It seems like there

It seems like there would be big money in a program that takes a list of guests and outputs the perfect seating chart for your wedding... all based on some attributes about each of the guests' personalities of course.

I'm about < this close > to writing one myself.

I still have all

I still have all the emails I've ever sent since December 1996—or, at least, I have just about all of them.

I didn't realize this until the other night, when I was looking through some backup disks, trying to find a story I once wrote. Instead, I found a stash of old email messages on a CD-ROM.

There are nearly 15,000 of them. And that's not counting the ones I wrote while using Hotmail or Yahoo or a friend's account.

If you're wondering, that's an average of seven messages a day for over six years. Of course, I probably sent more like 20 or 30 on some days, which was balanced out by weekends and holidays and camping trips spent with the people who were on the receiving end of some of those messages.

So like I said, I found these messages and I started skimming through them, reading what I had written back then. And I must say: What a terrible idea.

You see, scanning through all your outgoing messages since 1996 is like reliving six years of your life in the space of a few hours. Even if it's a good life, it's too much—too many emotions to unleash at once. It's much more intense than looking at a photo album or flipping through your diary, both of which are the sort of items that one creates with the future in mind. Instead, with the email messages, you're going over your actual interactions—the exact things you said to your friends, your coworkers, your girlfriends, your enemies, the people you wished were not your enemies, the people you cared about, the people you could not have cared less about, and everyone else in between who, for one reason or another, received at least a few seconds of your time at one point in your life.

Seven snapshots a day for six years. I don't know if there's anything that'll get you closer to being there, except for your dreams.

I haven't slept well since.

The magazine I helped

The magazine I helped launch along with a few other people has shut its doors, turned the last chapter, up and split, dead, done, gone.

What good is Free

What good is Free Will if you never use it?

"I don't like it,"

"I don't like it," she says when I answer the phone. It's the first thing, before Hi or Hey or even It's me. But I know exactly what she's talking about.

"Me neither," I tell her.

It's like this every time. She leaves and I spend the next two days pretending to work when really I'm trying to figure out why this part of it hasn't gotten any easier after two and a half years.

The guy's sitting cross-legged

The guy's sitting cross-legged on the sidewalk. He's got a bunch of change arranged in a peace symbol, nickels next to pennies. Only, the circle around the peace symbol isn't a circle -- it's a heart. Clever, I think, nodding in that way you do when you want to say Sorry, buddy. I'd help if I had any change on me.

"Oh thanks a lot," he shouts as I pass. "Go back to Iraq."

I think that if

I think that if you post a story on your blog, you should no longer be allowed to tell it at parties where people who read your site might be present.

I should probably mention

I should probably mention this before my full 15 minutes of fame runs out:

It starts out with a movie review I wrote a little while back. The movie is 25th Hour, the new Spike Lee joint. Anyway, I reviewed the movie and the review got published and I promptly forgot about the whole business.

Then, one night, I was working in the living room with the TV on, as I'm apt to do, and I heard something in one of the commercials that sounded familiar... so familiar, in fact, that I pulled up my review just to check. Sure enough, what I heard on TV was a direct quote from my article.

It turns out that someone who does the marketing for 25th Hour saw my review and decided to put my quote in the commercial, right after the one from Ebert & Roeper. (They gave it two thumbs up; I said it was "Certainly one of the finest films of the year." It was.)

So that's my story. If you're watching TV and happen to see the commercial for 25th Hour, look in the bottom right corner of the screen and you might -- just might -- see my name in tiny, tiny print.