Thanks, sis! Meg and Dee went to Art Chicago last week and sent me some digital missives of the complex carbohydrates they thought would really REACH me.

“Heyyyy! Welcome to DR!”

Ugh. I miss Steak ‘n’ Shake.

Life’s eternal questions, embodied just as they should be in Wonka-bar form.

Here’s a still life featuring butter (a.k.a. my life).

These cupcakes actually do look dangerous. Did the icing factory run out of color OR WHAT?

Says Meg: “yes - those balloons are attached to that girls hair… hehe”

Dee Barrett, who was consulted for permission to post these photos merely as a courtesy (because I was going to post them anyway), gave the OK:

NO PROBLEMS HERE.

And in the spirit of indulgence….indulge me and watch these!

May 2, 2008 — ‘DWTS Talk’: Bye bye, Shannequin
May 5, 2008 — ‘Survivor Talk’ cameo! I’m a medic. Of course.

Previously, on Yahoo!…

Chesh sent me this screengrab because, he said, “I couldn’t believe something so perfectly suited for you was on my screen!” Awww. It really is unrealistically perfect. I especially enjoy how the very question posed by the Top Story — “Is this for real?” — is negated by the fourth link below it, presumably a link to the same exact story as the big tout. I know words like “tout.”

But then inexplicably, the story had vanished from Yahoo! It appears someone didn’t do his/her reporting to find out that according to Wikipedia, the Luther Burger, named that because it was something Luther Vandross liked to eat, originated in Decateur, GA and has been around for years.

What I find even more ridiculous than Yahoo! taking the story down is that it was even a story in the first place. Don’t get me wrong — it’s definitely my idea of breaking news — but the fact that it was featured so prominently on the site, if only for a few minutes, is truly puzzling. It’s as if someone who really wanted to get fired from Yahoo! went and messed around in the backend for his/her own enjoyment. Annie Barrett’s separated-at-birth twin, are you having a laugh?

We couldn’t let the issue go…

Remember said puncture? Ahhhhh, the puncture.

WTF, Yahoo!?

Two weeks ago, I moved to the Carroll Gardens/Red Hook vicinity. I’m so cool. Check out some of my fave sights from the environs thus far:

Ha.

Ha!

YES!

I always do!

Welcome to the neighborhood, Annie!

Fine, a few pics from inside the “Apt.” (I posted these and more a few days ago by burying them in the archives. But that was bogus. Wait, you don’t care.)

The essentials.

Some backstory on that sad tomato, from an April 13 e-mail from Dee Barrett:

At T (Target), I purchased a ceramic tomato that I am almost certain Meghan said “we just HAVE to buy this for Annie” last time we were there together. The clearance tags were mounted one on top of the other, suggesting that this really is the tomato that nobody would ever buy. I’ll bet Annie would have purchased it at its original price ! However, always after a deal, the tomato is now ours for the very low sticker price of $2.47 !

Oh, D (Dee) !

The essentials (cont.)

Best desk ever. Note the pack of brownie bites sidling up to the PTP.

From living room into office. Jury’s still out on whether this room is called Office or Study. (Bordering-on-Tacky Lair of Sublime Creativity, Possibly, In The Future, If I Ever Get My Act Together… was too long.)

Kitchen, including the bane of my existence for 3.5 years: Three incredibly annoying “Lack” shelves from Ikea that are literally impossible to put in a wall. Milk crates, rug gripper, stand ‘em up on the floor? Sure!

Living room. Time to play Where’s The Cheeseburger Pillow?

First documented homemade Mexican Pizza featuring: Scallions! (4/30/07)

The End.

Any questions?

Dee called yesterday to tell me that the title of my last entry (”Stop coming here”) and the part where I said I was currently hating myself made it sound like I was depressed. I was like, “No, mom, that was a joke.” She was like, “How was it funny?” It was a really good question.

You’re probably wondering how the Plan (officially titled “Lose Weight”) is going. I kept a log, asked for professional feedback (free at NYU’s health center for Students Who Should Have Graduated By Now) and a group of dieticians categorized my progress as “Not Good.” Check out what I had for 3am Snack, or what in normal-person-time can be translated to: Lunch

It’s a smattering of the some of the few items left in my festering fridge and the end of a baguette that was stale yesterday. The topping consists of shredded mozzerella cheese (melted), pine nuts, scallions, olive oil, and garlic salt. They were not applied to the bread in that order. For a DR Challenge, try to guess the order yourself!

Sometimes (not in this case, because those little fuckers tasted amazing), I decide I’m unhappy with the meal I just ate. Maybe it was a loserish sandwich on wheat bread or a bowl of nasty soup with bad croutons. When this happens, I mentally shut down and start panicking about when would be a proper time for me to eat again. I feel like it should be sooner than later, because my previous experience was such a letdown. But eating something else right away would be piggish.

My solution, as of late, has been to chug two extra-large bottles of water (right, flanked on one side by Fritos Scoops!). One is a rectangular Fiji bottle I can remember buying. The other is the biggest bottle Poland Spring makes, but since I can’t remember ever buying it I know that it’s by this point in time incredibly disgusting and probably has bits and pieces of the general filth in my apartment encased into each of its Michelin Man-like ridges.

Dieters or people who just like to do sick things to their bodies: take note! Chugging both of these at once actually makes me hungry again within the hour, and if you feel hungry, that’s your body’s way of saying you should eat. So, score.

The chugging also makes me pee a lot, which can be fun and semi-convincing of one’s general progress in life. If I’m just going to be sitting around for four hours, especially if I’m at home, I feel a lot more productive if I have to get up and jog to the bathroom a few times. Throw 20 times into the mix and I almost have a workout going. It’s awesome.

So, as we’ve seen before, my mom, Dee, enjoys mailing me things. She mostly sends Twix, running socks (okay. I get it.) and newspaper clippings about reality television. But sometimes she goes above and beyond my Mawmee Expectations (ME) and sends something like this.

She probably doesn’t even remember sending this, but she’ll be so thrilled that I actually kept it. Seriously. It’ll warm her heart.

More recently, Dee sent this:

She wrote ‘’We’re enjoying his column lately.'’ Oh, Dee. It’s so cute that you wrote this out to let me know. Which TV shows are you enjoying? What was the last movie you rented? Did you like it? Please explain why in a 100-word essay, and send it with Kirschbaum’s cookies.

Dee also took this picture of my sister and me looking snobby (on purpose) on Bleecker street with our new matching bags — gifts from our parents thanks to the amazing Lighthouse Place outlet mall in Michigan City, Indiana. Did those last three words just blow your mind?

I’m sorry in advance.

Meghan and I are so self-aware of the stereotype here that we are effectively the ANTI-stereotype. The fact that I’m even putting it up on this site is a joke. Right? I think so…

Eh. Who even cares. MATCHING PURSES!

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.

My apartment looks like … whatever Dee’s equivalent of “shit” would be. I have to be all packed by Thursday night, at which point I’m jetting off to MI again (!!!), this time with the esquire-in-training (EIT. Get it? It’s the unhappy-face version of EIC) in tow. I’m officially moving next Tuesday.

I took the liberty of whipping up an omelette-like composition of everything left in my refrigerator, as if this was an appropriate “farewell” testament to the apartment as a whole. It sort of makes sense. As much as I like to think the world revolves around me, all the energy in this apartment has revolved around the fridge. I don’t even pretend to compete anymore.

I’ll try to take more pics of the Midwest while I’m there, since apparently the fruit market ones were a hit.