My cookie sheet arrived! My cookie sheet arrived!

And with that, I've officially become the least interesting person on the Internet.

A few unused jokes I wrote for this monologue (put together from several different writers):

On the heels of last week's crazy astronaut news, NASA has said that it will look more closely at psychological evaluations of its astronauts. Men and women having inappropriate relationships with co-workers will be grounded. Meanwhile, gay astronauts will continue to be allowed to pursue missions to Uranus.

New Mexico is combating drunk drivers by installing talking urinal cakes in men's bathrooms all over the state. The urinal cakes will remind drivers to be safe on the road. They'll also get verbally abusive if you piss them off.

We fell behind a bit this week, but a new Space Monkeys! comic emerges, like a paycheck at the end of a hard work-week. Like a diamond out of a bum's bum. Like manna for chocolate! Like a paragraph that needs ending.

Bursting! Stuff! Happening!

I was in a major funk last week because I felt like all the stuff I was trying to do for work was falling apart like overcooked pasta. Nothing felt right, nobody was calling me back, nothing was being written, at least for print. (I'm a mofo when it comes to Web updates, but I like to see my name in the paper, as you can probably guess.)

So I got antsy, and then I started to feel lazy and shiftless. The mind-trapping allergies didn't help. So I went into last weekend thinking myself incompetent or worse.

This week's been a lot better, more productive, more energy (I'm back at the gym and going to bed a little earlier). I'm trying not to get too overwhelmed because I've got some trips coming up and lots of stuff is happening all of a sudden. After this week, I have a month-long recapping break, which will be nice. I'm getting a little burned out on this Lex/Lana/Clark bullshit.

I'm way late on the Best of '06 CD, and at one point I decided to just not do it, but I think I've got just enough energy left to do it one more time if you all are open to it. This will definitely be the last one, though. I see a CD-free future for the project if it continues, as I've said before.

What else is on my mind... Last night's Lost was the first one I've enjoyed in a while. For me, I really don't care about the Sawyer/Kate/Jack triangle. If I want to see a pointless love triangle, at least I get paid for the one I have to watch on Smallville. Friday Night Lights continues to make me weepy almost every single week. Heroes has lost a tiny bit of its charm, but that may be just me. 24 has become 24 Ways to Torture a Motherfucker Every Week. I'm still watching Gilmore Girls, but I hope it ends this season. Sarah Silverman Show is as great as I'd hoped.

We watched Total Recall this weekend because my wife was outside living life and playing tennis while I was watching shitty movies in theaters as a teen. I had to try to explain why Rachel Ticotin seemed like such a babe at the time and why the film seems so crazy-violent now. The fact that it was in the delicious Blu-Ray format did not make the film appreciably better.

On our list of movies to see in the near-fut: Quinceañera, tons of Oscar nominees in the theater, Snakes on a Plane, Idiocracy, Sherrybaby, Science of Sleep.

Sometimes it's very hard to feel it.

You wake up and your head is full of cotton candy, your limbs feel tingly and the room feels 20 degrees colder than when you went to sleep.

The day feels too short and before you know it, it's late and time for bed again. You're not sure that you felt anything all day. This can make it even harder to feel it the next day.

Sometimes, you are walking, or talking, or just driving with the music loud and you suddenly feel it. You may have hypnotized yourself somehow, allowed it in without noticing, but your heart goes large and your brain feels flooded, and you imagine fractals breaking apart, expanding, filling the room around you and blinding the landscape like a nuclear weapon.

And you want to tell someone, but at that moment, your mouth can't say what your brain is trying to funnel to it, and you just wash out yourself, staring and churning.

You wonder if that moment is simply being alive, or if you've hit on something that is higher and farther than being alive. You know you've felt this before and you know it will happen again. But you wonder how you've lived these days not feeling it, dreaming from one day to the next without it. On some days, you forget that you've ever felt it, and these are days that you allow in yourself: regret, panic, uncertainty.

There's no way to remember it all the time, but you're capable of feeling it. And knowing you can feel it, knowing that it happens at rare and unexpected moments... sometimes that's all that's needed to keep everything else unnecessary, cluttery, away.

Michael Barnes says very nice things about my seldom-loved Digital Savant blog.

I've said it before somewhere in these pages, but he's one of the coolest people I know.

New Smallville recap is up at TelevisionWithoutPity.com:

Let's Give 'Em Something To Stalk About -- The world is made up of two kinds of men: those who are stalking Lana Lang because she's the perfect woman, and those who aren't. Lana is terrified when somebody takes her picture with a cell phone, which leads to lots of dark hallways, scary music, and "suspense." The paparazzi get blamed, but ultimately the answer is a bit more complicated and a lot dumber.