Yesterday marked one week that Pulao has been in India, while I’ve remained in Minneapolis.

So far, things are deteriorating rapidly. Last night, I had beef jerky for dinner. I’ve also decided that growing a goatee is a good idea, even though my face lacks the proper follicles to support manly hair growth. I’ve even looked into the mirror, rubbed my budding peach-fuzz goatee with two fingers and mused, “Mustache . . . ?” Uh-oh.

A week may seem fast to have descended into the depths of mustache-musing, but remember: I work at home. I may not see another living thing for days, outside of a particularly sharp-toothed cat.

There was an unfortunate mustache-growing incident a few years back . This was the only known instance in history where growing a mustache made someone look younger; I transformed myself, through the magic of facial hair, into a scruffy 14-year old.

My friends and fellow apostrophes Duodecad and dbay made no mention of the budding goatee Saturday night. Either they were used to the more robust, Hemingway-esque style of beard that Duodecad seems to so easily sport, and didn’t actually notice my “beard,” or else they realized that, in polite society, it’s best to pretend that nothing had happened.

I’ve resolved not to go down the dark path of my friend Ian, whose wife Anika has been gone for several weeks, teaching kids at a summer camp. Ian, he confessed, recently slept on the couch with all his clothes on. Why? Why not, he said.

Crazy. But the more I think about it, why not, indeed? The bed is rather large nowadays, and who needs the hassle of undressing, and then dressing again in the morning? The couch, clothes on . . . I like it!

Anirban, in response to the last post, remarked that we at 12apostrophes have not received a lot of comments recently.

“Ha!” I say. We at 12apostrophes currently have 262 comments in a holding pattern (or “spam box”), waiting to be unleashed upon the blog-reading public.

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From Canada Consolidation Loan Private Student, on “You talkin’ to me?:”

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Do you ever read McSweeney’s Internet Tendency? It’s funny, you should check it out: especially the lists.

The McSweeney’s humorous list, some friends of mine and I were thinking, has become a genre all its own. And it seems many a dabbler in the Intarwebs has submitted a list to McSweeney’s and been rejected. A casual inquiry turned up four instances, one of them being me.

But reading my friends’ lists, and rereading my own McSweeney’s reject, made me realize that, although they missed publication due to hard luck, I was very glad McSweeney’s had the wisdom to pass mine by. So I had to make a new one, which I will get rejected sometime in the future.

Without further ado, 12apostrophes’ list of McSweeney’s reject lists:

Top Five Numbers
By Dingus

1). 1

2). 2

3). 3

4). 5

5). 4

Worst Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Choices:
By Eric Nolan

“If you think that Sergeant Slaughter should charge ahead without really thinking it through, turn to page 76.”

“If you think that it would be a good thing to explore the dense jungle on your own without a guide, by all means, turn to page 25.”

“If you would like to follow Deathman into the cave, turn to page 199.”

“If you think inside the treasure chest was a stash of pristine Middle Eastern pornos, turn to page 135.”

“If you are only curious as to know the most gruesome ending, turn to page 90.”

”If you are undecided at this point of the story what should occur, welcome to my world and turn to, I don’t know, page 13.”

”If you would like to ignore all the foreshadowing that I’ve intricately woven into the text, turn to page 55.”

“If you think that Encyclopedia Brown would be foolish to turn down a free sex party, turn to page 2.”

Semi-Droll Listservs That I Maintain:
by Donnie Boman

Lacanian-Marxist readings of ancient Sumerian texts LacMarxSumer-lserv@lacmarxsumer.com

Chihuhahua owners for revolutionary social justice cofrsj-list@cofrj.org

Obama-Perot 2008 obamerot08-L@obamerot.com

Vendors who make great Tabouleh without mint, united vwmgtwmu-L@taboulehminus.net

Droll ideological bullet lists DIBL-list@macsswain.org

Other Titles of Lists McSweeney’s Has Rejected:
By Kris

Thing My Boss Said That Made Me Mad Last Week, I Don’t Know Why

Links to My Blog

Name of Observable Star Cluster in Quadrant M49 or Word I Just Made Up?

Smelly Facts about Races, Religions, and Nationalities Other than Mine

That Thing that Happened Yesterday that Was Funny But Won’t Be Soon? 36 Things About That

Captions to Funny Cat Pictures (Without the Pictures)

What I Have in My Pocket that I Shouldn’t

Pet Names for My Mother

Methods of Suicide I’ve Contemplated if I Don’t Get Accepted into McSweeneys

Pulao, Jayu, and I saw the worstest of worst movies at a friend’s house the other night. I saw the box at the movie store and picked it up of my own free will, even though the title was I’m Reed Fish, which should have told me all I needed to know. I saw the funny kid from the short-lived TV show Undeclared and the girl from Gilmore Girls, arm in arm, smiling up at me from the cover. They looked so happy, but it was all a lie.

The IMDB Plot Synopsis reads “This plot synopsis is empty” which turned out to be a scarily accurate description. You learn, after about a half hour, that the film you are watching is really a film within a film, directed and screened by the main character, Reed Fish, to an audience of characters in the film, some of which play themselves, and some of which are played by each other. Yeah.

There’s a “zorse,” which is a striped horse–half horse, half zebra–and the zorse really stole the show–although it was only onscreen for 24 seconds, he elicited a pleasant “huh,” and then a slight intake of breath that almost led to a chuckle, which was the emotional highlight of the film.

I’m Reed Fish is the recipient of two awards too many, by which I mean the U.S. Comedy Arts Festival Film Discovery Jury Award in two categories–Best Actor and Best Actor Award. So that’s one award too many. It also grossed 3,130 dollars too many, if you know what I mean. If what I mean is that it grossed $3,000, which is one of the greater scams of the century.

I’m Reed Fish proves Einstein’s special theory of relativity, which shows there’s no absolute measurement of time, but that time depends on an observer’s position, speed, and on the soulless quotient when measuring the delivery of inane dialogue, so that the 93-minute running time advertised on the box easily stretched to 6 or 7 hours in the space-time fabric of the couch where we sat.

Anybody seen any bad movies lately? Worst. Movie. Ever?

P.S. More I’m Reed Fish reviews: “Compared to “Princess Diaries 2″, another PG movie I saw this weekend, “I’m Reed Fish” was easily the more enjoyable film.“

Last week, I saw M.I.A. at First Avenue with Pulao and some friends. M.I.A. (a.k.a. Maya Arulpragasam) is a British hip hop musician and visual artist, and, as a child, a refugee from the ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka.

The show was spectacular and high, high energy. I danced my butt off. M.I.A. rhymed from atop the speakers, crowd-surfed, and, at one point, climbed from the stage to the balcony without missing a beat.

For the song “20 Dollar” M.I.A. said, “Turn off the lights! I’m going to take you to Africa.”

The house lights went down, leaving M.I.A.’s sparkling podium and the screen behind her DJ, which was filled with simple pixels of arcade-game soldiers, at either end of the screen, shooting at each other. Their bullets were dotted white lines. The explosions, vintage Centipede. It looked like a more violent version of Pong.

The song itself is heavy, with electronically drenched guitar loops playing what sounds like a dirge (it’s actually a tricked out version of New Order’s “Blue Monday.”) The titular verse:

Do you know the cost of AK’s up in Africa?
20 dollars ain’t shit to you
But that’s how much they are

The chorus takes the lyrics, if not the melody per se, from the Pixies song “Where is My Mind?”: “With your feet in the air and your head on the ground . . . you’ll ask yourself: where is my mind?”

Put the sound, the lyrics, and the video together with M.I.A.’s palpable on-stage charisma and you get a lot of raw power. But to what use?

Okay, I get it, a little. I like taking the Pixies lyrics, which resonate with a lot of the audience at First Ave (and anybody who’s seen Fight Club or a number of other movies that use “Where is My Mind?” on the soundtrack), and take whatever Frank Black was talking about (drugs? the existential angst of life? fucked-upedness for fucked-upedness’s sake?) and turn it to a situation with more material consequences. “You know what’s really crazy?” M.I.A. seems to say, “Violence in Africa.”

But all that was really clear from the song’s performance was that Africa is dark, crazy, and violent. This is, I think, the generalized opinion of a lot of people anyway—I’ve heard water-cooler talk in the Twin Cities where co-workers said, “It’s all crazy tribes fighting each other in Africa, won’t ever stop.”

The stereotype works against what we might assume M.I.A’s point to be—to help stop the violence in a specific place like Sudan or Somalia. As one of my concert-going friends said afterward, how can you tell the difference between a critique of violence and an avowal of it?

Some of the lyrics clue you in: “And the leaders all around cracking up,” “looting just to get by,” “little boys are acting up.” You can get another hint when you visit her MySpace page and see that M.I.A.’s top friend, out of 21,000-some friends, is a fundraiser, “Education for Darfur.”

But maybe most importantly, something approaching awareness (even a vague awareness) could do wonders for the people in the crowd, myself included to the nth degree, who might be a hell of a lot more likely to surf Metacritic than read a NYT piece relating to the Darfur Conflict.

I got a fortune cookie the other day that wasn’t really a fortune, but more like advice. This happens to me sometimes. The best fortunes, in my opinion, predict the future, as a good cookie should. But more often than not, I end up with a platitude. “Good things come to those who wait.” Yeah, I want to say, but are good things coming my way or what? When, cookie, when?!

This is what I got:

All right, I thought. I’ll get right on that. I kept the fortune for posterity but I didn’t, you know, do anything with my loose ends.

Next time I had Chinese, I got this:

Oh, God, cookie, I don’t know! I looked over my shoulder for my problem, was it here in the restaurant? An assassin of some sort?

Tell us, renowned 12apostrophes readers, your disconcerting fortune cookie stories.

p.s. Everyone knows that to have good luck, you have to save your fortune cookie until the end of the meal. The very end, mind you. Pick your fill of sesame chicken from the lettuce on your plate before you crack open that fortune and taste the cookie, because there’s no turning back after that, or else you’ll have bad luck. Or a bossy fortune cookie.

A few days ago, at a bookstore, I saw a girl trailing after two women and couldn’t help overhearing their conversation:

Little Girl (in cute little girl voice): After this, can we go to the Walker Art Center?
Woman #1: I don’t think so, honey.
Little Girl (in pitiful little girl voice): It’s free on Saturdays.
Woman #1: Have you ever been there?
Little Girl: Yes, lots of times.
Woman #1: What would you do there?
Little Girl: They have art for kids.
Woman #1: It’s just an art museum.

I’m a poor judge of kids’ ages, but this girl was little itty-bitty. I’d guess like five. Or seven. Or nine. Somewhere between five and nine, but she would have been a really short nine-year old.

And I know I don’t actually have kids. And God knows when I do, they’ll ask me to go to the art museum, and it’ll be Saturday morning, and I’ll be on the couch in my underwear, and I’ll growl, and make them mow the yard instead. But first get me a beer, I’ll say.

But when your kid wants to go to the art museum instead of McDonalds, which is where I begged my parents to take me when I was five (and seven, and nine), you know, take her! Or at least don’t tell her art is lame.

Had to post this video; just for the madness of typing that title.

Since the I-35W bridge crossing the Mississippi collapsed here in Minneapolis last Wednesday, with (at this writing) five dead and eight missing, my gephyrophobia is back, going strong.

That’s JEFF-i-ro-FO-bee-uh. Or fear of bridges.

I never got gephyrophobic on the 1900-foot-long I-35W bridge. (Turns out I should have been, but I wasn’t.) I’d get nervous on the bridge across Lake Ponchartrain into New Orleans, which is 28,145 feet long, as my four-cylinder Toyota got buffeted but the highway wind, and I’d see the choppy surf waaaay below me.

In the wake of the disaster, ABC news dusted out the psychiatric dictionary and talked to an expert about more people suffering from gephyrophobia:

“Their fear is not that the bridge is going to collapse; their fear is that they will get halfway across and freeze or drive off the bridge,” says Jerilyn Ross, president of the Anxiety Disorder Association of America.

Their fear used to be that they would freeze up on the bridge; now, I think, people are going right ahead and being frightened of a bridge collapse itself.

Jerilyn went on: “A true phobia is fear of fear itself — a threat of danger that’s not really dangerous.”

Since, according to the Federal Highway Administration last year, nearly 1 out of every 8 bridges in the United States is (like the former I-35W bridge) “structurally deficient,” I guess gephyrophobia isn’t a phobia after all anymore; it’s just common sense.

What’s the treatment for gephyrophobia?

For those who have an intense fear of crossing a bridge, for example, treatment may begin with them sitting in the passenger seat of a car while crossing a very short bridge. Gradually, the intensity of the experience would be increased until the person has learned to deal with their fearful impulses.

. . . Or until one of the 73,533 of the nation’s structurally deficient bridges they are driving over collapses; whichever comes first.

As you might know from reading this blog, my office building shut down and the three employees left in Minneapolis started working from home. That includes me, thank God. I have now worked from home for a full week, or as some say, been living the dream.

Let me tell you, cubicle-bound lackeys, if you’re wildly envious, you should be. It’s awesome!

At home, I can now do anything I want. If I want to get up and do that laundry that’s piled up in my bedroom closet, I can. I haven’t availed myself of that particular opportunity just yet, but it’s just a matter of time.

I can sleep in a good 15 – 20 minutes in the morning, saving the time I used to spend getting dressed, brushing my teeth, shaving, walking to and riding the bus, showering, etc. In fact, I may never have to shower again, now that I work from home.

Now my cat can sleep on top of my work laptop, while I’m trying to type, just like he always wanted to.

When 5:00 rolls around, I’m already home! I just declare myself “off work” and walk to the other side of the room. Or roll over and go to sleep, if I’m still in bed at the end of the day.

I think in my parents’ generation “working from home” was a gentle euphemism for getting the sack. When I told my mom, she asked: “Does payroll know you’re working from home? Will you still get your check?” I thought I knew the answers, but I must admit, those questions roll around in my head around 3 a.m.

It would be a pretty slick way to “downsize”: “Guess what everybody? Mobile workforce! Everybody go home!” And then your employees work for a couple of weeks before they realize nobody’s paying them.

I’ll let you all and Mom know around next payday whether I’m working from home or “working from home.”