Blogspot, writer of words, channel of fear.

One of the great joys of digital cable is that for any change in time t, there are d[2(e0)x]/dt instances of pre-3rd season Will & Grace showing (where e0 equals the permittivity of free space). In 8th grade, the show made me long for an elevated kitchen and a lucrative career in corporate law more than anything. I'm not kidding--Will and Grace is the major reason I did mock trial.

Of course, since new episodes are as fun to watch as a seven year old sitcom about faghags, all avalible shows are syndicated--which means they've had commercials injected into them with a turkey baster. The average commercial break goes something like this: A woman is dancing in a club when she suddenly realizes she sports a colossal, glowing pit stain. Shoulda used Dri-Pits! After this comes an ice cream commercial, followed without delay by advertisements for tampons designed for those heavy days. Do you see the pattern?

Fag hags who spend Sunday morning reading Cathy are unfortunate realities. There are good one though. My friend Blaire uses her charm to collect gays like stamps or mini-bottles of barbeque sauce; I suspect her secret intention is to pickle us and sell our shriveled corpses on Antiques Roadshow. I respect her.

Changing channels, Justin and I notice the demographic that watches The Science Channel are uniformly balding and lodged in a death-spiral of debt. I, for one, agree with the attractive, yet approachable, blonde spokeswoman that consolidation is the answer. I, for one, also agree with experts that there is going to be a killer asteroid in 800 years and we may go the way of the dinosaur.

*I drank 2 liters of green tea today to avoid overheating and that shit is driving me up the wall.

Blogspot, owner of many cats.

I got wasted last night and I ate 20 dumplings in a sitting today. We Tivo-ed Kelly Clarkson falling off the stage during the VMAs and watched the ten-second loop of her descent continuously for two minutes. During commercials, we jumped to the Weather Channel's round-the-clock coverage of Hurricane Katrina. Far-away storm surge and celebrity instability are my favorites, and I'm glad they're my roommates' favorites too.

The gang and I shopped for ingredients in Chinatown and came home with 25 pounds of rice, a bottle of 'Depressed Chinese Woman' brand chili oil and fruit pops that look like ice sausages. I plan to make MaPo Tofu tomorrow night before I go to my boyfriend's DJ set. I will drink martinis, he will play Joy Division, and it will rule.

The past spring was unusually cold, and I've come to associate the city of New York with chilly temperatures. The saturating humidity calls me out on my idiocy, so I will be sleeping shirtless tonight with the windows open. I had the exquisite sin of air conditioning in Boston, but I don't mind the change.

Blogspot, soiled teenage girlfriend.

I got up at 6:30AM to take a motherfucking test. The people who had shown up to take the MCAT were alarmingly attractive, as if the hospitals of tomorrow were primed to be backup sets for ER. The Kaplan practice books had somehow implicitly led me to believe I would be vying with trolls, so the impending competition with people with cheekbones more statuesque than my own came as a shock.

Our test was administered in the largest room of a high end Boston hotel. Desks were arranged with creepy precision as tacky chandeliers swung eerily above our heads. As students flooded in, the space came to resemble a cross between the ballroom of a haunted cruise ship and the lecture hall Albert Speer never got to design.

Our proctor, a high-strung Indian doctor, took his sweet time reading instructions. In fact, he spent so long handling administration that I sat in that room from 8AM to 7PM. At one point, people needed to pee and wanted to leave the room. In response, the proctor lifted his hands and, in exasperation, and began swatting at an unseen assailant. I couldn't help but see his resemblance to the dark priest from the second Indiana Jones movie. Let these promising minds be a sacrifice to the almighty Kali-Ma! Let me remind you now that everyone's a little bit racist.

I sat in front of two kids with heavy Bostonian accents, the Massachusetts equivalent of Jersey shore-trash. Nonetheless, as they discussed matters such as the renin-angiotensin system and complementary RNA interference, I realized that they were clearly the most intelligent shore-trash to whom God ever saw fit to grant life. It was unclear whether I should have been impressed or repulsed.

Finally, as a note to prospective test-takers: Before a major exam, do not listen to catchy pop music. It is clear to me now that the poor performance I forecast for myself on the biology-organic chemistry section should be attributed to Stephin Merritt and the French girl from Ivy. Damn you, Dominique.

Blogspot, factory of human chorionic gonadotropin.

In the week leading up to SATs, I was nervous--so much so that I had spent several hours a day compulsively doing yardwork. In retrospect, working with sharp tools under duress seems a damn fool idea. In my family, the prospect of failing at a standardized test undermines one's reason for life. It would call for a ritual suicide only made messier with the gas-powered chainsaw we used to clear the wall of bramble bordering our property. What a gory suburban scene that would have been: a chestnut sapling, sprouting from freshly mown grass, splotched with an elegant arc of clotting blood--and bits of shattered bone distributed like bacon bits on a salad.

Three years later, I am once again worried about standardized testing--this time, the MCATs. They are this Saturday. It's unusual for me to wait so long to start freaking out, but I guess it's no surprise that procrastination has finally extended its spindly fingers this far.

Recently I had a nightmare where I was taking the Physics portion of the exam. Halfway through, I discovered that the problems had nothing to do with electrostatics or whatever and actually tested one's skill in cake decoration. In the end, my creation, a torte covered in pink icing topped with a single cookie seashell, garnered me a combined score of zero. When I awoke, I jumped from a desire to laugh to a desire to cry with the regularity of an AC current.

Wish me luck. If I don't return to New York, they're probably scraping my intestines off my boss's windshield after my ill-fated compulsive attempts to wash moving vehicles.

Blogspot, protector of the forests.

Some days, when my boss and I become weary from our charges, we take a trip to the local chocolate store. The Lindt Boutique is located in the Longwood Galleria, a food court that was disembodied, much to the chagrin of community activists, when its associated mall was bulldozed to make way for yet another goddamn cancer institute. I know. It's sick.

The idea of mass produced swiss chocolate is about as bourgeois as things can be, but since the white truffles speckled with light, crunchy, chocolate orgasm flakes actually constitue fine art in sugar, we don't care. It's not like we even buy the chocolate. Andra and I mostly go there to get free samples served by the hottie who works there. When we hold out our hands, childlike, and mew "chocolate please" in our softest voices, I feel like a character from an old-time movie or a Charles Dickens novel: you know, the one where the gay guy goes with his Romanian boss to the candy shop so we can oggle the clerk 3 days before her wedding to the hot Argentinian Jew who isn't quite divorced yet.

Blogspot, deity of interior design.

With a sole exception, I have had trouble with the parents everytime I've seen a movie in theatres. I got disowned after Star Wars, disowned again after Madagascar and sent to therapy after Batman Begins. Last night, a day after seeing March of the Penguins, I could be seen running down my block in full hysterics without a shirt on (not even kidding). I'm beginning to think they are more concerned with my taste in film than with my homosexuality.

In anycase, Friday's movie made me empathize more completely with the sorrows of penguins than I had thought possible. Really, animals are generally more sympathetic than humans. Why? Well for starters: adult Emperor Penguins don't disown their children and the chicks aren't forced to maintain a complex web of lies in response. I feel guilty because in the last two months, I have become way more skilled in the business of deceit than I ever hoped to be. I keep around enough red herring to restock the North Atlantic.

As of late, my flesh and blood have been stepping up efforts on the bigotry front. So the deceit is all necessary. Clearly, the only way to combat ignorance is with subtlety and lies.

Recently, my mother told me a story about a young Chinese student attending Stanford. Under mysterious circumstances, his parents pulled him out of school--the implcation being that said young man liked to kiss boys. Momma proceeded to describe the whole unpleasant affair as being justified. Now, for a university-pretige whore like my mom, pulling a child out of a top-notch school like Stanford is the equivalent of an art scholar burning a Rembrandt because it doesn't match well the mauve wallpaper in the upstairs bathroom.

I am no longer allowed to shop at Banana Republic because, as Schmucky Ken's mother tells my mother: 'That's where some gays shop.' Of course, and as you will note entering its designer doorway, the store is practically an orgy. I also hate to tell you this but: gays shop at a lot of places--but don't tell anyone. It's a secret!

As of now, my parents are literally in Wyoming, visiting Yellowstone National Park. Peace and quiet might be good for me, methinks. Geysers and grizzly bears might be good for them, methinks.

Blogspot, icy manipulator.

Starting out at my job, I felt bad for these mice I work with because half of them develop prostate or colon cancer by the third week of life. The other half have non-functional immune systems and cannot leave the scary sterile room (which I call the MJ Music Video room).

Today, I got pooed on one too many times by female sixty-two so that now, I kind of just want to kill them all.

I am not a mouse bigot because no matter what color, strain, or mouse religion, I hate them equally. At this point, it's reasonable to say that I despise all rodents. If I come across a beaver, I'll kill it. Maybe I'll take a shard of shattered incisor as a fetish trophy. Who knows?

Moving on, let's talk Christian values. Today, my roving eyes found that a male I had misplaced at its weaning two weeks ago had impregnated not one, but four of his sisters. There were 17 pups in the cage. Overcrowding violation reports for everyone!

The worst part of mousework to endure is putting on those ugly canary yellow protection suits. At first I thought there were to keep me from getting mouse herpes. No--turns out it's to keep the mice safe from murine parvovirus. Murine parvovirus, really--Who the fuck cares?!

So after this summer, I am done with animal research.

So you--aggressive 9-month old unbreeding males--if you try to bite me one more fucking time, remember: when your time comes (and believe me, none of you will make it past August), I'm going to raise the carbon dioxide concentration just a little too fast for comfort. Then, after you have stopped spasming, I'm going to break your fat, disgusting necks for good measure.

Then I'm having a party and you are not invited because mice don't deserve pizza or lines of blow off the bathroom sink.

Blogspot, wellspring of eternal joy.

It'd be different if I was JK Rowling or Gabriel Garcia Marquez, but I no longer have the imagination to fabricate the stories of my life. Reality can't outdone by clever storyboarding.

For those of you unfamiliar with the Boston Fens, let me describe their most obvious feature. The reeds that line the river are some four times my height. From them, Egyptians could have woven together an aircraft carrier in papyrus.

The giant reeds that make the Back Bay Fens so spectacular are the same reeds that make the place such a good place to get anonymous head. My parents, unskilled in the rituals of public sex, decided on their last confused visit that the Back Bay Fens were merely pretty--which is why they brought me on their second trip yesterday evening--to show me this pretty place.

When the first leather daddy strolled out of a homemade trail through riverside thicket, my mother was quick to take notice. However, she didn't realize who he was and thought the red hankerchief in his right pocket meant he was carrying a gun or a knife. As it turns out from quick internet research, it actually means he enjoys having an arm up the ass.

Oblivious, my parents trekked onward through an obvious gay cruising area and I followed, making an apologetic face towards the gaggle of Spanish queens on the roadside. It wasn't until my father decided to see what was actually happening in the reeds that I panicked.

Half an hour later: The setting is in front of Boston's Christian Science Center. I am assuring my father that I do not have anonymous sex in parks. I agree with him that there is nothing more atrocious in the world than a public blowjob, not having the heart to tell him about the people who drink pee or the people who crash jets into buildings.

No, my dears, that would break his wee heart into a zillion pieces.