iSpy. iPod.

Well, well, well, what have we here? Could it be Ibrahim's present finally made it here, despite the fact that we apparently slept through the Fedex man ringing our doorbell at 11:30a.m. yesterday:

JAMIE
[through sleepy fog]
Huuuhn? Issshazt the door thinngie... bell?

IBRAHIM:
[mumbles indistinctly]

JAMIE:
[turning over to get back to sleep]
Muusht be fer the people downshtairs or summut...

IBRAHIM:
[snorts, pulls sheets up over head]

All's well that ends well, though, and Ibrahim dearly loves his new nano iPod. In fact, I think he loves the damn thing more than anything else in the whole wide world, except perhaps me. No, wait, that's not true. I think he actually loves the iPod a little more, because the iPod doesn't say things like, "Did you scrub the icky bits around the base of the toilet this time?" and then go check on the icky bits that men must be genetically engineered not to see and make him clean said icky bits, whilst I do and say these nasty and nefarious things. Methinks, ergo, that the iPod wins his lurve.

Look at that face! You just can't buy that kind of happiness. ( Well, actually, you can, and I in fact did, for $199 plus tax, shipping and handling. Ah , rampant American consumerism, how we love thee.)

Meanwhile, my ass is beginning to take root in the couch from so much bland entertainment in the form of action/adventure movies and Law and Order reruns, viewed with the relish only a LAO junkie deprived of her fix for months can muster. Law and Order is a beautiful thing, and they shouldn't mess with any more spin-offs, or pretty soon we're going to be watching painful swill along the lines of Law and Order: Traffic Violations Squad.

For in the world of Law and Order spin-offs, I maintain there's camp classic, and then there's just shockingly crappy. (If you think I'm wrong, then I'll have you ponder what the hell ever happened to that dismally redundant 'Law and Order: Trial By Jury' spin-off? I guess we liked Bebe Neuwirth more as Fraser's frosty wife than we did as a bitch-on-wheels attorney, for one. Besides, Dick Wolf, we know you and your deep and richly money filled production pockets are more than happy to oblige the public more of what they want, but what the hell was happening in the original Law and Order if not a trial by jury, pray tell? )

Not that we're not game for a little gratuity and camp. In fact, nothing, I repeat nothing is as sublimely ridiculous and therefore as poetically perfect as Vincent D'Onofrio's Detective Goran in LAO: Criminal Intent. Anyone else in that role would be heretical, as when they substituted that lame red-haired chick for Kathryn Erbe's steely-armed Detective Eames during her character-and-real-life pregnancy leave. For weeks I pined and suffered through scene after plodding scene with the red-haired chick whose main purpose apart from providing a life-like rendering of an actual human being, was to voice occasional throw-away lines like "Yes, Detective Goran." or, "I see, Detective Goran." Boring.

As you can see, not much is going on in my world; I have enough time to rhapsodize over television show spin-off characters, and can't bring myself to read high-flutent literature over the holidays, either. Actually, it's all just a big procrastination scheme, the philosophical equivalent of diverting my attention with bright shiny objects, so as not to think about work, and how badly it's gotten to me over the past few weeks. I suppose a job filled with death, suffering and human beings at their worst is bound to get to a person after awhile.

And actually, it's not just work I'm avoiding, it's the analysis of My Whole Life, which I try hard not to do very often, especially during winter months when due to shortened daylight I have to force myself by catapult out of bed each morning. Because it seems that no matter what I do, or where I go, or what plans I have, there's a little secret part of me inside that's all like, "What in hell have you gotten youself into, missy? " It has nothing to do with whether or not I like or dislike my job, my house, my spouse, my car, or whatever. It's just the neurotic way I think. Good lord, thank goodness I wasn't born to be Kierkegaard (poor Soren and that whole severe kyphosis thing, for starters). But I think I get why he wrote the way he did, because by God, if I had to live in Denmark or any place where it's dark and cold six months out of the year, I'd probably be writing philosophical tomes with schizoid titles like, "Either/Or" too.

I also miss school. I don't mean nursing school because that was just plain hell and no mistake. I miss real school where I learned stuff for the joy of learning stuff and not because if I didn't, I could potentially miss something and kill someone (and also, where I supposedly acquired a vocabulary, which seems at present to have gone off on holiday, leaving me with a marked propensity to use generic, nearly meaningless words like "stuff" and "postmodernism.")

I miss the wide-open spaces meant for deconstructing dark Swedish films and reading German philosophy in an attempt to puzzle out the meaning of human suffering. I miss the clamour of ideas and idealism richocheting off each other during a good argle-bargle in class. I miss the hero-worship of certain professors, who were and are only human after all, but seemed so wise and learned, and above all, kind.

So I suppose I don't miss school at all, just the idea of school. I even thought about taking a course at community college in something I'm dreadful at (math, maybe, or physics) just to see if I could do it, but then I think, maybe the light deprivation and filthy cold has gotten to you, after all, Jamie.