Sweet December

I'm finishing out 2007 at home in New York, at my parents' house (get ready for grandmother stories next week), back home in New York, and then in Hawaii and Oahu. In that time I will also finish my grad school applications, take the GRE, and watch hours and hours of Hunter on DVD. (Man, the guest stars from season one - Frances McDormand, Drian Dennehy, Ed O'Neil, and Dennis Franz, for example - rock my world.)

Not only am I fortunate enough to have a semi-easy end to my year, but I am lucky to see December 1st at all. As I have complained many times, drivers in the city seem to believe that red lights do not require them to stop their vehicles. They just cruise right through, even after pedestrians get the cheerful "walk" light and venture into the crosswalk. As I mentioned on Ev's post about hitting a deer (excerpt: "As I was standing on the brake, fishtailing towards a ditch, watching the deer's head and neck fly over the roof of my truck while the front half and the back half of the torso broke apart at the ribs, and I was thinking, 'Huh! I never would have expected it to do that!'"), I was nearly run down by a shiny new BMW that neglected to follow traffic laws. I was eating a Trader Joe's 100 Calorie pack of oatmeal chocolate chip cookies, and I hurled one at the car as he narrowly missed my toes. I smashed against the front passenger side window with a satisfying, if small, noise and shattered into a million pieces. (That's when I realized I should carry little paintballs in my pocket with me from now on...) The other guy crossing the street while I was agreed with me that drivers are fucking maniacs.

Another disturbance in the balance of the world happened when I read that The Red Balloon is being re-released. I cannot explain why that fucking movie vexes me so much, but it was always 34 minutes of hell when they forced us to watch it in grammar school. Every damn year. For reasons that are beyond me, my beloved Entertainment Weekly gave it a grade of A. Tarnation!