I am not, you’ll be fascinated to learn, a brand loyalist when it comes to deodorant. I don’t have any unusual needs in that area, so I buy what’s on sale and doesn’t smell perfumey.

Just a few weeks back, I noticed that Degree was rather nicer than the others, in that it does not feel all pinchy going on. So that’s it, thought I, I am buying Degree from now on.

Wouldn’t you know, within minutes of my making this decision Degree went all gender-segregated. While I’m more sympathetic for the consternation this might cause my acquaintances who aren’t exactly straight down that M/F divide, even I as a clearly delineated woman have problems with this.

You know what Degree Men does? It protects men who takes risks. BAD ASS. If you are human-flying it up the side of a skyscraper and you lose your grip, Degree Men’s Action Fumes(TM) will suck you back to safety like a huge magnet. At some point in that story, I started making shit up, but it was a tiny bit later than one would hope.

At this point, I’m pretty stoked, as you can imagine. What will Degree Women protect me from? Maybe I can have another baby now without all that pesky hyperemesis and Restless Leg Syndrome and whatever that thing that made me itch until I wished I were dead was! Let’s take a look at Degree Women’s tagline – oh my!

Dare to Feel.

DARE. to FEEL.

Dare to feeeeeeeeeeeeeeel.

Yeah. Somewhat ironically, I’m not feelin’ it.

My simple, clear-cut consumer plan now contains a spanner in its works. Because it’s going to be embarrassing going to the drugstore and buying that. And yet – not pinchy.

So I did it the other day. I looked at the array of different Degree for Women varieties and yeah, they were just as sexist and eyeroll-inducing as you’d think. EXCEPT. There was one style that came in the girl-deodorant equivalent of a plain brown wrapper – pale-blue with the word “Women” on it in a discreet light gray. I bought it, naturally, but couldn’t help wondering if it hadn’t been the result of a meeting on how a lot of women were going to find this “Dare to Feel” thing embarrassing, offensive, or both – so let’s throw ‘em a bone. Is it worse if they KNOW they’re being condescending? I’m not sure.

The next day, I saw another deodorant in our bathroom from an angle I usually don’t, and learned this: “If you don’t know whether or not you have an iron, you are a Mitchum Man.”

You guys.

I’m a Mitchum Man.

You know what this means, don’t you?

Had I seen this two days earlier, I could have been protected while I took risks.

Sometimes life’s just not fair.

NINE.

I keep reading them over and thinking I sound like Grandpa Simpson. Which is not my intention.

I’ll be back soon, promise. In the meantime, who’s watching The Amazing Race? Looks like a good one this year. I’m fully rooting for Mike and Mel White, but there are a couple other teams I could easily get behind if tragic circumstance decreed that necessity.

And on American Idol, I’m behind Adam Lambert, who is not really my sort of thing musically but is so over-the-top good at his sort of thing that I have to admire it.

Let’s talk TV. Save me from old-codger rantiness. I’d do it for you.

Guess what time it was last week?

First mammogram time!

Frankly, I was annoyed more than anything; I’m in zero cancer risk groups, and I have a longstanding theory – which there’s quite a lot of evidence behind by now – that while I am enormously susceptible to diseases that make you WISH you were dead, I will never get one that stands a chance of actually killing me. This is not hubris but wistfulness, if you’ve read correctly.

So if I come back here and tell you the test was positive, you can feel free to laugh at me. I realize it will seem inappropriate, but do it anyway. I’ll have earned it.

I had heard that it was going to hurt, a lot. It probably did, actually, but not nearly as much as I thought. Or it WOULDN’T HAVE…

For the uninitiated, they basically smash your boobs flat between two flat plates, from several angles, and take a picture. While things were being “positioned” for the shot from the side, I noticed but did not comment on one of those plates poking into my collarbone.

Women who are one or more years younger than I: If you notice? Comment on. If you don’t, see, you end up with one of your bones being smashed between two big heavy things with a crapload of pressure behind them. This sucks.

But not QUITE as much as my Extremely Meek Childhood Self making an unwelcome reappearance and reacting as such: “Oh, that hurts. Well, it’ll only be another second or two; I don’t think the bone will break. I just won’t say anything.”

Oh, Extremely Meek Childhood Self. You suck SO HARD. Although I suppose it would have been an amusing conversation piece, to come out of a routine medical test in a cast. Ha ha ha.

The other thing I noticed, which is quite minor compared to the whole bone-crushing potential, is that it was the weirdest and most awkward use of hospital gowns ever. You put it on tied in the front (which in this particular model didn’t, you know, work) and then do all this elaborate removing and folding and tucking to expose the current patient. Then you cover that side up and do the whole routine over again.

OK.

Nobody has ever accused me of being an exhibitionist.

But honestly, if you’ve already got one bosom out in the open air, is it really more traumatic to have ‘em both on temporary display? My vote: No. Perhaps you could fill out a little card about whether you prefer increased exposure to uncomfortable contortion?

I hope we have all learned something today. I know I probably haven’t.

It was a strange day today. The first crisis came when the year-end wrap-up I’d been working on for two days turned out to have been autosaving a very, very early version (I am 99% sure that rather than being a WordPress problem, it involved my pathetic AT&T internet connection, which disconnects itself every 5 minutes or so). It was totally comprehensive and multimedia, too.

After that I got lost for over half an hour trying to get to the local Trader Joe’s, somehow badly strained my right shoulder getting out of the car (I am aware this makes no sense), had a borderline panic attack based on too many people + forgotten shopping list, and on the way home, almost mowed down a waiter in a crosswalk.

So once home, I thought I’ll bake some potatoes, that’s easy enough. And the handle fell off the oven door.

I believe, ladies and gentlemen, that all this mischief and borderline catastrophe was caused by a gremlin. A gremlin who came to bring us these glad tidings: “STOP FREAKING THINKING ABOUT 2008!”

That gremlin is correct. Even though my essay was about the good things the year brought, I kept finding myself drifting into angry rants about the OTHER stuff. Before 2008, I was not even capable of angry rants. It was only the second-worst year of my life, but the first worst was merely crushingly sad – no rage. I used to wish I was capable of getting pissed off, but now I’d like a refund on that, thanks.

So it’s time to forget that and talk about what’s coming.

I have one official New Year’s Resolution, which is one more than I usually have: Attempt to do 90% less this year, and do the remaining 10% really well. I know – it’s a good one, right? You can totally borrow it.

That said, here’s some stuff I’d LIKE to accomplish this year:

Actually post to this blog regularly now that it’s all fresh and sparkly.

Move back to LA proper (this is almost a done deal).

I would like to start a massive cult-of-personality movement around Senator Russ Feingold. I didn’t know you could do that with politicians who weren’t dictators, but now that that glass ceiling’s been busted: This guy’s brilliant, charming, funny, handsome AND has rock-solid progressive ideals that he actually – get this – stands by. Join me?

Get a smart phone of some kind. The time has come.

Find a new job as a proofreader. I did it for years, then I did other stuff for years, and you know what? I should’ve stuck with my first idea. I’m absurdly good at it and I find it weirdly satisfying. What more can you ask from a day job?

Build a long-planned website (this is what I was test driving Joomla for) that’s a hub for information on feeding people with dietary restrictions, targeted to people who only have to do it occasionally and don’t want to stock up on specialty ingredients or become experts. The goal is to show people it’s not that big a deal; out there on the internets I’ve heard people ranting up a storm because some asshole with a severe food allergy is coming over for lunch, ya know? The holdup is that I can’t come up with a good name. My latest idea was Feeding the Masses but one hates to get too Biblical.

Oh, right: Do something about my health.

Also, I want to tell you what was cool in 2008 – shh! Really fast!

• Pushing Daisies
• Old 97′s
• Murry Hammond
• Passing Strange
• Duke Special
• Hawksley Workman
• The Magnetic Fields
• Russell Brand (video link)
• Of Montreal
• The Solipsistics
• The Greg Proops Chat Show
• Andy Prieboy

The above people and projects should, by the way, not be associated in any way with the horror that was 2008. They existed on a plane above it.

So what are you planning to be up to this year?

I’ve been cleaning out old drafts that were brought over from the MT blog; most of them were crap like “Does it show up when I do this?”

One, though, had me curious. It was entitled “The Zoo: Things I Have Learned” and began:

The first attempt to go to the zoo was on Easter Sunday. The theory was that it was a major holiday, and one that people spend with their families eating ham and disturbing “salads,” so it would be sparsely attended at best.

This was when I learned that despite having moved to California nearly 20 years ago, I still occasionally make plans based on assumptions based on my upbringing as a white chick from the Northeast. Because as it turns out, the zoo was jammed to can’t-get-near-it proportions; clearly, the hottest spot in town, followed closely by the many nearby offshoots of Griffith Park, which were packed with people who’d brought their upsetting springtime cuisine out for picnics. It looked like it’d be a lot more fun that way, actually. Semipredictable weather is a beautiful thing.

Then there was a little nubbin about how the kid who never napped DID nap, which was clearly leading to a whole big story, but didn’t.

So it’s rattling around the back of my brain now. What did I learn from not being able to go to the zoo? Was it something that would change the way I live my life? If so: Have I internalized it, or merely forgotten it?

I’ll probably never know. The lesson here: Finish your blog posts, kiddies.

Also, I’m rather happy with the phrase “upsetting springtime cuisine.”

Yesterday, my husband finished rereading Donald E. Westlake’s “What’s The Worst That Could Happen?” Saturday, I’d picked up a reissue of Westlake’s long-out-of-print “Somebody Owes Me Money,” which I started reading today.

So naturally, there’s been a lot of Westlake-related conversation around the house.

I wondered, for instance, why he doesn’t seem to be a household name. In the unfortunately segregated-in-bookstores crime-fiction genre, he’s massive, but I personally haven’t met anyone who wasn’t pretty heavily into that genre who knew who he was. Which is unfortunate, because he’s one of the best writers I’ve ever read. Unbelievably funny (you know all those internet acronyms, like Rolling On The Floor Laughing My Ass Off With Tears Rolling Down My Cheeks and Sudden Difficulty Breathing? Many of Westlake’s novels bring those to life), and with a gift for plotting that often makes whoever I read next seem as if they’re working in crayon.

And I don’t know if I said this out loud or merely thought it, but my brain definitely formed the thought, “I’m going to be incredibly bummed out when he dies.”

And my next Twitter check informed me that, in fact, he had.

Sigh.

So instead of JUST being incredibly bummed out, I thought I’d put some energy into encouraging you, if you haven’t already, to read his books. He’s written so many that it’s hard to come up with a starting place; my personal favorites, Drowned Hopes and Dancing Aztecs, are both out of print. So I’m just gonna go with: Buy the first title from the Dortmunder series you can find.

Really. You’ll thank me. I love being thanked.

RIP, Donald E. Westlake, 1933-2008. You’ll be missed, sir.