Today was supposed to be the day that Terribly Happy's Guide To Love Part II (Sexual Boogaloo) was to be unleashed on your fresh, ready-to-be-spanked ass.

But that didn't happen.

Why?

Because I'm ugly.

No, seriously. Don't. Just... turn away. Don't look at me.

I can't very well tell you how to go out and find love if I can barely bring myself to look in a mirror, can I?

(Stop staring at me. The answer is "no." You can look away again now.)

The thing is, guys aren't used to feeling ugly. Even good looking guys get rejected by women at least half the time, so we never think it's us. We take rejection as a matter of course, and even men who literally have three nostrils, hair growing under their fingernails and a smell that can only be described as an "Odor-dose," still manage to have a healthy sense of self esteem.

Those guys don't have to wear my glasses.

You remember my glasses, right? No? Oh, here they are:

Terrifying.

The countdown to my Lasik surgery has begun. For this last week before I have my eyeballs sliced open and shot up with lasers, I have to wear glasses so my prescription will stabilize. I have to walk around in these. In public.

Normally I try not to think about it. But the problem is the glasses aren't exactly the right prescription (they're even worse than the soft contacts I was wearing for this last month), and they're curved in a funny way on the lenses, and have no periphery, so when I walk outside of my house in these, the world looks like a Terry Gilliam movie.

Perspective isn't quite right, so I'm trying to shake someone's hand in the next room. Stuff on screen is not quite focused, so I lean in just inches from the monitor. It just makes me feel woozy and a little nauseous and just nasty to wear these all day.

In short, ugly.

And then there's this pimple thing between my right eyelid and right eyebrow that's hanging out there all, "Hey! Let's be friends!" and I haven't been able to go to the gym lately (a phenomenon that has coincided with my recent rediscovery of ice cream as a foodstuff), so I'm slow and bloated about the tum, and I think I may have a rash and... you know what? Now I feel worse.

So yeah, you're on your own in the love department. Right now I'm trying to figure out a way to telecommute for the rest of the week and order in food without scaring the delivery person.

 

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A couple of people have been asking how the job transition is going and I really wish I had a good answer for you. This whole week has been several days worth of suddenly not knowing how to do my job (or even what my job is, for that matter).

It's not that I don't think I can do it. It's that it hasn't really been defined. Clearly, there will be some changes in my job, but I can't figure out if it will be more work or less work. I can't figure if it will be more or less enjoyable. I don't know how much will be editing, how much will be writing and how much will be doing online stuff. I don't even know if I get to keep my desk, my G4 computer and the cool little office in which I work.

It's just flux. Big-time flux. Mutha-fluxing flux. I can't adjust because nothing is set. Just when I was in the rhythm of knowing exactly what my job was about and how to do it, now it's something different.

Did I mention I feel ugly, too?

So, I'm just keeping on, trying to grasp it. I'm really not unhappy or scared. I just want to get moving, to do what it is I'm being paid for and to stop feeling like I'm killing time until the new responsiblities are just handed down.

I had planned on taking a vacation this month, and now I'm afraid to because I might come back and there won't be a building, or a desk or a Congress Avenue. It's ridiculous, but I can't take time off in the middle of a huge change. I can't leave just when things are being firmed up. So I'm spending my summer indoors, in the cool dark office, not doing a whole lot of anything right now, and wishing just a little that I was anywhere else.

 

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This is the worst joke ever and it makes it even worse that I heard it on the redneck country radio station ("Cracker" KRKR FM, I think) that seems to be the only thing that pisses me off enough in the morning to wake me up with the alarm.

But I've told it to practically everyone I know including my gay friends. (All three of them. I think that represents a quorum in most Texas towns.) They don't seem to hate it. So, here goes. A joke:

 

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Hey, check this out: Bob Barker just signed a contract to do five more years of The Price is Right.

The fuck...!?! Of course, like all of you, my first thought was, "He was able to sign his own name?"

This photo of Bob Barker was the first color lithograph ever taken, circa 1932.

When I was about six years old, my grandma would always have Price is Right on in the house because it came on right before her soap (The Young and Restless. Yeah, like you never watched it.) so it provided a seamless transition from mid-morning game show fun to pre-noon naughtiness. It was like that for years. It may still be scheduled that way down in South Texas for all I know.

Even then, even when I was six, I remember thinking "Man, that guy is old! How does he spin that big-ass wheel like that?" I never gave it any thought that I was only six and that I'd probably have a hard time spinning it too.

So, right now, the man is 77. Seventy seven years old. And he's going to be doing this shit until he is 82. EIGHT TWO YEARS OLD. Let's get an idea of how old that is, shall we?

It's this many years:

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. (Deep breath) 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. (and this is where we start to see some problems) 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. (what? keep going? Are you fucking nuts?) 78. 79. 80. (why won't you just die?) 81. 82.

Look, that just took me a long time to type. And that's how many years he's got on him.

Bob. I love you. Really. And I love how you kicked Adam Sandler's ass in that one movie. And how you sexually harassed Diane right around the time when Viagra was introduced to the public. I'm all for setting your own retirement age. But honestly, Bob. Do you really want to be introducing the Showcase Showdown when the real showdown happening is between your bowels and those adult diapers?

That, Bob Barker, just isn't Right.