Reasons why leaving the family for 10 days may not be a great idea:

• Your brother may decide to divulge all of your adolescent secrets to your 12-year old who is staying with him and his family for a week of summer fun and extended family bonding while you're away. This litany of disclosure will likely include the times you dyed your hair purple; wore safety pins as earrings; got caught with your boyfriend hanging out of your bedroom window at 3 a.m.; vomited in the choir loft during communion following a Saturday night of drinking hurricanes in celebration of your 18th birthday.
• Your best gay boyfriend will become so bored he will launch his own blog which uses your full name and muses on all the things he loves about you, many of which you would rather not be divulged in public.
• You will receive 177 e-mails while you are gone, none of which are spam. Your eyes will bleed when you check your account remotely. You will be unable to deal with them and repeatedly hit the delete key in a fit of helpless anxiety once you arrive home. People will be really irritated with you for not responding to their e-mails. You will lie unconvincingly that your PC crashed while you were out of town.
• You will meet all kinds of wonderful people while you are out of town on your own, sans spouse and child. Every one of these wonderful people will want your e-mail address. They will begin to e-mail you immediately, further adding to your crawling anxiety over your inability to keep up with your e-mail correspondence. You will begin to hate these people.
• The GITB will rearrange all the furniture in the house in your absence. It is now not feng shui. It is fucked shui. And you keep tripping over and running into things THAT SHOULD NOT BE WHERE THEY ARE.
• After ten hours of drinking endless cans of Starbucks' double-shot espressos, smoking cigarettes like a sailor on shore leave, singing along with Springsteen at the top of your lungs and tailgating truckers doing 85 mph with all the windows open and your hair flying, you will discover that you really, really, really love solo road trips, so much so that you begin to fantasize about the next one exactly one hour after you return home. You will muse that this is probably not a good thing.

oh, snap, BBQ sauce on the wall...

Grace is visiting in preparation for her two-year move to Paris. I am in denial that she is leaving, that for TWO YEARS I can not impulsively jump on a plane and three hours later be standing in Times Square screaming at her on my cell phone to hurry up and meet me already. Which I actually do every few months.

Last night after the normal people went to bed, we put on a huge vat of ribs--she pre-cooks them in cheap beer then bathes them in BBQ sauce for a day or so--and went out to sit on the deck and look at the stars. I got her to try my Janis Joplin cocktail: Southern Comfort, Diet Coke, some cherries and cherry juice. Very southern girly-girl. We were thorougly polluted after two hours and many refills and decided it was time to get the ribs off the stove and into the BBQ sauce. Two plotzed women slinging ribs at 2:00 a.m. is not really advisable. There was a lot of giggling and whispered shushing of one another and bent-over laughing jags that went on until we forgot what it was that was so damn funny. The kitchen looked like the scene of a heinous crime when the family came out for breakfast. Damn, I am going to miss her.

I bought a lava lamp the other day. I have been meaning to do this since 1977 and, well, I finally got around to it.

When I got it home I was pissed to find that it was missing the lightbulb but since it was on clearance and I got it at such a steal of a price, I got over being pissed quickly and went back out to the store to get a bulb for it. All this and I had a mountain of laundry that needed folding on the dining room table, excerpts and essays from 11 books to read for school by next week, a houseguest and no plans for dinner. The GITB knows better than to give me shit about this because he does a lot of work with Hospice and therefore gets the whole carpe diem thing but he cannot understand why I had to have a lava lamp. He keeps referring to it as a "piece of shit," and then I foolishly ask him to cool it with the excessive profanity and so of course, he proceeds to say "fuck" about 50 times every time I enter the room the rest of the evening and tried to tell me I shouldn't watch the Sopranos because it is loaded with language I may find offensive.

Is it me, or is it ridiculous to yell "mother fucker!" at the contestants on Jeopardy! when they blow a really easy question? I use profanity, yes, but artistically and in the right company and under only the perfect circumstances for maxiumum effect. Did I ever mention that the GITB is a mental health professional? And a huge horse's ass sometimes? Maybe I did.

why too much of a good thing (watermelon shooters) really isn't always a good thing...

...the vodka-soaked delusion that one looks hot. I mean, really, really hot. So much so that a fish would just LOVE to smooch us. Oy.

run, forest, run!

once again, I have proven to be an idiot savant of pop culture.

Remember I was ragging on "Charlene" and her god-awful 1970s shit-ass song "I've never been to me?" And how when Miss Otis really wants to torture me, he calls me up and blasts the song?

Well, looks like CNN audience members agree. Well, sort of. But their ranking of the wretched song as number 4 of the top 5 worst is a rip-off. It deserves to be the #1 most shitty song of all time. And I should know. Because I called this one two months ago. Scary.

Do you think if I try to collect a consulting fee from CNN it would fly? Just wondering. Bastards.