words, words, words . . . words.

phrase least deserving of mass mailing:



thanks, urban outfitters! i thought they were picnics at which no one was allowed to eat anything but tuna sandwiches, and since i don't need to attend any more of those, i'd never have opened the e-mail without your clarification. you're the best. really. the best.

phrase that i can not look at or think about without becoming at least a teensy bit nauseated: tooth pulp. uggggghhhhhh.

new favorite word: widdershins! wonderful, wonderful widdershins! adjective or adverb, meaning in a left-handed, wrong, or contrary (counterclockwise) direction. can you use the word in a sentence, juniper? why, yes i can!

"my wee pet circles widdershins around the room, like a small and black and restless moon."

somehow the word has acquired some wiccan relevance, but i don't know anything about that. if you do, you can tell me. i like learning and whatnot. especially about widdershins.

funniest intro to a television commercial: "too many players hit balls without purpose." i'm not even going to tell you what they're selling, i'm just going to let you bask in its delicate, irridescent beauty.

phrase most likely to appear on the cover of the next book i buy for my roommate: fast lives: women who use crack cocaine. there's nothing funny about drug abuse or addiction and the ease with which it ruins lives, but come on; have you ever seen a more groan-worthy title? maybe they could make it a series. fast lives: women who downhill ski. fast lives: men who drive on the autobahn. fast lives: cheetahs.

fast post: and it's gone.

sunday best-of blogging

best song to stretch lazily and blissfully in a swath of sunlight that's warming your bed in all the right places to: "the greatest," cat power. chan marshall sounds like a very happy woman on this new album, and i'm glad.

best career news: in march, i started copyediting three days a week for a periodicals publisher. those three days were in addition to the three days i was already (and still am) working at the animal hospital, and that's why you haven't heard much from me lately; it was rough getting used to having one day off, when for the past year or so i'd had about four. but it's been worth the adjustment: wednesday the managing editor and president of the company offered me a full-time position as chief articles editor for three journals, one that's currently in publication and two that will be starting up in the summer. they're all on really technical sciency stuff like neurodegeneration and opioid receptors, so my inner geek is doing cartwheels, and the position seems like a pretty killer way to transition into a new field. as a bonus, i'll still get to do the copyediting on the truly troubled articles, like the ones that were written by people who don't normally speak english, and i genuinely love that stuff, so i'm one happy nerd. it's a lot more than i'd expected to be offered, coming in as a temp with no formal experience, but apparently i've got a golden ear for quality. it's especially fun for me because for the past ten years my best friend's nickname for me has been "chief," so i won't just be Chief Articles Editor, i'll be Chief, Articles Editor. what a hoot! i won't be making the switch until july, so i might still be off the radar a lot of the time, but know that i'm well and that i'm always thinking of you. unless i've died. i don't know how you'll know for sure. i guess i'd recommend cautious optimism.

best basis for sexual attraction: "he's got a real horshack-epstein vibe going on." spoken by toadie in reference to the lead singer of the band why? (whom you can search for on their label's site). why? opened for islands, also on wednesday, now on record as Juniper's Favorite Day in April Ever. islands contains two former members of the unicorns and lots of other people, and while i dreamt unfulfilled dreams of a "jellybones" encor, toadie's above comment, which was followed by, "i might have to throw my underwear on stage," made up for anything that might have been missing—especially because she and i are maybe the only two girls on the planet who could say it and mean it.

saddest punctuation development: the new yorker appears to have abandoned the en dash. as they were one of the last remaining holdouts, i fear for its imminent extinction in mass publication. it will forever live on in this blog, though, and doubtless in your faithful hearts, and the second i take over the magazine's offices you can bet your bonny behind you'll be seeing it back on those pompous, beautiful pages.

best missed photo op: ah, my dear, sweet, brazenly hypocritical mspca; how happy i am to be escaping your smarmy, capitalist façade of goodness. the society's veterinary hospital, who can't be my former employer one moment too soon, is in the midst of a MASSIVE and entirely cosmetic renovation, believing that a prettier outside will draw more clients inside. i've no idea how many billions of dollars they're pouring into it, but i imagine it's several. meanwhile, the staff is tragically underpaid, the ccu is cramped and inadequate (and staying that way), and dozens of patients are turned away or sentenced to death because their owners don't make the financial cut. oh, and the hospital's president owns a very small jet, which he likes to take out every once in a while for meditation purposes. 'cause he's tense.

anyway, since the external construction started, the grounds have been bombed routinely with rodenticide to keep mice from seeking shelter in the building, and half the trees on the once sprawling and lovely lawn have been cleared to make room for parking lots. yesterday, i.e., earth day, a surgery supervisor made a large, touching "happy earth day!" sign for us to take outside and stand next to the destruction crew with as they detreed our borders, and i was soooo excited—but then it started to rain, and they all went home. poo.

least inspiring television moment: i have no idea what the program was, or even what channel it was on, but the other night i saw a woman applying makeup to a tomboyish teenage girl, and when she was done and the girl admitted that she didn't look too bad, the woman said, "now, i want you to put this makeup on every day, O.K.? you have to promise that you'll do that, no cheating; girly girls wear makeup to school." i'd like to tell you what happened after that, but i vomited and passed out.

best kisser: your mom. at least, that's what it says in the fourth stall from the right.

tuesday half-assed blogging: the "things joon digs" issue

1. smart car!!!!! these suffocatingly adorable little critters were all over italy, and every time i saw one i wanted to run up and hug it. i held myself in check, mostly, but i did stroke a few lovingly on my way past. we couldn't understand why they weren't equally prevalent in the states, even taking into account the burning capitalist desire for military-grade recreational vehicles. turns out the real roadblock (heh heh) was bringing the car up to code with u.s. safety regulations—but their time has come. here in new england, they'll only be sold in new hampshire, connecticut, and rhode island, but that's plenty close for me. of course, i'd never get rid of my electric kiwi ilsa; my baby neon has been a true friend to me through thick and thin, and smashed, and arrested. but nothing lasts forever, and maybe by the time she exhales her last fumes i'll have enough tucked away to buy a sparkly new pod. i think she'd want me to remarry.

2. crispin porter + bogusky, the masterminds behind the sometimes bewildering, frequently unsettling, and eternally genius tv spots for the most recent burger king ad campaign. i was traumatized by their insistence that i wake up with the king, but their newest commercial for the cheesy bacon whosywhatsit is the platonic ideal of 30-second media. it's positively haunting. now, i know you've seen it, and maybe you're thinking, "come on, juniper. that's bullshit. it's a dude riding another dude who's dressed up as a chicken. whatever, i don't think you and i can be friends anymore." but there's a world of difference between seeing this commercial and watching this commercial. i need you to let go of all of your preconceptions and demands about what constitutes art, and give yourself over to the experience. trust me, my darlings, it will not go unrewarded*. i notice something new every time.

3. chad vangaalen is the dreamiest thing to come out of canada since, um, well, i bet you can guess. there is no better boy than the d.i.y. indie rocker, and chad's got it going on, what with the 4-track self-recording and the video he put together on his own. he covers all the bases and then some, too, with songs that bounce from feedback-heavy garage rock to sweetly melodic plaints. he's part thom yorke, part sufjan stevens, part something no one else can touch; i have no idea what he looks like, but i'm pretty sure i'd marry him tomorrow regardless.

4. wonder showzen, which i am not linguistically nimble enough to describe. for anyone who lives for outré humor presented in striking and peculiar contexts, though, it's something you shouldn't have to live without. the first-season dvd set came out today, so if the web site leaves your mouth watering but you don't have the fortitude to sit awake all hours of the day and night hoping mtv2 will throw you a bone, pick it up and hide it from the kids.

and i'm awful sweet on you all, too. now go out and embrace the freak show.






* it will also not make you want a sandwich, but sometimes you sacrifice a little bit of function for form. like with bulldogs.

sunday best-of blogging

best song to program a valentine-themed stuffed animal to play when squeezed: "absolutely cuckoo" by the magnetic fields. this gift is best for a significant other who is newly significant, but whom you're also pretty confident about. of course, i do allow for the possibility that the sentiment of this song is only irresistibly enticing to me, given my overly mushy reaction to shoe-gazing nerds, but i think it's a small possibility. if there is a way to fit the stuffed animal with some kind of pocketed garment, the pockets of which could then be filled with cereal, all the better. but again, i mean, maybe just for me.

best birthday*: happy 197th to chuck darwin, that crazy rabble-rousing boy with a dream, whose work has somehow turned the united states into a scene out of dr. seuss's the butter battle book, and abraham lincoln, whose battle was far from buttery and is, in sometimes subtle and sometimes not-so-subtle ways, every bit as ongoing, curiously enough in mostly the same regions. there are plenty of public celebrations being held in honor of darwin, and most of us americans get to sleep late for a day in honor of lincoln (and some other guy, whatever the hell his name was), but i think it might be good if each of us had a private moment of reflection today on the efforts of these two fellows and their dedication to the idea of emancipation, both physical and intellectual. it's tempting to wonder if they would have gone to such lengths if they had known how stubborn the world would turn out to be about accepting their proposed changes, even this far down the road; i'm pretty sure, though, that neither of them would have done anything differently, and that's why i love them. maybe you could blow out some candles and make some earnest wishes in their honor.

most ridiculous grounds for suspension: right here in massachusetts, where i had believed the overall crazy level was slightly lower than the national average, a six-year-old boy was suspended from first grade for three days after supposedly touching a female classmate's skin beneath her waistband. according to the boy, the girl pushed him or something, and he reached out to get her back as she was walking away and grabbed a bit of her shirt. as the article states, grounds for sexual harassment are typically that the harasser got, or desired to get, some sort of sexual satisfaction out of his or her behavior; the boy's mother has been struggling to explain the situation to her son, because he doesn't know what any of the terminology means—he isn't capable of sexual satisfaction. i'm sorry, i understand that people want nothing so much as to protect their children, but i think this is the single most nonsensical thing i've ever heard**. he didn't pinch her ass, he didn't ask her if she wanted to play with his "pink crayon," he just grabbed her, the way all little kids are constantly doing. the odds of the girl being adversely affected by it in any lasting way are slim to none. in my opinion, you're doing more damage to a child by taking this sort of action, because it creates the idea that most contact is negative. i don't have a kid, so it's harder for me to pass judgment about where lines really ought to be drawn, but i'm pretty sure that this case is nuts.

most barbaric arcade game: eight corners market in scarborough, maine, has installed a modified version of the classic claw tank, where the prizes are lobsters instead of toys. for two dollars a player can watch the lobsters "flap their tails, flail their claws and squirm this way and that" before being hauled up to the surface to meet their scalding fates. i will never understand the concept of torture as amusement. i guess some people have an easier time dissociating a living thing from its own sentience. i don't care whether or not you believe lobsters experience any form of pain, the fact that they attempt to escape from the claw more or less proves that they do experience some form of fear for their lives, and so inducing and then prolonging that experience for fun is pretty cruel. people are going to eat animals, that's just how it goes, but do we have to do things like this to them first? really? come on.

best duh: "in hindsight, [i] should have been suspicious of a veterinarian who only made house calls and treated animals at an undisclosed location." kudos to raymond reid, the owner of an incredibly lucky boston terrier named burt. burt survived an unspecified operation performed by steven vassall, a college student with impressive delusions of grandeur who was posing as a veterinarian and cutting up pets under who knows what conditions, maybe in his kitchen or the back of his van. that's a pretty rotten way to turn a buck. the news coverage is giving most of the attention to fred, the kitten who went undercover in the sting that ultimately led to vassall's arrest, but i think the animals who most deserve medals are the ones this creep has already treated. especially burt, who is probably experiencing extra hardships.





* i have to give an honorable mention to my imo, whose birthday was february 8. he's got some great new artwork up; here's my favorite:

** when i searched for an article on this story to link to, some headlines popped up about a six-year-old who was suspended for sharing lemon drops, but i couldn't bring myself to read that story. apparently sharing is only caring when it's done under the watchful eye of a responsible authority figure; the rest of the time, it's dirty and must be punished.

sunday best-of blogging

most romantic song about pants: i love your pants, too, rathergood.com. i love them right to death.

best album to remember you love after having forgotten about it for years: guided by voices' mag earwhig!. so good, people. so good.

most concise summary of tuesday's state of the union: blah blah blah, terrorists secretly long for democracy, blah blah blah, 9/11, blah blah blah, i'm above the law, blah blah blah, gays and women who have abortions will burn in hell. oh, and i guess i can close with some empty promises about health care and energy reform. heh heh heh.

in six years, this man couldn't learn to pronounce the word "nuclear"? i wouldn't trust him to lead me out of a pair of velcro shoes.

best alternative to the super bowl: the discovery channel's puppy bowl, which starts today at 3 p.m., is the cutest thing in the history of television broadcasting. last year i actually wept, i was so overwhelmed by the snuggly wonderfulness of it all. do not miss it. really. don't.

best blog of note:


finally! why has it taken the world so long to give my faf some sugar? you all should listen to me. i know what's up.

most captivating concert lineup: the tibet house benefit concert, taking place at carnegie hall on march 1, will feature philip glass, laurie anderson, sufjan stevens, antony (of antony and the johnsons), nawang khechog (a grammy-nominated tibetan flautist), damien rice, and allen toussaint, plus some other folks who've yet to be announced. cheapo tickets are about $30, but even at $100, i think the priciest seats are still a steal. but if you're not the sort of person who cares to pay big bucks—or any bucks—for a good time…

best way to see malcolm gladwell for free: the columbia university arts initiative has teamed up with the new yorker to present six free events, and malcolm will be talking about something delightful on february 21 (ticket info here, other events here). there was an article on malcolm in the 2/4 edition of the ny times; it opened up with a bit of a pan, and i wasn't interested in paying or signing up with their web site for a pan (i can hear people say snotty rubbish about him anytime i want for free), but if any of you caught it and believe i'm mistaken, please let me know. and, as always, if you or someone you know makes it over to his talk, send him my warmest, fuzziest love. oh, and look, it's february! you could even shower him with a fistful of candy hearts*. awwwww.

usage directions most open to interpretation: a friend recently told me about some sort of super colon cleanser he happened upon whose label directed the user to start out with one tablet at night and increase the intake by one tablet every day until the user experienced "2–3 meaningful bowel movements per day." meaningful? in what way? isn't the significance of that sort of thing a bit relative? how does one know if the appropriate depth of meaning has been achieved? reader assignment: compose a 500-word essay on the one eliminatory experience that left you the most moved**.

erosion of willpower i feel i should be most ashamed about, and yet am not: every time i see the commercial for the new platinum-edition monster ballads compilation cd, it becomes a little harder to resist. i can't be alone, though, and if you scroll down to the "customers also bought" section, you'll see that it is in no way necessary for a person to be an exclusive devotee of leopard-print spandex and aqua net to give in to the album's allure. not that there's anything wrong with that. and i don't care how much you make fun of me, mr. big's "to be with you" is the bomb.




* the new yorker readers in the crowd may have noticed that malcolm has written me a valentine's day article on the throughly unreliable practice of profiling, and his reference point is the public's completely unfair prejudice against pit bulls, some of the sweetest dogs ever (when they're not abused) and one of my favorite breeds. i'm going to read it on the 14th, 'cause it's more romantic that way, but you should feel free to dive into it now.

** pun absolutely intended.

sunday best-of blogging: the tv issue

best opening theme song: the original tune written for the boondocks, which i really, really, really wish were a full-length song on a full-length album that i could buy. *ahem* HINT HINT

best presidential footage: the bit that's been all over the air of him spacing out on a dangling camera like a baby faced with a shiny mobile absolutely destroyed me, in several ways. i laughed, of course, to see w forget where he was when presented with a lone misplaced object, but it was painful too. i'm sure you understand.

worst name for a metal band: as i lay dying. i caught this band on the mtv2 resurrection of headbangers ball (yes, i sometimes watch headbangers ball; do you never yearn for the innocent days of your youth?) and thought i would give them a chance, but they do not deserve to be trotting this title out like a fancy lap dog. faulkner is whirling like a dervish on glass, i'm sure. for shame.

best network programming surprise: saturday night live is funny again! i hadn't watched it in eons (aside from the weekly update, which i can't resist, because i've had a crush on amy poehler since upright citizens' brigade) because it was so stilted and forced and unprofessional, but i tuned in last night to catch dane cook, whom i adore to no end and had missed when the show originally aired, and man, was i surprised. i don't know if it was due to his influence, because he can turn that shit around, but the skits seemed more uninhibited and inspired than they have in well over a decade. that bit about the talent show? things that defy description shot out my nose. i've been optimistic about the fate of the show recently because the cast members are truly talented, rachel dratch and maya rudolph in particular (maya has also done some great work for the also surprisingly hilarious show campus ladies), but i couldn't help feeling like the skits were just never going to top par, and there's nothing worse than a talented individual succumbing to his or her meritless environment. but i've been happily surprised, and i can only hope that this recent standard will be maintained*.

most unwatchable new television show: i have, all my life, longed to bludgeon lisa loeb with a cast-iron skillet. her music burst vessels in my eyes, her scrunchy nose and cutesy cat glasses curled my tiny nerdy hands into furious riot-grrrl fists, and possibly worst of all, she created an unshakeable personal aversion in me to brown university, the school whose radio station saved my life and whose campus i owe the majority of my happy teenage memories to. now, i thought her last show, dweezil and lisa, would successfully convince the public that she was in no way deserving of its attention, but the chipper little fungus is staining the media yet again with #1 single, which debuted this week on E!. here's the intro to the first show, as found on the show's own publicist-approved page:

Meet Lisa. She lives in Los Angeles with a quirky collection of gnomes and Hello Kitty dolls. The singer-songwriter is single for the first time in about 12 years, but she's hoping a serious dating blitz will soon turn up her soul mate--she hasn't managed to meet any eligible guys on tour.

Her sister Debbie Loeb thinks all Lisa really needs is a good push-up bra. The problem is, date number one, Steve, seems barely worth a sports bra. He doesn't eat vegetables (don't ask) and serenades Lisa with a cringe-worthy karaoke version of her own hit "Stay."

oh, lisa. the song was always cringe-worthy; a karaoke version is probably the only truly fitting tribute, and i'm sure it's infinitely easier to listen to. i didn't want to watch, i swore i wouldn't watch, but i stumbled upon it completely by accident one afternoon and, as when watching an inevitable car crash play out from a distance, i was as horrified by my own inability to move or avert my eyes as i was by the fact that it was happening in the first place. while making kugel in her mother's kitchen, lisa weepily confesses that she used to look at the old people alone at parties and think to herself, wow, poor them, they're not married, how sad, and now (*sniffsniff*) she is one of those people (she's about thirty). when her mother cautions her against letting herself get trapped in another six-year relationship with mr. wrong, lisa assures her that she isn't staying with anyone else for six years unless she's getting married. ivy-league educated, successful (for a moment, anyhow) in a competitive artistic business, confidently kitschy, tall and not ugly and smarter than plenty of girls—life set lisa up to be the poster child for self-assured, independent, gen-x singer-songwriters, and here she is using what's left of her celebrity clout to engineer a high-profile private dating service, because she'd rather die than be single for one more second. it is great to be loved, lisa, and there's plenty to be said about the upside of being in a happy, committed relationship, but it is okay to be single at some point between the ages of 18 and 30, too. it can even be good for you. trust me.

girls named lisa, man. they're nothing but trouble.

worst commercial: the new zetia ad that features a wise old doctor meandering through the grounds of a hospital with his herd of bright-eyed young newbies wins for sheer awfulness, as its premise is nonsensical and we're beaten over the head with it for an interminable period. but honorable mention must go to the contact lens commercial where some whiny woman opens with a fully disqualifying statement along the lines of, "when my contact lenses are bothering me, i just can't go on with my day!" unbelievable. i wonder what would happen to her if we told her she had to drink full-fat lattes for the rest of the afternoon. you know what, honey? don't. don't go on with your day. the world doesn't need you.

most shocking project runway development: chloe broke unimaginably new ground this week by veering miles outside of her standard color palette of turquoise, black and beige to stun the world with this remarkable combination:

look at that chocolate brown! it's revolutionary! and that white is a very honest white—no beige in sight. no wonder the judges can't get enough of this girl. she's the only one who's keeping them on their toes.



* if you saw the show and thought it wasn't that funny, keep in mind that i had downed most of a very stiff tanqueray-and-tonic by the time it aired.

sunday best-of blogging: the "i'm cranky" issue

album i always want to listen to when wearing my peach wrap-around cardigan with the floral embroidery and sequined embellishments: seven swans, sufjan stevens. i can not begin to explain this.

most ridiculous automotive fact: my mechanic can not buy an oil pan for my 1995 dodge neon from a supplier, because the part is no longer manufactured. i'm pretty sure i don't have the lone existent neon, and if cars of this sort were going to need new parts they'd start doing it right around now, wouldn't they? so why would dodge tell us we can't have them? like we're all going to go out and buy new neons or something. if i had a 1949 mercury (and believe me, if wishes grew on trees i might) i would understand various parts for it being unprocurable, but that isn't at all the case. see? ridiculous. and i would never drive a mercury, those things suck gas like nobody's business . . . but damn, they're some sweet-ass rides:


most infuriating sound to be woken up by on a sunday morning: toadie's parrot's favorite toy is a small plastic frog with a mirror in its belly that makes what i assume is meant to be interpreted as a ribbiting sound whenever its head is pressed on. the ribbiting is not the infuriating sound, though; that sound is the one that's made by the hard plastic body banging against the floor and walls of the hallway outside my bedroom, where the bird most likes to play with his frog, maybe specifically because of the plastic-on-wood racket. what's really infuriating, though, is that toadie would never think that maybe it was a teensy bit impolite to set the bird loose in the hallway at seven o'clock on a sunday morning, or any morning, for that matter, and allow him to make all that noise. i would never do that to her, or to anyone. some people are so blind about their kids' bad habits, and their own.

most suspicious closing of a criminal investigation: oh, army, army, army. you're so dang skeptical.

the army closed a criminal investigation of abuse allegations by an iraqi detainee last year, finding no reason to believe his claims, even though no americans involved in the case were questioned, according to pentagon documents made public yesterday. internal army documents about the iraqi's capture on jan. 4, 2004, and his subsequent interrogation at an unspecified facility at or near baghdad international airport were not reviewed, the records show, because investigators were told they had been lost in a computer malfunction.

skeptical and conveniently disorganized. i'm a bit of a skeptic myself, though relative to slightly different points, as evidenced by my disbelieving italics. i don't have an objective problem with the military, but i do tend to bristle at people who assume they know everything before they've begun, with utter disregard for relevant evidence, as our army is wont to do. please stop treating us citizens like stupid, whining children. we recognize a supercilious brushoff when we see it.

best alito interview: nobody sticks it to 'em like fafblog. i've tried to stay abreast of the recent confirmation hearings, but it's tough for me to stay involved, what with it all seeming like a meaningless exercise the way it does. if fafnir had a news channel, though, it would be all i watched, except for sometimes the cartoon network and any channel airing svu, which i've recently been forced to proclaim myself powerless against. this, too, i am unable to explain.

weirdest partnering: that between starbucks corp. and lions gate entertainment corp., who have joined forces to market and distribute the movie akeelah and the bee, yet another heartwarming tale of a young spelling-bee champion. why were these things not popular when i was a kid? i'd have been a superstar. oh well. anyway, i think this is creepy. maybe i shouldn't, given the role of fast-food chains in pushing blockbuster paraphernalia on the impressionable masses, but i do. i think this quote is the one that really drove me over the edge:

"While we are a coffee company at heart, Starbucks provides much more than the best cup of coffee—we offer a community gathering place where people come together to connect and discover new things," said Howard Schultz, Starbucks chairman. "We are always looking for innovative ways to surprise and delight our customers, which is why we are so pleased to be working with Lionsgate on 'Akeelah and the Bee' as the first film to introduce to our customers."

oh, come on. here's what jarvis cocker and i think of you and your community gathering place, starbucks: grass is something you smoke, birds are something you shag, take your "year in provence" and shove it up your arse. you want our money and you'll shake us down every which way you can. well, i'm buying my espresso elsewhere, you shameless, heartless whores. nyah. p.s., your cds suck.

most despicable film adaptation: tristan and isolde, the wb rendition. i can't even force myself to learn enough about this movie to be able to criticize it effectively, i'm so angry. i'm so angry. how could you, kevin reynolds? you go to hell. you go to hell and you die. grrrrrrrrrr.

best act of rodent vengeance: monday morning, i heard a story on a local radio station (100.7, maybe? this is the classic rock station in boston, which, sadly enough for yours truly, now plays songs off of rem's automatic for the people. *sigh* i'm old.) about a very bad man who found a mouse in his house, captured it, took it outside and threw it into a pile of burning leaves in his backyard. bastard! i thought, and so did the mouse, i guess, who caught fire in the pile but did not go gentle into that good night and instead turned and ran back into the house, setting it righteously ablaze. do unto others, my friends; it's the only rule worth remembering.

sunday best-of blogging

best album to hem a dress to: penthouse, luna. i met this band in providence, ri, when i was 18 and made them sign the poster i stole off of the door to the club they were playing at, and it was dorky and pathetic, and we all knew it, and i didn't care. i love you, dean wareham. thank you for not laughing at me to my face. if it matters, i bet you'd like the dress.

artist most frighteningly devoted to his craft:



here's christian bale the way most of us know and love him, ripped like jesus and relieving my lungs of their troublesome burden of air more swiftly than a cannonball to the solar plexus. while i know mostly nothing about him as an individual and can't speak to his character, i can say with a great deal of certainty that this is the body i would program into my vanilla sky lucid dream. it's perfect, people. perfect. i crave it in a way that makes me blush even when i'm all alone in a dark, silent room. and here's christian making me want to die in a much less fun way in the machinist, which i got for christmas from my mom and watched for the first time on thursday:




MOTHER OF GOD. i've loved me some skinny men, but christian's body was so luridly grotesque in this film that it made me physically uncomfortable; i had a hard time sitting still in my chair while i was looking at it, and not at all in the happy, goose-bumpy way i've come to expect from past times with mr. bale. i was honestly uneasy. now, i know the movie came out a while ago and the sixty-plus pounds he dropped for the role are sort of old news, but they were old news to me, too, and i still got queasy watching him haul his jangly skeleton around for an hour and a half. a lot of that was the movie itself, though, which i think was great, although i probably need to watch it again to be sure. it was definitely troubling. christian plays a (drumroll, please) machinist who hasn't slept in a year, for no readily knowable reason, and he's a little edgy. the entire film is shot in overcast, brushed-metal tones and moves like a snowball rolling down a mountain, gaining density until what started out as a four-inch ball of packed powder ends up razing entire villages in the viewer's muddled, flinching head. at first i was annoyed by its orchestral score, sort of a cross between a scaled-down "peter and the wolf" and the instrumental background of every cheesed-out 1950s sci-fi debacle, but by the time the whole story finally came together i was so tense and distraught that i felt a tiny bit insane myself, so i guess it worked better than i expected it to. let me put it this way: the sixth sense didn't surprise me, and this movie made me pull my hair and talk back to the screen. (lest anyone be overly concerned for his health, christian finished the machinist and immediately transmogrified back into his hale and beautiful self in order to film batman begins.) congratulations, cast and crew, and thank you, christian bale, for being the only boy on the planet talented enough to make me sweat and/or recoil in horror at your command. you so crazy. oh, and just to be self-indulgent, let's take a moment to remember christian the way he was when he first caught my dewy little junior-high eye:



heh. dork. but heaven knows i'm soft for 'em. swing heil, indeed.

most poignant exchange from grey gardens:

big edie: that cat's going to the bathroom over there, right behind my portrait.
little edie: oh, that's terrible. isn't it terrible? it's just terrible.
big edie: i think it's wonderful. it's wonderful that someone here is doing exactly what they want to do.

now, maybe you know about grey gardens and maybe you don't, but the fact is, big edie is absolutely right—the cats peeing in the corners, and i guess the raccoons getting fat on wonder bread in the attic, are the only ones in the house who aren't endlessly mourning, or at least constantly reliving, the choices they didn't make, the chances they didn't take, the lives they're still sure they were meant to have but never will. when the camera zooms in on the face of the terrible/wonderful cat, its expression is one of utter calm and contentment; while big edie, at 79, has the bearing and attitude of a lot of older folks who are well past caring what the hell any of the rest of us think of them, it's still an expression i have a hard time imagining on either woman's face. i don't know if i want to recommend this movie, exactly, but i do believe a dedicated viewing will encourage you to think a bit differently about what course of action in any given circumstance is truly the least regrettable. i love my mom, and i've shot myself in the foot a few times trying to take care of her, because at the time it seemed like The Right Thing To Do, but there's no way i'd let us end up like this.

best e-mail alert: i have an extensive list of puerile sound clips that i rotate through as my mood shifts, but this one is my favorite right now. i'm on the hunt for some classic ren & stimpy quotes, so stay tuned. as if you could help it.

sunday best-of blogging

best holiday album: the jingle cats' meowy christmas. since i stopped living with imo, no one but toadie will let me listen to it all the way through. we love it to death, though; in fact, it's the only holiday music any of the three of us can stand. it appears to be one of the tests of true friendship for me, along with a willingness to laugh until you cry at bloodsucking freaks and vast sentimentality over the sad plight of cujo. go ahead and sample the cat rock yourself, and you let me know whose side you're on.

best/worst dog: my parents have a chihuahua named peanut, whom i don't know well, as they got him after i moved to boston and i don't usually get home more than once every three or four months. he is unnaturally attached to me, though, considering how little he's seen of me, and whenever i spend the night at my parents' house he sleeps on top of me and stands guard. any time anyone comes to the doorway of my room he stands up on my hip and growls, and if the intruder comes within less than two feet of me he goes berserk and bounces around barking and snapping until a more secure perimeter is established, at which point he lies back down as though nothing happened. i think it's pretty cute, especially since he's such an itty-bitty (and relatively toothless) critter, but my parents, who take freakishly good care of him, are less amused. my mother has been nearly bitten by him trying to remove him from me in order to bring him outside to pee, and that's bad, 'cause he should know that no one needs to worry about being killed in her sleep by my mom—if she's going to do away with you, she's going to do it to your face. still, though, it's pretty funny. but wrong. but funny.

best photo of the friendliest stray cat in italy:

that's toadie's leg he's wooing. you can see his much shyer female companion entering the frame from the far right, and on the left you can see our hostess' glorious yellow plastic boots. in the back there you can see the slushy lake that symbolizes the soles of all of our shoes for the last three days of the trip, but this was the first of those days and we didn't know how moist things were about to become, so we were all pretty happy to hang out in the muck and caress the locals. apparently they were happy with that as well. think of us fondly, kitty, and know that we carry your heart in our hearts.

best exchange from a crime drama: the following was transcribed verbatim, but i can't remember now what show it was on, because i was transcribing it from my bed after weaving in and out of sleep for fifteen or twenty minutes:

"fresh off an airplane from a conference, and BAM! i got seminal fluid."
"some things never change."
"what?"
"cocaine."

most socially oblivious comment made by a radio personality: "i hope you don't have too long of a walk from the parking lot to work today, because it is frigid outside." and if, by either choice or necessity, you make use of public transportation, or you couldn't afford the heating bill this month because all three of your kids are on antibiotics for strep and you haven't had health insurance since you got laid off in october, or you just got kicked out of the last available atm vestibule in the city, well, it sucks to be you. maybe you should try and get a gig as a dj, 'cause it's snug as all get-out in this here booth.

best cousins: the children of my father's baby brother are both such phenomenal human beings that every time i see them i want to pack up and move to georgia just so i can see them a little bit more. the boy will be graduating with his master's in may, two years ahead of schedule, and already has a job lined up as a math teacher in a public high school near athens. he's a supergenius and is always happy to spend hours talkingwith me about incredibly dorky things, but he also shares my exact tastes in movies and books, and all of my political and social views. when he was born i was about five years old, and i was obsessed with him and tried to claim him as my very own baby. today i would be every bit as thrilled to be able to show him off as my son, but i'm pretty content with the current situation. his sister, who is about a year and a half younger than him, is also a genius and an outstanding writer, but has decided she would rather spend her summers on the road with the warped tour than taking extra classes, and i think that's equally fabulous. she's wanted to be everything from a veterinarian to a music journalist (hmmm, who does that remind me of?), and right now she's thinking about maybe interning with a small music label and then looking into PR, but i tell her every time we talk to try everything before she makes any decisions, because you can't be sure about it until you're there. her mother doesn't necessarily appreciate this, but i couldn't care less, because i'm pretty certain it's the best possible advice. college will be there whenever she needs it, but the time won't be. we both get very excited about stripped-down indie rock and sanrio paraphernalia, and we both want to maul andie macdowell. she happened to drive to new york city a week after i did, and out of all the stores in manhattan we both have the clearest, happiest memories of yellow rat bastard in soho, which each of us stumbled upon accidentally. if everyone were lucky enough to have two friends of their caliber built right into the family there might not be any more frivolous law suits.

best new year's resolution; stop putting things off. and i don't mean washing the dishes or starting that book you bought three months ago or cutting back on white flour, i mean the real things. everyone has, or at least i imagine everyone has, a vision of the way his or her life would be if everything were just right, and still we trudge through days that are nothing like that vision, largely because we are waiting for the opportunity to get everything right all at once. well, i'm not going to do that anymore. i'm going to make a baby step towards the big, shiny picture every chance i get, starting this week, when i'll meet with someone about a new job. it's not exactly the job i fantasized about in exactly the city i've been dreaming about living in, but it's a lot closer to it than the job i've been hating going to lately, and that's all that ought to matter. it's true that you can never reach a point if every time you make a move toward that point you only halve the distance, but it's also true that all that halving will get you a hell of a lot farther away from the place you wanted to leave. so i choose motion, and happy travels to all of you, too.

sunday best-of blogging: the moment of silence issue

best last bit of advice: in the note she sent me before i left for italy, my grandmother told me to "remember everything!!" she sent me three disposable cameras and a notebook, and though i've been not so diligent about relaying my memoirs to all of you, i took her seriously. my most mundane moment might turn out to be someone else's favorite story, but i have to keep it long enough to talk about it in order for that to happen, and anyway, no experience is without some sort of significance. now, anyone who spent any time with my grandmother over the last five years or so knows very well that she did not remember everything, but she remembered to want to, and i think that might count a little bit more.

best way to spend christmas: with the people you love most, even if you have to be together in a hospital room, even if one of those people you love most can't be with you at the end of the day.

best three songs to hear later on as you're driving home in the rain: "night swimming," rem; "long december," counting crows; "today," smashing pumpkins

and that's all i'm going to say about that.

sunday best-of blogging: the "i drove to new york city by myself because i'm a lovesick groupie" issue

Best. Musician. Ever.: evan dando! yay! yay, evan dando! you're so the love of my life i can't even stand myself. evan dando, for those of you who do not know, has been my #1 rock star crush since i was 13 years old. that's a long time—and he's earned every second of it. he ties with jon stewart, who is only not my #1 rock star crush because he can't play guitar*, unless he can and i just don't know it, in which case i might never be able to decide. for some reason, everyone everywhere on the planet is not obsessed with evan dando, and some people haven't even heard of him. i can't understand this at all, but i'm also foggy on calculus and people's fanaticism for excessively manicured lawns.

awwwwww! i wuv my boys. and so do their respective wives, but let's not think about them.

best fan at the 12/17 lemonheads show: a lovely 19-year-old boy from toronto, who took a train all the way to new york by himself and stayed in a room at a hostel with four strangers. that's devotion. i thought i was pretty hardcore, but this kid takes the cake, the serving platter and all the silverware. i was so impressed by his devotion that i bought him a beer, but that was before i knew he was nineteen. in my defense, he was already drinking when he started talking to me, and the bowery ballroom swore that it wasn't letting anyone under twenty-one inside. what can you do? whatever, he earned it; he had gone to see the lemonheads in providence a few weeks before, which i did not do, and i only live an hour away. i didn't ask him his name, but whoever he is, he's fantastic. way to go, young man.

best secret-boyfriend synchronicity: i only spoke to two people in the two days i spent in the city; one of them was the aforementioned boy from toronto, and the other was a guy from dorchester named mike, who introduced himself to me at the friday show and, in the course of our conversation and with zero mention from me of anything of the sort, told me the last book he read was the tipping point. while he's from dorchester, he works half the week in manhattan, and when i said, "i have such a crush on malcolm gladwell," he said, "let's go get him, he lives in columbus circle." he agreed with me that malcolm and i would be a smashing duo, but i declined, for no good reason that i can think of today. no matter; now i know which corners to stake out once i've hoarded enough candy and kix to stalk with my all, which malcolm certainly doesn't deserve less than.

most jarring disappointment: i got up early saturday and walked to 12 harrison street, the address given on ken brown's web page, assuming it was his home-base store and that i'd score bushels of bizarro swag. NO! 12 harrison street is an apartment building, where, presumably, ken brown lives and fills orders from. now, i could have buzzed him and demanded that he load me up with booty, since i'd come all that way, but i was so thrown by the situation that i just turned around and headed back the way i'd come. *sigh* it was a pleasant walk, anyhow, and i did get a cup of great coffee.

best catharsis of all lingering romantic demons: before now i have only ever been to new york city once in my life; that one time was five and a half years ago, and i made the trip to visit a boy. i met him in boston in february and liked him lots, and at the end of may he moved to the east village and invited me out, and i'd never been so excited about anything in my life. so i drove down, and we sat on his couch for an hour and a half and had a wonderful chat, and then his girlfriend came home. i did not know about the girlfriend, and he became somewhat agitated, which led me to believe that i was not supposed to know about the girlfriend. bastard. anyway, she didn't seem too terribly flustered, so i tried to make the best of it and asked her if she could recommend anything interesting for me to do while i was there, since i was a first-timer. the girl looked me dead in the eye and said, "interesting? interesting, interesting… gosh, i don't know, mostly i just shop." i sat very still and prayed for a punch line, but all i got was, "soho has the best shops, that's my favorite. they have so many beautiful things." i looked around and saw that the boy was across the room with his head in a drawer, not acknowledging anything that was taking place. i felt rather unwell. i left a short while later and wandered for a while without paying any attention to where i was going, and i wound up at union square, where i sat down under a tree and was promptly kicked off the grass (they close the grass in new york city. what the hell is that?). so i moved to a bench on the perimeter of the park and sat there for two hours, thinking dark thoughts and throwing bits of cinnamon bun at pigeons. every time i thought about new york after that day, i thought about that sequence of events, and so the city was a hideous place in my crazy, cloudy head.

but yesterday i retraced all my steps and buried my sad, ashy ghosts under that tree. to think i let one no-good punk and one shopaholic bubblehead ruin this entire place for me… but that's the end, i've had a lovely time here, and i hope to have many more lovely times here in the future. perhaps even in the very near future, but i won't get ahead of myself.

best sign: "ENDLESS FLAX." really, that's all it said, with a phone number beneath it. it was a fairly large sign, too, not something handmade or slapdash. i like flax, it's in my cereal and my crackers, it's tasty and good in its way, but endless? i can't imagine what else the sign's makers might have been trying to say, though; if you have suggestions, please, tell me. lest i be plagued by it all the rest of my days.

best horoscope to read the morning of a five-hour drive: "all signs indicate that you should not stray too far from home today, if you can possibly help it. you are easily distracted, making you prone to accidents. behind the wheel of a car is not the place for you to be right now. stay home and tackle all those little chores you've been meaning to get to." thanks, earthlink! if i hadn't been easily distracted before, i sure will be now. it's my own fault, i suppose, for choosing to read my horoscope even though i know i'm a superstitious neurotic.

most un-bad news about my grandmother's health: she hasn't gotten worse. that's all the information i've been able to obtain, and it comes second-hand from my mother, who has been forced to wrench it out of doctors and hospital staff, since my paternal relatives are insane and only hear every eighth word in a sentence. god knows what i would think if i were listening to them. thank you, everyone, for wishing us well. it truly is tremendously appreciated.




* jon stewart has earned semi-rock-star status, definitely in my heart just for being himself, but also on a more general scale, because he let marilyn manson burn things while playing "lunchbox" on his talk show and he once lit his farts on fire on trent reznor's tour bus. but still, as it stands, evan wins.

sunday best-of blogging

best song to listen to over and over for five hours as you hurtle blank-faced down an unfamiliar highway while coming to the eviscerating understanding that that future you kept having visions of is never going to be yours: "makin' pies," patty griffin.

best explanation for that pointed, shooting pain just behind and slightly above your left eyeball, which you assume is the result of a stroke, or perhaps an aneurysm: you have just finished reading this passage from david grann's september 19 new yorker article on his experience in the brazilian rainforest, where he attempted to retrace the steps of the early-20th-century explorer colonel percy harrison fawcett, who disappeared searching for the remains of a primitive civilization:

as we passed the manso river, where fawcett had got lost . . . , i kept looking out the window, expecting to see the first signs of a fearsome jungle. instead, the terrain looked like nebraska—perpetual plains that faded into the horizon. when i asked taukane where the forest was, he said, simply, "gone."

a moment later, he pointed to a truck heading in the opposite direction, carrying sixty-foot logs.

"only the indians respect the forest," pinage said. "the white people cut it all down." the mato grosso, he went on, was being transformed into domesticated farmland, much of it dedicated to soybeans. between august, 2003, and august, 2004, ten thousand square miles of the amazon, an area the size of massachusetts, were cleared away—and, in the past year, at least another five thousand square miles were lost. the state governor, blairo maggi, who is one of the largest soybean producers in the world, told the times, "i don't feel the slightest guilt over what we are doing here. we're talking about an area larger than europe that has barely been touched, so there is nothing at all to get worried about."

ow. ouch. why do people say things like "barely been touched" as though it's a state of sin, as though human beings are failures for having let things go on that way? what size would it have to be for it to be worth worrying about? that of the united kingdom? of japan? of fucking rhode island? when will there be so little left that everyone will agree that we ought to back down? here and there up crops a lorax who cries out for the trees, but all around him are blairo maggis (even in his heart the devil has to know the water level) and the small earnest voices are lost in the din of buzzsaws and bulldozers and the jangling of cash tills, and i'm ready to start carrying that book around and soap-boxing on street corners—but books are made of paper. i suppose i'll just have to commit it to memory, but after all that my small voice won't be heard any better than the rest. it seems like common sense, doesn't it, to never let there be only one last anything? to not allow the earth to become so changed that we would not recognize it? and even david grann, i'd bet, went home and did nothing differently.

ow. ouch. but i have to keep reading the hurtful words, so i don't forget to speak other ones. i'll just never understand, that's all.

best addition to the season's first significant snowfall: thunder and lightning. i hear this combination only forms in new england. you folks are fairly well spread out, though, and probably better traveled than myself, so if you know something to the contrary please correct me. even here in new england, i've only seen it happen in december. i know nothing about weather patterns or fronts or atmospheric pressure, nor do i care to, so i'm free to sit on the radiator with my forehead pressed against the ice-crackled window and whisper "thank you, sky" over and over and over as if i were two and hadn't yet thought to understand anything. if it doesn't happen anywhere else, i suggest you all spend one month in or around boston every winter, because it's spectacular.

best drawing to use as a logo on a business card:



my ultra-fabulous best friend of fourteen years made this, and i've claimed it, because after sticking by him for that long i've earned dibs on just about everything. you can see more of his sketches here. he was putting lots of drawings up on his flickr page for a while, but lately he's been a bit of a monkey and replaced the drawings with lots and lots of pictures of himself without a shirt on, which you also may enjoy, depending upon your personal tastes. i see more of him in the artwork than the photographic self-portraits, but that's how we work; i'm a writer and a storyteller, and he always hears more of me in the anecdotes i tell about other people, or sometimes even in the pauses. we're lucky that way. if you're interested, he's working on a swell series of pictures of the abandoned mill in the center of our home town. i do love me some abandoned buildings. forgive their frequent photoshoppiness, the application is new to him and he's still pretty excited over it. if you have negative things to say about his work, don't say them here; he's been my partner in crime since he was a skinny weirdo in bike shorts and oversized hypercolor t-shirts, and i'm anything but objective about him.

most visually entertaining anti-smoking campaign: the charming antics of the baby-faced bobbleheads at ashtray mouth. (thanks, spine, for bringing them to my attention.) the tv spots combine so many of my favorite things—creepy children, garbage-pail-kid aesthetics, macabre humor, disjointed music-box melodies—that i forgive them for being, well, not all that effective. cigarette mouth tastes bad, it's true, but you'll get over it if you like the person you're kissing enough. i mean, i've never tasted cat vomit, but i doubt it's truly similar, and some people eat fish heads on purpose. do i want to kiss them? probably not. but if i found out franka potente and john cameron mitchell smoked, it wouldn't stop me from aiming for them in a tequila-infused round of spin-the-bottle. i think these folks are better suited to back an anti-morning-breath campaign. now, that shit's nasty.

best animated short featuring a bug being buggered by a bug: spoilsbury toast boy 2. i couldn't adore david firth more if he were a tiny floating moose with bubbly eyes and a platter of tuna sandwiches on his head, and believe me, my feelings for that moose are intense. every cartoon david makes lately twists the tarnished, pock-edged blade in my amygdala another third of an inch to the left. that's love.

best patient history: written on a request for lumbar-spine radiographs: "past history disco, current recurrence of signs; check for damage."

sunday best-of blogging: the travel issue

best song to wake up over the atlantic ocean to: "pure imagination," as sung by gene wilder, the one true willy wonka.

best reason to pinch malcolm gladwell rather hard on the arm: here's malcolm during the q & a after a speech made for the commonwealth club on january 20, 2005:

the word "intuition" does not appear in blink for a very deliberate reason, and that is i intensely dislike that word. i dislike the connotations that are associated with it, i dislike its fuzziness, i dislike the fact that it's, among many people, synonymous with something that is irrational, and, you know, it's called women's intuition—why is it called women's intuition? not as a way of honoring it, but as a way of degrading it, right? of dismissing it. but my biggest problem with that word is that it suggests that what is going on in an instant is not thinking, it's feeling; i'm sorry, it's thinking, it's just a different kind of thinking, and it may manifest itself as a feeling, but it didn't start out that way. it didn't start in your heart, it starts in your head ….

if you listen to the audio (this part starts around 8:55 of the q & a), you'll notice how emphatic he gets about all of this; by the end he's nearly yelling. you'd believe that he really, really hates that word, the way my high school english teacher hated it when people described things like weather and paintings as "nice," or the way i hate it when people put unnecessary and inappropriate quotation marks around words they want to emphasize. i listened to this on the plane heading in to paris (lsz, if you're wondering, the ums [which i've omitted in my transcript] worked like a charm) and thought to myself, malcolm, aren't you a cheeky little monkey, because here he is in his september 12 new yorker article on rick warren and the saddleback church:

"The Purpose-Driven Life" is meant to be read in groups. If the vision of faith sometimes seems skimpy, that's because the book is supposed to be supplemented by a layer of discussion and reflection and debate. It is a testament to Warren's intuitive understanding of how small groups work that this is precisely how "The Purpose-Driven Life" has been used.

cheeky! it's okay, malcolm, i still love you, but you need to remember that the world is watching, and there's always going to be one crazy person who'll remember everything you say and call you out. you're lucky, because today it's me, and i'm pretty swell for a crazy person. next time, though, it might be zp, and you won't be in for a paltry pinching then—she'll just beat you like a redheaded stepchild. for the record, though, if anyone asks, you are officially my bitch. you may decide how you feel about that in either your heart or your head, i'm not fussy.

most satisfying combination of elements in a return-flight movie: christian bale, cillian murphy playing an evil madman, ninjas, and, of course, batman, in batman begins. now, all of these perfectly blended spices were still not enough to mask the slimy, dirty-nickel-flavored core of the movie's banal and one-linery dialogue (i think the actual comic books took more care with their writing), and katie holmes is positively vampiric in her ability to drain a scene of any and all vitality, but she's not in that many scenes, and the boys atone for her almost every time. i'll tell you, though, when even the batmobile kicked it ninja style and went invisible without moving from the middle of a three-lane highway, i did the happiest dance i could do without rising from my cramped non-aisle seat, and i think cillian might be the new ronnie "z-man" barzell. it wasn't good the way i tend to want my movies to be good, but i liked it better than charlie and the chocolate factory, which came on after it, and some rainy weekday when i didn't have anything pressing to tend to, i'd be happy to watch it again. in a roomier space, mind you.

best location for a children's birthday party and/or easter egg hunt: il parco dei mostri di bomarzo, the one place we visited in italy that i never wanted to leave. i thought perhaps i would live here, and it would be sort of like living on a boat, which i've also always wanted to do. but my friends said, no, juniper, you can't live in the sacred wood of bomarzo, and i said, why not? i can forage in the woods for acorns and berries, and i can use the giant ashtray by the gift shop for a toilet, just like those stray cats, and they said, put your soggy ass in the fiat, juniper, we're going home. and i did, and we got there and it was cold and on the kitchen table there was a plate full of gnawed chicken parts that our hostess's roommate had left congealing in its horrible fats, and i didn't say it, but i thought, i knew i should have stayed.

best translator: renaissance le corbeau, who handled the site for the parco dei mostri and offers us this delightful bit of slain grammar: "The sculpture represents the descent into hell (but where did the soul of the beloved wife?) of Baccus."

friendliest stray cat: the suave gray tabby we encountered on our way back to our car after exploring the largely abandoned mountain village of casteluccio, on the eastern edge of umbria. he was such a charmer that i didn't even mind when he covered my thighs with tiny muddy pawprints as he worked his sly, stealthy way into my lap. i should have minded, because i only packed two pairs of pants, but what the hell. i may never be loved by another italian tomcat, and that outboard-motor purr went straight to my head. i know, i know, i'm easy.

best random search: the blue ribbon goes to montreal's trudeau airport, where i was made to remove all of my jewelry after passing through the metal detector and being given the once-over with the handheld. a stocky woman with hairspray-crunchy curls asked me if it would be all right if she went through my bags; i assume that i had the right to say no, collect my things, and hitchhike back to massachusetts, but i had nothing to hide except one box of matchsticks that i got in a restaurant in florence, and i could live without them. she rifled through my dirty socks forever, but in the main part of my suitcase she glanced at the folded clothes for a fraction of a second and moved on to the inner pocket, where she became obsessed with my soap. i had packed it in its original cardboard box, which she turned over and over and over, stopping occasionally to sniff at it with great suspicion. at long last she worked up the nerve to open it, and when she saw that it was indeed soap and not an incense-scented wad of plastique, she tucked it back in its place and waved me off. she never looked into any of the three small bags that i had packed inside of my larger book bag, which, of course, are where i would have stashed the explosive i had tidily tamped into eyeshadow compacts so i could then light it in the airplane bathroom somewhere over the nothingness between montreal and boston with the firenzian matches she had failed to find, were i the sort of awful person who wanted to use my genius for ill. but i'm not, and don't any of you be, either. random acts of destruction are wrong, unless they're committed by nature, who tends to have an excellent reason. i'm a good girl, and that's why i'm so annoyed with the impotent renditions of safeguarding we're supposed to feel protected by. if you're going to search me, for pete's sake, do it well. otherwise you're wasting everyone's time.

best job of rearranging an entire apartment in a single free afternoon: that done by my bad, bad roommate, who: removed all of my and toadie's belongings from the shower and hid my little waterproof radio under the towels; threw away all of our sponges and replaced them with one wedge of pepto-bismol-pink foam; threw away half of our food and moved what was left to the back of the bottom shelf of the refrigerator; set a nauseating mango candle on the kitchen stove, where it was free to compete for air space with the even more revolting chocolate-mint candle burning in her bedroom; took all of the kitchen chairs away from the kitchen table and stacked them in a corner of the living room; put toadie's cat's empty dishes next to the sink after, presumably, failing to locate her food (and the faucet?); dumped an entire box of scoopable cat litter into the litter box in the bathroom on what we think must have been the day we got home, because under the layer of bright new litter was much more than a day's worth of unpleasantness; threw away whatever mail had been left by us on the front hall table, because if we had deemed it too unimportant to open before we left then it couldn't possibly have been worth keeping around; threw away the cardboard boxes by the living room windows that the cats like to sleep in; and came into my room and turned on my laptop, which i had shut off and removed the power cord from. many months ago, when i started coming home and finding every application on my computer open because bad roommate doesn't know how to operate a mac, and after twice having to reload my internet software, i implemented a password. i know she didn't give up hope that maybe it was a phase i was going through, or even a mistake, because she kept sneaking in while i was out. you can't shut the computer down once it's up until you've logged in, you see, so she had to just walk away from it with the log-in screen up and do what she could to act like nothing had happened. one time i came home and the computer wouldn't turn on, and it was because she, in her desperation to get online and buy more hideous crap from old navy, had turned it over and seen a little dial with a picture of a locked padlock at nine o'clock and an unlocked one at twelve, and had turned it towards the unlocked one, thinking this would, of course, be the solution. but all it had done was pop the battery out, and she just left it that way, set the computer back down on its table and walked out of the room. it's like living with a three-year-old. anyway, since she had so much time with the place all to herself she must have decided to try to crack the code, because when i got home monday night the computer's sleep light was winking at me, and when i opened it up i saw that she had tried and guessed incorrectly so many times that the computer had offered her a hint. all of this computer business would be sort of funny if she didn't consistently deny having anything to do with it. THERE WAS NO ONE ELSE HERE. the hint now reads, "give it up, you sneaky rat," and that mango candle is in her closet where it belongs.

best thing to come home to: my little cat curled up on my bed, and no trace of anxiety-induced regurgitation anywhere in the house. i expected her to be prissy and snub me for a bit, but she didn't even, she just ran on over and started up her engine, and she's been pasted to my body ever since. i'm a crazy cat lady and that's fine with me, i've embraced it, and i have no qualms about admitting to you that i was in knots about leaving her with a fairly lousy person and not having any way of being reached. it led to some unsettling dreams, in fact, and i'll tell you about them later on. but she's healthy and lovely and didn't pull out any fur, and we're both pleased as punch that she's back on my shoulders.

best future jaunt already in the works: mine to nyc to see the lemonheads in two weeks. yay! and i won't even have to worry about scraping cheese off of things, because my hotel room has a full kitchen, so i can pack a little cooler with two days' worth of nummies and nosh with an easy grin. double yay! i wuv my toadie, but everyone needs a little alone time now and again, and i haven't taken a trip on my own since i moved to boston almost four years ago. that's too damn long. and anyway, any road trip that ends in two consecutive nights of evan dando is a mighty fine road trip. how long do you think it takes to walk from the bowery to central park? i say i can do it in an hour and a half, if i get onto park avenue at union square and don't have to wait too long at intersections. you all place your bets now, and we can divvy up the pool in time for you to spend your winnings on last-minute holiday gifts.

there's going to be a disgusting amount of in-depth travel narrative over the next few weeks, and eventually some (hopefully attractive) photographs, but i'll try to break it up with more universal material. thanks to all of you who have been checking in, and i'm sorry if my procrastination in announcing my safe return made any of you nervous. i'm sure you understand if i needed some silence.

i missed you.

sunday best-of blogging: the surprise tuesday issue

best lullaby to sing to your tiny, unsuspecting cat the night before you leave her for six days, all the while struggling to smile sincerely enough to convince her that nothing's going on, even though secretly you're remembering how the last time you were gone overnight she threw up everything she ate in a dotted line along the length of your bed: "there is a light that never goes out," the smiths

worst song to wake up in the middle of the night and find said cat purring menacingly into your ear: "indian lover," by jude, which goes something like this: "and if you go at last and leave me here, i will slowly run the gas into it, i'd be invisible, and fingering the match i'll strike one mortal, final blow…" oh, ophelia, whatever shall i do with you? please don't eat any wood chips or thread or shards of broken glass while i'm gone. i'm coming home, i swear. unless we crash into the ocean, and then i'm not, but it won't be because i don't love you very much. i have no control over the plane.

best way to pass time in store you don't want to be in: hide in the center of a circular clothing rack and squeak "pick me!" at browsers who seem torn between items.

best line from a song about clams: "clams, clams, you don't have any feet / clams, clams, you're filled with squishy meat." this tune is a rare gem in the pop world, being both catchy and true. it's featured in amy winfrey's latest installment of making fiends, along with an equally upbeat ditty about preventing scurvy.

best logo to notice for the first time on the handle of the mop that's been in your bathroom for as long as you can remember:



best vacation weather forecast to tell yourself it could be worse about:



and it really could be worse; look, there's no hail or volcanic fallout anywhere in there. ten whole days without a hurricane! i'm a lucky gal.

so, that's it, kids. behave yourselves while i'm gone—no fighting (and no parties!). help yourselves to the leftovers, but if you have friends over and they damage the furniture it's coming out of your allowance.

sunday best-of blogging

best song to let coffee dribble over your shocked, slack jaw to as your eyes widen in numbing horror:

Real Media | MP3

uh, thank you (?), think progress, for making sure the right brothers don't get mistaken by the power-pop set for just one more guitar-driven we-*heart*-blink-182 derivative drivelfest. this here's a band with a message, instead of a buttload of liberal LIES. that eminem, man… what a pinko. this is exactly the sort of activist anthem america's mall-roving hipsters need to wake them up and get them involved. perhaps it will convince some of them to enlist. perhaps the right brothers themselves will heed their own call to arms. but then, i guess we really do need them here at home; who else will thumb their noses at cindy sheehan?

best travel advice: "now, if any italian men pinch your bottom, don't you get angry; it's a compliment. i know sometimes you get a little upset about those things, but you have to remember that you're in a different place." courtesy of my septuagenarian irish-catholic grandma. what a peach, eh? i didn't argue with her about it, but i have a feeling that the random squeezing of one's body parts by a stranger is frowned upon around the globe, although i'm sure that in some places it's gotten away with pretty frequently. i don't approve of it in any location, though, and i'll do my best to speak their language and politely scrape their cheese into an inconspicuous pile underneath my napkin, but i'm an american girl and ain't nobody pinching my bottom. maybe it's just that grandma's a product of a different, surprisingly less uptight era. when she and my grandfather were dating he was playing drums in a jazz band, and my favorite story of theirs is how one night he took her to see him play in a gay bar, and before he went on stage he pointed out a transvestite at the bar who'd been giving him the eye; every once in a while, from behind the drum set, grandpa would look over at him and wink, and when he giggled and waved back coyly grandma laughed so hard her cape codder shot out her nose. now that i'm thinking about it, i remember my mom complaining frequently about my grandfather's habit of patting her tush on her way past when i was young.

best out-of-the-blue infatuation: mine with catherine zeta-jones as velma kelly in chicago. i had zero interest in this movie when it came out, being a decided non-fan of both the majority of broadway musicals and the entire cast. i'll tell you what i am a huge fan of, though: 1920s fashion. so over the past few days, as bravo has been playing the movie on a loop, i've paused on it enough times to have seen almost the entire thing, and miss catherine has stolen my heart right away. i still can't stand that zellweger, though, and i'll admit that my distaste for her is now fueled by a huge amount of resentment over how much better she looks in those little flapper frocks than i do. i don't generally wish that my body were built more like that of a 12-year-old male farm hand, but i think it's the ideal figure for those get-ups. so sad. catherine, though, has this delicious little roll of chub that peeks out over the top of her bodice now and again:




yum. murder is wrong, it really is, i believe that through and through, and i didn't change my mind when it was bebe neuwirth singing an angry, indignant song. nevertheless, when this particular velma says they had it coming, i'm with her.

best reason to return to 1991: so i can never watch aeon flux on mtv's liquid television, thereby eliminating my reflexive loathing for the current movie version. for all i know it's very good, but i'll never have anything to do with it, because i'm such a nostalgic elitist.




picture i like found here, picture i like not so much found here. eh? you decide.

best subject for late-night introspection: why am i so taken with vengeful, gun-wielding women in black bustiers? let's change the subject, shall we?

best canine miracle: about two months ago a little dog, part shepherd, part who-knows-what, was admitted to the hospital as an emergency after having been hit by a car. the person who had hit her had tied her to a tree on the side of the road, called the police and given them her location, and taken off. the critical care staff got her more or less stable and wheeled her in for x-rays, which revealed a crushed pelvis and a right femur in so many pieces we weren't sure we'd find them all. the surgeons weren't convinced they could repair it completely, and because she was ownerless at the time, no one was sure whether or not we'd be able to help her at all (the financial office is sickeningly strict. you wouldn't believe how many patients we have to turn away. animals aren't people, blah blah blah, but if human institutions ran themselves with the kind of cold iron fist this one does, there'd be no more concerns about overpopulation), but we held her overnight and did as much as we could, hoping someone would claim her soon.

well, i don't know how it happened, but her owner did manage to track her down. it turned out they were from new orleans and had come to massachusetts to stay with a friend while katrina was blowing their house down. they made it all the way here safely, just so their friend's nincompoop landlord could let the dog out for no reason in the middle of the afternoon. stellar. she got her surgery, but when she left the hospital two weeks later she couldn't walk at all, and her potential for independent mobility was pretty uncertain. she was a trooper, though, and incredibly sweet. you can't help but root for the poochies who lick your hand while you're tugging on their shattered legs.

so we were all thrilled to death to see her running down the hall this week, wagging her previously lifeless tail at everyone she saw. her radiographs show that she's healing beautifully; she'll always be stiff on her right side, because it's now more machine than dog, but she doesn't seem to care at all. pain-free, eager and able to frolic as a little dog should—the world's happiest ending. i wish more katrina stories ended so well, or even half so well. it's something, how quickly we stopped following them.

best readers*: megan and dina, who have very kindly offered to supply me with snacks and postcards that are more readily within their reach than my own. you guys are totally the cutest.





* everyone else who made it this far ties for second, and if i could i would wrap each and every one of you in something fleecy and feed you tiny cupcakes.

sunday best-of blogging

best song to silently and tranquilly embrace the inevitable to, even while inwardly mourning and resenting the world for forcing you to do so: "casimir pulaski day," sufjan stevens.

best communication breakdown: one of our cardiologists submitted a request for chest x-rays to data entry, and in the patient's history he scribbled a picture of a heart, instead of writing out the word. when the sad, skinny boy in data entry processed the request, the slip that printed out in radiology read, "persistent cough x several days, weak; evidence of love failure." single doctors throughout the building hung photocopies on their office doors.

best item extracted from a dog's intestinal tract: an entire pair of girls' panties, with "sweet" penned in sparkly silver calligraphy across the back above a picture of what i believe is a tightly wrapped piece of saltwater taffy.

best airline meal:


i am totally getting this.

my thanks to ken brown, who also designed the fabulous wrapping paper i mentioned in a previous best-of post. toadie and i are quasi-poor fans, as we haven't actually ordered anything from mr. brown (his minimum postcard order is 12 dozen or something, and while we would find ways to use them, we aren't made of money orders); we are promoting him every chance we get, though, mainly by sporting stolen, photoshopped morsels of his artwork on t-shirts. does that count? we think that counts.

best tortilla chips: the flour tortilla chips available in the prepared-foods section of whole foods. (insert homer simpson drooly noise here.) oh, they're so flaky and greasy and delicious, they dissolve into liquid glee on your tongue. the second best, though, for those who can't always make the trek to mecca, are the tostitos gold chips, which i can sometimes find one lonesome bag of on the bottom shelf of my local supermarket's nacho-fixins end cap, like the gods have stashed their irresistible hydrogenated yumminess away just for me. death by chocolate is a fine idea, but i'll take my final bow salty and oily.

best tradition: from john seabrook's article on the renaissance-era fruits of umbria, published in the september 5 issue of the new yorker, which i am just now finishing:

the dalla ragiones keep many of the traditional umbrian festivals, and at the end of the year they burn la vecchia, the effigy of an old woman made of rags and straw, and livio curses—"vaffanculo, anno vecchio!" ("up your ass, old year!")—and spits into the fire.

i am, as ever, bothered by the new yorker's decision to italicize the closing quotation marks around the italicized text, but not the opening ones. i'm putting it right out of my head, though, because i'm so enchanted with the saying. this family lives pretty close to where we're staying in umbria, so i'll have to make sure our friend and soon-to-be hostess remembers the curse and shouts it drunkenly at the top of her lungs at someone who has no idea what the hell she's saying this new year's eve. she'll be absolutely tickled pink. i'll probably do the same, but i think it'll be funnier for her, since there's a chance that the person she shouts at will think he or she should know what she's saying. unless she comes home and we wind up at the same party, and then we'll just shout it at each other, which i'm sure will be, at the time, the funniest thing yet.

best guilty pleasure: i, um, i love the bee gees. love them. unfortunately, i do not feel better having gotten that off my chest, and i'm still only going to listen to them when no one else is home.

best dream: one of the emergency/critical care doctors at the hospital came running through and ordered everyone to evacuate radiology, because she, for some reason, had to treat a dangerous tiger, and she didn't want any unnecessary personnel to be injured by it. toadie and i stuck around in case she needed help with the x-ray equipment, but we climbed up on top of the processor to be out of the way. the doctor shouldered her dart gun and marched out of sight, and the roaring and bellowing that had been emanating from around the corner suddenly ceased. we assumed she'd successfully sedated the tiger and crept over to check things out, and when we peeked around we saw the doctor attempting to stick a man dressed up like a character from cats in the butt with a giant syringe as he backed up against the wall, hissing, and swatted ineffectually at her with his fuzzy hands. she triumphed in the end, but we just left him passed out next to the door and ate some bagels.

sunday best-of blogging

best tune to stare at yourself in the mirror and swear that you'll never make that mistake again to: the piano intro to "icicle" on tori amos's under the pink, ideally isolated on a home-spun recording and leading directly into the "all the girls hate her/over it" piano suite off the "god" single from the same album.

best marketing idea: tootsie drops, the miniature version of tootsie pops. they'd be about the size of your average gumball and stick-free, so you'd get all the goodness of a tootsie pop without all the damned work. i think they'd be a tremendous success, because let's face it, folks, those lollipops are huge and impossible to enjoy while you're doing anything else. i suppose we'd have to alter the candy-to-tootsie ratio a little bit, but i think we could find a balance that would make everybody happy. well, not me, maybe, because i don't eat them, but it's not about me, it's about you—you and the millions of kids who leave saliva-drenched lollipops stuck to whatever public surface is closest at hand when they tire of their monstrous sweets. stupid stinking halloween.

best exchange overheard on a city bus: "you're gonna be toasted like a toaster strudel, gonna get scrambled like some ramen noodles…"
"man, you suck. you suck worse than scary movie 3."

best soup: imagine's organic creamy butternut squash. i've had it for lunch every day this week and i don't even like squash, that's how good this is. eat it. EAT IT!!!!!!!!

best compliment: "of course [i like you]! who wouldn't, save for someone with an ignoble heart the size of a chiclet?" hello, phila! welcome to the monkey house! i'll be your hostess. if anyone throws anything larger than a beer bottle, you come straight to me.

best search term directing a disappointed reader to this very page: heh. heh heh. the even funnier thing is that he/she followed it twice, on consecutive days. am i so forgettable? *sniff* i'm going to pretend he/she was just so bound up in the thrill of the search that names of pages got lost in the shuffle. sorry, dude. better luck next time. here, as you seem so devoted to your quest, i'll offer you a consolation prize.

best excuse for neglecting my sad, lonely blog: see next item.

best career news: this week i scored my first freelance copyediting gig for which i'm able to quote a price based on the difficulty of the document in question. the company i was working for before set a flat rate, and i could either accept it or not take the job. now i have to decide what i think i'll actually deserve, which is as daunting as it is exciting. i feel obligated to ask for less than most copy editors ask for, since i'm basically self-trained and impressively inexperienced, but the fact that this company thought me qualified before they knew my asking rates should have made me feel better about requesting a living wage. what i hope is that this experience will force me to look at my work with absolute objectivity, so i won't be afraid in the future to ask for what i've earned. it's a distressingly adult situation, and to be honest, i didn't really see it coming. my roommate thinks i might feel less uneasy about it if i put on a dress suit and did my work at a desk in the living room, instead of in my pajamas in an armchair in my bedroom. she could be right, but i think what i need more than that is a meager handful of instances where i say that i've worked this hard and should be compensated thusly, and the person who's compensating me agrees. and that, by all appearances, is precisely what i have an opportunity to provide myself with. i've knowingly lowballed on the first two jobs, but maybe i'll stand up for myself soon. that i'm even thinking about it is a giant personal step forward, so i'm applauding myself, but i'm only thinking about it, so that applause is being made surreptitiously by one hand inside my pocket.

why is this so strange? it's not as if i've never gotten the work i wanted before. when i decided that i wanted to work as a veterinary nuclear medicine technologist, well, by golly, that's what i did, even though there are only two veterinary hospitals in massachusetts that routinely provide such studies and no school anywhere that trains you specifically to perform them. i was hired a month out of school with the understanding that in no time i'd be heading and expanding the department, and i was just a baby; i hadn't even taken my licensing exam yet. but i worked for what i wanted, and i accomplished exactly what i told everyone i would. i shouldn't be shocked by a similar degree of opportunity in a different field, and yet i absolutely am. maybe it's just that i'm still a little shocked to hear myself admitting that this is what i want. i feel, for the first time, 100% in control of my own future, and it's this utterly foreign future that i had never once imagined myself in until it was waving its "welcome" sign in my boggled little face. it's weird. it's very weird. but if this is the way that turning twenty-seven is going to alter my life, i'll sure as hell take it.

best song to become suddenly certain it wasn't a mistake to: "michigan girls," califone.