safari hat to study the natives with

Grammar is a funny thing, that.

So maybe I've listened to Beyonce's Halo a million times in the last 30 hours. I do not feel bad about this. And interestingly enough, my Beyonce craze is coinciding with my new ownership of a radio. That's spelled R-A-D-I-O. I think they invented them back in the 1990's. Ancient times, I know.

I have not owned a radio since high school but now I own one because my mom was afraid I would continue to have alarm clock troubles which is an entirely different story that has to do with flashlights that I've painted white.

I got an alarm clock with a radio because I would die if I had to wake up to BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP. Plus I'm curious to hear what I can find on el radio. I'm so out of touch I feel like an ethnographer switching through the channels. Stations? What do we say in radio speak? I don't know. Because in the last five years the only radio I've listened to is Pandora or NPR.

I've been experimenting with stations over the last couple of weeks. I perch on the edge of my bed clipping my fingernails (over a trash can, of course, just so you know I'm not one of those sickos that lets their clippings go all over the place) and find a station playing Mary J. Blige. I stay there because I remember Miss Blige and I can almost sing along with a couple of lines in her song. This may be pathetic.

So far I can't seem to figure out what's a good frequency and I'm not letting myself switch back to NPR yet. Yup*, I'm being strong, I will not succumb to my comfort zone. At least for a while. But this means that I have no idea what I'll be waking up to every morning. Will this be one of those stations that has a crazy array of DJs? In the morning they cater to the late 30's commuting crowd and at 3:30 p.m. they pump it up for teenie-boppers? It's a game of russian roulette.

On another note we're starting to work on our creative non-fiction essays in my writing class. Uh, yes, you noted that we're submitting them for publication? They tell me I can pick between The New Yorker or the campus literary magazine. H, if I'm going to submit something for publication why would I pick just one? That hardly seems worth the effort. Plus, the campus lit mag seems rather dismal because I was the only person in the class who'd heard of it. I like it, personally, but again, I present to you the letter H. It's all going to come tumbling down, ladies and gentleman. Every piece of civilization and culture.

And in case you were keeping track, in the course of typing this out to fill your eyes with my dribble I have listened to Halo another five times. Congratulations to the lady in the corner who guessed correctly! She wins a one-way ticket to vacation in Jamaica for five days. How she gets back is her own affair.



*This is something we say in the upper midwest, as in, "Yup." We were a people of few words.