Here’s the deal, yo, I did straight up nothing for about the last month performance-wise. Nada, bubkis, ya dig? Tomorrow I’ll be up there with the mike doing the comedy thang, and my fantasy was I would walk through some new stuff that is unformed and bubbling in the otherwise echoey skull chamber.

Anyway, that was the plan and I would use tonight for two things — (1) Calming the rattley ideas in my head to something usuable on stage (least until I pussy out and fallback on the shit that works) and (2) Study me some Mandarin. (Man oh fucking man that Chiney is one hard language. I’m tone deaf and tone figures large among billions of the world’s people.)

By the way, the best reason to take a language class is to toss off a little workday stress by hating on your classmates. Every single fucking language I have ever studied (OK, all two of them, French and Russian) had to have two particular and striking types in the class: The studentka who pronounces everything in the same flat monotone squeezing out each letter and syllable with some kind of funked up American accent where all languages sound vaguely Brooklynesque and the hyper, over eager linguist who is all up in there learning and commenting on how “weird” everything is and asking question on what “they” do and what “they” say and how unique and weird and quaint “they” and “their language” are.

So far my fave example of the latter was about the Mandarin phrase “dianhua haoma,” which means telephone number. It’s two words, kind of like “telephone number.” Literally translated it means something like electric speaking number, kind of like telephone number, if you think about it. If English uses two words and one of the two words is also a clever hybrid of concepts, than why the fuck are we discussing how weird and hard and different and weird Chinese is? It’s the same goddamn thing. (Oh, and by the way linguist face, Mandarin is simpler and more logical than the shit we be speaking, and predates it by more than a few clicks of the sundial.)

If I were a language teacher, and thankfully for all involved I am not, I would be forever quoting Steve Martin, “They have a different word for everything…”

I’m totally off track of what this post is supposed to be about, namely thank god M. exists. Instead of studying or writing (because really why waste a night being useful to myself), I spent way to long perusing myspace.com . Specifically, I was looking at alumni from my high school and college, curious to see if I knew any one.

What I found was many sad-seeming divorced folk looking for the big myspace.com hookup. Perhaps I’m projecting and judging and all sorts of other bad karmic shit, but damn I hope to never appear that cyber-needy. For example, I hope to swallow a bullet before listing under life goals “finding a boyfriend this year,” and I have always wanted to end up living a distance greater than 1.5 miles from where I grew up.

So, damn, M. is my manna in the desert of post-40 dating.