I've had a recent deep craving for Mallomars. I grew up on them, and it appears that half the country did too. Unfortunately, it's the Eastern half of the country, since no one west of the Mississippi knows what they are. It's a quick way to discern the West Coasters from the East Coasters -- you say the word "Mallomar" and you watch the look on their faces. If they give you a blank stare, they're from the West. If they immediately get a look of longing on their face and that faraway look of recollection from their youth, they're from the East.

For those of you not in the know, a Mallomar is a great creation consisting of a graham cracker cookie topped with marshmallow stuff, then the whole thing is coated with chocolate. It's kind of like a S'more, but not really. It's round with a flat bottom and a hole in the middle. It's one of those things that makes you believe in the existence of perfection.

Except they don't make them out here. I can't find them in the supermarkets anywhere. And the worst part is, when I went to Nabisco's website, I couldn't find a page for them. So I'm hoping it's just an oversight, because you can't stop making Mallomars. It's an American tradition. If you stop making Mallomars, then... well... the terrorists win. Yeah. That's it.

So I watched yesterday's episode of "Sex and the City." Yes, I'm a guy, and I watch "Sex and the City." You want I should kick your ass to prove my security in my manhood? That's better.

Now then. There's two things that I took note of in the episode. And in recent style, I'll break them out in numbered form.

1. Carrie muses near the beginning of the show about something to the effect of, "There's three things that people in New York are always looking for: a great job, an apartment and a significant other. Why is it when we have two out of three, we always focus on the one thing we don't have instead of recognizing the fact that we have the other two?" It's not just in New York, it's everywhere. Even here in L.A. I have the job (despite recent tensions mostly fomented by my own screwups and a few bombshells that have been dropped), I have the apartment, but I don't have the woman. And I feel the lacking, especially given the fact that friends have recently become involved while I sit off on the sidelines or I come along as an odd-numbered wheel.

Even my best friend has said as such. Two years ago, we met up for a weekend in San Francisco, and on the spur of the moment, we had our palms read by some women who was sitting by the wharf with some fold-up chairs and a card table. She told me that once my career came into focus, everything else would fall into place -- including relationships. My best friend still hasn't forgotten that, and she reminds me of it often and, especially recently, has been telling me that I'm primed for a relationship and I should find myself a woman.

Yeah, well, easier said than done. But it's still at the forefront of my mind. I may have the cool job and the great apartment, but it's still preying on my mind that the last third of the puzzle is still not locked into place.

2. Carrie muses at the end of the episode that it's better to know that a person who you "sparked" with is out there, even if you can't have them. I wholeheartedly disagree. Even if it's unrequited, someone who ignites that spark in you is someone who you want to hang on to and make a part of your life. Knowing they're out there and you can't have them is one of the worst feelings that someone can have, because you go around thinking either that someone else is with the person who ignites your flame, or that you know that there's a chance the two of you could be great together, but it just can't happen -- either by circumstance of another relationship, distance, whatever.

It's like eating the best meal you could ever eat in your entire life, or driving the most perfect car you've ever driven, or hearing the most wonderful music you've ever heard, or seeing the most incredible movie you've ever seen -- and you can't ever behold it again. You know it's out there. You know it exists. But you just can't have it past that one time. (Pardon me while strains of Howard Jones' "No One Is To Blame" run through my head.) Do you honestly think it's better that you had the taste, that you had concrete proof that it exists... and that you can never experience it again?

It's not that you were in a relationship and it ended. It's not like you got involved with someone and you miss the passionate times, it's not like the spark cooled. You never had that chance. The spark ignited, and then the match went away, leaving you to burn out on your own.

Six months ago today, I left the East Coast and drove off to a new land whose mystery had always intrigued me. Six months ago today, I left a life behind to start over in a place that I had always thought of living in. Six months ago today, I cut my ties with my past and went forth to find my future.

Six months later, I still don't understand Southern Californians' obsession with ranch dressing. They put it on everything. I don't get it. I can understand liking it on salads, but there are some things that you just don't mess with. Buffalo wings, for instance. It's known fact that buffalo wings go with blue cheese dressing. But the SoCal people put ranch on it. They dip their pizza in it. They put it in their tacos and burritos, and on their burgers.

Quite frankly, I don't know what to make of this obsession. It makes me think that there's the possibility that ranch dressing makers have been lining the pockets of local Congressional representatives, or that there's some kind of mass hypnosis going on or maybe there's something in the water that triggers ranch dressing cravings. Either way, please make sure that I don't succumb. If I do, escort me to back to the land of normal salad dressing habits to deprogram me.

- A co-worker and I were looking for a particular Homer Simpson quote on the Net this afternoon so we could use it for a headline on a story he was writing. The funny thing was how we'd both see a quote, say it out loud at the same time, then crack up as we recalled which episode it was from and said other great lines from the episode.
- There's a lightswitch in my room that doesn't control anything. I've plugged a lamp into every outlet in the room and tried flipping the switch to see if it would turn on. But it doesn't seem to affect any outlet. There's probably some guy in North Dakota wondering why his lights are going on and off randomly.
- Maybe it's just the fact that I copyedit for a living, but I'm noticing a lot more mistakes being made in very obvious places as far as spelling goes. The promo for tomorrow's baseball game on the local Fox affiliate just labeled it "tommorrow." I've seen "alright" on the CNN news ticker. It makes me think that people are just getting terribly lazy.
- Speaking of the CNN news ticker, I can't deal with that thing. It's really distracting. The thing is, they're already presenting the news, why do they need the ticker repeating the same thing over and over? I can't pay attention to what's on the screen and what's on the ticker at the same time.
- There's a distinct difference between Slush Puppies, Slurpees and Icees. Me, I'm a Slush Puppie person. I've yet to find any places with Slush Puppie machines around here though.

I watched the opening episode of Comedy Central's "Contest Searchlight" tonight. I had two distinct reactions to this show, which I will now detail.

1. There are no -- well, there are some, but very few -- original ideas in entertainment these days. The people who made it into final consideration for Contest Searchlight, their ideas weren't anything new. They took other people's ideas and either combined them, or they blatantly ripped them off. It's a sad state of affairs when every plot I hear for a movie or a show or any sound I hear for a song, I can describe to others by referring to work I have previously experienced. During the press junket announcing the project, one of the executive producers, Lenny Clarke, even said that they were being like the Japanese -- they were taking someone else's project (in this case, HBO/Ben Affleck/Matt Damon's "Project Greenlight") and improving on it. So this whole idea itself isn't even original.

How many times have you been able to describe something as "[insert title/name] meets [insert title/name]"? How many times have you heard a plotline and said, "Man, that reminds me of [insert title]..."? How many times have you heard a song and said, "They sound just like [insert name]..."? I find myself saying that kind of thing way too often lately. I'm beginning to lose faith in the creative ability of America. Or is it just the industries stifling anything different? That leads me to Reaction #2.

2. I was rather put off by the way the Comedy Central people handled choosing the winner. They found both main finalists lacking, so they decided to combine their ideas, pick one as the winner, then later on during production of the winner's idea, they'd tell him that they had some changes they want made to the show. In fact, the guys making the final decision said things to the effect of, "I feel bad stabbing him in the back like this, imposing our changes on his project, but this is show business and that's how it is."

If that's show business and that's how it's usually done, it makes me wish that I didn't know about it. It makes me feel awful that these guys gave the winner some false sense of euphoria in that he thinks he's going to be able to fulfill his vision, when in truth, it's not going to happen and they're going to force something else on him or push him to the point where he'll leave the project and they won't have to go through with it. If everything has to conform to what executives want, no wonder why there's nothing new under the sun.

A friend of mine sent me a link to an article on SaveKaryn.com that ran in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. Word of her little effort are slowly spreading across the nation. But the article gave me a new perspective on the situation that I can use against her.

She's begging. Plain and simple. She's just using the Internet to do it. What makes what she's doing any different from someone sitting on the street with an empty cup, asking for change? How many people like that do you pass every day without giving a second thought to, but people have already given her $4000 just because she's doing it on the web? You might say, "She lives in New York, it's expensive to live there," but she was making over $100,000 a year and still managed to rack up $20,000 in debt without putting any money away! I'm living in Los Angeles and not making anywhere near $100,000, but I'm still managing to keep it together and keep my finances solvent, and you don't see me asking strangers for money.

You're walking down the street. You see a couple of people sitting in a doorway with cups asking for change. One of them is homeless, she's got ragged clothing, stringy hair, she's dirty and hungry and is badly in need of a shower, a good meal and a good night's sleep in a real bed. The other is wearing make-up, rolled out of her nice comfy bed and apartment to come down to the street for a few hours before she heads back up to her couch to watch TV before bed, has a Kate Spade bag and Prada shoes, just got a manicure and is begging for change to be put in a Starbucks cup that until recently contained a latte -- until she drank it. Who do you give your money to?

If you said the homeless woman (and I seriously hope you did), then put your money where your mouth is and instead of funding Prada-shoe-girl's credit card debt repayment, why don't you find yourself a nice little non-profit organization and give them your spare change instead. If we all gave $1 to a non-profit rather than to Karyn, think of the effect that would have. She dug her own hole, let her find the dirt to fill it in. These organizations are trying to fill the holes of others who really need it -- mostly because of circumstances beyond their control, like diseases or abusive partners or natural disasters -- and they're doing it out of the goodness of their own hearts and with limited resources.

To those of you who helped contributed the $4,000 to save Karyn already, I'm disgusted. Shame on you.

I have no idea why I seem to be a dust magnet. But everywhere I go, my living area seems to accumulate dust more quickly than others'.

Boston was the worst. I'd thoroughly clean my room, and two days later, there would be a fine coating of dust on the furniture again. It got to the point where I almost gave up, despite my air purifier (which didn't seem to do too much good). I had to open my mouse to clean gunk off the rollers more times than I can count.

It's kind of interesting when you find out where dust comes from -- dead skin, dead plants, but mostly from meteorites that burn up in the atmosphere. So the stuff I'm brushing off my monitor, my desk and my dresser came from outer space.

Let me preface this by saying that on any given day, at any given moment, I look like your average yuppie preppy white boy, accentuated by the fact that I wear glasses and my fashion sense isn't the best it possibly could be. I have been called "nerd," "geek" and all the other wonderful complimentary terms you give to the timid people who don't fit in so well because they might be more bookish than socially skilled (though I'd like to think that I am pretty socially skilled, but that doesn't mean that I won't feel comfortable lounging on the couch with a book either).

But I have my other moments, even though they may be few and far between. And every now and then, I go through what one of my former co-workers dubbed "a Clark Kent moment," where I shed the skin and the image of a stone cold rockstar emerges from this rather unremarkable shell. Or even when the looks are still in place, but the other personality comes out. I remember driving home once from a job interview last year -- it was during the summer, so I had all my car windows down and the roof open as well, so the music I was listening to was audible in the car next to mine. Given the look on the faces of the people in the car next to mine at the stop light, I'm sure they wouldn't have expected a nice-looking and well-dressed (I was wearing a suit) preppy white boy completely thrashing -- as much as possible while restrained by a seat belt -- to the sounds of Anthrax. But I was. At a previous job, a bunch of us went out and got drunk one night at a downtown bar, which happened to have a live band playing that night. My former co-workers started razzing me and saying things like, "You keep telling us you can sing... prove it!" So I drunkenly went up to the band, asked for a favor and completely rocked out while singing lead to the Buckcherry song "Lit Up." For those of you who don't know this song, it's fairly hard-rockin'. Suffice to say that when I got off the stage, my co-workers just stared at me for a little bit, then basically said things like, "Dude... you really do rock hard!" They were astonished to see such a performance from me.

I went to a concert a few months back with one of my best friends who knows that I'm into hard music, she just hadn't experienced it too much personally. So it was a new experience for her to see me react when System of a Down took the stage for a 40 minute set. I thrashed. I screamed along with the lyrics. I headbanged. I flailed, I jumped, I rocked out. And she confessed that it was a side of me that she'd never seen before and it lent a whole new perspective to my personality. I wasn't so mild-mannered and shiny-happy to her anymore.

In the episode of "Sports Night" that I TiVo'd this morning, Josh Malina's voiceover talks about how one of the characters gets past his writer's block by realizing why guys do things: to impress women. And personally, I feel like I'd get a rather nice head-start on impressing the women I want to impress if I could just get them to see me pull a Clark Kent moment.

I know I've ranted on this topic before, but I'll still never understand how people can overlook the true meaning of a song to just use it for their own means. My usual example is how all these college kids listened to the Verve Pipe's "The Freshmen" and thought it was talking about kids leaving school and not staying friends, while it was really about rejection and a girl committing suicide.

So I saw a commercial tonight for Wrangler Jeans, which attempted to evoke the whole "we're American, we're wholesome, we're all about being patriotic" image and feeling. The only problem was that they used Creedence Clearwater Revival's "Fortunate Son" as the backing music. (I think a Jeep commercial used it a few years ago as well, trying to project the same emotion.) They used the opening lines of the song, which, taken out of context, do sound fairly patriotic: Some folks were born/Made to wave the flag/Ooh, they're red, white and blue. Too bad that the rest of the song is a rabid anti-American tirade against the government, taxes, war and nepotism. Hardly a song that would evoke a patriotic feeling, eh? I wonder what CCR would say about it.

I believe this is my dream come true: Janeane Garofalo, Denis Leary and Jon Stewart all on the same TV program at the same time -- all being sarcastic. They're ripping apart the 25 worst music videos of all time on VH1. Pardon me while I stare at the television set in rapture. This is as close as a cynical sarcastic bastard like myself gets to nirvana, especially given the fact that these are three of my absolute favorite people in the world. If Lewis Black were in the room with them, I think I'd be bursting with fruit flavor.

Ever notice that when you live in a city, you never do any of the tourist stuff unless you're playing host to someone who's never been before? I lived in Boston for 8 years, and all of the Boston-based tourist activities that I did -- Bunker Hill, the Freedom Trail, the U.S.S. Constitution, etc. -- I did when I was a kid growing up in Connecticut when my parents took me up to Boston, or when we'd go to Boston on school trips. Once I lived there, I never really did anything tourist-y to see the town, and my friends and I never hung out at any of the tourist spots. (Well, except for Faneuil Hall, but that's because there were some bars there that we used to go to.)

My mom grew up in New York City. She spent 25 years there. But until five years ago -- 25 years after she'd moved out of New York -- she'd never been up to the observation deck in the Empire State Building and she'd never been to the Statue of Liberty. For those who only visit New York, those are some of the first things that come to mind when thinking about things to do, but they're not so forefront in the thoughts of the city's residents. I wonder if you asked a group of New Yorkers if they'd been to either of those places -- as tourists, not on business, at least in the case of the Empire State Building -- how many would say yes.

I've been a resident of Los Angeles for six months, and I haven't done a single tourist thing since I've been here. There was that one time I saw a movie at the Mann's Chinese, but the decision to go there was fairly "functional" since we were going to see Star Wars: Attack of the Clones and the Mann's Chinese was one of the few theatres in the area that had both digital projection and Dolby sound. Aside from that, I haven't been to any museums and I haven't been to any "tourist" places since I've moved here. Everything tourist-ish that I've done in L.A., I did when I was visiting here and interviewing for jobs. I almost feel like a real resident, since it seems that only real residents don't do tourist things, they just find new bars and restaurants to hang out at.

So tonight I drove farther down Sunset Boulevard than I'd ever been before, I was going to meet up with some friends at a bar. Experienced tonight for the first time:

- A car that hops. I really had thought that people didn't use hydraulics like that in real life, but there it was, sitting at the light on Santa Monica Boulevard, going up and down.
- A Hollywood hooker. She walked past me on Sunset after I'd parked my car and was heading to the bar. Fur coat down to the ground (a bit warm for Hollywood during the summer), fishnet stockings, pants that ended about a millimeter after her legs started. The guys in the Beemer parked on the street seemed awfully interested in her, but she wanted nothing to do with them.
- I parked across the street from the world-famous Palladium. It still blows my mind that I'm in the midst of all these places that I heard about for years that seemed like myths but are now places I hang out at.

I've had a couple different lines from a couple different movies running through my head over the past couple of days. See if you can match the line with the line with the film.

1. "What in the wide, wide world of sports is goin' on in here?"
2. "Now, back up, put the gun down and get me a package of Tropical Fruit Bubblicious." "And some Skittles."
3. "Leave us alone. Go battle evil on Aisle 12."
4. "I could never be a woman. I'd just sit at home and play with my breasts all day."
5. "Doing stuff is overrated. I mean, Hitler did a lot, but don't we all wish he'd just stayed home and gotten stoned?"

a. Pushing Tin
b. Bad Boys
c. The Tao of Steve
d. Blazing Saddles
e. L.A. Story

And that stupid Nike commercial with the guy being chased by the chicken? Can't get enough of it. Laugh my ass off every time I see it.

Point of perception: Being unaware of something until someone points it out to you, then suddenly noticing it everywhere.

My parents had never heard of Beyoncé Knowles until I told them I interviewed her, then they suddenly started seeing her everywhere -- in the ads for Austin Powers in Goldmember, on the cover of Maxim, in their local newspaper, on their local TV news in the entertainment features... She'd been there before, but they'd never much paid attention to her.

My recent experience of point of perception is Teri Polo. I thought I saw her for the first time in Meet the Parents. Then I started watching "Sports Night" -- she had a recurring role in that. Then I was flipping channels and saw her in The Arrival a few days ago. And then again on a rerun of "Frasier." It's ridiculous how much Teri Polo I've seen in the past few days. I'd seen her before, I just didn't realize it was her.

I can't help it. It's just a strange quirk. I absolutely love women in overalls. Especially denim overalls.

One of my best friends wrote me an e-mail a few days ago about how she didn't think she wanted to pursue dating a guy she met at a party we went to last weekend because she's getting to that stage where she thinks it's kind of pointless just to date for the sake of dating, and she's getting to the age where she'd like a relationship with potential to go somewhere. She's turning 27 next month and all, she wants to start thinking towards the future. My response to her was "when did we suddenly get so old?"

I've known this person for almost 10 years now, she's one of my oldest and closest friends. But it got me thinking about how I perceived myself to be at this age when I was a kid. I remember reading something that I wrote in elementary school, which said that at age 23, I expected to be married with a kid and making a lot of money -- around $35,000 a year. I think reality set in somewhere around when I finally hit that age and I realized that I was not ready for marriage and kids, and that $35,000 a year is not a lot of money. But to a 6 year old, that magical age seemed so incredibly far off. I found it interesting to ask people at the reunion I went to recently whether they were where they thought they'd be at this age from the last time we'd seen each other.

Now, even though I've still got a long way to go before my trip on this Earth is over, I'm feeling a little old. To an elementary school kid (and actually, to most people as well), I'm an adult, and I've accomplished a lot. The 6 year old inside me is scared by that. On the flipside, I still feel pretty young, since I've still got a lot to do and many many more years.

Getting all philosophical right after I've woken up is not a good idea for me. I think I've maxed out my brain for this morning. Time to crawl into the shower and go to work, where I will attack the coffee machine wolvy-berserk style.