B-I-G F-U-N
I played Scrabble with my friend Meredith today for three hours in a coffee shop. Amazing words were spelled. Marvel. Voltage. Avowal. Gussie. Winnows. Hairy (as in, "oh, Mr. Lehman, your arm is so _____"). I was one letter short of "troubled" -- which perhaps applies to broader things as well, but we'll let sleeping Scrabble implications lie.

It was a better three hours than the three(-plus) hours I spent with the Lord of the Rings movie last night. Not that that wasn't fun too, but the thing didn't start until 10:45, which meant the theater didn't go dark until 11, and then there were 800 previews to get through. Too much boring fighting, again, and too many false endings for 2:30 a.m. I wonder if Orcs (Orks?) would be worthy Scrabble opponents.

juniper and lamplight
It's raining on top of the snow right now just like it always used to -- and presumably still does -- in Connecticut. Dark December days make me want the library at Wesleyan... I spent quite a lot of time there, especially in my thesis carrel or the downstairs reading room that was halfway underground, whispering to T. and sneaking sips of instant hot chocolate made with coffee. Would be nice to be there right now, in one of the big armchairs by the windows reading one of these, many of which have just graced my ridiculously extensive wishlist. (Idea stolen from the stupendous Bookslut.)

It's such a cliché to want good books and hot drinks and warm light and big armchairs on cold, rainy days, but there you have it. Unlike rules, clichés are made to be proven correct.

Alissa and I are looking at Storypeople right now even though I am supposed to be mach schnelling her
My dad always told me, the right tool for the right job, but all he ever had around were a few screwdrivers, so he ended up using the telephone a lot.

Go find one of your own. Mach schnell!

a gift hoarse
That's two bad animal spelling puns in a row, there. Whoa, Nelly.

So, after way too nice a weekend, I seem to have lost my voice. I don't really feel that bad but I sound horrendous, like I swallowed a cactus, or a rasp, or a bunch of razor blades (speaking of swallowing razor blades, is anyone else in the world besides me and my roommates watching Carnivale on HBO? Brother Justin and his black eyeballs is/are the scariest, scariest, scariest character(s) to ever come out of a writer's head. We watched part of "The Shining" this weekend and it didn't even hold a candle. Brother Justin is creepier than the redrum kid and Jack Nicholson combined.)

I left work early today, drove home, had some tea, slept for two hours, got up and worked on the novel for four uninterrupted hours. I wrote through a part that had really been bothering me -- I'm not sure if I'll keep it, but at least it's out of my head and on the screen. And if I were able to speak, namely to call people on my cell phone, I don't think it ever would have happened.

Sometimes it feels like we just have to figure out the same few lessons over and over again. (If I believed in fate or "larger plan" or what have you, I would have written that setnence as, "Sometimes it feels like life just teaches the same few lessons over and over again.") I need to remember to carve out space for writing and other things that require mental quiet. Mouth closed, eyes and ears open, settling the extrovert down a little and encouraging the introvert to come out. I'll still be calling all of you back just as soon as I can talk again, because it's not like I can really live without that, but remind me to make time for this too so that I don't have to learn the same damn lesson that I've already learned 400 billion times 400 billion MORE times.

In the meantime, while I am still silent, take a look at this. I read it at the gym this morning and have been thinking about our one-man Rorschach test all day.

tails of the city
I took the Metro home from work tonight and, woefully underdressed for the 38-degree evening, decided to stop at Cosi for hot coffee to fortify me for the 15-minute walk home. I was probably about 20 steps out of the store, ready to turn down 19th Street, when this gigantic -- when I say gigantic, I mean absolutely insanely unbelievably gigantic -- dog bounds around the corner and slams into me. Puts its paws on my shoulders, literally, and sticks its huge doggie face into mine. I spill half of a very large coffee, complete with milk and Equal, onto its back.

The dog's owner comes around the corner, chasing after it with a leash, and begins apologizing profusely. (Because this is my life and not a Meg Ryan movie, the owner is a graying man who is at least old enough to be my father and wearing a rainbow flag pin on his coat besides. Figures.) I, in turn, am also apologizing profusely about spilling coffee all over his dog which, in the meantime, is hopping up and down with unfettered joy. His mammoth horse-sized head is swinging to and fro. His monstrous tail easily would have taken out any passing compact car. His paws could have trampled children or small adults. A non-dog person would have been horrified, but, of course, I loved it, despite the loss of most of my coffee. I really think the universe is trying to tell me something if random dogs are singling me out like this. Can I have a puppy for Chanukah? Please?

no time, but...
... I can't leave that thing up there about being miserable when I had such a good weekend. The pre-Thanksgiving turkey was brined and cooked in a hilarious turn of events Friday night, and a day later, 20 people and lots of food sat on the floor on cushions to eat it and talk to each other. It was one of those times that added up to more than the sum of its parts... halfway through, I looked around and had one of those so-many-people-I-care-about-are-in-one-room frissions of happiness. Really was warm and lovely and great.

OK, now it's back to work. (Later, we will go back to take it easy's regularly scheduled doom and gloom. I read an article in US News this morning that made me want to rip out my hair -- we can talk about it later, though. Concentrate on the happy pre-Thanksgiving and almost-real-Thanksgiving for now. :) )

bleh
I'm having one of those days when the world seems like a very harsh place and I'm just trying to duck out of its way so I can get on with my small, unimportant life. Avoid eye contact. If I can't see it, it can't see me either.

I've been working on the stuff about the trials for the two sniper suspects for so long that it's basically unreal to me -- a story, a page full of words, a loose bunch of details that need to be spelled correctly and posted quickly. An abstraction. Then this kind of testimony crops up and I remember that it's too real, unbearably sad, horrifying.

I know that losing perspective is a defense mechanism, and that it lets you think on a different plane so that you can operate objectively and make dark jokes about terrible things. I know a lot of journalists have to do it to stay sane. But the horrible jolt you get when you come back to earth and remember what you're really talking about might not be worth it. I feel awful. Too callous and too sensitive, too everything.

all artistic-like
This weekend, I went to The Corcoran to see an exhibit called "Beyond the Frame: Impressionism Revisited." A sculptor named J. Seward Johnson has basically taken a bunch of famous paintings and made them three-dimensional -- life-sized statues, hills full of fake grass and poppies, fully decorated rooms that you could step into and around.

There's something sort of trivializing and naughty-feeling (trying and failing to resist the liberal-arts pull of the word "transgressive," but at least I wrestled it inside the parentheses) about the whole exhibit. It was packed, and there were kids all over the place, touching the statues, climbing on everything. And the thing was that the exhibits didn't really create a feeling of anything the way that looking at -- or into -- a painting does. You'd think it would draw you in more, but it didn't, really.

That said, it was pretty cool. Johnson's statues are actually amazingly cool and not trivial at all. There was a lot of playful self-referencing in the exhibits, too, that showed a different level of awareness of the project. But I don't know, maybe I'm too snobby, but it didn't really have any kind of emotional impact at all.

Intellectually: cool. Practically: not so much. Except maybe the Van Gogh bedroom. My roommate had to drag me out of that one, which was, in fact, rather incredible. It sort of made you feel like you weren't really standing on the ground.

coaxing, gently
Come on, leafygreen, cooperate.

enemy terrirory
Scotty Claus suggested to me on the phone tonight that perhaps writing something here for a change might be a good idea. So to placate my innumerable (Scott + Carl = 2) West Coast readers, I figured my newly acquired DSL and I could cooperate to make his dream a reality.

One of my friends, who works for the defense department, is going to Iraq, probably for six months, and I had dinner with him last night to say goodbye. (He is an excellently secretive military employee as ordered, and I have absolutely no idea what he does at his current job, why he is going to Iraq or what he will be doing once he gets there. He soldiers with his brain and not with his brawn, but I don't know more than that. I am also deliberately not using his name or talking much about his reaction or feelings because I know D*nald R*msfeld stays up late every single night reading my blog and I don't want to screw up my friend's career. OK? OK.)

Anyway, I think I was playing the role of pep talker -- despite how much work it will certainly be, and how it's more than a little dangerous, and how far from home it is and how long six months will feel, this is an unbelievably cool opportunity. It's someplace no one from this country will ever get to see otherwise. Way more importantly, he's going to be a part of something so much larger than himself, something that is so important on a global scale. Talk about making a difference. If people as smart and capable as he is are in charge over there, I feel a little better about the whole thing.

But later, he pulled his dogtags out. Then I got it. He's really going away, and those pieces of metal are hanging under his shirt for only one reason.

I'm not sure how I feel about it now. I still think it's incredible and important, but there's an awful lot of dread and worry for him mixed in. And I'm still not that crazy about this whole thing. In case you were in doubt.

My pal Donny R. and I are going to go check the new fun blogs I am now reading, and then I am going to go to bed. Maybe tomorrow someone will explain to me why it seems as though we have traded weather with Iraq, and now it's 85 degrees in November.

the best birthday EVAAAAAAAHH
(Read this while keeping in mind that of course it would have been better if all of you had been there too, OK? OK.)

There was a restorative yoga workshop. For my birthday. In my house. Seven of us and our unbelievably awesome yoga teacher lying on the dining room floor. There aren't really words to describe how perfect and hilarious and perfect and awesome and perfect it was, so you'll have to trust me, but it was great. Visiting friends and long Metro rides and fun brunch, etc.: great. All of it: great. I still am on a fun-weekend high. Best. Birthday. Ever.

the coffee cup, I think about you
See, I don't blog for like a zillion years and then I have all these random things to talk about... so instead of forcing some kind of arbitrary connection, I will make a list without any paragraph hooks.

1. I saw "Follies" at *phrata Saturday night. When we did this in high school, I was sitting behind a lot of scenery (while juggling an oboe, an English horn and a baritone saxophone so I wasn't in a position to pay attention to the words anyway), and this was the first time I had ever actually *seen* the show. And it was good, but wow, is that show ever psychotic. Who knew all that crazy stuff at the end meant the four main characters were having nervous breakdowns? I don't know what I used to think all the wacky music was about. Probably I didn't think about it at all, because I was too busy trying to remember to switch reeds or something.

And -- with apologies to Hefk, who heard this train of thought yesterday -- thinking back on what we did makes me realize that having 16-, 17- and 18-year-old high school students perform that play really adds a layer of meaning to it, like the Langley Schools Music Project kids singing "Desperado." What having young people playing older people watching their younger selves imply? Inevitability, sure, and another serious layer of hopelessness on top of that. Whew. I remember a bunch of adults getting upset about the appropriateness of students doing that show, but I always thought it was just about the language or the "sexual themes" or whatever.

Also, there was an awful lot of H*mpfield-ity to this production, seriously. (Warning: a lot of google-proof vowel-asteriks coming up.) S**n *'D*nn*ll's mom was in it. Mrs. K**tt*r was in it and choreographed it, and it definitely looked it. Kr*st*n P*ntz got tossed around by C*dy Sm*th (who is tall!). J*sh D*b*rd is still cute. The woman playing the character originally played by Hefk had, like, the exact same fringy red dress on for the end as she wore. They all danced Dance-Theater-tastically. The show was good, but kind of eerie -- like imagining people you know really well totally naked, and realizing that for all of this time they've been naked underneath their clothes. That's not a perfect metaphor, but you know. Eerie.

2. This is how I totally feel about fall. I like gourds, too, and it is so beautiful outside that I want to scream. I went apple-picking last weekend and am still reaping the applicious bounty via applesauce, apple crisp, apple pie, apple bread pudding, apple-strawberry jam and apple butter. No exaggeration. Also, I basically have a completely new wardrobe this year, and that is expensive as hell but it's fantastic. I feel good in my skin.

3. Thank you for all the birthday wishes. Yay birthday! My parents' surprise party went off without a hitch, although I do think the gigantic leftover MEAT TRAY I was forced to take home afterward might count as a hitch. Ew. God. You all know how I feel about meat, but "you have roommates, someone there will eat it!" It's like 20 lbs. of roast beef and turkey. Each. Ew.

4. There are about 400 other things, but they'll have to wait because work is unbelievably busy right now. OK. Hope all is well in your respective worlds.

alissa is smart
It IS time for Storypeople:

How many people can you love before it's too much? she said & I said I didn't think there was any real limit as long as you didn't care if they loved you back.

debriefing
So the GBC was fun, eh? A little too much challenge in the challenge. Some of us did fall apart a bit at the end. But it was still content-ful and good, and next time we'll take the Big C's suggestion and do one topic a week for a month or something like that. We rule, though, basically. I like us and I like our writing.

Unfortunately I can't set up comments on that page because I'd need a new YACCS account, and they're not accepting new people, and commenting systems in general are a huge pain. So the central commenting location suggested by Hefk will have to be an idea for another day. Until then, you can keep your ideas for the next one snug in your giant brains. Let me know when it's time for GBC II: The GENTLE Blogging Challenge.

***Visit the homepage for the Great Blogging Challenge for topics, rules and contributors.***

Day Five: Something Worth Publishing
In the hopes that it will be inspired by its inclusion under the title "Something Worth Publishing," I'm going to talk about the book I'm writing now. It's something I never talk about with people I know -- or, if I do, only with sort of a hemming, hawing, aw-shucks kind of attitude. So I'm going to talk about it.

It's about a guy. A guy who leaves his life and moves to a farm that's populated with a host of characters. And, uh, things happen to them.

See, this is why I can't really talk about it. I don't know what to say. I'd much rather that you read it for yourselves, but I don't want people to read it because it isn't finished. And although I love feedback and hearing comments about the work-in-progress, I'd really rather have people read it finished. So it's not that I'm being secretive -- it's that I'm being selfish.

Now all I need is a really long stretch of not doing anything but writing. That's what I want most in the world, and also something I'm really scared of. I've been working on this thing for almost a year and a half; it's two-thirds done. It's no coincidence that its very best parts were written during long stretches of being able to work on it for several consecutive days while I was on vacation or something similar. Do I need to do nothing but work on it? No. Would I like to, and would the book be better for it? Yeah.

There's the rub. I wish I had something enlightening to say about it, but I don't. Maybe twenty-years-from-now Gwen can look back on this problem and laugh and laugh and laugh while she thumbs through her fifth published novel.

***Visit the homepage for the Great Blogging Challenge for topics, rules and contributors.***

Day Four: A Movie That Taught Me A Life Lesson
Dead Poets Society. Oh yes. If there's any way in the world that any of you have missed it, it's the story of a bunch of overprivileged white boys in the stuffy 1950s who go to a private school. Robin Williams is their English teacher and he inspires them out of their dull daily drudgery and makes them love literature and rebel against the constricted society in which they live. To demonstrate their rebellion, they get to dance around in the woods with bongos, quit the yearbook, build forbidden radios, star in plays, kill themselves in heartwrenching ways involving hats made of sticks, read poetry to pretty blond cheerleaders and stand atop desks to sound their barbaric yawps over the rooftops of the world.

The now-cliched "inspirational" parts of this movie really did inspire me deeply. When Professor Keating stands in a hallway in front of all the pictures of past students and tells Our Young Heroes about how they're all worm food, and has the kid read, "that same flower that smiles today/ tomorrow will be dying," and hisses "Carpe diem, boys, seize the day. Make your lives extraordinary" in their ears, it really, really did it for me.

And although the specific situation of the movie has lost some resonance over the years, the general message still works. Back then it confirmed something I had suspected about literature and now it reminds me of it when I forget: that books and words are a gateway to something larger than yourself, and that they can connect and inspire people in ways that few other things can. Also that Robert Sean Leonard looks wonderful without a shirt on.

Day Three: Games
OK, I pretty much blew this one -- I was going to be all creative and write my own Mad Lib, but I didn't have time yesterday and so I waited, and now I don't have time today. Also I just burned my fingers on a really hot popcorn kernel and it hurts to type. Shut up. Anyway, some genius put Mad Libs online! Go here. I'm sorry. To anticipate the next topic, in the immortal words of John Bender from the Breakfast Club: "Screws fall out all the time. The world is an imperfect place."

***Visit the homepage for the Great Blogging Challenge for topics, rules and contributors.***

Day Two: Earliest Memories

There are a couple. The one that I think is the very very earliest is from nursery school, and it's really just a picture of an object more than anything else. Is it weird that my first memory is mostly of an object that has no consequence in my life? Hm. Anyway. It was a green plastic inchworm with wheels that you could ride. It had a brown saddle on the middle part, the top of its inching body. Everyone coveted the inchworm, and I can see it absolutely perfectly, frozen in my mind. I don't remember riding it, or even the feeling of wanting to ride it -- just the feeling of looking at it, on the cement patio in the back of the church, in front of two glass sliding doors. Can see it like it's in front of me now.

My first real memory was when I was a little older than that, I think, probably about 4. I was in a shoe store -- Irving Shoes in Prk. City Mall, to be specific -- with my mom, and she was trying on shoes, and I got bored and decided to go to the toy store next door. So I did. By myself. I went to the back where the books were (some things never change, I guess) and sat down on the blue carpeted floor and started reading. And my mom found me eventually, but not before she called security and all that good stuff. But that's not part of my memory, because I wasn't there -- I just remember going in and then getting spanked afterward, which I think only happened two times total in my entire childhood and, in retrospect, was entirely justified. I remember looking at the yellow case of Smurfs on the checkout counter while I was getting dragged out of the store, and not really understanding what I had done wrong. Presumably I understood post-spanking.

And then there's another random one, which I really can't place age-wise, but it involved sitting in the black fuzzy recliner with my dad and Lambie, who was really one of a series of identical stuffed lambs that I loved to their early deaths. I would freak out when Lambie would get lost or forgotten, and I wouldn't stop until he was found or retrieved. He was awesome. No one messed with Lambie.

Day One: My Fictitious Weekend
This weekend, the Magic Money Fairy came to my house and threw 17 giant bags of money in the window.

This weekend, at age 90, I gave birth to a son. I was kind of jealous of my husband Abraham's concubine, who also gave birth to a son, so I had her and the baby banished, thus beginning 3,000 years of strife between two major world religions. Actually, thus creating the separate religions in the first place, which, when you get down to it, are the real problem.

This weekend, I grew a second head to act as a back-up hard drive for my brain, which is already coming in very handy, because I managed to remember how to get somewhere difficult this morning.

This weekend, I decided that Arnold would actually make an excellent president governor.

This weekend, I learned to leap tall buildings in a single bound. My cape is coming in the mail tomorrow.

This weekend, I finished "Seabiscuit." (Ha. That one is even more fictitious than the others.)

Pre-GBC: Anticipation
From "Poetics," by A.R. Ammons

I look for the way
things will turn
out spiraling from a center,
the shape
things will take to come forth in

so that the birch tree white
touched black at branches
will stand out
wind-glittering
totally its apparent self

I think it's a mixed blessing, anticipation. Sometimes it's better than the thing that's being anticipated; other times, it's more like cold dread. I read a statistic a long time ago about how people spend 93 percent of their lives waiting, and I always wondered how that was measured, because, really, you spend 100 percent of your life waiting for SOMETHING. Currently anticipating: the phone ringing, 2 p.m., the good news and the bad news, Rosh Hashanah food with my family, someone getting here someday, my 26th year, the leaves changing and the air getting cold.

get set
Actually, get set here: GBC homepage. (My sincere apologies about the very basic, very unlovely HTML, but I was in a hurry.) I will leave this link at the top of my page so that you can get to the topics every day, even when I begin writing about them. Which will happen tomorrow.

on your mark
Get your warmup suit (warmup typing mittens) on, 'cause it's time for the Great Blogging Challenge.

Here are the rules:

1. You do not talk about-- OK, that's completely played out.
2. Go ahead and talk about the GBC. Tell all your friends. Talk about it all day long.
3. A list of all GBC participants will be posted on this site for your click-through convenience. If for some reason you are participating but do not want your name included, please let me know.
4. All the topics will be posted now to facilitate advance planning, but try to do each topic during the 24 hours of the day assigned.
5. Or don't, whatever.
6. But let's not start until Monday.
7. But, in the spirit of contradicting myself as much as possible, there is a pre-GBC topic to be undertaken from now until midnight Sunday just to get us warmed up.

Here are the topics:

Pre-GBC (Wednesday-Sunday): Anticipation. They say hindsight is 20/20, but what about foresight?

Monday: My Fictitious Weekend. What could have happened to you this weekend, but didn't?

Tuesday: Earliest memories. Pretty self-explanatory. Visit Lauren's Sept. 12 entry for inspiration.

Wednesday: Games. Make up a quiz (per Angie), write an original Mad Libs thing that people can fill out, just generally ruminate upon the idea of games and the many forms they take. Interactivity preferred.

Thursday: Movie(s) that Taught You a Life Lesson. Must include a short description of said movie(s) in case people haven't seen it/them. This is mostly for Alissa's benefit, because somehow she still hasn't seen "Sixteen Candles," and honestly I can't fathom how she's made it this far.

Friday: Something Worth Publishing. Loosely suggested by Kelly, we will finish the week with a free-form entry. Write something of worth -- however you choose to define that -- that you'd want to see on your webpage in 20 years. Could be letter to your older self, poetic ode to shoelaces, personal manifesto, larger commentary on the world, favorite recipe for squash soup, whatever.

And that's all, folks. List of contributors will be posted posthaste.

hurried-cane
OK, that title doesn't even make sense. Whatever. Sometimes I'm not up for clever.

So the hurricane sort of sucked. I wish someone would have canceled it. Our power went off for about 12 hours, just long enough for it to be decently amusing to be in the dark -- we played backgammon by candlelight and debated the merits of opening the freezer for long enough to eat all the ice cream, and then the power came back on with a whoooooosh in the middle of the night. I woke up when everything whirred back to life around 4:30 a.m. and couldn't get back to sleep because the eerie green glow of the sky and the branches slapping against the side of the house. The office didn't have full power Friday, so I went to a friend's house to use his DSL and worked like a maniac, and then the weekend just kind of slipped away from me in a blur of shopping and gymming and I don't even know what else. Overall, the hurricane was just disruptive enough to inconvenience a lot of people, and not disruptive enough to be fun for anyone who doesn't work for the federal government. I give it a D. D minus, even. It sucked.

In other news, who's up for a blogging challenge? Too bad blink tags don't work any more. That would have been a good candidate. But anyway, blogging challenge, hm? Blogging challenge? What if we all blogged something every single day for a week, and enlightened each other with our wisdom? I'm tired of how I never write anything interesting, or even not interesting, any more. We need to liven these here pages UP. We could even have themes or something. Yeah, themes. What if we thought of a theme every day and then we all, uh, wrote something about it? Is that too much work? Any other ideas? Who's with me?

last night I had the strangest
I dreamt I was starting another semester abroad in Israel, and I was in an apartment that looked nothing like the one I actually lived in but I knew was the same. There were a lot of hallways and some kind of courtyard, and my old roommate Kim was running toward me through one of the halls. I can't remember much more except that I was so excited to be there -- unlike the first time, when at the beginning I was too freaked out to be excited about much of anything.

I know this happens to many of us every fall, but I have that old give-me-something-new feeling. I want to go to art school. I want to move to England. I want to disappear somewhere so I can finish the book.

I look at people (one person in particular) who have sort of forsaken "regular life" to embrace unscheduled possibility, who have taken really big scary leaps to start doing something they love stop doing something they didn't love and welcome fluidity and uncertainty into their lives. I don't know how to do that, mainly because I don't know if I would really be happier if I decided to quit everything. Too much of what I do love is wrapped into my average day. I am happy to get out of bed in the morning. I like my life.

<Sex in the City voiceover>But, in the fall, you can't help but wonder: What if different would be better?</voiceover>

brown eyes blue
It's like the sky suddenly remembered what color it's supposed to be. Oh yeah, blue. I'm blue. I'm not gray or tan, or weirdly yellow. Rain, although preferable to previous summers' alarming droughts, does not have to come out of me ALL the time. Your pollution has done your best to make me a vile, choking, muddy smudge -- but I will prevail. I will not be vanquished. I am blue! And beautiful.

Know what else is cool about the sky? Mars. Mars is really cool. 600,000 years -- we're smack in between the Neanderthals and the spacepeople of 2287, yo.

what seems to be the trouble
is that I have consumed a huge cup of coffee that was really about 4 cups of coffee and then chased it with a 20 oz. Diet Coke, and honestly I am already sort of unusually tense these days, and I really might just have to go home early from work because I can't form a coherent thought, but I did finally update the links on the side and the books page, because apparently the kind of stimulus I need to do both those things can only be found in caffeinated form.

next up: Weasley Brothers for President
Think J. K. Rowling deserves a Nobel Prize? So does he, and I am actually beginning to think this is a damn good idea. I scoffed when someone told me about this a couple days ago, but the more I look at this guy's site and his reasons why, the more I like his idea. A lot. Enough that I might write a column about it, but definitely enough that I'm going to send a letter to Sweden.

Because when you really think about it, there are some pretty diverse reasons that are listed for past winners. There is no reason why that relatively broad range couldn't include something like, say, "for her vivid, imaginative storytelling and her unmatched contributions to the literary lives of millions of readers worldwide." As much as I love the books, I don't think that Rowling will win any prizes based on the sheer skill of her writing. But most of the others aren't honored for the sheer skill of their writing either, and Rowling has contributed a LOT more to literature this year than anyone else that comes to mind -- she's probably contributed more than anyone in the last 10 or 20 years. I definitely think her accomplishments rank on the level of, say, 1956's Nobel winner, Halldor Kiljan Laxness, "for his vivid epic power which has renewed the great narrative art of Iceland."

Also, I love this kind of grassroots internet stuff. I think it's the only kind of activism I believe in these days, and it's fun to see its potential power when people start paying attention. Let's do it. No slight to Halldor intended, seriously, but I think Jo should stand a chance.

as Fair and Balanced as your butt
I like this way to combat the idiocy that knows no end. I read somewhere else -- somewhere that I am sure is Fair and Balanced -- that Al Franken's book went from 500 to 4 in its Amazon sales ranking after this whole thing started. I don't know much about "Lies and the Lying Liars who Tell Them" except that I like the title, but good for him.

I want to write some huge post to end all posts about this weekend, but I don't even know where to begin. It was incredible. I don't think I've ever had so much fun in my life. Maybe I'll do something unprecedented and post some photos of it when they're done -- Fair and Balanced photos that Rupert Murdoch would approve of, to be sure.

fortuitous futures
Several times in the last few days, I have gotten "you will be invited to a karaoke party," and -- true to the pixels' eerie predictions -- I have it on good authority that karaoke might well be in our futures Saturday night.

Leaving for a few days for the joining in holy matrimony of H and K (doesn't is seem like the letters "I" and "J" should be involved in that?). I'm awfully excited, to tell the truth. This is some kind o' wonderful. :)

destiny's child
The all-knowing Scotto just posted something that starts with the Dar line, "sometimes life sends us blessings sent in ridiculous packaging," and it's been playing around in my head all day. Last night's "Sex and the City" episode was about destiny, too, about meant-to-be relationships, and if things happen for a reason, and if life teaches lessons in any kind of meaningful pattern.

I have long held a negative position on this stuff. I don't think things happen for a reason. I think that humans invented these explanations because we can't abide the cold thought that our lives really are ruled by chance: the near-miss, the lucky guess, the coincidence, the accident. I don't really think that life is sending us blessings at all, ridiculous packaging or not... I think things happen or they don't, and that's that.

But.

I'm also really superstitious. REALLY superstitious. Not in a black cat, broken mirror kind of way -- although if I was really being honest with myself I probably believe in that stuff, too -- but in a terrified-of-jinxing-myself way that doesn't jive with this whole no-such-thing-as-destiny outlook. Somehow I've taken the most negative elements from both sides and formed them into one. I'm starting to wonder if there can't be some middle ground.

praise the lord and pass the toothpaste
Thank you, thank you, THANK you to the wonderful, wonderful, WONDERful women who bought me a Sonicare, the best toothbrush in the whole entire universe. Today, for the first time since I've graduated from college, I have had a dentist appointment that involved x-rays and did NOT involve me having cavities. I am cavity-free! Cavity-free, I say!

Seriously, this feels like a major, major accomplishment. The most major accomplishment since... um, I can't really think of anything. Since ever, apparently. Woo, I say! Woo!

as the hills
Last night, one of my roommates and I met her visiting younger sister at this bar. It was beautiful outside (is it really July? in DC?) so we wanted to go somewhere with outdoor seating; this place has a sort of rooftop patio that looks out over the north side of Dupont Circle. It was about 10:30 and I'd had a relatively long day, and we got drinks and bruschetta and waited for her sister. And when her sister got there, with her three friends? They were so incredibly young. So utterly, profoundly young. They were all, "ohmygod what did you get to DRINK?!" and "ohmygod it's so great to MEET you!" and "ohmygod this place is so GREAT!" with a lot of high-pitched laughter and fluttery hands. It was very sweet and genuine -- there's something so earnest about their excitement over life in general that it startled me out of my usual thought-bog. Made me feel ancient in a not-entirely-bad way. It was sort of nice and perspective-y, but we are old, kids. Old, old, old.

A certain vacation stealer and I are going down to put a bunch of H.'s stuff in a van and move it a couple miles across town this weekend. Hopefully our old-people backs and whatever will hold out. :)

four tidbits of linky goodness

1. Ten years from now, everyone will be able to repeat "I did not have sexual relations with that woman," but no one will remember this. There's evasive lying about a tawdry affair, and then there's straight-up lying about foreign policy matters that affect the course of history, not to mention the lives of millions of people. One gets you impeached; the other, at worst, gets you ignored. Which is which? Disgusting.

2. At least some people are as bitter as I am: 525 reasons to dump Bush.

3. "Is it fair to demand of novels that they be articulate and reasonable, that they attempt in some way to make the world a better place?" Personally, I think the answer is no, but it's a good question.

4. A beautiful summer poem.

bye-bye, boom-say
Sadly, my days at the old lap-of-luxury gym -- and therefore at the boom-say class -- are numbered. It's too far away from my house and too expensive; I can get a much cheaper membership at the less tricked-out one that's literally across the street. (I'm sure the new gym will be fodder for enjoyable stories at some point, though, because it's populated almost entirely by unbelievably attractive gay men who appear to spend at least four or five hours a day in the gym making themselves even more scarily ripped.)

Yesterday's boom-say class, though, entered uncharted territory: There was a man in the class, a very short Latino man who tried to sneak into the back about 3/4 of the way through. He had on running clothes and big white sneakers, and of course everyone noticed immediately.

Woman in the back of the room named Heather: Kukuwa! A man! There is a man back here!
Other women near him: A man! Woooooooo!
Kukuwa demands that we give the man a hand. Everyone claps. She starts the music for the next song and abruptly turns it off.
Kukuwa: This will not do. Come up here. Up here next to me and the mirrors.
The man goes up next to her. Everyone "woooo"s again. It turns out the man's name is... wait for it... Alfredo. Oh yes, Alfredo.
Kukuwa, starting up the music again: Class, did you know I am in love with Alfredo? I am in love with him. Our very first man. I am so proud.
Alfredo says something unintelligible, because he does not have a microphone.
Kukuwa: Come, Alfredo, you and I will dance! This is Africa, and in Africa we dance!

And Alfredo ROCKED OUT. It was fantastic. A banner day in Africa.

flame and moth got a sweetheart deal
Am back at last, and New Hampshire already seems like a distant memory. This is not good. I need some strong coffee with vanilla soymilk and a side of hey-get-your-act-together, stat.

'bring them on!'
Because there's nothing that a terrorist loves as much as being taunted, right? But in the indubitable spirit of bringing it on, I'm going on a 10-day jaunt to sunny, wonderful New Hampshire, where there is little web access and poor cell phone reception, hallelujah. So this will be my last post for a bit. Will miss all of you dearly. Be good.

what's your glitch, man?
Ah, Reality Bites. What a fine cinematic accomplishment. What's YOUR glitch?

Anyway, there was indeed some kind of weird publishing glitch between Blogger and our hosting company and the universe at large, but everything's fixed now. I highly, highly recommend Liquidpages. Its tech support people are fabulously responsive, and even though they didn't solve this problem (which wasn't their problem anyway), they were really cool and helpful about it.

So here's why I won't be voting for John Edwards in next year's primary:

A couple weeks from now, on the 4th of July, folks all over this country will line our streets to thank God and our forefathers for this remarkable dream called America. ... For more than 200 years, our country has been propelled by this single, powerful idea: that all Americans should have the opportunity to rise as far as their hard work and God-given potential can take them.

That's from a commencement speech he gave recently. What's up with all the blatantly sexist and religious stuff, John? Aren't you supposed to be a Democrat? It's a shame, because I like the rest of the speech. But I can't deal with that kind of unconscious "thank God and our forefathers" stuff, even in PR fluff. Plus, his name is just awfully close to JonaTHAN Edwards, and that freaks me out in a "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" kind of way.

the reason this here inter-net was invented
May I present The Knowledge for Thirst, my new favorite place for all things beverage. I really do think sites like these -- small sites about one thing, based on opinion and funny discourse and general goodwill -- are what the web does best. And, really, DIDN'T we just blow up Iraq to make the world safe for make-your-own smoothie shops?

it's a cold day...
...on the blog when I'm quoting Ani, but here you have it. Ms. Not-Angry-Anymore is talking about her -- not my -- parents:

She taught me how to wage a cold war with quiet charm
but I just want to walk through my life unarmed,
to accept and just get by like my father learned to do
without all the accepting and getting by that got my father through.

Once in a while I find myself wincing my way through an Ani album, just thinking she's so god-awful and annoying and why am I even listening to this, and then she'll suddenly come out with one little thought that totally does it for me. Like that one.

three snippets of boom-say action
1. Kukuwa: Good morning, America! But here at Tenley, the apartheid, it has not ended! Outside, America; in here, only Africans allowed!
As an aside to the Latina woman in the front row: Not you, honey, you can stay.

2. (Standing next to me in the back is an older woman, about 60-65, with aqua knit pants and gigantic sunglasses -- indoors, of course -- and one of those deep West Coast skin-cancer tans that just looks wrong, wrong, wrong. She will heretofore be known as "Malibu Bubbie.")
Kukuwa comes to dance next to Malibu Bubbie for one of the back-facing parts. She yells, "Come on, boom-say! Use the boom-say!" and Malibu Bubbie literally stops in her tracks and stares at her like she's just yelled something unimaginably offensive. Malibu Bubbie *sits down on the floor*. Kukuwa is unfazed, and everyone just dances on.

3. (A woman who's never been to the class before is standing in the front, next to Faux-Ellen.)
Kukuwa: Come on, what is the problem? This dance needs-- wait, no, wait.
Kukuwa turns the music off and gets very still, so that the entire class comes to a complete halt.
Kukuwa, looking very crestfallen and sad: What is your name?
Amy: Amy. I've never been here before.
Kukuwa: Yes, I can see that.
Amy, not sure how to take that statement: Um, I'm sorry?
Kukuwa: No, it is OK, but class, we have a situation here. Amy is not using her pelvic. Use the pelvic. Pelvic! Pelvic! Do it with me, pelvic! pelvic!
Amy and Kukuwa use their pelvics in sync.
Kukuwa, turning the music back on: OK, now we can all dance with Amy and her pelvic. Pelvic! Pelvic!

word wealth
I'm now all consuming -- note the new little javascript thingie on the side. It links up to my books page and gives an excellent recommendations list. V. cool.

Now, if I could only understand why I keep getting the "some think you handsome; others do not" fortune...

woman vs. womb
Outrageous, and not in a Bill-and-Ted sort of way.

not all that bogus, dude
Like every other person in the whole entire world, I saw the second Matrix movie this weekend. I liked it. I like it now -- when I'm discussing it with various people and reading articles about it -- even more than I actually did when I was watching it. Proof positive that I am a gigantic dork: I couldn't stop thinking about philosophy, specifically Locke, Kant, Descartes, Hume and Foucault, during the entire thing. One character uses the word "causality" as though that's a normal thing to do.

It would have been a better movie without all the BORING FIGHTING, and without Keanu generally being the worst actor in the entire universe, eternally waiting to "excellent!" himself out of his horrendously flat affectation. But even though the movie didn't take philosophical ideas to new heights or anything, it's certainly made me think more about the way it all hooks together. Sometimes being unsubtle with that stuff is OK, and an action movie with a million different allegorical levels is allowed to be unsubtle. I wish it would have gone a step further, that the theological and philosophical (others would probably add scientific, technological, etc.) aspects could have really been explored rather than just throwing them out haphazardly, like, "oh wait, he's the Chosen one? there's a character named Persephone? and one named Locke? hey, empiricism, what's that all about, again? did I ever finish 'Critique of Pure Reason'? did he just rip a lamppost out of the ground?" but I'll take it.

from "The Hours," by Michael Cunningham
Here is the ordinary world, a movie being shot, a Puerto Rican boy cranking open the awning of a restaurant with a silver pole. Here is the world, and you live in it, and are grateful. You try to be grateful.

in truth...
A nice first-person piece on the whole J*yson Blair ballyhoo. I think objectively that Sarah Hepola is an excellent essayist; emotionally, I feel very connected to her, for whatever reason. (On that personal level, I'm worried that he was liberally buying her drinks after she had already professed to having a problem with alcohol, and then trying to hit on her. Not only didn't she acknowledge how sleazy that was in the essay, she doesn't seem to have necessarily realized it at all -- she still speaks of him in such a wistful tone. I think it makes him look like a total dickhead. But whatever.)

On a professional level, though, there's a lot to be said about the Blair stuff. It's bad for journalists, especially young journalists, especially young minority journalists. It's bad all around. I know some people who worked with him on their school paper, and they all seem to say that he was very charismatic and driven, and also very shady, and none of them are very surprised. The scope of it blows my mind -- the massive spread in the Times attests to the sheer number of his transgressions, which, in my mind is really the biggest problem. How could there not be more checks and balances at one of the nation's best papers? It's easy to get wrapped up in the story of this one person, this one scandal, but it's the institutional failure that's more interesting to me. Just one tiny apsect: The post-Deep Throat culture of unnamed sources is so pervasive that a 27-year-old reporter can make up whole armies of masked internal sources without anyone questioning how he had access to them. Gah.

There's already so little trust in the media, and now there's even less. When you look at the state of the nation's media outlets in general, it's not hard to figure out why, but individual reporters should be exempt from that in some respects. There are so many -- SO many -- truly good journalists out there working unbelievably hard to make the world a decent place, to hold its leaders accountable, to get information to the public, to document people's lives. I work with a lot of them. And I see the frustration, and every time some big scandal happens it just adds to the burden of an already pretty thankless job. So disheartening.

happiness is a warm tub
As Lissa noted yesterday, the power of the Lanky hot tub is a mighty one. There isn't much better in this world than H. and her sister M. even without said tub, but their parents' back porch on a moonlit night was pretty darn good. Tub tub tub is fun to say, period. Said tub, said tub.

And I will stop talking about this soon, but the library saga continues, and just keeps getting more amazing. Now there are links to your local public libraries' wishlists. Although DC doesn't have a list up, and I don't believe that our public libraries are so well-endowed here that we don't need any books... our libraries probably can't afford computers from which to post a list. But anyway. This made me laugh out loud:

I said to Mary Ann that working at Amazon and giving a gift certificate for Christmas is like working at Subway and bringing home lettuce for your birthday.

Ha! Shout-out to Ang and her once-pickled self. It's so nice to go over there and read about all the wonderful book-loving people running around loose in the world. OK, I promise I'm done now.*
*Depending on what she posts tomorrow.

grassroots
From the Oakland Public Library, via Pamie:

To all of you unknown to us, with your cybernames and love of books...you have all renewed our sagging faith in humanity. There you are, wherever you are, responding to our need for books, in an unbelievably generous way! People who haven't smiled in months (especially our librarian who opens the Amazon.com mailers and our children's librarians with their precious Captain Underpants!) are giddy thanks to you.

The rest of the letter is here. I still think it's sad they need to resort to this, but a couple giddy librarians in California is pretty good for a Wednesday morning.

pomp and circus pants
Who drove home with someone's cell phone in her bag because she was busy programming "DAH, dah dah dah DAH DAH, daaaah dah dah dah DAH" into the editable ring tone melody feature? I love that song. It makes my heart fill with cheezy pride for the hard work of all the people under the tent, and their families and their mortarboards and their diplomas. Yay! Loved the lovely gradutation weekend. Also, I am proud of Bang's mother for giving birth to her. Love the lovely Angie G-Bangie, too.

After driving back (but sans extra cell phone) on Sunday night, I was lured out by the promise of mini golf for a friend's birthday. We all know how dearly I adore the mini golf. But before I proved my clear superiority on the Astroturf, we went to Generous George's in Alexandria, which was a somewhat astounding pizza place. Think Pappy's (hi Lancastrians), Toys R Us, an abandoned amusement park and the inside of Jackson Pollack's brain all rolled into one. Twenty-foot-tall nutcracker soldiers guard the bubble-gum-pink front door, if that gives you some indication. The food was kind of gross, but what ambiance -- I'll never look at giant plastic giraffes the same way again.

the state of the world today
is that because of funding cuts, public libraries in Oakland have to rely on random private citizens to buy them books. Books. Like, those paper things with the covers. The most basic -- although not the only -- reason for the existence of libraries.

I'm too tired to get as worked up about this as I should be, but pamie.com did it justice, and she has links to the wishlists. This is the one I got. It's about little kids and snakes in Pakistan and overcoming your fear of chickens or something. I don't know, it looked good. If you do it, you can even use the support Chicklit Amazon link to a double-good deed, and then we will all generate some double-good karma for sure.

you make-a me crazy
A little while ago, I came across the amazing site of this woman, an art student, who was documenting all her purchases and turning the receipts into this tremendous installation. It was incredibly cool, and I've completely forgotten its name, and I can't seem to get the right combination of words into Google to find it again. And this time last month I was apparently too busy musing depressively about the war to write it down. The site's name was "conspicuous consumption" or something like that. Did I send the link to anyone? Does it sound familiar?

Speaking of musing, apparently it's sorta kinda over -- but not until tomorrow night, when Georgie gets to have a sleepover on an aircraft carrier. Today, Uncle Don gets to play house in Saddam's palace, which I find a tad eerie.

Aargh. What was it. Conspicuous consumer? Inconspicuous consumption? Help?

in motion
Today's e-mail from Knopf's National Poetry Month's daily updates was a new translation of Sappho; the really cool book, which I gave my cousin for Chanukah, has the Greek on the left side and the English on the right. One of the fragments from today's e-mail:

I would not think to touch the sky with two arms

Mm. I like that. I've been concentrating on the "... but take it" part of the "take it easy" equation recently, and it is healthy and boundary-challenging and good for me, but it's also scary and difficult and leaves me feeling tense, needy, self-conscious, melodramatic, less like myself than usual. It leaves me racing. I would not think to touch the sky with two arms.

neither flaxen nor waxen
So I got about a foot of my hair cut off a few days ago. I look different; however, I didn't think it was as different as it apparently is. Of course people I see every day are going to be able to tell, but I've been truly shocked when strangers notice. The two latest commentators are the woman who works the self-checkout line at the Freshfields near my office and another woman I see when I go walking in the park near my house in the mornings. The first conversations I've ever had with these people have now been about my hair -- if I like it, how it felt, why I did it, etc. And part of the reason I find it so bizarre that they said something about it is that even though I always notice things like that, I didn't think other strangers did.

Probably pretentiously, I guess I thought the reason I pay attention to random people's outward details is because I write. Books, I think, put more stock in physical changes than we can in real life... in fiction, if a character is wearing a bright new white pair of running shoes (as the park woman was a few weeks ago) and it's important enough to be mentioned, it has to signify something -- change of some kind, or renewed innocence, or I don't know, something less cheezy than all the examples I can think of right now. In real life, it just means that her old shoes were dirty or worn out, or she got shin splints, or her dog chewed up her other pair. Symbolism doesn't have as much of a place outside of novels.

Anyway. I'm going nowhere with this, I just thought it was cool that I get to talk to these two random people now. Um, yeah. How's that for narrative structure?

something in the way he moves me
I'm seriously (not really) considering ditching work today to go see A Mighty Wind. I love love love love love "Waiting for Guffman" and love love love "Best in Show." (The number of times I wrote "love" is proportional to how much I love them.) I knew that the movies had lot of off-the-cuff dialogue, but I never realized they were entirely improvised. And I love Parker Posey and Christopher Guest. And I think the reason Eugene Levy is funny is because of his fabulous eyebrows.

kindly look to your left
oh wise oracle, what is my fortune today?

If you're Carl and you know it, clap your hands.
If you're Carl and you know it, clap your hands.
If you're Carl and you know it, and you're really awesome because you sent us chocolate at the most perfect time ever, and it was really really good chocolate and it totally made our day and it's so awesome to know that there are cool generous people in the world like Carl...
If you're Carl and you know it, clap your hands.

Yay for Carl!

(Look, it's about to be a whole entry not related to the war, terrorism, or political happenings of any kind! More exclamation points required!)

My gym has an Afro-Carribbean dance class Thursday mornings. I don't always make it -- because, frankly, sometimes I don't feel up to the stomping and the flailing and the what have you -- but today was one of the funniest classes I have ever attended. The teacher, whose name I unfortunately do not know, is this tiny spitfire woman with more energy than 40 average people combined and very melodious, accented English. (This is important later in the story.) I don't know where in Africa she's from, but I would guess it's somewhere French-speaking. "Anna" sounds like "AH-nah," that sort of thing. Anyway.

An important part of Afro-Caribbean dance is undoubtedly the boom-say. Due to the aformention accent, I don't know if this particular euphamism is actually "boom-sIE" or, in fact, if it's a euphamism at all or the actual word in the teacher's native language. The accent is on the first sylable -- BOOM-say. Also, the plural of boom-say is still boom-say: one boom-say, two boom-say, red boom-say, blue boom-say.

So the teacher rushes in late, straps on the microphone headset she needs to be heard over the positively deafening, boom-say-shaking music, and leads the class through an extremely strenuous warm-up. Afterward, when everyone is gasping for water and wondering how we're going to make it through 55 more minutes of post-warm-up actual class, she cries out, "Good morning, America! Good morning, boom-say! Wake up, boom-say!"

Add this to the fact that there is a woman in the front row whose face looks exactly like Ellen DeGeneres laughing her boom-say off. Other phrases that evoked laughter from faux-Ellen were, I believe, "More boom-say wiggle! More boom-say shake! More boom-say wiggle, more boom-say shake!", "come on, boom-say out, out," and "do not be afraid of the boom-say." What a way to start the day: loud, proud, and unafraid of the boom-say.

H. and I watched snakes eat mice this weekend! (That even calls for an exclamation point, a seldom-used form of punctuation here at Take It Easy.) It was so Discovery Channel. Very amazing and primitive. Their jaws really do unhinge. I thought it would bother me a lot more than it actually did, honestly -- I'm so squeamish about raw meat that you'd think watching something strangle and consume a mouse would be very disturbing, but it actually seemed natural and right somehow. We even held the snakes soon afterward, and you could feel the big lump of dead mouse in their bodies. Squicky but incredible.

In news entirely unrelated to snakes and mice and everything nice, how well do you know the Middle East? I know it 8 out of 10.

If I hear anyone else ask "why aren't the Iraqi people welcoming U.S. troops as liberators?" -- or, more broadly, last September's "why do they hate us?" -- I might point them toward the unbelievable disparity between the $75 billion we're spending on destroying their country and the $1.7 (that's one point seven, not one-seven like seventeen) billion we're planning to spend rebuilding it. Of that $1.7 billion, there's only "$543 million for refugees and humanitarian needs, and up to $200 million to replenish emergency food stocks." Priorities, anyone?

Anyway, the world continues to turn. There are weekend visitors and rainy lunchtime drives and big self-projects in the works, there are new jobs for old friends, writing being written, plans being made. Things change and stay the same at their usual pace. Dar's line "when you live in the world, well, it gets into who you thought you'd be" is stuck on permanent repeat in my head, and A Life Uncommon is usually awesome, but never moreso than today.

Last time I was what, 13? and Miss Hahn had us stand around the junior high auditorium holding long yellow ribbons to sing "From a Distance" (oof), and I remember those ubiquitous green-black pictures of the bombs at night. Funny how little access we have to the people we used to be -- I can't imagine what that girl felt then. Now, all I feel is a million shades of bad.

So the government has a new website that employs overly simplistic pictures to help us deal with terrorism or something, which logically means that other people need websites that make fun of the government's website that employs overly simplistic pictures to help us deal with terrorism or something:

If you spot a terrorist arrow, pin it against the wall with your shoulder

Bwah! They're all great. All the sick, hopeless cynicism this stuff inspires is -- although not always fun exactly -- usually conducive to humor. I can think of some other interpretations of that lovely illustration...

New Get Your War On stuff is up and stingingly funny as ever. Can we get rid of the president we have and elect the Get Your War On guy instead? 'Cause I think he'd do an outstanding job.

I've been thinking about that feeling you have after coming back from a long trip, when you've traveled thousands of miles and you're dirty and exhausted and exhilerated, and you open your front door back on your life, and you take the hottest shower you can stand and crawl into your bed and everything you've returned to feels old and new and perfect. I haven't had that in ages. My head feels more like that woman in "The Yellow Wallpaper" who's wearing a track around the walls of her room.

I wrote another article for Gig Matrix about Joe Millionaire. Ugh. I hate Joe Millionaire. I hate myself and Joe Millionaire. I'm interested to hear if anyone has thoughts about it, though.

"I have really never considered myself a TV star. I always thought I was a neighbor who just came in for a visit."

Sad day. Thanks for the visit, Mr. Rogers.

For anyone playing along with the really cool NationStates thing Escoto found, I've had to evacuate my original country. Something was wrong and I wasn't getting updated issues. The new country -- non-creatively named Gwenalia2 -- can be found here. Beware the uranium mines, but be sure to hug the fluffy poodles frolicking freely in the lush forests.

For anyone not playing along with the really cool NationStates thing, you should start. It's pretty amazing. God bless the world wide web, and god bless Mr. Seattle.

Interesting column by Amos Oz (a wonderful Israeli author whose name is pronounced like Ohs, not like the Wizard of) in The New York Times today:

The protesters have it wrong: this war campaign does not emanate from oil lust or from colonialist appetite. It emanates primarily from a simplistic rectitude that aspires to uproot evil by force.

I recently saw a breakdown of just where the US gets its foreign oil, and was surprised. I can't locate the numbers right now, but Canada was our leading importer, then a collection of Middle Eastern countries (including Iraq and Saudi Arabia), then a few loose odds and ends in South America. I still think oil is a huge issue in this soon-to-be war -- and that "no blood for oil" has some serious resonance -- but I think Amos Oz does have a point about the philosophical underpinnings of the administration. All the religious rhetoric, all the casting about for metaphor, certainly points in that direction.

And I'm not so dovish that I believe evil never has to be uprooted by force (thinking Nazis here), but I don't know that it's the answer to enemy that we're supposed think is a lone dictator rather than entrenched country-wide infrastructure. I also don't think it's an answer to a whole culture of people who are angry enough with this country to try to kill its citizens. If elusiveness is the order of the day, even if you're sure what the evil is, it seems to me that uprooting it becomes a little tricky. But what do I know.

How to Spend a Snowy Weekend by Way of Food, by Gwen

Saturday afternoon: Welcome three friends from New York to your house. Go to cute local bakery and pick up eight cupcakes of various flavors.

Saturday night: Cook vegetarian chili, homemade cornbread, and a big salad. Watch it start to snow.

Later Saturday night: Walk home from a really really bad movie, exclaiming, "hey! it's really starting to snow." Demand tea and cookies.

First thing Sunday morning: Wake up. Exclaim: "wow, it's still snowing! yeah." Eat cupcakes, breakfast of champions.

Sunday afternoon: Now in veritable blizzard; walk to Safeway to buy more food. Comment on how 17th Street (normally a major DC four-lane road) truly resembles mid-19th century painting, complete with hooded figures in black huddled against the wind and absolutely no cars. Slide down middle of street. Have inordinate amount of fun by way of sliding down middle of street. Rent videos. Drop videos in snow due to excessive intentional sliding down middle of street. Buy a lot of food.

Sunday evening: Cook lasagna, bread, roasted garlic, more salad. Attempt to locate car. Laugh.

Sunday night: Attempt to locate car again. Do not laugh quite as sincerely as before. Try to shovel car out preliminarily using a small plastic trash can. Give up. Return to house for popcorn and hot chocolate with peppermint schnapps. Resume laughing. Play Clue knockoff with friends. Knit. Watch videos. Have more hot chocolate. And more schapps. And a little more, thank you.

Monday morning: Shovel friends' car, for real, with gigantic heavy metal shovel some kindly neighbor left for public consumption due to stupid citified losers like self who do not own one. Be continually amazed at depth of snow. Exclaim repeatedly about depth and impressiveness of snow. Hire two unresponsive 12-year-old boys to help shovel. Then hire them to do other car. Watch, defeated, as gigantic snowplow pushes back gigantic pile of snow onto car once again. Go inside. Eat buttermilk pancakes made from scratch. Forget about stupid car.

Monday afternoon: Say goodbye to friends, who manage to get car safely out of space. Say goodbye to other friend, who makes it safely to Union Station. Eat leftovers. Make plans to catch ride to work Tuesday. Pretend car doesn't exist until next July.

And a good middle, too, because H & K have just won the wedding contest! Woo! I am so excited for "Swirling Hearts" balloon centerpieces, I can hardly express it in words. An excellent middle, yes YES.

Last night, I stayed with Kelly Ann S. in her hotel room. It was lovely and fun and it's so great to see Kelly so genuinely happy and excited. There is something impressive to be said for an organization getting new employees off on a foot so right as this: expensive hotel stays and meeting with high-ups and bonding with the other interns -- it is truly a wonderful sight to behold.

This morning, I woke up to say goodbye and see her off, and lounged around the hotel room for a while. As I was getting ready to get in the shower, watching a segment on the Today Show about the code orange alert, a man's voice came over the PA system in the hotel. Its first words were, "Attention, hotel guests." Of course, my immediate reaction was, "Wow, I didn't know they had PA systems in hotels... that's so weird... wait, stop thinking about that, because a bomb has just gone off in DC. You are in Alexandria right now. Start thinking calmly about what you're going to do." Its second words were, "We will be testing the fire alarm system this morning."

I felt that was a sign that I needed fresh melon, waffles, hashbrowns and coffee, so I treated myself to the continental buffet in the lobby of the hotel and started reading Kelly's copy of The Sweet Potato Queens' Book of Love, something I'd never have picked up myself but was finding immensely enjoyable. And then, to top it off, I heard "Can You Feel the Love Tonight," the official H & K wedding song of the universe, on the restaurant radio station. A good start, yes yes.

Carl, I almost forgot:

1. cabal: the artifices and intrigues of a group of persons secretly united to bring about an overturn or usurpation especially in public affairs; also : a group engaged in such artifices and intrigues
2. junta: a council or committee for political or governmental purposes; especially : a group of persons controlling a government especially after a revolutionary seizure of power

Totally interchangeable, and both of them are fantastic words. Personally, I prefer "junta." I am honored to be a member of the junta. A junta. ANY junta.

Ihadalotofcoffeetoday. I now have comments, too, so say hello if the mood strikes. Be forewarned: Liss and I are on the same YACCS account, so if a user is banned from one of our sites, s/he is banned from both. Behave, all ye who enter here. Whee!

Q: What happens when it looks like your hubcap is falling off, so you take your car to the garage to get it repaired?
A: You spend $400 on new tires.

I know. It doesn't make sense to me either.

I heard on NPR this morning that, for whatever reason, January's approval rating for The Impending War soared to 66% -- up from December's 53% -- and reversed the downward trend of the last few months. Great. Fine. Whatever. I give up (not that it mattered what I thought anyway) and I'll stop talking about it here. For today, at least.

I saw 25th Hour last night. Liked it a lot. I honestly think Spike Lee is pretty brilliant. Sure, he needs an editor and stuff, but his movies are really entertaining and I think it's amazing that he's not afraid to bang the same drum he's been banging since forever. That drum is still relevant, and his perseverance is admirable. Racial tensions still exist, even if we're all sick of talking about them. Plus, I think I could watch Philip Seymour Hoffman and Edward Norton stare at a wall for three hours and be entertained... those two, in that order, might be my favorite living actors . Both of them tend to play the same roles over and over, but I like both of their signature characters enough that I don't care. One of my favorite journal-writing people said that already, but I thought it too, I swear. She augments hers with a funny story about my pal Phil, too, so you should go read hers.

OK, I just erased something here because it would spoil the movie for any of you who might see it. But the ending is so good. Oh, what an ending. Really, really good. I'll stop babbling now, but only if go see it for yourself.

Have you ever wondered what a quintillion pennies would look like? It looks really, really big, and that is really, really cool. (Link stolen from The Morning News.)

Oh, and: In the process of gaining our rightful place we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred.

Just about once a year, I find myself at Polly Esther's. This is never by choice -- efforts to go dancing at a BETTER place are usually shouted down by the 80s contingent, also known as my old roommate L., who was visiting this weekend -- but if you grit your teeth and make a determined effort to embrace the atrocious cheeziness, it usually isn't too painful. But. Standing underneath a 30-foot poster of Wham!, watching a gigantic Rubik's Cube suspended from the ceiling flash its lurid colors in an indistinguishable pattern, standing amidst hundreds of weird Polly Esther's-loving people screaming out the lyrics to "Wild Wild West", holding a drink that contains both vodka and grape Kool-Aid, having Aaaahnold install his bionic eye in the Terminator video above the dance floor -- I cracked. Cultural overload from a period that I only truly remember through television and the playground equipment at my old elementary school and the words "Iran Contra Affair." It wasn't funny any more; it was just profoundly sad. Cosmic dissonance, I salute you.

It was also an interesting contrast to the protest I went to on Saturday. (This essay from the Post, although written in a tone more dismissive than I think is respectful, actually sums up the day nicely.) I had been very, very anti-protest in the last few years, after the infamous incident with the "I mock your value system" guy and the billions of dollars the WTO shrillsters have cost a city that can't afford to fund its schools, but I wanted to show up to this one. My usual pessimism and apathy were defeated by those very WTO protesters, actually -- my rationale was that the more thoughtful, logical, regular people attended, the harder it would be to dismiss the whole protest as bullshit.

And there were a LOT of people there. Sure, a lot of white college kids with hippie trappings (and I'm not saying that their voices don't deserve to be heard too, blah blah), but also a lot of families, a lot of older people, a lot of people with sensible shoes and sensible signs, a lot of veterans and soldiers in uniform. I saw a round, middle-aged woman wearing a little stars-and-stripes elephant pin and carrying a sign that said "Republicans against the war." OK, then. Not that I think this will do a damn bit of good, or that anyone who matters is paying much attention to a few hundred thousand people milling on the mall on a brilliantly cold January morning... but maybe someday, after this inevitable war, there will be a P.S. in a history book that reads, "not every American in this country supported this idea or this administration." Maybe.

I called today, and it's official: We're an org for another year. Long live leafygreen!

In the spirit of spending money and being technologically enabled, I have it bad for iPods. I've wanted one forever -- recently, I've been going to "visit" it online the way that H. "visits" her prospective canine pals on Petfinder. And although it pains me, I'm going to skip two sessions of pottery to save the cash. Sad, I know, but it's the easiest way I can think of to find $300 without involving my mutual fund, which I loathe but don't want to touch. My sole iPod reservation used to be that I couldn't hook it up to my car stereo, but now two different places have come out with little $30 gadgets that let you broadcast a weak FM signal so that your car radio can pick it up. Score, as they say. I feel very self-indulgent, in a not entirely bad way.

"We see again today the severe nature of the things the state of Israel is facing," Prime Minister Ariel Sharon told a group of young Jews visiting Israel for the first time. "All attempts to reach a cease-fire, even today, are failing due to the Palestinian leadership that continues to support, fund and initiate terror."

"The Palestinian Authority has condemned these operations," Ghassan Khatib, Arafat's labor minister, told al-Jazeera in a live interview from Cairo. "Sharon escalated the policy of killing, especially in the past few days during which the dialogue in Cairo aimed at finding a way out of the ongoing cycle of violence became more serious."

Unbelievable. Just unbelievable. It's amazing how things in Israel can continue to get worse and worse and worse and worse -- there's always a new low, always a new way for it to degenerate. But then again, there's always the same old people to blame for whatever new horrible thing has happened.