Rubber Buns and Liquor

The Internal Monologue of an Attendeee of True Love's Secret Santa Exchange

2010-01-04T13:22:00.012-05:00

Partridge in a Pear Tree
Kind of underwhelming to kick this off with a run-of-the-mill pheasant. Man, am I glad this isn't a Yankee swap. Though, hey, pears for life.

Two Turtledoves
Assuming a law of non-diminishing returns, this present is actually worth four turtledoves in the bush. If you play the futures market right, you could really turn a tidy profit on your initial investment at Cash4Turtledoves.com.

Three French Hens
Is France known for its high quality hens? Say what you will about the frogs, but between horns, hens, and bread, they've really got us by the balls come December.

Four Calling Birds
Grand Avian Count is now up to 10. Better hope they all like pear stew, or there's going to be an awfully merry burlap sack floating down the river.

Five Golden Rings
Quick thinking with the jewelry, guy. My set of caramel popcorn tins was starting to look pretty good.

Six Geese a-Laying
Well, that was short-lived. But hey, omelettes.

Seven Swans a-Swimming
What the hell? Was there some sort of fire sale at Birds 'R Us? Give it a rest. She's still got calling bird leftovers in the fridge.

Eight Maids a-Milking
It'd be nice if someone could bring eight icebox cakes a-cooking or something, as this week's been pretty protein-heavy. Hmm, I can't picture what my kid's face looks like.

Nine Ladies Dancing
Not even gonna ask about the Ninth Afternoon of Christmas. I assume this one's payback for the ballroom dancing classes she got you for your birthday.

Ten Lords a-Leaping
You know, just ten Lords a-standing would suffice. Don't blow your wad before the home stretch.

Eleven Pipers Piping
Hey, you want an entire reed section's sloppy seconds, that's your call. God, I hope I DVRed Modern Family.

Twelve Drummers Drumming
Knock it off with the slow reveal. You've smuggled in 50 people and 24 birds in the past two weeks. The jig is up.

A Slightly More Realistic Interpretation of my Company's Required Sexual Harassment Training Video and Dialogue Part II

2009-11-17T12:58:00.026-05:00

Start here.

Oh! Hey Bobby.

Yeah, that's it, Carrie. Act normal. Maybe he'll think someone else ratted him out for attempted rape at the office yesterday.

Don't talk to me!

The silent treatment? Really, Bobby? That's your follow-up to rape threats? Perhaps "copycat" would have been too harsh.

What?

Did we really need a whole slide for "What?" You forced poor bit player Jack to fit his entire soliliquy on the noblesse oblige of the Human Resources department into one closeup and this is what gets documented for posterity's sake?

Jack just told me about your bogus complaint! I even got written up! Heh, I've got my options too. It may not be today, or tomorrow, but I'm gonna get even! I'm gonna get you!

Option#1: Get Carrie today. Option #2: Get Carrie tomorrow. Option #3: This week's a little busy, but eventually get Carrie. Option #4: Eh, maybe just grab a bite to eat, take a snarling break. I'm exhausted.

What's the matter with you? You look terrible.

Wait, who's this? Where'd Bobby and Carrie go? Chekhov's gun, man. You can't get me all vested in Carrie's maidenhood and then slip in Mac from Night Court and expect me to just not notice. Though I have been wondering what Jack's been up to.

I was at our client's office, Spice Boy Magazine. And the Technology Manager over there, Conrad, has been hitting on me.

I take that back. This is far, far more interesting. Also, how much of a letdown is it to get hired as the Technology Manager at Spice Boy Magazine? Does anyone even bother to clear their browsing history?

Come on. You're just paranoid because Spice Boy is a gay magazine. What, did he say you were cute? Did he say you had a nice...

For a corporate instructional video, I have to say, this thing is doing just a terrific fucking job of building suspense. If it turns out Conrad is Keyser Soze, then this is gonna tie up a lot of loose ends for me.

Now wait a minute Jack. That's not funny! I thought the guy was joking until today when he invited me over to his house for dinner. For the past month, he's been making suggestive comments. And now he invites me to dinner?

I don't even want to know how "suggestive" those comments could have been if they all culminated in a casserole. I can't think of the last time one of my gay friends propositioned someone without some conjugation of the word "gargle".

A Slightly More Realistic Interpretation of my Company's Required Sexual Harassment Training Video and Dialogue

2009-08-26T14:35:00.022-04:00

So Carrie, I got two tickets to tonight's concert. You wanna go?

OK, this seems fair enough to me. If one is openminded enough not to judge a book by its cover--or if one's shelves are filled with books that are wearing my dad's sportcoat--then this is a pretty sweet offer, if one is undiscerning enough that "some band playing music" is enough to qualify as a night on the town.

On a side note, it's alarming to discover that a hairstyle that you still occasionally sport on moist days is out of date via a corporate sexual harassment video, like catching a glimpse of the dress you're wearing in a Cuban Missile Crisis bomb drill video. Quarter banana clip, I hardly knew ye.

Thanks, Bobby. But I probably shouldn't. I don't think my boyfriend would like that very much.

Well, Carrie, your boyfriend kind of sounds like an overbearing cock, if passively listening to sound near another dude is enough to set him off. You don't even know who the concert is for yet. It could be the Stones, you know? Surely Stones tickets are worth a little tiff followed by a passenger seat hammy.

Come on, you know I can take much better care of you than he can.

Hmm. This isn't the "No prob, maybe some other time" I would have expected from a nice, arts-loving guy like Bobby, but for all I know, he speaks the truth, so he can't be faulted.Carrie's boyfriend hasn't really bowled me over thusfar in the conversation, so I wouldn't be surprised.

Hey, he takes care of me. He does lots of nice things for me. He just bought me this dress.

Wait, that thing's a dress? There's even more of the same below the screen's edge? I thought this was taking place in a hospital examination room.

I also think a dress is an odd gift for a man to give a woman of this age. A "new dress" is sort of a Depression-era luxury, like saving all your butter rations to make a cake.

The "taking care of" I'm talking about, you wouldn't be wearing that dress.

Ah, gotcha. Bobby's a date rapist. My bad there, Carrie.

Though, to be honest, you were sort of asking for this line to be used. You could have just mentioned that your boyfriend fixes shit around the house, and Bobby would have been stumped at least long enough for you to yell "Fire!" or "Free samples!" or whatever it is we're supposed to call out nowadays so's you don't get Genovese'd in a back alley.

(Linda, a co-worker nearby, is disturbed by what she is hearing.)

Here's a thought, Linda--mind your own fucking business. And stop shopping at Carrie's House of Hausfrauity.

You know Bobby, I don't think you should be talking to me like this.

Way to leave yourself open to subjective interpretation there, Car. Let's say Bobby says "Well, that's a matter of opinion, and I think I should." Then where are you at? Not like you can call Linda in to mediate, she'd probably wet herself on the spot.

Come on, loosen up!

Yeah, I didn't think Bobby was much of a logician. But still, a simple "Fuck off, Bobby" probably would have sufficed.

Thanks for taking time to see me today, Jack. Actually, I'm really nervous talking to you about this. I don't want anyone to think I'm a trouble-maker or a whiner, but there's some stuff that's going on that really bothers me.

"Oh, hey, ummm, not to burden you or anything..I know you're busy, Jack, I can come back. When is good for you? I'm free through next week. You just let me know. It's super not a problem, I'm sorry to take any of your time at all. Actually, never mind, I'm sure it's fine. What? Oh, it's nothing...I'm just afraid that if I'm left alone with Bobby he's going to pin me down and threaten me with physical harm and then force himself into my body. But I'm probably just wrong, it's cool, I'll just deal. Forget I said anything."

Well, Carrie, what's the matter.

That's it, Jack. Play it cool. Don't play into her hysterics by using inflection.

Well, its Bobby. He's been hitting on me. Actually, I was very flattered at first. He's nice, good looking and all that, but I did tell him I have a boyfriend. Actually, we did go out one time, but it didn't work out. Anyway, I've asked him to leave me alone.

So NOW this comes out. Christ, Carrie, you're practically leaving a wet spot on the chair as you say this. You are the walking definition of "Actuallywedidgooutonetimebutitdidn'tworkoutAnywayI'veaskedhimtleave mealone" sometimes meaning "yes".

On yet another side note, did she change outfits in between being "harassed" and reporting it to Jack? I'm not sure what's more astounding here, that ruining a man's life required a costume change, or that you somehow thought it was a good idea to purchase two versions of that dress.

Well, that should be it.

Quite the optimist there, aren't you, Jack? How'd you get out of the Tet Offensive? Just tie a note to a rock that said "Knock it off, Charlie", and then hopped on a plane home?

I wish. Trouble is, he keeps hitting on me. And he sends me email with these jokes from the internet, a lot of 'em are really kinda gross. And the other day, he told me what he wanted to do to me, out of my dress. Now, I don't want Bobby to get in trouble, but I want this to stop.

Taking a bit of a poetic license with Bobby's dress comment, aren't you, Carrie? And I'm actually surprised that you even got that the guy didn't actually didn't want a 12-inch piano player so as to be offended.

Well Carrie, I appreciate you coming to see me. It's important this kind of behavior doesn't occur in the workplace. We can't tolerate it. As a matter of fact, its our duty to try and prevent it. I want to thank you for helping us do our job. Now, let me tell you what we're gonna do. First, I'm going to get all of the details from you. Next, I'll want to talk to all witnesses who might have seen this happen.

Suddenly, Jack has an awful lot to say. The email forwarding thing really struck a soft spot. Obviously, he's been burned by www.hahajokes.com before.

Linda was in the breakroom the other day.

Linda can't even handle direct eye contact or dressing herself properly. You think she's gonna come to your rescue? The woman probably feels guilty when she accidentally wastes a post-it, you think she's gonna go state's witness?

Okay. Okay, I'll talk to her. Now we'll do this as discreetly and as confidentially as we possibly can. Also, if Bobby continues to do this, let me know. Finally, Carrie, its important you realize no one can retaliate against you for raising a complaint. If anyone says anything to you about this complaint, particularly Bobby, you let me know.

"And as a postscript, I should also qualify that I meant no one can legally retaliate against you within the confines of this office or within a courtroom. If you plan on leaving it ever, I'd consider purchasing some sort of firearm. But, again, in the breakroom, we've got your back."

Thank, Jack.

Look at those moony eyes, you little puppy dog. Jack would respond with "You're welcome", but he's a bit worried that you'd end his career, too.

More to come

Aperture for Destruction Part II

2009-07-20T12:59:00.032-04:00

Another trip to the grandmother's, another few minutes spent rooting through giant tupperware boxes filled with my awkward youth. Again, a shout-out to the man who did it first, and did it best.

After three months of missed periods and six months of hurried nursery painting and shotgun wedding planning, my parents finally got their wish--to have a miniature old lady of their very own.

Already tired of this world and this life at the tender age of 3, I wanted nothing more to do with society's insistence on an annual celebration of birth. Just leave me alone with my dogeared copy of Walden, and find another reason to give into the capitalist's ridiculous penchant for buying cake.

The photographer of this picture was a charismatic man, a little prone to grandeur, but magnetic nonetheless. I can only hope this explains why these stills, which he promised would be "tasteful" and "artistic" and would do wonders for my career, are instead--and I'm finally ready to admit this--a little bit trashy.

This picture makes me want to go back to school, study special relativistic physics, invent a time machine, get inside of it, go back to this very moment on this very shag rug, and ask this young version of myself how the hell she bends that way.

Here's a representation of my middle years, the last one being taken next to the ubiquitous fridge in order to include the cat, who spent a solid 17 years not giving a shit about who the rest of us were or how food and water magically appeared every day. I remember one day when I was 13 the cat acknowledged my existence by making eye contact for a second or two, and the self-worth I gained from that carried me through my teenage years.

Rocketing back to the real theme here: My mother loved the dog more than me.

It's not a secret, she's really quite open about it, and I only thank God that the dog and I didn't share a common enough genetic ancestry that the possibility of asking me to donate organs to the ailing pup was on the table. Still, it meant that the dog had to be included in every single picture, no matter how out-of-context it might seem, and no matter how little upper body strength I had. I suppose it was a blessing in disguise, as at least it covered up some of the outfits that led to my continued virginity.

Lest that last outfit not go uncalled out, it was for a dance recital, which I only performed in after no part of the house's architecture or contents proved high enough to hang myself from.

For such a small, unintelligent animal, Tiger possessed an uncanny sense of how to invade my personal space without letting others know how creepily obsessed she was. Not wanting to see her go off the hinges if I confronted her about her SWF tendencies, I could put on a smile for others, but when caught in a moment unawares, you can see how much it bothered me.

Here we have the dog, stealing my 12th birthday from me. Ho hum.

Here we have 1) the only known photograph of my father ever to exist, since I'm pretty sure he's the Jackal and 2) physical evidence of the complete and utter befuddlement my father felt every time I asked him to play something girlishly imaginary with me. A man of science, and a man of a family composed entirely of manly men of science (see below) , I can now identify the word that always rested on the tip of his tongue every time I told him to drink his tea or purchase groceries from my "store"-- "Why?"

This was the closest the Buns and Liquor family got to expressing joy or amusement. Needless to say, my Garfield drawing career was short-lived.

While others cite graduation or marriage or childbirth as the seminal moments in their lives, this is mine, right here. This is just before the exact minute in which I made the decision as to whether I would be the kind of person that enjoys a pogo ball, or the kind of person that does not. I think I chose wisely.

*Due in no small part to the fact that it appears my legs, which appear to be non-load bearing, would have snapped off after just one bad fall. I can only assume I was propped up against the counter in order for this picture to be taken.

One of the problems of growing up in the 80s was the preponderance of girls that shared my name, the most popular of the decade. In my kindergarten class alone, 30% of the children were named Rubber, the girl next to me being the most attention-getting and jealousy-inducing. Here I am, plotting to kill her at the altar of our First Communion, where the Canadian Tuxedo lived and breathed. Later, I'd learn to be more subtle in my plotting.

In Which I Absolutely Refuse to Give Into Many, Many Homonym Jokes

2009-06-03T13:31:00.012-04:00

So in my daily wanderings about the internet, scavenging for absolute metaphors that I can drop into conversation in order to give off the appearance of knowing "things", I came across what passes as an interesting nugget these days: the CEO of the Build-a-Bear Workshop is called the Chief Executive Bear. Her blog of "musings" is pretty much in line with the type of person who describes her week as "PAWSOME" (needless to say, emphasis hers); we're hardly talking some Seinfeldian universal-relating here, but if you're in the business of constructing anthropomorphic animals, it's a decent toilet read.

"I'm at risk for heart disease! Yay!"

Groan if you will, but you too would have to develop a pretty sophisticated emotional defense mechanism if your daily grind involved hundreds of gutted creatures parading past your eyes, so I think that inventing a word like "PAWSOME" shows some pretty impressive portmanteau-ing in the face of morbidity: it's now neck-and-neck with "chortle" in my rankings, just above Tribeca, and leagues above that piece of shit "vlog", which is still out there, saving dozens of internerds the milliseconds they'll need to tend to their sex life.

Now, this woman is not only the CEB--one of my other organs just punched my womb in the face as I abbreviated that--of the company, but she's also the founder, which is pretty unsurprising; I imagine the title throws a lot jobseekers off from the position. If some Harvard MBA does ascend to a position of power in the Build-a-Bear Corporation, they'd likely have to print their business cards on straight twenty dollar bills just to get a little respect at the alumni mixers. When the time does come for Ms. Clark to move on to that great beehive in the sky--I only hope the mortician appreciates the irony at the time of the embalming--I can't imagine anyone would begrudge her a little nepotism in passing the title on down the family line.

Our definition of "cuddly" is different than Eleanor's.

I actually think Ms. Clark might be a lot more cunning then people give her credit for. Imagine if you built a multimillion-dollar company based entirely on the sale of the unfinished products of another multimillion-dollar industry? Like, Ivory spends more than a century perfecting their 99.44 in order to keep that soft little naked baby fed, and then I just swoop in and start selling people sacks of lard and lye and make a mint. Or, if someone parked a wheelbarrow of sleeves outside of Gap and people came running. There's got to be some hard feelings there, right? Surely at some point, Ms. Clark thought of the consequences her business venture would have on Big Teddy Bear and feared for her safety?

For years, decades, Christ, centuries, kids have just fucking loved them some stuffed bears, and companies went crazy trying to make a dime off of them. They stole honey, we found it endearing. They stared, we bit. You'd think that the second people found themselves shelling out to watch bears simply mind their manners, the jig would be up, but we kept coming back for more, and the industry kept throwing shit against the wall. Then this broad comes along and sells us incomplete bears, and we throw money at her. I walk past the Build-a-Bear Workshop in New York City several times a week, and there's so many children holding hollow bear carcasses that I expect to see Sacajawea passing out juice boxes.

Bedtime Bear: the catchall bear for children that were neither cheery, lucky, nor capable of loving-a-lot.

On a note that is either completely related or one of the scariest non sequiturs ever, I would definitely go to a Build-a-Human Workshop.

Oh, What a Tangled Web We Weave, When First We Practice to Receive

2009-01-05T13:36:00.005-05:00

Amongst the bounty reaped from the holiday season this year--the mother's Big Catalog of Needlessly Complicated Gadgets and Oddities yielded all sorts of treasures designed to turn simple acts such as opening an umbrella or wearing gloves into an entirely unwanted conversation with curious nearby strangers-- I received a set of nice hand lotions from my somewhat terrifying boss, a gift that ranks between Five Dollar Bill and Christmas Tree Ornament in the Chronological Scale of Half-Assed Gift Giving. It's not like I'm trying to turn a profit from Christmas or anything (though if the economy were to take a Serlingesque turn and I were to wake up tomorrow in a world where scarves were the most precious element in the periodic table, I could definitely afford to start serving a better cut of man), but I get a fair number of these token gifts, and if it's all the same to the people I casually interact with/begrudge in person every so often, I'd rather just ignore the whole season of giving conceit and merrily chap along.

The gift that takes a break from giving year-round.

After writing a thank you email to my boss--a true tour de force of deception involving some sort of farcical situation in which I left a non-existent thank you card/outpouring of gratitude at home, written upon handmade, artisanal stationery described at length, which I then offered to bring in for posterity's sake (sometimes it's nice to lie for the majesty of it, to remind oneself that it's an art not relegated to just times of covering one's own ass)--she responded with "Thanks, and thanks for the earmuffs", which is such an odd reply that I actually considered the possibility that it was a code telling me I need to get the fuck out of here and take my files with me, before realizing it was probably just a reference to a present I most certainly did not purchase for her.

And this was just the card's envelope.

Psyched for the opportunity to see two moles of wrong actually equaling a right, I asked a couple of friends for advice before realizing that they actually considered correcting her to be an option that was on the table. On one hand, this does involve willfully taking on the persona of someone who thinks that earmuffs*--seriously, these are individual hats for your ears--make a good present, but these could be the fancy Faberge sort of earmuffs worn by society matrons, and I wouldn't want to miss out on the goodwill opportunity. What I'm really looking for is more of a backup dialogue to put into play if she does discover that someone else gave her earmuffs, and I never corrected her. It's hard to play off an out-of-context mention of earmuffs without turning it into a euphemism for an eight ball or a sex act, so I'm coming up a little dry, but Shirley Temple curls really lend a lot of cred to feigned cluelessness, so I'm gonna risk it.

*As for the stigma attached to being the kind of person imaginarily gives earmuffs as presents, it's untrodden ground.

Murder, She Wrote

2008-12-22T12:34:00.007-05:00

The end of the year always brings some certainties with it:

a) The annual visit to the parents to renew the old goodwill meter, as I find it's good to do with all individuals who have any spare genetically-matched body parts in their possession.
b) Year-end best-of lists of media that I use as checklists by which I can measure my self-worth for the year.
c) Reception of fancy hand lotions sharply spikes, despite careful avoidance of any sort of reference to fancy hand lotions over the previous year.
e) The renewal of my Celebrity Death Pool list.

I've always had a morbid fascination with death--not sure there's any other kind, come to think of it--but the celebrity death pool is the single greatest thing to distract me from my responsibilities that does not include cheese. There's a few of them kicking around out there; I use this one, but am considering switching to this one--but the whole concept is the same: you write down famous people you think are going to die, and are summarily rewarded when they do.

A great deal of people find my joyful exuberance in a celebrity death pool to be unsettling, as if my desires played any sort of active role in the demise of marginally famous people; I take this as a complicit admission of my being some sort of deity, or at the very least, godlike, and am quite flattered. Aside from the fact that the rules very clearly stipulate that you're not allowed to actually cause the death of any of your team's registrants, or "even try to scare them or make them sick or anything", it's still gratifying to know that people think you're at least capable of it.

Learned a few lessons this year.

A year's roster is typically submitted in December, and no additions are allowed during the year. I used to start thinking about my team much earlier, but after getting bit in the ass by Gerald Ford and Saddam Hussein in the same sad, mortal last week of December, I now try to put off my selection process for as long as possible. If there's one thing a celebrity death pool teaches you, it's that the human spirit is either resilient or stubborn or both; I half expected Estelle Getty to croak before I finished typing her name, but she did some serious keep away with the Grim Reaper and kicked my ass three years in a row until shuffling off her mortal coil this past fall. Similarly, Castro's added "Continuing to Exist" to his list of atrocities in my book (just below "Hogging the Good Cigars" and just above "Bay of Pigs").

Actually, we can call it even.

Although I see myself as more of an oracle of mortality than any sort of harbringer--and no one questions you when you claim to have a hand in anything relating to their extinction--it doesn't change the fact that I'm still actively rooting for certain people to die, and for that reason I can never add anyone whose existence makes me happy, decrepit as they may be. While I don't mind wishing death upon Eunice Kennedy Shriver and would even lend a hand to any prospective Andy Rooney assassination plots out there, no part of me could ever take pleasure in Julie Andrews' or Bea Arthur's demise.

When I start soliciting suggestions for my upcoming year's roster, I always get a slew of people who think they've got the dark horse picked out and try let me in on their little secret--right on with your Britney conspiracy, champ, but I'm still gonna stick with the good ole "passage of time" as my main determining factor--and then a lot of people who truly don't grasp the concept of old. A lot of folks seem to think that career longevity is enough to get on the list, but merely spanning the decades isn't enough- I need the people who cause you to register surprise when you find out they're still alive, or even better, who you're shocked to discover still alive even when you're looking at a picture of them taken that week.

Not hard to guess what her birthday wish is.

You Are What You Eat

2008-12-10T13:28:00.009-05:00

I've long been obsessed with cannibalism, even considering myself to be a cannibalologist of sorts; I dare whoever flagged my Wikipedia page to prove otherwise, as I could probably tell them more about the mouthfeel of, well, mouths better than their owners. I've read all the literature, I've watched the right materials, I've seen just about every zombie movie ever made, and in the same way that writing about wine makes you crave a nice bordeaux and talking about Goldschlager makes you crave poor decisions , well, you get the picture. At first I thought it was the wendigo , but now I realize it's just carnivorous appreciation. I would like to eat human.

Off the hook.

Most people, when they hear this (it comes up more often than you'd think, if you does not equal me), assume that I'm referring those hypothetical situations in which one is without any food source but still has access to cooking utensils-- Jack Shephard didn't think it happened often, either--but if I were presented with the opportunity right now, at this very moment, then I'd dive right in, then make some crack about 'finger foods" to alleviate the attention that I imagine mounts when your coworker eats another human being in the break room. Of course, it would need to be OKed by said menu item, it'd have to be legally OK (or at least hard to prosecute), and it would have to be prepared in a manner in which one typically eats meat (though not marsala, I hate that shit). But I'd still eat it.

I'm on a current quest to eat an entire animal, nose-to-ass (fish and pigs excluded--I'm not an amateur), just so I can feel even smugger about my place on the food chain, and to eat an entire person would just feel so tremendously self-satisfying (obviously it would have to be someone smaller than me cough DeVito). I'd even be willing to let a fellow connoisseur eat me after I'm gone if they'd offer the same consideration, though obviously we'd have to set up some weird, double-blinded Secret Santa-type agreement with others so we wouldn't end up killing each other when we got hungry, or a Facebook group at the very least.

Well, at least the sommelier question is answered.

This also raises the question of which part to eat first, or at all, assuming that some of the rarer parts would be out of my price range. More importantly, which ethnicity do I want to cook it? The French do some nice sauces, but that might disctract from the taste; I trust Eastern Europeans with meat, but not near me with knives. I think the only ones who can handle this is the Chinese--their stoic, hardscrabble nature keep them from balking at the concept and the grittier aspects, and they're used to cooking the full range of organs and parts, and I could have an egg roll to start.

Aperture for Destruction

2008-12-02T14:03:00.016-05:00

The holidays brought the annual trip to the grandparents' house, along with their stores of unnecessarily scented household items and skirted furniture. While I'm happy to be back in a home where the phrase "decorative garbage can" doesn't exist, I did manage to find a few photos in the basement, in an homage to the man who did it first and best.

This is the most 80s picture ever taken in the history of moment capturing-devices. It is an analog TV, playing SuperBreakout on the Atari 2600, with a VHS and Betamax VCR also hooked up. Also, that's MC Skat Cat on top of the TV.

Who dresses their child up as a harem slave girl in order to take them fishing?

I know I've said it many a time before, but there's not a lot to do in Northern NY. If it gives you a better idea, I had been staring at that spot for three days straight. You can't imagine what a relief it was when those flowers actually grew- it was a real cliffhanger.

And yes, my house was orange.

I only put this here as insurance- insurance against all future opponents who seek to thwart me through blackmail. Now that this picture is out there, for all the world to see, nothing can touch me ever again.

I find it odd that if anyone other than my parents took this--and I really do hope it was my parents who took this--asked a small girl to pose naked next to something as uneventful as a fridge, it would land them in jail for 10-14 years. And yet, somehow, not only is this OK, it's being saved for posterity.

Here I am slaving over a hot stove. While other kids were getting kites, dolls, and games, my parents didn't want me to enter into the world of indentured servitude with any happy-fluffy illusions, and only bought me toys that would prepare me for a lifetime of hardship. I only wish I had been given a plastic database and Etch-a-Excel-Spreadsheet at a younger age.

Another example of the nudity trend. In what situation would two people, cousins, find themselves where one is fully clothed, and the other is completely stark naked, and not one party involved so much as thinks twice? What is the possible explanation for why this happened, and why my cousin was so cavalier about it?

I've never really commended my mother for much, but here she managed to capture the exact millisecond in which I went from "precocious youth" to "angsty teen", using some ethereal camera that captures otherworldy transitions. You can actually see the evil Green-Day listening, world-resenting spirit enter my body. It has friggin gills, for Chrissakes. This thing's more impressive than that flag-lifting Iwo Jima shot.

If I were to sustain some sort of blunt head trauma that resulted in retrograde amnesia--I'd love to say that "a la Mulholland Drive" was the first thing that came to mind, but it was more like "Samantha Who?"--and I forgot my entire life and had to piece it together based on old photographs, I would surmise that I grew up in a small fridge, one of many in a city of fridges. On the night of the Fridge Prom, me and my friends from my fridge district would get together to take pictures in front of each others' fridges, then we'd go off to the Fridge, which we'd decorated with a "Under the Sea" theme. Of course, I'd have no idea what the "sea" was, partially due to the amnesia, andmostly due to the fact that I never once left the front of my fridge during the course of my entire childhood.

Amazingly, I won the "best hair" contest that day.

I'm no psych major*, but it's just fascinating to me, how the world, in all its diversity and diverging paths and varying tastes, manages to craft little girls to just be so goddamn...girlie. Most standard-issue girl things are pretty much inherently without merit, and yet millions of girls the world over covet them, yearn for them, even kill for them. Dolls? Dresses? Fluffy bunnies? I'm thankful for the one shred of damn-the-manedness I exhibited in this room. Because that's a unicorner.

I stand by the brilliance to this day.

*Actually, I am, but the intro doesn't work that way

Drive In-n-Out Part II

2008-11-20T14:38:00.013-05:00

Kentucky Fried Chicken-When they introduced the Famous Bowl, I almost actually followed through with the heart attack Preachers keep insisting is right around the corner. Nothing new was introduced- same ingredients that compose every other product- and yet all of a sudden, everything was different. The only thing that changed was the container into which they placed everything. It really says a lot about the deliciousness of the food that KFC names its meals so sparsely that the boards reads like it's the Chinglish translation of a prison cafeteria menu- Breast & Wing Meal, Half Chicken Meal, Thigh Bucket--and yet it continues to build its fan base.

White Castle- I once stepped into a White Castle where a man was in the act of rifling through a woman's purse at the table in front of the door, and not for one second was I deterred. Something about White Castle attracts the morality and employment challenged, and if there's anyone I trust as connoisseurs of pure, baseless, hedonistic pleasure, it's criminals and hobos.

Arby's- Food's meh, works in a pinch when you're on the Mass Pike and need to stimulate an additional sense to preserve sanity. However, the fixin's bar is revelatory. The typical fast food patron is not usually one of means; for a chain to offer unlimited access to any edible solid that could possibly be abused, well, that kind of faith in fellow man should be rewarded.

Panda Express- Those who know me know that my love for Chinese food of all origins--Mexican Chinese is oddly appealing, in a Small World kind of way-- know no bounds. I can't say enough good things about Panda. First, they have the decency to treat me like a human being and trust me with an actual plate upon first meeting me- it took my mother around three years to gain that faith. Second, the way they refer to their combo meals, by the number of "items", makes me feel like I'm deeply entrenched in some Commodore 64 text-based game where I keep an inventory of shit I find along the way for possible later use, like I might later find myself in a locked room and somehow only chicken with cashews can get me out.

Chipotle- Not sure why people call this fast food- just because it's expedient? I mean, it's made, by hand, to your specifications, right in front of you. $7 literally buys you the use of another human being for several minutes, which is enough for me, and then as a bonus, you get a burrito larger than your spleen.

Arthur Treacher's- Whoever had the balls to name a fast food chain like it's a gay British schoolboy is all right by me.

In-N-Out- I once actually ate part of my thumb when I was absentmindedly making my way through a double-double with onions, and I didn't really mind.

Dunkin' Donuts- First you make a mint selling donuts. Then, you make another mint selling boxes of discarded donut parts. Whoever came up with this gambit, on his way up to heaven, there's just gonna be the creators of glue, dog food, and Slim Jims standing alongside the Pearly gates in a slow, exaggerated golf clap.

Drive In-n-Out Part I

2008-11-14T16:02:00.011-05:00

So I like fast food. Not in theory, not out of convenience, not for price. I like it because it's delicious. I'm not a large girl; people usually look at me as if there's more to the story for why I'm such a booster for the fast food industry, a saturated fat deficiency or a life spent entirely on offramps. Nope. It's fucking tasty.

(All non-fast food eaters will be heretofore known as “Preachers”, because ain’t no one that holds some categorical gripe against such delectable victuals that doesn’t let off some sort of organic rant to let others know how nice the view is from their high horse, which you are most likely eating didjaknow.)

Taco Bell- People often hate Taco Bell; I often hate people. Look, is it a little gross that all components of your meal come from a caulking gun? Maybe. But just don’t think about it. I don’t necessarily like the vivid mental images of horse asshole that accompany my fortnightly drunken Slim Jim binge, but I get over it. To any Preacher for whom the Crunchwrap Supreme means are the real problem, and not the ends, that’s just plain stupidity. You don’t look in the mirror and picture your parents fucking, do you?

Also: they made a taco out of chocolate, people. That’s some Wonka-level shit right there.

Dairy Queen- Growing up in small-town Northern NY, Dairy Queen was the answer to everything. Birthdays, engagements, sustenance. Despite having one of the most cut-rate mascots I’ve ever seen—it’s hard to see Dennis as a true menace when the kid with the locker next to yours is banging a 6th grader—their revolutionary ice cream technology negated that little blond annoyance. To this day, I consider a Dilly Bar to be a greater architectural wonder than Stonehenge, and I made it through two of Feynman’s “Six Not-so-Easy Pieces” before switching back to celebrity documentation.

___________________________

Pizza Hut- Three words- Stuffed Crust Pizza. How is it in the history of pizza making, it took until the late 90s to figure out there was a way to up the cheese/bread ratio? I’ll remain a Hut loyalist if only because I assume their scientists are working on a two-sided pie as we speak.

Little Caesar’s- Not much good to say about the taste, and I’m not a picky one. However, you got two pizzas at a time, and for me, quantity always rules over quality.

Papa John’s- Any establishment that provides me with spare butter for a meal that doesn’t even originally include butter has a special place in my partially clogged heart.

Domino’s- The pizza quality is all over the spectrum, but as a girl who likes my variety, I applaud them for their consistent efforts to invent more sides, even if kickers taste like cud.

That legendary pizza place in your college town run by the two old Italian men who remember your name- Yeah, it’s the best. Totally. Go away.

____________________________

Wendy’s- If ever one was to try and convert a Preacher, this would be the one to do it. While some Preachers can be tempted into eating something that wasn’t prepared solely for them by the touchy-feely chain stores like Baja Fresh and California Pizza Kitchen, there is no denying the deliciousness of Wendy’s chili, which in turn can be a gateway to other Value Menu items. If ever one were to want to try such a thing—and want is the operative word here, cause I for one can’t be bothered—you gotta walk before you can run, so start with the chili when Preacher Friend is drunk/entering into anemic shock, and then maybe a few years down the road, you can baconate them. Not bloody likely, though.

Subway- Anything you can buy by the foot can’t taste bad, carpet included. Mark it as doctrine.

McDonald’s- An oldie but goodie, and my number one pick for any first date so as get the stomach padding out of the way as quickly as possible before getting down to the getting drunk part. Given the building blocks of bread, potatoes, flattened pre-proportioned meat, about three condiments, and one tool (“hot thing”), they’ve done pretty well on the innovation front. Secret sauce? The Big n’ Tasty? I mean, one day someone at HQ was just fucking around with the piles of meat I assume they keep on their desks as stress busters, and boom! The McRib. National obesity epidemic aside—watch what you eat on your own dime, fatty, and let me have mine—I don’t think anyone has ever come up with a more soniferous sounding slogan than “Supersize it”, and that’s coming from the girl who just came up with the phrase “soniferous sounding slogan than Supersize it” without even trying.

Also, as a child, I would have happily stabbed any single one of my acquaintances for more Happy Meal toys, so nice marketing to boot.

Burger King- Not as good as McDonald’s; still, offers Onion Rings and this new Cheesy Tots thing, for which they should be commended. As a kid, my parents preferred Burger King to McDonald’s because they “baked not fried” (this was pre-gastric bypass), while I preferred everything I consumed to have undergone the Midas Touch*; luckily, the two were across the street and neither required the leaving of one’s car or the breaking of one’s ten dollar bill, so harmony was achieved. Also, a superior fish sandwich, for Catholics still observing Lent but not willing to pay more than $2.50 to do it.

*Oil, not King.

Subletter to the Editor

2008-09-30T13:28:00.016-04:00

New York City isn't just an expensive town- it is a town that requires one to hemorrhage money, and knowing how to spell the word "hemorrhage" isn't as lucrative as one would like. Some mornings I wake up and I look in my empty wallet and I wonder how I managed to spend exactly the amount of money I had without committing some level of larceny; some mornings I wake up and commit some level of larceny. The point is, those of us who like to live a certain lifestyle in this city (ie: fro-yo, toppings, DVR, ability to sneer at people who order chicken during group dinners) and lack incriminating photos of relatives usually have to get creative for our mad money.

Th only thing in the NYC location of this store is quarters- three for a buck.

I'm pretty good in terms of earning a little side cash--the resale of things on Ebay, taking yet not leaving a penny, fostering relationships with wealthy and frail great aunts, etc--but one of the major boons to my bank account has been the rental of my cute little apartment in the East Village. On weekends when I'm not here, or am able to not be here, I rent it to complete strangers for about a hundred bucks a night, depending on the season. Many people express surprise at this--my grandparents are so unable to wrap their heads around it after three years that I sometimes wonder if it's my fault for not starting off by explaining "currency" to them--and sometimes even derision; they then go on to their soul-crushing jobs inputting data into an infinite spreadsheet. But for the curious, I always get asked the same questions:

How do you find people to rent your apartment?
A: The same way you find people to fulfill your fantasy of a complete stranger coming up to you on the street, spitting in your face, and then walking away wordlessly. Craig's List, baby.

Aren't you worried about people stealing your stuff?
A: No. If you owned my stuff, you'd be pretty secure in its relatively low black market resale value as well. I used to take a $100 deposit and lock all of my valuables up in a spare closet, til I realized how depressing it was that my "valuables" consist of a laptop, two wireless Xbox 360 controllers, a vibrator, several bottles of liquor, and a ring I got for my confirmation that I had believed to be precious stones until I realized Leonardo DiCaprio and Djimon Hounsou didn't make a movie called "Pink Ice Topaz" for a reason.

Aren't you worried about people going through your drawers?
A: I've found that for a hundo a night, my privacy constraints pretty much melt right away.

But suppose they smell your panties?
A: I'm surprised at the number of people that place an importance on the happenings of their panties, as if they're living, feeling objects whose personal space shouldn't be violated. I'm not saying I don't respect the boundaries of certain objects--American flags, plants, sharp pointy spikes-I'm just saying that these items are typically not ones I store in my crotch.

People have sex on your bed.
A: Not a question.

People have sex on your bed (raise in intonation, as if quizzically)
A: Join the club.

Doesn't that bother you?
A: It bothers me that my parents still have sex. Very, very, very much. So much so that the idea of any other coupling involving any combination of man, child, or beast, at any location on this earth, could not even begin to enter into the stratosphere of Ick in which the mental image of my parents doing it resides. Sometimes I have to rewatch Faces of Death just to remind myself that other people out there have to resort to far more extreme measures to get their grisly kicks off.

Aren't you worried that people will make copies of your keys and come into your apartment at night after you've returned and kill you?
A: I wasn't, no. But if someone wants to lay out several hundred dollars for the privilege of killing me in the privacy of my own apartment instead of the very public hallway just outside of my apartment, then I appreciate the windfall.

Other means of gaining access to me in my apartment: hit this three times in quick succession.

Do they eat your food?
A: Not usually; my ideas of what constitutes a delicious meal usually appeals more to kindergartners than grown ups. Some people do leave me food, though, ranging from basic cooking ingredients (carrots, eggs, OJ) and beer to leftovers from nearby restaurants. I eat all food regardless of race, creed, or origin.

Do you meet the people first?
A: Sometimes. I used to require a copy of their driver's license and a deposit, but as with most standards I have, it required effort, and was abandoned. Sometimes I don't even know the name of the person that stays in my apartment, and I just leave keys under the doormat, or meet with the subletter's friend or relative somewhere in NYC to do the wad of cash/key exchange. It only takes about a minute, and I look like a badass drug dealer to anyone watching. I like to think I'm helping to eradicate stereotypes.

What kind of people typically rent your apartment?
A: A lot of foriegners who are travelling the country, a lot of couples in their 30s who don't want to crash on friends' couches at that age. I also get a lot of NYC people who have parents visiting and don't want to subject them to futons, the sounds of lovemaking, or the morning wood of roommates.

Suppose your landlord finds out?
A: That would suck. However, considering she's a 98-year-old (conservative estimate) Polish woman who lives several blocks away and had trouble with the ballpoint click pen that we used to sign my lease, I'm pretty sure the concept of "Craig's List" and "the internet" are beyond her.

I I I I

2008-08-28T16:17:00.005-04:00

I got contacts this week for the first time in twelve years. The last time I went at this I was an impressionable 16 years old, and having watched "Labyrinth" on VHS a solid dozen times, my dream was to look exactly like Jennifer Connelly. Since I apparently had nothing more than a cartoonish grasp on the various complexities of the human form, I assumed that blue eyes and dark hair were all that was needed, and I already had the dark hair (albeit curly, but I had plenty of delusion to go around), so a set of colored contacts was all that remained to land my own teenage Goblin King. My mother, whose love for medical specialists is rivaled only by her love of "Man Vs. Wild" and possibly my father, was overjoyed that she and her daughter would have finally have something in common, and she happily took me down to the Walmart Eye Clinic to have me diagnosed up, right next to the bags of Ice Melter for impulse buyers.

Wouldn' have pegged the Goblin State for a Constitutional Monarchy.

Not yet having spent a decade online interacting with people solely through Times New Roman, my eyesight was not terrible, but I did have some need for correction. The contact industry had not yet evolved to the point that companies didn't still have to explain the basic concept--I think the slogan for my brand was "It's Like Glasses for Your Eyeballs!"--so the lenses I actually got were pretty primitive and useless. This was the same cautious, unexplored medical era that warned us that tampons were only supposed to be left in for a barely-worth-the-unwrapping length of four hours max for fear of the dreaded Toxic Shock Syndrome (TSS), which had resulted in the death of thousands of careless nonexistent teenage girls everwhere, until a quick straw poll amongst the wives of AMA doctors as to how long women were actually leaving their tampons in resulted in a national "Ew" and TSS joining the Forgotten Medical Worries list below "Too Much Black Bile."

It took very, very many tries to get the contacts in to what the doctor referred to as "small set eyes" using a less than affectionate tone, and in the daily Sophie's Choice of painting tiny flowers on each fingernail, studying, or improving my vision, the hands had it. When I did put them in, the blue fighting against my normally very dark eyes didn't give me the mysterious air I was looking for, and I ended up looking like a nocturnal predator. I tried to put them in every now and then for a change, but I was comically bad at it, and in my sophomore year of college, after I found a lost contact that had been hiding in the back of my eye socket for three days, I gave up.

Heard the employment opportunities in the Land of the Blind are excellent.

Earlier this week, a combination of impending loss of employment/insurance and a driver's license renewal brought me to the local Cohen's Optical. I figured I'd just get the basic checkup and be done with it, since eye doctors never seem to appreciate my honesty when I tell them that I don't wear my glasses "because I'm vain", but when it became patently obvious that answers on an eye test should not contain the word "either" as often as mine did, I sheepishly asked the doctor to toss in the contacts examination. She followed up with a few very simple questions about what sort of contacts I wanted--apparently, "The ones that you can sleep in for a couple weeks" is not an actual brand, but rather and indication of the bad habits of many of my friends--and eventually gave me a pair that rather creepily promise to breathe oxygen.

I had thought that the fact I had made it to this age in one piece might indicate a general sort of competency, but when I went to the bathroom and the doctor asked me if "I had really washed my hands, with soap and all", I realized I hadn't exactly impressed her thusfar, and she made me put in a pair of contacts and take them out to demonstrate that I wasn't a danger to myself. Unfortunately, I was, and while the doctor was busily scrawling "DO NOT LET ON ROADS"on my DMV form, I proceeded to cry, poke, and snot my way through the trial, until she eventually had to come over and tell me to sit still while she combed through the folds of my dress to find yet another lost contact (still MIA). I finally was allowed to leave, and upon stepping out to the street and seeing my world with almost grotesque clarity, I wandered around like Nell all day, playing the "Who can read the sign first?" game like a child.

Lady Visa and Master Card

2007-09-17T22:09:00.000-04:00

This past Saturday, I attended a Renaissance Festival, also shortened to Renfest, as friends have informed me that the abbreviation makes it sound "less like losers go there", traditionally after asking whether I "dress up"with a look on their face that makes it clear that all future relations hinge upon my answer (a resounding "hell no"). Though I assure them that the Renfest is still populated entirely with Hot Topic employees and street magicians, regardless of what it's called, I still face a certain amount of derision for my yearly pilgrimage to the middle of the woods. While once I felt the need to justify my choice to attend (along with my friend Jess), after five years, I now have no need to explain my actions with mumbled excuses about spending time outdoors and historical education. The truth is, I love me some fried food. I love me some daytime drinking. And I love, nay, cherish, me the opportunity to make fun of those that deserve it, and if the act of donning a chain mail poncho and leather epaulettes in the middle of the summer doesn't represent a tacit compliance to act as a target for ridicule, then I can no longer trust my understanding of the world.

Being secure in the knowledge that I am very much the exception to the attendance rule for these sorts of events, having had sex with a member of the opposite sex before, and also being extremely drunk, it's a fun afternoon spent gaining perspective on one's position in the social strata; also, they let you play with axes. Jess and I have a nice little routine going in which we agree to abandon all social and moral norms at the gate, so that we might explore our mockery a little more openly and with our mouths full, which has allowed us to discover that the humor that comes from adding "Ye Olde" to every destination or action surprisingly does not diminish with repetition (this year's winner was when we incurred Ye Olde Transaction Fees at thee ATM), though I suspect booze might play into this.

This is the medieval version of the old mallet-and-bell contraption, frequently found on boardwalks and in 1960s high school fairs. Odd to think that when they were first crafting these back in the 11th century, so that men might prove their strength and virility to the maidens they would be raping later, people weren't even aware that gravity existed; then again, they also believed phlegm to be vital to life, so I guess Newtonian physics might have been a few years off still.

The wench that ran this particular game definitely had a dominant air about her--it might have been the whip--and was positively raking in the cash from Bridge and Tunnel types looking to achieve the rank of "Dragonslayer" (the lowest end of the spectrum, I believe, was just "female"). One the far left, there's even a kiddie version of the game, so you can teach your sons about naked male insecurity at a young age. Jess and I really started to make some headway on our quest to find out what really goes on behind the scenes at the Renfest, and after we got into a drinking contest with the man running the throwing star booth and flashed a little wrist--the land of the blind here, people--at the man running the bear cage, we were invited to the Queen's Ball later that evening. Though unable to attend due to lack of bustle and the sort of mental steeling that would be required to get through such an event (we felt as though they'd be able to smell the normal on us from a mile away and were a bit afraid of what happens when a RenGeek turns feral), we made a resolution to infiltrate next year.

This is Orm, a Viking just back from raiding the Baltic states. Though he promised me the world--and I believed him, I really did--and the chemistry was undeniable, alas, our love was not long for this Earth. I vowed to meet him at the Kissing Bridge at 5 PM, where we could seal our union under the eyes of God, but I got caught up at the ping-pong ball/fishbowl game, and we ended up as just two ships that pass in the night. It was all very An Affair to Remember.

Though I never saw his face, Orm did fair better than the man calling himself Casanova, who approached me with similar declarations of love and lust earlier in the day. Intrigued, but not willing to break my hard and fast rule never to sleep with anachronistic historical figures that I meet in the woods, I took a pass on romance. Renfests are interesting places in that a mainstream looking girl can do pretty well for herself, solely because she is an unknown quantity at these sorts of things. The girls at these things go pretty far over the top in that they will show you their genitals if you so much as make eye contact, and don't really make much of a secret about the fact that you can wake up the next morning with their fairy wings on your forest floor after only a couple of meads, so my theory is that even the highest-libidoed knights crave a little office-working, American Eagle-attired piece of ass now and then. Though not hideous, I do live in NYC, an aesthetically humbling city if there ever was one, but at the Renfest, I'm a solid 11, purely by dint of regular bathing and the fact that the odds of finding meat accidentally lodged in one of my crevices are slim to none.

Despite initial impressions, this man does not work for the festival. Don't get me wrong, this man should work for the festival- he's obviously put a couple centuries of time into crafting his appearance and, really, his very essence, however one does that, and that sort of devotion to a cause should be rewarded. But, as stated, he does not. He paid for a ticket right in front of me--the sight of this man holding American currency is more jarring than you'd think--and I saw him coming out of the port-a-potty. I'm entirely unsure of what sort of conversation could be happening here, but I'm guessing it involves directions to the Sherwood Forest Music Nook. I'd like to think that little girl is getting a big lesson in what happens when you make wrong choices in life.

This is sad picture of lost curly fries, scattered across the ground along Lockesly Lane. It reminded me of the utter despair that one felt as a child when the top fell off their ice cream cone, and caused me to picture the loss of innocence that occurred when some poor young boy, already destined to a life of persecution and mockery thanks to his penchant for fantasy role-play and garish silver jewelry shaped like ancient runes, let his curly-fry cone fumble through his fat little fingers, and he had his first brief moment of realization that maybe the world was not the ideal place he had believed it to be.

But perhaps I was reading too much into it.

The one thing that stands out about these things is the tremendous number of people employed by the festivals, and you can't help but get curious about the hierarchy of it all and the availability of the good jobs, or even what the good jobs are. It's hard enough being a liberal arts major in today's world, I can't imagine that the jousting market is all that bullish. The other thing that occurred to me is that for the acne-stricken teens of Tuxedo, NY, the Renfest is the new paper route, and every youth in the town has probably seen at least one summer of privy scrubbing. This was a particuarly forlorn youngster who had the misfortune of running the hot nut cart, which is awkward on so many levels; my middle school classmates could have gotten at least three semesters worth of jokes on "hot nuts" alone, without tossing the jester hat into the mix.

Ah, leather Rennathongs: Give your wench the yeast infection she deserves. Already well into my 6th drink at this point, when I saw these, I tried to picture whether I would be offended or honored if my skin was used to decorate someone's reproductive organs. I picture some sort of big noisy Cow Heaven in which they all just sit around talking about how they were disposed of; there's the big plebeian herds trading stories about various slaughtermills and cursing the Angus Third Pounder, there's the snotty Indian cows all high and mighty and shit, and then there's the one or two cows just sitting there unassumingly, til there's a slight lull in conversation, and one of busts out with "I'm a Rennathong", and everyone just goes silent and wide-eyed.

Also, ironically, they really just don't get Gary Larson's humor up there. Go figs.

That Which We Call a Rose

2007-06-19T13:43:00.000-04:00

Word comes to me that there is standup comedian/magician with my same name making the rounds of New York, doing the sort of damage typically wrought by people who call themselves standup comedians/magicians and soiling my good name. A lifetime of living with a name so ridiculously common that at times I think I’d be better off being referred to by a number or bar code has made it so that these mixups aren’t surprising—there was a particularly annoying incident with my Burger King Kids Club membership as a child that cemented my MickeyD’s loyalty for a lifetime, if only to avoid the red tape—but that doesn’t mean that I don’t get a little curious about the other namesakes out there, and feel in competition with them. After a lifetime of username rejections and the ensuing replacement “suggestions” that go with them—I’d rather not have my Amazon login read like Cathy swearing at her fridge—I managed to score a coup in getting my first and last name as a gmail address, putting me at the top of the rankings and sending a fuck-you to the other Rubber Buns and Liquors of the world. As an added bonus, I often receive their emails, and I feel secure that their lives are not as interesting as mine, most likely due to the downward spiral caused by the loss of their preferred Google login.

Sucks for you, but sucks even worse for people named jch337ds.

You can tell a lot about a person by which shortened variation of their name they pick. Johns that stay Johns aren’t nearly as much fun to drink with as ones that become Jacks, and Elizabeths that become Lizzes are much less likely to be caught reading their boyfriend’s incoming text messages than ones that become Ibbys and Betsys. Mine is as it is for brevity/ease in barking, so that if something heavy is falling towards me, I have a slight millisecond head start on getting out of the way (downside being that I also answer to the word “genocide”). My full name being the result of two highly unsentimental people who accidentally mixed their DNA at a young age—I’m half surprised I wasn’t named after the nearest object in my father’s line of vision as he filled out the social security form—I’ve always had a fascination with names and how they shape a person, and vice versa. Is a girl named Lola because her parents were certain of her genetic blessing, or did the societal pressure of being hot enough to be worthy of the name Lola shape her physical appearance? Do men named Sully tropistically punch immoveable objects, or is it a learned behavior that comes from being surrounded by the type of men that hang out with guys named Sully?

Now disappointing in Christmas stockings near you!

Emily- Stop naming your kids Emily. The market is saturated. I cannot describe to you the heartbreak of being a young girl who is unable to get pencils or miniature license plates with your name on them. If my childhood were a sad French movie, it would just be 60 silent minutes of a small brunette child staring at a sign that says “Out of stock”, and then she’d light a cigarette and the screen would go black.

Grace- A gorgeous name, which somehow got hijacked by the Asians. I was OK with the fact that they look damn near immortal and their mp3 players are smarter than I am, but losing “Grace” was sort of the last straw for me .

March/April/May/June - There seems to be an unspoken rule against naming a child after the month they’re born in, but what about the month they were conceived in? I think that’s probably the best way to teach your children about contraception.

Jane- If one were to do a highly unscientific psychological probe of women named Jane, they could probably pinpoint the exact moment at which issues began to form as that in which the other schoolchildren learned the phrase “Plain Jane”, and Janes the world over began to act out against the rhyme through various bodily mutilations, fornications, and general sass. I’ve always thought an interesting addendum to the study would be to measure the amount of rebellion between attractive girls named Jane and ugly girls named Jane, for whom “plain” is actually an upgrade.

Sarah- Sarahs are rebelling against the book “Sarah, Plain and Tall,” so they’re much like Janes, only slightly sluttier.

Clyde- Started off as the go-to name for geeks, but then the black man went and surreptitiously took this one over. It’s still a damn geeky name, but I’m much less likely to raise that point to a cruiserweight than my IT guy.

Jason- Good God, are there a lot of gay men named Jason. I assume this is due to the ease with which children figure out the childhood taunt of “Gay-son”.

Harry- What a good guy Harry is. Everyone knows and likes Harry. If I were named Harry, I would spend the first part of my life trading in on this, then I would rob (Rob) all my friends blind and move to another city. Let the other Harrys of the world make up for it.

William and Richard- I wonder if somewhere back in the lineages of medieval kings, a decree was made that no male name can have amongst its variations/shortenings more than one euphemism for the male penis. I would think so, because I have a hard time keeping a straight face every time I say “Bill”, and no one else seems to notice.

Kyle- Douchebag name. No reason.

A Taste of Soap

2007-05-09T16:16:00.000-04:00

I like to swear. I don't know why. Neither of my parents are particularly vulgar, and though I knew more than my fair share of truckers and sailors growing up, we didn’t converse on a regular basis. It’s not a conscious effort, and not meant to shock—there’s a certain tipping point for each person at which curse words stop having an effect, and mine was reached around the time that “shit” replaced the majority of my subject pronouns—but it’s more of a natural linguistic pattern, sort of like a lisp, in which sybillant esses are replaced with the word “fuck”.

"Fuckering Fuckotash"

Though I have my own personal favorites, on the matter of swearing, I have to defer to my beloved George Carlin’s legendary “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television”, at least a quarter of which were introduced into the vernacular of various NYC youths during a hot coffee spill on last month’s Take Your Child to Work Day (now renamed Take Your Pill Regularly, Without Fail Day).

Shit- A golden oldie, partly because of its universal applicability to animal waste, but mostly because it rhymes with so goddamn many other things, granting it unlimited lyrical power. If, during the Genesis of Cussing, when the gods were first hammering the dirty words into tablets (replicas available at Spencer’s Gifts), they had chosen “Shorange” instead, I highly doubt it would be as popular. Or shit would be as popular. You see what I mean?
I use this word more often than: I exhale

Piss- Who doesn’t remember that seminal moment in which they officially switched from using the word “ticked” to “pissed”? I couldn’t tell you a single thing that was said at my First Communion, yet the day that I made the conversion to “pissed” stands out firmly in my memory. A banner moment in any young curser’s life, I can’t wait til my own future young ‘un comes toddling up to me at the bar and says “Mommy, the guidance counselor is pissed that you’re setting such a bad example.” Warm my heart, it will.
I use this word more often than: I actually piss

Fuck- The swear word of choice amongst consummate professionals everywhere. Everyone’s read the email forward regarding its various parts of speech and uses, so I won’t bother to rehash its versatility, but the first time I got the email in college, there was a fair amount of head nodding, glass raising, and You-tell-it-brothering going on. I first realized the potential of this word as a very young child, when my mother, taking a page from “Dr. Spock’s Book of Cliché Shit to Distract Your Kids”, put on some ridiculous record of children’s songs sung by a man whose voice makes Tom Waits sound “velvety”. When the “Name Song” finally reached its fifth round, my father looked up from the neuss he was fashioning and said “Let’s do Buck!”, only to get slapped by my mother.
I use this word more often than: “the”

Cunt- There was a great article in GQ a couple of years back about the stigma attached to this word, and how in our hyperverbose and freespeaking society, it was the last front in curse words that still have an impact. Four thousand words later, I remember thinking “Well, it was. Asshole.”
I use this word more often than: I probably should.

Cocksucker- Not bad, but given that 60% (51% female+10%gay-1%lesbian*) of us actually are, or have, or should be, sucking cock, a bit limited in usage, not that it should matter. I’m a big fan of tailoring insults specifically to the person; it’s like a bespoke suit, something that can last for years.
I use this word more often than: I floss

*This last figure is completely made up. Googling “percent lesbians” brings up some less than statistically sound websites)

Caulksucker

Motherfucker- Perhaps one of my favorite compound words (rainbow and corndog being the other two), this one enjoyed a brief surge of usage in the early to mid90s thanks to people like Andrew Dice Clay and Quentin Tarantino, bordering on hackneyed. Luckily, by the time I came of age to use it/no longer lived in a town where the fucking of one another’s mothers was a very real possibility, it had built up some cachet again.
I use this word more often than: I call my mother

Tits- I didn’t even know this was a bad word. My Mother’s Day Card is definitely going to need a proofread.
I use this word more often than: My actual tits, from a purely functional perspective.

Cool Ways to Die

2007-05-04T13:59:00.000-04:00

Duel (fencing and/or pistol)
Now, assuming there’s an afterlife, or at the very least, some sort of celestial watering hole in which people sit around and drink Michelob Ultra (not my choice, Anheuser-Busch just has their hands in everything) and shoot the shit, well, I imagine that after the 1,834th time a guy tells the story of how his fatal heart attack “really came out of nowhere”, ears will definitely perk up when you casually mention that time you got pierced through the heart for defending a woman’s honor/sleeping with the Earl’s youngest daughter. The nice part is, even if you were in the wrong, the other guy looks like a dick, especially if you start a vicious rumor that he “totally turned on 9”. I’d love to see the look on the other guy’s face when his wizened old spirit steps into the bar decades later and millions of angry dead people start whispering.

Remaining Behind on a Giant Asteroid Heading Towards Earth to Push the Detonation Button, Thereby Saving Mankind
I didn’t say it had to be probable. But you’d definitely get a statue or a fountain or something.

Coming Into Contact with Someone Composed of Your Exact Antimatter
If only for the moment immediately after the implosion, in which you look over at the other soul floating up to heaven beside you, put out your hand, and say “So anyways. I’m _____. Nice to meet you.”

Falling Into a Giant Vat of Liquid Nitrogen
Because somewhere out there, there is a scientist who has just been dying to know what would happen, and scientists need to have their frat boy itch scratched, too. Also, a nice memento for your family.

Eating Brussel Sprouts
Conclusive proof that it actually does kill you. It sucks to have to be the one to take it for the team, but millions of kids the world over would be vindicated.

Devastating and As Yet Unnamed Disease
I’m not sure on the specifics of this sort of thing, but after the media covers your heartbreaking battle with the mystery disease and then mourns your passing, I think it’s only fair that they name the disease after you, immortalizing you forever. Alois Alzheimer didn’t stand a chance of having his name remembered until he tacked it onto a disease. Especially not by, you know, Alzheimer’s patients.

Asshole Cancer Coupled with the Flesh-Eating Virus*
*If you’re the guy that sits across from me at work who changed his ringtone to “Bagpipes”. And only cool for me.

During Sex with a Famous Person
Because though it would be gauche for you to bang-and-tell, you can’t help it if the media does it for you. There are worse curtain calls than riding George Clooney.

Rules, Like Thumbs, Were Meant to be Broken

2007-04-24T17:09:00.000-04:00

Following a fairly recent conversation with coworkers regarding microwaves, microwaveable entities, and the science and technological oddities of all things microwave (50+ hour weeks had killed the part of our brains devoted to object permanence, leaving us unable to converse on anything not directly within vision), it came about that when you put aluminum foil in the microwave, it shoots blue sparks. Being familiar with the effects of metal in the microwave from an unfortunate office incident a couple years back involving a knish, an errant mustard packet, flames, and about 10,000 iterations of the word "shit", this wasn't news to me, but when I asked how everyone else's experiences had come to pass, it turns out that not one but two people had made their discoveries by actively placing foil in a microwave and hitting "Start". Now, growing up in the country with little supervision, I'm no stranger to doing stupid shit "just cause"--like you've never wondered what an electric fence feels like--but there were certain hard and fast rules that were never to be broken, ever, not out of respect for authority figures, but because we had been imbued with such fear for what would happen if they were to be broken that life as we know it would come to an end.

Don’t eat wild berries

I lived in the woods, so while this doesn’t make most people’s top ten list, this was a pretty sound bit of advice for the old madre to pass along, although I suspect she was more worried about the potential for tooth stain than poisoning. I don’t know what it was, but for some reason, every friggin berry I encountered on my forest explorations looked irresistible. I have no explanation for it, I read Babar, was well-fed, and was given free reign over a houseful of unhealthy and hence delicious junk foods--mounds of Mounds, heaps of Peeps, Storeos* of Oreos—but every single berry I encountered sang its own little siren song, and I have no idea why. I’d like to think it was a manifestation of a primal urge to procure my own food and thus sustain life, but honestly, I think it’s just ‘cause they were pretty colors. In retrospect, I’m a little amazed I grew up to be, you know, alive.

*Storeo: a full or more than adequate amount or supply

Don’t open the refrigerator door without knowing what you want

Blah blah waste of electricity aside, between the yelling and the torture--they didn’t actually use the Spanish Boot, they just kept it in the corner as a reminder that they could if so inclined--if you were to convert the amount of energy expended by my parents in getting me to shut the fridge thatmuchquicker into viable energy, there is no way that the efficiency balances out. I’ve decided that when the time comes to raise children of my own, I’ll make them sign a contract stating that they may leave the refrigerator door open for any amount of time, as long as they slip me twenty bucks upon reaching the financial stability of adulthood.**

**I’m also assuming that by the time I reproduce, we’ll have found a cheap, renewable fuel source, and 20n (where n=number of kids) will turn me a pretty sweet little profit.

Don’t run with scissors

Actually, I don’t really know my parents’ stance on running with scissors. I don’t even see how the circumstance in which an adult would be required to make a ruling on this would even come up. What six-year old needs to get anywhere with such a sense of urgency that they’re required to run, let alone the sort of situation that requires cutting devices? I think the bigger issue at hand here is time management. If we’re going to come up with arbitrary societal rules involving sharp objects, I think we should be devoting more energies to more fatal combinations of things like “Glass is not a baking ingredient” or “Don’t put knives in your mouth.”

Don’t swallow chewing gum

This was not a rule in my household, but seemed to be a pretty central tenet upon which all of my friends’ and friends’ parents’ entire concept of anatomy and science was built, in that the piece of gum that you spend hours chewing must never, ever be allowed to pass beyond the golden gate of your epiglottis, as it would automatically turn evil, and you would die in a manner that no one has any evidence or record of. To this day, I consider it a dealbreaker if a man still believes that he will fall ill should he swallow gum, as to me it’s indicative of the sort of tenuous grasp on rational thought that leads one to be afraid of monsters under the bed. Some day, I’ll meet a guy who considers swallowing gum a dealbreaker, and we’ll have the least exciting breakup ever.

Don’t go home with strangers

Honestly, this really only needs to be said once, and even that’s pushing it. Who the hell (under the age of 18) goes home with a complete stranger, when given the option? I’d like to think there’s some sort of Darwinism in effect here, as kids that stupid really aren’t helping the gene pool. Though strangely, I feel a little less animosity towards children that go home with strangers offering candy, as at least there’s some sort of validity to the transaction, depending on the candy. Still, I feel like you could probably save some time by just laying out a general “Don’t be a fucking idiot” maxim to the kiddies, and this’d be covered.

Don’t get Them wet, or feed them after midnight

This was my pet, Gizmo. Cute little thing, got him in the back of an old thrift shop from some Chinese Guy when they ran out of my usual supply of jade buddhas. Dude didn't speak much English, but he kept repeating, over and over again, "Don't feed him after midnight. And never get him wet." And he seemed really serious about it, too, so serious, in fact, that I never did either. Except once, and he ate my dad. Just kidding, they don't make Chinese people in Northern NY.

It's a Five O'Clock World

2007-04-20T15:55:00.000-04:00

Checking into the barren wasteland that is my inbox this week, I found this notice for next Thursday’s “Bring Your Child to Work Day”, which apparently exists outside of heartwarming Reader’s Digest fiction.

I’m not sure my company could have come up with a less accurate approximation of what my day actually entails. Assuming that the whole point of “Bring Your Child to Work Day” is to provide a gentle indoctrination into the working world, to show your offspring the value of being a breadwinner and a hard day’s work in the hopes of them following suit, I can understand why they feel the need to blatantly lie to the kids, as the phrase “in accordance with Sarbanes-Oxley” doesn’t have the same merry ring to it as “ride along in the cop car” or “take a tour of the spaceship”, but if your kid honestly believes that you come to work every day to play with Legos, well, I’d rather not have them in the work force anyway. And even if that is the case, doesn’t that make you out to be kind of a dick? Hey kids, each morning, mommy and daddy desert you at school to bury your nose in books and long division while they go off to the office to face paint and watch cartoons.

Since the top employers in the area I grew up in were a correctional facility and a mental institution, they didn’t really encourage “Bring Your Child to Work Day”, but since we were kind of strapped for cash in the early years, I would often find myself tagging along to my father’s jobs, coloring book in tow (he worked in the emergency room of the local hospital by day, and the medical clinic by Thursday-Friday night). Having spent a childhood surrounded by medical textbooks and horror movies, I had no problem with the fact that my dinner was often brought to me by someone covered in blood, and I suspect I’ve acquired antibodies for diseases that would make your local slaughterhouse owner gag, but looking back, I do wonder what it was like to sit in an ER, anxiously waiting for news of your loved one, as a happy little girl munched on peanut butter crackers and asked you if you want to play a word game. As for the clinic, well, not a lot of children are given access to their teachers’ medical charts, and it’s every bit as satisfying as it sounds.

Did you wash your hands before dinner?

Now, having spent an entire lifetime not getting knocked up, and doing a damn good job of it, I don’t see why I’m being punished like this. Not only do I have to sit at my desk and pretend to be impressed by people’s ability to procreate all day—each spawn’s “final, framed masterpiece” equally more impressive than the last, I’m sure—but I have to put in a full day’s work while some chick from Accounting gets to watch a friggin’ magic show because her condom broke in high school. The only thing that’s going to get me through the day (besides drinking heavily at lunch and my 12:30 appointment to “Steal Kids’ Food”) is the hope that someone will have thought it a good idea to bring not one but two rugrats to work, so I’ll get to witness a VP of something bullshit his way through a daylong contest of “Daddy, whose _____ is better?”.

Games (Other, More Physically Fit) People Play

2007-04-11T12:17:00.000-04:00

I'm a sports person. I'm not diehard, I don't collect articles of clothing worn by athletes, I can't look at a program and go all John Nash on the stats, and I still hope for a Leisure question when I'm going for the green pie piece in Trivial Pursuit, but sometimes I'm sick of being responsible for my own happiness and I want that weight to rest on someone else's shoulders for a few hours. Also, I like to drink and gamble. My motives are pure.

I'll take twenty on the white guy.

As a teenager, I chose the Buffalo Bills as my team, right before they made it to their third Super Bowl, against the Cowboys. Clad in a starter jacket that displaced roughly four times the volume of my own body , I sat at my best friend's house, on a rug made out of something her dad had killed, eating chips and (I believe) pure sugar cubes, learning what it truly means to have a man break your heart, and earn millions doing it. I also learned why one never should spend their Christmas money on a commemorative t-shirt before the actual event, because if your team loses, it will only serve as a painful and unfashionable reminder of your loss, and because it is made of some indesctructible 1990s polymer and will somehow remain in your dresser forever, so that when you return home for Xmas and need a tshirt to work out in, you'll be forced to dress exactly as you did in 1993.

I stayed with the Bills through the next year, recreating the same scenario at my best friend's house the next January, only a little more aware of Frank Reich's ass...ets as a respectable backup QB. This ended much the same way as it had the last time, and I was taught a lifelong lesson in why you don't go back to someone who broke your heart the first time around; I believe this also planted the seeds for what now might be termed "a clinically unhealthy hatred for all things Texas".

Also makes an excellent burger.

Sick of justifying why I continued to like a team that had brought me so very much pain, I took a break from the sport for several years, rejoining at the advent of fantasy leagues, where I could distribute my expectations and minimize the risk of crushing blows- the mutual fund of sports. Though I toy with other sports, my main fantasy squeeze has long been football- I find the draft offers just the right mix of knowledge and hunches in the earlier rounds, and reliance on dirty-sounding names in the later, less-informed rounds (God Bless You, Neil Rackers, for years of juvenile joy). I've played with the same guys for years now, and even though I wouldn't know to spit on half of them if I passed them in the street, we've remained a pretty constant group. There have been a few wild cards that cycle in and out (I always get the league in custody battles), and when a new person enters, usually the coworker of a friend's cousin or someone else with similarly solid credentials, the first thing we need to know is what niche they'll corner in the shittalking market. With an Asian Guy, Italian Guy, Black Guy, Irish Guy, Girl, Canadian Guy, and Once Highlighted His Hair in 1998 and Has Been Called Gay Ever Since Guy, my league is a veritable small world of slurs after all, so it's often a stretch to find new material; when we got some fresh blood a few years back and discovered that he had a young daughter, I could practically see saliva dripping onto keyboards across the country, such was the breadth of new (and highly incrimimating) jokes opened up to us.

Racker? I hardly even know her.

Now, as my fantasy baseball team begins what looks to be a looonnnng season of pooch-screwing and general fuckuppery, my hockey team enters the playoffs wiping the blood of the rest of the league from its mouth. I've been here before, and I just don't know how much of my soul to invest in a city that has essentially shoved me down the stairs then told me it loves me so many times before, especially considering how long-term the commitment is. It looks good going in, but two months is a long time to vest yourself in something without the guarantee of eggs in the morning. If we win, I get to lord it over the other three hockey fans in the city, but if we lose, well, back-to-back viewings of Miracle can only do so much healin'.

Butterfly in the Sky

2007-04-04T13:11:00.000-04:00

I'm a reader. I read things. Papers, magazines, books- hell, I know the active ingredient in most toiletries found within typical range of the bathroom sink (least fun Kings category ever, btw). I read at lunch, I read on the subway, I read in bars, I read before bed. I fall asleep reading every night and wake up covered in words and pictures of celebrities like I'm made of paper-mache. When I meet other readers, we immediately launch into a furious, Amazon-like flurry of recommendations and comparisons. Some people think it's pretentious to call yourself a reader, but it's hard for an activity to be pretentious when hobos can do it just as well.

I wish I could read my blanket.

On the rare occasions that the mother would take me out to dinner in one of my hometown's many variations on the "Affable Blue Collar Local Deep Fries Things and Can Install Your Snow Tires, Too" eating establishments, it was an unspoken rule that we both would bring books, so that we might order, then immediately commence our respective reading, lest there be any actual exchange of emotion or conversation. Given that my parents and I have spent at least 80% of our time together reading in silence, I'm amazed at the number of horrifying discussions we've managed to cram into the remaining 20% (7%-Revelations of life truths at a premature age, 3%- Passing along of false information, 2%- Graphic discussions of family health issues, 3%- Ordering at drivethrough windows, 5%-Ongoing lifelong dialogue about why The Naked Gun is/is not funny), and grateful to the majesty of reading for sparing me what I can only assume would have been an additional 3-4 years of my parents repeatedly demanding I mow the lawn for lack of anything else to say. When your child's favorite thing to do is read, there's not a lot of threats you can use against them to force them to do your bidding; grounding/revoking TV and friend privileges just provides more reading time, and society had fortunately started to frown upon beatings by the late 80s. In retrospect, I didn't take advantage of this nearly as much as I should have.

Seemed as though a picture of a book should appear somewhere.

Recently, I've taken to listening to audiobooks during my lengthy walks. My family are all huge book-on-tape fans; at Thanksgiving you can seek refuge from the barrage of questions regarding the state of your uterus in what you believed to be an empty room, then shit yourself when you find 2-3 people sitting in the dark staring off into space like zombies, headphones in ears. Every single car trip I took with my parents between the ages of 4-17 was accompanied not by public radio shows or family singalongs, but books-on-tape, cruelly interspersed with my father's only other album, Neil Diamond's Greatest Hits, giving me the coveted teenage skills of knowing all the words to both"Solitary Man" and the first chapter of Tom Clancy's "Patriot Games". I'm digging my latest download from audible.com, but it's very easy to get lost in the story as you walk along, and when I suddenly start grinning at a particularly delightful turn-of-phrase, I imagine it's unnerving to others walking in the opposite direction. I used to work out to comedy albums, and there is no stranger look one can receive than when he/she suddenly bursts out laughing on the elliptical because an unseen George Carlin has said "fuck" creatively.

Now I read that critics are denouncing the Book-It program, the grade school reward system wherein if you read five books a month, you get a free Personal Pan pizza from Pizza Hut. I took part in this program back when a Personal Pan really was a meal, and not a palm-sized apertif meant to keep your mouth busy chewing on something while you wait for them to squeeze your gordita into existence at the attached Taco Bell Express (perhaps that's just me), and never has a Pavlovian loop been more solidly formed. If I read a book, I got pizza. Now people claim that the program promotes the consumption of junk food, and that some children read easier books to get points, and are more motivated by the prize than the reading itself, to which I say "No shit."

Ironically, a sentence fragment.

Free pizza was (and is) the most motivating factor in a redblooded human's life. Never mind the fact that all of my food was free back then, thanks to the love of my parents/federal law, and that pizza was probably the only food I ever ate with the main ingredient not ending in "xenyol-9". If I read a book, I got pizza. Sure, it's a little sad that at the age of seven, I had yet to fully appreciate the beauty of the written word and the insitution of literature as reward in itself, but out of all of the things you could have gotten me to do for free pizza- treason or renouncement of God among them- reading seems pretty harmless. I had classmates that to this day would not have ever read five books in their life had there not been pepperoni at the end of the reading rainbow. We were in the second grade, and at that age, kids do shit for the payoff. It's not dirty, it's a lifetime theme--I don't sit at a desk all day, pretending to work out of a deep-rooted devotion to mankind, and though I don't remember why I agreed to toilet training, I can pretty much guarantee it wasn't out of an adherence to societal norms--and there's no reason to pretend otherwise.

When I Wake Up in the Morning and it's Quarter to Seven

2007-03-29T14:00:00.000-04:00

A couple weeks back, following a string of drinking events in which friends' Flickr accounts are more likely to be categorized as "evidence" than "nostalgia," I decided to take a night for laundry and self-improvement , which for girls means painting your toenails. As an added bonus, I also decided to floss my teeth, which is something I don't do very often, and of course, should. To make the world's most mundane story short, I did, my gums spat in my face , spun around on one heel, then spread vicious rumors about my performance in bed, and now I'm left with a toothache on one side. Having been without dental or medical insurance for the first 25 years of my life (though in possession of it now), and being a ridiculously healthy individual, I've been following the "Wait and See" track of treatment, in the hopes that if I ignore it, it will go away, but unfortunately, it's a no go. My one bout of dental responsibility unleashed some sort of beast, and I suspect I'm going to have to do something about it. It's not that I'm particularly squeamish, and a high tolerance for both pain and drugs means that unless my dentist is the Marathon Man, it won’t hurt that much. It's that I have no doubt that if I were to go to a dentist, my mother, ten hours upstate, would somehow, some way, find out.

I make no secret of the fact that my mother is both a dental hygienist and certifiably insane. Having my married my dad, who, thanks to an unfortunate birthing incident involving two things that should never be used in conjunction, one of which you typically use on salads, has what are medically referred to as "fucked up teeth", well, she knew a lost cause when she saw one, and so was able to channel her full oral neuroses onto me. I am certain that when I sprang forth from her womb, it was Down's-be-damned, the first thing she had the doctor count was teeth. Anyway, amongst the other dental crimes committed against me--Mentadent users, be grateful that for every minty mouthful you spit into the sink, there was a 12-year-old guinea pig out there who, upon trying the prototype formula, was somehow able to make her searing, abraded lips formulate the words "IT BURNS SO BAD"--I was also subjected to harsher than normal standards for oral hygiene, including but not limited to random plaque-stains, flossing under duress not by my own hands, rejection of romantic others on the basis of "bad teeth", and several occasions in which I was pulled out of a group of friends, handed a toothbrush from the secret flap of skin that my mother had installed for just such a storage purpose, and told to "go brush".

"It was inspiring."--My mother

My mother was also responsible for cleaning the teeth of a large portion of the village and town in which I grew up; a naturally chatty woman, I would dread my friends going in for cleanings, as they would inevitably come back with some personal information that she had spilled in the interest of full disclosure of her teenage daughter’s most secret shames. When the guy that I had a crush on for three years came back all pearly white and informed me that my mother had let loose that I both drooled in my sleep and liked the taste of communion wafers—two points that to this day, I cannot possibly connect in any sort of logical, linear conversation—I had to lay down the law about what was and was not OK to talk about to other people, which was Nothing and Everything, respectively.

Well, you know, with peanut butter on them.

When I return home for Christmas, my mother still checks my toothbrush at night to see if it is wet so that she will know if I have brushed, and if I have forgotten to brush/wet my toothbrush, I will be pulled out of bed and made to do so. Once I reached college age, I was able to assert myself enough in the bathroom to refuse to brush in front of my mother, who keeps a running color commentary on stroke methods and the latest research in brushing technology. The only thing more disappointing to my mother than when I got my first of many cavities is when I finally came out and admitted that I prefer manual toothbrushes to the myriad state-of-the-art electric toothbrushes she had been providing me with over the years, and that I had even been using a regular old Oral-B under her roof.

Nature did not intend me to stick that in my mouth.

I have sealants on teeth that were not meant to be sealed, and probably are not sealed on any other human in existence; if mine is the body they find encased in ice 150,000 years from now, it will seriously fuck up anthropology. These came during visits in which my mother would keep me in the chair for multiple hours under the guise of “just trying something”. I still go through the “treasure chest” in her office to take my prize when I get my teeth cleaned, not because I’m not stocked on Super Balls and fake tattoos, but out of spite for those children that get to sit in her chair and not get sworn at/have facial imperfections pointed out. I used to open my Christmas stocking and find the latest high-tech flossers and toothbrushes; I once received a care package at college that contained a giant, Goldbergian device with a post-it note that read “The Rolls Royce of tongue scrapers! Let me know if your friends want one.” I did not have braces as a child, due to lack of funds and the geographical reaches to which one must travel in order to find an orthodontist office in Northern NY; instead, I was given a tongue depressor and weekly checkups at the LaZBoy, then told which teeth to “pull” and which to “push” as they came in. Despite losing my final two canines at the not-in-the-least-bit awkward age of 16, they’re actually almost perfectly straight, and when I look back on old pictures, I’m able to cringe myself in half for dozens of reasons other than a metal mouth.

A fondness for fabric paint being one of them.

The point is, if she finds out, and she will, oh yes she will, it won’t be pretty. I'm sure it'll go away.

Items in the Office Vending Machine and the People Who Buy Them OR Phoning It In

2007-03-16T13:37:00.000-04:00

DO-Hershey’s Special Dark. My grandfather, your grandfather, Belgians with low standards.
D1-M&M’s (regular). Mothers looking to occupy their children. When I look back on the amount of time I spent categorizing, defining, and dividing M&Ms into different color groups, I question whether my parents even existed, or whether I just imagined them.
D2-Butterfinger. Aging frat boys, members of corporate softball teams.
D3-Three Musketeers. D’Artagnan, me. I’m a big fan of these, and usually I bite off the chocolate coating in sheaths, then eat the sticky inner part all by its lonesome. I always assumed that this was the norm, like just eating only the middles of Oreos or cheating on your taxes, but when I was first witnessed performing this ritual, my friend looked at me like I was methodically deboning a live bat.
D4-Peanut Chews. 1940s schoolgirls. As a general rule, I don’t think any food product name should include the bodily function required to digest it.
D5-Peanut Butter stuffed cheese crackers. Costco-shopping mothers needing to send their kids to snacktime with something other than leftovers. Am I wrong, or didn’t these used to be two separate snacks? Peanut butter crackers, and then cheese crackers. I don’t know if I applaud the manufacturer for efficiency, or blame them for all that’s wrong with America. I think the former.
D6- Zagnut. Beetlejuice, me. This is my favorite candy bar, and the one most likely to flake off into your hair, neither of which is much of a selling point.
D7- Hot tamales. Latina firecrackers who tell themselves things like “You’re fabulous”, people wronged by men named either “Mike” or “Ike”.
D8, D9- Peanut M&Ms. Mothers looking to occupy and choke their children. These weren’t as fun to categorize and define, probably because they rolled off the table so easily, and because when one of these mutated in the candy-coating process, it made them look downright carcinogenic.
EO- Nature Valley Peanut Butter granola bar. HR Women who applaud themselves for “snacking healthy”.
E1-Snickers. Everybody. These are my favorite ingredient with which to make my beloved Dairy Queen Blizzards, as there’s always a very real possibility that they will break the machine, adding an element of danger to my gluttony.
E2- Nutrigrain bar (apple). No one. No one buys these. That same bar has been sitting in slot E2 longer than your mother*. I once saw a guy accidentally hit the wrong button, get one of these, and just leave it there. The unwanted orphan baby of the vending machine.
E3- Almond Joy. Mounds lovers who feel like throwing caution to the wind. Though delicious, no one has ever eaten an Almond Joy and felt in any way sated.
E4- Nature Valley Oats-n-Honey granola bar. Horses, HR Women who applaud themselves for “snacking healthy” and look disdainfully upon colleagues buying the peanut butter version.
E5-Nutrigrain bar (strawberry). Still no one. I’m not saying that vending machine restock guys need a background in statistical analysis, but surely someone up the line has noticed that this product has failed to move a single unit in the history of its existence.
E6- Starbust. Midlevel execs who are trying to quit smoking, surfers. When are they going to just make an all-pink Starburst pack, already? Those green ones are the grenades of the sleeve.
E7- Lorna Doone shortbread cookies. Though typing the phrase “My opinions on shortbread are already well-documented” has singlehandedly caused me re-evaluate my life and the choices that have brought me to the point at which I’m able to make such a statement, I just want to reiterate- who the hell picks shortbread as a snack?
E8- Snackwells cookies. Fat chicks. Disturbingly familiar with Snackwells brand products thanks to a childhood spent under the dietary tutelage of an overweight parent, I can tell you how the process works: Lower fat=ability to eat more of the product with less of the guilt. The full box should read “Serving Size- You’re holding it in your grubby, sausagey hands”.
E9-Kit Kat Crispy. Average people of average weight with average intellect who tell you stories about their kids. Aren’t all Kit Kats crispy? Isn’t that the selling point? It’s kind of hard to make a wafer-based product not crispy, though I’d buy it in the name of science.
FO-Joey’s Pound Cake. Girls in accounting who have just been dumped by their boyfriends. This is the start of Obesity Row. Fitting.
F2-Newtons Minis. Props to Nabisco for managing to turn a dime from figs, especially after that whole Raiders-of-the-Lost-Ark-dead monkey PR nightmare, but this is just greedy. I’ve never seen anyone turn down a Newton on the grounds that it was “just too gigantic.”
F4-Entenmann’s Carrot Cake. My grandmother, Grandmothers of the World, Rabbit Grandmothers.
F6-Devil Dogs. No data available. Though they sell surprisingly well considering they’re named for two things I don’t want to put in my mouth.
F8-Joey’s Marble Cake. Girls in accounting who were dumped by their boyfriends a day or two after their colleagues
HO-H4- Lifesavers and Carefree gum. I’m pretty sure these are just cardboard cutouts standard with every vending machine.

*doesn’t make any sense.

Grindstoned

2007-03-07T14:16:00.000-05:00

My current job is somewhat uncommon, and yet not in the least bit exciting. I'm more than happy to tell people the company I work for, but I have a self-imposed gag order on giving anyone my actual title or going into any sort of detail about what it is I do, coworkers included. I've run through all of the different kinds of people that exist in the world (at least those found on the "Guess Who?" board), and there is not a single one that could possibly come away from an explanation of my job's duties a richer person.

While not at a particular loss for not being able to share my occupation with the world, I do sort of mourn the fact that I never grew up into one of the standard occupations rendered so lovingly in cartoons on the pages of my French workbook, like a butcher or a fisherman or aunt. There's something to be said for having a job of the ages, so that if you were to suddenly find yourself in another era past or future, Connecticut Yankee/Bill-Ted style, you wouldn't have to hastily make up some lie or risk some sort of grandfather paradox because you accidentally taught a civilization what a "database" was before its time. I kind of enjoy not having to explain my job to anyone for their own sanity, and though I have secretly always craved a unique job, I wouldn't relish having to give every new person I met a rundown of my life, like when you meet someone who's seven feet tall or from Alaska. I would make exceptions:

Furrier. I kind of like the idea of dealing in pelts, like a pilgrim or an owl. Plus, there's something very solid about coming home after work smelling like a bear or a wolf. It beats smelling like a spreadsheet. Downside: Omnipresent PETA members.

Mad scientist. This one's not that difficult to achieve, due to ever-expanding fields of science, and the rather general nature of the job title. All you have to do is become a scientist, then go batshit insane (I suppose it could work the other way around, as well, if one was up for the challenge). There are certain areas of science that would lend themselves more poetically to mental imbalance than others--a mad agricultural soil scientist doesn't have the same ring to it as say, a mad volanologist or a mad geneticist-- but on the whole, I think it's a pretty storied tradition. Downsides: Constant pressure to keep up with advances in the field and new technology, resulting in a stream of younger, hotshot mad scientists angling for your job.

Chess Grandmaster. There are two ways your day can end: One, you won. Two, you lost. There's a certain tranquility in the simplicity of it . Also, everyone would address you as "Grandmaster", mostly because you'd fucking insist upon it. Downsides: Birthday/Christmas gifts from coworkers and Secret Santas would always be novelty chess sets along the "Simpsons" or "Star Wars" line.

Funeral Director. Everyone you'd meet would be having a worse day than you. Assuming some sort of normal distribution, no matter how crappy your day is, within the scope of your universe, it's the best. Downsides: Constant realization of your own mortality; also, messy.

Q. From the James Bond series. The crux of his job is figuring out how to fit explosives into increasingly smaller objects, then basking in 007's appreciation; it's basically a Dremel tool, some C4, and a legion of devoted lab assistants rolling in hazard pay. There aren't a lot of opportunities for a science geek to save the world, but this is definitely the one that gets you most laid. Downsides: M seems kind of a bitch to work for.

Longshoreman. I don't really know exactly what a longshoreman does, but they seem to lead a pretty hedonistic lifestyle. You never hear about anyone frowning upon a longshoreman for swearing too much, getting too drunk, sleeping around. They get away with murder. Probably literally. Downsides: I don't know, but there's got to be some, otherwise I feel like I'd have met more longshoremen.

Jack-of-all-Trades. I dunno. Just seems handy. Would look good on a business card. Downsides: Union dues would really add up.

One man's treasure

2007-03-01T13:13:00.000-05:00

In gathering my belongings at work in preparation for my move to a new desk, one that actually sees visible rays of sunlight for a period of 11-12 minutes in the later afternoons, May-August, I'm finding that my residence for the past two years has come to resemble those dusty old closets in which wizened old Chinese men keep their mogwai and cursed monkey paws. Some oddities:

For my job, I communicate with a large number of institutions, and often am required to send them prepaid packages with which to return documents to me, for which I select the postage. These are the supremely gay Legends of Hollywood "Judy Garland" stamps, which I use for institutions that I loathe more than the usual (institutions that I like/have yet to incur my wrath get the venerable "Baseball Sluggers"). The idea of a tightass, Old BoyVice President bringing an envelope covered in Liza's mom to the mailroom not only keeps me from puncturing major arteries with office supplies, but sometimes even turns my frown into a blank, neutral expression on mornings when I'm still particularly drunk.

This is a small pot made for me by a coworker taking "Ceramics I" as her elective when getting her Master's so she could leave this very job. While touched by the gesture, I was immediately informed that this was her practice pot, and that the glaze is highly poisonous, so it's not really suitable for, you know, use. I use it to store the cough drops I offer to people who reheat fish in the microwave.

These are the pictures on my bulletin board. Since I'm unmarried, my family avoids the camera with a Jackal-like consistency, and I have no pictures of friends that do not involve beverages or obscene gestures, I've appropriated pictures from other sources so as to appear normal.

1. This is a photomagnet of a lanky, awkward teenage girl and her trusty basketball, left by the previous owner of the bulletin board. I tell people it's my daughter (I'm 27) and she's a star power forward, then watch their faces as they privately wonder if their own teenager is having sex.

2. This is a picture sent in by a young man trying to get something published, following the ever-important seventh step to succeeding in business-"Make sure to include a photo of yourself topless". I think he looks like a dickhead. When people ask if he's my boyfriend, I say "No, he's a dickhead."

3. This came as a placeholder in a coworker's wedding album, and I put it on my bulletin board so that people will assume that I came from the hard-knock, tuberculosis-ridden streets of Limerick, and that when I say "If you could, please get back to me at your earliest convenience", they know that I fucking mean it.

This is my collection of miniaturized items brought back to me by a coworker that actually gets sent places for work (it included an impossibly adorable mini-Tabasco bottle until this past weekend, when I made a batch of impossibly adorable Bloody Marys). I 've never thought to ask where he gets sent that he's given so many tiny foodstuffs. Perhaps our company does a lot of business in Lilliput.

This is my jar of forks, soy sauce, and a shower cap. I had assumed most cubicle-dwellers have one, but upon further inspection last week, I realized that it's just me, and that this jar makes me look like I'm batshit insane.

This is the collection of highly-processed food I keep at my desk for when I need to eat dinner before going out, which coworkers tell me looks like the contents of a freshman boy's dorm room. I laugh goodnaturedly, but if ever we're all forced to live in a fallout shelter following a nuclear war that unexpectedly occurs between the hours of 9-5 M-F, I am so fucking not sharing.

These are the pumpkin-flavored Godiva chocolates sent to me by my grandmother around the holidays. They are without a doubt the most vile, putrid thing I have ever put in my mouth, and it was only out of sheer inflexibility that I did not immediately lick the bottom of my shoe to get rid of the taste. I keep these around for two reasons; one, in the hopes that someone will actually take one of these when I casually offer it to them, and two, so that on especially rotten days, I can say to myself "Hey, at least I'm not in the midst of swallowing a pumpkin-flavored Godiva chocolate", which really helps me put things in perspective.

Over the River and Through the Woods

2007-02-22T15:34:00.000-05:00

With some vacation days nearing expiration, I decided to squeeze in a surprise visit to my beyond awesome grandparents, carefully coordinating with my uncle so as to dance the fine line of Surprising Old People that falls between "Pleasantly Caught Unawares" and "Massive Coronary". After five days of drinking so severe that I actually began to feel myself devolving, I was looking forward to a couple of days spent padding around in slippers, playing cribbage, and introducing my grandparents to basic features on their electronic equipment in a benevolent, godlike manner (Last Channel, Delete Messages, etc.). Tuesday morning proved to be a high point of my trip, as I convinced my grandmother to take a break from her endless, bloodhound-like search for microscopic crumbs and sit down to watch the bootleg copy of Jackass 2 that my uncle had dropped off (or, as she later referred to it in a conversation with her sister, "You know, The Assholes? Two."). Sample conversation:

Grandmother: I couldn't hear that. What did he say?
Me: He said "I am not eating that fucking shit."
Grandmother: Does he mean real shit?
Me: Jesus, no! Oh wait, yes. Sorry.

After our (read: my) decision to take in the special unrated features, we'd wiled the better part of the afternoon away and segued neatly into "The People's Court" and "Judge Judy", which after three days' of viewings, I can safely assure you would not exist in a world without at least two of the following: used cars, security deposits, broken condoms/uneducated hicks. A good, relaxing time overall, but after years of city living in which my shelves have shelves, I sometimes get a little out of sorts with all of the available space and amenities, and the highly irrational means in which they use it:

This is but a small portion of my grandmother's vast collection of candles, none of which are actually meant for burning because "that's how fires get started". Though I've pointed out that by refusing to light a single wick, she deprives the candles of their very raison d'etre, she'll have none of it. The most frustrating thing about the whole thing is that they're all descriptively named after incredibly delicious foodstuffs, leading some primal part of me to actually desire to eat wax. I'm not sure if that was their original intention, but score one for Yankee Candle.

Note: That front candle is entitled "Sparkling Angel". I find this bothersome because at some point my grandmother stood in a store and thought to herself, "Hm. I wonder what an angel smells like when it burns?"

This is my grandparents' Sitting Room, which is somewhat innacurately named in that one is not allowed to actually sit within its confines (even entering the room is discouraged). This room exists entirely as a showpiece for visitors, reminiscent of some Victorian tradition in which the ability to keep a room pristine indicates Good Virtue and Gentlemanly Qualities. They've been living in this house for three years, and as far as I know, there's still a possibility that all of that furniture is made of cardboard.

This is my grandfather's collection of creepy, leering dogs, arranged on his bureau so that no matter what vantage point you view them from, they are staring at you, defying all properties of light. As for the warped, freakish glass clown in the background, in 27 years, not a visit has gone by that I haven't expected it to come to slowly come to life, look me straight in the eye, and huskily whisper "I'm going to kill you."

Note:Just above this shelf, they keep a picture of me as a teenager that is only slightly less unsettling.

Do your grandparents have a heart-shaped jacuzzi in their private bathroom? Well, mine do. And that's all I have to say about that.

These are a few of my grandmother's Hummels, a sort of collectible German figurine that ranks somewhere between Beanie Babies and Faberge eggs in terms of classiness/worth (far, far closer to Beanie Babies). Though my mother and aunt are also rabid fans, my cousin and I have been unnerved by these since we were children, and whenever we're told that we stand to inherit them, we usually just look at each other, shrug, and say "You can have 'em." The worst part about them is that they depict cherubic young German children from the Nazi era doing mundane, angelic things that I have never seen a single child do, let alone a Hitler Youth.

1. I'm not sure there is a pose in the world that can make one look stupider than "Staring Blankly at Two Piglets While Wearing Leiderhosen".

2. He is looking (slightly downward) into your soul.

3. First off, I don't know who issues a 6-year old a shotgun, but that seems a moot point. Second, he's using binoculars to presumably look for his next kill, when there's a rabbit not two feet in front of him. Third, nothing robs you of your innocence more than a porcelain depiction of a rabbit asking to be shot.

People Who End Their Day of Work Feeling Even Less Fulfilled Than Me

2007-02-15T15:25:00.000-05:00

1. Author of the text at the back of books that describes the font that was used.
2. Advertising Manager, Stanley Bostitch B8 Staples, 1/4" Account.
3. Filing clerk, China National Civil Records Office, Chan-Chang division.
4. The "Time to make the donuts!" guy.
5. Meeting Leader for the Alcoholics Anonymous chapter nearest the bar I was at last night.
6. Robert Glovsky, of Boston-area law firm Mintz, Levin, Cohn, Ferris, Glovsky and Popeo.
7. Director of Research and Development for the wheel.
8. Head of Security, Carville Leprosarium.
9. New Recipe Creator for Kellogg's Rice Krispies.
10. Head of the US Tourism Board, Nagasaki, Japan.

On Imperfect Things Which Could Stand to be Improved

2007-02-13T10:36:00.000-05:00

Girl Scouts' Trefoils. As a young, entreprenaurial scout, I tried not to pass judgment on my customer's choices, but when someone did ask if I had these, I was immediately suspect, as if preferring bland shortbread cookies to Samoas was the manifestation of some sort of dangerous kink in their personality. I half-expected the next words out of their mouthsto be "Also, how much do you want for that sash? Unwashed."

Tonic. I've got my own personal issues with tonic, but those aside, I don't understand why this is such a popular mixer. Is it because the horrifically bitter flavor distracts the taste buds from the bite of the accompanying liquor? Couldn't the same thing be said of, say, a kick to the groin? And yet no one orders a Gin and Kick to the Groin.

Revolving doors. At what point did a normal door become not good enough? I am near certain that one of these doors will be directly responsible for my death. The only thing that suppresses my rage towards the inventor each and every time I get stuck in one of these is picturing the look on women's faces in bars as he says to them "Me? I'm a door architect."

Stressballs. "Man, what a crappy existence. If only I could symbolically channel all of my existential worries and concerns over my future into a foam ball shaped like a smiley face. Ah, all better now."

New Jersey Town Names. Hackensack? Mahwah? Tewksbury? It's a rare place that sounds like you'd imagine it smells, but Jersey seems to nail it every time. We can't all live in Celebration or Winter Haven, but at least Florida manages to at least pretend that it's something other than God's Waiting Room.

On Perfect Things Which Cannot Possibly Be Improved

2007-02-09T11:45:00.000-05:00

Toilet paper. I'm just psyched that after the advent of two-ply, scientists decided to quit while they were ahead. Unlike garbage bags, someone had the good sense to say, "Able to wipe your ass with it? Check. Now how we doing on cancer?"

Flyswatter. It's got to be nice knowing that you're leaving this world at the hands of a machine designated specifically for your execution, instead some hastily rolled newspaper or magazine that got jerryrigged at the last minute. I'd probably pick old age/in the arms of a much younger lover as my method of final exit, but if it's going to be murder, at least have the respect to premeditate it, you know? I'm worth it.

Cupcakes. At some point, someone took the cake--already a near perfect machine in itself--and said, "There's got to be a way to reduce the cake:frosting ratio", and just like that, the world became a better place. I hope that person went on to live a rich and meaningful life, and didn't let that bitch Betty Crocker bogart all the dividends. On a side note, there is not a person in my life whom I would not gladly auction off in exchange for cupcakes.

Tetris. I can't beat Tetris. I can't even come close. And yet, every time I pick up my Gameboy, I make an attempt, then am made to feel like an idiot by the concept of placing shapes in a straight line. If ever I invented something that caused millions of people to feel stupider, I would feel like the king of the fucking world. On another side note, I'm not that good a person.

Chewing tobacco. Yeha, yeah, it's bad for you. You'll lose your tongue. I don't dip, but if you're someone that does, there is no more perfect delivery system than chewing tobacco. There's something to be said for a mind-altering substance that essentially does away with the middle men; unlike liquor, which must be fermented, distilled, bottled, and then most likely mixed with something to distract one from the fermenting, distilling, and bottling processes, with tobacco, what you see is what you get, and it's up to you to get it in your bloodstream the easiest way possible. It reduces men to the same running line of thought they had as two year olds: "Will it make you feel good? Put it in your mouth."

Pixie sticks. I don't know how this marketing meeting went, but I imagine the pitch was something like this: "You know how kids like sugar? Let's sell them sugar. See you guys Monday."

Track and field. Unlike most other sports, which get bogged down by complex sets of rules and explaining those complex sets of rules to your friends' lame girlfriends at the bar, track and field events break down sports to the most base elements:
a. Sprints- Run faster than that guy.
b. Discus- Throw this heavy thing farther than that guy.
c. Long jump- Jump further than that guy.
d. Pole vaulting- This one's a little complicated. Let's just replace it with bowling.

Greek mythology. There is no such thing as an anticlimactic ending to a Greek myth. No one gets the girl, or retires to the country, or lives on the street with his son in order to get a coveted job at an investment banking firm. Men eat their cildren, women have sex with swans, even the friggin dogs have three heads. Aesop was well and good with his talking animals and his morals, but when it comes to imparting lasting lessons on your little ones, the prospect of being tied to a rock to have their liver eaten out by an eagle on a nightly basis gets the job pretty well done.

From Rags to Slightly More Expensive Rags

2007-02-05T11:19:00.000-05:00

Walking to the subway this morning, fresh off losing some cash in what might be the least desirable real estate ever found on a Super Bowl scoring grid--I think I would have had a better chance if I'd drawn the decimal places or pi-- I spotted an unscratched lotto ticket on the ground. A longtime fan of Cashwords, which also double as currency in my family, I had just purchased the same type of ticket last night, to no avail, so the significance of finding a lotto ticket, on the ground, hours after losing on the very same ticket was not lost. I've seen enough movies to recognize the universal sign for "You're going to win a fortune and your life will change forever". But while Charlie had to go through the emotional turmoil of the Chocolate Factory tour and that creepy bubble room before he got his golden ticket, a lifetime spent immersed in feel-good movies means I have the luxury of already knowing this ticket is my way outta here, without having to scratch it off and go through any of that Not Poor, Just Broke nonsense.

Taking a lesson from the good people who wrote King Ralph, I've decided to sit on it for awhile and assess my life, so I'll know who my genuine friends are and what I truly value in life and all that shit, at least until rent's due. The universe doesn't tell me things very often--I think my last epiphany was "You didn't need that last shot", which didn't really do me much good post facto--so I intend to milk this missive for all it's worth and see what kind of future insight I can interpret from the ticket itself:

EARN and RETRY. I'll admit, this doesn't look promising. This pretty much guarantees some sort of crisis/comical mixup in which I end up sleeping on the streets or in jail, before I learn my lesson and end up broke, but happy. Nice and all, but I think I'd rather just get the riches and leave it at that.

RAT. This either points to a future betrayal of trust by a 1920s racketeer, or an actual rat. If given the choice, I'll probably go with the rodent.

HOE. I wish the glare was covering up an "S", but it's not. The universe called me a ho, and misspelled it at that. Cheeky little cosmos.

TIME. I bet every time someone goes to the universe with some crisis and asks for answers to their vapid life questions and the universe is all sick and tired of having to tell people that they should follow their hearts and leave their corporate jobs etc., it's just like "Ummmm....time?", and people get all wide-eyed and nod their heads solemnly and walk away changed, and the universe is just like, "Man, you people are suckers."

PECAN and APE. These don't really fit in here, I'm guessing they're more of a "rosebud" type clue that will make sense to me at some crucial point in the future. I look forward to the day when a mysterious stranger in some Moroccan bar whispers the word "Pecan" to me and everything comes together.

PLAQUE. I have no doubt in my mind that my mother is somehow behind this one. You might think that it seems like an awful lot of trouble to tap into the underlying machinations of the universe just to badger your daughter about flossing, but you would be vastly understimating my mother's committment to nagging. In fact, I'm sure she was going to to go with "TARTAR", but decided to throw the "Q" as punishment for my last cavity.

FLAW. Jesus, I get it. Greed is the root of all evil, don't let it corrupt me. Losing subtelty points fast.

Things I Would Do if I Had an Identical Twin

2007-02-01T11:45:00.000-05:00

1. Commit multiple jewel heists. If caught, exploit courtroom loophole involving identical twins/fingerprints, get off scott free. Sell jewels, give Twin twenty bucks or a gift card or something.
2. Secretly switch with Twin before her wedding, wait until my turn at the "I dos", scream "I DON'T!". After a lengthy pause for effect, say "Because I'm Twin's sister. Shouldn't you be able to recognize the woman you're going to marry? Just kidding, I'm sure you'll be very happy together."
3. Feign a life-threatening illness for Twin, and inform employer that I am the only one able to donate (unspecified, made-up bodily fluid). Take two months off work to "heal".
4. Starting at infancy, slowly build a sororial relationship based on fear and subservience, so that once we reach adulthood, I can force her to wait in line for me at the DMV.
5. Steal all her nice clothes, obviously.
6. When my sister dies, pretend it's me and host an open-casket wake, then listen to what everyone says about me. Depending on what people say/the hassle of switching a death certificate/how much time I've got left anyway, switch back after the funeral, but not before Twin's family has sprung for my headstone.
7. For every person that makes an attempt at a witty Sweet Valley High reference, look them in the eyes and say "Well, we were triplets, but the other one died."
8. Never tell anyone that I have a twin. Hide similarly-dressed Twin in the bathroom, gather friends for leisurely shrooming session, then eat harmless dummy shrooms. Spend the afternoon fucking with their heads.
9. When douchebags in bars inquire about the possibility of a threesome, tell them that one of us has the clap. Are they a gambling man?
10. Every time our parents accidentally call us by the wrong name, sob violently and claim to be unloved. Take the ensuing guilt to the bank at Christmas and birthdays.
11. Take up a hard-drinking, hard-partying lifestyle. When organs fail, play upon Twin's sense of sisterly duty, then demand one of each of hers.

Start it Up

2007-01-26T12:34:00.000-05:00

Today's launch of Windows Vista has already started bringing the detractors out of the Angry Nerd woodwork, roaring about bugs and patches, especially those hyper-paranoid internet denizens that constantly fret about being watched, or observed, or recorded, the ones that use the phrase "Orwellian" and genuinely do not expect you to stab them with a utensil. Though I've found that my friends of this type are typically the absolute last people I would expect to be performing any sort of incriminating, or even interesting, activities in their off-hours--I would be shocked if any of them even leave dishes in the sink overnight--I admit that it lends them a certain air of mystery, like they might come home after a long day at work, take off their cuff links and unbind their breasts, then sit down with a cup of cocoa and a snuff film.

Someone's got a case of the Mondays...

Now, I'm not against my webdoings being recorded for future use; at one point while writing my college thesis, the only thing that kept me from lashing the other end of my school tie to the overhead light fixture was checking my Ebay feedback for the brief buoy of being described as A+++++. But considering the fact that I am a moth to any NSFW flame that gets passed my way, I don't see how anything named a "cookie" would be the thing that brings the government to my door. When friends complain that they're worried that their work's IT department will pick up the use of swear words or references to actual social events taking place outside of their office, I apologize, then write a Tourette's-like stream of filter-trippers (fuck shit sex Hitler bestial heroin manga) in transparent text at the bottom of the email. It's not that I think computers aren't smart- Clippy's intuition as to when I'm writing a letter is uncanny, and Joshua figured out how to win a global thermonuclear war back when I was still writing "BOOBIES" upside down on my calculator- it's just I don't think the people monitoring them care.

Of course, I'm not saying that the new wave of recommendations systems are infallible-you post one sarcastic fake review of a friend's book on Java algorithms, and Amazon thinks you're Bill Gates for the next four years- but all in all, they're pretty spot-on about most of their suggestions. When I go to my Netflix account and find that they think I'd like some of my already-favorite movies , I feel momentarily validated, like I've done something right, followed the correct course of human existence or something. I think my ultimate fear is to login to Netflix and find that the "Movies You'll Heart" section looks like this:

Who Wants to Live Forever?

2007-01-23T14:43:00.000-05:00

Reading some light armchair philosophizing this week, and there's a fun little dissection of immortality, one of the few philosophical experiments in the book that actually ends in an answer and not some big old rusty trombone for Hume. For our society and entertainment industry being what it is, a lot's actually been said on the subject- hell, even Indiana Jones weighed in on it, and that's hard to do when you speak only in pithy one-liners and gutteral sex moans-but, like the book, they seem to end up on the same page; namely, boo, immortality.

Dishwasher safe.

What gives? Immortality sounds pretty top-notch to me. I was forced to read Tuck Everlasting in grade school just like everyone else, and though I now question why the NYS school system was forcing me to confront my own death at the age of ten while neglecting to go over the ins and outs of "biology" until several years later, it still seems like they were laying down some pretty premature foundation. The moral of this book kind of hit you in the face at a young age, and didn't leave a lot of room for musing on the pro-immortality side of the argument (I believe the succinct-nay, eloquent- thesis of my review was "You get bored if you live forever so don't.") In the same way that repeated childhood readings of "Grimm's Fairy Tales" ("horrifying your kids straight since 1812") hammered home the point that giving up my firstborn in exchange for some gold-spun-from-straw is a bad idea without really exploring the positive fiscal aspects of the bargain, I mildly resent the fact that these assumptions were placed in my head at such a young age and with so little debate.

This story wouldn't have been as compelling if his name was "Mike".

Susan Ertz said "Millions long for immortality who don't know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon." To which I say, well, if you don't like football, then maybe immortality isn't really your bag. Also to which I say, "Who the fuck is Susan Ertz?" I think Highlander had a nice little breakdown of what one should do with their immortality, which is to drink, screw, and prank your way through the centuries, with the occasional beheading of an enemy; also, antiquing. I'm sure there's religious implications and all, and watching your loved ones die again and again probably doesn't tickle , but come on. The whole "get shot, get right back up again, T2-style" wouldn't get old for ice ages, not to mention lesser Uncle victories and the ability to save mankind and whatnot. It's a pretty sweet life when you become a superhero out of boredom.

Anyway, you know how the stories go, this all ends with me pleading with the devil at some point.

Elegy for an Old Lady

2007-01-18T14:04:00.000-05:00

Elegy more in the reflective sense, as my grandmother is not dead- in fact, it was recently stated point blank that after my cousin graduates in May, it will officially be my turn to provide the event/milestone for which she must stay alive, which is only fair, given that my cousin has managed to stretch a graphic design degree at the community college into a six-year affair- but she is a cool, cool old lady, my favorite as a matter of fact, and she deserves to have her praises sung on a little-read blog that she does not know exists, and never will, as the act of trying to explain the heady concept of a blog to a woman who can't quite wrap her head around the "Redial" function of her phone must surely already be reserved for someone else's purgatorial task.

My grandmother believes that every single morsel of food must be removed from its original packaging and rewrapped in SaranWrap or another acceptable sealant; to ask her the reasoning behind this results in a look of abject horror so utterly convincing that you actually begin to believe that you might as well have been pissing on your cold cuts all these years for all the good the deli wrapping is doing you. In this vein, though, she also shares my appreciation for the wide world of questionable meats and processed foods. To whit, her latest care package:

Prepackaged tuna steak, salmon, beef jerky, Tyson's "Buffalo Style Chicken Chunks" (made with all dark meat!), and the viande de resistance, Bite Size Teriyaki Snacks, which is essentially Pupperoni for humans.

Firstly, I love picturing my grandmother wheeling around the supermarket with the shopping list of a WWII trench soldier. Second, dark meat chicken jerky? Who even knew such a thing existed? I'm half expecting the next package to just contain a bag of beaks and hooves. Thirdly, she also included Necco Wafers in the shipment, perfectly and subtly asserting her old ladiness. The woman knows her way around a care package.

I'm a big fan of things that unabashedly embrace their stereotypes- Europeans who smoke with their fingers held straight, hot dog vendors who say "Whaddaya want?", dogs that lick themselves- so the fact that although my grandmother could, and often does, strike fear in the hearts of men for as little as forgetting to double a coupon, she still enjoys scratchoff lotto tickets, watering her plants, and sending pastel Hallmark cards could not be more delightful. At the relatively tender age of 61, the woman strapped herself to a young man and a parachute and jumped out of a plane; now at 71, she's got some heart problems and has difficulty walking for distance, but steadfastly refuses to "look like one of the cripples" (during one particularly long visit last October, I convinced her to go to bingo at Foxwoods Casino by pointing out that at her age, things were only going to go downhill, and having just had her hair done, she was, in fact, looking the best she ever would for the rest of her life, so why not take to the streets?). Over Thanksgiving, when my mother produced a wheelchair from the back of her flaming chariot and insisted that she use it within the mall, my grandmother instead placed her oxygen tank in the chair and pushed it around herself, so it looked as though she was some sort of orderly who had lost their senile old person. One of the many members of the Buns and Liquor family in possession of a Handicapped Parking pass ("cripple pass"), she tells me that when a member of her friend group dies, those little old ladies clamor to put dibs on first the parking pass, then the clothes, and things get ugly. Fake IDs for old people- who knew?

The woman WHITEOUTS HER POSTITS. That is devotion to a literary cause. I'm so lazy I frequently write on my own hands rather than locating paper; this puts me to shame. All this on top of the text of the note, which reads:

"Jen- Put peanut butter on these for breakfast. Yum, Yum!! Also, I found Smucker Uncrustables GRILLED CHEESE!! "Micro" oops!"

If I ever find someone else in this world who is so excited by the prospect of premade, crustless, microwavable grilled cheeses that they give it the "all caps, double exclamation point" treatment, I'll have to immediately sneak up behind them and strangle them with a piano wire, because the world does not have enough room for such awesomeness. These are the same Post-its that she hands me each time I visit, asking me to label things that I want when she dies, oblivious to the fact that a. it's weird to claim one's worldly possessions the same way that one keeps their office workers from eating their lunch and b. the legality of the whole endeavor is questionable at best. Of course, she's also stated that when she does kick it, we should just cremate her in whatever box is handy, then toss the ashes in a coffee can, which puts me in the unenviable position of either looking like a dick in front of the funeral director or not fulfilling an old lady's dying wish.

Another example of my grandmother's undeniable coolness, as if one was needed:

Text reads:
"Didn't want to walk to the den to get a smaller envelope."

SHE APOLOGIZES FOR WASTING ENVELOPE SPACE. As I've pointed out to her, the very act of writing across the envelope, apologizing for wasting its intangible contents, justified the use of the larger envelope in itself, but when it comes down to getting into a metaphysical discussion with your granddaughter or watching Judge Judy, well, I'm big enough to know my place in the pecking order.

Outgoing baggage

2007-01-07T18:44:00.001-05:00

Last weekend I was (sarcastic adjective here) enough to have my purse stolen, a watershed moment in any girl's life, though one I had been hoping to put off til old age, when I would snatch back the purse and begin hitting the thief over the head, surprising him with my spunk. I hadn't realized purse theft still happened in NYC, and in this day and age, I don't really see much of a profit in it, but I suppose they can always bring it back to the Artful Dodger or whatever it is people do when they steal knockoff purses from the kinds of bars that offer such specials as "Hey, you, come here. Drink this."

I'm not sure a top hat and ascot are the best way for a pickpocket to "blend in" with the crowd.

While not worried about someone assuming my name or credit line- woe to the person that plays the identity theft lottery and comes up as me- I was definitely concerned with the fact that I had lost my keys. Wanting nothing more than to sleep in my own bed and slit my wrists with my own knives, my friends John and Lee forced entry into the building and I called my landlords, a 70+ Polish couple who have managed to conquer the NYC real estate market despite an inability to conjugate verbs in anything other than the present tense. After a brief phone conversation, I walked to meet the man half of the couple, adopting the proper level of shame that a girl must exhibit when meeting up with a 70-year-old man at 2 AM wearing the world's shortest skirt ("Nice shoes," I said sarcastically to John earlier. "Nice vagina," said he. Touche.), and brought him back to my apartment. Though by the grace of God and Arthritis I was able to beat him up the stairs without exposing anything, and had managed to craft a pretty sympathetic little sob story that danced around the fact that I had been hanging out in dive bars dressed as someone who would be described in a court of law as "asking for it", the opening of my apartment door grandly revealed the remnants of a couple of earlier hours spent entertaining at my apartment, and the night's activities could not have been any more obvious unless Peter O'Toole himself was standing in my kitchen refilling his highball. After sending him on his way, my credit check effectively nullified, my friends extraordinaire bought me a slice of pizza that made my troubles seem so far away, pressed twenties in my hand, and went their merry way.

Skirt: Hydrogen isotope

The next morning, after purchasing a cup of coffee the size of my torso and briefly revelling in a Sunday morning in which my mother had no way of feverishly contacting me to dispense such wisdoms as "Don't eat poison" and "(TLC Show) says that you can make a small space seem bigger through the creative use of shelves!", I hurried through the rounds of reclaiming my life, including the purchase of a sleek little cell phone number that I manhandled for the rest of the afternoon. On Monday, as I was on the phone with the last of my card companies, the bar called- they'd found my purse with everything in it, in stark contrast to the previous morning's visit and query, at which I was told they had not found my purse with everything in it. While for some people, this represents a restored faith in humanity, a fuzzy of warmth for fellow mankind, I was pissed to have to have gone through the hassle, and even more pissed when I found that the only things missing from the purse were the cash and the somewhat expensive new concealer I had just purchased, which meant the perpetrator was either female or a mime.

"Wait a minute! I'm going to die alone! Silently."

Even worse, I was now faced with the Sophie's Choice of phones. I'd grown oddly attached to the new one over the course of two days, like when they let you take the classroom hamster home for the weekend and come Monday morning, and you found yourself contemplating going all Gere. I never had any problems with the old phone, we had a strong working relationship, but as soon as it was out of sight, this new phone was the flexible blonde secretary, all sleek and contoured, and any devotion I had to the old battleaxe melted away. There's the new ad slogan right there: "Samsung: Phones so good you'll find yourself making longwinded, creepily sexual comparisons about them."

Anyways, I decided to go the self-flagellatory route and return the pretty new phone. If I were a better person, I'd probably learn a lesson from all this, but, you know, eh.

Phrases That When Used in My Presence Will Get You Punched in the Face

2007-01-05T13:54:00.000-05:00

1. "fin de siecle "
2. "I only read nonfiction."
3. (incessant sound of nearby coworker's Japanese-inspired ringtone)*
4. "I'd like to smell the cork first."
5. "Please punch me in the face."
6. "Motherfudger"
7. "I just find his music so....transcendant."
8. "Well, I am a Scorpio, you know."
9. "So anyway, after I finished raping that kid..."
10. "Is this organic?"

*Soon. Soon.

New Year's Self-Realizations

2007-01-03T15:49:00.000-05:00

1. I look retarded in earmuffs.
2. You know you have bad taste in music when you find the Gap Rap catchy.
3. Oddly and unjustly, it seems far less awkward to ask the question "Is that your real hair?" than to answer it.
4. If there is a difference between prosecco and champagne, I will be damned if I care.
5.If someone asks you if you floss regularly, you will never, ever go wrong by just saying "yes".
6. I'm so happy I overcame the irrational fear of mushrooms that stemmed from the death of the king in the Babar series.
7. Pens are not to be used for stirring, no matter how ergonomically effective they are, and no matter how close they are to the beverage at hand.
8. I still harbor a great deal of resentment towards my mother for wrongfully teaching me that one needs to wash a pair of pants after 1-2 wearings.
9. Sometimes when someone asks you what you do for a living, it's better just to shake your head, put your finger to your lips, and say "Let's not spoil the moment."
10. There is no easier place to get into borderline violent fights about sports than an airport bar.

In Which I Go All Ansel Adams on Your Shit

2007-01-01T22:12:00.000-05:00

Christmas treated me well this year, bringing me an irresistably adorable little digicam, Trivial Pursuit (Genus VI!), a wad of sweet green, and some atomic alarm clock that my mother ordered from her Big Catalog of Needlessly Complicated Gadgets and Oddities. Considering that my morning routine consists of an hour long conversation with my snooze button, in which I trade off increasingly necessary hygienic-upkeep activities in exchange for nine minute naps, I'm not really sure I need a (radioactive) timepiece that utilizes the same technology used by the world's preeminent nuclear physicists, but gift horse/mouth, etc.

As I've only had the camera for a week, the only things I've had a chance to obtain pictures of, aside from a surprisingly entertaining experiment with stop-motion animation and a godawful New Year's Eve closeup taken by some renegade photographer in which I'm making a face that can only be described as "baby's first taste of pickled ass", are my childhood home in Northern NY, a microscopically small and unbelievably cluttered one-level that until two years ago had the distinction of being the only non-cartoon orange house in existence. Having lived away from home for ten years, it's always a treat to go through the pile of destruction that is the house and realize that when the 'rents do finally kick it, the will will most likely read "To Rubber: Your problem now. "

(Disclaimer: Yes, obviously the pictures conjure up the phrase "white trash". It's been open season on that joke for nigh a decade, but if you feel you have something new to contribute that isn't just a mangling of a Larry the Cable Guy routine, I'm nothing if not open to good insults)

Now that, that's a Northern NY garage if I ever saw one, and I didn't even capture the toolbench/weightlifting apparatus/punching bag half of the room. This was the scene of my father and mine's annual reunion upon coming back from the airport, where I was greeted with "Hey! Can you help me with this? It's a two-man job," and where I left with my jeans and sneakers soaked in gasoline. The moral here: Though the non-mouth end of the siphon may seem like the sweeter deal, looks can be deceiving.

Our couch. Rather, mine, as the parents have their own recliners, so this is more of a repository for AV equipment (361 days a year) and my ass (4 days a year). The latest in a long line of hand-me-down sofas, this couch has the distinction of a. being the most indescribably horrible piece of furniture I have ever seen in my entire life b. having had my grandmother die on it. You'd think this little tidbit of magical thinking would have precluded my father from accepting the donation, but hey, free couch.

My bedroom, now reappropriated for general storage and spillover from the rest of the house. A breakdown:

1. A stuffed animal ferret (gift from a friend). I do a terrific ferret impression. Seriously. The urge to throw me into a tub with the Dude is overwhelming.

2. This was the window spot that until two years ago housed this sticker:
Now, arson is no laughing matter (unless you set Steven Wright on fire- that guy's hilarious). But I always felt the slight twinge to strike up a match near the old oily rag pile just to see the look on the fireman's face when he heroically busted through the window and found a fully-grown 25 year-old woman asleep beneath the Carebear comforter.
3. Curio cabinets. Parents of the world, the best way to get your child to do anything you ask is to cultivate in them a desire to collect miniature unicorn figurines. As long as you remain their only means to the fix, they're putty in your hands.
4. Bug strip and Off. Thanks to a particularly severe family allergy to mosquitoes, these are fixtures in all four rooms of the house, and the smell of DEET still brings those awkward teenage years rushing back. I think this might even have been my baby mobile.
5. Bunk beds for an only child. Why? Still don't have a clue. Still fun to jump off of, though.
6. Light saber (dad's). I would ask why, but that would imply that there actually is a sensible answer to the question, beyond "The Rebel Alliance needed my help."
7. Precariously balanced telescope (dad's). When accidentally and somewhat painfully pinned beneath this while rifling through my suitcase, I remember thinking "Wow. Now this is a geeky way to go."

My childhood bookcase, bearer of years of fairy tales, Sweet Valley High novels, and maudlin teenage literature. A closeup, if you will:

Ah yes, I remember those cold winter nights when my dad would sit me down on his lap and read to me from my favorite book, "Urinalysis and Body Fluids". Isn't it every little girl's dream to meet her prince/overcome acute urate nephropathy?

Huh for the Holidays

2006-12-19T16:29:00.000-05:00

I'm busily preparing for my trip to the North Country, including two days of Christmas in Vermont with my father's side of the family, a nice enough crew who nonetheless refer to both me and the dog by the childlike y-ending version of our names. An eerily silent and unemotional bunch, the Buns and Liquor family is dependent on cards and board games to get us through the 48 hours we spend together each year; I worry that in the event of a death in the family, the remorse would only last until it became apparent that the even number of players required for Spades had been thrown off, at which point it would be demanded that I reproduce immediately and the child be taught the game in utero.

As the sole grandchild in the family for 14 years, I was required to learn to play cards right around the same time I learned the word for "card". Upon making a bad strategic play at the tender age of 8, my grandfather (a man so unable to grasp the very idea of youth that I have to assume that my father and uncle sprung forth fully-formed, Athena-style from my grandmother) turned to me and demanded that I pay the loser's fee; it's an odd choice, explaining to your child the concept of trump before going over procreation, but I picked up both eventually.

Baby's first Caribbean stud, low hole card wild

My family's not that big on gifts and has no real access to stores, so what few presents that are exchanged are overwhelmingly practical in nature; last year's collection of travel-sized shampoos and toothpastes pretty much signified the end of whatever youthful noel innocence I'd retained. It was also the first year that my cousins were informed that there was no Santa Claus, mercifully allowing the rest of us to stop our half-assed routine of pretending to be excited to open our gifts from "Santa" and then feigning great joy when we got those new Brita Water Filter replacement cartridges that the elves had been working on all year.

A contribution to my 401k? Thank you baby Jesus.

A lifetime late-sleeper, my parents have long delighted in torturing me as I slept peacefully, from my father's favorite "alarm clock" (throwing a cup of cold water on my head, running like a coward), to the series of unflattering photographs that my mother took as I lay unconscious following my wisdom teeth operation, for use as cautionary tales for her dental patients. Back when my cousins were smaller, my mother encouraged them to wake me up on Christmas morning using any means possible (the year that they donned their new wizard costumes before physically prying my eyes open with their tiny, creepy fingers was a particularly memorable, Clockwork Orange-esque way to start the day); now at the ages of 48, 14 and 11, the game has apparently not lost its luster, and I still find myself brought to consciousness by 170 pounds of teenager jumping onto my stomach as 120 pounds of mother documents the occasion. As the boy cousin is starting to get a little beefy, I pray to God this is the year teenage angst kicks in and they start finding the idea of doing anything adults tell them stupid.

Things I Would do if I had an Obscene Amount of Money

2006-12-13T15:07:00.000-05:00

1. Purchase a building at my alma mater, name it a dirty word.
2. Up the price for which I habitually dare people to do ridiculous and oftentimes dangerous things from one to three dollars.
3. Drink cheaper whiskey. Why? Why not.
4. Rewatch The Thomas Crown Affair, smile knowingly.
5. Bury a big chunk of cash somewhere and inform my heirs that they'll only be given its location if I expire from natural causes. Begin a torrid affair with my much younger butler, leave it all to him anyway.
6. Purchase love, affection, and happiness just to prove that it is in fact possible.
7. Buy that new student loan I've always wanted, paid off in full.
8. Instead of breaking up with someone in person, just hire Peter Gabriel to come in and do it for me.
9. Follow the advice given in the Barenaked Ladies' "If I Had a Million Dollars" word for word, enjoy looks on friends' faces when they are gifted with K-cars and monkeys.
10. Give some to charity or cancer or whatever.

Of (dead) mice and men

2006-12-07T12:28:00.000-05:00

After yet another dawn awakening to the sounds of a Rodent of Unusual Size, I decided to up the ante and purchase more traps, turning my apartment into a sort of Saw for mice- if they wanted to get out of there alive, they were going to have to really want it, at least more than they wanted peanut butter, which is probably quite the existential conundrum for a mouse.

Settling in to do my Christmas cards, which consists of drawing snarky conversation bubbles coming out of the mouths of the characters found on generic dimestore Xmas cards, I heard a snap, followed by a loud squealing. My sympathetic nervous system, dulled by years of lackluster business confrontations that end with nothing more than a curt "Well, then, I'm going to have to get back to you", immediately went into Flight mode, carrying me a full fifteen feet away into the bathroom, where I made a sound that can only be described as a string of consonants interspersed with the kinds of sacreligious statements that make Quentin Tarantino blush.

Hey! Homonyms!

Composing myself, I was able to shut the door to my living/bedroom and turn on my backup CD player, drowning out the screams of the frantic mouse with a party mix from 2002. Cursing myself for purchasing the "Superficial Wound" traps instead of the fatal kind, I decided that the best thing to do would be to live entirely out of my kitchen and never, ever go into the bedroom ever again, even if it meant sleeping in the bathtub and limiting my wardrobe options to the outfit I had on and a ladle. Luckily, the realization that I would never get to see the new Real World that I was currently DVRing hit me full force, resulting in a violent bludgeoning with the non-business end of a broom, and the subsequent donning of a sultry little yellow rubber glove/trash bag number that would excite janitors the world over.

My grandmother's lingerie.

Satisfied that I had asserted my dominance over the animal kingdom, celebration was in order, but upon coming out of the shower the next morning, I was confronted with another trapped and yet annoyingly alive mouse, squealing under my couch. After another quick trip to the bathroom to take the Lord's name in vain and to briefly toy with suicide, I finally sucked it up, picked the trap/mouse up, and brought it to the window to release it onto the ledge, which hopefully bought me some karma that will ironically pay itself back by actually killing the next mouse I catch.

Cheese Stands Alone

2006-12-04T15:40:00.000-05:00

I have no problem living with critters- three years of East Village walkups and a childhood spent in the country give you a pretty clear perspective on who would win if Rodents and Man were ever to throw down- but I've always thought there was a tacit understanding that any animals not paying rent would stay out of sight out of mind, and limit their mooching to shit that falls under my stove (oddly, I once had a similarly parasitic roommate on whom I placed the same restrictions ).

Remember the plague? Still bitter about that.

However, in the past couple of weeks, I've had a mouse who's been outright flaunting his existence. The little guy must have balls the size of peas. Not only has he taken up residence in my living/bedroom, peeking his head out from under my dresser every night before disappearing into an invisible and untraceable hole that at this point I have to logically assume is an unstable tesseract that sporadically appears behind my furniture, but I discovered he ate my emergency off-season Cadbury Creme Egg stash, a Ferdinandian assassination if there ever was one. On top of that, for the past two nights, I've awoken in the middle of the night to the sound of a mouse pacing around the perimeter of my room, eventually settling under the bed to loudly gnaw on something that I obviously don't value very highly, having forgotten what or where it is , but will be pissed to find out I've lost nonetheless. Last night, as I lay feverishly awake waiting for the sweet, sweet lullaby that is the sound of its neck snapping, I realized how little credit we really gave Tom, and what a dick Jerry was.

Way to perpetuate a stereotype there, Jer.

Lacking the space and the carpentry skills to set up the elaborate, yet effective, bowling ball/bathtub/bootkicking contraption that I seem to remember working so well as a kid, I've purchased some of those classic wooden mousetraps (also, if I had a man just hanging around my apartment who would be willing to be catapulted into a tub of water at my beck and call, I could probably save a lot of trouble and just, like, ask him to kill the mouse.). Years of Disney Afternoons would lead me to believe that the best way to catch a mouse is through the use of a giant piece of cartoonishly fragrant cheese, but the country girl in me knows that peanut butter is the only way to go.

Wait, this was a game? For more than one player?

Though not afraid of mice or dead mice themselves- I'm more of a "string of borderline racist expletives" kind of girl than a "high-pitched shriek" kind- I am in fact scared shitless by the traps themselves, partly because I know that I'll inevitably be drunkenly stepping on them someday, and partly because it blows my mind that you can purchase little instruments of death from Duane Reade for about 50 cents a pop. On a side note, you can tell you've reached the point of needing to set out traps when you realize that as you're laying them down, there exists within you an actual fear that a mouse might jump out and just snatch the peanut butter from you before it even touches the ground.

What I Keep in my File Cabinet at Work Instead of Actual Files, OR, Testing the Limits of How Inane a Blog Can Be

2006-11-29T17:36:00.000-05:00

1. Flask (inscription "Good Ol' Boys, Badass Toys" with a picture of a Mac truck). Picked this baby up at the 99 cent store and brought it to work during one particularly boring stretch of drone work, to share with a coworker on the roof like rebellious teens gettinh schnockered on schnapps. It seemed like it would be exciting and dangerous, but as with most events of my teenage years, was not. Turns out spreadsheets look the same with Jack as without, which is probably not an ad campaign the Jack Daniels Corporation will be snatching up anytime soon.

2. Emery boards. I take a secret pleasure in talking to someone over the phone while filing my nails like a classic bored 1980s secretary (think Janine in "Ghostbusters"). Sometimes I'll also chew gum and pretend to be extra-detached. This would be filed under "Whatever Gets You Through the Day".

3. Socks. Amongst the many injustices and dignity-strippers I face on a daily basis, I sit both below the air conditioning duct and next to a Russian, and I often have to toss these on to keep the extremities working in such a frigid climate. The thermostat control guy seems to think I'm joking when I ask him to "pee on my hands for warmth". I wish I were.

4. Frizz Ease Dream Curls Curl Perfecter. Because every working girl should look her best. I purchased this because it had an awful lot of superlative sounding promises in the name, although I want to know whose subconscious is so barren that they dream of curls. It's aight, but a bit of a letdown considering the name. Caveat Emptor, I guess.

5. Bubble Bobble Revolution for Nintendo DS. I bought this to play on my travels around Germany. I left it in my file cabinet. Maybe that's not a sob story for most people, but I near wept when I realized what had happened. There's probably a German word for "remorse for leaving your videogame at home when travelling a foriegn country". They have words for everything.

6. Aleve. For hangovers. Get off work, drink to forget work, wake up, go to work, take Aleve to forget drinking to forget work, repeat. Round and round like a circle game.

7. Approx. seven hundred pieces of Banana Laffy Taffy. The day after Halloween is a very good day to be the only person on the planet who likes banana flavored taffy. One night, I'm going to have a dinner composed entirely of taffy, to make my 9-year-old self proud.

8. Eye drops. For hangovers/crud in my eye. I swear to God, for someone who sits at a desk all day, you'd think I was some sort of camel for all the crap that gets in my eyes.

Things that Suck Harder, or That I Imagine Would Suck Harder, Than My Day

2006-11-27T16:50:00.000-05:00

1. Anal Cancer
2. My fantasy football team
3. Your Mom*
4. That whole Holocaust thing
5. Jumping off the Empire State Building and landing on a bicycle with no seat**
6. Industrial Air Cast Iron Pump Compressor - 4.5 HP, 60 Gallon, Model# ILA8046065
7. This post

*Only applicable for John Dabiri of Pasadena, CA.
**Cross-reference with "Grosser than Gross".

Plymouth Rock City

2006-11-17T11:22:00.000-05:00

Unfortunately, I've planned it so that I'll be eating and drinking my way around Bavaria mere hours before encountering my mother in her latest incantation, that of a newly svelte 48-year old, gastric bypassed woman. Figuring I'll be jetlagged as hell and fighting bantam instead of feather for a week, I've decided to resign myself to the holiday beatdown by placing my soul in small jar and just handing it over to her when she picks me up at the train station, saving myself the resistance energy and allowing her to devote more time to trying to win that damn "fiddle of gold/best that's ever been" bet she's always on about.

The expression on her face didn't tip you off that you might be getting a raw deal?

Still, there's a definite amount of interest amongst friends as to what exactly my mother looks like, having not seen her since about 50 pounds ago. Having gone through gastric bypass surgery followed by a DJ Tanneresque workout routine, she's almost halved her weight, and despite my inquiries towards whether or not she's covered in wrinkly old lady skin, she refuses to say or send pictures, as she's worried that I'll place them on the internet (and yet, I'm entrusted with her living will). My grandmother was allowed to see some hard copy photos of my mom in her underwear (I assume she used the camera's timer option and most definitely did not ask my dad to snap them, for self-preservation reasons), and confirms that my mother does indeed look "kinda creepy", and my uncle informs me that she's definitely lost her rather formidable boobs (I assume he asked someone else to judge, and most definitely did not look at his own sister's chest, again, for self-preservation reasons), but I won't really be able to see for myself until Wednesday night.

The other issue is the excessive preachiness that accompanies such an incredible weight loss. While I'm happy that she's healthier and able to nag more actively, the woman's definitely listing towards the "rub it in" side of the Good Ship Educate Others. Between myself and my grandmother--who each year brandishes a knife in order to proclaim ownership of the giblets and neck, despite the fact that in my 27 years of existence, no one has ever once even gagged in their general direction-- neither of us are looking forward to the disapproving looks and admonishments that will accompany each bite of food that surpasses the half a cup mark. Our only real hope is to find some small chink in her armor, some fatal flaw that wasn't there before surgery, and when reaching for seconds, exploit, exploit, exploit.

No thanks, I'm stuffed from lunch at the rendering plant.

S(k)ins of the flesh

2006-11-15T14:51:00.000-05:00

In planning* our upcoming trip to Germany this weekend, my friend Jess and I have laid down a challenge to partake of a different kind of sausage every day leading up until Thanksgiving (when I'll help myself to the grandmother's Thanksgiving kielbasa. Not a euphemism). No stranger to German meats, having had a longstanding love affair with Landjäger, we look forward to truly celebrating being at the top of the food chain, and probably just a few drunken Hitler jokes.

*This challenge was, in fact, the only thing I planned. Shout outs to Jess and Lee for an anticipated four days of pointing my ass in the right direction and answering the question "Is this where they make the Hummels?" on a semidaily basis.

Don't judge a sausage by its casing.

Anyway, in anticipation of the broadening of our carnivorous horizons, I figured it's best to take stock of all of the animals and meats I've eaten thus far, so I know exactly how dominant I can feel.

Steak/beef- Tartare, rare, raw, Charred Beyond Recognition, stripped, hamburgered, filetted, fajitaed, Porterhoused, you name it. My hope is that some day the cow will actually be able to walk up to me and ask me which part I'd like to eat, Restaurant at the End of the Universe-style.

Buffalo- Tastes like beef. Also, weird to be eating your football team's mascot.

Elk- What a majestic animal. For me to digest.

Frog's Legs- Once you get past the Epcot-like novelty of eating something so French, I'm actually a big fan of these. What were we doing with our dead frogs anyway, barring a sudden plague? A practical use of a somewhat creepy animal.

Venison- In Northern NY, it's a rite of passage to hit a deer. Hell, I hit a baby deer, my dad hit a buck, and my mom a doe. Isn't that cute? Anyway, if you did manage to kill it and the car was still driveable, my friend Natalie's dad would take it to his garage and carve it up for you for $20 and 10 pounds of meat, so if you had insurance, it could turn out to be a sweet little deal. Little known fact: Venison makes a terrific jerky.

Chicken- Boorrrring, doesn't count. However, points for being highly deep-fryable.

Duck- It's like someone sat down and said "Hmm, I need something that tastes like chicken, only less plentiful and more expensive. Also, I'd like for it to continue to secrete after its death and contain so much gristle that I gag after every third mouthful."

Pupperoni- I'm not gonna pull the latchkey kid excuse here, unfortunately this had nothing to do with too much time on my hands, and everything to do with the fact that these dog treats both look and smell delicious. If you can get past the fact that they're most likely entirely composed of livestock offal, they don't taste half bad either.

Pork/bacon/ham/sausage- Gimmes. Though I once ate 50 of those Morningstar sausages in 4 days, which ranks only slightly below "getting my bachelor's" in terms of sources of self-pride.

Horse- Not straight up, but judging from the number of questionably processed foods I've eaten (hello, Slim Jims!), I'm going to guess there's been a hoof or two in there.

Lamb- Eh. Not a fan, but I don't begrudge anyone else the affection, unless it manifests itself in a more romantic display. And even then, sometimes these things just have to be done.

Tripe- Eating stomach was just a little too meta for me. Also, I took a bite of my napkin afterwards just to get the feeling of chewing this out of my mouth.

Haggis- There's something about packaging an animal in its own intestines that just appeals to me. I know the sheep didn't really have a say in it, but it seems thoughtful, nonetheless.

Shark- I know this is technically seafood, but since it eats red meat itself, I'm tossing it in here. The Mother was never much of a cook, in that the oven was seen as more of storage device than a functional unit, but on those blue moon nights that she actually put hand to anything but takeout menus...well, still not much of a cook. However, I do have a memory of her excitedly sitting my father and I down at the kitchen table one Sunday night, putting dinner in front of us, and having us "guess what it is" throughout the meal. I'm always up for these sorts of games, but as we quickly ran through the list of acceptable fleshes and were met only with mischievous headshakes, I started to worry that my mother had indeed cooked us human flesh. Eventually the truth came out, and Dad and I breathed a sense of relief, but I think the fear of committing a mortal sin might have tainted my memories of the actual taste.

Mmmmmmm...dog.

Skills I Possess that I Thought Would Come in Handier Than They Have

2006-11-09T15:53:00.000-05:00

1. Knowing all of the lyrics to Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire", REM's "It's the End of the World as we Know It", and the McDonald's "Big Mac, McBLT, a quarter pounder with some cheese" jingle. I need to reiterate that I was a rural latchkey kid and had a lot of time on my hands. I don't know why I painstakingly worked these lyrics out (pre-Internet lyrics search), or what expectations I had; when karaoke came around, I thought I'd finally see some validation, but "ITEoftheWAWKI*" is perhaps the most boring performance piece known to man. The only way to inspire less applause is to sing it in binary.

* What to do with the 3 seconds of time I saved by using an acronym here, what to do.

2. Ability to open champagne bottles without whimpering like a girl. Sure, there've been momentary triumphs here and there, but on the whole, this hasn't taken me as far in life as I'd like. I wait for the day when some rich older woman desperately needs some champers popped and no one's man enough to do it. I swoop in, pop the top, and she's so grateful she gives me a sweet job designing storefront windows for the large, ritzy department store she happens to own. Like you've never seen Mannequin either.

You look awfully proud for a guy fucking an inanimate object.

3. CPR. Why there's a certification for this, and why I had to get it, I don't understand. If my heart stops beating, I'm not going to ask to see credentials. At that point, if you can vaguely approximate my torso, you're tops in my book. Also, TV led me to believe that people dropping dead in public spaces was a far more routine occurrence than it actually is. I feel almost wistful about that.

4. The times table for 11. I don't know the universal forces behind it, but I have never once had to multiply something by 11. I know this portends that I'm going to die on November 11 when crushed by a giant 11 or something along those lines, but I'm just saying, 15 would have been more useful.

5. Balloon animal making**. My dad, an amateur magician, decided to learn to make them for some of his younger patients, and again, without a driver's license, I was a prisoner in my own home, so I took up the art to help pass the time. It just seemed like it would come in handy. Everyone loves balloon animals. Who doesn't have a quaint story about that time, with the balloon animal, and that guy and a girl, that mom and crying kid, that cobblestone park? Maybe it's not your story, maybe it's a friend's, or a friend of a friend's, or maybe you're thinking of a movie in which there was a quaint story about a balloon animal, and a guy and a girl, a mom and crying kid, a cobblestone park. The point is, it seemed as though at some moment, a well-timed balloon animal would just make the fucking story. It has yet to.

**We're not talking that dog and sword crap. I do a such a good monkey you half expect it to throw its own shit.

6. The Radio Alphabet (alpha bravo charlie). Don't remember how I picked this up (I'm gonna guess it was that time I was stranded on a submarine for six months), but as my name is ridiculously common and easily heard, I have yet to whisper the sweet nothings of "Juliet Echo November" into anyone's ear. Barring any sort of sudden career switch to midshipmen, I'm saddened by the 80s song lyrics that will be lost in retaining this knowledge. Also, random thought, it would suck to actually be named "Alpha Bravo Charlie". Every conversation you'd have with customer service would play like an Abbott and Costello routine.

Golf Alpha Yankee

Ghouls and Gum Disease

2006-10-31T14:56:00.000-05:00

Northern NY, where I'm from, is extraordinarily cold, to-build-a-fire kinda cold, and whatever costumes we worked by day were obliterated by heavy downs and Bills starter jackets by night. This, coupled with my parents distaste for wearing non-bathrobe items of clothing beyond 6 PM usually meant that on Halloween my dad would be dispatched to take me down to the old folks' home, where seniors would lie on their (adjustable) deathbeds, dispensing suckable candies/throat lozenges. I think this was supposed to be considered some sort of treat for them, but reflecting on the whole event years (of repression) later, I'm not sure the best way to ease the old souls' minds after a lifetime of hard work is to parade in younger, healthier specimens of themselves to ask them for shit. Either way, after my vocabulary became sufficiently large enough to include the words "creeped out" and "really uncomfortable", I managed to convince one of the 'rents to take me into the village where I went to school, so I could utter the words "Trick or Treat!" without some sort of painful reflection on my own mortality.

What I wanted from this man: Werther's. What I got: Halls.

Meanwhile, back at my house, my mother would be busily preparing giant ziploc bags full of king size candy bars, toys, sugar free gum, and toothbrushes and floss. As a dental hygienist, and a slightly unhinged one at that, she's supposed to intrinsically dislike Halloween, yet she took relish in the idea of giving treats to kids. We never actually got any trick-or-treaters, living too far out in the country to make the trip worth it, but each and every year, she stocked a bowl full of candy, which we continued to eat until December (see previously: Gastric Bypass Surgery) . I was personally required to submit to a thorough review of my bounty, not for fear of tampering (indeed, one year a highly, highly questionable, unwrapped "popcorn ball" sailed through the process without even a glance), but so that all hard sugary candies could be thrown away for fear of plaque. Later, when I turned 20 and discovered that my love of contraband Pixie Sticks and Mountain Dew had given me my first cavities, it was with no small amount of satisfaction that I informed my mother of the futility of her Halloween ritual. I don't doubt that if my family had any sort of money or possessions that could be sold for money, she would have disowned me right then.

Even worse? Razor-flavored suckers.

One of the benefits of living in a small village is that I was able to continue to trick-or-treat until the end of college without risk of embarassment, since a. all my friends were doing it b. I knew everyone and c. the town's teenage pregnancy rate left a healthy amount of leeway in terms of what exactly consituted "embarassing". There was a slight twinge of remorse upon showing up at my retired band teacher's door dressed as a Slutty French Maid when a decade earlier I had stood there as the Terminator (and lead snare drum!!), but the benefits of bringing a bag full of candy back to college after Fall Break far outweighed the downsides.

Is this the house giving out the Sarah Connors?

Halloween Costumes that I Wish I Could Be Were I Not Required by Society to Dress Like a Slut

2006-10-24T16:21:00.000-04:00

1. Bea Arthur (don't know why, she's just such a strong presence, and pantsuits seem so comfy)
2. Central American Maid
3. Flesh-eating Zombie (Romero style)
4. Jesus from The Big Lebowski
5. Indiana Jones (presence of a whip does not necessarily imply sluttiness)
6. Centaur
7. Present Day Marilyn Monroe (as in, what she looks like now)
8. Librarian (no tearing hair out of a bun, whipping of glasses, unbuttoning of blouse. Just an organizer and catloguer of books and reference materials)

Shit I Have Went/Probably Will Go As Instead

1. Sexy Bea Arther (been trying to make this work for years)
2. French Maid (default sexy)
3. Nurse (the kind of RN that wears fishnets)
4. Sexy Huck Finn (Intrigued by general challenge of getting a man to go home with a 12-year-old boy)
5. Girl Wearing a Miniskirt, Blue Wig, and Some Extra Eye Shadow
6. Shit I Found in the Duane Reade Costume Aisle on October 30
7. Sexy Kitty Cat (bestiality implications are disturbing, though)
8. Prostitute

My John. Part II.

2006-10-17T16:10:00.000-04:00

In an act of solidarity , I decided I would be as timely in my blog postings as my handymen were in their destruction/repairing of my bathroom. That first day started out auspiciously enough, and Josef and his spry(er) young(er) help(er) did not give off the air of two elderly immigrants so beaten-down by the world that they would choose to spend two weeks crammed into my apartment. However, much like the two years I spent in love with my high school friend Kevin, whose shared love of show tunes and eventually, dick, would prove to be a "bad read" on my part, I was very, very wrong.

Vertical bathtubs- much better in theory than practice.

When I arrived home that first night, things didn't look promising. While relieved to find a decided lack of corpses in my apartment, my entire bathroom was gutted and had been relocated to my kitchen. Realizing the power these men held in their hands, I went out to purchase cookies and water, to hopefully win them over and expediate the process, and resigned myself to a not-so-fresh feeling the next day.

Yes, "Dogs Playing Poker". Like your Monet print is so much fucking classier.

The next few days passed in a blur of construction and dust-inhalation. While the idea of waking to a Polish man wandering my apt brought me back to VE Day, by Day 5, the romance was lost. Despite my almost worryingly inactive lifestyle, at two days sans showering, I get a little ripe, and I found myself relegated to using that ice-cold mystery shower that everyone has in their office building in case of chemical spills or CEO divorce. Between the fact that I hadn't washed my hair in four days and the fact that the act of showering at my office made me feel much like I had had a one-night stand with my job, I pretty much gave up on any sort of social life or activity that didn't involve sighing heavily while surveying my apartment.

That's actually just my nighttime skincare routine.

By Friday, my cookie budget was rivalling my income for the week, and with my bathroom sink still in the kitchen, I decided to starve the workmen into action. I got up early, confronted Josef, and laid down the law, which is difficult to do when the only common words you both know are "hello" and a questionably racist Polish term that your grandmother taught you. I'd like to think that my tone and body language themselves might have gotten the point across, but it would be another three days before I found myself able to leave out my birth control lying around.

My John.

2006-09-25T15:01:00.000-04:00

My shower is of the weird marbled stall variety, like the kind you had in college, if you went to the University of Little Nottinghamshire in the 1500s. While charming and at times useful, in that I've often been able to dodge various men's dreaded whispers of "Let's shower together" under the excuse of less than 50% of the unholy coupling being able to fit (and not under the more honest excuse "Showering with someone else blows"), it's still pretty damn inconvenient to have to go all swami if I want to shave my legs. It's also kind of strange that I don't have a tub, considering I have tons of extra yardage in my bathroom, to the point where I have - gasp- empty shelves. My toilet even has its own alcove, so you feel secret and naughty and regal when you lay a twosie. In a neighborhood where your local supermarket offers specials such as this:

Stock up for the winter.

Well, it can be a home away from home. Anyway, recently, I'd been finding a small flood had formed each time I showered. At first I blamed myself and the chemolike amounts of hair that I lose when I bathe, but I soon realized that I had some sort of plumbing problem. After a brief phone call with my landlords, an old Polish couple so stoic that I can only assume that the NYC real estate market is no biggie after the horrors of Dresden, they assured me that "Josef" the handyman would be at my door at 9 the next morning.

At 810 AM the next morning, my buzzer rang and woke me up, and a few minutes later, a 75-year-old Polish man arrived at my door, wheezing what I assumed would be his last breath. He evaluated my situation by swearing under his breath in Polish for a few minutes,and then somehow managed to communicate that he'd be back at 9 on Monday to "tub", and that for me, there would be "no washing for two days". I assured him it wouldn't be a problem, as I could shower at the gym, which is odd, since I don't belong to a gym and have no reason to lie to a man that shares less than 20 words in common with me, but hey, sleep deprivation makes me outright lie, what can I say.

At 845 AM this morning, Josef arrived, having brought a younger helper of about 60, who I assume will be doing the heavy lifting and rescue breathing. Josef and I were old friends at this point and past the need to communicate with words, and since I was sopping wet and wearing only a bathrobe, I was happy to snatch my birth control, give him the keys to the place, and point at the bathroom in a grand sort of ribbon-cutting gesture, while I went to my bed/living room to dress. For anyone who's not had the pleasure of lotioning themselves down to the harsh Slavic yells of Polish laborers, it's like going to a spa where everything has to be done urgently. Before I left, I caught view of a missing wall and Josef grunting something about "tub" and "moving sink", and I saw this tool on my kitchen floor:

Is that a.....I'm just gonna assume you're happy to see me.

So I'm guessing that tonight's not a good night to entertain.

Stingray tears

2006-09-15T15:39:00.000-04:00

After enjoying a brief respite from last week's eye problems, I've found myself in ocular hell all over again, when my lifelong battle with dry eyes finally reached breaking point (read: having trouble seeing the TV). Granted, I do have prescription glasses that I don't wear for medical reasons (I'm medically vain), and I don't imbibe any liquids that aren't diuretics, so it's not exactly nature's fault, but it's finally gotten to the point where five-and-a-half senses* isn't going to cut it, and something's got to be done.

Probably not the best hangover cure. But so pretty.

According to the good people at agingeye.net, which I imagine is the least beat-off to site on the internet, this can be caused by a number of things, including decreased lubrication as we age (no, you're not weird because you just pictured your grandmother's snatch. It's a perfectly natural reaction), or the lack of blinking that typically accompanies activities such as "watching television or looking at a computer monitor", which pretty much describes 87% of my waking hours(the other 13% breaks down to time spent in transit between said monitor and said TV, refilling of my glass, and the occasional how's-your-father given to the undercarriage).

Basically, they're telling me the cure for my chronic dry eyeness is to blink more, which is just about the most patronizing prescription ever given, second only to that given by my father, an incredibly intelligent and infuriatingly calm Physician's Assistant, who, upon telling him that your arm/wrist/back/leg is causing you excruciating pain when you move it a certain way, will simply look at you and say, "Then don't." By nature, I think blinking, like breathing, is supposed to be a sort of involuntary process, one that I pay my autonomic nervous sytem good oxygen to perform, so attempting to make it voluntary is both frustrating and fucking impossible. I'll remember for a minute or so, get caught up in the ramblings of the good people at Cracked or Unleashed, then suddenly remember my vow and blink 20-30 times in rapid succession to generate some lubrication (hey baby), which results in me looking like a coquettish young vixen, attempting to seduce my computer. If I had to use this much effort to breathe, you'd have found me living the Arthur Digby Sellers life long ago, purely out of sloth.

So, you like pizza and sex?

Apparently, there is one drug out there that can cure this, and it's shown results in 15% of those that take it, though frankly, with those odds, I'm probably better off splitting threes. I've gone to Duane Reade to purchase Artificial Tears at the low cost of $4.99 per half ounce, but that seems a little pricey for an excretion. If I'd known what the going rate was, I would have been saving that shit all along- I probably waste at least fifty bucks every time I watch the end of Armageddon. The final option is to cut out my own eyes, but I think that 's more of a last resort (shout out to Oedipus, for setting that bar pretty high). We'll see.

*No, not dead people. I'm just really good at touching things.

Turn, turn, turning onto 81 S., Garden State Pkwy.

2006-09-06T15:49:00.000-04:00

As with the end of any season, there's always regrets, mine namely being that I would most likely remember this as "the summer I watched the entire series of Oz on DVD", and that I had a terrific new bikini that had yet to be exposed to sunlight. Knowing that nothing short of a time-space wrinkle could undo the amount of assfucking and heroin snorting that I've witnessed in the past couple of months, I decided to work on the second, and so my friend Lee and I decided to rent a car and drive down to the NJ shore beach house that my friend Jess had rented. Knowing that Saturday was going to have bad weather (I believe the term "hurricane" was bandied about, but as the only time I left my apt was to purchase a bottle of vodka for the trip*, I'm just going on hearsay), we planned to leave Sunday morning.

*It's funny how events that some people would call "personal low points" can be other people's "personal high points".

That's actually considered a pretty nice little Saturday in Russia.

Anyway, the trip was a breeze (for anyone in the area, 95.5 FM- All Bon Jovi's "Bad Medicine", All the Time), and the weather at the Jersey shore this weekend was unreal, with the dreary grey Saturday followed by two days of perfect sunshine and angry, tourist-fucking waves. Being a fairly active person at the beach, I can usually spend hours boogie boarding to and fro, but after one particularly violent ride in which the ocean floor politely reminded my c5 vertebrae who was running the show, I decided it was best to stand in the shallow water with the rest of the masses and just enjoy wading around.

What followed was three hours of horror, in which I actually heard a wave break the sound barrier, and found myself closer to God on several occasions. If one made it out past where the waves were breaking, and past the bodies strewn across the shore, it was actually quite pleasant, and I even found myself in a few "We're all in this together" type conversations with strangers similarly enthralled to find themselves still able to walk. At one point, two 11 year-old girls targeted me as a potential confidant and asked me to tell them if there was really a Santa Claus, and following my refusal to tell (with some bullshit not-quite-comfortable-being-an-adult dismissal like "I'm sworn to secrecy" and a twisting of an invisible key in front of my mouth that was so fucking lame I actually heard my 13-yer-old self making fun of me to other kids), they conferred briefly and countered with "Are you able to tan?", at which point I decided that I'd best risk the trip to land before I found myself taunting preteens about their virginity.

Maybe if you weren't so harsh on her, she wouldn't have wanted to sell her tongue. Did you ever consider that?

Poseidon was having none of my high road, however, and after inadvertently showing my breasts to several unimpressed starngers, I ended up in a face plant somewhere nearish the shore, and at some point a grain of sand somehow got trapped in my eye socket (well, I assume it was from the weekend's beach time, but it could also be a the little plastic neuss that comes in the Clue box). It's an odd feeling to sit at a desk in front of a spreadsheet with facial lacerations, knowing that you look far, far more hardcore than you actually are, and for those who have never had the particular pleasure of something stuck in your ocular cavity for an extended period of time, it ranks on the Annoying Scale just above oral surgery and just below my mother*, but all in all, a good time was had.

*On a follow-up note, my mother informed me last night that she now weighs 140 pounds, and although I'm happy for her, she's getting dangerously close to my own weight, and I'd rather not have to commit suicide.

Spicy Smoked Snacks

2006-08-31T15:20:00.000-04:00

A little shoutout to Slim Jims, makers of those fine sticks of spicy hyperprocessed....beef? Not only have they been going strong since I was a child and was encouraged by many large WWF wrestlers to "snap into" one (it's a policy of mine to heed advice from people with 4x my body mass, regardless of the quality), but their business savvy cornered them the elusive market of drunk people and/or truck drivers. But the real reason is that I looked at the nutritional information on the back of my latest five-pack of Jims*, and the company considers one "serving" of Slim Jim to be...the entire box. As in, a quantity that might be eaten by a normal human being to eat. As in, you could conceivably stop after a few and just be like "No, thanks, I couldn't possibly have another 2/5ths." As in, feet of meat.

Kudos.

*Bad idea.

Least photogenic occupations. Or "Jobs that Ugly Guys Always Seem to Have".

2006-08-24T15:13:00.000-04:00

Opera singer

This is one of those occupations where being fat is sort of unavoidable- if your job was to live in Italy and work only a few hours a day, during which you remained stationary, you'd feel a little zaftig, too. I'm no connoisseur, but I wouldn't trust a thin opera singer with my aria further than I could throw them, if that makes any sense.*

Also, assuming that there's a certain amount of occupational incest going on-a dipping of pens in Metropolitan Opera Company ink, if you will- well, if I were an eager-to-please mezzo-soprano and I had to be pinned beneath 300 pounds of sweating, thrusting Pavarotti, I'd want all the cushioning I could get.

*It doesn't.

Radio DJ

There's no real reason why a radio disc jockey would have to be attractive, other than to avoid the open-mouth gazes of others who behold their hideous faces, but statistically speaking, it just seems like there would at least be one DJ of note who wasn't completely busted. Perhaps there's some sort of social psych thing going on here, where society's taunts and judgments cause on to develop an outgoing, charismatic personality to compensate for lack of physical acceptance. Or maybe DJs really just don't give a shit about their appearance.

Magazine writer

Not typically the girls, who keep themselves well-preserved through the use of a myriad of health and beauty products passed onto them by PR flacks (also, by starvation), but the men leave something to be desired, namely, other men. They don't call it a "face for magazines" for nothing.

*Not at any of the magazines where I freelance, of course.

Whatever it is that this guy does

Because he's really ugly.

Lead singer of the Pogues

OK, granted, Joe Strummer is a hotbed of sex, so he doesn't count, but if 2/3 of the people that had held your job were considered to be amongst the most unsavory people on the planet, you'd definitely start to question the job responsibilities. I mean, I know there's a reputation to be upheld, but considering that this is one of the few lead vocal jobs where you don't actually have to be able to carry a tune, you'd think some of those energies could be channeled elsewhere, say, into a toothbrush or razor.

Garbage men

Some might say this is a class bias (those not trying to live off my salary), but there are plenty of traditional hard laborering positions who would be considered sexy as a whole. Construction workers? Yes. Electricians? Yep. UPS men? Hell yeah. And yet, not one girl has ever confessed to a blue collar crush on the garbage man. This isn't because their day-to-day work isn't glamorous, or because they're covered in the juices of a thousand peoples' waste. It's simply because they're unattractive. Like Radio DJs, this might be a chicken-or-egg deal. I mean, there's only so many roadkill carcasses you can slog before the hair product starts to seem a little futile.

Landlord

No one's ever had a hot landlord. No one's ever even had a passably average landlord. I haven't. You haven't. Think about it.

Also, why the hell is this movie available on DVD? I probably could have run the numbers for you on that one, 20th Century Fox.

Backwoods country store cashier

You'd think being the town's sole hub for purchasing food, medicine, and ammo would make you take a little pride in your appearance, but nope. Why? I'm guessing it's because ythey're the town's sole hub for purchasing food, medicine, and ammo, and they just don't need to. A little-known evil of a capitalist society/inbreeding.

In Which I Anthropomorphize Things In and Around My Apartment

2006-08-18T17:15:00.000-04:00

This is a dead cockroach, found on the steps just inside the entrance to my building. It has been there for over a week now, because every single person in my 26-apt building is putting their finger on their nose in terms of being the person to actually get rid of the thing, and because the misnomered "super", a Russian man with a fondness for the fashions of 1992, won't do anything about it. Even though the corpse is only about 8 feet from the door, and quite obviously dead, not one of us is willing to suck it up and deal with it, mainly because it's the largest insect I have ever seen. When you step inside the door, you actually feel a gravitational pull towards it. For perspective:

The cockroach, the Collossus at Rhodes

Ignoring the fact that the first time I came face to face with this cockroach (I climb up stairs on all fours, Homo Habilis-style), I essentially shat both myself and my neighbor across the hall, I've found myself growing to respect this roach. He just looks so peaceful. This isn't a roach that left the world fighting, this is a roach that accepted the inevitability of death and its role in the circle of life, and decided to recline and just let go, albeit on the grungy, unwashed step of my East Village walkup. This roach didn't meet his maker at the business end of a rolled up newspaper, he didn't keel over after ingesting a bad batch of trap poison, and he definitely didn't starve to death, having apparently been feeding on thick, juicy steaks, and, I would imagine, radioactive waste. It was not a bad life, so it follows that it was not a bad death. Would that we all could shed our mortal coil with such dignity.

This is an old lamp that has resided in the hallway of my building's second floor (that is actually considered a hallway. No one in my building has more than two dimensions). It just popped up one day out of nowhere. At first, I thought there was some sort of poetic symbolism behind it, in a Petit Prince kind of way, but a month later, I realize that it's probably just broken and nobody wants to carry it outside to the trash, least of all the aforementioned super, whose tapered jeans don't allow for the navigation of stairs. I'm guessing it's a remnant from the recent death of an Old Person in my building, when I witnessed the disposal of about a million cookbooks and one of those potty chair contraptions that allows you to turn any sort of container into a toilet. Anyway, I wish someone would throw this out, but again, finger on nose.

This is the side tiling of my shower. As you can see, the front tiling has already fallen off, but I had thought this corner piece was pretty soild, at least, until I gently brushed up against it with my fuzzy slipper, sending it crashing to the floor. Upon looking down, I saw dozens of species of bugs scurrying around, searching for dark moist places, much like when you would turn over a big rock or log as a kid. For those of you that grew up in NYC, this is what a rock and log look like:

Scissors felt left out.

It seems my shower tile has been playing Anne Frank house to hundreds of creatures while I lathered up mere inches above. My first thought was "They're just as scared of you as you are of them", followed by "Holy fuck shit shit Jesus Christ", but in the end, the proper course of action was to replace the tile, admonish it, and pretend that it never happened.

This is my shoe.

# of times worn- 1

# of cockroaches killed- 3

It's my stomping shoe. Good grippable front, separate heel, no give. If the roach is especially large, then I'll combine the shoe with a few sprays of 409, to stun (and clean) the bug, followed by a swift stomping, girlish squeals, and wine. I have no intention of ever wearing this shoe again, as I wouldn't want to confuse it about its job. I even keep its matching shoe so it will have someone to go home to at the end of a day, and remind it why it keeps working. It's an unconventional career path.

This is my air conditioner. I would fuck it if only it were physically possible. I would put on a cowboy hat, cover myself in oil, and tell it to just lie back and let me do all of the work- it can just watch the game. However, being that appliance/human love is of the forbidden type, we have to settle for a few stolen kisses and some tender handholding. Such is the closemindedness of our society.

Things I Do When I Come Home Drunk, Because I Can't Just Go to Bed Like a Normal Person

2006-08-11T12:49:00.000-04:00

Respond to ex-boyfriend's email in what I think is incredibly subtle, superior way, but is, in fact, glaringly obvious and kind of nonsensical.

Scrub my toilet (vomiting provides a unique POV from which to view the detrimental effects of splashback)

Buy scratchoff lotto tickets (Cashword variety). Win. Rejoice. Go to sleep and forget about it. Wake up, win again. Rejoice again.

Watch TV shows that I have DVRed, erase them. Go to sleep, forget what I watched. Wake up, regret.

Vow to write a seminal play/book/article, make mark on the world, enter annals of history. Go to sleep. Wake up. Don't write seminal play/book/article, make mark on the world, enter annals of history.

Dance "sexily" in front of mirror. Marvel at the picture of grace and elegance that is me.

Eat Slim Jims by, like, the gross.

Spill shit everywhere.

Listen to Stevie Winwood's greatest hits, feel great love for the world and all of the little quirks that we call life, soar on cloud of possibility. Go to sleep and forget about it. Wake up, scratch self, face another bleak day of quiet desperation and indecision.

Starfucking 101. Or, Spreading 'Em for a Story.

2006-08-08T15:10:00.000-04:00

My friends and I play a game (when drunk, natch) called "Rock Stars You Would Sleep With". The point of this game is not to fantasize about banging Bono, because 1. Everyone would bang Bono and 2. He wouldn't touch you with his ten foot dick. The point is to discover just how far into the depths of shame you'd plummet in order to allow your naughty parts to rub up against greatness. A fun addendum is to determine the Rock Star sons and daughters that you'd similarly fuck, to even be one degree away from the genitalia of greatness (these are usually hypothetical sons and daughters of legal age). Some think it's sad; I'm just happy to have some extra time to think about whether I'm really willing to let Art Garfunkel's son stick it in me in order to get closer to the man who played bass harmonica on "Bridge Over Troubled Water".

Guess which one he is.

Anyway, it's a good game for discovering new things about yourself, and for discovering just how big of liars your friends really are. Any man that claims he'd kick Madonna out of bed for any reason other than abject fear is telling tales. Usually you have to start off easy, to lure in the friends and the coworkers still holding on to vestiges of their innocence, the kind that still insist they only sleep with people they care about:

Bruce Springsteen
Kurt Cobain
1999 Britney
Beyonce
Rufus Wainwright (for the queens)

Then, as the whiskey starts flowing and people are reminded that sex is fun, you can step it up a notch, and start throwing out a few outliers- I'm not talking Iggy Pop or anything, but maybe a couple musicians who did a little experimentation with wigs and eyeliner in the 70s. You know, get a feel for who's got the potential to be dirty:

Gene Simmons
Mick Jagger
Debbie Harry
Pat Benatar
David Bowie (for the queens)

By this point, people should be feeling pretty comfortable, both with each other and the fact that they're no better than prostitutes, just poorer. I usually find this happens about four whiskeys or one Motley Crue member in. Now, it's time to truly separate the men and women from the starfuckers:

Axl Rose
Billy Joel
Enya
Janis Joplin

I'd do her just to hear what moans sound like in Elfish.

Once you've weeded through your "fun" friends, you can move onto "story sex", in which there's no real debate about the utter lack of sex appeal of the musician in question, it's just a matter of whether one is willing to drop trou just to be able to say he/she did. If you have any friends that tend to play along the border of sluttiness (ie- they're insisting they'll only bone Pete Townshend if he buys them dinner), you can throw in a little qualifier or two, such as, they have to sing their hit song during the act itself.

Any of the Barenaked Ladies
The Fat Guy in Tenacious D
Shane McGowan
Cece Peniston
Nina Simone (if she'll sing Sugar in My Bowl during)
Andrew Lloyd Webber (if he'll compose "Music of the Night" during )

Now that several of your more tenuous friendships have resolved themselves (suddenly, and, most likely, self-righteously), there's one final step. It may seem like you can judge the relative looseness of one's legs based purely upon numbers, but the best way to tell who's truly a little whore is not quantity of legends fucked, but degrees of proximity to legend fucked:

Moby's Sound Mixer
The Guy Who Rescuscitates Keith Richards
U2's Merch Guy
The Woman in Arrested Development Who Yells
Yoko Ono

This is Bob Dylan's electric toothbrush. Do with it what you will.

Make sure to write down everyone's answers so you can use them against them in the future. Also, if you've got any fuckbuddies in the crowd, it's a good idea to start double bagging it.

Size Queen

2006-08-08T14:42:00.000-04:00

Things that Are More Appealing in Miniature Sizes
1. Liquor bottles
2. Cats
3. Playing cards
4. Tumors
5. Skirts
6. Volkswagens
7. Golf
8. Nintendo

Things that Aren't More Appealing in Miniature Sizes
1. Humans
2. Tapas
3. Muppets
4. KFC Snackers
5. Vans
6. Wads of money
7. Roller coasters
8. Genitals

Side Effects of Gastric Bypass Surgery that They Don't Really Talk About

2006-07-25T17:00:00.000-04:00

This past weekend's visit with my mother for the first time since she had gastric bypass surgery in April revealed a lot of seldom-talked-about side effects of the surgery.

1. Excessive preachiness. All of a sudden, the ability and/or the desire to eat more than 1/2 cup of food indicates the start of a gluttonous downward spiral into obesity.

Witty comeback I couldn't say because my birthday is coming up You know who else has to have their food intake regulated so they don't potentially eat so much their stomach explodes? Dogs. Also, goldfish, but that doesn't make as sharp a point.

2. Rebuking others' any and all attempts to defend their weight with the phrase "That's how it started for me, too". Including the seemingly impenetrable "I'm thin, I don't overeat, and I watch my weight."

Witty comeback I couldn't say because my birthday is coming up I imagine every story that ends with getting fat starts with the putting of food into one's mouth. I think the important part here is not to gloss over the middle decades, which involve getting pregnant at a young age and then consuming multiple bags of black-market-Cheetos knockoffs "Jax".

3. Forsaking of the AMA approved Body Mass Index. The very same BMI that told the insurance company that they should pay for your snazzy new surgery is apparently completely wrong when it says that someone else is of below average weight.

Witty comeback I couldn't say because my birthday is coming up Any other scientifically proven formulas you want to dismiss because they don't make you right? Gravity? The heliocentric system? Simple addition?

Unsurprisingly, "Sated Sated Hippos" did well in the West African market.

4. Inability to shop like a normal person. Apparently it's much more difficult to buy clothing once you leave the safe confines of Shapeless Frocks and Scrubs-R- Us.

Witty comeback I couldn't say because my birthday is coming up I understand you've always wanted to say you're petite. But when you wear a size XL in petite, it's kind of redundant. Also, you're not allowed to wear men's clothes and shoes anymore, because I already have a father.

5. Automatic assumption that you were some sort of cautionary tale that makes others want to eat less. All gastric bypass recipients should be paired up for the ordering of meals and takeout. Just because you "can't eat a whole order" doesn't mean that any of the rest of us want to split.

Witty comeback I couldn't say because my birthday is coming up If you're not willing to eat the leftovers tomorrow, you better learn to live off condiments and oyster crackers.

6. Constant keeping of a haughty, running tally of weight lost. Wait, so you're rubbing it in that someone had to essentially remove part of your stomach? Is this what it takes to get bragging rights nowadays?

Witty comeback I couldn't say because my birthday is coming up I could lose 20 pounds a month, too, if only they could get rid of these pesky arms.

To be honest, I'm just greatful this didn't go the way of the gall bladder removal she had when I was twelve, in which I went to her hospital room to find her proudly displaying her stones. I half expected to show up and have her excitedly shove part of her large intestine in my face, screaming "Lookie! Lookie! Lookie!"

Animal husbandry. Delicious.

2006-07-19T15:43:00.000-04:00

Awhile back, when conversing with a vegetarian friend-well, not actually vegetarian, because they eat fish, and not actually a friend, because I'd never be friends with a vegetarian- anyway, I was shooting the shit with someone, and I asked him why he'd become a vegetarian. Having once spent a year as a vegetarian, for no reason other than boredom and inability to cook meat safely, I'm curious as to why people would choose not to partake of the most majestic creatures that God put on earth (for us to kill). Sometimes I'll get some spiel about not liking the taste (bullshit), I have one friend who's worried about contracting Mad Cow seven years from now (bullshit as well, nevertheless, she'll be eaten first in the event of an Andean plane crash), but most of all, people tell me that they don't want to harm animals, or more succintly-and-self-righteously put, "I won't eat anything with a face". Nice gesture, but this reverence really only pays off if God turns out to be either a Veggie Tale or a member of the Aqua Teen Hunger Force.

No one's explained the concept of V-8 to them yet.

Despite their smug respect for all living things, when I ask most of these Face Vegetarians if they miss any particular meat product, they immediately start salivating and going on about burgers and steaks with the sort of crazed zest that makes you retract your extremities. So I was thinking, suppose someone were to open up a restaurant that only served animals that had died of natural causes*? Just keep a big range out back, with cows and chickens and whatever heavenly creature bacon comes from, let'em graze, and then when they croak (peacefully, in their sleep, surrounded by their family), hack them up into choice cuts and charge a ridiculous price. It's the perfect conscience loophole for protein-starved veggies, and anyone who's ever been to a Whole Foods knows that these people will shell out for just about anything that claims to be healthy and organic. ("I'm organic," I always say. "Completely carbon-based. Eat me?").

The Chinese takeout version of my restaurant.

It'll probably only work in the more touchy-feely markets like Vermont and Northern California, but I figure I can get a mail-order side business going as well**. If the publicity brings more customers than I have barnyard animals, there might have to be a well-timed outbreak of Old Age, but I figure after the first couple of years, I'll probably get the numbers down. See? Everyone wins.

Vegans, though, they can go fuck themselves.

*Natural causes includes cancer and Alzheimer's and whatnot. This IS a business, people.

**I also have an idea for a Stoner Snack Shack, in which I just lay out bulk tubs tubs of ice cream and raw doughs on the floor, toss on a Phish song (one is long enough), and charge each person $10 for a spoon. I'm pretty sure I wouldn't even need to wash the spoons.

The sterling glint of the seasoning packet

2006-07-14T12:35:00.000-04:00

Sitting at my desk all day, waiting for Celebrity Death Beeper to send me word of the latest in, well, dead celebrities, I've become accustomed to the day-to-day deterioration of my spirit, but today, the flesh is suffering as well. Thanks to a rope-a-dope of credit card debt, student loans, and the general assfuckery that is my rent, my meager income is spread pretty thin, not so much like spreading butter over too much bread, but more like spreading butter over ...I don't know, a continent. Fuck similes, I'm always broke.

Aaaaanyways, to make up for money hemorrhaged on a daily basis, I'm pretty good at reining in my food costs to a bare minimum, whether it be by taking advantage of Omaha Steaks' delicious discount barnyard animals, or by my daily lunch routine, which involves adding hot water to ramen bought in bulk. At 99 cents for six packages, there is no better deal in this world. If you had told six year-old Rubber that one day the tooth she was putting under her pillow would feed her for a week...well, Reaganomics being what they were, that wasn't such a hot deal in 1985, nor did the specifics of a market economy really bowl me over back then. But nowadays, it just tickles me pink.

When science allows for a menage a trois with Kraft Mac & Cheese, I will make you a very happy prepackaged dehydrated noodle.

The aforementioned spirit-deterioration pretty much ensures that lunch is taken at the same time every day, a predetermined time that divides the day into chunks designed to minimize the damage done to my soul, so I've become a bit of a fixture in the kitchen; I'd like to think the site of me hydrating my noodles is comforting to others, like the rising of the sun. Recently, a new man joined my workspace (around the same time that Hated New Guy departed for sunnier, and more importantly, other, shores), a middle-aged bald Asian man with a precarous grasp on the language, and a habit of being polite that makes even the least cynical of New Yorkers wary. After a month of ramen making and kitchen encounter, this exchange took place:

Bald Asian Man: You make noodles every day.
RB: Yep. They're good. And cheap.
BAM: They are bad for you.
RB: Probably. But they are cheap. And good.
BAM: I used to make in college all the time.
RB: Me too. They were so good. And cheap.

I'm not against a little stranger-on-stranger conversation, and I'd like to think that I got my point across to even the ESLest of people; money is indeed an object, and mostly, I just really like the taste of ramen. Every day, I look forward to eating them, and in my 20 years of eating them (the Mother's not exactly an epicurean), I have never grown tired of them. I'm like a goldfish, albeit one that meets 400% of its daily recommended sodium allowance.

8 g of Trinitrotoluene? I don't want to be a prude or anything...

Today, as I sat at my desk, mourning Red Buttons, BAM approached and offered me a small package of beef ramen, the hardcore Chinese kind that wouldn't be caught dead in packaging with a cartoon of Fu Manchu on it. He said that "it taste better" and I should try it. I thanked him profusely, not having been bought a meal in longer than I care to remember (at least not of the solid variety) and said I would try it.

As lunch hour approached, I took a look at the nutritional information, something I don't often do. 490 calories, 20 g of fat? I'm not a calorie counter by any means (side note- try the deep fried Cadbury Cream Egg, it's a little battered ball of heaven) , but that is some serious, serious shit there. This is three times the levels of my normal ramen. This is Big Mac level calories (side note- try the deep fried Big Mac, re: heaven). This is the kind of stuff that they give to West African children to put weight on their bones. This is so not getting eaten.

I don't want to hurt his feelings, so I can't eat my regular noodles today, but I am sure as hell not putting That Ramen in my body, not unless I can help myself to a steaming bowl of anti-That Ramen afterwards to cancel out the aftereffects. BAM doesn't appear to be leaving his desk anytime soon, and now that I know what fuels him, I don't want to get on his bad side. At this point, it's probably easiest for me to just sit here, waiting for his heart to give out. And so I will, starving, weakening, dying in body and soul until they release me on the Wendy's of the world.

Under the Boardwalk

2006-07-12T17:37:00.000-04:00

Visiting my grandparents this past weekend, I played more games of Monopoly than recommended for someone still granted the use of their legs, and was given a glimpse of the naive optimism that a young Rubber posessed when playing the game at the age of 11, before the weight of the world killed her spirit. While I'm grateful for the sense of voracious capitalism instilled in me at a young age (I have distinct memories of my 11 year-old self purchasing my broke opponents' actual game tokens from them and forcing them to play with scraps of paper found on the floor, purely for sport), I'm worried that it might have built up my expectations; namely, that I would one day ever own property, win a beauty contest, or find free parking (not to mention the less-frequent-than-I-was-led-to-believe encounters with Scottie dogs and top hats).

Oh, just visiting an angry monkey with thumbs in prison. Ho hum.

Encountering the game again in the twilight of my midtwenties, I found myself even more money hungry than fifteen years ago, especially when playing against my crunchy Vermont cousin, who, God bless her stoned little heart, actually WANTED to be Banker (it was a bear market, and I didn't have the heart to tell her that the current fiscal climate and low interest rates were NOT going to make it a lucrative position, as it would harsh her mellow).

That seems kind of counterintuitive.

After we'd quickly cleared the board of anything and everything that could be purchased, rents were due, and I was struck by how little money is actually involved in the game. It's the same amount as it was back then, but having lived in Manhattan for three years, the idea of paying $18 for one night's worth of rent made me almost giddy with savings; I decided to purchase Mediterranean Avenue and not do a goddamn thing with it just for the God complex (I should mention that I'd found an old bottle Kahlua under the counter at this point). And $200 of salary, for 10 minutes of work? Tax free? Clearly I'd never appreciated the generous tax breaks that Milton Bradley had passed along.

It's not even worth going to the reading for a hundred bucks.

Sailing around the board, managing my properties, crushing my poor cousin, who had not realized that blood does not, in fact, run thicker than imaginary pastel currency. I was heady with power, enjoying the life of luxury (taxed at only 10%!), until I looked down and realized that in a world where an entire avenue can be purchased for $120, a world created during the fucking Depression, I had more money in the pile in front of me than I did in my actual real-life bank account. Whatever nanothread of childlike innocence I had left in me died at that moment.

Ten Foods I Would Stuff Into My Mouth By the Handful if Society Did Not Dictate Otherwise

2006-07-06T11:21:00.000-04:00

1. Peanut Butter
2. Oysters
3. Lucky Charms Marshmallows (excluding purple hearts)
4. Lobster Bisque
5. Movie theatre nacho cheese/Hollandaise sauce(tie)
6. Melted butter
7. New James Bond actor Daniel Craig
8. Bologna
9. Steak tartare (not a particular favorite, have just always wanted to eat it with my hands)
10. Country Crock Sides - Mashed Potatoes

DQ: My friend Jocelyn's wedding cake (no longer hypothetical. Sorry, Joc)

La parapluie

2006-07-05T11:59:00.000-04:00

Why would someone make an umbrella smaller than the width of the human body? Why? Sure, it fits in my purse, but in doing so, it becomes completely nonfunctional. There are certain inventions that serve very distinct purposes and cannot be improved upon, and should not be- toilet paper, flyswatters, umbrellas. It is comforting to think that primitive people wiped their asses and swatted flies in much the same way that we do now; it means that these are good and true inventions, necessary to our survival. But when someone (I'm looking at you, Totes) goes and fucks with the basics....it makes me very angry, that's all. Angry and wet. If I were the Hulk or a Gremlin, someone would be paying hell for this.

Be my Danny Glover

2006-06-28T16:00:00.000-04:00

With the World Cup going on, my classic-American-girl attraction to white guys with British/Irish/Aussie accents becomes even more apparent; I know I am far, far from alone in this, but having slept with more men than I care to estimate based solely on their accent, or what I've drunkenly deemed to be their accent (in the past, merely slurring the word "schedule" has been enough), I'd like to think that I'm one of the more devoted Anglo/Hiberno/Oz -ophile. A guy in a Jersey is enough to get most girls in a bother, but when I walk past a man in a bright orange wig and blue face paint, smoking the wrong end of a wet cigarette and picking out splinters of the chair he just broke at one in the afternoon, I practically need to change.

Someday, my love.

Now I know in the Darwinian sense of things, things would be easier for me if I was automatically attracted to a rarer subset of the population-I once lived with a girl who had a Canadian fetish, and she positively cleaned up- but you've got to go with what nature gives you. I'm not hideous or anything, and my fetish has been reinforced (ahem) enough to keep me coming back for more. Unfortunately, hooligans are an often-preoccupied bunch, whether they be busy with other bustier women or punching their mates in the face, and there's not as much of a mutual attraction as I'd like.

However, having lived in major cities for the past five years of my life, I have discovered a couple of groups that do feel the earthly pull towards my translucent skin and moppy curls. You see, giant black homeless men and 5 foot Latino guys love me. They follow me down darkened sidewalks, they stop in crosswalks, they they go out of their way to tell me what they'll do to me, presumably if I were to let them/they found me unconscious. They tell me "Very, very nice" and offer to take me places. Hell, I've been masturbated in front of twice, and I'm proud to say, within arm's reach.

They, I've surmised, must have a incredibly pale smallish white girl fetish, which I'm guessing goes as unfulfilled as my own want for hooligans. If only we could change our hearts' directions, so that I desired nothing more than a drug addled hobo, and so that they longed for whoever it is that fetishizes drug-addled hobos (Slovakians? Nederlanders?), then there'd be a lot less heartbreak in the world.

Mwah.

The morning after

2006-06-23T11:47:00.000-04:00

That icky feeling you have, the second you wake up. It pervades your body, and as you hurriedly shower to try and wash the dirty feeling off your body, you can't stop thinking about it. Flashbacks pop into your mind as you rub the soap all over your body and exfoliate for extra measure. The dinner, the wine, they were all factors, and now, now you're not going to be able to forget this for another year. Things seemed fine when you spoke on the phone, almost like nothing had happened, but you know that's not the case...

It's the morning after your parents' anniversary. You know they've had sex, and they've had it more recently than you.

Solidarity, brother nerd.

2006-06-21T21:55:00.000-04:00

Has anyone ever noticed that there are lot of dorks that look exactly alike? Not in an 80s movie way, where they just stuck a skinny kid in thick, black-rimmed glasses and a pocket protector, but more like this:

Sadly, I found this picture on Google Images just by searching for "Josh Weinstein", which is what I imagine all nerds' names to be. I assume this kid'll be suing me within the week.

I don't know if it's sociological or evolutionary or what, but it's kind of comforting- I think one day when they take over the world, it'll definitely help the cause.

Only idiots call it the idiot box.

2006-06-21T21:50:00.000-04:00

Heading to Staten Island for a worthy event this weekend, I had a conversation with my friend Andrea.

Me: I've never been to Staten Island before.
A: I have, once, but I don't really remember it.
Me: The only thing I remember about Staten Island is from that one episode of Sex and the City where Carrie judges the hot firemen contest there.
A: The only memory you have and it's not even yours?
Me: Well, I remember watching the episode.

Like any of your lives are more exciting than TV. Still, it would be nice to refer to actual, non-imaginary people in conversation once in awhile.

Don't pick scabs

2006-06-21T12:37:00.000-04:00

On my way home from work last night, I saw a group of men striking outside the Orpheum Theatre, the permanent home of Stomp, that troupe of urban percussionists who bang on makeshift drums made out of weird materials like Tide bottles and ice blocks to create "music". And I thought, man, I bet the Stomp picket line is AWESOME.

It turned out it was just waste management workers, but still. I would definitely underpay to see Stomp on strike.

Dairy Queen

2006-06-20T18:05:00.000-04:00

A man just hit on me in the downstairs kitchen when I got some coffee. As I put the milk back in the fridge and he pulled it out, he said "Ahh, milk, it does a body good." I was the only one there, and we were like, touching at the counter and I thought it would be rude to pretend he wasn't there, so I was like 'Yep, agreed". And then he asked "So what's your favorite? Skim?" , which is flattering, because the new tank top I'm wearing unexpectedly turned out to be about 3 microns thick and I think look lumpy, like one of those stress dolls you used to buy at Spencer's Gifts.

Anyway, I said "2%" and then we made love.

Mahbles.

2006-06-19T14:46:00.000-04:00

On Friday, following a semi-cultural afternoon at the Met, my friends Jason, Shirley and I decided to get a drink at the Oyster Bar in Grand Central. After a rather daunting trek to get the hell out of the Upper East Side/White Collar Purgatory after the trains broke down, we settled on a bottle of their finest (night have been cheapest) wine and some calamari. Finishing up, I make my usual run to the bathroom, and as I'm coming back, I spot a celebrity near and dear to my heart.

Me: Oh my God. I think that's Kobayashi, the World Hot Dog Eating Champion.
Shirley: Where?
Me: Over there, eating like 17 pounds of lobster.

Shirley, is just as excited by this prospect as I am, and Jason, having an Asian fetish, musters up some excitement. After a few seemingly logical inferences ("He's wearing a bib!""It's near July 4th!""He's with other Asians!") Shirley takes a run to the bathroom and agrees that it looks like him, and demands that I ask him to confirm. I mention that if I'm wrong, this would mean that I basically saw an Asian dude eating, then assumed he was the World Hot Dog Eating Champion, and if someone saw me eating and out of the blue asked me if I was the World Eating Champion of something, it might dampen my appetite for the rest of the meal. But this doesn't matter, as we're two crazed bitches on a Racist Mission®.

As with every other important aspect of my life, the matter of who would ask is settled with a best 2-out-of-3 Rock Paper Scissors. I lost (damn you, rock), and we planned an escape route, a dingy back staircase that led to places unknown, where we both agreed to live out our days in hiding. I put on my sweetest face, we approach, and I mumble something about an odd question and the World Hot Dog Eating Champion, to which one of the men looks at me and says, very slowly and deliberately, like he's an 80s Movie Foriegn Exchange Student, "Hot....Dog?"

And then we ran up the mystery staircase (ends at a Brookstone, not a twisted alter dimension, thankfully) and giggled like the embarassed little white girls we were.* And then we drowned our guilt in whiskey, which we probably would have been doing anyway.

*Shirley, incidentally, is Chinese, but I seem less loathsome if I refer to all racist activities using "we".

Final exit

2006-06-19T14:38:00.000-04:00

I ran into the grocery store yesterday to pick up a couple of things I needed, namely Draino and beer. As I checked out, I realized that for all intents and purposes, it looked like I was heading home to kill myself.

The lady working the Met Foods didn't seem overly concerned, though.

Hint

2006-06-14T12:57:00.000-04:00

I’m a little disturbed by how many people have forwarded me this link, on how drinking coffee cuts back on liver damage from alcohol. It’s not like my caffeine addiction is secret- I’ve introduced more than a few people to Vivarin by pressing a tab into their hand and claiming that it’s a “nice, mellow buzz, totally amazing, dude”- and my propensity for drinking isn’t exactly Hoffa’s grave, but why is this the link that unites all of my friends in their perception of me? Where are the New Yorker articles and analyses of nonfiction and cryptic literary anagrams? Why this? It’s like that one Thanksgiving during college that my grandmother slipped a Dear Abby article into my cousin and mine’s suitcases, the one that claimed that men “won’t buy the cow if they can get the milk for free”.*

*Cliché, yes, but not when spoken by Dear Abby or your grandmother or a combination of the two, because when old ladies that say old lady things, it’s just right. Also, my cousin and I compared notes and then assaulted her with forward questions about sex, driving the whole family into a quaint New England moratorium on anyone ever admitting they had had sex, ever.

Fifi

2006-06-13T10:27:00.000-04:00

Do you ever look at those women carrying little dogs dressed in designer gear, and think that even the dog is a little scared by the amount of projection happening?

Now, why is a whole different question.

2006-06-06T13:35:00.000-04:00

I'm trying out for "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?" tonight, because I love that show so much it hurts. Not just the format, or the fact that cheating is encouraged (ask the audience? Phone a friend? Why can't we just write the answers on the bottom of your sneakers, Growing Pains style?), but because the title is so rhetorical. Shows like Deal or No Deal, deciding the title is the hardest part of the whole show.. But this one, it's like, well, I do.

$$$

2006-06-06T13:31:00.000-04:00

I don't like the idea that there are estates that earn more than I do per year, like James Dean's estate earning $5 million a year, 50 years after his death. There are imaginary things that make more money than me. If that doesn't make one feel a tad worthless, I don't know what does.

I just like my jeans.

2006-04-17T17:32:00.000-04:00

The hardest thing I've had to do all days was try to convey to my drycleaner/seamstress the urgency with which I needed my jeans patched. She asked if Thursday was OK, and I had to try not to whimper a bit. But at the same time, I couldn't bring myself to say "I don't really have any other pants", because that would be a new low point.

6 miles? Why?

2006-04-17T17:30:00.000-04:00

I'm not giving money to your March of Dimes walk. You don't need to do something pointless to get me to give you money, and it's not like you wouldn't be walking somewhere that day, anyway. Besides, if I'm going to give any group money, it's going to be one that researches something that I might one day get.