March 30

When I was still cool enough to listen to the radio and not old enough to drive, my mom would let me sit in the front seat and man the dial. Sometimes we liked the same songs, sometimes not, but I never listened to 101x in the car, since the language and lyrical content of many of the songs upset her (Uninvited's Too High for the Supermarket is one that comes to mind). Instead, I usually hung around the more commercial stations, 96.7 and 94.7, expertly maneuvering between the two.

(For those of you not from Austin, 104.3 was a very bad ass, commercial-free rock station for a while, as well. I think they ran out of money, since they had no commercials. Also, 93.3/99.7 used to be a ridiculous techno station. 102.3 used to be classic rock. Ooooh, back in the day.)

In 2001, Shaggy's version of Angel was released by Universal. My mother loved the original version of this song, and I thought that this new cover would be equally mother-friendly. I was completely wrong.

Shaggy's lyrical rewrite ran as following:

Girl, you're my angel, you're my darling angel
Closer than my peeps you are to me, baby
Shorty you're my angel, you're my darling angel
Girl, you're my friend when I'm in need
Lady

I remember sitting in the car, singing along a bit, getting my fourteen year-old groove going. My mom reached over and turned off the radio. "I don't like that song," she said. "What?!" I was shocked. It was harmless. "Why not?"

"I don't like that dirty thing he says," my mom replied. I couldn't figure out what she was talking about. She turned and faced me. "Christina, what do you think 'peeps' means?" she asked me, eyebrows raised. I tried to explain to her, "peeps" was people. "You know," I said, "Like, people. Peeps. Good friends, buddies."

She shook her head at me, and I could see how naive she thought I was. "Christina," she said, lowering her voice the way parents do when they're going to say something that makes them uncomfortable, "He's talking about breasts."

March 29 (2)

Today I received a spam email from a kid in one of my classes.

"This is an abuse of the UT email system and strictly forbidden by the UT Acceptable Use Policy," I wrote him back, copying and pasting the relevant part of the policy, and linking him to the entire thing. I almost threatened to report him, but then I realized he could be a super hacker spy.

March 29

When I was in high school, I dated a boy who never spent his change. Instead, he would put all of it in an empty drawer in his dresser. Once a month or so, he'd put all the change into a sock and give it to a homeless person.

I once lent him my favorite sweatshirt, because that's what you do when you date people. After we broke up, I asked for it back. "I don't know what you're talking about," he said. "You're wearing it in your photo on your band's website," I told him. "Oh." He said. "I lost it."

One of his fingers was too short; I guess he'd lost the tip in an accident, but he never told me about it. He'd also dropped out of high school, and when we met in a park--he chased me down after I had walked past and told me that I was beautiful--he had just gotten out of rehab.

He was a terrible money manager, and always broke. Sometimes we'd hang out at the halfway house, all those sad, middle-aged men around trying to put their lives back together.

We didn't date very long. "I'm sorry," I told him. "I think we should take a break." He got in his van and drove away. "I know what that really means," he said as he was walking away from me.

March 28

I just wanted to revisit the sheer genius of this article.

1.) It's Putin.
2.) It's Abba.
3.) It's Bjorn Again.

"'He [Putin] was dancing along in his seat to Super Trouper and raised his hands in the air during Mamma Mia when we asked the audience to,' she said."

March 25

Holy shit. This is like four times the calories I eat in a day. Although I do eat fewer than the government recommended 2k calories/day.

March 23

When I was young, my parents took our television up to the attic where it stayed for at least the next decade, nestled among cardboard boxes, home insulation, and Christmas decorations. I have very few memories of television--I remember my parents once watching Star Trek, I remember pretending I woke up early enough on Saturdays to watch Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and I remember watching a Disney movie one day with my mother as men replaced the shingles of our roof. But for the most part, I didn't remember anything about having a television, and I didn't miss that it was gone. I spent a lot of time outside.

One of the things I remember best about playing outside (besides the fact it enabled me to watch for and then greet the mail carrier, which was my life aspiration at that point), was the cicada shells. You would find them all sorts of places, where the cicada had decided it was now too big for its skin, and it was glorious for me as a child to find these relics. Sometimes they would be on our wood fence, sometimes the stone of our home, sometimes on a tree, but always magical. A dried, empty, hollow husk of bug, dull brown but, in my small eyes, a complete wonder. We would collect these empty bug shells, take them into our home to show our mother, proud as she was of her beaming children.

The most magical aspect of these skeletons, for us, was that we never saw the real insect. We could hear them alright, every night, but they were shy creatures, I guess, because the only bugs I could ever catch hold of were the big slow moths that clodded around light fixtures. One day my father showed me a picture of a cicada. "What's that?" I asked, staring at the picture. This creature was bright green, vibrant, with beautiful, clear wings. "That's a cicada," my father told me. Looking back I imagine him patting me on the head, but I doubt that happened. I was dumbstruck. How could such a beautiful creature leave such a dull, frightening shell behind?

These days, I don't find cicada shells any more. I don't know if it's because I've gone inside, or because the insects have gone somewhere else. I have a television now, but I still don't have any channels. I'm fairly certain I still wouldn't wake up to watch Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. But I've never resented that my parents took away the television's monsters so that I could invent better ones in my own backyard.

Maech 22--DUDE

Okay. Blind people in movies and TV? Total gimmick. Who's going to tell them if they do it wrong? DUH. No one. The only people that know can't *see* them.