These sneakers are made of silvery velvet.

I want them anyway.

For those of you who were wondering about the results of my minor cosmetic surgery, allow me to present this bit of cruel irony:

Now that it's mostly, if not completely, healed, I can see that the removal of the mole from my upper lip left me with neither a flawless upper lip, nor with a hideous and unsightly scar -- the two possible results I'd imagined.

Instead, it left me with a third kind of result, and one I had not envisioned: a small, unobtrusive scar, in the center of which can be seen a flatter, smaller, but still very visible... mole.

Yep. The fucker is still there.

Sigh.

This week is gonna be awesome you guys.

Amidst increasing hype about next-generation iPhones, I keep reading about all the cool things an iPhone can do, and I keep having the same thought over and over. I've said this before in various forums (fori? fora? hell, I may have already said it here) and to various individuals, but I'm feeling the urge to rant again here in case anyone who works at Apple reads it (it could happen!):

I am as ardent a lover of shiny gadgets as you will ever find, but  I do have one requirement that the iPhone thus far fails to meet:

I'm not buying an iPhone until it can automatically sync all my contacts, calendar items, todos, notes, etc., over the air, to a website. In FACT, this would be a great use of the $99/year .Mac account I paid for, that sits largely unused. And vice-versa -- I'd also like to be able to enter stuff into my .Mac account and have it instantly appear on my phone. In essence, I want my phone to be a handheld portal into a web-based data repository. And I don't want to have to plug my phone into a computer to keep it synched, because, you know, it already talks to the web.

Here's the thing: my crappy Sidekick II that can do that. Why can't an iPhone? It's actually been an incredibly handy feature, especially the several times my Sidekick's been lost/stolen. I've been able to lock down the data so the missing phone can't access it, and then repopulate my new phone with all my info, instantly, over the air, without doing a damn thing other than signing into T-Mo's network. No plugging into anything, no manually synching anything. Just username, password, and boom, there's all my stuff.

Doesn't this seem like a simple enough thing for a fancy-ass company like Apple to accomplish? I CAN'T be the only person who wants this...

2nd result of Debut Album meme:

Beaver Creek, Left On This Earth

I saw Iron Man. Contrary to all expectations, I fucking loved it. You should see it. That is all.

Fun meme!  Do this, then post your results in the comments:

Your Debut Album

1 - Go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
The first random Wikipedia article you get is the name of your band.

2 - Go to Random quotations: http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3
The last four words of the very last quote of the page is the title of your first album.

If you want to do this again, you’ll hit refresh to generate new quotes, because clicking the quotes link again will just give you the same quotes over and over again.

3 - Go to flickr’s “explore the last seven days” http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days/
Third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.

Put it all together, that’s your debut album.

Mine was:
Wadd, "Can It Be Done."

Continuing on in the vein of things that are making me feel a little better at the tail end of a mysteriously crap-ass week, allow me to present (via trocadero), this Mike Doughty video for the song "Fort Hood," which is the first track on his most recent release "Golden Delicious," which you should already have boughten and please rectify that at once if that is not the case.

The amazing thing about this video is that it will make you feel good just by watching. No, seriously. I swear to god. It's just a mouseclick. Try it. See if I'm right.

Why yes, I AM listening to Jordan Zevon's "This Girl" and pretending, full-on junior-high-school style, that he's singing it right to meeeeee.

I've got the world on a string
I keep it wrapped around my neck
Living on the street of dreams
Just got my notice to evict
These days I only see the sunset through my rearview mirror
And the objects of my life are further than they once appeared

But there's this girl, there's this girl
There's this girl, there's this girl
This girl who guides me through the pain
And puts me on my feet again
There's this girl, there's this girl, there's this girl

Seems like I've been having one of those days
Since sometime back in 1998
And a turnaround is surely on the way
Or maybe that's me spinning down the drain
And I suppose my woes are only momentary stains
Just one foot in the door and all my worries wash away

'Cause there's this girl, there's this girl
There's this girl, there's this girl
This girl's my private Avalon
An island miles from all that's wrong
There's this girl, there's this girl, there's this girl

There's this girl
The rescue from the pessimist avalanche
There's this girl
Who loves her bitter victim of circumstance

'Cause there's this girl, there's this girl
There's this girl, there's this girl
This girl whose eyes can light my way
Through the haze that fills my day
There's this girl, there's this girl, there's this girl

You can even download it and sing it into your hairbrush put it on your iPod.

Song of the day/week/maybe even month: "Gun For A Mouth," by David Poe, from his forthcoming cd. I haven't been able to stop playing this for days on end. I can't resist a great beat, handclaps and tambourines, and an astute lyrical metaphor. See what you think.

David Poe: Gun For A Mouth

Via Salon's "Broadsheet" column:

"According to Forbes, the survey found five common "antigens" to women's success in corporate culture, including feelings of isolation (respondents reported often being the only women on a project team), a lack of female mentors, a macho and hostile work environment, and long hours that conflict with family responsibilities. The authors report that women drop out most frequently about 10 years into their careers, when they hit a 'perfect storm' in their mid- to late 30s of career hurdles and increased family pressures."

CHECK CHECK AND CHECK, although, two things:

- the current job is actually fine, so perhaps I'm in the eye of the perfect storm
- some of the best mentors I've had in my career have been male

BUT STILL.

AWESOME idea. totally want to do this.



(Here's how.)

Honestly, I can't wait to get these band-aids off my face and become relatively featureless. And not just because it's embarrassing to walk around with band-aids on my face and endure the confused looks of my coworkers and the sidelong glances of strangers. Although, that too.

Living with that stupid mole (and its 2 smaller, slightly less annoying friends) was like living in a house where the previous tenant had installed some kind of bizarre water feature in the front yard -- not something elegant like a koi pond, but something tacky, with multicolored floodlights and an ornate fountain where the water cascades out of the horn of a unicorn. And you're dying to remove it from your yard, but you realize it would involve time and expense and would leave a big ugly hole in the ground and how would you cover or fill in the hole and anyway, who do you call for water feature removal? is there a specialist for that?

I think I now understand the allure of plastic surgery, this ability to exert influence over what you're stuck with. To make yourself over in a way that conforms to your own aesthetics.

OR, maybe I'm being melodramatic. :) At any rate, here's to relative featurelessness!

A few minutes ago I had this thought, and I quote:

I don't understand why, when you have The Pinkeye, it is not okay to touch your eyes with your hands, IF -- IF! -- you are very careful to only touch your right eye with your right hand and your left eye with your left hand, as I have been assiduously doing so as to avoid cross-pollinating the pestilence.

Less than 10 seconds after having that thought, as I was sitting here smug in the belief that I could safely indulge in wiping my itchy eyes with my actual hands using my genius hand-to-eye matching method, I of course absentmindedly wiped my left eye with my right hand. Like IMMEDIATELY. Wtf?

Livejournal posts don't get more exciting than this, do they.

I've postponed my little cosmetic surgery rodeo until next week due to a hectic work schedule. I should have been clearer about the fact that I'm not removing the mole out of any concern about skin cancer; it's quite benign and doesn't pose any future risk as far as I know. While the upper lip is a common location for skin cancers, removing this one really is purely cosmetic and not at all a safety issue. I'm gonna go for it, though. Why not. It really is just a mole. And soon it will be just a memory.

I'm kinda glad to be postponing it until after The Pinkeye has passed, though. It's hard enough to maintain any semblance of pretty with my eyes crusted shut, without the added benefit of big bloody band-aids all over my face. (You didn't need that midnight snack anyway, let's face it.)

Alright then! Off to compulsively change my pillowcase.