I Bet You Think This BLOG Is About You...Don't You?

New year, new adventures, new blogs - right? And that dear Tingley All Over reader is my pledge to you. I resolve to fill 2007 with more blogs about my comings, goings, passing fancies and day-to-day obsessions. With that said, er uh typed, I thought I would kick off this entry with a year-in-preview of sorts.

WHAT I'M WATCHING
Is there really such a thing as too much TV or too many ass-swelling hours watching movies?I say hell-to-the-NO, which is why I'm wasting precious brain cells on shows like The Girls Next Door. For those of you unfamiliar with this grade A piece of reality trash, Girls follows the lives of Playboy overlord Hugh Hefner's THREE girlfriends: Bridget, Holly & Kendra. What fascinates me most is a) the ultra white trash decor of the playboy mansion (really, pink canopy beds loaded with nappy stuffed animals) and b) the supreme delusions of these girls thinking that ol' Hef isn't going to trade them in for a younger model before you can say season two. I'm a bit of a Girls late bloomer as it came out like a year ago, but it is still totally worth the Tivo if you are looking for some very good badness.

WHAT I'M READING
Always on the lookout for the next Auguston Burroughs or David Sedaris, I saw David Rakoff on "The Daily Show" and decided to give his novel Don't Get Too Comfortable a scan across the peepers. Although it didn't make me laugh out loud (usually a trait reserved for reading in a public setting that makes me look crazy), I did find it interesting. More than anything, I totally self identified with his chapter about crafting and the zen-like focus that comes from a mound of modge podge or a hot glue gun. He also shed some light on the fact that when one gives a home crafted present to someone, "it might appear very generous on the surface, but in another sense it's an act of bullying...it's an attempt to curate someone else's tastes." How do I plead to such an offense? Guilty as bedazzlingly charged!

Side note on the David Rakoff book - he's a bit of a word nerd. I found myself underlining words that I had to look up later in the dictionary. The two that I've adopted for my own vocab are "effluvial," meaning emanating odor (e.g. My dog Fatsy Cline has an effluvial mouth) and lugubrious meaning boring (e.g. defining words in one's blog could be considered lugubrious by some).

WHAT I'M OBSESSED WITH
I have seen the future and it is an $8 toy game from Wal-mart called the 20Q. Take the innocence of the car-trip-staple twenty questions and fuse it with the heart and robotic soul of a cyborg, and you have the 20Q. Jerrett and I have spent hours trying to stump it only to have it guess even the most random things 9 out of 10 times. And even when it's wrong, it's still eerily close to the answer. For example, I figured I would throw it for a loop with "vagina," but it guessed "sphincter" then "womb." For a small piece of circuit boards and plastic, I gotta say, sphincter womb ain't just whistling dixie.

WHAT I'M LISTENING TO
(AKA WHAT I'M CREATING DANCE NUMBERS TO IN MY HEAD)
Dreamgirls. I know, I know, show tunes, how shocking? But what you don't know is that underneath my pasty hide beats the heart of a soulful Jennifer Hudson and upon hearing a soaring ballad such as "And I am Telling You," the JHud within is released. With a flip of the hand, a toss of the head and a quiver of the lip, I can convince even the most harsh critic that I too have my rightful place next to Dina and Lorell... and I'm not goin' nowhere. So if you pull up next to me on the street and see me twitching and convulsing, or you catch me strutting about the house doing my best turkey neck - I'm not having a seizure. I'm just feeling the dream girl deep inside!

Love, Love

Love as disco-riffic as my rendition of "One Night Only"

Love, Jef