10.02.02 - 4:10 p.m.

Dealing with reader emails always puts me in a bad mood. Somehow I was assigned the task of organizing this fabulous, FABULOUS plan to recruit readers to try one of our diets, and since they started advertising this in the magazine back in June and haven't really thought about it since, I have a backlog of, oh, ONE THOUSAND EMAILS waiting for me.

And these women are a) impatient and b) illiterate, it seems.

These freaking Middle America moms with their Tweety Bird email stationery and their [email protected] email addresses (heh, I hope that's really an address and some spam generator picks it up and starts emailing triple-x porn to it) and their "Whelp, I jest popped out five kids an' I can't figure why I can't lose weight" stories, not to mention the ones who ask, "Can you send me information on the So-and-So Diet?" that we just ran a FOUR PAGE SPREAD on! Are you fucking BLIND? Come ON, how much more information do you need? Do you want us to come over there and fucking cut your meat for you? No, don't answer that. You probably do.

And it makes me worry that in 20 years I will be blindly searching for a miracle diet plan to suck away the fat that magically snuck onto my thighs. Even though I know more about healthy eating now than most of these women ever did and I'm selfish enough to want to take care of myself first. O youth! O beauty!

And I want to be so wrong about all of this and to be shown that our readership is intelligent, witty and just looking for a few health tips, but it's hard to hang on to that notion when thse emails are staring me in the face.

On the bright side, I'm writing more entertainment stories. If I can keep the health and fitness monkey off my back, all will be fine.

On the second bright side, I am now the proud owner of my first pair of disposable contacts, FINALLY, after years of being waiting for my poor eyesight to catch up with technology (that's a -6 in the left eye and a -7 in the right eye, for those of you who know blindness), and I walked through BR twice to get to and from the parking lot and didn't buy one thing. Not even a contrast-stitched leather cuff.