I was recently asked if I enjoy offbeat, quirky, and/or foreign movies.

Well…

I have an inexplicable affinity for Finnish Christmas polka music (and not just because it’s a fantastic way to torture my roommates).

I drive a MINI with a blue-and-white checkerboard roof.

I have (and thoroughly enjoy) dreams wherein I am Emma Bovary, alternately sitting in cramped and partially flooded sinking ship cabins with neglected broccoli-eating children and asking Parisian parking lot attendants for directions before I speed madly toward Charles de Gaulle Airport in a high-powered Mustang with a fussy clutch and no brakes.

I relate scenes from Monty Python and the Holy Grail to scripture passages I’m studying.

…

Nah. Generic Hollywood romantic comedies for me. All the way.

syllogic [sɪ-laˈ-dʒɪk]: Sylvian logic.

syllogical [sɪ-laˈ-dʒʌ-kɞl]: Characterized, affected, persecuted, or tortured by Sylvian logic.

You know how there’s generally a hard way and an easy way to do something? And how sometimes you have to do something the hard way a WHOLE lot of times before you figure out the easy way? And the hard way involves shooting yourself repeatedly in the foot, rendering the easy way thereafter impossible without starting all over again from step 1 and thereby wasting even MORE time and effort and not-inexpensive-because-they’re-the-fancy-kind CDs?

I don’t hate iTunes. I don’t hate iTunes. I don’t hate iTunes.

Or my roommate’s computer.

Or my computer.

GRRRRR.

So I haven’t been able to open the DVD drive on my computer, for some reason, ever since it hit the pavement a few weeks ago. Today I got to feel all technical and handy as I deftly removed the DVD drive from my laptop, shook it out (that part was fun), and then replaced it, all with the unseen but audible help of Dell’s telephone support personnel, who very kindly didn’t force me to admit I’d dropped the computer until the end of our conversation. (Actually, I didn’t drop it; I just knocked it off the counter at the curbside check-in station. Same difference, though, I suppose.) In any case, I fixed it, all by myself (mostly), and for that I am proud.

I love this.

LOVE it.

Thanks eternally to Anna, who told me about this delightful (meta)song back in September.

One drizzling and chilly afternoon, when I was still in Germany, I was walking through a cobblestoned square that had either a statue or a fountain- – and running through the square was a little toddler with white-butter-yellow curls, probably 18 months old, chasing the pigeons. He would run in one direction and the birds would scatter while he shrieked with delight; the birds would land a few feet away and he would toddle in that direction, clapping his hands, still shrieking with delight, his mouth wide open and his head tilted back in pure exhilaration. His father stood close by watching and his older brother was in on the action too. I stood and watched for five or ten minutes, smiling, wondering that so much joy can make even pigeons beautiful.

Before this morning, I thought having a camera go up my nose and down into my throat would be kind of cool.

It wasn’t.

I really hate it when people make comments like “Person X must have been cooking–I hear the smoke detector!”

However…

(In my defense, I always smell something burning well in advance of the smoke detector. But it’s going to take AGES to clean that soup pot.)

So I created a new game this evening, thanks mostly to a somewhat careless driver:

Dodge-the-Snowplow*! (“Dodgeplow” for short.)

Luckily for me, by virtue of the Rolling Suitcase Jumparound Dance, which resembles the sort of activities usually seen near maypoles, only without the ribbons, I won this round by almost a foot.

*Not recommended for kids, and not just because it generally involves inadvertent swearing.

This morning I jumped into the Atlantic Ocean.

Then I came home and slept for a while.

Then I spent the rest of the day in my pajamas.

…

…

2008 is going to RULE.