I just had this conversation with my boyfriend:

J: I have a flashing vacancy sign on my head.
Me: I can't cast any stones. I'm pretty bad too, as you know.
J: I have a fried egg for a brain. Yours is still in its shell.
Me: My shell is definitely cracked. Just wait 13 years when I'm your age. I'm going to be wearing a bike helmet and drooling. I hope you still love me with my bike hetlmet.
J: Are you going to tape cut-out pictures of Kelly Clarkson all over it?
Me: I don't know yet.

Obviously my blog has been hanging around with the newspaper I work for,

because I now have to post a correction to one of yesterday's stories (for the record, I believe that the newspaper I work for should have a Corrections sections. It should really have an entire section in which we would be able to print all of the corrections and retractions from the previous day's issue. Oh, and when you paid to have that obituary of your poor dead Aunt Eloise put in the paper and we printed an ad for Zu Zu's Bead Shop instead? Yeah, we'll fix that in there too).

I received an irate phone call from Connie last night. She was calling to inform me that the scene at the swing set did not go down when I was a senior and she was a junior. Apparently, this took place when I was a sophomore and she was a freshman. She feared that people might think her to be "the ass hole of the world" if they were lead to believe it had taken place her junior year.

So she was two years younger. Big whoop!

I then received a text message from her that read, in its entirety, "k have crabs."

Now, I could only assume that she had meant to send "I have crabs", which, for the record, she doesn't (at least I don't think she does), but it's a long-running joke of ours. Then I couldn't help but laugh out loud because it said "k have crabs" which could be read as "Okay, have crabs" which is just downright hilarious! Like I need her permission to get crabs or something! I'll get crabs whenever I damn well please, thank you very much!

I had a very good night last night. Can I just say that and then no more?

You know it's not like me to complain,

but it's oppressively hot in my office today. It's the hottest day of the year (currently 95 degrees - feels like 100+) and our air conditioner is broken. It was working fine yesterday. Go figure.

I did get a banana popsicle, though. I love banana popsicles. It's too bad I got halfway through and realized it wasn't banana, but really pineapple. I do not love pineapple popsicles. I'm very allergic to pineapple. I'm actually also very allergic to bananas. I might be more allergic to bananas than I am pineapple. I'm not allergic to banana popsicles, though. I am, however, allergic to pineapple popsicles. My throat is itchy and, if I'm at all lucky, closing up as we speak.

I just know that there's an SAT question somewhere in that last paragraph.

Okay, so I don't really care about the lack of air conditioning or the banana/pineapple popsicle or even my imminent death. What I really care about is that today is my Coming out Anniversary. Five years ago today I told my then and now best friend Connie that I do not like vaginas. She was (and still is) about as supportive as any one person could ever be. I truly believe that it's because of her that I am who I am today. I love her and cherish our relationship more than she'll ever know. Also, she's hot.

And now that I've said all of those nice things about her, I'm practically forced to share a related story that consistently mortifies Connie to this day.

I was a senior in high school. Connie was one year behind me. We were at a local hangout one night and had decided to make the short walk up the road to a nearby school's playground, just as we'd done many times before. We liked to swing on the swings. We'd been swinging and talking for a little while when, suddenly, Connie stopped. I slowed myself to a halt and we sat there on those swings on that warm summer night. She turned to me and said, "Have you ever just wanted to kiss a friend?"

I said, "Nope!"

I just cracked open a fortune cookie

and the fortune reads : If your desires are not extravagant, they will be granted.

All of the sudden, life seems a little less worth living.

My left eye was sore when I woke up this morning.

It honestly feels like I got punched. Also, my lid is puffy and droopy. I really couldn't think of what it could have been, so I asked around at work. The general consensus among the women in the office is that it's either a stye or the onset of conjunctivitis. It was suggested that I apply hot compresses or even a hot chamomile tea bag. Based on the size of my eyelid and the amount of pain I feel if I press on it, though, I'm inclined to think a gopher has climbed up into my eyeball. So, basically, I'm not sure if I need hot compresses or an exterminator.

I've moved roughly 216 times in my life. Approaching my 217th-ish move, I've decided that I will not wait until the very last second to get myself ready to go. In light of this decision, I spent some time in the closet this weekend. It's been such a long time since I've spent any serious amount of time in the closet (ahem), so there was a lot of work to do! J and I decided that if we each managed to sort through our clothes and get rid of the stuff we're not going to wear anymore then there might be more than an iceberg’s chance in Hell of all of our clothes fitting in one city house.

I'll tell you one thing, though. If I have to throw away my extra lowrise bootcut jeans with the silver-studded leg seams and back pockets then he has to throw away at least a few of his ten million ripped-up, stained t-shirts.

After culling the less-needed items from wardrobe, I found myself with 2 huge trash bags filled with hardly-worn, overpriced clothing.

In related news, there should soon be an onslaught of smashingly dressed homeless people in the north shore area. Don't be alarmed, but consider yourself warned: That guy with the beard that walks around downtown will still beat you up if you look at him funny, despite his new army green 5-pocket corduroy cargos.

I am not eating cake right now, as evinced by my less-than-sunny disposition. Today is the annoying girl from the Classified department's last day an

I am not eating cake right now, as evinced by my less-than-sunny disposition. Today is the annoying girl from the Classified department's last day and there's cake to be had. The cake is scheduled to be cut somewhere between 3:30 and 4. Now, I leave at 4. If I don't get a piece of cake before I leave I'm going to be pissed. I wonder if it would be rude to cut a piece for myself before the annoying girl even gets to see it.

In unrelated news, I don't know why I even watch Shark Week on the Discovery Channel. I was having panic attacks in my bed because I was having flashbacks to the one time I was in the ocean. I was carried and thrown in, as I would never have entered of my own accord. It was a brush with death, in retrospect.

Also, I learned that white sharks frequent the waters in the San Francisco area. This, of course, prompted a conversation in which I urged J to stay out of the water. I told him that I just don't have the time to be worrying about him getting eaten by sharks. Furthermore, I told him that bull sharks have been known to venture into fresh water and that maybe even the shower was a bad idea.

Then he promised me that he would not shower until I get there, to which I responded that he had my permission to shower, but that he must be extra careful until I can get there and make sure that the shower is bull shark-free.

See, he really needs me around. For the important things.

And for the record? I miss him so much right now it hurts.

When I was a very little boy,

I used to go out after the rain had passed and comb the fence in my back yard. I was looking for snails. They were small snails that couldn't have been any bigger than a popcorn kernel. I would find as many snails as I could, pluck them off of the fence, and put them into a little plastic bucket. I would then grab a hammer from Mother's collection and bring it to the bucket. Those poor snails probably never saw it coming. They probably didn't expect me to take that hammer and smash them all up in that little plastic bucket.

For the record, I absolutely believe in karmic payback.

Margie Girl was let go yesterday.

She'd made too many mistakes. She was truly a liability. Had it not been for the vigilance of others within our own company and the companies involved in publishing our newspaper, there could have been numerous occasions where she would have been the singular reason that we did not publish a paper on a particular day. In the newspaper business, it's generally a good idea to actually publish the newspaper.

Despite all of the complaining I did, I suppose I can say now that she's really not an awful person. She wasn't so bad. With a little more time she could even have been a real asset to the company. She was not an unintelligent woman and some of what we do here is actually quite abstruse. In saying this, I think I might actually miss her!

...

I'm a wicked good liar, huh?

Margie Girl was the bane of my existence. She has the mental acuity of a rubber spatula. A monkey could do this job, people (in fact, I think one does - she sits behind me)! Also, she dropped fetid bombs in the lady's room. Good bye Margie Girl! Goodbye to you, your rubber spatula brain, and your fetid bombs!

I am all alone in the office.

Everyone else is at a company meeting. I have been allowed to miss the meeting because I am leaving the company in a matter of weeks.

I've turned my radio up a little too loud. I've unbottoned the next button down on my shirt. Next I think I'll sit my bare ass on Mouth's keyboard and rub my hoo hoo dilly on her phone receiver.

Yeah, that's what I'll do!

Okay, so remember what I spoke about on Saturday?

It's definitely getting worse. I've really done well, all things considered. I made it almost six months without ever feeling like I really needed it.

For the record, I no longer feel that way. I need it. Now. Yesterday. 12 days ago.

I went to see Fantastic Four yesterday. I could tell you what I thought about the movie, but all I'd really like to talk about are the thoughts that were running through my mind re: the three hot men in the cast. I'm actually not even going to lie about it. Even Jessica Alba (whom I typically don't like) was turning me on in that skin-tight just-enough-cleavage blue number.

Even watching the news isn't safe. I turned on the news this morning to find that my usual moderately-attractive-in-that-news-anchor-kind-of-way news anchor was out for the day and had been replaced by a young-and-kind-of-too-cute-to-be-a-news-anchor news anchor. I realized that I may or may not have a serious problem on my hands when I started to lick the television screen.

Okay, I didn't really lick the television screen, but that's only because I was in a rush to get out the door. I suppose I'll really have a problem when I actually stop and make the time to lick the television screen. I'm not there yet, people, but I don't know how much more of this I can endure!

Also, it seems that something I said a few days back has been misconstrued. I don't want to quit blogging. I think I just want to move to a new place. I'm so over Diaryland, people. If I do move, I'll be sure to tell both all three all four all five of my readers (Hi Con and Bits and Kate and Chris and Mare!) where to find me next.


Also, okay, I get the point people! More than 2 people read this thing. I promise not to go anywhere any time soon (blatant lie, by the way. I'm so picking up and moving to a new location soon).

Once, when I was a senior in high school,

Mother called me into the kitchen. When I sat down at the breakfast bar she started to tell me a story. She was a young girl. She'd crept into her father's bedroom while he was sleeping and found his stash of dirty magazines. She, along with some of her friends, took those magazines outside and behind a large rock. They were curious. They wanted to know all about these forbidden pleasures and no one was willing to indoctrinate them so they took matters into their own hands.

I sat and listened to this story, all the while wondering why I'd been called in to hear it. Then she said, "I found your porn under the bathroom sink."

She'd found my porn under the bathroom sink!

She'd found my porn under the bathroom sink?

A) I didn't own any porn. B) Had I owned porn I would have been smarter than to hide it under the bathroom sink!

Obviously, I denied ownership. She said she'd already been to my brother and that he wouldn't claim the magazine either. She wasn't mad, but wanted me to know that these types of publications objectify women and depict them in a less-than-flattering light. I was mortified that she didn't believe me! I begged her to believe me! I was afraid that she'd think less of me.

Now I love to rub that story in her face. The proof couldn't have been any more in the pudding (and by pudding I mean the fact that I don't like naked women in any light. In fact, if there are going to be naked women in the room, I'd prefer there to be no light at all.)

I was thinking about porn today.

I don't really think about porn. I don't like porn. I didn't see an honest to goodness porno movie until I was a freshman in college. It was straight porn and very bad straight porn at that. I'd just moved into my dorm and only met the girl down the hall a few days before, but I'd known her roommate since the summer. She invited me over to watch straight porn and drink red wine out of red plastic SOLO cups. We sat in bean bag chairs. I don't know which of the three I found least appealing: the porn, the SOLO cups, or the bean bag chairs.

I didn't see gay porn until the following summer. A guy that I may or may not have been dating at the time invited me over for a movie. He might have said movie, but I was still in my salad days and, thus, probably wouldn't have picked up any such inflection in his voice. Even then I knew that "Come over and watch a movie" is the universal euphemism for "Come over and get nekkid", so I never really expected to watch a movie, but I really didn't expect to walk into the living room and find 4+ naked Czechs getting all sorts of nasty on the television.

I wouldn't consider myself conservative, but the thought of watching other people have sex has never turned me on. It's all just so contrived.

So why was I thinking about porn? Because my boyfriend lives 3,119.59 miles away (you know I just Mapquested that, too) and I keep thinking that there must be some way to allay at least one aspect of this anguish. Unfortunately, though, I still refer to my own private part as a hoo hoo dilly, so I don't think I'm ready for the big guns.

I'm considering a second move in the near future.

We all know I'm moving back to San Francisco (largely in part to fact that I only talk about it every 9 seconds and, oh, also the giant digital countdown I've raised here in town).

I'm also thinking that it's time to move off of Diaryland. Under three different names I've been here for five years (note how I'm skillfully omitting the first time I moved off of Diaryland, posted two and a half times, then dropped off the face of the planet).

I'll decide if I really want to move off of Diaryland after I make my real life move. I don't really know what that move is going to make of my little corner of the Web.

Note to self:

Witch hazel and hydrogen peroxide are not the same thing.

Liviasgarden was really trying to be helpful when she suggested I try a little witch hazel to ameliorate some of the itch I've been experiencing from my recent monthly manscaping. What she doesn't know, though, is that I'm a complete monkey. A monkey who, for some inexplicable reason, managed to make it 23 years thinking that witch hazel was just a fancy name for hydrogen peroxide.

Believe you me, you do not want to be splashing hydrogen peroxide onto your freshly-shaven hoo hoo dilly! I have, however, duly noted this as a potential form of torture as I'm a firm believer that one can never have too many methods of torture in one's repertoire.

After applying some aloe gelly (that's what it says on the bottle. Aloe gelly. I've never been partial to the word jelly, but there's something about gelly that really upsets me) to the afflicted area, I did have a few minutes of relief, but the itch persists.

At this point, even cinnamon & raisin oatmeal sounds like a good idea.

If I had a million dollars

I would pay The Barenaked Ladies to stop singing that wretched song.

I usually try to exercise at least a small amount of restraint here.

There are certain things that I feel should be kept sacred. Some things just aren't meant to be laid out for anybody with access to Google to see. There was actually even a recent article about this notion.

Having said that, I'm now going to tell you that my naughty parts are itchy. I performed my monthly grooming two days ago and now my naughty parts are itchy. I always just tough it out, but I wonder if there is anything that could be done to alleviate the itch.

I just asked Bitsy about it (yes, we can talk about my itchy nether region out loud at work) and she said that I should be using aloe directly after. She also said that I might want to go home and apply an oatmeal and water mixture. The only oatmeal I have at home, though, is cinnamon & raisin. I don't know if that's the same thing.

A part of me thinks it's a little sad that I'm 23 years old and I have to learn about shaving from my boss. Another part of me thinks that my father might have been a little put off had I asked him how to groom my man bits.

I used to think I was ugly.

Genuinely hideous. I hated myself on the outside. I would dream of ways to change how I looked. I felt physical pain in my stomach every time I looked at myself in the mirror.

Having a hot boyfriend has fixed that.

Now I can say with all sincerity that, when I want to, I can look pretty damn cute.

That fact alone is what makes me think that, on some subconscious level, I decided to look like crap today.

Totally unrelated bit that I didn't even plan on writing: Love is a Battlefield just came on the radio and I couldn't be any more pleased than I am right now! I'm all about Pat Benatar right now and I love every second of it. God give me the strength to not get up and do my Love is a Battlefield dance right here in the office.

I just went up into the attic

to locate some of my kitchen stuff that I'd like to bring with me back to San Francisco and, while I was exploring, I found six broken irons. Six broken irons.

There is a place where irons go when they die and that place, apparently, is my attic.

I must have gotten all of 14 seconds of sleep last night.

War of the Worlds was, for me, terrifying. I don't know if it was the whole Aliens Conquering the World thing or the fact that I couldn't help but find Tom Cruise exceptionally attractive, but something did not sit well with me. Actually, it was definitely the bit about the aliens. Tom Cruise can be a creepy, domineering nutbag and still be hot. I'm okay with that.

Obviously, though, the aliens are going to get me. Maybe they didn't last night, but that's only because we didn't have any lighting last night. There are, however, thunderstorms expected for the next week and I fully expect to be abducted (again) soon.

Perhaps I would have gotten a better night's sleep had I used the SLEEPTRACKER Watch. I learned about this dubious little gizmo yesterday morning from my friendly morning news anchors. The watch allegedly tracks your movement throughout the night and then, when it senses you're at the perfect moment to wake up (based on movement), it sounds the alarm. Hello? With my luck, I'd fart in the middle of the night and that damn alarm would go off.

This morning I learned about the Anti-Jetlag Diet. They talked it up as if it was some simple diet that would completely eradicate jetlag and, naturally, I thought that this might be a good idea for my move back to San Francisco (can I just say here that me + jetlag = ugly? The last trip I took out to see J I never really managed to get on West Coast time, which, unfortunately, resulted in a lot of passing out and drooling down his back while we were lying on the couch watching movies). Upon further inspection of this diet, I learned that it requires more than just, say, eating nothing but cucumbers for two days prior to the trip. It requires "Feast Days" and "Fast Days" and, while I could definitely get behind a day of feasting, I have little to no interest in fasting.

Lastly, and not at all related, I'd like to thank my dear friend Andy for supplying me with my new mantra: People are like slinkies: Not very useful, but still a lot of fun when they fall down the stairs.

I'm having t-shirts made up as we speak, people.

It's a grey, wet day,

I'm listening to Tori Amos, and Margie Gal will not be in the office today. I'm almost tempted to say things are going well.

I did have to endure a "heart-to-heart" with The Deaf Dock Man this morning. He's lonely. He's ugly. His friends don't like him. He's going to die alone. (These are all his words, not mine) Does anyone know how to say "You make me want to drink battery acid" in sign language?

And now, because I've said something negative, I will follow up with something positive.

Two reasons why I love my friend Angel:

1. While sitting at the bar in our little Mexican joint last night, she picked up a cup containing flowers that couldn't have been any less than six inches tall and said, "Hey, it's like a shot glass!"

2. While playing Trivial Pursuit 90's Edition (also at the bar), she read me some question about the U.S.S.R. Government, flipped over the card to find the answer, saw Mikhail Gorbachev, and couldn't figure out what a ballet dancer had to do with the Communist party.

In a related story, I hear Mikhail Gorbachev can do a mean pas de chat.

Connie and I complain. A lot.

All of this kvetching sort of belies our pretty amazing lives. A week or so ago we decided to make a concerted effort to stop and realize how bad things really aren't. I proposed that, within each daily email, we had to include at least one positive thing that's going on in our lives. Well, now that Con has a new job, it seems as if we won't be having daily email correspondence any time soon. This is putting a real damper on my Drive Towards Happiness. In lieu of the Connie emails, I think I'm going to have to put some of my happy shit here.

First of all, I just counted (I know, it's shocking. I can count. Maybe next I'll learn how to tell time!) and I only have 29 days of work left, assuming I work every other Saturday. Twenty-nine is not so bad, people. At least that's what I chanted this morning when I had my letter opener pressed to my jugular.

Second of all, my turkey and muenster is on wheat today, and not rye like yesterday. I'm partial to wheat, so that's a good thing.

Third of all, I'm down 2 pounds from where I was 2 weeks ago (138.5). This is good news, obv, because I'm losing weight. It's kind of bad news because I was actually down 4 pounds a week ago. I suppose one can only expect to pack on at least a couple of pounds when you spend an entire Saturday eating and drinking. I did manage to shut myself off (albeit a tad late) after exclaiming, crestfallen, from the backseat of Connie's car, that I had "eaten all of the dip." (I suppose the fact that I couldn't even take a short car ride without toting along the chips and dip says a lot, either about my inability to exercise moderation or the fact that I'd had a few too many peach bellinis, strawberry daiquiris, and/or some creative beverage that we aptly nicknamed Cement (pronounced SEE-ment, preferably with a southern accent).

Lastly, my hair has looked superb the last two days. Really fantastic. It's a shame that such perfect hair should be wasted on the people here in this office, but if I were to put a positive spin on it then I could say that I'm actually doing them a service by raising the quality of aesthetics their lives.

I feel better now, don't you?

We just had a moment in the office here.

It was one of those moments where Margie Gal asked one of the four million questions that she asks five bajillion times a week. These moments are painful. These moments are like having a root canal without novocaine. These moments are like running through a briar patch, then falling into a pool of nail polish remover. These moments are like falling nine stories from you Florida summer apartment's balcony and not landing safely on an awning.

These moments are so painful that, in an attempt to somehow balance the pain of listening to her ask her question, I started punching myself in the head and yelled "I'm punching myself in the head!"

Now my head just hurts.

So I hate to come back like this,

(and I have been away. Not really "away", but away. Also, did I just imply that I was at some sort of rehab, because I wasn't at any sort of rehab, unless you consider surplus alone time and enough Double Stuf Oreos to make Kirstie Alley say "No thank you, I've had my share." some sort of rehab.) but I just sat here and listened to Mouth for 12 minutes. I suppose "listen" isn't the correct verb, because I didn't actually catch any of what she said. I did, however, make note of her cotton/spandex shirt that could only be described as light mauve, with its third and seventh buttons no where to be found. Classy. And, no, it does not match that hot pink trench.

Some 362-year-old woman was just in the office to pay her bill. I was half-tempted to direct her to the classified department so that she could place an ad for her missing teeth, but I bit my tongue.

I bite my tongue around here a lot. It's really a wonder that it's still attached.

I'm not speaking to one of my dogs.

She chased and killed a little baby bird in my backyard yesterday. It was really very terrible and, admittedly, still a little hard to talk about. Let it be known, though, that the little thingy received a proper burial behind the garage. I dug the hole and Mother placed the deceased into it (wrapped in newspaper, natch. We don't touch dead things). The mound was marked with a stone. There wasn't a dry eye between us.

Also, before I'm lambasted about it, I know that she's just a dog and I know that some dogs do that kind of thing. My dogs, however, should not be doing that kind of thing. I'll get over it. I just need some time.

Connie is home for the weekend and you can absolutely color me excited. I haven't seen her properly in months. I managed to see her for all of 15 seconds last March when I was in the city but that's just not enough Connie for me! We're meeting for dinner tonight and having The 5th or 6th Annual Connie & Taylor Fourth of July Celebration Cookout tomorrow.

Also, I'd like to think that we'll be celebrating more than all that independence crap. I'd like to think that we'll also be drinking to Connie's recent graduation from NYU as well as her new job that starts on Tuesday. My Connie doesn't just have crabs, she's also all grown up!

For the record, my Connie does not have crabs.

At least I don't think she does.

Happy long weekend all!