JENNIE SMASH!

I just saw The Aviator on DVD, and I don't know what people were talking about: Howard Hughes was completely sane, and anyone who says differently is totally riddled with syphilis and staph.

It's true that I have been accused, now and then, of hypochondria. However, I see nothing in the least strange about waiting beside a bathroom door until someone comes in and spares me having to touch the doorknob myself. And as for repetitive thoughts ... dear God don't get me started. I mean, please, I'm begging you: Don't get me started.

On another note, isn't Leonardo DiCaprio supposed to be, like 30 years old now? Even in his burn makeup in the last half of the movie, he looked like someone I could be arrested for viewing in the altogether. That dirty Gisele. Guess she likes 'em young.

Please enjoy my latest contribution to the Black Table.

I had insomnia the past two nights, so I decided to stock up on OTC sleeping pills and melatonin and just drug myself into a stupor. I've been through this before: Once you get on a wakeful tear, you have to break the cycle any way you can.

So last night, I slept like a baby, but I had the weirdest dreams. I only remember one of them. I had decided to move back to Boston, right away. Even my mother was surprised and upset. Everyone kept saying, "But you were so happy in New York!" And I said, "Well, yeah, but if I move in with my Mom, I won't have to cook anymore."

I'm not sure what this means. Except that I'm lazy and that medication has a funny effect on my little brain.

A friend of mine and I recently decided to try online dating. I've done this before, with decidedly mixed results. She's never done it, but feels that now is the time. I'm feeling fairly optimistic, since I basically just want to meet people in my new city. I mean, that's a lot easier than looking for the love of your life, the way I admittedly was when I was doing this before.

Just to make sure, though, I vetted my profile with my pal. She wrote back and said that she thought it was really good and that she might need my help:

You might be called in to spruce up my profile. I can't think of
anything interesting about myself that won't scare the dudes away.

* I can spend money faster than anyone you've ever met.
* I have anxiety problems and sometimes take prescription pills to
alleviate panic attacks.
* I want to have a baby ... NOW.

I'm really leaning toward her leaving it as is.

So, I don't know if you know this, but New York is really expensive. I know! I was surprised, too. The point is that my decision to live in Manhattan (in a small box like a veal, but a veal who lives in an awesome neighborhood) required me to make some serious sacrifices in terms of expenses. The first thing to go, I decided, would be cable.

I've been cable-free for awhile now, and the weird thing is that I don't miss it at all. No, sorry, that's not the weird thing: The weird thing is that I feel better about myself in general, because without cable, I don't watch TV, and without TV, I'm not exposed to a continuous flow of android women who were grown in labs specifically for the purpose of making me and my curvy little person feel like crap.

Don't get me wrong: I love TV. When I visit my folks, I stare at it blankly for hours. I'm never going to be one of those people who brags about not having a television. I don't think it's particularly boast-worthy one way or the other.

But the other day, I was getting ready to go out and I put on a shirt that was, oh, maybe a little tight, and when I looked in the mirror, instead of thinking, "God, I'm a big fat cow," I was all, "Meh. Maybe another shirt." And then I looked again and thought, "Ah, fuck it." And went out as is.

Of course, the other option is that this has nothing to do with TV, and everything to do with me growing up a little.

Ma Smash: Are you at home?

Me: I am.

Ma Smash: Is someone singing?

Me: Yars. Billie Holiday. Sorry, I leaned near the speaker.

Ma Smash: Oh! I heard this voice singing and I thought it was you! But you were talking. And singing at the same time. It was very confusing.

Me: That's because when I sing, I imitate Billie Holiday.

Ma Smash: Well, she sounds just like you.

My next-door neighbor was having sex this morning. I know this, because one whole wall of my apartment was shaking. As I live in a pre-war building, and the walls are quite thick, this is impressive. Less impressive? The walls shook for, oh, about two minutes. Throw him back, lady.

ETA: My roommate in college used to call out reviews to our upstairs neighbor, whenever she had company. A random sampling:

"Throw him back!"

"Aw, c'mon, man, throw out your A-game!"

And finally: "That's the one! He's a keeper!"

I should really look her up. She was fun!

Some group of native people or other -- forgive the nonspecificity, but it's Sunday, and I'm far too lazy for research -- believed that if you told people your real name, which had been given to you at birth by the shaman, that you would lose your soul. I love this idea. Not of having a secret name, necessarily, but about having a secret self.

For the most part, I tell it like it is. Not out of any commitment to truth, necessarily, but because I am incapable of subterfuge. Things pop into my head and then they roll right out my mouth. I get mad easily and hold grudges never. My blood pressure should be right on par with a cold-blooded animal away from its heat rock.

A short while ago, a friend of mine called me up to ask me if I was mad at her. We hadn't talked for awhile, and she was afraid that she'd done something to piss me off. I said, "Have I called you lately to tell you that I'm pissed? No? Then I'm not pissed." It's true. If nothing else, you always know where you stand with me.

But there are some things that I'll never tell. Secrets that are so small and inconsequential that there's no reason not to tell them, but I never will. Thoughts I had when I was a kid, and the world was covered with a hallucinatory sheen that I can still glimpse sometimes when I'm sleeping enough and spending enough time alone and remembering who I am. These are my secret self.

Even more recently, another friend of mine told me about why she'd stopped talking to this girl we both know. The girl was needy, and wanted to know, always, what my friend was thinking, what she wanted, what they should do on that particular day, how she was feeling. Was she mad? Was she mad? Was she mad? This girl could not be alone.

I felt sorry for her. She must feel naked all the time. Exposed. There should always be a locked room in your heart, where your best secrets live. If you give them away, all you're left with is your reflection in the mirror.

If people could see me eat when I'm alone, no one would ever ever want to kiss me again. They might not be able to look me in the eye, even. It's that gross. I just ate half a box of crackers with a jar of salsa and half a jar of sour cream. I eat like a bulimic, except without the purging part. When I was done eating, I sat there slack-jawed and looked around me in horror. There were crumbs EVERYWHERE. On my bed, on my shirt, on my knees. The soles of my feet. In my hair. In the blinds.

I swear to God it looked like Cookie Monster had just blown through.

This morning I wandered into my bathroom to take an innocent pee and a horrible segmented she-beast ran out from underneath my trashcan. Don't ask how I know it was a she: It was wearing earrings. But seriously, I refuse to fight to the death with a male supervillian, because of implications of woman battery when he gives me a cinematic bruise along my left cheekbone and so, the bug, it was a she, just trust me.

My first thought was: Roach. I've never seen a roach, so I wasn't sure if it was one. But it had antennae and it was super-fast, so it was roachy enough for me. I smushed it with the corner of the trashcan, much more easily than I would have thought, given roaches' bionic reputation, and headed off to work, feeling slightly dejected.

I take the F or the V to work. Which is to say that I take the F, but sometimes I sit on the V for five to ten minutes while it sits there for one million years, unmoving, as if it were the air-conditioned waiting room for the F (which it is, I swear). Today, whilst sitting on the V, staring out the open doors, I saw a truly horrifying sight. A small brown rat, cute enough, if it were in a picture book and not scampering down the subway platform, paused in front of the open doors and peered in at us, twitching its nose. It looked for all the world like it was going to ask if the V stopped at Broadway/LaFayette.

I screamed, for the second time this morning, and yelled, "Rat!" No one else even looked up. I was momentarily embarrassed, until I realized that I regularly see people humping the air or sniffing their figures or yelling "Fuck fuck fuck, you bitch, I said FUCK!" all Motherless Brooklyn-style on the F, so who cares.

When I got to work, I did a Google search and discovered that the bug I saw was actually a silverfish, not a roach, and therefore, according to my coworker Madeleine, nothing to worry about. Of course, she grew up in New York, so she's not easily impressed by bugs.

Today, while wandering Chelsea in search of answers to my banking dilemmas, I saw a man begging for change. That in and of itself was not so strange. What was strange was that he was shirtless, and had pulled his pants down so far that his bare bum was resting on the pavement. Basically, were his bidness not snagged on the elastic waistband of his track pants, he would have been nude.

The woman standing next to me at the walk light noticed this as well, and curled up her lip in disgust.

"Oh, nuh unh," she said. "I know he ain't sitting there all bare-assed thinking I'm gonna give him some change."

"Maybe he thinks that we'll give him five bucks to put his pants back on," I suggested.

She shook her head. "You want money? You put your pants back on your own self. There are rules."

I was glad to hear that.

"This is why I tell my boyfriend, 'You take those shoes off before you come walking in on my carpet,'" she said. "You don't know what nasty-ass shit you stepped in today. Like homeless people's ass prints. That kind of shit."

I mean, excellent point, right?

This morning I went to the bank to take out some money for coffee and poundcake, and found that $2500 was missing from my checking account. This caused me to lay a dinosaur-sized egg in the vestibule of the ATM and embark upon a three hour odyssey of calling: my bank, my local HR people, and corporate HR.

The upshot was the check was returned for insufficient funds. The catch? The funds, they are quite sufficient. The company I work for is owned by the New York Times, which is doing just fine, thanks and has been since, like, the Civil War.

Our HR people, who are excellent and deserve to have statues dedicated to them in the Farmer's Market over on Broadway, straightened the whole thing out and got me money and even managed to pretend that I did not have an obvious and tremendously professional panic attack in one of their offices.

And by the way, because I'm crazy, of course I briefly thought that my check had actually bounced. I could see the media blogs lighting up: "Man, did you hear about the New York Times? 150 years of stability and then Hubley joins up and they go right down the shitter. It's like she brought the Year 2000 with her. Jayson Blair was nothing compared to this."

But no, no. It was not my beloved NYT. It was, rather, my bank, which has lovely customer service people but terrible systems. Another friend of mine just had $500 go missing, and last week, when I needed to replace my checks, I was told that they could not issue me temporary checks, because I opened my account in Boston. Nice "merger", you guys.