OK, I know I have been terribly bad about keeping up the blog. I've been all distracted lately, and was thinking of just putting Pineapple on hiatus, but then there are those random moments that bear retelling here, and it would be a shame if my own self-imposed hiatus made it impossible. So please just bear with me in my distractedness, and hopefully it will subside soon....

anyway, here's the thing that happened today: I got my pupils dilated to see if I had glaucoma (I don't) and then had to make my way down to Tribeca to have drinks before going to see an adorable young band at the Knitting Factory, and I stumbled out onto the street from the eye doctor looking like possessed Willow from "Buffy" with my eyes all black, and couldn't read anything, and put on my sunglasses even though it was 6 in the evening and it looked stupid, and the five-minute walk to the subway felt like quite an adventure, what with me trying not to walk into people and vampirically shrinking from bright lights, and the effect of the whole thing was that it really made me nostalgic for drugs. Is this as kicky as my adventures are going to get from now on? Dilated pupils in midtown? Good god, I hope not.

Talk about story intros that just write themselves....

So I worked until pretty late last week one night and then I went to the bar afterward to have a well-deserved drink and there, amongst several co-workers, was the Big Cheese, the editor in chief, to whom I was introduced by a rather inebriated friend, and who seemed, himself, to be somewhat toasted, and then someone asked me where I was, and I wittily replied, "working - unlike all of you," which, in retrospect, seems like something one might not want to say upon first meeting the person who signs your paychecks. Yes. In any case, he went on to invite me to dig into his plate of calimari, so I suppose all was not lost. But still. Still.

Commemorated the day by seeing "Manhattan" in a giant, packed theater. Amazing to watch with a crowd of emotional New Yorkers. If I ever get my dachshund, I will name him Waffles in homage.

The ride home on the subway was pretty creepy. I was just reading my book for a while - well, doing my usual half-reading, half-daydreaming thing - and I noticed the person next to me reading the newspaper full of awful 9/11 photos and then remembered all the dire warnings on the news today and looked around and everyone was all silent and looking around, too, and I think we were all partly mulling over that tiny, tiny possibility that our subway car might get blown up (or is it just me and my vivid catastrophe-centric imagination?) and partly thinking that this time last year we were all unsuspectingly having our last nice carefree fall evening.

Which, I might add, I am going to try my utmost to re-create with the help of a hot tub, cold Rolling Rocks, and friends. Orange alert, my ass.

Wow, a whole week of no updates. My tiny readership may well dwindle to none. What can I say? I've been out soaking up the last drops of summer. On Sunday, put aside my compulsion to a) exercise, b) work or c) at least make some sort of overture toward cleaning the bathroom, and did absolutely nothing of any productivity whatsoever. Drank midday cocktails, and watched "Mad Max," which I was surprised to discover is not the same as "Road Warrior" - that, it turns out, is the sequel, and "Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome" is the third in the series, not the second. Who knew? At any rate, I'm not sure Mad Max is really worth the time. Too many shots of Mel as not-yet-mad Max with his adoring wife, before she gets run over by the motorcycle gang and things get more interesting. Also, tonight found myself wondering when English Muffins got smaller - or did I just get bigger? There was a time when one of them would constitute breakfast. Now, not so much. I really think they're making them smaller, though.

Went dancing last night - showed up a little on the early side at midnight, but it got packed by one and we were all happily sandwiched in the midst of a crowd on the dance floor. Then, all of a sudden, a drag queen was up on stage introducing the evening's headliner, some live band dressed all in white with sunglasses and looking extremely bored, who proceeded to bring us all to a dead stop with their leaden attempt at Devo-emulation, accompanied by a small white guy who kept yelling such original things as "awwwww yeah" and "aaaight?". In ten minutes most of us were slinking away to drink beer and stand around annoyedly waiting for them to be done already. One of my friends noted, somewhat optimistically I thought, that "avant-garde culture is *supposed* to be alienating." Yeah, but isn't it also supposed to be artistic or original or something? We stayed, but the buzz kill lingered. When we finally left, we happened upon a large, brown silicone penis in the middle of the road. Which, in an incredibly immature gesture, we placed on someone's windshield.