Let's start things off the way I like best - with important questions that affect us all:

Will I be able to watch Bend It Like Beckham just once without snickering at the title?

Okay, pretend like we're taking the SAT's and humor me for a second:

L. Ron Hubbard:Scientology :: _____:Kaballah

What's the answer? It's gotta be somebody real, besides, like, some sort of 'mystical' Yawheh, right?

Seriously, what's up with this whole ridiculous Kaballah craze? Can we take bets on where they build the compound? Do they give John Travolta and Tom Cruise a run for their money and build it across the street from Scientology on Franklin & Bronson, tearing down Mikey's apartment from Swingers?

C'mon, they've got Madonna, Demi, Ashton and Britney on board for starters and you don't think they're gonna build a Kaballah Celebrity Centre? Which one of us is being naive here?

Next on the agenda: When in the name of all things holy is KCRW's pledge drive going to end? I mean, the whole point of these things is to make listeners just guilty enough to subscribe, which I usually do, but frankly I'm gone in less than a month so there's no chance in hell I'm renewing. But I've been a member for two years - doesn't that give me a free pass to not have to listen Ruth Seymour ramble on? Seriously, whose brilliant idea is it to let her lead these things on the air? Could we perhaps listen to nails on the chalkboard, instead?

What ever happened to fruit roll-ups? Are those still around? Could we get somebody on this?

How much of an idiot am I? Drinking one of those Sobe Citrus energy drinks at 12:05 AM? And not only did I look at the label and see "guarana" as an active ingredient, I actually said "cool - this has guarana in it, and I'm cool because I know what guarana is AND I'm going to buy this drink for the guarana." After midnight! I saw nothing strange about this! That is, until about 4AM rolled around and I still couldn't make my eyes stop moving. Seriously, what the hell was I thinking?

Next year, when my girlfriend's 2000 miles away, does that mean I become a total gym rat and hit the weights incessantly to fill the void - thus slimming down - or do I go in the complete opposite direction and just slack off and not care and become morbidly obese? Needless to say, Cronkette has her money on the latter...

I learned a valuable lifelong lesson this weekend: Cleaning the bathroom is like fighting a war. You can't judge your progress on individual cleanings, because you're gonna win some and you're gonna lose some. But after scrubbing off years' worth of caked-on lime & mildew from my shower all afternoon yesterday, I finally felt the tide turning. You could start to see definite progress - slowly but surely, we were breaking their lines of defense. Yes, I felt my spirits lift - we would win this war yet.

My bathroom looks startlingly clean now - it hasn't looked like this since we first moved in four years ago. I gotta say, I inherited a lot of the mess from other roommates, alright? I recently moved from another room with a private bath to share the bathroom in question...and the circumstances necessitating that move deserve their own week's worth of postings, let alone their own post, to properly do them justice. I'm sure I'll get to the story sooner or later. Suffice to say I'm getting our place extra spic-n'-span so we can live up to the "cleanliness a necessity" part of the ad we posted to replace me, and really turn the corner on getting a quality new roommate.

In other exciting news I went surfing for the first time in a long time on Saturday - just some good little summer chest-high's, nothing too terrifying like the 7-foot swells you get in the winter. Winter's about testing your limits (and not dying) - summer's all about fun (and not hitting swimming children.)

[sigh]

I'm gonna miss the beach. I chuckle at midwesterners when they call their lakefront "the beach" - it's really cute. I'm gonna miss sitting out there on my board, nowhere to be, no cares in the world, conjuring up lame Mark Harmon-esque metaphors about life based on the sets of waves rolling in.

It's hard to give that all up, especially when reading this gem. Yay!

I'm so fucked.