Happy birthday, Tom!

Poking head: JZ! You're still here?

Do NOT taunt me about the absence of halogen torchiers on the market.

Not everyone likes lamps that tend to start fires.

Happy Birthday, Tom Scola! May this be a great year for you.

Birthday, Happy to Tom.

My body and brain are mad at me for going along with Daylight Savings Time. That's it. No more. I will stay at EST+1 for the rest of my life.

Stupid 47-hour weekend.

Snarl.

Nilly! Sort of. I spent the entire weekend sleeping like a dead thing. The only productive thing I managed, really, was to do a lot of dishes, but since I was also the one who dirtied a lot of them, really I just maintained dish stasis. I meant to do laundry, as the laundry pile is now up to my knees, but every time I planned to it started raining and I got discouraged at the thought of lugging giant laundry bags a block away in the rain, and I took a nap instead.

The only other event of note is that yesterday I ran into a couple I know from the RenFaire at church, and just as I was about to start chatting I got hit by a wave of exhausted-plus-queasy and had to make a quick excuse and bolt away to go sit in my car and try very hard not to throw up. They looked very confused as I left. I should probably send the girl an email to explain that I'm neither crazy nor repulsed by them, and please don't judge me by the haste with which I fled.

Thus endeth the tale of my weekend.

Happy Birthday, Tom!!

Happy Birthday Tom!

I'm so mad! NBC is switching Heist and L&O. Now, I have to miss Heist because I know I can't miss Lost or VM. . . this isn't the week that VM moves to Tuesdays, is it?

Sort of.

I hope this won't exhaust or put you straight to sleep, then. I translated for you (and for practice) the "My So Called thirtysomething" thing I told you about upthread:

- It just seems like, you're agreed to have a certain personality, or something, for no reason -- just to make things easier for everyone. But when you think about it, I mean, how do you know if it's even you?

I didn't die my hair in highschool, definitely not in crimson glow. I was never in love with the most handsome boy in school, with the guitar and the car and the meaningful silences. I never built any distance from an old friend in favor of the wild girl, and I was never blind to the secret love of the neighbor boy (because nobody was ever secretly in love with me). I was different from Angela Chase in almost every way possible, and still, those were my so called life. Or, at least, that's how I felt.

And it was the first time in which a tv show made me feel such identification. As a little girl, the stories I was looking for were as far as possible from the routine, known too-well daily life. Distant worlds, magics, monsters and knights filled my imagination, as well as historical epics from all over the world, exciting discoveries and breath-taking adventures. Not just on tv, but also in book, as well as in any other imaginary outlet I could find, away from the world around me. I was looking for the different, the unfamiliar, the fascinating and exciting. I've hardly ever read any books which depicted the lives of children like me, with all the tiring details of their days, and I definitely didn't want to watch such movies or tv shows. I knew this world from my own daily life. I didn't need any story to depict it for me.

But a few years and book-cases for older children in the library later (as much as the strict librarians permitted, and sometimes even under their noses), I started to discover between the bindings and the pages the magic that is hidden in the description of the everyday life. The written word penetrated into the depths of the inner worlds of the characters, in a direct and immediate description, until I felt that I myself was inside their skin. The tapestry was sensitively woven, the focus shifted from the technical details to the emotions of the characters, their thoughts and conflicts. The word “familiar” had more meaning than the simplistic “been there done that”, but rather the much richer and deeper meaning of “am I not the only one who feels this way? How can you describe so accurately what goes on in my head and inside my guts?”

In tv it took longer. As a little girl, it seemed like there are two kinds of shows: the ones with the heroes who have unusual life, like in the adventure storybooks, and the ones which presented the everyday life, and were mostly educational and explained why you're not supposed to drink alcohol, not believe in yourself, lie to your parents and not tell the truth. In each and every story about a world I knew, I felt like I was also told how this world should be conducted and look.

Even later, when it was OK to stay up until the late hours of the night and watch the “grownups” shows, what seemed to be describing people who leave in an ordinary world, actually wasn't: cops (who catch criminals, even murderers, on a daily basis), lawyers (who change the lives of the people that the cops from the previous shows caught, without blinking), or doctors (whose effect on their patients lives is even bigger than that of the former two). Under the disguise of undecorated reality, the lives that were presented were even less ordinary than those of the crinolines-wearing, swords-yielding or conquerers of barren lands.

- And I mean this whole thing with yearbook, it's like ... if you made a book of what really happened, it'd be a really upsetting book -- you know, in my humble opinion.

(continued...)