During parties, especially ones in designer-conscious downtown Los Angeles lofts, the couch is coveted territory. People have just spent twenty minutes making polite non-committal remarks around the kitchen island, and all anyone wants to do, at this point, is rest on the cushions and maybe squeeze an end pillow. However, the same competitive drive that applies to every other aspect of life in the city is amplified here. The people on the couch are ruthless motherfuckers.

Lounge singing is one of the perennial occupations of pop culture. Most elegantly embodied by Frank Sinatra, and most cheesily realized by karaoke, lounge singing is a cultural touch-stone, a greasy but instantly recognizable symbol. What is it about the sight of a man leaning up against a piano, tie slightly askew, a once primo cocktail disintegrating into the watery dregs, that digs so deeply into the soul? It is every man’s dream to prowl a softly-lit stage, tossing off harmonic platitudes to a crowd of clingy drunks?

I fell three feet and into a puddle of grape-flavored Juicy Juice. Not too much juice, it was probably just from one carton. But this was no ordinary puddle; there was something different about it. I knew that because it told me. “Hey you! I’m no ordinary puddle!” it said.

I do not have the H1N1 Virus… I think. It all started on Thursday night over a steak and wine dinner with some close friends. A barely-there cough emerged that evening and I did my best to ignore it. But it got worse overnight and come the next day I was like something out of a George Romero movie — my skeleton ached. My brain felt like it was melting. My five senses were blurred in a confusing haze of total homeostatic failure.

Let’s put aside the grammatical heartbreak of text messaging (or, txt msng, if you prefer). English, that great weird bargain bin of romance languages, Teutonic asides, and Latin root verbs, is starting to slide into obscurity. Don’t worry—this is not a disguised ode to William Safire’s “On Language.” This is more about the fact that this whole alphabet thing—the 26 separate letters representing vowel and consonant sounds—is starting to vanish into obscurity, to be replaced by a much more compact and efficient written language system, a la the kanji utilized in Chinese.