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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It’s a Daft Punk song (”Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger”)… so wait the 45-50 seconds until things get going and lyrics start and you’ll see why this is super cool. At about 2:10 through to the end, you’ll just marvel at the dexterity… if you haven’t already seen this 18 million times. Seriously… spending hours at work doing actual work stuff gets in the way of being on top of the even-not-so-recent viral videos.

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I haven’t had a non-migraine headache this bad in a very long time.

Today was a pretty chaotic and stressful day at work; not in a negatively stressful way that made me want to pull my hair out, but in a way that made me wish that things would just STOP for a moment and let me collect myself, breathe for about five minutes and then continue.

Alas, this did not happen. I ended up taking work home with me and doing that until about 30 minutes ago. Now I’m tired and I have to see the dentist at 10 a.m. tomorrow, so I’m going to call it a night now and see if I can get to sleep without having strange dreams about dying in a tidal wave like I did last night. I don’t know if it was a dream, actually. I was falling asleep… and I would start to drift off and then start thinking about standing somewhere along Fifth Avenue near 33rd Street, and imagine this HUGE wave of black water tearing up from downtown and curving up like that Hokusai print (Behind the Great Wave at Kanagawa) but deep blackish purple. And the water was speeding up towards a crowd of people and we were standing there and I was standing next to someone I knew because we decided that if we all held hands, we’d be OK. But we all died, and then I started to see it all over again and kept thinking about it over and over… which is unlike me. And I’d look up at the clock and go, “Damn… it’s 12:18 - enough with the stupid tsunami already.”

I flipped over to my other side since I thought a chance of “environment” might help me break out of this insipid thought pattern. So instead of the blackish purple tsunami, I had the blinding white avalanche that kept crashing the roof of a log cabin over my head while I was still in it. Over and over.

At some point, I turned on a CD of relaxing rainforest sounds or something and since I don’t recall dreaming about being suffocated by mounds of bat guano or having an entire forest of kapok trees crush me or a mangrove forest trip and strangle me with its roots, I think that went well.

Now, not having a degree in psychology and not being a big believer in dream interpretation (since I don’t generally remember my dreams or get enough sleep to have a meaningful dream cycle beyond dreaming I ate dinner) I won’t read too much into this, but being a student of literature, words, meanings and symbolism, I think I can hazard a guess as to what this might mean. When we feel there’s a lot going on, we might say, “the weight of the world is on my shoulders” or “things are crashing down on me” or at work, “it’s an avalanche of paperwork” etc.

I think I might be feeling a bit stressed. And that wouldn’t be crazy or bad or wrong. My boss is away, as is my co-worker, so I’ve been juggling some extra work.

So let’s see if I can do this sleep thing tonight. If nothing else, I want to go to the dentist, enjoy the pina colada flavored local anesthetic, and maybe hit up the bookstore to check out The Spiderwick Chronicles by Holly Black (a native Jersey chick - I think I may have met her back in the day when the books first came out… and I was working at the bookstore)and The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper. Those previews before Harry Potter did their jobs.

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I’m going to get overly and nauseatingly nerdy. If this bothers you, just turn away now. Go back. Do not proceed. I had only four hours of sleep last night, so my filters and automatic editing aren’t working terribly well either, and I might meander more than usual.

Let me start by saying that I liked “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix” (the movie), which I saw this morning. I liked it a lot; I can’t say I absolutely LOVED it as much as I LOVE the books, but I liked it a lot. That said, I will be looking forward to the DVD release for two reasons.

The first reason will be to see the deleted scenes - like the St. Mungo’s scene, for example. They filmed it (according to an interview with the screenwriter) but it was cut for time (I think). They replaced it with Neville making a rather “Basil Exposition”-esque comment to Harry (essentially “Here is why I will want to exact revenge.”), and the other with a cut to a happy family gathering (essentially, “We are your surrogate family, Harry. We symbolize the love and closeness that you possess and you-know-who lacks.”)

Personally, (and I’m not a director juggling many hats and attempting to keep things paced, or a screenwriter trying to condense 800+ pages of highly detailed novel into a 2 hr 10 min movie, or a producer not wanting to shell out extra dough for additional production, etc.) I think the St. Mungo’s scene in question would’ve done a much better job of “showing and not telling,” to use the old creative writing workshop saw.

I think putting it in dialogue form pushed it too much to the front and center and caused it to lose the nuance that had made it poignant and meaningful in the book. The movie could’ve been 30 minutes or an hour longer and I would’ve been fine with the additional time since it would’ve offered more of what I felt were key elements.

I mean, dude, there was time to watch Hobbits steal produce from a field in The Fellowship of the Ring - and we can’t get more than a two-line speech from Dumbledore?

Granted, we’re not talking about Bergman or Kubrick or “Citizen Kane” here, but this has its own value in our culture.

It’s a pretty rare occurrence for a BOOK, much less a series of books (well, James Bond/Ian Fleming sort of did it), to become such a part of our everyday discussions (whether good or bad) and to enthrall so many people (all ages, nations, etc.) and then spin off and find almost equal success in the film world. Especially when the books describe a world with so much vivid detail, provide us with a whole new lexicon, and prompt borderline obsessive reading, re-reading and memorization of this imaginary universe (and I don’t feel I am in danger of the last one - I am certain there are 11-year old children out there who could kick my ass in Harry Potter trivia).

The second reason I am looking forward to the DVD release? Just to re-watch the movie… to do some slow-motion viewing of wizarding battles and the like… to listen to the Helena Bonham Carter/Bellatrix Lestrange cackle… to enjoy the snazzy special effects, especially in the Department of Mysteries… to see what I might have missed when the arse in front of us in the theatre was hacking up a lung. I desperately wanted to lob a lozenge at his head; alas, I had none.

I can see the movie again in the theatre, but I find that being able to pause and rewind provides me with the proper control-freak power I require.

My head is pounding. I had a coffee this morning (something I do not do) to counteract the four hours of sleep, and now I’m paying for it. It’s going to be an early night.

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The recent heat wave has dried out the tips a bit, but she’ll be OK with plenty of water and moderate temperatures. I’ve managed to keep her alive for almost six years and through several such heat waves. She’s taller than she looks - almost three feet tall. And that’s a little off-shoot to her left that wasn’t doing so well in the big basin, so I moved her to her own vase, where she is doing OK…

P.S. Playing with the Gaussian blur filter is fun.

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NOTCOT.org strikes again — this time alerting me to the hottest piece of watch I’ve seen in ages… this new Philippe Starck from Fossil’s Philippe Starck Collection. It’s a men’s watch. It’s called “Veiled”. I want it. This watch is seriously cool. I mean,

“The crystal is specially electroplated to mimic the breaks in the bracelet, and the sides of the case continue the effect with carefully etched details for design continuity. The crown is a case-back pusher to continue the uncluttered elegance of this style. The shiny stainless steel bracelet is designed to remain thin and comfortable wtih hidden links.”

My surgery wrist is still swollen and all my women’s watches are sort of tight, so a men’s watch might not be a horrible idea. I don’t know if they could take out a link or two from the back since the design seems to be pretty tight… but I could always ask. Just look at it!

I shall now go through the other new items in my Google Reader tab and see what’s going on in this big old world. One I’m definitely going to look at more closely is this one from the Freakonomics blog entitled, “If Public Libraries Didn’t Exist, Could You Start One Today?” Dubner caught my eye with his numbered list (all italics mine):

…you could argue that, in the long run, libraries augment overall book sales along at least a few channels:

1. Libraries help train young people to be readers; when those readers are older, they buy books.

Absolutely… my habit of hoarding books was fostered and supported early in life (9, 10, 11 years old) by librarians who would cheer me on when I asked if I was allowed to take out 18 books at a time… and again when I came back a few days later for more!

2. Libraries expose readers to works by authors they wouldn’t have otherwise read; readers may then buy other works by the same author, or even the same book to have in their collection.

Well, not so much anymore, but it is how it started. Even in college, I would spend the hours between classes in the Bobst Library at NYU, hanging out on the humanities and literature floors, checking out authors I knew and then just looking at the surrounding books and picking up anything that caught my eye. Sometimes I read entire books right there in those hours between classes, and sometimes I’d go to my bookstore job later that night or that weekend and purchase the book I’d enjoyed reading at the library. Could I have done that at a bookstore? To some extent, yes… but a bookstore will generally carry books that will SELL - the independent, academic or small press is far more likely to have a shelf presence in a library than in a bookstore.

3. Libraries help foster a general culture of reading; without it, there would be less discussion, criticism, and coverage of books in general, which would result in fewer book sales.

I can’t speak on that with personal experience, but I’m sure there is truth to it as well. Partially because of the greater availability of information, but also because there are communities where libraries function as meeting places for clubs and groups - reading and otherwise. That’s not the case in my life, but I’m not a particularly social butterfly.

Back to reading those feeds.

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