There is a couple sitting at the computer terminal next to me, and every few minutes they turn away from their Hotmail account to suck on each other's faces and gross me out. The first time they did this I muttered to myself for them to get a room. Or at least I meant to mutter it to myself. But when my headsets are on and Busta Rhymes wants to know if this (s)hit makes his people want to jump, jump, my ear sometimes fail to tell the difference between the under the breath voice reserved for inner discontent, and my loud, outdoors, planes are flying overhead voice. Oops.

I don't want to talk about the war. I don't want to hear about the war. I don't want the war. And unless I'm watching CNN or the eleven clock news or The Daily Show, I don't want it on my television either. Especially not when Young and the Restless is supposed to be on. Especially not when I pay for chanels like MSNBC, CNN and BBC to take care of all that.

The major networks are behaving like parents of a newborn, snapping pictures every fifteen minutes, afraid to miss out on something new. Because of this I have no doubt that by the middle of next week they will have dumped this puppy into the laps of cable news until it learns to walk or say its first word, and go back to worrying about Ross and Rachel. But until then, how much longer must I endure that single-cam shot of cars speeding through the Baghdad intersection?

My stomach growls in the morning. It doesn't matter what it I eat for breakfast - - whether it's a big breakfast or a healthy breakfast or one loaded with carbs or smothered in maple syrup, my stomach will start making fierce noises at approximately 10:20 AM. Every day.

So I'm in lecture, and suddenly my stomach decides it wants to go public with our affair - as in a one row back, one row forward, four seats down in each direction radius. As it continues to gnarl for food, the girl sitting next to me asks if I am okay. I sincerely believe she's afraid that whatever's growling inside of me might reach out and attack her next.

"Am I okay? Yeah, sure. It's just my stomach growling." "What? The stricken look on my face? Oh, that's just mortification. Thanks for amplifying the experience."

She offers me a pink, sugar covered marshmallow shaped like a rabbit. I kindly decline. I can't accept food. It's like admitting guilt to something I didn't do. Shame on me for coming to school on an empty stomach. Well, it's not empty. If she could just ignore it like we usually do, it would shut up and behave. Really.

But no. Five minutes later she offers me pretzels. Then she reaches into her bag again for the box of sugar dipped in food coloring. "Are you sure you don't want a marshmallow?" No, no, no, no, no. Maybe she would have understood me better if I'd asked, point blank, for her to stop waving that shit in my face.

I hate you stomach. I hate you to the depths of my soul. I hate you more than I hate people who walk shoulder to shoulder on the sidewalk and force me to climb into the snow just to get around them. I hate you more than I hate...Dawn on Buffy. Dawn AND Riley. Yeah, that's right. And I'm not taking it back.

Funny, when my manager was first hired I wanted to quit for the first 4 months she was there and now, two years later, it's her last day and I don't want to work for anyone else. As we hugged and cried, I remembered the time I threw a hissy-fit over scheduling and we resolved it by hugging and crying. At the time I thought "How stupid is this?", but today the memory only made me hug and cry harder. And even though I knew by saying goodbye I was effectively saying 'have a nice life', I just let go.

Why do we do that? Why don't we hold on tighter and build better bonds and promise to keep in touch and call every three weeks and meet for lunch and share secrets and swap good books and try to know as many people as we possibly can in our lives, rather than smile benignly as they walk out the door?

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