(for references, see IMDb… at least “Down with Love” and “”Bring It On”… )

I woke up this morning, watched “Oleanna” and “The Man Who Wasn’t There” (not particularly light-hearted or fun), had some breakfast and then - and then - put on some of the funnest music I have and have been cleaning like a crazy woman while listening to songs like “Une Very Stylish Fille” by Dimitri From Paris (samples dialogue from “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”), “I Don’t Feel Like Dancin’” by Scissor Sisters and “D.A.N.C.E.” by Justice.

I’ve been skipping. Finding myself SKIPPING occasionally while cleaning. To the music. What in tarnation? I haven’t overdosed on antidepressants or anything.

Next thing you know, I’ll be inspired to write a cheer to catapult my team to the head of the regional competition or write a best-selling book or [insert other plot].

This can’t last… or can it?

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I was driving home late tonight after a business dinner and the traffic was moving quickly since the roads are pretty empty at 11:00 on a Tuesday night.

I was listening to music, driving along and thinking about how absolutely insane the act of driving is, just in terms of what it actually is that any of us are doing when we drive a car.

We’re steering a 1.5 or 2 ton pile of metal along the road at speeds of 50, 60, 70 or 80 miles an hour, shielded by plates of extremely slow-moving liquid sand. We trust that we’ll be kept safe by sacks of air all around us, and we trust that another four containers of air, surrounded by metal and wide straps of solidified tree sap (enriched by sulfur) will keep us from sliding off the road. Our speeding piles of metal are powered by burning off gallons of decayed dinosaur juice (they’re called fossil fuels for a reason).

I must just be tired. I’ve still got some laundry to do before tomorrow.

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I helped my friend Theresa paint a room on Saturday and I’m still discovering bits of pale green latex paint on the sides of my toes and the soles of my feet (just standing in the shower won’t really do a thorough job of washing it away). I will have to be extra vigilant with a foot brush tomorrow morning if I wish to wear sandals to work.

We took care of filling in the cracks and holes in the walls (it’s an old house), smoothed everything over, masked off the trim, and then painted it over with a nice fresh coat of sage green; the perfect project for my current state of mind.

Perhaps the heat was making us punchy or perhaps we develop the brains of teenage boys when we hang out sometimes (OK, often), but the double entendre flowed like wine, often unintentionally. Por ejemplo, “How much caulk does this hole need??” was one of our more stellar accomplishments and one that made my friend’s husband giggle with amusement at how dirty we girls can be.

What’s also funny and only mildly dirty is this clip from “Extras” (Ricky Gervais’ series). Oh, Daniel Radcliffe. How strange it is to hear you curse a bit like a sailor!

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When I think of displacement, I think of the old yarn about Archimedes and the tub (or was it a pool?) of water. He sat down in the bathtub, noticed the water sloshing over and out of the bathtub, somehow measured that the amount of water displaced by his body was equal to the amount of his body in the tub. Then he ran naked into the streets yelling, “Eureka!” He’d discovered a way to measure volume through buoyancy and displacement. Whether or not the story is true is irrelevant. The principle is the point.

People who cook will sometimes use this same technique on the (thankfully rare) occasion that a recipe calls for vegetable shortening. Rather than trying to spoon out a 1/4 cup of Crisco globs into a measuring cup and level it off somehow, you pour 1 cup of water into your measuring container and then add enough Crisco to get the water line up to 1 and 1/4 cups of water. Measuring by displacement.

My point: once you remove whatever’s been taking up the space—Archimedes’ water-wrinkled ass, a quarter cup of slimy white Crisco, what-have-you—you’re still left with whatever you had in the first place, but there’s often some spillage or loss of the displaced material.

This brings me to distraction; distraction is a detour. A moment of, “Hey! What’s this over here? I need to check it out!” that pulls you away from whatever you were doing or thinking, regardless of whether you want it to or not, whether or not you’re enjoying what you’re doing. Distractions are often viewed as negative things, but I feel this is yet another case of “too much of a good thing.” Distractions in moderation and used when necessary and called for are good. Sometimes you need them to refocus on things at work or in life. If all you do, though, is mess around moving from distraction to distraction while at work, this is a problem.

Distractions are a huge part of my life: not at work, but when I get home. Essentially, my entire home life is one big intentional distraction. I have several hundred books, around a hundred DVDs and a 350+ long Netflix queue with four DVDs out at a time because, quite honestly, I need to fill the hours between coming home from work and going back to work with something. The average movie provides two hours of thought-free distraction during which I am almost certain not to cry or otherwise end up giving into depression or crappy negative thoughts. A book, while sometimes harder to focus on, depending on how crappy and negative the thoughts are, can offer significantly more hours based on page count, vocabulary and plot intricacy. Between 7pm and midnight? A movie and a book? Easy. Insomnia helps/doesn’t help, depending on how I view this situation on a given day. I like reading and I like movies, so it’s not the worst possible solution.

While some people complain about not having enough hours in the day, I really feel like I have far too much time on my hands. I would love to sleep more. But I usually can’t fall asleep. I could sleep later; I’d love to - but I have to get up and get on that train. I wake up in the middle of the night and waste an hour here and there listening to the radio or reading a book; sometimes I do work because I feel guilty “wasting” that time at 2 a.m. or 4 a.m. “Time is precious.”

Perhaps what I need to do is learn to displace my time rather than fill it with distractions. With distractions, the time is still there and totally unaffected; it simply has a thin veneer of something else going on above it. It’s not compressed or trickling over the edge. I may wander off for a moment, but it’s always there. Just waiting, tapping its foot and looking at a pocket-watch, I imagine. If I can displace it with some more engaging activities (though the tunnel vision right now is pretty severe and I can’t think of anything that doesn’t seem like a Herculean or Sisyphean task), perhaps a little bit will leak out here and there “Time flies when you’re having fun!”,”Where does the time go!”) and I will feel like I have far less time to use up every day.

That would be much less burdensome.

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I saw The Simpsons movie. On Friday. With a friend I haven’t seen since late April since he’s been doing something productive with his non-work hours for the last few years and, um, going to law school. It’s actually nice to have a friend you catch up with every few months as opposed to every few days - it leaves plenty to talk about, and you tend to be more discerning about which news you actually share. The cream rises to the top and all that jazz.

Anyway, yes, I was one of the millions of people* who contributed their hard-earned ‘Merican moneys towards the $71 million which, I am almost certain, had some link (if only symbolic) to the deaths of Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni.

I don’t mean that in a bad way. I enjoy both Bergman and Groening. A little searching actually turns up a little connective tissue. In the sixth episode of The Simpsons entitled, “Moaning Lisa”, our friends at Wikipedia (where else) inform us that:

In the script, the opening scene with Lisa looking into the mirror is called “an Ingmar Bergman moment.”

(Both writers of that episode attended Harvard… not that it’s proof positive of anything, but certain schools have certain reputations and certain cultural references are attributed to a certain educational background…)

The reason I’m mentioning the movie at all now? Because Wil Wheaton summed it up perfectly in his review on his blog.

The best part of his review, however, is the “Drawback to seeing it in the theater” section. I thought the actions he described were limited to a certain segment of boorish northern NJ audiences, so I’m almost glad to hear that it’s not the case and that people are sort of oblivious and moronic all over the place. The audience in our theatre was just distractingly annoying–which is not the norm. I suppose it is something about feeling like you’re in your living room. Well said, Mr. Wheaton.

*My estimate is about 10.1 million people, if we use an average ticket price of $7 a ticket (the 2006 stat was $6.55 from the Natl. Assoc. of Theatre Owners).

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Note: I wrote this a few days ago, saved it as a draft and forgot to post. Now I’ve had to revise (almost completely). Oops.

In my current (2007) planner, the August 31st entry reads:

“Purchase 2008 planner.”

By that date, I will have to decide which planner I will purchase. While I’m relatively happy with this year’s planner, I’m not sure if it’s the end-all be-all of planners for me. Is this a mundane life decision to make? Something geeky? Something boring? Something beneath notice and not worthy of time and consideration?

For some people, perhaps. But not for others. I have several friends and co-workers who align themselves with me in this strange obsession or cult. We speak in whispers of it and will email or call each other just to say, “Hey - Target has this year’s new school supplies out.” or “When we’re out of the office for lunch next week, do you want to swing by Staples? I saw some of the new Post-its.” Seriously.

And we are not alone. There are sites. Among them D*I*Y Planner and Lifehacker’s occasional Office Supplies Fetish feature. I’m certain there are more. I’ve just been afraid to reach out to my brethren.

Anyway, I’m debating between the following three at the moment:

• 2008 version of this year’s planner - a Paperblanks Mini format handtooled day planner; I would just have to pick a pleasing cover design since I know I’ve seen more than what’s on the site, and those appear to be slim pickings.

• Pomegranate’s P+ 2008 Calendar

“The Perfect Planner for Anyone in Any Kind of Business” Tab-divided sections! Monthly 2-page calendar grids! Meeting notes pages! To-do list pages! A travel/expenses section! Reference materials, including international holidays and calling codes, weights and measures, and a 2009 mini-calendar! Book flaps hold receipts, napkin notes, and business cards! (All exclamation points mine and despite apparent facetiousness, it looks like a cool-ass planner).

• The hipster accessory of the year, the Moleskine. I have a Moleskine notebook and I love it and it lives up to the hype. It’s durable and the paper quality is vurrrry nice. But I don’t know that I need a Moleskine planner that looks and feels the same.

Decisions, decisions.

Anyway, two videos. The first is a short little feel-good moment for cat people. The second is also, ultimately, a feel-good moment for cat people but it got me all teary-eyed like no amount of fictional death in a Harry Potter book ever did (my friend good naturedly called my a cold-hearted bitch yesterday since I didn’t cry over two specific deaths in the last book).

It’s a tear-jerker in the manner of ASPCA commercials, but there’s no abuse or neglect here. Just an adorable cat with a motor skills disorder.

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Or, how I talk. There’s an entertaining quiz you can take to see how your pronunciations of words place you geographically in these here United States. My (accurate) results –and the first question to get you started– are below. The map with all users’ results (a work in progress) can be viewed here.

They’re not surprising; the questions are pretty routine for these types of studies. A few years ago, there was a cool and fairly comprehensive (~130 questions or more, if I recall correctly) Harvard study online with basically the same info, and a map that overlaid the answers to the individual questions on the map so you could see which answers were common to which regions (e.g. which regions say “pop” versus “soda”).

What American accent do you have?
Created by Xavier on Memegen.net

Northeastern.
You’re probably from somewhere near New York City, possibly north Jersey, or Connecticut or Rhode Island. If you are from New York City you may be one of the types who people never believe when you say you’re from New York.

Take this quiz now - it’s easy!

We’re going to start with “cot” and “caught.” When you say those words do they sound the same or different?

Same Different Same, no wait I mean different, maybe, a little bit different…

Now I need some dinner.

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When we last heard from our hostess, she was eagerly awaiting her copy of Harry Potter 7. To catch everyone up, here’s what happened.

Friday night, I re-read book 6. I had to. I had already watched “Princess Mononoke” and “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire” and was wide awake with anticipation. I was up until 3 in the morning and then woke up at 8:30, checking UPS tracking every half-hour (no more frequently - that would’ve been a bit crazy). I puttered about until the mailman arrived. UPS had passed along my package to the USPS for local delivery, so it came with the mail at 11:30.

Boom. Package opened, book opened, I’m back in bed and reading.

I emerged from my cloud of fantastical loveliness four hours later. I am a very quick reader (yes, I retain what I read), but the Harry Potter books are exceptionally quick reads. By this I mean that they are deeply engaging and enthralling, do not require a bedside dictionary, and despite their high page counts, if you decreased the typeface, pared down the whitespace in general (margins, gutters, leading, etc.) you could probably get this one down to a 400 page trade paperback.

Anyway - four glorious hours. I enjoyed it tremendously and it is my favorite book in the series. There are a few solid reasons, but I shall not divulge them for another few weeks until I know that everyone who’s still reading has finished. I could pull the old font color trick so you have to highlight the text here to read it, but I don’t want to do that. I’ll just wait. Patience is, after all, a virtue.

I got misty-eyed a few times while reading, but I didn’t cry. My friend Krys left me a (not truly) scathing voicemail about this. I had promised to call her when I finished reading, so I did and left a voicemail saying that I’d finished it, loved it, got emotional, but didn’t cry and thought she’d love it, too. Her return voicemail: “How could you NOT cry when [plot points omitted]?!?!?”

This doesn’t mean that there weren’t sufficient reasons to cry; I’m just a hard nut to crack when it comes to those things. That is, unless I’m suffering from a depressive episode, in which case I will cry when I hear the Natalie Cole song from the eHarmony commercials, when I can’t decide what to wear to work or if I want Manhattan clam chowder for dinner and the only canned soup in the pantry is split pea. Pathetic.

So, read the book once. Watched half of season 1 of “Arrested Development.” Read the book again and then went to sleep. Sunday, I spent time with my friends Theresa and Kofi; we went out for Thai food, talked about Harry and the Potters (the band - they move in some similar musical circles to my friends) and then talked about Harry Potter.

And then work, work, work.

Tonight’s train ride home was a good reminder of why I do enjoy taking the train; there are often some interesting little slices of life one can view. On NJ Transit trains, passengers are allowed to drink alcoholic beverages. The man sitting across the train aisle from me was kicking back after a long day, in his suit, with his nice dress shoes, drinking a beer and just chillin’. The woman next to him was reading Harry Potter 7. The man kept looking over the woman’s shoulder and checking out the book. Finally, he excused himself and asked her if she was managing to get through it without hearing spoilers and finding out how it ends.

You could see her tense up, jaw strained, her book suddenly closed and a weak smile on her face. She said, “No, I’ve been doing fine. I’ve just been making sure I don’t read the papers or go online!” The man replied that he was thinking more about the train - that he was sure someone on the train would have been talking about it, would’ve been reading the paper, or would have said something to her. Again, she looked somewhat frightened and replied that no, she hadn’t overheard anything or anyone and that she was almost done (she was - only had about 50 or 60 pages left.)

The man continued on for a bit and it became clear after about 30 seconds that he wasn’t going to give anything away, so the woman opened her book back up and answered his follow-up questions (”Are you liking it?” “If you were her, would you write more?”) pleasantly and politely.

That last question about writing more got me thinking… that’s a weird one to ask randomly on a train. Really. And he was totally interested in hearing what she had to say. Hrmmmm.

And I remembered that I’d been listening to NPR last weekend and they had interviewed J.K. Rowling’s publisher/editor, Arthur Levine. They mentioned that he lives in Montclair and visits a local independent bookshop in Montclair. Our train was nearing Montclair - and, actually, nearing the very stop for the bookstore mentioned in the NPR piece. The man got up, gathered his bag, wished the woman good luck in finishing the book unspoilt, and got out of the train at the Montclair stop.

Could it have been Arthur Levine? I think it could have. The man wore glasses, was balding and had his hair cut very close to his head otherwise, was on the youthful side of middle-age… so I got home and did a Google image search. I’m not 100% sure since I was watching his profile most of the time, and the pictures are all straight on, but it could have been him.

So… now it’s time to watch my newest Netflix arrival - “Perfume: The Story of a Murderer.” It was an amazing book and I can’t wait to see how the movie translates. I was uncertain, but when I attended ALA last month, one of the librarians I spoke with said she was very impressed with the translation to film. She was also surprised that I’d read the book since she hadn’t met anyone else yet (in her profession???) who’d read it; but it’s a great book. Read it. It’s short, but so rich. Mildly disturbing, but worth your time.

Oh, and here’s a creepy video with people in strange animal costumes riding bicycles at night and clapping in unison.

Now I will go purchase some more Bat for Lashes songs from iTunes. I really like “Horse and I” and now I like this song, too.

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This week was brutal. Just brutal.

I need a vacation and I have PLENTY of vacation time, but no money to get away and do anything. Maybe I should restate that: I have some money, but I’d feel incredibly guilty and wasteful using it for something like a hotel or airfare when I have a $17,000 school loan on one shoulder, another smaller school loan and credit card debt on the other shoulder, and car payments to boot.

Since I can’t do anything about a vacation right now anyway, I’ve decided that tomorrow can be a mini-vacation. My copy of Harry Potter 7 is sitting in a UPS shipping facility a few towns over, waiting for tomorrow. It will arrive late tomorrow morning (which is fine - I’ll sleep late) and then if it’s not disgustingly humid and stays in the low 80’s temperature-wise, I might actually venture outside (after downing some allergy medicine and with eyedrops in tow) and settle myself on the hammock in our backyard.

Hammock, shady trees, a pillow, a pitcher of iced tea, the new Harry Potter book with its spine still uncracked… that sounds pretty sweet.

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I have been actively AVOIDING any sources of information about Harry Potter book 7 spoilers, not wanting to know ANYTHING. ANYTHING.

However, tonight, I might have stumbled across something - WITHOUT WANTING TO - and I am angry about it.

I have been playing this fun word association “game” called Human Brain Cloud. It’s cool - check it out, play it, etc. But whatever you do, DO NOT go to the “view the cloud” page and type in any words even remotely associated with books, literature, magic and obviously anything more closely connected to Harry Potter — unless, of course, you want to have elements given away.

I typed in a general book-related word (just to see what people’s word associations are) and the tag cloud popped up… and the phrase linked to my chosen word read, “__________ dies”. The underlined portion indicates the name of a character in Harry Potter (and I just made it ten spaces long as a matter of counting, not to indicate which name is being omitted); perhaps someone planted this as a red herring, but I have the heavy, dreadful feeling that this is not the case and that this is one of the assholes who read through the leaked photos of the book before they started getting pulled down and could not resist putting the information somewhere out there and potentially ruining the fun for some of us who LIKE to be surprised by even these small things since our lives lack surprise in every other way.

The two little words - white text against that black circle - are haunting me. My stomach actually did a little shocked jumpy thing when I saw it because it was the last thing I expected or wanted to see pop up on the screen there. ANGRY.

I was already pissed before I started because I spent 20 minutes on the phone with Sallie Mae’s customer service people in India explaining that I wanted an address or contact information so I can write to someone higher up at Sallie Mae regarding their practice of sending an email with a PDF attachment to communicate sensitive student loan info. The PDF is not the problem; the problem is that the PDF is password-protected and the password is your #$^^&$%^&#% SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBER. Their advice to help you with any security concerns?

Please keep in mind these personal safeguards:

- Save the document to your computer and disconnect from the Web before opening it.

- Only use a personal computer to view the file–do not use a public computer.

Yeah, I’ll go ahead and disconnect my computer from the Internets. Sure.

How many people routinely disconnect from themselves from their ISP (DSL, cable, whatever) these days? At this time, about 50% of internet users are using broadband connections, so there are some folks not constantly connected… but c’mon. Even from a customer service perspective alone - asking people to disconnect from the internet to safely open a PDF attachment??? I’ve got the ethernet cable shoved in the back of the computer and that’s out behind my desk and I am not CRAWLING behind my desk to unplug the ethernet cable for the sake of opening a friggin’ PDF!!!

I called, I waited… and I stated my case. I told them that:
a) my email spam filter automatically marked their email as spam because of the attachment (attachment.pdf). I should think this is a problem… attachment.pdf???
b) while the email address certainly looked valid, there are ways of concealing that info, so…
c) ain’t no flippin’ way I’m going to type my SS# into an unsolicited/unexpected PDF document
d) there are a MILLION other things they could use as passwords that wouldn’t be nearly as sensitive or dangerous in terms of identity theft: say, your student loan account number, birthdate, the password and “challenge” question they require from you on their own SITE to login to your account, a separate alphanumeric password you can only retrieve from the site (if you want to do the paperless thing and get PDFs sent to you)

BUT ULTIMATELY… why wouldn’t a regular old email do the trick? The PDF itself contained a one-page letter. This letter informed me exactly and precisely this and no more:

NAME
ADDRESS
ADDRESS

ACCT #

Dear FIRST NAME LAST NAME,

This is to inform you that your payment amount has changed. Since you are making your payments electronically, we will automatically debit your account for the new payment amount of # beginning on MM/DD/YY. This new payment amount will continue to be debited from your account on the payment due date each month.

You can access current information on your loan [etc., etc.] at www.SallieMae.com. If you have any questions [contact info].

Thank you for the continuing opportunity to be of service.

Sincerely,
Customer Service

[and below this, my total loan amount, interest rate and payments to date]

Honestly, I’d be far more comfortable seeing all the information contained in that PDF right in the body of an email than having to type in my SSID# to access a PDF that doesn’t reveal anything more than the fact that I have a school loan.

Maybe I’m just stressed and pissy. But dude, this is something I might write to the nice folks at Consumerist.com about since the supervisor I spoke with just told me to use the “contact us” form on the website. Uh-huh. Form submissions always get the desired form response, so that’s great.

I love the post that’s currently the most recent on Consumerist, entitled, “Stay Out of Our Comments, PR Douchebags.” Inspired. And right on.

That’s a prime example of a company NOT getting the whole “transparency” thing. This person might’ve been raked over the coals a bit if he/she came straight out and said, “I work for this corporation and here’s how we’re viewing this… we’d be interested to hear your feedback.” - but “Stankwell” would at least have gotten some respect for being forthright. Instead, “Stankwell” registered as a commenter for the first time with the response to this post and made a comment that positively REEKS of corporate-speak spin (including my favorite lines, “they’re gaining access to world-class online banking” and “BofA is a monster — the good kind!” - I regularly talk about my bank and other service providers in this way) and scampers off. Please.

I’m going to go and see if I can find some negative posts about… uh… Verizon (a company I genuinely have no issue with and who’s been my mobile service provider since 1996) and defend them, pulling sentences from their press releases verbatim and using those in comments. That will go over really well because that’s what consumers regularly do, right?

Ah, well. I will now listen to The Cars and enjoy a moment in the eighties.

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