Internet, I’m back into Ice Breakers chewing gum!

Have these been around this whole time? I stopped noticing them years ago; maybe I didn’t want to be the one child left behind during the formidable flat-pack gum movement. Who cares? My mouth is really fresh right now. It has been at LEAST three minutes. Two more before the “ice” “liquidates” into a puddle I won’t notice until the next commercial break.

Whoa. Maybe everything I want has been right on the candy rack this whole time.

Ha! Not even. Brachs Villa Cherries were discontinued in 2003. Take that, breakthrough.

A bunch of losers are complaining that NBC won’t stop airing beach and indoor volleyball all day instead of any of the other 33 worthy events. Sucks to be them! I am in HEAVEN.

Ooh, I like this shot better because Dalhausser’s massive block is hitting BRA in the face:

Dalhausser, nicknamed “The Thin Beast,” calls to mind my 1997 AOL screenname, “Block4aPt.” Yes, that would be a truncated version of the command: “block for a point.” As in “HEY! BARRETT! YOU HAVEN’T DONE A DAMN THING ALL MATCH! BLOCK FOR A MOTHER ****ING POINT ALREADY!” Roughly.

Anyway, he’s my fave. Go team!

SPORTS.

Mandi Bierly and I covered a preview performance of The Little Mermaid on Broadway. It was my first Broadway show. How sad is that! Here’s our PopWatch post.

To mentally prepare for this spectacle, I went around the office all day singing “Under the Sea”. It’s pretty alarming that I could never imitate any sort of accent (like during my six years of French classes — I gave up trying after 7th grade) and yet I can perfectly mimic a vaguely Jamaican-sounding animated crab from 1989. Supersmart!

My Aunt Elly apparently saves everything, and this Thanksgiving she festively decorated her bathroom wall with this fictional menu I wrote as a child. (Who does that? And who is Golda?) No date on it, but I’m guessing I was around 7? I’m hoping? God, what if I was 17?

Allow me to count down a few highlights — sort of a Take 5 without those annoying audio/visual elements, if you will…

5. Jinjre Ale as a featured “Bevrage” Was this like a ganja-fied version of ginger ale? Sidenote: I’m completely impressed with my affiliation with Pepsi products instead of Coke at such a tender age.

4. Get the full slab! It’s cheaper! I love how it was important enough to me that my fictional customers might want to take advantage of a great deal on BBQ, should one be offered. Six bucks for a full slab, wow. It certainly was the ’80s! And Golda’s Cafe certainly must have been adjacent to a truck stop on a central Indiana highway, even though we lived in Illinois.

3. Pizza Plate (5 squares) Continuing with the low-class theme, it’s clear that I was tailoring this dream menu to be as close to my childlike tastes as possible. The insistence on “squares” suggests that the greatest type of pizza I knew of at the time came frozen and developed into its most gourmet state via a magical microwave. Sadly (although I’m pretty fine with it), these are still my tastes. I’d eat lunch every day at Golda’s Cafe if I could. Is there one in midtown?

2. “Five Hidden Cherries!” OMG so fun!!! But who exactly was doing the hiding? I’m almost certain it would have been me. Or maybe this “Golda,” but something tells me she wouldn’t have had very clean hands. Plus she never wore her hairnet. You just know it.

1. Becks Thanks to Barnacle Bill Barrett, probably the only name-brand beer I knew of besides Heineken. And there’s no way I was spelling that.

From Time.com’s Swampland blog:

The official reviews had not yet come in when the Barack Obama staffers started celebrating last night. And what better way to celebrate than a walk into the drive thru at McDonald’s? A function of audacity? Hope? Or maybe just change we can believe in.

(Obama spokesman Ben LaBolt, in the act of loving it.)

OH YES HE DIII-IIIIID.

I have never Ben prouder of my good friend and high school prom date (heeeey!), Ben fucking LaBolt. He shows up on the Internet all the time, but I never link to his mentions because frankly, they’re not consistent with my rather narrowly focused authorial agenda. Only after the ‘razzi catch him on a fast food joint WALK-THRU while sporting a shitgrin, cool jeans and coat, and attractive “I live on the bus” facial hair does LaBolt finally show up here. Look at him, hungry for that grease. 50,000 Big Macs could wallop that parking lot in a torrential hailstorm and not only would this guy make it safely onto the bus, he’d already be on his seventh fry.

Ben LaBolt, Diminishing Returns (finally) salutes you. And keep it up… a well-publicized Taco Bell visit will get you your own category.

GO TEAM.

This is love: Rickie Vasquez BUSTING A MOVE at the World Happiness Dance!

Take 5: Memorable My So-Called Life scenes, set to memorable music

Who else had the Enigma CD with “Return to Innocence” on it circa 1994? God I was so cool.

Even though me updating my blog does NOT seem familiar at this point…

I got around to watching Sunday’s Family Guy and realized with glee that Peter and the boys’ Quahog Men’s Club was a clear homage to the clubhouse in The Berenstain Bears’ No Girls Allowed. At one point Peter even said “No girls allowed.” Get it?

Yay!

My favorite BB book, though, is obvs The Berenstain Bears and Too Much Junk Food. I loved how the candy they ate had no labels and came in clear plastic cases, like drugs. And would you look at the height Brother Bear is getting on his candy pour? Totally impressive. The supermarket scene (not pictured, though I would really like to do a page-by-page commentary on this book so I should find a copy) is also killer. Did you guys know I love edible crap?

My mom, Dee, and I got this cookie last week at the Jersey Sub Shop, which is obviously located in Michigan.

The JSS is amazing on all levels including “has giant Shrek outside for no reason” (see much less ambitious post, below). But come on. WHAT is this design?

We didn’t quite grasp the extent of its mind-numbing quandary when we first ordered it. At point of sale, it was basically like “We need to get a big-ass cookie, end of story.” Then we got home and, post-subs, just kept staring at the cookie for entire minutes. We checked out different angles, adjusted the lighting… at one point I deliberately walked off in a huff, like “I’ve HAD it with that cookie” and then of course walked right back to see if a whiplashed, fake-first impression would do the trick. It totally did not.

We flat-out refused to eat the cookie until we figured out what was supposed to be on top of it, then gave up and ate it anyway. Among our guesses: Snowflake (all me), [confused look] (Dee), simulation of Spirograph (all me), [exasperated look] (Dee), variation on the Burger King crown featuring squiggly lines representative of what happens inside after you eat Burger King (all me). I thought snowflake was pretty spot-on, but Dee gave a final [ENRAGED LOOK] that ran a close second.

You will note that this cookie is roughly four times the circumference of a modestly sized glass of Diet Dr. Pepper. I’m all about the SCALE these days.

I had one more guess and basically nothing to do for the rest of the day, so I drove back to the JSS to confront the guy at the counter head-on about the puzzling design. It was weird.

ANNIE: Hi.

DECORATOR: Oh, hello!

ANNIE: (awkwardly, unnecessarily) I’m back!

DECORATOR: [blank stare]

ANNIE: Did you, like, decorate those cookies? [points at others]

DECORATOR: Yeah! I decided to give it a shot today.

ANNIE: Was the usual decorator not around?

DECORATOR: Right.

ANNIE: Oh, that’s really cool of you. [?!] I have to ask. What exactly were you going for, here? My mom and I have been debating it for half an hour. We’re so confused. I mean, I’m all about artistic expression and doing your own thing [?!], and since this is clearly “your own thing,” [air quotes] I love it just for being itself and… existing. But… what did you have in mind when you set out to do these? TELL ME YOUR FUCKING VISION, MAN.

DECORATOR: [thinks for a long time]

ANNIE: [thinks about leaving because this is SO AWFUL]

DECORATOR: You know what? I have no idea.

ANNIE: I think I know what it was. [gingerly extends a printout of the following image]

ANNIE: It was Queen Frostine’s wand from Candy Land. It’s been on your mind for decades and you’re just now coming to terms with it.

DECORATOR: Holy shit.

ANNIE: [smirks]

DECORATOR: I think you’re RIGHT!

ANNIE: You… like… Candy Land?

STEVE HOLT: No. … I LOVE it!

—

True or false: The above did not actually happen, because I’m way too lazy to re-leave the house.

This shit is STILL hanging on the door to our garage in Illinois. My optimistic poem makes me die inside a bit, superficially because of how thin the rainbow’s red stripe is compared to all the others. Not to mention the misplaced comma after “rainbow.” Just kidding! Sort of. I really do think these two things every time. But it’s not like I can’t handle it.

I much prefer my younger sister’s “poem,” at left. Very spoken-word. Exclamatory. WAY cooler to perform. We should totally stage a slam!

(Just tried. Will post video entitled “Slammin’ It!” or “All in the Slamily” later. Probably not.)

Oh tiny, not-yet-disillusioned young Annie… where the F is “this rainbow”? I’ll spend my life trying to find it because you said it was there. You little fucker.

I still don’t know!

See also: How orange crayons are made, courtesy of Sesame Street.

These “Mega” M&Ms, artfully photographed in New Buffalo, Michigan, remind me of Crayola’s “Bolder” markers. Remember? There were the plain Bolds, which I adored (especially jungle green), and then all of a sudden you couldn’t buy Bold anymore and instead had to choose between either Classic or Bolder. Bolder sucked! They were all so… extreme. That’s how I feel about these candy colors. All the colors except the light blue are a tad too bold for their own good, especially that nasty maroon. What was wrong with just being bold? Why must we overdo it?

P.S. Mega? Give me a break. I’d rather buy a bigger sack of regular-size M&Ms, one I’d have to swing around behind my shoulder because it was that cumbersome, than a normal-size bag of these new overgrown, mutant M&M’s spawn. Eating these jumbo ones makes me feel like a hoss because I’m so used to the noncommittal nature of eating regular M&Ms. Those are so tiny and harmless. It’s like eating air!

The candy itself should not make one feel fat. Waking up the morning after eating a sack of candy should make one feel fat. Aftermath is a bitch, but at least you got to enjoy the intake worry-free.

Happy 7-11. Get a Slurpee. They’re good for you.

I could never do a pull-up in elementary school. This meant I could never get the Presidential Fitness Award, because in order to get that, you had to do at least one pull-up (if you were a girl. Boys had to do more than one. Boys are way impressive).

Girls who couldn’t do a pull-up had to settle for the flexed-arm hang, which involved a gym teacher hoisting you up over a metal bar as if you were doing your own pull-up, simulating the experience for you to remind you of how unsatisfactory you are on your own. Then you just hung there with your arms “flexed” until they felt like they were about to fall off, at which point you let go and plummeted towards doom. To make things worse, the gym teacher would be counting out loud from all the way down on the ground, so that you knew exactly at which point you had earned the stupid, lesser, no-good National Fitness Award and could finally let go. My arms always started shaking well before this point, but I refused to quit. I’d end up earning the second-rate, Dan Quayle version of the esteemed George H. W. Bush honor. “She’s kind of a fighter, that Annie Barrett,” the gym teacher would say when we all left to change. I’m sure he said that. He had to.

So many things about the flexed-arm hang were uncomforable, the most obvious one being that another person had to lift you above the bar — all of you — because you couldn’t lift all of yourself by yourself. That’s gross. I dreaded the lift, not just because of the shame game, but because why should a gym teacher get to grasp a little kid like that? Looking back, I’m surrpsied no one ever yelled “bad touch!” during the lifts. I should have, just to see the looks on people’s faces. But I wasn’t that edgy yet. It would have been out of character for the Young AB to make any sort of outburst.

The shame I felt during the lift itself was astronomical. (What a lame word, astronomical. Do I mean to suggest the shame was from outer space? No.) The gym teacher had to undeservedly bear the brunt of my excessive existence — the random long limbs I couldn’t muster up the strength to deal with by myself. And my weight wasn’t even excessive. I was skinny! I realize today that this was never fair. I was too tall. There’s no way an 11-year-old girl who was my height could have lifted herself up without some serious weight training or ‘roid use on the side. (And you know how I feel about the ‘roids. I feel weird even accepting an immunity or protein booster from the smoothie place. Seeing as my diet consists mainly of pad thai and cookies, I should probably get over this for the sake of “health”.)

But that’s not what I told myself back then. The entire time I hung up there over the bar, flailing, I imagined a voice informing me what a disgusting slob with no upper body strength I was. I’d also be wondering why I bothered to break a sweat during the mile run.

This should not have happened! I’m telling you, gym class in Illinois public schools was evil. I’m sure everyone in every state had to take gym, but Illinois people have to take it for an HOUR each day,all throughout high schoo l. I could probably write an entire book based on traumatic gym-class episodes from the Land of Lincoln. Okay, great! Nobody steal my idea.

So when I’m trying to fall asleep, I often lament about the blue Presidential Fitness patch, or what I call “the one that got away.” I think of those little feisty girls who could do pull-ups, and I hate them all over again. When we got to high school, I’d kick their asses in all areas, including obvious ones such as sports but also others like intelligence, metabolism, stealth while ditching class to drive to Applebee’s, and general coolness. But in fifth grade, they were still the stars. They could lift their wiry bodies above a metal bar. It was awesome.

To better convey how I feel about forcing little girls to attempt pull-ups, here’s a homemade animated graphic (Huh? Annie can do that? YES.) of Madonna flipping the bird to the camera during a special-edition cut of her video for “Sorry.” Apparently the kiddies at home would have been too tormented by Madonna’s obscene, shriveled-up middle finger, so they cut the gesture out for the official release. A good move, if only because she knew the original cut would leak and keep people talking about her. Madonna is really funny. I often realize I’m simply glad she exists.

Apologies in advance: I don’t get to write about The O.C. anymore (I’ve moved on to covering a far more ridiculous show), so I’m gonna do it right here. Instead of covering the entire episode, I’ll just be focusing on something really small (annoying, even!) and apply it to my own life because HELLO! It’s what I do. I’m cool.

Last night on The O.C., Marissa and her on-again/off-again sister Kaitlin were chillin’ out by the pier, because that’s what all cool girls do in Newport Beach mid-morning, and Kaitlin told some long-winded story — that was actually a lot like this sentence — about how when they were younger, Marissa could never decide on which flavor of ice cream to order at Baskin Robbins.

I was immediately intrigued, for many reasons. 1) These two actresses probably haven’t even eaten ice cream since they were around six. 2) That’s a really funny product placement, even if it’s only a Mention. And 3) Baskin Robbins was my favorite ice cream store when I was younger, and the more things on TV that can relate to Annie Barrett’s Own Life, the better! Also 4) Baskin Robbins made the Clown Cones I’ve written about before. You remember, right? (I’m basically talking to myself here, so yes, Annie, I totally remember that! It was such an awesome entry.)

Anyway, the story 14 year-old Kaitlin told was funny because I can totally picture someone as annoying as Marissa wanting to sample all 31 of the flavors before making her final decision. Imagine my shock and awe when I realized that Kaitlin was actually describing my life! See, Kaitlin, who bragged that she always got Gold Medal Ribbon because she “knew” that she “loved it,” is like my friend Kara, who in the hundreds of times we must have gone to Baskin Robbins NEVER ordered anything except Gold Medal Ribbon. She knew about it from day one, even before I’d ever been to the store with her. It was like she’d claimed that territory as part of her America. I’d always be a little jealous, becuase I too liked GMR. She was right — it never disappointed. It was just something you could count on, like running water or Ryan Atwood.

So Kara would choose Gold Medal Ribbon. They’d give it to her and she’d stand there all smug, totally happy with her decision. Smart as a whip, that Kara. Such conviction at such a young age. Meanwhile, I’d be sweating (literally… I wasn’t even fat, but I did sweat a lot as a preteen) while touring the rest of the flavors. If I got Gold Medal Ribbon, I’d be a copycat, but if I got something I didn’t like as much, I’d hate Kara and myself for the rest of that day. Sometimes I went with rainbow sherbet or a Clown Cone or even this other flavor they had called World Class Chocolate that always always always sat right on top of GMR. It was brutal. Sure, I liked World Class Chocolate, but I never once got to order GMR if Kara was there because I thought she’d get mad at me. Why didn’t I just order it first, or pretend like I didin’t remember that it was her favorite flavor? Nah, she’d be onto me in a second. Smart as a whip, like I said.

Wow, Annie, another killer graphic.

What the F is the point of this? It’s right here: I hate Marissa. And now I’m LIKE Marissa. It follows that I now hate myself. Great! Time for this week’s Query Chart, or what people searched online that made them find this site.

Yesssss. larry king’s chili and i hate oprah are welcome additions to the list, which 100% of the time includes the query “butt crack.” I am an amazing writer and a prominent thinker of my time.

Speaking of phrases like “of my time,” how absolutely offensive is it that in this year’s Survivor, they broke up the women and men into older and younger groups? One of the women, Cirie, was like “I thought I was young!” while the graphic below her name said she belonged to the OLDER WOMEN group. Yikes. I also think producers planted that fish in the rocks so Tina could find it, bring it back to camp, be seen as even more of a threat, and get BOOTED!

The Office was really good last night, too.

But I don’t really like TV.

Does anyone remember a cookie manufactured during the ’80s called Giggles? I asked Dee last month but she didn’t know what I was talking about. Look, Dee! I loved these cookies and thought they were both adorable and my special friends when I was really little. I’d carry them around in the box and occasionally eat one, but there were about six different varieties of faces in the box so I’d be sure to leave one of each face in the box. Then I’d lay them all out on the counter and study them quizzically, trying to decide which one I liked the least and therefore deserved to be the first casualty of my final round. I did this until all that was left were crumbs. < --- Kind of Cute or Sick and Pathological? You make the call. I already know my vote.

Besides, it’s not like I walked around giggling like that doofus in the commercial. I wonder if he turned out screwed up. That was insane. Rather, I was very methodical about the whole process. It was almost as if carrying around the box of Giggles was my full-time job for that day. I was so intent on executing the job correctly and fairly. Wow, my professionalism shone through at such a young age. I wonder what happened to it.

How can it be August already? I don’t like August because there are too many birthdays for me to remember and because it means summer’s half over. Not that I’d mind it being over. It’s been so deathly hot lately in the city that I feel like I’m gonna, well, die. (”You just want to fly!”) While on a plane recently, there was an internal discussion that I’ve had many times before in a novel I was reading. This made me happy, then a little jealous. Here’s the internal discussion: Would you rather suffer from extreme heat, or extreme cold?

I remember asking myself this question during my preteen/teen years, specifically while walkng across the parking lot at Bernard’s Cafe and Deli in Willowbrook, IL, during the winter. It’d be well below zero and as I’d wait for Bill to unlock the car, I’d think about taking a steamy bath. Keep in mind I never thought about taking baths unless I was in the parking lot at Bernard’s. (That’s kind of creepy. I feel like I’m about to uncover something huge. But baths are beside the point.)

My mind would inevitably lead from baths to the question of which sort of extreme temperature I would rather suffer. The initial hypothetical just involved a sweltering summer day and a below-freezing winter night. No biggie. But then I’d take it a little further, make it more morbid. I’d wonder whether I’d rather freeze to death or burn to death, as if this was a legitimate offer of the sort typically made to junior-high girls in Illinois. What? I remember reasoning that it would take a lot longer to freeze to death, so I always leaned towards the burning.

I would later learn via ER, Chicago Hope, Scrubs, Strong Medicine, CSI, The Apprentice, and Grey’s Anatomy that burn victims no longer feel pain after their burns get to a certain degree. Okay, it actually wasn’t on The Apprentice but can’t you just picture Donald Trump announcing this fun fact in his choppy-sentence shouting voiceovers? It’d be like the scientific fun fact of each episode, brought to you by Domino’s. So it looks like I made the right choice of wanting to burn to death instead of freeze without even knowing it. (Very recently, I also learned the various stages of how the body freezes to death underwater in under ten minutes while watching a Discovery Channel show about crabbing called The Deadliest Catch at work. This reaffirmed how smart I was to go with the burning.)

Sidenote: I’m sitting at my desk, facing away from the coffe table. I have placed a large bag of Lay’s Kettle Cooked Mesquite Barbeque potato chips on the table behind me. I did this entirely on purpose, and I think I actually believed at the time that having to make the huge effort of turning around and rotating my arm to reach into the bag would make me not want to eat so many chips. Why did I think this would work? I have turned around at least 50 times by now, with some turns garnering more than one chip. What a horrible diet trick. Next time, I should try something really crazy — like, um, not buying chips.

Anyway, the book I was reading discussed how people always think the opposite season would be a lot better. So, if you were sweating profusely on a busy street in the summer, you’d imagine winter, which is nasty, treacherous, and induces depression, as a lovely, breezy, better-smelling way to go through life. You’d wish for winter quite desperately. But what people don’t realize is that it is truly impossible to accurately imagine the opposite season while suffering through the current one. The reason it’s impossible is that both extremes suck. We just delude ourselves into thinking anything’s better than what we have right at that time. (Look at me with the self-help-esque phrasing. WTF?)

Now I’m seriously concerned at why I seem to remember the Bernard’s parking lot as my childhood example of “cold.” Isn’t that weird?

And now I’m recalling all the really unfashionable winter outerwear I used to don in high school. The Cool Girls and I used to go around in these really thick solid-colored fleeces from J.Crew or Eddie Bauer. I actually remember really liking my forest green one from Lands’ End (a travesty!) and then feeling really inadequate after noticing how many kids had the “North Face” logo on their own fleeces. The Lands’ End ones never had a logo. Looking back, I’m proud of myself for not wearing a logo becuase now I despise them. At the time, though, I kind of felt left out. But it’s not like I couldn’t have acquired a North Face jacket if I’d found it truly necessary. Maybe something deep inside me was pre-rebelling to the idea of a logo. At any rate, I’m glad I “kept it real” with the Lands’ End fleece.

Wow, Lands’ End. Who even shops there? I’ve never even seen the catalog since I moved away from Illinois. This blast from the past has me thinking of a funny exchange in the second season of DR’s favorite show, The O.C. Lindsbree gushes over Marissa’s Marc Jacobs shoes, bag, skirt, shirt, sweater, lip gloss, etc., and instead of just saying thank you and keeping her mouth shut, Marissa finds it necessary to say, “Oh, thanks. I like your… backpack. Where’s it from?” Ha! Shut up, Marissa! Lindsbree cringes while stammering, “Um… L.L. Bean.” Can I just tell you guys I was rolling on the floor laughing at this point? Can I? Can I? ROFL people!!!

The best part about this profoundly embarrassing moment is that I started wincing for Lindsbree even before she started to answer. I knew it was going to be something typically Midwestern, something you could order from a big catalog, you know, because we don’t have any stores out there. Out there where the land just… ends. I was like “Oh, no, she’s gonna say Lands’ End.” But L.L. Bean is even funnier, because it’s basically the same thing as Lands’ End but the three syllables actually make saying it out loud more humorous and more embarrassing. It’s also just a dorky name. Bean. Hehe.

—

And on a ridicuously high note, here’s a photo collage I just made, featuring my friend Peter, a bartender at Rose’s Turn, and Rob Corddry, a correspondent for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Enjoy.

Who dat?

I’m sitting outside on the deck at the lakehouse in the middle of a storm with no rain. The thunder is outrageous and I keep seeing lightning out on the lake. It’s awesome. But where’s the rain? I need to know. I’m freaking out that even one raindrop will get on my lovely tank of a computer. I’m very nervous right now. After each of these words I type, I glance up, as if I might have missed the first drop. It’s really annoying that I’m doing that.

(One hour passes.)

Okay, the downpour is over. I got inside fine, before any water hit the deck. I chickened out after envisioning the destroyed Mac floating in a pool of what just killed it. Why did I need to take it that far? I even started imagining different and more awful scenarios. One involved me running inside on a sunny day to do something, probably get a large snack, and leaving the Mac outside during a sudden downpour. In this vision, I didn’t even think “I have to run out there and save my computer.” I just went about the snack and let it sit there, forgetting. Hours later, when I remembered what I had been doing hours ago (because that’s what I do) I went outside, realized what had happened, and began to weep. In my mind I pressed the pause button and watched myself bawl in slow motion. I recall there being snot involved, which would make sense because right now I have a cold. Then I called Apple in tears and Apple laughed and called me a moron, which made me cry even harder and since I coulldn’t see, I ran smack into a table, hit my head, and never woke up. Keep in mind none of this actually happened. This was me sitting safely indoors with the Mac, willingly plunging into a nightmare.

I do this a lot — get a freakish pleasure out of imagining really sad scenarios. I remember trying to convince my dad of something once during Annie Barrett: The Teenage Years and him looking at me with this “you’re crazier than I thought” look. I told him I’d want to throw my childhood doll, Carwie, off a speeding boat. If anyone knew me back then, you know that despite my “teen” status, I was still obsessed with this doll to the point where we all considered her a member of the family. (Her birthday is October 2nd and she is always just turning two. I still believe this.) It actually became quite comical within the family. I don’t think anyone else would get it so don’t even go there. Anyway, I adored her. So there’s no reason I should have wanted to throw her off a moving boat.

I tried, and failed, to explain the thrill I sought. I wanted to fling her in wildly into the air, and then sort of stop time (pause button!) so that she’d never hit the water. I just wanted the momentary feeling of doing something that treacherous and reckless, but I didn’t want to have to deal with the trauma of the aftermath. (Friends tell me this is also a common attitude towards sex.) I tried to explain that it could be like a still frame in a movie, when something in motion stops suddenly right before the credits roll. I’d be standing at the edge of the boat, post-fling, mouth wide open and screaming, the doll on the upwards portion of her arc, still smiling. That’s it. It would have to stop there.

This sort of reminds me of the scene in Love Actually in which Colin Firth loses his manuscript. The Portuguese indentured servant accidentally picked up the coffee mug that was holding the typed pages down, and they all blew away into a pond. I want to do that! For some reason I’d find it thrilling to have a stack of my own meaningful, irreplacable typed pages fly away and be gone forever. Or if not, I’d at least like feeling like I had the power to make it happen. I’d sit there, nudging the paperweight, toying with the idea until it completely freaked me out and I couldn’t take it anymore; then I’d probably chicken out and run inside… just like I did with the computer. This post is getting so meta.

Come to think of it, the losing-the-writing thing is pretty common. It happened in Anne of Green Gables with the handsome father figure Morgan’s work, and I’m pretty sure it happened in a Parker Posey movie. I forget the movie. It’s a male writer on the top level of some sort of fancy boat (meta!) and he throws away the novel he’s just completed on a whim, because he knows it’s a piece of shit. How writerly of him. No wonder I can relate. What damn movie is this? Why am I thinking Celebrity? Was Parker Posey even in that? That has to be wrong. I’d google all of this, but no wireless out here and it’s more fun to torture myself like this. Even though going inside would be a terrific idea now that a Shania Twain song just came on, about 40 notches higher in volume than all of the other songs. Two good reasons to visit the stereo. WTF? The neighbors hate me.

Anyway, now I’m back outside, and I’m even charging my computer. That was an effort. I knew there was an outlet somewhere along the side of the house but couldn’t find it for the longest time because Bill managed to cover it with something the exact same color as the faded gray wood. Bill the Builder never fails to impress.

Everything’s still wet, so I laid towels from the outlet to here so that the cord wouldn’t be resting on water. Was that necessary? I don’t really understand how electrocution works. I’m aware that using a hairdryer in the rain would kill me, but what if water just started pouring while I was using a plugged-in computer? I highly doubt I’d die from that.

And yes, if you were wondering, I am sitting here envisioning myself just on the precipice of turning on a hairdryer in the middle of a storm. I’d just have my finger on the button! I wouldn’t actually do it! Nothing would happen!

Okay, this is becoming scary. Suddenly I’m recalling a moment during my drive here that I found a tad worrisome but nothing major. During the Cars song “Hello Again,” there’s the line “You just want to fly!” at the end of a verse. It’s the kind of line that gets you really revved up for the next few seconds, a line you’d sing even if you didn’t know the rest of them, because it sounds more passionate than the rest of the lines.

But instead of “fly,” I sang “You just want to die!” I was certain that was correct. Strangely, I’d made the same mistake many other times in the past. I guess I just never fixed the glitch. Or maybe this is my way of telling myself that I want to die. But probably not. Pretty sure there would be  warning signs other than mistaken Cars lyrics.

Maybe being all alone in a big house (family’s coming up tomorrow) is making me crazy. I live alone in New York, but it’s different being alone here, in a place where a step in any given direction doesn’t require the artful dodging of mountains of crap. This place has (gasp) multiple rooms. I feel like I should spend an hour in each one, just to appreciate the space. Yeah, let’s try it.

The offending item:

First, these are all shitty choices. Dairy Queen can be good if it’s July, you’re in the Midwest, and you’re resigned to being fat and happy for the next seven days. Baskin Robbins gives shoddy portions, and Coldstone Creamery employees make me want to shoot myself. It was suggested by someone I thought cared about me that I apply for a job and work there for a few weeks for research purposes, singing to the customers and shouting out my name in cheer form with key anecdotes about myself. Dude, I have a blog for that.

Yes, it would be hilarious and I might even get to write a bestselling novel about it, but who needs millions of dollars when you can have, instead, ice cream dignity and $14 an hour to watch for product placement in television? Not me, that’s who! Besides, I’m still planning on getting a job at Starbucks for a few months, just long enough to pen my debut novel, Lots of Lattes. Or maybe even Latts o’ Lattes. It’s gonna be about, like, espresso and stuff.

Secondly, I don’t appreciate the way “Rob Jefferson” has preselected Baskin Robbins for me. I remember those “Clown Cones” from Baskin Robbins. Did every store have those, or was it just the one at the Garden Market shopping center in Western Springs, IL? This was an ice cream cone with — again — a severely low amount of ice cream in the actual cone and (here comes the “clown” part) little florets of thick, multicolored buttercream icing dotting the cone and the ice cream itself to form a “clown face” that never looked anything like a real clown but tasted really, really sugary. Most of my naive little playmates would eat all the florets at once because they were all anyone cared about. I was all “WTF?” to such children because I preferred to eat my florets gradually, with a balanced ratio of ice cream to icing in each bite. I’d feel sorry for one part if I favored the other unfairly. The textures of both clashed so violently that it was just a tumultuous experience in general. In fact, I’d really rather not repeat it or even think about it ever again. And yet I’m writing about it. You can tell it’s almost six in the morning. Maybe you can’t, and I’ve just outed myself. Whatever. Look, I just found an article which mentions the Clown Cone. The writer seems to think the CC was a once-a-year birthday treat. Wow. Either they became too popular for that rule to hold, or the Garden Market chain’s employees just got way too overzealous with all the floret fun. I’d like to bet on the latter, but again, with the shoddy portions… those employees (always the same man, woman, and teenage daughter — it’s like they slept behind the counter) didn’t seem like so much fun at all. What am I talking about? Look how long this paragraph about florets is! Am I really going to post this?

Guess so.

I wrote the TV Watch for LOST on EW.com today. That’s why I am awake. It’s not my fault, except it really is.

Just realized the date is 05/05/05. DUDE.

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.

Does anyone else feel a little uneasy in the time surrounding, and especially during, the Olympics? I always feel so worthless whenever I watch them, particularly the women’s events.

While watching the Olympics during high school, I’d always keep one eye on my parents and one eye on the screen, scanning their expressions to see if they’d have that disappointed “Annie, that could have been you” face.

Sometimes I ended up not caring about who wins the medals and instead searched the screen for that girl who spent her entire 17-year life training for one Olympic event and just came in seventh.

That sucks. I wonder if she thought it was worth it. Don’t get me wrong, seventh place worldwide is a huge accomplishment. But part of her had to be thinking, “Fine. It’s over. I’m a failure. NOW can I eat some donuts?”

I speak from experience. When I was 13 and on a local swim team, this evil 14-year-old named Trish Jackson edged me out from my rightful place on the Timber Trails Swim Club 13-14 Girls Medley Relay.

Our group of four had won gold medals at the annual inter-suburban conference for three years now. I was the slowest of the four, so swam the final freestyle leg, also known as the “let the other people get the lead for you and then try not to fuck it up” leg.

But suddenly, we did “time trials” during practice and Trish Jackson swam freestyle faster than me. I was devastated. I had to swim butterfly, the hardest stroke, in the B relay. At meets, I watched the other three - MY three - gossiping with the cool older girl from two lanes over.

Trish never put on her bathing cap until two seconds before her event was called - she was that cool. I envisioned mauling her in the face with her bathing cap, forcing her into the water only to be drowned by her own wayward locks of hair. “MAYBE YOU SHOULD HAVE WORN YOUR BATHING CAP!” I would have screeched, in cold blood.

Then it came time for the biggest event of the summer, the inter-suburban conference. Booyah. I still wasn’t on the medley relay, but I was one of two Timber Trails representatives in the 50-yard freestyle event along with - you guessed it - Trish the Dish. We were so close in time that she was the third seed and I the fourth, out of 20 swimmers.

The pressure was high. I can honestly say, even after ten subsequent years of beer and nachos cravings, that in my entire life I have never wanted anything more than to beat her time, even by one hundreth of a second. I had never won a medal of my own, and this was my chance. It would be mine. Pure, glimmering, bullet-proof… bronze.

(Sidenote: this just proves that I am not Olympic material. I don’t need to “win it all.” I just need to beat the people I don’t like.)

Race time. I looked over at Trish. Still no bathing cap. She was making friends with girls from other teams, totally NOT focusing on the race.

I decided I would beat her. Maybe, throughout my intense swim club career, I just hadn’t been trying. Maybe I wasn’t using my spindly little limbs to their fullest capacity. That was it. I would simply swim faster than ever, at a pace not even the coaches would believe. Those evil dictators, Bob and Marc, would be stopped dead in their tracks at the side of the pool, able to muster up only enough movement to reach up and slowly lower their knockoff Ray-Bans in utter amazement.

The most pathetic self-psych-up of all time ensued. I closed my eyes and clenched my fists, thinking that might help. I performed the “visualization” exercise our coaches had taught us, except my version didn’t involve the race, just the moment after the race, when my name would come up next to “3″ and Trish would look perplexed. And then start to cry.

It was settled. I would win the bronze medal and Trish would get the puke yellow 4th place ribbon. I was sure of it.

Then she beat me by .04 seconds. My insignificant 13-year-old world crashed down around me.

Well, sort of. After all that drama, I’m pretty sure I hid my oppressive, overflowing emotions from my mom and simply begged her to take me to Applebee’s or something. It was easier that way, plus I got to eat Applebee’s.

Because, you see, I’m not Olympic material. And nothing looks prettier next to puke yellow than an Oriental Chicken Salad Rollup and huge fountain Coke.

Debating among paint colors:

a) Golden Cricket
b) Sea Fantasy
c) Rustic Pottery
d) Cajun Shrimp

About to go with (d) because it’s food.

Happy Father’s Day, Barnacle Bill.