Welcome to the first edition of our weekly advice column with your host Choire Sicha, retired and bedraggled former Gawker editor. From this week's mailbag:

Q. I've been invited to one of Tina Brown's soirees, but I hardly know her. She looks scary. Could you suggest a good icebreaker?

This image was lost some time after publication.

A. Maybe, if you're REALLY bored at work, you're wondering where I've been since I stopped writing Gawker and got kicked upstairs as "editorial director"? (No? You're not?) Well, mostly I've been locked in publisher Nick Denton's SoHo apartment. I get to leave in the afternoons, because he makes me take unemployable webloggers out for lunch. Oh, the joy of watching Wesleyan graduates eat with their hands because they watched too much Free To Be, You and Me when they were young.

Worst of all? This week I was forced to go to the single gayest party ever — and it was our party.

So, to prevent myself from going insane here, I conned Denton into giving me a weekly advice column on Thursdays. So send me some questions, and I'll answer them here next week.

But enough about you and your petty problems. Sympathize with me for a minute here. So, worst day on the "job" ever: we had a launch party on Monday night for a bunch of new weblogs. This is somewhere lower on the cultural-value scale than an Madison Avenue in-store for a line of pantyhose, but perhaps just above a cell-phone PR fiesta. Best of all — it was billed as a "testosterone-laden" extravaganza, because all the sites are about boy stuff like video games and cars, you know, the kind of stuff I clearly know ALL about, but this was the single faggiest party I've ever been to in New York. AND it was in a CAR SHOWROOM. IN MIDTOWN.

Oh yeah — sorry you weren't invited. Lucky.

What a mess. Seriously — it was more fruit-laden than the John Waters premiere two weeks ago. As evidence, I present the picture above of a gentleman and his hand-held CHIHUAHUA. Is Paris Hilton missing? Is she trapped inside his body?

I'm only sorry I don't have a picture of the Mincing Gay Journalists Association in attendance. It looked like the yearbook from the Harvey Milk gay high school, class of 1987. Or 1977, maybe. What, wasn't there a Narciso Rodriguez fashion party that night?

Man, I wish I worked at the gay high school. At least there I'd probably get some dates. If I'm going to be poor and work for this cash, at least I might as well help people, no?

Ha. Just kidding. Helping people is so... yucky.

What was I supposed to be talking about? (I'm way out on a caffeine relapse, after four years of latte-less living.) As for your question about breaking the ice with Tina Brown, just do what Martha Stewart once did: get drunk in the garden and fall over backwards into the planters, legs straight up like the Wicked Witch of the West. We're sure there's a face behind Tina's mask somewhere, but it's gonna take a lot to crack it.