wickedqueen.net

Greatest video ever:*

I’ve been playing a lot of turn-by-email Scrabble lately via Scrabulous, which also has a Facebook app so you can play through the Facebook interface if you prefer (which I do, mainly because I check Facebook a lot).

And if you really don’t feel like working, Name 50 states in 10 minutes. I missed four, but I’m not going to give you an edge by telling you what they were.

Not the best video in the world, certainly lacking the broad appeal of the first, but if you like a) Highlander (and/or, you know, bad TV/movies) and b) the post-apocalypse,** you cannot help but be intrigued by this totally unauthorized mystery trailer for Highlander: The Source:

The voice-over totally sounds like they slowed some tape in an attempt to mimic Ian McKellan, doesn’t it?

Thanks to Keely and j00j for the video links.

I’m going to see the Simpsons movie tonight on Travis’s recommendation. Spider-Pig better not be the funniest part.

Oh, and as I was alerted by another friend, e.l.f. (Eyes Lips Face), a make-up line, has been bought out by Nordstrom’s and is clearing out their inventory. Virtually everything is $1. The website is a little wonky, but if you get a weird message box just hit “cancel” and hit whatever link you wanted again. Let me know if you want an “All Over Color Stick” in Pink Lemonade, as I accidentally ordered two.

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*I know I say that a lot, but this time it’s REALLY TRUE, srsly. And it doesn’t even make crude insinuations about anyone from Harry Potter.

**This could be wishful thinking on my part, but it sure LOOKS kind of post-apocalyptic.

These are the cutest things I have ever seen in my entire life, ever.

Cyn, you will LOVE them.

The whole site is pretty awesome, although the actual blogger is a big Hello Kitty curmudgeon and doesn’t seem to provide direct links with which one could actually ORDER the stuff. But there are some amazing photos, and now that I know that the Hello Kitty keyboard EXISTS…

(I’ve actually already converted my tower into a Hello Kitty machine–it was already hot pink, and I had some big sparkly Hello Kitty scrapbooking stickers. You see where this is going.)

It’s been a big week for technology here in Cabell World. Despite my sister’s belief that I am the most fiscally irresponsible technophile who ever lived*, I maintain my position that getting a new desktop was a good idea.

My old one was about four years old, which is getting pretty elderly in computer years. It had a pretty good graphics card installed, but it’s running on slightly less power than it should have, and I decided that attempting to upgrade it into the machine I wanted wasn’t going to save me any money in the long run–I’d just end up buying a new one in a year or two anyway, and then be out the cost of parts. Plus, with everyone talking about how much Vista sucks, it seemed prudent to get a new machine during the window of time when XP was still easily available.

And finally: it turns out that you can get a desktop from ibuypower.com with a hot pink case and metallic green keyboard and mouse. Also 2GB of RAM, a nice fast dual processor, and a supercharged graphics card.** But most importantly: hot pink, people. Just imagine how incredibly awesomely awesome it’s going to look after I get done applying my sticker collection.

It arrived today, and now I’m in the process of transferring data over from my old machine, which is somewhat less awesome because I’m doing it via USB and it is very slow. But the cable was cheap. Despite being marked $39.99, it mysteriously rang up at $15.74, including tax. I kept my mouth shut. Once I get that box cleared out, I’m sending it to my friend Jenn from high school so that we can play City of Heroes together–she recently bought the game only to discover that their laptop couldn’t handle it at all. We know that my old desktop runs CoH fine on the basic graphics settings, so I’m selling it to her and her husband for the cost of the upgraded parts (plus the pleasure of playing CoH with her).

I am also listening to music on my cellphone, because I just got a new one of those, too. It was free. I was finally eligible for Verizon’s “new every two,” and it only pushed my contract end date back by like a month because of the switching back and forth on plans I did while I was in California. I got a Razr V3M–people had some bad things to say about the Razr, but they were mainly about the first two versions, and most sources seem to agree that the V3 has significantly improved on those models, especially in terms of durability.

The screen is still almost impossible to make out in direct sunlight, but my other option, the LG Chocolate, had the interface from hell. Among other issues, the keys were way too sensitive; my sister tells me that her roommate’s Chocolate actually went bonkers to the point that you didn’t even have to TOUCH the keys, just hover your hand over them, to cause it to start speed-dialing people. So far I really like the Razr. It came in pink.***

Today I got the 2GB micro-SD memory card I ordered for it off Amazon–it was half the price that Verizon wanted for a 1GB card; it never ceases to amaze me how shamelessly they gauge on accessories, but I guess as long as a third to a fourth of the customers who would buy reasonably priced accessories keep buying them from Verizon anyway, they’re not losing any money. The rest of the suckers are just gravy.

Once I finally figured out how to install it–not impressed with Motorola’s manual OR the Verizon website’s flash video demos, let me tell you–I was able to start loading music onto it easily, which is nice, because the audio on my mp3 player is about to go completely out again. I’ll probably just start using this at the gym instead.

So: I am awash in brand new technology. I feel incandescent with futuristic mojo. I, for one, welcome our new AI overlords.

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*Considering that she DID meet my college boyfriend, who once bought an extremely large TV instead of paying his share of that month’s rent, this is a little insulting.

***Not as good a pink as the Chocolate, but they didn’t have that one in stock in the store anyway. And I ordered a snap-on hot pink cover for it immediately.

(I’m back-dating because it IS a Valentine’s Day post, and I have other ideas for today anyway.)

So somebody lost Facebook a LOT of money this Valentine’s Day.

The Facebook gift shop has apparently been manifest in some form for awhile, but it was only within the past week that it was added to users’ home pages, on the right sidebar–in fact, is has now disappeared again from that location, but if you go to a person’s profile page and scroll down, you’ll find a “gift box” just above their “wall,” with the option of giving them a gift.

The “gift,” in case you don’t already know, is a brightly colored graphic, less than an inch square on my resolution anyway, designed by Susan Kare, who did the original Mac icons. They’re cute. They cost $1 each.*

They are, of course, totally noncorporeal. Some people might wonder why anyone would pay $1 for some pixels, but the issue here is the nature of gifts, which have never really been about what they are. Or they are other than they seem. Whatever.

Gifts aren’t about necessity, which is why, for instance, bath products are so popular.** Gifts are not about permanence, either–a real flower is much more transient than a digital one. Gifts are generally about reciprocity; it’s embarrassing to get a Christmas gift from someone for whom you have no reciprocal present. And gifts are about giving and getting–giving and getting as social actions, which means that in general, they’re enhanced by an audience.

The major point of flowers on Valentine’s Day is not the flowers themselves. It’s the knowledge that someone loves you and gave you flowers–a knowledge that is even better shared, that is, when all your co-workers can SEE that someone loves you and gave you flowers. What better place to put a gift than Facebook, where the audience is not limited to the recipient’s dorm or office? Where the audience, in fact, is everyone on the site whom the recipient has designated as an Other of some degree of some signifance? And where the newsfeed makes it fairly likely that they’ll see the fact of the gift?

The smartest thing that Facebook did with these gifts was give everyone one free token. One gift to give at no cost–but only one. Unlike MySpace, Facebook does not order friends. You don’t have a Top Eight (and MySpace’s top friends lists are statically ordered, so that even within the Top Eight or Twelve or whatever, you can only ever have ONE Best Friend).

But if you have one gift, and you give it, you’re making a pretty major statement about the recipient you singled out. Unless you give it to a boyfriend/girlfriend-type Significant Other, chances are there are going to be people who thought they were just as important.

The obvious strategy here would be to give NO gifts, but the lure of the free is likely to draw people into giving one that has no cost–and then they’re much more likely to buy more gifts in order to maintain the peace by not overly favoring a single relationship.

Valentine’s Day is obviously a prime occasion for all this gift-giving, and in fact the Facebook giftshop provided seven V-Day only gifts. However, for AT LEAST five hours on Valentine’s Day, the giftshop was inoperable, clearly overloaded by too much traffic.

Most people were probably giving gifts pretty impulsively. If the giftshop wasn’t there when the mood struck them, they probably didn’t keep reloading to see if it was up and running again.** Those five hours of downtime, I suspect, cost Facebook a HUGE potential profit, although they may have coincidentally driven up the social value of those limited edition gifts.

I’m not sure why they took the giftshop link off the home page after V-Day, either. It didn’t take up a lot of room–depending on how many system messages you have in that column, there’s very little in it. Maintaining a link above individual profile’s walls is a good idea, and maybe that’s how people prefer to give a gift anyway, rather than going to the gift shop and having to mentally scroll through one’s friends list to think of whose name to enter.

I’m interested to see what holidays they do this for. Will Easter rate? God, I love Easter crap.

Speaking of which, today being the day after V-Day, I have a strong instinct to search CVS for discounted V-Day stuffies. Oh, pink fluffy imaginary animals, how I love you.

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*Actually, at least for the moment, when you buy one for a dollar you get the option of buying 4 additional gift credits for $2, so that you end up paying $3 for 5 gifts. But I don’t know if that’s a special promotion or what.

***I am a special obsessive case.

Oops. I went a week without updating.

I’ve been BUSY, okay? I discovered episodes of Daria on YouTube, and in less than an hour I will be leaving my rented rooms forever, taking a bus to the CalTrain station, taking CalTrain to Santa Clara, and then taking another bus to the San Jose “International” Airport.*

Last night I shipped most of my stuff to my parents’ house in Missouri and my storage unit in Boston. The FedEx Kinko’s on California is open 24 hours, and at 9:30 the employees are starting to get a little punchy. I was greeted with, “You must have spent some time in BOLIVIA. …You know, when you spend time in Bolivia, you come back colorful?”

When I came out here, I shipped five big plastic tubs of stuff. One of the tubs got pretty banged up in transit, so I didn’t ship it back. In addition to my four remaining tubs, I shipped a liquor box (full of books), a standard-sized paper box, the box my full-size memory foam mattress pad came in, and, uh… five 20″x20″x20″ FedEx boxes. One of them weighed 50 pounds.**

Where does all this crap COME from, a person might wonder. I mean, there were some things I bought here that I probably should have just shipped from home, since work was paying: a backrest pillow, hangers, that mattress pad, a crockpot, some dishes… On the other hand, hangers are bulky to ship and cheap to buy. And I’m shipping all that stuff on to Boston, so I’ll be using it again.

And there were Christmas presents. God, were there Christmas presents. I made one last run into the city with Katherine on Saturday, and picked up a few things I’d been meaning to get. I also visited an H&M for the first time. They put one in Madison right when I left for California, and if they had them in Tokyo, I didn’t know about it–on a related note, for like the first six months I lived in Tokyo, I thought Tower Records was a Japanese chain, because I’d never seen one before. Now they are going out of business, and they sell DVDs and books as well as CDs, so I encourage you to seek out your local store, if you’ve got one, for some discounted loot. And you can marvel at how 40% off $18.99 is kind of like a reasonable price for a CD. No wonder they’re going out of business. Anyway.

Still. My ability to accumulate stuff–oh, there were also those two Palo Alto public library sales I attended–is kind of ridiculous. The thought of what I could do in a semester in Boston with an entire apartment to fill is a bit daunting. I bet they have H&M there, too. Oh, for the first couple of weeks, with the memory of having to clear out this place AND my Madison apartment still fresh in my mind, I’ll be cautious. I’ll avoid garage sales.*** But as the weeks wear on, and I forget about the horrors of packing and moving…

Of course, I’ll have my cats. They’re bound to destroy a few things. God, I miss the little fuckers. Homeward!

One last picture of the yard for my rented rooms:

You may note that my landlady did, in fact, get rid of that toilet. No one is more surprised than I. Well, possibly Katherine.

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*It is the dinkiest little airport you can imagine. It’s like if Madison’s airport was “international.” Apparently they have flights to Mexico.

***Which reminds me, I am leaving a nightstand for the landlady to deal with, because it was $2 at a yard sale my first week here and it is made out of particle ROCK or something; it weighs a ton. I definitely wasn’t shipping it.

So in 2000, or possibly 2001–I could look this up in the archive of my old domain journal, The Scorpio Papers, but I’m lazy–I purchased a Sony CyberShot digital camera in Tokyo.* It was 3.3 megapixels, which at the time was EXTREMELY cutting edge. I took all kinds of pictures, including approximately 437,003 shots of the cherry blossoms in March/April 2001, so we know it was before that.

…Wait, we know it was in 2000, actually, because there are pictures from Kyoto, which I visited in November 2000. Possibly I purchased this camera in the wake of ridiculous interpersonal drama. That’s how I deal with emotional problems, you know; I shop. Okay. So: I bought this camera some time before November 2000, the upshot being: in September 2006 it was no longer, by any stretch of the imagination, cutting edge.

Furthermore, it had developed an issue with the battery (which I replaced in 2003 and it didn’t really solve the problem, so I think it’s likely that the camera itself was the culprit) wherein it never really believed that it was charged, so even if I’d had it on the charger for hours beforehand, it would constantly flash the low battery light at me and shut itself off. I took it with me to San Francisco last weekend when I visited Katherine and took, like, maybe four photos, because it’s such a pain turning it back on all the time.

I’d been meaning to get a new camera for some time, but that motivated me. After a great deal of comparison shopping on Amazon, I settled on the Nikon Coolpix L1, which at $199 features 6.2 megapixels and, more importantly, 5x optical zoom. The 6.2MP means you can make 14″x19″ “photo quality” prints; the 5x optical zoom means they’ll actually be in focus. I don’t have a lot of call to make 14″x19″ prints of anything–not that it isn’t nice to know I could–but the optical zoom was what I was really looking for.

$200 was about what I was hoping to spend, actually, although then I ended up getting a 1GB flash memory card and a set of rechargable AA batteries with charger, since the L1, like most of the newer digital camers, uses AA batteries, and since it also has no viewfinder, only an LCD screen, it sucks up the juice pretty fast. It’s a nice, compact little thing, though–smaller than my old CyberShot, and a stylish matte black, too.

Anyway, it came today. Unfortunately, the memory card did not, which meant that I was able to take seven photos on the default settings before the 10MB of internal memory was full, but the card should be here tomorrow or the next day. In the meantime, I present this photo of my backyard:

Why, yes, that is a decommissioned toilet. When I moved in, the landlady told me that her son-in-law would be carting it away within the week. I told Katherine this when she inquired about it while dropping me off last week.

“I’ll bet you twenty bucks it’s still here when you move out.”
“Do I look like an idiot?”

I really like that flowering purple tree, but so far no one knows what it is.

And in related news, I paid for a Flickr Pro account, because they only let free users have THREE SETS. Three! It was not to be borne.

Look forward to an exciting photo tour of my neighborhood, and, as a bonus, the Route I Walk to Work. You may have to wait until Saturday, since the weekend is normally the only time I see much daylight except for the morning walk to work. I know it’s not true, but I have this vague, unshakeable impression that it gets much warmer in California on the weekend, because during the week I am inside all day and I get chilly sitting at my computer. I know this is not actually the way things are, but you try telling it to my toes.

While you are waiting for that, anyway, I am uploading all my old Japan photos to Flickr. I’m the blonde, in case you get disoriented.

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*Consequently, it came with a Japanese manual, which you might assume, in the digital age, would be no big deal. You would be wrong. Over the next five years, no English PDF of the damn thing ever became available anywhere known to Google. I’d had the camera for at least four years when my friend Matt figured out–over AIM, FROM AUSTRALIA–how to use the timer function.

There’s something about being Far From Home that seems to drive me to book sales. I mean, it isn’t as if the Madison library doesn’t have “Friends of the Library” sales, although I think they’re rather fewer and far between than the monthly ones put on by the Palo Alto Public Library… and probably the selection isn’t as good. But I almost never went to them anyway.

In Tokyo, I once went to the Kinokuniya foreign language paperback sale after a full night of karaoke and a very awkward traditional Japanese breakfast at Denny’s (one of the other foreign exchange students was having personal issues), and, needless to say, no sleep whatsoever. This meant that later in the day, I had to teach two conversational English lessons also on no sleep whatsoever, but I didn’t regret it, because I’d gotten a giant bag of Y500 English fiction, which is no mean feat in Tokyo, where an English novel usually runs about Y1400 (~$12 at the time).

It was in Tokyo that I started reading Terry Pratchett, who I’d been avoiding because I erroneously believed him to be similar to Piers Anthony, and also where I read White Oleander, which I’d been avoiding because it was on Oprah’s Book Club and I am sometimes incongruously snobbish.*

Here in northern California, I think of White Oleander frequently, because the stuff is everywhere. More specifically, as I noted to my sister Hannah after she had checked the online bus schedule for me and determined that the bus I wanted back from the book sale doesn’t run on Sundays, when I see all that oleander, I think of People Whom I Would Like To Poison.

“That must be a long list,” said Hannah.

“You know,” I said. “Some people rate higher than others.”

My father always used to tell us that in Florida (where he grew up), every year a couple of people would die from building campfires with oleander brush, or, in some memorable cases, using oleander sticks to roast weenies. As a child, I was fascinated with poisonous plants. It may have started with the dire warnings I received from my mother about pokeberries, which were a lovely deep wine color and grew in our yard; I was also very interested in belladonna, an indication of my nascent goth tendencies. I thought it would be a good name for a girl.

Anyway, except for having to carry 52 books approximately a mile and a half to the nearest bus stop when it developed that the #88 (which would have taken me within THREE BLOCKS of my house) does not run on Sundays, I would say the book sale was a success. It was a bit picked over, it being the second day, but the second day is also when they let you fill up a grocery bag with books for $5 (or, the woman at the cash drawer tempted me, five bags for $20, but even if the #88 had been running this seemed a bit beyond my means). So I spent $5.50 for nine books at the regular sale, and $5 for 43 in the bargain room:

(more…)

So I’m very excited about the birthday present I got for my friend Laura’s daughter Abby, who is turning four next week. (I’m also excited about the birthday present I got for my mother,* but she is 58 and can read, so best not to describe it in detail on the internet.) Speaking of reading, I’ve been writing Abby little letters for the past couple of months because Laura thought it might be an incentive for her to learn to read and write, of which Laura is sure she is capable but which she seems a little reluctant to actually DO (I suspect she may fear not being read to anymore, although of course this is groundless).

I told my friend Kristen about this plan and she looked a little skeptical:

“She’s going to learn to read from YOU writing to her?”
“What?! She likes me! She loves my hair! Anyway, little kids like mail.”
“No, I mean… your handwriting, Cabell.”
“Oh. Yeah. No no no. I print.”
“I was going to say.”
“Yeah, that would be kind of like those people in Kentucky who only spoke Klingon to their children.”

Currently, Laura reads Abby’s my letters and then takes dictation of the responses. The letter I received shortly before my prelim contained a paragraph about trees, which are tall, and have leaves and trunks, the latter component being shared with elephants. I remarked on how delightful I had found this–and how disappointed I was when I was unable to work it into my prelim–in a recent phone call, and Laura explained that Abby dictated that part after inquiring what exactly a “test” was, and Laura told her that it was when people ask you questions to see how much you know. Abby decided to focus on trees, which was good, because I hadn’t been reading much about them.

Anyway, Abby turns four next week, so when Kristen took me to the AMAZING Japanese import stationery store in the Town & Country shopping center in Palo Alto last week, I immediately thought that some cute Japanese stationery would make a good present–and then I spotted the pack with five different envelope/page designs, four of the five pink in varying degrees of intensity, and all of them covered in hearts.**

Clearly, it was meant to be.

I realized later, however, that I hadn’t provided for the sealing of these envelopes; Japanese stationery does not come with glue on. On the off chance that a gluestick might not be immediately at hand, I thought I should go ahead and include one. Admittedly, I didn’t really need to go BACK to the Japanese stationery store for a gluestick, but I sort of wanted to make another pass at it, so…

And I think I can safely say that few other consumer outlets would have had the variety of gluesticks available at the Japanese stationery store. Including, as it turned out, scented ones. As soon as I saw them, I realized how silly it was to be surprised.

Of course, I thought to myself. Strawberry-scented gluesticks. How Japanese.

And it went with the stationery.

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*My mother’s birthday present is over a month late. I am a bad daughter, although it didn’t help that her birthday was the day before I took the social psych prelim exam.

**Also some weird English, which hopefully will not freak Abby out the way the horned toad postcard did. Apparently she found it very unsettling that a creature that was so OBVIOUSLY a LIZARD should be called a “toad.” Children are very into categorization.

Right before I took the social psych prelim last month, I read a really interesting article in the June issue of Social Psychology Quarterly by Ellen Granberg about weight loss maintenance, incorporating Identity Control Theory, possible selves, and the narrative of self.* I don’t remember if I actually got to cite it on the prelim, but it was one of the few things that I actually enjoyed reading in my frantic whirlwind of studying.

Of course weight loss maintenance is something that holds particular significance for me, but I also thought that she synthesized the theories really well–basically, the idea is that losing weight is a process of identity change for most people who embark on the project, but that cultural narratives about what weight loss means do a lot to undermine the maintenance of the new, lower weight. Because we’re taught that losing weight will completely remake our lives, it’s very difficult to feel like we’ve “succeeded” when we do manage to lose weight and subsequently do not become perfect princess rock stars.

Possible selves are pretty self-explanatory; they can serve as motivators when we imagine ourselves actually inhabiting them, either positively (if I lose weight I will be a happy skinny person) or negatively (if I don’t lose weight I will be a miserable slug-like creature). Identity Control Theory argues that people seek out self-verifying feedback, and if they don’t get it, they may adjust either their behavior or their self-concept, with the latter usually being a last resort if the former doesn’t work. Granberg suggests that self-concept change may be a more frequently used strategy, however, in situations where one is adopting a new identity.

She argues that the people who are most successful at keeping weight off are those who either start out with domain-specific expectations about their skinnier possible self (”My cholesterol will go down”; “I will be able to ride my bike faster and longer”), or who are at least able to change/narrow their skinnier-self-concept if they start out thinking that they will experience a total extreme make-over of self by losing weight. People who can’t give up that construction of the skinnier self are more likely to become discouraged by the continued lack of confirmatory feedback and may end up reverting to old bad habits and regaining weight–because keeping weight off is a project, too, and one that doesn’t produce dramatic results like losing it did. If you feel like you’re working hard to maintain a self that’s really a disappointment–because you lost weight but you’re still not a perfect princess rock star–it’s not surprising that you might gradually become less dedicated to the work necessary to maintain weight loss.

This is definitely something that I find myself thinking about sometimes, although when I started working on losing weight, I think I was fairly realistic about what I wanted to attain; I just didn’t want to feel actively bad about my body anymore. But it’s hard to totally escape that mainstream cultural narrative of the fat ugly duckling becoming the thin beautiful swan, the plot of every other teen movie ever, even when you’re aware of it. It’s hard not to catch yourself thinking, when things get really shitty, I thought everything was supposed to be better now.

Like most psychological processes, I guess it’s just a matter of degree. No one is issue-free, and it probably doesn’t help that nobody’s body seems to fit the clothing designer ideal. My problem used to be my chest being too big for things; now it’s my shoulders, which are apparently freakishly broad in relation to the rest of me, and my butt, which isn’t there. But overall I feel pretty good about my body, and I still feel invested in maintaining the ground I’ve gained in the past year and a half.

Besides, while I know that weight loss will not fix everything that has ever gone wrong in my life, I’m pretty sure that these shoes will:

Um. Amazon is having a blow-out shoe sale.** Spend $80 or more and get free shipping (even for stuff that normally isn’t eligible, I think) and $20 off (that only works once, in case you were wondering).

WeightWatchers and other weight loss programs frequently suggest buying shoes as a reward for losing weight because, in addition to presenting an obviously superior alternative to, say, celebratory eating, your shoe size is much more resistant to change than your pants size. This is true, but I still lost about a half shoe-size last year, too. And yet, thanks to my incredibly well-muscled calves, buying any boots that go up much higher than those remains an ordeal. It’s always something.

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*Full citation: Granberg, Ellen. “‘Is That All There Is?’ Possible Selves, Self-Change, and Weight Loss.” Social Psychology Quarterly 69.2 (June 2006): 109-126.

**That link goes to the women’s section, because there doesn’t seem to be a link for the top level, and I suspect that most people who will be interested in this sale will be primarily interested in women’s shoes. But men’s and children’s are on sale, too.

I am a hoarder. This is partially by disposition and partially by circumstance–when you depend on the kindness of others for rides to the grocery store and whatnot, you tend to stock up as much as you can, particularly on things that you use a lot and know you will pretty much always need more of, eventually. Witness the 150 pounds of kitty litter currently stockpiled in my apartment.

However, the problem with being a hoarder is that most of this stuff gets stored kind of out of sight, and there you are at the grocery store thinking, Well, I’ve been baking a lot, I use a lot of unsweetened applesauce, I know there’s some in the fridge but it stores well… And then you get home and discover that you are ALREADY storing an extra giant jar of unsweetened applesauce in the cupboard. Now you have two. This also happens a lot with mustard, for some reason.

So really, what I need is not a shopping list but a NON-shopping list, recording all the things that I already have way too much of and should under no circumstances buy when stricken with a vague sense that, god forbid, I might be running out.

This list will also now have to include wine. Woodman’s gives a nice discount on many of their cheaper vintages if you purchase by the case… Shut up. I love the Yellow Tail shiraz/grenache blend. And it’s going to be a stressful summer, what with the social psych prelim in August.

I also bought sunscreen, because by god, it has been super warm for the past two days and even though I know, as a compulsive student of the weather report, that temperatures are going to drop like 20 degrees in the next couple of days, they will rise again, and I would really like to repeat last summer’s amazing feat of Not a Single Sunburn, Not Even a Little One.

I spent a long time in the sunscreen section, studying the billion available varieties as if I have any idea about anything having to do with the active ingredients of sunscreen. I finally just started popping them open and smearing dabs of them on myself, because the two qualities of sunscreen about which I DO have a real opinion are scent and viscosity.

I surmise from the frequent claims of “light feel” on the packaging that most people do not prize thick, viscous sunscreen; however, I have no confidence in a preparation whose presence cannot be felt ten minutes after application. I suspect those spray-on formulas are about as effective in the prevention of UV damage as prayer. I like a sunscreen that FEELS like a sunscreen, dammit. Fortunately, just as I was despairing of finding such a thing, I discovered my preferred brand, Ocean Potion, hidden behind a display of some other kind.

I got two tubes of it, plus some Hawaiian Tropic SPF60+, because I couldn’t resist. I know they say anything above 30 probably isn’t any more effective, but I am very, very fair. Hawaiian Tropic actually had some stuff marked SPF70, but it felt too thin and smelled too coconutty. I realize that an element of coconut is pretty much inevitable when it comes to sunscreen, but pure coconut makes me gag.

I do wonder why they can say something is SPF70 if it really isn’t any BETTER than SPF30, but I guess it still blocks more rays; you’ve just reached the point where blocking more rays provides negligible benefit. And of course none of us are actually putting on as much sunscreen as they use in laboratory tests. And obviously it works as a marketing device, especially once one company starts doing it: I am too fair-skinned to be taking chances, so if your brand doesn’t have at least SPF50, I will go with the brand that does.

The same principle probably applies to the Pepperidge Farm 15 grain multigrain bread I saw in the baked goods aisle. I frequently get Brownberry 12 grain. I like multigrain bread, and I like the thought of 12 whole grains. One can imagine that at some point I might be swayed at the thought of three additional grains, but I think Pepperidge Farm will have to make their bread bigger first. That’s the other thing we consumers like: big portions. Huge quantities of bread and sunscreen and Yellow Tail red wine.

Not to mention TV on DVD, the ultimate in media big portions. I don’t want to go into too much detail on my most recent failure of Amazon.com impulse control, but I will note that they are having another 50% off sale on select TV season sets. Including Firefly, which doesn’t seem to be on that list page, but which is currently available for $24.96.