ask me if I'm a pineapple

2003-01-19T22:19:00.000-08:00

But wait! This just in. After writing about the demise of TheSleaze I checked it and it's up again! But not with the same voluminous entries, and I'm wondering if it's even the same girl. Nice to know anyway, though...

2003-01-19T21:22:00.000-08:00

I remember several years ago I used to religiously read this website called TheSleaze.com. It was a gossip site written by this chick who seemed to have this amazing ability to get backstage and get completely trashed and hook up with just about everyone you'd want to read salacious stories about. Anyway, I read it every week for like a year or two and then one day she just stopped posting. It was so upsetting- I *still* go back to that site and check. But no. Anyway, I always like to think there are a couple of people checking my site for signs of life.

Fluff is on the brain tonight as I just finished watching the Golden Globes. Who I love: Tony Shalhoub winning for his OCD-detective show that I think is hilarious but always worry will be cancelled because it doesn't seem like anyone else watches it. What I'm wondering: how has U2 managed to brainwash the entire world into thinking they are a great band? What I'm regretting: the 2,000 chips with guacamole consumed over the course of the evening. What I'm resenting: the fact that I have to work tomorrow when nobody else does.

2002-12-11T12:54:00.000-08:00

Due to overwhelming demand (OK, one person) I'm gonna start writing this again despite the fact that anyone who did read it has probably stopped checking it as I never update it. We'll start off with today's burning issue: sweaters. Why the hell can't stores make nice soft comfortable sweaters not made of stuff that makes me sneeze? When did cotton become such an outlaw? Shivering in my three-quarter sleeves, I went out to purchase something big and fluffy at lunchtime - even arm warmers would have sufficed - and found only turtlenecks that felt like hairshirts, and cardigans made of bunny hair that made my eyes start watering when I came within a couple of feet of them. Hence, still freezing at 4. Bring back the uniform, I say. Bring back formal office wear. Minus the pantyhose rule. There's nothing worse than pantyhose. Except maybe the word "sandalfoot."

2002-11-16T17:23:00.000-08:00

OK, I've been shamefully neglecting the weblog, I admit... life circumstances have been such that I've been all busy to the point of not even having time to write anything here... but I'll be back soon! I swear I will. Keep checking. In the meantime, entertain yourself with this, unless you have loud speakers and are at a job where people don't like hearing swear words.

2002-10-21T21:35:00.000-07:00

So I'm just back from a whirlwind trip to the 18th annual Chicago Pinball Expo under the guise of journalistic investigation (a great excuse to play endless games of Pinbot and Black Knight 2000 and hang out with a bunch of people who make you feel relatively un-obsessed - and, I might add, wildly untalented). Although I had resolved not to leave the confines of the Ramada O'Hare for the entire weekend, there was one brief trip out into the world, with a carful of World Champions, as we searched in vain for a Red Lobster (but settled for strip-mall Mexican). Sunday's tournament was fierce, with the grand prize (a pinball machine, natch) going to Lyman, the front-runner with the jockey-like stance, though I had been rooting for Paul, the unflappable underdog with the mullet. A weekend well spent- though now I have way too much material to write a little article, and not nearly enough to write a big one. More research is definitely necessary.

2002-10-11T07:14:00.000-07:00

Dear rest of the world,
Just wanted to let you know, for the record, that there are really quite a few of us over here who can't fucking believe what our supposedly democratic president is up to these days. We tried really hard to keep him out of the White House, but he had connections. Now he's probably going to get a bunch of us killed even though most of us think the whole Iraq thing is bullshit. So we just wanted to make sure you knew that, before all this shit goes down. We had nothing to do with it.

(Now all I have to do is get major world leaders reading my blog. I mean, if they don't already.)

2002-09-30T21:02:00.000-07:00

OK, I know I have been terribly bad about keeping up the blog. I've been all distracted lately, and was thinking of just putting Pineapple on hiatus, but then there are those random moments that bear retelling here, and it would be a shame if my own self-imposed hiatus made it impossible. So please just bear with me in my distractedness, and hopefully it will subside soon....

anyway, here's the thing that happened today: I got my pupils dilated to see if I had glaucoma (I don't) and then had to make my way down to Tribeca to have drinks before going to see an adorable young band at the Knitting Factory, and I stumbled out onto the street from the eye doctor looking like possessed Willow from "Buffy" with my eyes all black, and couldn't read anything, and put on my sunglasses even though it was 6 in the evening and it looked stupid, and the five-minute walk to the subway felt like quite an adventure, what with me trying not to walk into people and vampirically shrinking from bright lights, and the effect of the whole thing was that it really made me nostalgic for drugs. Is this as kicky as my adventures are going to get from now on? Dilated pupils in midtown? Good god, I hope not.

2002-09-23T20:27:00.000-07:00

Talk about story intros that just write themselves....

2002-09-16T20:51:00.000-07:00

So I worked until pretty late last week one night and then I went to the bar afterward to have a well-deserved drink and there, amongst several co-workers, was the Big Cheese, the editor in chief, to whom I was introduced by a rather inebriated friend, and who seemed, himself, to be somewhat toasted, and then someone asked me where I was, and I wittily replied, "working - unlike all of you," which, in retrospect, seems like something one might not want to say upon first meeting the person who signs your paychecks. Yes. In any case, he went on to invite me to dig into his plate of calimari, so I suppose all was not lost. But still. Still.

2002-09-11T21:28:00.000-07:00

Commemorated the day by seeing "Manhattan" in a giant, packed theater. Amazing to watch with a crowd of emotional New Yorkers. If I ever get my dachshund, I will name him Waffles in homage.

2002-09-10T18:27:00.000-07:00

The ride home on the subway was pretty creepy. I was just reading my book for a while - well, doing my usual half-reading, half-daydreaming thing - and I noticed the person next to me reading the newspaper full of awful 9/11 photos and then remembered all the dire warnings on the news today and looked around and everyone was all silent and looking around, too, and I think we were all partly mulling over that tiny, tiny possibility that our subway car might get blown up (or is it just me and my vivid catastrophe-centric imagination?) and partly thinking that this time last year we were all unsuspectingly having our last nice carefree fall evening.

Which, I might add, I am going to try my utmost to re-create with the help of a hot tub, cold Rolling Rocks, and friends. Orange alert, my ass.

2002-09-08T21:19:00.000-07:00

Wow, a whole week of no updates. My tiny readership may well dwindle to none. What can I say? I've been out soaking up the last drops of summer. On Sunday, put aside my compulsion to a) exercise, b) work or c) at least make some sort of overture toward cleaning the bathroom, and did absolutely nothing of any productivity whatsoever. Drank midday cocktails, and watched "Mad Max," which I was surprised to discover is not the same as "Road Warrior" - that, it turns out, is the sequel, and "Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome" is the third in the series, not the second. Who knew? At any rate, I'm not sure Mad Max is really worth the time. Too many shots of Mel as not-yet-mad Max with his adoring wife, before she gets run over by the motorcycle gang and things get more interesting. Also, tonight found myself wondering when English Muffins got smaller - or did I just get bigger? There was a time when one of them would constitute breakfast. Now, not so much. I really think they're making them smaller, though.

2002-09-01T11:21:00.000-07:00

Went dancing last night - showed up a little on the early side at midnight, but it got packed by one and we were all happily sandwiched in the midst of a crowd on the dance floor. Then, all of a sudden, a drag queen was up on stage introducing the evening's headliner, some live band dressed all in white with sunglasses and looking extremely bored, who proceeded to bring us all to a dead stop with their leaden attempt at Devo-emulation, accompanied by a small white guy who kept yelling such original things as "awwwww yeah" and "aaaight?". In ten minutes most of us were slinking away to drink beer and stand around annoyedly waiting for them to be done already. One of my friends noted, somewhat optimistically I thought, that "avant-garde culture is *supposed* to be alienating." Yeah, but isn't it also supposed to be artistic or original or something? We stayed, but the buzz kill lingered. When we finally left, we happened upon a large, brown silicone penis in the middle of the road. Which, in an incredibly immature gesture, we placed on someone's windshield.

2002-08-28T21:38:00.000-07:00

Borderline chilly wind blowing in my window this evening... fall cannot possibly be approaching. But if it is, it brings with it the demands of new fall clothes, a prospect that is even chillier. I need a mother-type (not my mother, who is so not typically motherly this way) to march in here, grab my hand and tell me we're going shopping for clothes and we're not coming home until I have a new pair of pants, new shoes, and a couple of pretty new dresses. And maybe a Trapper Keeper.

2002-08-26T13:17:00.000-07:00

For the second time in a row, I wore a strapless dress to a Jewish wedding. Obviously it didn't get drilled into my head the first time around that when you've got people grabbing your hands and then you're all running/dancing around the room in a line swinging your hands up and down wildly, you don't want to be wearing something that's tenuously attached to your upper body. Way too many close calls. On the bright side, there was a mashed potato bar.

2002-08-20T21:34:00.000-07:00

Here is the song I can't stop humming to myself.... unfortunately the lyrics don't lend themselves to bursting into song in the office....

2002-08-19T20:34:00.000-07:00

The woman with the breast pumps in the bathroom at work (see earlier entry) is getting to be a regular fixture in my life. Go into bathroom around 7 p.m., apply lipstick, make small talk with woman with suction cups on her breasts. Speaking of which- babies, I mean, not breasts, though I know I wasn't directly speaking of them- I was totally into watching all these babies, well, more like toddlers on the beach the other day. Especially this one with a turquoise diaper (do they make them in colors, now?) who kept screaming at the top of his/her lungs. Like really happily. It looked like fun.

2002-08-18T20:15:00.000-07:00

The beach today had nice-sized waves and sparse people (thanks, totally inaccurate weather forecasters!). Would have been perfect but for the herds of jellyfish floating around everywhere. Where did they all come from? Sure, they're not the sting-y kind. But still - having little balls of that squishy, snot-like substance bumping up against you in the water... it's enough to keep you on dry land. Well, almost enough, anyway. I perservered despite being totally grossed out by the jellyfish, but then got my foot sliced by who knows what down there on the ocean floor, and my friend got pinched by something, and then a helicopter flew by just low enough to make me think it was scouting for sharks.... the combination of all those sent us out for a couple of hours. In retrospect, though, I suppose it's a good sign that there are actually living organisms in the water. I just wish they weren't so creepy.

2002-08-15T21:03:00.000-07:00

Best use of inappropriate quotation marks: deli at 62nd St. with a big sign outside inviting you to come in and Create "A" Salad.

2002-08-14T21:45:00.000-07:00

Went to see "Hairspray," the John Waters movie turned Broadway musical, tonight and was seated next to some old guy with a younger girl who, at intermission, was warmly greeted by Jeffrey Lyons and then by some woman who excitedly asked for his autograph, and I was so curious, but somehow didn't think it would be appropriate to tap him on the shoulder and ask "so who ARE you, anyhow?" So I guess I'll never know. But the show was great. Especially Harvey Fierstein (who for a little while I confused with Harvey Weinstein, and thought, what a nice little side project for him) in the Divine role.

2002-08-12T20:57:00.000-07:00

So I walk into the bathroom at work this evening and seated on the couch in the entryway is a woman with her shirt pulled up and breast pumps on. Breast pumps! Like these suction cup things attached to them and tubes going into this machine and it's making this machine-y noise. And I know I'm supposed to be OK with this because, I don't know, sisterhood and all, but yuck! I scooted out of there as quickly as humanly possible. And I can't help thinking, you know what, honey? If you're spending so much time at work that you are attaching suction cups to your tits instead of your INFANT, maybe it's time to take some maternity leave!

2002-08-11T20:45:00.000-07:00

OK- I promise this is the last I will say about it- but I saw XXX this weekend and it did not disappoint. High point for me was the scene in which Vin is clad in only a lavish fur coat, long john bottoms and combat boots. You must admit, not a combo most men could pull off. But this is perhaps a greater example of the Diesel effect: the entire audience - and this is a Saturday night Times Square 10:00 show crowd - was oddly well-behaved. I mean watching them file in you would have thought you wouldn't be able to hear anything but a chorus of cell phones, beepers and unclever retorts to the characters onscreen, but the movie was so loud and everyone was so rooting for XXX that I got through it without one time wondering if I was going to have to throw my popcorn at someone (a response I have yet to actually use, but spend an inordinate amount of movie time fantasizing about). We all cheered at all the right places- like when Vin para-snowboarded down the mountain and started an avalanche with a bomb and stayed just enough ahead of it so that he could leap onto a radio tower and cling to it while the snow obliterated his enemies. Awesome. (Obviously, I need to go inundate myself with Wim Wenders films or something to get my head screwed on straight again....)

2002-08-10T05:37:00.000-07:00

It seems I'm not the only one with a crush on Vin...

2002-08-07T08:06:00.000-07:00

This morning the Jesus-esque guy who's always walking around the park (see earlier blog entry) smiled at me as I rode by on my bike. I swear he did. It was just a split second. But I feel like this is a big step forward for our relationship.

2002-08-05T19:58:00.000-07:00

I never really understood the whole Russell Crowe phenomenon, but I have to admit something: I'm just crazy about that Vin Diesel. What a man! That giant bald head... those tree-trunk arms... the miles of tattoos.... I just want him to pick me up under his arm and carry me around. Kind of like that scene in the locker room in Sixteen Candles. How did I miss The Fast and the Furious? And that terrible sci-fi movie, Pitch Black I think it was? Nobody has ever exuded more testosterone than Vin. He is all action, no talk - or, well, sort of inarticulate talk anyway. He is a superhero without the dorky spandex outfit. He's dreamy.

2002-08-04T21:39:00.000-07:00

Well I would just like to brattily say that as you are more likely than not reading this as you sit at your desk on Monday, I am frolicking in the waves on Long Island, as I have scored a three-day weekend... of course this three-day weekend means I have no health insurance, but who needs reliable medical care when you can have an uncrowded beach and a nice tan? Plus, what better place to come up with story ideas. Men in speedos: horrible trend, or enduring fashion faux pas? Fried dough stands: we sample ten of the best! Shark attack hysteria: so out it's in again!

2002-08-01T21:05:00.000-07:00

Two things:

Firstly, a great reason given by a friend who didn't want to go into a greenhouse (at what point were you planning on going into a greenhouse, you ask? I can't remember. But that's beside the point):
"It smells like bees fucking."

Secondly: this is how hot it was today, and how spacey I became upon leaving the office, like one of those times when you really should just call it a night and go straight home, but you don't:
Was supposed to meet a friend (not the anti-greenhouse friend) in Union Square, simple enough, get on the F and transfer to the N/R/Q and that's that. Only I got on the F and for some reason imagined myself to be in my previous job, five blocks south of where I work now, and hence got off the train at 42nd St. instead of 34th St. and wondered why there were no signs for the N and the R, only the 7, and where the hell does the 7 go? Then hopped the V train, a very peculiarly empty car with just one old weird bearded guy sitting in it, which when you got on you discovered was because there was no air conditioning. Got off the hell-car at 34th, waited for what seemed like an eternity in the fiery pit of the subway platform, got on the Q, and managed to blow right by the Union Square stop, only coming out of my stupor at Canal St., at which point I annoyedly got off, stomped up to the 6 uptown, waited on the fishy smelling Chinatown platform for what seemed like yet another eternity, and finally finally made it to meet my - incredibly- not pissed off friend. It was all capped off by the ride home, which featured a large black man rocking in his seat and telling us, "Conde Nast, 4 Times Square, racist drug dealer. I ain't never heard of a chocolate matzoh ball till I worked for Conde Nast, 4 Times Square" ad infinitum.

2002-07-30T20:28:00.000-07:00

So am I the only one who finds it really amusing that the director of "Y Tu Mama Tambien" has been chosen to direct the third installment of the Harry Potter movies? How great is that? From Chris "Mrs. Doubtfire" Columbus to explicit Mexican threeway artiste? Could anything be more brilliant? Can we look for Harry/Ron/Hermione action? Perhaps the older and wiser Professor McGonagall imparts more to the young scholars than just how to turn their schoolbooks into toads? I'm sorry, I mean, I know this could veer right off into slash (if you don't know what this is, so much the better) but come on, that's pretty damn funny.

2002-07-29T20:49:00.000-07:00

Winner, most inventive (and successful) pickup line in recent memory: "I'm obsessed with your teeth."

2002-07-27T10:36:00.000-07:00

OK, I'll admit it: I have become a little consumed with this electroclash stuff. Can't stop listening to all that robotic dance music. To the point where I felt a pang of withdrawal upon lending out the Fischerspooner CD. At the same time, not sure how I feel about the fan base... especially the girls, with their angular blue eye shadow, Flashdance shirts and ripped fishnets... it's like, get your own decade, please. Walked into the bathroom at a club last night to the following conversation between three of said girls:
"So they inject all this demerol, like, right into your uterus and you can't even feel it."
"Plus, you know, you've got like twenty eggs, right?"
"Yeah, I thought about doing that in college."
"It's SO easy."
"Like, that's just so 'Brave New World.'"

2002-07-24T20:38:00.000-07:00

Finding myself in the odd position of having lots of actual work to do. To the extent that I can no longer maintain the rigorous emailing and site-checking schedule that has occupied so much of my time for the past six months or so. Mediabistro? Salon? Romanesko? They've all become distant memories. Of course this is a fantastic development. And yet, the funny thing is I feel like I am dropping the ball... friends send me emails and there they lie, all day, unresponded to. Meanwhile I have a job where nobody uses email ever, and when you want to talk to someone you actually get up and go over to their desk. Almost every day at some point one corner of the office erupts into applause, and I have yet to figure out why. The whole transition into actual life from online life is unsettling. Like in The Matrix when Keanu woke up naked and bald and shriveled and gasping in that pod after the wires got pulled out of him. That's me. Shriveled and gasping.

2002-07-22T20:26:00.000-07:00

Nothing makes me feel quite so degenerate as when I'm on my way home with takeout and I stop in a convenience store and buy a single beer. I always feel like the cashier is judging me for buying just the one, as if I am going to hurry around the corner and swill it out of the paper bag, and that I might as well just buy a forty and have done with it.

2002-07-21T21:32:00.000-07:00

Crowning achievement of the day: at the beach, was dubbed "the girl Spicoli" by a fellow bodysurfer. Finally, to have my life goals so clearly stated...

2002-07-19T22:16:00.000-07:00

Hmm, that time I thought it would be a really swell idea to go out on the town with three gay boys, and that surely if I accompanied them to their disco inferno bar full of overly muscular yet effeminate martini-swillers, that they would equally enthusiastically accompany me to my basement full of mohawked, mulleted and - gasp!- straight boys dancing to weird retro tunes... yeah, that was pretty much totally wrong. If you think you're going to convince gay boys to go anywhere at midnight that isn't rife with the possibilities of casual sex with other men, you've got another think coming.

2002-07-19T06:43:00.000-07:00

Replacing that little soft spot I had for Buckcherry is this cute new band. I am prepared to be alone in my liking of this one, too....

2002-07-16T19:44:00.000-07:00

Went to the movies last night - a silent film, actually, Metropolis, which was quite good, and contained the seedlings for every movie cliche in the book (not to mention the character sketch for Christopher "one-point-twenty-one-jigowatts!" Lloyd in Back to the Future) but did tend to run on a bit.... at two hours, you really do start to miss the talking part. So anyway as I'm in my apartment getting ready to go, it's about ninety-five degrees and I'm trying to decide what to wear and what I end up wearing is this rather skimpy tank top with nothing under it because, hey, that's one of the advantages of being rather diminutively built in that area, and out I go and I swear to god, everyone I had any sort of interaction with looked at my chest instead of my face, and I felt a moment of true sympathy for the girls out there who get that sort of thing every day; for me, see, it's a novelty, and hence kind of enjoyably sleazy almost, but I think that if I was getting looks like that on a regular basis I would probably quickly become the kind of person who snaps, "my face is up here."

2002-07-12T07:58:00.000-07:00

I am off to a weekend in the Hamptons (or thereabouts) with a Hamptons-esque crowd... will I be able to behave myself and blend in? Have animated conversations about the social lives of socialites? I doubt it, but at least there will be sun and beach.

2002-07-08T08:27:00.000-07:00

So one of the big things in New York in the summer is that a bunch of places offer partner-dancing nights of all sorts, with free lessons and whatnot, and last night I went to a swing dancing affair on some pier in Tribeca. And here's the thing: I think I like my brand of pretend-swing dancing better. All that fancy footwork is just far too complicated and forces you to be looking at your feet and counting off and trying to figure out when is the rock-step and when is the shuffle-step and when is the kick-step. Whatever. Just swing me around a bunch of times. All those people who show up in their bobby socks and saddle shoes, and dance with these kind of maniacal, Annette Funicello beach party-esque grins on their faces, scare me a little, if you want to know the truth. I'll take the sweaty nightclub full of people who have no idea what a lindy hop is, thank you very much.

2002-07-05T21:38:00.000-07:00

Was quite surprised to find myself dancing, all alone, in my living room to this record. Just put it on and try not to.

2002-07-02T23:17:00.000-07:00

I have nothing to say that could possibly be as interesting as this article, written by one of my favorite people.

2002-07-01T10:28:00.000-07:00

It's a slippery slope, going out there multiple times... my latest midwest visit has cultivated a fervent interest in cowboy boots and old farming equipment signs. Also, I'd like to recount an actual joke told by a great-uncle: Why have farmers stopped putting round bales of hay out in the fields? Because they want the cows to get a square meal.

Obviously, my days as anything remotely approaching hip are nearly over.... well, it's been a good run.

Also: while standing at the ticket counter at the Kansas City airport, spotted a boy in line ahead of me sporting a near-mullet cut streaked with blonde, Salvation Army-esque T-shirt, and Vans. Soon realized there were three more just like him up ahead- with lots of equipment! And a couple of fat guys with bad shorts! Yes, it was a band. Some band. It's nice to find that some things don't change: in this case, my interest being sparked by any boy with a guitar case and a tour itinerary. I was good, though, and read my book quietly while only ogling them out of the corner of my eye. Then they got off in Milwaukee, never to be seen again.

2002-06-27T07:39:00.000-07:00

I'm off to the land of legal fireworks, grazing camels, and creationism. Yes- Kansas, once again. Look for new posts next Monday.

2002-06-26T23:23:00.000-07:00

If you happen to be naked and making a tuna sandwich, here's a tip: open the pull-top can while holding it at arm's length from yourself, otherwise when the tin top comes free it will most likely splatter you with little bits of fish and fish juice. This is hardly noticeable when you're wearing a shirt. Okay, maybe the solution is just try to be clothed when undertaking this procedure.

2002-06-26T12:10:00.000-07:00

I have been chastised for my lack of recent postings.... and have no excuses, at the moment, other than that I am so hot in my mostly-non-air-conditioned apartment that I think all creativity is being leeched out of my brain and turned into sweat. I also am mostly inclined to write about a rather too personal situation that is foremost in my head at the moment. But as I have adopted a policy of abstaining from such indulgences, I will simply offer this: my general reaction to not getting what I want bears a striking similarity to this Roald Dahl character. Hence, ensuing crankiness.

2002-06-20T08:01:00.000-07:00

Maybe it's because I hear them early in the morning, before my humor-discernment abilities have woken up. Maybe it's because the Howard Stern show is such a nice mindless contrast to my heavy diet of NPR's Morning Edition. But I really think these "Real American Heroes" Budweiser commercials are kind of hilarious.

2002-06-18T22:21:00.000-07:00

For me, nothing brings back that nostalgic childhood feeling like obsessing over nuclear war. I remember, vividly, lying awake in my bed as a kid, freaking out whenever a plane flew overhead because I was convinced that was the missile that was going to kill us all. (Of course having been told, in detail, what the layout of a nuclear bomb's destruction would be like, at age ten, I was maybe a little more neurotic about it than most.) Then I grew up, realized that missiles don't sound like airplanes, and eventually mellowed out, knowing I would never have to live in a time like that again. Then today I found myself in Times Square, theorizing that it was actually the safest place to be in the event of a bomb, because it would undoubtedly be Ground Zero and thus a more immediate death by vaporization. The Addams Family child in me is resurfacing. Good god. Well, at least I know I'm not the only one....

2002-06-18T11:32:00.000-07:00

Here's what I hate: when a friendship goes unexpectedly tepid. You know when this happens because you suddenly find yourselves very hard-pressed to schedule a time and a place to actually be in the same room together. Of course, the rampant scheduling is in itself something of a New York phenomenon: nowhere else, I think, is quite so reliant on consulting the datebook for making decisions or plans of any kind, including Down Time. But it is somewhat sad when you both know that the friendship has migrated from A-list to B-list, and yet are still pretending otherwise; it is not something you can come out and announce, you simply have to let it siphon itself off slowly. Soon, you realize, it has been months since you were able to find a free night in common, and at that point you can both breathe a sigh of relief and move on-- keeping the other person on your email list, of course, in case of large events and fundraising.

2002-06-13T12:56:00.000-07:00

In the interest of all those who might be planning air travel in the near future, I have a couple of suggestions: bring a picture ID, and leave your self-defense weapons at home. On my latest trip (see earlier entry) I found myself with no official identification whatsoever, which led to the frantic overnighting of my birth certificate and social security card (does anyone actually carry those around?) by my dad, and the assembly of an an envelope full of supplementary material to prove that I exist, like tax returns and utility bills and whatnot. Still, in spite of my best efforts, the airplane people stamped a big S on my ticket-- for Suspicious? Search? Sinister?-- which led to multiple pattings-down at security checkpoints and the complete unpacking of our carefully packed suitcases. One of which contained my little container of pepper spray, which my sister had hastily advised me to take out of my shoulder bag and stow in my suitcase. So the security guy took our bags, and my sister, and went off to the Suspicious Passenger room I guess, and apparently came across my pepper spray, which is disguised as a pen, and upon uncapping it remarked merrily, "Oh, perfume!" At which point she figured he would spray it on himself, or her, or even in the air, and chaos would ensue, and we would both be immediately arrested. But, perhaps more disturbingly, he simply put it back in the bag and told her we were free to go. Although I am glad to have come out of the whole experience without it involving incarceration, it is a little unsettling that a paid professional bag-searching guy would assume that a container that looked like a pen but was actually a spraying device would be perfume. As Jackie-O pointed out, who needs to disguise perfume?

2002-06-12T13:38:00.000-07:00

My internet connection is so excrutiatingly slow, and I am so impatient... lately I have taken to moving my mouse a lot around the screen as a page is downloading, as if to remind the computer that I am still right here, waiting, instead of having wandered off to do something else (which might be the productive thing to do). It seems to work in that sort of fake psychological way that it appears to help rack up more points, in pinball, when the ball is up at the top stuck in those bumpers, and you hit the flippers a lot while it's bouncing around. I know there's no connection, but it always seems to help keep it up there longer.

2002-06-10T21:40:00.000-07:00

Things I like about small-town Kansas (or, you know you're not in New York anymore when):
-The cashier asks you if you'd like a "sack" with that
-Every salad bar prominently features jello with fruit cocktail in it
-A movie ticket costs five bucks
-A hotel room costs thirty bucks
-It really, really doesn't matter Who You Know
-The only thing lighting up the horizon at night is the grain elevator
-There is no such thing as gridlock, and
-You see equal numbers of cows and cars as you drive on the highway
-McDonald's draws a crowd for breakfast on Sunday
-Tornados, tornados, tornados
and the number one reason I like Kansas especially now:
-Probably nobody would try to blow it up

2002-06-10T15:18:00.000-07:00

Sorry for the lapse- was called away to the midwest on account of, well, death. Descriptions of Kansas forthcoming. Descriptions of death, maybe not so much.

2002-06-04T21:25:00.000-07:00

And now, a rare moment of literary indulgence: recently I came across this quote from this French social theorist and anarchist named Proudhon. I thought about trying to pass myself off as having been reading French social theory, but I actually have to admit that it was cited in a book by E.B. White, who seems like one of the most charming writers who ever lived, and is, in my opinion, a sound judge of worthwhile quotes. Anyway, I thought this seemed like a good philosphy to pursue, if you were going to pursue one:

"Humor- true liberty!- it is you who deliver me from ambition for power, from servitude to party, from respect for routine, from the pedantry of science, from admiration for celebrities, from the mystifications of politics, from the fanaticism of the reformers, from fear of this great universe, and from self-admiration."

2002-06-03T19:40:00.000-07:00

Triumph! The Ikea table is assembled, at least in part, after an hour spent pounding, cursing, and throwing things across the living room; OK, so the shelves that go underneath are not attached to the legs, and I tightened the bolts by hand instead of with a wrench (in my life I have managed to amass six identical little screwdrivers, two hammers, a giant tape measure, and a million nails, screws, brads, bolts and picture-hangers, but no goddamn wrench), and the whole thing looks as if it might fall apart the first time I attempt to cut a vegetable on its surface, but the important thing is it LOOKS like a whole, presentable cutting board-table thing, and I did it myself (no thanks to the male population of New York, largely composed of nancy boys who pale at the words "some assembly required" and own no respectable power tools whatsoever).

2002-06-02T18:15:00.000-07:00

Winner, most unexpected readership of this weblog: I am in the top ten search results- out of 12,000!- for the query "a fourteen year old boy f'ing a girl." (no, in case you're wondering, I did not actually ever string together all of those words in one sentence.)

2002-06-02T18:08:00.000-07:00

Musing on an especially eclectic weekend, in which I, among other things:

Consumed a bizarre Japanese eggplant dish involving a topping of fish flakes that writhed and twisted around as if they were alive but were, the waiter assured us, actually quite dead and just moving because they were "thin"

Ran around Central Park dressed as a prepubescent soccer player for a photo shoot, part of which involved posing with a crazy probably homeless man who insisted that he was really a "theater guy" and, separately, some guy in a giant rabbit costume (the best part, though, was that I found myself standing around on the periphery of the action shots, which more than anything else harkened back to my actual childhood on a soccer team, in which I tried to do as little as possible so as to practice gymnastics on the sidelines)

Had a distressingly realistic dream that I had been shot in the gut by someone quite close to me, and was for some reason attempting to keep this information to myself, right up until the time I started bleeding all over the place and had to go to the hospital, at which point I thankfully woke up

Made a new friend in an older British gentleman, who likes my "impish face" and assures me that by the time I'm forty, it will be OK that I can never decide what I'm going to do when I grow up

Spent several sweaty hours dancing, until way past even my usual insomniac bedtime, in a club that looked as though the main ingredient of its decor was tinfoil and was overflowing with people who quite seriously sported mullets, mohawks, drag, and, in one case, a stunningly accurate David Bowie getup

Wandered all over Spanish Harlem, including this strange, elaborately manicured garden, and attempted to eat a Firecracker popsicle, which promptly melted all over my hand and left blue raspberry stains on my shirt and reminded me of swimming at White's Pond when I was little, where the arrival of the ice cream man was the only thing that could entice us out of the suspiciously warm water in the shallow part

.....Now I am home to disarray and editing homework and the as-yet unassembled Ikea butcher block table, which just sits there in its box mocking me for not being able to insert screw A into hole B. No, seriously.

2002-05-30T07:56:00.000-07:00

A moment of silence, please, for the death of Mildred Benson, a.k.a. Carolyn Keene, creator of the Nancy Drew series, without which we might never have been introduced to the terms "titian-haired," "blue roadster," and "girl sleuth."

2002-05-28T21:10:00.000-07:00

So I have to admit that I am of two minds about this whole Bernie Mac phenomenon. I mean, on the one hand his show is actually pretty funny, for a sitcom- he does this very caricatured, fake-mad, scary-eyed thing when the kids piss him off, and his armchair comedy routines seem sort of irreverent and innocuous at the same time. On the other hand, there's this article about him in the New York Times magazine, about how GROUNDBREAKING this show is, and how beloved Bernie Mac is in the tough streets of Chicago where he spent a scrappy childhood, and how when some woman comes up to him to ask him for advice about her wayward teenage son, he takes her aside and tells her to punch him under his right eye and he'll never misbehave again, and filtered through the New York Times reporter- and, from what I can gather, most other media outlets as well- this is supposed to be just all Part of the Act. But really, I can't help thinking if some guy came out with a sitcom, in this day and age, where he joked around a lot about, say, wife-beating, everyone wouldn't be quite so amused about it. And at the same time, the fact that I get so uptight about this makes me feel super-white, and that maybe I just don't understand cultural differences and whatnot. So there you have it. I'll laugh, but it makes me squirm a little bit all the same. That said, I have watched the show in question maybe three times.

2002-05-24T10:23:00.000-07:00

What am I doing for Memorial Day, you ask? Let me share some of the ingredients with you: road trip; midwest; strapless lavender dress; uncomfortable heels; someone breaking a glass under a cloth; too much champagne. Yes! It's another wedding, this time a Jewish one, in the great state of Ohio, which I don't think I have ever actually stopped in despite having driven through it more times than I can count. I am of course in something of a panic at this point, having not decided what to wear to the rehearsal dinner, and knowing that my calculation of the level of formality will, no matter what, be way off, so I might as well just wear ripped jeans and have done with it, and I have not bought a wedding present yet, which doesn't really matter because of that one-year rule, but in reality I sort of know that if I don't do it now I may forget about it entirely. I also may well be expected to give a toast of some sort, being in the wedding party and all, which I look at with a significant amount of dread. Perhaps I can resort to my tried and true format of haiku, and write something amusing which will be all of three lines long. And of course there is the issue of the 8 hour drive out, which I am taking with some boy I have never met before, and who I am desperately hoping has decent taste in music. Please, anything, as long as it is not a) experimental jazz, b) wall-of-sound indie rock, or c) Steely Dan.

2002-05-22T07:45:00.000-07:00

Went to a screening of Insomnia last night, in which Robin Williams plays a character that seems to be what Robin Willams would be like if he went around the bend just a little bit more, and Al Pacino doesn't sleep for six days (hence the title! subtle, eh?) and spouts a lot of cop cliches while floundering about in a plot that makes no sense in the midst of the beautiful Alaskan wilderness. The man sitting in front of me made two calls on his cell phone during the course of the movie, which I had heard people do but had never actually seen it myself, and he was one of those guys who you know is just WAITING for you to tell him to shut up so he can start a fight with you, so I didn't, and it would have been unforgiveable except for the fact that the movie was so bad it was kind of a nice diversion.

2002-05-21T08:07:00.000-07:00

So I'm sitting at a bar in a kind of remote area of Williamsburg, a great bar with a refreshing lack of 22-year-old trust fund punks with perfect hair and no jobs, not to mention great DJ'd music (I was trying to remember the words to a song by The Flying Burrito Brothers and then they were all of a sudden playing it) and a live band that included a fiddle, several shirts with embroidery on the shoulders and one fantastic mustache. So I'm sitting at the bar with this guy (not the owner of the mustache) and I notice that it kind of smells like vomit, and I'm thinking it could not possibly be the case that this is how this guy smells, and I'm really hoping that he doesn't think that it's ME, for god's sake, and I'm just wondering if someone threw up, like, right under where we're sitting and it didn't get quite cleaned up enough, but I don't say anything, because there really isn't anywhere else to sit and you don't want to be all choosy about where you sit in a place like this anyway, like it would be weird to get up and move after you'd established yourself at the bar and the cute bartender was giving you free Stellas, so I just pretended not to notice it and eventually it kind of blended in. Funny how that will happen after the third beer.

2002-05-20T07:19:00.000-07:00

Side effect of working from home: I am developing my parents' radio habits. I listen to NPR morning and evening, day in and day out. I have even developed a tolerance, if not a liking, for Brian Lehrer's 10 a.m. call-in show, in which government officials and Brooklyn hausfraus call in to drone on and on about otherwise actually interesting topics, like the diminished municipal water supply, or Mayor Bloomberg's position on whether the city should be reading a book together (he thinks we should, but it should be his autobiography).Usually I can take about twenty minutes of that before I reach my droning limit and go sprinting across the room to turn it off. Then I put on something loud and raucous for a while and try to get some work done. At 4:30, more and more I tend to remember that it is time for All Things Considered, the news show with the brassy theme song that irritates my sister to no end. (An interesting Pavlovian phenomenon, that.)

2002-05-17T23:04:00.000-07:00

Went with much trepidation to Attack of the Clones... and was not disappointed, thanks to my low expectations... quite a scene outside of the actual film, though. A line wrapped around the entire Ziegfeld block, with more people wielding umbrellas than lightsabers, thanks to the shitty weather. I sat in a weirdly empty midtown diner before meeting my friends, and ate a waffle for dinner while the waitress leaned against a booth and stared at me... (and you, you know who you are, really should have been there with me, eating mediocre diner cheesecake and then waiting on line with me with the rest of the reluctant Star Wars freaks).... it was certainly essential to see it in the midst of a humongous crowd of people who cheered at the slightest provocation (including, inexplicably, the Technicolor logo) and who you could tell desperately wanted to be convinced that it was actually a good movie... and hey, what's not to love about Jedi warfare? Favorite worst Hayden Christensen line- and there were loads of them- "I hate sand." All in all, a Friday night well spent.

2002-05-16T12:37:00.000-07:00

As I am now on the home-work schedule, I am finding myself increasingly familiar with the other Brooklynites who run in my circles... particularly in the exercise realm. At the gym every day around noon, there is Older Guy Who Stands on His Head; Meathead Guy Who Grunts Overly Dramatically While Lifting; Personal Trainer with German Accent and Wacky Sense of Humor.... meanwhile, in Prospect Park, the crowd leans heavily toward mothers with strollers, bikers in really ugly spandex, and the inevitable Overweight Guy on Rollerblades Struggling Up the Hill. But the real enigma is the Guy Who Kind of Looks Like Jesus- I may even have mentioned him here before, I'm sort of obsessed with him. He's bearded, really skinny, wears a T-shirt with the sleeves cut out, seems very likely that he would not smell that great... and he is ALWAYS out there. Today, on my third pass around the bike trail, I ventured a smile at him. Does he recognize me? What does he do with his life besides circle the park? (Come to think of it, he may be thinking the same thing about me, at this point....)

2002-05-15T08:48:00.000-07:00

Last night, at a screening of About a Boy, I was in the bathroom and the woman next to me sneezed, like, really emphatically and loudly, so I said Bless you, because it seemed to be the sort of sneeze that needed affirmation. But she didn't say thank you, and I was briefly offended. Perhaps, however, she was simply surprised that a stranger said bless you at all. Is that weird? I mean, it's not like it actually has any religious overtones or anything. In any case, I maintain that it's good form to thank people who say bless you. Now if they say GOD bless you, that's another matter....

In case you were wondering, the movie was pretty okay. Not earth-shatteringly brilliant or anything. But Hugh Grant does a good job of reigning in his stutter, and there is a heartbreaking middle-school recital rendition of "Killing Me Softly"' that is worth the price of admission.

2002-05-14T12:30:00.000-07:00

See, this is what happens when you go into used record stores and start randomly buying anything that costs ten bucks... I've been listening to The Who's Tommy for the past three days and now I've got this song firmly stuck in my head. I'm still sort of piecing the whole plot together, though, having never actually seen the thing, not even the cheesy movie version... apparently somewhere along the way he starts seeing and hearing again. That seems sort of unlikely, doesn't it?

2002-05-11T21:37:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Anne, I got a little culture in my life Friday night at the Film Forum, where we joined a truly eclectic crowd for a showing of Lagaan, a fabulous four-hour Bollywood epic involving oppressed peasants, cricket and a whole lot of singing and dancing. Oh, and a strapping romantic lead by the name of Aamir Khan, who, as it turned out, was keeping a low profile in the back row of the theater, much to the girlish giggles of all the women who realized it. The elderly couple sitting next to Anne were adorable right up until they lost their will to sit quietly, somewhere during the third hour: he began loudly narrating the plays of the cricket game, as if they were actually at a match and not in a small, chilly arthouse theater. Nevertheless, a great film, not least for its mockery of super-bland, ultra-stuffy English culture- and, by association, our own. The more foreign films I see, the more I'm convinced we really don't know how to have a good time.

The weekend was rounded out perfectly by two things: First, my discovery of the holy grail of summer footwear, the elusive Converse one-star slip-on, which seems to have been abandoned by most stores in favor of the vastly inferior Chuck Taylor mule (just picture that- in what way is it a good idea?) but was kept in stock, in a shoebox that was really showing its age, in a small sneaker store in the west village. And second, dinner at an old-school Italian restaurant in Coney Island, where we sat in a brightly-lit ballroom full of Mylar balloons celebrating various occasions, waiters a good thirty years older than any you'd find in Manhattan, and a clientele that could easily have done double duty as extras on The Sopranos. Everything on the menu involved breading, even the artichoke. Divine.

2002-05-10T09:33:00.000-07:00

New York is the best place on earth to live, no doubt, but it's sorely lacking in one crucial area. I was jonesing for old country music last night, as I find myself doing so often lately (a lingering reminder of my departure from the heartland?) and couldn't find one damn place to go... every bar here that's associated with the word "country" is either filled with cheeseballs (see Rodeo Bar) or Coyote Ugly-style waitresses dancing on the bar (see Red Rock West), neither of which really fits the bill. Can it really be true that there are no good country dives in this whole city?? Maybe there's hope: I found one tiny bar last night that might have to become a regular spot- it has a jukebox that juxtaposes George Jones and Metallica, not to mention cheap beer and decent pinball- but it was still full of people who looked like they'd rather be at a White Stripes show. I want to find that elusive, perfect bar that escapes the categories of tourist, hipster and frat boy... am I just deluding myself?

2002-05-09T08:25:00.000-07:00

Extreme gross-out item of the day: NPR's Morning Edition has a new sponsor, and it is a food product called, get this, "Smart Beat Fat-Free Cheddar Flavor Slices." I mean, good god. Even I, a self-respecting vegetarian-who-hypocritically-eats-fish, cannot fathom being desperate enough to consume something called a cheddar flavor slice. Slice of what, exactly? In any case, it's certainly not something I want to be thinking about at eight o'clock in the morning. Why can't Krispy Kreme sponsor my morning news?

2002-05-07T12:24:00.000-07:00

I am sitting in the window seat of a bar on 8th Street in the east village last night when all of a sudden a fire truck comes screaming down the street; my date is grumbling about how the damn firemen think they can just do whatever they like after 9/11... and then another comes, and another, and another, and they all stop right outside the bar we're sitting in, and an old fireman with a striking resemblance to Lou Reed jumps out of the truck, smoking a cigarette, and kicks some garbage bags away from the fire hydrant and turns it on with a giant wrench. Water floods the street, not quenching any identifiable blazes. Small crowds of people have gathered now and we are all asking each other where the fire is. Nothing seems to be amiss, and there's no smoke... Lou Reed fireman begins yelling at our waitress, "Is this your garbage? This your garbage?" She assures him it is not. He asks a manager at the restaurant on the other side of us. Nope. He rings the doorbell of the apartment nearby and asks the super, a half-asleep elderly woman, who says no too. Lou Reed fireman now grabs a couple of the many bags of garbage, swings them into a separate pile, and says, "OK, two for you, and two for you, and two for you," dividing them into three piles, then yells at all of the assembled potential garbage-offenders NOT TO STACK THEIR GARBAGE ON THE FUCKING HYDRANT. A handful of other firemen, in full uniform, stand around watching the show. Then they all get back into their trucks and drive away.

2002-05-06T09:02:00.000-07:00

Not only does the new Spiderman movie live up to the hype, it goes above and beyond: the best part, in my opinion, is the fact that J. Jonah Jameson's hair looks exactly, but exactly, like it did in the comic strip. This may be yet another indication that I am really a geeky fourteen year old boy at heart....

2002-05-01T15:20:00.000-07:00

A huge, huge shout out to Mark for telling me about the dancing banana, which has been entertaining me for a good day and a half now and enabling me to keep my sanity whilst working from home writing a brochure about a hack business school. Best quote from him on the subject: "The banana is the most athletic of all the fruits."

2002-04-30T07:30:00.000-07:00

It's so good to be back... went to Botanica last night, sat down on a saggy old couch while my friend was getting drinks, and heard someone talking to my right; it was a sort of old guy sitting in an armchair, alone, and I gave him a quizzical look as if to say, are you talking to me? He just smiled back and I turned around again. He kept talking, though, and I turned around and looked again and he said, very politely and with a bit of Southern twang, "I'm just talkin' to myself over here... hope I'm not bothering you...." I assured him he was not. Then 2 Live Crew came on and you couldn't really hear anything.

2002-04-26T11:31:00.000-07:00

What could possibly be the explanation for the baggers who put all the heavy stuff in one plastic bag at the grocery store? There must be one. They all do it. Do most people carry all of their grocery bags in one hand? Even then, it wouldn't really make sense. But there MUST be a reason. Other than they're just doing it to fuck with you. Perhaps that should be my next career investigation: bag girl at supermarket. At least it would get me out of the house once in a while.

2002-04-22T17:02:00.000-07:00

Greetings from Seattle.... unlike my more responsible blog friends, I have not asked anyone to write anything here in my absence. But in case you were wondering, I'm having a lovely time out here in the cold and damp... although it, as most places, convinces me that there's no place else for me but New York. There is, stereotypically, a Starbucks on every corner and lots of polarfleece (including on me- I resisted putting it on until today, but finally gave in after four days of shivering in my scant H&M overcoat) and people are nice, but in a way that almost immediately bores me. Kind of longing for the crazy Cobble Hill coffeeshop, the "excuse me, excuse me" homeless lady on the downtown F train, even that terrible smell that wafts from the carts on the street corners when a peanut falls into the roaster....

2002-04-16T07:47:00.000-07:00

Things I learned at the graduation/reading for my writing class last night: other people hate those giant, obnoxious golf umbrellas with as much passion as I do; if you go to the doctor in Belgium they just make you get naked and sit around without even one of those paper gowns, which is initially awkward but eventually liberating; not to be late when it says 7:00 because there's a chance your poem could be first, and even though you're not reading it yourself you kind of want to be there to hear it. Oh well- I heard from someone that people laughed, which is good.

2002-04-13T15:09:00.000-07:00

Wow, you never know what to expect around here.... I got a new freelance gig that will actually help me not be poor, and an amazing tax refund and a byline in a New York magazine I've been gunning to write for since I moved here AND THEN I got a call yesterday telling me I was being laid off from my initial, main job, and found myself desperately contemplating a move to the middle of nowhere to cover the "cops and courts" beat for a tiny, no doubt David Lynchian town BUT THEN I got a stunning flood of sympathy and job leads from my fantastic friends and wondered how I could ever have thought of leaving this city AND THEN my invitation to a certain person to attend a spring wedding with me was summarily rejected BUT THEN said person made me feel so good in the after-rejection conversation that I managed to come away from it without feeling completely hopeless and, actually, in quite a better mood than I had been for the rest of the godawful laid-off day and maybe in quite some time AND THEN I went to a party in which I had another interesting conversation with a long lost friend who claims to have deleted the link to this blog as she now wants to receive only firsthand, horse's-mouth updates about my life, which is a nice turn of events AND THEN today when my sister and I were taking the subway into the city the R train stopped very suddenly after trying to leave the station and the EMS people and the police were being called and it really seemed like someone had been hit by the train BUT THEN in spite of that horrible probably-accident I went shallowly on to buy myself a nice new lipstick. So- what now. Maybe I'll pull through after all. Or maybe when I walk out my front door next, somebody will be trying to move a piano into an apartment via rope and pulley and all of a sudden the last remaining supporting strand will break and the piano will come plummeting down as I stand, Wile E. Coyote style, underneath it in disbelief as the piano shadow grows bigger and bigger around me and then... yeah. You never know.

2002-04-04T06:58:00.000-08:00

Last night as I'm watching TV (the disappointing Greg the Bunny) there's an ad that consists of this montage of all these ordinary people doing ordinary people things, and the narrator is asking something like, Do you really need to be famous to make a difference in life? Do you really need to win awards to know you're important to other people? And I'm thinking, how great is that... and my heart is completely warmed.... until, at the end, it turns out to be an ad for Verizon. Which just makes me feel manipulated. Someone, please, buy me a TiVo so I don't have to watch commercials ever again.

2002-04-02T09:03:00.000-08:00

I'm on obituary-writing duty at work today, and in the process of going through the strangely large number of celebrity deaths in the past week, I was reminded of the very odd fact that one of my first really racy teenage dreams involved Dudley Moore. Yes, Dudley Moore. Poor guy. Sad life. But man, was he memorable in that dream.

2002-03-31T16:27:00.000-08:00

Spent a few days in the countryside (always a good way to make one appreciate returning to the city), the highlight of which has to have been a visit to a llama farm. Have you ever seen a llama? They are big and furry and their eyes are sort of strangely on the sides of their heads and they have really cartoonishly long eyelashes, and they generally resemble some sort of lesser-known muppet species. Apparently they make very good pets, though I'm thinking I would have a hard time selling that idea to my landlady.

2002-03-28T15:19:00.000-08:00

I realize I've been dreadful about posting lately... please bear with me, all you (handful of) people who read this... I will be back and prolific next week, after a visit to the wilds of western Massachusetts to clear my head. Happy whatever holiday you celebrate, even if only in sort of kitschy spirit... I myself will be dyeing Easter eggs, and last night participated in a seder in which we had a short play about the exodus of the Jews. I played Moses. And if you think Charlton Heston was good...

2002-03-26T15:03:00.000-08:00

I have nothing to say, so I'm just going to direct your attention to this, which never fails to entertain me...

2002-03-22T12:10:00.000-08:00

I wandered into a very surreal temp assignment yesterday- it was for a "three hour focus group," said the perky blonde thing who sets me up with all of my gigs, and I was glad, because it meant I had the rest of the afternoon to myself. Showed up at the offices of the publisher of Ladies Home Journal, among other bland American mags, along with another temp, an affable young guy on about his third assigment, like me, and was told that the project at hand was an interviewing workshop, and that we were to be the guinea pigs. For the next two hours, we traded off pretending that we were interviewing for editorial jobs at magazines, being grilled about our backgrounds by the managing editors of various publications while other editors looked on, all to practice a new style of interviewing (a rather grating one, I will say, which involves barking out questions that force you to recount specific situations in great detail, apparently so they can spot "star" editors, which I guess means being able to come up with really detailed bullshit on the spot as opposed to the usual vague cheerfulness that is most interviews I've ever been a part of), the joke being that of course both of us really would very much like to have actual jobs, and thus this being compelled to go through the paces of interviewing while not actually being offered a job was kind of grim. I suppose one might, if more optimistic than I, look at it as "practice." But then I've always been a glass-half-empty kind of girl.

2002-03-20T10:55:00.000-08:00

Hey... new look for the blog! This one just seemed like a natural. Bear with me while I figure out how to adjust templatey stuff.

2002-03-20T10:51:00.000-08:00

Right after Sept. 11, I signed up to be on the mailing list of this organization called Revolutionary Women of Afghanistan, these amazingly brave women who filmed all sorts of horrible behavior from behind their veils and put it all on the internet.... now that they've become (somewhat) liberated and much more well-funded, I find that they are sending me approximately three emails a day. Every time their name gets mentioned in the press, I hear about it. And I don't mean to sound disparaging of their very admirable mission to get the word out about what great things they're doing... but it's funny, now that they're becoming more visible and more... westernized, I guess, they've also become just another annoying email presence. That's democracy, I guess.

2002-03-19T14:14:00.000-08:00

I got nothing again today. Nothing. My social security number is being pirated as we speak, and I'm all sad about a boy. How do I like them apples, you ask? Not all that well, really. I would prefer other apples.

2002-03-18T13:50:00.000-08:00

I have nothing good to say: it's raining and I'm sniffly. But rather than bore you with that sort of thing, I'm going to pass the buck and just direct you to the one thing that's made me laugh today. Fair enough?

2002-03-15T07:13:00.000-08:00

So I have been taking a writing class over the past month... an exercise in weekly freelance article crafting... it's been sort of grueling but I'm learning to love it, and here's why: because it is maybe the only time since I came to New York that I've gotten to sit around with people and discuss article ideas and read my stuff out loud and have it be actually FUN... people here actually get excited about their ideas (and, better yet, they get excited about mine). Sure, the constructive criticism can be a bit thin at times- this is a group more inclined to write "great!" in the margins than, say, "this is a really boring sentence; take out the joke about Bush, it totally doesn't work"- but there is something so heartening, so refreshing, about being around people who aren't so jaded by the whole freelance thing that all they can come up with is, "Did you see that thing by Christopher Hitchens in the Atlantic Monthly? Yeah, it was OK... I mean, whatever, that magazine kind of sucks now..." I don't think I have ever heard any of my friends who actually do publish things in magazines on a regular basis say anything to the effect of being excited about their work or anyone else's. More often than not it seems like a competition over who can be the least impressed. Does this mean I should aspire to have enough bylines that I, too, am incapable of feeling a thrill when I see my name in print or when I make someone laugh out loud while reading my stuff? Does it mean that freelancing will suck all of the joy out of being a writer eventually? I'm kind of hoping not.

2002-03-13T11:12:00.000-08:00

Here's what not to do on a gray, rainy day: wear a wool sweater over a tank top. The resultant hotness and itchiness under your overcoat as you slog your way to work will inevitably set your day on a downward trajectory. Of course, it does give you an excuse to tear off said sweater as soon as you get to work, and parade around in a tank top all day, pretending that it is summer instead of f'ing-with-your-mind, cold-one-day-warm-the-next borderline spring.

2002-03-11T19:30:00.000-08:00

Today was a real day of extremes: unexpectedly got a poem published in the Times. Later, found myself rummaging through all my bags and coats, picking out random lint-covered quarters so that I might have enough money to buy food until Friday.

Unrelated: spent some of my nonexistent money on a container of Whopper brand malted milk ball mini Easter eggs, which come in a little container with a happy looking Easter bunny on it. The mini eggs, unfortunately, look exactly like rabbit shit. They didn't even bother to make them fun pastel colors. They're brown. Is there any way that didn't occur to the Whopper people before they shipped these out? Or do they just get bored sometimes?

2002-03-11T10:26:00.000-08:00

I spend my whole day looking up random stories in newspapers and magazines. Once in a while you run across something you would never have thought anyone would write an article about. Like this story about a shrink in Afghanistan.

2002-03-08T12:09:00.000-08:00

Went to the doctor a couple of days ago; the questions she asked made me feel like my life is really together. “Are you under any threat of domestic violence in your life?” Well, no. “Do you smoke cigarettes?” Nope. “Wear your seatbelt when you’re in a car?” Am rarely in a car- I guess when I take cabs I make a reasonable effort to wear my seatbelt. I’m ahead of the game! Good thing she didn’t ask things like, Do you end up staying out late at bars too many nights a week? Do you tend to date boys who are completely inappropriate? Are you under any threat of your career totally imploding?

2002-03-08T08:08:00.000-08:00

So today I am temping again, this time at a drug company that makes all sorts of neat little "life-enhancing" substances like antidepressants, and as much as I would like to be all disgruntled and critical, I would have to say that the people here are just so gosh-darned nice that I really can't complain. It does, however, make me wonder if they are actually pumping some of the goodies straight into the water supply, because the ambiance here is just the same as at any other big corporation (gray cubicle walls, fluorescent badness, pale thin men in button-down shirts who look like they haven't seen the sun in years). What they do have to offer is food. God, the food is everywhere: bagels in the kitchen, crumb cake on the file cabinet in the hallway, giant places of spicy pasta in the cafeteria... it reminds me of a saying my darling transvestite cult leader roommate used to descibe this sort of environment: We Are the Veal. I can kinda see it, from this vantage point...

2002-03-06T11:51:00.000-08:00

Here is a certain type of person who will never be a close friend of mine: the co-worker who is forever sending out invitations for people to get together and play Paintball. The more you read on these invites, the worse they sound. What is fun about waking up early, going to some remote location in New Jersey, and having to run around ducking for cover while other people shoot paint cartridges at you that are apparently big and painful enough to leave lacrosse-ball sized bruises on your skin?

2002-03-05T12:06:00.000-08:00

Was reading Sarah's blog entry from Sunday, and I found much to commiserate with. I, too, am scared to call my landlady, because not too long ago I told her it was maybe not a good idea to leave the mail on the burning hot radiator instead of, say, the not-hot-ever radiator RIGHT NEXT TO IT, and ever since then she has hated me, going so far as to avert her eyes when we pass in the hallway so as not to look at me, as if I am dead to her. I am trying to devise a plan to win back her love, or at least her disinclination to raise my rent, and the plan right now revolves around cookies. Maybe St. Patrick's day cookies. I will bake some homemade cookies and decorate them with green sprinkles, and gaily bring them by her apartment (which she never, ever leaves, and sits around all day with her sweet but depressing old mother, and the whole place just reeks of fat lady and hopelessness) as if I am constantly baking cookies, and just happened to be dropping some by, and she will have to be completely charmed and forget all about her little radiator vendetta. In the meantime, since I am afraid of incurring more wrath, I dare not ask her to turn up the almost-nonexistent heat, and instead have taken the step of shrink-wrapping my windows in insulating plastic. Nothing looks more ghetto than that, I might add.

2002-03-04T13:19:00.000-08:00

Things you learn being a travel editor: there is a valley of rock formations in Urgup, Turkey, which includes a section of especially, uh, mushroom-shaped structures known to locals as "Penisville."

2002-03-03T15:13:00.000-08:00

Since nobody else seems to be doing it, I'd like to propose some new guidelines for the modern wedding. First of all, there should be completely separate requirements for guests who are similar-minded couples well on their way to getting married themselves, and single people such as myself to whom the whole concept is still a bit of a mystery. The aforementioned couples, since they probably spend a fair amount of time thinking about this stuff themselves and are expecting to have all the same festivities afforded to them in short order, should be the ones who throw the pre-wedding showers/parties, make the finger sandwiches, and buy the gifts. Single people should be excused from all prior parties, especially bridal showers; they often do not own a full set of dishes themselves, sometimes even using Mason jars as drinking glasses, and therefore should in no way be required to buy someone else an ornate serving platter or cream pitcher. Single people should really only be expected to show up to the actual wedding wearing something without obvious stains on it. Couples will be responsible for giving teary-eyed toasts, dancing to the inevitably cheesy music, and talking to the old folks about how wonderful weddings are. Single people will be expected to drink, have funny conversations with other single people (with whom they will be seated, instead of in between two adorably happy couples who met at the same fraternity/sorority mixer back in '92) and occasionally hook up with one another in bathrooms. Couples will stay in their own nice little hotel suites; singles will take the red-eye back to New York, thanks very much.

2002-02-28T18:44:00.000-08:00

It's lean times on the old blog, I admit... but just picture this: tomorrow, I am going to put in my first day of temp work in, let's see, six years. I am showing up to be some sort of administrative assistant to someone or other in the Human Resources department of some bland midtown office. Yes yes. Let's just think about that prospect for a moment... how long will it be, do you think, before someone asks me to file something and I forget my place and indignantly shout "I'm an editor!" and flee? Perhaps I should busy myself printing out lots of porn on the color printer, as a good friend did and maybe still does to while away the hours... in any case, I am feeling more connected with my just-out-of-college self than I have in quite a while.

2002-02-26T13:08:00.000-08:00

Subjects of emails currently in my so-called work inbox:

bicycles
bike stuff
blurb
Bogosian's book picks
booze
can this be real?
fact checking position
funny
ha
haikus
heeb
hey
hey baby
hey sweetheart
hey!
hi
hmm
hola
ick
I'm giving it away!
like I was saying...
madness
one more time
paintball anyone?
resume
small thing
so....
speaking of S&M...
tee hee
the funny
the gig
the slope
the white stripes
wednesday sounds good!
whatever, whatever
whew
wow
you're welcome

2002-02-25T15:06:00.000-08:00

So I go to this fancy event-thing on Saturday and I decide that I'm going to go all out and put on the high-heeled mary janes that I love so much but always dread wearing, and they really do lend an extra air of slinkiness to the outfit and I feel so much more at ease amongst all the crazy socialites... but then the party ends and we leave and have to walk, god forbid, two whole city blocks to get a cab and I am immediately hating life and wanting so badly to take off my shoes, and it occurs to me that this is why all those frosty New York women are the way they are... there is no way foot pain like that can coexist happily with a good sense of humor. No way.

2002-02-25T08:22:00.000-08:00

Sort of obvious, and yet you never expected it to be phrased quite this way:

People Burn Half the Calories That Wild Animals Do