Pluggin'.

Yesterday was Tuesday, which means there's a new books column over at neighborbee. Go for my little piece on Augusten Burroughs, stay for the stunning insights on Air Hockey as a bar sport.

(And for those who are interested, you can come back later for a blow-by-blow account of How My Parents Met Brad's Parents This Weekend. Oooh, exciting.)

Variations on a theme

This evening, right after work, I made a beeline for the grocery store. It was a very gray, very rainy day, and that always puts me in the mood to cook -- in this case, I was fixated on ratatouille and could not rest until I'd put together something tomato-and-onion-and-eggplant-ish.

Of course, in these situations, there is always a foil.

In this case, I'd forgotten -- only to immediately remember as soon as I laid eyes upon their gleaming purple bodies in the produce aisle -- that I have very friendly feelings towards eggplants.

No, really. Just take the journey with me here, okay? Picture an eggplant in your mind. Look at the picture to the right. There's something about them that's very satisfying, isn't there! They're very hardy, very regal. (It's the purple, I think.) In fact, for reasons that I can no longer remember, I can never look at an eggplant and think, simply, "There is an eggplant." Instead, in my mind -- not that I am always thinking of eggplants or anything, but when I do think of one -- an eggplant it is not An Eggplant at all.

Instead, when I hold an eggplant in my hand, it takes on an entirely new identity; I call it Prince Aubergine.

Trust me, I know what you're thinking. My God, you are saying to yourself, she is utterly off her rocker.

And to you I say: Whatever. Eggplants (or, as the French call them, les aubergines) are a perfectly viable subject for anthropomorphism.

So down the aisle I trotted, to the place where the eggplants all lay, ass-end-out, piled atop one another in a delightful pile of firm, purple flesh. I inspected one, and then another, and then, at last, I pulled a prime specimen from the shelf. It had a perfect star-shaped top, lovely purple skin, and a firm bottom that gave gently when I squeezed it.

Ah, I thought, Prince Aubergine!

Maybe it's because I hadn't eaten much, or because the rain made me stir-crazy, but I admit that I started a little dialogue in my head with Prince Aubergine while I shopped. I laid him in my basket and thought, Zere, Prince Aubergine! Areh you cohmfortable? (I also supplied a French accent to my internal dialogue with Prince Aubergine; all I can say is that, at the time, it seemed appropriate.)

Prince Aubergine was docile as I made my way to the peppers, and then the onions.
Zere, Prince Aubergine! I chortled internally. Some ve-geh-table friends forh you!

Prince Aubergine rolled happily around in the basket. I admired the way that his purple flesh contrasted with the red of the pepper, the white of the onion.

Oh, Prince Aubergine! I said, You are so 'andsome! Would you lihke a can of toh-matos?
Prince Aubergine said that he would, and I picked one off the shelf.

Well, Prince Aubergine! I said, Eet eez time to go, non?
Prince Aubergine said that it was.

I walked with my basket up to the checkout line and loaded my purchases onto the conveyor belt. Prince Aubergine rolled in a lazy ellipse along the black rubber, looking very purple and somewhat smug. He really was a handsome eggplant.

A second later, the cashier grabbed hold of Prince Aubergine and laid him on the scale. She rang up his weight (Prince Aubergine, you are fat! You must lose zee kilos!) and then went to put him in the bag.

Along the way, however, Prince Aubergine slipped from her grasp. His round behind thumped gracelessly against the countertop.

"Sacrebleu, Prince Aubergine!" I chuckled to myself as I searched my purse for cash, "How she manhandles you!"

I was still digging in my purse when I suddenly felt that something was off. I looked up and realized what it was; the cashier was no longer bagging groceries. In fact, she had stopped moving entirely and was standing quite still. The eggplant was in her hand. She was staring at me.

It took me several seconds (more than it has taken you, I'm sure) to figure out that I had said that last bit of dialogue directed at Prince Aubergine out loud.


The frequency and intensity with which I embarrass myself being what it is, I didn't even try to explain. I just took Prince Aubergine home and ate him. He was delicious.

Wanted: house.

There are certain mysteries inherent to apartment dwelling that, while titillating, are usually better left unsolved. I have always wondered, for instance, just how much mouse pee is really inside our oven… and yet, I'm simultaneously aware that I don't really want to know the answer, because it would drive me so far over the edge of tolerable grossed-out-ness that I might never cook again.

And similarly, though I had sometimes wondered just how much noise carries out of our apartment and into the homes of our neighbors, the question is one which I knew better than to explore. Because that way lies madness. It's the by-extension stuff in particular that gets to me: the knowledge that if they heard us having noisy sex (for example), then they also undoubtedly heard That Other Thing which is nowhere near as mundane as noisy sex and, though they are too polite to mention it, confirms us as certifiable weirdos.

Basically, ignorance is bliss in matters like this.

Or rather, it was bliss, until this pesky incident last weekend in which Brad was acting like the worst person in the world, leading me to shriek a multisyllabic profanity-laced epithet at him, on an otherwise quiet morning when I knew without a doubt that our neighbors were at home.

I spent the next day in embarrassed limbo, praying that our walls were somehow thick enough to have obscured the sound, but then I saw them near the park the next day.

They gave me a scared look and crossed the street.

Under normal circumstances, I'd just knock on their door and apologize for frightening them. "Hey, sorry," I'd say. "Brad was acting like the worst person in the world, but everything's cool now." The thing is, I can't be sure that that's what scared them -- because not 24 hours before the screaming thing, I was skipping around my apartment in my underwear and singing showtunes, specifically the soundtrack to Phantom of the Opera, at top volume.

Which they also undoubtedly heard.

And so, for the foreseeable future, I find myself at an impasse. Because while I'm happy to knock on my neighbors' door and own up to some screamy premarital discord, there is NO WAY IN HELL that I am owning up to an afternoon at home with Andrew Lloyd Weber.

Wanderlust!

If you’ve been wondering where I am (as I often do myself, particularly when I’ve been drinking, and often while simultaneously wondering where my pants are)... well, I’m still here.

Except that I’m also somewhere else. AT THE SAME TIME!

Which is to say that I’ve once again succumbed to the green, green lure of pastures not my own, and happily accepted a spot as the Book Scene columnist at neighborbee. I’ll be there each week— penning little literary diatribes, posting the occasional book review, and just generally stinking up the place along with several of my bloggy friends.

You can find my first post (in which I laud the merits of curbside garbage browsing) here, and a lot more interesting information about New York music, theatre, shopping and restaurants all over the main site.

Okay? Okay! Now get the fuck out of here!

(Oh, but do come right back – I’ll be posting later today.)

saggy gay asses dot com.

As previously mentioned, I started a new job this week. (To be filed under “Sad But True”: writing articles for teen magazines is great fun, but it does not exactly pay the bills.)

But that’s ok, because I love my new job. I loved my old job too, of course, but the pretty, shiny NEW job has a number of wonderful things that make it special – the fact that I still do not have to work on Fridays, for instance, or that I am getting paid ridiculously well, or that I have business cards (business cards!) and my business cards are orange (orange!). Also, and possibly best of all, all the men in my new office are gay.

And if you can’t understand why that’s awesome, then clearly you have never worked in a predominantly homosexual office, because it’s The Bomb. There’s always good coffee, nobody makes off-color remarks about my tits, and my boss (rather than calling me “Hey You” as so many other bosses are wont to do) always refers to me as “Kat, my daaaahhhling!”

And yet, even when one’s office is The Bomb… well, there’s always room for awkwardness.

Earlier this week, I was assigned some image research for a brochure. The caveat: because the brochure is for an organization that focuses on the needs of the aging LGBT population (or, in the words of my coworker, “old queers”), the usual images of a family on a beach with a dog weren’t cutting it – they just weren’t… gay enough.

Thus, I found myself typing the word “gay” into the Getty Images search box, hoping that doing so would preclude any images of hetero couples from infiltrating my results.

First, let me just say that it worked. I hit enter, and every resulting image was utterly and completely gay.

The thing is, utterly and completely gay image sets tend to include -- how to put this delicately? – a lot of asses. And why wouldn’t they? What could be gayer (and hotter!) than an unclothed man stretched facedown on a bed, smiling sweetly over his shoulder and sporting a bare-naked behind so juicy that it cries out to be smacked? And so it was. Line after line of beautiful round butts appeared on my computer’s screen – some blurry, some partially obscured by a sheet, but all undeniable paragons of ass-ness.

It didn’t take long before my boss looked over and said, “Whoa!”
“I know,” I said. “Apparently, typing the word ‘gay’ into an image search brings up a lot of behinds.”
“Those are some nice ones,” said my boss.
“They are, indeed,” I said.
“But if we’re being honest,” he sighed, “We couldn’t even use a nice ass like that one. It’s too young. We’d have to find some old saggy asses.”
“I don’t think I’m going to have much luck in a Getty Image search for ‘saggy gay asses’…” I said.
“No,” my boss agreed, “you’d need to look elsewhere.”
The designer, who had been listening to our conversation, suddenly started laughing. “Haa!” she said. “You’d have to visit www dot saggy gay asses dot com!”
“Saggy gay asses dot com!” my boss cried. “Ha! Ha!”
“Can you imagine if that were a real URL?” I said.

Both of them were suddenly looking at me.
“Do you think it is?” the designer said.
“It could be,” said my other coworker, laying one finger against the side of his nose authoritatively. “After all, there’s something on the internet for everyone.”
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s see if it’s real.”

I turned to the computer and obligingly typed it – www.saggygayasses.com -- into the browser address bar, then hit “enter”.

And then, as coworkers crowded around me, all eager and waiting to confirm the existence of saggy gay asses dot com, I started thinking.

Namely, I started thinking that if saggy gay asses dot com was, indeed, a real site, then we were all about to experience some serious awkwardness. Sort of like when you’re watching a movie with your parents that turns out to have a sex scene in it – you all watch it, you might even laugh about it later, but privately? You think to yourself, “I wish I had not seen that in the company of my parents.” Just as, had saggy gay asses dot come turned out to be real, each of us would have inevitably found ourselves staring at a picture of – what else? – a saggy gay ass.

And thinking, oh-so-regretfully, “I wish I had not seen that in the company of people with whom I have a professional relationship.”

Of course, it wasn’t real. Thank Christ. Apparently, there are still some people out there for whom the internet does NOT have something.

Greener pastures

No, no, not that sort of "greener pasture". I'm not quitting the blog.

I have, however, taken a one-post break to write utterly without snark (gasp!) about my "escape from New York" on -- most appropriately -- Jen's blog escapetonewyork.net.

Please do visit, and not just to read my dumb little opus about the joys of small-town, high school theatre; Escape To New York is a lovely snapshot (often with fantastic photographs) of the starry-eyed artist's pilgrimage to NYC.

I've also started a new job this week which is keeping me from blogging here as often as usual, but I promise to put together a truly moving entry within the next few days. As a teaser, I'll share the following tidbits about the upcoming post:

1) It is about my new job.
2) Its title is "Saggy Gay Asses Dot Com".

Admit it, you can't wait.

I was bound to blog about the wedding sometime.

So Brad and I had dinner on Monday with our wedding officiant -- which, for reasons that I still can't totally explain, put me into a complete panic.


I know these things are supposed to be very low-key, very "getting to know you", but as the evening approached I was stricken with nerves. I couldn't shake the feeling that we were auditioning to be married. I was half-convinced that the guy would come out, take one look at us, and tell us – a la Project Runway – that we'd been eliminated from the running.

"Are you fucking kidding me?" he would shout. "I'm not marrying you! You're obviously way too immature to be taking a step of this magnitude." (I also had an alternate version in which he replaced that last sentence with, "Kat, your fiance is obviously GAY", and barring that, another one where he just came out and slapped us both in the mouth.)

We were supposed to meet Mr. Officiant at his Upper West Side office before going out for dinner. I was gunning for Mexican food – I have never in my life been so desperate for a margarita – while simultaneously worrying about its possible repercussions. (sample thoughts: Is it cool to drink tequila and eat chimichanga with your wedding officiant? What if I accidentally get drunk? My God, what if I fart? Nobody likes a farter!) The office was eerily quiet, with an utterly empty waiting room and an incessant humming from one of those machines that create a low-frequency noise to mask any conversation that might be audible outside of a closed door. At exactly 7:00, we walked in and hovered uncertainly in the middle of the room.

"Um," I said.

"So…" said Brad. "Should we sit down?"

There were three options: a run-of-the-mill beige sofa, a blue armchair that looked as though it had been rescued from a landfill back in 1970, and a deep red leather chair with dark wood accents and a high back and an overall, undeniable resemblance to a throne.

It was beyond fabulous.

We both eyed it.

"I guess we should sit on the couch," I said, still looking longingly at the Throne.

"I guess so," said Brad. I looked at him suspiciously. I was convinced that he, too, was covertly lusting after the Throne. We sank reluctantly on the couch and I reached for his hand, keenly aware of the seductive gleam of the red leather only a few feet away.

"This is probably a good idea," I said. "I mean, it might freak out our officiant if he came out and saw us sitting in separate chairs."

"Agreed," said Brad.

Fifteen minutes passed.

"Does he know we're here?" said Brad.

"He buzzed us in," I replied, straining to hear any sound over the hum of the noise-masking machine. Brad sighed and looked around the room. I snuck another longing glance at the Throne.

Another ten minutes passed before Brad said, "Should you call him?"

"I don't have his number."

He got to his feet and started pacing. "This is ridiculous."

I also leapt to my feet. "He'll come out! We just have to relax!" I had a panicked vision of Mr. Officiant coming out to discover that we were not only not sitting together, but bickering in his reception area, a scene which would surely result in instant disqualification from our marriage audition as well as serious embarrassment. I looked guiltily at the closed doors that ringed the room, not even knowing which one was his.

Brad sighed, patted my shoulder reassuringly and said, "Alright. Well, let's get comfortable."

And we did. At 7:30 -- half an hour after we'd first walked in the door -- Brad was on his feet and happily perusing an Amish cookbook that he'd grabbed from a nearby shelf , while I sat resplendent on the Throne with one leg crossed jauntily over the other, pretending to smoke a pipe.

Mr. Officiant, who strolled out of his office several minutes later and who turned out to be NOT a judgmental puritan but a big, bearish guy with an Indiana Jones-style hat, did not even seem to notice.

The moral of this story, of course, is that a successful relationship is one in which you do not attempt to deny the burning desire of your heart for the sake of appearances. At least when it comes to chairs.

The road less travelled is paved with poorly-concealed self-loathing.

It's funny, when you think about it, how much is revealed about a person simply by seeing what they search for on the internet. Some of you might remember the uproar a year or two ago, when AOL released the search strings for a bunch of their customers; that incident brought home with full force just what a huge invasion of privacy it is to have that information stored, sold, or made public. (This woman, for instance, was identified by her searches when a reporter easily used them to deduce -- among other things -- her last name and where she lived.) The topic was also revisited this weekend by an op-ed contributor in the New York Times.

But it isn't just identity that's placed at risk, here. Because internet searches, at base, are the closet thing to an immediate outward manifestation of your inner thoughts. One minute you're wondering what ever happened to that old boyfriend of yours; the next, you're typing his name into a search engine. You worry about your weight; you Google "calories in white castle".

A person with access to all that information doesn't just stand to find out who you are, where you live, or what you do; they might as well be peering inside your head.


Which is worth thinking about, of course, but at the moment all this has only served to preface our next installment of Dear Googly... in which I present to you a visitor to pink india ink who, based on his search string, clearly has no underlying issues with women at all:


Hideous nude bitches, eh? Dear Googly cannot help but wonder why our dear friend is looking for such a thing. Tell me, sir -- if they are so hideous, and such bitches, why on earth should you want to see them nude?

If she didn't know better, Dear Googly might think that you were harboring some extremely conflicted feelings about women, including a healthy dollop of misogyny and several more dollops of self-hatred. She might even go so far to suggest that you were hoping to beat off to photographs of naked, ugly women because it gives you some sort of backwards power trip. How uncouth!

Of course, Dear Googly would never suggest such a thing. But she is, admittedly, perplexed as to how she might serve you in your quest for "hideous nude bitches" -- would you settle for a hideous shaved bitch?

Ohmigod, SO HOT.

Aly and AJ... and me!

I have an article in this (the April/May) issue of Girl's Life. To say that I'm ridiculously excited about it would be a total understatement; I mean, it's GIRL'S LIFE! And my piece is in there, complete with hilarious teen-mag illustration, sandwiched nicely between an interview with Aly & AJ and the "Body Q & A" column which inevitably contains a letter from a girl asking if her vagina smells normal. (Note to teenage girls: Seriously, this is ridiculous. Stop sniffing your vagina and go take an advanced math class. You'll thank me later.)

I ran out and bought the magazine in a big hurry. Delayed gratification is not my thing, after all. But then, I was faced with a dilemma.

Having just had a birthday which officially put me in the "closer to 30 years old than 20" bracket, I've become newly aware of the concept of age-appropriateness. It seems like I can't round a corner without running headlong into another blaring headline about The Importance of Dressing Your Age, or a television show focusing on some kind of Fashion Intervention for a 30something woman whose default wardrobe is a pair of shorts that only cover one fourth of her ass. Basically, I'm alarmed at the idea that I am apparently just one bad choice away from being rushed in the street by Carson Kressley, who will be brandishing a skirt-suit and shrieking, "Giiiiiiiiiirlfriend, you are a FASHION EMERGENCY!", hellbent on forcing me to acknowledge the error of my ways.

So what do you do, at age 26, when you find yourself desperately wanting to read a magazine which is decidedly, and more to the point, evidently intended for fourteen year-old girls? Wait until you can read it, unembarrassed, in the privacy of your own home; or tear into it on the subway and suffer the uncomprehending looks of fellow passengers who are clearly wondering if you're a high school freshman to whom life has been really, really wrinkle-inducing?

I doubt that I even have to tell you this, but I chose the latter (feeling vaguely justified by the fact that I sometimes still get carded when I buy a pack of cigarettes). And then, since I was already in it, I decided to go ahead and read the rest of the magazine.

Whatever, I thought, turning the pages. I'm just reading it. It's not that age-inappropriate. I mean, it's not like I'm listening to Aly & AJ or reading teen novels or wearing these clot--

(Outfit bearing undeniable resemblance to one I wore last week)

Ah, shit.

Peebiscuit

Last night, a reader sent me what is by far the most extraordinary piece of email that my blog has ever received.

Its subject line was "undergarments?".
The text is below.
I cannot stress strongly enough the importance of not trying to read this while drinking anything.

Ready?

Okay.

To: pink.india.ink@gmail.com
Fr: [redacted]
Subject: undergarments?

My horse and I do competitive long distance riding....25 to 35 miles at a pretty fast rate of speed. I am now finding that my saddle is becoming wetter with each ride...urine leakage, and am not really aware of what is happening until I am quite wet! I wear tights on these rides and am trying to find a pull on brief that will absorb, fit well, breathe, and most of all not be noisy! I would prefer not to advertise my problem to fellow riders. Does anyone have a garment in mind that might fit this description?

Thanks,

Soggy in the Saddle

If you are currently sitting at your computer either a) openmouthed and blinking rapidly, or b) unable to breathe, then we are on the same page.

Because I confess: at first, I thought this was some sort of joke. My God, I thought to myself, now they are just FUCKING WITH ME.

But then, after poking around a bit, I concluded that this email is, shockingly, NOT fake. Rather, it is a bona fide plea for help from someone who -- as a result of this post, I'm guessing -- considers me qualified to offer expertise in the area of... well, let's face it, we're talking about adult diapers here, aren't we.

Which I know nothing about.

Honestly, I'm kind of disappointed. Not that I don't have personal experience with adult diapers -- I'm perfectly content to put that off for as long as possible -- but because I have no useful advice to offer, and an internet search for "adult diapers ratings" only brought up 1) a lame ePinions page without much concrete info, and 2) this, which is hilarious, but ultimately unhelpful.

So, Soggy in the Saddle -- do you mind if I call you SITS? It seems so much friendlier, don't you think? -- if you're reading, please hang tight. I've posted your email, not out of any malicious desire to mock you, but in the hope that one of my readers might have the knowledge that I, unfortunately, lack.

Readers, it's on you. If you have some experience with incontinence and can recommend a pee-proof brief for active adults that is comfortable, doesn't leak ,and, most important, won't make outrageous noises when SITS gets back in the saddle, leave it in the comments.


*Note to anyone who read the previous "unrelated" addendum about my disallowing anonymous comments and was worried: I was kidding. It was meant to be a ironic joke given that I'd just asked you all to tell me about your problems with incontinence. But it appears that I didn't write it very well, so I have removed it. Just to clarify: Anonymous comments will forever and always be allowed on pink india ink, so says the proprietress, Amen.

There's nothing like a good book to make you feel like a hideous troll.

For the first few years after I moved to New York, I worked in publishing—a fact which, in the context of this blog….uh, has absolutely nothing to do with anything. All told, it was one of the most miserable times of my life, career-wise (as previously alluded to), and the only thing I took away from the entire experience was a bunch of free books that I didn’t even really want to read. (Um, oh, yeah, I also got Brad out of the deal. Hahaaaaa, Penguin Books – you may have won the battle, but I made off with the last of your straight male employees!)

However, based on my days as a book publicist, I do still have an enduring interest in publishing-centric gossip and news – news which, of late, has been a bit disturbing. I’m not so much angry as… concerned. Publishing seems to be getting a bit off track, such that if it were my child, I’d probably be sitting it down right now for an Important Conversation about its future.

First there was the product placement. Over at HarperCollins, a bunch of bright young publishing things have gotten together and decided that the wave of the future – the most innovative new way to make money from book-making – is to gratuitously dump brand placement directly into the narrative.

Genius, right? I mean, just the other day I turned to a friend of mine and said, “Hey, you know those awesome movie scenes in which a character, for no plot-pertinent reason whatsoever, suddenly grabs a bag of Doritos and begins eating from it with the label conveniently facing camera-ward? Don’t you wish so hard that we could have that same thing in books, too?!”

And now we can. Giving rise to such gems as the following tidbit from “Cathy’s Book”, a YA novel in which there is nothing odd whatsoever about the flow of conversation in this scene where the distraught protagonist is being comforted by her friend:

“Hey—no crying,” Emma said. “You’ve got a driver’s license and you can vote. You’re wearing your favorite silk shirt and your coolest leather jacket, right?”

I made a sad little hiccupping laugh. “A killer coat of Lipslicks in ‘Daring’, and strictly smear-proof mascara,” I said, wiping my eyes.

…Well! No, certainly, there was nothing at all awkward about that. That is some quality, intuitive – hell, damn near organic prose. It almost reminds me of that famous line, arguably one of the most delicate and beautifully-worded in all of contemporary literature, in which Daphne du Maurier’s nameless protagonist writes,

“I dreamt last night I went to Manderley again WEARING A KILLER COAT OF LIPSLICKS IN ‘DARING’!”

The most pitch-perfect beginning to a novel ever!

That is how it read, isn’t it?

Oh God... or was it another kind of lipstick -- that sparkly Maybelline lipstick that made everybody’s mouth look like a disco ball? Or that coveted clear gloss by Elizabeth Arden? Shit! I can’t remember! This is awful – I’m only hours away from a trip to the British countryside where my lovely estate home is being haunted by the memory of my husband’s dead wife and the ghastly, evil Mrs. Danvers, and I don’t know what kind of lipstick to wear!

...Oh, wait, I remember – Rebecca didn’t mention lipstick at all.

Because lipstick would totally get in the way of people enjoying the motherfucking story.

Which is simply to say: If the only way to make money from a book is to litter its pages with paid advertising in the form of complete conversational non sequiturs, then it is not a very good book.

And then, as though all of this weren’t proof enough that young adult literature is headed straight for the toilet, I then came across this lovely excerpt from a press release for the update and re-release of the Sweet Valley High series. It details the Many Important Changes that have been made in the books to make them once again relevant to the modern age:

Now, back by popular demand, SWEET VALLEY HIGH is returning to the shelves with a modern new look and updated content to appeal to today's reader. Some differences that fans from the 80s might notice:

1983 (vs) 2008

The Wakefield Twins wore "a perfect size 6."
The twins are now "a perfect size 4."

The twins drove a red Fiat.
The twins drive a red Jeep Wrangler.

Elizabeth was an editor at the Oracle, the school newspaper.
Elizabeth is an editor at the Oracle, the school's website.
(Elizabeth also has an anonymous blog.)

(Please do take a look at the entire letter, painstakingly scanned here.)

Wow, right? A lot has changed since the 80s! A Wrangler is cooler than a Fiat, schools have websites instead of newspapers, and… hmm, what was that third thing?

Oh yeah, where a size six was once considered “perfect”, it now makes you a FAT FUCKING COW.

Because while concrete updates like automobile trends and the invention of the internet are important in keeping a book’s content current, nothing says “relevance” like giving teenage girls a whole new reason to hate themselves.

Well played, Random House.

It’s possible, I supposed, that the publishing industry will step back from the abyss and reclaim its soul over the next several years. I hope. But as of right now, given the state of things, I have no intention of ever teaching my children to read.

Lies, lies, lies.

Brad and I broke up. The wedding is off. He cheated on me with a fucking manicurist, for Christ’s sake, and I’m dying inside, and I’m going to go drink a bottle of bourbon and…. and….

Oh, the hell with this. I can’t write an April Fool’s post for shit, okay?

Sigh.

I confess, dear readers, that I spent most of today in contemplation of subject matter for said post. It was surprisingly hard to come up with a winning idea – I was actually of three minds about it, so numerous were the options available to me for taking advantage of your credulousness with a little bloggy prank. And new ones kept coming to me! All day long! If nothing else, after sitting at my desk for hours and giggling more uncontrollably with every new, evil idea that came to mind, I think I’ve gotten a good feel for what life as a professional evil genius/cartoon villain must be like. That’s what they do, isn’t it? Sit around, hatching devilish schemes and then cackling with maniacal mirth at their own badness?

Oh, but the April Fool’s post, yes.

Well.

I suck, obviously. Mostly, I got scared; I had three reasonably good potential posts in mind, all of which could have been fantastic day-long jokes, and all of which I ended up rejecting based on various fears. It broke down something like this.

Post idea: Ohmigod Brad and I broke up!

Rejected due to fear of: Anger and bitterness from those readers with an emotional investment in my relationship; anger and bitterness from Brad, who would probably not find it funny; the possiblity that my pre-marital calamity-calling would lend credence to previous accusations that I am morphing into a new version of Clink.

Post idea: I’m pregnant!

Rejected due to fear of: Giving my parents a heart-attack. (Not because they disapprove of pre-marital pregnancy, but because my extremely UN-maternity wedding dress has already been purchased with a not-insignificant chunk of my father’s money.)

Post idea: I’m quitting the blog!

Rejected due to fear of: Nobody caring.

Obviously, I am too much of a pussy to pull off any prank that is not of the “whoopee cushion on boss’s chair” variety – and even then, my giggling and furtive looks tend to ruin the entire thing.

But all this got me thinking about April Fool’s Day, and how unabashedly it breeds dishonesty. By its very definition, the day is a celebration of lies, all in the name of fun, but all with the infinite potential to do terrible harm to those who fail to recognize them.

Imagine, the fate of the poor souls who left important emails unsent because of Google’s little “joke”! Or those crowding into bowling alleys in fervent anticipation of a Clinton-Obama bowl-off that will never, ever happen! I can’t help myself. I mourn for them. April Fool’s Day is cruel, and an affront to society. Does nobody remember that heartbreaking scene from Goodbye, Mr. Chips, in which all the young english schoolboys band together to play an April Fool’s prank on their dear teacher? None of them knowing that said teacher is coming to class directly following the death of his wife and child!

And who’s to say that April Fool’s Day itself was not responsible for that, too?!

There’s nothing for it. April Fool’s Day is evil and wrong and it KILLED ROBERT DONAT’S WIFE FOR FUCK’S SAKE.

I weep.

...Happy pranking, you crazy kids.