Only in Los Angeles would you get heckled for wearing a Harvard University T-shirt. Last night I was walking home from the grocery store sporting just such an item, and as I passed a group of guys/tools hanging out in front of their apartment building, one of them yelled, "Whoa! Look out for the Harvard girl!" They all laughed.

For the record, I didn't go to Harvard (my sister went to grad school there). Also for the record, as someone who was obliquely pressured to go to Harvard from the age of 6, I have a healthy disdain for the place -- I only wear the shirt when I work out because it's really soft. But I have to admit, last night I sort of enjoyed being mocked for my perceived nerdiness.

And wow, considering what my high school career was like, I can't believe I just wrote that last sentence.

Last Friday, at a baseball game, I went to buy beer and handed over my ID. "Oh wow, you've lost a lot of weight, haven't you?" said the barmaid, looking back and forth between the current me and the photographed-five-years-ago me. No, I haven't. See, this harkens back to my earlier blog in which I discussed being unphotogenic. I look like a complete fatty in my license photo. COMPLETE fatty. And trust me, the first DMV photo was even worse. The photographer made an exception and let me take a second photo when the first one turned out so horribly.

The woman saw my expression of sadness and said, "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to be impudent. You should be proud of yourself." And just like that, my annoyance turned to instant love for the middle-aged ballpark beer server who so casually used the word "impudent."

Today I am the narrator in "About a Boy," marking off time in half-hour increments. My gift and curse right now is that the majority of people in my office are on vacation, and any work I need to do over the next few weeks before I myself go on "vacation" (three-week surgical leave) could easily be completed in a few days' time. So I have nothing to do and no one to answer to, a situation that I thought would be far more revelatory than it is.

Over the next two weeks I will be attempting to eat all of my favorite foods. My surgery is a jaw surgery, and my jaw surgery will have me on a liquid/soft diet for quite a while. But I'm finding that I no longer have a go-to list of Top Ten Foods the way I did when I was a wee one. Lobster and steak, yes, but beyond that I feel lost. If anyone has suggestions as to what my next 42 meals should consist of, rain them down upon me.

There is no way to measure the depth of my boredom today.

I'm a big-time dog stalker. No half-cute doggie is safe from my overzealous exclamations of love. The other day we went hiking and there were two of the cutest puppies in the world playfully sizing each other up. I went over and tried to ingratiate myself, get a few pets in, but they were having none of it. I was the Kevin Millar to their Manny Ramirez and David Ortiz.

Dan thought I should start another blog, called Bldog, and document my dog interactions, which I thought was a pretty good idea. Right after he suggested it, though, I started to see all sorts of dead dogs on the side of the highway. This I considered to be a bad omen. I don't want to be writing a Bldead Bldog.

I still have days when I can't believe I will never be famous. This sense of entitlement harkens back to the sixth grade, when I played the part of "Shepherd" in my class's original play about the Greek gods. The mother of a friend of mine later gave me a ride home and told me that I had a "certain something up there on that stage" and that she could "see my name in lights some day." Inside, I puffed with pride.

Unfortuantely, I followed up that performance with a disasterous turn in "Oliver!" (one of my few lines was, "You little ungrateful wretch!" which I performed as "You little ungrateful wrench!") And then, well, puberty hit, and any desire I had to be in the public eye disappeared for about 10 years.

But I've always still sort of thought that I would, you know, get famous some day. I know, I know, everyone thinks this way. Or do they? My residence in Los Angeles has screwed with my head on this front. The city is filled with people who think they're special (translation: better than you) and who cling to the idea that fame is their destiny. And some days, being the latent egomaniac that I am, I wonder if maybe I ended up here for a reason and if --

ARGH! I forgot to feed my meter and just got a ticket moments before I got out there. ARGH! I suck. I am SO not getting famous.

Blood given. Meaghan woozy.

Today I'm leaving work early to give blood. It's not an altruistic act -- I'm giving blood to myself, in anticipation of surgery I'm having in a few weeks (don't worry, I'll be playing the sympathy card soon enough and filling in my readership on the details of the procedure). I was instructed to eat a lot of protein beforehand, which, roughly translated into Meaghan-speak, meant, "Gorge yourself on bacon."

Bacon. I may have been a vegetarian for six years, but I never stopped thinking about bacon. Delicious on its own AND the perfect foil to a myriad of food items (everything tastes better wrapped in bacon!), it may well be the perfect food.

However, as I was reminded again today, too much bacon is not a good thing. I'm feeling pretty ill at the moment.

Today I managed to lose a banana in my office. Crawling around the floor looking for the stray fruit, I thought I'd reached a new low. But then I found the banana! It had fallen into my gym bag somehow.

Since I'm getting married in Key West next year, I've been trying to get into the spirit by reading some Hemingway. I am now reminded of how BOR-ing I find a lot of his writing. To Have and Have Not is my current endeavor, and it quite literally put me to sleep five pages in last night.

My vitriol has abated somewhat, or at least is being rechanneled towards a more deserving target. Goodbye, seasonal workers and slackers; hello, Red Sox. (Actually, come to think of it, the Sox fit into those former categories perfectly.)

I had to kick empty boxes around the house last night after that latest loss. Brady et al. cannot enter training camp soon enough.

I'm feeling "eh" about the long weekend. Our plans are too vague right now, and we've developed a habit of being on the periphery of July 4th celebrations the last few years. Like, Oh, look, I think those are fireworks going off in the great distance. I could go for being smack dab in the middle of a small-town July 4th fete this year.