My Own Planet

The finer points of Scott Speedman, Lesson #1
This is: Do not attempt to educate a gay man on the finer points of Scott Speedman. He will be distracted by making disparaging comments on the over-the-top gayness of Javier (whom you will not admit you’ve always found endearing, even though he really does act nothing like your real-life gay friends). And when his attention is not divided by Javier, he will decide that Noel is actually cuter than Ben. One episode (in which Noel was going through his “Leon” phase and had those hideous blond streaks in his hair, it’s worth noting), and he’s already in the Noel camp? Oy. But what did I expect from a guy who doesn’t understand the finer points of Seth Cohen, either? That’s elementary, people!

From now on, I’m only watching Felicity with straight men, who can at least appreciate the finer points of Keri Russell. Oh, Chase, why must you live so far away? And why did we last spend our brief time together ruining the Felicity episodes we watched with the audio commentary? I dare say we won’t make that mistake again.

Perfect timing
I managed to make it through three episodes of Felicity before the power went out. In an unusually well-timed move (at least for my power), it went out just as I was finishing heating up the sauce for my spaghetti. So while I didn’t get to spend much of the hurricane with Scott Speedman, I also didn’t starve, which is a good thing.

After I finished my spaghetti and did some proofreading by the light of my new candlesticks, I got in the car and headed over to stay with my friend Chris, who still had power. (Before you say anything, I realize that driving during a hurricane was possibly not the smartest move, but I can assure you that it was much less perilous than driving in a blizzard. Not that I was actually driving then, per se, but I was the only one seeing there for a while, so it counts.) Anyway, Chris wouldn’t indulge my Felicity obsession (I need to educate him on the finer points of Scott Speedman, apparently), so we made popcorn and drank wine and watched a movie (Clockwatchers) until we (and by “we,” I mean “I”) started to nod off. Just as I had gotten into bed, finished reading a chapter of my book, and got ready to turn out the light, his power went out. Nice timing once again, power.

Always be prepared
Due to the impending arrival of Hurricane Katrina, we got off work at 2:00 today. I decided to use some of my sudden free time to make a few last-minute hurricane preparations. This time, though, I didn't stock up on E-Z cheese; rather, I went by the library and checked out the Felicity Season 3 DVD. Now I'm just fervently praying that my power won't go out. Just in case, I've already watched my Felicity holy grail ("Hello, I Must Be Going," also known as "the one where Julie goes apeshit and leaves the show"). I just hope it holds out long enough for me to watch the season premiere ("The Christening"), which is one of my all-time favorite Felicity episodes.

I realize that most people in my situation would be worried about the power going out because it might get really hot, or because all of the groceries I bought yesterday might spoil. But you must realize that most people (with the exception of Chase, of course) do not have the same level of obsession for this show as I do. I also realize that for most people, hurricane preparedness means stocking up on water, batteries, and non-perishable foods rather than Felicity DVDs, but again, I am not most people. And I don't really mind starving to death, as long as I have Scott Speedman with me when I go.

Two girls, one Saturday afternoon: A side-by-side comparison

This is what I did on my Saturday afternoon: went to the pool, ate a cheese-less cheeseburger (some might call this a hamburger) from Sonic, cleaned my bathroom

This is what my friend Nikki did on her Saturday afternoon: went to the art museum, ate a muffin, got engaged

I've got to say, I think her Saturday afternoon trumps mine. I mean, maybe, maybe if they'd actually put the cheese on my cheeseburger, I would have been in contention. But still, a muffin?! There's no way I could compete with that. Muffins are awesome!

I jest, of course. (Well, not about the awesomeness of muffins, because they are indeed awesome.) Congratulations, Nikki! On the engagement and the muffin.

"After a lot of thought, I'd like to reconsider. Please, if it's not too late, make it a...cheeseburger."

I would ask what part of the word "cheeseburger" the girl who took my order at Sonic did not understand, but clearly it was the "cheese" part.

It's just not the same without the cheese, is it?

Ben brought this on himself, you know
Unlike my long-lost blog twin, I do not blame Ben Affleck for all of the ills in this world. In fact, I only blame him for one: the term “Bennifer” (which is no doubt being added to the next edition of Webster’s as we speak), and the celebrity name-combining frenzy it has inspired. I groaned at Brangelina, but I let it slide. I grudgingly learned to live with TomKat. I attempted to embrace the whole “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” motto with my own creation, Kennée (which, honestly, I can’t believe I haven’t seen anywhere else yet). I finally drew the line at Scartnett, but apparently that line wasn’t drawn clearly enough.

So I draw it again, this time with BenGar. Seriously, people! Ben Affleck does not merit two distinct relationship name combos. He got us into this whole mess by dating someone named Jennifer in the first place, so why should he get a new name combo when he starts dating someone else named Jennifer? In my opinion, Ben Affleck should be forced to wear the scourge of Bennifer for the rest of eternity (or at least until he stops dating, getting married to, and/or having babies with people named Jennifer, which, considering that he’s still got Aniston to go through after he’s done with Garner, won’t likely be any time soon). If a differentiation must be made between J.Lo and J.Gar (hmm, maybe I should be blaming Jennifer Lopez for these annoying name-shortening trends), can’t we just go with “Bennifer II,” “Bennifer Part Deux,” or—my personal favorite—“Bennifer 2.0”?

That said, I do have to admit that I found Ben’s SNL “Bennifer” spoof pretty entertaining (particularly when he pulled out the T-shirt that read “Mary-Kate and Ashfleck”). But that was a long time ago. My patience is wearing thin, Ben. Or should I call you Bennifer?

I may never have to buy another CD again
This is the beauty of having a co-worker who has similar taste in music and also owns approximately 40,000 CDs, all of which she’s uploaded to iTunes. Last night, I fell in love with a Damien Rice song (“Delicate”) after hearing it on Lost, and by this morning, I had managed to copy the entire CD over to my personal music library. She even threw in the new Coldplay CD for good measure. I meant it when I said my CD buying days might be over. Hmm, I wonder if she has any Iron & Wine…

Because nothing says “I love you” like produce
This morning I was talking to Kristen, whose second wedding anniversary happens to be today. She mentioned that, for their anniversary, she and Jason were getting trees removed from their yard. This didn’t exactly sound like the traditional second-anniversary gift, but I couldn’t really remember what the traditional second-anniversary gift was supposed to be, so I went on Google to find out. (It’s cotton, in case you care. And since cotton and trees are both technically plants, I guess having trees removed could be sort of related to cotton, if you really want to stretch it.)

Anyway, the list I found gave both traditional and modern gift suggestions, going all the way up to the 100th anniversary, for which the gift is a 10-carat diamond. (And yeah, I guess if you make it to your 100th anniversary, you deserve a 10-carat diamond.) While the traditional gifts are generally pretty boring (and tend to peter out as the years pass), the modern gifts provided me with a few laughs. For example:

For the seventh anniversary: Desk sets. Note to future husband: If you buy me a desk set for our seventh anniversary, there will be no eighth anniversary.

For the twenty-fourth anniversary: Musical instruments. Happy anniversary, darling! Please accept this accordion as a token of my love.

For the thirty-first anniversary: Timepieces. If anyone out there can tell me how this differs from the first anniversary gift of “clocks,” I’d love to hear it.

For the forty-first/forty-second anniversaries: Land/Improved real estate. So I guess for the forty-second anniversary, you have to buy your sweetheart better land than you bought her the year before.

Forty-fourth anniversary: Groceries. This is my personal favorite. My parents will be celebrating their forty-fourth anniversary in 10 years, so I'm planning on getting them a nice head of lettuce. Maybe I'll even throw in a jar of spaghetti sauce, too.

That new furniture smell
It’s almost as seductive as the new car smell, but much cheaper to obtain. After several hours spent at IKEA yesterday (even I, being the IKEA romantic that I am, was starting to get weary by the end of it), I arrived home with a new kitchen table and two new chairs. Most of last night found me camped out on the living room floor, wielding my power drill while surrounded by wood, screws, and empty boxes.

As much trouble as I had trying to assemble a microwave cart from Target a couple of years ago, I expected assembling the table and chairs to be every bit as stressful. But it was actually pretty simple, which either means that my carpentry skills have improved, or IKEA’s instructions are far superior to Target’s. I think it might be the latter—it’s amazing how much easier instructions are to follow when they’re not accompanied by words.

In addition to the table and chairs, I also bought the candlesticks from my last post (which do indeed look really cute on the new table), plus a few other small items. My favorite purchase ended up being a striped lampshade that I never would have noticed had Terri not called me over to get my opinion on a similar one she was thinking of buying. That’s the great thing about IKEA—you can indulge in impulse buys without too much remorse.

Of course, as soon as I had assembled everything and placed it just so in my apartment, I immediately thought of several other things I should have bought. Like seat cushions for my kitchen chairs. Or a couple of folding chairs to use for extra seating at dinner parties. Plus, they didn’t have the rug I wanted in stock, so it looks like another quick trip to Atlanta is in order soon. As if I needed an excuse to go back.

On love
So I realize that not everyone in the world feels the same way I do about IKEA. The Tyrant, for instance, has an ambivalent relationship with IKEA, which is perfectly understandable under her unique circumstances. Also, Edward Norton in Fight Club does not particularly care for IKEA, either, which is slightly less understandable since he was kind of totally insane.

But that does not change the way I feel about IKEA, which is an almost visceral love that has burned away in my heart since that fateful day five years ago when Lisa first introduced me to IKEA in Denmark. My heart starts beating faster, and I am overcome with a giddy, lightheaded feeling as I thumb through the new catalog, which I have been doing (virtually, sadly, as the printed copies can't be ordered yet) for this entire week in preparation for my visit to the new Atlanta store this weekend.

Why do I love IKEA so? Well, for me, it represents everything that is good in the world: products that are aesthetically pleasing, yet cheap. This is the reason why I also love stores such as Target and H&M, but IKEA is really the apex of this principle--nowhere else have I ever found things that are so aesthetically pleasing and still so cheap.

There's more to it, though, for it is this vision set forth by IKEA that I want to build my life around--or, more specifically, the driving force behind the magazine I want to start (which will, naturally, eventually evolve into a multimedia empire). Merely looking at the new catalog has inspired me to resurrect this dream. And it didn't even take the whole catalog to do it! Why, all the motivation I needed was right in this candlestick:


Take a good look at this candlestick, friends! It is the candlestick that will launch an empire. And one day you will all be able to look back and say, "I knew her when she was just a girl with a dream. A dream and a candlestick."

Unfortunately, I'm not even going to be able to buy said candlestick when I go to the store, as I have put myself on a strict IKEA budget, confined only to the purchases I really need, such as a new kitchen table and rug for my living room. (And honestly, these are not so much things I need as they are things I "need.") Still, I think I might have to splurge and shell out $10 for a pair of candlesticks, seeing as they are the inspiration for my empire and all. Plus, they would just look so cute on my new kitchen table.

Reverse psychology: Working on kickboxing instructors since 2005
In the past couple of weeks, my friend Robyn and I have stumbled upon the discovery that the difficulty of our Wednesday-night kickboxing class is inversely proportional to our wish for it to be so. As in, the more we express our desire (usually sarcastically) before class for our sadistic teacher to be hard on us, the easier the class is. (Before this, I harbored a theory that her level of brutality would increase if she were wearing her smiley-face wristband, but it turns out this was merely an annoying accessory.)

Last night, since neither of us were in the mood for kickboxing (not that we’re ever really in the mood to be tortured), we were pretty over-the-top with our tactic. “I hope she’s really, really, really brutal tonight,” Robyn said as we walked to class. “Yeah,” I countered, “like so brutal that we won’t be able to walk tomorrow.”

And what do you know? It worked! It worked so well, in fact, that it kept our usual sadistic teacher away from class, and therefore we had a sub, whose entire workout wasn’t even as difficult as the warm-up in our regular class. (And who seemed rather impressed that, while she was heaving and panting up at the front of the room, the rest of us had barely broken a sweat. She clearly has no idea what we usually have to go through.)

Still, as we left the class, I found that I actually kind of missed feeling like I was about to keel over and die. Who knew? Maybe I’m a masochist after all.

OK, maybe I spoke too soon
I'm beginning to realize that I could have all the men I want, if only I were five years old. Sadly, I haven't been five years old for about 20 years now, and the fact that the only boys who seem to flirt with me these days are in the single digits, age wise, is just starting to get kind of depressing.

Is it possible that, sometime in the recent past, under the influence of an unspecified substance, I could have gotten a tattoo on my forehead that reads "Parents, please let me entertain your children while you sunbathe/read a book/canoodle with your spouse in the shallow end/otherwise find some way to ignore the repeated shouts of, 'Watch! Watch! Watch!' Really! Don't let the fact that I am swimming in the lap lane fool you into thinking that I am actually trying to swim laps." Nah, I think I'd remember something like that, inebriated or not.

So then is it possible that, after working at a baby magazine for so long, I've started to develop some maternal instinct that has begun to seep out of my pores and attract attention-starved pool children, despite my best attempts to supress it? God, how frightening.

Or maybe it's just that the kids have read my blog and word has gotten around that I'm willing to watch their death-defying feats in return for some cute little anecdote to laugh about at dinner parties and write a blog post about the next day. Eh, as long as they keep the assholes away from me, who am I to complain?

Out of the mouths of babes, part 2
I've decided that I'm only hanging out with four-year-olds at the pool from now on. Not only do they keep me from having to listen to diatribes from annoying assholes, they're also pretty entertaining. Witness part of a conversation I had today with Richard, this little kid who will strike up a conversation with basically anyone who looks his way. (I guess he hasn't had the whole "Don't talk to strangers" lesson yet.) Earlier this week, he was showing me his "muscles," and today, he was demonstrating how he could put his "head" (which I soon figured out only meant his mouth) underwater.

Me: Wow, where'd you learn to swim like that?
Him: The Internet.

Clueless in the digital age
Remember that scene in Clueless where Cher says that she never trusts mirrors and therefore always takes Polaroids? Well, I have to confess that ever since I got my digital camera last year, I've often thought about translating this idea to real life. I mean, it's true! Sometimes you just can't trust mirrors.

Last night, I was getting ready to go out and couldn't decide what I wanted to wear with the shirt I bought at the Kookai outlet in Paris. Should I go slightly punky with a black skirt and knee-high boots, or should I go for casual glam with jeans and heels? The mirror was no help in this instance, as I really needed to see both outfits side-by-side to make an informed decision. And then it hit me--break out the digital camera!

I set the camera's auto-timer and took a photo of myself in each outfit, which I then had to crop, because I was standing too far away to really be able to see the outfit well in the picture. I flipped back and forth for a minute or two, debating the merits of each outfit, before I looked at the clock and realized I had wasted so much time fooling around taking pictures of myself that I didn't have time to change again and would just have to wear the outfit I already had on (which, fortunately, was the one that looked marginally better in the pictures).

It just goes to show, I guess, that there are some ideas that are best left in movies. Then again, maybe I just need a Polaroid camera.

They don't lie at Disneyland
A couple of days ago, I received a comment from a complete stranger who had found my blog, and subsequently my novel, through Kristin's blog (which she came across randomly, I later discovered, via a Blogger interest search). She was excited that I had chosen her hometown--Athens, Ohio--as the setting for my big soccer/sprinkler/kissing scene. I confessed that I had actually just picked Athens at random off a map, and it wasn't until an embarrassing length of time had passed that I realized it was also the hometown of my good buddy Dave Gustafson. (Apparently when you're writing a novel in a month, the memory's the first thing to go.) Anyway, as it turns out, she actually graduated from high school with Gusto. See? It is a small world after all!

Ill-advised advertising decisions: the Lost edition
Man, the advertising placement during Lost really cracks me up sometimes. (And by sometimes, I mean quite infrequently, as I hardly ever actually watch the commercials. I'm going to have to curb my channel-flipping habit soon, though, now that Chase will be appearing on the small screen in a Lexus commercial.)

Several weeks ago, I happened to see the very end of a commercial for Oceanic Air (i.e., the airline that, on the show, crashed off course and got them all stranded in the first place), featuring a nice shot of a tropical-looking island that bore a striking resemblance to the setting of Lost. As I missed most of the commercial, I'm not sure what its message was, but I can only assume it was something along the lines of, "Wanna get stranded on a deserted island with Matthew Fox? Fly Oceanic Air!" Hmm, actually, that's not such a bad advertising strategy, as long as they leave out the parts about potentially getting eaten by polar bears and stuff.

Which brings us to tonight's stellar advertising placement decision. Right as people on the show are about to get eaten by a polar bear, we cut to a commercial in which Dennis Franz issues a warning about the dangers of trying to keep exotic animals as pets. Because I know that when I see people about to get eaten by a really scary-looking polar bear, it makes me want to run right out and adopt one as a pet. Thank God Dennis Franz talked some sense into me before it was too late.

Don't even ask*
My day started with a huge fight about glitter necklaces and ended with an attempt (in vain, as it turns out) to rescue an injured hawk.

And here I was really hoping that it wasn't going to be one of those weeks.

*No, really. Don't.**
**You're going to ask anyway, aren't you?

This is not making my day a whole lot better
Last week, I bought gas for $2.19 a gallon. Today, I noticed that the price has since gone up to $2.39 a gallon. Clearly, if I keep driving to work every day, by the end of the year, it's going to have cost me approximately $27,000. (Ed. note: This may be a slight exaggeration.) Given this, I spent the rest of my drive home brainstorming alternative methods for getting to and from work.

-Walking. I've estimated that, to do this, I would have to leave my house approximately three hours (Ed. note: This is not an exaggeration) earlier than I normally do in the morning and would get home approximately three hours later. After the first week, I figure I'll either be in really, really good shape, or I'll be dead. I'm not sure that's a chance I want to take.

-Bike. This is much more feasible than walking (or it would be if I actually had a bike, but I hear they're not hard to obtain), but the likelihood that I would die increases tenfold, due to the craziness of most of Birmingham's drivers.

-Pony. Unfortunately, I was never one of those kids rich enough to have my own pony. Now that I'm out on my own, I'm definitely not one of those adults rich enough to have my own pony. Besides, if I did have one, I'd be afraid that the aforementioned crazy drivers would soon claim the life of both me and my pony. And that would be sad.

-Hitchhiking. This seems like a pretty feasible solution, until you consider that my chances of getting into a car with one of the aforementioned crazy drivers are very high.

-Begging my friends for rides. I have a feeling this would make me very unpopular with most, if not all, of my friends. Especially when I informed them that I wouldn't be chipping in any gas money.

-Hot-air balloon. I love this solution, but I'm afraid it might be a little high-maintenance. Besides, even though I could probably find parking for a hot-air balloon at work, I doubt the garage at my apartment complex would be big enough to hold it.

-Private jet. While I wouldn't mind having my own private jet, the reality is that I would probably waste more gas getting to an airstrip where I could take off in my private jet than I would just driving to work in the first place. Plus, if it costs me this much to gas up my car, could you imagine the expense of fueling a jet? Yikes.

-By some sort of contraption (a harness, possibly?) transported by homing pigeons. Considering how much I hate pigeons, this really isn't a viable option at all.

-Public transportation. Let's be honest here. In this city, I'd have more luck with the homing pigeon contraption thingy.

-By rearranging my molecular structure. Of all my ideas, this one seems to have the most potential. Every time I take a trip with my dad, he assures me that this idea of his (which he finally admitted he blatantly stole from Star Trek) will come to fruition in my lifetime. Well, it's my lifetime. When can I start rearranging?

Meant to be
Yesterday afternoon, I was watching the Rosanna Arquette documentary Searching for Debra Winger, and one of the actresses she interviewed was talking about the lack of female writers and directors in Hollywood. Naturally, this led me to daydream about how awesome it would be if my novel were optioned as a screenplay. (I realize that for this to happen, more people than just my friends and friends of friends would have to read it, but whatever. Indulge me.)

Truth be told, this is not the first time I’ve thought about the novel being made into a movie or, more specifically, who I’d want cast in the movie. I’ve always thought Katie Holmes would have the right look and spunky personality to play Julia, but I’d be wary of comparisons to First Daughter. (And believe me, I want to distance myself from that movie as much as possible.) Plus, I’m not too jazzed about the thought of Crazy Cruise hanging around the set, stealing my leading lady away for make-out photo ops every five minutes. No, Katie Holmes clearly wouldn’t work.

So I turned to my second choice: Rachel Bilson, who, when you think about it, is really just the Katie Holmes for a new generation. Brunette? Check. Spunky? Check. Rose to prominence playing an adorable girl next door on teen melodrama? Check. And her boyfriend, while rumored to be somewhat of an ass in real life, still possesses the promising trait of not being completely insane. Perfect.

Later that night, I happened to be leafing through the latest issue of QuizFest (thank you, Anne) and came across a sidebar about Rachel Bilson in which she says that she would like her choices of movie roles to be similar to Katie Holmes’. Is that fate or what? Not only that, but she also reveals that she’s a huge Jeff Buckley fan, which means she would probably greatly appreciate the prominence of the song “Hallelujah” in my story. (Even though Julia technically favors the Leonard Cohen version, but whatever. Rachel is an actress. She can act like she prefers the Leonard Cohen version.) And she’s currently filming a movie with Zach Braff, which means maybe we could convince him to direct the movie. And then, of course, he would fall madly in love with me and dump Mandy Moore, and we would live happily ever after.

Now if I can just find a studio exec who will read my novel, want to turn it into a movie, and give me full reign to choose both the cast and director. Shouldn’t be too hard.

The story about Peter Jennings you won’t hear anywhere else
In the next few days, I imagine we’ll probably all hear lots of stories about the (now) late great Peter Jennings. But there’s one story you’re probably not going to hear elsewhere, unless you happen to be talking to my friend Cara. This is the story of how Peter Jennings learned about the Backstreet Boys.

During the summer of 2001, Cara’s internship at World News Tonight coincided with Backstreet Boy A.J. McLean’s admission into rehab. ABC planned to run a short piece about it during the evening newscast, but there was one problem: Peter Jennings, who, according to Cara, knew pretty much everything, admitted that he had no idea who the Backstreet Boys were. So Cara, being the teen pop aficionado that she is, explained to him the finer points of boy bands. However, I’m not sure Cara’s love of the genre quite transferred to Peter Jennings, because apparently, during the newscast, he said something along the lines of, “A.J. McLean, member of the boy band—yes, folks, that’s what they actually call them—the Backstreet Boys…”

Still, I think we can all take solace in the fact that Peter Jennings died knowing who the Backstreet Boys were, even if he never really learned to appreciate them.

Out of the mouths of babes
Apparently, yesterday was the last day of swim lessons for the four-year-olds at the Y. As a treat, they got to spend the time playing in the outdoor pool. I happened to be heading out to the pool at the same time and noticed one little girl in the group who wasn't wearing shoes, and therefore was trailing a little behind. As I came up behind her, she turned around to look at me, turned back, then whipped around to scrutinize me again.

"You look like someone on TV," she told me. "Really, who?" I asked, secretly hoping she would say Jennifer Garner, although I was pretty sure most parents don't let their four-year-olds watch Alias. "The lady on Garfield!" she cried, as if she couldn't believe I wasn't aware of my small-screen doppelganger. Not being well-versed in the culture of four-year-olds, I had no idea if I should take this as a compliment or an insult.

Once I got up to the pool, I learned that a few of the four-year-olds (including Rachel, the girl who pointed out my TV twin) felt that swim-lesson play time gave them license to play with anyone who happened to be in the pool. One particularly gregarious little guy named Joseph asked me to help him over the rope into the lap lane, then requested that I watch as he dazzled me with a series of increasingly elaborate cannonballs. I would probably still be at the pool watching him do cannonballs if not for the mercy of the lifeguard, who managed to distract him long enough to allow me to go back to swimming laps. (That's the good thing about four-year-olds. They're easily distracted.)

My exit from the pool, however, did not go unnoticed by my new buddy. He saw me wrapping a towel around myself and asked where I was going. I told him it was time for me to go home, which elicited the universally favored query of four-year-olds: the plaintive yet simple "Why?" Not knowing how best to explain concepts like "freelance proofreading" and "ER rerun," I told him I had to eat dinner and go to bed. "But it's not even dark outside," he said, looking at me like I was crazy.

Four-year-old logic. You've gotta love it.

Nostalgia, with a side of inspiration
While my parents were here at the beginning of the week, my mom left me with several stacks of pictures. She'd finally gotten around to organizing our photos from the last decade and a half, and she'd taken the duplicates first to my sister and then to me to take out the ones we wanted. She said my sister had taken about 20 of the pictures to keep. I found it hard to be so selective.

I started thumbing through the pictures last night, intending only to occupy myself during the commercial breaks in Lost, but as I thumbed through years of birthdays, first days of school, band performances, O.M. skits, family vacations, the dog dressed up in funny hats, proms, graduations, and new apartments, it became clear that this wasn't an activity that I could just put aside and pick up later. I had to keep going until I'd seen it all.

I wanted to cry when I saw how young we all looked--me, my sister, my parents, my grandparents, my friends. As I looked at a picture that my dad took of me on the first day of my senior year of high school, I chastized myself for not knowing, or not believing, how beautiful I was.

It was hard to pick a favorite. There was the one of me sitting at the kitchen table after O.M. practice, wearing a paint-splattered sweatshirt, jeans, and my dad's baseball cap, eating ice cream from the carton while reading a Baby-sitters Club book. There was the Christmas picture of my sister, my cousin, and me, in which my sister for some reason looks like she's stoned out to the edge of oblivion. (She wasn't, obviously. She was like 9.) There was the one from a family trip to Williamsburg, in which my mom and sister and I are sitting in a booth at a pub, our glasses clinked together, as my sister is simultaneously shoving food in her face.

I knew my favorite, though, the instant I saw it, and I went immediately to put it up on my fridge. It's a picture of the maple tree in our front yard, obviously taken in winter, because the limbs are entirely bare. Halfway up the tree, I'm sitting in my favorite perch, wearing one of the many ill-advised outfits that plagued my adolescent years. During that time, the tree was my retreat, my haven, a place where I could get away from the world. Eventually, I grew out of it and found my solace elsewhere. Before my parents moved out of the house, they had several of the tree's lower branches removed, a fact that upset me so much that I still refuse to drive by it. I want the tree to exist forever in my mind as it does in that picture--perfect, untouched by time, the things that I carved there still undiscovered by anyone else--so that maybe, if I need to, I can still escape for an hour or two.

Wired
A very wise man who occasionally (although not so much lately, I would guess) goes by the name of Flosso told me recently that when going to lunch is considered part of your job, it's a very good thing. Today, I learned that the same maxim is true for going to tea, which is what I spent the better part of my afternoon doing. As far as I can tell, the only downside to spending the afternoon in this manner is that approximately seven cups of tea (I lost count after awhile; it's kind of like wine that way) can have quite an effect on someone who normally avoids caffiene. And while the jolt was welcome for this evening's kickboxing class (the many scones and tea sandwiches consumed shortly before class, not so much), it could make going to bed tonight rather interesting.

And, as if all this excitement weren't enough, I just received a text message from Chase, telling me that he's just met my future husband. Well, maybe not husband, exactly. My future...what's the male form of mistress? Mister? Anyway, if the audio commentary on the Felicity DVDs taught me anything, it's that Scott Speedman is best seen and not heard, unless he's reading lines written by other, much more intelligent people. But he's so pretty that I'd just like to keep him around for, you know, recreational purposes. Hopefully Chase can arrange this.

I'm so busy it's giving me hiccups.
No, really. That's the only explanation I can find (other than the interruption of my all-water-all-the-time routine with two Sprites, drunk to ease a stomach that was already upset from eating scrambled eggs for breakfast even before reading Christa's vaguely disgusting post on the subject) as to why I have had the hiccups no fewer than six times today. Thank God the failproof hiccup cure given to me by one of my dad's cousins a long time ago (take three deep breaths; on the third, hold for 20 seconds; if you hiccup during the process, you must start over) seems to have worked so far. Because honestly, I'm this close to trying the failproof hiccup cure given to me by my fourth grade teacher a long time ago (hold your breath for 20 minutes).

Is this week over yet?