let's have a pity party.

this is john hodgman. he's my new favorite imaginary roommate. you may know him as the pc in the "i'm a mac, and i'm a pc" commercials. or you may have seen him in one of his quasiregular appearances on the daily show, in which he is consistently hilarious and absolutely darling. he is also both of these things in his book, the areas of my expertise, said areas reaching far and wide across the ever-expanding ocean of human experience. john grew up in brookline, massachusetts, all of ten minutes from where i'm sitting right now, but by the time i got here he had long since left for new york. that's why he's my imaginary roommate and not my actual roommate. i suppose there could be some other reasons, like that he's been married for four or five years, but that first one is the real root of it. new york takes all of my boys from me, makes them monstrously famous, and then waves them over my head. she's like a cruel-hearted babysitting older sister who tells me i can't have dessert and then breaks out a tray of tiny, delicious cupcakes and says i can have as many as i want . . . if i can reach them. it's so unfair! she's, like, ten miles taller than me. oh, alas and alack. oh, sigh.

anyway, john's very smart and will probably make you laugh, and if that sounds like the kind of boy for you, tough. he's taken. but you can read his book and then hang his picture on the back of an armchair that you're sitting across from and have a fictional conversation with him about it. i mean, i don't do that. but you could. if you wanted to. i don't care, it's your armchair.

stop looking at me like that.