I just spent 15 minutes writing something obscenely insightful about 2005 and then accidentally closed my browser, deleting each and every character in succession. This is for the best, the first post was wordy and didactic and had poor punctuation (moreso than this one). I shouldn't try to quantify my life. I'll only say this:

I'm going to miss 2005. It's the year I officially got my shit together.

I'm desperately in love. I never knew that being with the right person is all it takes to turn your life around. I wish more people knew this. Being in a bad relationship will eat your eyes out from the inside. So many people would finally be happy if they just cut their losses and told that special somebody to go fuck themselves.

A man on the street gave me 10 free bananas tonight. Just gave them to me. "Happy New Year," he said.

Happy New Year!

I was walking down 45th, on my way to "The Comfort Diner" (to get a grilled cheese and a hug from someone who whispers You're one of my favorite people, you know that? Do you know that? while rubbing the small of your back in a circular motion) when I saw a heaving, galomphing tractor trailer called SHREDDERSAURUS. It's a mobile shredder.

Which, I think, is an excellent business model - but a terrible horror movie.

This summer: Hide your W-2s...

I know it sounds pricey, but shipping and handling is included.

It's not because I'm xenophobic, I just want to understand what they're saying when they fight.

I understand that not everyone has lemons on hand, that's why I bring my own lemons with me. I don't want to impose. I bring my own. So, where's a good spot for me to put down these lemons?

It's like this - I don't like the packets. I don't, I do not! If the Lord our God had wanted us to consume lemons in such a manner, we would have a perforated line that said "tear here" in the corner of each lemon. And we don't.

If anyone would like a slice of lemon, by the way, speak now or forever hold your peace! Going once. No? All right, then.

And like I say, I don't want to impose. So I bring my own. It's easier for everyone that way. I don't have to rely on lemon proximity. I mean, you never know.

Oh, anyone got a pulper? Woah! Never mind, I think I got my own. Oh yeah. I wondered what I was sitting on there. Thought my Huffy's banana seat was riding up on me. Ding, ding!

I don't want to impose, so I bring my own pulper. And, of course, I bring my own lemons with me everywhere I go. It's just easier that way.

In honour of that, here is a conversation I overheard on the 6 train last week:

Woman 1: "But have you ever had peaches and apples?"

Woman 2: "Ooh! I could go for an apple right now!"

Woman 1 looks away, as if offended. There is awkward silence for several seconds.

Woman 1: "I think I have one and a half limes at home."

And there you have it!

You know what I love? I love when someone remakes a Beatles song. Because they're always so much better than the original.

No one really defines who John Lennon was creatively like The Innocence Mission.

Someone is playing chopsticks outside my window.

I don't mean the flat-key tune everyone can plunk out on the piano. I mean they are making the unmistakeable sound that can only come from two chopsticks knocking against each other subway busker-style. In the literal, playing with chopsticks.

I only mention this because I realize it's the first time I've heard this sound inside my apartment, when it is coming from the outside.

I simply cannot convey in words how irritating an invisible chopstick player is.

That's the last time I leave a box that says "Free chopsticks! Play me!" on the sidewalk.

Okay, the second to last time.

I finally sat down and read the Onion piece that someone claimed was similar to my recent post. They both mention advertising as a concept, but beyond that, I think it's a different premise.

Also, someone who gets paid to write for the Onion wrote that, whereas I wrote mine for free on my blog because I'm a failure.

So there's also that distinction.

I've owned my winter coat for two years now. Today, I discovered a new pocket. A stealth pocket. The "secret track" of clothing.

A coat is the only item of clothing which revels in surprising you years after you've bought it. I've never put on a pair of panties and said, "Hey, where'd this strap-on hole come from?" or looked at a pair of socks and said, "Hey, where'd this strap-on hole come from?"

Can I borrow $442,000 dollars?

I was in the supermarket today, where my personal space was unethically bombarded by their intense product placement campaign. From soup to nuts, to coin a phrase, this grocerteria coerced my brain into hunger. They went to great lengths to ensure I was tempted at every turn.

From piping hot cereals to international Goya flan, I embarked upon a journey of extreme longing. I could not help but yearn for each bright and shiny soup tin which I observed being lowered into colorful shopping baskets, or for the 15 pound bag of rice that sat atop another 15 pound bag of rice on the bottom shelf marked "rice".

Unscrupulous advertising, you have me in your clutches!

Preying upon our sensitive human desires, the Key Foods in Queens places aisle after aisle of tantalizing paper goods, detergents, teas and canned vegetables before us, tempting us with the knowledge of their existence!

Perhaps David Schwimmer uses this room freshener, we muse. Perhaps Robert DeNiro partakes of a certain type of cracker. Let's buy 900 of them. Let's use them to build a protective fort in Michigan! But I digress.

I have recently seen both Coke and Pepsi in the same aisle simultaneously. I don't want to linger too long on the grand conspiracy behind this, but someone, somewhere is making muchos pesos from a backroom deal, no doubt! Britney Spears herself may as well have been dancing suggestively and pouring a fizzy liter of warm carbonation across her ample bosom while Michael Jackson loaded up my cart with 6-packs.

Mainly, I am concerned for the children. Unlike adults, these teensy creatures do not have the mental faculties which allow them to discern between necessary and uncessary objects. Instead, they tottle behind their parent's carriages, crying out for vanilla extracts or cream of tartar, unable to resist the irresistable lure of marketing. You'll see it and you'll want it, cry the advertising agencies. And so our children long for manhole covers, bricks, and mittens. All through the power of repetitive suggestion.

Advertising is relentless. With constant occasions in life to use various products, it now attacks us at our very bedsides. Every time I put sugar in my coffee, I find myself longing to buy sugar. Its attractive snowflake packaging beckons me. "Add a little sweetness to your life!" sugar says. Then, the act of buying sugar causes me to want more sugar. I hold two packages in my hands. Each one causes me to want another one. I run out of hands. There is no way out. Can I borrow $442,000? I long to return home, but I fear all.

p.s. Can I borrow $442,000?

First of all, I don't understand why we don't just say "Okay."

"Okay, Christians," we'll say. "Okay Dover school board. Okay Kansas. It's on!

"Evolution should be challenged in schools. You're right. We're now teaching alternate theories of creation in science class. In fact, in addition to theory of Intelligent Design, we'll also be teaching how Rabbit Boy Kicked the Blood Clot Around as well as the story of Om.

We trust you won't have a problem with us adding even MORE proof against evolution, will you?"

But then this. It occurred to me (as I carried Franz De Waal's newest book: Our Inner Ape - A Leading Primatologist explains why we are who we are. and ruminated on a Thomas Hobbes podcast from yesterday afternoon) why these nutfucks are afraid of evolution.

That is, if they are afraid of evolution, and not just looking for a loophole to get Christianity taught in a science class. (Here I stifle a hearty sneeze-like guffaw. It sounds like this: *guffle*)

In De Waal's book, he makes the case that we are not just "killer apes". He cites the bonobo ape, who is as close to us as the chimpanzee, but quite different from chimps in culture.

If you give a chimp a box, he says, the chimps with fight over it. If you give a bonobo a box, they will have sex.

In bonobo culture, the females are the alphas. They settle disputes with sex. Males greet you with bulging hard-ons. Bonobos blow each other. Bonobos are bisexual. Bonobos, it turns out, invented the Moog synthesizer! Truly.

And bonobos, most of all, are empathic. Which presents an interesting conundrum as you go to lay your coin down on the church collection plate.

A female bonobo, upon finding an injured bird, took the bird to the top of her cage and let it go with a flutter. When it fell, instead of flying, she climbed down and picked it, nursing it back to health until it was able to fly.

It's more than learning the sign language for "grooming". It's being capable of putting yourself inside the mind of another species.

Having been raised as a Christian, I know how we just LOVED to eat meat. We looked down on vegetarians (Fags! *snort*)while citing the scripture in Genesis that said God gave us dominion over all the animals. You know, the same scripture that says God gave Man dominion over Woman? That's the chain: beasts, women, man, God. In ascending order.

We only had love because God gave us love, we said. Animals, poor things, had no understanding of God. Therefore, we should bludgeon them and steal their wallets (wallets made of IVORY!).

Over and over and over - how lucky we are to be human. So special. So blessed. So fucking chosen.

But - if evolution is a fact, and we descended from the bonobo, how can we claim empathy all for ourselves? If the bonobo is peaceful and empathic, where does that leave us? How can we claim love and heterosexuality and family came from Jesus?

After all, without God, we'd just be animals, right?

No, it's not that evolution makes us animals. It's that it makes us more human. What tenuous theological corporation wouldn't fear this?

I accidentally deleted this during my spree. Here's a repost, in honor of my pal Chris Walsh, who just slayed 'em at Rififi last night. Meanwhile, back in time...

Two weeks ago, my good and great friend the inimitable Chris Walsh and I got pizza at Pinocchios in Cambridge, MA (a pizza parlor which inspired a recent theory on parallel quantum worlds) and since seats were at a premium (which is just bad service for a quantum pizza parlor after all), took our slices to a bench in a small park outside of Grendel's Den.

Sitting on the bench, we set our sights on a time-warped street musician, who apparently resides in a wormhole circa 1985, as she and her roadie/lover/feathered hair companion set up a massive amount of equipment including a smoke machine, a generator, and about 5 more speakers than necessary. She then impressed us with a pretty dead-on Stevie Nicks impression, and dare I say she garnered a shiny dollar bill from each of us at the end of dinner.

About this time, we notice the bum.

He's limbering up, doing hamstring stretches against a huge boulder where two women are sitting and drinking coffee. Foreshadowing, anyone?

Foolishly, we don't pay him much attention. That is, until he begins barrelling full-speed at the two women, jumps up ONTO the boulder, screams "WHOOOO HOOOOOOO!" does a forward flip into the air and lands on his back, splayed out like a snow angel.

Two blonde-haired children sitting on a wooden fence begin to squeal and applaud.

The two women drinking their coffee do not turn around.

Chris and I drop our pizza and our jaws simultanously and look at each other to mouth the words "The fuck?"

The bum is obviously broken. I mean, he must be. His spine is certainly shattered. He's not moving. He's got the physique of Charles Bukowski, and could drink Hemmingway under the table. His liver is showing through the holes in his shirt. He's not moving.

"TAH-DAHHH!!", he exclaims, as he surprises us all by popping straight up into the air, his arms extended like a Russian gymnast. The children yell "Do it again! Do it again!"

He does. He does it again.

Not only does he do it again, but again. And again.

The coffee women do not move off the rock.

The bum flips about 3 more times, each time lying on the ground immobile for just slightly longer, but always getting up with an olympic flourish, a smile, and a "TAH-DAHHH!". Im-fucking-pressive! This bum is the man! Well, the wasted, unwashed, prone-to-violent-outbursts man, but the man nonetheless.

Excited and in giggling hysterics, the children are now joining in. I then realize that the couple on the bench next to us are actually the children's parents, and I think it's simultaneously very cool and very creepy that they are nonchalantly allowing their children to frolic with a drunk. Occasionally, they look up and shout "Look out!" as the bum comes tumbling across the rock, nearly crushing the skull of two aryan siblings. Now, I don't have kids, and they've just saved theirs from certain death, so, uh, I guess that means they're good parents...?

At this point, Chris and I are applauding.

Now one of the bum's pals, we'll call him "Shitfaced Steve" wanders by. He's just missed a fabulous flying Walenda move, so all he sees is his buddy lying prone on the grass. Just par for the course in this world so he lies down on the grass next to him and listens to Steve Nicks, who has provided the perfect sountrack to our surreal Romper Room episode.

Shitfaced Steve (in a dapper blue blazer, mind you) seems amused but unconcerned by the reason that two giggling children are singing and jumping up and down across his splayed legs. Maybe he just chalks it up to delerium tremens. Maybe his friend always has children following him? Maybe this is what happened to the Pied Piper after his wife left him and the dog died.

About five minutes of recovery time go by and Bum The Magnificent dusts himself off to head back to the boulder. He screams WHOO HOO does a flying leap into the air (the children scatter) and lands about 2 feet away from his buddy on the ground, who opens his eyes, manages a weak (weak, very weak) smile and proceeds to pass out.

Eventually the family moves on, and the children say sad goodbyes to Uncle Bum who sings "Why can't we be friennds, why can't we be friennnds?" at the top of his lungs for several stanzas and goes down in the history books as the coolest acrobatic bum ever.

And the smoke machine continued to puff out whisps of etherial cloud, but David Lynch was nowhere to be found...

I spent the day internet-shredding.

I've been culling my blog archives, which go all the way back to 2002.

All I have to say is:

Holy Christ! I think I may hate myself even more than my parents do!

I first moved to New York 2 1/2 years ago. My main regret from that time period is only this: every conversation I ever had with every single person I met always, from the beginning of time. I should have stayed in a small box for two years.

I have no idea how many people I insulted, offended, or just made uncomfortable by virtue of being creepy and awkward. What's the population of Queens?

There are a lot of things in my life I wish I'd done differently. A lot. No, a LOT. But it's hard to regret anything that culminates in a blog post this awesome. Ladies?

Yes, the past 31 years of my life have all been leading up to this: being monstrously horrified by my past in a public forum.

Huge. Dork. Gigantic. Some may doubt my dorkdom. You may even say, "Pshaw!" or "Come, come now, pet." You would speak like this because you are also a gigantic, enormous dork.

You may doubt! But only because you haven't yet seen my list of podcasts.

B'hold:

Corn, the economy, and cheese. Your witness.

There is no better way to start your period than to plunk down $15 on a pregnancy test. My uterus must get a kickback.

And not only did the test tell me I'm not pregnant, but it also told me I'd be a bad mother!

Also, aliens will land in Chichen Itza in 2007.

It's amazing what a piece of plastic dipped in urine can conjure.

My lady d'schitzo wears an inappropriate hat with a clown circle of rouge on each cheek and carries the prerequisite frayed beach bag in patriotic red, white, and blue.

I say hello as I enter the elevator, to which she replies:

"You look like Zoe."

"Oh, Zoe? Um. Yep."

"Zoe Schultz. The actress. I don't like it. I don't like it one fucking bit. No, I didn't say fucking! I said I don't like it. Get back in the movies!" she hisses, "You'd better not follow me!"

We are very close in this elevator. I start imagining "the very sad Sunday" when I have to take down an insane lady who attacks me in my own elevator because she thinks I'm an imaginary actress.

"Have a nice night." I say, as the doors opens.

"I'll have more than that!" she screams (by which I guess she means, "I'll also have a severe chemical imbalance!") Then she turns to the security guard and says, "Hello George! How are ya?".

Wait - what the hell was that? The security guard gets smiles and niceties, but I get an f-bomb and ordered back into the movies? I'm Zoe Schultz for Christsakes! Not fair!

"I told you not to follow me!" she says, and she is well within her rights because I totally am following her. "I saw you on David Letterman! And then you... you stabbed me in the back with that black thing! They'll find out about this."

We're both going to the laundry room. Grand. She turns around and makes a stabbing motion, illustrating the way I must have stabbed her back. I notice that her manicure is very nice. I should ask her where she gets it done.

Okay... laundry not dry yet... very crazy lady still here... just put in 4 more quarters, quietly go back to the elevator and - oh, great! she knows which clothes are Zoe's now....

"Get back in the movies, Zoe!" she stabs into the air.

"Mmm-hmmm, thanks, crazy lady." I say. But I don't say "fucking".

This month, I'm learning Spanish. Specifically, I'm using an audiobook on my iPod called Rush Hour Spanish to learn Spanish in the most amazing way possible... by listening to musical numbers!

Imagine the horribleness that is RENT combined with the pain of learning a new language and you have the joyous experience that is Rush Hour Spanish. It was created by someone who'd been singing a 'Pollo Loco' jingle for a week and realized that space in the brain could also be used by phrases that allow you to experience other countries and cultures.

Click the link. Hear the sample. Then you'll know Spanish. Then you'll know why there's 'a fine, fine line between pleasure and pain' (Spanish speakers love the Divinyls).

Make sure to fast forward to the end to hear my new favourite song: "Donde Esta? Esta aqui!" On my iPod!

I saw graffiti recently that said "Kill all iPods". A nice thought, incase iPods ever become sentient. I thought it was hypocritical, though, because that kid would own an iPod in an instant if only a whole Phish song could fit on it.