This Week in Its Briefs - Lacy Bits

1. Technology, people - I pray we always use our powers to make white magic and may The Force never die. As an example - I'm not only playing favorite songs on the computer from my teensy little ITunes library while writing this post, but I'm simultaneously conducting an MSN messenger chat in a combination of French and English (including the ubiquitous web cam) with Mr. Fresh Hell's nephew in Algiers.

Coming from a childhood where the benchmark of sophistication was a knowledge of the inherent wonderfulness of Tang, I sincerely doubt that I could have envisioned this as something I would ever do years later in a tragically cluttered guest room of a Queens apartment. True, my favorite future offered flying cars, but thank God I've not been holding my breath.

2. What is it with me and shopping? How can I enter a store with a concrete purchase in mind, like finding a simple black slingback pump with a 2 1/2 inch heel, and find every other shoe under the sun but this one? The correlary of this particular conundrum is that if I happen to wander into the deluxe and mighty shoe store (DSW, I'm looking at you baby) at random, with no particular item in mind, I will find at least three different shoes that I love. This is my version of the imp of perversity (and why I shop online a lot).

3. Cupcake news: The Emeritus Cupcake has been spending less time in the office, as his slide into retirement is predictably unfolding. More of my work is with Chairman Cupcake The Second, and the very recently inherited Marketing Cupcake III - I'm actually doing more interesting and challenging work now as opposed to tedious personal assistant duties which, while they often border on ludicrous, have generally been good for a laugh on the cocktail circuit. Cupcake Emeritus continues to find ways to try my patience to its utmost breaking point but so far, I've not yet poisoned him. Check in next time, though - things change!

4. Rain, rain, rain - we've been innundated with early summer thunderstorms. I do love them, though - the unbridled power, the force - it's wonderfully cathartic, especially when I am at home to monitor the open windows. They have been wild, chaotic, and cleansing.

But I feel a longing for the true New York city summer to begin - the one where the weather is just too hot, humid & sticky to bear, when tempers flare and the sidewalk cafes are packed; when it seems like the entire world is spending the night out on the street because the oppressive heat of the accummulated concrete squeezes the breath right out of your lungs - that's the true city summer, not this candyass constant rain and gray sky.