-Until I have a family of my own, my “home” will always be my parents’ house on Long Island, where I lived until I was eighteen (and where my mom and dad still reside).  Twentysomethings tend to lead a nomadic existence and I’m no exception, having lived in five different apartments on two coasts since college.  At two and a half years, I’ve inhabited my current apartment in West Hollywood the longest.  Though I love my place and have taken great care to furnish it properly, to call it a home would still be a stretch.  Sure I have birth announcements and holiday cards on the refrigerator, but there’s also a beer funnel in the cabinet above it.  Yes, the two works of non-fiction I’m currently reading rest on my nightstand, but on the shelf below sit two shotglasses, a flask from a sorority date party, some Mardi Gras beads, and a piggy bank in the shape of a miniature Yankees helmet.  An apartment?  Yes.  A frat house?  Perhaps.  A home?  Not so much.

-My dream is to one day live somewhere that doesn’t have wires from my TV and router running all along the walls, under the carpet, and around doorways.  Because nothing says “classy” like exposed coaxial cable.

-Sometimes I think I enjoy traveling not so much for the experience, but for the opportunity to show off by displaying all of my Frommer’s guides on the bookshelf.

-The other day I noticed that the little tray thing that holds the silverware in my dishwasher had some dried food stuck to it.  I thought to myself, this really needs to go in the… oh wait.

-Whenever the cleaning woman leaves my apartment, I notice little things are out of place.  No big deal.  But last time she left, I noticed the settings were changed on the trimmer I use to manscape my balls.  I’m pretty sure that can’t be caused by dusting.

-If filling up the garbage can in the kitchen as much as possible before taking out the trash was an Olympic sport, I’d be so dominant that people would accuse me of being underage.

-Why are the instructions on my resealable plastic bags printed in English, French, and Spanish?  You mean to tell me that not only are these same exact bags sold around the world, but that Ziploc has also deemed all of us too fucking stupid to figure out how to use them on our own?

-My vacuum cleaner is broken.  I’m pretty sure it just needs a minor, inexpensive part.  But when I started Googling to find a local repair shop, a sponsored ad for Amazon.com popped up in the search results.  Wait, they sell vacuums on Amazon?  Problem solved.

-I speak to Angie, my cleaning woman, in broken Spanish and she speaks to me in broken English.  So I guess, in a way, those multi-lingual plastic bags bring us together.  Still doesn’t explain what happened to my ball trimmer, though.

-No matter where I’ve lived, my reaction when someone knocks on the front door is the same: sheer terror followed by tiptoeing around, and then spying through the peephole.  On TV, they answer the door about a nanosecond after someone knocks.  Not me.  Is it a FedEx guy or a murderer dressed as a FedEx guy?  I’ll find out just as soon as I can figure out where the fuck Angie put my big, scary steak knives.

-As always, here are some random things I’ve been ruminating about lately…

-I was reading about this new diet where you’re not allowed to drink alcohol.  Well, I read the first sentence at least.

-If every time I tell you that no, I don’t have a CVS card, you go ahead and swipe the one you keep next to the cash register anyway, that seriously diminishes my motivation to actually sign up for one.

-Radio DJs always seem a lot more excited that it’s Friday than the average person.

-If I’m giving directions to someone who doesn’t follow football, I always give the distance to a nearby landmark in feet instead of yards.

-My web designers sent me an overly extravagant gift basket for the holidays.  Memo to my web designers: next year please forget the gift basket and give me the equivalent value in services.  Also, I will be sending you my medical bills for the diabetes I may have contracted from eating all that caramel cashew crunch.

-Sorry, “the economy” is not a valid excuse for everything.

-Why do I always get stuck on a plane next to someone who has obviously experienced a personal tragedy or is traveling to a funeral?  Not to be insensitive, but the pain of being forced to listen to you try to choke back tears for five hours straight is surely more excruciating than the loss you’ve just suffered.  Next time, take Amtrak.

-When my MacBook Pro starts to run slowly, I run a handy freeware program called Disk Inventory.  It’s essentially a utility that analyzes the mounted volumes on my hard drive and generates a sophisticated graphical representation of how much porn I have.

-There’s nothing that people who get off work at 5pm hate more than being at work at 5:01.

-And, finally, this winter I’ve been thinking that the only time it’s acceptable to turn down a free vacation is if it could possibly result in serious injury.  Thank you for inviting me to go snowboarding with your family, but I actually have other plans: not dying.  You and your buddies are going scuba diving?  Sorry, I can’t make it; but can you pencil me in for a drowning next month?  The thing is, I’d just hate to be a hypocrite and fly back from a trip sniffling the whole time because my friend was impaled in a freak hang gliding incident or something.  Though, if the annoyed passenger next to me asks why I’m upset, I can always say, “The economy.”  Fuck me!

HOME