the ninth of november, an unremarkable tuesday


I am obssessed with that "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire" show. I can't stop watching it. (Okay, so, I didn't watch it on Sunday because that was sacred X-Files time, but I watched it last night and I know I'm going to have to watch it every night now.)

It really is a great show, and I understand now why it's a craze. It's because everyone sits there in their homes and yells the answers at the television screen. It's because I know there were many, many people like me, who knew every answer that the people missed or walked away from last night. (Even that tricky whole-notes-in-an-octave thing, which everyone assumes is 8, but it's actually 6.) It's because Regis Philbin rocks at being a game show host.

I felt bad for the guy who called his science teacher friend who told him that the most common element was either Hydrogen or Carbon, and when the guy asked to have two answers taken away, they took those two away. I felt even more bad for the science teacher friend, who must be kind of humiliated.

What pissed me off about it was that the original group of ten people looked like the average board of directors: Ten white guys. There's something wrong with that.

But anyway, I also like the old-fashionedness of this show, even though it's all lights and computer screens and snazzy graphics and opening-theme-to-Jaws music. It's prime-time, baby, it's Americans gathering around their televisions with the whole family to watch the drama unfold, just like 40 years ago.


I am already starting to make moving plans. It's a good seven months away, but I have to start now or I'll never get it done. The biggest issue that I have to deal with is the fact that I don't have a dumpster available to me; all of my trash goes in bags I have to buy from the city, and then put out on the curb once a week.

This is a serious problem. Every other time I've moved, the dumpster to my apartment building ends up overflowing with crap that either (a) I actually don't want anymore or (b) I'm too lazy to figure out how to move it. (I left one perfectly functional Papasan chair in my last L.A. apartment. It didn't even make it to the dumpster, I just abandoned it in the apartment. I hope it went to a good home.)

And I am so overrun with clutter at the moment that I could probably put one bag of it a week on the curb and I still wouldn't be through it all by May.

But I'm determined to be. I am not going to carry all this shit with me to my new home. I can't promise an end to packrattedness, but I can start the hell over.


Speaking of trash, the corner of my apartment where my desk is smells rather funky at the moment. I can't decide if it's my shoes that have leftover ginko fruit stuck in the tread (and I am not kidding when I tell you the smell is just vile) or something has died somewhere.

God, I hope it's just the ginko.

And speaking of lousy smells, my trunk is a disaster. I had some bottles of water that I kept back there for emergencies, only they leaked. Now everything in the trunk (well, there's nothing in the trunk anymore, but everything that was in the trunk) is damp, including the mat covering the spare tire, and there's even mildew growing in several spots. (All together now: Ewwwwww.)

So I bought some dampness-absorbing product at Wal-Mart. It's a nifty contraption with little pellets of something that you are supposed to leave open in the area for 2-3 weeks and the pellets absorb the water and it drops into the bottom of the cup.

Except that there are several problems with this. Number one, I can't really leave an open container of pellets in the trunk without spilling them at the first turn. So I go back and put the lid on it every time I drive somewhere, which leads to number two: at some point I will either forget to put the lid on or forget to take it off, and the whole exercise will be pointless.

The only other thing I can think to do is rip the mat out entirely and either shove it in a dryer somewhere or hang it from the clothesline in the backyard, and then scrub the trunk, both of which are huge pains in the asses, but I guess not as much of a pain in the ass as not being able to use your trunk.

Do you see what my life is like? Ginko fruit and damp smelly trunks.

It doesn't get any better than this.