joe jonas, if you're reading this, i still totally pink puffy heart love you, too, ok?

So we're nearly five days into the new year and I'm just now getting to sit down and write a new post. If I had any great ideas to write about, I assure you that THAT post would have been totally super awesome, and you all would have moved heaven and earth to figure out where I live so you could travel here, en masse, and be waiting for me when I return home Tuesday from my taxing three-hour shift at the bookstore to raise me upon your shoulders and carry me through the cul-de-sac, cheering my greatness and perhaps weeping at the power of my beauty and/or words (neither of which, I should warn you, are in huge supply right now).

Then, after you've put me down and a few of you have enveloped me in hugs that perhaps went on a wee bit longer than they should have, I'll invite you in, ask you to disregard the mess (have I mentioned a thousand times that my Tool Man and our little nut and bolt have been home, together, for nearly two weeks? Yeah. We have. Be ever so careful stepping over the carcasses...), and ask if you want some monkey bread (now with 100 percent less monkey!). It is, to quote my oldest son, frickin' awesome. I wouldn't know. One of my spur of the moment resolutions for 2009 is to lay off the monkey bread unless I want a gorilla ass.

(I don't)

Look at that. Two paragraphs about nothing! On with the show!

I hope you all had a lovely New Year's celebration. I'm still slowly working my way through blog posts to catch up with the lot of you. At around 11:30 p.m., on New Year's Eve, as Tool Man and I yawned, sprawled out on the couch, and watched the end of The Dark Knight, I was struck by the similarities between my New Year's Eve observances at the ages of 41 and 14. Both involved lounging in a dark room with my best friend, watching movies, drinking pop, and eating popcorn. The only thing different now is my BFF has a penis (a nice bonus), and we didn't cry together when the ball dropped at midnight about how neither of us has a really cool boyfriend. Tool Man absolutely doesn't dig it when I weep about this fact.

So...speaking of being 14 years old, come here and let me whisper a secret to you:

******** I AM A RAGING HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL FAN!!!! ********

OMG!! On Friday, I gathered the boys (and my BFF, who, because he has a 40 year old penis didn't love it as much) and we finally got to go see High School Musical 3 (or HSM3, as the cool kids call it), and I am not kidding you one bit when I tell you there were points in the action where I got weepy! At first I thought it was because I was suffering from PMS, yet again, but then I did a quick calculation and decided nope, it wasn't PMS. It was genuine concern that Troy and his fellow East High Wildcats were going to lose their championship game! It flared up again when Troy didn't know if he could talk to his Dad about how he was torn between playing basketball or going to Julliard (yeah, it could happen) after graduation (but not before he and his classmates staged a super cool senior year musical that apparently was written by one girl in the class whose name I never caught because hi, more Zac Efron, please)(p.s. He's 21, so that makes him two years older than Joe Jonas, my other bushy headed, bushier browed cougar nugget. Not that that matters since age, as I told my 11 year old son when he made fun of me last night about my crushes, is just a number)(though I'm not sure how state or federal authorities would respond to that).

By the middle of the movie, I was kicking Vanessa Hudgens to the curb and picturing myself going to prom with Zac, which I suppose was the same fantasy the gaggle of 9 year old girls seated near me were also having, but screw them! I'm bigger, faster, and clearly older than all of them, therefore, I could totally take them, and while they all boo hoo'd their fate on their MySpace pages, I would shout my victory from my crisper, less annoying Facebook page.

Yesterday, while all the boys were gone, I watched the first two HSM movies, and even though my pain-riddled back (which I'm sure doesn't still hurt because I'm old) prevented me from dancing through the house, I also listened to all three soundtracks, loudly, and then added them to my iPod. They're all there. Right next to the Jonas Brothers' cds. When I was done, I did something I've never done before (but I'm sure 14 year olds do all the time). I text messaged Disney for a free HSM3 ringtone for my cell phone. Once I figured out what the hell I was doing. This fancy technology is confusing to my 41 year old brain! Now nothing makes my 11 and 6 year old boys (or my 40 year old husband, for that matter) happier to be around me than to have my cell phone ring and the opening verse of Now or Never fills the air, if by happier I meant super embarrassed and perhaps mildly annoyed.

Me? I'm thrilled. Hell, I'm even saving up my allowance money so I can buy the DVD when it comes out (on February 17, fyi, in case you want to get me a belated Valentine's Day gift or something). And long story short, Zac, if you're out there and you've got nothing better to do and you're Googling yourself and find this post among the 13,500,000 hits that come up when someone enters your name into the search engine, give me a call. Right now I can hardly breath!

And I have some monkey bread for you.