I won a contest.

Notice the lackluster punctuation in this post's title. A period is a very understated full stop. There's none of the provocativeness of a question mark or the enthusiasm of an exclamation point. Forget about the coy suggestiveness of ellipsis marks....

As you probably have seen in the post below, I read and savored Meg Cabot's Insatiable. After having raved about it to those who have no choice other than to listen to me because they're stuck living with me and if they don't listen I will just follow them to the bathroom and yell my review at them through the door as they do inside that which can only be done in a bathroom (keep in mind many a shower has been taken under a tropical waterfall - at least on Gilligan's Island - so obviously I'm not talking about that), I perused the internet for mentions of the book. I did the "simple Google search" that unhelpful people are always telling us we can do to learn about things that they are too lazy or daft to tell us about, even though there is sometimes no substitute for picking a real person's brain. So, on this search I found a contest, entered and was later notified that I'd won a signed copy of Cabot's vampires-in-NYC-tale. I gleefully dashed off a thank you email and received Insatiable today via the US Postal Service. I love getting books in the mail.

So why the listless punctuation? My inner existentialist teenager (named Morticia) is screaming the answer: people are YUCKY. All right, that's my inner existentialist teenager, Morticia, self-censoring her language. Morticia may be into the whole well-the-world-is-hurtling-through-space-and-tomorrow-we-might-hit-an-asteroid-and-die-anyway-so-why-bother-thing that some teens go through, but she doesn't feel it's necessary to use bad words. So, 'yucky.' Use your imagination.

You know those days when work just GETS TO YOU and you wish you could dream up the next big useless money-making idea (like that blanket-cape thing people wear around the campfire on that TV commercial and everyone seems to adore although humans have been doing perfectly well for centuries by draping a proper blanket over their shoulders)? And then you go on errands and someone tries to fleece you and you quite rightly complain to a manager and now you're not fleeced but you invested time and energy in the endeavor when you were all the time wishing that you could be playing Hungry Hungry Hippos like when you were a kid? You know what I mean, right?

Of course you do. Because that is the human struggle: to toil in the workaday world while harboring fantasies of flipping game chips into multicolored plastic hippopotami's mouths and watching the money roll in from your blanket-coat business. Perhaps you'll say, 'Wait a minute. Isn't it nice to come home to a signed copy of a fabulous Meg Cabot book? Count your blessings.' Well, of course you're right. But sometimes yucky people just drain you of the energy needed for enjoyment of good stuff. But writing is a good catharsis, and I'm feeling a little bit better now. So you know about those yucky people?

Yuck them. I'm going to gaze lovingly at my new book.