I just realized that today is Mardi Gras, and while I did not pull up my shirt, in my entry this afternoon I spent a lot of time describing what was underneath. Therefore you should email me some beads. Thank you.

I bet you’d rather not hear about my underpinnings but today happens to be Bra Awareness Day for me, where things are just a little uncomfortable. This happens whenever I wear the Frankenbra, which consists of two unsettlingly solid cups molded out of god-knows-what: synthetic foam forged in the Fires of Mordor or something. I can’t believe I’m telling you about my bra and going for the Lady Laffs and all that. But really: you can knock on the side of this bra. It thumps like upholstery. It endows me in a way I do not quite like; it makes me feel like the Metropolis robot. The Frankenbra tends to wears me more than the other way around. I don’t know why I bought it.

I wear it only on days when I am running late and can’t find any other clean support contraption. I can always find the Frankenbra because it is impossible to lose it. It’ll be lying on the floor and I’ll stumble over it like it’s a goddamn ottoman. Even in a huge pile of laundry it manages to send one mighty cup up to the surface to survey the landscape. I fear the Frankenbra. And yet I live with it.

Sorry. I promise I won’t complain about this kind of thing ever again.

I had my course in Remedial Knitting today. It turns out I was spendng all this time just sort of shuffling the stitches from one needle to another. It’s true I was wondering why I wasn’t seeing any actual knitting appearing after going through the motions of completing two or three rows, but I’d persist and keep going with this crazy phantom experimental performance-knitting thing, until someone at last set me straight. Now I have four rows of honest-to-god knitted stuff, and I stroke them lovingly.

I think I would have made more progress if I hadn’t been recovering from the effects of several hundred Miller Lites (I know) consumed at Schuba’s before the Gaper’s Block/SPEC reading, during the reading, afterwards at Schuba’s again, and then still yet more afterwards up in my neighborhood. The reading was good. I keep seeing it referred to as a “blogger reading,” but a number of people just had ‘zines, I guess. You know ‘zines, right? They’re like Amish weblogs.

I found this account of the reading in my referral logs. When Sour Bob got online today I made sure to instant message him: “DO I HEAR THE THEME FROM SHAFT PLAYING?!” He keeps saying that “Back in Black” is more his theme. And really, you should not get him started on that song. Anyway he read from this entry and I held up my cell phone and did an Audblog post of part of it. I think the person you can hear moaning softly is TranceJen, who was sitting in the row right in front of me.

Also, I was very happy to meet Mimi Smartypants. I won’t tell you how that went because my friend Shylo, who couldn’t attend, would like to keep her experience of Mimi Smartypants pure and virtual and would prefer not to know any specific details. Okay, I will say this: she had a HAT. And it was nice.

In case you’ve been wondering how the knitting is coming along: I studied Debbie’s book and I learned to cast on, I think. I can cast on dozens of stitches along the needle and it looks pretty fricking cool, let me tell you. It gives me great pleasure to cast on a neat long row and then leave the needles and the ball of yarn there on my kitchen table so that you’ll come over and think that I am a knitter for real. I also believe that I can do at least part of the first row of knit stitches using the English method. This allows me to have an even more convincing knitting tableau to casually leave out impress visitors. “Stitches on both needles,” you’ll think. “Wow.” However by the time I finish a row some of the stitches have gone retarded, and when I get to the second row all hell breaks loose, and it gets so that I’m just poking at this gnarled, flailing yarn appendage thing. I mention this because on Sunday I will be meeting with people who might be able to help me with this shit.

On Saturday I’ll be at this thing and you should go, too. There’s going to be another blogger reading event in April at Ann Sather’s and I’ve tentatively agreed to read at that one, since I was too chicken to do it this time. Therefore tomorrow I am going to hoot and holler for the people I know as well as people whose sites I love. I may also buy a robot before the show, because lately I’ve been thinking there just aren’t enough robots around for it to be 2004.

I love gum. Please let me have my gum. It allows me to indulge my horrifying oral dependency issues in friendly, non-deadly ways. Sometmes at work I will have to drop everything and walk out the front door and stumble through our non-pedestrian-friendly office campus, across the street, and through a massive parking lot to get to the nearest store that sells gum. I can’t do this in the middle of winter when there’s a lot of snow on the ground, though. Gum needs to be a utility, like water or heating gas. Understand: I must have gum.

Jesus Christ, do I ever love to chew stuff. You don’t even want to know. Even with gum I still have lots of illegitimate chewing pursuits, such as coffee stirrers, cocktail straws, the earpiece tips on sunglasses, bubble wrap (useless to most after popping, but delicious to me), plastic keychains, action figures, rubber jar openers, certain plastic cords used for purposes other than electrical or data transmission. Don’t give me a pen. Don’t ever give me a pen. Give me gum. Give me, especially, the fancy gum like Eclipse or Dentyne Ice that comes in that special plastic blister packaging, because when I’m out of gum I’ll chew that, too. Do you have some gum? I would like some gum. Thank you.

Yes, it’s one of those stupid quizzes. The highest possible score is 50 points. Some questions have more than one correct answer, but you can only choose and get credit for one per question. You also get partial credit for some answers. I don’t think you have to give your email address at the end of the quiz. If you even get there, that is. They seem to be running on a server that constantly swoons and gets dizzy spells.