formerly a fearless temp

OMG! I just picked up my voicemail and a friend had left a message there, and in it she said that there was new CNN breaking news! Britney Spears files for divorce!

Naturally, I was all, "OMG, GASP!" and maybe jumping up and down because I love celebrity gossip. And then my friend's message went on to say something like, "And isn't that a sad commentary on America? That on Election Day, THAT is the top news story?"

And then I felt kind of bad for jumping up and down. But not enough to not post this LJ entry. Anyway, hey, I voted! I pushed down all of the appropriate little levers (for the last time, possibly - I think NYS is going to a more high-tech method next year, and I will miss the little levers).

And now for the important PSA: New Friday Night Lights tonight! I strongly suspect the episode will include Matt Saracen being awesome and/or adorable. I will have to tape because some alternate version of myself volunteered to help the Dems on Election Night. Off I go to headquarters! I am secretly hoping they won't need my help! That's the kind of lazy American I am!

.i. friday night lights!

Tomorrow at 10PM, NBC will be airing Friday Night Lights instead of a repeat of Studio 60. I love Friday Night Lights the way I love popcorn, chocolate, and Diet Pepsi: even though I know that I could theoretically live without them, I would hate a reality in which I was forced to do so. To make a FNL-less reality less likely, more people need to watch!

It's an awesome show. All the critics are blabbering about it, which is great, but also makes me a little nervous because I think sometimes people think critical darling = medicinal TV (good for you, but boring/blah/bossy). FNL is SO NOT THAT. It is just plain awesome. It is both high-quality and tremendously satisfying. I mean, people have dramatic arguments and make out in the rain! And there are rousing fourth-quarter comebacks! And Kyle Chandler looking ridiculously good! And there are several attractive male football players whose portrayers are totally in their twenties so it's not that skeevy!

Check it out!

.ii. public speaking phobia

I recently reconnected with a woman I met through Literacy Volunteers, who had a recurance of cancer in the time since I last saw her, and understandably hasn't been feeling well. When we went out to lunch a couple of weeks ago, I told her to let me know if there was anything, anything I could do.

LiteracyBuddy: Well, actually . . .

FearlessTemp: Name it. Whatever you need - company, someone to pick up groceries, fun novels. Just let me know.

LB: Okay. I was supposed to speak at the Literacy Volunteers event in November, and I'm really not feeling up to it. Would you be willing to fill in?

Outer FT: Of course! No problem!

Inner FT: Dammit.

Which brings us to this weekend, three days before the event, and how is the speech coming? I loathe it! Has my paralyzing fear of public speaking gone away, even after a year of teaching? Not at all! Can I stop thinking about poor LB and how paltry my concerns are in comparison to hers? Of course not! Does this lead to increased self-loathing? Naturally! Will I stop this Q&A pattern? Immediately!

All I want to do is watch TV and eat fudgesicles! Why can't doing that produce a heartfelt, witty speech?

And even if the speech is witty and heartfelt, will anyone notice if I look like I took a can of shoe polish and combed it through my hair? I dyed my hair on Thursday for the first time ever, and had the hair stylist color match it, and I don't doubt that she did, but. It's dark. It's probably no darker than it was last week, and just looks different to me because the gray is gone, but I have this worry, now, that it looks obviously dyed, and I've always heard that dyeing your hair darker is a bad choice (I always think of Elizabeth Taylor in her perfume commercials before she went white), but maybe that's just for the over-sixty set? I don't think I look over sixty. In fact, the person in the next chair at the salon thought I was 18 or 19. That's what happens when you never leave the house! No sun damage.

(In all honesty, it's more that I've worn SPF 15 moisturizer or makeup on my face for the last five years, and also that my face is chubby - chubby faces show fewer wrinkles. It's one of the few benefits we get.)

.iii. pollage

[Poll #856164]

.iv. it

Over the weekend, I gave up three hours of my life I'll never get back to an ABC Family re-airing of the mini-series It, based on the Stephen King novel,which totally scarred me when it first came out. I mean, there was a killer clown with razor-sharp teeth! And a kid getting sucked into a pipe! And Richard Thomas a.k.a. John Boy from the Waltons wearing a ponytail! It was extremely scarring. And I totally screamed a few times when watching it this past Saturday (I'm a pretty big scaredy cat).

Watching it now, I was blown away by how much TV has improved in the last sixteen years. The special effects, sure, but everything else - the dialogue, the pacing, the characterization was just so cheesy and badly done, in my opinion. John Ritter was solid, as was Annette O'Toole - I was totally invested in ( spoiler for the ending! )

I bet the book is good, but am too much of a scaredy cat to try it.

.v. boots!

Boots, my Nana's missing cat, has returned! Unfortunately, he's in bad shape and his chances of recovery from his time in the wild are iffy (he was severely dehydrated and had gone into kidney failure by the time he was found). If anyone can spare some good thoughts for Mr. Boots, they would be v. much appreciated.

I park on the street, and every day I leave by backing into the driveway and peeling out at top speed, as if the seconds I shave off my morning drive time with the maneuver will somehow make me five minutes late for work instead of ten. It has never worked! I am always late! But I never just drive straight away, even though I can get to the main road that way too. It takes at least 20 seconds more, you see. And what was I risking by backing into the driveway?

The mailbox, it turns out. Every day in the past I've driven by it, often close enough that I could see the brush marks in the black paint, but never making contact. But today was different! Today was the day the mailbox met my passenger side view mirror, and surprisingly, in the conflict between the two, my dinky little side mirror totally took out the mailbox, which was sitting on a sturdy wooden platform (having been driven over in the past, I think by a delivery guy when we first moved in. It is not a lucky mailbox.).

Yes, the wood splintered, and broke, at which point I slammed on my brakes. And then I got all flustered and nervous and did that ditzy forgot-what-gear-I'm-in thing, and let go of the clutch/pressed the gas that last little bit needed to pull the thing clean off. It was LEGENDARY. I finally pulled my car forward, away from the carnage, and left it running with the door open while I tried to put the mailbox back together, hoping that somehow by lining it up juuust right, it would totally forget that it had been split down the middle and stand tall. This meant that there was a lot of fussing and fiddling and me-stepping-away-only-to-watch-it-fall-apart. Until I looked up and saw my father stomping down the driveway, a hammer in one hand, a bunch of nails in the other. And then we stood there together and nailed it back in place. My father didn't flip out at all, even though he would have been totally justified, since I was having a particularly late morning and hit the mailbox at approximately the time I should have been arriving at his office.

The other exciting mail-related news of the day was that I got my first season American Dreams DVDs in the mail today. I started watching regularly in the second season, I think, so it's, like, a newly released prequel to me, or something. I am still so sad American Dreams got canceled. Still! Why isn't it in syndication? Why? Because the music rights are too expensive, probably. But! It was such an awesome show!

Anyway, in other news, I am deeply troubled that I may have burned all of my Sports Movie Credits with my friends when I dragged two of them to see Invincible with me. I did not REALIZE how much I would want to see the one with The Rock and the prison football team! Dammit! Will I be able to cash in again? I have until September 15 to find out.

.i. library terror

Peeps, I have so many overdue items from the local library that I've been putting off searching the site for a particular book because some tiny corner of myself, the same corner of myself that can't sleep with the closet door open, believes that I will be awakening the beast with my query in the search box. The library will realize that I owe them 378495 items (only a slight exaggeration), and send operatives to my house, who will beat down my door, awakening the neighbors, a la COPS.

Or like the Bookman, from Seinfeld!

( one of my favorite scenes from Seinfeld, ever )

As if you couldn't tell, I've been experiencing a Seinfeld Renaissance lately. Hence the icons, such as this one, from another one of my favorite episodes, The Marine Biologist.

.ii. perspective

I woke up this morning feeling much more even-tempered and kind of can't believe I wrote such a lengthy LJ post about a movie theater employee being rude to me. Kids are starving in Africa, etc! I do realize my plight was not that terrible. I haven't been sleeping well lately, and I'm back to hateful law office employment, and there are NO JOBS FOR SOCIAL STUDIES TEACHERS around here, so I'm just generally cranky. Oh well.

.iii. request!

I'm going on vacay on Saturday, and I am going after work tomorrow to the bookstore to burn some of the gift certificates I got for my birthday/graduation. Does anyone have any recommendations? I'm looking for novels, I guess. Sample set of books I adore: Sloppy Firsts etc., most of Meg Cabot's YA, Bridget Jones's Diary, American history books (I tend to value good writing above almost everything else here), Bill Bryson's stuff, Georgette Heyer, Barbara Kingsolver, lots of other things I can't think of.

Has anyone just finished a truly awesome book?

I am about to wrap up terrifying cleaning task two of three (my half of the computer room), and seriously, people, NEVER AGAIN will I go through this. I've already invested six or seven hours in this GD computer room, I'm not done, and it's been sheer torture. I am going to turn over a new leaf. No more living in disarray and filth! I've kept my bedroom clean for a full week! I think I may be on to something.

Next up is my car, which, though smallest, has potential to be the grossest of the three terrifying cleaning tasks. Since I'm always running late, I tend to eat meals in there, and since I'm clumsy, food falls. I try to clean as I go, but stuff can get under the seat and out of sight and forgotten about. Every time I clean out my car, I fear reaching down and finding that a nest of squirrels have taken up residence under the driver's seat, subsisting on old PB&J crusts.

More news as it develops.

In other news: Did anyone else watch Broken Trail tonight? I keep wanting to call it Broken Arrow, and then I remember no, that's that terrible Christian Slater movie about a nuclear weapon, and then I think, Whatever happened to Christian Slater? And then I remember how much I loved Pump Up the Volume when I was in high school, and wonder whether I should watch the movie again, or will it have lost something? Probably.

But! The movie I meant to talk about is called Broken Trail, and it is a two-part western on American Movie Classics starring Robert Duvall and Thomas Haden Church, a.k.a. Lowell the dull-witted mechanic from Wings. Also, he was nominated for an Oscar last year for Sideways. But I liked Wings better, so that's what I choose to remember him from. The movie is about two cowboys trying trying to bring a bunch of horses across the frontier who run across five Chinese girls about to be sold into prostitution, and then take the girls under their protection. Drama ensues. Is anyone else out there watching it?

Okay, would say more, but it's late and I have to move some furniture before I toddle off to bed. And so off I go, to move furniture! Then sleep! Here's hoping I don't drop anything on my toe, like my father did last week in the office.

One of the things that makes me believe that the world does get better as time goes on is the expansion of summer television programming options. Back in The Day, all I had to entertain me during the summer months were reruns of The Wonder Years and Growing Pains (both admittedly awesome). But now? Now! Now we have ALL of this FIRST RUN summer programming! Like this show, which I cannot wait to see - and I'm not sure if it's because I'm sleep-deprived and punchy in the best way possible tonight, having a three-day-weekend to look forward to (thanks to LJAGU's graduation! Whoot whoot!):

Pshych - Psych centers on Shawn Spencer, who possesses uncanny powers of observation honed by his police officer father, Henry, who drilled young Shawn to note even the smallest details of his surroundings. When Shawn is accused of committing a crime that he actually solved for the police department (by calling in a tip), he convinces the cops that he's a psychic. With the reluctant assistance of his best-friend Gus, Shawn starts solving cases for an ever-skeptical -- but grudgingly impressed -- police force.

AND Gus is played by Dule Hill! Charlie from The West Wing! I thought it sounded kind of interesting when I heard about it a while ago, but I just watched the video preview and laughed out loud.

Off to hunt some dinner.

Every so often I get a little overzealous with my Proactiv and run out of the cleanser before my next batch arrives; this happened recently, and so I've been using some random Neutrogena scrub, which was probably the cause of my breakouts. I used my Proactiv again tonight and my skin does feel different - the thing is, when I was using the cleanser, it felt different. Not as gritty, as if they'd made the grit they put in it finer or something. But that may simply be because the grit in the Neutrogena scrub was huge.

Random note: It literally took me like fifteen minutes to come up with the term "gritty" which I'm still not completely satisfied, but is better than the next-best-thing I'd come up with, which was, "those small rocky things in the cleanser that probably don't do anything but at least give the illusion of exfoliating."

Anyway, my question is, for any of you out there who use Proactiv: Did the formula change at all? Or is it just me?

Randomly again: If you get the chance, I recommend checking out Troop 1500 on PBS. It's a documentary about a Girl Scout troop made up of girls whose mothers are in prison, and it was really excellent. I really want to know more about the girls and their mothers, but I can't get any concrete information anywhere. Also, I came in late to watching it, so I missed finding out why one of the mothers was in jail, the one who was in there for (by my caculation) at least twenty more years. What did she do? Did anyone else watch?

I owe replies to comments and stuff, but had to give a heads up - The Cutting Edge 2: Going for the Gold is going to be airing again tonight at 8PM on ABC Family. I mention this because I know some people may have missed the cheese the first time and would like to experience it. I still haven't seen the second half of the movie (got caught up in my to-do list last night), and may not get to see it tonight (so much to do! so sad!), but I will do my part to ensure that others do! That's the kind of gal I am!

The internet is such a black hole. It swallows up my good intentions and academic drive to succeed. I came here for the specific purpose of digging up gossip about Genghis Khan, and yet somehow I find myself sitting here forty minutes later, typing up an LJ entry, after spending ten minutes desperately searching out General Hospital spoilers (after spending twenty minutes reading a variety of threads on TWoP, and checking my flist, and reading Dwight Schrute's blog), and do I have any new gossip about Genghis Khan? No! No, I do not!

Old gossip about Genghis Khan: I watched his A&E Biography yesterday, and it strongly implied that he and the head of another clan were an item. The Biography special didn't say it straight out, of course; Dramatic Intonation Guy said, "'Genghis and [Other Clan Leader] were said to be great friends, closer than brothers. They slept together in the same bed for one and a half years, making Genghis's wife jealous.' - The Secret History of the Mongols."

It ended like so many love stories do: With one taking over a good chunk of Eurasia, and the other being brought before him to be executed. Genghis, the old softy, had to leave the room while his old pal was being killed. A shocking show of sentimentality, considering he killed his brother over a fish when he was thirteen or so.

ENOUGH ABOUT GENGHIS KHAN!

I really think it's important that more people watch General Hospital and talk to me about how adorable Patrick and Robin are. I don't know why I find them so cute, but I do. I want them to bicker and fight viruses together and I want one of them to fall victim to the man-made mutant strain of encephalitis (these are all words that have often been used on GH recently), and I want the other to stand by all nervous, and wonder Why He/She Did Not Realize How Much He/She Mattered. Is that so much to ask? Is it? I'm being forced to watch Emily pant after Sonny! Give me something, GH! I've given you almost eleven years of uninterrupted viewing! Have you no reciprocal loyalty?

1. I can't find my GD cell phone. I blame my subconscious self, who is, I believe, attempting to keep me within my alloted daytime minutes by refusing my conscious, too-chatty self access to the phone. Stupid subconscious.

2. Project Runway is awesome.

3. Somewhere in me there's a series of posts about Astaire/Rogers movies to go along with all those icons I uploaded ages ago, but here's something quick I thought of when I looked at my default icon in the corner of my Update Journal window here - in Swing Time, Ginger plays Penelope "Penny" Carroll and Fred plays John "Lucky" Garnett and it was only after I'd seen the movie at LEAST five times that I realized the pun. Isn't that sad?

4. You should all totally see Swing Time asap. It is awesome. I bet it's even more awesome if you're clever enough to get the punny jokes the first time around, as I'm confident all of you are.