today i am troubled because . . .

when "and a dab of
rectal fluid" is in the
recipe, just pass.



. . . centipedes live for about six years, sometimes longer. that means every time i see one and fail to catch it in time to kill it, i have to assume that it is going to be hanging out behind my bookshelf or bureau or bathroom sink for up to a decade. in high school a spider lived in my bedroom window. at night i would see it hanging upside down on the curtain, and i would watch it and watch it and watch it, sometimes for almost an hour at a time; it never moved. and then i would turn out the light and roll over to go to sleep, and if i sat up and turned on the light five minutes later the spider would be down at the bottom of the curtain, making its steady, stealthy way into my bed, and as soon as i drifted off it would bite me and bite me and bite me. spider bites are easy to recognize once you've received a few. when you examine the site closely, you can make out the distinct entry wound from each individual fang in the center of its small red welt. my spider, for some reason, tended to strike three times in a row in the same general region, usually on my stomach. i loved my spider. i talked to it, i named it, i told it about my day and wished it sweet, sanguineous dreams. i missed it when it was gone. but centipedes live for about six years, sometimes longer, and so now i not only have to face them, to force myself to stay in a room with one, but i will also have to chase them about when they try to run for it, because i would rather let the ghastly twenty-ton queen mother of all murderous arachnids chew my face off and lay eggs in my brain than wonder while i'm brushing my teeth some night in 2009 whether the centipede that beat me to the door in 2005 is about to march over the toes of my left foot.

. . . i'm pretty sure that if a person who knew nothing of him were to watch the speech george w. bush made last night without any sound, that person would think one of two things: (1) that the president of the united states is actually a faultily wired automaton whose movements are dictated by puppeteer chimps administering electrical shocks via remote control, or (2) that he is the victim of some sort of neurotransmitter typhoon that has left him manic, tic-laden, and deranged. turn on the sound, my lovelies, and you are forced to admit that, actually, he is both. and that don't leave us but nowhere. i understand that at some point a well-placed round of applause was begun by one of the president's aides. excellent.

. . . i can't stop eating chunky peanut butter out of the jar with a fork. my mouth says yes, but my tush says DIE, YOU DISGUSTING WHORE! HAVEN'T YOU HURT ME ENOUGH?

. . . the eels are playing right now not thirty minutes from my home. and i'm writing this.

toadie's dream about steven wright

she met him once in
a camera store. he rented
a slide projector.


that's a true story. it was the ferrante-dege in harvard square, she worked there while she was in college. but that was years ago and she hasn't seen him since then, and two nights ago she dreamt that she was housesitting for him, and for some reason she rearranged all of his furniture, and in the course of moving things she found a large blanket with each of its corners folded over. when she unfolded them she saw that each corner contained a tiny dead gorilla, about the length of an adult index finger. she suddenly became incredibly nervous and put the blanket back as close as possible to the way she had found it, and then she went to sleep on steven wright's couch. just as she was about to fall asleep she realized that steven was in the house, watching her, and when he thought she wasn't looking he ran over to the blanket to make sure she hadn't moved any of his dead baby gorillas. once he knew they were all accounted for and in good shape he ran out of the house.

and that was all she could remember.

i think this is hilarious, i want her to call him up and talk him into making a short film out of it with us. she does not concur. but if you do, please, say so. we'll circulate a petition and get this show on the road. i can't see him saying no.

the shame, the terrible shame...

i might not believe
in calories, but junk food
will still make me fat.



if i'm g.w. bush or some ninny member of his administration, though, you'll never convince me that it's the calories that are doing it. it'll just be a natural phase that my body is going through, completely independent from all coinciding factors. much like global warming has nothing to do with anyone or anything on the planet, it's just a natural shift in the earth's climatic trend.

now, you and i know that this is bullshit, right? peanut butter and home fries live eternally in your dimpled remorseful flesh, and human beings are razing the planet from stem to stern. and yet, amazing things like this keep happening...

only the wicked sleep soundly, that's what they say, isn't it? something like that. i believe it, anyway. that's why so many politicians have such tidy hair-dos. jerks.

recent developments

i don't know how the
APA 5th cites corporate
memos. but i'll learn.


• i have had to confront and kill two centipedes in the past week and a half. one of them was on the wall right next to my head while i was lying in bed at three in the morning, and the other, today's, was actually IN my bed. in it. my bed. it slitherscurried all horrible with its legs and its antennae and its crawly rippling bristling electric underworld evil right up beneath my mail and under the blanket, and i left my body, and from the adjacent room toadie heard me scream

"GET OUT OF MY BED, YOU LITTLE BASTARD FREAK!!!! DIE!!! DIE!!! DIE!!!"

and i found myself staring at the newly gooey underside of a sneaker. you can't crush the legs or the antennae, which, of course, are the truly terrible bits. they remain intact and reach out at you from their bug-gutty puddle, smug and unflinching and enough to paralyze my diaphragm, even in death.

i'll tell you a secret: i always feel awful about killing them, because most of me would rather not. it's only a very small part of my brain that absolutely must destroy them, but that part is incredibly strong. she's incredibly strong, and she forced me to change the sheets, move all the furniture and vacuum every millimeter of the bedroom. but i bet she still won't sleep tonight. and neither will i.

• i realized suddenly that malcolm gladwell's the tipping point is the book that inspired my ex-boyfriend to use the word "maven" incessantly and inappropriately while and after taking a class called "the madness of crowds." he never mentioned the title of the book or malcolm, referring to them only as "this book" and "this guy," respectively, but, man, did he like that idea that he never fully got his mind around. i'd been addicted to the new yorker for ages by then and loved malcolm's articles, but i'm terrible with names, and in general, and never associated him with the writing. i've opted to make the assumption that he would be fine with that, since i've had no difficulty hanging on to the ideas contained in those articles. yes? no? irrelevant? so, ex sold the book back to the campus store without lending it to me like he'd promised, and we broke up, and i deleted the word "maven" from my vocabulary and pressed on, and a year later i fell in love with malcolm anyway while he was talking about a different book, blink, on cspan's book-tv, and now i know why i had to endure that ridiculous relationship: ex was supposed to introduce me to malcolm--but he couldn't get his mind off himself long enough to do it. no worries, of course. fate offered up added intervention, because she's so lovely and always has my back, and now everything is as it should be. circle, circular, like a merry-go-round. when i'm patient all the perfect things make their way quietly to me. and so do the centipedes, but a balance must be maintained. this i accept. and now that i understand how publishing royalties work, i'm fairly certain that some portion of said ex's largely wasted tuition went straight into malcolm's pocket. excellent.

• i have a new armchair. it's orange and corduroy, and the cats can't scratch it enough.

• the one confusing portion of last night's dream, which i won't bore you with because it would require an endless amount of ultimately irrelevant back-story, just resolved itself and now makes perfect sense to me. what do you know.

greetings from the land of queasy disbelief!

that little dog sure
can dance. slap some chaps on him,
he's michael flatley.



the latest addition to my ever-expanding independent network lineup:

WHO'S THE ASSHOLE?

in each episode, jonathan antin, the surreal star of bravo's reality program blow out (who would like to emphasize to the viewing audience that he's "just hair") will compete against some hopeful individual. jonathan and his rival will both be followed around by camera crews twenty-four hours a day for one week, and at the end of that week all of the footage will be submitted to me. i will lock myself in a room with it and review it exhaustively in order to determine which contestant has made the most ridiculous, arrogant, outrageously obnoxious comments in the set time period. keep in mind that "most" will consider both quantity AND quality, meaning one monstrous jaw-dropper could outshine a hundred mildly egregious quotes. once i have made my decision, jonathan and potential asshole x will be brought to the screening room and asked to stand side by side facing the door. i will come out of the room and immediately punch one of them right in the face; that person will be declared THE ASSHOLE and will subsequently be presented with a gigantic platinum sphincter that can be mounted on the roof of his or her house like a satellite dish. my money's on jonathan ten to one under any circumstances, but i'm compiling a list of folks who i think might pose a commendable challenge. i can't release those names at this time, however, because i'm thinking this show will work best if the contestants don't have the world's clearest idea of what they're vying for. but, i mean, you never can tell.

speaking of ridiculous comments, it's time for a rousing round of "know your pope!" for fifty points and a "get out of eternal damnation free" card, which wacky pontiff made each of the following statements:

1. "human life, as a gift of god, is sacred and inviolable. for this reason procured abortion and euthanasia are...crimes which no human law can claim to legitimize."

2. "there may be a legitimate diversity of opinion even among catholics about waging war and applying the death penalty but not, however, with regard to abortion and euthanasia."

for the game, explain to me in twenty words or less how these quotes are, in fact, mutually exclusive.

the human mind: a riddle wrapped in an enigma buried under a pile of dirty laundry

i've never been too
good with names, but i remem-
ber faces. sometimes.
-primarily evan dando, who would seem to be better about the faces than me.





dear ben affleck,

i was a freshman or sophomore in college when "chasing amy" came out, so that was, oh, seven or eight years ago, i guess. i liked the movie a lot and have watched it numerous times since then, maybe as many as a dozen, as i have most of kevin smith's works. he rocks. well, duh, i mean, like you didn't know that. anyway, i've seen it a lot, and i've seen you a lot, because you're everywhere, and i know who you are, sometimes i even recognize your voice without looking at the screen.

here's the thing, though. man, this is weird. okay.

last night on E! there was this show about what hollywood has taught the public about sex, and one segment was introduced with the line, "before ben was chasing jennifer, he was 'chasing amy'." and i turned to my friend, who was watching the show with me, and i said,

"ben affleck wasn't in 'chasing amy'."

but there you were in the posters and posing for photographs on the night of the premiere and i was like, "who the hell was ben affleck in chasing amy?"

seriously, i had, like, no idea that that was you. isn't that wild? absolutely no idea. but then i came up with this theory, right? because i've always had this incredibly strong yet utterly baseless aversion to you as a human being, and i'm thinking that maybe between the isolated cluster of neurons that appears to have been devoted to watching that movie and the rest of my brain there was one feeble synapse, just functional enough for a vague shadowy breath of recognition to limp across. i never quite made the full connection, but every time i saw you in some setting not related to "chasing amy" i thought to myself,

christ, what a fucking douchebag.

it's crazy, man. brains, they're just, like, complex. unless you're really a douchebag, which is totally possible, and then i'm just a supergenius and i should work for the government rooting out spies.

so, tell jenny garner it's too bad elektra was such a flop, and i've never seen "alias", but it's probably okay, even if she is a bitch for dumping scott foley, 'cause he seems like such a sweetie. and tell matt damon that i'm superexcited about his next movie, whatever it is. all of his movies are good 'cause he's so awesome and talented. you should tell them this story, i bet they'd think it's wacko like jacko.

your unwitting fan,
joon

like your habitable planet? read this.

i don't know where my
recycling ends up, but i
try to think the best.




if you have ever stood on the shore of a lake or river or ocean and taken a deep breath and felt a delightful and temperate breeze ruffle the hair on the top of your head and thought to yourself, gee, i think i'd like to do this again someday, perhaps in fifty years or so, and maybe i'll take my grandkids to this very spot so that they can come back with their grandkids

or if you've ever, just, you know, been really thirsty and had some water and thought to yourself, DAMN! water ROCKS!

or whatever, you know, if you like plants and soil and oxygen and, *sigh*

okay. listen. you want to call me a hippie right about now, and that hurts my feelings. i am not a hippie. hippies do power yoga in hundred-dollar leotards on hundred-dollar mats for three hours every day and believe that black beads will protect them from the modern world's negative energies, they go to stadiums to be blessed by the dalai lama and then put the digital picture of them shaking hands with the dalai lama up on their desktop, they'll only eat organic fucking broccoli sprouts but the broccoli sprouts came in a plastic container from a mammoth supermarket, to which they were shipped in a big truck that guzzled up some obscene quantity of fossil fuels on its way

hippie, as far as i'm concerned, is short for hypocrite. they are all talk and no action, and that talk is rarely if ever even a hundredth as well informed as it ought to be. i am not a hippie. i am a scientist, and i love facts. and here, courtesy of elizabeth kolbert and the new yorker, are some of the most terrifying facts i've seen in one place in all the time i've been alive. i subscribe to the magazine and finished the third part of this series of articles this afternoon, and i'm not at all embarrassed to tell you that i wept, right there in the middle of the radiology file room. i love this planet, and i've dedicated a lot of time to finding ways to do right by her. i believe that a lot of people have. what i learned today is that all across this planet, the most intelligent and devoted of those people, the ones with the most information on the subject, are slowly beginning to accept that there may be nothing we can do, or, at least, that nothing will be done. see, this country (the united states, i mean, for those of you who didn't know) absolutely must enact massive shifts in environmental policy for there to be any hope of even stabilizing the planet at its current level of disrepair, and this country doesn't wanna. the people making the decisions will be dead before any of the shit that's gonna go down goes down, so they don't feel compelled to act. the problem is, by the time the people with the power are the people who feel threatened, it will be too late for anything they decide to have an impact.

just read the article. there are some things everyone has a responsibility to know.