can you hear the drums, Fernando?

Highlights from my office:

The other day, there was a food tasting in one of the conference rooms, and they had fancy schmancy stuff like salmon and eggplant roulades and chocolate covered strawberries and grilled veggies. I loaded up a plate of non-walking goods, and when I got back to the office, Fernando noticed that I had asparagus, which he had neglected to choose.

He looked at my plate, looked at me, and said, "Can I have one asparagus? I want the pee."

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Have you heard of a thumb drive? It's one of those portable memory devices, also known as a jump drive, a memory stick, a flash drive... you know what I'm talking about.

In Fernando's world, though, a thumb drive is more like a coat drive, where everyone brings the thumbs they're not using to the office and then they get collected by charity workers. Because thumblessness is a huge problem in this world.

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Fernando and I took a trip out to the wilds of Bushwick recently to see a friend's show, and on the way there, we saw the most ghetto, hand-written ad for Herbalife that we've ever seen. It might as well have been advertising The Quitter's Version of Herbalife. Or Herbadeath.

After pantomiming what someone on Pathetic Herbalife would be like for a while, we then started rewriting the ad. No longer would you be purchasing Herbalife if you called the hand-scrawled number -- you could get GERBILIFE! A life filled with gerbils! All for $29.95 a month! Or better yet, you could get BURBALIFE! Turn your life into a burbling brook for only $29.95 a month! Call now!

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On the way home from that same trip, we saw a woman on the subway who was, to be polite, NOT petite. Fernando leaned over to me and whispered, "That woman has some serious potty mask."

I sat for a second, wondering what in god's green earth he was talking about. The woman was fat, but her face looked fine.

"Potty mask?" I asked him.

He closed his eyes, rolled them back into his head with laughter, and said, "No, BODY MASS."

Oh, yeah. Body mass.