Queer Abby and the Hall of Razors

I have three apologies to make this morning:

1.) I would like to apologize to my aunt, who's birthday dinner I was too sick to attend this past Sunday night. For the past couple of weeks, I've been getting these intense waves of debilitating nausea, bad headaches and an overall "out of it" feeling. I have self-diagnosed myself with all of the following: pregnancy (despite the extreme mathematical impossibilities); early onset menopause (which is possible, especially if you subscribe to the "if you don't lose it, you lose it" school of thought); Celiac disease; Graves' disease; Lupus; Dengue fever; African Sleeping Sickness.

Whichever it is (and I'm leaning towards all of the above,) I feel like an asshat for not being there. I wrapped her present, took a shower, did my hair and makeup and everything, but in the end, the thought of getting on a rocking metro to go eat seafood was enough to bring tears to my eyes. Worst. Niece. Ever.

2.) I owe a huge apology to our weekly advice columnist, Amy. I busted her balls Sunday night to get me this week's Queer Abby before Monday morning, but then completely fell asleep while waiting for it. However, knowing myself and how I live everyday like it's "Random Cup Night" at a Sigma Chai mixer, I set an alarm right before I passed out to wake me up at 7 so I could finish the post before work.

...Unfortunately when my alarm went off, I was having this really intense dream that I went to Hogwarts and in my dream version of Hogwarts, all sophomores have to pass this crazy test at the end of the year called "The Hall of Razors." To do so, you get on your broom and fly from one end of the hall to the other as random ghosts lash out and try to cut you with an X-acto knife as you whizz by. Right before it was my turn to go down the hall, my alarm clock went off and I woke up and thought to myself, "Ohhhhh no you don't. I didn't go through a year of training just to wake up and miss the big event, a-thank you very much" turned my alarm clock off entirely, and went back to bed. It wasn't until my body naturally woke itself up 45 minutes before work that I realized perhaps I hadn't made the most "responsible" decision.

3.) Mostly, I apologize to you that you didn't get a post up yesterday because I was too busy indulging Harry Potter-based dreams.

But better late than never, right?

Queer Abby,

Hi, I am your resident confused teenager. It's almost ridiculous. And I'm indecisive, great combo. Anyway....SO. I like this guy, let's call him, Griffin. I've known him for three years and we've been really good friends and I had always looked at him as HIM, so I was never attracted to him! But then, in May, the planets aligned or some shit, or my hormones got the best of me, and I started to like him. Then it sort of grew into a LOT of liking him.

Then there's, um, Lucas, and he's seriously my best friend. When we first became friends I really liked him but then it started fading. Lately we've been spending time a lot, but I would get jealous when he would talk to his WHORE ex girlfriend and I can't bear for them to be together. I am normally a jealous bitch but this just makes me straight out ANGRY. Now I like him! Lala, great. Does he like me? Who the fuck knows, he probably wouldn't like me.

BUUUUT. I like the both of them. SHIT. Bad news. Yeah, uh, I spent three days with Lucas then three days with Griffin. So confused. There's ups and downs for the both of them! Lucas is very impatient, and insistent. And that pisses me off a lot of the time but spending time with him makes up for it. Then Griffin, is some sort of philosopher! I feel like I have to act smarter around him or he'll like me less as a friend. (By the way, I don't think either of them like me but I wanna pursue one of them.) I'm a lot more comfortable with Lucas, and he's the one that comes to mind first, but then I think of Griffin and I get excited and it feels new. I love spending time with the both of them, though. I always have fun with them. Then, there's a very serious health problem with Griffin. It could potentially kill him. And then LUCAS has a health problem too. I worry about them so much.

Neither of them are really interested in dating, either. (Gee, I sure know how to pick 'em.) WHO THE HELL DO I CHOOSE?!?!?!?

Please help me, no one can!,

Confused Hormonal Teenager

Dear CHT,

I’ve really, really, really, really tried to come up with advice that you would be likely to follow, but I just keep coming back to this: neither. You’re young, so I don’t want tear you apart, but you’re creating your own drama. Why would you pursue either of them when you don’t think they like you and they’ve said they aren’t interested in dating? Don’t get me wrong; I’m all about putting in the effort—often times one of any eventual-pair has to work for it….. Buuuuut that should pretty much stop when the other person outright says they aren’t interested or has consistently failed to reciprocate your interest… unless you want to look desperate or crazy.

So yea, don’t choose one to start ‘pursuing’. No one is asking you to make a choice here. Why not hang out with both until you find someone else you like better or you know which one you want to be with, no contest, and he’s expressed some sort of interest in dating you.

Uh, my advice to you is to call me as soon as humanly possible so we can coordinate a time to simultaneously think, "UGH, SOMETIMES I WISH WE COULD JUST SWITCH PLACES" and trade lives for a few days, à la Freaky Friday. Because I would give anything for that kind of drama in my life again. You know what the current dramz in my life is? That I have Dengue Fever and the second-coming of Christ in my womb. You know the last two guys I had to choose between? Seth and Josh Meyers, upon discovering this photograph:

And by "choose," I mean chose which one I'm going to whack it to later. Obviously.

If I were you, I'd stop stressing out and enjoy myself a little more. Crushes are fun! And you have two! Enjoy that. I do, however, agree with Amy. If they've both made it clear that they're not interested in making you the Gwen to their Gavin; move on. It's not worth your time and makes you look slightly Crazy Pants to the rest of the world. But that doesn't mean you can't totally crush on them in the mean time! Just enjoy them for what they are: a reason to take a shower and put on clean pants in the morning. No more, no less.

Abby,

I'm 20 and I've considered myself straight all my life... but two years ago I fell madly in love with (and was obsessed for a while) with this one girl who was four years older than me. She was basically exactly what I wanted to be. She has always been straight, and was always a little freaked out by the way I acted around her (she coined the term "hero worship" and she sort of knew what was up). After knowing each other for almost a year, we hooked up when we were really drunk and pretty much rounded the bases. That was the first and only time I've hooked up with a girl (other than a couple pecks while drunk at parties or in spin the bottle). Right now I'm away for the summer, and I'm intensely attracted to this one girl here, and the feelings I have for her are like nothing I've ever felt before. I'm not totally in love with her the same way that I was with the first girl, but I think she's super hot and I would really love to hook up with her. She is very straight, although from what she's said, I'm pretty sure she's at least kissed girls before. There's a tiny bit of a language barrier, but it's cute. The only thing is that she is very friendly and flirty with everyone... on paper, anyone would tell me that she wants to hook up with me too... I'll list some things that have happened—

- Sometimes she sneaks up behind me and hugs me

- She once said that "Girls are good for short term and boys are good for long term"

- She told me I was funny, cute, pretty, and smart and that all the boys should be all over me

- She asked if I had a boyfriend

- She often invites me to have coffee or a beer with her

- One time we were hanging out with boys and they jokingly asked if we were lovers and she (pretty seriously, or at least it seemed) said "Not yet"

I'm pretty sure she has no idea what signals she might be sending. I'm trying to be flirty and return the signals in a positive way, even though she probably isn't getting them anyway. All the boys here want to hook up with her and she has no idea.

Sometimes I can hardy stand just standing next to her because I am so overwhelmed by the thought of just being alone with her or kissing her. And I don't want it to happen when we're drunk, because it want to remember it and I want to be "all there" when/if it happens. I guess all I can do now is keep being her friend and return all the signals even if it doesn't mean anything to her. Right?

What do I do? Part of me wants to just bring it up with her so that we can get it out of the way, and if she wants to, we will, and if she doesn't, I'll get over it. But I also know that half the fun is in the chase, and this intense excitement I feel when I'm around her (or just thinking about her) will go away if she's a "sure thing."

And a note about my own sexuality— as I said, I've always considered myself straight, but now I just go with whatever I'm feeling, and if those feelings are for a girl, that's fine. I'm not going to label myself as being bi or a lesbian, because I figure that I'm going through a time in my life when it's okay to experiment and see what I like and don't like... there's no point in busying myself with putting a label on my sexuality. Is that legitimate? Or am I just being a noncommittal wuss?

I know this was probably a lot longer than it needed to be, and I want to thank you in advance for at least reading it!

I enjoy 2birds1blog SO much, and I love the Queer Abby posts!

Thanks again!

OK, as for the girl—It’s hard to say from here, but it sounds like you’re right: she’s probably flirting with you some. Sounds to me like she likes the attention, from you and others. If you were trying to really start something sustainable with her, my advice would be cautionary—for a number of reasons—but since your time there is limited and she’s been very up front about the fact that she’s not totally opposed to messing around with women, I’d say go for it. I mean, if you’re both open to the idea of being with girls then I don’t see why you’d handle this any differently than you would if it was a temporary-guy you really wanted to hook up with.

So yea, as you said, just bring it up with her, unabashed and confidently, and see if she responds in kind. If so, awesome! If not, shrug it off and say something like “hey, no harm in trying, right?” or something else that, in context, seems calm, confident and maybe even charming or flirtatious so the rapport between you doesn’t change much. You won’t be there for long so don’t take it hard or make it a pride thing, and don’t act any different than before around her. I promise, you’ll have way more control in dictating the level of awkward after the fact than you think; if you don’t act like it’s awkward, it probably won’t be.

Re: your sexuality- You’re not being a non-committal wuss, per se. The most important thing is that you don’t deny your feelings, and it doesn’t sounds like you are… And it’s totally fine if you’re really not interested in labeling your sexuality, BUT I hope you realize that ‘straight’ is just a label too. There are infinite points on the sexual spectrum, and the number of people who sit on either end are FAR fewer than those who are somewhere in between (if you don’t believe me, ask a few gay boys how many "straight" guys they’ve given head). So yea, it’s always more complicated than just "gay", "straight", "questioning", or whatever else, and it’s really no one else’s business. But, to call someone straight, and even very straight, with the caveat that "sometimes she kisses girls"… well, that’s kind of bullshit, imho.

First and foremost, I just googled "imho" and it means "in my honest opinion." So there's that.

Secondly, I was on the phone with someone at work today and honest-to-god suggested that they look something up "on the web."

Finally, we need to wrap this up soon because I'm missing tonight's episode of "Murder She Wrote" and need at least 20 minutes before bed to work this Geritol Liquid down.

Look. Human sexuality is a tricky, tricky subject that I frankly don't want to touch with a 30-foot-pole. That's why god invented people like Ex Co-Blogger Eddie who sit around all day not eating meat and discussing Queer Theory at fancy east-coast liberal grad schools. Personally, I'd rather stick a double-sided dildoe in my eye, but hey, that's just me. I say you go for it with this girl and not worry about what it makes you. Because sexual experimentation is an extremely healthy and natural thing to do, right?

Sometimes I feel like less of an American because I never went through an "experimenting" phase myself. I just never felt the need. I don't know if it's because I'm secure in my heterosexuality as much as I'm just lazy, but either way, I feel like I missed out on something. I feel the exact same way about shoplifting. Everyone I knew went through a crazy shoplifting phase around Freshman year of high school but I was always too scared to do it. (Oh god, I have such a good shoplifting story about Talia but it's too late to call her and ask if it's OK if I tell it...rough.) I don't know if any of this advice has helped you, but I for one feel better. Because TOMORROW I'M GOING TO LICK A CHICK OUT AND STEAL SOME SHIT FROM WORK. Look out, World.

Yep. Queer Abby: changing lives. Mainly mine. Got a question that you'd like answered? Shoot an email to QueerAbby@2birds1blog.com!

State of the Meg—July, 2010

- 'Eh...I've been going through some stuff that I don't really care to talk about, suffice to say I learned (yet again) that it's not a good idea to suddenly try to wean yourself off anti-depressants. In my defense though, I did take AP Psychology in 2002. I got a 3 on the exam, a B- in the class and remember three things from the entire experience:

1.) The story of Phineas Gage, the guy who was working on a railroad in the 1800's, when a tamping rod shot through his brain and turned him into a real asshole. (And truthfully I only remember that story because I think "Phineas Gage and the Tamping Rods" would be an excellent band name.)

2.) That thing when you're just about to fall asleep but you jerk awake because you feel like you're falling is called "Myoclonus."

3.) "Rooting" is when you poke a baby on its cheek and automatically turns and searches for the nipple.

So clearly, I think we both see why I thought I was qualified to make executive decisions about my own mental health.

- And speaking of good band names! I refer you to the following email I got this morning from my sister:

Do you remember that one time when we looked up what time the sun was going down because I was walking back to VA and we found the term “civil twilight” and I said it was a great name for a band? Well someone stole my idea! http://www.expressnightout.com/content/2010/07/civil-twilight-civil-twilight-cd-930-club.php

Bastards.

Bastards indeed. However, that's exactly what I always imagined the band "Civil Twilight" looking like. Exactly.

- And speaking of my sister and depression! Last week's quote of the week went to her when she met me at work after I emailed her and asked if she would come over and give me a hug. She showed up within five minutes (aww...), and I took her to a discreet corner of the greeting card section and proceeded to hug the crap out of her. It was nice and reassuring and I'll ask you to reserve your judgment, thank you. I'm not a robot. Sometimes I need a good skip and a good hug. Plus, I like my co-workers, but I don't think we're on please-hold-me-in-the-card-section terms. Yet.

After we hugged it out, this conversation transpired:

Becca: What's going on you, dude? You haven't been blogging.

Me: I don't really know, but something's up. I've been significantly more depressed than usual. Like sleeping 17 hours at a time, depressed.

Becca, unfazed: ...Isn't that kind of normal for you?

And you know what? Touché, madam.

- I bought a Gillette Mach-3 razor the other day because it was on sale at CVS with my extra savings card and my legs have never been this smooth in my entire life. Ever. It seriously blows my mind. If I ever had physical contact with a member of the opposite sex, I'm sure he would appreciate it. In the mean time, I keep catching myself zoning out and absentmindedly stroking my legs at inappropriate times, which only makes me feel slightly like a child molester.

- And speaking of sad single woman stereotypes, guess who's getting a cat for the next six weeks? THIS GUY. No, no, not Evie. (I wish.) It's my sister's best friend Laura's brother's cat. Laura and her husband Chris were supposed to cat-sit her for the summer, but unfortunately she got in a vicious fight with their two other cats and perhaps lost an eye? So who do you turn to when you have a one-eyed cat that needs to be unloaded for a summer? Meg McBlogger, that's who. Truthfully I'm more than happy to help Laura and Chris out and I met the cat last weekend and she seems nice enough. She's a calico. Her little pirate eye broke my heart. However, I take offense with her name—Cashmere. I just have an issue with sharing an apartment with anything that sounds like it should be a featured weekend dancer at Larry Flynt's Hustler Club. Here are my top-3 choices for what I'll call her:

- One-Eyed Willie

- Chester Copperpot

- Sean Astin

So far I'm leaning towards the latter.

- In the continuing battle of Meg vs. Common Everyday Metals, I'm allergic to the back of my name tag at work. Normally I wear a cardigan or a cami under my shirt at work so the metal doesn't touch my skin, but it being July in Washington, DC and all, it hasn't really been layer-appropriate weather recently. So now I have a rectangular shaped welt on my chest that's flaking and constantly itches. It's really, really cute. Sometimes I catch people staring at it and I want to be like, "IT'S NOT SCABIES—I JUST HAVE A SEVERE ALLERGY TO NICKEL AND AM TOO EMBARRASSED TO ASK FOR A SPECIAL HYPO-ALLERGENIC NAME TAG AND PAINTING CLEAR NAIL POLISH ON THE BACK OF IT DOESN'T HELP!" But that wouldn't really make anything "better," so I let 'em just assume I have scabies instead. That's the state of my life right now—I willing let people believe I have scabies.

- Speaking of work, we sell a birthday card that has an illustration of two beavers holding a log that says "Happy Birthday!" and the description when you ring it up is "Happy Birthday 2 Beavers". Everytime someone buys it, I pee myself juuuuuust a little bit.

- In the continuing battle of poverty, I have good news and I have bad news. The good news is that I picked up 10 extra hours a week at work because I sent the most Desperate Debbie email to my managers begging them to throw any leftover hour scraps under the table for me. Thankfully, they were very generous. The bad news is that I'm still not making enough money to make ends meet, so I turned to the only place where a young, working woman can make a few extra dollars without compromising her integrity—Craigslist.

The Haunted Ghost Tour thing didn't pan-out, so I answered an ad for a health study on smoking that promised to pay $100. Now I'm not a "smoker" per se, but at this point I'd get on all fours and eat a pack of Marlboro Reds if you gave me 100-bucks. But alas, I hauled ass to NIH on my day off only to find out that my lung capacity is too good and I was turned down. Thus I call shenanigans on my mom for telling me that pot damages your lungs just as much as cigarettes and expect $100 retribution in the mail any day now. Kthnx.

- Feeling extra desperate recently, I decided to parooze the Craigslist adult gigs because sometimes you luck out and find some schmo who gets off on really random and non-sexual things and it's like, shit—I'll let you watch me do sudoku for a half an hour as long as I'm fully clothed and we do it in a Barnes & Noble, you know? Who am I to judge? Unfortunately all of the adult ads have been too sexual to consider recently, which is unfortunate, but does remind me of one of the biggest disagreements Ex Co-Blogger Chris and I have ever had in the history of our friendship.

When we were roommates in Brooklyn, I found an ad for a guy who would pay $500 to come and clean your house (fully clothed) and all you had to do in return is berate him while he did it (also fully clothed). I thought I had solved three problems with this ad: 1.) lack of money; 2.) anger management 3.) the hard to reach grease caked around the burners of our stovetop.

I drafted an email to this guy and out of courtesy told Chris what I was doing and he was having none of it. He refused to let me do it because he thought the guy would kill me. Meeting him halfway, I told him he could be there when it happened, but that only made it worse because apparently the guy would "kill him too." Here was my argument for why it was a good idea and Chris was wrong:

1.) Our apartment's messy; you wanna clean it up?

2.) $500. (I mean, yes, this was a pre-Recession world we were living in, but even back then that was a shit-ton of money.)

3.) Spending a Saturday berating some repressed Wall Street weirdo while he scrubs our toilet and we watch and eat Craisins sounds like the most fun thing I humanly can think of. If it doesn't to you, perhaps you're not the man I thought you were.

4.) $500.

5.) I grew up watching HBO's Real Sex; the people with the weirdest fetishes tend to be the most corn-fed, middle America, harmless, normal people.

5.) $500.

6.) I will give you that anyone willing to answer a Craigslist fetish ad has to be slightly eccentric and open-minded, but serial killers don't get off killing those kinds of people. They go for the normal, girl-next-door type who answers an ad from the guy who has an extra ticket to the Jason Mraz concert tonight and is looking for a LTR. That girl isn't expecting to get killed; she's expecting a night of grade-A crooning. The fetishist at least somewhat expects to end up a lampshade. And where's the fun in that? Where's the element of surprise? Jesus, watch an episode of Profiler or something.

7.) $500.

In the end, the fight escalated to "if you answer that ad, I'm moving out," so I decided to concede and forget about it because I'm such a good person. But I still kind of resent Chris for it and bring up this fight whenever possible. Obviously.

- I was at work the other day and a family of very obvious tourists walked in a started looking around the "Fun & Funky" table. On said table, we sell a book called Farts: A Spotter's Guide. It's basically a little noise machine that makes various farting noises attached to a book that explains what each kind of fart is. (I got it for Talia's birthday and it was the hit of the party. Mind you this was the party with the gin bucket, so the bar was already raised pretty high.)

The patriarch of the family picked up the book and started shaking his head disapprovingly. (Mind you he looked like the kind of guy who asks his son if he's a "queer" for not wanting to play football, but then creeps into his room at night to make him touch a completely different kind of pigskin, if you know what I mean. An Intervention Father, as I call them.) So he has the book in his hand and is shaking his head at it when he sternly says, "Farts. Farts, in our Nation's Capitol," puts the book down in disgust and walks away.

Thus, my new moneymaking scheme is to write a hit children's book called, Even The District Farts! and make a million dollars.

Good day to you, poverty.

State of the Meg: SCABIES!!!!!!1

Thoughts I Frankly Didn’t Try Very Hard to Flesh Out into Full Entries Because I’ve Had A Shitty Few Days

Eugenics: My mother and my aunt have never gotten along, although now that they’re getting older and their health has started to fail they get along better because they finally have something to talk about. Any time my aunt comes up in conversation, my mother says “Oh! She married those two idiots! It’s going to take us generations to get those genes out of the family.”

Abortion: My good God Almighty, I am tired of hearing about abortion. Like the Roman senator that ended every speech, no matter the topic, with “Carthage must be destroyed,” every political argument in this country (and a surprising number of private conversations) works its way around to abortion. In later centuries, historians will study our political system and be sure they’re using a bad translation. I’m sure I used to have a rational, well-considered position on the issue at some point, but I don’t remember what it was after a quarter-century of “Choice! Life! Choice! Life!” I especially hate the bumper sticker that says, “Your Mother Was Pro-Life!” Ignoring the foolishness of having any bumper sticker that contains the words “your mother,” no, she wasn’t. She just didn’t have an abortion in 1984. (Five bucks says someone leaves a comment saying “But she should have!”)

To Hell with Punctuation: There used to be an anti-abortion billboard on the highway on the way to my mom’s house from the airport (it was across from a place that offered “tattooz” – why is the area near the airport always so frightening?) Like most ads, it featured a dopey grinning baby, and bore the caption “Did you know? I got my “GENES” at conception. Why in the world are they “GENES”? Is “genes,” pronounced “hen-ess,” the Spanish word for soul or something? It makes me think that the person designing the billboard doesn’t really believe in genes, but, hell, might as well fight fire with fire? “Genes is the keyword here. Better do something to it. Quotes, italics or something.” Yesterday I was walking to the post office and passed a house with a sign on the door that read “Please leave deliveries on the step…” And… what? Ellipses… generally lead to something. Adding punctuation for no reason… makes no sense. I feel like there are a lot of signs on restaurants that have similar random punctuation, especially the poor, exploited quotation mark. “Please” NO SMOKING. One per “customer.”

Creation vs. Evolution: I had a fight with my last girlfriend (last as in both “final” and “most recent”) over this issue. She strongly favored teaching evolution, and I strongly didn’t give a damn.

“How do you not care if people are taught good science?”

“Because I went to a public high school! Our anatomy teacher was a defrocked monk! Who the hell cares what the teachers in high school teach, no one listens to them.”

“But it’s science!”

“It’s high school. Nothing that happens in high school matters unless you get pregnant. Name six things you learned in high school.”

To be fair, I didn’t really… do high school. By a lucky quirk, we had an excellent theatre department and crappy-ass sports teams, so the theatre kids got the privileges jocks traditionally get. I also tested well, so I really didn’t have to do a thing. (The defrocked monk thing is true, though. He had other, more time-consuming classes to teach so my senior-year anatomy class was mostly making power-point presentations about various parts of the body. Fingernails, for example. My partner and I started putting heavily haloed Renaissance pictures of Jesus in our presentations and adding narration by “the Bioluminescent Christ.” We were theatre kids, so we got away with it.) Anyway, my take on the matter is this: Go to an all-you-can-eat buffet the day after the government pays out benefits. Watch everyone’s table manners, and then tell me if you think we’re not descended from apes.

Chris Goes to Work: I’ve designed a job for myself. I’m going to hang out in the maternity ward of the hospital and veto stupid names. I went to middle school with a kid named “Dude.” During my very, very brief stint teaching underprivileged children, I met “Acuchi” (pronounced “a coochee” as in “a sniz” as in “female genitals”) and “Grunisha.” A friend of mine once had a beau named “Cable.” My mother, who for all her other eccentricities is usually truthful, swears she knew a woman who taught elementary school who had a pupil named “Vagina” (pronounced “Va-geena,”) and my father’s sister knew a family whose daughters were Georgia, Virginia, and Tennessee. We’ve all met someone named McKenzie but spelled some jackass way like “MyKyNzI” – not that McKenzie was ever supposed to be a first name, but at least most people could spell it within three tries. Even my dear, dear friend Apples wants to name her daughter “Aoife.” The A and the O are silent, and it’s pronounced “eefuh.” I asked her if she had had a stroke, and she said “It’s Irish,” as if that explained anything. You know what other names are Irish? Claire. Maureen. Eileen. So spellable. So pronounceable. There’s clearly an opening for someone to sit by the bassinet and say, “Kensleyton is not a name. Your choices are Henry or Jack.”

Politics: Ronald Reagan was president of the most powerful country in the world for eight years. He was also the star of a movie about a chimpanzee called “Bedtime for Bonzo.” (Well, star after the chimpanzee.) To me, this says two things. One, follow your friggin’ dreams, because hell, they might come true. Two, there absolutely is a God, because in a world governed solely by cold, rational natural laws, the “chimpanzee guy” never comes near the big red button.

The whitest things I’ve ever done:

- gotten a sunburn through a shirt

- had a nightmare, an actual nightmare, about having made a bad financial decision

- been scolded for not crying, more than once

White men traditionally get shit for not showing our emotions, but I ask you: The plane is going down, the Russians (The Iranians, the Pakistanis, the Chinese, the North Koreans, the Basques…) have dropped the bomb, the risen dead have appeared at the head of the block. Who do you want near you: someone having feelings, yelling and crying and (God forbid) trying to hug you, or someone in control of himself? I’ve always feared dying in a group for exactly this reason. Given my luck, not only would my plane get shot down by the one anti-aircraft missile the Green Party managed to buy, but I would be next to someone who wants me to “open up” on the way down.

“Is there anything you want to address before the end?”

“I, uh… sorr about the bag?”