Inane in the membrane

Just one of those weeks, you know? My muse and I seem to be on a temporary break. I'll woo her back soon with great promises of polysyllabic profundity. In the meantime, um, I dunno, read some of my old entries?

Half-finished entries rattling around my Blogger account

-A rant against L.A. female drivers and their proclivity towards moronism.

-A rant against Usher's ubiquity.

-A rant against the CK-derivative misogyny of American Apparel ads.

-A rant against margarine.

The dim sum of all fears

I think I ate tripe by mistake yesterday.

Happy Friday

Through the most fortuitous of events, I stumbled across this insanity this afternoon.

I don't believe in fate, but I do believe in happy accidents. And that woman is nothing if not a happy accident.

To the coworker who sits in the common area outside my office

I've been trying to find a way to say this to you for a while. But it's hard, you know? We've only worked together for a little while, and I don't know you all that well, although you seem very nice. So I'm going to say it here, and hope you find your way to my blog someday. Here it is:

You don't have to close your Yahoo! Fantasy Baseball page every time I walk by.

I swear, I'm not going to chastise you, or report you, or think any less of you. Au contraire, comrade. I relate to you. I understand you. Why, as I type this, I have web pages open to CNN.com (gotta track the latest in the Aruba missing girl case!), NYtimes.com (gotta read up on the latest moronic Supreme Court ruling!), my hotmail account, blogger, and maybe three different entertainment sites detailing the latest TomKat escapades (did you hear that they might get married on Letterman tonight??).

Meantime, that news release I'm working on? The one that has to go out today? It consists of about five words –- one of which is "TKTKTK" -- in a Word document titled "Document1."

So I will never ever be casting stones your way. Ever. Go ahead and fritter away all the work hours you want, my friend. I’ve got your back.

Can I please stop being my own worst enemy?

I am on a Google binge this morning, looking up incredibly peripheral characters in my life and then feeling badly about myself when I read about their professional successes. Stupid, and a tad egomaniacal to boot.

I'm missing all of my pants

Common sense would dictate they're hiding out in my clothes hamper. But once a piece of clothing hits the hamper, it's dead to me. So, no pants this week.

Karma's a dreamy bitch

Most unexpectedly, an old co-worker showed up in my dream last night. This guy managed to be both a nerd and a jerk, an arrogant yet dorky editor who later became a dorky (yet presumably arrogant) science writer.

When I knew him, he was on the nerd fast track and had no use for me. If we crossed paths, he would dodge any eye contact; if I said hi, he never said hi back. Eventually I stopped giving him any mind; after all, there were many more interesting coworkers ignoring me back then.

He may have never again appeared on my radar except for the fact that he recently won a Pulitzer, which I read about in my alumni magazine (despite his pointed disdain pour moi, we did manage to attend the same college). Accompanying the article was a photo of him looking almost kingly in his dorkiness.

So in my dream, he was a German makeup artist with clown paint and a mohawk. He offered to do my makeup while naked in bed with me, and for whatever reason, I obliged. Dan stopped by while we were in the midst of this and began to express outrage, but I waved my hand over in Clowny's direction and said, "Come on." Dan replied, "You're totally right," and left.

Twenty-five years ago, this would have been my Utopia

On Sunday, it still came close. Even if I managed to shoot a 31-over par (a mini-golf record?) and at one point launched my ball over the green, through a fence and across the street, finally hitting a car a good hundred yards away.

Depressive schmoos

You know those white, oblong blobs in the ads for Zoloft? The ones with the cowlicks that kind of bounce around even when they're sad?

I think they're really cute. I want one.

Dammit

We just had an earthquake that everyone felt but me.

Read your Strunk & White, Mr. Michaels

It takes a lot to get me on the elliptical machine these days -- specifically, an iPod Shuffle's-worth of Superfund-level garbage music. Only a full spectrum of lyrical inanity can get me through 40 minutes of cardiovascular tedium.

And with that disclaimer in place....

So I was on the elliptical machine today and Poison's "Every Rose Has Its Thorn" came on. It worked well, as I was in a cool-down period. Then we got to the chorus -- "just like every rose has its thorn/just like every night has its daw, aw-aw-awn/just like every cowboy sings a sad, sad song" -- and I started to get annoyed. Just like every night has its dawn? That analogy means the polar opposite of what was intended. Poison has three choral chances to drive home all the agony and despair that comes with a Pamela Anderson breakup, and they blow it? Was Bret incapable of penning three lousy comparative clauses? Did no one in the band take Comp 101? Rikki? C.C.?

It would have taken an avalanche of innocuity to save me from my editorial fuming at that moment, and thankfully, so it was. Thank you, Falco.

Just to be patently clear

...that last entry was soaked in sarcasm.

Whew, we're safe

Thanks to Michael Jackson's acquittal, there is no chance of a "race" riot erupting in Los Angeles. What a relief.

"Wait, stop, please. I'll tell you everything."

This is not at all funny. But it's also very, very funny:

****

Reuters - The White House is split over whether to close a U.S. jail in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, a Republican lawmaker said on Sunday, as a magazine reported a top al Qaeda suspect interrogated there was made to bark like a dog and listen to music by Christina Aguilera.

Stop this embarrassment train, I wanna get off

Okay, no more self-deprecating tales for a little while. I don't want some high school rival to stumble across this site and revel in my sustained idiocy.

I could take this time to start making fun of other people, like the guy who said hello to me in the hall yesterday and then promptly tripped, or the Canadian in my office who pronounces "photo" like it ryhmes with "Frodo." But I won't.

Maybe my whitest moment ever

Dan and I were listening to the car radio when Tupac's "California Love" came on. We both sang along for a while until suddenly Dan stopped and stared over at me.

Him: "What did you just sing?"

Me (reflexively): "Nothing."

Him: "Come on, what did you just sing?"

Me (singing): "'In the city..... city of gumption.'"

Him: "'City of Compton.'"

Me: "Oh."

"Let us never speak of the shortcut again"

I was going to let this one disappear into the mortification vortex, but....

Last Friday I was in a hyper mood, what with it being a long weekend and me being five years old and all. Dan was refusing to properly appreciate the Tom Cruise meltdown on "Oprah," so I decided to demonstrate it for him. Up onto the couch I jumped, except my left foot got caught in the pillow crease. Down onto the coffee table I crashed, butt first.

Some women complain that they never see their husbands cry, but Dan cried very hard that night, and it touched me. No matter that his tears were tears of laughter, and that they were virtually obscured by his screams of mirth.

For the record, the coffee table didn't break and my butt is fine.

The O.C. ain't got nothing on the B.H.

A little bird alerted me to the fact that SoapNet is now showing "Bevery Hills 90210" reruns. That show was just the best. Melodramatic, cheesily written, implausible in the extreme -- and yet, strangely earnest.

Witness this exchange, in which Donna tries to convince Kelly that Dylan still has feelings for her:

"Kell, he smashed a pie into John Sears' face for you!"

"Donna, he didn't do that for me, he did that for himself."

Perfection.

I also love how on a campus of thousands (SoapNet's into the college years right now), the 90210 gang is at the center of every fraternity event, every academic scandal, every "Take Back the Night" rally. They're like those apples in the cartoons that are a different color than the rest of the apples -- the ones you just know are about to become an integral part of the action.

However, at the moment, I'm most enjoying the fact that chunks of the episode I'm watching were filmed at my current workplace. Really, there is no end to the minute pleasures of living and working in L.A.