I’m happy to report a new personal best. Got to work this morning in 34 minutes, door to door, including a stop at Starbies—slashing 6 minutes off my previous best time! Of course, I left at 6:15, so I was pretty much the only person on the roads. (Actually, I never cease to be amazed at how many people are up and about at that hour.) I suppose there are some perks to only sleeping from midnight to 4 a.m. Goodbye, rush hour.

In all honesty (and modesty), I am the best driver I know … I have scary-good predictive lane-changing abilities, and I can text message, tune the radio and apply lip gloss (the kind with a wand, no less) at the same time without veering off course. Sure, I may have grown up in the Midwest (home of the I’ve-got-no-place-to-go- and-nothin-to-do-so-please-by-all-means-cut-in-front-of-me school of driving), but I learned to drive here in New England and have spent the last ten-plus years honing my skills in Boston (home of the Masshole school of driving).

Noooo, I don’t use my turn signals most of the time—only when my movements will impact other drivers, to be more specific. Anything more is just a plain waste of a free hand.

Is my driving record spotless? Hell no. That’s the price you pay for gettin’ where you’re going. Here are the germane facts:

• number of fatalities caused: 0
• number of bodily injuries caused to self or others: 0
• number of fatalities caused to furry little creatures: 2
• number of bodily injuries caused to furry little creatures: 1
• time since most recent furry little creature incident: 12 years

The lesson here? Cars aren’t reflections of our worth as human beings. Anyway, driving’s not meant to be self-esteem camp. Getting from A to B … that’s all we’re doin. My superior navigational skills don’t mean you’re less worthy of love or happiness. If life were a game of Driver, however, you’d want to be on my side. That’s nothing to be ashamed of.

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[Ed. Consumating joined the dead pool last year. Apparently, it was a hipster/tech/geek dating site.]

Owing to the fact that my recent bout of insomnia leaves me often awake but, alas, neither alert nor productive, I’ve been spending a fair amount of time in my laptop’s warm glow. Recently, I found a clever little Web site cum social networking app cum online dating site … Consumating.

Consumating’s motto is something about finding people “who don’t suck,” which I think is about as high as is reasonable to set the bar when meeting people, online setting notwithstanding. The organization and design of the site are simple and inviting (a little ajax magic, I suspect).

The nifty bit is that instead of asking for a bunch of bullshit canned info, the site lets you tag yourself as you would a blog post or a del.icio.us link, and it leaves the question-asking to users. You can also see little live-action snippets of conversations going on between members—enough to satisfy all but the budding voyeur.

Turns out I’m no better at tagging myself than I am my Web links.

The site does have its down sides. You see an awful lot of the ole witty-and-disaffected muscle flexing, as with most social networking sites. Case in point, a search for people who’ve tagged themselves with the word fisting comes up with seven or eight people. Call me old fashioned, but there’s a term for people who give up that kind of info without a few dates and the better part of a bottle of Jack …

Naturally, I was tempted to search for people tagged with skullfucking, but I’m pretty sure the Russians are monitoring my Web use. I refrained.

There’s also the all-too-familiar ranking and voting nonsense. This is somewhat mitigated by the fact that you can vote on anyone without them knowing who, exactly, gave them the thumbs up or down, catering to the spineless coward in all of us.

All in all, it’s a fun way to while away a few pre-dawn hours, but I wouldn’t recommend giving up your clever MySpace handle just yet.

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Is it worth letting these guys know that Trader Joe’s has $5 bottles of wine … or that bleach is not potable?

I wonder about these things.

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