Today is the day to put a round peg in a square hole.

Guess what? It's not too late to make plans to go to the Haypenny One-Year Anniversary this Saturday.

Anyway, too bad today's interviewee will not be there, because Brooke Weinstein is a fun person. She'd bring the rock, the roll, the intellect, the foolishness, plus she's a good poet (but she does know it.) I met her the first day of college, thanks to my freshman-year roommate, Liz McArdle, and we've been pals ever since. I know I say this about everybody, but it's very difficult to find somebody more intelligent, gorgeous, hilarious, spontaneous and human than this Brooke here. I've met a lot of Brooke's in my time, but not only is Brooke the first one I've ever really liked, I'd go so far as to say I love her, too. (No, not in that way. Or is it? Hmm...) Brooke, a rambling woman, has been hard to pin down the last year or so, which is why it's such a thrill to have her here. Please read about her, I'm sure you'll find something here which you'd like to ask her about..

The Brooke Weinstein Interview: Slightly Less Than Twenty Questions

You work in a veterinarian's office, have spent a summer mutilating fish for a professor of yours, and have been known to have an affinity for animals. Please give us a rundown of some of your more personal and exotic pets.
1. Mortamer: Mortamer is probably my best known pet. He is a prehensile-tailed skink found only on the Solomon Islands, off the coast of Australia. He eats a variety of organic-only fruits and vegetables and is arboreal, which means he lives in the trees (or in his case a 5-foot high cage). He has "cute fatness." I rescued Mortamer from a horrible pet store where he was forced to live in a 10 gallon tank with only browned lettuce to eat. For my efforts Mortamer terrorized me, took over my apartment, and once bit me so badly that I had to call my friend Kevin, who ran Georgetown's EMS service. He came to get me but refused to take me to the emergency room and refused to cut the flap of skin that I had hanging from my finger because I was being such "a crybaby," so now I have a big old scar/bubble to remind me of my troubles. Mortamer has plans to run for president, one day (see below), and is presently working on controlling his temper.

2. Reward: Reward was my horse in college. He was a bad horse. He used to try to attack me when I went in his stall and those of you who met him know that he had a flatulence problem. But he was beautiful, and fast, and fun to ride once he stopped throwing me all the time.

3. Cousteau: Cousteau is my only nice, well-behaved pet. He is a baby ball python that I adopted from the animal rehabilitation place I worked at in college. Some little kid won him from a kid at school and the kid's panicked mother found him starving in a shoe box under the boy's bed. So…voila! I have the best snake ever, and he's so mellow that I would let a baby hold him without flinching. My sister thinks that he hates her, because "he coiled up and glared at her once", but I think she's wrong.

You and Eminem have something in common: you've both pissed off Moby. Tell us about your experience?
I decided to let my sister answer this one. She does share approximately 50% of my genetic material and she's the love of my life, so…

Lauren: "As you may or may not know, my sister lives under a Herculean rock where she remains happily oblivious to the burning feud between Moby and her partner in Moby-hating crime, Eminem. Shortly before recording his new album, Eminem clearly heard of the Brooke/Moby incodent and decided to capitalize on it. Anyway, Brooke's own futile battle of wills against the aforementioned Loser began when she very seriously compromised her personal integrity to get the two of us box seats to the Tibetan Freedom Concert at Carnegie Hall two years ago, and to gain us access to the celeb-packed party afterward which included the likes of Tarantino, The Weinstein Sisters (damn straight), Uma and Ethan, and of course the dark-lord Moby.

"Perhaps it was the excitement of having just seen her idol David Bowie saunter past with Iman that made Brooke decide that a super-funny trick would be to jump into a picture being taken of Moby, Natalie Merchant, and a bunch of Tibetan monks. Being the good sister that I am, I attempted to preserve Brooke from humiliation whilst simultaneously preserving my own cooler-than-thou reputation by grabbing her arm and saying subtle things such as 'You giant moron, they're gonna kick us out' or 'Holy sh*t, I can't believe I'm related to you, you huge idiot' etc. Despite my best efforts, in she went, arm thrown confidently around Moby's shoulders, all eager smiles and photo-readiness. Unfortunately, I am also featured in this picture, which is floating around somewhere, probably looking equally as disgusted as Moby and hopeful that it is all a big fatty nightmare. As the paparazzi was dispersing, onto DJ Moby's face formed the most horrifying look of death, which was being aimed at poor Brooke's back.

"Instinctively, I felt the urge to defend my kin and say something to the effect of 'Why do you always gotta front, Moby? Why do you always have to be the center of attention?? Well, feel the center of THIS biiiotch! (cue crippling kick to nether-regions)' But, I mean, we were guests of Uma and Ethan and I didn't want to, you know, be disrespectful and stuff. OK, fine! I was mortally afraid of Moby! Moby is short, scary, shiny and mean! Eminem knows, he's got my bizaack."

When one thinks of snorting, one thinks of derision, phlegm, and cocaine. But why should one snort vodka?
One should only snort vodka when in Australia with one's freshman year of college roommate when one's kayaking guide (who happens to be a sexier-than-hell eco-challenge contender) is trying to get you drunk so he can sleep with you. Then one should snort vodka. Lauren (Cerullo, currently a first-year medical student and not my sister Lauren) snorted perhaps a little more than I did and became very intoxicated. I brought her upstairs from the bar to the room we were sharing at the quaint inn and tried to put her in bed. She became increasingly agitated and kept asking me who I was and where her passport was. Then she rolled over into the wall and almost broke her nose. Finally she passed out and I crept back downstairs to, um, play pool. But seriously, apparently it's all the rage in Australia.

Can you tell those who don't know why you keep dead mice in your refrigerator? How does your roommate feel about this?
I keep dead mice in my refrigerator for Cousteau (see above). I can't stand the idea of feeding him live mice so I have them shipped to me frozen from a company called "Mice on Ice." In order to fool my snake I plunge them into hot water before feeding them to bring their bodies up to endothermically acceptable temperatures, and then shake them around vigorously until he, sighing almost audibly at my efforts, strikes.

Aubrey is very tolerant of my frozen mice. I double bag them in a benign looking paper bag, and actually a few times I've caught her peering in there eagerly, obviously thinking it's something good to eat like, say, chocolate or a pint of ice cream.

You haven't been to Italy or even Canada or Mexico but you have been to Australia and Romania (as well as rode horseback through Ireland and beached it up in Cannes). Any particular reason why you've chosen your international travels to be more off-the-beaten-paths?
First of all, I have been to Mexico. I went to a small magnet high school and after graduating the school sponsored a trip to Cancun for all 30 of us seniors. We had teacher chaperones and stayed at a really nice hotel but were so ill behaved that they cancelled the trip after us, so we ruined it for all subsequent classes.

As for the rest of my travels I just kind of go where my impulsive judgment leads me. I have had many chances to go to Italy (especially to visit you, Claire, which I should have done) but somehow keep going back to France. I've been there a handful of times and harbor a desire to move there and live my life as a glamorous ex-patriot. As for beaching it up in Cannes my actual beach time ended abruptly when I was assaulted by a team of Argentine pornographers. Liz McArdle, her Canadian escort, myself, and my Australian fling were relaxing, sunning after a long night of film-festival fun. All of the sudden I heard a lot of excited chatter and half-opened one eye to see a camera pointed at my exposed breasts and discerned the word, "blanca, blanca!" being shouted. Apparently they were fascinated by my white chest, which had never before seen the light of day. The guys finally got rid of them, and I think Liz was laughing, but I will never again "beach it up."

You own some really bizarre videos. Can you pick out some of the more esoteric selections and explain why you have them?
I own all of my videos because I love them and watch them over and over. But I guess if I stopped to think about why I love them, there are good reasons. Here are a few:

1) "Faust": This is a claymation/live-action film from Czech director Jan Svankmajer. He is brilliant and I have all of his movies, but this one's my favorite, probably because it's the first one I saw by him, completely by accident, at a Charleston film festival. Claire, I made you watch this, right? [Editor's note: No, thank goodness. Although God knows she tried.] Besides being terrifyingly surreal (this guy influenced Tim Burton) it is a completely different adaptation of Goethe's Faust. In Goethe Faust is a great Romantic, risking his life to cross the limits imposed on human knowledge. Svankmajer makes his Faust an everyman, rising from the crowds in a Prague subway at the start of the film, who is tragic for his weakness in resisting the Devil. But it is also careful to show that resisting is equally, if not differently, tragic by harshly interspersing glimpses of the institutionalized happiness offered by society. It's the most f*cked up thing ever.

2) "Claymation Adventures of Mark Twain": I remember seeing this when I was really little and it disturbed me greatly. It basically a mosaic of Twain's works brought together in the adventure of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, who sneak aboard a fantastic flying contraption that Twain has invented to take him back to Haley's Comet, where he will perish. It ranges from "The Mysterious Stranger" with its excursion into self-indulgence, nihilism and despair: "There is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a dream--a grotesque and foolish dream." It then slips easily to hope, as when his Eve says of Adam, "The Garden is lost, but I have found him, and am content...It is my prayer, it is my longing, that we may pass from this life together--life without him would not be life…" It makes me cry every time.

3) "The Point": This early 1970's psychedelic, anti-discrimination cartoon was shown to me for the first time last year by a great guy named Ryan. It's the story of Oblio, a round-headed boy born into a town of pointy-headed people. Oblio and his dog, Arrow, are good and happy and everything's fine until the evil ruler banishes them to the "Pointless Forest" after Oblio beats the prince at a game of triangle toss. In the forest he meets a variety of hep characters and learns some invaluable lessons, too. The Pointed Man, for example, tells Oblio that "A point in every direction is the same as no point at all," when asked for directions. Then there's the Rock Man, who's clearly smoking up and talks about being "stoned" (because he's made of rocks, get it?) and tells him, "You don't need to have a point to have a point. Dig it, man?" The best part is the music by Ringo Starr and the narration by Dustin Hoffman.

What are the benefits of blaming everything wrong with your life on dehydration?
My sister loved this question. She read it and exclaimed, "Oh my GOD! That's SO true! You DO blame everything in your life on dehydration!" Well, in response to that all I can say is that all of the rest of you should be just a little more careful yourselves. Dehydration gives people seizures, permanent brain damage, and can kill you. But the good news is that it is 100% preventable. This is why remaining well hydrated is perhaps my most obsessive goal in life, along with wearing sunscreen on a daily basis. Millions of people walk around at least mildly dehydrated every day and, since your body is mostly water, this causes decreases in energy, organ system functioning, and physical coordination as well.

No thank you. I drink at least 3 liters of water a day, more if I'm hiking or otherwise exerting myself. You lose water constantly when you exhale and from the surface of your skin due to evaporation, so it's important to replenish constantly. As for blaming things in my life on dehydration I admit that I might be a little off, sometimes. But it just sounds so much better, when I stumble into a cafe to meet friends for brunch to explain, "Sorry, folks, I am just really dehydrated!" when asked why I look like someone took a blunt object and beat the crap out of me instead of confessing to having consumed 3 bottles of red wine the night before.

I also try to pass this important information on to today's youth. This summer I was the Director of the Smithsonian's nature camp and, as such, had dictator-like control over everything. It was great. Often to my staff's chagrin I would lecture the kids for an hour at a time about how to recognize the signs of dehydration. "If it's clear, have no fear!" I would chant enthusiastically. I also made the kids who had meal duty fill pitchers of water and pour each camper a huge glass before every meal that they were required to drink before getting other, less hydrating, beverages. Unsurprisingly, I lost no campers to dehydration, although I sadly came close to being there myself a few times, like when I would oversleep and miss breakfast or trip when telling campfire stories, lighting parts of my clothing on fire. Whew!

You've always been a good Halloween dresser. What are some of your best costumes? And would you say that you have a talent for making even the most seemingly ordinary costume sluttish?
While I hesitate to use the word "sluttish," I will admit that I have a talent for appearing, shall we say, inviting. I'll be honest here and confess that it's all in the cleavage. For example, Claire, do you remember my costume when we lived together in [Georgetown apartment] Village B? I rented a Renaissance dress that looked innocuous enough on the rack, but when laced tightly enough gave me a chest distinctive enough to provoke people on the street to poke me asking, "Hey, are those real?!" Liz's brother Tom was visiting with his friend John Schwartz, a fairly classy guy who, for Halloween, wore a pair of those plastic breasts as his costume. Poor guy, he got made at me because I was taking attention away from him. Incidentally, that was the same night I discovered that I knew how to swing dance and we brought home a random guy none of us remembered ever meeting in the backseat of my car. Remember, Claire? [Editor's note: Yes, I do remember.]

Our senior year at Georgetown I went to Chicago to visit a friend. We went shopping for costumes together at thrift shops and I ended up with an old mechanic's jumper suit. How unsexy is that? Well, pretty damn sexy if you pair it with knee-high, four-inch heel boots, a black lacy push-up bra, and unzip it halfway down your chest.

But I do admit that there was a time when I did not look "sluttish" on Halloween. Once I was one of those "yip yip" aliens from "Sesame Street", which was not sexy. I was recently Pris from "Bladerunner", which was definitely more scary than sexy. The trick is that I always wear my lucky Uma-Thurman-in-"Pulp-Fiction" wig and, frankly, a lot of it's in the attitude. You go, girl. Halloween is perhaps the only time when a decent, self-respecting girl can look like she works on a corner and not be looked down upon.

Who's the best roommate you ever had, Brooke? It was me, wasn't it? Remember, I know a lot of embarrassing stories about you.
Don't be silly, Claire. All of those embarrassing stories that you think are about me actually happened to you! Don't you remember now? Like the time that you…oh wait, that was me. Crap.

Of course you're the best roommate I've ever had! Remember the time that we kidnapped Liz when she came home really drunk and dragged her, passed-out, into the backseat of my car. Then we drove all the way to Richmond and stayed at a fancy hotel so that she woke up thinking, "Where am I?" and heard only us gorging ourselves on room service and talking animatedly about our upcoming day at King's Dominion. Hah, that was sure fun! Or the time when we dragged a shopping cart down the stairs to our apartment and took pictures of you standing naked in it on Liz's camera, so she'd be traumatized when she got the roll developed?!
[Editor's note: As with most potentially embarrassing stories involving Brooke and me, the nudity was all Brooke. Actually, so whas the shopping cart.]

When will Mortamer.com be up and running? Tell us why it will be the wave of the future.
This is a sensitive subject. I bought the domain name without thinking about the fact that I know nothing about designing a web page. I mean nothing! So alas, given my previous lack of initiative, the chances of mortamer.com's much anticipated birth seem slim at best. However, I am plotting a much-touted, largely foreign-funded hostile takeover of Zulkey.com--the change will be barely perceptible at first…a claymation skink here giving advice to the lovelorn, a claymation skink there answering technical questions about home improvements. But soon the revolution will begin, and Mortamer will launch his campaign to become the first reptilian president of the United States. He will have a startlingly liberal platform, with special agendas on conservation of endangered species (logical given his own perilous CITES listing) and support from such celebrities as Tom Hanks and Harrison Ford.

Can you explain the fun of excess? Why a late-night turns into an all-nighter, why a small trip turns into a blow-out, why a small indulgence ends up to be an entire bender? This happens to all of us, but in your intellectual way, maybe you can explain it?
I feel like publishing one of my famous rationalizations of bad behavior is a little too personal for my debut interview, so I will limit myself to saying that most people like extravagance. I happen to really, really like extravagance. I dislike the intermediate life-the overtones or the undertones. Also, as I get older I am discovering that this habit of extreme indulgence is self-perpetuating. Anais Nin perhaps said it best: "Abnormal pleasures kill the taste for normal ones." Oops, and it gets worse every day.

Sarah Mallin is a recovered vegetarian. You are a wanna-be vegetarian. What's the difference?
No difference, really. I consider both to be states of weakness. I don't know Sarah, but I am extrapolating that she probably still believes that being a vegetarian is the best way to live. Whatever her moral or ethical reasons were for becoming a vegetarian in the first place probably have not changed, beliefs rarely do. I'm sure that they got pushed to the back burner in place of some tempting hamburger, or inconvenience, or lousy medical advice. I know first-hand how easy it is to stop thinking about things.

I am just as guilty as Sarah except that I never committed myself to what I believe in the first place. I do not feel that it's morally wrong to eat meat, but rather dispute the ethical soundness of today's big business factory farming. Animals are raised in suffering and indifferently killed in a high revenue, high-production environment that additionally passes countless quantities of chemicals, pesticides, and hormones into the environment.

But the fact is that I really love a good hamburger or a nice filet, always rare, as rare as they'll serve it to me. I haven't eaten chicken, turkey, pork or anything like that since I moved to California, but I just can't resist ordering beef every once in a while at a nice restaurant. So I am currently hypocritical, but I'm working on it. And I hope that when I really, truly do decide to stop eating meat that I really, truly mean it and that I never find myself in the position of having "recovered."

One time you slept under a bus. Tell us the experience of that, and if you've slept in (now I mean literally, I'm not engaging in a bit of randy ha-ha) any other similarly bizarre places?
Liz and I went to Woodstock '99 our sophomore year…why weren't you there, Claire? [Editor's note: I believe I had the internship from hell that summer, and was busy logging tape or getting insulted by Geraldo Rivera, or something to that extent] Anyway, it was crazy. I don't remember much about it except that I was deliriously hot, dehydrated (yes, that's right, it's true), and generally not in my normal state of mind the entire time. We never slept, because we couldn't find our tent in the sea of hundreds of thousands of identical tents. We never drank, because the water fountains weren't working and bottled water cost $10 a pop. We never went to the bathroom because they never cleaned them and you could smell the mess a mile off. We were sick. So between Guster and Kid Rock on the last day I crawled (I don't remember if Liz was with me) under a concession truck, out of the hundred degree heat and into the shade, and slept quite soundly, in the midst of loud revelers and general Woodstock madness, for hours. I remember thinking how comfortable the concrete was. And then when I woke up, they burned the place down.

I'm sure there have been some other bizarre, non-randy ha-ha places, but none come to mind. Oh, in Australia, Lauren and I went on a weeklong hiking trip through the rainforest and we had to sleep in little green supply hammocks tied between trees because the leeches were so bad on the ground. I remember being terrified that, as a restless sleeper and augmented by the enormous amount of port we'd drink before bed, I'd tumble out in the middle of the night and awaken to find all the blood already sucked from my marrow (the pinnacle of dehydration!).

You have memorized Edgar Allen Poe's "The Raven." Has this impressed less, more, or about as many people as you'd expected?
Poe said himself that there is nothing more melancholy, and hence more poetical, than the death of a beautiful woman. I pictured myself reciting dramatically, my face cast in the eerie glow of a makeshift fire, the impeccable cadence and symbolism of the verse drifting about my admiring listeners, lulling, terrifying, and yes, impressing. Unfortunately, the only time that I've recited the poem in the two years since I memorized it was this summer when, in my role as Director (dictator) of nature camp, I decided to subject the campers to it at an overnight campfire. I gave quite a performance. I was so engrossed in what I was saying that I soon forgot my shocked, under-age audience altogether. My friend Aubrey, hunkered behind the fire with her eyes squinched together in knowing despair provided the essential "Nevermore!" at the appropriate moments in an awesome shriek. It was great. When I recited the final verse with its lines of self-damnation, my voice trembling, and finished I looked out at my campers and saw fifty pairs of horrified eyes staring back at me. The campers were totally quiet for the first and only time the entire summer. None of them could go to sleep afterwards until we had gone through exhaustive rounds of cheerful songs such as "The Littlest Worm" and "Boom-Chicca-Boom." I like to think that I scarred them for life. Aside from that I mostly recite it as a mantra to myself when I'm bored, standing in line, or trying to not listen to what someone's saying. In class I used to write all 18 verses out to keep from falling asleep. Who knows when or if I'll recite it again--maybe at your wedding, Claire, in place of a toast. What do you think?

We've been to some nutty places, seen some nutty things, Brooke. Now tell people why we went to a frog show.
I won't lie about this. We went to a frog show because I had a huge crush on our Greek literature professor. He was wonderful and a true Renaissance man--he was a classical scholar who taught not only literature but ancient Greek and Latin as well, played in a jazz band and, best of all, bred and collected herps (yes, mainly frogs). We were obviously destined to be together, as evidenced by his remembering me from the freshman discussion group on Isabel Allende he lead that I was assigned to. Four years later our connection was just as strong. When I walked away from his office on the last day of our senior year after handing in my final he yelled down the hall after me, "Keep in touch!" My heart fluttered. "I mean it!" his voice boomed a minute later. But I couldn't, it's just too painful. But you were a great sport about that frog show, Claire. I did buy you a T-shirt, remember?

Of all the places you've ever lived, up and down the country, if you had to settle down in one of those places, which one would it be and why?
I will always have a certain nostalgia for Charleston, but you know I'm not a Southerner at heart, say, the way Fielding is. I love where I am right now, in northern California but more specifically in Berkeley. I get up in the morning, roll over and look out the window and think to myself, "Well, it's another perfect day!" Then I get up, drink a glass of yerba mate that I buy bulk at my neighborhood grocer's, and pad two blocks down the street to the Living Center, where I take 1.5 hours of Iyengar yoga. Then I walk down flower-covered, anti-war poster plastered streets to the hospital where I work, past people who always smile and say, "Good morning!" and past a group of street guys who sing, "Hello, I love you, won't you tell me your name?" to me in a weird Jim Morrison meets barbershop quartet style. I work a little, and am well paid, but mostly just sit around talking surprisingly liberal politics with my bosses. Someone always brings brownies or cake and my co-workers and I relax with tea and gossip about our personal lives. At the end of the day I walk home through rapidly cooling air that is incredibly invigorating and cook dinner from the freshest food imaginable. San Francisco's 20 minutes away, with all that it has to offer, but mostly I curl up on my bed and read, or lower my window to hear the beat and chanting from the drumming circle that is inevitably going on down the street at the communal hippie house. It's a good life, and it's also indescribably wonderful to be on the lower end of the crazy scale, for a change.

You worked at a coffeehouse and rose through the ranks of the student association at Georgetown. But what people want to know is, did you have any cute stories of coffeehouse romance?
There was only one coffeehouse romance, and it began our junior year when I was the Director of Personnel for the coffeehouse. Now in this position I did all the scheduling, and as I was doing so I decided to put myself on an evening shift with the one guy who worked there who I found attractive (and who wasn't gay). The thing was that he rarely came to the shift, always getting it covered at the last minute. One day I opened my folder and found a note from him apologizing and asking me if he could take me out to dinner to make up for it. We went out for Mongolian Barbeque and had a great time, but from there our relationship disintegrated into mad working-together craziness. We fought a lot, but would inevitably end up locked in the small office at the rear of the coffeehouse making out during shifts. I'd emerge first, all disheveled-like, and try to pretend nothing had happened. Then we discovered pub storage, a small storeroom located in the Mariott-run bowels of the student center. I'm convinced that the only reason I got promoted to Director of Human Resources for the company was because it became common knowledge that I would have trysts back there and that sealed my reputation as being crazy enough to throw good parties (little did they know that once I had the position I would attend few if any of my own parties). Even after not officially seeing each other we'd be drunk at a party and would send someone else to tell the other to meet in pub in 5 minutes, or whatever. It was fun, and we still keep in touch, so…

How does it feel to be the 26th person interviewed for Zulkey.com?
Dehydrating, of course.