Also, this isn’t Moe’s fault, but the publisher’s decision to put footnotes at the end of each chapter rather than at the bottom of the page was downright annoying, especially given that most of these were jokes/asides and not really worth flipping back and forth for.

Perhaps I’m just lburned out on the “Hey, let’s do something wacky for an extended period of time and get a book deal out of it!” genre. But while Conservatize Me had its funny moments, overall I found A.J. Liebling’s The Year of Living Biblically a more thought-provoking and worthwhile read.

Strange that there’s never been any rox avec lying sweet-talk, now that I think about it.

Swamplandia! by Karen Russell
People either love or hate her, but her George Saunders-esque take on Everglades life is engaging and poignant, so far. And some of her sentences are just killer. Extra credit for the awesome anhinga reference.

Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches
Sometimes the simplest possible meal is exactly right. Satisfying, portable, wholesome, and suitable at any time of day, particularly when made with good peanuts-only peanut butter and quality preserves. And toasting a lightly buttered sandwich in the skillet for a few minutes per side could change your worldview completely. Try almond butter to completely upend your idea of PB&J.

Inbox < 20
The whole Inbox Zero concept is nothing new, and while it’s an admirable goal, getting your work inbox down to fewer than 20 emails is liberating. Even better is when you’re able to leave for the day with fewer than 15 emails: the next day begins with a feeling of clarity and promise.

You Look Nice Today: A Journal of Emotional Hygiene
The only podcast whose episodes I can listen to on constant repeat and still make me bite my tongue to control the laughter on the train. Merlin Mann (@hotdogsladies), Scott Simpson (@scottsimpson), and Adam Lisagor (@lonelysandwich) have terrific chemistry, and their ad-libbing genius is impressive to say the least. By turns satiric, puerile (those who abhor salty language should give it a miss), surreal, and smart. Bonus: John Hodgman both provides the interstitial voiceovers and guest-stars (with Jonathan Coulton) in a three-part “VSOP” series. Also bonus: Mann has a knack for impersonating folks, including Burgess Meredith, Robert Evans, Randy Newman, T.S. Eliot, and Tom Waits.

The live recordings at events such as The Monsters of Podcasting tour suffer a bit without the benefit of Sandwich’s keen editing, but there are nuggets of brilliance that make them still worth a listen. Start with the first episode, Morning Powder, or try The Tux Age, The Sake Period, or Truck Spank on for size. RIYL Patton Oswalt and Mr. Show.

Fair Isle Knitting
Also called “stranded colorwork,” this technique feels impossible and you’ll worry that your tension is all wrong, but as each row reveals a bit more of the pattern, it’s like a little magical surpriise. Next project: Pirate Mittens or the Squirrel and Oak Mittens. Bonus: knitting garments using this technique makes them doubly warm.

Minneolas
Easier to peel than an orange, and larger and more flavorful than a clementine. This is the snack that will make nearby cubicle-dwellers green with envy. And the vestigial nub on top is rather charming.

Leaving work early to see a movie with your fella or gal
Feels like playing hooky, without the threat of getting in trouble, especially if it’s a Friday afternoon. It will breathe a sense of anticipation into the end of your workweek, and, depending on the timing, you’ll be able to enjoy dinner afterward (preferably someplace delicious you haven’t yet tried) at a sensible time.

The Illusionist
Nothing against the charms of The Triplets of Belleville, but Sylvain Chomet’s animated feature based on a script by Jacques Tati is more gorgeously drawn and tender — and benefits from better editing — than its predecessor. See it on a big screen, and you will wish that you could walk out of the theatre and wind up in Edinburgh.

Benefit’s Dr. Feelgood
Hard to say what this stuff does, besides making your skin look a little velvety-smooth and smelling a little citrusy and nice. Supposedly the Vitamin C in it also has something going for it, too. And the smoochers on the label are rather charming.

Pulse (iPhone 4.0)
Pros: lovely, easy to use interface makes it possible to read your RSS feeds (up to 20 in the free version) when you don’t have wireless connectivity. (That is: on the subway.) It also magically talks to Google Reader, so the things I’ve read in one are marked as such in the other. Cons: Feeds can be sluggish to update if you haven’t logged in for awhile, but they seem to have improved this in the last version.

Finally learning the name of that nice woman at work
She greets you by name in the hallway or ladies’ room, but after working at the same company for several years, it had seemed too late and bad form to flat-out ask. Now you can respond in kind. (It’s Cara.) Satisfying.

30 Seconds with Phone Guy
Another Merlin Mann project: short videos featuring that Assenstein sitting next to you at the airport or in a cafe. His phone is a wallet, for some reason.

Bye!

BFoB: You look great!

AOD: Ehh, I could stand to lose a few pounds. [Pats paunch.]

BFoB: Where’s the glasses?

AOD: Yeah, I had Lasik!

BFoB: Oh yeah, how’s that?

AOD: Amazing! Last year I got my ear fixed, so now I can hear. This year, I got my eyes fixed. Next year it’ll be my schlong!

BFoB: …

Annnnnd, scene.

And I’m a little surprised at how thrilling and swoonifying and altogether exciting this new circumstance actually is.

Because I did this once and it didn’t turn out so well and so spent many years a bit jaded and such. And it’s not as though I felt I needed a proposal to feel any more bonded or committed or happy in my relationship with Doug.

But for some reason his (very romantic) proposal has kind of thrown me all loop-de-loop and I can’t stop smiling, even in conference rooms at work (where there’s absolutely no reason to smile, ever), and I walk down the street with a lilt and thrill that wasn’t there last week. And the warmth and excitement from our family and friends just makes it that much more fantastic.

It’s going to be a good rest of my life.

Why was I so convinced that I wouldn’t enjoy it?

• My sci-fi detectors were on high alert given the improbable premise.
• I typically shy away from anything that could fit into the romance genre, however loosely.
• The cover image is of the legs-and-feet variety, and thus makes me want to hurl.

Imagine my surprise when I stopped trying like mad to grasp the complicated rules of the time travel gimmick and was forced to admit that I really cared about the characters. (And, having stopped scoffing and rolling my eyes at the temporal mechanics, it all started to make perfect sense.)

Chicago librarian Henry DeTamble is the title time lord who meets Clare, his future wife, when she is a young girl and his 40-year-old self pays her a visit. Possessed of a genetic malformation that causes him to become “unstuck” in time, he jumps backward (and occasionally forward) to various points in his linear life, usually when under physical or emotional stress. The adult Henry, while visiting himself as a child, teaches the himself the arts of lock-picking and wallet-snatching — necessary skills for when he must quickly find clothing and money during his unexpected travels.

The foreknowledge his condition affords him is a blessing and a curse. It makes for some palpable tension as Henry and Clare encounter one another at different points in their lives — the teenaged Clare falls hard for visiting middle-aged Henry, who knows that they will wind up together but doesn’t yet know the circumstances. And their first “linear” encounter during their 20s reverses roles, since he hasn’t met her yet and is (happily) blindsided by her forwardness.

Their relationship, however steadfast and passionate, isn’t without trials. It’s touch-and-go on their wedding day whether Henry will actually be present to walk down the aisle. Clare never knows when or for how long Henry will be time-traveling. His taste for mood-altering substances verges on the immoderate. And Henry’s condition makes conceiving a child a difficult if not traumatic and near deadly undertaking for the couple.

Despite occasionally verging on the melodramatic, the characters are well-drawn, with complicated family histories and close (sometimes too close) friendships. Their dialogue is witty but not unnatural, which balances the suspension of disbelief the reader needs to accept the supernatural elements.

I was also gratified that my wonderful fiancé enjoyed it, too. This is probably a book I’ll read again, and I’m curious about her second novel, Her Fearful Suspicions, as well as the upcoming The Chinchilla Girl in Exile.

The bigger themes of choice vs. fascism, the paradox of infinite choice, the cycles of pleasure/satisfaction and pain/craving, the whole Marat-Sade angle, Hal as Hamlet paralyzed by indecision, the glorious hilarity of the Eschaton section, the incredibly satisfying Gaudeamus Igitur (i.e., Mario’s ONANtiad section), the heart-stopping tragedy of Joelle’s self-immolation, the theme of being caged (by desire, by addiction, by deformity), how a police lock would work to help one stand relatively upright, the whole looking and mirrors and light and reflections and film and angles, how the act of sticking with it, especially at the beginning when everything is all so new and a little perplexing and makes you want to chuck it just perfectly mirrors AA’s Keep Coming Back and Trust Us It Works, the deeper knowledge I now have of Boston informing descriptions and settings (before, I kind of chuckled at the Storrow 500; now, I can visualize the neighborhoods where the lowlifes and privileged and in-betweens make their way).

Other confluences:

• Having seen the World of Warcraft documentary “Second Skin” (why can I never recall that title on my own?), I can’t help but connect WoW addiction with The Entertainment.
• Having gotten a secondhand TiVo and completely loving how freeing it is (from having to sit still for a prescribed period of time at a specific date and time as well as from having to view advertising) as well as how beguilingly enslaving (I think I’m watching a lot more TV now than before). And the connection to InterLace and TPs and such.
• And of course every mention of self-demappings of course reverberates and haunts.

I have had a tough time since David Foster Wallace killed himself. For months afterward, I’d glance at the fat faded-orange spine of IJ and kind of long for it, but feel too raw to even take it off the shelf. Matthew Baldwin’s Infinite Summer project seemed appealing but way too scary when it first kicked off, so now I’m interspersing sections of the novel with the amazing commentary and ideas from Infinite Summer, making the experience that much richer. I’m still deeply saddened that such an author is no longer here, but much of the fury about his suicide has dissipated from having re-immersed myself in his writing. As Mario Incandenza said when Madame Psychosis’ MIT-radio “60 Minutes +/-” radio show suddenly left the airwaves, “It’s weird to feel like you miss someone you’re not even sure you know.”

One example of an unfunded project that received the maximum safety score of “10” is the floating slabs and tunnel leak repair project between Alewife and Harvard stations on the Red Line.

This $80M project involves the complete removal and replacement of the existing system of floating concrete slabs beneath the Red Line tracks from Alewife to Harvard stations. “Floating” slabs rest atop a series of rubber disks that are designed to absorb the vibration of a train as it travels along the track.

Water leaking through the tunnel walls is creating several problems:

• The leaking water is deteriorating the slabs themselves, causing sinking and misalignment of some slabs.
• The water is corroding the fasteners that attach the track to the concrete.
• In some areas, the fasteners are no longer holding the track in place, causing track to move out of alignment and presenting the possibility of train derailment.
• In addition, the water is corroding the signal system along the track and compromising the cable and wire conduits.

The MBTA has been spiraling downward for the past several years, racking up astronomical debt and experiencing the massive fails in service and safety that go with it. I just hate to see a city that has the infrastructure already in place lose what might be its most vital mode of transportation for the majority of its citizens. I moved to Boston in large part because of its public transportation system, and it pains and frustrates me to watch as “signal delays” and “switching problems” and “disabled trains” become the rule rather than the exception.