too relevant.

Whenever I get unwanted emails, I try to unsubscribe from whatever list sent me the email in the first place. It's an exercise in futility, like crushing individual ants. It's not even as satisfying as crushing ants. But I do it, because it feels like fighting the good fight.

I especially do it whenever the email is from a big, well-known company, because I trust big, well-known companies to have policies about spam and working websites. With smaller companies, sometimes you have to unsubscribe several times. Sometimes, after realizing that the automated unsubscribe system does not work, I will send them nasty emails. NASTY. That is reasonably effective, and is every bit as satisfying as crushing ants.

Staples is a big company, so I did not expect trouble when unsubscribing from their list. Indeed, I did not get any. But I did get a survey, asking me why I was unsubscribing. I'm always a little amused by these surveys. Sometimes they have options like "I receive too many emails," which makes me picture someone harried and frustrated, unable to ever get any work done because they keep getting emails, that friendly "You've Got Mail" mocking them every five seconds. Once, I saw one that said "I do not remember signing up to receive emails," which pissed me off. They did not leave room for the possibility that I actually didn't sign up, only that I had forgotten about it. Jerks.

Anyway, Staples has a question I'd never seen before.

Did you catch it? Aside from the understandable option "Staples emails are not relevant to me," they have "Staples emails are too relevant (feel watched)." Apparently, Staples is concerned that its customers will think that an office supply store is stalking them.

You know, I feel like I have a little insight into this one. You know how some people are crazy or even idiots? And sometimes those people get to make decisions? Some higher-up at Staples is convinced that the internet is spooky, and every time he gets a targeted ad on his Google search, he tries to call Google and complain. Or maybe his first idea is to call Google, but then he thinks better of it because then they'll tap his phone line. So he insisted that the developers put this option on the unsubscribe survey. They tried to tell him that it was colossally stupid (they used nicer, smaller words), but in the end, he's the boss. Being the boss in software means that other people have to implement your whims.

Not that I know anything about that.

Or maybe I'm all wrong, and they added that option because so many people were picking "Other" and writing "Feel watched" (although my guess is that they would type it "fEEL wATCHED"). In which case, we could all band together and get our own option added. We just subscribe to Staples emails, then when we unsubscribe, we all put down the same answer under "Other." Now we just need to think of a good line for our write-in candidate. Some ideas:

• Staples emails contain inappropriate/offensive content.


• I am illiterate.


• Staples emails remind me of my dead husband.

Other ideas?

other people's code.

The first real world code that I ever wrote was on the flagship product at my old job. You remember, the one where I wrote software that talked to trucks. I was given a relatively smallish task: Add a column to a chart full of truck information, and fill in the appropriate info into that column. It was a good assignment for a newbie in that it was fairly representative of the kind of work I've done in the real world. In college, you write small applications from scratch. In the real world, you write code to add functionality to an existing product. In college, the whole program is designed and written by you. In the real world, your new chunk is designed and written by you, but all that other code was designed and written by other people. Not one other person, lots of them. The older an application gets, the more fingerprints it has on it. When you add your own fingerprints, you have to work with the design and code that is already there. In college, you write code. In the real world, you shoehorn it.

Sometimes, this is okay. I've had mostly good experiences with other people's code, because the majority of people that I've worked with have been competant programmers. Some of them are fantastic programmers, and it's frequently a pleasure to add my own contribution. Because what they wrote was designed well in the first place, it is easy to add on. Other times, it is not okay. When Sartre said that hell is other people, he had not yet met the hell that is other people's code.

Anyway, back to that first assignment of mine. I did an okay job, I guess. It worked pretty well and there were pretty icons, which seemed to make people happy. There were bugs, but there will always be bugs.

A year later, I was asked to fix one of those bugs. I jumped back into that code that I had written, and I found it very difficult to figure out just what was going on. It was downright confusing. That was my first experience with code amnesia. I could tell it was my code, because it looked like my style. And I had a vague memory of writing the feature. But I had no recollection of how it worked. This has happened several times since then. Spend six months away from some code that you've written, and you'll have no idea what it does anymore. It's as if a novelist forgot his characters' names six months after finishing the book.

Having spent some time away from that first assignment and then being thrust back into it, I noticed some glaring design problems. Namely, that it was a really crappy design. It was unnecessarily complex, when it could have been much more simple and elegant. I'm not sure if I was able to realize it was bad design because I was coming at it with fresh eyes, or if I had grown so much as a programmer in that first year of real world coding that I had actually learned something about how not to write bad code. What it amounted to in the end was that I had written code that would be hard to maintain. If even I had a hard time following the design well enough to fix a bug (and remember, I wrote it), then the poor fellow who had to fix the bugs after I left the company was in worse shape. Hell was my code. It was a very humbling experience.

Only the programmers among you will understand this part, so I only include it as an aside: there was a hashtable of arrays. There might have been more than one. While there are appropriate times to use such a thing, it should be a red flag.

This week, in my real world job, I had to fix a bug in a feature written by someone else. And the deeper I got into this code, the more I suspected that it just wasn't a very good design. Now, I wasn't here when it was written, so I don't know the requirements. I was thinking about maybe rewriting a couple of parts in it, just small parts, to make it a little less, you know, crashy.

And then I saw the hashtables of arrays. There were ten of them. TEN. I wanted to cry. Or have a beer. Or cry in my beer. Working with this code feels like penance for the bad code that I wrote, that some poor sop now has to maintain. I don't know what he's doing penance for. I can't even feel superior as I try to fix this bad code, because I know that I once wrote something just as bad.

The worst part is, I could still be writing bad code now. Maybe this is why people in this industry switch jobs so often.

the switch to low fat.

I had thirty minutes to kill.

It used to be a lot easier to kill half an hour in a giant shopping center. Once upon a time, back when I lived in a city whose mall was not so much a mall as a series of furniture outlets, the opportunity to visit a quarter mile of shiny capitalist temples would have thrilled me.

I decided to go to Barnes & Noble. Used to be, I would visit a B&N once a week at least, but in the last five years or so, I've made maybe three visits. I'm not sure how places like this can compete with the internet. I could sit outside the store on a bench and order a book from my cell phone and probably get a better price. There seem to be people here, though, so maybe there are those who like the experience of a brick and mortar store.

As soon as I walk in, I see the coffee shop. It's after 8 pm, and I haven't had supper yet. Never, ever shop when you're hungry. Just half an hour earlier, I had almost bought a bag of Twizzlers at Best Buy, which is sort of like buying a hammer at Food Lion; it's got impulse buy written all over it. Heaven help me if I went to a grocery store and accidentally wandered down the Dorito aisle. It's funny, I asked a coworker if you could still get Teddy Grahams, and he acted shocked that I didn't know. Don't you ever go down the cookie and snack cracker aisle? No, not really. That was a realization for me, that I so rarely walked down the Teddy Graham aisle that I had forgotten you could buy bear-shaped sweetened crackers. I felt a little smug, because the reason I don't visit those sections of grocery stores is because I just make my own cookies. But I don't know how to make Doritos. Maybe that's for the best.

The reason I used to visit B&N every week was because it was open until 11 pm, and I wasn't old enough to go anywhere that was open later, but I was old enough to have a 12:30 curfew. My boyfriend and I went out every Saturday night to Hickory, which had furniture outlets, but also an actual mall and a Best Buy and a used record store. These were our dates - dinner somewhere cheap, then hitting stores until they were closed. Then we went somewhere and made out until it was time to go home. I don't know what other kids did on their dates. The making out part was probably universal, but maybe they went to the movies or had nicer dinners than Cici's Pizza.

I hate Cici's Pizza. When they opened in Hickory, it was still only $3.99 for the buffet. The food was decent, the price was right, but we went so many times that I couldn't have told you if any other restaurants in town were even still open anymore. They'd all be relegated to the Teddy Graham aisle in my mind. My boyfriend liked restaurants in phases, so we went to the same place over and over for six months before he switched to somewhere else. It sounds like I'm complaining, but I didn't mind it so much then. Having grown up in a home where our eating out experience consisted of getting milkshakes every two years when we bought a new car, I was happy to go anywhere. Plus, I was young and in love and still had really good metabolism.

The mall closed at nine, and some of the other stores closed at ten, so that's when we went to B&N. Sometimes we would to go Wal-Mart, which was always a mistake. A bunch of other kids, who were also too young to go to bars but not interested in books, would go to the Wal-Mart parking lot and cruise. It was impossible to get in and out without spending twenty minutes in between two pimped-out Civics. Eventually, it got better, because the Wal-Mart manager finally called in the Hickory police to monitor the parking lot, direct traffic, and tell the kids to move along now, move along. I suppose if you were going to commit a crime in Hickory, Saturday night at 10 pm would be the best time to do it.

At B&N, we would get hot cocoas, because we were too young to drink coffee. Then we'd go through the bargain books. Once we finished with those, he would go look through the art books and then the magazines. I ran out of things to look at before he did, particularly since I had to look at things which were close to him because he didn't really like me to wander away from him in the store. So I would sit on a bench and page through bridal magazines, because I was too old for Seventeen, but too embarrassed to read Cosmo. I wasn't making wedding plans, but I liked to look at the dresses. I wonder if it weirded him out, seeing me pour over pictures of brides. Probably not then, though maybe it would have a few years later when we were both in our early twenties. Sometimes we sat in the coffee shop, flirting across the table. Once he tore up one of the to-go cocoa cups and made me a flower. I kept it in a shoebox in my closet, along with all the other random keepsakes, including a purple paper hat and an envelope full of rhododendron leaves.

Last night at B&N, I gave in to temptation and walked to the coffee shop. It wasn't a fight at all, but a quick surrender to hunger and nostalgia. I'm too old to drink coffee that late, so I ordered a medium hot cocoa. It was $2.94. Seems like it had been two bucks when I was sixteen. The lady handed me my drink and I meandered over to the bargain books, still kept right at the front of the store. My cocoa was too hot to drink yet.

The bargain books are always the same, even when they are different. They're remaindered from the publisher or collections of classics put out by Barnes & Noble. Some coffee table books heavy on pictures and light on content, with popular topics meant to draw you in and then hook you with the fact that they are half the price of the regular books in the store. A few of them were interesting, but years of buying books for a quarter at yard sales has pretty much ruined my ability to give B&N any of my money.

I still had ten minutes to kill. I guess I could go look at bridal magazines. I'm still too embarrassed to read Cosmo. I wandered around aimlessly instead. The cocoa was not good. Maybe they've switched to low fat milk instead of whole, but I'm inclined to think it's just bad cocoa mix. It used to be a lot better than this, at least I think it did. Seems like Teddy Grahams used to be good, too, and Cici's Pizza.

There was a table of paperbacks labelled for "summer reading," whatever that means. They were classics, and I greeted them like old friends, maybe like old lovers, except that I've never greeted an old lover, so I don't know what it's like. I counted the ones I had read and picked up the others to read the blurbs on the backs. I wished that I had a book with me so that I could kill time by immersing myself in it rather than taking a stroll through a place that looked just like I remembered, but wasn't the same at all. It was like walking around in your old elementary school and marvelling at how short the water fountains are. It's just a change in perspective.

I'm not sad that I've changed, and I have zero desire to be sixteen again (apart from that metabolism bit). Nor do I necessarily care that I no longer get any enjoyment out of a cup of Barnes & Noble cocoa. But the fact that it is so far from good now makes me wonder if it was ever good, or if I just didn't know any better. It's hard to not let this cup of bad cocoa sully memories of cups of good cocoa past. Because it was so good then, rich and creamy. I remember enjoying the cocoa, the books, and the magazines, though maybe it was just all about the boy the whole time. But even that has been tainted by all that happened later.

Sometimes it's best to assume that they're just not using whole milk anymore.

yard sales, july 17.

I've noticed that during the middle of the summer, yard sales die off.  This might be more of a Raleigh thing, because I don't remember this being the case back in Lenoir, which is much cooler in June, July, and August.  Then again, the season here extends all the way through October, whereas in Lenoir it peters out in early September.  Yard sale seasons are like growing seasons; they vary depending on your location.  You could plot the season here by the number of ads in the News and Observer.  I thought very seriously about doing that, and then decided that it was too dorky of an endeavor for even me.

Anyway, we're in the thick of the summer doldrums around here.  That doesn't mean that I'm not going to sales.  Let's not be silly.  It just means that there are fewer sales to go to, and almost all of them are single family sales.  Come September, maybe we'll get some big church sales again.

There was a small church sale, and I bought these small glass nesting bowls.  I bought them for a silly reason:  the Pioneer Woman has a set, which I've seen in the pictures that accompany her recipes.  It's really the equivalent of buying strawberry pop tarts because they're the favorite breakfast food of the youngest New Kid on the Block, as revealed in this month's Tiger Beat.  These Duralex-brand bowls are sold as a set of nine, but I guess the original owner of these didn't have much use for the tiny bowls, probably because they're not internet cooking stars.

Aside from being cute, these bowls are both French and indestructible.  Josh threatened to test their promise of unbreakability by dropping my sweet new bowls on our hardwood floors.  I was temporarily insane at the time, so I took that as a challenge.  I took the bowls from him, and just dropped them.  The tiniest one went flying across the room, but they all remained intact and free of chips or cracks.  Which is a relief, because we were both barefoot, and it was a pretty stupid thing to do.  Still!  Now we know.  Duralex:  can't bust 'em.

My main purchase of the day was a cast iron skillet.  I've been sorta-kinda looking for one for over a year now.  I could wax poetic about the lesson of delayed gratification inherent in buying secondhand, but to be honest, I've seen several cast iron skillets at sales, but never bought them.  When the time would come to pick it up and pay for it, I just never did.  Maybe it was because I didn't really have any idea what it was I was going to do with one, only that I had some sort of vague notion that it was a good thing to have in my cookware.  Also, I didn't really know anything about cast iron, so I wasn't sure what to look for.

Two weeks ago, Josh told me he thought we should have one.  Last week, I read a blog entry about cast iron skillets and which brands to look for.  These elements combined to give me the motivation to buy a skillet.  So Saturday, I bought a Wagner 10 1/2 inch, which is a brand recommended by that other blog (also:  Griswold and Lodge).  I bought it from a guy who clearly used to be an avid fisherman.  He was selling a dozen fishing rods and a bunch of outdoor cooking gear.  I felt bad for him, that he was being forced to let go of a hobby which must have brought him a lot of joy (or at least cost him a lot of money), but I liked the idea of having a skillet that had cooked fresh fish over a campfire.

I still don't know what I'm going to do with the dang thing, other than wield it threateningly during arguments, of course.  IT'S YOUR TURN TO DO THE DISHES!

Finally, this little table is more than just a prop in my front porch photography studio.  I went to an estate sale of someone who did a lot of woodworking.  Is it odd to pick up someone else's homemade project?  Seems like those are the kinds of things most people keep because they feel obligated to the person who made it.  But I like it's rusticity, and I think it would be a good place to put a couple of potted plants.  Will I ever actually put potted plants on it?  Who knows?  I'm still trying to figure out what to do with the skillet.

Oh, okay, one more thing.  Best yard sale sign ever.

new puppy muffins.

I bought four pints of blueberries from a coworker whose father grows and sells them. It was an impulse buy. I was thinking about delicious blueberries and picturing a little old man with a big floppy sun hat working out in his garden, picking fruit and throwing them into a gallon milk jug cut up to be a berry bucket. I was not thinking about what I was going to do with four pints of blueberries.

There are lots of things you can do with blueberries. You can just eat them straight, or you can do smoothies or pancakes or shortcakes or muffins. You could make a pie or scones or one of those American flag cakes (provided you also have some kind of red berry). I like all those things. Unfortunately, my partner in eating is a little more cool to fruit-based desserts. When you are cooking for only two people, both people have to like the food or it won't get eaten.

Josh does not like fruit pie, or rather, it's not his favorite. The basic problem is that he doesn't like fruit that has been cooked. If I were to make a blueberry pie, I could expect to eat it all alone. Part of me likes that idea, but the rest of me knows that being forced to eat a whole pie by yourself before it goes bad just sort of ruins the idea of pie for you. I would never, ever want to ruin the idea of pie for myself. So no pie.

He does like fruit shortcake. If asked, he raves about it, which leads me to believe that someone in his family made a really good one once, maybe on a day that he got a new puppy or something, so that he has very strong happy associations with shortcake. Whenever he mentions how much he likes shortcake, I go look up a recipe. Every time my man goes on and on about some kind of food he loves, I feel compelled to create the experience for him. Maybe it's love, or maybe it's me trying to convince him that there is no reason for him ever to venture outside my house in search of fulfillment of his desires.

HOWEVER. I have been down that road before, I have made him a shortcake. It was lumpy, but tasted the way it was supposed to. Yet again, I was forced to finish most of it myself. I could blame it on the recipe. Perhaps it wasn't as good as the new puppy shortcake. I should try a different recipe, right?

No. Absolutely not. It will be the same all over again. It will be me eating shortcake, and frankly, if I'm going to have to eat most of a dessert, I'd rather eat pie. I remember being very frustrated by the whole shortcake experience. You said you loved shortcake, I made you a freaking shortcake, now you're gonna eat it all while I stand here and glare at you.

The problem was not the shortcake. It was actually a problem in communication. Though Josh said he loves shortcake, that's not exactly what he means. After years of studying the Joshua in his native habitat, I have finally figured out what he is actually saying, as opposed to what it sounds like he's saying. Here is a little translation guide, in case you should ever find yourself with a Joshua and a lot of extra berries.

What he says: I love shortcake.

What he means: Shortcake is very good for a dessert that doesn't have chocolate in it. I would happily eat a piece of shortcake. If it is a particularly good shortcake, I might eat yet another piece tomorrow.

What he says: I love chocolate.

What he means: I must have chocolate or my life will spiral into despair. I could eat two or three slices of chocolate pie every day for the rest of my life. The same goes for brownies or chocolate cookies, or just straight squares of bar chocolate.

I honestly only figured this out recently. Silly me, I had been taking him at face value! He was not trying to deceive me. He just didn't realize that to me, a person who has a sane and normal relationship with chocolate, the world of desserts is not automatically split into chocolate and everything else. No matter how much he likes shortcake (or any kind of non-chocolate dessert), it is not on the same level as a chocolate one. So if I make such a dish, I had better be prepared to eat most of it.

I don't mind this limitation. Now that I understand it, I can work with it. The realization gave me peace about the shortcake incident (which had gone from "the time I made shortcake" to a full-blown "incident"). It was not my shortcake, it was the fact that all shortcakes since the beginning of time are inherently inferior to anything at all that contains chocolate. I had been trying to build a repetoire of dishes to make for him, because there are many desserts that I love, and I enjoy the variety. He loves a variety of chocolate desserts.

Back (finally!) to the four pints of blueberries. Last night, I made muffins. I picked the recipe with the most five-star reviews and made it. I tell you, I was kinda ho-hum about fruit muffins. They're okay, I guess. But that was because I had never had muffins like these. These were more like coffee cake with fruit inside. This is what all fruit muffins aspire to, it's why fruit muffins were invented. These are new puppy muffins, but you don't have to put down any newspapers! I ate three of them last night, and then another two for breakfast. Five muffins in twelve hours. If someone had asked me yesterday morning whether I liked blueberry muffins, I would have shrugged and said "Sure. Everyone likes muffins." Now, my answer might be more like "I love some blueberry muffins, but a lot of them are crappy. Those muffins do not deserve to be in the same room as the good ones. It's like comparing chocolate to shortcake; it's not even close." Then that person will never ask me a question again, and they surely won't be offering me any baked goods.

Josh agrees that these are about as good as fruit muffins can get. In the middle of his muffin, he said, with his mouth full, that this was going to be our muffin recipe, for now and all time. And then he finished his muffin, got up and got himself a brownie.

Blueberry Muffins
The only change I made was to substitute brown sugar for white in the topping. I also only had to bake them for 18 minutes.

yard sales, july 10.

I had a wine tasting Friday night and got to bed somewhere between 1 and 2 in the morning. It was poor planning, because Josh was supposed to be in Athens, Georgia by 4:30 Saturday afternoon. We had to leave Raleigh by 9 to make it. Given that information, my thought was that I could still get in two hours of yard sales.

At 6:53 on Saturday morning, I woke up. My alarm was set to go off at 6:55. During the week, I hit my snooze button half a dozen times before finally dragging myself out of bed to go to work. But on Saturdays, I wake up before the alarm. I don't usually even bother setting an alarm most weekends, just because I know that my body knows when it's time to get up and go poke through other people's trash.

In the car by 7, driving to the first sale on a list of seven. I had picked sales close to my house, mindful that I had only an hour and a half of sale time. On the drive, I started to wonder whether I was crazy. Not like ha-ha fun crazy, but obsessed crazy. What I needed was sleep, not more crap in my house. Yet the idea of sleeping through yard sales was unthinkable. I couldn't help missing sales because of the trip to Georgia, but I didn't want to count the whole day as wasted.

Then I went to the first sale, bought five Pyrex dishes, and forgot all about worrying whether my hobby was becoming unhealthy. Five lovely vintage Pyrex dishes, all for $5. The sale was run poorly. It was a living estate sale, run by an old man and a couple of his descendants. Nothing was marked, and as I came in, a young guy told me to just make a pile of what I wanted and then he'd price the whole shebang for me at the end. I found that sort of irritating, as whether I want to buy something hinges on the price of it. But it turned out to work in my favor anyway.



Here's a yard sale tip for you embedded in this post: price stuff individually ahead of time. It is long, difficult, and tedious work. But if you try to do it on the fly, you'll get panicked trying to read the buyer standing in front of you, rather than thinking about what the thing is actually worth to you. You might even do what this guy did, which was ask me what I was offering. He put the control of the negotiation into my hands. I said $5, and I could tell by the look on his face that he thought that was way too low. But then he turned to the old man and asked if that was okay, and the old man indicated that he didn't care, as long as the crap got cleared out.

I drove to the next sale, not at all thinking about whether I should join (or found) some sort of Yard Salers Anonymous group. I was thinking about Pyrex. I got to the sale and bought something that I need even less than I need more dishes: furniture. My house is full. When I moved in last March, I had lots of room to fill. But I don't anymore. I only have room to upgrade, which means if I buy something big, something else will have to go. That's not so bad. Buying used is a bit like continuously upgrading. You get something, use it until you find something that you like better. Then you reintroduce the first thing into the secondhand market so someone else can use it.

I bought two folding chairs. As furniture goes, they don't take up much room. I told myself that I had need of extra seating. You know, for parties. Not that I regularly have enough people over such that additional seating is needed, but I could. Besides, these are the most amazingly cool folding chairs in the history of the world.


They are in fantastic condition, particularly for being fifty years old. They make me want to throw a party, just so I can use them. Three bucks apiece and totally worth it. They are called "Wonderfold" chairs, made by Coronet. As the bottom of the seat says, "You have to be told...they fold!"

And that was it. I went to a couple more sales and bought a couple of small things (blue Mason jar, stationery). In terms of finding neat stuff and paying very little for it, it was a great hour and a half day.


I also saw these solid wood filing cabinets. I was actually a little relieved that they were already sold. I have no need of filing cabinets, not even ones which have reached the pinnacle of filing cabinet beauty.

got hops.

This is a hops vine.

You know, I've always liked the phrase "got hops" to indicate that someone could jump really high. It's like saying someone's got chops, but for basketball players instead of musicians. That doesn't have anything to do with anything, I was just thinking about it.

This vine is growing on a piece of twine that goes from the ground to the roof of the Terrapin Brewery in Atlanta, Georgia. I'm not sure if they use their own hops. For one thing, they probably do not grow as much as they need. For another thing, maybe the quality is inconsistent or at least not as good as hops that you buy from the beer-making supply store. Still, it's a nice gesture. It shows that the people who make the beer know where beer comes from. It doesn't just appear, cold and delicious, in front of them. It comes from plants (and water and yeast).

A coworker of mine makes his own beer in a giant stock pot in his kitchen. He invited us all over to brew up a batch once. I confess that I was a little disappointed in the process. He was just following a recipe. Boil some water, put some stuff in it. Then boil it some more, add more stuff. The stuff he added had been bought in pre-measured quantities, which somehow took a lot of the magic out of it for me. I mean, I know that I follow recipes when I cook, but at least I have to do my own measuring and chopping. It was like watching a TV chef who had everything all set out in little matching bowls by an invisible assistant. He wasn't really doing anything.

So in the real world, that is where a beer's ingredients come from. They come prepackaged in bags that you can just dump right in. And I bet that Terrapin makes beer that way, too, but with much bigger bags. So it's nice to see that even if it doesn't make business sense to grow your own hops, it makes a kind of poetic sense, and that's enough for them.

broken butt.

I saw a girl break her butt one time. In high school, a girl on my volleyball team went up for a spike, but then landed right on her butt rather than her feet. She immediately started screaming. Usually when someone gets hurt in public, they wince and whimper and maybe actually cry, but mostly they try and hold it in. But she didn't care about any of that. She laid out on the floor, unable or unwilling to move, wailing in pain. I didn't know before that day that a butt was something you could break. I knew about the tailbone, of course, but the butt is not really the tailbone - it's the muscle and fat around it. Still, there was no other way to describe it, because if you asked her where it hurt, she would have no choice as to where to point. So I learned that day that you could break your butt and that it really, really hurt.

Last weekend, I broke my butt.

I'm not sure if there is any broken butt story that is not at least tinged with embarrassment. But mine is not a good story. We were fly fishing on Wilson's Creek, which has huge boulders in it. I was trying to get upstream by climbing the boulders. I misjudged my ability to climb boulders, and I fell on my butt and slid into the water. I shrieked. Then I wished that I had shrieked in a lower pitch, because those who did not see the fall knew who had created the shriek and splash. In any case, I broke my butt while I was fishing. Fishing.

It didn't really hurt all that much. It hurt a little, the way things hurt when you have a minor mishap. It was more like bumping your head on a low ceiling rather than falling off your bicycle and smashing your head on the pavement. I certainly had no idea that I had the equivalent of a butt concussion. As the day went on, I noticed that the tenderness did not go away, but I had other things on my mind, like catching fish and falling in the river again. I thought I might have a bruise, and I even looked for it when I finally got back to the house and peeled off my waders.

But then my butt didn't feel better. The pain did not go away, it got worse. Sitting down for dinner consisted of me shifting my position every five minutes, as one position after another became unbearable. The only thing worse than sitting on my tender bottom was changing positions to find a better way to sit. And then we drove the four hours back to Raleigh, and I felt every bump in the road. Yet still I did not even think of it as a broken butt. Because broken butts hurt immediately, so much that you lie screaming on the floor.

Then I looked it up on the internet, and the internet says that sometimes broken butts don't hurt until later. Apparently the butt's emergency broadcast system is not very efficient. The internet also says that you can go to the doctor, and he will give you painkillers and an inflatable donut, but nothing else. This is the most frustrating part of a broken butt - you can't do anything about it. I don't mind problems that I can fix, but this is a problem where I have to wait on it to fix itself.

Using my status as expert of my own butt, I have decided that my tailbone is not broken, only bruised. If I had really broken it, I would have filled the forest with my high-pitched shrieks. Since I do not intend to go to the doctor, there is no way to confirm or deny this theory. However, even if my tailbone is not broken, my butt still kinda is. It's not broken as in fractured, it is broken as in it does not act the way a fully functioning butt should. Well, okay, it acts exactly the same, but it hurts all the time. I had no idea how much I use my butt. It's not just sitting, it's walking and climbing stairs, too. The absolute worse is getting up from a sitting position. I had no idea a butt could hurt like that - a sharp stab of pain at the very bottom of my spine. I bet if I went around saying that I bruised my spine, I would get a lot more sympathy.

Because you get no sympathy at all for your broken butt, only jokes. My sister, who broke her butt last winter (snowboarding - much cooler), pointed this out to me. And I remembered how I made fun of her broken butt, not realizing the special kind of pain that only a broken butt can create. I remembered how we all laughed at the girl on my volleyball team, once she stopped screaming. I would say that I learned my lesson, but I haven't. In telling this story, I'm playing up the fact that a broken butt is, well, funny. Just the words are funny - broken butt. I broke my butt. I went fishing and broke my butt. I'm laughing right now, the movement of which, by the way, hurts my butt.

gypsy rides again.

Last August, my car Gypsy stopped running at a red light. She just quit, like she had sudden-onset car narcolepsy, and I could not wake her. I did not know it, but there was a short in the wiring, which caused most of the wires in the electrical harness to just sort of melt. A tow truck took it to a mechanic, who told me that maybe, if I had the finances, it was time to buy another vehicle. I was very sad, because I thought that she was a good car who still had a lot of miles left in her. But I bought another car. A red one, with amazing gas mileage and the ability to transport just about anything I might care to buy off someone's lawn.

Gypsy sat in my driveway for many months. Every day I would park the new car, the red Honda Fit, in front of her, and I imagined her looking at the shiny new car and feeling inadequate and abandoned.

I have a mechanic friend. He was my college roommate for a year, after he married a girl who was already my college roommate. He works at a junkyard, and he told me that he would keep an eye out for an electrical harness for a 2001 Toyota Corolla so that he could replace my fried one. That hope kept Gypsy in my driveway, and after a while, I didn't even feel guilty as I went off to yard sales in the Fit.

Months passed. Apparently the rest of the Corolla owners in the world were repairing rather than replacing their cars, so my mechanic friend didn't have the part. At some point, I made the decision to just sell her off for parts. I have packrat tendencies, but this was a little too much baggage for me. I was going to put an ad on CraigsList that I'd take the best offer from anyone who wanted to take a broken Corolla away. And then my mechanic friend emailed me and said he had the part. He came up on a Sunday and fixed her. She passed inspection, but might need a new battery and one new tire. Also, the mouse that was living inside seems to have died.

Here's a bonus hint: if ever you have a car that won't go and you want to make sure the mice are comfortable, be sure to leave a box of tissues in the trunk.

The timing was fortuitous. Right before Josh left for his tour, his SUV decided that it was no longer interested in turning left. It has 240,000 miles on it, which I'm sure was a lot of left turns. It was just a broken CV joint, but the repairs on this thing were getting to the point where it just wasn't worth it. So it sat next to Gypsy. For months, we had two disabled vehicles in the driveway. I suppose that's my redneck blood coming out.

Anyway, it's still sitting there. And maybe it sadly watches as Josh drives Gypsy to work every day. Last week, Josh had a show in Durham. We were arriving at different times, so we drove separately. After the show, he followed me home, Gypsy's headlights shining at me through the rearview of the Fit.

And I was a little jealous.

Let me expand on that. I was driving a car that is less than a year old. He was driving a car that is nine years old, has 160,000 miles on it, burns oil, accelerates painfully, and smells like rotting mouse flesh. And I was jealous.

I'll take a moment to tell you that I love the Fit. When I see my car, I get the warm glow of a decision well-made, because I am the kind of person who takes pride in responsible choices. I love every time some stranger helps me load a large yard sale purchase into the Fit, because they go from being skeptical that it will go in at all to asking just what kind of car is that, anyway. I love the forty-plus miles I get to each gallon. And I love the giant windshield, which makes it seem like the world itself is a bigger place.

And yet, and yet...Gypsy and I have a history. We were friends. Sure, the Fit and I will be friends someday, but right now, we haven't been through enough together. If I were into cliches, I'd say something about metaphorical trenches right here.

Once, back when I lived in Winston and drove to see my boyfriend every weekend, Gypsy's check engine light came on during one of those many Friday night drives to Raleigh. I was just past Greensboro, about halfway to my destination. I was terrified that I would be stuck somewhere on I-40, left to rely upon the kindness of strangers. So I talked to my car the whole rest of the way. It was an hourlong monologue, encouraging her, supporting her, reminding her of my complete faith in her ability to do her job.

Of course, I know that talking to the car had no effect whatsoever on what her engine was doing. It was really just keeping me from bugging out. We made it, I got the catalytic converter fixed, everything was fine. I do understand that a car is just a car. Yet we spend so much time in our vehicles, and our daily lives revolve around our ability to just go wherever we want. Though most of our treasured memories and rites of passage do not happen within a car, the car is how we got to where they did happen. I can't be the only person in the world who thinks of a good car like a good friend.

And I am a good friend to her, too, so I am glad that Gypsy rides again. I just would have preferred that she did it someplace where I would never see her with her new driver. Then I wouldn't think about the good times they're probably having together, her calmly and reliably getting him from place to place. Maybe this was my punishment for all those mornings that I climbed into the Fit, right there in front of her.

Then, the Saturday after that drive from Durham where I thought about how Gypsy was going to be friends with Josh now, I took Gypsy to get her inspection. I drove her all of five miles, the first five miles I'd driven her since she took a nap last August. And for all my talk about friendship and trenches, I was mostly just noticing the fact that Gypsy drives like an old car. An old car with a dead mouse inside.

At that point, I decided that I could be okay watching Josh drive Gypsy. I could be happy for her, happy for Josh, and happy for me, too. After all, I have a very nice, new car that will gladly provide me with years of reliable transportation. We shall go through our own trenches. And, it doesn't smell like death.

normal people stuff.

In the week leading up to last Saturday, I didn't really think about yard sales. After all, it was a holiday weekend. Not just a weekend with a holiday in it, but a weekend attached to a holiday Monday, which means people would be out of town. But then Friday came along, and I figured I might as well look and see what sales were advertised. And then come Saturday morning, I had a list of seven sales, ready to go.

With only seven sales, all of them single-household, I was possibly setting myself up for a disappointing outing. But actually, no, I had a very good day. I didn't find a bunch of ca-razy items. No vintage lamps, no antique glassware, not even a single piece of old stationery. I bought really sensible things, and I present them to you to demonstrate that yard sales are not just for ridiculous people like me. You can find normal people stuff, too. Some of you are normal, right?

Normal People Item 1: A bed frame.

I haven't had a "real" bed situation in five or six years. I used to sleep on a hand-me-down futon. It was fine, though as time went on, it got progressively lumpier. Then someone told me that grown-ups deserve grown-up beds, and I spent $1000 on a nice king-sized pillowtop mattress set. In that huge splurge, I did not buy a bed. So I had really nice mattresses sitting on the floor for a year and a half.

That's not a big deal, really. There's nothing wrong with mattresses on the floor. The only time I really cared about looking for a bed was when I wished I had an under-the-bed space to put things. Otherwise, it didn't bother me. But I found a bed frame at a yard sale for $5 (retails for about $60), and decided that it was a good enough price to get me to upgrade.

When we got it set up with the mattresses and everything, I realized how much I had been missing the frame. For one thing, the bed feels different - springier. Plus, the bed skirt I bought last year finally hangs prettily, rather than dragging the floor like a fancy dust collector. But the best thing about getting the mattresses up off the floor is that it made me feel more permanent, less transient. I took out a huge loan to buy a whole dang house, but it's the $5 bed frame that gave me roots.

Also, I could fit a whole bunch of stationery under there.

Normal People Item 2: Spice jars.

For this, I must apologize. See, my sister-in-law told me that she needed spice jars. I've bought her several, enough that I was starting to wonder whether she had enough. And then I found a huge box of jars at a yard sale. Some of them were dark glass, which made me wonder if they were from some kind of home photography studio. But then I noticed that the box was labelled "Penzey's" and I realized that I had found something that cost someone else a lot of money. Faced with this box, I decided that I too wanted to put my spices into pretty glass jars that I could label neatly. So I bought the whole box for $5 with the intention of keeping them myself and not even sharing with my poor sister-in-law. She probably had enough anyway. By the time I received her email that said she still wanted more spice jars, I'd already labelled these. And labels are forever.

For the curious - the price per jar as stated to me by the seller was fifty cents. By offering to take them all away for a fiver, I paid about sixteen cents a jar. And if you really want to know, the price on the Penzey's website for them all would have been over $50, plus tax, plus shipping. Of course, having your spices neatly organized with labels written in my impeccable handwriting are, as the ad goes, priceless.

Normal People Item 3: Movies.

My mother asked me to get her some movies appropriate for young children, as my niblings have already seen The Aristocats five thousand billion times. So I bought these for fifty cents each.
Babe
A Bug's Life
An American Tail
101 Dalmations (original version)
The Great Mouse Detective

I also got Don't Eat The Pictures, a Sesame Street tour through the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but that one's for me.

Ridiculous People Item 1:

I did not buy this. There was a time in my life when I would have, provided they were willing to come down from $65 to $50. They probably would have, because how many ridiculous people are there in this world?

brownies outside the box.

We've been looking for a brownie recipe. The weird thing about brownies is that the kind from the box taste the best. It's a terrible thing to say, but I stand by it. You can argue that it's because I've been conditioned to think that something called a brownie is supposed to taste like those things that result when you combine a box mix with oil and eggs and milk. I guess that's a good point, but it does nothing to change the fact that when I want a brownie, I want something that tastes like it came from the kitchen of Betty Crocker.

Homemade brownies are good, sure, but they are not the same. Box brownies are chewy, with a thin, paper-like crust on the top that shines. When I bite into a homemade brownie, I am not really concentrating on how good it is, but how it is not what I wanted out of a brownie experience. I am focused on what it is not, which prevents me from appreciating what it is. This is a general issue in my life, but that's a different blog entry.

Josh wanted brownies one night, so I turned to Allrecipes. I begged it to give me box brownies without the box. I found a promising recipe, and I made a half batch, which was plenty for two people. It was very well-received. So well-received, in fact, that as the last brownie was eaten, Josh said that we would have to make more now, as if running out of brownies was the same as running out of milk.

When I did not immediately replenish our brownie supply, Josh took it upon himself to do the job. However, he did not notice that I had halved the recipe. He did notice which pan I had used to bake them. I think he is a selective noticer. So he put enough brownie batter for a 9 x 13 pan into an 8 x 8 pan. Josh thinks he has just invented the best thing since sliced bread. I'm not sure what he invented, but it is something different than what the recipe intended.

The double-decker brownie has a thick crust. It is so dense that I don't think you could eat it cold or even at room temperature, as it would be like biting into a chocolate bar two-inches tall. So you have to heat it up until it is no longer a brownie, but a piece of molten chocolate that would be roughly cubed shaped if not for the oozing. He can eat it plain, but I have to have ice cream with it, because I do not have whatever gene he has that enables him to eat pure chocolate all the time without a chaser.

I think that we have found our brownie recipe, which I now share with you. If you are the type, you can make oozy chocolate cubes, which are excessively rich, though some people like them.

Brownies

corn water dogs.

We had hot dogs and corn on the cob last night. Which seems like kind of an unusual combo, but we ate what we had. And what we had was three-quarters of a pack of hot dogs and eight ears of corn that had been sitting on the counter, unshucked, for two days. I wanted to make chicken parmigiana, but then the leftovers would overcome me and we'd end up forgetting about the hot dogs and have to throw them out next week, sometime after they started growing blue stuff.

So we had hot dogs and corn on the cob. We had six hot dogs and five hot dog buns.

Last weekend, we had company, and I served hot dogs and french fries with homemade cincinnati chili. I don't like to tootle my own horn, but I make fantastic hot dog chili. It is better than my mother's. Which is to say that we follow different recipes and mine produces a superior product. I take no credit in this chili, because although I do the leg work of making it, someone else did the more difficult work of writing out the instructions. It would be like me using the GPS to drive you to a theme park and then taking credit for rollercoasters.

The nice thing about this chili recipe is that it makes enough chili for about four packs of hot dogs. So after that first lunch, I stuck the whole pot of chili into the fridge, to be divided up into 1-cup portions and frozen later. But then I had to go to my brother's on Monday, and Tuesday, I just didn't feel like it, and then on Wednesday, I found an open pack of hot dogs in the fridge. This threw me off, because I had not been planning to eat hot dogs again soon. I was thinking about making chicken parmigiana or maybe something that went with corn on the cob. But hey, I'm hip, I can roll with the punches. I can adjust my plan when a blue-eyed eating machine rummages through my fridge.

It was a little weird, though, because I knew we didn't have any hot dog buns. We didn't even have any sandwich bread. I'd actually bought hot dog buns on Sunday to serve to my guests, because when you're already making a big pot of delicious hot dog chili, going the extra mile of making buns is just too much. So Wednesday night, I decided to make a batch of hot dog buns. A batch usually means sixteen, but today it would mean fourteen. I specifically made enough for one and three-quarters packs of hot dogs, because it would not make sense to not have a one to one correspondence of buns to dogs.

Josh came home from work and saw the buns cooling on a wire rack, still warm and a lovely shade of golden brown. He grabbed a jar of olives, a pack of salami, a block of cheddar, and a single hot dog bun. That was his dinner. We now had six hot dogs and five buns. My head exploded.

So last night, I decided it was time to eat hot dogs. We had buns, we had dogs, we had chili, and we had corn. I was filling a giant pot of water for the corn when Josh said, "You can use the same water for the hot dogs after the corn is done."

"And then we can make coffee."

A long time ago, my brother "invented" something called coffee dogs. Which means that he boiled some water to cook hot dogs, and then after the hot dogs were done, he made coffee with the water. I would call that hot dog coffee, since it seems like it was the dogs modifying the coffee, not the other way around. But it doesn't really matter what you call it, because it's nasty. Don't ever make coffee dogs or hot dog coffee. It is gross, but it will make a good family joke. I will allow you to borrow my family joke, though, to spare you having to ever drink coffee that tastes of a ballpark.

So even though I was more than a little freaked out by doing anything related to the idea of coffee dogs, I boiled the hot dogs in the corn water. I ate mine with delicious chili and cheese, but couldn't really enjoy it. All I could think about was what I would call it. I settled on corn water dogs.

wild, carefree, and responsible.

I've wanted a GPS ever since I saw one in action, riding in my friend's car in Washington, D.C. We needed a place to park my car and were looking for a metro station that had free weekend parking. And he just told the GPS what we needed, and the GPS told us where to go. At one point, he took a wrong turn, and the GPS cheerfully figured out where he needed to go to get back on course. It was beautiful. The GPS opens up new places. You can be in a strange town and still find whatever it is you are looking for. Got a hankering for barbeque in Rocky Mount or need to make some copies in Austin? The GPS can make it happen. No more wandering around for hours or stopping at a dimly-lit gas station to ask someone for directions, only to be told "I don't live 'round here." I have been told that by so many different gas station attendants that I wonder whether people say that just to avoid having to think about how to get somewhere.

So, yeah, you don't need to sell me on the concept of the GPS. Unfortunately, my mother trained me to delay gratification. I wanted the price to keep coming down, and I wanted the technology to get better. Two years ago, I was hoping to win one at my company's holiday party. I put all my raffle tickets into the GPS prize bucket. But my stupid coworker won it, as if he needed it for his stupid airplane.

However, my new phone, the Droid, has a GPS system. A beautiful, occasionally quirky, battery-depleting GPS system. It is super awesome. I justify the purchase of the Droid by the fact that I would have spent $100 on a GPS system anyway, and this particular one also makes phone calls, takes pictures, and checks my email.

The GPS is the friend of spontanaeity, or at least of well-organized spontanaeity. When I go anywhere, I always make sure to print out the Google directions to my destination. I am responsible like that. Even if I decide to go somewhere just for the fun of it, off the cuff for no reason at all, I go and print out directions. Taking the time to do that makes me feel less wild and carefree than boring. With a GPS, I can be wild, carefree, and responsible.

The GPS is the friend of those of us are not walking compasses. It's taken me a long time, but I'm beginning to suspect that I do not have a good sense of direction. How does a person even know that, anyway? Having never been inside someone else's brain, I have no idea whether any other sense of direction is superior or inferior. But I suspect it, mostly based on this example.

My high school was a big rectangle, three floors high, with stairways at each corner. I went to that same school for four years, and I never, ever got it straight in my head which stairway went where. So if I went down the stairs to the right of the library, I was always a little surprised to come out right next to the lunch line. It didn't matter, because I was always going to the same place every day, so once I had a routine, that was that. Unless I had to go somewhere that was not on my routine. Then I sort of turned in a circle, trying to figure out which stairway to take. At no point did it occur to me that some people just knew how the upstairs mapped to the downstairs of the building. I never even thought about it, and I was surprised to find that other people did.

So yeah, if I can spend four years in a smallish high school, not knowing my way around, I think it's pretty safe to say that I have a tendency to get lost, once let loose upon the great wide world. The GPS understands this about me, and it helps me, ever so patiently. When I miss a turn, it blithely redirects me, happy to be of service. If I take the wrong exit, it's more than happy to send me clover-leafing without judgment.

Most of all, the GPS is a friend to yard salers. I try not think about how many of my major decisions revolve around my thrifting hobby, from the purchase of a fuel-efficient hatchback to my long-held desire for a GPS. Before the Droid, I would pick out the yard sales, plot a course on Google Maps, and then print out instructions. To save paper, I would often print as many as six pages per sheet, which made for very tiny text (not good for when you're driving and reading at the same time). This strategy worked well, except I could never veer off course, or switch the order of the sales I visited, because the directions were good for one exact course only. So I got lost sometimes, wasting precious Saturday morning minutes trying to escape giant suburban neighborhoods.

Now, I still plot a course on Google Maps, using CraigsList and newspaper ads to find where the good sales are going to be. And then I just email the list to myself. I open the email on my phone, click on the address, and immediately my phone shows me the location on a map. It helpfully offers to navigate there from my current location. Then, once I am finished with that sale, I go back to the email and click on the new location. If I need to stray from the course in the case of a doughnut emergency, I can, and if I need to go to sale D before sale C because sale C hasn't started yet, I can do that, too. It's like my GPS wants me to have a good yard sale day. I wish all my stuff felt that way.

your bearded friend.

I was glad to see the dancing girls. Before the dancing girls, there had been empty dance floor, a ten by twenty feet space between the stage and the bar where no one stood. There were lots of people at the bar and at the tables in the front of the restaurant, and there were even more people milling around in the square outside. So many people, and yet none of them wanted to stand within twenty feet of the band. Most likely, it was a vote for conversation rather than a vote against the music, but still, it looked bad. I sat alone on a bench to the side of the dance floor, five feet from the stage. I thought about standing in the empty space, a vote of confidence for the band, but I hadn't even finished my first beer yet. Let me have another pint of confidence, and I'll get up there.

I'm actually a very confident person. No, really.

So I was glad when two girls, well, women, got up and started dancing. They weren't exactly the kind of girls that would encourage young men to come closer to the stage. But even if they were a touch overweight and in their 30s, doing interpretive dance, it was better than empty space. One was dressed in all black, a rose tattoo peeking out of her tank top. The other wore a flowing dress and a fake gardenia in her short hair. Could I get away with that look?

One of the women, the one in black, came up and gave me an encouraging rub on the back. "Come dance with us! You don't have to sit here all by yourself!" This was Cheryl. I smiled and nodded. What I wanted to say was that I was actually a very confident person who was not afraid to sit all by herself.

So I got up and danced. It was not the twirly-arm dance that Cheryl and her friend were doing, but more of a gentle bounce to the rhythm. Honestly, it was a lot closer to standing still than it was to dancing. Cheryl introduced herself and her friend with the gardenia, Tammy. Then she asked when my birthday was, which I thought was an odd choice of small talk for someone older than five. But really, it was the kind of question you ask to steer the conversation, and so then Cheryl told me about her birthday extravaganza last month, which lasted four days. She rubbed my back a couple more times. Someone with personal space issues would not like Cheryl much.

She finished the last of her pink cocktail, then asked me whether she ought to have another.

"I can't make that decision for you." Kind of a square answer, isn't it?

In the end, Cheryl decided to have just one more. She offered to get me one, too, and I was tempted by the floating orange slices, but I know better than to switch to liquor after beer. She came back from the bar and told me that the old guy sitting there had told her to get as drunk as she wanted, because he could drive her home if necessary. Ah, a Good Samaritan. She seemed equal-parts creeped out and flattered.

"These guys are good!" she exclaimed about the band. I smiled and nodded.

"Have you seen them before?"

"Yup."

I suppose this would have been the moment to mention that I had seen this very band three hundred million times before. My long-term relationship with the bassist of the band would also have been relevant information. But I didn't say any of that. I can say it was because the music made conversation difficult, but really it was because I didn't want to.

After a little over an hour of live music, the guitarist announced that it was time for them to take a short break. Cheryl and Tammy retreated to the bar to get refills. I waited in the middle of the floor for the bassist. He hopped down off the stage and met me with an encompassing embrace and lingering kiss, which is a poetic way of saying that we made out for a while, just a couple of seconds. I imagine that if Cheryl viewed this scene, she wondered why I hadn't mentioned that I was on a making-out basis with part of the band. Or maybe she didn't see it at all, being busy talking to Trevor, the guitarist, while Tammy seemed engaged with Dave. I couldn't help thinking that I got the pick of the litter. It helps that I put my bid in years ago. Maybe Cheryl had decided to befriend me, because as a trio, we would have more luck collectively hitting on the band. Maybe they'd already picked out which ones they wanted and were going to leave me with whichever one was left, most likely Dave, who is a fine fellow, but the eight-inch beard can be off-putting.

Josh and I spent the break talking to each other and basically ignoring everyone else. After ten minutes or so, the guys got back onstage and the show started up again.

"Is that your man?" Tammy asked. Seems like an obvious question. Or maybe she thinks I have such incredible skills of seduction that I can get a rock star to jump straight from the stage into my arms. Maybe she wanted pointers.

"Yup."

"Good job."

"I know." Heh. "I mean, thank you."

"You can tell he really likes you, that he really loves you because he keeps looking at you and grinning." She is not the first to mention the way Josh looks at me during shows, picking me out among the crowd in between scans of the audience and concentrating on his bass or the other band members. Once, a girl, who was very drunk and very concerned about being twenty-five and single, repeatedly screamed at me during a show, "He's looking right at you!" as if I should have been in the throes of an ecstasy-induced seizure from his glances alone. No, I don't go into seizures, but I do relish those moments. They are like stolen moments between us, when everyone else in the room seems to melt into the background.

Another girl approached the stage and beckoned to Josh. He leaned down to hear her, and I heard "Can you play..." I groaned. I hate it when people make requests. Would you ask the Beatles to play the Rolling Stones? Of course not.

Tammy heard my groan. "Oh, don't worry about her. She's just some dumb girl."

"Oh, no, it's not that, it's just that she's making a request, and-"

"And look at her dress. Really, nothing to worry about." Again, I felt the urge to reassure someone that I am actually a very confident person. Also, I don't think guys care about dresses.

The show ended a little after 1 AM. Cheryl was sloshed, having renewed her "just one more" policy several times. Tammy was only half-sloshed. Assuming they did not want to accept a ride from Creepy Guy At The Bar, I hoped they had sober transportation. I sat next to Tammy at the bar while I tried to get the bartender's attention so I could close out my check and get some water. A few seats away, Cheryl giggled and talked to Trevor.

"I like their music, but I can see through those boys like cellophane," Tammy said, looking across the bar at her friend, who had put her head on Trevor's shoulder. Who knows how many times she had rubbed his back?

"What do you see?"

"He's trying to get her to say they can sleep at her apartment. And if that doesn't work, he'll try and get her to buy them a hotel room."

"That's...possible," I admitted. Tammy probably thought the guys were after sex, though I was almost certain that they were just trying to avoid having to sleep in the van again. I wasn't sure if Trevor would be so bold as to ask someone to buy them a hotel room, though I had just seen him try to finagle a free drink from the bartender, claiming that he had a "cute face." Does that ever work? Would he play up his cute face to a drunk girl in exchange for a piece of floor to sleep on?

"I hate groupies."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. They don't care anything about the guy. They don't care what he likes or that he writes poetry or what his personality is like, they just like that he's on stage." Maybe Tammy thinks that all musicians like poetry. "But my best friend is wasted," she continued.

Josh came over to talk to the bartender about leaving their equipment there overnight and picking it up in the morning. He was accosted by Tammy.

"You tell your bearded friend that he should have paid more attention to me," she said. I guess she thought she was taking a principled stand by not throwing herself at Dave, who may or may not like poetry. There was more of her speech, perhaps a couple more uses of the phrase "your bearded friend," but I didn't hear it. And I hoped that Josh did not relay the message to Dave. I didn't want to think of the uncharitable remarks that boys might make about girls with low self-esteem.

Finally, having been assured that the equipment would be fine, Josh turned to me and said, "You wanna get out of this-"

"Horrow-show? Yeah."

We walked out the front door of the bar, and as we crossed the now-empty square, he took my hand.

hemingway.

I came across a Scentsy booth this week. Scentsy advertises itself as wickless scented candles. It seems we have crossed a line where the point of candles is no longer light, but smell. I would argue that it's time for a new word, since there are times when I'm definitely going to want a candle with a wick. In a power outage, for instance. A wickless candle won't do me any good at all then, not even to set a nice mood for any power outage romance, because you have to plug it in.

For those of you who are still baffled as to what a wickless scented candle is, I'll explain. You buy a little ceramic pot that plugs into an outlet. Inside is a low-watt bulb, 15 - 25 watts. You then put some wax in the pot, and as the wax melts from the bulb, it gives off a nice smell. Basically, it's a plug-in air freshener with a nightlight.

I am not a scented candle person. I've owned a couple in the past, but I never end up using them. I never think to light them, and more often than not, the scents are overpowering. For my birthday last year, some girls recommended to Josh that he buy me scented candles. They were horrified to find out that he was buying me an entertainment center. I guess they expected him to get me something romantic and girly, as opposed to finding me something that I'd actually want and use. Scented candles are what you buy for people that you don't know very well, the kind of generic gift that is sure to both not offend and not excite. If a guy I had been dating for four years bought me a scented candle, I think I'd cry.

The Scentsy booth is fragrant, as you might expect. They had little jars sitting out so you could get a whiff of their different waxes. After a few sniffs, I found that I needed some sort of nose palette cleanser to differentiate. Not only were all the smells starting to run together, the inside of my nose felt vaguely irritated, as if I'd been chopping jalapenos and then picked my nose without washing my hands first.

All the different scents had names, of course. Some of them were pretty standard - you can predict from the name what Baked Apple Pie and Cinnamint might smell like. Others were a little more questionable. Is French Lavender very different from, say, Italian Lavender? And while Satin Sheets certainly evokes a nice feeling, I'm not getting much of a smell memory from it.

But the majority of the names gave you absolutely no indication of what the scent inside might be. For instance, Autumn Sunset, Welcome Home, or Oxford. I have no idea what those things are supposed to smell like. And Echo? Really? That sounds like a thought question in a crappy new-age self-help book: What does an echo smell like?

My favorite Scentsy name (not to be confused with my favorite Scentsy scent, which was Thunderstorm) was Hemingway. It's part of the Scentsy Man collection, made to appease husbands who object to their wives buying candles that don't do any good in a power outage. The catalog describes Hemingway thus: "Rich, ripe apples and warm, woody accents of sandalwood and cedar with hints of spice." I smelled it, but I don't remember all that. However, I had sniffed half a dozen jars by then and my nose was very confused in general. In any case, it was nothing like what I expected Hemingway to smell. I expected tobacco and scotch, with accents of gunpowder and a hint of dead fish. It would be a manly smell, maybe a little too manly for the likes of a wickless scented candle. I imagine that ole Ernest would not be particularly pleased with the idea of being the namesake of a Scentsy wax, any more than I would be pleased to receive scented candles as a gift from someone who ought to know me better.

Here's your thought question for the day: What would your Scentsy wax smell like?

the disappointed one.

I've been developing a theory about The Golden Girls. It's similar to my ninja turtles theory, wherein one's favorite childhood ninja turtle indicates something deep and meaningful about you. Do you choose the leader, the smart one, the fun one, or the sarcastic one? Except the Golden Girls are not divided up the same way. Instead, there is the slutty one, the stupid one, the sarcastic one, and the old one. Bonus thought experiment: if there had been a slutty ninja turtle, which one would it have been?

I watched The Golden Girls when it was first on, and then again when it went into reruns. I even remember seeing a couple of episodes of the short-lived spin-off, The Golden Palace, which sounds like a Chinese restaurant. Actually, I think there was a Chinese buffet in Lenoir that was called that, which lasted about as long as the show. Whenever I see the original series now, I'm surprised to find that the show has held up reasonably well. I mean, it's dated, what with the shoulder pads and the laugh tracks, but it's still pretty entertaining. This is not something the show has in common with Teenaged Mutant Ninja Turtles.

When I was young, my favorite Golden Girl was Blanche, otherwise known as the slutty one. I was watching this show when I was about ten, and sex was a mysterious and taboo subject. My fascination with Blanche was really just my curiosity about sex. I don't think I even got all the sexual humor in the show, and there is a fair amount, but I could tell when a joke was dirty, even if I didn't understand what was dirty about it. As I got older and started to see Blanche as less exciting and more...slutty, I started to wonder what her problem was. Big Daddy issues, most likely.

Then, in my late teens and early twenties, I learned to appreciate Rose, the stupid one. My love for Rose came from her wholesome naivete, the fact that she never got it (though she occasionally had out-of-the-mouths-of-babes moments). I particularly loved her St. Olaf stories. The best thing about Rose is her unintentional funniness. Dorothy and Sophia made jokes, Blanche was a joke, but Rose did and said things that were funny in their own way, and then funny again because she didn't know it was funny. Some of the Rose jokes are just plain boy-is-she-stupid jokes, but the best of them are about her unique childlike perspective of the world. A lot of shows had a cute kid; The Golden Girls had Betty White.

One night recently, I was watching the show, and I began to feel a strange closeness with Dorothy. I never really cared for Dorothy before. She had some great lines, and she filled an important niche within the group. But how could Dorothy be your favorite Golden Girl? She often just seemed like a huge walking ball of bitterness. She's very smart, but got pregnant as a teenager and had to marry Stan Zbornak, the loserly one. Zbornak, really? She went through the rest of her life feeling like she could have been a contender, if only, if only. Dorothy was the smart one, the tall one, the vaguely masculine one, and the sarcastic one, but mostly she was the disappointed one.

Really, all signs point to Dorothy, because in every group of friends I've ever had, I've been the smart one, the tall one, the sarcastic one, and yes, fine, the vaguely masculine one. The funny one because I couldn't be the pretty one, the uptight one because I had too much confidence to be the slutty one. However, I don't want to be the sad one. I don't want to be Dorothy, I don't want her to be my favorite. When Blanche and then Rose were my favorites, that meant that I liked the show the most when they were onscreen. I never actually related to them. But I can relate to Dorothy, the disappointed one. After all, I have found life to be sometimes, just a little bit, well, disappointing.

Aw, crap, I'm Bea Arthur.

Which makes me wonder whether, when I'm 80 years old, shrunken and crabby, Sophia will be my favorite. I've always found her to be a bit annoying. I feel sometimes that she is unnecessary, redundant even. Dorothy could have made good on her promise to take Sophia to Shady Acres, and I never would have missed her. After all, what other show has "the old one?" But being the old one is about being the wise one, the Master Splinter, to continue the ninja turtle comparison, and Sophia has her moments. Sophia is Dorothy after she got over her disappointment. Sophia knows that life is frequently not what you were hoping for, but that it's pretty neat and often quite wonderful in ways you didn't even think to expect. Disappointment with life is a problem with expectations, not with life.

Anyway, all of this is to say rest in peace, Rue McClanahan, and belatedly, Bea Arthur and Estelle Getty. You were in a silly sitcom about sassy old broads, and I miss you all.

hair destiny.

Can you stand another entry about hair?

When I was in my college roommate's wedding, we had our hair done at an ungodly hour in the morning, and then I was expected to keep my hair looking pretty until mid-afternoon, when the wedding actually happened. This seems like an unreasonable expectation for someone like me. Would you dress a five-year-old for his pictures seven hours early? Of course not. Yes, I am considerably older than a five-year-old, but I also once ruined a pair of suede shoes from sitting perfectly still. I can probably avoid getting messy or dirty, but let's not push our luck here. After getting my hair done for that wedding, I went to an outdoor flea market. In July. So I ended up sweaty and dirty, my hair lost about 50% of its volume, and I had a great time.

Last July, I was in my niece's wedding. Our hair was to be done at 11 am, while the wedding was at 3. This was much more manageable. It was also not on a Saturday, so the flea markets weren't even open. The girl who was to do my hair was not a professional hair-doer, but a family friend. In fact, there were two family friends doing hair: girls who had long and lovely locks themselves. They were just good at hair. I am good at math, which has never come in handy at a wedding before. You know how in sci-fi movies there's always a guy whose good at math, and he tells everyone else that their risky plan has a 3.52 billion to 1 chance of working? Math people are never appreciated.

The bridesmaids were to all have the same hairstyle, a pretty updo with a silk flower pinned in. I'm going to go ahead and admit that I had been looking forward to my turn in the chair for a month. At the previous wedding, my hair went all the way down to my chin, and there was not much the hairdresser could do with it. Her solution was to spray a can of hairspray into it and give it lots of volume. I looked like a TV news anchor. It wasn't a big deal, and no one cared, but I felt unfeminine. I also had a strange urge to say "Back to you, Phil."

But this wedding would be different. Someone with skill was going to do something magical with my hair. Because I had hair going all the way down to my lower back and I never let it live up to its potential. It was long, it was thick, and all it ever got to do was sit in a messy ponytail on my head. When I played volleyball, I would put it in a long braid a la Xena, Warrior Princess, which Josh called "battle hair." Sometimes I even braided it in pigtails, but the most attention I ever gave my hair was with the intention of getting it out my way. But today, TODAY!, it would finally fulfill its destiny. I like to pretend that inanimate objects have destinies.

I sat patiently while a woman named Stephanie that I'd never met before did mysterious things to the back of my head. I had no idea what she was doing. I knew that she pulled sometimes, asked me to tilt one way for a while, then sprayed hair spray, molecules of which probably ended up in my Mountain Dew. A lot of bobby pins seemed to be disappearing. And then after twenty minutes or so, she was done. I was afraid to move my head, for fear that it would all come cascading down. Yet it seemed oddly secure. I gave my head a couple of test shakes and whatever was keeping my many hairs in place seemed to hold. I could probably go to the flea market and sweat and it would still hang on. This was battle hair with style.

I nervously looked in the mirror: Ah, sweet mystery of life, at last I've found you! This was beautiful: feminine, classy, not me at all, but that's what was great about it! Feeling incredibly silly and shallow, I went into the bathroom and took pictures of my hair so that I could remember it forever: the culmination of five years of growing pains.

The next week, I went to a salon and had my hair cut off. All those years I'd been growing it, I knew that I was not a long-hair person and that I would want to cut it all off at some point. But how would I know when the time was right? I kept having dreams where I'd cut my hair and I would always wake up in a panic, relieved to find that it was all still there. As much as I was tired of dealing with it, would I be sad when it was gone? I guess I decided the time was right after the wedding. My hair had fulfilled its destiny, and I could let it go now. Maybe my decision-making process needs work.

Honestly, it was easier than I thought to be rid of it. For years people had told me that I should cut it gradually so the shock wouldn't be too great. I had begun to think that this haircut would be some sort of trauma, despite my initial feeling that it would probably be a relief. But once it was done, I knew I should have trusted my instincts. I put it in a plastic bag and mailed it to a company that will make a wig for a bald kid. The bald kid will be grateful, even though the color is mousy and it won't hold a curl. People were shocked, asking if everything was okay or if I needed some counseling to help me through my loss. The men at work seemed proud of themselves for noticing that I looked different at all.

It was not traumatic. I grew my hair to see if I could (as it turns out, I can). I knew that once I cut it, and I would cut it, I would probably never grow it out again. Donating it was pretty cool, and having a mass of thick locks was fun for a while. I'm glad that my hair had that one bright moment during the wedding. But it was time to have short hair again. It was...destiny!

jiffy lube of hair salons.

I got a haircut last night, and it was fantastic. I go to one of those walk-in, flat-fee places, because I don't care about my hair. Of course, that's not true. But I only care about my hair about $15 worth, and no more.

The main problem with those places is consistency. You're likely to get a different person each time, and there is no guarantee that any of them really know what they are doing. Sure, they're licensed cosmetologists, but I'm not sure how much of an achievement that is. What do you have to do to get your cosmetologist license? Take a short exam, where you answer questions about split ends and perm solution, then do a brief practical test, where you have to cut the hair of an old, mostly bald man?

Those places are the Jiffy Lube of hair salons. There might be someone trustworthy and competant working there, but then again, there might not be.

Growing up, my mom would take us to Marilyn, who was a lady that had a one-woman mini-salon in her basement. While Marilyn cut my mom's hair, I would play with the assorted toys she kept in a big box in the corner. Two things about Marilyn fascinated me: one, her husband had a Corvette, and I would check the driveway as we drove past to get a glimpse of it. There were not a lot of expensive cars in my hometown. Two, she had a tiny personal black-and-white TV in her shop. It had a six-inch screen and was usually tuned to either game shows or soap operas, depending on the time of day. This was back before everyone had big TVs in every room, and no one had those really cute TVs. Either Marilyn was cutting a lot of hair, or her husband did something that paid very well.

The best thing about having Marilyn cut your hair was that she had really long nails. She would use incredibly hot water to wash your hair, and then lather the shampoo, those long nails grazing your scalp. It was awesome. I promise I'm not a masochist who likes to be alternately scalded and cut, but I do enjoy a good head massage.

At some point, I outgrew Marilyn. I asked my girlfriends where they were going, and they directed me to a tiny place in town, where two women in their early thirties cut hair. Once I started going there, I had a revelation about hair. Nothing against Marilyn, who is a very nice lady, but she was from an older generation and some of the new-fangled styles were a bit beyond her. And so when I started wanting styles more complicated than straight bobs, she was a little out of her league. So I went to Cindy, and she introduced me to the concept of layers. Do you know about layers? They give you the illusion of volume.

I'm not sure how I ever made the jump from Marilyn to Cindy. It's not like I have ever in my life known what I wanted for my hair, other than in the second grade (and the sixth grade), when I wanted a perm. Maybe I just noticed that my girlfriends' hair always looked much better than mine, and I hoped that a good haircut would make the difference between limp, straight, brown hair and full, voluminous red hair. It couldn't hurt, right?

But then I moved to Boone, and Cindy was too far away. I'm sure there are inexpensive places to get a good haircut in Boone, but I don't know them. All I could see were places like Haircut 101, which was around the corner from my house and looked shiny and expensive. I think that salon turned me off completely from the "101" suffix. There has never, ever been a class called "Haircut 101." Why would you want to imply that your employees were students, anyway? The other week, I saw a restaurant named China 101, which makes even less sense. Guys, let's end the 101 thing.

So there were the Haircut 101s, and then there was SmartCuts, which was only $8, and you didn't even have to make an appointment. So I started going there, and after a few times I forgot what it was like to be really happy with my hair. I got $8 haircuts, and I probably looked like it. Well, sometimes I looked like I had a $10 or maybe even a $15 haircut, depending on who was working when I wandered in. But it was fine, because I pretty much ignored my hair, no matter how it looked. I moved to Winston, and then to Raleigh, where they didn't have SmartCuts, but they have Great Clips, which was a $12 place.

A year ago, I got a major haircut, like twelve plus inches of a haircut. I knew I wanted to take the plunge, but I didn't know where to go. Because there are times when a $12 haircut doesn't seem to be enough. I was going to be taking off a foot of mousy brown hair, and I wanted someone who knew what they were doing. So I looked up shops in the area, and they all seemed to be in the Haircut 101 mold: stupid names and high prices. As important as I thought this particular haircut was, I couldn't bear to spend $50 on it. In the end, I ended up going to Famous Hair, which also has a stupid name, but the prices are better. It's a $14 place, and I reasoned that it was bound to be at least a little better than the $12 Great Clips I normally went to. That was my splurge, an extra two bucks. Are you getting the idea that I don't care all that much about my hair?

The hair gods were smiling upon me that day. They ignore me most of the time, probably because I make so few offerings to them. But they were helping me out, in two ways. One, that I happened to go on a Thursday, which is when Jeff works. And two, that Jeff was the stylist that happened to be next in the rotation for receiving walk-ins. You can request a particular stylist at this shop, but I'd never been there, so I just took whoever was next. I don't remember who else was working that night, and it's possible that they would have done a bang-up job, too. But that's not what happened, and so I thank the hair gods for Jeff, who reminded me what it was like to be happy with my hair. Not just okay with it, not merely satisfied, but actually happy. Thrilled even.

Becuase I had such a good experience at the $14 place, I kept going back. Jeff was never working when I went, maybe because I did not go on a Thursday. I didn't pay attention to the day, because I now had confidence in the whole salon. Each time I went, they did a good job. I never felt like I got a crappy haircut, which I cannot say for the $8 place in Boone or the $12 places in Winston-Salem and Raleigh.

Then last night, a Thursday, I went again and saw Jeff. I requested him, even though it meant I had to wait an extra 20 minutes. It wasn't that I had anything against the two ladies working, but I was still so grateful to Jeff for doing such a good job the first time that I wanted to give him the business. He first washed my hair, and I closed my eyes and enjoyed the sweet-smelling shampoo, the hot water, and the head massage. My only complaint about Jeff is that his fingernails are not long enough.

Once I had clean, wet hair, he asked what I wanted, and I panicked. I hate this question, because I don't freaking know what I want. I wish I could say, "Just make me look good." So I told him to just give me a trim, to make my hair land right at the shoulder, and he got to work. He did the basic cut, and then he started doing the layers. Layers are a pretty standard trick nowadays, but he did things the other people didn't do. I was watching him, and I could tell that he knew other tricks.

Theoretically, I walked in last night with the same haircut that he gave me a year ago. Each time I've gotten a haircut, I've told them to just trim it and keep the same style. So it should be the exact same thing he gave me, only a little longer. But that is not true at all, because the other stylists do not know the Jeff magic. I'd suspected as much, but I don't know anything about hair, so I couldn't be sure.

The haircut last night cost $14, just like every other haircut I've received at that place in the last year. But it looked way better than the other cuts. I looked like someone who actually cared about my hair. And I remembered what it was like to have a preferred stylist, someone that you can trust to do a great job every time. That's all I want - someone who knows that I don't know anything about hair and just makes me look good. At last, I now know the secret to a good haircut: always go on a Thursday.

poor joe camel.

Dude, I saw this online advertisement today. It started with this picture.

And then it changed to this picture.

Did you see that? Do you understand the significance? Smoking has become uncool.