I'm entering this from my new laptop, sitting in front of the TV, and using a new extension to Firefox that supposedly lets me blog without going to my site.

I guess it's okay, but I don't think I can assign a category, not that anyone I imagine who looks at Crenellated Flotsam cares very much about that.

I hope to learn to love laptops as much as the general population does, but I miss my mouse quite a bit. I guess I could plug one in and return to my youth and work the same way I did on my first laptop, which was given to me by my employer. That machine, to be at all usable for me, ended up being used with an external display and mouse and was, really, no more than a large case for the CPU and disk drive.

Oh, well. Maybe someday I'll grow to love this Synaptics pointing device.

One thing that always surprises me about Christmas is how little mention is made of ham. In many homes and families, Christmas and Easter are celebrated not with turkey, but with ham, a meat which both tastes better than any bird and has the added benefit of excluding Jews and Muslims. Nothing says we're exclusive better than celebrating one's holidays with something specifically forbidden by your rivals.

My niece, who prepared this year's holiday feast for her family, prepared both a turkey and a ham, both of which were lost on one of my grand-nephews who is such a fussy eater that his plate consisted wholly of a couple rolls (which he had to be told were "bread") and some corn. Others among us were a bit more adventurous and enjoyed every part of the meal, including the two flavors of cranberry sauce.

My sister ended up bringing most of the ham home with her, and it serves as a wonderful accompaniment to the small ham that I received from the same cooking niece in a Hickory Farms assortment. I'm not sure what Dorothy Parker would say about one person with two hams, but in my defense neither one is a whole ham.

Last night I barely dented the leftovers with my ham and cheese omelet, and I'm hoping today's ham sandwich will do a better job. If I make it to the market and pick up some more vegetables, maybe I can branch out to include Denver Omelets, which I don't think I've ever made. I could, of course, eat nothing but omelets all day, every day, but until they stop going back and forth about whether eggs are healthy or not, my enjoyment of them is always tinged with guilt and concern.

In any case, I now as much ham as I could want, at least for the week.

No, really. How am I doing? I have no idea.

I ask this because, in honor of the holiday season and the daytime getting longer by something like four seconds a day, I'm drinking a cup of hot green tea. I know, I'm a wuss and am in danger of having my testicles revoked, but that's not the point. I mean, it's not like I've gone completely to the darkside and have started a love affair with cats.

This tea, which I bought because it was on sale and would, I figured, makes a completely tasteless ice tea, and also works pretty good as hot drink in cold weather (not that I'd know anything about that). It also makes me feel refined because if there's one thing I know about Joe Six-Pack, it's that he doesn't drink green tea.

Hot or cold.

In addition to warming up my body's core, according to what's written on the box, this tea also removes free radicals and helps as an anti-oxidant, although I think those are two ways of saying the same thing. I don't have a problem with that, but I'd like some numbers.

I don't ask for that to gauge the effectiveness of this particular tea over its competitors or against other products, it's only that I have absolutely no idea how many free radicals I have running around in my system. Or, how much anti-oxidizing I may need. I suspect it's a lot, but the thing is I don't know if this tea eliminates two free radicals, the limit for advertising the plural, or millions.

And, without having a good idea about how many I have, a trillion removed may either flush my body entirely (for the moment) or barely make a dent in their vast army.

I suppose I could take some level of solace in knowing that, after drinking the tea, I have fewer than when I started, or in the simple argument that any reduction at all is a good thing, but I need to know how good I should feel. If this delightful tea lives up to its claims and is capturing those wily free radicals even as I type, and I'm not doubting it does, I'd just like to know how many. If I knew that, I could figure out how much of this I need to drink to remove them all, or if that's just a pipe dream.

Any reduction may be better than none, but until I know just how much improvement this tea is giving me, I think I'd be a fool to act all happy about it.

As much as I think about breasts, other things pop into my mind as well, such as figuring out the right answer to the questions we're all faced with. The operative word there is right, since it's pretty easy for me to come up with a good answer to just about anything.

Although I have an obsession for asking and answering questions, I'm more convinced than ever that it's rare that there's a definitive right answer, at least not to the questions worth talking about. In most cases, the answers rely on answers to other questions, which are themselves subject to debate, and so on, and I wonder if most people realize their beliefs aren't based on Truth as much as they are on a series of beliefs that are themselves worth examining.

All of which is just a fancy way of saying there's more than one way of looking at things.

It's looking a lot like ... those who love me may have to dig deep into built-up reserves of affection this season. I'm not sure me or my car is up to fighting the holiday crowds and, if the rest of this week is as filled with rain as the stores are now with holiday shoppers, I may not be going anywhere.

Hmmm.

Now, first off, it may strike you as odd that someone who's decided to live in a county of some ten million people would have any reason to gripe about crowds, but there you have it. Sure, plenty of them are attractive women, which makes going among them a treat, but many are not, and even the best view gets tiring after waiting in line behind them for a cashier for fifteen minutes. It's not the shopping I mind so much, or even the cost, it's that I'm not happy with anything I'm buying.

To make matters even more challenging, all of my sister's family (excepting husbands, boy friends, in-laws, and baby daddies) is in town this year. That's all three nieces and their children I have to get things for, and I'm not sure I'm up to the task. Sure, it's only six people over the usual, but those three grand-nephews better not have their hopes for anything they want.

I don't, really, know them at all. I'm fuzzy on their ages but know their names, I have no idea what size anything they wear, no clue about their likes and dislikes, their hobbies and hatreds, and am very much out of touch with the younger generation. The good news for me is, I'm not sure there's much expectation on their part. I mean, really, there can't be all that much for precedent in gifts from great-uncles. I know for a fact no great-uncle ever got me anything, and I couldn't even tell you any of their names.

What I do know is that they're all boys, ranging between high school and elementary school and tall and lanky to short and stout, respectively. I also know that no boy has ever hoped for clothes or, in spite of the their thanks, very satisfied with any sweater. I have no idea what they already have or need and, as teenagers, about the only thing I know for sure is they'd like porn.

My only hope is that they have such low expectations for a great-uncle present that anything will do. I just hope I can guess who likes German scat.

Tuesday, before I slit my fingertip open in a careless, regrettable accident, I bought a hard drive for one of my computers. I haven't installed it yet and can't remember why I thought I needed it, but it was a good price.

Maybe I can use it to resurrect my old e-mail.

When I got back from the store I saw that they had a special on notebook computers, and ever since seeing that I've been looking them up online. I have a laptop now, but it's old and can't run these latest whiz-bang operating systems. It can connect (slowly and laboriously) to the Internet and my other computers through a wire, but it's gotten to that age where the battery can't keep a charge and needs to constantly be plugged in.

Those are all excuses, mind you, because it does what I insist a laptop do, which is record my typings so I can transfer them to a "real" computer.

Then again, with this injured finger, typing anything right now is a painful reminder of my idiocy.

Anyway, back to the laptop. The day I saw that ad, after returning from the store where it was on sale, was also the last day of the special price, which was a great one. Since then I've been trying to locate a comparable or better deal, but with no luck. As the days have passed, I've once again been reminded of a funny feeling, that of impending purchase.

This getting a new laptop keeps nagging me, and a good reason for that is I'm convinced that I could successfully complete the purchase. I know what to do when it comes to buying laptops, so I expect I could carry the transaction off with ease, but then I keep remembering that I don't need one. Not right this minute, anyway.

The only way I can describe it is that I have feeling, much like destiny, of having to buy a new laptop. Part of me "knows" it's going to happen, and that part can see me eagerly opening a new one, reformatting the hard drive, and installing everything to get it working just right. If the past is any gauge, that part will win, too.

The other part of me, the less-used rational part, insists that it would be a huge expense that I can't afford and have no need to satisfy. Today that part had a slender victory and kept me from going to Fry's, where I know it would be doomed once I walked in the door.

So, even though I don't need one and can't afford it, I have a feeling that I will soon own a new laptop, and I don't know how to get rid of that feeling except by buying one.

Sometime in my early twenties, soon after learning about them, I began having epiphanies. It might be interesting to wonder if this was something like learning about the Doppler Effect or the writer's rule of "write what you know" or similar names and concepts where once aware of them, they tend to be all over the place, or it might just be that I had finally aged enough to have them.

Most likely, it was a combination of the two since nothing is as binary, as black and white, as I often wish.

In any case, it was only a matter of hours after having any of these understandings of the workings of the universe dropped on my head that I began doubting them. Not doubting that I had them, mind you, but doubting if they were, in fact, worthy of being called epiphanies. Sure, I suddenly and finally had an insight into how this world more closely resembled my idea of heaven than it did of hell or how asking the wrong questions led to unsatisfactory and bewildering answers, but I wasn't convinced these were true epiphanies.

As far as I knew, they may have been basic understandings that everyone else was born with, that they had no need to discover, that they grasped and shrugged off about the same time they learned to distinguish their right from their left.

There's no doubt they changed my life, that I considered such awakenings as momentous, but I was unhappy not knowing if my life defining moments were actually worthy of the name. On the one hand, any event that defined life for me was, in and of itself, pretty damn important and noteworthy, but it irked me that I could never tell if it was universal and genuine or just exciting for me in particular. Not having anyone else's mind or experiences, they became another in a long list of things, like love or anger, that I named after what I imagined others felt without ever truly knowing if my experience and theirs had anything in common at all. Sure, I called them the same things, but were they ... really?

As it turns out, I can never know. What I'm wondering now, instead, is that having a series of these moments might be what we call maturing. I haven't thought about it much -- the idea never occurred to me until this past month -- but it may be possible to make a case that having epiphanies might be what separates the wise from the masses, and it's only a unexpected side benefit that this would put me in a distinct class of humanity.

Or it may just be, as I've long felt, that getting older just means you have more experiences to draw on and recognizing the similarity between things that no one can have at age twenty just means you're old.

It's a delightfully cold and wet day here in Los Angeles, the kind that makes me glad I have some of those warmer clothes. Although we really don't ever get anything in the way of weather here, since this is the movie capital of the world we get as dramatic as we can whenever it's anything other than seventy degrees with bright, blue skies.

So, the local news teams are all on storm watch and, to feed our need for drama, are showing us pictures of water running in gutters.

It's long been my practice to take advantage of days like this to stay inside, as warm as possible, and to cook up a big batch of chili. In a deviation from my normal practices, however, right now I've begun a big pot of chicken soup, which I normally only make when I'm feeling shitty. Right now I'm feeling excellent, though a tad sleepy, so I'm curious to see if this will keep me well or if it might, in confusion, bring on a flu or cold.

To keep the illness demons at bay, I'm not duplicating my get well soon recipe, which changes every time I make the soup, anyway. I'm leaving out my secret, crucial ingredient, the leeks, and using those yellow potatoes that dissolve. I may end up with more of chicken stew than a soup, but since I refuse even to acknowledge the concept of chicken stew, it will most likely be termed a thick soup.

Another thing I'm trying is using a chicken that comes from the butcher shop inside a small local market. It came wrapped up in several layers of plastic wrap and inside a plain plastic bag, so the environment benefits from the lack of ink. I would have been even more adventurous and seen what was inside a mysterious store that specializes in chickens, something I'm often tempted to do, but it was too far to ride on my bike. I think they even have live ones there, and some day I'll see if I have to slaughter my own.

For someone so experienced, I sure have trouble with simple things.

Like e-mail.

A good part of my frustration and bafflement can be explained by acknowledging that I'm frightened and fearful. I like it not only when I think I know what's going on, but when everything's in one place, easy to get to, and familiar. This all changed last summer when my computer died, taking along with it years of e-mail and e-mail related stuff. That old e-mail program and all its contents are now safe, but not accessible.

When I got a new computer, I installed a new e-mail program, but I considered it temporary. I figured I'd get the old one back soon, but that just shows how little I know myself. Temporary fixes and bandages seem to hang around forever in my life, until they either crash and burn or, by default, become permanent.

A couple days ago my e-mail program stopped working. Well, not exactly. It worked, but couldn't find its way to the Internet or any of the servers that hold my e-mail. I downloaded and re-installed my e-mail program, thinking that might help, but it didn't. Still, no connection.

This was after a Vista update, so, naturally, I thought that update might be the problem. So, I restored, turning my computer back to how it was before the update. This had the effect of rendering my e-mail program completely useless. It wouldn't even launch.

So I got another, a third, e-mail program and got it to work. I also noticed in all my monkeying around that I'd never told any of my temporary e-mail programs to delete any messages from the servers, which explains why so many people have been telling me about my e-mails bouncing. I was leaving them there until I got my old e-mail program working again, and forgot about it.

I think I made enough room to last me through the end of the year, but I expect by now most people have simply written me off. Oh well. They deserted reading my blog a long time ago, and I survived that!

I now have a working e-mail program that I don't like very much, but it's one I used to use years ago (Eudora). I have one I like, Thunderbird, that doesn't connect to the Internet any more, and I should really get off my ass and figure out how to make it functional.

But I'm cold today, and my right hand doesn't feel like typing .

The other night I had a pretty common dream, at least for me. It reminded me, though, about how boring my dream life is and how often my dreams contain the same, tired elements. It's almost as if sleeping, while still a valid escape from the horrors of daily life, isn't an escape from tedium.

While my dreams often have me driving a car or riding a bike with mechanical problems such as tricky or non-working brakes or steering, shouting ineffectively to be understood, impotent fighting with my blows performed as though I were swinging my fists under water, and, less often, scantily clad or naked women, I frequently have dreams involving mazes. Not the kind of mazes like rats run through for food or that are seen on some palatial estates, mind you, more like three dimensional mazes like you'd find in trees, cavernous mountains, or other large objects. In this latest dream, I had to solve how to climb and get through sculptures that sat on lawns and corners of some neighborhood.

In most of these dreams, I've already solved the maze and have determined the fastest way through. Incredibly, I'm often proud of knowing the best and fastest way through, and somehow "win" when I'm being chased or just showing off. That the same mazes, or at least the appearance of a known one, shows up might mean something, but I have no idea what. Maybe it's a lame attempt by my dream self to give me confidence or it just might be a lack of imagination.

It's not unusual, I don't think, for my dreams to keep being centered on certain places, such as my apt in Playa del Rey where I happily lived for seven years, but these mazes confound me. I mean, it's not like I'm any good at solving mazes in real life or enjoy them very much, so it's not like I'm doing something in the dream world that I want to do in this one. While the appearance of willing women who want something to do with me makes sense in a dream setting, mazes do not.

Still, I can expect to show everyone up by my whisking through that conical mountain at least a few times every year until I die, just as I've always done. I can also expect to get so excited that I'll never stay asleep to dream long enough to find out what she's really willing to do.