Stroller-aged kids' names from my subway ride home yesterday: Kilian, Spencer, Finley, and Merriwether. Yeah, they were honkies.

email me if you want to hear the lesbian bar name that popped out of nowhere into my head the other day.

"When elephants wrestle, the ants take a beating." That's from the book I'm reading about the business of art, in which the elephants are Sotheby's and Christie's auction houses. The book's interesting, this entire world has been invisible to me up to now. Two things I've learned--I don't have to worry about any kind of sales pressure at galleries, they'll size me up at a glance and dismiss me. Secondly, in the parlance, I'm a VOP--very ordinary person. That being said, I think this ordinary person might just attend an auction this week of Latin American art at Christie's at Rockefeller Center, see if I can relate what I've learned in this book to real life.

Two ways of looking at winning an auction: one, you, the hunter, brought down the big game and get to pose with it while losers look on in envy. Or, you know for a fact you paid more for something than anyone else in the room thought it was worth.

After a lifetime of not caring for it at all, I'm suddenly falafel-mad!

I was just at the grocery store where the adorable young cashier asked me how I was paying. "Charge," I said. She looked at me blankly, and realizing my mistake, I said, "I mean credit." After a beat she said, "I'm sorry, I never heard that one before." "I guess I'm showing my age," I said. After some signing and bagging, she said, "You know in India and I think China, they think it's good to be old, like, they'd rather be older and wiser." I should have told her I was named after "Three's Company".

I bought a cut-up Purdue chicken for 89 cents a pound, can you believe that? I don't care if it's because it was coughing before it was killed, it's going on the Me Love You Long Time Vietnamese coleslaw I made earlier today. Another fave now in my fridge--pumpkin pudding. My expected weekend guest had to cancel, so I guess I had some hostessing energy to rechannel.

This new movie, "Obsessed" is just a mentally ill girl getting beaten up by Beyonce, right?

I finally put my finger on what irritates me so much about the way parents around here talk to their children, there's lots of teaching, but no training. I've yet to hear a parent tell their child "what do you say?" or "stop kicking that nice lady's seat", but I've heard, on two different occasions, fathers explaining the difference between camels and dromedaries to their young kids. What's this generation going to be like? Granted, if I had to wager, my money would be "like every other generation"; everyone was doing everything wrong when I was a kid, too.

I was talking to a guy who's refurbishing the apartment next door yesterday and when he had to leave, he told me to let him know if I needed anything (I think this is New York-speak for under-the-table stuff), his name is Henry. "I'm Janet," I said. "Oh, Janet like in 'Three's Company'!" he said way too enthusiastically. I should try telling people I'm named after that show. Which started when I was 18.

Can you believe I missed Brussels sprouts at Momofuku by two days!? They moved on to snap peas Monday. I bought some and made them at home, but why, oh why, didn't I mark Brussels sprouts season on my calendar when I was there last fall and they didn't have them? When all a gal wants in life is a bowl of Brussels sprouts . . .

I don’t watch “American Idol” regularly, but it comes in on the kitchen TV so sometimes I see it during dinner, and after however-many seasons, I’m getting the feeling that the only thing standing between me and a recording career is “song selection”. Similarly, the only reason I’m not a Top Model is, well, there are too possibilities, either I lack confidence, or I overthink things. Which, no contestant on that show has ever in her life been guilty of overthinking anything. It must be a fashion-insider code for, taking a guess here, underthinking. I do see that show often enough to be pissed that they fired Paulina. First Janice, then Twiggy, now this, how many “fashion icons” do they think we can emotionally bond with? But by all means, if you can get Kate Moss or Naomi Campbell to heroin-up the joint, do so!

I'm seeing a matinee today, and according to the Momofuku Ssam web page, Brussels sprouts are in season, so I'm hitting that for lunch. If you don't think of sprouts (or as infantile porn star Katie Morgan called them on HBO, "balls") as something you'd shove an old lady with a walker out of the way to get to, then you haven't tasted David Chang's. Balls.

Any gathering where people say "It's nice to see some of the younger people here" and they're talking about me, that is not a group that's going to be too groovy. I'm referring to two events for alumnae of my college I went to this week, a tour of Gracie Mansion, very cool, and a reception afterward at another woman's apartment. This place looked like where Woody Allen lives in his movies, shelf-lined hallways and libraries with overstuffed chairs and moldings and tasteful paint and all the whatnot. Since this gal's from Minnesota, I was expecting coffee and bars, but she had chicken skewers, a full bar, water crackers with salmon and capers and three nice hunks of cheese. Then fresh-baked brownies appeared.

A bit of theology, courtesy of an employee of the library, who was holding the girls in thrall I would have liked to be checking out my books, "It can be a rational decision. Think about it, if you think you's coming back as something better, it's a rational decision to kill yourself."

I have an idea for increasing revenue for TV advertisers. With interactive cable, it should be technically possible for me to specify which ads I'm interested in seeing. I'm not in the market for a car, but maybe I'd rent a car, so it makes more sense to show me a Hertz commercial than a GM one. It could even be within categories, like national restaurant chains. I might plan a visit to Red Lobster if they show me the cheesy biscuits and a pile of shrimp falling through space, but no matter what they say, I'm not going to Applebee's, I hate that place. There's some refinement to be done, because so far, we've got the cable company delivering my eyeballs to advertisers, but it's not linked to any particular show. But what if it was all the reverse from how it works now, I view x, x being a rather high number, of hours of TV a week, and am in the market for this basket of goods. The cable company gets $Y for delivering me, and a portion of that goes to each of the programs I watch. I don't have to watch commercials for stuff I'm not interested in, and advertisers know they've reached me, versus hoping they're running ads on the shows I watch. Not as brilliant as my solution to the kidney shortage problem, but still a win-win.

The inside of my dishwasher is dirty, how does that happen?