Frackin Bungalow

It's our wholesome tradition here in the Voodoo Bungalow to spend the Christmas holidays watching TV.

Last year, we rented Alias, as many seasons as there were, and watched whenever we could grab time away from marking papers, raising a kid, pretending to be sick and unable to write, etc. It made us homesick for Los Angeles, for international travel, for student life (even if all we learned was medieval Welsh and American Transcendentalism, and not so much Kashmiri dialects and how to kill a man three ways with a Bic pen). We started wearing black turtlenecks and reading Le Carre and glancing surreptitiously at the man beside us in the grocery line. Is that really a bag of limes, sir, or will there shortly be some kind of noxious gas incident that puts spy agencies around the world on alert, margueritas on the no-fly list and avocado salad on the plates of only the world's illiterate?

This year, it's Battlestar Galactica.

I now have bad feelings about the microwave and have started doing dishes by hand. And I am worried about my arms; they aren't sculpted. They aren't visible. They don't pack a whallop.

I also wish that I had religion -- not any earthly religion that currently exists, but something groovy and galactic and involving Greeks gods in sexy green flight suits. It actually just comes down to that: We need us some flight suits here on earth.