A brilliant tip (plus, shiny)

Okay, if you are on a budget but you need wrapping paper, here is my advice: get a giant roll of plain silver.

Silver wrapping paper will get you through every possible situation. It's good for birthdays, Christmas, weddings, Hanukkah, and graduation. All ribbon colors match it, so you can put whatever you want on there.

I have three rolls of wrapping paper—one orange-and-yellow plaid, one gold with Christmas balls, and one plain silver, and seriously, I don't know why I have anything other than the silver. It's the classiest and the most versatile.

So that's what I recommend. Also, "Prom Night at Hater High" by The Long Winters.

Bubble tea and birthdays will be the exceptions

Shameful: I have "The Greatest Love of All" stuck in my head. Fortunately it's the version Joe sings at graduation in Say Anything, but still.

But this is not what I want to talk about. What I want to talk about is the Month of No Eating Out.

The Month of No Eating Out starts today, and it's going to be pretty much what I said. A month. Where I don't eat out. Fun, huh?

By and large this is to curb going out to lunch at work, which tends to be expensive. Saving money is the chief goal of the MoNEO, since I've got a butt-load of expenses coming up here at the end of the summer. But it's also to force me to cook more. We all know I need practice, and I need to stop letting food go to waste because I don't feel like cooking it. Even if it is tofu.

So that is the current program. For those of you who were hoping to eat out with me at some point this month...sorry. But! Let me know far enough in advance and I will cook for you. Mmm, tofurkey.

Thank God I am going to grad school soon and will have something worthwhile to do with my evenings again

Tonight I sat on my couch and tried to teach myself that card trick where you hold them in one hand, bend them, and then shoot them to the other hand. To the shock of only my cats, I am very, very bad at it.

Sometimes I like to think about possible back-up careers in case I flunk out of grad school (slash can't find a job after I get my degree). I think poker dealer in a casino would be fun, and, if nothing else, shiny. It's the only nametag job I can think of that wouldn't make me want to stab my eyes out every day. I'm probably not pretty enough to get hired automatically, so I'd have to get the job based on my witty banter skills and the aforementioned card trick. Note to self: keep practicing. Both.

If that washes out, I've always said (in all seriousness, really) that I'd like to go to beauty school. Lord knows I play enough with my own hair to make this worthwhile. By the way, I had my hair dyed professionally last week. I know! It's sort of maroony now. The guy told me, with a heavy gay lisp wrapped in a Mexican accent, "Honey, I guarantee you it is going to turn out fabulous." I'm not sure if that actually happened, but it'll do until after my brother's wedding in two weeks.

Oh, yeah, anyway. I've had beauty school in the back of my mind since I was about six, I think, and made friends with my mother's stylist's daughter Sarah, who had fantastic curly red hair that I didn't have the sense to covet until much later. I think I'd like to learn how to cut and dye other people's hair, especially if I could become one of those stylists that just does whatever the hell she wants without regard to the client's demands. I am probably intimidating enough to get away with this. Or maybe they teach you that in one of the advanced beauty school classes, who knows. Alternately, I could be one of those stylists that calls all her clients cute little nicknames like "sweetie" and "babydoll." (Like my flaming Mexican stylist, who is, incidentally, bald, and answers the phone with "Hey, bitch.") Also, I would start saying, "Girl, please," a lot more, which I think I'm going to do anyway.

The other alternative profession is massage therapist. I'm not as gung ho about this one, if only because I suspect it's actually a lot of physical work, and [Girl,] please, I think we all know I am not about the strenuous exercise. Still, I adore my massage therapist because she is kooky and free-spirited and knows about weird stuff like how squeezing your earlobes will make a headache feel better (try it) and the synergy of your uterus and your bowels (sorry, guys). Also, she can make football players cry by pressing on their knots, and I am all about learning how to make burly guys cry like tiny babies. Another bonus: she totally charges $60 an hour, which is approximately six times what I make currently. I've been told by a few people that I have good hands (ooh, racy!), so it's definitely an option if this English thing is a bust.

Looking at these alternate professions, I have to say I'm a little surprised by how people-oriented they all are. Clearly my subconscious thinks sitting on the couch and practicing card tricks before an uninterested feline audience is getting just a tad old.

The Summer Reading List 2005

These are the books I want to read before I stop getting to read what I want again. If everything goes according to plan, you'll get a fun little book report every so often. Let me know if you read one of these and want to discuss. It'll be our own little book club, whee!

Lost by Gregory Maguire
The Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Farber
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince by J.K. Rowling
A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali by Gil Courtemanche (admittedly this is cheating a little because I've already started it)
Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norell by Susanna Clarke
Plainsong by Kent Haruf
Der Kleine Prinz by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Digressions on Some Poems by Frank O'Hara by Joe Lesueur
Max and the Cats by Moacyr Scliar
The Dragon Rider by Cornelia Funke
The Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver
Pompeii by Richard Harris
She's Come Undone by Wally Lamb
Monkey Dancing by Daniel Glick
I, Claudius by Robert Graves

Following up the gross with the random

I got a new computer at work last Monday, which was totally exciting because I didn't think I was going to get one of the five new ones they'd ordered for our department. But I did, so yay! The best part of this computer is that it came with a flat-panel monitor that I turned on its side so I could see an entire page of whatever book I'm working on. The worst part of this computer is that I can hear its parts whirring and clicking at odd intervals, and I know the randomness of it is going to make me have a psychotic break and go screaming out of the building at some point this summer.

This is a rule: if you have new clothes, you must wear them as soon as possible. I don't know why, but this is clearly true. If you don't wear them on the first appropriate occasion, clearly you didn't need to buy them. If you don't understand this rule...you're probably male. (Oh, please, that's not even my joke. One of the girls at work came up with it.)

Did you know the vividness of your dreams is linked to your menstrual cycle? (Clearly this is less applicable for guys.) I have no scientific evidence to support this (only some fruit loopy websites), but it made perfect sense when a coworker told me that after I explained to her that I'd been having really intense dreams for the past couple of days. I realized this does actually happen about one week out of every four or five. They sort of culminated last night in dreaming that my mother had died, which is my last recurring dream left over from childhood. The other one that I remember clearly: that my parents had left us with our babysitter Tara and the basement had turned to pools of lava. (Liquid hot magma.) We had to get out and it was scary. I think this dream was brought on by the combination of Fire Safety Week at school and a concurrent study of the Ring of Fire. Did anyone else have fire trauma? It seems like it was fairly common among my friends. Smokey was more threatening than comforting, I think.

If you eat pizza-flavored items (chips, goldfish, jerky, whatever), you are not an adult. This is true. I'm having pizza-flavored Pringles right now.

Does anybody want to play 1000 Blank White Cards with me? If so, let me know and we'll kick it at the Walabama Ice House.