In the croquet groin meeting yesterday they were talking about the client we’d be speakerphoning with and how he was young and smart and talented and sharp and whatnot and I said, “Wow — is he single?” And during the following couple of seconds of silence it occurred to me that I was in a conference room with men who would probably only pretend to be gay if they cranked their pretend-gayness up to such absurd extremes that no one would take them seriously. Whereas I said it in my usual tone of voice, because I’m a big believer in not modulating your tone at all, ever, and yes this is directed at you, the guy who always turns the volume way way up whenever he’s making a joke, just in case we might miss it.

Like, for example, I’m at this party in college with people I don’t particularly know and I’m drinking one of those horrible improvised college cocktails made of probably like tequila and apple juice and vanilla extract and I say something like, “This is the worst thing I’ve ever put in my mouth. Except my father’s dick.” The same deadpan sort of approach and the same subsequent silence as people scanned me for any sign of jokiness.

My fellow copywriter known as Misuser Of The Word Literally just cornered me in a hallway to complain about how much work she has to do, and how she’s been working till ten every night this week and how unreasonable the manager (the Chewer-Outer, no less!) is with his deadlines, and then she asked me what I was up to, and I had to admit that I was sort of wandering around, thinking about getting something to drink. I left out the part where I was also trying to find if there was a cache of blank CDs anywhere that I could pillage, and that I’d had absolutely nothing to do all day, aside from a conference call this morning that I sort of wandered away from after ten minutes.

Another guy here is not a Misuser Of The Word Literally, but definitely an Over-User of it, which keeps me on my toes. So instead of “I literally died laughing” or the like, he just throws it in as filler: “You can literally move the mouse yourself and literally click on the button and see, literally see, what happens on the computer screen.” I worry about how he perceives the world.