Plan B

Stock it, or else.

Anybody who sticks it to Wal-Mart is okay in my book. Kristen directed my attention to this today, thinking I'd get all lathered up. Right now, I am too introspective to lather. Or, my lather is on the inside.

Corporate Update

Ugh. My boss just reminded me that the uber-boss of the uber-company that owns our little company is here to tell us about the state of our profits. It usually goes a little something like this:

Your Tiny Company earned a boatload of money this year since you all nearly went mad making that grammar book everyone uses. Our German newspapers continue to suck the bag, and we have a couple bestsellers in the works that will bring us more profits. We made millions of dollars last year, but we have given you shitty dental coverage and lower raises because, well, if it's good enough for the oil companies to screw consumers and employees while posting record profits, it's good enough for a publishing conglomerate.

This always sours my mood. Dammit.

The Breda's Back

Bad news on the C line, folks.

The awful Breda cars are back.

I'd seen them running along the tracks, without people in them, apparently to make sure they don't topple over. I can't say I didn't see it coming, but it doesn't mean I have to like it. These trains suck even when I'm not on them. I live on a part of the C line that the trains going inbound go downhill into an intersection, so when the light is red the Breda cars do that squealy breaking thing that I can clearly hear in my room. The older trains rumble, but that noise doesn't carry as well as the squealing does. These cars ruin my day when I'm getting ready for bed.

I think I need to live further off Beacon Street. You can't beat the access to the T, but the noise from the trains, cars and drunk people stumbling past my apartment isn't great. There are some places further off Beacon Street that seem like bucolic scenes in comparison. The happy calls of one child to another. The yips of small dogs walking along. Less drunk people. Sadly, most of these places are condos, so I'm out of luck until I marry rich. Or win the lottery. Or publish a bestseller.

The Breda cars do have one advantage-- people seem more willing to get out of the doors when you're trying to exit the train since it's a small step down. Unfortunately, this is offset by the fact that people who get on later clog the vestibule of the train, so you have to shove through twenty people in grey wool coats to get to the open door. I miss the way the seats were set up on the old train cars--it fits Boston quite well. Very few seats face each other. T commuters aren't there to meet people or chat. We want to get where we're going, iPods cranked, our faces buried in books or the Metro. The idea of trying to chat somebody up at 8:30am is not appealing.

Hallelujah

Finally, the other side of Providence is getting a commuter rail station.

Of course, by the time the State of Massachusetts, the State of Rhode Island and the MBTA get all their ducks in the proverbial row, I'll be able to afford a car and drive myself home. And that is a long, long, long time in the future. But I look forward to this great day when my mother needn't drive "through the city" to pick me up.

If You Feel, Like I Feel, Baby...

I am not good at doing laundry. This is not to say that I shrink things, or fry things, or mistreat my clothes. I just forget to do it until I'm in the too tight, too itchy, or too big underwear and wearing the socks that flow into the bottom of my shoe like water rolls down a hill. I meant to do a load of wash before things got out of control, but events this weekend kept me from the "laundry room" (read: a washer and a dryer for nearly forty people in my apartment) and this week is busy, so last night was the only time I had to dedicate to the arduous process of washing my clothes. I piled my clothes into my wheelie suitcase and trudged up the street to the laundromat.

I'd hoped that by waiting until Monday I would have avoided the weekend rush and I'd have my pick of the dryers and washers, but four of the twelve dryers were out of commission. Since there's no other laundromat nearby, I figured I'd have to suck it up and get to washing and wait around if I had to. I'd stopped at the gym before heading home, so it was late and I hadn't eaten dinner. I sat in the nearly-broken plastic lawnchair and waited for my wash to finish.

I called my Mom since I hadn't spoken to her in a while, and she caught me up on her work dramas and how her hip is doing. As I talked to her, a girl walked in and started her laundry. She was one of those women who dress really well in the hopes you don't notice she's short and squat. She had on a tan wool coat, black slacks, and diamond studs. She had the air of the rich girl who expects everything and everyone to fall at her feet, even though she's not attractive, nor has a particularly winning personality. That sounds cruel, but something about her just rubbed me the wrong way. I wrote it off as being really hungry, and kept talking to my Mom.

I use the semi-large load washers, so they took about forty-five minutes to complete the cycle. At about twenty minutes, I started scoping out the dryer situation to see which ones I could use. I usually divide my clothes into dark colors and lighter colors to keep the lint from being too obvious, but with the lack of functioning dryers and huge amount of very annoying people in the laundromat, it looked like I'd get only one.

The first load finished up. I threw my wet garments into the basket, shoving it forward at full force so the woman who looked like a Shape reader model wouldn't shove all her workout clothes into the dryer I'd had my eyes on. I tossed in my clothes and a dryer sheet and smugly loaded my quarters in.

My second load, however, still had five minutes to go. I hoped that someone would unload their stuff so I could keep my darks and lights from mixing, especially since the idea of lint-rolling my black velvet pants into wearable condition didn't strike me as much fun. I grabbed my clothes from the washer as soon as they were done, and headed for the functioning dryer that was empty. Unfortunately, Shape-model had made her claim on the bottom dryer, as a black track jacket that seemed to be identical to the one she was wearing was laying in the dryer like a murder victim.

"Son of a bitch," I muttered, feeling my crankypants come on. I opened the dryer with my lights in it, a flurry of socks and thong underwear raining onto the ratty-ass carpet, and tossed in the dark items. I picked up my clothes from the floor and closed the door. I threw in some more quarters, defeated. I went back to my lawn chair, keenly aware of the rumbling of my stomach. I considered running to Star Market and buying something to eat, but I didn't want to leave my suitcase unattended. So I sat, miserable, and read my book.

Then the annoying entitled girl came back, this time with her ugly boyfriend. Seriously. Ugly and annoying, the both of them. They stood in front of the dryers, and apparently the comingling of her jeans and his hoodie turned them on, because they kept schmoopily kissing and embracing in front of the dryers. They decided to get coffee. They came back. They sat on the folding table, she reading the JobFinder ads, him talking about his job. And I thought, why couldn't you have come and done this during the day, you unemployed, ugly bitch. My mood was not charitable.

Finally, ugly girl and ugly boy took their still-damp clothes out of the dryer, their pheremones getting the better of them, and they elected to go some and sate their base instincts. They left the JobFinder ad spread out like it was awaiting dog urine on the folding table, and I reassembled it, muttering "sloppy bastards." I don't like very many people when I'm hungry.

I collected my clothes, putting them back in my suitcase and wheeling them home. I preheated the oven and threw in some fish and ate a salad, and my mood improved greatly once my blood sugar was set to rights. And now none of my clothes stink, and I will smell like a clean sheet for the personal trainer I am meeting with today at the gym. I'm sure this can only be an adventure, since I generally get very nervous around the uber-fit types, and this girl is about 6'2 and weighs less than I do.

It's a lot like life...

So the dominatrix who was accused of chopping up one of her clients after he suffered a heart attack was found not guilty. Kinky people of the world, rejoyce!

But, seriously. Lady needs to follow up on the top protocol and make sure the bottom knows the safeword. Because there is no better time to use it than when having a heart attack. All I can imagine is one of those waivers like they have people sign at the gym:

I, Kinky Dude, promise I am in good health, and can be strapped to different surfaces, hit with various impliments, and have consulted with a medical professional before starting my kinky sex program. Please chop up my body into little bits in case of emergency, because I've seen Desperate Housewives and when the Missus finds out about this, I may as well never be found.

I'm seriously glad that most people avoided using this case to tisk-tisk about the sexual predilictions some people have and find this woman guilty because she does "dirty" things. Good on ya, jury. Bad on ya, prosecutor:

But it was Nelson's theatrical closing that provided the most dramatic moments of the trial.

The prosecutor pointed and hollered at Asher. He dumped a box full of hoods, collars, and paddles onto a table, and proclaimed that Asher was trying to protect her business.

"That's why she didn't call the police," he said.

With both hands, he reached back and clutched the top of a blackboard to simulate Lord being strapped to the rack.

He paused as his head hung forward as if to simulate Lord's alleged death.

Republican With a Soul, For Real

My Rhode Island homeboy Lincoln Chafee is voting against Sam Alito.

I can proudly say I voted for Lincoln. Good on you for thinking. Check this shit out:

"I am a pro-choice, pro-environment, pro-Bill of Rights Republican, and I will be voting against this nomination," Chafee said.

Awesome.

The Farmer Takes His Leave

Dear Dell Computers,

There are thousands of people in America who would really love those jobs you're sending to India. Maybe you'd like to keep them here? Oh, right, Americans expect good pay and healthcare. Carry on, then.

Sincerely,
Americans Who Don't Have Manufacturing Jobs Anymore

Ha. Ha. Ha.

Oh wait. Threatening to poison a Supreme Court justice isn't very funny.

When I am sad, and lament my existence on this planet, I try to remind myself that at least I am not Ann Coulter. I may be a miserable bitch at times, but I am not Ann Coulter. And that's something we all have. Except Ann Coulter.

1986

A visual representation of what 1986 looked like.

The Challenger was twenty years ago? Man, time flies. I was in kindergarten twenty years ago. My brother wasn't even a year old twenty years ago. Our house was being built twenty years ago. My Dad was alive twenty years ago.

I have now given myself a strong case of carpe diem. I am going to go quit my job and move to Australia.

I Bet He's Really Regretting that Title Now

Oprah gets her shitkickers on, and kicks James Frey into a Million Little Pieces. Ha ha. See what I did there?

I still stand by my assertion that memoir doesn't have to be 100% accurate to affect people. I think that you should come clean as soon as the facts are questioned, though, and James Frey didn't. He threatened to sue, he called the Smoking Gun "bullshit," and, the worst sin of all, he made Oprah look like an idiot. And Oprah isn't going to stand for that nonsense.

Whatever. He's happy, because everyone talking about his book is just going to make even more people want to read it than when Oprah just put her stamp on it. Oprah's happy because people are talking about her, and she got to drag Frey through the mud on national television. I'm happy, because dreamy Heath Ledger is on her show today talking about Brokeback Mountain and his cute baby and how much he loves Michelle Williams, which is fine with me, surprisingly, because I'd totally do Heath Ledger, but I also really like Michelle Williams.

Death by Flushing

As if any speaking Elmo character isn't scary enough, now they ask children "Who wants to die?"

Those kids are never going to be potty-trained now.

Not So Sweet Dreams

Good morning, everyone! I trust you are all well. I don't really have that much to say, which is odd given my prolific bent as of late. The world is kind of as it should be, I have a coffee, my hair, now washed, still looks okay, but not as good when the woman took 20 minutes to blow it out nicely (I have about 300 metric tons of hair on my head). I still like it.

I just joined a gym this week, after anguishing about how much fucking money it costs around here to join one. When I was with the Whatever, we'd planned on me joining his gym, which cost about forty bucks a month. Because it's in Dedham. I was going to join my roommate's gym, which is also downtown and was much cheaper than the one I ended up at, but it's a tiny basement gym in Downtown Crossing, which is in the opposite direction from my office. So I joined one in Back Bay, and will shell out seventy bucks a month for the next year to work out.

I'm not too upset about it, because the last gym I went to was in Brookline, but it was a teeny gym, and when they raised the rates for their shit gym I quit. It was a pain in the ass during baseball season to wait for a T I could cram myself into, ride out to Brookline, work out, then get home. So I decided to keep it in the Back Bay, which gets expensive. It sucks to pay so much, but I'm not one of those girls who joins a gym and never goes. I do enjoy working out. I feel more energetic, and while I don't lose much weight, I am more toned and feel better about my appearance in general. I also hope to stave off the arthritis that my Mom has just about everywhere in her body, so I can keep any joint replacement surgeries off until I'm actually elderly.

I joined a co-ed gym, which has it's pluses and minuses. A major plus, as Stephanie pointed out, is that you know guys who work out at a gym are at least making an effort to take care of themselves, so it's a good place to potentially meet people. I don't really dig the weightlifter physique, but I like a guy who's toned. I do it, you can do it too, gentlemen. No need to be an iron man, because God knows I don't look like a model in Shape magazine. But I try. A minus is feeling the need to not look like a complete schlub while exercising. When I went to a women's gym, I kind of didn't care what I wore. Now I have to at least try to match my shirt to my pants. Also, a lot of the girls at the gym with the dudes are Shape models. Oh well.

Anyway, what I'm getting to is that regular exercise has a huge effect on my mood, I'm realizing. This fall, I would fall asleep early, not wake up at all in the night, and wake up feeling tired. This may have been due to the drama with the ex, but I think if I was in shape I could have slept less and felt more rested. Then when I started exercising again (about a month ago) I started needing less sleep, and remembered my dreams more. It's bizarre, but I've been able to wake up and remember them with much more clarity. Which is good, when it's a dream that helps me sort something out or is pleasant. It is not good when it's a sad, scary dream like the one I had last night.

I dreamt that the boy and husband in the family I babysit for died, along with my brother. I don't remember how, but I remember being really upset about my brother dying (of course) and talking to my Mom about how he never really got started in his life, how he never got to do whatever it is he wants to do. I have dreams about my brother dying sometimes, and it always freaks me out. In college I had a very vivid dream about him dying, so vivid that I called him up the next day and told him we were hanging out. We went to the mall and had some Indian food, all stuff Sam likes, and in the course of the day he told me his toe was "weird." Turns out he had a severely ingrown toenail. Which isn't fatal, but if he'd let it go it would have been much worse. So I guess I've got to call the little brother later.

The most vivid thing I remember from my dream last night was walking into the kitchen of the Family's house, and seeing the kids' mom sitting at the table with her head in her hands. I told her I would do anything I could to help them out, and she just kind of half-smiled and said she'd be fine. It was so sad, and I remembered it as I was getting ready for work. To me, these are the most terrifying dreams–– the ones that seem like they could actually happen.

Anyway. That's all I've got for now. As you were.

All That We Can Leave Behind

Wow.

Let's think about the victims here.

Imagine you're a young, marginally handsome, successful young man who works for the Boston Red Sox. Imagine you work alongside another marginally handsome young man in this same organization. Your boss sits you down, tells you you're both promoted, hands you a comb and tells you to get ready for the media. You deal with Shaugnessy's whining, the photoshopping skills of the blog community, the collective "whatever" from within I-495. You sigh, wishing you were rolling in hypothetical offers of one-night stands and free drinks without needing to answer the question, "When's Theo coming back? For real?"

You buy yourself a boat, maybe get one of those low-interest credit cards from Home Depot and fix up the place in Newton a little bit. Maybe some bamboo flooring, a couple of nice Persian rugs. You notify your accountant that you've gotten a raise, and you roll over your 401k. You open a college savings account for your kid. Life looks good.

Then you have to start answering more phone calls from the old boss. He keeps calling in with suggestions. He drunk dials late at night, begging you to take him back. You get tired of it. You have persistent chronic headaches and take to drinking a vodka tonic before bed and therapy sessions to relax yourself. You begin to snap at people.

"When's theo--"

"Shut UP!"

"...ld centerfielder going to come get his stuff? Or should we just torch it?"

Then, a mere 44 days after your promotion, you get demoted back to your old job, the old boss comes in and gets a title promotion, and the free drinks and offers of sex dry up completely. Your dreams of bamboo floors and Harvard for your kids fade away, but the headaches remain.

It was a good run, Ben and Jed. Thanks for the memories.

Camera Phone Fun

So I finally got paid for writing the articles for InSite. Not in money, but in the next best thing: a gift certificate. The certificate was for an obscene amount of money to a salon, so I decided to let a professional color my hair and cut it, following only the stipulations that it be long enough to put in a ponytail and be extremely low-maintenance because I am a lazy bastard.

Behold, the results!



I took this one before I walked outside and had it blown all over the place.



This one is in my apartment, in the room with the best light I could find. Stupid camera phone.

I hate getting my hair cut. I love reading the crappy magazines (my Glamour reading was interrupted by the need to wash out the dye) but I hate the idle chit-chat with the person cutting my hair. I feel like I should be talking because this woman is putting chemicals on my head and wrapping them in little bits of Reynolds Wrap, but I don't know what to say. She asks me where I work. I answer. She asks me if I'm still in school. I answer. She asks me if I have any plans for the evening. I answer. I try my best to follow the Cosmo date rules— ask her open-ended questions so I don't have to carry the whole conversation, try to answer her questions in a way that she can keep talking, but it just kind of falters and I wish she'd give me the Glamour back and end the awkwardness. The woman who did my hair wasn't nasty, but I'm just not good at small talk. Talk, I can do, especially with people I know.

But, whatever. My hair is now cute and not a big heavy sack of nothing attached to my scalp, so mad props to the fine people at Amaci Salon for turning this lazy bastard into a cuter lazy bastard.

Pornification

A very interesting article on Boston.com about the pornification of American culture. Of note, this tidbit:

Even cooking shows on the Food Network -- the Food Network! -- contain distinct parallels with the cinematography, dialogue, and body language of pornography, according to an article wryly headlined ''Debbie Does Salad" in the October issue of Harper's magazine.

My Mom will tell you this is true. Giada De Laurentiis annoys the hell out of her, because, per my mother, "her boobs are always in the food." Giada bugs me because she seldom swallows the food she prepares. Watch her. She pops the tidbit in her mouth, and the camera pans away or they cut to a commercial.

"She's got a bucket behind that counter," my Mom says, disgusted. We both trust only chunky chefs like Paula Deen and Ina Garten.

This article poses a lot of questions and raises some good points about how the media has become so hyper-sexualized. I've been noticing it a lot lately, and it's especially depressing if you read craigslist for any amount of time. While that's not always the highwater mark of Boston society, it's depressing how many guys describe girls as having a cute ass or nice boobs, and as an afterthought say "and she seemed nice." There's a lot to attraction and pheremones and all, but should I feel bad because my chest doesn't make cleavage very easily? Am I at a disadvantage because I don't wear low-rise pants and barely-there shirts to bars?

I am lucky to have a mother who told me I was beautiful, and that my appearance isn't everything that I have to offer, even in light of this boob-centric society. She never called me too heavy, even when I was, and she offered me encouragement when I lost weight. With those strong messages from my mother, I'm pretty good at resisting the pressure. I dress well, but not slutty. What happened to mystery, the idea of making somebody work to see you without clothes on? Maybe I'm a sixty-year-old woman in the slightly paunchy body of a twenty-four-year-old, but it seems stupid. I just think about girls whose mothers made them insecure, girls who watched their attractive mothers diet themselves into bobbleheads, and then they themselves dieted themselves too thin. One girl I graduated with missed the ceremony because she was in the hospital with anorexia. The pressure for a woman to be just so in this society is unbelievable. I think the pressure is less conspicuous but still present for men, and in a few years it will become more prevalent.

Everybody just needs to have a beer and some fries and chill the hell out.

I'm a Dunkin Donuts Girl In a Dunkin Donuts World...

This is pretty funny. Universal Hub determines the center of Dunkin Donuts gravity in Boston.

This would be pretty amusing to do with Rhode Island, since it has the most donut stores per capita of any U.S. state. Too bad I am lazy.

Julie, Julia, and Amy's Opinions

I don't give up very easily. Whether it's a product of stubbornness, parking my pride in two spots so as not to get dinged, or just another quirk in my personality, I don't like putting something down or walking away from something I start. I may throw things, I may whine and complain endlessly, but odds are I stick it out until it's over.

I went to the Brookline Public Library last week to pick up The Red Tent. As always, I checked out the "Speed Read" section, which has new books that you can borrow only for a week so they rotate through faster and more people can read them. Usually these books are mysteries or chick lit, but one caught my eye. Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 recipes, One Tiny Apartment Kitchen. Sounds great, right? The story of a young woman sorting herself out by cooking the traditional recipes that a woman of her mother's generation made accessible to housewives in America. I wish I'd thought of it.

Well, frankly, I'm glad I didn't write it, because it has next to nothing to do with Julia Child, cooking, or learning anything. I'm about one hundred pages into the book and I hate it with a white hot passion. I feel like Simon Cowell, but I really, really hate it. Julie Powell's writing is disorganized and lacks originality. She uses clichés, and often inappropriately without comic effect (one example, "I love my husband like a pig loves shit. Maybe more."). I see what she's trying to do, but I can't stand it. Playing with cliché can be a fun literary exercise, but this just takes away from the point she's trying to make– that she loves her husband. Instead, my first reaction as a reader is to say, "Ugh. Lucky guy. ::eye roll::"

I also wish she'd stuck to the point more. In a chapter about finding a cow bone to get the marrow out of, Powell introduces a friend who offers to help her find the elusive bone. Instead of using neat tricks like dialogue to show us how she feels about her friend, or giving us her friend's backstory through dialogue with somebody, anybody, she goes on and on and on about how Powell feels about her. Which is fine in limited doses, but it takes the reader out of the immediate action of finding the bone and getting the hell on with the recipe, and I just want to flip the three pages (yes, three) ahead and find out what happens.

Many books use cooking to advance the plot and hold the story together effectively. The excellent book Like Water for Chocolate does this nicely. Not all of the action happens in the kitchen, but most of the action relates to some activity that main character, Tita, needs to do to complete a recipe. But what happens defines the characters, advances the plot, and keeps the reader interested. Powell just made me mad because she lends credencence to the argument that bloggers don't make good writers, which I desperately, desperately hope is not the case. I'm sure she doesn't care what I think since she's using her advance to fix up her apartment, but I had such high hopes from the concept that the author didn't deliver.

I kind of hope someone publishes a collection of Julia Child's letters or something, because I can't get enough of reading about her life. Any Amazonian-built woman from Wyoming who pulls a Felicity and goes to Paris to learn to cook and impress her man, but ultimately ends up with her own career is a story I want to know more about. The poorly written story of a frustrated actress in New York transforming her life through Julia Child's cookbooks is, apparently, not one I am interested in.

Bush and Pussies

George Bush is a pussy.

I'm not saying that lightly, nor to just get a rise out of any conservative viewers who stumbled on this site. He, along with most other American politicians, is a big, lazy, conflict-avoiding pussy. Yesterday was the 33rd annual March for Life rally in Washington, D.C. All this hullabaloo is to mourn the Roe v. Wade decision by the Supreme Court.

Since he was elected president, Bush has called in to this rally every year. Which is lame. If he wants to reach out and touch someone, fine. But if he feels passionately about an issue, which I'm sure Bush feels passionately about pro-life people because the polls tell him they are his voting base and the Bible tells him these people are right, he should show face. He should allow himself to be photographed in a sea of angry, hateful, insulting signs. Allow Time to run him on the cover, his squinty face next to a poster with a graphic picture of an aborted fetus. Don't half-ass it. If Bush wants to be Mr. Pro-Life President, do it. Don't just call up and leave a message. Bush is such a pussy he literally phones it in.

I'm surprised Hillary Clinton's "plantation" remarks haven't gotten her into more trouble, but I'm glad she said it. The wussification of politics is annoying at the least and disturbing at worst. A leader should be able to articulately stand by the issues they find important and mean it, not half-ass a reaction to satisfy one group and not actively piss off another group. I don't want abortion rights limited, but if Bush wants to advocate for that, he should show his face at such a large gathering of like-minded people. Maybe if someone charged the marchers $500 a head he'd attend next year.

Snow Daze

Boston.com has this photo essay of the gigantic blizzard that struck a year ago today, which I totally thought happened next month. I'll always remember that snowstorm with a sense of cognitive dissonance-- I'd just flown back in from Florida the night before after doing my first living in sin vacation with the Whatever. Kristen drove me to the hospital in the early blowing snow since I had a UTI that had me sobbing on the couch, and I spent much of the next day talking to her as she was snowed in in Weymouth, drinking cranberry juice, and hating the Whatever for still being in Florida, even if he was just with his older coworkers.

This morning's snowfall was cute, until it delayed my train, making it extra fun to support the old coot who decided to stand in the middle of the aisle and use my back as an extension for the handlebar I was holding. It was kind of pretty to watch-- the big fat flakes of snow falling when it's almost warm enough to rain, giving the view of the hotel across the street from my office the appearance of being inside a snowglobe. If we had ten inches, it would be annoying, but since there isn't much on the ground, it's nice.

It is not, however, allowed to snow on March 1. It will be a beautiful, warm day with light winds both here and in New York so we can make it to Italy with a minimum of fuss. After that, it can snow all week so Logan can't even be located on Google maps as far as I'm concerned. I'll buy a phone card in Venice, call the office and say that, shucks, I can't make it back to the States with all the snow, and I'm going to go sip some wine and eat gelato until I puke.

Italian lessons still proceed slowly. Muzzy DVD and book is on reserve at the Brookline library. Hopefully the seven-year-old finishes up with it pretty quickly because I could really, really use that.