Last night, without any warning, a friend approached me in a kind of intervening fashion. We had just spent a nice, lighthearted evening suffering through Damn Dawson's Damn Creek, which she watches with guilty fervor and I tolerate in the hope that I can someday coax her away from it. It had been nothing but smiles all night, but her brow furrowed as I got up to leave.

"Are you... all right?" she hesitantly wanted to know. I thought it was a kind of subjective question. I mean, if you asked some of the priests at SLU, they would tell you I was going straight to hell. (I skipped church on Christmas--shhh!) On the other hand, in a world where thirteen year olds carry firearms, yes, I would generally say that I am all right. So I said yes.

She wasn't convinced. She kept making a face like the one my mom made the night I came home and said, "I'm thinking of cutting my own hair!" It's a face my girlfriend makes at me a lot.

The reason she was asking, I found out, was that she'd been reading up on me here. In particular, she'd seen some things I wrote about Jell-O shots and my birthday and whatnot, things that gave her the general impression that I was having an appreciation crisis. I imagine she pictured me sitting on the floor of my apartment in the fetal position, singing that "nobody likes me, everybody hates me" song. She thought I seemed a little too bitter in my writing about drinking etc.To her, she said, it seemed like I was saying that my friends ridiculed my feelings and never took my problems seriously.

I can understand why she would get that impression. I do tend to look pretty bitter on paper. (Inflection is everything.) Oh, and there's also the fact that my friends ridicule my feelings and never take my problems seriously.

Mind you, that's not a complaint. It's actually praise. If my friends ridicule my feelings, it is only because I'm being ridiculous. If my problems aren't taken seriously, it is usually because I don't have any serious problems. In fact, the closest thing I've had to a problem lately was when they took Star Trek: Voyager off the air here in St. Louis.

Don't get me wrong. The Voyager thing was a huge deal. I couldn't have been more irate if Channel 30 had come and towed my car. I fumed for three weeks. I wrote to the TV station. I grumbled loudly to everyone who would listen, and then I actually asked my girlfriend's parents in Dallas to tape the show and mail it to me on a weekly basis. They thought that was the stupidest thing they'd ever heard, and they were probably right, but that only made me fume more. A lot more, so much so that now they actually do tape it and mail it to me just in the hopes of shutting me up. I guess what I'm getting at is, my biggest problem is that I make my little tiny problems into big problems. If you were my friend, you'd laugh too. I'm cool with that.

(The worst part is, Voyager isn't even really a good show. Although it certainly beats Damn Dawson's Damn Creek.)

Even though I knew that my friend had nothing to worry about, she took a lot more convincing. I did my best to oblige, especially where the my-friends-drink-to-hurt-me jabs from Feb. 14 were concerned. I don't want people thinking that the alcohol issue has become a Thing with me again. Alcohol was a Thing with me for the longest time, especially my sophomore year of college. (In all honesty, just about everything was a Thing with me that year; half the people I was friends with then are still afraid to come near me.) No one could even say the word "beer," or even many of the words that rhymed with "beer," without being treated to a speech so long-winded and self-righteous that even Karl Marx would have yawned and looked at his watch.

These days, though, I have been known to join my friends at the pub a time or two without even clucking my tongue disapprovingly. I mean, when you get right down to it, how many times can you have the drinking-is-from-the-devil, no-it's-not-Jesus-loved-wine debate before you've just said it all? We all know that stupid war's been waged over the dinner table 1000 times; it's not like somebody's been saving special ammo for debate #1001 that's going to make anyone say, "Oh my God, you're right! What was I thinking?" They know I hate to be around alcohol. I know they don't give a $%!*. Everybody shakes hands and moves on with their lives. We know where the lines are, and we don't cross them.

Most of all, I appreciate the level of candor* I share with my inner circle. There is nothing we say behind one another's backs that we haven't said to one another's faces. If I write that Greg is a potato gun fanatic who has a bad habit of arranging my prized Star Wars figures into sexual positions, it is only after saying, "Would you shut up about your potato gun? And for the last time, put Princess Leia down!"

(In all fairness, nearly everyone reacts to my Star Wars figures by eventually placing them in sexual positions. I have no idea why this is; perhaps as adults, my friends need to emotionally distance themselves from play by crassly mocking it to demonstrate both their worldliness and their superiority. Or perhaps I'm just spouting to cover up how little I actually learned in college.)

So no, I ended up telling my friend, I don't feel unloved at all. Far from it. If anything, I am relieved that I can count on my friends to tell me when I'm being an idiot. (Plus, it's a lot of fun being able to return the favor.)

Random Note: To all my e-mail well-wishers far and near: my birthday went quite well. Brunch was delightful, none of the people who had enemies on the guest list showed up, and none of the other diners appeared too put out by our antics. My girlfriend did coerce the entire room to sing to me loudly and embarrassingly, but I decided to spare her life when I realized that I would be getting free ice cream out of it.

*CANDOR: a word meaning UNRESERVED or HONEST, as opposed to "lighthearted irreverence, like when you take something seriously but not really" as it was recently defined by Someone Who Will Remain Nameless. Try to use it in a sentence today.

Today could not help being a good day. Even if the moon's orbit had degenerated, causing it to fall out of the sky in huge flaming pieces, killing billions all over the world, today could not have been worse than any day last week.

Last week was a very good week for my boss, Chris. Chris got married, and then he went on a honeymoon in Hawaii. He lounged in the sun with his wife. He ate fatty foods. The sea tickled his toes. He bought genuine Hawaiian souvenirs that had been carved out of coconuts in the Phillipines and shipped in mass quantities to honest, friendly Hawaiian merchants. He wore ugly shirts. Life was good for Chris. Boola boola for Chris.

Sadly, I am not Chris. I am the person who had to talk to Chris's clients while he was away, keeping them abreast of what was going on with their campaigns. That would have been fine, except

1) I did not have, and indeed do not have, any earthly clue what the @&#$ is going on with their campaigns;
2) I have several thousand clients of my own, all of whom also want campaign updates and none of whom went on vacation in Hawaii last week; and
3) despite the fact that my coworkers and I are decent, hardworking people with thoughts and feelings and mommies and daddies and people who love us and noble qualities and value as human beings, all of our clients hate us a lot, and they regularly perform voodoo rituals in the hope of speeding our deaths.

Actually, most of our clients are nice people, who know their jobs well and love our work. Unfortunately, those people have no reason to talk to me. Even with my own meager list of client contacts, I have to deal with at least two people a week telling me how much they hate me. As far as I can tell, it's what they pay us for. They're not sure what the internet is, but they're pretty sure we're doing it wrong.

(Rhetorical question: If you bought a store, and filled the store with stuff that you also bought, and then hired a bunch of people and paid them your money to work in the store, would you not at some point GO to the store? Just to see if it was really there? Would you not, in fact, make it your business to know all the ins and outs of running the store? Why, then, do people hire teams to put up web sites, rent space for web sites, buy stock to sell on web sites, hire handsome and decent young men to promote their web sites, and basically plan their lives around web sites that they have never seen?! Why would you have a web site if you'd never even learned how to surf the damn web?!

Someone is going around telling the Rich Old White Men that the internet makes money pile up at your feet. It has to be stopped.

If a squadron of Stereotypical Movie Terrorists held some of my contacts hostage and shouted in broken English, "Show me you web site or die, infidel!", a good many of my contacts would have to close their eyes and wait for the A-Team to come and get them. That is why I must send them updates. That is also why they do not understand the updates, which is why they call me up to yell. They would yell via e-mail, but some of them do not know how to reply to an e-mail. God, how I wish that was a joke.)

In short, quadrupling the number of people who could potentially call me last week did wonders for my skittishness. By Thursday, I was like a hummingbird in a straitjacket.

Things were not helped on Wednesday when the company's internet connection went down for four hours. It was as if all my old professors' dreams had come true, and I had been thrown into an alternate universe where people can be heard saying, "AGH! Why must I be forced to procrastinate when there's WORK to do?!" All I could do was play Nerf basketball all day and wait for the angry phone calls. It was like waiting for the electric chair at Showbiz Pizza.

I think it was all the work-related strife* that caused me to be so standoffish recently, and I think that's why my friend seemed so concerned about me last week. I suppose my Issues have been worse than usual.

And I do still have Issues, despite how relatively mild-mannered I am compared to a few years ago. We all have unique Issues. What it boils down to is: a lot of things that bother almost everyone else don't bother me, and the things that bother me annoy no one else. I have no problem waiting an hour for a restaurant table. I can stand in long lines for no apparent reason all day long. I can sit in traffic until the seasons change. Although I am a nonsmoker, it doesn't particularly bother me when people blow smoke in my face, even at the dinner table.

There are some things, though, that everyone else is fine with, and I often have a Thing about these things. One Thing that has caused some disharmony lately, especially with these particular friends, is previews.

Every week, we gather together for a ceremonial viewing of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. (Shut up. At least it isn't Melrose.) Every week, at the beginning and the end of each episode, the WB (home of Buffy and the infernal Dawson) shows a preview. I hate these previews. I hate previews in general. They make me insane. They put me in a foul mood every week, because they try very hard to convince me to tune into a show I already plan to watch by ruining the show and giving me no reason to watch it. The WB is especially bad at this, because they show viewers a preview for the show that's going to be on in twelve seconds.

They try to attract casual viewers through creative editing, manipulating the footage to make it look like Buffy the Vampire Slayer has sex with a lesbian goat woman in tonight's episode. And every week, every single week, the people I'm with go, "OOoooooh!" as if the events depicted in the preview are actually going to happen. Every week the preview is a bald-faced lie, and every week "OOoooooh! She's gonna sleep with that goat thing! I can't wait!" Sixty minutes later, someone will turn to me without any irony whatsoever and say, "Hey....! Buffy the Vampire Slayer didn't have sex with the lesbian goat woman at all!... Oh, shhh! Be quiet! It's the preview for next week!"

None of the main characters is actually going to die. Nobody is ever going to have sex with any of the main characters. No one is going to remove any clothing unless they are possessed or hypnotized or under a spell. All that's going to happen is, they're going to show a completely misleading montage of images and sounds, and I'm going to see just enough to figure out how it ends a week before it's even on. It's depressing.

So I say, "Hey. We're going to watch it next week anyway, even if it's a rerun. Why don't we not watch the preview? Ever again?" And suddenly, there's a war on! People are selling bonds and rationing sugar and tying yellow ribbons around the television. The troops are rallied and suddenly, everybody's gonna teach me a thing or two about censoring the previews. "Previews, you say? The previews are wholly good! They are prophets, showing us the future of Buffy the Vampire Slayer through a crystal clear looking glass! I think we shall watch the previews with special attention from now on! Why, I think I'll turn up the volume! Is that better? Can everyone hear the preview?!"

We actually got into a physical fight over the mute button a month ago. People were sprawled all over the couch. We were an embarrassment to humanity. Fortunately, Dawson's Creek was on and there was no trace of humanity to be found anywhere.

Non-Preview-Related Pet Peeve of the Day: Misuse of the word "literally." I hate Grammar Cops ("'Can I...'? Don't you mean, 'May I?'"), but it's a good word that's being completely robbed of its meaning. For the record, it means "actually" or "really," not "virtually."
INCORRECT USAGE: The Titanic is so under so much water pressure that attempting to walk on it would literally vaporize you.
CORRECT USAGE: Having Kate Winslet's character in Titanic carry aboard paintings by "some nobody named Picasso" was literally the dumbest thing in a movie all year.

*This is probably the only time in the last fifty years that the word "strife" has been used for some purpose other than rhyming with "life" or "wife" in a bad rock song.

Today was a rather disconcerting one at work. St. Louis was dotted with tornadoes all day today, and the lightning was quite a sight to behold. After what is becoming for me a traditional non-Easter (for the second or third year in a row, Easter Sunday was commemorated in my family by absolutely nothing), it almost seemed as though Jesus had come to twist some religion up my arse in a 50 mph gust. After realizing that the Emergency Annoying Screech System was not "only a test," we found ourselves unplugging the entire office and huddling in a corner for a while.

There was a time when I might have called that kind of precaution ridiculously excessive. That time lasted until three years ago, when I pulled up to my driveway just in time to see lightning strike in my neighbor's front yard with a force great enough to completely obliterate my computer. The bit about the computer not working was, to me, far scarier than the bit about the ominous bolt of electricity parting my hair on the way across the street. Hair comes back for free. My computer, however, had to be replaced with (cue dramatic music) insurance money. After I replaced it, and pulled open the new one to add a bunch of hardware to it (thus voiding the warranty and making it impossible to return), the insurance company took a long look at the fried one and decided that it could be fixed after all. They took their money back, and I suddenly owed my parents $2000 because I forgot to unplug the computer from the phone jack during a rain storm. You'd have thought I hurled the thunderbolt myself.

Needless to say, my computer now gets unplugged. I unplug it, put it in a rubber slicker, and cover the outlets with duct tape every time I leave the room now. And the people at work are the same way.

To be completely honest, though, my unease today had nothing whatsoever to do with the tornado (which, if I heard the news correctly, blew my office's entire block to Oz about ten minutes after I left this afternoon-- I may be sleeping in tomorrow). The storm was no big deal. We shut down for half an hour and bowled, with a little help from a Nerf ball and my action figures.

(We are really harsh to those figures. It's almost creepy, the way they stand there stone-faced day after day as we shoot them with rubber bands and throw them through mini-basketball hoops and cackle like villains. It almost makes me feel guilty. I'm half-waiting to wake up one night and find that Dilbert doll holding a pillow over my mouth.)

No, the thing that really bothered me all afternoon had nothing to do with the storm. You see, Chris decided that today would be a wonderful day to bring in his Monkees CD. The Monkees, unfortunately, are the heralds of Death.

I realize that that may be the strangest thing I've ever said. I accept that. I completely understand. Allow me to explain.

Years ago, there was a time when I was actually a huge fan of the Monkees. In 1986, when I was about eleven years old, there was a kind of resurgence in the Monkees' popularity, as the revolutionary programming possibilities of cable TV introduced a hungry new generation to an infinite future of mediocre sixties sitcoms. I was among the affected; I had a videotape of my favorite Monkees episodes, and I must have had at least half a dozen of their albums. They were my favorite band, opening my eyes to a whole new world, a world beyond the cheesy radio crap of the time, a world of cheesy radio crap that was also old. Yes, the Monkees were a far cry from the Madonnas and David Lee Roths my peers were settling for. The Monkees were a symbol of my cultural maturity.

Then, one night, everything changed. I had a dream, one of the most vivid, potent dreams I have ever had. In it, I was sitting alone in our basement watching TV. The Monkees were on TV, in the midst of one of the brilliant, glorious musical numbers that punctuated their show. I was riveted, because it was a song I'd never heard them perform before. Just then, from over by the staircase, I thought I heard a noise. A bit peeved that something would disrupt the Monkees Experience, I went over to the stairs to see what was the matter. I rounded the corner to look up the stairs.

I barely got a chance to reach the stairs when I find myself staring into the dead eyes of the Grim Reaper. He descended upon me at full force, a hideous banshee shriek from his loose bony jaw, his clawed fingers rocketing towards my flesh. His stench and foul torn robes enveloped me before I was even sure what was happening. That was the only time in my life that I have ever woke myself screaming. Even thinking about the dream 12 years later, at the ripe old age of 23, I had to get up just now and turn on an extra light. Meeting death in the basement went on my all-time top ten list. It was absolutely horrible, and to my young mind it contained only one clear lesson: stay the hell away from the Monkees.

And that is exactly what I did. I threw away all my videos and cassettes, and I never came within ten feet of that television show again. Not for months, even after I realized that the Monkees were probably not the harbingers of the apocalypse. It was just a bad dream, but I was only eleven, and I wasn't taking any chances.

One day, a few months after my dream, my family and I were spending the weekend with some family friends. While we were in their home, the Monkees came on TV. Now, since I realized that I was not in my own home, and I also realized that my fear was irrational, I didn't say anything. I mean, what was I going to say? "You have to turn this off; the Monkees are the heralds of Death"? Not bloody likely. My parents thought I was weird enough. So I kept quiet and watched the Monkees with a knot in my stomach.

Within half an hour of the Monkees' broadcast, our friends' dog was dead. Just dropped dead, fell over right there in the back yard while we were visiting. Apparently, I later learned, the dog ate rocks. Every once in a while, they would put the dog out in the back yard, and it would go over to the landscaping and purposely just swallow a rock. I guess it never digested them, and they cut up its stomach, which would have been bad enough if the rocks hadn't been really dirty (which they were since, after all, they were rocks). The diagnosis: death from massive internal bleeding, infection, and most importantly, prolonged Monkee exposure.

I was a believer. The age of Monkee tolerance was over, I decided, for the greater good. The only other time I've seen the Monkees on TV since, I was at my neighbor's house, and that night my neighbor's house burned down. (Would I really make up a story this dumb?) It's all just another unwelcome bit of weirdness in my life, and I do my best to avoid it, coincidence or not. If one of their songs comes on the radio, I practically abandon the operation of the car until the station has been changed. I know it's ridiculous, but what can I say? Chalk it up to childhood trauma.

How do you tell a story like this to your boss? "Sir, we can't listen to your CD. I'm sorry. One of us will have to die." I don't know what your relationship is with your boss, but that's not a conversation I'm ready to have, heralds or no heralds. So I sat there all day and suffered. On many levels, actually, because it turns out after all these years that the Monkees suck. They are an ugly old vehicle fueled entirely on nostalgia, and the gauge is very near "E". The theme song still creeps me out.

Nevertheless, I listened and went home, and then the office was in the path of a tornado. Another coincidence...? ...or another piece of the sinister Monkee Mystery...?....

I clearly need more sleep.
(And/or fewer dreams.)

Seems like years since I last sat down to write anything. I just haven't been in the mood. Every time I try to jot anything down, I always end up coming from an angry place.

The last ten days have not been uneventful, mind you. For one thing, my girlfriend's play finally opened, which means
a) the rehearsals will stop now, and I'll actually be able to remember what her face looks like, and
b) since the play was at SLU, I got to spend more time at my old alma mater thank God.
Except for the part about having to be on campus again, it is always a thrill to see my girlfriend up on stage doing something she enjoys with a group of comrades I've never met before. Sometimes I worry that I monopolize her too much; it makes me proud, in an almost condescending way, to see her playing well with her little friends.

More importantly, we won't be suffering from Emergency Goldfish Syndrome again for a while. It's an unfortunate side effect of play rehearsals: because she only has one night off every week during rehearsals, that night is Mandated by God Himself as "quality time." To even think of wasting the only night we will have together for six whole days by doing anything foolish like trying to live our lives would be an affront to couplehood. The International Assembly of Couples would revoke your membership for such misappropriation of "quality time." Unfortunately, because that night is her only night off, that night is also my girlfriend's only opportunity to run a week's worth of dull and pointless errands, errands which the International Assembly of Couples have apparently voted in as "quality time."

In essence, whenever my girlfriend is cast in a play, it means that I will have to spend one night a week rushing through downtown traffic so that I can get to her apartment in time to go with her to the stores so that she can buy food she's too busy to eat and videotapes she's too busy to watch and dental floss and curtain rods and shoelaces and a lot of other things that are so boring I can't even stand buying them for myself, and this will be our quality time. The last time, we very nearly killed each other because the urgent errand was goldfish.

My girlfriend needed very desperately to buy goldfish that she was too busy to take care of. Needed very desperately, that very evening, to spend a ridiculous amount of money on what could possibly be the single stupidest thing that exists. As far as I see it,

All the stupidity of keeping filth-producing living things in a human home for one's own amusement
+ All the stupidity of filling one's house with ugly colorful trinkets that do nothing (SEE: Candles)
___________________________________________________
= goldfish.

Fish provide no companionship. They are not interesting to watch, lacking any eye-catching moving parts (limbs, prehensile tails, tongues, eyelids). They don't make pleasing sounds. They don't like you. The better you treat them, the more expensive they are. Keeping them involves touching great volumes of pellets that smell like dehydrated death and, essentially, used toilet water. The closest thing to an interesting moment of fish ownership is monitoring the temperature when you change the water. Except for the bit about the water and pellets, I might as well be describing my socks. That, in essence, is the goldfish experience.

To hear my girlfriend on her One Night Off, however, you would think they did your housework for you. "I need to go and get a new goldfish tonight! Right now! The angelfish can't do all that laundry herself!"

Rewind to one month earlier. My girlfriend is going on a trip to Dallas. She has three fish, but hasn't found a sitter for them. (If someone ever asks you to be a fishsitter, consider yourself insulted.) Before leaving, my girlfriend looks for "one of those shell-shaped things where you put it in the water and it releases food to them every day." Unable to find such a mythical device, she just goes to Dallas and leaves the fish to die. Just leaves for a week. "Good luck, Polly! Try not to gnaw the little diver guy's head off while I'm gone! And no resorting to cannibalism, ha ha ha!"

When she came back, the fish had eaten the fake plant thing that was decorating the tank. In light of this experience, my girlfriend decided that she needed more mouths to feed. Immediately. And thus, our quality time consisted of me going to the pet store to be an accessory to murder.

We had three other errands to run, naturally; it was the Only Night Off. Obviously, me going to other stores to partake in enjoyable shopping while the little lady was selecting her prey was out of the question, so I stood in the front of the pet shop and looked at the poor little yipping dogs in captivity. The more the little dogs yipped, the worse I felt about the whole institution of petdom.

"Yip yip!" said one pup. "My ancestors used to roam the countryside as proud pack animals, running free and hunting their food. Will you release me to follow my evolutionary destiny? Yip?"

"No, proud hunter," I replied, "but we will tie a bow around your neck, and cut off your genitalia, and call you Patches in a baby-talk voice for the rest of your life! And then, when you get senile, we'll gas you! How does that sound?"

"Yip!" said Patches the Hunter.

"Yip, indeed," I replied.

(If this were truly classic literature, the professor would now stop to compare Modern Man to Patches, emasculated, patronized, and ultimately euthenised by Society. Much would be made of the name, Patches, and how it symbolizes our disjointed, thrown-together lives. Sadly, this is just my journal, which is so far removed from decent writing that I've even been known to leave prepositions where sentences end at.)

To make a long story a bit shorter, we bought this poor little fish and took it home, but not before growing terribly irritated with each other. Normally, none of this would have even happened. She would have gone out with me one night and gotten her victimfish later. But the play made some problems, and so I'm glad it will soon be behind us.

It helps that it was a really good play, and that she was really good in it. As I told her castmates afterwards, it takes a lot to make me forget I'm at SLU. It was so good, it was almost worth running into my old professor.

Of course, it would have been more enjoyable if I had found someone to go with me. If there's anything better than hanging out at SLU, after all, it's hanging out at SLU alone like a dirty old man. Sadly, my usual play dates Nicole and Greg had better things to do than go to the opening night of their friend's play; after all, Katey was having a party! I was given the distinct impression that Nicole was alone in wanting to attend this party, but as a member of the International Assembly of Couples, Greg was legally compelled to go along. No hard feelings though. I mean, that makes perfect sense; my girlfriend has opening nights all the time, but how often does Katey have a party??

What's that you say? Every weekend? Oh.

It's already water under the bridge, though. At the risk of copping out, nothing would come of me addressing the issue with them anyway. They would only murmur about how irrational I was for being annoyed by it at all. Of course, they would then also get mad at me the next time I missed one of their big events. Hell, they're probably mad at me for not going to the party.

In other current events, 700 people I know have gotten engaged in the last two weeks. The International Assembly of Couples is apparently having a membership drive.

It's absolutely insane. There's suddenly this lemming-like rush to the altar. It's as if one stupid couple got engaged, and all the insecure people in the world turned to their partners and said, "Well, if they're getting married, surely we're ready!" My friends from high school are getting married. My friends from college are getting married. My girlfriend's friends are getting married. I haven't seen this many rings exchanged since the day after Christmas at the Wal-Mart jewelry counter.

I dare not comment on this turn of events too much, because I am genuinely happy for several of the people involved. This segment is not meant as a criticism, but as a warning.

If you are reading this right now, and you are one of my single friends, I warn you: