You Look So Absurd You Look So Obscene As I was just pouring my second gigantic drink of the evening, a drink my grandpa liked to call a Dipsy-Doodle (but which I recently found out is just a Manhattan with more cherry juice and ice), I was thinking about how Gray has been really stressed out from work lately and how about two years ago he embarked on a "30 Days of Drinking" program. He's not a drinker at all by nature, which is quite frankly a bummer for me since I like to drink quite a lot, and doing it by yourself is shall we say not especially socially acceptable. So while doing his experiment he'd come home from work, have a drink, and ostensibly get mellow. It didn't really work, it just made him tired, and probably it poached his liver a little. But he has a group of friends who all email back and forth with big life news every once in awhile, and the 30 Days Program was what he chose to tell his people about. His line went something like, I'm stressed out, work is bringing me down, so I've decided to start drinking at night when I come home. And, you know, it was kind of a funny tongue-in-cheek experiment, and he's such a teetotaler that it could never turn into anything crazy. But he has two married friends who are both shrinks, and one of them wrote back very seriously to him alone and said, "Gray. You shouldn't do this. There are better ways to cope with your stress. Don't go down this path, it's a very dark place and it could lead to addiction and it's unhealthy and it's nothing to play with." It was really nice of her, right? It just made me think shrinks are more uptight and crazy than I already did.

I was just looking at facebook photos of Comic-Con from somebody Gray knows who likes to a) photobomb people and b) took pictures of every crazy costume there. There are some gigantic Halloweenie nerds out there, let me tell you. That said I especially liked the Indiana Jones guy's costume with the spiders glued all over the back of his vest.

Tomorrow we're going to a 40th birthday party for one our friends. Except his birthday isn't until February 2012. His wife is pregnant and thinks that since the baby will be three-ish months old when his actual birthday rolls around that she won't have time to deal with a proper party, so she's having it one, two, three, four, five months early. It's a surprise for her husband, tomorrow is. I promise to have my camera out and ready to take a picture of what for sure will be the most startled, freaked-out and confused look a person having a party thrown at them has ever had on their face, and then I will share it with you.

  ¶ 8:18 PM