Earlier this week I got an e-mail from Jen Selk, who fell off (well, got kicked off... ahem) the face of the earth over two years ago. All things being equal, this appears to be Being Friends With Ex-Girlfriends month at the Tederick.com offices. The secretaries are mightily overwhelmed, and the phones are ringing off the hook.

Most of my friends are resolutely of the "scorched earth" approach to post-breakup relationships - and don't even get my sister started - but I just can't seem to summon up the necessary reserves of cold disdain. I am, even if on an intermittent basis, far too curious about the beings who have been key players in The Story Thus Far, in spite of the fact that correspondence can prove to be a jarring and tumultuous process. Shit, I'd sit down and have a beer with Scott Adair (my grade-school bully) at this point in my life out of naked curiousity, so why not the people I was variously in love with for years upon years? (Man, it just occured to me right now that in the space of the last three weeks, I've talked to all three of them. Yeah. I cope like a champ.) And so, I respond to e-mails, go out for drinks, occasionally get myself in way too far over my head, and yet somehow, rather lucklessly, always fail to have sloppy, emotionally-destructive post-breakup sex. But then, that's my life in a semi-permeable nutshell.

The only real side-effect of all this is a very slight, but perceptible, slip in your mental tally of time and place. Honestly, the date, the nature of my job, and the identity of the ex I was currently chit-chatting with all eased out of my brain at at least one point today, and it took effort to pull it all back into focus. Otherwise, I'd say, bully for the satisfaction of everyone's enduring curiousity. Matt Brown: dating him sucks, but man howdy he's interesting afterwards.

(That was the joke part. Calm yourselves. Boy, sometimes around here I feel like Bilbo at his birthday party, and not just because I drank too much wine and tried to make off with Mrs. Proudfoot.)

Mmm.... Tederick.com porn....