The streetlights climbed slowly up my hood, over my windshield, and down the back of my car. Slowly, because, for once, I was driving slowly. I can't remember the last time I drove aimlessly through town, zigzagging, U-turning, taking my time. Probably because I'm perpetually busy (or something like that), because I like having a destination, because I'm always in the spaces between, running late and catching up, because I think it's an irresponsible waste of fuel.

Tonight, though, I climbed into my car alone, rolled the windows down, and drove. I drove down streets that I haven't been down in years; the people I once knew there moved long ago, or my apartment changed, or my job. I again saw the things whose details had disappeared, my memory having tilted the streets and the distances between buildings. Raleigh was French: familiar, but growing increasingly distant each day without practice.

The strangest part was that when I had to make my first decision (right or left?), I had no idea where to begin. I could only think of the streets surrounding my parents' town, from high school afternoons of flying down back roads that had more cattle than traffic lights. But I then I remembered destination wasn't the purpose. Aimlessness was the purpose, which might sound like an oxymoron, but it actually makes sense.

He works in my building and strikes up conversations with me whenever he sees me. Actually, I think he strikes up conversations with everybody, but I can't be sure. Tall and lean with a soft southern drawl, maybe early 40s, he usually wears jeans and a big, floppy hat, and appears to spend most of his time outside or by the snack machines chatting, commenting, teasing, telling jokes. He tells me about his daughter or his young, wild days, his dream of living in Nashville, old jobs, country singers, tricks he likes to play on people. I'm not sure what he likes about talking to me, since I usually do more absorbing than sharing. Maybe all audiences are equal, as long as they're polite.

Today he stopped me while on my way to get a drink.

Him: It feels like summer out there. It's gonna git cold again this weekend. Next weekend I'm goin to the Grand Ole Opry. You ever seen that on TV?

Me: No, I haven't.

Him: Well, it's real...oooh, my leg's gittin hot. [He steps away and starts patting his pockets.]

Me: Yeah? [I shuffle off to get my drink, wondering how to take that.]

Moments later, he explained that he had a lighter and a battery in the same pocket, causing his leg to heat up, which inspired not one, but two stories about how he detonated fireworks in a car he was sitting in.

Him: Had I not had my wallet in my back pocket, I woulda hurt my rear end real bad. And I couldn't hear for two weeks after that.

This is where I was supposed to insert my own fireworks horror story, but I don't have one.

I didn't watch the address, though I know I should've. I just didn't want to hear any more lies or justifications or the words "'Mare-can" or "terra," or anyone telling me after it was over that he looked "presidential" and that his approval rating is an alarming 99 percent and that we're doing the right thing for the good of humanity everywhere. But I should've watched it, because now I can't comment; instead I must rely on summaries and commentaries, rather than relying on my own head. And isn't that the main problem with this country?

I find it disturbing that I can no longer remember what I put in the big, black plastic bags yesterday, the bags that will soon be delivered to a local thrift store, dumped out and sorted out, their contents put on hangers and stored next to foreign blouses with ruffly collars and double-knit pants that smell like mothballs.

I promised my mom I'd help her get rid of some of my old stuff, now that I'm able to do that to some extent. So yesterday I drove down to Buies Creek and made piles: clothes to give away, clothes to keep at my parents' house just in case I ever want to wear them again, clothes to take back to Raleigh, and clothes that maybe my mom will want to wear. Together, the last three piles (which are all some form of 'keep,' I realize) outweighed the first pile, of course, but progress was made. That's right, two big bags of progress.

Inside those two bags are garments that give me a pang of recollection, a feeling I've grown used to being able to produce with a peek inside my old closet. Ha! I remember wearing that. Man, that's hideous! But that moment of nostalgia shouldn't outweigh some sensible organization or the necessary return of those '80s gems back in circulation. I know kids today are dying for a white cotton newsboy hat, a Swatch visor, and some frighteningly short dresses...right? I know that being able to locate items in pictures I see from long ago does not connect me with the past, and, contrary to my belief as a child, any children I might have will very likely not want most of the crap I've been so busy squirreling away.

I just want to remember what it was that I casually discarded yesterday. All I can recall right now are those hats and dresses and some cheap, plastic belts that now only fit around a thigh. I'm not going to need that stuff, am I?

According to an advertising supplement in today's paper, this year Target is selling novelty valentine gifts: a 0.5-oz. autographed heart filled with candy, a 0.75-oz. milk chocolate rose, a 7-oz. giant Hershey's Kiss, and a 2-oz. candy-filled SUV.

The top story on the local news tonight was about a goat in a distant county that got attacked by a wild dog, and about a llama who is able to protect this herd of goats against future attacks by acting as a scarecrow. After spending ten minutes tallying up the number of offspring the dead goat might've had, had she lived, and projecting how much money those goats might have been worth, the news went on to cover how a local psychic "got on the wrong side of the law" and how a custody battle in Florida is "almost like a soap opera!"

Tomorrow I'm going to try to avoid input that causes such emotional confusion that I don't know whether to laugh or become angry- frustrated-depressed. (Usually I end up doing all of the above.) Tomorrow I'm going to limit myself to news that is depressing in the most thorough sense, in substance rather than absence. It won't even occur to me to laugh.

I pedaled around my part of Raleigh for the last five hours, acquiring a green bowling ball bag, a bell for my bike that resembles a beehive, and a necklace with a green chicken feather attached to it, along with a few other less spectacular items. Next I'm going to burn the roof of my mouth on lasagna because I'll be in a hurry, rushing to a friend's house to watch a documentary (rushing there only to sit down, heart still quick), up again as soon as it's over to make it to the club to hear Richard and Scott and Suran play. And an after party? Right now I hope not. Somehow I've managed to stuff my day full again; only the beginning was calm and paced and lazy, when I woke up to nothing (no alarm, no music, no phone), sat cross-legged on the couch and read Vietnam propaganda from 1961 with a bowl of Rice Krispies in my lap. The sun shone through the window like a spotlight on my cat, and the phone and house were noiseless. Damn, my time is up.

For some reason, whenever I pour the mystery dust into my mug to "make" hot chocolate, my brain short circuits and tells my body to fill the mug up to the top with that pretty brown powder, as if my mug is some sort of measuring cup and my goal is to smooth it off at the top. Only when the mug is three-fourths full do I realize that I'm making a horrible mistake and I stop pouring. I'm left, then, with a mug full of dark sugar punctuated with little cubes of white sugar, faced with the decision whether to pour the mug's contents back into the container, pour it into the trash, or pour a small amount of hot water on top of it and stir for an extra minute or two. I swear I don't do it on purpose, but it does taste surprisingly good that way.

I guess I should mention that lisawhiteman.com was selected as a finalist in the SXSW website competition. I didn't expect to be a finalist at all, but especially not in the "grrl site" category, as I'd submitted my site underneath the "weblog" umbrella. I'm certainly not complaining...just feeling a little perplexed/surprised/flattered. And happy to be going to Austin for the first time, where I will no doubt recognize people I see in my computer and have no idea what to say to them.

***

Filling up my gas tank, getting groceries, roaming around my office building in order to figure out where someone's desk is—all things I hate doing. Today it was groceries, tired and hungry. If I go to one store in particular, I have the luxury of walking down the aisles like a zombie, knocking boxes of food from their neat little rows into my chaotic cart, bagging the same fruits and vegetables week after week, picking out the same variety of yogurt—strawberry, blueberry, mixed berry, 1, 2, 3—Diet Coke: check, cheese: check, where did they move the Star Crunch? I don't have to think much because little ever changes. Occasionally I'll buy a peach instead of an apple, an orange pepper in place of a red, but I'm probably not doing enough creative shopping.

Today, however, I discovered a new section; I guess I've known it was there all along, but I never really paid much attention to it. It never occurred to me that anything good could be kept in those rows of plastic tubs, the ones accompanied by little scoops that sit in labeled cradles, waiting to shovel orzo or cereal or nuts. That's right: orzo! nuts! yogurt-covered raisins! Why didn't anyone tell me about the plastic tub section before? Has it really always been there?

When I got home, I discovered that my cat Leeches, who, like me, didn't care for last night's trout, also likes yogurt-covered raisins.

Not only did my brother listen to Top 40 religiously every week, he made detailed lists of each song and artist, notebooks full of statistical information waiting to be calculated, waiting to reveal how long Borderline had been at Number 1, and the speed with which King of Pain slipped down the charts. And he recorded. Not all of the songs, of course, but the new ones he approved of, with maybe a long-distance dedication or two thrown in.

Combined with a weekly dose of Solid Gold, the pull was too strong for me, and I began listening, too, picking out favorite songs, rooting for their success, and sometimes even composing my own awkward dances to their seductive beats. Before long we were recording joint-compilations, songs chopped off at the beginnings thanks to a windy DJ or a tardy hand, sloppily blended with commercials at the ends.

In between the songs my brother and I would talk; he would recite Bob and Doug skits, often referring to me as Doug, attempting to rope me in as his partner. I wasn't very good at it. I didn't know the lines—in fact I didn't have anything at all to say—though that didn't deter me from blathering on. If I couldn't think of anything to talk about, my fallback was usually making sound effects: producing a noise (such as a whistle) in one microphone and carrying it to the other, so that the headphones listener would get a special treat. Again and again and again.

Homemade commercials about breath deodorant and toilet paper. Fake news reports. An interview with Ronald Reagan. By our third album, we got tired or bored or older, and stopped including so much commentary and focused more on early '80s pop.

So I'm in the process of preserving these embarrassing relics on CD, because I just acquired the capability, and because I like to do that sort of thing, despite the fact that I don't want anyone to hear them and that I'd like to remember my childhood mind as being less obnoxious than the tapes suggest. So far I've recorded two tapes, and today I made the CD covers, incorporating the original tape covers my brother designed. He pretty obviously liked The Police at the time.

Today Martin and I went to a recycling center, to get rid of the stuff that isn't regularly picked up at the house, to get rid of the stuff that's been accumulating for months: magazines, newspapers, and boxes. Today Martin and I went to a recycling center and possibly brought more home than we left there.

After discovering a magazine bin that had a top layer of publications from the late '50s and early '60s, we began sifting through, collecting, and stacking. Unnatural colors, perky fashion, gelled male hair and flipped-up ends. Jeans: $2.98. "New" models of cars and refrigerators, long-retired fonts and lingo. Cigarette and medicine ads with no warnings or listed ingredients. In-depth articles about "red" China, the desegregation of U.S. schools, how the women of Rio "flower" early, and Vietnam. Covers with an alive Marilyn Monroe, John F. Kennedy, Winston Churchill.

I'm guessing these magazines were tossed out with the death of their owner, the person who browsed through them when they were brand new. (Which puts a new mortality angle on my own pack-rat tendencies... Will someone throw these out again when I die? I hope it doesn't come to that.)

So, while everyone else walked away from the bins empty-handed, we headed back to the car with our arms full. I plan to read the articles and make tape/CD covers from the ads, so, no, it isn't really clutter.

My hair is wavy and tangled from the weather, and my shoes are wet inside and out, as is my cell phone, which, when I last checked, wasn't working.

Six of us met for coffee around 11:00 this morning, fogging up the glass front of Cup a Joe with hot coffee breath, turning the normally transparent window into an opaque cloud. By 12:00 we were strategically placing our cars at two different points, two miles apart from each other, and proceeded to walk from one car to the other together, along with 500 (so I was told) strangers. A large percentage of the people wore pageant-like banners labeled with the names of various countries and carried full-sized corresponding multinational flags, made of colorful wet nylon that whipped around in the wind and occasionally slapped me in the head.

Punks, college kids, teenagers, elementary schoolers, middle-aged and seniors; dreadlocks, afros, and permed white hair. A few chants, some singing. I stayed quiet and jumped around to different parts of the queue, snapping quick pictures of i-don't-know-what, the eyepiece of my camera also a victim of fog. By the time we got to the finish line, my pants, socks and gloves were reservoirs for much of the water that had fallen out of the sky.

1:30. Drying out, a heap of raincoats piled on the floor; musicians, speakers, and poets, also on the floor. I wasn't surprised to find that I liked the speakers the most, who were skeptical, hopeful, and rightfully frustrated. I laughed and clapped and got warm, relieved to discover that there are more than I expected in support of alternatives to war. I left around 4:00, contributing my signature to a couple petitions on my way out the door. It's now after 6:00, raining harder, and my cell phone and I are still trying to recover. Still cold, slightly more optimistic.

My downstairs neighbors are stomping around in steel-toed boots, slamming doors and cackling, yelling "What I want right now is Chowda!" over and over again in a forced Boston accent. The music hasn't started yet, but I'm certain it will at any moment.

I'm spending my evening at home alone, something I was looking forward to, but, now that it's here, I'm feeling too tired and deflated to really enjoy it. A long busy week, a party last night for Stef's birthday at which I stayed unwisely late, yesterday's long and involved political conversations that left me hollow and frustrated, and, of course, other things. Aha! The music just started. It would've been nice to have been wrong about that.

Just rode down to the record store to freeze my bare ears, pick up a requested CD for a friend, and, most importantly, test my new-old bike. Did I mention that it's green and silver? And that might not even be its nicest feature. Of course while I was in the store, I experienced a new breed of worry, my bike sitting U-locked and alone, its detachable bird-like seat attractive and unprotected. I've never had a bike—or a car for that matter—that anyone ever wanted to steal. I don't know if anyone wants this one, either—it's a few years old, with sporadic scratches and mismatched grips—but it feels vulnerable, I guess because I like it so much.

I need to learn to walk in a record store without buying a CD. Did I make a resolution pertaining to that? I can't remember.

Ah, nothing like listening to Pogo in Togo on the way to work and mindlessly singing along with the lyrics to make one realize that the head is full of inane garbage. At work, while copyediting twelfth grade history test questions, I was reminded that there's lots of worthwhile information in there, too. If I could make an inane-worthwhile pie chart of my brain, I wonder what it would look like. But I suppose that's subjective.

I just woke up from a four-hour nap. Mexican food always makes me sleepy.

She brought her new video camera over, and, after we made tall sandwiches including slices of her first avocado, we watched quiet videos of snow and birds on the pop-out screen, digits clicking by in the top corner. Then I took over, roaming through the house, pointing the camera at toys and cats and a monster head that groaned when his eye was pulled out, and at that bat that hangs in the living room, who flaps and squeaks when you flip his switch, and, oh, that Blacula poster in the hallway, and that inflatable grasshopper on top of the kitchen cabinets! Look! If you hold my cat Leeches up and stretch her out, she spans the width of the door frame! I was only able to quit when the battery was dead.

We also scanned wedding pictures—tiny, faded images in which she and my dad look young and nervous and sort-of unreal, the way all dated pictures appear to me: fascinating, yet remote. We were turning those digital, too, just as I had my house. Attempting to preserve.

A used bike, half the price of a new one, gears broken (but cheaply fixed), shiny green with stray scratches, with the character of an old car: a little worn, but an appealing shape, and a history. No warranty, and a suspect "restocking" fee. Sold in a pawn shop by a used-car salesman, slicked-back hair and thin moustache, a fat tie that doesn't quite reach his belt for his belly, whose young employee tried to put air in the tires via a screw in the brake pads.

A new bike, twice the price of a used one, in perfect health, shiny and black, with the character of a new pair of sneakers: bright and obvious and virgin. A generous warranty and a year of free tune-ups. Sold in a specialty shop by a man in a strange pair of glasses who readily responded to questions with thorough, straightforward answers, and who, in an odd moment, confessed that he sizes up his customers and is often wrong.

I bought the used bike. And last night—after returning a gift, eating in a restaurant with an incomprehensible menu, scanning my parents' wedding pictures, visiting with old friends, and taking pictures of a friend's band (bumping my way to the front and squatting above spilled beer and sneaking to different sides of the stage, curling around deafening speakers)—I sat on the floor and polished my new bike with an old sock. I think I did the right thing.

Strangers are good. Friends are good. It's the people in between. I only have a problem with them because of the small-talk that usually comes with them—I'm no good at it, and sometimes it seems so ceremoniously false and forced that it makes me want to laugh, rather than keep up the charade that we really are interested in hearing that the other person is most definitely "fine." Sometimes I want to sit on the steps outside of my office building and do nothing more than think and absorb the weather, maybe watch. But it's inevitable that one of the in-betweens passes by, and rather than being allowed to hang over everything like a cloud, I'm asked to comment, to respond to a comment, to smile and explain what I'm doing outside, and it's really true what they say about people talking about the weather. But then it would be rude for neither of us to acknowledge the other, even if the only exchange is an unanswered 'sup.

For the record: I'm not anti-social and I usually like meeting interesting people, and, sometimes, exchanging awe over the news or the weather with an unfamiliar peer is simply a nice thing to do. But only sometimes.

The three of us moaned and swore at each other, complained about our cards, panicked and celebrated, while Scott remained stoic, true to his claim that he wasn't going to get emotional about a board game. He seemed to barely notice when I accidentally caused him to fall into a pit, inadvertently killing him. The rest of us were enjoying some strange drive borne of manufactured competition, vengeance, and the pursuit of a meaningless goal. It's odd that for recreation we shoot our friends, push them into pits, get in their way, and kill them, finding such satisfaction in victory. In my defense, though, I should say that I'm a pretty peaceful player, that I rarely use my weapons, that I like to slip into the win quietly and unnoticed.

After a brief bout of paranoia, I think I can safely say that CD man does not visit this site. I haven't spoken with him, but he's flashed me a couple of friendly grins, not the sort he'd give if he were aware I'd just confessed my true feelings about his CD to everyone but him.

I drew a stick figure with a circle somewhere around the groin area, and my partner (correctly) guessed "appendix." I drew a cube next to a stick figure, and my partner knew it was supposed to be "blockhead." Before I even connected the stick figures with the identical bows in their heads, my partner blurted out, "siamese twins!" I'm pretty sure that by the end of the game, everyone at the table not-so-secretly hated us.

That was last night. Tonight I slept away my evening, leftovers on the stove, contacts in, lights on, and book open. Looks like Resolution number 1 is going to see some resistence as well.

Doh! Resolution number 9, lying broken on the floor. About two weeks ago, a stranger who works in my building handed me a CD of his friend's rockabilly band. Why he wanted me to hear it, I have no idea. It actually took me a couple days to follow orders, but when I finally did, I discovered that yes! I hated it. Later that day, after he left work, I quietly placed it on his seat with a polite but non-revealing thank-you note stuck to it, and promptly forgot about the exchange, until just now, when he came up to my desk and asked the dreaded question. Well, how did you like it?

I'd been all prepared to say something along the lines of oh, it's not really my thing, but thanks for loaning it to me, but he caught me completely off-guard, so that when I opened my mouth, the words uh, yeah, it was alright, yeah, pretty good came out. He said he'd bring me another CD by the same band for me to hear later. As soon as he walked away, I whispered to myself over and over: be more honest, be more honest. Well, I suppose it is only January 7th, and if resolutions were so easy to adopt, there'd be no need of going to the trouble of making a pledge to do so. I'm sure I'll get another chance to exercise my new brutal honesty very soon. Perhaps with the next CD he loans me…?

The back corner of my closet is empty for the first time in years, the negatives to all the pictures I've ever taken are in labeled sleeves, and I've finally gotten rid of long-expired resumes and cover letters. The drive to organize and throw out crept into me sometime after lunch and is only starting to die now, hours later, sneaking back out again with each yawn.

While sifting through one particular mound of chaos, I came across some old writing and instantly noticed how much more jagged and honest and cryptic it is, compared to what I post here. Some of it seems much more daring, much better; but, then again, it's sitting in folded piles on a shelf, mostly unread, and occasionally even I have a hard time discerning exactly what it was I meant. Maybe that's why I like it—because it forces me to revisit moments I'd forgotten, and because it has turned into a riddle only I can solve. But perhaps that makes it irrelevant to everyone else.

All of it was a strange coincidence, really. He was in the airport at the same time I was (although neither of us had planned it that way), but I never saw him. He was leaving, and I was picking up a friend. They met at the gate while I paced beneath them, searching.

***

I took four rolls of film today, of a wealthy semi-local mayor (a friendly guy who liked to pose with his cell phone and chuckle while quoting the Emancipation Proclamation), of antiques (heavy wooden furniture, porcelain dolls and costume jewelry), and of camera-shy kids (who either stared blankly at my camera even though their mothers suggested they look away, or who ran and clung to giant familiar legs, burying their faces in safe thighs, and then stealthily checking to see whether I'd disappeared).

Sometimes I wish I could be invisible.

It's slowly dissolving into noisy drips of water off the corners of houses and the tips of icicles, and with it dissolves the guiltless time to sit at home pasting pictures in books and watching marathons of movie trailers, excuses to invite friends over to play board games, and the incentive to walk to the neighborhood store instead of driving there. My car is still immobile, and the earth is still white, but the footsteps that violently crushed the smooth surface of the snow are no longer being filled in, and the black shingled rooftops are beginning to undress. Maybe by the time the last of it melts, I'll be well again, now that I've missed sledding and snowman-building invitations and two days of work.

I haven't been completely homebound, though. Last night I stomped through knee-deep drifts at the train tracks and fed chocolate to a hungry opossum who met me there. I molded one or two pitiful crumbly snowballs, and I walked to the store with Martin in search of ingredients for homemade soup. Today I feel up for more, now that I have relearned how to dress for this weather, and now that the sun is out.

I can say, with relative certainty, that there's no milk or bread at the local grocery stores, no shovels left on the racks at Home Depot, no movies to be rented at Blockbuster, and no kids sitting in school. Why? Because there's snow everywhere, and it's North Carolina. Lucky for me, I can walk everywhere I need to go, except for work.

Of course I'm still sick, so I'd probably be home anyway. Yesterday evening, around the time the snow was starting to fall, I tried to venture out, but found standing and walking around really exhausting. I'd gone to a used bike shop full of animals, and, while I was squatting to pet an orange cat, I noticed a large, green parrot staring at me from between two shelves. When I looked up at him, he yelled "Cracker!" at me, which was nice. I spent the majority of the rest of the evening inside, swallowing vitamins, eating pasta, and watching A Time for Drunken Horses, a movie that'll make you feel guilty for even having the resources to watch it, sitting there lazily with a full belly, wrapped up in a blanket, in a warm room, the outside glowing with white frost.

So I woke up in my living room yesterday morning (still wearing the uncomfortable clothes from the night before), laying across the two-person couch, my shoeless feet hanging off the end, my head next to the pillow, and a cat on either side of me. The night before, I ended up going to Stef's for a modest gathering that turned out to be just the right size. And I laughed just when the ball dropped, which is potentially a good sign for the new year.

And, yes, that sickness did turn into something and I'm sitting at home when I should be at work, which brings me to my (abridged) list of resolutions, starting with health:

1. Go to bed earlier/get more regular sleep.

2. Get in shape.

3. Try to maintain a healthy diet, and maybe learn to like a few more vegetables.

4. Save money.

5. Read more (starting with the book Eric just gave me, The Trial of Henry Kissinger).

6. Take more classes. Practice things I've taken classes for in the past (such as guitar, German, photography, etc.).

7. Do more professional writing. (If they let me.)

8. Spend more time alone.

9. Be honest with people, even if it means hurting their feelings. (Also: Be more considerate.)

10. Do more volunteer work/get politically involved.

11. Avoid spending money at the major corporations; support small businesses.

12. Travel more, and go camping more often.

13. Detach myself from my old stuff (: learn to throw things away).