Re: Last Thursday's rant on the utter stupidity of my fellow human beings, I found this auction on eBay. We could probably solve the world's hunger problems if we just implemented some sort of "Eat the Stupid" campaign... but then who will take our fast food orders?
I have never wanted to strangle someone as much as I did today — and believe me, I've had days when I wanted to strangle someone. I was on the tech support desk at work, which is an absolutely thankless job to begin with, and I spent all afternoon listening to the most retarded things I have ever heard come out of an adult's mouth, save for when that adult is George W. Bush. Working tech support, you literally have conversations like this:
Moron: Hello? Yeah, it won't let me download my file.I'm not making this up: One of the people I had to help — and I'm like ninety-eight percent sure he's not a member of the Yanomami who was just introduced to electricity last week — wanted to print out a file and then e-mail me the paper printout. And since I'm at work and it's a business and everything, I can't treat this guy like the ignoramus he is, and that creates a lot of stress for me. Not to mention the stress from catching crap from people with projects due in two hours and who have never heard of Murphy's Law. And the stress from trying to fix someone's computer over the freaking phone — imagine trying to describe to someone how to repair their car's transmission without actually seeing what they're doing, or directing someone to perform open heart surgery over the phone, or defuse a nuclear bomb... Some tiny little thing that I could fix in three minutes if only I were actually by the damn computer becomes this ginormous headache simply because, apparently, in the eight-hundred miles between my office in New York and this idiot's office in Milwaukee, there isn't one person who knows how to use a goddamn computer.
Tech Support: Okay, I'm gonna need you to go to your computer's "Start" menu...
Moron: Hold on... You mean I need a computer?
I put my Christmas music on my iPod last Friday, and I'm already fucking sick of it all. That's part my fault, since the following is my Christmas music collection: On A Winter's Night: A Windham Hill Collection, Trans-Siberian Orchestra: Christmas Eve and Other Stories, More Trans-Siberian Orchestra: The Christmas Attic (I'm pretty sure that if I had known what the Trans-Siberian Orchestra looked like — they're like a hair metal band reduced to playing holiday parties — I wouldn't own more than one of their CD's), and Mannheim Steamroller: Casio Keyboard New Age Christmas Carols. Gee, who wouldn't want to hear that every day for a month? I also own the Kenny G holiday album, but that one's quarantined in a special Level 4 biohazard container because I appreciate my sanity.
I feel tons of sympathy for those poor people who have to work in department stores and fast-food franchises and everyplace else where there's Christmas carols playing over the P.A. twenty-four/seven. Not that I don't enjoy some ambient music, possibly sprinkled with a subliminal message or two, while I'm spending my hard-earned money on other people... but during the holiday season, you're at the mall, minding your own business, and suddenly "Hark! The Herald Angels Sing" gets a suction hold on your brain and you're humming till Martin Luther King Day. Starts off small, with genuine Christmas songs — "Greensleeves" and the unintelligible "Carol of the Bells" — and then your mind moves on to those Christmas songs you learned on the elementary school bus with the real lyrics replaced by dirty stuff you didn't quite understand at the time, and finally to those God-awful new Christmas carols they play on the pop-rock radio station. Because there's no better way to celebrate the birth of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ than having greedy record labels put out sappy songs about some girl's boyfriend miraculously making it home for Christmas Eve. And he got a lift from Santa! And he's bringing presents for orphans! Happy holidays!
Therefore, no sympathy for the people mass-producing our twenty-first century Christmas music, even if their job requires them to rock around the Christmas tree twenty-four/seven, three-hundred sixty-five days a year. Or probably three-hundred sixy-four, since I imagine they don't go into the office on Christmas.... But, ironically, they won't escape the carols! Insert your own evil holiday cackling here.
This is what happens when young people get purchasing power: they complain that chess, that thrill-a-minute board game for supercomputers, old Ruskies, and homeless guys on a park bench, needs some sexing up. According to this article in the always-superfluous New York Times Sunday Styles section, two Kazakh grandmasters thought it would be good for the so-called sport if they brought in some of the asinine misogyny of the Miss Teen USA pageant, and thus the World Chess Beauty Contest was born. It's basically Am I Hot Or Not but with chessboards in the photos. Seriously. (On the plus side, the WCBC does appear to be a Lorenzo Lamas-free zone.)
I guess the chess club needs some loving too, but can we perhaps have just one thing in the world that's purely an intellectual pursuit? Jay is saddened.
If you're hot, and you contribute to the dumbing down of chess, you can apply for the contest. I guess you need to send in some portraits or something of you, a chess set, and skimpy, totally-inappropriate-for-chess clothes. You also need to fill out a questionnaire, with questions ranging from the semi-understandable — "What attracts you in chess?" — to the unnecessary — "Where would you like to live besides your country?" — to the insipid — "What is your ideal of a man?" What, is this Blind Date all of a sudden? Oddly enough, it doesn't look like your actual ability to play chess factors at all into the judging. So, all you guys with a checkmate fetish, sorry but you're S.O.L.
Let's pretend that this whole chess beauty pageant thing is depressing enough without reading on the home page that the WCBC "arbiters" noticed some statistical abnormalities in the hotties' ELO sexiness ratings. And Diebold wasn't even involved in this election. So you've got some nerd in Romania or Bulgaria or Belarus or somwhere rigging the vote count on a horny chessmaster's website, which is even lamer than, say, rigging the election for class president or chairman of the condo board. Dude, write the Melissa worm or hack into the Pentagon or something, because the chess girls are probably looking for someone with a little... I don't know... ambition.
I should point out that the chess hotties website gets five to six hundred hits a day (or so they claim), while my blog gets about twelve. In that vein, I'm starting the Reasonably Attractive Readers of Jay's Blog Beauty Pageant. If you read my blog, and you're reasonably attractive (no extra appendages, all body parts more or less where they're supposed to be), you can send me a photo and answer this simple questionnaire:
I'll put your pics on my site and have other readers rate you, and I'll keep a constant lookout for voting irregularities. Now, since my blog is at least twice as cool as chess, I expect to soon be seeing a thousand to twelve hundred hits a day. While I'm at it, I think I'll set up the Canasta Girls Gone Wild... or maybe I won't.
- Brief bio.
- What reason for you reading my blog?
- What are your interests besides my blog?
- A mundane event in your life.
- Where would you like to live besides your planet?
- Who is the American Idol?
- Do you think that your BFF must read my blog?
- What is your ideal of a man? (Bonus points for describing me.)
- If I become a winner of RAROJBBP, I will...
- Your motto?
ABC announced that this will be the final season of that derivative Buffy hackfest Alias because, thankfully, all of America finally came to its senses and realized that pregnant women are not sexy. Go figure. Nevertheless, now seems like a perfect time start my online petition to give the one shining beacon of talent on that show, Kevin Weisman, his own spinoff. For the programming directors at ABC, here's my idea: Weisman continues playing his lovable, babbling alter ego Marshall Fleck, only Frinking the character up a few notches with a lab coat two sizes too big and a Jerry Lewis accent. He builds little gadgets and gizmos in his nerd lab, and also, he fights crime. But not with violence. He bores his enemies to death by reminiscing about the eighties. I even have plans for the obligatory episode where Weisman concocts a potion that makes him ultra-urbane, but also turns him into a total mimbo.
Mom's not letting me tell you how my Thanksgiving was, because certain people might read my blog and become offended. Suffice it to say that I learned how my generation is lazy, how we'll never change the world, how we have no imaginations, and how we don't know whatnot bout how to writing good. I have this strange feeling that, in a parallel universe somewhere, Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson made a mediocre comedy about my family's Thanksgiving.
I think that last sentence was pretty well-written. I challenge anyone in the Greatest Generation or in the Baby Boom to improve on it.
Since I have a soul — albeit a withering, emaciated one — I'm more than a little overcome with guilt, considering that I live better than at least ninety-nine percent of the people on Earth and the ratio of time I spend appreciating my family, my health, my freedom, and my comfort to time I spend bitching about those same things is... well, let's be honest, I don't really spend any time at all appreciating what I have. This entry was originally a mean-spirited rant about that little bastard kid with muscular dystrophy or whatever who writes assy inspirational poetry, but it just takes one idiot reader to get offended before I'm in trouble with Mom, again, cause she can't understand why I can't muster up the constitution to be positive and gracious about anything.
Okay, Mom, here's something positive. Poetry Boy died last year. That means while he probably outshone me back then, when it comes to longevity, I win. Boo-yah!
Hmm... I'll bet Mom's not too happy with that. She's so difficult to satisfy.
But when I see someone who's life is in the shitter acting all Norman Vincent Peale while I'm hopelessly downing two Prozacs a day, it stings more than a little. It's like detox, and it's impossible to focus on the roof over my head or the comfortable bed I sleep in or the alveolar rhabdomyosarcoma I'm not suffering from till all the toxins wash away first. I think it would be great if Poetry Boy's heartfelt Heartsongs and Reflections of Heartsongs and Chicken Soup for the Heartsongs or whatever really did move me, but apparently happiness and gratitude and that living for the moment bullshit is a little too complicated to be reduced to a eighth-grader's creative writing class.
I almost feel like I should be grateful for something, but it's not on the standard list of friends and family and at least you've got your health. Something more transcendant: maybe God wants me to find someone even more miserable than I and pray, "Thank you, Lord, for not making me that guy." That sounds awfully cruel, but I think it also pretty accurately describes my barely masked contempt for God (assuming He exists, which I prefer not to assume). There's this charlatanry, and Norman Vincent Peale, and Poetry Boy, and the company that makes those inspirational posters hanging in the breakroom are all in on it, busy tricking us into thinking everything's okay so no one will feel compelled to actually go out and improve anything, like we're all Job, sitting around doing the same old things while things fall apart. If you're rich, if you're famous, if you're best friends with Oprah and fading pop-star Lance Bass — ahem, Poetry Boy — if your problems can all be solved with a few phone calls, that stuff, the things that put you in the top one percent of the top one percent of all six billion people in the world, you should be thankful for. But just living day to day, a piece of human meat to be used by society, ignored by nature, not really living for anything... that's literally the very least a moral God can do for you. It's not like I'm the one going around encouraging genocides or giving little kids cancer, and I'm a bit tired of being treated like I am — MOM.
Which is what really grinds my gears about Poetry Boy there. We all have problems, and I'm not going to start this pity contest to see who's problems are worse because that would be asinine: misery falls into two categories, that which you can handle and that which you can't. Experience has shown me that I can hardly handle my own crap, and I'm pretty sure I couldn't handle Poetry Boy's crap either — but God chose him, made him a prophet, inspiring millions of extremely vapid housewives (and Oprah — holy shit I despise Oprah). If I come down with ALS or mesothelioma, is the Make-A-Wish foundation going to turn my last days into something fulfilling? Would it be worth getting some terminal disease if they did? It seems telling that I'm not too willing to find out. (It's not telling, but it seems that way.) I'll just wait. Maybe by next Thanksgiving, God will grant me a reason for existing, and then I'll be grateful for that.
I was down in Atlantic City today, and I just have one suggestion for the management at the Sands casino: put some clothes on your goddamn cocktail waitresses! Yes, on TV and in the movies the casino cocktail waitresses are always these reasonably fuckable young women, but those chicks are all at the Borgata or somewhere else and the waitresses at the Sands are invariably in their mid-to-late hundreds and have no business traipsing around anywhere in a prison orange miniskirt. You can take my drink order just as easily wearing a muumuu like all the other grandmas in Atlantic City, thank you very much.
No, I'm sure this is just another nefarious casino technique to get me drunk and impaired. Too bad that I'd die from alcohol poisoning long before booze would make Eileen the over-botoxed drink girl even remotely attractive.
Harry Potter and the Something Or Another Whatever opened this weekend, thrilling Gen-Y geeks, nerds, and dweebs everywhere, as well as their poor geek, nerd, and dweeb children. Let's do a little math here: Thanks to the war in Iraq, increased oil prices, and the greedy bastards at Sony, movie tickets are now eleven dollars... times four movies so far, plus you need to bring a friend or two, so that's already between eighty and a hundred dollars donated to Warner Brothers. The books are like twenty bucks apiece — and you could borrow them from the library, but the waiting lists are so long your grandkids will be asking for the Harry Potter books by the time you get them in your hands — so that's another hundred and twenty dollars you've given to the corporate execs at Scholastic. Thirty dollars each for the DVD's, so there's another ninety out of your kid's college fund. And there's seven books in the series. Jeez, Rowling, why not fifty? Keep the kids sending you royalties till they're collecting social security.
I can see how some spoiled-ass kid (or some puerile adult without a budget in place) can easily spend over a thousand bucks on this Pottermania crap, considering all the merchandising, the special edition DVD's, the McDonald's Happy Meal tie-ins, the inevitable Harry Potter and the Great White Way Broadway musical starring Haley Joel Osment as Harry and Christy Carlson Romano as Hermione, the Official Harry Potter trivia game (I know people who own Harry Potter Trivial Pursuit or whatever it's called — it's an awesome game to play when you're stoned), the action figures, the collector's edition DVD's, and the special ten-year anniversary DVD's. I really need to get into this children's serialized fiction racket.
You see, now I feel bad too. I haven't spent a damn penny on any British children's lit since C. S. Lewis, back when I actually was a child, but I did read the first Harry Potter book, and I saw the first two movies, which were directed by hackmeister Chris Columbus. It's that last part that makes me feel guilty of crimes against art, since if I'm gonna... um... tolerate the work of the Hollywood prostitute who brought the world Mrs. Doubtfire and Bicentennial Man, I no longer have any excuse to avoid Alfonso Cuarón's installment of the series. Here's what I'd do if I were world dictator: double feature — we put Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban on second (in IMAX of course) but first we show Cuarón's brilliant Spanish-language erotic homosexual coming-of-age film Y Tu Mamá También, just to give the kids some culture. Besides, I'd feel like my eleven dollar ticket is worth it if I get to see parents covering their kids' eyes, plugging their ears, and generally freaking out about the awkward conversations sure to ensue.
Prada, apparently. Turns out Pope Benedict has a Bradshaw-esque shoe fetish and a penchant for Gucci sunglasses to go along with the pointy-hat fixation that What Not To Wear tells me is a fashion faux pas. Uh... a dude wearing $800 shoes and $200 sunglasses? Sounds a little gay to me, Benny.
At least John Paul's gluttonous vice was pimping out the Popemobile. Maybe a little ghetto, but at least he wasn't falling in with the fashionista sodomites.
I'd like to know when the church is going to collapse under the weight of its own haughtiness: the sex abuse scandals, dwindling numbers of seminarians, now the pope has the same fashion sense as Brittney Gastineau. It reminds of me of the story in the Decameron about the Jew who converts to Christianity after travelling to Rome and seeing all the corruption in the church:
"It seemed to me the churchmen were all so steeped in lust, greed, avarice, fraud, envy, pride, and other like sins and worse, that I regard the place as a hotbed for diabolical rather than devotional activities. As far as I can judge, it seems to me that your pontiff, and all the others too, are trying to reduce the Christian religion to nought and drive it from the face of the earth... But since it is evident to me that their attempts are unavailing, and that your religion continues to grow in popularity, and become more splendid and illustrious, I can only conclude that it deservedly has the Holy Ghost as its foundation and support."
I had to report to jury duty today, which I've been dreading for months. Because I believe it's important to do my civic duty, I tried my best to get out of jury duty. They mailed me that summons with the dreaded "under penalty of perjury" questionnaire and my excuse was basically that I'd make a crappy juror. I believe my exact words were "passive-aggressive, easily pressured, misanthropic, and bigoted," although my parents made me take out "bigoted" because they don't own a fucking dictionary. Mom thinks the court will interpret "bigoted" as "racist," while I believe that there's no goddamn point in communicating if we're all just going to make up our own definitions for words. Needless to say, that didn't work... which is disturbing.
So I didn't have very high expectations for the whole jury duty thing. The summons and the jury office voicemail message that you have to call are kind of... um... bossy, and if I wanted to be told where I "must report" and at what time and what the dress code is, I'd join the army. But as it turns out, the court people were all totally cordial and professional, so kudos to them for living up to the bare minimum standards we expect of well-mannered people in a civilized society.
I get to the courthouse, and the first thing we have to do is watch this amazingly asinine video about the New Jersey judicial system. When I say "amazingly asinine," I mean this movie doesn't have the production value of those videos you'd watch in drivers' ed class — it has the production value of those filmstrips you'd watch in drivers' ed class. At least in drivers' ed, we got to see auto carnage. The court video is just interviews with random judges and jurors about how awesome New Jersey's court system is, then they showed us how the court's much more efficient with these new-fangled computer gizmos — now in color! How about showing us a bootleg of the new Harry Potter film or something?
What's sad is that's pretty much the high point of the jury duty experience. We all went back to the jurors' lounge, then there's some name calling. It's basically the lottery in reverse, or The Lottery in forward. If your name's called, you get to go down to a courtroom, where there's a lottery semi-final to see if you get called for the jury. I didn't win the first lottery, so I spent like six hours in the lounge doing crossword puzzles.
On the plus side, I don't have to go back tomorrow, and I'm civic-obligation-free for the next three years. Suck it, county government bitches! The down side is I won't get a forum to expound my judicial philosophy, which not only involves my patent-pending plutonium mines but also has a few shreds of logic and reason buried within it. Like, I was thinking about it, and much as I disdain my fellow human beings, I don't think I'd ever be able to find one of them guilty of a crime and sleep well afterwards. Evidence is suppressed, testimony is privileged, lawyers are manipulative, and I don't think I'd ever be sure enough to send someone to jail. Well, I don't know — I am a bigot (see above), and a hypocrite (I feel guilty about that). I'm used to having that luxury because no one really listens to my opinions anyway, and I have no idea at all how I'd behave or if I'd put my prejudices aside.
Judge Barisonek, or Walter, as I call him, told us that as long as we decide the case based on the evidence and in accordance with the law, we can sleep well. I'm sure that bullshit keeps Walt sane, but it's probably not too comforting to the victim whose assailant gets off or the guy who spends eighteen years in prison for a crime he didn't commit. I have a sort-of solution, though. No more suppressing evidence, nothing privileged, give the jury all the facts it needs to decide the case. (Actually, I'm not sure twelve idiots who couldn't get out of jury duty should be deciding people's fates. I might be more comfortable leaving the matter to an impartial panel of forensics experts, emphasis on the "impartial.") We deal with the government violating defendants' rights with consequences for breaking the law. Not leaving a reprimand in someone's file consequences, but serious, life-changing consequences: they lose their job, pay a huge fine in damages, spend years in jail. I don't know.... I'd still be nervous. I don't enjoy being responsible for stuff.
I am so pissed at FOX for cancelling Arrested Development. Somebody must die!
In the meantime, I'm consoling myself with this article.
I go to an incredibly white church. Actually, I stopped going to church when I was sixteen because everyone there was either a hypocrite or an ass or both. Even as a little kid, back when Reagan was still fucking up our country, I knew everyone there was full of it. I'd go to Sunday school (which confusingly took place Monday afternoons) and some idiot teacher would be reading us some feel-good lesson from "The New Illustrated Politically Correct Catechism For Kids," something like maybe how Jesus is your best buddy and when all the kids at school make fun of you for sucking at kickball, Jesus will be there — well, not technically "there", there, like that doo-doohead Corey who's still laughing at you for running like a girl — but there in this abstract, celestial sense that there's no way a grade-school kid is gonna understand. I was the kid who felt like something was amiss, and out of nowhere, I'd bring up issues like the problem of evil or Biblical authorship — not to be a jerk but because I genuinely couldn't understand this crazy-ass religion with these questions unanswered. I tended to get dirty looks and occassional scoldings for my troubles.
Mom claims she "made a promise to God" that she'd keep taking me to Sunday school till I was pretty much old enough to get a driver's permit. Lucky Jews: turn thirteen, you get to have a big party at the Hilton with the Chicken Dance and the Electric Slide, and you're an adult. I probably got a few Hallmark cards for first communion, but I don't believe I got shit for my confirmation. Not so much as a "Congratulations, God thinks you're a grown-up" from the archbishop. While I'm ranting, I'll mention that I wasn't even going to go through with the confirmation thing, except that every time I brought up the idea of giving up the church or running off to join the Hare Krishnas or something, Grandma would remind me, "What if you meet a nice Catholic girl, but she won't marry you unless you're confirmed?" I now realize that would be probably be a sign that this hypothetical girl and I are less than compatible.
Basically, the whole confirmation process was mindless and condescending, although in a more modern, holistic way than the good old-fashioned "memorize a book" catechisms of yore. Like, we had to go camping for God, which was like a three day long orgy of Chicken Soup for the Soul with a soundtrack provided by Creed. (Was Creed popular back then? Maybe it was Jars of Clay. Sooooo much better.) Of course I wasn't invited to the orgy part of the trip (read: party in the girls' dorm), just sitting on carpet squares listening for hours to these kids who thought they found God talk about how wonderful their lives were. Oh yeah, and one time the "peer counselors" or whatever blindfolded us and tied us up in the back of Jennifer Savage's shed. Really. It was supposed to be some sort of faith-building exercise, like afterwards we were gonna talk about God or something, but it really came off as this retarded hazing for Jesus. So yeah, I'm skeptical.
But Grandma likes going to church, because she's old and stopped using her brain years ago, and Mom had to go to a funeral in Queens, so I did my good deed for the year and brought Grandma. Grandma likes it when I take her to church, ostensibly because she likes spending time with me, but in reality because Mom is absolutely incapable of getting her to church on time. This, of course, means she'll be going to hell.
I always knew there was something weird about my (former) church, but I never really put my finger until I spotted a black family there a few years ago. They really stand out. The thing about these WASP-y churches — or I guess, in my case, WASC-y churches — is that no one seems to know what the hell they're doing there. It's all very pseudo-spiritual at best, and perfunctory at worst. You go to, say, a Baptist church and there's the whole community up and dancing, clapping their hands, spontaneously receiving the Holy Spirit. Whitey don't do that. We white folk kinda treat church like school: You sit down and shut up and tolerate it because you get to chat with your friends once the day's over. Of course, I don't have any friends at church, because everyone I know there is way too S&M for me. (I'm still bitter about that whole being tied up thing.)
This is what drives me nuts whenever I do go to church: that implication that the Church community itself equals God. Maybe it works for some people, getting together with their church-buddies and worshipping makes them happier and healthier. But it does not mean they're any closer to God. God's probably not all that impressed with my agnosticism, but I doubt he's any more impressed with the people who treat church like a meeting of the Optimists' Club. Okay, the priest read to us from Matthew 25:14-30, which is the parable of the guy who gives his servants money to invest and one loser servant goes off and buries his charge. Disturbingly prescient, given this whole rant I'm having. Somehow, a story about God bestowing His spiritual munificence on those with faith and withholding it from the non-believers got morphed in the sermon into a story about regretting the things you haven't done. It's a good lesson, I guess, but how super-puerile is it? Seriously, I'm gonna regret not getting laid before I die, but I don't think that's supposed to be found in the Good News.
I was at the Virgin Megastore yesterday, killing time till I had to catch my train home. Oh, by the way, let me tell you what I saw on the train ride: this middle-aged white trash dude with an imitation-Jeff Foxworthy mullet hitting on a fifteen-year-old-ish girl. I never saw that before and I guess I just assumed I lived on a sex offender-free train line. Now I'm tempted to check out that online sex offender registry to see how many other perverts live around me and which of my neighbors I should be afraid of. (Okay, I just got back from doing that, and it turns out that I'd rather not know how many sex offenders live in my town, which I probably should have thought of before going to the sex offender map website.)
Anyway, here's what happened on the train. We've got these four guys who have "multiple appearances on Cops" written all over them, and between the four of them, they're trying to figure out the train map and whether this train goes anywhere there's a good selection of liquor stores. And these two girls get on the train in Westfield, and they're also looking at the map. The girls are trying to get to Hackettstown, which is on a different train line. But it's okay, cause they're "going there later," and that's when Mullet there tries to be helpful: "You can stay over at my house on your way over."
High-fives all around. And Mullet keeps his drinking buddies happy: "I can drop you off in Hackettstown tomorrow morning."
Dude! I'm not the type of person who finds a lot of things people say inappropriate, but holy crap that was totally inappropriate. And, Mr. Mullet, it's not just that when you're at the age you need to get a prostate exam regularly, your wife isn't gonna be thrilled that you're brining a high school girl home for the night. Even if this were Japan or Polynesia or sub-Saharan Africa where it's culturally acceptable for mid-aged dudes to ask out pubescent girls, and even if she were looking to sleep with an old geezer, she could do a whole lot better than you. That's why you're going to a liquor store with your football buddies in the first place, ass.
Anyway, back to the Virgin Megastore, which contrary to what you're now thinking, sells music, DVD's, other trendy electronic crap to accessorize your music and DVD collection. It's got this club atmosphere, with the bouncers and the DJ and everything, except there's no dancing and you're allowed in even though you're ugly. I used to buy stuff there — right after I started my Barnes & Noble boycott — until I realized that Sir Richard Branson is a douchebag and spending twenty bucks in one of his stores won't make him get trampled by a herd of psychotic antelopes any sooner. Now I just go to play the sample X-Box games they've got in the corner of the store.
Besides, music is free. I'm sick of hearing these overpaid musicians and multinational media conglomerates bitching about how much money they lose to music piracy because it pales in comparison to the money these assholes are making by shoving mediocre drivel and filler on the American public. Especially the musicians. Every now and then, somebody comes along with the dense-ass argument that how would I like it if I wrote something and then people copied it without paying me? I sit behind a desk at work writing up websites for a financial consultant — if I were making a living — let alone an obscenely profitable one — playing music for an appreciative audience, I would never complain about another thing in my life ever. I hope there's a special place in hell for ungrateful dickweeds like Metallica, but I'm afraid Dante didn't envision an "arrogant pop star" circle.
I'm actually proud that I haven't bought a CD since those greedy bastards at the RIAA started suing their customers.... Or actually, I have bought one CD: Moby's 18. I figured there's one and only one good reason to give the record labels money, and that is that they're not producing records to bring the beauty of music to humanity. They're greedy and they want my money, and hopefully if I spend money on stuff I like, they'll make more of it. I think that's actually a pretty productive symbiosis between consumers and the corporate bigwigs who make our junk. I mean, they made Saw II, right?
Me: I can't believe you spent your day off raking leaves. Leaves suck.
Mom: I told you not to say that. I don't like that expression.
Me: [takes a moment to calculate whether she'll be offended...] You suck.
Dad: Jay! That was very rude. Go and apologize.
Me: I was kidding.
Dad: I know you were kidding. But Mom said she didn't like that expression.
Me: I know. That's the joke.
Dad: I understand that, but still, go apologize to Mom.
Me: [walks over to Mom in the kitchen] I'm sorry, Mom, that you have no sense of humor.
You ever notice how some people smell of a particular magazine, like they're carrying the odor of Architectural Digest or Modern Bride? I was sitting next to this woman on the train this evening, and she reeked of Us Weekly. The smell of bronzer and three-month-old collagen injections. But then she took out her reading material — turned out it was an In Touch Weekly. So that'll teach me not to judge people. 
This is just a random, irrelevant thought, but you remember the wedding scene in The Little Mermaid and how the priest gets a boner in the middle of it? I do, not only cause, like all kids growing up in the late eighties, I've seen that movie a million times but also because we spent a whole day in tenth-grade health class studying it. Suffice it to say that my sex ed teacher was a fanatical follower of subliminal-advertising alarmist Wilson Bryan Key and also seriously... uh... deprived, and she couldn't help but read innuendo into every freaking thing. Like, we also spent a class trying to get Aladdin to tell us to take off our clothes. I mean, we were fifteen-year-old boys at the time, and we were pretty impressed with Ms. Kling's ability to make a "that's what she said" joke right on the spot.
But back to The Little Mermaid, it was just like two seconds ago that I realized the irony of Christian wackos complaining about a little erection in the movie. After all, Ariel is hot, for an animated chick. (She's also like eighty-percent naked throughout most of the movie.) If he weren't at least a little in the game, then we'd have the Family Research Council bitching about how the priest is gay.
I'm not gonna watch any of the election results because I'm so, so tired of the whole campaigning thing. I voted, I did my civic duty, not like it'll make a difference or anything. The polling place thoroughly annoyed me — there was only one voting booth and I can't understand for the life of me why every single person in there took so damn long. It's not like there's any freaking decision to make: vote for the semi-corrupt Democrat, not the extremely corrupt Republican. Maybe they were trying to parse out Prop 2, which looked something like this:
Since 1996, 4% of the annual revenue from the Corporation Business Tax has been constitutionally dedicated to fund environmental programs. Approval of this constitutional amendment would: (1) expand the authorized uses of those revenues to provide grants for the costs of air pollution control equipment to reduce particulate matter emissions from diesel-powered engines, and funding for other measures to reduce human exposure to those emissions, and (2) change the allocation of funds for the existing authorized uses. The Constitution currently allocates one-half for hazardous discharge cleanup performed by the State, a minimum of one-sixth or a minimum of $5,000,000 for water quality projects, and a minimum of one-third for funding loans or grants for underground storage tank upgrades, replacements, closures and remediations, loans or grants to remediate hazardous substance discharges, and for an underground inspection program. This constitutional amendment would reduce the allocation for hazardous discharge cleanup by the State to 33% for ten years, allocate 17% for that period for grants for air pollution control programs, and would allow up to $1,150,000 per year of that 17% allocation to be used for the State's associated administrative costs. Also, this amendment would allow the use of no more than $1,000,000 per year for State administrative expenses for the underground storage tank program, and would allow an appropriation by the Legislature of up to $10,000,000 from the preceding unexpended balances dedicated and appropriated for the underground storage tank program to provide grants for cost of air pollution control equipment to reduce particulate matter emissions from diesel-powered engines, and funding for other measures to reduce human exposure to those emissions.What the hell? We've got Americans who can't figure out how to put a pointy thing through a piece of paper, but they're expected to understand this? We can only hope the masses abstain. (Or vote yes on Prop 2, cause the other option is siding with corporate criminals and polluters.)
There was some confusion tonight at the 8:45 Chicken Little screening at the AMC Empire 25. I guess a reel or two got mixed up, and instead of Disney, the kids were treated to some foreign film that opens with a young man hanging himself. I know what you're thinking: foreign film? You mean the kids are gonna have to read?
Of course, the real show wasn't on the screen. Here's the story as reported in the New York Daily News.
A Times Square movie theater laid an egg at a showing of "Chicken Little" last night.My absolute favorite part of the whole incident is how the North Korean Times managed to pick up on the story, right next to "R. Kelly sues Jay-Z over pepper spraying," cause that's totally relevant when your family's being kidnapped by the Pyongyang secret police. And there's a North Korea Times news forum page, as if the North Korean press actually wants to hear your opinion on the Chicken Little incident.
Adults and kids expecting to watch Disney's G-rated animated flick at the AMC Empire 25 theater on 42nd St. were instead presented with a foreign film that opened with a young man committing suicide.
"It's pandemonium," Joshua Gallo, 30, told the Daily News as he rushed out of the theater with his 5-year-old son and 1-year-old daughter. "The kids are crying. The mothers are screaming for the managers to stop the film." [Okay, here's me again. What's the Daily News reporter doing hanging right outside the doors, waiting for some crazy parent to make an insipid comment "as he rushed out of the theater?" I smell a leak at the highest levels of AMC management.]
Terrified children didn't know what to do as they watched a young boy hang himself from a tree at the 8:45 p.m. screening. [Bullshit. Kids can't tell Oliver & Company from hardcore porn. The adults were freaking out, but the kids knew what to do: sit down and shut up. Not that they were doing it, though.]
After five minutes, "Andrea," a Spanish drama opening today, was turned off and "Chicken Little" was played.
Patrons got a coupon for a free movie.
I am ill. I was afraid I've got the avian flu, thanks in part to Dubya's speech at the National Institues of Health the other day. Then I recalled that Bush is just fearmongering so we'll stop thinking about Scooter and the CIA leak investigation, skyrocketing gas prices, Harriet Miers, over two-thousand U.S. soldiers dead in Iraq, and Brownie's response to Hurricane Katrina, and I decided that I probably just have a cold instead. (By the way, "Scooter?" "Brownie?" Is Cub Scout Troop #215 running the country?) Keith Olbermann points out how each of the governments increased terror threats "coincidentally" came a few hours to a few days after some massive Bush administration bungling, and he invites his viewers to draw their own conspiracy theories. It's tempting, until you realize that the Bush administration fucks something up pretty much every day, so there really aren't any conclusions to reach.
That being said, I wish that Dubya could make it clear in his speeches when there's a viable threat and when he's just trying to Neuralize the American public. Maybe something like, "The British have intelligence that Osama bin Laden is trying to acquire chickens from China. We must not allow evildoers to get their hands on any poultry." I hope that after eight years of punking us, the administration will eventually tell us where the hidden cameras are.
Back to my disease, which is probably not bird flu and which, despite the title of this post, probably isn't lupus either, because my immune system does hate me, but in a passive-aggressive way. I have this post-nasal-drippy throat and my nose feels like it's full of cotton, and some mentholyptus-flavored ice cream would be totally awesome right now. Awesome and disgusting. Some wasabi-scented candles or maybe horseradish air freshener would be nice, too.
I am disturbed by the sheer array of wasabi-mint scented products that Google found, including not only candles, but also body scrub, hangover treatment, and foot fetish soak salt, which I don't even want to ask about.
Like a good liberal, I believe that when shit happens, it's important to play the blame game. So when I inadvertently walked out of Palmer Video with a DVD of Road To Perdition in loathed fullscreen instead of 2.35 : 1 widescreen, I immediately knew who was at fault: the white trash philistines who demand that every square inch of their TV be jam-packed with critically-acclaimed film. Also, Palmer's at fault for stocking the pan-and-scan version, and Dreamworks for producing it, and 20th Century Fox for distributing it. And the pimply-faced semi-pubescent kid behind the counter who didn't point out I was renting the "modified to fit your TV screen" variant.
Hmm... who else can I blame that's not me? There's the FCC, for not pushing high-def TV technology earlier...
I don't much care for Halloween. Pretend to be surprised by that. I hate adults getting dressed up, and I hate kids, period. However, I've decided that I can at least respect adults who really make an effort, who become actor-for-a-night and totally embody their otherwise puerile game of dress-up. Unlike Mom, who got dressed up as a hippie because all the other teachers in her school were doing it. (Because that's an important lesson to impart on our impressionable kids: always cave into peer pressure and follow the crowd.) Mom stole one of my white t-shirts, tie-dyed it, and told everyone she was a hippie. Lame! Where's the Grateful Dead wig? Where's the anti-war poster? Where's the hemp?
But my point is that Halloween needs to grow the hell up. You go through phases: First, you're harassing your neighbors for candy. Then, you're vandalizing. Finally, you're hiding by the side of your house with a garden hose, spraying people who walk by. (Only the teenage punks, though. Even I'm not mean enough to hose down innocuous trick-or-treaters.) We need an adult Halloween, and that's why I think we should give out Kit-Kats to the kiddies and flaming tequila shots and Xanax and condoms to the poor parents forced to take them out.
I wish I thought of this back in college when the condoms were free.
I'd like to see Halloween turned back into the devil-frightening bacchanalia it's supposed to be, with drugs and orgies and thrash metal. Fanwood's Halloween parade is so saccharine it would even make Jesus feel like He'd just eaten a whole bowl of candy corn. We can only listen to "Monster Mash" so many times before we regret the killer in Saw II is only a fictional character. Even the big dogs, the "Nation’s Most Wildly Creative Public Participatory Event in the Greatest City in the World" somehow got perverted into a mindless anti-Bush, gay-rights, puke-till-you-drop puppet show shelling out free ad space for the Chocolate Buddha (which I'm tempted to get Anne for Christmas). I want to see the village banding together as a community for one night against the Devil's minions, and also against those retarded-ass inflatable Frankensteins that my idiot neighbors with bad taste put on their lawn.
Seriously, someone should inform the zoning board.
Tis the season to start bitching about how stores are honoring the birth of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ by putting up their Christmas decorations earlier and earlier. We used to complain, "But it's not even Thanksgiving yet," and I guess Macy's didn't want to hear any of that crap so they've got the holly and poinsettia hanging from the ceiling before Halloween. Do they have their Martin Luther King Day sale in November?
Thirty. That's the number of kids I counted at the mall this afternoon, which I thought was more than a little odd since I was at the mall from around noon till two and I'm like ninety-five percent sure today's not Columbus Day. I'm not talking about little tots getting pushed around in strollers either; I mean children old enough to waste their disposable income on Green Day CD's and Lucky Brand jeans. I wanted to stop one of these parents or legal guardians shopping with their offspring and ask, "Shouldn't your kid be in school?" This is why Americans are so freaking stupid: we're letting our children run around the mall, irritating me, rather than out of sight, getting an education where they belong. Not that I want to tell these parents how to raise their kids, but seriously, they took their children out of school for a shopping spree — someone needs to play Dr. Spock and tell these parents how to raise their damn kids.
. Um... okay, Abercrombie marketing geniuses, what's wrong with this ad? Let's think about it... you're trying to sell me Abercrombie apparrel, so... there aren't any fucking clothes in the goddamn photograph!!!! I'm not really an expert, but I can't imagine anybody being both so gay and so stupid they're thinking, "Today I buy an overpriced shirt that says 'Abercrombie' on it, tomorrow I get hot gay sex with Matt."I guess Election Day is coming up because I got my sample voting ballot for the 22nd Legislative District in the mail today. Since I'm not retarded and don't need to study the ballot two weeks ahead of time, I usually just throw the thing out and I never noticed before that our gubernatorial candidates get to make a personal statement on the back. I was kind of happier not knowing about the freakwads vying to be our governor — now I'm scared for democracy because it looks like any moron can run for the head office in the state.
There's a part of me that's amused by the third-party candidates and wants to waste my vote on one of them. Like Edward Forchion from the Legalize Marijuana party. Gee, I wonder what his platform is. In case there's any doubt that marijuana's bad for your brain, here's the opening of Ed's personal statement:
"The reason I'm running for Governor [sic] isn't because I think I will win, but for the opportunity running gives me (and anyone who votes for me) to give the "FINGER" state-wide to our Demo-publican party politicians who wage their LIE based "WAR on US". "Us" meaning; [sic] "we the people" who freely choose to use substances regardless of what the "do-gooders" think is best. I personally chose to use the "GOD GROWN HERB MARIJUANA" so I fight our governments [sic] war on it's [sic] "POT-FRONT". The fact that I can obtain marijuana any day of the week I chose [sic] is testimate [sic] to the failure of our Governments [sic] racist war on drugs....Seriously, Ed, put down the reefer for ten minutes while you proofread. I mean, the hell does "testimate" mean?
A few weeks ago, I was driving through Summit, getting pissed off because apparently no one in town was creative enough to come up with as many street names as Summit has streets, leaving the town with both a Beauvior Avenue and a Beauvior Place. Frankly, when I'm driving, I have too much on my mind, like not steering the car into a mailbox, to deal with shit like this and if the people of Summit care at all about keeping their mailboxes intact, they'll rename one of those roads.
Speaking of which, there's a movement underway in Greenwich, Connecticut to rename one of the streets because someone, who I have no doubt was a fifteen-year-old boy at the time, thought it would be cute to call it Hooker Lane. Maybe cause it's on the seedy side of town? It's particularly absurd because Greenwich is quite possibly the WASP-iest place on the planet, and I'm guessing it's one of the neighborhood's little pleasures asking one of the prudish Stepford moms of Hooker Lane to repeat her address because you didn't quite get it the first time.
That would never get old.
As per usual, they're doing this for the children. The kids of Hooker Lane are getting teased in school: barbs like "You live on Prostitute Street" go by unpunished while Jane Olenchuk's son has to deal with, "Dude, you must be kidding." Take a moment to dry your eyes. Being a kid is rough. Seriously Jane, tell your kid to crap his pants during a math test, that way no one in school will be making fun of him for his address anymore.
What? No good? You think your child has it bad living on Hooker Lane, remember that the street's eponym is a family actually named Hooker. Imagine the shit those kids had to take. But don't look on the bright side, Jane. You just have to redraw the maps, buy new street signs, replace the mailboxes, fill out all the change-of-address forms. Where exactly was this paper-thin skin of yours when you moved onto Hooker Lane in the first place? This is my absolute hugest pet peeve with homeowners — they buy a house and then they go on this Elizabeth Bennett crusade to overhaul the crappy neighborhood. When I was in high school, for instance, there was this local protest to prohibit parking on the streets near the school. The people living in around the school didn't appreciate all these cigarette-smoking high school kids with their torn jeans and loud rap music parking their '92 Mazdas in front of these million-dollar houses. Of course, the students don't get any say in this because we weren't exactly allowed to vote. (Not that the residents actually voted either, unless something on the ballot affected them personally.) It infuriated me, and I just wanted to smack some sense into these idiots: "Why did you buy a house near the high school if you didn't want any high school students in your neighborhood?" Like, when I get my own place, I don't want any prostitutes in my neighborhood. So I'm not gonna live next door to a fucking whorehouse.
Okay, there's my rant. Back to Greenwich. The official proposal is to change Hooker Lane to "Stonebrook Lane," which is inspired by a Westchester development one of the residents passed on his way home from the golf course and is also, therefore, the most white bread street name in history. You want my opinion, they should call it "Whinypants Road," and then see how Hooker Road sounds. Jane doesn't care: "Who cares?" she said, a springer spaniel at her heels as she unloaded her car in her driveway. "Anything is better than 'Hooker.'"
Really? Anything? Personally, I think Gonorrhea Boulevard is worse, but that's just me.
I rented Chan-wook Park's movie Oldboy last night because I'm still hunting around for "my" genre, and for some strange reason, I thought that Korean sadomasochism films (or just plain Korean films, since they're pretty much all about sadomasochism) might be it. Don't read too much into that.
I should probably clarify. Apparently, sadomasochism has been running through Korean storytelling for generations. In my Asian humanities class, we read something from the nineteenth century called The Memoirs of Lady Hyegyong, about this king who's imprisoned in a box for like thirty years, goes mad (naturally), and kills a bunch of people when he gets out. Fun, fun stuff. Cut to a hundred and thiry years later, when people like Quentin Tarantino and David Fincher have perfected the art of stylized violence, and Korean cinema is basically high-concept excuses for chopping people up in various ways. Tarantino, in fact, awarded the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes to Oldboy, no doubt comparing it to his own misguided revenge drama in theaters at the time.
Oldboy is higher-concept than Kill Bill, with less of an excuse and less need to copy Peckinpah and those crazy seventies Hong Kong films. Park actually starts off with an original idea: a businessman, played by some Korean guy you've never heard of before, is kidnapped and held in a mysterious apartment. Fifteen years later, he wakes up on a grassy rooftop with a change of clothes, a cell phone, and a wallet full of cash. Then he eats an octopus. A live octopus. Ewwww. Anyway, who kidnapped him? Why? Why was he released? These are questions you ask while reading the copy of the back of the DVD case.
Too bad I stopped caring like fifteen minutes into the movie. There's something about the revenge drama genre that demands mindless, one-dimensional characterizations incapable of truly appreciating their vengeance. I can think of examples dating back to Titus Andronicus — revenge isn't merely cooking up the boys who raped your daughter and feeding them to their mother, revenge is a reversal of fortune: the haughty are brought low as the humble exalts himself. Otherwise, the whole deal is empty and you wind up with these hackneyed speeches about how killing so-and-so won't bring your partner back, which would've fit nicely in about ten different places in Oldboy. Maybe in place of that moronic sequence showing how our protagonist was hypnotized. (And no, I didn't ruin anything for you. Park ruined it by throwing in the hypnosis thing.)
However, since Park mistook style for genuine characterization, Oldboy rings very loud, and very hollow. Part of it is Park being completely oblivious to the fact that his antagonist is a total bastard, but Oldboy's bigger problem seems endemic to the whole Korean New Wave. Park is manipulative, from recurring themes mixing metaphors (the opening scene, with some random character almost falling off a roof, gets seen again, in the lamest of lame contexts, at the end), to the protagonist prying out this dude's teeth with a hammer, to the thing with the octopus, to the electronica operatic score, all of which are vacuous with a facade of resonance. "He's got a knife in his back but he's still fighting. Wow, he must really be pissed!" Well, yes, we get that. But maybe we can take a slightly less dispassionate look at our characters: yes, he's angry, but he's probably also confused and relieved to be free and a bunch of other things that Park never bothered to think of. Maybe Justin Lin will do better with the American remake. Ha!
Human Rights Watch is questioning whether Saddam Hussein will be getting a fair trial tomorrow. And while a fair trial is nice and all, I have to say, it's freaking Saddam: does it really matter?
Don't get me wrong — I totally support Human Rights Watch and the work they do, and I know that there are plenty of places in the world, not the least of which being America, where people are thrown in the gulag without any sort of day in court. I just think that the human rights organizations should devote their limited resources to the people who got caught up in this geopolitical net without being brutal dictators.
I own a hideous coat. It's maybe six or seven years old, from back in the days when my mom picked out my clothes, as opposed to now, when I pick out my clothes and Mom lodges ridiculous complaints about them. I'd include a picture of the offending jacket, but like I said, it's hideous. (Like that's stopped me before....) I don't really know where I should go to buy a new coat, but I do know that Burlington Coat Factory has "coat" right in the name, so it seemed like a good start.
I don't like buying clothes because I have a history of looking foolish while shopping. (The fact that, until recently, Mom insisted on clothes shopping with me because I "refused" to try anything on probably had a lot to do with that.) Usually what'll happen is I'll purchase something that makes me look like a member of the Addams family or I'll get myself caught in a zipper or something, but I totally wouldn't be surprised if I managed to unwittingly walk out of the store with a purchase from the plus-size misses department.
Maybe I was in an outlet store without knowing it, but Burlington Coat Factory has the crappiest clothes I have ever seen. Like Kohl's clearance-bin crappy. Seriously, there are clothes stores in Harlem and Chinatown that don't have names but have nicer merchandise. I'm not the most stylin' dude in da hood (what, you don't believe me?), but I don't think Burlington Coat Factory is the place for me. Also, pretty much all their coats are XXXL or larger, so I'm not quite sure who does buy stuff there. Like, is their entire customer base Shaq?
I'm blogging once again from the Chelsea Market because I don't feel like going to my self-esteem class, but my parents will get pissed off if I come home early and they think I didn't go. I note how this class had the odor of disaster from day one. There I was, feeling like an ass on icebreaker day, so I don't show up for the second class. And then I actually sort of feel like going to the third class, but I can't go cause someone will inevitably ask me why I wasn't at the second class. You can pretty much figure out how it'll snowball from there.
It's kind of annoying that I'm confined to this one spot in the Chelsea Market — it's the only electric outlet I can find. There's this mother sitting next to me, trying to feed her toddler, and this would usually piss me off, but not today. The kid would rather play with a plastic bag and cry and slump out of her stroller than eat — and looking at what this woman's trying to shove down her throat, who can blame her — and the mother's getting all frustrated and flustered and every now and then she just snaps and yells at the kid or slaps her or shakes her, like that's gonna calm her down. I'm like six inches away from them and finding the whole scene much more amusing than anything that could possibly happen in the confidence class.
Seriously, I'm twenty-three and if someone's beating me, it just sort of makes me a bit more aggravated. This little kid can't possibly have any idea why Mom's bitching at her... or maybe at the age of two she already realizes that her mother's totally insufferable.
Oh, that reminds me, the other day I was at the train station enjoying myself while I listened to this lady bitch and moan about my towns-kin. We weren't even outside, and she's all but yelling into her cell phone about how she's been sick for a week and the doctor's office won't give her an appointment and she can't get any of her neighbors to help out with the kids even though she's helped all of them out — you gotta appreciate, too, that this whole diatribe is in one of those awwful Lawwng Oyyland accents — and the realtor sold them a house that's falling apart and she can't make any friends (I totally sympathize) let alone any Jewish friends and none of this happened back when she lived back in West Orange and no one's being nice to her and.... Holy crap, Lady, no wonder! I've only known you five minutes and I already hate your guts. Your poor neighbors...
No, that's not very nice. In my experience, the townsfolk are pretty callous. But you get my point: let's please do our private toddler slapping and talking about our neighbors behind their backs in private for once.
Apparently, we're all going to die. I don't mean that in some metaphysical, philosophical way; I mean that the news media, which would never in a million years sensationalize a story, is already laying odds on how and when Armageddon will come. The fashionable predictions for the annihilation of mankind right now include the avian flu and the always-popular terrorist attack on a subway, and that means that you'll get much better odds betting on something obscure like mutant zombie experiment gone horribly wrong or a black hole collapsing the university into a singularity of infinite density and temperature. I'm personally going with the fifty-to-one odds on self-replicating nanotechnology consuming all the planet's resources for their reproduction. Of course, it'll be a bitch to collect if I win.
By the way, did you hear that New York's well-to-do got word of the subway threat before the rest of us plebes? Normally, shit like this would piss me off (the real issue is how rich people can take taxis and avoid mass transit soft targets altogether), but since the threat turned out to be nothing, I'm kind of amused how the rich folks got punked. In fact, I think we should send more spurious terror warnings the socialites' way, like someone within Homeland Security leaks a classified memo about how al-Qaeda's dumping arsenic in our nation's supply of seruga caviar or Hamas planting a pipe bomb in the Knickerbocker Club.
I used to be the type of person who'd hear that killer bees have been adapting and migrating north and east across North America and I wouldn't leave the house for like a week. Thanks to delicious, delicious drugs — and I'll also give a little credit to maturity — I've gotten better about putting that stuff out of my mind. Nevertheless, I'd appreciate it if someone would tell me what I genuinely need to worry about, because all these warnings from a zillion different sources are becoming a little more life-consuming than I'd like. Take the bird flu, for instance. Now, this sounds suspiciously like that SARS thing that freaked everybody out two years ago or West Nile virus, which I actually caught and it was the shortest cold ever. I mean, even Robitussin could whip West Nile's ass and Robitussin normally can't do shit.
So I'm no longer sure what to think, but thankfully, I'm also no longer sure that the media isn't fucking with me. With the anthrax scare back in 2001, my dad insisted that I open my mail in a well-ventilated area wearing latex gloves and a face mask. My friends don't even mail me birthday cards, but all of a sudden Osama bin Laden's gonna become my pen pal. Or how parents were freaked out two years ago when pretty blonde girls suffered a spate of wacko kidnappings, or beachgoers and the "summer of the shark" and miraculously we're all still here. By the same token, I don't recall A Current Affair saying one damn word about the weakened levees in New Orleans or terrorists flying planes into buildings or any of the crap that we actually should have been worried over.
For a relatively risk-averse person, this is tough, because I've got a finite amount of energy I can spend avoiding things that'll kill me. I made a partial list of things to avoid:
Clearly, I watch too much TV, but tonight's Alias confirmed my hypothesis: The entire Buffy/Angel cast is totally unwatchable outside of Joss Whedon's creations. (As opposed to the cast of Alias, which is totally unwatchable, period.) I include a chart for future generations to study:
- Nicholas Brendan on Kitchen Confidential: unfunny and unwatchable.
- David Boreanaz on Bones: phoning it in and unwatchable.
- Allyson Hannigan on How I Met Your Mother: unwatchable. Despite Hannigan, Jason Segal, and Neil Patrick Harris, this show still blows monkey chunks. I can't even begin to understand it.
- Charisma Carpenter on Veronica Mars: highly watchable. But also naked for most of her scenes.
- Kristine Sutherland in those commercials for Advil: unwatchable.
- I haven't seen James Marsters in Smallville yet, but seriously, it's Smallville.
- And tonight, Amy Acker continues J.J. Abrams' tradition of pissing me off with characters who lack any sort of wit, or personality, or more than three facial expressions. I'm seriously suspecting some sort of Jaybrams/Terry Cunningham mind-meld going on here.
I found this article on CNN.com about the epitome of arrogant bastard parents. The headline: Mom delivers 16th child, thinking of more. Apparently, Michelle and Jim Bob Duggan of Arkansas (where else?) are trying to populate the world with their own redneck race, which is, I don't know, a few steps back for mankind. How freaking narcissistic do you have to be when having sixteen miniatures of yourself running around your house still isn't life-fulfilling?
Meanwhile, the New York Times Style Section, also known as "Snobs on Parade" ran an article about parents who have this crazy compulsion to push their snotty little trust-fund kids around in this thing called a bugaboo, which is like if a stroller mated with an amphibious assault vehicle. Actually, this being New York, it's more likely that the parents paid for the bugaboo, but the Puerto Rican nanny is the one actually pushing it. The New York Times article saw the bugaboo as just another sticking point in the yuppie debate of starting a family vs. childless by choice, but that just glosses over the real problem with bugaboo parents: they're selfish and overwhelmed with a sense of entitlement, like they deserve a lucrative career, fabulous showpiece kids, and everybody else getting the hell out of their way. Hello, parents, here's something to teach your kids: the concept of bullshit.
Seriously, Michelle and Jim Bob, did you really need to have that sixteenth kid? You were already only devoting one-fifteenth of your time and energy to each of the progeny you've already spawned. Did you think that would spoil them? How about taking care of the kids you already have instead of contributing to our overpopulation problems.
I saw this woman on the train coming home with an iPod nano, and I'm there with my gigantic four-inch iPod and the two of us are totally jealous. It was my first time face-to-face with one of them, and I can't believe how tiny the iPod nano is. Pretty soon they'll be implanting the iPod zepto directly into your eardrum, and everybody with those annoying white buds sticking out of their ears can simmer with envy at technophiles having Maroon 5 blasted directly into their brains.
Apple will also make the "iPod zepto: U2 Special Edition" that also pumps a feeling of self-importance and a compulsion to exploit human suffering in the name of rock star fame. God, I hate U2. And Angelina Jolie.
On the other end of the spectrum, Apple will be putting out an eighty gigabyte iPod. Meanwhile my desktop computer only has a fifteen gig hard drive. Okay, Steve Jobs — game over. You win. I'd seriously like to meet the person who has trouble fitting all their music on the sixty gigabyte, fifteen thousand song iPod — that one guy in the world with fifteen thousand and three favorite songs.
The following does not necessarily represent the opinions and views of Starbucks, its partners, subsidiaries, or affiliates.
The Way I See It #36
Mother-love is not inevitable.
The good mother is a great artist ever creating beauty out of chaos.
--Alice Randall
Novelist, The Wind Done Gone and first black woman to write a No. 1 country song
Starbucks is putting these inspirational quotations on the back of their paper coffee cups. Here's today's heartwarming quote that came with my overpriced caffé latte
The Way I See It #58And then, there on the bottom of the cup, in tiny, tiny print, Starbucks' legal department weighs in: "This is the author's opinion, not necessarily that of Starbucks."
I have faith. Faith in our wondrous capacity for hope and good, love and trust, healing and forgiveness. Faith in the blessing of our infinite ability to wonder, question, pray, feel, think and learn. I have faith. Faith in the infinite possibilities of the human spirit.
--James Brown
Emmy-winning sportscaster and co-host of FOX NFL Sunday
I like the warning on the back of Johnson's Head-To-Toe Baby Wash.
safety tip: Keep out of reach of children.I should call up their product helpline and hassle them about this: "So I gotta wash the kid with this shit, but I can't get it near him. How exactly am I supposed to work this out?... Oh, no, I don't actually have children. Children suck."
Health care professionals say that something like one-hundred fourteen percent of Americans are chronically sleep deprived, and I'm one of them. Back in college, I got myself into a naughty mid-day napping habit that drives both Mom and me crazy. Mom hates how my perennial lethargy keeps me from achieving maximum productivity (and she's an elementary school art teacher, not a middle manager, in case you're interested) while I realize that I'm generally unproductive whether I'm sleeping or awake but I nonetheless find my dozing off depressing. Think about it: you're supposed to six to eight hours of sleep a night, minimum — which means if you're getting a full night's sleep each and every night, you're spending a quarter to a third of your life in bed. Twenty, maybe twenty-five years asleep total.
It would be nice, I have to admit, to run out of steam at the end of the day instead of in the middle, or to wake up refreshed like I went to sleep with a coffee IV stuck in my arm. I was actually tested for mono, for vitamin deficiencies, for weirdo thyroid problems and came back clean, so the next step was to spend a night in the hospital for a "sleep study," which is where I spent my last night.
It was... uncomfortable. In so, so many ways. Sleep studies take place in the nicest rooms in the hospital, with private bathrooms and full-size beds and a comfy recliner in the corner and a night-vision camera in the room. There's also an always-on microphone, and a nurse-technician who's got the most boring Friday night in history, watching and listening to me sleep. I worried I'd be caught cursing or masturbating in my sleep or something.
The whole sleep observation experience starts with electrodes: four on my legs, two on my chest, and about thirty all over my head. I include pictures so you can mock me. You can also make fun of my electrodes.
Then the technician tells me to fall asleep, which is tough because, first of all, it's not even eleven o'clock yet and, second, I HAVE A BUNCH OF WIRES STICKING OUT OF MY HEAD!!! They get tangled and hold me hostage in bed, and every few hours the technician reminds me over the intercom that I'm not sleeping too well. Gee, thanks. Did the EEG you glue to my skull tell you that? It's not an ideal way to get some shuteye.
Anyway, if I can my hands on that video of me asleep, I'll post some of the highlights, just in case your life is a little too exciting. It also makes a good cure for insomnia.
I'd like to introduce you to the most freaking ostentatious place ever born of the mind of man: ABC Carpet & Home in New York City. It's the place I go to when I need visual overstimulation because you're pretty much shrooming as soon as you walk in the door. I found out about this place freshman year of college, when I was living in a dim little cubbyhole where the nicest furniture were these Yaffa blocks Mom made me buy, and Yaffa blocks are like what Scandanavian rednecks use instead of stereo racks. They're modular, and they say, "I'm poor, but I'm not so poor that I'm putting my TV that works on top of a TV that doesn't work." 
And here I am at ABC, surrounded by all this baroque, super-expensive furniture and just downright puzzled, "Who is fucking insane enough to put this ugly-ass crap in their house?" It's not just the cost of the furniture and decorations, but then you'd have to pay off all your guests to stop asking you what the hell you were thinking.
Where else can you throw away a couple thousand dollars on a Vishnu idol, cause that'll show all those bastards in yoga class how spiritual you are? As if one sofa made from a petrified tree trunk wasn't enough, ABC has three for you to choose from. They run between six and eight thousand dollars, which is a lot to spend to have people sit on something uncomfortable while laughing at you. But there's nothing quite as gaudy as ABC's Adirondack and American Country line, at right. 
Here's a close-up of that chandelier. Yes, those are antlers. What is that???!!! Just in case the crazies Trading Spaces got to redecorate your house decide to go with a moose motif.
Dude, I must own this humpy cow. But I don't think it goes with my curtains...
Don't you love how the Channel 4 news had Doppler 4000, and then the Channel 2 news had to totally put them to shame with the brand new Doppler 2 Million radar? I don't get it. Channel 2 has to be aware that Channel 4 can just rename their radar the Doppler 4 Billion, and then Channel 2 will make a Doppler 2 Trillion and we'll have a local-news nuclear arms race to see who can give their radar a higher number. Eventually, someone's gonna wind up with Doppler Infinity-Zillion2 and then it's gonna be game over.
Here's my pet peeve of the day: fat people who take up more than their allotted eighteen inches of seat space on the subway. I need my square foot and a half of personal space. Like today, the ass sitting next to me — if he was any closer we'd be making out. Speaking of which, how come it's always a smelly dude next to me and never a hot chick? Or an average chick?
Until that happens, I'd like to see them install stainless-steel adamantium blades between the seats so we can start training people to keep their appendages to themselves. Cause what happens now is I just get passive-aggressive on my neighbors, like pretending that I have to stretch or something, and that never really works. Maybe if I did that, but stopped wearing deodorant, it would help.
I think it's about time I start finding some new places to get lunch. See, sometimes when I'm in the city, I pick up lunch at this place called F&B, which I usually describe as "if IKEA sold hot dogs." It's just on the far end of walking distance from work, and the food's pretty good and pretty cheap. The only problem is they're getting a little familiar with me — and that means they're getting a little too familiar with me, like the counter girl now sees me and she knows what I want and at lunch today she tried awkwardly to start up a conversation. This disturbs me on many levels.
First, I've been going to F&B since I was a college freshman, and the counter girl, (whose name may or may not be Patricia, so I'll just call her Patricia) has been there at least as long as I have. And I invariably get the same thing; I mean, maybe thrice in six years I did not get the chicken frites meal with pommes frites and a small lemonade (did I mention F&B is European?) and it's just today that Patricia's catching on? Boy, that sure makes me feel like a valued customer.
And second, I don't really like it when the staff all of a sudden gets friendly. That happened once before, at Columbia, with the cafeteria carving station guy Julio. Now, I like my meat, and frankly I think the hunk of cow or hunk of pig or hunk of fowl was the only thing they had in that cafeteria that didn't come straight out of a cardboard box, just-add-water. Suffice it to say, Julio saw me a lot, and he's a generous guy and all and this was before I had my current stunning physique so Julio started piling on the — crap, this is gonna come off dirty — extra meat. Cow or pig or fowl. And I'd thank him, you know.
Then one week, out of nowhere, he started telling me how he's gonna give me extra cow, pig, or fowl to "fatten me up." He'll "send me back home for the holidays all fattened up." Like, every day that week. And there was always coincidentally some junior varsity crew member standing right behind me in line, and Julio'd say to him, "I'm gonna fatten this guy up," and I started to become a little afraid Julio wanted to eat me.
I mean, it's bad enough these people spit in your food and everything....
The moral is: never get friendly with the people serving your meals, because they might let it slip that they're cannibals and then you'll no longer be able to eat dinner in ignorant bliss.
