Me, rambling on about Twitter and Mike Mills

If you've been with me for very long, you know a few things about me.

1.  I love hot sauce, and there is no such thing as too hot.

2.  As a french horn player, I have had many unsavory thoughts about John Philip Sousa, who obviously had many unsavory thoughts about french horn players, judging from the kind of brain-dead parts he always wrote for us.

3.  I am an R.E.M. fan, in much the same way that lungs enjoy oxygen.  I even have a Tumblr blog which features nothing but R.E.M.-related things.  You've heard me post all that squishy geeky love for Mike Mills, right?  Sure you have.

So imagine my curiosity when I was doing my daily websurfing and happened to discover that Mike Mills is one of the many human beings who currently Twitters.  I decided to click the "follow" button.  It occurs to me that 20 years ago, if you made arrangements to keep close tabs on someone's personal updates, you might be labeled a stalker or at least a mentally-unbalanced individual.  Now, in the techno-joy of the modern age, we can all sit in our bathrobes drinking diet coke while keeping tabs on as many celebrities as we like-- and it's simply called "Being Connected To Social Media".
Yay for progress, I guess.

Anyway, it also occurred to me that after I clicked that "follow" button, Mike probably got a notification that he'd received a new follower.
Assuming he has a ton of time on his hands and the inclination to click on the link to my own twitter page, he'd see a link to this blog, the Jannaverse.  And if he has even further time and inclination, he might be reading this very post, and might even have clicked on that link to my Tumblr blog.

Yikes.

I know, I know.  It probably won't happen, in much the same way that you "probably" won't get hit by lightning in your lifetime.

Still, yay for social media.
I guess.

P.S. Mike, if a miracle has happened, and you actually are reading this, I swear I'm 92% harmless. It's ok.  Unless you write french horn parts the same way John Philip Sousa did.

It's also possible an alien is trying to escape from my larynx

For some reason, I woke up with a weird rash on my neck, right in the middle of my throat. It looks sorta like someone tried murdering me in my sleep with a scouring pad.
Bizarre.

Possible benefits to this:

1.  If I am coming down with some new and unusual disease, perhaps they can name it after me.  Jannaitis, maybe.  Or Janna-Brillo syndrome.  Or Jannakemia.  (Anything except Jannarrhea.)

2.  Perhaps as I am lingering in the hospital, surviving on a diet of jello and weak chicken broth, someone can convince Mike Mills to come visit me.  I can tell him how much I've loved his music, and I can spend my final words trying to make him feel guilty for never answering the only fan letter I ever sent.

3.  Hey, it's a welcome distraction from the depressing holiday season.


I feel ok, actually; I just wish I knew why the center of my throat has a big red rash on it,  Big dark red splotch, disturbingly noticeable.  Looks almost like a hickey, but it isn't.

Weird.

P.S. Mike Mills turns 54 on December 17th.
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Home!

I'm back!
I finished my house-sitting gig and am now back to spending a hot weekend any way I want.

Unfortunately, by "hot" weekend I mean it's 90 degrees.  Not "hot" in the sense of being surrounded by sexy muscle-bound pool boys.

I don't even own a pool.

And I seriously prefer nerds over muscle-bound jocks.

I'd take Leonard Hofstadter or Mike Mills over a muscle-bound jock any day.
Something about the black glasses and all those pulsating brain cells...
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Yes, it's definitely getting hot in here.

Sorry.  I can't help it.
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Feel free to psychoanalyze me in your leisure time

I can't think of anything to say today, so I'm going to list fifteen random things as they pop into my head:

1.  Fabric softener
2. Antifreeze
3. Leather
4. The R.E.M. album Automatic For The People
5. Socks with little holes starting to appear near the big toe
6. Cheekbones
7. Ketchup
8. Cheap candles that smell like old lady perfume
9. AA batteries
10.  Cat hair
11.  Amnesty International
12.  Gummi Bears
13.  A coupon for $1.00 off frozen pizza which I totally forgot to use before it expired
14.  Beige
15.  Ren and Stimpy


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I bet Mike is extra cute when he's dizzy

Various thoughts:

1.  I've been imagining a contest between Mike Mills and Sheldon Cooper where they spin around in circles to see which one would fall down first.

2.  I really, really love bacon.

3.  Why do raccoons seem to enjoy my yard so much lately?

4.  If I had to choose between Mike Mills and bacon, I would probably choose Mike, but I'd be so upset about losing bacon that Mike probably wouldn't want to be around me for awhile.

5.  Wow, Richard Dawson died.  I remember watching him on The Match Game when I was a little kid.  I was really young, but I remember the show using the word "bosoms" a lot.

6.  Maybe, if I'm lucky, Mike Mills will taste like bacon.

It's still better than talking to goldfish

Recently at McDonalds, I saw an older guy walking out to his car . His pants didn't fit very well, and he really needed to pull them up. They were sagging noticeably.
While watching him, I thought "Wow, hey, pull up your pants!!"

And, a few seconds later, he reached back and pulled up his pants. (!)

This can only mean one thing.
I am able to telepathically communicate with people over 50.
I'll spend the next few days considering how I can effectively use this new-found superpower.


UPDATE:
This just in...

After extensive research experimenting with the new superpower, I've made the following discoveries:

1) Sadly, I am not able to summon Mike Mills to visit me while wearing a glow-in-the-dark thong, nor am I able to convince him to answer the fan letter I sent him last summer. Neither will he agree to autograph my huge collection of R.E.M. CD's even if I allow him to wear clothes over the glow-in-the-dark thong. I get the impression he's also not interested in connubial bliss atop a grand piano.

2) Just a moment. I'm still not done being devastated about #1.

3) I was not able to convince the CEO of Taco Bell to give me a lifetime supply of chalupas.

4) Neither was I able to make a driver of a red Toyota go faster than 45 mph in a 55 zone.


Clearly more research is needed.
Are YOU over 50? If so, what am I thinking right now?
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Various Thoughts

1. On the way home this evening, the odometer switched over to 123,456. This was one of the most exciting things that happened today.

2. I almost hit a deer yesterday. He was getting on my nerves and I just wanted to punch him. No! Wait! What I meant is that I was driving home and I almost didn't see these two deer that were crossing the road. In fact, if it hadn't been for an oncoming car that DID see them (and flashed their brights to alert me), I might have cluelessly plowed right into them, singing R.E.M. songs with deer hooves and windshield pieces lodged in my spleen. Thank goodness for oncoming traffic.

3. Speaking of singing R.E.M. songs, I would like to announce that I have finally managed to memorize all the lyrics to "Its The End Of The World As We Know It". (Die-hard R.E.M. fans know why there shouldn't be an apostrophe in that title. It kills me to break traditional punctuation rules, but R.E.M. said...)

4. I bet if you tried making giraffe jerky, you would have to roll it up into a really long coil.
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Crazy Michigan lady collapses, surrounded by dimes

Here in Michigan, we have a ten-cent deposit on every bottle of pop.
That means if you buy a bottle of Sprite for $1.25, you actually have to pay a dime extra, for a total of $1.35.
After you drink the pop, you take the empty bottle back to wherever you bought it, hand them the empty bottle, and they give you your dime back.

Bring back ten bottles, you get a dollar.
Twenty bottles, two dollars. Et cetera, et cetera.

Here's the thing.

I really, really want R.E.M.'s new (and very LAST) compilation album. It's a 40-song retrospective which covers their entire 31-year career. It is positively dripping with the sounds of Mike Mills, in much the same way that African trees are dripping with giraffe spit.

Perhaps that wasn't the best analogy I could have come up with.

Anyway, because life is hard these days, because I enjoy a challenge, and because I'm kind of weird, I wanted to see if I could buy the R.E.M. compilation entirely through money derived from bottle returns.

I realize this falls somewhere between the realms of frugal, creative, pointless, and bizarre.

In the one store I've checked so far, it costs $16.99, plus tax.
Yikes.
I'm really hoping I can find a place that has it cheaper.

What's frustrating is that Amazon has it for only $9.99, but I can't buy it from there because I don't have a credit card. I can only pay cash.

I haven't checked Wal-Mart yet, both because I kinda hate Wal-Mart and because all my self-preservation instincts are telling me to stay the heck away from that place during the height of the holiday shopping season.

If I really end up having to pay eighteen dollars, ($17 plus tax), that means I'll have to return 180 empty bottles to have enough money.

So far, I've returned 53 bottles, for a total of $5.30.

It dawned on me, somewhere around bottle #32, that this is going to take forever.
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Various thoughts

1. Cold toilet seats are about as much fun as chewing on frozen bricks.

2. I am craving ice cream. Clearly this proves I am insane, since winter is knocking at my doorstep and I have no intention of letting it in. Yet I would freely welcome a pint of Ben & Jerry's. Or Häagen-Dazs.

3. Squirrels always look happy. For some reason this annoys me, yet I still think they're cute.

4. I'm wearing black socks right now, in case you were wondering.

5. Here's a picture of fettuccine alfredo for no reason.

6. Also for no reason, here's a video of R.E.M. doing a cover of Blue Oyster Cult's "Don't Fear The Reaper".

7. Now I'm craving fettuccine alfredo.

8. Today I realized that I totally forgot to put my updated car registration sticker on my license plate, so for about a month I've been driving around with expired plates. It's ok; I had the sticker all along. I just forgot about it. Rest assured I am now legal again. Good thing it wasn't expired yet when that cop stopped me awhile back.

9. Here's a recipe for fettuccine alfredo.
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Math Problem For Today

Calculate the number of times I have daydreamed about Mike Mills in the past 24 hours.

Multiply by the number of readers I would have bored to death if I had actually blogged about that.

Add the number of readers who would actually have been interested.

Subtract the square root of the number of hairballs the cats have barfed up on my carpet since 2008.

Divide by the number of Nutter Butter cookies it takes to absorb an entire pint of milk.
(For extra credit, send me that amount of cookies.)
(For an automatic A-plus, just send me Mike Mills.)
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Things I discovered over the weekend

1. Walking aimlessly around the cemetery is good exercise, plus it lets you see strange creepy forms of moss that you didn't previously know existed.

2. New socks are wonderfully comfortable, and they help your feet to forget about some of the injustices in the world.

3. Tumblr is a strange place. I created an account there so I could post all I wanted about R.E.M. (And therefore bore you slightly less often with my obsession.) Tumblr is nothing like Blogger or Wordpress or any other blogging system I've seen. You don't leave comments on people's stuff there; you actually re-blog what they did, and it shows up on your own Tumblr page. That would be the equivalent of me deciding I liked your blog post, and copying and pasting the whole thing word for word here on The Jannaverse. It would probably tick you off, yet somehow on Tumblr it's considered a compliment. There's no way to leave text comments on anyone's posts. You either re-blog it, or you click on the "like" button. Weird.
The irony is that I've had that account for only a couple days, yet I already get more "comments" (re-blogs and likes) per post than I usually get here at the Jannaverse.
I guess there are a lot of R.E.M. fans and Mike Mills fans on Tumblr.
It's a strange and different place... and yet, I'm growing increasingly fond of it. It makes it really easy to quickly share things like videos and multiple picture sets. I like how it automatically arranges the pictures in a neat style.
Anyway, if any of you care about my R.E.M. obsession enough to want to see multiple pictures and videos of Mike Mills, or if you're interested in seeing a blog where I have not (yet) mentioned farts, here's my new Tumblr blog called "Jangst". (because "angst" is so much better when it's spelled with a "J".)

4. Dead mice start to stink after awhile.

5. When you're trying to sleep in, your cat will make as much noise as possible through a variety of creative methods, including but not limited to earth-shattering meows, crinkling plastic bags, walking over papers, and fighting with the only other cat in the house.
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Note to self: Be more numb and less fast

Last Thursday I was driving into town, not quite realizing how fast I was going.
My mind was on other things.

I was listening to R.E.M.'s "Bittersweet Me", and was just about to switch over to "So Fast, So Numb".
To my surprise, I heard a siren behind me and saw flashing lights.
I pulled over and this little young-looking cop asked for my license, registration, blah blah blah. He was nice enough about it, I guess.
He explained to me exactly how fast I was going.
Ahem.

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BRIEF CONVERSATION WITH SELF:

Self #1: So, um, should I tell the readers how fast I was going, and what the speed limit actually was?
Self #2: Nah. They already think you're nuts. Plus you've already bored Monkey Man to death again just by mentioning R.E.M.
Self #1: That reminds me, do you think I could fake my own death easier if I used glass ketchup bottles instead of plastic ones?
Self #2: What?
Self #1: What?
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So, after what seemed like forever, the nice little young-looking cop brought back my license/registration/insurance. He explained, to my great surprise and relief, that "this time" he would let me off with a warning.
Thank goodness!
I've had enough emotional upheaval for one week.
I think it's time I spent a few days hibernating under the covers with a pint of good ice cream and a CD of Automatic For The People.

Self #2: You just did it again.
Self #3: Oh. Sorry, Monkey Man.
Self #2: Hey, where's Self #1?
Self #3: I dunno.... hey, do you smell ketchup?
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R.I.P to R.E.M.

I'll miss the music," admitted Peter.

"I'll miss doing the videos," added Michael.

They both looked over at Mike. "What about you?"

Mike sighed. "I guess I'll miss that weird chick in Michigan who daydreamed about swimming in my favorite beer while singing all my harmony parts."

"Oh, you mean Janna?"

"Shhhh. She'll hear you."

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In case you didn't figure it out, today's 55 was a tribute to R.E.M, who decided to break up last Wednesday after 31 years. You know from my previous post that I'm heartbroken about that. I loved their music, and I loved them. Especially Mike Mills. I loved his musical proficiency and creativity, his mild-tempered easygoing nature, his adorable nerdiness, his wonderful voice, and the great kindness which seemed to be ever-present in his eyes.

R.I.P. to my favorite band, R.E.M.
You meant more to me than I can currently articulate when the wounds are still so fresh and raw.
It's nice to be in a community of R.E.M. fans over at Murmurs, people who are also grieving right along with me.
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The Day The Music Died

Let's all observe a moment of silence as we reflect on the awful news that R.E.M. has decided to retire.
I'll go ahead and sob uncontrollably while you read about it here and here and especially here.

I'm probably the 89,347th person to make this remark today, but "It's The End Of The World As I Know It."
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Now I have a sudden urge to dance with furry yellow creatures....

This video has been my guilty pleasure for the past two days.
A few years ago, R.E.M. was on Sesame Street, doing a parody of their song "Shiny Happy People".
It's called "Furry Happy Monsters".

I love it immensely, and yet I get the distinct feeling that I shouldn't admit that to too many people. :)
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Never share BBQ chicken with angels

Things I did on Saturday:

1. Watched Goldfinger
(I pretty much have the entire movie memorized by now, but hey.)

2. Drank enough diet pop to turn my bladder into a chemical swamp.
(Bleah. Actually I prefer a good cold bottle of water).

3. Ate BBQ chicken which was delicious enough to make angels cry.

4. Realized my hair looks like a hurricane went through it.

5. Re-kindled my hatred for road construction zones.

6. Tried waltzing to Oh My Heart.

7. Realized that I have absolutely no clue how to waltz and that it probably takes two people anyway.

8. Said "I don't know where Czechoslovakia is" in Russian.

9. Mailed in the paperwork to join R.E.M's fan club.
(Shhhh. Please let me enjoy my mid-life crisis.)

10. Discovered that I have lost 110 pounds so far.
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Number six is starting to sound good

The hot weather brought lots of rain and storms, and now a cooler front has moved in.
The storm winds have left a mid-sized tree limb in my yard.
It's about 8 feet long, about the diameter of a small shrub, and it's too heavy for me to move. I tried. I'm sure a big strong guy could lift (or drag) it with no problem, but alas; I am a weakling.

Things I could do with this limb:

1. Chop it up into beverage coasters and attempt to sell them to you for $4.95 plus shipping.

2. Climb under it and wait to see how many people try to rescue me

3. Pick off the leaves and make a salad (thankfully the rain washed off all the bird poop).

4. Send a huge chunk of it to Mike Mills and beg him to autograph it

5. Send myself along with it and beg Mike Mills to autograph me instead
(And then we can eat salad off our new coasters...)
(Hopefully he'll see I'm all bark and no bite.... Ha! Get it? Tree? Bark?)
(No, wait... I've got another one... the salad would have "branch" dressing....)

6. Bonk myself over the head with it and get a few extra hours of sleep

7. Forget about it and wait for the elements to slowly dissolve it over the next hundred years
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What I learned over the weekend

1. If you leave your favorite dress jacket on the sofa, your cat will throw up on it. Twice.

2. REM's old CD "Automatic For The People" is downright awesome.

3. If you forget to wear the right pair of shoes, (the ones that actually go with what you're wearing), absolutely no one notices and no one cares.

4. My imaginary friend has taken an unpaid leave of absence, and I have no one to talk to while he is in Bermuda for three weeks. (At least I think it's a "he". I never asked, come to think of it. Maybe that's why he's upset.)

5. Lean Cuisine "Garlic Chicken Spring Rolls" are downright awesome, almost as awesome as REM's "Automatic For The People." They are significantly more awesome than REM's current album ("Collapse Into Now"). For my rant on why I dislike the current album, click here and feel free to comment, because Jantrails is a very lonely place.
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Various Thoughts

1. Last weekend I noticed that BK has brought back the "Angry Whopper". Or, as I dubbed it a few years ago, the "Barely Pretending To Care" Whopper. Don't waste your money.

2. If I had to choose between bacon and saving the world from a meteorite, the world would be doomed because it would take me too long to decide. I apologize in advance. These things happen.

3. My head is stuffed so full of REM songs right now that I went out and bought a bottle of Orange Crush so I could look cute as I sang along with them.
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In the meantime, you're all really blurry

Things I promise not to do on Memorial Day:

1. Invent a new scented air freshener called "Limburger Possum"

2. Steal any of the ketchup packets you currently have stashed in your car

3. Dance naked in front of approaching Amish buggies

4. Eat liver


Things I have already done on Memorial Day:

1. Showered (you're welcome)

2. Forgotten that I left my glasses in the bathroom

3. Watched YouTube videos of Mike Mills (the bass player from R.E.M.)

4. Eaten 14 grams of fiber


Things I will probably do before the day ends:

1. Go get my glasses

2. Wish I had air conditioning

3. Reluctantly fold laundry while secretly wishing I was a sexy French maid named Jeanne-Marie

4. Try to write some music
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