Before I shut up about it once and for all, I would like to tell you a little bit about my birthday. First of all, if you can swing it, I highly recommend taking the day off work for your birthday, particularly if your birthday is on a Monday. This way you can stay in bed until 11am, reading your new library book (Lorrie Moore's A Gate at the Stairs, very enjoyable so far), periodically cackling to yourself with self-important glee because NO MORNING MEETING FOR YOU HAHAHA.

We never actually planned to have a party to celebrate my birthday, but then walking home from work last week, Sean convinced me that we should. "Eh," I said. "Well, maybe just something laid-back."

I have decided that I cannot possibly go to the cinema anymore. When you go to the cinema, you see, you are entirely too dependent on the people around you to be reasonable and sane. Most people in the cinema are reasonable and sane, of course, but every now and then you get one bird-brained knucklehead who breaks the social contract---the social contract of, you know public sanity and reasonableness---and ends up ruining it for the rest of us.

I may have mentioned this before but my apartment is tiny. We have a bedroom, a bathroom, a living room, and a kitchen, and basically that's it. Please don't tell me that there are people who have rooms in their house that exist solely for the purpose of containing a washing machine and dryer, because frankly I don't think I could take it. First I'd faint with jealousy---the space! imagine the space!

We spent our weekend in Costco. I wish I were exaggerating when I say this---oh, alright, I sort of am exaggerating when I say this, I suppose. I mean, it's not like we were camped out at the big-box behemoth from Friday night through Monday morning, although the fact that visited both Saturday and Sunday sure did make it feel like we were. We had to make an exchange, you see. Have you ever made an exchange at Costco? Oh my friends, welcome to hell.

Ever since I became obsessed with America, which I estimate to be somewhere around 1993---but which could actually be traced to a moment six years earlier in my school library in Hong Kong, when I picked up this horribly outdated 1970s-era book entitled something like "America: We Swear This Is What It's Like," featuring pictures of orange Camaros parked at gas stations and people wearing bell bottoms eating hot dogs in stadiums---I have wanted to go to a football game. 

Speaking of anniversaries, October 15th is not a good one. On this day last year, we lost a sweet and kind and generous soul, my co-worker Jessica, who died suddenly at the age of 28. I have seen Jessica so many times this year---which is, I guess, what happens when you live in a city of hip and leggy brunettes---except when I've got closer, it's never been Jessica at all. I have dreamed about her a lot too, but when I've woken up, the dream has always slipped away.  

This evening, I went out for Thai food with some friends and I inadvertently ate this pepper that I think was meant to be a garnish. I don't know what kind of pepper it was, other than a horrible, evil, nasty pepper---probably not its proper scientific name---but I actually thought I was going to die.

"Did you know Charlie has a Facebook page?" Sean asked me last night on the couch, while we were setting the DVR to record Grey's Anatomy, even though the only person on that show who doesn't irritate me anymore is Dr. Owen Hunt, whom I also find unusually and curiously attractive, please tell me I'm not the only one. 

"Charlie?" I said.  "Charlie who?"

"Charlie our cat," said Sean.

"Oh," I said.

I think it should be a requirement that all newlywed couples pay a visit to Ikea---extra credit for a weekend outing---sometime during their first month of marriage. Really, there's nothing quite like it to guarantee an abrupt end to that sickening post-honeymoon behavior you've been exhibiting up until now---"I love you, husband!" "no, I love YOU, wife!"---and give everyone within hearing distance a break from their barf bags.