NOW, MORE THAN EVER,
NOT THE NEW ANYONE

The hotel where I’m staying is alarmingly close to the Reagan Presidential Library. It’s nice, though. My room has a little private balcony that overlooks the pool. It does not, however, seem to have a phone that can dial the 800 number for my long-distance calling card. Heather at the front desk keeps telling me to call the phone company operators, who in turn have told me I need to check with the hotel switchboard operator who is… well, Heather. Who has made it clear that telecommunications is just not her thing. Three operators and Heather have concluded that I guess I’m not supposed to be dialing an 800 number from my room phone, which, by the way, has specially labeled speed-dial buttons not just for the taxi company and room service, but for the Reagan Presidential Library. At least I have internet access.

The last time I was in this part of California was in high school, when my grandma and I visited my great-uncle and great-aunt, who lived in Santa Monica and sort of never threw anything out in their house, which isn’t to say that they were filthy, because they weren’t, just a little crazy, like some kind of eBay bomb had gone off in their house, and the only way to deal with being around so much stuff was to feign interest in whatever object such as a candy dish or Avon bottle or novelty transistor radio shaped like a baseball or ziploc bag full of latchhook rug yarn happened to be close to you, and if my great aunt saw you touching or even looking at the random whatever, she would insist that you take it.

This trip isn’t anything like that, of course. It’s been so many years, though, that I am actually sort of gawking at the palm and citrus trees out here.

I have no idea what time it is. My Midwest laptop clock and the California clocks don’t agree. Is it 11:00? 1:00? 12:00 but then really 11:00 due to daylight savings but then, really, in non-California time, 1:00 a.m. Or maybe 12:00 now. Either way i need to sleep.

I’m flying out to California today on business. Maybe an entry later if I can find wireless access. And haven’t passed out for lack of sleep.

I can’t be the only one who thinks this news story (which I found linked from here) sounds exactly like a Girls Are Pretty blog entry.

Three possible future relationship books for women, now that He’s Just Not That Into You: The No-Excuses Truth to Understanding Guys is such a big damn hit:

He Can’t Come to the Phone Right Now:
How to Tell Whether It’s Really Him or Just His Voice Mail

He’s Choking, Dammit:
Why Men Sometimes Sputter, Gesture Wildly, And Start Turning Blue

1.) There are sixteen pieces of candy corn in an ounce of candy corn. One piece of candy corn is 0.125 POINTS™.
2.) At least twenty minutes out of my workday were devoted to the pursuit of that knowledge.
3.) The journal feature at Weight Watchers Online has tidy little fields where you can record your POINTS™ for your Morning Meal and your Midday Meal and your Evening Meal and your Exercise, but they really could stand to have a separate field for Alcoholic Beverages.
4.) Unless I’m supposed to call a vodka tonic a “snack,” that is.
5.) It’s a nice enough feeling to complete a whole day on your POINTS™ journal, to have filled in all the blank fields, and clicked on all the cute little glass-of-water and serving-of-fruit-or-vegetable icons, and tallied everything up, and ALL THAT, but I keep wishing something else would happen after that. Like when you’d clear two screens in Ms. Pac-Man and get to see a little cartoon.
6.) Yeah, you know what would be cool? A Missy Elliot video. Have “Gossip Folks” pop right up after you click on save. Do they even have a video for that? WW would probably have to edit out that “I heard Missy eat one cracker a day” line because, well, that’s not the sort of attitude they approve of, is it?
7.) Some of this was written under the influence of “snacks,” so I apologize in advance.

I think I have carpal tunnel syndrome. I’m wearing a brace and everything. It’s not so painful that I can’t type, but it is just bad enough that I manage to talk myself out of typing lots of things, like blog entries about Love Your Body Day, and how, even though I’m all for their cause, I guess I’d rather this particular occasion of awareness be called Screw Sucky Media Representations Day, because, well, I know it’s just semantics, but a name like Love Your Body Day gets all up in your personal space somehow, like women at parties or guys at gay bars who feel compelled to tell you that your cleavage is very life-affirming. Or else it’s like having a Hug Your Children Day as a response to terrorism. If we need to have our most helpful and appropriate gut reflexes pointed out to us like this, what the hell does that say about us?

If you want to do more than just consciously emote Body Loving Feelings for ten minutes, and if you feel all horrible and guilty for reading this list and one by one ruling out most of the things on it, go and buy this Lynn Peril book and this Wendy Shanker book (and yes, I know she’s a spokesperson for this Love Your Body Day thing which I was just now being all contrary about, but that’s just how we Wendys work).

I would also recommend you get a TiVo so you can fast forward through all the self-esteem-withering commercials, although it can’t stop the atomic-particle-like torrent of eight hundred thousand product endorsements from a typical episode of America’s Next Top Model. Which–and I don’t know what you’ll think of me when I say this–is the show I was watching on Love Your Body Day.

No, really: it was the episode where the skinny girl cried and cried in the mirror about how ugly she thinks she is and the plus size girl cried and cried about how hard it is to be strong all the time. I thought it was great in ways I’d be happy to explain to you, as well as in ways I’m a little ashamed to admit. And then I didn’t write about any of it. Is it okay to say I really hate my wrist? I hate my fucking wrist.

If I were to sit down and actually list all the specific potential scenarios that I’m worried about encountering next year when my book comes out, I think “being interviewed by a radio talk show host who not only dislikes your book but egregiously misunderstands it, and in fact spends an inordinate amount of time histrionically babbling and even weeping about how much it, as well as a great many completely unrelated things, upset her” would be really high on that list.

I won’t say I’m glad Gwen had to go through that, because I sure as hell wouldn’t wish that on anyone, but it’s good to know that, yes, it’s possible to live through such an experience. And it’s worth the lengthy download to hear how wonderfully Gwen handled it.

(The interview is just past the halfway mark of the archived show. More about Gwen Zepeda’s book
here.)

So for the past week I’ve been counting Weight Watcher POINTS!™ again, because I’m cool like that. This, after months and months of unaccounted-for overconsumption of all things POINT-Y™ and otherwise, during which time I was not only off the wagon but also gleefully throwing things at it: dirt clods, rocks; maybe pieces of rotisserie chicken if I had any nearby, and often I did.

I enjoyed this little era of my life so much that now, it feels a tad inappropriate for me to be standing out here waiting for the wagon–or whatever vehicle might metaphorically represent a major weight loss program–to pick me up. Though obviously the big flaw in this analogy is that I don’t need a fucking wagon ride so much as I need to walk more, or bike more, or perhaps elliptically-cross-train more over the imaginary and curiously gravity-free terrain for which the elliptical cross-trainer trains you, and no shit, I plan to get RIGHT on all that, people. Soon.

I did ride my bicycle today along the lakefront for the second time in week. I felt very virtuous until, about thirty seconds into my ride, I encountered about 5,000 other people in matching sweatshirts on a 4-mile fitness walk for breast cancer who were therefore automatically better than I was. I mean I watched them striding by gloriously and was all: oh, yeah? You’re raising money for a cure for cancer? Well, I’M trying to raise five Activity POINTS!™ to eat some cheese, so there. But then, unlike me, they’d all thought to wear warm gloves today. Just for them I shook an icy, wind-chapped fist at breast cancer. Screw you, B.C.!

I’ve been meaning to return to Women’s Workout World or else investigate this other gym I might join, but I haven’t been able to bring myself to do either as long as there’s still a little bit of sunlight left after work. As some of you know, I spent most of the summer indoors with my fingers fused to an iBook, which in turn fed on my life force like a great sucking spiritual tick, and now I keep going outside and picking up leaves and stroking them against my face. Sometimes I’ll even stroll around on my weak, wobbly limbs, like that kid from The Secret Garden, and pretend that this makes a huge difference. I am far from being in shape, and farther still from being the Competitive Aerobicizer that I once–briefly–fantasized I was.

(I found this most excellent picture on a web page about aerobic competitons. I’d seen commercials for the telecasts of such things but I forgot that they existed until I read about them in this Cintra Wilson book that I’m loving right now, which is not even the new Cintra Wilson book, which I plan to read next. But still: Aerobic Competitions! Strangely enough, when I did an image search, most of the websites that I found were all from France, and you’d think the very concept of Competitive Aerobics would curdle the creamy, buttery souls of French people, but this doesn’t seem to be the case.)

Anyway. I am trying to take this seriously. Bear with me. More later.

My internet is all plugged in again and everything’s fine. Or so it is at home–I came in to work the other day to find my computer was unconscious, with sad little X’s for eyes. It’s icky and inconvenient and I’ve had to do more than usual at my day job, so forgive me for not having much for you this week.

Tuesday morning I woke up thinking that it was Election Day and I’m not sure if I was relieved or mad that we have three more weeks.

I’m posting this entry from a my laptop at coffeehouse because my broadband connection broke again this morning. Exactly a week after it busted the first time–like before, the connection was working fine late Friday night into the wee hours of Saturday; but then, this morning, just like a week ago, I woke up to find only the “internet” light blinking on my modem (clearly it lacks a “fucked” light). After I couldn’t reboot it I called Comcast again to yell at them. They’re coming tomorrow, but I hope this doesn’t become even more of a regular thing than it is already.

I’ve had this high speed connection for more than a year, and until now I hadn’t had any problems other than the need to restart the modem every now and then. When the repair guys came out on Monday they tried switching modems, tweaking the cables, and twiddling things in the back stairwell and basement of my apartment building and worked for a distressingly long time before they managed to fix whatever the hell was wrong–something in the basement or outside, I guess. They mentioned that the wiring is really old and crappy in my building so now I’m worried that they’ll decide it can’t be fixed and I’ll lose my shit and will have to move all because I suddenly can’t stand not having the super ultra high-speed pipeline pumping data to my apartment at all times providing me with the whopping doses of digital heroin that I somehow managed to live without until June 2003.

The guy on the phone this morning speculated that maybe a neighbor has a satellite dish or some kind of thing that is causing a disturbance at regular intervals. I have new upstairs neighbors and if they have anything to do with this I’m pretty sure I will need to have them killed.

If anyone has any kind of advice or experience with this sort of thing, let me know. Broadband problems, I mean–notcontract murder.