UPDATE: Some brainiac at MT thinks it's a good idea to make you approve each comment? Really? This is what ya'll call advancement in software?

If someone can give me a quick fix for problem #1 of 5,0000 let me know. All comments should flow with no filter. JEEZ MUTHAEFFING PLEEZE.

Other things I like: working (and existing) databases, Noro with no knots, writing dialogue, talking to Corey, Meyer lemons, the new season of American Idol, Nailtique.

I would ask you what's on your list today but of course comments are still off during the software upgrade. So save up your list for next week! Or of course you can hit me on the tweetermachine in your pajamas, rain or shine.

While prepping my server for the upgrade this morning, guess what happened! I sort of deleted the entire database. Yes, that's right, I pressed a button and *poof* like magic all eight years of writing and cat pictures and navel-gazing and comma splices disappeared. Gone. Finished.

Luckily I have a remarkable server company (pair.com, if you need the best hosting on the planet) and John at the help desk was able to restore my database from a backup and he didn't even laugh at me (much) when I offered to come to his house in Pennsylvania and show him my thanks in person. By cleaning his house of course! Duh.

It sounds all funny and whoopsy and easypeasy now but readers, what I experienced this morning was a full thermonuclear meltdown. When I realized my error -- just after ruining years of work but just before finding solace in the soothing dulcet tones of Help Desk John -- I experienced a mix of physical and psychological insanity that I have only felt once before in my life.

When I was thirteen my mom left my adorable, perfect, blonde baby brother Eric in my care at the Acadiana Mall in Lafayette, Louisiana for one hour. It was hard being a mom to two awful teenagers and one crying (but adorable) baby, so I do not blame her for trusting her youngest and most adorable child to a permed, bracefaced kid with a deep obsession for Duran Duran keyboardist Nick Rhodes. While I was using my allowance to buy a pair of acid-washed denim jeans with zippers at the ankles, my little brother vanished in the middle of Express. He was only hiding under a rounder of long, flammable rayon dresses but those few minutes when he was missing and not answering my frantic calls were the worst moments of my life. My adorable brother was missing, and probably being sold on the black market, and I was SO GROUNDED and would never be able to live with myself or wear my cute new jeans.

Then of course we found him and I made him promise to never tell what happened. As soon as our mom picked us up in the food court he told her exactly what happened and I was SO GROUNDED. But it didn't matter, really, because I had my little brother safe and sound and I had my acid washed jeans with the tiny ankle zippers and all was well in the universe and one day Nick Rhodes would come to Bayou Nowhere, Louisiana and marry me.

My point here is that you should never push the delete button without first backing up the database. And even then, go shopping instead of deleting. Listen to some old Duran Duran songs. Call your mother. Do whatever it takes to keep from nuking your life's work. There is more to life than a tidy file structure, OK?

Somewhere along the line my Tivo developed a brain of its own and grew wise and now outranks me in IQ. Proof? A few weeks ago it spontaneously decided on its own to stop recording The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. While I still plod along in my human toil, looking forward to my trashy hour of Kyle and Kim and Vanderliciousness, my Tivo grew a brain and decided to stop watching the show. Out of contempt for me, perhaps, the Tivo still has the show on its season pass list. Yet nary an episode has been recorded in two months. I have had to catch up on my trash the old-fashioned way, through copious Bravo reruns.

The indignity!

In other machine brain news...

The server will be undergoing an upgrade in the coming month, so there will be changes here. I am telling you this now because out of a deep respect for your fear and loathing of change (as well as a healthy serving of tech avoidance on my part) I have averted major upgrades for some time, but that time has ended and I know we all need fair warning that change is on the horizon. This is your warning.

There might have been misplaced words in that paragraph.

Finally...
Does anyone have a good recipe for carne asada marinade?

Oh Magique! Are you a stripper? A sparkling body spray? A purveyor of magic tricks? A master of disguise? So many questions! So little time at the red light.

The hip hop class consisted of all good dancers and me. It was highlarious. Surprisingly it was one of the most intense aerobic experiences I have had in a long time, largely because I was trying to keep up with the class while also reigning in control of my flailing limbs which refused to move to the music. Plus I learned to Dougie*. (When I got home my phone was ringing, March of 2011 called and they want their moves back.)

I loved the class. Also, I believe the class loved me. Every class enjoys having one person who is so bad it makes them look like Beyonce. I know it. You know it. And now I am bringing that joy to so many new people.

This time last year I would have cut off my left ear all crazy painter style before venturing out alone on a school night to some hip hop bootyshaking class in the valley. So, yeah, I haven't exactly reached the pinnacle of enlightenment yet but I can now Dougie. Progress, people.

- - -

Seen on the boulevard:

Pink hummer! Palm trees! Swimming pools and movie stars!

- - -

* and *
Teach yourself how to Dougie, or watch the Glee version.

I made a few small goals for 2012, assuming the planet stays intact. I love that NASA felt the need to issue a press release stating that the world will not actually end in 2012, it was comforting to those of us who enjoy a good press release with a glass of merlot. Those crazy Mayan onions and calendars! Predicting nothing but onion rings and apocalypse.

Since many people use the new year as a time to berate themselves for the onion rings of months past and start a new exercise regime, I thought this email from reader Kathryn was timely:

How do you separate the idea of exercise for weight loss from the idea of exercise just for the sake of it? Who exercises just for the sake of it?

You can almost hear the unspoken, "... you crazy weirdo!" at the end of the note. I can appreciate the strangeness of this idea, it's like getting a Brazilian bikini wax without getting any lovin' the next weekend. Who does that wacky nonsense?

Well, some folks.

Try to think back to a time before exercise was a mandatory condition for fitting into an arbitrary pair of jeans. What was it like to be a kid and want to go ride bikes? Or roller skate? Remember in the summer when all you wanted to do was stay in the pool just five more minutes? Please, mom? Just five more minutes!

When I was a teenager something fizzled and went wrong with the messages because exercise became about looks and sizes and weight. Untangling that took some time but was well worth it. (When I say it took some time, I mean "years.") I'm not sure the best way to untangle it for yourself. You may have to experiment with different activities and new motivations. What I can tell you for sure is that there are psychological benefits from exercise that you simply can't get from a diet. Bodies were meant to be moved around. I happened to find a simple, cheap thing I enjoy -- walking -- but it can be anything as long as it makes you feel good. Gardening is exercise. Cleaning house is an excellent workout (there's a little shout-out to my OCD homies! woot woot!) Yoga, swimming, softball, playing with the dog in the backyard, chasing a kid, these are all activities that can be as weight-neutral as nail polish.

Over the weekend I was walking in the Hollywood Hills and as I was midway up a particularly challenging slope, I heard the sound of bicycles wheezing up the hill.

"You can do it, Jonah!" said the dad. "Keep pedaling, buddy!"

It was a dad and two pre-teen-ish kids, a boy and a girl. The dad kept saying encouraging things to both kids to get them up the hill, and as they passed me I heard him say something that gave me a little stab.

"OK, Justine, we're almost to the top, make it this far and you've earned that ice cream!"

I cringed. I thought about how careless it was as a remark, certainly not intended to give a kid body issues for the next 30 years. But all the same it was the subtle beginning of associating a bike ride with work, earning, payoff. And associating food with work, burn, sweat it off. Can't a kid just go for a bike ride anymore? Do we really have to earn our ice cream? What the heck happened to us, people?

It used to be fun just to get on the bike and pedal hard up a hill. Remember? Before the Mayans had us on our last onion ring?

1) Mysteriously growing piles of poor, dried-out Christmas trees on the curb.

2) A flood of new exercisers on the sidewalks each morning who are hell-bent on fulfilling New Year's Resolutions but haven't yet figured out you must push the button for the crosswalk to give you a walk sign. PUSH THE BUTTON.

Yes, it is true, if you arrive at the crosswalk first it is your duty to push the button. If you do not push the button in Los Angeles, you do not get the crosswalk man. Without the crosswalk man, people in cars think it is OK to drive into you. New exercisers, take heed.

A few days ago I got this message from Karen on Twitter who nudged me to say,

@crazyauntpurl, I could sure use another inspiring post about walking.

I'm not sure if this will inspire you or entice you to send me heavy medication, but below is a little graph, courtesy of Nike.com, that shows how much pavement-pounding I did in 2011:

(click to enlarge)

(Oh, so many things I wish we could merely click to enlarge.)

According to my Nike+ chip, in 2011 I completed 246 workouts, walked for 331 hours and 47 minutes and burned 187,681 calories. The calorie count is not accurate at all but is still amusing.

What's crazypants is that I walked an astonishing 1, 172.93 miles, which is just about the distance from my home here in Los Angeles to Oklahoma City. That tally doesn't count all the shlepping I did in Washington, D.C. (I forgot my sportsband that weekend) and it is all the more impressive since apparently I didn't move from my sofa for the entire month of January. Take that, New Year's Resolutions!

This is the time of year when every magazine and TV news program and website and weight-loss business cashes in on our perennial self-loathing and peppermint bark regrets and showers us with information on diet and exercise. Every cover story mentions cutting calories, working out, celebrity diet secrets and "Half their size!" (I bought it, by the way. I always buy that issue of People magazine. I am not immune.)

Inevitably each success story includes gems about "portion control" and "strength training twice a week" and "I allow myself a small piece of chocolate, but don't overindulge." I am waiting for the article that talks about accidentally ordering a large pepperoni lover's pizza to celebrate the day so-and-so made it through her first spinning class. Oh wait! That was me!

I feel proud of my imbalanced and simultaneously impressive graph of footsteps. It reminds me that one does not have to be perfect or even completely consistent to be successful at something. (No matter how you stack it, walking over 1100 miles in one year is a success.) But look at January -- nothing. Nada. And there were some slow dips mid-year when it was eleventy-nine hundred degrees outside and I was less than motivated to move. Still, by year's end I was a little walking machine. Lacing up my shoes and getting on the road is my favorite part of the day.

Now it's 2012 and I have so many goals for this year, so many hopes and keep-my-fingers-crossed dreams and to-do lists and tasks and work, work, work. At the beginning of every year I feel optimistic and hopeful. Secretly I also feel scared and worried about momentum. What does the year ahead hold?

When a slump comes or a month brings a whole lot of nothing, I want to look back at my little 2011 walking chart and remind myself that as long as I don't give up I can actually walk all the way from Hollywood to Oklahoma City one step at a time. It is perhaps one of my cheesier metaphors, and I don't care, I am the one after all who celebrated spinning class with a pizza.

It is important to note that two years ago I could barely walk around the block without needing a sherpa. For a whole year I would get up on the first day of each month and challenge myself: this month, take a small walk each day. I consistently failed. I would miss a day here, a day there, I don't think I ever made it the full 30 days for a whole year! But I never gave up. I just kept going, and one day I stopped counting days because all days were walking days.

Like most people I used to mix up exercise and weight loss. I thought that I had to exercise so I could lose weight, and that just made me irritated and guilty. I'm not sure when exercise and weight loss started to become separate ideas, but that split has certainly changed my outlook on movement. I like being outside and seeing all the people with their dogs and looking at the yards and storefronts and flowering trees. I like going to yoga (even though I have the worst Downward Dog in the whole class) (who sucks at Downward Dog??) I like my weird dance classes and I like hula-hooping.

On New Year's Day, instead of getting up and resolving once again to start a desperately determined exercise program I just laced up my shoes and went for a walk.

No one has time to exercise, you make time. I made time. I moved my whole life around to make time. No one likes getting started and realizing they're out of shape. No one enjoys the first trip around the block. And no one ever becomes perfect. Some people still order pizza as a reward for pedaling a bike to nowhere.

The chart reminds me that perfection isn't the goal and that perfection will never happen. I finally get that you don't have to be perfect to accomplish something. I look at the chart and I realize I was flawed, I was erratic some days, I was not even on the pavement for a whole month -- and still I walked 1, 172.93 miles.

I just didn't give up. That's all I have to remember for 2012. Keep walking. Don't give up.

And push the button!

Anyway, I can appreciate the weather today because I was finally well-rested. Last night we had a reprieve from the window-rattling sound of helicopters constantly flying overhead and I actually got some sleep. My building sits right in the middle of the disturbing fire path set by the arsonist and everyone was on edge in the neighborhood. The sound of sirens and helicopters all night long for four nights in a row didn't help. The fires were scary.

When the news showed footage of the mad arsonist being arrested in Hollywood you could see his face, at one point he turned and smiled for the cameras like he was on a particularly sick episode of TMZ. The first thing I thought when I saw that look on his face was, "I don't know what he's guilty of, but that dude is guilty of something."

My neighbors and I have never really talked much, when you live in a crowded city in a crowded building and you share walls and guest parking spots and laundry facilities, you tend to keep your fences high. But during the unsettling nights of the arson spree everyone kept looking out the windows into the parking area, waving at each other across the alley. The opera guy in the building next door gave me a thumbs up sign one night around 3 a.m., when sirens were streaming past the building and two helicopters were hovering overhead. It was oddly comforting to see opera man's little sign of solidarity.

So today was a really good day, beautiful and sunny and clear. On my walk this morning I passed a plainclothes policeman (just like on TV!) wearing jeans and a T-shirt with his badge on a chain around his neck. He was checking the garage of a building nearby. When he heard my footsteps he looked up quickly.

"Good morning," I said, gave a little wave as we passed.

"Good morning," he said.

Then I heard him say quietly, "It is a good morning."

What you see when you look down:

Yesterday I was at Umberto getting my hair cut and absorbing the wise counsel of Aharon, hair stylist extraordinaire, who knows more about people and human nature than almost anyone I have ever met. He also knows quite a bit about the right shade of blonde. Aharon has an assistant named Troy who is exactly the picture I have formed in my head of what the perfect assistant should be: funny, easy-going, happy and ridiculously good looking.

People, I plan to have an assistant one day. Along with a hefty insurance policy covering sexual harassment claims. And also I want to get a horn for my Dad that plays "Deep in the heart of Texas..." What can I tell you. I have lofty aspirations over here.

ANYWAY. Troy and I were chitchatting about New Year's Eve, I love to hear what everyone has planned for that night. Some folks are very contemplative and nesty on that night, some care nothing for it, some plan dramatic excursions to Hawaii or Las Vegas or go to big parties in the Hollywood Hills.

"Are you going out?" I asked Troy. "Your girlfriend is still in town on winter break, right?"

"Yeah, we might go out to a party." he said. "But I think my mom wants us to be with her. It's a Korean thing."

This is probably a good time in the story to mention Troy is Korean.

"What is a Korean New Year thing?" I asked.

"My mom wants us to go to church with her," he said. "In our culture we have a service just before midnight, like to get rid of the old year. Then there is another service right after midnight, bringing in the new year."

I thought this was one of the best things I had ever heard and I said so. I was so taken in by this idea that I was just about to invite myself along until he mentioned the whole service is in Korean and all of it lasts about three hours.

"Do white people have any crazy traditions like that?" he asked. "I've never heard any, not about New Year's anyway."

I enjoy being the representative for all white people, especially crazy white people. I feel I could take it on as an ambassadorship of some kind.

"Well," I said, "Southerners have all kinds of weird superstitions around the New Year, like you have to eat black-eyed peas on New Year's Day for good luck and even if you hate black-eyed peas you have to eat at least a spoonful or the year is done before it starts."

"Black Eyed Peas? Like the band?" he laughed.

"Oh they're better," I said. "Especially with hot sauce. And Cajun superstition is a whole 'nother ball of wax, because for Cajun people New Year's Eve was when Bonhomme Janvier brought little presents."

"Bahn ome who?" he asked.

"Bonhomme Janvier, he's the Cajun Santa," I explained. "And down in the bayou there's all kinds of stuff about sweeping bad news off your porch, and there's one superstition about whatever tasks you do on January first set the tone for the whole year. So you don't want to bury a body or scrub toilets or get scabies. You can only do happy things like eat and drink and get naked."

Troy tipped his head back and laughed.

"I don't think I've ever met any Cajun people, but they sound almost as nuts as us Koreans," he said.

"Oh trust me," I said. "Southern people and Cajun people are much crazier than Koreans. We might both be from cultures with good food, and you might even have the edge on spare ribs, but we have you beat on crazy. We invented drinking, I'm pretty sure."

He started to argue but I hit him with the last and very final word in crazy.

"We invented country music," I said.

I had won the argument. Do not even get me started on Zydeco!

Eventually I left, of course, one inevitably must leave the comfort of the Beverly Hills flat iron and return to the Valley floor. It was so warm outside that I zipped the windows off the Jeep and cranked up the radio. Driving up and around and through the canyon roads of Los Angeles on a balmy December day is like pure honey, there is nothing better. When traffic is moving and a good song is on the radio there is no other place in the world you want to be.

I thought about the few little squares left on my calendar, the last days of the year. In my head I started making a list, all my resolutions, my goals, my tasks, people I need to email, people I need to call, bills I need to pay, stuff I need at the market, I'm almost out of half-n-half.

I came around a curve on Crescent Heights and I was singing along with the radio, making my list, and out of nowhere I saw a guy on rollerblades walking a giant black poodle up a driveway. Or maybe the poodle was walking him. And it was 78 degrees on a December day at the very end of 2011 and in that one absurd moment it didn't matter who I needed to call. Everything would still be there in a few days.

All I had to do was stop at Ralph's and get a can of black-eyed peas. The only thing you must must do on New Year's Day is eat your black-eyed peas.

That and avoid burying bodies.

---

So tell me, I want to know: What is your New Year's tradition? What is your unique superstition? What is on your list? Do you eat your black-eyed peas, do you go to church at midnight, do you sweep the porch?

I love the New Year because it is the one night and day that everyone (all of us, hot Koreans and crazy white people and Cajuns and everyone in between) mark in the same way, flipping a new page on the calendar, recognizing the dawn of a new year.

How do you do it in your house?

Do tell.

"You are the only person I know who loves and hates Christmas so much," she said.

And it is true. The expensive therapist has told me this feeling of opposites is a state called cognitive dissonance, when the brain can hold two conflicting emotions at one time. She's nice (and expensive) so she says it's a sign of enlightenment. Ralph Waldo Emerson -- who I have not paid for therapy but to whom I owe much in the way of growthyness -- once said, "Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines." Meaning, I suppose, that this idea of being consistent and never changing and holding true to only one feeling is actually a big, dumb fake out. It's OK to not know, or to be in the middle, or to both love and hate Christmas. Emerson would have used better adverbs. But you get it.

When you expect a person to stay who they were, you imprison them forever and you restrict your own life. You become limited by what you expect from others. Like it or not, people change. Everything changes. It's like my dad says: The only thing you can count on is change. (I hate that saying, by the way. I'm way more into the hobgoblins.) So you go out to dinner with someone who always orders a pinot grigio and one night, out of the blue, he orders a stoli on the rocks with a twist. Why is it you're the one who feels left out? If your sister becomes a vegetarian this week, why are you feeling an overarching need to defend the cheeseburgers? And when Christmas rolls around and it's both lovely and loathsome, which side do you pick?

Old Ralph Waldo and the spendy therapist would both say it's healthy to hold a little of each. It isn't a sign of weakness of schizophrenia to feel simultaneous love and loathing for Christmas, it may indeed be the only sign you have that you're ready to write that novel you've been marinating on.

The ability to hold two very conflicting ideas is quite a feat. It's perfectly all right to love providing a holiday home base for your family and meanwhile want them all to leave, now. It's absolutely understandable to be alone and feel both relieved and ruined with sorrow.

It's Christmas. They make movies about it, you know.

So I wish only the happy parts for you, but I accept the inconsistencies, the disasters, the hide-alone-in-a-bathroom parts of the day, too. This is what makes us enlightened! Or so says the expensive therapist and our old pal Ralph Waldo.

Merry Christmas, y'all. Every piece of it.

I'm going to spend the next eleven days finishing what I started, thinking ahead to a fresh new year, and on at least one occasion I will paint my nails bright red while watching a Nick & Nora movie.

My three things for today:

1) The weather is sunny and chilly and clear and I get to wear my Uggs, and that makes me happy.

2) I figured something out that I couldn't see until just this morning and I feel relieved and freed up by it. I love the way the brain works, all wrapped up in confusion and mystery and emotion and then one morning you wake up and *click*

3) Barbecue sauce.

What are your three things?

xo
laurie

While I was standing at the sales desk waiting for my return to be processed a man approached the sales clerk.

"What size is a large?" he asked, holding up a dress for the clerk to see. "Is this a large?"

She checked the tag inside.

"Large is really more, well, anything starting at size eight and up is the large range," she said. "Eight, ten, twelve..."

I must have cocked my head to the side like a puzzled basset hound. A size eight is a large? Perhaps my brain was working so hard on digesting it that I made noise, because the man looked right at me.

"What size are you?" he asked.

"UH. WELL," I said. "It often depends on the item."

(And the crowd goes wild, with an excellent save from Perry out of left field!)

The poor man was just standing there, holding up a hanger with a black dress, looking exhausted and defeated by the mysterious world of women's sizing. And in that moment I felt his pain. Because women's sizing is just ridiculous and it's Christmas and anyway the fourteen-year-old sales girl thinks a size eight is a LARGE.

"OK," I said. I turned to face him. "Is she smaller than I am? Or bigger?"

"Oh thank you," he said. "I'm completely lost here." He scrutinized me for a minute.

"She's taller than you are," he said. "And she's definitely bigger than you are. Maybe not on top but bigger in the middle."

The clerk made a little giggle and the man suddenly realized what he'd just said. His face started to turn red. I couldn't help it. I laughed.

"Well let's all be glad you're not lingerie shopping today," I said. "OK, if she's taller this isn't the right section anyway, this is all petites. Is it a gift? Does she need a dress for sure?"

"She likes dresses," he said. "Petites? I don't understand. Where does it even say that?" His voice had taken on the desperate sound of a man who had hit the shopping wall. He was out of oomph, his shoulders dropped even deeper into his collarbone. He'd been beaten.

In a moment of Christmas kindness I decided to level with the poor man.

"Look, unless you know for sure she needs a dress and unless you know her size and favorite style and unless you can be absolutely certain she won't clock you for buying her a LARGE, therefore telling her she is a LARGE, I highly recommend you go with jewelry. You can never, ever go wrong with jewelry," I said. "Or a gift card. One size fits all."

It was like seeing a man come out of a fugue state. He must have been trapped in the dresses section of the Sherman Oaks Macy's for a lifetime because the look of pure gratitude on his face was something out of coffee commercial. In that one moment you could see his brain forever abandon the gift of clothing, perhaps remembering some time in the not-so-distant past when his wife or girlfriend or concubine surprise-attacked him with a stealth does this dress make me look fat, honey?

"You're right," he said. "THIS IS NUTS."

"Jewelry is one floor down," said the helpful size-zero clerk, the one who believes a size eight is a tent dress. She handed me my return receipt and the man handed her the now-abandoned dress.

"OH! And just for the record," I said, smiling, "a size eight is a solid medium. It is definitely a MEDIUM."

Good grief, people.