Eh, I guess I’m done. Blogging is a chore. Thanks for reading.

A couple weeks ago, they installed all these fancy clocks throughout my office. There are probably 10 to 15 on the floor.

The problem: all of the clocks were mounted too far from any outlet for their power cords to reach.

So they sit, nonfunctioning.

I’m cheating a bit by using this photo today because I took today off to go to the two-month Ash Wednesday “cancellation party.” And I don’t have any good photos from it. But I was still technically at work on the morning of December 12, so I COULD have taken this photo then. You don’t know, right? (Actually, I did! This photo isn’t cheating! I still have only two cheating photos on this entire website.)

One thing I’ve neglected to dwell on here is that for almost a week, we’ve been dealing with a gas leak in the stove in my apartment.

We will call the gas company, who will detect the leak and shut off the gas, which is all they are authorized and trained to do.

Then we will call the landlord, who will send his incompetent handyman over to try to guess where the leak was, and fix what he guesses the problem is. Then he turns the gas back on.

Then we smell gas again and call the gas company again.

This has been happening over and over.

Last night I got home at about 3am and smelled gas again, so that meant staying up an extra ninety minutes to call the gas company, wait for the gas company, and stand around while they performed the usual divinations and incantations.

Between this nonsense, my job, and the constant aural terrorism from the tennis court immediately above my bed, I haven’t been getting much sleep lately.

So tonight, as I returned home, I murmured a quiet prayer to myself:

“If there is any benevolent power in the universe, please let there be no gas spurting out of any household appliances tonight… or out of anything else, for that matter.”

It worked!

Various companies give us different products to hawk on the show I write for. This morning it was “Caffe Acapella,” a high-end candy bar composed mainly of coffee and chocolate.

When I came in for the night shift and full boxes of it were still cluttering the office, I knew it must be pretty gross. TV staffers are like goats. Anything they don’t eat, there’s a reason.

In this case, the reason is that Caffe Acapella is disgusting.

I brought a couple bars home for my roommates anyway.

Consider me… scarified.

Dave Warth (lying, on top) and some teammates perform improv at the Magnet.

After the show I brought Dave to a housewarming party hosted by one of my old AT&T friends, where he made a potential business contact. That makes me happy. I, on the other hand, was looking out for potential makeout contacts, and the number of prospects was very close to zero. There was an adorable Columbia film grad student from England whom I talked “Doctor Who” with, and never once did she mention a boyfriend, but friends later informed me that her boyfriend was in the room, and her boyfriend had won an Academy Award. But does he know his Daleks from his Cybermen?

It’s amazing to me that it is legal to put apartments under a tennis court with little to no vibration- or sound-dampening. Can anybody research this? Is there some kind of legal standard or precedent out there? It’s kind of amazing what people are expected to put up with in this city. I guarantee you that, in any other part of the country, the only people who would live their lives to the constant rhythm of stomping fat tennis players are drug addicts or prostitutes. In New York, this is yuppie housing.

A. took me to see a strange and very cool work of dance/circus/performance called “Au Revoir Parapluie” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. She gets season tickets with a bunch of her friends who all used to be dancers with her.

Then I got a sandwich at Ziad’s, a 24-hour deli in my neighborhood that is pretty serviceable. It’s nothing anyone’s going to write home about — although apparently Jonathan Lethem put it in a novel — but it is reliably acceptable. What I’m trying to say is, it won’t kill you.

Bob, who moved out of Maddy and Alan’s a month after I moved in, left this printer behind for me.

Okay, that’s out of the way. So — I left my camera at home today, which is why you get that crappy printer shot. If I had brought my camera with me, you would have seen a photo of the greatest sign ever made by man. This was seriously the worst missed photo-op of all time. The sign was on a plain sheet of paper and at eye level on a subway platform, so I only pray that it is still around and not defaced or removed by the next time I see it, which probably won’t be until Sunday. I even tried to dictate the sign into my cell phone’s “voice memo” function, just to have as a backup, but my phone died mid-dictate. You are SERIOUSLY in for a huge treat if the sign is still up on Sunday. I am not overselling this. The sign will cure AIDS.

Next order of business: I want to learn how to play Scruggs-style banjo. I’ve wanted to for a while but I finally got my hands on my friend Angela’s banjo, and I don’t mean that metaphorically. It seems really fun. Any suggestions for good beginner banjos, books, and ways to prevent your roommates from killing you when you’re learning the banjo are welcome.

(Roommates, I promise I will never practice when you are home. Don’t worry.)

The sign on the 47-50th Street platform has always fascinated me. It is so specific and unique, and at the same time, so completely unintelligible.

It clearly means something to New York City transit insiders, but I wonder if there’s anyone who has the knowledge necessary to understand that sign while simultaneously not knowing that “this tower is now on automatic.”

Clearly this is not the sort of sign you go buy off the rack. It’s a custom job. Somebody, probably multiple people, had to sit down and come up with the wording. And then someone else had to approve it.

-So, the tower at 47-50 is now on automatic, but nobody seems to know that. I keep sending out emails, and I think people just delete them. We had at least twelve track-adjusting specialists just last week thinking the tower was still on manual. It’s now on automatic.

-Okay… how about a sign?

-Good idea. I’ll get one made. “This tower is now on automatic.”

-I like it, I like it… but it doesn’t quite convey the nuance of the situation. You know?

-Yeah, I’m just not sure how we can accurately communicate all the ramifications of this tower now being on automatic.

(thoughtful silence)

-I’ve got it! “What you punch is what you get.”

-That is so, so perfect.

-Just make sure that part is in quotation marks.

-Please, do you think I started here yesterday?

Went in to AT&T for some cast publicity photos for the show I worked on over the summer. It’s crazy to be in a cast photo. It makes me wish I had acting talent and a normal face so I could be a real actor. I’m human, so let’s face it, I love getting “hair and makeup” and having people tell me what expressions to make so they can get a good photo of me because I am the person they are paying to professionally stand somewhere and make expressions. And I really loved writing and directing and performing in these shows, even though when I was performing I felt like apologizing to everyone because, really, I am in no way an actor at all, and I look like a hydrocephalic James Spader.

Two people who do not look like a hydrocephalic James Spader are Jack, my writing partner for many of the episodes, and Tiffany, the star of the show. I also performed with Jack in the show. He’s the one who had the Christmas party a few days ago. By the way, I should mention that it was insane. He and his girlfriend prepared no fewer than twenty dishes of varying complexity. That’s not an exaggeration. There was pasta, ham, cake, cupcakes, goat cheese things, kielbasa, stew, pigs in blankets, various cookies, and at least eleven other things. What?! I know.