I will no doubt have more to mention regarding my Essex excursion, but for the moment I offer you more baby pictures. Apart from irrefutable evidence that I was in fact the cutest baby ever, I’d like to briefly delve into this series featuring myself, my brother, and our cousins Peter and Edith. Here we are looking rather wholesome and outdoorsy. I myself am apparently sporting some sort of sundress, if such a thing is conceivable (left to right: Isaac, me, Edith, Peter):

Cute, right? Impish, even. And then suddenly, not long afterwards, we have apparently all four of us entered an (incredibly) awkward stage, simultaneously! I believe this was an Easter morning at the grandparental abode:

I think I’m either trying very hard not to wet my pants or trying very hard not to spit out a mouthful of acorns; either way, there’s clearly tremendous energy being expended if only to maintain that expression. But that’s not all:

White turtleneck aside, we seem a little more comfortable in this one. It’s unclear what I’m reading, but I seem jovial enough. And Isaac’s got some pretty serious hair, anyway.

I’ll make an effort to get a photo of the four of us over Christmas, maybe; it wasn’t feasible at Thanksgiving as Edith is still off in great Canadia somewhere and couldn’t be here this weekend, sadly.

So, you know, Thanksgiving. I’m in Essex until tomorrow afternoon doing the whole family thing, which I have to say is really pretty great. I’m mostly encouraged to sprawl in front of the fire and gorge myself on the parental library, which puts my own infestation of bookery completely to shame. And they keep feeding me in a more literal (as opposed to literary) sense - yesterday’s feast was of course an unprecedented experiment in just how many yams can be squashed into the human stomach, but even today there’s a pumpkin muffin or hummus and French bread sandwich waiting to attack every time I turn around. I’m not even going to discuss the samosas.

I’ll be back tomorrow evening, assuming I can be successfully wheeled onto the train and wedged into a seat without some sort of mashed potato explosion resulting. Think of the carnage.

After an hour or so of our old friend MGS2, Crispy and I have become convinced of the necessity of cardboard boxes as a method of disguise even in non-terrorist-evasion situations. I’m considering carrying around the box that came with my Apple Studio Display just for when people try to talk to me on the train, and perhaps a smaller (more portable) box is in order for public restrooms and that corner where everyone goes to smoke outside Main building. I admit hiding in lockers is also entertaining, but there really is nothing like seeing a box with legs fleeing from armed guards. Especially - especially - when the boxs happens to be fleeing down a flight of stairs.

It’s one of those strange, strange weeks where my routine is shot so completely to hell that I’m stumbling around campus just sort of hoping I end up in the right rooms at the right times. What’s that? A midterm today, with less than three weeks of classes to go? Sure, sign me up! Thanksgiving, you say? Oh yeah, I guess I am going to Boston this week, aren’t I?

For those of you who have to spend the next month or so thinking up things to wrap in colorful paper and give to other people: Dress To Kill comes out on DVD tomorrow. Who wouldn’t want a shiny new executive transvestite for Christmas?

You lucky, lucky people: I won’t be home until around 5pm EST this evening, which means you latecomers have through this afternoon to grab a shirt if you still want one. After that, though - you can’t tell, but I’m shaking my fist. It’s really threatening, I promise.

(I know I don’t have to remind you that today is the last day to buy a shirt, so I won’t.)

I used to wholeheartedly scorn Victoria’s Secret and Victoria’s Secret customers alike. Those poor misguided fools, overpaying so dramatically for their unmentionables! That insidious store, tempting mall patrons with their fake pillars and pink wallpaper! I walked past the SoHo location with my head held high and my Filene’s Basement underwire stabbing me nobly in the armpits: I had my flaws, but at least I didn’t shop at Vicky’s.

But, see, here’s the thing. Over the summer, they had this sale, right? And I was desperately in need of something in a non-stabbing brassiere, and their cotton collection was marked down enough that it made my pitiful bargain hunting seem all for naught. So I caved, and I bought one, and then I went back the next week and bought four more of the exact same thing. Because, my little buckeroos and buckerettes: This god damned bra is a feat of engineering on par with the fucking pyramids, I’m not kidding. There is no stabbing. There is no strap-slipping. There is only the gentlest yet firmest support imaginable, and there isn’t even any of that lacy crap all over it.

It’s a slippery slope, I’m not denying that. I’ve decided it’s acceptable to stock up on fancy undies when they’re on sale. I’ve redrawn the line at paying full price for any of their products, no matter how tempting, but I can feel my resolve slipping already. I braved the store again this past week to pick up some of their (5 for $20) panties, and it was all I could do to walk out without new pajamas and bathrobes and did I mention they have an entire collection named after me?

It doesn’t help that their salespeople have been effectively instilled with a manner that somehow combines a sort of co-conspiratorial slumber party slyness with the pushiness of a used car dealer. The one girl who singled me out from the herd and attacked, measuring tape waving cheerfully in her wake, seemed genuinely hurt when I turned down her offer of a free bra fitting. No, no, it’s not that I don’t want you to feel me up in the back room, it’s just I have this class to go to. No, honest! Please stop crying! Look, look, I’ll get a couple more pairs of the charcoal heather low-rise bikinis and we’ll call it even, okay?

Hit the Met yesterday, and although we did not get thrown out for sexually harassing the statues, we did get some good photos. One of my favorites was a guardian lion we came across as we were on our way between collections and I had just packed my camera up because the batteries were running low. I couldn’t resist, though; I love his expression. I’m not sure he makes a terribly fearsome guardian, but I wouldn’t mind having one at my house.

Afterwards, we went to Souen with Spencer. The waitress was friendly and flustered and brought me the wrong entree, which I didn’t realize until I’d already started eating it. However, the boys weren’t that fond of their vegetables and Spencer couldn’t finish his tofu, so there was more than enough to go around. I still don’t understand how anyone can not like sweet potato, though.

Since it was pouring outside, we needed something to do between dinner and Hell House. Wandering around in the rain turned out to not be all that much fun, but Crispy came to the rescue by discovering Twelfth Street Books, a small but fantastic used and rare book store at which I found a philosophy text I’d been looking for (at about a third what I would have been willing to pay for it). Mmm.

One of the things I liked best about the documentary Hell House was that its director didn’t have to make fun of his subjects in order for them to appear ridiculous: he just let them speak for themselves. Hell House is an annual event held by an extremist Pentecostal church in Texas. It goes a step farther than the Bible study club at my high school, which held a party at someone’s Mom’s house every Halloween in order to keep people from participating in the horrible heathen rituals usually attending the holiday. I never attended one of the parties, myself. Being the horrible heathen that I am, I preferred trick-or-treating in my younger days and working at a haunted house when I got older - which is, incidentally, the genesis of Hell House. The idea is to use the traditional haunted house bit to lure in flocks of unwary and unholy teenagers, and then scare them with scenes of the everlasting torment they have to look forward to, should they fail to accept Jesus etc etc.

The problem, of course (or at least one of them), is that the whole thing is so bumbling and clumsy that it’s not so much frightening as hilarious, if a little bit pathetic. Watching the cast of enthusiastically virginal teenagers painfully overacting the roles of Raver Date Rapist and Homosexual Man doesn’t scare the audience into a new wholesome look on life. Rather, you can’t help but feel a little sorry for these people, so blindly convinced that something like being gay can result only in AIDS and death, after which you’re apparently dragged off to a Plexiglass-sealed Inferno by a Christian Electronic DJ in bad Crow makeup and a black bathrobe. If the alternative is spending eternity with these people in Heaven (which consists entirely of silver streamers and deathbed-repenting drunk driving victims), sign me up.

The scariest thing about Hell House isn’t bad acting or the fog machine and red lights; it’s the ignorance of the organizers. During construction of the Cult Worship scene, an argument erupts over whether the spraypainted pentagram on the floor should be white or (as a real live Hell-House-visiting Warlock apparently suggested the previous year) red. When we’re shown the final product, however, it seems they had more than color confusion - the symbol that ends up painted on the black cardboard is not a pentagram, but a star of David. When the local DJ in charge of the Date Rape Rave scene is asked if he happens to know what the name of the date rape drug is, he’s stumped. After consulting his fellow Hell House participants, their collective best answer is: “It’s, like, offically and scientifically, like the police understand it as the Date Rape Drug and everything.” Apparently the flock of Trinity Church is very familiar with the symptoms of Rohypnol (”No, she wouldn’t be, like, spazzing out so much, would she?”) but has never even heard the term Roofies.

Perhaps I spoke too soon, re: guest speakers. Our second substitute professor for Genetics was nice enough, but clearly terrified of us. I can’t blame him; I don’t have any particular public speaking phobia, but I’m sure that faced with an auditorium of two or three hundred students I’d get a little nervous, too. He’d prepared a lecture and PowerPoint presentation intended to last the full class time, but ended up talking so quickly that he finished his last slide in just about forty minutes. He assaulted us with a barrage of auto-immune disorders and some very convoluted explanation having to do with plasma, and then suddenly it was all over. We were left gaping and confused, with unintelligible half-pages of scribbled terms we didn’t have time to copy from his diagrams. It was almost like that post-car-accident feeling - what? I’m missing how many limbs? But I was just on my way to Stop N Shop for some Kraft dinner!

My Genetics professor had told us at the beginning of the semester that he’d be away this week and next (in Mexico, apparently, studying fish) and that we would have a series of guest lectures in his absence. I’d forgotten about it until yesterday, when we had our first guest speaker, who is one of the other professors in the department. This morning in lab, everyone was talking about how much more entertaining his lecture had been, and bemoaning our luck that he wasn’t our regular professor.

While I’m a little vexed with our normal instructor myself (the second midterm comes to mind), I feel bad for the guy. I used to do some babysitting and tutoring in high school, and it wasn’t uncommon that the kids I’d be watching would express the desire to have me stay forever instead of leaving them at the mercy of their nefarious parents. It wasn’t that they had bad parents, it was that I didn’t have to put up with the little bastards twenty four hours a day - when you have the option of giving a shrieking second grader back to her parents at the end of the evening (and you get paid in the process), it’s a lot easier to have patience with her. Of course they thought I was more fun - I was just there to play Mortal Kombat with them and make Tollhouse cookies and help out with Spanish homework or whatever. I never had to make them do their chores or go to the doctor or whatever.

I think it’s kind of the same thing with guest lectures. Of course the professor you only deal with for an hour is more engaging than the one whose midterms and grading policies you’ve suffered through for two months already. That doesn’t mean our guest speaker wasn’t eloquent and entertaining, but I’m sure the novelty would wear off if we had to take his final.