I am definitely over Paul McCartney's fans. I wrote this little rant about why I find Paul less than my favorite musician, and put it on my web site. I never advertised the rant. People keep finding it by putting Paul + McCartney + Hate into a search engine. If they dig at it long enough they come to my site. And then the fun begins. For them, not for me. I have been called a loser, a pathetic loser, fat, ugly, stupid, a teenager, and a slut and a whore. Actually the same guy called me both a slut and a whore.

I think that they are mutually exclusive, at least theoretically. A slut, is, by definition, someone who will have sex with anybody freely and for free. A whore, on the other hand, is someone who has sex for pay. I think that a whore, in her (or his) time off does not have sex with lots of people for the fun of it. I think that on their days off, whores tend to avoid random sex entirely. Hey, I could be wrong, but I'm just saying.

I have been called a pathetic loser for posting my views on my personal website. I have been accused of desiring attention from Paul's fans. Nothing could be further from the truth. I posted my rant for my own entertainment. It wasn't me who put my address on the official McCartney site. It was a fan.

Why? Why would someone who trolls the official site to wank ad nauseum with other fans care to place my rant there? And then to call me a loser when they are the ones who found me by trolling for Paul + Hate. I may be a loser, but I have never in my on-line life tried a search for Bob + Dylan + Hate. Why would I? Why would I care if I found someone who disliked Dylan. No skin off my nose. (There's a huge Michael Jackson joke just sitting there for anyone who wants it.)

Who are these fans and what pleasure do they derrive from accusing me of such personal failures? And why don't they just shut the fuck up already. Threatening me won't shut me up, nor will it change my opinion. But if you WANT my opinion, spending your time on line to debate with other fans far and wide as to which haircut over the years really made Paul look the cutest; well, THAT's what I call a loser.

I'm in the sky tower, watching the buzzards circle. No, really. Capistrano has swallows, Miami has turkey buzzards. Not as romantic an image, perhaps, but they have a certain poetry to them, as they like to circle the Court House. Get it? Buzzards, lawyers... It's humor.

Well, they also hang out around here at the towers. Hopefully nobody sees the irony in their loitering around a hospital.

That's all I'm doing today. Loitering. Banging away at the old keyboard, working on my personal website and waiting until I've put in enough hours to leave on this Friday after a mid-week Christmas. In my head I sound like a Simpson's talking watch. "Are we there yet are we there yet are we there yet?"

Hey. At least I did something when I wrote this: you, on the other hand, are merely reading. Go back to work.

I'm not even a Christian and I'm having a typical Christmas.... I have injured myself in a kitchen accident while making a pie for the Christmas dinner we're going to. I'm depressed from talking to my parents. I'm depressed in general. I'm totally stressed out. There's nothing on TV or radio that ISN'T Christmas, so it makes me feel like a stranger in a strange land. Another one of my fish died. Not the koi. They're doing fine. But the twenty-four cent goldfish went one after the other. And one of the algae eaters died the first day I had him. Probably not enough algae for him to eat in a brand new pond. Not to mention that little bit of lime still leaching out of the concrete. I guess if you are sucking the walls, lime isn't a good thing for you.

Anyway. Bah humbug. I want to go back to bed and sleep through the whole damn thing.

It's time for my annual office relocation. This morning we packed up our computers and what not and moved across campus to the Towers. OOOOOOHHH. Sounds scary. The Twin Towers. The Two Towers. More like Fawlty Towers. But I am most definitely NOT complaining. From my new desk I can see Biscayne Bay and the skyline of South Beach. Hell, I can see. Period. My last uh, one, two, three offices were bunkers with no windows at all. I'd leave work and see puddles and feel like Sherlock Holmes: It must have rained.

Now I have carpet and windows. And a kitchen. And my own bathroom that I don't have to share with the sort of riff raff a public hospital is prone to. Answer me this: Have YOU ever seen shoe prints on the seat of the toilet where YOU work? I have. I don't like to think about why.

I'm in training. Training to write code. The first question they asked us was what our expectations were for the class. So I said I expected to be reduced to tears at least twice. Half the class are members of a team that already use ColdFusion and just need to learn the ins and outs of the latest version. Another three are developers and then there is me: a graphic designer who was taken by the sucking black hole that is the world wide web.

One of my fellow trainees has decided to hijack the class. She is needy and demanding. And whiny. And she has a stoopid name: Tonda. Yesterday the instructor offered to skip the lab modules and cover more information at the end of the three day class. Since half the class already knows the program and since the optional material is the most valuable to the rest of us we all went YIPEE!

At 11:30 as we were rolling into the next module, Tonda announced that it was lunch time. "This is a big retail area and it's a very busy retail season so if you want us to be back in one hour, you need to let us out now." So our teacher let us out. When we came back, Tonda demanded that we take another vote about the class format because she wanted to do the labs. "I could be getting the same knowledge from a $50 book in front of my laptop at home."

Yeah? Then do us all a favor and go home with the book. There was much eye rolling and hemming and hawing as nobody ever wants to confront a bully. But we all know how charming I am and how much I love a fight, so I finally said, "Look, you're being selfish. The rest of us need the information from the end of the class. You want to do the labs, do them at home."

So we hit a compromise: if she wanted to do the labs with the instructor at the end of the day, he'd stay with her and the rest of us could attempt to beat rush hour traffic. That led to the rest of the day's acting out activities: constant questions, interuptions, and demands that the instructor not click his freaking mouse so fast. I was ready to bitch slap her into the next class room.

Today she's sucking up and trying to take the instructor to lunch so she can have some private face time. He keeps dodging the bullet, but we'll see how it plays out.

Yesterday my husband treated me to the most wonderful birthday. He let me sleep in. He made me coffee. He took me to an afternoon movie (Star Trek: Nemesis, the best part of which was the lights coming on in the theater when it was over), and then out to dinner at Les Halles with a few of my best girlfriends. We drank, we smoked, we yapped like lap dogs and we ate divine food. And I got presents. It just doesn't get any better.

One of my presents was getting the koi pond finished and filled with water and fish. Another was a watch with Charles Demuth's "I Saw the Figure Five in Gold" as its face. And band. Only my favorite painting in the world.

I received several books yesterday. Nina gave me a Dr. Suess 4-pack which included another one of my favorite things: The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins. Marc gave me two books, the latest one by Christopher Moore, and David Hockney's essay on Optics and Art in the Renaissance. Fabulous.

Yep. It was a great birthday. Wish me luck in my attempt to survive till the next one.