AHHHH! BRAIN EXPLODING! BEST EPISODE OF “GLEE” EVER!!!!

I’m just warning you, there are going to be a lot of exclamation points in tonight’s recap. A LOT!! I loved this episode so much, I was practically jumping up and down in front of the TV! (My kids do that during “Star Wars” fight scenes.) I loved it so much, I made a list!

WHY TONIGHT’S EPISODE OF “GLEE” MADE ME WANT TO JUMP UP AND DOWN IN FRONT OF MY TV, A LIST:

This week on “Mad Men,” Don sleeps alone and hardly drinks at all. No, really. Also, the agency continues to bleed out, with Lucky Strike gone, and the ghost of adultery past pays Don a visit.

I really liked this episode, even if it didn’t feel quite big enough to the be the last episode before the season finale. I actually liked Don this week, not constantly, but I got a flash of why I liked him so much during the first season — back when he was smart and kind more often than he was destructive and cold.

“I thought it was better now,” Pat Powers said.
When Pat was in high school — when I was in high school — 20 years ago, we didn’t even have the words to talk about homosexuality. We had “gay” and “fag,” but we used those words for everything, we didn’t know what they meant. We didn’t know any actual gay people . . . In Omaha, in 1989, gay was just something that you weren’t supposed to be.
No way was Pat going to come out in that atmosphere. Not in middle school or …

Sometime this season, I’m not sure when, “Project Runway” stopped being about the clothes.

As if to underscore that point, this week the designers were asked to design over-sized, gray sweatsuits. Fashion, fit and fabric weren’t even relevant, which made it a lot easier to focus on the real drama — breakdowns, temper tantrums and EVEN MORE bullying.

I’d like to apologize to everyone who left comments on my blog entries that never showed up in the comments section. I opened the spam folder last night for the first time and found dozens of great comments (as well as hundreds of weird Russian-language messages and ads for camping equipment and illegal porn). Not sure why your comments ended up as spam, but I’m really sorry. I hope you didn’t think I was ignoring or disliking what you said.

I promise to check the spam folder regularly from now on. (And thank you to Melissa, who sent me an email asking me why I was ignoring everything she said about “Glee.”)

My morning latte got more expensive this week.

How much more expensive? I don’t know … a dime? Twenty cents? It has something to do with global coffee prices and the new restaurant tax …

The person who made my drink Friday was worrying aloud about it. What if customers decide it’s not worth it, she asked.

It’s already not worth it, I thought to myself.

Preposterously unworth it.

I spend about $4 on coffee every day. That’s not a decision I make with the rational part of my brain. I never think, “Well, that’s a fine value. Four dollars, sometimes five, for 20 ounces of milk, coffee and sugar. Score.”

I’m not sure I can objectively recap “Glee” this season … I’m so grateful when the show makes sense and doesn’t tie its continuity in knots that I don’t necessarily expect it to be good.

By the did-it-make-sense standard, this was an excellent episode. No one behaved out of character. Relationships didn’t reboot unexpectedly.

By any other standard? I don’t know. The Grilled Cheesus stuff was funny, Sue out-zinged herself, and the clothes were especially great … but I really hated a lot of this episode.

For an episode about sex and death, this one was pretty boring.

Last night on “Mad Men,” everybody at the agency learned what Roger already knew — that Lucky Strike was dumping them. I feel like this could have been a really good episode: Peggy reunites with Abe in a big way, Trudy spends the whole episode in labor, Pete never sleeps, Roger hits bottom, and everyone else is on high alert, trying to keep any more clients from jumping ship.

But there was no tension, and only a few good lines.

The first time I drove in Chicago, I remember wondering why anyone would ever want to live there.

You can’t go anywhere without getting stuck in traffic, rush hour starts just after lunch – and you have to drive to the suburbs just to find a parking space.

That’s how much I associated myself with my car. If a city wasn’t a good place to drive, I figured it wasn’t a good place to live.

Omaha, of course, is a great place to drive.

You can still get most places in less than 20 minutes. Parking is usually abundant and almost always free. And bumper-to-bumper situations are so rare, we associate them with celebrations – like fireworks shows and the College World Series.

But I’m starting to believe that being such a great place to drive is one of the reasons this city isn’t the greatest place to live.

I hope that one of my boys grows up to be a fashion designer — because if the “Project Runway” contestants are at all typical, DESIGNERS LOVE THEIR MOMS.

“Runway” went all “Survivor” this week and brought the contestants’ moms to the workroom for a visit. And the designers went CRAZY. They cried and cried, and wouldn’t let go of their mothers. You could see that a couple of the moms were like, “I get it. Enough. We’re on TV here.”