Two travel weeks in a row, and I am already fried of air travel enough for a lifetime. Twice I had TSA agents stop me because of what was in my bag. The first incident was because of a rogue toothpaste tube that didn't end up in a proper sealed baggie. The TSA agent pulled my backpack aside and said, "I'd like to look through this." [ Read The Rest ]

I have seen the end of my deodorant stick and I am sad. I am faced with the dilemma of replacement and it's not as easy as just heading down to CVS and picking up whatever's on sale. Personal hygiene products come with a myriad of considerations and for being the anti-shopper that I am, I get bottlenecked on the simple decisions. [ Read The Rest ]

I scrapped the article I was writing for today because I had one of those moments. The moment goes something like this. Writing, writing, writing. Stop. Think, "What the hell am I writing about anyway?" Sometimes an article idea sounds good conceptually but then you get into it and you're like, who the hell is going to read this? [ Read The Rest ]

After a two-year estrangement, I finally boarded the plane to take me back to the mother country. Granted, we boarded two hours after our departure time, but the pilot assured us that we would make up the time in the air. Before the wheels touch down again, the rolling hills of lights greet you from every direction. On the right side of the plane, you can see a glimmer of green, a sheen of the Manhattan skyline (albeit, the buildings draped in faded pastels), the crystalline spire of light arching into the sky from the peak of a pyramid of glass. And...hey, what the hell are those three buildings? [ Read The Rest ]

For whatever reason, the roads are clogged with distractions this week. Yesterday, I was taking the 1.5 mile drive to work and got stopped at the end of my street for a 45-car funeral procession that left me sitting there for twenty minutes. It just so happened that Brett Favre's retirement press conference was live on the radio, so I spent the better part of that time listening to him alternately sob and thank his old coaches. It made for riveting theater, even as I was keeping track of the cars passing me on the way to the cemetery on one hand. Every time the fifth car passed, I would make a tic mark in my passenger seat cushion. [ Read The Rest ]

A world opened up to me in the form of Trivia Night at the bar. I know what you're thinking. I'm too old to be going to the bars where the average age is 20. Or you might be thinking that my age is an asset in bar-related Trivia because Don Rickles and Carol Burnett were alive in my day. (Carol Burnett, as I found at Trivia Night, she won a lawsuit against the National Enquirer for reporting that she was a drunk in 1976. Pitcher of Pabst: $9. $2 pizza with any pitcher: $2. That kind of random knowledge about Carol Burnett: priceless). [ Read The Rest ]

Welcome to Friday B.S. We know exactly how you feel.

One of the effects of this sort of mass-blogging (I still haven't figured out what vlogging is, but I'm pretty sure I caught it from my last boyfriend   Zing!) is that blogs have to have a point now. Do you remember logging into your MySpace account and clicking on Manage Blog, getting a cup of coffee, clicking on Post New Blog, going to pee, and then sitting down (assuming MySpace deigned to load on that particular day) and then just writing a bunch of random shit about nothing whatsoever that only your closest friends would voluntarily choose to read? Those were the days. (Obviously, this flashback courtesy of 2006. MySpace works faster than it used to, if not any more reliably.) [ Read The Rest ]

Welcome to Friday B.S. We know exactly how you feel.

I love people from New England. They have no problem being trapped in a house surrounded on all sides by twenty-four feet of snow (which for the record, is four times my height and cold) but a tiny tremor in the earth caused by two tectonic plates playing chicken, and the world is coming to an end. Don't get me wrong, snow melts. Power lines can be restrung. But damn if the building comes down in a topple or a highway collapses in a pile of rubble and yellow school buses, and none of them fixes are all that great. [ Read The Rest ]

Passion is a tricky thing. I'm not talking about sex, though lord knows I still haven't figured that out yet. But passion for life, passion for activities and hobbies and causes - the kind of energy that develops from really believing so steadfastly in the actuality of something that you go out of your way to embrace it. Okay, so maybe it is sometimes about sex, but just not right now. [ Read The Rest ]

I'm in negotiations for the type of party I get after I die. Oh you know, everybody wants some say in what happens after they go, though more often than not the directive goes something vaguely like this: I want people to throw a party after I die. As if the choice is mine to make. [ Read The Rest ]