What I'm doing instead

I'm not:
• Sorting my laundry
• Paying my end o' the month bills
• Wrapping my nephew's birthday presents
• Making sense of all that crap on my dining room table


I am:
• Following the Dodger/Giants game on Gameday. The Dodgers are behind 3-2 in the 8th but I'm hanging in there. I'm "thinking blue!"
• Watching Friends, the one about (ironically enough) laundry. It's from 1994. God, they were young! Especially Matthew Perry and Matt LeBlanc.
• About to play more Pogo

I have no self discipline whatsoever.

I'm not good at this

My best friend is off to Dallas right now as we speak. He's spending the weekend there to celebrate a family wedding, and he's flying down in his brother-in-law's private plane. (Or maybe it's a jet; like "affect" and "effect," I never can keep planes and jets straight.)

So today I have been very mad at Barbra Streisand because she lied to me. People who need people are most emphatically NOT the luckiest people in the world. People who need people worry themselves sick about bad weather tossing silly little cylinders of steel about in the air. People who need people get lonely because the people they need are incommunicado.

For most of 2003 I was unemployed and freelancing, working from home. I was very independent and very comfortable with my own company* and truly cannot remember the sensation of missing anyone. Or being this genuinely worried about (or perhaps neurotically fixated upon) anyone else's welfare. Was I better off then? Was I happier? Maybe. Perhaps I'm just not cut out for this caring about people shit.


*I was also usually broke, but that's another subject for another time.

Digging for gold

Seen on the el this morning: Young, upwardly mobile suburban mom, bringing baby girl and stroller downtown. Just about everything on both mother and daughter had a highly visible label. Land's End, J. Crew, Jeep are just the ones I can recall. They were both wearing purples and lavendars. They both had their shiny dark hair pulled back in ponytails.

As Mom sipped her Starbuck's latte and chatted animatedly on her Razr, her perfect little girl (strapped into the stroller and safely out of Mom's sightline) dug around in her nostril and proceeded to eat the contents.