Meet Zelda.

I first noticed this astonishing translucent green spider with her dramatic red and white markings a month or two ago. (Go ahead – click the photo. Freak yourself out.) Check out the head-to-head mortal combat. The bee didn’t stand a chance.

Fascinated with this gorgeous creature who stared boldly back at me, I went online and typed in “green red spider,” and there she was – or rather, there were her many cousins. Turns out Zelda is a green lynx spider. Identified by their charming surprised eyes, exotic markings and spiny legs, lynx spiders jump great distances onto their prey, and some claim their bite is toxic to humans. Beautiful and dangerous…but so much more appealing than the black widow, that spinner of nightmares. Scientists have studied the possibility of deploying green lynx spiders as agricultural agents of “green” farming (pun reluctantly acknowledged), because of their penchant for devouring harmful pests. It’s too bad about the bees, though.

Zelda’s rose hangs at the end of a long thorny stem that flops over the neighbor’s fence. Like an anxious aunt, I started to worry that some over-zealous and under-observant gardener might dead-head the rose, not noticing its gaudy occupant – or worse, noticing, and dispatching her anyway.

One day I saw a smaller green spider hanging out cautiously nearby, no doubt drawn to the regal Zelda, yet perhaps dimly aware of his peril. The next day the hapless suitor was gone. As the weeks progressed Zelda grew fat and glossy. She was eating well – I figured she must be eating for two. Two hundred, that is. Sure enough, last week I noticed that Zelda was looking downright skinny, even a little peaked. And she was hovering protectively over a large, round, spiky, dusty grey object. Nice work, Zelda! I was reminded of Charlotte’s Web and the reverence we all learned to feel for Charlotte’s beloved eggs – how protective Wilbur was until all those tiny baby spiders with their tiny soprano voices drifted safely away on their silken filaments.

I am Zelda’s Wilbur. Twice a day, walking my dog, I peer at Zelda’s withered rose, first relieved to see it’s still there, then admiring (not without a certain creepy shiver) the strange unlovely egg sac she guards so jealously. I hope no oblivious gardener interferes. I hope I’m there to see those dozens and hundreds of tiny Zeldas work their way out of their cocoon, to spread their weird beauty far and wide. In a world poisoned by pesticides, heavy metals and artificial hormones, where extinction threatens everything from honeybees to polar bears – a planet so polluted that we routinely sicken along with our air and water and soil – each fragile creature’s survival is a tiny victory.

Small Wonder.

Barbara Kingsolver’s book of essays is making me cry in my car (see audiobook tribute below). It is a searing love letter to wilderness, an indictment of unbridled consumerism and war, an earnest argument that our love for our lives and each other is the only thing that might redeem us. With her inimitable mix of compassion and steel, she exposes the hypocrisy and hubris of American imperialism, gently but resolutely skewering the greed and blindness of our bloated erstwhile democracy. Kingsolver captures the grief we feel for the country we love – for what it used to be, and the pale shadow of its founding ideals it parades on the world stage today.

Small Wonder, published in 2002, was written largely in response to the September 11 attacks, in an attempt to make sense of the unfathomable. In it, Kingsolver tells us that according to the United Nations, it would only take an extra $13 billion above and beyond then-current expenditures to provide every person in the world with basic healthcare and nutrition.

$13 billion. Even though today it would doubtless be more, it’s still a tiny fraction of the $700 billion the Treasury Secretary has demanded that we, the American taxpayers, hand over, double quick, no questions asked, to bail out Wall Street – with no oversight, no help for homeowners and no equity stake for us investors. $700 billion is roughly the same amount that has been spent on the catastrophically wrong-headed Iraq war – the war that has bankrupted our defense coffers and crippled our standing in the world. The entire bailout proposal, pushed with such breathless urgency by President Paulson and Co., is so outrageous as to beggar belief. Fortunately it’s getting some push-back from both sides of the aisle – Democratics and Republicans alike are nixing the blank check idea – but chances are Congress will pass it in some form. What an inheritance for our children and grandchildren. The U.S. was already staggering under a record burden of debt, but now, unbelievably, future generations will suffer even more for the unbridled corruption and greed of a relative few.

The idea that the entire world’s hunger and illness could be alleviated for an almost negligible portion of the bailout money is both sobering and infuriating. Says Kingsolver, “We have the resources to behave more generously than we do.” Extolling our amber waves of grain and our purple mountain majesties, she contends, “We could crown this good with brotherhood…what a vast inheritance for our children that would be…if we were to become a nation humble before our rich birthright, whose graciousness makes us beloved.”

If, indeed.

Swoon, part 2.

Remember those thousand points of light? Brad Pitt is one of them.









Back in 2006 Brangelina announced that they would not marry until their queer sisters and brothers had that right. This week Brad donated $100,000* to fight Proposition 8, the right-wing-supported ballot initiative that would overturn the legal right, enshrined in California's constitution earlier this year, of same-sex couples to marry.

For our part, Charming Girlfriend and I volunteered this year with Equality for All. We accosted people coming out of supermarkets (CG thrives on this kind of confrontation, but I do not), gathering signatures, donations and allies. A lot of people were surprisingly nice (it's true that you can't judge by appearances) but we also had to deal with a lot of sneers and turned backs. During Pride weekend it was easier – pretty much everyone was gay, but then again they were sweaty and drunk. We learned that the folks behind the ballot initiative (Grinches, Slytherins – take your pick) were bringing in paid signature gatherers from out of state – presumably because they couldn’t find enough volunteers for their nefarious work in California.

Marriage used to be about property (see: land ownership, women and children as chattel). These days people like to think it’s about love, and plenty claim it’s about religion. But in our supposedly secular society, marriage is fundamentally about civil rights. When you deny two consenting, tax-paying adults the right to commit legally to each other – and benefit thereby in a thousand federally sanctioned ways – you are denying them full citizenship.

Californians, talk to your friends, family and co-workers. Stand up for your fellow citizens and your constitution. Vote No on Prop. 8.

*Just to show you the difference between me and Charming Girlfriend: when I told her about this, she said "$100,000? That's it?"

The crush-worthy Rachel Maddow.

You say you are overwhelmed by the calumny and viciousness of the Pain – McPain campaign? Struggling in the throes of despair at the decline of Western civilization perpetrated by the Shrub/Cheney imperial administration, aka the Fall of Rome v.2? Choked with grief at the destruction of our oceans, polar bears, wolves and old-growth forests? Outraged by the evils perpetrated on rape victims, pregnant women and queers who just want an ecru wedding?

My fellow Americans, I give you Rachel Maddow.










Oh Rachel, you who have burst upon the media landscape (scoring top ratings on MSNBC in your few days on the air, no less) in the nick of time to reach out a lifesaving hand, a sympathetic grimace, a knowing smirk! (Yes, I realize I'm jumping on the Rachel wagon late in the game – she's had a show on Air America for quite some time – but radio is not television.)

It is on television that we can appreciate the expressive eyebrows, the subtle butch makeup, the twinkle. Yes, she has a twinkle!

Rhodes Scholar Rachel, with her poli sci PhD, her direct, articulate manner and her sly and trenchant commentary exposing the hypocrisy, lies and sheer ridiculousness of the Republicans.

Sure, we've had the inimitable Jon Stewart, the dryly fabulous Keith Olbermann, the indispensable Bill Maher (to wit: "the underlying problem we have in this country is that the people are too stupid to be governed. The public is like a dog...it can’t understand any sort of rational argument").

But Rachel is way hotter – and she is an out lesbian. Yeehaw! Rachel, this is an open invitation: bring the wife and I'll bring the cocktails.

My new obsession.

For years my aunt has waxed enthusiastic about her “books on tape” from the library, but it wasn’t until I happened to notice a CD version of The Lord of the Rings trilogy at my own public library this spring that I too got sucked into the sisterhood. It took about ten minutes. Seduced by Rob Inglis’s masterful narration, I became an instant audiobook-ophile. I devoured all three Tolkien books in quick succession, rushing to my car on my lunch breaks and sitting too long in the driveway at home, loath to turn off the stereo before Legolas and Aragorn or Frodo and his devoted Sam extricated themselves from whatever fresh predicament had befallen them. I haven’t listened to NPR in months!

I’ve just finished listening to a fantastic book called The Golden Ocean, a swashbuckling fictional account of Commodore Anson’s historic circumnavigation of the globe back in the early 1740s – complete with scurvy, shipwrecks and pieces of eight – told from the point of view of a young Irishman (and narrated brilliantly by a John Franklyn-Robbins). Avast, ahoy, ye swabbies! I ejected the last disc with the greatest reluctance and immediately went in search of more nautical books by Patrick O’Brian. Fortunately there are a lot.

I love when reading, or in this case listening to a book ignites a hunger for new knowledge. After reading Delta Wedding this summer, I ransacked Wikipedia and Google for everything I could find about Eudora Welty. Same thing with Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters, an entrancing comedy of manners from a direct (literary) descendant of Jane Austen. As soon as I finished the book I had to watch the BBC miniseries, because I just wasn’t ready to let go. Movies will do it, too. After I saw Cate Blanchett in Elizabeth, I brought home a pile of books about the Elizabethan era.

And a whole new obsession was launched earlier this year when Chandler Burr’s The Perfect Scent, a book about perfume (previously a topic of only passing interest), led me to The Emperor of Scent, about fragrance master Luca Turin and his revolutionary theory of smell, and then in turn to Turin’s own vastly entertaining Perfumes: The Guide, and then inexorably to the perfume counters of Nordstrom and Sephora, where I proceeded to spend lots of money.

Hot gal of the day?

So, Out magazine's website has this “Hot Guy of the Day” feature and I was getting all bent out of shape about this brazen gender parity deficiency – I mean, would it be so hard to have a “Hot Gal of the Day”? Does Out think that there just aren’t enough hot women out there and they'd have to post different shots of Angelina Jolie (everyone’s favorite bisexual knife-wielder) every other day, after they’d run through the cast of The L Word? Everyone knows how phallocentric the national gay mags have always been, but I thought things had maybe changed in the fifteen years since the Lesbian Avengers were protesting this sort of thing. Was I wrong!

Then I click on the “Hot Guy of the Day” link and damn, if I thought my knickers were already in a twist – mercy! This bare-chested rippling hunk slits his eyes at me with his prominent package and trimmed pubes barely contained by skimpy skivvies – NSFW alert! (“Not Suitable for Work,” not "Not Suitable for Women” – though an argument could be made). And someone’s heading straight for my desk, and I’m hitting my “Back” button frantically, because I don’t want anyone at work to know I’m a perv.

All these thoughts cascading through my mind, and I’m wondering if I really want Out to flaunt a “Hot Babe of the Day” after all, because feminists shouldn't objectify other women, plus the kind of thing lesbians find hot is quantifiably different from what men – gay or straight – like to leer at. Right? Contrary to everything the Dinah Shore would have us believe. I mean, the Dinah Snore. (Did you see those naked women with painfully fake tits, teetering around the pool covered in Bud Lite body paint? I’m not opposed to body paint per se [see: Burning Man], but when the tits are emblazoned with a cheesy corporate logo, it just doesn’t say artistic or sexual freedom to me. And since when do lesbians like obviously fake tennis ball tits?)

I guess maybe the lesbian version of “Hot Babe of the Day” might look just like any other Page Six hottie (and lord knows the media-saturated world we live in is a veritable explosion of Hot Babes of the Day). It didn’t used to be like this. Didn’t dykes used to like shaved heads and unshaved armpits, pixie haircuts and no makeup? Lesbians have upheld a different standard of beauty than straight men – than Cosmo and the CW and beer commercials have foisted on our collective impressionable consciousness. Often the women declared by men to be “hot” have left lesbians decidedly cold.

But is it a brave new world? Did feminism and its insistence on women’s worth not being contingent on our looks careen headlong through sex-positive empowerment and arrive right back at brazen self-objectification?

Now, of course, having taken a firm grip on myself, I have scouted over to AfterEllen.com, dykedom’s answer to all things Out, and – lo and behold! AfterEllen’s “Hot 100,” in all their glory. L Word cast (Jennifer Beals, Leisha Hailey, Kate Moennig – check, check, check). And the delectable, I mean talented Mary-Louise Parker, my girlfriend Cate Blanchett, Gillian Anderson (be still my heart), Blake Lively and, clocking in at #11 (down from #2 last year), Angelina Jolie.*

Okay, so there’s some overlap. And a lot of hair and lipstick. I guess the straight world and lesbians are in agreement about some things. There are, unsurprisingly, icons and role models like Ellen (avowed) and Jodie (not so avowed). But there are some cuties on AfterEllen's list who would never appear on Maxim’s Hot 100 –













and, mercifully, the reverse is also true.

*Notably missing is the so-smart-it-hurts Rachel Maddow, who will unquestionably appear on next year’s list. If Lindsay Lohan and Samantha Ronson are still together, they will too.

The hoarder.

In the year and a half that I’ve lived in my Los Feliz apartment, I never saw the woman who lived across the street, downstairs from my friends the flamboyant Southern boys. The shades were always drawn. It was like Willy Wonka’s factory: nobody ever went in, and nobody ever went out. The only indication, indeed, that anyone even lived there was a sign tacked to the front door a few months ago, when the landlady was remodeling another apartment in the building (which is, by the way, one of those cute olde-Hollywood Spanish-style suckers with a red tiled roof and whitewashed walls). The sign basically said, “If you’re not a cop with a warrant in your grubby little mitts, stay the FUCK out of my apartment!”

I guess someone had infringed on her privacy.

Well, last week I found out why. The first sign that anything was amiss was the week-long yard sale, tended by...no one. The invisible tenant was holding a yard sale! But she was nowhere around. For days I gazed across the street, puzzled – that the stuff (books, dishes, fax machine, computer, stereo, a broken couch, a mountain of odds and ends) was still there, and that people weren’t just carting it off wholesale. I’d never experienced a weeklong yard sale before, moreover one that wasn’t presided over by somebody.

Then my neighbors filled me in on the gossip. The tenant had been evicted. She was, it turns out, a hoarder. I feel like I should put it in capitals. A HOARDER. Now, I’ve heard about the crazy people with stacks of newspapers up to the ceiling, but I’ve never seen a real hoarder’s nest. I figured it was only old crotchety men in lightless tenements who practiced that particular brand of weirdness, not middle-aged, seemingly intelligent (if a bit short-tempered) women in high-end neighborhoods. Well, two days into the sale, going in search of someone to sell me a couple of books, I got a glimpse inside this woman’s apartment, and my jaw dropped. Filthy carpet covered in gunk, stacks of old pizza and takeout boxes and empty gallon cat litter containers, STUFF piled up underfoot and against the walls in a disorderly jumble. Stuff everywhere. And it stank.

Turns out, too, that the tenant had successfully fended off the landlady for three or four years, despite being taken to court more than once and causing the landlady a stiff fine by the fire department last year. It took a lot of time, effort and dogged determination to uproot this woman from the apartment she had taken over so thoroughly, like a a crop of mushrooms, all connected at the root.

Later, after the sheriff had locked Ms. Hoarder out, after she’d driven off with two U-Hauls full of stuff, and the landlady had brought in a fleet of Got Junk? trucks to haul off her junk, I walked through the apartment gingerly, under the guise of maybe being interested in it myself – after it had been fully fumigated, smudged with sage, and exorcised by an Orthodox priest. The front bedroom was still – now this is after filling four Got Junk? trucks – still so full of stuff that there was no way of getting to the bed. Evidently this poor woman had, by default, been sleeping on the living room sofa. There were still mirrors, pictures and a dozen handbags hanging from the wall of the other bedroom, a filthy bathroom full of bath products, a filthy kitchen full of stuff, and all over the stained carpet miscellaneous piles of framed pictures, wire organizer containers (the irony!), clothes and tchotchkes and furniture. And an entire garage filled to the door and ceiling with more junk.

It’s creepy. It’s disturbing. I couldn’t help but understand the disgust of my gossiping neighbors. Their whispers were thrilled and horrified. We raised eybrows with the Got Junk? guys. We made sympathetic faces to the landlady. There was a general “thank god she’s gone” sentiment. Sweep the dirt somewhere else. It – she – doesn’t belong in our upper-middle-class enclave of Pottery Barn-perfect homes.

It's awful and sad. I know hoarding is a symptom of mental illness. I can’t imagine the burden of being this woman (I came home, glanced around my own messy apartment nervously and set to work cleaning it with zeal). Although her former apartment is being slowly, laboriously cleared out, remodeled and steam-cleaned to within an inch of its life, she took her illness with her. How soon will those two U-Haul loads of stuff morph into another two-bedroom apartment so jam-packed that she won’t be able to forge a trail from the kitchen to the bathroom? Is she in treatment? Is she ever going to be okay? I thought how scary it must have been to be locked out by the cops while there was still so much of her STUFF inside. She’d been given plenty of notice, but, I suppose predictably for someone in her condition, she hadn’t swung into action until it was too late.

And you want to know the capper, the thing that makes the whole situation just shimmer with weirdness?

The woman is a MAID.

I'm not ashamed to say it.

I wanted Hillary.

I didn’t love everything about her (I didn’t love any of the Democratic candidates, for that matter – they were all flawed, though each a thousand times better than the dangerous fool we’ve suffered for seven years). I came to my decision after a lot of soul-searching. I can never forgive Hillary for voting for the Iraq war – and then not apologizing for it. I think her campaign advisors failed to portray her as a true candidate of change, at a time when our country desperately needs it.

But to me her decades of experience – fighting the good fight for women and children, establishing herself as a non-partisan team player in the U.S. Senate, and yes, her experience in the White House, plus her blazing intelligence (named one of the Top 100 lawyers in America, twice) made her the stronger candidate. More Presidential. I believed she would beat McCain more easily than Obama would. I cheered her dogged refusal to give up despite the outrageous misogyny she faced – and just because screeching, irrational pundits said she should (despite her stunning wins in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Texas and all the rest).

But perhaps most importantly, I imagined the psychological difference it would make to every little girl in this country – and around the world. American women only gained the vote in 1920, after decades of struggle. Feminism has made our lives better and easier in so many ways. We fought for Title IX, and girls’ sports are no longer ignored and under-funded. We face fewer obstacles in education and the workplace (but are making slow progress in changing the mostly male bastions of commerce and government). It is less common for “man,” “he” and “his” to stand in for all of humanity – male and female – in textbooks, journalism and even in church. But women are still the disproportionate targets of sexual violence, and girls still absorb the message that it is better to be hot than smart.

A woman in the White House – a strong, brainy, experienced, Democratic woman – would have been a beacon of hope and a role model unlike any other, to girls and women everywhere.

Obama, for all his inspirational speechifying, his promises of change, his good looks and charm and undeniable intelligence, and not least his skin color, is just another man. And that doesn’t feel like much of a change at all.

Performance anxiety.

I have a few writer friends who regularly give readings in public. I used to do this a lot when I was involved in the performance poetry scene (though, as a matter of principle, I refused to adopt that over-the-top, self-important, I-am-a-serious-artist, I-am-DOWN-with-the-revolution, syncopated performance poetry cadence. You KNOW what I'm talkin' about). Yes, believe it or not, Pontifica is a poet. Or, rather, was. I've found that television and poetry do not mix. They inhabit entirely separate corners of the culture; they hang out in mutually exclusive parts of the brain and guard their turf jealously. There's only so much writing time, juice, territory. At least when you're holding down (however tenuously) a full-time job (what we like to refer to as a "support job.").

I do still write the occasional essay, and I think I should get out there again and read in public. Sometime. Some nice, free night when I have no writing class, no writing to do, no dinner to prepare with my girlfriend, no reading, no TV to watch (hey, it's work. I take notes).

Once I was at a lesbian holiday party at The Gauntlet (back when it catered to dykes one night a week, before it became The Eagle, which caters to the fags 24-7) and there was a whole slate of performance scheduled for the evening. Some of it went over well (the kissing contest was a real crowd pleaser). But I'll never forget the poor earnest writer gal who got up on stage to read an earnest essay about what it felt like to be Jewish at Christmastime.

The bar was packed. Hundreds of super-hot east-side art-school chicks were buying each other drinks and screaming into each other's ears above the din. The woman onstage was fighting an uphill battle. Nevertheless, I felt a glow of sisterhood. I wanted to support her. I wanted her to look out into the melee and meet at least one pair of understanding eyes.

But unfortunately, right in front of me there was a gay porn video playing on a giant TV screen, in which a man was being fisted, and peed on, by a whole posse of leather daddies.

I had never seen a man being fisted before. I was unable to drag my eyes away.

The writer kept reading doggedly, getting more and more flustered, more and more verklempt. Finally she screamed, "You all need to pay attention! I worked hard on this! I'm sharing something meaningful with you!"

Everyone ignored her. The racket continued unabated. Oh, the guilt. And yet she kept reading. I wanted to tell her, "just let it go. Get down off the stage and Be Here Now."

But I was too distracted.

Amo el Dia de los Muertos

My girlfriend and I went to the Day of the Dead celebration at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery on Saturday. It's the coolest cultural event in Los Angeles, if you ask me. I love the clouds of copal incense drifting through the darkness, the tall skinny palm trees leaning in rows below the half-moon, the festive live music, the tacos and margaritas, the hipsters and kids and regular folks in amazing costumes, and most of all the phenomenal altars. People invest so much effort and creativity in these memorials with their sugar skulls, loaves of bread, marigolds, flickering candles, photos and personal effects. They're beautiful, fantastical, sobering. What's not to love about grinning skeletons dressed as brides and grooms, friendly skeleton dogs, cats and even fish? Everyone's having a gay old time, treating death with humor as well as reverence. Yet there were angry political monuments too, shrines to the dead in Iraq, the murdered, and Mexico's desaparecidos – the disappeared. Who knew an appreciation of death could be so life-affirming? And who knew making out in a crypt could be so hot?

I finally did it: I got up the gumption to bang the door-knocker on the giant tomb in the middle of the lake. Then hightailed it across the bridge to safety. Better safe than clutched by ghostly, skeletal hands.

Newsflash!

"Sexualized images in media may harm girls, young women"

This is one of those headlines, trumpeted all over the media today, that merits a resounding "Duh!" The American Psychological Association has released a study decrying our culture’s overt sexual fetishization of females, pointing out that sexualization occurs when "a person’s value comes only from his or her sexual appeal or behavior, to the exclusion of other characteristics" and when "a person is sexually objectified—that is, made into a thing for others' sexual use, rather than seen as a person with the capacity for independent action and decision making." Look for earnest coverage next week in Time and Newsweek (always on journalism’s receding edge).

I mean, really. A full generation after the women’s movement? Three and a half decades since feminists started calling our attention to the effects of sexual objectification on tender female psyches? Even Reviving Ophelia came out, like, ten years ago, people!

This is on a par with other "duh!" news headlines like "Study Indicates Smoking is Bad For You" and "Everybody Loves Money." (Come to think of it, I'm as guilty of sexualizing money as the next guy – I mean, gal.)

Still, I’m grateful that we’re having the conversation. The APA study lists some “Positive Alternatives to the Sexualization of Girls,” and blogging is applauded as a means of girl empowerment. Kewl!

Overall, I’m glad that this exceptionally self-evident concept is being hammered home to a new generation. I guess if you’re not a girl, or a parent, friend, husband, teacher, coach, or brother of girls, you might actually not have been aware.

Turncoat!

So now John McCain thinks Roe v. Wade should be overturned?

I always find it entertaining when men make sweeping declarations about whether women should be permitted to make decisions about their own bodies. I say, when men start rushing out en masse to buy pregnancy tests, enduring morning sickness and third-degree tears, and thrusting their cracked nipples into screaming infant mouths (while risking their lives, their promotions and their college scholarships), that’s when they can opine about abortion. Till then, they should shut their traps.

It’s really a shame. McCain until now represented that rarity, a quasi-cool Republican (I know, I know, a contradiction in terms) thanks to his "maverick" views and semi-Libertarian leanings (though his support for the Iraq debacle pretty much landed him in the enemy camp). Now, on the campaign trail, this grizzled vet has decided, late in the game, that the moment has finally come to pander to our great nation's illest common denominator: the charming folks who, gosh darn it, honestly don’t believe women deserve equal rights, agency, and full citizenship. All while fervently believing that if abortions are illegal, women will Just Stop Having Them! Hey, give ‘em a break – they’re probably too young or too drunk to remember back alleys, wire hangers, and dead sorority sisters.

It's the same kooky wingnut logic, willfully blind to human nature, that insists that withholding condoms and sex education will stop kids from getting it on and contracting HIV, and that Just Saying No will prevent kids from experimenting with pot. It ignores the fundamental fact that People Are Gonna Do It Anyway. As soon as you leave the room.

Wasn’t the GOP supposed to be all about individual liberties? But hey, this is the party that colluded with the right-leaning Supreme Court to appoint the current White House resident, in defiance of the popular vote. Hey, yeah, remember that, my fellow Americans? (Not to distract you from your nonstop Anna Nicole Smith-fest – may she strut her stuff in peace.)

Well, Senator McCain. Not that you were going to get my vote anyway, but I’m ashamed of you.

BFF!

I am loving Katherine Heigl, a member of the dizzyingly large, Golden Globe-winning cast of Grey's Anatomy, who is very publicly throwing down in defense of her gay best friend. As everyone with the slightest celebrity obsession (or a TV, or an internet connection) knows, the cuddly T.R. Knight, another member of said cast, was the target of not one, but two homophobic slurs from Isaiah Washington, yet another member of said cast. To wit (and I paraphrase): "I'm not a faggot like T.R." (off camera) and then (at the Golden Globes, no less) "Hell, no, I didn't call that faggot a faggot."

I'm so proud of how fiercely and courageously Katherine is defending her best friend, who has since come out (i.e., made the best of being outed). (Props to you, too, T.R.) "I will beat you up," Katherine vowed, if you mess with her boy. Not many people would go out on a limb, risking disapproval from her bosses and her network for publicly calling Washington out on his homophobia, when they would surely have preferred to just sweep everything under the red carpet. We all know how outraged Mr. Washington – and everyone else – would be if someone had used the "N" word disparagingly about him.

You go, Katherine. You're putting the fabulous back in f*g hag.

Me & Angelina, sittin' in a tree.

Last night I dreamed that I was Angelina Jolie's girlfriend. Sadly, in real life her mother just passed away. Evidently they were very close. In my dream, though, her mother was alive and delightful, and I played my violin for her. It occurred to me that I'd better get ready for an onslaught of paparazzi photos because I was going to be plastered all over Us magazine like Jenny Shimizu (only taller). Wow, maybe I should lose ten pounds, I thought, and get my hair done.

It was fun being Angelina's girlfriend. She seemed warm, smart and down-to-earth, and we would've made quite an entrance on the red carpet. Of course, I have an actual girlfriend who is Angelina's equal in every way, except for the paparazzi photos, and so I was not terribly disappointed when I woke up. I'm sure Brad and the kids were relieved.

Speaking of Charming Girlfriend, I am disconcerted to find out that her porn name (an amalgam of your first pet's name and your first street) is Tawny Blossom. How apt! Mine, however, is Tom Tom Wicopee.

That is just not fair.

Bye-bye, Tivo.

When I moved to my new hood, I decided to cancel my Tivo service. Don't get me wrong, I assured the customer service rep who was desperately trying to change my mind, I love my Tivo! I'm one of those freaky-ass Tivo-philes who gushes about my Tivo-love with my Tivo-having friends. But an upstart competitor who shall remain nameless* was offering me a FREE 100-hour DVR, with the ability to record two shows at once (always a bone of contention with my old-skool 40-hour Tivo box), plus FREE service for a year, and only $5.99 a month after that instead of Tivo's $12.95, plus $10 off my bill for 15 months, PLUS a free portable DVD player. In the battle between brand loyalty and the bottom line, filthy lucre won out.

So what am I recording on my shiny new DVR? What merits a season pass? What counts as no-appointment-necessary television?

Rome: I am totally hooked. Titus Pullo, Lucius Vorenus, Servilia, Brutus, Octavia and Octavian: these people and their world are utterly real and compelling to me. Someone said this second season will be the last. Please, say it ain't so!
House and Bones: old, good friends.
the L word: I talk back to my TV more during this show than any other. I jeer, I groan, I roll my eyes – and then there's a hilarious, hot, scandalous and gorgeously shot episode like this week's, which redeems it all.
Heroes: don't tell me, don't tell me – I haven't seen this week's episode yet.
American Idol: they're back and better than ever.
The Closer and Saved: when they come back, they'll be at the top of the list.

I'm looking forward to seeing more of Brothers & Sisters, a show I really want to love. I'm checking out Rescue Me and Criminal Minds, Grey's Anatomy and Medium, and a little Everybody Hates Chris because one of my new neighbors is on it.

To my shock and horror, for the first time in umpteen years I missed the Golden Globes – even after telling my dad how it's the best awards show because everyone's totally wasted – but the glorious Kyra Sedgwick won for The Closer, so all is (briefly, politics and global warming aside) right with the world.

*Unless you need me to hook you up, in which case I'll tell you.

I love Los Feliz.

Today I went home at lunch and lay on our new brown and cream zebra-striped rug, with its new woolly smell, in fat stripes of sunlight. I love being on the second floor with its views of sky, trees and rooftops, nothing to block the light streaming through the windows. The neighborhood was silent. Silent! No screaming, no horns playing La Cuca-fucking-racha. Only birds and breezes. My dog sighed and settled down beside me, and my cat rolled on her back and stretched in the sun on the porch outside the open door.

New year, new apartment.

Mere minutes after arriving home from my vacation, I resumed a frantic box-packing marathon that lasted late into the next night (despite all my pre-holiday efforts – dang!), and then for a few more hours the following morning before I absolutely had to go pick up my U-Haul truck or lose my reservation. Last time I moved, I hired three guys, day workers, to help with the heavy lifting, and my plan was to do the same this time around. I’d had a heinous experience with a professional moving company the time before that (they’d held my piano hostage in the pelting rain while extorting more money out of me; I later looked them up in the Better Business Bureau and found that they had a long history of consumer complaints. Lesson learned.)

So on my way to pick up the truck, I thought I’d swing by Home Depot, where I’d heard the day laborers were to be found. A block away, I noticed dozens of guys, who surged toward me in a body as soon as they noticed – almost before I noticed – that I was slowing down. They swarmed around my car, yanking the doors open and sliding in before I could even think. Here I’d thought it would be a sane, measured procedure: I’d find out who knew how to drive, who was experienced at moving. But there they were, three grinning guys in my car and more struggling to squeeze in, knocking on my window with pleading faces. I held up three fingers and shrugged helplessly: Solamente tres.

Hours of delays, frustration, and back-breaking labor ensued (though there were also a couple of angels who swooped in to help in my hour of panic). I valiantly resisted shrill screams of utter desperation. Sweat flew freely, especially when all three Guatemalan guys – and me – wrestled my giant sofabed up a steep, narrow flight of steps, almost toppling it over the railing to the pavement below.

Today I’m bone-tired and I ache in every muscle, including my hands and feet, and I have hundreds of boxes to unpack. But when I opened my door this morning in my beautiful new Los Feliz neighborhood, I heard birdsong and smelled the delicate fragance of the flowers that twine up that very same railing.

Moving takes forever. I went back to the old place at lunch to clean and deal with all the leftover stuff: framed pictures, curtains, curtain rods, all the random detritus that we abandoned yesterday when the truck got full. I’ll be back there tonight loading my car and doing one last, nostalgic load of laundry in my trusty old washer and dryer. (There’s nowhere to put them at the new place. Hello, laundromat.)

P.S. The water pressure in my new shower is amazing.

Visions of resort vacations dancing in my head.

At my company holiday party last night, on top of delicately nibbling coconut shrimp and imbibing bad Chardonnay (why does everyone in California insist on drinking Chardonnay? Ugh. They were also serving bad Merlot. Californians and Merlot! What is everyone thinking?), I also won a prize in the gift raffle. I'm sure my proximity to the big tree decorated with little penguins had something to do with it.

Oh, the thrill of hearing my ticket number called. (From the shrieks and hollers when people's numbers were called, and the boos and hisses from everyone else, you'd think they were giving away glamorous resort vacations! They did give away a PSP, whatever that is. Everyone else thought it was pretty cool.)

And what did I win? Two nights at a hotel. Pretty sweet, you may be thinking. I see a romantic weekend getaway in your future.

But...the hotel is the Holiday Inn.

In Burbank.

When I told this to my coworker this morning, he burst out laughing. He thought I was telling a joke.

In other news, I have no credible explanation for my long, long, long-ass absence from my own blog. Something about moving and packing and stressing about leaving my huge apartment for a tiny garret, albeit in a better neighborhood. It's pretty cute, as garrets go. And it's all in service of my longterm goal, which is to buy a house next year. My girlfriend has whispered the word "condo" to me a couple of times, but so far I have shuddered at the very thought. She says it could be the first step toward being a real-estate mogul. Does that mean I could quit my job?

Frogtown.

Tonight I came closer than I ever have to the LA River. I went to the Frogtown Artwalk (Frogtown: something to do with a plague of frogs many years ago; a little snip of land between the 5 and the river). Tonight is one of those nights when all LA has an overlay of magic. I love LA in the winter. It's 64 degrees and almost chilly. I walked along the LA River footpath and followed glowing green balloons through the dark down to the sandy water's edge. The river was probably 50 feet across, the widest I've ever seen it. Fringed by bamboo and other leafy things, gurgling and flowing like any river should.

I really love connecting with the LA art scene. All of us wandering around looking at art and architecture, and each other, could have been in Brooklyn, Chicago, San Francisco, anyplace where people put out cheese and crackers and sangria in their fabulous beamed lofts where the smell of oil paint, dust and turpentine mingle most bewitchingly. I met an elderly dalmatian the same age as mine and a large white pit bull with brown spots. I saw some transcendent oversize color photographs of the Mexico/U.S. border. I looked longingly into people's spare industrial loft living spaces. I drove back through Silverlake and Los Feliz. I've been househunting lately and I'm getting the feeling that my house is out there, much like the feeling that one's true love is out there in the world before that fateful meeting occurs. My house-to-be, I believe, is in the 90026 area code.

Romance is so not dead.

OMG!

Trolling craigslist today for writing gigs, I came across this gem:

NEED AN ONLINE DATING PERSONAL ASSISTANT

Reply to: i'mtoosexy@craigslist.org
Date: 2006-10-30, 5:09AM PST

I'm seeking an individualo to work about 12 hours/wk primarily from home w/ flexible hours at $10/hr to manage my online dating accounts, send out emails, reply to emails, etc. this is steady ongoing work with cash pay.

Perfer mid 20's to 30's man or woman with significant experience dating online. Email us your resume with a brief cover letter describing extent of knowledge of teh various popular dating websites.

Preferred also: College degree

Compensation: $10/hr, Performance-based bonus

Could I be the “individualo” to take on this unique challenge? I mean, this poor guy clearly needs help. Swamped, overwhelmed by so many online dating accounts that he needs to hire me, a total stranger, to manage his social life. (No more dangerous double bookings!) Get paid to email sweet nothings, innuendos and brazen propositions to chicks? (Hell, I know a thing or two about that.) And on a “steady ongoing” basis too. Doesn’t sound like he’s looking for true love, does it?

But what if all this college-educated, vicarious online flirting leads to a Cyrano-esque mistaken-identity crisis? What if the guy (or gal) he hires just happens to fall for that saucy redhead who was lucky enough to get sucked in by one of those multiple ghostwritten profiles? Oops!

But hey, courtship and marriage and fatherhood are so freaking labor-intensive. Maybe our busy Mr. Outsource-My-Love-Life would dig this time-saving way to outsource the whole shebang! At very reasonable rates!

And how ‘bout that “performance-based bonus"? I love that. I guess that’s in case, against all odds, our Lothario ends up actually falling in love – or even tying the knot. Thanks to my – MY – online wooing! The nerve!

Now I'm going to think about other areas of my life that deserve a performance-based bonus.