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[03.31.09]
So, I go to the gym now. Yes, me. I'm the furthest thing from a gym person that you can imagine. Except now I'm a gym person. People, I do weight machines. The other day I was brushing my teeth and I noticed arm muscle. Brushing my teeth! I wasn't flexing in front of the mirror, I was just going about my business! But, you know, I used to get fatigued from brushing my teeth, and now I don't anymore, so I must have the gym to thank for that.
I like my gym because there's no pretention. No small girls wearing make-up and earrings, no flirting by the water fountain. Just worn carpet, old men working out in khaki shorts and polos, and the smell of chlorine from a pool I'll never get in. But it's there if I change my mind! A big bonus is that going to the gym gives me the opportunity to put my Tribe Pride on display. Sometimes I wear both a William & Mary shirt AND William & Mary shorts. It's probably tacky--in the sense that the colors don't go with each other or with my pasty legs, and that it's like double-lettering when you're in a fraternity (Nate!)--but the beauty is that I don't care! And no one else seems to either. And when I get home I will shower and put on my William & Mary pajama pants, feeling good that if my translucent skin is going to show off my veins, it might as well show off my muscle too.
[04.09.09]
A couple years ago, some friends from work and I drove the Corolla to Pennsylvania for a week to volunteer on the campaign of a woman who would not win a seat in Congress. You may remember that the trip produced such hits as "Any bar that has nudie photo hunt games is salt of the earth" and "There's a time and place for the deuce--and this is not one of them!" We spent time in a number of small Pennsylvania towns and hamlets, ventured down highways and back roads, but the most fascinating discovery we made was in the home of our host family. No, I'm not talking about the "Slap Ya Mama" seasoning that went on our morning grits. I'm referring to a neighbor who had once been a mover and shaker on the Hill, but had ultimately moved away from the center of the universe to suburban PA. We asked him how he did it, and he agreed that it had, at one time, seemed utterly unthinkable to him. It was unthinkable to us then and still is. I know that there are countless opinions, both scientific and nonscientific, about where the center is exactly, and that I have a handful of friends who would argue that the answer is NYC, or London, or Dubai, or Havre de Grace, etc. But for politics, it's here. Yet the transient nature of the town persists. I mean, look at Annie D.! She peaced out! So I wonder--when will the gravitational pull weaken? And where might the next center of my universe be?
[03.19.09]
AN OCCASIONAL AND REGRETABLE RANT: I recently got a new work laptop, which meant a transferral of all my mp3s--or, should I say, m4as, or whatever the iTunes format is. I don't have all of this on a personal laptop because, as some of you may recall from a tirade you read here on A&A.com, or have heard repeatedly in person, it was stolen by gypsies on a subway in Madrid a year-and-a-half ago. In light of that, I'm into backing up, and having back-ups of back-ups, and moving my music around has gotten ridiculously complex. I find myself yearning for a big book of CDs that I can see and feel and manipulate manually. I still have a lot of my digital music organized in folders by genre, folders I took hours putting together in college until they were just the way I wanted them. For instance, one was labeled "For Lack Of," which held some Marc Cohn and choice hits from the animated Chipmunks movie. Of course iTunes has reorganized them, turned them into its special little format, and let's me listen to them only when it determines that I've been a good girl. I don't get it! Why is iTunes so persnickety!? Why does it promise things like automatically downloading album art, but it doesn't deliver? Why is it SO HARD to fill in the names of artists and songs on a mix CD I've imported? Why does it lose songs and alert me when it tries to sync? Winamp never did these things to me! I'm thisclose to installing a ten-CD changer in the MINI and being done with it.
[03.11.09]
trade pubs," whatever, because your job depends on it. (This leads to another thing I love about DC – meetings are rarely before 10 AM.) So how come there isn’t more uproar here that newspapers are DYING?! Sure, the slow death of journalism is lamented for the lost jobs, lost bureaus, lost column inches, but think about it DC: you won't be able
to do your job if papers shut their doors, like the Rocky Mountain News just did or the San Francisco Chronicle threatens to do. Where's their bailout?? This is the one for-profit industry I can think of that regularly goes against best business
practices to do the world a service, and they do it for ridiculously low salaries.
Clearly the Internet caught a lot of papers off guard (watch this 1981 video on the crazy idea of news online), but do we really want to be informed solely by blogs and Wikipedia? And it's not like we're going to pay for news online (remember the NY Times subscription debacle?). So while I'm in DC, I'll do a little lobbying: bail out the newspapers. Don't make me imagine a world where I actually start working as soon as I get to work.
[03.04.09]
Another Mardi Gras, another trip to New Orleans. Only this time, Annie D., Tedd, Potter, and JC1 were along for the ride! I think the "bring a friend to Mardi Gras" theme was celebrated widely--it felt like there were a lot more people there this year! While the crowds seemed younger, the boobs seemed older. Ick. (See fave quotes.) Other fave moments from the trip include:
**Potter yelling "RUBBER-CHICKEN-RUBBER-CHICKEN!" at parade floats as they passed. Granted, they were throwing rubber chickens, but it was still funny.
**Maksim explaining how sausage is made, accidentally replacing the word "intestine" with a similar-sounding body part.
**Guitar Boy discovering that Roman Catholicism is the devil and questioning all he's ever known.
**Chris C. demonstrating his athletic prowess via bead catching.
**Ashley getting hit in the face with beads. (Obviously lacking such prowess.)
**Sarah turning one of my old bridesmaid's dresses into a maternity gown.
**Being in the same room as Val Kilmer.
**Getting out of town before any of us got shot.
[02.26.09]
Most of you are aware that generally once a year I put out a mix CD called The Rotation. What you may not know is that Annie D. is the person responsible for the name's origin. Some time during our junior year, I asked her if she was familiar with a new song that had quickly become my favorite. This was a dense question, considering that we were roommates at the time and I had been playing the song, along with a few others, on repeat. (Thank you, Winamp!) She politely replied, "Yes, I think I've heard it in the rotation." Ta-da! A mix CD was born.
I thought of that this morning as I stared at my ipod, sick of my recent playlists. I will beat a dead horse, people, hard as I try to avoid it. Creating the Rotation and A&A CDs every year requires me to listen to a song enough to determin that it won't get old fast. I think of it as quality control! And honestly, I only put songs on those discs that I'm sufficiently obsessed with. Unfortunately, that means four or five months later, though the songs aren't old, I've started to go a little crazy. I sent out an SOS text to Jen S. the other day, begging her to move up the release date for her "penultimate Spring mix." I now extend my plea to all of you, fair A&A readers. Email me! Link me! Playlist me! Inspire me!
[02.18.09]
I will call them the Capital Letter People. You know the ones--they have a very singular identity, based on one thing only, and they have to let you know what it is within five minutes of meeting you. Maybe it's their political party, their religion, their level of education, or just where they're from. You know, "Hi, my name is so-and-so, I'm a Democrat" or "Hi, I have an MBA from Harvard" or "Hi, I'm from Delaware" (sorry, K-Dawg). Now, I like democrats--I AM a democrat--but that sort of thing will become apparent or come up naturally as we get to know each other. It doesn't need to be announced. And if you think it does, there's a 93 percent chance you are going to get on my nerves (and that you're overcompensating for something). Let's just say that I was seated next to one of those at the Charter Day dinner, and it made for a long evening.
But, the rest of the weekend was lovely! At the Saturday morning Charter Day ceremony, I got the chance to hear W&M's new-ish President Taylor Revely speak for the first time. He has a very deep voice and a very dry sense of humor, and he made me laugh out loud several times. I'll leave you with my favorite excerpt of his speech, about why we celebrate Charter Day:
"Perhaps we gather because William & Mary is very old, and people in Virginia like old things. Doubtless we all remember why it takes five Virginians to replace a light bulb — one to unscrew the old bulb and insert the new, and four others to talk about how truly marvelous the old bulb was. So, Charter Day is very Virginian, a time to remember fondly our ancient self."
[02.11.09]