-In less than ten short weeks, I will reach that most dreaded of milestones – my twenty-fifth birthday.  Soon, I will have been alive a full quarter-century.  Soon, I’ll be classified as “mid-twenties.”  Soon, (gasp!) I’m going to have to start taking responsibility for my actions.  In the words of my generation…dude, this sucks.  I think what’s ironic about the whole situation is that I used to be so mature for my age.  I was a precocious little kid.  I picked things up quickly in high school.  I had a good head on my shoulders in college.  Now, at the age of twenty-five, I’ve all of a sudden become immature for my age.  Great, at the rate this is going, by the time I’m thirty, I’ll be hitting puberty again.  Your twenty-fifth birthday is a time to take stock of your life.  It is a time to decide whether investing your money wisely or drinking until you vomit is appropriate behavior for someone of your advanced age.  In essence, twenty-five is the time to choose between growing up and throwing up.   This won’t be easy.

-First off, I’m not even sure that I qualify to be in my mid-twenties.  When I have dinner, I sit hunched over on a sofa bed in the halogen bulb-lit common room of my apartment eating take-out off of an IKEA coffee table while sipping grocery-store brand cola out of gas station souvenir glasses adorned with football helmets from teams that have since relocated.  I’m not even sure that qualifies as human.

-Before you turn twenty-one, the last thing you want is to get ID’d at the bar.  Once you turn twenty-one, you love getting ID’d at the bar.  Then you turn twenty-three and you start getting annoyed when you’re ID’d at the bar.  When you’re thirty, you again love getting ID’d at the bar.  At twenty-five, I don’t know if I should be insulted or flattered.  I guess the more important question is, why I am still going to the same bar?

-Twenty-five is an especially important milestone for my friends in grad school.  According to my friends, you don’t have to do any work at all in law school after your first year.  Then how come every time I call your cell phone, you pick up whispering in the library?  In a few months, my law school friends will have real, hard-core jobs for the first time in their lives.  Well, it’s been fun chilling with you guys for a while, see you in ten years!  Suckers.

-Med school, according to what I hear my from my friends, is the opposite of law school.  It just keeps getting harder and harder until you either go crazy or become a doctor, whichever comes first.  Now that’s comforting.  All I hear from my med school friends these days is complaining about how early they have to get up for their rotations and how tedious their lives have become.  I don’t understand this.  You knew this was going to happen all along.  You took bio in college.  You studied for the MCATs.  You’ve been in med school for three years.  They gave you a stethoscope for God’s sake, what did you think was going to happen?

-Quote of the Month.  With all this unexpected stress in their lives, some of my med school friends recently decided to do something very unusual: they went on spring break.  Little did they know that not everyone would be very receptive to their pale presence on the beaches of Acapulco.  My friend Triplet #3 (soon to be Dr. Triplet #3), was making small talk with some chick at a club.  He asked her where she went to school.  She told him Eastern Michigan University, and then asked him where he went to school.  He told her he already graduated and was now in medical school.  She said, “Get a life,” and walked away.  Ooooh, I think the proper medical term for that is “low blow.”

-In Triplet #3’s defense, though, twenty-five is the age when a guy can pretty much hook up with women of any age, from barely legal to middle-aged.  We’re just slimy enough to go for the college chicks while just adept enough to bag horny divorcees.  Of course, it all gets interesting at the bar when the girl you’re with gets carded and she could either be rejected, insulted, flattered, or old enough to be the bouncer’s mother.

-As for me, I’ve spent the past four years, almost the entirety of my early twenties, as a swinging bachelor.  I think that telling people about a new relationship is like finding out you’re pregnant – you don’t want to say anything for the first month or two just in case something terrible happens.  Hopefully, I’m out of the woods.  Yes, that’s right, while it may come as a shock to many of you out there, I’m happy to report that I actually have a girlfriend now.  Wow, that was hard for me to even type!  How did it happen?  Well, we were united by a mutual love of Family Guy, drink specials, anything made with four cheeses, and bad weather (since we both work from home and enjoy the suffering of others).

-My girlfriend is a strong woman, I’ll tell you that much.  She has to be.  After all, I refuse to dance.  I have no sense of direction.  I have terrible posture.  I’m a bathroom-flooder and a fast-walker.  I read the instruction booklet cover to cover before playing a new video game.  I hate shaving more than once a week.  I hate karaoke.  I hate her cat.  I hate all cats.  One of my armpits is hairier than the other.  I need all the bills in my wallet arranged facing the same way and in denomination order at all times.  I’m an insomniac.  I can’t whistle or tie a scarf.  I strongly prefer my honey mustard with more honey than mustard.  I’ve never used cruise control.  And when I tell stories at bars I tend to gesticulate wildly and knock over nearby beers.  Oh yeah, this’ll last.

-While having a girlfriend is a huge step for me, it’s small change for some twenty-five-year-olds I know.  Next month, my first friend from high school is getting married.    Ironically enough, the other day, as I was vainly trying on my old tux for the big occasion, a friend forwarded me a porn site – with what looked like another girl from my high school getting violated six ways to Sunday.  It just goes to show the wide spectrum of the twentysomething mentality.  Some of us are on our knees popping the question, while others of us are on our knees….OK, you see where I’m going with this one.

-After spending so much time thinking about my impending birthday, it’s sometimes good to reminisce about simpler times.  I recently filmed some segments for VH1’s “I Love the 90s,” which is coming out this summer.  It’s going to be a pretty funny show, but for some reason I have this sneaking suspicion that they’re going to edit out all of my witty comments about Seinfeld and snap bracelets and just feature me crooning The Fresh Prince of Bel Air theme song terribly off-key.

-And since I still perform at colleges, my perspective on getting older is influenced by those younger than me.  My little sister, Caryn, is graduating from Dartmouth in a few months and moving on to grad school at UCLA.  That makes me feel old.  Sadly, my fraternity at Penn, after a glorious and lecherous 97-year run, was just kicked off campus.  In a way, I feel like my own inner frat boy has been kicked off campus as well.  But not everything has been negative, however.  When I performed recently at Indiana University, it seemed like before the show everyone in the audience was a little, well, off.  I pulled one of the girls aside and said, “Excuse me, um, are you…high?”  And she said, “Yeah, we all are.”  “Why?” I asked.  “Well,” she said, “To see you.”  People were getting high just to see me!  How awesome is that?  You see, there is hope after all.

-It does seem, though, that older people do remember clearly what it’s like to be in their early twenties.  I was at a bar a few weeks ago and some dancing drunk girl knocked into my arm which caused me to jerk my hand up and chip a tooth on my Amstel Light.  When I called my dentist’s office the next day, I told the receptionist that I needed a chipped tooth fixed but didn’t say how it happened.  She looked at my chart, saw my date of birth and said, “So, beer bottle, right?”

-I’ve noticed a strange phenomenon among my friends and I as we enter our mid-twenties: both our alcohol tolerance and the length of our hangovers is increasing.  Never did I think that I would be able to hold more liquor now than I could in the dog days of college.  It’s quite a mystery.  Of course, the side effect is that my hangovers are twice as brutal.  My buddy Claudio got so bombed recently, he actually threw up two days later.  Now that’s impressive.

-I was recently asked to come back to my old high school to speak to the graduating seniors.  I don’t know about it, though.  I don’t want to be that guy at the assembly that no one is listening to, you know?  What would I even tell the kids?  That if they study hard, when they get to be my age they can still go on spring break, bang older chicks, become a lawyer or a doctor, cause bodily injury while partying, get married, appear in online porn videos, or drink themselves into hangover-comas every other weekend?  Hmm, now that I think about it, that’d be one pretty cool assembly…

-So my early twenties are numbered.  I’m not twenty-five just yet, though.  I still can’t legally rent a car in about forty states.  I still think that box wine is an appropriate gift.  I still have no idea which hand towel to use in someone else’s bathroom.  But it is time to look ahead.  I’ve set some pretty lofty goals for my late twenties.  I’d like to win an Emmy.  I’d also like to appear in a rap video with the logo on my t-shirt inexplicably blurred out.  But there’s really one thing that I want in the future more than anything else – my own toilet.  Now, I’m not talking about having my own bathroom, plenty of people my age have that.  But other people can use it.  I’m talking about a toilet that I and only I am ever allowed to use.  One whose lid answers only to me.  That’s right, I want a virgin bowl.  It may seem silly to some, but to me, having a virgin bowl marks true success in this world.  It means wealth, power, and cleanliness.  Hey, I can dream, can’t I?  After all, that’s what you’re supposed to do when you’re twenty-five.

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

-I think that if I invented a food that was both low-carb and whitened your teeth, I’d become a billionaire.  Because everything that’s advertised these days is one or the other, right?  Imagine if there was cheese or something that was both Atkins-friendly and brightened your smile?  Now that’d be some cheddar.

-I don’t understand people who “can’t take compliments.”  You know, these are the people who cringe and get all awkward when you say something nice about them because they “don’t know what to say back.”  How about “thank you,” douchebag?

-At Passover Seders last week, the ten plagues that God visited upon the Egyptians to punish Pharaoh were recited.  This is something I never understood.  Why didn’t God just kill Pharaoh?  Wouldn’t that have been a lot easier?  The Jews would have gotten to go free and no innocent cattle or first-born children would have had to die.  I mean, come on God, eliminate the middleman.

-I think that “cross-ventilation” is a myth.  Every time I open a window, someone always says, “Wait, let me open this door too, we’ll get a cross-breeze going.”  No, we’ll just be getting wind from two different sources.  You know that compliment I just gave you?  I take it back.  You’re an idiot.

-Memo to dudes wearing sports coats over t-shirts in bars: you’re kidding me, right?

-When I swipe my card at the front desk of my fancy gym, the person at the desk always says with a toothy grin, “Enjoy your workout, Aaron.”  Enjoy?  What’s to enjoy?  Sharing a locker room with naked, unusually hairy men?  Being asked to “work in” when every other machine in the place is available?  Running the treadmill with every TV set to the “The View”?  When I swipe my card, they should just say to me, “Wow, this is gonna suck.”

-Let’s face it, the best show on television right now is “The Apprentice.”  I have considered, like I’m sure millions of others have, applying to be on the next season of the show.  But I didn’t apply for one reason – too much packing.  Have you noticed that the contestants have to pack all their clothes up in their little rolly suitcases every time they go to the boardroom, and then unpack if they don’t get fired?  And I’m sure they have to iron everything after that.  It’s just not for me.  I’d love to run a multi-million dollar corporation, but I hate folding pants.

-One thing that I’ve always wanted to do was start my own slang.  I mean, rappers can do it, why can’t I?  So here’s one I came up with many, many years ago: using the word “gourmet” to mean “cool” or “dope.”  For instance, one could say, “Damn, those sneakers are gourmet!” or “That chick you took home last night had a gourmet ass.”  I think it’s pretty good.  How about we all start using it and see what happens?

-My roommate Brian redefines “thinking with your stomach.”  He actually remembers dates by recalling what food he ate that day.  Last week, I asked him if he knew when he last paid the cable bill.  He thought for a moment and then said, “It was President’s Day.  I remember because I had this amazing porterhouse the night before.”  Of course, this is the same man that once fell asleep in his bed with a half-eaten grilled chicken sandwich in his hand, who once claimed to have a “meat hangover” after dining at an all-you-can-eat Brazilian restaurant, and who once spent half an hour pontificating to Triplet #1 about how it’s possible that a meatball parmesan hero is actually made with mozzarella because the word parmesan in that instance refers to a style of preparation and not the type of cheese used.  You gotta love the bastard.

-Brian and I have a stack of photos piling up on the IKEA coffee table in the common room of our apartment.  Every photo has two things in common: both of us are in the picture and we only have one copy.  Since we are unable to come up with a fair way to divvy them up, the pile just keeps growing.  Triplet #2 once asked Brian what we were going to do about the pictures when we move out.  Replied Brian, “Fight to the death, I guess.”

-Meanwhile, another potential domestic crisis was narrowly averted last week when we ran out of toilet paper.  Since I left Wall Street to become a comedian but Brian still has a “real” job, somewhere along the way it became my implied responsibility to keep us stocked up on toilet paper.  Fed up with this treatment, I didn’t buy anymore this time, but didn’t say anything about it.  I just left the last empty roll hanging on the dispenser and waited to see if Brian would go and buy more himself.  But he never said anything.  After a day or so, I took some rolls from my girlfriend and hoarded them in my closet for my own use.  A few more days of the TP embargo passed and Brian still hadn’t said anything about it.  Meanwhile, I had no idea what he was using in the bathroom.  As Toilet Papergate reached Day Six, I considered sending my girlfriend as an emissary to talk to Brian’s girlfriend about the situation.  After a week, Brian finally asked me what the hell was going on.  Apparently he had just been using tissues from his room.  After much negotiation, consensus was reached, the embargo was lifted, and we agreed to split the responsibility in the future.  Can you believe that our girlfriends think we’re strange?

-Aren’t parents just adorable?  The tiniest little things make them happy.  My mom just got a new cell phone.  Last time I was home, I changed the greeting on the main screen of her phone from “Verizon” to “Supermom.”  Considering her mastery of this device is limited to dialing my number and hitting the key with the picture of the green phone on it, I won like a thousand good son points.

-Has anyone else had the theme song from “The OC” stuck in their head for about six weeks now?

-When did the word “nice” become the standard response to everything?  When anyone tells you anything and you don’t know how to respond, you can always say, “Oh, nice, nice.”  And why do we say it twice?  Is that to reinforce the point that the statement we just heard has little to no relevance and that the entire conversation up to this point has in fact been one huge waste of time?

-Have you ever noticed that no one has any idea how to use the conference call feature on their phone at work?  You’ll be talking to a buddy and say, “Hey, why don’t we get Jeff on the phone?”  And your friend will fiddle around for a minute and then say, “Hold on,” put the phone on his shoulder, lean back in his chair, peer out of his cubicle and shout, “Hey, does anyone know how to use conference on these phones?”

-If you’re anything like me, then you probably spend a good chunk of your day reply-to-all emailing with all of your buddies about what you did last night, what you’re going to do tonight. and what you’re doing this weekend.  Some days, you’re like the leader of the pack and you’re replying to all the emails in like five seconds.  And some days, when you’re really busy, you get annoyed when yet another stupid email pops up.  Have you ever not checked your email until like noon and you have about 57 messages, 51 of which are from your friends?  And you think to yourself, wow, imagine if we knew how to conference call!

-Sometimes, if I’m at a bar and some dude starts hitting on my girlfriend, I’ll let him.  After all, for the past four years, that guy was me, so I empathize.  Only if she’s ever really in trouble will I step in and say, “Hey, listen buddy, that’s my girlfriend you’re hitting on.”  Hopefully, the next time I do that, the guy will be like, “Really?  Damn she’s gourmet.”

-I walked into a Starbucks the other day and was talking on my cell phone when all of a sudden something very strange happened.  I got shushed.  That’s right, someone actually shushed me.  I turned around and saw that the entire place was filled with people studying – med school kids in fact.  Is nothing sacred anymore?  It was like a fucking study lounge in there.  Shouldn’t you people be on spring break or something?

-And, finally, it is with bittersweetness that I write that I’m taking a few months off my Ruminations column.  But don’t worry – you haven’t heard the last of me.  I will be working on the sequel to my hit book, “Ruminations on College Life.”  My new book, “Ruminations on Twentysomething Life,” will be published by Simon & Schuster in 2005.  In other words, the best is yet to come.  Sharing my early twenties with all of you has been an especially amazing experience.  Looking back, I think that our early twenties are marked by size, or rather lack thereof.  We are trapped in tiny cubicles and living in cramped apartments, earning small salaries and getting laid way too little.  But we still dream big.  With that in mind, try not to let the inevitable setbacks of twentysomething life get you down.  And when shit hits the fan and everyone is looking to you for answers you don’t have, I hope you’ll think of me and, with a glint in your eye, shrug your shoulders and say, “Fuck me.”

HOME

-When the sun sets in New York City, one species emerges as the dominant breed – single twentysomethings bent on inebriation and fornication.  While these objectives are nothing novel to us (after all, we’ve been partying and mating for the better part of a decade at this point), the way we go about achieving these objectives has changed.  Each weekend night in the inexorable march toward our late twenties is marked by higher stakes – the alcohol more costly, the women more choosey, and the nagging suspicion in the back of our minds that there’s more to life than binge-drinking and laying pipe.  I’m not ashamed to admit that, for me, the weekend remains an opportunity for release, both mentally and, well, you get my gist.  This is my nocturnal admission.

-No twentysomething in the nightlife scene is more skilled in the art of hyperbole than the promoter.  Promoters are paid by clubs and bars to attract people to their establishments, usually via an unsolicited barrage of calls, emails, text messages, and crazily ornate fliers featuring japanimation cartoons of scantily-clad women who, if they really existed, wouldn’t go within a hundred yards of said establishment.  Never ask a promoter if a party is actually going to be good because this is the answer you’re bound to receive: “It’s going to be off the heezie.  Seriously, dude, off the heezie.  There’s not even going to be any more heezie after this party, man.”  Um, OK, I think I’m just going to stay home and jerk off to this flier instead.

-Never meet your friends out at the bar unless you know exactly where the bar is.  Because once your friends get hammered, the odds of them being able to direct you to a dive with no sign off an alleyway on Avenue B are slim to none.  Drunk friends can’t even comprehend why you can’t find the bar.  They’re like, “Karo, what do you mean you can’t find the bar?  We’re in the bar…we’re in the bar right now, just come inside!”

-Of course, once you finally make it to the bar, you immediately attempt to meet a girl and then leave as quickly as possible.  The worst is when you get in a cab with a girl at the end of the night and she right away tells the cabbie “two stops” – meaning one for her and one for you and your party flier.  I once went home with a girl who told the cabbie to go to my block. I was psyched until she bolted from the cab and into her apartment – which just happened to be across the street.

-Why is it that you can be naked hooking up with a chick all night but when she gets up in the morning to put her bra on she turns her back to you?

-I was talking to a girl in a bar recently and she told me she was excited because she had a date the next night with a guy who had “The List.”  “The List?” I asked.  “Yeah,” she said, “He’s got everything a girl wants in a guy,” and went on to name them: attractive, smart, funny, right religion, good job, and a nice family.  As we continued the conversation, I realized that she was talking about a blind date that her friend was setting her up.  I was like, “Are you kidding me?  Every guy has the List BEFORE you meet him!  Hell, I’ve got six friends with the List on the way right now.”  Too bad they couldn’t find the bar.

-Some guys are just blessed with more game than others.  I have one buddy in particular that possesses the one trait that all guys wish they had – the ability to get laid any night of the week.  My friend Shermdog is impossible to track during the course of the night.  You’ll see blurry glimpses of him in the shadows hitting on chicks, but then he’ll disappear without a trace, kind of like a khakis-clad Bigfoot.  Then the next day he’ll call and tell you some ridiculous story about the girl he took home.  My friends are fond of saying that the two worst things you can hear in life are that your relative is in the hospital and that Shermdog knows your girlfriend from camp.

-The sad truth is that not all men are blessed with Shermdog’s game.  Brooke M., a subscriber from Chicago, wrote to tell me that she was at a bar when a guy began hitting on her.  He regaled her with stories of his travels abroad including a little tale about how he and his friends taught some naive Czechs in Prague that it was OK to piss in the bathroom sink of a bar if the line for the urinal is too long.  She called him on it right away – that’s my story from Ruminations #46.  What a jackass.

-Have you ever hooked up with someone that actually worked in a bar?  I used to hook up with this bartender chick.  I never knew what to tip her.  Too little and I wouldn’t get laid, too much and she felt like a prostitute.   So I introduced her to Shermdog and never heard from her again.

-Quote of the Month.  Considering my alcohol intake, sometimes I wonder how I’m articulate enough to even hook up at all.  On New Year’s Eve, I managed to make it back to a girl’s place and, just when things were getting hot and heavy, I blurted out, “So is your roommate around?”  She was like, “Asshole, I live in a studio.”

-This month, however, is a time for introspection for me because it marks exactly four years since my last serious relationship.  You learn a lot about yourself being single that long.  You also learn that the girls you hook up with over the years tend to have the same interests.  For instance, mine all seem to wear Uggs and have those magnetic words plastered all over their refrigerators.  Great, all these years of bachelorhood and I’m attracting women with bad grammar who wear boots in the summer.  I think it’s time to get out.

-I hate to admit, though, that when I party these days, there’s one thing I’m more concerned with than how much tail is at the bar – it’s deciding if and when to break the seal.  Breaking the seal is of course a euphemism for taking your first piss of the night.  Purely scientific studies done over many years in frat houses and other places of male intoxication have proven that, as one participant put it, “Once you break the seal, you’re fucked.”  Apparently, once initial urination takes place, the male bladder is no longer capable of storage and instead becomes a conduit from the bottle of Amstel Light directly to the toilet (or sink if you happen to be in Prague).

-The ability to delay seal breakage is put to its most severe test during that celebrated ritual know as open bar.  The open bar, when experienced under ideal conditions (i.e. top shelf, no waiting), is a twentysomething Utopia – costs are fixed but potential inebriation limitless.  Unfortunately, open bar rarely exists under said conditions, forcing us to imbibe beforehand.  Thus we end up actually pre-gaming prior to an unlimited drinking event.  This paradox is closely related to the “drink less, spend more” phenomenon in which on a night you decide to drink less, you end up spending more money, because buying a few beers at the bar is a lot more costly than drinking heavily in your apartment before you go out and then coasting the rest of the night.  Trust me, this paragraph makes sense, just read it again slowly.

-Ever notice that when you are with a bunch of guys approaching a bar, everyone instinctively slows up just before reaching the door?  Or that half the time when you ask for a bottle opener you’re holding a twist-off?

-Is there anything more disgusting than when you’re eating breakfast in your apartment the morning after having a bunch of people over to party and you accidentally drink a leftover screwdriver instead of your orange juice?

-Do chicks really stash things in their bras or is that just some urban myth?  Maybe that’s why they always turn their back to you when they put it on in the morning…

-Is it possible to lay in bed with a girl after hooking up and not have at least one of your arms fall in some awkward and uncomfortable yoga-style position where the girl says, “Is your arm OK?” and the guy lies and says “Yeah it’s fine”?

-Does the guy with the ugly shirt at the bar know how ugly his shirt is or does he hope that being the ugly shirt guy at the bar will somehow attract women via some convoluted ugly shirt reverse psychology?

-Don’t you hate when you’re trying desperately to get a drink at a crowded bar and you finally get someone’s attention and yell out your carefully scripted order, but then you realize it’s just a busboy who happened to make eye contact but who has neither the authority nor the inclination to serve you anything?

-In the end, I think that professional promoters and I have a lot more in common than I initially thought.  After all, we both spend our weekend days communicating with partygoers via phone, email, and text message.  The only difference is that promoters spend Saturday afternoon hyping up that evening’s event to their friends and contacts while I spend Sunday afternoon apologizing to my friends and anyone I had contact with the night before.  You see, while I may have been blessed with a sense of humor, I am severely lacking in that other important quality known as tact.  Thus, after a few dozen cocktails, I tend to speak my mind when I should shut my mouth.  But my buddies and hook-ups know by now that I ramble not out of disdain, but rather out of drunken adoration for this city, its nightlife, and the men and women that make it all come alive.  And that is my nocturnal admission.

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

-Currently, I am in the midst of performing a cruel and unusual experiment on myself.  Tired of craving this horribly addictive product, I am attempting to wean myself off of chapstick.  It is proving to be much more difficult than I expected.  They should call it crackstick.

-Isn’t “wintry mix” just meteorologist slang for “we have no fucking clue”?

-I don’t like the fact that everything advertised these days is guaranteed to work.  There is not one product on the market that does not offer guaranteed satisfaction or your money back.  It’s pretty much impossible that all these claims can be true.  And who are the people who actually request their money back from a stick of deodorant?  If you have so much time on you hands that you’re demanding anti-perspirant reimbursement, it’s pretty safe to say no one cares you’re sweaty anyway.

-And how the fuck does Gillette have the nerve to put the words “high-performance” on aftershave?  High-performance?  It’s blue goo that stings, not a Ferrari.

-Ever notice that no matter how diligent you are about regularly going to the gym, the one day you slack off you end up walking right past it, and it silently taunts you?

-My fancy gym has some pretty wacky aerobics classes.  Without fail, there’s always that one solitary dude in every session full of women.  Hey, if you feel comfortable taking a cardio-striptease class, then more power to you, man.

-How come when me and another guy are the only people in the entire gym locker room do our lockers always end up being right next to each other?

-Something I’ve always wondered: if you can’t feed Gremlins after midnight, then when can you feed them?

-My mom’s response to every complaint I have is “open a window.”  “Mom, it’s really hot in here.”  “Open a window.”  “Mom, I don’t feel so well.”  “Make sure the windows are open.”  “Mom, I’m hungry.”  “Did you try opening a window?”

-You know, I don’t think I’ve ever ordered the special in a restaurant in my entire life.  Who can pay attention when the waiter is speeding through all those fancy dishes?  I pick up like a “bisque” here and a “black olive puree” there and then just order the chicken.

-My roommate Brian and I regularly have a woman clean our apartment and do our laundry.  I am not embarrassed by this – we are both financially independent and that’s one perk we choose to spend our money on.  What I am embarrassed about is that we decide to call the cleaning woman not when our apartment is sufficiently dirty, but when we run out of underwear.  The problem is, we have different amounts of underwear and so an argument ensues every time.  In order to ease tensions between us, we held an “underwear summit” where we both decided on a per day underwear allowance that would result in a mutually agreed upon laundry day.  Cooler heads prevailed for a while until Brian’s girlfriend broke the ceasefire by buying him a few new pairs, thus throwing off the balance of power.  My ally, my mom, responded by buying me even more underwear and now Brian and I are locked in a heated battle to stockpile the largest arsenal.  It’s like the Cold War of boxers.

-One of the most depressing experiences in twentysomething life is having to go to the ATM two days in a row.  It’s almost like when you swipe your card the machine says, “What, you again?”  And, just once, I’d like to not be completely baffled by my account balance on the receipt.  You always do that double take like, what the hell is going on here?  Why is my balance $4,000 less than it’s supposed to be?  I don’t get it, I was just here yesterday!

-What’s the first thing you say when someone tells you that you snore?  “I don’t snore!”  That’s got to be the dumbest argument we as humans ever make.  It’s like we’re saying, “Listen, I know I’m unconscious and completely unaware of my motor functions, but I think I know what I’m doing, damn it!”

-Just once I’d like to see a talk show host say to his guest: “You know what, that joke you just made wasn’t very funny, so I’m not going to utilize my fake laugh at this point.  We were going to show a clip from your latest film but let’s face it – it sucked.  So thanks for being here tonight, let’s go to commercial before we lose even more viewers to this incessant dribble you call conversation.”  I think that would make me happy.

-I’m pretty psyched that new episodes of “The Sopranos” are coming soon to HBO.  Just a word of advice to the FBI guys on the show: when you bring someone from the crime family to your offices to interrogate him, you should probably remove the large mafia org chart you’ve put together on the dry-erase board in the back.  I’m no law enforcement expert, but it’s probably better if the bad guys don’t see a graphical representation of all the dirt you have on them.

-Hey, if you can’t get a jar open and you give it to me and I screw it off easily, you don’t need to say “I loosened it for you.”  Let’s just assume the joke is implied, OK?

-I hate IM lurkers.  I don’t use instant messenger, but when I’m home at my parent’s house, sometimes I log on to my old America Online account.  Immediately, I’m bombarded with IMs from high school friends still on my buddy list.  “Where are you?”  “What are you up to?”  I mean, you know that if I’m on IM that I’m home and that if I’m writing you, I’m doing nothing.

-Do DJs and producers really need to wear those big headphones all askew on their heads?  I know you need to keep one ear in the headphones and one ear on the music, but that doesn’t mean you have to wear the thing like you just crashed headfirst through Radio Shack.

-The good thing about the new cell phone law?  You can switch carriers but keep your number.  The bad thing about the new cell phone law?  The proliferation of cell phone commercials trying to get you to switch to their service even though it sucks.  “Verizon Wireless – We never stop working for you.”  Yeah, except when I’m in the basement of the bar at 3am trying desperately to make a booty call but can’t get through because there’s no reception.  Guaranteed.

-Have you ever gotten an assignment at work that was exactly what you learned to do in college?  You think, finally, for once, I can actually put my education to use instead of completing random tasks that have nothing to do with my degree.  Then you get cracking and realize that the assignment sucks.  Because it’s just like schoolwork.

-Coffee people need to calm the fuck down.  Where do these people get off being all surly and gruff just because they haven’t had their morning coffee yet?  I think the coffee people should join the cigarette smokers in the stained, stinky, cranky, annoying, and addicted section.  It’s in the back.  The way back.

-To use the bathroom in the studio where I take acting classes, you have to use a key attached to a little bathroom pass that hangs on the wall.  Besides the obvious “what are we, still in kindergarten?” feel of the whole thing, I don’t like the fact that this piece of wood is traveling to and from the bathroom all day.  Why don’t we all just urinate directly on the key?

-And, finally, my dad recently lost a lot of weight on the South Beach diet.  I’m very proud of him and he looks great.  The only problem I have with the whole thing is that it seems as if all family members and associated acquaintances are now required to comment on his weight loss each and every time we see him, even if you’ve already commended him.  Otherwise, my dad gets offended.  So now I’ve had to wrack my brain every time I come home in order to come up with a new compliment on his trim figure.  Last time I visited, I decided I’d had enough and didn’t say anything.  Sure enough, my dad gave me a hard time.  When I complained to my mom about it, you know what she said?  “Open a window.”  Fuck me.

HOME

-One gloomy afternoon back in my Wall Street days, as I roamed the fourteenth floor of my company’s mammoth skyscraper, I came across a desolate and sparsely decorated cubicle.  Sitting on the desk between an unused monitor glare guard and an ergonomic mouse pad was the book, “Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff at Work.”  Half absentmindedly, I picked up the book and found that I was soon heartened by its spirited tales of teamwork and levity in the workplace.  I turned to a nearby receptionist and asked whose cubicle I was standing at.  Eyeing the book in my hand, she replied, “Oh, you can just take that, he was laid off last week.”  And so it goes.  The plight of the twentysomething in corporate America is a paradoxical one.  We don’t want jobs but need them to support our gluttonous lifestyles.  We hate our jobs but are scared to death of losing them.  We find new, exciting jobs only to find out they suck just as badly as the last one.  And so let’s once again examine what I call the era of Job Insecurity.

-In our first jobs out of college, we are so naive.  We don’t realize that being given a pager, cell phone, or BlackBerry by our company is very, very bad.  Sure, the NYU chicks at the bar may think it’s cool when you pull that little toy out of the holster on your belt to send a quick email, but everyone else just thinks you’re a jackass.  Plus, now your boss can find you wherever you go.  You know what other organization has that capability?  Prison.  I do not believe this is a coincidence.

-The “off-site” meeting is another misdirected attempt to boost productivity.  Ostensibly, the purpose of the off-site is to gather the whole team in a mildewed conference room somewhere far from the actual office to prevent distraction and engage in embarrassing team-building exercises.  In reality, everyone spends half the day in the hallway checking their voicemail and about the only team-building that occurs is the unanimous agreement that the sandwiches brought in for lunch are soggy and inedible.

-Your first drug test is a rite of passage in corporate America that all twentysomethings remember.  I’ll never forget mine.  Most people in line for the single bathroom were calm and collected while everyone who partied in college was cowering in the back and chugging huge bottles of Poland Spring.  I think my buddy Harlan has my favorite drug test story.  While filling up the cup, he suddenly realized he had more business to take care of in the bathroom.  So he calmly turned around and took a dump while the rest of the puzzled first-years waited patiently outside.  Now that’s stickin’ it to the Man!

-It is a sad fact that many attractive girls I know tell me they get harassed at work on a daily basis by disgusting guys.  Now I’m not talking blatant breast-touching or the “date me or I’ll fire you” type of harassment, I’m talking about subtle, constant, inappropriate emails and innuendos from ugly, balding, married men.  I’m pretty ashamed of my own gender for this.  Guys, crude and improper behavior belongs in the bar, not the boardroom!

-My office was always business casual, so I feel bad for guys who have to wear formal attire.  Twentysomething guys usually have about five suits max but one they don’t really like and another is pretty ugly.  And when you’ve got a three-suit rotation going, there’s little room for error.

-I love how the term “FYI” is now used as every part of speech in the office.  Noun?  “Just as an FYI, tell James I’ll be at the meeting.”  Verb?  “Can you FYI James and tell him I’ll be at the meeting?”  I swear I once heard a co-worker use it as an adverb:  “I told James FYI-ishly about the meeting.”  It’s like when the Smurfs use the word “smurf” to mean twelve different things.

-If you’ve never played “Religious Chicken and Stove Top” at work, you have to try it.  When the holidays came around, I’d tell my boss I had to go to services, I’d tell my mom I had to go to work, and then just I sat home and ate ice cream all day.

-Let’s face it, the working world is full of annoying people.  Here are some of my least favorite: people who set up out-of-office replies on their email when they go home for the weekend, guys who have female assistants leave their outgoing voicemail message, people who keep a little tube of toothpaste and a toothbrush in their desk so that they can brush and floss every time they touch a morsel of food, people who take the elevator only one floor and, the all-time-worst, unnecessary business-card-exchangers who give you their card at the bar even though you have no fathomable use for their services nor any remote desire to contact them in the foreseeable future.

-One side effect of being a cog in the system at work is that you no longer feel remorse about lying.  In fact, you are encouraged to lie, on the job, about your job.  Only in corporate America, it’s called “recruiting.”  I once stood at a table at a job fair for three hours just straight-up lying to undergrads about how amazing my job was – even though only a few months earlier I had been lied to myself.  No wonder one of my buddies had no qualms about sticking a dozen cotton balls in his mouth once so that he could call his boss and pretend he just had his wisdom teeth out and couldn’t come to work.

-Just once, when you’re walking down the hallway at work and a co-worker is walking toward you and you both almost walk right into each other because you both moved the same way, and then you laugh under your breath and start sort of stutter-stepping to try to get around one another, don’t you just want to uppercut the guy in the face and be done with it already?

-I hate when I call a friend at work and an assistant picks up and says, “Jason Smith’s office!”  Can you giving me a fucking break please?  I know you don’t have an office.  I also know that same assistant answers the phone for a dozen other drones.  In fact, I bet she has a bigger cubicle then you do.  So get off your lazy ass and pick up your own goddamn phone because now your assistant wants to know what I’m calling “in regards to.”  She won’t transfer me unless I tell her what this is “in regards to,” even though there’s no regards!  Finally, I just get fed up and say, “Do you really want to know what this is in regards to?  Do you really want to know?  Well, I’m calling to ask if Jay got head from that chick we met last night, OK?”  And I get transferred right away.

-Any twentysomething guy reading this right now knows that there is one thing about work that is worse than everything else combined.  Taking a shit in the office.  I know, I know, with the economy in shambles and sexual harassment running rampant, this should be the least of our concerns.  But it’s not.  Shitting at the office is akin to desecrating guys’ most sacred ceremony.  The primary issue is the noise factor.  Solution?  Time your thrusts to coincide with co-workers’ coughs and sink usage.  Then there is the uncertainty principle.  Don’t go into a stall if you see the person who just came out.  You never want to match a face to an ass.  You can also use the bathroom on a different floor.  Even though the architectural layout is bound to be identical, the fact that you won’t be able to recognize anyone’s shoes is somehow comforting.  Of course, if you’re really shit-shy, you can always use the bathroom they use for drug tests.  My friend Harlan says it’s quite roomy.

-I worked in an office with some of the smartest young minds in the business.  Graduates of Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and Amherst.  And no one could work the fax machine.  In fact, I would venture to say that the most difficult aspects of working on Wall Street are faxing and printing.  Once, I was late for a meeting when the printer broke for the sixth time that week.  The error message said, “Load magenta toner.”  I almost broke down in tears when I realized that I graduated from Wharton yet only understood one out of three words in the message.

-When you call an investment banker, I think you can judge how disgruntled he is by the length of the sigh he makes after he picks up the phone but before he starts talking.

-Many of my friends spend more time in the office looking for a different job than actually doing work.  The clandestine nature of searching for a job while on the job means that when your friends call, you can’t just give them an update because you don’t want your boss to hear that you’re about to jump ship.  I’ve actually become quite adept at discerning what the hell my buddy at work is trying to tell me about his meeting with a headhunter by using a few benign code words and a lot of yes or no questions.  It’s like playing white-collar Taboo.

-The business trip, like the BlackBerry, is another corporate mirage.  Sure, it sounds cool to your mom that you’re going on an all-expenses paid trip to Dallas, but let’s face it, if you’re under twenty-five and going on a business trip, all you pretty much get to see is the airport, a Starbucks, a mildewed conference room eerily similar to the one where you had your last off-site, the hotel, one fancy steakhouse, and then the airport again.  All in less than 24 hours.

-Have you ever been so bored at work that you actually asked for more work to do, then when you got more work instantaneously regretted opening your big, stupid mouth in the first place?

-In the end, I don’t think I was cut out for Wall Street.  My three least favorite things in life are waking up early, shaving, and tucking in my shirt.  Obviously, I chose the wrong profession.  Now that I think about it, being a twentysomething in corporate America all comes down to one thing – being tucked in.  When you’re working, you have to tuck in your shirt.  You’re stuffy, you’re uncomfortable, and your crotch itches.  When you’re out of work, you’re untucked – you’re loose, free, and uninhibited.  I don’t think we were meant to spend our twenties, our most cherished years, all tucked in.  It’s not natural.  So turn off that BlackBerry, skip the off-site, blow off your drug test, throw out that toothpaste, drop-kick the fax machine, and untuck that goddamn shirt.  You’ll be glad you did.  That is, until your rent is due.

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

-Have you ever gotten into an argument with someone over whether a shirt is black or dark blue?  Some people are not very religious or political, but when you attack them on cloth color, their beliefs are unwavering.  And I love when the argument gets so vociferous that you need to bring in a third-party fabric and compare.

-Porn star Jenna Jameson is on the cover of Penthouse magazine this month.  When I read the headline, “Jenna Jameson As You’ve Never Seen Her,” I couldn’t help but think, is that really possible?

-Have you ever had a friend email a bunch of the guys out of the blue and suggest that everyone take a trip somewhere and it’s not until later that he reveals that the only reason he wants to go is because he has enough frequent flier miles to go for free?  The other day my friend Triplet #1 was like, “Yeah, we should all definitely take a vacation.  We just, uh, we have to fly Delta.”  Dick.

-You know what would really improve my quality of life?  If the tongue on my sneaker didn’t always wedge itself to one side.  I know it sounds petty, but I feel like I spend half my day futilely centering my sneaker tongue.  Maybe I do need a vacation.

-There’s a liquor store and a 24-hour Dunkin’ Donuts on my block in New York.  And that means my street is a favorite nesting ground for crazy people and other assorted vagrants.  What always interests me about crazy people is that they all seem to be wearing headphones all the time.  What do you think the crazy people are listening to?  My guess is it’s that stupid “Milkshake” song playing over and over and over and over…

-I hate when someone makes a vague complaint about being sick and someone else says, “Yeah, it’s going around.”  What’s going around?  “It”?  Could you be a bit more specific?

-I also hate when television commercials ask rhetorical questions – “Where do you want to go today?”  “What’s in your wallet?”  “Where’s the beef?”  Honestly, I think the American consumer has long since been desensitized to catchphrases and jingles that don’t involve the Coors Light twins.  Please don’t ask us any more questions because we’re too lazy to answer them anyway.

-When did the “The OC” become an hour-long infomercial for bands I’ve never heard of?

-Have you ever noticed that having exact change is a pretty stressful experience?  As soon as you realize you actually have coins for once, you tell the cashier to hold on a second while you drive your hand into your pocket which seems to have shrunken in the past two minutes to the point where you can barely manipulate your fingers around the coins while you start to sweat knowing that everyone in the line behind you is paying with a credit card like a normal person and now you’re not sure if it was a dime or a nickel that you just felt and finally at the last minute you emerge victorious from your pocket with thirty-seven cents and vow to never pay with change again.

-Of course, just the opposite occurs when you pay for something and the change is only one cent.  All of a sudden, the thought of receiving and carrying around one penny for the rest of the day is so abhorrent that you mumble “don’t worry about it,” grab your purchase, and get the hell out of the store before the clerk even thinks about handing you that godforsaken piece of copper.

-What do you think the Jerky Boys are doing at this very instant?  Why do I think it’s not making prank calls?

-Quote of the Month.  When I worked on Wall Street, I felt that most people didn’t understand what I did.  Now that I’m a comedian, I think people are even more confused.  A few weeks ago, I went to see one of my idols, Jerry Seinfeld, live in concert with my friend Lindsey and her parents.  The show was great.  Lindsey’s mom especially liked Jerry’s joke about people doing whatever they can to avoid getting up when they let you by in the movie theater.  After the show she said to me, “Karo, can you use that bit in your act?”  Um…that’s not really how it works…

-Why do people in New York City have welcome mats outside their apartments?  Do you know how far indoors I walked and over how many carpeted surfaces I traipsed to get to your door?  I think my shoes are clean.

-Why even bother putting the tongs in the bucket of ice?  Let’s be honest, they’re for show, no one is using the tongs.  You make one stab at an ice cube with tongs, the cube goes flying across the room, and next thing you know you’re fist-deep in the bucket like you’re searching for exact change.

-Don’t you think this surfer chick that got her arm bitten off by a shark is a little too happy about the whole thing?  I mean, I stub my toe and I’m bed-ridden for the rest of the day.

-Well, it’s official, I’ve been converted.  A few weeks ago, I got TiVo.  Actually, thanks to the geniuses at Time Warner Cable in New York City, I have what’s called DVR – it’s twice as powerful as TiVo and it’s right in my cable box.  I’m telling you, DVR is my new religion.  The only bad part is that it’s made me a little testy.  Since there’s no separate DVR equipment, people come over and don’t even realize I have it.  Heaven forbid anyone starts watching commercials and I go crazy – “How dare you watch commercials in my temple!  You must fast-forward and pay homage to the DVR gods!”  Just about the only way I can calm down is by watching instant replays of the girl-on-girl action in “The L Word” on Showtime.

-And when it comes to TV, the biggest conspiracy around is JetBlue.  They’re always hyping the DIRECTV service that’s in every seatback.  It’s such a rip-off.  You get like the History Channel, the Game Show Network, and eight back-to-back episodes of “Will & Grace.”  I once spent an entire five-hour flight watching the ticker at the bottom of the ESPNEWS screen because it was the best thing on.  I want my frequent flier miles back.

-Being shown how to do something on your cell phone that you couldn’t figure out is always such a glorious experience.  You know, there’s that one little annoying feature that you can’t for the life of you understand and then some random dude at a party who doesn’t even have that phone will walk by and casually say, “Yeah, just hold down the button on the side,” and walk away without even realizing he just made your night, week, and possibly even your decade.

-Most twentysomethings think that parents are amazing.  As long as they’re not your parents.  When my roommate Brian’s parents come to visit, he’s a nervous wreck and invariably an argument ensues over dinner about whether Brian’s shirt is blue or black.  Meanwhile, I’m totally relaxed, just enjoying the free meal, and wondering why Brian is so uptight.  Until my parents come.  Then I’m a mess and can’t wait for them to leave while stupid Brian is making them feel at home by showing them how to DVR “The West Wing.”

-A lot of my buddies are really big gamblers.  They’re always playing poker or some card game for inordinate sums of money.  I’m not a big gambler or very good card player.  But thankfully I have really good friends.  They never make me feel left out.  They’re always encouraging me to play and offering to teach me how.  They’re even betting amongst themselves who can get me to play first.  What nice guys.

-When I go out to eat, I usually offer everyone at the table a taste of my meal.  Is it wrong that I’m only doing it because it’s a social convention and secretly I hope that no one takes me up on the offer?

-And, finally, I think that five voicemails or missed calls is the threshold for getting worried that something bad has happened.  If you look at your cell phone and you have four missed calls, you think it’s strange but don’t panic.  But if I turn on my phone and hear that I have five or more voicemails, all of a sudden every horrible scenario that could possibly occur runs through my head in a matter of seconds and I start freaking out until I realize that two are hang-ups, two are wrong numbers, and one is my friend Lindsey’s mom calling to suggest I write a sitcom about four friends who have a masturbation contest.  Fuck me.

HOME

-Males in their early twenties approach each new situation in life the same way we approach a new issue of Maxim magazine – first we look for the hot girls, then we check to see if there is anything else interesting going on, and when there’s not, we go about our day as usual. We are a simple species, yet so often misunderstood. For instance, if you follow entertainment news at all, you’ll know that everyone in Hollywood is freaking out because the highly coveted 18-34 male demographic doesn’t watch prime-time television anymore. I’d venture to guess that the reason for this is that Hollywood does not place enough emphasis on our three primary interests: chicks, beer and SportsCenter. This month, for the benefit of confused women and befuddled network executives alike, I’d like to take you on a journey through the world of the twentysomething guy. I have to warn you, though, it ain’t pretty.

-Guys never order fancy shit off of a drink menu. If it’s not either clear or brown, we don’t want it.

-Guys lose clothes when they get ass. Whenever a girl leaves my place in the morning and asks for something to wear, I always give her my most expendable shirt because I know I’m never getting it back. It’s like a sacrifice to the hook-up gods.

-Guys hate it when girls ask us to guess how old they are. The worst possible thing to do is offend them, so you have to make sure you guess younger than you think they actually are. Last week I met this chick at a bar and she asked me to guess how old she was. I was like, “Uh, eight?”

-Guys exist in only two states – pre-ejaculatory and post-ejaculatory. Ladies, pre is the time to ask us for favors, have political discussions, and meet your friends. Post is the time to quit hogging the blanket so I can get some fucking sleep.

-Guys don’t like to pay you back promptly. I’m going to see Chris Rock at the Garden in a few weeks and it was just easier if I charged six tickets myself and then collected the money from my friends. Of course, my buddies are making it as difficult as possible for me – they’re trying to pay me all in quarters, writing nasty messages in the memo section of their checks, threatening not to pay until the moment Chris enters the stage. It’s really not fair.

-Guys aren’t big on long-distance relationships. A friend asked me why I don’t get serious with this girl I’m hooking up with in Philadelphia. I was like, are you kidding me? I won’t even date a chick on the Upper West Side.

-Guys never pay more than twelve bucks for a haircut. A few months ago, in a moment of weakness, I tried to go to a fancy salon instead of my neighborhood barbershop. The guy butchered my hair. I should have known better when the stylist was wearing a fucking beeper.

-Guys learned most of what they know about women from watching “Real Sex” on HBO as impressionable adolescents in the early ‘90s. Thus when sex does not involve midgets, video cameras, or fudge, we get confused. Please cut us some slack.

-Guys don’t do yoga. Guys do, however, enjoy watching women in spandex thongs stretch suggestively. Thus, merely watching yoga is still OK.

-Quote of the Month. Guys like to fight other guys for little to no reason. A while back, I went to my buddy’s apartment to get hammered. Before we left the building to go out, me and a couple of friends were horsing around in the lobby and got yelled at by this doorman with a wacky crew cut. Drunk and emboldened, I responded, “Hey, fuck you Forrest Gump!” Just then, another group of guys who apparently lived in the building entered the lobby and heard this exchange. One kid came up to me with his fists raised ready to fight and actually said, “Hey, are you making fun of my doorman’s haircut?” Holding back laughter, I turned to the doorman, apologized, and gave him my stylist’s beeper number.

-Guys don’t care if a girl’s place is messy. A few weeks ago, I went home with a girl and she made me stand outside her door while she “tidied up.” Why? Honey, I’ll hook up in an abandoned mine shaft, if that’s what you’re into.

-Guys will watch any television show that involves ranking. Top ten plays, fifty greatest movies, hundred richest men, anything. Hell, one of my favorite shows is “Around the Horn” on ESPN where they argue about arguing about sports. And get ranked at the end.

-Guys take tickets to sporting events very seriously. When we get tickets to a big game, we are usually faced with the dilemma of who to take with us. For instance, if I score seats, my roommate usually automatically has first dibs. But last time I got tickets they were for a Yankees game. And he’s a Mets fan. However, he did take me to an Islanders game last season. But I hate the Islanders. It’s very complicated. You know, I just got Knicks tickets and I think I’m just going to take whoever pays me for Chris Rock first.

-Guys feel uncomfortable talking about girls’ you know, um, cycles. Last St. Patrick’s Day, after drinking green beer in the middle of the afternoon for five hours straight, I tried (unsuccessfully) to rip a street sign down and badly gashed all the fingers on my right hand. Not wanting to stop the pub crawl to get band-aids, I struggled on, gushing blood. I think some girl saw me turning blue because she gave me some sort of maxi-pad type thing to wrap around my hand. It quickly staunched the bleeding and saved the day. And that’s everything I know about tampons. And that’s fine with me.

-Guys don’t really listen when other guys tell them important information. I went on a family vacation to Aruba last year. When I got back, I had 27 voicemails on my cell phone, which was cool, except not one of my friends had any inkling I was away.

-Guys are highly illogical. Somehow we are extremely protective of our little sisters but have no problem masturbating to Hilary Duff.

-Guys are easily distracted. I was talking to this girl in a bar once and she mentioned offhand that her grandfather invented the Chipwich. We kept chatting for a while and then I was like, “Wait, did you say Chipwich? The chocolate chip ice cream cookie?” For the next half an hour I bombarded her with annoying questions about the novelty ice cream business. Needless to say I don’t know if she kept a kept a clean apartment or not because I didn’t get anywhere near it.

-Guys are surprisingly resourceful. I don’t cook. My roommate doesn’t cook. Our apartment is kind of small. So when we don’t know where to put something, we just stick it in the oven because it’s never been used.

-Guys give up surprisingly quickly. My buddy Seth was dating this girl for about a year when one day they got into a huge fight over the phone and both hung up in a huff. They never spoke again. That’s it, no discussion, no reconciliation, no break-up, nothing. I was like, “Dude, you can’t do that, you have to talk to her, you went out for a year!” Seth said, “Why? Forget it, we’re through.” I pleaded, “Seth, do it for me, please. She had hot friends. Damn it, I need closure!”

-Guys are really proud of their dirty, disgusting baseball caps. I’ve been wearing the same beat-up New York Rangers hat for going on eleven years now. Once the fire alarm went off in my apartment building. When we evacuated, I took my hat but forgot my roommate was fast asleep in the other room. Funny thing was I think he was more angry that I didn’t try to save his old Mets hat.

-Guys will attempt to get anything delivered. I’ve overhead friends on the phone trying to convince flustered shop owners to deliver beer, liquor, porn, video games, and even food orders that totaled less than two dollars…with tax.

-Guys also have no perception of when stores close. If we’re hungry, we believe someone out there should be willing to provide food. Ever see a drunk guy banging on the door of a pizza shop at 5:30am? It’s pretty sad. Of course, then he just goes home and tries to get it delivered.

-In the end, the 18-34 male demographic is a fun-loving bunch. We work hard and we play hard. But despite what you may think about our lazy, lecherous, and illogical ways, twentysomething guys are still out there, every day, changing the world. For instance, a group of my fraternity brothers once took a trip to Prague. Out partying one night, they were dismayed to find the line to the bathroom was wrapped halfway around the bar. Cutting to the front of the line to get a closer look at the situation, my friends were surprised to see that the bathroom was not being used to its optimal capacity. While the confused Czechs looked on, my buddies entered the bathroom together and all took a piss – one in the urinal, one in the sink and one in the garbage can. The next day, they left the city to go backpacking through Europe for a month. Upon their return to Prague, they once again went out to the local bar. After a few shots of absinthe, my friends went to the bathroom, prepared to cut the long line again. What they saw amazed them. The Czechs had organized themselves into three short lines – one leading to the urinal, one to the sink, and one to the garbage can.

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

-Ever notice that when you’re sitting at a restaurant and the waiter comes over to take your order, you instinctively re-open and look at your menu even though you already know exactly what you want?

-I just got a new computer with a CD burn drive. How come they sell blank tapes and floppy disks that hold so little data in boxes of five but blank CDs that each hold like half your hard drive only come in packages of a hundred?

-As I’ve said before in this column, I do the vast majority of my shopping online these days. One of the reasons is that I hate going into stores where it’s not clear right away which stuff is men’s and which is women’s. The worst is when you’re looking at a sweater and the salesperson causally comes up behind you and tells you it’s a women’s sweater. You’re always like, “Yeah, um, I knew that, it’s for my sister.” And then you get the hell out of there.

-Why do women always make you switch tables at a restaurant because they “feel a draft”? Forget the fact that the draft is non-existent, why can’t my mom make the decision to switch tables right away? She always starts complaining about ten minutes after sitting down. So now that we’ve dirtied the napkins and water glasses at this table, how about we all get up, take our jackets, change waiters, bring our bread plates, and move ten feet away? And of course we all need to look at the menu again even though we already know what we want.

-When did everyone become so obsessed with candles? I can’t walk into an apartment anymore without being besieged by twenty different burning aromas. And I love the people who have candles but never use them. There’s always that lighter sitting neatly in the wax tray, just begging to be used, but you can’t be the first otherwise everyone will know it was you who stunk up the bathroom.

-Speaking of stinking up the bathroom, in my bathroom, there is a can of air freshener with the scent “Butterfly Garden.” That’s great, when someone takes a shit and then uses the spray, it smells like someone took a shit in a butterfly garden.

-Memo to the producers of SportsCenter: don’t worry, you’re still my favorite show behind Seinfeld, but could you please stop showing so much Kobe Bryant trial coverage? If I wanted to watch court on TV, I’d watch Court TV.

-Memo to people who list Evanescence as their favorite group: in the future, please limit your favorite artists to those who have been around longer than six months and have more than one overplayed song. Thank you.

-Memo to people who use the word “metrosexual”: just because an idiotic buzzword becomes popular doesn’t mean you have to use it excessively and, most of the time, incorrectly.

-Memo to Old Navy: I swear to God if you don’t take those Fran Drescher/Lil’ Kim commercials off the air soon I’m going to go nuts. And while you’re at it, do you think you could make it a little easier to tell the men’s clothes from the women’s?

-Memo to John Stamos: take a hint when not even the people in your commercials want to use your crazy long distance calling plan thingy. No wonder Rebecca hyphenated – it’s her escape clause.

-Memo to the women in my grandma’s old-age home: You’re getting way too excited. It’s just bingo. The winner gets a nickel for God’s sake.

-Memo to politicians and celebrities who are still wearing an American flag pin on their lapel: yeah, um, I think you can take that off now. Hollow displays of patriotism strictly for personal gain are so 2003.

-Doesn’t it seem like everything has an expiration date on it these days? Beer, cheese, bottled water, golf balls, playing cards. I’m worried that people are going to start paying less attention to their milk going bad when they see their tennis balls are safe until 2011.

-I hate the Lakers, but I have to hand it to their fans. Because Lakers fans will watch every second of every game on TV. They could be up by 37 points with sixteen seconds left in the game and my buddy Ryan will be like, “I just want to see if Kobe hits this free throw.” I’m like, you have to be kidding me, let’s go out. Besides, they’re replaying the game on Court TV later.

-Have you noticed that you can’t use a gold dollar coin without apologizing to the person you’re giving it to? Hell, my grandma won one in bingo and tried to give it back.

-You know when you get seated at a diner and one person is in the booth and the other is in a chair? I think which seat you choose says a lot about your personality. For instance, I always choose the chair. I prefer the ability to adjust my position in any direction because I’m a person who likes to be in control. Also, the booth makes my ass sweaty.

-I want to give a quick shout-out to Company E of the 131st Aviation Regiment, Alabama National Guard, who are stationed in Kuwait and Iraq and have been reading my book and column to get a little taste of home. You guys rock! We’re all supporting you back here. Some of us are even wearing pins!

-I just signed up for this site Upromise.com so now whenever I use my American Express card, a small sum of money is automatically contributed to my two-year-old cousin Daniel’s college fund. I feel good that now when I go out binge drinking and wasting my education, I’m actually helping Daniel pay for his own education. And maybe one day he can waste it, too. I know it’s a dream, but it’s my dream.

-Whenever I watch an old episode of Sex and the City, I can’t help but wonder, how come the girls I meet aren’t this easy?

-The good thing about Sex and the City is that you can, for the most part, watch any episode without having seen the previous one. I rarely watch continuous series. It’s just too much like going to church or synagogue – you have to be there at the same time every week and people make you feel guilty if you miss it. I’m like the guy who only shows up on Christmas – I only tune in for the season finale and pray I didn’t miss too much.

-And while we’re on the topic of TV, just once I’d like to see an episode of “ER” that isn’t advertised as “very special.”

-I hate when you stop the car so that someone can just get out quickly and get something and they leave the car door open because they’re coming right back but while they’re gone they’re either letting the air conditioning out, the cold in, or preventing you from moving when you’re blocking someone’s driveway, and you have to struggle to do that awkward reach where you attempt to close the passenger door while sitting in the driver’s seat and pull all your stomach muscles and the only thing stopping you from driving off without your stupid friend is the fact that his goddamn door is open in the first place.

-I have absolutely no idea how to score bowling. Once someone gets two strikes in a row I just give up and order another pitcher of beer.

-And, finally, as I said earlier, I don’t know much about women’s um, uhhh, you know, cycles. However, a while ago my roommate Brian and I were talking to a few girl friends of ours and the topic came up. Apparently, and again, this is news to me, when women work together in an office for an extended period of time, eventually their, um, cycles synchronize so that they’re all, you know, flowing at the same time. This both intrigued and frightened Brian and I, but we didn’t think much of it. A few weeks later, we were sitting on the couch in our apartment, happily eating turkey sandwiches and drinking Gatorade (which thankfully did not expire for another six years). We started to reminisce about some of the hijinks that have occurred in the two and a half years we’ve lived together. The story about long-term period synchronization came up and we both had a chuckle about the ridiculousness of the notion. A moment later, we simultaneously took the last bite of our respective sandwiches, licked our fingers, took a swig of Gatorade, leaned back on the couch, and sighed in perfect unison. Startled, we both looked at each other and said, “Fuck me.”

HOME

-I rang in 2003 violently dry-heaving in a bathroom in the bowels of the MGM Grand in Las Vegas during the wee morning hours of January 1st.  In a way, the experience would become a metaphor for the next twelve months – an incredible amount of effort was exerted but without much to show for it in the end.  2003 was supposed to be a year of maturation for me, a time when I would evolve from frat boy to manhood.  It didn’t quite play out that way.  As I look back, I can’t help but marvel at the money I made then spent, alcohol I consumed then saw again the next morning, and women I hooked up with then never saw again.  In other words, twelve months have passed and I’m right back where I started.  And I’m ready to do it all over again.  Welcome to a year in the life…

-What really pissed me off this year is people who kept telling me that I had to “pay my dues.”  That’s old peoples’ response to everything isn’t it?  “Well, you have to pay your dues.”  “You have to pay your dues first.”  “Don’t worry, you’re just paying your dues.”  You know what?  I’m sick of paying dues.  My whole life I’ve been paying dues.  When the fuck do I get paid?

-I just went into my bank account online and calculated how much money I spent this year.  It’s disgusting.  The problem with being twentysomething in New York City is that you can spend tons of money but gain nothing tangible.  Everything goes to rent, sushi, light beer, and cell phone bills.  I spent tens of thousands of dollars this year and the only proof I have that the money ever existed are a few bank statements and a new pair of Sauconys.

-People born this time of year were the kids who were always younger or older than everyone in their class.  I always thought it was strange that a decision your parents made when you were five would many years later determine who could binge-drink legally before or after everyone else.  And I love when people who were the oldest in their class and people who were youngest in their class meet, and find out they graduated at the same time.  The older person always has to annoyingly calculate the age difference: “Oh my God, I’m like eleven months older than you!”  And clearly no more mature.

-For some reason, this year I suffered more RDIs than at any time in my life.  An RDI is of course a Random Drunken Injury that you wake up with the next day but have no idea how you got it.  I’ve gotten a bruised tailbone, cut-up elbows, a sore wrist.  And I don’t know if I got them getting laid or laid out!

-It’s only the first week of December and I already hate New Year’s Eve.  I hate it!  Because no matter where I go on New Year’s Eve, I will pay too much, wait on line way too long, and buy drinks that are way too weak, while at the party that I decided not to go to, drunken orgies of supermodels will no doubt break out without warning on the dance floor and everyone will get ass while the Belvedere flows like water.

-But despite my apprehension about New Year’s Eve, there is no one I feel sorrier for than the saps I see at Blockbuster that afternoon renting Hugh Grant movies to watch with their girlfriends at home before Dick Clark’s Rockin’ Eve.  I may wait on line all night and wake up on January 1st with a bruised tailbone, but at least I gave it my all!

-I hate January tan people.  Even in high school I hated January tan people.  These were the kids whose parents took them to Puerto Rico every winter break while you spent your vacation shoveling yellowed snow for minimum wage.  You returned to school even paler than you left it while they were bronzed to perfection.  I hate January tan people even more now.  It’s just that I can’t stand what they represent – having fun when I’m not.

-In my opinion, one person brought the country together this year like no one else.  And it wasn’t the President or the Pope.  It was Paris Hilton.  As soon as that video hit the Internet I was getting emails from people I haven’t spoken to since elementary school asking for or sending copies of the tape.  It was really a beautiful thing.  Of course, if Paris has taught us anything, it’s that lighting is crucial.  Why shoot porn in night-vision?  I could barely tell if she was sucking dick or saving Jessica Lynch.

-The worst advertising campaign of the year has to go to Nextel.  You know, they have those myriad commercials where there are a bunch of people in the same room using the walkie-talkie function on their cell phone to talk to each other.  Uh, what?  Why are they even using cell phones if they are in the same room?  Oh, wait, it’s counter-intuitive…is that the point?  I don’t know, but someone’s ass needs to get fired over there.

-Quote of the Month.  This year, a lot of my friends left their first jobs out of college for new jobs.  I think my friends were happiest when they were in that lame-duck period of already having accepted a new job but half-ass finishing out the contract on their old one.  I talked to my buddy Harlan at his new job the other day and I asked him how it felt to leave his old investment bank.  He was like, “Dude, my last month of work there I partied for like six weeks straight.”  Really?  Well I certainly hope you listed strong math skills on your resume.

-Many people my age are taking standardized tests in preparation for applying to grad schools next year.  This phenomenon disturbs me for two reasons.  One, I am then forced to ask the question, “How was your test?” which is the second most annoying question behind “How was your trip?” in that the person doesn’t really want to repeat the same answer over and over again and you don’t really care anyway.  And two, I have again begun hearing people say they are “bad test-takers.”  Mind you these are not people who are dyslexic or have other learning disabilities, it’s just that when it comes to test-taking, they are “bad.”  This has got to be the sorriest excuse in the world.  How are you going to be a lawyer or an MBA if you can’t pencil in bubbles within an allotted time period?

-My sister Caryn, a senior at Dartmouth, is applying to grad school right now (and she’s an excellent test-taker, thank you very much).  She was telling me this “woman” in the career services office was helping her with her applications.  I said, “Oh, that’s cool, how old is this woman?”  And she said, “About two or three years older than me.”  I said, “So that makes her my age.  And you called her a woman.  Does that make me a man?”  “No,” my sister replied, “You’re still an idiot.”  It’s good to know some things never change.

-I was thinking of maybe getting a new watch for the holidays.  There are a couple that I really like but they all have one very disturbing thing in common – no numbers or dashes.  How do people tell time like that?  It’s like we’ve progressed thousands of years since the sundial and all we’ve really succeeded in doing was making it small enough to fit on a wrist.

-In a few weeks, when you start accidentally writing 2003 instead of 2004 on all of your paperwork, please keep it to yourself.  Life is difficult enough without having to hear trivial complaints about your inability to get the year right.

-Something occurred this year that, more than ever, made me realize I’m getting older faster than I would like.  All of a sudden, I absolutely hate getting mail.  Remember back in the day how you never got mail and when you did it was usually something cool?  Everything in the mail now is just bills and coupon books for goods and services I would never purchase.  Nothing cool comes anymore except the occasional misaddressed Victoria’s Secret catalog.

-Another thing I noticed myself doing this year is screening my calls.  When I first graduated, I couldn’t wait to get a ring on my cell phone.  Now I wield the “ignore” button like it’s nobody’s business.  Private number?  You’ve got no shot.  Even when I recognize the number, I send my friends straight to voicemail, just to show them who’s boss.  I was home at my parent’s house over Thanksgiving and they don’t have Caller ID.  I got a beep on the other line and I almost broke out into a cold sweat.

-I see it looming.  It’s coming, I just know it.  In 2004, the bubble will burst.  People I know are going to start getting engaged.  So far I only have one good friend and several acquaintances who have made the plunge, but I have a feeling that’s about to change.  I never thought it would come to this.  People are settling down, making serious commitments, moving in together, starting a family.  Meanwhile, I’ve been single longer than at any time in my life.  My apartment is such a bachelor pad that I have a sofa bed but not enough room to unfold the actual bed.  I don’t own shoes or a belt that would be appropriate attire for an engagement party.  I haven’t worn a tux since my senior year fraternity formal.  Hell, my “terrible twos” just ended last week!

-Looking back, I think that this entire year I felt uneasy.  I constantly had that feeling of dread that someone who didn’t deserve it was going to strike it big.  You know that feeling?  It’s the same feeling you get when you’re watching your dumbest, laziest, most dim-witted friend play the lottery.  You’re sort of rooting for him but deep down you’re thinking, if this idiot wins a million bucks a week for life, I’m just going to shoot myself.  Thankfully, that didn’t happen this year.  In 2004, when one of my friends gets a new job or gets engaged, I’ll be really happy for them.  Hopefully, as long as no January tan people or bad test-takers scratch off a mega-millions jackpot winner, I won’t feel as uneasy either.  After all, 2004 to me means endless possibilities of women, money, booze, fame, and fortune.  I’ve paid my dues and it’s gonna be a great year.

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

-Have you ever waited on line or worked really hard to get in somewhere exclusive and then at the door the pass they give you is just a generic raffle ticket?  You immediately think to yourself that you could have just gone to the supermarket and bought one of those tickets yourself even though it’s pretty impractical to be carrying around a spool of every different color ticket in anticipation of such a situation.

-I have never once been satisfied with the amount of topping I get with ice cream.  If you have them put the topping on, you eat through it right away.  If you get the topping on the side, you have to meticulously ration the sprinkles in order to save enough for the last few bites.  It really takes the fun away.

-I think that the makers of chapstick are ripping us all off.  You know when you get to the bottom of the stick but there’s still more left only you can’t get to it unless you squeeze your lip into the tiny cylinder thereby chapping your lips even more?  Hey, I paid for a full stick and I shouldn’t have to french kiss the fucking thing just to get it.

-Honestly, girls are so predicable sometimes.  My friend Kim went away to Australia.  As soon as she got there, she started sending pages and pages of daily emails about her trip.  I’m talking serious detail here.  Then in one email she mentioned she met an Australian guy.  Then in another email she mentioned they were dating.  Then in another email she said they were getting serious.  Then the emails started coming less and less frequently.  And now I haven’t heard from her in six weeks.  That’s OK, I don’t have shoes to wear to the engagement party anyway.

-Mapquest never works quite the way you want it to, does it?  It’s like you hit zoom in once and you’re looking at the bathroom of the bar and you hit zoom out and it shows you the continental United States.  All I’m looking for is cross streets here.

-Have you ever seen “guilt-free” fries on the menu of a health-food restaurant?  They’re always so bad you wish you could give them the death penalty.

-While watching my new favorite show “The OC” the other day, my friend Triplet #1 made the keen observation that the family was eating Chinese food out of the carton with chopsticks.  That’s such a TV thing isn’t it?  Have you ever actually eaten Chinese food like that?  Oh, and is Seth Cohen’s mom getting hotter in each episode or what?

-Whenever I am introduced to someone and they say, “Hi Karo, nice to meet you, I’ve heard a lot about you.” I usually respond with a chuckle and say, “Well don’t believe a word of it!”  How lame is that?  I’m a fucking comedian and that’s the best I can come up with.  It’s sad.

-God damn that Hilary Duff’s got some catchy songs.

-Do the people who are interviewed for segments on “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” realize the show is on Comedy Central and that they’re making complete asses of themselves?

-I love when people hold their cell phone way up in the air like that extra ten inches is actually going to get them better reception.  And even if you do get better reception, how are you supposed hear anything if your phone is way up in the air?

-I can’t comprehend how guys get haircuts and then go about their day without showering first.  No amount of talcum power or sweeping your forehead with that poofy brush thing is going to get everything off of you.  You always see the tiny leftover hairs at the base of their scalp.  I get itchy just thinking about it.

-How come the jacket of every fiction book I read features a picture of the author wearing a turtle neck and a tweed jacket, and a biography that says he lives with his wife, two kids, and a dog in New Hampshire?

-What do you think Ralph Macchio is doing at this very instant?

-I love the moment when you go out to dinner with a few people and you know, you have a few cocktails, some dessert, whatever.  You get the check and you’re like, oh my God, I can’t believe how much this is and instantaneously in your head you divide it up and realize how much you have to pay and how you really can’t afford it and chastise yourself for spending so much money until finally someone next to you looks at the bill and says, “You realize gratuity is already included, right?” and you stop hyperventilating and realize it’s not more than you expected after all.

-I also love when everyone at the table gets their food first except for one guy and he’s always like, “Eat, eat.”  And everyone puts up a mild protest: “No, no, we’ll wait.”  And then the guy insists, “Seriously, eat, it’ll get cold.”  So everyone digs in but you know the guy without food is thinking, “I’m so fucking hungry right now and I hate everybody at this table.”

-I’ve found that when I’m on the treadmill I tend to slyly glance at the person next to me to see how fast they’re running.  Like we’re in some sort of crazy race that goes nowhere.

-There are few things more awkward than trying to drink water while running on the treadmill.  You can barely keep your arm steady enough to direct the water into your mouth, you’re panting too hard to really swallow anything substantial, and it ends up all over your chin and thighs.  You might as well dump a cup of water on your head.  That’s what people do when they’re racing anyway, right?

-It still boggles my mind that there are people out there without cell phones.  How do they live?  How do they make plans or meet anyone anywhere?  Remember the last time you met someone on a corner somewhere in the city?  How many phone calls did it take?  Like a dozen right?  “What corner are you on?”  “East side or west side of the street?”  “Are you taking a cab?”  “Are you close?”  “I can’t find you.”  “Which store?”  “OK, I see you, I’m crossing the street.”  “No, the other street.”  “I’m directly behind you.”  Hmm, maybe that’s why Nextel makes those walkie-talkie phones.

-Has anyone actually ever left a “callback number” on someone’s voicemail?  Why even have that option?

-Have you ever gotten a cell phone call, but declined the call and put your phone back in your pocket, and then a minute later your phone starts vibrating again and you think to yourself, wow, I’m really blowing up today until your realize it’s just the voicemail alert from the previous call and you’re not that popular after all?

-Another pet peeve of mine is people who hesitate on their own voicemail message.  It’s like, “Hi, uh, this is Jared, I’m not here right now so leave a message and I’ll, uh, get back to you.”  What’s with the “uh”?  Are you unsure of your name or what you’re supposed to do when someone leaves you a message?  Do you not know how to erase your message and re-record one that doesn’t make you sound like such a jackass?

-I feel like corrections in newspapers are never sufficient enough.  If the paper makes a mistake, no matter how egregious it is, they always print the tiny correction the next day like sixty pages deep.  It’s bad enough you accidentally reported this guy was dead, the least you could do is put the correction before the obituaries!

-People use the phrases “a la carte” and “caddy corner” in conversation with me all the time and I have absolutely no idea what they mean.  I just smile and nod.

-Who are these people that drink coffee while working out at the gym?  I certainly hope they don’t try to drink while running on the treadmill.

-Out of all the people you know with Palm Pilots, I’m willing to bet about two-thirds of them haven’t even looked at the thing in at least eight months.

-Who actually responds to spam emails?  Someone out there must be responding or they wouldn’t be sending them in the first place.  I’ll admit, sometimes I’ll actually get fooled by spam and open an email that says, “How are you?” thinking that it’s legitimate.  But when I see that it’s an offer to increase my penis size with no exercise or dieting and free access for a month to a program designed by porn star scientists, I quickly realize I’ve been had and delete the email.  But some people must actually think these things are legit.  And these are the same people that win millions in the lottery.

-And, finally, this year I started to notice that while I’m getting suave enough to hook up with much older women, I’m actually losing my game with younger girls.  A few months ago, I did a stand-up show at a college and my set went really well.  Afterward, I was talking to some of the students in the audience.  This really cute girl came up to me, asked me to sign her copy of my book, and then said with a coy smile, “You know, I have a single in the dorms.”  I said to her, “Oh yeah?  That’s so neat, so did I!”  It was only after she walked away with a grimace that I realized what she was implying.  Fuck me.

HOME

-Remember your senior year of high school when in countless college interviews and applications you were asked the question, “What do you like to do in your free time?”  And in each instance, in order to salvage any chance of you getting accepted, you were forced to reply with something like, “I’m active in student government, I excel at varsity football, and I volunteer six times a week,” when the actual answer was “I didn’t even vote in student government elections, I excel at Madden ’97 on Sega Genesis, and I masturbate six times a week.”  And if you actually did get in anywhere, your college days were probably more of the same.  But now that you’re twentysomething, leisure time is all of a sudden at a premium.  After all, you spend most of the daylight hours staring at the gray/burgundy walls of your cramped cubicle filled with Dilbert cartoons and photos from your last sorority date party.  But when you leave work, that’s when things really start getting interesting.  Because for my generation, the hours from nine to five are unimportant, it’s what we do afterward – from five to nine – that really counts.

-No matter where you live, every hard-working twentysomething in the country has one priority as soon as they get home from work: get undressed as quickly as possible.  I used to go from three-piece suit to boxers and dress socks in under six seconds flat.

-Some of my friends belong to corporate softball leagues and play with their co-workers several times a week.  Sometimes I wish I was part of something like that, because I’m a really competitive person and there’s nothing really for me to compete for anymore.  The last time I played organized athletics was my Greek League soccer team in college.  My fraternity made it all the way to the finals but when the championship game was scheduled for a Thursday night at 9pm, we forfeited and went out drinking instead.

-The other night I realized just how much my roommate Brian and I are clueless bachelors.  We had a couple of the guys over to have some drinks when someone spilled a beer on the carpet.  As the Miller Lite flowed out of the bottle onto our IKEA rug, Brian and I stood paralyzed as we simultaneously came to the realization that we did not have one single paper product in the apartment.  No paper towels, no toilet paper, no tissues, nothing.  Without anything to absorb the spill, there was nothing to do except blow vigorously until it soaked into the floor.

-The next day, as I walked to CVS to buy paper towels, toilet paper, and tissues, I thought to myself that it’s just amazing how much of my free time I spend running errands.  And it’s amazing how many of those errands involve going to the drugstore.  And it’s amazing how much I spend at the drugstore even though I was just there a few days ago.  Then, as I finally reached CVS, I proceeded to make an ass out of myself.  You see, I’m one of those guys who refuse to take a cart or a basket while shopping – oh no, that’s too feminine for me.  So instead I awkwardly attempt to carry all my items throughout the store in a giant bear hug and usually as I reach the end of each aisle, I drop something.  Then when I bend to pick it up, I drop something else, and so on.  Chicks are zooming by me with carts left and right and I’m trying to figure out how to carry an eight-pack of Charmin with just my pinky and index fingers.

-Quote of the Month.  After CVS, I headed to my next errand, buying porn for the apartment.  I have no idea how I was delegated this task, but for some reason Brian pays the cable bill and I supply the porn, that’s just the way it’s always been.  The thing is, pornography is like a Bic pen, no one actually buys it, you usually just have it, and if you don’t, you either borrow it or steal it.  Nevertheless, I did my duty, but apparently I didn’t do a very good job.  After privately surveying my latest purchase, Brian emerged from his room in a deep sweat and said, “Karo, this is the worst DVD I have ever seen.  The women are so repulsive I wouldn’t have sex with them in real life!”  Dude, I’ll pay the cable bill if you want to switch jobs.

-After the porn purchase, I had one last stop, the cell phone store.  Oh dear lord, the cell phone store.  I think that cell phone store employees are like an all-star team of the most incompetent, slow, rude, and lazy people on the planet.  But the beauty of the cell phone store is that the employees aren’t half as bad as the customers.  I’ve never seen more customers that can’t read instructions, don’t follow signs, and are generally unable to function in society than at the cell phone store.  When you have incompetent salespeople completely ignoring dozens of illiterate customers who are all on the wrong line anyway, you get utter chaos.  If your phone breaks, trust me, just throw it out and buy a new one online.

-Though errands tend to take up much of my free time, there was one thing that replaced them in importance the past month – the baseball playoffs.  I’ve never watched more baseball in my life.  The final result was bittersweet for me because although my Yankees beat the hated Red Sox, we lost the World Series.  You see, I’m a die hard Yankees fan going back many generations.  In fact, my family is no longer allowed to watch Billy Crystal movies because my dad is still mad at him for wearing a Mets hat in “City Slickers.”

-Without baseball, I’ve been feeling pretty bored lately.  I mean, I’ve already read the “The Da Vinci Code” twice, gotten a flu shot, and replayed the tranquilizer gun scene on my “Old School” DVD about a hundred times.  Since I can’t bear to watch the strangely uncomfortable, live 6pm Dan Patrick SportsCenter, it’s off to the gym.

-If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s having the same silly encounters happen to me over and over again.  It seems that lately, more and more girls I know have been joining my fancy gym.  That in itself I don’t mind.  I just hate when I bump into one of them and I’m all sweaty and she’s all sweaty and there’s that awkward moment where I’m not sure if I should give her a kiss on the cheek and we both sort of pause in mid-hug until one of us finally says, “Ugh, I’m disgusting,” then we both chuckle, say hello, wipe our brows, and get on with the rest of our lives.

-Much of my free time is also spent either eating, thinking of eating, planning on eating, or resting in a state of having just eaten.  Since I can’t cook (the only pizza I’ve ever made had perforations in it), I take out almost every meal.  Sometimes, I’ll meet a friend for dinner, usually when I’m sick of ordering from establishments where “double meat” is an option.

-Eating out, like the gym, is full of moments I can do without.  For instance, when you’re about to order but you’re not sure if the other person is going to get a starter and so you’re not sure if you’re going to get the soup that looks really good because you don’t want to be eating when the other person is not, and vice versa.  It’s like appetizer Russian roulette.  Then there’s that awkward moment that occurs when you’re in mid-conversation but then that guy comes by with that strange crumb scraper thing and slowly and methodically removes every morsel from the tablecloth while you and your friend sit in strained silence and try not make eye contact either with each other or the busboy.  And you think to yourself, you know, double meat doesn’t sound so bad right now.

-When I’m in my apartment just hanging out or watching TV, a lot of times I’ll crack open a beer.  This wasn’t always the case.  In high school, I hated the taste of beer.  In college, I said I loved it but still didn’t really like it that much.  Now, I can honestly say sitting on the couch and drinking a beer is one of my favorite activities.  Of course, to my mom, this is the worst development in my life since I told her I wanted to leave Wall Street to become a comedian.  She’s always been like, “Aaron, why can’t you just nurse one beer?”  Now I can finally say, “Mom, I am nursing just one beer.”  It just happens to be at 7pm on a Tuesday for no reason.

-Quick thought: why do beer bottles list the awards they won like four hundred years ago?  It seems like every import I drink won some sort of medal in the 1600s.  Is that really still a selling point?

-To many New York twentysomethings, going out on Friday and Saturday night pales in comparison to the scene during the week.  If you haven’t partied hard on a weekday, I suggest you check it out.  You will not believe what goes on at 3am on a Wednesday at some lounges in this fine city.  Sometimes I’ll just stand back and watch the drunken mass of bodies and wonder, doesn’t anyone here have a job?  And more importantly, where are all you people on the weekend?

-A few weeks ago, I got up at 8am to catch a bus to Boston to watch a Yankees playoff game at Fenway that afternoon.  I realized that I hadn’t been up and out that early since my previous life as an Equity Research Junior Associate (oh yeah, the chicks used to swoon at that title).  What I saw on the street didn’t surprise me.  Exhausted twentysomethings hustling on their way to work, many so tired they could only keep one eye open, most wishing they were anywhere else in the world at that moment.  Many looked hungover as if they had heeded my advice about weekday partying.  As I watched them, I remembered the morning I threw up in a subway trash can only a block away from the office.  Good times.  But as I observed these troopers entering their own offices, I took solace in knowing what would happen next.  They would return to their tiny cubicles, chug a cup of black coffee and, as the clock struck nine to begin another tedious day, turn to their co-worker and say, “I can’t fucking wait until five.”

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

-How many more blades can they possibly add to razors?  I just saw this new one with four blades.  The Mach 5 can’t be far behind.  Of course they just introduced a new Mach 3, which is just the same as the old Mach 3 but in red.  What do they take us for?

-I don’t understand the purpose of DVD reviews.  Isn’t it going to be the same as the movie itself?

-Don’t you find yourself in conversation saying, “Wow, it’s amazing what a small word it is” more and more often these days?  Just once I’d like to hear someone say, “Larry?  Nope, never heard of him.  Boy, this world is HUGE!”

-Who are these people that can’t swim?  I’m always reading about people who can’t swim getting rescued and seeing people drowning on the news and in movies and shit.  Every single person I know can swim.  Maybe not well, but they can at least can float.  It’s really not that difficult people.

-The other day I forgot my wallet when I went out for the day.  Then, I couldn’t remember my best friend’s phone number.  Later, I was having trouble figuring out the tip at a diner.  Then it hit me.  Watching Jessica Simpson on “Newlyweds” is actually making me dumber.

-My sister Caryn went to buy new sneakers to work out in a few weeks ago.  When she picked out the pair she liked, she asked the salesperson if they were suitable for running.  The guy told her that, unfortunately, they were only suitable for “incidental” running.  “Incidental running?” my sister asked, “You mean like if I’m being chased?”  “Exactly,” said the salesperson.  What?  Where did this guy work previously, a cell phone store?

-Doesn’t it seem completely amazing to you that Newton and Leibniz both invented calculus at the same time?  I mean, fucking calculus.  When me and my roommate both had the same idea to have fajitas for dinner one night, we thought we might be psychic or something.

-People who use the word “hella” should be shot.

-It’s getting pretty cold here in New York.  I hope it snows soon.  That way all the trendy chicks in the West Village won’t look so ridiculous with those big fluffy boots they’ve been wearing all summer.

-Well, another Halloween has passed and yet again I did the walk of shame in the wee hours of November 1st looking ridiculous.  Previously, I’ve espoused my first rule of Halloween – that no matter what her costume is supposed to be, every girl basically dresses like a whore.  Now I’d like to add a second rule.  No matter what you’re wearing on Halloween, there will always be one part of your costume that bothers the hell out of you all night.  For me, it was the stupid belt on my army man outfit that kept coming apart.  Given the amount of time I spent at the bar trying to fix my belt instead of hitting on women dressed like whores, it’s astonishing I was able to do the walk of shame at all.

-The beginning of November is also that sort of awkward time in New York when you’re not sure if you should bring a jacket out or not.  You can rationalize that you’re only going from your apartment to a cab to the bar, but somehow you know inevitably you’ll end up wasted and freezing at 4am on some deserted street in Chinatown, so you take one anyway.  I love the art of trying to hide your jacket at a bar instead of checking it.  You’re wrapping it around bar stools, you’re stuffing it behind couches, but no matter what happens, you always find it three hours later on the floor nowhere near where you put it.  If you find it at all.

-The end of the year also brings with it one of the most joyous of traditions – the office holiday party.  You’ve got to love a society where every year we gather to celebrate record-low profit margins and the opportunity to fuck inebriated co-workers.  I always enjoyed standing at the outskirts of the dance floor with my fellow entry-level grunts, blue button-downs rolled up at the sleeves and a Heineken in each hand.  The key was to find any female employee who seemed to be dancing excessively.  Because that, in our Neanderthal minds, meant she was easy.  It’s incredible Wall Street doesn’t just collapse upon itself in stupidity.  More often, anyway.

-Of my last two New Year’s, one I spent in the hospital getting my appendix out and the other I spent in Vegas.  This year, I’m looking for something right in between.  But from now until the end of December, me and my friends will spend hours discussing, arguing, making, and revising our New Year’s plans.  The worst is my friend Claudio.  Every year we make elaborate plans and then he cancels on us at the last minute because he has to celebrate his mom’s birthday.  We’re like, dude, you’ve known the entire year that your mom was born on January 1st, why do you even make plans in the first place?

-Living in New York has one major disadvantage: I’m all but disqualified from playing on “The Price is Right.”  Seriously, I was watching the show the other day while on the treadmill at the gym, and I was so far off on all the prices because everything is so expensive here.  I’m thinking a bottle of detergent is like fifteen bucks and the answer is $3.99.  If I was on the show, I’d have to be that annoying guy who bets one dollar every time so everyone else busts and I win by default.  Still I lament, with all the money I spend at my overpriced drugstore, I may never make it to the Showcase Showdown.

-You know who I hate?  Fake-ass celebrities who go to major sporting events just to be seen on TV and take seats away from the real fans.  But to be honest guys, I don’t really care if you go to the Yankees game, just don’t buy a brand-new Yankees hat just before you get to the stadium that looks ridiculous on you because it’s barely creased and proves to everyone at home that you don’t even follow the team.  Hey Denzel, Calista, Mayor Bloomberg…you suck!!

-Have you ever noticed that if are up late in a really quiet house or apartment, the sounds coming from the door down the hall always sound like people are having sex?  It could be the TV or the stereo or just someone talking on the phone, but for a brief second, your sexual radar pops up.  And of course you creep up to the door to get a better listen but you’re always disappointed when it’s a false alarm.

-Is there anything more annoying than listening to someone who just got a new cell phone scrolling through all of their rings to find the one they want?  I just want to be like, will you just pick Fur Elise and shut the fuck up already?

-To me, finding out that someone uses text messaging on their cell phone is like finding out someone shares your interest in obscure Far Eastern pottery – all of a sudden you have so much more to talk about.  It’s really incredibly addicting and you’d be surprised how, with a little practice, you’ll be able to text “I’m shitbombed” to your friends with only your left thumb…while you’re shitbombed.  It’s also fun to do when you’re bored.  Every once in a while my buddy Jason will send me the most grammatically correct text message, complete with capitalization and punctuation.  When he does, I always text him right back and say, “r u taking a crap right now?”

-Nothing says “I don’t care” like an email response to a phone call.  Ever call a girl and leave a message and then she emails you the next day with the subject “got your message” and some excuse why she couldn’t call you back?  Yeah, well in case you were wondering, that’s girl-code for “Drop dead.”

-Ever put on an old pair of glasses, look at yourself in the mirror, and wonder how in the world you ever wore something so hideous?

-I think instead of calling it Daylight Savings, it should be called “How the fuck did I get that clock up in there in the first place?” Day.

-Is it weird that sometimes when I receive a really nice thank you note, I wonder if maybe I should thank the person for thanking me?

-I only own one suit and I’ve been wearing it forever.  I think I’ve literally worn it to four weddings and funeral.

-And, finally, the other day I was in my gym locker room getting ready to leave.  My lazy ass hadn’t been there in a while, and on top of that it was an especially grueling workout since I kept running into sweaty girls I didn’t want to hug and I had just realized my “Price is Right” shortcomings.  As I was finishing up, I overheard a conversation between two pretty muscular guys in the next row of lockers.  One guy was like, “It was really hard to come to the gym today.”  And I thought to myself, true that man, true that.  Then the other guy was like, “Yeah, especially after you’ve been gone for a while, it’s tough to get back in the swing of things.”  And I thought, yeah dude, I feel you totally.  Then the first guy said, “I’m really sore too, maybe I’ll take tomorrow off from working out.”  And I found myself thinking, maybe I’ll take tomorrow off too.  Boy, these guys are really on to something.  Then as they were walking away, I heard the second guy say to his friend, “See, I told you it takes a while to recover after finishing a triathlon.”  Fuck me.

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-To me, single women in their twenties are like a preseason football game – it may seem like they’re trying to score, but really they just don’t want to get hurt.  On the other hand, single men are like the Super Bowl – they’re always trying to go all the way like it’s the last chance they’ll ever get.  This seemingly small difference in thinking leads to an extraordinary amount of waste generated by single men and women who have absolutely no clue what the other wants.  Money is wasted, time is wasted, and next thing you know it’s 4am on Saturday night and you’re alone…and wasted.  Go to any bar and you’re bound to see the mating ritual happening in pairs – two guys who’ve had two too many drinks circling the outskirts of the dance floor with two dollars combined left in their wallets staring at the two chicks at the bar clutching two overpriced handbags and ordering two more apple martinis.  But don’t worry, you’re not seeing double, you’re seeing single.

-The first decision that single men, like myself, must make is what to bar to go to in order to pick up women.  This decision is usually made over many drinks while pre-gaming with the boys at someone’s apartment.  Inevitably, you decide on a place where one of your buddies “heard there were gonna be a ton of hot chicks.”  That this has never once been true does not deter us.  The fact is, drunk single guys go to annoying bars for the same reasons weary travelers fly into Newark airport – it’s out of the way, it’s inconvenient, but you weren’t thinking straight and it seemed like a good idea at the time.

-The fact that the bars, clubs, and lounges of New York have become the arena for single mating puts guys at a serious disadvantage.  For one thing, we can’t get in unless we’re with girls.  But if we were with girls, we wouldn’t be going in the first place.  This leads to the desperate measure of getting on your cell phone and calling girls that you know are inside to come out and convince the bouncer to let you in.  And when that embarrassing situation is finally over, you get inside and usually head straight for the bathroom – where you are forced to piss in a trough filled with ice.  So I’ve been out of the house for about twenty minutes, I haven’t even hit on anyone yet, and I’ve already been completely emasculated.  I should have just left my balls at home.

-How to Lose a Guy in Ten Seconds at the Bar: tell me how much you enjoy being an investment banker, take a drag off your lipstick-stained Parliament, ask me if your fake ID looks real, mention your boyfriend who just got drafted by the Bears, discuss your opposition to pre-marital sex, order a mixed drink with Diet Coke, ask about the strange rash on your inner thigh, or tell me how you really have to get home tonight…to New Jersey.

-How come women consistently list the number one trait they are looking for in a guy as “sense of humor” but when I say I’m a comedian they look at me like I’m a janitor?

-Single guys have an intricate system for scouring a bar for prospects.  We usually use a two-man formation.  One guy is the designated “wingman” whose primary responsibility is to find and initiate conversations with hot chicks.  Once the wingman has established a position, he transitions his friend into the conversation and then reports back to the other guys.  When describing the attractiveness of a girl to his friends, guys will sometimes use the “beer rule,” which is the number of beers one would have to drink in order to hook up with a girl.  Anyone less than a six-pack is pretty good.  Anyone over a twelve-pack will just make for a funny story the next day.

-I’d say the biggest drawback to being single in New York is that you never get any sleep.  Since the bars are open virtually all night, you end up leaving with a girl at like 3:30am.  You get in a cab, you get back to your place, you start hooking up, and by the time all is said and done, it’s daybreak – so much for your one-night stand.  In other cities I’ve partied in lately, like LA, Philly and Boston, last call is at 1:30am.  You’re home with a girl by 2:30am and sleeping soundly by four while your buddies in New York are still pissing in troughs.

-I have to admit, now that I’m unemployed, I kind of like doing the walk of shame during the week.  I think because it reminds me of my childhood.  You know, the girl is trying unsuccessfully to get me out of bed while simultaneously getting ready for work.  I’m cranky, my hair is a mess, she’s putting her make-up on, and I’m eating snacks out of the fridge.  It’s just like getting ready for elementary school!

-At about 4:30am on the streets of Manhattan, you will see dozens of single guys walking solemnly down the sidewalk, their constitutions broken, their shirts ruffled, and their wallets empty.  They have left the bar without hooking up and are now trudging back to their tiny apartments alone.  I call these unfortunate men the “Lost Souls.”  I have been a Lost Soul many a night.  I usually use this time to ponder life’s great mysteries.  Like how come everyone likes Coldplay so much?  What exactly is cilantro?  Why do M&Ms and Budweiser even bother advertising?  What ever happened to Pras from the Fugees?  Did I leave the Foreman grill plugged in?  Man, I think I need a girlfriend.

-In my group of friends, I am the highest-ranking single guy (meaning I have been single the longest).  That means it is my duty to prevent my buddies who have girlfriends from becoming totally whipped.  I feel like I am losing this battle.  You know you’re losing your friends to their girlfriends when they all start hanging out together as couples.  My roommate Brian and his girlfriend had a dinner party a few weeks ago with a bunch of other couples.  I overheard him on the phone talking to one of the guys and he actually said, “But my girlfriend likes red wine and yours likes white, what should we do?  I guess I’ll just bring an appetizer then.”  I swear if he didn’t pay half the rent I would have killed him right then and there.

-Of course, I gave up on my roommate a long time ago.  It started harmlessly enough, with a Post-it note.  When his girlfriend left the apartment one morning, she left him a little Post-it note that said something like “I love you.  Have a great day!”  OK, so that was pretty lame but I let it slide.  Then I found another note the next day that read “I love you.  Have a great day! XOXO.”  The next day, the note didn’t even have any words, it just said “XOXOXOXO.”  Just when I thought things couldn’t get any worse, they did.  I discovered it on a Tuesday, on his desk under a pile of love notes.  A mix tape.  They’re making mix tapes for each other.  Each one has a different “mood” when it’s supposed to be played.  Hmm, I wonder which one I should play when I’m feeling like my roommate is a pussy.

-Those of my friends who are still single have started to diversify themselves a little bit.  My buddy Claudio has been hooking up with a thirty-five-year-old marketing executive.  I asked him how the sex was.  He said, “Who cares, she’s a vice president!”

-Meanwhile, I’ve been trying to hit on the models in my acting class.  For some reason, though, they all have boyfriends.  And those boyfriends are forty-two.  And millionaires.  And used to play for the Bears.

-Quote of the Month.  As I said at the beginning of this column, I think that single women are way too afraid of getting hurt, when they should just be trying to have a good time, like guys do.  For example, my buddy Shermdog was telling me about this girl that he hooked up with twice.  All of a sudden she said she couldn’t see him anymore.  When he asked her why, she said she was worried he was going to break her heart.  “Break her heart?”  Seth said to me over a couple of beers, “How am I going to break her heart?  I don’t even know what I’m having for lunch.”

-Guys have a few steadfast rules when it comes to the opposite sex.  Our first rule is never go out on a date on a weekend night if you’re not sure you’re going to hook up.  If things go sour, you’ve wasted 50% of primetime for nothing.  Second, never break up with your girlfriend, no matter how much it’s not working, if you have some sort of temporary disability, such as a broken wrist.  You’ll need someone to work the remote while you’re laid up.  Finally, once you hook up with a girl, whatever you did in bed is reasonably expected to be the minimum of what you do the next time.  Listen, I don’t make the rules, I just follow them!

-I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised that single men and women have such a hard time getting along.  We’re just so different.  Girls dream about meeting that one great love.  Guys fantasize about the Olsen twins and the Hilton sisters…at the same time.  Girls have all the pictures they have ever taken in their lives organized by genre on Ofoto.  Guys say they’ll make doubles of that picture of you puking on yourself but never actually do.  Girls spend their free time shopping for shoes, hair products, and non-fat frozen yogurt.  Guys spend their free time deciding who to play at wide receiver on their fantasy football team when the Vikings have a bye week.  Girls spend all of their hard-earned money on shoes, hair products, and non-fat frozen yogurt.  Guys spend of all their hard-earned money trying to have sex with girls.  So I guess there’s really only one thing we can agree on – we all love watching “The OC.”

-In the end, being a single guy is both strange and unpredictable.  Like sometimes I’ll go to run on the treadmill at the gym and find that no one is around but that all of the TVs have been mysteriously tuned to “The View,” almost like some girl is trying to brainwash me.  Other times I’ll be pissing in a trough at the bar and feeling kind of down on myself, when I see another single guy using water from the sink to style his hair.  When I realize that this is my competition, I don’t feel so bad anymore.  So I leave the bathroom, tip the attendant a single, and go find my single buddies at the bar.  When the bartender comes my way, I take one look at all the beautiful single women around me and say, “Hey, make that a double.”

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

-When you call someone on their cell phone and they say, “I’m home, let me just call you right back on my regular phone,” why does it always take like 100 seconds for them to call you back?  All they have to do is put down the cell phone and pick up the other phone.  I don’t understand why this takes a minute and half to do.

-Don’t you think that optical illusions are pretty much obsolete?  I mean, think about it, when was the last time you were fooled by an optical illusion?  If someone gives me something and says, “Hey, check out these optical illusions,” I’m pretty sure that both of the lines are the same size even though one looks longer.  Otherwise, what would be the point?

-My cousin Daniel is two years old.  I have absolutely no concept of what his abilities should be at this point.  I was thinking he’d be potty trained and working on multiplication tables by now.  In reality, he watches “Dora the Explorer” all day while shitting himself.

-Have your parents reached that age where they’re not yet retired but they don’t really seem to work anymore?  When they’re not on vacation, they’re taking days off like they run the place.  And they have the nerve to make fun of me for being unemployed.

-What the hell is the point of forty-second shock protection on a Discman?  It really makes no sense.  Have you ever hit a bump that lasted 40 seconds?

-Why do cities have welcome signs that list both population and elevation?  I mean, I understand how population could possibly be relevant, but who cares about elevation?  Am I going to go, hey, Burbank is 485 feet above sea level, I better slip this puppy into third gear!

-On one of my favorite shows on television, “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” they’re always discussing the cut-off time for calling people at night.  It’s generally recognized as 10 or 10:30pm, with special extensions for birth or death.  Twentysomethings’ rules are a little more lax.  We can pretty much call each other until 1am on a weekday, with special extensions if you have a really funny story about hooking up with a girl rated above a twelve-pack.  The more important cut-off time is how early you can call a twentysomething on a weekend morning.  I don’t even turn my phone on until noon.  But for some reason, my parents always try to call me at 9am.  Maybe because they have nothing better to do.

-How come when I buy something that I think I might not want or that is from a less than reliable source, do I put it on my American Express card and feel better about it?  For some reason I feel like American Express is my defense against all evil in the world and that if I buy something I shouldn’t have, Amex will make it all better.

-Why does Snoop Dogg spell out his name in every single song?  We know there’s a “double-g” Snoop, you’ve told us a hundred times.

-Memo to dudes who gel their hair up into a little mohawk: see, that was cool like way back in the day, then it was out for a while, then it came back.  And now that you’re doing it, well, I think it’s pretty safe to say it’s lame again.

-Memo to former contestants on the “Bachelor” and “Bachelorette”: you’re not interesting because you were on a lame reality show…and lost.  Stop trying to use your D-list celebrity status to get laid.  It’s not working.

-Memo to electronics store salespeople: if I ask you a technical question and all you do is read off what it says on the back of the box, you are not adding value.  In fact, you are subtracting it.  Please leave and find someone who is not an ignorant jackass.

-Memo to people who email me asking me to join Friendster: I already have a network of friends.  They’re called my friends.  Clearly you are not one of them.

-I’m twenty-four years old and a little bit more than two years out of college.  What is the significance of this time in my life?  It means that all of my shit is breaking.  Everything that I had in college that I took with me to New York because I thought it had a few more years left in it is starting to go.  My TV doesn’t work, I had to buy a new stereo, my computer is outdated, my jeans are falling apart, my t-shirts are so worn-out I don’t even separate colors from whites when doing laundry anymore, my rug has holes, my couch is sagging, my entertainment center leans to the left, and my coffee table has three legs.  It’s like everything from IKEA spontaneously combusts after five years.

-But there is nothing that I’ve spent more money fixing in the past year than my cell phone.  I swear the thing is like a used car, every few months something breaks and it costs a lot more than you expected to get it up and running again.  I should have known it was time to get a new phone last week when the battery died…while it was plugged into the charger.

-When I’m filling up a car with gas, why do I try to round the price to an even number when I’m paying with a credit card anyway?

-Have you noticed that the gels, lotions, and shampoos found in women’s’ bathrooms always come in some sort of scent that doesn’t actually exist in nature?  It’s like vanilla grapefruit, green tea blackberry, and mango teriyaki.  Doesn’t that freak you out a little?

-By the way, I now have a regular advice column in Seventeen magazine.  I’m not kidding, starting this month I’ll be educating impressionable young girls on all the nuances of college life.  Hey, as a recovering frat boy, it’s the least I could do.

-I don’t quite know why, but I just hate people who put bumper stickers on their cars.  It just seems so pointless to me, like seeing your political views while I’m stuck in traffic is going to change my opinion.  Maybe it speaks to the unity of this great country.  Because whether you’re for the war or against it, we’re all still dumb enough to deface our fenders for no reason.

-I’m convinced that hanging a wrinkled shirt in the bathroom while a steaming shower is running does absolutely nothing.  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve tried it and all I’ve gotten was a soaking wet shirt.  Who comes up with this shit?

-Other things I just don’t get: how do stadiums that have been around for fifty years set new attendance records, are they putting new seats in the bathroom or something?  Why do two people who are speaking a foreign language in the subway always sound like they are arguing when they’re probably just discussing the weather?  What are those extra four digits that come after the dash in your zip code and how come 99% of the population never uses them?  What is the point of the culture expert on “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy”?  Do motorcycles have radios?  Where do valets actually park your car?  And why do people who read this column feel the need to email me with the answers to my clearly rhetorical questions?

-Sometimes I do things that make no sense.  For instance, even though I had laser eye surgery eight months ago, I refuse to get rid of the boxes and boxes of contact lenses that are clogging my medicine cabinet.  But I’m still amazed at the stupidity of others.  You would not believe how many times over the past eight months I’ve told people that I have 20/15 vision now and the response was, “Oh wow, but how come the surgery can’t make it perfect?”  Um, asshole, 20/15 is BETTER than 20/20!

-I bet that in the last two years you lost a pair of sunglasses.  And you were really pissed because they were pretty expensive and really annoyed at yourself for losing them.

-And, finally, a while back I went to see the third American Pie movie.  It couldn’t have been a more gloomy experience.  First of all, I was home on Long Island to go to the engagement party of my first high school friend to get married, a very sobering event.  Then, I had to go to the movie by myself because all of my friends had already seen it without me.  So now I’m depressed because I’m thinking about getting old and married, plus I obviously have no friends otherwise I wouldn’t be at the movies alone (maybe I should join Friendster).  As the previews began, a couple of junior high kids whose parents were clearly not with them came down the aisle and tapped me on the shoulder.  “Good,” I thought to myself, “I can’t be that old and uncool if these guys still think I’m approachable.”  I thought wrong.  “Excuse me, sir,” the first kid said, “This movie is rated R and we snuck in.  Since you’re alone, if the security guard comes by, will you say you’re our dad?”  Fuck me.

HOME

-A little over two years ago, at the end of my senior year of college, I started to feel like I needed a change.  After all, for the past several years, I had been hanging out with the same fifteen people every day.  We all went to the same bar, the same movie theater, and the same deli.  I was ready to graduate and move on.  So I moved to Manhattan where I now live within a ten-block radius of my entire crew from high school and about a dozen fraternity brothers.  We all go to the same bar, the same movie theater, and the same deli.  In other words, besides the 400% increase in my rent, not much has changed.  While I was initially disheartened by this stagnancy, I soon learned that being surrounded by old friends isn’t a bad thing.  In fact, having a lot of friends around actually makes it easier to meet new people.  And those new people sometimes know cute chicks.  And that’s a very good thing.  In the daunting streets of New York City, your friends are all you’ve got.  Each one serves a specific purpose – some to make you laugh, some to get you drunk, and some to get you laid.  Taken together, your friends form an intricate support network of checks and balances, from wingmen to designated drivers.  I call this well-oiled machine the Buddy System.

-My friend Claudio is a bad-introducer.  I’ll be standing next to Claudio at the bar having a beer and a succession of girls will come up, kiss him on the cheek, and make small talk, but he doesn’t even acknowledge me.  It’s like for three minutes, I no longer exist, then the girl leaves and I reappear.  Unlike me, Claudio is friendly and nice, so he knows tons of people.  But I’ve never met any of them.

-My friend Eric is a shit-talker.  These are the guys that are incapable of telling you a story without exaggerating.  When you become close enough friends with a shit-talker, you learn to discount everything he claims by 75%.  So if Eric claims he got a $20,000 raise and slept with four chicks last week, I know he only got a $5,000 raise and hooked up with one chick.  Tops.

-One drawback of the Buddy System is the constant amount of peer pressure being placed on you.  For instance, over the past year, I’ve partied like a wild animal in Manhattan, South Beach, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Mardi Gras, and Rio de Janeiro.  I’ve spent thousands of dollars on martinis and Michelobs.  I’ve hooked up a lot and been shot down even more.  I’ve thrown up on myself and others.  But when one of my friends calls me at midnight on a rainy Tuesday night to see if I want to grab a beer and I decline, the response is always the same: “Pussy.”

-In several past columns, I’ve mentioned my high school buddies who are fraternal triplets.  I thought I’d take a moment to elaborate on these characters, who I refer to by their birth order.  Triplet #1 is a consultant who spends most of his free time watching the World Series of Poker on ESPN.  He has an extensive collection of twenty-dollar Movados and Rolexes that he buys off the street.  Triplet #1 also has the biggest cell phone I have ever seen, complete with a digital camera that takes pictures that never come out.  He never cleans his plate and is currently single.  Triplet #2 is an investment banker with an enormous head.  Literally.  His skull is so large he needed to get a specially made helmet shipped in from Taiwan to play football in junior high.  In high school, he fainted in Health class while watching “If These Walls Could Talk.”  Triplet #2 is also a karaoke microphone-hogger, refusing to let anyone else participate as he belts Tracy Chapman songs from memory at the top of his lungs.  He suffers from low-grade narcolepsy, always cleans his plate, and is also currently single.  Triplet #3 is a med student who has a serious girlfriend.  Because of that lethal combination, I hang out with him the least of the three.  Medicine is obviously in his blood.  In high school, when an inebriated friend tripped and hurt his ankle, he rushed to scene yelling, “Everyone out of the way, I know what I’m doing – my uncle is an orthopedic surgeon!”  Triplet #3 has great hair, still lives at home, and is fond of stealing Triplet #1’s fake watches.  Some people ask me, “Karo, how do you remember who was born first?”  That’s easy, their initials are on their mom’s license plate in birth order.  Triplet #2 isn’t allowed to sit in the back though, his head gets in the way.

-My friend Chi is an unnecessary drink-buyer.  When 4am rolls around at the bar and you’re nauseous and bloated, you can count on Chi to order two double rounds of the most disgusting shots available.  Chi is also my male friend with the least knowledge of sports and holds the distinction of being the only person I know who used all his cell phone minutes for the month in one night by passing out drunk while on the phone with someone.  I guess he shouldn’t have taken that extra shot.

-The linchpin of the Buddy System, the place where it all begins and ends, is of course, the roommate.  While Brian and I have been friends for about fifteen years now, we have not yet tired of trying to one-up each other.  In fact, our relationship is defined by competition.  In our junior year of high school, I completely bombed a math test.  Brian has kept my test for eight years, and it now hangs on the refrigerator of our apartment.  We once took an IQ test to determine who was smarter.  When he beat me by a point, I declared the results null and void, seeing as his mom, who scored the test, was more biased than a French ice skating judge.  And last year we made a handshake agreement that if either one of us ever won the lottery, we’d split it with the other.  This was not to increase our chances of winning, but rather to ensure that neither of us would have an unfair advantage in the race to get rich first.  I mean, I love the kid, but I ain’t going out like that.

-Brian is a meal-describer.  Meaning that when he comes home from dinner, I get a detailed, play-by-play account of everything he ate: “Karo, you should have seen this sandwich I had, man.  It came on a semolina roll with the mozzarella melted just right.  The chicken was topped with red onions, bell peppers and…”  I’m like dude, will you shut the fuck up, I’m trying to watch VH1 here.  Of course, my efforts are in vain, because Brian is a connoisseur of all things culinary.  He once almost got into a fistfight with his girlfriend’s parents during a friendly game of Scattergories because he insisted olive loaf was a food that started with the letter “O.”  And after inspecting a new gourmet bakery that opened up down the block, he stormed out declaring he would never return.  When I asked him why, he said, “They can’t fool me, those are store-bought croutons, I can tell by the texture.”  Brian loves Wow Chips, family-style restaurants, a lemon slice in his ice water and, appropriately enough, his plate-cleaning abilities put Triplet #2 to shame.

-Quote of the Month.  Despite the shit I give him on a daily basis, Brian has always been there for me, even when I don’t need him.  When we first moved to the city, we went out drinking to celebrate.  At one point in the night, some idiot starting fucking with me.  We got into a bit of a shoving match until cooler heads prevailed, at least temporarily.  Brian, seeing the altercation from afar but not seeing that we had already quashed the fight, came flying across the room and, in a fit of drunken friendship, clocked my adversary in the face.  The melee that ensued spilled out into the street and resulted in Brian fighting two kids at once in a pile of New York City curbside garbage bags.  When the dust settled, Brian looked down to see that his watch had fallen off, and this wasn’t a twenty-dollar Rolex that Triplet #1 would buy.  Hearing of the fight, the rest of our friends converged from around the city, but by that time the only thing left to do was search the trash for the expensive watch.  As I picked up yet another disgusting garbage bag, I asked, “Brian, what does your watch look like?”  Brian, with blood on his face, looked at me incredulously and said, “Karo, you asshole, if you find a watch, chances are it’s mine.”

-Despite Brian’s heroics, there was no greater test of the Buddy System than the blackout that shut down Manhattan three weeks ago.  Here’s what really went down.  When the lights first went out, I had no idea what had happened.  Probably because in true unemployed fashion, I was lying face down on the couch at the time.  I only figured it out when Brian and Chi showed up at the apartment after being sent home from work.  Now many news reports praised New Yorkers for pitching in to help during the crisis by directing traffic and evacuating the elderly.  Not us.  We grabbed some flip-flops and a flashlight and headed straight to Hook & Ladder, a local bar owned and operated by firefighters.  There, New York’s bravest served their city by dispensing the only cold beer for blocks.  Several more of our friends soon joined the festivities, some carrying battery-operated shower radios as our only means of getting information.  The local news told us to avoid using any expendable resources but that the Mets game at Shea would go on as planned.  We all thought, what’s more expendable than the Mets?  As nightfall descended and with a steady buzz going, we returned home to find that although all of the high-rise doorman buildings in our neighborhood were equipped with emergency exits, those stairwells did not have backup lighting, thus making ascent nearly impossible in the dark.  To prevent injury, no one was allowed back inside for some time.  My twentysomething brethren were undeterred however, and spilled out into the darkened streets and courtyards to hang out, drink beer, smoke weed, and play music.  It was sort of like an impromptu Jewish Woodstock.  When finally allowed back inside, I made the climb to my roof to see what the famous Manhattan skyline looked like when pitch black.  To my surprise, this once-in-a-lifetime view was ruined, as Triplet #2’s nearby investment bank was fully lit, no doubt powered by the steady pedaling of first-year analysts in the basement.  The next day, Brian and I wandered the streets, starving because we had spent all of our cash on lukewarm 16-ounce cans of Budweiser and ATMs still weren’t working.  But as the lights began to flicker on, our friends around the city were quick to offer us food and air conditioning.  And when power was finally fully restored, I took stock of what had happened during the previous 28 hours.  Claudio got laid.  Eric said he did too, but he was probably just talking shit.  Chi spent the afternoon tanning on his girlfriend’s roof while Triplet #3 spent it studying reproductive endocrinology.  Triplet #1 got flashed Mardi Gras-style but the picture he took with his camera-phone didn’t come out.  As for me and Brian, with nothing else to do we almost came to blows over the board game Guess Who? (recommended age: eight).  And so I learned that although you can’t trust the nation’s power grid, there’s one network that’s always there when you need it – the Buddy System.

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

-A lot of times when I fill out a form or something, I’m told to keep one copy for my records.  Uh, what records?

-I think that when people leave a list of reasons why they called you on your voicemail, the last one is always the real reason.  You know it’s like, “Hey Karo, yeah, um, just calling for a few reasons.  First of all, just wanted to see what’s up, haven’t spoken to you in a while.  Also, I heard you did a stand-up show last night, wanted to see how that went.  Oh yeah, also, um, I was just wondering, do you think I can crash at your apartment next week?”  Could you be any more obvious?

-Have you noticed that nothing ever gets done in the American economy after May?  I feel like in every industry I’ve worked in, from Wall Street to Hollywood, people are always using holidays as excuses.  It’s like “Yeah, well Memorial Day is coming soon so we can’t meet then, and after that the summer starts and people start going away, and the week of July 4th is totally shot, and right after that is Labor Day and I’m not available, and then it’s hard to schedule a meeting around Columbus Day, and next thing you know it’s Thanksgiving and then Christmas and so we’ll just have to get back to you in January.”

-Sometimes I wonder what percentage of all the mail the U.S. Postal Service delivers in a day is unsolicited credit card applications.  I must get at least twenty a week.  And I love when there’s fake “handwriting” on the envelope that is supposed to be a personal note imploring you to open it.  Are people actually falling for this shit?

-I hate talking to people in the morning.  Luckily, by the time I wake up, my roommate is long gone.  I usually get up, check my email, throw on my headphones, and head to the gym.  When I get back from the gym, I check my email again, maybe buy some shit online, and then shut my phone off and lie face down on the couch for a while.  Some days I can go almost ten hours without speaking to a soul.  And you know what?  I really don’t mind it.

-It bothers me that all sports video game commercials show the game in “replay mode,” you know where all the players look so big and life-like and they’re high-fiving each other and doing end zone dances?  But the real game is never really like that.  In fact, you spend most of your time hitting the start button to skip over all the replays and touchdown celebrations.  All I’m looking for is a little truth-in-advertising here.

-Listen people, if you don’t know how to use a computer, stay off the fucking Internet.  For instance, people who have the time on their computer set wrong so that their emails to you say they were sent like October 21st, 2016, so no matter when it was actually sent it always shows up in your inbox as the most recent message.  Then you have the people who don’t include your original message when they email you back and therefore you have no fucking clue what they’re talking about when they respond only with “Yes.” three weeks later.  And of course you have the people that send you pictures they’ve taken with their digital camera except they haven’t shrunken them and the files are huge and they send you like twelve of them thereby clogging your inbox and preventing you from receiving emails from all the other idiots.

-I’ve gotten a lot emails lately from people who lived in New York this summer for the first time.  They told me about what an amazing time they had and about all the museums and attractions they saw and incredible restaurants they ate at and all the unusual people they met and how they couldn’t wait to move here.  And I thought to myself, how come I live here year-round and never do any of that?

-Memo to the citizens of California: all this absurdity regarding the gubernatorial recall election has only confirmed what those of us here in New York were already thinking – you people are out of your mother-fucking minds.

-Memo to the club owners of New York: what is the point of having an exclusive VIP room in the back if there’s no bar or bathroom?  Seems to me like the rest of the bar has all the perks.

-Memo to guys who propose to their girlfriends on the scoreboard at baseball games: could you be any more unoriginal?  Can’t you think of anything more romantic than popping the question while thousands of drunken slobs yell from the bleachers, “Say no!”

-Memo to people who only take small amounts of money from the ATM at a time so that they won’t spend as much: what’s the point if you’re just going to run out of money and then borrow from me?  I think I’m going to start charging a fee.

-Memo to people who ask for a “taste” of ice cream before deciding what to order: what the fuck is wrong with you?  These flavors are not new, they’re just combinations of other flavors you’ve already tried.  Besides, you look like an idiot slurping out of that miniature Dixie cup anyway.

-Memo to people who haven’t been to the dentist since college: do you still need your mom to schedule your appointments?  Stop eating that ice cream and get off your ass!

-Watching MTV leading up to last week’s Video Music Awards was just painful.  Because every single goddamn show from late July on was about the VMAs: “Best of the VMAs,” “Worst of the VMAs,” “Things You Didn’t Know About the VMAs,”  “Things You Don’t Care About the VMAs.”  Enough is enough already guys.  Oh and by the way, 50 Cent, listen man, we get it.  You’re a pimp.  Now let’s move on.

-After a long flight, when you put your seat back in its upright position, doesn’t it seem like you’re so far forward your body is actually at an acute angle?

-Have you ever cut the price tag off of a pair of pants and the little plastic “T” that was holding the tag on the inside just disappears?  Where does it go?  I think that when I move out, I’ll find a little hidden nook somewhere in my apartment filled with plastic Ts, missing socks, stray Cheerios, and the original stylus that came with my Palm Pilot.

-It’s pretty amazing to me, but my sister Caryn can actually tell which episode of Friends is on by only watching the first six seconds of the show.  The credits will roll, Phoebe will walk in the room, and before she even says anything my sister is like, “This is the one where Joey’s tailor molests him!”

-Is there really any point to a martini glass?  Are we that obsessed with cool-looking glasses?  I mean, is it possible to drink a martini without spilling it all over your hand or to buy a martini for a girl and bring it over to her without losing half the contents on the walk over?  I think “martini run-off” is one of most serious problems facing twentysomethings these days.  Something must be done!

-As I write this, it has instantaneously become fall in New York – it’s already freezing outside.  Great, so the summer was like six days long.  You watched some fireworks, ate a burger, saw someone propose at a Yankees game, and next thing you know it’s snowing and everyone is wearing stupid-ass wool Von Dutch hats.

-Have you ever gone home to visit your parents and then had to perform a task that you didn’t pack for?  On Labor Day, I went home to Long Island and decided to go for a run but hadn’t brought home any of my workout gear.  So I dug up a decrepit Walkman and a pair of foam headphones stolen from American Airlines.  I listened to a mix tape that I made in junior high that featured “Damn I Wish I Was Your Lover” by Sophie B. Hawkins and “Tennessee” by Arrested Development.  Then I headed to my high school track wearing a Bat Mitzvah t-shirt, a pair of Umbros, and my old Nike Bo Jackson sneakers.  It was not a pretty sight.

-The other day I actually read the articles in Playboy.  They’re not bad.

-I love how I look at the Nutrition Facts on a box of food like I have any idea what I’m reading.  I’m like, ooh, 50% of my recommended daily intake of Riboflavin?  I’ll take two!

-And, finally, as a Wharton grad, me and my buddies from college always keep a close eye on our classmates to see how they’ve fared since graduation.  I was recently talking to one of my friends who is in the know in order to get the inside scoop.  I asked about one guy I knew from school and he told me that he was trading bonds for Lehman Brothers.  Then I asked about another classmate, and he told me he had just started at a hedge fund.  Given that I thought my slothful comedian lifestyle trumped both of those career paths, I was feeling pretty darn good about myself.  Then I asked, “And what about that kid that used to sit behind us in Venture Capital class, you know with the long hair?”  “Oh him,” my friend replied, “He’s dating Lara Flynn Boyle.”  Fuck me.

HOME

-To me, summer in New York City is like going through puberty.  Beforehand, you’re both apprehensive and excited about what lies ahead.  Then, you don’t even realize it’s underway until halfway through when you start breaking out and can’t stop thinking about girls.  And when it’s all over, your memory of what actually happened is fuzzy, the frequent awkward moments replaced forever in your mind with sporadic instances of glory.  The summer is a time when twentysomethings are on a voracious prowl for all things new – that bigger apartment, that sweeter job and, of course, that next piece of ass.  Hell, it’s August and even Kobe Bryant and Harry Potter can’t keep their hands to themselves.  Summer of Love?  No way.  It’s the Summer of Lust.

-Guys on the streets of New York this summer are not looking or peeking or glancing or gazing at women, they are full-out gawking.  I don’t know if it’s because we’re horny or because your thong is showing, but ladies, I’ll be the first to admit it – we have lost all semblance of self-control.  If it wasn’t for the hordes of yellow-shirted Greenpeace volunteers clogging the sidewalks, I swear we’d be running around unchecked, accosting every blonde with a pulse and a low-riding terrycloth sweatsuit.

-Meeting women this summer has taken on an additional twist.  The fact that college kids two years younger than me just graduated, combined with the fact that there are tons of summer interns in the city right now has produced one very weird experience: hanging out with my friends’ younger sisters.  The situation is always the same.  I’ll be hanging out a bar and I’ll meet a cute girl that looks vaguely familiar.  She seems to know me yet I can’t figure it out.  Then the kicker: “Oh I’m Mike’s sister, I met you when I visited the fraternity house four years ago.”  I immediately think, “Oh shit,” then excuse myself, throw cold water on my face and get the hell out of there!

-There have been some marked changes in the New York nightlife scene over the past few months.  For instance, the new “in” spot at the bar is no longer the VIP room in the back or the tables near the front.  No, the new “in” spot is actually outside the bar and around the corner, where flocks of hopelessly addicted chain-smokers huddle in deference to the new smoking ban.  The landscape has changed such that by taking a brief cab ride down Park Avenue South, you can actually tell which lounges are most happening by the size of the nearby smoke cloud.  It’s pretty pathetic.

-And who can forget the phoenix-like rise this summer of the phenomenon known simply as “guest bartending”?  Here’s how it works: some chick you’re somewhat friendly with mass emails everyone in her address book, inexplicably CC’ing everyone instead of BCC’ing, which results in the inevitable reply-to-all clusterfuck.  Her message?  She’s “guest bartending,” so everyone should drop everything, call all their high school friends, college friends and camp friends, and come to some lounge recently rated by Zagat as “consistently abominable.”  There, forty sweaty bankers in blue button-downs with black attache bags slung across their shoulders clamor at the undersized bar while the guest-bartending girl flails clumsily with the soda gun and serves way-too-strong drinks for free with a wink and a smile that shames you into tipping her five bucks anyway.  I think I’ll pass.

-Because I’m the kind of guy that watches ESPNEWS during commercials of SportsCenter, I’ve inadvertently been inundated with Kobe Bryant coverage.  While watching this spectacle, the only thing that I could think of was that I have never once been unfaithful to any of my past girlfriends.  Cheating just seems like such a pain in the ass to me.  What with all the lurking and sneaking and lying.  I get tired just thinking about it.  Besides, who has time for adultery these days?

-This summer’s other most famous hornball is, of course, Harry Potter.  Millions of people, myself included, devoured Book #5 to see if Harry would finally get in Cho Chang’s pants.  Now I won’t reveal what happens, but I do have one complaint.  J.K., darling, honey, you’re a fabulous author, but do the British know the meaning of succinct?  Do you know what it’s like to carry around a 900-page hardcover?  I couldn’t even read in bed because every time I rested the book on my stomach, I felt like I had to take a piss.

-This is the time of year when many college grads and out-of-towners move to the Big Apple.  And that means finding an apartment.  And that means dealing with one of the country’s most notorious swindlers: the New York City apartment broker.  Never have such a collection of poorly trained charlatans controlled such important assets.  Here’s a typical conversation between a newly minted Ivy League grad from the Midwest and her rapidly balding broker: “I’ve got an amazing apartment for you, you’ll love it.”  “Really?  In the East Village?”  “No, it’s a little farther uptown, uh, Upper West Side actually.  But it’s sick, I promise.”  “Um, OK, it’s a three-bedroom though, right?”  “It’s actually a studio…but it’s huge!  You’ll love it, I promise.”  “Uh, OK, how much is it?”  “It’s a little out of your price range but we can always negotiate.  Why don’t you just come see it?  It’s unbelievable.  I’m telling you, it’s got like five exposures, beautiful hardwood floors, it’s sick.”  “Sounds great.  You’ve seen it before, right?”  “Well…actually, no.”

-These days, when you’re really in a crunch to find a new place or a new roommate, no one ever really helps you out, they just suggest you use the web.  “Hey, didn’t you say you knew someone who was looking for a roommate?”  “Uh, maybe, uh, I don’t know, uh, I’m kinda busy.  Did you check craigslist?”  Lazy bastards.

-And if you’re not looking for a new apartment this summer, chances are you’re looking for a new job.  After a year or two of mind-numbing tedium, you’ve convinced yourself that there’s got to be a better cubicle out there somewhere, so you clandestinely start putting together your resume.  Writing your resume boils down to one thing: making the dumbass shit you do sound impressive.  “Did” becomes “utilized,” “helped” becomes “facilitated,” “boss’s dry cleaning” becomes “value-added relationship management.”  When I was on Wall Street, I used to love reading the resumes of frat boys like myself.  Because I knew that “fraternity treasurer” really means “beer purchaser and money launderer.”

-After you’ve adjusted the margins on your resume for the twentieth time and have finally sent it out and gone on interview after interview, nothing is worse than waiting for “them” to get back to you.  Ask any job-seeking twentysomething how their search is going and they’ll always tell you the same thing: “I think I’m pretty close to getting something, I’m just waiting for them to get back to me.”  I hate “them.”  “Them” cowers behind an anonymous assistant every time you call.  “Them” makes you endure the cruel and unusual process of interviewing for a job without knowing how much it pays.  “Them” is leading you on even though “them’s” niece who just graduated from Penn State has the position all locked up.  You know what I say?  Fuck them.

-Nothing makes my day like receiving a corporate farewell email.  After “them” finally gives your co-worker a new job and when he’s done taking down all his Dilbert cartoons and stealing stacks of Post-it notes, the only thing left to do before leaving is write a mass goodbye email.  Through thinly veiled euphemisms like “incredible learning experience,” “keep in touch,” and “warm regards,” you can almost feel the undeniable hatred toward everyone in the office.  And unlike guest bartending, this is one email that is always BCC’ed.

-Unfortunately, the summer is also when New York is besieged by tourists.  I fucking hate tourists.  Actually, let me qualify that statement.  I only hate tourists because some New Yorkers are so dumb that they can’t tell the difference between tourists and regular people.  I’ll be walking in midtown, minding my own business, when a red-vested asshole will tap me on the shoulder and ask, “Excuse me, sir, would you like a double-decker bus tour of the city?”  Hmm…let me think about that…do I mother-fucking look like I want a double-decker tour of the city?  Do you see a digital camera on me?  Am I wearing a yellow Yankees cap or unusually high tube socks?  Why don’t you try asking the twenty dudes from Kansas behind you who are actually taking pictures of the bus?

-And just in case you’re new to the city and can’t spot the tourists, they usually come in groups of four: the father is slightly overweight and sports a moustache, the mother is holding a map and wearing a visor, the son is holding on to his mom’s leg and whining, and the daughter is dressed strangely slutty for someone her age.  Oh, and by the way people, a blinking “Don’t Walk” signal means GO!  The only reason you should be waiting on the corner is if you’re a police cadet or a seeing-eye dog.

-Though only a month remains in the Summer of Lust, I feel like a lot has happened already.  For instance, I discussed with my friends for days on end where we should go for a long weekend, though inevitably we’ll end up never leaving the city.  I went fishing with three buddies and no one wanted to rub sun tan lotion on each other, so we all got third-degree scalds on our backs.  I argued with my roommate over whether we should itemize our astronomical air-conditioning bill because I’m home all day but he has a more powerful model.  And I received dozens of angry emails from strangely optimistic Red Sox fans promising me that this is “our year.”  But when Labor Day comes and autumn is upon us, I’ll take solace in the fact that of all the beautiful things to gawk at year-round on the streets of New York, for my money nothing beats a brunette in a wife-beater on a hot summer day.

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

-Are there any accidents not caused by overturned tractor-trailers?

-Much to my father’s chagrin, another summer has passed without me taking up golf.  I try to explain to him that it’s not that I don’t like the sport itself, it’s just that it involves my two least favorite activities: getting up early and being outside when it’s hot.

-My friend Zach is a long-message-leaver.  When I check my voicemail and I hear it’s him, I know I’m in it for the long haul.  He’s telling stories, he’s making plans, he’s telling me about this movie he saw, he’s changing the plans, he’s answering his landline, he’s leaving his number even though I already have it.  And he wonders why I don’t call him back.

-Does anyone ever actually use the vosotros form in Spanish?

-You know I’ve never once used a semicolon in my life?  I’m not really sure how they work, and when Word puts one in automatically it always looks so weird so I delete it and use a comma instead.

-For some reason I always get screwed with the seating arrangements at big dinners.  If it’s a big round table, then everyone has an equal opportunity to make and be part of the conversation.  But I always show up late when there’s a rectangular table and all the good seats at the midpoints of each side are taken so I end up all the way at one end next to the guy that nobody knows, desperately trying to listen in to figure out why everyone in the middle is laughing and hope it’s not about me.

-And speaking of restaurants, I hate when you are sitting around with some buddies casually having a few beers and the waitress comes over and your friends order another beer.  The waitress inevitably looks to you to see if you want another one too.  You look to your beer and see that you are in a state of “refill limbo,” meaning you still have 3/7 of your beer remaining.  If you order now, you’ll have to hurry to finish the beer before the next one arrives.  If you pass, you might be stuck with an empty glass for a while.  The default move is to order the refill and chug your beer so as to realign yourself with your friends for the next round.  So much for casual drinking.

-Since my roommate and I never keep any food in the house, his girlfriend sometimes buys snacks for him and leaves it in the kitchen.  So just like when I was five years old, they have given me strict rules as to when I can eat cookies.  The cardinal rule is that I can’t open a new box or eat the last one of anything.  I don’t understand why this is such an iron-clad rule.  More importantly, in a box of six it only gives me a four-snack window!

-I actually used the word “unbeknownst” in a sentence the other day.  I felt like I was in Star Wars.

-There is one thing that I have always thought TV weather reports were missing – yesterday’s weather.  Seriously, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve checked the weather and still had no idea what to wear.  Telling me “today’s high is going to be 73 degrees” gives me no basis for comparison.  What they should say is, “Hey, remember how yesterday even your balls were sweating?  Well, today is going to be even hotter.”  Now that’s helpful.

-Memo to anyone wearing fanny packs: no, they’re still not acceptable no matter what.  Just because it says North Face on it doesn’t make it OK.

-Memo to dudes wearing class rings: what are you thinking?  The only guys who should be wearing rings are married men and Derek Jeter.

-Memo to people wearing t-shirts from Urban Outfitters: vintage t-shirts aren’t cool if they cost thirty bucks and everyone has the same one.

-Memo to dudes in suits wearing baseball caps: the fact that you are wearing a suit pretty much eliminates the possibility that you’re going to the beach or a baseball game, thus by wearing a hat for no apparent reason, you are actually calling more attention to the fact that you are clearly bald.

-Memo to food service employees: if you leave those latex gloves on the whole day, including when you handle money and use the bathroom, it kind of defeats the purpose.

-Memo to medical personnel: when you stand outside in your scrubs on your shift break smoking Marlboro Reds, it sort of sends the wrong message, you hypocritical morons.

-Memo to people who set their watches five minutes fast so that when they think they’re late they actually have more time: that’s the dumbest fucking thing I have ever heard.  Seriously.

-As I have noted many times in this column, I can never remember anyone’s name.  In fact, names are my third biggest weakness (behind brunettes in wife-beaters and a complete lack of sense of direction).  I am also a sarcastic wiseass who can’t resist cracking a joke at someone else’s expense.  Surprisingly, this actually helps with my names problem.  The other day my friend Jen started telling me a story and I stopped her like, “Wait, Jessica, who is that?”  And Jen was like, “She’s the blonde that you met last time I visited.”  “Oh yeah, I made fun of her shirt and she hated me.”  “No Karo, that was Linda.  You told Jessica the gap in her cleavage was unusually wide and she started crying.”  “OK, right, Linda: shirt, Jessica: cleavage.  Got it!”

-You know what freaks me out?  Wet fingerprints on the toilet paper roll.  It’s bad enough that you’re using someone else’s bathroom without having to look at the phantom presence of the previous shitter.

-Not to toot my own horn or anything, but when you’re right, you’re right.  In Ruminations #34, I predicted the imminent demise of a trendy lounge called Spread that opened up down the block from me.  I’m happy to report that it went belly-up last month.  Score one for the little people!  Also, I want to give a shout-out to subscriber Amy G. of Philadelphia, who while reading Ruminations and laughing, accidentally swallowed a huge gulp of hot coffee, convulsed so hard she cracked a rib, and had to go to the emergency room.  Get well soon!

-Quote of the Month.  My apartment building has a new doorman.  The guy is not physically able to remember me and my roommate Brian.  Months have passed and every time we walk in he thinks we are someone else.  The other day, after asking us our apartment number for the thousandth time, we finally got fed up and asked him why the hell he doesn’t remember us.  He peered at us through his glasses and said, “Well, you guys are dressed differently today.”  Brian looked at him for a moment with sheer incredulity and then replied, “Dude, we dress differently every day.”  And, no, he still doesn’t remember us.

-I think that the phrase “It’s girls night out” is the new version “I’m washing my hair” when it comes to excuses why a girl can’t go out with you.  Women act like “girls night out” is some sort of secret, sacred ritual.  But I think I know what’s going on.  It’s twelve girls in heels going to an overpriced restaurant where everyone orders a salad or the tuna, the last three guys that each girl hooked up with is given an official nickname, at least one dish gets sent back, everyone gets tipsy off two glasses of white wine, the bill is paid on twelve different American Express cards, and then everyone leaves and calls each other to gossip about all the other girls.  See, I know what’s up.

-Whenever I get a spam email with the subject “Stop paying for porn!” I think to myself, who’s paying?

-And, finally, I’m a simple man.  I really am.  I’m just a Pert Plus kind of guy, really easy to get along with.  OK, maybe I have a few quirks.  Like I can’t go to sleep without having a glass of water on my nightstand.  I still have trouble getting the straw into a juice box.  I hate coconut, white chocolate, karaoke, and the WNBA.  I’m a pen-chewer and a nail-biter.  I prefer plastic utensils to real ones.  I refuse to pluck my eyebrows.  My goals for the future include reaching such a position of power that people use the word “abdicate” when I retire.  I have to use sun tan lotion that is PABA-free but I have no idea what PABA is.  Nyquil actually keeps me up.  I can’t pack a suitcase when people are watching.  I’m completely addicted to chapstick.  My hair is turning red instead of gray.  More often than not I swallow gum instead of spitting it out.  I go for the first parking spot I see no matter how far away it is.  I have to change into a darker shirt before eating anything with red sauce because I always get it all over myself.  And, of course, I have to wash my hands after touching animals, subway poles, money, bathrooms, fast food, strippers, small children, or public mailboxes.  In other words…fuck me.

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-The other day I found myself sitting on the couch watching reruns of Lizzie McGuire on the Disney Channel (and feeling sort of guilty because I was kinda getting turned on).  And as I stuffed another piece of my roommate’s girlfriend’s leftover Valentine’s Day candy into my mouth, I realized something – I haven’t worked in a full year.  Furthermore, I realized that the past year since I left Wall Street to pursue comedy has been one of the best years of my life.  Now don’t get me wrong, I’ve worked many a job in my day – from investment banks in New York to consulting firms in London, from tiny dot.com start-ups to huge, multinational corporations.  And they all had one thing in common: I hated every second of it.  Look around you.  I bet every unemployed twentysomething you know is desperately looking for a job while everyone with a job is desperately looking to get the hell out.  We’ve entered an era of job insecurity.

-Getting up at the crack of dawn for work is sort of like doing the New York Times crossword puzzle – it gets harder and harder as the week goes on until it’s almost impossible on Friday.  And when your alarm goes off and you sit up in bed with one eye open, you always do that silent “reverse acceptance speech” where you curse every person of authority in your life.  You think to yourself, “I’d like to say that I hate everyone who brought here me to his moment at 5:45am.  I hate my parents, my boss and, of course, my co-workers who come out every single day to support me.  I hate you all.  And now I’m going to snooze for seven more minutes.  Goodnight.  Assholes.”

-Why do girls carry that extra bag to work?  Everyone’s got their laptop bag and maybe their gym bag, but girls always have that extra, brown Bath & Body Works shopping bag piled high with crap.  I’m baffled.

-I love the people that proudly wear their employee ID cards around their necks all day long and refuse to take it off.  Its OK buddy, we’re at lunch now, and that’s a terrible picture of you anyway.

-In the past eight years, there have only been two times when I shaved my sideburns completely off.  One was after my first night of pledging when my pledgemaster told me that if I didn’t shave them off, he would.  The other was after my first day of work, when I was told that facial hair was “frowned upon” in the office.  In both cases, I grew them back without anyone noticing, was summarily shit upon for months on end for no apparent reason, and when it was all over, had learned nothing more than a few bizarre and mundane skills not applicable anywhere else.

-On the subject of bizarre and mundane skills, to all the investment bankers out there reading this, if you’ve ever found yourself arguing with someone about who is more skilled at using keyboard shortcuts, it’s all over for you.  You’ve had a nice run, but it’s time to get out.  Slowly make your way to the door without making any sudden movements.  Oh and leave that Bath & Body Works bag, someone else might need it.

-I love corporate America’s futile attempts at boosting employee morale.  For instance, the Friday afternoon beer bash.  Have you participated in one of these?  You get to stop work early on Friday and hang out in a drafty conference room sipping lukewarm Heinekens with a bunch of co-workers you already spend twelve hours a day with.  Um…yeah…could I, uh, just go home early instead?  Because that would really make me a lot happier.

-For me, the moment I knew I was spending too much time in the office was when I caught myself using buzzwords with my family.  I was like, “Hey Mom, I just touched base with Dad.  Yeah, he’s out of pocket right now but we’re gonna circle back in about an hour.  I really think it’s critical that he gives us the view from 50,000 feet because there seems to be some disconnect between…wait a minute, what the fuck am I talking about?”

-Quote of the Month.  This month’s quote comes from my friend Adam R., a disgruntled banker.  He was going out to lunch one day with a few co-workers, all wearing the standard blue Banana Republic shirt, gray J.Crew pants, and black Kenneth Cole shoes.  A cheerful secretary passed the weary group in the hall and said, “Hey, you guys all look the same!”  To which Adam replied, “You mean miserable?”

-You know who I hate?  People want to go back to business formal attire.  There’s always that one asshole in the office who for some reason needs to make it known to everyone that he would rather wear a tie and a dark suit in the middle of the summer.  Shut the fuck up and stop trying to ruin this for the rest of us.  And will you take that goddamn employee ID off already?

-There are few things worse than attempting to make it through a day of work with a massive hangover.  You know, you’re perspiring slightly, you have a huge glass of ice water, you’re trying to stay very, very still, you tell everyone you have food poisoning, it’s horrible.  I actually threw up in the office once.  I came back from the bathroom and everyone was giving me a dirty look.  I told them that I had some bad sushi and they all shook their heads in disbelief and went back to work.  The funny thing is that I really did have some bad sushi the night before.  Plus twenty sake bombs.

-Right up there with trying to survive when you’re hungover in the office is trying to stay awake at your desk after you come back from lunch.  It should really be an Olympic sport.  It’s a beautiful day out, you just went out to eat and had a nice turkey sandwich, then you get back to your desk and all of a sudden you become narcoleptic.  Phones are ringing off the hook, people are yelling, but your Herman Miller chair is the most comfortable bed in the world.  I once fell asleep for so long on my computer that when I woke up I had impressions from the F and J keys in my forehead.

-I think the most important skill that any twentysomething working in an office must learn is how to look busy when you’re really not.  The easiest way to do this of course is to throw a bunch of paper around your desk to make it look really messy and keep a complicated looking document up on your computer screen.  You can see this charade in action in other professions as well.  That trainer at the gym who’s constantly arranging the dumbbells in weight order?  He’s got nothing to do.  The doorman who’s triple-checking his list of dry cleaning deliveries?  Nothing as well.  And how do you know when you’ve been pretending to look busy in the office for too long?  When you reach that moment, and I know you have, when you decide that you’ve officially surfed every web site on the entire Internet, and have been reduced to searching your own name on Google.  At that point, you should make sure you’re still actually employed.

-Ever notice that as soon as someone above you in the office curses in front of you, you feel like you should curse in every conversation with them from then on?

-Ever get an email from a friend at work who is trying to outwit the system that scans all of his outgoing messages?  It’s always something like: “Hey Karo, what the f@ck happened with that b_tch last night?  Her t*its were huge!  I want all the details you m%ther f@cker!”  I’m like, are you sure your company won’t be able to figure this out?

-Ever try to explain to your grandmother what you do for a living?  No matter what you do, it’s always way too complicated to explain.  You’re like, “Well, you see, our clients are looking to raise additional capital and we provide a liquid market for…uh, yeah, you’re not following this.  How about this?  I’m a stockbroker.  Yup, just like on TV.”

-I think the people with the most warped outlook are those working on Wall Street.  It’s amazing the kinds of hours that people will work in exchange for a tote bag and a hat with the company logo on it that they’ll never wear.  And the expense account, that’s where the real brainwashing comes in.  My roommate will come home from work and start bragging like, “Karo, I expensed the sickest sushi dinner tonight!”  I’ll be like, “Dude, wouldn’t you have rather paid for your own dinner and not come home at 2am?”

-How come when you quit a job you have to give two weeks notice but when they lay you off you have to leave immediately?

-For those of you reading this at work right now, I want you to know that I feel your pain.  I know what you’re going through.  If you’re a summer intern, right now you’re watching the clock, waiting for it to hit five so you can bolt out the door and hit happy hour.  If you’re in your late twenties, right now you’re wishing you went to law school.  If you’re a guy, the office is way too hot and the other window open on your computer is Bill Simmons’ column on ESPN.com.  If you’re a girl, the office is way too cold and the other window open on your computer is the new arrivals section of Bluefly.com.  As for me, well, I know that living off of book royalties and stand-up gigs can’t last forever.  Maybe one day I will return to the working world.  But this time, I’m keeping the sideburns.

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

-I think the lamest excuse anyone can ever give is “I didn’t get your message.”  How did you not get the message?  I know I left you one on your cell phone.  It’s impossible to not get messages.  You’re so lying.

-Nothing kills good news like having to tell the same story over the phone to your dad and then your mom consecutively.  Because once you get to your mom, you’re already pissed that she didn’t pick up the other phone and listen to the story the first time so you give her the abridged version, which she can’t follow.  Then you have to go all the way back to the beginning and remind her who each person in the story is.  And by the time you’re through, you hope you never have good news again.

-The other day I passed a diner that had a sign out front advertising a special on soup plus a half sandwich.  And I couldn’t help but wonder, what happens to the other half of the sandwich?

-For some reason, my roommate Brian thinks that food is healthy just because it comes in a pita or a wrap.  Of course this is the same kid that pours the salt onto his hand and then onto his food because he says it gives him “better control.”

-I always find it amusing when I’m talking to a chick in a bar and it turns out that she’s there with a guy she’s hooking up with.  And the guy wants to make it very obvious that he’s with the girl so he marks his territory – he’s putting his arm around her, he’s holding her hand, all while I’m still trying to have a conversation.  I’m like, take it easy dude, why don’t you just lift your leg and piss on her shoes while you’re at it.

-There’s just something about smelling your ex-girlfriend’s perfume.  When I meet a girl and she’s wearing the perfume my ex-girlfriend used to wear, it always involuntarily brings back a flood of memories – the laughter, the joy, the screaming matches, the name-calling.  Of course, I still have no idea what the name of the perfume she wears is…wait a minute, is that something a boyfriend is supposed to know?

-I’ll admit, I’m single, so I may be out of the loop, but I don’t think couples my age should be going away for weekend trips with other couples like a bunch of my friends did this weekend.  That’s what my parents do.  And they’re like…old.  I’m just afraid that one of my buddies is going come back from the trip wearing loafers or something.  And then there’s no going back.

-What the hell is treble?  Treble is just one of those things that we all take for granted but no one knows exactly what it is.  Ask the person next to you what treble is.  They definitely don’t have a clue.  And no, “Sort of like the opposite of bass” doesn’t count.

-I think my dry cleaner has some sort of hold over me.  I mean, every time I get my dry cleaning back I say to myself, man, these guys really suck, they’re horrible.  Yet I keep going back.  I won’t switch.  I’m hooked.  You think maybe they’re somehow brainwashing me?  Or maybe it’s because they have my credit card on file.

-Sitting outside to eat is never as good an idea as you think it will be.  You’re always like, it’s such a nice day, let’s get a table outside!  Next thing you know your napkins are blowing away, one person is sitting in the sun so he’s too hot, you’re freezing, there are mosquitoes everywhere, and you’re just praying that the booth inside is still available.

-You want to hear something crazy?  I’ve never been to the Hamptons.  I know, I know, how can I consider myself a connoisseur of New York nightlife without ever going to the hottest summer spot?  Well, the fact is that the scene in the Hamptons is the same scene I try to avoid in the city except it’s two hours farther away.  I also hate the beach.  I just don’t like getting sand in my crotch.  And I burn easily.  Oh my God.  I sound like I should be wearing loafers.

-I love how every ridiculous model who is featured in a racy spread in Maxim always has that quote next to her picture that says something like, “I was a total flat-chested dork in high school and no guys would talk to me.”  Where the fuck is this high school?

-We all try to do it, but let’s be honest, it’s really awkward trying to walk in flip-flops.  I know it’s the summer and we’re trying to be all casual, but it’s just not working.  Our feet are dirty, our calves ache, that space between the big toe and the toe next to it is all cut up, and we look like fools when one sandal flies off and we’re forced to do the one-legged hop to retrieve it.  Lets face it, it’s time to give up.

-In the past decade, we’ve witnessed the creation of the Internet, the proliferation of the cell phone, and unheralded advances in medicine.  Fireworks, however, have remained exactly the same.  Why has there has been no progress in this field?  The fireworks I saw this weekend are the same ones I saw ten years ago.  Except there’s that new smiley face one.  But it always comes out upside down.

-And when watching fireworks, is it really necessary to say, “Hey look at that one!” every time a particularly bright one goes off?  The fireworks are exploding in the middle of the clear sky above the East River.  And we’re standing on the roof of a thirty-story apartment building.  I can fucking see them all.

-I’m convinced that time travel does exist.  How else can you explain Demi Moore’s ass?

-If you don’t live in New York but have a friend that does, you’ve undoubtedly heard about the madness that has been going on this summer.  It started with a period of six weeks where it rained every single day.  Then we had about a month where it was nice during the week until Thursday at 5pm when a vicious monsoon would descend upon the city and not abate until Sunday morning.  That was followed by the two straight weeks of 95-degree balls-stuck-to-the-inside-of-your-thigh heat that we are currently experiencing.  Let me try to put this all in perspective for you.  It has actually become fashionable to talk about the weather in New York.  No longer is the weather relegated to first-date icebreakers and elevator small talk.  People are actually interested in the weather.  Weather is in!  Weather is the new black!

-Have you noticed that they are starting to show about two-dozen previews before the movie starts these days?  To be honest, I actually like the previews.  It’s the people in the theatre who feel the need to comment on the previews that piss me off.  There are usually two types.  The first type try to be the first to call out the name of the movie that is being previewed.  Great, that’s really helpful, I couldn’t wait 90 seconds for that.  The second type like to tell the person next to them whether or not they think are going to see the movie when it comes out, usually with witty remarks like, “There’s no way I’m gonna see that.” or “Total chick flick man.” or “I liked it the first time when it was called Die Hard.”  Hey, are you the same guy I was watching fireworks with?

-I don’t understand people who leave their cell phone on when they take naps then act surprised when I call and wake them up.

-This weekend I ran into one of my least favorite types of girls: the boyfriend-mentioner.  The boyfriend-mentioner finds a way to bring up her boyfriend in just about every sentence she utters, even if you’re not hitting on her.  My boyfriend thinks this, my boyfriend did this, my boyfriend said this.  And I’m thinking, no wonder your boyfriend isn’t here, you’re really fucking annoying!

-I love when someone at the pizza place tries to pay with a fifty-dollar bill and the cashier holds it up to the light and studies it closely like he’s some kind of counterfeiting expert.  Stick to slicing pepperoni, chief.

-And, finally, one of the benefits of living in New York, the financial and media capital of the world, is that it is also the summer intern capital of the world.  As I write this, the NYU dorms in Union Square are swelled with girls from across the country, not to mention all the chicks taking the train in from Jersey and Long Island just for the weekend.  The skirts are short, the IDs are fake, the IQs are low, but the chicks are hot!  A few weeks ago I was at a bar talking to this really cute girl.  We were definitely hitting it off.  I bought her a few drinks but she seemed kind of nervous that the bartender would card her.  I told her to relax because there are always underage college chicks there and no one cares.  She said, “But I’m only a junior.”  “So what?” I said.  “In high school.”  Fuck me.

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