Crankums.

You'll have to pardon a restless, cranky message. I said I'm sometimes crankums, and I am. I am a fretful poodle flomping from lap to lap, driving everybody nuts as I scramble ungainly out and to the next lap ouch watch it flomp flomp. (Can't wait til I get my computer at home! Will help.)

I am cranky, restless, enervated, unable to be satisfied. Media consumption scratchin no itches. Books are annoying and familiar, or annoying and unfamiliar, and don't engage. Movies: the same. TV is annoying on the largest scale...a bizillion channels and nothing on. The only lil things on TV that got me perked up this weekend were a great documentary about Niagara Falls on PBS, the kind of thing that almost - not quite - makes up for the begathons; the documentary I'd already seen about Tai Shan's birth (Animal Planet's "Panda Party"--downright skimpy); and god help me some C-SPAN2 hearings about online privacy and predators with the myspace.com guy and others being grilled by a senate subcommittee (fascinating). I need to be living larger, in a Bierstadt painting. No book, no TV, works when you're in that kind of mood. Need to go sniff some fresh air. Join a Girly Fight Club [tm] where I can beat a fellow GenX low-income over-educated professional to bits and we can pretend we're George Foreman. Thwack some tennis balls against a wall. Things that have nothing to do with this journal. I am, at least, sensible enough to be blasting The Replacements' "I'm So Unsatisfied" at unhealthy levels in my headphones.

My favorite new photo of Tai Shan is this one. Adorable little humped over chubby absorption. If you don't keep up with his development online, I highly recommend that faboo reading: http://nationalzoo.si.edu/Animals/GiantPandas/default.cfm . I am also newly enamored of Owls and Walruses. Owls, despite all the adorableness they decimate, are just so cute. Big-eyed, fluffy, confusable, but smart. Ruffly. Vertical. And walruses are just nuts. They're so prehistoric I want to jump out of my skin.

At the same time that I am all unsatisfiable, I have a case of what my father used to (with annoying perspicacity, I thought) call "the Heavy Wants," which was his term for the crazed Christmas state I and my sister would get in where we wanted more and more Things. I've come to think of this as a very accurate description of that consumerist wanty frenzy it's so easy to slide into when you're all tetchy and twitchy and vulnerable. I want to go on an ocean cruise, I want to go on the Queen Mary II before I am too much older, I want to stay in grand old decaying hotels from the last century in this country, I want to go to spas and watering holes in Eastern Europe, I want to drive a beautifully-kept old car, I want to build kitchens from beautiful tile, I want to build a folly along the Hudson River. I don't feel greedy, I feel loosed from earthly bonds and floaty. It's not that I want to *own* them, exactly...

I am having the same problem with food. Nothing is tasting very good, but I am really hungry. I am starving for foods with all sorts of connections to my childhood: I want great Chesapeake Bay/Carolina coast fish and fried flounder and GOOD crab cakes and if I don't get good hush puppies soon withOUT big pieces of onion in them FUCK ME do people not know how to cook hush puppies?? I will die. I want vinegary lean eastern carolina BBQ on softy-soft rolls with delicious coleslaw. I want Krystal burgers. I want sausage gravy and biscuits, peppery grits, chicken fried steak and scrambled eggs. I want to go to meat-and-threes. I dunno what's going on, but I'm not going to be happy until I am neck-high in a pool of sausage gravy having a Mai Tai at this rate. Will let you know how it goes. Am in need of some serious restaurant-going.

Heavy wants.