And then Lauren was all, WTF is wrong with Congress?

​After spending a long and frustrating day last week trying to figure out what year it was and what country I was living in because my government decided it was cool to discuss a little issue regarding birth control but magically barred the only person with a uterus from being in the room, I was tired. I shut off my thousand-year-old computer and walked away from it all, burying my yoga pants in the couch for three good, vapid hours of watching The Hills.

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Best meme of all time.

​After the University of Colorado at Boulder's meme page showed up on Facebook, I was convinced that the Internet could use fewer memes. While glittery animated GIFs were once the way to "show some love," memes are the way to show some stupidity, taking an image and vandalizing it with a statement about cats/women/politicians that is not always true and is often misspelled. Not all memes are inherently bad, of course; some are actually funny (see photo to the right). But my Facebook newsfeed is littered with misinformed memes, often posted by otherwise intelligent people.

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Hit me up.

​Once upon a time, before Facebook made social networking acceptable for non-nerds and technology was on the cusp of the cellular-phone revolution from the brick to the flip, I had a pager. I also had a boyfriend who I fought with, in public, for about 80 percent of the duration of our relationship. He also had a pager.

After one of our many raging arguments, he changed the greeting on his pager to Smoking Popes' "Need You Around," so when I called to leave him a message, I would hear it and know he was sorry. (If this series of messaging events makes no sense to you, read more about pagers and pager protocol here. And if you're unsure as to why the image of the pager on the Wikipedia entry has a chain attached to it, it's so it won't fall off the front pocket of your overalls and into the toilet, duh.)

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Demetri Martin was here.

​ Dear Diary: Last. Night. Was. Awesome. My friend Nichole won tickets to see Demetri Martin at Macky Auditorium in Boulder, and guess who she chose to be her plus-one? This lucky girl, right here. And can I say, for the record, that the tickets were bomb. So bomb. We were in Row A, seats four and five. "A" as in the first letter of the alphabet and "A" as in front row. I was ten feet from Demetri Martin. And his pants.

I made sure I was properly prepared to see my future husband's nonstop, laugh-a-minute stand-up routine -- I studied his Wikipedia page the night before, so I knew that he was single and allergic to peanuts. I even made sure to take a shower and wear cute, clean underwear to the show, because I knew I'd have to be ready. Ready for Demetri and confident enough to fend off legions of other girls with glasses who wanted to woo him too.

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Goodbye, Chrissy Snow hair.

​I'm not a blonde anymore. That fantasy has officially ended. After spending the better part of a year transitioning from dirt brown to Michelle Pfeiffer's off-yellow Scarface bob to accidentally sea green to Gwen Stefani white, my hair is now a pleasant rich-chocolate color. So my mother can stop thinking about how much she hates the way I look with blond hair and re-focus on why I'm not married. (Tip: Other than getting married, another thing that makes a mom happy is when you stay as close to what you looked like when you came out of her uterus as possible. Meaning no dyed hair, tattoos, piercings or shirts that say stuff like "FBI: Female Body Inspector" or "Nice New Girlfriend -- What Breed Is She?")

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No, we don't carry flare.

For a brief and beautiful moment in time, I lived in New York City. During that year of boot camp for life, I learned a few things -- like, there is no such thing as privacy, the only scary part about the subway is that sometimes it smells like human shit, and once, as I was hoofing it around SoHo looking for a sales job, a little voice in my head appeared and said, take that lip piercing out right now, young lady. It makes you look like you're from meth country.

I also learned that there are three kinds of retail stores: the bodega, the boutique and the mega-store. By sheer luck, I ended up working in a boutique called Irregular Choice, where I sold raver shoes with plastic cat heads on them to very polite, very beautiful tourist women from Lisbon's upper echelon. But the bodega-style store fascinated me, particularly OMG Jeans.

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Just call me Baby-Skates.

​When I was growing up, everyone had birthday parties at Skate City. Like, everybody. My mom was more of the "let's roll the Slip N' Slide out on our dead lawn and make Kool-Aid (because it's cheap)" kind of party-thrower, but I really just wanted to celebrate with a wax candle jammed in a Little Debbie Swiss Roll like a normal entitled kid. I finally got my birthday wish when I was nineteen, and all I remember about it was that someone in my party won Christina Aguilera's "Genie In A Bottle" single on cassette during a skating contest, and we listened to it until the tape snapped. I don't think I've skated since.

With Beauty Bar's monthly Down And Derby party happening again this Friday, I'm ready to give skating another go, though. In preparation, I've compiled some dos and don'ts for those of you who, like me, may not have been rollerskating since the late '90s.

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Actual cover of my actual diary.

​Once upon a time in the '90s, I was not the cool blogger I am now. I was just like any other teenager, barely existing on the Internet (save for being a third, observational party to my best friend's chat-room adventures) and living out my writing dreams as a reporter for my high-school newspaper, The George Washington Patriot. That was where I first began pushing my annoying opinions regarding the Spice Girls and local band Uphollow on anyone bored enough to read the publication during study hall.

But beyond that body of highly professional work, I also kept a journal.

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My New Year's Resolution: Eliminate the ACK!

​I love New Year's resolutions. If I keep them, I feel like the most important person in the universe of me. If I break them, I just go back to the original list and edit, making it look as though I hadn't planned on making my bed every day anyway. To me, this is how resolutions work: There's a real list and a sub-list.

(With that kind of work ethic, maybe I should run for president when I turn 35. I mean, I already have the two other things necessary to be a female prez candidate -- "smart girl" glasses and a scrunchie. Maybe that should be a resolution for a few years from now....)

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R.I.P. FML 2008-2011

​Yes, 2012 is creeping up on us like my 32nd birthday (no need to send presents -- I will only be accepting fan letters as gifts and creepy Facebook messages of adoration from high school stalkers). Since the world is not going to be ending as some of us maybe thought it was, it's time to look at the upcoming year with a fresh set of eyes. The new year is a great time to not only make resolutions for ourselves, but to move forward with a few nice gestures that might benefit our fellow humans and, you know, make the world less crappy in general. To do my bit, I've compiled a simple list of things that should stay in 2011, which would make 2012 a less annoying place -- for all of us.

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