shindigs...

1) The work thing was very crowded and very loud. I'm finding it harder and harder to deal with that - crowds and noise. Time for "Miracle Ear". Had two JD's on the rocks and cut out kinda early.

2) The PBS panel discussion was fun and lively until it was punctuated by an Intelligent Design advocate who was determined to make an ass of himself in front of a panel who could intellectually snap him like a twig. Then it was lively and excruciating. Neither my "date" nor I was up for much in the way of schmoozing. It was hard to tell what sorts of people were there... not many of them looked like scientists. Maybe media types, or big PBS donors? Anyway, I didn't recognize anyone particularly famous there except for maybe Kathleen Turner. She got fat, right? I think it was her. I guess she narrates things?

One funny moment early on - we walked up to the front desk of this swank hotel and were greeted by the concierge with a fairly abrupt instruction of "Second floor...". What, do we have the word "SCIENTISTS" written on our foreheads? Maybe we're a couple! Maybe we want a room!!!! My colleague was unable to let this go all night. ("Second floor! We didn't even open our mouths!!!!")

Anyway - two parties in two days is MORE than enough for me. I'm sleepy.

why hasn't someone...

... invented a pumpkin-by-mail service? You specify the style (round, squat, tall) and the diameter or poundage that you prefer, and a nice fresh specimen is mailed to you on October 28th. Surely "Harry and David" or the "Fruit of the Month Club" could pull this off. I would seriously pay $20/gourd (plus shipping) to NOT have to drag the kids out today and deal with this shit.

In other news... I'm really starting to resent the fucking Girl Scouts. Between the piles of THEIR shit cluttering up MY house, and the fact that their activities and meetings and training exercises seem to fuck up at least TWO of my days every week (by demanding 8 hours of my wife's undivided, and I should add UNPAID time)... not to mention their annual contribution to my own morbid obesity...

Fuck the fucking Girl Scouts.

the good (....) and the ugly...

Physics midterm grades...

95
93
92
90
88 88
87
85
83
82
GAPING CHASM!!!
65
64
56


And I can assure you, a generous curve was applied to bring UP the lowest three grades as much as I possibly could. The difference between one side of the chasm and the other? Attendance!! Come to class... pass the exam. What a concept!

I need a drink.

maybe i'll get my picture in the "society" section of Seed magazine...

Now that I'm a famous radio personality, I've been invited to a PBS/Nova cocktail party at the Carlyle Hotel. Ok, everybody else in my department got an invite too, so probably every scientist in NYC has been invited... still... I'll be pretending it's because of my new life as a talking-head public radio expert. First NPR... now PBS... my plan to become the next Carl Sagan is proceeding nicely.

Perhaps I sould go shopping for a nice tan corduroy blazer...

sleep, fitness, hard drives, and other things...

I intended to blog this morning, but instead I slept - HARD. I mean, DEAD unconscious from the first stop after I got on until the next-to last stop from the end. Almost 2 solid hours of real sleep. Sometimes I doze off on the train, but rarely does it reach the drool-level.

I weighed myself in the morning today for the first time in more than a week, and... if I can believe my semi-focused eyes at 5:30 AM, the scale read 195. Which means that since September 1st I've lost 15 pounds. Which is great. Although there is a part of me that thinks I should look BETTER having lost that much weight. At least I know all this walking and starving is paying off.

I just got out of a dreadful work meeting. I can't even explain it. Let's just say it was the worst kind of corporate workshop you can imagine. You know... the ones where they give you handouts of the PowerPoint slides they are about to show? WHY?? WHY DO THEY DO THIS?!?!

Thankfully I got to leave early because I have some sort of family obligation that I don't really understand. All I know is, the wife needs to be somewhere at 6:00, so she is meeting me AT the train station with the kids and we are swapping. I get to put the kids to bed tonight, but it's not a bath night, so it should be easy. Frozen pizza, kids!!

I spent the afternoon making a major adjustment in my hard drive usage. I took nearly ALL of my music OFF of my laptop. I transferred it to the iMac at work. I will start syncing my iPod to THAT, so that I have all my music with me on my iPod, but I have 10 gig free on my laptop instead of 1.2 Gig. The reason? For one thing, I just hate having my hard drive be 79/80ths full, but for another... I want to be ready should I decide to "Leopardize" sometime in the next couple of months. I convinced the lab manager to buy a "family pack" of 5 licenses for the science lab, which only has 3 Macs, so... I will claim one license for myself. But I'm going to hold off installing until I read some reviews of other PowerBook G4 users' experiences with the new OS. My computer seems to be getting slower by the day. Unless the new OS is FASTER than the old one... and I can't imagine it will be... I may just skip it until next summer when I buy a new machine.

Anyway... how long before I want to listen to an album and realize that it's not on here and my iPod's battery is dead?

One final note - I made a very bad sock choice this morning. I think when I picked my socks I was planning on wearing a different pair of shoes, and then changed my mind without changing my socks... and so now I'm wearing brown socks w/ tan shoes and it just does... not... look... good. Not that anyone can see when I'm standing up, but it's the kind of thing that irks me ALL DAY LONG.

"sometimes, when i hear myself on the radio..."

The latest 15 minutes (ok, actually 8 minutes) of fame is up at the NPR website. Two things I have noticed - I need to learn to...

a) not start every answer with "Um..." and
b) not trail off so much at the ends of my sentences.

Other than that I thought it was ok.

very nearly a good day, and yet horrible...

What do you get when you take two awesome things, intersperse them with a bunch of irritating things, and then pack them all into the smallest space possible? A giant fucking headache and the worst night's sleep ever.

Awesome Thing #1: Rather than try to deal with unpredictable cellphone reception - not to mention the ridiculousness I would feel discussing nuclear energy very loudly on a train full of commuters - we decided to pre-tape my NPR interview yesterday. After my exam I rushed up to 42nd street to the studio. It was a very surreal experience... the whole glass booth, headphones, light up "On The Air" sign. As I got there, they were just finishing up interviewing David Cross. Therefore, I have decided that, by association, I am exactly as famous as David Cross.

Anyway, I think the interview was ok... not as awesome as my video-tesseract thing, but it should make a decent segment. They tried to get me to talk "policy", which I asked them not to. I basically dodged the question, so I'm hoping they just edit that part out. Oh, also I got a dig in at the President... not sure if that will make it in, but the one host said they may make that their teaser-quote. I'll let you all know when it hits the podcast.

Awesome Thing #2: Visited a colleague's English Lit class. They've been studying sea voyages and whatnot and the professor wanted me to come talk about the "Longitude Problem"... which oddly enough is a topic I'm very capable of talking about. I did a quick 45 minute lecture on the history of the intersection between navigation, astronomy, and timekeeping which actually drew applause at the end (which is always a little embarrassing, actually... but cool). When I asked the students for questions, the first question was - "Do you teach any freshman classes?" There were even a couple of those awesome teaching moments where you catch a student in this state of pedagogical bliss. So yeah - nice, right? And yet, packed into the same 3 hour block of time as the NPR interview, I was just completely fucking drained.

Irritating Thing #1: I had given a midterm exam in my OWN class earlier in the morning, and the ink wasn't even dry before I got an email from a student complaining that the exam was too different from the sample exam. Mind you - FOUR questions on the exam were taken VERBATIM from the sample exam, another four were differently posed questions on the same TOPICS as those from the sample exam, and maybe 2 or 3 more were what I would categorize as a "surprise". I informed him as much in a fairly terse email, and he STILL wouldn't let it go. His second email went so far as to say that an exam with too many surprise questions could "cost him an A and lower his GPA". I just LOVE the attitude that the DEFAULT grade that students are owed is an A. Here's an idea of a way to improve your grade. How about not undermining your professors' authority so they don't HATE YOU.

Irritating Thing #2: Another student missed the midterm completely, and emailed asking if she can make it up. And you know... emergencies happen and all, but this is a student with a history of this sort of behavior. Hell, she added the CLASS two weeks late. Fine, take the midterm late, get your C- and leave me alone.

Irritating Thing #3: Remember the very clear email about the online class? About how if you haven't posted anything to the class in a month, you should probably consider withdrawing? I had a student respond by saying basically - "Yeah, I know I haven't posted anything, but the online format isn't really working for me and I was wondering if I could do a separate project or meet with you individually or something instead of participating in the online forums."

What? Seriously? It's fucking midterm. Eight weeks of the semester have gone by and NOW you are going to decide that maybe the format of the class isn't what you had hoped? You did know that the online class was going to be... you know... ONLINE, right?? You have heard of a thing called Drop/Add... three weeks at the beginning of the semester during which this sort of decision can easily be made. But now I'm supposed to invent a some sort of personalized curriculum for you, in addition to trying to run this disaster of an online course? In a word... no.

I love how they refer to it as an "extra" project, too. "Is there some sort of EXTRA CREDIT project I can do?" Well, no see... it's not EXTRA credit unless you have done the ORDINARY credit. What you are asking for is CREDIT. Extra credit is for GOOD students who want to do MORE than the required work to get an A. What you are asking for is a special assignment that is more to your liking that will allow you to salvage a C. Show me you can do ANY WORK AT ALL and then we'll talk about "extras".

So you can see now where my headache is coming from, yes? I took 4 Advil when I got home, took a nap, and made a very lightly steeped Darjeeling tea at around 6:30.

Do not... not... NOT drink Darjeeling tea at 7:00 PM. Apparently it wasn't brewed as lightly as I had hoped, because I lay in bed at 11:00 and just... BZZZZZZ...my head would not stop. I think it was the nap, too. Nap + tea at 6:30 PM does not make for a restful night later on. I woke up on the hour and tossed and turned all night. And yet somehow managed to oversleep. And so - here I am, ready to start another one.

I really... REALLY need to get back to yoga. I could go for about 6 hours of Savasana right now. I've actually been trying to take a few minutes every day to loosen up my back... just doing a few deep forward bends and trying to get my hands to the ground again. It's nice that I kind of can still do it... that as tight as everything is, it feels like my muscles still sort of "know the way" and could get back into it pretty quickly given the chance. I should set up my mat in the guestroom and do just 15 minutes of downward dogs and simple stuff either in the morning or before bed or... well, that's the problem, is the WHEN. I want to get loose on my own before I head back to a real class and get my ass kicked, but when I'm "on my own" I don't have time to do anything but yell at kids and sleep.

I'm rambling now - this is like the longest post I've written in 6 months. I think I'm gonna go watch some computerTV now. Turn OFF the brain for a while.

no video this time...

Instead of a video extra for their podcast, the NPR guys want me to do a live on-air interview via phone on Wednesday morning. Which is fine, but I can't figure out how the hell I'm going to get to a phone by 7:30 AM. I may be taking the 5:15 in on that day. (Eech!) Or maybe I'll just sleep in the lab.

Anyway... I wore my nice Dr. McPhysics sweater today for nothing.

"bad cop" email...

If you are receiving this email, it is because my records show that you have not accessed the online astronomy course for 2 weeks or more, and that your posting has been infrequent or, in some cases, non-existent.

Monday 10/22 is the last day to withdraw from courses with a grade of W. If you plan to stick with the course, please email me and let me know what the situation is.

man at work...

I have a lot of crap on my plate right now, work-wise. And I am developing some really bad habits in the afternoons at work that involve 2-3 hours getting pissed away, 4 days a week. I need to make some changes. I need to find a quiet spot with NO INTERNET access to sit and WRITE and READ in the afternoons. I need to devote specific blocks of time to specific projects so that certain ones don't get completely neglected. The thing is... most of it is stuff I actually enjoy working on when it comes down to it. I'm just really mentally disoriented lately.

Blogging is, of course, included in the neglected chaos.

thoughts from the Apple Store...

* According to Google, the round trip walk from my office to the Apple Store in SoHo is 2.1 miles. Yay me!

* Every time I go to SoHo, I feel like a fucking hobgoblin. The entire part of town is like a big club that I am neither good-looking nor well-dressed enough to get into. I'm surprised there isn't a velvet rope at 6th and Houston.

* I played with an iPhone for the first time. The weird thing is... I've never encountered an electronic gadget and thought - "Gosh, I wish this thing was BIGGER".

* When I was there, it was shoulder to shoulder with people and there was some kind of hip-hoppy band setting up to play in the presentation area. I can't figure out if they were there to draw people in or to drive them away.

media star...

So the NPR guy called me again today. I am apparently officially "his guy" now. He wants to talk to me next week about nuclear energy, perhaps to make a 3-part series. It's only a matter of time before I have my own regular weekly NPR feature to take down "Science Friday".

I'M COMIN' FO' YOU IRA FLATOW!!! I PITY YOU, FOOL!!!

only 1 minute 40 seconds in...

...to the bootleg pilot of the "Sarah Connor Chronicles", and all I can think is... what the fuck would Sarah Connor be doing wearing a trendy little schoolgirl sweater and flouncy miniskirt?

Oh wait, it was just a dream sequence... maybe she was just fantasizing about dressing like the cheerleader from "Heroes".

So, it looks like this will probably suck. Which is fine, since Bionic Woman is turning out to be fairly watchable, and I don't really feel like I need TWO ass-kicking-babe shows on my weekly watchlist.

coasting...

I really have nothing to say, and not in a BAD way... now that the play is behind me, I'm sort of coasting towards midterm... busy by not overwhelmed... lots of little projects at once occupying my tiny little brain...

It's really weird that next week is midterm. I mean, I know we are just hitting the middle of October today, but it doesn't seem like the semester could really be half over. And yet.

Walked down to NYU today to pick up a big stack of biographies for research for my new play proposal (still keeping hush-hush on the plot!) so, I think I'll open one of those up and read on the train until I doze off. Forgot my headphones today, so the latest batch of bootlegged TV shows (Bionic Woman, Sarah Connor Chronicles) will have to wait until tomorrow.

OK... I found something to be irritated about. If you are going to plan a trip into Manhattan with your friend to go shopping, DO NOT take the train home between 4:00 and 6:00, or you will annoy all of the REAL commuters who have a REAL reason to go to the city with all your giant fucking bags and your talky-talk talking.

Better?

sorry honey... have to stay late at the "lab" again tonight...

Jesus, if I knew that THIS was a possible avenue of scientific research... I sure as hell would've picked a different major.

happy...

i'm supposed to be working. instead i am pissing away the whole day. it's my birthday dammit, and if i want to watch tv and dowload porn all day... why the hell not?

Dr. McPhysics...

It's raining this morning... one of those damp, foggy rains where the drops are so small they don't feel like they are falling... they just hang there in the air while you walk into them. My arthritis simply LOVES this sort of weather, and is throbbing in both fists and my left foot like a slow morse code signal. I'm pretty sure it's saying T...H...I...R...T...Y...E...I...G...H...T...

I'm wearing a sweater, which is really not like me. (It's brown, though... which IS like me.) I'm wearing it over a white shirt... collar out, sleeves unbuttoned at the wrist, maybe even a little untucked shirt-tail at the bottom. (I haven't decided if the shirt-tail is trying too hard.) It's the default outfit of Derek from Grey's Anatomy, actually, and while he IS around my age if not older, he is also a fictional character on a TV show for 24 year-olds. So, I'm not sure the look is age-appropriate. But it feels like England outside, if not Seattle, so... I'm sticking with the sweater.

I'm not sure I've mentioned it, but I've also dropped 10 pounds since the semester started. I'm down at least one if not two belt loops, and I even had to loosen my watch yesterday. The needle on the scale is dead on 200 now, and that's the cusp for me between "standard mid-30's guy waistline" and "fat guy". So, while I may not be looking "McDreamy" just yet, progress is being made. Five more pounds and I can hit the yoga classes again.

Here is my secret "Lose 10 Pounds in One Month" fitness plan...

DIET - between 7:00 AM and 6:30 PM, drink two enormous cups of highly caffeinated black tea, and eat nothing but one apple. Eat whatever the hell you want between 6:30 and 10:30 PM. (How much damage can you do in 4 hours?) But drink only water with meals.

EXERCISE - get off the subway 5 blocks early. Do not take the elevator at work, ever.

That's pretty much it. I'm not sure it's going to lose me any MORE. I seem kinda stuck for now. But at least I didn't have to do anything unseemly like eat vegetables or... sweat.

kid suck...

So I'm sitting here watching Kid Rock on Letterman, and thinking... is someone still letting him make albums? The production philosophy behind this new song "Rock 'n' Roll Jesus" seems to have been... let's keep adding percussion, horns, background singers, and rock clichés until it stops sucking.

It didn't work.

There's even a COWBELL for fuck's sake. There is no sadder last resort to making a song pretend to "rock".

theatrical debut...

Well, it wasn't a disaster, which is about how low I was aiming, honestly. In fact if you believe "people" (which I generally don't) the play was very good. And the reading as well. And I didn't suck. Not that anyone would have told me to my face if I HAD... y'know? Although, now that I think about it... all my students left BEFORE the Q&A was over, so... maybe I DID make a fool of myself. Thing is... usually I KNOW when I'm making a fool of myself. I'm not one of those people who makes a fool of themselves without realizing it.

(Wait... but if those people don't realize it.. then... maybe...!!!)

Anyway, I feel like it went well enough, I feel like people LIKED the PLAY, and asked the kinds of questions at the end to indicate that they GOT it. What the hell more do I want? And lots of people who "know" people were there, so maybe someday it will see a REAL staged performance.

Meanwhile, it took me long enough to pack up video equipment and to schmooze afterwards that I missed the 9:55 train, so... here I sit at 11:30 after a Penn Station dinner of a burger, Jack Daniels, and reheated-tasting fries. I'll get home around 2:30, and then wake up again around 6:30.

No wonder actors do so much fucking coke.

rehearsal...

...was very strange. Not in a bad way. I feel like I did a pretty good job of "absorbing" the other actors' way of speaking. Maybe even too much... because, I don't want it to look like I'm TRYING too hard. But I don't want to seem "out of place" either. Especially because the only actor with whom I have scenes is REALLY GOOD. Which is good. My co-author and I are excited, because we don't feel like either of the two earlier staged readings were very good at all. He blames the other director for not "getting" the play, unlike this director, who seems to. It was weird to BE directed... to be told how to FEEL when reading something. Actors and directors are weird people, I've decided. And yet it was pretty awesome to sit around a table and listen to actors talk about getting into the heads of these characters that WE created, and getting it mostly right, too.

Anyway, tomorrow night should be interesting. I want to get a good night's sleep tonight, so I SPRINTED for the 6:15 train home. (The next one isn't until 9:30!!) Tomorrow afternoon, I plan on picking up an airplane-sized bottle of Jack Daniels to throw down a half hour before the show starts. My first scene isn't until halfway through the play. I figure that should get me through the nerves, and yet still leave me able to read my lines.

I can't figure out if having a few dozen of my students in the audience will make me more or less nervous. On the one hand, I talk to these kids all the time, often reading the words of Galileo... some of the SAME words of Galileo... in the form of a dialogue. And yet, it feels more like... Come see your science professor make a fool of himself out of his element! Lose whatever tiny morsel of respect you have for him! From now on, every time you think of it in his class, you can snicker!!"

I exaggerate of course. Still...

Wish me luck tomorrow.

apocalypse parking lot...

nobody takes the train to the city on a sunday. i arrived at the station at 11:00 in the morning and the parking lot had 5 cars in it. the clouds were low and grey from the front that just moved through, and the wind blew the smell of creosote off of the old maintenance yard across the tracks, and i couldn't help but think... this is exactly what this place would look like if all of us disappeared in the middle of the night.

drama...

Three days before the reading of my play in New York City, and I've been stricken by an idea for my next dramatic work... almost fully formed... purely by chance... while flipping through a book on the bargain shelf at the bookstore. I have complete confidence that I'll get a Sloan Foundation commission for this, but I'm not blogging the plot, becuase I don't want it "out there".

I'm very excited.

balance sheet...

So, I'm teaching at the boy's school today, and I think I've mentioned that the reason I'm doing this is that I'm getting us a $2000 tuition discount. So on Friday's, I drive the boy to school and spend the bulk of the day hanging out in that neck of the woods... no sense making another 30 minute-each-way drive back home, right? Problem is... so far today I have spent $55 at Barnes and Noble and $88 at Kohl's. If I do this every week, I'm not sure I've really saved any money at all. (Although I guess I'll have a big pile of books and cool shoes to show for it.)

Anyway, sitting here in B&N, I'm supposed to be working, but couldn't feel less like it. I just wrote an email to a friend from college, and it has my mind wandering and feeling all nostalgic. Well, maybe that's not quite the right word... I was pretty miserable for most of college, and I don't think you can really be "nostalgic" for misery. But my mind is elsewhere.

I picked up the new Douglas Coupland book ("The Gum Thief") which probably won't help to improve my mood. Those are generally not particularly uplifting. What does it say about me if books by my "favorite author" kinda depress me?

I have a lot of book obligations this month. Next week, I'll probably wind up buying the new Stephen Colbert book. And then the week after, Oliver Sacks has a new book out about music and the brain. I'm not sure when I will be able to READ any of these books, but it's important to HAVE them.

It's after 12:00 now. Maybe I'll buy a sandwich.

right off schedule...

Courses have been going so well, it's been 5 weeks since I've actually bothered to look at my syllabi. Turns out that I'm five lectures ahead in one class, and two lectures behind in the other. And yet I persist under the illusion that everything is going just fine. That, folks... is what we call "confidence".

dr. dave: special victims unit...

I was sitting in my science lab this afternoon, working (or something) when I realized that I had been hearing the words "CUT!" and "ACTION!" being shouted outside my window on the street below. I walked over to the one open window in the lab, and looked out and...

"What... are they loading a BODYBAG into that van? Is... is that ICE-T?? Wait - THAT'S MARISKA HARGITAY!! And she's packing heat!!!"

Pictures...

The bodybag...



Ice T is tough, even when the camera is off...



Mariska Hargitay is kinda hot, actually...



Shooting the actual scene, for like the 15th time...

hey, einstein...

As of this week, I have officially hit the point in my relativity class where I can no longer come in and wing-it off the top of my head. If I do, I will turn into one of those fumbly, derivation-bungling professors, and I HATE those guys. So the only alternative is to actually start prepping for lectures. Which, quite honestly. takes all the fun out of teaching, because it makes it seem like "work".

On the bright side, though... there are some topics in relativity that I've never really understood on a deep, "gut" level, so maybe if I'm forced to teach them, they'll finally click.

Speaking of Einstein, I read an interview last week with the new director of the NYC opera, and he promises that the 2009-2010 season will include a full schedule of 20th century works, including a revival of Philip Glass's "Einstein on the Beach"!! I am so fucking psyched. Three and a half hours of arpeggios, counting, do-re-mi nonsense syllables, and schizophrenic-penned monologues?? I am THERE, dude.

look at me, i'm "collegial"..!

In the past month, I have volunteered to teach classes for three other profs. Two lectures on energy for the Sustainability class, one lecture on Galileo for a theater class, and one lecture on celestial navigation to a literature/history class.

Someone damned well better notice all this collegiality when the tenure review comes around. And some of the students better respond to the "advertising" and take my classes in the spring. I need to replenish the groupie stables a little before next year.

to-do today...

* photocopy practice sheet for Einstein class
* prep for guest lecture in Energy class
* fax parking pass application
* locate chapter on Copernicus for director of play
* post lecture video to astronomy class
* post lectures from yesterday and today to their respective classes
* find a good picture of a panda skeleton. (don't ask)

the new TV season...

Since it occupies so much of my time, maybe I should say something about all of the TV premieres that have aired over the past week.

Heroes: The premiere was... weird. The "Four Months Later" device is kinda lame. I take it to mean - "We will confuse you with flashbacks all season!"

Survivor: There is no indication that there is anyone even remotely likable in either of the tribes. Or even particularly hot, for that matter. (Ok, except for the black guy in the boxer-briefs). Oh, and speaking of underwear - how long has this show been on the air? 9 seasons? If you were a woman and were going to be on Survivor... would you not pack, like 14 sports bras? And fucking tennis shoes? Why is it that every season there is some idiot struggling through the first week of challenges wearing a lace demi-cup bra and high heels? You HAVE seen the show, right?

Reaper: Based on the premise, I had very low expectations for this show, but Kevin Smith really made the pilot work. It was pretty damed funny. Plus! You can apparently say "dick" on TV now! At least on the CW. (It's a whole new world. Thanks, Justin Timberlake!) Anyway, too bad Smith isn't directing the whole series. I expect it to go rapidly downhill.

Dirty Sexy Money: We watched this because it stars Peter Krause, and for no other reason. I don't know what it is about this guy, but I really, really enjoy watching him act. And not in a gay way, I don't think. As for the show... I found the premise pretty uninteresting.

Big Shots: I think we maybe only watched this show because Josh Malina was in it (Who was also on "Sports Night", with... Peter Krause!) The show is mostly forgettable, and can be summed up with the two words "Desperate Husbands", but I should mention one odd fact. Both this show and "Dirty Sexy Money" feature a subplot in which a rich, powerful man is found to be having an affair with a transsexual. What the hell is up with that? Is there some sort of cultural "moment" happening? Are transsexuals the new black?

Grey's Anatomy: I think this show has jumped the shark already. (Do people still say "jumped the shark"? Or has that phrase jumped the shark?) I have never bought for even an instant the whole Izzy/George thing. And the Lexi Grey thing just feels cheap.

Private Practice: I've lost interest in this one already. 40-year-old doctors are not as interesting or angsty as 20 year-old doctors. And what is the sense of holding a medical drama in a private clinic if every time there is a REAL emergency, they have to call an ambulance and take them to the REAL hospital?? There is a reason that doctor shows are generally set in emergency and operating rooms. Nobody wants to watch an hour of fucking strep swabs and pap smears.

Desperate Housewives: I only look up from my laptop when Eva Longoria is in her underpants. Which is fairly often.

Brothers and Sisters: I do like Rachel Griffiths, but only because she was in "Six Feet Under" with... PETER KRAUSE!! Aside from that, I usually suffer through the first 30 minutes of melodrama, then go take a shower. If I hated my family that much I would just move out of state and not talk to them. Oh wait! I did that!!

Bionic Woman: I think I can already write the Bionic Woman drinking game. Bionic Woman leaps between two buildings, or over a deep crevasse - DRINK!! Bionic Woman runs in fast motion - DRINK!! Bionic Woman uses super-Terminator-eyeball-scope-vision - DRINK!!! I mean seriously... how many different ways can she jump, run, and kick ass? What else is there for her to do? Didn't the original bionic serieses run out of ideas halfway through the first season too? (Steve Austin jumps over a fence!!! ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch...)

i really need to think of...

... something better to do on Monday mornings than to recap the weekend on the blog. It's usually not something I want to "re-live".

* Saturday: Garlic Festival. Sure it sounds good on paper, but the crowds at this place totally ruined any enjoyment we would have gotten out of the experience. The lines for food were like waiting in line for a ride at fucking Disneyworld. It took me 20 minutes to get a lemonade. Insane.

* Sunday: Yardwork. Mowed the lawn and cut down a half-dead 20' pine tree that has been creeping up on our pawer and cable lines for the past couple of years. I have to say - Lorax aside - that's a pretty satisfying feeling.

* Today: Suspense. Dave oversleeps! Should he wait for the later train? No, he's going to try to make it! Zooom! Screeech! Look at him go. He pulls in the the station in record time, plenty of time to get to the... BUT WAIT! Today is October 1st, and he forgot to buy his monthly ticket! He dashes into the ticket shelter. One of the machines is broken! (DRAMATIC CHORD!) He waits nervously for the other customers... one eye on the tracks. Finally it's his turn. Frantically, he pushes the buttons... beep, boop... "please insert card"... What's that? A light on the tracks! "Bank authorization in progress"... TOOT! TOOT!... "Your ticket and receipt are now printing" CHUGGAGHUGGA... TOOOOOT! He grabs the ticket... (damn the receipt!) and springs out the door to the platform as the train pulls to a stop. THE DAY IS SAVED!!

So, anyway. Here I am.

Things in general continue to go well. I have a little cold/throat thing, but it isn't amounting to anything debilitating, so I plan to just use it as an excuse to end class 15 min early.

(As if to punish me for saying that things are going well, the conductor just announced that the rear engine on the train just died!)

As the date of the reading approaches, I've decided to take advantage of my newfound fame and invite the NPR producer who interviewed me a couple of weeks ago. I figure, I don't have that many "connections"... might as well play the ones I DO have.

The first committee meeting of the semester is tomorrow. I will pretend to be inconvenienced while at the same time secretly enjoying the excuse to come home late.

(The helpful conductor informs us that yes... the engine is dead. He neglects to give any indication of what they might DO about this fact.)

I'm trying to teach myself Final Cut on the Mac at work. So naturally I did what any good nerd would do - I bought a $30 book. Then the next day I found an even BETTER book for $40!! There is no problem that an expensive enough book can't solve.

We're moving now, and they seem to be trying to make up for lost time. Because what I really need is the excitement of a DERAILMENT to really perk up the morning.