I’m a night owl, and generally function far more effectively between 10pm and 8am than I do during “normal” working hours. In fact, I’ll get more done during one all-nighter than I did the previous 5 working days. This may simply be a sign of my hummingbird-like attention span, or it might mean that I’m supposed to be nocturnal and should just go with it.

But either way, one 48-hour day a week is pretty much the limit if I’m going to be at all productive. So why, why, why am I staring at my laptop and a long list of to-do’s at 1:30am with only one night of sleep under my belt since the last time I was in this position?

At least this time the thermostat is working.

So! I’m taking a quick break from the drudgery to blog, because I love to blog and because you love it when I blog. So let’s begin with this:

Ah Brett Favre, when will you finally retire? Still sexy though, still damn sexy. Ah yeah.

Also decidedly sexy is the great guru of calm, Cesar Milan. Yes, it’s true, I’ve got a crush on the Dog Whisperer. What can I say? Any man who can tame a snarling Rottweiler, convince a dippy spoiled rich chick that she needs to stop buying her Pomeranian (named Prada, I’m not kidding) Gucci sweaters and Evian, and still sound just as smooth as Antonio Banderas as Puss-in-Boots gets my vote.

Except for two things… One, he isn’t the original Dog Whisperer – Paul Owens is. But since Mr Owens lacks the sex appeal and Southern California clientele, I guess he got the boot. And the second thing is – well, it’s the Landrollers.

I can’t decide if they’re seriously, seriously dorky, or if I want a pair.

Speaking of dogs, it has recently been discovered that my puggle is actually part mogwai and part gremlin. Interchangeably. On her own whims.

Yeah. Just like that.

She’s frickin’ adorable though, honestly. No matter how many times she craps on the floor, pees on the couch, or refuses to come when I tell her (oh Cesar, where are you when I need you??), I can’t help but be completely in love with her. The vet says she weighs 12lbs and is almost fully grown – I swear she’s at least 15lbs, but I’d be thrilled if she stays this small! Much easier to carry up the stairs.

I love technology. It lets me show everyone how frickin’ adorable my puppy really is. (If you can’t link to that for some reason, try this. I promise it’s worth it.)

On a down note, I am still in shock over the death of Heath Ledger. I’m not a star-chaser, and I generally think people who obsess over the lives of Britney and Lindsay and Paris and whatnot are pretty sad. But Heath was really talented, and was one of those people you just don’t expect to lose from the world. I can’t explain it – it’s just that he was young, attractive, successful, and part of my life via his roles in movies that I’ve enjoyed (10 Things I Hate About You, A Knight’s Tale, Candy), and he was someone you’d just never expect to lose in this manner. I can’t decide if I’m glad or not that they’re saying his overdose was accidental. It’s easier for me to identify with someone in his position who was losing their grip on themselves and their reality, someone in the limelight who was deeply lonely (a la Owen Wilson), than to think that he just partied too hard one night and whoops! OD’d. And don’t even get me started on the fact that an Olsen twin was involved. That’s just embarrassing.

Also embarrassing, Tom Cruise. Just in general.

So most of you know I used to live in LA, and while I was in LA, I sang a cappella with the SoCal VoCals, and when I sang with the VoCals, we recorded a few albums with Gabriel Mann. I adore Gabe. He’s a monster in the studio, a brilliant songwriter, and one of those guys who has made being kind of geeky completely hot. Dead sexy.

See what I mean?

I’ve also performed with the lovely and talented Kyler England, another LA resident, and am completely and totally in love with the music of Adrianne. Her EP, boy songs, is one of my favorite albums right now – versions of “Eleanor Rigby,” “I’m on Fire” and “Girlfriend in a Coma” that are just phenomenal. Amazing.

I tell you all this so that you’ll understand how overcome with both excitement and envy I was when I was told that Gabe, Kyler and Adrianne have formed a power trio, The Rescues. They’re touring a bit, they have songs up on their MySpace page, and I’m currently trying to figure out how to get their debut CD. I would have ordered it without hearing a note. The combination of these three is just…good god I’m jealous.

Okay, it’s almost 4am and I’ve got to hit the hay so I can push through tomorrow. I’ve only got a few days left to finish a whole slew of things, and then Adam and I will be on a plane to Budapest. Yes, Budapest. We’re backpacking around Europe for a few weeks, which I’ve always wanted to do and have always managed to not do. So Budapest, Prague, Vienna, Paris, who knows? We’ll wind up in Amsterdam, and then I’m back in time to hit the road for more college touring in February.

I’ll be blogging from overseas, don’t you worry.

A few of my favorite things:

Having my ass rubbed with mint lotion by a man named Klaus
The new Gibson Robot Guitar
Watching Evey drink water out of a Dixie cup

…Realizing that the man named Klaus who was rubbing my ass a few hours ago is not listed on the spa website…

Just scroll down to the video of the “spoiled rotten 15-year old beauty queen”. And brace yourself. I think this might be real.

It has been a wild and crazy weekend my friends, and I confess that I have been riding the procrastination train with a vengeance. Tonight will be an all-nighter, complete with frozen Junior Mints and a pile of Kiera Knightley movies (there’s something about watching Pride and Prejudice as the sun comes up that is oddly satisfying), trying to catch up on my many projects and trying to redeem myself a bit.

But the weekend was well worth it. Friday night was an excursion to The Baton Lounge with Adam and a group of friends and family to see the city’s hottest transvestite review. Now I’m a damn open-minded girl, and I’ve had friends from all walks of life, but I’m still trying to decide what was most disconcerting about the evening: trying to remind myself that the really hot chick onstage shaking her ass in ways I’ve never been able to is actually a guy, or trying not to be grossed out when the largest performer (and I mean large, like to the point where it’s part of her act) came out wearing a skin-tight rhinestone catsuit and a Cher wig circa 1987. Kinda like this, but much, much bigger:

So the next night, you’d think I’d have been good and stayed home, gotten my work done, etc. Which was part of the plan…until it was brought up that a new friend of mine had never been to a strip club. Which, in my opinion, is just unthinkable for someone with the adventurous personality she displays. So Adam, our roommate Dave, and a few other friends loaded her into the car and headed for our favorite south side strip club. I’ll leave the details out to protect the innocent and the not-so-innocent-anymore, but let’s just say that when I fell asleep finally around 5am, it was with many colorful images in my head and the satisfaction of knowing that my friends had a lovely time.

As for the headline of this entry, I feel that there may be those of you out there who see us “rockstars” as some sort of higher beings, blessed with good looks and big brains and unable to make mistakes or say inappropriate things. In case any of you are out there, still believing in the power of celebrity infallibility in spite of Britney’s desperate attempts to prove you wrong, I think it’s my duty to dispel that myth and remind you that we’re just human. A moment from my week:

Adam and his friends have been going to a bar and playing trivia once a week for years. They compete against other teams, answering questions in 5 different categories, and the team that has the most correct answers each week wins the pot, sometimes a few hundred bucks (which, when his team wins, is given to the waitress as a generous tip). There’s one person who runs the show each week, asking the questions over a PA system, giving multiple choice answers, and then announcing the correct answers and the winners at the end of the night.

Sounds simple enough, right? Well, the girl who used to run the trivia was nice enough but was, unfortunately, poorly equipped for the main duty of the job, i.e. reading out loud. I cannot even begin to recall the number of times that I personally witnessed her flubbing words that most of us mastered in grade school, and not just once – she consistently mispronounced or got confused by the same word or phrase each time she’d read and re-read a question. Apparently the boys used to mock her pretty openly for this, and, since she had a good sense of humor, it was never a big deal.

A few months ago, though, she got a different job and had to abandon her trivia duties, and her replacement – another south side girl I don’t know personally – was, believe it or not, even worse. If girl #1 misread 4 out of 50 questions a night, girl #2 was thoroughly confused by at least 10. And it’s not as if they were handed a script and asked to read cold – these girls were responsible for finding the questions and answers beforehand. Plenty of time to check for tough words, make sure everything made sense – and still. On top of it all, we didn’t know the new girl and couldn’t joke with her about it, so the room became an awkward hush of giggles and stifled snorts as over a hundred people tried not to rip on her for choosing a job that openly displayed her inability to read in her native language.

Yes, I am a grammar nazi and a vocabulary snob. I make mistakes too, of course, but I try to catch myself and think before speaking, and I’m always incredibly frustrated by the obvious errors in newspapers, magazines, and books. So when I showed up to trivia last week after a couple of months away, I was thrilled to see a new person behind the microphone – a guy in his late 20s who started on time, read the questions succinctly, and even sent out his assistant to ask for help pronouncing a tough word in the Biology category. It was awesome.

After the session was over and we were paying our bill (we took 2nd, and I still maintain that if the boys had listened when I swore that hedgehogs are born with soft quills that harden as they dry out and that’s why they don’t injure their mothers on the way out, we’d have had it), the guy running trivia stopped over to say hi to one of our teammates. Everyone was complimenting him on the categories and the well-run night, and I joined in, saying how well he’d done and that he could come back and run trivia anytime.

And then I managed to singlehandedly define the word “blurt” as I leaned forward and practically yelled, “Yeah, you were awesome, because at least you’re not retarded!”

Keep in mind that I hadn’t been drinking, nor was I tired or on any kind of drug. I cannot explain what incited me to make that particular statement at that particular volume, but somehow it seemed like a compliment to me – after all, he was obviously much better than the previous two people I’d listened to, and everyone was saying things along those lines, so it felt like I was being supportive. Until the words were out of my mouth, when everyone within hearing distance suddenly stopped speaking and looked down at their feet or at the table, and an incredibly uncomfortable silence filled the air.

And that’s when I realized that the girl he was filling in for, the one I had just called retarded, is his girlfriend.

I don’t think I stopped blushing furiously for at least an hour. And I’ll definitely not be going to trivia again for a few more months. Ugh.

I just realized that I hadn’t posted here since before the FameCast announcement. Wow. I’m slow.

Well to be honest, I just decided that winning that kind of a competition, with all the hours I’d put in and all the energy expended, merited a bit of a holiday. And with Christmas and New Year’s shortly to follow, I felt like it was the perfect time to stop working. Completely. For almost a month… Yeah, okay, I probably should have at least kept up with a few things, but when I finally let myself relax, it’s all or nothing!

So now it is 2008, and I am recovering from last night’s shenanigans in downtown Chicago, curled up on the couch with my puppy gnawing on a Nylabone next to me and Predator 2 on the big screen. Yes, I said Predator 2 – I saw the new Alien vs Predator: Requiem last week and realized that I’d never seen, well, any Alien or Predator movie. And I love Bill Paxton, for some odd reason. So here I sit.

I actually saw some really great movies over the holiday, and I’m recommending them to you now unequivocally – go, watch, enjoy, laugh those holiday party pounds right off. You will not regret it.

Anyway, I’ve been on vacation long enough, I think. Time to kick things back into gear! Happy New Year, everyone. And watch out for big ugly creatures with more than one mouth.