What does this song mean? For my whole life I don't know what this song means. I mean, 'Should old acquaintance be forgot". Does that mean we should forget old acquaintances or does it mean if we happen to forget them we should remember them, which is not possible because we already forgot them?
~ Harry

Well, maybe it just means that we should remember that we forgot them or something. Anyway, it's about old friends.
~ Sally

Old years begat new years. For friends young and young-at-heart, new and longtime, here's to making our marks significant and meaningful and deliberate on the blank page that is 2012.

Skål!

Chin chin!

Cheers!

Things I Think About...

Who really is the better Darrin – Dick York or Dick Sargent?

What makes Tootsie Roll Pops so darn addictive? And no, I don't know how many licks it takes yada yada yada...

Where did manners and civility and respect for one’s fellow man and woman go? What is wrong with people that they have to act like such jackasses sometimes?

Mario Cantone looks just like a shorter, slightly more gay version of my old boyfriend. Who was (unconfirmed officially, but I have a great sense for these things) gay himself, just not out at the time we dated. He's still on my "dead to me" list even after 20 years. More on that later...

Do people with self-tanning addictions really think looking like they just came out of a food hydrator is attractive?

The Coca-Cola people should hire me to do testimonials for Daisani. I drink that stuff by the gallon. If only it came in gallon containers (hint-hint)...

Does Donald Trump style his own hair after he gets out of the shower? Does someone come in and swoop and swirl it for him? Are they properly compensated?

And speaking of hair -- Gene Simmons. His hair. Defies description. Really. Have you ever looked closely at it -- it's like a pack of Brillo pads, sans soapy stuff, was taken and moled to make hair. Fascinating in a can't look away sort of fashion.

There needs to be a food truck in my neighborhood that serves/delivers made-to-order breakfast.

Are people really as damn happy to be eating at Olive Garden as they seem on TV?

Why do fools fall in love?

Seriously – what is wrong with people these days?

Did Jesus’ feet ever hurt after doing all that walking in what must have been very uncomfortable sandals?

Why can I not give myself a “pedicure” without looking like a gorilla painted my toenails?

Lovey Howell was underrated.

Am I EVER going to get my office unpacked and organized? God bless America, it’s a hot mess. Ask me about this, please. I have many projects (novel, essays, podcast, website) percolating for the new year and I need a place to work, y'all. If I want to morph into the modern-day Sally Rogers, I need to get on this ASAP.

If Jon Hamm rang my doorbell and said “run away with me” I wouldn’t bother to close the door behind me as I left.

If I had my own talk show, my set would look like a big, glorious bedroom and my guests and I would wear pajamas and sit around the bedroom to chat. And we'd have a house cat. Plus a little band on a set that looked like a paneled basement. Refreshments would be served.

Is there a better pop love song than "Maybe I'm Amazed" by Paul McCartney and Wings? I think not. Been singing it a lot lately... makes me smile.

Gee my skin looks terrific. Fresh air, natural vitamin D, 300 SPF and good moisturizers.

I don't use the word "dodgy" enough. Must remedy this.

Why did straight up aerobics go out of fashion? I loved that -- it made me feel like I was a dancer. What?

Do kids today (after they get off my lawn) listen to jazz? Do people of my generation? I hope so. Man I hope so. PS:and by jazz I mean the straight up, classic stuff or the current interpretation of that. Not the smoooooooth jazz that makes my ears cringe (yes, I know. Your milage may vary.)

We need a revival in earnest of that Random Acts of Kindness movement. Our world could use a bolus dose of it. Maybe I’ll start it…

Why are the women on House Hunters (that show on HGTV) so damn disagreeable all the time when they look at houses? Is that part of the casting requirements: "must be raging bitch and complain about everything, especially if the kitchen countertops aren't granite, there's only one sink in the master bathroom and the dining room is painted a color she doesn't like."

Does Rhianna own pants? Seriously -- all I ever see her in anymore are those high-waisted modern day granny panties and fishnets. Won't she be cold here soon, if not already? Is she planning to spend the winter months in the southern hemisphere?

Eggnog should be available year round. This "only at the holidays" nonsense is unacceptable.

These are Things I Think About

Without a heart, I can never really know what it would be like to love someone, or every really understand a trashy novel.
~ Tin Man, some weird anime version of The Wizard of Oz

I have always surrounded myself with books. Man, I love those things. I don't ever remember a time when I didn't read. When I was a kid, one of my favorite things to do was read the novel synopses in the back of the volumes of the supermarket encyclopedias my parents "bought" with trading stamps. I knew more about Tobacco Road than any seven-year-old should have.

Now, that's not to say that I didn't read standard kid stuff -- Little Women, Anne of Green Gables, Nancy Drew, From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler -- all took up space on my bookshelves. Then there were magazines -- I learned about life from the "Can This Marriage Be Saved" column in The Belle's Ladies Home Journal magazines. Cultivated my love of cooking from Bon Appetit. Read classic sports journalism in Sports Illustrated. I have a good friend from high school whose indelible memory of me from those days is me reading Gone with the Wind. Still have the copy I read then, held together with ancient masking tape.

But all that changed the summer I was 12. I discovered Harlequin romances. Each volume dirt cheap at the grocery store. I wasn't much for the historical versions -- I was more the contemporary romance kinda girl. Even tried my hand at writing one -- my hero's name was Van Doren. Don't remember what the beautiful, spunky heroine's name was, but she was an Olympic swimmer slumming as a life guard at a resort in Florida.

Go ahead and gag. I know I am.

Harlequin romances. My gateway drug. To my still-current dirty little secret.

True Confession I: I love trashy novels. More than anything.

First it was Judith Krantz with Scruples. Then more of her genre. Jacqueline Susann. Valley of the Dolls. Sidney Sheldon. My goddess Jackie Collins. A truly deliciously horrible set of books about a group of deliciously repulsive women called The Crazy Ladies, written by a woman called Joyce Elbert. In that quinella, the "hero" was a pervy physician named Fingerhood. Yes, really.

True Confession II: At this moment in time, I pretty much read only trashy novels. Or silly little murder mysteries.

Nothing of literary value. Nada. It's all fluffier than the cotton candy kiosk at the circus.

Yes, I have a degree in English literature. Yes, I've read some of the world's greatest novels. I love to talk about those books still to this day. And there was a time when I read worthwhile things for pleasure. But somehow I've slid into the lazy crazy habit of not engaging with books that make me think past "wow, that's an interesting sexual scenario" or "my goodness, that woman is a slut."

My literary side right now is the equivalent of a Kardashian.

I am vapid. And I am unashamed.

When you are to the point when you order your beach trash from Amazon.uk, you just need to own it. By the way, just because a book text contains words like colour, glamour and dodgy, doesn't mean it's not a smutty book. It's just posh trash.

Not sure how I ended up here mired in literary muck. Maybe it's been collateral damage from my crazy, stressful life. Or perhaps I still have a little burnout from my crazy college schedule when I would have to carefully read at least two novels a week while holding down a full-time job -- and then have to be versed enough in them to participate in class discussions. Hammering out One Hundred Years of Solitude in a week isn't for the faint of heart. (But oh, what a beautiful book.) Or perhaps it's more that I came to need that discussion and interaction with others when it comes to a book of significane, now that I think about it. I'm a girl in need of a book club. Maybe.

PS: I got my English degree with a GPA of 4.0, thankyewverymuch. And my nine hours of grad school credit -- 4.0. Just for the record. *Cheshire Cat grin*

The new year always heralds a clean slate in terms of personal goals and objectives, hopes and dreams. A full calendar with all its pages on one side of the spiral signifies options and opportunity. Think I might add reading books that might engage something than my endorphins to the list. Add a little protein to the junk food literary diet I've been on. It'll be good for my mind to have something to process so that the mush my brain's become isn't so, well, mushy.

But for every Jeffery Eugenides book I add to the top of my nightstand, for every Chuck Klosterman essay I mentally process, I'll guarantee that there'll be a Jackie Collins or Brit Posh Trash book to match it.

I am woman. I like smut.

The truth is, everyone likes to look down on someone. If your favorites are all avant-garde writers who throw in Sanskrit and German, you can look down on everyone. If your favorites are all Oprah Book Club books, you can at least look down on mystery readers. Mystery readers have sci-fi readers. Sci-fi can look down on fantasy. And yes, fantasy readers have their own snobbishness. I’ll bet this, though: in a hundred years, people will be writing a lot more dissertations on Harry Potter than on John Updike. Look, Charles Dickens wrote popular fiction. Shakespeare wrote popular fiction—until he wrote his sonnets, desperate to show the literati of his day that he was real artist. Edgar Allan Poe tied himself in knots because no one realized he was a genius. The core of the problem is how we want to define “literature”. The Latin root simply means “letters”. Those letters are either delivered—they connect with an audience—or they don’t. For some, that audience is a few thousand college professors and some critics. For others, its twenty million women desperate for romance in their lives. Those connections happen because the books successfully communicate something real about the human experience. Sure, there are trashy books that do really well, but that’s because there are trashy facets of humanity...

~ Brent Weeks

The Jump-Off: Things you can do in three minutes

• Have a quickie *lascivious eyebrow raise*
• Give yourself a facial
• Do a whole lotta crunches (engage your core!)
• Read a magazine article
• Give yourself a ghetto gorilla pedicure
(The Do-It-Yourself part = ghetto. The fact that you get more polish on your toes than your nails = gorilla.)
• Play a game of solitaire
• Saute an onion
• Load the dishwasher
• Do a quick eBay search
• Deep condition your hair
• Pull weeds along your front walk
• Have a mini-one-song dance party
• Sign and mail a “just because” card to a friend
• Read the comics in the newspaper
• Cook an egg -- poach, fry, scramble, etc., etc., etc.
• Make and cool down (from "Atomic Hot) a bowl of oatmeal
• Iron a pair of pants
• Boot up my Macbook Pro
• Brew a cup of tea
• Collect a bunch of shells on the beach
• Do my nightly skincare routine
• Watch a video on YouTube
• Use a set of those Crest Whitestrip things
• Whistle a happy tune
• Surf through all jillion of your cable channels
• Toast a piece of bread
• Fall asleep
• Kill a couple of levels in Angry Birds
• Complete a row of needlepoint
• Stain stick all the spills and stains on your kiddo's school uniforms.

Stay tuned, as this list is fluid... got anything to add?

If it's the thought that counts, then why do we have fingers?
~ Piglet

Y'all will be pleased to know that I've created a new spin on that tired old thing known as mathematics -- something geared more towards the fabulously right-brained members of society. It's called JaneyMath and features such premises as "rounding up to the nearest whole dollar when entering check amounts in the ledger assures you of always having more money than you think you do in the old bank account." See. Perfect sense. (I can feel the heads of all the accountant-types I know exploding in five-four-three-two...)

In JaneyMath, there's also something called the Present Theorem: For every gift-giver, there is at least one gift-receiver. Seems obvious, no?

However, there's nothing in said theorem about the intent of the gift-giver nor the attitude of the gift-receiver. We add our own subjective colors when it comes to that.

Picture it: Christmas, 1998. The Mister and I had just been married for a year and were still trying to figure out the whole "whose family do we spend what holiday with" chore. We'd done Thanksgiving with his mother in Baltimore, taking the AutoTrain in order to pick up some furniture she had for us. Christmas was split a bit, with an early celebration here locally with my folks and then several days with my father and step-mother-in-law at a mini family reunion in north Alabama. Whew.

Opting to have a little celebration at home before we hit the road on Christmas Eve night, we packed the car and then sat down for a little dinner and present unwrapping. There were lots of oooohs and ahhhhs as we revealed all sorts of treats underneath paper and ribbon.

And then we got to the boxes from The Mister's mother. I can't remember specifically what they all were -- most likely a pullover sweater for him, along with probably a Home Depot gift card and maybe a weird book by some religiously fundamental author or a "doctor" espousing a kooky unorthodox position on health and healing. There's not a lot of variety in her gift-giving repertoire. Actually there is, but let's save that conversation for another time. When I have more wine available.

Finally, there was a large box for me. I'd already received some bolts of fabric she'd picked up on a mission trip to Central America. Gorgeous cloth, but damned if I still don't know what to do with it. Anyhoo.

I tore the paper off, opened the box, pulled aside and discovered... a set of cat stove burner covers.

Wow. Just wow.

It was at that moment that I was immensely thankful I was opening the gift without the giver present. The look on my face said it all.

At the time, my beloved kitty-witty Roxanne was still around, afoot and underfoot. Black, with the exception of a white bib and white paws, she was my spoiled little minx, named after the iconic song by my favorite band, The Police. And the cats on the burner covers looked a lot like Roxanne. Nifty.

The way I see it, there are two sort of people who have cats as pets. People who like cats. And cat people.

People who like cats are just that -- they dig felines. It's not necessary to have cat images a-go-go on myriad things in their possession. They like their pet. That's kind of it.

Cat people, well, are the opposite of that. Please note that I'm not judging cat people. Some of the nicest folks I know are cat people. You do your thing (meow), I'll do mine (le mew, le purrrr.)

But. In the dictionary, next to the phrase "cat person, subgenus obsessive," is a picture of my mother-in-law.

And she assumed that because I had a cat, I liked cat stuff. That I was a cat person.

Ai yi yi.

I was extremely thankful that we had a gas stove at the time and the covers didn't even fit, saving me from having to whip them out when the M-I-L came to visit. This gift was a mismatch literally and figuratively.

And a classic example of "it's the thought that counts."

It's provided me with a good lesson in the art of gracious acceptance, though. Which has proved invaluable.

See. Silver lining. Even in the form of some cat stove burner covers. WIth some help from JaneyMath.

Gracious acceptance is an art - an art which most never bother to cultivate. We think that we have to learn how to give, but we forget about accepting things, which can be much harder than giving... Accepting another person's gift is allowing to express his feelings for you.
- Alexander McCall Smith

The greatest gift you can give another is the purity of your attention.

Lucy: Say, by the way, can you play "Jingle Bells?"
[Schroeder proceeds to play "Jingle Bells", which sounds like a traditional grand piano]
Lucy: [interrupting] No, no. I mean "Jingle Bells." You know, deck them halls and all that stuff?
[Schroeder begins to play again, with the piano sounding like an organ]
Lucy: [interrupting again] No, no. You don't get it at all. I mean "Jingle Bells." You know, Santa Claus and ho-ho-ho, and mistletoe and presents to pretty girls.
[gazes lovingly at Schroeder, who then out of frustration taps one key of the piano while playing "Jingle Bells," which sounds like a child's toy piano]
Lucy: That's it!