all-time favorite hits I don't own

Just between you and I. Don't tell, some of these are embarrassing.

Golden Earring, Twilight Zone
Howard DeVoto, The Rainy Season
Ocean Blue, The Captain of Her Heart
Alphaville, Big in Japan
whoever it was that did Lunatic Fringe
The Divinyls, I Touch Myself
A-Ha, Take on Me
Live, pretty much their whole first album
The Eagles, Hotel California
Gipsy Kings, Hotel California (see a pattern? no?)
Almost everything Adam Ant ever did, or at least up to and including Friend or Foe. After that, he pretty much jumped the shark with Viva le Rock, and whatever the one was right before that.

I'm trying to decide if it's worth getting into the whole file-sharing thing by making a list of songs I'm looking for. You know, the songs that if you hear them on the radio in your car, make you swing your head around and frighten other drivers.

My first real meal, post-chorizo incident: Pad See Ew, at King of Thai. I always bring a book when I go there, and never end up reading it; tonight that would be because they had the television turned to "Blind Date," a show I hadn't seen before. I wish I lived in LA so I could be on the show! It would make as much sense as anything else I do with my time. And then, as I was finishing my Thai iced tea, "Ex-Treme Dating" came on. The hostess seemed too mindless to maintain the brain function required to hold herself up, but the concept--like "Blind Date" except that one of the daters has an earpiece transmitting catty comments from the other dater's exes--reminded me a lot of a play I once thought about writing, so I watched for a while.

Can you imagine? I started to ponder which exes I would suggest to the producers, were I to go on the show, and what they would say about me. You really don't want to go there. The date they showed--between a very cute personal trainer and a nice-enough seeming professional bowler with a bit of a vision problem regarding himself--looked like it was going okay, until one of the offstage commentators told the guy to ask the woman about the time she stuck a fork in a guy's head on a first date.

Geez, aren't first dates hard enough? Of course, she was also doing this weird thing where she was deep-throating the egg rolls and asking this poor sap whether he was more like an egg roll or some other piece of food off her plate (I couldn't tell what it was, but I think it was a bit of deep-friend meat.) She must have thought the whole display was cute and spontaneous and flirty, but it was just weird; especially as bits of the egg roll were falling off her chin. I shuddered to think of every thing I've ever done that I thought was cute and spontaneous and flirty on a date, but probably came off as mildly psychotic.

This is why I don't own a tv. I get sucked in by this inane crap and afterwards feel like I've had the vital energy sucked out of me. Jerry Mander and his Four Arguments For the Elmination of Television aside, I just don't feel like I have the time in my life or the energy to sacrifice to the glass teat.

The first big dose of tv I had in several years came earlier this year, when LabRat had to have some outpatient surgery. I brought him home from the hospital, and decided to hang around until his roommates got home. So we watched his DVDs of Thunderbirds, and then it was the Discovery Channel doing something about Stonehenge that was sort of interesting, and then we watched:

Pet Psychic.

Yes.

As I said, life is too short. And after THAT we watched Joe Millionaire, by which time LabRat's official painkillers were wearing off and his roommates were firmly in attendance. So I skedaddled, shaking my head in disbelief.

Eventually I have to go home and face the Howlers. God, they must be asleep by now, right? I started thinking today about looking for a studio apartment, and consolidating my living space and office/studio space again. Studio because I may just need to live by myself after this whole fiasco with Mama Bear and the Howlers and the skinny pothead boyfriend, consolidating to minimize costs. I can't really afford to live alone, but can my sanity afford to live with other people? Maybe I just need a place where I can let the egg roll dribble off my chin in peace.