It's Moving Day, finally.

Join me in a moment of silent chewing for the final Pink Palace post.

And it's just a photo. Which is fitting. (Refer to site's title.)

[Sniff.]

Marissa starves to death: Read the full recap.

Okay, slight problem. I will really miss gazing at Mischa Barton. I'm not kidding.

Don't get me wrong -- I thought Marissa was vile. But I still appreciated her face, frame, and hair. Who wouldn't? She's a dream. The O.C. made it so easy for people like me to have a relatively good excuse to stare at Mischa for an hour (the show was usually all about her -- agonizing, but easy on the eyes) while exerting the least possible amount of effort. (Did you guys know that? Watching TV is easy.) What are we supposed to do now? Google image search that bitch? Rent The Sixth Sense? See whatever awful movie she makes next in all her emancipated glory? Watch a video of her pushing Nicole Richie around in a shopping cart?

Fat chance, Mischa. Yeah, that's right: Fat. Eat a pancake.

Someone should market a Mischa Barton slideshow of sorts. Not a calendar, nothing like that. Just basic photographs of Mischa in expensive, cool clothes -- a slideshow that would change maybe every few hours. (But only when it was switched on, like a desk lamp. It's not like I'd look at it all the time. Just whenever I wanted to).

Or, if I was the richest person ever, I could hire her to just sit in front of me, or show up wherever I happen to go. Like if I'm walking down the street, she'll be walking the other way. No big deal, just "Oh, there's Mischa." Yet again. Just my luck!

She'd always have to be expertly styled -- that's the catch. I'd want her to do what she always did on the show: make me feel dowdy, large, and hopelessly unfashionable. I don't want to miss out on this now that Marissa's dead, and I fear that I might. Who will I love/hate to idolize now?

Nope. I'm voting slideshow instead of in-house existence. Seeing her in person -- seeing anyone in person, actually -- would be incredibly awkward. That's not even what I want. Excluding special cases, I typically don't like having to deal with actual human life. I'm confident that I'd never want to talk to Mischa, or do anything with her. I just want to be able to stare at her if I feel like it. A slideshow of her, looking good in different outfits. It's not so much to ask.

Congratulations Danielle!

A little old lady tried to buy my necklace while she helped me out at the bridal registry counter (holla, Heffa!) at Williams-Sonoma today. I don't get that. If I bought it for myself, why would I sell it to you? Is this, like, a common practice?

As soon as I told her I'd bought it in Brooklyn, she looked crestfallen. No, no, it's a cool store! There are two incredibly convenient locations! I tried to explain. But she wasn't havin' it.

"Oh, I'll never go to Brooklyn," she said.

And that was that. If our conversation was taking place within Nintendo, the screen would have flashed GAME OVER at this point. This was a perfectly normal, able-bodied citizen of Manhattan, flat-out refusing to travel less than five miles to Brooklyn.

She then started trying to find sneaky ways for me to get the necklace to her via a route that did not involve her setting foot in Brooklyn. Maybe she could write down her address, and I could send it to her, and she could send me money (because she didn't have any cash.... yeah right). Maybe I could buy her one, then bring it back to the store and she'd pay me extra. Like a tip. Like I'm the food delivery guy. And finally she asked the biggie:

"Well, why can't I have that one, that you're wearing?"

There were many reasons, which I didn't really feel like going through. Not that she wouldn't have been willing to listen. She was clearly bored by her job and had an intense girl crush on me. (Some of her pickup lines included "I just love your style!" and "You're my kind of girl.")

So I could have whipped out a notepad and outlined specific bullet points of why I couldn't/didn't want to take off my necklace and give it to her. Instead, I just stared at her and made a noise that probably resembled "Hehhhhehh." Imagine the noise Pat, the SNL character, made when he/she was nervous. Mine was in a lower tone. I probably sounded like a trucker.

Now I sort of want to go buy it for her and drop it off next week. It'd be so unlike me. I'd feel like a great humanitarian and she'd be thrilled and tell everyone she knows about the total angel who bought her a necklace.

Seriously, who would refuse to go to Brooklyn? I'm already obsessed with it. Reason 1: The movie theaters are always empty! Check it out (left). Just one of the highlights of my new and improved Brooklyn Life: Leno and I were treated to a private screening of the new L-Lo vehicle Just My Luck.

This movie was horrible on all levels, the most significant of which was the unfortunate presence of Samarie Armstrong (Anna from The O.C.) as one of L-Lo's nondescript best friends. I gather that she was supposed to be "the quirky one," which mostly meant a guitar, a lot of fake fur, and hot pink highlights. I don't understand how this girl keeps getting to act while refusing to enunciate a single word in her life. Wouldn't someone say something? Come on. We're dying here.

This is brutal.

My DVR/life partner never, ever tapes the Survivor season finales. It's probably because they're always on Sunday nights instead of the regular Thursdays. (WHY?) But shouldn't such an advanced piece of technology -- and the gadget I consider to be my soulmate -- have slightly more intuition than this? It's happened like five times now.

I am furious. I watch the entire season of a show I know is worthless, a show I don't even like that much but remain devoted to simply because it was the first American competitive reality show based on a somewhat interesting idea. Also, my parents watch it, so it's fun to discuss plot points with them. Sometimes, between all of our conversations about current events, snacking, and me, I hardly know what to talk about. Thanks Survivor!

Anyway, every season I invest hours of my precious little life into these people, and don't even get to see how it all ends. Ugh! Thing is, I know the finale was lame as usual, I know I would have ended up making fun of everyone's outfit and how they all look fat now, I know I would have wanted to throw things at the screen whenever Jeff Probst tried to act like he wasn't reading from cue cards. But for some reason, I relish this crap. So I'm pissed.

The only reason I care enough to write about this right now (I'd gotten over it about two hours ago) is that my next-door neighbor is currently watching his or her recording of the finale. I can hear the drawn-out-too-long flute music. It's time yet again for tribal council. And I'll never get to see it.

I've never seen my neighbor(s?), and I definitely never hear their TV, so this just seems like an even crueler implementation by God (or Probst) to mess with me tonight.

Or, and this is actually more likely, this is karma biting me in the ass for being such a horrific neighbor to him/her/them for almost two years now. Whoever lives there absolutely hates me and would kill me on the spot if we ever met, which we won't. I play music -- loudly and at 3 a.m. I watch TV -- loudly and at 5 a.m. I actually don't think my various forms of entertainment are ever that loud, but since the walls are about three inches thick, I'm confident that the neighbors think they are that loud.

Quite recently, at 3 a.m. on a Friday night when I was playing music quietly and chatting animatedly wwith one other person in the apartment, we were treated to five loud pounds on the shared wall. FIVE. With spaces in between. So it wasn't like a casual knock-knock-knock, "Hey could you turn that down" request (which, yes, they've done before). This was a calculated, determined, "I've hated you for years and if you don't obey me right now I'm shooting my gun at the wall" plea. There was desperation in the pounding, but it was so forceful it felt like a death threat. We now refer to it as the Knock Heard 'Round the World.

Update: they just finished their recording, and I heard the sound a TiVo makes as they probably deleted the episode. So if I had a TiVo, this wouldn't have happened. Noooooo!

Shout-out to my new friend Alison in Park Slope. I didn't think you were weird, if you were worried. Quite the opposite!

Sing it with me.

I'm in the process of painting my new apartment. I should say "our." I'm living with a Scandanavian arctic creature named Poor Leno (right). He doubles as a human. We hosted a "painting party" last night and got one room completely done, in a life-affirming shade of green called Brookdale Gardens. Yes! Painting is extremely fun and rewarding for at least ten minutes. You should try it!

I'll tell you what's disgusting: primer. I coated my room with it because the infant named Jackson who lived there before had an apparent fondness for pumpkin orange, a color darker than my choice of Luster Blue. (I'd actually call it Dusty Violet, but whatever.) Let's not linger on the fact that I'm moving into a tiny cube previously inhabited by a baby, and instead focus on primer being disgusting. From the first massive "roll" I applied to the wall, I was treated to a constant shower of tiny wet, white specks. I felt like I was in a commercial for a shampoo called "Primer." It was sort of fun becuase I've always wanted a ton of freckles, but mostly it was disgusting. I don't even know if it was worth the effort. Note to everyone: Say no to primer! (I love how I paint one room and I'm suddenly an expert on manual labor.)

Here's one cool thing: the color we picked for the hallway (a light sea green) is called Prairie Princess, and both of us are from Illinois, which everyone already knows is... The Prairie State! True to our roots, we are. Maybe we should make it a theme and stencil in some corn on the cob and the ever-obligatory outline of Abraham Lincoln's head.

Since painting the rest of it looks to take 10-15 days or perhaps years, this site will be even lamer than usual (Exhibit A: this post) in the near future. Please stand by... and grab a roller and HELP us, with a backwards E.

Or leave tips on painting, specifically how to do it for extended periods of time without going insane.

It's a slow news day in my head, so here's this.

Kate forwarded this to me around Easter... I just remembered it becuase I'm still working on a Fannie May Solid Milk Chocolate Rabbit from a few weeks ago. (Ew!) It's all part of the Great Apartment Eat-Out, my self-imposed plan to eat only the food in my studio before moving to the Slope in two weeks. I was going to document The Eat-Out daily on DR, before I realized it was really boring and trivial "in the scheme of things" -- like everything else I seem to care about only worse!. But I still incorporated the photo (Tostitos, above left).

The word "Solid" on the box is so key. Dee only sends solid chocolate animals, as we share a deep-rooted resentment for hollow ones like those pictured. Who do they think they're kidding? Nearly everyone! What a buzzkill.

We will not stand for this. It's solid or bust! Dee enjoys the bonus chocolate. I like the "ski slope" skid marks I get to leave on the rolling plains of solidity with my teeth. Also: the bonus chocolate.

Those "crumbs" in the graphic look suggestive of feces. I'd still eat 'em.

A week or two ago, I found the darling little "news" snippet to your right on AIM.com.

Question: Was it necessary for the copywriter in charge of this "blurb" to be so incredibly bitchy? Let's count the ways:

1) "Sucks to Be You." Okay. I'm sorry. I'm just reeling here. Think about it: could there be anything meaner than this line? It almost seems like a joke, a headline that college-newspaper editors would print out in the middle of the night, purely for their own amusement. Then, it'd be funny. Here, it's just sad.

2) The "Sorry, Heather Locklear" link. What a great way for everyone who really wants to stick it to Heather Locklear to be directed to the full scoop! Clickin on the mouse will be like snapping an extra-forceful lash of the whip to Heather. Yeah, kick her while she's down, that dirty little hobag! Not to mention the second-person apology. Our dear copywriter seems to think Heather Locklear is standing right in front her, ready to gobble up all the shit she throws her way. Uncalled for. Speaking of gobbling...

3) That heinous photo selection. I bet whoever picked this was like "Let's get one where she looks awful!" Too bad this one doesn't come close. Heather seems almost joyful here -- or at the very least, pleasantly surprised. Maybe she's in the act of remembering that even though she just got cheated on, she's still rich, hot, and Heather Locklear.

Clearly the site was just trying to pander to people's love/hate obsession with celebrities, but they took it a little too far. Would Us Weekly put "They get cheated on by their best friends!" next to this photo on their intellectually stimulating "Stars: They're Just Like Us!" pages? I'd be surprised. (Fine, that might be a lie.) This is about adultery, not dropping a stirrer at the Coffee Bean and then using it anyway! Shouldn't there be a limit to what we can point fun at, or are famous people asking for it simply by being famous?

Oh, and to make a long complaint short: Who the hell cares about Heather Locklear's love life?

Unbelievable: Two people have informed me that the English word muscle is derived from the Latin word for mouse. Check it out.

So Dee either:

--Is insanely intuitive with just a dash of eerie

or

--Has been a Latin scholar this whole time

Vote now! No, don't. Mom! Can you believe this? Might you have unconsciously absorbed the reference earlier in life? Are you a rare genius who's been communicating via brainwaves with wise souls from the Olden Days? My mom now has this mystical quality we can't just delete. Seriously, Dee: What is your deal?

I was in ecstatic awe at this discovery. The entire world made perfect sense for like three seconds. Then I turned on the TV and it was Kelly Clarkson belting out a Ford commercial. World, why must you torture me? Oh well, it was fun while it lasted.

Having an inconsequential Web site finally proved productive today! We all learned something, and the DR Graphics Department did a particularly top-notch job. High fives all around! That's it, now gimme a hug with those hot rodent arms.

For a few years now, my mom has been making this weird reference to skinny people's tiny arm muscles looking like mice. She'll say stuff like "Oh look, she's got the little mice" while flipping though magazines, or "If I keep lifting weights, maybe I can have... you know, the mice. In the arms!"

To reiterate: for unknown reasons, my mother wants it to look like there are mice in her arms. She thinks "the mice" look really attractive. Add this to reasons why DR loves Dee.

Still... huh? Why mice? Why any living animal, for that matter? And are they mice that run around, or do they just get stuck, under the skin? Muscles can't exactly switch locations.

I don't really understand the mice, but at this point I just play along. It hasn't been easy: She's brought them up so many times that during bicep-baring season, if I catch her even glancing in the general vicinity of my arms, I imagine her thinking to herself, "Hmm... Annie should really try and develop some mice." Or I fear she'll eventually come right out and say it: "A, you know what would look great with that top? The mice."

My sister and I refer to these choice analogies as Dee-isms. Just like deism, which is appropriate considering the source.

In last night's O.C., Kirsten's shoulder blade looks ready to pop out of her skin. I'm imagining the Dee-ism, but with Kirsten, it's more like a rock-solid worm lodged on top of her shoulder, trying to wriggle its way out at all costs. Look closely, and there are even two little shadows that look like they could be antennae. Or the wriggler could be something mechanical, like a ticking bomb or an in-body computer.... like something out of Alias or the movie Species. What if this show suddenly got all sci-fi on us and Kirsten stood up clutching her vodka bottle... now a robot? I'd flip the F out.

I've somewhat abandoned my policy of not caring about famous people to follow the story of Kaavya Viswanathan's (right, being smug) expeditious plummet from wunderkind author to hack plagiarist. What a long, completely unsurprising trip it's been. If you don't know what I'm talking about and would like to, try the link above, or this most recent story, or this one, or this quite comprehensive collection (you'll have to start at the bottom).

I don't have much to say about her borrowing of other author's materials. Obviously, it sucks, and she should have known better. I'm mostly confused as to why she even needed to do it in the first place. Aren't writers supposed to just... write? Why couldn't she just write the book? I seriously don't get it.

I picture this girl settling down in the Harvard library with all the horrible chick-lit books she copied from for another long night of cutting and pasting pieces of them together like an arts and crafts project (albeit one contracted for $500,000). Who would do this? How is this writing? Why would a company want to pay this girl in the first place?

Don't worry, I know the answers to all of those questions, because I (sort of) understand how the world works. It's just depressing.

Apparently this girl (I'm so sick of her name that I'm not gonna use it) has excelled mostly in math and science her whole life. Which isn't to say that she couldn't be a good writer. I have nothing against anyone who wants to be a writer trying to be a writer. (Honey, please.) But what pisses me off the most about this girl is that, in character with the rest of her analytical, purpose-driven life, she treated the construction of her novel like a mathematical equation, copying passages from other books nearly word-for-word in an effort to make the project as commercially successful as possible. Like a math problem, it could have one correct answer: a huge profit.

I picture her thinking of the writing process almost like a cheesy high school essay contest with the topic "County Pride" or something, in which the student who injects her rhetoric with the most names of locally revered diners or words like "community" and "nationalism" might win $100 and her photo in the American Leigon's headquarters for one glorious calendar year. It seems that writing the most popular novel ever was something this girl just decided to do as a self-imposed extra-credit project to tack onto her roster of accomplishments, even though she wasn't competing against anyone in particular, and even though the world certainly didn't need another astoundingly annoying book of fluff.

What resulted was, in essence, a blueprint instead of a narrative. SIMPLISTIC DIALOGUE + FASHION DESIGNER NAME-DROPPING + OTHER AUTHOR'S PARAGRAPH SKELETONS = MY AWESOME BOOK. Yay! She'd certainly won. For a few days, at least.

I saw Katie Couric interview this girl a few weeks ago on The Today Show, before any of the cheating stuff broke. I'd been up all night and for the most part was neither lucid nor listening to their blatantly scripted discussion. The only thing I remember is glancing up at the screen in horrifying recognition of something very clear: "This girl's an idiot!" I said out loud to my TV. It wasn't in a mean or dismissive or jealous tone, except for maybe that last one. More like crestfallen. Like "Oh, that's really too bad." I was mostly just disappointed -- that what was obivously a shallow book would become a hit, something the herds would race to buy, plow through, and discuss at book club weeks or months later... and all because a teenager with shiny hair and a fun, ethnic but not too ethnic accent happened to "write" it.

We can't do any better than her? Seriously?

Ew.

Just found an old "multimedia message" (which is so confusing to me... why can't they be called "someone just sent you a photo") on my phone. It's from my sister, and reads "Check out this one-legged duck."

So I think you should too.

Props to Meghan and her keen eye for abnormal creatures. This one, she said, was spotted at the Oakbrook mall (30 mins west of Chicago). So at least it's a classy one-legged duck. It's not like it decided, "Shit, I only have one leg, better hike it to Yorktown."

Not that it could have.

*UPDATE* I've just been informed that this is a goose, not a duck. This figures. We Barrett girls are very poorly versed in animals. We've made it a mission to avoid them our entire lives. I'm not kidding. (I don't think you could possibly think I was kidding... since I had no qualms about assuming this was a duck.) I'm going to go crawl back into my hole now.

Earlier this morning, I did the EW recap of last night's Desperate Housewives. It probably makes no sense because while writing it, I was literally shaking in my chair in fear of what turned out to be a small moth that had entered my tiny apartment through the wide-open window that I haven't shut for eight days. TO AVOID THE TEDIUM OF THIS POST, SKIP RIGHT TO ITS CONCLUSION.

When the moth came in, I didn't notice. (I can focus really hard on staring at a blank document, as long as I don't have to actually do anything to it.) But then I heard a really rapid clicking noise, like what you hear when something gets caught in an electric fan. I jumped up and tucked my legs under my butt, as if that would help, as if the creature making the noise might try to attack me from the floor and I would be ready.

I'm trying to decide if "clicking" is the best word for the noise. It could also have been ticking or flicking. The point is that a constant "ick" sound was resonating through my apartment. I'm not embellishing! The apartment is very small, and I swear this was very loud. "Ick-ick-ick-ick-ick." Agghh! THINK ABOUT IT!

At times, the noise would cease, and for some reason I'd get worried. By this point, I'd resigned myself to having a houseguest, so I couldnt' just forget it and move on. Even though the ick-ing was ridiculously unnerving, so was the thought of the thing slinking around on foot, defecating on my possessions or worse, eating my food. I would not stand for this. I wanted it out, which meant it better start making more noise so I could figure out where it was.

So when the ick-ing would suddenly cease, I'd wave my arms wildly, play my coffee table like a bongo, and attempt to simulate "wind" with my mouth. Just blowing into the air wasn't cutting it, so I grabbed a near-empty water bottle and went to town on that. Still no response. I think my low point was when I started asking the creature where it was, out loud. "Where are you?" It began as a whisper, but after it was so rude as to not respond, I decided to bark it out. "Where? Come on? What the f---?"

I finally started rolling around on my chair just to provide some noise and let the creature gather what a powerful force I (compounded with the chair) could be. I realize now that this probably woke my downstairs neighbor. Okay, I also realized it then. Yes! Courtesy.

Then I finally saw it and it was a small moth. Lame! And yet I became terrified of the thing, simply because it was constantly moving and I was not. If we were at war, it would win based on activity alone. It was fighting so hard and I was just sitting here, frozen and staring, wanting so badly to kill it but knowing I had something important to do and that I should try to ignore it.

None of this proved too productive on the writing front. Insetad of focusing on the present and the task at hand, I could only think about what life with the moth would be like a few hours from then. When I'd try to fall asleep, would the moth still be in here? Would I even attempt to sleep if it was? I was positive I wouldn't. I decided I had to kill it. The story was due at 6, but there was a moth in my studio that absolutely had die at 4:55. Priorities. I'm telling you.

It was all or nothing. I'd either kill the moth and then write the story, or I'd do neither. Instead of being scared that I'd get in trouble or seem unprofessional for turning in the story late due to moth-killing, like a normal, professional person might do, I felt a sudden sense of relief. If the story turned out horribly, at least I'd have a really valid excuse. I was 100% preoccupied... by a tiny insect in my room. Totally acceptable! Definitely.

LONG STORY SHORT: I killed it in under two minutes. I faced my creature, backed it up against a salmon-colored wall, and whacked it unnecessarily hard with my paperback copy of A Drinking Life by Pete Hamill. It was amazing. He would have been proud. Or disgusted.

I'm aware that this has all been really weird and sad. Tomorrow I'll be more acceptable. Reset. Hello May!

How do you deal with unwanted houseguests?