Before my tirade I'd like to wish everyone a Happy Monday. Thrills, Pills and Bellyaches, everybody! (Remember "I'm Losin' My Melon, Man"?)

There�s a guy on my shit list to begin with because he keeps threatening to beat up my friend S because he�s not thrilled with S�s choice of friends, morals, and so forth lately, meanwhile, the stories I could tell you about this guy would make you say, �there�s more glass in his house than he could throw a stone at,� i.e. riding his bike to Chinatown in the middle of the night to smoke crack with hookers or maybe just to get a very special wholesome late night $15 hand-job�I don�t want to divulge too much� point is, he has no room to complain about others� moral standing (because as Trent Reznor once so eloquently put it, his �moral standing is lying down�). So one of my very good friends (who happens to be his roommate) was telling me that they got in some discussion about beauty and whatnot and he says to her, he says, �Well, you�re cute and all, J, but you�re no Britney Spears.� Ok. Fair enough.

But:

1. I wasn�t aware we were all supposed to roll over and turn into Britney Spears. I must have been having the fat from my ass injected into my boobs when God decreed it.

2. There�s only one Britney Spears and that�s all there should be (although her little sister is on the scene now in a Nickelodeon show and she looks like Brits only younger�I guess now that Britney is getting too mature-looking for men to jerk off to they have to bring little sis in to pick up the, er, slack, or sac, as it were... har har).

3. What in hell makes a man think he can say this to a woman? Who the fuck does A think he is? And is his head so far up his ass that he�s not even mildly aware of the effect of blah blah blah on women blah blah?

4. He would never say this unless he thought J were actually attractive (hence secretly wants to sleep with her) and therefore wanted to cut her down. Only a SuperMeanPerson would tell an ugly girl she was �no Brits.� Even though I think everyone is beautiful in her own way, blah blah.

5. Insert something derogatory about the size of his penis and something about how he�s just jealous because we womens have beautiful flowers between our legs while he has some sort of bent squash situation happening. (After looking at these awful male nudie playing cards that K gave me, penis after penis after penis upon penis, in various sizes and various stages of erection, all I could think was, �Jeez, it must be a pain to carry around a freaking squash between one�s legs.� That, and �God, these guys must have been super desperate to pose for these Made in Hong Kong Bought at Ricky�s Adult Playing Cards. What could they need money for?� as I inspected their bodies for track marks. It�s like a science class, these cards, their hair all curled and crunchy).

I bring up this �Y�Ain�t no Brits� sitch, fair readers, because it�s not the first time I�ve heard that exact sentence used against an attractive friend. One guy I know said it about his girlfriend when she was in the bathroom. He was commenting on the fact that she wore glitter on her eyes and that I �should talk to her,� (being the only chick at the table), as, yes, Britney wears glitter, but S is no Brits and therefore the glitter is just a nuisance that ends up on his face and should be promptly discouraged, by me (!), even though I JUST met this girl. �You should talk to her,� he says. He follows that with, �Lock Brits up in a bar for fifteen years, make her smoke lots of cigarettes and drink a ton of whisky and then maybe you�d have something a little closer to S.� Very nice. And when Brent went to the bathroom I said to W., �I�m glad my boyfriend doesn�t talk shit about me when I leave the table.� And W. was like, �Oh no, D.�s a really good guy, blah blah.� Yeah. A real fucking peach.

He�s a Goddamn Prince!

And don�t get me started on the time he started a strange affair with some random woman he met on the street whose child came in the room and �cupped� A�s balls whilst they were in flagrante delicto upon which he put a bookshelf against the door when �Mommy�s exercising� didn�t sufficiently quench the child�s curiosity enough to amscray. And more than that. We all laughed it off and gave each other sideways glances and told him it was �a little fucked up.� Because he was our friend and we knew he was wacky� but now that he supposedly has �his life together,� he�s criticizing the hell out of everyone else. Threatening to beat them, calling up other friends and accusing them of being bad influences. It�s ridiculous.

Word of the Day for Monday July 29, 2002:

prelapsarian pree-lap-SAIR-ee-uhn, adjective:

Pertaining to or characteristic of the time or state before the Fall.

Because artifice connotes civilization to the Chinese elite, it doesn't have quite the negative meaning it has for Europeans brought up on stories of prelapsarian Eden and on Romantic conceptions of nature. --Yi-Fu Tuan, [1]Escapism

No visible tourists (apart from ourselves), no hotels or apartments in sight, high rise or otherwise; it was possible to imagine we were in a prelapsarian Mediterranean paradise. --Annalena McAfee, "High and dry," [2]The Guardian, March 2, 2002

The mid-twenties were, in general, a prelapsarian period, before the stock market crash of 1929 and the depression of the 1930s. --Mark Lawson, "Beautiful and damned," [3]The Guardian, June 26, 1995

Prelapsarian is derived from Latin pre-, "before" + lapsus,

"fall."