bold.

I did not mean to buy the first house I saw. I will admit to a inner desire for more spontanaeity in myself. I envy people who successfully fly through life never thinking more than a few hours ahead. Those people seem very happy and carefree. But when I want that in myself, that means that I want to be able drop everything and go to the beach for a day. I want to be spontaneous while still keeping a good credit score.

I decided to buy a house on Thanksgiving of last year. Then I postponed doing anything about it until after the holidays so that I could devote my full attention to the process. When the new year came around, I started looking at realty web sites. I even went through a copy of The Real Estate Book, something I might have done once when I was 17 and really bored. I made an inquiry about one promising looking house, but then found out that it was on a teeny lot and had window unit air conditioning. I looked at lots and lots of web listings and realized that while I could never get tired of ranch dressing, the same did not apply for ranch style homes.

I had a vague idea of what I wanted. Something a little older sitting on a half-acre or more. Reasonably close to Raleigh, though I would be willing to trade convenience for more land. A neighborhood that wasn't too manicured so I didn't feel too suburban. A house that didn't look too much like its neighbors.

I struggled with the purpose of my buying a house. This would be my first home, so it didn't have to be perfect. I found myself being attracted to the listings that were sitting on 10 acres out in the boonies. One of them had a chicken coop, and the offer of a couple of starter chickens - CHICKENS! It also had an hour commute to my office. Too bad I couldn't get the chickens to fly me to work. At some point, I want to move back to the boonies. But it didn't have to be with this house.

Once I'd made that concession, I started wondering how much of my ideal home I should have to sacrifice. This was just a temporary home, even if temporary meant twenty years. It was no problem finding a home on a reasonable lot. Nor was it a problem to find a home that was cut from a different mold or a home that had a short commute or one within sight of a tree. It was finding all of these things in one home that was the problem. If I could find a house with 75% of what I wanted, would that be enough? What about 50%?

That's what I thought about while I looked at listings and repeatedly ruled out a house for some reason or another. I marked a couple, but without much enthusiasm. Looking back at the same homes I'd bookmarked earlier, I would wonder what had appealed to me about them. There was exactly one that really looked promising. I didn't figure anything would come of it, but I scheduled an appointment to view the house, thinking that I might as well start looking at places in person instead of on the internet.

I don't know how the house felt about me after that first visit, but I was pretty sure I was in love with it. This house was the building equivalent of a laid-back skinny musician who grew up in the country and liked puns. I loved the house, I loved the neighborhood. Ten minutes from work, the view from the front porch looked like a quiet mountain neighborhood. There was a lake and so many trees you can't see the actual house from satellite pictures. Inside was a big stone wood-burning fireplace, with pine floors and skylights all over the place. The kitchen was big and open. It wasn't perfect, but as a temporary house, it was wonderful.

The house had character. I know that's a real estate word for weird, but to me it's a necessity. I want to live in a place with personality. All houses have personalities, I suppose, but some of them are really boring. Most people don't care about that sort of thing, even people who themselves are not boring. That's fine for them, and I'm glad those people are out there to buy up the houses that I don't want. It takes all kinds, right?

Josh was very ho-hum about the wonderful, glorious house. He liked the floors and the fireplace, but thought it was too far away from downtown and too expensive. I thought he was a sour puss.

I left that house feeling very sad. Here was this wonderful house, and someone else was going to buy it before I felt comfortable making an offer. I'd been looking at online listings for two weeks, and this had been my first viewing. I couldn't just buy the first house I saw. That was the kind of thing that a person with a bad credit score would do. I felt certain that someone else would buy it soon, and I thought about how happy they would be there.

During the next week, I continued to look at listings, but now they were all tainted. I could barely even bring myself to consider a ranch home at this point. The realtor sent me some more listings and I sent some more back, and we agreed to go on a general house-viewing tour the next Sunday. The houses she sent me were very nice, and I managed to get myself excited about some of the bells and whistles. One had a finished basement, another a dual HVAC system. As the week wore on, I managed to accept that I would not be getting the other house and started turning my attention to appreciating these new houses up for my inspection.

The first house was very nice. And so was the second one. As was the third one and the fourth one and so on and so on. Each time I would walk around the house, pointing out things that I liked (brick fireplaces, really luxurious thick carpeting, bathroom tiling) and things that impressed me less (shower stalls in the master bath - are you freaking kidding me?, cave-like kitchens, so much hideous wallpaper). And then I would get to the end of the tour and shrug. It was fine. If I visited someone living there, I would be sure and tell them how much I liked the fireplace, and I would absolutely mean it. They were all nice houses...for other people. After two of these reactions, my mother, who was along for the ride that day, remarked that I was an "individual." That's a non-realtor way of saying weird.

My realtor, sensing that I was never to be satisfied, remarked that a lot of a house's feel came from the furnishings. I know this is true, because I live in a pretty beige apartment. Between the mirror shaped like a ship's helm and the globe of the moon, I manage to weird it up a bit. But I hate to do all the work. The house should at least meet me halfway.

After the fourth house, I asked if it would be too much trouble to swing by the house I'd seen the week before so that Mama could see it. I'm not sure what I was thinking here. I would not have admitted to myself that I still had hope of getting that house. It seemed very much out of the question. But I must have had that small hope glimmering inside me. Had I been truly resigned to the fate of someone else living there, I would not have asked to go.

This time, I gave the tour. I pointed out all the wonderful characteristics of this house to Mama, pointing out the real hardwood floors, the skylights (I hadn't noticed the one in the bathroom before - awesome), the view, where I could put my new freezer. I'm sure the realtor was off snickering somewhere.

We saw one more house after that. It was also a contemporary style, though most of its character came from the furnishings. These people had fantastic taste. Of the new houses I had seen, this one was promising. I could see myself here. I'd want to tear down the wall separating the kitchen and the dining room at some point and the wallpaper would have to go, but this house had potential. I could tell that it had personality, but that maybe it was a little shy and needed a confidence boost. At the same time, it sort of felt like an impersonator of the first house. An impersonator that was on a smaller lot, had fewer trees, and was right next to a busy road. And cost $25,000 more.

I got home from the excursion feeling really bummed. We had seen lovely houses of different styles in nice neighborhoods and nothing had spoken to me. My realtor was perfectly willing to keep going at it, pulling listings and visiting them, but I had my doubts that it would be much different from today. The houses we'd viewed today only served to remind me how much more I liked the first one. If only I could just buy that one.

Josh and I discussed the day's house-hunting. He had done a complete one-eighty on his opinion of the first house. He was downright enthusiastic about it. Seeing all the other ones convinced him that it was really a fantastic and unusual house...and cheaper, too. Maybe I should have made him look at all the listings of ranch homes beforehand. While we were talking about it, I realized that I could very easily regret not buying that house. I could look for months until I ended up settling for something that was less than what I wanted. I could also find something equally awesome later, when I felt more ready. But I couldn't see myself regretting jumping on this house while I could (unless a dinosaur stepped on it later or something, and I could just get insurance for that).

So why didn't I just buy it? It was exactly what I wanted, in my price range, and likely to go up in value. The only thing keeping me back was the fact that I'd been looking at houses for all of two weeks and had seen in person a total of six. It seemed hasty. But maybe it wasn't hasty at all - it was bold!

So that's how, ten days after viewing the first house in my first foray into home ownership, I signed a contract saying that I would buy it. It was scary, but even after I signed the paper and wrote a check for $1000 earnest money, I felt good about the decision. I felt bold.

discouraged.

"Erloardgh?" The phone woke me up. The clock said that it was 3 AM, and I was inclined to believe it.

"Hey." He sounded down and tired. Usually putting on a show exhilarates him, but maybe Alabama was getting him down. He had called earlier in the evening and had sounded positively ecstatic that there was a tornado watch and the show was across the street from a trailer park. Maybe he was just happy to be out of the van after a ten hour drive.

"I'm sorry I woke you. But I said that I would call after the show."

"No, I'm glad you called. How was the show?"

"The first set was pretty good. The second set was a meltdown."

"A meltdown? What does that mean?" I was picturing all sorts of crazy situations. Like maybe the crowd had thrown rotten vegetables or the guitarist had swung the guitar at the drummer's head.

"Oh, you know, we were all off at some point or another." Oh, they had played badly. I gotcha.

"Well, I doubt the people who had never heard you before could tell."

"I guess." I keep forgetting that he doesn't respond to logic as a form of consolation.

"How was the other band?"

"They were okay. They played a lot of covers."

"Ugh. Well, what kind of covers? Good ones at least?"

"Yeah, they were good covers. It's just...discouraging." Audiences respond to cover bands because they'd rather hear a song they already know than original material, no matter how good it is. So you can work hard to write a great song, but it won't even matter because people don't listen to it.

"I know. It's what people like, though."

"Yeah, that's why they do it."

"Where are you sleeping tonight?" To save money, they were planning on crashing at people's houses when they could. And when they couldn't, well, the van had two free benches and two captain's chairs.

"In the van."

"Will you be warm enough?"

"Yeah, it's pretty warm here."

"I'm sorry you have to sleep in the van, baby."

"It's okay. We'll get up early and go to the beach."

"I miss you. I wish I was - well, no, I don't want to sleep in the van."

We talked a bit more before making our mushy goodbyes and hanging up. I rolled over in my soft, warm bed and felt sorry for my baby, 600 miles away. It looks easy to be a rock star, but it seems pretty hard to get there in the first place.

individually-wrapped apologies.

You tell me: can a bag of homemade granola bars make up for being a crappy girlfriend?

I guess the smart answer is to ask how crappy the girlfriend was and how good the granola bars are. Well, the bars were pretty good. I'd never made them before, but it was all from scratch, using honey from my dad's bees and whole wheat flour that my sister-in-law had milled. Does that make it better? I don't know, but I feel like these would make good bullet points on the granola bars' resume. And I used golden raisins, because they're nature's candy. And also chocolate. And love and support.

So how crappy was the girlfriend? Pretty crappy, I'm afraid. Not like, cheating-on-him-with-his-piano-teacher crappy, but more of a general whiny and selfish kind of crappy.

Here's the setup: Josh's band is on tour. You might not think this is a big deal, because Nickelback goes on tour all the time. Small local bands don't go on tour all the time. It takes a lot of work convincing bar owners in other states that they should pay some unknown band from Raleigh to come play. They'll be taking their band van, which still has the name of the church they bought it from on the side, and driving it all over the south and midwest. They left Wednesday morning, and will be back in about a month.

Here's where the crappy girlfriend part comes in. Rather than be excited for Josh, I fell into a glum mood every time it came up. I didn't really complain out loud all that much, other than to nag him ferociously about taking his phone charger. In my head, I worried about how he was going to be gone a long time and would be driving in an old van and there would be drinking and late nights and did you know that there are GIRLS in the south and midwest? But out loud, it was all about the phone charger. "Make sure you take your phone charger, do you need to borrow the one I use in the car, are you going to have a place to plug it in?" You see, kids, this is how to have an adult relationship. Rather than actually discuss what's bothering you, make sure and harp on a minor, only slightly related issue.

I'm sure he found the sudden importance of the phone charger pretty confusing. See, I'm going to be worried every single second that he's gone. But as long as I can call him to verify that he's still breathing, then everything is okay. I can function normally. But if his phone were dead, then that might as well mean that he, too, is dead. Or that he has R-U-N-N-O-F-T with some Alabaman floosy. Because men who like Alabama floosies never charge their phones.

About two days ago, it really started to sink in to me that he was going to be leaving on this trip. I also realized that I had been a total bitch about it. He was really excited and had been looking forward to it for a long time. But he couldn't share that anticipation with me, because I'd turned into an icy phone charger enthusiast every time the subject came up.

So the night before they left, I made granola bars. I put lots of chocolate in them and wrapped them individually in plastic wrap. I wished that I had time to make more travel snacks, and also that I hadn't been such a crappy girlfriend. I debated putting gushy love notes in the wrappers, but thought that might embarrass him in front of the other guys.

He ate one that night and raved about it. Maybe he could taste the love and support that I put it into it. I really had a lot of support lying around, seeing as how I had been withholding it for months. I don't know if he knew they were individually-wrapped chocolate-rich apologies or not. I told him that I was sorry about my behavior, but he sort of waved it away and helped himself to another granola bar.

I hugged him goodbye in the rain before he left. He loaded up his car with his bags, one of them containing a plastic bag full of relationship-healing granola bars and another containing his phone charger.

web thief.

Someone picked my PayPal pocket last week. How annoying.

I'm not that mad, nor am I surprised. I had a massive viral infection on my laptop last month, and so the fact that someone ended up breaking into one of my accounts is almost expected. It's a weird sort of world where someone can steal $400 from me and I think it's my fault. Seems like my sister has someone using her credit card every year to buy tickets to Singapore, so it was really about time for it to be my turn.

PayPal emailed me to tell me that something was fishy about a recent transaction. I'd like to know how they decided it was fishy. Did someone sign on to my account from Mongolia? Did the guy have a webcam on at the time and look really shifty? Did he put "Stolen" in the comments of the transaction? In any case, kudos to PayPal for recognizing something was amiss.

They immediately put restrictions on my account, forcing me to change my passwords and security questions. I submitted up a "Fraudulent Transaction" report to tell them that I had not sent $400 to that dude, so gimme it back. They promised to look into the situation. They updated the status of the case, where I could check every day to see what was going on. It wasn't very exciting. I was hoping it would be like an episode of COPS. They would post a video of the PayPal police (who kind of look like the Geek Squad) busting into someone's trailer, where a brand new $400 lawn mower was parked out front. There might be a chase involving the lawn mower later, which would end in its being flipped into the ditch. Not only did they have to pay up my $400, but they can't even take the lawn mower back! Take that, web thief!

But not, the status report was just a little chart that said PayPal had sent emails to me and the other dude. They sent one that day, and then again three days later. Finally, a week after this whole thing started, they sent me an email saying that I could have my money back.

And that was that. The thing is, I wasn't even all that worried. PayPal seems to be a company that has its ducks in a row. Their job is not easy, because they have to deal with both malicious intent and pure idiocy. They have to protect their users from other users and also from themselves.

Good job, PayPal. I'm sorry that I let the virus on my computer and left myself so vulnerable. Thank you for saving me from the web thief and his lawn mower dreams.

vintage tastes, retail expectations.

I went to a vintage store in Durham last weekend. I've been to stores like that before. There was a shop in Boone that was mostly clothes, like a consignment shop specializing in tacky stuff that regular consignment stores wouldn't sell. I had a certain respect for that store, as I have respect for all those who try to give new life to old stuff. But I didn't shop there much, because most of the stuff was general thrift store fare at consignment store prices. I could buy that Foreigner shirt from the tour of '83 for $15, or I could just find a Journey shirt from the '85 tour at a thrift store for a buck. To buy something at the vintage store, it would have to be special enough that I could overcome the nagging feeling that I would find something just as good at a yard sale the next week.

This Durham store was a lot like that. There was a ton of really cool crap, and another ton of less cool crap. There were clothes and tacky souvenirs, a whole room full of holographic Jesus pictures, jewelry made from old toys and bottle caps. There was a small rug featuring the likeness of John F. Kennedy and a Pee Wee Herman pull-string doll. But it was all overpriced.

There were several boxes of vintage stationery, and you know how much I love vintage stationery. They were boxed cards, like the type your grandmother might buy once a year to have enough to send to each of her grandchildren. One box was really sweet, with animals in 1970s colors. Inside, there was some sort of cutting and coloring craft project that you could do with the card. The box was $12. Are you kidding me? I would pay $1 for that. Secondhand shopping being what it is, I will probably never find those exact cards at a thrift store. But I'll find some that will please me just as much. Buying used has already acquainted me with the idea that I may not find the exact thing (the perfect size, the perfect color, etc.), but I will usually find something good enough, with the low price making up the difference.

Vintage stores make promises that they can't keep. They promise me that they are like a thrift store, except everything is cool. They promise to be like the ultimate yard sale. But they let me down by disregarding some of the very reasons that I like secondhand stuff in the first place. To me, there are four reasons to buy used.

1. Cheaper.
2. Treasure hunting fun.
3. Sense of history in the items.
4. Very green, because you're reusing or recycling or reducing, whichever one it is.

Stores like that take away two out of the four reasons. It's not really cheaper than buying retail, and it's many times more expensive than buying used at a thrift store or a yard sale. And there is no treasure hunting to it at all. If you find something at a vintage store, it's not a "find." That's like calling something at the jewelry counter at Macy's a find. You didn't find it, it was put there on display. Going to a bunch of thrift stores and finding a sweet pair of earrings under a bunch of stuff that used to be at the jewelry counter at Macy's is a find. Maybe I subscribe too much to the belief that something should be hard to get to be valuable.

Basically, you're paying for someone else to do the hard work of rounding up this stuff. Frankly, I'd rather save the money and do it myself. Vintage stores are for people with vintage tastes, but retail expectations. Vintage stores are for wimps. There. I said it.

a penny saved is a jukebox earned.

I have always been a saver. I've had a savings account since I was about nine, and since then any money that I came across went straight into the bank. That's not to say that I don't spend, too. Obviously, I do. But I've always earned more than I spent, even without being particularly careful about it. I live pretty cheaply because I like to buy used and cook my own food. I splurge sometimes, but I don't worry about that, either, because I've saved enough that I can afford to do that. My savings has been a nice cushion, the pillowtop on the mattress of my life. It wasn't necessary, but it helped me sleep better at night.

I've pretty much been saving my money for nothing. Well, I've been saving it with no particular goal in mind. If you asked me what I was saving up for, I probably would have said, "The future" (unless you asked me when I was about eleven, when I would have said "A jukebox!"). I really had no ideas more concrete than that. About a year ago, I looked at my bank balances and started thinking about investing it in something. Having the money in the bank felt about one step up from it being actually in my mattress. Sure, I made interest off of it, but that didn't feel like much.

I asked my mom about investing, and she recommended Dave Ramsey and his Endorsed Local Providers. These are regular brokers and financial dudes that have passed some sort of application process and received the Dave Ramsey seal of approval. So I filled out the online form to be put in contact with my Endorsed Local Provider. A week later, I received a survey from Dave Ramsey's group, asking if I had been satisfied with my ELP. I irritably replied that I had received no further contact from the guy, despite even sending an email in addition to the one generated by the web site.

After being kinda left in the lurch over investing, I forgot about the idea for a while. Maybe it seemed like a bad omen, when I was already a little hesitant about using my precious savings. It was only last week that I realized that had I invested my money over the summer, I would have lost most of it in the fall. Perhaps I should write Dave Ramsey and tell him to thank that dude for being so negligent.

Though I had shelved the investing idea, I did start thinking about a house. I've been renting since my sophomore year of college, and I'd started to hate writing those checks every month. I realize that it's a necessary evil when you're not sure how long you're going to be in a place. I liked the freedom it gave me, knowing that if I needed to move suddenly, I could just pack up and do it. I'm not sure why I liked that idea, because frankly, that sort of spontaneity just isn't in me. But I've been living in Raleigh for almost two years now, and I love my job. It's an incredible market for buyers and mortgage rates are deliciously low. So maybe it's time for a house. Turns out I'd been saving for a house all those years, and I didn't even know it. Maybe I could get one with room for a jukebox.

Once I spend all my money on the down payment (how irritating to spend your life savings and still owe more), I wonder if I will feel insecure without my green cushion. Okay, I'm not spending every single penny of it, but I am spending enough of it that I'm thinking more about how much I spend on groceries these days. My new, much smaller cushion is not so much for dinners out as for the eventuality that my car will die on me. So far, my impression of budgeting is that it kinda sucks.

But once I get the house, I hope to feel that all that saving paid off. I've been saving for the sake of saving for so long, it might be nice to see that there is a point to it. And I'll be writing a check to go into the house every month instead of to my landlord's pocket. It'll be an investment, a piggy bank big enough to live in. My savings will be in my walls, my floors, and my roof, not just my mattress. It's a brand new era of saving in my life.

And once the house is paid off, I may just get that jukebox.

catch-and-release.

As we drove up to the sale itself, I could tell we would be there awhile. There were some kids clothes, but it appeared to be 95% books. There was a tall, wide bookshelf and then another six packing boxes on the ground. Books take a little longer to poke through than most things. Also, Josh likes to be very thorough when looking through them. Since I've been taking him to yard sales, most of what he's bought has been books.

As I poked through the titles, I looked for a common thread. You can get a glimpse into someone's personality by the books they read. These were all over the place. There were cookbooks, a couple of classics, some recent Oprah book club novels, some popular thrillers, a pair of weight loss books, some religious and anti-religious texts, and a few really old ones. I wondered if these people had owned a book shop at one point.

"Did you guys own a shop or something?" I asked the man as I pulled out a stack of books from a box.

"No," he laughed. "My wife is just a bibliophile. We probably could open a shop just with what she has."

I finished looking before Josh did and stood in the sunshine. There aren't a lot of yard sales in February, but the weather was so nice out that we had decided to see what we might find. I'd already spent $3.75 at a pair of previous sales and had a quarter left in my pocket, though Josh said he had some cash. My big find of the day was a homemade xylophone that I was thinking would look great hung up on the wall somewhere. I'd also bought a 1987 NC State sweatshirt, a deck of French playing cards for my brother, a bad sci-fi movie, a box of mismatched old greeting cards, a large silver picture frame, and a pair of earrings.

"Do you guys go to yard sales often?" the man asked as his wife worked at taking some of the boxed books and putting them on the shelves.

"Every Saturday when it's warm," I answered.

"Do you look for anything in particular?"

"Not really," I shrugged. "I have friends and family members who will tell me to be on the lookout for some stuff, but mostly we're just looking around."

He nodded in understanding. "Yeah, we used to go every week, too. We try not to buy anything retail. If we can avoid it."

I was pleasantly surprised. Most people that I meet find my hobby odd. To meet some hard core secondhanders out in the wild was something new. I felt a warm kinship between us. I realized that they had a ton of books because when books cost under a buck apiece, it's hard not to grab every thing that might interest you. A lot of those books were probably bought at other yard sales and now they were being sold the same way. It was like a yard sale catch-and-release program. These people understood that the lifetimes of things did not end when you were done with them.

We picked out five books, four hardbacks and a paperback. According to the prices quoted to us when we arrived, that should have put us back $4.50. But she asked for $1.50, which we happily paid, using up my last quarter. I knew we were getting the secondhanders discount. I got back into the car with my $4 yard sale budget completely gone, but I was happy. The sun was out, I had a homemade xylophone, and there were other people in the world who thought there was no better way to spend a Saturday morning than looking through other people's crap.

kilz.

My office smells like paint fumes right now. I've had to deal with office construction several times, and I find that as a general rule, it sucks. It's loud and in the way. And sometimes it smells. They've been tearing apart our building for about three weeks now, and I've actually been impressed at their quick progress. Several times I've considered working from home to get away from the noise, but then I put my headphones on and power on through. Less distracting than the noise is the guy in the cube next to me saying, "Woooo! Yeah, don't hold back!" every time there's a racket.

But the paint fumes are something else. I hear smell is the sense most powerfully associated with memory, and paint fumes are the key to a very powerful memory from the summer before my senior year of college.

My first apartment was a crappy basement with lots of character. We loved it, because the location was fantastic, the rent was dirt cheap, and we were the types that could handle odd things like sloping kitchen floors. When we were moving out, we had to paint the whole place antique white, because we had painted it a variety of bright colors that were not really allowed in the lease. Before we used the actual paint, we had to apply a layer of Kilz, a hardcore primer meant to kill all the mold that we'd been breathing in for two years.

Being in the basement, there were two windows in the whole place and no other kind of ventilation whatsoever. Kilz is already a very pungent product, and the lack of odor escape route made the fumes headache-inducing. I should tell those kids that huff paint to get high to invest in some Kilz. That stuff messed with my head. Aside from making it ache something awful, I had a really hard time focusing on what I was doing. I remember sitting in the corner of my room, painting the wall. I would do that for maybe thirty seconds before I would stop and sit there for a couple of minutes, not doing anything. Then I would remember what I was supposed to be doing and I would start painting again, only to stop and stare into space again a few seconds later.

Later that evening, I watched TV with my roommates, who had also been painting with Kilz that day. Despite my throbbing head, whatever was on TV was extraordinarily funny. We were all literally rolling on the floor with laughter. But then again, I had been pretty entertained actually watching paint dry earlier. I can only assume that when kids stick their faces in some paint to get high, that they then watch TV instead of try to finish any sort of task. I would like to further say to those kids that they shouldn't be doing that at all, or they might end up like this guy.

The Kilz incident came screaming back to me this morning as I sat in my smelly cube. Thinking about the kind of code I might write when under the influence of Kilz, I emailed my coworkers that I would be working from home for the rest of the day.

beta blues.

My company is on a yearly release cycle. So from May to December, we work on features for the year. In January, we tie up the loose ends and release a beta version of the new version of our product to certain users. They use it and give us feedback. We fix things and release another beta a few weeks later. They use that one and give us more feedback. Finally, we release the final product in the spring sometime, and the whole thing starts all over again.

The nice thing about this sort of schedule is that you can sort of predict what work is going to be like at any given time of the year. In November and December, it's very busy and tense and stressed as people try to finish up features in time. Some of that leaks into January, though not for everybody. During the summer, when you've just been assigned your features and you got like six whole months to finish them, it's very relaxed.

If you've been paying attention and are good with calendars, you'll realize that right now we are in beta. This can be a stressful period as well, but in a different way.

First of all, the software has bugs. All software has bugs. Some of them are incredibly obscure and may never get found. At my old job, we found a bug where if you were using the program, then just happened to change your screensaver and then just happened to try to close the application after that, it crashed and burned. A crash is something to avoid, but seriously, how many people are likely to change their screensaver at the moment they're using the program?

We do test our software here. But we could never come up with every single possible usage of the application, just because it's a pretty complex one. So we rely on the beta period to shake out some of the common things our users will run into. We also take suggestions for improvement, for instance in the way something looks or behaves. We get feedback mostly from our user forum. Users who are using the beta log on and create a topic for a bug or suggestion. We respond, asking for clarification or telling them that we were able to reproduce the bug ourselves and will fix it.

Of course, the first day we release the beta, there is a floodgate effect. We release, we have a couple of hours of peace, and then all of a sudden users are adding bugs left and right. This user has a problem with this feature on UNIX, and this one thinks this tool is hard to use, and another one thinks we should add an option for something or other. What is stressful, for me at least, is the way I get pulled in several different directions. I only have to really respond to reports that deal with something that I worked on in the first place, but I might have half a dozen of those come in within a couple of hours. I read a bug report, I see if I can reproduce it, I respond to the user, I enter a ticket in our bug tracking system, and finally I get down to fixing the problem. By then, several more might have come in. I just need to focus, is all.

The nice thing about beta is that it sort of allows you to polish your features. After a couple of weeks, the reports from users starts to slow down a little, and you can catch up. You might even finish with all the stuff those nagging users asked for and have time to add a little polish of your own. There are always things that were required to be finished before the feature could be called "done." And then there are the other things you might have thought of along the way that fell into the "nice to have" category. I suppose it's sort of closure.

So that's your day in the life of a programmer. At least this particular programmer in January.

egg-battered toast.

Remember when we were "boycotting France" by calling cut up and fried potatoes "freedom fries" instead of "french fries"? Man, that was stupid*. I think we could hear the French rolling their eyes from here. Anyway, at the restaurant where I worked at the time, we happened to be reworking our breakfast menu at the time. My boss wanted to be patriotic and rename the french toast. His idea was "egg-battered toast." I managed to talk him down from this idea, mostly from the fact that no one would know what the heck it was. Then the servers would all have to tell the people that it was just french toast, which would completely defeat the purpose.

Sunday morning, my mother came to visit. Instead of going out, I made french toast, because I'm trying to save money. I was telling a coworker about our nice little brunch, and she asked me a question that totally threw me off.

"Did you make it from scratch?"

I'm sure that face reflected my confusion. "I, uh, what, uh, from, uh, I'm just not sure how else you could make french toast."

"Well, there are those freezer things."

I tried to conceal my horror at the idea of serving my dear, sweet mother microwave french toast. I mean, I could have really splurged and taken her to Burger King to have the french toast sticks there. Instead, I just replied, "French toast is so easy to make."

"Those freezer ones are really convenient."

"Bread, eggs, and milk are convenient."

I will not go into a rant about convenience foods. Because then if I ever am caught using one, which will happen, I will be forced to microwave a frozen crow dinner and eat it. But in general, I am not a fan. When given the option to spend a little extra time to create something that is better for me and tastes a million times better, I'm going to pick that one. I wonder if people just don't know how easy it is to make stuff from scratch.

So today I'm going to do my part to put the frozen french toast makers out of business. It's criminally easy to make the real stuff, and it won't taste like public school food. Make some for your mother.

Take a couple eggs. Beat 'em up. Pour some milk into the eggs and whisk that all together. Throw in some cinnamon or vanilla or nutmeg or whatever you want. Dip a slice of bread in, making sure to coat both sides with the mixture. Put the piece of bread in a frying pan over medium heat and let it grill. Flip it over to get the other side.

There. French toast without a freezer or a microwave or a toaster. Now I'm going to tell you how to make the best french toast ever.

There is a restaurant in Brooklyn which serves french toast that does not need syrup. Think about that for a second. Can you even imagine something that delicious? I think they had secret ingredients in their batter, some magic spice mix. According to the menu, they also used Challah.

So when I came home, I decided to make Challah. This is not a required step in making french toast from scratch. The Amish would say that store-bought bread is a convenience food, but that's something I'm willing to deal with. Baking bread isn't particularly difficult, especially if you have a mixer of some kind, but it's time-consuming. The wee yeasty beasties do all the work, but you have to give them time to do it. You can make it in the bread machine, too, but then it won't be pretty and braided.

Once I had made Challah, I made french toast with it. And I think that New York restaurant is on to something, because using Challah is a big step in french toast improvement. I found Challah to be very absorbent (a feature which makes it great for dipping in soups as well). Maybe it's the same with any fresh homemade bread. Perhaps I should conduct a great french toast experiment, in which I make lots of different kinds of homemade bread and see which yields the best french toast. That sounds like delicious science.

Now that you have your french toast, do not put Mrs. Butterworth's on it. Don't even put real maple syrup on it. Get some fruit syrup. Not fruit-flavored syrup, but stuff that tastes like fruit jam, but is much runnier. You might could even just use jam. Then, pour some cream on top. Whipping cream, half and half, whatever. My British friend taught me that trick, and I'll never go back to syrup.

And that is how I make french toast. Even if you can't get a hold of some Challah, try the fruit and cream trick. And if you can't do that, please just make french toast "from scratch." Don't buy the frozen things. Bread, eggs, and milk are very convenient.

*Stupid, but not unprecedented. There was a lot of renaming going around during the World Wars. One particularly silly one was the renaming of German measles to liberty measles. We're so angry at the Germans that we will refuse to name our diseases after them.

nice things.

It was after 11pm and everyone else had gone to sleep. With his parents gone, Josh and I felt free to snuggle a little closer on the couch and watch TV shows with mild adult language. I'm TV-starved, as I don't have any channels on my set at home. And while that never bothers me when I'm there, I always find myself fascinated with the tube whenever I find myself near one. But then I get sick of the commercials after a half hour.

During the first commercial break (Have they always been so loud? And idiotic? And frequent?), I decided to go raid the fridge, full of Thanksgiving leftovers. I started poking around, opening various containers and sniffing the contents. I settled on some pecan pie and started hunting for the silverware drawer. I hate having to find eating utensils in a strange house, checking every drawer and wondering what sort of backwards organization system is in use. It's a very minor, yet very irritating form of impotence.

After only two tries, I pulled open a drawer to see sets of gold gleaming knives, forks, and spoons. They glittered like the lost treasure of a pirate who had an Oneida penchant. This might tell you something about both my upbringing and my current household, but I was shocked to see that they all matched.

I have matching silverware, eight of each utensil. When I was in college, I noticed that my roommates and I kept running out of forks. So I bought a bunch more at the thrift store for a dime apiece. Then we kept running out of spoons, and I added to that collection. And finally the knives had to keep up with all the forks and spoons. I'm not sure if the people who manage to live with a matching set of silverware have bigger sets or if they do their dishes more frequently.

The sight of the shining spoons reminded me of the previous weekend, when we had helped Josh's dad move. While the guys had been out doing something manly, I helped Josh's stepmom unwrap her crystal. It was all beautiful, and the collection was extensive. It seemed like there was a shape of glass for every kind of alcohol ever invented. I gingerly unwrapped each glass and handed them to her, feeling a lot like a bull inside a china shop, one who is trying not to make a fool of himself in front of people who might be in-laws later. I felt very out of my depth, thinking about the two sets of champagne flutes that made up my mother's crystal collection. At Thanksgiving, we would pour our $4 sparkling wine into those flutes, which were still dripping wet from having the dust of the basement just washed off of them. I drink my $4 sparkling wine in white wine glasses from a set of eight, which are actually pretty nice and from which I've already broken two.

Admiring the silverware and remembering the crystal, I thought about how it would feel to own nice things. I thought about how I could buy matching silverware and I could even start collecting crystal a bit at a time. I began envisioning lovely shelves of differently shaped and sized crystalware, sparkling with cleanliness in neat rows like soldiers in dress uniform. Maybe below them would be a drawer, in a very logical and convenient location, full of the finest silverware, all matching and always enough.

And then I came to my senses and realized that even if I obtained all those nice things, they would not last. The silverware would get tarnished and lost, and new, non-matching members would somehow work their way into the ranks. The crystal would be broken, piece by piece. If something didn't get broken, it was because it was collecting dust, unused and forgotten because of the rarity of my partaking in sherry or cognac or whatever beverage that shape of glass is designed to accentuate.

And I wouldn't even care about the broken crystal or the mismatched silverware, because deep in my heart, I am not a nice things person. Might I become one someday? Sure. It seems sort of unlikely, though. I'd rather have something durable than delicate, functional than flashy. If these things are temporary anyway, they might as well be inexpensive and useful. I don't have anything against people who have nice things, they're just not for me. I just can't summon the will to care about nice things.

And then I realized (I'm still standing over the silverware drawer, are you keeping up?) that just as I had not grown up in a house full of nice things, Josh had. I wondered about the expectations of his future household. Sure, slumming it with a girl with mismatched silverware was fine now, but when he is older, will he wish that the design on his fork matched the design on his knife or that his Scotch was not served out of a juice glass?

I returned to the living room with my pecan pie and golden fork. The commercials were still on.

"Your mom has gold silverware."

"Yeah."

"It all matches."

"Mm-hm."

"You know, honey, if you marry me, our silverware is probably not going to match. And we're not going to have a bunch of nice crystal like Susan has."

"That's okay."

"I'm just letting you know, that a life with me is probably not going to be a life full of nice things. I mean, I don't know if that matters to you, because you seemed to grow up with lots of nice things."

He looked at me like I was absolutely crazy then. Then he pulled me closer to him and told me he didn't care about that kind of thing either. I believed him and offered him a bite of pie. Then I thought about how there were too many commercials on TV nowadays.

the kickiest.

Buying used is an act of patience in a lot of ways. For one thing, you have to sort through the crap. Say that you just bought a kicky* wool skirt with little red berries on it. Now you need a kicky** red sweater. When you go to JC Penney's, the sweaters are in one section. Each rack has a different style of sweater, possibly in several different colors. There are several sweaters of the same style and color in each size, and these sizes are organized.

When you go to Goodwill, the sweaters are in one section. They are organized by color. There is only one sweater in each style. It's probably too small for you. If you go to a different thrift store, the sweaters might not be organized by anything at all. They might not even get their own rack in the women's section. They might be in a pile somewhere, possibly even on the floor or in a box. Either way, you need patience to sort through all the sweaters to find the red sweater that is your size and might look okay on you.

Even after all that, there is no guarantee that you will find a red sweater that will match your kicky*** wool skirt. You might have to go to several thrift stores to find the perfect sweater.

What's worse, you might not even find the sweater that day. You spent all day rooting through very unkicky sweaters, and you didn't even find what you wanted. You have two options here. One is to give in and go to JC Penney's. The other is to wait a week and hit the thrift stores again. And that's where the true test of patience is here.

Some people are amazed that I find so much good stuff used. They went to a thrift store once and didn't find a darn thing, just a bunch of crap that people were right to get rid of. So they think I am magical. I have to explain to them that I spend a lot of time on this hobby.

For example, at my old job, we were about to switch to a business casual dress code. I didn't have any appropriate clothes, so I started checking out the thrift stores. There are four Goodwills in Winston-Salem, and I hit a different one after work every Monday thru Thursday for three weeks. I ended up with a great wardrobe, but most days I didn't buy a thing.

Usually, I don't really need anything specific. However, most of the time, I will have a running list of things that I'd kinda-sorta-like to have. Items might be on the list for a year before I find what I want. But most things pop up eventually, and until I find the thing, I just keep on doing whatever I was doing before I decided I needed it. Sometimes other people ask me to look for things for them. They know that I might not ever find those things, but at least I am keeping an eye out.

Another example - I broke my blender. It was a crappy hand-me-down blender anyway. But it still sorta worked, the pitcher just wouldn't latch properly, so I had to pick up the blender and give it a firm shake if I wanted to make sure the stuff at the top got down to the blades. It was not an ideal situation, but it worked.

I had in my mind the idea of a blender with a lot of buttons and a nice thick glass pitcher. Every time I went to a thrift store or a yard sale, I looked for blenders. I saw one just like my old one (but presumably not broken) for $2, but I resisted. I saw ads for $15 jobbies at Wal-Mart, but I resisted still. And then one day, maybe two months after I broke my old one, I saw the exact kind I wanted at a yard sale, and the woman gave it to me for free. Patience wins.

I think all that waiting is probably good for you. It makes you think about what you want and what you need. It's just stuff, and you can wait to have it. Wear a kicky green sweater that you already have. Pick up the blender and shake it; it's sorta fun, really.

*You know, I heard the word "kicky" used once to describe a scarf, and I've liked it ever since. I have no idea what it means.

** I looked it up: "So unusual or unconventional in character or nature as to provide a thrill."

***I've been thinking, and this word describes everything I've ever truly loved: my kicky zipper earrings, my exceedingly kicky penguin hat, and my boyfriend, who is the kickiest.

snow day.

I am at home, in fleece pants and a long sleeve t-shirt from one of my high school clubs. I am home on a Tuesday, because it snowed three inches in Raleigh, North Carolina last night. Snow days never lose their appeal. Even though I can log into my office remotely, writing code documentation in fleece pants has its benefits.

My laptop is in my lap, and I am streaming CNN because I don't have cable. Josh is sitting behind me with his chin on my shoulder. We watching the inauguration, and we are happy. I was one of the people who a year ago would have said that this country was not ready to elect a black president. Now I'm one of the people filled with hope - totally naive and unassailable hope.

Sometimes the video freezes as my connection tries to catch up with all the history that is being sent through the air in my apartment. But the audio keeps going, and I'm glad that I won't have to watch it on YouTube later. I'm trying to pick up which line will be the sound bite that will be played over and over, both tonight and tomorrow and fifty years from now.

I'm trying to take a mental snapshot of this moment, so that when my kids ask about it, I'll be able to tell them the story. The story about the snow and the fleece pants and the laptop and the hope.

three-legged tenant.

While we had the van at our disposal, I decided to get rid of a three-legged tenant of my apartment that had been ordered to leave months ago. I'm not sure when the leg of my sofa broke. I may have bought it that way. And it wasn't so much broken as loosely attached. If you picked the sofa up and carried it around, the leg was very liable to fall off. But if you put the leg back carefully and left the sofa on the ground, then you couldn't tell a difference.

The sofa was a two-seater with upholstery that was trying really hard to be leather but was clearly made by a man and not a cow. It was a dark vomit green and looked like the kind of thing you'd find in the basement of an old man who was trying to convince himself that he was very learned. It was going to be his reading sofa, except that he ended up falling asleep in the recliner in front of the TV most nights.

This is the fun of buying used furniture. You can invent past lives for them.

I bought the sofa for $15 at a yard sale during my last year of college. I loved it, because I empathized with its struggle to be a learned old man's study couch. It was the main piece of living room furniture for me in Boone, in Winston-Salem, and here in Raleigh up until about four months ago. At that point, I came to grips with the fact that for all its charm, it just wasn't a very comfortable place to sit. The sofa got moved into the dining room, where it waited for me to find proper transportation for it to go to Goodwill. A futon was put in the living room, and I hope that the sofa was not too jealous of the fact that we stopped sitting on the floor so much and actually used the futon.

Transportation finally happened Sunday night. Yes, I lived with a sofa in my dining room for four months, what of it? That's the kind of wild and crazy single life I lead. We carried it down the stairs, stopping and picking up the fallen leg on the way. We loaded it up and drove down to Goodwill. As we were unloading it, I cautioned Josh not to let the Goodwill employees see the gimpy leg, because I was afraid that they would not take it.

Is that dishonest? Am I required to give full disclosure on the known limitations of an item if I am giving it to someone for free? We weren't really trying to pull anything. Yes, the leg fell out, but if you left the couch on the floor, you could reattach it very nicely and use it without incident. But even if Goodwill did take it, they would likely discover the defect later, at which point they might just dump it. I wished that I had taken the time to get some wood glue and repair the leg before I battled this ethical debate.

Well, none of that matters, because in route to the donation door, the leg did its thing and gave me away. The Goodwill lady said she could not accept my donation of a sad old man's basement study sofa and I had to put it back in the van. We asked where we might take it, and she recommended the dump. I wished that I could have covered the sofa's ears before she said that so its feelings wouldn't be hurt.

We wouldn't have to take it to the dump. There was a dumpster at my apartment where you could put large items. Many people put stuff there, only to have someone else see it and adopt it. I had saved multiple items myself this way. Every time I did, I griped and shook my fist at the unknown person who threw away a perfectly good item. Even though I was rescuing it, they had no way of knowing that someone would take it, and they'd be much better off taking it to a thrift store where it was sure to get new life.

It was starting to get late, and there were rain clouds overhead. I pictured my three-legged sofa sitting next to the dumpster, maybe with an old Christmas tree to keep it company, in the rain. I knew I couldn't do it, and I waited a few moments before daring to ask Josh how he felt about carrying the sofa back up the stairs to my apartment.

He agreed without even a sigh, because he knows me pretty well. He was probably waiting for me to ask. If I left a functional item out there to sit in the rain and wait for some sympathetic stranger, then I have no right to shake my fist at anyone else who does it. I don't want to be a hypocrite, and I don't want to be wasteful.

We bought the wood glue, we made the repair. We will borrow the van again, carry the couch down the stairs again, and try to give it to a different thrift store. For now, the couch is still in my apartment, probably sniggering to itself because it's managed to mooch off me for another week. Or it's grateful that I care enough to give it new life. Or maybe it's just a sofa and doesn't have feelings at all.

negative nelly.

"Do you know how much it weighs?"

"No."

"Well, how big is it?"

"Standard freezer size. Like the size of my fridge."

"How old is it?"

"Kinda old."

"That's going to make it even heavier. You don't know exactly how old?"

"No."

A pause.

"Well, where are they keeping it now? In the basement or something?"

"Well, they live in a trailer, so probably not in a basement."

"This is getting better and better. Do you know the name of these people?"

"The lady's name is Stephanie. She said she tried to sell it before, but the people who wanted it wanted to put deer heads in it and the shelves aren't removable, so the deer heads wouldn't fit."

He does not even bother to respond to that one. The giant former church van bumped along the road as we traveled deeper into the redneck underbelly of Cary.

"You think I'm being too impulsive?"

"Yes. But you haven't committed to buying it. You can still say you don't want it and I'll be mean for you."

I don't think that's ever happened before. My role in the relationship is to be the stable voice of reason, whereas he likes to fly by the seat of his pants. I've never figured out how to sew wings to my pants, but maybe I'm looking at the pants-to-wing-attachment problem the wrong way.

I saw an ad for a freezer for $50, and I wanted it. I was sick of only buying a couple of pounds of sale-priced ground beef and then running out a month later and having to buy it when it wasn't on sale. The lady on the phone sounded very nice, and that was pretty much enough for me. I made sure I could get use of the band's van, and I signed up for a time to pick up my new toy. And now Josh was being all negative about it. I've never bought anything off Craig's List before, but I figured that this was how it worked. You see an ad, you call or email, and then you go check it out. Maybe having a Negative Nelly along is part of it, too.

We drove slowly down a poorly-maintained road, taking in the sights of the mobile homes on either side of us. Some had fences that enclosed various barking mutts and rusting appliances. We pulled up to the one with a freezer on the front porch and a rebel flag in one of the windows. I sighed and held tight in my mind to the sound of the lady's voice on the phone. She did not sound like trailer trash. I am no stranger to trailers, and I've known lots of people who lived in them. Some of them fit the stereotype, and just as many of them don't. Some of them are racist but otherwise very nice. People are complicated.

Stephanie came out on the front porch, and I felt relieved when I saw her. She didn't have the hollow, apathetic look that I associate with trailer trash, people who are ignorant by choice. She looked like a perfectly normal, likable person who just happened to live in a trailer. And her freezer looked like a perfectly acceptable one that just happened to be a little older, not suitable for holding deer heads, but perfectly capable of containing ground beef packed into half pound patties. I gave it a quick inspection, saw that it was clean with minor dents, but in very good condition for its age. I happily forked over $50.

Her husband and two teenage sons (I wondered which one had the room with the rebel flag) carried the freezer to the van and hoisted it in, while I talked to Stephanie about how her driveway flooded when it rained and her dad's upcoming retirement. We thanked them and wished them well, the intersection of our lives likely over forever.

The ride back was very different.

"So they were nice," I said.

"Yeah. I liked them. The guy looked like he knew what he was doing, too. He might have even checked out the freezer, too, to make sure it worked. I could tell that he was handling it really carefully, too." His change in attitude was startling.

I guess I can fly by the seat of my pants sometimes, too.

my ungrateful heart.

I was holding a gallon-sized ziplock bag of frozen chicken soup, standing in front of my open freezer, looking at a gallon-sized ziplock bag of frozen stroganoff and a gallon-sized bag of frozen vegetable beef stew. On the counter sat a gallon-sized ziplock bag of chili. I was struggling to have a grateful heart and it was not working.

Over Christmas break, we went up to Snowshoe Mountain, where Josh's dad rented a condo for the family. I'm no stranger to tagging along with a boyfriend on holidays. Some of them are uncomfortable, some of them are tense. This one is just pretty awesome. We go out in the morning and ski, and then come in for lunch, where Josh's step-mom has prepared us something delicious and hot and homemade. Then we go out and ski again or maybe just take a mid-afternoon nap. At night, we watch movies and play games and eat more home cooking.

Josh's step-mom, Susan, always cooks too much food. I'm not talking about the way that your Grandmother makes three biscuits for every person at Thanksgiving. I'm talking about making enough food that each person could have five meals a day and still take home a doggie bag. It's Too Much Food. Luckily, she has a strategy for getting rid of all the food that doesn't get eaten. That strategy is to give it to her step-sons.

And that's why I suddenly found myself in possession of multiple ziplock bags of frozen food. Don't get me wrong, I love free food. Don't ever offer me free food if you're only being polite, because I will take you up on it. But there just wasn't enough room for all this genuinely-offered food. I only have the small freezer that comes on top of my fridge, and I use every available inch of that. Opening the freezer is an adventure at my apartment, because not only do you not know what you're going to have to move to find the corn you're looking for, you don't know what's going to fall out the second you open the door. If you're lucky, it's the corn you're looking for. If you are unlucky, it's a whole chicken.

As I was standing, looking at the freezer with all the gallon-sized ziplock bags full of frozen food around me (and a bag of frozen corn on the floor), my grateful heart disappeared. I became angry and resentful that Susan lovingly made all this yummy food and then gave it to me. I was being inconvenienced by her poor planning. I suppose in actuality, she planned very well. She planned to give all the food to us. I began to wonder what the deal was with all the extra food and started to psychoanalyze her need to make Too Much Food. I even complained to Josh, who was not sympathetic and told me that I did not have a grateful heart. I started to resent him, too, even though he had done a good job lobbying to get the mustard (which we were actually almost out of anyway) and making his brother take the light mayonnaise (which I would never, ever use).

So I thawed those bags of food one at a time and then repackaged their contents into quart-sized bags. They fit better in the freezer and would be easy to take out and heat up for one meal for two people. I still did not have a grateful heart, but I stopped complaining and started dealing with it. Actually, I kept complaining, but I did it while I dealt with the food. Once repackaged, it all fit into the freezer, provided I close the door very quickly. I came up with some theories about why someone would feel the need to cook so much food, and I prepared myself to eat a lot of chicken soup in the next couple of months. Then I prepared myself to have to deal with this problem every time I saw Susan.

I did that by looking at freezers on craigslist. And you know, just thinking about getting a freezer made my heart feel much more grateful.

the long and short of it.

I am hoping that I will know when it's time to cut my hair. I was hoping that there would be a gong when I fell in love, so that I would know for sure about that, too. There wasn't. But maybe hair is unimportant enough that the universe will feel it's okay to give me a sure sign. I'm a slow learner.

See, my hair is tremendously long. Sooooo long. I have a love/hate relationship with it. It gets a lot of attention, which I like sometimes and others not. Also, I have learned that in terms of hair, quantity can overcome poor quality. I don't have especially pretty or striking hair, but there is a lot of it, which seems to count for something.

But long hair also requires a lot of maintenance, and to be honest, I don't even maintain the very short hairs on my legs anymore. Get this: with long hair, you have to brush it at least two times a day. Frankly, that's just too much for me. It takes forever and a day to dry and gets in the way all the time, and the only thing that I ever do with it is put it up. I have vivid dreams of cutting it off.

The weirdest thing about all this hair is that I don't believe it's mine. People who have seen it several times still act surprised to see it all coming from my head. I roll my eyes at them, but to be honest, I'm sort of surprised whenever I see it, too. I had short hair for ten years. Sometimes it was short enough that I would get mistaken for a boy with big hips. And I still think of myself that way, as I guess all the people who knew me then think of me. In my heart, I have short hair. There are people who have only known me with long hair, and they have no idea about the short hair in my heart.

Someday, I will cut it off, all of it in one fell swoop. I will send it to a little kid with cancer, and they will be much more grateful than I was about it. They will not complain about how it's the mousiest brown ever. But...not yet. Even as I hate it and battle with it and whine every time I have to tame it into brushability, I am not ready to go back to being a boy with big hips. It took so darn long to get to this point. I didn't do anything but not cut it off, but I did that for four years. And I think that once I do take the plunge, I'll never bother to grow it all back.

Having long hair has really been the only time I've had interesting hair, and that's where my reluctance lies. I know that interesting hair is only a phone call to my stylist away, but I shy away from that because it would make me feel even less like me. I would want to shout out "I have straight, mousy brown hair!" to anyone I met, lest they think I was trying to fool them with that lovely head of burnt auburn #17. I'm not against chemical hair alterations in general, but it's not for me. That might be a stupid way to feel, but there you go.

I am hoping it will be a haircut dream that will tell me when I'm ready to make the big hack. So far, I've always been sad that I cut my hair in the dream. And then I wake up, surrounded by a tangled mass that I was supposed to brush before I went to bed, and I am relieved. But one night, I won't be sad. I'll be glad that what's on my head again matches what's in my heart.

who are the caniacs?

To be fair, my hand was over my heart. It had to be, because it was holding a red-checkered paper tray with a barbeque sandwich in it to my chest. Two girls were singing the anthem in lovely harmony. I could see them way on the other side of the room, but I could see them much better on the jumbotron. It took me a minute to locate the flag, which I was supposed to be looking at reverently while I held my hand on my barbeque sandwich.

The girls sang on. "And the rockets'-"

"RED!" screamed everyone around me suddenly, making me jump.

"-glare, the bombs bursting in air," continued the girls, again unaided by the crowd. Then they finished and everyone cheered for America, God bless it, while I put down my barbeque sandwich. It sat next to a bobblehead of a Nordic-looking fellow with his fist in the air, a free gift to me upon entry into the arena.

Alex Trebek appeared on the jumbotron, which was as unexpected to me as the sudden importance of a single adjective within a song full of words. He gave a Jeopardy-style answer about the name of the craziest fans in the entire NHL. I wasn't sure about his fact-checking, but I was pretty sure I knew where he was going with this one.

Who are the Caniacs?

Everyone around me cheered again, as if Alex had just said their favorite color. Mine happens to be blue, but I'd be darned if I brought that up here, surrounded by all these rabid Caniacs, rumored to be the craziest fans in the entire NHL. I couldn't tell you for sure, because this was my first hockey game. They seemed pretty crazy, though.

I don't know anything about hockey. I said this was my first hockey game, but I meant that this was the first time I'd ever even watched a whole one. I know how they score goals, and I know a couple of jokes about fighting. As it turns out, that's really all you need to enjoy a hockey game. It also helps to know where the jumbotron is. There is useful information there, such as what to yell next. Also, you can watch the people in the stands as they sit staring dully into space for a second before realizing that they're on the jumbotron and start smiling and waving.

Hockey is exciting. It's non-stop fast-paced action, so it's got both baseball and football beat. It's still hard to score, though, so while it seems like everything is happening at once, somehow nothing is advancing. It's like an action movie with no plot. Maybe you have to understand the rules to get the plot.

A lot of the enjoyment is in the mob mentality. Every time the red team (that's us) took a shot and missed, we all went "awwwww." And then when the other team took a shot and we blocked it, we went "yeah!" I was genuinely excited when these things happened, even though I have no association with this team other than a shared base city and a newly acquired bobblehead. But I was enthralled. Why? I have no idea. I think it has something to do with testosterone, because I felt the same sort of excitement when there were fights.

About the fighting - it really is as bad as the jokes say. There were probably three tussles that night, and each one caused the fans to stand up and lean over to peer down at the action. It was the drama in the action movie.

I can't help but wonder if the fighting is...embellished. Not fake, but not exactly genuine, either. It's like everyone on the ice is looking for a fight, as if they'd gone to a bar after midnight and started yelling yo mama jokes at strangers. There's not really much punishment for it. You have to sit out for a while, but then so does the other guy, so your team isn't down a player. The referees will stop it before anyone gets too hurt. And the fans love it. They pound on the walls of your penalty box, which looks like the thing that the Pope stands in when he visits. There's even a montage of movie clips that shows on the jumbotron during the fight. Fighting is just a part of hockey.

Two of the fights were stopped pretty much immediately. But then there was that first one, where suddenly a player stopped skating, faced another player, tore off his gloves and held up his fists, street-fighting style. The other guy did the same. The refs stood back, watching, like kids on the playground who are more interested in seeing what happens than preventing anything. And then they went at it for a little while, swinging at each other until one guy was down and the refs stepped in. Apparently, if you take off your gloves, you're allowed to fight in a hockey game. It's like honor or being a gentleman or whatever else is at the intersection of testosterone and pride. It was oddly inspiring, as if this particular bout of fisticuffs were about something noble and not a guy on skates pushing another guy on skates into the wall.

I don't really advocate violence, but it seems to me that hockey is providing an outlet. Maybe without hockey, all these players and all these Caniacs would be at bars yelling yo mama jokes to strangers. It's not exactly constructive, but it's not hurting anything either. Perhaps hockey is where men can still be men, whatever that means.

I am not a man, but I have to say that our game was a great one, where we won by a goal scored in the last minute of sudden death overtime. I jumped up and cheered at that last goal. My favorite color is still blue, but at that moment, I probably could have passed for a Caniac.

bunny lips.

My brother didn't have to email me about it this time, but I've gone and used another offensive word without meaning to. A commenter mistook me on Monday, thinking that I pictured my ex-boyfriend's new girlfriend with a hairy lip. I actually said that I imagined her with a harelip, which is far worse. In fact, having a little bit of hair on the upper lip is a common affliction of otherwise nearly-perfect dark-haired ladies. But the comment caused me to doubt my own understanding of the word, and so I looked it up. And then I learned that the word "harelip" is offensive.

Huh?

Of course, I immediately started thinking of my defense. I've been using that term, albeit very rarely, for years. And I think once that I called Josh "bunny lips," so does that count, too? Since I didn't know that the word was offensive, was it still offensive when I used it? Well, yes, but I do have some plausible deniability. And I bet I'm not the only one. I bet you've been throwing "harelip" around left and right and had no idea how many cleft lip victims you were offending. You are so insensitive.

I had a hard time finding out why it was offensive. Lots of web sites said that it was without any further explanation. The only explanation I could find was honestly a bit sketchy. Apparently, the term comes from the fact that hares, like all rodents, cuddly or not, have split lips. But then that got all mixed up with a connection between hares and witchcraft. In fact, if a child was born with a cleft lip, then it indicated that the mother had been knocked up by the devil. I suppose that's legit. If I implied that a person was the inspiration for "Rosemary's Baby", I would understand how they might be upset. But this explanation didn't ring true to me, maybe because it seemed like it referred to a limited time period. The writer then sort of lamely says that no one likes to be compared to a rodent.

But in my not-at-all extensive research (I skimmed through forty Google hits), that was the only explanation I could find. Usually internet research yields much more information. So if no one knows that a word is offensive, and no one can remember why, is it still offensive?

I wonder if maybe it became offensive the same way that "retarded" has. It started out as a totally legitimate medical term. But then people took it and started applying it as a general insult to people who were not actually mentally retarded, but just displaying some level of stupidity, either in general or by buying a really ugly hat. But then that makes other people mad, because you're being insensitive to people who are actually mentally retarded and would not be caught dead in that hat. And so the word that was formally just a regular term is now offensive to use at all, even when it's appropriate. Then we have a to come up with a new words for "retarded," but I bet it's only a matter of time before "mentally challenged" goes the same way. It's possible, maybe even likely, that eventually "retarded" will become non-offensive as more people grow up associating it with general stupidity only and not mental disabilities.

I suspect, and I have absolutely no evidence whatsoever to support this, that that scenario happened to "harelip", perhaps when it was a more common and less fixable condition. How long before "cleft lip" starts being used as a derogatory term? C'mon, you can call someone a Clefty*. That's offensive and catchy.

In any case, I feel bad about using the term at all now, because looking up info about it only leads me to pictures of cute babies with cleft lips and palates. How am I supposed to feel superior to my ex-boyfriend's new girlfriend if I start thinking of her as a sweet innocent baby whose face didn't develop properly in the womb? Maybe I should have accused her of having a hairy lip. Even better, a full beard. Yeah, we'll go with that. She's a total bearded lady, and he picked her up at the circus. She probably uses the term "harelip," too, which, as we all know, is very offensive. She's so insensitive.

*Okay, that was offensive, and I knew it. I have no excuse.

baseball girlfriends.

I'm fascinated by social groups formed by the significant others of people who hang out together. I can't say that I've ever been in a group like that. My friend Amy was in the group of baseball players' girlfriends in high school. They would all sit together and chat during games, because there was nothing else to do. Some of these girls were people that I knew she did not like. And yet she spent several hours a week talking to them. The really weird thing was that once the connection was severed, so was the relationship. Once baseball season was over, she didn't hang out with those girls anymore. And if one of the players broke up with his girl, then she was no longer part of the group. I suppose I should be in some sort of band girlfriend group. I should be hanging out with the drummer's girlfriend at shows, but I hang out by myself instead. As a result, I don't even know the girl's last name, despite us having boyfriends in the same band for over a year. I guess that's just what it's like to be me.

It's not that I don't understand about temporary relationships. I have had many. Someone I sat next to in a class one semester, an old roommate that I never bonded with, an coworker who left for another job. We had exactly one thing in common, and when that thing was done, so was our relationship, even if I talked to them often or liked them. That person is gone from my life, probably forever, and it doesn't bother me at all. Sometimes I might hang on to a relationship if I felt there was a connection with the person which went beyond whatever caused us to meet in the first place. But the ratio of people I kept to the people who have basically fallen off the face of the earth is very small.

And this baseball girlfriend thing, it's like that, except the thing you have in common is even more removed. The relationship is even more tenuous than hanging out with your boyfriend's friends. It's like letting someone else pick your friends. Two people who have a class together might have at least one interest in common. Having boyfriends that play the same sport seems even less likely to yield a connection.

Seeing my sisters-in-law over Thanksgiving made me realize that I might someday be part of a group like theirs - the members of a family who were not born into it. Then Josh and I went to a party with his step-brother and his girlfriend. I started looking at the girlfriend in a new light, realizing that if the stars aligned properly, I could be hanging out with her for the next fifty years. I could be invited to the birthday parties of her children. We might comfort each other at the death of an extended family member. It would be like we were sisters, but always with the possibility of having that tie severed. If either of our relationships ended, I would probably never see her again. We are baseball girlfriends in a neverending season.

I like the girl. I admit I am trying harder than I normally do to talk to her, because I know we might be bumping into each other at family gatherings for years. Of course, my normal social anxiety is not helped by this analysis of the situation, but that's what it's like to be me. Seriously, does anyone else in the world ever think about this stuff?

As I talk to her, I try to figure out how our relationship will develop. Will we be close, or will we just be extended family? Will we be limited to small talk at Christmas, or will we call each other up for parenting advice? How likely are two men who grew up in the same house to pick spouses that will bond with each other?

Of course, I have no answers and no foresight. I doubt you expected any, and frankly, you're surprised to find that anyone really thinks about this stuff. That's just what it's like to be me.

reckless gene.

My sisters-in-law have a support group. They get together to ask each other if their husband is weird or if their husband's whole family is weird. Usually they come away feeling better from the meeting, knowing that it's all their in-law's fault. This better prepares them to deal with the fact that their children are starting to act kinda weird, too.

I caught them in a meeting on Thanksgiving. Their item of discussion was the "reckless gene." I think everyone blames my dad for this one, though my mother is hardly Princess Grace. But Daddy has that combination of the reckless gene and testosterone. He's rolled a lawnmower over on himself and been gored by countless goats. He'll come in from outside with blood all over his face and not even know it. He once made my nephew cry by poking him in the side with a fork. The kid's mother, who has been in this family a long, long time, resolved the situation by looking at her son and calmly saying, "Honey, Grandpa is dangerous."

I never saw myself as a clumsy person until Josh told me that I was. I knew that I tripped or ran into things sometimes, but everybody does that. I don't think I do it more than anyone else, and frankly, I would like a second opinion. He is afraid of me, thinking that severe bodily harm becomes increasingly more likely the more time he spends with me. He keeps his distance every time I'm wielding something sharp. I told him the story about my dad poking my nephew with a fork, and suddenly he's hiding all the forks in the house. Sure I step on his toe every once in a while and I did stick a muddy finger in his eye once, but I resent being treated like a walking time bomb. What doesn't kill you makes you stronger.

One of my sisters-in-law called it "obliviousness." I think this is more accurate, and in my case, I think it's more like "lack of awareness." It's like when you're going through puberty, and your body is growing so quickly that you haven't had time to get used to its new size. So you're bumping into things and knocking into others because you haven't figured out that your arms and legs extend that far. The reckless gene is nothing more than a very extended awkward stage.

So maybe I'm clumsy, but I come by it honestly. It came with the nose. And now I have someone to blame every time I step on Josh's poor little whiny toe. It wasn't me.

It was Reckless Gene.

everything's alright.

I haven't had any contact with my ex-boyfriend since we broke up three years ago. Considering we were together about eight and a half years, a lot of people find our complete and total separation bizarre. Everyone says that they want to be friends after a break-up, but I have to tell you that total silence is a great way to encourage moving on. This person used to be the most important one in my life, now he's gone completely, so adapt NOW.

I have always figured that running into him at some point is inevitable. I imagined these confrontations being at different locations and in different situations, but the format is generally the same. Usually he had a new girl with him, usually one displaying genes which should have been ruled out by natural selection generations ago. I would be very cool and collected, wearing something modest but highlighting my natural beauty. Sometimes he would start an argument over some thing in our past relationship, whereupon I would show superior rhetoric skills and logic and prove him to be wrong, all wrong about everything that ever happened between us. If I was daydreaming in a good mood, he would start the conversation by just apologizing immediately. Then he would give me that dress mannequin that I paid $2 for a yard sale but that ended up in his apartment. The world would be right again.

So yeah, that hasn't happened. Thankfully, as time passed, my desire for such a confrontation lessened. I let go of a little bitterness, I conceded to myself that I was not so innocent with regard to the disintegration of our relationship. My imagined scenes became less confrontational, though his new girl still had a harelip and noticeable body odor. I didn't want retribution and groveling apologies so much as a sort of friendly "Hey, I'm okay, and as far as I'm concerned, everything's cool between us."

The internet makes it easier to be silent. You don't actually have to contact someone to find out what they are doing now. There are blogs and social networking sites and all that to fill the void. If he wanted to see what I was up to, all he had to do was come right here. And I go to his blog and web site periodically, just to see what's new in his world. For some reason, I am always surprised at how much he seems to be the same person. I guess I expected him to change in some really obvious way. After all, I've changed a lot. I have really long hair now and I've learned to like both South Park and beer; I'm like a completely different person.

It's actually comforting to know that he is still him and not the sort of person that would actually start a fight with me in public about five-year-old wrongs. His apparent stasis makes our relationship feel like it happened in a dream a long time ago, maybe even to someone other than me. I'm a different person, but he appears to be the same, so obviously, it must have been someone else. I'm sure if we met again, I'd be surprised at all the little things that are different about him. Perhaps he eats mayonnaise now. I can't even describe how that would blow my mind.

I don't know if we'll ever be friends again, and I'm not worried about it either way. As far as I'm concerned, everything's cool between us. He can even keep the dress mannequin.*

* I mean, if he wanted to get rid of the dress mannequin, because, like, it was taking up space and stuff, I would probably be willing to take it off his hands. You know, if he was sick of having it. That's all. It's not a big deal, and I am totally over the dress mannequin issue.

bailey park.

I'm on a yard saling expedition with Josh and Sarah, my twelve-year-old niece. It hasn't been a terrible morning as far as yard sales go, though this is Memorial Day weekend, and so there aren't a lot of sales. Still, we're driving around, following the homemade signs to whatever house has a bunch of junk piled out front. I turn into a neighborhood that has two such signs posted at the entrance and stop at a modest house. Out front were a couple of tables. As we pull up, a Hispanic woman in her thirties comes outside, leaving an unknown number of children talking inside. "They want to keep everything," she explains to us. I am curious, because though I have seen many folks from south of the border at yard sales, this one is my first where a Hispanic was hosting it.

We looked around a bit, didn't see anything we desperately needed, said a nice thank you, and left. As we drove further into the neighborhood, I noticed that all the houses were of a similar type: cookie-cutter affairs with vinyl siding, clean and new, though small. These were clearly starter homes. We followed the signs to the other yard sale in the area, and as we stopped, we saw that once again, a Hispanic woman was in charge. This time I did make a small purchase. As we got into the car, I remarked to Josh, "I think we're in Bailey Park." And because Josh is Josh, he knew what I meant.

For those of you who are not Josh, Bailey Park is the name of the neighborhood of homes built by the Bailey Building and Loan in It's a Wonderful Life. Bailey Park was where people who didn't have a lot of money could still buy their own nice, clean homes in safe neighborhoods. It was where people who immigrated here in the pursuit of the American Dream could actually find a piece of it instead of having to live under leaky roofs in high-crime areas.

Sarah asked me why I liked this neighborhood so much. To her, the houses looked fine, but not necessarily something that anyone would ever fantasize about. Josh and I tried to explain it to her, using phrases like "American Dream" and "middle-class aspirations," but I don't think we were able to communicate our feelings very well. That's okay. She's only twelve, and she'll get it someday. One day, she'll look at a neighborhood like this and be glad that places like it still exist.

the new old thing.

I sit on the floor with a roll of paper towels, a squirt bottle of off-brand window cleaner, and a paperclip. It is a Saturday afternoon, and I have come home from a morning of yard sales. I am sweaty and dirty because I just spent a few hours pawing through unwanted items in the heat. I am wearing yesterday's clothes, pulled off of my bedroom floor at 8 AM. My attention is focused on something I acquired that very morning. I am performing the ritualistic cleaning of The New Old Thing.

I apply a few generous squirts of window cleaner to The New Old Thing and begin wiping off the traces of the previous owner. Some of the stains won't come off, but the improvement is noticeable. I use the paperclip for detail work as I poke into tight spaces to get out accumulated grossness. I find that using a curved edge works better than an extended pointy end and doesn't leave scratch marks. I unscrew parts to examine them for completeness and clean them individually. I turn The New Thing upside down so as to get to some of the harder angles. Looking at this thing right-side up, you'd never even notice those dirty spots, but I am determined to be thorough.

I am welcoming The New Old Thing to my life. It used to live somewhere else, and it gave many great years of service to another. The previous owner never gave it such a scrubbing as it was receiving today. And then it was discarded, maybe reluctantly, but discarded nonetheless. It sat in the hot Saturday sunshine on a table next to other discarded things. Then I saw it, wanted it, haggled over it, bought it, and brought it home to start anew.

I know that I am never again going to clean it like this ever again. If it happened to be on the receiving end of a nasty spill, I might give it a quick wipe-down, but nothing involving disassembly or a paperclip. I bought The New Old Thing so that it could be useful to me, and it doesn't require spotlessness to do that. I already know it well enough to know that it doesn't mind being dirty, so long as it can still get the job done.

This is part of the resurrection of The New Old Thing. The first part was my buying it out of someone's trash pile. Now I'm cleaning it up to give it a fresh start. I'm getting to know it, figure out how the parts go together, what works flawlessly, what squeaks while working flawlessly. I have sat on the floor with many New Old Things, cleaning and restoring them to welcome them into my collection of New Old Things. Sometimes I tighten screws or touch up paint with colored markers.

It's the same feeling as taking a New New Thing out of its box and reading the instructions, popping the bubble wrap, reveling in the ownership of a New Thing. But in this case, we are giving an Old Thing a second chance to be New. And couldn't we all use a second chance once in a while?

2 AM.

He was kinda tipsy and her feet hurt. The bar was closing, but there was a party at someone's house and everyone was invited. He wanted to go, and her feet hurt.

He didn't know where the party was but he could definitely get a ride. He didn't know the guy who was throwing the party, but he knew the band, the members of which were friends of the guy who was throwing the party and who had been assured him that it was totally cool if he came along. He didn't get out as much as he used to in college.

It was 2 AM and her feet hurt. She'd dressed nice for the evening and was wearing high heels. They looked great but felt awful after four hours standing on a hard floor, even with the wine. The wine had worn off a while ago. She'd come to see the band with him, even though she didn't know them very well. She was happy to go, because she loved him, and she had liked the band. It had been a fun evening, but it was now 2 AM and her feet were seriously killing her.

"There's a party at someone's house," he said.

"Yeah. Is that what you want to do?" she said. She knew he wanted to go.

"Maybe," he said. He knew that her feet hurt.

There was a long silence, as they watched the other happy bar patrons exiting and going off to their parties or their homes, depending on whether their feet hurt. They both hoped for distraction from this issue, though they knew it would have to be addressed.

"You can go if you want," she said. She didn't want to be a mean girlfriend.

"No, it's okay. We can go home," he said. He didn't want to be in the doghouse.

"Are you sure?" she asked. She knew he was afraid of the doghouse, and wanted to make it clear that it really was okay if he went. Really.

"Yeah, no, it's late," he said. He didn't believe her.

He explained to his friends that he was just going to head on out, and they understood because they saw her standing next to him. She resented being seen as a ball and chain or a leash, but in the end, her feet hurt and she was secretly relieved to get her way. They walked off with his arm over her shoulder.

As they left, Josh and I turned to look at each other, both of us shaken by the surreal event of having something from your past acted out in front of you. We had stood by them, unable to tear our eyes away from the drama unfolding before us. We watched it happen exactly as it has happened between the two of us when it's 2 AM. He's gone home before he was ready, and I'd stayed out when my feet hurt. I hoped that by watching the scene between another couple, I might be able to figure out the answer. What should happen? What is the proper ending to the play?

I came up with nothing. I sympathized with him, because he was having a good time and he wanted to keep doing that. And I sympathized with her, because she'd been hanging out with his friends all evening and was trying to be understanding. Maybe the answer is that sometimes you have to do things you don't want to do because other times the other person has to do things they don't want to do. It doesn't seem like much of an answer, and it won't help me the next time it's 2 AM and my feet hurt, but it's all I've got.

it's all gravy.

We were having a gravy race.

I love homemade gravy. It's delicious science, is what it is. You have some liquid, you add some thickening agent and flavor, stir awhile and there's your gravy. Why does it thicken? I don't know, that's the science part. You don't need a silly little store-bought packet. You do need patience.

I am not patient with gravy. The recipes always make it sound like a quick step. "Add the broth and then stir until thickened." I mean, that doesn't sound like very long, does it? And because I apparently have no accumulated memory, I don't remember the last time I thought making gravy wouldn't take very long and so I wonder why this time is taking so for-EV-er. I think about adding more flour or cornstarch, but I apparently do have some accumulated memory, because I remember doing that before, and it didn't turn out well. So I just keep stirring. And complaining.

We were making meatballs for Thanksgiving, 95 of them to be exact. We had rolled them out and placed them into neat little rows, like tiny rotund Swedish soldiers, ready for a battle with hunger. But my pans would only hold about thirty meatballs at a time, and so we had to cook them and their gravy in shifts. After the meatballs had been browned, it was time to make gravy. Each of us had added all the ingredients and were deep in the stirring stage. It was just a matter of whose gravy would thicken first.

You've probably never had a gravy race before. I'm not sure if ours was typical (or perhaps it was the first ever?), but there seemed to be a lot of trash talk.

"You call that gravy? That runny stuff wouldn't even clog an artery."

"It's thicker than that brown dish water you've got going over there."

"Your mama."

There was also a lot of kissing, which might seem like it didn't go with the trash talk, but we made it work.

I thought of an interpersonal psychology class I had taken a couple of years ago at a community college. We were talking about examples of quality time, ways to spend time with someone else that would allow you to bond. I suggested making dinner together. One woman thought I was crazy, as if I had just suggested a nice romantic walk across hot coals. I should look her up and suggest that she and her husband have a gravy race.

the only pretty pen-pal in Montana.

I briefly mentioned my pen pal before, and I thought that I would take the time to mention her less briefly today. A couple of years ago, I started feeling that I wasn't doing enough to help the world, and so I started looking into volunteer programs. I looked mostly at tutoring math, but most of the programs were more after school than after day job hours. Then I started thinking about those prison pen pal programs that are always the basis for wacky situations on half hour network comedies.

I'm going to pause here to let my mother freak out for a little bit while she thinks about me writing letters to felons. In fact, I'm going to depart completely from my topic, knowing she'll read whatever is next out of motherly obligation. She'll read it as fast as she can, sure, but she'll read it, trying to get to the part where I reassure her about the felons.

I once had a pen pal in third grade or so, arranged through the school. My classmates and I were all paired up with the classmates in some other school in Montana. My girl sent me a picture of her with her pet bunny, and all the boys in my class thought she was really pretty. Or maybe they just liked a girl who could handle a rabbit. In any case, I enjoyed a very weird sort of popularity for having the only pretty pen pal in Montana. Later, the pen pal (what was her name?) wrote and asked for that particular picture back, because her bunny had died and that was the only photo she had of him. Because of the really bizarre popularity that picture provided me, I was very reluctant to send it back. How did young Sandra respond to this early test of her willingness to help out her fellow man? I'll just say that I found a picture of a very cute little girl holding a rabbit in my stuff a couple of years ago.

Alright, my mom is getting pretty antsy now, so I'll just let you know that you have to have a P.O. box to write to a felon, and I don't. I was secretly relieved. No matter how funny it is when Steve Urkel's convicted pen pal gets out of jail and comes to see him, I can imagine other scenarios that would end up on the 10 PM crime drama. And of course, that's very unfair to judge the incarcerated that way, but there you go.

But I did find a nursing home in California which had a pen pal program for its residents. And this sounded like a great idea for me, because I could feel helpful to the world without actually having to leave the house. It also gave me an excuse to buy stationery.

I'd always really liked pen pals. On that old PBS show, Ghostwriter, there was a cute Hispanic kid named Alex who had about fifty pen pals all over the world. He had a map up on his wall with push-pins representing each long-distance friend.

Alex is the cute one on the very left. He's totally working those early 90s clothes.

I thought Alex was really cool.

Aside from the prettiest pen pal in Montana, I had another pen pal for about five years who lived in New York. We wrote each other from about third grade to eighth grade, a time period that seems really long in retrospect. I found some of her letters recently, and I was shocked at the things I had told her, including highly-sensitive information about a crush on a boy that I never told anyone else in the world about. I guess that's the good thing about pen pals, the level of trust that comes with distance. Of course it is possible that the entire town of Victor, New York knows about how I almost "went with" that boy. I found a letter where she told me about her first kiss, and it was terribly sweet, like the stuff of a sappy coming of age movie. Of course, I cringe to think of all the letters of mine that might exist somewhere and how I probably sounded idiotic and naive. But she, she was sweet.

I actually sent a letter to this girl's old address a couple of years ago, but either she moved or she wasn't interested in putting a push pin on Raleigh, NC. I would have liked to inform her that I, too, have since been kissed by a boy (but not by that other one). I like to assume that she moved. Lots of people deride denial, but I personally find it very useful in day-to-day ego maintenance.

I wonder if pen pals have fallen out of fashion now that there is email. Of course, you can just have an email pal. But I'll go ahead and give the usual argument in favor of the old-fashioned and say that it's not the same. It's less personal. Maybe something is lost when you can't hold something in your hands and think that it came from someplace far away. Or maybe it's better because it's instant and easier to maintain. Or maybe it's worse because a friendship which is more difficult to keep inherently means more. Or maybe nothing is ever good or bad, but thinking makes it so.

I can't decide. I wish I knew how Alex felt about it.