So, in the interest of seeing whether my 1 reader is as faithful as she claims, I’m posting this entry:

Melis, the night that we hung out at your place with Meg and Mat…I ended up trying on and wearing a pair of your earrings.  And so of course I walked right out of the house with them and have been keeping them safe ever since (in fact I wore them on Friday – I think they are the sole reason for my excellent 2 year review).  I’ll bring them to OAR on Saturday…evidently Joe isn’t the only drunken clepto in the family.

All right.  I’ll admit it – I am that person who has the champagne dreams and the Bud Light budget.  I’m the person who wants the cool new thing before it’s out and damn the price.  So to keep myself on a tight rein is difficult under the most normal of circumstances.  Now, with that in mind, imagine a room full of people my age (and in many cases much younger than me) tapping away on shiny new MacBooks, scrolling glibly through screens on their iPhones…everywhere I turned I caught glimpses of glowing white or shiny black, smooth keyboards and dazzlingly clear displays…it would have been less torment for a blackjack-addicted alcoholic with a fetish for flashing lights to be set loose in Vegas.  Seriously. 

But I’m back now and away from all that temptation…or am I?  In my free moments as I recover from my jet lag (ie – when I’m dozing off at innapropriate moments or staring off into the distance in a mental funk), my mind tends to return to those sexy, sleek little beauties peppering the main ballroom of the conference.  Between the unflappable nature of the Mac (despite Carrie’s little issue, in S4/E56 they are rumored to never ever crash…as one who has seen far more than her PC-equivilant blue screen of death, I can appreciate that a LOT) and the gorgeously designed OS, I can’t help but wonder if now might be the time for this PC girl to make the switch.

Stay tuned…I am trying to rein it in, but as you all know, I am no good at controlling my impulses.

When I was 17, my mom shipped me off to Minnesota to visit my best friend/ help her celebrate her high school graduation.  It was basically the first time I’d been away from home, on my own and I was a little drunk with my own independence.  Her parting words to me, as she forked over the traveller’s cheques, were “don’t come back with anything pierced”.  I wasn’t a particularly rebellious child, but the fact that I’d been contemplating a belly button piercing before she even uttered those fateful words made it an edict impossible not to ignore.  She didn’t find out about it for about a month, by which time there wasn’t much to say on the subject…and that incident essentially began and ended my teen angst phase.

News broke last Friday about a group of girls who agreed to get pregnant together so that they could raise their kids together…now, four days following the initial story, there is some speculation as to whether this “pact” was a pre-pregnancy promise or a post-finding out fall back plan, but one thing is true about the story – there are 17 girls in Gloucester, MA who are under 18 and pregnant. If this situation was the result of best friends promising to get knocked up together so that they could share the experience of pregnancy and child rearing – from a joint baby shower to cute little houses with white-picket fences next door to each other – then something stinks in the state of Massachusetts.

My story about belly button piercing – the most rebellious thing I did short of rolling my uniform skirt to make it shorter – illustrates just how far we’ve come as a society. Fifteen years ago, teens might have defied their parents with a piercing or a tattoo kept hidden under layers of clothing. Perhaps we’d stay out an hour or two later than curfew. Maybe we’d blow all our saved allowance money on something foolish. These strikes for indepence were all essentially harmless – they hurt only ourselves in the sense that we are now late 20-somethings/ early 30-somethings with cliched piercings and regrettable tattoos.

These Gloucester girls are now moms-to-be…they not old enough to vote and yet they’re bringing new people into this world. I’m sure they’ll all try their best…many of them probably have parents and partners who will help. Maybe their fantasy of bringing up all their babies together will even come true. What I’m also certain of, though, is that they are woefully ill-prepared for the responsibility of having and taking care of a child. They’re relying on men who – if you believe the statistics – won’t outlast the child’s toddler years. If they’re lucky and beat the odds, they’ll scrape together a high school education, which, in this declining economy isn’t going to keep them in Pumas or Seven jeans for long.

I paint a grim picture but it’s based on facts…I’ve worked with this topic for long enough that I know that a teenager who is willfully trying to get pregnant needs an extreme reality check. And for that I have to ask: where the hell are these girls’ parents? Why didn’t they know what their daughters were doing? It freaks me out to imagine these girls getting to a point where they were having sex without protection (WHAT?!?!) and then celebrating learning that they were pregnant. I was fortunate enough to have a mom who treated me like an adult but also set boundaries; it’s a shame that these ladies didn’t have the same.

A camera crew from Good Morning America is setting up in my boss’ office about 5 feet away from me.  To be this metaphorically close to Diane Sawyer is nearly giving me heart palpitations.

“With ‘The Joe’ decked out in red and ready to rock, the Penguins drained the juice out of the building in the first.”

…I learned at Wine Fest 2008:

10.  during a downpour, an open bottle of wine is often more useful than a case of umbrellas;

9.  the inventor of aerosal antibacterial and the Tide stick is my hero;

8.  when considering what to wear, think of the probability of the following: rain/ mud/ red wine and dress accordingly.  As a rule of thumb: Lightness in clothing color should be in inverse proportion to amount of stainable materials;

7.  I am far less hilarious than I think I am;

6.  in addition to making the most putrid smelling beverages, Red Bull also makes extraordinarily low quality tents;

5.  digital cameras are a vital tool in the post-drinking reconstruction of events;

4.  spaghetti straps aren’t meant to take that much abuse;

3.  my boyfriend is a cleptomaniac alcoholic*;

2.  sometimes the bus driver cliche isn’t just a cliche…it’s a hilarious fact of life;

1.  my friends and I can have fun almost anywhere under almost any conditions.

 * in truth, I knew this before Wine Fest 08.