I quit every game I play.

1) ...am ill.

2) ...worked this weekend, when all I wanted to do was go home and hang out with my family('s dogs).

3) ...have realized that I like exactly one thing about my job: my favorite coworker, with whom I want to settle down and have babies. (Only without the babies.)

4) ...am completely regressing by posting in this livejournal. (Which, per The Blog Readability Test is of a lofty junior-high reading level.)

5) ...have discovered the amazing restorative powers of Incredible Troves of Fabulous Links That Must Be Shared, even when all seems dank, dark, and dreadful. Witness:

• a fabulous article about the repackaging of YA novels, which pleased both my inner ten-year-old, Sweet-Valley-High-loving self and the 31-year-old publishing professional that I currently am.


• an exploration of the naughty thrill of V.C. Andrews, as exemplified by my favorite of her books—My Sweet Audrina.


• a brilliant article about the never-ending nostalgic wonder that is the early- to mid-80s oeuvre of John Hughes.


• look, it's my life!

(Links courtesy of Pop Culture Junk Mail, just FYI.)

Did I mention that I think it's lame they broke icanhascheezburger.com up into cat and dog editions? No, I suppose I didn't. But I do.

I never thought it would happen to me.

Nearly all of my working life has been spent in front of a computer, but never once did this glut of word processing-typesetting-correcting text affect my time off the clock. "After a whole day at work, I'm just sick of computers" was something other people said, ones I felt a little bad for. After all, where else is the whole world accessible at the click of a button? Where else can I buy anything I could possibly want to have, see anything I could possibly want to see, and learn anything I could possibly want to learn? In our day and age, computers are nothing short of portals to some of the best things in life: companionship and information and commentary.

For the past few months, though, the thought of turning on my handy little Powerbook after work just hasn't seemed so attractive. I used to check my friends list approximately 8,000 times a day, even if I never commented. I used to read movie reviews and shop for books and type more words into AIM than I would say aloud in any given week. And there was always some new fanfic to read, or the promise of new wonders to be found with just a bit more browsing on checkmated.com.

But now the bloom is off the rose: I'm months behind on my friends list, I find AIM repellent, and I don't really have much of anything to say here.

Whoever would have thought this font of useless words would dry up?

It's not that there's some boy that suddenly takes up all my time, or that I find Internet access hard to come by on the carny circuit, which I've joined as a fire eater. I'm still the same suburban, middle-class girl I always was. It's just that I'm out of the habit of packaging up moments of my life for general consumption, or even twisting the day-to-day drag into the magical world of wish-fulfilling fiction.

Instead, I read books. (Fifty-five so far this year--more than all of 2006!) I watch TV. I cook (kind of). Sometimes I even go out to see horror movies or drive to Manchester for author events at Northshire, considered to be one of the greatest bookstores in the country.

I don't think about things I used to think about, which is maybe for the better or maybe for the worse. Is an end to seemingly neverending navel-gazing and obsessive self-reflection something I should celebrate, or mourn?

I'm far, far too tired for any sort of eloquence here, but I have to get some Harry Potter love off my chest, ( lest it suffocate me. )

Over the past few days it's become abundantly clear that avoiding all my usual haunts is the only way to stay pristine and unspoiled until the Deathly Hallows fairy visits. I sure can't go to ohnotheydidn't, or even read my friends list. It's not that I don't trust you—it's more that I don't trust me. If you post a link to the leaked pages, I will click on it, just like I click on every single NSFW link I come across, no matter how gross or unsettling it may promise to be. If you read the book and write about it, I will read what you have to say, whether you've politely posted a spoiler alert or not. I don't even dare to visit icanhascheezburger, because I can already imagine the wank explosion caused by the first "i'm in ur castle....resurrecting ur headmaster" post.

So instead of getting all worked up about the possibility of someone (i.e., me) slipping, I'm just spending some quality time in waters less dangerous than good ol' livejournal, such as:

• Design*Sponge. Although there's no argument that the American editions of the Harry Potter books are lookers, they're not quite design-blog ready. You'll find no boy wizard love at this site, but you will find photos of all that's fabulous, from furniture and housewares to stationary and art you can actually afford.


• TasteSpotting. While on my last diet, I discovered that looking at sexy pictures of food is almost as good as eating it. Enter TasteSpotting, a clearinghouse of timely foodie links, all of which come with big, beautiful photos that will make you want to lick your monitor. As long as nobody bakes a Harry Potter cake with spoilers spelled out in fondant, you're totally safe here.


• Shorpy: The 100-Year-Old Photo Blog. A hundred years ago, they didn't even know who Harry Potter was! How much safer can you get than this site devoted to historical pictures and frequented by the Internet's equivalent of NPR listeners--people who are safe, thoughtful, and just a little dull.


• StephenieMeyer.com. Are author-approved quotes from a forthcoming book the Splenda of spoilers--delicious, yet consequence free? Find out for yourself on the website of Stephenie Meyer, author of the Twilight books, a series almost Harry Potter-y in its wonderfulness.


If you're trying to stay spoiler free too, may the force be with you. You'll need it.

( Cut for spoilery movie talk. )

So Hanson on Howard Stern? Foul mouthed and tasteless and, most importantly, the best Hanson interview since Taylor and Isaac outed Zac by pulling handful after handful of candy bars out of his pants pockets back in 1997.

Howard Stern is totally taking them to task about getting married as infants, just like their mother should have. And, even in spite of Zac singing lead, the two songs they've covered sound great. Color me shocked but I'm actually excited about hearing the new album, for the first time ever.

Listening to this is like reading a crasser version of Boy Harlot. Only, you know, I didn't have to write half of it.

Thanks to carpel tunnel syndrome, that scourge of the modern world, I've been sleeping in a wrist brace for about a month now. It's black and synthetic and strappy, and looks like a leftover piece of Janet Jackson's wardrobe from the Scream video. It's not the most comfortable thing I've worn to bed, but it pays off in the long run: once upon a time, I could barely brush my teeth in the morning without my entire hand going completely, burningly numb. Opening the mayonnaise jar was a nightmare, and combing my hair was iffy.

Word on the street is that carpel tunnel syndrome is caused by repetitive motion, which worried me. Would I have to wear the brace all the time, like a grown-up version of Joan Cusack's sad extra in Sixteen Candles? I spend practically every waking hour in front of a computer of some sort, so if typing was the enemy I was clearly about to be massacred by it. But no, said my doctor. "Mostly it's how people sleep that clauses problems," he said. "And you look like a curled-into-a-ball girl if ever I saw one."

His observation, in addition to being slightly unsettling, was totally true. So off to the pharmacy I went to purchase what will probably be the only size "Medium" I'll ever own.

That first night I must have put the brace on too tightly. I dreamed that my hand was being savaged by a deranged squirrel, and that no matter what I did it would not leave me alone. In the dream I shook my hand violently, whipping the squirrel around in blurry, squirrelly circles. But it wasn't bothered one bit until I whacked it hard against the wall of my bedroom. I mournfully looked down at its crumpled little body, but then did what any reasonable person would do when faced with an attack-squirrel: I went to the hospital to be checked for rabies.

"I don't think it broke the skin," I assured my dream doctor (who, of course, was much more younger and handsomer than my real doctor).

He examined my unmarked wrist, where the squirrel had been. "Well it must have, because this is full of teeth."

Then I woke up, only to find the brace lying pell-mell across the room.

Since then, I've woken several times to find my wrist oddly flexible and my brace missing, but never to strange dreams of rodent attacks.

It sort of kills me that I live this whole life while I'm asleep, one that I know nothing about. Sometimes I remember my dreams--big, majestic epics with casts of thousands--but usually I wake up a cranky blank slate. I know things are going on, though, because occasionally I'll hear stories about what I said while asleep.

The last time missaurora spent the weekend, I awoke on Saturday night to vague a call from the living room: "Amanda, are you okay?" It turns out that I'd been laughing, in missaurora's words, "like an evil genius. Like you could never laugh when you were awake."

Could I be spending my nights plotting world domination? All I know for sure is that I wish I'd give up sleep-talking and start sleep-writing. At this rate, it's the only way I'm ever going to write a novel.

I wrote this really long, heartfelt thing on weight loss. And then LiveJournal ate it. Go figure.

So instead all you get are my Deathly Hallows predictions, with a little help from Leaky Cauldron. Sorry.

I can remember the exact moment when I first heard of the New Kids on the Block. I was 13 years old and it was midsummer and Please Don't Go Girl was on MTV, back when they actually played videos. I was on the phone with my mother, but I hung up without one word of warning just before the second verse. I knew, immediately, that divided attention wasn't good enough.

The late 80s and early 90s had been devoid of teen idols for girls like me--sure I liked Michael Jackson and all, but the thriller video was really scary. And a Madonna poster, circa Desperately Seeking Susan, had indeed taken the place of the crucifix above my bed years before. But she was slightly suspect, rolling around in those wedding gowns and leaking an aggressive kind of sexuality that never seemed to appear in the trashy romance novels that were the sum total of my erotic experience.

So I was adrift. Until them. Until the New Kids on the Block blew into my life, leaving behind them trading cards and sheet sets and beach towels and, unexpectedly, a few listenable albums. For years their posters were the first things I saw in the morning and the last things I saw at night. I wrote dreamy Mary Sue fanfic about them long before I knew what either Mary Sue or fanfic meant, and I was sure that Joe McIntyre was destined to be my one true love. The day my father presented me with tickets to the Magic Summer Tour's stop in Portland, Maine, was probably the happiest one in my young life.

(The concert itself was just what you'd expect: backing tracks galore and Donnie Wahlberg floating above the stage in a special effects harness, all experienced from the very worst seats on the outfield of the Old Orchard Beach ball park. But the build up, the build up was the real magic: all the fodder for the imagination one could ever hope for and so much more.)

I haven't thought about the New Kids, or my ardent adoration of them, for years. When I was a sophomore in high school, the posters came down. And although I bought their final album in 1994, it was nothing more than an exercise in nostalgia. Things got in the way--the hustle and bustle of life, and eventually newer, greater loves, both real and imaginary.

But looking back, those years of NKOTB worship might have set a pattern for the rest of my life: to paraphrase Butterfly Boucher, my heart is a rubber band that keeps getting caught on things.

Even now, almost twenty years later, I still get a pleasant thrill whenever my iPod shuffles to the opening bars of Please Don't Go Girl. I'm prone to abject love, and they were built for it from the ground up, after all. There was a New Kid for every girl--the wild one, the boyish one, the responsible grownup, the health nut, and the genuinely talented one. And if you're part of my generation, I guarantee that you filled in the appropriate names to go with each archetype in that last sentence.

When missaurora inquired after my New Kids music collection the other day, it was like a revelation. I listened to I'll Be Loving You Forever for the next two hours, and when I got home from work that day, I contributed $20 to the New Kids retirement fund by purchasing from iTunes both Step by Step and their first, eponymous album.

It's funny to listen to this stuff fifteen years on, older and wiser, yet somehow still completely defenseless against the power of their sappy attempts at blue-eyed soul. Initially, Maurice Starr was obviously desperate to turn them into the Jackson Five, starring Joe as little Michael. Only Joe grew up too fast and started to kind of suck, so the plan was all shot to hell. And Jonathan Knight could not carry a tune to save his life--his songs clearly required more cleaning up than Britney Spears at her worst. To say nothing about Danny. Did he exist for any reason other than the "sexy" spoken intro to the slow songs? And how does one show one's face in public after having sung Stay with Me Baby, Donnie's misguided, semi-racist foray into reggae?

It's easy to see why I would have loved them back then, though--I grew up on my father's old Motown records and say what you will, but it's not such a big jump from Smoky Robinson to the NKOTB oeuvre. The real question is, Why do I like them now? I can't tell if it's caused by our long history together or some ghostly shadow of my love for the band, but I've got to admit that I've been enjoying the albums tremendously. They're cheesy and formula and wonderful, and listening to them feels like coming home.

I read the wikepedia entry on the band today and was excited to find a song name I didn't recognize: If You Go Away. This, I was sure, would be my chance to find some proof. As a fairly sophisticated thirty-year-old, would I like a brand new NKOTB song? Would I feel it through every inch of me, like I feel Baby I Believe In You and This One's for the Children and The Right Stuff?

It turned out that iTunes, ever the enabler, actually had the song. (And many of the old videos, might I add.) I waited with bated breath for it to download, only to recognize it immediately: It's all velvety Jordan falsetto and Joe harmony and chiming instrumentation. Me likes, but me liked in the early 90s, too.

So I have no proof. Could these New Kids songs actually be good? (Well, the later ones, anyway. Even I can't defend Popsicle--sorry.) Or am I just wildly prejudiced in their favor? I'll never know for sure, but one thing I do know is that I picked wrong back in the day. Joe grew up to be cute and all, but that Jordan! He was a Taylor-esque superstar of a boy, a slap in the face to mediocrity, powerful of voice and beautiful of form. How did I miss a gem like him? And how can it be that he's not a huge success today?

I'm obsessed with Nancy Drew right now. I never read her mystery books when I was a kid, but of course knew of her. Who doesn't? She's the grandmother of everything from Sweet Valley High to Scooby Doo, and as indelibly part of our society as Mickey Mouse and O.J. Simpson.

But I recently stumbled across the fabulous biography Girl Sleuth: Nancy Drew and the Women who Created Her, and have since been plowing through one yellow case-wrapped bon-bon after another. These books are a window into a perfect, timeless dream world, where mysteries are always fun and girls are always smartly dressed and brilliantly daring.

The big secret of the books, to those in the know, is that the original 1930s-era manuscripts were completely re-written in the late 50s, making them PC and ramping up their already frenzied pacing. Also, the re-writing turned Nancy into something of a sanctimonious priss.

Nowadays, Nancy lets grownups speak first and asks rather than demands, which are pretty annoying character traits when you consider what a firebrand she used to be, back in the good old days.

I'm only about 50 pages into the first original Nancy Drew book, but have found it as different from the revised edition as night is from day. Its Nancy is saucy, its plot logical, and its supporting characters are actually worth the paper they're printed on. The redacted book, condensed and prettied up, featured an impoverished girl whose biggest tragedy was not being able to afford singing lessons. In the original version, this same girl was worried about how she would feed herself come winter. It gives the story different heft, knowing that Nancy is dead-set on finding a missing will both to assuage her curiosity and to help a friend out of a desperate plight. (To borrow a pleasantly hyperbolic phrase from the books themselves.) The new book's lessons with Signor Mascagni just don't cut it when it comes to motivation.

As a publishing geek, it's interesting (terrifying?) to see the injuries editors are capable of inflicting. It's easy to follow the exact thought process involved in the changes: they take Nancy completely out of time and fill in every blank as ham-handedly as possible. In the original book, Nancy happened to meet the aforementioned poor girl on a day when she has baked a cake. In the new book, the editor obviously thought that a poor person would only make a cake for good reason--and voila, instant birthday party.

That being said, not all the edits were bad. Nancy started off as 16 years old, which, to modern ears, sounds awfully young for tooling around all alone in her blue roadster and staying out overnight searching for clues. 18 is an age that fits her better--she's mostly grown up and independent but still sometimes needs adult intervention and guidance. (Plus there's the little trifle of school. The truant officer would be all over old Nancy, who, at 16, apparently never had a day of formal education in her life.)

Nancy's relationship with the Drews' housekeeper was another rough spot in the old books. As American society has become increasingly classless, their chilly employer-employee relationship seems bizarre and a bit offensive. New school Hannah Gruen truly loves Nancy--and vice versa--which provides the stories a warm heart that they originally lacked.

And it goes without saying that I'm all for the disappearance of the "ignorant darkies" and the evil "oriental" types that dotted the old books. Once upon a time, racism really was part of the wallpaper, so widely accepted that it was taken for granted. But it's a slippery slope: just how long will it take for George to be rewritten as a lesbian? As an adult reader, I'm grateful for a chance to read the original text. I'm not so sure the ten-year-olds of the world are quite ready for it, though.

Overall, the Nancy Drew stories stand up in spite of the tinkering. Written only twenty-five years after the poky, old-fashioned Anne of Green Gables series, the original Nancy books were fleet-footed and bright, and are just as slickly lovable as ever in our era of cell phones and the Internet.

And the edited versions? If you cut wonderful in half, you still end up with something pretty great.

***

(I'm sure everyone in the world is all abuzz about this, but I feel the need to chime in anyway. Put that thing away before you blind someone, boy.)

It just occurred to me that at this exact second I am, for the first time ever, missing the first show of a Hanson "tour" on North American soil. Mostly, I don't care. I've been to the Starland Ballroom; I've eaten at the ghetto little pizza place down the road and laughed at the teenies lined up outside the venue, looking hot enough for fainting at one show, cold enough for frostbite at another.

I'm through with it in the same way I always knew I would be, someday. I've been through it before, after all--the planning, the dreaming, the adoring from afar. In 1990 I thought I'd never make it through a day without listening to Hangin' Tough, but by 1994 it was just another forgotten cassette cluttering up my nightstand. Getting over a band is a little like a chick breaking out of its egg, I guess: for the longest time it seems impossible. But then, one day, it happens seamlessly, and without a second thought. Just as nature intended.

I won't deny that this makes me a little sad. There isn't a single moment in my life I remember as vividly as watching Hanson take the stage at a tiny promo concert in Groton, Connecticut almost seven years ago. That day I thought I would dissolve of happiness, that I would shatter into a thousand joyously trilling pieces, and that I would most certainly never, ever be the same again.

And maybe I'm not. Because of Hanson I've seen more of America than practically everyone I know, even if what I saw mostly revolved around one endless freeway after another, and a sea of faceless suburban tract malls that could have been in New Jersey just as easily as they could have been in Oklahoma. I've met people from around the world, and done things nobody would have imagined I would do, from write what pretty much amounts to a novel to travel across the country to love something so completely, so indelibly, that I've been changed by it forever.

In a way, it must be lovely to be a hardline evangelical Christian. To really and truly believe that God not only cares for you, but is a participant in your every action and every thought. To know that you are completely, sublimely, correct in your every belief, and that everyone else in the world is completely, utterly wrong in theirs. That you either love Jesus, or you don't. And that's all that matters.

To these people, the world isn't a place of flesh, but one of spirit, where God himself will fight off the devil to ensure that the Powerpoint presentation runs smoothly at Jesus Camp. Everything not prayed over by a believer—like all those Powerpoint presentations created by infidels about things like driver safety, or the Civil War, or God forbid [literally], global warming--might just go to hell. Because that's where their makers are headed eventually, after all.

The children in the religious summer-camp documentary Jesus Camp
look suspiciously like Hansons. They have rat tails (in 2006!), are homeschooled, and regularly wear God-themed t-shirts. Also, they're crazy. Not like...a little crazy. Like "gimme the Kool-aid" crazy. They speak in tongues and pray to a life-sized cutout of George W. and genuinely believe the devil is kicking around in the world, convincing Britney Spears to leave the house without panties and Islamic people, well, to be Islamic people.

Also, of course, there's Harry Potter hatred in the movie. The cult-leader who runs the camp screams out that in the old testament, Harry Potter would not be allowed to live. The cavernous room full of tweens nods fervently. Later, they pray for God to bring an end to abortion in America. The children sob, scream, and plead with fiery eyes for God to step in, for him to make the world what they believe it should be, in spite of what anyone else might think or need.

Which, to a not-particularly God-fearing blasphemer like myself, sounds a heck of a lot like magic. Like the sorcery they're so against--but somehow God, this mysterious, invisible power more present in their lives than I am in mine, is exempt from the rules.

At one point, I thought I might not hate these people too much. "How would you feel if you went to a school that told you 'creationism is stupid'?" asked a middle-American mother while homeschooling her son from a textbook called Using Physical Science to Explore Creation. "I'd hate it," the son replied. "And if they said, 'evolution is stupid'? You'd love it, right?" For two beats, I thought she was making a point about tolerance. About the multiplicity of viewpoints in the world, and how we should treat other people how we ourselves want to be treated.

But she wasn't. She was imagining a perfect world, one in which her vision of right was king of the hill. Where evolution would be a universally reviled concept, verboten in schools, and where her Church and the American State would be one and the same.

Two Netflix movies arrived in my mailbox today, this one and the blood-soaked thriller The Descent. I haven't watched the latter, but I can tell you right now which one is scarier.

What ugly, horrible hatred these people are breeding. And what pig-headed, closed-minded, self-righteous little monsters they're raising.

So even though I've watched approximately thirteen hours of The Office over the past four days, the wit doesn't seem to be rubbing off.

While discussing trips to the doctor at lunch today, one of my coworkers said "I'm always afraid I'll go and they'll tell me I have six months to live."

I think I nodded in response. What I should have done only occurred to me hours later: If I was Pam Beesly, I would have said in that lovely, deadpan monotone of hers: "I think that would take more than one visit."

***

I got an envelope from the State of Vermont today. My first thought, of course, was, Oh shit. I'm totally being audited, and will therefore have to kill myself, as there's no way my financial record keeping* could stand up to that kind of scrutiny. This means that I'm a glass half-empty sort of girl. If I were a glass half-full sort of girl, I might have guessed what it actually contained--a letter stating that my 2004 state tax refund check of $174.00 had never been cashed.

I have no recollection of this event--or lack thereof. Nonetheless, definitely glass half-full territory.

(Provided, of course, that it's not actually a glitch that will eventually be resolved, requiring me to pay the state $174.00. And be audited.)

* Financial record keeping:
--Shove bills, receipts, and correspondence of a financial nature into desk
--Repeat
--When desk is full, discard bills, receipts, and correspondence of a financial nature
--Repeat

***

This whole posting amusing links thing is addictive. Voila.

How Much Is Inside. Ever wondered just how many uses there are in a Sharpie? Or how much creamy white goodness is in a bag of double-stuff Oreos? Or whether you could freshen your gold-plated watch with a bottle of Goldschlager? Well, the creators of this website have, bless their souls.

Wikipedia's List of Unusual Deaths. So incredibly up to date, it even includes that poor woman who died trying to win a Nintendo wii. Nice work, Wikifolk, nice work.

Geogreeting. What did people do before the Internet? Like...work and lead productive lives or something? How incredibly dull that must have been for them.

Apparently there's an entire movement on livejournal consisting of humiliating personal care anecdotes.

Chreebomb Has Technical Difficulties with Her Home Remedy

Watch4whales Realizes That Waxing Is Bad

Who knew?

(Beware TMI and casual use of shockingly naughty terminology in the above links, ladies.)

And by the by, I'm so laughing with these girls, not at them--I once tried to wax my own 'stache and ended up having to stay home from work for two days while the wounds healed =X

(Oh my god. Did I really just reveal that in a semi-public forum??)

A short and sweet meme stolen from zappo.


Four jobs I have had:
--Cashier at Kaybee Toys. This lasted for all of one shift, as my till was $2.00 off at the end of the day. Because the store was run by my cousin, I was demoted to shelf-straightening rather than being fired as company policy dictated.
--Per diem in the kitchen of the hospital where I was born. One of the many reasons why I went to college: A miserable, hot, thankless job with terrible hours.
--Editorial assistant. My first post-graduation job was one big experience-bomb. Understaffed and overworked, I held practically every position in the editorial department at one time or another.
--Production editor. Bigger title, bigger paycheck, less work. Who could ask for anything more wonderful than that?


Four Movies I have watched over and over:
--Circle of Friends. I'm defenseless against this movie: fat girl gets handsome boy, and, after a few tribulations, lives happily ever after. (Even if they did bring Minnie Driver over from the other team to play said fat girl.)
--Ever After. I've never loved Drew Barrymore more than in this silly trifle of a movie, horrible accent be damned. A sweet Cinderella story for the ages.
--Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Far and away my favorite of the Harry Potter movies, this is the dark, powerful adaptation all the books deserve.
--The Anne of Green Gables miniseries. Who am I to argue with (or change the channel on) perfection?

Four places I have lived: My mother's house. An apartment down the street from my mother's house. Burlington, Vermont. North Clarendeon, Vermont.

Four tv shows I like to watch:
--Heroes. Although I think Hiro is slightly overrated, I love this X-Men meets Lost tale of regular people with supernatural powers.
--Ugly Betty. A kitchy classic in the making, this underdog-loving series is completely different from everything else on TV,
--Bones. I didn't buy David Boreanez as a people person for many an episode, but the sizzling chemistry and witty banter kept me coming back for more.
--The Office. I avoided this show for a long time, worried it would strike to close to my cubicle, but it turns out it's just as great and funny as everybody's been saying all along. (Pam and Jim TLF!)

Four places I have been on vacation: Aruba, Key West, Paris, and Los Angeles.

Four of my favorite foods: My mother's ginormous meatballs (informally known as guinea pigs in light of their shape); alfredo dipping sauce and breadsticks from the Olive Garden; my dad's meatloaf; Sal's pesto garlic bread.

Four places I would rather be right now: On my dad's couch with a lapful of basset hound and an eyeful of flatscreen; at the exciting-sounding Georgia Aquarium (even if their whale sharks just died); on the biggest roller coaster at Dollywood; in the louvre, with my own private guide (preferable of the young, hot variety).

I've totally blown my 53-books-a-year vow for 2007 by starting off with London: The Novel by Edward Rutherfurd, which is not so much a brick of a book as it is a cinderblock. Weighing in at 1,189 pages, it's the longest thing I've read voluntarily since the heady junior-high days of my obsession with Stephen King's The Stand.

It follows six individual family lines (thoughtfully identified both by such genetic mutations as webbed fingers and shocks of white hair) throughout London's history, from its geological birth right up to the modern day. And as I flip back to the beginning of the book every few pages to peer at the ridiculously involved family trees included there, it occurs to me that the way I'm living my life is making me a dead end.

I'm thirty years old and quite happily single; the odds of me conceiving are just a bit lower than the odds of me winning the Kentucky Derby, barefoot. So what does this mean? That humanity will continue forever with nothing of me in it. That when I die, the only things I'll be leaving behind are a body too tubby for donation to science and more books than currently reside in my town's library.

In a way, this seems like a tragedy. It's opting out of world history, getting out of the gene pool and cutting the threads that bind past, present, and unimaginable future.

In London (the novel), certain personality traits follow the family lines just as much as physical abnormalities: You know exactly what's going to happen when a character named Silversleeves or Bull or Doggett shows up. In the real world I'm not sure I believe that personality is so predefined, even taking into account the influences of nature and nurture. You and I ultimately define who and what we are, just as much as our bodies and our histories do.

Because I find heaven and the survival of the immortal soul so hard to buy, death seems like an incredibly final thing. And, if nothing else, children are a biological remnant of an existence that probably won't be marked by anything more notable.

Having said that, hanging out with a friend with a year-old child this weekend was a peek into the mouth of the beast. When you have a baby, your entire life and everything in it is forfeit for at least the next few years (or 18 or 19, to be a pessimist)--you're so busy feeding them and cleaning them and making sure they don't die that you barely have time to live.

On top of this, the thought of childbearing seems completely abstract, even at my age, like something meant for older, more responsible and established people.

But is not doing so worth the price of some small part of me--eye color or height or penchant for sniffing books--living forever?

In the world of pop culture, my coworkers are blind fieldmice. They're dimly aware of the greater culture around them--they feel its weight, its power--but they can't seem to understand its shape or meaning. Walking into a lunch conversation about American Idol embarked upon by two people who've seen an accumulated five minutes of the show between them, I was asked "Doesn't it make you fear for your species that these people are being held up as role models?"

But a real consumer of popular culture knows that this isn't the issue at all. The audition weeks of American Idol make me fear for my species, but for an entirely different reason: They're the grownup equivalent of getting down on hands and knees behind the special ed kid about to be shoved on the playground. Last night's two-hour episode literally featured three decent singers. And what did they do with the rest of the show? They humiliated each and every comer, employing the holy trinity of modern America: snark, eye-rolls, and egotism. Even Jewel--who I've always loathed as a musician, but somehow managed to respect as a human being--didn't hesitate to go for the sad, middle-American jugular every chance she got.

I assured my coworkers that the show will eventually get down to business; it will include likeable people who actually have pleasant voices. But for now, it's nothing more than an in-joke calculated to make the home viewer feel smart. "Look at that stupid fat girl with the raccoon eyeliner. She says she's watched every single episode of American Idol, so why can't she see she doesn't have a chance in hell at anything but a sound trouncing?"

Mean-spirited and smirkingly self-satisfied, the early episodes of Idol are content to look for the freak, for the poorly educated, for the sucker. Sure, there's the occasional contestant with talent. And sometimes there's a contestant who just doesn't care--who's out for the lark of getting on TV, even if they have to wear a goofy costume and warble a painful rendition of Somewhere Over the Rainbow to do it. But most of the time, it shows people who genuinely think they have a shot, who earnestly believe that, in spite of all evidence to the contrary,they can sing.

Sure, I've spent half my career laughing at ridiculous manuscript submissions about the confluence of Kabbalah and Baseball (entitled Ka-baseball-ah, of course), sent in on twenty sheets of rainbow stationary purchased at Kmart. Sure, I love the snark. But American Idol is taking it to a whole new level, one where human beings are nothing but a source of amusement barely more sophisticated than Roman gladiatorial contests.

I love you, Simon Cowell, you of the sharp British accent, clever commentary, and skintight black t-shirts. But I also hate you, Simon Cowell, you of the disdainful sneer, of the dismissive hand wave, and of the dark, Ayn Rand-ish future of mankind, when success at the brutal expense of another is a matter of course.

God, do I love the red carpet: the dresses, the jewelry, the glitz. I'm no fashion girl and haven't worn a dress in...well...forever, but this time of year I'm all about vintage Chanel and Fred Leighton and those cool little mirrored purses everyone's carrying on their way into Golden Globes. I won't be watching the award show itself, but I most certainly will be reading deliciously catty Worst and Best Dressed lists for weeks to come. Award season is so one long Superbowl for girls.

Also on the pop culture front, I now know exactly how all those "but he looks like a girl" Hanson detractors felt in 1997. Check out the lead singer of the German boyband Tokio Hotel. The real shocker, come right down to it, is that he's human, say nothing about a boy: He's an anime character, creepily reborn into something resembling flesh. I'm so glad I'm not German. First David Hasselhoff, and now this.

To wrap up this extremely short and pointless post, does anyone know what that song is called--the high pitch-y one with a guy singing about putting the pedal down and believing we're free or something of the like? And it's not by Hillary Duff, FYI. ;)
[Edit: Thanks to missaurora, here's Mat Kearney, Nothing Left to Lose.]

Oh, and proof of the end of an era: There's totally a new Hanson CD coming out in a few months, and I don't even care. Who knew such a thing was possible?

Things I Wish to Marry
(an abbreviated list):

• My new generation 5.5 iPod. When I put this particular item on my Christmas list, I felt a little icky: I already had an iPod that was trucking bravely along, even after four years of use and abuse. So its battery life was essentially nil. So I couldn't play the new-fangled iPod games on it (or watch videos or look at pictures or see anything in color). So I could barely read the screen, what with the oldschool backlight being something of a joke. But I now realize that second generation iPods are Neanderthals to fifth generation's homo sapiens: my new iPod is bright and shiny and sexy and clever in ways my old iPod never imagined. Scrolling is a snap with the new automatic alphabet pop-up; the screen is so bright I could read it from the moon; and the album art is a crisp and beautiful addition to my aural experience. Plus, it allows this Mac user to finally play Bejeweled, the single greatest time-waster in the history of mankind and one of the saddest losses in my platform switch.



• The office space heater I finally scored. The only difference between a meat locker and the big, cavernous office shared by my editorial coworkers is a few sides of ambiance-giving beef .



• Liquid Treat. From crazy jewelry to bizarre art installations to gourmet bacon-of-the-month clubs (all mouthwateringly well designed to boot), Liquid Treat is the best source for Friday morning procrastinating. Every week, it presents a mixed bag of things to ogle, admire, and buy.
  
  
• Cedric Diggory. Although an underdeveloped blip on the radar in the Harry Potter series, at least one fanfic has managed to bring Credric to glorious, Technicolor life (even if it does insist on calling him "Ced"). With lovely writing, spot-on characterizations, and a leisurely unfolding plot that follows and augments that of book five, Finding Himself is the filet mignon of fanfic. And, fittingly, its Cedric Diggory is toothsome enough to eat.



( Oh, and the last three books of the year. )

( And part deux starts off on a frivolous foot! (Surprise, surprise.) )