On Friday night I left work to meet Tomas and Hutch at a bar, the first time I've been out drinking since starting the new diet. I bought records on the way, because I have a problem. I cheated to the tune of two beers, but had really needed it, as the stress of getting UGO's CES feature had made the workweek a total hell. Tomas and I talked about Zapata shutting down the Word and Charged websites so I got a FTP password to rescue my stuff before it's gone forever. Hutch showed up with her friend Lea who told a very amusing story. Here it is, paraphrased a bit:

"When I was just starting to go through puberty, I got really freaked out about my nipples. They were developing all weird and hanging down strangely and I was really sensitive about them. On Thanksgiving, when all of the family was assembled in the house, I was wearing a white shirt and they looked so bad I started crying and ran to my room. For some reason, my grandmother was the one sent to try to calm me down, so she stood outside my door, knocking and trying to talk to me.

"She said 'Lea, what's wrong? Why are you crying?'

"Her English isn't so good, so what came out next could be attributed to that. She said 'Are you crying because nobody likes you?'

"At that, I started crying even more. That didn't deter her, though, as she kept asking me question after question along the same lines. 'Are you crying because you're fat?' 'Are you crying because your hair looks bad?' And I just kept crying and crying."

It was an awesome story.

So I went home and called A. and we talked for a bit and then I crashed out in bed, a beer-fueled slumber filling me with sweet joy.

The next morning, I woke up and headed off to my PO box, where I got the new issue of the Stranger, a Christmas card from my old genius school, and another envelope of craziness from the Burchette Brothers. I bought a bunch of magazines for A. to look at for design ideas and for me to send Portal Of Evil press releases out to. I'm trying to drive more traffic to the site to stave off the collapse of the Internet.

So I got over to A's house and discovered that the hideous amount of design work she had to do for the weekend had evaporated into air, leaving us three days of total freedom to account for. I muddled around for awhile until A. sprang on me her secret plan - to check out the robot exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum. Duh! We took the train down. I had never been to the BAM and neither had A. but we liked it a lot. The robots were cool. The whole museum is really homey and not very imposing, which is a good thing for a museum. We saw the robots and I bought a book, then we explored the rest of the museum.

We went for some disappointing vegetarian food and then saw our friends Jerk Alert play. Neither of us were drinking so it was a tough call and the opening band were horrible in a way that I've rarely seen so we absconded to the Megatouch machine to play sex trivia. Ass soundly kicked.

The next day we slept in, luxuriating in the epic pleasure of doing absolutely nothing. I didn't leave the house all day - A. had a hair appointment, and while she was out I listened to Puffy and 3 Mustaphas 3 while doing some drawing. I checked out the beta site for Plastic which rapidly grew to embrace me.

A. got home and I went to get us some dinner, so I guess I did leave the house. I came back with a delicious roast chicken and steamed broccoli, and we watched an absolutely hideous and amazing video of a death metal band playing at a home for retarded people.

The next day I left, because A. had band practice and I needed to get some errands done. I went home to check on the moving, which is proceeding a little slower than I would like, but enough to calm me down a little bit, and then I took off to buy a bath mat, shower curtain, coat hangers and other general household crap. I also bought some books - I was trying to find an online bookstore that would let me link to them and maybe earn a penny or two if you bought them, but both Amazon and Barnes & Noble are totally fucked up in that regard. Is it that hard to program a goddamned form, you idiots? I bought the Neal Pollack book from McSweeneys and the new Michael Chabon.

Then I went home and watched wrestling, wrote some articles, read the Pollack and went to bed.