This weekend, I actually paid to see the new Jennifer Lopez movie, and then snuck into the Hillary Duff movie (which is surprisingly easy when you and all of your cohorts have been old enough to drink for a decade or so).

The first movie made my brain all gummy and warm. Half way through the second movie, little bits of my grey matter had liquified and begun to slip silently from my ears.

While in D.C., we took a tour of the National Building Museum, which was having an exhibit on concrete. The exhibit was surprisingly fascinating, in part because our tour guide was the curator who put it together. Near the end of the tour, he said we were going to look at examples of “the holy grail of concrete, which is, of course, transparent concrete.” Of course.

Anyway, he then showed us various examples of light-conducting concrete, of which this was my favorite.

Over dinner at a bachelorette party:

Woman 1: Well you know, before you’re twenty-five you only have a 25 percent chance of conceiving every time you have sex. Then that drops to 15 percent after twenty-five.

Woman 2: Only a 10 percent drop? I’d think it would be more.

Woman 1: Well, there are only a few days a month when you can get pregnant at all, so we have our little calendar and we figure out the days.

Woman 3: You know, you can just get a Basal thermometer, and it measures when you’ll be most fertile.

Woman 4: Best bachelorette party conversation ever.

At the season-opening softball tournament in St. George, Utah, no one is allowed to bring beer onto the field. In the late morning, a few men gather around an open car trunk in the parking lot. They are friends of Bryan’s father, and he says hello as we pass.

Bryan’s Dad: Havin’ a little breakfast?

Guy holding beer: Well, no. We had breakfast back at the hotel.

Bryan’s Dad: Oh… OK.

The morning after Fruity Drink Night, our kitchen is crawling with ants.

Me: Glah! Where did all of these ants come from?

Bryan: Could it be the simple syrup on the counter?

Me: Or maybe the open container of confectioner’s sugar?

Bryan: Or the chunks of watermelon.

Josh: Or perhaps it was the Purina Ant Chow.

I decide to watch a little TV, and realize there’s an “Oprah” on Tivo that I haven’t seen. I read the show description:

“Children sold into prostitution, children trained to kill, babies raped by men.”

Yeah. So, if I flip over to VH1 to watch “Behind the Music” with George Michael, I’m definitely going to hell.

I return a rental car about a mile from the Fleet Center, and a bomb-sniffing dog searches my car. As I walk over to the convention space, I’m struck by how many men in dark suits seem to have descended in the last twelve hours. On every street, there are packs of men having a Reservior Dogs moments.

I pass through the barbwire-encased free-speech zone on my way in. It’s the size of a football field, and it’s utterly empty except for four or five people listening to a man with an unusually loud megaphone. He screams, “THIS IS WHAT IT’S LIKE TO LIVE IN A POLICE STATE, PEOPLE!” I can hear him in my teeth.

As I wait to get in, a small group of protesters marches past. They are shirtless, even the women, and are wearing hoods over their heads to mimic the plight of the prisoners at Abu Ghraib. A boy in the front has a whistle that he blows at regular intervals to match their footfalls.

I go through the metal detector, give up my umbrella and my bottled water, and show my credentials to the woman at the door, and then the guy at the escalator, and then the guy at the next door. Near to the boiler room I stop to watch a class of grade-schoolers pass. The union workers offer high fives, and the kids jump to reach their hands. A volunteer pushes past with a huge taiko drum. He thumps it with his thumbs and sings, “I bang my drum for you, a rum-pum-pum-pum!” Larry King is behind him.

A week before all the action starts, the office is overwhelmed with interns. They’re playing catch in all the open spaces, wandering aimlessly through the hallways, Web surfing in every cubicle.

-Where the hell did all these interns come from?

-I don’t know. They’re everywhere.

-What are they supposed to be doing?

-No one has figured that out yet. We’re calling them the cicadas.