This evening, we went to Lara's wedding. It was a nice wedding. I loved the touch at the very end of the traditional, Baptist ceremony, as the new bride and groom walked away from the altar and suddenly The Cure's Just Like Heaven kicked in. It was unexpected and jolting - in a joyous sort of way.

We both met Lara back in the mid 1990's, when she was a cat named Hero on the now-extinct Seattle BBS named King Of The Cats, and she was predicting that two cats named Beatnik (me) and Velvet Paw (Phillip) would eventually become a couple. I wish that some of the other KOTC alumni would have been there, so we would have known more people at the reception. Sure, Bagheera and Miss Kitty were there. We knew they would be, since they're Hero's father and stepmother. But it's generally accepted that it was Bagheera's relentless anti-homosexual posts, specifically targeted at two cats named Beatnik and Velvet Paw, that caused King Of The Cats to shut down. So we weren't very motivated to mingle with them.

It was an enjoyable wedding, though.

Why have I resisted graphic novels for so long? I enjoyed Preludes and Nocturnes so much that I reserved the next in the Sandman series: The Doll's House. It arrived two days later (the fastest library hold I can remember). I picked it up on my way home from work last Monday. I'm liking this book even better than the first. (I love the Little Nemo in Slumberland take-off!) After this one will come Dream Country.

I found a newspaper at lunch today - I think it was Seattle Weekly, but I don't remember - and read an editorial on how terrible the practice of "product placement" in television shows is. The editorial pointed out The Restaurant as one example. It called product placement "deceptive" and mentioned that there is a movement to force television stations to flash disclaimers on the screen to inform viewers that a certain company paid to have a certain object displayed.

Personally, I don't mind product placement. Money from advertisers is what funds television, and I find product placement the least offensive form of television advertisements. It can be distracting - especially if it's overly obvious - but it's a whole lot less offensive than those "pop up" ads blocking the lower third of my TV screen. Personally, I'm smart enough to realize that a visible logo is probably there because someone paid for it to be there. I figured out from the opening credits of the first episode of The Restaurant, when a case of Coors beer was passed in front of the screen, followed by a close-up of an American Express card, that Coors and American Express were sponsoring the show. I thought it was pretty funny, actually, on last Tuesday's episode of Queer Eye For The Straight Guy, when Carson was sitting in the back seat of the Fab5 SUV, holding a soft drink bottle out in center view of the camera, while the straight guy in the front seat was holding the same brand of soft drink bottle. (It was especially funny, because I couldn't figure out what the soft drink brand was.)

The song stuck in my head this morning, for completely unknown reasons, is "One Toke Over The Line," by Brewer & Shipley. (I had to do an internet search to discover who did the song). This song started in the shower and rode with me all the way to work, and it's still following me.

How to be an old guy:

1. Introduce yourself by your last name. "The name's Anderson. Bill Anderson."

2. Replace the word "my" with "the." "The name's Anderson. This is the wife."

What about my resolution for 2004? I can't come up anything that seems very difficult. (This year's - start to learn Spanish - took almost no effort.) What I've come up with is a list of resolutions. I still have a month to work on refining that list.

1. Learn more Spanish

2. Read The Book of Matthew

3. Drink 25 varieties of teas (and teasans)

I am tired. I'm still working overtime this week. I've been riding the 43 into work, and I miss my walks across campus. Plus, I miss the variety of sightseeing I get when I ride the 7 to work and the 43 home.

I made a late night decision last night and reserved a Flexcar for after class tonight. I'm still not convinced that it was the best thing to do. After going back and forth on the matter, what made me decide to go with the Flexcar was the realization that I'm getting to work before 7:00 tomorrow, before the hourly charge starts up again. I won't have that opportunity next week, the last week of Spanish class.

I'm not as excited about tonight's class as I think I should be. Maybe I'm just tired. Maybe it's the thought of getting outshone by Cathy again. (I really doubt it's that.) Over lunch today, I studied up on ser and estar - those cool, but tricky, forms of "to be" - one permanent, the other temporary. I discovered that my dictionary has a great way of defining the differences between the two. Estar is defined as "to be," while ser is "to exist."

We went to Kurt & Lori's house yesterday. We played hearts, drank wine, played more hearts, drank more wine, played more hearts, and drank more wine. I stopped drinking wine once I had a good buzz going - I wanted to drive home. As Phillip is fond of saying, wine knocks me out. It puts me to sleep. We got home at 8, and I asked Phillip to feed the sugar gliders so I could take "a nap." I woke up a few times, interrupting some great dreams, but otherwise I slept soundly until 8 this morning. It turned out that the twelve hour sleep was exactly what I needed. For the first time in this four day weekend, I felt completely energized.

Most of the dreams I had last night and this morning were, of course, instantly forgotten. There was one about a picture book of Europe that came alive. There was another one about some experimental missiles that were launched from the public park I was standing in. These missiles were designed to spread foam, instead of exploding, upon impact. I watched the missiles disappear into the sky, then I saw them come back down. Suddenly, I realized that the missiles were going to land in the same park I was in. I panicked. I hid behind a tree, but decided the tree wasn't going to be big enough to shield me. I drove behind a bigger tree just as the missiles impacted. Mountains of thick foam rushed past me like an avalanche, but the tree protected me.

Meanwhile...

DVD commentaries often surprise me. I had high hopes for the commentary track for Yellow Submarine - a film I consider a classic. What I got instead was some old man reminiscing about the number of premises they leased for the girls in miniskirts who did the inking, and pointing out the animation was a lot more difficult than it would have been if they had had the computers they have today (well, duh!), but no real insights into the film itself (although the story about the non-actor they hired for the voice of George, who turned out to me a military deserter, was pretty funny). On the other hand, the other DVD we rented this weekend was Bulletproof Monk. It was an enjoyable movie, but not what I'd consider a great film. I waited until this morning to listen to one of two commentary tracks. It was an enjoyable commentary - it pointed out the symbolism scattered throughout the movie, and gave some interesting information about how the movie, and movies in general, get made. I didn't listen to the other commentary track - I was tired of watching the movie.