I have no idea why this didn't post earlier -- stupid blogger. Oh well. I post this for historical interest.

Dear Keith, from Project Runway:

You totally deserved it, you prick. And don't even start claiming you're a "scapegoat" or that you're surprised this happened. You lied and cheated, and you got what you deserved. Nyahh.

Dear City of Chicago:

You know I love you, so why do you have to treat me so mean? You give me parks and theater and great restaurants and lots of cool things to do, and then you have to go mess it up by being a complete dick when it comes to parking tickets. I mean, really: Why give me a ticket on Thursday when the street cleaning signs in front of my car and in front of my building say Friday? And why compound the insult by having the administrative official who reviewed my appeal either fail to read the letter or completely misunderstand my (clear, simple) argument: I didn't say that the signs were obscured, or missing, I said they were clear, but they said the wrong date. And worst of all, why do you require a $98 court fee to protest a $50 ticket? Grrr. I'd like to stick with principle and contest the ruling -- because you're wrong -- but apparently my principles are worth 48 additional dollars. Why you have to be so mean?

Dear Wilmington Blue Rocks:

Jane posted something about minor league baseball, which prompted me to look you up. Granted, I'm not a baseball fan, so it's all a little academic to me -- I'm hardly your target audience. But I was maybe just a wee bit confused about a couple of things:

First off all, "Blue Rocks?" It sounds like slang for sexual frustration and/or dysfunction. (Doesn't it? Or is that just me?)

Second, there's the mascots. Rocky Bluewinkle? Isn't that perilously close to copyright infringement? And how many moose (or moose-and-squirrel combos) occur naturally in the Wilmington area? As far as I know, Rocky and Bullwinkle didn't originate there. So that's one thing.

Then there's Rubble, a large, inflatable blue rock. OK, sure. Why not.

But the most puzzling one is "Mr. Celery." That's a stalk of celery that comes out to "CEL"-ebrate home runs. An.. bu... wha... celery? Does celery even grow in Delaware? Does celery feed on blue rocks? Is there some sort of blue-rock-to-celery or celery-to-blue-rock circle-of-life thing I don't know about? Is it a DuPont thing -- have they invented a chemical that transforms one into the other? I'm puzzled.

So I did some searching, and finally I found this:

"Our food service provider once did a promotion with a celery stalk, and then we put the costume in storage for four years," says Chris Parise, director of sales and marketing for the Wilmington Blue Rocks. "We were all meeting one day and talking about doing odd promotions at the ballpark that made no sense, and we thought of Mr. Celery."

Parise says Mr. Celery became an instant hit with fans who wondered why a celery stalk dances after every Blue Rocks run.

"We never really explained the reason behind Mr. Celery because there isn'?t one," Parise says.

And that's... actually, that's kind of awesome. You all were sitting around trying to think up thegoofiest t, least sensible things you could bring onto a baseball field, for the hell of it, and you remembered you had produce costumes in storage. So you figures, "Hey, let's screw with people's minds a bit, make a seven-foot-tall stalk of celery a mascot, and see what people do." It's a weird sort of mind game to keep you amused, and the Wilmington fans embraced it. I love it.

So Wilmington Blue Rocks, despite your odd name and your insistence on perpetrating baseball, I salute you. You appeal to my sense of the bizarre.

That's my hometown, folks. Explain anything about me?

Dear people who may want to rob me:

I'm meeting a bunch of college friends in Galena this weekend for catching up and drunken revelry (At least, as muchdrunkend revelry as we can fit in while all the swarms of toddlers are there.) But do not think my place will beunguardedd, for nay! I have defenses in place.

So, standard robbery disclaimer: Nuclear lizard watchmen, little yappy dogs... OF DOOM!, patrolling attack cat, ninjalike neighbors, sharpened spikes, spikey sharps, blow guns loaded with venom, and Snakes! On a muthafuckin plane! in my apartment! await you if you try to break in. Don't rob me.

Welcome to a wondering post full of pointlessness, where I discuss Asian medicine, why my chi should probably stay unmoved, Project runway, and why I really, really shouldn't watch reality shows. It's all Wendy's fault!

I lived in Hong Kong for three years, but I never really used any Chinese Medicine. The one time I raised it with a Chinese woman I worked with, she said "Yeah, the Chinese medicine doctors give me this herbal remedy for things, but it just makes me throw up." And I'd heard horror stories of people taking herbs thinking it must be safe, because "it's natural!" Dude, so is arsenic. Natural does not necessarily equal healthy, or better than manufactured. It's just different, and there's plenty of stuff in the natural world that can kill you if you take the wrong dosage/prepare it badly/piss off the gods of the forest/whatever. So I stuck with western medicine -- it's the devil I know.

That's not to say I don't support Chinese and other Asian medical traditions. For example, there's a whole lot to be said for the mind/body connection, for seeing the body as a system as opposed to a collection of organs, for using traditional remedies at times -- I mean, hell, aspirin is basically derived from willow, you know? I'm not as knee-jerk skeptical as, say, my Dad seems to be. I'm all for taking the best out of all traditions -- if, god forbid, I ever got cancer, I'd be all over the latest breakthroughs in medical technology, but I'd also be meditating my ass off in hopes of helping the healing process along.

This is all a long intro to talk about why I've been a hermit this weekend. See, I went to Meridian Touch Yoga with Angie on Friday. It's a sort of combination of yoga stretches and accupressure, and they emphasize not straining or making your body do things it doesn't
want to do. It felt great while I was doing it, but I woke up the next morning feeling like crap, with enlarged lymph nodes and and a headache and general blehishness. Apparently, there's enough accupressure/massage-type stuff to really get your chi moving (or to get your lymphatic system draining, if you prefer western terminology). My chi apparently hasn't moved since approximately 2002, so there's a lot to flush out. Lucky me.

(My father, of course, insists that I just caught a cold from someone there. But no one was sniffling, so who knows.)

I haven't decided whether I'll go again -- it's not an exercizy class, but a body-awareness/breathing/stretching/chi-moving kind of thing. However, Angie made a compelling argument -- it's pretty much a 60-minute massage (although you have to do some of the work) for $15. That, my friends, is value.

So I spent Saturday running errands and then curling up with the last four episodes of Project Runway. Once again, I am captivated. Damn you, Despain, for getting me hooked on this! I started out loathing Malan, and then felt awful when he got booted. Vincent is clearly insane, Jeffery is far too impressed with himself and needs to get kicked inthe ass, and Angela is a raging bitch. But Keith is the one who really makes my hackles rise. His arrogance! His refusal to listen to anyone else! Gah!

Keith didn't hit my radar at first -- like I said, Malan and Jeffrey were the first targets of my disdain, just for being such cocksure schmuckboys. But the last episode really put me over the edge. Look, Keith does have talent -- the dress he designed in the first challenge did look lovely -- but he seems to feel like the rules of the competition shouldn't apply to him. He sort of showed that by ignoring Tim Gunn's suggestion that perhaps the judges would ask to see more creative use of materials in his first dress, and then getting all high-and-mighty when he won. Yes, sweetie, it was a pretty dress, but you took the safest possible route. It's not really anything to crow about.

But what really made me get my loathe on was his reaction at the doggy design challenge. If you don't watch the show, here's the deal: The designers had to design an outfit inspired by "one of this year's hottest accessories" -- and they all got a little purse dog as inspiration. They had to design a dress for the woman who owns the dog, and then something for the dog itself. Yes, it's silly, but that's the terms of the challenge. And everyone got into it, with varying degrees of success, but Keith decided his dog was precious enough not to need an outfit, and his owner was the type to give her dog a jeweled collar, not an outfit. OK, you're ignoring part of the challenge, but that's your choice. Whatever. He made a pretty stunning dress, I'll give him that.

Then, then, when they got to the judging, the judges asked him why his dog wasn't dressed up. They went back and forth, and the judges said "OK, you ignored a part of the challenge, we need to take that into account." He also tried to pass off the jeweled collar his (somewhat hideous) dog was wearing as his own work, when it was basically a piece of jewelry from the accessory wall that he'd tied a ribbon around or something. The judges were unimpressed.

So he makes it into the round of highest and lowest scorers, and Heidi says "Keith, you're safe. You might have won this challenge if you'd designed something for the dog." But when Keith went backstage, he said "I didn't win? That doesn't make any sense!" Yeah, it does asshole, because you decided the rules didn't apply to you. You want to swan around having people recognize your genius without having to pay attention to anything they say. That's not how the show works, you pestilent schmuck -- you have to follow the same rules as everyone else. When you don't, you don't win challenges. The judges said that when they gave you feedback, but you decided that's not good enough. "But I'm Keith, and I'm a genius!" his attitude said. "Why should I have to do what everyone else does?" Listen, buddy, when the world acknowledges you as the Mozart of fashion, maybe, maybe you can get away with that sort of crap. But you're not the Mozart of fashion, you're a contestant on a reality show on a basic-cable network. You have no more right to win than anyone else. You have to actually prove that you're good, every week, and jump through the hoops the show puts there for you. If you don't like the hoops, don't go on the show. You ass.

And that visceral loathing is why I shouldn't watch reality shows. I know that there's a hell of a lot of editing involved, that maybe Keith said a whole lot of things that reflected well on his character and only a few things that made him look like a colossal prick (who probably has a very teeny prick.) I know that I'm being manipulated. I know that there's more to this than they show. But my quick-trigger judgmental side comes to the fore in this kind of thing, and I start frothing at the mouth. Who the hell are you narcissitic idiots, and why do you think we should care about you?

Of course, I'm watching, so in some sense, I do care what these narcissitic idiots are doing. I'm just feeding the beast. Dammit! At least I feel bad about it....