Whereas, "same sex" unions will cause a Gay Apocalypse, with "horses" and "riders" and everything, but we don't really have any evidence of that, so we're just going to make some shit up and then throw in an example of a gay high school student that has nothing to do with civil unions, but we sure do think it's scary; and

Whereas, we loves us some Rick Santorum, but not in THAT way; and

Whereas, gay people don't really want to make permanent commitments to each other or have things like hospital visitation rights, because they're just trying to make fun of us, and it's not our fault we don't know the difference between Gucci and Prada; and where all married heterosexuals are monogamous, including us, except for at that one office party, but that doesn't count, because we were really drunk; and where everyone knows that gay people have lots and lots of sex with lots and lots of other gay people, and promiscuity is bad for society unless we're the ones getting laid; and

Whereas, a penis fits nicely within a vagina; where it has been revealed throughout the ages by various deities, some fake, one real, that a penis fits nicely within a vagina; and where the failure to be awed by that truth is bad for the sacred union of penises and vaginas; and

Whereas, we wish gay people would be gay where our kids can't see them being all faggy, because watching people be gay makes regular folks--except us--want to be gay; and where our children must be protected from the tractor beam of gayness; and

Whereas, gay people can already give their stuff to other gay people, and we're ignoring things like tax laws here, because gay people probably don't pay their taxes anyway; and where gay people contribute to the moral decay of society by convincing our youths to become "male ice skaters" or "feminists" or "independent filmmakers"; and where didn't you hear us when we were talking about the lots and lots of sex that all gay people have; and where we have to stop them, for God's sake, I mean, give them an inch, and they'll take six; now, therefore

Be it enacted by the General Assembly of Virginia:

1. That the Code of Virginia is amended by adding in Chapter 2 of Title 20 a section numbered 20-12.1 as follows:

§ 20-12.1. Marriage; legislative findings.

The General Assembly finds that the public policy of the Commonwealth of Virginia is best expressed by the phrase, "Marriage: It's what's for dinner. As long as dinner is hot dogs and bagels."

Am I the only one who is bothered by the widespread use of the word "troop" to refer to individuals? If a "troop" has become just one person, then what's an actual troop? A gaggle? A throng? A flock?

It occurs to me that I haven't publicly made it clear just how asinine I find the low-carb craze that has swept the nation. Here's the problem: diets as extreme as the Atkins Diet can be quite effective for rapid, short-term weight loss. Losing weight and then maintaining that weight loss safely is not a short-term activity; it's a long-term commitment. It's a commitment to health. People know this. However, people don't want to make a commitment to their health. People want to lose weight. So they do. And then they gain it back, because that's what happens when you take a short-term approach to a long-term problem. So a cycle begins: people get thin on the Atkins Diet. People get less thin when they go off the Atkins Diet. And because the reason people get sucked into this cycle in the first place is that they want to be thin, they start to feel like they should be on the Atkins Diet ALL THE TIME.

Look: Atkins is not a reasonable way to eat for the rest of your life. Carbs are not the Dark Side to your Force. They are not evil. They have a place in every reasonable diet, and they will not kill you. Cutting them out of your diet in favor of protein, on the other hand, very well might kill you. Sandra Woodruff, nutritionist and author of the Good Carb Cookbook: Secrets of Eating Low on the Glycemic Index, elaborates:

• Too much protein burdens the kidneys and liver, which have the job of excreting any excess protein that the body cannot see.


• High-protein, low-carbohydrate diets deprive the brain of glucose, its preferred fuel.


• High-fat meats and dairy products are rich in saturated fats, which raise the risk for heart disease.


• Pesticides and other environmental toxins accumulate in foods high on the food chain, so meats and dairy products (especially high-fat versions) contain higher concentrations of these substances than plant foods do.


• High-meat diets cause the consumption and pollution of far more natural resources than plant-based diets do.


• A diet high in meat and low in plant foods lacks the phytochemicals (nutrients found only in plant foods), antioxidants, vitamins, and minerals that delay aging and fight cancer, heart disease, and many other health problems.


• High-meat diets are very low in fiber and can cause chronic constipation and diseases of the colon.

(page 36)

Part of my irritation with the low-carb fad is the kind of irritation I feel with all sorts of things that oversaturate the American popular culture market, both as concepts and as products. The other part of my irritation--the larger part--is a very serious concern about the potential effects on public health of a diet that makes you feel guilty for eating an apple. An apple! I mean, Jesus, people. Book of Genesis aside, there are very good reasons why thinking of an apple as verboten is counter-intuitive. It probably should also get you on some sort of list of potential threats to national security. Homeland Security is watching you, apple haters! You're in their register, right next to the baseball haters and the people who say bad things about Mickey Mouse. Apples are good for you. Fourteen of them? Not so much. But how much intellectual work should it really take to figure out that it doesn't matter what you have at Souplantation if you eat three platefuls of it?

Let me be clear that I'm not holding myself up as a paragon of health, here. I'm not a paragon of anything. I just find it astonishing how hungry (cough) people seem to be for a formula--low fat, low carb, low whatever--because they are resistant to something most of them already know, which is that for the vast majority of people, the best way to lose weight and maintain that weight loss is to:

It's not rocket science. Most of us already know a good deal about healthier eating choices and at least a little bit about exercise. You know that dumping four ounces of ranch dressing on your salad does not constitute a healthy eating choice. You know that eating at McDonald's three times in one week is a bad idea. You know that the pint of Ben & Jerry's you just ate will go straight to your thighs. You know you didn't need to eat the entire box of macaroni and cheese. If you make these choices, fine: they're yours. I make them, too. But I also know that if I sit around eating Girl Scout cookies, drinking beer, and watching TV for a week, I'll gain weight and feel sluggish--and that if I want to counteract that, I'm going to have to: I honestly believe that most people who want to lose weight already know everything they need to know to do so in a healthy way--if that's what they choose. Most of us can also benefit from adding to what we already know with good sources of information. The cookbook I quoted above is one of the many good sources available; this particular book has six full chapters on the differences between refined and complex carbohydrates, as well as tables of data on the glycemic index of various foods and an extensive bibliography that cites sources not just on weight loss and carbs, but also on topics like insulin resistance and polycystic ovary syndrome. If you want to get complex about things, it's possible, and that can be a good thing. What I find distressing is the fact that the marketing that arose out of and continues to drive the low-carb obsession is so powerful that people would rather eat something that is labeled good for them than something that actually is good for them. I keep expecting that any day now, I'm going to walk into the mall and find that Cinnabon is selling a "low carb cinnamon roll," and would you like a tub of low-carb butter with that?

While I was in line at the grocery store last night, I saw a magazine--I think it was TV Guide--with a cover brightly announcing that inside, you would find information on the "Survivor Diet." As in Survivor, the television show, which simulates people being stranded on a desert island without any food. Life really shouldn't turn into an article from The Onion, I thought to myself as the cashier rang up my purchases. It's funny, but not funny ha-ha. Now I'm waiting for the "Apprentice Diet" to come out. It will be great fun to watch a bunch of thirty-somethings eat nothing but fajitas (they're fired--on the grill!) washed down with massive quantities of Trump Ice.

D-City of Buena Park, Ban Sale of Fireworks
Vote Count Percentage
Yes 1567 49.6%
No 1593 50.4%

I really, really hope a Buena Park precinct or two has yet to be counted, because I was eagerly looking forward to not hearing explosions every fifteen minutes during the last half of June and first half of July. The "no on D" contingent has been vocal, sending direct mail with bullet points like this:

• Government takes away one more freedom


• Cuts $400,000 from our Community Groups


• Punishes All Citizens for the Actions of a Few


• Makes Traditional Patriotism a Crime

Even if we overlook the fact that the "no" side obviously feels that choices about capitalization are a matter of whimsy, I resent the implication that blowing shit up is a right. I also think it's ludicrous to claim that to ban fireworks is to banish patriotism, because if the only way you can express your overwhelming sense of pride in your community and country is to "set that there thing on fire," then you, my friend, are a piss-poor patriot. This is especially true when you consider that this issue is NOT ABOUT what happens on the 4th of July. If we were talking about one day, I wouldn't have been so delighted to see measure D appear on the ballot. What we're talking about is 3-4 weeks of extremely loud noises at irregular intervals. They're the kinds of noises that make you jump. The kinds of noises that make your dog shake, pant, and hide under your legs. The kinds of noises that have nothing to do with civic goodwill and a whole lot to do with being mu'fuckin Bruce Willis.

Let's take bullet points two and three together. You're selling $400,000 worth of fireworks. That's a lot of bang for your red, white, & blue buck in a town of just over 10 square miles. These are the actions of a whole lot more than "a few." Buena Park is one of only five OC cities in which fireworks are still legal, which means that every year, our town becomes the site for everyone else's pyrotechnic pilgrimages--and by "everyone else," I mean the 250,000 people who walk the two blocks from La Palma, Cypress, and Anaheim across city limits and into the BP DMZ.

Yeah, I know that the Buena Park Kiwanis Club and Assembly #231 of the International Order of the Rainbow for Girls make good cash hawking patriotism sticks every year. Whatever. Let them sell cake!

On a final note, I would like to say that if results from all the Buena Park precincts are included in these figures, then the fact that 3,160 people voted on measure D--in a town where over 60,000 people are 18 or over--is the most depressing thing of all.

If I wanted to buy a Hummer in the greater Los Angeles area, I'd know just where to go. I could leave my house and pull that new Hummer into my driveway a couple of hours later. Same with a Ford Expedition. Or a Suburban. Or various other vehicles that get 15 miles to the gallon on a good day.

If, on the other hand, if I wanted to buy a Prius (55 miles per gallon, combined city and highway) in the greater Los Angeles area, I'd get letters like this one:

Dear Shasta,

At this time, we currently have a waiting list of customers wanting the 2004 Toyota Prius. To be placed on this list we require a $500 refundable deposit. This will place you on the list, and we will call you when we have a vehicle that is a match for you. The price for this vehicle is MSRP, depending on the equipment package that you choose.

At this time we are estimating March/April delivery.

Kisses,
Every Toyota Dealer South of the Grapevine

I would then start getting (rare) emails informing me that one dealer has just received one Prius, and it can belong to one of the lucky people reading this email for just $33,000! Never mind that $33,000 is about $10,000 more than the MSRP on a fully equipped and generously accessorized Prius; think of it as a donation--a donation to the planet!

Unfortunately, I'm not in a position to be quite so charitable, so Corolla it is. "Why, , did you not just sell a Corolla that you had owned for nearly ten years?" you might ask. Yes, yes I did. It was a great little car. I'll pretend to be creative by selecting a different color.

Even if I had absolutely no interest in the products sold in the Athleta catalog, I'd still enjoy getting it in the mail. That's because I like looking at this:

... a whole lot more than I like looking at this:

P.S. The Ultra Run Pants are fantastic.

When you stay up late watching TV while you fold laundry and generally futz around your house, you start to see some really great commercials starting around midnight or 12:30. One of my favorites is is the ad for the Gerber Life Grow-Up Plan.

The Gerber Life Grow-Up Plan, for those of you who are too classy even to slum in my target demographic, is a life insurance plan for children. You can take one out on bouncing babies as young as 14 days of age. Gerber Life claims to know all about how you "want to give your child every advantage possible." The company also suggests that these policies make a great gift, one you should seriously consider giving if you are a grandmother or grandfather. Why? Because "your thoughtfulness today helps ensure your child will be better equipped for adult responsibilities tomorrow." After all, who couldn't use a little extra peace of mind?

Folks, this is life insurance we're talking about. What this means is that if you have one of these policies on your kids, you'll get a check if they die. What grieving parent wouldn't find that comforting?

And just how much comfort, in monetary terms, will Gerber Life give you?

$5000. For about $6 a month.

I realize many of you probably don't know much about life insurance rates, so I won't assume that benefit-to-premium value seems absolutely absurd to you. I'll just tell you it's absurd. Right now--at age 32, which is considerably older than 14 days--I could get a $250,000 policy for about $25 a month. $5000 might just about cover my burial costs, unless someone decided to be all showy and get me a fancy tombstone. One with words and stuff.

Ridiculous cost aside, let's talk about why you buy life insurance. You buy life insurance because someone--maybe multiple people--would find themselves in a real financial pickle if you suddenly crossed the threshold into the next world. That's usually because you have an income that goes toward shared expenses. Babies, as you might know, are not very good breadwinners. They might be good at holding bread, chewing bread with their little gums, and processing bread in various baby ways, but they are not good at winning bread.

So what's the hook? The hook is that when your child turns 21, the benefit amount will automatically double, but the premiums won't go up, not ever! That's right! Instead of paying $6 a month for a really shitty life insurance policy, you'll be able to give your college junior--who is no doubt extremely concerned about his or her mortality--the chance to keep paying $6 a month for a slightly less shitty life insurance policy!

No wonder the baby in the Gerber logo looks so surprised. Two weeks out of the womb and they're already trying to screw him. At this rate, his parents will have him signed up with Amway before he can pronounce the word "wholesale."

I was also going to tell you about a local bail bonds company running ads in which distressed Latinos fret about getting their family members out of jail until some white guy dressed like Captain America shows up in their living room, but I no longer have it in me.

Why oh why did I not open this catalog until I was pretty much done with my shopping? I'm sure somebody on my list really needed those record coasters, the duct tape wallet, the writers finger puppets, an animal lamp, or some of the cutest baby socks ever made. If they didn't need those, they probably did need a wine tote to go with a bottle of wine wrapped in one of these wonderful little dresses.

I might have to get a couple of these things anyway. The American Express bill doesn't come until next month, right?

In other news, I heard Band-Aid's "Do They Know It's Christmas?" today for the first time in a while. Did you ever really listen to those lyrics? They're awful. I don't remember that having occurred to me when the song came out, but a lot of things are like that: you experience them when you're young and then revisit them when you're older, only to find that your perspective has totally changed. Then, you wonder how you possibly could have not realized that the Chronicles of Narnia are so very Christian, or that mushrooms on pizza are really quite good, or that Flashdance is a terrible, terrible movie. So, let's revisit "Do They Know It's Christmas," shall we?

There's a world outside your window,
and it's a world of dread and fear
Where the only water flowing
is the bitter sting of tears.

We're talking about Africa here, right? If I remember correctly, the proceeds from the song and from the Live-Aid benefit went to Ethiopian famine relief, but don't quote me on that. In any case, the song doesn't say anything specifically about Ethiopia, or about any other African country, for that matter. It's just "Africa," the whole continent. And apparently, the only water on the whole continent is the water of human tears.

And there won't be snow in Africa
this Christmas time,
the greatest gift they'll get
this year is life. (Here's where Boy George goes "ooohhhh!")
Where nothing ever grows,
no rain nor rivers flow...

No snow? Tell that to the people hanging out by Mount Kilimanjaro. Or the Atlas Mountains. Or the ski resorts in South Africa. No rain? What's happening when it rains, then? ("That's God crying. Probably because of something you did.") And how do you account for the portions of Africa that are, you know, rain forest? Finally, I don't care if you flunked fourth-grade social studies; you still should know that the Nile runs through Africa. You should at least strongly suspect that there are other rivers on the continent, too, but come on: the Nile?

Raise a glass for everyone
Underneath that burning sun.

Rub it in, Bob Geldoff. Rub it in. Cheers, you poor bastards! We'll order an extra round and dedicate it to you, because I bet you don't even have cocktails in Africa.

Do they know it's Christmas time at all?

I'm guessing the non-Christians don't much care. If they do, we certainly wouldn't know about it, since every single citizen of every single African country speaks exclusively in clicks and whistles.

I'm all for the spirit of giving, but my word, would it have killed Geldoff to not be such a tool about it?

Also, Simon LeBon can't sing.

I am interested in basketball.

I am interested in the Kobe Bryant rape trial.

I am not interested in hearing an update on how Kobe feels now that he's eaten a burger for lunch, or whether Kobe's new shoes are chafing him, or how his "personal troubles" have or have not contributed to said chafing.

I am not interested in hearing more arguments for why Kobe is innocent that go something like this:

• Kobe is famous and his accuser is not. Therefore, Kobe is innocent.


• Kobe is the man. How could you not want to sleep with Kobe? Therefore, Kobe is innocent.


• Celebrities have affairs all the time. Therefore, Kobe is innocent.


• The Lakers really need to practice, because even though they have a ton of talent, it's going to take time for Kobe and Shaq to gel with Karl Malone and Gary Payton. That'd be a whole lot easier if Kobe didn't keep trotting off to Col-o-fucking-rado. Therefore, this whole shebang is a conspiracy, and Kobe is innocent.

And then there are the arguments the defense is actually using, which often aren't much better.

I might be interested in hearing someone say they just don't know what happened, but they'll update me when they have more information. And by "information," I don't mean a piece on whether or not Kobe's accuser set off some bellhop's rape-dar.

Ironically, as I was typing this, a stray dog walked over and started checking out our front patio. I went outside to see if it had a tag so that I could either bring the dog home or call its owner. It was the golden retriever from down the street. His name? Kobe.

I'm pretty sure he didn't do it. He did, however, get so excited that he pissed all over my doorstep. It's a good thing that dog isn't really good at basketball. If he was, I'd no doubt be hearing all manner of anecdotes about how much chicks dig it when celebrities piss on their "welcome mats."

Southern California is on fire, and even though the flames really aren't anywhere near our house, the ashes are. If the ashfall continues at this rate, I'm going to make myself an ashman. With a corncob pipe and a button nose. And two eyes made out of something that isn't coal, because I'm thinking that coal won't look so good in a base of ash.

Only an ex-smoker would look ruefully at the particles floating around in the air and think, hell, if I'm going to breathe all this shit, I should do it through a Marlboro filter.*

In other news, I bumped my head on a corner of my desk last night. It hurt, but I didn't realize quite how much until I went to bed and realized I couldn't lie down on my left side. After I woke up this morning, I tried to sit up and heard a click. That was the sound of my neck doing yoga without the rest of me. I do not have high hopes for any day that begins wth Xanax and do-it-yourself physical therapy.

* There is no danger that I will actually do this. I'm just sayin'.

National Marriage Protection Week is totally gay.

There's an enormous supermarket strike going on in Southern California. It involves 70,000 workers at Albertson's, Ralph's (which is the same thing as Kroger), and Vons (which is also Pavilions, which is also Safeway). I had read that a strike might happen, but I had forgotten when it would happen until I pulled into the parking lot at Albertson's last night and saw workers picketing. I won't cross this picket line; the supermarkets are trying to pull a huge screwjob on their workers, and I'm anti screwjob. They want to make massive cuts in healthcare that would raise premiums for family benefits by at least $800 per year while raising deductibles and co-pays. New hires would get an even worse deal, receiving plans worth a third of the value of plans held by current workers. In addition, there are salary issues: the supermarkets want to freeze the salaries of current workers and substantially lower the salaries at which they hire new employees.

Media coverage of a strike in progress is always much more interesting than coverage of an impending strike. For one thing, you get gems like this:

"The gravy train is over," yelled one man, as he strode from the Eagle Rock [Vons] store, not wanting to be interviewed.

That's priceless. It's almost as good as the time I waited in a remarkably long line at the post office while a man well advanced in years monopolized one of the three clerks; he was one of those people who brings in sixteen packages--each of which needs to go to a different country--but insists on filling out all the customs forms right there in front of the clerk. At 4:50 pm. "I give you $200,000 a year in taxes!" he told the clerk in a voice he obviously hoped we would all overhear. "Well, if you're giving it to me, something's wrong, because I'm not getting it," she returned. I cheered her silently.

Grocery store workers, by the way, aren't exactly rolling in the dough: even long-time checkers make somewhere around $35,000 a year; most workers make a whole lot less. And this is in Southern California, where you could sell a Fisher Price playhouse in someone's backyard for a couple hundred grand if you could manage to get the proper permits.

Then, there are quotes like this one:

A Gelson's in Pacific Palisades as much more crowded than usual. "Business is way up," said Gelson's grocery manager Eric Gibson.

That ticked off Edith Bartz, a Gelson's regular who was forced to circle the lot several times looking for a parking space. "OK, I wasn't annoyed about this strike before, but I am now," said Bartz, from the driver's seat of her turbocharged Audi A4. "I don't have time for this."

I wonder if Edith knows Anna Gitlin?

I thought those of you who don't live in California, and therefore won't have the pleasure of voting today, might appreciate a visual or two.

Of special note here in case you didn't know about this: if you can make out the lettering, you will notice that the names are not listed in alphabetical order. The state reordered the alphabet through a lotto-like drawing. Seriously. They picked balls with letters on them out of a bigger ball. What's more, they did this for various locations throughout the state to avoid accusations of alphabetical discrimination. Or something.

If you didn't know about these, it's because they're much less fun to talk about than the fact that Arnold Schwarzenegger likes grabbin' him some ass. If you look at Proposition 54 for more than about 3 seconds and think about all its possible applications, you'll see that it's a truly horrible idea. That doesn't mean it won't pass, but today, I've decided to try to maintain a shred of faith in humanity.

So, there was one kind of anniversary yesterday, and a different kind today. I celebrated being a non-smoker by spending an hour on hold with Countrywide Financial. Why, you might ask? I'll show you.

What you should know to follow this sequence of events properly: our homeowners' insurance payment is paid through our escrow account with our mortgage company. It is due once a year, in the spring, and the cost of the policy is $463.

04/01/2003 12:00:00 - homeowners ins pmt	-$463.00
05/08/2003 12:00:00 - homeowners ins pmt	-$463.00
Shasta makes phone call #1. She learns that our mortgage company has paid both our homeowners' insurance company and some other random homeowners' insurance company. She requests that the payment that was made to the wrong company be refunded. The phone people say okay.

05/14/2003 12:00:00 - homeowners ins credit	+$463.00
05/14/2003 12:00:00 - homeowners ins pmt	-$463.00
Shasta makes phone call #2. She learns that our mortgage company requested a refund not from the random company we've never heard of, but from the company that actually holds our policy. When the refund arrived, somebody noticed that the company's return of the funds meant we were no longer covered under a homeowner's insurance policy. They fixed that error. Shasta is glad that she still has insurance, but she again requests that the payment that was made to the wrong company be refunded. The phone people say okay.

05/16/2003 12:00:00 - homeowners ins credit	+$463.00
All seems well. Until...

06/25/2003 12:00:00 - misc posting

-$463.00

Whee! For anyone who would like a summary, this means that we have paid our homeowner's insurance premium four times and had it refunded twice. Shasta makes phone call #3. She learns that Betty in the Lancaster office is confused as all hell by this series of transactions, that Betty has at least three coworkers who are also confused, and that because the 6/25 payment is labeled as a "miscellaneous posting," she cannot say she will have the payment refunded, for it must have been authorized by "one of our account executives." Translation: she knows I'm being fucked, but she can't fix it. She has to write a note to somebody in a suit, and that person will probably fix it. Or might fix it, anyway. Betty is a nice lady with a headache.

The bad part? I'm pretty sure this will never, ever end. The good part? Not once while I was alternately talking to Betty and listening to Muzak did it occur to me that two years ago, that would have been a five-cigarette phone call.

Yossarian the Kitty Guest is settling in nicely—thanks to those of you who provided advice on the transition! He's confined to my study right now, and he doesn't seem to mind so much. He has a good view of the front patio, and he likes to hang out underneath the big blue chair. That last part worries me a bit, because it's a reclining chair, and if anyone actually reclined it while he was under there, he would get rather squished. However, there are usually too many files/books/random items of clothing on the chair to make sitting possible, so that shouldn't be a problem.

When I spend time with other people's cats, I'm often struck by how nice they are. Yossi is a sweet little wisp of a thing. When I came in this morning, he squeezed out from under the blue chair and sat on my lap for a while. I let him stay, because he actually didn't seem to have been reading too much Bram Stoker lately. I had forgotten that cats come that way. Compared to Yossi, Leo is a brutish bruiser of a kitty. "What is good in life?" I asked him one day. He answered with an enthusiastic speech on the "lamentations of the sparrows."

Nicer isn't necessarily better when it comes to cats, and I often find the ways Leo can be a rat bastard quite funny. Still, if I had my druthers, I'd lower the probability that I'll stand at the sink and find myself suddenly choking on toothpaste, as there are cat teeth in my ankle.

I also love that Yossi, for obvious reasons, makes me think of Catch-22, because it's simply one of the best books ever. I taught it as part of an introductory humanities course in 1998 and 1999, and I do believe that book is almost as much fun to teach as it is to read. The first year I taught Catch-22, my classes were reading it while elections for freshman class officers were being held. Washington Irving got two write-in votes for President. He also showed up on the roll sheet from time to time, as did Irving Washington. A.T. Tappman, Chaplain, U.S. Army, also visited my class on occasion. I know this because I received notes from him informing me that he yearned for me tragically.

I went to the Sephora in Downtown Disney tonight to pick up some sunscreen. It's probably ridiculous that I buy my sunscreen at Sephora, but I wear it on my face every day, and I have very specific sunscreen needs. Whatever I choose has to provide broad-spectrum protection, which means it has to include titanium dioxide, zinc oxide, or avobenzone (which is the same thing as Parsol 1789). At the moment, my skin is too sensitive for avobenzone, so I'm limited to the other two ingredients. My sunscreen also has to be at least SPF 15, and it can't contain algin, coconut oil, cocoa butter, isopropyl myristate, or isopropyl palmitate. In fact, pretty much any ingredient starting with "iso" is bad.

I say all that because I do actually feel a need to assuage some guilt over the fact that I could feed a small village somewhere with the amount I just spent on two ounces of sunscreen. Okay, and one or two more items. It couldn't be helped. Sephora is a vortex. It's a good thing the sampled perfumes that hang thickly in the air in a tribute to the general philosophy of air quality in these parts—a smogcrocosm, if you will—make my eyes sting and water after a while. Without incentive to leave, I'm sure I'd be able to convince myself I need things like heated eyelash curlers; never mind the fact that I don't curl my eyelashes.

So, anyhoo, the nice Sephora lady is ringing up my purchases, and she shows me a sample of a perfumed lotion she's about to stick in my bag. I don't pay much attention at the time, but when I remove it from my bag later in the evening, I notice the label:

MICHAEL
MICHAEL KORS

AN EXPENSIVE
BODY CREME

It's expensive? Fabulous! What's in it? Who cares! What does it do? Well, I don't really know, but I'm pretty sure it makes you smell expensive.

As I was walking towards the parking lot, six different young-ish guys said "hi" to me in a span of about two minutes. You people think I'm just imagining a conspiracy, but I'm telling you it's bona fide. Proximity to Disneyland be damned; the Magic Kingdom doesn't make people that nice. After the third "hello," I was wondering when I'd be handed a pamphlet informing me that I was missing out on what heysinner would call the "FUCKING RIGHTEOUS LIGHT." The Rev would be talking about the ALMIGHTY FRANK. They wouldn't.

As it turns out, they talked about nothing. They just said hello and went on their way. There's a back story; I'll swear to it. Maybe they were weapons inspectors. "Hey, weapons inspectors, now that you didn't find a goddamn thing, what are you going to do next?"

Some kids I used to know called whatever they didn't like "crummy network reruns." As in, "this nature hike is crummy network reruns," or "the current administrative regime is crummy network reruns." Every time I remember the phrase, I wonder why I don't use it all the time.

We headed out to UCLA yesterday to go see a small production of a play our friend Ryan wrote. It was a comedy called The Three Christs of Ypsilanti, and it was inspired by the true story of three mental patients, each with a Christ complex, who were put into group therapy together at a state hospital in the '60s. I already knew Ryan was funny, but it was a very cool thing to see his creative efforts materialized. I like knowing interesting people.

While on campus before the play started, I was having a cup of coffee in an outdoor lounge-type area when a guy I didn't know walked past me on his way to a trash can. He threw away whatever it was he wanted to throw away, looked right at me, and started humming the theme song from "Dawson's Creek." Now, it could be that I'm making too much of this interlude, but given the fact that I first became aware of that show's existence when someone told me I looked like Michelle Williams—and that it would take two hands and a foot to count the number of subsequent times random people compared me to Jen, her character on the show—I am fairly certain I was being WBified.

It's not paranoia if they're really out to get you, kids. Cha-cha.

This post from razorart reminded me of a conversation I regularly used to have with parents who brought their non-swimmer children to the municipal pool where I was a lifeguard. It went something like this:

Me: "Hi. I just rescued your child. The shallow end gets deeper than you might think. Your son got in over his head, and he began to drown."

Parent: "Oh. Can he go back in?"

Me: "All parents who bring their children here are required to supervise them at all times. Since your child is a non-swimmer, you must be in the water with him in order to supervise him properly."

Parent: "You mean I actually have to get in the pool? I can see just fine from where I am."

Me: "Did you see your child drowning a few minutes ago?"

Parent, defensive: "No, but I wasn't watching just then."

Me: "Exactly."

Parent: "Well, what are you lifeguards here for, then?"

Me: "We're here in case of emergencies. Our regulations require that parents supervise their children at all times so that we can keep emergencies to a minimum. Look, I'm not here to argue with you, and it's important that I get back to my post. However, I will tell you that the rules are not optional, and if you would like details on the reasoning behind them, my manager would be happy to talk to you. In the meantime, please wait at least 10 minutes before going into the pool with your child. He needs to rest for a bit, because—as I mentioned—he was drowning a few minutes ago."

Last month, a friend of mine who has been living in Tunisia wrote about Americans' obsession with safety. I think he raised some good points, and I think it's probably true that the average American parent is relatively safety-conscious. Does it go too far at times? Sure. Risk management procedures these days often have less to do with preventing accidents than preventing lawsuits, and on a more individual level, there are certainly parents out there who are overprotective.

At the same time, I'm coming at this from a different angle. I worked in parks and recreation every summer from age 14 to age 24. Most of that work was at a YMCA camp, where I was a junior counselor for 3 years, a counselor for 3 years, and an assistant program director for 2 years. I worked at the municipal pool where parents tried to drown their children for 2 years, and I was a program director for a day camp in Santa Monica for another 2 years. (If you're actually doing the math and are confused, I worked at both the pool and the YMCA camp one summer). During that time, I came to believe in three basic principles:

Kids will fuck themselves up. Even under the best of circumstances, accidents will happen. Kids will fall. They'll swallow things they weren't supposed to swallow. They'll get poison oak, they'll be stung by bees, and they'll run into each other. Some things are inevitable. However,

Kids who have help fucking themselves up will fuck themselves up worse. Let the five year-old with anger management issues draw with a sharp pencil, and she will use it as a weapon at some point. Leave a nail sticking out of a wall, and someone will get caught on it. That nub from the old horseshoes pole that's still in the ground? Some poor kid is going to fall on it and end up with a huge gash in his side. Anything you do—or fail to do—that makes injuries more probable will make those injuries more common.

Parents are idiots. All parents are not idiots. In fact, most of them are not so bad. That doesn't matter, because there are still a whole lot of idiots. They're a veritable army. Those of you who have ever worked retail will know what I'm talking about: 90% of your dealings with customers in a given day might be unremarkable, but the other 10%? Hooboy. Seriously, I'm sure I could find parents who would act surprised if I advised them to stop letting their kids eat broken glass.

And that's why I'm all for hyper-awareness when it comes to things like child safety. The rules and regulations might seem overwhelming; they might be overwhelming. If you work for a childcare organization, the documentation of safety procedures required by your insurance company might be excessive. Still, until common sense becomes far more common than it actually is, we'll just have to keep codifying it.

Today was Day Two of my "Get Up in the Morning Like A Normal Person" plan. I've been a night person since I was a kid, and I'm fine with that. I do not want—nor have I ever wanted—to be a morning person. Something about morning people just after they've woken up strikes me as vaguely inhuman. Morning people don't need to do a whole lot of research before they buy an alarm clock, because they don't need to know exactly how many minutes will elapse between presses of the snooze button, or how many times total the snooze button can be pushed before the clock just gives up on you. I bet the morning people among you didn't even know that it's possible for an alarm to give up on you. That's because while I'm trying to ignore the existence of the world for an extra eight minutes (times four), you're busy making yourself a wholesome breakfast and directing lively comments towards anyone who enters the room. If you're a tolerable-variety morning person, you understand that no matter how I feel about you, your lively comments are like fingernails on the chalkboard of my caffeineless psyche. If you're an insufferable-variety morning person, you chatter incessantly despite my baleful glares, and if you're really bad, you also take a break from your monologue every ten lines or so to ask me what's wrong.

So, no. I don't want to be a morning person. Even if I did, I don't think you can change your preference if you lean heavily in either direction. I know plenty of night people who get up early every day because they have kids who get up early every day, or because they have to get to work. They can maintain this routine for years, and they'll still think it sucks. If they have a partner who isn't of the same sleep persuasion, they'll probably spend about twenty minutes each morning wondering what they did to deserve eternity with Julie Fucking Andrews.

My goals are more modest. I just want to stabilize my schedule to help fend off insomnia, start lifting weights again—I've been going to the gym, but I got lazy and stopped lifting—and gain the ability to make phone calls to the East Coast during business hours. I've decided this means I should get up at around 9:00. So far, the plan is working fine. I bet I'll like it even better when I lose the sensation that my arms are maybe about to fall off.

On friendster, my email address is listed as majorweather@yahoo.com. My full name is Shasta Turner.

We have signed up with a gardening service just for the front. They are going to mow the lawn, edge the sidewalks & walkways, trim bushes & shrubs, sweep the driveway and sidewalk, rake the lawn, weed in all cracks and crevices, clean the street in front of our house, and fertilize every 2-3 months for $9.95 per visit. I feel kind of bad for hiring them; I keep imagining their staff as a bunch of 8 year-old ex Nike employees from Indonesia. Of course, it's much more likely that they'll be adult males who have immigrated illegally from Mexico.

In a state like California, in which the labor of illegal immigrants has an enormous—though not officially acknowledged—impact on the economy, it's sometimes hard for me to decide whether or not I feel okay about my own role in these economic transactions. Always, there's the dilemma: am I providing necessary employment to people who need the money or contributing to the exploitation of an unenfranchised class of workers? Perhaps it's both, a catch-22. I suppose I'll wait until they come and then decide how I feel about it.

Do you remember that song by Randy Newman, "My Life Is Good"? I think it was on the same album as "I Love L.A."

"A couple weeks ago
My wife and I
Took a little trip down to
Mexico
Met this young girl there
We brought her back with us
Now she lives with us
In our home
She cleans the hallway
She cleans the stair
She cleans the living room
She wipes the baby's ass
She drives the kids to school
She does the laundry, too
She wrote this song for me
Listen
Yeah."

The man's a genius, really. It's astonishing to me how many people are incapable of wrapping their minds around the fact that the primary feature of much of his older work was irony. There are a whole lot of them. They are, as "I Love L.A." the official anthem of the City of Los Angeles. They're the short people who were offended by "Short People." They're the ones who think that when Robert Frost wrote "good fences make good neighbors," he was promoting the sanctity of property lines. They think the people behind blackpeopleloveus.com are obviously racists, and they probably don't think bonsaikitten.com is even a little bit funny.

It would seem that I'm in the middle of a full-blown insomnia phase. I accepted this fact when I realized that it had been well over an hour since I had taken a muscle relaxant that would normally knock me out in under 20 minutes. I took the muscle relaxant instead of Ambien because all the tension in my body is currently concentrated in my neck, jaw, and the upper part of my head. I've obviously started grinding my teeth again when I do finally get to sleep; I could hardly chew tonight because of the jaw pain. The muscles in my forehead are actually sore from crinkling themselves up too much. I keep trying to massage my face into some sort of zen-face-master state, but it only works for about ten minutes at a time. Plus, it hurts. So, now, my mind is good for absolutely nothing, but I still can't seem to switch it off, as I've developed a drug-resistant strain of a wakefulness virus. I wonder what they give horses. Maybe I can convince our vet that we have livestock out yonder with a hankering for some good downers.

We are refinancing our house. For several days, pretty much all I did was look at amortization charts to try to figure out how to get the best deal. Our mortgage payment will soon drop by $267 a month, which is a lot, so that's good. The whole research and chart-staring process created something of a bee in my bonnet, and so we are now trading a variable-rate home equity line of credit, a car payment, a personal loan, and two credit cards for an enormous home equity loan with a 60-month term at a low, fixed rate. While it's rather frightening to commit to a payment of that size, the amount of that payment will actually be much lower than the minimum payments alone on the debts we're replacing, and we'll end up saving $239 per month just on interest. Plus, since it's a fixed-term loan, we won't have the option of hanging out and making interest-only payments for the next ten years, which is currently what we're doing with the home equity line of credit.

I realize personal finance isn't the most exciting topic, which is why I haven't been updating. However, if I haven't lost you already, and you're actually interested in things like this, then here are some other things you might be interested in:

1. bankrate.com is a really great site for comparing rates on all sorts of loans and savings accounts. That's where I found our new home equity loan.

2. I love this little program.

3. If you're looking for information on debt reduction, go here. Many of the steps outlined in the lessons are more common sense than anything else, but the workbook that accompanies them is excellent.

4. I've been getting mail for the last couple of years from companies offering very low rates for student loan consolidation, but it was my understanding that I couldn't consolidate my student loans until after I was out of school unless I wanted to start repaying them now. That's wrong—or at least it's wrong if you're me, or anyone else who has at least one Direct Loan from the US Department of Education. If you have a Direct Loan, you can get a Direct Consolidation Loan even if you're still in school, because unlike other lenders, the Department has a special in-school consolidation program.

Federal rates on Stafford loans are the lowest they've ever been, and they're expected to drop even lower on July 1st. While students paid 8.19% on Stafford loans in the 2000-2001 academic year, students this year are paying 4.06%. The projected rate for July 1, 2003 to June 30, 2004 is 3.42%. This is a huge deal, especially if you owe an amount that you're pretty sure exceeds the operating budget of, say, Rhode Island. For me, the difference between 8.19% and 3.42% is a savings of over $90,000 in interest over the life of the loan. It's also the difference between a monthly payment of $628 and a monthly payment of $377. It's big enough that I was actually considering going into repayment early so that I could lock in the lower rate. Now that I know that's unnecessary, I'll wait until the rates drop in July, consolidate, and once again start pretending I never borrowed all that money.

This whole Iraqi playing cards thing really creeps me out. It strikes me as grotesquely clichéd, the product of too many movies that rely on heavy-handed symbolism to make the point that there's evil in the world, folks, evil. But is it the evil of human greed and corruption—Joe Pesci in Vegas evil? Or is there an element of the supernatural at work? Like, would these be tarot cards if distributing tarot cards wouldn't cause god-fearing Americans everywhere to accuse the US military of being a bunch of goddamn satan-worshippers, with their fortune-telling, their Harry Potter books, and their WB network? Nope. Tarot won't do, so Texas Hold 'Em it is.

So, there are these old weight charts that were developed in the 1950s by insurance companies. There are all sorts of problems with these charts; they failed, for example, to take body type or activity levels into account. As a result, the ranges provided in the tables were unrealistic—and indeed, unhealthy—for large numbers of people, particularly for shorter women or for anyone with a more athletic build. One of the most influential of these charts was the 1959 chart developed by Metropolitan Life. Met Life has since revised those charts, but unfortunately, many doctors and health organizations continue to use the 1959 charts as a baseline.

Another formula often used—and I don't know who came up with this idea, but it's worse—is that women should calculate their ideal weight by allowing 100 pounds for the first five feet of height, and then adding 5 pounds for each inch of height after that. The resulting number could be adjusted plus or minus 10% to provide a "healthy range." So, according to that formula, the base number for a woman who's 5'5" would be 125 pounds. A wide variety of people and organizations still rely on this basic formula or a slight variation of it.

Here's the problem, and I'll use myself as an example, because I have data on myself, and it's just easiest that way: I am five feet tall. Therefore, according to the above formula, I should weigh 100 pounds, give or take 10 pounds. I do not weigh 100 pounds. I can't remember the last time I weighed 100 pounds. Nor do I weigh 110 pounds. I do remember the last time I weighed 110; I was 14 years old. What I weigh is about 119, which would mean, according to this formula, that I was on the verge of obesity and facing numerous weight-related health risks.

Even if I had no other way of gauging where I "should" be in terms of weight, that wouldn't seem right to me. I'm certainly not immune to distorted body image, and I can pine for a smaller ass and a flatter stomach along with the best of 'em, but even if I decided to believe someone who told me I should weigh 100 pounds, I suspect that it wouldn't be physically possible for me to lose 19 pounds without making myself really sick. This becomes more clear to me when I spend a few minutes playing around with calculations based on body fat percentages.

It can be difficult to obtain a reliable measurement of your body fat percentage, particularly if you're depending on someone who's using calipers to measure your skin folds, but who doesn't really know what they're doing. Many gyms and some doctors now have these fancy bioelectrical impedance devices that provide more accurate results. There's a margin of error, certainly, but if you take multiple measurements on different days under similar conditions, and then average the results, you'll be about as close as you can get without doing an underwater weighing.

So. The numbers. What the keepers of the fancy device tell me is that my body fat percentage at my current weight is around 21.8%. Of course, that doesn't mean anything unless you use some sort of chart to interpret it, and these charts can be totally inconsistent. In general, it seems that the charts you'll find from organizations dedicated to general health provide higher numbers in the "healthy" category than do health clubs or organizations that focus specifically on fitness. You can find a fairly typical general chart here, and a fairly typical health club version here. If you know your body fat percentage and your weight, you can use the formula from this page to figure out how many pounds of your total weight are fat and how many are lean body mass.

For example:

My current weight is 119, and my current body fat percentage is 21.8%. If you multiply those, you'll get a total for pounds of body fat.

(119 pounds total) x (.218) = (26 pounds of fat)

You can then subtract the pounds of fat from the total weight to figure out how much of your weight is muscle, bones, organs—that sort of thing.

(119 pounds total) - (26 pounds of fat) = (93 pounds of lean body mass)

Since the idea when you lose weight is to lose fat, not muscle, bones, and organs, you can use these numbers to come up with a much better idea of the kind of weight range that would be healthy for you. You can also use them to demonstrate just how bullshit some of the old formulae are.

For example:

If I think my goal weight should be 100 pounds, and I know how much lean body mass I currently have, I can subtract the lean body mass (because I want to keep all that) from the goal weight to determine how much fat I'd have at that weight.

(100 pounds total) - (93 pounds of lean body mass) = (7 pounds of fat)

Because you have all those figures, you can set up a simple equation to figure out how that translates to a new body fat percentage. If you're working with 100, the equation part is really unnecessary, but whatever. I'll write it out anyway.

(pounds total) x (body fat percentage) = (pounds of fat)

So...

100x = 7

Divide both sides by 100 to isolate the variable, and you get .07, or 7%. Looking back at this chart, we can see that women need 10-12% body fat to live. Even if I lost only fat on my way down to 100 pounds, I'd be lunching with Karen Carpenter. If I lost only fat to get to 110 pounds, the very upper end of that stupid formula's range for my height, my body fat would be 17%. While that percentage isn't dangerous, it's getting there. That chart I've been referring to lists the range for "athletes" as 14-20%, but it's important to remember that many athletes—particularly in sports like distance running, gymnastics, and skating—have body fat percentages that are way too low. (If you're interested in more specifics, here's an interesting article on the topic. I haven't fact-checked it, because I have a research fetish, but I also have limits.) Indeed, while the numbers vary for different women, many start to develop all sorts of problems, including amenorrhea, low blood pressure, and lowered bone density, when their body fat percentage drops below 17%. Clearly, 110 pounds isn't a realistic upper limit for me; it's barely high enough to be a safe low-end limit.

The point is not that this influential chart doesn't work for me. The point is that much of the advice we get about what we "should" weigh is terrible advice that can have devastating effects not just on our self-esteem, but on our health.

And that, my friends, is the story of why young gymnasts always look slightly deformed, why you should never rely on an actuary for health advice, and why you should love your ass. I can write a sentence like that if I want to, because even those of you who thought you were going to make it through this whole entry stopped reading when I wrote the word "equation." Still, I'm posting it anyway, because just when I find myself thinking that people already know this kind of stuff, I remember women I knew in college who taped pictures of Victoria's Secret models to their mirrors with annotations like "ME IN JUNE." Screw that. Screw the fact that I completely understood. And screw Victoria's Secret; they send me too many catalogs, and the last bra I bought from them has an itchy spot in the back.

Knocking you out with my Scandinavian thighs,
Shasta

I've always had problems with swim goggles; I just didn't seem to be able to find a pair that wouldn't leak. I tried goggles made specifically for women, goggles with special foam that's supposed to mold to your face shape, goggles with little eyes, goggles with big eyes... some were better than others, but all of them more or less sucked. I tried out a new pair this evening, and was delighted to discover that I had found a pair that didn't leak, not even a little. The brand? Speedo Juniors. Yup, I now wear kiddie goggles.

Some of the men who use that pool do silly things all the time. I'm guessing they do these things in an attempt to look strong, fast, and generally fuckworthy. Unfortunately, it doesn't work. The one that stands out most is when they stride purposefully out of the locker room, hop in the pool, and give me one of those "I'm gonna smoke you, so don't get in my way" looks. In the past, I've instantly hated any guy who gives me that kind of look, and I've seen it a lot over the years. As an adult, it has come most often from men who don't think women have any business taking up space in the weight room. In elementary school, it came from boys who complained when there were "too many girls" participating in a race or playing on their kickball team. In high school, it came from boys who hurled themselves across the volleyball court during PE in order to hit a ball that was coming directly to me. Or from the track coach who announced that no girls were signed up for the long jump in an upcoming meet and requested volunteers, but responded to my raised hand with, "You? I meant someone who could jump more than six feet." Nothing could have ensured my participation in the event more effectively: I would do the goddamn long jump, and whatever I lacked in talent, I'd make up for in spite. I don't even like the long jump, but I did the event that entire season. I refused to quit until I placed at districts and felt I had proved my point.

These looks I got had absolutely nothing to do with my performance, by the way. I intentionally chose examples of activities I either am or was pretty good at. It wouldn't annoy me nearly as much if someone didn't want to pass me the ball in a game of basketball, because the chances that I'd screw up the play are really quite high. I might still be annoyed, because the only situations in which I'll agree to play basketball are times when I'm with a group of people who get half-crocked and then decide to go to the park, and if you can't lighten up and pass to some incompetents in such a situation, then you shouldn't play basketball with motley groups of half-crocked people. However, I won't be infuriated. I won't want to crush you. I won't root spiritedly for anyone who can crush you if I can't get the job done myself. I won't want you humiliated, demoralized, preferably crying.

I really don't have many buttons, but clearly, this is one of them. I imagine most women have felt this way at one time or another, but I think it's perhaps a little more tempting for the men who do this sort of posturing to write off people who look like me: short even by short people's standards, with blonde hair, blue eyes, and a round face that pretty much no one finds threatening. I can walk onto a plane flying out of Las Vegas wearing a friggin' pirate hat without inspiring a single person to actually check my identification—and this was after September 11. Children and animals trust me. I wear kiddie goggles. All this is fine. Except for the airport part; they really dropped the ball on that one. None of this means you have permission not to take me seriously.

It doesn't bother me as much as it used to, though I'm sure that doesn't come across as the overall gist of this post. But it's true, mostly because so many of the people I see this attitude in no longer own condescension and prowess in a matching set. As a result, their displays are just kind of sad. I have a hard time getting worked up over someone who does such a top-notch job of making an ass of himself that I feel embarrassed on his behalf.

Which brings me back to those pool guys. So, there's the purposeful stride out of the locker room, hair still dry. Then, there's the hop into the pool and the "I will smoke you" look. Then, there's a flailing of the arms, a kick that leaves a frothy trail, and a whole lot of gusto. For about one length of the pool. They slow down considerably on the return, and after completing maybe four lengths, they pull themselves up the ladder onto deck, gasp for a bit, and head back to the locker room. It's like watching a long build-up to a magic trick when the rabbit that's supposed to come out of the hat is in plain sight under the table. There's no shame in getting tired—everyone does at some point—but I can think of few things I'd like to be less than a peacock without feathers.

1.) I am loving my new flat pens. They're bookmarks! They're pens! They don't make great big lumps in my books!

2.) J Crew is having a "Secret Sale" right now—you have to follow one of these links, because they don't have this sale linked from their main page. These events aren't unusual, but I feel compelled to point out that jersey short-sleeve crewnecks are currently priced at 6.99, and several of their petite jeans styles are currently priced at 29.99. Many of the exact same styles of jeans are being offered through the main site for $20.00 more per pair. This probably doesn't mean much to you, but these jeans seem to be the only ones in the universe right now that fit well and are short enough for me.

3.) I love TurboTax, especially when it tells me that we'll be getting a refund of several thousand dollars by the 14th of this month. I love that interest on home equity lines of credit is tax deductible. I love Quicken's debt reduction planner. It takes your balances owed, interest rates, current monthly payments, and minimum monthly payments, and then, it tells you how you can optimize the payments and get out of debt more quickly. It's currently telling me that we can get out of debt* in 2005 instead of 2010—and save $7000 in interest—if we start by jacking our car payment up to $820/month and pay the minimum payment on everything else. Writing a check that big for a car payment makes me choke a little, but I trust the wisdom of this plan.
* That doesn't count our mortgage or my student loans. Those would seem to be eternal.

4.) I think I might also love the fact that the FHA Streamline Refinancing program exists, but I'm not sure yet.

5.) I got this book for something like $3.00, and I want to make about two thirds of the dishes in it. Right now, I especially want to make peppers stuffed with cinnamon bulgur. You can see a little picture of them in the upper right corner of the back cover.

6.) I signed up with GreenCine. I think I learned about them in sxoidmal's or vaxjo's journal, but I don't remember for sure. I have made myself a great, big, long queue, and when I'm done with a movie, I just put it in the little envelope and stick it in the mail slot in my door, and then, some more movies come, and this makes me happy.

7.) In 1989, my friend Eva and I got uncomfortably stuck.

8.) When the hubby was a kid, he had a pet monkey.

9.) When I was 16, I was pissed off.

10.) When I turned 21, my friends bought me some nasty drinks.

Have you seen these commercials? I was going to paraphrase them loosely, but then I found actual transcripts.

Guy #1: It's a ploy.
Guy #2: What?
Guy #1: This "Drug Money Funds Terror"; it's a ploy.
Guy #2: A ploy.
Guy #1: A — a manipulation.
Guy #2: Ploy.
Guy #1: "Drug money funds terror," I mean, why should I believe that?
Guy #2: Because it's a fact.
Guy #1: A fact.
Guy #2: F-A-C-T. Fact.
Guy #1: So you're saying that I should believe it because it's true. That's your argument.
Guy #2: It is true.

And that's it! Guy #2 wins, not because he has used anything that looks even an eensy, weensy bit like logical reasoning or evidence, but because he was that kid in elementary school who could say, "I know you are, but what am I?" 400 times and still be up for another 400. He also did just fine in spelling, which is a good thing, because as everyone knows, spelling something out makes it more true.

"Who are you?"
"I'm the mack daddy."
"You are not the mack daddy."
"Am too. M-A-C-K D-A-D-D-Y."
"Oh! I see."

If you're me at this point, you're hoping the ad was supposed to be open-ended—that they couldn't possibly show us two adults arguing at recess and expect us to be nodding our heads and thinking, "Yeah, it's true because it's true, dipshit!" But nope. There's a part II, and here's how it starts:

Guy #1: Okay, so it's true.
Guy #2: What's true?
Guy #1: Drug money funds terrorism.
Guy #2: It is true.
Guy #1: Okay!
Guy #2: Okay?

And I'm not even going to get into the rest of the commercial, because addressing what's wrong with it requires discussing a whole other set of issues about just how drug money has been linked to terrorism. They're complex issues that are worth getting into, but I don't feel like getting into them right now, because they're not my point.

So...

The bad news is not just that critical thinking is a waste of airtime; it's also obstinate and quite possibly un-American, seeing as how questioning the argument of someone who hasn't actually presented an argument can align you with terrorists so easily.

The good news is that I'm the mack daddy.

Progressively responsible leadership.
Marshalling resources.
Managing multiple projects.
Balancing global concerns with attention to detail.
Versatile and student-centered.
Innovative approaches to the use of technology in the classroom.
Maintaining productivity in a deadline-driven environment.
Conflict resolution skills.
Increased site traffic by a blurgazillion percent.

Thinking up this kind of crap doesn't come naturally to me at all. It's driving me just a little bit insane, especially because I'm applying for a wide variety of jobs right now.

1) Editing gigs (requires corporate-friendly resume)
2) Higher education administration gigs (requires a strange combination of corporate-friendly and academic-friendly resume; combination changes with job title)
3) Things like part-time tutoring gigs that can generate quick cash (they get a resuvita, which isn't a word, but should be)
4) Tenure-track jobs at community colleges (requires first serious revision of CV in quite some time)

That last one's newer. I wasn't considering it before, largely because I'm not sure I want to be a full-time community college instructor. But then, I started looking at jobs, and I got a sense of what's out there that I want to do, am qualified for, and would receive adequate compensation for. There isn't a whole lot, so I was indulging in some anticipatory despair.

And then, I kept coming across these job listings for full-time positions in community colleges. The college up the street is hiring—I could actually walk to work. Other nearby colleges are hiring, too; there are at least two more within ten miles of my house. The community colleges around here seem to give instructors a more reasonable load than many do. I've learned that a typical position in this area requires that you teach 3 courses per semester, not the 4 or 5 common at many junior colleges. A typical position gives you two full months off per year, plus holidays. A typical position pays somewhere in the mid-40s to start. And if I don't like it, I don't have to do it for the rest of my life. I can do, you know, something else.

I have no idea why this didn't sound good to me before, because it sounds pretty damn good now. Actually, I do know why, but it's too complicated to get into at 3 in the morning. So, yeah. I'm putting together several totally different versions of resumes and vitae and in-between-type documents, and it's time to stop now, because these things get to you after a while.

Experienced headspinner with outstanding yoga pants.

You see?

All Christmas presents have been purchased and wrapped. By me, even. Those of you who are habitually on the ball might not understand the import of that first statement. This is not just unusual; it's unprecedented. Normally, I'd still be on the Internet today, paying through the nose for two-day shipping. Normally, I'd end up running to the mall on Saturday evening (we leave on Sunday), desperately purchasing anything I could feasibly give as a gift and cursing the the acquisitive, obnoxious, slow-walking and loud-talking excuses for humans who surrounded me. Normally, I'd still not have anything wrapped until late Saturday night, and once everything was wrapped, I'd realize that I didn't have, say, gift tags, so I'd have to just stick Post-Its on everything and hope that someone in my family had extra tags on hand.

So, what do I do when I've somehow managed to get everything done at the eighth hour rather than the eleventh? I'm going to Disneyland!

Of course, on tomorrow's agenda is cleaning, packing, finishing laundry, giving the dogs a bath, and realizing that there are a million things I forgot about entirely, but today, dead men tell no tales.

bohunk says:

oh! and confidential to all customers everywhere, when someone offers you a catalog, accept it with thanks and go. just go. do not, i repeat, do not make comments about bathroom reading. and if you have the self-control and inner censor of a 5-year old and you absolutely must make a bathroom reading comment, you need to fully expect to be stabbed through the hand with a ballpoint pen for tacking on the phrase, "you know, i look at it while i'm...[insert knowing wink]."

And, for the variation, I present to you this letter to the editors of Budget Living, a new magazine I like because it has articles on lamps and snacks and refinancing and how to fix your sink:

I saw your premiere issue and thought, not another magazine. But I bought it, because I love the color red and had $3.99 to spend. I took BL to the bathroom with me and, honestly, I couldn't get off the toilet. I read every page because every page was interesting. I was so tired of reading mags that featured stuff I can't afford. BL is a real mag for real people. I was actually sad when I finished it. I want more—now!

—Rayschael Eison, Stockton, CA

Did I mention this was a letter to the editor, one Rayschael is probably quite delighted to see in print? That she has no doubt bought several copies of this issue so that everyone she knows will be able to see she's been "published"? That I suspect she's given her real first and last name, because come on, who just pulls "Rayschael" out of a hat?

That reminds me of this girl Debbie I knew from swim team in high school. Debbie decided she was going to change the spelling of her name to "Debe."

"People are going to call you Deeb," I told her on the bus on the way to practice.

"Well, they shouldn't!" she declared. "It makes perfect sense! It's Deb plus e."

"One of the cool things about getting past age 5," I returned, "is that people learn how to read words all at once—whole words, even big ones! They don't need to stop and sound them out anymore. That's why you might do fine with the 4 year-olds, but everyone else will call you Deeb."

I didn't like her very much.

Nor do I like Rayschael, whose parents probably named her the perfectly reasonable "Rachel," but dropped the ball when they failed to teach her that you don't write a goddamn letter to the editor saying you liked a magazine so much, you couldn't get off the toilet.

So, today, I:

• Went to my friend Kelly's apartment, because it's been way too long since I've seen her.
• We went to have lunch on the Third Street Promenade. A pigeon stole one of my fries.
• Next, we went and tried on overpriced clothes just for fun. Apparently, I have no idea what size I'm supposed to try on. Have stores made clothing proportions more generous so that people will feel better about shopping for smaller sizes? I've gotten myself back in decent shape and have lost more weight, but I don't understand how I can suddenly be a size 6. Kelly says I need to revise my body image. I think they just made clothes bigger.
• Next, we realized it was happy hour, so we stopped for a drink. I had a martini. A man came into the bar after we had been there about ten minutes and sat down in the seat next to me. He kept his back turned most of the time, and we thought nothing of him—until we had paid our bill and were about to leave. That's when he turned around, touched my ass, and quickly turned back around. It took me a little while to process what had actually happened, because people say all sorts of things on the Promenade—already, a homeless fellow had told us "happy birthday" several times, and a random guy had asked us whether we were from England or Australia—but they don't usually do anything. Who just sits next to strangers in bars and surreptitiously cops quick feels? I mean, really. Jesus.
• Next, we left.
• Then, we walked around on the pier for a while. I love that place. We sat on a bench and watched an insanely gorgeous sunset—one of those sunsets you know is is spectacular because of the smog, but for a little while, it's hard to care.

I'm getting panicky about money. At the end of spring semester, I cut down dramatically on work to leave myself available for full-time dissertation writing. I never made a huge amount of money, and we were doing more or less fine while I was working, so we thought we would be able to handle the decrease in our joint income without too many problems. And that was true until we paid some large household repair bills, resumed monthly tuition payments with the beginning of fall semester, and realized we both needed eye exams and new glasses. We've basically used up all the room we had for overflow, and we're consistently spending more than Jeff brings in every month.

So, I need a job that's more substantial than the little here & there gigs I've been doing. That's fine; I've been lucky to have as much time off as I've had, and it's not like I'm wowing everyone with the mind-blowing speed of my dissertating. The most obvious thing for me to do is get a job teaching comp at one of the nearby colleges. Part-time comp jobs are easy to get around here if you have a master's degree and teaching experience—Cal State Fullerton, Cal State Long Beach, Cal State LA, Cal State Dominguez Hills, and Chapman University are all within perfectly reasonable commuting distance, and there are several more four-year colleges I could get to if I took on a nastier commute. There are also numerous junior colleges in this area; one of the larger ones is about three blocks down the street.

The problem with part-time comp jobs is that:

1) Grading comp papers takes forever, and most classes at the Cal States and the junior colleges are way too big. I've never been able to get my time for grading a single five- to seven-page freshman essay down to under about a half hour without seriously compromising the quality of my comments. (I know several of you teach, and I don't mean to imply that you can't do a good job of commenting in under a half hour—I'm saying that I can't.) If you're teaching two or three classes at an average of 30 students per class, with papers due every two weeks, it's easy to start feeling like all you do at night is grade papers.

2) The wages are terrible. It's not unusual for community colleges to pay under $2000 per course. Most of the four-year colleges around here pay somewhere around $3000. When you add up classroom time, office hours, and prep & grading time, the hour-for-hour pay is mind-numbingly awful for a job that requires a master's degree, even if you prep and grade way more quickly than I do. I've had friends who were teaching at community colleges actually calculate how much they were working and discover they were earning minimum wage with no benefits. No one gets a graduate degree in the humanities because they're hoping to really rake in the dough, but part-time adjuncting is the intellectual equivalent of sweatshop labor. I'm only exaggerating slightly.

Something else, then. I could look for something that has nothing to do with academia, but finding a random part-time job that pays an hourly rate I'll work for—and which won't make me insane—could take a whole lot of work.

Instead, I've been looking into university administration. At this point, that's the most likely post-doctoral career direction for me anyway, so it makes sense to look in that area. Unfortunately, this is a bad time to look. I've only come across one part-time position that pays what I'd want, and it's a stretch; it's basically academic advising, but while I have the required student services experience, their preferred candidate is an actual counselor, someone with a master's in counseling or clinical psychology. And I doubt I can talk anyone into considering English or history "closely related fields."

And then I come across positions like the one below:

Assistant Dean for Student Affairs (Student Services Professional IV-12 month)
Job No. 2200
Department: Student Affairs/College of Business and Economics
Salary Range: $3,943 - $5,336 per month
Duties: In collaboration with the Dean of the College of Business and Economics and with the Vice President for Student Affairs, delivers and integrates student services, ranging from recruitment to graduation, into the academic setting. Designs and coordinates programs with faculty, students, and administrators that attract potential students, promote access and retention, enrich the academic environment, and enhance student development within the College of Business and Economics. Recommends university and college-wide policy to the Vice President for Student Affairs and the academic dean. Coordinates student services, college publications (print as well as electronic), enrollment management efforts, co-curricular learning, and college climate assessment efforts for the academic college. Oversees staff and graduate students.
Requirements: Equivalent to four years of progressively responsible student services work experience which includes experience in advising students individually and in groups, and in analysis and resolution of complex student services problems. Equivalent to graduation from a four-year college or university in a related field plus upper division or graduate course work in counseling techniques, interviewing, and conflict resolution. A master's degree in a job-related field may be substituted for one year of professional experience. A doctorate degree in a job-related field may be substituted for two years of the required professional experience. Must possess an understanding of the academic environment. Previous experience in advising student organizations, program development, budget, and personal, academic, or career counseling. Ability to design and implement leadership training experiences for college-based student organizations. Ability to work with faculty and administrative units. Ability to be creative, use independent judgment, and tolerance for ambiguity. Ability to work in a complex organization with a diverse, multicultural population. Ability to work with minimal supervision.
Preferred Experience: A master's degree in a job-related field preferred.

It's the kind of job I was intending to apply for once I finished my degree, but I'm tempted to apply for it now, because I do need a job, and if I'm going to work, it might be nice to make real wages. When I was piggy-backing five part-time teaching and editing jobs for about the same amount of money I earned at summer jobs when I was 19, I couldn't help but think that if I was going to leave the house every day at 8:30, come home at 6:30, and spend a good portion of the evening grading or putting together materials for my next class, it would be much smarter to do so for full-time pay. The mindset stuck, and I seem to be applying it to the idea of any formal work arrangement now, full-time or not.

Another important point for me is that I'm fundamentally uncomfortable on some levels with relying on my husband financially to the degree that I do. I'm a kept woman! A kept woman, I tell you! Really, though, he's been wonderful and amazingly supportive—I'm fully aware that I'm quite fortunate. I'm also aware that, no matter how much I'd like it to be unimportant, money actually matters, and as such, it affects the dynamics of relationships. This issue gets quite complex, because I think what I'm talking about is a nexus of some of my own issues with the tangible benefits of having money and the cultural values attached to earning it—values that include the association of money with power, which in turn affects the power dynamics at work in a partnership. The fact that these kinds of dynamics also involve the interplay of power and gender adds a whole other level of complexity to the problem.

To be more concrete: I've known a lot of couples, and I've been surprised at the degree to which financial inequities have been bound up with questions like who cleans the bathroom. If you have two people in a partnership who maintain a joint checking account—one works 45 hours a week for $80,000 a year, while the other works 45 hours a week for $25,000 a year—I think it's hard to avoid at least a hint of the notion that the partner who makes $80,000 is making a more valuable contribution to the household. I think that often, the partner who earns less feels pressure and/or is pressured to "make up" for the perceived imbalance by contributing more in other areas. Like housework. And in heterosexual couples, the partner who typically earns less is the woman.

I want to make it clear that I'm not talking about a scenario in which an evil man gets himself a fat job and then demands that his woman have dinner ready when he comes home, despite the fact that she's been working all day, too. Nor am I just talking about housework. Those topics are certainly worthy of attention, but they don't interest me nearly as much as the kinds of domestic negotiations undertaken by people I relate to in some important ways: people who identify as progressive, people who identify as feminists, people who are critical of things like stereotypical gender roles and capitalist imperatives. What I find interesting are the things that "stick," whether or not we realize it—the factors that shape the ways we figure out how to split up chores, who will have the final word when deciding whether or not to buy the cedar bedroom set, and who (if anyone) gets to go on vacation alone just for the sake of being alone for a little while. What I find interesting are the decisions we make every day without even once thinking of Foucault.

Several years ago, a friend of mine told me about a guy he knew who had just broken up with his long-time girlfriend. The guy came from a wealthy family and had a large trust fund. One of his complaints during the breakup was that his girlfriend "hadn't been appreciative enough" of what he had done for her financially. I have nothing against people with trust funds; I rather wish I had one myself. I also don't presume to know anything about these people's relationship. What I responded to was my idea of an exchange I hadn't been a part of or even observed, and my reaction probably says more about me than about the situation itself, but after determining that this wasn't a question of basic rudeness, I got frustrated on her behalf.

"What the hell was 'being more appreciative' supposed to look like?" I wanted to know.

And really, I still want to know, just theoretically. What was she supposed to do? Say thank you, sure. Do thoughtful things from time to time, sure. What else? If he wants to pay for the two of them to go to Oaxaca, and she hates Oaxaca because she had an awful trip there as a teenager, is she ungrateful if she says she'd rather go somewhere else? Should she not bug him about taking out the trash and just do it herself? Perhaps she's obligated to drop what she's doing every time it occurs to him that he'd like a blowjob? I realize I sound flippant, but I really am being serious. My cousin knows a woman who, before marrying an older and much wealthier man, signed a pre-nuptial agreement that stipulated she could never say no when her soon-to-be husband wanted to have sex with her. Never mind the fact that if someone asked me to sign such a contract, I would be more likely to kick him in the balls than to suck them. (Ha ha! I can be vulgar if I want to, because this is such a long-ass entry that you probably aren't even reading this part.) Never mind the fact that enforcing a "never say no" pre-nup would be nearly impossible. I want to know whether or not holding to it would demonstrate that the wife was sufficiently appreciative.

And of course it wouldn't. It wouldn't be enough; no single ever thing is. People don't work like that.

What I'm getting at is that on a much more subtle level, accepting my husband's willingness to support me for a time has raised questions I haven't had to ask myself before. Tricky questions. Did I agree to a different set of boundaries when I stopped earning a significant income? I think that to a certain degree, I did. I know that when we disagree on financial matters, I sometimes wonder whether I'm standing up for something perfectly reasonable or have crossed the line into telling Jeff what to do with his money. This gets even more complicated than you might imagine, particularly when it starts to involve things like requests for favors from family members that could be financially disastrous for us. And I think it's right for me to be sensitive to those kinds of questions.

At the same time, I'm also sensitive to the fact that I will probably always earn less than my husband. Way less. He has a master's degree in applied mathematics, works in the technology sector, and is really very good at what he does. I play with words, and that doesn't typically lead to enormous monetary windfalls—which is fine; I'm glad I chose the path I did. But it's important to me that I remember it's all too easy to act as though a paycheck means more than it really does, because it's also easy to forget that some things stick, and that what you think is sometimes much less powerful than how you feel. More than once when I was juggling several jobs, I came home to find out that Jeff had gotten a raise for more than I would end up making that whole year. I was delighted for him, proud of him, glad his company was recognizing his talents. I also found myself frustrated by what seemed like the comparatively sorry state of my own employment. The jobs I had were good jobs, competitive positions for which there were a whole lot more applicants than open spots. To me, they seemed—well, diminished. I don't want that feeling to stick, not just because it's unpleasant, but because I suspect it's part of a whole set of other attitudes and behaviors. And I don't like any of them.

So, to sum up: I'm feeling panicky about money. I'm looking at what's out there. I have issues. And I didn't even get into how I think being the daughter of a single mom can feed into a drive for self-reliance that borders on pathological! Or how much I hate the idea of trying to turn my CV into a resumé!

It is hot. Really hot. And before you say to me, "Oh, Shasta. You don't know from heat. It is only 90 degrees where you live, and it is 106 degrees here. So, you see, you should not be hot, because I have more desert than you," I would like to point out that we don't have air conditioning, and therefore, it is hotter inside my house than it is outside. And if you try to tell me that having the temperature inside your place of residence hover somewhere in the low 90s is mild and altogether desirable, I will call you a stinking liar. If you insist that you aren't lying, I will call you a dirty weather poseur and set your thermostats to 93 degrees for all eternity. I'll then abscond with your popsicles and send you a postcard every three days reminding you that actually, you think it's quite balmy and are immensely comforted by the fact that it's fifteen degrees hotter in Joshua Tree.

Around these parts, the Fourth of July seems to start about now. It then goes on for weeks. Some asshole down the street bought a megaphone recently, and he's been doing things like having conversations with our next-door neighbors through it. The conversations consist of shrill, finger-in-the-mouth whistles, long "aaaaaaaaghs," and snippets such as "CI, baby! Criminal Intent!!" or "I got beer in the pick-up." Did I mention one half of this exchange is broadcast through a megaphone? I thought so. Just checking.

The fireworks aren't yet happening at intervals throughout the day, but they have begun. My neighbors seem to be especially fond of explosions. This wasn't the case in my former neighborhood, where the only person who regularly set things on fire in the street was the guy who decided to cope with being put on permanent disability by making it his goal to go through a case of beer every day. He began at nine. It was the Beast or some such swill, but I don't think that much mattered by about noon.

I've got this idea that the desire to get trashed and blow things up can certainly crop up at any socioeconomic level, but is particularly prominent in typically middle-class, suburban areas. My last neighborhood was comprised primarily of working-class families, most of them immigrants from Mexico. They busted their asses at work, and to blow off steam, they had big, festive parties that started at four and ended by ten or eleven. My current neighborhood is comprised of people who are just comfortable enough to feel they deserve more, because they really got screwed by that one boss, and they'd have his job if they hadn't been stymied by massive injustice. This is a generalization, of course—all sorts of different people live near me—but I think it's true enough for the ones who are the loudest. They'd really relate to "Frank's Wild Years" if they didn't think that Tom Waits sounded like such a freak.

So, in order to cope with the cosmic imbalance that keeps them working for The Man when, by all rights, they should be The Man, my neighbors purchase some Cuervo Gold and Bud Light, get a good buzz on while they sit by the pool and watch the kids play, put the kids to bed, pour another round of shots, and then decide that they are all mu'fuckin Bruce Willis. Meanwhile, their bosses have done pretty much the same thing, only they've done it in a gated community with Scotch or expensive wine, and they have decided they are not mu'fuckin Bruce Willis, but smooth-skiing James Bond. In reality, the best they could hope for is Inspector Gadget, though they try valiantly to convince you otherwise by showing you their GPS systems and offering to drive in their cars that talk but only get fourteen miles to the gallon. Chances are they can't even make a decent martini. The bosses, not the cars. If drinking on the freeway were legal, Lexus would make a "driving experience" with space for vermouth and Bombay Sapphire next to the wiper fluid tank, and suits everywhere would pronounce the resulting cocktails "not half bad."

Of course, it could be that I'm just feeling grumbly because I'm working on a Friday night instead of drinking a Manhattan and pretending that I'm a sweet-sashaying Ann-Margret (1964 model). But that may or may not matter.

So, there's this thing that happens when you watch movies made in the US but set in France. This thing is that American actors, the vast majority of whom lack the skills to even approximate a bad French accent, instead affect a bad British accent. The logic of this consistently baffles me. Is it really so important to the directors that the actors speak with some sort of accent that it doesn't matter if they've got the right part of Europe? Apparently so. They even have Drew Barrymore try this technique, which tends to come out sort of Van Nuys on the Thames. "Oh, definitely, I mean, yeah, we must rise up against the tyranny of our oppressors. Totally."

I realize there are more important things to worry about in this mad, mad world, but I don't get bent out of shape when people squeeze toothpaste tubes from the middle, so I feel like I'm making up for lost pet peeve time.

So, I'm heading out to the first freeway of my commute today, and the traffic on the street is terrible. Really, really awful. I was leading an evening workshop and was coming in later than usual because I'd be staying later than usual, but still—it was 2:00 in the afternoon. The drive from my house to the freeway normally only takes about five minutes, so I figure I can't possibly be stuck that long. After moving about 2 blocks in 10 minutes, I see a sign:

LAW ENFORCEMENT
ACTIVITY
IN PROGRESS.
Well, hell, I think to myself. What do they have going on here? A sobriety checkpoint? If so, just how many people do they think they're going to catch on a Wednesday at 2:00? I meditate on the manifest inefficiency of my local police force for a time while periodically pressing the gas pedal to move a foot and a half forward.

About two blocks later, I see another sign:

CALIFORNIA DRIVER'S LICENSE
CHECKPOINT AHEAD
At least this means there isn't some sort of standoff that's lasted so long they've put signs up, I think. Then, I glance over towards my bag. Was my wallet in it? Of course not! I was thinking about the workshop I would be leading in the evening, and I managed to pack several books, a folder full of handouts, a bag of cough drops, a nice selection of pens, and three different tubes of lipstick. I did not, however, manage to pack my wallet.

Clearly, the only thing I could do was turn around. I really wasn't that far from home, and I had left plenty of time to get to my destination, so arriving late wouldn't be a huge problem. I hang a u-ey. And then, I see the fucker. "Christ on a bike," I think to myself, only this biker was not Christ at all.

As it turns out, hanging a u-ey right before you reach a police checkpoint is a clear indicator that you have six pounds of blow stashed away in your trunk and are angling for a spot on "America's Funniest High-Speed Chases." So, mister cop-man pulls me over, and I explain that I live four blocks away and was turning around to get my driver's license, which I accidentally left at home. Mister cop-man eyes me suspiciously and asks if I have any ID on me. I respond that I have an expired University of California Alumni Association card, and that I might be able to find something from Petco with my name on it. He looks at me in disgust. "But I do actually know my driver's license number," I added hopefully. It now amuses me that I didn't even consider turning down my stereo, which was set to a station playing "We Are the Champions" at the time of my bureaucratic setback.

So, I got a ticket. Mister cop-man eyed my trunk and glowered, but he seemed impressed that I had memorized my driver's license number, and everything he saw when he punched that number into his system seemed to be in order. Since sharp memory + whiteness + an address that really is four blocks away = 2 ounces of blow in the trunk at most, he didn't search me. He would have found some awfully nice--and very empty--envelopes.

The workshop went just fine. If you're looking for materials to give students when you're talking about the revision process, I have some that might be useful. If you're looking for ways to avoid California Driver's License Checkpoints, I can't help you.

Today, I transplanted some cute little succulents into the bed that was too hot for last year's Zinnias, planted some Impatiens in the bed that was too shady for anything but clover, transplated some Petunias into pots, and tried to be nice to my poor, neglected Geraniums. I'm pretty sure Martha Stewart doesn't mutter "come on, no whammies" to herself when she does this sort of thing. The uber-WASP has probably never killed a plant in her life. I think she and Tom Cruise are in cahoots. They plan to take over the world. As part of their strategy, Martha markets domesticity, and Tom markets... well, I don't know what Tom markets. Hair design? Sunglasses?

Speaking of Martha and Tom, I have a few words to say about Oprah's recently dismantled book club. Think what you will about Oprah; I really don't care whether or not you like her. I do think that people who express their dislike of her by making fun of her struggles with her weight are stooping awfully low, and that they might do better to mount an actual critique—perhaps of the show itself, perhaps of the ways in which she can be ruthless in business matters (which, of course, is also a reason some people might cite for admiring her). However, I have a hard time with the anti-Oprah bandwagon when it comes to the book club.

I don't like all the books Oprah has chosen to feature. I haven't read all the books Oprah has chosen to feature. However, I've read a number of them, and many are damned good books: she has people reading Toni Morrison, Isabel Allende, Harper Lee, and several other authors who are really worth reading. She's gotten women who never considered themselves readers to get through Beloved. I knew a whole bunch of English majors as an undergrad who didn't make it through Beloved. The dinner discussions Oprah leads actually have a certain amount of rigor, as well—she asks some tough questions, encouraging the participants to dig deeper than they might otherwise.

So why would someone object to the fact that she's gotten more people to read? I've heard people snort derisively at the fact that "these people have to be told what to read," with the attendant implication that they can't judge for themselves what is or isn't quality literature. Well, good lord, people. How much has your idea of what is or isn't admirable literature been influenced by the syllabi your instructors have handed you? By book reviews in the New York Times? And what does the background of the person telling you to read the book have to do with the quality of the book itself?

The other thing I've heard people say is that the people who eagerly buy Oprah's book club selections "couldn't possibly get it." This strikes me as mind-blowingly elitist. No, people who haven't done as much reading as you are not likely to get the same things out of a text that you might get—but they'll get something. Does the fact that they might not pick up on as many allusions, recognize certain rhetorical techniques, contextualize as fully, or articulate themselves as well mean they should be doomed to Danielle Steele for all eternity? Does it mean they can't learn? I know dick about opera, but no one questions my "right" to see one. I suspect that's because some people feel that my academic credentials function as a passport of sorts: although I might not know much about opera, I have been formally certified as someone who can assimilate such things, so when I see an opera, I'm learning—not overstepping my bounds.

So, yes, I'm sorry the book club will no longer be something Oprah does regularly. And if you believe that exercising our capacity to learn is a good thing, that we'd be better off if more people developed sharper critical thinking skills, and that reading books and discussing them can play a part in that learning process, then perhaps you'll agree with me.

So, I was listening to the Pretenders today as I got stuck in traffic on the 91, the 57, and the 10, and it occurred to me that Chrissy Hynde might very well be the coolest woman on earth. Who can touch Chrissy? She has the perfect combination of sultriness, grittiness, and detachment. You might adore her, you might not. It doesn't matter, because she couldn't care less. If the Fonz were a woman, he'd be Chrissy Hynde, only Chrissy is, in fact, cooler than the Fonz.

In other news, this talking baby thing has to stop. I realize the plot possibilities when you represent what babies actually do are limited, but good god. Talking babies, dancing babies: this is an alarming trend, folks, and we would all do well to stand at the ready before a Stephen Hawking baby sitcom gets the thumbs-up from some power-suited yahoo at CBS.

First: receiving official documents of one kind or another and finding that someone has decided to append my husband's last name to my first name. I didn't change my last name when I got married. That was a conscious choice. I respect other women's decisions not to make that choice, and I think it's only fair that I be accorded the same respect. It's one thing when someone makes a mistake on the phone or in casual conversation. It's quite another when I receive things like, say, renewal forms for our homeowners insurance, and I see that some asshole has decided that my name can't really be my name, because it's obviously missing something. I was even more annoyed when I received a copy of my credit report two years before Jeff and I even got married (we were living together) and found that someone had done the same thing.

Second: the series of Reebook commercials with the "it's a woman's world" theme. If you haven't seen them because you avoid television or don't live in an area where the series of ads is running, they depict scenes like women in a crowd at a WNBA game cheering lustily while a group of scantily-clad male dancers shake their asses, or a group of women making a huge mess in the living room while they watch a football game, totally ignoring the distressed man who is trying to clean up after them. Another features a man who has no idea how to use the equipment in a weight room, and the women who are working out look at him like he's an idiot until one decides to help him. The soundtrack to these various scenes is James Brown's "This Is a Man's World," a song with lines like the following (though, of course, we don't hear all of the song during the commercials):

You see man made the cars
To take us over the roads
Man made the train
To carry the heavy loads
Man made the electric light
To take us out of the dark
Man made a boat for the water
Like Noah made the ark

This is a man's world
But it would be nothing
Nothing without a woman or a girl

At the end of the commercials, we get a screen that says, "It's a Woman's World." Then, we are supposed to go buy shoes.

So, clearly, the ads operate on a mechanism of inversion. The viewer recognizes that what we're seeing is the exact opposite of the scene we would expect in the Land of Traditional Gender Roles, and if we missed that, there is James Brown to hammer the point home. The spots are supposed to be both comic and inspiring.

The problem is that the intentional irony of these ads doesn't actually work. While the ostensible message seems to be that thinking outside the gender box can lead us to a new perspective on the ways in which it isn't a man's world (women even work out! don't forget to buy shoes), the ad attempts this by invoking scenarios that are recognizable only when we switch around the roles: we know about scantily-clad female cheerleaders, we know about men who make a mess while they're watching "the game" and leave clean-up to the women, and we know about women who look like idiots in the weight room. The fact that these are the things we actually do recognize renders what we don't see in the commercial more powerful than what we see.

The scenes invoked are extremes, but at heart, they speak to the kinds of issues many feminists fight against: the objectification of women, the domestic expectations that often lead to enormous imbalances in the amount of housework done by women and men. Yet, we are supposed to laugh, because obviously, what we're viewing is the opposite of a stereotype—and if we laugh and then end with the message that "it's a woman's world," we have removed much of the force from that stereotype. It might still be a stereotype, but it no longer has any truth to it.

What Reebok tells us is that the sexist scenarios—and, by extension, critiques of them—no longer really hold, because we're beyond that. If you don't believe me, believe a member of the ad team that came up with the campaign, Michelle Nova Sassa: "Female empowerment is dead—we've already arrived. We're just not seeing or hearing about it yet... It felt good to say, 'It's a woman's world.' It really is." If we extend this logic, we might conclude that if you don't recognize that, then you and other women must not be talking about it enough. "We've already arrived," and if we just spent more time discussing that than the things that are wrong, we would understand that affirmation is more important than struggle. Also, buying tennis shoes is fun.

My basic point is that we haven't come far enough for that kind of irony. It's important to think about the progress that has been made, no doubt about it. It's also important to recognize that there is much work left to do, here and elsewhere. It's inaccurate to claim that American women who think we still need feminism only think so because of some monstrous PR failure, but it's truly ludicrous to make that claim on any global scale (the writers do use the word "world," after all). Write a letter to RAWA telling them it's already a woman's world, Michelle Sassa. I'd like to see how they respond.

"We face as a nation the deep, profoundly perturbed and perturbing question of our relationship to others—other cultures, states, histories, experiences, traditions, peoples, and destinies. There is no Archimedean point beyond the question from which to answer it; there is no vantage outside the actuality of relationships among cultures, among unequal imperial and non-imperial powers, among us and others; no one has the epistemological privilege of somehow judging, evaluating, and interpreting the world free from the encumbering interests and engagements of the ongoing relationships themselves. We are, so to speak, of the connections, not outside and beyond them."

—Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (1993)

I can't fully comprehend what happened on Tuesday. I don't understand, and I'm not going to. I feel a tremendous sadness, and I'm frustrated and angry. But I also feel hope. And, as I try to figure out where to go from here—as I decide what I'm going to do with the emotions I've experienced—my hopes have begun to acquire a shape.

I hope that we continue to take care of each other. The compassion I've seen people express has been astounding. People have reached out to each other and responded to each other. Concern and empathy are good things always, but they are especially good right now. The interaction I've seen among LJers alone has been both comforting and inspiring. I think it's important for us to continue to reach out and support one another, to allow for the wide variety of emotional reactions we have all experienced, and to give ourselves room to feel differently and heal differently. This support and appreciation for diversity among ourselves is powerful.

I hope that we each do something to help. We can give blood. We can donate money. If we are in a place where it makes sense to do so, we can volunteer our services. There is a post with some good resources here: http://www.livejournal.com/talkread.bml?itemid=10562015&nc=2.

If you have already taken advantage of these options, or if you cannot, for one reason or another, there are still things you can do: you can organize a vigil, among friends or on a larger scale—this helps, too. You can think carefully about how we will discuss these issues with children. You can tell our government officials how you would like them to respond in the face of this crisis. These sorts of things are important.

I hope that we each cultivate and maintain critical perspective. This is the hardest part, because this is where we decide what do to with our anger and how to channel the pain we are feeling. The media coverage of the events in New York City and Washington is problematic at best. There is a tendency to move to the right in the face of a national crisis. I've heard people saying that we should "nuke 'em all." I've heard people saying that we should change policies to allow for the assassination of suspected terrorists without trials. I've heard people saying that we should deport any people from the Mid-East currently in this country, including those on work or student visas. I've heard people reviling all Palestinians because they saw a horrifying picture of a group of Palestinians celebrating Tuesday's tragedies.

We must remember that there are people in the countries we feel threatened by who are mourning along with us, who are as scared as we are. We must remember that blindly striking out in retaliation would destroy innocents as well as the potentially guilty, and it would not necessarily remove the threat. We must remember that cultures are multifaceted, and that most of those of Middle Eastern descent who live among us are both horrified by Tuesday's events and frightened for their own safety. We must remember that, just as we distance ourselves from those in our own country who perpetuate hate crimes or spout ignorance—"that's not us," we say—many people in Palestine are thinking the same thing about those who celebrated in the streets when they heard that the World Trade Center had been hit.

We might not feel up to the challenge, but I think we are at a point when it is absolutely crucial that we do challenge ourselves, our news sources, and our own assumptions. We probably will not (and should not) understand the hatred and the bloodlust that caused so many deaths on Tuesday. At the same time, we can (and should) try to understand why so many people in other countries resent the United States and its foreign policies—not because we should feel sympathy for murderers, but because the actions of our own government have often been profoundly troubling, and because we are blessed in this country with a voice, with the ability to effect changes in our government's policies. It's difficult work, to be sure, but we have that capability.

Moreover, exercising that capability—our right, our responsibility to express informed dissent and to clamor to make our opinions heard by those making decisions—by no means indicates that we despise our country. On the contrary, taking such action is a decidedly American thing to do. The kind of debate it engenders is the very core of democracy, and believing in that process and appreciating our access to it—even when we do not condone our leaders' foreign policies, even when we question those leaders' own commitment to the democratic process—makes us citizens in the truest sense of the word.

To that end, I would urge you all to seek out alternative sources of news and opinions. I would urge you to compare perspectives. Most of the links I am about to post are left-oriented, because those are some of the sources I have found most helpful when trying to wrap my mind around some of the perspectives lauded in the mainstream media—most recently, George W. Bush's claim that the attacks happened because "we're the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world." This is a gross oversimplification, though a useful one if we wish to cast this conflict as a straightforward battle between Good and Evil. Reality is, as always, considerably more complex.

Some resources:

Always interesting, it provides information on numerous US involvements in foreign conflicts, some of which I—quite shamefully—had never even heard of before I saw discussions of them in Z Magazine. Very much left biased, but quite powerful.

My first experience with The Nation was when I had to write a paper on propaganda and the Spanish-American War. Unfortunately, my library carried none of the Hearst or other publications that provided such propagandistic points of view, but it did carry The Nation. I was thus forced to change my paper topic to "Moderate Reactions to the Spanish-American War." Editions of The Nation from this period were invaluable, and the publication still reflects its original commitment: "to wage war upon the vices of violence, exaggeration, and misrepresentation by which so much of the political writing of the day is marred."

Formerly hailed as a non-corporate alternative to NPR, the Pacifica Network has been beset by controversy over management and content. I used to make a yearly donation, and I no longer have enough confidence in the network to support them financially. Still, they provide much programming that I find both enlightening and refreshing.

Mother Jones always has interesting content, and they do provide some web exclusives. It is primarily a print publication, so don't expect to rely on it as an online source.

I do not aim to turn you into a Chomsky devotee or to convert you to a darling of the left. I simply hope that we will do the work necessary to provide us with a wider variety of perspectives on the state of our nation, to sift through point and counterpoint in an effort to find out where we ourselves really stand. And I do this because, as Edward Said claimed seven years ago, "We are... of the connections, not outside and beyond them." Let us not forget that we are not only of those connections by default, but that we can shape them if we have the resolve and the energy, and that the attempt to do so is a profoundly optimistic act of faith in the principles upon which our country was built. Peace and healing to you all, and I mean that sincerely.

I'm developing a real hatred for one of our mail carriers.

I know which one it is. It's the one who walked up with the mail not long after we moved in. "Hi," I said.

"Keep your dogs in the house!" he shouted.

"Umm... they are in the house."

"Keep your dogs in the house! I've been bitten before!"

"Well, I'm very sorry to hear that you were bitten. Still, the dogs are in the house. They love people, and even if they didn't, they wouldn't be able to bite you, because they're inside and you're outside."

"Just keep them in the house!" The man was only capable of some variation on this phrase, I swear.

Now, he's decided to refuse to deliver the mail to us when I have the screen door closed but the sliding glass door open. He sent us an official letter saying that dogs had been known to bust through screen doors to attack letter carriers, and that until we create a more secure environment, he won't serve us. When it's 90 degrees out and you don't have air conditioning, leaving the glass doors closed is a poor option.

When the postman comes up, the dogs stand there and wag their tails at him. The whole thing is absurd. Always rings twice, huh? You don't even ring once, you rat bastard!

I don't even think it's really about his fear at this point, either. I think I have managed to become embroiled in a power struggle with our postal service representative. He is trying to drive me mad. Or make it really, really hot in my house.

The meter readers don't have this problem. They walk right into the yard, say hi to the pups, and do their job. Meter readers are a tougher breed than mail carriers, I believe.

This community is incredibly disturbing. Particularly when I get to quotes like this:

"How do you guys feel about Rice Cakes? Too fattening? It just when i get to feeling to weak i need to naw on something and I defintley don't want to eat a load of food.yuck just thinking about it makes me feel dirty."

or:

"He called me up and said I need to eat. God, what do I have to do to get him off my back? I know he really cares about me, but he knows it is making me go over the edge by contiunely asking me to eat. [Shakes her head in disgust] No one is going to make me eat except myself. Only me and that will never happen.... I hope. "

It makes me sad. I'm off to go eat something now.

... and because I'm sick of the neighbor's car alarm talking in the middle of the night, here is a list of Fifteen Things that Get or Have Gotten on My Nerves.

1. People with car alarms that talk, of course. ("You are too close to the vehicle." "Step away from the car." Bah.)
2. People who keep roosters in residential neighborhoods.
3. People who don't bother to look before changing lanes.
4. People with inane personalized license plates. (I have at least 15 more driving-related pet peeves, but I'll hold back.)
5. People who play with all the sounds on their cell phones in restaurants while I'm trying to eat.
6. The college students in the back who yell, "I DIDN'T GET ANY PUSSY!" at 4:00 in the morning. Of course you didn't. You're a moron.
7. Administrators who work in student services but truly despise serving students.
8. The persistence of confusion between "your" and "you're."
9. Guys in college who used to say things like, "I can't believe you won't sleep with me. All those hours I spent working out in the gym were for nothing. Now I feel undesirable to all women." With lines like those, you're on your way, buddy.
10. People who arrive to pick up a member of their carpool at 5:30 am, park outside with the car running, and honk incessantly. (I suppose that's driving-related. Yeah, I changed my mind.)
11. Republican Hair. (Think Nancy Reagan. About half the female guests on Politically Incorrect. Arianna Huffington, no longer a Republican darling but still sporting the 'do.)
12. People who don't clean up after their dogs at the park.
13. People who give me shit for not changing my last name after I got married.
14. Passengers on planes who won't stop kicking the back of my seat.
15. Movie-goers over six feet tall who, after surveying scores of open seats, decide to sit directly in front of me, thus forcing me to move. They are usually the same people who get up for more Milk Duds halfway through the show and then loudly demand a full recap from their friends upon returning.

When I take off my glasses, I can't see a damned thing.

I have tried contacts, but I always seem to stop wearing them after a while. I have allergy problems, and they always irritate my eyes. Plus, I'm kind of lazy. Glasses are easier.

I would consider LASIK surgery if I ever get enough money to have the procedure done, but the scary stories on the TV frighten me. Of course, I also recognize that shows like Fox's "When Good Pets Go Bad" aren't going to keep me from loving my dogs, but the idea of elective surgery is worrisome, particularly since I have spent years building a degree and a potential career around my ability to read and write. If anything went wrong with my eyes, I would be screwed.

Once, just after college, I crashed at a friend's place after a party. I had drunkenly managed to slice my contacts up when I put them in their case. However, I didn't know that I had done this, and I woke up in the morning discovering I had no means of vision correction at my disposal. I lived only a few blocks away, and it was around 4:30 am, so I knew there wouldn't be much traffic. I drove home, and I was able to stay in the correct lane, but turning left was a nightmare. Any cars that were gray, silver, or blue just merged with the road, and I had no idea whether or not anyone was coming. I made it home OK, but filed the incident under "Most Idiotic Things I Have Ever Done."

That was 7 years ago, and my vision has gotten progressively worse each year. I would never try that shit now.

I wonder what my pets see.

"When Good Pets Go Bad" is a real show, by the way. Strangely, they include animals like elephants and alligators in their coverage. The elephant was being mistreated by its trainer, and it went on a rampage. Not exactly a "bad pet," if you ask me. The alligator was part of a show by this guy who made a living by sticking his head into alligators' mouths. He started sweating, a drop triggered the alligator's chomp reflex (not the technical term), and it bit his head. Why they blamed the alligator for that, I don't know.

I am strangely fascinated by such shows. I always feel dirty after watching them, but something keeps me in front of the TV.

I think I'd almost rather be looking at her for President...

Really, though... is it silly to hope still?

November 8, 2000 12:00:00
Web posted at: 4:10 a.m. EST (0910 GMT)

(CNN) — CNN retracted its estimate early Wednesday that Texas Gov. George W. Bush had won the presidency, after Florida state officials announced a recount there that holds the presidency in the balance.

I think I need to start leaving the house periodically when I really need to get work done. I find so many things to distract myself when I'm home. I had a big pile of work I should have been slogging through, but instead, I spent a bunch of time reading about and making a Favicon for a web site I maintain. There isn't anything particularly wrong with that. However, I just seem to get on a track and keep going with it, with no regard for my other priorities.

It might help if I could actually get on something that resembles a normal sleep schedule. If I never had to get up and go anywhere in the morning, I would be perfectly happy to stay up until 4 and sleep until noon every day. However, since there are days when I actually need to show up somewhere in the a.m., my schedule varies so much that my body never settles into a pattern. When I was having really severe problems with insomnia a few years ago, I read that people with insomniac tendencies tend to do best when they try to go to sleep at the same time every night. Maybe I can compromise and try pushing for 2:00 or so. I don't know. See, the problem is that I don't really want to—I want to stay up as late as I want, whenever I want. I just don't think my body is reacting very well to it.

Maybe I'll try going to the public library and seeking out a nice corner to get some reading or editing done during the daytime. I wish I could find a nice cafe around here—when I lived in Seattle, I couldn't walk down the street without passing a place that was perfect for hanging out, studying, and drinking coffee. Around here, I really haven't found anything more inviting than Starbucks, and Starbucks—for so many reasons—just doesn't have the kind of atmosphere I'm looking for.