Yup, sir, me and the laptop are gonna sit out in the living room a spell. I'll drape an arm over the part of the couch where butts usually go and Mr. Laptop sits nearby on the coffee table. That's right now. In two hours it will be 830 am and I might have my face buried in the beige-ish shag carpet with Mr. L flopped over my head sideways like a folding chair on a pro wrestler. Sleep, like death, can sneak up on you and leave you frozen in the most undignified state. Last night I think I fell asleep with a hand in my shoe and my face in a copy of The Stranger (the paper, not the little existentialist book).

I'm out here for a change of scenery - the office was getting a little too familiar. That, and I want to bake something. No, actually I don't particularly want to cook, I just want to eat a baked thing and I have none prepared. I wonder what other guys do when they want baked stuff but don't want to or don't know how to bake it. I guess they must purchase troupes of baking slaves from the French. (Unless I'm making stuff up, the French are world reknowned for kidnapping bakers and selling them on the "noir market" as it were) Wait, I'm definately making stuff up. In these enlightened times, people probably use tireless industrial baking robots.

A little while ago I made up a custom cereal at mycereal.com, and subsequently got very addicted to it. There's satisfaction in being able to choose the exact shapes and materials you want to have in your cereal bowl. Want your crunchies to be shaped like puffs? Stars? Rings? No problem! How about marshmallows? Are dinosaur shapes okay? Maybe they are internal organs shapes, actually. Little cereal marshmallows are not the best medium for icons. The cereal arrived via fedex packed in pre-measured bowls of one serving each, with my name (actually, "Andr00") and the name I gave the cereal ("Wheat Happen") printed on the lid. A little flyer included with the shipment gave full nutritional information and a little background on how mycereal is a good source of folic acid. (Next cereal name: Folic Acid Crunch) The hardest thing about designing the cereal online was that their cereal wizard kept rejecting my combinations as nutritionally unbalanced. "Well, it's my damn cereal," I thought, "so what if I want soy flakes and chocolate covered spaceship-shaped nut clusters? I'm fully aware of how stupid that sounds." I suppose they don't want to be sued when someone makes a cereal that causes fatal electrolyte imbalance after 6 servings. My friends Brett and Nathan also got in on the action (Brett's: "B-Nut Bust". Nathan's: "Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs"). The only element missing from the Total Custom Cereal Experience was interactive box design and layout, perhaps with suggestions for gentle early-morning inanity to put on the back. If only such a service were available, I would give everyone original cereal when gifts were expected. My sister Beanie, especially, deserves a box of "Frog Lips" cereal fedexed to her door.

"WEREW" Am I Formulaic Yet? One crash away from nonexistence (1.04M mp3)