My favorite Top Gear presenter, Captain Slow, takes on Gordon Ramsay, one of my favorite tv chefs—lots of fun, very satisfactory results, and a great thing to share in my first post of the new year:

It seems more than a little silly to have a favorite commercial, but this lady makes me happy every time she comes on:

Nausea, heartburn, indigestion, upset stomach, diarrhea, yyyyyyeah!

Flustered more by the total cliché of having a crush on a barista than by the actual cuteness* of said barista, I completely forgot that I’d ordered a chai latte instead of my usual café au lait and proceeded to dump two packets of raw sugar into my cup without so much as a sip beforehand. Cute barista looked at me with an expression I recognized as the exact same face I make when the person ahead of me at the movie concessions stand orders a giant tub of popcorn with butter and a gallon cup of Diet Coke.
I’m not sure where I found the strength to smile and walk slowly out of the coffeehouse, instead of dropping my cup and running away in embarassment never to return, but now I’m sitting on my bed, sipping my far-too-sweet beverage, wishing I wasn’t such a giant dork.
* Although he is terribly cute—I do not usually like hipsters or musicians, and he is clearly both, but oh his hair is so wonderfully floppy, his glasses are at the exact intersection of nerdy and stylish, and his beard is the perfect length for making out. These are the kinds of things I only type out when I am single.

Verlyn Klinkenborg’s recent NYT editorial on teaching young writers at a small college in Minnesota really struck a chord with me when I first read it, and I found myself wanting to revisit it today, especially this part:

I’ve often noticed a habit of polite self-negation among my female students, a self-deprecatory way of talking that is meant, I suppose, to help create a sense of shared space, a shared social connection. It sounds like the language of constant apology, and the form I often hear is the sentence that begins, “My problem is …”

Even though this way of talking is conventional, and perhaps socially placating, it has a way of defining a young writer — a young woman — in negative terms, as if she were basically incapable and always giving offense. You simply cannot pretend that the words you use about yourself have no meaning. Why not, I asked, be as smart and perceptive as you really are? Why not accept what you’re capable of? Why not believe that what you notice matters?

Another young woman at the table asked — this is a bald translation — won’t that make us seem too tough, too masculine? I could see the subtext in her face: who will love us if we’re like that? I’ve heard other young women, with more experience, ask this question in a way that means, Won’t the world punish us for being too sure of ourselves?

My two primary addresses have been down for the count for over twelve hours—thanks for that, Dreamhost!—so if you’re trying to reach me, for now please IM if you know it or send me a message via my Facebook profile or my Flickr profile.
Update: Email working now, hurrah! While I was waiting for things to get fixed, I started thinking how funny it is that I started blogging eight years ago because it was easier than emailing my friends links all the time, and yet I’ve spent so much of this year emailing my friends links instead of posting on my blog because writing a personal blog feels, well, too personal sometimes—even when all I’m doing is sharing silly things like Helen Mirren eating a cheeseburger.
I feel like even as it expands, the web feels smaller and smaller, and not always in the kindest of ways. Shit, do you remember webrings? We used to link to random people we’d never emailed with or knew anything about, not to sell more Google ads or up our Pagerank or anything else other than the pleasure of nebulous shared belonging to one group or another. All of our pages linked to one another, forming chains of Scully fans, broccoli lovers, Nascar enthusiasts. It’s like we were all hugging the web, you know?