Nothing to say

The more you blog, the more you can find to say. And vice versa. I haven't blogged in a month and a half; therefore: nothing to say. But if I want to get BWD back on its feet I'm going to need to create something from nothing -- not unlike, say, the creators of any given CBS sitcom. But I digress (even though I have nothing from which to digress yet).

I can talk about shirts. And how I hate tucking them in, because they inevitably come untucked, but not completely untucked; just partially untucked, so that they balloon around your waist and make it look like you just need a few more pumps before you're ready for the Macy's parade. And how the worst part of all that is that I'm usually blissfully unaware of that chain of events until I either look in a mirror or feel cool air-conditioned air against my no-longer-completely-insulated stomach, meaning that the ballooning phenomenon has already been occurring for quite some time.

But that's boring. So I could talk about water (always one of my favorite subjects). And how the Brita filter is clearly a more fiscally sensible solution than bottled water, not to mention far better for the environment, but on the other hand doesn't provide an easy way to drink just enough water but not too much. With the Brita filter the water's dispensed into a glass of indeterminate volume (probably around 12 ounces, I guess), and then consumed, usually while still standing in front of the sink. Then that might not be enough, so I'll immediately refill the glass and drink another. Now I'm up to, I guess, 24 ounces. Is that enough? Did I drink enough the rest of the day? How soon do I plan on going to bed? How do I weigh the risk of dehydration versus the annoyance of waking up at like 3 AM and really having to pee but even more really not wanting to, and trying to force my brain to ignore any signals from the bladder area and only listen to my otherwise-ready-to-go-back-to-sleep self.

But that's boring too. And it made me thirsty. Be right back. Okay. So, I could talk about how cool it is to have a wireless keyboard and mouse at home, thus rendering the "but then I'd have to get out of bed" argument moot in a variety of instances. And how it's almost creepy to look down at the desk and not see any cables coming out of either device.

But that, if possible, is even more boring than anything else yet discussed. So what now? The new TV series Celebrity Cooking Showdown? No, because this is the wrong blog. U.S. immigration reform? Not likely. Tic Tacs with "Bold Fruit Flavor," yet another instance of a breath-freshening product branching out into fruity versions of itself, which I've never understood because I've never heard anyone complimented on their "cherry-fresh" breath?

Nope. See, I really don't have anything to say. But that's only because I haven't been saying anything. (And no, I'm not going to write a treatise on circular reasoning either.) So, hopefully forcing myself to say something will enable me to actually have stuff to say in the future.

We'll see. But for now: nothing to say.

Documenting the world with my camera phone, episode 1

Rally's: Doing Our Part To Fill America's Emergency Rooms

Correction

It has come to my attention that I didn't credit my breakfast amigos in my breakfast post, which is really wrong of me since they were the ones who dragged me out to Doughboy's in the first place. Or rather, they caved in to my constant begging for them to drag me out to Doughboy's. In any case, the team of Myasorubka (one half of Girl on Girl Cooking) and her dude deserve their props, which I am now giving them. Thanks, and we now resume your regularly scheduled blog, already in progress.

I'm usually the car

Pretty much everyone at work is sick. When this happens, I feel like I'm playing Monopoly, the whole board is filled up with hotels, and I'm clenching my teeth every time I roll the dice, desperately hoping I keep landing on Chance and Community Chest (or at least one of the railroads).

Save me, Zicam.

If this were my last meal, I'd tell the warden to bring on the lethal injection

Overland Cafe finally has competition for my breakfast dollar, and my heart. The rival's name is Doughboy's, and while the 20-ish minute drive to 3rd and Crescent Heights means they're unlikely to snag me on a weekly basis, I can't guarantee I'm not going to be having impure thoughts about semolina waffles with mascarpone while I'm chowing down on my usual eggs benedict with veggie sausage. I'm not feeling particularly essay-ish today so let's just do a quick snapshot comparison:

Doughboy's:

• Really freaking awesome coffee... and a whole big french press full of it for $3.50.
• Best waffle I ever had in my life.
• Lots of other stuff to choose from on the menu.
• And the total money shot: a whole sub-menu of home fries. Yes. Home fries with cheddar and grilled onions, home fries with roma tomatoes and mozzarella and basil, etc., etc. That's about enough to make me wonder if Zale's has a ring big enough for a restaurant.
  

Overland Cafe:

• 3 minutes from home, on foot.
• KCRW discount.
• Weak-ass coffee, even though they refill it every 26.3 seconds.
• Vegetarian options on every breakfast food imaginable.
• Great home fries, even though they're not customizable.
  
• They know me.

Advantage: Overland Cafe, for now, since they have the home field advantage and I don't switch loyalties easily. But if anyone has a truck capable of towing an entire restaurant (including outdoor seating), please let me know. Actually, forget the outdoor seating part. Doughboy's chairs are too low. I'll provide replacements, probably from Ikea.

Bad With Grammatical Directions

I know I never, ever post about Starbucks. So I figured this would be a nice change of pace.

Here's my question. Who labels the pastry trays there? Has he/she passed 9th grade English?

INCORRECT: "Old Fashion Doughnut"

CORRECT: "Old Fashioned Doughnut."

Thanks for listening.

Dear PETA,

I don't normally get all political on this blog, but I kind of have to ask...

What the hell are you doing?

Seriously. Please, please stop all the nonsense. I'm a vegetarian. I avoid wearing leather whenever possible. I try to buy non-factory-farmed stuff, free range eggs, and so forth. I do this because I think the world would be a better place if everyone else did too.

But I think the world would be a better place without you. Or at the very least, it would be a better place if you channeled your energies into supporting local agriculture, lobbying for companies with good records of non-cruelty (Trader Joe's, Tom's of Maine, etc.), and generally trying to effect change in more subtle ways.

I don't see that happening, though. Apparently you people think that your goals are best achieved by throwing flour at Paris Hilton (see above), signing up Pamela Anderson as your spokesperson, and breaking into laboratories in the dead of winter to set a bunch of raised-in-captivity animals "free" so they can enjoy a long few hours of life in the wilderness before they freeze to death. It makes me wonder if you even want anyone to take you seriously, or if you're a puppet organization secretly funded by McDonald's to make every other vegetarian/animal rights supporter look like an idiot. I'd kind of rather believe the latter, to be perfectly honest.

OK then. Good luck with your craziness. My check for $0.00 is in the mail.

Nick

The Decline of the 315

In the second half of 2005, when I'd finally developed my sought-after [minor] caffeine addiction, the Starbucks in lower Westwood Village could rely on my steady revenue stream of three dollars and fifteen cents per day for an iced grande nonfat latte. This drink, eventually nicknamed the "315", has many advantages. First off, since it's basically just a caffeinated glass of skim milk, it provides a daily supply of nutrients that those food pyramid guys would be proud of. Second, it's quicker to prepare than any of the hot beverages. But most importantly, it's completely possible to drink the entire thing in the time it takes to get from the front door of Starbucks to the crosswalk at Westwood and Wilshire. Thus, as I'm crossing the street, the milkified espresso is crossing the blood-brain barrier, and I arrive back at my cubicle fully hopped up. It was a rock-solid system that worked for many a month.

However.

It may be less than a pack of cigarettes (I think?), but $3.15 a day adds up if you do the math. (Normally I don't do math, but I made an exception in this case.) Eventually I decided to implement the caffeination backup plan I'd considered months ago but could never pull the trigger on. The crux of said plan: switching from iced grande nonfat latte to straight up double espresso. Same caffeine content, but $1.40 less per day. (That's almost a muffin!) And Starbucks probably wouldn't want me to divulge this secret, but you know those stainless steel containers of nonfat milk by the napkins and Splenda? You can use them for free! All I have to do is dump in a quarter-cup or so and I'm good to go. With much less volume and no ice to slow me down, I'm done with that sucker within ten paces of Starbucks. Time and money saved.

I should be running the national freaking budget.

Football game?

Yeah, not even really interested in the commercials this year. But I still wanted a killer bowl of nachos washed down with a pint of Guinness. So, I chose something else to watch.

Thoughts for the day

Guy who stood at crosswalk on Westwood and Wilshire listening to his iPod but never pressed the "walk" button:

If I come to a crosswalk and someone's already standing next to the walk button, I usually don't reach over and press it. Because I don't like to insult people's intelligence. But now, because of this guy, I will be forced to do exactly that for the rest of my life. Way to go, iPod guy.

Soup I improvised last night:

One onion, chopped. Four cloves of garlic, smashed. Most of one potato, cubed. One can of great northern beans, drained. One can of diced tomatoes, also drained. Most of one container of vegetable broth. Thyme and oregano for seasoning. Grated peccorino romano on top.

Taste of above soup:

Not bad. Probably missing an ingredient or two, but I don't know which.

Cheese placed on toasted baguette slices as side dish:

Drunken Goat.

Amount of Drunken Goat left over:

None.

Thought I had after exiting Jamba Juice today:

If I found a time traveller from the 1950's, I would totally bring him in there and tell him that this is what all food is like in the future.

Jamba, we still hardly know ye

I am, to put it somewhat mildly, a frequent customer of Jamba Juice. When it's lunch time and I really want to do the bare minimum required to alleviate hunger in at least a semi-nutritious way, it's my best option. Plus, if you go in around noon you really don't have to wait. Apparently, the rest of the Westwood business/academic community is spending that time filling themselves up with greasier, more lunch-like items possibly ending in -ito, -izza, or -ow mein. Anyway, I usually choose to spend my minimal waiting time reading some of the literature that they offer for sale. In the past, this has included such stimulating titles as the Juliano Raw "uncook"-book, which teaches you that it's possible to make authentic mayonnaise out of organic nuts soaked overnight in tap water. But they stopped carrying that one, and my well of insults to hurl at Juliano should I ever run into him on 3rd Street Promenade regrettably ran dry.

Now, a new book has taken center stage on the shelf:

Jamba Juice Power (Amazon link provided for informational purposes only; please do not buy it, because it is stupid)

I picked up this book today in the frenzied hopes that it would provide me with the recipe to produce a Protein Berry Pizazz of my very own. Not that the recipe should be all that difficult to reverse-engineer, but still... why waste all that time and soy milk if I don't have to? Well, the beginning of the book was fairly unpromising, mainly focused on health and exercise and all that crap. I flipped through page after page explaining why various nutrients were important, what times of day were best for consuming them, where to get some good horse 'roids in L.A., and so forth. Then, at last, I arrived at the recipe section. Long story short, no PBP was to be had. In fact, there was not a single recipe for any of the smoothies they actually sell at Jamba Juice. In their place were stupid just-made-up-for-the-book drinks like "Aaaah, Apple" and others of similar levels of inanity. Because guess what? Those Jamba guys may act all hippy-dippy, but they'd tie their grandmothers to railroad tracks before they gave up any real dirt on their beverages.

Well, I'll show them. I will not rest until I can manufacture a working replica of the Protein Berry Pizazz in my own kitchen, perhaps using more than $4.25 worth of ingredients from Whole Foods, but nonetheless emerging with a satisfied sense of entrepreneurial spirit and self-worth that can't be bought at any price. Or maybe I won't, but whatever.

This should totally be the ad for that one Japanese dude

So, yeah... um, here:



You know that rule about two things not being able to occupy the same space at the same time? I think that's one of Newton's laws, or the Hippocratic Oath or something like that. Well, turns out it's, like, wicked true especially when you're talking about fingers and fancy-ass Japanese knives. "What fancy Japanese knife would that be, Nick?" you ask?

Okay, you're a little morbid, but I'll indulge you:



Ha! Just kidding. I wish. Not that the girl who sliced me isn't hot.

Anyway, the knife looks more like this:


Take that sucker and get it sharpened by a super master Japanese knife sharpener guy like a week earlier, and you've got a PARTY!

(And by "party" I mean "comfy Band-Aid brand gauze taped to your finger for a few days.")

Sometimes when you give life the finger... oops, already used that joke.

The year begins hypothetically

Instead of resolutions, this year I offer a list of questions that may help explain why I tend to be kind of a skeptic. Because if I really believed in anything that didn't have hard scientific evidence, these sorts of thoughts would plague me.

Anyway, let the hypothetical crap begin.

How do you know that weren't born a squirrel but switched bodies with a human for a predetermined amount of time, and your lease ends tomorrow? (Naturally, during your human time you would have wanted to forget the fact that you were really a squirrel, so temporarily erasing your squirrel-memory would have been part of the arrangement.)

How do you know that you're not a character in someone else's dream? (The good news is that this person is in a coma. The bad news is it's just a food coma.)

How do you know that you never wished chicken pox on someone, got your wish fulfilled, and then wished to forget you ever wished it?

(If you were born on or after April 5, 1994) How do you know that you weren't once a world-famous garage band frontman who decided to end it all but was offered an opportunity to live a brand new life with no knowledge of your previous one?

How do you know you didn't give up a portion of your brain to find a cure for avian flu, but the cure never panned out and you never got the piece of your brain back? Naturally, it's the piece of brain that remembers the whole thing happening.

(If you're living on less money than you'd like) How do you know you weren't once fabulously wealthy but had a really annoying hangnail that just wouldn't go away, and it eventually drove you crazy enough that you paid a witch doctor to cure it in exchange for all your money? Naturally, blacking out your memories of being rich was part of the deal.

How do you know you weren't born with the highest IQ of any human being in history, with the potential to solve all the world's social and political ills, but lost it all the moment your umbilical cord was cut?

(This one I first thought of well over a decade ago.) How do you know you don't have a rewind button for your life, but it's only the size of a regular rewind button and is located on a tree somewhere in Nebraska?

How do you know that every time you go to bed, you sleep for a whole year, but the rest of the world acts like only a day has gone by to prevent you from feeling left out?

And finally...

How do you know that you couldn't cause every Starbucks on earth to spontaneously combust by concentrating really hard on a piece of celery for a couple of hours?

* * *

Well, there you have it. Welcome to 2006. Just thought I'd start if off a little differently.

What have we learned this year?

Sometimes you can't escape your obligations to the legal system.

But you can always dream. And dream. And dream some more.

You can get your friends to start their own blogs. Or, if they already have one, you can give them one of yours to play with.

Then you can start a podcast. Then get a couple of girls to start one. (And totally not get jealous when it becomes more popular than yours.)

You can work on developing a caffeine dependency. Really make an effort. Seriously. Then worry that your wish has come true, and cut it out cold turkey for a week. This may be difficult, but at least resuming caffeination has some moderately interesting results.

Of course, you'll get back into it a little too much, and have second thoughts (or are they third by now?), and try another detox week.

Oh, but it's much harder this time. So hard that you have to learn to cook just to distract yourself. One day you're amazed that you can add stuff to scrambled eggs; but it won't be long before you're on to stuff that almost destroys both your kitchen and you. And a kick-ass knife always helps.

In the meantime, there's always time for quiet reflection upon stuff you bought at Ikea.

And lots more adventures in caffeination, and returning produce.

Throw in a new haircut and Netflix, and you've got a year.

Now, as long as I've got a couple weeks left, what were those resolutions again?

What's in Alaska?

Dreams are a lot like movies in that you have no control over their content and just walk into each one hoping it will be entertaining. Plus, the ratio of good ones to bad ones isn't very promising. Fortunately, last night was one of the few that actually didn't disappoint. Bear with me as I attempt to describe it in as non-surreal terms as possible.

I'm in Alaska. Not sure why. Internship? School program? That part never got answered, or I forgot it. Anyway, it's the late afternoon and I'm wandering around the Alaskan streets. They don't look like Alaska (to the best of my knowledge), but more like L.A. In fact, they look like a studio backlot. I'm standing on the sidewalk and a bunch of police cars start tearing around the corner. More, and more, and more. Some of them are regular cruisers; others are unmarked cars. They just keep coming, and some of them start pulling over a couple blocks away. Eventually I realize they're there to block off all the streets ahead. I try to walk up towards where they are, but signs start appearing telling me that I can't go any farther. They're not even real signs; they're painted into the streets and sidewalks.

I walk back in the direction I came, and the streets start getting crowded with people heading in the same direction. It's like the whole place is being evacuated. At one point I follow some people into a big old-fashioned building, and some people are heading upstairs. I go a different way and find a marked door that says "Official Mapping and Planning" or something like that. Inside are three people sitting in chairs holding maps or blueprints. I ask them what's going on, and they tell me there's been a big earthquake. I get out of there and find myself inside this giant cruise ship type of thing. Apparently it's a safe place to go to get away from the earthquake. The whole middle of the ship is a giant pool, and I'm in the pool treading water and talking to other people. I ask them if they're sure we're safe in here, and they say, yeah, of course, we'll be fine. About a minute later another earthquake hits and the whole ship tilts way down in one direction, plunging lots more water over us all, and people are frantically trying to swim back to the edge to climb out. Some smaller people and children are being helped out of the pool by adults, and as the adults toss them out of the pool they tell the children's names to the people up above -- I guess so they can be recorded as survivors, or something. I climb out by myself, and find out that the earthquake was so big that it hit L.A. too. There's some kind of hotline to call so you can be listed as being okay. I consider calling it but then decide to call my parents instead, to see if I can get through or if the lines are too busy with other people calling home. (Luckily, my cell phone stayed in my pocket the whole time I was in the pool.)

I get through to my parents and ask them if they know what's going on. They don't; they haven't heard about it yet. I tell them this is a pretty big deal and will be all over the news by the end of the day. As I'm talking to them, I walk out onto another street, and a whole section of wall from a storefront falls in my direction; however, it's light enough that I can stop it with the hand that isn't holding the phone. I go across the street to a little bar/restaurant and see most of my friends from college inside. I get off the phone and go inside the bar and talk to my friends to make sure they're all okay (though I never question why they're with me in Alaska). Two of my friends who basically haven't seen or spoken to each other since college (because of bad blood which I won't get into right now) are hugging each other, and I realize that I had always wondered if a life-threatening incident like this would be enough to get them to reconcile and forget about their little feud, and I now have my answer. Then I feel guilty for thinking about that, because it's such a trivial thing in light of what's going on around us. One of them comments on my new haircut and glasses, and interestingly she's now turned into teenage actress Michelle Trachtenberg (who played Dawn on "Buffy" and was also in "Eurotrip").

Then it's over.

The Christmas Letter

Although much has been written about my Jewish tendencies, there is still one aspect of goyish -- even WASPish -- culture that I count myself extremely privileged to have a connection to. And that is The Christmas Letter. I feel very sorry for anyone who has yet to experience one of these, because they have the potential to turn otherwise boring, obscure relatives into unintentional comic geniuses on a level you can't imagine.

But first, a little background. Long before blogs, MySpace, or mass emailing ever existed, The Christmas Letter was the undisputed method of describing the important events of your life to a lot of people who didn't really give a shit. And even in the face of those new exciting technologies, The Christmas Letter survives thanks to scores of people throughout the Bible Belt who still chuckle to themselves at all the "neat" things you can do with Print Shop and a four-color printer.

I am related to some of these people. I don't see them regularly (or in some cases, ever in my life), but once a year I am reminded of their existence via the treasured letter that makes its way to my parents' mailbox. What a letter it is. The whole year is encapsulated in two to five pages, sometimes with embedded photographs. Without even looking at it, I can already list the topics that are sure to appear within:

1. Job promotions and/or layoffs
   
2. Travel (usually within the continental U.S., more specifically anywhere reachable by car)
   
3. Attempts at home carpentry
4. The brand new niece/nephew/grandbaby, and the mischief he/she is already getting into
5. Health issues and/or death (always sandwiched between lighter things, of course)
   
6. Community/church activities

Other stuff pops up from time to time, but this is usually the crux of it. And as varied as these categories are, they're inevitably united by a central theme. That theme, of course, is Jesus.

If you read these letters without knowing who Jesus was, you'd probably imagine him to be a charitable great-uncle, a helpful Human Resources manager, a sperm donor, a ruthless mafioso, or some combination thereof. Regardless, you'd sure come away with the notion that Jesus had one hell of a busy year. Jesus blessed the family with a baby, Jesus helped find us a new job, Jesus gave us some great weather this summer, and Aunt Lucille passed away but that's okay because it was the will of the Lord (who, we understand, signs Jesus's paycheck).

And then the letter ends, usually with "Warmest Wishes for a Blessed New Year" or something like that, and I'm left pondering what kind of crazy hijinks Jesus has in store for the coming months.

The weekend in dumb haikus

Friday

it's not hard to make
cheesecake factory's salads
with stuff from whole foods

podcasting is fun
especially when you are
tres caffeinated

Saturday

party city has
lots more goyish than jewish
stuff. what can you do?

2 floor Target is
fun; it has the escala-
-tor just for your cart.

made grown-up mac and
cheese (see link); it's really good.
used parsley this time.

sort of semi-watched
what's eating gilbert grape, which
was a decent flick.

Sunday

I owe the city
of west hollywood twenty-
nine bucks; hence, they suck.

(that's because I parked
on a hill with my wheels not
turned right. whatever.)

I love my car, part 2

(Click here for part 1)

Anyway, I could wax probably poetic for another 200 pages or so (except the middle 75-80 would just be pages full of "I bet you didn't read this far"), but I won't.

The car is dead. (Or traded in, same thing. Non-wastefulness issues notwithstanding, I kind of don't even want to think about someone else driving it because it just feels very wrong.)

Long live the car. Brand new Civic with all the fixin's. Still on its first tank of gas, having yet to be driven anywhere outside of the Westwood/Palms/Santa Monica area. We're definitely still in the honeymoon stage, so let's talk about the good stuff before I've driven it long enough to have things to complain about.

First of all, electronic gadgetry. I'm not going to start listing off specifics, because that would be boring, but let's just say I could pretty much drive around until I died of natural causes and still not run out of music (granted, I'd really be scraping the bottom of the barrel by that point... I'd have to save some good stuff for the end so I didn't exhale my last breath with, like, Kenny G in the background).

Then there's the navigation system, which made The Sparkler wonder if having that would force me to change the name of this blog. No, I replied, the car may be good with directions but I still royally suck with them. At least now it'll be fun to get lost because I just have to hit a couple buttons to get me home... then make a wrong turn, hit some more buttons, make another wrong turn, drive into a ditch, call AAA, get pulled out, hit another button, accidentally turn on rear defroster, finally find correct button just as HOLY CRAP I'M IN THE WRONG LANE and I veer off onto the sidewalk and hit an L.A. Weekly display case (this week's headline: Are You Edgy Enough? Here's Why Not) before finally realizing that I was only going out to get groceries and should have just walked. Plus the whole thing is voice-activated, so I don't really need to hit any buttons at all. Unfortunately, the voice-activation girl has a bit of an ironic streak because when I say "Display Audio" she says back, in her perfect your-call-is-very-important-to-us voice, "Display Hospitals" and proceeds to pop up a bunch of hospital icons on the map. Sometimes when I give her an order she just does nothing, which I think means she's giving me one of those "Eeeeh" faces usually exchanged by opposite-sex siblings. I'm sure we'll work out our differences, though.

Incidentally, my long-term linguistic project is to find some kind of trace of a provincial accent in the voice activation girl's voice. I think I can do it. Like I said, it's long-term. But she has like at least a several-hundred word vocabulary, so she's got to slip up at some point and reveal her regional upbringing. And when she does, I'll be there to blog about it.

I love my car, part 1

I should be doing cartwheels over the fact that I have a brand new car, but for the moment I'm wracked with guilt and thinking about Toy Story.

Some people think that humans are set apart from other animals by nature of the depth and meaning of the bonds we make with others of our species. I don't think that's it; I think what sets us apart is our ability to make deep, meaningful bonds with inanimate objects. And I'm not just talking about the stuff we personify as kids (stuffed animals, action figures) or mementoes that represent one specific thing (security blanket, first dollar earned, ticket stub, etc.). I mean that it's possible, and probably inevitable, to form a lasting connection to something that's been in your life for a very long time, even if that something can't talk, meow, bark, or gurgle. Not that this is all that earth-shattering of a point to be making; I think we're all pretty well aware of it. But I'm wondering if that concept works in reverse. Tyler Durden told us that the things you own end up owning you, but the more heartening (and potentially guilt-inducing) message of Toy Story was that the things you get attached to end up getting attached to you. Did my 1995 Honda Accord get attached to me? (And hey, isn't 1995 also the year Toy Story came out?) Is a machine capable of feelings? Well, now we're getting into Terminator 2 territory. But I digress.

I had the car for about ten and a half years. At the risk of introducing yet another metaphor, I guess it was kind of like having a pet -- first in the sense that its entire life was encapsulated in a relatively small period of mine, and then in the sense that it saw me through a lot of very different stages in my life without much obvious reaction. Wherever I was, it just did its car stuff. Clearly I needed it to come with me when I moved here, because living in L.A. without a car is tantamount to living in Utah with only one spouse, but really, I didn't just need a car; I needed that car. As much of a disconnect as it was to be driving down Sunset in the same vehicle that used to require regular de-icing for 3 months a year, it also made everything sort of make sense. I was protected from the forces of external change by this light blue metallic forcefield with bumper stickers strategically placed to cover up scratches. The CDs that used to be the soundtrack for getting lost down one-way streets in Boston just switched over to being the soundtrack for getting lost on the way to LAX or the Valley or wherever. (Not that that happens anymore.) So even though things were a whole lot different in the world outside the car, on the inside they were pretty much the same.

Another digression, and then I have to go to bed. Here's a partial list of places the car was, at some point or other, driven around in, skipping the obvious like Boston and L.A.:

Vermont (most of the state)
New Hampshire (probably just a little)
Rhode Island (Newport and environs)
Connecticut (drove through)
Montreal (because you can drink and gamble when you're 18)
New York (but not NYC, sadly)
Georgia (mainly Savannah)
Florida (Daytona Beach and Orlando)
every state between Massachusetts and Florida
San Francisco
Vegas (twice)
England (well, the New one anyway)

Part 2 and so forth later.

I give life the middle finger, then life gets my finger back

November 15th: Scrape knuckle of middle finger on car door, or maybe somewhere else -- it's a little fuzzy at this point (my memory, not the knuckle; thankfully, I don't have gangrene or anything). Develop minor scab. No big deal.

November 18th: Wake up to find tiny laceration on side of same finger. No idea how I got it.

November 23rd: Scrape area behind knuckle on same finger while packing luggage. Wonder what kind of bad karma my middle finger stirred up.

I should take a picture of the finger to illustrate the uniqueness of each injury, because it really is pretty remarkable. Actually, I think it's possible that my middle finger was the right side of my car in a previous life. (See the right side of my car for reference.)