Instead: Richard drunk reports tomorrow!

I know we met, but I don't really remember. There was something about happy hour and an empty stomach, right? Our good friend Tuesday Morning Text Message told me that the date did, in fact, go well, but, again, the whole incident must have just slipped my mind!

Hoping we have a more memorable meeting next week,

Cait.

And vaquero, I have a gym membership and have paid for personal training sessions. And yet! Haven't used 'em in months! Ughhhhhhhhh.

Back to Jon Stewart...

And when, that winter, I really fell in love (or what I thought was love at the time, it was really just teenage infatuation) with a boy who was not (at the time, ugh) gay, it just felt like the world had bottomed out beneath me. I never went to school, I cut every class I could. I started smoking, and soon after started drinking. I was miserable at home. Couldn't quite cry because for whatever reason that's just never been something I was able to do, but I felt like I would--like I was on the brink of it--every day.

I started going to therapy and got "better" and felt not so desperate, not so alone. I felt in some way a little bit understood.

It came back--that lost, fiercely alone and hopeless feeling--when I was in college and I started smoking more and drinking more and not going to class and I slept all day and when I wasn't sleeping I was pining away for some imagined life I'd never have, that I will never have.

Therapy eventually helped me out of that black hole and I'm sort of now, three years out of college, "OK." Though I still can't sleep at night, I still can't bring myself to meet men, to enter into relationships. The little sex I do have leaves me with intense feelings of guilt and loneliness. And here I am today. Just trying to make this thing OK, to make it stay "OK."

What a wonderful, adult choice I've made, Ms. Palin. What an amendment freedom I've exercised. Thanks for supporting this choice of mine, Sarah. I'm so glad I made it. Every day.

And I'm so glad that you, Ms. Palin, have helped and are helping to create a world in which these wholly unnecessary feelings of being alone aren't, in any way at all, not remotely, encouraged and perpetuated.

First you want to make sure the television set is on in the other room. Is it loud? Is it some sort of vaguely depressing game show? Good.

Next, sit down at the kitchen table. Does the room smell of eggs and pills? Is everything orange?

Once you've surveyed the room, pull out a piece of paper and put it in the typewriter. Make sure the ribbon is old. Curse quietly and old-timey-like under your breath and creak up from your chair and shuffle down the hall to Tini's old room. When you walk in be sure to notice that the dust ruffle is uneven. Straighten that out.

Stand looking out the window at the neighbor's dog in their yard. Then look at the Matheson boy sitting on his back porch smoking a cigarette. Remember the time he took Tini to her junior prom and showed up stinking of whiskey and you chased him off the porch. Remember that Trini said that that was the final straw and that she swore she would never speak to you again once she got out of this backwater town. Remember that she hasn't, but that you were happy for the card on Christmas. Make a weak ball with your first and shake your head tiredly.

Next, roll up the old roll top desk and bumble around for a new ribbon. Find it and walk back to the kitchen.

Swat at the typewriter for a while, trying to jam the ribbon in, cursing "Dagnabbit!" and other variations.

Finally cram the damn thing in after calling "Gene/Jean?? Gene/Jean???" several times without any response. Gene/Jean should be asleep on the sofa in front of the television set in order for you to properly write the letter.

You are almost there! Focus your eyes and search for your glasses on top of your head. They will not be there. Realize that they are on the little necklace doodad that Paulie and the kids got you for Grandmother/father's Day last year.

Put glasses on. Prepare to type.

By now you should have forgotten entirely what you were so upset about.

Write about the grocery store and/or the town alderman who wants to close the library in the middle of town at four instead of five on Sundays to save some money. Just a lousy buck or two. That's all anyone's after in this world.

At this point the phone should ring. You will hope it is Trini. It will be someone trying to sell you some piece of junk. Hang up, shuffle off to wake up Gene/Jean. Forget about the letter until weeks later. You'll drop it in the mailbox when you're driving home from the library. At four.

And there you have "How to Write a Cranky Letter to the Editor"