“I don’t know why we are here, but I’m pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves.”
—Ludwig Wittgenstein

"You happen to pull this shit while I'm in a transitional period."

Your favorite movies. In 30 seconds. Reenacted by bunnies.

Check out Jaws - they just nail Richard Dreyfuss. Aliens and Star Wars are also nicely done. Princess Leia bunny ears! My favorites are the ones where the bunnies sing - the first few seconds of Highlander theme will make you mess your pants.

If you like that, check out the outtakes from recording the James Bond themes in bunny sound.

Which Grey's Anatomy character are you?

Now here’s a quiz I can get into.

Wanted to be:

Quiz thinks I am:

Ok, if you've seen the show you know this is highly inaccurate. I am not an insensitive career-driven commitment phobe. And don't you dare say I am or I will take you DOWN!

Ok, now you take it, and email your results to me so I can tell The Internet.

Our parents never had these problems.

Despite the fact that I haven't had an active profile on Match.com for several months, I continue to get almost daily email solicitations from them. They also send me the weekly report of "My Matches," people they think I'm likely to take my pants of for, or eventually procreate with. It kind of concerns me because JFJ is presumably getting these emails, too, since I originally met him on Match (albeit as a running buddy, but the point is that my boyfriend gets delivered to his email, on a regular basis, profiles of single women who live nearby and are looking for a man!). As I pondered this, it occurred to me that the Match former-member email marketing might work a little better if they actually geared the emails more towards our demographic. Emails with subject lines like, "Has she stopped putting out already? Upgrade to one of these!"

Today, a Match email invited me to take a test that started by identifying the relative lengths of my fingers:


The email promised that, "Using engaging questions like this, we determine your personality type and then provide you your most compatible matches." Wow, I'm really impressed that Match takes such a studied approach to pairing people up. Am I more or less likely to take my pants off for someone whose index finger is roughly the same length as their ring finger?

When I joined Match, my hand actually looked like this:

What do you think that says about my personality?

A little more than a vacation snapshot.

I'm on the last audio CD of The Places In Between, Rory Stewart's account of his 2002 walk across Afghanistan. Towards the end of his journey he meets a French photographer named Didier Lefevre, and his work is so intriguing I thought I should share it.

Monday Helpful Chick Tips Day

JNCis a f*cking rockstar when is comes to useful information (and switching jobs - SNAP!).

Useful tidbit numero uno: Clean out your closet and get rid of clothes you don't wear -- turn all your hangers in the opposite direction. In a year, or six months [depending on seasonality] if the hanger is still the same, throw out the garment b/c you haven't worn the item and it's time to get rid of it.*

Useful tip numero dos: The no-period pill. According to the New York Times, this is highly controversial. Really? For most women I know, your period is just a monthly "heads up" that no little swimmers have slipped past the goalie. The article states that "Doctors say they know of no medical reason women taking birth control pills need to have a period." Besides just a handy reminder that you're not knocked up, is there some non-health related reason to have a period? I don't know many women who "celebrate the period as a spiritual or natural process." It seems like most modern women are content to let periods be a thing of the past, so we can get back to slowly but surely taking over most sports, professions and real estate.

You can learn all about this at the site fewerperiods.com, which loses points for pretending to be a neutral provider of information when it is, in fact, the manufacturer's own site.

Curious to get your thoughts, gal pals. Is having a period part of the mystery and essence of womanhood? Or is that hippie bullsh*t?

*This was actually on Oprah but JNC vets Oprah and passes the good tips on to me.

One of my colleagues is taking her four year-old to Disneyland and announced her intention to write her cell phone number of the kid’s arm in sharpie, to aid in resolution if they were separated. Seems like a good idea.

Oddly, it reminded me of something I witnessed a few months ago at the Ross in Capitola. Now, if you’ve been to a Ross, you know that it’s a great place to go if you’re on the fence about sterilization because the amount of screaming, unsupervised children is just astonishing. Everytime I leave here I find myself on my hands and knees, begging strangers, "tie my tubes, please... someone... tie my tubes..." But Ross sometimes has fun, cheap shoes and when this drama began to unfold I was knee-deep in a pile of size 8’s, trying to find the other half of a pair of NineWest black slingbacks with white stitching. Rounded toe. Little ankle strap. $24.99. Lovely.

The music at Ross is purposefully annoying so you will buy something quick and get the hell out, just to avoid hearing Right Here Waiting one more time. Just as my ears were about to start bleeding from Up Where We Belong the loudspeaker crackled:

“Ross shoppers, your attention please. There is a little girl at the front counter who is missing her mom. She is waiting at the front counter for you.”

A couple minutes later…

“Attention, please. There is a little girl at the front counter who is lost. She has brown hair and is wearing a white shirt and red pants.” There is a pause, some muffled sounds and a different voice repeats the message in Spanish.

About five minutes pass. I find the other slingback but it won’t fit over the huge bunion on my right foot. I am cursing my genetic history in my head when I hear another announcement:

“There is a missing child at the front desk. Please look around and make sure your kids are with you. The parent of this child needs to come to the front of the store and collect your child immediately.”

Customers in the store start looking at each other and raising their eyebrows. Who hears a description of their kid called over the loudspeaker and doesn’t immediately run over? The woman next to me shakes her head, “People these days…” she mutters. I nod. She looks at me sharply, “It’s not your kid, is it?” I shake my head “no” vehemently. Later I will come up with the phrase, Bitch, does it look like this body has had a baby? Tragically I have not yet had occasion to use it.

A few more minutes go by before there is another announcement. This is a different voice, older and... pissed.

“There is a little girl here at the front counter who is lost. She will not tell us her name. She is very scared and if her mom is here you need to come get her right now. If you do not come get your child we will have to call the police.”

At this point everybody’s looking towards the front of the store. Sure enough, there’s a little girl up there. She has long brown hair and she’s probably about 4. She has some kind of toy with her which is the focus of her attention. She seems more nonchalant than scared. It looks like a couple of the employees are asking her questions but she just kind of looks at them. She ain’t talking. I know I’m not buying anything but I’m not going to leave while all this drama is playing out. I sidle over to sunglasses and wait to see what happens next.

“Attention, please. If know the little girl in the red pants and white shirt, you need to come get her, right now. This is not a babysitting service and we will call the police.”

I kept expecting someone to burst into the store hysterically: There you are! But no one does.

The little girl’s expression does not change as the announcements come over the loudspeaker. She continues to look down. Does she understand what's going on? I see a mom with a couple small kids with her prodding the little girl for her name but she doesn’t respond. The concerned mother’s kids hang back quietly, staring at the little girl. Their expressions are more wary than confused.

Every time the door opens the growing crowd surrounding the girl looks over, but no one who comes in seems to be missing a child. We know what we expect to see. We already have the resolution in our minds. A woman runs in, face streaked with tears. She’ll grab the little girl, the panic over, the relief visibly washing over her. Everyone will be relieved, the story will come out: She ran into the store while I wasn’t looking... I turned my back, just for a second... her brother was supposed to watch her…

Eventually I decide that maybe I’ve done enough rubbernecking of human tragedy for the day. There's no useful role for me here. I cast a glance towards the little girl as I leave. The woman whose appearance matches the old and pissed voice on the loudspeaker is on the phone, gesticulating angrily.

As I walk to my car the horror of the situation starts to hit home and a cold feeling spreads through my gut. What if it’s not just some kind of horrible mix-up? What if her mom really does just leave her kid in a store and go off on her own? What if she’s been abandoned? It occurs to me I don’t really know what would happen to this little girl.

As I drive out of the parking lot I see a Capitola police car slowly pull to stop outside the store. I don't know what happened after that.

My morning

8:03am -- Leave house.

8:14am -- Stop at Noah's, pick up bagels for the office and coffee for me.

8:22am -- Pick up ibuprofen at drugstore. Discuss relative merits of store brand versus Advil with stranger.

8:37am -- Arrive at work, arrange bagels in break room, chat with colleagues.

8:46am: -- Drop by boss's office, discuss meetings planned for the day.

9:02am -- Say hi to new temporary employee. Encourage her to have a bagel.

9:22am -- Look down and discover fly is unzipped and displaying red underwear to probably most of the people I've run into this morning.

Can I just point out how quickly it was translated into French?

I've been hearing a lot about the new book The No Asshole Rule by Robert Sutton. The book is about creating a work environment in which people with severally bad attitudes (in other words, jerks) are not allowed. From what I've read so far, by "not allowed" Sutton means they are fired or, better yet, not hired in the first place. I think this sounded like a great idea until I saw an online quiz that you can take to determine whether you are the asshole. It never occurred to me that it might be me until I had the opportunity to test it. As you might imagine, an online quiz doesn't really provide enough depth to root out assholism without asking pretty obvious questions. Still, it's a good tool to identify negative behavior - even if it's my own!

Are you an asshole? Take the test and find out.

How much mucus can the human body produce?

There wad no swibbing yesterday. I dink I have a cowd from my long, wet wide. Lots of node-blowing. Nostrils hurt.

That sloshing sound is coming from my shoes.

So I just completed my weekly Saturday ride with the tri team and I'm pleased to report that I'm still alive. Every time I leave for a ride I look around at my place one last time, half convinced it's the last time I'll ever see it. Since the forecast was for rain, I was more sure than ever that I was about to die in a gruesome accident. But I stoically accepted my fate and headed out the door.

This was the first ride in the rain. Normally rides are cancelled if it's raining but lucky us the rain didn't start until we were already on the road. We were riding up at UCSC and just got drenched. At least the views were great and it seems like people driving on campus are more used to cyclists than just on the roads around town.

Scary moment of the day: We stopped near the top of a hill and one of the other new riders asked the leader if he had any tips for riding in the rain before we headed downhill.

"Uh, yeah," he said, "Remember that the roads are really slick... and, uh, that your brakes don't work. Okay, let's go!"

Um, what? But we were already on the road, and had no choice but to just take it easy. As cold and wet as we were, a ride in a warm ambulance didn't sound that bad. At our next stop we had a group discussion about whether to keep going or cut the ride short. It was a brief discussion. We all got back safe and sound (and cold and wet), but triumphant.

Tomorrow is the swim workout where I will finally conquer the flip turns! Or drown. But hopefully conquer.

Eva Evermore

What’s your Bond Girl name?

Missed Conncection Comics

Likee? There's a whole book of 'em coming out.

Corner Store Haiku

NO ID
NO BEER
NO ARGUMENT
STILL FRIENDS

From the sign next to the register at the scruffy Days Market, with a cartoon below of two people smiling and shaking hands.

here's a poem for ya.

Dulles Access Road
by Stephen Burt

Seen from the paid-for
taxicab on the way
to the paid-for flight,

this is our preparation for
the world, which insists
on employment, which insists,

if you want adults
to take you seriously,
that you have to make somebody

pay. We are untrained
to manage even the pace
at which we live. Slow down at the last red light,

its monochrome certainty ordinary
for it, but never for us,
though it swings on wires nearly within human reach;

behind it, as they do
almost every day at this hour,
impregnable metal containers dissolve in the sky.

Thanks, Slate.

You mess with one Ya Ya, you mess with 'em all!

Oodles latest soccer shenanigans make for a good read. I prefer her soccer posts about getting into fights with buff soccer lesbians on the field. She's normally a very level-headed person, except when someone fouls her on the field and then she's ready to Throw Down.

Anyway this post made me feel like someone just cut me off in traffic. There's an initial wave of rage but then you realize that it's not worth doing anything stupid over because you'll just end up making things worse. Then you sort of drift off into this fantasy about what you'd do if there were no consequences, and it typically involves violence. Then you channel your inner Buddhist for calmness and love for all peoples. Then you think about what you'll have for dinner. Or is that just me?

Streetwise MBA

Sitting in traffic on Saturday afternoon, a grungy-looking dude was leaning against a wall by the side of the road, his shoes kicked off in front of him.

"Pipes for sale," he'd mutter as the cars inched past, "Pipes for sale."

In the drivers seat, JFJ grimaced. Thinking he was perturbed by the street sale of drug paraphenalia, I made some mild complaint about the large homeless presence in the area. JFJ looked a little surprised and shook his head to indicate that's not what his expression meant:

"I was just thinking, he should be a little more enthusiastic. You know, it's not a very effective business model."