So things which I guess should be of interest:
1) I just got back from Florida. I liked it.
2) I almost died in Florida. But not in a dramatic way
3) We have acquired a dog
4) I have gotten into graduate school
5) I may be rethinking certain positions vis-à-vis gender, sexuality, and relationships. This version actually skews (more) male-positive
6) There are photos of Whitney Houston’s crack den on the internet

Explanations for such things:

E1) Florida is the only really Caribbean area in the continental United States, and as such it seems a world apart. Your drive down through the gulf coast (yes, hurricane ravaged, but in an aesthetically pleasing way which will lend itself nicely to photographs) and it feels completely unique—sand and swamps and people who I literally couldn’t understand (and strangely, everyone had a baseball cap on. Not sure what that’s about). Florida proper is full of Carmel people without racial definition (my favorite) and the highways are all over oceans, and it feels like Florida, it doesn’t feel like any other place; it’s managed to reserve some sense of locality, which is increasingly harder to find. We also took the kids to Disneyworld before they grew up too much to enjoy it. And while the admission was ludicrous ($550!) and the people terrifying (dregs of America swirling about. Chubby, rude, fannypacked dregs), the place still manages somehow to captivate a certain sort of magic—as clichéd as it sounds. It really feels wholesome and innocent and fun, and somehow cynicism doesn’t really stick. At least for me. The downside was Julia’s insistence that we bring a friend of hers, and I’ll refer you to the source for this But by and large, outside of some bumps, Sanibel Island was lovely. I spent the whole time getting brown, and would wake up mornings at 530 to collect seashells. Not too bad at all

E2) One of the fun things about me, one that goes right in the “Gratuitously Unsexy Information” file is my nervous tick with regards to picking. The usual culprits are acne and calluses, but skin, scabs, any sort of dermis problem really—I hate things on my skin, and will go as far as cutting parts of my flesh off to get rid of skin tags or moles. Those of you close to me are usually kind enough not to point this out and be disgusted, but I’m sure it bothers you. It should. It’s gross. Even grosser, is when you’ve been popped some acne on your cheek, but you pop it too close to a vein—say, a sinus vein, right by your eye. The irritation starts to spread into your vein, developing into a clot called veinous thrombosius. You try to ignore the swelling, but your face starts to go black and then purple in that area, and you can feel the vein start to harden, every day getting a little closer to your eye, until one day you go to your dad if, say, your dad is a doctor, and you say “dad, there’s something wrong with my face,” and your dad says, “let me see” and he touches it and he shouts “you have veinous thrombosius! Get me a phone!” and then he calls into a local pharmacy and orders emergency antibiotics because if the infection moves up your sinus vein/artery and to your brain you will die within a few days, and so you pop pills every four hours for the rest of vacation, and spend some time lying on the couch with a hot compress on your cheek watching reruns of “Irreconcilable Differences” and marveling at the gem that is Shelly Long.

E3) I am not a whiner. And yet, I have been whining non-stop since this dog has come into the house. I hate it—not the dog per se, but the responsibility of caring for a creature who, unlike a child, will not grow up to be interesting. I’m also not a big domesticated animals person. I like my spaces tidy, and I’ve become obsessed in the last two years or so with having perfect scent feng shui—every area must have a harmonious, balanced smell, and none of my zones can accommodate wet dog. What do we need animals in our homes for in this day and age? Companionship? I don’t need companionship—especially not from some mammal who follows me around everywhere and makes no conversation. If I wanted that, I’d go to LDS-Linkup. So why then do we have a dog? Because a woman in our ward is going on a mission and she needed someone to take care of it because she’s single (and 60) and she loves it like the husband she doesn’t have and so we offered to take it for the year and a half she was away and, to quote Ron Burgandy, “I immediately regret this decision.” Even if it is for charity.

E4) I have heard back from Rutgers, BC, and the New School. I have been accepted to all, and offered scholarships to some. Still waiting to hear back from my two top schools, NYU and Columbia, as well as BU. Do I feel guilty that they probably want me because I’m a Native American verses because I’m a brilliant English student? No I don’t.

E5) I’m beginning to question this whole “in caveman times men could impregnate hundreds of women whereas women can only have one baby at a time so evolutionarily men are suppose to cheat” argument. There are all of these ‘evolutionary’ reasons tossed out to explain why marriages are failing and why people are unhappy by and large in their committed relationships, and I’m beginning to find, talking to people, that the traditional school of infidelity and male/female sexuality doesn’t seem to be, really, at all like reality. You know, the idea of the inconstant, look-obsessed male and the clingy, status hungry woman who somehow cobble a relationship for the sake of progeny and yet are desperate to be unfaithful and in fact, should be—it smacks of hippiedom, doesn’t it? And who proffers these theories? Old male hippie dinosaurs. I’ve started to really listen to men when they talk, really watch how they act, and I’ve read some articles in Psychology Today which seem to show that neuroscience is telling a different story. I think, honestly, during the heady days of the sixties certain professors trying to, maybe unconsciously, justify their lifestyles became wedded to certain theories which have no barring on the modern man. I don’t know yet. More on this as I read some more.

E6) Dude, go to perezhilton.com That is messed up