I want to make a few things clear right now. And that is that Morris + King (they've repped Stardoll.com for two years now) and a ton of other PR agencies are fantastic. They're good people. However, the way I was bullied, word-slapped, and yodeled at by a rep from Full Picture PR (who reps Heidi Klum and Jordache) not only clarified to me how other press/writers/journalists can abhor the PR function, but also makes me think that Heidi Klum, who was polite, sweet, and hotter than a twice-baked potato, would not appreciate someone attached to her/their brand acting like …

Where did this wool brain sweater come from? It has Media magazine's "The Future of Media" Issue Release party sewn into the tag, thank you very much. Last night I covered two parties. One was MediaPost's aforementioned fete with a who's who of young PR, sharp-witted media types, legendary publishers, and a certain fellow who was once immortalized in Guns-N-Roses lyrics back in his SPIN days, and the second was a party celebrating the launch of Heidi Klum's virtual Jordache line for Stardoll. One was awesome. One was awful. Let's start with the first, which was awfully awesome.

Every time I hear the word "boat" I think of my dad and our old boat on Lake St Clair in Michigan. He would obnoxiously sing the Banana Boat jingle "Get on de boat [Yeah!] the Banana Boat [Yea-AH!]" before boarding. I laughed at him until I turned 15 and my gangly girl rage just wanted to throw him overboard. I heard that ridiculous jingle as I approached The World Yacht. That and the sound of my own heart racing in my head as I ran, confident I was about to miss the boat.

What did you do on your Sunday? Did you hang out with some pals, watching eight different football games? Did you cook for the week (believe it or not, in my more organized past life I did that every Sunday!) Did you try to get your Advertising Week calendar all squared away? Maybe you were perfecting your couch potato lean. While you were up to no good, I was hanging out at the place to be on Sunday nights: the United Nations.

September. It's not supposed to be 90 degrees in September. Gets me thinking about the pool. How, even though we're smacked with a couple of really sloppy hot days, the pool in my parents' backyard is still getting gradually colder, making the "ooch, ahcch, eech, ooch" slow-body-part-lowering-dance longer and harder to get through. I haven't covered a party in our industry in, oh, two weeks? And let me tell you, acclimating myself into this pool might be harder than I thought. So, I eased into it rods and cones first, at the ADC Young Guns Final Fifty opening party.

Amy Corr, illustrious writing talent here at MediaPost, once sagely stated, "Whenever there's cheese around, there's a party." This was in response to me waffling on what to write during a really slow party week a couple months ago. I ended up writing about Grandpa's Cheesebarn (which brought quite a few Ohio readers out of the woodwork!) Here we are again. It's the final week of August. All the big wigs and fancy pants are running around The Hamptons in linen trousers or lounging with George Clooney on their Target-Super-Center-sized reflective yachts in the Mediterranean. What's a piddling social diarist …

Professional women, straight-outta-college women, and a couple of guys dotted the audience at O The Oprah Magazine's "Evening of Comfort and Conversation" at the Hearst Tower in the Joseph Urban Theatre. What really grabbed me in the invitation was "... and chef Art Smith will be performing comfort food demonstrations of his favorite macaroni and cheese recipe. Cocktails will follow."

Have you ever been to the Boat Basin? It's one of those old New York feeling places, almost like an English Grotto or The Secret Garden. It's a place where you look around and get disoriented, forgetting you're actually in Manhattan as joggers weave through, sailboats glide by in the glittering, sunset-sparkling Hudson, and media types gather for cheap fermented beverages, good conversation and, in my case, bruised knees from falling up the stairs with fists full of duct tape before the party even started. Yes, Jeremy laughed loudly.

Twitter is pretty neat, huh? One minute, you can let the world know it's toenail-cutting time, and in the next you can point your followers to the launch of your glossy reflective-button-decorated drop-shadowed wonder of a Web site. Business tangos with pleasure quite nicely and with tweetups (that's a social gather or "meetup" birthed from twitter) pop up like a bad run of Hep C. One such rash was orchestrated from the tweeting mind of Joe Marchese, President of SocialVibe. The destination was Thom Bar, the goal was to party with social media nerds, and the drink was... whatever Joe …

Leading up to the party, er conference, I kept getting confused. And I kept seeing a scene from "The West Wing" where the dude is at the podium and the reporters all snap snap snap away with their honkin' cameras and wave their hands in the air while hooting "Mr. President! Mr. President! Were you in the library with Mr. Peanut last night?" Is that what they meant by press conference? And then... I don't think everyone leaves the Oval Office and drinks exquisite drinks with their exquisite food while tapping their investigative feet to the exquisite music. Want to …