departments are organized groups of people who agree in precisely the same way on what is wrong with everyone else.

"join us for a 2.5-mile walk to fight asthma"

read a sign near the prescription pickup line in duane reade.

i tried sort of hard to stifle the laughter. a walk? 2.5 miles? is that all they can do? that's not going to get asthma very far, i'm afraid. someone should tell them the breast cancer people are already way ahead. and, tell me, how do i sign up for the ten-foot shuffle to the fridge to fight obesity?

oh, i'm so mean. i won't be laughing in october when my foot's in a boot and i can't carry my own tasti-d-lite.

tho she doesn't own a necklace of rocks,

the middle authority here in my department manages to giggle like wilma flintstone. she even squints her eyes and does that rapid-vibration-approaching-hummingbird-levels thing with her shoulders. this is not to say that she doesn't also know how to cackle unattractively like gargamel.

hey, was i alone in my childhood misconception that gargamel is a woman? which, given that he is balding, is a bad call, but on the other hand, could i be blamed if the creators put him in a shapeless dress and red booties?

without even thinking

i just said to my boss, 'yeah, i love the occasional plain-speaking flight attendant.'

she was like, 'whaaa...? OH, p-l-a-i-n plain. good one.' har har.

quote of the day

from dan kennedy, who solves your problems with paper on mcsweeneys.net:

"I'm currently in the habit of dumping eleven bucks a morning on something called a venti caramel macchiato, an orange Odwalla, and a blueberry Bliss Bar just to try and have some fun in the face of what feels like a wave of gray, sensible, humorless, pained so-called adulthood that is trying to kill us all."

on friday i went straight from nap to party upstairs at wake forest dave's. on the roofdeck. one of his penthousemates (the bolivian interior decorator) was celebrating her birthday with sangria, a potful of paella, and a roomful of very fine liquor, including my diabolical friends tangueray no. ten and vintage porto. dave (from my program in italy), who managed to live two floors above me for three months before we ran into each other in the elevator and began getting shitfaced on the roof together, took me to meet carlos, the penthousedweller across the way and custodian of the veryfine roof place, so that i would be welcome to come up without dave and dave's penthousebrethren.

carlos gave us the first allow-me-to-show-off-my-room-and-all-of-my-fabulous-toys tour i've been on since the fourth grade. first, he showed us the front room with its blue-muraled walls that climb to retarded heights and its giant fish tanks and, yes, its jacuzzi from which you can remote-control the air-conditioning or one of the penthouse's many stereo units, or pretty much anything electric. for all his affection for the remote control, this man also has a great fondness for the orgasmically posed cast-metal feminine figure. they pepper each room, sometimes free-standing, sometimes paired together in a concave formation to support a clear glass tabletop. the tour reached its pinnacle when carlos opened closet after closet of suits, always making stroking motions through the air (the best comparison to which i can make being wayne and garth's DOO-doo-doo wavy motion that signals yet another alternative ending) while intoning, 'versaaassssshhhh, versaaasssshhh, ALL versaaaasssh, ONLY verssssaaaasssssh.' then we saw the shoes. those had their own closet ('manolo BLAAAAHHnik, yes, yes, manoooolo'), including a snazzy pair of white leather short boots that dave wanted to borrow.

while we were gone, dave's bathroom caught on fire! and you know what? i was too drunk to notice. i went in there and was like, hmm, there's sort of a strong smell in here. and who put all those ashes in the sink? and, man, that sure is a beautiful black streak going up the wall. i hadn't noticed it before.

duuuude...a technical position just opened up in our NY museum, on ed's, like, second day in the city. i am so excited. i think it looks like something close enough to what he's done. i am containing myself by wisely drinking yet another cup of coffee and munching on donut.

you're all a bunch of milk-packagers and surgeons, aren't you?

notice those ads (powered by google, of course) at the top of this page? their content changes when mine does. as i type this, they're pushing dairy packaging technology and sterile biotech probes. sort of amusing to see what they isolate out of all these streams of words. will the google ads, having scoped the previous sentence for nouns it can match with its ad inventory, implore you to give yourself a break and finally take that wilderness vacation as soon as i post this? even if i type 'streams of urine'? or streams of insults? or streams of streamers and streamy steamy seamy same-y streaming extreme streams you can streak along?

all this makes me suspect that the free 1-GB google email accounts with targeted ads based on email content will be more humorous than scary.