ITEM! Last night, at the IO, this girl was talking about the Coffee Bean she frequents in her hipster Los Angeles neighborhood of Los Feliz. She was riffing on the various types of people who come in during the course of the day, specifically, the crowd that shows up at 10:30am-ish. This group includes the screenwriter types with their laptops, Tony Hawk and his crew of skateboarders/hangers-on, and huge fan of the multi-national java chain: the lead singer of Rage Against The Machine.

Rage, indeed. Rage against that machine! Rage against everything!

Except, of course, lattes. Oh, and the palm pilot he carries. Ah, and, um...the, uh, Jaguar he pulls up driving.

But everything else? Rage! When the barrista forgets the cinnamon sprinkles? RAGE!

FadeIn: Slowly dissolving into celebrity rag since 1975.

I, too, harbor a secret desire to Rage Against the Espresso Machine. I want to be anti-, to buck convention. Every once in a while I entertain my fantasy that, one day, I'll be Oscar nominated, but in lieu of attending the overblown awards show I'll just stay home that night and play Memory.

And, sure, it's a nice little daydream to pretend I'm that cool, but the reality of the situation is that if I didn't go, my mom would kill me. So, for that first nomination, I'll be there in my normal-person's-three-month-salary suit (because, really, a suit is so much cooler than a tux, yes?), my glamorous woman with $65,000 jewelry on loan from whomever loans out crazy stuff like that, sitting there in the fifth row chuckling and eating it up while Steve Martin zings me for my legendary love of cashews.

The way I see it, the fourth nomination is the one you skip. At that point, I won't be able to be bothered to leave my Scottish seaside villa. And really, why should I?

But for now...when one's financial issues are nothing that couldn't be solved by finding an abandoned truckload of PS2's, one has to take life's pleasures where one can find them.

And, thankfully, this weekend was filled with the best things, the simple things in life.

There was beer, there was food, there were uncountable episodes of The Simpsons, and there was excellent company. There's a test I've developed to determine whether or not you're truly having a good time: Think back on everything you just did, then re-imagine that same scenario with an unlimited amount of money and a change to your choice of any locale in the world. If none of the basic components that made it enjoyable in the first place really change in any significant way, you've done well.

Simple things.

Saturday night included some long delayed and much needed roommate bonding. He marveled at my truly heroic intake of In n Out, as I had a taste and some new code words to try out. I marveled at his interesting and promising new short film script. We marveled jointly at the amazing amount of cuteness possessed by the girl that plays the housekeeper in Bottle Rocket.

His short is really good, and it's going to get much better in sunsequent drafts. There's a role for me in there, and I may take a crack at being his director of photography.

Oho, I just got a call and learned that I'll be temporarily employed for the week. I did the math, and it turns out that I'll earn more by enduring this administrative travail than the tax dollars the fedrali's would give me to sit around and write funny instant messages to you good people, so...off I go.

Great, I guess.

Goddamnit.