And now for a rare glimpse at what I do all day at the office… EW.com’s ‘America’s Next Top Doll’ video series. WHO! Will be eliminated tonight?

I know everyone thinks these shoes are heinous, and I guess they kind of are… to look at. Still. I think wearing them would be totally comfy. If I lived in a region where no one was fashionable and all I had to do all day was walk around the town/beach/forest/desert/my car, etc. I would be wearing Crocs 24/7. I’d have all the colors of Crocs, and I’d probably post pictures of me in Crocs on my blog. That car would have to be really big, too, so I’d also post pics of that.

People would be like “Hey, did you read Croc Girl’s blog today?” and their friends would say “Of course. What a fool! Killer blog though.”

I’m not going to do it or anything. This is just to state that I really want to. Whatever. Bite me!

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.

Feel free to shoot me, but I think the Sprint commercials with the kids about the overtime minutes are hilarious.I’ve been watchcing the Olympics for six straight hours now, but feel no shame because it doesn’t really feel like TV. Today’s obsession is how absolutely gorgeous all of the athletes are. Seriously, with all of them - even if the face isn’t great, the body is so perfect that you kind of just stare. And gape. And snack on sugary cereal.

I have noticed, particularly during women’s volleyball, that they do a lot more closeups of the prettiest two players on the court than the “stars” of the teams. Sometimes the cameras just follow them around for no reason. This was even more obnoxious during women’s synchronized diving. They showed this beautiful German girl on every dive even though she came in close to last place. The seemingly unnecessary “rinse off” shower portion after every dive of hers was especially gratuitous.

I guess this isn’t wrong. Anyone who makes it to the Olympics has a right to be on TV, and personally I’d rather watch nicer-looking people than ugly people. I feel horrible admitting that. On normal TV, there’s none of this guilt because everyone in every show is aesthetically close to perfect. The Olympics can’t screen like that.

Wait for the profoundness. It’s coming. It’s so close.

The Olympics are like the epitome of democracy. And they’re in ATHENS! Democracy’s BIRTHPLACE! It’s, like, all coming together! Like.