omg i am sooooooooooooooooooooooooo

overcaffeinated. but i love you, instant coffee, i love you dearly.

you and me, baby. i'll hug the jar when i stop trembling.

mmm, more pleather goodness...

well, it would seem to me, the moron layman i am, that auntie anne has burned a pretzel (does anything made with lard and deep fried in lard catch fire or just smolder, do you suppose?) and penn was evacuated and cleared out and then, when re-opened, the passage ways were sporadically closed leaving a couple thousand people in the same waiting areas accompanied by transplanted mid-westerners in army fatigues carrying machine guns with dogs. no, uncle george, i do NOT feel safer with some acne-encrusted barely post-pubescent midwestern-transplanted teenager with a gun in my city. kindly get them the hell out and replace them with real wo/men who know that the hell to do when auntie anne's has a smoke alert and who won't evacuate penn station out of fear or obligation to some code of behavior that some other transplanted moron from the midwest wrote who thought should work in time of emergency.

geez. but i digress, here i sit in pleather goodness.

lovely week at work. the monday thing was right nice, and tuesday, wednesday, and today were thumb-up-my-ass fests. it's the problem with being both hyper-efficient and hyper-unmotivated: things get done and then nothing gets done. well, nothing meaning searching ebay for that pair of shoes and the belt i want, um, at least twenty times, and checking my email incessantly. (my economical friend: my apologies. my turn to write, or yours? geez. sorry, hon.) thankfully, my friend who works for the mayor, directly or indirectly, kept me going all day yesterday and today about friends (and non-friends...) we have in common from back in the day. and my friend who takes dogsleds to work always makes me laugh when we correspond, which, thankfully, is very, very often. few people make me laugh like her, for knowing the freaks i encounter daily and with whom i work can she relate. and to my friend with the two last names that rhyme, you're so kup en krank. mir schlungen kup in vant, indeed.

so, having a ton of use-or-lose vacation days (the joy of corporate america), i am taking tomorrow to make peace with the piping plovers and terns and maybe, just maybe, my clamfriends. yes, all three of us have had our problems, but it's nothing we cannot work out before the spf gets replaced with the carhartt.

today is homer's birthday, the most important reason to take off: happy birthday homer! your fortieth anniversary of turning twenty-one... tomorrow, you and i will chill for a bit and catch up. maybe pump you for a bit of advice: you're really good at that. always have been, and i miss it dearly and daily.

i'm only going to say this once.

here is how call waiting works:

if you're on the phone with me, and get a beep, check the id and see if the other call makes you want to let me go or put me on hold for just a teeny weeny moment to tell the other person something. that's it. not brain surgery.

if you put me on hold for more than a teeny weeny moment, i'm going to hang up. if i hang up, and you call back, your first words should be, 'sorry i'm so damned rude. i deserved that.' NOT, 'why did you hang up? i was only gone for a second!'

see, boys and girls, i don't know about you, but my landline serves no other purpose other than to be a conduit for dsl. other than that, it's got a dial-tone with absolutely no bells and whistles and i don't use it for phone calls. (but damned if i'll give up a 212 is all i have to say.) what is my other option? my cel. i'm not going to sit on hold like an idiot with my minutes expiring because YOU had to take a call from someone you deem more important than i.

got it?

nope, still no crabs

epiphanies of this weekend:

1. lilypads do exist in real live. i'm told frogs go on them, but nothing like disney movies. despite, lilypads aren't like unicorns and atlantis.

2. the good shit doesn't give you a hangover. i know, took me this long to find out.

3. drunk + boating = after school special, despite being in a lake the size of my apartment in which you could stand up and walk out if you needed to. ok, not necessarily, but you get the hyperbole of this bullet point.

4. no, i don't know how i got that bruise or why my left eyelid is sun burned.

5. small town + a brady bunch station wagon full of rowdy faggots = don't make eye contact with the locals.

i didn't get crabs this weekend

(so far. unlike last weekend.)

and as has been the theme of my weekends as of late, running to the train because i'm running late, maybe i've had some of marge's wine, maybe not, all in the pleather comfort of my beloved train, here i sit hoping to educate you, my loyal readers, about the weird shit that seems to happen to me almost daily.

some of you will recall the seagull incidents of 2001: i am not too sure why they attacked me two weekends in a row (my sunscreen an aphrodisiac?) but they did. scary shit, and i've never quite gotten over my fear of the little bastards. yes, piping plover, you and i will spar again, a la the gang wars in 'the wanderers.' you can take the boy out of the beach, but you can't take the beach out of the boy. ask the clams about last weekend, yeah, bitch, i'm a local hero. NO ONE has gotten THAT MANY clams in as short a time as i this season. yeah. so keep throwing me those looks and i'll have your ass on the grill for dinner in no time.

wait, one cannot eat seagull. and i'm a vegetarian. but that's not the point. not. the. point.

and no, terns, i haven't forgotten about you and how you aimed your razor-sharp beaks at me circa fourth of july of this year when i went to get the stray beer bottle so YOU wouldn't cut yourself. (good thing i run sub-six when i need to... just rarely on race day, grr. maybe i need a seagull attacking me?) it's ok, though. you don't want me near you, that's fine. maybe we can work something out against the flies? using our powers for good instead of evil? just a thought.

get back to me on that one.

where was i going with this. it's gone. far too much wine.