:) You are a hard worker. :)
What, were the fortune cookie muses on strike or something?
My dad, who's happy to eat the cookies but who thinks the fortunes themselves are sophomoric, got "You are an inspiring and exciting person." Maybe today is opposite day.
You all remember T.G.I. Friday's, right? — That restaurant at the Blue Star shopping center with the nauseatingly perky waitresses where you and your friends would go to eat mainly cause it's the only restaurant in town. Well, I had my Fourth of July brunch :( there with my wild and crazy family, and I'm happy to report that T.G.I. Friday's has a new employee dress code. No more vaudeville-style red-and-white striped vests, like their waiters are walking barber poles; no more cheesy-ass "pieces of flair" (that's stoned-happy talk for pin-on buttons); same saccharine attitude from the staff, meaning it still takes the same amount of self-control not to beat the living shit out of your hostess. Okay, I guess it doesn't take quite as much self-control, considering how I no longer go to school with anybody working at T.G.I. Friday's.
What I should've said...
Dr. Schlessinger: There's one thing I'm curious about. Why did you decide to use mescaline in your play?
Jay: They say to write about what you know.
For some reason, Mom believes that I've got a job interview today. Maybe it's because I told her last night that I'm going into the city for a job interview, but I don't claim to understand how her mind works. In any case, it's the last time I lie to her about having an interview, because this morning, she went into conniptions when I refused to wear khaki pants to this imaginary interview. The arguing went back and forth...
Mom: You have to wear long pants.
Jay: But it's going to be eighty-seven degrees out!
Mom: You can't go to a job interview in shorts.
Jay: But I don't want to be all sweaty all day long!
Mom: No one else there will be wearing shorts. Some people will even being wearing ties.
Jay: Stop telling me how to dress! You always treat me like a child!
At which point I locked myself in my room and told her, "La la la, I'm not listening to you! You're not the boss of me!" 8-)
Mom points out that there are lots of people, lawyers and CEO's and poor dudes working at the Mens Wearhouse, who have to wear a suit and tie every day, no matter wha t the heat index. I even wore a suit and tie to my first job interview, at the U.S. Small Business Administration. It was approximately a hundred degrees outside and I was being slow-roasted in my own sweat thanks to the wardrobe. Needless to say, I didn't get the job, and I blamed it on the tie. (Honest. The interviewer told me I looked a bit uncomfortable — always a good sign — and I told it was cause of the tie.)
Getting dressed up just seems stupid, and I personally have as little respect for people who wear three-piece suits and ties in the middle of fucking summer as I do for people who go around shirtless in February. Unless they're chicks, in which case they can go shirtless whenever they like, and I won't complain. Mom says, "Well, what would you do if you if you lived in colonial times, when people wore layers and layers, all wool, no matter how hot it was outside?" I'd die of heatstroke, that's what I'd do.
And I'd like to point out to everyone who says people got along fine back in the day, even though they dressed for a blizzard no matter what the season and it was scandalous to show a millimeter of ankle and there was no air conditioning and no electric fans: back in those days, life expectancy was in the late thirties, and people said "thine" and "thee" and "methinks," and there was slavery back then.
There, I said it: suits and ties are racist.
I never gave much thought to the dreaded job applicant question until I ran across it filling out an online applicaton yesterday. Describe a time when you worked in a team and your role in the team. I grumbled, longing for the day when the anti-socialites take over the world and reminding your co-workers that there's no 'I' in "team" will be a federal offense. But the more I looked back on it, the more clear it became that I actually went through four years of college not once working with a group of my fellow ego-driven, obsequeious, capitalizing user classmates — er, I mean, a team. No massive projects, no sports, no quiz bowl or Parliamentary debate or planning committees or — what else do people do as a group? — or orgies (damn!) or relays-for-life.
Didn't matter all that much anyway since the job is in Upper Saddle River, wherever that is. Apparently it's quite a hike, and I'm given to daily complaints about the off-hours commute into New York. So, I left the question blank. I told Anne about the questionnaire and my non-answer; she admonished me: "You can't do that," in that tone that tells me she's sick of my indignant impudence. And for my part, it was only an amusing anecdote. I know that I should have a happy teamwork story; that here I was talking to a computer that couldn't care less about, and hell, might possibly share my contempt for my fellow man; that when I'm sitting across a desk from an executive in a tie and he wants to know about a time I worked with a team, it's gotta amount to more than "Can I get another question?" The job market's not looking too good for jaded loners.... Well, maybe the post office is hiring. 8-)
But, for now at least, fuck team playing, fuck extroverts, and, while I'm at it, fuck Mr. Goudy and his sandbox skills. And the truth is, it ain't my fucking fault that I'm cynical!
Lemme tell you a little story about one time I tried accomplishing something with a group of other people.
It was junior year of high school and I was invited to some extracurricular literary-magazine how-to-be-a-humorist program at William Paterson University. For reasons I can only attribute to general asshole-ness of mankind, a mass contingent of retards, slugabeds, and jerks also managed to rummage up invites, as did Ankur, who isn't a retard, slugabed, or jerk, but who fits in with them effortlessly. It was some sort of creative expression program, where the administrative hand divided us into groups of twelve-ish whose goal was to produce a short game show skit and perform it in front of the larger congregation at the end of the day.
I found myself in group ten — and you know it was a incredibly lame experience when you still remember your group number six years later — and group ten didn't have particularly creative members. Or particularly funny ha-ha members either, for that matter. We did, however, have nine members who thought it'd be damn enlightening if we just copied those Celebrity Jeopardy parodies they used to have on Saturday Night Live, down to the fake questions that weren't all that funny when the professionals performed them.
Now, it's late at night, so I don't really have any brilliant game show ideas at this moment. But back then, at eleven in the morning, I had one or two that would've made Merv Griffin himself say, "Gee, I wish I'd thought of that.... Jay, your ideas make Wheel of Fortune look like the intellectual skeeball tournament that it is." My so-called team would have none of it. This color ends in "urple." What is light urple? That's comedy zirconium there.
Making matters worse, I had another brilliant idea that I shared with the group: we should write a script, rather than simply telling our "jokes" to each other and then forgetting them. Somehow, that idea got nixed, too.
Long story short: after lunch, I wandered away from the group and sat outside, writing. Figured that they didn't seem to need me anyway. The adult supervisor freaked, like I was alone in the playground while the killer bee swarm attacked. In fact, I think that bitch would've freaked less were I being attacked by killer bees instead of, uh, writing and not plaigarising. Actually, it took about two hours before anyone even noticed that I was gone — "Hey, wasn't there a kid with glasses here suggesting we write up a script? Our group could use a stenographer..." And the manhunt was on. Eventually, Napor and Aneesa and Jason Meehan came to my rescue and offered me coffee (group four, their group, got the classroom/lounge with the coffeemaker), but I spent the rest of the day moping on a cheap collegiate couch. Why couldn't I get the group with people I liked, why couldn't I get the group with the coffeemaker, why, if I made the world a better place by murdering my nine ex-groupmates with an axe, would I be the one going to jail?
It was the best field trip ever.
Nevertheless, it seems I'm still a bit resentful.
What am I supposed to say when someone tells me they majored in communications? And when they say it with a big, dumb, communications-major grin on their face like they just cured cancer or something?
Smile and nod, Jay. Smile and nod.
My perpetually despondent gym career hit a new low at the YMCA this morning when, while struggling with an assisted chin-up, I spotted an elderly gentleman come in with an oxygen tank on wheels following him closely. Now, since I've returned to the Y after six or seven years in absentia, let me make a brief correction to my gym story-excuse: not all of the elderly people at the Y, and there is quite a large population of those proto-zombies there, can lift more weights than I can. Like, today, for example, there was this corpulent woman in her mid-to-late fifties, and she got exhausted after doing a plate and a half on the chest press. (Oooh, that sounds dirty — yet kind of nasty when used in the same sentence with "corpulent woman in her mid-to-late fifties"...)
But anyway, back to the old man of the hour. First, he's on the exercise bike, so there's no real basis for a Jay-to-elderly-man-with-personal-oxygen-supply comparison.... Part of me hoped he'd pass out so I could stop feeling insecure and taunt his exhausted body: "Boo-yah! Who's your gym master? Me, bitch! Yeah!" (I was going to write "drop dead" instead of "pass out," but I'm afraid that my reader doesn't share my moribund sense of humor here.) Next up, he's doing the pullover, which is a retarded machine — it's like an ab-roller with a seatbelt — and besides I'm too busy trying to figure out if that's Meghan Mele on the Stairmaster and if it is her, whether she remembers my name or is just smiling at me to be friendly and either way whether I should go over and say something that would probably sound awkward and pathetic to her. That reminds me, there's some high school yearbook pictures I need to look through.
And then, he starts on the chest fly and I count him doing one, two, three, four weights. That's the same number I do! He isn't stronger than me! Or, to put it another way, I am as strong as an old man who can no longer rely on the atmosphere to keep him alive.
Next time... next time, Jay, you're doing sixty sit-ups and twenty chin-ups and seven plates on the chest press.... I'll beat his emphysemic ass in weightlifting yet!
Also, there's this other at-least-in-his-sixties guy at the Y who does about fifteen plates on the chest press. He challenges my masculinity, but, you know what, I think he's on steroids. Maybe I should report him.
My aunt's dog, Snookie, died the other day. She was fourteen years old, drooling like a beagle, and barely able to walk anymore. I never got to know her as well as I would've liked — I don't see my aunt more than once every couple of years — but I know she was a sweetie who could reduce a grown adult to coddling baby-talk and kissing her shaggy face. Snookie will be missed.
What's worse than being the sort of person who can never think of a good retort is being the sort of person who thinks of a good retort, only months or years too late, after the conversation has been forgotten to the annals of minutiae. Case in point — a morning by the Broadway Hall elevators:
Jay to Uma: Are you and Sung-Min alright? I heard you two screaming last night.
Uma: Yeah, he was showing me "Jackass: The Movie." It's so stupid. Who likes that stuff?
I forget what I said, but since I was trying to impress her, it probably came off sounding retarded and not nearly as piercing as what I should've said...
Jay: Well, darlin', it's an outlet for his latent homoerotic angst.
It's trenchant and true! 8-P
Pre-adolescent "awkward age," my ass. We all went through junior high, so maybe it would be nice if we could all pick up the simple lesson that it might not be half as awkward if the education specialists and the developmental psychologists and the superintendant and board of education could just keep their damn mouths shut and quit making the generalizations. True, some of us struggled through an awkward phase in junior high — and it seems like some of us, ahem, haven't quite outgrown it yet — but the junior high I remember was a second home to the R.J. Milligans and Cara Bristols of Scotch Plains and Fanwood, too. The more urbane end of the awkward spectrum.
I spent lunchtime in middle school vacillating between two tables at the far end of the cafeteria, first sitting with the band-and-comic-book nerds and then sitting with my posse — my six classmates who were (are) even less socially adroit than I was (am). God, I hope they're still clumsy enough to make me look like Mr. Big. I don't need Josh Hamerman showing me up at our high school reunion.
The point is, when do I get to hit my stride? When does the fucking acne subside and the voice not squeak out when I try to get someone's attention? Every now and then, NASA makes some amazing discovery about space, and a spokes-weenie gets on television with his thick Drew Carey-glasses and his anodized astronaut pen sticking out of his shirt pocket and starts going into a wanking frenzy about pulsars and moon rocks. Science geek I am, yet not even a NASA-discovers-bacteria-on-Mars breakthrough can lift me from the funk washing over me when I see myself reflected in this middle aged dorkwad on the TV. No booze, no pot, no clubs, no sports — and it's all cool with me save for the fact that it ain't cool with anyone else.
And that's what I think this whole damn awkward age bullshit is about, and why, in a future life, I dream of coming back as a masked figure who bitch-slaps every uptight mother in the world who won't let her daughter wear lipstick and every dad who thinks MTV is a bad influence. (Don't worry, in a different life, I'll be a masked avenger who dishes out beatdowns to parents that can't control their bastard kids.) My co-collaborator Allison tells her lost and wandering college freshmen to "just be yourself," that's how you'll fit in and make friends. Wrong, wrong, wrong — it's like the seeing leading the seeing. I mean, how 'bout if "yourself" is a total asshole? Just be yourself? Sure, being an asshole never stopped anyone from getting ahead.... But what if you're just a pathetic loser? Then what are you supposed to do?
I'll tell you what to do, and this is why you should buy my soon-to-be-written book instead of Allison's: lose your inhibitions and be the person everyone else wants you to be. No, I don't mean invisible. I mean shamelessly entertaining, uplifting and encouraging and agreeable. Like half Tony Robbins, half Kelly Ripa, with just a pinch of the "Queer Eye" fashion guy thrown in for good measure.
The more I think about it, the less impressed I am with this guy who knows all the answers on "Jeopardy". Sure, it was cool watching him amass $9,200 before anyone else managed to buzz in once, but I think I got this guy pegged: He just rings in on every damn question, and I'm supposed to impressed that he knows the answers? I'm more impressed that he beats the other contestants to the buzzer.
After all, I know most of the "Jeopardy" answers, and most of the "Millionaire" answers, too, but apparently the challenge is getting to your buzzer before the other players. It's one thing to sit in front of the television and shout out answers; it's another to do it for real. I don't think that point has really sunk in — I fly out of my seat like its burning rubber when I answer a two-thousand dollar question that Ken the Jeopardy Genius missed: "Oh, what is 'Prince Maximillian I'? What is 'magnitude'? Fuck, yeah, I knew the answer and that guy didn't! Alex Trebek is my bitch!"
But I get the feeling if I was ever fortunate enough to actually get on Jeopardy or Millionaire, in front of a national audience, I'd denature into a bit more of a pussy. It's easy to shout out the wrong answer and call Alex Trebek your bitch from the safety of your bedroom, but I think I have too much shame to do that in public. They should make a pill for that.
Ain't nothing chomps at my self-sufficiency and masculinity like one of Grandma's coming-to-America stories. To hear Grandma tell it, she came to the country when she was sixteen, not knowing anybody, not speaking any English, as if she woke up one morning and found herself of Mars. But thanks to her wonderful personality and extremely old old-fashioned virtue, she pulled through to become the beloved queen of the bra-making factory where she slaved away for the next fifty-odd years.
"...And you, Grandson, why the hell can't you make friends?" is the tacit end to all of her stories.
Well, these irritating stories do give me a little bit of pleasure, thinking about how all of her friends are dead.
What would I do if I found out I only had six months left to live?
I'd like to imagine that I'd live my life differently, with more passion and adrenaline, but it just doesn't compute. I could empty out my bank account, try to blow fifty-thousand yen the day before I died, and I'd simply fail. I'd make big plans — cross Europe on the Oriental Express; the richest, fattiest dinner at La Tour d'Argent; ride every roller coaster at every Six Flags in the country — but in the end, I'd probably just spend my last day on earth at a Barnes and Noble, skimming some computer book. I know how I want to blow my fortune, but I still don't quite know how to blow it.
It's sad. My life so far: I remember being alternately busy and frustrated or bored and frustrated. Okay, that's not completely true — I had my moments, much as it pains me to say it. But they're like sunny days in Seattle; you don't go there for the weather. The fact is, I always claimed that my reservations were some mode of self-protective foresight: don't get hammered cause you don't wanna live the rest of your life with a rotted liver, don't tell the greedy dickholes at Sparknotes what you really think of them laying you off cause you might need those bastards as references in the future. But now I think about it, I read all those Chicken Soup for the Soul books (for some reason, back in high school, all my friends thought I needed some spiritual salubrity; as a result, I now own pretty much the entire Chicken Soup for the Soul literature series, including three Chicken Soup journals and the travel-sized Chicken Soup), but it just doesn't work.
Fine, it's ridiculous to live like today's your last day on earth, cause chances are, it isn't. But I thought about it, and that's not the point. Even if I knew today were the end, I'd still live it timorously and apprehensively. I wouldn't live out my fantasies, kiss the Girl, play in the Championships, turn the world into my own personal Make-A-Wish Foundation (holy shit, I despise those goodie-two-shoes helping terminally ill children like suck-ups to God). But, I've been timid so long... now it's part of my constitution. There's no reason behind my behavior anymore, it's just who I am. And I find that very sad.
The Columbia Alumni Federation or something sent me an offer for a $25,000 life insurance policy, with no premiums for the first six months. I'm seriously considering taking it: I mean, if I die before January 18, I get a $25,000 windfall! It'll be like winning the lottery!
Oh, wait a second...
...tire. I'm not really sure what happened. After the Dido half of the concert, Rian and I went for dinner. One second, I was walking up Third Avenue, the next something shoved me into a building, and the next there was a tire on top of me for some reason. People came out of the building, asking if I was okay — in general, New Yorkers are a pretty helpful bunch, provided you're not some snooty-ass retarded tourist trying to make over the city into the podunk you came from — and, aside from the fact that a bus tire just clobbered me, I was. I've got a few scratches and a bruise on my leg the color of the tire, but I sort of like the look. I might even keep the just-hit-by-a-smoking-bus-tire look after I heal; it's like I just came off the set of an action movie. I'll probably lie and tell people that I just stepped off the set of an action movie, too.
I hesitate to say it — Rian tells me I can win a bigger settlement if I keep playing the victim here — but it was the most exciting thing to happen to me all week. I wish somebody had been filming it.... On second thought, I'm glad that Rian's the only one who saw it, since I probably looked like quite the doofus. Nonetheless, I found a police officer, who called an ambulance, who called two more police officers, and the paperwork began. The healing did not, however, since all the EMT's did was have me sign a form. A word of advice: don't get sick in New York City.
The whole official angle caused some major confusion, since, as you can see from the pictures below, while the tire was prostrate on the sidewalk, the bus it came from drove off, sans a wheel. We tracked down the bus later; it was parked a few blocks away and not only had the tire fallen off, but so had the brake drum, and its axle was dragging on the ground. I, on the other hand, am not missing any pieces, and I made it much farther than the bus did. So: Jay 1, Bus 0. Victory!
The offending tire
No matter what, the concert was a bargain. Anybody could wander into and out of the park, but the powers-that-be set aside a premium area for people who signed up for a Sony credit card, and I have to wonder how many people chose to risk their credit rating just to get up close to the stage. My estimate: a lot. I tried to sneak in, signing up for a Sony credit card with a fake name and social security number, but I failed shamefully when the kiosk girl asked me for ID. Turns out it didn't matter anyway; Rian and I walked into the premium area without so much as a glance from security.
The host for the event was 95.5 FM disc jockey and professional time-waster Rich Kaminsky. He seemed particularly concerned that the audience was having fun — he asked us in that manic music-industry voice if were having a good time whenever he appeared on stage. Well, Rich, we were having a good time, but to be honest, we didn't really come to see you (although it is interesting to put a face to the disembodied radio voice) and we certainly didn't come to watch advertisements for Sony products on the big screens. And although we didn't come to see this amazingly loaded protester doing his scary, spastic white-boy dance, he was by far the most entertaining part of the show. It's tough to describe this freakwad's movements, but he sort of alternated between pretending it was two-thirty in the morning at an iyengar yoga nightclub and pretending that the Holy Spirit entered his body and brought along uppers from heaven. Hilarious, but quite inappropriate — it wasn't a damn Creed concert.
(Off-topic, but thank God Creed finally broke the hell up. Although I guess, in their own strange way, they're kind of convincing in that God exists — remember that story in the Decameron where the Christian tries to convince the Jew to convert by sending him to Rome and letting him see all the miracles of Christianity?)
And then it poured... and if our those goddamn tall people obstructed our view before the umbrellas came out, we really couldn't see anything afterwards. Actually, that's not completely accurate: we could see a few things.
Examples:
Food is some weird, weird stuff. For example, I got a roast lamb sandwich at Tartare for lunch today and, surprised by the fact that I'd unwittingly ordered the lunch special, I found myself goaded into getting a cup of cream of mushroom soup, too. Now, cream of mushrooms... the thought of eating flora makes me wanna puke — kind of like the thought of eating candy corn, except not quite as much — but I'm trying to be gastronomically open, and besides, the only other soup choice was vegetable orzo, which ain't much better.
Anyway, I open the container, and cream of mushroom soup is this speckled, oily substance the color of, well, fungus. I got a few drops on my spoon, sniffed, and down the hatch: it actually tasted bisquey and good, hardly the mold spore mixture I expected. And if I'd only heard it was the soup du jour, I would've eaten more. But unfortunately, I knew... it's cow-juice and fungus soup. I couldn't bring myself to do anything but sip.
What's up with the national dodgeball fascination? Seems like we've all gotten nostalgic for elementary school gym class, but to be honest, dodgeball was (relatively) cute when you were in fourth grade and significantly less so when you're thirty-seven and unemployed. Besides, it's not like we've seen any major recurrence of adults riding Big Wheels™ bikes in circles or climbing on the monkey bars. (Well, there is the Al-Qaeda training video they keep showing us of the Afghani dude doing the monkey bars at that training camp.... Could the media please stop showing it? Seriously, we're not scared of that guy — he's doing the freaking monkey bars for Christ's sake. I bet after that he plays on a tire swing or something. Asshole.)
See, my theory is that we're all so filled with rage and frustration and... uh, what's a synonym for "rage"... and fury that we fantasize about pegging total strangers with a red rubber ball. I mean, it's a bit more legal than beating them over the head with a two-by-four or hitting them with a Volvo.
At least, that's my theory. I haven't actually played dodgeball since fifth grade, and in six years of dodgeball — which, I have to say, is the longest I've stuck with any sport — I've never been pegged and I only got one person out. In fourth grade, about two-thirds of the way through the year, I caught that British kid Oliver's ball — and he was good at the game — sending him to the sidelines and significantly boosting my dodgeball self-esteem. And now, come to think of it, my classmates did give me my dodgeball props, and I was no longer picked last for teams. I'd moved up, as if fourth-grade phys ed were the Billboard charts, to third or fourth from last.
Gotta say as an aside that Mr. Dubrowski, the Coles School gym teacher, was suprisingly fair about picking team captains. And hypocrite that I was (am), as team captain, I always picked Oliver or Jason or Kevin Brenner or R.J. Milligan first too. I can sense your disapproval as I write this but, hey, I wanted to win.
That's what I remember about dodgeball. It wasn't the hell most other people recall, but it certainly wasn't worth turning into a game show or a movie (okay, maybe a Ben Stiller-quality movie). I don't quite get the appeal because most of real dodgeball memories involve me hiding behind the multi-purpose room stage steps or proscenium with Becky Gindin. Mr. Dubrowski was too busy keeping track of which of the approximately five-thousand kickballs currently in play were slugging our classmates to notice the young love blossoming sub-rosa in the recesses of the gym. For some reason, I just don't feel like that's the point of dodgeball.
No, the point of dodgeball is, as I said, taking out your anger at the world on some pathetic shlub who can't get out of the way fast enough. Problem is: right sentiment, wrong time. On the dodgeball range (Court? Field? "I'll meet you down at the karate rink!" -- Tom Servo), no one's actually in your way. Being a middle-aged dodgeball player would be infinitely less pitiful if, out of nowhere, you hurled a kickball at the greasy guy who always holds the elevator door open for his slow-ass friend or an old lady who insists on paying for her groceries in nickels and pennies. Think of how much more smoothly the world would operate if everyone carried around a large rubber ball for just such a situation!
Mary-Kate and Ashley are finally legal. We could be celebrating... or we could be feeling bad for that girl who played Stephanie on "Full House." I mean, while the Olsens were making video after direct-to-video video, what has Jodie Sweetin been up to? Probably wishing she'd been born a twin, that's what.
If there are two things I remember about my high school guidance counselor, the first was her astounding ineptitude and inability to answer routine questions regarding the high school microcosm. The second was her answer to one of those questions, something she told me about making friends that, in hindsight, reveals the full extent of her cluelessness. It was freshman year, and all my friends from middle school were too busy ingratiating themselves with the likes of Jess Biegelson and Dave Frank to remember that, excuse me, hell-lo???, we used to be friends. Cliques were forming, and I they were kind of leaving me out. I didn't have a therapist back then, and my parents are about as helpful in these matters as a fortune cookie, and I figured my guidance counselor was supposed to be some sort of advisor.
So I went to her, I told her that I was having trouble making friends and everybody else already settled comfortably into their little groups. Here's what she said to me; I still remember her exact words. "Well, I know that even if I already had a group of friends, if another person wanted to be my friend, I would be friends with them."
Okay, even at the time, that statement wasn't particularly helpful. I only realize just how out of touch my guidance counselor was now, after experiments with the high school Harry Potter misfits, the band geeks, the suitemates freshman year of college, the film students, the Asian Hum students, the creative writing students, and the neuro‑neighbors. It's not a big mystery; what I really don't understand is why nobody just bothered to tell me how to make friends.
So, for the benefit of all you loners out there, I'll tell you how it's done.
Something got into me last night and I looked up some of my old high school classmates on classmates.com. It appears that seven people have checked out my profile, which is seven more people than I ever expected to give a crap. Better yet, I'm pretty sure that at least five of those people aren't me. Unfortunately, we have something of a mystery on our hands, since it doesn't look like there's any to find out who those seven people were. So, if you are one of those people who checked out my classmates.com profile, please e-mail me and let me know. I'm kind of curious.
Also, who the hell was "Herbert Ropentstein"? If that's like a fake name or something, it doesn't have the same substitute-teacher giggle-factor as "I.P. Freeley".
One weekend back at home, I stumbled over this photo from my third grade birthday party. It was just sitting in my desk drawer, probably in more or less the same spot for the last twelve years or so. Funniest picture ever: my little friends and I, sitting at one of those faux picnic tables they had at that low-rent Sports Park USA-knockoff they had (still have?) there in Edison, with a pudgy, pouty Andrew Schwartz looking indignant into the camera. You've gotta remember that this was the kid, nine years old, who, at the Loewingers' birthday party a few months back, ate an entire medium-sized pan pizza. He was a little piggy.
Naturally, since Andrew and I no longer keep in touch, I wanted to bust out this picture for the rest of my friends, so we could share an evil laugh at someone else's expense. So, I went to find this photo which, mind you, hadn't moved more than five inches in the past decade-and-then-some, and it's gone! Now how will Aneesa and Val and I make fun of the formerly obese?
So, I'm searching for this lost photo. I'd post "Lost Photo" signs on all the electric poles around town, but I don't have a picture of the photo to use. Instead, I'm searching through all my albums, through loose photos in my desk drawer, through those envelopes you get from the photo developing places. It's fun, going back, re-discovering old memories — makes me feel like an archaeologist. It's less fun when I found something and then lost it again 'cause I'm like an archaeologist without a sensible organizational scheme.
Words of wisdom from that big dude on MTV's Pimp My Ride: "You can't pimp a ride, wittout a engine." Damn, that be poignant, yo.
Can someone please explain the appeal of that specialty food store "Trader Joe's?" Is it that it's decorated like a supermarket and a gay yacht club had a baby together, with the hardwood shelves and life preservers hanging from the ceiling and cashiers all wearing luau-style shirts? Or is it all the low-carb, all-natural, organic vegan macrobiotic gluten and wheat germ crap they've got there? Either way, every time I go there, I feel like I've gotta wash the seaweed and driftwood off of me as soon as I get back home.
Yet for some reason, people seem to love the place. Even my parents, who are so fad-oblivious that they think Britney Spears is a waitress at the Sun Tavern, have somehow jumped on the Trader Joe's bandwagon, and our house is full of an eclectic smattering of outpost food: Trader Joe's soy sauce and Trader Joe's cheap Australian wine. Trader Joe's veggie-burgers — and I don't think food counts as vegeterian if it tastes like it came out the wrong end of a farm animal. The chain has even expanded into consumables that science has vastly improved over nature's originals; I'd like to meet the Luddite who's buying Trader Joe's-brand all-natural soap or shampoo. And nothing in this world would make me happier than when the poor dog who's been fed Trader Joe's soy dog food rebels and eats his heartless master.
...C-SPAN has never been more boring since Ronald Reagan died. Now, I know that whoever produces C-SPAN doesn't exactly have the world's greatest grasp of what's interesting and what's about as much fun as watching a pot of water boil, but do I really need to see a procession of jobless losers walking by a coffin? How does this enlighten the public?
Besides, I don't understand the whole obsession with celebrity death thing anyway. I mean, if you died, President Reagan wouldn't be stopping by your funeral to mourn. He wouldn't even send a condolences card.
One of the great things about being a graduate — a high-school graduate — is that from eight in the morning to three in the afternoon, I get to do whatever I want. In particular, I no longer have to spend my time in that oppressive hellhole called school. (Nyahh, nyahh, Mom! You still have to go to school and I don't!) So why is it that whenever I go out during midday, I always see these frickin' kids everywhere. I mean, 10:30 on a Tuesday morning, and there are school-age children walking around, riding their bikes, going grocery shopping.... Summer hasn't started yet! I need to be free from those little cooties-infected bastards!
Now today, I was at the Chelsea Market, which is a mall in New York City that primarily plays host to classy gourmet food shops. I sat down by the waterfall to get some work done, and in retrospect, this was probably not the best place to sit. Because there was this family there — a mother, a little girl, maybe three years old, and some other people — and for some reason, the little girl was crying. I tried to maintain my famous equanimity, but eventually I had to look and see what was wrong. And I looked over, and the little girl was standing in the middle of the mall, peeing on herself while I, her mother, and a mall janitor stared. No one moved.
Little kids have no shame. Somebody should do something about that.
Of course, that's not all. Now the janitor, who was obviously thrilled to death that this kid walked into his life, went up to the mother and asked her, "Why didn't you do something? Now I've gotta clean this up." And the mother — a fat, angry blob of disinterest — in her distaff wisdom replied, "What did you expect me to do?"
Even dogs know not to do it inside...
So the moral of this story is, dumb people should not be allowed to reproduce. I mean, if we put heavy restrictions on ugly people, then this is only a natural next step.
Anyway, apparently the janitor had more important cleaning emergencies, and he decided the puddle of piss would evaporate all on its own. (Side note: it took a surprisingly long time to evaporate...) He didn't even bother to put out one of those yellow "Caution: Wet Floor" signs. People were stepping in it and rolling their strollers through it. Another happy ending, all thanks to kids.
...as well as my own total lameness picking up a book and reading just because the rest of America is. God, I'm a sheep. And making things worse, I even went to the Da Vinci Code website and played the little "Can you break the Da Vinci Code???" game they've got set up there.
I don't think that everybody necessarily loves a good conspiracy so much as everybody gets uppity when we hear bits and pieces of stuff that the ubiquitous "they" don't want us to know. We get that I'm-an-outsider feeling, that same feeling that creeps up on you when everybody else is at a party and you're sitting in front of your computer masturbating. Not that I'd have any familiarity with that.... But there's gripe number one: the book is freaking manipulative. Brown doesn't merely start the reader off ignorant, reflecting his protagonists' confusing, which is totally cool; he's gotta be an asshole and tell you he's keeping secrets. I'd include a quote here, but the book is already back on the shelf and I don't feel like getting it; besides, I'm no longer in college, so I just spout random bullshit without having to support my arguments. It's wonderful.
In that spirit, I'll say that all the puzzle stuff was intriguing. Not as intriguing as, say, the puzzles in Myst or a crossword puzzle that you have to solve yourself, but intriguing nonetheless. Like any decent storyteller, Brown's psychic manipulation worked and I wanted to find out the solution to this puzzle and move on to the next. (Admittedly, the website didn't function psychologically in quite the same way — finding out the solution to each remarkably superfluous puzzle just felt like a perfectly good waste of my life.) The problem is that the book has, as William Safire puts it, a multi-dimensional plot and unidimensional characters. So, you don't really get involved with the characters; the book itself is essentially a verbal crime scene and you're a detective whose only concern is piecing the clues together. Who cares if the characters reach their goal, so long as you, the reader, reach yours.
And here's where Brown gets stuck. As the reader, you become invested in the puzzle; when the book ends, the characters might live on, but the puzzle is decidedly over. (Until the sequel, naturally.) But you, dear reader, have nothing left to be invested in. Like the lady in the commercial says, the only thing better than doing the crossword puzzle is finishing the crossword puzzle — except here, you don't get the satisfaction of finishing the puzzle because you didn't actually do anything. Brown wrote the puzzle and solved it for you.
Things are just as bad when the ending is open-ended, like with Pynchon's (infinitely superior) The Crying of Lot 49. Okay, you don't have to give up the puzzle just because the book's over, but you've pretty much lost all hope of progressing with it, too. Futility or emptyness, what a choice. It's almost enough to make me want to pick up Harry Potter.
By the way, the butler did it.
"Is he joking???" :-D
James and I got into the following debate: given a thousand dollars, would you spend the money on that Zillion Dollar Fritata lobster and caviar omelette they serve at the Parker Meridien hotel (Norma dares you to expense them — you might have to finance them or something) or on a pair of designer socks? I say omelette, James says socks.
James reasons as follows. There are certain people in the world who are, shall we say, impressed with the superficial things in life. And although James isn't quite one of them, he certainly resonates with them, browsing in Hugo Boss and Brooks Brothers, all metrosexualled up in the clubs. After all, he wants to go into the fashion industry.... Anyway, James figures that, damn, he'll be da shit in these fashionista cliques if he wears thousand dollar designer-label socks or, better yet, thousand dollar underwear. It's not just about keeping up with the Joneses, or the Versaces or Armanis or Yamamotos — it's about out-doing those snooty bastards and forcing them to respect you playing their own game. The more outrageous, the more it offends those of us who are reasonable, who were never blessed with a silver spoon, the more you win from those pricks.
And I concur. Imagine, you're sitting at lunch with, say, your loquacious, arrogant next-door neighbor (no bitterness... well, alright, some bitterness) and he's talking about his favorite topic — himself — and in the middle of one of his interminable sentences, I mention, "I was at Norma's, at the Parker Meridien, for breakfast and I had this omelette with homard lobster and topped with ten ounces of Sevruga caviar. Set me back a grand, too. But you were saying something... about your own insecurities, if I was reading you correctly." That'd shut him up.
For about ten minutes.
Last night, I had another one of my trademark bizarre dreams — I dreamt that "pickleball" somehow became a professional sport. For those of you not familiar with pickleball, it's a game we played in high school gym class that was essentially the deformed child of an unholy union between tennis and ping-pong. There were many, many good reasons to take pickleball as your gym elective, not the least of which being that it wasn't "advanced weight training," otherwise known as "weight training," seeing as how our school did not offer beginner weight training or intermediate weight training. Also, pickleball was taught by Ms. Panko or Ms. Kesting, who, unlike the rest of the physical education at our high school, both (a) were capable of feeling empathy for their fellow human beings and (b) were not morbidly and ironically obese.
I mean, seriously, if our plane crash-landed in the Andes, our whole gym class could survive for a week off Mr. Butz's love handles. You could fit three of me inside Miss Pantano and still have room for Ian Bonner's overgrown ego! What the hell business did these people have telling me to get fit? (Note, fellow senior-year gym-classers, not one word about "Sally"...)
Back to my dream, I was visiting the high school, feeling invincible thanks to the fact that I've graduated from the wretched institutions of education and the school no longer exercises its vile power over me. (Uh... right... that's not why I'm in therapy or anything.) So, I walk into the gym and for some reason, I join a game of pickleball with a bunch of little sophomores who don't really seem to be getting the concept of the game. Rather than hitting the ball over the net, they spend most of their time crowding each other. Meanwhile, I keep whacking the official pickleball (it's just a wiffleball) out of bounds with my powerful yellow table tennis paddle, and naturally our team loses. I blame the sophomores. But, but, but here's the kicker: the five-minute bell rings and I just walk out of the gym — no getting changed, no having to hang out in the locker room cause having a bunch of sweaty boys loose in the hallways is just an invitation to trouble — I'm free to do what I want.
Not that I didn't pretty much do whatever I wanted back when I was actually in high school, but now that I'm a graduate, the school can't even try to control me.
And I'm walking through the halls again and who do I run into but Miss Young. We both scream like little girls, except in her case, it's socially appropriate. Then I wake up, realize that Miss Young is probably still lost somewhere in the New Hampshire wilderness, and I'm starting another crappy day before six in the morning.
New fact: cheese dough + refrigerator + time = intractable cheese rock. There's twelve dollars that would be down the drain if we had a garbage disposal. (Actually, it went down the drain anyway.)
One thing that I really missed when I was living in New York was the whole idea of a supermarket. NYC is littered with just-plain "markets," meaning no laser-vision, no super-strength, and generally none of what you're actually looking for. What I was totally unaware of was that during my four years in New York, real supermarkets here in the suburbs have grown to astounding Wal-Mart-sized proportions, and pretty soon they'll come to life and destroy Tokyo unless Godzilla can stop them.
Now, when I came back home, I decided that I was going to learn to cook so that I could throw sweet-ass "Queer Eye" style parties (only not as gay) when I get my own place. That way I'd be popular and I wouldn't have to die alone. My first recipe, the simplest thing that I could find in the book: cheese sticks. They called for a pound of cheese, and even though my family is made up of a bunch of freaks and myself, we didn't happen to have a pound of cheese in our house. So it was time to head to the supermarket.
Remember when the supermarket was just for buying food and maybe the odd package of cat litter or bottle of bleach? Well, apparently the supermarket-shopping populace grew restless with only buying food and household products at the supermarket. That's why they built not just a "Stop and Shop" but a "Super Stop and Shop" at the Watchung Square Mall (which I have to say is like eighty percent parking lot and twenty percent mall). Where else can you get patio furniture, a carton of soy milk, and a home loan under one roof? Besides Wal-Mart, I mean. 
←Wal-Mart's evil!
So here's my shopping list: 1 pound cheddar cheese (or other flavorful cheese), 8 oz (1 stick) of butter, a pinch cayenne pepper, coarse salt. We already have two cups of flour at home. All goes well: there's not much of a cheese selection, but I find the cheddar no problem. Butter is naturally way, way, way in the back — I think the supermarket should provide golf carts for the convenience, and fun, of its customers. Cayenne pepper is in the spice aisle, labelled "hot pepper." And salt... when exactly did salt mutate like a virus? There's kosher salt, sea salt, garlic salt, onion salt, garlic and onion salt, Mrs. Dash, celery salt, salt-free salt... what the fuck! Wasn't life confusing enough when all we had to worry about was creamy or chunky peanut butter?
Twelve dollars of food altogether, just for some crappy cheese sticks that, to be honest, I wasn't even really in the mood for. But I get home, I throw the cheese, flour, and butter in the food processor, and promptly make a mess of the kitchen. Mom would be proud. I do, however, come out with something that's a cross between dough and a tumor. It needs to be refrigerated for a day.... more on the cheese stick progress tomorrow.
I never liked the YMCA, but it's the closest gym to my house and it's by far the cheapest. I've been going to the Y since before kindergarten, first for the most futile of futile swimming lessons, time-wasting "tumble-tots" gymnastics class in kindergarten, then for befofe-and-after-school day-care, and finally more more more styrofoam heavy swimming lessons. But what I remember most about the Y, aside from that irritating Village People song, was the smell — this sanitized, saccharine, sticky smell reeking of angel shit and chlorine but that I could never really put my finger on. Until today....
It's the odor of children. 8-(
Now Puff Daddy wants to start a political talk show.... Can I ask how much longer we're going to indulge this dickweed's asinine fantasies? It's bad enough we've got to put up with his MTV show, his Broadway role, his restaurant and sweatsuits and perfumes, his constantly reminding us how he's from the ghetto when he really lives in East Hampton next door to Steven Spielberg, and his insipid stage name changes. (I don't care what Sean is calling himself these days; I'm gonna keep calling him what I've always called him -- "that pompous jackass with the girly sparkling earring.") What gets me is how disingenuous he is: pretending he's someone with a talent other than wearing a suit. At least Nelly also has the ability to get himself shot. But back to my original point, do we really need another no-talent charlatan manipulating the retarded American public? I guess on the plus side, it's not like Puffy's constituency actually takes a break from pimping their rides long enough to get to the voting booths.
And speaking of creepy, ugly things, I found a giant mutant spider when I went to put on my sandals this morning. Naturally, I freaked out and screamed like a little girl, but you have to understand that this was a freaking humongous spider -- maybe two or three inches long, or the size of a mouse, or a Yorkshire terrier. With fangs and spikes. Look, if you saw it, you'd've been scared too, and you would've wanted a hug.
Yesterday I was waiting my turn at the haircutters and I had this revelation. I understood why the rest of the world hates Americans, and why I hate them too. I was sitting in one corner of the pre-haircut area, listening to Lite FM on the radio and watching some little pissy kid run around on a sugar high, and there was, on the mass-produced Ikea-reject love seat in the other corner of the room, the quintessential ugly American. An obese, oily, blotchy lump of flesh one-third-covered in the Wal-Mart clothing line.
It's not that the ugly American is a cheap-ass dirty porker, it's that we're content to be our tubby, stupid selves. Try even imagining Europeans, for example, with Americans' particular flaws: There's no such thing as an obese Brit; they're "portly." Or a greasy Italian; instead, they're "pomaded." And that's not musk you smell on a Frenchman; it's "cologne." Unlike the rest of the world, America seems to breed this "eh, whatever" attitude where "room for improvement" are dirty words. We fall into two camps — those of us who are stick-figurish and complain that our thighs are too fat and those of us whose thighs really, really are too fat but who don't seem to picking up on all the insecurities Vogue and Cosmo and Shape and, uh, O: The Oprah Magazine are shoving onto those of us who don't need them.
So here's my plea to America: You don't have to be perfect, but you do have to get off your corpulent asses and put some goddamn effort into improving yourselves. Now, I've gotta go and find some Stridex pads.
And a pen.
Actually, for the record, I got a diploma, two pins, a pen from the company that supplied my college loan, and an "I survived the swim test" beach towel. I kind of wish I weren't such a downtrodden prick that I could believe I'd also nicked a few friends from these four years, but that sort of optimism just isn't a part of my constitution. I certainly didn't believe Dean Quigley when he said we'd continue to make friendships as part of the Columbia family. Horse-phlooey! It's not like I've been making friends from Spiffy High since they put me in a cap and gown and kicked me out into the real world. The whole Fanwood social scene's been pretty much downhill; I'm thankful for the few plateaus.
As it turned out, class day was the perfect culmination to my four years at Columbia, in the most literary sense possible, an unintentional metaphor. In the real world, the celebration was disappointing, even for someone with my low, low expectations. It was about a million degrees out in the sun and I could feel the skin on my neck and ears burning off. There weren't enough chairs out for all the graduates, although the maintenance crew solved that problem at the last minute. I couldn't find my parents in the crowd because, while everyone else's proud family members congregated right up against the procession, my dad — and remember that he's the guy who used to take us to the Fourth of July "Stars and Stripes Forever" concert at the Summit Park and, even though people around us were picnicking and playing Frisbee and catch, he wouldn't let us make a damn sound during the concert — my dad thought it would be improper if the family moved from their seats in the middle of the crowd. He also had his cell phone off, so I couldn't tell him where to look for me, but he did call me as soon as the emcee told everyone to "please be seated."
And then this totally unfamiliar feeling come over me. I was disappointed that I didn't see my family. That never happened before; usually I'm thrilled when those dull freaks are not around, for the reasons described above. But yesterday... maybe it was cause everyone else was finding their, well, maybe "loved ones" isn't quite the correct term. I caught myself scanning the crowd for them (now I know how a Secret Service agent feels) and even standing on my chair hoping to get a better view. No such luck.
Even after I got my name called and I was recessing off the stage, instead of rushing out of their seats to come see me, what do they do? They sit there, in the heat, listening to some fat woman call the names of eight hundred total strangers. Other kids getting hugs and flowers and stuff....
So there were the customary speeches. Here's a rule for making a speech: put your mouth up to the fucking microphone, or else no one will be able to hear you! Jeez! Apparently our guest speaker, Tony Kushner CC '78, gave an amazing speech, but I couldn't make out one damn word of it. I did, however, get to hear our valedictorian Jacob, the same Jacob who I called an "intellectual masturbator" in one of my e-mails from the first week of school, the same Jacob who suggested a "no put-downs" ground rule at our freshman orientation sexual assault ice-breaker and I wanted to say "That's the stupidest thing I ever heard" in response but didn't, I got to hear every last cliche and platitude out of his mouth. And then this other totally unfamiliar feeling came over me: "Why can't you just enjoy this?"
Maybe because it was just unenjoyable. I mean, no one else I talked to enjoyed class day either. Maybe some things just suck ass.
You know what would've improved class day? If those cicadas all spontaneously flew out of the ground and celebrated our graduation in song, then went off to mate. It would be like fireworks, except with giant horny bugs. It would be even more like fireworks if all the cicadas exploded on cue.
I'll tell you, nothing good ever happens after one in the morning. The frat boys are drunk, Conan's got his crappy guests on, or you're at the Crane Club and you spot the cute girl you like letting herself get felt up by some other loser white boy whose only dance move — besides playing with her tits, that is — is this half-cocked spastic fist-pump that went out with roller skates and disco. I think there ought to be a law: not that straight white guys aren't allowed to dance in clubs, but each white guy should be given an eighteen square inch area on the dance floor, and if his arm or foot should move outside his boundary, I ought to be allowed to shoot him. This would turn the club from a total grope-fest to a scene of order and civility, with the occassional murderous gunshot.
Music makes people do weird things that they'd never ever do in silence, like dancing or letting some loser dipshit simulate fucking her from behind or use cell phone text messaging. It's like everybody's so sick of the troubles of normal communication, talking, using their own words, they just blast some horny rapper as loud as possible and reduce their need for human interaction to the bare minimums — drinking and screwing. These rappers, who, I should mention, are such freaking disgusting human beings that there's no way they'd ever be able to get bitches to sit, stay, heel, and fetch — let alone women — were it not for their otherwise pointless ability to rhyme and buy bling-bling... these rappers just order the dance floor around. "Put'chur handz in da air!" or "Slappem wit' ur dick!" or whatever. Personally, I resent being bossed around by my music, but since everyone else is a sheep, they don't seem to mind. What we need is a rapper who tells everybody to "Stand still and shut the fuck up already!" Then, "Keep the conversation to a dull roar and if a really sweet but shy guy asks you to dance, don't lie and say you're tired, cause maybe, just maybe, you don't know what you're missing, okay?"
And maybe the rapper could throw in something about a hug or a peck on the cheek, just to make God smile.
Something strange happens to your mind as you get older. For some bizarre reason, when you hit middle age, all of a sudden any manner of stupid, pointless ceremony takes on a grave new importance. Case in point: Columbia's class day, which is the day when they — and by "they," I mean someone whose life is apparently much more valuable than mine — call the names of all the graduating students. One by one, we each walk up on stage when the almighty calls us, and we shake the president's hand or the dean's hand or a trustee's hand or, for all I know, it could be Pauly Shore's hand. I believe at a normal school, this is when that somebody would hand me my degree, but to be honest, shaking a thousand hands is more than enough work for him, and we pick up our degrees the next day.
In case you haven't fully grasped this, here's the situation from the senescents' point of view. The old people are sitting in the audience, listening to the names of a thousand strangers, like a veterans' memorial, waiting for one so they can duly applaud. (Ten to one some college bureaucrat asks them to hold their applause till the end.) From my point of view, I'm listening to the class president or valedictorian or some other monstrously arrogant prick dweeb fawning over a thousand people I don't even like, and I have to smile and pretend to be happy while inside I'm convinced that if God existed, some people would be getting hit by lightning bolts.
This goes on for three interminable hours, and to put that in perspective, the Daytime Emmy awards only go on for two and a half. I thought, "Hey, why don't I bring a book? At least that way I won't have to pay attention." I told my parents (always a mistake) and they looked at me as if I told them I was going to walk on stage and tear the still-beating heart out of President Bollinger's chest cavity, pour mustard on it, and eat it in front of the whole senior class. I might still bring a book, but needless to say, I didn't get their blessing. I'm just glad I didn't suggest bringing my Game Boy.
And this is the difference between a rational twenty-two year old and an Old Person. I don't see what the big deal is, and they think that my reading will ruin the entire commencement ceremony. (I probably have the advantage here thinking that there's pretty much nothing I can do that will make commencement worse than it already is.) Their petulance is goddamn frustrating, especially when I can make this money-back guarantee: there will be some jackass graduating this year who when his name is called is gonna get up on stage and raise the roof or do a cartwheel or do something else phenominally retarded that he saw Snoop Dogg do in a video — and I also guarantee it's gonna be a white kid acting like his brain just spent the past year in a self-tanning booth — and all of the other football-playing vodka-drinking slut-fucking fart-lighting morons graduating with me are gonna cheer for him.... and if I bring a book it'll ruin the ceremony???? Please.
I should've gone to an all-girls school, like Mom wanted me to go to Smith.
"Administrative assistant" my ass! The job is "secretary." Don't try to sex it up. It ain't working.
Once again, I hate my Y-chromosome. It comes with so, so many irritating social obligations — holding doors open, carrying packages, pulling out her chair at the dinner table — and none is worse than the perpetual need to be masculine, especially when God thought it would be funny to give you the chromosomes but not the growth hormone to make that possible. This is why we go to the gym, make dirty jokes, and watch those retarded "Jackass" spin-offs. (Well, there's also the suppressed homoeroticism inherent in close male friendships, but we'll talk about that some other time.) Which is all well and good until there comes the time to put your metrosexuality on display; right now, I'm writing sappy graduation notes to my friends at college.
The first step is to make a list of questionable words — that is, words that might make me seem either gay or horny or both. This eliminates words and phrases like "sweet," "such a good friend," and "wonderful." Not to mention that there's no way I can sign my notes with the l-word (that would be "love," for those of you with dirty minds) even though all of my girl friends coolly sign their most mundane e-mails with that word. The problem is that these happy-graduation notes are supposed to be sentimental, histrionic, and even holding a dash of that drunken ain't-you-so-beautiful-honey romanticism that society says I ought to eschew as a guy.
I guess the alternative isn't that much better. It's a trade-off between magazines with articles about bulking up and magazines with articles about slimming down, or commercials showing cotton absorbing some mysterious blue liquid versus commercials asking me whether I need to get back in the game. Maybe if we're lucky, in our future lives, God will reincarnate all of us as hermaphrodites.
It just hit me: Jerry Orbach is going to be leaving "Law and Order" on the very same day as my graduation. I'm not sure I'll be able to bear it. Although, to be honest, I'm kind of surprised that Jerry Orbach is still alive in the first place.
***sigh***
I guess I'll take some deep breaths and I'll be okay, as long as Sam Waterston doesn't leave to do more of those T. Rowe Price commercials.
With you, friend is a four-letter word.
—"Daria"
You see, the problem with college is that even if you're not a women's studies major, you start seeing concepts like "post-modern disenfranchisement" and "objectification sans agency" all around you in your daily life. Or at least I do, probably because it's easier than simply saying to myself, "Self, nobody thinks I'm important." I think that at least mine isn't a unique situation; we all want some kind of esteem from our peers. Some of you get it; I get passed over for homework or a ringing phone or a fishtank. Please stop wondering why I'm bitter.
I've been worrying since freshman year about my post-graduation social life. Mom and Dad have fewer friends than I have vaginas, and Fanwood's never really been networking central for me. Some people, cough cough Justin Ross arrogant bastard ahem, had a monopoly on the geekwad social scene. Come to college, live in a dorm with four-hundred other eighteen to twenty-two year olds, I honestly thought things would be different, that I'd be joined in a community with all my egghead brethren. While the students matriculating at state school would spend their 3:30's in the afternoon looking like shirtless retards outside the "Total Request Live" studio, I'd be sitting in Columbia's perestroika-infected Illuminati sewing circle talking jazz fusion and Ayn Rand and Harlem gentrification over a glass of sherry. I conceived of the sherry as a nice detail, but I guess it was more important than I thought, cause none of that shit actually happened. Most of my college experience involved using my high-speed internet access to masturbate to cyberporn at two in the morning, then miss my nine a.m. class because I didn't get enough sleep. I can't understand why I didn't make more friends.
But now that all the college work is just about over, let's see what kinds of creative excuses people come up with for leaving me by my lonesome writing in a blog that no one except Rian actually reads. (Thank you, Rian.) Parents coming in for the weekend. Or, what the hell, the whole damn week. Okay, that tops me. Real real busy with work. Yup, higher priority than I am. Phone's ringing. That'll trump just about anything. Gotta fertilize the lawn. I'm farther down on the totem pole than that. Sticking my head in the refrigerator....
Last paper ever, finished. I might've thought that after four years of writing those damn things, I would've gotten better at it. Hasn't happened. My final paper was just as scatterbrained and incohesive as the first Lit Hum paper I ever wrote. And with both papers, I spent way too much time fiddling with the font to make it look like I wrote more than I did. Maturity, right?
Truth is, it's kind of bittersweet. I get the distinct feeling that when you're a bona fide grown-up, you don't get to spend much time thinking about Buddhist ethics or the philosophical implications of quantum mechanics or classical genre study. I really had a whole damn lot of stuff to say in college, and I doubt that more than five percent of it got past the anxieties and fears cluttering my brain and into the academic sphere. Good thing I wasn't a communications major. I'm not really sure what I expected from college, but it sure as hell wasn't this: classes with fifty students, some of whom were old enough to be the professor's father; professors who seemed too busy with their own grandiose ideas to be bothered listening to mine; schoolmates... well, who knows about the schoolmates. All I know is that they weren't talking shop with me.
I told Anne — she's the only person I know who won't be a college grad in less than two weeks — to enjoy her papers while she still can. But even that seems a bit sketchy. I think there's something to be said for being able to write Thurman a seven-page single-spaced e-mail in less than a day, while being stuck without a paper topic for weeks and weeks. The eight-page double-spaced paper took four days and innumerable solitaire breaks. I can't help but wonder if all that extra time wasn't devoted to "polishing" the paper with a veneer of professionalism that de-emphasized the actual ideas I was talking about... not to mention the fact that I was talking.
I'd like to say that if I had to do it all over again, I'd do things differently. I'd get to know my professors, show up at their office hours, engage them. I'd speak up in class, I'd join more clubs, I'd talk to the CGND and all the synecdoche I can extrapolate from her. (Those of you who know what I'm talking about know what I'm talking about.) I'd like to say that I'd do all that, but I suppose the real reason the last paper ever is bittersweet is that I know I wouldn't. One time, Harrigan asked me if I thought I'd be happier somewhere else, and I told her I just didn't think it was part of my constitution. We'll see what the future brings, and let's say I have high hopes and high expectations, but not for happiness.
Back in high school, Ankur roped me into writing an editorial for the awkwardly-named Fanscotian newspaper about how much the junior prom sucked ass. You can read the article, which needs some major prettying up, here. I forget how the whole thing came about, although I have a feeling I got the job thanks my perpetual bitching about how unpopular I was and how little I cared about Jane Shih's dress. There were two problems, however. First, the article was due before the junior prom actually took place, and second, like The Shawshank Redemption, the junior prom started off slow but ended as a rousing success thanks to, ironically, Jane Shih. But anyway, I wrote this article and I figured that since you'd have to be extraordinarily bored to even consider reading the Fanscotian, it would just go by unnoticed.
Well, it didn't. And I want to analyze what happened because I think I've come to a conclusion about people. About other people.
See, the editorial got one of two responses. Either you had a blast at the prom and you had some problems with my article, or Dave Lasus dumped you at the prom and my article captured the experience perfectly. (We don't even want to think about why you were dating Dave Lasus in the first place.) My own experience — I sat quietly at table nine, ate my nasty food, watched Jess Biegelson and Evan Dornbush make out prudishly. Every now and then, I went off moping and James was nice enough to commiserate. A little before dessert, I was moping on a flowery bench outside the bathroom when Jane and company saw me looking pathetic, told me I ought to be dancing, and the rest was history. Random chance — if I wasn't on that bench, if those girls didn't all decide to pee at the same time — and the prom would've been a lot different.
It's just a very familiar pattern... cough, cough, senior dinner. You head in with these expectations, then capricious fate and mercurial personalities intervene, and you realize how different things could have been and how little control you have over your experience. No wonder there's no gray area.
If you've been reading my blog regularly, you know that I've had some, uh, issues with the Senior Dinner celebration. After all, I was the one who suggested that we have a "Carrie" themed senior prom back in high school, and an attitude like that is sure to lead to problems later in life. The world just seems more suited for social events than I am — since I never had a group of five or ten friends to register with, I signed up as an individual, knowing full well that nothing good happens when you're alone. 'Taint natural to be lonesome. — Thorton Wilder, "Our Town"
When you register alone, you get to choose your own table, sitting with all the other social disasters who couldn't muster up four friends. This is why Bailey's Irish Cream was invented, and I'm pretty sure the reason it tastes like chocolate-covered fire ants is to keep people like me from overdoing it. Anticipating the awkwardness that could only come with a three-hour long senior pseudo-icebreaker, I convinced Erica and our friend Vik to start off the evening with a few glasses of Bailey's and Citrona before dinner. No, it wasn't all that hard to convince them.
My fears were unfounded. Erica has nine friends, so she got a table. Vik also has nine friends, but he didn't bother registering, so he and I shared table 88 way in the back with eight invisible companions. And drinking. Nasty white wine with salad. Nasty red wine with the chicken, which was breaded and served with that same radioactive orange sauce that caterers reserve for junior proms and dinners in tents. I spent the night engaged in my favorite hobby: looking for people I know and then waiting for my Paxil to kick in while I build up the nerve to go talk with them. I ran into a few people, had the obligatory futile conversation with them — "Hey, how are you? It's been such a long time, I never see you around! How've you been? What are you doing after graduation? [awkward silence.....] Well, it was great seeing you again. I'll talk to you later." A lie. How damn disappointing.
And the night would've been a waste except that right before I left, Erica, in a drunken stupor she still denies, sent me on a mission to find Sarah. I was walking around the tent, about to give up, when I spotted Sylvia. Sylvia's a great person to spot at any event because, unlike yours truly, she knows everybody and she's like human serotonin. She got herself right in front of the stage, at the table of honor with the mouthwash-colored alcohol that I'm guessing was brandy, and there would have been much high-pitched screaming and happy hugging on her part had not the a capella group Uptown Vocal taken the stage and led the senior class in a rousing and pointless rendition of our irritating school song, "Roar, Columbia, Roar." I shrugged off to the sidelines and resisted the urge to kill the entire senior class with a plate of radioactive orange chicken. There was much high-pitched screaming and happy hugging and photos — don't forget the photos! — when the song was over.
As an aside, I learned something important from Hanna and Harrigan: chicks love talking about their weddings. The ceremony, the location, the dress, the invitations, the reception, the caterer, whatever. I did my best to put the testerone aside and get engrossed in the details of Sylvia's upcoming wedding. Smile and open your eyes real wide when she shows you the engagement ring. I have a feeling Sylvia now thinks I'm gay.
Nevertheless, I really couldn't follow the description of her dress. I just don't have it in me.
Okay, I want to wax philosophical about the experience, but I've got real work to do. More dinner talk tomorrow.
As part of Columbia's end-of-the-year celebration, they're having all sorts of stuff-your-face gluttony contests on the steps in front of Low Library. The first contest is beer chugging. Excuse me? Beer chugging? How good are all the remaining hot-dog-eating and pie-eating and roast-pig-eating contests going to be if everyone's sluggish and lethargic from all the beer? If I was running the thing, I'd make the first contest espresso chugging. A whole carafe full. Then we'd see some fun contests afterwards.
Rachelle and Rian run this organization called Columbia Community Outreach, where one day a year — this Saturday, in fact, — lots of Columbia students and groups head out into the city and volunteer their time on various projects. According to the massive amounts of literature of gotten about the event, these projects include "playing squash with kids, restoring fireboats, planting flowers and beautifying our neighborhood parks." Now, Rachelle and Rian are running the event, so they're asking pretty everybody they come in contact with whether they've signed up for CCO. Rian, in particular, seems to have this idea in her head that I'm some sort of misanthrope —imagine that!— and she's crusading with extra vigor to get me to sign up.
She'll fail, of course. It's cause there's nothing in it for me. I know, I know, that's an awful thing to say about doing charity work, but it's true. Thing is, I like that warm and fuzzy feeling that comes with doing something nice for somebody as much as anyone else does, but this is just too much of a risk. See, you can't sign up for a project per se, so I couldn't sign up to restore fireboats, say. You have to sign up for a "team," because there's no 'I' in "volunteer," and on Saturday morning, your team finds out what lucky sons-of-guns get your Ivy League help. Here's the best part: if you're like me, and you have an 'I' but no team, you can sign up as an individual and be assigned to a dreaded t-word.
Just a side note here — will people please not tell me to stop moping and make new friends? Like with the senior dinner thing, I had to sign up as an individual (surprise, surprise), and now I've gotta hear from people, and from Mom, "Well, you can make new friends with the people you're sitting with." Blank stare; I restrain myself with difficulty. Um, people... if I could make new friends, then I wouldn't be in this predicament. Assholes.
Anyway, you're randomly assigned a project, rather than picking what you want to do. Rachelle assures me that there are reasons for this... many of the organizations CCO-ers will be helping out don't jump aboard until the last minute and others only want a specific number of students. I'll assume you're smart enough to figure out all the ways in which this system is incredibly stupid. But suffice it to say that restoring fireboats actually sounds pretty cool, and who knows, maybe they'd even have a volunteer thing working with animals (that doesn't involve picking up crap after them), and I'm kind of irritated that I'd have to play this roulette game to sign up. After all, who the hell turns away volunteers?
Also, if anybody wants to join me starting up a volunteer group that finds flaws in people's plans and products, then expounds on these flaws in a condescending, cynical manner, let me know.
Hi, do you have a minute for 'Save the Children'? asks the idealistic activist on the street as I pass by, pretending to ignore her. Sometimes I just say, "No, sorry," and sometimes I move to one edge of the sidewalk or the other, as far away from her as possible, hoping that she'll accost somebody closer. But I wonder what would happen if:
Her: Hi, do you have a minute for 'Save the Children'?
Me: Yes, but I don't want to save the children. I don't like kids.
And I keep walking.
That's the thing about kids — tell people you can't stand the little snot-nosed bastards and they give you this blank does-not-compute stare as if thanks to my disgust for kids, the terrorists have already won. Truth is, only thing worse than kids: their parents.
Went to the 110th annual Varsity Show, first time ever. It's a Columbia tradition. Thanks to what I'll call a confluence of events — the show was oversold and we couldn't get seats, Wonderfalls was cancelled because people have bad taste, and some guy screaming "Yeah, Kevin!!" at the end of each scene — I left during the intermission. Nevertheless, I'm going to give a completely honest and disinterested review of the show, because if one word describes me, it's "cynical".
For starters, jokes about Yale aren't funny. Neither are jokes about Harvard or Dartmouth. We know you didn't get in and you're bitter, but we still heard all those jokes during orientation, and again during homecoming and spring fling, and they weren't funny then either. You're just insecure, get over it. However, Brown and Princeton are great targets for jokes, because they rejected me.
The show was about some guy with minions who wanted to move Columbia from Morningside Heights to New Haven, Connecticut. Now, I can say from personal experience that New Haven is a total shithole, but it's not like Morningside Heights is Eden either. Much as I love a song featuring references to Duane-Reade and Columbia Hot Bagels as much as the next guy who can tell good from bad, I don't have enough imagination to believe a song that glorifies our neighborhood via the West End restaurant and pub — that poorly-lit bar where everybody looks like their pet gerbil just died. The good guy is a bike-riding Columbia professor who can't bear to move his beloved university; the dude with boring henchmen falsely accuses Professor Tighty-pants of drawing a racist cartoon in the Fed, this crappy Columbia newspaper that appears in my mailbox every week even though I didn't ask for it. Columbia's liberal students turn against our doofus professor, and then, because Morningside Heights is located at the nexus of a time-space vortex that causes ninety-nine percent of the community to ovulate constantly, those same students sing about how sad they are that Columbia will be moving out of state.
Naturally, nobody is going to explain how exactly Columbia is going to move. Is Low Library going to walk to New Haven? You see people, satire only works when it's believable. They should've taught that in Lit Hum, then they could've sung about it during the Varsity Show.
With only thirty-four days left in my college career, I had my first real alcoholic beverage tonight. It was this drink they call an Electric Iced Tea, which was a mixture of vodka, gin, and that blue stuff they use to disinfect combs. Now, the whole drinking thing's been growing gradually, both because I'm currently overdosing myself on Paxil and I worry that I might be called on to save New York City by driving and/or operating heavy machinery and because for my first two years of college, I had no friends and nothing says your nineteen-year-old life has hit rock bottom than spending three hours at a bar all alone. I mean, there were health reasons, too — I never exercise, I'm essentially a red-meat-and-junk-food-etarian, and if there was one nice thing I was going to do for my body, it would be avoiding the spirits.
But honestly, when you're a college freshman, who cares about the excuses? It's bad for you, it impairs your judgment, it's illegal. Truth is, my bullshitting lying cunt of an elementary school health teacher told us that you might be an alcoholic and not even know it, and you might throw away all your money on booze before going on to harder drugs like pot and smack and crack, and your family would disown you and your friends would hate you and the cops would arrest you, and then you'd die in prison and the temperance union ladies would come and piss on your grave. Same thing would happen if some mean fifth-grader offered you cigarettes in the playground and you smoked once. And she showed us that picture you've all seen of the healthy liver on the left and the cirrhosis-rotted liver on the right, and there was that Lifetime movie about the kid who gets his driver's license, threw a party with all his friends and the devil's beverage, and then drove home and ran over a family of missionaries. This was back in the days when the philosophy of our educational system was based around a complete lack of respect for the students' intelligence, and no one had the gall to tell me the, ahem, truth.
They still don't. Last year, my mom freaked out when I told her I hadn't smoked pot. Then she gave me a pamplet from the Partnership for a Drug-Free America. When I asked my doctor about for some facts about the dangers or lack thereof from marijuana, he looked at me as if I told him I was thinking about experimenting with cannibalism before telling me, "Don't do that." I think I would have gotten a more frank answer had I asked him about the benefits of urine therapy. I guess there's a certain wussiness factor at work here, too — the same trepidation keeping from haphazardly putting things such as booze, acid, and wasabi into my body — otherwise I'd just yell at my poor pediatrician, "I'm trying to make some informed decisions here. Do you want me to make uninformed decisions? Would that be healthier for me?" I hate people.
Back to the alcohol, ever since Sarah and company took me to The West End last year and found out that I was too abstinent (read "scared") to drink anything stronger than water, it's been a pet project of just about everyone I know to take me out for my first drink. It just never happened. The closest we got was a bottle of cooking wine in Erica's room before those more experienced than me decided that wasn't the way to start me out on my new career as a dipsomaniac. Sarah's suggestion, after I listed all the things I wouldn't drink — nothing carbonated, nothing fruity, and, had I known, nothing blue — was a White Russian: vodka, kaluha, and milk. Sounds delicious.
Meanwhile, hoping to not be totally pathetic, I was experimenting with, groan, my dad. Had a sip of his beer last Halloween; tasted like lawn fertilizer, only more bitter. Took fifteen minutes and three packets of soy sauce to get the taste out of my mouth. Tried white wine, Lord knows what kind, on Thanksgiving; tasted like lawn fertilizer, only sweeter. Neither time, I got drunk, so things were looking good for me not being an alcoholic and not so good for my bullshitting lying cunt health teacher.
So last night, me and my ad hoc friends Rian, Rachelle, and Uma went to the Amsterdam Cafe, or "Am Caf" if you're lazy, for drinks. Rian invited me around seven, they spent the next four hours at the Varsity Show, and I spent the next four hours teaching myself about mixed drinks. They all have such telling names: there's a Borrowed Rum, and Kamakaze, and Liver Rot, and Hey Whose Bed Is This. Rian, Rachelle and Uma are all neuroscience majors, so I figured if they didn't care about fucking up their brains, then neither would I. See there, bullshiting lying cunt health-ed teacher — three real-life almost graduated twenty-one-or-two-year-olds who think you're full of, um, bullshit and who know more about brains than you do! I guess another thing keeping me from drinking was the whole bar atmosphere, by which I mean the West End. The West End is crowded enough to make the fire inspector freak and it has about the same cheerful lighting as a movie theater. My guess is that it's crowded with ugly people, which is why they keep the lights down. Also, the crappy music is really loud in there, presumably because your friends don't have any interesting conversation worth making anyway, and hence suck ass. They would probably make good plutonium miners. People at Am Caf were slightly more attractive, but evidently no more conversational, considering the music volume.
Stupid question: how the hell am I supposed to pick up chicks if they can't hear me?
So there I was, me, my inhibitions, my itchy, gnawing temperance, and a beverage list. No carbonated nothing, no fruity stuff... but I can't say I've ever had a blue drink before. Besides, it's an Electric Iced Tea, and on what planet is iced tea blue? And I order. Twice. The waitress can't hear me first time. I wonder why. We're waiting for our drinks. Uma says something. I nod politely. Low talker. Rachelle's done with her MCAT. Good for her. That sounds stupid. Don't say stupid shit. Uma: "I want a Sex in the Library." Rachelle: "You like having sex in the library." Uma: "Shut up!" Jay: "That's what you get for making a pun." Uma: "What?" Jay: "That's what you get for making a pun." Uma: "What?" Low talker. Goddamn bass line. Where's the drinks?
And there they are. And mine's, well, you know. But I figure, what the hell, I paid eight bucks for this mutant drink and no one in the real world is quite as understanding as they are in public service advertisements. So I sip the stuff, and wait to see if it'll kill me like my bullshitting etc. teacher said it would. It didn't. And it tasted.... well, not like lawn fertilizer. It was kind of bitter, like unsweetened iced tea, and then it became really pungent. Caustically, bitingly pungent. Imagine a blue version of Nyquil.
So, the prediction was that I'd either lose my inhibitions (that's Erica's idea) or I'd be rushed to the hospital from some horrible interaction between alcohol and Paxil (that's my idea). I guess what transpired was a bit closer to Erica's prediction. I talked more than usual, worried less than usual, but since I only drank about an eighth of a glass of that nasty comb-wash stuff, I'm not sure that the alcohol was the cause. Still, Erica should be a sibyl when she grows up.
It's just, here's what I don't understand. So beer tastes nasty and wine tastes nasty and Electric Iced Teas taste nasty. (Rachelle concurred with me on that last one, so it's not like I'm a complete abberation.) So what the hell is compelling people to go out drinking? If you just want to get drunk, there's always 180 proof Nyquil. And if you want a refreshing beverage, get one that, I don't know, doesn't make you want to vomit. Nobody agrees. I feel so alone. It's like fifteen years ago, being at a birthday party for one of my eight-year-old friends, and not drinking any soda because, goddammit, carbonation burns your throat! (Not as bad as Electric Iced Teas burn your throat, though.) But here, it's worse. Everybody else is an adult — a semi-mature adult, at best — and I'm a little kid with my sippy-cup full of chocolate milk. And you see, if I ramble like this when I'm sober, imagine when I actually am inebriated.
Anyway, there's thirty-three days left to try pot. Then my college experience will be complete.
Someone stole my umbrella. And then they replaced it with a different, nicer umbrella. Which I lost.
Who the hell does that? Either a lousy thief or a total asshole.
I hold you all responsible for Fox cancelling Wonderfalls, which was one of the smartest, funniest, most worthwhile shows on network television. But of course, you were all too busy with your Friday night movies and dates and getting drunk to care.... All I can say is God help me if anything happens to Arrested Development.
Every election year, we hear the insipid talking head commentary on the network news: this is going to be the worst election year for mudslinging ever. And maybe it's true. Maybe every four years, those Madison Avenue slicksters come up with new and better and more creative invective for the Joe Bag-o'-Donuts morons who comprise this country to swallow. Four years ago, it was "Gore will raise your taxes;" this year, it will probably be something like "Kerry will eat your children."
I used to think that was bad until I took my Classical Traditions course, which is ostensibly a survey of ancient Greek and Roman literary genres but inevitably devolves into a course about homoeroticism. You see, when the Greeks invented democracy, they hadn't really worked all the kinks out, and it wasn't long before orators and demagogues started taking advantage of the cultural flaws in the system in order to get every Theocritus Bag-'o-Donuts to vote their way.
Case in point: Demosthenes and Aeschines. Alexander the Great has been conquering Greece and he's at Athens's doorstep, and the Athenian denizens need to decide whether they should pay tribute to Alexander. Demosthenes is in the forum arguing that the Athenians should declare war on Alexander, while Aeschines's argument is, "Demosthenes is gay. Let me list the ways in which Demosthenes is gay." To which Demosthenes replies, in front of the entire Athenian populace, "Don't you all think Aeschines is a little too straight?"
In case you were wondering, Demosthenes wins the argument.
And then nobody compares to Cicero when it comes to character assassination. From his Pro Caelio, defending Marcus Caelius on charges of conspiracy — Cicero argues that his archrival's slutty sister Clodia entrapped young, innocuous Caelius — "I would argue this case with vigor if not for the animosity I have with that woman's husband... oh, excuse me, I meant brother. I'm always making that mistake."
You know, when I started this blog a whole three weeks ago, I figured I'd have something to talk about at least every other day. Well, it turned out I was wrong. Life is banal and hardly worth sharing. Sorry.
