BFA2k2 The Boyfriend for America 2002 archive.
I was especially proud of this.

_ I spent the afternoon playing with Legos today. I whiled away countless days as a kid, building spaceships and tanks, etc., on the floor of my room in Vineland, NJ. It's been years since I did that, but I went to my parents house today, and my dad was building with my nine-year-old cousin, so I decided to join in. Five hours later, as my mother was admonishing us to clear the blocks off the table for dinner, I had come to realize two very important things.
_ 1) There is a certain pleasure and satisfaction to be gained from imagining something, picturing it in your mind, and then building it. Making the thing that you saw in your head into a three-dimensional object, that you can touch, examine and destroy if you wish, is a creative thrill of a very high order.
_ 2) I am much more anal-retentive than I was as a child. My method of storing my Lego pieces was to dump them all into huge plastic bins. When I needed a specific block, I would sift through them like I was looking for the last green M&M. Today, as I was digging through the bins as I built my hovercraft, I was seized by a near-overwhelming urge to sort each and every piece by type, size, color, and whatever other category my compulsion demanded.
_ *sigh* I guess I'm just not the same carefree kid I used to be. Although people who know me now will find it hard to imagine that I was ever carefree, let alone a kid.

  Here's a question: why do people feel the need to bare their souls to retail employees?
I support my bastardly activities with a day job at a bookstore. It's one of those mall-box type stores, a subsidiary of one of the giant mega-book-coffee warehouse chains. Aside from my mad register skillz, my main function is book-retriever. Customers come in, describe a book to varying degrees of vagueness, and I try to match their sparse data with an actual title.
  Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, but it invariably takes a few minutes of searching, both in our computer's database and on the shelf. For some reason, customers quite often feel impelled to fill that void of conversation with an explanation of why they're looking for the book in the first place.
  "My son's got ADHD, and he's a very bright boy, tested all off the charts, and his teachers don't know how to handle a kid that's so much smarter than they are. I heard that this book can set them straight."
  "I just found out I have this really large tumor on the inside of my skull, and the ichor dripping onto my brain is making me nauseous. My cousin's best friend's dentist is a water-skiing nut, and he says this book helped him overcome motion sickness, so I thought it might help."
  "The first time I made love to the missus, we was in the back seat of my Chevy Nova. We were so cramped and bent around and twisted up, but for some reason, I was fantastic. I here that this tantric sex has some yoga or somethin' involved with it. Maybe that'll help me be able to get it up again."
  I've heard more stories about sexual dysfunction, family dysfunction, marital dysfunction, recently diagnosed diseases, learning disorders and pet peeves from complete strangers than I ever expected. I feel like the world's lamest bartender. Is there a reason that these people are driven to share their sordid secrets with me? Is it just because they aren't comfortable with silence? Do I LOOK like I care? Whatever the reason, here's a piece of advice. The next time you're in a retail establishment, and the conversation lags for some reason, resist the urge to fill the void with intimate details about your personal life. The interest/sympathy/fascination that you'll elicit from the sales associate is most likely feigned. And, if it's a good enough story, it just might end up on the Internet.