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There are two things in this world that I can’t stand to eat: blue cheese, and my words. When I arrived in this office, about this time last year, about half the women in the place had just signed up with Weight Watchers. For the next month, just about all I heard, especially in the lunchroom on meeting days, was points this and points that and how many points does that have? One day, a client brought in a huge jar of pretzels (deli pickle-jar size) and nobody would eat them until someone posted a sign on the jar saying “3 = 1 point.” (Over half the jar was gone in 30 minutes.) I couldn’t deny that the program seemed to be working for most of the ones who took it seriously, but the level of obsessive commitment freaked me out. I swore I wouldn’t become one of the herd next time it came around. Then I watched myself pack on 15 pounds over the next year.

Mooooooo.

The whole thing would have to start on a day when we have no groceries in the house and are coming up on a weekend. I ended up with oatmeal for breakfast because there wasn’t anything else in the place I could eat and still have points left for dinner. Especially when there’s a darn good chance that dinner will be eaten somewhere besides home. I can’t believe capellini friggin’ pomodoro is 6 points for half an order while a strip of bacon is only 1 point. (Must be all the olive oil.) At least I’ve found a mug that makes drinking indiscreet amounts of water palatable. (The 9-11 memorial freebie we got from some vendor, of all things. Holds 2 cups!)

What I can’t figure is where they get their daily points ranges. The upper end has been lowered for nearly everybody since the last time the other women did this, so instead of the 22-29 I’d have had then, I have a max of 27. I’m trying to budget for 6 per meal and then add in snacks. I honestly don’t know how people with an 18-23 range can survive on that little. I’ve been hungry all day, and this is with half a bag of baby carrots sitting within arm’s reach (they’re gone now).

And I ran the numbers on what I used to eat in Arroyo Vista, spring quarter of freshman year, when I lost 15 pounds, reached what doctors would just barely call a healthy weight for my height, and felt like crap the entire time. I was eating between 30 and 35 points on the days I followed my formulaic meal algorithm, and I was losing the entire time. So where they get off maxing me out at 27, I have no idea. Maybe they figure 99 percent of people are going to cheat? Maybe if they put the max back at 29, fewer people would.

At least I don’t have to eat blue cheese.

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My alarm clock is a stupid mofo. Of course, considering that I got it specifically because it was simple to operate and didn’t have any strange features, that shouldn’t surprise me. But it’s beginning to piss me off that I have to turn the alarm function completely off every morning to shut it up, and then remember to turn it back on every night (because if I do it immediately after turning it off, it just starts up the alarm cycle again). I’ve woken up late (i.e. initial flying-open of eyes takes place more than 15 minutes after the desired time) about six times since getting this clock, which is more than I’ve done in the last five years, maybe even more than in the last 10.

And the corker is that any other clock I might get is going to piss me off just by its existence. I mean, have you shopped for bedside alarm clocks recently? They’re all postmodern sculptural chunks of weird, and badly balanced for trying to hit a specific button when your nervous system isn’t quite up to par. Boss-types trying to unravel the mystery of a chronically late worker should ask if their clock is the type where the only button you can find in the dark is snooze, and the OFF button doesn’t work if you’ve hit snooze so you have to wait for it to go off again or make your bedpartner do it for you. My last radio worked that way for the last year of its life, but only because the OFF button (which was nicely marked with a little raised bar) refused to work consistently and had to be rattled like a machine gun. The last thing a sleepy person wants to do is play Braille with an array of trendy little buttons, all alike, just to get out of bed. The second to last thing is knocking the radio over because it’s taller than it is wide, or hitting the volume control with an errant finger.

Now that I think about it, the last thing a sleepy person wants to do, actually, is get up. So clock hatred comes naturally. Good thing you can’t get arrested for a hate crime against a clock. Yet.

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When I lived with my family, we used to have just the right type of TV/cable box connection for a really neat trick. My sister and I discovered by accident that, by leaving the TV on channel 4 instead of 3 when switching to cable, we could get the picture from whatever channel was on the cable box (fuzzy, but identifiable) with the audio from channel 4. Combining a dignified-looking lawyer’s speech on the predecessor of Court TV with the audio from a commercial for Pull-Ups was truly quality television. Unfortunately, now my parents have a Dish, which isn’t cooperative.

Meanwhile, our current TV/stereo system is intertwined. The TV audio comes through the stereo speakers, and the DVD and VCR are hooked up to the TV. At the Presidents’ Day BBQ with the usual gang of suspects, we put Star Wars in the VCR for some background entertainment. Enter Jakob Luebke, age 17 months. Displaying remarkable electronics aptitude, he hit the TUNER button and switched the radio from classical to Star, thereby turning the movie into one long music video. It was the strangest way any of us have ever watched A New Hope. Highlights include a Robbins Brothers commercial saying “Dial 1-800-555-RING” just as a ring of debris explodes from Alderaan, Macy Gray performing in the Mos Eisley Cantina, and a used car commercial warning against lemons (“You’ll regret it!”) as a Y-wing blows up. There’s also a bunch of stuff I can’t remember. (Guys?)

So now I’m thinking about other ways to mess with audio and video. We have a large collection of stage-musical soundtracks that include chunks of libretto for better pacing. But darn it, Fellowship still isn’t fast enough to work with Rent……

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If I stepped out into untamed water
If I were to melt–
All this worldly spray paint
Swirling in bright whirlpools over the tiles–
If the sugar, the sweetness dripped off the light
Would the rain wash away in forty minutes
All I have left of self and greed?

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Have you ever realized that an elegant solution to an age-old question was sitting right in front of you? Or rather, had just left town for an undisclosed reason? My point: I think I know how the proverbial “Slayer army” can come into being.

Here’s the problem: Buffy is, for all intents and purposes, the Slayer, but as we’ve seen, when she dies, no new Slayer gets called. The line goes through Faith, who as far as we know is currently in jail. So, barring prison riots, getting any new Slayers by killing off Faith seems problematic at best, especially when you take into account that she’s slated to appear on both shows sometime this season. Doing what some people have suggested is possible, and creating a “Slayer army” by deliberately flatlining and then reviving Faith and each subsequently called Slayer, seems more plausible at this juncture than ever before, given the crowd of potentials hanging out in Sunnydale. But how to accomplish this?

Enter Gwen. We’ve seen her shock Gunn to death and then back to life, and she’s not contractually bound to appear on only one of the two shows. It wouldn’t take much for her to show up, not know anything about Faith, and kill her, then revive her when someone in the hotel goes berserk upon walking in a few seconds later. (Or any other scenario you can come up with, it doesn’t really matter.) Then you get a phone call from Sunnydale saying that one of the potentials just über-whupped a teammate in a practice session, and does Angel know anything? and Faith and Gwen eventually hightail it off to the Summers residence. Presto: Slayer army.

But how to get Faith out of jail? That one’s easy. L.A. has descended into eternal darkness, and vampire armies are looking for recruits. What better place to find people already turned to the dark side than a prison? And imagine their surprise when one of their candidates starts slaying her way out. Now there’s a teaser sequence I’d like to see.