• Good Lord, Did You See Dateline Last Night?

• Did I Tell You Your Aunt Pat Is Having Foot Surgery?

• Well, I Guess the Weather Forecast Was Wrong

• That Subway on the Corner of Stewart and Long is Moving

• Did Your Dad Tell You We’re Having the Carpets Professionally Steam Cleaned?

• Remember That Kid Steve Who Was Your Physics Partner in High School?  He Has Cancer.

• Isn’t It Funny When City People Go to the Country and Interact With a Cow/Horse/Bear/Bumpkin and Learn Something About Themselves?

I like this movie better when it was called “For Richer or Poorer.” (no I didn’t)

I never have been able to successfully keep a journal, even as a young child.  If you pick up the Hello Kitty diary I was given when I was seven or eight, you will find a few days’ worth of entries and then … nothing for a year or two, then an entry talking about how I forgot about the diary, then another year long gap, then a poem about pumpkin pie written in the style of Shel Silverstein.  Followed by nothing but empty pages.   Sans the poem, it’s the same story with the three or four other journals I’ve started at various points in my life.  Why?  I love the idea of journals, and I’m drawn to them in the store.   “Maybe the problem is that I’ve never had the RIGHT journal,” I’ll think.  “Maybe this exquisite leather-bound one with the creamy smooth pages is just the thing I need.”  It’s a pack of lies, though.  The journal does not exist that I will ever be able to maintain, and I’m not sure why I thought a blog would be different.  It’s easier, in that it takes far less time to type than write.  It’s public, which you would think would encourage me to put stuff out there (“Think of your FANS!”).  But ultimately, whatever it is that keeps me from reflecting on things by writing them down in journal format seems to be the same thing that prevents me from regularly updating here.  Is it laziness, or stubbornness?  Is it a short attention span?  Is it an overwhelming feeling of having nothing of particular interest to say?  I do believe it’s that last one, or maybe I just prefer that answer to being straight-up lazy.  Regular, every-day life does not seem like something worth memorializing, and even as I say that I realize how horrible it sounds.  We all fool ourselves into thinking we will remember things forever–this sunset, that summer breeze, those hikes in the woods on a fall day–but I’m really spectacularly good at fooling myself that way, and really, how stupid of me.  We live in a culture of overshare but can’t I be bothered to write down some words to just share a little?  Can’t I take a moment in this space to mention that I harvested a little crop of red hot cherry peppers and poblanos from my patio garden and it looked like a handful of Christmas?  I could make a resolution right here to blog regularly, just as I have many times before, but maybe I’ve been going about it wrong.  Maybe I need to resolve instead to forget less, and the only way to do that is to write it down or take a picture.

Yes, that’s the ticket.  Remember to forget less.  It’s so simple, I can’t believe I never thought of it before.  Now if you’ll excuse me, this afternoon nap isn’t going to take itself.

Today I was taking a shower, just innocently washing my hair, when a HUGE spider just crawled out of the shower curtain like it owned the place.  Remarkably, I didn’t scream and kept my cool, used the shower head to spray the beast off the curtain and into the tub and drowned it to death.  It was the size of a quarter.  That’s right.  I didn’t swear or scream.  It’s OK.   I’m not a hero, I’m just an ordinary girl who just goes about her business like it ain’t no thing when a tarantula-type spider just drops by while I’m washing my hair … and saved the freakout for when I turned the water off and had to dispose of the thing.

And, still freaking out, hours after it occurred.  <shiver>  WHY DOES THIS HOUSE HAVE SO MANY SPIDERS, I ASK YOU.

Oops, I’ve been neglecting the blog again.  Well, you know how life gets– work gets crazy, you’ve got relationships to maintain, TV to catch up on, errands to run, life gets overwhelming … and the next thing you know you’ve left your baby in the dressing room at Macy’s and then don’t even remember you have a baby until much later when you trip over a stuffed dinosaur on your way to the refrigerator .  (Note: the baby in that illustration is this blog.)

Let’s see.  The last movie I saw was “Adventureland,” which was OK, and before that “Sunshine Cleaning,” which was great.  I’m reading “Watership Down” right now, but I’m only a few pages in and still adjusting to the fact that I’m reading a book about rabbits.  The BFF and I are trying to (finally) get our Etsy store up and running, and I have resolved to try and get into the habit of writing regularly so I can get back to my novel.  Oh, and the latest Insufferable License Plate award goes to ‘CHEMSTAR’, because what?  I don’t see how you could have that plate and be a person I would be interested in knowing.  I know that makes me sound judgmental, but I’m just fine with that.

Anyway, mama’s so sorry she left you at Macy’s!  She won’t be doing that again, probably, at least in the very near future, why don’t you just have a cookie and let’s change the subject.

I did think they’d gotten smaller, but didn’t realize HOW MUCH SMALLER:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gL83wBRIl8&feature=related

Today the search for insufferable vanity plates brought a curious submission.  Sometimes personalized plates are hard to decipher–combinations of words and letters that most likely spell out an inside joke or family name or some other nonsense, but leave you, the driver stuck behind them on a deadlocked 405, dying of suspense.

This plate was not one of those.  It spelled out everything clearly: “GNUHAIR.”  ????  What the crap is that supposed to mean?  No possible answer is satisfactory.  Do they raise gnus for a living, or give people hair transplants, or transplant hair from gnus on to balding people?  There is no sensible answer.  Congrats, Prius owner!  You have won the Most Inscrutable Vanity Plate award (previously held by ‘ICU81MI’ … which is a 30 Rock reference, for all you clueless folk.)

Easter is approaching, bringing with it all of the finest the candy industry has to offer.  I personally love pretty much every kind of candy in the Easter genre, but there is a special adoration reserved for the Cadbury egg.  A recent Facebook status of mine relating to this fact revealed that a lot of people apparently hate them.  So I’m taking this to the polls!

I don’t understand how big stars and a good director can make a movie that is so forgettable as this one. I could spoil the plot for you except that I don’t think I could rehash it … something about an evil bank controlling other country’s debt, which frankly makes no sense to me because since when have dictators ever cared about paying back their loans? Clive Owen and Naomi Watts are sufficiently pretty and one breathtaking gun battle staged in the Guggenheim reminded me how much I like Tom Tykwer’s previous work, but geez. I expect The International to vanish into the same ether that The Interpreter went — they are practically identical in cast, intrigue, and substance, but at least I remember liking Nicole Kidman’s coats in her film, even if I had to go to IMDB to remember that Sean Penn was in it too …

You’ve gotten everything you need at Target and now you carefully evaluate the checkout lines and pick one that seems shorter than the others.  Stop!  Ask yourself these two questions:

1) Is the strange-looking man two people in front of you buying nothing but the show “Dallas” on DVD?
_X_ Yes ___ No
2) Is the woman currently checking out wearing a white bucket hat and buying literally hundreds of blank VHS tapes?
_X_ Yes ___No

If you answered yes to one or both of these questions, you should immediately move to another line. Now is not the time to patiently wait. You are in the checkout line of the damned, and your time is about to get a-WASTED.

That I am giddy at the prospect of a new Neko Case album has no bearing on the fact that the cover of it is one of my favorites ever:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/images/B001MWGZDG/sr=8-1/qid=1234908000/ref=dp_image_text_z_0?ie=UTF8&n=5174&s=music&qid=1234908000&sr=8-1

I like the digital revolution. I love having all of my music stored in that flat little rectangle. But it makes me sad that eventually, no one will put any effort into cover art. If all anyone ever sees is a little thumbnail, it won’t make a difference whether it’s good or bad. But I will be driving to a store and purchasing this CD with my own two hands, so take that, THE MAN.