you know i'm no good

since being unemployed, i have been trying to use my brain a bit. i would hate for it to turn into mush, which is what might happen according to alec baldwin and hulu. i have been doing a lot of reading - books and online, doing sudoku and word warp on my ipod and watching podcasts so i can get some politics, social commentary, and refresh my french and german. i spent today downloading a whole bunch of new podcasts on itunes - money tips, wine, bartending, nutrition, yoga, business week, and tracey ullman. oh and get this! so tracey ullman has a new series out - state of the union or something like that. i downloaded the first episode and was watching the previews / ads for it and one starts out "when returning to north dakota from canada..." !!! it was so funny! it was about this old woman who went to canada to get cheaper medication and got caught by chris hansen (to catch a predator turned to catch a drug mule). isn't that hilarious? what i find most funny is that this nearly happened in my family...

some years ago, when anthrax was just starting to be a big issue in the US, my cousin in fargo got a letter in the mail. it was written to him in a scribbly-script with no return address or anything. the postmark was hard to read (as postmarks can be sometimes). he opens the letter and inside finds white powder. no note. no indication of anything else. just some white powder. what do you do with this? it was the height of the anthrax scare, so he calls the fargo police department. FPD shows up at his apartment and ... they dont know what to do. how do you handle anthrax? do you contain the area? who has been exposed? why would some random guy with no political associations get white powder in an envelope? they take the envelope and tell him they'll get back to him if he needs to do anything. about a week later, my aunt who lives in walhalla (very northern north dakota), calls her son and asks, "did you get my package?" "what package, mom?" "well, i was in canada and so i picked up some tylenol with codene because i knew you had some pain, so i put them in the mail to you." and all of a sudden the pieces fell into place. no one was trying to poison him! his mom was trying to HELP him. she didn't put her return address on it - why would she? she knew her sons address and wrote quickly to get it in the mail. to this day, i dont know why she didnt put a letter in the envelope, but maybe she didnt have time. when put into the mail, the postal system's machines crushed the envelope and made powder of the tylenol. my cousin calls back FPD to tell them what happened and get this - they're mad at him! supposedly for finding flaws in their policing (they didnt know what to do). so, anyway, tracey ullman is funny.

that was a little tangent... back to the real story. i went for a walk to listen to some of my new podcasts. i'm not really one for walks and enjoying the outdoors. i always think i can be doing something else, but this was a compromise since i could be educated. i guess going for walks isnt HORRIBLE, just boring. what i DO like doing is looking into other people's homes to see how they're decorated and what people are doing. a bit voyeristic, i know, but if you dont want people looking in your house, close your blinds. about two blocks into my walk, i got a big wiff of a fire. it wasn't a fire from a fireplace, but something you would smell sitting around a campfire. i actually really like the smell of campfire. i like sitting around them. you wouldn't guess that about me, would you?? i HATE the outdoors and forests and hiking and all that sort of thing. but i like campfires. i would REALLY like it if there were plush couches, air conditioning, skyscrappers around, no bugs, and cocktails served to me - all around a bustling fire. maybe a campfire on a movie set is for me.

anyway, this campfire smell reminded me of two things - 1 being on my cousins farm growing up and 2 this leadership retreat i went on in college right before becoming an orientation leader at northeastern. there were about 30 of us college sophomores at a camp in western mass. after a day of team building exercises in the woods, we had dinner in some stupid wood buildling. there were 5 or 6 of us at a table and the bus driver sat with us. i was complaining about how much i hated the woods and the bugs and the smell of nature. i wanted skyscrappers! and cement! and traffic and people. and then the food was served and there was little i could eat because at the time i was a vegan. the bus driver asked me why i was a vegan if i didn't like nature. i said, "well, i don't do it for nature. i don't care about animals, i just don't eat them." and then he asked, "where are you from?" my friend alex busted out laughing, "this is the best part!" and i said i was from north dakota. the bus driver, a big hairy man, started laughing so hard, the whole room was looking at us. it scared me. he reminded me of mr. pruitt - the truck driver without a right hand - from adventures in babysitting. he would pick you up on the highway and help you out, but if you were screwing his wife, he'd shoot you in the head.

so that is what i thought of on my walk this evening. it made me smile.

after that, i came home and watched desperate housewives with my mom. in the episode, edie brit died. sorry if that was a spoiler to you, but if you didn't see that coming then i have no comment for you. she was cremated and i would like to say, for the record, that if i were to die - or when i do die, rather - i want to be cremated, as well. just don't spread my ashes in a forest. that would be an ironic - not the funny kind - final resting place.

and then to end my night, you'll never guess what i did. i watched a movie on abc family - my fake fiancee. i don't even know how i noticed it was on, but i saw that it had joey lawrence (now going by "joseph") and melissa joan hart (LOVED clarissa explains it all back in the day). it was a pretty bad movie, but i actually enjoyed it. it could've been really good if it had better actors and slightly different writing, but if i was 13 again, i would've LOVED it and so i can appreciate it for what it is. it tugged at my heart strings and reminded me of my old crush on joey lawrence. he and jonathan brandis...