Police chase!

Today, I found myself running through the streets of downtown Omaha, literally chasing after a mounted policeman, one hand clutching my purse (and my heart), the other hand trying to keep my scarf from flying away in the gale-force winds that were stinging my eyes and making it difficult for me to see. As it turns out, horses can easily outrun young women in heels.

Take a minute to let the absurdity of that image sink in. Now let’s start from the beginning.

You may recall that my darling VenJetta took the opportunity last week to burn out a headlight while I was driving by a very bored police officer. He pulled me over, issued me a written warning, and ordered me to have the headlight fixed within five days. Then I was supposed to have a police officer – any police officer – check that the light was fixed and sign my warning, which I would then mail back like a good girl.

You may also recall that the VenJetta promptly decided to break down completely and have itself towed before I had a chance to fix the light. The car went to the shop last Monday, where the dealership held it hostage until today. Today marks the 9th day since I received the written warning, and so I have officially broken the law.

“Criminal” is not an adjective I generally like applied to me, so I dutifully stopped at a police station on my way home from the VenJetta doctors today, intending to plead my case. At least, I had assumed that this building with 35 police cruisers in the parking lot was a police station, but according to the sign I found on the door, it was a police “Assembly Station.” The sign politely asked me to take my criminal business elsewhere, because there was no way I was getting into this building without a badge. Criminal.

Dejected, I went back to my apartment to look up the Omaha Police Department online. According to their website, there was only one police station in town that would accept “walk-ins,” and it was, appropriately, downtown. I giggled at the thought of literally having to “go downtown,” and I set off.

I hate downtown Omaha. It is full of one-way streets and crumbling buildings with no street numbers or signs. Somehow, I always get turned around, find myself on an entrance ramp to the wrong highway, and I end up in Iowa, cursing. The “Welcome to Iowa” sign might as well be a string of expletives for as often as I associate the two.

Today, I followed my Mapquest directions pretty faithfully, but I’ll be damned if I could find a police station where they said it was supposed to be. As I cruised slowly down the street, talking to myself and searching for street numbers, I spotted a mounted policeman standing on a corner. I also spotted a metered parking spot on the street just around the corner. I looked from the mounted policeman to the parking spot, and then glanced at the buildings again. I had no idea where the police station was, and I was intent on clearing my vehicular name, so I made a snap decision to park the car and ask the policeman to sign my note.

A few minutes and a spectacular parallel parking job later, I stepped out of the car. It was at about this time that I noticed the 50 mph icy winds that threw me bodily into the street. Holy crap. I had been out of the car one minute and already my eyes were watering and my scarf was on its way back to my apartment without me. I braced myself against a streetlamp, fished around in my wallet for some change to put in the meter, and looked toward the street corner. The policeman was gone! Wait, there he was, one block up, disappearing around the corner with a swish of his horse’s tail. I looked around. Still no sign of the police station, and my car was safely metered. Oh, what the hell. I took hold of my unruly scarf, leaned into the wind, and followed the cop.

It might have been a good idea at this point for me to mentally calculate the likelihood that I would be able to catch up with an animal that’s bred to race in most countries, and weigh that likelihood against the environmental conditions that were rapidly stripping away 4 of my 5 senses, but that didn’t occur to me. I turned down the next street with the intent to cut the policeman off before he got to the next intersection, and I nearly made it. But the cop and his horse had already reached the intersection, and were fast disappearing around the next corner. I started to jog.

I would very much liked to have seen the expressions on the faces of the people in the many coffee shops that line the streets of downtown Omaha. I imagine them sipping their lattes and leafing through a magazine, then looking up to see a policeman on a horse walk briskly past the window, followed a few seconds later by a windswept young woman in a long coat, jeans, and heels, wildly clutching her scarf and purse as she runs with comically small, quick steps. I’m sure it was a laugh riot.

Finally – FINALLY – the policeman paused at a crosswalk, and I rushed up to him, out of breath.

“Sir – gasp – excuse me – gasp – I’ve been following you since Douglas Street –” I doubled over a bit to catch my breath.

The officer looked down at me without smiling. Even the horse was unamused.

“I was wondering if you could…I mean, I need to have this thing signed that says I got a broken headlight fixed, and I don’t know where the police station is, and I saw you on the corner, but that was like three blocks ago and I tried to catch you, but that’s quite a horse you’ve got there, and holy cow, is it cold out here, and is there any way you could sign this thing for me? I’m parked a couple blocks back that way…”

The policeman said nothing, but he picked up the reins and started to walk in the direction I’d pointed, so I took that for a "yes." Jolly fellow. I thanked him as we started walking, and when he still said nothing to me, I decided I had better shut up and not press my luck. We headed back the way we had come, and I was hilariously aware that everyone on the street was watching as I was being followed by a cop on a horse. I tried very, very hard not to laugh.

“You’re parked over there?” He speaks!

“Yes, by the library.” God, the wind was shredding me.

“Let’s go this way, then.” The cop promptly turned into an alleyway that I would never have attempted to walk through without police escort. As the horse clip-clopped beside me, I swear it gave me a shifty sideways glance. “I’m sorry,” the cop suddenly said, “I can hardly hear anything with these earmuffs on.” Well, that would explain the stoic silence.

“That’s okay. At least you’re keeping warm!” I was using my saccharine cheeriness reserved for violent drunks and mounted policeman.

“Not really.” Bitterness trumps sweetness. I didn’t say anything after that.

As we finally neared the VenJetta, it became laughably obvious how far I had been chasing this guy. The cop stood by my car (his horse trying valiantly not to be swept away by the wind) as I showed him my headlight (dirty!) and gave him the ticket to sign. I didn’t even try to explain the whole five-day-limit saga. He handed me the ticket back with a monotone “Sorry you had to walk so far,” and abruptly turned tail and left. Another valiant officer of the OPD, ladies and gentlemen.

When I got back into the car, I looked at the ticket he signed. He didn’t date it, which was awesome. As the heater started to kick in, so did the hilarity of the situation. I laughed as I pulled out of my very cool parking spot. I laughed a little less exuberantly as I passed the very poorly marked police station I had been searching for.

I stopped laughing when I ended up in Iowa. Again.

My car thinks it's funny. It's not.

My car hates me.

No, really. Inexplicably, the car has a vendetta against me. It is a VenJetta, if you will. I am at a loss as to exactly what the car has against me, since I have always gone out of my way to see that it had a loving and nurturing home life. Ever since I bought the car four years ago from my sister (when it was only 3 years old), I have gone out of my way to treat it with respect: I shift gears kindly, I keep the vinyl treated and shiny, I drive around mud puddles, and I try not to park under birds’ nests. If I can’t avoid hitting a pothole on the highway, I always apologize. You’ll recall that I’ve even mentioned how I thought the car had a nice ass. But despite my slavish devotion, the car sees fit to embarrass and inconvenience me at every opportunity, and I can only chalk it up to misanthropy. Or garage envy.

The first day I got the car, the passenger side door lock broke off, unprovoked. I didn’t realize it at the time, but it was a sign. It was the car’s way of verbalizing: “Hello. I don’t like you. I’m not likely to start liking you anytime soon. Here, sit on this.”

In the coming months, I tried not to let the car bully me into disliking it. I showed appropriate concern when the Check Engine light would come on. I would take the car to its doctors, they would charge me $200 to tighten a screw, and I would hit the road again. About a week and half later, the Check Engine light would invariably come back on. Back to the car doctors, more screws tightened and hoses nudged, and back home again. It became a game to see how long the dashboard would be lightless. Eventually, when it got to the point where the light would be back on before I even returned home from the mechanic, I knew that the car was playing psychological games with me. The Check Engine light always came back, like the cat in that song, more regularly than my period.

After the fifth or sixth appearance of the Light in two months, I started to ignore it. This may be where my car started to hate me.

The VenJetta’s new quest became finding fresh new ways to distress me. The brake pads disappeared one day. Various fluids started to flee their confines. Every instrument on the dashboard completely died one day while I was driving, leaving me with no speedometer, odometer, tachometer, or gas gauge. I had to have the entire instrument panel replaced, which cost roughly what would be required to start a small country run by little people in 24 carat gold costumes who dine on nothing but diamonds and caviar. The belts and motors in my power windows would randomly break, resulting in a sudden SHWOOMP! and a frightening change in air pressure as the window would simply fall down into the door, never to be seen again. There were a few traumas inside the engine involving parts I can neither pronounce nor remember, but I have the receipts to prove it. The light that illuminates the AC control panel hasn’t worked since 2001. The glove compartment no longer opens or shuts; it is stuck ajar, one side of the door hanging 45 degrees lower than the other side. I can squeeze my hand into the compartment just enough to retrieve my registration for when a cop pulls me over to scold me about a headlight that went out THAT DAY (probably just as I was driving past the cop, because my car thinks it has a sense of humor). I lowered the driver’s side sun visor one day and the hinged plastic cover that protects the mirror on the backside of the visor fell onto my head, broken, and narrowly missed my eye. Not long after that, the exact same thing happened to me when I was in the passenger seat. It’s getting harder and harder not to take these things personally.

The car outdid itself a year or so ago with an especially creative attack on my sanity. I began to notice that people would randomly honk at me while I was driving, and I couldn’t figure out why. I would turn a corner and hear a sudden honking, and I would immediately turn around to make sure I didn’t have an axe murderer in my backseat, because I’ve read Urban Legends 3, and you can never be too sure. As the curious honking followed me around town, I suddenly realized with utter horror that the noise was coming from my own car! It was honking by itself!

God help me, my car was Christine.

I had no idea when or where the car would choose to voice its road rage, but I was certain that I never touched the horn. I avoided eye contact with other drivers who would shoot me resentful looks as the VenJetta would let loose a maddening bellow in a quiet residential neighborhood. My devil-incarnate-Volkswagen-dealership (a story for another blog altogether) would not take an appointment until the next month, so I drove around in this humiliating manner for almost two weeks. Finally at my wit’s end, and with an inspired suggestion from my father, I went into the fuse box and removed the fuse for my horn. The next day I nearly got into an accident in which having a horn would have been a useful warning to an idiot driver.

For the past few months, the VenJetta has been fairly quiet. A comprehensive (and expensive) tune-up seemed to have bought me a short reprieve from the car’s fury, but I should have known it would not forgive me so easily. A couple of days ago, the car began to make a funny noise when I started it up, but it would drive perfectly. I made a mental note to schedule an appointment with the mechanic the next day. That night, the car introduced me to the aforementioned cop with nothing better to do than ticket people for burnt-out headlights.

The next day (yesterday) it broke down in the parking lot of a Border’s bookstore. The starter simply blew, and any attempt to turn the engine over was met with a profoundly dismal whine and a mocking flash of the dashboard lights, including the Check Engine light: FLASH! Hey there, Mel. FLASH! We haven’t done this little dance in awhile. FLASH! I know you are going to be late to work, FLASH! but let me introduce you to my little friend named AAA. FLASH! They won’t be here for awhile, so make yourself comfortable. FLASH! Watch the seatbelt, there. Wouldn’t want you to choke. FLASH!

Anybody want to buy a car?

Look, Mom! No swears!

My mother IMed me the other day. The absurdity of that statement is rivaled only by its improbability.

I had put up an away message with a link to this blog, which she dutifully clicked on and discovered this site. After reading my latest entry, she IMed me again, and this was the resulting conversation:

Mom: I'm reading "Let me get this straight." What on earth is it?
Meldraw: Ha! That's my blog.
Mom: I don't remember you mentioning you had a blog.
Meldraw: No? I started it a couple months ago. It's just a random thing.
Mom: Good writing, except for a couple of inappropriate words.
Meldraw: Inappropriate?
Mom: If I were an English teacher I would ask you, "Don't you have the intellect to express yourself without seeking the lowest common denominator?"
Meldraw: It's probably a good thing you're not an English teacher, then.
Mom: “Mother” will do...
Meldraw: My blog is for me to express whatever I want without feeling constricted. That's probably why I’ve never brought it up to anyone in the family. It's not that I don't want you to read it or anything, it's just that it is a separate entity.
Mom: Point taken. You just don't want a potential employer or customer to run across it and be negatively influenced. Everything you do is a self-portrait. How do you want to look?
Meldraw: My name is not attached to this website.
Mom: Your screen name is on it.
Meldraw: What are you trying to say? I'm not ashamed of what I've written.
Mom: Just what I said before. You write extremely well. Just don't be crude if ten thousand people are going to be looking at it.
Meldraw: Ten thousand? I think I have ten regular readers. But I will keep that in mind.

[pause]

Meldraw: Are you going to start reading my blog now?
Mom: Probably. I'll put it on my list of favorites and check in periodically. You do write well. Will that freak you out?
Meldraw: No.

[pause]

Meldraw: I'll try not to swear.
Mom: Love you.
Meldraw: Love you.

It's beginning to look a lot like...wait.

Yesterday, while I was at work, my ears started to ring.

At first, I just waited for the sensation to pass, but I started to get nervous when the ringing persisted. I shook my head a little, and put my hands to my ears for a second, completely aware that I looked like I either had a tic, or I was arguing with the voices in my head. The ringing wasn’t that loud, but it wouldn’t stop.

Just when I had decided that Kelly Clarkson’s latest “pop sensation” had finally caused me to bleed directly from the eardrum, I walked past the front door of the store, and noticed a change in the ringing. Huh. It’s coming from outside.

I peeked my head out the door and looked in both directions. There, at the end of the strip mall, I saw it. My breathing stopped, and the blood drained from my face. It was horrifying. It was repulsive. It was worse than Kelly Clarkson. It was a Salvation Army bellringer.

Let’s be clear on one point before we continue: the Salvation Army? It does good work. I am not an ogre, a Scrooge, or a selfish bitch. I throw money into the red kettle every year, and often. I donate coats to the Warm Up drive, I “round up” my purchases at participating retail establishments, I give canned goods to the needy, and I think about volunteering at the Soup Kitchen until I realize that I’m not actually that good a person. I get into the giving season as much as the next upper middle class consumer with a guilt complex.

But, dude. November isn’t even half over, and the bellringers have started to station themselves at stores like freaking gargoyles. My problem with the bellringers is that not only do they get you coming and going, they do it at every public building in the country. You can’t go to the grocery store without hitting at least four of them before you get to the parking lot, and each time you pass them, they give you the “If you can afford to buy Nutty Buddies than you can put some moolah in my kettle” look. I’ve almost gotten used to the fact that “But I gave on the way in!” is not an appropriate response, and I take comfort in the fact that I only have to survive this for four weeks. I use the week before Thanksgiving to prep myself and save up laundry money, because I know I won’t have a single quarter in my pocket for the rest of the year.

It would appear that the invasion has come early.

It’s a disturbing trend that is echoed in the media, advertising, and retail industries. The Christmas season starts earlier and earlier every year; twinkle lights are in the same aisle as Halloween decorations at Target and television commercials with singing Santas and Coke-swigging polar bears air right alongside the “very special” Thanksgiving episode of insert-your-favorite-show-here. Everyone is in on it, and the conspiracy might go a little deeper than consumerism…

This morning started out like any other, with me stumbling groggily to the coffee-maker, throwing a bagel in the toaster and calculating how many shortcuts I could take to work in order to go back to bed for twenty minutes. With my coffee in one hand and my bagel in the other, I passed by the window, glanced outside, and stopped dead. It was snowing. Hard. Last week I had gone to work in a short sleeved t-shirt with no jacket, and today it was snowing. What the fuck? It’s like when I went to bed last night, the beautiful golden fall weather was in full swing, and when I woke up December had just bitch-slapped November into submission and grabbed the wheel of Mother Nature’s snowmobile.

While I finished my breakfast, I tried dutifully to find a silver lining to the fact that I was going to have to dig around in the trunk of my Jetta to find my snow scraper. I settled on being happy that I could do it while wearing sexy tall boots, my favorite wool peacoat, and very soft, extra long scarf. That would be good.

By the time I got to work this morning – late – my tall boots were cold, my coat was itchy, and my favorite scarf was all wet and clammy. I really, really missed fall. I went about opening the store, counting the register, vacuuming the carpet, turning on the radio, straightening the – OH MY GOD THEY’RE PLAYING CHRISTMAS MUSIC ON THE RADIO ALREADY! The lite rock radio station we are required to listen to all day long at work has switched over to 24-7 Christmas music. On November 15th. What the hell is going on? Basically, Omaha is grabbing me by the collar, throwing me against a wall, and whispering menacingly, “Thanksgiving is dead to us. You will get into the Christmas spirit, and you will do it today.”

For Christ’s sake.

An exercise in futility.

It was a beautiful fall day. On my way home from work, I noticed how warm and vibrant the falls leaves looked in the late afternoon, so as soon as I got home I grabbed my camera and went for a walk in my neighborhood.

I live right on the edge of what I consider to be a “buffer zone” between the extraordinarily rich side of North Omaha and the ghetto. It’s a relatively safe neighborhood, and fairly clean, but everybody has a chain-link fence and a lisp. It’s kind of like West Virginia.

So I was faintly surprised when I practically walked right into two young gentlemen in nice suits. (Apparently, one’s peripheral vision is compromised when one is looking through a camera’s viewfinder, and one is not always aware into whom one is walking.) I looked the two young men up and down: clean-cut, Caucasian, nice suits, moderately expensive briefcases, and they were both smiling. I was willing to bet $100 they were Jehovah’s Witnesses.

“Are you getting some good shots?” The short one gestured to my camera.

“Oh, yes. The light is really amazing right now.” I mentally scanned my flirting checklist, ran my fingers through my hair with an auxiliary hair-flip, and tried to hold my gigantic camera as if it weren’t some 50-pound alien baby.

“What kind of leaves…?” The tall one apparently was not aware that sentences end.

I laughed casually. “I have no idea. The colorful kind?” Lame.

“Well, it’s a beautiful day for it. Can you believe this weather?” Neither man was wearing a wedding ring, and I was pretty sure they were roughly my age. I hoped they weren’t gay.

“Not at all. I keep waiting for somebody to realize that we are the only state in the country that’s not getting pummeled with rain and send us a tornado just on principal.”

The young men laughed appropriately at my charming weather humor as I gave them my best through-the-lashes Girly Eyes. I wasn’t entirely sure why they were meandering through my neighborhood dressed like attorneys, but I had a pretty good idea. Still, a single man is a single man.

The short one looked at me. “Have you ever been to Utah?”

Two thoughts ran through my head: That was quite a segue. Also: I knew it. Missionaries. Dammit.

“I…uh, no. Why?”

The tall one looked comically at the short one as if he, too, were wondering how Shorty planned to continue that thought.

“It’s quite nice there in the fall, too.” Uh huh.

I started to make some reference to a recent drive through Pennsylvania and the beautiful fall foliage, but it was absent-minded small talk as I noticed the name tags they were both wearing. Shorty was actually Jacob, and the tall one turned out to be Matthew. I wondered if Jehovah’s Witnesses were allowed to choose biblical names the way resort workers in Cancun were allowed to choose easy-to-pronounce English names like Jefferson and Mike.

I abandoned my 101 Ways to Look Cute and started trying to think of a way to end the conversation that didn’t involve the phrase, “I’ll take my chances with Armageddon, thanks.”

Before I knew it, Jacob had managed to introduce himself as a Messenger of God, and he asked me if I wanted to go somewhere to discuss the Truth. I fought the impulse to laugh at how that conversation might go, and instead said, “I actually think I better be getting home, but thank you.”

“Do you think if we gave you some reading material to look over, you might consider calling us later to talk about the word of God?”

About 7 inappropriate jokes went through my head. I carefully considered how to respond. Finally I settled on, “Honestly?”

The tall one, Matthew, smiled. I liked him. “Well, we wouldn’t want you to lie to us.”

“Then, no. I probably wouldn’t. But good luck with the rest of your…you know, mission.”

I smiled, hoisted my 700-pound camera over my shoulder, turned in the direction of my apartment building, and left the cute missionaries behind amidst the leaves. I felt good that I had been both honest and polite to them. They probably catch a lot of shit from closed-minded and irritable people on their route. People around here get prickly about God, especially when the idea is being hawked like Thin Mints. I didn’t want to be disrespectful of their beliefs, but I didn’t want to waste their time by humoring them either.

It’s true what they say, though: all the cute guys are either gay, married, or Jehovah’s Witnesses.

I love the...Nov. 12s! 3D!

In honor of my birthday, I did a little research into what kinds of interesting things have happened on past November 12s. Here is what I came up with:

• In 1981 (the year I was born), the space shuttle Columbia became the first shuttle to be launched twice from Earth. Nothing happy ever happened on November 12 ever again, apparently.


• In 1993, Michael Jackson, hounded by allegations that he had molested a teenage boy, canceled the rest of his worldwide "Dangerous" tour, citing an addiction to painkillers.


• In 2001, an American Airlines Airbus crashed shortly after takeoff from JFK Airport in New York. More than 260 people died in the crash.


• In 2002, a new tape surfaced from suspected terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden in which he warned U.S. allies to be ready for the consequences of supporting Washington against his al-Qaida network.


• In 2003, the defense rested its case in the Virginia Beach, Va., trial of accused Washington-area sniper John Allen Muhammad after only three hours.


• In 2004, the Palestinian people gave their leader Yasser Arafat an emotional, chaotic farewell, disrupting official burial plans in Ramallah on the West Bank.


• Also in 2004, a California jury found Scott Peterson guilty of the 2002 murders of his pregnant wife, Laci, and their unborn son. Peterson was sentenced to death.

I share my birthday with:
Auguste Rodin
Wallace Shawn (Awesome!)
Grace Kelly
Megan Mullally
David Schwimmer
Tonya Harding
Ryan Gosling
Anne Hathaway
Sammy Sosa

Vehicular Voyeurism

Cars do funny things to the human psyche.

Most people, especially Americans, consider a car a necessity. The majority of us have one, and we use it as our primary mode of transportation. We have a car that we drive everyday to work, to the grocery store, to the movies, to a restaurant. Many of us spend more time in our car than in our homes, and it becomes rather important to us. We simultaneously consider it vital to our existence, and often take for granted its everyday use.

Spending so much time in a vehicle causes us to think of the car as an extension of our bodies. Maneuvering through high-traffic situations means communicating via the “body language” of our driving technique. (And in case you were wondering, tailgating the person in front of you will not cause him/her to go faster so GET OFF MY ASS ALREADY. My car is old enough that I don’t mind slamming on the brakes just to give my insurance company something to do.) When I first got my VW Jetta, I remember thinking the car had a cute ass, and so, by extension, did I. It made me happy. When we start to think of our cars as part of our bodies, it’s easy to imagine that nobody really sees the little human body inside. We relate to other people in terms of their vehicle: “Did you see that SUV just cut off that Camaro?” as if the cars were driving themselves. We sing, we laugh, we talk, and we pretend that our vehicle is one giant poker face.

I have news for you. I watch everyone.

My rearview mirror is my best friend at stoplights. I love to watch the person behind me when they don’t know I’m watching. I always have a pair of sunglasses on hand to disguise my gaze. Is the person watching other people? Does he look happy, sad, confused, stupid? Is he picking his nose? Is he singing at the top of his lungs? I take special pleasure in trying to figure out if he’s listening to the same radio station I am.

Today, as I was driving to work, there was a young man sitting alone in a red car behind me at the light. He reminded me of a young Dr. House: long face, nice eyes, scruffy pseudo-beard, and he looked pissed. He was staring at the back of my head, as most drivers tend to do, but I couldn’t tell if his anger was focused outside his car or inside. He did not move his mouth at all, but every ten seconds or so he would roll his eyes, exasperatedly. It cracked me up every time. I have no idea what he was listening to, or whether or not he just really hated my Alien Fish, but I started to imagine all the things that could possibly cause that awesome House-ian eye roll.

This voyeuristic impulse of mine also causes an inverse reaction, where I assume everyone else is looking at me, too. This is what causes me to sing unabashedly until someone pulls up next to me, whereupon I immediately start humming so it doesn’t look like I was singing. It’s what makes me hesitant to use a hands-free cell phone device so that I don’t look like I just left a nurse lying unconscious in the middle of the hallway at Belleview. It’s what makes me nervous to accidentally lock gazes with another driver, because I don’t want them to think I was staring, even though I totally was.

One evening, as I was driving home to my apartment after a particularly exhausting day, I stopped at a stoplight and noticed a beautiful full moon off to my right. It was amazing: huge, low on the horizon, and bright orange. I leaned forward in my seat to get a better view of it through the windows of the car parked next to me. I was so taken with the sight that I didn’t even notice that the driver of the car whose windows I was looking through was looking sideways at me, confused. To him, it looked as though I were staring very intently at him, with a faint smile on my face. Of course, the driver was a teenage boy, with lots of teenage boy friends in the car with him, and by the time I turned my gaze back to the stoplight in front of me, they were all quite interested in getting my attention again. At first I was confused about why they were honking and waving at me, until I realized that I inadvertently started the whole thing. Luckily, it was dark, so they didn’t see that my face had turned beet red as I stared straight ahead and peeled off when the light finally turned green. I wish I had the courage to do something very clever and sexy before I drove off, but then I would have been paranoid that they would follow me home. I’m gutless.

Anyway, the next time you are sitting at a stoplight, picking your nose, take a look at the rearview mirror of the car in front you. The girl in the sunglasses? That’s me, and I saw that.

The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

What follows is a brief account of what is going on in my life at the moment, which can be categorized into three succinct categories:

The Good:

• House is back from the baseball hiatus, which makes me happy. It is on Fox, Tuesdays at 9:00/8:00 Central. Do yourself a favor and watch.


• My best friend just visited me, whom I hadn't seen in over a year. We had a gloriously relaxing time of eating out, wining in, and vegging out.


• The freelance business is going well. My clients are patient and kind, and my work is accumulating. As is the pay.


• I think I may have just gained 11 new pen pals. Honest-to-god, handwritten letter pen pals. Fun!

The Bad:

• I put all my clothes (and soap) into the laundry machine and went off to be productive elsewhere. I forgot to turn on the machine. Dammit.


• On Halloween, I got a nasty case of food poisoning, courtesy of the Great Wall's excellent health standards for their Chinese take-out.


• Everyone around me is getting married, engaged, or moving in with their significant other. I am trying to feel sexily single. It's not working.


• No one leaves me comments on my blog anymore, so I have no idea if anyone actually reads it. My guess is no.

The Ugly:

• My cat, who has always been very good at keeping everything inside her body that is supposed to be, has recently developed the habit of throwing up her cat food. Perhaps she went to the Great Wall, too.


• Someone showed me this today. Ha! I totally just gave you a heart attack, didn't I?