Of course my titles are fair trade.

There are a lot of things I've given up. Smoking, drinking, driving too fast, staying up too late, hot young men. Okay, so maybe some things gave me up first. Some were harder adjustments than others, but by far the most painful was caffeine. The great injustice of it all is that I didn't even give it up on purpose.

It was a Sunday, and I realized that I wasn't going to have enough coffee to mainline my regular amount during the day and still have a fix left for breakfast the next morning.

Yes. Coffee is breakfast.

Bell rung, drool collected, I got ready to follow my well ingrained response pattern to the store. It was then that cruel lucidity sunk it's razor sharp reality into my poor defenseless torpor. It occurred to me that coffee was the only thing I was really out of. There was nothing else I was going to need before I'd be able to stop by the store on my way home from work on Monday. No other reason to make a special trip.

That's when I got arrogant. Arrogance is stupidity wearing sequins on a dance floor - something very few people can pull off and an absolute slaughter of dignity when attempted by people who can't. I decided I didn't actually need coffee. I decided to tough it out, and to quit capitulating to my every whim.

By ten am the next day my forehead was hanging inches above my desktop like a water logged Jack-In-The-Box, and I was all but completely incoherent. The only word I was able to articulate was headache. Hm. Articulate might not be the exact right word. I believe I pronounced it something like "eeeeeeeeeeeeruuuuungh". I am confident that it's meaning was adequately conveyed, though.

Arrogance had gotten me that far, I figured, so what could be the harm in seeing how much more it would take to destroy me completely? Again, I'm probably not transcribing things entirely accurately. While I do believe that was the actual evil plan my brain was formulating, it did present a far more seductive sales pitch to my squirming puddle of conscious awareness at the time. Something about how if I never wanted to go through that pain again, I had better not put the crap that hurt so bad leaving my system back into my system. No matter how deliciously, divinely good it feels going in.

It wasn't the drug that made me want to quit, it was the withdrawal.

Fine. Rah rah rah go me. Ouch but okay, I surrender. No more coffee! Come what may! Come sleepless nights, come panicked deadlines, come 7 am - and it does, every single morning 7am shows up as if somebody might actually be glad to see it - I will face them all with courage and conviction, but without caffeine!

What came, the very next day, was the directive from my boss to attend one of the city's finest hotel's meet and greet shmooze fest for industry contacts. One featuring not only some of the most succulent smelling fresh brewed coffee I have ever smelled in my life, but tables - plural - filled with the most opulent display of the finest quality assortment of dark chocolate confections that I will probably ever see in my life, created fresh for the occasion by a gourmet chocolatier. All of it chock full o' caffeine.

That was their theme. Those bastards made expensive chocolate the entire theme of the event. They really wanted me to eat it. I really wanted to eat it. It was right and honorable and good that I should eat it. I couldn't eat it. I didn't eat it.

I was a sad, sad little critter. Standing there. Staring at it. Sucking my sprite through it's tiny little red bar straw.

I prevailed, though. I made it. I detoxed and became caffeine free. There was no way in hell all that suffering was going to waste. Now that I am detoxed I don't make servers brew a special pot of decaf just for me and I definitely haven't cut chocolate out of my diet. I'll have caffeine on an occasional basis and in small amounts, I'm just not letting it build up in my system again.

Technically I'm not an addict anymore. No caffeine? No withdrawal. No problem! And yet, you'd fare better trying to take a bone away from a pit fighting dog than you would laying one greasy paw on my morning decaf. Such a quaint, all consuming little obsession, coffee. Isn't it?

I found this title in the clearance bin marked Slightly Irregular.

I spent almost twenty dollars on socks yesterday. Obviously I didn't spend it all on one pair.

I got two pairs! Okay I know that still sounds crazy, but you have to understand that they were 50% off. So while I spent nearly $20 on socks, I got nearly $40 worth of socks.

That didn't make it sound even a little bit less crazy, did it? Well who knew eighteen dollar socks even existed? But I promised I'd buy myself good socks for a change and... and I spent eighteen dollars on two pairs of socks.

Oh dear. I hope I'm not stupid. I try so hard not to be.

The package says they were developed for the military. Knowing military budgets, eighteen dollars is actually rather cheap for a pair of socks. That's their average per unit cost on a post-it note. It also said they had, um, advanced sock technology for... I think a better overall sock wearing experience of some kind? Or something?

Oh no. I am stupid, aren't I?

These better be good socks. Wait wait wait right there let me qualify that! These had better be good socks by my definition only. By my dog's definition they better be terrible socks.

There's a reason I'm always out of socks. His name is Max.

Is it laundry day yet? I'm starving!

After every spring thaw I find roughly 4-6 socks in the yard. Max carries them out there. You can just get rid of any charming images of a happy dog bounding playfully into the yard with a sock hanging out of his mouth right now, though.

Those socks did not drop out of his mouth.

I don't understand the appeal! At first it was just socks out of the hamper. He'd go rummaging in there while I was away. Charming. He misses me, and obviously my dirty socks smell more like me than anything else in the house. Cute. He loves me so much he wants to eat my stink. I'll just have to make sure to bury them a little deeper in the future.

Okay, that didn't work. He ate two tea towels and a wash cloth to get to them. Less cute. I'll just have to keep the laundry basket in the kitchen, on the other side of the doggie gate.

Now why is he eating clean socks, for heavens sake, and how did he figure out how to open my sock drawer? Yes, I'm asking you, cats.

So the sock drawer is blocked off behind a trunk now, the laundry basket's in the kitchen, and he still manages to get his daily recommended servings of sock more often than I care to admit. Sometimes I am careless and take my socks off when I'm somewhere other than in the kitchen. Sometimes the phone rings between taking clean socks out of the dryer and barricading them in their secure repository. I also have to let him through the doggie gate to go outside, and sometimes he manages clandestine visits to his beloved laundry basket while I stand flapping my hands like signal flags trying to navigate my more blind than not little sixteen year old dog through the large gaping hole in the wall that leads to the yard.

Sometimes I fall into a deep sleep wearing two socks and wake up wearing one.

It's not that the dog's smarter than me. Not much, anyway. It's just that he has a lot more time to devote to finding ways of getting my socks than I do to finding ways of keeping my socks away from him. While I'm busy running around trying to manage our household and the career that finances it, he's spending the day on his doggy bed calculating the what correct angle for startling a sleeping cat in order to knock the best pile of laundry off the dryer is. I've had to resign myself to the reality that there's pretty much only one place in this house that is completely safe for a sock to be.

That's why, should you ever drop by and decide to grab yourself a snack, there are forty dollars worth of socks in our refrigerator.

Too much title? Or not enough?

Now that I've blatantly condoned lying, I'd like to address the importance of keeping promises. Namely the promises we make to ourselves. Specifically the promises we make to ourselves when we're kids. Promises we swear we'll keep when we're grown up and riding destiny like a well broken stallion.

I, for example, was honor bound to buy myself a jar of Flinstone's vitamins for my eighteenth birthday and to eat as many as I could in one sitting. A promise is a promise, and if you can't trust yourself life is going to be a very dark place where fact and fiction commingle in obscene and uncomfortable ways. Kind of like an angry Three's Company. Only you're not Janet or Chrissy or Jack - you're all of them. And you're the Ropers, too. Eventually you become Mr. Furley as well. And that guy with the chest hair. Jack's friend. Whatshisface.

I thought if I kept typing that analogy would eventually go somewhere, but I think I'm going to let it drop now.

I ate the purple ones and the red ones. The orange ones? Threw them away! It goes both ways, remember - when you grow up not only can you eat anything you want to, but you don't have to eat anything you don't want to either. Run destiny, run - into the wind!

Of course want itself does evolve in alarming and unforeseeable ways as we age. You can't really know, for example, how important another person's wants can be to you until your hormones teach you how badly you can want another person. Likewise you can't really know how badly you want to eat well and stay healthy until you're no longer cute enough for other people to want to tuck you in and feed you soup when your orifices start spontaneously erupting with slime.

Generally speaking, though, we actually do a very good job of avoiding things we promised ourselves we'd never make ourselves do. The backbone of the global economy has been built on industries that profit directly from our promises that we wouldn't make ourselves do math or walk to the store when we got big. What happened to all the things we promised ourselves we would do, though?

Look out in your driveway. Do you see a fire truck there?

Where is your driveway? Do you live in Disneyland yet?

Okay not everything's going to be doable. But have you at least gone to the theme park your parents never managed to take you to?

Hey I'm not pointing fingers here. Last time I checked in the bathroom mirror I still wasn't Cher, so I've still got a lot of figuring out to do to make good on all the promises I made myself as well. Some of them are completely doable pretty much anytime, though.

C'mon. If you've got a box of Jello powder in the house odds are part of you wants to stick your finger in it, and if that's true odds are even better you promised yourself once upon a time that you would buy yourself a package someday specifically so that you could stick your big ol' spitty finger in there, whether you remember it now or not.

Off you go then.

And yes, My name is PJ, you most certainly do get confetti for being my 100th follower!


Hope it's okay like that. I just hate to have to get the vacuum out. You know.

AAA1 Quality Blog, Ltd: Titles You Can Trust

The party was over. The dj was announcing the last of the door prizes and I was loading up the props. On my way down the hotel corridor I passed a dashing young man in a rapidly accelerating state of dishevelment standing just outside the ballroom. He talked on a cell phone while being swarmed by an elegant and very agile young woman wearing a feverishly pink ball gown.

"Hi, mom? Yeah, it looks like the gala's going to run really late tonight and... nono, you go ahead and lock up for the night. I can crash at a buddy's place..."

There are those who believe that lying is never acceptable under any circumstances, and I respect that. If I hadn't believed in the concept of greater good before last night, though, I feel confident that I would now.

This title needs a little work.

So I figure if my grandmother could get 102 years out of a body built in the late nineteenth century, it's completely reasonable for me to expect my twentieth century model to last at least 140. That's 140 good years, mind you - all the usual caveats about being able to swallow all my spit and deposit any other physical creations of mine directly into the appropriate plumbed receptacles apply. I'd also really, really like to forgo the fart-as-you-walk thing. I'm willing to exchange clippable toenails for that one.

I not only think it's possible, I think it's likely. No, I am not forgetting all the things I've inhaled, drank, and eaten. I'm looking at the people who taught me how to inhale, drink, and eat all that crap. The people whose beautiful young bodies started breaking down when mine was still growing new and exciting things in feminine places.

Thank you, baby boomers. Thank you for smoking, toking, drinking, and living on soda pop and the fine family of Hostess products. Thank you for taking your youth for granted, and for freaking out when you discovered that you'd decimated it.

I guess what I'm really trying to say is thanks for botox. And tummy tucks. Thank you for laser eye surgery and for advanced dentistry techniques. Thank you for every revolutionary nip and age defying tuck. Thank you for sacrificing any communist principles you may have held in your youth for self serving, scientific research funding capitalism the minute you realized that the arteries in a heart full of love can clog up like a sink fed bacon grease and coffee grounds just as easily as the cold dead pipes in the chest of an industrialist can.

Most of all, thank you for doing it first. Thanks to your legacy of wanton excesses and panicked regrets, all the technologies will be perfected and all the prices will be competitive by the time I need to start booking appointments.

None of this should be taken as an admission to my having or even considering getting work done, mind you. I wilt like a tender little flower at the very suggestion of such stigma. It's all very progressive and open minded to get a tattoo or a piercing, but pump a few CCs of saline into your boob and people start looking at you like great grandma looked at that hussy who had the bold faced temerity to bleach her hair just like those common tramps in the moving pictures.

Why can't people just grow old gracefully? Because people can grow old any damn way they please, and the older they get the less of a damn they give what anybody thinks about it.

It will all be irrelevant soon, thank goodness. When the technology evolves to the point or a practice becomes popular enough that you can't be sure the person you're talking to hasn't had the same work done as the person you're trying to ridicule, that's the point at which a body modification becomes socially acceptable. By some extraordinary coincidence.

This post has been brought to you by the color gray, because it occurred to me the other day that I have no idea what the average age is for people to start to go gray since almost nobody ever does anymore. Nation of bold faced hussies, that's what we are!

Now everybody under the age of 45 go hug a baby boomer, and thank them for giving you the option of dying old and leaving a good looking corpse.

I have written this title before.

Why are you putting the dog food in a tree? How would you feel if I put the coffee maker on the roof?

Over the years my dog has had many occasions to puzzle over a variety of my behaviors, from the bafflingly inexplicable to the despicably unfair. From why do I go to all the trouble of carefully picking all the cat poops out of the box when I'm just going to throw them away, to why won't I let him do it and keep them from going to waste? He has always weathered my various transgressions of logic and compassion with grace and patience, but this time I think I might just have snapped his doggy zen clean in two.

I started to notice that neighbours on the end of my block always have a swarm of chickadees on the tree in their front yard. I'm a big fan of birds who have the fortitude to winter up here on the fifty-stupidst latitude, and there aren't many. For all their noise and mess, you really appreciate the sight of a crow or a magpie when it's the only living thing for miles not wearing a parka, and they are pretty much the only things you do see around at this time of year. Them and the chickadees. Now it's one thing for a bird the size of a guinea pig to tough things out, but it's downright awe inspiring when a critter with legs like guitar strings and less meat in it's shell than a pistachio nut hunkers down and takes it like a Canadian. I do so love and admire chickadees.

Geese, on the other hand, are despicable traitors. Don't even talk to me about geese. Enjoy Florida, you cowards. Hope you don't get heat stroke under all that fat you got from eating our grain during the short growing season. Geese are the animal kingdom equivalent of unwelcome relatives who overstay their welcome, drink all the booze, don't clean up after themselves and never offer to chip in for anything.

Okay. I wasn't going to get started on geese, but I did and now I'm done. It's out of my system now, and that's probably for the best.

Long story short, I decided that I wanted chickadees in my yard too. Careful observation led me to conclude that the containers hanging from the tree where they gather likely hold some sort of an attractant, so I took my little theory to an expert. My boyfriend. His qualifications as an expert are extensive: he has a really big yard.

My theory was confirmed. Those little containers hold a substance known as bird food. Fortunately my boyfriend is also an expert in another subject I'm largely ignorant about: grocery shopping. He's been in aisles I've never even heard of. He's purchased pasta products that contain neither macaroni or cheese, soup that takes longer than three minutes to cook and, yes indeed, food that was developed specifically for birds to eat.

It was right by the cat food. I'd bet money that stock clerk put family planning next to the baby food aisle, too. Listening to canned, 80's pop music forty hours a week can turn a mind to very dark thoughts.

It turns out that one of the favourite foods of these tiny, delicate little creatures is suet. I must say when I learned that my admiration for them increased exponentially. Why, they scarcely look able to intimidate a fruit fly, and here it turns out they dine on cattle! I'm not sure how they manage to secure this favourite food stuff in areas that are not equipped with pet food aisles, but if I'm ever near a cliff and see a cloud of them darkening the sky I'm going home.

So my dog and chickadees have something in common. Oh the joy that spread across his little doggy face when I unwrapped the stuff. Oh the spring in his step when we exited the house and took it out into his yard.

Oh the face that will haunt me in my dreams forever when we hung it out of his reach.

It's been out there for two days now, and the chickadees haven't touched it. Might have something to do with the hundred pound carnivore guarding it around the clock, coupled with the fact that there don't happen to be any steep cliffs around this end of the trailer park.

Have I written this title before?

I am vehemently and passionately opposed to naps. Have been since the age that my taking one was a medical necessity (for the health of my teachers). Nap time was always my worst subject. I was the kid in kindergarten lying on the floor and staring at the ceiling wide awake, wishing I could tell time so I could count the minutes until I was allowed to get up off the floor and get back to the important business of wondering how long it would be until I was allowed to go home.

Now I'm the grown woman sitting at a desk and staring at the computer screen half asleep, wishing I could tell time to hurry up so I didn't have to count the minutes until I'm allowed to go to bed. Not that I ever need a clock to tell me when it's time for bed. If I've got eyes like a startled cartoon character and am bouncing around like a balloon losing air I know there must be just exactly enough time for me to get a good night's sleep before I have to be up in the morning.

And am I getting enough sleep at night? Generally yes, in direct defiance of the super happy exploding brain-itis that strikes me every evening, I am. Am I eating my vitamins and getting lots of fresh air and physical activity? Check and check and check again! Transforming into a brain deprived zombie for absolutely no reason at two pm every day, even on days that I slept in until noon? Yeah. Why is that?

I've been informed that it's because I'm more plant-like than my succulent meaty textures would indicate, and follow some kind of natural cycle which likes to shut bodies down in the middle of the day. Seems like a crock to me, but apparently it's science and my personal opinions are not. I'd like science to explain why it closes me up like a dandelion after sun down in the middle of the afternoon when there's nothing else stopping me from being productive, but keeps my naked monkey self wide awake all winter long despite the fact that winter is cold and I believe I just mentioned that I'm naked and perhaps I should also note that there are critters with thick fur coats whose bodies still have more sense than to stay awake when it's minus forty outside. So why doesn't mine?

Yeah yeah, science. Blah blah Kenya blah blah evolution blah blah space heaters. Stop excusing and start fixing. Here's the deal: if I go to bed on time like a good girl and get a good night's sleep, you let me stay up in the afternoon to play earn-a-living. Okay?

No, I know better than to expect a rational compromise. This is no accident of nature. This is a very carefully designed plot to usurp the laps of humankind, and this is exactly why house cats should never have been allowed to rule the world.