New decade, same ol' bullet points

Once in a while, I just have to do this. Sorry. It's not gonna be the most enlightening thing you ever read, but there's some fun to be found.

* L'Ailee was so glad to have a vacation at the end of December, and I'm glad she got one, because she desperately needed it. Now she's slammed with work again. Being an instructor at a gym, she sees a lot of New Year's resolution traffic every January. She and other instructors take bets on how many of their new students will be leaving. For right now, I don't get to see much of her, unfortunately.

* This week at work was crazy-busy for me, and it will most likely get very slow next week. I prefer a nice, steady pace all over, but who doesn't? (And who gets that? Almost nobody!)

* I have a performance day with my belly-dancing class coming up on the 24th. This one makes me nervous. It'll be a smaller group than I've performed for before, but a very talented group of women, and I am at the shallow end of that talent pool. I talked my best friend Yemaya O'Reilly into taking up belly dancing at the gym when she moved up here--since she works nights, it's a terrific way for the two of us to see each other and catch up, plus we've been each other's favorite dancing partners since our late teens. She's gotten twice as good as I have in half the time.

My instructor said to choose songs we really love, since we'll be living with them a while, but I am barred from picking anything country this time, and Yemaya and I are both banned for life from picking anything by Sinead O'Connor. (Yemaya loves her as much as I do, which is an awful lot.) So it took us both a long time. We settled on "Galvanize" by the Chemical Brothers for our tandem performance, and my solo will be to the Revels' "Comanche". Now you know what's been blasting through my place all week.

* Portugal gets same-sex marriage. But New Jersey doesn't, though there might be a lawsuit coming. I think of a character in one of Louisa May Alcott's novels that is not Little Women getting upset because English women got the vote before American women: "America should be ahead in all good things!"

* No doubt most of you heard how Fox News' Brit Hume gave Tiger Woods unsolicited advice on air. Apparently if Tiger became Brit's kind of Christian, he'd never ever have another affair again ever, because that is how such noteworthy Christians as Ted Haggard and Mark Sanford roll. Sharing this message makes Brit a hero in some peoples' eyes. Barbara Hoetzu O'Brien, About.com's Buddhism guide, explains why he "doesn't know Buddhism from spinach." And Austin Cline from About.com's atheism subsite explains to anyone who cares to listen why atheists in particular take offense at evangelism. Believe me, non-atheists can relate.

* If I had to learn about this, so do you. There is now such a thing as lipstick for a woman's lips that are *not* on her face. Not even kidding. NSFW, of course.

* Finally, Queers United offers *the* viral video of the year so far. It's a young year, true, but this will be extremely difficult to top. As tennis star Andy Roddick conducts an interview at an Australian nature preserve, a couple of female koalas get very natural right behind him. To quote a YouTube commenter--and I know, they usually aren't this good--"So, Andy...holy shit, koala sex!" I couldn't resist asking L'Ailee if she wanted to "do it koala-style," and she retorted, "I don't think you could stay in the tree."