NP: David Bowie, Reality (CD)

If your roommate borrows your car to take her cat to the vet, then comes home visibly distraught, but the cat is fine, the safe money is on the car. Clearly, my Subaru requires my personal supervision at all times, because bad things only seem to happen to it (save one or two little bounces off of other cars in traffic that never amounted to anything) when I'm not with the damn thing. This makes two break-ins, two side-view mirrors knocked off, and one major accident, none of which required or involved my presence.

I didn't even look at the damage, because the really easy way for me to deal with it is to just act like she borrowed it for five days instead of one morning. Everything else can and should be a black box, and there doesn't even need to be any grand declaration of never being able to borrow my car again, because I suspect it will be quite a while before she'll even ask. Nobody was hurt. Cars can be fixed.

On the one hand, they might even repaint the hood scoupe, which had been peeling for a while now. On the other, the AC compressor that was the source of all those wear-and-tear repairs over the summer has to be replaced again. Not like I could have possibly known this would happen.

Meanwhile, some potential freelance work has popped on to my radar, but considering that I had several thousand dollars worth of proposals that never came through last year, I'm not exactly banking on it. I nudged somebody at my most recent potential employer, but no word there yet. Abi's gig is back on the calendar, with no further conflicts, and Diver's got another one coming up this month. Sometimes I just get really curious as to how (and when) all this will shake out, entirely apart from the deep-seated need for resolution and for sound financial footing.

Oh, and this morning's hare-brained fitness idea is to do 50 to 100 situps whenever I get bored. Super Bowl festivities left me feeling a bit bloated, so I may yet swear off pasta, bread and beer. Bared nipples on national TV, though, will stay on the docket whenever possible. If you don't know what I'm talking about there, I can't help you. Personally, I preferred Lucy Lawless' escape from her bustier while singing the national anthem at a hockey game about five or six years ago, but you can't blame Janet for trying.

Which, of course, is patently false. Lots of people blaming Janet, blaming MTV, blaming the Pats for not covering the spread, and blaming the Panthers for missing those two-point conversions. The exception is Shaquille O'Neal, whose profanity-laded outburst on live TV earlier in the day immediately became a footnote on the FCC daily memo.