“The female is looking for someone to mate with,” announced the Borg drone (referring to my friend Viki) to the rest of the bar. The Klingon asked why this was the case, as she had a perfectly serviceable male (i.e. me) right beside her.

“He’s my ex-roommate,” Viki attempted to explain, not knowing how well “long-time homosexual friend” would go over in the Empire. The Borg drone would not likely have a problem with this: under his pasty skin, he was attractive, had a sexy accent, and was likely the campiest Borg drone to have emerged from the Collective in some time. I wanted to show him the Teddy Borg my female ex-roommate had bought me, that I had already designated Rob-of-Nine in honor of my boyfriend, but his diodes blinked menacingly, as if he had assimilated Mommie Dearest and discovered a wire hanger.

“The roommate never gets any!” yelled a guy at the other end of the bar, who was drinking a frothy James Tea Kirk out of a fishbowl. He called for another round of drinks and said, “Put it on the roommate’s tab!”

The Klingon smirked with feral amusement when I attempted to sell Viki to him in exchange for the alcohol.

Later that night, I changed into the new chocolate-brown linen shirt I had bought, in a fit of depression, just days before. (Banana-Republic Therapy is so much more effective than Prozac.) The shirt looked great on me—it brought out my eyes—and I slicked down my hair to simulate formality. My pants were too tight, which was strange because they were the same size as the pants I had been wearing earlier in the Ferengi bar and during my brief flirtation with heatstroke on the way to stand next to the World’s Tallest Man. No second breakfast tomorrow, I vowed. Later still, through a feat of incomparable skill and derring-do, I transformed five dollars into nearly fifty, which I then transformed into a mere eight dollars and twenty-five cents through the magic of another bar tab.

Sipping one of many bloody Marys, sitting next to a female looking for someone to mate with, I found myself wondering what would have happened if I had indeed introduced the Borg to Rob-of-Nine. My poor stuffed bear would probably have spent the evening scrubbing the bathroom floor. “Scrub, Rob-of-Nine, scrub. You must comply. Resistance is futile.”