Come oooooon, December 26! Hooray, sales. Mama needs a new pair of adidas superstars. I've run these suckers into the ground.

A few weeks ago I made a note about catalogs that I can't decipher...when I write these things I try to make them as chickenscratchy as I can so people don't read over my shoulder at work and ask me what I mean when I say things like "DP's hands are like hooks because of the CT, no muscles." Yeah, not interested in having that conversation. "See, I have a blog, and I make notes, and I noticed poor DP picks up heavy things more with momentum than strength and hands them to you with a swinging motion, kind of like a metal hook on the end of a chain, because the carpal tunnel in her wrists has damaged the muscles so that her arm motion more closely resembles the loading crane of a cargo ship from the 1890's.....I was going to write about it...why?...it's, uh...character development." In a blog. Online. Which is one of those explanations that has a twinge of deposed Nigerian prince to it.

My note says "catalogs discriminate DADT marriage laws periwinkle."

Christmas at the scrapyard was kind of fun. We only worked until 12, DP gave everybody cookies, all the workers were talking about their adorable kids, and we didn't have any difficult phone calls. I mean, no phone calls are truly difficult at the scrapyard, but relatively, they can be difficult. 45% of the phone calls are "What time are you open?" which we answer, 45% are "what's the price for _____?" which we transfer right up to the owner, and the difficult 10% are sales people trying to talk to someone who they can swindle. It is immediately apparent which phone calls are which the minute the person speaks:

1.

Jacky: Scrapyard?

person: what time you close?

Jacky: 5:00 today.

person: aight thanks. *click*

2.

Jacky: Scrapyard?

person: watchu payin' for copper?

Jacky: hold please. *transfers to someone else*

3.

Jacky: Scrapyard?

person: gooooooood morning how are you todaaaay!?

Jacky: I'm fine, how are you?

person: I'm doing just great, could be better, but you know how it is! HAHA

Really, salespeople would do much better if they would open with a monotone like everybody else in the world. "...hi, hello? Yeah, I got a couple of questions about metal." You'd go straight to the top. Difficult phone calls at my old job went a little something like, "I need you to send someone up here right away, my water spigot in my bathtub has fallen off and water is pouring out of the wall and all over my condo." What makes this particularly difficult? We weren't allowed to enter the units. I would have had to tell this person NO, and to call a plumber.

God, I'm so much happier.

NOW THAT DADT HAS BEEN REPEALED, CATALOGS ARE THE SECOND MOST OPENLY DISCRIMINATORY INSTITUTION BEHIND MARRIAGE LAWS! I opened up an L.L. Bean catalog a few weeks ago and still, catalogs are allowed to say periwinkle is for women only. How backward. "Don't none of you pink-lovin' men order these boots, because they are for WOMEN." "Don't get any wise ideas, thou of slight-build musculature, if you possess male genitalia this lavender parka is NOT FOR YOU." And if any of you ladies enjoy the black and olive color combo, get your windbreakers elsewhere. L.L. Bean will not accommodate you. Men Only. Seriously, catalogs. Women Only and Men Only are a thing of the past. Show me the progressive catalog that offers pink chucks in man sizes. Pink is manly now, right? That was a thing. That was a thing in the early 2000s. Men wearing pink. I think it came with the metrosexual craze, and I'm sorry, but whoever deemed proper hygiene to be a "craze" is probably the same group of people who think vaccinations cause autism.

I was reading a book a few months ago about a woman who has an autistic child, and about 40 pages in she has this emotional inner monologue about how "he was so different just a few weeks after his vaccinations," and I closed the book right there. Listen to Auntie J, kids. vaccinations are the reasons we no longer have polio and tuberculosis. Or, we no longer HAD those things. Thanks to this vaccines=autism crowd, this shit is back. The guy who first put forth the theory has REDACTED IT. He himself has said it has no credence of proof. Penicillin ain't a wonder drug anymore. Every bug that appears is stronger than its predecessors, that's the nature of evolution. Vaccinate, or welcome back the dark ages when half the population died of bubonic plague. You want the black death to come back? No? Vaccinate. I mean, the End of Days is coming, no doubt, but don't help it get here.

Sorry it had to get real there for a minute. Sometimes, you just gotta blog real. This is very serious business, keeping blogs. This is what the aliens are going to read after they invade and enslave us all, so please, everybody stop blogging about how much we all love bacon or they'll turn it into some kind of mind control breakfast.

Karaoke.

I love karaoke. It is the best night out. If you don't like karaoke you must be from one of those sheltered sects that don't allow any fun or happiness. No chocolate, no internet, no karaoke. Only God and butter churns.

The Japanese have such great ideas. They invented that baby onesie with mop heads on the knees and hand pads so your baby can sweep the floor while it's crawling around. Efficient, man. It's the name of the game. And how to you get drunk people drunker as quick as possible? Make them listen to drunk people singing. It's lucrative. Japan's economy can shatter to pieces like sugar glass, but they'll always have karaoke and people buying more and more alcohol, so they'll always recover the quickest. We should make karaoke a vital part of the recession recovery plan.

So every few weeks I actually run the karaoke DJ equipment at my friend L's mother's bar in Baltimore. It's really great. For one thing, I now get to call myself a DJ, which is the one thing I never, ever thought I'd be able to call myself. DJs are (to my white girl sensibilities) this entire counterculture of people wearing backwards hats and wifebeaters with enormous headphones only covering one ear and boxes and boxes of records from obscure nordic electronica bands under their turntables. I sit behind a computer and drag tracks like "I've got you under my skin" into Winamp.

Karaoke starts at 9 and at first if no one comes in I get to line up a playlist, which at first was really daunting but now it's great because I'm the only one controlling it (unlike a damn jukebox - you cannot trust people's taste anymore) so I pick all songs that I want to listen to, and sit there. Sometimes, the bartender brings me crab balls. On Saturday I had to make a playlist because there was only a bunch of kids eating dinner with their parents, so started picking songs and only realized halfway through a huge playlist that most of them were....lady singers! I unconsciously picked ladies before men! Success. I had to throw a few dudes in there, but I made them classics, like Paul Simon and Billy Joel and Elton John.

And since there were kids, I put a christmas carol in. Bad move: they ran over to me and asked to sing it, and then for 30 minutes a 9 year old boy and a 13 year old girl sang every goddamn christmas song I had. If there is anything worse than an old man drunk on nattybo singing My Way by Frank Sinatra, it's a bunch of kids with chicken wing breath singing rudolph the red nosed reindeer.

While all these carols were going on there was a family in the back eating quietly - a dad who got up to sing a Garth Brooks song, a mom with a lot of piercings, and a little, little boy who couldn't have been 2 yet, or maybe was just barely 2. He was definitely walking, because as soon as the christmas carol kids left he stood up on his chair all the way across the bar and started jabbering at me with his hands outstretched. There were words in there, but it was mostly "abasa! abasaba!" Then he got down on his chair and ran at top toddler speed, came behind by desk, and reached his hands out. I held out the mike - "Do you want this, buddy?" "AAAAAAH SING ABASABA!" and he snatched it, stood out where the singers stand, stared at the blank TV screen, and started singing into the microphone. Biggest smile.

His mom came up and asked if I had Take me out to the Ballgame, which I did -I put it on, the dad pulled the kid up into his lap and helped him hold the mike, and the kid sang every word, loud as hell, into that heavy microphone. "TA! ME OU TO A BAAAA GAAAAA, TA! ME OU TO A CRAAAAAAA, BUY ME A PEE NUH AA CRAAAAAKA JAH, AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH NEVA CUH BAH..." I about died. At the one! two! three strikes you're out! part, he threw his fingers up and counted and started pumping his fist in the air. His parents were singing, the bartender was singing, I was singing and clapping, it was awesome.

There are two doors to the bar and the family was on their way out the door farther from my table when the little kid broke free and ran back to me and began falling all over himself with thanks. "Thank you! sing it thank you! thank you sing it, ball game, thank you! sing it good!" And I told him what a wonderful job he did, and I was so happy to meet him. And then this two year old kid picked up my hand and kissed it, and ran back to his parents and left.

After that, you can pretty much handle anything that comes your way. I had planned to write about how insane the rest of the night was, about how one particularly wasted guy wouldn't answer to anything but his name backward, so when I'd call him up on the mike he would ignore me -

Jacky: ok, Timmy! Timmy, come on up. Hey, Timmy!...Ok, YMMIT.
Ymmit: Oh, is it my turn?
Jacky: Yeah, Ymmit.
Ymmit: I want to sing American Pie.

Then there was the guy who requested My Way by Frank Sinatra, but someone had already sang it earlier in the night, and he said "go ahead and put it on anyways. I'll sing it the right way." And then the guy who wanted to sing John and Yoko's War Is Over (So This is Christmas), and thank god I didn't have it.

But none of that seems to matter much after a baby kisses your hand after singing Take me out to the Ballgame.

Karaoke Slog.

I need to be updating more. At first my plan was to update every day, then that became not possible and I swore I'd update every other day, and now I'm updating randomly and without urgency. But I've been so beeeeeeesyyy!! So much to do. Been steadily packing for 3 weeks and want to make the transition from here to there as smooth as possible. I kind of like moving. It sucks and it's hard but I throw away SO MUCH triflin' garbage and organize so much more. I like lifting things and putting them in nice stacks to be simplistically moved around like big legos. I do have a lot of stuff, but I'm not asking for anybody's help in getting it together, so there!

I try to take notes every day about stuff I can write about in my BLOG. Blog, blog, blog. What a hideous word. Truncation of: web log - modernization of: captain's log. I like captain's log so much better. For one thing, it's way science-fictionier, and thus betterDON'TARGUE. In Star Trek all the captains keep captain's logs. Pirates keep captain's logs too, and I guess non-pirate ship captains keep captain's logs too, but who cares about them? Honestly. This is the internet. It's been nothing but pirates, ninjas, cats and pornography for 15 years. I prefer captain's log, but to truncate that to "slog" is even worse than blog. "-log" is just one of those icky hiccup words that don't sound good with any combination of sounds in front of it, unless those sounds are "chocolate yule." Back me up.

To call it a journal is so emo. I used to have a livejournal and oh, man, how I hated the sound of my own voice after I read it over a year later. Ouch. No wonder the really great writers are depressed. I'm mediocre at best, and I wanted to Van Gogh myself. Or Oedipus myself, since I was reading it. But then someone could strap me to a chair in a damp cellar and read it to me...I guess I'd need to Helen Keller myself. But what if someone taught me how to speak by signing letters into my hands and read me my livejournal that way? I'd have to Lavinia myself, too. (English majors, holla!)

What the hell was I talking about? Slog, blog, keeping notes. I tried to carry a notebook with me for a few days to try to write blog notes in that, but I realized I couldn't whip out a fancy-schmancy little journal and scribble a bunch of junk into it when I was supposed to be combing the POP for irrelevancies (scrapyard lingo - you wouldn't understand. Gotta be cool like me and work in a scrapyard.) So anyway, I fold a piece of white computer paper in half and have four sections of paper, front and back, to take notes on, so that's what I do. Not exactly glamorous, but it works. And my little piece of paper is telling me I now need to talk about karaoke like I'm supposed to.

But maybe I'll talk about karaoke tomorrow. It'll give me a reason to blog tomorrow and get back into it like I was supposed to be doing from the beginning. I have so much I need to write about. I worked for a year at a place that was like an oil spill of inspiration, equal parts prolific and deadly. I have stories about old people, about rich people, about poor people, about bosses, about co-workers who only speak spanish, about contractors, about electricians, about hirings and firings, about connivings and deception, all within the fascinating world of property management. Does anything sound so boring as property management? No. Nothing does. But once I recover from the trauma, I'll show you how not boring it really was, and why I'll never, ever, EVER live in a condominium unless people learn how to not be assholes, which I think we can all agree will never happen. Basically, I was the switchboard for every SINGLE individual's complaints against each other, from upper management to lower management to employees to residents to outside contractors. It was me. A human dumpster. I was a 512K modem and everyone was trying to log on at once. Does that make sense? If it doesn't, nobody tell me. Just pretend like I know what I'm talking about, so I can keep pretending I know enough about computers to keep my job.

Oh, big news: I GOTS KINDLE. And it is amazing. CS got it for me, and for us there is no sanctity in Christmas so we just gave each other our gifts a week ago. Couldn't wait. As of now I have downloaded 55 free books, all classics, and ohmygosh it's amazing. I have War and Peace, Moby Dick, Aristotle's Ethics, Origin of Species, Machiavelli's The Prince, and all those books that are for free on Amazon for Kindle because they are out of copyright so they are no longer anybody's property. Holy moly. Now, all the classic books I've always wanted to read are mine and I don't have to buy them or cart them around. I said I want interesting bookshelves and I still do, but really, who would choose to have a physical copy of War and Peace if they could have an electronic one stored with 54 other books on something with the size and heft of a child's dinner plate? From Kmart? (I went there.) The dinosaurs went extinct when an astronaut dropped War and Peace out the window and it slammed into Earth. True story. That's how big that damn book is.

I'm reading a book right now called Herland, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Required reading for any feminist. For anyone, I'd say. Not that I think her version of utopia is viable at all or even minutely possible, but to see a woman write (in 1915) about how women are defined as being not men is extremely interesting. And also to think about what women would be like if they were not exposed to men or anything man-like for 2,000 years is thought provoking. Go read it. GO DOWNLOAD IT FOR FREE TO YOUR KINDLE! Don't have a kindle? Bummersauce. Get your man to buy you one and download all that feminismy goodness.

I got him Donkey Kong Returns, or whatever that new Wii game is. He loves it and I love it too - I'm video game challenged. The stress of it is too much for me, but Donkey Kong is fabulous because people like me (or young children with no motor skills) can be Diddy Kong, who hops onto Donkey Kong's back and is then controlled by the person playing Donkey Kong! You're holding a controller, and you don't have to actually DO anything! It's a marvel. Why did no one think of this sooner? But the best part is this - if you shake the controller a little, Diddy Kong throws bananas at stuff. So you're riding along, doing all the jumpy, swingy stuff on Donkey Kong's dime, and then lo! a pinchy crabby thing! shake your controller and throw a banana at it! *gasp* you stunned it! And then Donkey Kong jumped on it and killed it!

CONGRATULATIONS. YOU ARE PLAYING VIDEO GAMES. Now go read a book on your kindle.

I love the future.

Bowling.

On the 8th, the scrapyard held the Christmas party at a bowling alley, and if it's possible to get drunk off a plate of nachos, I did it.

It was a lot of fun. I love bowling. I suck at it, but I love it. I used to be really good, I don't know what happened. I used to be good enough that I didn't even embarrass myself when I bowled with computer scientist (CS), and he even took bowling as a PE credit for college one summer. He took bowling and billiards - needed 2 PE classes to graduate! Why? What the hell? I needed a PE class too. I took self defense - it was a lot of rolling around on mats and meditation. Question: Why do we still do PE in college? Shouldn't college PE go the way of those manners/embroidery/pleasing-your-husband-after-a-long-day-at-the-office classes the womenfolk used to have to take? It's college. We GROWN. And half of us are doing college sports. Probably don't need to spend 3 hours a week playing kickball anymore. Especially when you're playing kickball with half your team hungover from last night's rager. So good for CS for taking bowling and billiards. If you're going to make me take PE I'm going to take the most ridiculous PE you offer, and really, you're practically asking for it by offering ping pong.

Where was I? Oh, yes. Being terrible at bowling. How terrible, you ask? Like, 38 pins terrible. That's right. I knocked down 38 pins, out of all those rolls, and one of them was a strike. How did I get a strike? I said I didn't used to suck so badly. It must have been one of those amnesiac clarity moments where you remember your name for a split second and then go back to forgetting that you killed somebody. Or pretending that you forgot you killed somebody. Either way, I don't trust amnesiacs.

But I got to hang out with DP, which was wonderful. We sucked at bowling together, but she has an excuse that I don't have - carpal tunnel and 8+years since the last time she bowled. Last time I went bowling was this summer, and she still beat me the first time. CS got to meet everyone though, and I got to meet some voices I only knew over the phone, and I got a fun new nickname at the office! Can you guess what it is?

38. They call me 38.

And I got some gift cards for being the worst bowler ever! They were pity gifts. I can't tell you want they are, because I'm re-gifting them. You'll know what they are if you are lucky enough to be the recipient. Or unlucky enough, depending on whether or not you're offended that I wasn't going to get you anything until I was handed some gift cards for free.

By the way, how do you tabulate bowling? What is the DEAL with those strikes and spares and extra roll at the end? You get three strikes in a row, your score stays hidden until you mess up, and all of a sudden you have a zillion points. Ridiculous. It's the same in football. Six points? Seven points? One point field goal? Two point field goal? Screw it. Scoring sucks. It breeds self esteem issues in people who are bad at sports. Or people who are bad at figuring out how you tally sports scores. And people like me who are bad at both would prefer to sit aside and overdose on bowling alley nachos than dive into the fray and emerge 45 minutes later with a nickname like 38.

I'm kind of bummed I was so terrible, even though the night was fun. My body disobeys my brain, and I hate it. I would get up there and say to myself, "ok, we know we're slinging our arm to the left and it's going straight to the gutter. So, let's straighten out the wrist this time." And I'd feel my wrist go straight and I'd aim for the arrows on the lane like you're supposed to, and the ball would go right to the gutter. CS would tell me I swung it left, and I KNEW I felt my arm practically bending itself to the right to send it a different direction. My mind is right there doing exactly what it's supposed to do but my appendages are total snot balls about it, like rebellious teenagers who turn up the My Chemical Romance too loud and write bad poetry while their parent (my brain) is screaming through the bedroom door about doing homework or some other totally lame shit.

I've always been that way, to my great shame. It must be so GREAT to be good at sports. I sucked at karate. I couldn't jump, I couldn't kick, my arms wouldn't do what they were supposed to do, but they fooled my brain into thinking everything was going great. It's only when I look at pictures or video of myself later that I realize how ridiculous I looked.

sigh.

I strained my ankle tendon the other day. I think it's the Achilles, if ancient greek artifacts are at all accurate. Far be it from me to check a medical text. Painted clay pots were good enough for my ancestors, dammit, and they're good enough for me. But all I did was stand on my tip toes to put something on a shelf and I felt it go rat-tat-tat-tat! and now it doesn't hurt and my foot motion capabilities are completely the same, but every now and then it shudders a little like it's having a bad memory. Both my knees make sandpaper noises in my ears when I go up stairs or crouch down, but I blame that on the karate and how I had to jump up and down and run around on a cement floor without shoes for 5 years. Right when my legs were growing the most, too. Bummer. That's gonna be some surgery in about 30 years.

I'll just have to console myself with being good at brain things. I'm very good at brain things. Like...like....um....math logic science history physics random, useless trivia. (The thing on the end of your shoelace is called an aglet.)

And reading. Music?

Know what I'm good at? Cooking. Planning on how to move from one house to the other, and packing up stuff. I'm good at budgeting. I'm good at making other people feel happy and whole. I'm caring! I'm punctual. You can trust me usually. Just don't ask me to split up a dinner check. Or figure out a bowling score.

Public Service Announcement.

Hey urr-body - my computer has been enlisted into homework service for at least the weekend, so the blogs will be coming later. School comes first!

Love,
Jacky

Navigation.

Yesterday I drove all over Annapolis, which was the USA's first capital city, and even though that posterity would be nice I'm glad they moved it to that half-breed swamp DC. Annapolis could not handle the nation's traffic and would sink into the Chesapeake. Although the old bars in downtown would probably still be open to service all the congressmen and senators who would stumble in after a particularly rigorous filibuster to drown their sorrows in liquor and complain about how hard their lives are to the less-than-minimum-wage beer wench as she refilled the pretzel bowl.

As I'm reading over that statement, I realize a particular descriptive phrase could be seen as bigoted because of the current demographic spread of DC. Allow me to remind my gentle readers that DC was created by pulling land from Virginia and Maryland, so it is a half-breed. Which is great, because if it mated with another city it would make a baby city with a more robust genetic code, and we need that kind of thing nowadays. Our cities are far too sickly, with their busted up roads and condemned buildings and lack of proper circulation. Lookin' at you, Baltimore.

DC It was also built over a swamp. These are facts. Ruminate upon their factness with a fine cabernet.

So I was driving around Annapolis after about 6 years of living away. I guess I've only been away for about 2, but 4 years of college can atrophy your geographic memory better than most hallucinogens. It's like you dump the old stuff to make room for the new. "So that's what stellar parallax is! Aaaaaand I have no idea where I live now." It really doesn't help that Annapolis is constantly under construction, and unlike other cities (ahem) it gets that shit taken care of. Every semester when I'd go back home I'd be confronted with some new traffic pattern that made no sense to me and screwed up my entire map of the city. And it's also constantly building new and taller buildings with new convoluted shopping centers. I think there used to be a law in Annapolis that you couldn't build over a certain height, and when you would drive there from Route 2 you could always see the white peaks of Suntrust Bank, which were designed to look like sails.

Now you see a huge apartment building that is only probably 1/10th sold because of the recession and were converted to rental apartments to avoid bankruptcy. Poor condo owners, who now find themselves surrounded by snotty 20somethings who only moved there to be within walking distance to all the bars in the shopping center below. I weep for the ladies who work in that office. They probably get 50 bitchy phone calls a day. There is nothing nastier than a bunch of half-rich people who are pissed about being upside-down in a condo surrounded by people who play Call of Duty on max volume and bring the party back to their place when Cadillac Ranch closes at 2.

So Annapolis' construction projects can eff off. I don't want to say I'm a bad driver because I think I'm pretty good, but I am a terrible navigator. I'm like an ant who gets the leaf dropped in its path. If you change how I'm supposed to get there, the entire map in my head erases and becomes an empty abyss of nothingness. I think it might be because I have such an awful time telling left and right. I can do it, but it takes me about 5 seconds longer than other people. It's the one thing that never clicked for me as a kid, so when I have no home base of reference and you change the flight plan it becomes empty infinity in all directions. Here is something that will help me out: If you are navigating for me, don't wait til we're right up on the turn and tell me to go right because I am going to either miss it or go left. You need to tell me on the street before so my brain has time to confer with itself and figure out what you're trying to tell me. It seems like for everyone else it's instant, just like thought or speaking. You say "go right," and all the little office workers in my brain throw their papers in the air and start rushing into other people's cubicles and punching them in the face and throwing rolling chairs out the windows. It's chaos.

In college when I was learning how to drive in Baltimore I had my friends tell me "this way" for turning right and "that way" for turning left. It worked much better. But driving in Baltimore is a whole other blog.

And telling me, "just go North" means NOTHING to me. When I go up a hill, feels like north. When I go down, feels like south. When I turn left it feels like West and when I go right it feels like East, so screw the compass.

I wish I was better at navigation. It's possible I'll be living in new places next year and would really prefer not to take four years to acclimate myself to the area. I don't want a GPS for a place I'm supposed to call home. Dad has a GPS that's supposed to be voice activated so you can do the hands-free driving thing while you're GPS'ing, which is a miserable failure whenever he tries to use it. He tries to tell it to find Annapolis and it sends him to Indianapolis. He wants to go home and instead goes to Rome, Texas. I want to be able to say oh, yeah, we're here and we need to go here, so we'll go this way. Like they did in the old days. Technology is becoming a handicap, kids! Hope you didn't toss your atlases, because when the End Times are here you're going to need them, and even then they might not be much help because of the disastrous state of the highways. All I can say is I hope it happens quick like that Nicholas Cage movie where the sun explodes and the aliens drop the kids off on the new planet. Although I bet they'd plan their cities poorly, too. So I'm pretty much stuck being a terrible driver no matter what planet I'm on. Stupid aliens. Take a few college grads and Ph.ds next time, you know, people who can repopulate the planet and rebuild it at the same time and don't have all that time-wasting puberty to go through. I volunteer - I'll be the griot. As long as I can bring a kindle with me I'll be able to bring at least 3,500 books. Sorry, guys, the holies ain't making the cut. Our new religion is Star Wars.

Ladies.

Today I went shopping with my friend H and I bought bins and sleeping bags. I bought the bins because I need to pack up my crap and I need sleeping bags for 5 year old boys. I'm not crazy about the design on them - it's this pixellated blue camouflage pattern and I kind of totally hate it when non-military people use or wear camo, but they are blue which is a calming color with good juju. And my other options were all that stupid kiddie design crap like Hannah Montana or Dora the Explorer or Cars with Tow Mater and Bonnie Hunt's sexy blue convertible car character grinnin' all over the place. Why Bonnie Hunt? Was she really the sexiest voice that movie could swing for their heroine? And do I remember correctly that her car was supposed to be owned by a lawyer? Am I making that up? Because I don't remember any people in that movie. And there were a lot of things that only people could make, like neon signs and buildings and stuff. All the cars must have killed the people. I'm not putting sleeping 5 year olds in zippered polyester covered in pictures of such dastardly villains, so I went with blue pixel camouflage.

I put a distress signal out on facebook that I wanted more lady vocalists on my iPod. Most of my music is dudes. That's cool, I like dudes, but I want to expand my horizons and I want to get into the female perspective on stuff. Most songs are about love (unless you are the Decemberists, in which case it's about ghosts and princesses and vendettas) and I feel like I'm neglecting 51% of the population's take on the subject. That's right, gentlemen - there's more of us than of you. Now if we could all figure out how to vote the same way we could run this joint.

I hate to say it, but in the past I have not enjoyed women's voices or their music or lyrics. I don't know why. I have preferred men's voices and music. I don't know if this is because I have been conditioned to like men's voices more, if it's because there are so many more men vocalists and bands out there in the genres I prefer, or if it's because I am attracted to men. I have a male friend who's name IS his initials so I can't really name him here, but he probably has more female vocalists in his music library than male vocalists, and his library is impressive indeed. When I last spoke to him I think he was up to 250 GB. Now it's probably more. I remember not even believing that there were enough women musicians (of our preferred genres) out there to fill up that many gigs. For shame, Jacky.

I remember asking him about his vast collection of lady singers and he said something to the tune of, "women's voices are my favorite instrument. I think it's because I'm attracted to women, but I prefer them." So maybe that's it. I think I've wanted to be sung to, and I've wanted to be sung to by a guy. I used to listen almost exclusively to musicals and they have the most wonderful love songs in musicals. Just amazing. And those songs are sung TO somebody, and aren't for a bunch of half-attentive gender-nonspecific people listening to the radio on their way to the grocery store. Because THOSE songs by women almost KILLED my ability to enjoy lady singers. Are you hearing me, Katy Perry? Faith Hill? LeAnn Rimes, Rihanna, Britney, Christina, Miley, Madonna(recent)? Yeah you, Sheryl Crow and Shania Twain, guilty. Taylor Swift...you're ok. And then gasbags like Heidi Montag tried to crowbar their way into a musical career...current pop-culture women singers do not have a terrifically impressive or illustrious curriculum vitae right now, and I just don't know where to go or how to look for the artists who perform in the styles and genres I like.

And damn, I loved those musicals. I had planned on being a musical pit-orchestra violinist from about ages 12 to 20, did you know? Because the music is so gorgeous. Musical love songs are meant to immerse all of your senses into the beauty of a perfect moment, and I know I have been completely sucked in by that. I think listening to musicals and hearing fantastic voices sing beautiful songs to enraptured lovers really shaped my tastes. I was young! And I had fantasies! And they involved handsome heroes confessing their love for me through song! And those feelings have hopped the fence and attached themselves to my current musical tastes today! Conversely, what women sang about in musicals sucked a little bit. They always got the "woman ballads," as my friend P says, which is a slow song about waiting for love or wishing for love or being confused my love or wanting to sacrifice everything for love or some other kind of melancholy boo-hoo shit. Not awesome. So I'd skip forward until Robert Goulet sang "If ever I would leave you" and imagine myself up on the balcony.

But now, I think what I have in my real life is a lot better than all those Handsome Hero Fantasies, and the thought of having men sing to me isn't nearly as wonderful as having one particular person give me a kiss goodnight. In fact, they're something I almost want to throw off myself, like training wheels - "well, don't need THESE stupid things anymore" - and I am aghast that women are so poorly represented in my music, which I listen to daily. Bad feminist! I realize I've almost cut myself off from a whole universe of expression, and it's one that I feel I should appreciate more because it springs from people who share a lot of what I am. And I KNOW they are out there, and I know they sing about awesome stuff in awesome ways, and I know I haven't found them only because I've been a lazy S.O.B in tracking them down, especially with such grand assets like le internet magnifique at my disposal. And seriously, after posting the query on facebook, I had about 30 suggestions in mere hours, most of which were FABULOUS.

So pretty soon I'm gonna be knee deep in lady voices. Next is to read more lady authors. Stand by, Facebook.

Cooking.

Yesterday I perfected the divine art of toffee-making in my friend L's kitchen. I successfully brought sugar and butter to 300 degrees in a saucepan without using a candy thermometer. This isn't easy. It's taken me three winters to do it right. L and I made 3 batches and in the past we've burned the first batch, undercooked the second batch so it came out all crumbly and useless, and juuuuuust barely got the third batch to the crunch point. We have done this because candy thermometers absolutely suck. Who came up with this design? "Ok, lets make it a huge dial the size of a coaster and then give it a long metal spike that sticks directly into the center of the pot so no one can stir what's inside, and then let's slide this crappy rubber clip up the spike but not secure it at all so it falls off and flicks nuclear candy into the air. This is brilliant. Best idea ever." Oh, and one more thing about candy thermometers, a wee eccentricity, a minute detail, just a teeny, tiny piccadillo...if the thermometer touches the bottom of the pot, even for a second, you're FUCKED. START OVER.

So candy thermometers can suck it. This year L and I wanted to find one of those bitchin' laser thermometers that are shaped like guns, and you point it at something and it tells you the temperature instantly. We couldn't get one in time, though, and all the ones our friends had were covered in pit grease and oil from car shops and other mechanic-type things, and we didn't think penzoil and toffee were such a good flavor combo.

If you're making toffee the L and Jacky way, the first batch is going to be a loss, unless you have a coven of people who routinely destroy their tastebuds with cigarettes and black coffee. These people have the mind-over-matter thing going for them and don't actually taste things anymore, so burned batches don't bother them - they just imagine what they think it's supposed to taste like or how they remember it tasting as a child. Toffee feels crunchy in their mouths and they enjoy the stroll down memory lane. Luckily, L's husband has been working at the scrapyard for years, so our burned batch has always found a home.

The second batch is awesome crumbled over ice cream. Not a loss, but not toffee.

The third batch is...well, there's no describing it. And this year, I pitched a perfect game. One pound of butter with 2 cups of sugar brought to a boil over medium heat and stirred slowly until it's at 300 degrees, then dumped onto a cookie sheet, spread out (quickly before it cools!) and drop hershey bars face-down on top. Cover with another cookie pan and let it sit outside in the cold air until the chocolate it completely hardened. That's why it's a winter project. After all that, lift up the sheet of toffee and smash it apart with the blunt end of a butter knife, and eat so much of it you get so sick of it you can't eat it again for another 12 months. That is also why it's a winter project.

I wonder who invented toffee. Who was the first person to discover that this exact ratio of butter, sugar, and temperature yields the perfect piece of candy? Did they start with the ideal of toffee in their minds and attempt to reach that goal through experimentation, or did they have no idea where they were going and just burnt up a whole bunch of valuable butter and sugar until something worked? I am fascinated by invention. Inventors, moreso. To be able to see something where there was nothing and then make it reality, that's amazing to me. I want to invent things. I feel like I have a lot of great ideas, but no funding or ability to plan or do math. Inventing takes a lot of math, of course you know. But to invent things usually requires already-invented things to be molded or shaped or changed into new ways they have never been made before, like making a plastic or metal prototype. Does one call up a steel yard and just ask for a certain dimension of metal? It's such a mystery.

I want to invent simple things. I want to invent non-computer things, because those things will still be around after the apocalypse. There have been three blackouts in Baltimore in different areas for no discernable reason at all in the past week and a half and I'm fairly convinced the End Times are here, so I have very little time to get my inventions off the ground.

I want to invent a bookcase that converts to a carrying case for books. Each shelf will break apart and close up and can be moved from place to place without disrupting the books or packing them into bins. Then when you arrive at your destination, you stack up the carrying cases, open them up, and you have your bookshelf. It might be a little industrial-chic looking, but that's totally in right now.

I have a great idea to reinvent the candy thermometer. I think it should be a little marble sized ball sensor that gets dropped into your batch and transmits the temperature to a little display on the counter. It would read the temp from it's surface, which is completely submersed in whatever you're making. It would be like a little laundry ball for your 3oo degree candy. It would allow for stirring because it's just in there, hanging around. It could have a heat-resistant string that ties to the top of your spoon so when you're done you can yank it out of the mixture like yoink!

My dad invented things. Well, not really. But he got really resourceful with the junk he had lying around. One Christmas he cut the end off of a garden hose and stuck it down through the tree and into the tree stand. The little metal end wrapped around a branch at arm level. We could water the tree standing up with a watering can instead of on our stomachs on the floor with a ball jar, getting poked in the face with sappy pine needles. I liked that invention. A few years before, the antenna fell off the house the day of the Superbowl and out in farm country in 1998 we didn't get any internet or cable or satellite, so dad climbed on the roof and duct taped our huge antenna to the fake chimney. It was still there 10 years later when we moved.

Dad also cooks a lot. He makes peanut brittle every year, and it took him about 3 winters to perfect his peanut brittle making too. I think he may have started with a candy thermometer like me, but gave it up after a couple of candy-thermometer-related disasters. Maybe he still uses one. I think he might even stir it with the spike, which is a resourceful use of an existing invention. That's his specialty - which will certainly come in handy when the apocalypse hits and we'll have to find some use for all these iPads and Xboxes.

Books.

This morning, my computer scientist and I said the same word at the same time inside two separate, unconnected trains of thought. He was singing Lady Gaga's Poker Face and I was telling the cat to get his ass out of my face, and at the exact same moment with the same pitch and articulation, we said face. I love that stuff. It makes me feel good about the state of our species' collective consciousness.

I cleaned today. It's my favorite thing to do on Saturdays, even though it's Wednesday. I made the bed, did laundry, cleaned up my nightstand (soooo many paystubs) and threw away about 19 Panera receipts. That's an exaggeration. I threw away about 15 Panera receipts. Honesty is the most important thing when blogging, ladies and gentlemen.

As I cleaned, I had the same thought I always have when I clean - "holy moly, I have a lot of books." I like to say holy moly. The letters stop looking like they form words and sounds if you look at them for long enough. But I do. I have so many books it's overwhelming, and the last time I moved them all it ended up in pulled back muscles and aching knees for everybody. And since then, I have acquired more books. AND I LIKE IT THAT WAY. Books, man. The thinking man's movies.

Lately I've been thinking about moving. I'll be moving soon, and to think about packing up this stupendous collection of literature is daunting at best, but I'll just have to suffer for fascinating bookshelves. I remember going over to people's houses when I was a kid and having to occupy myself with whatever non-toys I could find - one time at my grandmother's house, she handed me one of those glass oil-and-vinegar salad dressing dispensers with the plastic tip that holds the liquid in unless you shake it. I was supposed to play with this thing. So I filled it with water, threw in some glitter I found in the obligatory craft box all grandmothers have, tossed in some lego men and pretended like they were either drowning like criminals or swimming like mermaids. Probably mermaids, because of the glitter. Can't be sure.

I wasn't dark as a child. I wasn't one of those kids who ripped the heads off of barbies and covered dolls heads with green crayola smello-marker. I took care of my stuff and played with them as their purpose allowed. I did cull hundreds of non-barbie related items and create such massive apartment complexes for them that it was almost impossible to walk in my room from time to time. One time I took a weird playdough candle holder I'd made in art class and shoved a little barbie lamppost inside and voila, barbie shower stall. I was more constructive than destructive, although the feminist in me wishes I had some stories about yanking off my barbies' little plastic bras and burning them with a matchstick.

Either way, there's probably wet glitter still in that oil bottle.

This is because my grandmother had weird books. She still has weird books, and some of those weird books have made it to my shelves. A book tour, shall we? Intruders, by Bud Hopkins. Story of alien abduction. Transformation, Whitley Streiber. Communion: A True Story, Whitley Streiber. Alien abduction. Past Lives, Future Lives, Dr. Bruce Goldberg. Past life regression. Stalking the Wild Pendulum, Itzhak Bentov. Parallel universes. Journey to Ixtlan and A Separate Reality, Carlos Casteneda. Expanding your consciousness through peyote and other such psychosomatia.

That's it. That is the fare that stocked my grandmother's shelves. That, and the Great Books - those massive tomes that St. John's College based it's curriculum off of, did you know that? All that Socrates and Ptolemy and Copernicus. As noble a gesture as that is, I hope St. John's left room in their lesson plans to correct all those mistakes they made in the 1600s. My grandmother has totally legit books I will certainly read now that my brain can process it. But for a 9 year old, come on. If she would have had some cool fiction or something, I wouldn't have had to stick lego men in her dressing dispenser. So I want fascinating bookshelves, for all ages. I want people to walk into my house and know they will never be bored. This, of course, hinges on the belief that real books will not be totally replaced by digital books.

I don't know how I feel about all these Kindles and such. I'm of two minds. The thought of having 10,000 books at my fingertips is tantalizing, but having the books hidden as a series of zeros and ones on a green circuit board the size of my earlobe makes the whole experience of reading them seem cold and unnatural. Reading isn't just for your eyes, people! It's for your hands and your nose, too! I went on Amazon recently, though, and found that you can get certain books for FREE for the Kindle, which I am 100% in favor of. All the classics, basically. All the books I don't have but always wanted to have, but all the canonical writers, for free, for a Kindle. Um...that's something I can get behind. I think the Kindle and I could be great friends.

But I'm going to need my real books. I'm going to need bins upon bins to move them, and shelves upon shelves to store them. It's going to be inconvenient, and if obsessively watching Hoarders: Buried Alive has taught me anything, it's that you need to CONTAIN. YOUR. CRAP.

I'm trying to. I really am. I've been doing so well getting rid of the unnecessary, but I just don't put books in that category. So I'm going to collect real books so I'll have a fascinating house, and people will always be excited to come over and stay, or bring their kids, or hang out for a few hours away from the world, which is exactly what books are supposed to be for. And when you think about it, people in this world have spent inane amounts of time and money collecting much stupider things.

*ahem*Pokemon.

Starbucks.

There is a Panera and a Starbucks conveniently close to my work, and I've been stopping in to Panera to get their morning souffles, and man, are they fab. I reward myself with food, so one morning after I'd had a seriously terrible night, I went to Panera AND Starbucks in the same morning. This is NOT common practice for me - in fact, I've been coffee-sober for 2 years. I get the non-coffee frappucinos (you know, the really, really sugary ones) and even then I hardly go to Starbucks anymore. That time, I'd had such a terrible night I decided I needed a souffle AND a frappucino. I mean, I was going to be working for 9 hours each day all week, it was raining, my hair was wet, my shoulder hurt, I had some time to kill, it was such a hurricane of reasons to get Panera and Starbucks it would have been ludicrous if I hadn't. That was a few weeks ago.

So this morning I got my souffle and thought to myself, "wow, I made it here with an extra 5 minutes to spare. I should reward this momentous accomplishment with Starbucks." I grappled, though. That is money I do not need to spend. Any dollar I toss away now is one less dollar I'll have when we really need it (like, soon) and my sense of responsibility was duking it out with my sense of I-love-frappucinos. I decided to drive over and see what the line was like. It was outrageous. I left. But I really, really wanted that damn frappucino. Once you get the itch, man, it owns you. So I told myself, "ok, I won't get one, UNLESS I see another Starbucks."

It is maybe 2 minutes from this Starbucks to my work, but there are 2 shopping centers between it and that, which I had never thought to check for Starbucks before so I thought I was making a safe bet. I was not. And I found myself in utter disbelief that there were no more Starbucks between Starbucks and work, which caught me short, since just a few years (months?) ago we were all geeking out when we'd see more than one Starbucks in any given area. And now I've come to expect it. I'm even hedging bets on it.

To be sure, there were other coffee places between Starbucks and work - 7-11 and Dunkin' Donuts. 7-11 is ick, and Dunkin' Donuts...I just wouldn't know what to do. They're two different languages and cultures entirely. I can sense myself cautiously opening the door to a Dunkin' Donuts and being completely taken aback by what I see, trying to fall in line and act like the other customers like some alien who was dropped off at the wrong planet. What the hell, there are DONUTS here?? The colors are all wrong! What is this pink and orange garbage?And then I'd try to order and it would all come out wrong and the sales associate would look at me funny, and I wouldn't understand a thing she was saying.

Jacky: I'd like a grande vanilla bean frappucino, please.
cashier: Flarb?
Jacky:...what?
cashier: dooga blagin flarb?
Jacky: frappucino. vanilla. bean.
cashier: ugh, flaggin dooskie meekin flarb?
Jacky: I...I don't -
cashier: glaskin decker flarb moogen.
disgruntled customer behind me: dooga blagin flarb, you idiot!
Jacky: just give me a donut.

Honestly, I don't even know what the inside of a Dunkin' Donuts looks like anymore. I vaguely remember some kind of metal people-herder to keep the line in one place, like at amusement parks.

I heard on a reputable news program on the radio that some university did a huge cultural study and found that if you are democrat you are more likely to go to Starbucks and if you are republican you are more likely to go to Dunkin' Donuts. They were some seriously big stats, too, like 90% of Starbucks' clientele is democrat and 85% of Dunkin' Donuts' clientele is republican. If you are Green Party, you stay home and drink tea. I just made that up, because it was an easy joke.

*sideline*

Speaking of easy jokes, working at a scrapyard is seriously one huge game of That's What She Said, except no one is playing but me, and I'm only playing in my head because I'd probably get fired if I didn't. We have these radios and everyone gets one, so it's very cool how we're all like secret agents with radios that clip onto our belts. I get to say things like "prices on line 1" and "the shipper is calling on line 2," and then action happens! People do things! The radios are fabulous, I love the radios. Every workplace should have radios - these phones and IMs are getting cocky. Take it back old school, people! But the best part about the radios is I get to hear what everyone else says to each other, and all I want to do, all day, is get on the damn thing and say "that's what she said, over." We don't say stuff like "over" and "roger" but that would make it funnier. Here are a list of things I heard really did hear over the radio today:

Guy 1: What's the baler doing now?
Guy 2: your cans.
Jacky: That's what she said.

Guy 1: This guy has 200 pounds of copper wire.
Guy 2: how many feet?
Guy1: I don't know, it's too long.
Jacky: That's what she said.

Guy 1: What's wrong with the load?
Guy 2: It's too big, I can't fit it in.
Guy 1: well, pull it out and put it back in. Pack it in hard.
Jacky: That's what she said, that's what she said, THAT'S WHAT SHE SAID.

sigh.

*end of sideline*

So, I was in disbelief and angry that there was no Starbucks near the Starbucks. I even got to the point of cursing the whole area with a "Jesus, Glen Burnie! Join humanity, why don'tcha?"

And it got me thinking about this book I'm reading called The White Tiger. It's a first person fiction story about man from India who pulls himself out of his caste by playing the Indian political and social system by bribery and murder and spying. It's really good so far. But there's a part where he is a boy and takes his father to the village hospital because his father is about to die of tuberculosis. The hospital assistants lay his father out on newspapers in the hallway with all the other sick people with limbs hanging off and jaundice. They say they hope a doctor comes out to the hospital that night. The doctors of the area have a pact with the Dude In Charge of Doctors that if they give him one third of their yearly salary they won't have to go to the shitty village hospital, and so they just don't, and the father dies.

And here I want another Starbucks between Starbucks and my job.

Shame.

Work.

Worked at the scrapyard today, and overheard my boss describe me to a trucker as "the brainiac over there," because I "can do computer things." Someone has been deceiving this poor woman, and I think it's me. The more I do work things in the not-college world, the more of a dunce I turn out to be. All I can say is, thank science for Google. Really. My beloved boss, henceforth called DP, is a self-taught computer genius, with no formal education to speak of, 4 grown children, 3 ex husbands, and a backwoods upbringing. This is a woman who can speak at length on how to butcher, bleed, and cook venison, drives a firebird, owns two motorcycles, and collects cars that her mechanic husband drag races all over the country. She weighs about 110 pounds, outlines her eyes in thick, kohl-like eyeliner, and scoliosis has curved her back to make her about 5'4, but she commands, baby. She. Knows. Scrap. And she knows computers.

She has networked EVERYTHING together, created entire databases of information that automatically update if any user makes a change, she's taken Quickbooks and made it her bitch, she's fixed computer hardware with a broken screwdriver she found in a scrap bin, and what's more, ladies and gentlemen, she has attained the unattainable: DP has broken the Microsoft Office Suite, as one breaks a wild stallion, taming it and bending it to her every will with the minutest of keystrokes from her black-tipped gothic french manicured nails.

Do you know what this means? OF course you do. You have gotten into screaming matches with Word, when it won't format your shit. You have searched and searched and SEARCHED for the superscript font, but you can't find it. You have tabbed, caps locked, returned, and track-commented yourself into a foaming passion that can only be cured by knocking over your office chair, watching 2 hours of the food network, and eating peanut butter right out of the jar.

Can you even imagine a person to whom Word and Excel cower in fear? Can you imagine a person who, at one point in time, must have leaned in to a computer monitor, her breath making delicate fog clouds on the screen, and quietly whispered, "not this time, motherfucker," and then systematically ripped open the inner macros and micros and formats and options until nothing sacred and nothing secret remained? And every time after that, when a new blank document was to be created, Office let out a sigh of submission and bent over?

I have met this person, and she is formidable, with all her venison and Harleys. And somehow, this person thinks that I am her equal, that she can relinquish her extraneous tasks to me, and I will be able to do them with her same kind of mastery and skill. DP will rattle off a series of instructions to me to do this, do that, network this, create that, print this, sum-total this, cascade menu these things, link this spreadsheet with this database, import these entries into Quickbooks in this format, and all I can do is sit there and nod my head, give her the good ole "oh, yeah, I've been doing this for YEARS, lady," and turn to my computer hoping to god whatever comes up on her monitor will be interesting enough to divert her eyes from mine for at least an hour or two while I frantically:

1. try to remember what is the end result I'm trying to accomplish from this heinous list of computer tasks she has given me,

2. google the ever-loving crap out of it to figure out how it's done,

3. trial-and-error the process for about 45 minutes until I feel safe taking the first leap into my pile of assignments.

And on top of this, I know it's crucial to every now and then ask a good question, to let her know I am totally on the level. So, every half hour I'll lean over and say, "DP, do you want this cascade menu to have some kind of default option, or do you want it to be a blank unless an option is chosen?" or, "DP, I'm re-formatting this bill of lading and I was wondering if you need these couple of fields to be fillable areas with set constraints, or if you want me to leave the document unprotected in case any of the legal language changes for each shipment." Do I know what I'm saying? Not really. But I seem to be doing ok in her eyes at least, because she's calling me the brainiac to a bunch of truckers. And she's liked my documents so far.

I have made one valuable contribution to the office computer network, and that was to essentially network the other 5 offices together with the Glen Burnie office through the free online vaulting site Dropbox. She had one document she needed all the offices to fill out each Monday without them emailing her their pieces and she sticking them manually into the spreadsheet for them. Through some miraculous, silvery and spider-thin connective arc from my past to my present, when I was a technical writer for Digi-Data, this kind of file-sharing gobbledygook was exactly what I was working on in its nascent stages back in 2008. So when she told me of this problem she was having, I got to work, googling (of course) the various programs available today to make this possible. In 20 minutes I had Dropbox, and in 4 hours I had 5 offices in MD and 1 in PA editing a single document, updating simultaneously, just like DP had going with all the programs in our main office.

And THAT little piece of brainiac karma I plan on riding until my legs are half driven into the ground.

Movies.

Yesterday, I woke up at 7:30 and watched Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, because I just read the book and needed to know. First of all, didn't realize it was Johnny Depp until the hat came off. Secondly, was kind of surprised it was directed by Terry Gilliam, whose latest offering was a steaming pile of self-congratulatory slag known as The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, which also had Johnny Depp in it, for just a little bit.

Then, as I scanned through the Netflix, I saw Babes in Toyland, which I had faint memories of watching when I was a kid. At least, I thought I did. When I called my mom halfway through this cinematic atrocity to demand and explanation, she said she didn't remember it at all, so maybe I made my memory up because the Babes in Toyland music is so famous. At first, I wasn't going to watch it...until I noticed it was starring Keanu Reeves. And Drew Barrymore, right at the age when she began snorting cocaine and drinking tequila. You know, 13. So I watched it, and now I know why Drew Barrymore started snorting cocaine and drinking tequila at that age. There are lots of scenes where people are close-talking to her face (for some reason, probably because the director didn't know how to frame a shot) and I kept thinking, "Can't you smell it on her breath? By her own admission she was smoking a pack a day when she was 13. Was there a behind the scenes Babes in Toyland Barrymore intervention? It's the only thing that would excuse this movie for being so, so, so very shitty, is if everyone was more concerned about Drew Barrymore's 13 year old intervention than they were making sets.

But man, Keanu Reeves. I know I have seen this movie, I know it. Way back in my toddler brain, this movie registered. And I wonder if my teenager brain, in the primitive part, remembered that I'd seen Keanu in Babes in Toyland when I saw him in The Matrix. I think I might have. Because all through The Matrix I remember feeling that he was a little off, like he was hiding something in his eyes. And it wasn't the whole Morpheus speech about "all your life, you've felt that things were not as they should be" and excellent work on the directors' parts to make the audience feel it. No, it's something much more primitive that I think we all feel when we watch Keanu act. It seems that he, more so than any other actor, is unable to separate his past from what he's doing at the moment, so all the bad movies he's made are haunting HIM, instead of US. We can forgive. We want to forgive. But Keanu....he can't forget.

Then we (WE, not I) watched (*choke*) 6 episodes of Denise Richards: It's Complicated.

Then I watched the second Matrix, which did not suck as badly as I thought it did when I first saw it! In fact, it was great. It made sense this time, It flowed from the first one...because I really hated this thing when I first saw it. I don't even think I've seen the third, that's how much I hated it. Maybe because it's been about 8 years since I saw it and computer programs are no longer such a mystery to me, and all that blahsy-blah about back doors and exiled programs and keymakers and shit were way too elevated back then. Of course, Keanu seems way too...present in each scene, like he's saying his lines, but his eyes are saying, "Ok, now I'm reaching into Trinity's body and pulling out the bullet, which is so much cooler than that time I drove a little purple decoupaged go-kart around Toyland to help save Georgie Porgie and the Cookie Factory. SO much cooler. I hope everybody remembers THIS, as I EXTRACT THIS BULLET WITH MY BARE HANDS IN MY BITCHIN BLACK LEATHER TRENCHCOAT, and not THAT, when I was locked in a jail cell by the evil Barnaby Barnacle, scourge of Toyland, and I sang that song at the top of my lungs about Cinncinnati Ohio being the best city in the world so I wouldn't turn into an evil minion by breathing in the evil smoke he sprayed everywhere."

Fact-check me, I triple-dog dare you.

What a big, open Sunday I have before me. I have little stepping stones of stuff to do, like clean the kitty box and wash my bras, but I could do anything I wanted today, provided it's free. So that's pretty much movies and books, which is what I did yesterday. But I have another Matrix to watch and the other half of Alice in Wonderland to read, and another whole season of Denise Richards.

Jumpin' right in.

So what's going on, crew? How was Black Friday? I was safely locked away inside a scrapyard listening to Pandora. I think I've finally reached the year where I am not excited to hear Christmas music on the radio. I still like Christmas music - I like the Christmas music I grew up with, but there is just SO. MUCH. terrible Christmas music on the radio that it's a painful experience no matter what time of day I turn it on. I mean, it has to be, because there are only about 90 Christmas songs, total. I mean it. If each song is 3 minutes (and some are less), that comes out to

*math*

and that is no where close to 24 hours. So radio stations have to accept every awful singer's rendition of every awful song, and they have to play every modern song all these famous people's people are throwing down onto legal pads drenched with flopsweat in the waiting rooms of recording studios, desperately trying to come up with something, anything, that will make more money, ill-got or otherwise.

And as a result of all this hustle, we have songs like Christmastime in Washington, Feed the World, and that F*CKING EAR-RAPING NUCLEAR HOLOCAUST CTHULU SUMMONING KRAKEN FILLED CESSPOOL Simply Having a Wonderful Christmastime, a song which upends all my noble ideas about gun control every time I hear it. And this is December's radio. No, this is December and the last two weeks of November's radio. 97.1 started earlier than ever this year, on the weekend BEFORE Thanksgiving. 101.9 had the decency mercy? quiet but detectable malice to start 12:01 a.m. on Thanksgiving day.

What else do we Baltimoreans get to listen to, now that two acceptable stations have been slain? 101.1, which is so riddled with Nickelback and Linkin Park landmines that it's just not worth it. 104.3, which plays a total of 10 songs "sung" by a total of 4 "artists". Our only refuge is commercial free, listener supported 89.7, which is usually great, but I've been getting far too much hilbilly bluegrass gospel lately, and the pledge drive alarm is starting to go off in the back of my head. PLEASE, 89.7, don't pledge drive during Christmas. Think of the children. The children who drive to work every day.

How did I get on this? I don't even remember. Ah, Pandora. Blissful, wonderful internet radio. You never let me down. Although, you know what? I realize all my complaints are very 2002. Really, I do. What with satellite radio and iPods and stuff, why am I even complaining? Call me old-fashioned, if you must. I still listen to the radio. I think it's a good idea that I don't want to go away. I want the old radio days to come back. But radio today is becoming more and more a symptom of this current generation that supposedly has a negative attention span, where 10 "songs" by 4 "artists" is all they can handle. I was reading Alice in Wonderland last night because I don't remember if I've actually read it (probably have, and I thoroughly encourage re-reading anything), and I thought to myself, "jesus, no kid I know would EVER be able to sit through even the first chapter of this." And that's depressing, because Alice in Wonderland is a fantastic, fabulous, earth-shatteringly wonderful piece of children's literature, and at one point, little children even read it BY THEMSELVES.

But Christmas and all its music is upon is once again and fun shall be had by all, even us atheists. I've been asked in the past how atheists justify celebrating religious holidays if we don't believe in what they represent. First of all, forgive me for divorcing the act of putting a tree in my living room and hanging lights on it from the holy birth of your Lord. Second, just about all the Christian holidays are superimposed onto pagan holidays (harp, harp, yes, everybody knows) and you've divorced yourself from what they represent, so we're not so different, you and I.

I remember Christmas as a kid. How amazing. My poor parents would drag all the boxes out of the attic and put them in the middle of the floor and my brother and I would attack them, putting every stupid thing with a piece of glitter out and somewhere in the house, from little porcelain santa clauses to a huge stuffed reindeer that got shuffled from room to room because it was so big and inconvenient, but we HAD to have it out. If we didn't, I'd imagine all the poor Christmas decorations that didn't make the cut, sweating it out all year long in a box in an attic, making tic marks on the inside of the box as to when they'd get to come out again, only to be pulled out for half a second, declared to be ugly, and thrown back in for another year of waiting. Pulls my soul apart just thinking about it now. Now that I'm grown up, though, I know exactly what my parents were thinking with each tacky thing that came out of that box: "One more thing to put away later. Stellar." I mean, I think that now, when I'm trying to convince myself to put on a clean shirt. If I ain't using it, I sell it. Go make tic marks inside somebody else's box.

But once the tree was up and all that tacky stuff was out and the lights were on and it was juuuuuuust dark enough outside and it was Friday night so there was no school tomorrow, I would sit on the couch and the tree would be lit up, and I'd be surrounded by Christmas throw pillows and stuffed knock-off reindeer with green noses, and it would be the most amazing feeling. And then, mom would put on some of that GOOD Christmas music, like Johnny Mathis (don't hate) or the Nutcracker Suite, and life was a pure, perfect, untroubled pool of mercury that reflected all good things and was going to last forever.

I really want that feeling back. I want it back not just at Christmas, but all the time. I had it my last two years of college, when books were begging me to read them and post-it labels were quivering with excitement at the thought of being used. Then I lost it for a long time, and nothing inanimate had much to say for a while. Now I think things are getting ok, because I quit my awful stressful job, started working at a scrapyard 3 days a week, and books are starting to talk to me again. Going to bookstores on my budget is almost unbearable, everybody's hollering at me and I have to make all these promises I don't know if I can keep. That's how I got Alice in Wonderland the other day. It sat demurely on the special table with all the grandfather books, like Wuthering Heights and Kafka's Metamorphosis, and cleared it's throat a little when I walked by. I was impressed with it's restraint.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas didn't say a word, but it did glare at me, and I am the kind of person who allows myself to be intimidated by books. So I got it too.

But anyways. Merry Christmas, y'all. And if anybody has any idea what to get a computer scientist for Christmas, please chime in.