Loose change...

Time to close out the week in much the same way I started it, with a lot of random comments that don’t really amount to anything.

For years I always laughed at anyone who used one of those Coinstar machines. You know the ones where you put in a dollar of change and it gives you ninety one cents back. I’m the first person to call lotteries a tax on people who are bad at math but these machines are for people who have no concept of the value of money. Or at least that is what I thought until recently. I found out a few weeks ago that they will give you gift certificates to Amazon instead of cash and in the process not take a nine percent commission for counting your change.

This has been a very important discovery for me as I haven’t cashed in any of the loose change that I’ve accumulated since I moved to this town over three years ago. Given that I live a predominantly cash life this turns into an incredible amount of quarters just lying around the apartment. (Why a cash life? Mainly because I don’t want an itemized credit card statement at the end of the year telling me precisely how much I’ve spent at my favorite bar. I already have one bartender describing me as his vacation fund, I don’t need to know the specifics.) And since I spend a lot of time on Amazon this is a perfect match.

So this leads me to a question that I posed in my monthly report but no one has replied to yet. My main goal is to convert my loose change into a more impressive DVD collection. Here is my question, what are the ten DVD’s that you feel you must have in a collection in order for it to complete? Don’t care about genre or quality, just what do you think are the must-owns. Just post a list in the comments, I want to get an idea of what I should pick up. (True, I might already own some of them so don’t bother listing “Bloodbath: Wrestling’s Greatest Steel Cage Matches” because I already have that one. Hey, don’t look at me that way, I got it as a Christmas present.)

The big celebrity news is that Ryan Phillipe and Reese Witherspoon are getting divorced, which leads to the question, “Wait, they were still married?” This falls into the Chad Lowe-Hillary Swank category of where one wins the Oscar and the other’s career consists mainly of guest spots on ER. You can measure the lifespan of those relationships with a stopwatch. That said, who would’ve thought that a relationship founded on the set of Cruel Intentions would have lasted this long in the first place.

Think that will be it for the week. I’m out of ideas and don’t have any more stories from high school to share at the moment (though if I can ever dig up my prom photo I will post it.) I’m hoping that this weekend will be as interesting as last weekend’s, though this time with a slightly better conclusion. Or it will just turn into a quest to find the Morton Salt girl. As my novel used to be titled, my life really is a sitcom.