Wow. Did all of you guys who said you cried actually cry over that last entry?

Pussies.

No, if you think you guys cried, what do you think happened to me? Good Lord, when my mom told me about all this in her phone call Sunday, I was ruined for the next few hours. I thought I'd be OK at first, but my mom has that ability all mothers possess: She can detect the emotional heart of any situation and present it with so much drama that it can't help but emotionally affect you. My mom could make her annoyance at your leaving the toilet seat up a Lifetime movie of the week.

This is basically how it went down:

MOM: We had to put Barney to sleep on Tuesday.

ME: Oh my God...

MOM: (said the bit about the liver sausage and chocolate)

ME: Aww...

MOM: (said the bit about the playing with the babies and cuddling in bed)

ME: AWWWWW...

MOM: (got to the part where she said "Go find daddy..."

ME: ...

MOM: Bill?

ME: ...

MOM: Are you there? Hello?

ME: SOBSOBSOB! CRYCRYCRY!

MOM: Oh, no! Are you crying? Oh, Billybear, I didn't mean to make you cry!

ME: (high pitched noises and choking sounds follow) It's OK. I'm just sad.

So, yes, yours truly spent a good portion of Sunday afternoon crying. I'm sure my roommate assumed something else was going on when he saw that I was on the phone and had closed my door. And, honestly, most of the time he'd be right, but that day I was actually hunched over my computer, crying and typing. I'll miss that pupper.

Yesterday, I had a job interview. My first real, honest to goodness job interview in months, thank you Bush, good steward of our economy. I didn't mention the interview beforehand, because I didn't want all of you to get your hopes up, only to have them collectively dashed, which they would have been, because the interview went about as well as things did the day that the Hindernberg crashed into the Titanic and caused that earthquake in San Francisco.

The job was an agent's assistant position for a mid-sized talent agency, and the woman I was interviewing for handled TV lit. Perfect. If I were to get the job, I could learn a lot about agents and what they want, meet a lot of writers, and get a nice little inside look at the industry. So I got all gussied up in my refinery, dipped into my store of reserve confidence and positive thinking, and went to go subject myself to the long hours and personal hell that, by all indications, is being an agent's assistant.

The first thing out of this woman's mouth as I sit down in her office: "I'm interviewing assistants from ICM and UAA (two of the most falutin'st high-falutin' agencies here)...what makes you think I should hire you?"

'Jesus,' I thought. 'You really fucking shouldn't, then.'

I almost felt a bit like Lenny in that scene from The Simpsons, where Mr. Burns challenges him to explain why he should keep his job without using the letter 'e.'

LENNY: Um...I'm a...good...work...guy?

Lenny was then sent to his death via trap door. I was nowhere near as lucky, as I seemed to still be sitting there in the office. I braced and launch my counter-attack.

If nothing else, I seem to be good at talking to people and shmoozing them up. This isn't ego talking, and it isn't something I consciously developed, though I am practicing it more now that I'm in LA. I bullshitted my way onto 'What About Joan' back in Chicago, and you should have been there to see the eyes of my boss on 'Buffy' light up when I slickly let her know that I was aware of her pre-Buffy career. I owe a lot to the fact that I can sell myself to people when I get in front of them. That 'getting in front of them' part has been the big problem of late.

And so I talked. I hit her with the Hailed Murray, assailed her with the Sasquahana Shuffle, and baffled her with a bit of the Bill Blah Blah Blah. But she was resolute.

"I'm really looking to hire someone with more agency experience," she said. "I brought you in here as a "courtesy interview" because we're both from the midwest."

'Well, great,' I thought. 'The part where I got here at 1130 and you made me wait 45 minutes to talk to you was especially courteous. How very Wisconsin of you.'

So we talked, and she softened, and she gave me some nice advice. She told me she'd refer me to the mailroom, which I humbly thanked her for. The impossibly pretty non-human receptionist validated my parking (but nothing else) and I went outside into the too hot for September sun, a splitting headache, and a voice mail on my cell phone.

My improv friend Robin was back in town, and she had brought me a gift from North Carolina.

Robin's a funny girl. When she's drunk, she likes to proclaim that she's a cold heartless bitch before breaking out crying. It's really more endearing than annoying, but thankfully she's only done that the one time. Still, despite the constant flirting, it's the kind of thing that makes me relieved she has a boyfriend.

She called while she was back home, and we got to talking. The conversation turned to food, and she talked about the kind of things she was eating down there in the south. It was apparently during this talk, when I told her that I had never sampled a certain delicacy, that she decided to gift me.

Improv class last night, and we're between scenes, all of us students standing in the stage area being talked to by our teacher. Robin walks in, 20 or so minutes late, and unceremoniously, in front of everyone, tosses something to me.

I look down at my hands and realize that I've just caught a bag of hot barbecue Pork Rinds.

After class, at the bar, I begin to operate on the theory that pork rinds make friends.

They don't.

Both of us ready to leave, she asks me to walk her back to her car, and I do. She tells me she that she was late to class because she forgot my gift and had to turn around to go get them.

God damn that boyfriend.

She then goes on to tell me that she's mad at him because he went to the wrong airport to pick her up, only the latest episode in their eye-roll inducing, ongoing litany of Way Too Much Drama.

God bless and good luck to him, too.