Peanuts

We watched the Charlie Brown Great Pumpkin Halloween thing tonight.  Boy is that depressing and aimless as an adult. 

More Halloween stuff

Apparently,  you can buy a Carol Channing doll for your children. 

Separately, Chertoff is still ghoulish:

Discarded Halloween costume ideas

• The Starbucks Abortionist
• The Sexist Barista
• Rocket Man
• Charles and Mary Beard
• Steve Jobs with ass-out jeans
• Heroin-addict Ray Romano
• Sexy Shylock
• Condé Nast

Little irks

You know, it really blows when your laptop screen dies and you have to use the mid-90s model TV in the sublet you’re in as your monitor via an S-Video cable, which makes the text comically large and blurry and unreadable. 

It’s frustrating when every morning you linger in bed ten extra minutes after the alarm first wakes you because you want to hang onto being in bed and defy the commands of the damn cell phone clock and you think that you can make up the time by just brushing your teeth a little faster and gobbling down your breakfast a little quicker, but you still end up leaving your apartment just seven minutes after you should already have and those seven minutes make all the difference and now you don’t get a seat on the train and if you get coffee before work you will definitely be late and your cubemate is starting to notice it’s a pattern because there is no more room to streamline your morning routine if you are uncompromising on the need to shower and rinse and buckle and fold and check your bag and kiss goodbye and lock the door with your keys from the outside so it proves you can’t be locked out again.

It’s slightly irritating when I try to use the bathroom at work around 5:30 and the janitor is already in there cleaning it.

Upstate

C and I were upstate in Ulster County this past weekend, as C’s superbly generous boss let us borrow her remarkably cozy house in the woods up there.  Over three days, we fought back the city impulse to get out and see or do interesting things, and just stayed in the house.  We cooked, drank wine and read our books.  And, on the last night, plugged our ipod into the Bose where we could listen to our music as loud as we wanted, since the neighbor’s house was nowhere nearby.  This was quite liberating and new, given that, as non-car-owning apartment dwellers for several years, we pretty much never get to hear and sing along with music of our own choosing played at high volume in open air.  This fact, combined with the wine, resulted in me doing what C called “the gayest thing she has ever seen,” which was to mouth and enact physically the words to “I Guess That’s Why They Call It The Blues” by Elton John for her while she sat on the couch.  I did this twice.  We tried several other songs, but the incarnation of the Decembrists lyrics, for example, just doesn’t work as well.   

Probably the most fascinating post ever

After an eighteen-month tea-based hiatus, I have started drinking coffee once more.  One generous cup in the morning–Starbucks or fancy-schmancy stuff only, to make sure — with the built in deterrents of taste and expense — that I don’t return to the perpetually hyper-caffeinated coffee swill-drinking mania that I lived in before.  (During the Tea Period I remained as such, since I just replaced the coffee with quite frequent Diet Coke, which I have since eliminated from my diet entirely).  I can’t believe I denied myself this little celebration of the morning for so long.  I feel like an adult again.