Hands-down, the best part of Thanksgiving happens on the day after. You go to the fridge, its plastic shelves laden with all that food, made to celebrate a day of historically bunked bliss. You take out some leftover turkey. (A "tofurkey" would probably not work in this scenario. But then again, I certainly wouldn't know. Perhaps it would work, in some incredible, healthy, taste-free sort of way.) Then you get yourself some bread, and some mustard, and maybe a tomato, and you make yourself The After-Thanksgiving Sandwich. And then you eat it, and love it. And all is right with the world.

Yessirree, that's what I call bliss without historical bunkifaction.

Two dregs of femalekind were at the cheap nail salon today. (The more my grief for admitting my presence there ... but sometimes a brunette just has to let somebody else deal with her eyebrows.) Like a Barbie in the hands of one very scary little girl, the first woman had her too-long hair highlighted in several designer colours, while her collagen lips were lined with expensive, one shade too-dark lip liner. Her heels were four inches off the ground, and her actions alternated between drinking a blended ice coffee, answering her cell phone with the words, "Hi baby," and finally, indistinctly muttering something which to a super-sonic ear might have sounded like a thank-you to her manicurist. I thought, you know, this is not a woman who has too much money. This is simply one lost dreg.

The second woman was decidedly less-Barbiefied, but somehow she had managed to snag not one, not two, but three candy-coloured magazines from the waiting area. And this woman must have been in desperate need of a bulimic model fix, because even though there were obviously no other -- and believe me, I use the term loosely -- "reading materials" left, and there were several customers waiting with nothing to "read," she perched all three mags on her own little lap the entire time. I thought, you know, this is not a woman who is lost in her own little mag-fed world. This is another lost dreg.

Then again, I suppose there were really three lost dregs in the salon. The third one got her jollies by thinking up sociological observations on others of her own sex from a nail parlor, and then scribbled about them in a deeply cynical manner. You know, this is not a woman who has too much sarcasm. This is only a lesser-dreg, a smallish-tallish dreg, and one in great need of a holiday.

We haven't any snow here. When I was very young, in elementary school perhaps, I remember it snowed one day. But then, I don't so much remember the snow itself, because I also remember that I was ill and therefore missed the school-snow that day.

I think we all tend to most-remember the unfair things about being small. If we liked our childhood, though, I think we best-remember the lovely things, but they're apt to come more in terms of feelings rather than fulsome memories. For example, I well-remember Christmas-morning feelings, and new-pencil-case feelings. Carrots-in-the-garden feelings. Dolls-in-the-grass feelings. Running-about-in-ballerina-costume feelings. I remember these things better than no-snow feelings, because after all, who needs snow when you've got warmth -- or especially a beauteous new plastic pink pencil case?

After kinking my back out this weekend -- for the third time in my life -- I've come to realize how much a person really needs their back. You use your back far more often than you think. You use it to stand, to sit, and to just plain get around. There's an old saying about how one never realizes what they've got 'till it's gone. Some of those old sayings are spot-on, they are.

I wonder if there's a saying about ice packs, or at the very least, about how to pick stuff up without bending one's knees.

A smallish film experiment was conducted today, by little ol' moi. After recently purchasing The Son of the Sheik on DVD, I found its background music score to be highly displeasing. Since the music for silent films was once played by live orchestras in the movie palaces of yesteryear, many silent films today have had to be scored anew. Unfortunately, these new orchestrations are often made up of icky-sounding synthesizer tunes. (There even exists a blasphemous version of Metropolis that positively reeks of bad eighties lyrics.) So, in order to better enjoy Rudolph Valentino in all of his surprisingly sexy and forever-analyzable deliciousness, I decided to do something that pretty much only a film major would think of: I turned off the telly volume and instead played some minor-keyed Rachmaninoff on my nearby stereo. The effect was amazing. Completely different visual moods were both instantly and subtly created -- and often enhanced -- just by placing different musical adrenaline in different places. That's what we film majors might call, "the effect of the aural on the visual," or in a simpler nutshell, "A film's background music serves to influence and even change the film's picture." You too, you laypersons you, can also try this with any silent film and any happy fun time instrumental recording.

If you've never seen a silent film, well, shame on you. One can never truly understand a film if one knows nothing of films past. I believe that statement also enjoys masquerading as, "Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it." And when that statement has a bad day, it gets itself a spiky new haircut, dresses in artsy black, and shortens itself to, "History is important, yo."

No matter how much I buy, milk always seems to run out on me. And as we all know, unless you fancy tossing out your cereal, hot chocolate mixes, pudding, and anything else which requires the ol' moo-juice to make, whenever you run out of milk then you just have to buy more. And I dearly hate grocery shopping just for milk.

Recently I've switched over to organic milk, because I think cows ought to be allowed some grazing. It's not much of a life, being a cow. To be born a cat, or an Aspen tree, or even a pillow would be better than being born a cow. Cow lives seem pretty much consumed by grass-eating, cud-chewing, and just-standing-there. They'd probably kill for a deck of cards or something, although I'd wager that non-organic cows sneak out to play dice behind the barn every now and then. They're most likely high-rollers, too.

It took me some time to gather the courage to premiere this particular design, ardent fans all, because I don't particularly fancy the thought of seeing my crazy mug randomized all over the place. Nevertheless, as I am the woman in the box whom all the cooler, cultured, and catatonic people of the world read, there I be.

And yes Virginia, I will be scribbling more often from this day onward, or else Santa Claus will leave me a lump of coal in my stocking. And then the paupers of England won't have any fuel for the winter, and my god won't I feel awful. Toasty, but awful.

One thing I miss about boys is their cologne. There's nothing like the smell of fresh, spicy, clean boy-cologne on a fresh, spicy, clean boy. Man oh man. They say that females are often driven by their olfactory systems -- come on, I know you've read those studies just like I have, all about how every person has their own "natural scent" and is only really attracted to persons of complimentary natural scents. One study I read even surmised that a woman on birth control was perhaps rendered hormonally unable to detect her favored natural scent on men. Are those studies to be believed? I doubt it. It sounds like a lot of dumbed-down, evolutionary-determination-alone hooey to me. Plus, it makes me want to shower a lot more than usual.

Lame Guy: Pardon me, collegiate-coed-lookin' missy, but if I said you had a beautiful smell, would you hold it against me?
Me: Curse these natural scent glands!

But that doesn't change the fact that men's cologne is very nice indeed, particularly when it's paired with soft boy sweaters. Oh, lordy lordy lordy. Save me from my scenter.