Shortly after September 11, 2001, I flew back to London to begin my final year at university. For three months, I slept on a futon in my friend Anna's spare room in a building with a doorman and a dishwasher, an apartment far nicer than I could have afforded on my meager student budget. Anna had finished with university already and had a real job and a boyfriend with a BMW, a boyfriend who only tolerated my presence in the apartment because Anna and I had known each other since we were seven.

When the old Dooce got her car broken into a few weeks ago, I read the hundreds and hundreds of comments from people sharing their own stories about how their cars got broken into, and my first thought was "wow, that's nice, I bet it makes you feel better to commiserate and know that the same thing has happened to other people too." My second thought was "hot damn, a lot of people sure have had their cars broken into. These odds don't look very good."

When I got home from work this evening, Sean said "did you hear about this thing with Al Gore's son?" And because I had spent all day writing feverishly about Vail---rather than half designing websites and half checking CNN for baseball scores every five minutes---I said that no, I hadn't.

"I've been sleeping with a clown above my bed...."

Congratulations, PR department who worked on this movie. Your job is done. A full three days after watching this cinematic piece of dried dog poop, I suddenly found myself spontaneously humming as I walked home. What was I humming, you ask? Well, I was humming "A Way Back Into Love," the song Hugh Grant and Drew Barrymore write for the teenage pop tart Cora in this joyless, soulless, totally predictable sapfest.

My mother once told me that one of the best things about getting married and moving in with my father was that she didn't have to write her name on the food in the fridge anymore.

When I went to see the Shins a few months ago, some obnoxious milquetoast---probably a close relation of one of the Judds who stood right behind me with their shirt collars up, talking throughout each and every song---waited until the opening bars of New Slang and then called out "this band will change your life!"

I'm a guest poster today at Joy Unexpected. How did this happen? Well, the lovely Y hurt her neck and asked me to be one of a series of guest bloggers on the site so that she wouldn't just be writing about her neck the whole time, and I, of course, jumped at the opportunity. There may also have been some exchange of Vicodin involved. No, I'm totally kidding. I'm a Valium girl all the way. Also kidding. I swear.

In the wee small hours of this morning, I woke up with a jolt. I don’t mean that figuratively, like I suddenly sat up in bed and said “sweet baby Moses, I forgot to feed the cats!” I mean it literally: I was jolted awake. Physically. It felt like an eight-wheeler had slammed into the bedroom wall. The bed shook for a few seconds, and I thought---in that detached sort of way you think things in the wee small hours of the morning, unaided yet by caffeine or clarity of thought---“whoa, weird, the bed is shaking.” And then I went back to sleep.

Hey, remember how my car was broken into two weeks ago and the window was smashed and we all felt sorry for me for a while and I said a few bad words and then I paid $317 for the window to be repaired and I thought that was the end of it?

Oh Internet, I hope you're buckled in, because this is going to be one wild ride. I've told you a little bit about how Sean and I met, I think, but I'm not sure I've gone into it in as much detail as is warranted. I don't think you've really felt the pain of my 16-year-old self sufficiently yet, and since July 25th 2007 marks the anniversary of the ELEVEN YEARS I have now known Sean, we're going to take a little trip back in time.

Something you probably don't know about Sean is that he's a bit of a drill sergeant. Not normally, not on everything. But when it comes to me updating my blog, he suddenly turns into one of those pushy stage mothers who enter their three year old daughters in beauty pageants and then say things like "you need more mascara, Coral Lynn! And when you pirouette next time, do it with feeling!" Seriously, that guy is all up in my grill about posting when I haven't posted in a few days, all "write a blog post! write a blog post!