I got about halfway to the subway before Devon was all, “You walk like a toddler on smack” and offered to let me use his arm to stay upright. Because despite the frequent blog abuse I inflict upon him, he loves me. He even worked hard to hail a cab at the end of the night so I wouldn’t  have to walk back home. I abuse him enough that it’s only fair to not abuse him sometimes.

The reason he had to work hard to hail a cab is because convincing Manhattan cabbies to go to Brooklyn is like convincing Lindsay Lohan to switch to O’Doul’s, and the ones who refuse should rot in the hell of first-world problems. But I digress.

These turn me into a bobble-headed doll: Everything is fine as long as I stand perfectly still and don’t move too far in any one direction.

Our friend mentioned she took her daughter to see something called “Freckleface Strawberry,” which is apparently about a girl whose raging insecurity leads her to believe her classmates hate her. After groveling for their acceptance in a vortex of codependent need, she snaps and kills them all with a chainsaw before settling down for some quality time with her XBOX and that kid from “Freckle Juice,” who thinks she’s pretty effing hot.

At least, that’s how it would end if I wrote children’s books. Which is why I’ve been chased out of all the best playgrounds.

A lot has already been said about this, and I don’t have any wisdom to offer. But it’s pretty exciting to see so many people exercising their right to freedom of speech in such a big way, even if it’s still a work in progress.

The complaints are mostly financial:

Some are about education, implicitly and explicitly:

Good sign. 

                            Bad sign.

Some people go for the long shot:

Some people relax:

Some people work:

And some go off the deep end:

I can’t help but wonder how many will stick it out through the first frost.

Devon’s lucky I have a slow burn. Someone will say something, and then three days later I’ll realize I’m angry, at which point it’s pretty stupid to say, “Hey remember that thing you said three days ago? DIE!”

At any rate, lips and assholes are pretty tasty with salsa.

Rockin' Gen Con like Emi Shortfuse

It was during Gen Con, as my friend Donna and I were struggling to escape the cloud of three-day-old gamer funk we found ourselves trapped in, that I realized I am not the PC of my own life.

Donna and I struggled to find an escape route via the service/maintenance area. We laughed about how our quest was to escape the smelly, unshowered gamers clogging up the dungeon with their pirate and Slutty!Anime costumes. It was hard. Our aggro was high, and we kept pulling adds. Being on a PvP server didn’t help.

We ran into a security dude who told us that if we kept going the way we were going, we’d end up on the roof. He escorted us to an area where we could bypass the stench of fermented sweat and escape to the bar for beer and cheese.

That was when we realized this wasn’t our quest. It was security dude’s escort quest, and we were NPCs.

Goddamnit.

We didn’t even give him a sweet magical necklace when we were done. We were like those asshole quest-givers who make you walk all the way across Azeroth for 10 silver.

I think I just choked to death on my own geekery.

On the way home from the picnic, we accidentally off-roaded the Prius a bit. The blacktop was a little higher than the edge of the road, and when we pulled it back, we blew both tires on the passenger side. Two busted tires – 1 spare = one busted tire and 70 miles to go.

After several hours at a gas station in Milford, N.J., we finally got a AAA tow back to Brooklyn: 70 miles at $4 a mile. I also need to thank a guy named Steve Hill, who stopped and offered us his spare, but it didn’t fit. It was pretty darn nice of him to go through so much trouble anyway.

Yesterday, we took Fitz to the pet ER because she still wasn’t eating or drinking, and she was on the couch all day, extremely listless. That’s where she is now. Her temperature rose to 104 F, then dropped to 94 F. Her blood pressure and blood sugar are low, and she seems to be in some pain in her abdominal area. The doc is running more tests to find out what’s wrong with her. It could be a really bad stomach ache, or pancreatitis. Or she could have a uterus infection that’s making her septic.

I hope not. Fitz is a good dog. A crazy dog, but a good dog.

Also, we’re looking at about a $3000 vet bill, on top of the $1000 we spent on her mouth and the roughly $700 I expect to spend on the car situation.

Ouch.

If I had a penis, I could be like Devon, who paid very little attention to what he ate and drank for two and a half weeks and didn’t gain a pound.

But then I think about all the reasons having a penis sucks. Like, if I were one of those guys on the subway, I’d have to sit with one knee in Seattle and the other knee in Istanbul just to be comfortable. (Note to those guys: If you’re average weight and taking up twice the space of the morbidly obese woman next to you, you need to close your legs. No one is that big: no one.)

Guys who are not that big

And then there’s the fact that if I had a penis, Devon would probably be irritated with me.

I guess this is the best of all possible worlds.

P.S. To all the web surfers who Googled “penis” and “dirty hooker,” my apologies for wasting your time.

“Mmmm…rock-climbing.”

Oddly enough, I believe he barely noticed the chick with her legs wide open. The boy loves his rocks.

People who claim the subway pole in the name of Spain.

If you’ve ever ridden the NYC subway, you know what I mean. There are poles near the doors to help people who are too far away from seats and doors to remain upright. Pole hoggers are people who damn near wrap their bodies around the pole, often sleeping against it, so no one else can use it.

The result is that the only hand-space available is really high up where only tall people can reach it (i.e., not me) or really down low where only Smurfs can reach it (i.e., also not me). So this morning, while little miss sleepy pants took her nap, Devon held the pole while I clung to the front of his jacket like a galley cook clinging to a life raft off the side of the Titanic.

My other option would have been to hold on to her saggy boobs like doorknobs.

Here are some visual aids.

What a pole hogger might look like (not from this morning)

What an elite level 24 Hogger might look like (also not from this morning)