I�m glad it�s cloudy today.

Happy birthday, Billy Joel! I met him at one of his concerts at Nassau Coliseum when I was in eighth grade, fully sporting a fresh perm (remember perm smell?) and an awful bloused brown bomber jacket. He was my height. Christy Brinkley breezed past with her long flowing blonde mane and a green velvet beret. Lovely. Debbie Gibson (she wasn�t Debra yet), being from Long Island, got on stage to play piano with Billy and the audience booed the living daylights out of her. I felt bad for her but sneered along with the rest of them and was probably even wearing Electric Youth perfume at the same time. Remember that? And Exclamation? Those were my favorite scents for awhile. Electric Youth was the perfect teenage sweet pink elixir and I always prayed no one would ask me what I was wearing because I was an embarrassed closet Debbie Gibson fan. Of course every chance I got I would make tapes of myself singing �I Get Lost In Your Eyes� on my sister�s karaoke machine. Another funny thing about Debbie Gibson and my lurid past is that when I was that age my Dad still had to approve all of my music and he even managed to find something questionable on the first Debbie album I got. It was a song called �Fallen Angel,� and well, being Catholic, he had some kind of problem with that, you know, it had to be evil or something. I can still remember the lyrics underlined in his telltale red pencil. As I got a little older I started hiding the music, as everyone does. I always got nervous someone would find the George Michael �I Want Your Sex� record in the closet. Then when I was in depresso high school I wore black and ached to The Cure and The Smiths and wrote down lyrics on any surface that pen would take to and drew a depresso picture of a girl and around her wrote the lyrics to �There is a Light that Never Goes Out." Here they are:

Take me out tonight

Where there�s music and there�s people who are young and alive

Driving in your car I never never want to go home

Because I haven�t got one anymore

Take me out tonight

Because I want to see people and I want to see lights

Driving in your car oh please don�t drop me home

Because it�s not my home it�s their home

And I�m welcome no more

And if a double decker bus crashes into us

To die by your side what a heavenly way to die

And if a ten ton truck kills the both of us

To die by your side oh the pleasure, the privilege is mine

Take me out tonight

Oh take me anywhere, I don�t care

And in the darkened underpass

I thought, Oh God, my chance has come at last

But a strange fear gripped me and I just couldn�t ask

Take me out tonight

Oh take me anywhere, I don�t care

Just driving in your car I never never want to go home

Because I haven�t got one, I haven�t got one

And if a double decker but crashes into us

To die by your side what a heavenly way to die

And if a ten ton truck kills the both of us

To die by your side oh the pleasure, the privilege is mine

There is a light that never goes out

There is a light that never goes out

Well one day my Mom found it, which wasn�t too difficult considering it was in clear view hanging on my wall next to my bed. As I said before, I ached. Now because it was The Smiths I had given them their credit at the bottom of my little drawing and if you can believe it, my Mom was terribly concerned because my sister and brother-in-law's last name is Smith and she thought her little black-wearing daughter was on drugs and plotting some odd suicide-pact thing for my sister and brother-in-law because the lyrics had all been written out with "-The Smiths" at the end of it, as if to say these words were my secret wish for the demise of sister and husband. It was crazy weird. Anyway, she brought my little creation to my Dad who then questioned me about it, but in this really diabolical way, and said, �read it out loud.� And I wouldn�t do it because even I knew, for God�s sake, context is everything and to read those lyrics out loud in my sixteen year old girl voice would just be ridiculous and Morrissey�s plaintive British voice was the whole point. So instead of reading it out loud I was heavy-handedly persuaded to rip it to bits and throw it away in my Mom�s marbled brown plastic bathroom waste paper basket. Years earlier my Dad found my sister�s sheet music to Billy Joel�s �Captain Jack� and finding unacceptable the chorus lyric �Captain Jack will get you high tonight and take you to your special island� ripped it up and scattered the bits all over the piano and bench.

The other day Brent and I were going through my old records, including many 45�s that I acquired from my sisters and it seems no matter how many times I go through them I always find something new. We put on Journey �Faithfully� and slow danced school dance style and laughed.

Macauley Culkin has agoraphobia. So does my aunt.

Great. One of the cats is vomiting. So much for my pristinely clean kitchen. Well, it wasn�t really pristine. I still have to take the swiffer wet to the floor.

Ew. For some reason the bottle of water I just opened smells like soy sauce.

Word of the Day:

sang-froid, also sangfroid sang-FRWAH, noun:

Freedom from agitation or excitement of mind; coolness in trying circumstances; calmness.

The Treasury Secretary's sang-froid in moments of crisis.

--"Keeping the Boom From Busting," [1]New York Times, July 19, 1998

Both men were mightily impressed by the calmness of the Americans on board, particularly among the women. "I had, during my sojourn in America," Beaumont said later, "a thousand occasions to see the sang-froid of the American."

--Michael Kammen, "Wrecked on the Fourth of July," [2]New York Times, July 6, 1997

Gaviria knew Alberto as an impulsive but cordial man capable of maintaining his sangfroid under the most stressful circumstances.

--Gabriel Garcia Marquez, [3]News of a Kidnapping

Sang-froid is from the French; it literally means "cold blood" (sang, "blood" + froid, "cold").