Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention:

I have meetings all week long, so I probably won't be around much for the next few days. In the meantime, I suggest you amuse yourselves by picturing your old Auntie Jennie attempting to drive herself waaaay out into the hinterlands every morning, in the snow, to get to the hotel where the meetings are being held. It's pretty gee dee amusing, I'll tell you. If you think strokes are funny. The kind where your head explodes, not the band. Those Strokes are kind of funny, too, but not because they're trying to be.

Site stat update

Someone got to my site by Googling "inflatable pants." Actually, two someones. Or perhaps the same someone twice. I'm wondering who this person is, and why they were looking for inflatable pants. Do we have a clown contingent here at the Smash? Is this the latest in child safety devices? I remember when I was a wee small Smashlet and took figure skating lessons, my mother used to stuff a pillow down my pants so that I wouldn't break my tailbone when I fell down. These days, of course, nature has provided me with more natural padding. Plus, a general unwillingness to participate in sporting activities unless I can accurately measure how many calories I'm burning off by torturing myself.

The continuous catalogue of complaints: My arm hurts

I have the tendonitis again in my arm, mostly from type-type-typing all day long and passing out on various sofas when I'm done type-type-typing. I know it's probably tendonitis, but in my heart of hearts, I really think that it's a tumor. Because I always think that something is terribly wrong with me.



The tumor, if it exists, is sitting right in the socket of my arm, pressing on the nerve. It will not be discovered until it's too late, because no one ever listens to me. By that time, I will have to have my whole arm removed, right up to the ball joint. I will keep an orange in the space where my arm used to sit, and haul it out at parties.



I had a shrink once who told me that she had the perfect engraving for my tombstone: "I told you I was sick." Instead of laughing or rolling my eyes, I leaned forward in my chair and demanded, "Sick? Why? WHAT HAVE YOU HEARD?"

One is silver and the other's gold

For various reasons, which may or may not be made clear to you all shortly, I have been thinking a lot lately about friendship, beautiful, beautiful friendship, and how hard it is, in this day and age, to know when you've actually made a friend.



I don't mean a social acquaintance. I don't mean a drinking buddy. I mean an honest to goodness friend, someone who will tell you that you're not fat and it's not your fault and yes, you have talent and blah, blah, blah, with a minimum of eyerolling, and maybe even at four in the morning, if it's really an emergency. Or, in the case of Ira Einhorn, The Famous Unicorn Killer, someone who will help you carry a heavy trunk out to the river and toss it in.



I am quite sure that at least a few of my friends would help me dispose of a body, but old Ira wasn't quite so lucky. Maybe they were pissed that he lied to them and told them that the trunk was full of "secret documents." Maybe they had carpal tunnel syndrome. Anyway, they didn't help. I mean, you know, thank goodness. In case you confused about my stance on serial killers -- I'm against them.



Honestly, I don't know why I keep watching these true crime shows, but it may be time to call someone. I think I watch like two of these damn things a day now. Soon I'll see serial killers when I shut my eyes, like the after-images of Tetris tiles burned into my corneas.

Girlhood dreams

When I was a little girl, I dreamed of the day when a man would look at me tenderly and say, "My girlfriend and I have a 'don't ask, don't tell' policy."



Many girls have this dream. We cherish it so strongly, that we never ever mention it in public. It's like our longing to have a hysterectomy before the age of forty, or our desire to eventually give birth to a two-headed baby. It's just too precious to be spoken of, aloud.



When the gentleman I'm referring to told me about his "don't ask, don't tell" policy, I looked at him shyly, my eyes wide and shiny with unshed tears.



"You mean," I whispered, awkwardly reaching for his hand. "You're not going to tell each other that you're both actually GAY?"

It's a national holiday! Get back to work.

Can we put aside the fiction that there are actually any such things as national holidays anymore? Because it pains me to be lied to in this fashion.



Today is Martin Luther King Day, and yet here I sit at the website factory, cranking away. Many of my friends actually do have the day off. Others don't. I feel that this failure on the part of all of our employers to come to some sort of consensus regarding MLK Day is just plain wrong. Ideally, we should either all be working, or none of us should. Guess which one I'm voting for.



In other news, I have decided to start making up holidays, just for fun. If we're not going to have the day off anyway, why not have a holiday, like, once a week? Wouldn't that be GREAT?



Today is the International Day of Stuffing Your Face With Candy. You know what to do.

I'm the 'Fun Czar' around here

This is ludicrous:



Harvard hires 'Fun Czar' to spice up student life



Let me tell you how we did things down at the state school, kids. We made our own fun, out of beer and hormones, often on a very tight budget, while walking uphill, in the snow, etc. What is the matter with Harvard Students, that they need an actual Officer for fun times? That's one of my questions. My other question is, "How do I get that gig?"