Twelve years ago my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. A lumpectomy, radiation treatments and no small amount of tears and stress followed, but she has been cancer free since that time. This is something I am quite happy to report.

Given the fact that breast cancer seems to run in families, not to mention the latest news that us lefties apparently have a higher risk (thanks to R for pointing that out) - I’m considered a high risk. I consider myself an even higher risk, since I’ve so far shown signs of inheriting just about every other medical ill my mother carries (Which is a lot, lemme tell you!), and I lived in a cancer cluster area for 13 of my formative years.

Breast cancer research is a cause that is near and dear to my bosoms, as you might imagine. October, while being the month of my birth, is also Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Honestly, I’m not much of the activist type despite my strong opinions on many matters (because I usually prefer to simply support those who better articulate these things) but this is one of those things that I really, really, really care about, so I’m trying to work up some giving to the cause.

It is in that spirit that I have submitted a photo of my aforementioned ta-tas to Boobie-Thon. The concept of there being a picture of my rack floating around out there on the Internet is a bit daunting, to be sure, but I have little spare money to contribute to the cause. In place of that a picture of my melons seems appropriate, seeing as how more research in the field of breast cancer will hopefully mean I get to keep these knockers for the rest of my life. Plus, it meant I got to have a conversation with my mother earlier this week that began, “Soon there will be a picture of your only child’s boobies posted on the Internet!” That was a moment well worth the price.

(And I’ll stop with the euphemisms; it was getting a bit silly. I’ll just stick with my favorite - which is boobies. It’s just such a silly word. I love it.)

I urge you all to consider participating - either by a monetary donation or a picture of your own boobies. And yes, men can share too! In fact, more men should share. Not only is it a disease that boys can also have, I want to see more of those sorts of pictures in the gallery, you know?

NO! No, before anyone asks, and I can already foretell who will, I will not tell you which ones are mine. Yes, yes, I know. You’ll just have to pick a set and pretend they’re mine if you’re that intent on seeing them.

You know, one day my boyfriend is going to stumble across this blog and he is really going to wonder what exactly it is I’m up to when I’m back here in my lair…

Ok, I’ll finally admit it: I can no longer claim that I don’t watch a lot of TV. (Though I’m sure by now no one believed me on that anyway, since I seem to talk about TV a lot.) I never was really one to wear that claim as a badge of honor as many people do; I’m not an anti-TV evangelist. I’ve all along believed that there could be good TV; it was just a medium that wasn’t quite living up to its potential and I simply lost interest in the shows. Whenever I had to answer the question “what are your favorite TV shows?” the answers were always cartoons, a few pay network shows, and old comedy stuff like Kids In The Hall. It just seemed to me that so much of what was on was silly, pandering, and dumbed down.

A lot’s changed in the last few years apparently, and I somehow missed the revolution. I’m catching up though!

Battlestar Galactica was the first one to hook me. My boyfriend’s baffling ability to enjoy anything that has a sci-fi twist to it came in handy for once. Who knew?

Dan successfully hooked me to Alias and even though the first few epidodes of season 4 left me a little bummed, I’ve set up the DVR to record TNT’s airing of the 4th season, as well as the 5th season that starts tomorrow. I’ll be a month behind everyone else, but I’m going to catch up soon.

Then there was Lost. Though I’ll admit I’d dismissed all the people who told me it was great TV before, after getting hooked to Alias I decided to give it a chance, thanks in no small part to the fact that J.J. Abrams is the creator of both shows. Damned if the people weren’t dead on. I’m hooked, and all I can say is thank goodness for the DVR, since I don’t leave the store till 9 PM on Wednesdays. Though I really wish they’d just explain HOW THE HELL DESMOND GOT ON THE DAMN ISLAND ALREADY. Um, pardon me. Tonight’s episode was just a weeeee bit frustrating for me.

Then today I popped in disc 1 of the first season of Desperate Housewives to play at the store as I checked in the boxes of rainbow stuff the UPS man dumped off. I was completely against this show at the outset; I rolled my eyes whenever anyone mentioned it, almost as an automatic reaction. I have to break that habit now, because, dammit, count me in. It’s hysterically funny, smartly written, and never, ever, ever would I have thought a line like “Rex cries after he ejaculates” would have me in tears. I’m only through episode 4, and I’m not going to be able to catch up to the season that’s airing now (especially since the boyfriend’s reaction to my revelation of fandom was “Yeah… that’s one you’ll be watching by yourself. No interest whatsoever.”), but I’ve added it to my list of favorite shows at TV.com (which is a nearly seperate addiction of its own…).

As a personal challenge, I’m really going to try not to discuss my theories and frustrations with the high concept shows here - I do that enough with my friends who are also watching these show, and I’m sure it’s damn boring to anyone who hasn’t been following along. But - be warned - if next Wednesday’s episdode of Lost doesn’t give me at least a little bit more on the topic of HOW DESMOND CAME TO BE IN A FUCKING HOLE IN THE EARTH ON A (not-so)DESERTED ISLAND, I will most likely be bitching up a storm. This is information I clearly need to know to continue maintaining my calm, peaceful, and happy existence.

So if I disappear again for a little while, you can probably safely assume that my tube watching has completely engulfed my brain, thus making it so all I can think of to talk or write about is TV. I might need an intervention… just please, wait till the Desmond thing is worked out, will ya?

I eat a lot of IHOP food these days. I do not proclaim this with any sense of pride, it’s just a fact. It’s cheap, made even more so by the buy-one-get-one-free coupons we have most of the time, it’s close to the apartment, and it’s easy for me to pick stuff from the menu that jives with my whole low-carb thing. I’d rather regularly patronize a locally owned small business if I could, but the only locally owned place that actually compares on all of the aforementioned points is The Diner on Clifton. I adore the Diner, but I can’t smoke in there. Given the likelihood that I won’t be able to smoke in any restaurant soon enough, I choose to dine where I can relax a bit after eating.

I eat there so often, a portion of the staff knows me on sight. I’m usually there one day during the week with my boyfriend, and recently I’ve spent a few Saturday nights after work there with my dearest fruit, Dan. (The Lakewood IHOP at 9:30 PM on a Saturday night is the best place to relax, chat, eat, drink, and smoke… because it’s usually completely deserted. Which is what Dan and I need, as we tend to get a little um… goofy and loud. Any outside observer would probably swear that we were high. A less tolerant or more busy establishment might not be able to deal with us.)

This past Thursday as my boyfriend and I were being seated, the waitress who usually ends up stuck with the slightly insane power-giggling duo of me and Dan on Saturday nights waved from a few paces away. At that moment it struck me that she was used to seeing me there with a different guy, and I can’t help but wonder if she thought about that. My boyfriend and I got a kick out of the idea that I might have a bad rep at the IHOP.

Our waitress that night was one we didn’t normally see in the restaurant, an older lady who said she usually worked the morning shift. She remarked that she’d been told that we were regulars and we were really nice people. With a slightly devilish grin, I said, “Yeah, I come here a lot. I’m here with him during the week and with another guy on the weekends.”

She just arched one eyebrow and turned to clear the table without further comment.

A couple of days ago a guy and a girl walked into City Dweller, walked around for a few minutes, then the guy came to the counter. “So what new stuff have you got in?” Since this was someone I didn’t recognize as a regular, I had to ask when he was last in to gauge what stuff would be new since his last visit. “Oh… it’s probably been a year or so.”

Like I can tell you what’s new, throughout the whole store, in the last year?

So I tried to narrow it down a little by asking what kind of stuff he was looking for. “You know, fun accoutrements, like a fondue pot. A cute fondue pot.” (No, I’m not kidding, he used the word accoutrements to refer to a “cute fondue pot”.) I just stared at him, slightly dumbfounded, for a few moments, and all I could think to respond with was, “Um, we don’t really carry a lot of things like fondue pots. We have some barware, a few cute coffee mugs and such…” and I trailed off without a clue as to which direction to go from there.

He sighed (not without a large amount of attitude) and walked over and whispered something to his girlfriend, at which point they both snickered a little then left.

I am still quite confused by that encounter.

A couple of posts back I dropped a little line in that I’m thinking of participating in NaNoWriMo. (National Novel Writing Month - seriously, go check out the site. It’s good reading even if you’re not interested in trying it.) Step one in starting to actually do it.

It’s kind of like deciding to go on a diet: until you tell someone else you’re thinking about doing it, no one knows that you’ve already postponed the start day 15 times. Once you tell someone you’re thinking about it, then that person might call you on the burger and fries you just ordered instead of the salad you know should be eating. That one little offhand comment was my declaration of intent.

Then there’s the step where you admit that you started the diet. The other person has the opening to really lay into you about the junk food after that point (which of course is when you start sneaking it in when no one’s watching). That’s where I am now; this is where I state that I *am* going to participate in NaNoWriMo. Hopefully though, I can do this without guiltily avoiding the writing that needs to be done.

I started a story outline the other night. (This is within the bounds of the rules according to the often amusing FAQ.) Not being formally educated, and never having actually completed even a short story that was fiction (I can write for hours about something that actually happened, but the creativity for fiction is not one of my strong points), I don’t really even have the first clue what I’m doing. But I’ve got a story idea, and it seems like this will be a good exercise. Now I just have to figure out where that story idea is going exactly, which is where I’ve always gotten stuck before. I know my character, I know the situation, I just can’t figure out what the point of the story is yet.

This might be some insight as to why my entries here never really seem to have any relevant point… I’m just telling stories. No morals, no happily ever after, just stories. If I’m going to do this, looks like I’ve got some habits to break.

An big day for me is quickly approaching. On October 14, I will be marking the 10th anniversary of my 21st birthday party.

This statement could be read in several ways. You could be thinking that I’m making a coy statement about the fact that I will soon be turning 31. Or you could be thinking I’m trying to take a sly approach in announcing that my birthday is coming (though the date of that momentous occasion is actually October 12.) Or you might even be thinking, given my penchant for telling stories based in nostalgia, that I’ve got a little tale to tell about that party.

Turning 31 actually seems a little stranger than 30 did, but I do not intend to be coy about my age. I don’t have a problem with aging, as I’m still a big kid (as I’ve mentioned before) and I think I’m aging quite gracefully in the physical sense, if you’ll pardon the bit of an ego trip there.

However, I am a total attention whore about my birthday. I make sure that everyone I know is well aware of it’s imminence, and I am not in the least embarrassed to admit that. I am not going through the whole “Oh, don’t make a big deal over little ole me” game. Nah. Make as big a deal as you want. I will enjoy every last second of it with a huge grin on my face. This is not a ploy to get gifts, it is simply a ploy for attention. A shameless and brazen one. (Plus I do really like to celebrate birthdays - mine and others. I think it’s a great thing that we get to celebrate another year down. I don’t really understand why so many people get all uptight and weird about it.)

But more importantly, I do have a little tale to tell, as I’m sure you’d guessed by now. I can be a bit predictable at times, I suppose.

Sherman, set the wayback machine for 1995; I want to take these folks to a birthday party.

(more…)

Ahh, the lure of the idiot box.

In reality, I’ve never been much of a slave to the television. It’s the one category of the pop culture edition of Trvial Pursuit that can snag me (but that is the only only category that trips me up - I still remain the champ among my crowd). I know the major points, but really that’s just what I’ve picked up in conversations or from the bits I’ve read while partaking of my ritual-like reading of Entertainment Weekly¹. The trivial details mostly escape me. I just don’t watch that much TV overall.

The reason why is hard to explain actually. I just find that TV shows rarely capture my attention. Cartoons, both kiddie and adult in nature, are the biggest exception to the rule. But occasionally a TV show featuring real people (or at least real people portraying characters) will snag me. This happened with Queer As Folk (even though the last season pretty much blew chunks, I watched it all the way through), Battlestar Galactica (the latest season isn’t quite as gripping as the first season was honestly, but it’s still a good show) and most recently - as I mentioned previously - Alias. (We’re watching it all on DVD though, as I’d never been able to catch up for the broadcast.)

Alias is just brilliant to me. Every time I think I’ve got something figured out the writers reach through the screen, smack me on the head, and say, “Silly girl! There’s no WAY you could have seen that coming!” The story line is complicated and complex, it’s twisty and turny, and the setting (that being the world of intelligence, via the CIA) is ripe with deceits and ulterior motives. The background story has mystery and a bit of a riff on the nature of religion. Even the underlying love story is decently written, and while it does get a little smoochy for me sometimes, even one as jaded and cynical as I can appreciate the soul mate nature of the relationship.

All of this praise has held true through the third season. (Well, except for one cheesy little gadget moment that broke all bounds of believability… but I’ll forgive them that for the rest of the brilliance.) But we’ve just started watching the fourth season (thanks to, um, tapes that someone made…) and I have to say that I’m getting a little disappointed. The underlying stories seem to have taken a back seat to the mission driven stories, and it seems dumbed down. It’s not as complicated, not as twisty, and well, boring. The episode we watched earlier this evening (that being season 4 episode 4), despite what I think was a bit of a reference to Cat’s Cradle (my absolute favorite book in the world), really left me cold. (Which is a pretty good pun if you’re familiar with the show. Ha, ha.)

This makes me sad. I don’t know if it’s that the writers have gotten bored with the story, or if they think it needs to be simplified to attract new viewers, or if this is really all part of the bigger story and we’re just not being shown why yet… but whatever the reason, it bums me out. I’ve actually decided to wait until the fourth season DVD is officially out to watch the rest of the season now (this is also partially due to the fact that the sound synch is off in the last 15 minutes of every episode on the copies I’ve got, and while that was amusing for the first few minutes, it makes it hard to concentrate on the show), which means I still won’t be up to speed with the broadcast. (Don’t even get me started on how ridiculous it is that they’re aren’t releasing season four on DVD until *after* season five has started airing…)

And why am I writing about all this when it’s clearly quite trivial in nature?

1. This - the fact that I’ve watched three seasons (that’s 66 45-minute episodes) of Alias in about a month - has been a major player in the lack of time to write. I shall have more time on my hands now, at least until November, when I hope to get up the guts to take part in NaNoWriMo (whose site is down as I’m writing this, sadly).
2. I am lacking any real creative thought at the moment, having spent the last few days’ spare time re-writing a friend’s resumé, building a pretty little MySpace page for another friend, dealing with a scary (but really great) number of orders from the DU website, and working on our latest little project from the store (which I’ll probably talk more about later). I’m in tech geek mode, and I just needed to take a break to write *something* even if it was about something as lame as TV.
3. Dan, bless his soul, has got to be very tired of hearing me ramble about Alias by this point. Even though while I was writing this I recieved a note from him that season four does get better in response to my earlier message about not liking the first episode, I feel like I’ve driven him nuts with my relentless Alias dissection over the last month, so I decided to vent some of my frustration here.

I promise to write of things that mean a little more soon. Or at least regale you with tales of debauchery from my youth.

¹ I religiously read nearly every word of Entertainment Weekly every week. I’ve had a subscription for about 5 years, barring a few weeks here and there when I’ve let it lapse due to lack of funds. And here’s where I reveal details of my ritual that only a few have been privvy to till now: I read it, cover to cover, in order (I don’t flip through - I read first page to last page, though I do occasionally skip over stories when it’s something I don’t care about the first time through but I do go back and read them eventually), leaving the magazine turned to the page I was on when I left it, and it stays in the bathroom until I’m done. I’m not normally very OCD about things, but this is one that I am. If the magazine is removed, or my boyfriend inadvertantly leaves it open to a page other than the one *I* left it one, I’m liable to explode. I really lose it when he reads ahead and tells me about something he read that I have gotten to yet. And no, I don’t know why I’m so psycho about this. I just am.

Or something like that.

I realize it would appear, to the average blog reader, that I have dropped off the face of the planet. Indeed, there are moments where I have felt that way.

I could offer up the usual excuses, I’ve been busy, tired, muse-less, etc. But you’ve heard it all before, and eh, who really cares anyway?

I will say that I’m missing this like crazy - that outlet, that place to vent, to spill, to shed, not to mention the feedback and playful jabs. I need it. And thank you to those of you who have prodded me to get my butt in gear.

My original blog, started many eons ago, died shortly after September 11, 2001. To be fair, it was in critical condition months before that, but I had a hard time doing anything with it after that awful day. Because after that happened, I felt petty airing my silly little grievances with my life in a public forum when my problems seemed so trivial and small compared to what others were facing at the time. I feel much the same after Katrina. I’m not putting my daily life on hold or anything quite so extreme - but it’s hard to feel like I have any right to complain about my cordless trackball finally giving up the ghost to a world that’s dealing with much larger problems at the moment, or telling some wistful, nostalgic story about my glory days while my life is still pretty ok in the grand scheme of things.

I don’t want that blog death to happen again. I missed it when it was gone before, and I feel like I need to have this here, whether anyone else is reading it or not, so now I’m trying to fight the urge to suppress the trivial…

It is in that spirit that I bring you, courtesy of Jaclyn, a meme to kick-start my brain. (I’ve taken the liberty of modifying it a tad, seeing as I don’t know enough about Jaclyn to complete the first part [though if she’d come by the store some day - hint, hint - I might], and I don’t think I’m in any sort of position to be tagging anyone, as most of you have probably presumed the life cycle dead for a bit now.) I’m hoping this leads me into more fertile creative meadows soon… (where I will need to work on my metaphors a bit, methinks.)

7 Things I Plan To Do Before I Die:

1. Get back to Paris for more than a one day visit
2. See at least 100 more concerts, hopefully including another Dresden Dolls show at some point
3. Learn a lot more than I know now about everything
4. Write a novel, even if it royally sucks and I never show it to anyone
5. Read at least a thousand more books
6. Live in Portland, OR for some period of time
7. Become the crazy old cat lady in the house on the corner that all the neighborhood kids think is a witch

7 Things I Can Do:

1. Bitch and complain (I’m very talented at this in fact)
2. Cook yummy stuff
3. Adapt to situations quickly
4. Talk a LOT
5. Unscramble the Jumble words quicker than most everyone I know
6. Be really cheerful and friendly at work even when I’m in a really crappy mood
7. Roll my tongue

7 Things I Cannot Do:

1. Pay all of my bills
2. Draw / paint / sketch
3. Sing or play any musical instrument, short of playing the melody of Do-Re-Me on a piano
4. Stop myself from crying during sad moments in movies and TV shows, even when I know I’m being manipulated
5. Be organized
6. Resist tangents in conversations
7. See more than a few inches in front of me without my glasses

7 Things That Attract Me To The Opposite Sex (not necessarily in this order):

1. Passion for something
2. A high level of geekdom
3. Beautiful eyes
4. A sarcastic and/or sardonic sense of humor
5. Lack of large amounts of body or facial hair
6. Intelligence
7. A good smell… not cologne, but a clean smell… this is a big thing for me for some reason.

7 Things I Say Most Often:

1. Fuck. (Easily my most often used word - as an expression of joy, anger, surprise, pain, and more. Used in many combinations with other words.)
2. Uber-_______ (Because I have a tendency to need to exaggerate everything to infinity.)
3. I need soda. (Because I drink WAY too much of it.)
4. This is the best ___________, ever! (Um, yeah, more exaggeration.)
5. Huh? (I’ve lost hearing in both ears and I mishear a lot.)
6. That is why I’m never having children.
7. Sugar, bad.

7 Celebrity Crushes:

1. John Cusack (Forever and ever, amen)
2. Cillian Murphy
3. John Cameron Mitchell (Yes, I know he’s gay. This is not a fact that deters me in the least.)
4. Brian Molko
5. Dave Navarro (pre-Carmen Electra, he lost something after she hooked him)
6. Johnny Depp
7. Eddie Izzard (My predilection for gender bending types is showing here, isn’t it?)

So there you have it. If you are reading this and you have a blog, feel free to continue the meme… or not. Just keep writing, and I will try to do the same.