Kitschen Table

BK in tha Hizzouse, Fool

2007-09-05T13:49:00.000-04:00

Later for Coney Island, suckas! Hang with me, and you too can spend your Labor Day hauling a bunch of crap that you didn’t pack in time for the moving van from your old apartment in Astoria to your new place in Flatbush, spending two and a half hours in a car driven by an ill-tempered asshat who doesn’t know his dick from his armpit and ten blames you for giving him “bad directions” (BQE to Atlantic to Flatbush to Ocean--pretty straightforward) because you end up all the way across Brooklyn in fucking Brownsville, and all the southbound streets are blocked off because of the West Indian Day Parade, and then starts in with the “bad directions” bullshit again and claims that if you just followed HIS directions (which were what, again? I didn’t hear you mention those until we were about halfway to JFK, dick splint), we wouldn’t have had this trouble until your large, mean-looking friend tells him to let up. That’s a FINE bookend to the lazy, crazy days of summer in the city, and even though he does not read personal blogs, I must again extend my thanks and appreciation to the Pirate for helping me lug my remaining possessions and keeping his cool throughout. After all, he has a real job, and there are plenty of things he could have done with his day off, like clean his ears or de-flea his cat, assuming the little hellion is thus infested, which I don’t believe she is. (Just for the record, for those of you who have never met the Pirate or seen a picture of him, he’s not “mean-looking”, so to speak—just tall, barrel-chested, and hairy. I mean, I don’t call him the Pirate ‘cause he looks like Woody Allen, you know?)

Sorry. I suppose I should have proceeded as though all five or so of you readers had absolutely no idea that my cheap cunt ex-landlady finally made good on her ill-veiled threat to sell the Astoria homestead, but I’ve been awake for only two hours and am still not equipped to milk conceits that have no business being milked in the first place, because it takes me until about 6 pm or so to get to that level of wordsmithery. Anyway, long story short, five days before I left for my trip to Flagstaff to visit DJP, a messenger acting on behalf of the new owners (who are about as decent, honest, and principled as you’d expect and still manage to look like Cardinal Cooke next to Cheap Cunt) showed up at 8 pm with eviction notices. This was not a complete surprise to any of us, as my now-former neighbor Feline Bill discovered that the folks CC had told him were there to appraise the house for a new mortgage were, in fact, realtors and potential tenants when they asked him where the property line was and, when he asked them what bank they were from, froze up, turned tail, ran a couple hundred feet down the block, and started screaming at each other in Greek. But denial is a powerful river in Egypt, and FB’s wife Mrs. Rosewater and I managed to convince ourselves that there was no way in hell CC was going to be able to get anyone to buy a rickety old frame house with roach nests and holes in the wall except to tear it down, and what the hell could they possibly put there, given that the property is not that big and the house leans up against the one next door? Add to that the fact that CC was “supposed to” give us some kind of official notice (although, since none of us had leases, she was not legally required to do so) that she was selling the house, and…well, assuming there is such a thing as a benevolent cosmic force field (there isn’t), the frantic confabulations of two overeducated, underemployed slacker artist types with no place else to go ain’t gonna shake it into action on your behalf. Moral: If your Cheap Cunt landlord/lady starts making noise about refinancing the house for a mortgage, log onto Craig’s List without a moment’s thought and look for a new place tout de suite. Simply asking if the bastard/bitch is fixing to sell the house is naught but a quaint idea, as Feline Bill discovered when, about two weeks before we got notice, he did just that and CC looked him straight in the eye and lied her sleazy ass off. Bitch. It’s too bad none of us will be there to see the look on her face when the IRS shows up at her door and discovers we’ve turned her in for tax fraud. Va funcullo, stronta! *

Another word of advice: If you’re fixing to get a place in Astoria and have no roommate, money, or steady employment, nab one of the three posthaste. I started pounding the pavement about twelve hours after the news came down and quickly discovered that the chances of my finding a one-bedroom with more than just, say, a holding cell-sized living room/dining/kitchen area for under $1200 were about as good as the possibility that there is, in fact, a benevolent cosmic force field. There were a good many three-bedrooms for only $2100, which would work out splendidly if the two other entities sharing your apartment were not of the species Felis cattus, or if said beings were able to keep you solvent by starring in Fancy Feast ads. My beasts are gorgeous little critters, to be sure, but I consider myself lucky when they ootch out from under the futon and butt me with their pretty little heads. (Actually, that’s somewhat of an exaggeration. They’re totally cool with me these days and Fitz has even progressed to the point that she’ll let my dad touch her nose, but they’re still way too schizy to go into show business. Pity, that.)

I figured Astoria was done when I called yet another realtor the day I left for Arizona and he rudely informed me that I must be dreaming if I thought I could get a one-bedroom that would take cats for under $1200 in Little Athens, and why didn’t I just get a roommate, for chrissakes? (Fuckhead. Oh, and by the way, I do realize that Queens is a large place, and I need not have limited my search there to Astoria/Long Island City. It’s just…well, it’s Queens. I hate to be an obnoxious git, but I’m not much of a fan. Too suburban for me, ultimately.) DJP seemed keen on my getting a pad in Sunset Park, which is a still-reasonably affordable, if somewhat hip enclave in southwest Brooklyn that did present a few worthwhile opportunities, including a couple for under $1000, but those were, predictably, snatched up by the time I got back to the city. I did look at a place on Third Avenue, but it was the size of a walk-in closet and the building was right under the BQE, and it was $1250 a month. The dude who showed it to me tried the “Well, I see tons of apartments, and let me tell you, you’re not going to get much better than this” line that almost got me when I was an idiot grad student looking for my first real place, and I was thrilled to be able to inform him that I had just visited a huge railroad flat in Bushwick that was going for $150 less than that shoebox, and nearly catatonic with glee when he didn’t know what the fuck to say to that. (Man! That Bushwick apartment was the shit. HUGE eat-in kitchen, two big bedrooms, and a good-sized living room with a fucking fireplace at the front. If only my credit weren’t so diseased and/or the landlord didn’t put so much stock in a person’s credit rating. I realize they need some sort of yardstick to weed out potential deadbeats, but I do think that credit rating is fundamentally inaccurate, because if an indigent person has to choose which bills to pay, she’s going to let the credit card and doctor bills go before the rent and utilities. You know, because you need a place to live, and it needs to be inhabitable. Comprende? That’s the way I do it, anyway, but I do have quite the track record of doing things exactly opposite of Everyone Else, so why should bill paying be any different?)

So I wasn’t too hopeful when, almost as an afterthought, I stumbled on this $1050 a month place on Ocean Avenue in what the immensely kind realtor told me was Flatbush, but appears on most maps as a no-man’s-land between Lefferts Gardens, South Park Slope, and the aforementioned. (Park Slope Southeast? South Lefferts Gardens? Northwest Flatbush? It’s all a bunch of bullshit, really, when all is said and done.) I was even less optimistic when he showed me the place, which was gawjiss, with a renovated kitchen and bathroom and a big long hallway and a living room the size of my first apartment on East 62nd Street, which was renting for $1425 by the time I moved out in 2001, and I had to fill out yet another credit check form. Figuring I was pretty well fucked, I priced out a couple more places in Bushwick, but I kept putting off actually viewing them because it’s kind of a right pain in the ass to get to Bushwick from Astoria, and besides, I didn’t get the best vibes when I went to check out that lost, lamented railroad flat. It’s not that the neighborhood seemed dangerous—there were tons of people hanging out on the street, listening to salsa music and running in and out of spraying fire hydrants—it just seemed…I guess “desolate” is the word for it, as though here was this safe, if slightly seedy neighborhood with tons of people hanging out, but it was, literally, on the moon, or the apocalypse had come and gone and yet people were still there. (Maybe there’s some truth to the latter, given the place basically went up in flames during the ’77 blackout. Those were the days…)

Anyway. Long story short, the new landlords decided my credit rating wasn’t too much of a liability, and they let me have the place, which they would not have done if my dad weren’t my guarantor, but whatever, who cares. And so, here we are. I’ve been here exactly one month now, and it was just yesterday that I got the last remaining crap out of old place to dump it unceremoniously in that big bowling alley of a hallway. Mind you, there’s still a lot of crap remaining at the old place, most of it belonging to Cheap Cunt, who figured that anyone paying $950 a month including utilities for a two-bedroom in Astoria hadn’t the right to complain about sharing her living space with volumes of ancient Greek tomes and computer equipment from 1985, but since that place has a date with the wrecking ball sometime in the not too distant future, I figure the new owners can just suck it up and deal. No point in making it easy for them—it’s not like they’re a bunch of stand-up guys trying to make an honest living. Hey, Eichmann was just doing his job, too, motherfuckers.

I actually have to run up to Astoria today and give the new owners my keys so I don’t have to show up in court tomorrow and do it there, so I’m going to have to wrap this up shortly. Today was the first time I actually took a look at the summons, which I found slipped under my door at the old place about a week ago, and in particular its component known as the Affirmation of Service, which is basically just a page stating that at such-and-such a time on such-and-such a date, the attorney or a representative served papers kicking me to the curb. What shocked me was the physical description—first of all, that they require one (I suppose so they can hunt me down if I fail to appear in court), and that this ass monkey who served me listed my weight as two hundred and eighty pounds. I’m sorry, but…who in the what now? I realize I’m the size of a truck these days, relatively speaking, but ain’t no way, no HOW I weigh TWO HUNDRED AND EIGHTY FUCKING POUNDS, YOU MENTAL MIDGET! Hell, my DAD doesn’t even weigh 280, and I think if you saw the two of us standing next to each other you could pretty safely say that, even figuring in height, the padre is packing significantly more tonnage than his deadbeat daughter. Unless this is some idea of a joke, or perhaps an attempt to goad me into calling them up and returning my keys (as if the prospect of appearing in court in Jamaica weren’t incentive enough), there are no words.

Signing off for now, but tune in tomorrow or Friday (I swear!) for part two of What I Did On My Summer Vacation: The Interdimensional Fourth of July Adventures of DJP and the Alexandrian K-Whales. It will make a lot more nonsensical sense when you read about it, I promise.

PS. Just to make sure I was right and that livery driver was, indeed, an utter asshat who was lucky if he could even figure out how to get to Brooklyn, period, I checked my map and lo and behold, Atlantic Avenue runs smack into Flatbush Avenue at the Atlantic Center Mall (there’s a Target!). Took a cab home last night and Atlantic was still running smack into Flatbush. Bad directions, my ass. All you gotta do is turn right, fucker. Yeah, you’re welcome.

*Cheap Cunt is actually Greek, but I don't know how to say "go fuck yourself, whore" in her native tongue.

I Was Kidnapped By A Band of Brigands and Held As the Love Slave to the Sultan of Adair!

2007-06-27T15:08:00.000-04:00

And that, folks, is why I’ve been mostly incommunicado for the past two months. Except, of course, it isn’t.

There are a whole bunch of reasons I haven’t posted, most of them stupid or insane. I certainly haven’t been busy—god forbid my temp agency actually finds me work or something equally radical. Per usual, I thought it was my fault; after all, I let my first boss convince me that the reason one of our clients didn’t receive a UPS we sent him was because I failed to notify him that we’d sent the UPS, as if that immense blizzard in the Chicagoland area had nothing to do with it and she couldn’t have notified the guy herself, the fucking bitch. (Nota bene: I am NOT stupid, except when it comes to my involvement, however superficial, in things gone awry.) Anyway, unless my old belief that I emit evil cosmic vibes/have a scarlet letter “A” on my forehead/secrete noxious poisons is true, it’s not my fault that I can’t get work; it’s the economy, stupid. I went to two other temp agencies, one of which actually did manage to get me four days’ work at an exceptionally high pay rate, I think, for doing nothing except playing on the Internet and answering the phone. Since then, though, nada. Feh.

On the sort-of bright side, I found out that I am eligible for unemployment any week I work three days or fewer and gross less than $405.00. That’s kind of awesome, but dammit, I feel like such a slug. I don’t care if I am allegedly entitled to government handouts, er, public assistance; I still can’t get over my childhood conditioning that “bleeding” the “government” “dry” is sinful and selfish. As a pragmatic socialist (tm The Pirate), I am 100% in favor of the “government” (why the finger quotes? Watch the news, and I don’t mean Fox) establishing social programs to help those in need. That is its responsibility, particularly since it is also responsible, in no small part, for creating the conditions leading to the necessity of so many US citizens relying on public assistance just to be able to afford a box of Tuna Helper (and murdering Ethel Rosenberg in cold blood, the fuckers! Tell everybody!). As an overeducated, underemployed, over-privileged white chick, however, I just don’t think I have the same moral entitlement to public fundage—unless, of course, I get an NEA grant, which, come fucking on. But hoes got to eat too, so I’m taking it. And frankly, I think I’m a better cause to support than the Iraq war, ‘cause I’m gonna live forever, I’m gonna learn how to fly. So fuck you, RNC, Bible thumpers, and other assorted demons in and out of my head.

By the way, MS Word is telling me that “fundage” is not really a word. Maybe it isn’t. If one of you three readers would please let me know either way, I’d greatly appreciate it. I was distraught to learn from The Pirate that “healthful” is not a real word, and he’s…well, I was going to say he’s never wrong, but this one time we were talking about Auschwitz and he claimed it was liberated in April 1945 because that’s when most of the camps were liberated. That’s true, except the Auschwitz inmates were, um, lucky enough to have been liberated by the Russians on January 27, 1945. Where do I pick this stuff up?

Anyway. If my White Liberal Guilt failed to impress you, maybe this will: I was recently accepted into a troupe called The Actor’s Project, which is a sort of workshop/performance-oriented operation that culminates in a showcase at the end of the “semester” (since this is not technically an acting school, I don’t suppose that’s the proper term, but I don’t really know what else to call it). Ostensibly, casting agents and other Persons of Note show up at these things and baby, put your name in lights if they like you enough. Listen to your mother—those stage and movie people got there because they’re special. And whorish! Don’t forget whorish! Seriously, though, growing up in an epicenter of Rush Limbaugh fans and religious zealot guns nuts will fuck with your idealistic, artsy-fartsy head to the extent of convincing you 1) you have no chance of scoring any work, no matter how minute, as an actress, so why don’t you just get an accounting degree from Penn State Harrisburg and work for the PA State Legislature until you find a nice husband, which you won’t because 2) you’re a complete whore for wanting to break into acting in the first place! Don’t you know that life upon the wicked stage is not only never what a girl supposes, it’s roughly akin to Mary Magdalene’s original profession? Repent, sinner! Blow, Gabriel, blow! Sit down, you’re rockin’ the boat! (Oops, there I go with musical theatre references. That must mean I’m gay! Hee.)

I’ve also started writing for a film website called The Aspect Ratio, which affords me no guilt at all, because it’s writing, which requires brains, unlike prancing around on a stage with my tits a-bouncing like some WHORE! Also, it prevents me from taking up too much space in the physical world, which is a good thing for a woman (although, if you check out this article in the current issue of Bitch, female bloggers hardly dwell in some kind of latter-day feminist Eden). Actually, it’s been a lot of fun, not least because our “Best Films of the 1970s” list made IMDB and we received a lot of angry feedback for failing to post Chinatown and The Exorcist (we did), not to mention Rocky and Saturday Night Fever (hey, life’s a bitch, folks!). One fellow (how sexist—as if a woman couldn’t be equally idiotic!) claimed that Ingmar Bergman died in the 1960s, even though he was still making films in the 1970s. My, that’s a neat trick, along the lines of “I was walking down the street and I turned into a coffee shop”! And by the way, Bergman is alive and semi-well in Sweden; as of January 2007, he was recovering from hip surgery. How did I find this out? It’s the damnedest thing, but I looked his ass up on IMDB—the same place, presumably, that this Mensa member found our list. Oh, my brain, how she doth bleed.

Lest you think God’s in his heaven and all’s right with me (and we can’t have that—I HATE those fucking people, don’t you?), I spent about two weeks mired in a deep, paranoid depression engendered by shabby treatment at a couple of extras’ agencies I went to, which just plunged me right back into the early 1990s and my sixteen-year-old self, stuck playing Jan in Grease! because I was “too fat” to play Rizzo (side rant: Our director, who alternated between Coolest Teacher in School and Total Fucking Sexist Prick, was adamant that whomsoever he cast fit the character descriptions. It was my fucking luck that Rizzo was described as “thin, Italian-looking.” The part eventually went to a girl who fit both those criteria, but not before said director originally cast a blond soprano with baby fat. The FUCK? The only thing I can surmise is he thought our idiot townspeople would rip up the auditorium if this girl were not cast in a lead role. Thankfully, my friend MarkRickSteve, the student director, talked him out of it. I still got stuck playing Jan, alas) and the devastating realization that most of the public regarded me as some kind of tap-dancing fat minstrel instead of a Great Talent. Oh, yes, and that vomitrocious Blues Traveler song throbbing through my soul--does it matter which one? It got so bad, I refused to even post my picture on Friendster, choosing a shot of a proboscis monkey in its stead. Therapy helped; I am now defiantly proud to announce that my mug adorns both Friendster AND MySpace, although I still can’t get it to load here. So, if you want to see what I look like, click here. If you’re one of the date rapists with whom I attended middle school, high school, or college, and your sole interest in viewing my picture is so you can post some kind of ass-fuck comment about how I’m still an “ugly fat fucking bitch,” well, in the words of John Turturro in The Big Lebowski, don’t. Fuck. With Jesus! (Thanks to the guys and dolls—twitch!—who said nice things about my picture. You all were more instrumental in bringing me out of my black hole than you might think.)

I’ll be heading out of town on the evening of July 3 to visit my dear friend DJP in Flagstaff, whose thank-you gift for complimenting my headshot will be a private screening of The Star Wars Holiday Special and a bottle of medium-expensive whiskey. But I’m sure I’ll find something about which to foam at the mouth and fall over backward before then. Lucky us.

It's Been Almost Two Months...

2007-06-18T16:35:00.000-04:00

...and this isn't even a "real" post, although I'm sure it's much more worthwhile and substantive than anything I have to say. Read it and weep--I'll pick up later this week. Oh, and thanks to the Pirate for sending me this.

http://www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com/archives/11163.html

June 18, 2007
White House can’t ‘cherry pick the laws it likes and the laws it doesn’t’
Posted 2:05 pm | Printer Friendly | Spotlight

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We’ve known for a while that the president has a nasty habit of issuing “signing
statements,” through which Bush tells Congress which parts of certain laws he’s
decided to ignore. Senate Pro Tem Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) and House Judiciary
Chairman John Conyers (D-Mich.) recently asked the non-partisan General
Accountability Office, Congress’ investigative arm, to look into how these
signing statements affect administration policy.

The GAO issued its report today.

Today, the nonpartisan General Accounting Office (GAO) released a report
which found that in a limited number of Presidential signing statements
examined, the Bush Administration failed to execute the law as instructed in
over 30 percent of the cases.

GAO researchers found signing statements in 11 of 12 appropriations acts in
fiscal year
2006 and examined a sample of 19 provisions with which the President
expressed concern in his signing statements. The President objected to, and
federal agencies failed to execute, public law in six of those cases - 30
percent of the total sample.

“The Administration is thumbing its nose at the law,” Conyers said. “This
study calls for an extensive review of these practices, something the
Administration has so far refused to do.”

Added Byrd, “The White House cannot pick and choose which laws it follows and
which it ignores. When a president signs a bill into law, the president signs
the entire bill. The Administration cannot be in the business of cherry picking
the laws it likes and the laws it doesn’t.”

It’s worth noting, as Paul Kiel emphasizes, that the GAO’s report said,
“Although we found the agencies did not execute the provisions as enacted, we
cannot conclude that agency noncompliance was the result of the President’s
signing statements.”

On this, the GAO is agnostic. In other words, we don’t know that the executive
branch failed to follow the law because of the signing statements; we only know
that the president issued a signing statement questioning certain provisions of
the law and then, lo and behold, the administration ignored those provisions.

And what kind of measures are we talking about?

Some of the most troubling instances that the GAO examined include:

- The Defense Department did not include separate budget justification
documents explaining how Iraq war funding was to be spent in its 2007 budget
request, as required by public law;

- The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) did not submit a proposal
and expenditure plan for housing, as directed by Congress;

- Customs and Border patrol did not relocate its checkpoints in the Tucson
area every seven days, as directed by Congress.

The full report is online (.pdf).

Byrd concluded, “This GAO opinion underscores the fact that the Bush White House
is constantly grabbing for more power, seeking to drive the people’s branch of
government to the sidelines. Too often, the Bush Administration does what it
wants, no matter the law. It says what it wants, no matter the facts. We must
continue to demand accountability and openness from this White House to counter
this power grab.”

Sounds right to me.

Boerum Hill, Bayside, Red Hook, And Points South

2007-04-24T12:49:00.000-04:00

I’ve never been one of those people who make the most of long stretches of unemployment, using them as an opportunity to brush up on my now-almost nonexistent Russian, read The Grapes of Wrath, or hell, even clean the house. (Especially cleaning the house! My god, who do you think I am? I guess those kibitzers back home were right when they told me no man would ever want to marry me!) No, I typically use my weeks off to listlessly search for employment, rack my brain for something that can remotely pass as interesting to post on here, and flog myself for being a spoiled white brat who can afford to piss around “finding herself,” supported by regular cash infusions from the Bank of Dad. I can’t even make an effort to rehab myself into respectability anymore, like I could when I was in my mid-twenties and thought there was something wrong with me that I wasn’t fulfilled by marketing skate shoes or entering invoices into a computer for eight hours a day. (Actually, I probably could have stomached the entering invoices, had I been in the employ of, say, a hole-in-the-wall theatre company run by a bitchy flamer with a heart of gold instead of a pharmaceutical PR firm where my boss was a bitchy, frumpy Lawn Guylander who pulled shit with me like claiming she’d given me the rent bill when she hadn’t and ordering me to pick up the oatmeal wrapper she left on the kitchen counter while making all sweetie-sweet with everyone else. Anyway, my celeb BFF has written a whole book about this, and she did a far better job capturing the ritual degradation of peon desk work than I certainly can at this hot, sleepy point in time, so do us all a favor and buy it.)

I have actually committed to registering with Central Casting, but as I believe I’ve already mentioned in these pages, you need a Social Security card to sign up with them, and I don’t have one at the moment thanks to that fucking bitch who stole my wallet and my own stupidity for keeping my Social Security card in my wallet in the first place—precisely what the Social Security office itself tell you NOT to do. So now I have to go through the process of replenishing my identification documents, a task which, in my book, rivals logging invoices and watching paint dry for a good time. I hate standing; I hate lines; I hate standing in lines, and I’m not looking forward to hauling my ass into Manhattan to do exactly that. But I suppose this is as good a week as any (hey! That just made me think of Lloyd Bridges in Airplane! and that whole “Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit smoking/drinking/amphetamines/sniffing glue” schtick), so reckon I’ll be taking the big trip to the island of Manahassa sometime in the next couple of days so I can sign up for the ritual degradation of peon acting! Movin’ on up to the East Side…

Hauling ass into Manhattan to shift back and forth on the balls of my feet in a government office may be (and is!) about as easy and fun as pulling an infected molar out of my cervix, but doing same to Brooklyn to write fiction at a café is rather like flossing, I have to say—so eminently satisfying that I wonder why in the Good Gourd I don’t do it, like, every day. (Well, for one thing, it can get expensive, and flossing is mostly free, but…) My already precarious mental health necessitated that I break with my unemployment tradition and flee this cave I call home for the wilds of
Boerum Hill, Brooklyn and the shelter of the legendary (to me, at least) Boerum Hill Food Company, an unassuming little boho/slightly-hipster-but-not-so’s-it-makes-me-wanna-take-strychnine java joint right off the F/G at Bergen Street. Not coincidentally, the Boerum Hill Food Company is also where Ayun Halliday wrote her first book, The Big Rumpus, and since I’m a crazy stalker and she plugged the joint in the thank-you notes in said tome, I figured what the hell. (And I’m not a crazy stalker—AH and family are in the Balkans until Friday, and as soon as they return, I’ll be confining my writerly activities to the cafes of Park Slope or the far more down-to-earth Greenpoint because I am respectful. So there.)

Alas, I digress. So, yeah, the Boerum Hill Food Company was worth the trip—it’s food, after all, and hot coffee, and it’s not part of my usual stomping grounds, which are limited to good old SoAs/LIC, Gramercy, and the West Village, for the most part. The young lady working the counter was the sweetest person in the world, and I don’t know her name but she has a dark blond ponytail and groovy black-framed glasses, and I think she works on Tuesdays, so if you happen to pop in, tell her the girl from Astoria says hi, and profuse thanks for her gracious hospitality. Added enhancement came in the form of a precocious but not bratty second-grade girl with whom I had a sweet conversation about how to make a lowercase “k” in cursive, a two-hundred-pound prima ballerina named Alexandra something-or-other, and the contents of my notebook, which would be the fiction project I’m attempting to craft. Odd, isn’t it, that I’ve lived in this great city for eight years and change and I’m still writing about good old all-American fascist high schools. In fact, the working title is “Claudia Schatz and the All-American Fascist High School.” Rather cuts to the chase, don’t you think? Don’t worry, I didn’t tell the little girl that—she didn’t ask, number 1, and number 2, I don’t tend to blow the minds of other people’s kids, baby, unless specifically invited to do so.

While we’re on the subject of der Kinder, you know that story about how when a couple is trying to have a baby, and the second they decide to quit trying and adopt, the woman gets pregnant? Well, lemme just say that the second I trounced out of this house to go writing in Brooklyn, my temp agency FINALLY called me with some work after six weeks. Answering the phone at a doctor’s office, nine to five, no problem, except the clinic is in Bayside, which is way the hell out in Queens—so way the hell out, in fact, that no subways reach it. Eep. As a tenderfoot who never takes buses and likes to sleep real late, I almost balked at the idea, but after six weeks, I really was in absolutely no position to turn down anything that came my way save, perhaps, a day’s work in an abattoir in Bayonne. There’s NO good way to get THERE from Queens.

But I’ve heard nice things about Bayside—according to Kevin Walsh, author of Forgotten New York: The Ultimate Urban Explorer’s Guide to All Five Boroughs, “the neighborhood has always retained a small-town atmosphere,” and while small towns in America make me scratch frenziedly at imaginary fleas, small towns within the five boroughs are nothing if not kind of awesome. And as it turned out, I didn’t have to take the bus after all! At the end of the 7 line, Flushing-Main Street, all you have to do is walk two blocks south to get the Long Island Railroad, which will drop you in Bayside in eight minutes. If you catch the 8:40 and walk fast, you’ll get to work only two minutes after nine, which is an improvement over your usual twenty after, which you always blame on train trouble. (Jeez, all of a sudden I’m Jay McInerney.) I’ve ranted about Upper East Side doctor’s offices on these pages, so let me just pause and say the folks at Premier Healthcare are a much-needed break with uppity tradition, treating the temp like a human being and offering her free coffee like everyone else and chatting with her in the lunchroom. The one rude doctor I encountered was on the phone, barking at me to find someone’s bloodwork NOW, as if that information were just shimmering readily at my temp’s fingertips. Prick. Probably on the Upper East Side himself. Only other slight bummer was discovering that whomsoever is in charge of these things blocked AOL and MySpace—for security reasons, I suspect, since no one seemed to mind terribly that I spent my time between phone calls assembling a cheap restaurant list with the assistance of the Village Voice and New York Magazine. To cap off the day, I found a little Japanese cheap goods shop on the way back to the LIRR and bought myself some pretty l’il 99-cent earrings. Yay yay.

The next day, Friday, found me haulin’ it to
Red Hook, a neighborhood I’ve always wanted to visit but balked at because to get there, you have to take THE BUS. (I’ve also always balked at seeing On the Waterfront, which was filmed in Red Hook, because Elia Kazan wrote it as justification for turning in his friends to HUAC, although I suppose I’m not doing Kazan any harm by watching it now, so I reckon I can stop being such a silly ass and stick it in my Netflix queue.) But my friends Brook and Mr. Shangles have been keeping house there for quite some time, and I had to give Brook some opera tickets, so no time like the present. And I reckon I can consign my bus aversion to the same bin as the On the Waterfront one, because not only was catching the bus easy, it was also totally fucking cool! At the risk of sounding like a complete stoner rube, MTA buses are rad because you can actually see the neighborhoods through which you’re passing, and unlike those ripoff double-decker jobs in Manhattan, you don’t have to contend with a passel of tourists and an annoying loudspeaker! (I should get over myself—while I never, in all my years as a tourist in NYC, did something as obviously touristy as that, my dad and I did succumb in London, which is kind of silly in retrospect because London is not all that difficult to navigate, and everyone speaks English.) And I must thank the stars that the MTA has a trip finder on its website, because the directions I’d thought Mr. Shangles had emailed to me amounted to “take the G train and then the bus.” In case you’re looking to get from Astoria to Red Hook, take the G train to Hoyt-Schermerhorn (downtown Brooklyn, FYI) and grab the B61 bus, which will drop you off at various points along Van Brunt Street. You can also take the G to Smith/9th and get the B77, which will let you off two whole blocks closer to the Brook/Shangles residence.

After a wacky adventure involving Brook’s doorbell not working and my frenzied quest for a pay phone (which will not happen again, I assure you—I finally replaced my old cell phone yesterday! And it’s a cool cell phone, to boot—it’s silver and flips up and has a camera and everything), I caught up with her in the park at the end of Coffey Street, which is not, as I thought at first, the Red Hook Recreational area but a smaller grassy knoll at the foot of a pier, with a great view of the Statue of Liberty. Per usual, Brook was painting, and she had attracted a little knot of neighborhood kids who wanted to make their own art, which Brook in all her hippie earth mother loveliness handled far, far better than the author of this piece would have, I assure you. We ended up hitting the Pioneer Bar-B-Q on Van Brunt and Pioneer Street for brisket and pulled pork and a pint of the local microbrew, Sixpoint Craft Ale. The bartender was a gruff but friendly old gent who’d grown up in Red Hook, so naturally he was pissed off that “they” were driving up rents a thousand percent and forcing all the old-timers out, but as he also pointed out, there had once been gunfights in the streets every night, so “they” had to do something. I seriously hope “they,” whoever they are, don’t crud up Red Hook too much more with panini bars and hip, fun, and trendy restaurants (please note I fervently believe that “fun” does not belong in the same sentence as “hip” and “trendy” unless used to produce contrast). Compared to Williamsburg and, to a lesser extent, Boerum Hill, Red Hook can still kick it old school—Brook and I were hot to visit the VFW on Van Brunt, but someone has to invite you and, well, no one did—but man, it just brings me down to see those telltale orange signs with the Bloomingdale’s font hawking a restaurant called Bistro 718 or some such tripe. All’s I can say is, those yuppies better not touch Greenpoint if I’m ever going to realize my dream of living in Brooklyn. Seriously, why the hell does “gentrification” have to mean buying up old warehouses and converting them into hip nightclubs where normal people can’t even get a job, much less afford to patronize? If I had the drive and the business sense, I would start a community organization that buys up old warehouses and converts them into affordable housing. I’d make sure to slap some 99-cent stores in the neighborhood, too. Oh, yeah, and some cheap, hole-in-the-wall ethnic places too.

On the way back, I discovered that I needn’t have taken the G train in the first place, because the B61 bus goes straight from Red Hook to Long Island City! Punk rawk! It was dark by the time I caught it, but it was still fun to ride through Carroll Gardens, Downtown, et. al. and see what I’ve been missing. My radio’s batteries had died, though.

As a final note, props and thanks to the always awesome Ruth for her company this past weekend, not to mention the gifts that I should have given HER, seeing as her birthday was April 4. (The gifts were a citrus/cilantro natural oil diffuser and a Sting magnet made from a bottle cap by Sante Fe artist Goldie Garcia. Who knows—maybe I’ll get around to posting pictures.)

Freaky White Men

2007-04-11T13:45:00.001-04:00

You know, I spent an hour and change yesterday writing a big old reactive post about the whole Don Imus affair, and I’m actually kind of glad the computer ate it, because this whole thing is getting way the fuck out of hand, and I’m nauseated by the way the media keeps humping this story like the proverbial dog at the fire hydrant, and if we’re going to hinge a discussion about racism on this asshole’s remarks, well, I may just have to rip my eyeballs out with a coat hanger and/or move to a bunker in Nevada and broadcast extraterrestrial conspiracy theories on AM radio a la Art Bell. So I will say this: Imus is a dick who made a stupid, crass, racially charged remark, and while I certainly think he deserves to take some well-deserved shit for it, there is a difference between a true racist and a person who makes racially charged remarks yet does not, prima facie, support the institution of racism. Imus, I suspect, is the latter. Rush Limbaugh, whom you may recall made the remark, “Who cares about black people? They’re like 12% of the population,” is the former. And while millions of dumbasses depend on Limbaugh for moral and political guidance, no one depends on Imus for anything (including, I suspect, entertainment). But no one sees fit to call Limbaugh on his OxyContin-laced shit because, as my friend the Pirate pointed out, IOKIYAR (it’s OK if you’re a Republican), and Imus is not, to the best of my knowledge, affiliated with any political stripe. Hmmm. Maybe I should change my voter registration for the sole purpose of being able to spew all sorts of racist, sexist bilge and not get called on it! [/sarcasm]

All righty (lefty?), then! Moving on to What Is Truly Important In Life, my deepest, most insincere apologies to my friend Marcia, who would have had me watch “The Bachelor” on Monday night, but whose edict I cast aside in favor of an awesome documentary about Jonestown on PBS. Ahhh, nothing like spending an hour and change sacked out in front of the tube with a pseudo-religious mass suicide cult! (For those of you who know nothing about Jonestown, the charismatic, if extremely fucked-up Reverend Jim Jones was the founder of the People’s Temple, an ostensibly Socialist organization (yay!) that relied upon good old-fashioned religious chicanery like faith healing in order to manipulate its followers (boo!). When San Franciscans got wind of Jones’s darker practices—he raped more than one of his female disciples, and may have done the same to some of the men—Jones moved his followers to the jungles of Guyana and established the communal cult known as Jonestown. On November 18, 1978, Jonestown came to an end when 909 of its residents drank Kool-Aid mixed with cyanide. I’ve heard that the Kool-Aid ingested was not, in fact, Kool-Aid proper, but a cheaper house brand. Details, details. I suppose it matters to the Kool-Aid marketing department. At any rate, hopefully I haven’t given away too much of the plot for you to lose interest. If you really want to freak yourself out, then listen to the recording of Jones’s voice on the PA system exhorting his followers to “hurry up, we’ve had a good run” as they drank themselves to death. Scary. Check your local listings and all that.)

Apparently I just can’t get enough of those 1970s-era sociopaths, because Tuesday morning found me in the company of the final pages of Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song, his “true-life novel” account of Gary Gilmore, who murdered a gas station attendant and a hotel manager in Provo, Utah, and was subsequently tried, convicted, and sentenced to death in October 1976. (Hey, me too! Well, I was born that month and year, but y’know, same difference.) Gilmore gained notoriety by arguing vociferously for his own death, which, when it was finally carried out on January 17, 1977, was the first execution carried out in the United States after a five-year moratorium. Now, when I say I was in the company of the final pages of this book, I have to stress the word final, because DAMN, it is one long-ass book. Nine months in 1,024 pages. Jeezus! It’s awesomely well-written, to be sure, and I have to give props to anyone who can crank a thousand-plus pages out in 15 months, especially when budgeting time for interviews, but hell’s bells, Gone with the Wind was 1,037 pages, and that spanned twelve years! What kind of speed was Mailer on that he could squeeze every last drop of minutiae out of everyone from Gilmore’s lover, Nicole Baker Barrett, down to the guy who was supposed to be running the gas station the night Gilmore shot Max Jensen? Seriously, I want some! I can’t even write a page a day without ripping it up and starting over about ten times, fer Chrissakes.

Bleaugh. Anyway, if you have the stamina to plow through a thousand-page book, go for it. It’s worth it, if only for the chapters leading up to Gilmore’s execution, in which Gilmore and his family/friends are, no lie, hanging out and boozing it up in the visitors’ lounge at Utah State Prison. I mean, dag. The Rosenbergs didn’t get a fraction of that kind of treatment, and they were innocent. Ooh, it makes me wonder…

Before I make like a seam and split, I’ve just been invited to post on another blog, Ornery Woman, which you should check out regardless of whether or not I’ve vented my womanly spleen. Hee. (I'm gonna need to after writing about all these dudes.) Oh, and if you can tell me what form of execution Utah uses, I’ll give you a prize. Or something.

2007-04-06T12:49:00.000-04:00

So I actually tried to write a semi-thoughtful "political" "essay" on Eric Alterman's little dig at my new beau, Keith Olbermann (yes, it's one of those ten-years-after-everyone-else things, although I feel obliged to point out that the person responsible for getting me to push through my Trazodone fog and post something on here because she's "bored" or some such tripe had not HEARD of Keith Olbermann until yours truly enlightened her, and she should know better. Hee. You know I love you, Responsible Person!), but Blogger erased both drafts of it, and I was so drained from my Herculean efforts to sound far more pundit-y than I actually am that I ended up huddling in bed for two days with occasional forays into the evil succubus known as MySpace. In case you're curious, the dig in question occurred two weeks ago in The Nation, in a column entitled "The Many Man-Crushes of Chris Matthews", and referred to Mr. Olbermann as "taken-for-a-liberal." As Keith himself would say, "How DARE you, sir?" Then again, I'm not the one with a column in the left-wing weekly of note, nor do I have a couple of New York Times best-sellers blasting the liberal media myth, so what do I know? Smoke gets in your eyes and all that.

In other failings, my friend DJP, who is doing the MFA in fiction thing himself, challenged me to write him a story, on the heels of a mini-tantrum on my part about why I don't write much anymore save for this little corner of the internet (no talent, not smart enough, not literary enough, hate it, hate it, and hate it). I accepted the challenge, but I promised I'd deliver him something in two weeks, and, well, that didn't happen. It's not entirely grad school's fault--I've always been one of those writers who scribbles three or four sentences, decides she doesn't like them, and crumples up the page, yelling "I'll never get it! Never, never, never!" a la Don Music of "Sesame Street" fame. And to quote my celebrity BFF Ayun Halliday quoting someone else, "Writing is like pulling teeth. Out of my dick." And that's for "normal" people on a good day! Long story short, pulling teeth out of my metaphoric dick, which we can also apply to exercising and eating healthfully, is not one of my favorite activities to attempt to shoehorn into my lazy, Air Sign slacker life, something about which I assure you dear DJP knows nothing. (Heh! Please, girlfriend--he's all of the above and more. DJP, you know I love you, darlin', and that I certainly don't consider these attributes character flaws on your part. On mine, now, different story, because as various teachers and other busybodies have told me throughout the decades, I want to be "better than that." The fuck?) But slow and steady and so forth.

Oh, yes, and my temp agency hasn't been able to scare up any work for me. Waah! What the freakin' fudge? Come on, it's Passover/Easter season! Go out of town, people!

However...! Thanks to a fellow improv troup-er, I found out about the actor's temp agency that is Central Casting, as in the pejorative "straight out of." If working as a TV/movie extra is YOUR dream--and why shouldn't it be, especially if you're currently working as an "events marketing planning assistant coordinator" a la those ladies who go on "The Bachelor"?--just go to the Central Casting website, click the appropriate tabs, download your I-9 and your W-4 and the registration form, fill 'em all out and show up at the Central Casting offices at 4 pm sharp on Tuesdays and Thursdays. (Offer good only in NYC.) Alas, as my friend Muzetta points out, the catch-22 in all this is you really need to be a member of SAG to get good, steady work, and you have to accumulate a certain number of working hours before you can join SAG, which requires your getting work, which is much harder to get if you aren't a member of SAG. Pissbeans! I hope she's at least a wee bit wrong on this point. There've got to be some sketchy, sort-of-under-the-table student films that require non-union background talent to stand around and look pretty (or ugly, or bored, or whatever) for a few days, no?

Before I go, happy belated birthdays to Ruth and Claudia, who both claim April 4 as their points of entry, albeit two years apart. And happy early birthday to my friend Kimberly, whose domain is tomorrow, April 7.

Eyeballing It

2007-03-16T11:44:00.000-04:00

Took a trip back to Central Pee-Yay, the Place to Be, earlier this week to help out my dad, who at the ripe old age of 58 just had his first cataract surgery. I hear 58 is a little young for cataracts, but in any event, all went well, and having a cataract removed is apparently less of a bother than having a tooth extracted, especially when your doctor is at once deft and decent and doesn't load you up with antibiotics that trigger the dreaded C. Diff bacteria. The only mishap was of my dumbass making when, on the way out of the clinic, I backed up into a Jaguar (!) and cracked the turn signal light. Fortunately, the Jaguar was at least ten years old, it was "just" a turn signal light, and the guy driving it was, like, the nicest guy in the world. So hopefully not too much harm done there, unless the nicest guy in the world does a complete 180 and decides to sue me for triggering some long-buried neurosis or hairline fracture. Which I kind of doubt, but then again, I once believed that if a thief stole money from your account, the bank would give it back to you, no questions asked.

As you may recall, my train trip home necessitates a close shave past Three Mile Island, which is always a source of mirth for a black-hearted, anti-nuke wretch like me. (My friend Marcia's dad likes to tell me that "Three Mile Island is good!" in his Transylvanian accent, another source of bleak mirth, especially since the Marcia family was living in Bucharest at the time of the Chernobyl disaster. I also fondly recall the time my friend DJP called me up at work and helped me waste some time MapQuesting the ol' radioactive holiday camp, not to mention all the "Simpsons" jokes you care to eat.) This trip found me unintentionally, I swear, cueing my portable CD player to Nena's "99 Luftballons"* just as the reactors appeared on the horizon--in both directions. Freaky! I may have to get a copy of Timbuk 3's "The Future's So Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades" and stage a mini-tableau.

Other than that, not much else to say about the 'Burg except the obvious. Hasn't changed much, will never change much, still feel a strong pull to move back there and live a socially sanctioned lifestyle instead of fucking around in NYC, especially when visiting the grandparents who genuinely mean well but get all up in arms about my fucking around in NYC, except I'm forbidden to use the word "fuck" and all its conjugations in their presence. Which is okay, really.

*As in the German version, thank you, not the English remake. The next time some teeny-bopper calls up WPLJ's "'80s at 8" and requests "Ninety-Nine Red Balloons", I am going to rip my eyeballs out and fax them to the request line, I swear.

Men Are From Mars, Women Suck Their Penis(es)

2007-03-06T17:40:00.000-05:00

Thanks to the Summer 2001 issue of BUST magazine for the title. The parentheses-ES at the end is my anal copy editor persona sneaking in, since if we are talking about multiple men, who are by definition multiple since "men" is plural, we must assume that we are dealing with more than one penis. Unless, of course, we are dwelling in a parallel universe in which all men share one penis in sort of a rapid timesharing scenario vis-a-vis the Internet, and who's to say we are not?

I think I just used vis-a-vis wrong there. Meh. Yes? No? Perhaps I am confusing it with the German "wie", which means "like." Because heaven forfend I just say "like." Meh again. Sorry. Up late, lost an hour of sleep (bastard Congress--criminal waste of tax dollars), tad too much beer.

Anyway. It has occurred to me lately that I have not done any pimping of the comedy improv troupe where I've been hoofing it nearly every Saturday night for the past two months. So here we go: The Grown-Ups Playground (which really needs a MySpace page, not least because MySpace is my new BFF) is a multiracial, multigenerational comedy improv troupe led by Joy Newman, whom you may know as Cousin Ruthie from Radio Days. We are not the Upright Citizens Brigade, nor are we Second City, but we have been known to make people laugh, sometimes even a real whole lot. So if you're in the New York metro area, we'd all be very happy if you'd come and join us at the New York Comedy Club, 214 East 24th Street, just off of 2nd Avenue. Even if we happen to have an off night, we'll still be happy. Or at least we'll pretend to be.

Don't you hate when you take that last swig of beer and you find out a bug has crawled into it? I know I do. Viva la vie Boheme!

Entomological matters and shameless plugs aside for now, the other night found me in the company of a friend-of-a-friend who, well, was a bit of a total douchebag. Said douchebaggery included, but was not limited to, gibbering ad nauseam about how fucking awesome he was, referring to women as "they" even though half the party possessed ovaries and were sitting right next to his ass, and bragging that he had no use for those who refused to wax "their" pussies. He would also like to know why "they" insist on kissing him after performing fellatio on him, and by the way, he will not engage in cunnilingus unless he really likes a chick, because that's like fucking gross, dude. But vice-versa...? Oh, do I even have to trot that hoary old double standard out of the crypt?

Look. I really have no problem at all with people going into minute detail about their sexual proclivities. Depending on who it is, I take a certain perverse pleasure in it, in fact. But man, it just brings me way, way the hell down (har) when guys start going ON and ON and ON about how chixx should fuckin' go Brazilian on themselves because lotsa hair is gross. Yhee gads. For the love of humanity, gentlemen, please absorb the following tenets: 1) Learn to tell the difference between the Playmate centerfold and the girl in your bed and 2) It ain't all about you and yer dicks. And yes, two thousand years of phallocentric religious dogma CAN BE and IS total bullshit, so let's please all consign this "men can't control themselves" bile to the medical waste incinerator where it belongs. (Enh, maybe that's not such a good idea, because them at the top have a certain fondness for slapping medical waste incinerators in inner-city neighborhoods so poor Black and Latino children can get asthma. Perhaps we should just shoot it directly at the sun and watch it burn up.)

Here's the thing: This guy is a prick. Strip away the prickery, and he's not even my damned type. But fuck me if I wasn't sitting there like a big old douchebag myself, pissed off at myself that I'm not this dude's type, because all men want to have sex with all women at all times, because they just can't control themselves. Like how cute is that? :-) [sarcasm/]

All right, so I'm (still) a total douchebag myself. But I will give myself a wee bit of credit and say that I'm not nearly the same dumbass I was in grad school, sitting across the table from a guy like this at a bar and hanging on every pig word that came out of his maw and believing that all men were like this. So, young man, I will leave you with this: Absorb those tenets! I genuinely believe your life will improve.

All Up In MySpace And Shit

2007-02-28T15:12:00.000-05:00

I tend to get into things ten years after everyone else (like seeing Ghostbusters for the first time the day before I graduated high school in 1994) so there's no need to break this trend with my new MySpace fixation. Since the only reason I signed up in the first place was to join Ayun Halliday's MySpace group , I didn't feel any particular need to customize my page. I think I may have been completely opposed to the idea at the time, beings that I'd just turned thirty and was not for the first time coming to the realization that I was still an irresponsible fuckup who'd yet to fulfill even a tenth of her much-pimped early promise. Still haven't, but so what! Point is, I didn't really want to meet anybody. Or perhaps I should say I really did NOT want to meet anybody save kick-ass writers who never fail to respond to their fans' sloppy-kissy emails. Anyway.

And then, I don't know what snapped, but last week or so I just started going APE over this MySpace thang. Well, whatever "it" is snapped, let's say, when I clicked "Add Your Schools," or maybe before that, because as you two readers know, I hate(d) my schools. (Oh, and you know what else I hate? People who get all snotty when I'm trying to do my damn job. I have an absolutely dream temp job checking people in at a to-the-trade-only showroom that allows for all the MySpace/AOL/Blogger/Television Without Pity time I care to eat, and this uptight broad got all up on her high horse when I asked for ID because SHE'S here ALL THE TIME. Right, Lady, and I ain't, so give me your fucking driver's license and quitcher bitchin' when, like, um, Darfur. You dig? Oh, well, thus far she's been the only asshole, thank the Good Gourd, and I'd rather the grimy environs of the Garment District than the evil Upper East Side. Well, I'd rather a hot knitting needle with arsenic on the tip than the UES, but I digress--and rhyme, apparently.) And maybe I'm a tad paranoid and self-loathing, but I had nightmarish images of tormentors of yore smacking me with such original missives as "Your a fat ugly bitch cunt fuck off" and since they're doing that in my head almost 24/7, I really don't need to have prophecy coming true online where everyone can see and shrug their shoulders that boys will be boys and um, not to be rude but maybe I should lose some weight or something and then they'd leave me alone.

But I guess unlike me, most people have better things to do, and are in better mental health. Not that I've been emailing former classmates I couldn't stand and telling them to fuck off, mind you. I have, however, been consistently agog at the pages of some of the pituitary cases who are my former classmates (note to those of you I've added as Friends: none of you are pituitary cases, which should be obvious, but sometimes these things bear repeating). And while it doesn't take much to yank me back to that grungy whineland known as High School in the Early '90s, I was not prepared for the full-on ICK immersion in which I found myself not waving, but drowning when I read the profile of a guy from my class who claims to be carrying on the good work of Ronald Reagan. Or something. I swear, reading some of these people's profiles makes me feel like I've gorged on Mountain Dew and Slim Jims and am wedged in the back of an '87 Camaro listening to Pantera. Or something. Must make like Karen Silkwood and take a decontamination shower! (And perhaps administer meself a lifesaving emetic...)

On a more serious note, I've started a fundraising campaign for Heifer International, whose efforts to stomp out world hunger and promote women's lambing programs should go a long way toward Tom's of Maine-ing the Ron Reagan/Slim Jim/DEEEWWWW!!!! residue from our collective mouths, if nothing else. I'm trying to raise $1,000, and honestly, every little bit does help, so please contribute. Just click that there Heifer button on the sidebar and you'll be redirected to my uninspired fundraising page. I promise to add some color tomorrow.

And one last thing: If someone steals your wallet, and then steals $3K from your bank account, do not just assume your bank is going to give it back, especially if you are a poor slob like yours truly. Chances are they'll just give you reason after reason for not paying you what's rightfully yours, including accusing you of perpetrating the theft yourself in order to defraud them. Because they can, and because they are rapists. And that is the moral of the bank story with which I teased you last time.

Visit my MySpace profile at MySpace.com/badlittlegraycat, s'il vous plait. Et de rien!

Make Me Normal!

2007-02-07T15:10:00.000-05:00

More stuff going on with the ID theft, but I can't disclose it until the matter is resolved. Now, that's a tease, innit? As a college classmate remarked when our professor gave him a B-plus-plus on a paper, "Don't bring me to orgasm and then make me finish it off in the men's room!" Oh, yes, lewd did I live, & evil I did dwel.

Turning to non-classified matters, I've been rolling my eyes into my cranium at the whole Ted Haggard affair. I'm of the opinion that trying to "cure" homosexuality is like trying to cure someone of disliking Brussels sprouts--impossible, and thus an utter waste of time, space, and energy. And homophobic, but of course homophobia is a creation of us immoral, mentally ill traitors on the Left as an excuse for us to do whatever the hell we want before we start indulging in hot man-on-dog action under the glare of the eye of Mordor.

Ahem. I'm curious to find out what this allegedly curative process entails. Not that it would work on me--I'm not gay, for starters, and since I suspect it involves something to the effect of straying from Christ and reading that passage in Leviticus until your brain bleeds, it wouldn't take even if I were into "tuna tacos," to put it, um, quaintly--but I can't help but wonder if it's similar to the scenario posited by the great Jon Stewart last night on The Daily Show, wherein he likened the treatment to Dad catching you smoking behind the garage and then forcing you to smoke a whole carton. Hee. Yeah, like, do they stick you in Oz or something? That's not a guarantee, though--I just remembered this little tidbit I read about Lawrence of Arabia, who was raped and beaten by brigands and experienced "a delicious warmth...swelling through [him]." And then--THEN--after that happened, he actually PAID young, hot, swarthy natives to flog his buttocks whilst engaging in gay coitus. Horrors! Point being (other than that the "cure" for homosexuality is elusive and partial and differs with each individual*), I should do some research on this topic--the HomoCure, not gay flog-fucking--and share the info with y'all so you don't have to do it yourselves. Hell, it's not like I have anything better to do right now anyway, other than deal with this ID theft bullshit that I'm not allowed to discuss in any detail but keep bringing up because I'm an evil tease.

I've mentioned on here before that I grew up just 45 minutes from Amish Ground Zero, and the runoff effect into Harrisburg is a whole motherlode of hyperreligious, patriarchal bullshit, including but certainly not limited to fag-bashing. Ironic, perhaps, that three of my very close friends at my immensely gay-loathing high school--two girls and a guy--came out of their respective closets when we were in college. (We all joke that there's something in the water...hey, Three Mile Island is just down the road!) And now that I think about it, while lesbianism is certainly considered immoral in that them thar neck of the woods, I never thought it carried quite the visceral loathing and sense of betrayal that male homosexuality did, or does. So what the hell is that all about? Is this an extreme, Bible-freak example of more typical straight-male homophobia--you know, refusing to see Brokeback Mountain because you might catch gayosity? And could someone please explain to me how gay marriage is a threat to traditional marriage? Or will that just lure me down the rabbit hole of utter ignorance and stupidity, which I'll then end up trying to make sense of and just emerge feeling stupider than I already do?

Oh, yes, would that we could all fit into the traditional bounds of God, country, and family, and that all the therapy and religious training in the world would make that possible. Such a lovely thought, no? Such a lovely, idyllic, frightening, disgusting, Disney-esque, devastating thought.

Sting Would Be Ashamed

2007-01-23T11:28:00.000-05:00

Okay, here's some more Keystone Kops antics to keep you chuckling. (At me? Heaven forfend.)

I think I mentioned that right before Christmas, my dad and I went to my local precinct to report a case of grand larceny (that's the worst case of grand larceny I've ever seen! Take two Cipro and call me in the morning. Ahem.) that the bitch who stole my wallet perpetrated in the Bronx. The Astoria cops said, well, since the crime was committed in Precinct X, and we're Precinct Y, you'll have to go up to Precinct X and file the report there. As I had an audition later that afternoon, and neither of us had the smoggiest idea where Precinct X was, we asked Precinct Y to fax our material there. They complied, we spoke to Precinct Y, they told us they were on it. End of Act One.

Act Two, Scene 1. My dad calls Precinct X to find out the status of our report--like, did they give us a case number, for starters. Ummm...let's see. Rustling of paper, checking in system. Well, you know, Mr. Karla's Dad, it's the damndest thing, but...we kind of sort of "misplaced" your report. Oh, I know! It's terrible, and we are so. Sorry. Ummm...would you mind coming up here and filing the report in person...? (I'm imagining that big goofy oops-I-fucked-up-but-don't-shoot-me grin Homer Simpson got on his face that time he was heckling Ned Flanders at the Little League game and then Flanders made Homer the coach to teach him a lesson.)

Act Two, Scene Two. Dad and I hire a car, since we have no idea where this place is, to take us to Precinct X. We tell an admin assistant that we're here to file a report. She actually remembers the case, but she tells us she cannot take the report herself, as Grand Larceny is one of the seven major crimes that must be filed directly with an officer. Okay so far, but the sarge-in-charge is not there that day, as he worked till midnight the night before. Can we come back tomorrow? As we sit there, mouths agape, another officer comes over. She's very nice, very together. She asks us where the crime took place, asks me where I live. Tells us, okay, since you live in Precinct Y, that's where you have to file the report. But...but...butbutbut...? I know, says the officer. Tell them to look on page 35 of the General Police Procedures Manual (or whatever it's called); it'll tell them you have to file the report in your precinct of residence. Have a nice day.

If I weren't so exhausted by this whole melodrama, I'd be more amused at the way the NYPD is playing Hot Potato with the jurisdiction on this case. I picture a cop from Precinct X saying to a cop from Precinct Y, "You," and the cop from Precinct Y responding, "No, you." "No, YOU!" "No, no, no, YOU!" "No, I insist--YOU!" and so on. Or perhaps it would look more like, "I ain't touchin' it." "Well, I ain't touchin' it neither." "Ain't my job to touch it--you touch it." "Bitch, I SAID I ain't touchin' it! Talk to the hand!"

Moral of the story, kids--don't carry your wallet in...oh, never mind.

More Red Tape

2007-01-12T15:58:00.000-05:00

And the fun just doesn't stop when there's a government bureaucracy involved! This afternoon, I trudged down to the precinct here in SoAsLIC (Southern Astoria/Long Island City, in case you were wondering--my old friend Mr. Shangles and I thought that might well be a snappy real estate designation along the lines of DUMBO and NoHo, and we should all listen to him, because he's getting a Ph. D. in geography) to officially and legally report the theft of my identity. When I called the police station yesterday, I was told to "bring whatever material [I] had plus [my] ID." So I scraped up the fraud affidavits and the statements, slapped them into a folder, and sallied forth. Turns out the only documents they can use are the fraud affidavits, of which I have only one, and it has to be notarized before they can file a report. Oops. I did not know this. Nor did anyone see fit to mention this over the phone. As my dad put it, their MO is, "Sure, bring whatever you have down, and we'll take a look at it, and then we'll tell you we can't use it, so then you can go fix it and come down here again."

And they wonder why these things go unreported. And aside from, oh, getting rid of the roaches in my apartment, or finding gainful employment, or refurbishing my German, I really don't have anything better to do. Did you know that dealing with government bureaucracies can untarp massive wells of ickiness? I'm sitting here typing this in the relative comfort of my apartment and all I can see is a urine-soaked, paint-peeling municipal hallway.

"Being a fucking pussy"? Well, that's one way to put it, certainly.

Son, Be a Dentist-You'll Be A Success

2007-01-09T16:56:00.000-05:00

Shout-out to my fellow musical theatre geeks for the title. I was toying with using the whole Steve Martin/Bill Murray S&M sequence wherein Bill Murray, upon having a tooth extracted, ecstatically hollers "Ohhhh...candy bar! Gonna get a candy bar!" whilst Steve Martin bears down on his jaw with the savagery of a rabid SS officer, but I thought perhaps that would be a mite obscure. I guess I should point out that the above is from the movie version of Little Shop of Horrors-the musical version, of course, not the 1971 Jack Nicholson straight horror flick, which I don't think I could watch because I'd be sitting there singing along to, well, nothing. Which is okay if you're alone, but I know from experience that singing show tunes under any circumstances tends to drive those around me to drink, insanity, or murder. Sometimes all three at once.

Unnecessary but potentially amusing prologue aside, I made a trip to the dentist today to see what was up with a molar that's been twingeing off and on for a couple of weeks now. Since moving here eight years ago, I've been to a dentist twice. And unlike a friend of mine who shall remain anonymous for the purpose of this anecdote, I don't spend forty-five minutes at a clip brushing, flossing, Water Pik-ing, and gargling with extra-strength organic mouthwash. I tend toward the benign neglect philosophy of dental care, a stance further aggravated by my coffee and nicotine habits. Given the evidence, it seemed reasonable to assume that the twingeing in my molar was the beginning of the end for my tooth. I've never had a root canal, but I've heard stories. And like appendicitis and cancer, it's one of those things I'd deal with if I had to, but I don't precisely wish upon myself. Well, except when deep in the throes of "crucify meeee!", but let's move on.

Picked a dentist out of the Queens Yellow Pages ("Gentle Dentistry"--sounded good), toddled off, filled out the paperwork, got X-rayed, waited for the verdict. Which was? Nothing. Not a damn thing is wrong with my tooth. According to my new very pleasant, if somewhat reserved, but fairly gentle dentist, the molar is "sensitive." That's it. Brush with Sensodyne, come back in six months. As for the other teeth, there's an infinitesimal pit that may or may not develop into a cavity in another molar, but is fine for now.

I've had two cavities in my lifetime, when I was nine and 11. I went through two excruciating years of orthodontia in middle school (curiously, the bullies never said word one about the tinsel teeth. I guess stomping after me in the hallways chanting "Fat bitch" slaked their thirst for brutality), and I had my wisdom teeth extracted when I was fifteen (and let me tell you, I swelled up like an eggplant! Holy shit--I had no freakin' clue my face could get that big, and I thought it was permanent, and when another friend of mine who shall also remain anonymous dropped by to offer "comfort" saw me, she shrieked, "Oh my god, you look like Eric Stolz in Mask!"). I've gone four years--twice--without seeing a dentist. The way I figure it, my teeth should be rotting out of my head and my gums should have receded to the quick long ago. I am now firmly convinced that I have ivories of Kryptonite. Which I suppose would technically make them Kryptonite instead of ivory, but details, details.

Bottom line--I gots good teeth. Thank god. Or fluoridated water. I'll go with Door No. 2.

Identity Crises, Missed Weddings, and Squandered Talents--Live at 11!

2007-01-08T13:27:00.000-05:00

I mentioned in passing in my last post that I lost (or someone stole) my wallet on or around November 15 in the 23rd Street N/R Station in Manhattan. Fortunately, I was on my way to my therapy group, so I was able to hit up my generous friend Muzetta for a loan to help get me through the next few days. Went through the whole dance of cancelling my credit and ATM cards and figured that would be the end of it. Dumbass that I am, my Social Security card was in my wallet. Need I go on? I mean, really, what do you think could possibly happen, given the intrinsic decency and lack of financial desperation so characteristic of humanity at large? Well, let's see. First off, the woman--I know it's a woman, 'cause she's using my name, and unfeminine as I consider it, "Karla" is not androgynous--forged a check belonging to a couple in Mt. Kisco who, as I mentioned in my last post, may or may not exist, deposited it in my bank account, extracted a considerable sum of money from that transaction, then hefted an even more considerable sum of money from my dad's account. The papa and I filled out a report with my local precinct and did all the requisite paperwork with the bank, then closed our accounts and figured that would be the end of it. Notice a theme here?

Yesterday evening, I returned from a weekend in PA, where I attended my 80-year-old grandfather's wedding, to find a whole stack of peculiar envelopes outside my door. Actually, the envelopes themselves weren't peculiar, as they were all from mainstream corporate behemoth merchants, but since I make a point of patronizing independent and/or cheap-assed boutiques, it didn't take a huge amount of neurosynaptic power to deduce that, yet again, something was rotten in the state of Denmark. Turns out the thief opened five credit cards in my name, a situation I at once find mind-boggling and terrifying, especially given my abysmal credit history. I've been joking to all my friends since this thing happened that I pitied the po' fool who attempted to open a credit card in my name, beings I'm some $2K and change in the hole on the one credit card I did open back in the day, when I had a steady, respectable job, because there was no way in hell any respectable merchant was going to allow an irresponsible, poverty-stricken case like me the opportunity to rack up even more charges on things I don't need and can't afford. Um, ha ha ha? WHAT are these stores THINKING? If I worked for a credit card company, I would NEVER offer me credit, and here are these people flippin' out the plastic like it's chocolate-covered peanuts to a person who isn't even, well, ME! Perhaps that's why...? I'm not sure I exactly believe in karmic retribution, but perhaps I should start.

And you want to know the best/worst part? You probably already know this, but I did not, given that I tend to be completely out of it regarding financial intricacies, but if you go to a store and open an account with them, you don't have to wait until you receive your card in the mail to start using it. No, they'll give you a "shopper's card," or in-store credit, or however they happen to dress it up, and you can start racking up the goods that very day. So much wrong with that, I don't even know where to start. I rather doubt any higher-ups at the credit card companies or behemoth corporate retailers are reading my blog, but a girl can dream, and thus I will outline some ostensibly obvious hazards:

1. If you don't check to see if the person to whom you're issuing the card is, in fact, the real McCoy, chances are very, very good that the real McCoy will find out what the identity thief is up to and will go through the process of cancelling the fraudulent accounts. Now, Behemoths, as you well know, TRMcC is not responsible for reimbursing you for any goods or services purchased under a fraudulent identity, and unless they catch the thief, you're gonna be out at least a couple grand. But hey, what do you care? There's more where that came from, right? And hey, what's a couple grand to you? What do I think this is, 1953 or something?

2. Okay, you've ascertained that I am, in fact, who I say I am. You've taken a blood sample, checked the footprints on my birth certificate--all of which you've managed to do at your foldout table in the front of the store next to the $400 pleather pants. But you don't check my credit history. As I said before, I would not issue me a credit card. If I, a self-realized irresponsible individual, can at least manage to be responsible enough to acknowledge that I am incapable of handling a credit card, is it too much to ask an exponentially larger body of individuals to run the quickest of checks on me and determine the same thing?
Yes, I realize that you didn't precisely offer the woman claiming to be me a $10,000 credit line. But still. Which brings us back to the first point, and so on in a continuous loop.

I have to say, the fraud departments at the various retailers have been nothing short of lovely and accomodating, and to my credit (hee), my dark sense of humor has stood in good stead. If nothing else, I've managed to keep them entertained, although one lady suggested I stop watching so much Court TV. Good advice.

*** *** *** *** ***
In happier news, my 80-year-old grandpa and his 72(?)-year-old girlfriend of four years tied the proverbial knot this past Saturday at their home in the suburbs of Harrisburg, PA. The only glitch was I missed the ceremony, even though I showed up 15 minutes before it was scheduled to take place. Grandma and Grandpa decided that since everyone else was already there, they might as well get it over with. The freakin' fudge? Y'all couldn't wait 15 more minutes for the only representative of the Grandpa side of the family to show up--on time, I might add? (English 101 students--behold an example of a rhetorical question.) In fairness to the lovebirds, I cannot imagine that planning and executing even the briefest, most unpretentious of nuptials at their advanced ages is without its considerable emotional and physical toll. In fact, they both made that abundantly clear several times throughout the day--my grandma voicing the sentiment that she'd been waiting for months for this day, and she was so glad it was over; my grandpa falling asleep in his chair in the breezeway while my new family and I yakked it up. Well, he does suffer from sleep apnea.
Oh, yes, a bit of not-so-trivial trivia--my grandmother baked her own wedding cake. Yes, she used to run a bakery, so this enterprise was--wait for it--a piece of cake by comparison, but wow. Feeling inadequate yet? And yes, it was delicious--she made it from real ingredients, after all.
Much love to both grandparents. I don't know if I can fully express how much I love you both. And thanks so much for everything.

*** *** *** *** ***
Okay, here's a little moral/metaphysical puzzle for ya. What, exactly, does it mean to "waste one's talent"? My grandma claims I am wasting my talent by not even attempting to pursue a career as a singer/actress. No, she's not an expert, but she knows what she likes, and she's not the only person who's told me I'm a good singer/actress. Is it "wasting my talent" if I just sing for my grandparents and various friends? I mean, I don't consider them a waste, certainly.

Of course, if you haven't heard me sing, I don't expect you to be able to gauge whether or not I have the goods to carve out any success in the entertainment industry. And believe me, I am well aware of my flaws. And there's a whole other motherlode of muck and mire to plow through around this issue, which I'll spare you for now. If you'd be so kind, please stick to this question and share your thoughts.

Out of Hiding (And Happy New Year)

2007-01-03T15:37:00.000-05:00

Um. Well. Hi, all. Been a while. Wish I had a creative excuse to explain away my absence. I can think of a few off the top of my head. Feel free to use any of them for your own nefarious purposes:

1. Laid up in bed with a debilitating case of typhus (not to be confused with typhoid, by the way. You contract the former from lice, and the latter from contaminated water.).

2. Revelling in an erotic maelstrom with Kevin Kline, Liam Neeson, the long-haired greasy guy from the Metallica cover band that plays down at that bar on the Lower East Side where the kosher deli where the Rosenbergs shopped used to be*, the Hitachi Magic Wand, and various fictional characters including but not limited to Rhett Butler, Atticus Finch, and Konstantin from Chekov's The Seagull.

3. On a six-week goodwill tour of Africa, trying to undo the damage wrought by overzealous, ill-informed Mormon missionaries. I was nice about it, though.

4. Smashing each and every roach in my kitchen with a stiletto heel.

5. Getting wasted with Jimmy Page.

6. Learning to clog dance from a band of schizophrenic midgets.

7. Writing the Great American Novel, getting it published, winning the National Book Award, punching Jonathan Franzen in the face at the book release party, and spending two weeks in Riker's.

8. Spending two weeks in Riker's without all the glam-fab prelude.

9. Playing Stella Kowalski at Circle in the Square. (Hint, agents, directors, et. al.!)

10. Imprisoned in a straitjacket in a padded cell at Bellevue after distributing leaflets emphasizing the political importance of eating a teaspoon of wheat germ with every meal.

Impressive, no? Sad to say, I was engaged in none of the above. Oh, I could well have undertaken the roach project, and there are plenty of times wherein I think the men in white with the butterfly net should well cart me off to the bin and dope me up with Thorazine, but the truth is, as always, so much more mundane. I was working a temp job at a property management office in Midtown East/Turtle Bay and instead of using my considerable computer time to subject y'all to my verbal masturbation, I spent it reading the old "7th Heaven" recaps on Television Without Pity. Now, there are certainly far worse ways to spend one's time, but I nonetheless allowed myself to be lulled into a state of passivity that, while it afforded me the opportunity to feel superior to a TV family of the Xtian faith, prevented me from coming out of my head and doing the things that needed to be done to join the land of the living.

Oh, yes, and I came down with a stomach bug, and just as I was recovering from that, I came down with a cold, and in the middle of transitioning from one disease to another, I found out that someone was using my stolen driver's license to (badly) forge my signature on some cheques that may or may not belong to a couple in Mount Kisco who may or may not exist. Fortunately, the NYPD was very helpful and efficient and caught that rapscallion thief in no time. (How much of that statement would you guess is true?)

On the bright side? I finally met the lovely Ayun Halliday at Vox Pops in some neighborhood in the middle of nowhere, Brooklyn--no one seemed to quite know where we were, although Miss Ayunee suggested the name of the enclave was Ditmas Heights. Missed the reading, and stood around feeling like the most awkward, dweebiest lump of nothing this side of the East River (I swear, I have not felt that awkward and lame since college! Well, except for that time I was in a bar and I went up to say hi to this singer on whom I had a huge crush and he snipped "Hi" at me and turned away and the friend I was with kept giving me pitying stares and I didn't know who to bash with a meat axe first, and I include myself in that. We're all cool now, except I haven't actually spoken to the friend or the singer in two years) until I introduced myself to Ayun H. and she recognized me as "Karla from the MySpace group". Sigh. Double bonus points for letting me use her cell phone to make several interrupted and thus panicky calls to a friend whose party I was agitating to attend way the hell down (up?) by the river in Williamsburg. (Did I make it? I'll never tell! Oh, the suspense!)**

I'm hesitant to mention this next item, because I don't want to jinx it, but I am very strongly in the running for a slot in an improv comedy troupe called the Grown-Ups Playground, which struts its stuff at the New York Comedy Club (East 24th between 2nd and 3rd in Manhattan) every Saturday night at 6 pm. I'll be performing my trial show on January 13, so if you're in the NYC area, please come down and take a gander. Well, unless I fuck up, in which case, stay the hell away. BIG SHOUT-OUT to Sarito for the tip-off!

New Year's Resolutions? Feh. Lose weight, I guess. Be a better person. Maybe I should make some. I need some focus right now. Odd-numbered years throw me off. They're too linear. I prefer the roundness of a six or an eight. Don't ask why, 'cause I don't really know.

I can tell you this--I feel MUCH safer now that Saddam Hussein has been hanged. I'm sure we all do, as well as supremely vindicated. Har.

Till next, loved ones...

*Doesn't exist, but it could!
**Yes--barely. But that's another story, and I'm a tease.

Movin' Out

2006-11-08T11:31:00.000-05:00

I'm thinking of moving again. I believe I suffer from what astrologers call a "geographic," which is one who believes his or her happiness lies in location. Or to put it another way, "Wherever you go, there you are." And since I'm not too thrilled at the moment to be, well, with myself, my geographical clock is ticking overtime.

Of course it's all fantasy at this point, because I am not one of those people who can stuff everything she owns, including her cats, into a knapsack and hie off to parts unknown. I have too much emotional baggage and far, far too little gumption, not to mention a loving but immensely overprotective dad who would not let my whereabouts stay unknown, I can assure you. And while many would disagree, I consider myself far too decent a person to do such a thing to my poor dad, whose life revolves around me, the cat, and his business, in that order. Besides, I'd miss him.

So there's that, and there's my penchant for staying in abusive relationships, tiptoeing around like a geisha, hoping if I'm nice enough and quiet enough and say just the right things at the right times, I can fix everything, because it was my fault in the first place. (Thanks, Mom!) I cannot honestly say New York has treated me well. This hardly makes me an anomaly, because, after all, you don't come to New York to be treated well. You come to New York to divide and conquer, and you'd better have the hide of a rhino. Alas, I have the skin of an onion. I may have the mouth of a rhino, or at least of a stevedore, but on me, it's like building a house over quicksand. I can be bragging about how I don't take no crap from nobody one minute and be bawling the next because that man over there in the green suit gave me a dirty look, and he obviously can see through me to my awful, evil inner core even though he's never met me in my life. (FYI, I no longer brag about not taking no crap from nobody. Instead, I brag about having the skin of an onion and the emotional resilience of a sponge. Or rather, I don't brag, I just tell it like it is, but I do it in a way that a friend once described as "arrogantly insecure." Like, "I have the emotional skills of a three-year-old who's been locked in a closet her entire short life, and what are you gonna do about it, motherfucker?")

It occurs to me that perhaps I should not use such a public forum to admit the full degree of my codependent spinelessness, as I fear it might well send a plethora of assholes scurrying to my door. But that's been going on my whole life anyway so really, what's a few thousand more? Bring 'em on!

Anyway, back to moving. Where were we? Mouth of rhino, skin of onion, eye of newt (heh)--right. I am also good at deluding myself, particularly when said delusion materializes in the face of opposition from others, particularly elder others. Like, when I was thirteen, I actually convinced myself that living in NYC with no money, working crap jobs and starving for my art would be fun or something, because those who asserted otherwise wore puff-paint sweatshirts, worked as secretaries in the PA House of Representatives, and went to holy-roller churches every Sunday. And guess what? They were right! It's not fun! It's humiliating and degrading and soul-crushing--all the qualities endemic to an atheist childhood in East Jesus.

You could argue that at least I get to be humiliated and degraded and crushed in New York City, which is far superior to experiencing the above in PA, and you'd be mostly right. But dammit--and stop me if you've heard this one--New York just ain't what it used to be, people! The New York in which I expected to humiliate and degrade myself sounded the death knell when Disney bought out Times Square in the mid-90's, and from there it's been a slippery condemned path toward Yuppies and "hip" restaurants and goddamn motherfucking chain stores that I could go to in, like, my own hometown--or at least in the Philly suburbs, since I am sure those on the Harrisburg city council would dismiss such stores as Anthropologie as "too high-end for people like us." It's lonely as hell to be humiliated and degraded in a city where everyone else is striving up, up to god knows where and for what--another "hip" restaurant? More chain stores? No wonder my confrere the Pirate never leaves the house. I suppose I can include myself in that, too.

The Pirate has been talking lately about moving to Vancouver, which has less to do with the state of NYC than it does to do with the state of the Union, although perhaps last night's House victory will buy him some time. But I'm betting he doesn't move. I'm betting I won't, either, as much as I dream about bartending in Barrow, Alaska or, shit, even moving to a smaller, cheaper city like Baltimore or Atlanta (the latter of which is home to one of my favorite authors, Hollis Gillespie, and maybe if I move there she and her sideshow freak friends will take me under their wing and we'll all live happily ever after). If there's one thing my mother instilled in me, it's how to survive a crappy relationship. I never got to come out on top with her, nor with the vast majority of the other dicks, male and female, who've passed through my life, but call me deluded or sick or just plain too fucking lazy to move my fat ass elsewhere, it looks like I'm in this relationship for the long haul, and I'm still clinging to the belief that I'll come out on top.

Work Ethics

2006-11-06T14:16:00.000-05:00

I've been working for the past week in a commercial real estate office on Park Avenue in the 50s. I can think of few things more soul-crushing, mind-numbing, brain-draining, and a whole host of other synonyms for boring than commercial real estate, and yet as a temp job, it's not so bad as far as these things go. For one, I don't have to interact with panicky Upper East Side mothers calling in and demanding their son's Lamcital, so that leaves me a lot of time for spacing out and constructing Walter Mitty fantasies in my head. Two, it's only three days a week, so that leaves me time to "write," except I've been using that time I should ostensibly be using to further my so-called career as an excuse to stay in bed and moan about how awful a writer I am, and how when I was ignorant of my ignorance, I could easily and arrogantly dash off twenty nonsensical but lovely-sounding pages and call it a short story. No more. Now I have to work at it, and I'm not sure I know how to.

I've never been much of a worker, unless I knew that I would succeed at whatever I was working on. When I transferred to a college preparatory academy in sixth grade and the straight A's I'd plucked like strawberries in elementary school suddenly stopped falling into my lap, with the encouragement of my classmates, I declared myself stupid. When I discovered that the cello required talent and effort far beyond my childish capabilities, I decided it was pointless to practice unless under threat from my mother to throw me out the window. I've never minded working at acting, because even in the darkest of times in the worst of productions, I somehow knew we'd all pull together in the end--or at least I would, and to hell with everyone else.

It helps, too, if I don't particularly care about the work I'm doing. That's the beautiful thing about temping--no one expects you to care, dammit, they just expect you to do the job well enough that it gets done and no one is killed or maimed along the way. But I do care about writing, almost too much, if there is such a thing. I care about it so much I can't even look it in the face and say, yes, this is really, really what I want to do with my life. It scares me to work on a piece and then have to chuck it because it's the complete opposite of what I wanted to say, or because it ended up coming from a place so far removed from anything in my particular human experience that I can't bear to let anyone read it, because it must be a truckload of bullshit and apple butter.

When I was a teacher, I cared a great deal. I was teaching mostly black and Hispanic kids from the inner city at a two-year college, and I wanted to do the proverbial Right Thing. I came home physically and emotionally exhausted every day, terrified of being exposed as the fraud I was, a messed-up kid with an MFA. What did I know about life, or literature? What business did I have inflicting myself on these kids? They'd already been through the worst in education NYC has to offer; they didn't need me in there fucking it up worse. When the layoff came (due to budget cuts, not because of anything I did), I was at once dismayed and relieved.

Two members of my acquaintance have recently declared their desire to become college professors. I envy them that. I don't think I could go down that path again. I either need to find a job that doesn't bore me to death but in which I'm not emotionally invested, or somehow get over this fear that I have no business putting myself out there. That's where I'm at right now, straddling this line between curling up in my bed and hiding for the rest of my life or throwing myself out there and risk getting hit in the face with an axe and I tell you, I can't think which is more terrifying.

Frankly, My Dear...

2006-10-27T14:07:00.000-04:00

Such a baaaaad title, given the text I'll be taking today. And it's a Gone with the Wind reference, which I know will send a certain person who shall remain anonymous (Marcia) to the loo with dry heaves. As they say in the Jack Chick tracts, haw haw!

Ahem. As I mentioned, I've been rereading Sarah Vowell's books lately. I can't help but love a self-realized history geek who manages to work President James A. Garfield into the same sentence as Lou Reed, and who publicly admits to once having uttered the phrase "Wonder Twin powers...activate! Form of...a straight-A student." That said, I also "can't help but" feel like a total dumbass in her literary presence. I mean, the lady is a nerd. And I envy that. I wish I had the drive and the attention span to "go too far and care too much about a subject," as SV describes herself. Oh, sure, I have the Rosenberg case to keep my soupcon of nerdosity thumpin', but that's nothing compared to SV and the geekiness of some of my friends. The Pirate, for example, has a master's in medieval history. He can also hold forth on physics, current events, George Balanchine versus Jerome Robbins, Bela Bartok, and every war movie ever made. Only twice have I been able to point out errors in his narrative. Once, he claimed Auschwitz was liberated in April 1945, but I happened to know it was liberated in late January of that year. Another time, he claimed that Morgan Freeman was the original Gordon on Sesame Street. I am in the proud possession of a book called Sesame Street: Unpaved, and was thus able to inform him that the only 1970's kids' show on which Morgan Freeman appeared was The Electric Company. Both times, the Pirate felt it necessary to go look this shit up on the Internet rather than take me at face value. How insulting! I suppose that's what I get for jettisoning my "commitment to excellence" shortly after my mother died, so exhausted was I by her campaign to turn me into a Stepford student by drilling me on the various works of obscure Baroque composers and clobbering me upside the head. But I digress, per usual. Point being, as a former straight-A student myself turned surly underachiever, I am wildly intimidated and self-loathing in the face of such overwhelming nerdiness, whether leaping from the pages of SV's books or filtering through my telephone courtesy of the Pirate.

But there is one area in which I feel confident enough to refute SV's position, and that is on the topic of Frank Sinatra. As with Elvis, another one of SV's musical heroes, I have never quite understood the Sinatra mania in which at least two-thirds of my fellow townspeople appear to be in possession. Don't get me wrong--I like Sinatra. I find him enjoyable to listen to, albeit in small doses. "New York, New York" never fails to engender a big, goofy grin on my face, "Luck Be a Lady" makes me want to throw on the glad rags and swill a few martinis at the Stork Club, and even "Something Stupid" sets my toes tapping, despite the fact that he's singing it with his daughter and because Sideshow Bob sang a version of it in the Simpsons episode wherein he marries Aunt Selma and subsequently tries to murder her during a postcoital viewing of McGyver. ("And then I go and spoil it all by doing something stupid like explode you." Remember that? Sigh.) But too much Sinatra is like being drenched with maple syrup. I don't need to feel like I'm in a mob movie for more than oh, say, ten minutes before I find myself yearning for things like bagels and the Equal Rights Amendment. (For the record (hee), I feel compelled to state that I really. Don't. Like Elvis. At all. "Jailhouse Rock" is about all I can handle before I have to snap off the radio and bleach my brain.)

I was partially raised by my maternal grandparents, and so I grew up listening to the greatest hits of World War II. Go to my grandpa's house, and you can still listen to 8-tracks of the Mills Brothers, the Ink Spots, Vera Lynn, and the Andrews Sisters. But there's nary a Sinatra album, cassette, or CD in the house, although many years after her death, I discovered that Frank had been my grandma's favorite singer at one time. When I asked my grandpa why, he said "Because he's overrated." Hmmm, thought eleven-year-old I. He's certainly ubiquitous. (One of the perks of having an intellectual despot mother was learning words like "overrated" and "ubiquitous" at a fairly early age. Those things stayed lodged in my brain; the complete works of Monteverdi did not. Tough titty toenails, Maman.) Summering at the Jersey shore as a kid, I could neither fathom nor handle the Sinatra onslaught that seemed to befall us every time we set foot on certain areas of the Boardwalk. What was the deal with this guy? Why, like Elvis, did he have to be everywhere? What was so all-fired great about him, and what was my problem (and my grandpa's) that we were unable to jump on the Frank-wagon?

My dad, per usual, opened up the Sinatra phenomenon a bit for me in my teens. I learned that at least some of the Frank adoration was warranted, that he was actually a fine musician, and that he had an amazing arranger, Nelson Riddle, who unflaggingly accomodated him after he famously lost his voice sometime around the occasion of his marriage to Ava Gardner. (Another thing I didn't realize, that the Frank with whom I was most familiar was post-voice loss Frank. I've since heard recordings of him singing in the '40s and I recall an angelic tenor, not too different from the crooners emanating from my grandpa's 8-track.) Why so many people slobbered over the man, my dad could not explain. The girls loved his looks, but to me, he was a rubber-faced doofus. (Still is. Heresy!) And yes, he was a fine singer and an excellent showman, but still, why was he a friggin' industry?

Beatlemania, for some reason, I could totally dig. It's not that I'm completely against hero worship. In fact, that's how I've conducted my relationships for most of my life--find someone to worship, hope they pay attention to me, and do everything possible to gain and hold that person's attention, lest I find myself forced to commit suicide. Gee, wonder where I got THAT, Mother? I don't advise living your life this way, and I'm working very very hard to find a new, less degrading way of relating to people, but I get it. It makes sense to me. If I'd been born thirty years earlier, I have no doubt I would have been running after the moptopped lads from Liverpool screaming my lungs bloody. At the very least, I would have ensconced myself in my dorm room at Berkeley, playing "Tomorrow Never Knows" over and over while ingesting copious amounts of acid. And no, I'm neither unaware of nor insensitive to the fact that John and Paul were hardcore Elvis worshippers.

Like anything else of this ilk, when all is said and done, I suppose it's a question of personal taste. The Beatles were brainy. They were trippy. They went to India with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. They assaulted my young, fertile mind with such lyrics as "Now my advice for those who die/Declare the pennies on your eyes" and even "Elementary penguin singing Hare Krishna/Man, you should have seen them kicking Edgar Allan Poe," backed up by wailing guitars, overdubbed strings, and weird, dissonant harmonies. The most sensitive of my erogenous zones has always been my brain, and the Fab Four infiltrated my gray matter with the power of a hypodermic needle delivering a shot of the purest amphetamine. Then, too, let's not forget that they were British. At the crux of hero worship is a strong sense of inferiority, and like many of my tribe (Americans, not nerds), my reaction to the British can best be encapsulated by that old New Yorker cartoon in which an old lady states, "Everyone in Paris is so sophisticated. Even the streetcleaners speak French." Clearly, I'm not the only one with the need to feel inferior to something. Yes, I can and do blame my mother all I want for kindling this need in me, but I have to wonder if I wouldn't have felt the same had she been a garden-variety Bohemian with PMS who didn't beat the living shit out of me every time I failed to cater to her myriad psychotic needs. After all, there's a reason Christianity has been such a, well, "success," and we can't blame it all on the Crusades or the Spanish Inquisition.

And Frank Sinatra? Well, he was smoove. There is a difference between "smoove" and "smooth," and while I'm wont to respond to the latter, I'm rather allergic to the former. "Smoove" is specifically about "come here, baby, I'll buy you diamonds and mink." As spineless as I tend to be, I've never fallen for that jive. If a fellow tried some line like "Your mother should be arrested--she stole the stars and put them in your eyes" on me, I'd laugh in his face. By contrast, when my high school boyfriend told me "You have this alluring quality that makes me want to stand riveted to this spot talking to you all night, but I can't, because my fucking mother needs her car back by one," I fairly swooned. Then, too, I never felt inferior to Frank. We're both from the same people, although as I frequently remind my dad, being one-quarter Italian does not a paisan make. But I think it has less to do with ethnicity than it does the idea of What Women Want, or What Humans Want. Most humans--well, American humans, at least--are easily smooved. They love it. It's no surprise that we have the pituitary case we do sitting in the White House. And although I liked the guy, although I cast my first presidential ballot for him, Clinton was a grade-A smoover. But even though I'm still pissed at him for essentially destroying the last vestiges of the American Left, at least in the mainstream, at least the guy had the goods to back it up, even if he often didn't use them for honorable purposes.

I suppose I get it the Frank thing now, at least on an intellectual level. But I don't want to turn this into some kind of ideological battle any more than I already have. In short, I guess it's more like preferring tomatoes to carrots than it is declaring one's political allegiance, but maybe if I keep this up long enough and do some hardcore research, someone somewhere will give me a Ph. D.

As for Elvis? If someone reading this wants to explain THAT whole mishegoss, be my guest. Because I really. Don't. Get it. At all.

Here We Are Now, Entertain Us

2006-10-25T11:21:00.000-04:00

In addition to my beloved East Village Inky, I've recently discovered two new 'zines of note (thanks to EVI, of course). One is a lovely little softcover called Revelling in New York, written by two Brooklyn gals, Megan and Heather. "Part guidebook, part storytelling," Megan and Heather profile such offbeat activities and venues as the First Saturday Winter Ball at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Alice's Teacup (an Alice in Wonderland-themed restaurant and tea shop on the Upper West Side), and the Roosevelt Island Smallpox Hospital (in ruins, natch). To order it, visit Megan's website at somethingsbegun.com. Price is $2 (not including shipping and handling).

The other 'zine, Xtra Tuf, is written by a commercial salmon fisherwoman named Moe Bowstern, who makes her home in Portland, OR during the off-season and spends the rest of the year fishing in Alaska. Stunningly well-written, in terms even a soft, doughy whiner like I can understand, Xtra Tuf #5: The Strike Issue can be ordered from Microcosm Publishing, a hipper-than-thou 'zine publisher in, yup, Portland, OR. (Well, hipper than I am, anyway, which doesn't take much. I have no way of assessing the rest of my audience. Who knows? Maybe you're hip. Maybe you live in Portland. Maybe you even work for Microcosm.) According to Ayun Halliday, who is at once hipper than I am and a loud, proud, spazzy dork--that's a compliment!--Moe won't get paid for her work until the stock is sold out. So even if you think commercial fishing is not your thing (I would like to point out that I often fantasize about buying a fishing boat and living on Prince Edward Island), be a dear and buy a copy anyway. It's only $5! (Again, not including shipping and handling.)

You've probably guessed I have a bit of a complex about Portland, OR. As a kid, Portland was hallowed ground, home as it was to my doppelganger Ramona Quimby. But that was in the early '80s. Then the grunge thing hit, and hit hard. Suddenly, Portland was this hipster haven of diners, tacky bowling alleys, 'zines (which I learned about from reading Sassy--one of my only saving graces during high school), heroin, and "really cool bands from Seattle." And as much as grunge purported to be about the alienated and disenfranchised, there was only a certain frequency of alienation and disenfranchisement that was acceptable, and I was nowhere near it. I guess there was no room for a loudmouthed, unattractive girl, even if said girl was coping with the death of her mother and the fact that her mother had beaten the shit out of her up until the day she went in for a nine-hour surgery to remove the cancer that was eating away at her colon. Further rubbing salt into that wound was the fact that the same classmates who wanted nothing to do with me because I was such a big, raw nerve insisted they could "feel Kurt's pain, man." Like fuck they could. I am convinced to this day that these pituitary cases knew nothing of pain (well, maybe not nothing--we were all teenagers, after all), that they saw this scrawny, stringy-haired guy on MTV and decided he was cool because he was on MTV, and even though if he'd gone to our high school he'd probably have been beaten up like every day, they decided to emulate him and his, and all of a sudden they were sensitive and deep. Yes, I'm so sure.

I sort of feel like Portland, if I were to go there, would treat me like an abusive boyfriend. On his terms, and under certain conditions, we might make sweet love, but he'd always keep me in my place, and he'd never let me forget that he could get with any girl he wants, all of whom were a million times prettier, smarter, and sweeter than I am. Oddly, I don't feel that way about Seattle, and that's where this whole thing started. Maybe because it's bigger; maybe because it's become synonymous with Bill Gates and Starbucks. For me, loathing Bill Gates and Starbucks is like loathing having a hot knitting needle poked into my eye. Like, shit, doesn't everybody? But the whole alternative thing, as I said, purports to be about misfits uniting, and you'd think it would be some nice commie arrangement where anyone who wants to can eat tempeh burgers and tool around town on bikes, but it's not. You still have to rank. I am no earthly good at the ranking game. Oh, I get caught up in it, because I'm weak and doughy and whiny, but I have never managed to rank. If you take pity and invite me to your party, I guarantee I'll be the one in the corner, worrying about imposing herself on the other guests. Then I'll storm out in tears at some point because I know I'm not hip enough or smart enough or pretty enough or whatever enough to be a ranking guest there, that you invited me because you know I'll help you clean up the beer bottles and puke at the end of the night. Or maybe you invited me because you like my Ethel Merman imitations, and you needed a court jester. Either way, I'll be outside in the cold, sobbing over a cigarette, hating myself for being, well, the way I am and hating you and your friends for being cooler than I am, and hating the damn Darwinian system that keeps us all in our places to begin with. (I just realized this is not a good way to make friends, slapping this Karla trivia up there. Disclaimer: As long as there is no Nirvana or Stone Pearl Pumpkins in Chains on your stereo, I am actually a decent party guest. But the second you press "PLAY" on that tripe, I'm gonna regress. Or if I don't regress, I'm just gonna bitch reeaal loud about your choice of music, and that isn't polite. So if you insist on playing "Black Hole Sun" over and over, either don't invite me or take it like a (wo)man. Thanks.)

By the way, I must confess to having a thing for the Riot Grrrls (platonic). Courtney Love? Now, that's some Seattle pain I can feel.

Influenza, Assassinations, and Other Trifles

2006-10-23T13:45:00.000-04:00

I was chatting with the Pirate the other night when about an hour into our conversation about the Star Wars Holiday Special (more on that later), I felt an invisible nail poking into my right eye. I tried to counter the invisible nail by poking the blunt end of a knitting needle into it (please don't try this at home, kids), but no dice. Then I took the more traditional route of swallowing some Motrin, but that didn't work either, so it was back to the blunt end of the knitting needle. Finally, I begged off, hung up, lay around moaning for twenty minutes or so, and ended up vomiting Pad Thai into a bag next to my bed. Lather, rinse, repeat twenty minutes later. Yoicks. Not sure if that was food poisoning or if I've contracted The Bug That's Going Around (there's always a bug going around in a city of 8 million people), but I'm still not feeling too great. The headache's gone, but my stomach keeps making noises like that alien from Spaceballs is gonna poke its way out of my abdomen and sing "Hello, Mah Baby." Bioterrorism, perhaps?

I have one word to say about the SWHS: Wow. Just...wow. If you've seen it, you know what I mean. If you haven't, I can't really explain its godawfulness to you. All I can do is warn you. There is a scene in it perhaps more disturbing than the one in Pink Flamingos where Divine eats dog shit, and since the Pirate neglected to mention it to me, I feel obliged to share it with you. Harvey Korman's character (yes, Harvey Korman--other guest stars include Art Carney, Bea Arthur, and Jefferson Starship) gives Chewy's dad, Itchy, some kind of 3-D fantasy machine as a Life Day present. The fantasy consists of Diahann Carroll talking all sexy to Itchy (who is, I must remind you, A WOOKIEE) and singing him a love song. There are also shots of Itchy grunting in his chair whilst this is going on. You have been warned. If you still want to seek out this thing on eBay, or if you have a geeky friend who still displays all his Star Wars action figures in the living room and you can get a bootleg off of him, I won't stop you. But don't blame me if you throw up twenty-four hours after you've seen it.

I spent Sunday in bed eating bland food and rereading Sarah Vowell's most recent book, Assassination Vacation. Those of you who are fans of "This American Life" might recognize Sarah Vowell as the squeaky-voiced, yet curmudgeonly commentator on all things historical and macabre. If you're a fan of Disney Pixar (shudder), you might recognize her as the voice of Violet Parr in The Incredibles. If you still don't know who I'm talking about, well, do a Google search. What can I say?

Anyway, in this book, Sarah Vowell chronicles geographical and historical points of interest relating to three presidential assassinations--Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley. No trip is too out-of-the-way or irrelevant for SV, who braves a gut-wrenching boat trip to the Dry Tortugas National Park, where John Wilkes Booth conspirator Samuel Mudd was held prisoner, visits the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia for a glimpse at a piece of flesh that purports to be a piece of Booth's thorax, and tours the site of the former Oneida Community in upstate New York, a former religious commune/free love cult that hosted Garfield assassin Charles Guiteau for a time before abandoning its seamy underside and going into crockery. (The two events were unrelated.) Guiteau, according to Vowell, was "the only guy who couldn't get laid at a free love commune." That would probably be just my luck, too. At any rate, it's a fun, informative read, and I wish I were only half as brilliant and enterprising as Sarah Vowell, but whatever--it's a lovely way to pass the time while laid up with Star Wars Holiday Special Syndrome.

Off the subject, but still important--drop on by Ayun Halliday's new MySpace group and say hi and send her your love. And what's not to love? She's an awesome writer, she still washes her family's clothes at coin laundromats, and if you email her, she'll email you back! Sigh.

Reds

2006-10-17T11:53:00.000-04:00

And the birthday wishes just keep on coming! Thanks to Ruth for the lovely package (three skeins of yarn, Stitch 'N Bitch Nation by Debbie Stoller, a DVD collection of female comedians, and a very odd ribbon featuring a picture of a penguin and the words "I Can Dress Myself." Why can't you reveal the source?). Thanks, too, to my great-aunt Dot, who I am sure is not reading this blog, but who continues to send me a birthday card every year, even though I'm a rotten great-niece and I never, even though I swear I will, send her a response in kind. No more!

I also got another book from my dad, which wasn't a surprise because he told me he was getting it for me, The Rosenberg Letters: A Complete Edition of the Prison Correspondence of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg edited by their older son, Michael Meeropol. I've had a...um, well, I guess you could call it a thing for the Rosenbergs for about five years now, ever since I saw this picture of the two of them kissing in the back of a prison van after their arraignment. People fall in love with couples all the time. Normal people fall in love with, oh, Brangelina or Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner. I happen to be in love with two executed alleged Russian spies. What does that say about ME? Go on, I can take it, motherfuckers!

Actually, the Rosenberg case has lapped at the edges of my consciousness since I was about thirteen. Having spent some of the most formative years of my life under Ronald "We begin bombing in five minutes" Reagan, I assumed that Communism was bad and Russians were bad and everyone accused of spying for Russia was guilty and of course bad, bad, bad. So when I read a little blurb about this couple, who were listening to The Lone Ranger on the radio when Julius was arrested, I thought a)how perverse, but then again, Hitler liked Mickey Mouse and b)obviously they're guilty. How did I know this? I didn't. But hey, if they were arrested and executed for stealing the secret of the atom bomb, they must have been guilty, right? (And I was supposedly a gifted child? How in the hell did that work?)

Over the years, my dad gradually worked on me, explaining that many innocent people are arrested, convicted, and even executed without benefit of a good defense attorney or a truly fair trial. He explained that an eye for an eye was not justice, as prosecutors claimed, and that there was no such thing as "closure," another word the DAs like to bandy about. I don't recall if he ever mentioned the Rosenbergs, but they were always there, lurking about in some kind of netherworld of fact and fiction. They were murderers; they were completely innocent. Ethel was the mastermind (I had no trouble believing this because of my own mother, an ace-jake manipulator whose abuse left me loathing and distrusting most women for longer than I care to admit); Julius was the guilty one. Somewhere in my early twenties, a fellow named David Greenglass seeped in, along with the famous Woody Allen line, "I love him like a brother, David Greenglass." I couldn't figure out why, if he'd lied at the trial, Ethel and Julius had still been executed. And then my dad got me a copy of The Brother: The Untold Story of Atomic Spy David Greenglass and How He Sent His Sister, Ethel Rosenberg, to the Electric Chair by Sam Roberts and I opened it up and saw a picture of that kiss and I just thought, that's it, they can't possibly be guilty.

But guilty of what? The common misconception is that the Rosenbergs were convicted and executed for treason, or for "stealing the secret of the atom bomb," whatever that means. They were not. They were convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage, which is a crime technically punishable by death. However, they were convicted without any evidence save the testimony of David Greenglass, who freely admitted he lied about key points to save his own ass. Then, too, let us not forget Roy Cohn, the closet case assistant prosecutor who admitted to engaging in ex parte communications with J. Edgar Hoover (you know, what is it with these HUAC-era lawmen? Why were they all closet case drag queens, and what was their whole power trip about? Or did I just answer my own question?) about the trial, particularly the sentence of Ethel Rosenberg, which is patently illegal. On that basis alone, I think they should have thrown the whole case out. As for "stealing the secret of the atom bomb," well, as many have pointed out, there's no such thing. The atom bomb is a highly complex entity. There is no such thing as one secret, one pinpoint that says, "Hey! Here I am! Without me, there would be no V-J Day!" And assuming that Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were, beyond a reasonable doubt, one hundred percent guilty of the crime with which they were charged, there were many others who were far more instrumental in transferring atomic secrets to the Russians. One was physicist Klaus Fuchs, a German-born resident of England who'd worked at Los Alamos during the war. The other was Ted Hall, a nineteen-year-old American physics whiz kid from Chicago who also worked at Los Alamos. By dint of UK citizenship, Klaus Fuchs was tried and convicted there, where anti-Communist sentiment was much, much lower. He received fourteen years in prison. Ted Hall was never charged or convicted of anything, although he all but admitted to espionage before his death in 1999.

And what about Julius and Ethel? Well, in the early 1990s, the government released the Venona papers, which were decrypted documents supposedly detailing the activities of several "atom spies" during WWII. One of them, code-named "Liberal," was alleged to have been Julius Rosenberg. Another, code-named "Kalibr," was alleged to have been David Greenglass. There was no code-name for Ethel, because she was not an espionage agent. Yes, that's right--Ethel, supposedly the mastermind behind this atom spy ring, was not herself a spy. And the government knew that all along. But they gave her the death penalty as "leverage" on Julius, in order to force him to confess. As for Julius, assuming the Venona documents are one hundred percent true and correct, it appears he was involved in some kind of low-level non-atomic espionage. The information he supposedly transmitted to his Soviet contact was of little or no value, and certainly not in the construction of the atom bomb.

I'm not even going to try to puzzle out David Greenglass. He admitted to lying under oath, with the government's consent. As I said before, that admission alone should have been enough to throw out the trial. Did he make up the entire story about passing "atomic secrets" to Harry Gold, the courier who visited him in Albuquerque in 1945? He claims not, but how can we trust him?

Obviously, the government has a lot to hide in this case. Surprise, surprise, the government has a lot to hide! Why else would Judge Kaufman, who presided over the trial, seal his private papers until 2026? Why are items taken from the Rosenbergs' apartment still in the custody of the FBI? What happened? That's all I want to know. Who did what and when?

As I write this, I'm wondering what kind of a reaction I'll get, assuming I'll get any. (Besides, of course, "Dude, how boring! Why did you write like ten pages about the Rosenbergs? Who cares?") It amazes me how many people are still convinced "they" were spies, as if the government's papers prove anything one way or the other. And it's always "they." "They" stole the secret of the atom bomb, even though it's clear that Ethel's role was to make coffee and serve sandwiches. Are people that reluctant to believe that the government could orchestrate such a nefarious cover-up? Adults, I mean, not dumb-ass thirteen-year-olds preoccupied with zits and Guns 'n Roses. (I speak of myself, you understand.)

To close out, Julius and Ethel's younger son, Robert Meeropol, is the executive director of The Rosenberg Fund for Children, a foundation dedicated to the financial and emotional support of children whose parents have been imprisoned, injured, or killed because of their political activities. Please check out their website and consider making a donation.

Party Like It's Your Birthday

2006-10-16T12:11:00.000-04:00

Yesterday at 9:30 am EDT, I celebrated exactly thirty years on this planet. I believe the auspicious occasion was marked by walking down to the R train and discovering there were no R trains running to Manhattan, thus forcing me to walk seven blocks in the opposite direction to catch the N train. Oh well, it was a quintessential New York moment. You won't find it in a Woody Allen movie, but trust me, non-New Yorkers: Arriving at your subway stop on a weekend to discover your train isn't running is far more common than gazing out a window of a twentieth-floor loft at a panoramic view of the city lights. Sorry to disappoint.

My acting class gave me a nice surprise--a card, a bunch of sweets, and a rendition of "Happy Birthday." (FYI, the song "Happy Birthday" has a copyright on it! That's why, when you go to The Olive Garden or Chilis on the big day, they sing their own version.) From my dad, I received a check, a CD, and a copy of Amy Sedaris's new book I Like You: Hospitality Under the Influence. A hilarious read, and surprisingly useful. Lots of good recipes, including her famous Tattletail's Cupcakes, which were named second best in NYC by New York Magazine. For those of you unfamiliar with the wacky world of Amy Sedaris, Tattletail is her late rabbit, after whom she named her cupcake venture. She's since changed the name to Dusty's, after the new rabbit who shares her digs.

Every birthday card I've received so far has a cat on it. Wonder why?

So let's talk about those plans for this new decade. An anonymous poster recommended I not get bogged down in the American self-help oeuvre, because writing that novel or acting in that play might afford me what therapy can't. Sound advice, but the problem is, I'm so bogged down in it already it's like I've forgotten how to write. Oh, I can write on this blog without too much trouble, but when I settle down to write fiction, it's like my brain hardens and then spins away, into outer space. I can't wrap my mind around it. I used to be able to rely on random intense spurts of grandiose energy to write reams, but it appears I've outgrown those. If I'm going to write, I have to learn a new way to do it, but I'm not sure how or where or when that's gonna happen. Any advice?

By the way, I'm having a party on the 28th, but since I'm such a huge web celeb (hee) it wouldn't be prudent to reveal the location at this juncture.

T-Minus Three Days and Counting...

2006-10-12T11:54:00.000-04:00

No more brain trust! Yay! At long last, they hired someone else full-time, thus relieving me of my filing/copying/pacifying Upper East Side parents duties slightly earlier than I'd expected, but not a moment too soon. I had to seal my brain off to work there without screaming. Unfortunately, I couldn't unseal it on command at the day's end, so I've been stewing in a whole load of toxic juices for a while now. Gotta keep those seratonin levels up!

In other news, I'm turning thirty on Sunday, and while some older friends are pulling the ain't-tryin'-to-hear-that-you're-just-a-baby routine (justifiably, I must add), it's still a bit of a mind fuck. Sure, I know thirty is the new twenty or whatever, but I grew up reading a lot of Tennessee Williams, and Blanche DuBois was over the hill at my age. My dad, who is fifty-eight going on eighty going on five, had a two-year-old daughter and a mortgage at thirty. My mother had only nine years left to live at thirty, which scares me most of all.

"You don't want to end up like your mother, do you?" was a constant refrain in my childhood. (Not from my dad, I must stress, because he doesn't subscribe to the Auschwitz School of Motivational Techniques.) I've since come up with the snappy retort "You mean dead? 'Cause we're all gonna end up like her at some point." I'm still not entirely sure what was meant by that. As a teenager, I figured it meant living off my parents for my entire life, diddling about in Harrisburg music groups, convinced I had some kind of a career. Well, guess what? Thus far, I'm not that far off. Maybe it meant that I didn't want to end up having a kid and beating the shit out of her. How strange and destructive to grow up thinking I was going to end up like my mother, as if I had no say in the matter. And I really didn't think I did. For all the bluster I heard about having choices, there was still this threat that I was the way I was, and there was nothing I could do about it, because my course was unalterably set. I didn't know who the hell to believe. I certainly couldn't believe my father. Who was he? What did he know about raising kids? And he was the only one calling bullshit on all this, so how could I trust him?

Thank god I don't have a kid to worry about, at least. I swore when I was thirteen I wasn't even going to think about having kids until I was at least thirty-five, and that still stands. The idea of having a thing in my uterus makes me nauseous. I think it stems from a dream I had when I was fourteen in which I was pregnant with a seahorse. Later that year, my biology teacher drew a crude pregnant abdomen on the board with a stick figure fetus to explain amniocentesis, and I actually passed out. I guess if I'm going to do the mom thing, I should adopt, except I think I'm pretty set on the position that I love kids, as long as they belong to someone else.

So what should I do this year? I feel like I should do something momentous, something geared toward putting my life in some kind of order. Should I lose weight and start making the rounds of casting agents? Should I write that novel? Should I just focus on "healing myself", whatever that means? Or should I just get that tattoo and say mission accomplished? Any suggestions, book contracts, or NEA grants would be welcome...

She's Got To Be Somebody's Wookiie

2006-10-10T20:05:00.000-04:00

A few weeks ago, my friend and occasional opera date the Pirate (a.k.a my friend in the Bronx, but the Pirate is snappier and just as apropos) ever so kindly burned me a copy of of perhaps the worst film ever made, The Star Wars Holiday Special. How bad is it? Well, the plot centers around Chewbacca (at this point, Ruth exploded, "Oh, Christ! He's a Wookiie!") and his attempts to get back to his home planet and his wife, child, and father (who never thereafter are heard from again, in any sequel or prequel) for Life Day. Still with me? Okay, the first fifteen minutes of the movie are in Wookiie, without subtitles; there's a scene at the famous nightclub featuring Bea Arthur singing a torch song; and the film wraps up with a "very embarrassed looking" (cf. the Pirate) Harrison Ford, an in-between-operations Mark Hamill, and Carrie Fisher, joining Chewy for the Life Day celebration, capped off with Carrie Fisher singing the Life Day song. Yoicks.

I have not yet watched the movie, but the Pirate's snidely horrified description was enough to convince Ruth to actually volunteer to watch this thing with me. Since she's in the middle of moving, I may have to go out and draft someone else in the meantime (anyone? Bueller?) because ain't no way in hell I'm watching this thing without another sentient being and a case of beer present.

If you really, really wanna hook this flick up yourself, your best bet is eBay, because it exists only on bootleg. According to the Pirate, reaction to this movie was so swift and horrific that George Lucas had all the negatives burned, and no one involved in the project will answer any questions about it. At all. So if you happen to run into Harrison Ford at Hogs 'n Heifers and just for shits and giggles, you ask him about that Star Wars Holiday special, expect nothing in return save a blank stare. No, not even a sock in the face.

Oh, yes--I neglected to mention that, in the grand tradition of absurd Lucasian nomenclature, Chewbacca's father's name is Itchy. Yeah.

*** *** *** *** ***

Fortunately, VH1 has recently been showing a film at the other end of the spectrum (well, not quite, but according to the Pirate, the Star Wars Holiday Special makes Plan 9 From Outer Space look like Citizen Kane), Cameron Crowe's Fast Times at Ridgemont High. I missed out on all the fun, being born in 1976. Just think, if I'd been born ten years earlier, I too could have gone to a high school with Pat Benetar lookalikes and lusted after Rick Springfield sans irony! (Actually, I probably would have been the snarly girl in the corner with the Joy Division T-shirt, and I probably would have wished I'd been born in 1956 so I could have gone to high school in the days of Altamont and Watergate. But that's neither here nor there, since I got stuck going to high school in the fucking grunge era with a bunch of emotional subdwarves who claimed to feel Kurt's pain, man. Oh, the very memory of it makes me want to throw daggers.)

Anyway, not for the first time have I noticed bewildering characteristics and inconsistencies about this film. Since I'm sure Cameron Crowe and Amy Heckerling both have me on their XML feeds, I shall direct my questions to them:

1. Why does the stereo salesman who deflowers Jennifer Jason Leigh take her to "The Point" to accomplish the task? He's 26, right? Doesn't he have his own pad? Or does he still live with his parents because Ridgemont rents are too high for a stereo salesman's wages?

2. Speaking of parents, where the hell are they? Why are teens in these movies always running around wild? Yes, I know, the excuse "they're away for the weekend" is always given, but come on. Do you know how confusing this was for me as an only child? I thought that staying alone in the house was my birthright as an adolescent. Imagine my shock when my dad went to Arizona on business when I was sixteen and he flew my grandmother in to babysit me! Was this just an '80s thing? Did some report come out in the early '90s warning parents against the dangers of leaving their kids home alone for the weekend? Did they get hip to John Hughes flicks? Or was my dad just a total lameass?

3. Did all high schools in the 1980s have, like, 3000 students? And out of these 3000 students, why are only two of them black?

4. I realize this movie is set in SoCal, but why are they playing football in February? Come on! Even in SoCal, that's basketball season!

5. A biology classroom that has a caged monkey. Who? When? Where? I wanna go to that school!

6. How does a teenage boy become a scalper? Come to think of it, how does anyone become a scalper? Please forgive me--I was nudged unequivocally toward a career in the arts, which didn't leave me much room for exploring sketchier options. (Shit, my lameass dad wouldn't even leave me alone for the weekend!) Well, unequivocally, excepr for my guidance counselors, who were, I believe, trying to nudge me toward an exciting career as an admin assistant for the PA State Legislature. Assholes.

That's about it. Oh, except for the age-old, as yet unanswered question as to why all teenagers in these movies are thirty and look it. Well?

Laments

2006-10-09T17:33:00.000-04:00

I haven't been able to think of anything to say for a week. Not that I haven't tried--I attempted to write a piece about a documentary I saw on PBS called No Bigger than a Minute, but I couldn't wrap my mind around anything witty and profound to say about dwarfism. Still can't, actually.

The only thing I can wrap my mind around these days is rest. Curled up in bed, with the blankets around me, daydreaming of exactly the kind of like I've always reviled, a warm, clean, cozy house in the suburbs with quilts and potpourri. I can't believe I used to look at that kind of lifestyle as taking the easy way out. My god, the effort required to run such an operation! I can't even get it together to change my cats' litter half the time.

I feel as though I'm ducking my head, that there's some thing at the center of the fog in front of me, but I can't get a good focus on it. It's sobering to realize that as I wrap up my third decade on this planet, I don't think I've ever had an original thought in my life. There's nothing I can think of that hasn't been thought of before. And it's distressing to realize how ignorant I really am, how mentally and emotionally incapable I am of deciding what I want to do and sticking to it. How do people do it? How do they know so much, or appear to know so much? And where, oh where, do they find the energy? Do they all feel like they've been run over by a bus and they've just learned to suck it up and deal?

Someone once told me that realizing how little you actually know is the beginning of wisdom. In fact, I believe Plato came to the same realization himself. Perhaps this should make me feel better, but it doesn't.

What the hell is wrong with me?

No Surprises Here, Folks

2006-10-03T19:25:00.000-04:00

Oh, my brain feels like it's swimming in cotton batting and amniotic fluid right now. I spent my two days off from the brain trust sleeping and watching CNN, and I feel like someone who's just come out of a coma and has to relearn basic functions. I wish I could just stick a needle in there and drain it off. I also wish electroshock were still de rigeur. Anyone out there want to do a lobotomy, gratis?

Of course, the big stories yesterday were the Amish school shooting and the marc Foley pedophilia scandal. I can't say anything that will do justice to either. I'm not familiar with the area where the shooting took place, although I may have passed through it once as a kid on the way to the Jersey Shore. (That's where we PAers summer--remember the Billy Joel song? "Our fathers fought the Second World War/Spent their weekends on the Jersey Shore...") I can't even say, sadly, that I'm especially shocked that a crazy man would burst into a one-room Amish schoolhouse and start shooting. The world is going to hell in a handbasket. Why would the Amish be immune? The real tragedy, to my mind, is that because of the Amish's lack of exposure to the rest of the world, they aren't buttressed by the same cynicism that manages to keep the rest of us "safe."

Nor am I especially surprised that Marc Foley was, uh, exposed as a pedophile--oh, excuse me, as an "alcoholic with related behavioral problems." So that's what the kids are calling it these days. I simply love how these fucking Republicans accuse us degraded, immoral Lefties of refusing to take responsibility for our actions, then turn around and play the victim card when one of their own is caught flanging his wang over underaged specimens of studly man meat. And bravo, fellas, for shielding your beloved constituents from Foley's proclivities for lo these many years. Why, if folks had known what he was really like, it might have interfered with their decision-making processes the first week of November! And how nice of you to protect your adolescent male charges by encouraging them to stay away from Foley because he has "problems"! A job well done, and pretty fucking typical of what I've come to expect from the party that engendered Nixon, Reagan, and so on down the slippery slope of the Apocalypse.

On a personal note, it doesn't look like I'm going to be able to swing the NeoFuturist gig for the time being. Their rehearsal night is the same as my therapy group. Sigh. Did I mention I'm going to be thirty in twelve days? Am I ever going to get my shit together? If we keep on going the way we are, is there any point?

The Play's The Thing

2006-09-30T09:06:00.000-04:00

By the grace of G-d and the Jewish holidays, I managed to swing two days off from the brain trust. I spent my first day sleeping and arguing with my psychopharm about the necessity of my taking a so-called "mood stabilizer," particularly since the last one they put me on caused my muscles to ache and my knees to feel like they were coming out of their sockets. Although I suppose it's better than arguing with Upper East Side parents about the eventuality of them getting their children's meds to them like, yesterday. It's like waitressing, but I sit all day. Kind of reminds me of when I worked at Friendly's in high school and folks would come in at five and say they had to be at mass at 5:30. What can I tell you? Go to Wendy's. Don't wait till the last minute and then accuse us of delinquency.

Thursday night, my friend dawnybird and I caught our gal Sarito in a series of one-acts at the Producer's Club (358 W. 44th Street between 8th and 9th). Actually, Sarito was in only one--the last one, as luck would have it--playing a seventy-year-old woman with a penchant for, well, dick. (Sarito, for the record, is 59, and if you've seen her picture on her blog, you'll agree she doesn't look 70.) Although I was tempted to be a bad friend and skip out on the evening, beings that my brain felt like it was encased in cement with a cloud of noxious gas swirling around it, I'm glad I went. My favorite play was a poignant story of an estranged uncle showing up at a young lawyer's office to bring him news of his estranged father and his own impending mortality. There was nothing gratuitous about it, thank god--it's a very easy topic about which to be gratuitous.

Also, it occurred to me as I was watching the first play--a strange number about a woman who lies to her new boyfriend about having cystitis to see if he'll stay with her even though they can't have sex for a month--how strange most plays really are. I can be no more or less articulate than that. Seems like, beginning sometime in the late '60s, that plays started to take on this deliberately "quirky" mien, laden with bizarre character details that do little to service the plot but nonetheless give it an "edge." I'm working on a David Lindsay-Abaire play at the moment, and the husband's character has a sexual fetish for eating Barbie doll heads and shitting them out. The whole play is like that--not about shitting Barbie doll heads, but full of bizarre details that just leave you going, "Huh?" For instance, another character's wife was killed when a huge peanut butter jar they bought at Costco fell on her head. I mean, it's not that I don't enjoy the play, but it's so laden with kooky things that it kind of makes me seasick. What happened to going straight for the action? Oh, for the halcyon days of Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams! Even David Mamet is a welcome respite.

Anyway. Speaking of seasick, that plate of lobster ravioli in tomato cream sauce I ate at the Irish pub next to the Producer's Club severely disagreed with me. Not sure if it was my dairy sensitivity or the presence of some rogue bacteria, but ugh. Not the night before the opera, please!

Dreams, Reflections, and Memories

2006-09-25T19:00:00.000-04:00

What a way to start off yet another exciting week at the brain trust: My back seized up in the shower this morning, so now I'm lumbering around with my gut thrust out like a pregnant lady, and I'm still reeling from the nightmare I had about being stuck in the middle of a roundtable discussion about prom in my AP English class. As I was the only one not going, I requested we cease the discussion because I found it painful, and the whole class booed. Like THAT didn't have any basis in reality or anything.

On my way to work, I tried to quell the rising tide of nauseated panic (oh, the stench of those hallways! The fetid stew of the cafeteria, the locker rooms, and hormonal adolescents! How you've seared yourself into my brain; how impossible you are to capture in mere words) with some internal debate about the Andy Warhol documentary I saw on PBS yesterday--unless I missed something at the beginning, how can they do a film about Andy Warhol and not mention Edie Sedgwick? Usually, thinking about passive-agressive hipsters of yore serves as a pleasant diversion from youthful traumas, but in this case it was like trying to salve a burn with butter. So then I tried to resurrect the lovely Tennessee Williams discussion I had with my acting teacher yesterday--FYI, the streetcar named Desire is now a bus (thanks, Claudia, for that disconcerting piece of information)--but that just dredged up the memory of my evil 11th grade English teacher, who dismissed my paper on The Glass Menagerie as "too depressing." I wish I'd known then that TW died with a pill bottle lodged in his throat, or that his sister, Rose (geddit, Mrs. Teacher? Rose? Blue Roses? Laura Wingfield?) was the recipient of the first prefrontal lobotomy in the state of Mississippi. Ah, l'esprit de l'escalier.

Anyway. You think you have this shit resolved, and it turns out all you've managed to do, yet again, is pave over it with a particularly cheap brand of cement.

I'm Pro-Biotic, And I Vote!

2006-09-23T12:45:00.000-04:00

It appears my dad has seen the light at the end of the tunnel of his epic battle with his diseased intestines. He discovered the magic potion known as kefir at a local health food store--local in Harrisburg, no less! I know there are health food stores there, because my mom dated this macrobiotic dude for two years and they used to drag me there to get tofu, but I always assume they'll be closed down because they sell Commie food. Anyway, he's getting used to the taste, but he's hoping the influx of good bacteria will enable him to move his bowels like a normal fifty-eight-year-old who lives on frozen dinner entrees. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like he'll be able to sue the dentist who gave him clindamycin. Although clindamycin, as I've stressed on these pages, is notorious for causing intestinal upset, he was taking other antibiotics for other problems at various times throughout the year, and while the clindamycin probably pushed him over the edge, he can't prove that the drug itself was the sole cause of his problems. Not to mention, he neglected to read the small print, and without that, you don't have a case.

In other news, I'm back in touch with my college drama director, who loathes my undergraduate institution as much as I do. I was on their website yesterday and my eyeballs were bleeding with all those pictures of clean-cut preps in their Polartec fleeces. I'm tempted to add something to the class notes about working as a dominatrix (false) just so I can imagine the gasps of "Well, I never!" (To which Groucho Marx responded, "Well, you should, you might like it.") Ugh. What was I thinking, attending the undergraduate institution which shall remain nameless so I can make fun of it? Even my dad warned me against going there. I will never forget his words--"Those kids are really preppy, and you know how you feel about preppies." But noooo, I was seduced by ivy-covered walls and a beautiful lakefront. My hypothetical kids will do no such thing. They will attend the ugliest state school known to man! Fortunately, my drama director made it somewhat more bearable. I will forever cherish the memory of the playwriting class in which he gently responded to a girl who gave, as an example of stage devices, the story of seeing a play in Dublin about the life of Mrs. Oscar Wilde, in which the playwright recreated her childhood molestation with a huge monster puppet that forced her to fellate it, "This is not a good example, because we have to deal with our feelings about sex, and we have to deal with our feelings about puppets." You may have had to be there. I won't reveal his name either, even though he has tenure.

Nothing doing this weekend. Just sleep, the brother of death. Next weekend, I hit the opera with my friend in the Bronx, who promised to wear a tie.

Baby, I Can Put My Name In Lights

2006-09-21T20:15:00.000-04:00

Thanks to everyone who stopped by yesterday for the interview, and a million thanks to Amy Guth and her publicist Jen for affording me the opportunity to host it, and to get to know Amy. Yay!

So I'm on the mailing list for the New York NeoFuturists, a theatre troupe that was started in Chicago and featured none other than the awesome Ayun Halliday and her husband, Urinetown author Greg Kotis. The Neos are famous for Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind, an attempt to perform thirty plays in sixty minutes. I get this email today that says they're looking for actors to fill out their troupe, so what do I do? Email them to set up an appointment! Oh, I delude myself in spades. Assuming they would take my fat amateur ass, am I really up for turning my Friday and Saturday nights over to late-night theater? What about my acting class? What about my therapy group? How am I going to explain this to my family--oh, wait, that's not an issue, thank god. They'll probably just ask me what the hell has taken me so long. Breathe. Just breathe.

Anyway, we shall see. Chances are not great, but what the hell? Clearly I'm stage-sick--the latest draft of my novel begins with my narrator explaining that the reason she temps is because she's in a comedy troupe called the Misanthropes, the toast of every dank basement in Chinatown and Williamsburg. Maybe I'm just doing it backwards.

I forgot to mention that while Ruth was here, I saw a hilarious show on Queens Public Access. No, I swear--it was genuinely hilarious, not accidentally so. It was a comedy troupe called Cheese Theatre that bills itself as Queens' only sketch comedy troupe. For all I pay attention to my borough of residence, they might well be. The awesome thing about NYC public access is that they're somehow allowed to use words you've never heard in the Bible (christ, they show porn over in Manhattan!), and these folks made good with plenty of "shits" and "motherfuckers." My favorite was an ad for "Gun Clock" by "Malo" in which one fellow is telling another how he was on an elevator with Bill Maher at the same time he was fucking a girl up the ass. Then the clock strikes five and--boom!--the two guys get shot. That's my kind of sketch comedy! I can't tell if this means I'm tremendously evolved or severely emotionally underdeveloped. Perhaps I should get to know my neighbors...?

Anyhoo, wish me luck. I can't tell if I've put my foot in it or I'm about to change my life. Maybe neither.

Amy Guth Has Really Fucking Cool Glasses

2006-09-20T16:35:00.001-04:00

If you haven't yet heard of author/blogger Amy Guth, chances are you'll start hearing her name mentioned a lot in the upcoming months. Her debut novel, Three Fallen Women, which is currently in pre-release from So New Media Press, chronicles the lives of "a frustrated painter newly-aware after a breakdown; a heroin addict whose organs are attempting to warn her she's dying; and a woman who finds serious catharsis in prostitution, castrations and mercy kills – as they individually fall apart, reconstruct, rinse, lather, repeat" and has been described as indispensable for anyone "who thinks the patriarchy needs a suckerpunch to the ballsack." (You'll be hearing that line a lot too.) While you're waiting for your copy to plod its way through the mail, check out Amy's monthly "socio-feminist" column in Outcry magazine and for god's sake, make damn sure you visit her blog and post some comments.

Amy is a former New Yorker who has claimed residence in various other cities, and she apparently has the accent to prove it. Currently living in Chicago, Amy further adds to her contemporary Renaissance woman cred with a stint as an improv-er/collaborator for the hallowed Second City troupe, where she distinguished herself with a little skit about snorting improv coke off a dead hooker.

As I was compiling this interview, I discovered that Amy and I have more in common than smart mouths and cats. Turns out that Amy herself had the same job at NYCO that I did, pimping opera during the 1999-2000 season! Did I mention she also has really fucking cool glasses? And a friend who lives in a yurt! Aces!

Enough patter. Let's let Amy speak for herself...

Where did you come up with the idea for the "What I did with Her Book"
contest?

I lived near a drycleaner in New York City who ran this contest where you
had to make something out of drycleaner bags and wire hangers. The winner
got six months of free dry-cleaning. So, I thought of that one day and
wondered about applying it to myself and that's where it ended up. I've
had a big response so far.

I read your interview on QueerCents, in which Nina says that Three
Fallen Women "has been recommended for anybody who thinks that the
patriarchy needs a suckerpunch to the ballsack." Did you begin this novel
with such, um, lofty aspirations in mind?

No, but I couldn't be happier with that line that has emerged about Three
Fallen Women. I began the novel at a time when I was suddenly very aware
of some women around me having trouble enforcing their boundaries and then
ending up in these extreme situations. So, more or less, I suppose I was
trying to make a statement, whether or not I would have realized that at
the time, and ended up doing it through the mouthpieces of these
characters.

You are a very funny woman, and I'm not just saying that because
you're doing me the honor of appearing on my blog. Do you still find a
huge resistance to being a smart, self-deprecating funny woman? It seems
like for every Janeane Garofalo or Amy Sedaris, there are about thirty Meg
Ryans-that whole brand of fresh-faced, cutsey-pie thing that Hollywood
tries to convince us is high comedy. Do you see us making any headway on
that?

You know, I see a lot of instances of women being faced with a situation
where they can either be supportive of another female artist, or they can
be catty, and they keep opting to be catty, and I just don’t get it.
There's not a cap on success or creativity in the world, but a lot of
women act like it's this crazy competition and it makes me crazy. I
totally believe in supporting people who are out there doing their thing,
and if someone is cool, I want to be friends. It’s really as simple as
that, but people make it needlessly complicated and I wish they didn't. As
for your original question, yes, I do think there is a lot of resistance to
women who are smart and funny. I think it exists because most people want
to be able to categorize everyone they meet and when confronted with
someone who defies categorization, they don't know what to do, so,
unfortunately, a lot of people switch into a negativity mode.

It does seem that a lot of what the cattiness is about-and this is
something I struggle with all the time-is focusing our frustration on each
other, rather than trying to create something new and dismantle this
stronghold from the ground up, or deifying women as peaceful, nurturing
warrior goddesses. It leaves us no room for growth.
I think that's probably true. I just feel like there isn't a cap on
success, or abundance, not really anyway nor, am I wired to really mess
with competitiveness. I just don't see the need for it. So, I I feel like
sharing and outward supportiveness is really necessary to any kind of
successfulness.

Along with "smart-ass," "vegetarian," and "cat lover," one of the
credentials you claim on your blog is "Jew." Your practice strikes me as
awesomely heterogeneous-the sacredness of yoga here, the Wiccan practice
ofswirling honey and sugar and herbs into a bottle there, along with the
traditional apples-and-honey on Rosh Hashanah. How do you see Judaism et.
al. as having shaped and continuing to shape you?

I don't think there is one true religion or way of thinking. Whatever
works and creates positivity in a life is valid for that person. Again and
again it strikes me that there are so many bridges that exist in various
religions to perhaps develop a deeper understanding of each other, and
ourselves, by seeing and understanding those similarities. And, personal
ritual has always fascinated me, particularly in secular contexts. So, to
me, and for probably a lot of other Jews, Judaism isn't a set of beliefs
or practices, but a way to filter things. I mean, we really consider the
hell out of things and I'm no exception. I try to consider as many sides
to any given subject as I possibly can, and I think my decisions are
temporary. By that I mean, why lock myself in? Why should I aspire to feel
the same things and practice it the same ways at 30-ish as I will when I'm
50-ish, right? That would freak me out to lock into one set way of doing
things forever. So, that was a tangent, but basically, I really put
Judaism to work for me because it's like having an organized way to
intentionally disorganize things to run freely in order to see what works
at any given time. Does that make sense?

Works for me! You posted an interesting piece about practicing lashon ha-ra, which
is not spreading "negative truths" unless the person to whom you're
speaking needs the information. How's that working out for you?

I adhere to it everyday. I think it's really important. I mean, haven't we
all slipped and said something crappy about someone? I have and it always
made me feel bad afterwards, to put so much negativity out there like
that. So, I decided to adopt the practice of lashon hara because it's a
solid name for something that's really important to me. There just no
reason to knock other people down and by talking smack, it's like you're
trying to tell people how to feel about someone, which seems manipulative
to me. And, it's easy to keep lashon hara in practice in my daily life,
as I just tell people that I don't have an ear for gossip and that usually
shuts it all down.

Okay, here's a light, dipshitty question to finish up: Tell me about the tattoos.
How many, what are they, the fun stuff. Also, as an ex-New Yorker, can
you recommend a safe, reputable place to get one?

Well, get a tattoo whenever you feel comfortable. You'll walk into a shop
and know it is the right one for you, and the same applies to your artist.
You have to really get along and feel comfortable with the person giving
you a tattoo or you'll always have that slight memory of what a
not-positive experience it was. For a jumping off point, stop people on
the sidewalk with beautiful tattoos and ask them where they went. Ask your
friends. People know good artists.

I have a back piece in progress. The first part has been finished for a
while, so I need to get off my ass (what was I busy doing? writing a
novel?) and add the other three or so sections. But, I also have a little
tattoo on my abdomen, just below my navel. It originally was a memory tat
for my grandmother, but it's fading so I have my eyes open for a way to
redo it but evolve it at the same time.

Thanks a million times over, Amy, for letting me play hostess, and my apologies for not putting this up sooner in the day. Hope everyone played nicely while you were waiting for me to post this.

I Am A Pirate King

2006-09-19T19:32:00.000-04:00

I'm still pushing paper and answering phones at the brain trust, and I am still convinced every kid on the Upper East Side has ADHD. My question is, how many of them actually have ADHD, and how many of them have Upper East Side parents? Oh, what a shitty place to raise your kids. How will they ever learn the fundamental lesson that life's a bitch? Oh, well, maybe they won't have to. Don't cry for them, Argentina. It's not the kids' fault that their parents are such arrogant shits, though.

Last night, I descended further into the bowels of reality TV with ABC's "Wife Swap," which marathon I missed thanks to the always illuminating presence of Ruth and the yoga workshop I attended. Holy shit, these people make poor Jo Frost, SuperNanny, look like Alistair Cooke. Sadly, because ABC is owned by Disney, there's no swinging here. That's a shame, because I'd really like to see John Q. Preppie discover the erotic maelstrom that is Jane P. Scullery Maid and vice-versa. I'm not really sure there's a point to this show other than pure exhibitionism, but who am I to visit judgment? Leave that task to Bitch magazine. I'm just a temp.

The swingin' couples in question were a professional organizer from Southern California and a woman of questionable employment means in Oregon who, along with her husband, have carved out a lifestyle based on "pirate-itude," which as far as I can tell, involves dressing up like a pirate and refusing to work a 9-to-5 job. Works for me! Is there some whole pirate subculture here I don't know about? Aren't pirates typically rapists and plunderers? The only pirates I know about, besides my friend in the Bronx, who just looks like a pirate, involve my beloved loser baseball team, and that's more about Pittsburgh than anything of the walk-the-plank variety. Speaking of, big deal, Mets, you beat the Pirates! I, too, can shoot fish in a barrel!

Anyway, so the professional organizer made the pirate chop off his ponytail and take a job in an accounting firm, which I was thrilled to hear him describe as "the most soul-crushing four hours of [his] life" and the scullery maid forced the kids at the anal retentive ranch to quit cheerleading and football and write a pirate play instead. Here's where I'm torn: I want to support the scullery maid to shake the Stepford kids' world up a little bit, but she didn't exactly go about it in the right way. Forcing a poor thirteen-year-old FemBot to ditch cheerleading and makeup at the drop of a hat is not going to bring about the subversion you crave. Why not start slow? Play her some Patti Smith; read her some Allan Ginsberg. Or start off even slower and show her some old "Daria" DVDs. (Birthday alert!) Don't go running about claiming you're Mad Sally. And Professional Organizer, I hate to say this, but I could use your help. As long as you don't force me to get a job in accounting or "take pride in my appearance," which is your codespeak for spending two hours on my hair and makeup, could you please come over and help me clean up my charming prewar apartment? I am really glad you're not my mother--you know things are bad when I'm grateful that I had Vikki the Crackhead pushing me out of her uterus--but I could stand to have a cleaner pad. Thanks.

Enough of the pirates. Please stop by tomorrow and check out my interview with the awesome Amy Guth, who has pirate-ittude to burn. In spades.

Chinatown, My Chinatown

2006-09-18T15:54:00.000-04:00

I'm back after a lovely weekend playing hostess to my dear AF (henceforth to be known as Ruth, her given name), traipsing around Chinatown and the East Village with her buying a lot of cheap crap I don't really need, but was too cute to resist. The piece de resistance was a $3 figurine of two Chinese people having sex, procured in a little tchotchke shop on Mulberry Street. Why? 'Cause. In my defense, I picked one of the more discreet ones--a man and a woman having conventional intercourse sitting up. If you look at it quickly, it probably wouldn't register that they're fucking, but once you do a double take, it's pretty clear what they're up to. I may have to go back and buy some of the more Too Hot For TV ones because, dude, they're figurines of people having sex! Anyway, the copulators are now residing on my night table, next to the Feng Shui kitties I picked up the last time Ruth was in town. They haven't yet complained.

While Ruth attended a two-day workshop with a world-famous acupuncturist (apparently, he's world-famous among acupuncturists, and no one else), I went to a yoga for weight loss workshop with a fellow named Brandt Bhanu Passalacqua at Integral Yoga on Sunday afternoon. Bhanu, as he's known in the yoga world, lost a hundred pounds in a year practicing a very gentle form of hatha yoga and modifying his diet to gradually include wholesome, organic foods (and eventually, no meat, but he doesn't soapbox). Awesome is not too strong a word here. Basically, everything we know to be true about weight loss is wrong. Carbs are not "bad," and you are not going to guarantee a safe, permanent weight loss by putting yourself through boot camp, unless that's your thing, because the number one cause of weight gain is stress. So, what do you do? Breathe a lot! Do gentle hatha poses without straining! Eat good, wholesome food six times a day! Buy his book! (Of course I did. Do you think I'm going to pass up a chance to lose weight without depriving myself?) The workshop ended with Bhanu passing out some of the yummiest dark chocolate I've ever tasted. We took deep breaths while we were eating it, which essentially forced us to savor what was in our mouths. Oh, what a relief to know I can still lose weight and give my poor creaky knees a break. (Christ, I probably sound like a fucking "Cathy" comic, don't I?)

I met up with Ruth after our respective workshops ended, and followed her around while she sought out the perfect jade roller for her face (it's an acupressure thing). Then we had to go into a few Chinese pharmacies. Then tchotchke shops. Then another Chinese pharmacy, and then the store where I bought the Chinese-people-fucking figurine and Ruth perused a box of three-for-a-dollar jade medallions for, like, a half hour. As exact and perfect opposites (Ruth is an Aries; I'm a Libra), this is one area that causes some friction between us. I go into a store, and if I don't see something I like for a reasonable price, I leave. Ruth browses and browses and browses and frankly, I don't know how she can stand for that long. But for some reason, the same behavior that would drive me into a spitting rage with a whole host of other people makes me like Ruth all the more. Not that I don't whine and roll my eyes at her and step out about fifty times for a cigarette when she's looking for the perfect aquatic woodcut for her office. We have our schtick, but it works well.

The evening concluded with the two of us watching the vomitatory "The Girls Next Door" on E!, a show I would not watch by myself unless I were being paid a substantial fee, but watching the TV-deprived Ruth watching Hef's girls cavort around and generally behave like thirty-year-old adolescents was all the entertainment I needed.

I'm now trying to get Ruth to go to India with me, but she's pretty much under contract to go to China at some point, and she can't afford to do both. Oh well, we have five years. Hey, didn't Stalin say something about that...?

Speaking of, if you're in Chinatown, pick me up a Chairman Mao watch. I'd get one myself but 1)broke and 2)birthday in less than a month. Thanks!

I'd Rather Have A Bottle In Front of Me...

2006-09-14T20:31:00.000-04:00

How do people stand working at doctor's offices? How do they stand dealing with patients demanding the doctor deliver their son's Concerta prescription right now, by laser beam? I cannot imagine anything more suffocating than making a career of being a medical secretary, and I'm only a goddamn temp. If you are a medical secretary and you genuinely like your work, I am in awe.

Been working on the novel this week for the eight billionth time. I've been starting and restarting that damn thing since I was about twelve and trying to make a grand statement about teen suicide. I actually wrote a play about teen suicide that won a Scholastic writing award when I was thirteen. Got to come to New York and have lunch at the Waldorf Astoria and everything. No lie! And it was the day after my first kiss, no less.

The two bright spots this week were an awesome documentary on POV called The Boys of Baraka about four poor black boys from Baltimore who went to a boarding school in Kenya for a year (the school was forced to close when the embassy in Nairobi shut down--isn't that the way it always works?) and an article in a yoga magazine whose name escapes me about yoga charter schools. Roll your eyes all you want, but I think it's a great idea. Why aren't schools incorporating yoga into their curricula? Because it's "faggy"? Beats the hell out of lining up for forty minutes to wait to hit a field hockey ball into a net.

In other news, today is Sarito's birthday, so send her some love. Oh yes, and lest we forget, my 30th is coming up in one month and one day. Still don't know where I'm having my party. I'm leaning toward Two Boots in the East Village. Of course, I'm terrified only two people will come and I'll be sitting there like an asshole all night while my two true friends give me pitying stares. Has that ever happened to you? I'm not saying it's happened to me, either. Yet.

Book Tour, Brain Cases, Yurts and All

2006-09-12T09:49:00.000-04:00

On Wednesday, September 20, I will be hosting author Amy Guth on these pages as part of her book tour for her new novel, Three Fallen Women, which has been described as a must-read "for anybody who thinks that the patriarchy needs a suckerpunch to the ballsack." I'm there! In the meantime, check out Amy's blog and spread much-deserved words of love. She's hilarious.

In other news, having lost my job at NYCO for failing to sell more than four subscriptions in the almost two months that I was there, I'm back to temping until I can figure out what the hell I want to do next and/or I find a job that doesn't make me want to stab myself (and who'll have me). My current assignment is at a neurologist's office on the Upper East Side. Very chichi. It's a bit disconcerting to see patients come in and know there's something, well, wrong with their brains, and yet they look normal. The doctors are quite congenial, which is a plus because the office is a mess, and the patients insist on telling me their life stories over the phone and expecting me to call in their authorization codes and precerts and book them for MRIs. Ah, the power of the phrase "I'm just a temp." Meaning there is none. Not only am I "just a temp" with no power to convince their insurance companies that their brain scans are not some luxury like teeth whitening, the patients don't give a rat's ass. "Well, can you do this?" No, I cannot. "Well, how about--" I can have the doctor call you back. That's it. Now go tell your spouse that the bitch at the doctor's office wouldn't help you because she's a bitch and fuck her. But oh, those case files! Far better than People, I must say.

And in other other news, I'm torn between saving up for a trip to India when I'm thirty-five and buying a yurt. The Times real estate magazine ran a little item on these adorable little homes in the round, and I'm seriously considering moving into one. There is a yurt-ville somewhere in the Grand Tetons, but I think I'd install my yurt along the coast. Which coast, I'm not sure. I'm also not yet sure if I'd do away with electricity or if I'd install a generator. As for what I'd do for a living, I'd probably grow organic vegetables and trawl for clams or something. I might learn to knit better than I currently do, too.

Of course, I could buy a yurt and move to India, but that might just be taking this hippie fantasy a bit too far. Then again...

9/11 Redux

2006-09-11T09:47:00.000-04:00

I can't decide if MSNBC's "historic, real-time" re-broadcast of "The Today Show" from September 11, 2001 is tasteless or cathartic, and I'm not sure what it says about me that I have it on in the background. (I can think of a few choice epithets for myself, given that five years ago today, I was working as a temporary receptionist, and now I'm doing the same thing again. You probably can too.)

If nothing else, it's important to remember that, as my therapist pointed out, even with the horror of the attacks, America was not an innocent victim in this. This was the culmination of years and years of crappy politics in the Middle East. No, I don't suppose we "deserved" it--no one who died in the attacks deserved to lose their lives in such a way--but there's only so much a person or persons can take. We must be more vigilant, and I don't mean by monitoring people's Internet activity or even forbidding liquids on airplanes. We need to think about how we're living our lives. Maybe it's too late for that. I don't know.

But hey, how about that SuperNanny! Just watched a marathon on the execrable ABC Family network yesterday and dag, I wish I'd had her when my momma was beating the shit out of me! I love her Cockney accent and her firm, loving, not-at-all-condescending way of stating what should be obvious but isn't. I'm kind of waiting for some scandal to break about Jo Frost beating the kids or sleeping with the father when the cameras go off, but that's because I'm a sick fuck. Thank god we have SuperNanny to make us comfortable during these last days before the Apocalypse!

I'm slightly bummed that I'll be missing the "Wife Swap" marathon next Sunday, but the AF is coming to visit and I'll be going to a yoga workshop. So!

...And Many Happy Returns

2006-09-09T09:57:00.000-04:00

Last night, Sarito and I went to hear my pal Tessa Souter at Joe's Pub. Sarito, as you'll recall, as my sometime acting buddy and frequent spiritual mentor. Tessa and I met in a memoir writing workshop last spring. Not only has Tessa published a book, she's an awesome, awesome chanteuse and songwriter who's also--wait for it--gorgeous and a total sweetheart. Sigh.

Anyway, before the set started, I was telling Sarito that I seemed to be going through a strange period right now, what with my thirtieth birthday right around the corner. Much of it is the predictable jazz--no career, no money, no motivation save fear--but some of it is positive, if unnerving. For example, I've made a decision to take more responsibility for who I am instead of passing it all off on my shitty childhood. Sarito explained that what I was going through was what the astrologers refer to as the Saturn Return. Hmmm.

The Saturn Return, which is the period between 28 and 30, is the first time Saturn completes its cycle through your birth chart and returns to where it was when you were born. According to Skye Alexander, "Few people describe Saturn Return as a pleasant period. While undergoing your Saturn Return, you may find yourself turning inward and reflecting on your individual destiny...you may feel lonely and alienated from those around you, while family and friends think you are shutting them out. But this is a necessary period of consolidation, when you must retreat from the distractions of the outer world and focus on yourself at your most fundamental level." (See, therapy group! I was going through my Saturn Return! That's why I've been such a cunt these past two years. Hee hee.)

It does make sense to me, in an odd way, but I suppose we can cook up any explanation for any phase of life. There's too much about astrology that makes sense to me, though, for me to dismiss it as sheer coincidence--not least the fact that my birthday was designated "the day of the world's stage."

The question is, what to do with all this information? I do kind of wish that we could all be more attentive to this and let it shape us in some real way that doesn't let us off the hook of, as Jerry Springer puts it, taking care of ourselves and each other. I mean, I don't endorse constructing a legal defense along the lines of Dan White and his Twinkies--"My Saturn Return made me do it!"

Anyway. The show was great, the writer's block continues, but I can feel something trying to push its way out of there.

Drugs Are Bad, Mmmkay?

2006-09-08T10:38:00.000-04:00

I’ve been doing a little research into my dad’s intestinal condition, which as you’ll recall he developed after taking clindamycin after having a tooth removed. (It can also be spelled “clyndamicin.” If you type the former in on Google, you’ll get a lot of official websites; if you do the latter, you’ll get a lot of message boards for people who’ve had similar trouble with the drug.) It’s been two months, and he hasn’t been able to get rid of it. The hell of it is, he was given clindamycin as a preventive measure, not to treat an existing infection. Naturally, he’s pretty pissed off to be so full of shit.

Many people who take clindamycin develop a condition called Clostridium Difficile Colitis, also known as c. diff. With c. diff, the “bad” bacteria—the clostridia difficile—kill all the “good” bacteria, thereby generating a lot of shit, to put it bluntly. Sometimes this condition can be cleared up in a few weeks. In other cases, it takes more than a year. Many people who take clindamycin develop it, to the point that the pharmaceutical companies developed a drug, Flagyl, to combat its aftereffects.

At this point, we aren’t sure if my dad has full-blown colitis. He’s taken Flagyl, which has helped up to a point. Just when he thinks he’s in the clear, he has another attack. Fortunately, in our case, it’s been more of a pain in the ass (literally and figuratively) than anything else. My dad’s secretary’s sister took clindamycin, developed c. diff, and lost seventy pounds over the course of a year. As portly people, my dad and I have joked about losing seventy pounds, but that’s a hell of a way to do it. And no, I am not recommending you take clindamycin if you want to lose weight by shitting your brains out.

In fact, I’ll say it again—please do not take this drug unless you have to. Even the NIH website warns you not to take it if you develop severe cramping and bloody stool.

And while we’re in PSA mode, when it comes to street drugs, lay off the hard stuff. You don’t know what you’re getting, and you’ll probably end up getting shot.

Have a nice weekend, kids! Check out my friend Tessa Souter and her torch songs tonight at 9:30 at Joe's Pub in NYC.

Tom and Katie, Sittin’ In A Tree

2006-09-07T09:38:00.000-04:00

In case you haven’t read Tom Shales’s review of Katie Couric’s debut on CBS Evening News, here it is. And here’s my attempt to sound erudite about it.

When he’s not oozing condescension (replete with snarking about Couric’s outfit, and his subsequent assertion that commenting about it isn’t sexist), Shales does make some decent, if obvious points that what transpired Tuesday night isn’t so much news as it is news magazine, riddled as it was with such “special features” as “Eye On Your Money” and a “free speech” segment that, as Shales put it, “turn[s] out to be the oldest idea in television: Have some well-known or obscure blowhard pop up and do a rant into the camera.” Blowhard, indeed—tonight’s segment features none other than Rush Limbaugh.

It’s hard to tell if this bells-and-whistles approach is Couric’s doing or her producers’, but it’s a bit disingenuous given who Couric is, and it’s not clear what she and they are trying to do. Is this a not-so-subtle statement that Couric is too femme to tote the manly yoke of the nightly news? Is it an attempt to make CBS Evening News more populist, as Couric’s appointment was supposed to accomplish?

Yes, Couric is “perky.” Yes, she’s the first woman to anchor the evening news solo. My reaction to that is simultaneously, great, and what the hell took us so long. No, Katie Couric’s appointment is probably not some great leap forward on the road to equality, but it’s nice to see, anyway. Couric is no revolutionary. She is who she is—a perfectly competent broadcaster with some endearing qualities, some grating ones, and the good fortune to embody most of which we prize in contemporary American womanhood.

If Couric wishes to revolutionize the American news broadcast—and I’m not saying she should just because, hell, she’s a woman, and isn’t it our sole responsibility to be the change we see in the world? —she’d do well to look to the BBC’s fine tradition of delivering the news straight, no chaser. Of course, the current “populist” approach doesn’t allow for this. We need ten million more reminders that obesity and smoking can kill. I suppose that makes it more interesting.

My message to Couric: Just do it. Just give us the news. If you have to throw some obesity ultimatums in there, I’ll cut you some slack. You’re good enough, smart enough, and doggone it, people like you. Kick Limbaugh's ass for me.

'Round the Outside! 'Round the Outside!

2006-09-06T12:14:00.000-04:00

We have here a word from my friend and de facto little sister Marcia, whose opinions were formed, tainted, and rendered unreliable thanks to nine years under Ceaucescu:

I personally hate the term "well-rounded." Hate it. It just evokes the whole American guidance counselor philosophy on how to get into college by adding as much self-involved, superficial crap as possible such as 'Participated in "Pep Club" and "Cheerleading Squad" and "Student Council" (which evinces one of your favorite qualities: "leadership")' to applications. Oh and it also usually involves volunteering at your church.

You know, it's odd, but I don't have a huge problem with "well-rounded," as long as it's accurate. I do have a huge problem with high school guidance counselors insisting upon students amassing these particular activities for their CV in order to give colleges the oft-false impression that these kids are, in fact, multifaceted. ("The Charge of the Light Brigade" by Suppe is tripping through my brain as I type this.)

Oh, and by the way, kids? If you're not at a parochial school, the National Honor Society admissions committee has a Constitutional obligation to absent religion from its selection process. You probably already knew that, but clearly the folks at the brainwashing pen Marcia and I attended do not. Or maybe they do, and like Ceaucescu, they're just making shit up and ripping the Constitution unit out of the history texts, except for the 2nd Amendment. Wouldn't put it past them. Hey! Teachers! Leave those kids alone!

She Blinded Me With (Political) Science

2006-09-06T09:57:00.000-04:00

Songwriter and Communist Abel Meeropol once said during a political education class, “I know who the bosses are, I know who the workers are, and I know which side I’m on. Why do I need to know more than that?” My assessment of the PA Senate race is just about as sophisticated. Here’s my position: Do not vote for the guy who equates homosexuality with hot dad-on-daughter action. Simple as that. (Did anyone else out there watch Meet the Press this Sunday besides the guy who called in to Brian Lehrer yesterday claiming that while Rick Santorum was focused and on message, Bob Casey Jr. “just sat there nodding his head”? I can’t seem to get the transcript.)

In keeping with our “Back to School” theme this week, here’s a little political education for you. I’ve included the answers right after each question, just like my 12th grade Government teacher used to do.

Section 1. Who Said It?

1. “What the Christ is wrong with the Jews, Bob?”
a. Bud Dwyer
b. Richard Nixon
c. Carl Bernstein
d. Pat Buchanan

If you guessed (b) Richard Nixon, sing “Hava Nagilah.” Tricky Dick was not only, well, tricky, he was also a Halcion –popping Jew hater. But hey, how ‘bout that thing with China and the pandas?

If you figured out that “Bob” was H.R. “Bob” Haldeman, give yourself an extra gold star (of either the David or the Christian variety).

2. "What a waste it is to lose one's mind--or to not have a mind. How true that is."
a. Ross Perot
b. George W. Bush
c. Dan Quayle
d. Nigel Hawthorne

Although George W. Bush hasn't the brains God gave a leech, and Ross Perot is certifiably something or other, the correct answer is (c) Dan Quayle. Bonus points if you recalled that J. Danforth was speaking about the United Negro College Fund.

Section 2. True or False

3. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were convicted for stealing the secret of the atom bomb and transmitting it to the Russians during WWII.

FALSE. Patently false, actually. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage, a crime that is technically punishable by death, although their co-defendant, Morton Sobell, received “only” thirty years in prison, eighteen of which he served.

The only evidence the government had against Ethel was a letter she allegedly typed outlining “atomic secrets.” In 2001, Ethel’s brother David Greenglass revealed on “60 Minutes II” that his wife, Ruth, was the actual typist.

4. Actress Jane Wyman claimed that one of the reasons she divorced Ronald Reagan was she “couldn’t stand to see that damned King’s Row [Reagan’s only critically acclaimed film] one more time.”

TRUE, as far as the story goes. Or she may have just woken up one morning and realized the person sharing her bed was totally icky.

Section 3. Presidential Fun Facts!

5. Name one other president, besides Thomas Jefferson, who had red hair.

Trick one! NO other president was thus coiffed. According to Schott’s Original Miscellany, Andrew Jackson, Rutherford B. Hayes, Calvin Coolidge, and JFK were all “questionable.” JFK’s more of a strawberry blond, don’t you think? And he’s nowhere near as hot as Bobby. Mmm, Bobby, baby.

6. Who was the last president to own slaves?

Well, hell’s bells, it’s none other than Ulysses S. Grant from Ohio, of all people and places! Hey, didn’t he fight for the Union?

All right, kids. Put your pencils down. Your teacher would like to recommend an awesome place for you to pick up beer to drink in your parents’ rec rooms after school. Heliopolis on Broadway at 33rd in Astoria not only has a vast array of brews from Magic Hat, including the awesome “Mother Russia,” which we’ll be covering next month, but it’s also the only place I’ve ever been able to find rose water for your mango lassis, which you shouldn’t mix with beer. ‘S all right? Good. Now go and carpe diem or whatever.

Language Arts 101: Professor Karla’s Word Allergies

2006-09-05T10:04:00.000-04:00

Welcome back, class! I hope you all had a lovely summer. Actually, I don’t, since I spent mine working two dead-end jobs and didn’t even get to hop the Q train out to Brighton Beach. So I am going to vent my broke, spinsterly spleen on you young’uns and slap you with a thousand-word theme on The Scarlet Letter, which I told you was mandatory if you wanted to come into my Honors English class, but which you probably didn’t read when you were summering at Mummy’s mummy’s house in the Hamptons, did you? Oh, paybacks are hell! Mwoohoohahahahahahaha!

Ahem. You know, it occurs to me that I was supposed to have read The Scarlet Letter for an Honors English class, but I think I just skimmed the Cliff’s Notes. Pity, that, because it might well have been a good read. I’ve just never liked doing what I was told (spoiled brat), especially by English teachers who refuse to believe that Tennessee Williams died in the Hotel Elysee with a pill bottle lodged in his throat. Oh, well, perhaps when I’m in the iron lung.

Anyway. Today’s lesson is on word allergies. You have ‘em; I have ‘em in spades. So here are a few words and phrases that set my teeth on edge. Pay attention; I expect a six-hundred-word theme on this topic by the end of the week.

Leadership. The most offensive word I can think of. Every time we use it in therapy, I am so tempted to ask if we can use another, like “splunge.” (Extra credit if you can tell me where “splunge” came from!) It reminds me of high school band camp and the National Honor Society, the latter from which I was excluded by a fraction of a percentage point and the former which gave me a bone spur from roll-stepping in the ninety-degree heat for five days on end. “What the fuck is so goddamn important about leadership?” I screeched to my dad. “Why can’t I just go off and do my thing and they go off and do theirs and we just leave each other alone?” My dad basically told me I was preaching to the choir and don’t worry about it. Plus, it’s jargon, and Glomer no like jargon, Punky friend.

Take Responsibility For. Again, whuzzah? Many would disagree, but I’m not entirely opposed to the concept. I think we need to take more responsibility for our actions (like, by actually thinking about whom we elect President and not just going, yipe! 9/11!) and yes, our feelings (“When you do A, I feel B. Would you mind trying C?”). But like accepting Jesus as your savior, it’s at once vague and oppressively specific. Plus, I’ve been held solely responsible for too many things that weren’t my fault at all or in which I played only the smallest part whilst the responsible party got away with murder that I refuse to trust anyone who uses the phrase with me. (Spoiled brat?)

Where the Rubber Hits the Road. So male go-getter. Puke.

Stocks and Assets. Fine if used when conversing about the stock market, dehumanizing when talking about, uh, humans. I’ve never forgotten the guy from college who told me I didn’t have enough “assets” to make “investing” in me worth it. Not a day goes by that I wonder if he wasn’t right.

Principled. Too self-righteous. I prefer “Ethics.” Like “responsibility,” I’ve had this one used against me, usually by someone behaving completely unethically.

Moral Values. Gee, wonder why.

Decent People. See above.

Not to Be Rude, But…Ohhhhh, maaaaan, if I had a nickel for every time I heard this slime out of the mouth of some chick in junior high/high school. You know the one I mean. She’s so beautiful and charming and she plays field hockey and she’s going to Villanova! How on earth could you doubt her veracity? One of these days, I’m going to make a T-shirt that says “Not to Be Rude, But…” and go up to someone and tell her she’s a fat bitch and see how well it works. Probably not very, since I’m none of the above and I sneak cigarettes behind the band room.

Disrespectful. I’m not entirely sure why this one gets my goat, because I sure as hell think we need to learn to treat each other with a hell of a lot more respect than we currently do. I think it sounds too much like a Marine barking at me. (“Don’t you dare be disrespectful to that cop! He’s got a right to crack your hippie skull open if he wants!”)

Choices. They talk about “choices” a lot in therapy. Maybe that’s why it gets me. “You have choices.” “You made your choices.” “Good choices.” “Bad choices.” Oh, my fingernails!

You’ll Never Amount to Anything. How often does this go pounding through my brain? It sounds like something India Wilkes would say to Scarlett O’Hara. (Sorry—I know at least one of y’all has a massive GWTW allergy.) Here I have to confess, I feel bad for India Wilkes. I actually think in a different time and place, if finding a husband weren’t the celebrity death match it was in the antebellum South, India and Scarlett would have decided this boy-chasing stuff was absurd and gone off and been punks together and started a ‘zine and taught the Tarleton twins how to give them orgasms. And did you ever notice that the actress who played India, Alicia Rhett, was actually very pretty? And that Scarlett O’Hara, according to Margaret Mitchell, “was not beautiful”? No, India definitely got the short end of the Confederate stick, but she insisted on hoisting that little nub into the air. I can relate.

We have five minutes until the bell rings, so why don’t YOU tell ME what words make you want to punch something and why? You can post them here or email me. I’d like to share some of the more creative ones, so if you’re emailing me and you’d like to remain anonymous, please let me know and include a pseudonym (along with your real name, of course, which I won’t publish.)

Okay, class dismissed! And don’t run in the halls, and stop stuffing poor Jimmy into his locker. He can’t help it he hasn’t hit puberty yet!

Weekend Wrap-Up (or, Dispatches From the Road, Part 2)

2006-09-04T18:09:00.000-04:00

I'm back at my computer in Astoria, so technically this is not a dispatch from the road, but I did write several drafts of this on the train ride back. Anyway, I'm far more relaxed and refreshed than I was when I left this mess for the immutable boredom of "the Midstate," and although my dad's intestinal disturbances (remember, folks, that's "clyndamicin," and don't take it unless you're infected with flesh-eating staph) prevented us from delving as deep into PA Dutchland as I would have liked, I still got some good pictures of local tack that I'll past here later this week. (And really, doesn't the guy have a million better things to do than haul my sorry, spoiled ass around Lancaster County so I can take pictures of kitschy oddities?)

Some highlights:

1. The Ku Klux Klan held a rally at the Gettysburg Battlefield this weekend. The local newscasters kept tripping up and saying "Klu Klux" or "Ku Kux." All together now, folks...

A peace-loving gent (he was wearing tie-dye) was arrested for hurdling the barricade separating the Klan from the normal folk. The charge? "Entering an enclosed space." As my dad says, what's next--"breathing restricted air"?

2. The outskirts of Lititz are turning into exactly what I'd prayed for as a kid, a suburban megalopoly that, if not quite up to the standards of the Main Line, at least contains more than one Starbucks. Careful what you wish for and all that jazz.

3. Route 441 is the most boring road in PA. (Gee, how many PA roads fit that description?)

4. Even the blandest food tastes like manna when your dad cooks it for you.

5. According to Grandpa, "accepting Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior" has no metaphorical bent. It means what it says--worship Jesus. Grandpa's problem with this is that Jesus, while a great prophet with wonderful ideas, is not equal to God, and thus is not deserving of worship. My problem is with the idea that I need to be "saved" from something. We both agree that most churches are not teaching the Word of the only begotten son of our Lord (hmmm...what does THAT metaphor mean?)and thus we are both heretics who will burn in hell. But we already knew that.

6. Speaking of burning--Grandpa, in his quiet way, gave me a much-needed smack upside the head regarding smoking. (As did the lovely young med student sitting next to me on the train ride back.) "I don't guess I need to tell you how bad smoking is," he said. "Your grandpa can't breathe, and your uncle died from emphysema." Ouch.

I'm nowhere near ready to quit, but sweet jeebus, the smoking thing is really fucking with my newfound ability to go into head voice whilst singing "The Sound of Music." Therefore, I've resolved to get myself down to a steady half-pack a day within the next two weeks, where I plan to remain until I decide what to do next. (Which, we hope, would be to quit, young lady?)

7. Gray's Anatomy really is a good show.

Thanks to Dad, Grandpa, and Vera for the free eats, therapy, and all-round hospitality this weekend. Vera, I promise to get out more this year, even if it kills me, because it's too expensive to be a hermit in NYC. I mean, it kind of defeats the purpose, doesn't it?

Back to school tomorrow, kids! Sharpen those pencils and spit out your gum--I'll have a little Language Arts lesson of my own up here when the bell rings tomorrow morning.

Midnight Express (or, Dispatches From the Road, Part 1)

2006-09-02T13:07:00.000-04:00

I wrote the following mess o'pages during the very loooooooong, boring train ride from New York to Harrisburg yesterday...

9/1/06. 4:50 pm. On the Keystoner from New York to Harrisburg.

Just got out of the loo after a mildly epic battle with the sink. It wasn't until I had Amtrak soap smeared all over my hands that I realized the spigot was one of those push-up jobs. Is there a good reason for designing train sinks thus? Is some kind of immutable law of physics at play here? Will my train fare skyrocket from a reasonable $56 to somewhere around $560 if Amtrak installs normal sinks?

The Keystoner, so-called because of its singular route through the Keystone State (PA is the only state named after a shape, just as Libra is the only astrological sign represented by an inanimate object), is quite possibly the worst Amtrak venture on the Eastern seaboard. How so? Because it has no food or beverage service on board, that's how. I don't know about you, but if I'm going to spend four hours on a train, over half of it riding backward through cow/alien abduction country, I'd like to be able to get a turkey sandwich and a diet Coke without having to strong-arm my way through the masses at Philly's 30th Street station when the train changes engines. (The Keystoner changes from electric to diesel once it gets to Philadelphia. That makes me think of the way the fine city I call home builds medical waste incinerators in the South Bronx. Do they think because we're a bunch of Puritans who keep our lips zipped in service to the Lord that we can and should accept the expulsion of a noxious fuel into our spacious skies? Is it retribution for Three Mile Island, or perhaps William Penn's theft of the land from the Native Americans? Hey, some of us Pennsyltuckians are agnostic spoiled brats who like clean air, I'll have you know! I'll pay extra for a beverage car and an electric engine, as long as they up my Amtrak Guest Rewards points significantly.)

5:25 pm. 30th Street Station, Philadelphia.

Had a couple of cigarettes with some folks--a guy with an eyepatch, a beautiful young girl with a striking resemblance to Kelli O'Hara, and a Hispanic woman who's on her way back from Massachusetts after visiting her fifteen-year-old son in the hospital. He was in a car accident and is now paralyzed from the chest down, but he's speaking and eating. Thank god for small mercies. I offer this sincerely. Thank god this woman's son can still eat and speak. Thank god he's alive. I hope he will be able to walk again. I hope this woman and her son will be able to weather the road ahead with the same weary, matter-of-fact strength she's using now. I hope they get a few well-deserved breaks along the way.

The fellow with the eyepatch thought it would be nice if they let us smoke on the train. He was as appalled as I was eight years ago, when I first moved to New York and I was coming back to see my psychiatrist in the throes of a panic attack that made me dizzy, to discover that there's no food or beverage service on board this train. I don't mind the no smoking rule. I agree that it's a filthy habit, and I try to shield the innocent as much as possible from my disgusting, cancer-causing activities. And I don't guess it's a huge problem to buy a sandwich at Penn Station and bring it on board. But it's the principle of the thing that bugs me. That, and I'm a spoiled little bitch.

Oh, yes, and the reason they switch from electric to diesel at Philly? Because, per the affably brusque white-haired conductor who fielded my question, there isn't enough electricity to power the trains from Boston all the way to Harrisburg. Well, is it any wonder y'all are bankrupt? Save the planet, guys!

6 pm. Ardmore Station.

Ardmore, the first stop outside of Philly, is home to a little restaurant called "Peace A Pizza." The sign in the window says "Sorry, We're Open." How many times have I been tempted to blow this pop stand, jump off, and have a slice? And pizza's not really my bag, either.

Ardmore is, or was, also home to Susan Reinert, the English teacher at Upper Merion High School near King of Prussia, who was murdered by her colleague, Bill Bradfield, and her principal, Jay Smith, in 1979. Susan Reinert was married to a guy who seemed to be quite decent and steadfast, if somewhat unromantic, and she threw over her marriage to take up with Bradfield, who was not only living with yet another colleague, Sue Myers, but was still legally married to his first two wives. That's a pat assessment, but it's a big part of it. Bradfield promised to marry Susan Reinert when her mother died and she inherited $750K, but he had no intention of following through, at least on the matrimonial end. He convinced Sue Myers and two other friends/colleagues, Vince Valaitis and Chris Pappas, that Jay Smith, well known throughout Upper Merion for his sexual perversions and variegated drug addictions (he 's also rumored to have murdered his elder daughter and son-in-law and dissolved the bodies in nitric acid), was going to kill Susan because she "knew too much about his trash." According to Bradfield, the "trash" consisted of bodies he'd chopped up and spread in the Dumpsters around school. As one cop put it when he was interviewing Chris Pappas, "Did you ever think if you let go of that rope Bradfield had you shinnying up, that maybe you'd fall into a big lake of drizzly bullshit?"

The veracity of the most popular book on the case, Echoes in the Darkness by Joseph Wambaugh, came under fire about eight years ago when it was discovered that the head cop on the case, Jack Holtz, who had already taken a huge blow when it was revealed that he'd falsfied evidence in the Jay Smith trial, an act that resulted in the whole case against Smith getting thrown out, had "practically written the book for [Wambaugh]," depicting himself as the strong, silent type who rises through the ranks to save the day. Wambaugh himself admitted to paying his subjects tidy sums of money, but I think the real kicker is that it was again discovered that Jack Holtz falsified evidence in yet another murder trial. No word on what's going on there. (Bradfield was convicted in 1983 and died in prison of a heart attack in 1998, at the age of 64. Jay Smith lives in Delaware with his brother.)

That said, I still reread the book from time to time. I like to freak myself out, and I must confess a certain affection for ex-cop Wambaugh's grade-B Sam Spade writing style. I first read the book when I was eleven. How my mother let that one slip into my grasp, I will never know. Perhaps she figured I was old enough to learn that sometimes, when two people are in love, the man might put Tab A into someplace other than Slot B. I can think of worse ways to learn about fellatio than reading Jay Smith's extracurricular love letters, I guess (and by the way, I learned the word "fellatio" later that year, when i saw and fell in love with an awesome play called Biloxi Blues), but man, it was grim stuff, reading about this rubbery old guy and what sounded like he was taking a pee in there. Do, like, normal people do this, or is this kind of thing solely the provenance of dudes like Smith and his comrade Chester, Chester, Child Molester? (My mom must have been prepared for the eventuality of my asking her if she'd ever indulged, because when she mock-gasped "That is NONE of your business!" she didn't smack me upside the head. I guess we'll take that as a yes...?)

6:30-7:10 pm. Between Downingtown and Lancaster.

Nothing to see here, folks. Keep moving. You seen one cow, you seen 'em all.

7:15 pm. Outside Elizabethtown, home of M&M Mars.

Three Mile Island! Woooo! I wish we'd all make like the passengers on that flight from LaGuardia to HBG back in 1979. About a month after the almost-holocaust, my parents and I went up to Vermont to visit my aunt. Harrisburg's airport is situated such that before landing, every plane dips its wings so you get a big ol' money shot of TMI. On our return flight, the plane did just that, and then there was silence. Then, "Boo!" "Boo!" "Hiss!" and much laughter. Bow down to her now. Bow down to your queen! The queen of filth, the queen of putrescence. Boo! Boo!

*** *** *** *** ***

After disembarking, my dad and I had a lovely dinner out at one of my favorite local restaurants, The Country Oven, famous for their cheese bread and their Golden Gate house dressing (a mixture of French and Bleu Cheese, if you're interested). I had the crab-stuffed shrimp and a very strong bourbon and ginger. Upon returning to the ranch, my dad encouraged me to pet our beautiful gray cat, Hades, and she had the unmitigated gall to smack me with her claws! Jeez, my cats are more sociable than she is, and they're feral. Maybe she needs a cat friend.

I'm headed over to Grandpa's this afternoon to try and solve, once and for all, the mystery of what "accepting Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior" really means. Tomorrow, we hit Dutch Wonderland!

Grandma Gloria's Home Cookin'

2006-08-31T15:37:00.000-04:00

We wrap up the summer with some PA Dutch recipes belonging to my grandmother, Gloria, whom you may recall as the one who was always after me about my diet and posture, for all the good it did. PA Dutch food has never been a favorite of mine, I have to confess. The quintessential PA Dutch recipe is a stew of sorts called chicken pot pie. No, it's not chicken pie--that's a whole 'nother thing, which the rest of the world knows as chicken pie, the thing with the crust and the succotash and the gravy. Chicken pot pie is not a pie at all but a kind of stew, as I said, comprised of chicken broth, egg noodles, corn, and celery. Thrilling. But PA Dutch cuisine is nothing if not plain--heavy on the starch, with little to no spices to glam things up. I like my salt and grease and chipotle peppers in adobo sauce. See why I had to leave home?

This first recipe is heavy on the grease, and it also covers your RDA of vegetables too! (Snark.) You don't want to eat too many vegetables because, as James Lileks points out, vegetables are for Communists, and if you eat too many of them, you'll spend the rest of your life in Esalen flying kites and communing with flowers.

Hot Bacon Dressing

Ingredients:
4 slices bacon, diced
2 tbs. chopped onion
2 tbs. vinegar
1 to 2 tbs. sugar
3 cups coarsely shredded cabbage or other torn greens

Instructions:
Cook bacon in skillet until crisp. Drain excess fat. Add onion, vinegar, and sugar to bacon. Heat through. Pour over cabbage, toss and serve at once. Makes 1/4 cup dressing.

This next recipe is a staple of all good PA Dutch women. It's the only dessert I never could stand, but it is very PA Dutch.

Shoo-Fly Pie (Fine sense of irony!)

Ingredients and Instructions:
Make a liquid of:
1 cup old-fashioned molasses
1 cup boiling water
1 tsp. (rounded) baking soda

Make crumbs of:
2 cups flour
3/4 cup sugar
Pat of butter the size of a large walnut

Line a 9" pie pan with pastry. Fill pastry with alternate layers of liquid and crumbs--liquid first, then crumbs. Bake at 450 until crust begins to brown, then finish in oven at 350 until firm--about 1/2 hour.

Don't have a pastry recipe? Use this one, or do the storebought thing.

Pie Shell

Ingredients:
4 cups flour
1 3/4 cups Crisco
1 tbs. sugar
2 tsp. salt
1 egg
1/2 cup cold water
1 tbs. vinegar

Instructions:
Mix ingredients together. Roll dough flat. Line pie pan and bake according to shoo-fly pie recipe. If a pie made entirely of molasses is too much for you, as it is for me, I reckon you can just use canned pumpkin or cherries.

*** *** *** *** ***

Happy chowing, kids! Make sure you get back to your regular broiled fish and steamed broccoli schedule tomorrow. As for me, I'll be hitting the road for PA Dutch country tomorrow afternoon, but I'll send dispatches.

Happy Birthday...

2006-08-30T14:02:00.000-04:00

...to my grandmother, Trudie, who turns 82 today. She's probably going to throw a fit that I posted her age, but hopefully I can appease her with a handmade Teddy bear or three.

Trudie, whose real name is Grammy, got her nickname during the springtime of my three-year passionate affair with one Gordon Matthew Sumner, known to the rest of the world as Sting, although my fellow fanatics and I can tell you exactly when and where he was born, and what his dad did for a living. (October 2, 1951, in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, England; Dad was a milkman.) So distraught was I that Sting had bequeathed the bulk of his affections to Trudie Styler, the actress/Tantric chick who would become his legal wife when I was sixteen that I thus nicknamed Grammy Gertrude. The name stuck, and now we all call her Trudie. (Hey, it's prettier than Gert, for heavens' sake.)

Because Trudie lives on the other side of PA (the western side--Harrisburg is located in what local newscasters like to refer to as "the Midstate," a term that drives my dad batshit due to its woeful innacuracy), I always thought of her as my "other grandmother"--the one who didn't live a mile away and didn't tell me to sit up straight, stop eating so much, and act like a little lady. Oh, she might have tried, but Trudie has always been the slop-over-with-sugar type of grandmother, and so any attempts to establish authority fell by the wayside as soon as I said "no" and started screaming. Not that she isn't a tough broad in her own right. Trudie worked as a Rosie the Riveter during WWII (one of the loveliest conversations I ever had with her was one in which I discovered she'd longed to go to college and become a metallurgist), raised three law-abiding, basically sane kids on no money and a lot of canned food, and, after my grandpap Bud died, traveled to Italy, France, Egypt, and Israel on a host of, as I put it, "old Catholic lady pilgrimages." I have a picture of her someplace with her friends in Italy, and they're all grabbing at the Pope like he's Bono. As if this weren't enough, Trudie hasn't been able to eat solid food since 1998, and within the confines of the feeding tube she's stuck on, she still gets out there and does her thing. I think we've managed to convinced her to let her nephews change the lightbulbs in her kitchen ceiling, but other than that, Trudie does what she wants, god love her.

The thing that I loved most about Trudie when I was a kid was that she could sew. Oh, Gloria could knit and crochet and hem, but Trudie was an alchemist when it came to a sewing machine. For my fifth birthday, she made me the dance costume I'd been harassing my mom to buy me for over a year. The pattern included a clown hat--I seem to recall a minor skirmish when I didn't want to wear the hat when I went trick-or-treating. (Parents, listen up: Many, many kids eye clowns askance. They are scary men who paint their faces and pull phallic objects out of their baggy pants. Do not hire a clown for your kid's fifth birthday party under the assumption that she or he will find it funny. Remember John Wayne Gacy? All right. Thus concludeth the PSA.) For Christmas when I was seven, during the height of the Cabbage Patch Kid plague, Trudie made me one when my dad's tireless efforts to score one of those freakish mutants proved fruitless. She went on to buy me like, ten more, long after I'd outgrown them and the plague had diminished to a small, nagging infection that one learns to live with.

I'm pretty disgusted with the way I treated poor Trudie during my teenage years. Nasty doesn't cut it. Bitch barely scratches the surface. No, I was the dreaded "C" word when it came to my grandmother, but she mostly put up with it without ever once suggesting I should be smacked upside the head or transferred to a mental hospital, which is more than I can say for many of the women of my acquaintance during those years in Jesusland, none of whom bore even a fraction of the brunt of my rotten gittishness. Trudie, this is a paltry offering, but I am very sorry for telling you to get the fuck out of my room that time you were visiting Dad and me and I was watching that videotape of my high school's production of Hello, Dolly! This is not an excuse, but the reason I was so horrified that you walked into my room without knocking, besides the fact that I was a rotten adolescent desperate for privacy, was that I had a huge girl crush on the girl who played Dolly, and I didn't know how to articulate that, even though girl crushes are completely de rigeur and even if it were a full-blown, ride-the-pink-glitter-pony type of crush, I doubt you would have cared. Thank you for saying nothing more or less than "I don't know how to please you, Karla," in response, because if you had just yelled at me, I don't think it would have had the impact that it did. And thank you for never once suggesting I should go to church or to a mental hospital to cure my uncontrollable mood swings, even though you are a devout Catholic and you were well within your rights to do so. And please stop trying to change lightbulbs on your own, lest you fall off that ladder again.

Trudie and I are more than cool now. I've stopped being a cunt to her, and she makes a valiant effort to not call me "Precious" or talk to me like I'm five too much. I actually quite enjoy hanging out with her independent of my dad when we go out to see her on major holidays, like when we drop a few bucks at evil Wal-Mart on yarn and beading supplies. My only request to her besides not talking to me like I'm five is to please stop hovering when I make the Durkee's onion and green bean casserole for dinner. She complies about half the time, but she often forgets. Hey, she's 82--I'll give her a break.

So, Trudie, be good to yourself this year. Thanks for putting up with me. I'm going to stop now before we get into Hallmark card territory, because that just won't do. Love you!

Chef, What's Shrimping?

2006-08-29T11:05:00.000-04:00

Well, children, shrimping is a trendy sexual activity, the likes of which involves…you know, I’m really not entirely sure. I’ve never indulged because…uh…I’m a virgin! Yeah, that’s it. Hee. (I do leave the house sometimes.) Anyway, this is not that kind of blog, but I wonder if those looking for more adult content will give me some hits today. For the rest of you, please feast on the far more appetizing (and tame):

Karla’s Shrimp Curry with Texmati Rice

As with shrimp and black bean sludge, you can use any kind of rice you want. Get a life and stop doing everything I do!

Ingredients:

One tablespoon olive oil
One small onion, finely chopped (I usually use scallions, but I didn’t have any on hand)
Two plum tomatoes, finely chopped
A handful each of fresh basil and cilantro, finally chopped (yes, you can use dried)
A half-pound defrosted, cooked shrimp
One cup plus one tablespoon plain yogurt
Juice of one-half lime
Cayenne, turmeric, coriander, cumin, and salt to taste
One cup green peas
A small handful of raisins (optional)
Two cloves garlic, minced
Texmati rice

Instructions:

1. As with sludge, cook the rice according to the package directions.

2. Chop up the veggies and herbs and dump them into your skillet or stockpot, which you should have already slicked with the olive oil. Sauté on high for two minutes, stirring frequently, then reduce heat to medium. Cook until mushy—if the skin is peeling off the tomatoes, it’s ready for step three. Stir occasionally.

3. While the veggies are reducing, defrost the shrimp. When the veggies are reduced, take off the tails and toss the shrimp in the pan. Cover them up with the veggie-herb mix. (“Now, children, you want that shrimp and those tomatoes to be makin’ love like a man and a beautiful woman!”)

4. When the shrimp is suitably covered, add one cup of yogurt and the juice of one-half lime. Mix well. Add the spices according to taste, and mix well again.

5. When the concoction starts to sputter again, add the peas. Let sputter for a while, then reduce heat to low. Simmer for a half-hour or so.

6. If you feel like it, add a small handful of raisins. Any kind will do, unless you absolutely can’t stand raisins. In which case, don’t add raisins at all. Duh.

7. Five minutes or so before the end, add the chopped garlic.

8. The rice should be finished by now, so let it stand for five minutes. Do the same with the curry. This will give you the opportunity to run out to the corner deli for some cigarettes.

9. Serve the shrimp atop the rice, and make sure you have a good-sized glass of soymilk, cow’s milk, or beer at the ready, because that shit is spicy. Namaste!

*** *** *** *** ***

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Are You A Hermit, By Any Chance?

2006-08-28T11:22:00.000-04:00

Why, yes, I certainly am! And so I was thrilled that I had the opportunity to crawl out of my lair and spend a lovely evening quaffing Pilsners with my friend Claudia at the Bohemian Beer Garden in the heart of beautiful Astoria, Queens. The Bohemian Hall and Beer Garden (Bohemian as in the Czech region, not bohemian as they claim to be in Rent) is NYC’s only remaining outdoor beer garden, and it’s about what you’d expect—a big concrete yard with picnic tables and a rickety little stage where local rock, polka, and oompah bands can strut their stuff. As much as I swear up and down that I’m going to move to Brooklyn as soon as I get a little money, I like that my neighborhood is home to such an unpretentious watering hole where upper- and lower-case bohemians, hipsters, and even “reg’lar folk” can hang out and get soused without making a huge dent in their wallets. (Astoria is also home to one of the best Czech restaurants in the five boroughs,Zlata Praha, which translates to “Golden Prague.” It’s a similarly unpretentious place, right under the N train, heavy on the beer and starch. If you like German food, you’ll probably like Czech food, too—lots of meat and bread, but spicier than its neighbor to the west. Wonder if I should have my birthday party there? Anyone have any other suggestions? Anyone really hate Czech food?)

Even though it was raining off and on Friday night, that didn’t stop Claudia and me from making good on our long-delayed plan to grace this legendary institution (we were supposed to go last summer, but I was in the middle of an epic emotional breakdown and, surprise, didn’t want to leave the house), and it certainly didn’t stop a whole bunch of other people, including this one dude who made a point of doing pushups drunk. It probably won’t surprise you to know that I prefer cool, rainy evenings to warm, sunny ones. The New York in my mind is always rain-swept and candy-colored, like a Woody Allen film, and there’s also something about a rainy Friday night in late summer that invokes in me a nostalgia for an adolescence I didn’t have, slipping out to drink skunk water with a bunch of goofy, sweet headbangers and maybe having sex in the back of a ’77 Plymouth. (Why is it parents get so up in arms about their kids hanging out with the so-called “wrong crowd” –i.e. headbangers, Goths, et. al.—? It’s not like every one of these kids is Dylan Klebold, and it doesn’t mean that your own kid is necessarily going to pick up such habits as glue-sniffing and fucking bareback. And what is the big deal about teenagers having sex, anyway? I mean, I didn’t, but that’s just because no one asked me.)

The only drawback to my new favorite hangout is the seats. Four hours on a picnic bench…oh, the PAIN, the unmitigated agony! Literally a pain in the ass, and on the back. In fact, about halfway through the evening, I seriously considered asking Claudia if we could cut it short, because I felt like I’d put in six hours at the gym, done Vinyasa yoga, and been slammed against a speeding semi. (I’ve been in a lot of pain lately, and I’m not entirely sure why. Sarito told me today about some holistic pain pill she heard about on “60 Minutes” that’s supposed to start working in about a month and after that, cures your arthritic ills. I hope she’s right, because if I’m going to spend my Friday nights polluting my body on a metal bench, I’m going to need reinforcements. Not to mention that I can BARELY MOVE half the damn time. Ugh, I can just imagine taking my complaints to a doctor and having him say something helpful like, “You’re not even thirty! How can you be in so much pain? You need to lose weight.” Yeah, Doc, fuck you in advance.) Thank god I hung on, and not just because the lovely Brits at the table next to us gave us an almost-full pitcher of Pilsner when they decided to take their leave, but because in the midst of regaling me with stories about her year in Moscow, pagan rituals, and the SCANDALOUS, uh, proclivities of distant acquaintances (most of whom I’ve actually never met), Claudia proffered the following tale along the lines of MarkRickSteve’s account of the boutique saleslady:

“A friend of mine used to work as a travel agent, and one day she got this call from a woman who desperately needed to book a flight for her boss. ‘My boss is going to Portland, and she insists on no stopovers. Okay? No stopovers. So she wants to fly business class, and she wants blah, and bloh, and blee, and no stopovers. Absolutely no stopovers. And she’s flying to Portland. Oh, yes, and she’ll require X and Y and Z, and this and that and the other thing. No stopovers, flying to Portland. And she must have a hooker and a tankful of bourbon [I’m paraphrasing here] and no stopovers, in business class, flying to Portland. Is this all clear?’ My friend’s only response was, ‘Portland, Oregon or Portland, Maine?’ There’s a long pause and the woman says, ‘Uh…does it matter?’ Yes, it gets worse. It turned out, because this was right before Thanksgiving, on the only flight this woman can take to Portland, Oregon, business class is sold out, so she’ll have to fly first class or coach. The woman says, ‘Oh…well, does first class fly to Portland, Oregon?’ And my friend just said, ‘Ma’am, have you ever flown before?’”

High fructose corn syrup, I’m telling you. Just so you know, airplanes do not, as Claudia pointed out, “split in half like the starship Enterprise.” Nor do you, as I pointed out, have to be in the first five cars like you’re taking the 1 & 9 to South Ferry. Actually, they stopped running the 9 after 9/11, but old habits die hard.

For our next outing, Claudia and I are planning to plunk me in line for tickets to Mother Courage starring Meryl Streep and, in a small part, my boyfriend Kevin Kline. C’s and my friend in the Bronx saw it with another friend of ours, and he was quite laudatory of Meryl Streep, although he said that Kevin Kline, while good, wasn’t as good as you’d expect him to be. That’s mildly sucky, but the odds of my actually snagging us tickets to this thing are pretty low, and Kevin Kline at his worst is still a million times better than most of today’s entertainers at their best. Wish us luck.

I actually had the opportunity to go out two nights in a row—another friend of mine was hosting a benefit for the Agora dance troupe at the McCarren Park Pool in Brooklyn, but I was too stiff and spent to take advantage of the chance to be a geek amongst hipsters on Saturday night. Oh, well, next time.

Beans, Beans, and Nothing But Beans!

2006-08-24T23:57:00.001-04:00

In lieu of the supremely crass and obvious ditty about magical fruit, I give you this lyric from Into the Woods to kick off the second of this week’s gastronomic installments. (Any Sondheim fans care to weigh in here? Is it “nothing but beans” or “the special beans”? Or neither? I’m a Sweeney Todd girl myself, so if anyone wants to bring me up to speed with the fairy tales, please do so.)

Etruscan White Beans with Penne

Clever, eh? You’ve heard of Tuscan White Beans, right? Well, this is a little corruption of that, and it works because those white beans have been in the fridge since time immemorial. Yes, very witty, Wilde. Do get on with it.

Ingredients:

Half a yellow onion, finely chopped
Three good-sized plum tomatoes, also finely chopped (you can use canned—drain, or don’t; it’s up to you. If you don’t, you can probably skip the water)
A handful of fresh basil, chopped…you guessed it (you can skip the fresh basil and use twice as much dried basil, but there’s something so soul-salving about fresh herbs, n’est-ce pas?)
One tablespoon olive oil
One and a half cupfuls of cooked white beans (or one 16-oz can)
Dried oregano, dried basil, and salt to taste
Two cloves garlic, chopped
One cup water
One tablespoon milk
One cup penne

Instructions:

1. Slosh olive oil into the pan, chop up the veggies, and sauté until soft.

2. Add the beans. If you’re using canned, drain them and rinse off the sliminess. Actually, you can probably get away with not draining them—again, you probably won’t need to use the water—but do rinse them, because you don’t need to be eating that ick.

3. Dump the water in, if need be, and sauté over medium heat until soft(er). This should take about thirty minutes if your oven was constructed sometime after the JFK assassination. If you live in a charming prewar like I do, it will probably take closer to 45 minutes. Sometime in the middle of all this softening, add the seasonings to taste.

4. Chop up the garlic and scrape it in the pan. If you like, you can leave this step to the very end, because garlic loses its flavor if cooked too long. I like my garlic tasting like it would in that restaurant in The Godfather where Michael shoots that dude who shot the Don, so I added it about five minutes before the pasta was done.

5. Which reminds me—cook your pasta according to package directions until al dente. Now is probably a good time to get that pasta water a-rollin’.

6. Bean water: If you’re using dried beans that you cooked a week ago because you were planning to make chili, but you decided to hold off because you puked on Saturday morning (yum!) and you thought you had the flu, but it turned out to be the aftereffects of drinking, like, a whole can of coffee in three days, and fresh tomatoes, you’re gonna have to add the H20, because that bean concoction is gonna be sticking to the pan. Use your judgment. You want to go for a sort of pasta fagioleconsistency, but you don’t want too much of a broth at the end. You’re looking for moist, not soupy.

7. Swish in the milk for that extra creamy taste.

8. When the pasta is al dente, drain it and set it aside. If you’ve managed to time it right—and I did, miracle of miracles! —the beans should be at the appropriate texture around the same time the pasta is finished. Scrape the beans into the pasta pot and mix ‘em up. There may be a little bean crust from the frying pan, but that’s just gravy, in a manner of speaking.

9. Sprinkle some of that rice parmesan cheese you’ve had sitting in your fridge for, like, two years on top—or hell, use the real stuff—and inhale. Salud!

You can pair this with a nice Chianti (slurpslurpslurp) unless you’re like me, and you have to stay away from wine because it’s like drinking Sierra Mist. In which case, stick to beer or a couple of cocktails whilst cooking, because you want to be able to eat the damn thing without having it come right back up.

Oh, yes, and make sure you follow up with that yumbly rice custard you should have made with the leftovers from last night’s spicy shrimp and black bean sludge with Texmati rice. I speak of the rice, of course, not the sludge. But whatever gets you through the night, I reckon.

This Is Not a Food Blog...

2006-08-23T18:09:00.000-04:00

…but hoez gots to eat too, to quote Hollywood Shuffle. And since this blog has “kitchen” in its name, I suppose we’re long overdue for some down-home cookin’, Karla-style (i.e., whatever is in the fridge that we can slap together that tastes remotely Mexican). So without further ado, I present…

Shrimp and Black Bean Sludge with Texmati Rice

Ingredients:
One tablespoon olive oil
Half a green pepper, cored and chopped
Two medium tomatoes, chopped
One small tomatillo, chopped
A handful of fresh cilantro, chopped
Half a pound of large, cooked shrimp, defrosted (I use the precooked kind from WholeFoods)
About two cups (or one can) of black beans
Cayenne, cumin, coriander, and salt to taste
Juice of one small lime
Mole (optional)
A few drops Tabasco sauce (optional)
One tablespoon salsa (again, optional)
Texmati rice (you can use any kind of rice you want—this is just what I had on hand)

Hark, kitchen slattern! Whither onions and garlic? Well, I didn’t have any, and I certainly didn’t have the time or energy to run out and buy some, so they got the shaft. Actually, strict Ayurvedics give them the shaft too, on the grounds that they’re too difficult to digest. If you simply can’t do without onions and garlic and you have some on hand, by all means, chuck ‘em in.

Instructions:
1. Cook the rice according to the package directions. Do not use instant—it’s Ayurvedically unsound. Okay, use instant if you must. If you do, you can wait until the sludge has simmered for a while before cooking it. If you’re using the uncooked kind, start cooking it before you make the sludge, especially if you’re using a sixty-year-old gas stove, like I am.

2. Slosh the olive oil the pan, chop up yer veggies, and sauté on high for a few minutes. Reduce heat to medium.

3. Chop up the cilantro and toss that in.

4. When the veggie mix has softened to a “sludge-like consistency” (the things I learn from this woman! If she’s reading this, she must think I’m a total star-fucking freak), pour in your black beans.

5. Did you forget to defrost your shrimp while all this exciting activity was going on? That’s okay; so did I. Just fill a bowl of warm water, plop in the shrimp, and soak them for five minutes. Don’t forget to give the sludge a stir or three, and pay attention to that rice, for god’s sake!

6.Take the heads/tails/appendages off the shrimp and add it to the sludge. Stir well.

7. Add the cayenne, cumin, coriander, salt, and lime juice per instructions. Turn up the stove for a quick spin, stir, then reduce heat to medium.

8. Check email. Decide to add some of that mole that’s been hanging out in your fridge for nigh on to a year. Get kicked offline.

9. Hey, some Tabasco sauce might taste good here too!

10. And you know, this salsa’s in here taking up room and gathering dust…

11. Oh, fuck! The rice is sticking to the pan, and so is the sludge! Add water to both.

12. Tell cats they can’t have any of this, even though they think they want it because it contains shrimp. Ignore plaintive mews.

13. When rice and sludge are at their proper gustatory consistency, shut off the burners and let ‘em stand for five minutes. Have a fag, take a piss, whatever.

14. Wash hands, pour sludge over rice, and eat. Muy delicioso y caliente!

If you have any leftover rice, put it in the fridge and use it to make rice custard. Guess who has an awesome recipe for that? You’ll have to buy her book to get it, though. Hell, I did.

My Brain Hurts

2006-08-22T10:26:00.000-04:00

My friend MarkRickSteve was in town last week visiting his brother, and he told me the following story:

"This morning, we were in this little boutique in the West Village and I started talking to the cashier. She asked me where I was from, and I said Chicago. 'What time zne is that in?' she asked me. I didn't think too much of it--some people might think it's in Eastern or Mountain. So I said, 'Central' and I told her that it's an hour behind Eastern, so it would be ten-thirty there. So then SHE says, 'Is that a.m. or p.m.?'[Loud, profane expression of disbelief from me.] No, wait, it gets worse. I told her the reason I was so tired was I'd just taken the red-eye from L.A. 'Oh, what time zone is that in?' she asks again. I tell her, 'Pacific, which means it's THREE hours behind, which means it would be eight-thirty in the morning there.' And then she says, I swear to god, 'A.M. OR P.M.????!!!!!'"

MarkRickSteve also informed me that his brother's generation--he's ten years younger than we are, so I guess that would make them Gen Y--prefers Leno to Letterman. But...but...but...Leno's not funny! (Here I must confess: The one time I was in L.A. myself, I was coming back from the awesome Buffalo Exchange with my friend Thomasina's Human Mother when we saw a silver-haired man standing on a corner signing autographs. "Maybe it's Bill Clinton," THM suggested. Of course it was not; it was guess who. I don't know if it was the marine layer or the magic of the desert air or WHAT possessed me, but I leaned out the window of THM's car and yelled, "Jay, you rock!" Four seconds later, I smacked myself upside the head. Please let the record stand that I hate, hate, hate Leno.)

Personally, I think these Gen Y kids eat too much sugar and play too much XBox. That's why they hold these Kafkaesque ideas about Leno being funnier than Letterman. Which reminds me--you probably already know that the U.S. government pays farmers to plant a surplus of corn. Guess what they do with it? Turn it into high fructose corn syrup! So if you buy a can or bag of something or other and you see high fructose corn syrup listed as one of the top five ingredients, throw it away. This is a government plot to make you stupid and convince you that Leno is funnier than Letterman, and that ain't America, kids.

Jesus Loves Me, This I Know Part 2

2006-08-20T12:29:00.000-04:00

I've been doing a little digging into my mom's family's religious background of late. My mom's family is, for the most part, from Lancaster County, PA, which everyone knows as ground zero for the Amish. My great-grandmother Olga was from a small town called Falmouth, right on the Susquehanna River, just south of Three Mile Island, which you'll recall as the nuclear power plant that almost blew up in 1979. (You wouldn't believe how many people try to tell me that's the nuclear plant up the Hudson River. Do you think I can't tell the difference between TMI and Indian Point? Someone also tried to tell me once that TMI was in San Francisco.)

I've always assumed that Olga was raised in a strict Dunkard or Evangelical United Brethren home. A little Internet research told me that this was impossible, because these sects weren't established until 1928 and 1946, respectively. So I asked my grandfather the heretic what sect Olga belonged to as a child, and his answer was "None, really." Whoa! "That whole thing about how religious Olga was is mostly a myth," he continued, explaining that her collection of crucifixes and Jesus needlepoints was mainly "to impress people." That sounds like Olga. She was immensely proud of my grandpa, her rich son-in-law, when he made a small fortune in insurance in the early 1960s--never mind that she'd call my grandma every day when they were first married and tell him to leave the bum. So I guess Olga was a bit of a moral relativist, to put it kindly.

My grandpa is a passionate believer in God who is equally as passionate in his nonbelief in organized religion. He used to take a whatever-gets-you-through-the-night kind of approach, but the emergence of the Tim and Beverly LaHayes and their ilk in the past decade or so has morphed this into something perilously close to antipathy. (Hey, if George W. Bush could make Grandpa leave the Republican party, anything is possible. Not that he didn't vote for that stool sample, mind you.) I suspect the last time he set foot in a church was when my parents got married thirty-six years ago. Although Jesus is his favorite prophet, I've discovered (and borrowed) several books of his on Eastern religion. His, I think, is exactly what the fundamentalists go batshit over--a salad-bar approach to theology, with a firm belief of the power of the Almighty in nature. His solo journey toward this recognition is a bit too Ayn Rand for my taste, but I respect the hell out of it. It makes sense to me in a way that accepting Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior do not. (As AF put it, "What does that mean, anyway? That you believe that stupid story?" In case you're wondering which one, AF is talking about the resurrection. I'm sure my grandpa can explain that metaphor for you.)

As for me, I guess I'm what you'd call a foxhole agnostic. Meaning, if I'm ever in a foxhole in Belgium, with Bing Crosby singing "I'll Be Home For Christmas" on the Victrola in my mind, I'm not going to get religion just because the Nazis are dropping missiles on my head. I'm particularly amused by the instructions on the back of the Jack Chick tracts that instruct you on how to become a Christian. They're so vague, and yet so repressive. "Talk to God in prayer every day"? "Tell others about Jesus Christ"? "Read your Bible every day to get to know Jesus Christ better"? Look, I talk to people about Jesus Christ. I've also read bits and pieces of the Bible (and bits and pieces of what other folks have said about the Bible), and from what I can glean about Dear Mr. Jesus, he was a Commie! Imagine that--the only born son of God a Commie Jew. If you've read Al Franken's book Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right, you'll probably remember the chapter in which the evil Jew Franken talks about how, when he was in rehab, George W. Bush favored passages from Acts. You'll also remember that portions of Acts were ripped, word for word, by one Karl Marx. I believe it was the part about "each according to his ability to each according to his needs." Hmmm. Somehow I don't think this is what Mr. Chick has in mind...

Nor is it the faith of most of the Harrisburgers I knew. The prevailing relgious dogma in Harrisburg seems to be "I've got my seat on God's train; tough titty toenails for you." Oh, I think they're required to witness their faith in front of three people or something like that--sort of like Amway--but it's still all about them and securing that place on the bus to Heaven. (When I was maybe three, I asked my mom how my great-grandpa Karl got to Heaven and she replied with a distracted, "I don't know...I guess he took a bus.") I don't recall Jesus ever bringing solace to most of the people around me. To me, Jesus seemed like a big dick--someone who hated me for my "sins" that I was, nonetheless, supposed to love and worship. Being a Christian seemed to give folks a license to be nasty--to me, that is. Because we didn't go to church, because I lived alone with my dad in a rented tract house on the wrong side of town, because we kept to ourselves. The Christian adults around me seemed to demand that I protect them from the awful thing I was, from the horrible things that had happened to me when I was a kid, because they were Decent Christians who simply couldn't be tainted by such filthy information. (Did you people skip over the part in the Bible about Lot's daughters getting him drunk and seducing him to preserve his seed? That there is some filthy information, if you ask me.)

It's been only in the past few years that I've been able to realize that what I experienced was not pure Christianity, but a bunch of emotionally immature adults enacting precisely that which they purport to condemn, the salad-bar approach to theology, and using it to abuse their authority, like Stalin did with Marxism. What I'm not entirely sure about is if this was calculated on their part or if it was something with which they'd been raised, something they'd heard for years and unconsciously translated into a gut response. And while I'd like to think I adhere to the whatever-gets-you-through-the-night approach, I'm emotionally immature myself, and too often I fall back on the idea that if it doesn't get me through the night, it's probably not working for you, either. But at least I can admit that I have no way of knowing that for sure, just as I can admit that I have no way of knowing if there is a God or not. But I can't simply believe.

Now go in peace.

Paranoia

2006-08-19T14:07:00.000-04:00

The author and sole employee of this blog would like to state, for the record, that she is not opposed to people from Pakistan or any other Middle East countries in any shape or form. Nor is she opposed to people of non-Caucasian races. She is not even entirely opposed to small liberal arts colleges, although she encourages parents and kids to base their decisions on something more substantial than a cool brochure, ivy-covered walls, and a beautiful lake view from every window. She is, however, opposed to religious fundamentalism, men ruling the roost, and such practices as female genital mutilation. And if that cabdriver had been named Paul McCall or Owen Bowen, she would have found that amusing as well.

The author would also like to hear your thoughts on your understanding of the term "cultural sensitivity," especially if you, like she, did the small liberal arts college thing. If you'd like to see what it is not, go to the forums on this page.

Back to you in the newsroom.

Taxi Driver (You Talkin' to Me?)

2006-08-18T17:46:00.000-04:00

I hailed a cab driver today with the name Malik Sadiq. No, I'm not going to go all Mike Royko here and make fun of the dude's name, but I did find it a tad amusing.

Usually, I don't mind making small talk with a cab driver. When the cab driver is listening to Air America, we're guaranteed a pleasant twenty minutes or so of Bush-bashing and Cheney-hating before I arrive at my destination. When they start asking me about my (nonexistent) boyfriend, I tell them about a friend of mine in the Bronx, who is six-one and looks like a biker. He's a real person, but he is not, alas, my boyfriend, although he's cool with my claiming he is in order to prevent cab drivers and skeevy dudes on the subway from hitting on me. (He's also not really a biker--he just plays one on TV, so to speak.) Malik Sadiq was not listening to Air America, nor did he hit on me, but I was too exhausted to talk. So he pretty much left me alone until we landed on the Queens side of the 59th Street Bridge, at which point he says to me, "I don't like your culture. Oooookaaayyyy...and what might that mean, Malik Sadiq? I don't much like my culture either, if what you're referring to involves "American Idol" and Bud Lite and thirty-second rutting encounters with pink frat boys. Is that what you mean?

It was not. "Women in my country do not work like here," he says. "They work in girls' schools; they are nurses in hospitals. They do not work in shops. They are not police officers. Men work. Women are wives. They stay home and take care of the children."

Had this been a pink frat boy at an Upper East Side Irish pub telling me a loud, fat chick like me was never gonna get any better than he, pumping away at my intimate parts and groaning, I would have loudly and fatly told him he was a sexist prick whilst dumping a keg of Bud Light on his filthy white baseball cap. Because my cab driver was Pakistani, and I was hauling a week's worth of groceries from Whole Foods in Chelsea, I refrained from mentioning the Pakistani girl I once heard about who had the temerity to marry the man she loved and is now forced to live on the lam because her father and male cousins are trying to kill her. Instead, I said, "Well, I wouldn't mind not working..." to which Malik Sadiq let emerge a hearty chuckle. "You are tired," he affirmed.

Will someone please tell me, once and for all, what "cultural sensitivity" means? Does it mean keeping quiet when someone brags about women in his native country knowing their place? Because let me tell you, I feel like a real bigot just recounting this incident. Parents, do not send your kids to small liberal arts schools. They will graduate with nothing but a useless degree and a sneaking suspicion that they might be the next David Duke.

What A Bitch!

2006-08-17T16:09:00.000-04:00

I just realized that the story I'm about to tell involves my admitting I take Paxil. Amazing how old habits die hard, because I'm sitting here thinking, Should I admit that? No one will ever talk to me again! even though something like, oh, I don't know, ten million people in the world probably take it. In East Jesus, you don't talk about that sort of thing if you want folks to speak to you.

Anyway. A few days ago, I had to refill my Paxil prescription. The pharmacy on the corner is notoriously incompetent. Oftentimes, I'll go in there around 4 in the afternoon and they're closed already, even though they're supposed to be open till 9. You'd think I'd have learned my lesson by now, but no. So I go in there, check to see if the gate is down, and when I see it isn't, I plop my prescription down on the counter. The young pharmacy intern comes back. "We have to call your doctor," he tells me. They've pulled this shit before for no fathomable reason, so I tell him, not very nicely, "No, you don't." I myself work a job at which I have to swallow all kinds of rudeness, and so I try to be polite to those who are in similar straits, but when the pharmacist gives me shit about my prescription, s/he stops being human and becomes a vicious cyborg standing between me and my sanity. As my neighbor Mrs. Rosewater (the lovely wife of Feline Bill) pointed out, "It's not fuckin' Demerol, for god's sake!" Seriously, this isn't a buyer's club. Do you really need to call my doctor to verify that I'm dying of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and I'm feeling the need for weed? Well, yes, apparently. "Your doctor wrote that you're supposed to take a minimum of 80 milligrams per day," says the youth. No shit, I tell him, that's what I'm supposed to take. "Well, we need to verify that with her, because she's never done that before," he says. As I'm about to rip this young turk a new one (that's turk as in "punk," not as in "from Turkey," lest anyone start accusing me of bigotry), a regular pharmacist butts in and says, "Besides, we don't have any Paxil. We need to order it." What the fuck? Again, this is not Thorazine, for god's sake. It's Paxil, a very common SSRI that,again, probably ten million people take. Is it too much to ask to have that shit on hand?

So I yank the prescription out of the dude's hand and stomp six blocks down to the other pharmacy, and it's the same story. Oh, they have it, but they ain't gonna give it to me. "Because your psychiatrist blah blah blah and we have to verify that because yak yak yakkity blah." At least they had the decency to call my psychopharm (who, I neglected to mention, is not in the office on Mondays), but the receptionist there wouldn't talk to her. So they put me on the phone and she says give her fifteen minutes, she'll give my doc a call. Okay, fine. Well, not fine fine, but I'm freaking out and I'll take what I can get. During this whole battle, I run into a girl I knew in college. She's the complete opposite of me--quiet, pretty, and responsible. I tend to freak her out anyway, because I'm such a lunatic even when my seratonin levels are where they should be, and I'm standing there buggin' out with this demon grin on my face, trying to get my crazy pills out of these people, just one little dose, pleasepleaseplease, and I'm thinking, looking at her poised, married, pregnant self, I am gonna cause this chica to have a miscarriage. Anyway, she wishes me luck and leaves with her stash. God, I wish I could be normal. I wonder what she told her husband, who was briefly my housemate back in the day. He probably had a good laugh.

After a few false starts and another conversation with the pharmacist, in which she tells me my best bet is probably...you know, I don't even remember what my "best bet" was supposed to be, because all I could think was my "best bet" was for them to give me my damn meds tout de suite, I get my pills, pop them, and wait for them to take effect. By this time, I'm so frazzled that I end up having a minor freakout at work (fortunately, everyone at NYCO is a frustrated artist, and they don't snap at you for "being unprofessional" if you happen to start crying because some prick pharmacist won't give you your pills). I think I should take the advice of this lady and bake my pharmacist some cookies. Anything to wake these cyborgs from their bureaucratic stupor.

I feel like a right rotten bitch about the whole thing, because I really don't like being nasty to folks like pharmacists and waitresses and others in the service industry, because I know what a difficult job it is. On the other hand, I don't see why they couldn't have given me one dose. Paxil is not a controlled substance. And it wasn't even Paxil CR, it was regular old generic Paxil. I'm not going to smash it up like Oxycontin and sell it to teenagers.

Amy Sedaris once said she "cringe[d] when [she] heard people use the expression 'meds,'" because "when you hear someone say that, you know they have to be takin' a whole lot of medication." Listen, Amy, don't make me hate you. I am a huge fan of yours. Strangers With Candy is among the many DVDs on my birthday wish list. But you should know that I am on a whole lot of medication. I'm sure many of your fans are taking a whole lot of medication. I would like not to be taking a whole lot of medication, but my brain is all fucked up. I wish I didn't have to worry about falling for some fellow and have him ditch me when he finds out I take pills for my "mood disorder" (I ask you, how can a mood be disordered? Fuck the DSM-IV for deciding this shit!) and/or that my mommy hurt my head when I was a kid, because nice people simply can't associate with crazies like me. But that's not the way it worked out. So Amy, cut that shit out, and take a look at your brother, of whom I am also a huge fan but who clearly could have benefitted from some kind of obsessive-compulsive drug back in the day, if that one essay in Naked is any indication.

And finally, if anyone reading this wishes to tell me something like I don't need those pills, I just need Jesus, or something equally brainiacal, please keep it to yourself.

No Fat Chixxz

2006-08-14T12:19:00.000-04:00

My friend Sarito and I were just having a little discussion about "that woman on TV who's so breathless about getting down to a size 2." I assume she's talking about Kirstie Alley and Jenny Craig, both of whom/what/which Wendy McClure did an awesome job of lambasting in BUST last year. One of my favorite quotes went something to the effect of "At Pier 1, you buy overpriced crap made out of raffia; at Jenny Craig, you eat it."

As someone who has struggled with both her weight and the allegedly well-meaning but incredibly nasty remarks about my weight from those who claimed to be "just trying to HELP!!!!!", I find the whole weight-loss industry at once necessary and repugnant. I certainly can't fault Ms. Alley for wanting to shed tonnage--although I can certainly take umbrage with her spiritual practices and her lack of talent--but I wish to hell someone in the mainstream besides Naomi Wolff would finally just come out and acknowledge what this starve-yourself-to-Auschwitz-proportions marathon is really all about: Dicks.

Look. I'm a feminist, not a man-hater. These two things are not synonymous. Obviously, all men are not created equal in the sense that they do not share one immutable, collective mindset about how women should look. (Case in point: my awesome dad, who married my mom before she went batshit, and who even at her thinnest sorta resembled an apple propped up on toothpicks.) But we can't dispute that it's a bunch of totally phallocentric, well, dicks who are making these decisions about how women should look and think and be, and that we've bought and continue to buy into it, and then act like a bunch of Alexis Colbys when some skinny bitch steals our man. Okay, yes, this is extreme, but some of us never do outgrow junior high.

Think about it: If Kate Moss and her ilk were not shoved down your throat every day, if everyone from that asshole football player on down to your well-meaning but misguided Aunt Ethel weren't telling you that fat is bad and no man will love you if you don't lose some weight, would you give a good goddamn? No, of course you wouldn't. You might want to lose weight for other reasons, like diabetes prevention and the fact that you can't do certain yoga poses as easily as you used to, but if pissing off men were not the dangerous business that it is, if you weren't so utterly brainwashed (and I include myself in this, in spades), you would not be pinching your barely existent thigh fat and moaning about how corpulent you allegedly are. Hell, you might even like yourself, hard as it is to believe. I once told a therapist that I wouldn't care if I was fat if it weren't for the fact that everyone made such a big fucking deal about how godawful it was, and I don't think she believed me. But why not? We're humans, after all. We create this stuff, folks. If female bonobo monkeys can go against all traditional ideas about sex as purely reproductive and fuck each other bald, then we can get together and decide that we're not gonna take it anymore, can we not?

Here's a weight loss commercial I'd like to see: "Okay, here's the deal. I'm fat. Well, not really fat, but heavy enough that I can't get acting jobs that don't call for some incredibly degrading role as the 'Fat Chick,' which the script writer includes to make the skinny people feel good about themselves. Now, I'm damn sick of this, but I can't singlehandedly change the culture, and I've got to pay my rent. And I just don't have the balls, or ovaries, or energy to keep making my 'Fat Chicks are people too' speech to seriously fat, hairy, patriarchal prick producers, and I don't have the talent of Kathy Bates or Tovah Feldshuh to pull this thing off. That's why I choose Weight Watchers!"

Pretty good, huh? Cuts right through the bullshit. So next time someone tells you "No fat chixxz" and then has the unmitigated audacity to chide you for not eating that slice of cheesecake, recite this ad, and then kick them in the balls. Or ovaries, 'cause it ain't just men perpetratin' this shit.

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Calling All Geeks!: My friend Zoie requested some pictures of the cats. If someone has a "real" scanner (meaning one that is not part of a fax/printer/copier gadget) and the time to show me how to futz with HTML code, give me a shoutout posthaste.

Will You Shut the Fuck Up About the Damn Cats Already?

2006-08-12T12:19:00.000-04:00

Oh, ALL right. After this one, no more posts about cats for at least a week unless there's some dire emergency. But damn it, they're just so cute!

This morning, as I was heading to the corner deli for my morning provisions (cigs, coffee, soy milk, the Times, I saw two stray kitties being attended to by a very sweet woman about my dad's age. I've seen the little buggers before when I take the long route to the deli. They're tabbies, with long snouts and scrawny stray bodies. The fellow (lady?) who greeted us this morning looked to be part Maine coon, with a big, bushy tail that looked like someone or something had taken a bite out of--and who knows, perhaps someone/thing had. After I helped the very sweet woman feed the little beasts, we chatted about our own felines and she told me that down her way, on the south side of Broadway, there were quite a number of "cat colonies" to which she attended. Astoria does seem to be quite the feline hotspot, kind of like the Coliseum in Rome. We have our own little kitty hangout in the backyard, presided over by none other than Feline Bill, of course. In fact, every spring, Feline Bill rassles up the new kittens, cleans them up, domesticates them, and then unloads them on willing friends. Many, many times I've been tempted to spirit one of the little babies up to my pad, but I have an uneasy feeling that would set off all kinds of trauma for Hissy and Fitz, who would either hide in the closet or take a chunk out of the interloper's neck. At some point, though, in the distant future, if I'm ever in the market for another pet, I'm going to have to get a little female kitten and name her Maggie. I'm a theatre geek--it's in the contract, just as it's in the contract that on the extremely off-chance I ever get a dog, I'll have to name him Benjamin Barker, which, if you aren't a theatre geek or Sondheim nut, is Sweeney Todd's real name. When I was nine years old, my mom and I had a cat named Felicia, whom she never bothered to get spayed, which led to Felicia sneaking out of the house and getting knocked up. (You Catholic girls start much too late...) Anyway, the litter emerged on Beethoven's birthday, much to the delight of my bass-playing mother, and we ended up naming the surviving kittens Toby, Lovett, and Ben after various characters in the aforementioned musical. Toby's new owners renamed him Rusty, and my mom changed Lovett to Cecile on the grounds that it sounded too much like Lovey, and no cat of hers, blah blah blah. As for the runt who died, poor thing, well, my mother threw it in the trash. "What else was I supposed to do with it?" my mother said when I asked her why she didn't, um, bury it in the yard or something. "That ground's frozen as a hard as a rock!" Yes, but isn't there some city ordinance against throwing a cat in the trash? Oh, well, that was Vikki for you, all the sentiment of steel.

That was twenty years ago, and I assume all the cats in that litter are dead now. When my mother herself died, my dad and I took Cecile, while Ben went to live with our vet's housekeeper. Cecile was a case, man. She and Ben were left alone in my mom's house for two months after her fruitless surgery and before my equally sentimental grandfather figured he'd better find these little bastards new homes. (I can't exactly hold that against him--his only daughter was dying of colon cancer at thirty-nine, and he was trying to clean out our house and settle her estate and come to terms with the horror of it all.) Cecile never did get over being left alone in that house for so long, but the upshot of the situation was she became a true people cat. She loved her humans to the point of obsession, following us around the house and meowing a strangely bitchy little "r-a-a-a-h!" when she felt we weren't paying enough attention to her. My mother had had all the cats from that litter declawed, and so Cecile and my dad used to engage in "boxing matches" together. And how, you may ask? It was pretty simple, really--my dad would lie on his side on the floor, waving his hand back and forth between Cecile's front paws, and Cecile would bat at it. Nothing so exciting as the film clips of the boxing cats that "The Daily Show" likes to screen when they haven't anything better to do, but charming nonetheless. We called her "the goat cat" because when my dad lay down on the sofa to watch TV, Cecile would lean up against him like a little mountain goat. My dad and I used to laugh that she had nipple anxiety like the dog in Down and Out in Beverly Hills. Are we the only people who remember that scene? Because I swear, whenever I mention nipple anxiety and that film in the same sentence, people just look at me like, the fuck you talkin' 'bout, Willis?

Cecile lived to the ripe old age of 17, finally succumbing to a stomach tumor the day after Easter, 2003. I still miss "talking" to her on the phone--she purred so loudly my dad could hold the phone up to her neck and I could listen to her. And I still miss our big Buddha cat, Faron, a champion purr-er himself, who departed this life the same year as my mom, attempting to protect his humans from a pack of stray dogs that roamed the neighborhood (and which, I believe, was also responsible for the disappearance of our guinea pigs, Ginger and Mocha, who my mother saw fit to leave on the stoop, presumably so they could absorb fresh summer air. Mother, wherever you are, what the fuck were you thinking?). Faron was the mellowest cat ever--he was, after all, a stray from my parents' Vermont days in the early 1970s--and he used to put up with all kinds of crazy shit, like my dressing him in doll bonnets when I was a kid. When he wanted my mom to feed him, he'd walk across the piano until she put the meat on the floor. Our friend Deb lived upstairs from us, with her parents across the street, and one day Deb's mom called to let her know that Faron was sitting in the middle of the street with his tongue hanging out. "Is he sick?" she asked Deb. "Should I call Vikki? Is he going to get run over?" Deb just laughed and explained that was just Faron, nothing to worry about. And until he got into a tussle with the dogs who claimed his ninth life at 17, there really wasn't. He was just a stoner, protected by some cosmic force field.

I think Sally is the one I miss the most, though. Sally was the little white cat my dad got from a co-worker who lived on a farm after my mom split and took Faron and his "sister", Daisy. She was easily the sweetest, most well-behaved cat I've ever known, completely free of the bad behavior of Cecile and Faron, who chewed old newspapers and picked on the stereo speakers, respectively. With all due respect, I can't say Sally was especially interesting or social, but maybe that's why I have such a soft spot for her. Poor little gaffer developed diabetes late in her life and stopped cleaning herself, so my dad and I would have to bathe her. She hated it, but she was so good. And I will always cherish the memory of her wrestling with our then-new cat, Hades, a stray I unloaded on my dad when I was in college, with her front legs wrapped around Hades's neck. Who knew such a sweet little baby had such balls, so to speak?

As a foxhole agnostic, I'm leery about the concept of the afterlife, although I do like the Native American perspective of meeting your beloved pets after the final curtain is rung down. The only problem I have with that is, if my mother is there, who gets to play with Faron? I mean, I have nightmares about this woman surfacing from the dead and screaming at me that she knows all the "slander" I've been spreading about her (FYI, it's all true, so shut up, Vikki), so what's going to happen when I bite the big one? Maybe Faron will be able to share us. He always did like his humans. Maybe he'll even help us reconcile, but I doubt it.

Okay, let's wrap up Cat Week here at KT with some links to feline rescue organizations. And remember to do as Bob Barker tells you and spay and neuter your pet. (Not to mention spaying and neutering Bob Barker.)

New York
Grateful Paw Cat Adoption Center
Animal Welfare Adoption Network

Pennsylvania
Stray Cat Alliance (in Harrisburg, no less!)

Chicago
Cats Are Purr-r-r-sons Too
Tree House Animal Foundation

Northern California
Forgotten Felines of Sonoma County

Southern California
Los Angeles ASPCA
People and Cats Together

And, if all else fails, check in with me and I'll let you know what/who Feline Bill and I can rustle up from the backyard.

Cats 'n Blogs, Part 2

2006-08-11T10:21:00.000-04:00

Yeah, I know, genug already with the damn cats. But come on! Fifty years ago, I would be firmly set in cement as a crazy spinster, what with my utter lack of romantic companionship and feline fixation, so give me a break.

Anyway, Hissy continues to improve. She seems not to notice the fact that her wet food is further saturated with medicine--a painkiller and an antibiotic, for the record--and she's been rubbing against my ankles like a regular ol' mushball. As for Fitz, she's mighty rankled that her sister is getting all this attention and 9 Lives to boot, and she's been hissing and growling and generally behaving like a crazy-ass bizzotch. I hope these two come to some kind of truce, because I feel terrible seeing little injured Hissy receive such hostile treatment. Not that the cat actually understands this, but still. Feline Bill and I will be conducting a roundup later today so Hissy can get her surgical drain removed. I have a feeling it'll go about as well as the last one, so if you really want to know how it goes, just read the previous post.

Oh, here's some non-cat, non-blog related ruminations: As we all know, Ned Lamont roundly and soundly trounced Senator Joseph I. Lieberman in Tuesday's primary. My acupuncturist friend is, I'm sure, tickled pinko about this, because she can't stand Joe Lieberman's voice. (And I can't stand referring to her as "my acupuncturist friend," but she hasn't given me permission to use her real name, and I can't think of a suitable pseudonym. AF, if you're reading this, let me know what's what.) AF has a particular reason for why she can't stand Joe Lieberman's voice, which has to do with--you guessed it--Chinese medicine. See, in Chinese medicine, the human voice has five elements: a weep, a groan, a sing, a laugh, and a shout. One's voice is typically comprised of more than one of these elements and/or a lack thereof, leading to such combinations as "sing with lack of laugh" or "somewhere between a shout and a groan." What sends AF into anaphylactic shock is the weep, which is what Joe Lieberman has. During the 2004 primaries (oh, those halcyon days when we thought we might have a soupcon of a chance at getting rid of Bush once and for all!), AF made it clear that if she had to listen to "THAT MAN'S" voice for four years (Lieberman's), she would have to put NPR on mute, which rather defeats the purpose. "So," I goaded, "does that mean you're gonna vote for Bush if we run Lieberman?" No, AF assured me, she would vote for a salamander over Bush. She would just require a morphine drip if she had to listen to Lieberman. Crisis temporarily averted when we nominated Kerry, and I'm not about to rehash what happened next. Anyway, as soon as Garrison Keillor (weep) decides to retire, NPR will be safe again.

As for me, I don't have a huge problem with either Lieberman's or Keillor's voices, although I do wish they'd crawl under a rock for other reasons. Obviously, I have nothing but contempt for a Democrat who decides to play Carpetbagger, and my memories of Garrison Keillor involve having to sit mute on my crackhead mother's couch while she listened to the "News From Lake Woebgone" on Saturday nights. My lord, woman, it's not real! God forbid you pay attention to your only kid for two seconds. My apologies for being a flesh-and-blood child and not a trained puppet violin prodigy. (And no, my mother is not reading this. She died in 1989. And don't you dare tell me I shouldn't still be angry at her, especially when I have PMS.) No, my visceral reaction is for the sing, a trait that seems to be shared by local female newscasters the country over. Oh, it's like fingernails on a chalkboard--"A WO-man was RAPED TO-night in the BEN-son-hurst neigh-bor-hood in BROOK-lyn." Lady, she was raped! Quit crowin' about it! Inject some gravitas, and wipe that damn smile off your face! (Of course, I don't know that I enjoy their moues of woe any better. Just stay poker-faced, like they do on the BBC, and we'll all be much better off.)

So, blogs. My friend Sarito has started one of her own, Shredding The Envelope, which link will remain in the sidebar in perpetuity. I met Sarito in my acting class a few years ago, and we became friends the day we worked together on a mirror exercise. Since then, we've slapped together a scene from Alan Ayckbourn's Table Manners, quaffed tea, and smoked many cigarettes together. When she's not acting, Sarito edits manuscripts for a sort of New Age guru fellow (not Deepak Chopra, that's all I'll tell you), and her blog is, in addition to being much better than mine, is rather a rumination of all things, well...coincidental? Spiritual? Metaphysical? All/none of the above? Whatever--check her out and send her some love.

Cats n' Blogs

2006-08-09T17:45:00.000-04:00

So, Hissy's back home from the vet. What an ordeal.

Monday afternoon, my friend and neighbor Feline Bill came on up to the ranch and helped me wrangle the cat. We have a host of feral cats in the backyard that FB is used to grabbing by the scruff of the neck and hoisting through his kitchen window, and that's just what he did with Hissy, after a five-minute struggle that mercifully ended with Kitty in her carrier and no one sustaining any injuries. He ain't called Feline Bill for nothin'.

And not a moment too soon, either, because as I was waiting with Hissy in the exam room, I saw that the blood I'd thought was coming from her mouth was, in fact, from a puncture wound on her neck. The only thing I could think at the time was that somehow, during her two-week hideout in the closet, that she'd caught her neck on a coat hanger. Turns out the thread she swallowed two weeks ago HAD A FUCKING NEEDLE ATTACHED TO IT and the puncture wound was from the needle trying to work its way out. Lord Jesus shit. How the hell can a cat walk around for two weeks with a needle stuck in her throat and not die? She never stopped eating the whole time, either--I knew she couldn't be that terribly off when I plunked a can of 9 Lives in front of her and she snarfed it down. But still--good lord.

In addition to excavating the needle from Hissy's trachea, the vet also had to yank a rotten canine (feline?) tooth from her mouth and put in a fake one, clean her gums, excise the abscessed flesh around the puncture wound, put in a surgical drain, and update her shots. I am a shitty parent. I have not taken my cats to the vet once since I've had them--not counting this crisis, of course--because it's been damn near impossible to get them in a cage. Why I didn't think of Feline Bill sooner is beyond me. I mean, I've only been here five years!

FB graciously declined any payment save a bottle of beer, which was doubly lovely because that vet bill cost more than a plane ticket to Singapore. But it's well worth it to save the life of my little beast, whom I hope will think twice before she ingests thread again. I did a thorough vaccuuming of my room yesterday and dug about five needles out of the rug (shudder!) and put away the thread so she won't be tempted.

Hissy's getting back to her normal schizo self--she's been kinda puttering around the apartment, drinking a little water, eating a little Meow Mix, lightly brushing against my ankles, and bothering her sister, who meowed so piteously upon her absence but hissed in her face the moment she tried to bother her. And, oh yes, if I may so brag, everyone at the vet loved Hissy and said she behaved extremely well, and wasn't she a gorgeous little cat. Aw! My little munchkin is so precious. (I allow myself mushiness over cats, stuffed animals, babies, and assorted other blameless species. Oh, and the elderly, as long as they're not poking me in the back like that crotchety old sonofabitch at the Strand three years ago.)

Thanks to Dr. Glasser and the staff at Steinway Court Veterinarian, Feline Bill and his lovely wife for lending me the cat carrier, and the various friends and fellow bloggers who've offered their comfort and condolences the past few days. Of course, I can't express just how grateful I am to the financial/psychological/veterinary/technical/parental unit who footed the bill without batting an eyelash. Thanks, Dad. You're the best.

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Oo-ee-oo-ah-ah: Please make sure to sign up for Ayun Halliday's MamaLamaDingDong blog tour. Even if you've never read her books (and why have you not read her books?), post some words of love.

Animal Crackheads

2006-08-07T16:25:00.000-04:00

Medium crisis here at the ranch: My cat, Hissy, whom I praised to the skies for treating my ankles as a tree trunk, swallowed a hunk of thread a couple of weeks ago. She's been weird ever since, but since she appeared to be eating I decided to let her hide in the junk closet in the spare bedroom and come out of it on her own. A couple days ago, I noticed some strange stains on her neck and thought, Shit, I hope that's not blood. Lest you think I am some kind of awful, neglectful maniac, I fed her some wet cat food, and I thought it possible that she got cat food stains on her neck and couldn't clean them off. This morning, I was drinking coffee in the kitchen (!) when Hissy came in to drink some water. When she finished, I saw a stream of blood dribbling from the cat's mouth. Since she's semi-feral, just shoving her into a cage and toting her the four blocks to my local vet is not an option. I need the assistance of an experienced cat wrangler. Fortunately, one of my neighbors is the Buffalo Bill Cody of cat wrangling, and in about forty-five minutes or so Hissy and I (and possibly my neighbor) are about to undergo some serious trauma when we rassle her into the cage and get her to the vet. Now, since she's scarfing down wet food like she bagged Templeton the rat, I know it's not internal bleeding. The consensus of both myself and the lay veterinary department here at Kitschen Table is that Hissy still has some of that thread lodged in her teeth, and she's trying to get it out, and/or it's cutting her gums. I hope it's nothing more serious than that. Keep your fingers crossed for the poor little beast, and please don't send me any hate mail--I can't take it.

It does explain Hissy's sister Fitz's agonized yowls of the last few days, though. Fitz has always been my "spokescat," the one who mrrr-ooows at me early in the morning when the food bowls are empty. Her meow is very high-pitched, and at first I thought something was wrong with her. But she lets loose with it whether she's hungry or she's just jumped down from the windowsill, so I've always figured she just talks that way. But over the past few days, she's been unleashing these pear-shaped rooooowwwwllllls that have just sounded positively abnormal, but which all made sense today when she sniffed at the water from whence her sister had drunk and just let loose. Oh, of course. Cat's blood. Jesus. I wish I spoke cat. What a dunce I am.

The vet department and I tried to get Fitz to the vet once, about three years ago. She was constipated, and she looked it. As I told a friend, "She's walking around like she's got a load in her pants--I mean, of course, if cats wore pants." Unmitigated disaster. Not only would Fitz not get in the cage, she chomped a hole in my finger and sprayed pee all over the living room. (Who knew a girl cat could spray?) So we ended up in the ER at Mount Sinai, waiting for a tetanus shot for like two hours or so. I don't know which was more discomfiting--watching "Soul Train" in the waiting room, or watching KT's vet department watching "Soul Train" in the waiting room. Anyway, a tube of Femalt finally did the trick with Fitz, and we haven't had any problems since. Until now, of course.

Sigh. Again, wish us lots of luck. I'm taking off work for this--not that my little feline isn't worth it a million times over.

PS. Just discovered, when I was looking for a link for Templeton the rat, that they're making or have made a live action version of Charlotte's Web starring Dakota Fanning as Fern. Might have to go see that, except I really. Don't. Get. Dakota Fanning. How old is she now? Does that kid ever age? It seems like she's been about eight for like, three years now. It's like she's some kid version of Dick Clark.

Department of Corrections

2006-08-03T14:04:00.000-04:00

Hmm, maybe I should write more articles. Procrastinating has done wonders for my blog. This is the first time I've posted something only two days after posting something else. Hot damn!

A few errors that have now been rectified: Actually, it's only one error, but there are some updates. In my "Jesus Loves Me, This I Know" post, I spoke briefly of John Harris, the fellow whose only claim to fame appears to have been establishing the outpost known as Harrisburg, PA. As a fan calling herself "marcia" pointed out, I wrote that he "found Harrisburg in sixteen hundred and something." Well, "marcia" (is that your real name? Sounds a little sketchy to me!), John Harris did not, as you suggested, happen to be strolling along and find Harrisburg "sitting there being boring," as if he were some kind of grade-Z Magellan. At least, that I know of. Also, your question about Harris Savings Bank (now known as Sovereign Bank) is a fine one. I would wager that John Harris was the chicken and the bank one of his many eggs, along with John Harris High School and...uh, anything else named Harris, including the Burg itself. Does that answer your question?

As for the updates, I've included links to Harrisburg, Lancaster, Three Mile Island, and Philly's Main Line, among others. Why is it that whenever I discuss Pennsylvania with non-PAers, I feel like I'm trying to describe some remote mountain region of Nepal?

Anyway, back to work...

But Seriously, Folks

2006-08-01T11:33:00.000-04:00

So I'm working on this article, which is due Wednesday (of course!), and yesterday I'm scanning the TV for some background noise. Turn on CNN and watch a few minutes of the Israeli/Hezbollah coverage,when the reporter shows a Lebanese woman forced out of her small farming village just one day after missiles killed most of her family. As I watched her gathering her few remaining belongings and sobbing (she still, as she told CNN, believes that what Hezbollah is doing is "right"), I thought, My god, how the hell can she stand moving just one day after her family is killed? I wondered, too, when the enormity of this would hit her, if it hadn't already, and my stomach literally turned. Of course, I'm incredibly lucky--all I have to do is turn on VH1 and watch Peter Brady get married to a woman half his age, and in a half-hour or so I'm okay again. And that's what I did.

Fast forward to evening. I'm curled up in bed with Stephen Colbert (metaphorically speaking), and he's got a fellow named Ned whose last name I insist on remembering as Rorem, even though I know it's not, who's running against Joe Liebermann in the Connecticut senatorial primary. Rock on, Ned! It's such a relief when someone from my party displays a pair the size of brass symbols and portrays Bush as the dick splint he is. And contrary to Mr. Colbert's penchant for "truthiness," Ned busted out the fact, most of which I can't remember, except for "We're nine trillion dollars in debt." Nine fucking trillion.

I am not a political blogger. I don't pretend to be. In fact, I deliberately portray myself on here as a rather irresponsible, artsy-fartsy, self-absorbed smartass, mainly because that's what I am, but also because it spares me the responsibility of having to fact-check, which is not easy to do when one has dial-up and one's blog post might well disappear into the ether if one breathes wrong. My political education began in 1980, absorbing my parents smack-talking Reagan. I don't remember it, but both parents have assured me that I used to prance around in my Wonder Woman Underoos, declaiming, "When Ronald Reagan comes here, I'm gonna tell him he's a jerk." The '84 election, when I was 8, was a watershed for me, because that was when I realized there was Something Wrong with my mother's parents. Republicans! How could this be? I mean, I would have expected such aberrancy from my grandmother, who was always telling me to sit up straight and act like a little lady, but my grandpa? The same guy who let me chase him around the pool table? Oh, man, how devastating. Seriously, it was. I love my grandpa dearly--remember, he was the guy who got fired from teaching Sunday School--but I've never been able to look at him the same again. Yes, I know that's a normal part of growing up, but how painful to love someone so much and to exist on the other side of a wall constructed from platitudes gleaned from a 1930s civic textbook. (My other grandparents, thank god, were and are yellow-dog Democrats. Those damn unions!) Anyway, that's pretty much the reasoning I've used most of my life. Republicans bad, Democrats good. That's what Old Tyme Religion does to you--which, by the way, more on that this weekend. I've since amended that to Democrats, a bunch of panty-waisted twerps trying to become like their abusers, Republicans, unspeakably godawful. Of course, there are exceptions, but you know, if you're looking for in-depth analysis, click here.

So I'm a member of the Neo-Know-Nothing party, it seems. But nine trillion dollars. Nine fucking trillion.

I couldn't credit what I was hearing. Oh, I mean I know we're nine trillion dollars in debt, just as I know about the my-god's-better-than-your-god bullshit that's been seeping into my brain space since I was a wee tad. But having spent most of my life stuck in my head, largely under the victim's credo of "What's in it for me?", these things were just facts, things I could use to prove that I, unlike my brain-dead counterparts, watched the news. This is what two years of group therapy has wrought, at last--a gut reaction to seeing a Lebanese woman bury her dead and flee her home, and to hearing the words "nine trillion dollars in debt" spoken in conjunction with the waste of space that presides over our country. Seriously.

Spoke to my dad briefly this morning, and I told him about the nine fucking trillion, and I said I wished there was a word that could do justice to the damage that one puppet and his puppeteers have done, aching for the halcyon days of a government surplus and a president who could speak in complete sentences. ("Come on and marry me, Bill...I got the--" Oh, never mind.) The best description I could come up with was likening it to a MAD magazine cartoon, albeit a really, really dark one. And my dad agreed that this administration is so bad, it's a satire of itself. Or at least that's the way our brains have made sense of it, anyway. It kind of reminds me of when I was on the staff of my college literary magazine and we'd be reading some poem that some poor person had obviously put his or her heart and soul into, but was just so abysmal that all we could do was laugh at it. At some point, we would end up taking the position of what-the-hell-it's-so-bad-it's-good, much like two of my cinematic faves, Bachelor Party and Midnight Madness. Of course, I'm not saying anything new here--I believe Jon Stewart himself has said that they really don't have to work hard to satirize the news. But I'm a gut person, and when that bit of knowledge moves you where you live, well...what's left to say?

Oh, yes, except nine fucking trillion. And fuck you, Bush. Seriously.

Jesus Loves Me, This I Know

2006-07-22T16:53:00.000-04:00

While we're waiting for our intrepid blogger to figure out how the hell to load her Baltimore HonFest pictures up on here (Man! Traci Lords's biography was on A&E last night. Perfect timing! Except, well, not), let's all hold hands and noses and plunge into the swampland of Karla's BioDome known as That Olde Tyme Religion. Yes, you've read this story before, but remember what Tolstoy said about happy vs. unhappy families? Same logic applies here.

As I've mentioned in passing, I grew up in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, the sole offspring of two atheist parents. Actually, I think my mother might have been more of an agnostic--she read Tarot cards and charted horoscopes--but for the purposes of this story, that's really just a technicality. The point is, neither of my parents had any use for organized religion. My dad was raised a Catholic out in Western PA coal country, and my mother was sort of hauled around to various Dunkard churches until my grandpa got fired from teaching Sunday school when he told his class that--gasp!!--you can't take the Bible literally! Cue Gargamel's theme! It's to my grandpa's credit that his aim in teaching this was not to give the schoolmarms running this outfit the finger, as would be my childish motivation. No, he simply wanted to give the kids a different and more humane method of interpretation. Or that's what he says. Anyway, it was the '60s, lines were being blurred and redrawn, and venerable institutions were being thrown out the window, et cetera and so forth, and my folks renounced the Lord and took up with each other and moved to Vermont to teach music and smoke grass and stare at the Northern Lights and say, "Wow...far out, man!" Through a series of incidents and accidents, hints and allegations (tm Paul Simon), my parents ended up back in Harrisburg, my mother's hometown, with a new baby and a landlord who would later gain notoriety for being the plumbing contractor at Three Mile Island.

A little bit about Harrisburg: Besides being the site of an almost-nuclear holocaust, Harrisburg is also the capital of Pennsylvania. Founded in sixteen hundred and something by a fellow named John Harris, who was famous for founding Harrisburg (anyone out there wanna weigh in on this? It's been 20 years since I took PA History--does anyone out there know if he did anything else?), Harrisburg is situated about forty minutes northwest of Lancaster, ground zero for the Amish, an hour and twenty minutes due north of Baltimore, nigh on two hours west of Philadelphia, and about three and a half hours southwest of the city I currently call home. And it's the capital. Oh, and crime buffs out there may be familiar with the Susan Reinert murders, which took place in 1979. The murderers and their victims were all from Philly's Main Line, but Susan Reinert's body was found in the parking lot of the Host Inn in Swatara Township, about ten minutes outside of the Harrisburg city limits, in a little patch of nothing right before you get on the Turnpike to go to Philly. I swear, that spot claims vast realms of my psyche as one of the spookiest areas on earth. Even before I'd heard of the Reinert murders, that whole area had the sensation, for me, of falling down a rabbit hole into a nightmarish wasteland of nothing and nowhere, with an eerie undertone of deja vu, almost as if I'd been reincarnated. I'm still convinced there was an area just like that in London, where I was killed in the Blitz. Ahem! Did I mention that Harrisburg is the capital of PA? Okay, that pretty much does it, then.

Oh, yes. Except for the religion. I don't guess I need to go into a big lecture on the Amish and who they are and what they do. Even if you haven't seen Witness, you know about them. You also probably know about the Mennonites, whom the Amish consider heathens because of their use of electricity and automobiles. (Yeah, well, the Amish cheat! They bum rides and use cell phones when necessary. I've seen this happen--I'm not making this up.) As my former memoir teacher explained to me, all religious sects that derive from the Anabaptist tradition, from which the Amish and the Mennonites got their respective starts, are considered Mennonite, even if the practitioners of said sects don't go riding around in buggies and wearing skullcaps. That Dunkard thing I mentioned a bit up the page? That's an actual sect, so-called because of...well, shit, I should do some research, now, shouldn't I? I will hazard a guess and say it's because they practice some kind of full-immersion baptism. The difference between the Baptists and the, um, Anabaptists is, the latter does not baptize its young. ("Young"--I make them sound like apes. Apes! How heathen. Run!) They may raise their children in the church, but the children are not considered members until they turn 18, at which time they may decide whether or not they want to keep the faith. Sounds nice? Yeah, I guess, except for the shunning part. That's not so fun.

The emphasis in the Mennonite faiths, as near as I can tell, appears to rest heavily on the group as a whole. It sounds kind of cool and Commie, but it requires a systematic erosion of the individual self. This may have served (and still serve, if you're Amish) its practical purpose back in the days of claim-jumping and barn-raising, but in this modern world, it's completely counterproductive. Then, too, without some kind of glue to hold it all together (in this case, God), it's not just counterproductive, it's utterly destructive. (Sorry.) And if you don't need to raise a barn...well, you get the idea.

So the thing about Harrisburg is, you have this strong Dunkard undercurrent without any real practical need for it, and whether or not you attend a Dunkard or Evangelical United Brethren church, as my mother did with my great-grandma when she was a wee one, that moral rectitude, that same belief that we-have-to-do-it-this-way-because-this-is-the-way-it's-always-been-done-and-what-do-you-mean-you-don't-believe-in-God-you-evil-strumpet just seeps into your bones, no matter if you're chanting in a Buddhist temple or casting Wiccan spells. I rather liken the migration and corruption of this faith to playing Telephone, wherein you'll start off with a phrase like "I just called to say I love you" and you'll end up with one like "Musty halls never contain blue gloves." And forever beating like a strobe light is the phrase JESUS IS THE ANSWER, over and over again until you have no choice but to agree. Game over. I surrender.

I shall leave you with this for now. Storm's a-comin', and I literally have not eaten a single bite of anything today. (And it's not for religious reasons, either.)

A Night at the Opera

2006-07-14T17:00:00.000-04:00

So, it's a hundred and eighty degrees here today in the big city on this, my day off from my new job (my new new job, not my old new job, about which I'll still remain mum, except to say that I had to quit it because it was commission only, and ain't no way in hell I can buy bread and cigs on a wing and a prayer) selling subscriptions for the New York City Opera. Since my recent foray into telemarketing was a complete bust, I was convinced I was gonna be back on the soup lines faster than you can say "Un bel di, vedremo," which, depending on who you are, may take you a while, so maybe that's not the best example, but whatever. But wouldn't you know--I've sold three subscriptions so far, and I've only been hitting the phones for like a week! Hot damn! Granted, one subscription was for the IT department of this humble page (who also serves as the loan officer, part-time shrink, and music encyclopedia), but two were from folks who have no vested interest in seeing me make commission! Four hours a day, five nights a week on the phone selling opera subscriptions is a certainly bearable way of pulling a steady, if small income whilst I putter around with this blog and look for freelance jobs and try to decide whether or not I want to shed the tonnage I gained over the past two years so I can do the acting thing (or at least not lumber around like a waterlogged pregnant rhino). I mean, we listen to opera the whole time, for god's sake, and if that sounds like torture to you, remember you're dealing with someone whose musical snobbery was cultivated at a very early age, thanks to her even snobbier musician mother (it was her idea to give me the middle name "Dorian," after the Dorian Mode). It's so Stepford, but at the age of four or something, that woman had me trained so well I could sing that one phrase from "Carmina Burana"--"O, o, o, totos arde o, ya ma more, virginales, totos arde o"--flawlessly. Is that amazing or what? No, seriously, I need to know if that's "amazing" or if it's "what," because my sneaking suspicion is that it's more akin to a thousand monkeys in a room typing Shakespeare than it is any kind of genius on my part. I also don't know, after twenty-five years, if that's how the hell you spell that phrase from the aforementioned. Perhaps the Music Library could weigh in here...? Anyway, point being, I love opera, and you probably do, too, even if you think you don't or you're too cool or some such shit. By the way, there's no shame in admitting your first exposure to opera was through Bugs Bunny! I think that might be true in my case, although it's hard to tell, because Bugs and giving your child the Robert Eroica Dupea* treatment ran neck-and-neck in terms of importance in my childhood abode.

By the way, I thoughtfully provided the link to the website so you could watch the trailers and decide which operas you might want to see, not so you can buy tickets through it! The box office doesn't open till August, anyway, so if you wanna get the best seats (or the cheapest--hey, I's is po' myself), order 'em through me. Did I mention I need the money? Why, yes, I did, in the previous parenthetical aside. So don't wait--let me know! And please don't send me your credit card information in an email--just tell me you'll buy a damn subscription, and we'll take care of the numbers over the phone when I'm on shift. Capisce?

"But what operas should I see, O Wise One?" Well, my feathered friend(s), that's up to you. Here's what I'm going to see thus far: Carmen, by Bizet (remember that orange on "Sesame Street" that sang "L'amour et un oiseau rebelle"? That's from this opera); Die Tote Stadt by Erich Korngold (a disturbing, rather Freudian piece about a young man whose wife dies and who immediately falls in love with a woman who's the spitting image of her. Sounds godawful? It did to me, at first, and then I heard the music, which is some of the loveliest I have ever heard in my life. I can be no more specific than that--my music literacy Stepfordizing hit a serious roadblock when I started first grade and discovered the pop stylings of one Michael Jackson); Madame Butterfly by Puccini ("Un bel di, vedremo" is the aria playing in the background on that "Simpsons" episode when pre-AA Barney Gumble makes his award-winning film about being an alcoholic. "Don't cry for me--I'm already dead"? Remember?); and La Traviata by Verdi (the one they go to see in Pretty Woman that's so good it almost made Julia Roberts pee her pants). I'll probably end up seeing all of them at some point, but that's what's on the docket for now. For the rest of the season, see the website. I'm off-shift for now, and I'm oh, so tired of running through the whole season until my gums bleed, usually to hear a "Well, thank you so much for telling me about the season, but we're really not opera people..." Well, then, why waste my time? I highly doubt you were entranced by my thick, nasal alto with the Pennsylvania twang. Hardly a choir of seraphim whene'er I speak, you know? (Oops--hope I didn't alienate any potential buyers there. It just GITS to me sometimes.)

Oh, yes, a subscription means "more than one," which I'm sure you already know, although I have had a couple o'people who wanted to buy a single ticket. Can't do it--sorry. You gotta buy a minimum of four. Any fewer than that, you gotta go to the box office in August and take yer chances then.

So what else? Velllll...I have a freelance writing assignment for a little publication that shall also remain classified until I write the article. (All I'll say is it's genuinely a small publication--it's not like I have an assignment for The New Yorker and I'm being all coy about it.) But hey, who cares? I'm writing an article and getting paid! Who cares if I'm three months and one day shy of thirty and I should have started my writing career years ago and now I should focus on getting a Real Job and flagellating myself for being such an irresponsible, self-centered loser with emotional problems all these years. Well, that's the rule in Karla's BioDome anyway, where mothers raise their kids by scream and cuff and That Olde Tyme Religion permeates everything, like toxic mildew! (The BioDome is going to have to be a post in itself. I've brought it up in therapy two weeks in a row and this week, I qualified it with, "By the way, that's a Pauly Shore movie," to the amusement of my therapist and a hipster goofball friend of mine, who later told me he was all, "Oh, no, she di'in't!" when I said that. Hee.) Anyhoo, I'll let y'all know when it's published, but that won't be until at least October, so just relax.

And finally, I believe I mentioned my cats on here, n'est-ce pas? Well, if I haven't, it's probably no surprise that a misanthropic spinster like me is the proud mother of two adorable felines, Hissy and Fitz, who will be six years old next month. That's what the lovely women at the rescue place from whence I procured the little freaks told me, anyway. Hissy and Fitz are semi-feral cats who were rescued from a vacant lot in Brooklyn, where their mother was killed by a moving car and rotten neighborhood kids threw rocks at them. I've had them for five years, and finally, finally Hissy has made overtures of affection bolder than just staring at me pointedly for hours on end and/or curling up on my bed far, far from my feet. In the past month, Hissy has decided that I'm a tree trunk, and whenever my feet are planted firmly on the floor, she head-butts my ankles and winds in and out of the gap between them. It's adorable. She's at the point where she meows when she sees me coming and positively yowls if I dare to move a millimeter if she's not finished having her way with my legs! Mon dieu, mon petit bete! She's even grabbed the cuffs of my pants a few times, which would send her straight to the principal's office if she were a "normal" cat, but since she's such a schizo I take it as progress. I think her sister is getting a little jealous, but Fitz has kind of a 'tude problem. She's the one who meows when the kibble in the dish is down to inedible bits, but damned if she's gonna let on for one second that all she really wants is love. I can't pick her up, either--she runs too fast. Little tease.

That's all for now. Happy Bastille Day, everyone!

*Robert Eroica Dupea was Jack Nicholson's character inFive Easy Pieces. His father was a classical pianist who was determined to turn his son into a musical prodigy. Bobby Dupea responded by getting a job in the oil fields of Puget Sound and knocking up Karen Black and having sex with Sally Struthers while running around the house with her. Oh, yeah, and he also tells a waitress to shove the chicken salad up her ass. Just change "oil fields" to "accounting department of a mid-size PR firm" and strike the parts about the waitress and the having sex with my legs looped around someone's moving figure and you've got my life!

Pour Some Sugar On Me

2006-07-01T10:23:00.000-04:00

Oh, man, it's been a dog's age. Where to begin?

Well, let's start with employment. About three weeks ago, I began a real job--the exact nature of which I will not divulge, but it's not prostitution or drug dealing. Sorry to disappoint. In the middle of all this, I've been trying to finish copy editing a waaaay overdue manuscript, which I finally completed this week, and I didn't check email for three weeks. My publisher called to find out where the hell I was and was far, far nicer to me about my dropping off the face of the earth than I would be in her shoes. Hell, I'd string me up by my feet and baste me in fire ants and honey. Oh, wait, that's the torture I'd reserve for 95% of the Bush administration. I should, perhaps, be kinder to myself. Anyway, while things have worked out thus far, I wouldn't advise trying this at home. Kids: If you tell your boss you're going to return a manuscript to her by a certain date, then do it. If you can't make the deadline, let her know. Don't be a dick like me!

I'm also trying to finish a stuffed animal for a friend's birthday. Since BUST ran a recipe for stuffed animals made from socks in their December 2004 issue, I've gained a reputation as the stuffed animal lady, and I promised said friend a good, long while ago that I would make her a Jewish panda. And how does one make a Jewish panda? A few snips and a bar mitzvah, and voila! Hee. Seriously, it's a panda wearing a yarmulke and a tallis. I guess he's a Conservative Jewish panda. My friend nixed the Hassid idea, although that would be kinda fun. If you'd like a Hassidic panda, let me know!

Oh, yes, and I've taken up drawing again, after years of swallowing the line that I couldn't draw. Props to me when I proved my sixth grade art teacher wrong two nights ago when I cranked out a pretty damn fine picture of a howler monkey! (You know those evil little Nazi beasts in Raiders of the Lost Ark? Those are howler monkeys.) I'm trying to upload it onto my creaky, six-year-old computer, and as soon as that happens, I'll post it. Just don't go printing it out and claiming you did it, like Susan with the boing-boing curls did with the paper bag owl in Ramona the Brave. I won't scrunch it up, like Ramona did, but still, that's just not nice. Or ethical.

But of course the biggest event, and lapse on my part, to occur within the past month or so is the publication of Ayun Halliday's new book, Dirty Sugar Cookies: Culinary Observations, Questionable Taste. As soon as I had a few cents to my name, I was on Powell's snagging my own copy. Read the thing in an afternoon and was immediately online, furiously emailing words o'love to the author, who responded not ninety minutes later with words of love for my words of love! Sigh. So where did I go wrong? Well, I kinda sorta said I'd post a glowing review on this here site, and I kinda sorta failed miserably at that. Had a summer cold, plus the aforementioned obstacles, and the fact that I still don't have DSL, so posting is a precarious enterprise. Kitschen Table's IT department has been stricken with a strange condition engendered by the consumption of clyndamicin, an antibiotic given to him following a tooth extraction. Word of warning: Unless you're suffering from a raging infection that will lead to gangrene if you don't irrigate it with antibiotics, posthaste, do not take clyndamicin. Clyndamicin is so potent, it will kill all the "good" bacteria in your intestines, which regulate the presence of the bad, which I guess it's not potent enough to kill, and the result will leave you stranded in Pennsylvania, unable to sit more than five feet from a bathroom. So if your dentist offers you clyndamicin after yanking a tooth out, tell Marathon Man to piss up a rope and give you Cipro. (Or penicillin, if you're not allergic to it, as both the IT department and I are.)

Anyway, without further ado, I give you my review of Ayun Halliday's Dirty Sugar Cookies. (By the way, if you're wondering why I haven't given more detail about the who, what, and wherefore of Ms. Halliday, check out the post entitled "Periods! Prisons! Periodicals! Posts!" down the page a bit. Oh, yes, and click here for Ayun's food blog.)

So thank god for Ayun Halliday, whose "self-mocking autobiographies" and 'zine, The East Village Inky, have finally offered yours truly the female role model she's been so desperately seeking since she was, like, six. Those of you familiar with Ms. Halliday know about her artsy-fartsy, hippie-dippie, scrounging-for-change-under-the-couch days with the Chicago theater company The Neofuturists, her shoestring travel adventures throughout Southeast Asia with a succession of boyfriends, including her husband, Greg Kotis (the fellow who wrote Urinetown: The Musical), and cosleeping and breastfeeding her kids, India "Inky" and Milo Kotis. With her down-to-earth, smart-ass humor and her unabashed willingness to depict herself, when necessary, as a bit of an arse (in a good way), Ms. Halliday's writing manages to achieve the neat trick of being simultaneously self-assured and just as clueless as the next person, with the added fiat that she's not afraid to recount, in detail, the matter of her "ravaged bowels." (See her second book, No Touch Monkey! And Other Travel Lessons Learned Too Late for this, uh, in-depth account of suffering malaria in Africa, not to mention the picture of the howler monkey on the cover, which afforded me my magnum opus.)

Fortunately, save a chapter on Ms. Halliday's experience with listeria while pregnant with Milo, Dirty Sugar Cookies: Culinary Observations, Questionable Taste, is free of scatalogical remembrances. A self-described "picky eater" for most of her childhood, Ms. Halliday's fourth book is a--dare I say it? Yes, I'm afraid so--mouthwatering journey through the mushroom soup and canned spinach of her 1970s Indiana youth, to her Enchanted Broccoli Forest college years, to her attempts to spoon-feed ginger-steamed tilapia and roasted cauliflower to eight-year-old Inky, who proves that old saw about the apple and the tree, in spades. (I have to confess a great deal of empathy for Inky and the five-year-old version of Ms. Halliday. At that age, I wouldn't touch fish unless it was deep-fried in beer batter and smothered in ketchup. As I speed toward thirty, I'm forever imploring my dad to give up "fish squares," those wretched, bottom-feeder numbers that McDonald's likes to slap on a bun and call lunch. "I like them!" my dad insists. "I grew up in the '50's! This is what we ate!" True, that--I've got a copy of Look magazine from 1954, which features a recipe for barbecued franks and noodles casserole. There's enough sugar in that thing to keep Cuba's economy sputtering away till the next millenium.)

Ms. Halliday is an amazingly sensual writer, able to immerse the reader in the pain and euphoria of childbirth, the claustrophobia of an East Village tenement, and the agony of a dislocated knee in the mountains of Indonesia. In Dirty Sugar Cookies, she expertly plunges the reader into the tacky, decidedly non-nutritious culinary doings of the "Let's Make A Deal" era. In "Fruit Basket Upset," a hilarious retelling of her experiences with Betty Crocker's New Boys and Girls Cookbook, Ms. Halliday captures the taste of that book's Enchanted Castle Cake and its store-bought brethren as "like Crisco by way of cough syrup." The trauma of the communal lunches at her expensive prep school is summed up in her terrified description of a lunch monitor, Mrs. Hogarth: "Like a mongoose hypnotized by a cobra's terrible majesty, I couldn't help noting that her cardigan was exactly the same shade as the limas." The moment when Ms. Halliday transforms from picky eater to omnivore at her first bite of spanikopita is a triumph for all of us--"In that moment, some synaptic circuit I would never have suspected myself capable of possessing was completed, the same circuit that would eventually lead me to embrace a panoply of strange, low-budget dishes in kerosene-lit back alleys (and, closer at hand, pierce my ears more times than was standard, adorning the holes with dangly, no-carat baubles that made more racket than the coins encircling a belly dancer's ankles)."

In keeping with her matter-of-fact, low-budget lifestyle, which she continues to maintain with aplomb in Brooklyn, Ms. Halliday includes a recipe at the end of each chapter, with dishes ranging from her mother's spinach mornay to her own stir-fried tofu with broccoli and brown rice (which, without Ms. Halliday's recipe for guidance, is not that easy to render palatable, I have to say) to her grandmother's rice custard. If you aren't a city dweller, not to worry--most of the ingredients are readily available from your regular old grocer's.

It's not that easy to construct a linear, consistent narrative based on food--well, at least, I never thought of it till I read this book--but Ayun Halliday does it, and does it well. The result is not just soft-core food porn, it's also a highly enjoyable afternoon spent with a woman you can imagine befriending and inviting over to your place for a case of beer and homemade veggie burgers, of which, Ms. Halliday informs us, "You know you're on the right track when there's roasted, salted peanuts and not a lentil in sight."

So. Go to Powells, or Amazon, and pick up your own copy, and don't forget to write a glowing customer testimonial. (Unless it's something like The Rules or some such similar dreck, I don't think it's KIND to browbeat the author. Oh, unless he happens to be a pompous ass. Then all bets are off.) And stay tuned for my account of the Baltimore HonFest, and wish our IT department a speedy recovery.

Save the Internet, Save Ourselves

2006-05-24T14:41:00.000-04:00

Well, now. Hmmm. What to say? To my readers (what are there, about five of y'all now? Hee), I apologize for my protracted absence, not to mention leaving you stuck, for the past month or so, with an essay on the "100 Unsexiest Men." Sigh. Whilst fellow bloggers were all over Stephen Colbert's uncomfortable, if brilliant, self-acquittal at the White House Correspondents' Dinner, I was re-tweaking a three-hundred-some-odd page fantasy novel (the word "king," when one is scanning a manuscript to ensure it's capitalized in all the right places, takes on a new level of bizarre), half-assedly applying for jobs, and stuck in a depression that I tried to convince myself a)wasn't as bad as I thought, b)wasn't as bad as others I've had (true enough, but still), and c)was because I hadn't managed to accept certain Greater Truths about myself and life as a whole, bon mots along the Reader's Digest-y lines of You Need To Learn What's Really Important In Life, And No, Trying To Construct A Livelihood From Freelance Writing Jobs And Crappy Parts In Off-Off-Off Broadway Shows Is Not It, And Where Do You Get Off Thinking You're Too Good For The Likes Of Suburbia? Oh, man. What a bitch that is, trying to get up and make coffee in the morning with that racket on loop in your head. If that's the script I have to look forward to, where's the gas pipe? (Look, if that's your thing, fine. It just ain't mine. Quit yelling at me.)

Anyway, I'm back now, and feeling rather better. I met the PMS expert/gynecologist, Dr. Janis Enzenbacher, and while it's still a little early in the supplement-ingesting process to see if her claims bear forth, she's the nicest gyno I've ever had, and not just because she didn't have the classic Pavlovian reaction to my PMS woes--"Well, we'll just put you on the Pill, then!" Yeah, thanks for asking, Dr. XY. You know who you are, and you know you yelled at me for "failing" Yasmin, as they say of HIV-positive people for whom antivirals aren't effective. But I digress. She's a lovely woman, and very gentle, and took it in stride when I bellowed during a biopsy of my most delicate organs. ("Wow, that's quite the alto!" was her remark.) And the test results are all negative, and all is well for now. Think I better knock, knock, knock on wood anyway, though. You never know.

I've joined SaveTheInternet.com's Coalition to Save the Internet, which is part of the campaign to protect Net Neutrality. If you go to their homepage, you can click on the list of blogs/bloggers who've joined, and then scroll down to the K's and you'll see the name of the very blog you're reading now. (How egocentric! And how superfluous, if you found this blog through the aforementioned site. If you've found it through other means, check out the site anyway, and sign up your own blog, if you have one. You'll get a nice little graphic you can install on your page, if you, unlike me, know what you're doing. I can't figure this new template out. My links have disappeared, and hell if I know where to put the graphic. Nerts! I hope I can email the template's author, because this is a pisser.)

The following is probably superfluous too, if you've been paying attention to the news (I was wondering what happened to Moby myself!), but here's a bit of info on Net Neutrality, cribbed straight from SaveTheInternet.com:

What is network neutrality?

Network Neutrality — or "Net Neutrality" for short — is the guiding principle that preserves the free and open Internet. Net Neutrality ensures that all users can access the content or run the applications and devices of their choice. With Net Neutrality, the network's only job is to move data — not choose which data to privilege with higher quality service.

Net Neutrality is the reason why the Internet has driven economic innovation, democratic participation, and free speech online. It's why the Internet has become an unrivaled environment for open communications, civic involvement and free speech.

Who wants to get rid of Net Neutrality?

The nation's largest telephone and cable companies — including AT&T, Verizon, Comcast and Time Warner — want to be Internet gatekeepers, deciding which Web sites go fast or slow and which won't load at all.

They want to tax content providers to guarantee speedy delivery of their data. They want to discriminate in favor of their own search engines, Internet phone services, and streaming video — while slowing down or blocking their competitors.

These companies have a new vision for the Internet. Instead of an even playing field, they want to reserve express lanes for their own content and services — or those from big corporations that can afford the steep tolls — and leave the rest of us on a winding dirt road.

So, please do your part, because we really do not need to have our precious Internet time further fucked up by the banality of corporate evil. And stay tuned to this here site for such upcoming events as my trip to the Baltimore Hon Fest (June 9-11) and the long-delayed installation of DSL, tentatively scheduled to take place Father's Day weekend. Thanks, Dad! And thanks for helping me set up my brand-new 19-inch TV this past weekend. Finally, we managed to do something technical without killing each other. You're a good egg.

Lootellan, You Damn Saxy!

2006-04-22T12:53:00.000-04:00

So, I'm up early this morning, on my way to perform hostessing duties at the NYC Youth Volunteer Expo, when I double-check my flyer and discover that the event is next weekend. Eups. Since I'm already showered and dressed, I make some coffee, check my email, and discover an email with this link, from a friend. The blog, "Girls Gone Gossip" (I think that's what it's called), as near as I can tell, is a piss-take on sites like Gawker and its ilk, told in the form of AIM chats that may or may not be fabricated. The entry in question is a brief commentary on "The 100 Unsexiest Men in the World [sic]" list, as gauged by Bill Jensen and Ryan Stewart of the Boston Phoenix, which is to Boston what the Village Voice is to NYC, and so on down the line. Anyway, according to GGG, Brad Pitt came in at number 100 on the Unsexy list, thanks to his reputed poor hygiene. (By the way, the friend who sent me this link has certain neuroses about celebrities and their potential BO, their gnarly teeth, and the potential for fecal matter contaminating their hands. Said friend had the untmitigated gall to claim, once, that Kevin Kline was a possible fecal offender. Hey, said friend! You know I applaud and support your little psychological disorder, but you don't be claimin' my man KK got shit on his hands, 'less you want me to open up a can of whupass! Dig?)

Celebrity trifle aside for the time being, I putter around, activate a couple of Hotmail accounts, and find myself on the Hotmail Today page, where lo and behold, there's an article about the 100 Unsexiest Men in the world! Oh, evil succubus, damn you and your venomous tentacles for suctioning me into your lair! A few more clicks, and I'm on The Phoenix's home page, reading the actual text that started it all. And what's the "it"? Why, the controversy that's sure to be spreading over the blogosphere like a super-resistant strain of avian flu, that's what! I'm probably making an ass out of you and me here, but this does seem to be the kind of thing that gets our collective internal organs in a spasm, so why not add my two cents? (Yikes--the first "current events" thing I post on here, and it's about the 100 Unsexiest Men. Why am I not delving into a detailed analysis of military spending, or even the recently averted doorman strike here in the city? Oh, right, because I'm not Ana Marie Cox. Would that I were--I'd feel so much better about myself!)

All right, then. Back to the list. Here are ten of Jensen and Stewart's picks, along with my commentary.

#1. Gilbert Gottfried. Oh, come on! Number one? Look, the guy's no Paul Newman, but give me a break! There are far more unsexy fellows out there who should have nabbed this spot, not least your number 11 choice, Michael Jackson. So he's the voice of that AFLAC duck--is that really more of a bucket of cold water on the genitals than a...thing who, as you put it, is the result of "when an ugly J.C. Penny [sic] mannequin has sex with Pogo, the clown identity of serial killer John Wayne Gacy"? Please.

#8. Osama bin Laden. Well...uh...yeah...but whether he's sexy or unsexy isn't first in my mind, certainly. I mean, the guy who ordered the bombing of the World Trade Center exists, at least for me, in a sphere way, way above (or below) sex appeal, or lack thereof. And your comment about Dick Cheney not being on the list because "power is sexy"? I'll give you an inch on the latter, but there's also what you do with your power, and a fellow who looks like a Madball and is responsible for the decimation of thousands of soldiers and civilians alike in order to protect his oil interests ain't gonna get my panties wet. Sorry, guys.

#9. Jay Leno.Hee. Good choice. Hate him. HATE him. So much. Flames. The side of my face. Heaving, heaving breaths. (Stole that from the late, great Madeline Kahn in Clue: The Movie.)

#12. Wallace Shawn. Hey, fuck you! I can "get past that nasally lisp," thank you very much! There's a reason Woody Allen (who did not, to my suprise, make this list, even though I kind of have a weird little thing for him) cast him as the stud in Manhattan, I'll have you know! (Well, okay, because the whole idea's absurd. Still, in my limited experience, I must say, it's the ones who spent their teen years playing Dungeons and Dragons and having dinner with Andre who know how to make love to a woman, as opposed to the star quarterbacks who are used to just showing up, and can't even do that without falling flat on their asses. Rough generalization, I know, but there's truth in it.)

#14. Richard Simmons. Of course. But too easy.

#38. Larry David. Ah, anti-Semites! Seriously, though, you fellows might be surprised how many of us ladies have a thing for whiny, bald, self-absorbed older Jewish men, and I'm not just talking about fuckin' weirdos like me.

#50. Ric Ocasek. Mixed reviews on this one. He's not a looker, but he's got that classic rock star sleaziness that's appealing in an I'm With the Band kind of way. Okay, you "know who his wife is. And no, [you] don't care." Two points: 1) What the hell does that have to do with RO himself? and 2) Are there any fellows out there, besides those in my immediate circle of friends, who are either gay or are fuckin' weirdos like me, who aren't spanking it to Paulina Porizkova? So she's "hot"! Who the fuck does that even mean, anyway? Ugh.

#59. Clay Aiken. Hee hee. See #9.

#62. Bill Maher. Look, some of us like geeks, all right? And by "geeks," I mean "those who do their homework and know their shit," not those who saunter up in dirty white baseball caps, Coors in hand, and try to impress us with tales of their stock portfolios and allegedly large dicks. So the guy needs a haircut! Far more easily remedied than a brain transplant, as we saw in Young Frankenstein. (You know, Gene Wilder is pretty goddamn adorable in that movie. Maybe because he's, oh, I don't know, a geek?)

And, finally: #100. Brad Pitt. I happen to think "hot" is overrated, whether you're this guy or Paulina Porizkova, and I'm not ashamed to say I never quite got Mr. Pitt's appeal. His face is rather simian, what with that pushed-out lower lip, and that blank stare of his puts me more in mind of a junkie than a soulful hunk of manliness thinking deep, tormented thoughts. (I am also proud to say I LOATHED resident hottie Jordan Catalano, master of the blank stare, on "My So-Called Life." Angela, sweetie, he's looking at you that way because he hasn't the brains God gave a goat, okay? So spare us your gaggingly self-absorbed monologues and start a grrrl band instead. Or get it on with your geeky neighbor, Brian Krakow! Just give him a haircut first.) Anyhoo, that said, I can't really consign Mr. Pitt to the circular filing bin, thanks to his awesomely over-the-top performance in Twelve Monkeys. I like to think that anyone who can turn in such an amazing display of batshittery has some intelligence, but I still won't be bothering BP for some tail any time soon, and not just because of Angelina Jolie or those rumors about his BO. Hey, I hear Sting is not, shall we say, committed to grooming, but I spent the better part of high school totally besotted with him. (Of course, I didn't know about his shoddy bathing habits then, but no matter. He's still hot. Oh, that word! But he seems like kind of a geek, too.)

Yheesh! I didn't realize that was going to take me so long. No wonder I'm so hungry (snark). Anyway, be right back...

All right. I'm eating some cereal now. Breakfast at 2:40 p.m., and I've been up since 8. As you can see, I treat my body like a temple. Anyway, while that was fun, I'm a bit puzzled as to the authors' motivations in compiling this list in the first place. Are they gay? Perhaps, but that's too easy, and it's not like there aren't straight men out there who are capable of evaluating the sexiness of their own gender. But assuming these gentlemen are hetero, I'm still kind of all, what the fuck? I mean, did they do research? Did they ask for any female input? Or were they so stumped for content that they decided to just cobble a list of ugly (and, in some cases, not so much) men, and put the issue to bed? And why, oh why, did I spend all day on this? Kill me now.

Oh, well. Could have been worse. They could have given us a "100 Unsexiest Women" list, which would have been so totally piggish. Yeah, I know there's a whole host of guys out there who bore the brunt of fag jokes, atomic wedgies, and pretty girls ignoring them at the dances, and maybe this article will provoke in them the righteous anger a female version would elicit from me. But we're still so criminally underdeveloped when it comes to feminist issues--and I mean very simple ones, like equal pay, and not teaching our daughters that we're incomplete without a man to love us--that a "100 Unsexiest Women" list would prove nuclear at best. Maybe sometime before the earth becomes uninhabitable, we'll be able to laugh at such a thing, but that ain't gonna happen any time soon. So, Messrs. Jensen and Stewart, thanks, I guess, for not going there, at least.

Oh, some picks from my "100 Sexiest Women" list? Bebe Neuwirth and Annette Bening, of course. Now, those ladies are HOT!

Wide World of Boxing

2006-04-19T13:46:00.000-04:00

Ah, the joys of the 21st century, wherein one can be political without leaving one's house. I just signed MoveOn.org's petition to prevent Congress from killing Network Neutrality, which prevents big corporations from censoring websites, among other things. (God, I just remembered when I worked at that internet company, one of the most distasteful tasks I had to perform there was to demand that this fellow who ran a small website remove "inflammatory" content about one of our clients. My boss was an insane wench who so terrified me into her viselike grip for the nine months I worked there that I don't think I even remembered what the First Amendment was--never mind standing on a platform with a bullhorn demanding clemency for Lenny Bruce. Shudder.) Having signed an average of two MoveOn.org petitions per day during that righteously angry year of 2004, when we all thought we might have a snowball's chance in hell of ridding ourselves of the Head Douche, I've taken to deleting most of their emails, figuring we're all fucked in the ass anyway, so I'm not going to waste precious time and risk having my computer go batshit just to sign a petition, for god's sake. Well, that's bullshit. I am a lazy girl, but I can point and click, and even if we're all fucked, which I believe we are, so entrenched are we by the almighty dollar, that is absolutely no reason to not sign a goddamn MoveOn.org petition. If I may just wrap up this stupid anal sex metaphor, our efforts might be the K-Y Jelly we all need. Ahem. So, if you haven't received the email, go to MoveOn.org's website and sign the petition calling for Congress to retain Network Neutrality. Baby, rub it down and make it smooth like lotion. (Sorry--couldn't resist.)

I did actually leave the house last Friday night for the wilds of Alphabet City, which are not really so wild anymore, thanks to gentrification and the proliferation of hip Thai fusion restaurants of every corner (I'm all for making neighborhoods safe for people to go about their daily lives without fear of taking a bullet in the cerebellum, but why the fuck does that have to involve driving rents up 1000% and remaking Times Square into the Mall of America? I know why it does involve that--my point is, it doesn't have to, and it damn well shouldn't), to see my old pals Ellen and Lisa's spoken word show at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe. Wow, what a long sentence, and so many links! Anyway, for those of you unfamiliar with this somewhat venerable New York institution, Nuyorican is sort of the Studio 54 of the poet caste (or would be, if this were 1977--I have no idea where the popular kids hang out these days), famous for its Friday night poetry "slams," which are the literary version of the dance-off at the end of Saturday Night Fever. I mean, I really do not leave the house, as you can see.

In short, Nuyorican is the gold standard for a whole host of young, and old, bards, particularly for those who are into hip-hop and whose poetry is, if I may so lamely and generically phrase this, "socially conscious." Anti-PC as I am, I don't offer this as some kind of nasty dig, because it isn't. There is, however, a whole genre of literary work that falls under the "socially conscious" rubric, and as liberal as that classification portends to be, I've found it just as circumscribed and reactionary as any of the Bible-thumping rhetoric I was forced to ingest while growing up in the outskirts of Pennsylvania's Amish Country, much of which I have not yet managed to cleanse from my blood. (Top this off with a strong mushy liberal bent and you'll see, partly, why I'm such a nutjob.) It's difficult for me to reconcile the Leftist political sensibilities of this genre, most of which I share, with some of the godawful, didactic pieces of shit that have emerged from it, and even more difficult for me to discuss it in any forum other than a dive bar, with a few select people around who get where I'm coming from and several pints of beer in me. I've heard some lovely work at Nuyorican that can easily be categorized as "political" or "socially conscious," but I've also heard a lot of the aforementioned godawful, didactic pieces of shit, and it really rather pisses me off when the latter are hailed as "brilliant" and "revolutionary." Meanwhile, I'll be sitting in the corner, stewing, hating that I've just been preached to, hating myself for failing to see the revolutionary brilliance in this epic poem that could well have been simply distilled from a Marxism 101 lecture at the Brecht Forum. Where was the humanity in that poem? The idiosyncrasies? Anything that smacks of how real people actually live? Am I just too dense to get it? Too racist? Too emotionally underdeveloped? What the fuck is wrong with me?

When I first slapped this blog up here, I said, in effect, that I was a label whore. I like to think I'm actually a label call girl now, or at least I'm beginning to make the transition from working the docks to sitting in a well-appointed flat, servicing gentlemen at my whim. I've come quite a ways from sitting at the bar at Nuyorican, belting back wine and trying to retrain my brain to perfectly conform to an ideology with which I basically agree, in order that I might write brilliant, revolutionary, Marxist epics that also manage to sing and swing and get merry like Christmas. This go-round, I was actually able to enjoy my friends' show (which, by the way, ladies, was wonderful, and does not fall in the godawful, didactic category, and I ain't just saying that 'cause you're my friends, so keep kickin' ass) and neither steep myself in massive quantities of wine or guilt, nor attempt to synchronize my brain waves with the Nuyorican party line. Don't get me wrong--the tendrils of my childhood still dangle ominously, but I have my lucid moments now in which I'm able to step back and remind myself that this is not the only game in town, and there are as many ways of thinking, being, and creating as there are people in the world, and none of them is inherently "wrong" or "right." Well, except for the Bible-thumpers and Klansmen and die-hard Republican flag-wavers. Oh, and the so-called feminists who insist that women are Venusian peacemakers, which is really just an update of that old sugar and spice and everything nice saw. Oh, and ass-kissers can, well, kiss my ass. Or go fuck themselves up theirs. And I wouldn't exactly shed a tear if the entire Bush administration woke up one morning and found themselves buried up to their necks in sand, with fire ants crawling over their heads, which have been drizzled in honey. You get the picture.

By the way, the title of my friends' show? Boxes and Boundaries: How Do You Resist? Coincidence? Serendipity? This author's half-assed attempt to link her personal issues to a public event for the sake of posting something? All/None of the above?

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What a Bunch of Pricks: While working on a sewing project into the wee hours of Sunday morning, I was watching MSNBC, hoping to see "Lockdown: Inside San Quentin" or another of the life-affirming shows said station sees fit to broadcast at 1 a.m., when, much to my surprise, I found myself watching "Captured: On Tape." I'm not a big fan of this show, particularly when it involves housewives shoplifting at Wal-Mart in Ohio, but this installment was all about tattoos. Since I'm turning thirty in a shade under six months, I thought this might be a good time to revisit the tattoo issue. Ten years ago, I spent three months in Krakow, Poland, and spurred by the newly tattooed presence of my hipper-than-thou suitemates, I came very close to permanently decorating my flesh for 40 zloty, which is roughly the equivalent of $13 american. I chickened out at the last minute, figuring it was probably unwise to submit to needling in a country where one can get food poisoning from a carrot. (We had four cases of food poisoning in the first six weeks we were there. One of the victims was a strict vegetarian, and the doctors posited he picked it up from eating unwashed vegetables and fruit. I got it from a bad hardboiled egg I ate at a hotel in Prague. Trust me, you haven't lived until you've contracted salmonella in a former Soviet bloc nation.)

Anyway, ten years on, and safe(?) in the bosom of NYC, I'm thinking about celebrating my 30th birthday by getting a tattoo. If anyone knows of any reputable tattoo parlors here in town or in the metro area that manage to not transmit HIV or Hep C without charging a king's ransom, let me know. Also, if you have any tattoo ideas, post 'em on this blog. Now's your chance to come out of hiding! I'm leaning toward an anarchy symbol with roses entwined--a political trellis, if you will--on my ankle, but I'm open to suggestions.

And speaking of needles, if you're trying to seam a piece of fabric while balancing it on your knee, may I recommend wearing something more substantial than a T-shirt and underpants, lest you wind up dappling your thigh with puncture wounds?
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Finally, congratulations are in order for faux pundit Stephen Colbert, who, on Tuesday, became a father for the fourth time...of a baby eagle. No Stuart Little fantasies here (and I speak of the infinitely superior E.B. White book, not the wretched movie version)--the baby eagle is part of a litter (I know there's a proper term for a grouping of eagles, something along the lines of "a murder of crows"--I just don't know what it is) of eaglets belonging to the San Francisco Zoo, who offered to name a baby eagle in Stephen's honor. That is actually pretty damn awesome, not least because the first time I saw Stephen Colbert on The Daily Show, way back in the Craig Kilborn days, I thought, "Who is this milky-white 'nice guy'? Ooh! He's so creepy! Get him off!" I revised my opinion as the some of the most racist, anti-Semitic, flag-waving bile began to spew out of his ostensibly clean, square maw--all in good fun, of course. I have to say, that's always been one of my big lures, a fellow who looks like a straight arrow and reveals himself as a die-hard liberal through his satiric use of horrid, reactionary shit. I like that in women, too--I just don't like it like it. Yet. That I know of. Or am comfortable acknowledging. Anyway, congratulations, Stephen, and my most sincere apologies for marginalizing you thus lo these many years ago. I know you've probably bookmarked this page by now, seeing as I have a link to your site and all, and I look forward to a random celebrity encounter with you sometime in the not-too-distant future, during which I shall behave in a dignified manner and not attempt to engage you in adopting your screen persona for my personal amusement, unlike some of the RUBES you might run into. You're welcome.

No Business Like It

2006-04-10T14:37:00.000-04:00

Dad blast it, I really need to bite the bullet and get DSL. (I also need to get a Real Job, but let's not go there right now, shall we?) I was happily click-clacking away at the keyboard this morning when, sure enough, my trusty 56K connection froze, leaving me with no choice but to do the turn-the-computer-on-and-off thing Bill Gates commands you not to do, lest the computer explodes. (I'm not kidding--I actually believed, at one point, that if you turned the computer off without shutting it down properly, you'd lose everything on your hard drive and the computer would start spewing hot molten lava. Hyperbolic, but you get the idea. My first Real Job, after grad school, was in internet marketing, and one of the most valuable lessons I learned there that I apply in my present daily life was it's okay to turn the computer on and off. The computer will not explode. Stay calm. The humans shall prevail.)

As usual, I digress. We'll see how long my Stone Age connection holds up. But I really do need to get DSL. And a Real Job. And I should probably Spic 'n Span my kitchen floor, while I'm at it, since I haven't mopped the damn thing in two years. Oh, and I should read the Sunday New York Times more thoroughly, instead of just going straight for the magazine and the Arts section and doing the crossword puzzle. Oh, geez, she's embarking on yet another Quest for Self-Improvement. How original! (Yeah, well, tough shit, inner Frank Rich. There's a reason this show is playing off-off-off-Broadway, and there's no need for you to be a snot rag about it. So there!)

Ahem. Speaking of plays, and self-improvement, I'm working on two new pieces for my acting class. One is a monologue from a play called Miss Margarida's Way, by a Brazilian playwright named Roberto Athayde. The other is a scene from the play Fool for Love by Sam Shepard. The former, which Athayde has subtitled, "Tragicomic Monologue for an Impetuous Woman," is the kind of role I was famous (notorious?) for playing in high school, the libidinous, boobs-a-bouncin', brassy older woman with an evil streak. Luckily, I got off on that kind of performance, because every time we did a play that required a wacky old broad, it was, "Where's Karla? Get her ass out of marching band practice and into makeup!" It was fun, but it got real old after a while. There are limits to my tolerance, and while I was more than okay playing the wizened, brassy Bloody Mary in South Pacific (literally brassy! I'm not kidding--they painted me orange, because I was supposed to be Polynesian! Isn't that a bit racist? I mean, if we'd done Show Boat, which we would not have done, since there were only two guys in the drama department who could sing, would they have painted me black and given me red, fleshy lips to play Queenie the cook?), I was pretty fucking pissed off to be cast as Jan, as opposed to Rizzo, in Grease. (Jan is the one who, in the movie, does that whole "Brush-a, brush-a, brush-a" schtick at the slumber party.) We all adored our drama director, not least because of his propensity to work "fuck" and "shit" into every other sentence, but he was pretty damn rigid when it came to casting. Above all else, the show had to look right. If it said in the character descriptions at the beginning of the play that Rizzo was supposed to be thin, then Rizzo was gonna be thin, goddammit. Well, you're the boss, but...Adrienne Barbeau? Stockard Channing? Rosie O'Donnell? I seem to recall some extra flesh hanging off various parts of those ladies, and I don't think anyone was complaining. Oh, they complained that Rosie O'Donnell couldn't sing, but that's justified. Anyway, it was a shitty trip to lay on a sixteen-year-old girl, particularly an operatically self-loathing sixteen-year-old girl like me. I still haven't gotten over it. Part of my renewed mission to lose weight is because if I decide to go into acting, I don't want some casting director to pick my headshot out of a lineup and say, "Hey, she'd be great for the fat best friend! You know, the one who belts out that goofy number in the middle of Act One, and then she falls on her fat ass and shows her polka-dot bloomers, and then at the end of the show, she ends up with that funny-looking ranch hand with a heart of gold!" My acting chops are nowhere near Kathy Bates's or Tovah Feldshuh's, and even if they were, I don't think I'd be cast as Golda Meir at the ripe old age of twenty-nine. If someone out there wants to write a play about Golda Meir when she was twenty-nine, I promise I'll whip my acting chops into shape tout de suite.

As a quasi-adult, I much prefer working on roles that, while they can hardly described as neat, clean, and well-behaved, are not necessarily circus freaks. Hence my attraction to May in Fool for Love. The play centers around a dysfunctional couple (hey, wait, I think I've seen that one!) and their come-hither-go-to-hell dance in a desert motel room, where May has fled upon suspicion of Eddie's philandering. (MAY: Your fingers smell. EDDIE: Horses. MAY: Pussy.) Sigh. I love Sam Shepard. I get to say "pussy," May is not a circus freak, and in the closing salvo, I get to make out with Eddie while simultaneously kneeing him in the groin. Good times!

Oh, I neglected to mention that May and Eddie are half-brother and sister. If done well, as it was when I saw this play in a little hole-in-the-wall on the Upper West Side, it's somehow not creepy. The actress playing May had this odd little tick that kept my two fellow theatergoers and me in hysterics for months. At one point, perhaps halfway through the show, May's date, Martin, a local nice guy who earns a living watering the high school football field, comes to pick her up. May has the line, "Martin, I want to go to the movies. Let's go to the movies, Martin," which is written as a dig at Eddie. The actress took this line a bit too seriously, investing it with such vitriol that it came out, "Let's go to the MOU-veez." Guess you had to be there. My friends and I were grooving on it, though, and so for the next several months, every time we got together to go to the cinema, which was pretty much all we ever did besides drink, and/or inhale greasy Tex-Mex at Senor Swanky's, we'd say, "Let's go to the MOU-veez! I want to go to the MOU-veez!" We also had this weird little game called "Improvisational Mamet," which was about as lame as you'd expect, involving a lot of sentence fragments and incantations of "fuck" in all its many forms. No wonder actors get such a bad rap, and none of us were even in the biz! At least we didn't go around singing show tunes...oh, wait, we did. Well, one of us did, but I'm not saying who.

Anyone out there up for putting up a production of Streetcar? I wanted to play Stella, but my scene partner has played Stanley one too many times. Hmmm, maybe I'll produce it myself. That's what I'll do instead of getting a Real Job--I'll stage a site-specific production of Streetcar and cast myself as Stella. If anyone knows any rich backers, please direct them to me.
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Makin' It: I neglected to mention last week that one of the magazines I picked up was ReadyMade, which is a DIY-crafting mag aimed at urban hipsters. I am not a hipster, but it would seem that I share various hipster aethetic sensibilities, and I'm a sucker for any publication that teaches you how to make a very attractive table lamp out of film strips and that little metal spring you found in the gutter. The project currently on my table is the paper headboard, which is not a headboard at all, but a series of paper tiles tacked to your wall to form a complete image that pretends to be a headboard! Basically, one scans an image into one's computer--a bit tricky for me, since my scanner is part of my printer-slash-copier-slash-fax machine, and doesn't allow for a large book of David Hockney's works to be shoved into it--and, through the use of Adobe Photoshop, blows up the image, prints out the tiles, and tacks them on one's wall. It sounds doable, even for a confirmed Luddite like me. I'm trying to decide if I want to do a full-color blowup of Ganesha, that still from Streetcar with Marlon Brando unveiling his sweaty T-shirt whilst Vivien Leigh eyes him askance, or a picture of Angela Davis from back in the day. I thought about using that shot of Nixon getting on the plane doing the Victory sign, but I'm not exactly deluged with suitors, and I think that very well might send those few brave souls screaming into the night. So no dice. If anyone has any ideas, please send them my way, along with the rich backers.

And, it appears my Victorian era connection has held for the duration of this epic missive. Onwards!

Periods! Prison! Periodicals! Posts!

2006-04-03T12:49:00.000-04:00

I'm recovering from a nasty bout of PMS, although since the worst of it technically hit during my period, I should probably just call it MS. Except there's already a far more serious condition out there with those initials, so that won't work. (Apologies to any MS sufferers out there, or to anyone who does the MS Run/Walk. The preceding comment was not meant as a tasteless remark about MS; it was simply an illustration of my inability to encapsulate the precise nature of my condition.) Anyway, we're not talking the women-and-their-wacky-uteri moodiness Lifetime sees fit to depict with a host of mildly pouty women massaging their aching heads and fiending for chocolate. No, mine is more like Vivienne Elliot meets Joan Crawford for a cinematic swordfight while "Carmina Burana" plays in the background. No wire hangers, indeed! Yes, it's all fun, sun, and cute guys here at the ranch!

The upshot of the situation is that I'm going to see a holistic gynecologist at the end of April, a woman who bills herself as a "PMS expert." Probably a good idea to remain healthily skeptical about said claim, but the holistic part is definitely a good thing, and if nothing else, I'm 99% sure she's not going to stick me on the Pill the second I walk in there...but that's another story. Genug with the uterus, already!

Well, almost genug. On the second evening of this female fun fest, I popped a Midol Complete sometime around 9 p.m. and settled in for a good six hours of hyperactivity. Turns out that negligible amount of caffeine in there is not so negligible, after all. Oops. Around 3 a.m., I decided to put down the knitting, turn off MSNBC, and cuddle up for some tossing and turning. I've been an insomniac since I was a baby, according to my dad, who had to rock me and sing "This Old Man" for a good hour and change before I even thought about closing my eyes, so I've developed a fair number of somnambulatory strategies over the years. These include, but are not limited to, falling asleep in an imaginary lover's arms, imagining myself curled up in a bed at a Swiss chalet after a long day of hiking the Alps, and pretending I'm in a psych ward hooked up to a Thorazine drip. Stark raving as I was, the imaginary lover strategy was out. (Even my imagination has some basis in reality, and I think, given my behavior over the preceding 36 hours, the imaginary lover would have banished me to the guest room, provided he had the chance before I did it myself.) Same with the Alps--the last thing I was feeling was hale and outdoorsy, and the psych ward...well, that just hit a little too close to home at that point.

So, what cheerful scenario did I envision for myself? Prison! Yes, that's right--the Big House, the Pen, the Club Fed. How soothing! It was soothing, which is the utterly pathological part. (Oh, and get your minds out of the gutter and turn off the wah-wah pedal and the synthesizer. MY prison fantasy was clean, thank you.) The prison in which I was doing a 3-year sentence for...I couldn't quite figure that out, but it had something to do with social justice and government frame-ups, sort of like Ethel Rosenberg, but without the death sentence...anyway, my prison was a feminist, sisters-helping-sisters paradise where we made dolls out of tampons and copper wire (I read that somewhere--no lie), took writing workshops with Eve Ensler (again, no lie--there's this great documentary called What I Want My Words to Do to You that features her doing just that. If you want to check it out, go to the PBS homepage and check out the POV section, which should be under "Shows A-Z"), and bonded together against the fascist guards who would rob us of our dignity and humanity. What happened to my imagination having a basis in reality...? Anyhoo, within a half-hour or so, I was slumbering deeply, and oddly, my dreams were as lyrical and romantic as if I'd envisioned myself drifting off in a hairy, male embrace. (In Part One, Manhattan below 14th Street morphed into a lovely seaside village; in Part Two, which had no bearing on Part One, Scarlett O'Hara confessed her love for Rhett Butler, to which the intrepid blockade runner responded, "Huh? Really? Are you sure? Does this have something to do with the Honorable Ashley Wilkes?" Oh, and then there was some kissing, but since it was 1939, it stayed clean.)

Does anyone know of a prison like that, just in case? I don't anticipate committing any major crimes in the foreseeable future, but in these troubled times, one never knows if one will stand accused of passing state secrets to the you-know-whos, which start with a capital T, which rhymes with P, which stands for Pool.
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In lighter news, here are some of the publications I've been devouring of late, when they aren't strewn about my bedroom floor.

Issue #30 of The East Village Inky arrived at my door on Wednesday, occasioning a lot of jumping up and down and yelling "Dude!" The EVI, for short, is a 'zine authored by the "evil lactating genius" Ayun Halliday. I don't think she's still lactating, since her younger kid is five, and I don't know about the evil part, but I'm happy to attest to the genius label. Named for her older child, Inky, The EVI is Ayun's quarterly postcard-sized paean to her kids, Inky and Milo, her husband, Greg Kotis (who wrote Urinetown: The Musical) , and la vie Boheme in the Big Apple. This issue's piece de resistance is "The Incredible Idealized Adventures of Coco, the Class Bear," an adorably snarky epic dedicated to young Milo's kindergarten class project. Check out Ayun's website, subscribe, and send Ayun a condolence email on the passing of her notoriously crotchety old feline, Jambo. Oh, and check out her blog, Dirty Sugar Cookies--the link's to your right. You're welcome.

Cosmo, suck my left one: BUST's April/May 2006 issue is available at the Barnes and Noble on 22nd and 6th in Chelsea. If that's out of your geographical area, click the link above and check these gals out. No "Perfect Abs In Thirty Days!" or "How to Make Him Want You Real Bad" nonsense here, thank Goddess (hee, hee). BUST shows you how to craft nifty placemats from pencils, discusses whether the Hitachi Magic Wand or the Rabbit is more adept at satisfying your self-stimulatory needs, and keeps you apprised of various punk-rawk-DIY-grrl-power events throughout the globe. Don't forget to read Ayun's bimonthly column, "Mother Superior." (Bimonthly...is that right? I mean, the magazine is bimonthly, but she's in every issue, so...oh, forget it.)

If vibrators and crafting are not your thing, the current issue of The Nation contains an article about Ralph Reed, Christian evangelist/right-wing prick extraordinaire, who, shock upon shock, took money from Jack Abramoff! Who'da thunk? He seemed like such a nice boy. There's also an interesting piece about how socialism has become nonexistent in the American political discourse. I look forward to the day socialism is reinstated to dirty word status, myself. I wish I could be more detailed about these articles, but The Nation is somewhere in the imbroglio known as my room, and I really have to wrap this thing up, so I'm not going to go tearing the place apart to find it.

And finally: I changed the post options so now everyone, not just fellow bloggers, can put in their two cents as they see fit. Ass-kissing is welcome, but not necessary. Civility is mandatory.

Let's try this again...

2006-02-23T22:00:00.000-05:00

About two years and change ago, I got the idea to start blogging. Hey, everyone else was doing it, and maybe it would jump-start my four-year writer's block. After a couple of false starts, I settled on the title "Egghead Planet." I had this rather (okay, incredibly) grandiose idea that I would use my little, nothing corner of webspace to singlehandedly redefine the term "egghead," build a community of "friends" (the kind who slaver over you and always pick up the check, so thrilled are they to be in the presence of your greatness), and nab a lucrative book deal, thereby catapulting me from office drudgery straight into the bosom of Fame. (Anyone ever read that Tennessee Williams essay in which he refers to fame as "embracing the Bitch Goddess"? I wouldn't know a damn thing about that, but I haven't yet ended up dead in the Hotel Elysee with a pill bottle lodged in my throat, so...)

Well, as you can probably imagine, that whole enterprise turned out reeeaal good. (Maybe three people ever read the damn thing, for starters. And the kinds of friends I envisioned stayed, as well they should, well within the confines of my imagination. Oh, and greatness? A then-twenty-seven year-old woman, with the physique of a Russian peasant, subsisting on temp jobs and her father's largesse? Don't call us. Really. Don't.)

And later for that writer's block, man. Here's the thing about labels: They describe. Period. Here's my thing about labels: I can't seem to stop trying to live up to them. I'm not sure if it's my natural impulse or if it's the result of some pretty ham-fisted childhood conditioning, but when I did get up the gumption to post something, I was so committed to embodying (while simultaneously trying to deconstruct) that "egghead" moniker that I couldn't get through a paragraph without angsting, pulling my hair out, and generally behaving like the writer's version of the late, lamented Don Music of Sesame Street. (If you have no idea who I'm talking about, he was the composer Muppet who was always banging his head on the piano and yelling "Oh, I'll never get it! Never!" His character was pulled when--I kid you not--too many parents complained that their kids were starting to imitate his behavior.)

I gave up the ghost. I did other things. I joined a therapy group, in no small part because I wanted to be able to write again, but they kept pushing me to consider other things (like them, as people) and to stop behaving like the group therapy version of Don Music. I did freelance editing. I got hired to teach English at a two-year college. I made stuffed animals out of socks. I also drank, smoked, and ate too much, but those activities have been constants in my life since freshman year of college, so that's no surprise.

Then, a couple of months ago, a friend from the group asked me if I had a blog. When I said no, she suggested I start one. "I'd read it," she said. Another friend chimed in, "Yeah, weren't you going to do something like that a year ago? A 'zine or something? You definitely should! Do it!" Well, gee, if you insist.

At present, I'm what we delicately refer to as "between jobs." (No, they didn't fire me for being a disorganized spaz, nor was I carted from the classroom by a stuffed shirt yelling, "You can take your anarchist-socialist-hippie crap walking and like it!" It was a standard layoff, which, if nothing else, means it wasn't my fault.) I'm still freelance editing and living off my father's largesse. That leaves me with a lot of free time. I'm not sure I'm a better writer than I was two years ago, or a better person, for that matter, but I've made some headway on letting other people into my life and I don't throw operatic fits at the blink of an eye (well, not as much as I used to), and that's been a great help in freeing me from label worship and the paralyzing fear of making an ass of myself.

One more thing, before I go: The title, "Kitschen Table," refers to the messy space in which I drink my coffee, smoke my cigarettes, do the Times crossword puzzle, and engage in various and sundry nonproductivities. It's spelled, well, kitschily because someone else already has a blog with the properly spelled title. But I'm a sucker for a roadside restaurant shaped like a giant hamburger, so I suppose it makes sense in the end.

That's all for now. Thanks...thanks so much. In advance. Hee.