Sunday at almost exactly 2 a.m., I was in the middle of a particularly bad dream when the phone rang. Everyone hates phone calls in the middle of the night, and ever since I moved to the States, I’ve been convinced that if the phone rings late at night, it can only mean that my parents are calling to let me know my grandmother has died. (She’s fine, in case you’re wondering where this is going.)

I stayed under the covers and waited to hear the answering machine pick up. I don’t know if it was the relative quiet in . . .

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I guess at this point I have to start justifying my Netflix queue, so here goes. I liked Ben Kingsley in Dave and thought he was impressive in Sexy Beast (although I couldn’t get through the movie as a whole), plus HBO Films has a reputation for quality. That’s how I came to see Mrs. Harris. Based on a true story, it stars Annette Bening as the title character, a headmistress who attaches herself to Kingsley’s self-professed “country doctor” Herman Tarnower. Tarnower is less rural sawbones and more egocentric, womanizing publicity hound, and Harris soon finds herself taking a backseat . . .

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I fell down in the bathroom last week. In my apartment, this is actually quite an accomplishment, since the bathroom is only slightly larger than our refridgerator, and the walls pressing in on you tend to restrict any kind of movement.

I went down due to vertigo, which I don’t usually suffer from, but my inner ear was all wonky from a cold. I’d had a cold for about a week and a half, and I was so tired of having a stuffed head, I’d become kind of liberal about my nose-blowing. None of this polite sniffling demurely into a . . .

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Because the best time to make a list of your favorite albums of the year is less than three hours after you’ve had two teeth yanked from your lower jaw, with the dentist breaking one in the process and having to poke around in the hole to tweeze out all the root fragments—right?

10.  Mission of Burma, The Obliterati, 2006
It has its flaws, like the too-sludgy sound throughout and the fact that they let their drummer, Peter Prescott, write a few of the songs when they shouldn’t.  But I’ve been missing guitar breaks for a while, . . .

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