It's been ten minutes. Am I rich yet?

I just created an investment portfolio all by myself and traded my very own stocks. I have a 401K and company stock and done CDs and all that jazz, but usually I sign up for the account, then leave the “Dollars! Be fruitful and multiply!” part to the nice man behind the Big Metaphorical Curtain. They take some dough out of my check. I get something in the mail that I may glance at before filing away, hoping that it’s all steadily growing without much of my involvement whatsoever. And when I retire—surprise!—I’ll have a lot of money all managed by Someone Who Knows What He’s Doing. Which is not me.

I am a tourist in finance land no more. I'm done with these beliefs: "I'm not a math or finance person. I don't think I could be good at it. It isn't my personality. I don't understand it. I better to ignore it and entirely trust someone else with it." crap. No more of those thoughts. I'm a beginner, yes. I read a book, and I understood most of it. I did some research on the Web. I looked up words in the dictionary. I found some Web sites. It’s really overwhelming. But: I created a new account. I have access to free advisors, which I intend to use. And with that, I am learning how to manage this myself. It is, after all, mine, and money, if cared for, can do good things.

There’s a handy thing online that asks you a bunch of questions then makes recommendations to you. So I did that and got advice. Then, I researched what’s making money out there right now, got the code for a few Big Hitters and traded some of what I had for something else. I’m starting out slowly—with a moderate amount until I’m more comfortable with it all. For now, I feel empowered and good and rather grown-up.

Clearly I'm missing something here.

I just spent two hours in a meeting about a printer. It involved two guys in suits who are responsible for the expensive hunk of uselessness that occasionally spits out the wrong number of copies out of order, neither collated, stapled or three-hole-punched. The Sales Dude said our problems are Microsoft and we should whine to Bill Gates. I pointed out that Microsoft doesn’t make Acrobat, and our problem is printing PDFs. He said, okay, then, I guess it’s the printer.

When Sales Dudes left we ate and talked about how ridiculous our office is: someone paid $200 a YARD so the fabric in our cubicles could have a embroidered spines on them, which, no matter how much I squint or how much acid a person could drop, does not resemble a spine. Further, why? Why would you want fabric embroidered with a spine? If you’re going to spend $12,000 on each cubicle (no exaggeration), shouldn't they be made of solid gold and come with their own well-oiled grape-feeding pool boy?

Earlier today, my cube-farm-neighbor, I'll call him Jackass, was frustrated with a box he was trying to open. He grabbed the nearest club-shaped object, which happened to be a fake bone-model of a human leg, and hit the box repeatedly with it, rather like a monkey with a stick trying to get inside of plastic tube containing a ripe banana. Only it was a 32 year-old man wielding a femur.

Back at my desk, I started going through the draft of a booklet I’m working on. I had given it to a Brand Manager with questions. For example, I said, “We have two conflicting sources of info for Product X. Please tell me which source is correct—source A or source B.” His response? “Yes.”

Jam and a headless chicken

It snowed a foot last night. This morning we made eggs and bacon and coffee and toast and I opened one of the jars of jam my aunt gave me for Christmas. It’s made of blackberries from the family farm in rural Indiana. My relatives, they don’t really mess around when it comes to farming.

My cousin trains and drives his own oxen. They make their own tools and build houses and grow most of their own food. When I was in high school, when all the other hoodlums got to road trip to Daytona beach to drink Miller Light until they barfed out a second story window, I was at my aunt and uncle’s farm castrating goats and gutting bluegill. I liked it. It was spring and the grass was getting tall and lots of fish biting and flipping all rainbowy and sticky and lots of little sheep and goats and kittens being born.

This last Christmas, my aunt and uncle and cousins made a package covered in a collage of roses and filled it with jams and green beans and pickled stuff and roasted garlic. I’ve been eating them slowly so they last longer. My older sister also got a beautifully decorated package from them. She has dietary restrictions, so when she saw me open my gift, she assumed she got a similar thing and put the package under the tree.

It turns out that my aunt knew about Emmy’s dietary restrictions, so instead of putting in jams and pickled things, she gave Em a butchered chicken. But no one knew there was a dead farm chicken in the package. We thought it was jelly. Auntie thought we'd open them all right away, but that was not the case, and she had gone home. The package could’ve stayed under the Christmas tree for days. Luckily, we figured out what it was before the cat did, and the headless Christmas chicken was still mostly frozen.

The jam was good. I’m glad I got jam. More than that, I'm glad I'm realated to my family. They live very sustainably, and are gentle to the Earth.

And it only takes TEN to learn brain surgery.

I was watching an episode of Gilmore Girls a couple weeks ago. They talk really, really fast on that show. Anyway, and Paris and Rory had a conversation something like this:

Paris: Are you getting all the stuff done on your list before graduation? Have you registered for the GRE and sent your application for law school and did you submit your poem to the Iowa Review’s poetry contest?

Rory: I don’t want to go to law school, and I don’t like to write poetry, get off my back.

Paris: Please, it’s just a poem. It’ll take TWENTY minutes. Just whip something out and get it done.

First of all, screw you, you... you... imaginary TV land character. Second of all, poor readers for poetry contests have to sift out about 3,000 poems written in twenty minutes by people like this. I'm not whining about how hard it is--lots of things worth doing are hard--I'm whining about people who blow off something I value that is misunderstood. In real life, not just TV land.

Any writer who can write something in twenty minutes good enough to win a respectable contest is a freak of nature. A freak of nature I envy, but still—writing isn’t finger painting, friends.

A special valentine: To the month of March

Dear March,
You are sucky and I don't like you.
I'd like to fall asleep and wake up in April.
-Cavu

I don’t know what the guy who dropped the bomb on Hiroshima was thinking...

*

...but I can imagine that a few important thoughts crossed his mind. And I bet one of them was along the lines of “How the fuck did I get myself into this situation?” and another was something like, “How is it that pressing this button (or trigger or whatever) can kill so many people?” And a third may have been, “Okay: I can press the button and kill a zillion innocent people, and maybe end the war. Or I can not press the button and not kill a zillion people, and definitely not end the war, which could end up killing three zillion people.”

I don't know if what happened next was psychological moral disengagement or justification or fear or confidence or what. Obviously, he pressed the button and had to live with himself, never knowing what would’ve happened if he didn’t. Around a year ago, I was in a much, much milder version of a similarly-structured crossroads—being in the perilous place where I somehow arranged to have power over the direction of a few lives, namely my own, and had to make some tough decisions without the benefit of a crystal ball. Let me tell you—it sucked. I didn’t want to have any control over anything, thank you, especially something that could seriously fuck some stuff up and potentially harm people.

It’s hard not to think about how it turned out now that I’m a year down the path of the fork-in-the-road I decided upon. I don’t have any clue how things would’ve turned out otherwise, but I have to say: It feels like this was a wise decision. Likely, in my situation, it would’ve somehow been manageable the other way as well, but it had more potential to make life much worse. I guess what I’m saying is that there was no winning choice—both of them came with a truckload of pain, just different trucks. In the end, I namely went by intuition. Intuition can be a scary thing to trust, but I did trust it. When I remember it, and its consequential sleepless nights and hellish nastiness, I feel quite sad. When I remember how amazing all my friends were, and the external sources of support that seemed to come from nowhere and lift me up, that feels comforting and hopeful. It’s better now, much better.

*The bow-tie nebula is composed of material cast off by a dying sun-like star as it enters a new phase of evolution.

Gobble.

(For Ellen, who said, "Every time I see you in class now all I can think is 'Wild turkeys! Wild turkeys!", and for DK who has now officially heard it all.)

Wild Turkeys

I wanted Edgecumb,
Straight to Saint Paul.
But it’s 494, not 65,
I recognized an exit at least
the road pointed north, a start.
No. No. Flustered. Fuck. Fucking
Where’s my phone
I’m late I’m late, oh wait
Turn left—maybe this—
I’m so pissed I’m going
To be so late, going sixty,
Woah, woah, dirt turns to gravel
Bumpy slow down, don’t slide,
A field? What the hell?

Chaos:

Squawking squawking, feathers,
Talons on glass, smack, screech,
They slide up the windshield,
It’s a fucking herd, a gaggle, a pod, a school
I snap to a stop, hands on the wheel and see
Wild turkeys, a sea,
In the middle of the road
On top of my hood on my roof,
My God. Okay.

I get out.
Yes, turkeys. Hand to forehead.
I am lost. I am late.
I am in the middle of some field.
I am surrounded by wild turkeys
Who are totally pissed off.
I scan the crowd for their wounded,
They stop warbling, stunned.
I feel like I have interrupted
Someone’s dinner party, driven
Into their dining room on accident.
Like I’ve just landed on Mars
And the locals, unsure what to say,
Just blink their marble eyeballs.
I haven’t killed anyone.
I move one aside with my shoe
To get back in the car.
Before I shut the door I say,
Um, pardon me. I guess. Goodbye.
And I’m off, back to the city.
Carefully, back to my own.

Nuqjatlh?*

This morning I brought a bunch of yummy leftover Clementines into work. I’d taken them to class last night for snacks. (There were no leftover potato chips. Funny how that works.) I put one on my boss’s desk and my neighbor Sue’s. My boss, QB, arrived at 9:15. “What is THAT.” Uh, a Clementine. “I won’t eat it.” QB said, and she gave it to Sue.

“I thought you like orange food.” I said. Every morning for breakfast QB has cheese puffs and Coke. She used to get the big thing of Cheetoes, but she wanted to be healthier, so she now has the little individual-sized 100 calorie packs. Which she eats, like, ten of (packs, I mean), and drinks about ten Cokes a day. I don’t mean to imply I have anything against Cheetoes and Coke. I love them, actually. I consider them PMS food. Not breakfast. But that is where we are different, QB and I. I like fruit. She snacks as though she was a glass-eater in the circus curiosities tent in a past life. Lucky for us, my company honors personality differences, reveres them, in fact.

This morning there was an e-mail in my in-box from HR saying that they’re overdue (by a year) in giving me a team-building exercise to determine my personality type. First there is the exam that goes something like this:

Rate one of the following as “Most Like” and one as “Least Like” and the rate the rest somewhere in between Most and Least Like:

1. Patient and detail oriented
2. Aggressive and organized
3. Quiet, contemplative and rarely has an opinion
4. Prefers to lead, opinionated
5. Contemplative and addicted to caffeine
6. Secretly envies those who speak Klingon*
7. Would install a hammock in her cube if she thought she could get away with it
8. Has given up on fulfilling, meaningful employment
9. Voted for Ross Perot
10. Spends staff meetings fanaticizing about slow dancing to “I can’t fight this feeling anymore” with the hot guy in Finance

They’re all some obscure combination of traits that don't go together, or aren't relevant, or are broad generalizations. Maybe I’m contemplative and like to be a leader but I’m NOT always extroverted and I like organization in some things, but I’m also creative and sometimes quiet but always have an opinion? What then?

Repeat this question about 194573249 times, slightly re-wording and re-arranging the same exact questions in different combinations, all of which oversimplify and do not describe anyone. The results are compiled by some online wizard robot thing, enabling our sweet and perky but scandalously overworked HR Gal to have a big Personality Meeting with us, where she give employees a bunch of Legos (no shit) with words printed on them like, “Be bright, be brief, be gone!” and “Make me feel involved.” Employees are to build the Legos up in the way that most describes us (at the top) to the least (at the bottom) and place them in our cube so our co-workers can get a feel for our personalities, and, I presume, change how they interact with us.

I know how my cube-mates personalities are. When I hear QB scream “What the HELL are you bothering me about NOW? Stop asking me questions you dumbshit!” (which happens 80394933 times a day), I know that perhaps she’s “Be bright, be brief, be gone” kind of girl. When I put my headphones on to block her out, we can all see that my personality type prefers to tune out obnoxiousness (she’s never talking to moi like that) and is quietly seething because my company is investing money in LEGOS instead of sound proof walls.

Okay, fine. I admit here that I actually like my job, and even my cube. It’s as homey as a cube will get—I have up three paintings I made, photographs of friends, postcards, a lovely red lamp (lighting is everything) and a few plants. The actual work—I like the writing/design part. I do not like the documentation-for-the-government part. But that’s another post. Other than QB’s Army Sergeant voice, fueled hourly by 12 ouches of aspartame, phosphoric acid, phenalanine and a cubic buttload of sugar, which I totally ignore, I’m rarely bugged. I get to come in, grab my iPod, do my thing, and leave. Eh, it’s an office. Only with Legos.

Love is...

Having someone to clutch while careening down a slippery hill at a million miles an hour.

Goodnight Moon

This is Io, one of my favorite moons, and I'll tell you why. Io was discovered by Galileo, a very brave man, indeed. Her name comes from a bright and resourceful maiden goddess loved by Zeus (Jupiter) and her lovely four lovely colors come from a sulfur/silicone, a slippery purpled marble.

There’s a volcano that’s been erupting for all of the 18 years humans have been watching it. When you look at the whole moon, the eruptions look little, yes, see that puff of smoke? Darlings, it is not so little. The eruptions stretch about 150 miles out. Not one to let its mother planet push it around, the volcanic blasts create half the force Io would need to motor herself right out of Jupiter’s orbit and into the spacey void.

Io has a solid steely core and a sloshing lava surface. She's is constantly regenerating herself, which heals impact wounds. She doesn’t let Jupiter push her around, and Io is pretty. What more could you ask of a moon?

I do not.

What American accent do you have? Your Result: The South   That's a Southern accent you've got there. You may love it, you may hate it, you may swear you don't have it, but whatever the case, we can hear it.
The Inland North
The Midland
The Northeast
Philadelphia
The West
North Central
Boston
What American accent do you have? Quiz Created on GoToQuiz

weekend

Vroooooooom, baby.

So, my sweetheart announced that he’s going to acquire and start riding a Harley. I think he may have been expecting a reaction to this announcement wherein I dissuade him with generalizations about Harley Dudes and my lack of desire to date one, or mothered him regarding safety issues. But no. If that’s what he wants, he can go for it. One may not guess this upon meeting me, but I have a history with biker dudes, and I rather like fast, fast motorcycles.

I think it may have started when my parents took me to Deadwood for the Harley convention when I was in middle school. See, my family—two parents, 3 daughters aged 11-15—were piled in our maroon minivan headed for Yellowstone, and somewhere near Kadoka, South Dakota, the other automobiles on the road thinned out. Before long, we were the only four-wheeled trickster on the roads. As we neared Sturgis, we realized that we were the ONLY car surrounded by Harleys. A million of them. A million zillion. We were, coincidentally, headed for the Harley Convention. Most parents would’ve taken a detour to avoid the whole thing. My parents started calling ahead to find a campsite.

Parking lots sparkled as far as the eye could see, a sea of shining chrome. And let’s just say that the biker stereotype didn’t arise from nowhere. Generally, head-to-toe leather, R-rated slogans and inappropriately short skirts, tattoos. Some weren't all that concerned with political correctness, or using one’s ‘inside voice,’ or monitoring one’s cigarette and whiskey consumption or use of foul language.

My father is a Midwestern small-town hardware store owner. He wears plaid flannel shirts and shaves daily and likes to read books about the nesting habits of sea turtles. My mother, a high school teacher. She likes art and sewing and sips tea on the front porch. My family stuck out in the crowd, that’s all I’m saying.

Harley folks are kind. The whole vibe was quite social. When we walked into a place, the people were friendly and talkative. A few times, the gruffer folks noticeably straightened up into best-behavior mode around us children. The ladies called me honey and the men talked to my father about engine repair and joked us daughters in a protective-big-brother kind of way. We got lots of attention.

Years later, I dated a race car driver who had a motorcycle. Not a Harley, but something really fast that looked a bit like a bumble bee. Next, Nate the Fireman had an old retro bike with the headlight that looks like a big eyeball. The guy after that had a bike similar to Nate’s, but he took apart the engine and put it back together, and it broke.

That brings us to my current sweetheart, who is a nurse and a professor and is inheriting his late father’s Harley and is arranging to get a motorcycle license. He sounded braced for a "Hell-no-what-are-you-crazy" out of me. Rather, I suggested that we pack up our camping gear this summer and head to the Harley convention. Then S.A. said yeah, he’d go buy some leather chaps, to walk around in at the convention sans pants. That, however, is where I draw the line. Bikers are friendly, but no one makes friends in assless chaps.

To Poets Who Overuse the Word "Thick": You can keep your worn out words

And Keep your thick crusts of bread, your thick hair
the thick rain pinging your thick tin roof. Keep
Your cliché garden pansies.
Steaming coffee. Cigarette flickin’ attitude.
I don’t want your birds or beaches,
your broken hearts, like violin strings,
like, like, like another tired metaphor, or dusk—
Sunset’s beauty is over, friend, so are your rain clouds
with their heavy hearts, your strangling pinks and peaches.

Give me the jagged edged crusts from the serrated knife,
I want the rain that flattens your hair to your throat I want
a jellied fish too long on shore, sand that grates the thermos lid.
Fingers search through soil, I want your shovel-hits-granite crack—
I want the sound of picked strings vibrating wood
that someone once steamed
into the shape of a woman.
Give me your fingers on that hip.
Give me memory, real memory, not a sunset, but the sound of crickets
as the mighty sun sinks behind your tired back.

Dear Blog,

Why, oh why can't I see you? Have you gone away? On strike? Do we need to talk?
Come back now please.
Thank you,
Cavu

American Mussorgsky

My writer friend Lola seems to always seems to have a big enough bag with her at all times for taking notes on actual full-sized notebooks which she seems to categorize by topic. She’s a serious note-taker, that Lola, and doesn’t appear to mess around with little notebooks. Jessi, however, keeps little notebooks by the toilet in order to capture thoughts that may arise from the collective unconscious upon first waking for a few moments on the Throne. Writers, they have systems for such things.

As much as I’d like to be so systematic, I’m a helpless random-scrap-of-paper person. I’ve tried keeping notebooks, but I forever leave them on the coffee table or lose them—I have about a half-dozen such notebooks lying around at any given time, never where I need them when I need them. When I hear something I want or need to write down for later use, I use whatever is around at the time, then expect to find it later and use it as a prompt to write something no-doubt brilliant. This means I have stuff scribbled on the backs of matchbooks or coasters or receipts or sometimes important things I actually need.

Once in a dark theatre I wrote down a few dirty references David Sedaris made, you know, so I could look them up later to see what they mean. It turns out the piece of paper I'd dug out of my purse to write on was a medical training exam I had to hand in for work that will forever go on my permanent employee record. That’s the thing—these moments often come at the inconvenient times. I fully admit that I do idiotic, careless things while driving, I’m not so bad with cell phone dialing or iPod messing or lip-glossing while careening down the highway. What’s probably going to kill me is writing while driving.

The reason all this comes up is the fact that a while ago I wrote down something I really wanted to find last night and I couldn't find it later to save my life. The four Buddhist truths of consciousness (or whatever—I lost it, after all), or maybe it was the four Tibetan words for the stages of the cosmological cycle? Something like that. Anyway, I wrote it on the back of a bank receipt while driving down Hiawatha Street during rush hour, and the search for it soon became more about the determination to find it than what it actually said.

At home, I dumped out my paper recycling bag and sifted around for it. I didn’t find it, but I did find a random scrap where I wrote down something from the Composer’s Datebook (MPR) that says, “Roy Harris had been described to him as an ‘American Mussorgsky,’ which probably intrigued the Russian-born conductor, and when Koussevitzky learned that Harris had been born in a log cabin in Lincoln County, Oklahoma, on Abraham Lincoln's birthday no less - well, perhaps he hoped the 41-year old Harris might produce music equally all-American in origin.” To which I say, What the hell? American Mussorgsky? Why, I ask you, was this so intriguing that I had to scribble it down to save it for later?

Sometimes it makes sense. In my quest last night, I came across several cool articles I’d saved, some definitions to interesting words, a few notes from Wikipedia and this lovely poem by Kim Garcia:

Eager
Above the snow, a single maple holding forth
its dying flame. Among the feats of Nature:
the wild
greening from dry bulb, sour alchemy of rot, a rusty
handprint of lichen;
the eager
space-seeking species springing up after fire,
as though they took no lesson from destruction
but to begin again, twice as joyful.

That, my friends, is beautiful. That is a writing prompt.

So, this morning as soon as I got in my car, I pretzeled my arms under and around every seat looked through cubbies and cup holders and I found it crumpled up under the driver’s seat. I at least usually stuff them in my purse, but there you go. It says:

The big crunch
World System Evolution
Emptiness
Formation
Abiding
Destruction
Eras of…
Cycle/Formation, Endures,
Destroyed, Void
[subsist, begin again].

In the end, I'm happy with my system. I don't want to force myself to keep things neat and filed away--it's not me. And don't even talk to me about getting an electronic note-taking palm pilot or any of that rediculousness. My system is creative and interesting. I find what I need when I need it. Perhaps I'm whatever an “American Mussorgsky,” is, which may be why I saved that Composer’s Datebook scrap of paper after all.

I hit my point of return.

After finals, I’m always so fried from looking at my work and trying to be creative on a deadline and to revise things that have been through so many drafts that I can’t. Look. At. It. Any. More. I want to read what I want, watch mindless TV, and decompress.

I started by trying to read books on the MLA’s top 100. I read The Great Gatsby and Lolita, both of which have a main female character hit by a car at a very convenient moment for other characters. Then I switched to science audio books stuff, which I love, but it's difficult to concentrate on string theory while I’m trying to figure out Photoshop at work. So I went to my colleague’s desk to borrow a light and brainless audiobook (not that she's brainless--she's smart and lovely), and learned, with no surprise at all, that the guy who penned this got on the NY Times Best Seller List*:

"It was in the darkest hours of the night that he most often found himself remembering his night with Lexy in the cemetery, the night he’d seen the ghostly lights he’d come down from NY to investigate. It was then that he realized for the first time how much Lexy meant to him. As they had waited in the blackness of the cemetery, Lexy told him a story about herself. She’d been orphaned as a young child… she had terrible, recurring nightmares… Lexy instantly recognized the lights in the cemetery as the ghosts of her parents. When she told him this, he wanted to hold her in his arms."

Eventually, the switch flipped. I want to write again. No, I need to write. I have ideas. I need to do my art. I want to look at old projects and shine them up to send out. I’ve been scribbling down ideas, I started reading a book on the synthesis of scientific theory and spirituality by the Dalai Lama, and I found a beautiful photo of Tempel 1 for my project. I got a documentary on string theory to watch before I attempt Bryan Greene’s book again. I have a stack of articles on the marriage of poetry and cosmology, and my little brown book that I write poems in every day is almost full. And I want to write to Deborah and have her send me my weekly prompts. It is good to be home.

*A list I find pathetically useless, and need no part of.

How I Spent My Winter Vacation

Lifts you up, sets you down.

There is something about waves. My firefighter friend said neurologically, ocean waves and fire produce the same chemical reaction in the brain that feels soothing and calming. He’s had experiences where a bunch of firefighters race to the scene of a burning field then stand there for a moment, mesmerized by the waves of fire before they spring back into action, much to the alarm of the poor farmer who is losing his crop. The calming of a camp fire and the calm of water waves are more closely related than one might think. No surprise, considering that even the tiniest atom is full of waves, that sound and light and energy travel in waves, and we’re surrounded by and comprised of waves all around us. It all really is a giant symphony. I can’t say I’m entirely surprised by this news, though I haven’t researched it myself.

Mexico was lovely. It is the first time since Australia I’ve relaxed in crystal clear waves. Being neck-high in warm sea water, and having a big curvy wave coming with all the power and beauty of the Ocean, and consciously choosing to relax every muscle and let it lift me off my feet and set me to rest a little closer to shore—this is heaven to me. The trip, in general, brought back many memories of Australia, and cultivating a friendship with the ocean in this way, and my dear friend Dan teaching me how to approach the ocean. On this trip in Mexico, S.A. and I played on the beach and perched on the sand and swam, rested, swam, rested, repeat, repeat, repeat. And I would ask him to float me up—put one hand on my lower back and one under my head, and I’d lie on my back and be lifted and lowered, lifted and lowered, and every time I tensed up I’d take a breath and try to relax again. This is harder than you think—trusting it and making a deliberate effort to literally go with the flow. But it feels really good.

I’ll have to remember this when shit hits the fan at work today. There are rumors, people leaving, things getting shifted around and re-organized. There’s some crap going down—that likely wont effect me very much, but will have everyone else in a tizzy—and secrets and all that stuff that surrounds corporate nonsense. You can tell the shitstorm’s coming because first they start buttering everyone up. Our department head just came over and handed me (and a bunch of other people) a check for $50 for no other reason than doing a good job. Highly suspicious. And next they’ll offer us something good—like pizza or ice cream or something—to lure us into the conference room. Then, when we’re good and trapped in there: the news. And I'm gonna glide right through it.

Top Ten Signs You're At A Lame New Year's Eve Party

10. To give it a Times Square feel, everyone is groped, fondled and pick-pocketed

9. "Party hats" look suspiciously like stolen traffic cones

8. "Ball drop" at midnight consists of a trick your Uncle Earl does when he's loaded

7. "Champagne" really apple juice mixed with Alka Seltzer

6. You notice a "Happy 1999" tag on the package of shrimp you've been eating all night

5. The host kicks everyone out at 11:58 so he can go to bed

4. The only guests are you and Richard Simmons, and guess who wants a New Year's Eve kiss?

3. The Amish can do many things well, but throwing parties ain't one of them

2. It's just you and a dozen Mullahs in a cave

1. It's held in March