Oh dear, I've been terrible, haven't I? Haven't posted for at least a week, and there's no real excuse for it except that I've been so busy at work, and when I haven't been busy at work, I've been busy getting to work—and from work, come to think of it—because I have a two-hour commute these days (hour and a half if I'm lucky), and that seems to truncate the days an awful lot. Other things I've neglected recently include my email, my eyebrows, my roots, the towering pile of overdue library books on my bedside table, and the state of my house in general.

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When we moved into this house in June 2010, I remember saying—in the self-assured way that new homeowners have of saying things like this—"it's all going to be done by Christmas."

Oh, self. Oh, sweet, idiotic self. I'd roll my eyes skyward right now if they weren't already stuck from rolling them every time I've remembered saying it. 

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I know I've talked about it before, but I am super enamoured with Zumba. What's not to love? It's a solid hour of high-impact jumping-around-like-an-idiot—the sort of thing that used to be called aerobics, before aerobics became not very cool anymore—and it has so far managed to be the only physical activity about which I haven't thought, a few minutes prior to doing it, "oh god, I don't want to do this." 

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One of the things that never fails to crack me up is remembering a conversation my brother Luke once had with a customer service representative. When she asked him how he was doing, in that polite but rote way customer service representatives have of asking you things, he somehow got supremely flustered—in what I can only imagine was the sort of bumbling Englishman stereotype for which we have good old Hugh Grant to thank—and ended up conflating "not so bad" and "pretty well." 

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I hope you're ready for something gross and kind of disturbing because I'm about to take that old adage about not airing your dirty laundry and dropkick it into the great beyond. I am about to literally air my dirty laundry, is what I'm saying. It's not going to be pretty, but it is going to be satisfying—and maybe it'll even be helpful. 

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If I ever have the time and the inclination, one of the things I think I could make a pretty kickass stab at writing is a hard-hitting dissertation examining the opening statements made by each and every one of the women in the Real Housewives franchise.

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I've worked behind pub counters in touristy parts of London, for toupéed men in gropey bars, and—for the summer between my first and second years in college, mostly because they were the only store to call me back after I'd carpet-bombed the mall with applications—for the local Abercrombie & Fitch, where my superlative skills in sweater-folding were eclipsed only by my impressive ability to smile politely as bored 15-year-olds charged $500 in whiskered denim to Daddy's American Express without so much as removing the straw for the TCBY Frappé&nbs

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I am recapping, excruciatingly slowly, the two-week trip we took to South Africa last year. Here is part one, about our layover in Paris; here is part two, about Cape Town; here is part three, about Cape Point and the penguins of Boulders Beach; here is part four, about wine tasting and stroking a baby cheetah in Stellenbosch; here is part five about shark-diving in Gansbaai; and here is part six about the train from Cape Town to Johannesburg. Expect me to be finished with this sometime in 2014.

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I'm feeling a little sorry for myself because I can't find my glasses. Do you know how disorienting it is not to be able to find your glasses?

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Look, sometimes I want to get all deep and serious with my complicated feelings about the inevitable passage of time, and sometimes I just want to talk about nail polish, if that's okay with you. Today is a nail polish day and I have some important, pressing news about it: I have found the perfect one.

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