Tonight's Bubonic Mouse™ award goes to Colortyme—and, by proxy, every other rent-to-own shop in northeast Alabama with nasty guilt-tripping ads.

The first thing I heard in my car this morning was a spiel about how you should placate your family this holiday season. For your wife, buy her a bedroom suite to keep her quiet. For your children, a Playstation 2 to stop their whining.

Then it finished with the following jingle:"It's not what you thought.
It's what you bought."

Currently reading: Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury.

"How do you measure—measure a year?
In daylights—in sunsets / in midnights—in cups of coffee
in inches—in miles / in laughter—in strife—
in 525,600 minutes / how do you measure a year in the life?"
    - Jonathan Larson, Rent

I got my car back this morning. I doubt that many people would rejoice over the return of a six-year-old underpowered purple Sundance…but it's my car, and I've actually rather missed having her around. I always thought people were joking when they said that their cars developed character as they aged; now that I own an aging car, I understand.

I have a few minutes left before the end of my workday, so I'm going to sit here, look occupied, and type out today's random thoughts. I promise that I'm over my depravity from yesterday; it would take a while to explain why in the world I posted what I did, but suffice it to say, it was just one of those things that, once you heard about it, is hard to get off your mind.

While driving back from buying my lunch today, I was thinking about the concept of age, and how much it matters to people. We have a twofold conception of age in this society—we are obsessed both with our chronological age and our mental age. Due to our obsession with numbers in base ten, we see numbers that end with a '0' as being somehow more significant than others, more indicative of a stage of life, than any number in between.

Normally, this isn't a problem. But things get interesting when mental age doesn't equal chronological age. We as society members expect everyone to mature somewhere along an expected scale. We have certain expectations about the emotional maturation of two-year-olds versus forty-year-olds, for example.