So I was reading today's L.A. Times and saw an article about how some people have complained about Starbucks' new summer poster campaign featuring two tall glasses of ice tea, a dragonfly flying around them and the phrase "Collapse into Cool." Apparently, this reminds them too much of the World Trade Center towers. Starbucks has pulled the ad campaign.

How much political correctness is too much? How many different permutations of two slim and tall objects next to each other do we have to get rid of before it's okay with everyone? Hell, I work across the street from two silver towers that were designed by the same guy who designed the World Trade Center and look very similar to those buildings, should I complain and have them torn down? When people are complaining about pictures of glasses, it might be a little too sensitive.

Reflect about what the people in Israel are dealing with. Almost every day, abject warfare is going on outside their homes. Suicide bombers are walking into their favorite malls, pizza parlors and clubs and detonating enough explosive to kill several people and level the place. They're not stopping the ads for the chains of restaurants that get destroyed, they're not running off to their therapists. Our American cosmopolitanism is translating into more of a prima donna attitude. I think we need to toughen up a bit. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

It's not that I don't have anything to say. It's that there are some things better left unsaid. While I've occasionally used this space to vent my own private thoughts about Life, the Universe and Things, I'm a bit wary of opening myself up completely to a vast unknown audience. Plus, how many times can you hear about the same thoughts and neuroses running through my head all the time?

So instead, talk amongst yourselves. In my comments even, if you like. I'll even give you a topic: The Moral Majority is neither moral nor a majority. Discuss.

So I was poking around the Net while having dinner tonight and ran across a review of Spider-Man in the Baltimore Sun that basically comes right out and says that the reason why the movie is so popular is because it's a geek-gets-girl story. I couldn't disagree more.

The initial way that we see Peter Parker -- yes, that's a geeky guy. Big glasses, clumsy, smart, picked on by the school bully... stereotypical geek. But once he gets bitten by that genetically altered spider, he takes on a totally new personality in Spider-Man, but a lot of Spider-Man's characteristics also serve to enhance his own persona and rid him of a lot of the geek factor. Peter Parker never would've been suave and coordinated enough to catch Mary Jane and all of the items on her lunch tray when she slips on whatever on the floor without his improved "Spidey senses," and he never would've been able to win that fight against the bully had his reflexes and strength not been vastly enhanced. That is what gets Mary Jane interested in him -- the fact that he's strong and slick that way. Those are not typical traits of a geek, and they also gave him a spot more confidence. Mary Jane falls for a Spidey-Parker mix, and she never would've gone for him had he not taken on those new abilities.

Geek-gets-girl stories? Sure, we all love them. Can't Buy Me Love with Patrick Dempsey, Back to the Future (the first one)... Very popular geek-gets-girl movies. But not Spider-Man. Sorry, pal, you don't win the new Ford Tempo on this one.

I have done battle with and won against Strange Person Whose Cell Phone Keeps Calling Me. I received not one, not two, but three random phone calls from her on my drive home -- I don't like being on the phone while I'm driving, but I wanted to see if she'd actually answer the phone this time so I could tell her to stop calling me. She didn't, but at least the caller ID came up with her number. So I called her back when I got home to tell her to stop calling me, which I thought was brilliant. Except she doesn't speak English, and kept insisting "No, I no call."

So, being the resourceful person I am and my need for my own perfection to be satisfied, I waited on hold with the phone company for 10 minutes to find out how to block her phone number from calling me. I say, huzzah! I have defeated her.

Except my left ear is still ringing from the concert. Now if only there was a company I could call to have that fixed...

I got an e-mail over the weekend from someone who is withdrawing from Blogger Insider. Fine. I have no problems with that. What I have a problem with is her vitrolic diatribe against all Blogspot bloggers (and she did say "all") saying how they're all teenagers who have nothing better than to fill their blogs with quizzes and questionnaires, how they blog infrequently and sometimes don't blog for weeks at all but come back only to say "I haven't blogged in a while," or how they basically keep their blogs as a diary of "this is what I did today."

I'm so infuriated by that because I firmly believe that having your own domain does not automatically constitute good content or frequency of updates. Yes, I have my own domain but I started on Blogspot and kept that blog running for almost six months before I finally moved to my own site because I was just sick of Blogger going down all the time. I know plenty of domain-hosted bloggers who have little-to-no decent content, and conversely I know plenty of Blogspot-hosted bloggers who have great content and update frequently.

She wanted out of Blogger Insider, and I was more than happy to remove her from the list. Even if she had been writing to complain and not to withdraw, I still would've taken her off the list because quite frankly, I wouldn't have wanted such an elitist snob blogger as part of the program. She can go have fun on her own little site.

Somehow, I managed to get my act together today, go grocery shopping, stop by my office and do a spot of work, do laundry, cook up some food and wash my car today. I have no idea how. I'm completely and utterly drained of all energy, and I hope I'll be able to get to sleep sometime soon. My friends who tried to keep up with me are also drained, and most likely used today to take it easy as well.

I'm at the point where I haven't listened to music at all today except for a few minutes in the car. Honestly, I never thought I'd hit this point, but I've heard so much and been bombarded with so much over the past few days that I reached saturation. I suppose it's good that I hit saturation today, since I'm still partially deaf after the concert last night. My roommate was complaining about some kind of alarm going off outside, but I hadn't even noticed it because I thought it was just the ringing in my ears.

Speaking of music, I'm noticing the American influence on music even more. Despite the fact that Run Lola Run is a German-language film, the background music is in English.

The KROQ Weenie Roast completely kicked ass, and I saw some incredible performances. One of the things that I really liked was the fact that the stage was set up with a rotating circle that had a wall running down the middle of it, so while one band was on stage, another was being set up out of sight on the other side of the wall and when the on-stage band finished, they just rotated the circle and the next band came on. It was a lot quicker than having to wait while they disassembled each band's setup and then put together the next band's, it kept the concert moving very quickly and it really made for a good time because there wasn't any dead time between performances.

Life slowly returns to normal as my conference is over, all the concerts and shows and parties surrounding it are over. Tomorrow I will sleep late and take it easy for most of the day, and Monday morning I will go to work as usual. But I will add the Weenie Roast ticket and program to my growing collection of passes, tags, tickets, matchbooks and other paraphernalia that I've been slowly collecting as kind of a scrapbook of my incredible life recently. In some ways, it really does reinforce the fact that I feel like I've stepped into Almost Famous.

I realized while Moby was on stage tonight (and I liked his performance the most out of all the artists there today) what I really miss about singing. I miss the fact that while you're on stage and performing a song that everyone likes and gets into, you really connect with the crowd. You think that each person out there feels like you're singing/playing right to them, and that you're establishing a link with each individual on a personal basis. You see people dancing to your music, you hear people singing along to the lyrics with you. You can yell out, "Hello, [insert name of city]!" and the crowd will roar back at you in response because, again, every person thinks you're speaking specifically to them. It sounds like a power thing, and in some ways, it is -- but in a lot of ways, it's not. And I kind of miss it.

I got to thinking tonight about all that I have seen and done and all the people I have met over the past 4 months since I've arrived in Los Angeles. It's staggering, really. To some extent, my rational mind is telling me that I should just go ahead and enjoy it since I deserve it after all the muddling I've been through for the past several years. To another extent, I keep expecting someone to tell me I'm having too much fun and I've experienced too many great things and I've exceeded my limit for this decade.

I've been truly lucky to fall in with some great people, both professionally and personally. I feel like I waltzed into town and someone handed me all the keys. Even some of my co-workers marvel at how hooked-up I am, having said things like "when I moved here, my first six months were completely miserable and I didn't know anyone, but you know so many people already and you're having an amazing time and doing some things I haven't even done yet."

Tonight, I walked out of the door at the Viper Room that River Phoenix died in front of. And in about 20 minutes, I will walk through another door into a room that my boss graciously offered me to stay in tonight -- at Merv Griffin's Beverly Hilton. Pardon me while I pack.

It's been a very long day, and my head's spinning a bit from all that I've seen and heard so far. The morning brought a fair amount of useful business information, the afternoon brought a fair amount of frantic action as I lost my ATM card and had to run to the bank to retrieve it (or cancel it, if it had been truly lost, which thankfully it wasn't) while I also drove down to the World-Famous KROQ to pick up tickets for me and a co-worker to their upcoming big concert and drop off all the awards they won at our convention that afternoon, the evening brought a fair amount of free food and liquor and the Violent Femmes. I met some interesting people, got an In-N-Out burger from the In-N-Out truck that a record label rented for the event, and danced with my publisher. All in all, a very surreal experience. Especially given the fact that I never really realized how many stunningly beautiful women there are in the radio and recording industries.

I pulled the suit out of the back of my closet for the day today and was surprised at how many compliments I received as to how good I looked. I suppose that I should dress up a little more often, but I just feel comfortable in jeans and a shirt. I'm not quite sure how much my dress code over the past couple of days had to do with it, but a couple of people admitted that they thought I was at least three years older than I actually was, and were surprised to hear how old I actually am. I'm just mildly concerned that one of my closer friends here got a little weirded out when she heard how young I am. But I ramble because I'm exhausted beyond belief and will now proceed to collapse in bed.

You know those nights when you're really tired and you make an effort to go to sleep at a decent hour but as soon as your head hits the pillow, your mind jumps to warp speed and you can't stop thinking about all the things that are happening and all the things you need to remember and plan for the next few days and you're thinking so fast that even though you're tired you just toss and turn for a long time and end up staying up way later than you hoped so you only end up getting a few hours of sleep and you have to keep yourself going solely on coffee and adrenaline?

Yeah. I had one of those nights last night.

So most everyone in the U.S. woke up to a morning paper with screaming front page headlines about how an Al-Qaeda member had been captured despite his plans to detonate a "dirty bomb" somewhere in the country. But did anyone read closely enough to see that Jose Padilla -- or whatever name he's going by these days -- was captured more than a month ago, on May 8? What took our government so long to release the information if they're so intent on keeping the image that they're at the forefront of fighting terrorism? "Oh yeah, we stopped this guy who was in the initial planning stages of blowing up a dirty bomb here, but that was a month ago."

In other news, I got to ask my friend last night about the college reunion she just got back from -- she was a year ahead of me, so mine is next year. It was interesting to hear how most people haven't changed at all. The cliques are still there, the behaviors are still there, the personalities are still there. It's like everyone just got older but not much else changed. She said that in some ways, it was cool -- because the fun and nice people still stayed fun and nice -- but in other ways, it was pretty sad, since the stuck-up immature people still stayed stuck-up and immature. It's because of this kind of description that I'm mildly dreading any kind of reunion, and I've got a few coming up.

One of my best friends took me to a place that had all-you-can-eat-sushi last night. But after the third sake bomb hit, the food didn't matter all that much anymore. Either way, it was the first time in a very very long time that I'd gone to sleep before 10:30PM.

While talking to another friend before meeting my dinner companion, I described her as "my other half -- but in the way that we've known each other so long and so well that we're extremely close and we know what the other is thinking." Basically, like siblings. However, after making that "other half" comment, I was thoroughly questioned about whether or not we'd ever hooked up and the whole friends with benefits deal.

No, we've never hooked up. I've never been able to pull off the friends-with-benefits thing with anyone because I'm a little unsure of how it would strain a friendship, so I've just kind of kept my peace in those types of situations. It's hard to predict how awkward things would become if I hooked up with one of my female friends and whether or not the friendship would be strained to the point where it would cause too many problems. Then again, I could be totally wrong and things would be fine and it would be one of those things where it's just never spoken of again. It's such a blurry line and I guess that I feel it's safer not to cross at all.

Then again, I can't read women worth a damn.

Okay, so I've got a few Cultural Confessions to make.

1. I actually like the new Eminem song. A lot. Very much more than I should.
2. I did not like Episode 2 very much.
3. I can't stand "The Osbournes," nor any member of the family who goes off and does their own thing.

Let's break it down.

Eminem: I can't help it. The song's so damn catchy, it's got a great beat, and the video is hysterical. Watching Eminem and Dr. Dre bobbing their heads in time in the car just makes me want to bob along with them. And sometimes I do. Plus, the chorus just appeals to me: Now this looks like a job for me/So everybody just follow me. That's like my personal theme.

Episode 2: Hayden Christensen cannot act. He was completely awful. And the dialogue between him and Natalie Portman was so trite and unbelievable, they had no chemistry whatsoever. The love thing was just... well, dumb. On top of that, too much of the movie's "cool" factor was dependent on the fact that we know how the series will end. Like the line where Obi-Wan tells Anakin, "You will be the death of me." Well, it's funny because we know it's true. Otherwise, it wouldn't be funny at all. There's just too many allusions to Episodes IV-VI.

"The Osbournes": So the kids are spoiled brats in the worst possible way, the mother's a control freak and the father's an incomprehensible idiot, relatively speaking. Explain to me why they deserve $20 million for twenty episodes of this? They swear a lot. So what? Hell, I swear a lot, can they pay me if I let them film me swearing? Kelly and Jack deserve a swift kick in the ass and someone telling them to sit down, shut up and realize that just because they're the children of a rock star, it doesn't mean that they can act like brats and get whatever they want and whine so much. I still don't understand the appeal of that show, it's like watching your next door neighbors on TV except they're filthy rich. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy Ozzy's music and I completely believe that he helped shape hard rock to be what it is today, but that doesn't mean that I think his show is great. I've tried on numerous occasions but couldn't watch more than 10 minutes before I had to get up and leave the room because I was so turned off by it.

Now this looks like a job for me...

So Bally's kicked me out yesterday. Apparently, the six-months-free pass that I was using had two expiration dates -- one for members who were using it at their membership renewal that was prominently displayed across the top of the coupon and said "expires 5/01/05," and the six-months-free section that non-members like me could use that said "expires 7/31/01" and was buried somewhere in the middle of lots of fine print. So they took me upstairs and tried to bully me into buying a membership and tried to make it sound like I'd be doing myself a favor for buying one because then I'd get to use the section of the coupon for members. I wasn't buying. So when the salesman saw this, he flat out told me, "Well, we don't want those kind of free deals anyways." Really? I thought you'd be handing out free month passes all the time. I was not going to buy a membership with them given all the stories I've heard, so I'm going down to check out the gym my roommates go to.

And later on, I plan on finally seeing Star Wars: Episode 2. I know, it's taken me long enough, right?

The nighttime is an unforgiving mistress, she keeps me around and she knows I like it. It's always late at night that the whispers inside my head grow to the volume where I start to seriously question things and beat myself up.

It doesn't mean much
It doesn't mean anything at all
The life I've left behind me is a cold room
I've crossed the last line
From where I can't return
Where every step I took in faith betrayed me
And led me from my home...
-- Sarah McLachlan, "Sweet Surrender"