Perhaps you have heard of this site? Or perhaps your friends are sensitive enough to your long struggle with society-imposed celibacy and are kind enough not to throw this sex-o-meter site in your face. My friends are not so kind, and recently brought this thing to my attention. It is essentially an interactive map of the world where you can register your just-having-had-sex-ness, for all the web to see.

Because it’s important. Because I really want to know that someone just did it in the field behind my old elementary school (that’s hallowed ground, people). Ugh. I mean, sure, when I do occasionally hook up with people, I might feel the urge to tell as many people as possible, just to have a public record of the event. But there are more subtle ways of doing this, like pointing to the guy you just hooked up with, nudging your friend and saying, in a carefully modulated stage whisper, “yeah, I totally hit that shit. No, that one there, in the paintball shirt, with the thing on his face. Yeah, he’s totally into paintball, and I had the sex with him. Twice.”

Basically, this site should really be named overshare.com. It could also include lists of symptoms you thought indicated having a venereal disease but turned out to be  ingrown hair, the color of your vomit/urine/fecal matter, your grandmother’s unique and disturbing health problems, your pet’s skin condition, twitter updates about having “really bad” PMS… you get the idea. I don’t want to KNOW. I don’t want to overhear these things being discussed on your cellular mobile phone device while in line at the grocery store, I don’t want to see them posted on my facebook page where my mom can see them and be horrified, and I don’t want to look at the KFC down the street from my house and have to think “lovegerbil69 totally did it in that bathroom, then went straight back to work.” Shudder.

The site may not be my thing, but I will say it is eerily cheerful and upbeat, and pretty well-organized. They totally have these cute little pink and blue girl/boy icons that show you what the gender make-up of the most recent sexual festivities in your neighborhood were, and what positions were used. Apparently those pink and blue icons are pretty flexible. And creative. And have no qualms about doing it in a movie theater during an afternoon screening of Astro Boy. They have taught me a few things…  things I didn’t want to know.

I’ve had a Sidekick for four years now. Not the same one– I have a tendency to pour water on them or smash them or somehow get super glue all over them, so about once a year I am faced with the prospect of either replacing it or upgrading to something else. The problem is, the only thing better is the iPhone and that is barely a phone. As a device thingy, it’s great. As a phone, I usually end up asking people who call me from their iPhones to just send me the short film they made using their phones while waiting for the bus instead. I mean, it’s fun to try and guess what words might fill in the blanks left by the iPhone constantly cutting out– “So listen, I was at ______ and this_____ came up to me and said ________________________________ seventeen times__________ dead hooker!____________Tijuana___________ prison.” But as far as real communication goes, the iPhone needs to drop its carrier.

Which is why I still have my trusty Sidekick (also, I enjoy being down with the hip-hop teenagers, who seem to be the only other people still clinging to their Sidekicks). But recently my phone epically failed me when an over-the-air update crashed the system and wiped out mine (and everyone else’s– but who cares about them, this is MY rant) contacts. And my photos of things I’ve found on the street that are weird and/or give me the creeps, my 12-second video clip of The Kooks playing at the Palladium last fall, my customized butterfly-themed background, my smattering of poorly chosen ringtones assigned to all the wrong people (who for the most part stopped calling me a year ago,) and saddest of all, my $2.99 Bling Watch app that displayed a diamond-encrusted “watch” which was hard to read but made my phone look fancy. Oh, and my contacts. All of them. I didn’t have a single number saved anywhere, because the Sidekick was supposed to take care of that for me. It did not. Basically, I knew my mom’s number. And the first half of my ex-boyfriend’s number, which I used for avoidance purposes only.

Now, I’m a big fan of deleting people who I feel aren’t pulling their weight in the friendship arena. Generally, I write down their number somewhere on a piece of paper and hide it from myself or commit the most distinctive parts of their number, like the weird Colorado area code or the fun number combinations like 420 or 69 or whatever, to my tiny and already over-strained memory. Then I sit and wait for them to realize how cool and how much fun to hang out with I was, and then they (hopefully, finally) call me and everything is awesome again. I do this for their protection as much as mine– I try to restrain myself from unnecessary petulance and other irritating habits, but clearly, as I’m dedicating and entire blog entry to whining about my phone, restraint is not one of my strong suits. I have a hard time not telling anyone who will listen whatever is running though my mind at any given moment, so if a friend is already shunning me, I don’t want to push them over the edge with a ton of inane text messages.

But having 420 as part of someone number doesn’t really help when you want to call them to try and get tickets to a show they have a hookup for.  For the past two weeks I’ve been getting random text messages from people I haven’t heard from in over a year, and each one I have to write back to with the awkward “um, my phone deleted you, is this so-and-so?” Well, sometimes so-and-so just writes back with an angry note about my premature deleting habits and the friendship bridge is finally burned. But honest! It was the phone, not me this time.I had nothing to do with it. But on some level, I am enjoying the fresh start. In a way, it is the ultimate friendship test. The people who reached out first were generally the people I talked tot he most anyway. The rest can trickle in as slowly as they want. I have a legitimate get-out-of-jail free card this time, so don’t hate on me.

At least my closest friends believed me, but my cat doesn’t even use text messaging, so she doesn’t really count…

I know it’s kind of a cliche for a girl in my situation (mostly single, unemployed, living in LA) to talk about her cat, but my cat has gotten so fat lately, I feel it’s worth mentioning. Sometimes talking about it helps, you know? Anyway, I first became aware of the problem when a guy came over to take me on a date, and he was so impressed with her heftiness he felt the need to mention it, twice before we even left the house (for Chipotle, seriously), and then again later when he brought me home (from Chipotle, seriously). It was a rare opportunity for me to see kitty through fresh, burrito-loving eyes, and I realized my previously svelte furball had become, well, obese. To tell the truth, I was a little embarrassed, and not just because I went out with someone who took me to Chipotle.

Picture shown is one millionth of actual size of cat

Now, normally I’m down with the whole “more to love” excuse for the flabby result of our modern society’s wanton excess, but as her legal guardian, I feel the need to take action to prevent her flabbiness from become a serious health issue. So I decided to reduce her food intake by feeding her small bits throughout the day instead of filling her bowl in the morning. This plan backfired– now she seems to be so afraid that the small servings are all she’s going to get that she wolfs them down immediately and then begs for more. I know I’m bigger than her (not by much) and stronger than her, but she has the cute factor going for her and I have the latent Catholic guilt factor working against me, so I find the begging hard to resist. I start to doubt the validity of my weightloss goals for my feline ward, and I begin to imagine what everyone might be saying about me, on the internet and what not, calling me “cruel” and “cold-hearted” towards an innocent creature who really just wants to gorge herself, and then take a nice nap.

I know exercise is a factor, so I make an effort to chase her around the house so she can get a workout, but mostly she just finds somewhere to sit that I can’t reach and glares at me with “what did I ever do to you and you’re not so thin yourself eyes” I call her names like “tubby cat” in an attempt to make her feel self-conscious about her weight, starve her to death in small increments, all to no avail… Now she not only hates/fears me, but she appears to have gained a few pounds. She jumps on my lap and the air goes out of my chest as  I struggle to lift her bulk off of me. I took her to the vet last week, and $400 later I had a nice x-ray of her fat ass and the advice to feed her a little less. Grr. I know it’s not right to project LA’s ridiculous standards of beauty onto our pets but I look at other people’s normal sized cats, lithely jumping from counter to chair without making the room shake, and I have to sigh.

But I guess if she’s happy (she seems to be) and doesn’t feel bad about herself, then who am I to mess with her self esteem?

I wish my parents had shown me the same lassitude when I went through my chubby stage (age 5-21).