Donkey Punch.

Ever spend so much time travelling you feel like you've been donkey punched? I'm beginning to feel that way a little bit.

America, I am writing to you from the Starbucks in the Jet Blue terminal in Logan Airport. It's not a bad one, I'm sitting at a nice cafe bar thing typing on my my white ibook, so I pretty much look like every other yuppie asshole ever. I think that's OK, as I have become one of those people. I'm even wearing the new fleece my Mom got me for Christmas. There is one annoying thing that keep happening - some little timer for the airport internet servicekeeps popping up, which for whatever reason interferes with my typing until I click it to go away.

So it's New Year's Eve, and I am hoping to be ringing it in in my apartment by myself, or maybe with Betty Ann and some pizza from Palermo's, assuming they are even open. After doing Massachusetts, southern New Jersey, New York City, Connecticut and Massachusetts again in nine days, I'm really quite looking forward to passing out after eating a handful of clonopin, washed down with a glass of white wine from a box. I 'm thinking I'll wake up sometime around 2 pm tomorrow, which suits me just fine.

I am glad I did this trip though for two reasons. My 85 year old Grandmother, and her 90 year-old sister, my Great Aunt. They are living testimonials to the belief that not matter what, you just have to keep going. There is something to the New Jersey temperment that way, I suppose. A strange blend of optimism, selective perception, and the ability to leave things behind that are not going to benefit you in the long run. I am trying to pick up that habit, with the hope that it will come naturally from genetics.

And another thing...

Leave my language alone you Corporate a**holes. Businesses are not "organic." Plants are organic. People are organic. Molecules are organic. Alien insects that infest a human host are organic (unless they are silicon based.)

Nothing, not even power point "stacks," make the blahsphere of corporate life anymore interesting if you are not someone who likes it. I find the people who get starry eyed over "the low hanging fruit" and other such perversions of English/bad metaphor incredibly depressing and simultaneously enraging. You push paper, and make conference calls to other uninteresting people. Accept it, move on, and just shut up.

:)

This is what happens when I get one too many GE Orwellian emails in my box.

Kalifornia

Sometimes I despise native Californians. They can be alternately self-centered, rude, or just plain uninteresting. The "me" culture that is just so prevalent here, and the cult of the-good-life/physical comfort does raise my Cotton Mather hackles occasionally.

Then I tell myself to get over it and to enjoy another lunch outside in the middle of the Winter. Although it is colder here right now than it is in the homelands, which seems completely wrong to me.

Yet another Saturday morning.

I have to be honest. I like sitting on my sofa, reading web pages, sipping coffee and listening to Saint Etienne. I really do.

I first got introduced to SE back in college by my friend Karen. It was the Foxbase Alpha record. I thought it was one of the coolest things I had ever heard. As far as I was concerned, if you weren't walking around Providence with "Only Love Can Break Your Heart" blasting out of your headphones, you were missing out.

Lately I've been trying to go back and remember more things about college, since for the most part it has been just a blur in my mind without very many specifics.

Here are the specifics I can remember:

1) Smoking
2) Figuring out if I was going to say "hi" to that person coming towards me.
3) The steps of the SciLi
4) Faunce Steps, and sittting with Melanie on them
5) Never, ever feeling like I knew where I was going.

I've been talking trash about Brown for some years now, but I wonder if I should just get over it and realize that it wasn't all bad, it just wasn't what I wanted.

Sarah Cracknell is singing "People, get real" over and over again on my stereo, perhaps it's time to listen. Nah.

Oof.

Sitting at my desk after the departmental Holiday lunch. Had three glasses of wine with my filet mignon. Had german chocolate cake, and a lot of cheesebread as an appetizer. And then there are the french fries I had with the filet, peppered green beans and whatever else was put in front of me. Which included a salad that comprised of iceberg lettuce and roquefort dressing. Mmmmmm... roquefort.

I am a Holiday fatty.

It doesn't help matters that I am still recovering from one of the worst hangovers I have ever had in my life. Tuesday night was the last night of our favorite waitress ar our favorite restaurant - Malo in Silverlake. So, of course this prompts one to go and drink 4 double margaritas and to do tequila shots after. On a school night. Ridiculous. Wrong.

Is it wrong that I am nostalgic for things that never happened to me? Reminisce over feelings that are responses to imaginary events? Events that should have taken place on hot summer nights in New England, but didn't. But I did think about them. I suppose I reminisce over my memory of my imagination. I do know that I will reminisce at some point down the line over my insane drinking on a Tuesday, but not very soon.

I'm listening to April March's cover of "Cet Air-La" so that might be what started this cascade of Lynchian teenage mental wandering.

Friday

I am a vicious person sometimes. It is in my nature, and I try to guard against it. I often fail.

Number Ones

I'm sipping my coffee, and watching Star Trek on TVLAnd. I think mostly because anytime ST is on I will watch it. It's the episode where the recycled the original, non-Kirk pilot into a two part episode where Spock may or may not have committed treason or mutiny or whatever to get his old Captain back to a scary planet. It's the scary planet where aliens with heads like giant asses use their formidible telepathic powers to create illusions to confound, terrify or delight, but mainly confuse as they are trying to keep pre-Kirk captain of Enterprise in their Menagerie with a pretty blonde. To have more humans around, I guess. What's interesting about this original pilot that only went to air as a chopped up flashback is that Majel Barrett, known to most of us as Nurse Chapel, space Blonde who secretly burned for Mr. Spock, plays the First Officer in the original pilot. As in, first officer who wore pants and gave orders to people. The other women are also wearing pants. Clearly, the pilot was filmed, and network execs put the kabosh on a pretty but serious girl in a bad brunette wig able to give orders. I'm sure Gene pitched it as "she's like the captain's secretary" but Majel comes off as anything but. And clearly the pants were going to go because space minis were about become de rigeur star fleet uniform. The original pilot sets a more "Forbidden Planet" straight-up Sci-Fi tone, whereas the series we grew to knew and love was much more of a wild west program. Don't get me wrong, I still like it a whole lot. But it is interesting to wonder what would have happened had Gene been allowed to unfold his vision more - a galaxy of women in positions of power, wearing pants.