As some of you may or may not know, there is an animal—at least I’m assuming it’s an animal, I suppose it could be an extremely uncouth tiny human—whose been squeezing under a fairly imposing iron gate and using the area in front of my front door as a toilet. This has happened thrice, this morning being the most recent incident. At first I thought it must be a dog but then I saw a black cat in the backyard. I broke a mirror and threw the shards over my left shoulder to offset the bad luck! Then I opened and closed an umbrella six times in my apartment and said an incantation. I’m now wondering if maybe it’s raccoon excrement because everyone knows cats don’t just relieve themselves out in the open. Oh and I threw the welcome mat which the animal had compromised away in an attempt to get rid of whatever smell is attracting the beast  so today the animal just left a little gift right in the area where the mat used to be. It was a set of nautical themed coasters. Thoughtful, but doesn’t exactly make up for the shit.

Have you ever seen those studies where a bunch of words are on a page but they’re missing the vowels or missing every third letter or missing all the letter inside the word or something but still it’s pretty easy to make out the meaning and the whole thing is to illustrate that we only need bits of information and our brains will fill in the rest?

I was thinking about this last night while watching Mad Men. I’m admittedly a latecomer to the show, but if I had to describe it in a word it’s elliptical. And then I started to think that I should try to describe all TV shows in one word and I should start a one-word review web site and then I realized that I’ll probably never do this and I’d rather spend time developing my brilliant cologne that comes in a cell phone shaped bottle called ConeXXXion idea. Don’t steal that idea, folks, unless you want to be a billionaire!

Anyway, most of the time while watching Mad Men I go back and forth between “huh?” and “what?” and yet I’m hooked. Probably more so than if I understood what I was watching.

And it’s probably silly not to mention Lost in this post however I’m silly, you guys!

(Joel Stein wrote a tweet that said “I am still watching Mad Men, but I am no longer understanding Mad Men”) which is what made me remember all this today. Although perhaps he meant it in a less literal sense. Hm.

Mind if I share too much information? I didn’t think so.

So I woke up in the middle of the night sure of two things. 1) I needed to pee. 2) I needed to pee NOW. I wasn’t aware of the third thing, which was that my right leg was totally asleep until I attempted to use it and instead of moving forward, as often happens when you walk, I just sort of stayed in one place and all sorts of weird pins and needles shot around and it was so uncomfortable I couldn’t move. So then I stood there in the dark pinned to the ground but also pretty sure I was going to pee on my leg. I think I might have said “Oh no” a couple times. So then I did what I had to do–there was NO TIME to wait for my leg to wake up– which was basically drag my leg around the apartment hoping I’d make it to the bathroom in time, which I did, but I’m still giving my right leg the silent treatment this morning for not being there for me at such a crucial time.

UPDATE: My leg still feels funny. It just told two knock knock jokes, neither of which were hilarious but I laughed anyway. Sometimes it’s just easier, you know?

Click to enlarge

(I announced on Twitter that I was the “Mayor of not being on @foursquare,” because foursquare is a program where if you go to a location a bunch of times you can become that location’s “mayor” and all the web people in NYC are on foursquare and etc and then fellow Pomona alum Jonathan Vanasco (@2xlp on twitter) said that he was going to make me a location on foursquare and become the mayor of me. AND HE DID!

(Note: that’s not my address, btw)