i can one up you: last night i dreamt that steve carell and i went to hawaii to steal a bunch of exotic, brightly-colored birds. we transported them back in a black velvet bag. when we got home, we opened the bag, and all except one was dead.

???

my coworker t. had to leave work a bit early, so i walked outside with him to warm up and get some fresh air and chat. as we strolled out into the atrium, a gangly and obviously british man darted in front of us, racing out the front door.

"OH MY GOD!" i whispered. loudly. "IT'S RI/CHARD QU/EST! OMFG!"

if you don't know who RQ is, he's one of the business anchors for cnn international, and he's totally and completely adorable and hilarious. he is, without a doubt, the most british person ever. and i kind of love him.

"hey, come on, i'll introduce you," t. said, starting to drag me over.

"HELL TO THE NO," i whispered again. loudly. because if you know me, you know i kind of worship famous-ish people, but am absolutely terrified of meeting them. i turn into Retardo Catherine - even more so than usual. all guffaws and flailing hands and incoherent sentences.

t. kept dragging, and i kept wiggling away, and i kicked and spat and eventually ran - gracefully i assure you - out the far door - but not before RQ turned around to see what the hell was going on. it was terrible.

and it reminded me very much of the ted leo encounter i had with kriston. short recap: kriston and i were drinking margaritas, ted leo was sitting next to us, i had an epileptic fit, and kriston eventually forced me to introduce myself and get a picture. which, admittedly, was fantastic, but it was one hell of a painful process.

which also reminds me of the fact that my coworker t. is KRISTON'S EVIL TWIN. you know there was that picture where everybody decided that yglesias, tommy and kriston were triplets? pyromaniac triplets? well, i present the suggestion that t. be added to their ranks, because, what the hell:

Before you make my upcoming flight to London miserable, please go read Yglesias and Bruce Schneier. Not because it will change anything. But because I'd like to see a tiny flicker of guilt in your eye as you tell me I'm not allowed to bring anything onto the plane besides a willingness to quietly sit still.

And speaking of the TSA, whatever happened to the alleged change in policy making shoe-removal optional? As far as I can tell, it's had absolutely no effect on screeners' insistence that you take off your shoes. I've tried every type of footwear I can think of, but it's never seems to make a difference. On the rare (and seemingly random) occasions when I'm allowed to go through the metal detector without pulling off my sneakers, all it buys me is a more thorough screening on the other side.

alright, i'll admiit it - atlanta has started to grow on me. it's got all these great neighborhoods, you see - the only problem is that you have to drive at least 15 minutes in between each of them. but contained within these adorable little neighborhoods like east atlanta village and little five points are great stores - good bars, restaurants, and boutiques.

and therein lies the problem. you see, i'm sick. i've got a fever. and apparently the only cure is more dresses.

I BOUGHT FOUR DRESSES THIS WEEKEND. what is wrong with me?!?! seriously. i hardly EVER wear dresses. skirts i'll wear on occasion to work, but i much prefer a pair of nicely-cut trousers or jeans. but i went on a freaking rampage this weekend. here's the damage:

a black cotton dress from american apparel. gah! i'm a hypocrite! i hate the owner of american apparel because he is a sexually assaulting public masturbating happy freak, but this dress was so cheap and so comfy. only turn off in the store is that the cashier was wear gold lame hotpants. well, what are you gonna do.

a blue print strapless dress from sugar britches in east atlanta village. it highlights my swimsuit tan nicely.

a red halter dress and a white dress (only $30!) from rene rene in little five points. my lord, i cannot recommend this boutique highly enough. it was the first time i'd been in there, and despite the fact that i was wearing what basically amounted to pajamas, was toting my laptop around and generally looked like a low-class shlub, the staff was gracious and helpful. they must have smelled my dress lust in the air. but seriously - the stuff in that store was GORGEOUS. great skirts, these beautiful wool sheath dresses for fall...sigh. it was like a dream. rene is an older, kind of kooky, flaming red haired lady, and she designs all the pieces by hand.

so, yeah. i'm a dress whore. what the fuck am i going to do with all these dresses? i don't really know. they're certainly not appropriate for work - unless i sling a cardigan over them, i guess - and it's not like i go to cocktail parties or similar events all that often. sigh. most likely i will just coo at them.

anyway, i recommend sugar britches, rene rene and pieces of adrene (the boutique where i got this dress) for your shopping needs. just beware. you might walk out in a daze carrying a dozen things you don't even remember buying.

When I was younger I had a terrible temper. It didn't really get me into fights or trouble — mostly it just produced figurative headaches for my parents and literal ones for myself. I think it's the Dutch blood in me: that sort of passionate disposition is what allowed their East India company to deliver such competitive pricing excellence to its customers, right? Right.

Well, puberty eventually wrapped up, I put a little more effort into controlling myself, and I generally started having fewer things to get upset about. These days I like to think I'm pretty good-natured guy. My ceaseless fury is mostly reserved for when I'm speaking to customer service representatives on the phone. Admittedly, if those poor souls were to get together and commiserate, I've got a feeling that the term "serial killer-like" might come up a lot. That's about right, I'm afraid ("it puts me on the phone with its manager, or else it gets the hose again"). It's nothing personal, guys — it's just that your discomfort will under no circumstances interfere with the satisfaction of my incomprehensibly inhuman desires (e.g. wanting my DSL connection to work).

So I mostly limit myself to a telephonic stress/voodoo doll these days. The primary exception is when I'm particularly tired and/or stressed out. Which brings me to this entry's inevitable apology: I'm sorry, tonight's left lane dwellers of I-66 and Rt. 29. Repeatedly tonight, as you and your right-lane coconspirators trundled along, collecting cars behind you like beads on some sort of furious charm bracelet, I was surprised to find myself projecting invisible beams of hatred in your direction with such intensity that I'm pretty sure I began to cook you from the inside out. So, uh, sorry about that.

Dr. Tom's prescription for Tuesday non-success:

1. Sleep through your alarm.
2. Post the morning roundup late. Immediately receive shit from commenters.
3. Hustle to work. Discover that your sandbox site was defaced by hackers about a month ago, due to an unpatched flaw in some third party software. The site's not very important (hence the lax security), but some stuff for DCist runs on it (at your expense) because the Gothamist guys have never gotten around to giving you access to host it on the DCist server. So it needs to be uncompromised, cleaned and secured.
4. Prepare to make tech support call to non-client marketing trade group that you find morally repugnant.
5. Time for meetings! Two hours should do it.
6. Drive to Charlottesville to see mom, who's been re-admitted to hospital (nothing too serious). Drive back.
7. Collapse into bed.

Also anticipated: a ticket on 66 for violating HOV (Fox 5 ran a story about me and my nefarious HOV-violating buddies last night). When the fuck is Friday getting here, again?

Sorry for the whining. I promise I'll deliver a post about an electronics project involving a demonic glowing cow skull as soon as I can finish it.

I'm back from a weekend in Atlanta filled with fried food, delayed flights and filial guilt. I had a great time, although I was pretty surprised to find myself making the trip. I'd even tried to cancel my tickets on Thursday night, but, low on sleep and frustrated by cheaptickets.com's slow password recovery feature, let the situation fester until Friday. And by then my mom was feeling well enough that she and my sister told me to head to Atlanta after all. From the sound of things, it was the right decision — mom appears to be doing very well. I'll be heading back down to Charlottesville in about 45 minutes to confirm it with my own eyes.

But, like I said, Atlanta was great. I was pretty disappointed to learn that the Cyclorama is this rather than this. But there was plenty of stuff to make up for that. Catherine gave me a tour of her office (I peered into Sanjay Gupta's office! Exciting!), which was cool, although we did get yelled at by a guide who thought we'd wandered off the tour.

Liz, who was introduced to us by Scott, proved to be approximately the sweetest person ever and gave us an incredibly great tour of Williams Street, aka Adult Swim HQ (I peered into Dave Willis's and Matt Maiellaro's offices! Genuinely exciting!).

And we spent some quality time with my old friend Chris, gaining a keen and not entirely un-terrifying perspective on the Atlantean post-fraternity lifestyle. To be fair, an important part of this lifestyle seems to be sitting in a pool and drinking beer. So it's not all bad.

Other than that, we passed the time by eating a lot, dropping by a few bars, participating in an on-the-street podcast for the local McSweeney's farm team, and generally having a pleasant time. So thumbs up to Atlanta. Driving everywhere still sucks, though.

Wah-wah pedals. Laser pointers. Firearms. These are the sorts of machines that are simply too much for fun humans to use objectively. You might have a considered, intelligent opinion about their proper use, but it'll melt away as soon as you get your hands on one. Motorcycles belong on this list, too.

So, I'll just get it out of the way, since people are asking, and this seems like as good an information-dissemination mechanism as any that are available to me. My mom got into a serious motorcycle accident Wednesday evening. According to the cops, some guy suddenly decided he really, really needed to make that right turn to get some gas — enough so that he was willing to do it from the left lane. I suppose my above list is unfair, since the accident wasn't her fault. But I'm still not feeling very fond of motorcycles at the moment.

The resulting breaks, as of the last round of CTs: clavicle, back, pelvis, ribs, right arm in twenty places. Amazingly, it appears that she'll be fine. The right arm is the worst of the lot, but today's surgery on it went well. It sounds like she'll probably be in the hospital for a week.

What comes after that, I don't know. I'm trying to prepare myself not to be surprised by whatever unpleasant surprises come up in the future. So far everything seems to be going great — but I suspect that when an ICU nurse tells you something is great, it really just means that it isn't horribly, horribly bad. So we'll see. She should be moving out of that unit tomorrow and back into the real world. I'm guessing that a sense of scope will arrive around the same time as her physical therapist.

Anyway, thanks for everyone's kind thoughts and sentiments (and balloons! no flowers in the ICU, so folks have been loading her up with mylar and helium). Honestly, everything is surprisingly fine. My sister has been incredibly great. My mom started off the afternoon groggy, but was pretty lucid and cheerful by the time I left this evening, all things considered. Things are going as well as can be expected. Her head is fine, her life doesn't appear to be in danger, and we basically know what has to happen next. That sort of clarity makes it possible to remain pretty even-keeled about all of this.

short version of the weekend: driving past a great, old-timey krispy kreme sign on the way to my coworker's house friday night. moderate amounts of booze at house (curse you, driving). donuts from said krispy kreme suddenly appearing at coworker's house. me proceeding to eat 2 3/4 of said donuts. pool party. moderate amounts of margaritas at said pool party (curse you, driving!). running, and the continued battle between me wanting to be able to run and keeping my toenail. i know, it's gross.

i may as well include monday night in the weekend roundup, because even though it hasn't happened yet, i think it'll be pretty great. i'm going to dinner with mrs. gray and bubba at joel here in atlanta. this requires some prefacing. mrs. gray is, as many of you know, charles' mother, and is pretty much (along with the rest of charles' family, as crazy and hillybillyish as he keeps telling us the extended portion of the family is) the icing on the cake of having charles as a friend. imagine how generous, fun and laid-back charles is already, and add three more to that, and you have his parents and his sister. (also imagine how much charles likes to drink, and add three more to that, and the equation is pure awesomeness.) they're going to tuscany? why don't you come along! it's sunday? come over for dinner! christmas time? of course you're heading to their renowned christmas party. johanna is graduating in chicago and you're not remotely blood relations? they'll get you a hotel room and take you out for dinner and drinks! so on and so forth. and, of course, if they're in your town for business, they'll obviously be taking you out for a super nice dinner.

then there's bubba. how to describe.

• I've got nothing to do with this. (Removed due to signs of life — actual communication! It's great.).

  So consider this post my pathetic cry to current and future employers, peers, relations and acquaintances: I actually know what I'm doing, I swear.

• This is astonishingly stupid. Like, almost audiophile stupid.
• I've now accidentally caught Dashboard Confessional on both Leno and Letterman. That dude really can't sing, can he? His wha-oh-wha-ohs are okay, but the rest is pretty miserable.

The wheels have been in motion for some time now, so yesterday kind of slipped by without me noticing. But congratulations are in order for various friends in our corner of the aspiring DC media conspiracy: Kyle, Heather and Sommer are all stepping into new roles at DCist, and I'm pretty excited about it. I'm looking forward to reading more music stuff from Kyle; to Heather having a larger hand in the site's direction; and to Sommer finally having access to the budget necessary to pay down her not-inconsiderable debt in promised milkshakes.

But of course I'm also very sad to see Ryan step down. I imagine Catherine and I will write some more weepy posts closer to his departure date, but for now, suffice it to say that the guy is pretty amazing. I think DCist has had an unbelievable string of luck with its editors. Rob and Mike's encyclopedic knowledge of the city, organizational skills and affability helped attract and sustain readers and writers. Then Martin and Ryan stepped in with a level of talent and dedication that bordered on masochism. Martin's sticking around (the knots seemed pretty secure, anyway), but Ryan's off to pursue his boyhood dreams of a PhD in economic history.

I have no doubt that Sommer is going to be great as an EIC, but we're all sad that Ryan won't be around to occasionally save us. The level of dedication the guy has shown is more than a little ridiculous (and a testament to Lisa's overwhelming patience). If a writer said, "I had a post saved on my hard drive, but my computer broke and I can't afford to fix it," I have no doubt that Ryan would immediately start figuring out how much blood plasma he had to sell to raise the money. Not that Sommer wouldn't do the same — but Ryan's taller, and therefore probably has more blood. That's an important trait for an editor.

Hmm. I just biked back from Matt & Kriston's, where I consumed burgers, beer and Deadwood. That's all pretty standard for a Sunday night. What was out of the ordinary was what happened as I turned off 11th onto O. There was a skinny white kid wearing overly large shorts and a baseball cap in a particularly ridiculous configuration. And he said something to me as I whizzed by. I'm not sure what, but it definitely sounded indignant, and contained the phrase "my territory".

It was just a little too much. There I was, bike helmet, cargo shorts, ironic internet-themed t-shirt and Gap sandals — and at least mostly not predisposed to picking fights with neighborhood thugs — and I still couldn't stifle the snorted laughter that erupted.

I heard a response. It contained "aw shit", but I'm not sure what else. And it sounded kind of sad.

Anyway, my apologies, aspiring pimps of Logan/Shaw. I realize that yours is a difficult industry in which to find a foothold. It's not like there are internships on Craigslist that you can email your resume to. And even now, after you've found a position, you probably don't know who to approach about filling out the forms necessary to translate threatening neighborhood bicyclists into course credit. I mean sure, it's great that they gave that song the Oscar, but it hasn't changed the facts on the ground, right? It's just lip service.

Well, I wish you the best of luck. But I've gotta say, if you can't even scare the neighborhood's drunken, cycling nerds, I don't know how you're going to intimidate its hookers and/or gang-bangers. I'm sure you'll think of something, though. Maybe a bigger hat? It might make you seem taller.

a cool thing about work: generally, i feel like i'm working in the CTU offices on 24.

a few more cnn shots here.

let me give you all a little piece of sage advice: NEVER, EVER, IF YOU CAN EVER HELP IT, MOVE. ESPECIALLY NOT THREE TIMES IN UNDER A YEAR. IT'S A LITTLE BIT OF A BITCH.

take that as you will. as i sit amidst the ruins of carboard boxes and stacked ceramic bowls on my bed pillow, which is the only surface available on which to exist vaguely comfortably, i am still thankful - because i have the awesomest dad ever. on father's day itself he flew with me to chicago and is helping me with this total mess, not to mention driving back with me tomorrow morning. i am a lucky lady.

i'm also thankful that my week in d.c. was kinda great. dinner at palena, drinks all over the city, sporting events, family time, boyfriend time, friend time - it was wonderful to be back, even if it was for a shorter period than i would have liked. i still have a few more days there next week, but come friday, i'm off to the ATL till september (d.c. visits will dot that time, of course.) pictures forthcoming of the most recent activities as soon as i've puttied the shit out of my walls.

UPDATE: puttying is strangely satisfying. especially on zero hours of sleep and a few red bulls. anyway, the flickr stream has been updated with some random shots.

my beeeyootiful, talented, incredibly smart and soon-to-be-wahoo (WAHOOWA) lil sister graduated from high school yesterday. excessive photos can be found here. the best part: tom davis gave the speech, which was actually pretty funny. even funnier: when my brother graduated from thomas jefferson in 2001, davis spoke there as well...and gave the exact same speech. canned speeches: a congressman's best friend.

the party? was teh awesome. a smaller crowd than we were anticipating showed up, but that was actually good because a) more time to talk to wonderful people and b) lots of leftover beer that we'll need help killing the rest of the week. highlights of the evening included seeing all the great regular zuntaparty folks plus a few new faces, getting to know some of the lovely echoditto crowd that have made tommy so happy these past months and meeting the absolutely charming becks, one of my favorite bloggers. i mean, any night that ends around 4:30am with a bottle of whiskey being passed around and a rousing episode of karaoke revolution can't be a bad one, right?

emily was particularly gung ho with tommy's camera last night so you can expect some flickr action soon. thanks so much to everybody who came out!

UPDATE: drew comes through with the first photos.

UPDATE II: here's tommy's set.

tommy and i had the pleasure of attending ryan and lisa's wedding last night at the arts club of washington, and it was looooovely. everything about the ceremony was wonderful, including the vows that each of them wrote, which i usually pshaw. but tommy pointed out that it helps vows if you happen to be excellent writers. anyway, they both looked gloriously happy, the arts club was a beautiful setting, lisa was beautiful, the dinner was incredibly delicious, the cake (which was actually artfully arranged cupcakes from cake love) was actually....really good. i guess when you do let them sit out long enough they are, in fact, yummy, contrary to my previous thinking. the open bar was very open, and the dancing was fun. and one of my favorite parts of the evening? ryan, on his wedding day, was kind enough to bring me a stack of dcist temporary tattoos. god bless the boy.

photos here. frankly, a lot of them are really terrible - some because i didn't want to blind everyone with flash, some because i went on to get kinda drunk. but peruse freely!

don't forget: charles, tommy and i will be hosting a fine, fine party tomorrow night, starting around 10, and you're all invited. if i somehow neglected to get you the evite, just shoot me an email asking for details. my favorite "yes i'm coming" evite response thus far:

Michael (06/05)
if only to get to the bottom of this "tommy" craze, i'm there. plus i'm eager to discover that catherine is more than an alias that you created on your blog.

interesting theory. if tommy keeps popping in and out of the bathroom in a blond wig...well, just be prepared.

I can pretty well measure how rough a day it's been by how late it is when I open my RSS reader. It's 3:19 at the moment, and I'm only juuust thinking about hitting that BlogLines button. That means things have been busy.

It appears there was some sort of attack on our server farm at work; I was up late & early doing the roundup and launching a client site (and, uh, drinking, although not for the early part); and yesterday was so frantic that I still had two dozen or so emails left from it that actually needed answering.

On top of that, LastCall's Metro capabilities are broken. Given its relative stability thus far, the likelist suspect is a subtle change in RideGuide's HTML. The original HTML was a mess, resulting in some decidedly non-robust regexes involved in its parsing. It wouldn't take much to send them spinning off into oblivion — which is what I suspect happened. The smart money is on it being a real bitch to track down, too.

On the upside, Catherine gets into town tonight! Here's hoping absence has made her begin to consider Perl debugging a romantic way to spend an evening.

Between the LASIK and my generally geeky ways, my friends give me a lot of shit about my potential for becoming a post-human abomination. Digital-themed tattoo? I've thought about it, but probably not. RFID chip? Maybe in a few years. Intracranial bluetooth headset? Eh, I'll wait until I start seeing them in rap videos. I'm not actually all that anxious to modify my body in permanent ways.

But this... Oh man. I want this. The ability to feel electromagnetic fields, people. To tell when a wire is live, or a hard drive is being read, or a transmitter is on, or if a surface is ferrous. It's just a little too cool. Make it safe, then sign me up. Sorry, humanity.

proof the universe doesn't hate me (or, at least, tolerates my presence): as i was starting the arduous process of, you know, moving, about four days before i have to get out of here, i packed up garbage bags full of crap like my entire fridge, and that stack of lucky magazines i'd kept for god knows what reason the entire year. i dragged them down to the dumpster where i noticed all of them were absolutely overflowing with crap. jesus, i thought, what a pain in the ass. i dumped my trash on the floor and surveyed the situation. and what should mine own eyes see but my own salvation: the reason the dumpsters were overflowing is that there were boxes. millions and millions of boxes in perfectly usable condition that someone who had obviously just moved into the complex had used. having spent $20 just that morning on four boxes from the fedex around the corner, i literally did a little jumping dance. and then i made five trips between the dumpster and my apartment, carrying those precious boxes under my arms like so much discovered treasure. yes, i spent my sunday morning rummaging through dumpsters for cardboard gold. it was good. and now back to the packing!

i also just uploaded a bunch of photos to my flickr stream - most of me looking like a drunk ass, as usual, and i can't imagine you really want to see those. but i was walking around downtown chicago this afternoon on my way to a dinner party, and took some shots of that. the location of the dinner party was, i also thought, photo-worthy, as it was the corner condo of a building next to the drake hotel on lake shore drive with the most amazing view. here's the set of the evening.

I've finally got all of my photos from the beach uploaded — you can find them here, if you're so inclined.

And of course, I'd be remiss if I didn't link to DOG V. CRAB, the video sensation that's sweeping the internet. The two combatants both struggled for victory. The real winner? The viewing public.

The video portrays just a small part of the overall fight. Credit to Genevieve for capturing as much she did; Wreck had already cornered a ghost crab behind some fencing earlier in the day, but nobody expected him to find another one. He sniffed and jabbed for a while as the crab warily snapped at his nose — I thought it could go either way at that point. But one quick lunge from Wreck wrapped things up decisively.

if i haven't killed myself, a classmate, or a small animal by the end of today, it will have been a success!

UPDATE: no animals or people were harmed in the process of this day. now i get beer and pool so am happy.

Some of you might remember me asking for career advice a while back. I ended up deciding to take the new job, then blogged the first day. Then everyone at work discovered this site (using their strange internet powers), and, aside from some generalities, I haven't mentioned it.

Well, let me fill you in. It's been about six months, I think. People use the phrase "it was the best decision I ever made" to describe getting a hair transplant, or buying a boat, or ordering a Cobb salad. So I'd like to avoid joining their idiomatic ranks, but I can't. It just seems so obvious. These are the smartest, coolest, funniest, most talented people I've ever worked with, and the job itself is interesting, varied and rewarding. I look forward to work every day. Okay, every non-hungover day.

The reason for my gushing: we're hiring. If you're geeky, really smart and interested in working in the non-evil sector, you should think about applying. You'd like it. Seriously.

I'm back from the beach, as you may have surmised. Photos and perhaps some recapping will come later, but at the moment I'm too exhausted. The short version is that it was a lot of fun. I showed up at work today around 1:30 saturated with sweat, dog hair and fatigue, but other than that the experience was uniformly great.

Oh, and for those interested: the EVDO worked wonderfully, but someone had an open access point very near our house, so it was unnecessary. It came in handy during the car ride back, though. The final stage of my EVDO catch & release strategy will come tomorrow.

woohoo! big congrats to my little brother peter, who just got his navy assignment for the next four years. the details:

he will be assigned to San Diego, CA on the USS Jefferson City, a fast Attack submarine of the Los Angeles class.

i have no idea what any of that means, but i do know san diego was one of his top choices (and, um, mine too. i wasn't going to be so excited about the prospecting of visiting him in, say, guam or connecticut). anyway, i'm so proud of him! you can see him in all his fabulousness in some flickr shots.

clearly my blogging ability up to this point has been driven by my frenetic obsession with veronica mars and my impending move to atlanta, and now that those two topics have dried up, it has become apparent that i am a big empty vessel, devoid of any content. the media management project goes full churn for the next two weeks, stopping only for alcohol fuel along the way, so it's likely blog stuff from my end of the site will be pretty lacking. but still - random things for your discussion:

I'm heading to the beach this Memorial Day weekend, and I'm intent on bringing the internet along with me. Last year I still had a fly-by-night dialup ISP that only charged you in months when you used the service. That business model has since run its course, and I'm casting about for another way to ensure connectivity. Needless to say, the alternative is too horrible to contemplate.

So I stopped by the Ver/iz/on store on my way home and signed up for EVDO service. By the numbers: $80/month, $150 for the PC5740 card and — most importantly — 14 days to return it all. I'll still get charged a prorated fee for the service I use, so it's not totally shady. Just mostly.

There's one complication, though: the card doesn't work with Macs. Well, okay, it sort of does: I've already gone through these instructions, but they mean it when they say the account has to be activated on a PC. Sadly, Charles' laptop isn't up to the task (it's always been flaky about PCMCIA cards, and refuses to recognize this one). But we have one sort-of-working PC laptop at work, and a number of EVDO cardholders who've successfully gotten their Powerbooks working with the nominally PC-only technology. So spirits remain high.

1. catherine finds out she'll be working out at cnn.com in atlanta this summer. promptly starts freaking out about housing on the blog.

2. matt (who, incidentally, catherine knows through kyle) spends approximately two billion hours giving catherine neighborhood/general atlanta advice.

3. catherine spends approximately two billion hours on craigslist, which yields absolutely nothing.

4. matt is kind enough to post bulletins to friendster and myspace saying his clueless internet bud could sure use a decent place to live in atlanta.

5. matt's kind friend jeanie says, hey! i just bought an enormous gorgeous house in east atlanta. i might be willing to sublet a furnished room or two for the low low price of $400 including utilities and internet for however long you need.

6. catherine says hell yes!

and that is the story of how the internet saved catherine from living in a box outside of the CNN center this summer. i never thought i'd owe anything to myspace, but turns out, you just never know!

as for my dc stint, i'll be home from friday, june 9 until probably sunday the 18th, when i might head back to chicago for a few days to pack up all my worldly possessions. hopefully i'd drive back to dc by tuesday the 20th, then drive down to atlanta friday the 23rd. good lord, 26 hours of driving in one week, here i come!

and thus hopefully ends the period of catherine posting a boring blue streak about her logistical plans for the summer. praise be!

so i just registered for the 2006 marine corps marathon.

*shrug*

don't worry, this time around i won't be trying to bilk you all out of $2,000 for cancer.

is it wrong of me to not to follow up with people who are interested in my craigslist listing for my apartment because they can't spell words like "fill" and, um "apartment"?

Yesterday I had my LASIK appointment. I'll go ahead and ruin the suspense: I'm not blind.

The whole thing happened very quickly. I showed up, put my signature on a consent form and an uncomfortably large Amex receipt, and was whisked back in to the first of two staging areas. A woman named Zoya walked me through the contents of of my postoperative kit:

No rubbing your eyes, keep your eyes shut in the shower, don't wear eye makeup — "accidentally" saying this is apparently Zoya's little joke to the male patients, and when I didn't say anything she had to stop and point out how funny her gaffe was. Sorry for missing my cue, Zoya. I guess you don't get a lot of patients who're Cure fans.

As you can see, the kit contains instructions, some Tylenol PM for the postoperative nap, a slightly nicer pair of shitty sunglasses than the last one, steroid & antibiotic eyedrops, some artificial tears, and a totally awesome transparent mask for sleeping. I like to imagine it makes me look like Richard Hamilton, but so far the only real feedback I have is Charles bursting into laughter when I stumbled to the kitchen without taking it off.

Eventually I was whisked to a new antechamber. This one had all of the doctor's degrees in it, along with his various awards (which consisted exclusively of testaments to how many thousands of patients he had treated). The idea was clearly to set the patient at ease, if only by awing him with the facility's framing budget. But hey, the doc went to UVA for both undergrad and med school! Alright! It was good to know that any potential eye mutilation would come at the hands of a guy who's thrown up in the same places I have.

But the most fascinating part of the room was this:

Presumably setting 10 is only used for particularly severe medical emergencies.

Eventually the doctor came in, brimming with self confidence. He prompted me for questions — I'd already asked his staff everything I really wanted to know, but after my first query he said "alright, that was a good one! C'mon, gimme another", I felt I ought to comply. Then he said, "Alright buddy, let's go knock this thing out." He was very Top Gun. In other contexts this kind of guy would've bugged the hell out of me, but here I found it weirdly comforting. I guess I want American Supermen to be the ones manning lasers of all sorts. Even if they're pointed at my eyeballs.

So, the actual operation. At this point I'd been well-briefed, so there weren't many surprises. And the doctor narrated everything, which was also reassuring. They put in some drops, then some more. They taped one eye shut, then taped my other eye's lashes down to keep it open. Then some sort of wire device went in to really keep it open. It wasn't particularly uncomfortable, though, and everything happened too close to my eye for me to be able to see how evil-looking the tool was.

Then something else went on there — I don't know if this was the keratome or just something to hold my eye in place. But the doctor said for the nurse to turn the suction on, and I started to feel pressure (strangely, it felt like much more pressure for the second eye — the doctor said this was common). Then everything went dim. It was a fairly unsettling effect, but the alternative would have been worse, because this was when they made the corneal flap. There was a whirring, then the suction was turned off. Vision returned, blurrily. Then the doctor moved the flap out of the way, making things much, much blurrier.

At this point the blinking red light that I'd been told to train my sight on took up about half of my visual field, and it was hard to know whether to just keep my eye still, focusing on the part where I was looking, or to try to center on its middle. I settled for the former as the laser went off, and the doctor seemed satisfied enough.

This was the critical part, I guess, because the doctor's narration sped up. "Focus on the light, focus on the light, ignore the smell, focus on the light..."

Ignore the smell? What smell? Oh, right: the smell of BURNING EYEBALL. Note: scent analysis reveals that eyeballs are made out of hair.

Then it was over. They put the flap back and told me to close my eye. A shield was taped over the eye. And then they did the same thing for the other one.

A quick post-op check on the flaps' positions, and then Charles gave me a ride home. Needless to say, everything looked weird. The effect was like looking through lightly frosted glass. There were hints of new sharpness, but the halo effect coming off every light source made it hard to make anything out.

Things are better today, but it'll be a while longer before my vision completely settles down. Right now I still see a fairly strong halo effect coming off of all illumination sources (and yeah, I know it may persist to some extent). It's kind of like living inside a Barbara Walters special.

The worst part was waking up about 4 hours into an 8-hour dose of Tylenol PM when my neighbor decided to start lathing some metal (apparently). My eyes were hard to open, they hurt, and I felt like hell. Things were better once I got some more sleep, though.

So, complications? Nothing too bad. My eyes started feeling a little itchy about an hour ago. I mentioned the halo thing. And I'm pretty sensitive to light. Oh, and there's this:

But they say if I just stick with the ruby quartz eyedrops everything will work out.

ain't nothing finer than spending a sunday on campus, mucking around with dreamweaver. though it's not as if my day would necessarily be better spent outside, since chicago has been in a kind of 40 days, 40 nights, 40 degrees scenario for the past week and a half.

anyway, happy mother's day to mine and yours! with the help of my awesome mom today, i figured out a way i can get to the wedding, move my furniture, attend my little sister's high school graduation, and spend at least a couple of weeks in d.c. this summer.

that said, if any of you all have any sort of atlanta expertise, especially in regards to where the cnn building actually is and what neighborhoods are near it that might be good to live in, and whether or not a car is necessary, i'd love to hear from you.

back to the css! woo!

the logistics of this summer are going to bite me in the ass, i can feel it. i write down the following not at all because i think it would make an entertaining blog post, but more for my mental sanity, which is slowly unravelling.

so this is where the schedule stands thus far:

just fyi, there is a likelihood that i will be coming to you straight from hottlanta this summer, as i just got offered a fellowship with cnn.com there. this is both exciting and terrifying in many ways. more details to come! the one for-sure positive: the stress diet i've been running on since the beginning of the quarter just racheted itself up a few dozen notches. my goal of losing 10 pounds for a june wedding is now attainable! thank goodness for the little things.

Awesome:

Dear Member:

This is to notify you that we have removed or disabled access to the following material as a result of a third-party notification by Major League Baseball claiming that this material is infringing:

Bird Getting Hit By Baseball: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YPgEpQNHJDw

For the record, I believe that exploding birds are a part of our shared culture and should automatically fall under the fair use doctrine.

Bonus punchline: the only other clip I've ever posted to YouTube is an excerpt from a copyrighted DVD. It remains happily un-C&Ded.

I expanded on my little science project, and now you can call 202-318-0196 and use an automatically-updated menu system to navigate & listen to the ten most recent podcasts from work. And hear my voice! Excitement, internet stalkers! And yeah, it sounds weird to me, too.

If you're interested in hearing me hold forth on Asterisk and why it's sort of awesome, head on over to the EchoDitto blog — I've got some more voluminous ruminations over there.

I think this setup is kind of neat (if somewhat pointless). But I am disappointed that, now that I've fixed the script to actually grab the ten most recent podcasts (instead of the ten most recent that have media enclosures in the RSS), our Chuck Brown podcast no longer shows up. Go go's not really my cup of tea (outside the context of DC Lotto commercials, anyway), but I'm still mind-bogglingly happy that such a podcast exists, even though it was recorded before my time with the company. I'll have to remember to ask Tim how the hell he pulled that one off. I sort of suspect that Mr. Brown was deeply confused by the experience.

With Kriston in Chicago as well, the nerd contingent finally had numbers on Catherine, and the three of us ended up making a trip to the completely awesome Chicago Comics (conveniently located just a few blocks from Catherine's apt).

Thanks to Tim I've been jumping back into comics recently — he set me up with some Sandman and Transmetropolitan torrents, and I'm slowly working my way through them.

I have to say that I don't really get the appeal of Sandman. And it's not just that I'm tonedeaf to this stuff — I dig the mythical mystery, and I enjoyed American Gods. But so far the series just seems to be about a pale, skinny sliver of humorlessness who spends a lot of time on concerns related to faeries and the dreamscape. It's like some terrible, terrible Trent Reznor/Tori Amos collaboration. I'll stick with it, but so far it hasn't hooked me.

Transmet's considerably more enjoyable, even if Ellis's writerly narcissism isn't actually dismissed by his constant winking in the way he seems to think it is. Also, it provides another excuse to link to a photo of Julian's awesome Spider Jerusalem Halloween costume. And I think it might provide a comprehensive alternate philosophy of journalism for Catherine, should this Medill thing fail to cover all the bases.

I added to these at Chicago Comics. Kriston bought a bunch of incomprehensible but cool Marvel alternate universe thingamajigs, and a mixed bag of DC trade paperbacks. I stuck with my tried & true formula: volumes 7 and 8 of Powers (and 9's out already!? w00t) and a Hellboy spinoff that's not quite as awesome as solo Mignola, but still pretty satisfying in a "former Nazi scientists' hubris unleashing unspeakable supernatural horrors" kind of way. And that's one of my favorites ways.

So yeah — dorking it up: recommended.

I'm back from Chicago, barely. My redeye to DCA had powered up the engines for takeoff when a light went off. Apparently a warning system had registered a false positive, incorrectly indicating that the pilots had set the controls to some sort of wildly suicidal configuration. Back to the gate! Two hours later, the ground crew admitted defeat and I got bumped to the next flight, which was merely delayed, not cancelled. Also, ATA came through with a $50 discount card. I remain irked, but I'll get over it.

Chicago was great — first and foremost because Catherine is there, of course, but also just because it's a great town (albeit a rainy one on this particular weekend). She, Kriston and I walked a lot, drank a little, and ate way, way too much. And, as mentioned, met a bunch of fine folks from unfogged and the charming Dan. All in all, I declare my time in Chicago a success, even if there was a little more of it than I intended. But now I'm dead, dead, dead tired.

I'm in Chicago for the weekend; it's beautiful, and great, etc. etc. GODDAMMIT I LEFT MY PHONE CHARGER AT HOME.

I've now tried 3 different T-Mobile vendors, a Best Buy and a Radioshack — no dice. Nobody bothers to stock a Sidekick-compatible charger. Sigh. Well, I suppose I'll survive somehow. But consider this fair warning: my battery will inevitable decline; my responsiveness will slow as I leave the device off for longer and longer periods; and finally I will lapse into utter, terrible silence.

All of which is to say you should call Catherine instead.

tommy got in last night! kriston will be here today! that is to say, blogging will be even lighter as i squire the two lads around town for the weekend.

I just got back from my free LASIK evaluation at LASIKPlus. I chose them after a careful, two part evaluation:

1. Who is my health insurance compatible with?
2. Which laser center requires the least human contact to schedule an appointment?

A personal-interaction-free webform won LASIKPlus my business, and I headed down to Old Town this morning to begin fulfilling a lifelong desire to have lasers shot at me.

A tech named JT put me through the initial battery of tests. They flew by; the only other JT I've encountered was the simpleton cousin from Step By Step who turned out to be an alcoholic and domestic abuser in real life, and I was thinking too much about that to pay much attention to anything else.

The first thing they start to tell you about is the doctor, who you never meet until your 15-minute procedure. He's done thousands of procedures! People fly from all over the east coast to have him do their operation! He can tear a phone book in half! He projects the excimer beam from his eyes!

They're definitely ready and willing to put patients through a hard sell. The initial medical form contains stealth questions to aid them in this process. In between "what medications make you die?" and "has/have your eyeball(s) ever exploded?" they sneak in items like "what's the first thing you'll do after LASIK?" This is so that later, when the attractive female doctor has come in for final eyeball measurements and begun to discuss the $10,000/hr rate they earn for surgery, she can touch your arm and say, "Won't it be great to throw away your glasses/look at your grandchild/watch a beautiful sunset?"

I was feeling weirdly adversarial, so I left those questions blank. When she got to that part in the form I decline to answer, and instead asked some more questions, pretending like I knew what a diopter is. Also, I didn't buy any of the lines they fed me about me being "one of the best candidates they'd seen in quite a while". I suspect their criteria are largely credit-score-based.

But the one sweet nothing I do believe is this: I possess utter corneal dominance. "Monster corneas," JT said, and you could hear the quiet awe in his voice. The biggest he'd ever seen! That's right. If I accidentally fall through dimensions into a society with an ophthalmologically-based hierarchy, I'm going to be sitting pretty. Also, it's apparently good for LASIK, in case they fuck it up the first time.

Then they dialated my pupils. I hadn't really been planning on this.

Right now I look like an anime character with a serious coke problem. But even better were the sweet temporary shades they gave me for the ride home:

Yes, this is how you're supposed to wear them. They're basically just a curly piece of plastic that clings to your face. My pride made me consider trying for the Metro sans-shades, but it was just so goddamn bright out. Besides, my Alexandria friends were at work-slash-Vegas. I think I made it to the Metro station in relative anonymity. Apologies to the children I scared along the way.

Anyway, the upshot is that, after insurance, I'll be out $2500. I've got a very good shot at 20/20 and a reasonable expectation of better than that. My enormous pupils (which are apparently also bordering on the superhuman) make halo-effects at night a real possibility, but the doctor said that judging by my current incorrect and glare-free-free prescription, I was probably getting those already and just didn't notice or mind them. So I think I'll probably go through with it. I hate wearing glasses, and I've been talking about doing this for years. I'm pencilled in for May 13.

This is probably the part where you should tell me your LASIK horror stories.

Sunday: it's an up-and-comer. Between the injustice that is daylight savings time and the freshly-painted hallway flooding the apartment with solvent fumes, things were not shaping up well. But then a little Drupal installation, a little Chipotle and some cherryblossom-viewing with Michael, Emily and Tim served to brighten things up. Despite this flurry of activity, I somehow still found time to not clean the bathroom.

But, perhaps most exciting of all: the Radioshack cellphone cable recommended to me by this gentleman actually works with my Nokia 3100. I've been through two phones, a pair of Linux installations, and four $25 phone cables, but I can finally taste victory: I successfully sent and received SMSes from my miraculously un-lost Italian SIM. Score! Take note, Gammu googlers: the FutureDial cable (#22) is the one you should be investing in.

Now I'm over at Kriston and Matt's (whose names it now feels weird to hyperlink for some reason) for some grilled Italian links and Sopranos watching. It's the good kind of sausage party.

Q: Given that you're clearly much too old and mature for this sort of thing, will this ever stop being funny?

A: Strangely, no.

i have gotten some questions about these black leather strappy boots, and as a service to humanity, i'm letting you know they're made by seychelles. but, i cannot find them online anymore. i bought them last fall from olive & bettes when i saw them noted in, of all places, US weekly. as a result of that placement, they were pretty much sold out, and my order was placed on backorder for like two months. i almost forgot i had bought them until they showed up on my doorstep. like a present from the shoe god...anyway, i searched ebay and some other sources, but couldn't find them, so if you want to buy them, i think you might be outta luck. which might be okay, as people might be terrified of you if you wear them with a miniskirt.

UPDATE: i found them! (in brown) yes, i know, expensive. so sue me.

so here's the thing. i'm thinking about doing me some yoga.

this is very out-of-character for me. i'm a hit-the-treadmill, lift-a-few-weights, leave-the-gym sort of gal. my normal workout routine consists of 4-5 miles, stretching, and some arm weights if i'm feeling enterprising. i avoid with a passion all other machines (except when i'm on a spinning streak). i think the elliptical is the pussiest machine alive and i've never had a good workout on it (though i do appreciate that it is a good alternative for people whose joints, knees, etc won't allow them to run).

but i'm getting bored with the just running. spinning in the darkness just became too much for me, and there is no way in hell i am every taking anything resembling a step aerobic class, because i have witnessed the coordination needed for those things first-hand, and since i cannot so much do the laundry without tripping on my face, i am having none of it.

and most of all: let's face, i'm getting old. i could use some release for my stiff joints and tight muscles, and i think yoga might be just the ticket, as well as being a good complement to my running routine.

but it is scary. and foreign. and, like, omg, am i going to be a granola-eating pussy forever if i do it? i mean i can't even get a handle on the kinds of yoga out there. my gym offers ashtanga yoga? hatha yoga? forrest yoga? iyengar yoga, which "features use of props such as blocks and straps." PROPS? or heated yoga? heat? or the ever-popular offering of Yoga With Balls? do i need to buy a mat? do i need special clothes (the one part of the whole enterprise that i might not mind dealing with?) do i need to be super-bendy? yogabloggers, help!

I'm outta here in just a few short hours, and allegedly landing at National around 9:30. As you might guess from the whirlwind nature of this tour, I didn't get to see much of the city — and even skipped the salesforce.com-sponsored party at the space needle. But from what little I saw, I like Seattle. There's a monorail track outside my window, and although monorails never actually run on it, it seems like an important moral victory. Also, they've got what I'm told is called "liquid sunshine" going on outside, and it's not as horrifying as it sounds.

But this is the real kicker: I woke up every morning with KEXP blaring over my shitty hotel clock radio. Mountain Goats! Elvis Costello! Arcade Fire rarities! Ted Leo just did a promo for the morning guy! And, most importantly, lots of good music that I hadn't heard before. Yeah, there's an internet stream. But there really is something to be said for FM ubiquity. Your life and my life would be better if this station was on the air in DC. Seriously.

I'm safe and sound and in Seattle for the N-TEN conference. Trenchant observations about the city follow:

• It's rainy


• The coffee is good


• The space needle seems, from a distance, pretty much like you'd expect


• The SEATAC parking lot reminds me a LOT of the buildings in the movie Aliens. Perhaps that's just because it seems like dropping a nuke on it might be a good idea.

I know, I know: I'm totally turning your Seattle preconceptions upside down. More to come! Possibly! But first: a shower and free booze.

preemptive warning: this shitznit was written at 3am by a very delirious catherine. it is long and graphic intensive and doesn't make much sense so i shall put it behind the cut.

Apologies, Heineken Light. It turns out that you didn't try to poison me. I just got sick. I suppose it might just be that you did an unusually thorough job of poisoning me. But that seems unlikely. No, I now have no doubt that use of your fine product will lead to a robust physique and, based upon recent light beer commercials I've seen, improved performance at rollerblading, windsurfing, and other sports that were briefly cool in the eighties.

It seems that everyone is getting sick. I guess winter hadn't planned on spring elbowing in on its action quite so soon. The season has flown by, and it barely has any more time to make our lives miserable. "Flowers? Pollen? WTF! Better infect some suckers while I still can."

I would've used a sick day if not for a particularly exciting cell phone cable that, via the magic of Ebay, should be arriving at the office any day now. But now I'm starting to wonder whether any cable — regardless of the embedded microcontroller! — could be better than sitting at home in my pajamas watching TV all day. I know, it doesn't sound like me at all. I think I may be delirious with fever.

One of the cool things about working on DCist is that occasionally it gets me free booze. There'll be some media event, and the PR person behind it will want to invite some bloggers so that she sounds innovative at her next annual review. That, or invitations will trickle into the greater DCist swag ecosystem via the various legitimate media outlets for which folks on staff work.

Last night was one such instance. Heineken is debuting a light beer version of itself, and I managed to finagle an invitation to the premiere event thingy at the now-defunct City Museum. Free beer within five blocks of my house! It sounded pretty good.

now that it's public knowledge i can publicly congratulate them: cheers to the lovely and wonderful ryan and lisa, who got engaged this weekend! we couldn't be happier for them, and not just cause they do fun stuff like ply us with pomegranate martinis and wear DCist underwear on their heads (well, not lisa). congrats, guys.

in other news, today is both the birthday of charles and my father! happy happy to them! may they both get incredibly drunk tonight. well, my dad, anyways.

my dear friend claire agre, who i met while working in milan and who is now a graduate landscape architecture student at harvard, is in the new york times today! woohoo! it's an article about the environmentally responsible redevelopment of a historic piece of former mining land in colorado. check it:

Academics and experts on mine reclamation---one of the biggest environmental problems of the West, where there are perhaps 500,000 abandoned mines---say that Breckenridge's groundbreaking path could change how mine reclamation works. With ownership of the pollution and control of the land, they say, comes the power to shape the post-mining landscape in a way that goes far beyond just cleaning it up.

"Breckenridge can lead the way," said Alan Berger, an associate professor of landscape architecture at Harvard and founder of the Project for Reclamation Excellence, a group at the design school that works on reclaiming land damaged by resource extraction. "The opportunities of what the town and county can do here are completely open-ended."

And so are the burdens. The property is hatch-marked by miles of unmarked and unmapped trails carved by generations of backcountry users at a time when no owner was around to say boo. The new owners are bracing for what they expect will be contentious public meetings beginning this spring as managers decide which trails to keep open and who may use them. The town favors things like hiking and biking, while the county wants to make sure that motorized users have their say as well.

Mining's legacy on the forest is another headache. In gold's heyday, lumber was needed for mills and tunnels, and by the late 1800's the Horseshoe was stripped. The result today is a narrow monoculture in which the oldest trees are about 120 years old---mostly lodgepole pines.

Pine beetles, which have ravaged vast parts of the West, are just hitting this part of Colorado. Local officials warn that the bugs, which love mature lodgepoles, could kill 80 percent of Horseshoe's trees.

But Breckenridge, which has carved a tourist niche around its mining history and historic buildings also wants to incorporate the story of the Horseshoe into the fabric of the local economy. That means thinking about mines and miners, and how they gave rise to Breckenridge.

That is where Claire Agre, a Harvard graduate student in landscape architecture, enters the picture.

you'll have to read the rest to find out what superhero claire agre is doing to save the world!

you can see my world-renowned series of "claire, pensive" photos here, here and here.

I love my mother, and I try to be a good and attentive son when she asks me for help with something. But helping her upload a photo for her match.com profile? I'm sorry, but no. The combination of a tech-support request, an uncomfortable window into a parent's romantic life, and guilt over not wanting to help is some kind of new maternal superweapon. If she could somehow integrate asking me to pick up my room and warning me not to smoke, she and her allies might finally be able to declare victory over filial forces everywhere.

editor's note: anyone who prefers to think that girls do not actually urinate, and instead have their bladder transform the pee into golden fluff, which is then extracted by angels while they sleep and sent to line the beds of newborn pups, had better not read this post.

dear medill newsroom bathroom,

hi. first off, i just wanted to let you know that i'm a big fan. it must be said that you are nicer than any other office-environment bathroom that i have ever used. you have four roomy stalls; you are decorated simply but elegantly (i especially admire the marble sink counters and the shade of beige on your walls); your lighting is perfection - none of the blaring flourescent nastiness for you - the dim glow of your sophisticated lightbulbs always makes me look wonderful in the mirror; you've got nice touches, like a close-up mirror for applying make up in the mornings and a never-ending supply of aveeno hand lotion to moisturize after washing with your pleasant-scented soap.

we have to talk.

you need to know that your toilets are the bane of the existence every single female in the newsroom. your commodes, while equipped with fairly modern-looking automatic flushing devices, actually hail from the backwaters of azerbaijin. or possibly rural communist china. i know, i was surprised too. they're nice, and clean, and the first time i used them, i thought, "what nice, clean toilets." i should have noticed the 52 signs plastered inside each stall that implored you to "PLEASE FLUSH!!!! DON'T FORGET!!!!" in some grating, squiggly microsoft font. "why ever would we need to be reminded to flush when there are such lovely automatic motion-sensor devices equipped here?" i queried myself innocently. but i thought no more of it.

until the toilet automatically flushed all its nasty toilet bowl water upwards with the force of a fire hose into my special area whilst i was in the middle of, well, you know. and it has continued to do so nearly every time i use the toilet. in fact, your motion sensor is an eager one. it flushes when i enter the stall; it flushes when i sit down; it flushes when i go. in fact, it flushes almost every time i so much blink an eye at it.

EXCEPT WHEN I ACTUALLY FINISH. YOU KNOW, THE ONLY TIME IT SHOULD BE FLUSHING AT ALL, YOU MOFO.

going to the bathroom has become a deadly game of mental tug-and-war between me and the toilets' sensors. i approach the entire act of peeing with dedicated stealth and thought-planning. i really shouldn't have to expand so much mental energy on peeing. i'm a journalist, people. i'm working here. except when i'm peeing. then i'm slipping in the door, closing it with the softness of patting a baby's head, attempting stuff like trying to sit down on the toilet from the side so the sensor doesn't, um, sense me, and holding so goddamn still while i pee that you could balance a freaking book on my head. it almost never works, but every once in a while it does, and then i go have a beer, because that is a serious accomplishemnt. every time the toilet doesn't flush on me is a victory for the entire goddamn gender.

of course, after the beer i need to pee again, and we're back at the beginning.

meanwhile, post-pee, i've tried everything in my right mind to get the sensor to work. i dodge. i weave. i do little up and down dances. i flick it with my thumb. but does the sensor see me? does it even ACKNOWLEDGE THAT I'M RIGHT THERE, trying to get it to flush? no. the sensor, it is a cold, unfeeling bastard. so on the rare occasions that i haven't already been flushed on, i must press the button on the sensor, therefore rendering the whole "automatic" thing moot.

i was in the bathroom the other day and a friend walked in. we were chatting to each other through the stalls, when, you guessed, i got flushed on. normally i would retain some decorum and pretend like it didn't happen, but that was, like, the 8th time it'd gone on that day, and i just could not take it any more.

"FUCK." i exclaimed. "this goddamn motherfucking toilet won't stop flushing on me."

"oh i know," my friend, a lovely, demure southern belle replied. "that middle stall is the worst. i almost always try to avoid it if possible."

we are now strategizing our toilet use. middle toilet? 88% chance you'll get flushed on. first stall? maaaaybe 70%, if you're lucky. and the handicapped stall. don't get me started on that dirty whore.

do you see what you have reduced us to, medill toilets? instead of writing meaningful, educational and revealing articles, i am now wondering how many times i'm going to get toilet water sprayed on me that day. it's a near obsession. i feel twinges of hyperventilation whenever i enter the bathroom. so, you need to stop. if not for me, then for the sake of the entire profession of journalism.

think it over.

thanks,
catherine

It's been a few weeks, but I wouldn't be living up to this blog's titular mission statement if I didn't write something about the presents I got for my birthday. That's right: me me me.

Charles got me some instant-win scratchoff tickets. Partly this is because he's a nice guy, and partly it's because he enjoys gambling vicariously. As you can see, he selected "Blackout Bingo". I don't think he paid much attention to which game he was buying, but it's an accidentally perfect reflection of his personality.

back and not really refreshed from a wonderful weekend in d.c. my flight left the district at 6:30 this morning, and as soon as i landed i headed to the newsroom for some fun and fabulous journalism work. as i'm sitting here brainstorming and tapping away, i had to take a blogging break to talk about what went on:

thursday night: unbuckled. dc9. olivia mancini and the housemates; the hard tomorrows. you saw the pictures here.

friday night: tommy and i decided kind of last minute to head to coppi's, a pizza and italian joint on U street. though dcist reviewed it back in november, we had never been there and in fact hadn't heard much about it otherwise. walking in at 7:30 on a friday night without a reservation, we weren't surprised at being sat at the bar, which turned out to be nice and cozy, with an excellent view of the wood-burning oven, and an attentive bartendress. we started off with some excellent calamari, a bottle of red and then two small pizzas - i forget what was on tommy's, but mine was prosciutto and funghi. though the crust was a little iffy, we both thought their pizza could easily place a very close 3rd in district pies, after two amy's and pizzeria paradiso. i can't believe we'd never dined there before. fairly reasonable, as well. (though that's always easy for me to say when tommy foots the bill, as he almost always insists on doing.) 1414 U street.

saturday: i hit up the glorious, glorious tyson's mall with my family. we ate at brio, which, for a chain restaurant in a mall, was actually pretty decent. then my mom bought me a pair of editors pants at express. discuss: editors pants from express, best pants ever? i own like six pairs.

for dinner that night, tommy and i went to queen of sheba, a recently-opened ethiopian restaurant. pluses: a block from the apartment; nice space; pretty great ethiopian food. minuses: no liquor license (though hardly their fault); about, oh, a FIVE HOUR WAIT for food. well, more like 40 minutes, which struck us as pretty ridiculous seeing that the restaurant wasn't even half full. maybe they're still just working out service kinks, but until they start getting their food out in a timely manner, i'd go to sodere or dukem.

UPDATE: man, MT fucked up the rest of this entry. i talked about the rest of saturday night and EVEN sunday, too, but it somehow ate it. quick recap: ellington party, fries at the saloon, sunday lunch at saint-ex, and attempting to convert tommy and charles to grey's anatom. which i don't think worked.

an anecdote:

i was out the other night with a friend of the male persuasion (who shall remain unnamed and unlinked for purposes of discussion, though many of you in DC in the LOOP will know him; ha ha, make note to remind self to pat self on back for being so clever) and we were grabbing a few drinks at a bar. this friend is an engaging conversationalist, so as we were sitting at our little table we were having a good time, laughing, chatting and drinking it up. the bar was fairly crowded, but we didn't really know anyone else there very well and weren't making an extroverted overtures towards anyone else or anything. partway through the evening, i excused myself to go to the bathroom.

when i returned, said male friend was bemusedly holding a scrap of paper in his hand. he told me that while i had been in the bathroom, a woman had dashed over to the table as he was sipping at his beer, handed him this scrap of paper, said, "here, i think you dropped this," and dashed away so quickly that he almost wasn't even sure what she looked like.

the scrap of paper? a name and a number. the next 15 minutes? we spent pondering whether someone else had actually dropped this scrap of paper, or whether this was a very roundabout way of picking up said male friend.

emboldened by beer, and the fact that though we had been staring pointedly at the woman for several minutes while she studiously avoided even glancing our way, said male friend walked over and chatted the lady up.

turns out, it was a pickup strategy. any results that might be forthcoming aside, my questions are thus: 1. is this a smart or stupid method? would everyone involved not have been better served if she had been a little more direct? 2. THE HELL? WE VERY WELL COULD HAVE BEEN ON A DATE. in fact, i think she thought we were. if i remember correctly she said something to said male friend along the lines of "....well, i wanted you to have my number just in case your date wasn't going well..." let's leave aside the fact that a) i am enormously cute and witty and no date with me could ever go badly b) uh, we weren't actually on a date so i have no right to be offended, am i wrong to, um, feel a little bit offended? that's an awfully ballsy move, considering a guy could be out with a date or girlfriend. i simply can't decide if it was good ballsy or bad ballsy. i guess if they get married and have little ballsy babies, it will have been a good one.

i promise, i never make a big deal out of valentine's day, but how can i not enjoy getting something like this?:

what i DO make a big deal out of is tommy's 26th birthday, which is, of right now, tomorrow (ie wednesday the 15th). so make sure to wish him a happy one! he now joins my ancient ranks! mwahaha. you never stood a chance, young'un.

So the G gets an HDTV in her office. We have an HDTV here in the temporary office space, too, but it's kind of a letdown — it's out by the "CyberCafe" (= barstools and a Flavia machine) and is always tuned to CNN. Aside from sipping coffee while pondering what psychological defect could make a normal-seeming woman like Daryn Kagan volunteer to see Rush Limbaugh naked, there's not much entertainment to be had.

Still, the job is not without perks. Today we had to scan some user-submitted letters for objectionable content, which mean we had to make a list of stuff to flag. It's pretty great to be able to say "What about 'cocksucker'?" and have it be greeted as a valuable contribution to the meeting.

as noted in comments below, i stayed home sick today and have been using my ass-on-couch time to actually be productive and work on a number of assignments i have due for next week. unfortunately, my plan has been somewhat thwarted by, you guessed it, the Noisy Upstairs Neighbor. apparently he holds a job wherein he is required to a) stay at home all day b) do jumping jacks to a soundtrack of third eye blind for 7 hours straight.

my retaliation plan, put in effect 15 minutes ago?

playing belle and sebastian, really, really loud.

that's right, don't fuck with the motherfucking stuart murdoch. he will blow your ears out with pure cuteness.

My HDTV hopes have, thus far, been foiled. I headed to Microcenter without calling to check availability — I've made the mistake of doing so in the past, and accidentally tipped off store employees to a great internet deal, prompting them to buy all the stock up before I can arrive. Sadly, it wouldn't have mattered this time: they were sold out. Even worse, there was a weird little guy there also looking for the deal who wanted to bond over our shared LCD lust. No thanks, guy. Don't you realize we're competitors?

I'll try again on Saturday, but I'd say my odds aren't good. But that's alright; Matt's actual HDTV is nicer than my theoretical one, anyway. Besides, there's only one purchase I really want to make for the Superbowl:

Behold! A menu item so large and indulgent that it actually has to be cross-referenced with two other parts of the menu. It's meta-gluttony. I really, really hope this wing place is still in business. I'd say it's even money that a wrongful death suit forced them to close shop since I got this menu.

But although my refreshment strategy is pretty well mapped, I'm still not sure who to root for in the actual game. As previously mentioned, Charles makes a compelling case for Seattle. On the other hand, I suddenly find myself a fan of Ben Roethlisblogger ("had to do media it sux lol"). I'm seriously considering betting some money with a yet-to-be-determined disreputable internet gambling operation, just so I know who I want to win. Fantasy football was enough to get me interested in non-Redskins football; wasting $50 on the Seahawks might be enough to make me actually pay attention to parts of the telecast that aren't commercials.

The time has finally come: I'm getting rid of my car. Many of you probably don't even know I own one. That's intentional; like the deformed child you keep locked in the attic, I've hidden it from public view — despite a certain affection for it. It's best for everyone this way.

I bought it during my last year of college, after it turned out that the transmission on the van I had inherited was made out of branches stuck together with mud. The UVA newsgroups had previously delivered unto me a spectacularly ugly freezer that was now successfully dispensing keg beer in a corner of my living room, so I decided to give them another shot. They came through.

This used to belong to the wife of a Chinese grad student. She didn't speak much English and he wasn't the talkative sort, so I didn't get the full story about how the front-end damage originally occurred. All I knew was that I was broke and needed a car that would last for six months. For $450, the price was right.

Well, here we are — roughly four years later and the goddamn thing still runs. It's been sitting at my dad's house since I moved into the city, though, and suffering for the neglect. This year it failed its inspection (five months after it was due), convincing me that we should finally part ways. Besides, I had paid its purchase price twice over in insurance fees, its parking stickers were still coming from Charlottesville, and I had no idea where the DMV thought it was garaged. All in all, the process of renewing my registration seemed increasingly likely to result in jail time.

Also, there was this:

Some guy smashed my rear window in order to steal my bike about 15 months ago (note the safety glass in the backseat, which I have still not cleaned up). It turns out that windows — even small ones — are expensive. It would have cost about half the value of the car to replace this one — more than it cost when a rearview mirror epoxying-gone-awry forced me to replace the windshield.

So I called up WAMU and arranged to donate the thing. I briefly considered giving it to a worthier organization than effete and increasingly incompetent public radio programmers — Melwood* came to mind, since they're always angling for auto donations. But the car's exhaust leak seemed likely to only make their jobs harder. Also, I like imagining that I'm somehow putting Michael Feldman in danger.

So NPR it is. I'm just waiting for the call from the towing company that will arrange final pickup. But first I decided to strip everything of value from its interior — NPR shouldn't have to clean up my garbage, and I'd much rather give my stereo and speakers to a friend. I thought I was just going to find a bunch of rain-damaged papers in the trunk, but it turned out to be a treasure trove of college-era paraphernalia (not that kind). I was amazed at just how much awesome crap I had accumulated.

last weekend's.

this weekend was more low-key, but i can still recommend the following:

the freaks and geeks dvd. tommy got me this for christmas, and i've been too busy to watch it until now but have spent a large chunk of saturday and sunday racing through. it's certainly charming, although i'm not sure why it inspired such cultlike devotion - it hasn't totally grabbed me in that way. but still very enjoyable, and i am now also in love with linda cardellini.

el tapatio on ashland. you know the night's going right when a) your supposed 45-minute wait to eat at a restaurant turns into 15 minutes b) the restaurant lets you sneak in your beers from the bar across the street that you were waiting at c) along with your pitcher of margaritas the waiter scores you each an extra glass full and d) even though your "burrito grandioso" weighs approximately four pounds, it's so good that you eat the entire thing.

guthries. we were supposed to hit up this bar on saturday night, but it turned out to be too crowded to stay there. but it looked adorable - small, cozy, with a fireplace and stacks of boardgames that people were playing at every table. perfect for a rainy night. if our group had been smaller, i would have been content to snag a table and hit up some monopoly. as it was, we headed to the first bar we came across on southport - cullen's, which was basically your typical faux-irish pub but was still fun. they actually had a decent cover band that played everything from radiohead to gin blossoms.

fudgy chocolate-raspberry bars. though fresh raspberries obviously aren't in season, the bars were still delicious and elicited raves from a dinner i went to sunday night. i was glad, because only god in heaven knows what a trial it is to bake in my postage-sized kitchen. my kitchenaid mixer? has to go ON THE FLOOR IN MY BEDROOM BECAUSE THERE IS NO WHERE ELSE TO PUT IT/PLUG IT IN.

not recommended: lazing out on your weekend run of 8 miles such that you have to do it monday morning before your 2 p.m. class, and now it's flurrying. sigh.

This was projected on the outside of the YMCA tonight, as the radio station held an "open house" in the lobby. I really think I should get a discount on my membership dues for this. I go to the gym in an increasingly feeble attempt to feel like a badass. It's not going to help matters if my chosen location for manly endeavors starts trying to associate itself with John Mayer.

Okay, not an ISO, really — I need the original disc. We're perilously close to successfully softmodding Kriston and Matt's Xbox. All we need is one of the flawed games that open the door to videogame mischief. Sadly, the local Blockbuster doesn't stock any of these (they're too old). So I thought I might as well ask here. If anyone in the DC area has a copy of MechAssault, 007: Agent Under Fire or the original Splinter Cell and wouldn't mind parting with it for an afternoon, let me know. It's got to be the original version, I'm afraid, not the edition released under the "Xbox Classics" brand. Thanks in advance.

sigh. well, tommy is back safe and sound in d.c., and i just went on an hour and a half cleaning spree to keep the bad sad feelings at bay. still, though, we had a pretty great weekend. it followed the trend of us being ENORMOUS GLUTTONS every time we spend any time together since i moved to chicago. we like to eat out a lot, so when we have the chance, i guess we just go on an enormous eating out binge to make up for all the other times i, as a poor graduate student and he, as a tired web programmer, end up eating lousy dinners at the end of the day. mmm, mac n cheese!

luckily my neighborhood gives us a lot of delicious eating options. i imagine my following recommendations are old hat to anyone who's lived in chicago for a decent amount of time, but if you're new to the area, maybe they'll help you out. you can find addresses and more info at metromix.com.

Via DCist I see that Butterstick now has his own wikipedia page. Neat! The only problem: the Bandit the Panda people have added their own editorializing. "Bandit is also a popular name for the panda"!? Please. You're going to make people think wikipedia isn't trustworthy!

To be honest, I'm not incredibly keen on getting drawn into a juvenile wikipedia fracas, and probably wouldn't have responded if not for one thing that particularly galled me: the Bandit people constructed a sentence grouping the two t-shirt stores together, and listing an aggregate sum of money raised for the zoo. For the record, cafepress.com/bstick stands at just under $2k donated to FONZ. How much Bandit merchandise has been moved, I wonder? Well, I couldn't help myself, and adjusted the wikipedia sentence to break out the individual store totals. I'd encourage them to provide their own details.

I'll happily admit that this is embarrassingly juvenile. But I can't help myself. As I said before, I don't begrudge anyone the right to conduct their own stupid internet fad — all I'd ask is that they refrain from stealing from mine.

i barely ever read the horoscopes, but i do like those once-a-year ones that say if blah-and-blah is your birthday (because they're always nice. what astrologist is going to say, if this is your birthday, you are doomed to sadness and despair and dead kitties?)...here's mine:

TODAY'S BIRTHDAY (January 11). You dare to dream big, and therefore you break through your past limitations. Your birthday rockets you into an era of increased confidence and self-esteem. Love flows to you because you know you deserve it! A part-time enterprise makes a huge difference to your finances next month. Scorpio and Sagittarius people bring out your passion. Your lucky numbers are: 9, 3, 20, 25 and 35.

a part-time enterprise? either i will a) start freelancing or b) start hookering, because the way things are going this quarter, i'm not going to have enough time to do my laundry, let alone enterprise in any other manner.

And many happy returns (whatever those are) to my lovely girlfriend, who turns 26 today. Got any newfound words of wisdom for me and my callow peers?

It's January. STOP WATERING YOUR FUCKING LAWN, YOU STUPID BITCH. THANKS TO THE EVER-PRESENT PUDDLE OF STANDING WATER AT YOUR INTERSECTION, I WIPED OUT ON MY BIKE TONIGHT.

Somebody headed in the opposite direction stopped to make sure I was okay, which was nice. Also nice: the helmet I was wearing, which I felt impact the pavement. But my knees are bloody, my bike is fucked up, and I am not happy. It's not getting any greener, dumbass. If there had been a car behind me, I wouldn't have the luxury of whining on the internet. How about we just knock off the perpetual water-wasting, mkay?

You really, really shouldn't wear that Under Armour shirt you bought yourself to the gym until you're sure you can pull it off. How will you know when that is? When you're selected in the NFL draft, fatass. Now quit using the squat rack as a towel rack.

I haven't made any resolutions for the new year. For one thing, I think I'm perfectly delightful as-is. For another, I haven't been doing too well at tackling the items on this list. My gym-going has fallen off. I haven't been to a single Wizards or Caps game. And Kriston and I have temporarily shelved our plan to take a martial arts class while we investigate the legalities that will arise when we (inevitably) accidentally kill dudes with our bare hands.

But on December 21*, I finally got started on one of my goals: I began growing a beard. It was the last day of work before days off and a week of telecommuting, and we were going to be spending it moving the office. I would have two solid weeks to cultivate a respectable beard before I'd be in front of anyone who I wasn't prepared to have laugh at me. "It's beard time," I thought. "Let's beard it up."

By the weekend, things had taken a turn for the worse. It itched like a motherfucker, and I couldn't find an unguent or ointment that'd fix the problem. Also, I was unclear about how high up my neck I was supposed to shave — the line kept creeping upward, but I was terrified of ending up looking like that dope from Limp Bizkit (any of them). I voiced my misgivings to Kriston and Matt, my personal beard advisors. It was around midnight on Christmas Eve. We were in the Red Room, helping ourselves to some cheap domestic holiday cheer.

"No, dude! You've gotta stick with it. You're doing great. It's coming in really well!"

I knew they were lying, but I appreciated the sentiment. They seemed to view beard-growing as an important voyage of personal discovery. And, not having been through that looking glass myself, who was I to argue? I tried to take heart.

"Well, I guess I'll stick with it. Catherine has been really supportive, after all."

They fell silent, refusing to meet my gaze, their faces lit only by their cigarettes and the pinball machine's grim effulgence.

"She'll turn on you," warned Matt, his eyes still locked on the beer in his hands. It was becoming clear that this beard business was more serious than I thought.

But the itching passed, and I began to enjoy my new pseudo-beard. Bike rides were less cold, for one thing. And I was saving a fortune on shaving cream, presumably. The possibilities seemed limitless.

But it's been almost two weeks, and it's time to face up to reality. Here's the current state of the beard:

By way of comparison, here's what I had in mind. I've bearded as hard as I can, but I am still orders of beard magnitude away from my goal. I feel confident that, with enough time, most of the weak spots could be hidden with a skilled facial hair combover. But the area directly under my nose — yeesh. Still perfectly hairless. It looks like it'd take an entire second adolescence to get that patch going, and frankly I'm not prepared to resume spending that much time in Jeff's parents' basement.

So that's it for me. Maybe I'll try again in a few years. But in a couple of hours the facial hair is coming off. Besides, according to my pre- and post-holiday weigh-ins, this damn thing weighs seven pounds. That's probably not good for my neck.

* I didn't know it at the time, but this ScaryGoRound comic ran the same day. Grim portents, my friends. I should have known better.

A lot of folks seem to be glad to kick 2005 out the door and down the street. Not me. This has been a pretty good year for me. I moved into a new place, I met a lot of new people, I got a new job, and generally started to feel non-aimless. In fact, this year saw my life reach an all-time low on the Quiet Desperation scale.

Sadly, this means that my days of being an interesting person have probably come to an end. I suppose I can continue to crank out technical curios (although even they will be hurt by a decline in personal Stick It To The Man-ism). But let's face it: basically happy people are basically fucking boring. I apologize in advance to those of you who I will meet at the cocktail parties occurring between now and my death. To help you prepare, here are my planned conversation topics, ordered by decade (approximately). I invite you to compose your respondent bon mots in advance.

• Real Estate Prices


• What Baby Pooped On


• College Prices


• Pointless Hobby


• Quick, Let's Make Financial and/or Spiritual Plans!


• Kids These Days, What's Wrong With


• I Don't Think They Should Have Put Me In A Home


• I Am Wandering Through The Neighborhood In My Bathrobe! I Think I Am Going To See Pearl Jam, Or Possibly Artie Shaw, Although They Are Both Are Dead!

Another problem with contentedness: it's making me into a fatass. This is the time of year when I would normally start complaining about the looming onrush of New Year gymgoers, who will get in my way and then linger there, doing stupid things. But this year I'll be one of them. My 4-5 day/week regimen is long gone; three is a spectacularly good week for me now. And between sicknesses, visitors, projects and generally having better things to do, it's been months since I even hit that mark. But that's all going to change! Yes! I will radically alter my lifestyle. I will remain pleasantly slim. And, while I'm at it, perpetually youthful and vigorous.

Or if that doesn't work out, I'll pick up a used copy of the Everybody Loves Raymond box sets, settle down in front of the TV with some Cool Ranch Doritos and wait for death. It's called a backup plan, people, and it's what responsible life strategies are all about.

Yesterday we went to Pentagon City Mall to do some Christmas shopping. I was a miserable failure. All I managed to buy was a bag of chocolates for Catherine, then a stack of DVD-R blanks and an SD card reader for myself. But I now have plans! Good plans — no, very good plans. In fact, I'd go so far as to characterize them as some of my best laid plans. Doubtless everything will go flawlessly.

But on the off chance that it doesn't, it will be because I don't deserve for it to. Christmas shopping is a karmic investment, and yesterday — since we were shopping in the middle of a weekday — simply wasn't bad enough to earn me a happy holiday. Normally my yuletide mall experience transitions smoothly and rapidly from laserlike focus; to fatigued despair; to agoraphobic dread; to bottomless hatred for my fat fellow consumers as they amble mindlessly into my way, their meanderings every bit as slow and pointless as the path of a child's bowling ball as it slides down a lane with closed-off gutters. It's not that my own materialistic existence is any less existentially depressing, it's just that it involves walking quickly and in straight lines.

But like I said: there wasn't as much mall-based misanthropy this year. I didn't get anything but pictures, though.

Who else thinks L'Occitane changed the spelling just so they don't have to give Borf a cut?

If someone told me that "Dawson Fit" means something unrelated to the television show, I would probably believe them. Still, surely there are other ways to express whatever it is that "Dawson Fit" expresses. But no — the sickness deeply rooted in the brainpans of the Banana Republic corporate office chose to go with "Dawson". Man, I hate that store. The clothes are fine, but the aesthetic is strange. J Crew: comfortably in the "look, my dad can fire your dad!" aesthetic, it can be safely ignored. Gap: expresses the "I wish I wished I was a rock star" ethos/hypocrisy that fits me so well. What is BR's driving theme? Clothes that won't make you look out of place in the hi-tech, totalitarian city-states of the not-too-distant future? That's the best I can come up with.

I desperately want someone to read this, head to Barnes & Noble, and make a terrible mistake.

Today: Best Buy, aka "throwing money at the problem". Wish me luck.

Whew. That was quite a weekend. Thanks to everyone who came out on Friday, and apologies to those who stayed around until 3 or so. I thought I was doing pretty well considering the variety and quantity of booze I'd been consuming, but sometime in the early morning my liver decided it was going to bed, and didn't care whether I joined it. Hopefully I didn't scare any of you.

But look, if there was one undeniable truth about that party, it was that it could have been slightly bloggier. One or two attendees may have somehow snuck in without having a valid URL. So on Saturday night I headed over to Kriston and Yglesias' place for a stupefyingly internety fete. Kevin Drum was there! I wanted to pose for a photo with him, as if he were a cardboard cutout, but chickened out.

Instead, I mostly just drank beer, gossipped with Yglesias and took increasing pleasure in introducing myself as "a blogger of no consequence" (business cards?). I once made a fool of myself in front of Dave Winer without knowing who he was, so the evening was really just an exploration of an already established theme.

But I did genuinely enjoy meeting Roxanne, her husband, and John and Belle. And there was the usual collection of Prospect/Reason/Cato people, who are always good to talk to. And the fellas bought caviar! And Sommer makes an awesome spinach dip thing! So all in all, pretty fun. Although when a couple of the Important Bloggers started telling me how much I should cherish my (relative) youth, I figured it was time to head home. Because duh: I think it's pretty obvious that I am. Did you not just hear me discussing federal wiretap laws with that guy over there?

Sunday was Charles' folks' annual holiday open house, and, as always, it was great. There was no chicken liver pate this year, but the addition of several dozen pounds of unpronounceable cheeses more than made up for it. Also: Charles always gets the leftovers, and I conveniently share a fridge with him. That, combined with his stellar cleaning efforts, puts him solidly at the top of the Roommate of the Week ballotting. Good luck in the elimination round!

In other news: we have a heat pump, but still have no heat. And a pipe has burst under the sink, we're told. Which doesn't really bother us, but is apparently a pretty big inconvenience for our downstairs neighbor. We're now racking up negative karma every time we run the faucet.

so, after the blogiday party on friday night, this is how i spent the rest of my weekend:

saturday, around 10 a.m. thought about getting out of bed. thought very seriously about it. but realized it would do nobody any good. one or two more hours of sleep would surely help ease the hangover, right? right. very wise decision, catherine. proceeded to wake up at 2 p.m., aka the latest i have ever slept in at least the past 5 years, because ever since i became a GrownUp, i cannot sleep past 10 in the morning, even on the weekends i really, really try.

spent three or four hours doing some serious couch sitting. it took a lot out of me. with some protest, i eventually hit up the sketchy giant with tommy to grab some dinner. apparently the major movement of getting up off of the couch and out of the apartment reinstated the dreaded delayed hangover. i was doing pretty good until i had to stand up. but the standing up set off the pounding headache from hell, which prevented me from attending a party at matt's and kriston's that was to be even bloggier than our own. instead i spent the evening in my sweatpants uniform, watching the sound of music, which luckily happened to be on tv. it was like ABC read my hungover mind. christopher plummer+do re mi+a slowly sipped beer=defeat of the hangover. i have always been wary of the hair of the dog thing, but it really seemed to work. is there a scientific explanation for that or what?

this is the worst post ever, but i somehow cannot seem to stop typing.

anyway, sunday was charles' parents' annual holiday party, which is always highly looked-forward to, because it is always lovely and filled with wine and great food and we usually end up taking home 5 billion pounds of ham, 72 bottles of wine and eleventy hundred cans of beer. this year was no exception. i mean, i had a piece of ham, a shrimp, and a petit four for breakfast today. post-grays christmas party is a life of shrimp luxury. if only i could get out of these sweatpants.

so, our party, it was teh awesome. and you know what? it was FILLED WITH BLOGGERS and it was still totally awesome. in fact, it was made even more awesome by that fact. we have crossed some sort of bizarro line, my friends, when bloggers are advertised instead of shunned at a social gathering.

i met many lovely people that i hadn't had the chance to before, and i don't want to list them here, because i will definitely leave somebody out and then feel terrible about it, but you know who you are all and you are all internet sugar and spice, like the governess writes (and no pirate eye, lady! you look lovely i promise especially your hair of which i was v. envious). i stopped being surprised a long time ago at how much i like people in person whose internet personalities i like. that sentence did not make sense but you know what i mean.

the hot chocolate and the egg nog were big old hits (a ratio of one cup whole milk to 1/3 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips, melted in a big old pan, and doctored with as much amaretto or creme de menthe as your guests like, is especially yummy, and jeff swears by the joy of cooking egg nog recipe and it was delicious). unfortunately i didn't take as many photos as i would have hoped (if you took some please leave the link in the comments!), but those i did take are here, including some awesome pictures of kriston and charles dueting it up on some terribly maudlin love song. i would like to take this chance to say that tommy's and my rendition of "i've had the time of my life" was probably some of the most painful 5-6 minutes in the entire history of karaoke. my apologies, friends.

today will be spent recovering, maybe making lemon bars, and then probably humiliating myself in front of kevin drum. onwards!

UPDATE: Changed the Flickr link so Tommy's photos show up, too.

alright, people. this TomCat business has got to stop, mostly for the fact that it is obviously based on the nickname for Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes, aka the Two Freakiest People on earth. tommy and i are nothing like cruise and holmes - in fact, in nearly every way, we are the exact opposite. witness:

1. tom cruise is the scientologistest of all scientologists. tom lee is on a crazed mission to end scientology.
2. i am not a zombie child-bride-to-be.
3. nor am i pregnant, but if i WERE to get pregnant, it would be done the old-fashioned way, and not with a turkey baster full of scientology love. plus, tommy is comfortable enough with his heterosexuality without having to go impregnate ladies all over the place to prove it. he has his sidekick phone, after all, and if that does not scream hetero, i do not know what does.
4. when tommy helps me celebrate my birthday, he does not do with the creepiest-ever idea, a private FAO schwartz toy store visit, including giant cupcakes and a reenactment of the floor piano key scene from "big." the hell?!?!
5. if i had costarred with christian bale, you can bet i a) would not have ended up w/ tom cruise b) would have hit that.
6. we do not have 25 jamillion dollars.
7. etc.

we can discuss all other reasons this evening. see you tonight!

it's always fun to look back a year when you're in desperate need of blog content, isn't it? and so i look back to last december and see that around this time we were....

doing exactly the same thing that we will be doing tonight! with pics! (and some from mssr nye.) we are nothing if not predictable.

i also find it strange that i was sweating grad school applications this time last year. that seriously seems like about a billion eons ago. and has it really only been a year since dance dance revolution came into my life?

Okay, so perhaps — perhaps! — this is not the greatest photo ever, but it reveals a pretty great thing: there is a big fucking crane in our alley, and it's here to put a new heat pump on our roof. Rock. The age of constantly popping circuit breakers ("the space heater era") may be drawing to a close.

TOTALLY UNRELATED WHINING: Who thought it was a good idea to make OS X Firefox not tab through non-text form fields? An idiot, that's who. Also: what's up with the unreliable home key? It's apple-left most of the time, but in Adium and other apps it's function-left. Interface genius my ass.

Tonight we buy the booze. This is tricky: how many people are too cool to use evite? How many will decide to come at the last minute? And how much will everyone drink? In the past we've budgeted around 4 drinks per person and done pretty well — everyone is generally pretty far over or under that number, but it averages out. But it's hard to say how much of that is owed to planning and how much is thanks to fortuitous booze delivered at the last minute by gifts of wine, roving gangs of Latvian friends, and lucky Budweiser truck accidents. It might be time to bump our allocation up.

The restaurant where Charles works is donating a case of PBR, but at the moment that's all the serendipohol we're counting on. Good rules of thumb are welcome. Also, if anyone has developed a serious drinking problem over the past year, let us know in comments

Today was my first day at the new job. It was good — aside from learning that I won't get my first paycheck for a month, things couldn't have gone better. Everyone was smart, nice and extremely helpful. And hey: free lunch. Score.

There's a lot of half-learned technology about which I need to firm up my understanding. But by far the biggest adjustment is the new Powerbook. Yup, it's time to learn how Macs work. I've been issued a 15" Powerbook, and it's pretty sweet. DVD burner, 1400xsomethingorother screen, 80 GB hard drive. It's a beautiful machine.

But it doesn't feel like a real computer. I have a pretty deep understanding of the Window operating system. I can use it extremely quickly and efficiently. It sucks to give up that amount of skill. I'm sure I'll be able to become proficient in Mac-fu, but for now I feel oddly powerless.

I'll no doubt have plenty more complaints coming which will be answered by people more familiar with Apple products than I am. So far, there are only two that I'm not prepared to chalk up to my own ignorance. First, the missing mouse button. I know, you can plug in a real mouse. I know, it's to force designers to make good UI decisions (although the UI seems much more cluttered and disorganized than I expected — Mac Excel's menus are godawful). But it's still a huge pain in the ass to not have a right menu button available when using the trackpad.

My other complaint: the keyboard. It's not very well positioned and the action on the keys doesn't feel very good relative to the other laptops I've used. But most irritating is the absence of several keys. I like having insert available. And why have you taken away my pageup and pagedown? They're on the arrows keys, but this function key business just isn't going to fly. I can run a windows machine pretty well with one hand, leaving the other free to administer beverages, flip through channels or idly tap on the table until Charles goes crazy. These are expensive machines, Steve. You ought to be able to throw in a couple more keys.

Anyway, if it weren't for the salary cut and delayed paycheck, I'd probably be ordering a thinkpad right now. I know I'll come to love this machine, but I'm not converted just yet.

ALSO: I can't figure out the shortcut key combo that lets you switch between, say, the Firefox main window a comment popup. Hmm.

as i have been rolling around on the couch all day in a cold medicine-induced drug haze in the same sweat pants and shirt i've been wearing for approximately 34 days straight (uva pants and a northwestern hoodie, and no, they don't like each other very much), i thought of yet another thing i am truly thankful for in life other than my arctic parka - the fact that, this year, i do not need to attend any company christmas parties. this thought was partly inspired by kathryn's post, and partly inspired by the fact that i spent half the hallucinatory day staring at the green ceramic monkey tommy won last year at his company xmas party, trying to communicate with its innermost thoughts. (the fact that i just wrote a sentence that included tommy winning a ceramic green monkey at an xmas party should be reason enough to prove why i am thankful about not attending any more company xmas parties.)

now that i am a Graduate Student, and not working at blah blah company anymore, i can write about it without remorse, and what i will say for the most part is that it was a nice company with lovely people. except the one dreadful night i attended the xmas party at the president's house.

the night went something like this: arrive with tommy at formalish affair, take off coat, realize suddenly, though this somehow did not strike me before, that the beaded tank top i am wearing is ENTIRELY too low cut and slutty for a work party. have 3-4 gin & tonics; stop caring about prostitutish tank top. chat with workers, eat food, make good friends with open bar bartender person. la la la. it was, at any given point up until then, no worse than any other typical company party: some strained conversations offset by the copious amounts of alcohol. everything was going more or less dandyish until this terrible moment: the president's 30-year-old son reappears in the living room, dressed as santa. tee hee, very funny, cheesy, but whatever, catherine goes to bar to get another drink when she hears the president's booming voice say, "we need some lovely ladies to SIT ON SANTA'S LAP....CATHERINE! GO!"

i froze in my path, then kept on going, assured that the president was joking. but. he. was. not. above my most frenzied of protests, he insisted that i sit IN HIS SON'S LAP in front of the ENTIRE COMPANY wearing my prostitutish tank top while he TOOK PICTURES that would later in the week end up on the kitchen bulletin board. i tell you, i very nearly freaked out right there and puked up in santa's beard. i promise, i am generally game for many things, but sitting in freaky son-of-company-president's santa lap is not one of them. no doubt the entire spectacle, me sitting, plastic-smile-faced, on santa's lap, mentally picturing myself dunking the president's head in the punch bowl, did much to assure everyone of my professionalism and capability.

sigh.

now i am freshly humiliated by that entire creepy experience. i have half a mind to sic some elves on the guy.

after tommy posted that enormous, terrifying, veiny-handed, panda-psychosis-induced photo of me below (thanks boyfriend!) i feel compelled to link to my flickr stream, where just this afternoon i uploaded a backlog of photos of me and my eminently photogenic family and fat doggie from thanksgiving. i can't believe my brother's in the navy and my sister will head to uva soon. lord, i'm old!

Today is my last day of work. I plan to celebrate by going to Chipotle and doing almost nothing productive.

At the moment, I'm feeling very, very good about my decision. Particularly because the leader on this project — justifiably, if belatedly, terrified about the project's nonexistent chance of success — just came into my "office" and asked whether I thought I and the rest of the team ought to come into the office on Saturday and Sunday in order to meet our un-meetable Monday deadline. It was all I could do to keep from erupting into joyous laughter (I managed to constrain my reaction to "shit-eating grin").

And that's another thing — the word "office" is in quotes for a reason. It's actually a conference room that I'm sharing with the other developers. They took away my cube last week. Maybe as punishment for leaving, maybe just because they're ludicrously short on space. That was fine, though. The only galling part was the pretense: that this would be good for the project, foster a "bullpen" environment, and that I had been spoiling for just such a change. In the days after having my desk moved (for the third time since August), a succession of not-future-references trundled past the conference room door, cheerfully asking how much I was enjoying this new getting-kicked-in-the-nuts arrangement that I had been asking for. Normally I would have politely mumbled a noncommital "fine". But with my days numbered, I was free to explain, politely but in detail, exactly how little I wanted or appreciated the new accomodations. It was extremely satisfying, in a completely childish and pathetic way. Where's my red stapler?

Well, the last day of work is even more liberating. I'm in the contract prime's offices, as I have been for a while. There are no bridges to burn; these people are my boses' bosses, not mine. I don't want to get Actual Boss in trouble, but I'll never personally have to be involved with the people here again. I'm not peeing in the water fountain or anything, but I'm blissfully free to eschew workplace pretense. If it weren't for the loyalty I feel toward Actual Boss, I'd be wearing a sandwichboard reading THE END IS NIGH and wandering past the offices of everyone associated with this project. You have all been well and truly fucked from the day you signed this contract.

Ah well. I'm in a good mood. Tomorrow morning I have to go to Mclean, where I will spend four hours teaching my coworkers some of what I know. That tempers my elation, but only a little.

It's almost lunchtime — feels like a guacamole day.

Thanks, Slashdot!

And while I'm shamelessly stealing other people's links, check this out.

i know what i'm getting tommy for christmas.

But you know, I have been thinking about buying a new jacket...

(via bb)

On Friday Charles, Aaron and I headed out to Vienna to see Julie off to Denver. It was fun. How fun? This fun.

Needless to say, we're all sorry to see Julie go. She's sweet, and funny, and pretty well guaranteed to brighten the day of everyone she runs into. But the duties of aunthood call! So good luck in the mile-high city, Julie. We all expect much better home run production next season.

It sounds like the winter storm currently bearing down on Washington (shotgun full of snow, etc.) isn't going to come through. Topper Shutt's Bread-O-Meter stands at a meager 4.5, and is likely to dip even lower. Normally I wouldn't put a lot of stock in a local weatherguy's opinion. But Topper has always been Catherine's and my favorite: he has the saddest eyes of any weatherman. The rough and tumble world of meteorological prognostication was never meant for a soul as gentle as he.

But maybe it's for the best that the storm is dissipating, seeing as our furnace has been broken since Friday morning. For a while it was just freezing cold every morning. I was prepared to chalk this up to my inability to comprehend our stupefyingly complex digital thermostat, but our landlord had an HVAC guy come by on Friday to have a look anyway. I don't know what he did, but I know it was a bad idea. Prior to his visit the furnace had been deeply troubled but high-functioning. Afterward — well, on the plus side there was now a red LED illuminated on the thermostat. On the minus side, the system no longer produced actual heat. Hmm.

Saturday morning brought a 52 degree wakeup — time to call the landlord, who came right over, accepted our mutual impotence in the face of a broken heat pump, and then went to buy us some space heaters. Charles and I can now be luxuriously toasty in up to one room at a time, provided we don't mind tripping the circuit breaker every time so much as the refrigerator light goes on.

Being cold sucks, but it's at least conceptually pleasing to my cheapskate nerd side. Every power adapter, light bulb, computer and appliance around me, although cherished, is horribly inefficient. Entropy's inevitability doesn't just mean that you and I will die and that our universe will someday collapse into a cold, empty cloud of lifeless elementary particles (although its more practical upshot is just that I'm usually too existentially distraught to bother picking up my room). It also means that nearly everything in your house that takes electricity turns more than half of the energy it consumes into heat rather than useful work.

But with the furnace broken, suddenly all of that waste heat is an asset. I'm glad of every wasted watt-second, every gently warm plug pack. Up yours, physics! I'm getting my money's worth at last, Pepco! It's true that the heat-pump's 100+% efficiency has a distinct perpetual-motion-machine allure, but for now I'm happy shooting heat out of every available appliance and into my frozen toes. Time to start Linux recompiling again for no particular reason.

I have accomplished absolutely nothing today, other than contributing thousands of words to a contentious email thread. I feel surprisingly good about that.

let's all give a big round of applause to my lovely and talented little sister, marggie, who just found out tonight that she was accepted early decision to UVa! BOOYEAH. not that there was any doubt, but i know she had been stressing about it. but, hey, marggie, now you can spend the rest of senior year as you should: WITH MUCH SEX AND DRUGS AND BEER. haha, just kidding, mom and dad. that's what college is for!

my cell phone has been lovingly fedexed into my grubby little hands, i have been instructed on how to hook up my dead monitor computer to the tv so that it's usable, and i just got back from a drugstore run to pick up hot chocolate and a healthy amount of bailey's irish cream (can i say HOW MUCH i love that the drugstores here sell alcohol? i love it a lot).

even though it is 30 bajillion degrees below zero with the demon winds of hell, this truly is a joyous night.

if there's one thing the folks here at northwestern are very good at, it is instilling the ever-loving fear of god into you. mostly fear that you, despite attending a top-notch journalism school, will never obtain a job outside of licking the boots of some magazine editor or, barring that, serving up the delicious will-be-the-death-of-me pumpkin spice lattes at starbucks. i still have two weeks left in my very first quarter and i. am. already. terrified. so i do what i usually do when i am scurred: turn to the internets. internets, will you help me get a job or, at the very least, a prestigious summer internship? i feel like an idiot asking for a summer internship, since that is so very junior year of college circa 2001, but my advisor recommends it if possible and if i feel like taking a quarter off of school.

ideally, internets, i would like a job/internship at an online news site. if i'm going to get all specific, i would like a job at washingtonpost.com or chicagotribune.com. a job that is queen of everything. or, whatever. i'm flexible. i'm also open to consulting positions for new media companies. my full resume is on my dead-monitor computer, but i will post some suckily-formatted basic qualifications behind the cut, and if my dead-monitor computer is ever fixed, i'll upload a real resume. if you have any contacts, or friends, or ideas, or alcohol, send me an email. thanks!

zunta.org: asking for your job help since november 2005.

The Smithsonian American Art Museum has launched a blog helmed by the one and only Kriston Capps! Nice job, buddy.

You can congratulate Kriston here; you can write to your congressman about this horrifying waste of tax dollars here. Don't worry about sending mixed messages — it's all part of the stealth marketing campaign. If we can get Rush Limbaugh to declare a fatwa on Kriston, we'll know he's really made it.

On Saturday, I gave notice to my boss. Catherine and I were out by Tyson's to see the Harry Potter movie and eat dinner with her family. My boss lives nearby, so I went over to deliver the news. There was a knot in my stomach composed of equal parts dread and pre-movie TGIFriday's quesadilla. The two vile substances tore at me as they intermingled, reminding me that I had already made one serious mistake that day, and could be on the verge of another.

Breaking the news went amazingly well. I was surprised. I've seen my boss's temper, although I've never been its target. But he said he understood and that I'd be welcomed back if I changed my mind. Work breakups don't go much more smoothly than that. I left; we went to dinner; everything seemed better. In fact, even today, back at this unending Navy project, things seem better. Which leads, of course, to second thoughts.

But I've got no serious reservations about my decision. So in two weeks I'll be starting at Exciting New Media Consultancy, Inc., which I won't name because Technorati would then deliver this blog to their inboxes within minutes. Not that I think its existence will remain a secret for more than a few hours into my tenure there — It's just that I intend to savor those hours.

Leaving this job is still still going to be a shock. I think I've got it figured out, financially speaking, but I'm not at ease about it. It's the only real job I've had since college; I've been here for three years and change. Sure, it was boring and getting boring-er, but I had a comfortable little rut dug for myself. The prospect of change is unsettling.

Last night I dreamt that I was riding my bike down some unknown street, when suddenly I spied the stolen bike that it had replaced. It was locked to a signpost. I dismounted and walked over, and held onto both of them. I called the police but couldn't get through — and what would I do if I had? I couldn't prove my ownership of the old bike, although I knew it was mine. I woke up before I figured out what to do.

I don't usually remember my dreams. When I do, their symbolism is usually completely incomprehensible, if it's there at all. If my subconscious is going to descend to analogies as prosaic as that one, it must really be worried.

Mostly I'm thankful that I didn't die on my trip to and from Brewster, NY. For a day involving 12 hours of travel on buses and trains, everything went pretty smoothly. Okay, the cab I had arranged for didn't show, and the path from the Port Authority to Grand Central was unexpectedly blocked by the Macy's parade. My sister and I still managed to catch our train, though, and had a nice dinner with the New York wing of our clan. Interested family members can find pics here, although my failure to change the camera's settings away "smoky bar" means that they're kind of lousy.

Only other thing worth noting: I read Cold Skin on the trip, and it was pretty good. Plenty short and plenty unsettling. All in all a good book for teachers to get in trouble with the PTA over.

I really appreciate everyone's advice in the previous comment thread (keep it coming, if you've got more). Also thanks to ogged for directing his sage readership over to advise my callow self. As you all can probably tell from my responses in the thread, I'm still leaning toward taking the job. If I'm going to gamble with my career, now is the time to do it. Maybe the last time.

But I'm going to be subjected to some high-intensity hectoring from my mother over the holiday, who is not a fan of this earn-less-money initiative. And I'll actually crunch the numbers, instead of estimating them in my head on the way to the metro. And I'll be talking to the guy who's leaving the position on Friday. Maybe he'll tell me all the bohemianism is a lie, and the place is actually run by Chets in sandals. We'll see whether my starry-eyed idealism emerges from the weekend unscathed.

At any rate, happy Thanksgiving to everybody.

Alright, internet. You're going to have to forgive me just a little bit more career navel-gazing. I could use some advice.

The folks I interviewed with made me an offer yesterday. It wasn't what I was hoping for — it'd constitute a 10% cut from my last paycheck. If you count the raise I got between the interview and the offer, it's almost a 22% cut. They do 401k matching, bonuses and stock option stuff that my current employer doesn't, but it won't make up the difference.

My current job kind of sucks. It revolves around getting Microsoft technology, which I don't like, to do boring things for military and government clients. Our standard contract involves working for a client who has been sold something expensive by Microsoft but has no idea what to do with it.

The new job seems like it would be better. They use open source software. It sounds like clients typically approach them, say "we want people to think our website is cool," then let them run wild. Blogs, RSS, location-based services, AJAX — I'd probably get to play with all that good stuff. These are technologies I like messing around with in my spare time. And although I know there'd be drudge work like in any job, I think there would be much more room for doing interesting and innovative things.

At my current job I'm top dog. This is, to some extent, because we're a technical house of cards — I can't make myself watch webcasts about ASP.NET 2.0 in my off time like a Microsoft shop's CTO should, and nobody else on staff knows anything about software development. But my boss loves me, and I can pretty much get away with whatever I want. Business is starting to take off (hence the raises). I used to be able to work from home more days than not, but I don't know if that will ever happen again.

The new job would make me a developer working directly under the CTO. It's a slightly bigger company, but this move would still look like a step down on my resume. The place is filled with young people whose politics I admire, and from whom I could learn new things (instead of just treading water). The commute's slightly worse (although that will likely change in a few months), but although they only allow for one day/week of telecommuting, it looks like a more reliably pajama-friendly position than my current job. Also, I could wear jeans to work.

I think that's it. And I think I have to take it. I need to write out my budget and make sure everything adds up. Fewer electronic toys and fancy dinners with Catherine should do it. Aside from those, I'm not very high-maintenance. But I do hate the thought of, years from now, little Tom Jr. and Tomasina leaving a shittier house in a shittier neighborhood to go to a shittier school than would have been possible, if only their pop didn't hate SharePoint so goddamned much.

This is a young company; it could pay off down the road. Of course, we're on the brink of the "paying off" phase at my current job — it's just that now I can see that the payoff is a long career working in the government contracting ghetto. I meet people on this job who work for private companies but have navy.mil email addresses. That's how long they've worked on this goddamn project. I really, really don't want to end up like that.

This would be a do-over, with better politics, technology and people. I don't know if this is a really stupid decision, but I think I'm still young enough to be a little stupid.

Here's where you tell me what a dope I am. Trust me, I probably need to hear it.

Bah! Just when I'm wallowing in the crapitude of my job, daydreaming about leaving, my boss goes around and gives everyone a ridiculously generous annual raise. It's a nice surprise, but it doesn't change much except the level of guilt I'm experiencing — the nature of this project is such that for quite a while now I haven't been able to do my job as well as I would like. If I had to fill out a quarterly accomplishments form right now, "not jumping in front of the Metro" would be right at the top of the list. It doesn't really feel like I should be rewarded for that.

In other news, Catherine got home safe & sound, so everything is pretty great.

I got a haircut last week. I didn't really need one yet, but Catherine's was getting into town soon and I thought I'd better get through those first few awkward post-haircut days before she arrived.

So I headed into my favorite non-threatening haircut factory chain, gave them my name and waited to be randomly assigned to a stylist. This is a risk, I know. Most people develop a personal relationship with the person who cuts their hair. It's understandable — this person holds a lot of control over your life, and you have to trust in them completely. It's kind of like with Jesus, except the tipping mechanism is different.

But I like a more stochastic approach. Usually I'll draw someone from the thick hump of the bell curve — a pleasant immigrant lady without much English who does a good but unremarkable job. Other times I'll luck out and get one of the women who dress like fortune tellers (quick rule of thumb: the more jangly bracelets, the better the haircut is going to be). Once or twice in Cherrydale I got a smokin' hot Asian girl with a fondness for sporting leather pants and bored expressions. She gave me terrible haircuts that I didn't mind a bit.

Today was slightly different, though. I got a male stylist. Not so weird in itself, but he didn't fall into either of the male hairdresser stereotypes: he was neither grizzled nor effeminate. He was just some guy, about my age, with a goatee. If I ran into him in any other setting, I would address him as "dude". He was a dude.

I'd been in this situation before, in a slightly more traditional barbershop setting. The barber and I got through it by talking a lot about how great it was when the Redskin Cheerleaders visited his mall. You know what else is great? Sports! Yeah man. Also, heterosexuality. Bitchin'!

But this time there was a shampoo involved. That proved to be a problem. I'd like to jump to my own defense and say "it's not that I'm homophobic!", but I'm not sure that I'm the one who gets to make that call. You can, after all, get into a lot of trouble for declaring yourself "not sexist" (lousy bitches). Still, I don't think it was homophobia.

I say that because, in a way, it was the complete lack of sexual tension that I found so disturbing. I find scalp massages, or anything approximating a scalp massage, to be just about the greatest thing ever. In Charlottesville I once got a haircut from a woman who was also a masseuse, and who tried to up-sell me on her services by administering a scalp massage more thorough than my $11 actually justified. I walked away utterly relaxed, feeling like my bones had been replaced with a pleasantly warm liquid filling. Also, I was keenly aware that I owed Catherine some flowers.

It just isn't the same when a dude — not a professional male hair-cutter, but a dude — is handling the hair washing. All I could think was "I'm paying for this?" and "How did our lives lead us to this moment?"

I need to be sold on the shampoo. I need to think the shampooer cares deeply about his job and, more importantly (of course!), my personal well-being; that this isn't just some horrible kabuki intended to symbolize clients' dominance over their groomers. This guy looked like he was just counting the hours until he had to go pick up his stripper girlfriend. Which is fine, but kind of diminishes the experience. Seriously, just give me a sink and a towel. I think I can figure it out.

Today's gonna be a good day — Catherine's landing at National around 10:30 tonight. But my lingering Puritan genes are pushing me to punish myself before that happens. The office where I'm working is close enough to National that, if I look out the window, I can read the signs on the airport's Metro platform. Heading home and then coming back out to meet her seems kind of silly, particularly given how far behind we are on this project. So it's gonna be a little bit of a late night.

Still, it won't be nearly as bad as the Thanksgiving death march I've arranged for myself. That day will begin with a 6AM bus ride to New York, followed by a couple of hours on a commuter train. Then it's dinner, back on the train, then back on the bus. I'll be getting home around 2:30AM on Friday, having discharged my familial duties in the absolute minimum number of hours possible.

I did the second half of this trip last year; it wasn't too bad, but I'll definitely need a good novel. I had my heart set on this (murderous antarctic amphibians? sold!), but nobody in the area seems to stock it. Suggestions for suitable replacements would be appreciated.

The interview went well. I like these guys, and I think they liked me. It really seems like an ideal workplace: more structure, but still with plenty of freedom. Projects for clients worth giving a damn about. And, most importantly, coworkers from whom I can actuall learn things. Anyway, I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

Other news: when I got back to my block, I found it filled with MPD officers. I'd estimate six police cars (some of them unmarked), and ten or twelve cops swarming in and out of the run-down house on the street that always has folks hanging out in front of it. "Search warrant," said the cops, in a way that made it clear that this statement encompassed all of the information they were prepared to share.

Judging from the variety of people who'd hang out in front of the house,, the cars that'd stop by, and the occasional stray whiff of pot smoke, it was pretty clear that those guys were dealing something. But they never really bothered me, or Charles, so far as I know. I got a "what the fuck do you think you're doing" one time when I dared to walk through a pre-deal crowd of their friends on the sidewalk, but I don't think that outburst came from anybody who actually lived in the house. The only other interaction I had with them was when two of the guys hanging out there stopped me and Charles as we walked by and asked us to settle a bet: which has the larger penis, a whale or an elephant? I said whale. And I stand by that, goddammit.

Anyway, it looks like bad times for those folks. I can't say I feel too sorry, though. Sometimes on my way to the Metro on summer mornings I would see a little old lady sitting on a cushion on a folding chair outside that house. Maybe she was escaping the heat; maybe she was escaping something else. She doesn't deserve to have some deadbeat nephew or grandson selling drugs on her lawn, even if they were doing it with a minimum of ruckus. On the other hand, she doesn't deserve to have her relations thrown in jail, either. Here's hoping it all works out for her.

Charles is soliciting help from the internet in naming his goldfish, which inexplicably made it through the weekend. So far my suggestions of "stinky", "wrinkles" and "superdude" have fallen on deaf ears. BONUS POINTS for anyone who can name additional dead classroom pets of the Simpson children.

And with that, I'm off to the i/v.

I've got a job interview this afternoon. I feel pretty confident — I already know that my biggest failing is working too hard, that I am a self-starting team player, that I'm keen to leverage new synergies in a proactive manner, and that manhole covers are round so that they can't fall down the holes they cover. And really, what else could possibly be asked in an interview? But if you all have any tips, now's the time.

i can tell, it's time for some serious intervention. chicago has apparently gotten to me in a deep, dark way.

because i am SERIOUSLY CONSIDERING BUYING BOOTS WITH FUR ON THEM THAT I WOULD TUCK MY JEANS INTO AND I NEED YOU ALL TO STOP MEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

Alright — I think everything is working. Not only are we on MT 3.2, but I've upgraded from using the filesystem-based Berkeley DB to MySQL. What does this mean? Basically nothing. But backing stuff up will now be marginally easier. Also worth noting is that 3.2 is supposed to cost money, but I somehow downloaded it from Movable Type's website without them remembering to ask for a credit card. And the download shows up in my account "purchases" section and everything! So: shhh!

In other news, Charles bought a fish. We're not naming him until he proves he can make it through the weekend without dying.

No time for blogging — an understudy has arrived at the job, and I've got to intermittently pay attention to him. I suggest that you go terrorize my sister's newly-revealed blog instead. I particularly like the smooth transition from pictures of a cat goiter to pictures of indistinct charred meats that's featured in this post.

What an unusually beautiful weekend. Also, an unusually football-oriented one. For some reason Kriston decided we should get out and enjoy nature on Saturday, and worse, to do so by engaging in an embarrassing athletic display. "Football!" he said. "It'll be great!"

Photographic evidence was deliberately not collected. And just in case, we all shot dirty looks at the teenage girl who was photographing the nearby foliage. But despite there being a number of witnesses, we did play some football. Kriston, Yglesias, Charles, Jeff Dubner, Ezra and the tragically URL-less Jeremy all came to Meridian Hill Park expecting to toss the pigskin. Unfortunately, it quickly became apparent that none of us owned a football. Charles and I had brought a couple of frisbees, so we played a bit of Ultimate while we waited for the football-owning Katy to arrive and save us from our masculine failings.

The Ultimate was not a pretty sight to behold (it's going to be back to two-a-days for a while, guys). Also, Charles' skills have not atrophied as much as I had hoped based on the substantial quantities of cigarettes and booze that he's consumed since we last played each other. Much to my surprise we all seemed to do a lot better with the football.

I'd played football all of twice before, and only one of those times occurred even remotely close to the burly side of puberty. Yet for some reason I was chosen as one of the two quarterbacks. I like to think it's my "intangibles", or perhaps my "court awareness". Either way, the juggernaut comprised of Jeremy, Katy, Jeff and myself proved to be unstoppable, and good triumphed over evil. We mostly owe our glorious victory to Dubner's tenacious defense, although everyone had nice plays at one time or another. The precise clockwork of our mid-atlantic coast offense ("run that way!") also played a part.

Really, I have only two important things to report. First, Ezra Klein can do that back-flip-to-standing thingy. You know, where you're lying down, and kick your legs, and then BANG!, you're back up. That seems pretty good for a member of the punditocracy, right? Do you think Krugman can do that shit? I'll tell you right now, he can't. And if you've got the choice between two authors writing intelligently about national healthcare, BUT one of them may also be able to do a spin-kick, which one are you going to read? It's obvious. Ezra brings the value-add.

Second, I am a million years old. We played touch football for what, 45 minutes? My limbs were already stiffening up by the end. The next day my legs ached, my abs ached, and I was pretty sure I had turf toe, despite not actually knowing what that is. Apparently the elliptical trainer and the ruthless physicality of the software development game isn't keeping me in as tip-top shape as I had thought. Still, it was a lot of fun at the time.

Sunday was appropriately sedentary. Apparently one of the folks in Charles' church has started giving away his Redskins season tickets as a form of protest against Daniel Snyder, and this week I was the beneficiary of the spare. Rock.

I'd never been to an NFL game before. It was pretty great. The spectacle; the Skins' victory; the Eagles' loss — each sweeter than the last. Wow. Even the Philadelphia fans were great. Sure, they were detestable, just as Charles had promised, but they were detestable in exactly the right way. The ones near us were polite enough to be foreborn, the ones away from us were obnoxious enough to get kicked out, and all of them were pathetic enough to prompt truly outrageous post-game gloating from Skins fans on the Metro.

All in all, the footballiest weekend in a while. Oh yeah: feeling obligated by a Microcenter splurge on SD memory earlier that day, I took a ton of mostly uninteresting pictures. They're here, if you're interested.

so. where have i been? i don't know. i'll admit it - beat reporting and the constant writing about often-non-newsworthy events (we have to come up with three stories a week, whether or not there's actually, you know, A STORY happening in our area) has worn me down a bit. i did write a hysterical article yesterday, though, on a leather fetish museum in my beat. it was pretty awesome. did you know benjamin franklin might have been a sadist?! in a related note, the museum's guide, upon learning i was from d.c., reminded me that the Mr. DC Eagle contest will be held nov. 19! get your application at the bar now!

anyway, hopefully i can take this weekend to recharge - rumor has it that ms. seeking irony is in town, so i'm looking forward to a d.c. blogger reunion with her and mr. loop. and in a couple of weeks, the brave kyle will be the first to take advantage of the magic futon, flying in for the grand total of something like 36 hours and taking the windy city (and a super furries concert) by storm. and, then, THEN, i'm home for a week for thanksgiving. HOOrah. hopefully i'll muster up the energy to write something semi-interesting before then.

Last night was interesting. We made it to a good party, a great party, and a bar. More on the parties in a sec. First, the costumes. Adams Morgan turned out to have the best ones. We met all of the folks pictured on the street, and all in quick succession.

I hope you'll all agree that this is the year's clear winner.

So Kanishka's officially in the Foreign Service, and will be headed to Pakistan once the new year rolls around. Best of luck to him, of course. He was pretty excited when I saw him at Kriston and Matt's party on Sunday. Pakistan will be lucky to have someone with his talents and enthusiasm. And I'm not just saying that because he now knows how to shoot me.

Also pictured: the lovely Sommer. And me. And, uh, some other guy. Don't get me started on that guy! He's crazy.

Ah, mid-week happy hours. They always start out so promisingly, as we sip sherry and discuss the prospects for the coming yachting season. Then all of a sudden I've drunk an ocean of beer, it feels like it's 3AM freshman year, and I've resumed my habit of trying to put the "ass" in "iconoclast". Or at least "bombast".

Last night's casualties of my ignorance:

• Piet Mondrian, whose signature work still seems pretty tiresome to me by the light of day. But I forgot that he did stuff like this, which I find genuinely fascinating for reasons that involve torturing cats. Note to self: don't try to talk about art when everyone else at the table knows more about it than you ever will. Next time, try to gently steer the conversation toward TCP/IP networking instead.


• Feminism, which I grossly insulted by suggesting that more men get arrested for sex crimes than women because the male sex drive is greater. A sane discussion of this question is here, but last night I wasn't very good at expressing reasonable reservations about the "rape is solely about power" conventional wisdom. The spectre of reactionary misogyny hangs over all of these chats — did Andrea Dworkin seem crazy because she was crazy or because I'm a sexist asshole? Tough to say. Deciding to table the question in favor of empanadas was probably the right call.


• My friends. You guys are troopers. I promise to try not to be such a colossal jerk in the future.


• Last and least, myself. Today is going to take a turn for the worse when sobriety finally sets in.

Hurry back, Catherine. I'm not sure that your habit of punching me in the arm actually keeps me from embarassing myself. But when you throw water on Yglesias it really helps to distract folks' attention.

The blog was down for a bit — in fact, it looks like much of the internet was. Everything seems to be better now, though.

Personally, I'm looking forward to some downtime of my own. Yesterday was exhausting. Getting a haircut after work was enough to make me ready for bed, but I trudged over to City Bikes anyway and took a bunch of test rides before finally settling on this:

The Jamis Coda Sport. It seems nice enough, and is maybe a little faster than my old bike... but I still miss that thing. It's not just the mountains of filial guilt associated with losing a present from my mom; I'd also gotten very used to it and its quirks. I realize the Jamis's fancy Shimano shifters are classier, but I liked being able to skip up several gears immediately with the old grip shifters. The saddle was a little more comfortable, even after I upgraded the godawful factory default on the Jamis. Most important, of course, is that the old bike was prettier.

I'm sure I'll adjust. For the record, the City Bikes folks were extremely helpful. I paid a little bit of a premium for buying there, but a year's worth of free tuneups makes it seem worthwhile. Everybody there was very nice and knowledgeable. I guess it's easy to be nice when you know the person you're talking to is about to hand you several hundred dollars, but they actually seemed genuine — the salesgirl who helped me with the bike even walked down to their warehouse to check if they had a larger frame for me, then suggested we race back to the shop when I ran into her on my way back from a test ride. Hijinks! Surely that's worth an extra c-note.

The whole experience was a pleasant contrast to Big Wheel in Lyon Village, where the customer service ranges from sunny apathy to confrontational recordstore-clerkism. Okay, I have once had a City Bikes mechanic answer an inquiry about a spoke wrench's price by saying, "For you, it'll end up costing a lot because you don't know how to use it." That was a little prickly. But from the looks of him, I'm pretty sure that the guy in question is Alan Moore, and I love his work, so I'll let it slide.

After fulfilling my duty to consumer culture I headed to DC9 and joined Kriston, Jeremy and Heather to see The Black, of which Jeremy's sister's boyfriend is a member. They played a great set of what I can only characterize as Texas songs. Jeremy and Kriston were in heaven, and I left feeling strangely upbeat for a 25 year-old whose new tendency to get exhausted at 9pm hints strongly at impending lameness.

And that's how I spent my summer vacation. Now it's time to plan for the weekend. Who wants to crash the Howard University Homecoming?

I really hate getting mail. Sure, when I'm expecting a new lithium-ion powered something or other it's sort of fun, but mostly the mail just brings bad news. Car decal renewal notices. Guilt-laden postcards from mom. And, most recently, collection notices.

The creditor in question is CogniDial, and they and I have been through this before. I used their cheap phone service to call Catherine when she was in Italy, way back in 2002. They had some sort of automatic billing thing, for which I used a credit card that expired without my noticing. Much later some not-so-nice folks from a collection agency in San Luis Obispo informed me that I owed $45. After some tooth-gnashing, I ponied up the dough.

It was my fault, but I still made a point of never using their service again. For one thing, I didn't have to make any international calls. For another, I'd hate to be denied a mortgage because of another misunderstanding with some fly-by-night internet telecom.

Now it's much later, and I'm told I somehow owe them $40some dollars again. I'm starting to seriously consider whether they're just shaking me down. I've left an irked message with the collection people, and an irate one with CogniDial, but what can I do? It's hard to convince nameless functionaries that you don't owe their bosses money. The computer says so, even though I asked not-so-nicely to be removed from the computer after the last fiasco. I had a similar experience in college when my phone started reliably ringing every Saturday morning, then playing a recorded message telling me that I owed money and warning me not to attempt to deny that I was [name other than my own]. Reality eventually helped me win back the right to sleep it off. But this time the only reality is that some people are getting paid to believe that I owe $40, while my own conviction is funded solely by righteous indignation — which is plentiful, but likely to produce poorer results.

another day, another spinning class, another crappy musical playlist. highlight of the hour: hmm, it would have to be either that sappy corrs song or the five-minute out-of-the-saddle uphill climb set to jason mraz IN THE DARK. you don't know from inspiring.

sigh. at least at this point i've gone through most of the instructors so i know which ones aren't likely to cause me to think homicidal spinning thoughts. and i know i bitch a lot about it, but it's such an addictive workout, even if the music is crap and i can't see my water bottle and send it skidding across the studio floor. to wit: i hadn't gone running in a long, long time, but this weekend, after spinning for nearly two weeks, i was able to run five miles in just over 40 minutes. them's results.

one thing i don't think i'll be doing anytime soon, though: this, which i saw advertised in a poster at the gym. climbing two billion stairs? no thank you.

unrequited narcissism is now the #3 hit on google for "shrinking boobs."

due to this post. for those who care, the shrinkage seems to have stabilized. if only it would start on the stomach.

this is sure to rankle the cockles (i don't think that even makes sense) of anyone who is above the age of 25, but still: i felt superold tonight. and it is a weird, weird, sensation.

i was hanging out with my neighbor, his girlfriend and their friend, before i went out to a bar with some friends from school. the neighbor and co are all lovely, lovely people. very nice, funny, etc., and graduated in 2004 from their respective schools. we're all drinking beers, catching the last half of the uva-fsu game (HELL YEAH), and i'm telling the neighbor's girlfriend (whom i had not previously met) about my grad program. she asks me if i went straight from undergrad into graduate school, and i explained that i was three years out of undergrad - spent a year in italy, then two years working in publishing, then came to northwestern. she looks at me and goes, "yeah, i was thinking that you did look a lot older."

uhh.

yes, ancient wrinkly catherine, who is rarely at a loss for words, was then at a loss for words. must be my failing 25-year-old memory. sorry, 22-year-old wunderkid. in ALL OF TWO TO THREE YEARS you will understand why i was a little put off.

Despite this, the farce that is my career has yet to come crashing down around me. But then, it's only 9:40. I'll keep you posted.

Well, my bike just got stolen. Again. I had locked it up outside of Logan Hardware and gone in to buy some oil for the chain. My cable lock wasn't the most secure in the world, but I couldn't have been inside for more than ten minutes, it was a busy street in the middle of the day, and I locked it to a lamppost that didn't look like it was going anywhere.

I stalked around the block for 30 minutes or so, literally shaking with anger. Ran into some cops who repeatedly scolded me for not having registered it, then took down my information for the hell of it. I don't particularly like my odds.

Oh, and did I mention that yesterday my laptop broke? Yeah, one of the fans has died and it now spontaneously shuts down from overheating.

This has turned into a very expensive weekend.

UPDATE: Yup, no mercy from the insurance people. And they were jerks on the phone. On the upside, they called me back within 6 hours of my initial phone call. If you value speed over usefulness, Traveler's gets my thumbs-up.

As many of you are no doubt aware, some of my so-called friends have recently invented a hurtful new nickname for me. It came about as an intolerant reaction to a personal preference I expressed at our last get-together. A preference which, I should emphasize, I did not choose, but which seems as perfectly natural to me as it seems apalling to others.

But it's not the nickname that upsets me. If my friends can't accept me for who I am, so be it. I can take it. No, what really galls me is the hypocrisy displayed by my tormentors, as many quietly confided to me in private that they have the same feelings — and, on more than one occasion, indelicately asked me to help them pursue those feelings.

I can only assume that the abuse being directed at me is born of a profound sense of self-loathing. What are you people afraid of? Being happy? Being yourself? Or can you just not stand the thought of telling dad?

Well, I hope all you manage to work it out. I really do. But I refuse to be ashamed by the prejudices of your misguided Texan culture. Frankly, I feel sorry for you.

Well, almost. Dell home has the Canon SD400 for $263; they've also got the SD300 for $206. They're both very tiny and are supposed to take pretty good pictures. The difference seems to be a megapixel and perhaps some very slight image quality differences. I think that's enough of a reason for the splurge, although if anyone feels strongly that I'd be better off blowing that $60 on videogames, please let me know.

UPDATE: I pulled the trigger, and an SD400 should be winging its way to me shortly. And yeah, I went with Dell, despite the warnings. It's true that I've been through lengthy waits getting my orders in the past, but that's the worst Dell-related headache that I've encountered. And I'm not in any hurry.

I've coming looking for your wisdom, o great and powerful internet. Since I can no longer borrow Catherine's digital camera without involving Fedex, I think it's time to buy my own. I know that a lot of you are excellent photographers who are experts at this kind of stuff, so I'm hoping you can help cut down on how much of dpreview.com I need to wade through.

So here's what I'm looking for (besides the obvious stuff like USB2). I'd be grateful for any suggestions you've got.

• Something that can shoot in low light.


• Something pocket-sized (I do have a somewhat liberal definition of this).


• Something that can shoot photos in medium-to-quick succession.


• Something that produces pretty good pictures without expert knowledge — but also something with enough options to keep a one-semester-of-high-school-photo wannabe like myself from blowing my savings on a digital SLR in two months.


• Something that, ideally, costs less than $350. Cheaper is better, and if there's a last-gen camera that's worthwhile and can be had for $150, I'll opt for that.


• Extra bonus point: something that can take a lithium ion OR AA/AAA batteries. This is pretty unimportant, though.


• Extra extra bonus point: something with accessories that'll let it talk to my PDA, either via bluetooth or some other interface (in case I feel the need to blow additional money).

Anybody have any suggestions? I'm guessing 3 or 4 megapixels are enough to keep me happy. But if someone can make a case for a higher-res camera that eschews optical zoom for decent digital (and is consequently smaller), I could be convinced.

This would make for a pretty tidy Halloween costume solution. But buying it readymade seems like kind of a copout. Plus it's a little pricey, and likely to get pricier.

As you might have guessed, I'm back from Chicago. And for all the snark and bitching previous posts about the city have contained, I was really charmed by it. Apparently great things can happen when millions of people decide to huddle together for warmth. Everywhere we went seemed totally unpretentious and welcoming, and I came away much more excited by the town than I was after my previous weekend-long trip (during which I had just enough time to note the Chi-town cliches, then go home).

Catherine's neighborhood seems like a great place to live, and I felt at home right away. I'm pretty much counting on a godawful winter to send her scurrying home to DC in a year's time.

However, I still maintain that scripted comedy is innately superior to improv.

This is how I spent Sunday morning after dropping Catherine off at her parents' house. I have conquered HEMNES. I'm like, a craftsman, or something.

Seriously though, I'm starting to really enjoy putting this crap together. Last year's GOLIAT corner desk was... traumatizing. But now I'm thinking about sending my resume to these people. I think this must be what Thomas Friedman means when he says American workers should respond to globalism by learning new skills.

Catherine is leaving for Chicago on Sunday, and as you might expect I'm pretty depressed about it. I'll be at her new digs Wednesday-Sunday to work by remote and help her get settled, but that's really just prolonging the emotional bandaid peeling. We've been together since October 2000, and although we've agreed that the coming year's vaguely-defined mutual independence will be good for us in vaguely-defined ways, it's still going to be a major shock. There's no getting around the fact that in less than 48 hours I will most likely begin transforming back into an antisocial weirdo.

But don't worry about me. I've got three things working in my favor. First, lingering embarassment over how I conducted myself after my last mandatory girlfriend-evacuation, which occurred in high school and was truly and utterly pathetic. Second, Kriston's stoic example as he deals with a similar but worse situation — this will also hopefully keep a lid on my own expressions of self-pity. And third: a plan.

You know what I love? Getting email from lawyers. And people who work in law offices. Okay, when Charles was working for a PD's office they weren't all that amusing — just his regular "yes", or "ok i will take care of it" or, most often, icy silence.

But folks who work for bigger firms put a little something extra beneath their happy hour RSVPs. Usually it's something like this:

RECEIPT OF THIS COMMUNICATION IS INTENDED FOR ITS INTENDED RECIPIENT. PURSUANT TO SOME FEDERAL ACT OF LET'S SAY 1975, IF YOU HAVE RECEIVED THIS MESSAGE IN ERROR YOU ARE IN VIOLATION OF A NUMBER OF IMPORTANT STATUTES. BETTER LAWYER UP, SON. ALSO, PRINT OUT AS MANY COPIES AS POSSIBLE AND DESTROY THEM. EXCEPT, OOO, COME TO THINK OF IT YOU PROBABLY SHOULDN'T HAVE PRINTED THOSE. ACTUALLY THAT PROBABLY JUST MADE THINGS A LOT WORSE. BEFORE IT WAS JUST GONNA BE A FINE, BUT NOW THEY'RE GONNA TAKE YOUR HOUSE. YOUR FUCKING HOUSE, DUDE. SUCKS.

The idea that I could have somehow entered into a binding contract by virtue of receiving an email is so ludicrous — so transparently composed of gilded bullshit — that I know the sender can't possibly mean it, and that it's just there to give me a chuckle.

Also, the idea that someone has drafted a hundred-word footer to ensure their email's confidentiality rather than, you know, taking any technical steps at all to ensure that message's confidentiality... Well, it just makes me smile. Thanks, guys!

Catherine and I headed to the Nats game tonight. And though they lost to the dastardly Marlins, it was too nice a night for us to mind all that much. Plus we ran into Tom from DCMetblogs.

And on that internet-related note, I'll mention that there was a wireless network in RFK tonight with the SSID of "Marlins" (yes, I am a huge dork). If I had to guess, I'd say that tonight's visiting team owns one of these, that a fan could scan the attached machines with this, then find an exploit within this (using this). All of which would allow for proper vengeance to be exacted upon the hated, hated Marlins. That'd teach them to be better than us at sports, right? Right.

back from vermont, safe and sound! i'm trying to upload some pictures for your viewing pleasure, but goddamn photoshop keeps crashing my computer. i'll get them up later today.

vermont was nice, to be sure. the wedding was gorgeous - a plain white church on a wooded hill overlooking an incredibly lush valley, a tent and tables set up for the reception in a bright green field. the ceremony was lovely (although the somewhat elderly lady playing the piano/harpsichord played half the notes in a stuttered minor key, unintentionally, so that i was halfway in a fit of giggles as the bride and groom walked down the aisle to this lady's own personal rendition of "here comes the bride, totally out of tune."), the reception food was good, and i got a nice buzz going off all the magic hat. unfortunately it rained, loads, all sunday, so we didn't get out to enjoy the countryside. we caught "me and you and everyone we know" and read books in the 300 year-old house that tommy's relatives live in now (they also make lots of yummy organic food there; their quesadillas are to die for). other highlights included a mad run on the burlington bars on saturday night, an excellent sushi dinner, and the requisite stop at ben & jerry's.

there is one negative to vermont that i encountered, and it is this: approximately 75% of their cabbies are batshit insane. the hotel we were staying at was kind of out of the way, so tommy, his sister beth, her boyfriend adam and i had to take quite a few of them. the very first cabbie tommy and i encountered was an incredibly nice bostonian lady who picked us up at the airport and was meant to take us to the indian house, where we were meeting everybody for the rehearsal dinner. unfortunately, despite her being the friendliest lady in the world, she did not have an effing clue where she was going, the fact notwithstanding that downtown burlington is approximately 3 blocks large. highlights of the ride included stopping to ask for directions THREE TIMES (one of which she made me do because i was closer to the poor, unaware pedestrian) and arriving to the dinner an hour late. thanks, cab lady.

the second crazy cabbie was a more serious and tragic case, and i hate to make light of it, because it was so sad, but at the same time, this dude was totally bonkers. tommy, beth, adam and i piled into a cab at the hotel with the intention of meeting a bunch of people at a downtown wine bar and getting saturday night, post-wedding, started. as soon as we all got in the car, the cabbie asked how we were all doing. oh, fine, fine, we said, how are you?

him: well, i just found out i might have cancer. and i'm telling it to the world.

us: shocked silence, manage to emit a few feeble murmurs of consolation.

him: yup, my dad died of it, my mom died of it three months ago, and it looks like it's my turn now, doesn't it?

tommy, who got stuck up front: nodding, mutters something about "you gotta be positive," all the while darting his head around, wild-eyed, so that he looks for all the world like he's trying to figure out if leaping out of a 50 mile an hour cab would be a good idea.

him: well, i guess i'm goin' on to something better, ya know? *gets vaguely cut off by somebody on highway and suddenly transforms into cabbie of doom* "HEY, FUCK YOU, BUDDY. goddammit, i swear to god, nobody can FUCKING DRIVE. just the other day, this - and no offense to you ladies *gesturing to me and beth in the back seat* - but this DUMB BITCH cuts me off, and this bitch does NOT KNOW what she's doing. NOBODY can drive, these fuckers. MY GOD.

us: nodding vigorously, yeah, you were totally cut off. dumb bitches sure can't drive. also, please don't kill us. we just want to drink us some fine vermont beer tonight.

him (under breath, driving a little erratically): well, i'd rather die in a goddamn car crash than of cancer, that's for sure.

us: uhhhhh. immediately we all simultaneously open our car doors and do tuck somersaults out of the cab so as to avoid dying in the obvious murder suicide car crash which is coming our way.

just kidding. we make it alright to the bar, hurriedly wish the cabbie our best, and take off and drink copious amounts of alcohol to erase the entire terrifying event from our minds. sorry, cabbie dude. i hope you got good news instead of what you were expecting.

well, i'm done with work. i had lovely coworkers, and a nice office atmosphere, and i'll miss it, but i'm too excited about northwestern to be very sad.

anyway, here's to a month full of debauchery! susan and i both realized last night that we'll have at least a week where we're both a) unemployed b) bored out of our minds and c) hankering for some alcohol. so we decided we'll be all "ladies who lunch" next week, except it's more like "bloggers who get drunk and fall over and terrorize the city." you know how it is.

When I read this I couldn't help wondering how Jon's doing.

1. Uneven boards! The job is doomed to be half-assed, regardless of the proportion of ass devoted to it.


2. A belt sander is just about the wussiest kind of power tool out there. It's not at all satisfying to use.


3. The belt slides around the sander, requiring constant adjustment. If I stop paying attention the belt begins to shred in a shower of sparks. Which is, surprisingly, still not at all satisfying.


4. I'm a renter, so hey: now I'm throwing money and sweat down the drain.


5. The arsenic- and diesel-infused dust I accidentally inhaled has made my lymph nodes swell up and my throat sore.


6. This is all just a prelude to staining the whole goddamn thing.


7. Everything not listed above.

Pennsylvania local news is great. A teaser featured an anchor asking, "gas prices got you using regular instead of the recommended premium?", thereby portraying a wildly inaccurate idea of what you're supposed to put in your car; their intro to a piece on the $100 cheesesteak actually referred to its purchasers as "suckers"; and an elderly woman being interviewed about a watermain break noted that during a surgery she had died on the table twice. "So how bad could it [the watermain break] be?"

All of this within the first ten minutes. Awesome.

Okay, not really. But things are fine here. The job is manageable, the food is cheap, and the clients are pretty nice. The guy I'm working with is particularly cool -- lots of tattoos, piercings, and pictures of his cute six year old daughter in various vaguely punk-rock poses.

The hotel's not too bad, either, as these things go. The clerk seemed awfully upset at us for callously having forced his coworker to misbook our room, but they were ctually handing out free beer when we came in. That's a pretty good pace to set for yourself. Unfortunately, I eschewed the beer in favor of a trip to the hotel gym. Obviously this was a stupid, stupid mistake. The ancient rusty all-in-one machines in these places never work anything except my rotator cuffs. They, at least, got put through the paces.

The only really noteworthy thing about this place, though, is the smell. Or smells. Okay, sometimes they're predictable -- the wing with the pool stinks overpoweringly of chlorine. And frequently they're variations on a theme -- the hallway smells like old people; the other hallway smells like another, different old person; and the bathroom smells like feet (possibly a pair belonging to an old person). But there are odd wildcards... was someone baking oatmeal cookies in the gym? And did Mr. Kool-Aid drink fruit punch wine coolers in my microwave until he got violently sick? It's all very mysterious. But seeing as I have to be at work by 7:30 tomorrow, I don't have much time to investigate.

Next week I get to spend two days in lovely Bethlehem, Pa, for work (we'll be setting out around 4:30 on Monday). Anybody have any suggestions for how to best use my time there? Besides what I'll actually end up doing, I mean (surfing the internet in my hotel room).

Fun facts:

• Bethlehem is known as "The Christmas City"
• It has two websites
• That is all

just received a mystery SMS from a phone number i don't recognize, saying i should go to a happy hour tomorrow at buffalo billiards, because this person is moving to boston in a month...who are you, mystery texter?

The Nabob spins a tale of arranged weddings, tumultuous religious instruction, and a little blacksmithing. You should go read it.

But I mention this because I, too, had problems with Sunday School. I think my mistake was assuming that my newlywed teachers were somehow being forced to be there, the same way I was. Not so. Turns out they were just really really earnest.

So we ended up having occasional personality conflicts. One that springs to mind started with a particularly weird exercise they had us perform involving a piece of sandpaper and a cube of balsa wood. "Sand it into a sphere!" they said. The unstated goal was to make everyone end up with a shitty, asymmetric orb-thing. This was somehow supposed to make a point about human fallibility.

But, unfortunately for them, I am an awesome sander, and I ended up with a balsa ball that, as near as anyone in the class's imperfect human eyes could tell, was a perfect sphere.

Then I ran around the classroom telling everyone that my wooden ball was Jesus. That didn't go over too well.

The teachers eventually cornered my parents in the parking lot and, from what I managed to overhear, complained about my distinct lack of piousness. To their eternal credit, my parents never said a word about it to me.