I am extremely late with this post. You, dear reader, have my apologies. As you will recall from previous posts, my 02008 New Year's Resolution was to try my best to resist the urge to cut my hair, with the ultimate goal of donating it to Locks of Love . With just one week left in the year, my resolve to keep my hair uncut was still intact. However, my attention was brought to Pantene's Beautiful Lengths program, with its 8 inch requirement (which was better for me than Locks of Love's 10 inches). Well, I finally reached 8 inches in June! Here are the May 2, 02009 photos: Three days after those photos were taken, Beth could live with my long hair no longer. She decided it was haircut day, and she gave me my shearing. The next day, I stopped in for a visit to my barber for a bit of a cleaning up. These photos show the results: Now I feel very much less like a total doofus! Last week, I received a letter of thanks from Beautiful Lengths. So I know that my hair reached its de...

One of my coworkers decided a few days ago that she was sick of the music on her iPod. (She used the word "hate", but I don't think it was entirely accurate.) So she proposed an iPod swap. I went for it, and we've spent a few hours on each of the last few days listening to each others' collections. This is a wonderful exercise, which I highly recommend to anyone who is in a position to do it. My greatest joy of the exercise, so far, has been the discovery of a singer/songwriter named Joanna Newsom. I am absolutely hooked, and intend to buy her albums when funds become available. She has this magnificently unconventional singing voice which she uses to great effect with a unique delivery. Plus, the woman is a rhyme machine! My favorite lyric goes like this: I killed my dinner with karate - kick 'em in the face, taste the body; This artist is definitely my musical discovery of the year, and I can make no stronger suggestion to you, reader, than this: Listen to J...

I recently found out that I am scheduled to be part of a big round of layoffs from my full-time job. My scheduled date of termination is July 3. This is the sort of news that could be fairly devastating. (In this case, it is not.) I am being uncharacteristically optimistic. In fact, I have generally been keeping on the optimistic end of the scale for the last few months. This is a strange sensation. I, as you may or may not already know, am a world-class pessimist (despite my "be positive" blood type). This is not a point of pride. It is simply a statement of truth. My longstanding habit has been to always believe that things will go badly. To some degree, this acts as a bit of a built-in cushion. Rarely do things go as badly as I anticipate, and I'm therefore generally pleased with outcomes. However, when outcomes do turn out to be awful, at least they don't come as a shock. When I was in college, I took an Abnormal Psychology course. My professor was Martin E. P. Se...