the week before xmess

The baaaaaaad news: my iPod, which is only a year and a half old, went belly-up on Friday, and I had to send it to iPodMods.com for repairs. It was working fine on Thursday evening when I listened to it on my way home from work, but when I tried to listen to it on Friday morning, it went berserkers. I treat this iPod like royalty—I’m always very careful with it, thank you very much. And in return, it never gave me any grief—not even when I schlepped it through five European countries and a handful of US states. But now, suddenly, poof. Let’s hope it’s just a minor problem (a dying battery, say), and things don’t get overly screwed up when I try to reimport my iTunes library into the iPod after I get it back.

The good news: Uhhhh…lessee…is there any? Well, I’m nearly done with my Christmas shopping, so that’s good, but it’s not exactly a badge of honor, since Christmas is only a friggin’ week away. It’s not like I finished my shopping in November. And I still haven’t wrapped a damn thing! I’m going to kick aside any freelancing I’ve got next Saturday and instead spend the day wrapping presents.

I got a jump start on Saturday night, actually, after I finally heaved aside my day’s worth of freelancing. I decided to start painting the wooden letters I bought as gift identification tags, as well as supergluing wire onto the letters’ backs so the letters can serve as Christmas ornaments in the future. Pretty straightforward, right? Yeah, except I managed to get superglue all over my fingers. And my lips. Thus began my sizzling Saturday night of sitting home alone in my pajamas, watching Netflixed Doogie Howser DVDs (because I loved that show in high school, and I loved Neil Patrick Harris’s cute gay ass with the fire of a hundred suns, and if I could’ve had his babies I would’ve done so in a heartbeat), and frantically trying to remove superglue from my lips and my paint-spattered fingers. I’m exactly what the Beastie Boys had in mind when they sang for their right to party.

I’ve gotten back into reading McSweeney’s lately; here are some of my faves:

AN OVERHEARD CONVERSATION AT THE SUBURBAN NEIGHBORHOOD POOL, IF THE SUBURBAN NEIGHBORHOOD POOL WERE IN DEADWOOD.

JOHN MOE’S POP-SONG CORRESPONDENCES, VOLUME V: A LETTER BETWEEN SIBLINGS WHO LIVED IN THE HOUSE DESCRIBED IN “OUR HOUSE” BY MADNESS.

THE GAY AGENDA.

CORMAC MCCARTHY WRITES TO THE EDITOR OF THE SANTA FE NEW MEXICAN.
(this one made me laugh because I read his book The Road a few months ago, and this mimics his writing style perfectly)

OBSESSIVE-COMPULSIVE VALENTINES.

POEMS THAT WERE CONSIDERED AND REJECTED BEFORE ’TWAS THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS WAS ESTABLISHED AS “THE OFFICIAL AMERICAN CHRISTMAS POEM.”

FROM THE GRAD SCHOOLYARD: THE DIARRHEA SONG.

STORIES THAT WOULD HAVE TURNED OUT DIFFERENTLY IF THE PROTAGONISTS HAD HAD CELL PHONES.

THREE NEW MAC AD IDEAS.


song heard most recently before posting: Winter Solstice—R. Carlos Nakai