I posted that link just like you asked. Bless Mommy and Daddy and Billy and Grandma and Sally-Mae and Funny Uncle Jim. Also, please make my nose stop dripping snot, now and not later. If you do I will read the Family Circus every day and pretend it's funny. Amen.

Look at this. Now, you ask, how do I know it was God telling me to post this link, and not, say, my half-finished can of ginger ale? Well, guess what song was playing when I saw it. We all know God spoke through the Pixies.

slicing up eyeballs
ha ha ha ho
girlie so groovie

I had halfway decided to keep the blog free of New Year's resolutions and festivities, but then this silly quiz popped up in my referral logs to tell me I should resolve to become a wandering hobo. It's probably right.

Apart from that, though, I am supremely indifferent to the whole idea - the calendar year has almost no impact on my life, so it's best to spend my reflective energies making and breaking resolutions for the new academic term, the new vacation, the new country, whatever. Of course, I'm still bitter towards New Year's Eve, a holiday that creates a pressure to carouse and has yet to deliver on the actual screaming wild drunken fun. Tomorrow night I'll be sitting in an apartment with a few good friends from high school, playing board games, watching Dick Clark, and consuming only moderate quantities of alcohol; last year, I put myself on a discount-fare airplane at midnight, in two different time zones even. And yet, I still wonder why my New Year's celebrations never match the ones on TV. Some people never learn.

Bitch bitch bitch: I have one of those two-week-long horrible colds, and it's ruining my sense of taste. No matter what I eat, it tastes like it's been in the back of the fridge for three weeks and then had the mold scraped off with a muddy knife. Bleah.

Yami, I ask, what is the world coming to when a mall can be considered, ahem, venerable?

I wrote half a response to this in the comment form, and then deleted it because I was thinking too much and wanted a full entry. The gist of it is this: I think giant chain stores, and the malls they occupy, are inevitable in a culture that encourages lots of gallivanting around and resettling halfway across the country. I'm not prepared to condemn this kind of mobility, so I've been cultivating a sort of curmudgeonly affection for malls.

Not that I find them pleasant - too many people, horrid acoustics, lousy music piped through lousier speakers. But they're usually the quickest way for me to buy the things I need to buy, and since I hate shopping regardless, well, hey. Conveniently, it all ties back into local community again - traditional community centers (churches, schools) have become less central for whatever reason, leaving a lucrative void for clever merchants. Malls are also warm, sheltered places with enough open space for sundry community performances, bringing the art-fans in to shop and the shoppers in to the art world. It's all very warm and fuzzy and symbiotic; when in the hell did I become such a capitalist?

I think I just like the irony.

My earliest memories of the Sycamore Mall were of this big animatronic Christmas tree they put up each year a ways down from Santa's house. It moved its branches and spoke in a pleasant contralto; I was absolutely terrified. More recently, though, I've been thinking of the place as a study in retail failure. You see, a few years ago they installed a giganto-huge chocolate-covered scab complex on the other end of town, which has been steadily siphoning traffic from my childhood haunts ever since. And so the last time I ventured down to Sycamore, it was full of empty storefronts, dark skanky linoleum, and withered plastic plants. The only things left open were Radio Shack, FashionBug Plus, a crappy Mexican bar and an insurance office.

Enter some local development company, stage right. In a short amount of time they've replaced the dark skanky linoleum with light plastic tiles, the decaying plastic plants with fresh new plastic plants, and they've convinced several family-oriented retail ventures to move in. There are now snazzy new movie theaters, a Chuck-E-Cheese takeoff dubbed "Monkey World" and a selection of respectable shops. It's not exactly buzzing with people yet, but there were actual cars in the parking lot and more full storefronts than empty ones. I was shocked and impressed; there may yet be hope for the Forces of Good. In this case the Forces of Good really mean me not having to drive twenty minutes to see a movie or buy socks, but you can make up something about the power of grassroots organization and local community development if you'd rather.

I should mention, also, that I went to the snazzy new theater tonight to see the Lord of the Rings. I don't need to repeat the same old glowing platitudes that others have already repeated, and I'm too tired to give a coherent, insightful review. So I will merely use the time-honored literary traditions of Repetition and Punctuation to indicate my excitement. Lord of the Rings! Lord of the Rings!! Whooo!

So good night, and I wish all of you sweet dreams about elves doing things other than shooting bows or playing rugby.
*cough* *hack* *cough*
Um, I mean, for heaven's sake don't let the bedbugs bite.

Now is a good time to start the deluge of "it looks funny in Boogle Browser 1.2 for BeOS" complaints. And if you want to know which drug inspired me, it was pseudoephedrine hydrochloride. That shit always makes my head feel like a puffer fish.

Oh, and since time zones, according to blogger, are to be applied across the entire range of blog archives and therefore cannot be changed mid-week, I've decided to put myself in Greenwich for ever and ever amen. If you want to know things about my local-time habits, you'll simply have to subtract a few hours.

The only thing wrong is that my ears don't move like flippers, and also I don't have spines coming out of my cheeks. Otherwise I'd make a great puffer fish. And also I don't have any powerful neurotoxins in portions of my flesh, but that can be remedied. Blug, blug, glugg.

If ever there was a wine that was built to go with Christmas candy, this Country Red from Missouri would be that wine. It's very sweet and fruity, yet still classified as semi-dry... someday, when my sweet tooth is overacting again, I might try a sweet wine from the same winery. Uff da.

Meanwhile, Christmas tradition in my family holds that we should spend the entire day in pajamas, grazing on candy and leftovers and playing with toys, so I'm doing just that. I've been doodling around a redesign for this thing, too, but I'm short of inspiration at the moment. So, gentle readers, would you care to give me an arbitrary constraint or three? Rules and limits usually make me more inventive.

From the Department of the Coolest Things Ever: they found a new squid! It's not one of those giant sperm whale-fighting squid, but it's pretty damn cool nonetheless. Plus you can watch videos of it playing with a submersible.

The hoodlums of Cedar Rapids, Iowa have painted patriotic graffiti on the side of the highway. As we were driving past this on the way home from my grandparents (food, super-warm wood heated house, babies, more food) we were passed by a tailgating moustached man, whose white two-door coupe was smothered in American flag decals. I was prepared for the red, white and blue decor - stories of empty discount stores and ironic flag thievery are good fodder for even the European news media - but not for the sucking mindless void that seems to be behind it all.

What really got me were the stories in the tiny local paper. It seems that people are trying to refocus their Christmas celebrations, discarding some of the commercial fluff. This is all well and good, but what it really means is that they've discarded their clumps of red and green Christmas things in favor of all-new, all-ugly red, white and blue Christmas things. The advice columnist writes that a sensitive holiday party will make good use of patriotic napkins; childrens' printed letters to Santa Claus include requests for turtles, Nintendo products and United States flags in the same endearingly greedy sentence; my neighbor has a fairie-light flag as part of his outdoor display. What the elvis are these people trying to accomplish? Do they think their shoddy gestures of patriotism will be enough to scare off resident terrorists, or maybe sway the minds of the corn fields?

I can understand such displays during, say, World War Two, when American citizens at home were actually sacrificing something for their country - after all, it's good to be reminded that your privation is for a purpose. Today there are no ration books, no scrap metal drives, and gas is barely more than a dollar a gallon. So the only thing we're suffering from is fear - are we really displaying flags to remind us of why we're scared? I think Franklin Roosevelt had something to say about that once.

The whole thing is almost enough to make me question the selfless motives and worldly perspective of us Americans, who generally have enough to eat every day and whose president has promised to make the bad men go away by the magic power of bombs and guns. Almost enough, but not quite - some of those "God bless America" window decals were pretty damned persuasive. I think there's a squirrel in our backyard who's not quite convinced that the United States is the greatest country ever, so I'm going to go build a snowman and dress him in an Air Force uniform made of twigs. There's not much snow on the ground, so it'll be tricky, but by golly I'll do anything to teach those terrorists a lesson.

Oh yes, I'm back safe and sound and wrapped in fuzzy and cursing at msn and trying to remember American keyboards again. It's good. Jet lag is not so good, as I'm getting grumpy at unexpected hours and still don't know when I should be hungry, but on the other hand I went to the dentist this afternoon and had no cavities. I'm so gosh-darned proud of myself.

Right. My fingers are too cold to type effectively, and I'm tired, and there are muffins upstairs. We all deserve a short and crappy entry every once in a while, eh?

From my builing you can't quite see Kastrup Airport, but it's close; I've stood at the end of the hall and watched planes come in to land, lower on the horizon than the top of the high rise airport hotel before they disappear behind fuzzy trees and builings. But it always feels a little bit unreal to think about actually being on one of those planes. As far as I'm concerned, the inside of an airplane is a bubble universe completely disconnected from everything - when I'm not in an airplane, I find it difficult to imagine being in one, and when I am in an airplane I have no concept of the world outside the metal tube*. There are lots of bubble universes around, really - Caltech is another.

My things have been squished into my suitcases, with only a little bit of jumping. My room still needs a last vacuuming, and I have to clean all the nasty out of my refrigerator shelf. Twenty-four hours from now I will be finding my parents at O'Hare; twelve of those hours will be spent on an airplane. Those are just numbers. Now I'm going to go stare at the lights on the horizon, and I will post again when it's time for me to complain about jet lag.