I had my follow-up with the doctor this morning -- I am cancer-free, hooray!

Except now I need to find something else to worry about. Hmm, I haven't been following current events for the last few days; is there anything of concern happening in the world lately?

While I was cleaning and changing the gauze on yesterday's mole removal, I decided to take a picture. And oh my God, it's disgusting. Seriously. It's the grossest picture I have ever taken of anything, ever. It is literally the inside of my body. Not very deep inside, of course -- not even all the way through my layers of skin -- but still. Oh my God. It's insides. I was shaking, it was so gross.

Should I post it to Twitter?

Today I uncovered and cleaned the site of yesterday's excision. Yuck! Having a several-millimeter deep hole in your skin looks exactly what you'd expect it too. Unfortunately.

Footnote: Google's top result for "post operation skin care" is an advertisement for emu oil.

Barbara Boxer -- of whom I am generally a fan -- sent out a mass email today, asking for input relating to CA transportation. Here's my reply. I'm sorry, but this isn't very funny or interesting, unless you're the kind of person who finds this sort of thing interesting, which you are not.

Dear Senator Boxer,

I'm writing in response to your email bulletin today, in which you requested public input relating to your work in the Senate's Committee on Environment and Public Works.

As a longtime resident of San Francisco and employee of a major Bay Area company, I'd like to request that you help us to invest more heavily in mass transit. One of the great benefits of San Francisco is its potential for swift transit -- it's one of the main reasons I live here -- but there is much room for improvement.

Specifically:
- We need more rapid transit options, such as Bus Rapid Transit. Currently, the SFPD will not enforce the city's transit-only lanes.
- We need better connections between agencies; the confusing MTA and broken Translink are failing to guide customers from one transit network to another.
- We need to expand and speed up the transit networks that extend outside of the city. It is currently very time-consuming take transit from one town to another.
- We need immediate investment in bicycle infrastructure, which is suffering under an injunction and painfully slow EIR.

San Francisco can't accommodate any more cars, but our mass transit options can be slow and unreliable. Transportation in San Francisco is going to get worse unless the city is able to make good on its commitment to be "transit first."

Thank you very much for your time,

Matt Baume

I had an unwelcome visitor removed today -- the unpleasant blotch that popped up between my toes a month ago. Goodbye, blotch! I get the biopsy results next week.

In the mean time, one of my coworkers sent out an out-of-office on my behalf. "Matt's OOO today," she wrote, to which someone responded, "But isn't Matt 'Oooooh!' every day?"

They know me SO WELL there.

Some awfully brutal comments on Elizabeth Wurtzel's essay about David Foster Wallace in NY Mag.

I hope that when I'm gone people who barely knew me will use my death as a chance to talk all about themselves.

This is the first time I've felt really cynical since the whole thing happened. I wish I hadn't read this.

Whew! Ouch. Well-crafted comments, of course, but still. Ouch.

I just discovered that there's an incredible, outrageous limit to each Netflix queue -- just five hundred titles, and not a single title more -- and this is the movie with which I discovered it:

All this morning, I was wondering why everyone was getting so upset by Lehman Brothers declaring bankruptcy; and then I discovered that the company is not, as I had previously thought, a men's clothing warehouse.

Hint: yes.

If you ask Google to define "patois," here is one of the results that it returns:

Patois: the regional dialect of French spoken in the Caribbean; it differs significantly from the European form of the language and thus Mr. Rochester cannot understand it.