I'll write exactly half this title and th

I'm not typing this, you know. Well I guess I will be now in the future, but I'm not here in the past. As I arrange these words I'm lying on my side in bed, writing longhand into a spiral notebook with one knee propped up so that Cynthia the One and a Half Eyed Supercat can play tee pee. It's a weird fetish of hers. She likes to spend the first five minutes or so after I go to bed curled up under the arch of one or both of my legs. It's possible she was a troll in a former lifetime. Or perhaps a foot stool.

Who am I to call her fetish weird, though? I reread yesterday's post that I wrote earlier today just before crawling into bed. The post I opened with the statement "I'm not ritualistic". Now here I am yesterday, lying here like I do every night, using one of my ten identical purple pens to empty the extra thinks out of my thought hole into one of my four coordinating fruit themed notebooks so that I can sleep.

Of all places for me to state "I'm not ritualistic" I had to pick my blog? What is diarizing/journalling/blogging if not ritualized writing?

I really like that idea. As soon as you call a thing ritualized it immediately gains ten pounds and gets wrapped in cellophane. Transformed by the magic of romance into a thing of substance to be preserved.

Cynthia just crawled out from under the covers. That's when little Miss Doesn't Have Any Rituals here always puts down her nightly scribblings and tucks in for the night. If the entry continues from here it will be written real time, on the day it's posted.

Okay, it's not yesterday anymore now. At least not until tomorrow. Now I feel all weird, though, like I'm interrupting myself.

Anyway I got all excited about that, you know? I got a ritual! I'm all grown up and deep and stuff. Maybe I should start my own religion? Great tax breaks in that I hear.

Over-excited might be the better descriptor. It's just such a foreign concept to me. I've never joined in or adapted to any non-compulsory, social rituals. Not that I shunned them or anything. Shunning is actually not even nearly as much fun as it sounds. It does sound like it should be a fun thing, doesn't it? Like an old fashioned street game played with barrels and canes or some great old-country invoking domestic art involving yarn. Unfortunately it's just a fancy word that means going off and pouting and not playing with somebody when they won't do things your way. Boring! Screw that.

I just never got voluntarily involved in ritual on any kind of a social basis, let alone emotionally attached. I suppose that's the distinction I was making without seeing. Now there's this whole blog thing, though. It's definitely a ritual. It kind of dances the fine line of a personal vs a social one too, doesn't it?

Of course there is that whole title thing I do.

I'm not ritualistic. I don't have a lot of traditions. I don't even shower on any kind of reliable schedule.

Yeah, so? I live alone and I don't take public transportation. As long as I keep a can of Lysol by the door for when company drops by, where's the problem?

Ah you're just jealous.

Back to my point, if Muthering Heights is reading this she's probably experiencing a great galloping whallop of deja vu, because my opening statements are basically a repeat of a comment I left on her blog entry about traditions yesterday. It's certainly fair to say that her post helped inspire this one. It was the date, however, that instigated it.

December 01st. Is anybody else territorial about their birth month? That's right. I might not be ritualistic or traditional, but I'm hard core sentimental. I have no desire to relive or recreate any part of the past, I just don't want any of it to go anywhere. I'm alternating between writing this post and browsing vintage purses on-line. Guess how many of the ones I've earmarked remind me of my mother?

Hey, I'm a girl. It's not Hitchcockian for me to dress up like my dead mother. It's actually a really good idea. Mom always said I'd inheritted my father's sense of style. He of the self described "Chinese New Year" colour combinations, more popularly known on this continent as "Christmas decoration" colour combinations. When wearing his beloved bright red shirt and bright green pants combo stopped satisfying he painted our entire basement those colours. In high gloss paint. It looked like the dungeon where Santa keeps the mean elves. And yes, mom was right. I always did like the way he dressed. Even after I grew old enough to know better.

And now I manage both a roster of performers and a costume department. Yup, that means people have to wear what I tell them to. Adult people. If ever a job hiring deserved an evil laugh it was mine.

No no, I'm very careful not to dress other people up like me. I'm kind of Beethoveney that way. He could write the most delicately phrased passage in a symphony and then scream for peas at the dinner table like his underwear was on fire. I might look like a feral child raised at a flea market, but my performers are always polished.

December will always be my month. I was born in it, and I'm keeping it. I will always be my father's daughter, and I will always be reminded of him everywhere I look in December.

I guess I just don't feel a personal need for rituals or traditions. The world always manages to remind me of the things I want to remember without any help from me.

That all said, you know I'm going to be keeping this:


super awesome fox tail tie that I won from The Girl With the Flour in Her Hair over at her awesome blog Peeling An Orange With A Screwdriver for absolute ever. I just wish my father could have seen me in it.

Eh, it's probably just as well. He'd likely have just borrowed it and never returned the thing.

Don't read this title yet - I want to re-do it.

I performed for an audience of plastic surgeons last night. I was the featured focus of attention in a room full of people who have had extensive training to find room for improvement in people's appearances.

Well c'mon, I couldn't help but be conscious of that, could I? I do know that it's a silly thing to focus on, though. It's like back before therapy became so common, when people would worry about how sane their answer made them sound if a psychiatrist so much as asked them what time it was. "Quarter past. The hour, I mean. Which is nine. It's a quarter past nine. I do have the full time here. Just like everybody else! Says nine fifteen. Right there. Would you like to see the watch? Oh okay, oh... wait. It's nine sixteen now. I'd like to note that the time did change while we were talking, and that I have never had any difficulty in assessing the correct hour. I am not a communist!" Pure self obsessive paranoia. It was a great show and the doctors enjoyed the entertainment. They weren't analyzing my bone structure and doing a comparative cost analysis against the price of water front property in Hawaii. Probably. Right?

Okay, so I'm not convinced. Actually, if we look at that analogy a little more closely it's really quite odd that we have stopped guarding against involuntary psychoanalysis, isn't it? Our worst fears there have become realized in full technicolor with surround sound. We were worried about degreed professionals trained in objectivity analyzing us? Hah! You can't even order a cup of coffee without a free personality assessment thrown in on the side these days. "Check out Mr. Decaf Soy Cappuccino over there. Today he wants chocolate sprinkles. Classic passive aggressive transference, that. I'm betting he had a fight with his mother." Now pretty much everybody considers themselves qualified to analyze every single thing we say, either on the virtue of having taken a handful of psychology classes in university or on the basis of something they heard somebody else who has taken a handful of psychology classes in university say on a talk show.

I guess we don't worry about whether or not other people think we're sane any more because we know nothing we can say is going to convince anybody that we are anyway. The saner we sound the more obvious it is we're in denial, after all. It's okay, though, because we know the people who think we're insane probably consider themselves to be exponentially more messed up. They only have access to the symptoms of our mental deficiencies when we're actually around to display them (excepting, of course, those of us who have taken the wise precaution of preserving them for future generations on a blog), but self criticism never takes a holiday.

Nothing's ever going to stop us from worrying about what other people think about how we look, though. Birth control, automotive transportation and the internet combined haven't had the impact on social evolution that the invention of the mirror did. I'm sure the first person to ever look their clear, undistorted reflection in the eye immediately hid in a closet until their mother could convince them to come out on the promise that nobody would laugh and there'd be chocolate pudding for dessert. That's not to suggest we don't have our priorities straight, though. Of course we know it's what's inside that counts.

Why else would we be so anxious to create a good distraction on the outside?

You want this title finished when?

Q: When is the proper time to notify an entertainment company that you've changed the time of your event and/or invited an extra hundred people or so to attend and/or that you want specific customization done to the show?

A: The day before the event.

Wrong! Wrong! Wildly, wildly incorrect and no no no no no, what's more!

And yet, an unfortunately common answer.

Christmas has me by the throat. Everything is scheduled down to the second and the wrenches are flying with abandon, lodging themselves merrily in every well laid plan I have made.

I understand. I do. Completely. Hiring entertainment companies is not something most people do on a regular basis. Hey, that's not a problem! Nobody's expected to know exactly how to go about it or how things progress from the booking stage. That's fine. That's what we're here for! We're here to help. Give us a call. We'll answer any questions you might have. Anytime. Really. No, please. Call. Don't make assumptions. It's not a bother, we'll explain everything. No no no, please don't presume. Really, we're paid to handle it, let us handle it. No don't try to make these decisions on your own and then throw them at us at the last minute. We've done this before, we know what works. We know what doesn't work. Please don't do this. Stop it. No don't have a committee meeting I beg you. Please. C'mon - one lousy phone call!

They don't call.

I try to climb inside their heads to get an idea of what's happening in there sometimes. I go right to the very back of their brains and through the dusty, cobwebbed door with a stack of broken chairs heaped in front of it marked "entertainment company". Inside I find shelves as high and as far as the eye can see, each overflowing with clowns and magicians and other colorfully costumed characters. An intercom crackles, sending their little imagined version of me scurrying. For the record I don't actually scurry, and how dare they put me in that ugly cardigan? Okay fine, most of them have never seen me in real life, I suppose I can be forgiving. But really, the over-sized tortoise shell glasses? Couldn't they have imagined me some contacts?

Off little imaginary me goes, rolling a ladder with a top that disappears at the vanishing point along the towering shelves. She's clutching a little piece of paper that notes this client needs five more performers than they booked for, and they need them an hour earlier than scheduled. No problem! Up the ladder she scurries (yes, she scurries along both the horizontal and the vertical planes) until she reaches the appropriate shelf. She plucks off the appropriate number of appropriately costumed performers, and hurls them down into something resembling a laundry bin on a rail. Zoom! Off goes the bin along it's underground track which connects it directly to the hotel where they're holding the event. Voila! Another successful production.

Really, when you look at it that way, giving our company a whole day's notice is rather generous.

Every word of this title is true.

So if I were to write two consecutive posts about my pets, how annoying would that be? Very, wouldn't it? Okay. Maybe I should just write about my boyfriend.

My boyfriend gets along with my pets really well.

Look, I'm sorry! But there are five of them, you know. As I write this very sentence I am having my belly kneaded and thighs drooled upon by a loosely packed ten pound bag of purr. The topic's kind of inescapable around here. They're part of the very air that I breathe. Seriously - has anybody else ever inhaled a dog hair? That's like the final exam at sword swallowing school.

Look at it this way - it's really not much different than being a mommy blogger. It's basically exactly the same, only sad.

The point is I can't not write about my dog right now. In about forty minutes I have to leave to go and have dinner with my boyfriend, and the dog's not coming.

And the dog has somehow figured this out. And the guilt is already killing me.

Oooh yes he knows. I've been careful not to speak the man's name. I haven't made a move to get ready yet. Still - the dog knows.

Of course he knows. He's a dog. Dogs can smell guilt. Believe me, too - nobody oozes the stank of guilt like I do.

I've never had to face the moral dilemma of lying. I'd be more likely to face the moral dilemma of how to use super powers responsibly. I lie rather less ably than I outrun speeding bullets or jump over tall buildings, and I know that, so I just don't do it. Not even to my pets.

Really, I've tried it. It didn't go well. I told my cats that the cheap crap I bought them was all they had at the store. They didn't question my story. You know, because they're cats. I still crumbled. Confessed. Apologized. Assuaged my guilt with kitty treats. They accepted them happily. I considered counseling. Ultimately decided that would just be too embarrassing to admit to a counselor (but not, apparently, the internet), and decided it would be easier to simply never lie to my pets again.

Those aren't reflections of the flash in his eyes, those are guilt rays.

I think, though, that the lie of omission might be the worst lie there is when dealing with dogs. After all, to them one "blah blah blah blah"'s the same as the next "blah blah blah blah"'s the same as any "blah blah blah blah". It's when we're quiet that they know we're up to something.

Okay, I have to go and get ready here.

He's looking at me. Make him stop looking at me!

I'd better pack a toothbrush. I don't have the guts to come home smelling like roast beef.

Heeeeeeeeere titletitletitletitletitle!

People often wonder what animals would say if they could talk. I consider my pets. The many years we've been together. The many things they've seen. Then I consider the cost of having their vocal cords removed.

Absolutely, it would be wonderful to be able to ask them things like why the cardboard file box filled with important work documents was so much more tempting than the cardboard scratching post filled with catnip, or what, pray tell and for the love of all that is holy, is so horrendously, anguishingly dreadful about having your fur gently brushed that it warrants screaming that special scream dogs reserve for when they're trying to convince your neighbours to call animal protection services? I wouldn't expect a straight answer on questions like that anyway, though. I already get as much of an answer as I'm ever going to. Damn right animals can smirk.

No, there really is no practical benefit that could outweigh the dependency the relationship my pets and I share on the fact that they are not capable of relating anything they've seen or heard. Ever. To anybody. It's enough that they're capable of dragging the contents of the bathroom garbage out into the middle of the living room for cocktail party show-and-tell, I don't need them providing colour commentary on how the various items were used.

There are a lot of reasons cited for humans' deep affection for animals, but I think their provision of mute witness is the cornerstone. They'll keep you company while you hurl juicy insults into the toilet bowl and never remind you about the incident again. They'll listen to every argument about why your boyfriend should be drawn and quartered and never say "Well I certainly didn't expect to see you back here!" after you've stopped being angry at him.

They won't fart and blame it on you, and I think everybody with pets knows from experience that they won't defend themselves when similarly accused.

It's no use, Cynthia. Once you've seen me naked you can't un-see it.

Of course if they could talk they probably wouldn't talk about the sorts of things that we like to talk about anyway. I think we can take comfort in the fact that our dogs don't have enough interest in our personal dramas to go about relaying the details of our late night dessert fueled orgies of self examination. We could be confident, however, that were they ever to have a deep discussion with our dogs, our friends and neighbours would be provided full detailed accounts of the the many rich and varied fragrances that emanate from our backsides.

Any way you look at it, they know too much.

And now for some shameless bragging:

When somebody really funny gives you an award because they think you're really funny that's really cool, and that's why this Musterole Award! (exclamation point mine, because the words Musterole Award! just look naked without one for some reason) is so cool - because Speaking From the Crib gave it to me.

It's likely anybody reading this is already reading her blog because it's that damn good and she has that damn many followers, but if on the off chance I found you first, go go go go go to her blog. You'll love it.

Thanks, babe!

I'm only writing this title because I felt sorry for it.

I've done it, and I'd do it again. I just hope I don't have to.

There really is nothing wrong with internet dating, though.

Hahahahaha - you thought I was talking about burying my neighbours under the azaleas, didn't you? Ah haha. No no. I collect stamps now.

Really, though, internet dating is not the dip into the sleeze pool so many people make it out to be. You have to have a special membership for that. For the main part, internet people are a lot like real life people. It's almost as if the two were connected in some strange, mysterious way.

One of the greatest concerns people have when considering online dating is misrepresentation. Most women worry that the people they're talking to might not really be single. Most men worry that the people they're talking to might not really be women. Everybody worries that the person they're talking to might not really look like their picture, almost as much as they worry about whether or not anybody's going to notice the "Happy New Year 1987" banner in the background of their own picture.

Thank you, yes, some people do say I look young for my age.

The next most common concern is the matter of how does one describe oneself? A lot of people have realized that the simplest approach is to just write "I never know what to say in these little boxes LOL anything you want to know just ask". As I honestly have no idea how they keep up with the torrential responses from people afire with intrigue and probing questions I can't in good conscience recommend this approach.

Another popular method of self description is to describe yourself using nothing but cringingly obvious references to painful dating experiences:

"I believe in HONESTY and TRUTH in a relationship. Game players NEED NOT APPLY. If you just want someone to take you out and buy you drinks all night and pay for a cab to wait while you make out with the obviously underage cashier and then never return so much as a single one of forty six phone messages even though your mother said you were home and your car was in the driveway you know LOOK ELSEWHERE. I'm not willing to settle."

Some don't even get as far as the date:

"I'm not here to play games. If I write you the nice thing to do is write back, even if just to say you're not interested. Why are you even here if you aren't even going to write people back? I would write you back! IT'S THE DECENT THING TO DO."

These latter approaches manage to circumvent the torrential responses from people afire with intrigue and probing questions problem very effectively.

Those among us with basic powers of observation have likely noticed something of a pattern developing here. The two elements that are evidently very commonly believed to be essential for a successful dating site profile are:

1) Informing people that you do not play games, do not like games, are not on the site to play games, don't like people who play games, and don't care if they didn't ask you to play their stupid games anyway because you just said you didn't want to so there.

2) Remembering that if you need to share with people an important insight about the kind of person you are and what you're looking for in a relationship, ALL CAPS AUTOMATICALLY MAKE ANYTHING YOU WRITE POIGNANT. They're especially effective in conveying just how deeply sincere you are about the fact that you DON'T PLAY GAMES.

The self description component need not be an issue, however. If unsure of what to say or how to say it, simply post a clear picture of as much cleavage as the site censors will allow and/or an annual income of $100,000+, and you can write "Wheeeeeeeeeeee I'm a gumdrop!" and still hit in-box capacity within an hour.

In-boxes are someplace else entirely. Equal parts Christmas morning and visiting your mean aunt at the nursing home. Gardens of delights and cat poops.

The first thing you learn is not to open your mail. That is, not all of it. Open the profiles of the people who sent it first, then decide if you want to open their mail. If the profile features, for example, a webcam image of someone holding a ruler alongside their fully extended tongue, you might not be interested in learning their impression of the photo you posted of yourself holding a cat. If their profile is illegible l33t and emoticon soup you don't need to open the letter. I'll tell you what it says right now. It says "What's up?" or some witty variation such as "howru2nite?" or "40SS#%^?" which I mostly just made up but could possibly mean something (and I apologize if it made anybody cry), which in dating site-ese means "I'm bored, entertain me". If you want to help someone achieve the world record for most chat windows open at any given time by all means involve yourself. If you're hoping for a more romantic interaction I would suggest placing an order at a take-out window. You can play Chris Isaak on the car stereo and let your fingers touch when they hand you your change if it helps.

Letters with a subject line that clearly references something you wrote in your profile and indicates that they totally get your sense of humor? Clear your schedule, get a fresh cup of coffee, turn off the music and give every word every ounce of your attention. Those are the gold you're mining for.

If you're serious about finding someone to date, find other people who are serious about finding someone to date.

If they can't take the time to type full words for you, they're not going to go to much effort to win your affection later on, either. Delete.

If they're full of compliments for your photo and mention nothing about what you wrote, that's because they didn't bother to read anything that you wrote. Save your time for people who care as much about your contents as your packaging. Delete.

If, after reading their letter, you can imagine it being addressed to a someone completely different and still being completely relevant, it's a form letter. Delete.

You will get fewer responses if you don't post an income. That's a good thing.

You will get fewer responses if you don't post a hyper-flattering photo. That's also a good thing.

You will get bored, disappointed, frustrated, disillusioned, and fed up. So will the person looking for you. That's okay. If you both persist, the internet really isn't all that damn big. You'll find each other.

Just remember - always wear protection when kissing frogs.