considered

i have recently decided to suck it up and embrace the fact that i am a yuppie.

as much as i have longed, at different stages in my life, to be a hipster or a hippie or a small-town dweller/lover or an athlete or a power-broker or an earth mother or a charming eccentric, the fact of the matter is that i like cities better and i prefer to have a job and i look awful in skinny jeans and i am going to shop at anthropologie and williams-sonoma and i am going to care about celebrity gossip and i own a car and that's that.

i am a yuppie.

which also means that i am going to listen to npr and totally and completely geek out when emily h. invites todd and me to see the one, the only, the legendary carl kasell. live and in person.

he was just as charming and hilarious as he is on the radio, plus a dapper suit, a slight north carolina twang and a magic trick. (really. he did magic.)

carl talked about where he was when he heard that john f. kennedy had been assasinated, what it was like to cover the challenger explosion, and why radio will keep going strong for years and years to come. he talked about his early days as a country music deejay, how he landed the gig at "wait, wait don't tell me" and his biggest on-air faux pas.

he was smooth and gracious and unflappable and laughed at his own jokes. which i love.

the best story of the night was one about an episode of "wait, wait don't tell me" that included a quote from president reagan, likening the passage of a difficult piece of legislation to "crapping a pineapple." needless to say, most of the subsequent jokes ended up on the cutting room floor. as they say.

all in all, a truly fabulously wonderfully delightful evening.

maybe being a yuppie isn't so bad.

hoodies are for kids

i threw my favorite hoodie on over my dress just now to sneak downstairs and grab a piece of pizza while aunt joyce was teaching her group flute lesson. i like to slip into the kitchen while the kids are busy fluting away, and then head back upstairs to my attic kingdom before anyone knows i was there.

but tonight my timing was a little off, and i was still polishing off a piece of lovely cheese pizza (just for me) (can you name that movie?) when the lesson ended and the kids came flooding into the kitchen for seconds.

no matter. i finished my dinner and made my departure as inconspicuously as possible. except that, as i passed a small cluster of tween girls sitting on the stairs, one of them said to the others, "my sister has that hoodie. only she's 17."

and it hit me. maybe i'm too old to be buying clothes in the kids' section of target?

say it ain't so.

apples to apples

check this out.

the other day (it was tuesday) i was telling someone about my master plan to buy an iphone.

(a plan, by the w, which is about to come to fruition. this is a big deal. i have thought long and hard and practically and analytically about the switcheroo and i feel very confident in my decision. like, probably more confident than i feel about a lot of my decisions. not to mention my head might explode at the prospect of celebrity gossip at my fingertips at all times!)

anyway, back to tuesday. this someone told me i should hold off because, the word on the street was that the next day (that would be wednesday), apple was going to unveil a tablet computer and i might want that instead.

i told him he was probably wrong.

but in a nice way of course.

(because tablet computers. what is the point? more on this soon.)

then later that night (it was still tuesday) jaron and i were eating indian food that was way too spicy (for me) when his roommate came bounding into the kitchen and said we were never going to believe it but big news! apple was going to unveil a tablet computer tomorrow! (that would be wednesday.)

and i said, tell me something i don't know, buddy. and it felt totally awesome because i never know about stuff like this before people who actually care about stuff like this, but this time i did. (which actually makes me think it wasn't so much big, secret news at all.)

and then apple did unveil a tablet computer on wednesday (which was, that's right, yesterday).

and they named it... the iPad?

worst.name.ever.

i mean, i don't think i need to articulate what that name makes just about everyone think of. especially not when this madTV clip does it so well. (warning: that clip definitely references the vajayjay.)

seriously. are there no women on the apple marketing team?

and now i'll just go ahead and ask the big question, which is: what is the point of a tablet computer anyway? do we really need something between a laptop and a phone? really?

my current answer is no, but i also said i would never need an iphone (i mean who wants to be connected to the internet all the time?) (i do, i do!) so i'm probably wrong about the iPad, too.

though i am definitely not wrong about the name. awful now and awful forever. and that's all i have to say about that.

settled

friday night was game night at dana's. this means food and wine (and fancy lemon soda for me), and settlers of catan.

do you know about settlers of catan? people are quite taken with it. there was a lot of catan playing at the delaware beach house over the summer but i chose to just laugh at other people's intensity about the game instead of playing myself. there is just something sort of hysterical about hearing otherwise rational people shout out things like, "but two sheep for one wheat is a completely unfair trade!"

this time i joined the fray, with heather as my patient tutor and teammate. we didn't win, but we didn't embarass ourselves either, so i am chalking my first catan experience up as a success. next time around my strategy is going to include not sitting next to an open bag of gummi bears, as an hour or more of intense game-playing does nothing for my self-control, and a whole bag of gummi bears in one sitting does nothing for my general sense of well-being.

game night also included a rousing round of celebrity.

do you know about celebrity? everyone writes the names of a bunch of celebrities on pieces of paper, the pieces of paper go into a bowl, the people go into teams, and the teams have to guess what's (or rather, who's) on the pieces of paper. the first time around you can use any words but the celebrity's name to describe them. the second time around, you only get one word (same set of names). the third time around (same names again), you can only act them out.

i will warn you that playing celebrity with a cerebral group such as this one comes with a unique set of challenges. namely that the "celebrities" chosen included hilda solis (secretary of labor), adrian fenty (mayor of d.c.) and william makepeace thackeray (author of "vanity fair.")

for some of us (ahem, me), not too easy to describe (er, recognize), let alone act out. (yes, i wrote down lady gaga and charlie sheen.) but, let's just say that when i pulled out "mr. butt-man" on the charades round, i killed it.

the plastics

deride it though some people might, celebrity gossip has brought a lot of wonderful things into my life.

like today's post over at segullah.

that's right. a philosophical and even spiritual exploration prompted by spencer and heidi from the hills.

i would say stranger things have happened, but actually i am not so sure.

what's up, seven up?

after a little more than a week of having entirely the right amount of fun, i've spent the past couple days catching up on the responsible adult-type stuff i've been putting off.

or, as kj would say, i've been doing a little admin.

here's what's on my mind.

1. haiti. to say it breaks my heart seems like an unfair understatement, but i don't know quite what else to say. last night i read barack obama's piece in newsweek entitled "why haiti matters" and i loved it. haiti matters to us because we are fortunate enough to be leaders, and leadership is compassion. i often fall victim to thinking there are some problems in the world too big for a good solution, but compassion seems like the place to start.

2. the jay leno/conan o'brien throwdown. it is the train wreck i can't look away from. and i can't even stay up late enough to watch late night tv. i think jay leno is coming off like a big douche canoe here, but then again i've always like conan and his ridiculously tall hair.

3. the water heater at the casa de bennett. i think it must be inordinately small, because two mornings in a row now someone has beat me to the shower in the morning and there has been not a drop of hot water left. this means two mornings in a row now, i have washed my hair in the sink. it wasn't even fun when i tried pretending i was at some awesome, cheap hostel on an exotic vacation. plus, it made my neck hurt.

4. my new home. i am feeling really happy and settled here in a new and more confident way. of course, i knew that i would eventually work my way around to feeling like this, but it's nice to have a taste of it, with plenty more to come, i am sure. my life has the pace and the tone that i like right now. happy sigh.

5. i wish i had had a better hair cut when i met the president. i know this sounds like a "my diamond shoes are too tight" kind of dilemma, but my hair bugs me every time i look at the picture of me with president obama. and that is a lot, including just a few minutes ago. getting a good hair cut in d.c. has proved extraordinarily difficult, but i think i have worked up almost enough courage to try again.

6. fundraising for the press institute. i am in the throes of it. wanna help me out? every little bit makes more than a little bit of difference, especially since all donations will be matched dollar for dollar through march 10. your $20 will become $40! your $50 will become $100! and i will love you forever. think about it.
(and go here once you've made up your mind: www.globalpressinstitute.org)

7. i don't think i have time to get scuba certified before i leave for australia. i do have time to get unbelievably excited though.

what's on your mind?

(did reading that make you think of those capital one "what's in your wallet" commercials? because writing it made me think about them. i think i liked the ones with the vikings best.)

what heaven and auto zone have in common

i took a little trip to turkey last spring, if you'll recall, and returned to salt lake exactly six days before i was due to leave salt lake forever.

the timing, admittedly, could have been a little better.

throw in jet lag, a nasty cold and a most unfortunately (though temporarily) frozen credit card, and i think you can see why i was something of a spacehead the day i got back.

which is why, on said day, i drove away from the gas station without replacing my gas cap.

which i realized when i got out of my car in the parking lot at the bank, where i had driven straight from the airport (after stopping at the gas station, obvs) to take care of the credit card situation.

so back i went to the gas station to retrieve the forgotten cap from the top of the gas pump.

except that it wasn't there.

at which point i concluded that i had probably placed it not on top of the gas pump, but on the roof of my car.

at which point i concluded that the likelihood of the cap still being on the roof of my car was, shall we say, slim.

so, in my mind, it was nothing short of a miracle sent straight from heaven above that my gas cap was there! just perched on the roof of the car without a care in the world.

praises be to heaven above!

(my mom's response to this story: "oh, of course it was. i leave all sorts of weird stuff on the roof of my car and it's always still there when i remember it." why i did not ask for more details about this i'll never know.)

now, if you think i learned my lesson after that experience, you must not know me very well. because about a week ago, i realized that my gas cap was missing. for how long, i could not say. and where it could have been misplaced was an even greater mystery.

in short, the gas cap was gone.

and it would have been a true miracle indeed to bring it back.

but, did you know they perform miracles at auto zone? because i finally went there today to remedy my gas cap situation (after it was suggested that my car, sans cap, was at an elevated risk of bursting into flames), and they had just what i needed! a shiny, new gas cap that fit my little tank perfectly.

a prolonged life for me and my car, for a mere $8.76!

praises be to auto zone!

the end.