Happy Chinese New Year!

* I've grown to rather like the absurdity of anything named "Not Too Late To Change The Name." Also, it has a nicer ring to it than "Watch Jen Have A Nervous Breakdown."

* Further digging through old correspondance yielded a printout (vax!) of an email from an old friend. In this message, he states that in any given room, he will become attracted to the female who will inflict the most emotional damage. A decade later, he has a great wife he met online -- not in a room. Maybe he was right.

* Is it "correspondance" or "correspondence?" I won the spelling bee in fourth grade, before I knew how to use a computer or spellcheck. Further evidence that technology may have ruined my life.

* Why am I not sleepy? That little nap I took shouldn't make up for reporting to catering work at 6:45 a.m. and then doing dirty work all day. (Cue "I'm a fool to do your dirty work, oh yeah...")

* The Dismemberment Plan, "Ice of Boston:" (transcribed; all errors are mine)

Pop open a bottle of bubbly
Yeah, here's to another goddamn new year
And outside two million drunk Bostonians are getting ready to sing "Auld Lang Syne" out of tune
I sit there in my easy chair
Looking at the clouds, orange with celebration
And I wonder if you're out there

chorus:
Hey! The ice of Boston is muddy
And reflects no light
Any day or night
And I slip on it every time

Pop open a third bottle of bubbly
Yeah, and I take that bottle of champagne, go into the kitchen, and stand in front of the kitchen window, and I take all my clothes off
Take that bottle of champagne and I pour it on my head
feel it cascade through my hair and across my chest and the phone rings
And it's my mother
And she says "Hi honey, how's Boston?"
And I stand there, all alone on New Year's Eve, buck naked, drenched in champagne
Looking at a bunch of strangers
Looking at them looking at me looking at them
And I say "I'M FINE MOM, HOW'S WASHINGTON?!"

chorus

So I guess the party line is I followed you up here
I don't know about that
Mainly because knowing about that would involve knowing about some pathetic, ridiculous, and absolutely true things about myself I'd rather not admit to right now
I woke up at 3 a.m. with the radio on, that Gladys Knight and the Pips song on about how she'd rather live in his world with him than live in her world alone
And I laid there, head spinning, trying to fall asleep, and I thought to myself
"Oh, Gladys, girl, I love you, but oh...GET A LIFE!"

chorus

* The above song is on an MP3 mix I'm making that includes Prince, Brian Eno, the Dead Kennedys, Destiny's Child, Joni Mitchell, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, the Ramones, Taj Mahal, and the Spongebob Squarepants theme song. Maybe "Watch Jen Have A Nervous Breakdown" is a better name for this thing, after all.

Oh man. They turned one of the best dive bars ever into a bistro. Bastards! There goes the neighborhood!

Thanks to the first respondant to my Boston vs. New York and West vs. East poll. Keep those anecdotes coming.

Conversation I had with a Santa Monica resident who grew up in New Jersey (like me):

Jen: So you know how die-hard New Englanders get about the west coast..."earthquakes and crazy people."

California Dude: Yep, "fruits and nuts."

J: So what do Californians say about the east coast?

CD: Not much of anything. I don't think they think about the east coast at all.

J: Much like Boston hates New York City, and New York couldn't care less.

CD: Exactly.

Any Left Coasters (or New Yorkers) care to disagree? Email fruitsandnuts at Englishmajor dot com. I'm honestly curious.

Okay, if I have to read one more word about Nicole Kidman's fake nose in "The Hours," I'm going to start kicking walls. First Renee Zellweger got patted on the back for gaining enough weight to look like a normal person in "Bridget Jones' Diary" (she claimed it was really hard to eat big meals in preparation, thus proving that Hollywood will ruin your life). Now, isn't Nicole brave for looking, uh, so incredibly homely as Virginia Woolf? Crikey. You'd think she was playing The Elephant Man. It's still a smaller schnozz than mine :)

So you expect some occasional book-related content on a website called Englishmajor.com? I suppose you're entitled. To tell the truth, I've not been reading as much as I used to: about 40 books in 2002, a dozen or so fewer than usual. That doesn't count books I abandoned halfway (probably due to my own fractured attention span, not the quality of the book) and travel books I thumbed through and drooled on. As a side note, I didn't buy a book all year, except for a street atlas of New York City. All hail the public library.

Anyway, here were some of my favorites from last year, generally published in other years, but like I said, I ain't buyin'.

Fiction Your Professors Would Not Call "Literature"

The Talisman - Stephen King

The Diamond Age - Neal Stephenson

Generation X - Douglas Copeland

Demonology - Rick Moody

I Know This Much Is True - Wally Lamb

Literature(tm)

The Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

uh, I guess that was it. *blush*

Non-fiction

I'm a Stranger Here Myself and A Walk In The Woods - Bill Bryson

Nickel and Dimed: On Not Getting By In America - Barbara Ehrenreich (flawed in some ways and didn't tell me anything I didn't already know, but I still feel obliged to recommend it)

Tormenting Thoughts and Secret Rituals: The Hidden Epidemic of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder - Ian Osborn

Lonely Planet Books Skimmed And Drooled On

Germany

Taiwan

Middle East

Great Lakes

California and Nevada

Hawaii

This year: still less reading, more writing.

"When adults ask kids, 'What do you want to be when you grow up?' they're just looking for clues themselves."
-- Paula Poundstone

* My jetlag has reversed itself. After days of going to bed late and sleeping until the afternoon, last night I fell asleep around 9 and woke up this morning at 3:45am. Did I fly in from Europe and not notice?

* Speaking of flying, I must note that my wet-nap from the plane had an American flag emblazoned on the wrapper a la all post-9/11 pizza boxes. "Kari-Out will donate a portion of the proceeds from the sale of this FRESH NAP to charities for the attack on America." We sure do know how to turn "tragedy" to "tacky," and not just by moving some of the letters around.

* Additional flying anecdote: breakfast on AA flights now consists of a granola bar. I know they're cutting costs, but damn.

* Final flight tidbit: on the way back into Boston, we flew over my neighborhood. After 9 months of watching the planes land, it was cool to be on the other side.

* "Don't talk to me for about a week; I'm sorry, it just hurts to explain" comes from "I'm Free Now" by Morphine, which I once learned to perform in American Sign Language for a final project. Ah, liberal arts.

I'm back. Still jetlagged and non-functional. No resolutions this year. Don't talk to me for about a week; I'm sorry, it just hurts to explain. Name that tune.