• Monica Lewinsky in the soiled blue dress--I figure some time has passed, so there aren't gonna be a hundred other folks in the same outfit. Plus, it's still hilarious, when you think about it. I know there are some Republicans who have to be feeling pretty nostalgic right now for a time when they were going after a powerful Democrat.
  
• Tender Heart Bear--Always my favorite of the Care Bears.
  
• Drunk and Horny Ann Coulter--This is the scariest costume I could think of.
  
• The "Two A-Holes" from SNL (Couples outfit with wife)--I don't know about you, but I just can't get enough of this sketch. It's as funny the five hundredth time they do the exact same thing as it was the first.
  
• Rush Limbaugh doing Michael J. Fox--I'll just quiver and shake all night. Hilarity guaranteed!
  
• Giant Douchebag--Actually, this is the same as the Rush Limbaugh costume.
  
• Senator George Allen--I figure I can just walk around with a toilet and keep flushing my career down it.
  
• Aaron Sorkin--Another simple one. I'll just masturbate and then talk endlessly about how important it is.
  
• Batman--It'd just be really cool to dress up like Batman.
• A Unicef Box--People will put money in me all night.
  
• Skippy the Vomiting Clown--Just me in a rainbow wig, but it gives me an excuse to get really hammered.
  
• Guy Impaled on a Puppy--Not quite sure how to do this one, but it'd be horrifying, spectacular and adorable all at the same time.
• Pumpkin Bread--A lot of people might not "get it", but, damn, I'd be tasty.

• First, I'm so goddamn wishing I didn't live in a media market in which there's a hotly contested Senate race. If I hear one more word about how crooked Bob Menendez is or how much Tom Keane, Jr. loves to lick George Bush's nuts, I swear to God I'm going to puke in a bag and mail half of it to each of them. November seventh can not fucking come fast enough for me.
  
• Yesterday, I saw the most Pimptastic outfit ever. This dude was wearing, I swear, red leather pants with red fur down the sides, a shaggy red fur coat and a red leather hat. Plus big ol' sunglasses. My god in heaven. If I ever needed a prostitute, this is the guy I'd see, 'cause he look like he knew his way around a sexually exploitive employment situation.
  
• My wife has been very nice about this year's World Series. She's encouraged me to go out and watch it and has even been awesome about its appearance on our own television. So, the other night, I sat and watched Game Three, long after I'd decided that I no longer wanted to watch. The game was not all that exciting to me, and it was made all the worse by FOX's craptacular broadcast, but I couldn't just throw away my wife's sacrifice. So I sat through it. Until the Roaming Retard with the toupee-looking hair who regularly popped up all around the ballpark did a segment in the outfield, promoting Taco Bell's promise to give free tacos to everyone in the country if there was a home run during a mid-game stretch. The hair-do turned to a kid in the bleachers and said, "You're here for the free tacos, right?" The kid looked at him and said, "I'm here 'cause it's the World Series." I think maybe the Announcer Man had a gun on him, because the kid hastily added, "Oh, yeah, but a free taco would be great, too." My God, FOX is smooth.

For the last month or so, I've had a really tough time writing anything. I've had to force myself to sit down even a few times a week and bang out a blog entry, to say nothing of the other things I need to get done. My mind has been, for the most part, on one thing. And it's not something that really fits in with what I normally do here. About a month ago, my wife and I found out--for the third time this year--that we'd lost a baby.

We started trying to get pregnant about a year and a half ago. We did a really poor job of it, though. We really never paid attention to things like ovulation or cycles or such. It was pretty half-assed, at first.

But then, one day in December, I came home and my wife greeted me at the door, which is not her usual modus operandi. She broke the news that we were pregnant. I hugged her. She cried. I cried. We went out for dinner.

When you've been trying for a decent amount of time and you finally hit pay dirt, it's an incredible feeling. Every waking thought was filled with babies. We got to do all the fun stuff pregnant couples do--reading What to Expect When You're Expecting; deciding on names; figuring out how to tell our families. I have to say that I have never been happier in my life.

Early January, we had our first OB appointment. We'd wanted to go earlier, but the eight week point was the soonest they would take us. The doctor's reaction to the ultrasound wasn't quite what I'd expected. She asked us if we were sure of our dates. The embryo, she told us, looked to be around six weeks, not eight. We didn't see a heartbeat, but the doctor told us that you don't always see one at six weeks. We left the appointment unsure of what we were being told. The doctor has said that there was a chance the embryo was "not viable". My wife had to do a series of blood tests to see if a certain hormone, hCG, was doubling like it was supposed to. We had to wait through a very long weekend before we got the results.

My wife called the doctor's office on the day the results were due and the nurse there said that things looked fine. Things were not fine, of course, and whatever nurse it was that told her that should be strung up by their ass hairs. After a couple of days of thinking we'd dodged a bullet, we got another call--this time from the doctor--telling us that, in fact, the bullet had hit us square in the chest.

I can't even really describe how it feels. For me, it was bad. I'd been walking on clouds for a month and then someone pulled them out from under my feet. As bad as it was for me, I know it was worse for my wife. In addition to the emotional weight of what happened, she had to deal with the physical aspects. We didn't tell a lot of people, because it didn't seem to be the kind of thing of which you notify people. One or two of the people my wife did tell came back with innocently spoken, but devastating comments of the "It's probably for the best" variety.

It was a rough couple of months. Eventually, we decided to try again.

In July, my wife had what's called a chemical pregnancy, which means that you miscarry before a heartbeat can be detected by ultrasound. You're just pregnant enough for your body to start producing hormones and long enough to get a positive home pregnancy test. Then it goes away.

So we had all of that in our recent history when we found out in August that she was pregnant for real again. It took a lot of the joy out of it, having to worry constantly that something was going to go wrong. All of the elation we experienced the first time was replaced this time by anxiety. We couldn't let ourselves get excited about it. Just in case.

At six weeks, we went in for the ultrasound. We were scared. The image popped up on the screen and we could see the embryo clearly, heartbeat and all. That made things seem real. We kind of let out our breath. The doctor told us that, if everything was good at the eight week point, we would be pretty much in the clear.

So we gradually started to feel optimistic. Instead of talking about the potential problems, we talked about the potential of moving to a two-bedroom apartment. We started talking about names again. I threw myself into providing my wife with the proper nutrition for an expectant mother. We got happy again.

When the eight-week visit came around, I remember being a little nervous, but not too bad. I'd gotten used to optimism again. So when we didn't see the tiny heartbeat this time, when the embryo didn't seem to have grown all that much, when the doctor kept readjusting the ultrasound's position, it took awhile for me to realize.

We still don't know exactly what's happening. We've done some tests but have no real answers. Our emotions have been all over the place and we've swerved violently back and forth between wanting to try again and wanting to look into adoption and wanting to give up completely. We're still in the process of dealing with it. We'll be okay, I know. But it sucks. I love my wife more than anything in the world. And the knowledge that I can't do anything about this is hard to deal with. It's not the fun kind of misery I usually deal with.

• I need to stop saying I'm 5'10 1/2" tall. It may be true, but it just sounds desperate, like I'm trying to seem superior to guys who are 5'10". I think I started making sure to include that half-inch when I was still in my teens and there was some chance that I'd eventually put on a spurt and make it to 5'11". That possibility no longer exists. In fact, it's only a little while longer until I start shrinking. I may as well just call myself 5'10" now and get used to it.
  
• I have lost all patience for annoying goddamn TV commercials. I've grown curmudgeonly enough that I actually yell at the screen. The current number one target of my wrath is the horrifyingly awful follow up to the Head On commercials. The fuckwits have apparently gotten hip to the fact that their commercials are both unintelligible and irritating and have made a "clever" follow-up in which the worst actress this side of Andie MacDowell interrupts the commercial to mock it before declaring, "Head On, I hate your commercials...but I love your product!" Well, Head On, I also hate your commercials...and invite you to shove your product directly up your ass! Shove it directly up your ass! Shove it directly up your ass!
  
• As I age, I am not the least bit freaked out by the notion of my own mortality. I am just increasingly depressed about the various and sundry ways I've fucked things up so far.
  
• I've got an odd kind of mentality about my birthday and work. See, I don't make a point of telling people, "It's my birthday!" Because people who make you write their birthdays on your calendar are obnoxious jagoffs who are basically begging you to make a fuss over them. I don't want to do that. It's needy. It's pathetic. And yet, I get depressed when nobody wishes me a Happy Birthday all day. It's kind of like I'm a schizophrenic retard, isn't it? It gets worse. A few weeks back, a class of my students asked me if they could use my class period to throw a party for their Math teacher. I agreed, because I try to be a relatively nice guy when I can. And as they rushed around, putting up streamers and balloons and screaming at each other to hide quietly so as not to spoil the surprise, I thought, "They've never thrown a party for me." And it's true. I used to tell myself that it was just because my birthday came fairly early in the year and they weren't organized enough by then to put a party together. But this party was in late September, which shot that theory all to hell. The truth is simply that my students don't like enough to bother. And that bummed the shit out of me. Then I sat through the actual party itself. Which consisted of a gross-looking Carvel ice cream cake, cheese doodles, non-diet soda and music I don't like. By the time the period was over, I was actually pretty glad that they've never bothered to throw me a fete.