Listening to the news really makes me want to jam my fingers into my ears and sing MARY HAD A LITTLE LAMB LITTLE LAMB LITTLE LAMB LA LA LA I CAN'T HEAR YOU at the top of my lungs. Actually, I discovered this morning that Little Feat at top volume has the same effect, and is somewhat less likely to make the person in the car next to you freak out. Just crank up "Fat Man in the Bathtub" and let loose like so: JUANIIIIIIIITA, MY SWEET CHIQUIIIIIIIITA�.

I listen to NPR a lot at work, and when I get home The Boy usually wants to watch the news, so it's getting to the point where I flip on the radio, hear "General So-and-so of the Such-and-such Brigade" and I immediately flip it back off. I'm saturated. I can't hear any more of it, and I can't talk about it anymore either. It's already worn a hole in me.

*~*

There's a fluorescent bulb in my office that is halfway dead. It stays on about half of the time and then suddenly it will flick off. Every time it does, I feel like I am being chastised. "No light for you!"

*~*

In other news: love, actually, is all around us.

I finally saw that movie last night and I triple-scoop loved it. I suspected I would. It's well known that I am a great big sucker for Those Special Moments in movies that are supposed to get you all choked up, but holy moly. I cried about 97 times in the course of this movie. And it wasn't even that cloying Steel Magnolias kind of weepy-movie� desperately yanking for heartstrings, any heartstrings, any chance it gets. This was by and large a funny movie that had these stealth moments of joy-so-big-it-makes-you-cry. Like a sneak attack, and before you know what happened, Hugh Grant is saying something charmingly self-deprecating and you're laughing again.

It doesn�t all wrap up neatly in the end-- not everyone winds up where you want them to (and truthfully, I found the ending to be a little too cutesy). But still. It makes no apology for being a big sloppy love-fest, and for a love-fest, was really well done, I thought.

*~*

It didn't hurt that they used my favorite Beach Boys song in the end scene. I'd heard this song a lot lately since I put it on the Soundtrack to My Wedding and was listening to those discs a lot to check for skips and the like. I had a revelation about it one day a few weeks ago, sitting at a traffic light in my car. I'd always thought I knew what this verse meant:

If you should ever leave me
Well life would still go on, believe me
The world could show nothing to me
So what good would living do me?

until I heard it that day at that red light. What I�d heard previously was the way I have it typed above, with an implied "but" in front of "the world could show nothing to me." So that the net result was, "believe me�life would still go on without you. But yeah, it would kinda suck." That's the way I always heard it, I suppose because of the way the song begins: "I may not always love you�" I'd always thought of it as a love song with kind of backhanded sentiment. [1] Hey, it's Brian Wilson. What do you expect?

I heard it differently that time, though. That time I heard,

If you should ever leave me
Though life would still go on
Believe me-- the world could show nothing to me
So what good would living do me?

instead. It makes a big difference, doesn't it?

Then I wandered off into to my old familiar geek state of wonder at how a tiny little turn of phrase changes EVERYTHING.

*~*

I haven't seen a single cicada yet, have you? My boss gives me a Cicada Report every morning, which makes me feel like I should go out hunting for them, too. He is the type to go find them, though it sounds like where he lives, you don't have to go far. Where I live, there isn't much ground that has been undisturbed for 17 years, and very few big old trees. So, no cicadas in my hood. I will have to seek them out in some older neighborhood. I remember finding the little discarded shells when I was a kid, but I don't remember seeing the live critters much. I know their song by heart, though. It's the music you fall asleep to during summers on the Jersey shore.

Here is the part where I shiver over the fact that the last time the cicadas came out was the year I graduated high school.

*~*

[1] so don't ask me why I was planning to play it at my wedding.