and all was well.

tuesday morning: woke up feeling crappy. went to work. worked. had brief, futile debate with managing editor about the dubious ethics and general distastefulness of using previously published research from one journal to meet page count of a different journal without telling the authors we were using their work or telling the readers the work had been published previously, by us. felt crappy.

tuesday afternoon: left work feeling crappy. parked car in moat of slush interspersed with rock-solid chunks of ice. found recycling bin in street alongside three or four items apparently deemed unworthy of recycling by the city's crew. slipped on ice picking them up. felt crappy (and wet).

tuesday evening: went to see the lemonheads at the paradise. read an excellent short story by cate kennedy, called "black ice," in between opening acts; felt better.

tuesday night: rocked out like a fool to the lemonheads for just under an hour and a half. clapped my hands and hopped up and down like a small child being presented with a gingerbread house big enough to live in at the start of every song i recognized (i.e., every song), amusing the gentleman to my right no end. realized my own happiness had inspired mirth in others. felt awesome. skipped and danced down the street to my car to the tune of "great big no," the rhythm warming all my insides like sunshine jelly. found a dry place to park. fell asleep grinning like an idiot, with my ears not even ringing.

wednesday morning: woke up with small black cat draped over my entire face, her bony right elbow digging into my surprisingly pain-free jaw. realized my eyes were clear and i could breathe normally. upon leaving the apartment, saw that all of the ice had melted from my front steps and sidewalk. at work, did not have expected instructions from boss to revamp year-old articles for sneaky reprinting. heard birds chirping sweetly from sun-warmed rooftop outside window.

it's an old story, but i'll tell it again: evan dando fixes everything. perhaps he's a god of something other than rock. at the very least, i intend to go on worshiping him as my private household deity, as he's done me nothing but good over the past fifteen years. if only i'd thought to throw myself a dance party a week ago, we might never have had to suffer through these long, dark days of numbing separation. no matter--i am healed. a round of applause for mr. dando and all of his magical, medicinal qualities. and i bow my head gratefully to all of you, as well; your support has been tremendously appreciated. we now return you to your regularly scheduled programming, already in progress.

. . . so screw you, inhofe, you impossibly ignorant madman! three cold days does not a climate make! try running this great machine called america with both of your eyes swollen shut, you crazy fool.

monday punch-in-the-face blogging: the anti-punch issue

i won't pretend that nothing made me ball up my tiny fists and flare my nostrils this week; glenn beck is, after all, still on the air, and his desperate plea to return america to its lost, puritanical, shame-driven state of yesteryear didn't ring all that tunefully in my ears. porn addiction, like all addiction, is troubling, but a little porn here and there, provided it was made by consenting adults (and don't assume no one wants to be involved in that sort of thing; am i the only person willing to admit to regularly watching the girls next door and being enthralled by the glossy, caricaturish mountain of crazy that is bridget marquardt?), can be a fine thing. the more we castigate people for being human, with all the attendant human instincts and urges, the more we fuel the seedy, deviant underworld that beck so fervently wishes to eradicate--but of course i wasn't counting on him to approach the issue rationally. and then there's this guy, and, as ever, this guy, though to a lesser degree; as distasteful as i find him, when it comes to his limp-wristed swats at malcolm gladwell i'm generally content to leave sailer to his sophomoric, colbert-esque nailedjagasms and move on to more deserving subjects. but if one more person tries to convince me that it's more offensive and exclusionary to say "happy holidays" than it is to say "merry christmas,"* i swear i don't even know what i'll do . . .

it is the holiday season, though, and my heart is ablaze with the giving spirit, so i've chosen to focus this week on things that inspired a sensation opposite that which makes me want to open up a fresh can of whup-ass. i don't know what the opposite action is, exactly, but i think it involves clasping my hands together and doing that little squat-bounce move that small children who haven't figured out how to jump up and down do when they're very excited. that's a mouthful, though, isn't it? let's call it the yippee dance. the truth is, for all my moping and whining, i do that dance a lot; sometimes it's about personal, somewhat senseless things (e.g., my cat just lay down on her side and tucked her perfect feet up under her chin), and sometimes it's about still personal but slightly more reasonable things. i find it prolongs the effects to ignore the universal merits of the origin and just take the little cloudbursts as they come. and i'm in sharing mode, like i said, so here are some things that made tiny irridescent stars swirl around in my head on saturday.

i got up extra early to meet my ex-roommate (who's a lovely girl, despite her unfortunate passion for violent, destructive hookbills) in the south end for the 2006 bazaar bizarre, a craft fair for the city's underserved eccentrics. i lusted after all kinds of beautiful things, like a sock zombie that was crocheted to look as though it were drooling blood (from pepperberry) and this dish by ambrosia porcelain, but at this point in december i'm on a strict purchases-for-others-only diet. it was tough, but so am i--at least, i was, until i found chad walker, whose sweet, strange, misshapen cartoon characters stole my heart so swiftly and completely that i almost had to sit down. i did buy two prints and a button for a friend, but i folded and bought two prints for myself, as well, because they were so perfect, and perfectly me, that the yippee dance overtook me and i couldn't say no.
































the captions don't show up here, but the one on the right reads, "portrait of earth-like planet . . . you can tell it's not earth because there are less jerks." the second says, "for a moment we both feel better--rescued beetle." i didn't hug them in front of chad, because that might have made him uncomfortable, but i have hugged them several times in the privacy of my own apartment. carefully, mind you; i wouldn't want to crease them. the realization that somewhere in some other part of the world one person whom i had never met had been sitting at home being sad and pensive about all of the same things i'm sad and pensive about when i'm sitting alone at home--it's deeply mobilizing, in a way. suddenly i want to double down on all of my efforts to change those saddening things, because i was just one and now there are two, but if there are two there must be millions, millions of us with our one voices fading into the static and buzz swelling up around the jerks on this planet that is earth and not earth-like, and we're all waiting for someone to do the little bit more that will tip the scale in the direction of enough. the odds are maybe not in favor of that someone ever being me, but one never knows. i could imagine never being so angry with anyone again. one other person on the planet thinks there is grace in saving a beetle, and suddenly i am filled with hope.

so i came home with my swag and ate a sandwich and prepared for round 2 of my happy, happy day: going to see the lemonheads at avalon. you likely do not remember, and no one would blame you for that, but i also saw the lemonheads on december 16 last year. evan dando and i have a lifelong habit of falling into anniversaries. between 1996 and 2000, i was able to see evan every year within three days of my birthday, and twice the show started the night before and carried over into my birthday, and it was like a koala bear crapped a rainbow in my brain. then there was a brief transition period where things were a little less consistent (although in 2003 i did get one last rock and roll birthday), but in 2004 i caught him on december 17, and now we've established a shiny new pattern. i do love me a pattern.

what i do not love is driving to lansdowne street and paying an arm and a kidney to park in a garage for three hours, so i decided to take the train. how hard could it be? i wondered; i take the train everywhere else, and fenway park is the draw in this city. getting walking directions to it from the train stop ought to be the easiest thing in the world, and what more reliable source for public-transportation-related directions than the massachusetts transit authority web site? it's got "authority" right there in the title, after all.

NO! the transit authority told me to turn right when i had to turn left, because it assumed i would have the sense to leave the subway through the exit on the other side of the street, and even though i was almost a hundred percent certain that i was supposed to be walking toward the giant citgo sign, i carried on, and on, and on and on and on . . .

it's no one's fault but my own that i was too embarrassed to walk into a convenience store and admit that i had lived in boston for four years and had no idea how to get to fenway park from the t stop two blocks away, but i was, and so i wandered back and forth through the boston university dorms and under the overpass and up and down commonwealth ave. for an entire hour before i finally convinced myself that i really was sure i was supposed to be walking toward the giant citgo sign. and then i only had to walk for about four more minutes, because of course the avalon was right there.

by the time i got inside i was chilly and sore and very upset with myself, and the club was packed and the lemonheads had already been playing for ten minutes, and that made me feel about four dozen times worse. i picked a spot against a wall and shifted from one stiff hip to the other, scowling. but two and a half songs later i was already forgetting that any of that bad stuff had ever happened, and when evan played his genius, ballady cover of the misfits' "skulls," which i love and don't get treated to nearly often enough, i actually did the yippee dance right there in the middle of the club, and an hour later when the set ended i was so blissed out and permasmile stricken that i would happily have jogged all the way home with the transit authority's web master on my back. it just proves what i've been saying for the past fifteen years: evan dando fixes everything. if we piped bootleg recordings of his acoustic numbers into diplomatic meetings around the globe, the world might be a very different, and much improved, place. thank you, evan's wife, for making him so happy, and thank you evan for making me forget what wanting to sock a pundit feels like. i hadn't known it before, but i think there may be no lovelier thing to fail to remember.

there may or may not be punch blogging next week; it's christmas, sure, but that means i have to spend the day with my family . . . i won't worry about it yet, though. for now i'm going to delight in these tiny things that i've found, and i'll deal with the rest of it if and when i must. you find a tiny thing too, and if you're smart you'll carry it with you everywhere you go.







* three cheers to the united states postal service for rolling out six holiday stamps this year, including this one:


so pretty! at least john potter still believes that it takes all kinds.

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: the food issue

best album to eat cold, messy, saucy noodles to: the lemonheads' it's a shame about ray*.

best vegan** cookies: liz lovely's cowgirl cookies, no contest. i used to be able to buy these at the co-op down the road, and then i had to go to a different branch of the same co-op in central square, and then the only place to get them was a tiny natural-foods store all the way back in worcester, which i couldn't get to at all after i gave up my car unless i made the two-hour trip by commuter rail… so for a long time i have had no cowgirl cookies, and let me tell you, it's been a downer. the flavor had expanded in my memory into something mythical and life-saving, the cookie that would result if the batter were slowly churned by faeries inside of the holy grail while a greek chorus of sirens sang cocteau twins songs in the background. in other words, they was yummy. and i missed them.

but now they have returned to me! or at least, for the cost of shipping and handling across a state line they can be persuaded to return to me, because liz lovely has finally decided to offer direct mail orders. that means you can try them too, and i recommend that you do. if there were a way for me to enforce it i would insist, but i'll have to leave it up to your best judgment this time.

best food fact i never would have thought of, but that makes perfect sense to me now that i do think about it: a cucumber is a gourd. see? it's weird for a second, but then it's not.

best reason not to pass H.R. 3824: in order to get to the reason, i have to first exemplify my argument. hang in there for a minute, okay? this won't take so long.

fifty percent of peru's economy depends on brazil nuts. because of their importance, the country passed legislation protecting the trees, but, unfortunately, none protecting the surrounding flora or fauna. this is unfortunate for all sorts of reasons, but especially because brazil nut trees are only able to grow in undisturbed forests, a fact that no one was aware of until people started clearing what they thought of as extraneous plant life away from the trees in an attempt to give them access to more space and soil. the assumption was that the trees would spread and thrive, the way most crops do when allowed free reign of a designated space, making for a larger and more profitable brazil nut harvest. but no, my lovelies, that was not what happened; the trees in areas of swept ground failed to bear any fruit at all. hmmmm, people thought, what's happening here? so they went back to the intact forests to find out what they had missed, and here it is:

the Euglossine, or orchid, bee is native to and prolific in brazil nut forests. the trees are cross-pollinated by the bees (primarily the females), the only insects able to work around the curled stamens of the trees' flowers. in addition, the male bees are essential, and almost exclusively responsible, for the pollination of the numerous species of orchid that grow throughout the forest. in turn, the orchids are every bit as responsible for the bees' survival: the females are drawn to the males only when they are coated in the pollen of one particular type of orchid, the gongora. without the flower's one-of-a-kind perfume, the girl and boy bees pass right by one another without pause, like so many asexual ships in the night. so when people attempted to create brazil nut pastures free from all other plant life, they eliminated the orchid bees from the ecosystem and made life impossible for the one crop they'd been trying to promote. because a significant amount of the rainfall in the peruvian forests is generated by the trees and the atmospheric impact of their dense leaf canopy, plants and animals that depend on water from surrounding rivers and flood runoff are threatened by changes in the amount of precipitation; when the trees aren't pollinated and able to propagate themselves, the rainforest breakdown ultimately extends for miles beyond the trees themselves.

the disappearance of one wildflower from an area of a few thousand acres can disrupt, maybe even devastate, the functional balance of an entire rainforest, and the loss of a rainforest can cause irreparable damage to climates across the globe. but no one knew that that flower mattered until it started to disappear. so why save condors, manatees, otters? why save lichens and clovers and shrubs? because we have no idea what will happen if we don't, but it's in everybody's best interest to assume that the absolute worst will happen and take every possible precaution against it (i have said this OVER and OVER and OVER so many times that a) i'm sick of myself and b) there's a worn, shiny, bloodstained spot on the wall here next to my desk where i've spent countless into-the-void hours banging my head). the balance is unimaginably fragile, and its elements are connected by hair-thin threads that we should know to want to keep intact. we should know it. that's my best reason not to pass H.R. 3824—if we, as a species, could sublimate our ego enough to think objectively about the idea, we'd see instantly how completely brainless it is. it should be dismissed out of hand on the grounds that infinite narcissism is not an admirable trait in any human being, let alone an entire nation of them.

bad house of representatives! you've broken my heart, and believe me, it was not crying out for another breaking.

best engrish: ban chiang, a thai restaurant on centre street in jamaica plain, has put a large, colorful, eye-catching sign up in its front window that proudly proclaims, "YES!!! we're delivery!"






* this is also the best album to shower and clean kitchen surfaces to, but, ironically, not the best album to clean the bathroom to.

** blogger's dictionary doesn't recognize this as a word. that's discrimination, and i won't stand for it***.

*** yes i will. i love you, blogger, i just wish you could accept me for who i am. *sniff*