Well then! I’m back from the wilds of the Montana, and I’m sorry to report that there wasn’t any snow. At least it wasn’t excruciatingly cold—only in the teens and twenties. It was a lovely trip and I got plenty of much-needed rest.

Getting out of town, however, was less than simple. After a lengthy and bloody battle, I admitted defeat and decided Phoebe would stay home rather than be boarded with Max. I managed to screw up the pillowcase trick the first time, and after that it was really over. With twelve minutes remaining until the pet resort closed for the night, I finally gave up, crammed a very scared and desolate Max into his carrier and took off. In our struggles, Phoebe had managed to dig her back feet into the palms of both my hands leaving clusters of deep punctures that were actively bleeding stigmata-like as I drove to drop off Max. Needless to say, upon seeing my hands the folks at Rover Oaks were rather pleased to hear that Phoebe wasn’t coming. Thankfully, a kind friend at work was willing to stop by and check in on her during the week. Though she didn’t destroy the apartment and seems to be in fine shape, she’s vehemently angry with both Max and me. Max, contrary to my fears, had a fabulous time and doesn’t seem worse for the wear at all. Apparently, he loved the attention and made several new friends. $140 later, everyone comes out okay.

My car accident saga continues, as will be further detailed in the List. Other than dealing with that, general boredom at work, tornadic activity to the north, and the looming threat of being killed in my sleep by an angry calico, things are swell and it’s good to be back. I love going home, but there’s such a sense of life-suspended while I’m there that I kind of like coming back to my routine, even though I don’t like my routine at the moment. Oh, and I finally decided on a topic for my book. It’s going to be great, but the research will take a while, so no further details at this time. Stay tuned…

Anyway, here’s this week’s list.

Things I Like

• The Cosby Show. God Bless Nickelodeon for airing old episodes all the damn time. This weekend, they had two marathons of classic episodes…I was in heaven. I think part of the draw for me is that their family is so much more fun than mine. Well, I guess my family is fun if you’re an outsider and are watching the circus-like spectacle unfold before you. Being trapped there by blood, however, makes it difficult to see the fun in the millionth semi-drunk karaoke exhibition. What can I say, I’m a square peg in a family of round holes. Anyway, I dig the Huxtables. I went through a phase as a child when I thought they might adopt me if I wrote in to the show. I was pretty sure they wouldn’t mind that I was white, and it seemed like the house had endless bedrooms.

• Sleep. And man, could I ever use some right now.

• Big ideas. I am soooo excited about my book. It’s really one of the best ideas I’ve ever had and I actually have a plan to see it through to completion. Though I have no idea what the final form will look like, the research process is going to be pretty freaking amazing.

• Cute children. I have to admit, I saw a bevy of adorable and relatively well-behaved children while traveling to and from the great MT. I definitely went through a ‘kids are scary’ phase, but I think it’s over now. Though ill-behaved children (especially of the shrieking variety) still drive me up the wall, the rest of them are great and I honestly wish I saw more of them.

• Nigella Lawson. I love the way this woman cooks, almost as much as I love the way she writes about cooking. If you aren’t familiar with her, she’s a British chef whose television show recently started airing in the US. She has written two cookbooks, one of which I own, and she’s just an overall great addition to the cooking tableau. Her show is pretty cool, although it freaks me out a little when she licks her fingers and keeps cooking. I totally do that in my own kitchen, but never when other people are definitely going to eat the food. If other palates are involved, I wash hands often, use spoons once, the whole enchilada. I’d like it if she made at least a pretense towards believing in such standards for guests.

• Norah Jones. If you haven’t heard her cd yet, go buy it. Don’t borrow it from a friend, unless you were planning to end the friendship anyway and tend not to feel guilt. You will love it, I promise.

Things I Don’t Like

• Enterprise Car Rental. The only good thing about these jackasses is that they do direct billing with State Farm. This would be the only reason I am still doing business with them, because they clearly don’t know their ass from a hole in the ground. Not only did they put me in an entirely unclean car this weekend, I have been jerked around by more people from their various Houston offices than one would think reasonably possible. Watch your back with this group—they’ll screw you up at every turn if you aren’t preternaturally careful (and even then, it won’t be easy). I’m greatly looking forward to turning this Mercury-piece-of-crap back in, digging up the name of the regional manager, and writing a seething letter of disgust. Heh.

• Severe weather. There’s “tornadic activity” headed our way at the moment, and that doesn’t warm my heart. I swear, around here if it’s not floods or hurricanes it’s tornadoes or mosquitoes with West Nile. Why, why, why does anyone live here?

• Christmas trees after Christmas. Is there anything more depressing? I don’t mean little-Disney-ragamuffins-singing-Britishly depressing, I mean gained-another-dress-size-worth depressing. Muddy-dog-with-the-homeless-vet depressing. Grandparents-forget-your-birthday depressing. Yeesh.

• Overpowering perfume/cologne. This may affect me more than some, as I have an extremely sensitive sense of smell. Honestly, when applying any form of personal scent, I think everyone should put a tiny bit under their nose, so they can smell it. It seems that all too often, people think it’s just not strong enough and want to make sure those in close proximity can smell it. Man, not only can I smell it, I can taste it—a scenario that should only arise in slightly more intimate situations than standing on the opposite side of the room. I work with a few people who, I swear, I can smell through the phone.

Well, it's time to go wrangle the kids into their carriers and pack them off to their pet "resort" for the week. It is with no small measure of bravery that I move forth...Phoebe is already on edge because Maxey came home yesterday smelling like the V-E-T after getting his vaccines updated. All I can say is that the pillowcase trick better not fail me this time.

Due to travel fun, I won't be posting next week. You may expect a new and fabulous set of lists and other pearls when I return to my computer on the 30th. Until then, read the archives, eat a candy cane, and have a truly wonderful holiday.

~Peace on Earth~

Stars! I’ve actually been busy this week. I guess it goes to show that miracles really do happen in December. This week, we conquered the sizeable task of getting several hundred Christmas cards out the door. I think this is some sort of karmic justice for me, since I have never sent more than two or three Christmas cards at a time in my life. This venture involved taking stacks of cards, signed by my boss (read: his secretary) and stuffing them into envelopes we addressed by hand. Lord. Since they were hand-addressed, it wasn’t possible to run them through the automatic sealer thing we have in the mail room. Luckily, someone produced a gluestick at the crucial moment so we didn’t end up licking any. That’s really spectacular, because I avoid licking envelopes at all costs. See, a tech at one of the local emergency rooms told me a story about a patient she had whose lower lip was unbelievably swollen. When they tried to lance it and nothing came out, they discovered that a few cockroach eggs had ended up in her lip from a papercut she received while licking an envelope. The eggs had hatched and there were several roaches in larval state living inside her lip. No joke.

Anyway, here’s the latest installment into the Things I Like/Things I Don’t Like list. Please adjust yourself to this format, as I will be utilizing it often for future entries.

Things I Like
• Amy’s Enchiladas. I hope the kind folks at Whole Foods never tire of seeing me in their checkout lines with a stack of Amy’s Enchiladas in my hands. These things are like the heroin of yuppie food: try them once and you’re hooked for all time and eternity. I’m particularly fond of the cheese variety that comes with corn and refried black beans.

• The staff of the Downtown Post Office. I’m not sure if it’s a commitment to good service or a continued effort to drop the disgruntled postal employee from society’s cultural memory, but the folks at this branch are downright chipper. I appreciate this, and I applaud them.

• Gonads and Strife. If you’ve never seen this lovely little Flash site, you should. Don’t bother if your computer doesn’t have speakers—it’s the song that will make you laugh to the point of pain. Note: contains a few four-letter words and a few, um, choice pictures from Gray’s Anatomy (hey, you never know what will offend people). http://www.frashii.com/wldo.swf

• State Farm Insurance. My agent and all of her staff are extraordinarily kind people. In the days following my recent vehicular incident, they have been most helpful and have demonstrated legions of patience while I figure out this whole claims process.

• The wonderful staff of Discover Leadership Training. To avoid all chance of plagiarism allegations, I don’t do ratings on anything in my lists (to see the world’s most comprehensive and hysterically funny collection of ratings, visit the Brunching Shuttlecocks as http://www.brunching.com). However, I’ll make one exception and give this crowd the highest grade possible—A+, four stars, 10 out of 10…whatever scale you prefer. They keep my light lit, and there’s very little that tops that. Noticed the rather profound absence of last week’s general misanthropic haze? I give significant credit to this past weekend with the Discover crew. Thanks guys, I needed that.

• Soup spoons. They are, by far, the cutest utensil. I actually stole a silver soup spoon from a B&B I used to work at. Oddly, I never had the nerve to steal it while I worked there but rather when I visited on a trip back to Philly a few years ago. I keep thinking about sending it back, but I happen to really like it, and I also happen to know that they have upwards of 350 and rarely serve soup.

Things I Don’t Like:
• My job. In case I haven’t mentioned this recently… (though I am taking strides to remedy the situation—more on this later).

• The smell of money. I freely admit that I have an extremely sensitive sense of smell, and that I am disturbed by odors that don’t register with many other people. Still, I challenge anyone to tell me with a straight face that new bills fresh out of a brick from the Bureau of Engraving and Printing smell anything other than awful. Granted, I probably have more interaction with such bills that most due to my place of employment. Come on over, we’ll cash a check and you can smell the nastiness, too. This stands as yet another reason I am in full support of a cashless society.

• Rental car companies. In the two days following my encounter with the South Loop Enterprise people, I have given great heaps of thanks that the recruiter from Enterprise chose not to hire me when I applied for their management training program in 2001. Gawd. Aside from being incredibly schmarmy, the fellow who (at long last) helped me into a 2003 Trailblazer came quite close to earning the Bag of Hair Award for the day (as in, ‘dumb as a…’). Apparently, no one who has ever rented from them before has been entirely indifferent as to which car they receive. Usually, I tend to keep my “I just don’t care” commentary to myself, but this situation provoked me to actually say it about a dozen times. Oy.

• Gender discrimination. I’d really like to earn as much as one of my (male) colleagues who has yet to graduate from college, works about 5.5 hours a day, and has yet to discover the presence of spell-check. Not to launch into a feminist fugue here, but really. It wasn’t until I started working that I realized “little lady” is actually a working part of many people’s (men’s) vocabularies. The funny part? I’m not that little. Go figure.

• The Real World. I spent many summers absolutely glued to this show. Now, it just makes me sad, though in a good-grief-ma way rather than a feel-the-pathos-with-me way. I will probably use hours and hours of footage for research when I write my book about my 50th percentile theory.

• Cottage cheese with fruit. I’m down with the fruit, I’m down with the cottage cheese. It’s the combination that makes no earthly sense to me.

The holidays are around the corner…and I’m not very excited. If you could see the gray, rainy yuckness that is surrounding this city right now, you’d have an accurate visual for my general mood. I’m not even sure what the deal is—it’s not that there’s anything specifically wrong. I’ve come to know intimate hatred of my job, and that’s probably the biggest life-damper right now. Faithful readers know that I recently broke up with Boy, and though the relationship was short in tenure, it was long on promise (for me, anyway) and the fact that it didn’t work keeps sneaking up to bite me with big, sad teeth. Lastly, I went to see a specialist about my back last week—hoping to open big new doors of pain management for the condition that has caused me daily pain for the last few years—only to be told that I should really just exercise more and learn to deal with it. Um…are you kidding? The largest medical center in the world doesn’t have anything better to offer a 22-year-old in chronic pain than Celebrex and a pat on the head? Second opinion, please!

Compounding my general blah is the fact that tomorrow is my 23rd birthday. I just don’t care. I’ve always been really excited for my birthday—looked forward to it for weeks, planned special days, etc.—and this year it just seems like another day. 23 isn’t an age at which I’ll be taken any more seriously than I am at 22, so who cares? When I talked to my mom yesterday, she asked when she should call me Tuesday, and it took me more than a few beats to figure out why on Earth she’d be calling in the middle of the week!?! Finally it hit me (duh, it’s your birthday, moron).

So, I hate to venture into this thought process because it’s rather counter-feminist and that smells bad, but hear me out. I think a major source of my misanthropic tendencies this year comes from my harshly confirmed single status. Seriously, I thought about it last night, and I haven’t been really and truly single for my birthday (and my extension, Christmas/New Year’s) since my junior year of high school. I guess old habits die hard. That’s not to say that I was always in a good relationship each year (and yes, it was always a different one—never made a relationship last longer than 10 months), but there was always someone occupying my space and time. Maybe that’s what’s so depressing right now—I don’t even have any prospects. Short of my briefly-lived fantasies of Ethan Stiefel (dancer with ABT) or Noah Wyle, there’s no one on my radar right now. It’s one of the unpleasant realities of the “real world” that I’m still coming to grips with 18 months post-college. Couple a complete lack of preferred-gender interest with a completely under-stimulating and mind-numbing job…and it’s rather bleak. Please don’t get me wrong; I recognize and am immensely thankful for the outstanding lot in life I’ve been given. I have, through hard work and gratuitous luck, had and continue to have a very exceptional 22 years on this planet and that’s absolutely nothing to sneeze at. Everything just looks a little washed out right now.

I’m feeling especially guilty about leaving the cats for Christmas week. Given that all my friends will also be out of town visiting their families, I’m left with no choice but to board them. Gawd. I can’t even board them at my regular vet—I had to be referred to a “pet resort.” I’m going to pay $26 a day for them to be tucked away in private “kitty suites.” This is seriously causing me great amounts of anxiety. One the one hand we have Phoebe, who hates with a fiery passion any and all attempts by humans to take her away from her home and general sense of control. Seriously, she was named "Meanest Cat in the City” by the folks who spayed her. These are the people who spay wild animals…yeah, she’s a little on the wild side sometimes. On the other hand we have Max, whose feline herpes is greatly aggravated by stress and is prone to bouts of abject sadness when I leave him for more than 20 hours. Basically, I’m going to come home to weepy-eyed puddle of depression and one junior Satan. And I’m going to pay out the nose for it. Greaaat. I feel guilty already.

Greetings from the land of boredom and under-appreciation. For this afternoon’s post, I thought I’d throw out a two-part list called ‘Things I Like’ and ‘Things I Don’t Like.’ Sort of a self-propagated point-counterpoint thing, if you will.

Things I Like
• Paula Dorf’s lipstick in “Gilda.” This is a truly superb color and I pretty much plan to make it my new lipstick staple. Hell, this could be the thing that puts an end to my incessant lipstick-purchasing compulsion. Seriously, it’s bad. I estimate that, at present, I own upwards of 60 shades/variations of lip color. It’s a truly worthless obsession, but at least it costs less than handbags. I tend to purchase them on a much slower cycle.

• Benetint, by BeneFit. Truly amazing stuff here—it really is the sexiest flush you can get in a bottle. The fact that it smells and tastes like roses is a nice perk, too. Once in the olden days of my youth I went through a serious rose phase, in which I explored rose-related products in a bevy of incarnations. I think the low-point was the rose-flavored breath mints. They tasted like soap, but came in a neat bottle. What was I thinking?

• Good dates. Really, is there a better way to spend your time? A good date can send you into a certain form of euphoria that science has yet to articulate in pharmaceutical form. I hope they call me when they do, because it would definitely help nullify the yuck from a bad date (more on that later).

• Cheerful cashiers, particularly during the holiday shopping crunch. I wish all retail employees could summon up a good game face for the brief weeks that precede the winter holidays. When it’s good, it’s really really good…and when it’s bad, it’s horrid.

• Spell check. I greatly enjoy any and all automated functions that save me from looking like a complete idiot…or at least from looking like the poor typist I truly am.

• Full tanks of gas. For some reason, I get a brief but joyous high from knowing that my 19.5 gallon tank is totally full. There’s always a part of me that thinks, ‘Reno. We should drive to Reno.’ I have yet to act on it, but it’s only a matter of time.

• A cat under the covers. Oddly, of my two cats it’s the completely evil one that likes this. The cuddlier, snuggle-monster Max? Won’t do it. He’s a top-of-the-covers-only kind of boy. Phoebe, also known as Prickles the WonderBitch, has entered this weird phase wherein she absolutely MUST crawl under any blanket that I’m under and lay next to my hip. That’s not to say that she isn’t extremely fond of biting me while she’s under there, but it’s pretty sweet nonetheless.

• Great fonts. Doesn’t the simplest of text look so much sexier when it’s written in a completely cool font? I think it’s why I’m so taken with Calvin Klein underwear.

• Doctor’s appointments that take up the whole morning. Wednesday, baby, Wednesday!

• White cake with pink frosting. I have never made a white cake with frosting colored anything but pink and I don’t intend to change that practice. Ever. It just works. Yes, dipshit, I know it tastes the same…or does it?

• The entire Elsa Peretti line at Tiffany. I own one necklace (the silver bean), and that’s only the beginning. If anyone is hard-up for a birthday present idea for me, I will gladly accept the Elsa Peretti silver and diamond ring in size 6.

Things I Don’t Like
• Colorstay anything. Let’s face it—it’s really better to have your lipstick wear off completely and hazard reapplication than to be stuck with the mouth of an unfortunate 90-year-old ½ way through your day. You know it, you’ve been there: cracked, dry, flaking, an odd ring of cakey lipschmutz lining the inside of your lip. It never works to reapply, so don’t bother.

• Bad dates. I could actually pull together a nice anthology about this, but I think the interviews would take the rest of my natural-born life. Wouldn’t you think that most people could dial down the crazy for two hours? Two hours, I ask you! To protect the innocent (misguided, perhaps, but still relatively innocent), I will withhold the specific details I have in mind, but gawd.

• Surly salespersons. Oh, I’m sorry, am I inconveniencing you a great deal by asking where the hell the photo albums are? This Matrix-like maze of a store you have here is baking my noodle something awful, so please understand that it’s against my better judgement to ask for help. Please, go back to your absorbing conversation with Wanda about the ever-pressing issue of bangs versus no bangs. My sincerest apologies.

• Grammar check. I find great irony and rapture in the fact that the grammar check on this computer chose to underline the title of this bullet with it’s green squiggle of incorrectness. Ah, the mobius strip of Microsoft logic.

• Cat litter in my bed. I gave them a doormat to wipe their little paws on after exiting the box, but a few select grains find their way into my bed every day. Sigh.

• Comic Sans. This font is hideous and unprofessional. Why it appears so frequently in the business world continues to baffle me. People, it’s not cute, so cut it out.

• Thomas Kincaide and all of his “art.” It’s not art, people, it’s good marketing. This man and his hideously schmaltzy paintings make me physically ill. “Likes Thomas Kincaide” appears in the top-5 on my list of Relationship Dealbreakers. Right up there with declaring Canon in D as your favorite piece of classical music. Hang on, nausea….overwhelming me…must…find…basin…

• Unnecessary acronyms. This was a huge problem in college, and it only got worse when I left school for the financial industry. Not to name names, but here at this country’s central bank, we have more damn acronyms than you can shake a stick at. When you have to publish an online acronym dictionary, it’s time to admit you have a problem.

• Jennifer Lopez. I could, in fact, add her to the list of People I’d Like to Kick in the Teeth. Let me just say this briefly, and we’ll be done. The woman is absolutely talentless. She’s a talentless assclown. She can’t act her way out of a paper bag, can’t sing, and REALLY can’t dance. As we saw at last year’s academy awards, clearly having more money than God doesn’t mean you can hire a decent stylist. The dress sucked and didn’t fit, the hair simply defied explanation. Bottom line: she’s cheesy and I’m sick of her ass face.

I think that pretty much wraps it up for now. I kind of dig this format, so we’ll probably be seeing more of it in the weeks to come.

Reminder: Boys Are Stupid.