That's not ironic, Alanis, that's just unfortunate.

We all have our vices.

Troy has beer.
Brad has gin & sex with men.
I have internet TV.
My Dad has movies with talking animals.

We deal with them as best we can.

Around Christmas time, Troy and I were out in the suburbs, doing some strange and intense Christmas baking with friends. Troy got lit, and at about 1:00am, grabbed his keys to drive home. Every time this happens, we try to talk him out of driving. We do this for at least 10 minutes, which is an eternity when you're trying to talk a drunk person out of driving. And every time, he insists that he's fine...that he "stopped drinking an hour ago" and that he's "been drinking a ton of water." On this particular night, a Christmas Miracle actually convinced him to leave his car in suburbs and to catch a sober ride home with me and Brad. He left his little red car all alone on the empty street, with the promise that I'd drive him back out to it the next morning.

In the early morning hours, when we were all gradually waking up, crawling out of bed to retrieve cereal, and crawling back into bed to eat cereal...a very small suburban woman in a very large SUV plowed into Troy's car, crushing it's door. And it's frame. And it's soul. And any possibility that Troy would ever accept a sober ride home again.

That's not ironic. That's just unfortunate.

A female friend of mine would probably claim sex as her vice. She loves it. Can't get enough. Day, night, weekdays, weekends, in-state, out-of-state, young guys, old guys, married guys, co-workers... Sex. Has to have it.

For DECADES, she's had indiscriminate and unsafe sex with men all over the country with, as far as we can tell, no consequences. For the new year, however, she made a few resolutions to facilitate her transition from being The Girl You Fuck into being The Girl You Marry.

They're good resolutions...healthy ones. No married men, No sex until at least 3 proper dates have been had, etc. It's near the end of February, and she's been following the rules. This is amazing, because it naturally means that she's been going without sex. At the very least, she's going with a lot less sex than she's accustomed to having. In fact, she's only slept with one person in 2008, and she did it without breaking any of her resolutions.

She has chlamydia.