“We’re going to be so miserable in about two minutes,” I said, as our air conditioned car glided through Napa’s excrutiating heat wave, two minutes away from our destination.

“Let’s see how bad it is,” said the Lad, turning off the air conditioning and opening all the windows. Sean and I were shocked and awed by this.

“What’s the rationale here?” I asked, as the blistering 107 degree heat panted wolfishly down the front of my dress. “We’re going to be miserable in two minutes so we might as well be miserable now?”

“It’s like saying ‘I’m going to go to prison in two days, so I might as well stay in my house with all the windows shut, to get used to it,'” Sean said.

“And thinking, Maybe I can find some other men to beat off in front of, too,” I said, and then melted into a gooey puddle on the back seat.

Like many of my clove smoking college brethren, I’m having a hard time understanding politics these days. I decided to do a little research to try and get a handle on things.

The Moms is strongly in favor of Howard Dean, and pretty much has threatened to disown me if I don’t vote for him, so his website was my first stop. According to the biggest headline on the main page of site, Howard is in favor of Democracy, Freedom and Action. I am definitely in favor of those second two, but I’m not sure about Democracy, because there’s this whole socialist group on campus that puts up a lot of flyers and I’ve been sort of meaning to check them out. Are socialism and democracy in the same category? I would know if I went to those meetings. Howard Dean gets an arbitrary rating of three out of five.

Next stop: the President. George’s website’s banner has a quote from the man himself, as follows: “When government and landowners and conservationists and others work together, we can make dramatic progress in preserving the beauty and the quality of our environment.” I didn’t really follow this sentence, but I like the environment, and I am definitely in favor of beauty and drama. I also like that “the voters” are not being required to take action on this very important but also kind of dull issue. Although the vague use of “others” has a threatening sound that I don’t much like. I’ll give George four out of five for his use of a complete sentence.

I looked up Ralph Nader but he doesn’t appear to be running for president. I guess we don’t really need a Green Party candidate this time though, since George seems to have the environment covered. But even though this candidate is clearly superfluous, I’m still giving the party two out of five. Because weed is green and I fully support the weed-based culture of college students.

I clicked three different links on the Libertarian Party’s site and couldn’t figure out who they’re running this time around. But they still get one out of five because their name sort of sounds like “liberal” and I’m preprogrammed to hand out my voting candy to anything wearing that mask.

After my tedious quarter hour of research, George is the clear winner. And it turns out that Arnold isn’t even running for president. So I guess my vote is obvious. Sorry, Moms.

I hear you wrote good songs

And I’m sorry that you’ve stopped

Now I’ll never get to write to you

In my celebrity writing workshop

Now I won’t see you play concerts

Or jam live on MTV

Because the wake of nine-eleven

Has swept you out to sea

Sure, I don’t own your albums

But I hear they’re kickass noise

And I’ve always talked them up

To get in with indie boys

I wish I’d known you better

But I guess it’s not too late

To call up my friend Maggie

And request a Cash mixtape.

This weekend I found a Waiters On Wheels catalogue which lists dozens and dozens of wonderful restaurants that are willing to deliver right to my very door. To a semi-agoraphobic, this catalogue is crack cocaine.

A couple of nights ago I had a dream that all my friends told me I had a drinking problem, so I (in the dream) joined AA. Obviously I do not have a drinking problem, except the problem of being a lightweight, but I have become pretty addicted to staying in the house whenever possible. I’ve even been finding excuses not to walk the seven minutes to the Lad’s house because it would mean leaving my apartment.

After having this dream and realizing that I am addicted to not going out and having fun, I have started trying to disobey every inclination to stay inside. I find that my life goes pretty smoothly if I just assume that all my instincts are wrong. But I still have that catalogue burning a hole in my coffee table, waiting for me to slip up. I wish there was a support group for this kind of thing, but I think they would have to come to me for that to work. Maybe I can find something online.

I start school again on Wednesday. My excitement about this is a rock-colored throat goblin. It uses my uvula for monkey bars and does a perfect dismount onto my dry tongue. It takes naps curled like a hedgehog against the warmth of my glottis. It eats my breath for breakfast and leaves me wheezing like a smoker climbing a hill. When I am relaxing and unwary, the goblin ocasionally peers out from between my lips and emits a high squeak like an overstimulated guinea pig, then scuttles to the safety of my upper molars and peeks out, chuckling.

Friends, you have read many of my complaints about my frustrating government job at a certain unnamed California university. Well this week, I finally decided to do something about it. I joined the circus.

After an eight hour intensive course in acrobatics, I auditioned for the Cirque du Soleil’s new show, Zut!, a controversial acrobatic extravaganza which is performed entirely in the nude. There are many comic bits involving trapeze artists and painfully smooshed testicles. It will be a hoot. My role is the naked clown perched on top of the human pyramid.

During our first rehearsal I made so many mistakes that I was nearly expelled from the group. You would think it would be really easy to climb a pyramid of naked humans, since there are more handholds, but you would think wrong. At last, however, I managed to clamber my way to the top perfectly, and stood proudly naked, my white skin gleaming in the stage lights. Say, I thought, eyeing my stomach which shone like a diamond, maybe it’s okay to not be tanned. Secure in myself and my position atop the pyramid, I was at last fair and balanced.