Somewhere deep inside of me is the desire to blog. I know there is. There's also the natural ability to float on water, and let's just say I have been sinking like a rock since 1983.

I really don't want to write at this very moment. Instead, I'd prefer to read, talk to myself in the bath, and sleep. In that order. But I feel really guilty when I don't blog, just like some people feel guilty when they skip yoga class weeks on end (read: me) or eat fast food (read: almost never me - living to see 60 is overrated).

Thus, this entry. I have two things I've been thinking about in the last few days that I want to share in as non-preachy a way as possible. And then I'm going to recline and not get back up for a very long time. Don't worry, no extra value meals will be involved in this indulgent proneness.

1) A few friends of mine are in transition stages right now. One has just finished graduate school with a degree in something he is passionate about, a course of study that is not favored in a crappy job market. Nonetheless, I know he will find a position with benefits doing something.

Well, he will if he looks for one. The guy is so busy going out that I don't think he's really come up with a solid job search plan. I know it's scary, because I've been through it, but I'm getting really tired of being regaled with stories of his nights on the town when he's started worrying about scraping rent money together.

In conversation with another completely different friend last night, I started thinking about how other people I know are holding themselves back. Why do we - and I include myself here - sometimes shirk what we owe ourselves? We cling to this idea that denying ourselves what we so desperately need is okay, because maybe that means things are less messy, not as lonely, and more comfortable.

Stop it already. Do what you know you need to do for yourself, whether it involves going to bed earlier, asking for help, or sitting on your ass and perusing Monster.com.

You will thank yourself later.

2) I will preface this second thought by confessing that I haven't been following the election as closely as I could have, but I have a crush on Obama, and I don't mean Barack. The surge of Michelle-bashing - from Fox News referring to her as "Obama's baby mama" to people calling her "uppity" - really bothers me.

For all America's recent exploits in sexism regarding Hillary Clinton, the Michelle Obama comments aren't just about her being a strong woman. Many of them are mired in racism. Who calls white women "uppity"? "Bitchy," yes. But "uppity"?

Sure, Michelle can put her foot in her mouth. But I'd rather have a first lady who does that, instead of the glassy-eyed Laura Bush variety. That woman always looks like she's under general anesthesia.

The whole "image softening" blitz bothers me, too. Why does the potential first lady have to sugar it up and go on The View and the cover of US Weekly to convince people that she's not intimidating? Why do the potential first ladies still do that lame cookie bake-off? (Cindy McCain allegedly plagiarized her recipe, by the way). Why do we even call them "ladies"?

Michelle Obama is smart and opinionated. I personally like that she worked hard to get where she is, unlike the other first lady option out there. And also, not that I care, but she looks great in a sheath. Leave her alone.

*Spoiler Alert: This post is about the Broadway musical "Spring Awakening," which I don't think you should see. If you plan on seeing it anyway, you might not want to read on.

"Spring Awakening" may be the worst musical I've ever seen.

Mind you, I don't know enough show tunes to last a night at Marie's Crisis, but I can give a stereotypical gay man of my generation a run for his money. I filled in my bra listening to "Rent," "West Side Story," "A Chorus Line," and "Cabaret." At the end of high school, I realized I might have missed out: "Exile in Guyville? What is this? Who's Liz Phair?"

I'm occasionally open to seeing new musicals, because everything amazing has to start as a seed. I'm not into spectacles, though. I have no desire to see "Hairspray" or "Wicked," and I'm waiting to see the film version of "Mamma Mia."

But I thought "Spring Awakening" would be different. It won a lot of Tonys, so it couldn't be cloying and preposterous, right? Wrong! I knew it was hyped, but I thought, "Ooh, Duncan Sheik did the music and it's about adolescence. It's got a lot of people talking, due to some risque scenes." A friend had access to some discount tickets, courtesy of NYU, and I was in. I was excited to take TBID, who hasn't seen a Broadway musical since he had to write a report on it in middle school, because I wanted to show him that musical theater can rock.

And "Spring Awakening" does rock, if you like All-American Rejects rejects. Consider the fact that not a year ago, you couldn't shop at a major retailer without hearing such lyrical gems as, "I'm hot because I'm fly. You ain't cause you not. This is why, this is why I'm hot..." The poppy soundtrack of this musical was so uncatchy, with some lyrics that were so incomprehensible, that even mainstream radio wouldn't want it.

Not to mention that the show is completely implausible. All adults are played by the same two actors, because adults in the show are caricatures. They are all ignorant, with the exception of Melchior's mother, who succumbs to her husband's rule and plays dumb in the end. The teenage characters are undeveloped and just as unsympathetic. To tell you the story in a busted nutshell: Adults in "Spring Awakening" don't want to talk to their children about sex, and then the world ends.

I'm an advocate of sex education, and I don't mean the abstinence-only kind. But I know that sexual urges are not so all-consuming that they make teenagers explode and civilizations crumble. The writers of "Spring Awakening" would have audiences believe that one character commits suicide as a result of feeling sexually constrained. (There are other factors to this plot point, of course, but the sexual factor is the most apparent). I could understand if the play were about how adults can be unfair, but that was overshadowed by the themes of sexual taboos and exploration.

It was like watching something some high schoolers cooked up when the power went out one day when they'd been in the middle of a Real World marathon - the acting was that self-conscious and hackneyed. In a romantic scene between two gay characters, the actors got cheeky and made weird faces while singing about sex. The audience laughed; homophobia scored one more point.

I couldn't bring myself to applaud anything I saw or heard. The musical numbers, like I said, were very poppy, but not in a good way. One in which a girl sings about incest had the audience bopping their heads, and I don't know about you, but that weirds me out.

It was all shock, not to be confused with shock value. The shocking thing wasn't a bare breast or butt or the song wherein a character simulates masturbation the entire time. It was that some critics have lauded "Spring Awakening."

At the curtain call, TBID and I stayed in our seats. He looked at me, nervous about what to say. "I thought it was awful," I finally spat out. He sighed. "Oh, I'm so glad."

We are discussing another co-worker fond of saying "That's not my job!" Despite the clarification, we really aren't sure what she does all day.

Me: Does she have a Marketing degree?

Jim: Yeah. And a minor in Busybodiness.

Phil: [in a stage whisper to Jim] It's called Women's Studies.

These last few days haven't been very eventful. I've felt blah the entire week, but managed to finish up my pilates class card and schlep my printed and framed photograph to the art gallery. Life Coach was nice enough to drive me to Westchester to do the latter. Somehow the Google Maps directions I printed were wrong, thus ensued a misguided adventure Kerouac would have approved.

We saw deer! And strip malls! And finally, the NYC skyline! Phew. That was a close one.
This is my photograph for the exhibition, which opens next Saturday. I won't be attending, as I'll be in Manhattan walking to the places where I need to be (as opposed to riding to them). Incidentally, Manhattan also has wine, cheese, and small talk.
If the photograph doesn't sell, I'll have to go back to Westchester and pick it up. Argh! Life Coach has already wished me luck and purposely lost his car keys.

This afternoon, Cade and I went to a screening of The Business of Being Born, a Ricki Lake-produced, pro-midwifery documentary about the birthing industry. Women's health is right up my alley (PUN!), so I wanted to see it as soon as I read praise from The New York Times, which hates just about everything...just like me.

Cade is selectively squeamish to the point that I can't touch the veins in his wrist, but he has no problem unloading (PUN! wait for it...) biweekly diatribes about his digestive tract. Colorful ones.

The thought of childbirth freaks Cade out. This morning he actually said that maybe when he's ready to be a dad, the human birthing process will have been antiquated. O, modernity! I started ranting about Brave New World, which I read for the first time two weeks ago. Then I think we started talking about Cade's guts again. Then I mentioned all the sacrifices I've made in the name of entertainment for him, like the time I saw Too Fast Too Furious and found it Too Lame Too Stupid. I watched more than half the movie before I stretched across the seats and started daydreaming.

A cool part of the screening today was the chance to attend a Q&A with the director and Ricki Lake. I'm not a fan, but she's Ricki Lake! I used to watch snippets of her show back in the day. The themes were oh so clever. "You Think You're Hot, But You So Are Not!" What originality.

Unfortunately, I didn't see Ricki Lake in person, as she and the director were ill, but she called in and had a brief phone conference with everyone. Other people involved in the film showed up, including the director's son and baby daddy. The film confirmed what I've head about childbirth in America - that it's treated in a ridiculously Victorian fashion, that most C-sections are unnecessary, that it makes no sense for a woman to be delivering on her back, etc.

I'll definitely be rethinking my own birthing options if I ever decide to have a child. Right now, the thought of a human being tearing its way out of my body is enough to make me want to bind my legs. But I recognize the beautiful and transformative significance of this rite. Women are amazing and strong. Watching Ricki Lake and others give birth in various ways today affirmed this. The water births made a particular splash (PUN!).

I've seen two odd slogan tees on some fellow New Yorkers in the last week.

One was on a very small child. It was similiar to those "Call 1-800-Grandma" shirts that are generally supposed to validate primary caretakers, rather than describe the child. They're emblazoned with messages like "My Mom's Hot" or "I Love My Daddy." This one read, "WORKING MOMS RULE!" I thought it was a pretty poignant sign of the times. I have had a working mom for most of my life, but yeah, who buys that for their kid? Someone feeling barely-masked guilt, thus leading to their need for validation, or someone proud of the fact that they pay someone else to take care of their offspring during the day? Someone who thinks that being a mom shouldn't be one's sole occupation and wants other people to know that? I'd have asked the source, but the caretaker was a nanny. Obviously.

The other shirt was in the same vein as those tight "Hottie" and "Sexy" shirts with bubble letters or some whimsical font. The shirt read, "I am not opinionated." That was it. I thought there might be some punchline on the back of the shirt, but there wasn't. I think these shirts are supposed to be funny, and this one, like most, falls short of that goal. Of course, it could be ironic. The voluptuous girl spilling out of the tee might be an indomitable opinion spitter. And of course, to say one is opinionated or not, isn't that an opinion? Maybe that would only work with an adverb somewhere in there: "I am annoyingly opinionated"or "I am reasonably opinionated." Or can you prove the existence of opinions (or not) as fact, thus not making it an opinion? Yeah, I'm pretty sure the sentence is a fact, not an opinion. Here's another fact, err opinion: That shirt is stupid.

A book about a conversation I've had at least three times this week alone.

Liberal arts majors, take heed!

The Don Imus brouhaha reminded me of something that happened years ago, but still incenses me. I don't think of it often, but when I do, I honestly still feel disgust toward some people I know I'll never see again. I meant to write about it in a more timely fashion, but then the Virginia Tech shootings occurred. Everything else going on in the world paled in significance. I was upset for days and struggled to find the lesson in the story. Teachers at my school were debating whether or not we should discuss it. If yes, then how? Should we teach our students about compassion for outsiders? Should we preach non-violence and gun control?

We ended up going the compassionate route. I'm not sure it worked. Kids started calling other kids "Question Mark" to be rude. They laughed and joked that the shooter was mentally ill, not understanding that's it's not an insult. It's a diagnosis, a disease, a life sentence in which some of their own family members are trapped. Fifth graders can be really mean and petty, but they're mostly just ignorant.

Ignorance is what fuels most prejudice, but I don't think Don Imus is ignorant. I think he's made a lot of money being tacky, so he made an inappropriate comment. He knew he would push buttons and be called outrageous. It seems only some people can get away with racist commentary, though, and a white guy might not ever be one of them. (People constantly get away with sexist comments, so I won't even go into that element of the story).

My experience being Imused doesn't involve intentional or unintentional racism, and that's why the memory still smarts. It is about being labeled a racist in a group of people that abhor all the -isms, or at least know they're supposed to.

I was an RA at one of the largest universities in the country. Though in a red state not generally considered diverse, the student body has a range of races, cultures, and ethnicities. An entire day of RA training - and even freshman orientation - consisted of diversity training. There, we were supposed to learn to be cognizant of and sensitive to all those elements of identity we'd been told throughout the rest of our schooling were insignificant and merely skin-deep.

I'm much more comfortable around Hispanics than Northeastern white people, and I mean the really white Northeastern people. I grew up in a community where I was a slight minority, and it never bothered me. It just was. Despite how some of my writing has been construed, I'm not racist. That doesn't mean that I don't understand that many stereotypes are based on fact, and that I don't see certain trends in society that are horribly wrong, but perpetuated.

My first summer as an RA, I had to work on the Faculty Fellows program with a co-worker named Mani. He was benign enough when I first met him, but I soon learned that he didn't really do his share in coordinating events with the Faculty Fellow, a wonderful engineering professor named Dr. Beer. On top of that, Mani liked to insert snide, sexist comments in daily interactions. He did this more with other girls, as I didn't do the flirtatious routine with him. It still bothered me, though. A few weeks into the summmer, I was tired of working with his arrogant, lazy ass.

I also worked with this guy who is the colloquial definition of "tool". His name is Mario. He loved stirring up drama between staff members and then feigning ignorance. He did this throughout the summer with two girls who went from friends to complete enemies: "She thinks you're desperate. Psst, psst. She told me not to say anything. Don't tell her I told you." Mario thought it was funny to tell Mani that I had a crush on him, that it was so obvious, that that's why I acted like I hated him.

I can appreciate the Shakespearean flavor of the whole thing, but I don't wish this kind of deception on anyone. Mani started acting really weird around me, and saying things to me that were sexist. He also apparently debated whether or not I was worth liking back...to co-workers who later told me. (That's what makes this whole incident so stupid - that it was so much "he said, she said" with little mature communication). I ignored Mani, and set the record straight with everyone else but him - I couldn't stand him, he was repulsive in every way, and how deluded he was to think that I would ever like him. I know, I know. I should've just confronted him and shut my mouth.

Dr. Beer and I had lunch one day and he asked what I thought of Mani. I said he was chauvinistic and loved to take credit for my work on the program. Dr. Beer said something about the sexism being a remnant of Mani's culture, and then that train of thought petered out. I never said it, and I never gave it much credence. But it must have come up when I was talking to a co-worker, for Mani was a big topic, which I now know was a mistake.

A few days later, the comment was stretched into a racist embellishment and attributed to me. I have no idea who told him this, or if anyone actually told him this. Mani told everyone who would listen that I had said I hated him, because of his culture. At campus-wide RA meetings, I could feel eyes on me, seeing my color, seeing hate they wanted to associate with my color. I became what not to do and I hadn't done anything. I've never been a social butterfly, but now I was an utter pariah.

The final blow was when Mani confronted me in front of the entrance to our dorm. He said, "I heard you don't like me, Amanda." I replied, "Yeah. I don't like you." I'm not sure he thought I'd be honest about it. "Well, I heard you don't like me, because I'm Iranian! That offends me!" I remained calm. "Mani, I don't like you, because you're conceited and sexist. You're an asshole. I don't care about where you're from. I would dislike you if you were white, black, Hispanic, whatever... I dislike you for things completely outside your skin color or origins!" I was shocked to find I was screaming.

Hearing the lies bubbling from Mani's mouth was the straw that broke the camel's back, no ethnic reference intended. I was oblivious to the residents who witnessed the encounter and shameless in my rage, which is just not like me. All I remember is Mani quickly walking away from the scene and my never feeling vindicated. People stopped talking about the whole thing over time, especially when I proved myself as the RA who always put together the contraceptive education program. I hate unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases, not Middle Easterners. (Can someone please make me a button with that on it?)

I went on to be an RA in the same dorm for two more years. So did Mani. I never trusted anyone I worked with that first summer again. Not fully. I still think Mani's a jerk in a completely equal-opportunity way.

I've long believed that as much as it can be painful to be a woman, I wouldn't want to be a man. Men are allowed less freedom of expression than women. It's more difficult for them to live sexuality and gender as fluid constructs. And men's clothes are really boring.

Last week, I read Self-Made Man: One Woman's Journey Into Manhood and Back Again by Norah Vincent. For a year and a half, Vincent adopted the identity of "Ned" and dressed and lived as a man. ("Twelfth Night," anyone)? She visited strip clubs, bowling leagues, boardrooms, and even a monastery to find out what it's like to be a man. She learned a lot about attitudes towards women, bravado, and sharing emotions. Her conclusion? Being a man is hard, as is being a woman. We've got to cut each other some slack.

Those are the crib notes. For those of you still interested, here are some choice passages:

"Men get married, but their sexuality doesn't then magically disappear amid the bliss of family life. Hence the preponderance of married men loping off in shame and secret to the strip club.

Sometimes even respectable men with respectable lives have primal ugly stuff bracketed somewhere in their minds, kept in its place apart from the purported love that goes with the responsibilities of fatherhood and husbanding... It was only society's prevailing myth, or perhaps female wish fulfillment, that had pretended otherwise. As a result...sometimes it was too hard to successfully resolve the conflict between baseline male sexuality and the civilized role of a man."

"It was just the way of things in the wild when you were male. You were the eager athlete, the brightly colored bird doing the dance, and she was the German judge begrudging you the nod."

"At first the three women looked us over like inferior produce in the supermarket. Then they smiled weakly. They were well brought up. They knew enough to cover quickly with the kind of anemic politesse that we all use on bores at cocktail parties."

"[Women] think of ourselves as emotional masters of the universe. In our world, feelings reign. We have them. We understand them. We cater to them. Men, we think, don't on all counts. But as I learned among my friends in the bowling league and elsewhere, this is absolutely untrue and absurd. Of course men have a whole range of emtions, just as women do - it's just that many of them are often silent or underground, invisible to most women's eyes and ears."

"Yet as much as these women wanted a take-control man, at the same time, they wanted a man who was vulnerable to them, a man who would show his colors and open his doors, someone expressive, intuitive, attuned... If women are trapped by the whore/Madonna complex, men are equally trapped by this warrior/minstrel complex. What's more, while a man is expected to be modern, that is, to support feminism in all its particulars, to see and treat women as equals in every respect, he is on the other hand often still expected to be traditional at the same time, to treat a lady like a lady, to lead the way and pick up the check."

"I was curious to see what would happen to her supposed attraction to Ned when she learned that he was a woman... Many would and have argued that that is all love ever is, an attachment to something illusory. Lacan wrote that love is giving something you don't possess to someone who doesn't exist. Perhaps Ned was an object lesson in that principle..."

"Dating women as a man was a lesson in female power, and it made me of all things, into a momentary misogynist... I disliked [women's] superiority, their accusatory smiles, their entitlement to choose or dash me with a fingertip, an execution so lazy, so effortless, it made the defeats and even the sucesses unbearably humiliating."

"There was a residual sexism in [salesmanship] for women, a benign twist on being thought useless in the world of work for so many centuries. If we did it people would say, 'pretty good for a girl,' and if we failed we were still commended for trying. But a guy, he was a useless clod if he couldn't perform, and he said to himself at least as harshly as anyone else did."

"People will literally stand paralyzed for a moment, sometimes in mild, sometimes in utter panic when they don't know what sex you are. You can see the confusion registering, or with polite people, being suppressed, and then you can see the adjustment being made either for male or female or for an extremely uncomfortable and robotic neutral ground between the two. If they don't know what sex you are, they literally don't know how to treat you. They don't know which code to opt for, which language to speak, which specific words and gestures to use, how close they can come to you physically, whether or not they should smile and how. In this we are no different than dogs - with the notable exception, of course, that no dog has ever been mistaken about anyone's sex."

"Being the second sex imprisoned us, but it came with one sizable benefit. We didn't have to carry the world on our shoulders. The feeling is officially mutual. Women thought they held the world up and made it go, and for that service deserved a vacation. Men, it turns out, think the same thing. And we're both right."

"Men's liberation isn't a platform you can run on, even if it is the last frontier of new age rehabiliation: the oppressor as oppressed."

"Men's healing is in women's interest, though for women that healing will mean accepting on some level not only that men are - here is the dreaded word - victims of the patriarchy, too, but (and this will be the hardest part to swallow) that women have been codeterminers in the system, at times as invested and active as men themselves in making and keeping men in their role."

"Maybe it will happen. Slowly, fitfully, tentatively. I hope it does. Men haven't had their movement yet. Not really. Not intimately. And they're due for it, as are the women who live with, fight with, take care of and love them."

O, how mine weary eyes doth water by 10 p.m. this night!

I had to return to work after my boss sent my co-teacher and I harsh emails about how all the systems in place in our classroom (as mandated by the obsessively micro-managed administration, mind you) must now be overthrown and replaced. Work has been trying in recent weeks, as there's always someone breathing down my neck, telling me I'm not doing things the way the school dictates they be done. Everything is very rigid and structured and the whole school really ought to undo a button, because I'm not the only person in this environment feeling stifled.

Then I had a midterm for the philosophy of education class I have on Monday nights, in which I finished my rejection of some of Aristotle's philosophy of education with, "It may sound glib, but sometimes I think reason is highly over-rated." I'm thinking the professor will think it's funny. And I'm thinking it explains a whole lot.

An interesting article about race, debate, socioeconomics, and teaching.

Driving from Maryland to New Jersey last weekend, I noticed at least three billboards for the prescription sleep medicine Rozerem. Each ad features an interaction between a groundhog and an Abraham Lincoln impersonator. Does that seem as non sequitur to you as it did to me?

The only text on the billboards is www.theymissyou.com. Abraham Lincoln and a groundhog miss me? I couldn't figure out what was being advertised. Paul said he was pretty sure it was a new prescription for insomnia.

What a weird campaign. When I initially tried to make sense of it, I concluded that what Lincoln and the groundhog have in common is February. I now know that Lincoln was an insomniac. And yeah, groundhogs hibernate in the winter.

But still. Strange campaign, huh? Strange and curious enough to suck in possible consumers and advertisers like myself.

Ask your doctor if Rozerem is right for you.

Side effects may include - get this - drowsiness.

Amp'd Mobile - Bus Commercial

This commercial intrigues me for a few reasons. First, I rely on public transportation, so the concept is interesting. Second, I like pondering the use of sex, race, and class in the ad. Why does a white guy fight a black guy? Why does a black girl have to "shake [her] junk"?

Amp'd Mobile has even racier ads wherein a maid discovers a seeminly dead rock star and a hooker tries to revive a dying senator in a seedy hotel room. More interesting to me is the fact that the website supposedly compares phones to other everyday objects to show how small they are. Not so novel, right? But hold on. It uses a bracelet, a credit card, and even a condom.

Ford Freestyle commercial

I saw this commercial in Pennsylvania and have been thinking about it ever since. Advertising clearly reflects our culture. No one would watch this commercial and not get it, but even the most jaded person would probably be a bit jarred. Post-divorce joint custody in a Ford commercial? Now that's all-American!

Is this advertisement progressive, because it's realistic (or is it?), or is it sad, as it illustrates just how much certain values, institutions, and traditional beliefs have changed?

Ford Freestyle: The Family Car for the Broken Family.

Speaking of offensive t-shirts, I saw a teenage boy skulking around in one on Thursday that said, "I lost my virginity. Can I take yours?"

Blech. He was actually kind of cute, too. Blech.

*I wrote this during my last semester of college. I called this "The Ambience of Negligence." You'd think with a title like that, I'd be writing about the need for NYC public school reform or a terrible dive with roaches that is still a popular eating establishment. No. I was just being haughty and contemplative.

*****************************************

It started with a dream.

I walked through the crowded East Mall weaving in and out of crowds of people moving from one class to another. Cellphones hugged half the available ears, as it's so important to commemorate every ten feet of travel with a phone call to someone who doesn't really care. The fountain was on, but no one was practicing bizarre yoga poses on the crabgrass yet. Suddenly, I looked up and saw a white woman hanging from the high branches of a tree. She appeared to be dead. Her face was gray. The noose was gray. She wore dark colors.

I never startled, not even when I saw another woman crouching on another high branch of the same tree. She was not hanged, but looked afraid, like a hunted animal. No one else noticed. Conversations continued. Cell phones rang. Some people plugged it all up with headphones. When I noticed no one else appeared to see or care about the women, my desensitization was validated. I kept walking.


******

The earliest part of the day involved noticing everyone else's little errors. The misbuttoned coats. The car keys left in the trunk's lock. I never said anything. What do you do when you see someone has left his car keys dangling in a lock? Pulling the keys out would make me look suspicious if the driver suddenly came back. There's not generally a desk where you return properly placed car keys. (They do, after all, belong in locks. Just not when the owner isn't around). What story would this driver make up when he realizes the keys are missing? Would he totally forget he was ever messing around with the trunk? What if he remembers, goes to the trunk, and the keys are gone? Actually, what if the whole car is gone? If this happened to me, I would probably make up a story about how I must have been pickpocketed, or in my case, had my underwear picked. (I hope if I read this years from now, I will remember what the hell I am talking about).

I also noticed, but did not remedy, more evidence of the winter fashion paradox. My mom cackles when she sees "bozos" in flip flops wearing sweaters and coats. I've been seeing bare midriffs displayed from open coats and jackets. This is not a slight sliver of skin, either. I mean inches of carefully calculated belly display. If a person feels the need to wear a scarf and hat, why not also cover the stomach? Besides, the arctic winds must be hell on navel jewelry.

I then went to the computer store. It felt like an episode of Seinfeld - the long lines (in Seinfeld, there are always lines), the nothingnesss, my exasperation at a woman I do not even know who was wearing a maroon pleather jacket and carrying a hot pink pleather purse. This woman could have been one of Jerry's bad dates or a person Elaine worked with. I couldn't stop staring at the atrocity. I know I once wore pleather. Those cheap leather-like items are so tempting when you're twelve and your best friend's mom drops the two of you off at the mall and you only have $30 to spend. My aversion to pleather is a part of my coming of age and coming of credit card.

Pleather Woman was a cranky customer buying some Dell-related product (scoff, scoff), and she complained to an incompetent cashier about getting things shipped in and out, up and down. I almost forgot: pleather woman was also wearing a faux leopard round hat. I've been looking up hats for awhile trying to figure out the name of such a hat, but alas. I just know it looked terrible, especially with the colorful pleather pieces.

Surprise again. I didn't say a thing. She barked at that one incompetent cashier for a long time. Finally, I was able to get my student copy of Office 2004 Pro. Pleather Woman left empty-handed, mismatching into the afternooon sun. A preventable tragedy. I've felt guilty ever since.