The sun was out today with a chill in the air. A good day to have lunch at a decent restaurant and eat something good so I had pasta something or other with some of the ladies at the Yuppie Pasta Place in City Center. I'm not sure that's an accurate description, "Yuppie Pasta Place", but it's the one that's taken hold at the office. My pasta something or other was better than a burger. What kind of food would a restaurant chain serve that called itself Better Than A Burger? There would be more than one choice.

I was thinking today - bad to be thinking, it can get you in trouble, but feeling better often leads to thinking yourself into irrational behavior - I was thinking I need to change jobs, yes, but I need to do something other than the technology stuff I do now. But I also need health insurance. I don't need to make as much money, but I need to do something that excites me again. MSM suggested I write a column for one of the local free papers. This can be done, there's little or no money in it, all you have to do is write something that gets people excited and write it once or twice or thrice a week on a regular basis. About one in a million people who try this are successful.

I could do it. I could in the sense I could write thirty or forty of them to see how they sound. I've done it in the past, but you have to reach really far down and pull it out of your gut. Ouch. Yes. Better to do this when you're young, yes it is, and there are reasons for this: lack of good sense in people under forty, sensible people don't attempt the impossible; stamina, the young still have the stamina required to beat their head against the wall over a long period of time without slumping to the floor unconscious; and out of control hormones often make for snappy copy. And that's just for starters. I could use some of that hormone stuff right now.

Now this commentary right here would not make a column. Maybe an expansion on the Yuppie Pasta Place, something to offend everyone. Sounds a little tired, though, YUPPIE was something they coined in the sixties. YUPPIE's, SINK's and DINK's. Does anyone still use this terminology after the dot com nineties? "Metrosexuals" would be a better topic and I'll write something about them right here just as soon as I read the story I glanced at in the Datebook section of the paper this morning. The title got my attention: "Forget T&A - behind all that airbrushed flesh, Hugh Hefner's Playboy was really a how-to guide for 20th century metrosexuals".

I didn't read the story, of course, and that may tell me something about it as a choice for a subject. I'd also forgotten it was about Playboy and Hugh Hefner. How sixties. Still, I was there, I remember issue number one, although my father wouldn't have it in the house and I was 50's enough as a kid to think you shouldn't be looking at such stuff. "Metrosexual"? The very sound would have made me nervous. That's what was so fucking depressing about growing up in the fifties and sixties: so much stuff to transcend. It took you years just to scrape off the crud and get your head screwed on. Probably isn't any easier growing up today, even with Britney Spears.