So we haven't had a Bachelor post in a while, have we, and that's sort of because I pretty much forgot to Bring Out The Snark on last week's epsiode. Which is kind of a shame, actually, because there was plenty to snark about. One girl (Hillary, in case you care) had sort of a two year old's tantrum crossed with a low-grade panic attack at the end, all because Brad didn't offer her a rose.

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I mean, really, naming a boat after me? It's too kind! Honestly, you had me at the winegums.

And the cupcakes.

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Do you want to know the absolute worst I have ever felt? The absolute worst I have ever felt was in early September 1999, boarding an American Airlines flight from New York to London, crying in the way you never thought you'd actually cry in public, with the snot and the snorting and the heaving and the shuddering. A few minutes earlier I'd said goodbye to Sean at the departure gate. I actually thought I'd felt my heart break.

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It would be fair to say that I am just a little bit stressed. Yes, I think it would be fair to say that. Today, when the internet connection went out for no reason on my computer---and when my many attempts at pulling out and plugging back in the same cable had little to no effect on anything---I seriously considered my options. My options, to my mind, were thus: to throw, very hard, the apple that was sitting on my desk, or to climb underneath said desk and just sit and cry.

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Here is the cure: stay in a hotel where you are given a room with two bathrooms. TWO BATHROOMS. For just you! How are you supposed to decide which bathroom to use? Should you alternate? Will one of the bathrooms feel left out if you just use the other one exclusively?

And come to think of it, which TV should you watch? There are three, after all. And one of them is actually IN one of the bathrooms---in the mirror, no less!

I guess that settles which bathroom you should use. I mean, you'd hate to miss a moment of CNN while applying your mascara, right?

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I think I may have fallen half in love with Detroit. The strange thing is that I feel I've been here before, although I haven't, of course, I've just seen pictures. These pictures feature my newly-married parents at their youngest and most untethered---even as the first child, I wouldn't come along for a few more years---and the quality is grainy and blurred, the colors washed out, the edges rounded in the way drugstore-developed pictures from the 1970s often were. In this cache of pictures, my parents range from 24 to 27.

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Along with the Henry Ford museum and the Heidelberg project, one of the things I really wanted to do in Detroit was try a real jello salad. You know the kind: "salad" is a total misnomer since they're 98 percent gelatin, and they make frequent appearances at family reunions, where nobody but the kids really eats them. If you're lucky, they're topped with whipped cream from the can.

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Everything I know about life I learned from The Bachelor: namely, that reality dating shows suck and you should never trust a man who owns a bar called the Chuggin' Monkey. But then again, you probably could have told me that anyway. After all, no marriages have ever come out of Elimidate, at least as far as I know, and I am immediately suspicious of anyone who deliberately omits a letter from the end of a word.

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Sometime in the 1950s, when my dad was a little boy, his family got their first TV. Apparently this was quite an avant-garde turn of events in the 1950s and there was a whole lot of hooplah in the neighborhood; you know, kind of like how it is now when the first issue of someone's Us Weekly subscription arrives and it's the really thick one with BRITNEY'S TRAGIC PAST splashed across the front.

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London is like a cruel ex-boyfriend who some days gazes on you scornfully with eyebrows raised and the next morning smiles sunnily, asks you out for coffee, and makes you fall in love with him all over again. At first, I hadn't expected to feel like such an outsider. I had the accent, after all, as well as a working knowledge of the public transport system, complete familiarity with the different coins and notes, and a warm coat that had been worn before in even less temperate climes.

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I had dinner with an old friend on Wednesday night, and when I say old, I mean very, very old: Beth and I met on our first day of boarding school when we were both 11 and our beds were opposite each other in our ten-person dormitory. She had posters of horses on the wall; I had a poster of Chesney Hawkes. After lights out, we'd both flop down to the bottom of our beds, prop ourselves up on our elbows and talk.

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