Ravi and his Homie live in San Francisco. He was going to send more photos but couldn’t because he was so unbelievably trashed. On the whiskey.

Everyone should know that Ravi hosts Annietown out of the goodness of his own heart and he is a swell friend. He does things like takes me to the airport in a Zipcar but then when he gets to the Zipcar to take me to the airport he discovers the battery is dead and then it is like a mad dash to the airport where we are like OMG OMG OMG NO TURN RIGHT NO TURN RIGHT OMG OMG TRAFFIC OH DEAR GOD THERE IS TRAFFIC. Ravi cooks a lot, and he is good at it. Once he complained that his fridge was filled with clarified butter. I don’t think anyone has ever complained of such a thing before. He has very high cholesterol. Ravi explains that it’s genetic and not the fridge full of clarified butter. He is obviously high on his own supply (of butter) but that’s OK.

So thanks Ravi, for not being a dick.

Helen lives in South Australia. To give you an idea of where that is, think about Australia. Then think south. Now combine the two. Got it? Sweet. Homie is a proud chicana americana. But now she is a proud chicana americana de Australia del Sur. Or something. Whatever. I don’t know Australian Spanish. But I do know that South Australia is really far from the barrio.

Chicana discovers that South Australia has many ferns. They are pretty these ferns. But Chicana decides she wants to kick back with a fatty. She takes a few leaves and blazes up when Helen is not looking.

Chicana burns incense to cover up the dank sticky herb stank because she doesn’t want Helen to find out. Helen finds out anyway after she discovers Chicana is smoking all of her herb. WTF Chicana? Get your own.

There are also strange-looking natives of South Australia. She says slowly HELLO…NATIVE…MY…NAME….IS…CHICANA. And the native says, listen, I’m not deaf, there’s no need to yell, and just because I am pink doesn’t mean I am stupid. Chicana apologizes. She did not mean to offend.

Chicana meets more natives. They come in many different sizes. Chicana smiles and says, hello natives, my name is Chicana. The dolls do not respond. They stare at her a little confused. Helen explains that the dolls are deaf and, quite frankly, a little stupid, so she needs to talk louder.

In a horrible communication error, the deaf South Australian natives decide that Chicana is an unfriendly perpetrator coming to take away their land and herb. The natives summon the rats. They are the cutest rats Chicana has ever seen.

Thanks, Helen! You are representing the Homie who has traveled the greatest distance.

Michael goes to Australia. He thinks, oh golly, I hate traveling alone, I better take my Homie. Michael doesn’t actually ever say “oh golly” but he does in fact take his Homie to Australia.

This Homie is a Baller. That means someone who plays ball. As in any sport that involves a ball, including basketball, football, the other football, baseball, table tennis, bowling, shotput, pinball, cricket, you get the idea. If there is no ball involved, Baller does not care for it. For example, he thinks Frisbee is for the weak. Why don’t you throw a real ball? he asks. It is a good question.

Michael takes Baller on a car ride because when you go to Australia that is what you do. You don’t go see the bush or taunt wombats or look at kangaroos or avoid all the poisonous snakes that live there. You go in a car and you sit and then occasionally you fall upside down.

While on the customary car ride in Australia, you see signs. That is what Australians do all day. They sit in their cars and look at signs.

The other thing you do when you visit Australia is drink beer. Baller drinks beer. He thinks its delicious. Michael tried to make him eat some Vegemite on toast but Baller instead told him to go suck it.

Thanks, Michael!

In my line of work, if you can call it that, I do a lot of apple-c/apple-v if you know what I mean. As in, cutting/pasting. So I think it would be a ballsout experiment for you to all hit apple-v (or control-v) and see what comes up and then talk about it. Here is mine:

why don’t you just shoot me then because right now you are killing me slowly.

i have a headache. look at what you’ve done to me. i’m a shell of a person. i used to laugh.

Hahahahahah that’s awesome!!!!!!! OK, that is from an email I just sent to my coworkers. OH well, now it is here. I was cross because no one pays attention to the schedule except me. It’s as if a schedule is really a suggestion to them. Like oh hello, you can take it or leave it, this is just merely an idea or a construct that may not make sense to you. PLEASE the last thing I want to do is to apply my deeply personal, completely subjective rules of TIME unto YOU. Why I even bother MAKING a schedule is a complete mystery. Anyway I cut it because I thought it was too dickish but then I was like wtf am I talking about, it’s all totally true, and put it back in, so there you go.

OK your turn.

Also: Homies. I’m behind and I’m sorry.

I realize that many of my friends who should read my blog, do not actually read my blog.

But, of course, many friends do read my blog. I am counting the friends who are regular readers whom I’ve never met. That is nice. These people I have never met are actually better friends than the friends I’ve met who should read my blog but don’t, the ones I mentioned above. Not that reading my blog is a necessity to be my friend, but you know. This is all I’ve got.

So, why not do SHOUT DOWNS? I am tired of “giving props” and “giving shout outs” to the peoples who deserve them. I should be shouting down to the people who deserve them too. Yin and yang that is what I always say.

I shall begin with:

JoMo: You are a dick. But you knew that. But you are a dick.

Roz: Do you even know I have a blog? Sniff, sniff. You are a dick.

Chris: Your jeans are expensive. You are a dick.

Dominic: See above.

Karina: I don’t care if I see you everyday at work and yell at you. You are a dick.

Lizzie: You may be tall, but I can take you downtown to Painsville. You are a dick.

Jeff: Put the beer(s) down. You are a dick.

Yoko: You don’t have a mean bone in your body, but guess what? You, too, are a dick.

Jared: Paging Dr. Jared. Dr. Dick Jared.

Leila: I’d sue you for being a dick but THEN you’d countersue and then win and I’d be totally fucked. For that you are a dick.

Kumar: Come here so I can kick your ass, you dick.

OK, if you were not on the list above you are very lucky in addition to not being a dick.

Now, if you are on the list and you actually read this garbage blog, then you have my apologies and I suggest reading your name and shoutdown again, but this time replace the word “dick” with “delicious cabbage” or “sweet lover.” Shoutdown becomes shout out. This is why words are better than numbers.

I have been writing, for those who care (i.e. friends who are not dicks). I’m trying to do many things, among them write the second book. Also I must do my taxes. (YES I HAVE NOT DONE THEM YET.) Also I have to write something for an upcoming publication called Field of Gray led by my friend Israel. Which reminds me.

Israel: You are a dick and I am running late with the story. That does not change that you are a dick.

Man, so many shoutdowns. I am tired from shouting down.

Everyone else: you are delicious cabbage.

Let’s talk about bowling. Bowling is the only thing my doctor has told me to avoid completely: “Your tendonitis is bullshit, don’t go bowling because it will break your fingers in half.” OK she didn’t say that exactly, but you get the idea. I said I would never go bowling because who even GOES bowling in the first place? I do not live in 1955. The only bowling people do now is on Wii and even then we all know Mario Tennis is better. Like I do not think it will be a problem to avoid bowling. It’s not like avoiding wheat or dairy (on a side note I had to go on a wheat- and dairy-free diet to figure out some allergy issues and I was totally angry and hungry all the time so I caved in after two weeks and told my doctor at the time that I rather die tomorrow by eating pasta than live forever and never eating toast again, and then he kind of gave me that passive-aggressive thing that doctors do, as if to say, sure, fine, WHATEVER, it’s your life and you’re going to die but hey, don’t let ME stop YOU from eating your precious toast. And I’m like holy shit am I paying you to be a total dick? So then I left for another doctor who was like yeah I’m not gonna force you to do anything unless you are in the throes of death because I am not a jerk. She is the best.) Anyway, what I mean to say is that not bowling is not a problem.

But then Pony came to visit from Hawaii and the whole office decided hey, let’s go bowling. And then I gave about a thousand other suggestions that does NOT involve bowling, such as air hockey, ping pong, skee ball, and trapeze lessons, which all got shot down because everyone I work with, especially Pony, is a real douchemeister. YES YOU HEAR THAT? YOU ARE A DOUCHEMEISTER.

But hey, I am a team player. I figure, I will go bowling but I will not bowl. I will watch and drink beer. Delicious beer full of wheat.

Done and done.

Anyway while at the alley, I figured out a new way to bowl that does not require me to break my fingers in half. It was a technique I knew would make all my coworkers talk mad shit and make fun of me but by that point I was drunk so who cares. They are all douchemeisters anyway. So I walk up as far as I can go in the lane and then do a granny roll between my legs, but I do it, very, very slowly with very, very little spin on it. It kind of just rolls straight ahead and then hits the pins squarely in the middle, and then I get a strike. Yes. That is HOW YOU DO IT. I was the winner and I was victorious. Granny tortoise style, much better than the crane or praying mantis style. Jackie Chan would be like, whoa, wtf, I am going to cop that shit for my next movie. And then Jet Li would do it. And then Steven Seagal would do it but like, no one would care. And then some place, somewhere, Jean Claude Van Damme would be like, I am going to make Bloodsport 8 in tortoise style and everyone would be confused because they thought Van Dam was dead and then he’d have to explain, no, I’m not dead, I’m just Belgian. And people would be like oh right, Belgian, like the waffles, you know, I thought you were Danish, like the pastry. And then Van Damme would sulk and get his fake tan on.

So bowling: I give you the thumbs up.

I was house-and-cat-sitting on the Upper East Side again, this time for the Siben-Manning-Davies family. I realize that is what I do for a living now. I just go to people’s apartments and pick up poop and marvel at how all of that can come out of something so small. A total mystery. Anyway, the S-M-D family has a cat named Bailey who is the most non-cat cat I’ve ever met. And I don’t mean that it’s like a dog, it’s just not very cat-like. Like if you try to chase it, it immediately rolls over on its side. WTF? What cat does that? It’s docile and passive and I am used to Aura’s cat which will fill a tube sock full of rocks and smack you in the balls when you aren’t looking. And if you DON’T have balls, it would find the nearest set and smack them just to send a message. Kind of like how you have to beat someone up in prison right when you get there. This is why everyone who visits Aura’s cat has to wear a protective cup. Anyway this is not the point.

I decided to be healthy and take advantage of Central Park while I was house-sitting. Their apartment is a block away from the park. I figured, OK, Annie, time to jazzercise and run even though nothing is chasing me. Just run willingly in the name of health. So I did it.

It sucked.

First of all, every single plant in Central Park was blooming. Do you know about this? Apparently in the spring, all these stupid green things decide to do stupid things like grow and release anthrax into the air and this causes my face to blow up and my eyes to start watering and my nose to start running and it is like I’m taking a shower in my own snot (in Korean “snot” is translated directly to “nose water” which sounds a lot nicer than it actually is). So I run around for a bit, crying my eyes out, and then I run into a SWARM OF GNATS. Do you know about this? They swarm in like large patches and then ultimately I run through it because I don’t run with my glasses on. Then they decide to swarm around me for the rest of my run. And then when I opened my mouth about half of them went down the hatch and I ended up swallowing it. So my guess is that I ate 20% of all the gnats in Central Park. Good news is that I’m not hungry.

Now, if you excuse me, my entire office is going to go bowling.

Tonight/Last night I ended up presenting at Pecha Kucha as a last-minute sub for architecture critic/total douchebag Philip Nobel. (Pecha Kucha is kind of like Powerpoint karaoke where you prepare 20 slides and get 20 seconds for each slide and it moves ahead with or without you. It’s mostly architects, designers, and the like. Then there’s the occasional person who doesn’t know shit about anything and that’s where I come in.) Nobel wrote the organizers saying he was “sick” and stricken with “fluemonia” though, quite frankly, he sounded pretty good when I talked to him. Like coherent enough to do Pecha Kucha. It’s SIX minutes, you’ve got to bone up, you know what I mean? You’ve got to BRING IT and SHOW UP as my track coach used to say (he was an Olympic speedwalker, yes speedwalking is a sport, kind of). Anyway Nobel totally bailed and Marco asked me to sub. I said yes, of course. PK is fun but stressful, and more importantly Marco is a good friend. I will BRING IT AND SHOW UP. So I was like yeah! And Marco was like yeah! And I was like sweet! He would’ve high fived me if 1) I high fived and 2) we were in the same space. Then Marco was like OK better hurry with the slides.

Oh. Right. The slides.

Like every idea I’ve ever had, I did NOT think this one all the way through. I thought, dude, I can totally use Nobel’s slides, that’d be hilarious and no work. But then Nobel told me he hadn’t done his slides at all which just proved to me that that pansy had no INTENTION of doing PK and instead bailed because he had not the COJONONES (that means “balls” as in “testicles” or “yambags” or “hot pockets” and Pedro just told me that “cajones” means drawers, but not the kind like underwear, the other kind in which you store your underwear) to get up there in front of 400 people or whatever it is. He has a big mouth BUT NO BALLS. NOBEL, WHERE ARE YOUR BALLS? With a mouth that big, you should really know how to back it up. Maybe you swallowed your balls with that big mouth of yours ha ha ha. No really.

Anyway, I spent all day scrambling to make 20 slides with SWEET animation and the most eye-gouging color combos because that is how I roll with the Powerpoint. If you are forced to use Powerpoint then you have to go crazy with all the features because it is comedy gold. Not that it mattered because the computers at PK did not run my version of Powerpoint, so not all of the slides worked. Oh well.

Anyway, I spent about 5 slides calling Nobel out on being a douchebag flakemeister and the next few hitting on some of the majorly douchebaggy things he’s said about architecture and the like. Meanwhile, I have no clue about architecture whatsoever so it took a lot of research and reading and Nobel helped me out by sending some of his articles. Then I had to ask friends really stupid questions like “Who is Philip Johnson and where is he the dean of architecture?” And then a friend had to explain that Johnson wasn’t actually the “dean” in a literal sense, but more of like dean of Architecture with a capital A and I was like, so it’s kind of like how I want to be mayor of Earth? Exactly! Anyway, I totally rather be mayor of Earth than dean of Architecture but maybe that is me. Also I do hate it when people capitalize architecture. Like, you don’t capitalize history or health or science, do you? OK then!

Anyway it went well, and this time I only got a few boo’s (for saying that the new ICA in Boston looks a bit like Costco). Last year I think a few people walked out because they did not think people should make fun of architects. So thanks for everyone who came out and raged, it was good times.