While I was too undisciplined to write last week, posted I think my personal favorite Secret Society of List Addicts list to date: quotes I thought were from the Bible ’til an embarrassing age. Keep in mind, I went to Catholic school.

NTKOG Year 2, #15: The kind of unanchored, pleasure-motivated creature of Id who pays no mind to Should or Ought, but builds her castle on a foundation of Want.

I am: locked in a constant struggle with my discipline, both as a writer and a human being. For the past year or so, I’ve emerged as the victor, thanks to a ceaseless cycle of early mornings, late nights, and forcibly cutting off my internet access after hours.

I am not: convinced it’s been great for my mental health. Let’s put it this way: near the end of the three-month MFA application extravaganza, I had no trouble getting a seat to myself on the bus. ’cause I was twitching and shuddering like an ’89 Honda going a hundred on the freeway.

The Scene: My apartment. My god, my glorious monk’s-cell apartment, night after night, for a week of personally mandated laziness. During the second week of the new year, I made a deal with myself: You don’t have to write. You don’t have to do laundry. You don’t have to socialize with humans. Just do what comes naturally.

It reminds me, actually, of my project during the year after undergraduate: I declared a moratorium on alarm clocks, and spent a year living by my natural clock. I’ve never been happier or more well-rested in my life, going to sleep at 9:30pm and waking up at 5:30.

During this week of laziness, though, I assure you I wasn’t waking up in the wee hours. Oh most verily not.

For the sake of comparison, my general weekday schedule before MFA applications started:

6:30 Wake up
6:45 – 8:15am: Jog or clean; shower; eat
9:00 – 5:00: I don’t even want to talk about it
5:15 – 9:00: Writin’ in the library, with a quick break for dinner
9:30 – 10:30: Goofin’ around for a bit before sleep

Compare that to the mental health extravaganza that was life during MFA applications.

8:27am: Wake up
8:30am: Leave for work
9:15 – 5:00: Ugh
5:30 – 10:00: MFA applications and story editing, living on a diet of cookies and soft pretzels to justify my non-stop cafe tables
10:30 – 1:00am: Back hme, last-minute MFA stuff, research, panic attacks, until the dreamless death of sleep

So. Yeah. I was doing super great for a while. Now that the applications are all in and the weight of the world is off my shoulders, though, I figured one week of utterly debauched laziness would reset my system. And every day, I discovered another thing that I thought I’d forgotten how to love.

Whole novels, swallowed over the course of one decadent evening! Spending hours cooking complicated meals and meditating on the wonders of food! Walking the two and a half miles home from work because, hey, I have nowhere to go and no particular time to get there! My god, some evenings I can spend an hour or more doing nothing but cuddling with my stuffed elephant, vacant of thought, just feeling warm and happy to be alive!

I also, of my own volition, finally washed the dishes that were stacked up from MFA madness. I don’t want to talk about how old some of them were. Like, we’re not talking calendar — we’re talking carbon dating.

The effect of this mindset was best captured last Sunday, when I thought to myself: My god, have I not left the house since Friday night? then remembered with relief, No, it’s okay! I went to the convenience store TWICE today! Oh yeah. The rest of you girls can save the prettiest valentine in the box for Atticus Finch, ’cause apparently I’m in the market for a Boo Radley.

The Verdict: Well, my “week” reprieve started three weeks ago, yet here I am, lolling around in my pajamas, eating chicken curry and contemplating rereading Calvin Trillin’s “An Attempt To Compile a Short History of the Buffalo Chicken Wing”. As great as I feel, I’m afraid we’re going to have to label this one a decided fail.

How is it that just a few days indulgence, following a massive burst of virtuous do-gooding no less!, can push us so far backward in our personal journeys for excellence? I’m filled with discouragement, despair, self-recrimination, etc., etc. Well, I will be. As soon as I finish this chicken curry burrito and lounge around in my pajamas a bit longer. Sigh.

What demons are you facing right now? And if your demons happen to be passing a supermarket, can they pick me up some soy milk?

Over on Secret Society of List Addicts, check out some crazy lies my parents told me that I didn’t find out the truth about until embarrassingly late in life.

NTKOG Year 2, #12: The kind of girl who pits her (non-existent) desire to wake & bake against her law-abiding status and comes up with an, uh, interesting solution.

I am: a total fuddy duddy now. Y’alls, I don’t even jaywalk. And as for any desire to experiment with drugs, well, let’s just say those ended around the time Maroon 5 stopped pumping out number one jams.

I am not: all that psyched with how epically uncool I’ve become.

The Scene: A ritzy headshop (heh, I totally just said ‘head’) on Newbury Street where, after nervously shuffling at the counter for a few minutes, I selected a bag of K2, the legalized pot-alternative that’s been sweeping the nation for the past year or so. The scruffy dude behind the counter rolled his eyes as I asked him half a dozen questions, then asked me, “Dude, have you never smoked pot before?!” Uh, sir, I don’t even take cough syrup. But instead, I just attempted to bat my eyelashes until he agreed to roll me a fake-weed joint.

It’s not that I haven’t smoked pot, for the record. I did it maybe a dozen times in college — mostly courtesy of the culinary genius running the unofficial Stoned on Scones bakery out of the apartment next-door. I just don’t love it: it makes me lazy, anxious, and exquisitely famished. Which is to say, it doesn’t do anything at all. Still, in light of California’s recent failure to decriminalize marijuana use, I thought it would be fun to investigate the last legal recourses of stoners.

Drink deeply of the illicit image, kittens, 'cause in real life you're more likely to see me hold a cockroach than a roach-roach.

Surely any legal substance couldn’t actually get me high, right? RIGHT?! To answer that question, I present you with the musings of Stoned TKOG, who wrote the following completely unedited text after consuming a full joint of K2:

The Choreography of my Evening as a Legal Stoner

During walk from the store, marvel over its delicate sweetness – like a mixture of lemongrass and chamomile tea, you think. Perhaps it shall taste like childhood! It can’t possibly work, you know already, so your sober-as-friggin’-melancholy streak can go on another day.

Walking back from bus, pass convenience store and debate purchasing alleged “munchies” for the purpose of scientific inquiry; consider the contents of your bank account; vigorously veto experiment. Deliberate whether to smoke the fake joint outside, or to smoke it in the warmth and – well, let’s be frank here – nudity of your own apartment. Opt for the latter because you can’t bear the thought of anyone thinking you’re a stoner. It’ll be your little secret.

Back home, use torn cover from Oprah Magazine to wipe the dust bunnies off the plate under your obligatory sad-single-girl bath candle. Get so caught up in architectural marvel of a well-rolled joint (see Exhibit A) that you light it and puff curiously before remembering to open bathroom windows. “Eh,” you reason, “it’s organic. It’ll probably smell like incense. No way you’ll even be able to smell it.”

Yikes! Not a well-rolled joint! The first inch and a half are packed too loose and burn down in three seconds, (“Am I smoking too fast?” you worry, “Should I check into rehab?”) creating a truly prodigious cloud of smoke. After a few puffs, though, it burns slower and you can take satisfying pulls – without the usual lung-searing feeling. Become so fascinated with smoking process that you want to smoke as far into the joint as possible, and try to use small bathroom implements to extend the joint’s length.

Look up and see yourself – dude, seriously, life choices – in the most grim of drug tableaux: naked on the shower rug of your grimy bathroom, holding a fake-weed joint to your lips using a toenail clipper as a roach clip

Flush the roach down the toilet, then throw open the bathroom door to realize two things: 1) you are stoned. as. balls.; 2) judging by the skunky smoke billowing under your door crack, everybody in the building knows it. Judging by the reek of pot pervading the hall, there was enough K2-infused air pumping through my building to contact-high all my neighbors and several rounds of their ancestors. Uh, so much for no one thinking I’m a stoner.

Back into my apartment, and there’s only one urgent task at hand: camouflage the stench of pot wafting from my apartment.

Man, why did I veto the munchies experimentation? Mistakes were made.

Oh, no, right, the smell in the bathroom. Immediately, without thinking, turned the shower on at full blast. …with my head still in it. Drew the curtains and closed the door. Five minutes later realized, oh, I shouldn’t leave a shower unattended! and dashed to the bathroom to turn it off. Felt proud of myself. Got distracted by sad-single-girl bath candle and realized it could cover the smell, so lit it, went to close the door.

“Oh daaaang,” I realized, “my carelessness is increasing with comic exponentiality. I’m totally the after-school special about fake-marijuana use. I’m one scene away from a tragic-but-morally-nourishing grisy ending.” Decided to fend off tragedy by babysitting the candle while it works its de-incriminating smell magic.

Which makes me now a much more nuanced yet still grim drug cliché: naked on the shower rug of my grimy bathroom, hunched over a laptop, hoping the smell of a TJ Maxx hazelnut/toffee candle will overpower the odor of fake-weed billowing from my apartment at 9:21 on a Wednesday night. I – I often wonder what choices have brought me here.

Whoa, my heart’s beating the usual speed, but harder, and every beat’s reverberating like the taut face of a drum.

Screw this. I’m going to order a pizza and read a book about centaurs.

I only have three more distinct memories of the night. First, after an hour of deliberation, finally dragging myself to the pizzeria across the street and realizing, whoa, I feel almost happy.

Next, finding this picture by @cakewrecks, and laughing out loud to myself for a full three minutes…

…before thinking to myself: “How embarrassing to misspell that on your van! That’s weird, though, she usually posts pictures of cakes.”

Finally, just before I passed out, I grabbed my phone and frantically texted myself: “I feel very calm but I don’t feel very useful. Don’t do this again, dude. This isn’t you.”

The Verdict: Okay, Stoned TKOG, you may have almost set your apartment on fire and mistaken a cake for a van, but you managed to pull out a little wisdom at the bottom of the ninth. Cannabis lovers (and cannaibs lovers too, for that matter), I’ve got good news for you: legalized K2 is a fairly legitimate product and, though it isn’t identical to marijuana, it offers a very similar high.

Which means I’ve got bad news for myself: turns out I just don’t like the feeling of being stoned. Guess I’ve got another sixty years of fuddy duddying in my future, huh?

Over at Life As A Human, some musings from my first 100 miles of running.

NTKOG Year 2, #8: The kind of masochistic utter slave to hair removal who, not content with using specialty products to rip off fifteen layers of epidermis (and attached hair), gets a little, uh, weird with it.

I am: a sucker for test-driving pretty much every item I see at CVS with that alluring little “As Seen On TV!” sticker. Vidalia Chop Wizard? Couldn’t live without mine. Ove Gloves? Practically have erotic dreams about ‘em.

I am not: surprised, therefore, that I finally gave into the allure of SmoothAway: a revolutionary hair-removal system, consisted of a pad “covered with superfine crystals that buff away unwanted hair, leaving your skin so soft and incredibly smooth”.

The Scene: Sprawled out on my bed, of a Thursday evening, giggling with girly mad scientist glee while opening the SmoothAway box and gazing at — sandpaper. I mean, it’s sandpaper, right? That’s what we’re talking about here.

The contents of the box were unimpressive. A flexible pink plastic mitt with a few ovals of extremely micro-grit sandpaper meant to attach to its face. But it’s no secret that I’m into painful body hair removal — heck if there were a spa in the city that specially trained, like, Argentinian swallows to peck out errant chin and nipple hairs, I’d be there — so pasted the microcrystal paper to the mitt and started a-rubbin’.

$14.99 -- plus $6.99 in Shipping and Handling. Or, uh, eight bucks at CVS.

The thing I like best about As Seen On TV products is, gosh, the thing I like best about most endeavors: that first moment — the lean-in, as it were — when what you’re about to experience exists simultaneously in the realms of fiction and reality. The exhilaration of infinite potential. A phrase that sounds a little too elegant to describe the actual tableau: my too-large bearpaw awkwardly crammed into the flimsy pink mitt, lowering tentatively over my sun-bleached arm hair (the last memento of summer!), rubbing five times clockwise then counter, and then –

Holy frig! It totally, totally worked!

Is it possible? An As Seen On TV product that works as well as advertised?! …well, sort of. Fifteen minutes of fierce rubbing left my arms weirdly (but not unattractively) hairless, and exfoliated within an inch of their lives.

Alas, though, the hair-removal panacea was not to be. Sated with the initial glee of the experiment, moved the mitt to attack the few days’ of accumulated stubble on my legs, and — nothing. Glued a new pad on the board, in case my excessive vim had already dulled the microcrystals and — ouch! More painful nothing. In a fit of grim curiosity, more than anything else, decided to test the packages claims that SmoothAway could quickly and painlessly remove armpit stubble.

And I don’t know if you’ve ever spent upward of ten minutes vigorously rubbing your armpits with an abrasive pad, but if that’s what the marketing specialist qualifies as “quick” and “painless,” then I have a feeling she spends most of her professional life writing copy for ballgag disinfectant. On the bright side, though, the treatment did detract from the appearance of stubble on my pits. ’cause who’s going to notice a little underarm stubble when the whole region is inflamed seventeen shades of fire engine?

Yes, I did test SmoothAway on my bikini line. No, we’re not even going to talk about it.

After spending something like an hour experimenting with my new toy, came to the conclusion that it works by more or less disintegrating hair into a  fine powder with said microcrystals. Also, because of the broad-swath application method, while SmoothAway was decently effective at clearing areas of thin, fine hair, it doesn’t have the same brutally effective nuclear-winter-for-all-body-hair results as more exacting methods, like shaving or waxing.

That said, if your arms make it look like you’re turning into a werewolf, or if you want to, like, thin out peach fuzz on your stomach (is that a thing people do? feminine grooming puzzles me — I honestly have no idea), and dip a baby toe into s&m at the same time, there are worse solutions.

Also, for what its worth, if you ever get the idea: “Hey, if super-fine grit sandpaper works on my super-fine hair, maybe regular hardware store sandpaper will work on thicker hair!”? Don’t — don’t follow that inclination. Unless you want to experience the rare thrill of developing a bruisy rash on the back of your calf.

No comment on how I know that.

The Verdict: Every time an As Seen On TV product doesn’t work as I’d always dreamed, a little sliver of my hope for humanity withers away. At least I still have my Ove Gloves.

What “As Seen On TV” products always send you guiltily reaching for your debit card?

Over on List Addicts, stuff I know you’re supposed to do but, look guys, I’m just never going to. And at the charming Red Boots, I contribute to the Dear Sixteen Year Old Me letter-writing project with some advice I only wish I could have given myself back in the day.

NTKOG #241: The kind of obnoxiously chipper Suzy Homemaker who, of a quiet summer evening, knocks unbidden on a neighbor’s door with a tray of baked goods and an open heart.

I am: a pretty socially anxious dude. It takes me years of regular hangs and heart-to-hearts to upgrade someone from “acquaintance” to “friend” — to say nothing of that first leap from “stranger” to “acquaintance”.

I am not: even great about keeping social plans that I wanted to make. As The Ex will attest, 95% of my pre-going-out ritual consists of praying to Dionysus that I will get canceled on.

The Scene: The hallway of my apartment building, ungodly early one morning last week, bleary-eyed because the incessant baying of a neighbor’s hellhound had kept me up half the night. I’m a headache-prone dude, and when I first signed my lease, I only asked the landlord two questions: “Are there no-pet and no-instrument policies? Are they enforced?!” So you can imagine the virulent pre-7am torrent I was about to loose when the beast’s owner happened to open her door at the same time I headed out for my jog.

What the frig do you have in there? I wanted to ask. A great dane? A friggin’ coyote? But just as I caught the woman’s eye, she yanked on a leash, and out scampered a toy pomeranian half the size of my palm.

I don’t know what the national record is for an irate, sleep-deprived twenty-something melting to the floor and covering an entire dog with air kisses, but I’m willing to bet I beat it by a margin. Once I remembered there was a human in the hall, straightened up and introduced myself to said neighbor for the first time in my eleven months here.

To her credit, despite my blatant attempt at dog-poaching, she responded warmly and immediately told me that she and her husband love to meet people, and wouldn’t I drop by sometime to meet them properly? They’re home most nights!

Ha. Sweet gesture, but, c’mon, who in their right mind would ever take anyone up on that? As a compulsive maker of insincere plans (you’re the best dental hygienist ever! we should go see an opera together!), I flashed a big, fake smile and told her that maybe I would.

The thing is, I don’t even really spend time with people I like in Boston. I moved here in part to recuperate from flapping my social butterfly wings ragged. So when I set up shop in this city on the hill, I had one simple goal: don’t make any friends. Just don’t do it. And 95% of the time I’m totally thrilled with the decision to spend virtually all of my free time alone in my head, writing the literary zombie-pornos that pass as the building blocks of my fiction career and making conversation with my Roomba. And then there’s the five percent of the time I long for the old days of triple-booking brunch plans and non-stop hang-outs.

I’m not saying I lack for significant social contact. But I am saying that two nights ago I gave a birthday card to my favorite convenience store cashier. So there’s that.

Flash forward to yesterday evening. Heard the neighbors arrive home from dinner, bickering adorably, and thought to myself, “God, how awful would it be to force myself to actually go over there?!” And when I have a thought like that, dude, I just have to do it.

Loaded a Tupperware tray with half a batch of chocolate-orange dinosaur muffins (god bless insomnia baking) and nipped over to the door before the reasonable part of my brain could talk me out of it. Though it occurred to me just how weird the situation was when I knocked twice and then listened to them confer in alarm for a full twenty seconds before the door cracked open.

“Uh — hey. I met your, uh, wife the other day and I just made, like, too many muffins the other day, so I thought I’d drop some off? If you like muffins? Neighborly gesture?”

The dude was way less weirded out than I would be in the same situation. He waved me inside, called his wife to the door, and she bade me to sit down on their lumpy, pale blue couch.

We chatted briefly about the building and our mutual fear of the super, and just when I started to think, hey, maybe this wouldn’t be so bad — dreaded silence that we half-heartedly tried to chip away on all sides.

Weather? Humid! Sports? Sox! MBTA? MBTAre you friggin’ kidding me?!

The stilted ten-minute conversation sounded like a round of clues in the “Stuff Banal People Know About Boston” category of $25,000 Pyramid. Mercifully, we were all saved when the dog ran up to the couch and issued a tiny, perfect sneeze. We all gurgled adoringly over the palm pom, who ran around the coffee table in a display of manic friggin’ cuteness — after which, thankfully, enough time had passed that I could leave the museum of social anxiety once and for all.

As I waved goodbye, the wife called out: “You should come by again sometime!” Definitely, I smiled. Definitely.

The Verdict: Eeeeeek. Humans are underwhelming. I’m just going to glue some googly eyes on my Roomba and call it a day.

Do you guys ever hang out with neighbors? Can it actually be done? Should it?

NTKOG #240: The kind of unabashed glamour puss who spends half the morning primping before she deigns to run to the convenience store across the street.

I am: the lowest-maintenance person you’ll ever meet. As in, 95% of the time I am growing out my armpit hair. On purpose.

I am not: opposed to other people going to extraordinary lengths to look gorgeous – in fact, I’m glad they do it, as it gives me something to look at on the bus. I’ve just never felt the urge to go there myself.

The Scene: A perfectly ordinary lazy Sunday, with a hint of pizzazz. After my morning run (week six, baby!), took stock of myself in the mirror: drenched with sweat, PMS acne clusters dotting my cheek and forehead, dark circles under my eyes, erratic tanlines, squishy bits, body hair – to your average glamorous girl about town, I looked like a down-market Picasso. So, I set to work changing that. All of it.

At 10:30am, I hopped into the shower, armed with an arsenal of clay-based microscrubs, scented soaps, fresh razor, and nerves of steel. On a normal day, I spend a quarter of an hour getting ready: shower essentials, comb through the hair, dry off enough to throw on clothes without them sticking, then out the door, ready to electrify the world.

By a quarter hour into my GlamorBot primping? Tsh, I’d barely even shaved one leg.

I was halfway through my Empowering Ladies playlist by the time I’d finished all the hair removal (damn you, toe knuckles!). Afterwards, scrubbing, soothing, moisturizing – I was exfoliated within an inch of my dang life. (Seriously, have you ever exfoliated the inside of your belly button? If you haven’t then, uh, don’t.)

And that was just the pre-show! Afterwards, played some Peggy Lee and flipped through all of the candy colored silks and chiffons and laces in the “don’t even think about it” section of my closet, before settling on a black lace cocktail dress that wasn’t totally inappropriate for daytime.

Then the eye shadow, how it glimmered; the earrings, how glitzy. If I did this every day, you’d have to fucking commit me.

After a solid hour and a half of work, took a deep breath and looked at myself – made-up, coiffed and perfect sartorially attended for the first time in my life since, I kid you not, senior prom.

Quick twirl in front of the mirror, then met my eager eye and I looked – good. I looked, y’know, perfectly nice. Pulled together and even a teensy bit stylish. But I felt kind of underwhelmed.

Still, I reckoned, maybe when I ventured out into the world, I’d begin to feel that glossy halo I always imagine around Girl With Great Shoes And Store Credit Accounts. Ran to CVS, took myself out to a decent lunch, and spent a while perusing the sale bin at a book store and, dude, nothing. No one treated me differently, I didn’t feel any more or less confident about myself. It was just a normal Sunday with the only exception being that I was wearing a dress I was afraid to get grass stains on.

Eventually I gave up on the whole glamour game and walked to the Common, where I threw myself down on the ground (grass stains be damned!) for an afternoon of writing. At one point, before I packed up to head into Starbucks, the light was such that I caught a reflection of myself in my MacBook screen.

Glasses on, make-up melting down one cheek, grass in my hair, shoes kicked off – an hour and a half of primping totally undone, but it was the first time that day that I looked at myself and felt great about what I saw.

The Verdict: I know there must be a reason that some women go through this torture every single day, but damned if I can figure out what it is. I think this probably has something to do with the fact that my body isn’t the source of my superpowers. In fact, I look at myself in the mirror, on average, three times a day, and the time I’m happiest about what I see is almost always the same: after my morning jog, hair up in a disgusting frizzy pony tail, shapeless tank top liberally bibbed with sweat and all of my skin flaming seventeen shades of fire engine. It’s not People Magazine cover material, sure, but for some reason, it speaks to me.

In fact, I think I’m breaking all the rules when I say this but, dude, I just straight up like the way I look. I have since I was a teenager. I’m not gorgeous or even particularly good-looking, and the laziest photographer would find a dozen things to PhotoShop in every quadrant, but I just don’t understand the insecurity the world seems bent telling me I should feel. I like my thighs, I like my belly, I like my stress-acne and the stupid toe knuckle hair and the fact that you could see me randomly on the street and just know I’m the kind of girl who’s going to breast-feed her own kids. I truly cannot understand on even the most basic level why anyone else would feel differently.

I like my whole package, and time and make-up are expensive, so fuck it. Not that kind of girl with a bullet.

That said, you other ladies are more than welcome to keep spending hours getting yourself gorgeous before work, ‘cause the rest of us need something pretty to look at on the bus.

Ironically, the day I schedule this post for is also the first day I completely pooched my c25k run. This week, the program upped running from 9 total minutes to 16 — almost doubling my meager and hard-fought running time. I’d put up with it all week, but this time I took a slightly different route, got lost in my own neighborhood, and had a big snot-fueled meltdown in Brookline at 7am. Still. Tomorrow is another (painful) day.

NTKOG #231: The kind of unabashed physical fitness enthusiast who — ignoring the sniggers and smirks of other passers-by — attempts to push herself into the stupid zone.

I am: literally the worst jogger who’s ever drawn breath. Er, drawn deep, wheezy gasps, that is.

I am not: excited about this fact or even, really, super okay with it.

The Scene: A quiet Williamsburg neighborhood early on the morning of my birthday. Justice — vicariously excited about my couch-to-5k regimen — demanded I bring my workout gear to join her for a run. I tried to explain how truly out of shape I am, but after a few attempts to persuade her, I finally gave up and decided she’d have to see it for herself.

Some things, once seen, can never be un-seen.

When we got outside to pound the pavement at seven in the morning, two things immediately struck me:

1) Goddamn is New York a miserable, sticky gehenna. (Hey, have you heard my new band, Urban Heat?)

2) While I was inordinately proud of my newfound couch-to-5k ability to run for three minutes in a row, those colossal superpowers might not seem quite as impressive to Justice, who, when she’s in the zone, can run a quick five or six miles while keeping up a knowledgable discussion on tort reform.

Still, it’s just once in my life — surely I can accelerate my training enough to jog a measy half an hour, right? For the first five or six minutes, I jogged steadily at my usual blazing-fast rate, chatting only slightly breathlessly with Justice. I was doing it! I was doing the hell out of it! No friggin’ problem!

After a few more blocks: problem. Big problem.

By the time we’d gotten within a few blocks of the park that was meant to serve as our halfway point, it became apparent that something terrible was happening to my body. Around the mile mark, you see, some madcap prankster had decided to coat the inside of my lungs with a highly flammable substance.

“You can do it!” Justice soothed, jogging next to me in an elaborate slow-motion pantomime. “Just a few more blocks and we can walk for a minute!”

Which just goes to show the kindness of blind optimism. A few blocks? I was straight-up vomiting oxygen. After a few blocks, I wouldn’t be able to walk again.

Let us not labor the rest of the outing except to say that it was grim. I was basically a complete failure of a human being, a limping survey of every possible problem with the concept of locomotion.

At one point, I begged Justice to stop and bolted into a nearby closed cafe, where I begged the lovely barista to pour me a glass of water. Which I subsequently debated pouring over my head.

Still, we jogged not far nor (on my part) fast, but I didn’t die in a gutter. If I didn’t limp home with dignity, I at least came home a wiser girl. One who, for instance, now knows better than to jog in 98% humidity with a dude who can actually run.

The Verdict: So, turns out not even the best of intentions can allow you to hulk out at will. Bummer.

That said, this extremely ill-fated attempt to circumnavigate my poky old-lady jogging program helped me really appreciate how much said program’s done for me so far. It can come as no surprise that I am basically a weak and lazy human being, but — against all odds, I’m chipping away at the seemingly insurmountable goal of learning to run with the power of … discipline.

Discipline. Ask me six months ago, and I’d have told you that discipline is something you’re born either with or without; that discipline is the providence of strong people. Now it occurs to me that saying discipline is for strong people is like saying money is for rich people. Entirely missing the point.

Lord help me, if it takes another fifty years, I’m going to move this whole messy mountain, stone by stone. Just — just don’t make me jog while I’m doing it, okay?

Over on Life As A Human, I muse on mnemonics and wonder, just what does Gilligan’s Island have to do with your immortal soul? (Spoiler alert: uh, pretty much everything.)

NTKOG #218: The kind of desperate boozer who, in an effort to keep abreast of the latest youth trends at the withered old age of 23, chases a really, really, really dumb high.

I am: a big drinker, but…

I am not: a problem drinker. (Promise, Mom!)

The Scene: My apartment. Alone. So this is already starting out pretty great, right? In an effort to shake off the goody-goody status I’ve so enjoyed of late, decided to temporarily disable half my brain cells long enough to convince myself to kill a few more.

Have you heard about eyeballing? It’s the latest in a series of news-hogging “youth trends” that are, I’m convinced, lab-concocted by news teams especially to terrorize parents. Allegedly, kids the world ‘round are holding open their eye sockets and pouring in shots of vodka, hoping it will absorb more quickly to their blood streams.

I mean, that shit’s got to be made up, right? Who’d be dumb enough to actually d—

Oh. Oh.

At the liquor store, when I bought a bottle of mid-shelf gin, the caper seemed easy enough: pour out half a shot, slam that sucker in, and enjoy instant drunkenness. How bad could it be? No worse than using slightly expired contact solution!

Once I’d actually set up my ocular inebriation station, I remembered exactly why I stopped wearing contacts.

However, after sipping a few shots of ice-cold, cuked-up gin, confidence seeped back in. I’m a badass! A loose fucking cannon! I’ve read a Hunter S. Thompson novel, by gum, and watched somebody get a tattoo once – why I’m practically a hardened wild child! Shit, son, just pass me the gin and watch me trip balls. Eyeballs.

Pried open my eyelids ‘til my whites flared out like a scared horse, and poured a quarter-ounce of gin right into the socket. Time slowed as the droplets floated toward the eye. How bad could it be, I wondered? It might even be fun! Like when you snort coke and rub the extra in your gums cut an Advil tablet in half and suck on it so it kicks in faster! It might eve—

OH HOLY FRIGGIN’ BALLS DOES THAT HURT.

The Verdict: I don’t think I need to tell you not to do this. But guys? Seriously. If this sounds like a good idea, you should probably skip straight to the source and pour booze directly in your urethra ‘cause, uh, you shouldn’t be reproducing.

NTKOG #218: The kind of daily philanthropist whose heart is as big as her means are little, but tries to spread joy with what she’s got.

I am: working very hard on trying to do good instead of just being less loathsome.

I am not: able to do much, and, sadly, often wind up doing even less.

The Scene: The Finagle a Bagel across the street from the Boston Public Library, where I seem to find myself eating dinner every. single. night. Asked for my usual (toasted everything with light scallion) but, when I got upstairs noticed my friendly little bagel was schmeared with some horrifying garden veggie concoction.

Being (finally!) that kind of girl, I re-packed my computer and went downstairs to politely request my order be remade. But when the cashier told me I could just throw away the offending mis-order, I sheepishly asked if I could keep it to give to one of the panhandlers who loiter around the library until well after dark.

“That’s a real nice thing to do,” my favorite cashier smiled. “I lived in New York last year on the street. I would have killed for a bagel.”

Heartened by her endorsement, I smiled quietly to myself while I ate, excited to skip outside and enjoy a moment of kindness on a big company’s dime. The second I stepped out the door, the perfect opportunity: a man stood jangling coins in a discarded Au Bon Pain cup, begging for change.

“Hey, do you need money for food?” I asked him.

“Yeah, I’m starving,” he groaned. “I haven’t eaten anything in three days.”

“Here you go!” I chirped, reaching in my bag. “I’ve got a bagel for you!”

His face instantly twisted into a clumsy mask of disgust. “A bagel? What kind is it? Plain?”

“It’s, uh, an everything bagel with cream cheese.”

“Ugh, I’ll pass,” the man sneered. Then, as I turned away, he grudgingly consented, “I’d let you buy me a sandwich, though.”

Never has the phrase “beggars can’t be choosers” been so damn literal.

The same story with the next three men I approached. Two asked for money and, that failing, one attempted a counter-negotiation for cigarettes. The third man ignored me completely.

Finally I gave up and worked my fill in the library. On the way home, just as I was about to descend into the T, decided to give it one more try. A man (the one who groped me the other day, in fact) walked up and jangled his loose-change cup two inches from my ear. “Got any spare change?”

“I don’t,” I told him, “but I have a bagel you can have, if you’re hungry.”

“I don’t like bagels. You could take me to Burger King and buy me a hamburger, though. I like their burgers.”

“Look, I have a bagel in my bag. It’s a perfectly good bagel and, dude, it’s that or nothing.”

The man stood silent for a few moments, weighing the comparative advantages of choosing “nothing.” Finally he shrugged and agreed. As I reached into my bag to pull out the bagel, he leaned down and inspected my belongings.

“Hey, you got a bottle in there!”

“Uh, yeah, it’s a Diet Coke I’m drinking.”

“I’ll take that too!”

Um, no?

The Verdict: I couldn’t believe how hard it was to force a small act of kindness down Boston’s damn throat. It started as a bright thought for a tiny act of kindness, but by the third rejection, the friggin’ bagel was a doughy albatross weighing down this aspiring do-gooder’s neck. At least now I finally have a good answer to my mother’s dinnertime admonition that there are people starving to death in Africa: hell, they probably wouldn’t eat my spinach either. Now a burger, on the other hand…

From this experience, I’m choosing to take two lessons. First, given my history with person-to-person food donations, I’m going to channel all future culinary donations to locally operated food banks.

Second, and more importantly: some homeless people are kind of dicks. Counterintuitively, I think that’s a wonderful observation to feel myself making. As a bleeding-heart, I’ve always been taught that thinking homeless people are unpleasant is BAD and thinking they are misunderstood and wonderful individuals is GOOD. But both modes of thought share the same failing: they’re too categorical. Whether you want to romanticize or revile homelessness, taking the people it affects en masse is doing them a disservice. Whichever way you do it, to reduce homeless people to a homogenous mass of “them” is to completely deny their status as individuals.

At least if you’re interacting with someone enough to think “what an asshole” (or, more often, I hope, “that was nice!”) then it’s a sign that you’re looking at them instead of through them. And that’s a long way to come, baby.

NTKOG #210: The kind of rabid, screaming soccer hooligan who roots on her team to the death.

I am: utterly flummoxed by the World Cup fever flooding the globe. If soccer’s so cool, why don’t y’all watch it the other 119.5 months of the decade?

I am not: judging actual, year-round soccer fans (ie: Brits). Y’all can grab a drink with me any time. As long as you promise not to talk about soccer.

The Scene: A sunny afternoon in an uber-hipster neighborhood of Brooklyn a few weeks ago, in time for the eagerly anticipated (and brutally disappointing) Group C game between England and the United States.

Although in my normal state, I would have celebrated the game with my usual routine (which to say, finding out about it three or four months later, saying “huh,” and turning back to my gin and ginger), when Justice and Muscles suggested catching the game in an honest-to-pete sports bar, I got psyched.

After all, the one thing Boston has taught me is that the best part of sports is being surrounded by the infectious spirit of borderline-criminally insane fans. Surely an afternoon surrounded by screaming, body-painted fans would give me the soccer bug for once and for all!

What Justice and Muscles failed to mention? We were headed to the only hipster sports bar in the world.

As America recovers from England's first (and only) goal, Mustache Wax and Emaciated Jesus debate which of the two is wearing the tighter pants.

Wait, there's a GAME on?!

Yeah, that’ll get a girl fired up for her first game of soccer.

I gave it my all, but regret to inform I couldn’t dredge up any enthusiasm. I blame this partially on the fact that my British-American dual citizenship confused my alliances (although, for the record, I was quite pointedly drinking Bass beer all afternoon). Plus, how fired-up can you really get when, between shots on goal, everyone around you is passing joints and discussing the finer points of David Beckham’s metrosexuality?

The Verdict: The England/America game may been inconclusive, but let me go ahead and rank this experiment a decisive Hell No. I cut out after half-time to meet Brogre at a little Italian café, where we discussed grad school ambitions in a decidedly unpatriotic, non-hooliganish manner.

NTKOG #205: The kind of boozey, hard-bitten New Yorker who wakes long after sunrise, then spends the prime hours of the day soaking endless mimosas.

I am: a big drinker, yes, but…

I am not: a day drinker. There are too many other things to do!

The Scene: Harry’s Cafe and Steak in NYC’s financial district, where Justice, Muscles, Brogre and I meet up for a spot of brunch. Though Justice and I have been long-time brunch fiends together, today we were trading in our usual solitary kir royale for the restaurant’s trademark: free endless champagne, champagne cocktails, and bloody marys. At, y’know, noon.

When we checked in with the maitre d’ to meet Brogre, who’d been holding our table, found out the whole restaurant was so dead that every single person on staff knew Brogs by name. Apparently New York is a ghost town over Fourth of July. The restaurant echoed with the spectral clinks of two. occupied. tables.

For some reason, our waiter decided to take our his boredom by ensuring that our table single-handedly maintained the restaurant’s normal weekend booze ingestion. After he filled our champagne flutes for the first time, he winked back over his shoulder: “Y’all are going to get wasted, if I have anything to do with it.”

Unfortunately, he had everything to do with it.

All I remember of the next six hours: champagne; getting mad at Justice’s absolutist view of art; more champagne; thinking the waiter was kind of cute; four mysterious bloody marys appearing; someone dipping a business card in ketchup; after we’d paid our bill, me — quivering germophobe and avowed tomato hater — picking up Muscles’s abandoned bloody mary and draining the twelve-ounce glass in one sip.

Later, pull-ups on the subway bars, recommending a broadway show I hadn’t seen to a woman from Arizona, then, finally, blessedly, a pained and fitful sleep on Justice and Muscle’s bed. (See also: germophobe.)

At one point during the meal, I looked at my place setting and saw a bellini, a bloody mary, and a glass of Riesling, all halfway gone. “Dear fucking god,”I thought to myself at the time, “this is debauched. You need to get out of this life. You need to join a secular monastery, like, right now.”

Which was probably just the alcohol talking. But maybe not.

The Verdict: The brunch was enjoyable at the time, and obviously it’s nothing but a delight to spend time with my beloved friends, but I won’t be hitting heavy day-drinking again any time soon. After we got home, we all took naps (except Muscles, who is a machine), and spend the rest of a languid day feeling dazed and pecking grouchily at one another. It reminded me of the first third of Brideshead which, in turn, reminded me why debauchery is so much more fun to read about than to experience.