because we all have a morbid streak

I put down the storm window in my bedroom tonight, finally. I'd been standing at my dresser and wondering about the arctic chill circling my ankles, and I tracked it to the window. No wonder it's been so cold in there (aside from the dysfunctional radiator). Yeah, I'm bright. How long have I lived in New England? (Eleven and a half years.) You're a slow learner, my mom would say, and she'd be right. Tonight should be a bit warmer.

Still, this is an old building, and cold air seeps in anyway. Combine that with my tendency to feel cold all the time + the way my hands get icy cold at room temperature = serious and possibly neurotic attachment to my space heater. It's a heavy metal radiator on wheels. I just turned it on and pulled it up next to me. It's not soft and fuzzy like Cricket, but then again, it doesn't bite.

"No journal entry from you lately," my mother mentioned on the phone earlier. Yeah, well. I just don't really have any news, I told her. And there you have it.

Boston is cold and wet and slushy. The rain sounds half-frozen when it hits my air conditioner. (The air conditioner was here when I arrived and shall be here when I leave. It's pretty close to permanently installed with a few serious layers of duct tape.) The rest of the week is forecast to be cold and wet and slushy. I'm dreaming of a wet Christmas.

I've been hibernating and watching videos, movies and gymnastics. I don't have cable, so Tony, being an extraordinarily kind and generous individual with cable, taped the World Gymnastics Championships team finals off ESPN for me. (Anyone want to tape the all-around competition for me? It's being re-run on ESPN on December 30 at 1:00pm EST. I'll pay costs and say nice things about you in my journal.)

I downloaded a video of a gymnast crashing off uneven bars. It's a really awful fall. She loses her grip on the high bar and lands with her chest and chin on the mat and her back arched. Her legs whip back and her feet hit her head. When she stops bouncing, she rolls onto her side and starts gasping for air. It's morbid, but I watched it anyway.

The gymnast in that video (Kerri Strug, actually) was lucky. She sprained and wrenched everything in her back, but nothing was broken, and she went back to gymnastics after a few months of recuperation. (The Russian girl I mentioned a few weeks ago who landed on her head training a vault is walking again, by the way. Her gymnastics career is over, though.) I added the video to the other crash videos I have. Yes, I have a folder labeled Crashes.

The internet is an amazing buffet for an information junkie. I went through a Weird Videos phase. I saw car crashes and fights and someone getting kicked down a flight of bleachers head-first (thank you, Shawn, for sending me that little gem). Then I saw the Budd Dwyer video (link is to article, not video). I think that one cured me of the hard stuff. Someone told me, "There are some things you can see that you can never unsee." And he's right. Enough of that. I'll stick to gymnastics crashes.

And enough of my rambling. I've been swapping night for day and staying up too late and generally not getting with the program. Your holiday cards may be slightly delayed, but hey, I'm Jewish, Christmas isn't my deadline. The New Year is my deadline. It's also my deadline for getting my site live; Julie bet me I wouldn't make it, and while we didn't exactly establish what's at stake, I think it's safe to assume she'll gleefully shred me in her journal if I fail.