I went to the South this summer. A lot of interesting things happened! I could literally talk for a loooong time about all the things that I experienced in the South. My friend and I stayed in a bed & breakfast that we later learned doubled as the sensual-gay-massage mecca of Savannah; we ate our body weight in fried meats and somehow did not gain any weight, we went to Vicksburg, I bookmarked “Chick-Fil-A Location Finder” on my smart phone, we saw a terrible Matthew Broderick movie, and once she had a stress dream about improv auditions. We spent a night in a Holiday Inn Express saying in low but intense voices, “THIS IS VERY LUXURIOUS. I DO NOT DESERVE THIS.” We also went to the East Nashville Tomato Festival, which was interesting because I thought Williamsburg was the only Williamsburg, but it turns out that there is also a Williamsburg in Tennessee (I mean East Nashville. I mean, you are very Williamsburg-y, East Nashville! I ate kale and chickpeas while visiting you, and rarely have I seen so many denim short-silk shirt combos, if it is hot enough for shorts there is no reason to wear a sweat-absorbent silk shirt, except if you are a big old hipster!)

East Nashville is also notable for having a lot of graffiti, at least in my admittedly limited experience. I very much enjoyed a brick wall that had a Plato quote painted on it in magenta! But more than that I liked, and took a smart phone picture of, a poster that had a quote by some lady that said “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” Actually, now that I think about it, this was not graffiti, it was a poster, and I think it was actually in Charleston. Whoops! Get it together with your correctness re: locations and classification of artistic media! Anyway, my point stands: I liked seeing that. It was sorta a wakeup call. I was spending my days eating even when I wasn’t hungry just because it tasted good and waking up accidentally spooning my lady friend, and that became my life, for enough time to form many memories. If you do things enough, sometimes you just become the kind of person who does those things, as much as you would like not to be. Over the past year and a half, I’ve spent about twelve days writing as many columns for this newspaper, and that was part of my life, I’M SORRY, IT’S TRUE, I LIKE YOU WEEKEND!

In addition, I have spent the past three days watching about 10 episodes of “Law & Order: SVU” per day, because it’s streaming on Netflix. Turns out that that is fast becoming my life. Sometimes I am walking down the street and hear “DUM DUM” in my head, the musical sound of a portentous gavel, and sometimes I want to make a smartass, inappropriately lighthearted quip about a serious assault case, like Ice-T. So we’ll see how that works out for me. That’s how I’m spending my days, and today I was watching like my third or fourth episode, and just as the guest star said something sassy and got shot, I realized that it was adding up to more time I wanted to spend. Now I only watch one episode a day, sometimes two if it is a multi-episode arc. Go to the South if you can, okay, guys? There is no further moral to this view than that, so stop looking for one. That would be very luxurious, and you and I don’t deserve that.