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Beth is...a staunch advocate of Googlism.

I've been increasingly disgusted with my apartment. Well, with my furniture really, or lack thereof. I have this lovely large space, four spaces!, and it still looks like a dorm room. A dirty dorm room. So I got myself a catalog and started planning my new Ikean furniture-filled future. (Chuck Palahniuk is rolling in his, um, deluxe hotel suite at this, but you know what? Fuck Palahniuk.) Once The List was made there was the issue of how to reach Ikea. By rental car, Zipcar, borrowed car, Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria? Delivery was right out because that $90 delivery fee could be used to buy $90 worth of OMAR or VIPPA or SMYG rather than just one surly truck driver. As usual, K-dub came through with the solution.

Mom and Pop K-dub were in town last weekend and borrowed KW2's car to drive out to NJ to visit yet another of their blonde daughters. They were discussing with K how best to return said car to the city since they had to get to Newark airport Monday morning for their flight back home. Eureka! How about they leave the car in the airport lot with the keys stowed somewhere sneaky and then K-dub and I would shuttle it out there Monday evening straight from work, snag the car, shop our nuts off, then drive back into the city with our trunkload of conspicuous consumption, unload it and return the Sexy Hyundai to KW2 ripe with the scent of victory? It's a plan, stan.

And as it was written, so it came to pass that on Monday afternoon at the crack of 4:45 I raced from the hospital to Penn Station where K-dub and I found each other with nary a fuss (two cheers for preplanning + text messaging) and made the thankfully short trip on crowded-as-pants NJ Transit to the weird, Tokyo stylee Newark airport station where we hopped on my beloved monorail. Just like last time we didn't get to be in our own monorail compartment, instead sharing it with 2 gentlemen and a young blonde lady. The men were together, one middle aged-ish and burly and the other younger and taller. I paid them no mind until Burly started chatting up Blonde Lady, asking her what she did for a living. She tells him she's a celebrity impersonator, which I at first think is a joke, a way to blow him off but when he asks her what celebrities she impersonates and she answers "Marilyn Monroe, Reba McEntire" and a few others I realize she's serious and I feel bad for her getting sucked into this conversation with Burly who is surely not gonna let up on such a pretty lady with such an interesting job. Then Younger Guy pipes up with "And I thought I had the most interesting job in the room." or some such retardism. I am in the midst of a wild, out of control eye rolling contest with K-dub when, in answer to Blondie's polite "Oh, what is it that you do?", he says "I'm an actor. I was on Saved By The Bell for 12 years."

Motherfuckin' Screech is on the monorail with us. Screech. K-dub whips around and yells "Is it true or a rumor that you're Mike D's brother?" He says no and she says "I bet you wish you were." But he doesn't hear her because he and Burly are still stone cold mackin on Blondie who clearly does not really know who Screech is, but may vaguely know what Saved By the Bell is. Screech starts talking about the Microsoft product launch he just worked, specifically how lucrative those gigs are. I am speechless.

The Ikea trip was completely successful and I got the radest butcher block ever (fear my veggie chopping skillz) but really the rest of the evening was one big anticlimax. Story of my life.

Ankabuki is the Pied Piper of Crazy. It must be so. I've been chillin' at home, reading tons of books, minding my own for months now. This weekend the Kabuki comes to town and all hell breaks loose.

She arrived on Friday but was hanging with her other homies that night (or should I say disrupting their lives in a deep and permanent way) so we all made plans for Saturday. I started out Saturday in a wholesome, productive way by finally hauling my lazy ass down to the Home Depot on Hamilton to pick up a cordless drill (ooh!) and a DustBuster (ahh!). Instead I managed to find the drill I wanted for sale in a combo package of the drill + a hand vac (ohh!). I finished up and went home where A met me and then we called K-dub and made a plan to meet her at Uncle Nick's for some flaming cheese.

Uncle Nick's is famous, amongst my friends anyway, for this flaming cheese. They take a wedge of cheese coated in a thin layer of some kind of breading and when they bring it to you they douse it in alcohol and set it on fire. It's quite a crowd pleaser. However when your waiter is higher than Cheech and Chong, it's also a little scary. He got everything right somehow, and in a timely enough fashion considering he had to come back to our table every 15 minutes to reconfirm our orders and whisper "Ai, mami..." into K-dub's ear. Seriously.

Somewhere around dessert, Anca and I began to notice that K-dub was a lot drunker than her share of one bottle of wine should have made her. She confessed that a lack of food all day plus a couple of beers before we met up with her might have had something to do with that. Therefore after the wine with dinner and a shot of ouzo with coffee, she was ready to go home and pass out. Anca was having none of that however and ushered us off to the Bellevue, even thought it was Saturday and neither Tony nor Shay would be there. But Anca demanded Bellevue so Bellevue she would have.

It started out normally enough. We got our Bud Lites, Anca regaled us with tales of her badass reputation at school, K-dub worked up a slight addiction to the creepy new video game that replaced the golf game, K-dub somehow became more sober for a while, giving us a chance to catch up with her, and we were all having a really good time. I'm not gonna lie, there was a distinct "I sure wouldn't mind meeting a cute boy" vibe going on in all three of us, but no one imagined that it was actually palpable. But how else to account for what happened sometime after midnight? This guy who looked like if Jimmy Fallon and Jason Patric had a baby walked up to K-dub and said "I'll give you $5 if you kiss me." Yes, really. But the best part, the absolute best part is that as Anca and I are hysterically laughing, K looks up at him and says "Make it ten." And so he hands her $10 and they get up and move to the end of the bar and kiss like rockstars. Then Jimmy Patric buys Anca and K another round (I was playing stealth drinker that night, seemingly keeping up but really drinking at my own slow and steady pace) and they buy him a drink and he eventually leaves for Siberia (the bar, not the gulag) with his homies but not before giving K-dub his digits. Slick, right?

K-dub finally had enough as it came up on 4am but Anca and I were in for the long haul. How long exactly we didn't realize until it was after 4 and Christine still hadn't said last call. We waited and waited, enjoying our good fortune, then finally asked what was up. Time change! A whole extra hour for carousing. Sometime around then I started noticing this guy, cute, tall, with both arms covered in tattoos, sort of hovering behind Anca. He sat down on the stool next to her and was totally trying to strike up a conversation but she kept turning around to talk to me. Finally, the late hour and my growing lack of inhibitions caused me to give her an ultimatum. "I am going to talk to this guy sitting on the other side of me so that you will be forced to talk to HoverDude for lack of anything else to do." So I turned to the young man on my right and said "Hi, you should talk to me so my friend can talk to the guy sitting on the other side of her." And he said "That guy is my best friend, and that's why I came over here, so he could talk to your friend." Hey, your peanut butter's in my chocolate!

Thus Guy To My Right, who I shall call Ulysses, and I struck up a lively conversation (which Anca referred to the next day as "the coolest conversation I've ever heard. At 4am at the Bellevue.") while we waited for our respective friends to get it on. Unfortunately, for both Anca and HoverDude who doesn't know what he missed, HoverDude was too drunk to really hold a conversation of any kind. They communicated solely by singing along to Pantera lyrics together which Anca referred to the next day as "the most romantic thing ever." As far as what happened between Ulysses and I, I'll say only this: he was a very nice boy and I'll have to wear a turtleneck to work on Monday. The end.

Checking my spam folder this morning I noticed, buried in between "you's a ho!!" and "Do you really know what pee taste like? Ask a girl who has drank a quart!", I had gotten a message from CrushLink.com. I know these things are a scam, a way to make you give up the email addresses of your friends and acquaintances via guessing who sent you the crush link, but still. Damn. It's so tempting to guess, thus continuing the cycle of junk mail.

So let's fight the power, man. Fess up - who gave crushlink my email? Go ahead, let's break the circle of madness. It's OK, I'm sure I have a crush on you too.

Ever time I hear or see the name Andrew Fastow, and the ex-Enron CFO gets a lot of press these days, it makes me think of John Basedow and his rock hard six pack of abs. It is disconcerting, to say the least.

Doing data entry this morning I came across an address in Hadlyme, CT. Are the people in Hadlyme just trying to show up the good citizens of Lyme? "Lyme is so 20th century. We all have rickets now."

I moved to Manhattan in the summer of 1996. In one of those serendipitous quirks of life, I wanted to move into the city to be closer to my job at the same time an old college (Rutgers, not CUA) roommate was making plans to attend NYU grad school. We found a place on E. 7th St. near Avenue B that I would kill to have now. Two bedrooms for $1275! Two weeks after we moved in I was walking home and near my door was a homeless guy with a cardboard box. Apparently earlier in the day a woman in a car had stopped at the corner of A and 7th, gotten out, handed the homeless guy the box and then drove away. He was saying "I can't even take care of myself! What am I gonna do with these cats?!" There were two, both calico, one gray and white, one caramel colored and white. I hesitated, then grabbed the tiny gray and white kitty and brought him home. As I was walking away another woman did the same with the other kitten. My roommate was a little surprised, but damn, who can resist a tiny kitten? I named him Elvis. No one knows this but it was because I had a crush on Ryan, who at that time was my coworker and best friend.

I took him to work with me the next day so that I could dash off to the vet on my lunch. We kept him in the support area, in a giant box that some modem racks had come in and everyone came by to play with him. I remember I carried him to the vet in my backpack and after his checkup I stopped by a customer's studio to hand deliver our install disks because she lived on the same block as the vet. Ah, the days of NYC local ISPs...

The roommate and I grew far far apart after she started dating the Anti-Christ. By that time Ryan and I were dating and I was spending all my time a few blocks away at his apartment even though he already had one roommate. Finally I gave up the apartment altogether and lived fulltime with Ryan and Rudy and Elvis while searching for a place of my own. The economy had already kicked in by then and my search was a bust till I joined forces with Senor T and we found ourself a nice yet bizarre 2 bedroom on 6th and B. It was at that point that the El Vez and I parted. He stayed with Ryan, as T wasn't really into having a pet. Besides at that point Ryan was permanently attached to the Vez and was more than happy to keep him close.

That year, Vez got sick. He was very meowly which was incredibly odd as his normal state was pretty much mute. Also he peed everywhere and anywhere which was also incredibly out of character. We took him to the Animal Medical Center ("We have great service and it shows. In your bill. Your ENORMOUS bill.") and discovered he had that condition where cats form crystals in their bladder, making it hard to pee. Sorta like kitty kidney stones. With boy cats it can be life threatening, as their, um, equipment is more easily blocked by the crystals. Dr. Noelle was a motherfucking angel who did everything in her power to fix him with as little expense as possible. She averted the necessity of surgery by first trying to flush him out and it ended up working and saving us $5000 that we of course couldnt afford but were more than willing to spend.

T went off to grad school after our lease was up and I moved in with Ryan again, this time just the two of us, living in sin with our cat who had grown into something more akin to a puma or a jeguwa than an ordinary housecat. Seriously, he was HUGE. I think it started when he lived with Ryan, Rudy and I - he played us off each other like a mastermind. To Rudy: "They haven't fed me in days. Please, take pity on me!" To Ryan: "The girl forgot me again, before she left for work. I swear. to god." To me: "I'm cuuuuuuuute! And hungry." And so on, for years. He got up to at least 20lbs. I once sent an email to pamie because I realized her cat Taylor and Elvis were like twins. And she wrote me back, which was cool and for which I have Vez to thank.

When Ryan and I broke up he got "custody" of Elvis. While it made me feel a little like a deadbeat mom who leaves her family to go be a cocktail waitress in Vegas, I knew it was the right thing, the only thing, to do because I just could not separate Ryan and Elvis. And it's not like I actually was deadbeat mom, we're still best friends and I only moved next door. I missed him a lot more when I moved out here to Brooklyn.

Last night K-dub did one of those things that I love her for. She fucking CAMPED OUT in front of Sam Goody's all night long in order to get tickets to the Foo Fighters Halloween show. Ryan joined her because he also wanted tickets and is able to go into work late. The foo saga is best told by those two. I got a message after 9 from K that they had indeed succeeded in getting the tickets so when Ryan called soon after I figured he was also passing on the good news. However he was actually calling with awful news. He got back to his apartment around 9:30am to shower and change for work and found Elvis had died. We don't know how or why, Ryan says he found him curled up in his chair in a peaceful sleeping pose. Then he called me at work and told me.

I don't know what else to say. I am so very very sad. I remember what it felt like to leave Elvis at the animal hospital overnight when he was sick. The house was so empty then. I'm so sorry, Ryan.

"Friendship! mysterious cement of the soul! Sweetener of life! and solder of society!" - Robert Blair

To K-dub, my aspartame, happy birthday!

If you were made into a diamond I would totally wear you.