The coffee's cold. It's always cold. And the bagels - not much better. Bland, palate-shredding hardtack, dusted with enough stale poppyseeds and salt to give the appearance of flavor. The cream cheese could double as wall putty. Plastic is everywhere: plastic knives, plastic stirrers, plastic barrels of creamer marked with the warning, "For best use, do not refrigerate."

I left my apartment this morning before the sun rose, forsaking a warm bed and a fragrant pot of chicory coffee just to chug glacial joe and rend my gums on bagel bricks. And I don't regret it, not one bit. After all, nobody comes here for the food.

Let's get this out of the way: Portal is brilliant. You know it. I know it. Consider this admission our common ground, a way for us to circumvent 1500 words singing Valve's praises that would've normally filled this space, which you've already read a dozen times over, to which you would've nodded knowingly and I would've smirked and we both would've walked away from our computers not much smarter and hungry for cake.

But when I finished Portal, I didn't ponder its brilliant play mechanics or physics engine; all I really thought about was calling my mom and telling her that I loved her. Because as good as Portal is, what's more important is what the game's about: Mothers. Daughters. Women.

FILE ONE: Final Fantasy X. 48:15. 2 A.M., the day after final exams. A rainforest's worth of Kleenex at our feet, beer bottles sprouting on the end table. My closest friend and I muscling through the last hour of the game, sharing an intoxicated catharsis: noses red, glasses fogged, sniffling about unfairness and tragic love and how, after that ending, clearly all joy has been sucked from our worlds and we'll never, ever be happy again. (Even though I've never actually played the game - she's been accidentally saving to my memory card all this time - and those last 60 minutes are all I'll ever see.)

With bright eyes and sweat-slicked hands, Spencer pulls me by my pinky finger up the stairs. He's taller now than when I last saw him, and instead of jutting into a mohawk, his hair now lays flat, prim and obedient. His knees are grass-stained and scabbed. On the back of his maroon Spiderman shirt, a popsicle stain marks a dark bulls-eye. Vaguely I wonder by what mechanical miracle he managed to get such a large, purple blob at the exact center of his shoulder blades (especially since I'd seen him eat the culprit popsicle just half an hour before). But Spencer is eight, and eight-year-olds have their own physics, to which we mere mortals are not privy.

"C'mon, Cousin Lara!" he says. He's in some curious phase where he designates all family members with an honorific, as if he or we might forget our relationship to him. Uncle Alan. Sister Devin. Mother Mom. He pulls harder. "C'mon, I want to show you!"

Currently circulating in Harper's Weekly is a sexy, two-page Mercedes Benz ad; maybe you've seen it? The first page is a bold photograph, the car equivalent of a woman's thigh playing peek-a-boo behind a dress slit: a gleaming tire; a sleek, ebony hood; and a tiny Benz logo, erect like a metal nipple. On the second page, above some copy filled with words like "standard-setting", "quality assurance", and "award-winning", hovers an equally confident headline:

You're not buying a car. You're buying a belief.

He sighs. "You have to be patient."

"I don't know how," I mumble. "Patience is for people who are slower than me."

It's easy for him to recommend patience. He's genetically engineered to move at tortoise-speed. After all, he's from the humid, sweltering Louisiana delta, where people don't trust you if you talk too quickly, and if you walk too fast, you'll inevitably collapse in a puddle of your own sweat. I come from furious, frenetic D.C., where highway slow lanes have a minimum speed limit of 88 mph.

This article features spoilers from the game Chrono Cross. You've been warned.

Chrono Cross is one of those games that you can't set aside for a minute without losing track of the plot, and yet I left it rotting in my Playstation for a week without play (the equivalent of six Squaresoft half-lifes). I'm pretty sure that by now, my copy of Chrono Cross has lost enough electrons to qualify as helium; I'd like to turn the game on again, but I'm afraid I might inadvertently start a nuclear reaction, turning my Playstation into a mini-sun. That's how this game is. It bullies you into playing it, threatening you with solar annihilation if you turn your back for a day or two. (Oh, I am so screwed.)

It's just me and my dog on the couch. Open magazines and half-wilted carnations sit behind me. My laptop rests on my legs. The room vaguely smells like pasta. I'm desperately trying to come up with something to write, because it's my turn to go on Friday and I don't want to make Elysium whip out an Employee Profile on my behalf. I've come up with about six ideas, and written two or three pages each, and discarded them all because they weren't going anywhere. For some reason, I expect this one will.

Biscuits, cornbread, and honey cakes rejoice, for I am the queen of quick breads and the harbinger of baked goods. If it has flour and egg in it, lo, I can and will bake it, and with such tasty fervor, I put the great and terrible Martha Stewart to shame. Sure, I'm a mean cook, too, but there's just something special about baking, isn't there? For me, it serves a subtler purpose than sautéing and roasting, and one which is not just about achieving fluffier, flakier ends.

I have a not-so-secret confession to make: I love American Idol.

Yeah, yeah, I know. I'm a shameless corporate whore who clearly lacks both taste and maturity, and every time I watch American Idol, I bring my country one step closer to becoming a complete cultural wasteland. I know. I can't help it. I love American Idol.

I love the delusional caterwaulers, who, when rejected, hurl obscenities and earnest promises of revenge. I love the infighting among the judges (especially when Paula's precarious mental balance, shoved off-kilter by a snide Cowellian remark, explodes in a fury of banshee shrieks and bitch slaps). I love Ryan Seacrest and his vaguely homoerotic couture: those shirts printed with entire Shakespearean sonnets too small to read; those jeans carefully ripped in inappropriate places; those haphazard black blazers, adding just the slightest touch of class. Oh, I love it all.

Why? What's wrong with me that I should take such pleasure in outright atrocity? As a decent human being, shouldn't I delight more in watching people succeed rather than fail?