Tonight I caught the last 45 minutes or so of District 9. I'm so behind the curve in even bothering to comment on it.

But! (1) There's clearly some "going native" thing that's going on, reminiscent of Heart of Darkness (and the concomitant Apocalypse Now), along with Dances with Wolves, and probably some films that I'm forgetting. Avatar might be guilty, too, not having seen it.

(2) We like to look up there for an enemy, don't we? [Obligatory list of alien movies.]

Not that any of this is an original idea, and I'll appreciate being schooled on it.

When loading your dishwasher, separate the utensils by type into the different dishwasher holders. Then when you unload the dishwasher, they're already sorted and you can just plunk them into the drawer. Does everybody already know to do this? Why hasn't it occurred to me years ago? It makes so much sense. You load the dishwasher one item at a time; sorting should be done then.

That one came from my mom. Also Jammies and I discovered that my parents are completely terrible at take-out. We never got fast food growing up, but with Mom being sick, they've discovered a healthy little Mexican restaurant near their house called Chipotle. Maybe you've heard of it. Anyway, Dad brings home dinner. Then they putter about the house for a while. Then when it's nice and cold, they set the table, put out napkins, fill up water glasses, heat the oven to reheat the food, and generally create as much work and dishes as possible for a pre-made meal requiring no utensils. Parents!

What is it, I am forced by repeated exposure to wonder, about being driven that renders it such a frequent desideratum in potential mates? Surely someone who is driven is more likely than someone who isn't to ignore others in pursuit of that to which they're driven, and, moreover, to overestimate how much attention is actually due t.t.w.t.d.? I can't help but read it as a prayer that one should frequently be ignored.

Perhaps drivenness is supposed to be a proxy for belly-fire or financial success, but as far as I can tell it's actually independent of both.

1. Resolutions?

I believe in highly accomplishable resolutions. One of my most successful resolutions was when I resolved to let myself make more of the nonsensical jokes that pop into my head instead of censoring myself. This was probably ten years ago, and look, I'm still keeping it. Other good resolutions are: trying different kinds of cereal at the grocery store, (that was a This Past August Resolution, not a New Year's resolution), and not finishing this list.

I don't believe in willpower, in general, (as I've posted here before.) So if a resolution isn't going to allow more instant gratification, it better have a lot of structure built in so that it naturally happens.

2. Nominations for most Aughtie Song of the Aughts? If you're going to nominate something, provide an explanation. Otherwise it's just words.

3. Also, what's so 200X about the 200Xes? What makes this decade tick? The scare quotes? The meta-ironic-scare quotes? Actually, skip this one. It's just going to lead to an incredibly depressing longterm view of the damage sustained by the Bush years.

I've seen a lot of decade in review TV shows and blog posts that have taken to mocking Y2K preparation, with a tone of "Weren't we silly to think that Y2K could cause problems! Nothing happened! Silly us!" That's not the lesson to take from Y2K. Sure, some people took it to an extreme, building survival shelters and fearing that missiles would automatically launch, but there were real consequences that could have happened (just extrapolate from the events of this year if you want to see the ripple effects something as mundane as accounting problems in the financial sector could have caused) and were averted.

I think this attitude towards Y2K is especially dangerous at a time when we're trying to get action behind global warming. The lesson isn't that Y2K wasn't a real threat and we all were overtaken by some mass hysteria; the lesson is that we identified a potentially serious problem, the government and private sector took proactive measures to mitigate the threat, and were able to avoid it. We've done it once on a smaller scale and we can do it again. Dismissing Y2K as an overblown threat that didn't pan out just gives people an excuse to avoid tackling global warming, in the hope it turns out to be a similar issue.

I have a very low metabolism for household cooking and cleaning, and I feel quite guilty that I ought to be doing more of my share when I'm holed up with ten of my favoritest relatives. But other people get around to these tasks so much sooner than I do, which is what I mean by "low metabolism". I will get around to it eventually, but I'm sluggish. My standard ploy is to go to great lengths to minimize the mess I make, so that I can be sluggish about clean-up without living in a pigsty. In group situations, where everyone else seems to be on a churn out more mess (and I participate, in big group dinners, for example), and clean it up more often pace, my game doesn't work.

Somewhere I read "Guilt is what good people feel to avoid doing what they don't want to do." So usually I pooh-pooh guilt and just do what I don't want to do, but it seems when it comes to cleaning I'd rather just feel guilty.

Is popcorn ceiling universally deplored around here? I've heard it hated on enough that I assumed I felt that way too. But this rental house has popcorn ceilings and I can't tell what's so bad about it.