Work feels like the last day of school before Christmas vacation today. They should just go ahead and put in a copy of "The Borrowers Down Under" or "The Princess Diaries" (with the cat my friend believed to be talking, but was just Hector Elizondo off screen) to keep us occupied, because no one feels like working.

I'm doing some JavaScript work today, making sure scrollbars scroll to the correct location when the web page loads.

Invigorating!

Right now, I'm counting the minutes till I can walk out this door, clean my apartment, and finish wrapping gifts.

Well, isn't that special...

New rule: Never buy wrapping paper from the bargin bin at Burlington Coat Factory.

For one, you'll have to trudge through about a foot of acrylic sweater carnage at your feet to get to the counter, fending off large families who have enlisted their children to pick anything out of your hands that's remotely give-able, from the faux-Parisian notepads you saw for $1 each (carefully making sure that everything was spelled correctly on the cover) to the Nikes with the left lace holes slightly offset from the right.

You'll have to pull yourself away from studying the "Just In" "designer" section, wondering when FUBU made purple ski jackets or when Kenneth Cole experimented with silver lamé...all the while kicking yourself for not taking advantage of the fact that everything is XL, or XXL, or 6XL-Tall.

But once you get to the counter, resist the urge to buy that wrapping paper. You won't look too hard at it and, later, after you've gone through the ordeal of your debit card not working at the counter and being tsk-ed by an elderly couple, you'll notice that it says "Feliz Navidad." All over. And something else that you hope translates to "celebrate" or "merry."

If you're like me, you'll laugh and hope that your significant other will look at it as some sort of whimsical gesture, especially since he knows spanish a whole lot better than you do.

Take a sip of tea, turn up the volume while watching an overly-serious rerun of "The West Wing" and make those presents bilingual.

So, maybe the new rule should be:

Always buy wrapping paper at Burlington Coat Factory. Never look back.

Despite the repeated asthma when I wake up (where's the Will Rogers Institute when I need them?), I had a lovely morning eating breakfast with Justin and watching the "Only Thailand" fake commercial on SNL, with Ben Affleck in a kimono and Kelly Ripa wielding a butcher knife. Random, yes. Hard to explain, yes. But I haven't laughed like that at a fake commercial since "Action Cats" or "Oops, I Crapped My Pants."

It must have been the hilarity that made me forget to comb my hair. Justin must have thought I was going for a punk-like look, or maybe homeless-chic, because, five minutes before I got to work, I looked in my rearview mirror and jumped in shock--every bit of my hair was sticking straight up, held in place by a spray-in conditioner that I used in a rush to get out of the bathroom.

I ran into the bathroom at work and threw some water up there, to little or no avail.

I must look this disheveled every day, because no one at work has said a thing. =)

While I couldn't disagree more with so much of his platform, I couldn't agree more with Time Magazine's choice of President George W. Bush as Person of the Year. His words, his actions--even his persona--dominated so much of 2004 and how Americans viewed themselves and each other, there's really no other choice for a defining figure of the year.

I do have to chuckle a little about the fact that President Bush garnered this honor after the change over to the more politically-correct "Person of the Year," rather than the traditional "Man of the Year." Maybe soon we'll see a ban on the use of the word "Person" in that context, redefining "of the Year" awards to be "for a man and a woman" only...