The Biggest Earth Day Hypocrisy Award Goes To...

...the "Green Issue" of Vanity Fair, the multi-inch thick magazine that includes an entire rainforest in every issue. Old-growth rainforest, the classy stuff. And who better to embody the spirit of "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle" than the Material Girl for the cover?

I Am Swank, Briefly

My high-powered NJYP connections introduced me to Netparty, a site organizing networking functions for young professionals, and apparently people like me as well. Netparty held their premiere NYC event last night, where 1700 young professionals were expected to crowd into a club, trade business cards, and possibly hump each other, but in a totally professional, business-casual way. I went, expecting the social-phobic, fish out of water disaster these things usually collapse into — but I enjoy these stylish clubs, first because I get off on that slick, trance, mood-lit ambiance and second because I feel like someone important walking into this secret, sacred space, like Page Six or Heidi Montag might stop by and I'd get to be on the other side of the tabloid glossy for once. As if that's a worthy goal, but I think we can all agree that it sounds better spending tonight like every other night, commuting home, stuck in traffic.

The party was held at Hiro, an exclusive club that usually has no reason to be open at six on a Tuesday night. I confirmed this with a couple of the bartenders. Hiro is one of those obnoxious places that's kept hidden from the plebeians — 371 West 16th Street doesn't even exist during daylight hours, camouflaged as a service entrance for what I always thought was a homeless shelter but turns out to be an expensive hotel. It's easier to find at night because you can just look for the line of beautiful people heading into the Maritime Hotel's service entrance. I arrived a few minutes before the party sort of kicked off at six and the line was already down to the corner.

I was probably the only person waiting on line not talking into, e-mailing from, or texting on some kind of handheld electronic gizmo.

I'm generally super-awkward at these events and I somehow found myself sitting at the dudes' table. All of you with — not social skills so much as social confidence — haven't experienced this phenomenon, but basically you're hanging in the clu trying to look engaged, failing usually. One of the system admins already at the dudes' table — everyone at the dudes' table is inevitably a system admin — calls you over and you collapse, sucked into this black hole of low self-esteem, and wind up sitting with dudes sadly pointing out who's hot, or even more sadly not pointing out who's hot. Dudes and their repressive asexual work ethic are actually here for networking.

Here's where the night becomes awesome. So I'm at the dudes' table trying to explain this Netparty concept to some system admin who doesn't really speak English and is, seriously, expecting someone to make a presentation tonight, and just generally getting frustrated cause I've been sitting at the dudes' table since I was seven or eight years old. I want to escape and I see the woman who was in front of me on that long, long line outside sitting by herself. Understand: I never do this. I've never done this. But I was totally sick of being this guy's instruction manual — "No, you have to go and introduce yourself" — that I excused myself to go "mingle."

I went up to... the bar.

I checked out upstairs.

I brought my drink into the men's room. I've never seen this before: they have all this metrosexual styling product over the sink and a guy who charges you two bucks to use it. I'm a firm believer that you can judge the classiness of a joint by its bathroom — fake white marble, high-velocity hand dryers, those big bowl sinks. Hiro had the bathroom of your corner deli, plus the guy selling fancy soap or whatever was sort of creepy.

I left the bathroom and, out of places to wander, I introduced myself to the woman from outside. "I remember you from the line..." I'm not sure what the big—

Hold on. I'm forgetting something. It didn't hit me till later, but: !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I can't figure out what I was afraid of, since this went smooth as, well, curling up in a ball and floating underwater. Sure, the circumstances were really favorable — no competition, plus I had an opener, plus I don't know what the hell Hiro put in my drinks but I was spinning for hours — but still, in instant replay, it can't see my looming disaster approaching from anywhere at all. There's a moral somewhere in here; I really hope I can dig it out.

Meet BlingH2O

Hey, frivolous rich people! Are you looking for a way to stand out, to let the other mansions on the block know just who has the most money to throw away? Sure, you could buy a faster plane than the neighbors, or a larger yacht, but in my admittedly impoverished, humble opinion, the most brilliant way to announce to Page Six, "Nobody is gaudier than I am!" is by purchasing a case of (yes, this is real) BlingH2O, at forty dollars for 750 milliliters, the world's most expensive bottled water. That's a hundred bucks for one of those plastic Coke bottles full of something that literally falls from the sky. Now that's ostentation!

By the way, Coca-Cola, or Coke, is something we poor people drink when we've run out of Dom Perignon and Grey Goose.

Among the many healing powers of BlingH2O are the ability to get the lower half of this anonymous bikini model to talk to you.

But the best thing about BlingH2O is that it's fungible. I mean, it's not like BlingH2O comes with an extra hydrogen atom in every molecule or anything. So you could amuse yourself by, say, throwing a party with your wealthy friends and promising them BlingH2O but secretly switching it with Poland Spring instead. When I become rich, I'm totally gonna do that.

Stuff the Taliban is Missing Out On

New York City is commemorating the sixth anniversary of 9/11 with the solemn dignity it deserves: with Spring '08 Fashion Week! Woo-hoo!

That's one of the beautiful things about living in a free country like ours, cause if you go to Iran or Saudi Arabia, you're not going to find a week-long celebration of all things size zero and revealing. They're starved for sartorial variety over there, since there's only so much creativity you can put into the one-size-fits-all chador or burqa. I see progress on the horizon in the war on drab, which is great, since they hate us for our freedom and our low-neckline floral print sundresses.

I buy my clothes at Old Navy, which is conspicuously underrepresented at Fashion Week for some strange reason. I don't understand why; Old Navy has this new line of argyle sweaters that comes with a bouncy commercial jingle and five dollar shipping and handling. The people gotta know what pattern sweater they'll be wearing in the near future! Or else, we might all buy different styles, and then all of civilization will be doomed!

No, wait. Not doomed. Motley.

As much as I'm aware of the public's fascination with stupid, shiny things, why the hell does any of Fashion Week matter to anybody at all? No one even wears fashion; we wear giant neon rubber shoes and sweatpants with writing across the ass, and a little chunk of Tim Gunn's soul dies every time someone clips their cell phone to their belt. It's the same insipid news every half-year — "Color is big this season" — as if there's anything else they could possibly say. Really, color? Fuck you, Anna Wintour: I was just about to release my new clothing line made entirely of Saran wrap and Scotch tape! It would be great if Giuliana de Pandi would warn me the day before we all start wearing Lost in Space-style standard issue silver jumpsuits, but otherwise shut it and you can all just get back to purging.

Here's where all the resentment lives: I don't look like that! No one, except the bimbos and himbos sashaying down the catwalk, looks like that. First of all, these guys are WASPier than the all WASPiest WASPs in Greenwich and Newport Beach put together. Even the Chinese guy is WASPier than I am. (You wouldn't believe how many photos I had to search through to find that guy.) The lower-right photo guy is wearing an ascot. In my world, the only person who can wear an ascot without deserving to be punched in the throat is Freddie from Scooby-Doo, so he better get a Mystery Machine and start explaining how local ghosts are actually evildoers in costumes trying to scare everyone away real damn soon.

Would it kill these fashion designers to make clothes for guys who weren't part of a secret government program to genetically engineer square-jawed, six-packed, clear-skinned male models? Especially since... have you ever taken a look at the behind-the-scenes people at fashion shows? Maybe this chick just doesn't photograph well (not like she doesn't have an army of professionals whose job is to make sure their subjects do photograph well), but Anna Sui needs to stick a lot of fingers down her throat before I'll buy that "camera adds ten pounds" argument from her. These designers are practically all two steps away from being forced into a traveling circus. What kind of vain moron dripping with self-esteem issues takes fashion advice from these people? Halloween costume advice, maybe...

Really, dude? You're gonna wear that baseball cap in your official Fashion Week photo? Going with the sideburns and half-beard? Do you have a World Series of Poker tournament to get to after the show?

And that's just the men, where the only room for design creativity lies across two extremes: flamboyantly gay and enormous prick.

Or a really talented designer could theoretically combine the two: What the hell is this guy so smug about. Someone needs to get him a mirror, then smash his head into it to wipe that smirk off his face.

"You could be a part-time model/but you'd probably still have to keep your normal job."

I'd just die to see the mean, median, and standard deviation on one eHarmony question in particular, "How satisfied are you with your physical appearance?" My answer was two out of seven, but now that I've had a few days to live with my hasty choice, I'm afraid I've fallen victim to confirmation bias. Something sounds right when I say I'm 28.6% satisfied with my appearance, but way off when I deduce that means I'm 71.4% unsatisfied with my appearance. Most of the time, I'm indifferent to my physical appearance, and I'd like to tweak the numbers a bit: 25% satisfied, 30% unsatisfied, and 45% neither — and if you do some math with that, eHarmony-dot-com, computer-matching me on twenty-nine freaking vectors of love, the results seem to correlate with my true opinion of my looks, bias and chronic self-deprecation and just objective comparisons between my appearance and the physical appearance of the cast on the CW network included. I really wish I told eHarmony three or (gasp!) even four for that question.

The stats on those descriptive rankings — well-groomed, handsome, athletic, overweight, fit, and sexy — would also be illuminating, especially with the data on how people feel about their appearance. How many self-confessed overweight people are also satisfied with their looks, for example? (What if they used "big-boned" instead? Or if they asked people to rank how thin they are?) The thing that most fascinates me is how people rationalize their vanity. I mean, most people aren't all that hot in the first place. We're not kittens or pugs or panda bears, where you're automatically cute as a member of the species. To my eye, maybe one in twenty people could realistically rank themselves a seven out of seven in the "sexy" category, and one in ten men could do the same in for "handsome." Hollywood aside, and even then sometimes, the scale goes from unkempt to plain to trying too hard, with only a sliver of space for the mutants with perfect skin, zero body fat, and a thousand-dollar smile.

Let's not call it the myth of beauty, since there's plenty of good-looking people at the unkempt and plain ends of the scale. Instead, it's the myth of stunning, eye-catching, head-turning beauty, sucking people in for botox and plastic surgeries — half-man, half-gelatin — and screwing up the pretty curve for the rest of us.

The other question eHarmony asks is, "How important is it that your partner be physically attractive?" And in light of all this, I can honestly be happy with my answer of two out of seven. I was really going to put one out of seven, but I was sort of afraid then they'd hook me up with someone who spent the past twenty years living next to Chernobyl, growing an extra face or something.