February 2006 Archives

Today is THE day for Catholics to get wild before the dullness of Lent kicks off with Ash Wednesday. Even Protestant Britney Spears got into the action, surprising some little girls on Good Morning America with brunch and a shopping trip. Okay, I hate myself for knowing that. How about this example: even people in St. Louis are having a Mardi Gras, which Ryan and Paddy did not attend because their mothers raised them not to give girls shiny things just to see their boobies.

I never really got all that wild for Fat Tuesday, but it's my first year outside of Catholic school, so I kind of miss the discussions of "What are YOU giving up for Lent?" Not that I ever really gave anything up, but I discussed it a lot.

Mainly, girls just used Lent as a diet, like, "I'm not eating potato chips or fries or burgers or ice cream or candy or bread or meat. For Jesus." In grade school I would always give up something like being mean to my brother, and that would last until about 5 minutes after we got home from school when I'd have to smack him up again. (Love you, Paddy).

This year I plan to try and fail to give up Peanut M&Ms for 40 days. I know it seems lame to the average person, but the average person doesn't have the 16-year-old girls at the grocery store say things like, "Just M&Ms and Chips Ahoy again?" while they're ringing them up. It's more about the loss of that reputation than the loss of any weight, although Gil would concur that I most likely have eaten my weight in Peanut M&Ms during the past 4 years.

So what did I do for Fat Tuesday? Did I sit in a bathtub filled with ice cream while I was hand-fed deep fried M&Ms by chocolate elves who regenerate if you bite off one of their hands or ears? No, but I did watch a Nova special about a 20th Century polar expedition that ended in Syphillis-infected Inuits, an icy grave, and possible cannibalism.

I had told Ryan that I was going to pursue the ideal weekend. To me, that means an equal measure of sleep, leisure, reading, television, food, and adventure. I'm not sure how to scale this past weekend.

Saturday morning, I went to the library to sort through the small number of books that are in English and not romance novels. I had taken a brief hiatus from books, from most TV, and from my usual addiction to nearly all types of media. I had overconsumed, and felt so full of other things that there was no room left for me. But I'm back and I'm over it and I'm hungry again.

Saturday afternoon Reena came over from Spa-Ha for some hookah, Taste of the Tropics, and Target. Besides the fact that the Queens Blvd. Target is utter and complete madness, meaning women who are trying to push both carts and baby strollers through the shampoo aisle, I pulled a Nora** and left all my purchases on the train with Reena. I didn't even notice until we had separated and I shouted, "I FORGOT MY TARGET BAGS!" To which the man next to me responded, "No English."

On Saturday night, we headed out to spend the money that David's parents had sent us for a "new job celebration dinner." We had every intention of going into Manhattan, but the icy winds deterred us after a block and we dipped into Churrascaria Tropical, a Brazilian Steakhouse in our neighborhood. We didn't know what to expect, but were thrilled to find that although the restaurant is menu-less, the basic theme is that you sit down and are served as many cuts of meat as you can imagine until you tell them to stop.

I stopped at 10 servings of various meats, but David accepted several more before we discovered that the meat will stop coming if you just turn over this little block on the table so that the red side is facing up. 20-odd dollars for an amazing selection of steaks and other meaty delights was a steal of a deal, although you can't really put a price on your arteries. From now on, I'm on all all-carb diet.

Saturday night was capped off with a "tour of the city," a gesture from our Russian, cab-driving neighbor who wanted to re-pay us for checking his mail and apartment while he looked for a new apartment in Flordia, away from what he calls, "this classless City of wickedness and corruption." Apologies to people who have heard this story already, but the tour lasted 3 out of the 4 hours that he had (shockingly) intended it to last, and after a while I started to wonder if I was ever going to see my family or even the outside of a cab again. A well-intentioned gesture, but one that screwed with my sleep cycle and my sanity.

Sunday I found myself quite literally sweating like a whore in Church as our priest gave a Homily about marriage and how the relationship between God and his people is like the relationship between a Groom and his Bride, and how the "COMMITMENT OF MARRIAGE AND THE CONJUGAL RELATIONSHIP IS HOW GOD'S LOVE IS MANIFESTED IN PEOPLE." The Priest actually spoke in all caps while staring directly at me as I fiddled with my Claddagh ring, which plays a convincing role as a wedding band when I am propositioned by the drunk and/or indigent on the subway or street.

"Just act casual," I told David, who was flipping through the hymnal. "We don't have to, remember? Didn't you say that you were sure they would think we were just friends?" He was referring, of course, to the time when the Priest spoke in all caps and stared at us to encourage everyone there to register with the parish after Mass. I had struggled with our application and whether or not we should fill out two with the same address or not. Finally I had decided that yeah, it'd be fine to put both our names on one application. We could be roommates. Or friends. Or, in a move that would be even more offensive to my father than our current situation, a married couple where I kept my own last name.

I had intended to go to CBGB to see fellow Islander Chaz Kangas rock the mic, but I felt like zero dollars and besides, David had already made a commitment to Stacy Keibler of Dancing With The Stars. Judge me silently, but just know that when you don't have cable, you begin to watch equal amounts of PBS and bad network reality shows.

I couldn't sleep last night, perhaps because Stacy came in 3rd and I was upset over the injustice of it all. See? Told you I was hungry again.

Only in New York can a small and overpriced apartment look this inviting.

This view, of course, means standing in the kitchen.

Which is also the living room

And the guest bedroom

And the office

And the TV room.

I've had some interested hairstyles in my 23 years.

From the adorable:

To the adorable:

To the boring (but suitable for my hair texture and facial features):

To the poorly chosen:

To the drunken:

And now this:

This, apparently, is what the Jersey-banged lady who created this monster interpreted as a sideswept cheekbone-length bang. I tried to side sweep them after the fact, but they're too short and I look even weirder. A true waste of $5 if I've ever seen one.

I was watching American Idol last night (I know, okay?) when I saw Kevin.

Who bears a striking resemblance to Ryan

There are a few explanations for this:

1) Ryan, your parents have been hiding your little brother from you.

2) Ryan, you fathered a child at age 7.

3) Ryan, your dad has another secret family. Or your mom does.

4) Ryan, you could have been the next American Idol!

I had a whole post up yesterday about my new bangs (which are offensively short) and then the Internet disappeared and I was left with the little pinwheel spinning away in the middle of my screen. As Ryan said, life in New York City is one giant thrill ride. If I'm not writing about my bathtub I can always rely on my hair for a solid post.

Yesterday, David said something along the lines of "Why can't you just be a lady?" Now, before you gasp in horror at the sexism of it all, let me assure you that my football-star boyfriend took plenty of Gender Studies courses and is constantly challenging hegemonic masculinities. I don't know what that means exactly, but hello! He does the dishes! To give the story some context, I think at the time he said this, I had just finished a story about how G and I had to flee from a homeless woman who was spitting on random women on 42nd street, and how I wasn't sure if it was appropriate or not to dropkick a mentally ill person after she spit in your hair. I pose the same question to you.

I was going to argue that I am a lady, a ladies lady, I wear lots of lip gloss and I own plenty of shoes with impractical heels. I'm polite to the elderly and I tolerate children. Then I remembered that people find my blog by searching for things like "shit talking women" and I realized I didn't have a leg to stand on. So I instead told him a story about how during my 6 months in London I always wondered why I never saw anybody barf in the subway, but I once saw a pile of human poop in one of the stations.

That's when David came up with this riddle:

"What makes a football player look sensitive and is more offensive than a frat boy?" "You. " {Meaning me}

Today I will extoll the virtues of the three-day weekend. Just when you think Sunday is your last day of rest, your last day to sleep past 9am and eat ice cream for every meal, BAM! No work on Monday. So far I've taken a long walk with my neighbor, had a lovely brunch, taken a short trip to Brooklyn, and accidentally punched David in the face hard enough to make him say, "OW! You just punched me in the forehead!" Whoops.

Now I'm going to take this big dumb animal to get some ice cream and take some photos on this beautiful, sunny, frigid day.

The reason that the bathtub wouldn't drain was because the drain was closed. Not with hair and gunk as I had originally thought when I poured a bottle of Liquid Plumber into the tub, but closed as in intentionally meant to let the water pool.

We didn't know this because the drain is controlled by this antiquated level hidden next to the sink. The problem solved itself when I knocked into it and the tub drained itself. Until that exact moment I had no idea that it was even possible to take a bath in our bathtub. Not that I ever would.

Current or future employers may not want to read this, but I'm not sure if I would describe myself as a natural-born problem solver (although my performance yesterday during Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune would indicate otherwise). Sometimes, I don't want to jump right in there and fix things. Sometimes, I want to sit back and see how things play out.

Like our bathtub, for example, which is right now filled with about 8 inches of soapy water from my last shower, which I took yesterday at 4 pm. I'm under the impression that when the water CAN go down the drain, it WILL go down the drain. Why do we as humans feel this need to force the water to adhere to our standard of behavior? Sometimes, it is in the nature of water to just sit there.

But really, that stuff is disgusting. I offered to call the super, but like people insist we need to change our dependency on foreign oil, David is adamant that we change our dependency on our foreign landlord, so I put away my cell phone and watched him shove a wire hanger down the drain for 30 minutes.

18 hours later the bathtub is still filled with cloudy water, and I'm deciding to make my move. A secret phone call to Ra'Shede The Super and a secret trip to Rite Aid for some Liquid Plumber.

Tonight I had the unfortunate experience of watching a rerun of Trading Spouses. It was the much-publicized episode where the "God Warrior" goes to the hippie household and declares it so ungodly that the mere smell of their hippiness causes her to dry heave in the bushes while the hippie offspring watch in amusement. What bothered me most about the entire show, besides the enormous gap in this woman's teeth, was when the hippie wife was interacting with the God warrior's friends. The conversation went a little bit like this:

Lady: So what is your spiritual history?

Hippie: Well, I was a Catholic until I was 8. And then my family became Unitarians.

Lady: So what DO you believe?

Hippie: That we're all one. We're all the same and all important.

Lady: Even the rapists, and the terrorists and the prostitutes? Then you're not a Christian.

Um, really?

I'm not a hater of girls. In fact, I usually don't like girls who say they hate girls. To me, that signifies that you are probably the worst kind of girl, and therefore I hate you. Still, during a shit-talking lunch session with Galina and Reena, picking apart the wardrobes, personalities, and general appearances of every female we know in common, it hit me: man, I'm terrible.

This thought came out of my mouth as, "I would never be able to date another girl!" to which the Russians responded, "Oh my GOD I know! We'd tear each other to pieces!" Now, I believe that you can fall in love with anyone, regardless of their sex or gender, that love is something that just happens to people who are open to it. That said, the logistics of an actual relationship working out between two women of my disposition are daunting at the very least.

One thing that I like about David, and men in general, is that when I say something like, "I need to wax my eyebrows," his general response is something along the lines of, "what?" If my outfit isn't spot on, if my shoes are totally wrong for the outfit, if I look a little fat in my swimsuit, if I'm generally not the picture of perfection I'm sure that he isn't noticing. Or at the very least he keeps his judgments silent and incredibly undetectable.

God forbid I would end up with a woman even remotely like myself, and we would engage in a lifelong mental battle over eye makeup and push-up bras. I think the constant effort to outfierce each other would end in a murder-suicide involving clutch purses and age-defying moisturizer. A real nightmare. Although, it would be nice to date someone who understands why we don't wear muscle shirts. EVER.

A lot of people (okay nobody) are wondering why I haven't been filling out the little categories at the bottom that tell everybody what I'm listening to, reading, and eating.

Well, lately I've been listening to nothing. I've retired the iPod, I don't own a radio, and since I don't have MTV (which never played videos anyway) I'm pretty much musicless. I listen to my own frenetic thoughts, and that's enough for me.

As far as reading, I've discovered that my local library has more DVDs than books. Not even good DVDs. I mean, there are books in the library, but the few that are in English are cheap sci-fi paperbacks or Tom Clancy novels. And I don't do Clancy.

Eating is business as usual. Last night I came home and made a pastrami sandwich with spicy mustard and swiss cheese. I followed this with peanut m&ms in such a volume that I had to dump some of them in the trash to avoid eating them. This was followed with the strange choice of homemade oatmeal with brown sugar and walnuts. Bringing the evening home was a Chipotle burrito, a token of David's affection lovingly brought home cold in a brown paper bag.

Satisfied?

Today I used my lunch break to go on a leisurely walk wiith Galina. I was enjoying the thaw, particularly the fact that the sun and the City of New York teamed up to remove all snow from Midtown, when a giant drop of water fell from a building right into my left eye. Now forget for a fact that my eyelashes failed to do their one and only duty (besides being long, thick and pretty) and didn't do anything to protect my eye from said drop.

Usually I wouldn't care, but this isn't just any water droplet, it's a New York City water droplet, and it's probably filled with pigeon shit (which I know from the ads in the subway for the tv show Dirty Jobs carries 60 diseases) and car exhaust and Lord knows what else. G immediately suggested taking preventative penicillin.

This City has made me such a germophobe. Maybe it's riding the subway packed thisclose to people who are coughing and breathing all up on me. Maybe it's touching metal surfaces on the subway that I just KNOW are teeming with bacteria. Maybe it's all those damn pigeons. I haven't always lived like this, you know. Hand-washing wasn't always my first order of business after entering a new building. I used to live by the ten-second rule. Hell, even the 30-second rule. Okay, I used to eat food that I found on the ground. At least in my own house. Now, any food that even thinks about touching my floor goes immediately in the trash because I can't remember where I sprayed for roaches.

You can imagine how hard this has been for David, a boy who eats his own scabs. One day he was aimlessly playing with my umbrella (the large, old fashioned kind with a long tip to be used for strolling, like a pimp cane) and absentmindedly put the tip of it into his mouth as he was talking. It was Operation Shock and Awe: NYC. When I managed to tell him that the umbrella tip had been touching down all over the city, including the floor of the subway, he ran to the sink to gag and rinse faster than I have ever seen a man move.

Oddly, I've been pretty healthy the entire time I've been here. My theory is that being constantly bombarded with other people's sneezes and hacking coughs makes your body stand up and say "Oh hell no! You think I'm about to be laid out by the common cold? Not gonna happen. It's gonna take some muthafucking bird flu to bring me down!" Which is great, because I probably got bird flu in my eye from that damn water drop.

If I haven't made it clear that I have the best family in the world...go here.

I love my Momma.

My blog is #1 for the following searches:

Fat girl with donut attached to her head.

Ask me about my explosive diarrhea t-shirt.

Pictures of animals talking.

Why? I don't know. I was hoping my blog would be #1 for something like:

Skinny pretty rich girl.

Or something like that.

As my big sister asked as a child, “Why are all songs about love?” Well, I don’t know the answer to that, you little shrew, but I do know that it makes for some good listening. So I’m going to share with you some of my favorite love songs. Some of them are sad, some of them are stupid, some of them may make you want to profess your love for me. But please, say it with money.

Now, for the record, this is not a definitive list. These aren’t the most romantic songs, or the best songs, just songs I like and remembered at this moment on this day. So if I left something off it was just to save you the labor of reading more lyrics than you would possibly want to type.

Everyone knows it takes some serious shit to impress a Minnesotan when it comes to winter. Well, consider me impressed, New York. The snow started mildly, during a quiet evening at the Olive Garden in Times Square. I know, I know. It was a labor of love and breadsticks for my hungry boyfriend.

I fell asleep to this:

This was my first foray into shooting in night vision. Forgive me, I'm no Paris Hilton.

And I woke up to this:

My neighbor's yellow cab. He's not going anywhere.

My other neighbor's bike. Also, not going anywhere.

Because most conversations on the subway, in the elevator, or in the offie are started by mentioning the weather, all I've heard about for the past few days is the impending "Nor'easter" that is set to hit New York. People are buzzing about the potential of real, actual snow hitting the city.

What they fail to realize is that they are speaking to someone who goes unfazed by 8-12" of snow. I am the baby who was born on a firetruck* when the ambulance was unable to get to our home in Minneapolis. I am a girl who trick-or-treated in drifts up to my 10-year-old waist. I am a girl who used to drive to high school with my fingers frozen to the steering wheel because the car couldn't even think about heating up until I had actually pulled into the school parking lot.

Right now Channel 7 is on something called Storm Watch, interviewing people on how they feel about the potential snowstorm. I'm a winter baby. A winter child. I love to see my breath in the air and feel the freezing wind whipping against my face, if only because it gives me something to complain about, or something that proves my innate toughness. Plenty of people have been through winter, but winter as a Minnesotan knows it has no comparison, except for people who live in Wisconsin, Iowa, the Dakotas, and posibly Michigan. After a winter where I more than once went outside wearing only a sweater, I feel ready for some weather drama. Bring on the snowflakes. Let winter ring.

I'm known for my great taste in men. Really. Jonathan Taylor Thomas, Gene Weaver, Andy Hannan, David Coyle, Derreck Robinson...but lest you think I'm only interested in former teen heartthrobs, 4th grade boyfriends, unrequited grade school crushes, and massive high school football players to let you in on one of my sort-of secret crushes.

You know Doug Benson from Best Week Ever (or any other Vh1 show where they have funny people making comments on random things), from I LOVE MOVIES! on www.bobanddavid.com, and from the Marijuana-logues. Or maybe you really know Doug Benson, in which case put in a good word for me.

Why do I have such an intense crush on Doug Benson? Why would I hands down choose him over Brad Pitt and Joaquin Phoenix? Because on more than one occasion I have read I LOVE MOVIES and snorted water through my nose while at work. Because he is the best part of Vh1 (besides Flava Flav). And because I'm pretty sure that he could make anybody pee their pants. I would in fact challenge somebody to try NOT to pee their pants when watching Doug Benson, because when I had cable I was in need of adult diapers.

So Doug, if you're interested in courting me, you can fight Paul F. Tompkins for my affections. He and David Cross are already engaging in a battle of wits, jokes, and shenanigans to win my hand.

Sent with High Urgency, from a woman whose main concern is how the coffee break room is set up and maintained:

Subject: Sugar Bowl

Whoever removed the sugar bowl from the Kitchen on the 14th floor please return it immediately. If you needed to use it for something, there are plenty of bowls, vases, etc in the closets that you could use.

The sugar bowl (really a vase), was replaced mysteriously with a basket today. I noticed, sure, if only because I didn't have to try to shove my hand into a VASE for a sugar packet. This email was sent to BOTH company branches that occupy this floor. Including VPs.