I'm off to the land of legal fireworks, grazing camels, and creationism. Yes- Kansas, once again. Look for new posts next Monday.

If you happen to be naked and making a tuna sandwich, here's a tip: open the pull-top can while holding it at arm's length from yourself, otherwise when the tin top comes free it will most likely splatter you with little bits of fish and fish juice. This is hardly noticeable when you're wearing a shirt. Okay, maybe the solution is just try to be clothed when undertaking this procedure.

I have been chastised for my lack of recent postings.... and have no excuses, at the moment, other than that I am so hot in my mostly-non-air-conditioned apartment that I think all creativity is being leeched out of my brain and turned into sweat. I also am mostly inclined to write about a rather too personal situation that is foremost in my head at the moment. But as I have adopted a policy of abstaining from such indulgences, I will simply offer this: my general reaction to not getting what I want bears a striking similarity to this Roald Dahl character. Hence, ensuing crankiness.

Maybe it's because I hear them early in the morning, before my humor-discernment abilities have woken up. Maybe it's because the Howard Stern show is such a nice mindless contrast to my heavy diet of NPR's Morning Edition. But I really think these "Real American Heroes" Budweiser commercials are kind of hilarious.

For me, nothing brings back that nostalgic childhood feeling like obsessing over nuclear war. I remember, vividly, lying awake in my bed as a kid, freaking out whenever a plane flew overhead because I was convinced that was the missile that was going to kill us all. (Of course having been told, in detail, what the layout of a nuclear bomb's destruction would be like, at age ten, I was maybe a little more neurotic about it than most.) Then I grew up, realized that missiles don't sound like airplanes, and eventually mellowed out, knowing I would never have to live in a time like that again. Then today I found myself in Times Square, theorizing that it was actually the safest place to be in the event of a bomb, because it would undoubtedly be Ground Zero and thus a more immediate death by vaporization. The Addams Family child in me is resurfacing. Good god. Well, at least I know I'm not the only one....

Here's what I hate: when a friendship goes unexpectedly tepid. You know when this happens because you suddenly find yourselves very hard-pressed to schedule a time and a place to actually be in the same room together. Of course, the rampant scheduling is in itself something of a New York phenomenon: nowhere else, I think, is quite so reliant on consulting the datebook for making decisions or plans of any kind, including Down Time. But it is somewhat sad when you both know that the friendship has migrated from A-list to B-list, and yet are still pretending otherwise; it is not something you can come out and announce, you simply have to let it siphon itself off slowly. Soon, you realize, it has been months since you were able to find a free night in common, and at that point you can both breathe a sigh of relief and move on-- keeping the other person on your email list, of course, in case of large events and fundraising.

In the interest of all those who might be planning air travel in the near future, I have a couple of suggestions: bring a picture ID, and leave your self-defense weapons at home. On my latest trip (see earlier entry) I found myself with no official identification whatsoever, which led to the frantic overnighting of my birth certificate and social security card (does anyone actually carry those around?) by my dad, and the assembly of an an envelope full of supplementary material to prove that I exist, like tax returns and utility bills and whatnot. Still, in spite of my best efforts, the airplane people stamped a big S on my ticket-- for Suspicious? Search? Sinister?-- which led to multiple pattings-down at security checkpoints and the complete unpacking of our carefully packed suitcases. One of which contained my little container of pepper spray, which my sister had hastily advised me to take out of my shoulder bag and stow in my suitcase. So the security guy took our bags, and my sister, and went off to the Suspicious Passenger room I guess, and apparently came across my pepper spray, which is disguised as a pen, and upon uncapping it remarked merrily, "Oh, perfume!" At which point she figured he would spray it on himself, or her, or even in the air, and chaos would ensue, and we would both be immediately arrested. But, perhaps more disturbingly, he simply put it back in the bag and told her we were free to go. Although I am glad to have come out of the whole experience without it involving incarceration, it is a little unsettling that a paid professional bag-searching guy would assume that a container that looked like a pen but was actually a spraying device would be perfume. As Jackie-O pointed out, who needs to disguise perfume?

My internet connection is so excrutiatingly slow, and I am so impatient... lately I have taken to moving my mouse a lot around the screen as a page is downloading, as if to remind the computer that I am still right here, waiting, instead of having wandered off to do something else (which might be the productive thing to do). It seems to work in that sort of fake psychological way that it appears to help rack up more points, in pinball, when the ball is up at the top stuck in those bumpers, and you hit the flippers a lot while it's bouncing around. I know there's no connection, but it always seems to help keep it up there longer.

Things I like about small-town Kansas (or, you know you're not in New York anymore when):
-The cashier asks you if you'd like a "sack" with that
-Every salad bar prominently features jello with fruit cocktail in it
-A movie ticket costs five bucks
-A hotel room costs thirty bucks
-It really, really doesn't matter Who You Know
-The only thing lighting up the horizon at night is the grain elevator
-There is no such thing as gridlock, and
-You see equal numbers of cows and cars as you drive on the highway
-McDonald's draws a crowd for breakfast on Sunday
-Tornados, tornados, tornados
and the number one reason I like Kansas especially now:
-Probably nobody would try to blow it up

Sorry for the lapse- was called away to the midwest on account of, well, death. Descriptions of Kansas forthcoming. Descriptions of death, maybe not so much.

And now, a rare moment of literary indulgence: recently I came across this quote from this French social theorist and anarchist named Proudhon. I thought about trying to pass myself off as having been reading French social theory, but I actually have to admit that it was cited in a book by E.B. White, who seems like one of the most charming writers who ever lived, and is, in my opinion, a sound judge of worthwhile quotes. Anyway, I thought this seemed like a good philosphy to pursue, if you were going to pursue one:

"Humor- true liberty!- it is you who deliver me from ambition for power, from servitude to party, from respect for routine, from the pedantry of science, from admiration for celebrities, from the mystifications of politics, from the fanaticism of the reformers, from fear of this great universe, and from self-admiration."

Triumph! The Ikea table is assembled, at least in part, after an hour spent pounding, cursing, and throwing things across the living room; OK, so the shelves that go underneath are not attached to the legs, and I tightened the bolts by hand instead of with a wrench (in my life I have managed to amass six identical little screwdrivers, two hammers, a giant tape measure, and a million nails, screws, brads, bolts and picture-hangers, but no goddamn wrench), and the whole thing looks as if it might fall apart the first time I attempt to cut a vegetable on its surface, but the important thing is it LOOKS like a whole, presentable cutting board-table thing, and I did it myself (no thanks to the male population of New York, largely composed of nancy boys who pale at the words "some assembly required" and own no respectable power tools whatsoever).

Winner, most unexpected readership of this weblog: I am in the top ten search results- out of 12,000!- for the query "a fourteen year old boy f'ing a girl." (no, in case you're wondering, I did not actually ever string together all of those words in one sentence.)

Musing on an especially eclectic weekend, in which I, among other things:

Consumed a bizarre Japanese eggplant dish involving a topping of fish flakes that writhed and twisted around as if they were alive but were, the waiter assured us, actually quite dead and just moving because they were "thin"

Ran around Central Park dressed as a prepubescent soccer player for a photo shoot, part of which involved posing with a crazy probably homeless man who insisted that he was really a "theater guy" and, separately, some guy in a giant rabbit costume (the best part, though, was that I found myself standing around on the periphery of the action shots, which more than anything else harkened back to my actual childhood on a soccer team, in which I tried to do as little as possible so as to practice gymnastics on the sidelines)

Had a distressingly realistic dream that I had been shot in the gut by someone quite close to me, and was for some reason attempting to keep this information to myself, right up until the time I started bleeding all over the place and had to go to the hospital, at which point I thankfully woke up

Made a new friend in an older British gentleman, who likes my "impish face" and assures me that by the time I'm forty, it will be OK that I can never decide what I'm going to do when I grow up

Spent several sweaty hours dancing, until way past even my usual insomniac bedtime, in a club that looked as though the main ingredient of its decor was tinfoil and was overflowing with people who quite seriously sported mullets, mohawks, drag, and, in one case, a stunningly accurate David Bowie getup

Wandered all over Spanish Harlem, including this strange, elaborately manicured garden, and attempted to eat a Firecracker popsicle, which promptly melted all over my hand and left blue raspberry stains on my shirt and reminded me of swimming at White's Pond when I was little, where the arrival of the ice cream man was the only thing that could entice us out of the suspiciously warm water in the shallow part

.....Now I am home to disarray and editing homework and the as-yet unassembled Ikea butcher block table, which just sits there in its box mocking me for not being able to insert screw A into hole B. No, seriously.