So my big thought for the day — Hang out with someone who makes you laugh.

My mom was essentially a perennial victim. There was always some reason that her life hadn’t worked out, or small things that worked against her or just a reason to complain about how she never had any luck. I try very hard not to be that person.

Clearly, it’s not working. I know this, because at Star Market, M. turned to me as I wistfully browsed the half-price Valentine’s candy to imitate me, “No one ever calls me, {mock whimper], no one emails me…” Apparently, I am my mother’s daughter. Curse, genetics. {insert impotent fist shake here.}

M. makes me laugh.

Speaking of birth defects, my boss spent a certain portion of today taunting my accent. It seems on talk radio this morning, a local had called in to moan about the A-Rod trade to the Yankees. The caller had a poem, in which she was able to rhyme “pre-madonna,” “goner” and “corner.” I have a Boston accent, but I’m not a friggin cartoon.

I just saw Meg Ryan on Conan. Did she have a face transplant? I haven’t seen anyone look as different since Jennifer Gray got a nose job. Tomorrow I think I’ll dig up pictures of the transformation.

If you’re a new “comic” (it’s in quotes, because the fact that you have talked into a mike on stage doesn’t make you one) or even an older one who should know better, here are some rules:

Most of this list is a damn good idea.

I forced M. to eat some waffles. It’s probably not nurturing to force treats, but damnit I care so don’t make me have to stab you.

I’m keeping this short, to make up for last night. On average maybe I’ll achieve a readable length. (By the way, anyone who cares, let me know if the entry below is far too long and self-indulgent. I think about writing longer and longer pieces, but I also think I may not be able to sustain interest. Lord knows no one needs me as a sleep aid.)

M. just said that he thinks someone popping up from my 20s right before I turn 40 (it’s a forenight away now) is a roadside for moving on past a milestone. I’ll have to think about that, but it is interesting.

Because I think myself funny, I will end this entry with something I always remembered for making me laugh. When I lived with Malcolm, he had a line at my expense that I still remember.

The scene, our apartment on Beech Street in North Cambridge, which is also home to the Long Funeral Home, which I heard is being condo-ized. Typical rent-controlled turn of the century flat with thin walls and bad heat. What you need to know is I am in the throes of passion a tad vocal.

I wake up groggy after a night of entertaining a gentleman caller to find Malcolm with a morning cup of coffee (or probably strong tea, come to think of it) and the newpaper.

“Jesus Christ, Denise, I couldn’t hear the hockey scores.”

Rimshot.

Fucking HELL. I’ve spent the day doing pretty much only two things (1) trying to use the word “Valentine” in as many sentences as possible to taunt M. and (2) reviewing the ghosts of the past released from the comment section below.

In regard to (1) I have to say that in many ways M. is a champion of patience. And, there may be no better way to spend a fake holiday meant to force people to be together than to actually be together talking and joking. Then, filling our bellies at an Asian buffet (which is surely one of his visions of heaven) in the company of a couple of his old friends, moments away from birthing, is mellow and warm and lacking of hearts, pretense and the bogusity of smarmy sentimentality.

But, in regard to (2) it’s hard to even know where to begin as to the whole world remembered by a couple of quick lines. Not to get all Proustian, but I might as well have fucking chomped down on a madeline.

It’s probably a violation to talk about a guy who I remember as shy, in a retiring kind of way (not the don’t-make-eye-contact kind of way) and reserved in a very Scottish stoic why make a fuss kind of way. But, fuck it, he’s in Europe far out of reach.

Back in the late 80s, I worked for this publishing company. They are probably best known for the Readers’ Guide to Periodical Literature, which no doubt everyone reading this shit has probably used to legitimately research a high school paper or more likely crib a few additions to a bibliography to beef up said paper. We actually worked for the Readers’ Guide Abstracts, a companion publication where articles from general interest periodicals are boiled downed to pithy abstracts of 13 lines or less. I just grabbed the copy I have of the book, which is dated March 1989, so I worked there before then. I can’t remember if they gave us the books or whether I stole it. For a variety of reasons, even though I don’t usually go around pilfering, this book may be ill gotten.

For me, the job was to be the dream job for a 25-year-old aspiring writer fresh out of journalism school. Publishing was it, the first step in the right direction to destiny.

The dream quickly, probably more quickly than in any other job before or since apart from the three-day McDonald’s stint, turned to ashes. I SUUUUCKKED as an abstracter. Look at this shit right here. Me, boiling stuff down to it’s essence, sans punchline, in as few words as possible? FUCKING Please. The Cambridge office was rows of cubes housing a variety of literary types and lovers of the written word sitting behind a single terminal running only a dedicated Wang word-processing program humming direct into the mothership mainframe in NYC headquarters. Everyone had at least a bachelor’s degree from an English, print journalism, writing or library school. Some were in graduate programs, possibly to teach or become a librarian. Most were poets or storytellers or playwrights, hoping only in their lives to become the holiest grail of grails, a published author.

These were quiet bookish people. I largely am not. Sure, I can read, and I’m capable of higher thought. But, in a room full of people I have to speak at some point. It’s an imperative I can’t apparently control. Maybe I could with time and training, like Tibetan monks can control their breath and pulse, but it would be a struggle.

That’s me now, but at 25 with everything in the world seemingly possible and the proverbial amounts of piss and vinegar fueling me into life’s bacchanal, fucking forget silence. Ramped up on age and hormones and drugs and booze, I didn’t have the patience to count the minutes and the words and the meanings and the minutia that all make for good abstracting. My reading comprehension was at an all-time low, and the big-brother dedicated system could count my keystrokes or lack there of and verify exactly to the second by how much I had missed the precisely required log in time of 8 a.m. (Thank fucking Christ and all other dieties real and imagined that I now have a job in which I can arrive at about 10-ish.)

So, I became friends with Malcolm. He and I both had a taste for fermentation and most days of the week we easily found ourselves diagonally across the street from the office at the Plough and Stars.

In my recollection, now fuzzy with time, it was a halcyon time (expect for the part where I sucked at and hated my job), where people from the office followed us to the pub. Eventually a steady group gathered over pints, and bullshit was discussed, and dreams and yearnings were revealed. A less clever, but just as drunk, Algonquin Round Table.

In reality, it probably was rather pathetic. But, I think everyone should remember the greatness and potential of their 20s. (Although, I also think the current folk in their 20s should be segregated from the rest of the population, so that we who have already passed through need not endure their eager, shiny newness.)

Malcolm and I later became roommates, after I lost that job, and probably deservedly so. We had a third roommate, Patty, with a shaved, punkish Sinead O’Connor look, incredible cheekbones and body, and the sorriest taste in men a woman has ever had the misfortune to have. Vaguely, I remember the swirl of activity around Patty and men and drinking and whatnot, while Malcolm listened to music and read William Carlos Williams.

I think Malcolm moved out around the time her crystal meth-loving boyfriend, who also enjoyed tying her up and shredding her clothes, became too much of a fixture. He was the poster boy for why drugs are bad, what with the stealing, loudly appearing at dawn for a shag and leaving shit like his grimy BVDs around and all.

For anyone in Boston comedy who sees this entry, in some ways Malcolm is the doppelganger to comedy’s Andy Ofiesh. Quirky, genuine, maybe with a slight dollop of creepy, red-headed, very aware of who he is within the world around him, and the chicks dug him. The mousey girls who spent all of their formative years in libraries with faces jammed in books trusted him and spoke softly to him and revealed their inner selves to him. As with Andy, my current favorite redhead, you could never quite tell from behind the smirking smile whether he was listening or just looking at the young tits an earnest hand’s length away.

He tells me that from that time and that office, one of our group is now an editor at the Atlantic Monthly, which might be the highest success in terms of literature. At least two of us have blogs, duh, and I’ve been trying to remember and Google the rest. I even pulled the print edition off the shelves, because I thought we were credited and it would shake the names from my memory.

I’m sure as more comes back, and I wonder more about that time, I’ll come back to this time.

Although, I must say, I am very happy to be who I am now and spend time with the people I do. All in all, the times were interesting, but I do not want ever again to be that age or relive that time. 40 is greater than 25.

My heart is heavy at this news. Talk about marketing bullshit.

One bit of advice to Barbie if she takes up with someone from thatthat hemisphere. One minute you think they are adorable boy toys, and the next you’re addicted and missing them when they follow the sun to warmer climates.

Hey young lovers wherever you are, Happy Valentine’s Day. Since it is a saint day ofthe patron saint of greeting-card manufacturers among other things, I will spend my day in devotional prayer. Which is a true statement, if by “devotional prayer” I mean relaxing with my cutie patootie [can’t get the image file to show his cuteness, alas].

Just like old times, I received my coffee and a little banana bread in bed from a smiling man.

Unfortunately, such sweetness is at odds with my perceptions in regard to Valentine’s day. I have a lot of completely non-romantic associations with the day. When I first went to college it was in January and my mom starting wigging out in a serious empty-nest thang laced with jug wine. So I sent her some native Syracuse chocolateschocolate-covered potato chips on Valentine’s Day. Thereafter, I always made sure to send her something or come by and visit with a gift that sometimes had something to do with where I was living or what I was doing at the time. Another time, my uncle incredibly sweetly sent me a huge gardenia plant, no doubt after yet another dramatic, painful break up with yet another dramatic painful asshole. (It was a cold and rainy day, and I told the delivery man he had the wrong house. sniff sniff.) That plant was a rare houseplant for me; I kept it alive for years and even got a few flowerings out of it.

I don’t really have any great romantic associations. I do remembering trying very hard (read too hard) to please and creating tension and build up of epic proportions and being disappointed. For example, there was the time I baked brownies from scratch (no big deal) for a cat lover, so I included a field of sculpted marzipan kitties romping on the top of the platter. I have no idea what, if anything, was done for me that same day. Proving mostly, I think, that I was able to get myself so worked up into a neurotic fever beyond Martha Stewart’s wildest imaginings, I could effectively bypass any pleasure. Either that or it just proves I really don’t hold onto all memories of boyfriends’ past in a pathetic world travel-size steamer trunk of excess baggage. It frankly could go either way, neurotic or healthy.

Mostly though, in re the opposite sex, Valentine’s Day has been a festival of feeling bad or not good enough and having the illogically effective taunt of commercial marketing to grind salt into the wounds of inadequacies. I think my favorite wallow might be the alleged roses from WBUR radio. That link won’t show it today, but every year the local National Public Radio affiliate does a pledge drive by which they will send roses on Valentine’s Day for you with a certain amount of cash for them. One year, I think right after Kabloom became the Starbucks of flowers, something happened with the system of accepting pledges and actual delivery of roses. I waited all day with a sinking feeling that my boyfriend at the time had done nothing for me all day and would continue to do nothing. Meanwhile, a male friend had told me about his dire straits, because he had pledged to WBUR and just found out no roses would be going to his wife. By the time my beau called me, and we arranged for a rushed and last minute get together for dinner, I was already feeling under or unappreciated and unsure of whether he gave a shit about my feelings by the time I saw him. (In retrospect, if shit and the giving of it were an absolute scale, his lack would best be represented as zero on the Kelvin scale.) I’m sure I had a gift for him, and he was completely empty handed. As the evening wore on, and “wore” is what the evening did to me, in true pathologically passive-aggressive style he made me feel shittier and shittier for seeing his empty hands and assuming it meant nothingness. Eventually, we got around to discussing the WBUR delivery problem, my friend who had been affected and the news stories that had appeared at the end of the day with apologies from the radio station and the florist. It was then that he told me that he, too, was a victim and unhappily the roses he planned never materialized.

From that day to this one, I still really do not know whether it was a very lucky and convenient lie or the truth. What I have learned, however, is don’t date people who you can’t trust.

Which brings me to today. I am happy; I am lazy and there shouldn’t be any roses, which is actually fine by me. I am not a flower lover, since they are dead and they become more dead looking and the allergic-to-everything part of me feels like maybe they are harboring enemies to my sinuses.

A better gift than the bullshit flotsam and jetsam stores push with a vengeance at the moment really is relaxing together. The cup of coffee and the kneeled kiss by my bedside in the neighborhood of my feet are nice touches.

Maybe tomorrow we’ll buy some half-priced chocolate together!

(Is it wrong that I kind of miss my neurotic feelings of holiday-induced anxiety and inadequacy. I do cherish an overwrought diva scene, afterall.)

I just checked some stats for this site. It seems I am a lightning rod for people searching out insults for Asians.

Just to be perfectly clear, I only use words like “jaundy” when the situation calls for it.

The problem with being a narrow-minded, unaccepting parochial chick like me who consorts with the kind of folks for whom racial slurs were invented is evidenced by these searches. I don’t hate, I just embrace the language of hate, because misery suits me.

I’m going to hug a chink the next time I come across one (which is in approximately a nanosecond).