For my mom

who has no idea what my taste in guys is... so that she stops suggesting men like michael weatherly.

in no particular order (because of formatting issues)

Gary Lightbody- my most longstanding, most favorite of all.

Ryan Reynolds- who should not be married to Scarlett Johanssen

Chris Pine- Thank God for Star Trek, because watching the Princess Diaries 2 to see him is a little embarrassing.

Joshua Jackson- I never watched Dawson's Creek, so I've only recently come to appreciate his greatness.

Cillian Murphy- can sit next to me on a plane any time. (he looks better in movies than he does in still pictures.)

And Gerard Butler- who is just perfect.

So there you go mom. Next time you want to suggest I find a famous guy (since apparently you think actors are in my realm and i can stumble across) to date- use them as your jumping off point.

my sister had my child.

i know it sounds like the title of a maury povich episode, or at least a headline on a real, old-fashioned tabloid, but it's true. my sister had my child.

my sister's second daughter, lily, is the spitting image of me. sometimes it is a little weird. i will find myself flipping through my sister's latest kodak gallery, seeing lily looking just mostly like me and then all of the sudden... wham! a picture that is like looking in a mirror with a 26 year way-back feature.

what's even funnier about this is she got a fair few of my personality traits too. she loves to dress up as dorothy from the wizard of oz. she takes ballet. and as my sister puts it, she's a bit of a drama queen. (of course i don't remember being a drama queen. i remember having an older sister who bossed me around a lot because she thought she knew everything because she was 7 years older.)

anyway, this of course leads me to stand up for lily more than i will stand up for her older sister. my sister doesn't understand what it is like to be the younger child, bossed around by an older sister who thinks she knows everything. i'll always be there to buy her ruby slippers, to point out lily's side of the story, and show her what she'll look like in 26 years.

Jurassic Park 101

the other day we were in the car talking about disaster movies (my favorites) and the end of the world. one of my co-workers said, "we're not killing the earth, just our ability to live on it." and i said, "of course, that's jurassic park 101."

that's the first time i had ever been introduced to the concept that the earth will survive. we can pollute the hell out of it, and we will, and other species will die, and we will destroy the atmosphere and most everything on it, but as drs. grant and malcolm tell us, "life finds a way."

i got in the mood to watch jurassic park and realized that movie came out in '93. i was 16. that was HALF MY LIFE AGO. god i'm old.

anyway, it was a great night. we went to see it opening night, and came out of the movie thinking, "dinosaurs must exist. we just saw them on screen." 16 years later and the special effects aren't as strong as they used to be, but honestly, they're still better than you see in a lot of b-movies.

a note on the book, while i was reading it (i have a very, very active imagination) i was so scared that there were velociraptors downstairs in the laundry room one night that i couldn't go put clothes in the dryer. i had never seen a velociraptor, as this was before home computers and the internet. i just knew they were scary and they were waiting for me and that i would die if i went downstairs to put clothes in the dryer at 11PM at night when all the lights were off.

the great iPod unheard project!

every year since i've owned an iPod (2004), i've done "The Great iPod Unheard Project." i put the play count of everything in my iTunes back to zero, and put it all on a separate list, and then as i listen to everything, i delete what i've listened to off the "unheard" play list.

i've now owned my computer for almost a full year (minus the 7 days the mac geniuses had it.) and out of the 5410 songs (46.9 days - 22.53G) i'm down to 3828 songs (10 days - 15.8 G) being unlistened to.

i think what i'm going to have to do to finish this is start moving my regular stuff off my iphone and start putting only unheard stuff on it.

i try to do this as a way to clean some stuff out, and make sure that everything in there is worth it. obviously it was a bigger deal when i had a slower, crappier computer with less memory. the macbook can handle having the extra stuff in there, but still... why not clean?

weird things you thought when you were little

a drive in was just mentioned on the TV show i'm watching, and it made me think back to the drive in in sarasota, FL where i grew up. for some reason i thought i owned the drive in. i will never have an answer as to why i thought i owned the drive in. every time we drove by it i would think to myself, "i own that." what on earth could have ever happened to make a little girl think she owned a movie theater. one of life's great unanswerable questions.