In Memorium: Powerbook G4

This is all I have left of my Powerbook G4, the first computer I ever loved.

I've never really had something stolen from me like this, and it hits hard. I understand now why people are so affected by being robbed. And it could have been so much worse! I have 2 good friends who have disturbed their robbers mid-act, and in both cases it was something they needed time to get over (and, I am guessing from my recent, barely comparable experience, never completely have.)

In some ways, I had protected myself from it already. I had backed up both my finished novel and the one I am currently working on. I had backed up most of my photos and music (though unfortunately not all.) But there was tons of writing on that computer that is lost forever. Files that were merely a sentence long. Files that were a scattering of words. Files that were pages and pages and hadn't gone anywhere...yet. I thought I would come back to it.

It's silly, I know, but the things I miss most about that computer are these two things:

the E key, which was worn down to a dark grey spot,

and,

the fortune cookie fortune I had taped just above my screen that read, "It's up to you to clarify." Half of the time I spent writing my book was staring at that little phrase. It's up to me, I would think, all wild-eyed, and give it some crazy-profound meaning that worked just well enough in my writing-adled mind to keep me in my seat for a little bit longer. Silly me.

Oh my, I miss it.

Reviewed: Spiders

So we left New York, where the cockroach was king, for Seattle, where yesterday we killed what people around here call a "giant house spider" but might as well be called a terrifying, horrifying, disgusting spider that should not be in my house.

The surprising thing is, I'm already over it. Joe's the one with the fear of spiders and he's gone manic. We bought a spray yesterday at noon and today before noon it is already almost gone. He has patrolled the apartment endlessly. He keeps encouraging me to look for spiders so that we can "handle the problem" though I'm not sure there really is a problem.

There are things I'm scared of worse than spiders. Snakes are towards the top of the list. Ghosts, of course, are number one. I would find it a much bigger problem to find that this apartment was haunted by ghosts instead of a spiders. (Criminy, this building is over 100 years old.)

I'm also scared of robbers. Thieves. Burglars. No good criminals.

We've tackled this topic before here on Starred Review in the form of my paranoia. And in the meantime, my darling Powerbook was stolen. Right out from under my nose the day we moved out of New York. I know exactly when it happened and exactly who did it, but unfortunately since the thief covered his tracks so well, I didn't even notice it was missing until the next day when we were in Hazleton, Pennsylvania.

If you can't file a police report in person the NYPD won't do anything but listen to me rant and cry and plea with them on the phone. I did all three to no avail.

The thief is a sketchy friend of my downstairs neighbor, Scott, a 40 year-old, no-good, alcoholic skinhead with a Hitler moustache whose apartment is a revolving door of 19 year-old small time drug dealers who think they are badass.

His name is Angel.

He lives in the building two doors down from my old one, which was at 487 5th Avenue in Brooklyn.

He is a 5'9, light-skinned Hispanic with dark hair and very noticeable light blue eyes.

He has a tattoo on his left forearm.

He was recently released from jail for stealing mail, and also for defecating in front of a woman's door. (This last act was caught on camera.)

I've got lots of revenge fantasies, but unfortunately none of them will happen. But if you happen to see him, I wouldn't mind if you called him a useless, despicable f*ck.

Reviewed: Heat, Skins

It's one of those nights when I'm not really drunk but I've reached my wine and a half limit (equal to me wandering around the party with a plastic cup always a quarter full of sparkling) and I come home and bang around the kitchen until I can get a decent bowl of cereal going. New York has been hot as hell and my apartment is full of boxes. I admit I only packed two of them today, and they were both full of shoes. The thing is, we're leaving New York.

I'm sad about it, truly, I'm sad. Or I just want to think I'm sad, I can't really decide. Joe and I, we've moved around a bit in our 10 years of being together, and this time, this move feels different, like when I moved out of my hometown in '98. A puzzling sadness, a wonderment that after years of swearing I would leave, I felt suddenly sad to be doing it.

Because I just found the Sheep Station on 4th Avenue a mere month ago! The meat pies are delicious! And Jude Law is coming to Broadway in October!

And it's been too hot to eat on the deck at Barbone in the East Village. Though we did last night anyway, with friends that we'll miss, and it was too hot, even, to wear a necklace.

Here in our apartment we've got one little air conditioner stuck in the window of our bedroom and it's too small to really cool anything, and so loud that at night when we sit down to watch another episode of the BBC's Skins we really can't hear anything. Which is a shame, really, because the series is so addicting, so smart, that I can't believe I ever watched The O.C. and enjoyed it. Plus, Skins has a character named Cassie, and it makes me happy.

And outside it isn't so hot anymore, because earlier it rained, and the heat finally broke. And tomorrow I'll go to work at the neighborhood bakery one last time. And I'll wake up at 6am and walk three avenues over in the dim light of the morning and make coffee, and make coffee, and make coffee.

15 Stars.

Reviewed: Your Husband Gets New Glasses

Here I am in the new Jetblue terminal at JFK and it's full of people; everyone is delayed. This morning we had rain, lightening, thunder that cracked and you could feel it in your heart. Everyone's in the same boat. Tired, waiting, milling around.

And Joe has gotten new glasses and sometimes when I look for him I have to look twice. He's looking good, this guy I love, but different than usual. A good different.

I'm terrified of flying. Hate it. It's not the crashing, it's the claustrophobia. And this flight I'm waiting for is a really doozy. Six and a half hours in the air, in a tight little cylinder, where the door is all the way at the front and our seats are all the way at the back. Six hours! What if I need to get off before six hours has gone by?!

For me, sitting in an airport is worse than sitting in a hospital. At least in a hospital you're just waiting to get out. Here, you're waiting to get on.

So I need lots of support. Hug me, don't hug me. Listen to me whine, don't let me whine too much. Invent some new meditation to calm me down, don't talk right now. Let me concentrate on my magazine, make me wait to take the little pills for when they'll be most beneficial. And this guy with the new glasses is pretty good at doing all that.

100 stars.

Reviewed: Pepperface

Lately I've been developing an increasing fear of intruders. I get these kinds of irrational fears often; I'm a bit neurotic. Not too long ago, if my glass of water left my sight for too long I would start to think it had been poisoned, and I would have to ask Joe, "This is crazy, right, but you didn't happen to put any poison in my glass did you?" Not that I think he would, but when I was young I remember my sister once started to take a swig from a 2-liter Coke bottle sitting on our kitchen counter only to find that it was full of dirty oil, not Coke. My dad's a mechanic and he often used bottles like this.

Last week I was wrenched from sleep by a clattering in the apartment, like a bunch of pots had fallen, or an intruder had jostled something loose in the dark. Aren't the first words always, "What was that?!" to a noise at night in the dark? Immediately after that, when I followed Joe down the hallway in the dark I whispered to his back, "I'm scared I'm scared I'm scared I'm scared" like I was stuck on repeat.

My heart was beating like a rabbit, like a hummingbird. Everything felt prickly and wrong. My arms and legs were moving without me feeling them, and I manically went forward, looking, looking. I kept expecting something to happen, to startle someone out of their hiding place. I clutched my pepper spray.

It turns out that Joe never even thought for a second it was an intruder, but he knew something had fallen and he was trying to find what had--it was the soap dish, slipping off the edge and clattering into the tub. He said he didn't realize I had been so scared, that I should have told him, and that made me realize, uh oh, I've cried wolf too many times.

I wouldn't say I'm an abnormally scared person, but I've got kind of ridiculous fears (the aforementioned poison, seeing ghosts, aliens) that I probably talk about too much. Most of the time I'm not really, truly scared, I'm just needy for a little reassurement.

In the winter, walking to the bakery at 5 in the morning, it's dark and creepy. I wanted a weapon, so I ordered pepper spray. I'm not just needy, I'm also shallow, so I wanted a pretty one. Pepperface was just the ticket.

It's basically designer pepper spray ranging in price from 35 dollars to 300 (but that's for the super fancy one, with Swarovski crystals in the shape of a skull.) I got the basic Prevention Purple for 30% off on one of their specials, which they run fairly often. What else can I say? It's dangerous and it's pretty, and even though I'd rather have a switchblade, it's a good substitute. Every gal should have one.

90 Stars.

Reviewed: The Hurt Locker

Maybe one of the biggest things I'll miss when I move out of New York will be the movies, specifically, the ability to see anything you want; the lowest budget, the smallest indie gem, the movies that only make it to limited release. (I won't miss, however, the higher probability that your fellow moviegoer will be eating pork rolls and fried rice, or having a ten minute long conversation on their cell phone.)

The Hurt Locker is the best movie I've seen in a long time. It follows a small unit of bomb defusing soldiers (Jeremy Renner, Anthony Mackie, Brian Geraghty) as they try to survive their last 40 days in Iraq. As with any bomb movie, you're gonna expect tension, but this thing is Tense to the very end, so that when the soldiers finally make it home you're still sitting on the edge of your seat, waiting for one of them to fall off a ladder or slip in the shower.

But it's beautiful, too. The way a shell falls delicately into sand. Dust on eyelashes (and Anthony Mackie's got some killer ones.) Jeremy Renner, too, is amazing to watch. I'm still in an meandering depression over the cancellation of The Unusuals. I predict this guy will blow up soon (hardy har, I swear that wasn't intentional) because he's really, absolutely, that good. The movie wouldn't be what it is without him.

And The Hurt Locker is one of my favorite kinds of movies, where I can revel in my useless movie database brain and delight in everyone who pops up: pretty Evangeline Lilly from Lost, Christian Camargo (psychopath brother from Dexter), David Morse (creeper from Disturbia, the Hack), Guy Pearce, and my favorite, Ralph Fiennes, who shows up for a brief but memorable role as a Blackwater-type dude, looking as rugged and bad-ass handsome as he's been since The English Patient.

100 Stars.

Reviewed: The Quest Kayak

A few months ago I came into a sizable amount of cash. Let’s just say I finally graduated and was rewarded with many white envelops stuffed with cash. Although I wrote in every single thank you note that I would use the money for books in graduate school, I instead spent it foolishly on myself. I live in a mid-western land-locked Illinois town; so, of course, I bought a kayak. And a paddle. And a life jacket that I am too cool to wear, so I just stuff into the ample space at the front of the kayak. And a roof rack for my Nissan to tote the kayak around.

It may seem weird that I bought a kayak, but it really isn’t. Being on the water is my second favorite thing to do; right under watching TV on my couch. The problem is I spend a lot of time by myself indoors. Most of my friends are spread out across the country and R-Man works during the day. I needed something I could do alone and outside. A kayak is the perfect solution. I just put it on my roof, drive 30 minutes to the closest lake, take it down, and I’m free at sea.

The Quest Kayak is a smaller one person kayak weighing about 45 pounds and measuring about 10 feet. Mine is a vibrant red orange coloring, which keeps the fishing boats and pontoons I share a lake with from hitting me. Although it doesn’t weight that much, its awkward shape makes it difficult to lift and put on the roof of my car. However, other than trying to lift it above my head, it doesn’t seem that heavy. I can easily carry it around on one shoulder from car to water. I have taken it out several times without much hassle. Really the only trouble I had was the first time I went out. I tried to launch from the boat ramp, but to my surprise it was covered in slimy, green moss. My sandals went out from under me and I fell on my ass. Luckily the guy who has just asked if I needed any help had already driven away.

There is nothing more relaxing than paddling to the middle of a lake and riding the waves. I usually take a book along and find a place away from everyone to read for awhile. I even rest my legs on the top of the kayak in an attempt to get them from pale to pink.

77 stars: It is seriously difficult to get it on the roof of my car, but as it becomes easier my arms should start to look like Michelle Obama’s.