The Common Bonds of Disinterest and Ennui

Penn State

2011-11-10T17:15:00.003-05:00

The word “legacy” gets thrown around a lot when people are trying to justify something vile. When I was in college I went to a lecture by Charlene Teters, a tireless Native American artist and activist taking a stand against racist sports team mascots. After a screening of the documentary “In Whose Honor?” about the Fighting Illini and their (former!) mascot Chief Illiniwek, I remember her speaking quite a bit about how his continued existence was often supported by citing the legacy of the school, the legacy of the team, and the fond memories the legacy of the racist mascot stirred up in alumni with liquid assets. Legacy, here, was code for preservation despite offense.

Though I don’t generally like to compare the rotten apples of one tragic situation to the putrefying oranges of another, this use of the word “legacy” in response to the Jerry Sandusky/Penn State University child sexual abuse scandal tied the two situations together in my head. In 2005, the NCAA weighed the legacy of Chief Illiniwek against its overt racism and, despite an 80 year history at the University of Illinois at Champagne-Urbana, condemned its use by U of I teams. The University retired the symbol after the 2006-2007 basketball season. A legacy can be outweighed.

Imagine now that Chief Illiniwek was a real person and a University of Illinois graduate assistant walked in on him raping a child, who he came to know through a foundation for underprivileged youth. Imagine that assistant told the head coach—a really good head coach, who’d been there for a long time and known Chief Illiniwek for years—who told the athletic director, who told University of Illinois officials. None of them called the police. They dealt with the situation by asking Chief Illiniwek not to bring kids to the locker room any more.

And, when the story broke that Chief Illiniwek had raped not just this child but others, students screamed as loud as they could that their head coach should be allowed to keep his job because of his winning legacy.

Here, legacy is code for preservation despite degradation.

That is the argument the rioting students of State College made last night, violently. Joe Paterno won 409 games for Penn State so his unbelievable refusal to contact the police when told Jerry Sandusky had been witnessed raping a child should be forgiven. These students, some of them freshman who have been connected to the Penn State legacy for less than three months, have given Joe Paterno’s 409 winning games a weight greater than his complicity in the sexual abuse of at least one 10-year-old boy and systematic, pervasive, stomach-turning silence on the part of University officials at all ranks.

I can’t believe any of this even bears saying, but I’ve gotten a response from a Penn State girl supporting Joe Paterno on Twitter and, astoundingly, heartbreakingly, unbelievably, it seems the thought that we are all duty-bound by our humanity to protect children from harm is not universal. That something as trivial as college football can outweigh a child’s welfare is so sad I don’t have an adjective for it.

“Asked how she felt about Paterno being fired, Nicole Atlak, a freshman from Toms River, New Jersey, said: "Absolutely disgusted. From a student's perspective, it's like where do we go from here? We no longer have a president. We no longer have a 45-year legacy."
-The Christian Science Monitor

So, let’s just talk about legacy then. A legacy is anything passed down through time and motherfuckers, these kids who were abused are the legacy of years of oppression piled on rape culture piled on the privilege of a few to put their shit, however negligibly important, ahead of everything else. These kids were victimized by every fucking system designed to keep them safe. They were born difficult circumstances, found their way to a charitable organization for the underprivileged and, when they were preyed upon even there, found out that Penn State football fans are more important than the fact that they were raped. That’s the legacy you should be talking about, Nicole, and I hope every potential boss Googles you and you spend years justifying that quote. Poor kids get preyed on at Penn State and then ignored by University officials and, when caught, the student body is “absolutely disgusted.”

You’re right. “It’s like where do we go from here?”

30 Day Song Challenge: A Song That Makes You Happy

2011-08-18T14:59:00.003-05:00

Some blog I read recently posted a video of a guy singing along to his headphones on the subway. I’m gonna Evelyn Beatrice Hall this one and say that while I may not always appreciate the song choice/vocal volume/proximity to my head of subway singers, I will defend to the death their right to belt out whatever it is that’s making them okay with being carted in the dirty dark between stations, often standing, often tired. Outside New York City, the chances to sing on the top of your lungs come more frequently. Cars, in my mind, were built explicitly for this purpose. You can really murder a in the shower when your house is not divided from your neighbor’s by newspaper and seven coats of semi-gloss. But when the right song hits your headphones in public, the one that makes you just so thrilled to have ears in the first place, don't you ever feel like this guy? I respect this guy. I love this guy.

If music is a thing that makes you happy, it is a thing you often wish you could share. Living here you just can’t. So, my pick for a song that makes me happy is the one that gets me the closest to Mr. California Girl. It’s the one that makes me dance on curbs while I’m waiting for the light to change and the one I’ll stand up for on the subway just so I can do a subtle hustle. It’s Earth Wind and Fire’s “September.”

Tell me this doesn't make you ecstatic (and ever so seasick).

30 Day Song Challenge: A Song You Hate

2011-08-17T15:34:00.002-05:00

I can forgive a lot when it comes to music. For instance, I think Pink is great despite her consistently miserable lyrics. ( The waiter just took my table / and gave it to Jessica Simp.) (JESSICA SIMP.) I think Taco is perhaps the most frightening thing to ever happen to suits, synths, or the human face, but I can’t deny that his “Puttin’ on the Ritz” is somehow transfixing. I am legitimately moved by Velveeta classics like “Don’t Stop Believin’."

Moreover, familiarity alone can temper the hate I feel for a terrible song simply because I can sing along with it. Take Lady Antebellum’s “Need You Now,” for example. I was going use that as the song that I hate. If given the chance, I would gladly stomp a copy of that CD into smithereens. But I just listened to it all the way through and accidentally hummed some and ignored the rest because it’s boring to the point of invisibility. Plus, the members of Lady Antebellum themselves are so nondescript that I basically just picture Amish dolls when I try to visualize their faces.

It takes an attack of terribleness on all fronts in order for a song to be so singularly detestable that it’s the only one I can pick today. And that song is “Your Body is a Wonderland” by John Mayer. How do I hate it? Let me count the ways:

1. The music itself is bland and irritating and, were it not accompanied by stupid lyrics, sounds like something that would play during a toilet paper commercial.
2. The lyrics are a fist to the solar plexus. When Mayer sings “your bubblegum tongue,” I want to swallow mine.
3. His delivery is that of a sweaty, touchy stranger at a bar you are trying to get away from.
4. He was a racist jerk to Kumail Nanjiani, who I just love.
5. Guitar face.

Most importantly, I despise the idea that my body could be considered a wonderland. When Alice went to Wonderland, she was confounded by a world turned upside down, where smug talking cats hung around being inscrutable and also there was that nightmare pig baby. I don’t want my body to be a universe of things a guy is seeing for the first time, because that means my body is a mutant, or that guy is, like, 12.

(You can find this song on Spotify, but why would you do that?)

30 Day Song Challenge: Your Favorite Song

2011-08-16T11:25:00.004-05:00

Asking me to pick my favorite song is kind of like asking me to pick my favorite hair on my head. Each individual song I like is less important than the whole bunch of songs together, and also that none of them are tickling my ear. It’s even harder to choose one because I’m a song person. Few and far between are the albums I’ll listen to in a sitting, and many of these are a product of preteen years spent in my friend’s mom’s Jeep Cherokee with a handful of CDs to fill the drive between Salvation Army and Goodwill.

That said, there are certain criteria that will guarantee a song a spot on the soundtrack during a pivotal scene of Kathy: The Motion Picture:

1. It is short. If it takes you more than three minutes to say what you have to say, I think someone should confiscate your Moog, or your Pynchon, or your psychotropics, or whatever has gotten into your bloodstream.
2. It sounds good sung in a car at a volume that will cause you to be hoarse.
3. It is somehow sad, despite sounding mostly happy. See: Robyn, Dancing On My Own.

There is one song that continually spackles these holes for me. It’s kind of a weird choice because, as far as I can tell, it first appeared on the Friends soundtrack. After the Replacements called it quits, Paul Westerberg shit popped up on a bunch of soundtracks (Dyslexic Heart, for example) and the song “Stain Yer Blood” is my favorite. Ever. Of everything.

Paul Westerberg is basically the world’s best rock star. I’ll pick his brand of sloppy, dopey genius every time over something more self-serious and grand. You married a guitarist? Great. You still live in Minnesota? Better. You’ve decided to make questionably bold eyewear choices in your middle age? Fantastic.

My friend Kai and I had a mixtape blog for a few months a while ago and I put this on the “Songs for Those Dreamy Girls (…We Wish We Were)” playlist. At the time, I wrote that it was:

My favorite song about a girl because Paul Westerberg is kind of my favorite guy. This one hits close to home because of how real it is: she’s hanging around, he knows she wants him, he’s all let’s do this thing tonight, whatever, no big deal, people are gonna talk about it, fuck them. But then! Transcendent musical magic that differentiates the pop muse from my average self: “Is it love?”

I still sort of agree with that description, but I’ve come to think that the great thing about this song, and about all concise guitar pop songs that so accurately hit home the singular feeling of romantic possibility, is the way that it lets you write your own starring scene. I'm not the girl who inspires songs to be written, nor is virtually anyone that girl, but "Stain Yer Blood" lets you be her three minutes at a time. When I hear “Stain Yer Blood,” I’m wearing the fictional vintage dress of my dreams, leaning against a wall at a party that never happened, feeling some sort of cinematic sadness that is neither annoying nor selfish.

Whatever romance I picture thereafter is less important than the romance of the song itself, that double knot it ties in my stomach and the possibility of feeling an adolescent intensity about everything forever. Paul Westerberg, in his song "It's A Wonderful Lie," kind of cops to the charade of songs like this:

So don't pin your hopes
Or pin your dreams
To misanthropes or guys like me
The truth is overrated
I suppose
It a wonderful lie
and I still get by on those

But that's why I love "Stain Yer Blood" so much more.

(You can find Paul Westerberg's "Stain Yer Blood" on the album The Resterberg on Spotify.)

Ben Stein, You Are the Worst

2011-05-18T10:47:00.004-05:00

I didn’t think that I would be envisioning rolling up a newspaper and hitting Ben Stein on the nose over and over again before lunch today, but sometimes your day gets away from you.

Former game show host and minor character actor Ben Stein wrote a particularly vile piece over at the American Spectator (brought to my attention via Alex Pareene at Salon) about the rape allegations pending against IMF head Dominique Strauss-Kahn. Here are some choice bits:

People accuse other people of crimes all of the time. What do we know about the complainant besides that she is a hotel maid? I love and admire hotel maids. They have incredibly hard jobs and they do them uncomplainingly. I am sure she is a fine woman. On the other hand, I have had hotel maids that were complete lunatics, stealing airline tickets from me, stealing money from me, throwing away important papers, stealing medications from me. How do we know that this woman's word was good enough to put Mr. Strauss-Kahn straight into a horrific jail? Putting a man in Riker's is serious business. Maybe more than a few minutes of investigation is merited before it's done.

No, Ben Stein. NO. I am saying this in my commanding voice, so you learn that I AM SERIOUS about you crapping on the metaphorical rug of decent discourse, respect, sense, etc. It’s a valuable rug.

So you love and admire hotel maids. I’m sure this is a thing you think on a daily basis, how much you love and admire hotel maids; I’m sure you lose track of everyday conversations because you are floating in star-filtered fantasies where you clasp hands with a hotel maid and spin, spin in fields of wildflowers, her apron filled with the wind of your ardent admiration. I’m sure you get flowers for hotel maids on Hotel Maids Day. Except you probably don’t do that, because there is no Hotel Maids Day, because in America we don’t treat our hotel maids very well at all. “I love and admire hotel maids” is an insincere thing you’re saying to mitigate the shitty thing you’re about to say, which is that she cannot be trusted to tell the truth because she IS a hotel maid, and her accused attacker is a very rich and powerful man. “How do we know that this woman’s word was good enough”? Why should a woman have to overcome her hotel maidness to prove that her word is good?

I agree that putting a man in Riker’s is serious business. But the accuser didn’t do that. The police did that, after evaluating the accuser’s claim.

In life, events tend to follow patterns. People who commit crimes tend to be criminals, for example. Can anyone tell me any economists who have been convicted of violent sex crimes? Can anyone tell me of any heads of nonprofit international economic entities who have ever been charged and convicted of violent sexual crimes? Is it likely that just by chance this hotel maid found the only one in this category? Maybe Mr. Strauss-Kahn is guilty but if so, he is one of a kind, and criminals are not usually one of a kind.

I am floored by this logic. I am actually on the floor. I am experiencing carpet burns on my face because of your terrible logic. This woman’s accusation of rape and sexual assault should be questioned because economists aren’t historically rapey? Are you kidding me? I will dance this hustle with you for about eight bars, just to point out that okay, yeah, maybe economists wouldn’t be high on a list of notoriously rapey professions, but shall we investigate some of Strauss-Kahns other roles? Political candidates. They’ve got a squeaky clean record with regard to sexual conduct. Incredibly wealthy men. Also infamous for their discretion.

Also, if we do the ol’ flip-a-roo on your argument, we should probably be investigating criminals who we perceive to be one of a kind because there are others out there like them, right? In which case I should point out that Ted Bundy, serial killer and necrophiliac, was a law student and very involved in the Republican party during the 1970s. He was, in fact, employed by several Republican campaigns.

Oh, weird! Wait a second! So were you. Man. Creepy.

Royal Pain in my Butt

2011-04-29T10:13:00.002-05:00

I’m beginning to get a little miffed at the “Why the fuck would you want to watch the royal wedding?” conversation happening both in person and on the internet, mainly with men in either arena. Numero uno, I’m getting the impression that approximately all% of the disgust is due to the fact that weddings are girl stuff and girl stuff is dumb. And then there’s also this idea that, on top of that, wanting to watch something nice, or at the very least unedifying is something you should feel shame for.

Ladies, grab your scalpels! Let’s dissect these two ideas like a fetal pig.

1. Weddings are lady stuff, sure, whatever, you’re a jerk. It’s not even legal for two ladies to get married in most places in this country, which means the vast majority of weddings going down are half man and those men are at least peripherally (and most of the time very) involved in planning those weddings. And while the Groomzilla is not a phenomenon necessitating a TV series, I think hating on women who are obsessed with weddings is kind of like a cultural game of “Quit hitting yourself.” From the time a girl exits the womb she’s lead to believe her wedding is going to be the best day of her life, but then she’s stupid for being interested in something so vapid? Farts on that. I’m also pooping directly on the idea the reason why women are interested in this wedding is because kisses and love and dresses and princes and fairies. Yes, of course, that factors in for some people, but you know what else? The next dot in a millennium-long timeline of British history being played out on morning television. Also, the inside of Westminster Abbey, which I have never visited and likely never will. Just because ladies are watching and you think weddings are lady stuff doesn't mean that's why they're watching, assfaces.

2. The kind of person who makes you feel stupid for watching the royal wedding is probably also the kind of person who, whenever ANY SINGLE THING is in the news that they don’t like, makes a joke like geez guys, also, there’s stuff going on in Libya. This is the kind of person who only likes “good” things, and “good” things are only things they like. Why do I want to watch the royal wedding? Because my mom told me about getting up early to watch Princess Diana get married and I thought it would be cool to kind of continue the tradition of wedding watching. Because I was born three months after Prince William and he has been my age and in the news literally my entire life and it’s satisfying to watch his narrative play out. Because I work in an office every day and some days are bad and maybe I’d like to go to work having just watched two people who like each other get married. Because fuck you? Also because shut up. It’s okay for people to watch things that aren’t documentaries about fonts. Or like, documentaries about how documentaries about fonts are stupid.

Also, I really like this piece by Simon Doonan. Also, because of this piece, I want to start a band called Pneumatic Boobs.

The Ghost Adventures Drinking Game

2011-04-14T12:25:00.011-05:00

I didn’t play a game of flip cup until I was 25. I hadn’t even heard of Kings until I was 28. The artful dodgery of procuring booze seemed game enough to me when I was under 21, and thereafter the puzzle of getting to singing-Heart-songs-on-the-street drunk with nothing but $10 was plenty.

Until Netflix put up all four seasons of Ghost Adventures.

Have you ever had to tell a true story that was so unbelievably perfect people thought you were making it up? That is Ghost Adventures. Every terrible detail is so chock full of terribleness I would not be entirely surprised if the “ghosts” they capture on video during their final episode are Andy Samberg and some laser cats and all of 4Chan and J.T. LeRoy. Zak Bagans, an Ed Hardy wearing former wedding DJ with so much product in his hair he looks like a brunette Max Headroom, and his associates Kevin (guy whose cellphone n00dz you can immediately picture) and Aaron (guy who spent most of his childhood yelling “C’mon guys! Wait UP!”) are a paranormal investigative team who travel around spending the night in different haunted locations. Where most other television paranormal investigators aim to debunk, these guys have guzzled the spectral Kool-aid. There are so many ghosts, dudes. Like, just all over the place, all the time. And the Ghost Adventurers are so completely not even scared of them at all!

Just because Ghost Adventures is a total fart of a show The Travel Channel squeaked quietly into our airwaves doesn’t mean it can’t have a purpose. And that purpose should be a drinking game, devised by yours truly and tested by a bunch of my friends. Add this show to your queue, grab some silver bullets (clearly the most paranormal of beers) and let’s play...

THE GHOST ADVENTURES DRINKING GAME

1. Drink whenever you see a mustachioed local.
The preamble portion of the show (prior to the night vision Blair Witch extravaganza they call “lockdown") involves talking to a bunch of locals, usually dudes, usually mildly to moderately grizzled, usually admitting they're creeped out about the abandoned asylum/arms factory/lighthouse. Drink to their facial hair.

2. Drink whenever there's an old newspaper clipping.
Because everyone knows ghosts fucking love microfiche.

3. Drink whenever you see a man ring.

Zak is partial to the occasional bold accessory, cuz every ghost's crazy 'bout a sharp dressed man. Feel free to alter this as you see fit -- necklace on black cord, offensive belt buckle, anything with a Celtic cross on it, etc.

4. Drink whenever they say static night vision camera.
Static night vision camera, also known as a camera on a tripod they pointed at a hallway and left rolling because ghosts fucking love unattended electronics.

5. Drink whenever they say orb.
Known to you or I as dust and gnats, Zak and crew meticulously document any illuminated particle in their field of vision because a ghost is a ghost, no matter how small.

6. Drink whenever Zak says demon or demonic.
Demonic. Demonic. Put your ghosts all over my body.

7. Drink whenever there's an EMF spike.
Because ghosts are "known to be made up of electromagnetic energy." Because A) ghosts exist, duh, and B) nothing else in the universe will register on an EMF detector besides a ghost. Also, ghosts fucking love the song "Unbelievable."

8. Drink whenever the equipment malfunctions.
The cameras routinely go dark on this show, and it's definitely paranormal and not at all because these guys aren't very good with cameras.

9. Drink whenever they present incredibly dubious visual evidence of ghosts.
This is reserved for the slow-mo video or photograph with an arrow pointing to literally nothing.

10. Drink whenever Zak taunts a ghost.
Zak seems to operate with the assumption that all ghost interactions can best be resolved by a Jersey Shore style club brawl.

11. Chug through E.V.P. replays.
The investigators rely heavily on "electronic voice phenomenon," the secret ghost messages found in white noise. When the investigators capture an E.V.P., they will replay the sound bite a few times with a caption. Do not put your beer down until they've stopped looping the ghost whispering his message (usually something like "murder," which usually sounds more like "pudding," or Aaron tripping over something, or wind, or nothing.)

(And just because I found this and can't stop looking at it...)

Marcus Samuelsson, You Have Been Chopped

2011-03-29T16:00:00.006-05:00

Marcus Samuelsson (chef, restaurateur, and frequent Food Network face) just launched a site called Food Republic. My love of food goes back 80 pounds and my love of food media goes back to watching Yan Can Cook on PBS after school; I’m also a reader of blogs like Grub Street and Eater and check Epicurious daily and a fan of sites like Cooking Issues, but I don’t know of any celebrity chefs who’ve tried the blog thing and I was curious to see what Samuelsson was up to.

Here is a direct quote from the About Us page:

This is the site for men who want to eat and drink well, and to live smart.

Philosophy:

* Men are underserved in today’s conversation about food

Let’s just say I disagree with that. Let’s just say a certain someone has become my least favorite Chopped judge. Let’s just say I’m a duck breast simmering in a sous vide bag of piss and vinegar.

Men are far from under-served in today’s conversation about food. Men still make up the majority of professional chefs and restaurateurs, celebrity chefs, and food personalities. Who are your big food television stars? Bobby Flay. Tom Colicchio. Anthony Bourdain. Emeril Lagasse. Jamie Oliver. Mario Batali. Out of 62 chefs listed on the Food Network “Our Chefs” page, 41 are men. You could easily argue back with the popularity of Rachael Ray or Sandra Lee, or even Ina Garten, but to that I say: Padma Fucking Lakshmi.

To say that men are under-served in the televised conversation about food is to turn a blind eye to the entire dude food genre, the frat house of food programming geared specifically toward men; bacon-wrapped, burger-filled shows hosted by dudes like Guy Fieri. There’s Man vs. Food with Adam Richman and Meat & Potatoes with Rahm Fama and Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern and Feasting on Asphalt with Alton Brown and two Bobby Flay grilling shows and that is just on the Food Network alone. Move over to the Cooking Channel and there’s stuff like Food Jammers for the young hip dude in particular. This is not even taking into account all of the shows that turn cooking into sports—Iron Chef, for example. The secret ingredient there is usually at least a dash of testosterone.

For the record, I enjoy a lot of this stuff. But is it geared to me, a lady, who has an appetite and an interest in food? Absolutely not.

And that’s just TV! Men own the print conversation about food as well. Mark Bittman. Michael Pollan. These are the people steering today’s discussion about food politics. Look at your New York restaurant critics: Sam Sifton from the New York Times. Robert Sietsema from the Voice. Again, are these specifically directed toward men? No. But men are under-served in today’s conversation about food? Fuck you.

The part that really chars my poblano is that I am otherwise completely behind the content on the site. I immediately clicked on a front page advice post about carnivores dating vegans. There is good stuff here. It's just this pervasive cultural attitude that stuff by men is for everyone (food writing and programming included) and stuff by women is just for women that makes someone like Marcus Samuelsson think this site is necessary. I am a lady -- why shouldn't I enjoy Bizarre Foods? But at the same time, why shouldn't a dude watch the Barefoot Contessa if he needs a lobster roll recipe?

If men are unwelcome in any part of food culture, it is in two particular conversations under the vast umbrella of food media. I will give you that dieting and cooking for a family are completely focused on women. These are the conversations "under-serving" the male audience. You know what is "under-serving" the female audience? Virtually everything else that has to do with Capital-F-Food: food politics, the food documentary, the Michelin food, the competitive food, the MOF. The minute you want in on Hungry Girl, calories, 30-minute meals and tablescapes with Sandra Lee, you lemme know, Samuelsson. Otherwise, PLEASE PACK YOUR KNIVES AND GO.

South Dakota

2011-03-22T15:33:00.002-05:00

"Women need to just be reminded of the fact there is a natural, legal relationship between them and their child."
-Rep. Roger Hunt

Required waiting period before a woman can get an abortion in South Dakota: 3 days, under the new law.

Required waiting period for a person to get a gun in South Dakota: 0 minutes, 0 hours, 0 days, if they have a permit.

100 Greatest Times I Gave My Computer the Finger

2011-03-16T14:00:00.004-05:00

The practically perfect in every way Tiger Beatdown linked to this list of the 100 Greatest Female Characters in film history.

I’d like to air some grievances.

1. There are eight child roles included on this list. Drew Barrymore as Gertie in E.T.? Really? One of the hundred best female characters ever committed to film? Among the notable omissions from this subset of this stupid list is Jodie Foster as Iris in Taxi Driver. They even use her as a reference to justify including Natalie Portman as Matilda in The Professional. Also, just for a sec, I’d like us to take a second to wonder to know how many child roles would be included on a list of 100 Greatest Male Characters in film history.

2. Or, for that matter, how many sex workers. This list has four, including, inexplicably, Rose McGowan as Cherry Darling in Planet Terror.

3. Or, once again, how many of the 100 Greatest Male Characters would be cartoons. There are six on this list. Six. In fact, Lady (as in “and the Tramp”) beats Scarlett O’Hara.

4. Here’s one giant fuck you for including Audrey 2 at number 86. This is a plant. Voiced by a man. Fuck you.

5. Another fuck you? Zooey Deschanel as Summer Finn in 500 Days of Summer. TO QUOTE DIRECTLY: “Director Mark Webb intentionally made Summer a man's-eye view of the perfect girlfriend, but that's not exactly difficult when Deschanel is so adorable.” Fuck you.

6. I’d have to go back again to make sure that I’m right about this, but I think the only characters of color on this whole list are both played by Pam Grier, once in her role as Coffy and once as Jackie Brown.

I realize the futility of trying to put together these top lists of 100 anythings, and the stupidity of this endeavor in particular as it is a vague amalgam of character and actor playing that character and quality of the film in which that character appears. But this list is literally the worst. I mean, it is so bad I want to write eight or nine theses about gender and film studies right now and nail them to the Door of The House of Internet Jerkbags Who Make Misogynist Lists. One would be about how this list, not including the children and cartoons, but actually sort of including the children and cartoons, is basically a list of the characters on film that manage to not let being interesting get in the way of the very important job of being pretty. Then I would like wing DVDs of the following films directly at the author's forehead:

1. Precious (for Gabourey Sidibe as Precious)
2. Norma Rae (for Sally Field as Norma Rae Webster)
3. Harold and Maude (for Ruth Gordon as Maude)
4. Monster (for Charlize Theron as Aileen Wuernos)
5. Welcome to the Dollhouse (for Heather Matarazzo as Dawn Wiener)
6. Wendy and Lucy (for Michelle Williams as Wendy)
7. The Color Purple (for Whoopi Goldberg as Celie and Oprah Winfrey as Sofia)

And, I mean, those are just off the top of my head and I am not a film critic and my knowledge is hardly encyclopedic and I really only enjoy horror movies and indie films and anything involving a mental institution and oh my god, I am choking on my rage, or coffee, or whatever, I am sputtering and I should stop doing that lest I not make it onto the list of 100 Most Attractive People Ever To Write Blogs About How They Are Mad About Something.

Kathy Cacasem’s American Top Five Things I Like This Week

2011-03-11T14:41:00.003-05:00

5. Coming in at number five this week is Kings, the drinking game. I have a keg-sized hole in my collegiate career that apparently should have been plugged with cans of Natty Light and flipping cups and ponging beers and stuff, but I just plain never heard of or played Kings until like six months ago. My hatred of card games is on my permanent record, so I was completely voting nay on this one until Tuesday when I gave it a shot and it was actually pretty fun. Homework assignment: play Kings until you get to be the questionmaster, and then write 500 words on how awesome that was. Bonus assignment: write another 1000 words about how I am far too old for this.

4. Moving up several spots with every post is The Hairpin. I started off a Gawker, and then I’d call myself a Jezebel, and now I’m firmly held in place by The Hairpin. Everything is so good. Everything! I want to bottle what these writers can do and fill a bunker with it just in case.

3. Holding steady at number three is hedgehogs. They are BOTH prickly and soft-bellied. They are puppies in leather jackets, guys. Lambs in wolf costumes. Olivia Newton John at the end of Grease. Quirky pet of my dreams. Hedgehogs. Get into it.

2. Coming in at number two: soy curls. Ate ‘em when I was in Portland, Oregon, and insisted every restaurant had given us chicken by accident every time I ordered them. They are suspiciously delicious. They are healthy. They are almost guilt-inducingly meaty. Put them on your nachos and eat them while reading the packaging over and over to make sure they aren’t actually chicken.

1. Snagging this week’s number one spot is Carla Hall, recently julienned from the rest of the cheftestants on Top Chef: All Stars. There are approximately 350,000 reasons to love Carla, but HOOTIE-HOO, lemme count some ways. 1. Her loony facial expressions. 2. She made vegetarian food AND WON because LO AND BEHOLD, COLICCHIO AND FELLOW HERBS, there is a world without lamb. 3. She came across as one of the most genuinely lovely people ever to compete on a television show. Yes I know that the circumstances of filming a Bravo show can be stressful (you’re sequestered from the outside world and away from your family and your business), but when it comes down to it you’re taken care of while doing something you love for a prize and that’s a pretty lucky break. She always seemed to relish the excitement of every challenge, whether cooking for kids or muppets or Jimmy Fallon. I love this woman. I love her. She is the best. Buy her cookies! They sound great. And lest you had any doubt, check out one of her slam-dunk-she-is-the-shit-high-five-SIKE-too-slow modeling shots from the 80s:

South Dakota, Have I Got the Bill For You!

2011-03-03T14:04:00.002-05:00

South Dakota continues its war on reproductive freedom today, as both its House and Senate have passed a bill that requires women to wait 72 hours before having an abortion and to seek counseling at a “crisis pregnancy center.” These are the same centers required by a recently passed New York City bill to accurately label themselves as propaganda pushing organizations with an exclusively pro-life view, not full service medical clinics.

If South Dakota has decided it is in the business of passing reproductive laws even slightly colored by God and His Will and His Feelings About Your Uterine Contents, then South Dakota should be regulating all medications and procedures that interfere with reproduction. Lucky for South Dakota, I’ve caught a grave oversight in their reproductive bill! So, lest the Lord bring down His Wrath upon their heads, I would hereby like to introduce:

The Male Reproductive Medical Non-Interference Bill

Whereas South Dakota has decided that God determines where and when life begins, regardless of the desires of the female vessel in which it incubates, South Dakota must also recognize those instances where and when God has determined life should not begin. Erectile dysfunction medications such as Viagra and Cialis may facilitate the beginning of life in situations where God’s will did not permit reproductive tumescence.

The Male Reproductive Medical Non-Interference Bill will ensure total submission to God’s plan. According to this bill, any male afflicted with Intelligent Flaccidity (previously known as erectile dysfunction) must wait 72 hours from the point at which he would ingest a reproduction-altering drug and seek counseling before he may receive such a prescription. For example, if an Intelligently Flaccid man, perhaps after a few drinks on a Saturday night, finds himself desiring to copulate with a woman despite God’s decision that he should not be able to reproduce with her, he must immediately report to a doctor.

Please note, it is a doctor’s right to refuse to prescribe reproduction-altering drugs to the Intelligently Flaccid on the basis of his or her beliefs.

That doctor would then issue a prescription after a 72-hour waiting period, provided the I.F. man could provide proof he had received counseling at a Crisis Male Reproduction Center. Here, the I.F. man could be appraised of all his options, including adoption, frustration, praying, and ceasing his whining. He may then fill his prescription for reproduction-altering drugs at a pharmacy.

Please note, it is a pharmacist’s right to refuse to fill any prescription for reproduction-altering drugs to the Intelligently Flaccid on the basis of his or her beliefs.

Only then could the I.F. man ingest a reproduction-altering drug and copulate with the woman from at least 72 hours earlier. The 72-hour waiting period has the added benefit of permitting the woman to reconsider her part in denying God's will as well.

Further, the Male Reproductive Medical Non-Interference Bill would prohibit use of state funds to pay for reproduction-altering drugs, and state funds would not be given to any organization that prescribed, distributed, or defrayed the cost of reproduction-altering drugs.

Amen.

Dear _____

2011-02-25T13:31:00.002-05:00

South Korea is floating word of resistance across the Middle East to North Koreans via helium balloon.

That is the kind of thing you hear and wonder when you’re going to get an answer, addressed to your parents' house, to the letter you stuck in a bottle and threw in the Atlantic seventeen years ago.

Walk-on Sentence

2011-02-23T16:56:00.003-05:00

Yesterday I intended to go to the gym after work but instead found myself walking past the subway station to check out the bunch of tweens and paparazzi in front of the Trump SoHo waiting for Christina Aguilera to surface (can we call this groundhogging? When a celebrity shows face?), and then past a further subway station too, and then up and over this weird overpass near Laight street and then down Canal for a while, and then I gave up and gave in and decided to walk back to Brooklyn over the Williamsburg bridge instead of fucking with an elliptical for an hour, so I walked over past Ferrara’s because I love the sign, and then I thought about how I have this goal to eat at all of Little Italy’s cheeseball restaurants but I’ve yet to try any, and then I walked past this empty storefront that used to be this avant garde clothing store that made me wonder how it stayed in business literally every time I passed by and now I know the answer was “it can’t,” and then had this great ex-fat moment where I saw a sign that started C-R-E-A and assumed it was "creampuff," believed so hard it was "creampuff," realized it was "creative" and believed it was interesting creampuffs, and felt intensely let down when it was Creative Signs, which was disappointing all the way past those little cheapo clothing stores on Delancey by the bridge, the Manhattan cousins to every store on Knickerbocker, where I felt anxious at the specter of a summer with cropped shirts all the raging, and then up and over the bridge which was treacherously icy in parts but also really pretty when the lights came on, but I couldn't dwell because I was in this sort of weird unspoken race with a girl walking at nearly the same pace as me but I totally passed her on the down slope and she was out of sight by the time I hit that spot where you’re eye-level with the gym on the second floor of a building in South Williamsburg, just north of Broadway, near where I exited the bridge and walked to buy frozen green beans for lunch and green apples for snacks, and had my customary battle in the grocery store bakery aisle about whether or not to purchase an eat an entire loaf of Italian bread on the way to Sam’s house as I occasionally secretly do, but didn’t, and because I won this battle and also managed not to freeze, I ate a celebratory bowl of Trix and watched some game shows and called it a decent journey for a Tuesday.

Today, though, I think I saw Eric Clapton.

Put This in the Smithsonian Museum of Frenemies

2011-02-22T16:23:00.004-05:00

Every once in a while someone says something in the media that is just so pitch perfect it's like a tuning fork of total honesty. Or, in this case, bitchery. Gawker linked to this article about the secret world of Michelle Obama's stylist minions and poses the theory that her 29-year-old assistant Meredith Koop is actually doing most of her clothing-picking-out these days. Koop wouldn't comment, Obama wouldn't comment, the White House wouldn't really comment, Michelle's old stylist wouldn't comment, and thus the reporter had to talk to people like Koop's hair stylist and an old sorority sister. And get a load of this shining, beautiful diamond of Kappa Deltassholery!

She was "a ton of fun" at parties and "never had the need to conform to the Vandy Southern girl persona," said Abby Doll, a footwear buyer and designer in Salt Lake City who was a Kappa Delta sorority sister of Koop at Vanderbilt. According to Doll, Koop was noticeable for her tall, thin build and her model-like good looks. "Pretty, but not conventionally pretty," Doll said. "Maybe not mainstream stylish - she had her own style."

Trade Ya

2011-02-18T14:35:00.002-05:00

Real things in the bartering section of NYC Craigslist right now:

TRADE- Handyman for GFE or FWB

a running car 4 My Mac pro

Clown, Magician, Face Painter Services in exhange for your....
[among other things] laser hair removal

1,152 test tubes - swap for anything amusing

Items to barter for cb radio - $80 (Queens)
I have 60 adult videos, some copies and some original.
I have to sell for $80 or to barter in exchange for a Cobra 29 LTD CB Radio.

WILL BARTER HUGE SOVIET FLAG

Skilled handyman for Sensual Massage

Norman Rockwell Porcelain Mugs - $50
…Will trade for drum equipment/ snare hardware ect.

Gumball Machine 4 sm aircompressor

Trade 1 pizza for web/PHP/database work

will swap beautiful set of islamic prayer beads (queens)
to a student who knows how to give a 2 hour full body massage.

trade freshwaterfish for comic books
i have a suitcase filled with old comics from the 1990's, a lot of punisher. i would like to trade for central and south american cichlids for my acquarium. I am looking specifically for Severums. Size doesnt matter.

Here's What Rape Culture Looks Like

2011-02-17T14:54:00.004-05:00

From the reader comments of the New York Post article Battle-tough beauty no ‘wimpy girly girl’

stoneburner
02/16/2011 3:55 PM
shes stupid not brave, next ime they could kill her instead of raping her. what if they go after her entire crew. shes selfish.

Kenyon Schraeder
02/16/2011 1:06 PM
There is something that just doesn't ring right with these alleged events in Egypt. I have no doubt that the woman was accosted or even assaulted while on the job but the intrigue and mystery surrounding whatever transpired seems to be growing, as if it's been partially manufactured. I hate to think that any of this might be self-serving in some way either to her or to her employer.

From the reader comments of the New York Post article CBS reporters’ Cairo nightmare

pvanbell
02/16/2011 10:04 AM
Is 60 Minutes nuts! Why send one of their female reporters into a situation that that. Come on now - nothing prejudicial about sending only male correspondents - just common sense!

milkguy
02/16/2011 9:54 AM
a sexual assault is a terrible, violent crime. but a "60 Minutes" reporter requesting privacy???? in regard to privacy ( or lack thereof) ONLY, you reap what you sow

From the reader comments of the New York Daily News article Lara Logan, ’60 Minutes’ correspondent, suffers ‘sustained’ sex assault by Egypt mob: CBS News

beowulf39565
6:04:16 PM
Feb 16, 2011
She better have 4 male witnesses

TY
4:34 PM
Feb 15, 2011
don't mean to be insensitive, but does she not know this is how a mob operates??? bringing a pretty female into a lawless mob is like showing up at Charlie Sheen's carrying a ton of coke, thinking he won't snort it all!

LuckyLady
4:41 PM
Feb 15, 2011
February sweeps... Anderson Cooper, ABC reporters and now a CBS reporter. If this is true, why did the CBS spokesman have to make this public?

Monkeysdon't
5:08 PM
Feb 15, 2011
She should cover the Puerto Rican parade this year!!!

chanchis
5:13 PM
Feb 15, 2011
You know that women are considered second class citizens in this part of the world, why send a blond hair blue eyed woman to this protest??????? Shame on her employers.

Ezekiel12
5:23 PM
Feb 15, 2011
kpett, I know and that's why fshanks is all upset. White men (and women) will be screaming from their roofs all week over this. And for what? She was not the only woman sexually assaulted in Cairo over the past two weeks. I feel sorry for Ms. Logan. But I guarantee when the back story of how she got her second husband and her sexual hijinks in Baghdad come out, a lot of people are going to change their minds about her.

filmclipz
5:50 PM
Feb 15, 2011
Is she a soldier? Is she a fire fighter? A police officer perhaps? No, she's a journalist, whom was stupid enough to go into an area where women are viewed more as objects than people. And I'm supposed to feel sympathy for this? she put her safety of her life in name of a job. Sorry, but I dont think there is anything brave about that. She definitely gets the award for Moron of the Year.

PHILLIES FAN
5:56 PM
Feb 15, 2011
Sexual Assault PLEASE! Today's reporters just want the spotlight! Don't believe what you read!!

year2010
6:03 PM
Feb 15, 2011
I'm sorry, but this is what happens when they try to send one of those blonde "news bunnies" into a dangerous environment... Serious news correspondents went out with Walter Cronkite... Now, any college cheerleader with nice legs is suddenly considered a "journalist".... We all agree, they're nice to look at in the studio, especially the hot legs contest going on with those brainless chicks at Fox News.... But as fr the serious reporting? Leave that to the real journalists...

Azibidibo
6:21 PM
Feb 15, 2011
Assault on anyone is unacceptable let alone sexual assault. Having said all that, I don't like when reporters put themselves in the middle of the story in order to advance their career. When there is a popular revolt you don't move ahead of the crowd. There are ways to cover the story without being part of the story. By the way, didn't Lara Logan had an affair with the CNN Reporter Michael Ware?

scammer2
6:43 PM
Feb 15, 2011
definition of sexual assault means fondling and grabbing/groping...this happens all the time in NYC on buses, trains, parades etc...THIS IS NOT RAPE....NEWS SENSATIONALISM AT ITS BEST...

wherewolf
6:49 PM
Feb 15, 2011
This is what happens when a Liberal Network hires yet another cute blond who thinks she's "all bad", rather than a deserving guy who supports a family or himself - "Yea" Affirmative Action!

hmmm324
6:51 PM
Feb 15, 2011
Aw, the Poor Media Babe, she fall down, go boom!

eddip82000
7:50 PM
Feb 15, 2011
Isn't this the same Lara Logan who last year was accussed of sleeping around with two fellow male CBS News employees while overseas, in Beriut or Israel? Didn't she cause one of those men to lose his wife and children over this affair? Is this Karma or what?

glad to be here
8:51 PM
Feb 15, 2011
It's sad that this woman was assaulted. That being said, this woman made a decision to be a mother. She belongs in the relative safety of her home, caring for her child. Roaming around in a third world country where savages run free, one leaves themselves vulnerable to such horrible attacks.

Picked-a--pepper
12:01 AM
Feb 16, 2011
Isn't this lady the adulterer who got pregnant by her camerman?

EssenSieMich
5:15 AM
Feb 16, 2011
She just needed to learn her place. I'm sure if she ever goes back there she'll be much more humble, dress conservatively, and not get all mouthy when she addresses a man.

EssenSieMich
5:30 AM
Feb 16, 2011
She wanted a mans job and she got it. So now it's time for her to shake it off and start acting like a big girl.

big_ax_to_grind
5:52 AM
Feb 16, 2011
She covered up the lies of Bush and his gang to go to war and she finally was made to pay for that. She is also a lousy reporter and probably got what was coming to her.

Black 'n Proud
7:20 AM
Feb 16, 2011
If you put a hot chick like this in a rough place, she's gonna get banged. It's unfortunate, but it's going to happen. Such is life.

amand-la
8:37 AM
Feb 16, 2011
She wanted more. She must have fallen in love with her captors.. ."Just a week before, the Emmy-winning war reporter survived a harrowing night of being held - blindfolded and forced into a "stress position" - by Egyptian security forces." smh.

andwho are u?
9:19 AM
Feb 16, 2011
there is a old saying.."u stick your finger in a light socket..u going to get shocked!!" meaning..u travel to a foreign land that had a custom of putting down women and u know that u SHOULD dress a certain way but u dont and then something happens, now WHO fault is that...its YOURS!! iam so sick of these fem-bots screaming that its war on women and it wasnt her fault..when ever is it? Women have to take resposabilty and STOP THINKING that u are untouchable JUST CAUSE u are a woman.

KOOLPOPPA
11:17 AM
Feb 16, 2011
Please don't hype this thing up to be more than what it was, a case of @ss pinching and unwanted touching.

madibo
2:28 PM
Feb 16, 2011
Hmmmmm...she suffers a "sustained" sexual assult BUT gets on a plane back to Washington DC THE SAME DAY - Checks in and OUT of Hospital - THE SAME DAY and reportedly is scheduled to be back to work this week-end (for 60 minutes TV ratings you think?)

Ken Do

2011-02-17T12:22:00.002-05:00

Who is Bram Stoker?
(I, for one, welcome our new computer overlords.)

That’s how Ken Jennings answered final Jeopardy last night – correctly, and with panache. Let’s see you have panache, Watson. Naturally process the language of my finger.

Ken was on his winning streak during 2004, the year I lived at home after college and commuted two hours and fifteen minutes each way to and from work. I left at 5:45 in the morning in order to get home at 6:30, leaving enough time to eat dinner before my mother and I sat down to watch Ken. We were Team Ken. We were members of the Kenadian House of Commons.

It was hard not to root for him. He was unassuming and self-deprecating. He was funny. He wrote his name a different way every night. He was a dorkatron, for sure, but he also knew about music and pop culture. Picture Ken at a wedding reception. He’s definitely the dude who could talk to the old guys intelligently about World War II, but I wager a thousand that he would also know all the words to “Baby Got Back.” Perhaps most importantly, he was clever in a way that delighted, not annoyed. There are those people you know whose intelligence is a challenge—I need to have read what they’ve read, I need to know more about the politics of the Middle East than they do, I need to add more Godard to my Netflix queue because they can fucking quote Breathless in French, I can’t believe they heard the new Robyn eight months before it came out. The Ken Jenningses of the world, though, are the kind of people who can make a cigarette disappear or predict the weather or know a funny story about a thing that happened in 1815 on this corner or can fix your watch at the dinner table with a paperclip and it’s no big deal.

Watching Ken, a software engineer, win each day was a balm for personal bruises. I was just out of college, temping, then working my first assistant job, and interviewing the whole time for something better. Rejection letters, endless commutes, few friends, and a growing realization that I needed to have at least four years of internships AND prolific author parents in order to get the kind of job I was hoping for were all pressure systems combining into a hurricane of glumness. Ken, though, was a daily reminder that my job wasn’t a closed caption under my name broadcasting the entirety of my meaning. Sometimes a software engineer is secretly magnificent. An assistant could secretly be, at the very least, TK.

I, for one, thank our old human overachievers.

Only Usher Can Judge Me

2011-02-16T13:29:00.001-05:00

"I really don't believe in abortion," Bieber says. "It's like killing a baby?" How about in cases of rape? "Um. Well, I think that's really sad, but everything happens for a reason. I guess I haven't been in that position, so I wouldn't be able to judge that."

Thanks, The Hairpin, for letting me know that Rolling Stone is in the habit of giving teenage boys with a confounding amount of influence over young girls a platform about which to spout his informed opinions on both abortion and rape.

You know what, Justin? I don’t really believe in not starting an internet rumor that Justin Bieber has an uncontrollable flatulence problem. It’s like Justin Bieber was hoarding a thousand rotten hard boiled eggs in his colon every time he farts uncontrollably, which is all the time? Like every three minutes or so? I think that’s really sad, that Justin Bieber has an uncontrollable flatulence problem, but everything happens for a reason. I guess I haven’t been in that position, so I wouldn’t really be able to judge that.

A Dozen Nachos

2011-02-15T11:48:00.003-05:00

Much like everything in a red box in the Duane Reade seasonal aisle, interest in Valentine’s day is reduced up to 80% by the fifteenth. It’s a good day to take advantage of a convenient reverse commute of interest if you want to quietly tell a love story.

Three-quarters of the reason I’ve avoided writing anything for months is that the language I developed for myself in this here spot poorly describes my current life. I have given it shot, bridging the gap between what I used to write about and the things that have happened in the interim, but all I’ve got to show for it are a few saved drafts that use terrible and long-winded metaphors (pie crust, for example, and how its perceived difficulty kept me from trying to make it for a long time but actually I perfected it over the summer and I learned all these lessons and now we are treading dangerously close to the borders of Elizabeth Gilbertonia and also I am yawning right now and confused). There are plenty of ways I can talk about stupid dudes, funny dudes, dudes I talked to one time, dudes I remember having crushes on in high school, dudes who are friends, even dudes I used to commute with, but I haven’t yet got gotten the hang of writing about (spoiler alert) having a boyfriend.

I’ve done nothing in my love life traditionally or well thus far. Wait until you’re 25 to even speak to a straight guy; have a long and scandalous affair with Jack Daniels and a series of his flesh and blood buddies; turn to the internet; have your first relationship at 27: I know, stop rehashing the plot of EVERY Nora Roberts novel, right? Regardless of the Family Circus-patented wacky Jeffy path I took from point A to point B, I celebrated Valentine’s Day last night with my boyfriend. Again, because it would be almost disingenuous to do Valentine’s the Valentine’s way (criminally expensive dinner, tights with no runs, pretending I like wine, gifts) and I have done nothing normally thus far, we ordered a pornographic amount of Mexican takeout, watched Ken Jennings play Watson on Jeopardy, and ate an entire Whole Foods chocolate ganache cake out of the container. I made Sam a Valentine using a photocopier and an anatomy textbook. I got the serious stinkeye from an old broad reading a Jesus book on the train who, I think, incorrectly took my short hair and nose ring as proof that the “Sam” on the front of the card was short for “Samantha.”

I got to work really early this morning to do some prep work for a meeting and got into a conversation with a visiting colleague about an impressive flower arrangement on a co-worker’s desk. She got them delivered yesterday and they are seriously beautiful. It wasn’t until then that I remembered I’d grabbed a couple of the flowers from the bouquet Sam got me and stuffed them in my bag before I left for work. In theory, my Dixie cup of purse-mangled droopers can’t hold a candle to her dozen roses, but why hold a candle at all when I’ve finally gotten a lamp?

In Defense of Snooki

2010-08-10T11:57:00.003-05:00

I had a point about Snooki that sat parbaked in my cerebral freezer since the first season of The Jersey Shore aired and, now that she's back in boozy action and people are talking about her again, I think it’s time to defrost this here batch of brain croissants.

It's a fact that I started watching The Jersey Shore with the same kind of prurient interest that's always beckoned me to cultural superiority porn with a come-hither finger. I used to run home from high school to catch the troubled teen episodes of Sally Jesse and I positively ate up the slutty ninth graders with their bedazzled thongs and drinking problems and conviction that blow jobs are a legitimate form of currency. The payoff came in quotable sound bites of the "you don't know me!" variety and how smug I got to feel about being an honors student on a college-bound trajectory.

You can do this same thing with The Jersey Shore. There are plenty of things one can hold up as repugnant (or laughable, or enraging). Every situation begins and ends with liquor from a red cup. Every disagreement ends with a punch to the jaw. But I'm being completely serious when I say that the redeeming thing about The Jersey Shore is Snooki, who is a televised example of womanhood doing a decent thing or two for which she might not be getting her due.

Let me just say, though, that there are two points I am not making: 1. Snooki is a role model, and 2. Snooki is herself a feminist. Mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to be Snooki, yes, but should your daughter be less than five feet tall, round, relentlessly mocked for her appearance, imitated on SNL by a fat dude and unfailingly inclined to make left-of-field sartorial decisions, there is something to be gleaned from how little Snooki gives a fuck what anyone thinks.

I think my point was more salient during the first season, before Snooki was a brand. This new season is too self-aware to be taken without a whole margarita rimful of salt. However, there were some Snooki moments during the first season when she wasn’t playing a character where I was drawn in. The moment where she admitted to having struggled with an eating disorder was a turning point in the way I thought about her. Maybe you have to be someone who’s had problems with her weight to have this make a dent in the drinking and the fist-fighting and the pouf-sporting, but I think it’s worth it to recognize that Snooki is someone who’s accepted herself at a weight higher than her disordered ideal to such a degree that she can eat on camera, dance on camera, wear tight dresses and bathing suits on camera, strike out while trying to date on camera, and weather weight-related insults on camera. And laugh at herself.

The criticism of Snooki so often boils down to the way she looks. The criticism of The Situation comes down to him being a total shithead monster to girls. Somehow there’s a lot more bile in the Snooki criticism. My theory on this is that Snooki is a collection of easily-mocked physical characteristics—some chosen, some genetic—who carries herself as a hot girl, and this kinda gets people’s goats. Weird-looking girls, short girls, round girls, they can squeak by in the public eye relatively unscathed if they don’t walk around thinking they’re hot shit. Confronted with a tanned 4’9 tornado with big boobs and big hair and eccentric clothes who seems to think she’s a Victoria’s Secret model, you get descriptions like the following:

“That Snooki is not conventionally attractive — “A spray-painted Chihuahua,” Mike (The Situation) said when he first saw her — has a lot to do with why she is the breakout member of the cast. She is busty and short-waisted with small legs; sort of like a turnip turned on its tip. There is the weird tan, but the pièce de résistance of Snookiness is the half-doughnut-shaped pouf on top of her head….Snooki has a way of putting herself together that while in some ways is atrocious, is completely identifiable to her and consistent with her attention-seeking personality. She wears short, clingy dresses in a pattern or with some metallic trim, huge enameled or bejeweled hoop earrings and glittery high heels…Lots of 22-year-old women wear revealing clothes, but they may not have her body shape, and it’s a safe bet they’re not rocking a pouf.”

And that is from Cathy Horyn at the New York Times (full disclosure: for previous assholery, I am already inclined to say Horyn can eat approximately eight or nine bowls of poop). The rest of her Snooki profile is so dripping with condescension it’s hard to even read, but it all seems to stem from the fact that Horyn is the NYT fashion critic, Snooki does not endeavor to look like a runway model and doesn’t care, and Horyn reads this as stupidity.

And that’s what it comes down to for me: choosing to be something other than the ideal (whatever ideal) is a right, not a failing. And doing so in a big public way is kind of brave.

Believing that women have the right to choose what they do with their lives and their bodies and their presentation is one of those double-edged swords of equality. To extrapolate (way, way) up from the case of Snooki’s poof, think about the burqa for a second. Yes, it can be considered a historic symbol of female repression, but you also have to accept that some women choose it. You can look at Snooki and her tan and her cleavage and her underwearless backflips at the clurb and read it all as degradation, but you have to accept that a woman’s right to determine how she presents her body (and her sexuality) is chained to the right to do nothing more than have fun with it.

I know that I’m gonna get two billion responses saying Snooki is nothing but a moral vacuum/cultural death knell/oompa loompa, and I do get it. I do. She’s a famous person who did nothing but drink and fight and say a few funny things to earn that fame. There’s nothing admirable about any of that. All I can say is that something about the way her body is discussed jangled my own self-confidence nerves, and, as one funny-shaped person to another, the way she handles it makes me a little bit proud.

Three Months Too Late Book Reviews

2010-07-27T10:24:00.004-05:00

Because I'm incapable of reading or writing about anything when people care about it, I got And the Heart Says Whatever by Emily Gould from the library this weekend and then wrote four paragraphs of stuff that's already been covered, I'm sure. Oh well.

It’s not that I am opposed to someone monetizing her life. I’m not really even all that pissed about someone monetizing my life, mostly because of that old, possibly made up rule I learned when my third grade teacher was trying to get us to write Formal Letters to politicians and/or candy companies: for every person who does write a letter, there are a hundred more who feel the same way but don’t. If there are two girls who grew up in the suburbs, went to college in Ohio, worked in publishing, had empty-ish New York sex lives, bounced around different apartments in Brooklyn, lived with adopted dogs and got heart tattoos on their hips, there have got to be several hundred others. One of us was going to publish that story. The thing that does piss me off is that none of us should be paid to write about that life with passion that amounts to a shrug. The title “And the Heart Says Whatever” set me up for some degree of apathy, but it actually makes me angry that I read two hundred pages of disinterested bitchiness unseen outside a middle-school note. Yawn, then I got a job at Gawker. Eye roll, I was sad. Sigh, then everything was, like, dumb, and I kept thinking I was going to be good at something but I wasn’t, and yet here I am with a book deal. Or whatever.

And the salt in the paper cut is the way that very tone makes criticizing it impossible. I’m mad that Emily Gould has a balloon. I really want to pop it, but I can’t, because she already sat on it.

That was my gut response. Thinking about it for a little longer, I’m just not sure what anyone is supposed to take from this book or why it was published at all. I can’t imagine that a publisher signed this book for the huge number of Gawker readers from a few years back clamoring for a couple of pages about Gould sleeping with another Gawker editor, so she’s got to be considered some kind of poster girl for something, right? Between her New York Times Magazine cover story and this memoir, it feels like Emily Gould is being held up as the voice of some group. Demographically, I have to be a part of that group. All I can say is that nothing she described rang a single bell as I read it. The way she’s written about young adulthood, or New York City, or the publishing/media industry, or dating—the four themes that run throughout the book—is nothing more than a listless outline of her experience followed by reasons why no one should take her seriously anyway. So, why don’t we take her up on it? Don’t take her seriously, Publishing. Stop. Grab any 20-something off the street and I bet he or she could give you an essay of a thousand words about their life that justifies both publication and the living of that life.

To read anyone write about experiences so close to my own with so little care is irritating, for sure. What drives me nuts, though, is knowing that someone in publishing thinks her brand of oh, fuck it arrogance is somehow culturally resonant and representative of more than just this one bored voice.

Hot

2010-07-06T21:22:00.003-05:00

Oh my god, this heat, this heat! I am as aware how boring it is to bring up the torture chamber that is July as I am vaguely aware of all stimuli. When it is 100 actual degrees in my house I can only manage the murkiest of thoughts and my responses, where possible, come directly from the lizard brain. I am hot, the fridge is cold, I am sticking my head in the freezer. It is hot, this page is open, I am writing about the weather.

To those with air conditioning, the heat is like an old boyfriend you pass on the street. You guys feel the brief, sweaty simmering and yes, you return to your houses red-faced and anecdote-armed. Those of us without A.C, though, we are endlessly waking up during that point in a one night stand where you're sweltering under a blanket and a heavy, sweaty arm and leg and there's no escape. Kick off the sheet. Slither out from under the limbs. He's still there, hot breath exhaling on your shoulder no matter which way you turn.

It's fucking hot.

M4DoubleEw

2010-06-22T09:16:00.003-05:00

The best of New York City's M4W Craigslist personal ad headlines.

Bored at work - 24 - (Financial District)
Perhaps this is the reason why the housing market failed?

I am looking for a Sexy Secretary for a OFFICE FANTASY AND GET HELP
I am concerned this man was KIDNAPPED HALFWAY THROUGH THIS POSTING

Addicted to Asian and Indian women – 41
On next week’s Intervention. Or, god help us, Hoarders.

@@ Animal Sex ** ^^ ORGASMS ^^ ** @@@@@ - m4w – 49
The “Animal” in this sentence appears to refer to the muppet.

Hoping your pregnant –
Hoping you realize how much that sounds like a hex to the women perusing Craigslist for casual sex.

6ft tall in bear feet !!! Open for a laugh
I’m also 6ft tall in goat hooves, platypus bills and cow stomachs!

FUN SLAPPING C--KS ? -
I LOVE slapping corks!

Online Truth or Dare? - 31 - (Upper West Side)
Somehow I see this as being far less titillating online than in person:

Dude6969: ok, i dare you to take your shirt off.
Randolady: okay, just did it.
Dude6969: really?
Randolady: yeah.
Dude6969: awesome.

Bus Man in town in need of an assistant tonight – 32
Bus Man seeks Subway Girl for masked vigilante MTA justice!

I am looking to worship a Goddess - (Union Square)
Venus of Willendorf need not apply. (No fatties.)

SO WHY ARE YOU SINGLE? -
GOD, MOM, LAY OFF!

You Can Lead A Frog To Water
…but you can’t make it understand a well known aphorism.

really hot guy will pay you to eat your ass - 30 - (now)
I mean, the way this is phrased, even I would pay to see that happen.

Lost my father this year, seeking a new friend for brunch – 44
Terminal illness, suicidal thoughts, recent realization that God is dead, seeking partner for a lighthearted drink.

extreme male slave seeks service opportunity - 40 - (Downtown)
Leather sub, into humiliation and nipple torture, looking to hook up with local Habitat chapter.

Snugglebunny Looking For Snugglebunny - 33 - (Chelsea)
Christ, and my lunch is looking for an escape route back through my mouth.

Commuting

2010-05-27T19:21:00.004-05:00

If this was a short story, it would matter who I was or why I was on the train; where I was coming from and going to and what was in my bag; what was playing in my headphones; whether I was a little cold or a little hot and what I was wearing and how the weather was above ground at that moment. The difference between doing what I'm doing and telling a story is purpose. There's recording, which is selfish at its heart, and then there's communicating, which is selfishness with at least a varnish of altruism about making someone else in the world feel understood.

I was on the train just now. I took two; I was on the second but still less than halfway home. A kid got on a few stops after me with an African drum tied around his chest. When I say kid, I mean that he was sixteen or seventeen years old. When the doors closed he began to drum, and then by the time we were completely in the tunnel he started to sing, or shout, or kind of holler along with his drumming.

Three hours outside of work and having left pizza with friends because I was feeling too tired to manage the even the eating of pizza in a way that could convince people I wanted to be with them, the drum was loud. It was really loud. The hollering was louder. First I turned up the music in my headphones until it was distorted. Then I turned it down entirely because the drummer couldn't be drowned out. The sighs exhaled throughout the car could’ve inflated a Thanksgiving Parade balloon. A girl across the aisle was eager to make WTF-amiright eye contact and I couldn’t decide whether or not to engage in it because as much as I hated the presumption of this guy and his drum and his hollering at a time of the day when quiet is one of those gifts we all give a stranger, I didn’t actually hate the drumming. The way the low hits felt like someone dragging a thumbnail along the inside of my spine was nice.

But I did kind of end up giving in, at least a little, because I wouldn’t look at the girl directly but I closed my eyes in a way that might make her think we were partners in hate. The kid eventually stopped drumming. The girl across the way, she gave him a dollar.

And this is the kind of familiar tension that I both know and can’t stand—this drummer, he might be sincere but he is in the business of making himself look even more so for money, and I pretend to hate what he’s doing to avoid giving him any, even though in all honesty I am moved against my will and don’t have anything to give him anyway because it’s the day before payday and my checking account is in the single digits checking, and in the middle of it all there's the jaded one-upmanship with the girl across the way.

What I actually hate, the thing that sits right at the heart of it, is that I can’t even tell what I like and don’t like anymore because I’m so used to thinking about what I can have and what I can’t.

Ruby Lips Above the Water / Blowing Bubbles Soft and Fine

2010-05-10T15:17:00.003-05:00

The first time I wore lipstick I'd applied myself (I do not count the time my mother hastily applied a bit of hers backstage at my one and only dance recital when she realized all the other seven-year-olds were slathered from eyebrows to chin with pancake white and blue eyeshadow) was before a canteen in the eighth grade. It was gold. I'd definitely gotten it for free, probably in a goody bag after a birthday party. It made me look like an alien. An alien in a "ZERO" shirt. An alien in JNCOs, too, I think. An alien who did not grasp the idea of dressing like a human female and instead disguised herself as a boy that human female might theoretically want to dance with.

Anyway, yeah, I generally avoided the whole lipstick thing thereafter. In college I would occasionally buy a tube of what I thought was a kind of nice-ish pink but turned out to be the exact same weird magenta color I accidentally bought every fucking time, which was immediately banished to the basket of discarded identical bad lipsticks. No, scratch that, I owned red, too. Because I wore it one time. When I was doing laundry in my pajamas. And walked into a boy I had a crush on, who always managed to see me doing something embarrassing, like singing Cyndi Lauper very loudly to myself in an empty classroom. Or doing my laundry in Lucille Ball lipstick and rubber duckie pajamas.

Somewhere in the last year, though, I bought a 99-cent tube of violently red lipstick and it is about to become the first I've ever used up. It doesn't look any better than it ever did, nor have I learned to get through the day without smearing it at least partially onto my chin and having to wipe it off vigorously with a piece of toilet paper, nor have I been invited to a rash of events that would warrant flamboyant dolling-up. I'm wearing it right now, in fact, with my least favorite pair of jeans and a cardigan that is so beyond dirty I would feel okay using it to clean up a medium-sized coffee spill at my desk.

I haven't got a single glamorous bone in my body. Instead, some tangle of neurons in my brain is deeply dedicated to the ridiculous. There aren't many women in my life who wear real makeup every day, but those who do say cosmetics make them feel pretty and properly dressed up. As it turns out, I'm not nearly as interested in feeling dressed up as I am in feeling dressed up as. Why go to a work meeting merely looking as presentable as possible when I could go as a Robert Palmer girl?

Costumery is generally frowned upon in the cube world; Halloween might see a pair of cat ears or two, but a tiara on a generic Thursday would not fly no matter how desperately one needs to be wearing a tiara. On the flip side, costumery is also kind of de rigueur if you're me. I feel about as at home in businesswear (on the occasions when I actually have to wear it) as I do dressed as a cowgirl. Red lipstick--it's an inoffensive and nonspecific anachronism, a way to lodge a complaint against the (realistically inoffensive and) nonspecific daily grind.

I have felt like I was disappearing on the subway on my way to work more than once. The proof that highlighting your talking hole with some cheap red makeup has medicinal value is the fact that this tube is almost gone, but I'm very much still here.

One Good Line to a Country Song I Will Never Write

2010-05-08T21:27:00.001-05:00

My heart is like a double-yolked egg--
You crack it open and then you're afraid
Of just how much yellow you find.

A Love Letter to the Radio

2010-03-29T15:20:00.000-05:00

Charlotte moved away during the summer between seventh and eighth grade. We had a party for her, the details of which I remember very little about because she wasn’t the kind of close friend I would call to discuss urgent developments in the non-development of my preadolescent love life. Instead, she was the kind who’d make up 1/4 of the penmanship varieties on a note passed back and forth between a handful of my friends in life science. She was a peripheral giggler, a citizen of my lunch table, a nice girl whose departure warranted some kind of acknowledgement—but not the kind that would require me to ask my parents for cash.

I spent the all-request lunch hour just before her party frantically dialing 1-800-242-0100—digits I still know by heart from the number of times I tried to win tickets to see Bon Jovi or Green Day, or called the late night DJ from a sleepover to see if he’d put my friend on the air if she did a weird enough voice, or requested dedications or songs or shout-outs. We demanded a lot from our DJs.

They gave us a lot in return—like a song dedicated to Charlotte from the bunch of us, which I taped and gave to her.

I don’t get the technology blues when thinking about my childhood very often because, for the most part, every advance improved my life by leaps and bounds. It was unthinkable that I had ever lived like a barbarian with a Walkman once I got my Discman. God, rewinding? So eighties. I can skip to the beginning of the next track—oh, excuse me, you still call them songs?—with one button. And repeat? I can put this on automatic repeat? For hours? Yes, doing so will probably damage key neural synapses in such a way that my adulthood will include days of listening to a single two-minute song on a loop, but man, this Discman is the coolest.

Other things whose obsolescence doesn’t really cause an aching in my guts: vinyl, Gameboy, beepers, dial-up internet. But the radio, and the way it functioned as my cool older sister, that I miss. And now I’m going to write a sentence that will make me sound half “Get off my lawn!” and half “When I was your age…” but I’m just going to go with it: it makes me sad that the radio doesn’t mean to kids growing up now what it did to me then.

The burden of lameness that comes with being the oldest child of parents who count Asia’s eponymous album among their deadly serious all-time favorites is a hefty one. This, coupled with the fact that they didn’t let me watch MTV during my formative years, left me treading water in a sea of Jon Secada and Juice Newton and Huey Lewis and Rod Stewart and Jefferson Starship albums. I wouldn’t even have had a cooler musical island to swim for if it wasn’t for their love of listening to the radio in the car. They were channel hoppers, too. The Temptations cause as much nostalgia for my childhood as Tears for Fears.

When I turned ten or eleven and got my own stereo (and by “got my own stereo,” I of course mean “inherited my dad’s eight-track playing dinosaur that picked up about three stations”), DJs became my coolness sherpas. Elvis Duran on Z100 fed me the songs I’d have to know for school dances. X107 (an “alternative” station whose format change to exclusively country I still lament with such intensity it might as well have been a boyfriend who left me for another girl) gave me the first rock bands I ever listened to and loved. Luck is growing up in era when rock stations still existed, and they played bands with chicks in them. It’s not a stretch to say that X107 made me the kind of girl I am.

The internet makes musical Magellans. They’re explorers. But growing up on the radio, I swung my antennae around like a dowsing rod until music found me. There was something fated and intensely personal about the way a song faded in from static until it was clear, filling your room with a voice that hadn’t been there, that you didn’t know would be there just a second before, that might never be there again, that someone else had chosen for you to hear and so you were listening, responding to the DJ’s Hey, try this nudge.

It was just as likely for Boyz II Men to materialize as some weird folk recording on WFUV, both of which I would rush to tape record for later listening.

I think the thing that makes me sad when I think about fewer kids depending on the radio the way my friends and I did, as a lifeline, is the loss of a musical home base. And I know that I’m probably not even lamenting this for “the kids,” but for me. This is not to say that everything (or anything, at points) on the radio was good. Circa 1995, when I was thirteen and listening to every song I could tune in, I happened to love Del Amitri’s “Roll to Me.” This was a terrible song. Like, really horrible. But I liked it, and my friends all knew it, and the words were as familiar to our mouths as our own teeth for those couple of months when it was everywhere.

Now I (and everyone I know, and my younger brothers, and their friends) find music online and listen to it on headphones. I’ve become a creepy hoarder, stacking albums like old newspapers in the smelly basement of my personal taste. The experience of listening to music out loud and knowing that everyone has heard it—on the same station, at the same time—is all but gone.

I used to do this thing when I was feeling either very hopeful or very heartbroken, mostly about some guy, mostly who I’d never spoken to, where I’d turn on the radio and pick a number—say 3—and the third song that came on would have deep cosmic significance. Maybe that song would be Pearl Jam and I would take to heart the lyrics about not finding a better man. (To stare at. In pre-algebra.) It was just as possible that the song would be “Footloose” by Kenny Loggins and I try to wrest some meaning from the line about kicking off my Sunday shoes or life not passing me by.

It was load of horseshit.

That I still try to do with my iPod on shuffle, but it’s not the same because I’ve personally loaded it with every song possibility.

The radio, though—it’s mystical. Particularly for idiots like me with streak of sentimentality that can’t always be reined in.

ChatRoulessions

2010-03-08T14:46:00.003-05:00

Chatroulette was about the last thing on the planet I thought I would try, let alone like, let alone love, let alone forfeit sleep to use. But when the prospect of trying it with a friend at a bar materialized, suddenly it seemed like fun. Who cares if strangers can see you if there are two of you? The idea of looking at dick after dick after ugly, marginally turgid dick is far less creepy when you've got a partner in voyeuristic crime.

I don't like speaking to strangers. I don't even like speaking to my friends on the phone, as anyone who has ever tried to call me can attest. Webcams, 1990's era chat windows, abbreviated chat speak, old men and their exposed netherregions. These are things I am pleased I can avoid. They are also crucial Chatroulette ingredients. And yet? I was totally sold.

My take on Chatroulette is that it is at once the best and worst of people, a confirmation that everyone is nosy and judgmental and mostly id, but that even the drunkest group of teenage boys requesting to see your tits is there because they love the idea of seeing a real person. If the internet is the Berlin Wall of social interaction, Chatroulette is David Hasselhoff singing at its demolition: stupid and cheesy, yes, but also optimistic about basic humanity and its desire for connection.

Prior to my Chatroulette experience, I've never had a quantitative assessment of my first impression. Your friends rarely remember what they thought of you the instant they met you and they probably wouldn't tell you anyway. The social contract dictates that strangers, even if they think you are ugly and stupid, will not yell "UGLY AND STUPID!" and walk away. Chatroulette, on the other hand, is an endless first impression with accompanying commentary. I have learned I am unappealing except to the kind of guy who likes 30 Rock, which is thankfully not that small a population. I am actually funny; I can see people laugh when I say things. As I feared, my facial features walk the line between masculine and feminine in such a way that neglecting my eyebrows and putting on ever so slightly drag queeny makeup (a bad idea born from fluorescent lighting in my kitchen and poor resolution on my webcam) gives the impression that I may not have been born a female.

Contrary to how brutal it sounds, and how much this would normally make me weep, it's somehow liberating because of the detatchment I feel by virtue of it being on the internet. That guy thinks I'm ugly? Eh, fuck 'im. Next. On the flip side, this guy is cute! But boring. Nexting you!

All told, I've spent probably twelve hours on Chatroulette in total. Here's what I've learned.

1. As I mentioned, half of the world seems to suspect I am a man. These people will want to see my boobs anyway, so it's kind of a wash in the self-esteem department.

2. One can emerge relatively unscathed if you operate like an unattractive high school girl. Avoid large packs of teenage guys and old men. The pretty girls will pretend they don't see you.

3. Everyone smokes weed. Everyone. Every single person.

4. The French deserve credit for not playing to type. All of the French people I've come across have been charming and kind and not at all rude (wearing pants).

5. Everyone lives in the same shitty apartment. We all decorate from Target. No one does the dishes.

6. It's good to have some schtick. My response to someone jerking off is always "Mine's bigger." I may instead steal the line I got from a (very cute) guy in Salt Lake City, who uses "Ten points for Gryffindor!"

7. There is an excellent art project out there to be done based on screencaps of people's faces just before they instantly disconnect you. Particularly teenage girls.

8. Chatroulette is clearly about judging books by their covers, but as with literature it's often edifying to read the books you'd reject. This is how you end up talking to a Texan ex-frat guy Ken doll with a large tribal rib piece who coaches football...about David Foster Wallace. When you get disconnected you will actually miss him.

9. You don't realize how infrequently you wave hello and goodbye until you're on a webcam, nor how pleasing a gesture it is.

10. Ditto for the middle finger.

Dancing Around the Issue

2010-03-01T21:27:00.005-05:00

Because New York is a city where things like this happen, and because I cannot say no to things that give me access to any subculture that could've appeared on Louis Theroux's Weird Weekends, and because Sunday night is the time of the week when both unexpected invitations and an abundance of sequins could be considered therapeutic, I found myself at a ballroom dance competition at the Roosevelt Hotel last weekend.

The hotel itself was a trip. I've rarely been in a place decorated with that much marble where I wasn't required to genuflect before sitting down. It was the kind of hotel where I secretly hoped someone would think I was a hooker while I waited in the lobby for my friend, then realized they wouldn't because I wasn't classy enough to be the kind of hooker their guests would call, which made me all the more excited to be there. I wanted to order a Manhattan. There were no waitresses and I don't even know what's in a Manhattan, I just wanted to order one.

It was the kind of setting that made me wish I was a girl who can pull off hats.

The competition was in the ballroom, obviously, and we had seats at a table right on the edge of the dance floor. There were moments when couples rhumba-ed so close members of our party were hit by flying ruffles. The dancing was unreal, particularly the professional routines at the end which trod the (heretofore invisible to me) line between gymnastics and soap opera, but I was way more interested in the way the female dancers looked. Bizarre bedazzled gowns and all their strange cut-outs aside, these women were bronzed far past medium rare and into well done. Their hair was shellacked to their scalps with glitter hairspray and exploded into a ramen bowl of faux curls in the back. Stripes of rouge approximated eye black more than a healthy glow. I suspect there were even some teeth coated in Vaseline. I have no idea how to even begin describing the eyeshadow, except to ask if you’ve ever swirled a couple of colors of Play-Doh together and then rolled it out.

The more couples that danced, the more curious their uniformly eccentric style seemed. If you’re going to dance a waltz I can understand wearing either a regular formal dress or, if we’re gonna be authentic, something redolent of the period when the dance originated. But where did the feathered, gathered, sequined, open-backed, ruffled, fluorescent pink rayon floor-length gown come from? Why did they have to be so made up? Why the tan? I understand that even competitive, really athletic ballroom dancing is descended from something genteel and formal and black tie mandatory, but glitter? In your hair? That is fake?

Even though the dancers were actually lovely, they didn’t look beautiful. This is the thing I liked the best about it: I was watching a bunch of whirling grotesques who looked like they felt beautiful, and they danced beautifully. Even better: even though I’d worn my one pair of heels and a dress and fancy tights and (relatively) reasonably applied cosmetics, I was the outlier if you measured me against the standard of the room. I don’t dress up often and always feel kind of like a failure when I do. To show up to a room where the target I proverbially miss wasn’t even on the same field as the one these women were shooting for was a thrill.

Not to belabor a cultural phenomenon so overripe you have to make banana bread out of it, but this is kind of the same reason I’m a Snooki defender. It’s easy to make fun of the way she dresses and the way she looks, but what’s the point when she has achieved hot-as-fuck-itude on her scale and has more fun than most people I know as a direct result?

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about being beautiful because I’ve been feeling generally un-; this has nothing to do with anything besides the tidal nature of my confidence. Sometimes it’s way high up on the beach, but that means occasionally it’s also low enough to walk out on a sand spit. I’ve been wading in one of those moods where my peripheral involvement in Fashion Week and the requisite hundred accusations that I am ruining a photograph and need to move actually sting. And getting Kennedied (the verb for someone telling me I remind them of the old VJ, which happens with disturbing frequency) isn’t funny, it’s depressing. No, not even depressing, really (if anyone leaves me any confidence-bolstering comments I’ll die of embarrassment, so maybe I shouldn’t be putting this on the internet, but also, MY BLOG, MY RULES). To have attention called to your appearance frequently with a comment so neutered is purgatorial.

Confidence and the way stuff goes with guys is so tangled together for me it’s like pulling one necklace out of a jewelry box and having a snarl of ten emerge. It was my last Kennedying that made me decide to hang up my dating hat, at least for a little while, even though it was one of the best bar interactions I’ve ever had.

My roommate Jes and I decided several beers at our favorite bar were in order after a particularly brutal Monday a few weeks ago. She had come straight from work; I was wearing a crappy sweatshirt and my hair in its customary pile on top of my head. We were watching ice dancing. I didn’t even notice when the dude sat down next to me. I don’t know when we started talking. Somewhere between spinning Slavic couples I was Kennedied, yes, but so good-naturedly I didn’t mind. It was one of those moments where you end up talking to a stranger with such familiarity they feel like a room you could navigate in the dark. We made fun of each other for two hours—interrupted only to make fun of other people—and when I suggested we introduce ourselves he insisted it was cooler if we didn’t. I knew he and his friends were in town from Cincinnati for a few days, so he christened himself Cincinnati A. He knew Jes and I were roommates, so I was Roommate A.

Cincinnati and I bullshitted until his friends got bored with us somewhere around 3:00 in the morning and they left. In some Lost-style sideways reality, I probably should’ve married that guy. But in this right here right now, it wasn’t anything more significant than an unexpected gain toward nothing in particular. I prefer this to my endless fixation on the shit I’m missing. Two hours of stranger banter so perfect it’s like David Mamet co-wrote that episode of my life is way more valuable than a repeat with some guys whose names AND numbers I know.

To spread the metaphorical butter super thin, I think I’m forfeiting the goal of Fashion Week beautiful in pursuit of ballroom dancing beautiful. But not in terms of beauty, in terms of life. At least for now. Feeling less than lovely? Declare a romance moratorium, treat bar conversation like chess instead of flirtation, feel victorious when I win it. Writing projects are pointless? Get an acoustic guitar, remember more chords than I thought I did, feel victorious when Taylor Swift covers sound recognizable.

Perform them for the dogs.

Revel in copious tail-wagging.

Tonight We're Gonna Party Like It's 1620

2010-01-25T00:42:00.002-05:00

I recently read Sarah Vowell's The Wordy Shipmates, about the Massachusetts Bay Colony. I figured I'd start with a kind of diet history on the subject since everything I know about the English colonists of the seventeenth century was gleaned solely from a handful of visits to Plymouth Plantation when I was a child, and even those have been reduced in my memory to this one time we got a bunch of the reenactors to sing a hymn in four part harmony, and this other time a dude sort of insinuated I was a witch.

Anyway, the part that I found the most interesting was about Thanksgiving. I had no idea that the Puritans treated a day of thanks more like a ticker-tape parade than Labor Day, or any day of scheduled celebration. Vowell points out that the Pilgrims would probably be horrified by the idea that we celebrate Thanksgiving every year regardless of whether or not it was appropriate. They ordered up just as many days of fasting and repentance as they did thanks depending on the circumstances. Indian raid? Fast. Live through the winter? Feast! The fourth Thursday of November? Let’s wait and see.

I back this idea with all the ardor of two thumbs up and a follow-up high five. I can call in sick. I can take vacation days. I can celebrate the many regularly scheduled holidays recognized by Hallmark and on which banks and post offices refuse to cooperate with my needs. But, okay, say that one Friday night I get a little bit drunker than I thought I would and maybe Conan's final speech about not being cynical hits home way harder than it should and then maybe I'm having an existential moment at a bar while still singing Free Bird and stealing tater tots off of people's plates and texting my booty call A-team with no response, then moving to the B-team with similar success, and then I'm walking trainward in a slightly dejected and very wobbly fashion. Say that happens, "theoretically." I should have the right, as did the Puritans, to declare an immediate Day of Margot Kiddering, on which I am permitted to wander half-clothed, belligerent, and incoherent through people's yards, and everyone my life is alerted and given jobs like making sure I don't get murdered or too cold, or explaining to homeowners that it's cool that I'm trespassing. I called in Kidder.

Or, okay, say that it's Monday and the new computer system at work is not working again and you're depressed that you have to complain about the new computer system not working again, and you're pretty sure someone took your last working pen and also the fluorescent light in your cube is blinking towards death in a way that might cause you to have a seizure, and the whole office smells like Top Ramen. "Theoretically." I should be able to open my time clock program and select from the drop down menu as my reason for taking off the next 24 hours not "sick," not "jury duty," not "bereavement," but "Day of Mata Hari-ing." Then I put on a particularly seductive dress and you all send me secret missions that I carry out with panache, and I go to bed feeling like I've accomplished something cooler than finding out how to add a new signature in Outlook (for what it's worth, it's Tools, Options, Mail Format, Signatures).

This is, of course, reciprocal. If you needed a Day of Ghostbustering, for example, I would gladly provide the Ecto-Cooler and call you about urgent middle of the night toilet-paper hauntings at my apartment that you could dispatch with silly string.

Life hands us Christmas and Memorial Day and Valentine's Day regardless of whether we want them, deserve them, or can stomach one more conversation heart without vomiting a festive pink river. I am the last person on the planet to think that I would ever pick up partying tips from the Puritans, but I think they were onto something. Particularly on a day when it is unexpectedly rainy and warmer than fifty degrees in the middle of January and I want nothing more than to have called in Woodstock '95.

Big Girls: Don't Cry

2010-01-19T12:37:00.001-05:00

Cathy Horyn over at the New York Times posted a general comment about the Golden Globes on her On The Runway blog that referred to Christina Hendricks (star of Mad Men, general bombshell, growing fashion icon) as a “big girl.” The words weren’t technically Horyn’s; the quote came from an anonymous stylist who said “you don’t put a big girl in a big dress,” referring to the ruffled gown that Christian Siriano designed for Hendricks for the awards ceremony.

Full disclosure: Christian is a friend, though this has little to do with what I wanted to say about Horyn’s post. She’s not just free to hate whatever dress she chooses, she’s qualified to do so. She is a style critic for the New York Times. I am a person who wears a Sears flannel over an American Apparel dress to events where I want to pick up men. She’s paper to my fashion rock. But what I wanted to say (and what I left in a comment that has apparently been moderated into oblivion) isn’t an opinion on the dress that Christina Hendricks chose to wear. I’m really angry about how Horyn responded to it.

For the moment, let’s just accept as true the premise that Christina Hendricks is a “big girl.” Let’s also pretend that it’s at all appropriate for a New York Times journalist to discuss to her body in a pejorative and almost adolescent way. I’ll get back to these in a minute. The axiom that she attributes to the random stylist—but signs off on via its publication—is still insane and infuriating. What is a “big girl” supposed to wear? I’ve seen women of anything larger than a sample size faulted for dressing down, faulted for wearing menswear-inspired separates, faulted for wearing something understated and looking like a “mother of the bride,” and most of all faulted for wearing the form-fitting dresses that she and the stylist now seem to be prescribing. Thanks to this post, it’s now a faux pas for a “big girl” to wear a gown with a ruffle to the one occasion where it’s wholly fitting to wear a ruffled gown.

The subtext to the stylist’s comment troubles me even more than its surface bitchiness. Cathy Horyn and I both have something in common, and it’s that we both lost a lot of weight. Where she seems to revel in the fact that she can wear whatever she likes now, it’s something that’s made me uneasy about my weight loss and even angrier at the lack of fashion options for women who do wear plus sizes. Loving fashion should go hand in hand with a belief in allowing all sizes access to all styles. Fashion, style, clothing, accessories, shoes, hair, makeup: it is more you than your body, since it is all subject to personal choice. I hated that I couldn’t wear what I wanted to wear when I wore a size 20. Now I hate that I can wear what I want, which makes me feel more comfortable than I’ve ever been, while women who continue to wear a size 20, a size 26, a size 44, don’t have the same luxury. And most of all, I hate that Christina Hendricks, who is built like a dream and has the money and celebrity necessary to have the clothes she loves made for her, can’t escape the same scrutiny that there are things she can or can’t wear. Like she’s breaking the law for wearing a dress with a ruffle on the hip.

The stylist’s advice is stupid. You put a big dress on a big girl if she wants to wear the dress. You put a dress made of bubbles on Lady Gaga if she wants to wear it. You put a suit on Diane Keaton because she likes it. You put people in what they want to wear, because that is how people look beautiful. The worst part of the advice, though, is the language he or she used. “Big girl” is a descriptor so dripping with condescension you can almost hear it, like a leaky faucet. Christina Hendricks is 34 years old. A stylist declares her fat and all of a sudden she’s not just big, she’s a “girl.” It’s infantilizing and snide, and I wish to hell I could explain how hurtful it is to someone who has never had it used in reference to herself.

This is all kind of secondary to the fact that Christina Hendricks is not plus-sized in any way. She has an hourglass figure and a large bust. Her waist is several inches smaller than mine and I wear a size 8. The Times doctored the image that accompanied the article to make her look larger than she actually is. If you’re going to take issue with the sartorial choices of “big girls,” the Times should probably use a “big girl” instead of creating one in Photoshop.

I wouldn’t mind if Cathy Horyn hated the dress Hendricks wore. I couldn’t care less if she had written thousand words on the vileness of ruffles and a sonnet on how peach makes her vomit. She is a fashion critic and that would fall under her job description. Critiquing a woman’s body, however, does not.

Unfortunately, she is the New York Times style critic. And who the fuck am I?

M-4-DoubleEw (The Best of Craigslist Personals)

2010-01-08T17:15:00.000-05:00

Too deep, too intense, too emotional - 43 -
Personal? Or review of Antichrist?

Craigslist has become almost as bad as my sex life - 44 - (Ridgefield)
Full of transgender hookers? Hey-ooo!

ANY WOMEN WANT THEIR PXXXY KISSED? OR, WATCH ME J/O?? –
Or to treat their sex life like a Navajo codetalker?

I'M LISTENING... - 30 –
…TO YOU PEE

Can I Show You My Package? - 40 –
It’s 12 inches…by 12 inches…by 12 inches. Please be home to receive it between 5:00 and 8:00 or it will be returned to sender.

Reasons Why You Might Find Me to be a "Good Catch" -
For real, on this list of 40 reasons he includes “cried on 9/11,” and “I love to masturbate, (especially in front of a woman),” “I don’t have hair on my back,” “I’m not vegan,” and “I posed nude for a male photographer off CL this summer.”

Pretend to be my Girlfriend - 33 -
Okay, I’m pretending to be seriously pissed that you’re posting on Craigslist right now and also pretending to look through your text messages for other signs of infidelity and pretending to want to know who the fuck Linda is. Huh? Who the fuck is Linda and why are you sending her pictures of your junk?

TWO HOURS OF NONSTOP ORAL PLEASURE – 42
Come to my one-man show!

We Playing Naked Twister Back in My Hotel

2010-01-04T16:43:00.004-05:00

I like the cold. I’m saying this while sitting inside and still wearing my winter jacket, with suspected frostbite on the tips of two of my fingers given that they have remained noticeably numb despite being indoors for hours now, and having walked to the train this morning with my earphones on and my hood up and still feeling like some sadistic Claire’s employee was piercing my lobes with icicles. It’s not that I like feeling like a frozen hunk of hamburger. But I could never live in a place that didn’t get cold like this for at least a few months.

Through the kindness of Brad and Christian I got ring in the new year in Miami where, when the clock read midnight, the thermometer read 77, even after sundown, even on a balcony sixteen floors up and overlooking the ocean. When I say that this trip was magical, I mean it literally. Dictionary.com defines magical as “produced by or as if by magic” or “mysteriously enchanting.” To have my broke ass jet-setted to Miami for three days and three nights is totally fucking mysteriously enchanting. When one also considers that I was VIP-tabled and private cabana-ed and fed such a large quantity of free food and drinks so as to call to mind the edible forest and chocolate river in Willy Wonka’s factory, “magical” barely fits the bill.

There’s so little you can do to thank friends who have the means to transport you physically around the country, not to mention psychologically light years away from your real life. There was one moment on New Year’s Eve when I was three quarters through my purse whiskey (which truly is a girl’s best friend—forget that diamond shit) and dancing in a crowd behind a velvet rope and a beefcakey bouncer to cheesy remixes of Britney Spears songs played for the second or third time that night. I wound up dancing with some guy who kept spinning me around and taking pictures of us on his phone and complimenting my outfit, and as the room whizzed past my eyeballs I had the urge to wrestle the microphone from the DJ and yell “I AM A MEDICAL BOOK EDITOR! I EDIT MEDICAL BOOKS!” over and over. My dance partner, as it turned out, is on TV. I, as previously mentioned, edit medical books. There is no reason for me ever to be where I was, living a life that I could never in a billion years even think about affording, and wearing a tutu in public without question. Well, mostly without question. There were a few honks and someone called me Carrie Bradshaw.

I’ve never been in such a warm city for the holidays. Palm trees full of Christmas lights were weird, but nice. Weird in the same way that seeing the dubbed version of Ghostbusters on Telemundo is weird. I’ve also never lived it up in quite such a fashion. It’s one thing to drink on a roof, but it’s quite another to have a private rooftop lounge with a personal waiter who talks to you about his racing Chihuahua. Even the dog in this scenario is exceptional—one of the fastest Chihuahuas, in fact, in the entire state of Florida. Whose dream isn’t it to escape wind chill that will actually make your nipples ache and end up surrounded by rich guys in suits just itching ply anything even vaguely resembling a woman with drinks?

As it turns out, me. I loved every minute of my Miami vacation, but by the time I got on the plane bound for LaGuardia I was dying for the kind of cold that slaps your face red the moment you step outside, and for the kind of guy who might never own a suit, with whom I’ll gladly dance in flannel until last call, at which time I will purchase my own High Life. Maybe two. I couldn’t have been any luckier to have brunch delivered to a sunny cabana by the pool on Friday, but I couldn’t have felt any more at home having a friendly fist fight to old Blink 182 in a Bushwick loft near dawn on Saturday night.

To get kind of Empire State of Mind here for a second, I guess that’s the thing about New York. When it’s 7 degrees with wind chill and I’m spending my last $15 until payday and my rent for a shitty apartment is three times what it would be anywhere else in the country and I’m walking the frigid blocks to a bar that might suck, but might not, hopefully not, and I wonder why I do this to myself when there are cheap places to live where it never gets cold, the answer is: because I wouldn’t feel like I made sense anywhere else.

Kathy: The Mixtape

2009-12-11T19:07:00.009-05:00

I love end of the year music lists. This is because I love music, but occasionally suffer a panic attack induced by the internet and the endless bands floating around it like so many asteroids in the last level of the Atari game. Somewhere around August I give up on listening to new albums and run back to home base screaming olly olly oxen free. Or, more accurately, oh, make me over. But lists are comforting. Everything’s already culled down to just the shit that’s worth listening to for a whole subway ride. Armed with a bunch of albums that make me feel like I’ve taken advantage of the previous twelve months, I can march once again into the bloggy musical fray.

Aside from actual music publications and sites and podcasts and the like putting out their top however many whatevers of the year, I know a decent number of people who write their own best of lists. These are even better because 1. my friends have interesting taste in music and 2. it’ s like looking in their diaries. Have you ever gone through someone’s iPod? It’s more personal than picking through their garbage.

I was thinking about doing the same thing myself, but then I realized that no one cares about my top albums of the year because I am not a music critic. This is a theory that I could extend t0 this here digital venture but will not for sanity’s sake. So, rather than sum up the year in some kind of "this is good music, this is bad music, thus spaketh Kathy" fashion, I thought maybe I’d pull together the fifteen songs that will forever remind me of 2009.

Certain songs are rubber glued to particular times in my head; many of these songs have no distinguishing merit beyond their attached memories. Remember Boy Kill Boy? That song “Suzie”? No? Exactly. But that song is November of 2005 to me, the soundtrack to my first awkwardly attired and overly accessorized foray into New York nightlife. October 2007, driving to Foodswings with Brad and Jes is “Apologize” by OneRepublic. There are good ones too; “Under Pressure,” for example, is May 2004.

So, in no particular order, here’s Kathy circa 2009. Kind of a personal historical mixtape for life-archiving purposes.

1. Ghost Town DJs – My Boo
If 2008 was a year where I started doing a whole bunch of different things, 2009 was the year of becoming a regular. My bartenders know my name and my drink, and I have progressed so far as to be phone-number-friends with one of them. The bouncer at Enid’s balks if I try to show him my ID on Saturday nights when this particular jam is in heavy rotation. I’m not much of a dancer, but sometimes I want to jump around like a fuckhead to something and this happened on many occasions throughout 2009 at Enid’s with Robynn and Jes. This song tastes like Miller High Life and smells like sweaty flannel.

2. Slow Club – Giving Up On Love
On a day when it is so freezing cold I accidentally cried on the way to the subway, I wanted to put my beginning of the summer song way up toward the top of the list. I heard this for the first time when it was warm enough to leave my cardigan at work and take off on Friday with bare arms and I did a lot of aimless and generally cheerful walking around with these two singing in my headphones. I’ll never be able to hear this song and not think of South Street Seaport with the tall ships in the background. But more than that, this song got me at a time when I was excited about a boy. That was immediately followed by being confused about a boy. This shuttled me through both emotions with a good measure of summertime just-don't-give-a-fuckery.

3. Frightened Rabbit – Keep Yourself Warm
I don’t think I stopped listening to this song for an entire week in June. I’ve mentioned here before that, during my adolescence, I was kind of a perfect storm of unfuckability. Don’t despair: I managed to live one entire teenager’s-worth of shit in fast forward during the first six months of 2009. I stayed out way too late, I drank hard, I made dubious decisions that not infrequently involved making out in bathrooms. However, come summer, I was starting to feel pointlessness as the novelty of being reckless wore off. Still, when I heard this song I responded in the most adolescent fashion possible—by feeling convinced it was written directly for me. It made being full of doubt sound really pretty.

4. Pitbull – I Know You Want Me (Calle Ocho)
I don’t like this song. I don’t dislike this song. All I’m saying by including this on my list is that in 2009 I moved to Bushwick and my bedroom windows face the street.

5. Iron Maiden – Run to the Hills
In June, metal infected my life like motherfucking H1N1. I suddenly found myself surrounded by dude friends who, while watching the Planet Earth series, evaluated each species against a set of rigorous criteria to decide which was “most metal.” I will never hear this song again without being reminded of one incredibly rainy night with that bunch of people at Welcome to the Johnson’s and a fervent sing-along.

7. Temple of the Dog – Hunger Strike
8. Better than Ezra – Good
9. Offspring – Self Esteem
There was so much music from my childhood that I’d forgotten and found again in 2009, probably because I spent the whole first half being so thoroughly childish around a lot of people who never progressed past 1997, at least style-wise. Beanies. Skateboards. You get the drift. It felt nice, though, to listen to songs like these that were never actual favorites of mine, just big radio hits that play in the in the background of teenage scenes I remember from middle school. In that way, they’re more immersive. The power they had during 2009 to make both my friends and I nostalgic explains a lot about why I listened to them so much. Now “Hunger Strike” is also inextricable from my friend Robynn and a night we spent at Savalas fending off strange Italians who told me I look like Sharon Stone (untrue, patently untrue); Better than Ezra and Offspring are at once wandering around Yorktown looking for something to do at 13 and singing with Jes in the car with the windows open at 26, driving down Bedford toward Vinnie’s.

10. The xx – VCR
The xx felt like the secret everyone discovered at once this year. I had just found them and was listening to this song nonstop when Brad sent me an urgent text to get their album, stat. I fear for this band, that in a few years I’ll hear this song and immediately think about September of 2009 but wonder whatever happened to them. Bands that receive all this blog adulation have the curse of burning bright but quick and I hope for my sake that they last. This was a song I loved to listen to by myself, mostly on the subway late at night.

11. Japandroids - Sovereignty
12. The Pains of Being Pure At Heart - Everything With You
I was so late on the Japandroids boat I basically had to jump from the dock and swim for it in October. The Pains of Being Pure at Heart I found in the early spring but they didn't really sink in until the summertime. Regardless, I just plain love these songs. Like with the xx, I listened to these a lot at night, particularly after work and walking over the Williamsburg bridge. These are the kinds of songs that make me feel really excited. Like the night is splitting at the seams with chances. The reason why I like these two is that I can just listen and feel that way instead of fumbling around for words to describe that feeling that aren't completely cheeseball. I have not succeded.

13. Brad Walsh - I Don't Want U 2 Go
I've been able to measure the passage of time in my life for the better apart of the decade by Brad's musical doodlings. I've got bits and pieces of Destiny's Child remixes that are years old on discs somewhere that he would probably kill me in order to destroy. I've been impressed by everything he's done, but this song is the one that caught me viscerally from the first time I heard it in a way that was 100% seperate from Brad the Guy Who I've Known For A Billion Years Who Watches The Simpsons In Homer Pajama Pants. I love this song, period. I would love this song if he wasn't singing it.

14. Superchunk - Detroit Has a Skyline
Every year has its bummer jam and I'm happy to report that 2009's bummer jam is a markedly chipper one. Considering past years have seen me listening to "Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want" ad actual nauseum, I'm proud that this is an uptempo pop jam that merely makes reference to a crush not working out and listening to a song over and over again. I had a lot of crushes this year. Some were as quick as a couple of hours. Some are enduring right through this very second. None of them have worked out (and you know what, I'm gonna put a "yet" on that). But me and Superchunk, we spent a few nights drinking our sleep from a can and felt better. Meet us again, maybe a year from now.

15. Earth, Wind & Fire - September
The counterpart to a bummer jam is one's aural Prozac and, lo and behold, I'm as surprised as anyone to find it is a wedding band staple. I can't help but be in a rabidly wonderful mood while listening to this song and this was a fact I learned sometime in the early spring. It's come in handy more times than I can count since then.

Honorable Mentions:
The Lemonheads - The Outdoor Type (Lost since I was a kid and found again in the spring.)
The Wrens - Ex-Girl Collection (I listened to this a lot this year, like every year, but this year I saw them play live.)
Taylor Swift - Love Story (Just love it, and her. It cannot be helped.)

OkCupid, Draw Back Your Bo-oo-ow

2009-11-03T01:14:00.001-05:00

In lieu of having game, I’m trying to be game for things I would normally spout so many excuses to get out of I’d sound like a round of Family Feud: Avoidant Personality Edition.

Case in point: meeting a dude from OkCupid in person, which I did on Sunday night. After a series of good messages and excellent texts (and in the name of “putting myself out there,” a phrase that I hate with every angry molecule of my heart) I agreed to meet this guy for a drink and a Connect-4 showdown.

It didn’t go particularly badly. I had a good time, given my intense fear of awkward pauses in conversation, making small talk in general, even successful small talk, with someone I don’t know, meeting someone who only knows me from photos and text messages, and the loathsome possibility of being attracted to a guy who is not attracted to me because I am convinced that the guy can tell. But I was brave (not, you know, going to war brave, but brave for me). I wore a new dress and I think looked good: a group of drunk middle-aged women stopped me outside the bar and made me take off my iPod to tell me I looked “presh,” to which I responded “What?” and they repeated, “Presh! Precious! Cute! So presh.” I was hit on twice while waiting for the guy (three times if you count the old man who tried to sniff my hair on the way to the shuttle bus near my house). All signs pointed to being at least somewhat alluring to the cosmos at large. And, I’d like to repeat, I had a good time.

This is why it took me a while to figure out why I felt a little bit like crying when I left.

I’ve narrowed it down to three things. Number one, sheer exhaustion. Worrying for three straight days beforehand takes a toll. We parted ways with a one-armed hug and no further plans and, for the degree of nervous I feel before I do something like this, a plain old decent night feels like I failed.

Number two, this particular guy was dreamy. Like, the kind of dreamy guy that I am constantly hoping will get in line behind me at the grocery store so I can stand there and think about striking up a conversation about our shared penchant for the Luscious Lemon flavor of hummus, but not, because, you know, look at him. The kind that I imagine dates suitably dreamy tall girls in high-waisted skirts with long dark brown hair and bangs that lay flat. (I’m not sure how Charlotte Gainsbourg became my mental foil, but she is.) If it wasn’t for the internet acting as a friendly interloper on my behalf, this guy and I would never have spoken. I know I’m good written down. I’m can be awesome via text. But in person, these dreamy guys—well, let’s just say that most of the time it’s easier to watch them from the other end of the bar and imagine magic than try to make it happen.

Magic in general is number three, and that’s the big one. I don’t consider myself to be much of a romantic at all until I try something like meeting someone from the internet, the most logical of all possible interactions, and then spend the night psychically willing fireworks to explode. It’s like doodling hearts and flowers around the Periodic Table of Elements and calling it a valentine. I don’t want a guy to buy my drinks or pay my way into the movies. I can hardly take a compliment. I truly do not want to be dote upon or sweet nothinged. I thought this meant that I was the kind of person who could get into the mathematical matchmaking of online dating, you know, take comfort in algorithms and percentages that reduce the chance that you’ll hate each other.

As it turns out, chance is the one thing I love more than anything about love. I know that I live in a world where less than three signifies affection, not two, and I’m willing to text right along with everyone else into our technologically bizarre future--right up until the point where it takes away the promise that the next train car holds a meeting that can change my life. I’m not gonna give up flirtations I’ve imagined taking place over unripe avocados in the produce aisle, or in elevators descending from a floor high enough to permit conversation and a meaningful exchange of glances.

I guess it just boils down to the fact that I haven't ever done much of the love stuff, and I'm willing to swallow unattended dances and a dateless prom night and a decidedly single four years of college and twenty-six years of valentines from my mom and my friends if I can just not date like I'm taking a standardized test.

And I know, I know, it’s dumb and cheesy and a lot to ask and idiotic to wait around for and I feel like a vagina for even talking about it, but it’s the one stupid thing I want, to be surprised, to come back from the bodega with my two-liter of Diet Coke and a date with a guy I’ll come to find out liked the Smashing Pumpkins back when I liked the Smashing Pumpkins, a fact I’ll learn while drinking a beer together and not because I read it in his likes and dislikes.

And yes, maybe he continues to like Rage Against The Machine, which is a drawback, but means far more than being told we are 4% enemies.

Garbage

2009-10-06T15:32:00.001-05:00

I’m having one of those days where I take a walk at lunch and pass by your standard assortment of passersby but find them all beautiful in a way that chokes me up. There’s no way to say this without sounding like the voice over in some movie about redemption, or maybe rehab, or even (god help me) body image and acceptance, but it’s true. I feel cheap and vague in even employing the word beautiful because it doesn’t mean much. I’ve applied it to a sandwich, my performance at a meeting at work, a greyhound, the weather, and the unexpectedly early arrival of an L train in the last week alone. But here it applies in the actual dictionary sense of the word; everyone is beautiful, everything is lovely, and it’s like someone punched me in the stomach.

Five Minutes in the Closet With You

2009-10-01T00:09:00.000-05:00

So, back when I was in eighth grade, a bunch of my friends formed this Fight Club-esque Spin the Bottle society that met after school in the den/basement/garage of a rotating set of homes whose owners worked full time and trusted their children not to whore it up in their absence. Adolescent tongues, however, will always find a way.

I can't be sure how much of what I remember was hearsay or exaggeration or grandiose plans for making out that never actually came to fruition, or, most likely, the product of my own sordid imagination. Regardless, I was lead to believe by at least two members of the church choir that there were kissing games occurring on a semi-weekly basis, and that these were organized and refereed like a championship heavyweight tournament.

Needless to say, I was never invited. This contributed heavily to a lifetime of sexual anxiety wherein the merest whiff of Binaca will reduce me to a blubbering lump of insecurity. (Joking.) (Mostly.) Actually, the Spin the Bottlympics took place on the other side of town, and my hometown was so large as to require a nearly six minute drive to get from my neighborhood to theirs. Even if I had been invited, it was impossible at 13 to find a ride or solicit a parental note to take a different bus home and convince them to come pick you up before your friend's parents were obligated to feed you dinner. Being 13 in the suburbs was an experience that felt driven by intense emotion, but in actuality I was driven by my mom and dad. Everywhere. In the red Dodge Neon.

Sans transportation the world was sectioned off into neighborhoods just far enough apart render them discrete. It was not surprising that the phenomenon of make out games developed outside mine, since I lived in a Sahara near the mall populated with literally zero inhabitants willing to make out with me. The collection of back streets over by "town" was the slobbery mirage on the horizon.

I seem to remember Spin the Bottle club starting sometime in the spring, perhaps lasting a month at the most, and receiving note after purple-inked note in life science from a friend who desperately wanted to make out (on the regular and unconstrained by the bottle's cold impartiality) with some seventh grader. I definitely remember her asking me to sample lip gloss flavors from three tubes and imagine which I'd like better if I were a guy. I picked peppermint. She rolled her eyes.

I would like to point out here that I would still opt for peppermint and still have never seriously dated anyone, so maybe the lip gloss oracle of Mr. Schwartz's class has some respect owed to her.

So while she left school tasting like watermelon and bound for love like a guided missile set on “uvula,” I left school and went home and watched Sally Jesse Raphael. I've written about this approximately six hundred times now, that my teenage years were chaste and dorky and stupidly dressed and seriously, tragically fat and how this makes me a strange adult, but the biggest vestige of an adolescence spent fantasizing about kissing guys instead of kissing guys is an fascination with kissing guys that has endured with a vengeance.

Truth be told, I’m not 100% comfortable with saying the word “kiss” out loud. Fuck, smash, bone: these are verbs I can use without batting an eye. I find occasion to utter the phrase “trolling for dick” on a weekly basis. But “kiss” makes me uncomfortable in the same way as singing Happy Birthday in a restaurant, or proposing at a baseball game, or other similar displays of public mushery. “Kiss” is crammed full of chocolates and Babyface jams. I am mostly crammed full of pizza and beer.

Despite this, kissing makes up an embarrassing proportion of the shit going on in my brain. I was explaining to someone a few days ago that I often find myself thinking something along the lines of, "God, it would be really gross to make out with that old guy rollerblading shirtless through Tompkins in cutoff sweatpants." And it would. But that doesn't change the fact before passing a verdict, my knee-jerk reaction was to imagine making out with him. Perhaps he is still sweaty from his daily rollertour of the park. Perhaps my fingers accidentally uncover a gold Virgin Mary medallion buried in his chest hair like the proverbial needle in the haystack. It's disgusting. And yet I can't stop myself.

It's even worse with cute guys, and anyone who has ever met me knows my definition of cute ranges from Ryan Gosling to "Aw, I like his socks." Charming cashiers, good-looking bartenders, attractive dog-walkers; all of them get the imagined make-out and, because I already decided I loved them a little, an accompanying imagined heartbreak. Most of my subway rides are spent envisioning bouncing like an amorous ping pong ball between handsome commuters. On occasion, I lose track of conversations even with dude friends because I’m maddeningly curious what it’s like to kiss them.

I blame it entirely on not playing Spin the Bottle when Spin the Bottle would’ve been something to write about furiously in my diary. It’s totally fair. Everyone gets a turn, everyone’s an option. It’s kissing without the risk, this weird, exciting, entirely stupid thing humans do stripped of context and value beyond its inherent pleasure.

I’m more than a little taken with the idea of a bottle making the hard choices, of giving everything a spin and seeing if you can love what you land on even just for a couple of minutes.

eHarmonay-mo-mo-money

2009-09-02T03:22:00.001-05:00

I’m very nearly 27 years old. This means that it’s either time to bite it in style, like Jimi, Janice and Jim, or else delve once again into the world of online dating. There are no in-betweens. I refuse to believe that the future holds anything for me besides a year of indiscretion and the poor decision making of a rock star, or else growing up entirely. Like, joint checking account grown up. Like, grown up to the point where I both understand and have to pay property taxes.

The sad fact of my life is that my guitar skills begin and end with the Beatles’ “I’ve Just Seen a Face,” so I signed up for eHarmony. Though still unwilling to pay for their service, I have been perusing my matches with all the gravity of…well, actually, with all the gravity of a porn star playing a librarian in something titled, like, Stacked Girls Do it Write. I put on my very convincing serious face and evaluate each match on very serious criteria, the kind you reserve for choosing a life partner, like: use of emoticons (veto), unconvincing enthusiasm for outdoor activities (you live in Astoria and work in IT—you cannot possibly hike that much, you liar, veto), insincere sincerity (yes, everyone really wants to write about how thankful they are for their family and their health while trolling for poon, suck it, veto), improper use of the apostrophe (“its” and “it’s” are not interchangeable, dipshit, veto), lack of any humor whatsoever (you’re internet dating, for Christ’s sake, crack a goddamn joke, veto), making jokes that ring creepy (“IM REALLY A WOMANLOL,” veto), veiled chauvinism (“I just want a girl I can take care of who keeps herself nice,” fuck you, veto) , and, with unexpected frequency, listing Freakonomics as their last book read (shit came out in 2007 and has been an airport read ever since, and you’re explaining the premise like it’s Gravity’s Rainbow? Veto, veto, veto, veto and veto).

And then asphyxiating in my own vomit rises ever so slightly in appeal.

I do this every year around my birthday—note celebrity accomplishments achieved by my age (Billie Holliday had already recorded “God Bless the Child”), feel insecure, and then ruminate on my lack of forward momentum, particularly in my love live. My overall momentum is more like the Wonkavator. During my 26th year on this planet I’ve checked only the weirdest of things off the Before You Die list. I taught myself how to make bagels. I’ve received an invitation to and attended a Fashion Week show despite wearing hand-me-down flannel to the event. I’ve gone alone to a country where I don’t speak the language and enjoyed it. I became normal-sized. I wore a two-piece bathing suit in public. I’ve been in a bar fight. I’ve learned to roll a decent cigarette. I made out on top of a van painted like an American flag. I’ve made out with a member of a band I like (note: those who know, you shut up). Perhaps best of all, my teenage idol told me (and the internet at large) I remind her a lot of her. Those are big checks. First boyfriend? Twenty-six years unchecked and going strong.

I’m not actually bummed about it, nor am I truly using eHarmony towards this end. In fact, the world has my permission to kick me in the teeth if I ever do, for a range of reasons that span from their gay bias to the unappealing odor of desperation to Neil Clark Warren’s horseface. It’s just that the adding of another candle on my mental cake always sounds the “Oh, come on already!” alarm. Really? No takers, yet? Huh. It’s not that I haven’t progressed either. Kind of. I’ve gone from zilch to successfully going on a few dates with the same dudes, but also discovered a knack for making them disappear, Houdini-style, after that. Like, abracadon’tanwermytextallofasudden! I mean, that’s sort of moving in the right direction? Or maybe it’s just Wonkavatoring crossways and longways and diagonalways around the Boyfriend Room altogether. Who knows?

So yeah, the point here is that I’m almost 27. For my birthday, I’d like either a giant frosted mall cookie cake or blind dates with your devastatingly attractive friends. Either way, I’m aiming to have it all figured out by 28, which I will ring in either drowning in a bathtub in Paris or with a Jane Austen-style coupled-up finale.

Although if you do make it to 28, you've got to spend the next five years worrying about Mama Cass-ing at 33. Which is really, really not a good look.

Don't You Forget About Me

2009-08-07T01:53:00.001-05:00

I have this girlfriend who didn't go to hers, and every once in a while she gets this really terrible feeling, you know, like something is missing. She checks her purse, you know, she checks her keys, she counts her kids, she goes crazy and then she realizes that: nothing is missing. She decided it was side effects from skipping the prom.

John Hughes was a part of my life before I understood the prom, teen angst, or boner humor; before it occurred to me how racist it was to name a character named Long Duk Dong and sound a gong whenever he appeared; before I understood that James Spader was supposed to be smarmy and not dashing and Andrew McCarthy was supposed to be dashing and not lame; when rotary phones were current technology instead of something on which I just entertained the idea of spending $85.00 even though I don't have a house line or $85.00.

My very first exposure to John Hughes was actually through the Muppet Babies, which was my favorite Saturday morning cartoon. I remember eating one of those variety pack tiny boxes of Frosted Flakes (an indulgence bought with extreme infrequency and doled out by my mother only on the weekends, like the Eucharist or something) and watching the episode where Miss Piggy is drawn into the Pretty in Pink scene where Blane asks out Andie on their first date. I didn't understand what was going on entirely (why was this live action? What about Kermie? WHAT ABOUT KERMIE?) and it took years for me to place the scene. When I did, on my unavoidable run of enthusiasm for all things 80s and kitschy when I was about fourteen, it felt like returning a library book thought long gone.

I didn't go crazy when Farah Fawcett died. I don't think I've ever even seen an episode of Charlie's Angels. Ditto for Michael Jackson. I mean, I like Billie Jean as much as the next kid, but I wasn't gonna go apeshit and buy a ticket on the I Always Loved Him express just because his passing came as a surprise. But John Hughes, this one I feel, and feel justified enough in my love for his movies enough to lament his loss. In certain ways, I think more of my experience of what it's like to be a teenager came from watching his teens than living my own adolescence.

I grew up nerdy, but not Anthony Michael Hall nerdy. I grew up kind of weird, but not Ally Sheedy weird. I grew up unattractive, but not the kind of unattractive that's remedied by small amounts of brown mascara and a better outfit. The thing I hooked me in The Breakfast Club, Sixteen Candles, and Pretty in Pink was the way he included outsiders, for sure. But the thing that kept me watching over and over again was the fact that his outsiders were brave in a way I could never be.

Ted the geek and his dork-ass friends have the balls to go to a party where they're sure they'll be booted.

I, on the other hand, sat home on weekend nights in high school watching the bleeped version of Sixteen Candles on TBS for the hundredth time and eating Dove Promises by the bagful. His dorks had the guts to try.

Still, there is a part of me that resents the holy trinity of John Hughes movies for basically inventing the Pretty Ugly Girl. Ally Sheedy as Allison in The Breakfast Club is the best example, but Molly Ringwald as Andie Walsh in Pretty in Pink or Samantha Baker in Sixteen Candles isn't bad either. Long after these movies had come out, I found my way to the literary magazine, eccentric outfits, a pretentious preference for independent cinema, and disdain for high school and the suburbs and, heaven forbid, suburban high schools all because, basically, I was unable attract attention from the opposite sex.

I mean, not entirely; writing had always been a sort of a life raft for me, and I've never lost my desire to see new films, find new bands, yada yada. But all of it, all of the weird girl package, came from and begat sexlessness. And in a way, that was the point. Where John Hughes's brave nerds had the courage to step up to bat and strike out, I was to scared to even try out for the team and, instead, sought my victories elsewhere.

The Pretty Ugly Girl, though, she made things more complicated. For me, for many of the weirder girls in the real world, the weird was the merit we earned ourselves. But the Pretty Ugly girl held the secret pearl of attractiveness aside from being able to do everything I could do only better. (Alison's drawing of the covered bridge, pre-dandruff snow, is better than anything I could sketch; Andie designed clothes way cooler than the stuff I basted together from thrift store dresses; Samantha went unnoticed only in some demented school where movie star looks somehow register as invisibility.) She just had to budge an inch to be beautiful to boot. Allison changes her shirt and scrubs off the black shit and puts on a headband and, bam, Emilio Estevez wants to kiss her in the parking lot.

I changed my shirt every day. I wore headbands on numerous occasions.

I skipped the prom.

Still, I can't hold the Pretty Ugly Girl against John Hughes entirely, because she's part of the universal promise that his movies make. That promise is transcendence. Just as much as his characters defined the roles of jock, geek, cool girl, weird girl, rich girl, bitch, asshole, bad boy, and so on, they packed up and walked across the borders all the time. They shot grappling hooks into cooler identities and pulled their way up. They met and kissed on tightropes strung between loserdom and popularity.

I've actually been thinking a lot about Duckie from Pretty in Pink recently, which is why it felt particularly strange to hear the news that Hughes had died. That's probably my least favorite of his big three movies, mostly because Duckie makes me sad as hell and for a long time I couldn't figure out it was because I am a Duckie. And I think most people are. It's hard to identify with Andie--I've never been the girl with guys falling for her left and right. It's equally hard to identify with Blane, the rich dreamboat confident enough to date someone his friends hate. Which leaves you with Duckie, the one who tries too hard, who falls in love and no one notices, who can't win, who has to bow out, and around whom people wince twice for every one time they laugh.

You know how in cartoons they have an angel and a devil represent conscience versus temptation? I don't have that. I've just got Duckie on one shoulder, whispering in his most "She's gonna laugh. Can you blame her?" tone, constantly chickening me out.

Despite his embarrassing dorkiness, however, he's real. And he's loyal. He's good. He appreciates Andie without qualifications the whole time, and he's the one she's supposed to turn around and realize she's loved all along.

Apparently in the first version of Pretty in Pink, Andie and Duckie end up together. Hughes didn't like the way the scenes were shot, and he didn't want to send the message that poor people should just stick with poor people, and, on top of that, audiences wanted to see the girl get the cute rich guy. And so it went into cultural history.

But see? That's what I mean about Hughes and transcendence. Even when you think there's no hope for Duckie, for the geeks, for any of us at all, you find out that somewhere, sitting on some shelf, there's a reel where everything ends up as it should be.

Blog Request! Who's Hotter: Vampires or Werewolves?

2009-08-03T02:50:00.003-05:00

I received from my (internet) friend Alan MX a blog topic request and, since he is an endless supporter and champion of my particular brand of verbosity, he gets his wish. Go listen to his music.

Before I come down on my side of this debate, I would like to point out that to ask the question, “Who is hotter, vampires or werewolves?” during this particular moment in history is like asking “Who’s hotter? Robert Pattinson or, like, John Goodman?” Vampires are in with a vengeance and have sexy hair and sleep not in coffins, but on the cover of InTouch, tucked under the pillows of tweens dreaming big. Werewolves, on the other hand, are an unloved mythology currently relegated to a spot somewhere between Sasquatch and Alf on the spectrum of supernatural humanoid beauty. No one’s loins quiver at the thought of Frankenstein shuffling into the prom and grunting for the last slow dance—but they might, if Zac Efron was suddenly cast in Frank N. Stein’s Senior Year.

So, what I’m saying here is that we have to level the playing field and strip any current Twilight, True Blood mood lighting from the vampire scene and look at what they truly are.

And acknowledge that werewolves are way hotter.

Since neither exists in actuality, one can take both vampires and werewolves entirely metaphorically. A werewolf is a regular dude the majority of the month, except when there’s a full moon and he turns into an animal. Now take that last clause and read it as though this is a Danielle Steele novel. “The full moon was so romantic,” Susan sighed into the phone as she slipped on her leopard robe. “And Jackie, I swear, he was an absolute animal between the sheets.” If you read a werewolf as a literary construct, it’s completely sexual in that thumbs-up kind of way.

Vampires, however, are pasty, lazy goths who sleep all day and wake up solely to suck the fucking life right out of you. Oh, you’re allergic to daylight? You wear a lot of black? You’re literally bleeding me dry? That’s what a parent yells to Bauhaus-loving adult offspring who refuse to leave the basement and get a job. It is not, I would like to point out, seductive.

My preference for the werewolf is further exacerbated by the fact that I think there is one working at a restaurant in Williamsburg where I occasionally dine. And he’s sort of rockabilly. It’s almost painful to try to eat your salad while he paces around behind the bar, shirt tucked in with the sleeves rolled up Dean-style, pompadour completely frozen in place, and enough scruff and height and bulk to convince even the most skeptical nonbeliever that he has a suspiciously lupine air. He’s dreamy.

On the other hand, there is no shortage of pale, gaunt boys who only go out at night in my life, in this city, and on this planet. In fact, I was once even bitten to bruising on the neck by a boy who I’ve only ever seen wear black from head to toe. These guys are as vampiric as humans can get and it doesn’t make them sexy. It makes them fuck-ups.

So, in summation: werewolves, hot. Vampires: emo losers. You’re welcome, Alan.

Opheelings

2009-07-07T01:54:00.000-05:00

I’ve been vacillating between bummed and fine for the past couple of weeks like a cranky ping-pong ball. Sometimes circumstance strikes such a crappy chord that nothing feels satisfying except moaning along, improvising some miserably trite lyrics about how everything sucks and everyone sucks worse. Eventually I get fed up with laying all fetal on my kitchen floor and complaining, remember that my problems are minute and uninteresting when compared with, oh, let’s say fucking Iran, listen to “Better Things” by the Kinks for a few hours and cheer the hell up. And it works. Onion rings are ingested with gusto; sunshine is enjoyed; books are finished and new ones are cracked enthusiastically.

And then Monday morning comes calling and I wake up for work still tired, and everyone else was smart enough to make the long weekend longer, and ennui leaks right back in like my life is the basement of a shitty suburban ranch house, and circumstance strikes again to make me embarrassed like I haven’t been since I was twelve and had braces and a short, mean kid named Mike read my journal over my shoulder on the seventh grade Frost Valley camping trip and threatened for three horrible days to out my childhood crush, and I go to sleep listening to the Cranberries without even a trace of irony.

This has lead to a lot of googling of and affection for the stupid Victorians and their melancholia, and its sister illness nostalgia. I wish I could still convince people what I’ve got was a disease (it’s not) instead of a sour mood (it is), a serious one, but one that could be cured with lots of laying around in bed in fancy nightgowns and being considered very fragile and having my whims catered to out of medical necessity.

So, yeah, googling melancholia eventually lead to googling Ophelia (grant me my melodrama, okay?), and then I found this amazing story about a notoriously wonderful performance of Hamlet back in 1720. Apparently there was this actress named Susan Mountfort who was relatively famous for the time, but who had been suffering from some non-descript madness induced by a broken heart. I mean, that’s the given diagnosis. The shit is, she got away from her nurse one night and ran to the theater where she used to perform. The troupe was performing Hamlet. She basically booted the chick who had been playing Ophelia out of the way right before the big mad scene, ran onstage, and gave one of the greatest Ophelia performances in history. And then, according to the story I found, “she died right after.”

That. Is all kinds of awesome.

If you put your sadness on a scale and hope its purpose is a sufficient counterweight, that story is a supremely romanticized example that, yeah, maybe things can balance. Sure, she was heartbroken enough to go legit bonkers, but that let her play such a good Ophelia you can still read about it 289 years later.
I can’t put my finger on why that’s a satisfying idea, but it is, and after a month of feeling more than my usual hue of blue I’ll take it. I’ll just keep throwing my lame little bummers on the balance one by one and trust that there’s a point to it all that’ll even me right back out.

M-4-DoubleEw

2009-07-02T00:12:00.002-05:00

It's back. Here are my favorites from recent postings in the M4W Craigslist personal ads section.

Dominant / Rugged / Tall / Assertive / Masculine - 34 - (NYC)
I’m a Durango.

sometimes the stars are aligned - 61 –
To cosmically, magically, miraculously allow you to bone a dude already receiving the AARP magazine. Thank you, universe! O God, you are truly wondrous!

HELP! Do you have BIG LABIA? This is a real post! - 35 -HELP! THIS IS A LABIAMERGENCY! SOUND THE LABIALARM!

electrician looking for someone to spark with.... - 21 - (stamford)
Ba-zing, motherfucker, ba-zing.

Any women like men that show off the body in skimpy underwear/swimwear - 45 - (CNJ/NNJ)
Showing off my body in skimpy underwear is very different than showing off the body. It’s like seeing a shooting star when you find a simple case of article misuse that can turn your run of the mill pervy sentence into a serial killer’s one-liner.

Girl Boobs (Chinese) - 34 – pic
This sounds like something on a badly translated menu.

How would you like a long sensual mass and oral sex for u (optional) - (Downtown)
Oh fuck yeah babe, I’ll read from the Gospel of Mark real slow, and then I’ll bless that big, hard Eucharist...

I'm sick of games, how about you? - 22 - (Chelsea) pic
Word, if I have to play one more game of Chutes and Ladders I’m offing myself.

latin male looking for them freak ladys - m4w - 30 - (new jersey)
No. Problem.

I'm in a relationship but.. - 38 - (Upper West Side)
…I’m also on Craigslist being a dirtbag. (No fatties.)

In need of real "lady" - (Queens)
I’d love a “woman” to let me “touch” “her” “vagina.”

Every Inch of your Pussy......(no sex) - 30 - (Astoria)
No sex? What sentence begins “Every inch of your pussy” and does not include sex? Every inch of your pussy will be treated to a lecture about the Algonquin roundtable?

How I normally operate... - (Manhattan)
With a plastic knife in a room I made in my basement. What?

Today’s gold star goes to a poem that manages to be horrifying and entertaining all at once; the title is the kind of cutesy and nonsensical phrase that makes me want to wretch, and the triple use of “sore” in the first stanza made me cross my legs defensively, but picture a dude reading this aloud on a Vaudeville stage and it’s kind of (but just KIND of) endearing.

CUTIE DEAR BEAUTY(POEM) - 45 (Sac CA)
Cutie dear beauty, this poem is to you.
Its about all the things I want to do.
I want to make love to you, like never before.
And when I am done with you,you will be,sore,sore,sore.

To me lovemaking is an art.
Its takein 45 years to profect my part.
Twenty years ago,you would pay a high price,for me.
A male escort,the best that can be.

I am hung like a horse, and easy on the eyes.
Tall,dark,and handsome, I must not lie.
I love to make love, and the best that can be.
Looking for someone, someone like me.

So don't be afraid, to give me a try.
You never know, I might be the guy.
I can last all night, and part of the day.
You see my darlins, I am really good in the hay.

But you will never know, unless you try.
I am the best of the best, could be your guy.
I am respectful,honest,and wild in always.
I have had many woman say. (that i was there greatest lay)

You will never know,unless you try.
So here I am, simple guy.
I would love someone, to share my heart.
We will never know, unless you start.

Finding an Excuse to Use the Word "Hinterlands," Mostly.

2009-06-26T10:29:00.004-05:00

"Kathy," she said to herself, "you're doing it all wrong."

See, it kind of works. This tidbit is a telegram from my most remote psychological hinterlands, but occasionally when I'm feeling lousy or stupid or stupidly lousy, I do this thing where I turn my interior monologue into third person prose to gauge how ridiculous it sounds. If I wind up with something that rings a little Days of our Livesy, I know I'm being melodramatic. If it chimes kinda CSI, I know I'm too angry. Miss J-caliber quip? Scale back the bitchery. If I end up with Smiths lyrics, it's time for an Italian ice and some sunlight-derived vitamin D.

It's probably a legitimate problem, though, if you can read your life back to yourself and have it sound like a bummer. For the last month or so my narrator has managed to be fairly pathetic, a little bit indulgently "woe is me," and, worst of all, pretty on point about the suckage of several factors. There's that idiom that's proving annoyingly true about never being able to have an apartment, a job, and a relationship you love while living in New York.

"Kathy, far from attaining any of the big three, had fumbled even the most easily juggled balls: the shitty iced tea mistaken for the good one not once, but three times at the bodega; a misplaced phone and iPod; a favorite pair of shoes devoured by one of her canine roommates; vacation days misspent whining about bad iced tea and phones and shoes."

There are legitimate reasons to think one's life has gone to crap, and those are obvious: a lost leg, for example, on top of a dead pet, getting laid off, and identity theft. None of these have happened to me, so it's imperative at this point that I cowboy up and come to learn there are worse things than a general sense of career dissatisfaction. Or money troubles that leave me uncomfortable but not homeless. Or health problems that end at an occasional migraine or hangover of my own doing. Scooped on top of each other like the worst ice cream cone in history, everyday problems just have a way of adding up unmanageably. My day-to-day is all dirty laundry and bills and humidity and paperwork I don't want to do and a troubling amount of dog poop. In the midst, it's easy to forget the good things, the fun things, the hours in the park, more complimentary rounds of beer than I should've earned through congeniality alone, a handful of eccentrically nicknamed friends, unsolicited work e-mails written just to make me laugh, situations that drop me on the balcony of a fancy hotel, 18 floors up, looking at a motherloving rainbow stretched over New York.

"Kathy remembered computer class in third grade, and could recall none of the lessons that revolved around a blinking green cursor at a DOS prompt. All that stuck with her were three options: abort, retry or fail. She was ready to choose whichever option would work, whichever was quickest keystroke for an exit into a new game of Number Munchers."

Side Blogject

2009-06-09T11:47:00.001-05:00

Kai and I started a themed mixtape blog. You should read it and listen to it and marvel at our wit.

Those Mixtape Girls.

A Ghost Story with a Disappointing Ending

2009-05-11T19:36:00.006-05:00

My bathroom is haunted.

Fifty percent of the people who hear me say this sentence give me the old incredulous eyebrow. The other half hug themselves and ask me not to freak them out because they "totally believe that shit, seriously." But allow me to present the evidence.

The bathroom of my apartment is very small and located all the way in the back, right off the kitchen. It's the size of a closet. I can successfully close and lock the door, brush my teeth, rinse and replace the toothbrush, and turn on the shower from the toilet. There's one tiny window I believe is painted shut--even if it's not, we've never opened it.

Weirdly, the light switch is outside the bathroom on the wall in the kitchen. There were quite a few times when we first moved in that I'd find the light on despite being pretty positive I'd turned it off, but I chalked that up to absentmindedness and the flagrant lack of concern belonging to someone who hasn't yet put the Con Ed bill in her name.

One day a few months after we moved in, Jes was taking a shower. There's a framed photo of a rubber duck on a tub that hangs next to the mirror on the bathroom wall, just like it hung in both of my previous apartments. Seemingly without provocation, the glass in the picture shattered. The photo stayed on the wall. We embraced the rational possibility that perhaps the glass broke after years of subjecting the picture to shower-related temperature change, but still, flying glass can be unsettling. Then, a few days after the picture incident, I came home to find the soap dispenser smashed to shards in the bathtub. The door had been closed all day so I couldn't blame the dogs. I theorized about floor vibrations from the heavy-footed neighbors and cleaned up the bits.

I will freely admit that I look for every excuse to believe in the supernatural, the slightly spooky, the undead, the hexed, the telekinetic, the psychic, and anything with even the most vauge Craft-esque appeal. At this point, I was ever so slightly thrilled that signs were pointing toward poltergeist. This is why I didn't entirely pee my pants when, while home alone, I heard a weird sound coming out of the bathroom. I opened the door to find both faucets running. I hadn't turned them on. Jes came home and, upon hearing the news, ran to her room declaring she would never pee here again.

Taking this as a challenge, about a week later the ghost did the same faucet trick. This time while Jes was in the bathroom. Watching the knobs turn of their own accord.

Provided our ghost is something more sentient than air in the pipes and a creaky foundation, I'm not afraid of him. Or her. I was convinced there was something demonic in as benign a place as the Woolworths in my hometown when I was a kid; that store felt infinitely more menacing than my bathroom does.

Besides, there's something sort of comfortingly adolescent about a poltergeist. If my ghost is the kind that wants to spook me with some running water, it's probably the kind of guy who would've tried to impress me by pulling my hair or mooning me. There are ghosts everywhere; in the peanut butter still smeared on my walls, in my look-at-me glasses, in the ever-present Brooklyn handlebar moustache, in bright red lipstick, in short shorts, and in every stupid notice me gesture by which we're all completely haunted.

Boys Will Be...Girls.

2009-04-24T00:18:00.000-05:00

New Year’s resolutions aren’t my thing because at best I forget about them. At their worst they’re a constant reminder I’m failing at something I had an entire year to accomplish. I made the same resolution every year between eleven and fifteen (kiss a boy!) and managed to fall so spectacularly short each December (not even making eye contact with a boy who’s not my brother!) I gave up the practice entirely until this year. I resolved to dress like a girl more often.

I have a bad habit of dressing like the dudes I like. Going out tonight? Sweet. Dumb t-shirt, jeans, actual men’s boots. Occasionally I throw flannel and a leather jacket into the mix. The thing is that I actually kind of like clothes and, now that I lost some weight or whatever and can buy cheap dresses from those abominably wonderful bargain stores on lower Broadway (Extazaa WHAT WHAT), I’m endeavoring to do so. I think I’ve achieved some success.

This is why it’s funny that the larger issue of my failure at traditional girlitude, by virtually any other measure, has become a recurring theme in my life lately. It’s important to point out here that my preadolescence was informed by 90’s style girl rock, from Courtney Love (cartoony, psychotic) to Lilith Fair (crunchy, hirsute), so classic girlishness was never something to which I aspired. But at some point between then and now, when a friend helpfully reminds me to wash my hands after eating something spicy so I don’t accidentally make my dick burn when I pee, I ended up kind of Middlesex. All I was really shooting for was a little Tank Girl swagger.

I’ve been “dude”-ed and “bro”-ed while making out. I’ve been half of the phrase ,“guys like us…”. I’m used to the “YOU ARE SUCH A DUDE” reaction after telling a story. This bothers me exactly zero approximately 98% of the time. I know these people, mostly guys, don’t actually think I’m a guy. Moreover, I know I’m a girl and that, like any other girl on the planet, my brand of girl is appealing to some. I have successfully seduced a dude with only my knowledge of 1980’s era professional wrestlers while swigging PBR out of a coozy and wearing a ripped sweatshirt, no make-up and dirty jeans. I’m fairly positive I belched. I’m fairly positive that’s gross. My point here is that the one thing I’m completely positive about is that grossness and being female not are mutually exclusive.

Ditto for being frank/pragmatic about sex and being female. Or not feeling particularly caught up in the idea of having a wedding and being female. Or having the ability to take a joke about being ugly or being fat or being a slut and being female. Or not smiling and being female, although that one caught me by surprise. “Other girls, they smile at people when they walk by. Like, as a rule,” my coworkers informed me. “You’re the only one who doesn’t.” I’m willing to own the idea that I might be completely unfriendly, but that doesn’t make me a boy.

I’m not exactly treading new feminist territory here. It’s just that the “you’re a guy” reaction whenever I do something particularly un-girly gets to me every once in a while because first of all, I’m not a guy and I never will be. The only time I even semi-wish I was is right now because I have cramps, the lady kind, and there is some proof I'm not a guy right there in your pudding. And second, I get guyified whenever I seem unemotional. This defines being a girl as having feelings that are easily bruised and being a guy as not having any at all. That’s good for exactly no one.

So, to settle. Yes, I am a girl. Yes, my fingernails are short and chewed and probably dirty, but that makes me more of a grubby third grader than a boy. Yes, I sometimes, ahem, interact with dudes without getting lovey-dovey, but that makes me more of a sociopath than a boy. Yes, my laundry contains so much flannel I’m releasing an album under the name L.L. Cool Bean, but that makes me more of a creature of comfort than a boy.

And besides. Some of that flannel is in dress form. Four months resolved and going strong, bro.

Short Dispatches from Vague Territory

2009-04-10T16:15:00.003-05:00

I’m trying to come up with a runaway train metaphor for my life that isn’t horrendously cheesy and also doesn’t bring to mind the ride at Disney World or the Soul Asylum song, but I don’t think I can do it. And now I’ve just got that “like a madman laughing at the rain” part stuck in my head. But do you know what I mean, that feeling? Let’s stick with the rollercoaster over the 90’s anthem. An amusement park ride has rails; it’s clear you’re running along a path, however terrifying or nauseating, and it’s only the velocity that makes it feel dangerous. The scenery around you isn't all that interesting either--what's thrilling about an amusement park besides the speed at which average people whip into and out of sight? That’s the completely cheesy way I’m feeling lately, described even more smoked goudally. Havartishly.

On Lookers

2009-03-27T00:54:00.000-05:00

I was on the train this morning with a herd of eastern European high school kids on some sort of group trip that necessitated being in this country, being on the subway and being in my way, but also being adolescently excited in that school trip kind of way that is, as yet for me, unparalleled in adulthood. Everyone involved in a school trip (teachers and parents and kids unleashed on a city with an itinerary and pocket cash) knows it’s bullshit and no one’s learning anything—or, at least, anything that will enhance a two-page essay for Global Studies. But the group swindle is a great phenomenon. Everyone plays along just for the sake of breaking the routine. Imagine if you, your boss, the president of your company and all your co-workers just agreed that for the next three days, yep, you all have “food poisoning.” Wink wink.

Anyway, someone asked me recently whether I’ve noticed how freakishly tall the riders of the L train are, and I actually had. L train commuters are Amazons. But I also think the L train is a freakishly beautiful train (for whatever reason that probably has to do with having a high net worth). The F, my old transit stomping grounds, was not a particularly attractive train. It was difficult to even find a train crush. I eventually found a clumsy dork who hummed along to his headphones, but my taste tends to skew nerdy and I’m not sure how many other hearts he would’ve set a-thumping.

The L is a different story. There are fashion people, for sure, who obviously work in their industry as a result of being beautiful, but a shocking proportion of the rest of the train is jaw-droppingly pretty too. My uterus begs me to procreate with half the dudes on every car so I can add their genes to my average pool, like so much Tang into tap water.

So, three of the foreign school trip boys were brave enough to swim away from the school of fish to take advantage of an open bench across the car from me. I would guess they were probably about 16, maybe 17, and all awkwardly tall and hulking. They sat on this scale of Cro-Magnon beauty that ranged from “Pirates of the Caribbean Extra” to “Likely Face of Next Prada Campaign.”

I’m not sure any of them would’ve known which was which. They were all equal parts swagger, which makes me think they were all equal parts uncertainty, which makes me jealous that boys can retain that idea that attractive is something you might yet magically turn out to be for much longer than girls do. Girls figure out whether pretty is in the cards by the time they’re 10; contingency identities, if necessary, are in place by middle school.

Monologues and Asides

2009-03-19T00:13:00.001-05:00

My roommate Jes is gone for the week, leaving me alone in my apartment for the first time since I moved in. She’s even taken the dog with her and in his absence I’ve learned that, for weighing a scant eight pounds, he looms large in our household when he’s around. Not that I’ve exactly been alone the whole time. I had a dinner on Monday for a couple of people and a coworker who’s just moved here from abroad. It felt like a very adult thing to do but, despite pageantry involving flowers and side dishes and coats on beds , I think I came off like a kid having a tea party. I still haven’t done the dishes. Point proven.

I’m wondering how the internet knows what my insecurities are. Before I started losing weight, the ads on all of my social networking pages were all “25 AND OVERWEIGHT?” Now that I’m not either of those things, they all say “THIN LIPS ARE JUST PLAIN UGLY.” I’m waiting for the day when the internet can aggregate and psychoanalyze the stupidly large amount of content I’ve written on its back to spit out really targeted and creepy ones, like “YOUR HAIR LOOKS WEIRD FROM THE BACK,” or “EVERYONE KNOWS YOU WORE THOSE PANTS FOUR TIMES THIS WEEK,” or “REALLY, YOU’RE NOT FUNNY. THOSE WERE POLITE CHUCKLES.”

I used a flesh and blood dictionary a few times in the past two days, and now I’m looking up words I don’t even really need to know how to spell just because I like the paper, and sticking my finger in the notches for the alphabet tabs, and, best of all, the tiny illustrations. I forgot about them. Flip to Q and you get an etching of a quail, a quarter horse, quetzal (look it up, in a dictionary) and a quince. Every letter’s platinum card members are rendered in such a way that I want them all tattooed on me somewhere. K: king cobra, kiwi (bird, not fruit), and a diagram of 20 knots. P: prie-dieu, Prince Albert (the coat, not the genital mangling jewelry), proofreader’s marks, protea. But as much as I love the dictionary again, it just makes me miss everything from my grade school library—encyclopedias, particularly, and the card catalog. Anyone else care to get in on my pitch to PBS for America’s Next Top Library Luddite? Or go on a microfiche-centered date?

Last night after watching Lost at Brad’s house (for which I made desserts from fruit found on tropical islands and Brad covered Bud Light cans in Dharma logos) I ran into an acquaintance with several friends who I’d never met. I nearly walked right by them because I had my headphones on, loud, and when I can’t hear anything I also kind of can’t see anything (ditto for the opposite—if I take my glasses off I swear I can’t hear you). When I realized the tinny screams were for me I turned around and acted awkward and put-upon until I figured out I actually knew someone in the bunch. They were very drunk, I suspect, and the ones I didn’t know were weird in a way that would make them a great bar band in the Muppet movie. One of them grabbed my headphones to “totally rock out to what you’re listening to.” Which was a repeat of the mortgage crisis episode of This American Life. It is times like this that highlight how little I’m actually joking about microfiche-centered dates.

Le Freak. C'est Chic.

2009-03-10T00:16:00.001-05:00

I guess the thing about the mid-life crisis as a concept is that it presupposes you know how long you’re going to live. Having exactly that style of crisis right here, right now at 26 means that in addition to feeling The Dread every day upon waking up, some part of my brain is assuming I’m only going to last until 52. Which is, you know, extra uplifting to someone who can’t get out of bed without whimpering. I have taken to pleading with my alarm clock like it’s Judge Judy. Every morning it responds about as rigidly. Do not lend money, even to your family, without a contract; I have to get out of bed and go to work: these are incontrovertible judgments.

I think it started with the T.T.F.O. I don’t think this syndrome afflicts just me. Anyone who works in an office, gets in at nine and leaves at five has got to feel a tickle at the base of their neck in the stretch between lunch and release. That’s the three-thirty freak out. You have no choice but to hide in the bathroom and read for a few minutes, or make another pot of coffee against the wishes of your office manager, or stare at your cube wall and kind of pet your own head for a while, or else buy candy and sort it according to color and crush the pieces viciously between your teeth one by one.

The T.T.F.O feels natural. It aligns with when I was dismissed from school for the first 18 years of my life, so when some kind of reptilian brain flight alert sounds around that time it makes sense. But gradually my T.T.F.O. has bled from its usual boundaries and into a 2:30 freak out, and also a 10:30 freak out, and a number of other freak outs that would require entirely new acronyms. Like the A.D.F.O., or the all day freak out. And the E.C.E.M.B.R.—the everything can eat my butt reaction. This is the point at which I’m supposed to buy a Porsche, except I’m not 55, bald, rich, a guy, and unable to sleep with women who are…actually, my age. This is why this is all very uncomfortable.

The two scoops of raisins in the bran flakes of my problem is, I mean, what do you do? You can’t jump out of the job plane and into a recession with a parachute made from a weird diploma and no savings, a smart mouth and a hand tattoo, and very average Excel skills.

What Happens in Vegas

2009-03-03T02:03:00.000-05:00

There are approximately two billion places I would pay to visit on this globe, and another bonus billion I’d visit if someone else was footing the bill. Las Vegas makes neither of those lists so, obviously, this is where I was dispatched to a medical conference for three days last week. There were perks, of course. It was warm. It was sunny. I was staying in a hotel and tiny bottles of shampoo make me happier than they probably should. Cable. Chipotle was a reimbursable expense.

But on the other hand: Las Vegas. I did get to drive through the downtown for a few hours and totally succumbed to the appeal of the old casinos and all the lights and the wedding chapels and the kitsch, but the Strip! The Strip. It’s all the antiseptic, plaster, scale-model lowlights of Epcot Center thrown in a blender and frapped with some tequila and a few sequin fanny-packs and a crushing number of mobility scooters and as many state-fair-style comically large drinks in souvenir cups as you can cram in your luggage.

I grew up outside New York City so I don’t know if it’s the same when people visit here for the first time, but I couldn’t get over how Las Vegasy Las Vegas looked. Like, do people walk around Times Square thinking holy crap, look, they really sell hot dogs on the street, and people really walk fast, and there’s really a motherloving rat running around right there on the subway tracks? And everything becomes a musical montage set to “New York, New York” right then and there? Because I stayed at the Flamingo and it was all lit up pink outside, and when I walked through the casino and out onto the Strip at night there were so many women done up with fancy bags and tube dresses and boobs, so many boobs, like at least twice the standard issue apiece, and feather boas and sometimes even leather pants, and leopard print everywhere, and men in suits legitimately playing craps at the Bellagio with a crowd of onlookers, everything was so Vegas I heard Elvis in my head and felt the urge to duck because the next scene was clearly supposed to be fading in from the top of the screen. Total montage.

But at the same time, it was nothing like I expected it to be, because it’s actually the opposite of what everyone expects to be. Particularly the tourists trying to live up to their own expectations. If I heard one ex-frat boy say “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas!” I heard sixty yell the same thing, except nothing scandalous was ever going on. They were mostly referring to drinking a Bud Light on the street (legal and invited) or accepting one of the business cards they give out by the hundreds for hookers (also legal, and you know they’re never going to call). Everyone was going to see Donnie and Marie Osmond. Everyone was full of reasonably-priced prime rib. Minus the boozing, this could be Branson. The collective urge to feel like you’re doing something sinful while doing exactly what’s sanctioned and encouraged was a little…I don’t know, like giving in and talking back to the dummy at a ventriloquist’s show.

I think the thing that really got me about the Las Vegas strip was how nothing is old. Once a hotel hits fifty it’s time to tear it right down and build a model of some world landmark with slot machines in its base. There was construction everywhere you looked. My hotel was one of the oldest still operating and it was only built in 1946. Yeah, this is a city where the Rat Pack hung out, but I grew up taking trips to walk the Freedom Trail in Boston and buying the oldest used books I could find at the library sale, so unless I can stay where they stayed and drink on the same bar stools, it doesn’t matter much to me. It’s kind of a city with no memory.

Although that may be a good thing? Because that means that any business associates dining at Jimmy Buffett’s Margaritaville will probably not recall me dancing like an epileptic Jennifer Beals to the Journey cover band.

25 Albums

2009-02-20T00:54:00.001-05:00

Yes, this is a Facebook survey, but it turned out to be so long I figured what the eff, I'm saving this bitch for digital posterity. Here is the list of 25 albums that changed my life, arranged alphabetically. As it turns out, this is not the same thing as my 25 favorite albums, because some of these I really would be okay with never hearing again. But these were all crucially important to me at certain points, perhaps to an embarrassing degree given some of the odder selections.

1. Arcade Fire – Funeral
I was fresh out of college and back at home. I was the youngest person commuting on the Metro-North every day at 6:22 in the morning to a job that I didn’t love, and for the entirety of the winter I drove to the station in the dark, sat with no windows all day, and commuted home in the dark again. Then I found this album and everything was better. Actually it wasn’t better—it just made being sad feel semi-romantic.

2. Beatles – Help
The curse of being the oldest kid in your family is that you don’t have anyone to guide your taste but your parents. Mine tend to like things like Rod Stewart. Or Il Divo. Or American Idols. So when my cool friend and her cool older sister knew all the words to “I’ve Just Seen a Face,” I wanted to know all the words to “I’ve Just Seen a Face,” and I got the album, and my parents hated the Beatles, and suddenly there it was! Pre-adolescence! (For the record, I still know all the words, and moreover, it was the second song I learned how to play on the guitar.)

3. The Cranberries – No Need to Argue
The first CD I ever bought with my own money. I loved the shit out of this record. It’s one of those albums I grew out of and forgot about, but recently I heard “Zombie” in Vinnie’s Pizza and my heart skipped a beat.

4. Eminem – The Slim Shady LP
Weird, right? But yeah, if this is a list of albums that changed your life, this was one of them. It came out when I was maybe a junior in high school, and my best friend Kai and I heard it, immediately went out and bought it and sat in her room with it on repeat. For, like, weeks. We talked about Eminem. We theorized about his lyrics. We couldn’t stop listening to “Just Don’t Give a Fuck.” This was not normal behavior for two girls who, basically to this day, will not admit that grunge is over. For whatever weird reason, this was the album that reminded me music existed outside the scope of X107 (though I will still pour one out on the curb for the world’s best deceased alternative rock station).

5. Footloose – The Soundtrack
This record (we had it on vinyl) contained my very first favorite song: “Let’s Hear it for the Boy,” by Deneice Williams. Your very first favorite song is a life-changing thing, so this had to be on here. Shout out to the Doveman cover, which I was set to hate and didn’t.

6. Frou Frou – Details
Did everyone go through that annoying depressive phase when they were 19? Because I sure as fuck did and, in between drinking bargain vodka and crying in my dorm a lot, this was the only record that sounded good. It’s not an album I listen to much now, but then it meant a lot.

7. Heart - Heart
Not Heart’s best album, for sure, but the one my parents had on vinyl and the one that started a lifelong love affair with the Wilson sisters. I feel like Heart gets no respect, Dangerfield-style, but Ann and Nancy are total BAMFs. (Bonus trivia: I have a custom made hoodie with “Ooh, barracuda!” embroidered on the back.)

8. The Hold Steady – Boys and Girls in America
I just love this album. I’m not sure what else to say about it. The thing about the Hold Steady is suspension of disbelief; you either forget everything you’ve ever felt about electric piano and grandiosity and embrace it, or you hate it and you’re the reason I went to see them alone. Twice.

9. Hole – Live Through This
Basically informed my idea of the kind of girl I wanted to be, for better or for worse. There is a reason why my wrist reads “tear my heart out,” and it is track 9.

10. Juliana Hatfield – Hey Babe
The same cool friend who knew all the words to “I’ve Just Seen a Face” taped this album for me when we were 12 and I wore out the tape. Then I wore out two copies of the CD. Hearing Juliana's little kid voice sing thoughts I had thought myself was eerie and comforting, and is still both.

11. Leona Naess – I Tried to Rock You But You Only Roll
This is one of those albums that, were such a thing possible, you would put out in the Candy Dish of Music. It’s sweet, it’s light, it’s quick, and it’s the soundtrack to two of the best summers of my life. (If you do check this out, listen to “Mexico” at night.)

12. Liz Phair – Exile in Guyville
13. Liz Phair – Whitechocolatespaceegg
Liz is one of two artists who gets two spots on the list, which is probably cheating. But suck it. These are totally different albums and listening to them back to back like I do at least once a week is like United States of Tara-ing myself. Whitechocolatespaceegg is friendlier, it’s easier, it’s polished. It’s placates the me that holds doors for strangers. Exile is scarier and dirtier and blunter and probably even a little uglier, and it’s a soundtrack for the me that sometimes comes to work without going home from night before.

14. Lou Reed – Coney Island Baby
Sometimes I just listen to this album for a month.

15. Madonna – The Immaculate Collection
Okay, seriously, I know. But Madonna is…I don’t know, kind of like a crazy relative you see maybe twice a year and you’re like, oh, now you’re doing yoga? No, now you’re going to tell us all awkward stories about your love life. No wait, now you’re Jewish. But you love her because it’s comforting that she’s been in your life forever. I’ve been listening to Madonna since I was a kid; my mom loved her, Kai and I took up the Madonna torch in middle school, and then I knew a LOT of drag queens in college. Every song on this album has at least fifteen memories attached to it.

16. Nick Drake – Pink Moon
I don’t have anything to say about this album that people haven’t said approximately two billion times, but it got me when I heard it and that’s that.

17. Nirvana - Nevermind
Legally required to be on a life-changing albums list for people who attended middle school in the mid-nineties. I vividly remember requesting “Smells Like Teen Spirit” at every single canteen and, just once, the DJ caved and sandwiched it between the Real McCoy and Montell Jordan and I was so happy I could’ve died right there in my Jncos.

18. NoFX – Punk in Drublic
This album refuses to leave me alone. It was the soundtrack to my freshman year of high school. But then I was kind of embarrassed about my love for it by 11th grade and eventually lost the CD, then found it again in college, lost it, found it again when I moved back home, lost it, and then awkwardly got it back again last year from a dude. I’m not even sure I like it anymore (except for “Lori Meyers,” which I love), but I will never be able to shake it. I guarantee if I threw out the copy I have now, four would appear in my bag. Like I’d cut the head off the NoFX hydra or some shit.

19. The Replacements – Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash
Not my favorite Replacements album, but it was the first one I heard and “Hangin' Downtown” sold me on what became my favorite band. I mean, if you look on my network my computer’s name is Paul Westerberg.

20. Robyn – Robyn
This album was the best thing about going out in Manhattan for the first two years I lived in the city. New York nightlife was something I never expected to get involved in and I did it as a plus one, so I never felt entirely comfortable hanging out with angular people with angular hair at parties that don’t even exist anymore. But hearing Robyn amid ENDLESS FUCKING PLAYS OF “COMMON PEOPLE” was always the bright spot of the night.

21. Smashing Pumpkins – Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness
The Smashing Pumpkins circa Mellon Collie were the first band I loved collectively with other people. There were several of us superfans and we all made sure to study and memorize the lyrics to this entire album before seeing them in concert, after which we wore the shirts to school. Another band I outgrew (like, you know, the entirety of American culture), but I heard a few tracks recently and remembered immediately how exciting it was to love the same thing as your friends.

22. Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers – Greatest Hits
To me, Tom Petty is that acquaintance you’re always swearing you’re going to actually hang out with and you never do, but you’re legitimately happy to see them whenever you run into each other. I don’t think I’ve ever listened to one of his albums in its entirety besides Full Moon Fever, but the singles have been my car jamz and bar jamz and, fuck it, life jamz for as long as I can remember.

23. Weezer – Pinkerton
24. Weezer – The Blue Album
I got on the Weezer boat way, way late. I liked them enough back in the day, but I fell hard for Pinkerton around the same time I was commuting and full of commuterly despair. “The Good Life,” hello, Jesus, thank you. Pinkerton made me love the blue album more than I ever had, and together they keep me extending the olive branch to Mr. Cuomo after every one of his ensuing crappy albums.

25. The Wrens – The Meadowlands
I downloaded this by accident and then didn’t stop listening to it for six months. Contains the saddest song ever written, “13 Months in 6 Minutes,” and the whole album puts my stomach in knots.

My Slutty Valentine

2009-02-17T00:22:00.000-05:00

I don’t get hating on Valentine’s Day. I’m not trying to be contrarian, because at this point I’m not even sure whether it’s cool to like Valentine’s Day for traditional reasons, or hate it because you’re single/anti-consumerist/diabetic , or like it because everyone else hates it. But really, as a holiday it’s a solid 7 out of 10: no family obligations, no gift-exchanging necessary unless I opt in with platonics, and I get to look at flowers all day. And sometimes someone will offer you a truffle. Or a tiny éclair, if you’re me and the old guy who runs the bakery on your corner is holding it down as Mr. Heartwarming Geriatric Baker America 2009.

I started Valentine’s Day this year with a round of confectionary musical chairs, taking two fancy rolled-up chocolate frosted cake delights from said bakery over to Williamsburg for Brad and Christian, then stopping at Pennylicks for vegan chocolate-covered strawberries to haul back to Bushwick for Jes. (Like this was such a selfless gift; the thing about buying your roommate a dozen chocolate strawberries is that, should the urgent need to eat a chocolate strawberry arise in the middle of the night, you have access and limited guilt.)

I’ve never done anything romantic-like on Valentine’s Day because I’ve never had a boyfriend for the holiday. This is a corollary to the larger life theorem of never having had an actual boyfriend per se, but this is neither here nor cool. But I think this is the reason I like Valentine’s Day so much—when your holiday plans are fundamentally filed under “contingency,” it’s pretty difficult to be disappointed by them. Last year Jes and I went for a vegan platonidate extraordinaire and, since we’re valentines two years running and thus needed to up the ante, this year we decided to hit up Sacred Tattoo’s Valentine’s day deal before ingesting faux drumsticks of love.

The shop had exactly the Valentine’s bargain flash of my dreams: an anatomical heart shot full of arrows. Since they were also running a deal on script, I decided to finish off one of the pieces on my chest with the word I’ve wanted to add since I had the first part done. Jes added three big pieces to her nearly finished sleeve and our friend Brett did the same, but I’m still deciding what’s going where on my arm, so I didn’t want to put the heart anywhere it might futz up future tattoo placement. I was wearing tights so shit wasn’t going on my legs anywhere; I’ve been warned that feet hurt too much to even consider tattooing; the shop wasn’t doing hands or necks. This left the very funny option of putting a bargain Valentine’s Day tattoo on my hip and, ascribing to the great philosophical school of fuck it, I did.

Except my tattooer placed the stencil while I was laying down, and I took a look at it with a hand mirror and didn’t realize exactly where it was on my body until he’d already started. What I ended up with is a bargain Valentine’s Day tattoo encroaching upon pornographic territory. It’s on my extreme lower abdomen and very nearly covered by your standard pair of underwear, and therefore exponentially, accidentally, and hysterically sluttier than intended.

Somehow this seems fitting. If my Valentine’s Days are terminally free from making out and candlelit dinners and maple flavored Russell Stover chocolates jettisoned half-chewed from gifted heart-shaped boxes, they might as well end with me eating vegan mac and cheese with my friend, my pants surreptitiously unbuttoned under the table to keep them from messing with my aching heart. My totally slutty heart.

Am I a Don Henley Song?

2009-02-12T00:10:00.000-05:00

I’m beginning to wonder if I’m the only person in the world whose life is occasionally steamrolled by an obvious metaphor.

A few nights ago I was greeted upon my return home from an enchilada run by a bunch of my own underwear strewn around my stoop. It seems as though someone in my new neighborhood is fond of picking through whatever I put out in the trash, though I will admit this has recently included some above average garbage. Like big Chinese fish windsocks. Those were cool, but I can’t reach my ceiling to put them up and I owned about fifteen and I just didn’t want them in my room anymore.

The thing, though, about garbage is that it’s not just what someone doesn’t want. It’s also things no one should want. Like my biannual underwear cull. Rejected by me and then by the phantom garbage picker and then by my neighborhood as a whole, my hole-y or de-elasticized or stretched out or too big or just plain ugly drawers were spread out like a dirty welcome mat near my front door.

I’ve been unpacking for the better part of a week now, an effort derailed by a few sick days and a few fantastically stupid nights. I mean stupid in the sense that they were impulsive, but they were also really fun, or really epic; I'm fairly sure the world at large owes me a couple of high-fives. But see? This is my problem. I have this tendency to tell every stupid story I get myself into to everyone I know, because they are funny, but I do this without regard to my privacy, the privacy of those involved in said stories, and the potentially delicate sensibilities of strangers in earshot who probably don't want to hear about my life in grisly, CSI-caliber detail. I usually stop short of putting them on the internet, but my impulse to do just that is growing stronger by the day.

And then your neighbors are gawking at your dirty laundry laying metaphorically all over the sidewalk. That's just bad writing, cosmos.

Third Floor, the Two Windows on the Right

2009-02-01T20:04:00.000-05:00

I’ve mentioned this before, but I used to have this intense belief that whatever you were doing at the stroke of midnight on New Year’s would set the tone for the next twelve months. (Which was, a few times, sitting in my parents’ living room playing Bon Jovi’s “Always” on my Discman, but whatever.) This spilled over into lingering superstitions about firsts of all sorts: that whatever you wear on the first day of a new job can determine how well you do, or that whatever song you listen to on your way to hang out with someone for the first time can color your whole relationship, or, in last night's case, that the first DVD you throw in while you’re putting together your kitchen table can cosmically determine what happens in your new house.

So, of course, I played the boiler room make-out episode of My So-Called Life. That’s the one with the part where Jordan Catalano comes to Angela’s house all late and her mom is on the stairs and doesn’t know he’s down there and then and he’s all, “So you like me? Because your mom says you like me.”

(And I know, truly, that it is not cool or interesting to talk about this show, and the obviousness of my love for it irritates even me. I mean, if I could zoom out and pan back around to myself as a stranger I’d be just as annoyed with the cliché. Glasses? Bad hair? Nose ring despite being 26 and working in an office? Undying love for flannel? Eyeliner that is both too heavy and accidentally smeared? Large headphones? Chipped nail polish? That girl clearly loves My So-Called Life and she probably sucks.)

I’m trying not to get all new chapter-y about moving, but this is a monstrous change in my life and I’d rather focus on things I’ve felt consistently since I was thirteen than the onslaught of new, new, new. But (to continue with this recent all-consuming theme in my life of being an adolescent while simultaneously being in the middle of my twenties), that particular episode of that show is the way I want my new apartment to be. This is mainly to accomplish my one enduring teenage romantic goal: having a dude throw rocks at my window. Vibing the place all up with My So-Called Life can only help. Plus, my windows finally face the street. Big step in the right direction. All of my windows in New York have faced a fenced-in backyard. Or an airshaft! No one’s throwing pebbles of romance at a window that looks out onto airshaft.

I’ll leave a pile of rocks on my stoop. Now I just need someone to supply the charm and the decent throwing arm.

Boy Oh Boy Oh Boy

2009-01-28T21:31:00.000-05:00

Let’s get adolescent for a minute.

I've never been a girl who wrote about guys because I never actually had anything to say about guys, and that's because I’ve never been the kind of girl who guys paid attention to. This isn’t, like, me trying to wangle an emotional pity fuck from the entire internet—it’s just a straight-up fact that boys didn’t Talk to me with a capital T until last year and I know that this has a lot to do with the way I looked. Aside from the extra eighty pounds I was ever so gracefully carting around my midsection like the world's least appealing tutu, I made a lot of bad decisions. With regard to my head. While packing some shit into boxes the other night I found a disk of old pictures from my freshman and sophomore years of college and Christ, it was just like yelling at the screen when Buffalo Bill shuts off the lights and has his hand right next to Jodie Foster’s face. HE’S RIGHT THERE!

Or, in my case: EYEBROWS! YOU SHOULD HAVE TWO! Or: YOUR HAIRSTYLE IS WALKING THE VERY FUCKING THIN LINE BETWEEN HIPPIE AND SISTER-WIFE!

But, anyway, the last year has been really different and not always in a good way, but different in and of itself is sometimes good enough. Case in point: last night Jes and I went out for our usual Tuesday night beery bro-down and after our first round the bartender came over. “Someone wants to buy you guys drinks,” he said. “Who is it?” I asked. “Jesus Christ,” he said. “Now what do you want?”

We accepted the drinks because, you know, we’re broke (and apparently too weirded out by the Cary Grantishness of the move to think to order anything better than the same crappy Black Label/Evan Williams combo we usually get). We drank them braced for awkward conversation, but it never came. No one ever claimed the mystery drinks. I had my suspicion it was two guys lurking from the other side of the bar, but they put their coats on and left before the bartender had even set down our drinks. So, if it was them, that was the stupidest investment ever made.

Someone did come over and talk to Jes a little later, but he was definitely just talking to Jes and it would’ve been weird for that guy to have bought us both drinks. And, also, if that's the case, fuck your third-wheel sympathy beer, dick. Not that I won't drink it, but still.

My point is that prior to about a year ago, I wouldn't have even been in a bar where dudes were sending drinks, even pity ones. Or, okay, even better example: last night a pitbull visiting the bar got excited and knocked me onto my ass on the sidewalk. This weirdo rushed to my aid (already a departure from how things used to be) and, as he helped me up, whispered in my ear, "Don't worry, you looked hot falling down." I wish he had been joking.

Jes and I wound up eating fries in a 24-hour bagel shop and scaring the hell out of the cute guy who works behind the counter. He made the mistake of getting into our conversation about the dumb guys we've been dealing with of late, and once the floodgates were open all he could do was stand there, listen, and make that "Hoooooooooo!" noise the audience on America's Funniest Home Videos uses to accompany a shot to the balls.

My life thus far with dudes boils down to series of punchlines so stupid you don’t even need the rest of the story. Some highlights:

“Dude hit me up when you don’t have work and we can get it on.” [Via text, DUDE.]
“I’m gonna get you PREGNANT.” [This was in public.]
“You should gain thirty pounds and call me.” [Only me. Only I would get that.]
“Are you a dude? Whatever, it’s cool if you are.” [Not in jest.]
“You look like Kennedy from MTV,” as a prelude to, “Wanna make out?” [And that worked.]

I'm not sure what my point really is beyond hey, have things been a shitstorm lately because I am basically a thirteen year old girl when it comes to guys. When you grow up a girl who never assumes guys like her because guys do not like actually like her, the interest of even the most terrible guy is kind of an adventure. In the very short time any guys have been at all interested in me, I've been more entertained than upset by the sheer idiocy of the situations I manage to get myself into with guys who never cease to fabulously disappoint.

Even so, I'm not trying to say one of those reductive, "All guys are stupid!" things, because that's actually the opposite of what I think. It's just that--okay, if my love life is a passing circus train, I've only gotten to the car full of clowns. The thing that is so frustrating is I know that the circus is actually full of lion tamers and acrobats and fire-eaters and trapeze artists and a ringmaster in a tophat and tails I haven't yet seen.

Anthony Works it the Grocery Store / Saving His Pennies for Someday

2009-01-25T19:42:00.000-05:00

There’s nothing worse than helping a friend move and there’s nothing more boring than hearing someone talk about moving, but I don’t care and I intend to fill the next few days with both. If someone so much as breathes in a way that sounds sympathetic to my moving plight, I’m roping them into hauling my dresser up two flights of stairs. And I am going to talk nonstop about boxes and duct tape and furniture and cleaning my baseboards (which have somehow gotten dusty beyond the realm of dust possibility) until I get upset enough to need to sit down on the floor, wrapped in a blanket, eating sesame tofu and watching therapeutic doses of Flight of the Conchords.

I’ve lived in my apartment for almost two and a half years. That’s plenty of time to fill up two floors and a backyard with unfathomable amounts of crap I thought I might want to keep, in addition to the lifetime’s worth of stuff I’ve been hauling around since I was a kid. I have this hunch that I may end up one of those old women who likes to scrapbook because of my stupid tendency to keep anything even remotely nostalgic for anticipated bouts of future nostalgia, even though I only look at these things when I’m angry I have to put them into new boxes. This time I’ve thrown away a lot, despite the objections of my inner packrat: my PSAT scores (BUT WHAT IF YOU NEED TO PROVE YOU QUALIFIED AS A NATIONAL MERIT SCHOLAR IN THE LATE NINETIES?!) , collections of poems written between eighth and tenth grade (BUT WHAT IF YOU’RE A SECRET GENIUS AND THEY WANT TO POSTHUMOUSLY PUBLISH YOU LIKE ANNE FRANK?!) and several empty jewelry boxes shaped like treasure chests (BUT WHAT IF YOU FIND DUBLOONS?!).

The list goes on. Empty bottles of Southern Comfort consumed on good nights and kept like Emmy awards on my bookshelf. Earrings. My ears don’t even have holes anymore. Birthday cards. Shit I’ve bought at dollar stores just because, like those growing fish or baby barrettes and Jesus candles. All on the curb.

This is a big move. It's one I'm excited about, and it's one that needs to happen for finacial reasons (there is actually a reason why I drink on Tuesday nights when the PBR is free), and it's dumb to live in my neighborhood when I spend hours and hours every week taking the stupid F to the stupider G because everything I do is up there. I’ve lived in my part of Brooklyn since 2005 and with Brad that whole time, so it’s extremely weird to have keys, right now, in my pocket, shiny ones, that open an apartment off the L train, and that my bedroom is next to Jes’s now.

I’m trying not to get nostalgic about the whole thing, which is what all this removal of garbage is about, but I did kind of sob while taking down the Christmas tree, throwing it in a deluxe black trash bag and realizing we’re going to have to split up the ornaments for good.

My Support Ribbon Will Be Scarlet

2009-01-21T19:41:00.005-05:00

You can carry all kinds of diseases that have no physical manifestation. Aside from mental illnesses like schizophrenia, whose characteristic disembodied voices are audible only from inside the patient's skull, there are things like chlamydia. Women can have chlamydia forever without ever knowing. (I don’t have it—that’s not the horribly confessional turn this is taking, don’t worry.)

Or leprosy, even. You could live for ten years without a clue you're one big fleshy time bomb of decay until your nose started rotting off.

I don’t have that either. My secret sickness is nameless. I’m wondering if I can make it my eponymous syndrome since I’m both the discoverer and a sufferer. I’m thinking kathburculosis, or kathynemia, or something similarly medical-sounding yet pizzazzy. My disease is both extremely low in incidence (apparently just me, actually) and pathogenically mysterious. There is no known cure. It is not contagious. There are no outward symptoms until I am placed in the correct circumstances for a flare-up, and this only happens at one of two bars in Williamsburg that shall not be named lest the lecherous decide to prey on my feeble condition.

I will be talking to a dude. Things will seem normal. Things will persist for hours and, perhaps, even get slightly exciting; the whole “Oh wait a minute, does this dude like me? I think this dude likes me!” song and dance is probably my favorite shit in the world. Things are fun! Things are promising! Things may have progressed in any number of amorous directions! But then every time, every single time, my itis or my osis or whatever kicks in and I cannot avoid the following:

Me: “Blah blah blah blah blah.”
Guy: “Blah blah. Blah, my girlfriend, blah blah blah.”

Then I’ll immediately have to place the period on the sentence of our interaction and go home and go straight to bed. Or else take two shots and call one of my friends in the morning with the news that, yet again, I was enjoying the scenery so much I didn’t notice I was wandering onto the adulterous side of the street.

They say to starve a fever and feed a cold, but there isn’t much folksy advice for dudesareweirdtoyoumonia. For lack of a better explanation, I’ve chosen to believe it’s a germ that causes only guys with girlfriends to get the appeal of my devastating and legendary beauty, my razor wit, my understated charm, and—above all—my ladylike manners. And while there is some formerly Catholic segment of my brain that screams, “Be grateful anyone likes it!” and “GUILT GUILT GUILT GUILT GUILT for even talking to that guy!” there’s a more rational lobe that would like to find a cure. There’s got to be some antibiotic or inhaler or injection or poultice that’ll make me feel less like a silver medal with boobs. Or a jerk. Or a jerk who’s kind of pissed off because yet another shady guy was about it without bothering to let me know they weren’t supposed to be.

The kicker is that there’s no lack of cool guys without girlfriends who I legitimately like. Off the top of my head, I can come up with at least three who I think about with a preteen intensity, who I legitimately enjoy speaking to and who are not morally bound to keep it to the “just bros” level. These are pointless crushes that range in duration from years to, like, a couple days, but until I’m on the receiving end of a medical breakthrough I’m not sure there’s any way to get them interested without them getting hitched first.

In the meantime, I think I’ll just go to work, go home and dose myself with this medicinal mix I’ve concocted that’s 1 part 30 Rock, 2 parts hot and sour soup, 1/2 part Jim Beam if shit gets rough, and 3 parts the couch. It probably won’t cure anything, but it’s a decent way to spend a Thursday.

Two Line Pop Songs

2009-01-13T19:21:00.001-05:00

I have this position on pop songs that’s grown more vehement over the years, to the point at which I think it’s reached credo/philosophy proportions. I fundamentally believe that the optimum length for a pop song (and I affirm that basically everything that doesn’t require a tuxedo and a conductor is a pop song) is approximately two minutes and thirty seconds, and that anything after that just needs a brutal editor. Someone told me or I read somewhere (meaning this is a fact I’m probably making up) that songs recorded on vinyl used to be short because of the physical limitations of the format. Regardless of whether that’s true or not, when you listen to girl groups or old Beatles everything is all hook, a one-two jab of verse-chorus, then maybe an uppercut of a bridge and you’re out.

I don’t want your five minute guitar solos and I definitely don’t want sixty years of na, na, na NAnaNA NA. Two-minutes and thirty seconds is all you should get to say what you have to say, and if you can’t do it I’m taking out my red pen and you’re never getting your last verse back.

Because, okay, really? What is anyone ever yapping about in pop music that can’t be said in thirty seconds, let alone five times that? I love you, I miss you, I hate you, things rule, things blow, let’s fuck. The end. See how many words that took? FIFTEEN. Have you ever had to sit around and listen to someone talk about any of those things interrupted? And, if so, didn’t you want to swallow a razor blade right around the 2:30 mark?

Last night on the train I was listening to the Neil Young Sugar Mountain – Live at Canterbury House album and, of course, my favorite song by far is “Birds.” It clocks in at just over two minutes which is awesome, considering “The Last Trip to Tulsa” is over eight. Anyway, I like this song and it’s really pretty and sad and short…and you can strain it down to two sentiments: I love you. It’s over. Which gave me the idea: can you write a two-line pop song and have it be reasonably emotionally complete?

Yes. Let me show you them. Since I’m not a musician beyond knowing how to play the Peanuts theme on the piano, I’ve just written the lyrics.

In Fair Verona Where We Lay Our Scene
I’m over here with him, you’re over there with her,
You should be over here with me. Goddammit.

Read the Paper or Make a Move
I saw you on the subway and we didn’t say a word.
But you kind of looked at me. Love? Or boredom?

The Breaks
Dude, I really like you, but you don’t like me at all.
Isn’t that some shit? Isn’t that the shit.

Everybody Do the Brown Liquor
I think we’re breaking up. Yup, we’re breaking up!
I’m bummed about it. The rest of this song’s about whiskey.

Sighiaitus

2008-12-17T10:51:00.005-05:00

For someone who talks a lot of shit and says she hates a lot of stuff, I’m honestly not in a bad mood very often and truly bad days are even fewer and further between. However, when they do strike, it’s like twenty-four hours of that split second when you’ve already pulled your front door shut enough to know it’s locked behind you, but you’ve got a brilliant mental picture of your keys sitting on your dresser instead of in your pocket. Bad days are bad not because of the stuff that happens; they’re bad because better alternatives are painfully obvious.

And then sometimes, like leap years or Haley's comet or decent Weezer albums, a bad day stretches into a tragically bad week, or ten days, or however long I've been getting a professional wrestling-style dramatic beatdown from the universe at large. I did one pretty regrettable personal thing. Then I did one extremely regrettable professional thing. Then I got the typhoid tuberculosis consumption bubonic influenza, which smote me unto bed for more than a week. I was sick. I was talking to myself, cold sweats, body-shaped nest in my bed, too tired to answer the door for delivery, in pain all the way down to my teeth sick. I'm just now kind of feeling better, except that I get more tired than I should doing taxing things like, I don't know, chewing.

There was some other rotten stuff in there too, and sum of these terrible parts amounts to not doing much of anything for the better part of a month besides having that ache in my stomach that means nothing medical beyond, "You're in some shit, lady." December thus far has added up to a pile of used tissues, a flurry of apologetic e-mails, and six thousand utterances of this guttural sigh I didn't know I could sigh.

I'm thinking my run of crap luck is karmic retribution for this small selection of things I did this year that, given the chance, I'd undo. On a scale that runs from Point A: pretending you didn't see the old lady get on the subway so you can keep your seat all the way to Point B: premeditated homicide, I'd say my sins were maybe a 4.6, 4.7. Could have been worse, but I probably deserved the kick in the pants of justice I've received.

In a way, it's good. Yes, I've had a fever for the last 8 nights, but there's something therapeutic about burning off your own germs. I'm hoping the slate is all sponged and paper toweled for the new year. And that my inevitable 2009 fuck ups won't tamper with my immune system or embarrass the ever-loving crap out of Semi-Professional Kathy (career just barely included).

Guest Stars and Character Actors

2008-12-05T15:17:00.003-05:00

I hate Sex and the City for a lot of reasons, but mainly because I hate Sex and the City analogies. Everyone always thinks they’re the Samantha despite the obvious truth gleaned from taking a damn look around that nearly everyone is a Miranda or a Carrie.

Ditto for The Office. Half the girls who work in offices think they’re the Pam (Dawn, if you will), and that some random cute guy is the Jim (Tim), except that’s not true because no real life office guy is ever as fun as Jim, which means Not Pams are Not Pams because they don’t have his pranks to good sport along with, which is what makes a Pam. If there was ever a real Jim, he’d be fired immediately for insubordination. And in real life, the Not Pam just reads a lot of Perez Hilton and IMs about how cute some Not Jim is.

Which is fine and all, but I’ve been watching a lot of TV recently and sort of wondered why people mass identify with the characters they do. You never hear, “Ha, I’m totally a Detective Olivia Benson, SVU.” Or “I’m the Kenneth Parcell, I know it!” instead of “Oh my god, Liz Lemon is ME.” Which even I have said, I know.

But I guess it’s a natural impulse, because I’ve been trying to make sense of my junk drawer of a life by plotting myself on a scale from one character to another. One of the greatest compliments I’ve ever been paid by a drunk train wreck of a dude was that I was far more Patsy than Edina. As someone who has consistently been the Edina for, say, 25 of 26 years, Patsy is definitely a step up the repulsive comedic character ladder. But, honestly, I probably skew somewhere in the middle: brunette but a dieter, chubbier than Patsy but less fashion victim-y than Eddie, kind of in between their polar extremes of meanness and self-absorption.

The My So-Called Life Rayanngela Spectrum may be more realistic. Because sometimes I’m all Rayanne (yes, I know we’ve been making out on the street for, like, 15 minutes, but what was your name again?) and sometimes I’m all Angela (I am sitting in my room and listening to Elliot Smith for my entire day off, interrupted only by a Chinese food delivery and some depressed journal writing), but mostly I slide somewhere in the neurotic, unacceptably teenagery, flannel-wearing territory between the two.

I kinda Rayanne’d the other night because I’m Angela-ing for this other dude I really like—who, of course, I like in the most instinctual, adolescent, Angela Chase way, which isn’t based on knowing him well or reciprocity or actual events or possibly even reality. (So, like I always like boys.) But whereas I normally just flop around on the Angela side of things, being mopey and maybe, if things get particularly dire, listening to “Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want” on repeat like a dweeb, I chose to pull a classic Rayanne. I mean, the situation was cribbed from the show entirely: cheap beer, your standard issue random dude with a one-episode story arc, the need for fake IDs. All I needed was a Buffalo Tom song playing somewhere in the background on repeat to complete the picture.

He was nice and cool and all, the Cory Halfrick to my stupid Jordan Catalano, but I’ve had better ideas. Ones I should probably stick to. Like taking the G train alone and watching CSI: Las Vegas on my computer until dawn, as per usual. On the CSI scale, I’ve proven I’m definitely not as smart as a Grissom, but at least that show generally lulls me to sleep with the confidence that I’m cooler than a Hodges. And, if my life gets any more idiotic, that show also serves as a catalog of approximately two billion ways to undetectably off myself, provided someone is willing to lock my door from the inside and, like, throw some blood and semen around to give them something to investigate.

Which is, I believe, the true definition of friendship.

Tonight: Low of 36

2008-11-11T15:59:00.003-05:00

What the fuck, November? When did you get here? All of a sudden it’s that kind of weather where I do a 180 on my position on tights, from “I hate you, you make me hot and itchy” to “I hate you, you’re not nearly as warm as you should be.” Also, since everything I own is too big, I’m having a ball trying to come up with outfits that are warm enough for the weather without reeking of Little Edie Beale. If you see me in tights, a hat, boots, cutoffs, legwarmers, and an enormous scarf looped over a t-shirt that’s way too big, two hoodies and my roommate’s leather jacket, please be kind. It’s not Fashion. I’m freezing.

I’ve spent the last couple of nights retreating hibernation-style to my apartment with just a (digital) pile of new records to keep me company, under a billion blankets because I can’t get the furnace to turn on, candles lit for warmth so the house accidentally smells like vanilla.

I’m basically the classiest grizzly bear ever.

Secretly, though, I’m kind of stoked that it’s getting cold. I like putting up my hood and pretending I’m faceless because I can’t see anyone else’s features. There are few better feelings in the world than sitting on the F and knowing you’re nothing more to anyone than a pile of fake fur trim and the wire to your headphones.

The summer is for yelling. Not in a bad way, it’s just the time of the year when your legs are bare and your hair is stuck to your forehead and it feels good to say shit loud. Ditto for getting belligerent. Or sitting on stoops. Without foliage and all the rest of the stuff I didn’t think I would ever really miss about the suburbs, fall flips by like a commercial about pumpkin-flavored coffee.

And then suddenly it’s winter. And winter’s about being quiet. Winter’s totally for secrets, because everything is one—have you ever watched a stranger walk into a restaurant, or a coffee shop or something, and take off their winter stuff? Every vaguely human-shaped lump of wool and goose down is hiding some kind of inscrutable someone underneath a peacoat, a hat, a scarf, gloves, and three sweaters.

All I've Got Left to Say About the Election

2008-11-10T15:27:00.003-05:00

Since nearly a week has gone by since the election and I’m just now getting around to saying anything about it, the poetic/melodramatic/patriotic/emotional/political creek ‘round these here internet parts has pretty much run dry. And yet, because I write for basically masturbatory reasons, I’m still gonna chime in these $.02:

1. Prop 8 is garbage. Get it together, California.

2. I get off the C/E at Spring Street every morning, and I use the far exit that dumps you out on Vandam. There are three turnstiles. This should be plenty for the approximately 30 people ever exiting that end of the train, but every day—every single day—someone refuses to wait and slams through the emergency exit and sets off a violent alarm that’s enough to provoke you to homicide when you’re A) tired, B) on your way to work and C) ascending stairs that invariably smell like bum piss. (And I do mean bum, like, tin-can-bean-eating rummy bum.) Yet every day I get off the train and think, “Maybe it’s today. Maybe today is the Day of No Assholes,” and sometimes I get to the top of the stairs with a certain amount of faith in the general patience and goodness of my fellow commuters intact. Then BAM, alarm, someone couldn’t wait three seconds and, extrapolating to a larger sample population of humanity as a whole, Anne Frank was wrong and people are basically dirtbags who piss me off.

Anyway, this has a point. The Day of No Assholes? November 5, 2008. Thank you, President-elect Barack Obama. That is change.

Ghouls, Goblins, Ghosts and Losers

2008-11-04T16:01:00.005-05:00

I liked the banana, but I really liked Luigi.

Also, I talked to a Dogma-style angel who might’ve been an okay guy but, probably owing to his pantslessness, was broadcasting some very subtle creep vibrations. My favorite, though, was the sailor who hit on everything with ovaries (from the jellyfish to Carmen Miranda to Dorothy) like he was competing for immunity on The Pickup Artist 3: Night of the Living Dead.

I love Halloween.

And I love Halloween parties even more, because it gives you permission to use sentences like the ones above. “That zombie is super cute.” That’s something I only get to say once a year, unless of course the end of days comes sooner than expected and the graveyard across the street from my house is filled with eligible dead guy bachelors.

Google Maps apparently shares my enthusiasm for the holiday and sent Kai and me out past Transylvania Road on a hunt for Amity Street. On Halloween night. In the middle of nowhere. It took us three hours, two sets of directions from nerdy teenage boys, a bag of Lays, a Sour Patch elementary school of Sour Patch Kids, and a disgusting amount of licorice allsorts (don’t judge me and my increasingly geriatric candy preferences) to get to the Yale School of Forestry Halloween party. The third member of my teenage coven currently goes to school there. When I got her invitation, I threw together a costume (I was a riotgrrrl, which my regular wardrobe shamefully accommodated) and took the Great Paul Hunt to the Ivy League.

Sadly, the only Paul I was able to turn up was my friend’s ex-boyfriend and he looked like Jesus. I mean that he was both actually dressed in costume as the Messiah and that he physically resembled Jesus Christ and, on either count, I’m not really looking to get down all Nazareth-style.

The Paul hunt is not going well, and, shut up, I’m aware this is due to the fact that my friend made him up and I am something of a psychopath. But when you receive signs from the cosmos, you either start taking your lithium or you give in and follow wherever they take you. I prefer the latter. So, what I'm saying here is send any and all available Pauls Kathyward and I promise you at least a verbose blog recounting of our undeniably awkward meeting.

The best thing about this past weekend was that Kai found and passed on a relic from our teenage years that, to me, is every bit as good as finding Paul or the Holy Grail or the Dead Sea Scrolls or Tut’s tomb or whatever.

Yorktown, my hometown, has only ever produced one punk. He was fucking badass. He was a few years older than me and he was far too awesome to have any idea who the fuck I was. Except, once, he randomly sat down with me and Kai at a coffee shop and hung out for a few hours, eating our sour gummy worms and bullshitting and making me so nervous I’m pretty sure I did actual damage to my cardiac muscles.

I can’t remember what any of us said, but when he left he tore apart his empty box of Marlboro reds (BAD. ASS.) and wrote two phone numbers, his name, and “that loser from the coffee shop” on the back.

We never called it. We thought about it. Constantly. But we never even got near the phone with the numbers, let alone for one of us to actually dial, actually listen to the phone ring, actually have to come up with something to say to him.

Anyway, Kai knew she’d never thrown the numbers away, but when I got in her car the other night and I saw the square old piece of Marlboro pack sticking out of a book she was giving me I got so excited I think I actually rubbed it on my face like it was a kitten, or something.

The sad thing about life, now, is that you can Google people who probably should’ve been able to disappear into the ether of suburban legend. Last thing I’d heard about this guy was that he was tattooing somewhere down south; a Google search, however, turns up an interview he recently gave a free daily in Canada about being a crack addict. I’m sadder knowing where he is than I was wondering if I’d ever hear about him again, and I think maybe that’s the shit of it—maybe it’s better to look for a mythical Paul than meet a real one, and maybe liking the living is less fun than lurking a zombie for a few hours.

The Great Paul Hunt

2008-10-30T14:34:00.001-05:00

I’m using Halloween as an excuse to talk ad nauseum about my tenure as an adolescent witch, although, in all honesty, it’s kind of my favorite thing to talk about and I do it all year long. But, you know, fuck you. It’s festive.

Anyway, so, rewind to when I was maybe fourteen years old and a grunge suburban witch practicing her craft in her friend’s living room—it’s imperative you picture the Smashing Pumpkins t-shirt, the floor-length black skirt and the pastel baby barrettes to get the full effect. Kai, my legitimately psychic friend, was reading my tarot cards on the coffee table, as per usual for a Friday night. Why leave the house and talk to actual boys when, instead, you could have your friend do several complex Celtic cross spreads about when you’ll finally talk to some boys?

Since we had a lot of time on our hands (basically from 4:30 when I showed up after school until, you know, I left for college) we were in the middle of an extraordinarily long and in-depth tarot card reading about my entire lives. She was in the midst of telling me what I would be doing in my twenties, information that has long since been forgotten, when she mentioned this one thing that came back to me really vividly just recently. When she mentioned a boy, you know, like The Boy For Me, with implied vocal capitalization and everything, she said, very nonchalantly, “His name’s gonna be Paul.”

“Paul?” I said.

“Definitely,” she said.

Like I said, I’d forgotten this until maybe a month or two ago, and Kai still can’t remember it happening even after I told her about it coming back to me. I didn’t really think much about it until Jes, a friend from long after my teen witch days, had this kind of insane dream involving me, and her, and a scary dog, and several guest stars from my stupid life. We were all at a rooftop party in the middle of a blizzard, though none of us seemed to mind the cold. I got a phone call.

“Paul’s here!” Dream Me said, all excited, to Dream Jes. “He’s downstairs, I gotta go!”

Dream Jes knew that we had just started hanging out, but that we really liked each other. Real Jes also has a history of semi-prophetic dreams about my life, so when she told me that Dream Me was hanging out with Still Fictitious Paul, I was kind of excited.

Thus began the Great Paul Hunt of 2008.

I can recall knowing only two Pauls in my entire life, and I’m not sure if I ever had an entire conversation with either one of them. One rode my bus in elementary school, and the only thing I can remember about him was that he lived somewhere on Colonial Street. The other was in a writing workshop I absolutely hated in college, and our one interaction was me watching him accidentally spit a green Skittle (possibly an M&M, but I’m pretty sure it was a Skittle) across the room. No one else noticed but me and then we couldn’t stop laughing about it, silently, so as not to interrupt the painstaking dissection of student fiction. He was definitely cute, but I’m not willing to bank on him being The Paul given our one smidge of history that is, actually, kind of creepy I remember at all five years out.

I’ve asked around. I've even checked MySpace friends of friends of friends, and no one seems to know any Pauls. My friend Brian has volunteered his friend Paul to be The Paul, and so far I dig the only thing I know about him, which is that he is an “amazing badass Aztec/Native American.” But Brian lives in Santa Fe and I’m not sure if I’m willing to long distance my star-crossed Paulationship.

Anyway, so, I figured I’d put it out there. Paul? I know we don't, like, know each other very well, especially considering that I might have made you up and, even if you are real, you are a stranger. But seriously. You should call me.

Spell Me Something Good

2008-10-28T16:10:00.000-05:00

So last Friday night, Saturday, and Sunday—before a staggeringly large percentage of my friends ended up in the hospital--was an awesomely good weekend. Kai came down from Westchester and kick-started a weekend that included a pitcher of margaritas, and bands, and an unforgivably middle-school-caliber crush, and lots of driving around listening to epic nineties jams, and, best of all, the reason for Kai’s visit in the first place: drunken witchcraft.

I knew things were going to get all Craft-style nuts when, in the middle of our salads at Yaffa, she conjured from her backpack a red silk box filled to the top with stuff she’d purchased on family vacations to Salem when we were in middle school. We were never allowed to use any of it because our parents expressly forbade us from so much as lighting a candle in their houses, so it was entirely out of the question to burn sacks filled with all kinds of magical herb blends that, now, look suspiciously like potpourri and glitter.

While we were going through the crystals and little bags and thirty-one flavors of incense, our waitress came over to refill the water.

“Is that…wicca stuff…?” she asked.

She had artfully highlighted hair and impeccable eyeliner, so I wasn’t sure whether she was making fun of us or not. I kind of laughed and was like, yeah, uh, this is all stuff we found from when we were in middle school…and really liked The Craft…

“Oh my god!” the waitress said, putting down her pitcher. “When I was thirteen, me and my cousin though we were witches and we did this spell? To control the weather? And then we opened the windows and it was SO WINDY!”

See, witches receive signs from the universe in many, many forms, including extra-hip waitresses on St. Mark’s. We left her tip under a sizeable chunk of quartz, with a note that read “By the power of three times three…here’s a random crystal!” Because, also, witches know that whatever energy you put out comes back to you threefold, so we figured we better start sending out the love, stat, before we got too drunk to remember not to hate on everything we saw.

Witches also have the ability to transmogrify large chunks of their disposable income into Pabst, which, in turn, imparts the particularly devilish power to make pitchers of strawberry margaritas disappear instantaneously.

When we woke up the next morning, the basement of my house looked like Mellificent had been hit by an eighteen wheeler. There were incense ashes and crystals everywhere, and the Ouija board was out but cast aside because, as I vaguely remembered yelling, “these spirits spell so fucking slow!”. Next to that was a piece of paper on which I’d scrawled something very important the tarot cards had told me. This paper was surrounded by an assortment of herbs seasoning the tiles like the Colonel’s secret recipe. Not one to let the daylight and sobriety get us down, we burned some stuff on my Weber grill (probably not how they did it in Salem, but I’m hoping the spirits or whatever won’t mind my wishes smelling slightly of Boca burger) and made spells to carry around and, I don’t know, enchant my cubicle and the F train and, mostly, the bottom of my purse where the pink satin bag fulla love spell is currently hanging out.

It’s always a love spell. It’s always been love spells, since we were 12 and started hanging out in the “New Age/Spirituality” section of Barnes & Noble. Whereas Kai bought herbs to commune with nature (Me, last weekend: WHY DID YOU BUY THIS? Kai, last weekend: Seriously, I have no idea…), I bought pink candle after pink candle that sat totally unlit under my firefighter father’s roof and meditated in front of them on the no doubt copious charms of whichever pimply retard was receiving the brunt of my hormonal devotion at the time. I don’t think they’ve ever, even once, worked, but it seems like whenever Kai and I break out the witchcraft stuff like when we were thirteen, the only thing I can think is holy crap, it’s time for a love spell.

Because really, what else is worth it? Money’s great and I wish I had buckets more than I do now, but it seems sort of uncool to waste your drunken witch time on a money spell. That always seemed kind of like the stripper who gets her boobs done to make more tips instead of just going to night school and becoming a vet tech or something – like, maybe I should just work harder and get a better job instead of muttering things in my basement over a candle for more cash. What else is there? Your health? Crap. That’s like wishing for world peace on your birthday. Lame, and vague, and totally pansy. But then I’m too pansy for the other end of the spectrum—I’d never do a spell to hurt anyone because 1. I’ve seen far too many horror movies not to know how that goes and 2. I grew up Catholic and have such a lingering sense of guilt about everything I do I can’t even take a pen from a bank, let alone stick pins in a legit voodoo doll.

Which leaves you with a love spell. Because even if it doesn’t work, it doesn’t hurt to throw a few extra make-out vibes into the cosmos. And, while fumbling for my Metrocard, should you see a small pink satin bag leaking rose petals and glitter and generally looking like it was thrown together by Glinda on a bender, well, fuck you. It was.

General Hospital

2008-10-24T14:42:00.003-05:00

One of the best weekends I’ve had in a while managed to give way to Medical Calamity Week 2009. A fractured skull, an appendectomy, the worst stomach virus I’ve ever beheld, a sawed-off bit of thumb, a marathon E.R. visit, and second- and third-hand reports of stuff that’s far more serious. None of it’s happened to me though. I feel totally fine. All my bits and pieces are in the right place and in working order. But it appears that someone has put the voodoo on my friends, and I’m definitely jumping over cracks and throwing salt over my shoulder until everyone’s back in fighting shape.

The trip to the hospital last night was truly the puke green icing on this turd cake of a week. Just when I thought everyone was home safe, their nausea abating, their bones knitting, their stitches all Halloween festive, I got a call from Jes who was, apparently, dying. In the words of a dude we met in the waiting room last night: Jes lives in the hood hood, not even in the rap hood, so I called a car to take her to Methodist (which is at least familiar even if it’s not the greatest) rather than roll the dice with whatever hospital was closest to her house.

I’m beginning to think that six hours in an emergency room waiting room is a more accurate indicator of one’s personality than the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. Thirty minutes in, there’s this great divide between the patient and the impatient, and then from there the population breaks down into a variety of types: the caretakers, the complainers, the class clowns, the overreactors, the lonelyhearts, and the straight weirdos.

And the drunk. The very, very drunk.

A girl walked in bleeding from the nose and (this coming from a girl who takes her whiskey with a 40) stinking like booze. She was covered in terrible tattoos (light sabers, bible quotes surrounded by Buddhist imagery, a Star Trek emblem) and, after standing around picking blood out of a nostril for a while, she sat down without signing in and began playing with several of the sick, feverish children.

“Don’t worry,” she assured one of their mothers. “I may be drunk, but I’ve got two kids of my own!”

“I fell on my face,” she slurred as a post-script.

Eager to spread her herpes-esque friendship around the germy waiting room, homegirl then decided her time would be better spent hitting on a guy with crutches. Opening line?

“Hey crutches! Yeah, you! Other white person! We should hang out.”

Then she diagnosed his clearly broken foot as “a metatarsal, I definitely think you’ve got a metatarsal.” Turns out she’s a nursing student! I’m going to assume she’s in her first semester, though, and give her a pass on confusing the name of a bone with any kind of actual disorder or condition. When Crutches was called back to a bed, Florence Drunkengale turned her attention to a lone Hasidic grandma with a sprained elbow, and, valiantly, refused to let the English/Yiddish language barrier get in the way. Whenever Bubbie seemed a little confused, Nurse Jager would just repeat her question louder and slower. In Spanish.

(Fun fact: Bubbie actually made the pinky/thumb “drunk” gesture when I caught her eye.)

But anyway, back to my theory here, which is that when placed in a depressing room whose inhabitants have nothing in common besides discomfort, with no prospect of escape in the foreseeable future, you can really tell what someone is like at their core. You either laugh or you whine, you stick it out or you give up, you make friends or you piss everyone off. The emergency room waiting room is such a douchebag sieve it may, in fact, be the site of all of my future first dates. Any boy who could make me laugh for ten hours with nothing but sick children and injured grandmothers as comedy fodder would be one hell of a motherfucking keeper.

M-4-DoubleEw -- The Best of Craigslist Personals

2008-10-10T11:31:00.002-05:00

Craigslist is a horny hotbed of personal ads. It has to be the no-frills anonymity compelling the crazies to fill page after page with strange, demanding, borderline terrifying requests for love. Below, I’ve gathered and tried to explain my favorite headlines from recent M4W posts.

BIG BLACK DICK - 25 –
I RESPECT YOUR SUCCINCTNESS

FINGER FUN IN CENTRAL PARK - 45 - (Central Park)
WE HAVE DIVERGENT CONCEPTS OF FUN

if you are pretty, have a nice body and are between 18 and 22 .... - 33 - (queens)
…you are probably not trolling for 33-year-olds from Queens on the internet at 4:54 in the morning.

THE FALLING LEAVES DRIFT BY MY WINDOW - 63 - (East Village)
THE BAD POETIC CLICHES RAIN DOWN LIKE URINE FROM A DOG WIENER

Want to take a shower together? No sex! - 31 (ny)
Don’t worry, totally non-threatening if there’s no sex! Just you, me, and my soapy, unfamiliar dick!

ARE YOU A CUTE POTATO?LOVE DOGS?THE BEATLES? - 33 - (nyc)
I was going to be all what’s a cute potato? But then I realized that that might not be a bad descriptor for yours truly, and then I got sort of embarrassed, and then I realized I love dogs, and then I e-mailed him. Kidding. Mostly.

I have a new dress!!! - 28 - (brooklyn)
Me too! This is why we will never date.

Big Bad Wolf seeking Little Red Riding Hood –
To kill and devour her grandmother.

LIKE A VERY HAIRY GUY? - 40 - (MANHATTAN)
Shaved for the very first time?
Like a vee-rrryyy hairy guuuuyyy….
Electric razor
Starts to whine…
Ooooh-oo-ooh-ooh-oooo

LICKER in Queens - (Astoria)
JUST CROSSED MY LEGS DEFENSIVELY in Brooklyn, nice to meet you.

Soul meets soul on lover's lips – 27
Also where herpes meets herpes, just as an FYI.

A germaphobe romance –
File this one under “Craigslist Personal or Bestselling Debut Memoir Yet to Be Debunked as Fiction?” Particular points go to this guy because the ad actually includes the sentence, “I’d really just like to meet someone who doesn’t repulse me about 5 hours out of any given day.” Join the club, Mr. Clean.

Love, Cars, and The North Pole – 30
Greaser Santa seeks Pinky Tuscadero of his yuletide dreams?

I'M AN ORAL FREAK – 45
I HAVE 78 TEETH AND THEY ARE ALL SHARP

Imagine This Is a Note In Your Locker

2008-10-02T21:40:00.000-05:00

Holy crapola, it’s finally fall. Am I really, truly sitting inside writing about my stupid feelings instead of walking around and being cold and wearing sweaters and, I don’t know, doing something that doesn't rely on MS Word and trying to decide if the strange thing in the bottom of my coffee cup is a piece of lint or a dead spider? Yes, I am.

Verdict: lint.

I always fall prey to constantly thinking something very significant is on the verge of happening at this time of year. Currently, I’m aiding and abetting my own delusion with this playlist I made for my friend Kai entitled “Songs to Make Your Teenage Heart Hurt,” because we’ve known each other since before our hearts were even teenaged. It’s all pining and awkward lead singers and plaintive guitars and it’s making me so sure that I’m seconds from starring in my own John Hughes epic I can hardly sit still in my seat. I just wonder if October is going to turn me into a hormonal thirteen-year-old for the rest of my life, and at which point it will be inappropriate to acknowledge this. Forty? Thirty? Right now, because I am theoretically a grown-ass lady with health insurance and due concern about my credit score?

[Interrupting your regularly scheduled dumb minutia for the following conversation I just had with my boss, who is incidentally the president of a reputable international corporation. How I have a job is as big a mystery to me as anyone:

Boss: Who called before?
His assistant: Oh, just a solicitor.
Boss: Solicitor? There will be NO solicitation in this office! No streetwalkers!
Me: Then I’m gonna need a raise.
Boss: Get a part time job.
Me: I thought that’s what that was…]

Except, see, okay, when I was thirteen, I didn’t do anything exciting. I volunteered as a children’s librarian, I sang in a church choir, I was embarrassingly good at school, I returned my rented videos on time, and my one brush with alcohol involved chickening out of a parent-approved sip of champagne at my uncle’s wedding. Even my crushes were logical and non-threatening; who loves the same high-achieving, 4.0 GPA-earning, clean-cut dork of boy for four uninterrupted teenage years based on approximately two conversations? Yes, I walked around looking like a riot-rrrrretard and listened to loud music and, of course, dabbled in witchcraft, but I was never the kind of kid to take the extra step and, like, dye my hair pink. Looking like an asshole is not a great substitute for your life actually being unpredictable and diary-worthy.

I’m a firm believer in teenage rebellion, but also in that story of Archimedes and the golden crown and discovering in the bathtub that his volume in water was displaced when he got in. If this fluttery, thirteen-year-old feeling is the water in this equation, then maybe some of us just have an overfilled tub. Once you get in, it has to go somewhere, and bam, your twenties are sopping with adolescence, and there you are staying out too late with your close personal friend Mr. J. Daniels. And you develop quick and smiting crushes on boys, plural boys. And occasionally you’re that gnarly chick making out in public that thirteen-year-old you would’ve whispered about.

Is this is the equivalent of writing about myself on a bathroom stall?

Hollercore

2008-09-30T13:06:00.007-05:00

Usually I hate the street holler. Like, more than anything. More than getting up in the morning, more than coffee grinds in the bottom of my cup, more than losing a bobby pin in my bigass hair, more than fingerprints on my glasses, more than ill-fitting underwear, more than loud chewers on the subway, more than Joan Jett hates herself for loving you and can't break free from the things that you do. I'm in no way a ten or anything, yet I've been hollered at by cops, firemen, garbage collectors who stop the truck in the middle of the intersection at Myrtle and Marcy until I'm in the subway, a dude who swore to Allah he would buy me contacts and better nails while smoking on the G train, and, once, a short bus. I hate it.

Except I just got the all time holler of hollers and it actually was so absurdly charming it made my day.

I was walking down the street during my lunch just to get out of the office for a bit and passed some crusties with a dog. This is like my kryptonite. I can't not give them the contents of my pocket when they ask me for money. So, as usual, when the dude asked me for change I gave him a buck and kept walking.

Halfway down the block he yells, "WAIIIIIT!"

And I'm all, "Yeah?"

And he's all, "Lemme get your number! I'm serious!"

And I'm all, you have a phone?

And he's all, "Come onnn, I'm serious! You're so pretty! I'll buy you pizza and we can sneak into the movies!"

He kept hollering until I turned the corner at which point I realized that this is the best offer I've gotten recently. I'm not sure what that says about me, or the world, or you dudes in general as a species, but right about now sneaking into a horror movie and eating some misappropriated popcorn with someone who could conceivably give me scabies is actually sort of tempting.

My Chest Hurts

2008-09-26T14:58:00.001-05:00

I know it’s already Friday again, but I’m still stuck on last weekend, which was so out of the ordinary it made my whole entire life feel like a vacation. A herd of really, exceptionally good new people blew in and then left again like a tropical storm, and in their whirlwind came an epidemic of new tattoos, a flat tire in the projects, a party broken up by the cops, a really lame beatdown, a threatened retaliatory beatdown, an oil tank climbed and immediately unclimbed, and milkshakes, and pizza, and an excuse to bake two vegan cheesecakes, and bullshitting while sitting on piles of laundry in the kind of apartment that, when you’re a kid, you think you’ll have when no one can to tell you what to do, and several forties, and some late nights, and a sick day. And one extremely stubborn Sunday crossword puzzle.

I have this undying affinity for movies that take place on one night, because they always make my heart beat with a sense of teenage urgency that’s hormonal and visceral and lovely. I blame watching “American Graffiti” when I was, like, nine or something. To this day, if anything—movies, books, my stupid life, whatever—involves driving around in a car between dumb destinations and having conversations at an absurdly late/early hour with people you wouldn’t otherwise be talking to, I will love it.

I realize this isn’t exactly a story, but what’s the point? My life felt kinda like one of those movies for a little bit, but then I went back to work, I answered my e-mails, I went to my meetings, and I tried to go to bed at a normal hour.

But.

I was unable to completely hide two new chest tattoos. And I am equally unable to go sleep. When you lead kind of a normal life during the day, one which fits slightly uncomfortably, it’s kind of nice to caffeinate things for a little while.

Waisted: Jean-etic Disorders

2008-09-22T14:26:00.001-05:00

Kathy joined Weight Watchers. Shut up. Because it apparently breaks some weight loss commandment to display even a scintilla of cynicism at meetings, Waisted is where she bitches about eating, not eating, oversharing weight watchers, and probably you.

It is arctic in my office. It is so cold I have to pack extra sweaters in my bag like I’m going to Girl Scout camp in Maine or something. It’s so cold I have to take walks at lunch to thaw my fingers (and scour SoHo for possible Lindsay Lohan sightings. She is my Bigfoot. She is my Loch Ness monster.). Last week I made the mistake of coming to work in a skirt and, by one in the afternoon, I was so cold I had to go out and purchase pants.

If Lindsay Lohan is my Bigfoot, pants have historically been my kryptonite. Meltdown inducing, muffin-top producing, ass-crack revealing, thigh-squeezing, Old Navy-procured kryptonite.

I know they’re just two tubes and a zipper, but pants are just as big a social identifier as your hair and I’ve been frustrated for more than a decade at having to wear jeans that say the wrong thing. When I was in high school, all I wanted were bell-bottoms (it was a very Woodstock ’95 impulse, and you can all suck it) and all I could fit into were men’s carpenter jeans from Old Navy. When I was in college all I wanted were cute vintage pants from the consignment shop downtown, and what I settled for was ordering pants online from American Eagle (extended sizes available via the internet only, because fatties should never be allowed to leave the basement) and, of course, Old Navy. And then I moved to New York and all I wanted was a goddamn pair of skinny jeans, but I ended up instead with pair after pair of crappy pants from--say it with me now--Old Navy.

I don’t actually have anything against Old Navy and, in fact, rather appreciate that they carry a whole lot of size options in their stores. It’s just that the Old Navy aesthetic, the Aubrey O’Day to the Gap’s Victoria Beckham, is extraordinarily not me and more than a little cheesy. It’s always been difficult to cobble together some kind of representative look when everything there either goes one step too far (inexplicable rhinestones, or a fun screen print of a sun and a beach or something) or else feels like stuff my mother would’ve made me wear when she still made us go to church on vacation.

So, I was freezing and I needed jeans and I walked straight to Old Navy without thinking. I was barely through the security sensors when I realized, holy shit, I didn’t have to shop there if I didn’t want to. I spun my ass around, walked out, and purchased a pair of jeans at H&M for $19.90, and yes they have terrible back pockets but they were on sale, and fit right, and confirmed my suspicion that I’d lost another inch in the waist.

I’ve lost 58.2 pounds since January and look different enough now that people who met me once before then don’t recognize me as the same person. People I know are, with growing frequency, passing me by on the street without recognizing me until I say their name. It’s hard to see the difference when I look in the mirror, but the little changes weird me out sufficiently: my hands look completely different and I lost more than a ring size; my shoes fit differently; my mom’s middle school charm bracelet fastens all of a sudden; I can’t immediately identify which figure is me when I’m walking with a crowd past our reflections in a window. Weirder still, I’ve noticed people feel comfortable making fat jokes about other people in front of me, which used to happen very rarely. I mean, yay, I’ve partially shrunk out of the demographic you’re shit-talking, but emotionally, I’m a big-ass fatty fatso fat girl 4 LYFE, ya herrd?

But what do you do? I don’t know, I’m still figuring it out. Sometimes you just put on your small pants and they dye your legs blue because they’re brand new, and you talk to boys even if it’s completely pointless, and you get vaguely Diablo Cody-esque bro tattoos in a kitchen in Bed-Stuy, and you count your whiskey points dutifully, and you just keep going and hope anything makes sense when you get there.

And That, Kids, Is the Story of How I Met Your Dad.

2008-09-10T21:51:00.002-05:00

The thing I love about New York and that everyone else in the country probably hates about New York is the personal arsenal of "Only in New York..." stories we all accidentally amass by just doing our daily shit. Yes, they are funny, but yes, they also make us sound like smug assholes who think it's an accomplishment just to get to work.

But, see, when you drive to work alone, in a car, in which you can be reasonably assured no one will be jerking off, the world doesn't seem like quite such a war zone.

Case in point:

I was on the downtown F yesterday at rush hour. I got a seat, I was finishing up the crossword, and there was a garden-variety subway crazy sitting a few seats down and on the other side of the car. He was a mutterer and a several-plastic-bags-haver, if you're familiar with that particular crazy guy jam. He didn't smell and he wasn't pooping or screaming, so no one really paid his muttering much mind.

He muttered the entire way to 7th Avenue, where I get off. He was seated next to the door. As the train neared my station, I stood to gather up my shit and stuff my paper in my bag.

"Daaaaaaaaaamn, girl. DAAAAAAAAAAAAAMN! MAMA!" he said to my boobs.

"Fuuuuuuuuuuuck," I remember thinking. (For the record, my boobs have caused me nothing but trouble since, like Cabbage Patch Kid heads from magical soil, they blossomed, large and bulbous and creepy.)

He went back to muttering, though vehemently now and in the direction of my chest. The train slowed down and came to a stop, and, of course, of fucking course, this was one of those times when, no matter how hard you will it to happen, the doors just will not open.

This was when he looked me right in the eye.

"Well," he said. "I wouldn't kill you."

And with that single, terrifying, lucid confession, he turned his attention back toward muttering into the car of people whose lives, sadly for them, were not so blatantly guaranteed.

All You Other Slim Shadys Are Just Imitating

2008-09-04T07:38:00.003-05:00

Because I am a narcissist, I’m signed up for Google Alerts whenever my name appears on the internet. Mostly this is crap: links to old articles (that Britney Spears McSweeney’s thing just will not die) and those strange advertising pages that just aggregate text from other places on the web. Then, yesterday, I got an alert that I had published a poem on poetry.com.

This was troubling, because 1. I have written two poems since I graduated college. One was yesterday, and the other was a sonnet ode to trans fats, and 2. I did not publish either masterpiece via poetry.com. I live in fear that my tragically bad poems from college, high school or, god help me, middle school are circling like piranhas, waiting for a good opening to bite me directly in the ass. I held my breath and clicked.

Here’s what I found:

Children

Children are a blessing from our Lord
I have three.

Kathy Cacace

This, coupled with another alert that I had apparently signed up for Facebook and posted a picture of some lady with blonde highlights and tasteful earrings, means there is another Kathy Cacace in town. I'm assuming her recent appearance is due to a marriage-related name change, and not some Twilight Zone-esque Doppleganger life takeover plot.

I have always been the only Kathy Cacace on the internet. It may not be a good name, or even a name that people understand and so I have to spell it out several times, but then they think I’m stuttering and I’m not, there’s just a lot of c’s and a’s, but it's my name and mine alone. With it comes the right to the only Facebook account with my name on it, and to bogart all the Google hits, and to publish poor poetry of my choosing via a pyramid scheme to sell your name to mailing lists.

So, like the whiny little bitch I’ve been since birth, I struck back at injustice by writing down my stupid feelings.

Clarifications

I did not write that poem.
I have no children.
A leaf slowly falls.

Kathy Cacace

I Have a Poetry Degree and a Fridge Full of Old Hot and Sour Soup

2008-08-31T20:09:00.002-05:00

I am so sick of
pomegranates, honey,

blackberries, tea, bread
other than wonder,
plums and other lyrical groceries
that are the staples
of the poetically inclined.

Today, I ate a slice of your pizza
so cold, from the fridge,
and leftover;
I picked nothing
except the least
dusty jar of Hellman's
reduced fat mayonnaise
off the shelf of the shitty deli
where I also got:

Twizzlers and razors,
and nail polish,
separated, old
and undelicious.

Adieu, Adieu, To You and You and You

2008-08-29T11:02:00.004-05:00

One of the things that makes me the saddest (and thinky newspapers have a way of publishing a story on the subject at least once year during a news drought) is the idea of a language dying. The Guardian just today listed ten languages on the verge of extinction, each spoken by a handful of old people in some far flung place or other. I know I’m not ever going to speak anything with a click in it. Moreover, I know that even if I miraculously learned, everyone else who could speak it would be dead by the time I learned. But seriously, when I was in fourth grade and I heard that Navajo was a dying language and I was a WWII enthusiast (thanks, Starring Sally J. Friedman as Herself) and had just learned about code talkers, I was sufficiently upset to check out a Navajo dictionary published in, like, 1955 from my library and convince myself I could learn to speak it fluently. I never got past the words for vegetables.

This article goes on to say that half of the world’s 6,900 languages will be dead by 2050, which makes me so sad I could pukw. Mostly because when they say something like, “N|u is a Khoisan language spoken by fewer than 10 elderly people whose traditional lands are located in the Kalahari Gemsbok National Park in South Africa,” I picture three fucking old as dirt people sitting around a campfire, talking, and no one can understand them, and they’re saying some really great shit. I know that their cultural stories have probably been passed down in other languages, but come on. Hearing someone tell my Uncle Arcangelo’s story about going deaf in one ear in anything other than his Yonkers patois would miss the whole point.

I’m not sure where I’m going with all of this, other than that I feel like I’m culturally a part of several monsters. English is like the number muncher of world languages, and I was born into an immediate family of Yankees fans, which is about as fun as rooting for Walmart, and I had to stop myself from autopiloting into a Starbucks in the middle of the old cobblestone-y section of Heidelberg, Germany.

Airbrush with Death

2008-08-25T19:19:00.002-05:00

I will probably be a bad parent. I realized this seated at a plastic picnic table in a cloud of barbecue smoke next to the revival tent at the Duchess County Fair this weekend. My dad was eating something called ribbon fries, which were a fascinating potato chip/french fry hybrid, arranged into a nest and deep fried, then, in the parlance of Denny's, covered and smothered. Things have advanced by leaps and bounds in carnival gastronomy since the last time I attended the fair. Blooming onions, a veggie tempura tent, thirty flavors of italian ice, a gourmet coffee cart, a middle eastern tent, and a panini hut stood all Queer Eyed among the hot dog, hamburger, frozen banana spots I remembered.

But anyway, my point here is that I will be a bad parent. We used to come to the Duchess County Fair every single year, in addition to the Orange County Fair, and the Westchester County Fair, and other, smaller fairs my mother remembers only by the smell. We didn't have a whole ton of money growing up, and my mother was telling me yesterday that, since we didn't go to camp or anything like that, going to the county fairs was a cheap-ish way to fool us into thinking our summers rocked.

But, god, did I buy it hook, line and sinker. I waited all summer for the fairs. I wanted to pet cows and then eat burgers. I loved crane machines with an almost romantic intensity. I wanted to investigate the wares of every single virtually indistinguishable jewelry/leather goods purveyor in search of the perfect accessory (under $5) that would be lost under the back seat of the van on the way home, if not before, near the skee-ball games, or possibly in a porta-potty. I was resolved to figure out how that one plumbing company with a booth in the 4-H hall got their magical free-standing faucet illusion thing to work. If only I could've airbrushed my entire wardrobe with my name, I would've been in heaven.

Because I am classy, I still love the county fair despite the realization that it is probably the world's most expensive way to be trashy. It's four bucks to huck a dart at a balloon and win a Chinese finger trap. It's fifteen dollars to get your name airbrushed on a trucker hat. It's $2.75 for a very large pickle, sold by a dour-looking girl from a stand shaped like a giant barrel. It's free, though, to watch an ambling crowd of sweaty people doing ugly things in front of each other, like eating corn on the cob or applying sunblock to their aging cleavage. I love it.

But here is why I am going to be a bad parent. Pretend I am my mother, the valedictorian of her high school class, a world traveler, a musical theater enthusiast, a crossword completer, a Masterpiece Theater watcher (seriously, the show is apparently still on the air and has an audience) , and I have three children and few liquid assets, and they want to go to the Marlboro-clouded, mullety, sausage-scented, packed to the gills county fair, and they will cry when they don't win at least four stuffed animals that will be thrown out in two years when you force them to clean out their closet, and they will demand cotton candy and then try to hold your hand while they are all sticky, and one of them will be having a bad time for no discernable reason, and you will run out of quarters to give them for that game where the quarter runs down the little ramp and you try to get the thing to push more quarters over the edge no matter how many rolls of quarters you brought, and you don't relish the car smelling like cow ass for the entire ninety minute drive home.

If I were my mother, I would go upstairs and watch TV and finish a bottle of whiskey. This, obviously, is an indicator of poor parenting skills, although it is also an indicator that if my theoretical future children want to go to the county fair, I will be inclined to do so.

But so help me god, if they start begging to see a community theater production of "The Pajama Game," I will turn that car right around. Do not make me come back there.

My New Favorite Website

2008-08-07T12:36:00.001-05:00

Go have a look at this. It'll make you lose your faith in humanity and dessert simultaneously, but also make you laugh hard enough to cry at your desk.

Awesome Levels of Awesomeness

2008-07-31T12:18:00.002-05:00

It is so hot. It is so hot I want to punctuate that sentence with that annoying bloggy way of putting periods after every word because that's how I'd say it out loud if it wasn't too fucking hot and disgusting to take four breaths in such rapid succession. It is so humid my sheets last night felt like I'd pulled them out of the dryer too early, but since I haven't washed them in a repulsively long time I know that not to be the case. It is so hot my glasses fog not only entering air-conditioned buildings, but just walking around. It is so muggy my hair stays in a sweaty mess of curly ponytail when I remove the elastic. In short: I look awesome right now, so quick, let me run into someone from high school.

Cool, thanks Union Square foot traffic!

Waisted: Total Losers

2008-07-24T14:09:00.008-05:00

Kathy joined Weight Watchers. Shut up. Because it apparently breaks some weight loss commandment to display even a scintilla of cynicism at meetings, Waisted is where she bitches about eating, not eating, oversharing weight watchers, and probably you.

The thing I like best about my neighborhood is the coffee place, so of course it lost its lease and it's about to close. I went for an obituary of an iced coffee last night and realized that orphanhood is becoming kind of a leitmotif for my stupid life. I've been orphaned by the Tea Lounge and a few weeks ago I was orphaned by Ricardo, my whirling gay dervish Weight Watchers meeting leader.

He moved on to the greener and presumably thinner pastures of cosmetology school and I've missed my usual meeting ever since. Add constant travelling for the past month to the loss of my favorite giggly Brazilian weight loss oracle and the most enthusiasm I've been able to muster for the program is dropping in at lunchtime just to get weighed in. I split immediately after stepping off the scale. Somehow this arrangement still leaves me open to haranguing by a chipper WW employee who insisted on giving me a nametag as I walked out the door "just in case I need it sometime." Just in case. Just in case I really want to associate my name, the tit it's affixed to, and the Weight Watchers brand outside the AA-like secrecy of a meeting.

The thing I loved best about Ricardo was that he made me forget about all the reasons I don't want to lose weight. I read Bust magazine at an impressionable age. I helped circulate a petition to force my high school's administration to let girls wear pants to our graduation ceremony. I cut my own hair. I have never worn foundation in my life. For years I had a pin on the military surplus bag I used as a purse that read "Fuck your Fascist Beauty Standards." The idea that I am now dropping pounds and paying to do it sets off an internal sellout alarm that is difficult to silence, but Ricardo could at least turn the volume down. "Dis is nah abow dieting," he would say, "dis is abow lerneen to eat like a person who doesn't hah to theenk abow wha dey eat. Iss about peace of mine." Or even better: "Joo know how we talk abow portion contro for food? Sometie you got people in your life you gotta portion control. Sometie you gotta say hey, I luh you, but wha else do we have in common besigh pancakes?"

I was able to make my Wednesday meeting this week. Hal, a substitute meeting leader I can only describe as the Bill Frist of Weight Watchers, discussed the following (offered by a blonde girl in flared pants near her goal weight) as an inspirational quote to chew on:

Nothing tastes as good as being thin feels.

Hand to god, that is an actual Margaret Cho punchline I am now being asked to use as a mantra. It's perverse. My life is perverse, and my inner fat riot grrrl is lighting fire to my inner bras and kicking my inner Weight Watcher in the teeth with a pair of steel-toe Doc Martens. Number one, everything tastes as good as being thin feels, because thin isn't a taste. It also isn't a feeling, it's a social perception. Futher, how about guacamole? Can we discuss fettucini with pesto sauce here for a second? How about a motherfucking brownie covered in hot fudge and topped with mint chocolate chip ice cream? Being thin doesn't taste like anything, you stupid twats, and food tastes really motherfucking good.

Number two, the dumb asshole who offered the phrase mentioned that she had just gone on vacation at the beach and repeated that sentence to herself every time she passed this candy store that sold salt water taffy and candy apples and and homemade fudge. "I'd think that to myself and eat ten baby carrots and I'd get through it," she said, all proud of herself.

Fucker, I ATE that brownie I described up there last night for dinner, because that is the point of this whole thing. If I had to give up eating candy apples, I would never ever in a billion years have stuck to this program. Day one, meeting one, pamphelet one, the Weight Watchers people tell you that you don't have to avoid food like that. You just need to learn how to eat to accomodate it, and if you don't get that, I'm amazed you can button your own flares without assistance. (Or, really, the intervention of friends who shouldn't let friends wear flares, but that's your shit, not mine.)

Number three, FUCK YOU. Way to take something I was just starting to feel decent about and make me feel like the world's biggest bag of shit. It wasn't just the girl or the phrase that pissed me off. It was the whole meeting. Most of Ricardo's regulars were gone, including the weirdos I used to make fun of. The Quip Rehearser was there but she didn't say a single thing--not one practiced anecdote, not a solitary dumb pun. I didn't know that I'd unwittingly found the anarchist rebel Weight Watchrrrs group, but that's what it was when Ricardo ran it and now all I've got is a bunch of women losing weight for their weddings who don't see the value of eating salt water taffy next to real salt water. Ricardo's people were all a little nuts, and they said "fuck" if necessary, and Ricardo, unlike Hal, never asked you how much weight you'd lost before you were permitted to say your piece.

I've lost my coffee shop and I've lost Ricardo, but the other thing I've lost is 49 pounds since January. Tied directly to that, I've lost the stores I used to shop in (though it was liberating to bid Fat Topic adieu), and most of my old favorite clothes, and a concept of what I actually look like, and, most unnervingly, an identity based on how much I weigh. I've been the fat girl since seventh grade, so what am I if not that? Taking the "fat" part out of "fat girl" leaves me just as unmoored as if I'd taken out the "girl" part. I've still got a lot to lose, and, on the flip side, I've still got a lot to lose. Know what I mean?

We Three Things of Orient Are

2008-07-22T12:29:00.002-05:00

If someone were to tie off my arm and inject espresso straight into my veins, I'm not sure the effect would rival how antsy I feel at this particular moment in time. It's completely without cause, too. Tuesday is nothing but a normal day (possibly the normalest of days?) and, yeah, there's fun to be had tonight, but no reason to think it'll be different than any other Tuesday at my two Tuesday spots. I can't say that I don't relish the idea that I'm getting clairvoyant vibrations about some surprising and wonderful turn of events yet to unfold, but chances are I'm just fucking antsy.

Here are three paragraphs that are completely unrelated.

1. Estelle Getty, my favorite Golden Girl, died this morning. I'm sure that there are going to be campy gay tributes galore, but I didn't love the Golden Girls ironically. Actually, I don't really love them currently. I used to watch the show with my grandmother whenever she came to babysit, which was rare. She was a difficult lady in general, but watching Golden Girls and drinking Coke floats with her in the living room when my parents were at the firehouse dinner dance are among my favorite memories of a lady who once critiqued my overbite in the middle of a community theater performance of "Nunsense."

2. I fell asleep sideways with my head hanging off my bed watching "Girls' School Screamers" last night, so in addition to having the world's most voluminous head of hair, I had strange dreams that featured slashers and ghosts and, you guessed it, screaming girls.

3. I can't stop listening to Lil' Wayne. I don't understand what it is with me and him, but I feel like there's something there. I've google image searched him several times in the past few days before I even realized what I was doing. I've gone to his Myspace page but stopped short of requesting friendship, because I know it's not really him. I started out hustlin', ended up ballin'. Not true, but you know, someday. Maybe.

La Villa Real de la Santa Fé de San Francisco de Asís

2008-07-17T19:47:00.013-05:00

I think I'm probably a terrible house guest. I'm not the type to rifle through your medicine cabinet or drink your last beer; I'm just inordinately fond of sitting around with you and not doing much of anything. You can ask me seven hundred times what sights I want to see, but mostly I'm happy just to be hanging out so long as the topographic landscape of the couch under my caboose is exotically different than the Ikea model on which I regularly camp out. The thing is, I work in an office. My life is spent in pursuit of the elusive balance of Windows applications that will project efficiency but guarantee a maximum of bullshitting is accomplished during the eight hours I am contractually bound to my cubicle. When I can pursue leisure with all the proper tools of the trade (a credit card, a plane ticket, vacation days, whiskey, a friend in a far away city, and the constant awareness that I will never see any of these people again), I do so like I'm panning for gold in a stream, looking for pure, shiny moments of unadulterated time off.

After the world's longest Friday night, I arrived in Santa Fe looking like a homeless lady, smelling like an airplane, filled with complimentary pretzels, wired on complimentary coffee, and confused about the relationship of the people I'd sat next to for an entire flight across the country. Were they mother and son or husband and wife? Why did the one speak only English and the other only Spanish? Was the man developmentally disabled or just an asshole? What were they carrying in the overhead compartment that was wrapped in newspaper and leaking? Why do I always get the awesomest seat on the plane?

Anyway, I was there to visit my friend Brian, who I have seen for approximately 24 hours in the past two years. I like that I'm writing like 1. he doesn't read this and 2. anyone else does, but the conceit works for me and I'm just gonna run with it. He'd warned me that Santa Fe was weird and that everything closed early and even that I might not be able to breathe because of the altitude, but the pictures he sent looked pretty and I had never been further west than Oklahoma and I rarely get to see him so I went. And also, the desert. Like the polar ice caps, or sorority houses, or the entire state of California, the desert is this thing that existed only as a myth in my mind.

My friends and fellow nonbelievers, I present this photo as proof that the desert does, indeed, exist. I even saw lizards and cacti and shit. Brian says he's seen tumbleweeds, but since I didn't see any I'm going to go ahead and call him a liar.

Not that I'm qualified to make broad generalizations about a city after spending four days there, but I'm about to do just that. Santa Fe is this strange blended cocktail of New Age spirituality, rich old people, tourists, weird hippie/yuppie hybrids, "artists" who have cultivated their eccentricity, and then everyone who's not white selling them shit on blankets like it isn't the world's biggest hustle. It's really, really weird. Like, okay, I bought the paper at coffee place? But like, a serious coffee place. A coffee as religion kind of a place, like, where they make designs in the foam on your latte. The guy who sold it to me suggested that the sections of the Times that I don't read could make a "killer paper mache project." And also, as a kicker, everything is made out of adobe so you kind of feel like you're walking around the Epcot center version of the Southwest, because even, like, the bank and the McDonald's are aggressively picturesque.

Because Brian rules, he managed to come up with a ton of shit that was right up my alley. Namely: a staircase that has been featured on "Unsolved Mysteries," the world's fattest prairie dogs, and an absolutely insane warehouse of a store called the Black Hole that sells 50 years of decomissioned military equipment from the Los Alamos labs.

Apparently some nuns prayed for a staircase and some guy came and built this with no nails and left before they could pay him. It was Jesus. Obvi.

The sveltest of the fatass prairie dogs. I will upload the photo of the John Goodman of the rodent world later.

Seriously, this place was the coolest. The dude who worked there behind the counter gave us patches that say "Let there be nuclear light" and "In bombs we trust." It's going on my bag immediately.

Brian and his girlfriend Rani also took me up to Bandelier, where you can poke around in cave dwellings and, if you're me, look like a total New York douchebag for wearing dress flats and skinny jeans while you do so. Aside from being awesome, Rani earned the distinction of taking one of approximately seven photos of me that I will show anyone, and do so herewith:

So, see, I saw sights. This doesn't change the fact that my favorite parts of visiting Brian, like my favorite parts of visiting any of my friends, involved driving around and listening to music (how Lil Wayne has become a recurrent theme in the soundtrack of my life I'm not sure, but I like it), drinking, good bad movies, fast food, and sitting around on the couch.

On the way home on the plane, seated next to yet another weirdo with a mushroom haircut because, apparently, it's 1994, I started to hatch this half-baked and kind of hippie theory that there are probably as many ways to be friends as there are people you will ever know. I blame the vauge southwestern New Agey mindset for it never gestating to the the point where there was a point, but think about it: there are the friends you've always known, the friends you used to know that you don't anymore, the friends you see nearly every day, the friends who duck into and out of your life. Friends who get stuff without you saying anything. Friends of necessity: the coworkers and the neighbors and the bartenders and the coffeeshop people and the friends of friends. The friends you can be quiet with. Those awkward friends you used to like or used to hate. Friends for hanging out in garages, or for singing in the car, or for talking about boys, or for watching DVD marathons, or for getting in fights, or for not wearing pants.

See, that's when I fell asleep and woke up as we were finally decending into JFK, and so it's just a list and not even that great of a paragraph. But whatever, put it together however you like. I'm pretending I'm still on vacation.

A Euro for my Thoughts

2008-07-06T13:19:00.000-05:00

I've had one of those weeks where every time I look at the clock it's 11:11, or 12:34, or some other time when you're supposed to hold your breath and make a wish, which I do, and it's always: Let my life work out. I think I'm probably just glancing at the time more frequently because I've been getting more texts than usual, but all this wishing makes everything feel very significant. Or maybe, like, dire. I don't know. Shit has been weird.

I spent most of last week in Germany on business and, while walking along a river on a cobblestone street late at night in a strange town in the mountains, I had to stop and think, "Well. Look where I am." Because really, what was I doing there? How do you wake up one day in your house and eat remnants of hummus on a pita you have decided is not moldy even though it's really kind of a crapshoot, and then wake up the next in Europe in a hotel room filled with fancy towels, with a pocketful of strange currency and the ability to eat at a real restaurant and get a beer instead of deciding between them? I'm 25, I own two pairs of pants, I still get nervous during take-offs, I forget to pack conditioner and walk around with hair that just screams I like Ratt. Who would send me to Europe? It seems like a big mistake.

But that's the whole thing. It's not just the random Europe trip, it's everything; it's seventeen weird situations I'm not sure what to do about, because they're cribbed from a different movie plot. I feel like I've wound up in someone else's shoes. Someone far cooler and more successful and definitely hotter, and I've risen to these strange, serendipitious opportunities by being trashy and belligerent and weirded out and, on one particular (non-work-related) night, DRUNK. I'm totally okay with my slightly weird girl niche, but when you send the weird girl to Grownup-Effing-Business-World or, worse yet, Some-Dude-Is-Weirdly-Into-It-Right-Off-the-Bat-ville, things get kinda fucked. At least in my head.