LaughAtlantis

Since I didn't make any resolutions for New Year (or none that I can remember in any case), I decided to make a July resolution.

I've been SO lax in my blogging lately, so I'm resolving to blog at least three times a week this month. Hopefully that will get me firmly back into the swing of things.

And hopefully there are people out there who still care.

The other day, while walking the bike path, I saw a guy unicycling while pushing a stroller - one of those nifty sporty strollers, but still, he was unicycling with a toddler in tow. At the time, I marveled at it.

Today I saw the same guy jogging and pushing the stroller as he ran. The little girl in the stroller had a bright pink cast on her right foot.

Coincidence? I think not.

This weekend marked one year of dating for me and Rod. It's been a whirlwind and wonderful year.

I want to write something in here about how much I love him, about the way he makes me laugh and about the little things that he does that make my life better, about the fact that no matter how awful a day I have, it's all made better by the fact that I get to come home and have him there to hug me.

I want to write something that won't sound sappy or overdone or completely, nauseatingly unreadable to the general public.

But I'm in love. So that's hard.

So I'll just say this. In three months, Rod and I are getting married. And as wonderful as the past year has been, I have a very strong feeling that it only gets better from here. Because each day for the past year certainly has... and I look forward to a lifetime of ever more briliant and wonderful days, together.

There have been accolades all around for Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, and I wanted to present a dissenting opinion. I wasn't bowled over by it, and the further I get from it, the less thrilled I am.

So, Rod decided to blog about our electric bill. It's exorbitant.

Boston Common Online decided that more people should know about it.

So I just wanted to share with the rest of the world that yes, indeed, we used more electricity last month than most third-world nations do in, um, ever. I am sore ashamed and I hope not to have a repeat performance in the near future.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm just going to wander through the kitchen to do a load of laundry, pop the other one in the dryer, microwave some popcorn, then come back, sit at my computer, use a mirror to look at the TV playing Friends behind me and hope all of that doesn't drown out my stereo.

I have a theory about people.

I think that everyone is a geek in some way. By that I mean that everyone has at least one thing that they get a little crazy over, that they geek out about. For some peole it's computer games, for others it's sports, for others it may be doll collecting, I don't know. I do know that I have several geekeries... so here's confession number one.

I love dog shows. Love them. Animal Planet shows dog shows every Saturday morning at six a.m., and most every Saturday afternoon/evening, I watch them on the TiVo. Now, because they are on TiVo, I can fast forward through things I'm not interested in, or play the whol darn thing on fast forward if I want. But inevitably, there are dogs I have to stop and look at.

Lately, since I've been watching so many dog shows, I've gotten to know the dog show community in somewhat frightening detail. I've got dogs that I root for (Dallas, a gorgeous German shepherd; Tux, the cutest little fox terrier; a Tibetan Terrier whose name escapes me right now; and every darn Petit Basset Griffon Vendeen that crosses my screen) and dogs I can't stand (that stupid little Pekinese Les, a Pembroke Welsh Corgi that bugs me for no reason whatsoever, and every Kerry Blue Terrier and poodle ever shown).

Tomorrow there is not only the morning show but also the Eukanuba Invitational being shown in the evening. Frankly, this is so exciting to me; it just makes my weekend. The only thing is, it means I have to juggle my reality TV viewing, my improv, and my random computer-related pursuits, but those are geekeries that I will save for other posts.

Cross your fingers for the German shepherd. He's going to retire when he reaches 100 Best In Show titles and he's at 98 now... and, um, it's really really sad that I know these things, huh?

Go ahead, mock if you will... but if my theory is correct you've got a geekery for me to mock too!

Hopefully.

On Saturday, I went to Newbury Street to get my hair cut, then wandered through the Public Gardens and Boston Common heading toward the financial district. I nearly decided to walk to Cambridge, which was my end destiantion, but thought, "Na, it's too hot, just browse a bit and then take the T."

So I went into Borders and - because I am who I am - browsing of course turned to buying. I've been on a weird reading cycle lately, going from chick lit to sci-fi to Harry Potter to mystery to whatever. I'm always on the lookout for good books. I found a variety of books that I wanted to get - Dennis Lehane's Mystic River (my friend Zabeth is in the movie, coming out soon!), two Jodi Picoults, a book on wedding ceremonies. One of the Jodi Picoults was part of a Buy Two, Get One Free deal off the various books on one rack, so Icouldn't pass that up and I piled on two more.

Anyway, I was looking at the books that I'd piled up and noticed a trend. (This is actually a trend that has long-since begun, but I'm only getting around to being pissed about it now.) I got seven books, of which six were fiction. Of those six, only one was a mass market paperback sized book; the others were all trade paperback.

When did that happen?

When I was a kid, everything was mass market; you didn't have the trade paperback size. And mass market paperbacks cost $4.99, maybe 5.99 if it was really thick. Now you're lucky if you can find one for under 7.99. And the trade paperbacks are worse, they're at least twelve bucks a pop. I just want to READ. I don't want to have to sell my soul to be able to buy books.

But more than the money thing, I just sorta miss mass market paperbacks. It used to be that everything I read was that size - and maybe it still would be, if my tastes hadn't changed a bit as I've grown older. Now, you can really only get sci-fi, mystery, and romance novels in mass market size, everything else is bigger. And that kind of stinks, because there's just a different feel to mass market paperbacks. It fits right in your hand, the print is tighter together, and the binding is tight. There's usually some weird emboss-y thing on the cover, so you can feel the letters of the title and the author's name rising under your hand. And there's crappy coming attraction-type ads for other books by the same publisher in the back, books that have little similarity to the book in your hand, but they're there nonetheless.

I miss that. In a trade paperback the only thing at the back of the book is the occasional reader's guide. It's just not the same.

On the bright side though, it means that someday all my mass market paperbacks will be collectors' items.

I discovered a new author this month, and that always makes me happy.

Actually, Jodi Picoult isn't a new author at all; she's written ten novels, but she's new to me. I was wandering through Barnes & Noble a month or two ago and the title "The Pact" caught my eye. I pulled it off the shelf, flipped to the back cover, read the description, and was psyched to take it home and start reading it. Then I looked at the cover and saw that it had a circle on it proclaiming "Soon to be a Lifetime Movie."

That was almost enough to put me off it.

Lifetime for Women is not my favorite television viewing - given a chance, in fact, it's not my viewing at all. But what the hell, the back of the book sounded promising, so I bought it anyway.

Loved it. Absolutely loved it. Long story short, I've since read two other books by Picoult and bought another, and I'm thoroughly enjoying her material and her writing style. And that means I will no doubt be tearing through the rest of her stuff in short order.

And it all just goes to show you that you can't judge a book by its cover just because somebody at the Lifetime Channel screwed up and finally bought something decent to make a movie out of. That said, the movie'll probably suck.

So, in the course of the last six months or so, my hair has decided that it wants to be curly. I've always had pretty much bone-straight hair, but about two years ago, a small section of my bangs decided it might be fun to just turn right, just curl off to the side for amusement's sake. Why not, you know?

This year, it's as if the rest of my hair looked at that one little hair and said, "Hmm. That's a fashion statement we had not previously considered!" and it all curled like mad.

I have been fighting this for some time now. I've blown my hair dry daily in a sad attempt to keep it straight, but the humidity hits it and my hair just mocks me. It frizzes the moment I open the door in the morning.

So this past Sunday, I just decided, screw it. I'm not going to try to tame my head anymore; I don't have the energy and it winds up looking like crap anyway. So I let it curl. And surprisingly, I like it. Other people like it. I've gotten compliments on it, which I rarely get on my hair (because it tends to look like crap, so no surprise there, really). And I found out that around the time that you're thirty, it's really common for the texture of your hair to change. So it's kinda cool to think that this is the way my hair's going to be from here on in, with any luck. Woohoo, curly girl.

But today, I had someone ask me, in an astonished and condescending voice, "Did you get a perm?" No. No, I didn't. But why the condescension? Why be rude about it? If I got a perm, I'd just admit to getting a perm, but seriously, why attack a person just because of a choice in hair care? And aren't we supposed to be adults? I mean, isn't it sort of a junior high thing to criticize something like that? And did I miss a memo or something here - for god's sake, what's the shame in having a perm???

Last week there was a comment posted on an entry I made earlier this month. The entry was celebrating Rod's and my anniversary and the comment was from someone I don't know, who has never commented on my site before. I have no idea if he is a first time visitor or what, but here is what he had to say regarding Rod's and my year together

The fact is that time is very hard on relationships, even those that start as promising as yours. Most of us find ourselves sorely tested at some point and chances are you will too. But its hard to appreciate that at your stage. We all think that we're different and special but we aren't. What I'm actually reflecting on is my own life not so much yours. Good luck and thanks for sharing.

Well, gee. Thank you for sharing. Bitter much?
I think that in today's society, most intelligent people are cognizant of the fact that lots of relationships fail. Within my own family, my parents' did as did my brother's first marriage. I'm plenty aware of what the odds are.

On a personal level, I'm not naive of how difficult it is to maintain a relationship. I've been in long term relationships before; I'm not nineteen years old and rushing into marriage with the first guy I ever dated. I know how the world works and that couples have to tackle problems head on. I understand that.

There is, however, one thing I don't understand. That's this: where do you get off coming onto someone's blog who you don't know, someone who is clearly happy and in love and wanting to share that joy with their family and friends, and trying to rain on their parade? So you had a failed relationship. That's unfortunate, and I'm sorry about that, but for you to come on my blog and morosely warn me about the perils of the path ahead as opposed to sharing in that joy is just plain rude.

You say, "We all think that we're different and special but we aren't." The fact is, that's just not true. Every person is different and special and every relationship is different and special, and if you can't understand and value that, then I can understand why your relationship failed.

But again, thanks for sharing.

So, there is this new thing called googlewhacking. Basically, a google whack is any two words entered into the google search engine that wind up having only one result. I find this fascinating. Today, I entered random words in until I found three googlewhacks.

Of course, I cannot tell you what my googlewhacks were, or else they would come up twice in the engine and would no longer be whacks, but if your interested you can go to the list of whacks on the googlewhack site and look for me.

Or go enter some words into google and see if you can report one yourself. G'wan. It's fun. And mildly addictive.