I think it might be sort of funny to have The 1980's House on tv.

I think people would be surprised how much life has changed.

Like, there was a lot less food to go at the supermarkets in 1986 when I worked all summer as a bagger at the family owned grocery store in Melrose ("Paper or Plastic?) to save up to buy a used Mac classic for $1,000.

And they could have pre-programmed tv and radio so all the media would be accurate. And you could log onto CompuServe and trade dirty pictures with your friend around the corner.

Sometimes I think about buying two exact outfits and putting one in storage for 3 years and then busting out with it . Everybody would think I had found a really powerful fabric softener or something.

I have a terrible time (getting to a point) waking up in the morning.

I wake up at 7:30 am, when my girlfriend wakes up to head into Boston to toil for the beauracratic machinery, and feel fine, but I keep going back to sleep for 15 minute trips until I am always on the verge of being late. I thinnk between 7:45 and 8:30 I get progressively tired, like a tired Christmas Club account that I keep depositing 15 minutes cds into. I always see a little bit of Regis & Kathy Lee when I head out the door.

If I'm diligent about paying my bills, I have so little left for the next two weeks, enough to live on- but I can't just spontaneously do whatever I see that looks interesting. I spend the most on take out food. I like clipper ships. My trans-atlantic friend told me on Sunday that our mutual friend know makes $110,000 a year.

I tried to take a cooking class in Cambridge a year ago but didn't really learn anything.

I think this might be rading like a bad Larry King column for USA Today, though I can't bold famous names (like Regis Philbin).

Ani DiFranco, the Queen of Buffalo, is touring solo once again. I had a small cut out of her perched on the corne rof my Mac at work for a couple of years. I am not sure what I was trying to say with it. Look at me - I'm cool. But I guess it started some conversations. It was from a photo shoot she did with Uthah Williams.


Looking for Frienship ... and more.
I first heard of her in 1997 when I was fresh out of state school and toiling for $7 an hour laying out personal ad pages 40 hours a week. I think her lyrics are pretty memorable. I like the one where she goes, "I've got a big crush on you and it is crushing my mind." The midwest papers in the Bible Belt would not allow ads to have the words "and more" in them. While more liberal papers on the East Coast let people search for quadrapalegic dwarves who liked stockings and dog collars.

I was on Ani message boards and mailing lists and saw her 16 times. But now I am a more casual listener. I saw this editorial on theOnion.com a few weeks ago that was about this guy who was really into female music, and it ended - "Now if I could just get a woman to actually enter my apartment, she would see how sensitive I am ..." I thought it was pretty funny.

We subconciously self-edit whenever we write anything, thinking about who might read it and how we might want to impress them or not embarrass ourselves. I think Dave Eggers (I might be dropping this author's name to show my literary hipness) had an interesting passage about revealing oneslf in AHWOSG where he related it to a snake shedding her skin. And he went on to say that when we find the snake's shedded skin, how much do we really know about the snake?

I think I am pretty impressionable though, we always had stacks of People magazine in the house when I was growing up. I remember when they had the re-design about 7 years ago to make the papparazzi photos bigger in the front section - is it called Inside Tracks? At the time I thought it was jarring, but now take it for granted. And the Herald and Globe had re-designs in the past 7 years. The Herald is terrible at getting their color photos to register properly - half the time they end up looking like an abstract painting.

My mother would actually travel to a mall 30 miles away on Saturdays, because they got it in like 2 days earlier than her usual place. Chili dogs and Orange Julius at the mall with the fake tree and People mgazine. My whole family would play a game where we would try to guess, based on our watching of Inside Edition and reading The Boston Globe and listening to WBZ , who would be on the cover that week.

There is the saying "It's all been done" but to that should be added, "but not terribly well".

I've also been thinking about our inner talk and what we say to ourselves all day in concert with what we say to the outside world. It's like that classic Saturday NIght Live sketch where Joe Namath says, "I am going to go upstairs and masturbate" and his inner voice repeats the same thing. It was pretty risque stuff in 7th grade. I remember being a freshman in college and still being surprised that people were finally talking about certain things that you would never dare broach in high school.

Freshman year of state college was a pastiche of champion sweatshirts, dip stains on the study floor, fire alarms, watery eggs, everything was new new new. With each new persosn you met you had the possibility of re-inventing yourself.

The chain of 15 freshman you snaked to lunch with the first 3 days gradually paired down. The out-of-state-art-history-major you met at orientation painted your 10th floor door while you were gone for the night at a Sting concert with your high school prom date. Everything was incredibly important. You were the smartest perosn in the world, each night's dinner discussions revealed more about the true nature of religion and philosophy.

I don't think I drank at all freshman year and hardly smoked. I think finally having a girlfriend and being out of the house was enough for me to be giddy about.