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Reading: Paris: The Collected Traveler, the book I purchased
with the Amazon gift certificate that
Anna
gave me a while back. It's a collected anthology of
many a travel writers' stories
of their visits to Paris, grouped by subject (e.g., food and wine, the Seine,
the arrondissements) combined with practical guidebook information.
Very inspiring.
Listening: Still with the Moulin Rouge soundtrack. We all lose our charms in the end, people. Watching: The Spikealicious episode of Buffy that was on last night, which I caught completely by accident, and the last scene of which I watched about seventeen times in a row as soon as the show ended. Appreciating: Athena and Michelle, and they know why. Hoping: That my maid-of-honor dress will still look okay in five weeks. I'm getting it altered now, but I'm losing weight (14 lbs. so far), and I'm not ready to put that on hold just yet. Speaking of which: The BED page will be up soon, probably this weekend.
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So. This very morning, while I was watching the Today show and calmly eating my Lucky Charms, a story came on about these huge-ass crickets that are apparently taking over Utah. Now, these aren't your normal, everyday, backyard crickets that make the soft soothing sounds of summer. Oh, no. These huge-ass crickets (called -- big surprise -- Mormon crickets, not because Mormons have huge asses, but because they're in Utah, see) are roughly the size of your family pet, and Utah is having a plague, just like this really awful movie we had to watch in grade school about the early prairie settlers and one summer they had a plague and it just rained grasshoppers and the settlers tried to take shelter in their little house but the grasshoppers came in through the roof and fell in their pie and all kinds of gross things. Anyway, it seems the Mormon crickets really do have huge asses because they like to eat everything, and they've been destroying all kinds of crops in Utah. But after about the fourth shot of dozens of these giant crickets eating various things (including each other, thank you very much), I looked down at my Lucky Charms and thought I was going to be sick. So I lunged at the television set and pressed the first button I reached, which luckily popped the channel up one. I ate the rest of my breakfast in peace, watching the last eight minutes of A Different World, the one where Kim thinks she's pregnant and Jaleesa reveals that she had a miscarriage when she was a teenager and Whitley runs around preaching at everyone. (You remember that one, right?)
 A couple of random things happened at work today. First, there was a page for someone named June Cartoon. I hope to God that this was a dare, and that there really isn't anyone out there with that name, but I suppose you never know. Anyway, saying the name and the extension they're supposed to call once, then repeating it, is standard paging procedure. At first, the woman doing the paging was only able to get through it once, and you could tell her voice was cracking when she hung up. Then, a couple of minutes later, she tried again, this time getting through the repeat without incident. It took all the restraint I had not to call the extension and say, "Yes, this is June Cartoon. Did you page me?" (As a little tangent, this took me back to my days working the reception desk at Cannell Studios. During dead times, like the week between Christmas and New Year's, and pretty much any time us mailroom kids went to El Coyote for lunch (they make reeaaaallly good margaritas at El Coyote), we used to amuse ourselves by daring each other to make weird pages. We paged Tom Cruise, Steven Spielberg, Ross Perot, Bart Simpson. Once I paged Len Cariou, this B-list character actor you would totally recognize if you saw a picture of him, and someone called the desk asking excitedly if Len Cariou was really in the building.) Secondly, in my in-box this morning was an e-mail with the subject: "HPV and tongue cancer." For a moment, I pondered the fact that never in all my years of law school did I imagine I would end up working at a place where an e-mail entitled "HPV and tongue cancer" would end up in my in-box. Nor was I especially eager to open said e-mail, having been grossed out once already this morning with the whole monster cricket story. Thankfully, there weren't pictures or anything. And this didn't happen today, but it is work-related: you know how on Ed, Ed's full name is Ed Stevens? There is, I swear to God, a lawyer at The Firm named Ed Stevens. And I was thinking at first about how cool that would be, to not only have the same name as the main character on a show, but to have the same job as that character. Then I thought about it a little longer, and decided that it would pretty much suck. I mean, if the show became popular, then everyone you ever met would probably have to mention it, and you'd probably get pretty tired of it. Same goes for anyone who has the same name as someone famous. In seventh grade, I knew a girl named Michelle Pfeiffer. This was back when all Michelle Pfeiffer had done was Grease 2, but I would imagine she's pretty sick of it now. I also used to work with a woman named Madonna, who was at least fifty years old, and she told me that since about 1986 she'd been letting anyone who met her for the first time call her Donna, because so many people freaked out at calling her Madonna. This is not ever going to happen to me, at least not with the last name I have today. If I marry someone whose last name is Taylor, or Hurley, or Borden, I might have to deal with it. But there's never going to be a show about a lawyer with my name now, unless the whole show is about judges trying to pronounce it, which was the highlight of my days in the Public Defender's office. That's all for today. Happy Summer, everyone.
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