These songs will never be on my iPod.

This is a really tough one. It took me like, 3 weeks to come up with the ones that cause me the most pai-ay-ayy-ne

Jack and Diane by John Mellencamp

It was hard to choose just one John Mellencamp song. I truly hate his music. I chose this particular ditty because of the line "sucking on chili dogs" because, um, that is not, NOT, a charming vision of America's Heartland.

Mary Jane's Last Dance by Tom Petty

I also had to really THINK about this one, because I have a very love-hate relationship, mostly hate though, with Tom Petty. I just cannot stand how he stretches out the word "pain" in the song. Gack.

Hotel California by The Eagles

Just a really lame song. Right up there with Kokomo by the Beach Boys. "You can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave!" Come on, Don Henley.

A haiku about The Bridge

B and I recently watched the suicide documentary The Bridge. A guy set up cameras at the bottom of the Golden Gate Bridge to film the 25 people who hopped over the side in 2004. We want to move to the Bay Area, and figured this was a way to Get to Know the Culture.

People kill themselves

Jumping off the Golden Gate

Suicide, splish splash

Quite often I is left instead of right.

I was going to choose Harry Potter, then I saw the default heading was "... brings me back" and in no way am I "brought back" to HP. You can't be brought back to the present, and Harry Potter inspires me on a daily basis. WWHPD?

1. Third Grade, Mrs. Ryan's class. She brought Roald Dahl into my life, igniting a lifelong love for his books. I would regularly bust a gut over the misspelled words, and I remember crowing with my pals and, later, my parents over the HILARITY of Childchewer and Bloodbottler mowing human beans. I had to have read that book 10 times before I left elementary school.

2. AP Brit Lit, Ms Brooks: While the rest of my Smart Kid Class were slaving through Virginia Woolf and Chaucer and Shakespeare, I had the bright idea to pick a children's author with a wide catalog. I wrote my paper on Roald Dahl and the influence his childhood had on his children's fiction. If I had to relive high school over again, knowing I'd be starting off with World History and ending with that class, it might make it almost worth it.

3. Beauty, Terror and the Grotesque, Dr. McGuire: Because I am totally unoriginal, I wrote my senior thesis for my English major on the thematic prevalence of terror and the grotesque in his fiction. I wrote it over a period of 17 hours and was pretty thrilled just to be done. Not nearly as good a time as my historiography theis, but writing long papers on things I really love is always a good way to spend 2 days and a night.

Stuck in an elevator with Kristen Surette

Kristen Surette
I feel like she and i never ever run out of things to talk about. I'd probably have to have an iPhone with AIM or something on it though, cause we never see each other in person, so the probability of us getting stuck in an elevator is comparatively low. I talk to Kristen via email for 8 hours every day, and things like Paula Abdul's hair, people from high school, wedding dresses, baseball players, and different kinds of makeup are evergreen topics that need periodic review. I also think she would never freak out about being stuck in an elevator, because she knows there is More to Life.

I told her that I was putting her down as my Elevator Companion and this is what she said: "I like that we can go over things, or we can Think of Things. You know like "let's think of people who wouldn't be pretty if they didn't wake up at 430 to do their hair and make up"

We are totally on the same wavelegnth. GFFL.

MMM, garlic and broccoli.

Pad Thai Vegetarian - Spicy Noodle

Thai food. I love peanuts, garlic, gluten, chicken, vegtables, rice, soy sauce, egg noodles, rice paper, vermicelli, oyster sauce, satay. Maybe I'd make that Thai and Vietnamese, that would definitely be varied enough to keep me going for a year.