could choose between gold and porcelain, but for durability and longevity strongly recommended against the porcelain, and hence, I will be sporting a gold tooth come June 3. Insert the usual jokes about how ghetto-fabulous that will be. I suppose pursuing my rap career could be an effective way to that $940 as well. Wish me luck.

And finally, speaking of things that were broken and now are less so, remember that shovel I broke? Like my car (sometimes), it has magically healed itself. When I left for work yesterday morning, the two pieces of it were laying in my yard in the same place I'd left them when I was too lazy to finish cleaning up Friday. Yesterday when I came home, those two pieces were again one. Somebody had removed the broken bit of handle from the shovel's metal base and bolted the remaining length of wood back in its place. Who would do that?? And more importantly, why?? My money's on my favorite neighbor, not because he has nothing better to do than fix my garden tools, but because he is the only person I can imagine might have wandered near enough to my yard to even see the broken shovel sitting there. Then again, snowblowing my driveway is one thing. Taking the time to salvage something I simply forgot to throw away is another. So maybe it wasn't my neighbor after all. Yard Tool Fairy, perhaps? Maybe he knows the Tooth Fairy. I should have left him a note to put in a good word for me.

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* A title with little to do with the post, except that typing the word "Novocain" made me think of Jeremy Messersmith, and that whole mystery of the self-healing shovel made my brain move on to this one of Jeremy's next.
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A little more. A little less. This could go on all day.

2009-05-17T12:06:00.009-05:00

Things I should be doing right now:

Cleaning my house, as there is clutter on every flat surface within it (and even some not-so-flat surfaces as well), and the layer of dust on my entertainment center is thick enough that the ghost who may or may not live here might start writing messages to me in it soon.
Potting the tomato plants I bought this weekend, because the likelihood of me getting something I can actually eat to grow is slim enough, and probably becomes ever more slim the longer I leave the tiny seedlings sitting forlorn in a cardboard box atop my dishwasher.
Continuing the big dig in my front yard that I began on Friday, with the goal of replacing the sad, anemic mismatched bushes that came with the place with something less sad and less suited for a "before" picture on the HGTV show Curb Appeal.

Things I am doing right now:

Thanking the magical scientists who invented wireless connections for the still-novel-to-me ability to change my Facebook status and type a blog post from the comfort of my queen-sized pillowtop.

Clearly I'm well on my way to yet another productive Sunday.

As for the first bullet point, I think my solution might be to have a party in the not-too-distant future. It's been a while since I hosted any sort of gathering, and it may be the only thing that forces me to clean this sty on any sort of deadline. Then again, parties cost money, and they also give me one more opportunity to fret about my friends seeing the much-mentioned duct tape that's still in my shower. The logic in many of my hair-brained plans seems a bit flawed lately, but flawed logic is usually the more fun sort of logic, so why should that dissuade me?

Regarding the third bullet, I am almost letting myself off the hook with the excuse that I worked hard enough on Friday to justify a day off today, but I know myself well enough to know that granting a free pass like that is an excellent way to ensure I have piles of dirt signifying a project in progress for the better part of the entire summer. I was determined to follow through on a goal in a timely matter for once. "Determined" is apparently a relative term for me.

I have, however, already gotten all three of the odious shrubs in front of my house dug up and removed, despite their best efforts to thwart me. They put up a good fight: the barberry stabbed me with its prickly branches so many times that I almost gave up and said, "Fine! You win. You can stay." And I pried so hard against the roots of another shrub that I actually broke my shovel right in two. That's right: I broke a shovel. Just when my stubborn lawn mower has me feeling like a wimp I realize I'm totally She-Ra. Yay me.

Let's see. What else have I been up to lately? Well, yesterday I meandered around Art-a-Whirl. My goal was to find something new to hang in my living room. What I bought instead was a pair of earrings and a new handbag, which, while they are lovely and adorable respectively, are probably not well suited to be wall art. Details.

On Thursday I went out for dinner with two friends, where I ordered a bacon-infused Manhattan despite the fact that I'm well aware I do not like Manhattans. (See sidebar, with its recent search engine note that is obviously not too recent anymore. Note to self: either remove that component or scour your stats for a replacement search hit post haste.*) I have to agree with Salon.com that bacon may have jumped the shark** only shortly after it started showing up in candy bars and on donuts, but pop culture peer pressure made me want to try it anyway. For my money, I'll skip the bacon cocktail next time and order another Jackson Pollack instead. My pal Carrie posted a picture of it here, but she neglected to mention that this strange looking cocktail was both delicious and moisturizing. Each sip left a trace of green basil oil on my lips, making me wonder if perhaps I'd need to reach for my lip balm a time or two less that night.

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* Of course, when I do that, the reference in this paragraph will be lost, so I should note that the search engine phrase in question was "What is a Manhattan supposed to taste like?" to which my response was, "If the answer is 'battery acid,' I totally did it right."

** If you happen to click through to that article, you must read through to the second page, on which the author brilliantly reasons that bacon is the Arthur Fonzarelli of the meat world while Ritchie Cunningham is the skinless chicken breast of the Happy Days universe.
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After dinner we high-tailed it over to the Riverview for a three-dollar showing of The Wrestler. This paragraph may contain some spoilers, so if you haven't see it yet and plan to, you might want to skip ahead right about now. If you have seen that one, tell me, is the ending open to interpretation, or are we all supposed to assume what we think happened actually happened and Mickey Rourke said goodbye not just to wrestling but to everything else in this life with his final body slam? Assuming it's the latter, who do we blame for his early exit? After considering Ram's daughter, the stripper, and his own ego, my friends and I finally decided it was actually the Potato Salad Lady's fault more than anyone else. "A little more. A little less. A little more. A little less." Frankly it would be enough to drive anyone over the edge, no?

All right. It's now well into the afternoon hours, which makes still sitting on my bed in a t-shirt and pajama pants seem less delightfully relaxing and more slothlike and lazy, so it's about time I attend to at least one of the bullets in that first list.

So what are you doing or not doing lately? Do fill me in.

I'm also taking suggestions for the role of Me in the movie version of my life. Jennifer Garner? Janeane Garofalo? You decide.

2009-05-10T21:52:00.008-05:00

My friend Carrie and I often like to look at situations as though they are the movie version of our lives. It's not all about the fantasy of that idea. True, in the movie version of our lives, we would probably more often get what we want, and we would be wearing decidedly more fabulous shoes when we got it. But the exercise goes beyond wishful thinking. I sort of think that to imagine myself in a movie is to imagine a life less ordinary, a life where I take more risks and believe in more possibilities. There are worse mindsets to cultivate, don't you agree?

I've had enough unexpected encounters recently that my life is starting to feel like a highlights (or rather, lowlights) reel, and I can't help but wonder (I hate that Carrie Bradshaw has fully ruined that otherwise innocuous and useful phrase for the rest of us) just what that might mean in the movie version of my life. In the past month or thereabouts, I have run into or unexpectedly heard from five (count them: FIVE!) men whom I once went on dates with. As I've said before, Minneapolis is not Star's Hollow; I can go for weeks or months on end without running into anyone I know in a public place where I'm not expecting to see them; so to run into FIVE past dates in a one-month span is more than a bit curious.

The first one in this string was The Traffic Engineer, who e-mailed me again recently, for purportedly no other reason than to tell me they'd modified some signal timing on my commute and I should let him know if I notice any problems going forward. I haven't actually replied to that message, though I feel a little guilty for not doing so, particularly every Monday through Friday as I stop for the lights at Century and Lake Elmo Avenues, which have not changed in any way due to this new signal timing, as far as I can tell. They still somehow magically know exactly when I'm coming and turn red just as I approach, as if to say, "Woah, Stefanie. Hold up. Don't you want to stop and say hello to me today?"

In addition to The Traffic Engineer, I also ran into a past meMarmony match at a party recently, which is not such a big surprise, given that we knew, when the all powerful Dr. Warren matched us, that we had a friend in common. And then, at a film festival screening, I spotted the guy I've taken to calling Waldo, because he is EVERYWHERE I GO; I just need to look for him. When I emailed him on Catch dot Mom last fall, pointing out (in a hopefully not at all creepy way) that we seem to be in the same place at the same time more often than seems usual, he replied that "the city is like a bicycle wheel, and most people live life in only one or two spokes." Shockingly, I resisted the urge to walk up to him and his female companion at the film screening and say, "Get outta my spokes, dude!"

Then last week, at a concert, I ran into a guy I had two dates with last year... an inordinately nice gentleman who was ridiculously good to me and made me laugh and was more than financially sound to boot and yet who, frankly, I could not imagine ever getting naked with (sorry; should have warned you, perhaps, that I was going to edge into blunt and R-rated territory there). I really do wish I was attracted to that one, because I can only assume he's thinking he's still attracted to me; a mix CD from him arrived in my mailbox about four days after that unexpected run-in at First Avenue, and I'm trying not to read into the fact that three of the songs he chose to include have the word "love" in the title.

And finally, a few days ago, I ran into another random and unnotable meMarmony match at an MPR forum event. He spotted me first and came over to say hello. When he left, I turned to Carrie and Angela and explained, "We went on three dates last year." And Carrie said, "Three? Really?" to which I replied, "Yeah, I know. It was probably two more than I needed to go on."

When The Traffic Engineer contacted me yet again, I thought about what that might mean in the movie version of my life, and I wondered if perhaps he was the guy I'd overlooked and nearly let get away. If this were a movie, would his persistence finally pay off? Would he be the guy who finally wears me down and forces me to give him a second (no, third) chance, at which point I would suddenly recognize all his charms and finally realize he is perfect for me? I really (really, REALLY) don't think The Traffic Engineer is the one for me, so it's almost a relief that I had those four additional run-ins to diminish the significance in some way. Suddenly, these events aren't random coincidences; they are part of a montage! And in the movie version of my life, doesn't it stand to reason that there'd be a montage such as this right before I meet the one I'm supposed to be with, the one I've been waiting for all this time?

That's what I would I like to believe all this unexpected boomeranging nonsense might mean. In the movie version of my life, I would be sitting at that proverbial rock bottom place, drowning my frustrations in a dirty martini while I sit at home alone in my yoga pants on a Friday night, when suddenly, when I least expect it, Mr. Perfect-for-Me appears.

Mr. Perfect-for-Me is still playing hard-to-get, so perhaps I should just settle in and wait for the rest of the montage to scroll on by. It might help if I had the proper soundtrack, though. After all, movie montages always involve a song, do they not? I think that attempting to live in the movie version of my life means embracing the movie-ness of it all and envisioning it to the furthest extent possible. So I need a theme song. Or rather, a Mr. Not-Right-for-Me montage song. Suggestions, anyone?

Of course, rats DO have a bit of a PR problem, after that whole plague thing

2009-05-03T21:46:00.005-05:00

It seems that if I take a couple weeks off this whole sharing my life with the Internets thing, I completely forget how to do it. I have done lots and lots of mildly if not completely interesting things lately, and yet here I sit, staring at a blank Blogger box, not sure what to tell you about any of them. This is one of those times when a bulleted list of what I've been up to might be in order, but I would actually have to consult a calendar for that, such is the scattered and forgetful state of my brain lately. Besides that, I am guessing that most of you don't care which film festival movies or concerts I've seen recently. Perhaps you are more interested in the outcome of my M-P-R-ty date?

I think we can safely call that a date, by the way. Not because of any solidly positive outcome post-get-together, but because he paid. Ignoring all nuances and variables, isn't that the simplest metric we all know? I hadn't planned on him paying, by the way, even though it ended up being one of those inconveniently alcohol-free Coffee Dates, meaning that him footing my bill set him back all of a mere three dollars, give or take a dime. But he reached the counter first, and although my wallet was out, he turned to me after ordering and asked, "And what would you like?" Because I will always be the girl who lets whatever thought is in her head find its way immediately out of her mouth, I said, "I ask you out for a drink, and you end up paying?" To which he replied, "Well, sure! That's the way it goes, isn't it?" True, I suppose. That is the way it goes. On dates, generally. I decided that comment meant we were on one.

So then. How did it go? I have no idea, actually. I mean, I had a lovely time and would be happy to see him again, but that nonsense back in December has left me unable to trust my instincts in these scenarios. We talked comfortably and easily. He laughed at my jokes. I laughed at his. But he is also a very charismatic, warm, and friendly individual. I would venture to guess that he could have a comfortable and easy conversation with Hannibal Lecter. Maybe he would have bought Hannibal's coffee, too. My point is that I think he probably left feeling he had a perfectly pleasant time, but whether "perfectly pleasant" equates to just a routine, benign way to pass a Sunday morning or a spark of interest in something or someone new is anyone's guess right now.

I ended up with about 20 minutes to kill between the time our coffee date dispersed and the time my next plans for the day began, and since the next item on my agenda was only a few blocks from Carrie's place, I stopped over to give her an update.

"Well? What did you learn about him?" she asked.

I tried to formulate a brief summary. "He has two cats, he is not afraid of ghosts, and he thinks rats and pigeons have been unfairly maligned."

"That's a good list," Carrie replied. "Is that what you wore?"

I was a little worried for a minute that I should have posted a photo poll to garner wardrobe advice after all, but Carrie quickly assured me that my outfit was fine and the jeans I'd chosen were worthy of an encouraging and suggestive facial expression I'm not sure I've seen her make in my direction before. I don't actually think there is anything special about those particular jeans. I think she's just so happy to see me in anything other than the four identical pairs of Mossimo jeans I somehow acquired that she would make any face necessary to help ensure I consider buying a new pair of pants in this decade.

So. Now we wait. And I stop typing, because there is no sense typing about something that may be nothing and because I really do think it's best if I just put this out of my mind in a come what may (forget what may not) sort of way.

All that out of the way, let's move on. What did you do this weekend?

I'm still alive

2009-04-27T22:39:00.003-05:00

I promise that someday I will write something of at least marginal substance here again. Today, however, is not that day. People, I am TIRED. And it is only Monday. This does not bode well for the rest of the week. It's all good and fine to be busy and popular (I may be exaggerating or even completely making up the latter part of that compound), but a girl needs to take a night off now and then. One of these nights. Really.

Meanwhile, talk amongst yourselves. I'll give you a topic. What should Stefanie wear on her maybe-date with the MPR reporter she met two weeks ago? Yes, I have a maybe-date! But I did not plan an M-P-R-ty to acquire it. I just decided, in an impulsive "What the hell; what do I have to lose?" moment, that maybe it wasn't completely unreasonable to write to a total stranger whose email address happens to be in the public domain and ask if he'd like to have a drink with me. And apparently he didn't think it was completely unreasonable either, because he basically said, "OK." I know! I'm as surprised as you are. But stranger things have happened, no?

Of course, this is only a maybe-date, because first off, I did not use the word "date" in my invitation, and hence, he may have an entirely different label for this get-together in mind. And second, I have not actually heard back from him with any further confirmation of these date or non-date plans. It's all very hazy, obviously, which makes asking you what I should wear on a possibly entirely fictitious maybe-date or non-date entirely a moot point. Plus there is the problem of most of you having no idea whatsoever what is in my closet and hence no idea what the options in this multiple choice question might be.

So how about I give you a different topic instead? The Holy Roman Empire was neither holy nor Roman nor an empire. Discuss.

Bullet points of randomness, sans any bullets

2009-04-20T21:44:00.004-05:00

I realized earlier this evening that in the course of one day, I have heard new music on the radio from Depeche Mode, The Cure, and Morrissey. For a moment this realization made me want to paint my nails black, don a pair of black and white horizontally striped tights, and contemplate my intellectual superiority to all of the girls on my high school's prom court. But then it occurred to me that the respectable and irony-free return of the music that shaped my formative years was made possible maybe not just because the talent and appeal of these aging gentlemen miraculously stands the test of time and cross-generational tastes, but because we are currently living through an extremely strange and uncomfortable (for me) period during which anything and everything from the 80s is welcomed back with open arms and no questions asked. Yes, I have new music from Morrissey, but the tradeoff for this gift is the return of leggings and bubble tops. It's a mixed blessing, obviously.

I remain wary of how far the phenomenon will stretch. If there truly is no limit to the resurgence of all things 80s, has anyone notified Weird Al or the creators of Punky Brewster yet? Let's hope not.

This was going to be a post of bulleted randomness, by the way, as I have several thoughts on my mind but none of them are noteworthy or important enough to expand into a full post on their own. I have noticed that my bullet points often become full paragraphs, however, which renders the bullet essentially useless. How do you feel about full paragraphs of transition-free randomness? Are you OK with that? Good. Moving on.

For tonight's post, by the way, we can all thank Stephenie Meyer. Not because she has anything directly to do with it (or because her unparalleled success with crappy writing is an inspiration to me), but because the annual Minneapolis-St. Paul International Film Festival is currently in full swing, and I had planned to be at a showing of How to Be this evening, rather than at home typing a blog post. Amazingly, however, although Rotten Tomatoes knows almost nothing about this film at this point, tonight's screening of it at the festival was completely sold out at least a day in advance. What does this have to do with Stephenie Meyer? Not a lot, except that I suspect at least a portion of the surprising popularity of this particular festival entry might be related to the fact that it stars Robert Pattinson, and I may have underestimated the Twin Cities' involvement in Edward Cullen Mania when I neglected to buy my ticket in advance. My bad.

Speaking of strange mistakes (that was my half-hearted attempt at a logical transition for at least ONE new paragraph in this post), my phone rang twice in quick succession on Saturday, both from the same unknown number. Surprisingly it was not a sales call or a charity or a political organization, however, all of whom were the reason I let both calls go to voicemail instead of answering. No, the message the caller left on my voicemail went something like this: "Hi, if this is Colleen, I'm calling numbers out of the phone book at random. This is Al [LastName]. Could you give me a call at home, at 612-###-####?"

I almost wanted to call Al back and introduce him to the wonder and usefulness that is the Internet, because I can only assume that searching for Colleen on the Internet has got to be at least as successful as dialing numbers AT RANDOM from the phone book. Also, who still uses a phone book? People who don't know how to spell "Colleen," apparently, because if I were, in fact, using a phone book to locate someone by that name, I would probably skip right over all listings where the first name is the initial "S." Then again, how many people are even still in the phone book these days? Those of us with land lines are a shrinking minority. Maybe the logic is that we all must know each other. Come to think of it, I believe there was a Colleen at last month's meeting of Luddites Anonymous. I'll have to keep an eye out for her next time so I can pass along the message.

And finally, one more random thought. I have realized recently that I seem to be incapable of slicing open an avocado without smiling and proclaiming out loud (What? I live alone, remember?) how very much I love avocados and how I might even actually marry one now that Iowa's acceptance of gay marriage has paved the way for us to marry our pets and inanimate objects and anything else we might decide we cherish and covet in a potentially inappropriate way. I may have to move someplace where polygamy is legal, of course, as we all know I'm already betrothed to my blue yoga pants, but I like to dream big, people. I know this can happen in our lifetime.

ANYWAY. Back to avocados. Obviously I am a big fan. Love their work. Yay for avocados is what I'm saying. But it occurred to me tonight as I was slicing one into a salad that my love for the avocado is relatively new. I don't remember when I first had avocado in its whole (not guacamole) form, but I'm certain it was post-high school. Likely even post-college. Did I even know avocados existed when I was a child or teenager? Does the rest of the tiny town where I was raised know about avocados yet? I didn't have a bagel until college either, though admittedly that was because my mother simply never bought them, not because my town didn't know they existed. I have always been a late bloomer; what else is still fully off my radar? This whole avocado thing is making me wonder what other foods I love but don't even know exist yet. And don't say wasabi peas or Hapi mixed rice crackers, because I am already in full addiction mode with both of those at the moment. And don't say "pan-seared skate wing," because we already know how that worked out for me.

Yes, these are the big questions that I ponder during the mundane moments of daily life. Isn't there anything of little import that you're thinking about today?

We've come a long way since the Flowbee

2009-04-14T21:22:00.009-05:00

It was brought to my attention on that last post that many of you are not familiar with Mates of State. Let's remedy that, shall we? Yes, yes, I know you all hate video posts, but take a quick look when your coworkers aren't near enough to notice you're not working, OK?

I had other things I was going to tell you this evening... like that the new-to-me laptop I've been so excited about seems to have become possessed already but that I lack the techno-prowess to know what to do about it and hence, am attempting to solve it like I solve so many problems in my life: by ignoring it in the hopes that the problem goes away on its own. Or that my pal Carrie and I went to an MPR & Citizens League event tonight and both simultaneously developed a crush on the MPR reporter who was a panelist for the event, and that we are considering inviting him to our next party (or even perhaps planning a party solely so we can invite him).

I was going to tell you these things and possibly more, but I spent the time I would have spent typing that talking to Lara instead, and now it is time for bed. Lara fully supports that party idea, by the way, and even went so far as to suggest we call it an M-P-R-ty. Heh. Lara may have been inhaling fumes from her Ukranian egg decorating supplies when she cracked that joke, but I have to admit I lack any similar excuse for laughing at it.

Do you remember in old movies, when a long distance phone call was a major event? When people scheduled calls and had operators put them through, and a hush fell over the entire house because "Mr. So-and-So is on the phone, from NEW YORK! LONG DISTANCE!"? I don't want to imply that a phone call from Lara is not an event, but I do appreciate the fact that the air of formality over a long distance call has long since dropped. I mean, while we talked, Lara was dyeing Ukranian eggs, and I decided to read her the questions on Mental Floss's "SkyMall Product or Rejected Invention Patent?" quiz. It was probably exactly what we would have been doing if we were chatting in the same room together, instead of several states away. Ah, the wonders of technology.

Speaking of technology, allow me to present my favorite answer on the "SkyMall Product or Rejected Invention Patent" quiz. Mental Floss pitted the "Cool Steps" self-cooling footwear against the "The NECKpro over-door cervical traction device," and it nearly stumped both of us. I mean, a miniature air compressor in each shoe does sound a tad ridiculous, but so does an at-home traction device. Aren't there some things that should not be do-it-yourself ventures? I would have assumed cervical traction fell solidly in that category, along with at-home dental work and chiropracty. Alas, no. Behold: the NECKpro...

It's no personal mini-donut maker, but every product has its niche, I suppose.

I wonder if he'd wanna be a manta ray

2009-04-13T20:53:00.006-05:00

So then. I hope everyone had a lovely weekend. I hear there was a holiday of some sort yesterday, but it's hard for me to get particularly worked up over any holiday that does not involve a free day off of work, so it was pretty much just an average Sunday to me. Well, average except for the late morning brunch with friends, which perhaps should be a routine part of every weekend, but is not, given that it conflicts with both my desire to stay in bed as late as I feel like on weekends and my desire not to spend any more money than I already spend on social plans with friends.

Regardless, I had a fine time yesterday. Our urban orphans and heathens Easter brunch gets a little more top shelf every year. The whole tradition started four years ago when my sister and I were at Nye's Polonaise (best bar in America!) with some friends for my birthday and she spotted the Easter brunch flier on our table. Neither of us planned to go home for the holiday, and we decided it would be fun to gather our friends for the sort of traditional old school supper club buffet we would be partaking in if we were making the six-hour drive to attend church and dinner with our parents. In my mind, it was exactly what a holiday meal should be (or rather, for better or worse, what a holiday meal always has been, and as such, it had a homey and nostalgic appeal), but a certain foodie friend of mine who shall remain nameless (ahem) to this day cannot get past the cheese cubes and deli slices served on the appetizer table, and hence, we've sought out swankier digs in the years since.

This year took us to Vincent (sorry; Vincent: A RESTAURANT! That subtitle is obviously important, as it is everywhere, including in the outgoing voicemail message that plays when you call to modify your reservation), where I correctly predicted all of the choices the aforementioned foodie friend would make from the prix-fixe menu, while I, on the other hand, thwarted the efforts of anyone who might have attempted the same guessing game for my selections by choosing both eggs(!) AND fish(!) with my meal. If only I had ordered the mushroom-heavy buckwheat crepes as well, my entire table might have passed out from the shock (or at the very least, examined the base of my skull for evidence of some type of alien implantation). Alas, let us never assume I am always a creature of habit, too set in her ways to entertain the idea of trying new things. Despite my life-long hatred of eggs, I discovered last summer that Eggs Benedict is actually quite tasty, so I chose that over the fruit-topped waffles for my second course yesterday. And for my third course, I bypassed the safe-sounding spring vegetable risotto and went out on a limb and ordered the pan-seared skate wing instead. Skate is a fish, in case like me, you didn't know that. And no, fish don't have wings, but apparently skate is a member of the ray family, so essentially I ate something akin to the wing-like fin of a stingray or manta ray for brunch. According to my friends, it was spectacular, but apparently eggs and skate in the same meal is a bit too far out of the comfort zone for me, because for the rest of the day, my stomach felt a bit off. You know, sort of like I'd just eaten runny egg yolk and rubbery manta ray. No long-term harm done, of course. We'll call it a learning experience. Yesterday I learned I don't like skate wings. Knowledge is power, friends.

All that said, for the most part, our entire brunch was delicious, and I really should revisit Vincent (A RESTAURANT!) for their much-hyped happy hour sometime soon.

A few hours after brunch, I was off to the Varsity Theater to cap off the final part of my three-concert week. Both Lily Allen and Mates of State put on an excellent show, by the way. I still sort of can't believe the latter played to a sold-out crowd in a respectably sized venue. I am about to sound like one of those high and mighty music fans who says "Well I saw Nirvana back when they opened for... [whoever Nirvana opened for when no one had heard of them yet]" (See? Totally not that kind of music snob at all. And yet...) The first time I saw Mates of State was over another Easter weekend, probably close to ten years ago now. I'd made plans to go out with my friend Kristina that Saturday evening. If I remember correctly, we were headed to First Avenue for a Mason Jennings show. (Mason Jennings, by the way, married a girl who was at several of the same parties I attended my senior year of high school. That would be a more impressive bit of trivia if it were Mason himself and not his now wife, or if there were actually any chance whatsoever that said wife might actually remember who I am, and yet for some reason I bring it up anyway.) We were headed to see Mason Jennings in First Avenue's main room, but the band playing later in the much smaller adjacent 7th Street Entry was one Kristina had heard on a new music sampler that came with a magazine she subscribed to at the time, and she decided that for an extra five bucks, we should check out that show while we were there as well.

I remember an inordinate number of strange details from that evening. I remember Kristina bargaining with the door man, who insisted we were not allowed to leave and re-enter once we'd paid, and yet who let us leave for an hour to visit The Saloon anyway. The Saloon is a gay bar, for those of you not in the Twin Cities and therefore not aware, and I remember that while at The Saloon, we saw a promotional performance by the Twin Cities Gay Men's Chorus of their newest production, which was an all-Abba review. I also remember using The Saloon's computers and free Internet access to drunk-email the friend who would later become my boyfriend, because I thought he would find the whole evening entirely amusing. And after we'd done all of that (and likely also used the completely empty women's restroom at the gay bar), we went back to the 7th Street Entry, where we saw Mates of State perform in a room barely larger than my living room, to a crowd of fewer than 30 people. They were good, and I wondered if I'd ever hear of them again, and lo, here I am, years later, spending another Easter weekend with the Mates of State, but doing so with a whole lot more company than last time. Also, doing so entirely more sober than last time, as one more thing I remember about that evening was crashing on Kristina's futon and waking up on Easter Sunday very glad I didn't have to rally myself off to church with my family that day.

Another thing I remember about that Easter Saturday so many years ago is that I received a birthday gift from Kristina that night. She bought me a house plant that, in the tipsy ridiculousness that followed three gin and tonics (which were also a new introduction to me that night--I insisted that gin tasted like pine needles, and Kristina insisted that I give it a chance anyway), we decided should be named Menos. Menos. As in, the Spanish word for "minus," which I believe came up only because Kristina asked me what time it was, and for some reason, I decided to answer her in Spanish. "Son las diez menos quarto," I said. And suddenly, "Menos" was the funniest word in the world to her. "Menos! Menos!" she cried. "You should name your plant Menos!" And so I did. And because not too long after that, Kristina moved away and essentially fell out of my life, that plant is still alive and growing atop a shelf in the corner of my kitchen today. I've realized, you see, that plants from friends who aren't particularly important to me are the only plants I can successfully keep alive. The peace lily from my good friends Dale and Jenny (the one that came with a Last Will and Testament, such is my reputation for bad luck with plants) died within a matter of weeks. The flowering plant my former good friend Julie gave me? It met a similar fate. But the mish-mosh of breeds in a planter from an old coworker of mine? (The strange many-in-one plant that I aptly named Clusterfuck?) That one is still thriving, as is Menos, even though sadly, my friendship with Kristina is not.

I had to mention Dale and Jenny by name in that last paragraph, by the way, because I sent Dale an email last week, wherein I was hesitant to rattle on about any stories from my life of late because I knew there was a chance he'd already read those stories himself. I don't know how regularly he checks in on my blog, but I know he stops by from time to time, and I wasn't sure how recently he'd done so. "I still read your blog," he said in his reply. "But mainly I'm just looking for stories about me or your dad's snack cabinet." No snack cabinet in this post, obviously, but at least you got your mention, Dale.

Speaking of Dale, he really should get his own blog, as I'm certain he has ample fodder for it at home. The other day, his two-year-old apparently proclaimed, "I don't wanna be a robot!" That's a story I'd want to hear the rest of; wouldn't you?

This charming man

2009-04-08T21:38:00.006-05:00

It's been a while since I started a post with, "Woah, has it been a week already?" So. Woah. Has it been a week already? Perhaps I have been super busy lately. I suspect not, however. No, on the contrary, it has been one of those weeks where, despite the fact that no one would ever mistake me for a sci-fi buff, I am convinced I am going through time warps repeatedly at both mundane and inopportune times. Some houses have mice; mine has wormholes. Given my irrational fear of any critter bigger than my thumbnail, I suppose I'll take the wormholes, but it does make for some concern about early onset Alzheimers when someone asks, on a Monday morning, "So, how was your weekend?" and I actually have to stop and focus concentrated thought to remember exactly what my weekend entailed.

It's a bit late in the week for a weekend update, but just what did my weekend entail? Well, Friday night I went out for drinks with friends and discovered a happy hour deal that frankly I should have known about ages ago by now. $3.50 for TWO gin and tonics, and the bartender reimbursed me my two-dollar parking fee, too. Seriously--I handed her a meter receipt and she pulled two dollars from the till. I am considering going back and trying to trade in a dry cleaners receipt as well, but I think that may be pushing my luck just a wee bit. Also, dry cleaners receipt? Where did that come from? That particular train of thought would imply that I actually take my dry cleanables in for dry cleaning, rather than seemingly treating them as disposable items that just get tossed by the wayside when laundering is required. I vetoed a skirt at Target tonight primarily because I realized the multiple ruffles involved would be a pain in the arse to iron, so presumably I am maybe finally learning my lesson and taking garment care into account before purchasing, but that doesn't make the fact that I've had a pair of dry clean-only pants balled up in a pile at the base of my closet for the better part of a year any less ridiculous and shameful. Wait a minute. How did this post suddenly become all about laundry? Sorry about that. Moving on.

Saturday I met with a friend of a friend who did my astrological chart for me. That reading should perhaps warrant a post of its own, but instead, I will just try to summarize some of the take-away points, the first of which is that apparently there is great wealth in my future if I can just stop being such a damn Pisces and actually SWIM in the murky stream I'm floating in instead of just letting the stream carry me. Apparently I'm supposed to own my own business (or at least partner in one). It seems the planets say I have leadership and communication skills, and people will really listen to me, but I need to figure out just what sort of business would make me happily get out of bed in the morning to make those people listen to me. Frankly, when I get out of bed in the morning, what I'm usually thinking about is getting right back into bed for more sleep. Is there a business idea there? I'll have to think on that.

In that reading, I also learned that I'm best to stay away from Aquarius men, which is both a surprise and not a surprise to me. I realized a while ago that nearly every man who's held any significance in my life, relationship-wise, has a late January to mid-February birthday, and I've been wondering if that means I'm drawn to Aquarians for any valid reason or if, since none of those relationships have worked out, I should steer clear of Aquarians from now on. (In case you're keeping track? The Buddhist? An Aquarius. The newly divorced "One who I used to think was The One"? Aquarius. This guy? Aquarius. This one too? Aquarius. Seriously, if I put all of these guys in a room and tried to draw similarities, I'd be hard pressed to come up with many, but if you believe in this whole sun sign thing, perhaps there's something to it nonetheless.) In any case, my chart says the answer is the latter: Aquarius = NOT a good match for me. For me, apparently it's all about the Libras. Have I dated one single Libra yet? Not that I can recall. I guess I should add "When's your birthday?" to the litany of questions asked on a first date and cut to the chase on this matter from now on. Meanwhile, do you know any eligible Libras? If so, feel free to pass them along.

Let's see. What else have I been up to? Well, Monday night I saw Morrissey in concert, and it was a fine opener to what will be a three-concert week. It is April, you see, which means that the concert calendar for the next two months is jam-packed with acts who have shied away from the Minneapolis/St. Paul area all winter long. It's as though every manager and booking agent says, in mid-February, "Time to start planning this spring's dates. April? Yeah, it should be safe to go to Minneapolis by April. My client shouldn't freeze solid upon landing by then." If I had unlimited funds and unlimited energy, I would be attending no fewer than 17 concerts between now and the end of May. Since my budget is scant and my energy is constantly waning, however, I will instead be seeing only a few. Monday was Morrissey, which basically I had to attend almost as a way of tidying up some unfinished business from my youth. I never saw him in high school or college, you see. I had the chance to tag along with a group during my semester in Scotland, and oddly I've always sort of regretted not going. I like to survey the crowd at any show and determine the dominant demographic, and I was comforted to see that, at the State Theater Monday night, the demographic was, basically, me. Well, me and my friend Amy, who accompanied me, and hundreds of other thirtysomethings who we probably have more than a few things in common with, life history-wise. Morrissey put on a fine, high-energy show with a fine band of buff young boy toys in matching tight plaid shirts. I sort of think it's best I waited until now to see Morrissey live, because I doubt that in the 90s his shows had the same grandiose celebratory air they have now. Morrissey is a diva, no question about that. But by now, he has earned his diva status. He can prance around the stage with dramatic arm flourishes, telling the girl in the front row who cried, "I just love you unconditionally!" that, "unconditionally isn't quite enough" for him. Could he have gotten away with that in the 90s? Perhaps. But the arrogance seems somehow more charming and warranted now.

This weekend I'm off to see Lily Allen, as well as Mates of State (with featured opener Black Kids). In between those two shows, I'll be attending the fourth annual Easter Orphans and Heathens Brunch, wherein my friends and I who have no family in the Twin Cities (or who are, for one reason or another, not spending this religious holiday with family) gather together for conversation and daytime cocktails and gluttony. Easter is a bit late this year, and yet I sort of still can't believe it's upon us so soon. I've worked my way through a whole bag of Reeses Pieces candy-coated mini eggs, but I've yet to have a Cadbury Creme Egg, and as such, the season still feels a bit incomplete. I should probably remedy that before the Easter candy disappears entirely from the Target shelves. It's good to have goals and time lines, after all. I'm sure my astrological chart would agree.

This and That

2009-04-02T22:16:00.005-05:00

I think perhaps I've finally stepped out of the abyss I've been in recently. Whoo hoo to that; another funk passed (I hope). I haven't spontaneously broken into tears in well over a week now, which is solid progress given that for a while there, it seemed crying was becoming a new hobby for me. In fact, I don't think I cried at all last week, either, except when I heard Bob Mould's new song, I'm Sorry, Baby, But You Can't Stand in My Light Anymore. Those tears were totally justified, though. Have you heard that one yet? You can listen to it here. If you've ever likened yourself to a bit of a Wendy Darling, an unfortunate magnet for lost boys, I guarantee you too will feel a swift punch to your stomach when he gets to the line "I always find the broken ones. What does this say about me?" Maybe I'm the broken one indeed. Ouch. (Sidenote: You're not going to click that link, are you? Fine, but you totally should.)

On to things that do not make me cry (or rather, that do draw tears, but only tears of laughter)... This someecard is the funniest thing I have seen all week. Mind you, it is disturbing, but if you're the easily offended type you probably wouldn't be here, given all the shit ass motherfucker type language I've been tossing around lately. (If you are offended by that, I apologize. I'll try to reel it back in to the usual only occasional well placed "For fuck sake" again henceforth.)

In other news, remember that unfortunate incident a few weeks ago where Mr. I Make My Own Traffic Rules turned across my line of traffic and ended up with a sizable dent in his fancy silver Mustang? Our insurance company finally decided where to place blame, and the larger portion of it landed on his policy. Whew. He had a "witness" who claimed I ran a red light, but apparently when both drivers say the light was yellow, a supposed witness's word carries less weight. Nice try, lady. Perhaps you could just stay in your car and mind your own business next time.

Because it was only marginally my fault, I have to pay only $60 rather than my usual deductible, which is well worth it if you ask me. Perhaps it seems silly to replace the bumper on an eleven-year-old car, but on the off chance I actually attempt to sell or trade it in someday rather than driving it into the ground, I'll be much better off without the remains of at least three mishaps marring it. Still, because I am a Midwesterner, grounded in "Oh no, no; I don't want to be a bother" sensibilities (and because my latent Catholic guilt resurfaces whenever I feel I might be doing something the slightest bit shady), I was more than a bit paranoid when the insurance company's damage inspector came to verify the worthiness of my claim. I thought for sure he'd take one look and say, "Are you kidding me, lady? Your car is older than my third-grader, and that scrape over there was clearly the result of you misjudging the distance between your car and a giant retaining stone. We are NOT paying for this." In truth, there is a giant scrape where I misjudged the distance between my car and a retaining stone in the Crapplebee's parking lot, but is it my fault that fixing the damage that was part of this accident will conveniently fix that, too? Answer: it is not. It is a nifty bonus, though.

Let's see. I had other things I was going to tell you, but they seem now even less important than the last four paragraphs of things that were not particularly important. For instance, do you really want to hear about how I found a form on the Wendy's web site today that lets you invite a friend to meet you for a Frosty or a Garden Sensations salad? No, I'm guessing that won't be nearly as amusing to you as it was to me. Incidentally, Lara did not meet me at the designated Wendy's franchise after I sent her that message. What--ten minutes isn't enough notice for a Philadelphia girl to get to the St. Paul suburbs for lunch?

Likewise, you probably aren't particularly interested to know that I am sucking it up woefully in my recent Facebook Scrabble games, with the exception of the game Beej invited me and Aaron to join him in, wherein I used all my tiles and scored 70 points on my very first turn. Damn shame those boys have attention deficit disorder where Facebook Scrabble is concerned. One of my finest Scrabble moments may well be overshadowed by the shallow disappointment of an abandoned game.

But I said I wasn't going to tell you either of those mundane stories. Eh. I say a lot of things. Surely that's no surprise by now. Carry on.

There is a more informative and relevant URL I could use on that "Real Girl" link, but it would be a decidedly less safe for work one.

2009-03-31T22:01:00.006-05:00

More Facebook things, because seriously, there's just so much material to be found.

Thing the first: I am not going to take the "What type of cow are you?" quiz. I may have gotten sucked into "What is your best Zodiac match?" and "What TV show do you belong in?" but I have to draw the line somewhere, friends. Also, I have already taken the "Political Idealogy [sic]" quiz. My results probably even showed up in your news feed. I am not going to take it again. Please stop asking me.

Thing the second: Today, two of my friends became fans of Jews. There really is a Facebook fan group for everything. But those Jews, they're good people, no?

And I think that about catches you up on my Facebook activity for the day. Oh. Unless you want to hear about how I clicked "Ignore" on a friend request for the third time in a week and a half. I am getting extra devil-may-care with my wanton disregard for people's feelings, obviously. But seriously: the fact that you married a guy I went to high school with but whom I have not spoken to nor seen since high school is not enough of a reason for you to want to be electronically linked to me. It is most certainly not enough of a reason for me to want to be electronically linked to you. Here's a handy hint: If there is a chance that I am going to see your friend request and say out loud to my email screen, "Who the fuck is [insert name here]?" (and you have not even included a note to tell me who the fuck [insert name here] is), there is a very good chance I am going to click "Ignore." Call me crazy and closed minded that way. (Or, don't call me anything at all, because it's entirely possible I am giving all of this entirely too much thought.)

And while we are talking about things marginally related to that last post, would anyone else like to weigh in on the bangs suggestion raised by my anonymous commenter? It probably comes as no surprise that I considered posting a poll about this wholly unexpected issue to garner more scientific feedback, but then I realized that I really don't need to see those results. No matter how the responses panned out, I am not in the market for bangs at the moment. Perhaps I should have them, on account of my face shape or forehead size or my desire to look like Rory Gilmore circa season 7, but I have had bangs for much more of my life than I haven't, and I know I'm not interested in the upkeep right now. I am particularly not interested in bangs for the express purpose of looking older. Seriously, folks. I just turned 35, and I get carded only about one time in ten these days. Telling me I look too young is not exactly an insult in my mind. (Note to the anonymous commenter: I know it wasn't supposed to be an insult. I should clarify that it caught me off guard but didn't offend.)

In other news, my new (to me) laptop is working out quite well. My new favorite position to blog and read blogs is lounging on my couch, legs outstretched, computer on my lap. It is a little bit alarming to me how long I can sit in this same position without moving. I started to feel a bit cold tonight, and for the first time ever, I suddenly considered the fact that the Snuggie is maybe not such a ridiculous idea after all. But then I realized, hello, perhaps I should simply GET UP every now and then to ensure that blood is still moving to all parts of my body. Seriously, it's like I'm one of the former Earthlings on the hover track in Wall-E here. Thank god I don't have a robot to wait on me hand and foot or I might never leave my damn living room anymore.

That said, I did actually get some exercise before retiring to the couch this evening. Despite the fact that my hamstrings are still angry with me for revisiting an old The Firm tape I haven't done in years the other day, I decided to try a new Pilates band workout I bought on impulse at TJ Maxx tonight. So far, no additional pain has set in, but I suspect I won't actually feel any effects until tomorrow. Meanwhile, my bigger problem is this: I have washed my hands seven times since 7:30 this evening, and I still smell cheap rubber on them every time I lift my fingers towards my face. Tell me, does anyone else have any of these resistance band thingies? If so, tell me, will the rubbery scent subside in time, or am I destined to smell like I've just fondled a Real Girl every time I want to work my muscles without weights?

That may not be as important a question as the "bangs or no bangs" one, but it's the one I'm settling on in any case.

Facebook Things (Alternate title: Hi, I'm Judgy McJudgerson. And you are...?)

2009-03-30T20:15:00.005-05:00

I have gotten at least three comments in the past week regarding the giant margarita in my current Facebook profile picture. I don't know what all the fuss is about. The picture in question was taken in Mexico, after all, where margaritas are supposed to be as big as my head. One might argue that Mexico doesn't have to hold the patent on giant margaritas just because Mexico is where the tequila lives, but I'm trying to play by other people's rules here. People like the approximately 85% of my friend list whose profile picture features an infant or small child. I was actually thinking that perhaps I should borrow a baby for my next profile picture just to help me fit in a bit more with that crew. As it is, someone might erroneously believe that I am using tequila as a substitute for a baby. Actually, that would be a fine substitute if you ask me. Most days I would gladly take responsibility for tequila over responsibility for an infant, but I realize that's just me. I shared this train of thought with -R- a while back, and even though she does have her own baby (featured in her Facebook profile pic), she suggested that perhaps her next profile picture would be of her with a giant glass of wine. To which I, of course, replied, "Wine! Ah, yes. My FIRST-born child!" Someday perhaps I'll post a family picture of all three of us.
I think a particular high school acquaintance of mine has decided that Facebook's "What's on your mind?" prompt actually means "Precisely what's on your schedule today?" Every day he updates his status to say, "Chip is at work 7 am to 7 am, on the road 4 to midnight" or "Chip is at work 7 am to 7 am, on the road 3 to 11." I do not even know what this means except that if I wanted to rob his house, I'd have a pretty good shot at knowing when to best attempt that. And by "when," it seems I mean anytime, since he is apparently at work 24 hours every day. Incidentally, his name is not actually Chip. But "Chip" sounds just meathead enough to fit the person in question, and using "Chip" in place of his real name will prevent any of you from finding this particular person in my friends list and friending him yourself just to gain access to these riveting updates.
I have never yet created a Facebook event myself, so when I see invitations for various events, I can't be quite sure which information was entirely host-generated and which was selected from a drop-down list of default options. Is "Party - Night of Mayhem" a standard Facebook descriptor? I sort of hope it is. I also sort of want to use Facebook rather than Evite to invite friends to my next party (privacy and such be damned), because I sort of think perhaps there's not quite enough mayhem in my life. Night of mayhem. Doesn't that sound fun? Maybe not. Hmm.
I keep vowing never to click another silly quiz link that shows up in my news feed. In some foolish and gullible part of me, I would like to believe I might actually learn something interesting or insightful about myself from Facebook's "Who is your soul mate?" or "What color are you?" quiz, but in reality, any quiz that is riddled with spelling and grammar errors or asks me if I enjoy the smell of my own farts (no, really; that was on the "What alcohol are you?" quiz, and I refused to finish the remaining questions on the grounds of that one's ridiculousness) is probably not particularly legitimate. And yet? I keep clicking through, out of curiosity or self-inflicted punishment or simple boredom and lack of motivation to find anything better to do. Today, however, when a Facebook quiz asked me for my perfect choice on a first date and one of the multiple choice answers was "Olive Garden (or another nice place)," I became convinced once and for all that these Facebook quizzes are written by 13-year-olds. Don't get me wrong. I enjoy the $5 bottomless soup, salad, and breadsticks lunch as much as the next girl, but a bottomless soup bowl does not automatically equate to "nice place" in my mind. But then, I am the giant snob who laughed when the bartender at a supper club in my grandma's town pulled a bottle of "Mer-lott" off ice, so maybe I'm the one in the wrong.
Speaking of boredom and pointless curiosity, I've picked up a little hobby that I'm more than a bit ashamed to tell you about. Every few weeks, I like to pull up my ex-boyfriend's new ex-wife's Facebook profile. Once upon a time, I didn't let myself look at it because it only tortured me. Now that I don't give a damn about her, however, I find myself wholly amused by her profile, and viewing it is the sort of smug guilty pleasure that many of you look to reality shows on VH-1 or MTV to satisfy. It started when I realized that she and the man who I suspect was the reason her marriage ended were leaving each other inappropriately suggestive comments in what is essentially a public forum. Seriously, people, there was love poetry. BAD love poetry. The sort of love poetry found in 80s hair band lyrics. Come to think of it, it may have actually been 80s hair band lyrics, as the man in question is 16 years older than she is and was likely driving his mulleted self to Skid Row and Whitesnake concerts while she was playing with My Little Ponies and drinking out of a juice box. Now, however, it's not only the ex-wife and her new boyfriend whose wall posts I look forward to, but I find myself hoping to see an appearance from the ex-wife's friend "Hojanna" as well. I feel a little bit bad making fun of Hojanna, because it's entirely possible she may be "special" in the "air quotes around 'special'" way. Or maybe she is just a very bad speller. ("I saw your changed relationship statice," she wrote recently. "Whoes the new boe?") A very bad speller with a very bad picture. (Is it really possible that the best photo she could find of herself was one with a wide smile but her eyes fully closed?) A bad speller with a bad picture whose view of reality is maybe a little different from my own. ("I have a boyfriend, too!" she posted on the ex-wife's wall. "I met him on [meMarmony]. He lives in Ohio and we haven't met yet, but it's going really well.") Come on, now. Tell me you wouldn't click back on occasion for more of that comedy gold!

Tonight I'm gonna party like it's 2002

2009-03-26T21:26:00.002-05:00

OK people. On to some happier news. EXCITING news! Well, exciting for me, anyway. I can't claim it will be in any way noteworthy to you. Remember that aging desktop of mine? The one that gets upset with me and demands a rest if I dare to do two things at once (even though the second thing is often something no more complicated than turning on my printer)? That desktop is no longer my only means of accessing the Internet in my home! No, I also now have a new-to-me used laptop which, with the help of a very nice young woman in India, is now connected to my very own brand new wireless network. Yippee!

I was trying to decide from which room in my home I should celebrate by typing my very first wireless post when it occurred to me: I am wireless! I can type a little bit in EVERY room! I am coming to you right now from the comfy purple couch in my living room, but wait! ... Now I am in my KITCHEN!! Whee! Hold on, folks. Gimme a second here... Now I am in my bedroom! Whoo hoo! Oh, the freedom. I can even take you into the... Nope. I'll stop right there. I do have some boundaries, some lines I won't cross. Blogging in the bathroom seems a good one to keep solidly on the other side of that line. I DO look forward to blogging in my backyard come this spring and summer, though. Finally, my desire to be outside and my desire to waste time on the Internet do not have to feud with each other incompatibly! It really is a brave new world; is it not?

I do realize, of course, that this magical new life I'm living is one the rest of you took for granted five years ago already, but I am a minimalistic, baby steps kind of girl. I still have a paper checkbook register, remember? Still tape shows on a VCR. I didn't ditch the rabbit ears and pony up for cable until 2006, and my move from dial-up to high-speed came AFTER that. Maybe by the end of the next decade I will finally trade my land line and prepaid cell phone for a mobile phone with Internet access. Let's not get too ahead of ourselves, though. This Pioneer Days life I'm living, I like to think it has its own quaint charms.

I should note that the laptop came thanks to my pal Steve, who... oh my word; for crap's sake, was he really not in my sidebar all this time? Sorry, Steve. Totally an oversight, I'm sure, which I shall blame on the fact that I routinely forget I even have a sidebar (cases in point: I finished "Persuasion" nearly a week ago, and the same not-so-recent search activity has probably been in that box almost since Christmas) and on the fact that you, Steve, do not update very frequently, and I suspect that every time I thought to add you, I probably assumed, "Huh. Maybe he's quit blogging now."

ANYWAY... Steve! Steve is even more proof that the Internet really is an amazing, amazing place full of all manner of fantastic and helpful folks, because he read about my computer woes and subsequently secured me a used laptop from his office and shipped it off to me. Seriously. I have a new (to me) laptop all because some nice guy out in California found my silly blog and forged a friendship based on words on screen, photos on Flickr, and random nonsense on Facebook. What was that I was saying about a crazy brave new world? It doesn't apply just to wireless connections, obviously. Anyway, thank you, Steve. Thank you for protecting my sanity by assuaging my techno-rage, for keeping me from taking my old desktop and playing out a scene not unlike the fax machine assault segment in Office Space. Ah. Deep breaths. It'll all be OK.

Of course, with the Internet at my easy access anywhere and any time, I may never actually read another book ever again. Jane Austen, I hope you're comfy over in that sidebar spot there. You might be sitting there a while.

The rest of the story, because I promised it to you. But then, back to our regularly scheduled frivolity, I hope.

2009-03-23T20:11:00.012-05:00

All right; I owe you an update. I just wish I could decide how many words and how much energy to devote to said update. If you are on the Stefanie Says distribution list, you already read the whole sordid story last Friday, in the latest email blast. I'm kidding, of course. There is no such distribution list. I did, however, send a very long, very angry message to several friends detailing the whole ordeal. Seriously, people, it was so long, it could have been divvied into chapters. At the very least, there should have been headings and subheadings. Girl obviously had a whole lot on her mind, and apparently decided she simply needed to let it OUT.

Last Friday, I was so hurt and so angry, I wanted to tell all of you publicly on the Internet that The Buddhist's real name is Jimmy ______, and that now that he is partially employed again, you can perhaps find him at the __________ ______ store on ________. Also, that he is being kicked out of the Buddhist Center (for failure to pay rent and other transgressions) and is now staying at his new girlfriend's house, and that her name is _____ ____, and she lives at ____ ______ ___ in Minneapolis.

That's right, I said new girlfriend. Guess that explains the vanishing act, eh?

Except that it doesn't, of course. The fact that he apparently met someone far more fabulous (or possibly, far more dysfunctional) than I during the four freaking days that I was out of the country last month doesn't actually justify disappearing on me five days after that with no explanation or notice. I can only assume even The Buddhist himself knows that kind of jackassery was unjustified, as he had almost nothing to say for himself when we finally talked last week.

Did I mention that if I tell this story, there will likely be swearing? If I tell this story, there will likely be swearing. I'm sorry; it's all good and fine to be one of those graceful, even-keeled people who feel they can express themselves far more eloquently and dignified-like without resorting to profanity. I am not one of those people, for sometimes a well placed "Jackass fucker shithead" seems entirely more than apropos to me.

I didn't actually call him a jackass fucker shithead. I did, however, call him an asshole. To his face. Which is something I don't think I've ever done to anyone before. And the fact that I'm starting to feel just a teensy bit guilty about that makes me wonder if perhaps my anger is possibly cooling just a tad. And then I remind myself that The Buddhist is, in fact, an asshole (and a liar and a player and a flake, all of which I also called him)--or at least, has been insofar as I have been privy to see--and as such, maybe I should allow myself the luxury of not feeling guilty at all.

Six paragraphs in and still no real story. Clearly this post is turning out to be just as to-the-point and efficient as that email was. Good work, Stef.

Actually, the full story doesn't even really matter, I suppose. The short of it is that he met someone else at a party--a party I can only assume I would have been at with him, had I not been partaking in forced socialization with my coworkers that particular weekend. He met her, and he apparently fell head-over-heels into some instantaneous relationship with her, and saw no reason to tie up any loose ends or keep any promises upon doing so. It was convenient timing, given that his fellow Buddhists held an intervention of sorts that same week, which apparently culminated in him being asked to leave the house in light of his not paying rent for the past two months, owing nearly everyone there money, and abandoning the meditation practice that bound him to the group and also grounded and centered him in an obviously important and useful way. I can only assume the new girl was happy to take him in, given that her previous boyfriend apparently moved out mere days before she met Jimmy. Perhaps they are perfect for each other. Neediness and codependence is a recipe for relationship success, is it not? I expect I'll be able to find their registry at Crate & Barrel any day now, no?

I didn't find any of this out from Jimmy himself, of course. No, all of this information came courtesy of a friend and roommate of his who was kind enough to fill me in when she realized he hadn't, despite him specifically telling her not to. She offered to meet me for drinks to lend some insight, and as luck or misfortune had it, Jimmy himself decided to get a drink at that very same bar the same evening. It shouldn't have been a surprise, given that it's a bar where he is so much a regular, his Catch.mom profile actually suggests that anyone interested in meeting him might find him there. He hadn't gone in weeks, though, according to his friend and roommate. "He won't be there," she assured me.

He was there, of course, as was his new girlfriend. When he saw me, he was surprisingly unfazed. In fact, after telling me that our relationship was "absolutely" working for him and then subsequently vanishing on me a week later, his only words to me that night (after a chipper "Hi guys") were, "Happy birthday!" Happy birthday. Not on my actual birthday, even, (on my actual birthday he was still AWOL) but on the day after. Happy birthday. I've decided that this shall be the new phrase of choice in any situation where I am in any way tongue-tied, out of line, or wrong. No need for discussion, apologies, or the like. Just "Happy birthday!" It's appropriate in any number of awkward situations. Try it yourself the next time you've been a total ass to someone you know and have claimed to care about.

We talked for a while. Or rather, *I* talked. He said nearly nothing. When I replay those several minutes in my head, I still can't believe he looked at me as blank-faced and expressionless as he did. I may have actually said at one point, "Have you lost your soul??" It was maddening and baffling. I couldn't believe I was looking at the same person who kissed me in my kitchen as he left just a few weeks ago. I don't know what happened to him. I don't know where the Jimmy I knew (or thought I knew) went. It was almost eerie, frankly. Something is going on with him. Something besides a new girlfriend. But obviously I'm not going to be the one still around to find out what.

From everyone I've told this story to, the reaction has been the same. I dodged a bullet. I'm better off without him. I'm too good for him. And while I know they're right, none of those words really help. If I'm better off without him, why am I so hurt and angry that it ended this way? If he's not good enough for me, why was he the one who deserted me, instead of the other way around? He's the loser, and yet, he had two women willing to be with him at the same time. How is that in any way fair or sensical? None of these are new questions, of course. But that doesn't make them any less maddening.

It sounds so ridiculous now, but I thought we had a connection. I thought we had chemistry. I wanted to believe all the wonderful things he said. I wanted to believe he'd actually grown up a lot since we knew each other last. That I was apparently wrong about all of that makes me lose hope and distrust my instincts. More importantly, though, it makes me want to retract every fond thing I ever wrote about him--every past entry where I mentioned his name (not just since January, but in the four years prior). I want to insert an "edited to add..." note on the posts where I said we should have met five or ten years later to say, "WRONG! Once a flake, always a flake, my friend."

I've done a lot of dating, as anyone who's read this blog for very long knows. A lot. Both the upside and the downside to all that dating is that it's hardened and desensitized me a bit. I don't get easily invested. It takes more to get to me. Small transgressions don't bother me much; I've grown to expect them, in fact. That may make it harder for me to let any right guy in and past the shell, but it protects me from a lot of needless "But why didn't he call?" cries as well. The bigger transgressions, though? The ones that come after I have let someone in? Those hurt more each time. The cumulative effect is wearying. Each chink in the armor comes closer to totally destroying it and breaking me. I grow more jaded, more cynical, more slow to trust. I've become a fucking movie/sitcom cliche.

I honestly don't mind being alone. I'm used to it. I'm good at it. Being alone I can deal with. Being hurt and disappointed is what I'm tired of.

This is quickly taking a direction I didn't mean to turn, so I'll wrap this up before I peer any deeper into the damn Bell Jar.

I started this post two days ago, and I actually almost deleted nearly all of it tonight. I don't want to think about this anymore. I finally know what happened, which means I can stop wondering if there was some legitimate reason he vanished on me (something of the head injury or life's rock bottom variety) or if he honestly did just flake out on me with total careless disregard. Now that I know it was the latter, I can be angry and feel justified in the anger. The anger will eventually lift and I'll move on. The wondering would have nagged at me for life.

Friday night I did the crazy person inside myself a favor. I went to Jimmy's Facebook profile and clicked the "Remove from Friends" link. It's the first time I've ever clicked that link, and part of me wondered if it was too hasty. Once it's done, it can't be undone, and maybe somewhere down the line, I'll want to torture myself by spying on his life without me. I'd like to think I'm the grown-up in this situation, though, and letting him disappear seemed like the far more grown-up (and sane) thing to do. It was almost liberating. "Remove from Friends." Gone. Now if only there were a "Remove from Memory" link as well.

Is this what blogging in a third world country is like?

2009-03-22T22:16:00.008-05:00

It is no longer my birthday, obviously, so I'd really best post something new, hadn't I? Unfortunately, I just spent well over an hour completing a handful of simple Internet-related tasks that should have taken a mere few minutes, if my computer weren't older than my blog (which just turned four a few days ago, in case you want to bake a belated cake for Stefanie Says as well), and apparently the effort involved in those very strenuous commands was too much for this aging Dell; it's now insisting upon a one-minute rest after nearly every click or keystroke. I waited a full thirty seconds for the blinking cursor to return after typing that last sentence. Friends, I may be content to be old school a good majority of the time (what with my land line and my paper checkbook register and my still-in-use VHS recorder), but frankly, this is no way to live.

I do have stories to tell you... or rather, a story, but that particular story incites enough rage all on its own without my agitation at my inferior in-home technology heightening my ire. Hence, the story will have to wait. This, meanwhile, is just a pointless interim post--a courtesy, "I'm still alive" note so you don't fear that I've gone the way of The Buddhist and simply vanished without warning. The Buddhist is very much alive, by the way, and, as it turns out, very much worthy of all the kneecap-bashing threats generated in the comments on that post. More on that later; I promise.

I'm well aware it's almost rude of me to type that much without continuing, but seriously, it just took me a full six minutes to create that last hyperlink and type the two sentences that followed it, and it wasn't because I was editing and re-editing to fine-tune my thoughts. No, this computer is clearly crying for some shut-eye, and in the spirit of "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em," I guess it's the same for me.

Meanwhile, I hope you all had a lovely weekend. I had a German dinner at a Spanish movie night, held a preemie who is so tiny, I'm pretty sure the Chipotle burrito I had last week weighed more than her, and celebrated the first Sunday of spring by not leaving my house all damn day.

What about you?

Katie Holmes is doing it, so it MUST be all the rage.

2009-03-18T08:00:00.001-05:00

All right. Let's change the subject here. The post I wrote Monday night was a story I didn't think I could get away with not telling, but I still wanted to delete every paragraph immediately after typing it, and hence, I don't want to leave it in top position for too long. Thank you all for your supportive comments on it, however. I still feel like crap, but it does help in some small strange way to know I have a tiny but determined army willing to break someone's kneecaps if I only say the word. Well, if I say the word and maybe buy everyone a plane ticket. Whatever; solidarity isn't always about details.

In other news, today is my birthday. I sort of want to quietly ignore that, such is my lack of excitement about adding another year to my age. Is it me, or does 35 somehow sound significantly older than 34? Maybe it's that at 35, I can no longer claim to be in my early 30s. I'm solidly in the mid- years at this point, and the way math works, if you round up, I'm nearly 40 now. Of course, ten years ago I was probably equally freaked about 25, and ten years from now, 35 will probably feel pretty damn young. This is quickly turning into the most pointless paragraph I have typed in recent memory, so I'll stop my whining henceforth.

The good news is that the small spattering of snow we got last week apparently counts as my birthday blizzard this year, so for once I will neither be shoveling on my birthday nor fielding messages from friends claiming they can't make my birthday gathering due to a storm. And if all of said friends read my Facebook status over the weekend, I expect to receive no fewer than nine can openers at my party this evening--can openers that hopefully will be accompanied by Target gift receipts so I can trade the extras in for another cute fake leather handbag instead.

I kid, I kid. If you are coming to my party this evening, I require no presents at all. I will require cake, however, so hopefully at least one of you is on that. (Again, not serious. Please just show up, OK? Thank you.)

Speaking of cake, I thought it might be fun to do another then/now comparison just like the '80/'08 one I posted last year. Unfortunately, I have no photos from my birthday in 1990 at my quick and convenient disposal. Frankly, it's just as well, as I can assure you I was not nearly as cute at 16 as I was ten years prior, and it's probably a toss-up whether my fashion sense was any better or worse at that point. If I did have a photo of me to mash into a '90/'09 combo, the '90 half would likely feature pegged jeans, a sweater from The Limited, a pouf of bangs, and blue eye liner. Coincidentally, I was considering wearing the exact same thing tonight.

And now, for a total pick-me-up post...

2009-03-16T22:32:00.005-05:00

First off, a public service message to my single friends out there. Have you ever had a Catch.mom subscription, but let it lapse (or set up a user name and password, but didn't actually pay for membership, thinking, "I'm just going to lurk and check things out for a little while first")? During that period of non-payment, have you gotten messages from Catch.mom excitedly telling you that someone winked at you(!), and encouraging you to pony up for membership to find out who? In case you have wondered if perhaps Catch.mom is messing with you, if perhaps NO ONE has winked at you, and these mysterious emails are just a way of suckering you over to the signup screen, YOU WOULD BE CORRECT! Do not fall for this trap, my friends.

I am feeling more than a bit jaded and beaten down at the moment, so before my account could auto-renew recently, I clicked through the four pages of hoops they make you jump through ("Are you SURE you want to cancel? No, are you really, REALLY sure you want to cancel? Perhaps you didn't understand the question. Do you really, really, REALLY want to cancel? You must be joking, right? Because NO ONE could possibly EVER want to leave..."), and I stopped my membership. But because I didn't want Mr. Perfect-for-Me stumbling across my profile immediately thereafter and sending me an impossibly clever, well-crafted message that I would actually never see, I also hid my profile so that no one browsing through the listings would be able to view me. And yet, THREE TIMES since I did this, I have gotten messages from Catch.mom, assuring me that Mr. Right is out there, and he's winked at and is waiting for me. Obviously I am unconvinced. If Mr. Perfect-for-Me has the techno-skills to find and view my invisible-to-him profile and discern a way to wink at me, then he should have the skills to locate me in person and woo me in real life, possibly plying me with free drinks. Until that happens, I'm just going to assume Catch.mom takes me for a sucker, and frankly I won't have some silly web site do that to me.

All this is a roundabout lead-in to the question I have been dodging for a while now. I have been vague-blogging recently, and I do apologize for that, mentioning a stupid boy and a metaphorical stomach ache, but not elaborating beyond that at all. I've talked about only one prospect recently, and hence, the question could of course be distilled simply to, "Hey Stef. What ever happened to The Buddhist?"

What ever happened to The Buddhist indeed. Unfortunately, I can distill it to an equally simple answer. I have no fucking idea, to be frank. The Buddhist has, as far as I can tell, completely vanished on me.

I could tell you the long version or the short version of this story. The long version is fraught with idle details and personal commentary, so perhaps the short, "just the facts" version is the one you'd rather hear from me. The facts are thus. I had my doubts. I knew The Buddhist was in a not-so-great place personally and professionally right now. He lost his job the week we reconnected. His finances are a mess. But I honestly thought he had grown up a lot emotionally since we'd last met. I wanted to believe our paths crossed again for a reason. I wanted to believe maybe it was supposed to work this time. There were red flags just like there were eight years ago. But along with those red flags, there were compliments and glimmers of hope. He used the words "relationship" and "girlfriend" in near-direct allusion to me. He gave me the key-code to his house. He told me to remember what kind of cake I baked for his birthday, because he'd want the same cake again next year. We talked about how the last time we dated, he didn't break up with me when he started feeling freaked out about the status of us; he just grew more distant and flakey until it forced me to break up with him. We talked about that, and he looked me in the eyes and said, in all earnestness, "I promise I won't do that this time. I promise that if this isn't working for me, I will tell you it's not working for me. I promise I won't do that to you again." He told me that, and I followed it, of course, by asking, "So... is this working for you?" and he answered, "Absolutely." And a week later, he vanished with no explanation or warning. And I remain hurt and baffled by it.

Without going into too much detail, I can think of at least two semi-valid (in his mind) reasons he might have completely shut down and shut me out. Because I have an overactive imagination, I can think of at least 11 additional, near-ludicrous reasons he disappeared with no notice. But none of those reasons justify the complete and total vanishing act. None of those reasons keep me from wanting to punch him in the stomach should I ever see him again. I say this, and yet, I know this idiot has some hold on me. I am a smart girl, and yet, I still want to hear from him. I want an explanation. And somewhere, in some shameful, Jerry Springer Guest Candidate part of me that I wouldn't admit if I hadn't just finished off the rest of the sangria I made for a friend's brunch yesterday, I actually want to believe we still have a chance.

What that is about I have no idea. When did I become an "I sure know how to pick 'em" kind of girl? Did I tell you that The Traffic Engineer contacted me yet again not so long ago? The Traffic Engineer, who is a perfectly nice man who unfortunately does nothing for me. A man who I had a completely filters-off dinner with two months ago, in which I sighed about my recent (at the time) "best date of '08" disappointment and he gingerly countered by asking if perhaps I'd considered the possibility that I might be too picky. I was not in top form on that non-date. I didn't care what he thought of me, because nice as he is, I thought little of him. And yet, a month and a half later, in comes another message from the man, asking if I'd perhaps like to see another movie together. Maybe The Traffic Engineer is a prideless loser. The more time passes, the more I think that's probably the case. Or maybe he's just a nice guy beaten down by dating just like I am. It's unfortunate I can't muster any interest in him whatsoever. No, instead I'm crying over some apparently fake Buddhist who should be concerned about karmic consequences and yet who's treated me with more disregard than any idiot since my 25 and clueless days. Perhaps you have some insight on that, because I really can't explain it myself.

Maybe I'm supposed to meet The Buddhist again in another eight years. Maybe the third time is a charm. Wouldn't that be an even better Lifetime movie? Or maybe, as is more likely, I need to admit that I was wrong about him, that all that wondering over the years was for nothing and he has never particularly been worth my time. It'd be easier if it really were just that simple, wouldn't it?

What do Dexter, the Bible, and Library Boys have in common? Nothing, except they're all in this post.

2009-03-11T21:07:00.006-05:00

I know I'm really late to the bandwagon on this Dexter phenomenon, so maybe the rest of you can help me out on this. If I need to stop the DVD after every episode before the end credits music rolls and that creepy string part comes in... If watching the first season finale tonight got my heart rate up more noticeably than my 30 minutes on the elliptical earlier today... Basically, if I am a big old 'fraidy cat who can't believe she even started watching an entire series about a serial killer... well, should I even queue up the remaining seasons in my Netflix list? Given some of the decisions I've made in my life (dating ones, in particular), clearly I am some kind of masochist, so perhaps now that I've started I may as well proceed. But season one wrapped up so nicely--a neatly contained story all on its own. Maybe that's enough? It probably gets better, but does it also get creepier? I live alone, you see. And there is no boy here at the moment in whose armpit I can bury my face (which is the only way I got through the final scenes of The Ring, mind you). So... I'm uncertain. Advice (sans spoilers, please), anyone?

Moving on to things that are too ridiculous to scare me, do you remember when I took a stab at writing a script for the Angry Alien 30-Second Bunny Theater production of Twilight? (Do you also remember that somebody was supposed to remind me to go look for that production in a couple months? No? Hrm. Then perhaps that's why I had to remember to look for it myself today!) Anyway, it is there now! Whee! And shockingly, my version is not so far off from their end result. Go ahead and go watch it. I'll wait.

Good stuff, no? Yes, friends, the Internet is filled with all manner of wonderful things. Also, all manner of frighteningly hideous and laughable things... like these pants, which have showed up in a sidebar ad beside my email at least five times in the past two days. I know that supposedly Gmail targets the ads its users see based on the content of their messages. I use Yahoo, however, which I can only hope and assume is not so meddling or advanced, because while I have typed the words "Roller skating always = fun" in an email recently, I am quite certain I've typed nothing along the lines of "let's all zip our shiny pants up to our sternum and party like it's 1978." Seriously, we may not all agree on much, but can we all agree the shiny, skin-tight, high-waist disco pant is a terrible idea? I thought so. Thank you. Ah, American Apparel. The great unifier in its absurdity. Naturally, I would expect nothing less from the people who brought us the return of hypercolor and the brilliant skirt-as-dress plan. (Note: If you're clicking through on that last link, go right ahead and skip to #2 of that post.)

To prove that I do still leave my house on occasion for entertainment that isn't displayed on a screen, I should tell you that I went to the Central library last night to hear David Plotz talk about his new book, Good Book, based on the Slate series he wrote detailing the "bizarre, hilarious, disturbing, marvelous, and inspiring things [he] learned when [he] read every single word of the Bible." OK, that Slate series was housed on a screen, of course, but Plotz's appearance at the library wasn't, so the first sentence of this paragraph still stands. I haven't actually read the related Blogging the Bible series, but I very much enjoyed Plotz's talk. And now I am curious to read the Book of Ruth, which is, apparently, like a subcompact Jane Austen novel, a perfect story that encapsulates everything that matters in life and yet can be read in ten minutes flat. I'm also curious just what sort of jabs Elijah made to have Plotz deem him the original insult comic. Plotz's experiment in general is an intriguing and tempting one, and maybe I should try it myself, but he also assured us that if we don't know the Bible very well, his book is a useful and entertaining substitute, so perhaps I'll just read his instead.

My library venture entertained me even before the main event got on stage, though. I seated myself directly behind and to the right of a quiet-looking, 30-ish nerd/hipster hybrid with short dark hair, a scruffy beard, and black-rimmed glasses. He scribbled something in his Moleskine, and a few minutes later, looked up and then shifted himself to let another library patron slide past him into the row. I looked at the two of them sitting on either side in front of me and had to stop myself from laughing out loud, wondering if either man realized they were, essentially, the exact same man. Short dark hair, scruffy beard, black-rimmed glasses. Charcoal pants. One in a muted-tone sweater, one in a similarly colored hoodie. Both jotting notes in tiny books. I surveyed the rest of the crowd. Quiet-looking, dark-haired, bespectacled men were everywhere. Not a one of them wearing a color more vibrant than maroon. A while ago, my friend Carrie wrote about searching for Cafe Boy. I didn't realize Library Lecture Boy was just as specific a type. Usually, he is even my type (minus the quiet part, I suppose, though in a library, quiet is to be expected, of course). In case you are wondering, though, no, I didn't actually talk to any of the Library Lecture Boys. It may have been a "kid in a candy store" sort of scenario, but this kid has a stomach ache, so I'm steering clear.

Range Rovin’ with the Cinema Stars

2009-03-09T22:07:00.005-05:00

Hey friends. Guess who wants to borrow my blog again? Nabbalicious! You know Nabbalicious, don't you? You may remember her from such guest posts as Radio on the TV and... Um, I guess just Radio on the TV? Did she really do only one guest post here at Stefanie Says? Dang, and I totally thought I had a perfect Troy McClure thing going on there.

ANYWAY, Nabbalicious has a story for you, and I am all about any way to bring Nabbalicious back to the Internets (not to mention all about free posts arriving magically and unexpectedly right in my Inbox). Take it away, Heather...
_________________________________

It seems like everyone in LA has a celebrity story, and I just think that's really unfair, because I work very hard for my celebrity sightings. Whenever I happen to be on Robinson (where the Ivy and other celeb-approved restaurants are), I keep my eyes out for them in their natural habitat. When we drive by any of the Coffee Beans in Hollywood, I silently chant, "Celebrities... celebrities... where are you..."

Darren often sighs and says, "I'm telling you. The minute you stop looking, you will see one."

"Yeah, yeah… where's Jennifer Aniston?"

In the hunt for my own celebrity encounter, I'm not sure what I'm looking for, exactly, because it's not like I haven't seen them. I saw Hank Azaria jogging in Central Park (he's not as lanky as you'd think), Judy Blume passed me on the street in New York. I saw the back of James Spader's head at an Andrew Bird show, and Sandra Oh walked by me at a Wilco show. I was nearly trampled by the paparazzi in their attempts to get a shot of Holly, one of Hugh Hefner's Bunnies.

But I never really felt like any of those encounters counted. The first four had to be pointed out to me, and the last one I just didn't give two shits about. I wanted my very own encounter. I wanted to be the one to recognize the celebrity, and I wanted to maybe even care a little bit who they were.

I'm also not sure why I care about spotting a celebrity to begin with. I guess I'm like my dog Nabby when she chases squirrels – what would I do if I actually got one? I'm not interested in talking to them. I certainly don't want an autograph. I guess it's like when you want to see a band live after you've heard their music – you want the whole experience. What are they like in person? Well, Us says they're Just Like Us™, but I'd rather find out for myself.

This weekend, it finally happened. Right next to Dominique Dunne's grave.

Me, Darren and my friend Melissa went to Westwood Village Cemetery this past Sunday afternoon to check out the graves of the famous people who are buried there. Westwood Village is easily my favorite cemetery of all the ones I've visited out here because what it lacks in easy-to-findness, it more than makes up for in the bonanza of dead celebrities it houses, including Bettie Page, Roy Orbison (although it's unmarked), Dean Martin, Brian Keith and, most famously, Marilyn Monroe. Westwood is also so tiny that in 90 minutes, you can see every grave in the place and a good third of them belong to industry people. And of those, another third have hilarious headstones.

Jack Lemmon's marker says simply:

Jack Lemmon

Merv Griffin's says "I will not be right back after this message."

Billy Wilder's says, "I'm a writer, but then, nobody's perfect."

So, Melissa and I were standing by Dunne's grave when a charcoal-colored Range Rover pulled up.

The man inside wearing shades asked us, "Excuse me. Do you know where Marilyn Monroe's grave is?"

Holy shit, I thought. That's Pauly Shore. That low, Jeff Spiccoli-like drawl is unmistakable.

"It's over that way," I gestured back and to my left.

And even though on the inside I was remembering how much I enjoyed "Son-In-Law" and "Encino Man" when I was in college (don't judge) (I also smoked a lot of pot then) (are the two related? Probably.), I didn't let on that I knew it was him or even cared. But that didn't stop him from pulling up part of his black jacket to conceal half of his face.

"Uhhh, who else is buried here?"

Melissa and I rattled off some names. "Jack Lemmon… Walter Mattheau… Merv Griffin… Rodney Dangerfield…"

"Rodney Dangerfield is here?!"

"Yep, right over there."

"Okay, great. Thanks."

Melissa looked at me after he pulled away and said, "That sounded a lot like Pauly Shore."

"It was Pauly Shore!"

Darren, who had been hanging back about 10 feet, started making his way toward us to tell us who we were talking to. "I know," I said before he could say anything. "That was Pauly Shore!" Because that's the other thing. When I do see a celebrity, I never, ever know it. I've probably seen dozens and dozens without ever having realized it. Los Angeles is tricky, too, because so many people act important and smug. How can I separate the someones from the no ones if they're all acting entitled?

And that was it. My very own celebrity encounter. I know it's not A-list, but I think the air of total absurdity about the whole thing more than makes up for it.

And now, if you're anything like me, when someone tells you that they met or saw or in any way interacted with a celebrity, you pepper them with questions. In anticipation of such questions, I'll ask and answer them for you.

Did he seem nice?

Eh. He seemed absolutely, perfectly neutral. I suppose "reserved" is the word I would use. Or stoned, if he still is into that sort of thing.

So, he didn't say "Thanks, Buuuuuddy!"

In a cemetery? That is so inappropriate.

Did he apologize for "Biodome"?

He did not.

Was he tall?

He was sitting in a car, so I have no idea. He did get out near the area where Jack/Walter/Rodney are buried, and although he was far-ish away, he didn't look particularly short or tall. He also didn't look fat or thin. Just fit.

How was he dressed?

Not like Pauly Shore, that's for sure. Dark pants, black top, black shades, short curly hair.

Was anyone with him?

See, I thought it was a small woman with black hair and shades. But Melissa thinks it might have been a kid, and Darren seems to be leaning toward this one, too. This person never got out of the car, so this question belongs to the ages.

He must be doing well if he's driving a Range Rover!

I know! That's totally what I said, too!

Come on, he's from LA, he's never been to Westwood Village before?

Hey, it seemed a little off to me, too, but you know how locals never take advantage of their area attractions. Ah those celebrities... they really are just like us.

(Note: Photographic evidence of Heather's Pauly Shore encounter is here. Click on through, please, as I am far too lazy to save and repost to embed the photo on this page. This is a free post for me, after all, and free posts should involve as little work as possible, don't you agree?)

_________________________________

Thanks, Heather! Remember, you can borrow my blog any time. Though I still think you should just re-start your own instead. (No? Well, I tried.)

This post may start with the usual complaints about Daylight Saving Time, but I promise it complains about several other things as well.

2009-03-08T17:11:00.005-05:00

Is it my imagination, or is this "Spring Forward" thing happening earlier than usual the past couple years? Don't answer that, actually. It is not my imagination. Starting Daylight Saving Time three weeks early was yet another brilliant idea from the Bush administration, and now as a result, every spring and fall when I make the tour of my house to reset my clocks, I say a special thank you to my least favorite ex-president as I reset the ONE clock that previously was smart enough to reset itself on its own. That would be my VCR's clock, which, while an ancient and archaic appliance according to most people, was actually advanced enough to know when Daylight Saving Time was supposed to start and end and adjusted its time automatically. That is, until George W. got his hands on it. (Daylight Saving Time, I mean. Not my VCR. Even now that he's out of office, I'm pretty sure Bush has better things to do than rifle through my humble home.) This may be the least of the legacies of the Bush presidency, but it's an especially annoying one to me. Grr.

Speaking of annoyances, I started my weekend off on a fantastic one by getting into a car accident on my way out to meet friends Friday night. I am fine, and I'm well aware that is the most important part, but it's unsettling anyway. The jerk who I hit was making a left turn at an intersection where I was proceeding straight from the oncoming line of traffic, and he claims that since the light was yellow, HE had the right of way. I don't actually remember learning that rule in driver's ed; I'm pretty sure that in lieu of a green arrow signal, the rule is always "Left turn must YIELD," but this guy also said it was legal for up to two cars to turn left on a red light if they don't have a chance to make their turn before the light changes, so clearly he's working off a different manual than the one I received. Let's just hope our insurance company goes by the same manual I'm familiar with and not the wacky "make your own rules" one that jackass seems to own.

On the up side, while the delusional jackass's fancy silver Mustang has a giant dent in its right side, my car sustained almost no damage at all. People may malign my aging Saturn, but I'm telling you, it may in fact be invincible. The bumper is clearly made of titanium, as it has sustained notable impact and force from other vehicles at least four times now and has nary a crack or scratch to show for it. My license plate is mangled, yes, and there's some silver paint from the jackass's side body mingling along with the red paint I still hadn't touched up from that mishap last summer. But actual damage? None, as far as my untrained eye can see. So... GO Saturn, I suppose. Could the Honda Civic a friend of mine recently told me I should be driving instead promise the same?

While I'm looking for silver linings, I could also mention that I finally figured out how to file my taxes almost for free this year, and I was happy to see that my refund was already in my bank account, mere days after clicking "Send return." I saw that, and I promptly did the least fun and most grown-up and responsible thing possible with it--I made a second payment to my credit card bill this month, and I paid my $596 medical bill in full. And then I transferred the rest to savings, because my savings account and I have had a rather unbalanced relationship lately, and I thought it would be nice to give a little for once instead of always being a "take, take, take" sort of girl.

The medical bill, by the way, was for an echocardiogram I had back in January, which I don't think I actually blogged about, despite the fact that a strangely flirtatious Middle Eastern cardio technician slathering goop on my chest and then fondling me with a plastic wand while making uncomfortable small talk would ordinarily spell prime blog fodder. If I worked for a larger company (or lived in Canada), that test would have cost me nothing, of course, but since I do not, $596 was my portion of the bill. Frankly, I am tired of all the criticisms about national health care. In this case, Socialism sounds like a fine plan if you ask me.

I did allow myself at least one small impulse purchase knowing that tax return was in my bank account, though. I've realized it might be time for a new handbag, but rather than let one of my experienced handbag mentors guide me to a proper all-leather investment with a three-digit price tag, I bought this one at Target instead. Carrie and Angela, I'm well aware that neither of you would approve of this PVC, polyester-lined purchase, but at a mere $19.99, I promise I'm not opposed to investing in something more appropriate under your guidance as well.

Let's see. What else have I been up to lately? Well, Tuesday I put on my civics nerd hat (kidding; I actually look terrible in hats) and went to my precinct caucus. I wasn't feeling committed and ambitious enough to volunteer as a Ward or City Convention delegate, but I did volunteer to help with some data entry work this weekend. My friends Amy and Mark, who live 12 blocks and one precinct away, are both delegates, and had I been in the same room as them, perhaps I would have stepped up to that plate as well. As it happened, the only one egging me on in my precinct room was an egg-shaped guy in an R.T. Rybak shirt, nodding and pointing at me in a strange but encouraging way as our caucus leader asked for delegates. Naturally I assumed he thought I was cute and wanted me to be a delegate simply so we'd find ourselves in the same room again sometime soon, but alas, it quickly occurred to me that he probably saw the Rybak sticker on my sweater and was just trying to load the delegation in his candidate's favor. Pish posh.

So I will not be attending this year's Ward 1 or City convention, but I did spend most of the day yesterday helping to enter caucus attendee details into the state voter database. A surprisingly small number turned out, and a few hours in, the woman in charge started slightly badmouthing a few other active party members for transgressions during the caucus. When I said goodbye that afternoon, she thanked me for my help and said that she hoped her catty talk didn't dissuade me from getting involved in additional future events. I didn't have the nerve to say, "Au contraire! If anything, cattiness makes me MORE inclined to participate!" but the sentiment was in my head nonetheless.

And I guess that's about all I've been up to lately. Please tell me that your weekend was more positively eventful than any of that.

Like Christmas for Nerds

2009-03-04T10:40:00.005-06:00

Hey friends. Do you know what day it is? It's National Grammar Day!

To be entirely honest, I didn't do anything particularly notable to celebrate this event last year, and yet, I feel it would be out of character for me not to point it out again this year anyway. Maybe I will actually pour myself a Grammartini when I get home. Maybe you should, too. I have no idea what makes a Grammartini any different from any other -tini, but here is the recipe, for what it's worth.

The Grammartini

Pour two-and-a-half ounces of gin, a half-ounce of dry vermouth, and several ice cubes into a martini shaker.
Shake. (The shaker—not your body or your dog’s paw.)
Strain into a chilled martini glass and garnish with an olive. If you must, use a lemon twist instead. The Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar likes olives, however. When life hands us lemons, we make lemonade.

Now go forth and spread the word. Remember, times are tight, but good grammar costs nothing!

The Airing of Grievances

2009-03-03T21:48:00.004-06:00

Otherwise known as an ANTI-Grace in Small Things list. Surely we're all allowed one once in a while, no?

I lost a pair of gloves today. And not just any gloves, but the gloves that are actually warm enough 90% of the time and that match all three of my winter coats. Also, the gloves I wasted an hour mending not too long ago.
I am pretty sure I lost them at McDonald's. I NEVER go to McDonald's, except at rest stops on the way to my parents' house. I am convinced that losing my gloves was punishment for giving in to a bacon and cheese biscuit craving directly after getting my teeth all smooth and sparkly clean at the dentist's office.
I had to go to the dentist this morning. This isn't really a grievance; it's a necessary evil that, in all honesty, isn't even really all that evil. Still, I can think of at least seventeen better ways to start the day.
The public parking lot a half-block from our office that serves as an overflow lot for us is closed for an unspecified length of time. I do not work in a neighborhood where I should have to hunt for street parking blocks away in order to go to work, and yet? That is exactly what I had to do this morning.
The entire surface area of my forehead has broken out in a way I have not seen since the days when I sprayed Rave Extra-Hold on it routinely to fix my pouf of bangs in place. (To clarify, that was twenty years ago. Just in case there was any question about that.) I am blaming this on the not-intended-for-use-on-face sunscreen I rubbed on my face my last day in Mexico, but really, shouldn't that be out of my skin's system by now?
That stupid boy? Still stupid, as far as I can tell.

That really wasn't such a long or horrible list, I suppose. I thought surely I had more grievances to air than that. We probably all know it's that last one that's compounding the attitude that made me compile the rest of them, though.

Tell me. What's eating YOU today?

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Edited to add...

OK, I barely had that published when I started to feel guilty about it. Please stop playing the world's tiniest violin for me, for I do realize that 1) I am ridiculously fortunate to have three winter coats, when some people have none; 2) and 3) I am fortunate to have the expendable cash to blow on McDonald's, as well as access to reasonably affordable dental care; 4) I am fortunate to have a job that requires me to find a parking spot in order to go it; and 5) No major breakouts since my adolescent years makes me more fortunate than Jessica Simpson and everyone else who's ever appeared in a Pro-Active commercial.

I'm still annoyed about #6, though. That's totally fair; is it not?

As if I'd ever really consider gnomes "optional"

2009-03-02T21:07:00.004-06:00

I've realized that ever since I started a blog, I almost never write in a private journal anymore. It's just as well, I suppose, because when I page back through the journals I've kept over the years, I find that nearly the only thing I ever wrote about was this boy or that boy and the sorts of emotional roller coasters each one put me through. It's valid in some way to get that out, I suppose. Perhaps it does help to make sense of things a bit, or if not that, at least to purge thoughts from such a place of immediacy in my head. And while it makes me feel like a vapid high schooler, I do think I'm probably not alone. I remember Liz Gilbert writing in Eat Pray Love about Cambodian refugees, who talked to the therapists they met with not about torture or starvation, but about relationships and lost loves. "This is what we are like," Gilbert said. "Collectively, as a species, this is our emotional landscape.... There are only two questions that human beings have ever fought over, all through history. How much do you love me? and Who's in charge? Everything else is somehow manageable."

Right now the only things I feel compelled to write about are things best kept to a personal journal, rather than one that anyone on the Internets can see. It's not even about privacy so much as about committing thoughts to finality. Typing something in a public forum makes it so; it's harder to change my mind the next day. The problem is, I don't even want to waste the pages of a private journal on the mess that's in my head, because the things I need to write about are things I already filled a full journal with eight years ago. The more things change, the more they stay the same, I suppose.

I hate when people vague-blog, so I'll stop that soon. My point, it seems, is I got nothin'. Or, nothing I'm ready to type about here just now.

Meanwhile, then, let's talk about books and movies, shall we? (Answer: we shall. What, you thought you had a say in this? Ha ha.)

Perhaps my favorite thing about a beach vacation is the luxury of spending essentially an entire day doing nothing except lounging in a chair reading a book. Yes, yes, I know I could do this at home as well; it's certainly not as if I do anything more productive than that every Saturday of my life. The point is, I don't do that. Instead, my reading is typically relegated to a half hour or less before bed, which is why it takes me a month or more to finish nearly any book I start. (Yes, even crazy Mormon teenaged vampire books. Which I am finally DONE with, by the way!) Not so with vacation reads, though! When I was in Mexico last week, I had the luxury of plowing through Who By Fire in its entirety in a day and a half, which is exactly how Lara (who originally told me about this book) would have wanted me to read it. Unfortunately, I didn't bring a highlighter or my Post-it flags to the beach chair, so while there were several passages I had to stop and read twice, pondering why I've never crafted a sentence quite so spot-on or beautiful, I can't actually share any of those passages with you right now. In fact, I don't think I'll even try to summarize just what it's about or why I enjoyed it, as Lara already covered that in her initial review and her follow-up interview with the author. That's right. Lara totally takes the train into The City and has wine with authors like it's no big whoop whatsoever. Then again, I have had wine with Lara. It is a good time, if you ask me. Who wouldn't want in on that? Anyway, thumbs up on Who By Fire is what I'm saying. Even though I'm saying it three months after this book made the rounds in the blog neighborhood.

While I'm recycling other people's reviews in place of my own, how about I let Metalia tell you what she thought of Revolutionary Road? It's fair, you see, because she covered pretty much every single comment my friends and I made over wine after our budget theater viewing of it last night, as well as a few comments we didn't. (Vinnie Delpino was in it? Really?? How did I miss that??)

Revolutionary Road was one of three movies I saw this weekend, actually, and while I didn't hate it, I can't decide if it was my least or second-least favorite of the three. It's a toss-up between that one and Lovely and Amazing, which Netflix assured me I would enjoy but which had me rolling my eyes and yelling at the TV for nearly the full hour and a half. Rotten Tomatoes' 85% "Fresh" rating will have you believe it is a "finely observed comedy," but I found very little to laugh at throughout. They also say it is a "smart and perceptive female character study," but I'd rather not study those particular characters. If I wanted to watch insecure, self-sabotaging women drive every person in their lives away from them, I would watch... Hmm... Actually, I don't know what I would watch. No one I know in real life actually lives their life as a constant stereotype of everything that is wrong with the way women interact with men (and with each other). Exactly where do these stereotypes come from, again?

And that brings us to Wristcutters: A Love Story, which was a strange bright spot by comparison, given that it's actually about an alternate universe inhabited solely by people who've killed themselves. (Cheery stuff, no? Maybe I'm not in a funk about some silly boy. Maybe it's my weekend's movie viewing I have to blame!) Anyway, it starred Patrick Fugit, who you probably remember from Almost Famous, and who was almost likable enough to make me forget I sort of hate Shannyn Sossamon. (All right; maybe I don't actually hate her. Maybe I just hate the impossible-to-remember way she spells her name and the fact that she named her son Audio Science. Yes, really.)

Except wait! I nearly forgot! I actually watched four movies this weekend. Saturday was the latest in the series of "Foreign Movie Night" gatherings my girlfriends and I have begun as a way to pretend we are getting some culture in lieu of forming a book club. (The real point of a book club is just to chat and drink wine, right? We decided we can do that just as easily at a foreign film night without any requisite prep work first.) Anyway, this month we decided to pull out a familiar favorite and re-watch Amelie. I'm sure you've likely all see it, but I nearly forgot how charming that film is. It is even more charming when you preface it with brie and prosciutto on baguettes and cheese-filled, berry-topped crepes. And more charming still when you bring your very own garden gnome as a centerpiece to set the scene for the evening. In fact, I recommend you re-watch Amelie at your earliest convenience, crepes and gnome optional.