Gazebo project

Since my blog will never rule the blogosphere if I don't update it daily with blazing wit and self-depracating introspection, let me tell you about my new gazebo project.

My parents have a gazebo in their backyard. Once upon a time, the gazebo was lovely -- it was screened in, bug free, stained and water-sealed, and just an overall great place to sit with a glass of iced tea and watch the sun set. But my family has a way of not taking care of things, especially if said things are outdoors. Our patio is a graveyard of abandoned lawn furniture. The hammock on the hill is rusted, shredded, and rotted. And the gazebo, until yesterday, was home to three years' worth of seasonal debris -- mountains of leaves, caterpillar husks, creepy crawlies with more legs than I have fingers and toes combined, and, of course, wiener-dog shit.

I'd been spending a lot of time in there regardless because I'm addicted to the outdoors because lately my mood is directly correlated to the weather. When it is sunny outside, I am sunny inside; and when it rains I'm a crying-on-the-inside clown. But after gorging myself at the Chinese food buffet the other night, I realized that my need to be outdoors was merging with my need for beauty, which meant that even while outside, I couldn't enjoy myself in a place that reminded me of The Trash Heap.

So I Shanghaied my little sister (who is 20 and about to graduate from college, but I can still say things to her like, "I'll give you five dollars if you'll let me pick your nose," and she'll still say, "Sure!") and we grabbed some rakes and brooms and garbage bags and the hose and we hit the gazebo like motherfucking Delta Force. Thus, after years of oppression, the gazebo has been liberated from winter's tyranny.

That was yesterday. Today we went to the Home Despot and bought crap to re-screen all the screens and to clean all the wood, which is what we'll do tomorrow (and which we would have done today if it hadn't been half-drizzling all afternoon before I had to go to work -- make up your freakin' mind, weather!).

After that, we're going to plant cactus around the gazebo's perimeter, and then we're going to raid this local statuary place for these totally sweet seahorses they've got there.

We also bought an antenna to boost the house's wireless Internet signal so it will once again work in the gazebo, and, if we've got money left over, I'm going to buy an outdoor fridge. I also want to buy a wiener-dog costume so I can run around the backyard barking at all the joggers and cyclists who pass by, but that'll probably have to wait.

But the best part is, once everything is together, I'm going to throw Gazebo Gras 2006, complete with Christmas lights, fireworks, a slip 'n' slide, BBQ, and booze -- and you're all invited, so get psyched!

An argument in favor of nuclear waste

As the sun plays upon my face like cotton-footed children, and the harbor air, freckled with salt, moseys across my street, my thoughts turn to nuclear waste. "Is it really so bad?" my thoughts wonder. On a scale of one to ten, with one being Christmas and ten being Islamic jihad, does nuclear waste deserve to rate any higher than a six? Surely six is pretty bad, but what about nuclear waste's natural adversary, oil? Shouldn't oil rate somewhere near a ten?

What with global warming, military adventurism, Haliburton, and the high price of gas, I'm ready to take my chances with nuclear waste -- nice, clean, nuclear waste. We can produce nuclear power domestically and then convert all our cars to run on electricity and keep all the pollution contained in barrels and filters and rubber sacks instead of spreading it all over the place, and then we can tell the oil companies to go fuck themselves.

Speaking of which, when we do switch to nice clean nuclear power, we can't just let anybody supply it. It's going to have to be the hippies. Specifically, it should be the Green Party. They're the only ones we can trust to do it right. They'll have to learn from the Navy, which successfully uses nuclear reactors all over the place without turning all their sailors into night lights, so that might be a little rough at first, having all those long-haired pot-smoking weirdoes mingling with our armed forces, but with the age of peace that nuclear power will bestow upon us, it won't matter if all our army men go AWOL to follow whoever is replacing Phish.

Plus we can count on the Green Party to quickly get us away from nuclear power and onto the next newest cleanest power source. And think of what would happen to politics if the Green Party suddenly had as much money, power, and influence as the oil cos. do now?

Seriously, this is win-win for everybody (except the oil cos and dick cheney, who we hate anyway).

A politics post in which a food metaphor goes too far

I used to follow politics pretty closely, but paying attention has gotten harder and harder as the country continues to show that it prefers to keep its head up its ass. Today's case in point is Busby's loss to Bilbray in California. The Daily Kos post-game is all about how Busby's strategy lost her the race, but I'm beyond blaming Democrats at this point. I'm sure there are a million things to attract voters that Democrats can do better. However, there comes a point when then light shined on an issue is so bright that Democrats should be able to get a can of Beefaroni elected without spending a dime campaigning, and the CA-50 special election to replace Duke Cunningham should have been one of those points.

Cunningham was the beacon of Republican corruption. Rather than a loan fuckup threatening to taint the rest of his party, he was the spot of mold on your slice of bread that causes you to check the rest of the loaf only to discover that it's time to toss the whole thing into the trash. The fact that a majority of voters in the CA-50 chose to keep making shit sandwiches with their moldy bread is sickening. Worse is that many democrats apparently chose not to vote at all.

What the fuck, people? When the Republican rot smells as bad as it did in Cunningham's district, it is no longer the Democrats' job to entice their base to the polls, nor is it their job to convince moderate Republicans that it's time to change cleaning services. No, it's up to the voters to accept responsibility for cleaning out their own refrigerator. And if they can't be bothered to do it, then I don't want them living in my neighborhood anymore, lest the smell start to creep into my house.

All of which brings me back to my recurring desire to dissolve the union. Let's divide the country between the shit-sandwiches and the cans of Beefaroni. Let the maniacs have their lunch and eat it too, just as long as they do it in a place where the rest of us don't have to smell it.

BBBS

On June 15th I meet with the kind folks at Big Brothers Big Sisters to have an interview for becoming a Big Brother. I originally started thinking of joining BBBS almost a year ago because it would look good on my resume when I apply for teaching jobs, but I wasn't truly motivated to do it until my success as a tutor showed me that, gosh darn it, kids love me. So now I'm psyched about the prospect of getting to spend a minimum of two to four days a month hanging out with a kid in need just because I think it's going to be a blast.

The challenge is going to be finding ways to entertain a 7- to 16-year-old on Long Island (aka: Dullsville). At the risk of getting ahead of myself, I've started planning stuff to do. At the top of the list is dressing up like super heros and hanging out in parks or at the mall looking for villains to fight and people to rescue. Or we'll play skee ball or check out the aquarium. If I'm paired with an older kid, we'll go drag racing.

And if you've got any activity suggestions, send them my way.

The Da Vinci Irony

Well, it wasn't complete crap. Had I not read the book, I think I would have enjoyed the movie since the visuals add a lot of what the book is lacking; but the characters were still flat and there isn't anything beyond the puzzle to keep one involved. And since pretty much everybody knows how it ends...

The irony, though, is in the fact that the story revolves around the power, importance, and significance of women, but the movie turns Sophie into a know-nothing-girl who's just along for the ride, and every other female from the book is either diminished or deleted. This phenomenon goes so far that an important scene in the book where Langdon and Sophie get help from a reference librarian is replaced by a scene on a bus where they instead get help from some dude with a cellphone. The changes seem so pointless that one has to wonder if it's not in fact a deliberate commentary on what Hollywood thinks of the book's whole "sacred feminine" idea.

Brett Ratner's mutant power

is the ability to suck the life out of a perfectly good movie franchise.

X-Men 3 sucked. It sucked bad. There are so many structural flaws in the story, it would fail Screenwriting 101. I won't go into detail here since doing so would require lots of spoilers, but I will say that if you do see it, be prepared to endure pointless scenes, a pointless plot, empty characters, and lame action sequences. I want my hour and 45 minutes back. And I want to beat the crap out of Brett Ratner. And I wish there were some way to punish Hollywood for making movies that they must know are crap. Unfortunately, you don't know if a movie is any good until after you've seen it, and by then Hollywood already has your money. I'm going to write a letter demanding my money back.

The Candy Man can!

This post over at This Modern World is priceless. Go give love.

I dated a negro once.

She wasn't even one of the people who cleans my bathroom. In fact, I met her in a library (surprise!). Ultimately, our relationship was doomed (me being a capricorn and her being insanely tardy all the fucking time, I had to fire her ass), but as it ended I was shocked to discover that I'd developed some feelings for her. I was unprepared for the fact that her being black didn't get in the way of me really liking her. Thus, as we parted, I was forced to reevaluate my world view: if a white man like me could have feelings for a black girl like her, what other interracial coupling experiments might I one day be a part of and might I have to accept among other couples? What I learned was that just because someone is black (or hispanic, or Chinese, or Protestant) doesn't mean he or she is less lovable. It was a hard reality to face, but it's one I've adjusted to.

It's with that lesson in mind that I've watched the actions of the Senate these past few days. As they debate the issue of whether or not English should be our national language, I realize that what they're actually debating is whether or not someone who doesn't speak English is less American than someone who does. Six months ago I would have said, "Yes! If you can't speak English, you can't be my neighbor!" But now that I am wiser, I understand this is wrong. If a black person is not less lovable, then a non-English speaker is not less American. It's the only conclusion that follows logically.

However, if you are still unpersuaded, consider this: If speaking English equals being American, then we have to determine when it is that someone becomes an English speaker. Is it when he learns his first English word? Is it when he can order a ham sandwich at the deli? Is it when he scores a 650 or better on the SAT? This is important because most of the employees at the local Chinese buffet have English skills on par with the average second grader. If their English isn't good enough to make them Americans, then we also must accept that our children aren't Americans either. Further, Americans in general have poor English skills, and if being able to speak English determines one's Americanness, then it only follows that the quality of one's English determines the quality of one's Americanness. In other words, your ability to correctly use a semicolon is a direct reflection of how much you love your country. Up front, this might not seem like a terrible thing -- it just means that most people love their country an "average" amount. But look a little deeper and you'll uncover a horrible truth: that the most American people in the world are... (get ready!)... the British. Now that's irony.

And it's shameful. Shouldn't we be judging our citizens by more important standards? Like whether or not they drink domestic beer, or attend PTA meetings, or (here's a crazy idea) get out and vote.

Let's not wait until we're back to saluting the Queen before we realize this is an idea that's gone tits up.

(Special thanks to Hoot for helping me refine these thoughts.)

My hero and yours

Hoot Gibson has is own blog. Show the man some love.

Nickeled and Dimed

This is a post I've been wanting to write for a while now, but it just gets me so pissed off I haven't done it. But I'm awake now, much to early, and its on my mind, so I'm figuring maybe if I write it I can get back to sleep.

Over the past several months, assorted businesses have nickeled and dimed me out of nearly $1000 dollars. Really this has been going on for my entire life -- I'm used to get fucked out of money here and there and knowing that my only recourse is to spend months making telephone calls and writing letters. Frankly, I don't have the time for that, nor can my heart take it. What I need is an army of lawyers to handle it, but until I'm rich enough to afford them, I've just going to have to go on getting screwed.

For fun, though, let's review all the companies that have given me the shaft this past year.

Our first culprit is Verizon. After I moved out of my apartment last July, I transfered our phone and DSL bill into my roommate's name. Verizon charged me a $50 fee for canceling our DSL. Yet I did not cancel it -- I transfered it. In fact, when I called Verizon to clear this up, they admitted that I never canceled the DSL and shouldn't have been charged for it. They then proceeded to deny that I had been charged for it, even though the charge is clearly noted in big bold letters on my bill. My roommate and I spent three months (yes three full months, calling at least once a week each) trying to sort this out (Verizon had fucked up our billing in a number of other ways at the same time, but the DSL thing was where I was getting the shaft), and in the end we just had to give up -- the time and energy involved in fighting with them was no longer worth the $50.

Next is American Express. I order a $35 gift card for my brother for X-Mas and it never showed up. I called and called and called and nobody there could give me a straight answer as to whether or not they even had a record of my purchase, let alone how to get my money back. Again, the time and energy spent fighting with them was soon no longer worth the $35, so I stopped calling.

The worst offender is Oxford Healthcare. Now, I've been screwed hardcore -- for thousands and thousands of dollars -- by other HMOs in the past. To make a long story short, if not for my parents being well-to-do, my right leg would end at the knee thanks to Aetna who kept lying to me about what treatments they would or would not cover, and this nearly drove me into the poor house. Anyway, I've learned to be wary, so when I signed up for Oxford back in January, I thought I'd done all my homework: made all the right phone calls, read all the right fine print, asked all the right questions. How wrong I was. After once again being repeatedly misinformed about which doctors Oxford would cover, I cancelled my membership with them and started petitioning for my money back. I'd paid in advance for three months of membership: January, February, and March. But by the end of February it was apparent Oxford was running a massive scam, so my membership cancellation date is February 28. You'd think this would entitled me to a refund of my March membership fees since, you know, I wasn't receiving any services from them at all at that point. But no. Oxford insists they get to keep that money. To recap: Oxford argues that they don't owe you anything even when their representatives repeatedly misinform you about what doctors and services are and aren't covered, and they don't owe you a refund for months in which you aren't even a member anymore. It's fucking outrageous to the tune of +$700.

All of this is enough to make me want to buy a bazooka. But instead I will spend today (my day off), writing yet more fruitless letters and making yet more fruitless phone calls.

The new velocity

Just for Olman Feelyus, I went running in the rain today. The cold cold shitty shitty rain rain. It was fun, if wet. Very Eye of the Tiger. And, while running, I got to think about things, which is what I do while running, and so I thought about all the same things I've been thinking about for days: Who am I? Where am I? Where am I going? Where have I come from? Where have I been? I think about these things for about ten minutes before thoughts about telekinesis and bigfoot (and whether or not bigfoots have telekinesis) sidetrack me.

I was reading a thing about bigfoots on the teh Interweb today, and bigfoots are kinda scary, and one thing being another I was soon thinking about clowns because someone happened to mention clowns and then I was jogging and ruminating on the special way in which clowns have touched me life.

Some people are scared of clowns, but I am not. I hate clowns and am immune to their aura of fear because I used to live with one. For real. A real Ringling Bros. Clown College graduate. The most annoying dude I've ever met in my life. More annoying than Ned Ryerson. The only cool thing about him was his girlfriend, and only because in public she was all Martha Stewart, but behind closed doors she was a porn star. I still want to fuck her. Except she was also always wanting to slit her wrists, so that's kind of a turn off. Still, wrap all that dark nastiness up in a pink turtleneck, and it's hard not to want to pound the heckfire out of her.

But about bigfoot... I do not want to fuck bigfoot. But it would be awesome to run across two bigfoots fucking in the woods. That's how you know bigfoots are fake -- nobody's ever seen them fucking. I mean, we've seen Paris Hilton fucking for fuck sake. In fact, thanks to the Internets, there isn't anything (or anyone) left that you can't see fucking. Hell, if not for the family-friendly nature of this blog, I'd show you a picture right now of a dude fucking a car's tailpipe. And yesterday I downloaded a movie of Darth Vader having a threesome with Sonny and Cher. That's how you know shit is real. If you can't find it fucking something on the Internet, it doesn't exist.

And that's what I thought about while jogging today.

Once that was settled, I came home and signed up for two gym classes at good ol' Suffolk County Community College. Soccer (everybody's favorite), and "fitness walking." I have to put "fitness walking" in quotes because I'm not yet convinced it is a genuine athletic activity. Right. So. For all of June I'll be playing soccer in the early morning and doing "fitness walking" in the evening. It will be an unprecedented amount of physical activity for me. Plus, throw in my regular gym appointments, and it will be totally off the hook (as my 9-year-olds are now saying, though none of them have very good pronunciation skills, so it sounds all marble-mouthed when they say it, so it's about a thousand times funnier than you'd expect). To make it even more extreme (though, really, this isn't going to happen, but I'll tell you about it anyway), I'm considering biking to and from the college for my gym classes. That would be something. Can you imagine? Bike 15 miles or whatever to play soccer, then bike back to get to the gym, then back home, then back for fitness walking, then back home again? Lance Armstrong doesn't exercise that much.

Anyway, I'm a little concerned about the soccer class because I'm worried about getting my teeth knocked out. The last time I had balls flying at my face I was alone in the dark with my man Jarrett, and it wasn't a problem, but still, accidents happen.

Oh yeah. So. Back to the jogging and what I was thinking about while jogging before bigfoot interfered. What I was saying was is that I have a plan -- at least for the moment (maybe only the day). The two gym classes at SCCC are the last things I need to do (if I can get the English Dept. Chair's blessing) to finish my AAS degree, which I started there 10 years ago. (I'm hoping this will set a new SCCC record for longest student matriculation. And I will totally make my parents attend the graduation ceremony.)

ANYWAY. Back to the plan. The plan is to finish my SCCC degree, then go on to Hofstra (if they accept me. If not, I'm joining the KKK), earn my masters in English and TOEFL and get my teaching certification, and then use these credentials to live in fun and new places. Fortunately, all the sunny places I want to go are filled with non-English speakers (aka "Mexicans"), and I happen to enjoy (and am good at) teaching English to foreign language speakers of all ages. So, hopefully, this will open up lots of opportunities for me to live for a little while in each of my fantasy locales. And then it's just viva la viva. At least until I change my mind again.

Why the fuck aren't I moving to Hawaii?

My homepage has been set to show the weather in Hawaii ever since I spent a month there in 2002. Every fantasy life I concoct for myself is set in Hawaii. And whenever the weather on Long Island is beautiful I remind myself that in Hawaii the beauty isn't fleeting. In Hawaii I could ride my motorcycle pretty much 24/7. If I bought a jeep, I could leave the top off all year 'round. If I met a girl there, she would most likely look good in a bikini. Indeed, there is so much I like about Hawaii. So why the fuck aren't I aggressively working on moving there?

Money is one reason. Hawaii is very expensive and jobs there are sparse. When I was there, most people lived in impoverished neighborhoods and worked in tourism. Depressing as hell. But I'm aiming for school there, which means living on the beautiful UoH campus and (hopefully) getting financial aid. So money is mostly a bullshit reason for not going.

My second (and final) reason is also bullshit -- but it's very very very potent bullshit. I'm terrified of being lonely. I do not meet people or make friends easily; I'm solitary by nature, and a lot of the work I do, my projects, is best done solo. But at the same time, I need people around constantly. I'm desperate for socialization, desperate to know I can always find someone to entertain me at a moment's notice. There are not a lot of people in Hawaii, and, even at school, I don't anticipate many opportunities to meet people. Hell, I could barely meet people while living in NYC. Even out here on LI, I've got one reliable friend with whom I can spend time. Weekends are the worst. Without the structure of the workday and the time I'll get to spend with 9-year-olds, the weekends are nothing more than an exercise in killing hours.

Not to get all depressing about it, but instead to get back to the point, when I paint the picture that bleak, it seems like I've got nothing to lose by moving to Hawaii. But what I've got to lose is the last of my social support system. At least here there is somebody, but out there, there is nobody -- at least, there are no guarantees.

Still I try to convince myself that if I take the chance, things would workout for me out there. But it's hard to find the courage to do it, especially because if it doesn't workout, I have no more fallback positions once I'm 6000 miles away.

The Hills are alive with the sound of the meh.

My sister graduated from Buffalo State this weekend, so my whole family trekked up there for the ceremony. Graduations are interesting things. You're filled with love and pride for the person you're celebrating, yet also tremendous physical discomfort because you've got to sit in the bleachers for three hours surrounded by gigantic fat people who take up so much room that airlines would charge them for two seats. The lady sitting in front of me had what I'm told is called "shelf-butt." Her ass was so big that it literally formed a shelf sticking out of the back of her. And when I say literally, I mean literally. As in: When nobody was looking I daintily took my cellphone and rested it there, and when that worked, I considered emptying my pockets. Not that I'm all about making fun of fat people. Fat jokes are cheap, and fat people generally don't deserve it. But I believe there are rules regarding when fatness is and isn't okay (fatiquette!), and these people had broken those rules. But I'll write more about that later because this post isn't for talking about fat people; it is for talking about Hillary Clinton (who is not fat).

Hillary was the commencement speaker at my sister's graduation. The audience thought this was quite a treat and was very psyched. Chuck Schumer was the speaker for the afternoon ceremony, so we all thought we got the better deal, scoring Hills. But then Chuck showed up unannounced to the morning ceremony and we got to hear him speak, too, so we really lucked out.

Chuck's speech was better than Hillary's. It was a well-rehearsed personal anecdote specifically tailored to the lives of graduates. It was warm-hearted and made us laugh. When it was done, I wanted to go hang out with Chuck, but he ran off and I couldn't find him.

In contrast, Hillary's speech was meh. Her presence at the mic is very cold. It's hard to say why this is. It could be because her face doesn't emote. Ever. Even on TV. She looks a little bit like a ghoul. In the realm of charisma, she's about as opposite from her husband as can be. (I saw Bill speak once when I was at college, and he is fucking magnetic. You can't be within line of sight of him and not fall in love. It's magic.) The content of Hills' speech was below par. A number of people sitting hear me called her the Next President of the United States (remember, this is upstate western NY) and so everything she said was met with huge applause. Unfortunately (to me, anyway), everything she said was that same old empty Democratic rhetoric we've been hearing for years: "Quality affordable healthcare should be the right of every American!" and so on. Which is all well and good and is stuff I generally agree with, but it's trite, impersonal, and not what I want to hear at a graduation. And my beef isn't with her doing a little campaigning to a captive audience (Chuck managed to get a little campaigning in, too). It's that all these people kept referring to her as the Next President, yet she so clearly isn't a leader. She doesn't inspire. She doesn't make it feel like we can accomplish our liberal goals. Sure, we could do worse. But can't we also do better? Aren't we tired of trying to get excited over The Meh?

The Jogosphere

I just made that up. Clever, right? It's where my mind goes when I jog -- into the jogosphere, where I am Superman.

That's all I have to say about jogging.

Now I will talk about:

Life's Path!

You see, I need to make some decisions. Mostly about grad school. I need to pick a program, and since I will almost definitely be attending Hofstra (if they reject me, I'll buy a gun and join a militia), I'll have many options. And, well, there are so many options, and my internal debate is so complex, that I'm just not getting into it here. Instead, just know that my nights are sleepless and my days are filled with vacillations, during which I've got it all figured out until I don't. Since all this to-ing and fro-ing is exhausting, I retreat to the television where I can watch The Real Housewives of Orange County, which is the most surreal thing I've ever seen. How can these millionaires possible pretend that they have the same everyday problems as the rest of America? Yet I'm convinced they do. They are very convincing. For example, one of them is a single mom trying to send her kids to college while simultaneously suffering buyer's remorse after purchasing $10,000 earrings. I feel her pain. I feel her struggle. And when the jewelry saleswoman says that this lady bought something she "desperately needed," I feel that, too. And I'm not being snarky about this. I'm serious. Their problems are so normal, but just on a larger scale. Except for their children, who mostly seem to be assholes. How did these normal women raise such assholes? That's the part I don't get.

I do not have glaucoma.

Not that I really thought I did have glaucoma, but I got new glasses at LensCrafters a month or so ago and the dude there who did my eye exam said he was "concerned about [my] pressure." So I finally got to an opthamologist this morning and had it confirmed that not only do I not have glaucoma, but I am at low risk for glaucoma. Three cheers for something not being wrong with me for once.

Now that I know my eyes are healthy, I'm going to go stare into the sun.

You know what's good?

Salami is good. So so good. It's greasy and fatty and spicy and you can wrap it around cheese and crackers and hard bread, and even enjoy it with wine. Fucking incredible. And where does it come from? Pig parts? I don't believe it. More likely there is a magic salami palace in the sky and if you do the magic salami dance magic salami rains down upon you. Salami must come from the heavens. It is that<>that good.

Why the Ivy Leage can blow me

I just read about the "plagiarism scandal" surrounding Harvard sophomore Kaavya Viswanathan, and it's actually made me feel a lot better about not getting into Harvard or Stanford. I don't want to seem like the guy who's just bitching because he's got some sour grapes (though maybe that's what I am). I definitely liked both Stanford's and Harvard's programs best of all the ones I looked at, and, as more and more teachers tell me there's a huge job shortage for any but science and math teachers, I would absolutely love to have the golden ticket that comes with an Ivy League diploma.

But check this shit out:

In a profile published in The New York Times earlier this month, Ms. Viswanathan said that while she was in high school, her parents hired Katherine Cohen, founder of IvyWise, a private counseling service, to help with the college application process. After reading some of Ms. Viswanathan’s writing, Ms. Cohen put her in touch with the William Morris Agency, and Ms. Viswanathan eventually signed with Jennifer Rudolph Walsh, an agent there.

Ms. Walsh said that she put Ms. Viswanathan in touch with a book packaging company, 17th Street Productions (now Alloy Entertainment), but that the plot and writing of “Opal” were “1,000 percent hers.”

Getting into the Ivies involves hiring a private counseling service and getting hooked up with a "book packaging" company? Why does that sound a lot like you have to buy your way into these places?

Getting some guidance on the application process makes sense. I hired Kaplan to help me, and for a few hundred bones I got some very valuable insight on my application essays. But there's something, I dunno, suspicious, about a counseling service that can put you in touch with a book packaging company as well as get you into top schools. (Read about what a book packaging service does, here.)

Or, in other words (since I'm feeling muddled and verbose): if someone is hooking you up with a company that's going to give you the plot, the characters, the outline, and the first four chapters of a book, and then pay you a half-a-million-dollar advance to "write" the book even though your writing style is unexceptional, what would you suspect that same person is doing to get you into Harvard? Is there a fill-in-the-blanks process for that, too? I wish someone would have told me about it.

I guess I'm naive.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being Debt Free

In the interest of counting my financial chickens before they've hatched, it looks like I've nearly gotten myself out of debt. I have (or will imminently have) paid off my Amazon.com card, my WaMu card, and my Kohl's card. A few months ago I polished off my Apple Loan. And I've paid my motorcycle insurance for the year as well. This leaves me with college loans to repay, and my motorcycle payments. I feel free. I am a cigarette thrown from a car's window on the L.I.E.: I'll stay afloat for as long as there is turbulence to keep me going, yet inevitably, gravity will have its way with me (imagine those final orange sparks leaping across the ground like ballerinas fired from a cannon!). And what is this metaphoric gravity, you might be wondering? It is the HP L2335. I have wanted one for so long, and the payments would be sooo sooo small (the way peanuts are small, yet packed with protein and satisfaction). Oh, the hunger.

The Da Vinci Suck

Just finished reading the Da Vinci Code. Huge disappointment. I was hoping to have another Harry Potter experience, where I come late to the party but still find myself caught up in all the excitement. Instead, I found the book completely bland. The characters are flat, the mechanics of the quest aren't particularly interesting, and the payoff is poor.

However, the history and research that Dan Brown bases the book on are interesting (in spite of his liberties and errors) and I'd bet reading the straight academic work is more rewarding than sifting fact from fiction within The Da Vinci Code, so I'll be adding some more non-fic to my Amazon.com wish list. Yippee.