Yo I Gotta see this before it closes. I was born five to ten years too late to have Tower Records nostalgia but this tugs at my heart-strings in a really acute way.

I am only now beginning to comprehend the consequences of what a schedule will be with classes from 4:30 to 8:30 in distant Flatbush and work all day Saturday and Sunday, but at least I can, um, go to free galleries during the day?

I want to be a "regular" somewhere or have a "regular" order.

3. Guy who bought porn at Sam Goody and would always say "Oh boy-oh-boy-oh-boy-oh-boy!"
2. Angry couple at Chums, the Dairy King and Queene, a very special pair of regulars because they were loners who came into Chums to order disgusting amounts of dairy seperately, and then fell in love and ordered together. The Dairy King would always order for them: "Grilled cheese, one pizza bagel, an order of mozzarella sticks, a cappuccino, and a nice, tall, glass of milk." A nice tall glass of milk indignantly closed every order. They were jerks.
1. Best regular of all time, Rivers at Kims, who would stagger to the counter in a Hawaiian shirt with a randomly selected foreign rew release and say the same thing every time: "the name's Rivers, and I'm payin for it."

These people have made such a strong impression on me as a Woman Behind the Counter that I want have this somewhere with someone. To be someone they roll their eyes at, but who secretly means a lot in their predictability and support. Does anyone have any suggestions of places to become a "regular"? Is any sane person under the age of 25 a "regular" anywhere?

I feel very deceived/uncomfortable by how old Demetri Martin really is, he's sort of like Rivers Cuomo for the next generation of girls.

Dear Diary, will we be able to find an apartment in Clinton Hill? (Found epic place in Greenpoint.) And Diary, when will the rest of the world finally "get into" As Good As It Gets-based humor?

You'll never eat Pinkberry again: East Village closings-blog

I have a problem where I always know what to say a week after Tom Scharpling airs a discussion topic. An addition to the Creepapedia: friends who platonically cuddle. Terrible parenting: today at Trader Joe's a woman's child was crying in line, so she left the line, went to the dairy section, grabbed a package of processed singles, opened it, and started stuffing cheese slices into the baby's mouth to shut it up. Maybe one day I'll get the nerve or inspiration to call in, but until then I'll be a heavy-breathing fangirl listening via podcast.

Do you ever get your hopes up about something and then your spirit gets crushed? And there's nothing you can even do about it because it's all only a possibility you built up in your head? I think that's happening to me right now for a couple of things. "The Graduate" painted post-college as this weird nihilistic time but I just care too much about everything. (Well, not everything, apparently a customer complained yesterday that the girl working was too "nasty.")

I haven't had internet except at work for the past four days or so. I wish this could say that this taught me a profound lesson about how I don't actually need the internet, and how I could survive "like the olden days," but I needed it and missed it.

What will my employee picks for the few weeks I'm here be?

I'm downstairs shelving and watching Sweeney Todd with Angela Lansbury and I feel like I'm watching porn. I am nervous customers will "catch" me watching such a fancy musical. I keep turning my head and surveying. Also I got a Tegan-and-Sara type haircut that makes me super self-conscious so that might be it, too. Mostly the musical "theatre," though.

It's funny how the littlest things can take you back to high school, and yesterday it was a fire alarm going off at work. Our security guard, the "teacher" in the situation, shuttled us outside. Everyone complained. Once we started to awkwardly stand outside, all the customers stood divided into little clumps, and the staff stood separate, just like in school. Each clump became a clique, sizing each other up and gossiping about the other. It was raining and cold, and it seems to me like it always rained when there was a "fire" in school. (This is how people made the discovery that I get exponentially wetter than everyone else when it rains.)

The fire truck arrived and we had to do the uncomfortable, "there's no fire here, not really sure what the problem is," the same way the vice-principal used to when someone pulled a fire alarm to get out of class.

Basically this is the same way I feel whenever I size up pre-teens' outfits or get a song from a musical stuck in my head: fire drills were a part of my life for so long that it's impossible for them to ever leave.