Here’s Union Square Park and half of Zach’s face. We’re making fun of the figure in the circle. Why?

He had a REINDEER SWEATER on. In October! Actually, we sort of loved the effort. It was more funny that someone was wearing a reindeer sweater in Manhattan than the fact that he was way off month-wise. It reminded Zach of when his uncle wore a cowboy hat during his entire visit here. He’s working on an essay about it, entitled “Udderly Fabulous: The Life and Times of an Urban Cowboy.”

Today I visited the vending machine at work. Actually I went four times, but this one was the most significant.

I selected F1: Diet Pepsi, and the VM suddenly spat out a Pepsi! Note that Pepsi is not even an option in this particular VM. This may have marked the greatest moment of my internship. I guess we’ll see!

Then this happened:

Darth Vader and a Stormtrooper stopped by EW to promote a new line of vintage toys. I felt like a tool with my digi (not a new feeling for me) but then the cam ended up being a hit. In case you weren’t sure, that makes one whole “digi cam.” God forbid I use complete words.

Sometimes I use the Internet at work. Not often, just for research. Like when Rebecca and I send each other links to obscenely expensive bags over Instant Messenger (a newfangled computer program I’ve recently started using).

On the Coach site, there’s a “try this bag on” feature which I originally found rather cute and helpful. But then, for “fun,” I selected the 4′11″-5′4″ height range instead of my own, and was horrified to compare the two resulting diagrams.

Does anyone else think this looks disproportionate? The mini-me short girl might as well be the six-year-old child of the gargantuan taller one. Plus, who the F is 4′11″?

Despite the new law banning photography in the subway, I risked my life and this website’s flailing reputation to snap a shot of this ad for Manhattan Mini Storage:

Okay. Fine. As uncomfortable as the thought of “BURNING YOUR CROTCH!” while riding a crowded subway car is, I tolerate this ad because it includes a large spaghetti dinner. But let’s look closer:

The spaghetti area is the only portion that has literally been peeled away. This means that someone was bored or hungry enough to longingly scrape his or her nails against the poster as if it was scratch-’n'-sniff or something.

I respect the effort (though I personally would have gone for the garlic bread first), but I wonder if finally peeling away the top layer of poster was at all gratifying. To me, that’d just be a huge letdown: No, it’s really not food. You lose. Maybe it would have been better to just wonder and wonder and never find out.

I thoroughly enjoyed a large slice of Whole Foods cornbread at my desk this afternoon, 5-ish. (It was like I was intentionally sabatoging my chances of going running at 6:30. Except it wasn’t “like” that, it was that.)

I almost freaked out because as a result of what I thought was an ingenious plan to be tidy and let extranneous crumbs fall into the garbage can, I unwrapped the cornbread above the can only to watch a third of it crumble instantly and fall in. I took a moment and actually considered retrieving it, but realized it wouldn’t be “it,” it would be one million little pieces of “it” that I’d have to scrape up (against a banana peel) and re-mold as a dense little crumbly nugget of greasy cornmeal. “Oh no she di-iiiint!” the coworkers would say.

Well, they probably wouldnt’ say that because nobody ever speaks out loud in the office. But they totally would’ve e-mailed me about it.

When I was wee, we had cornbread for dinner a lot, the kind you can buy at Dominick’s in a big sheetcake for like $2.69 I was obsessed with it. Eating the cornbread today triggered an intense memory about my previous cornbread experiences. I realized that I used to swish room-temperature water in my mouth with every small bite of cornbread. Why the F would I do this? What a horrible idea, especially when there are so many other beverages I could have sampled? I think I was just really into ULTIMATE MOISTURE with the cornbread. Maybe it demanded it! It definitely asked very nicely.

The beverage-swishing process itself doesn’t strike me as that strange, considering I still have a vast repertroire of food-drink combos that MUST go together. For example, you must not know me that well if you didn’t know that I relish the mouth-swishing combination of 1) turkey sub and 2) regular cola. I like the cola to be ice-cold, but not on ice. Fresh out of the vending machine, sipped through a straw in a pitter-patter fashion is perfect. (I just said “pitter-patter.” I happen to know this is called onomatopoeia.) The sub should include crusty, somewhat challenging bread and a sizable, but not overwhelming, amount of mayo.

The Mouth Swish (MS) is key to our appreciation of food. Why shovel in more and more of one thing all at once when you can sit back, take little bites and little sips together, and really relish both what you are ingesting and the fact that — hey, you’re ingesting… and that’s awesome.

My own swishing process is not so much active swishing as an intense, euphoric period of comingling. First comes the bite, then the sip, and then you should just let the elements come together on their own. Don’t force it. Each bite/sip will be unique, according to the materials’ whimsies. It’s out of your hands. Just let them sit there and settle, and then 7-15 seconds later, let the tongue slowly compress the mixture…

This is getting weird. Rather than go into this more, I’ll just list a few more of my favorite MS combos:

–Fritos/Diet Pepsi
–Taco Bell Mexican Pizza/Mountain Dew
–anything cake-based/milk
–Nilla wafers/Minute Maid fruit punch
–Brownberry croutons/Five Alive citrus drink
–blueberry muffins/Tropicana OJ
–Pepperidge Farm gingerbread men/Haagen Dazs raspberry sorbet
–chicken pesto sandwiches/orange-banana smoothies

OMG BOOK IDEA.