Accismus

Two weekends ago, my friend and I were on our way into the city, when we saw lights in the distance from Bedfort Avenue (where we’d been eating Thai food).  We walked down to the lights, and found a fairly large fair!  I’d stumbled on this fair the year before, as well, but hadn’t known what it was.  Apparently, it is the Feast of Our Lady of Mt. Carmel and San Paolino, a 12-day festival that happens every July.  That would explain all the Italians.

Entering the fair...

Crowds at the fair.

A pretty big fair, too - it spread off in all directions.

There was everything you look for in a fair…rides:

This ride spins everyone around very quickly.

…guys grilling meat…

Meat!

…women frying zeppole…

This lady was upset at me for taking her photo.

…patriotic frozen drinks…

Red, white and blotto!

…souvenirs…

Not sure what any of these are.

…tasteful novelty Ts for i bambini….

Pity the poor child.

…games, where you can win a half-dead goldfish in a Ziplock baggie…

Chuck's Live Fish

…firefighters, lest things get out of hand…

In addition to these firefighters, there were many groups of funny cops standing around, but they told me that if I took their picture, they would confiscate my camera.

…and garbage, without great piles of which no street fair in July in NYC would be complete…

Smells better than the zeppole!

…and finally, bizarre religious iconography!!

Giant, garish, totem-pole-like thing.

Man in a boat. (Don't be immature.)

Now, according to this video that my roommate found on Gothamist, these two religious icons are stars in a ceremony, in which they are lifted by gangs of fellows and danced toward each other, to the tunes of the Rocky soundtrack.  Please watch the video – it is something else.  Unfortunately, we did not witness this spectacle.

After exploring the street fair, we went out a-drinking in the East Village, after which we thought it would be good to get Pommes Frites.  Apparently, everyone else thought so, too.

Mmmm...Belgian fries up ahead.

We couldn’t find a handy stoop to eat them on, but luckily the nearby Max Brenner’s was closed, and someone had left some of the tables out!  We spread out our fare and felt very clever.

Sidewalk dining at 3:00a.m.! No wait.

The next night, I went to see Jigsaw Soul, a local band that always provides a giant, multi-media performance experience.

Jigsaw Soul

The audience.

The Jigsaw Soul dancers.

Shadow visuals.

Choreographed keg cup stacking.

One of several giant papier-mache bird heads.

More visuals.

After the show, we were famished.  Time for shawarma and falafel!

Mmmm, gyro-loaf!

After that, it began pouring, so we went over to Washington Square Park to watch the band and friends play dodgeball in the fountain.

Rainy Washington Square Park.

Hipster swimming pool.

It's all fun and games till someone loses a contact.

The next day, I was pretty tired.  I went for a long, lazy Sunday walk, over the nearly deserted Williamsburg bridge.

Bike and pedestrian lane.

After that, I ate a massive cup of ice cream, but I did not choose to document that with photographic evidence.  A pretty good weekend, overall.

Today in the park, I saw a pigeon spot a Ritz cracker lying in the middle of the path. This was a big, fat glossy pigeon, and he began pecking at the cracker. Presently, a smaller, darker pigeon ran up and tried to get a peck in. Pigeon A attacked Pigeon B with a flurry of feathers and they went beak-to-beak. Pigeon A won, and went back to pecking at the cracker. Another small black pigeon ran up, and there was another fight, with Pigeon A winning. After that, Pigeons B and C lurked around the cracker waiting for an opening while Pigeon A strutted in tight, little circles around the cracker’s perimeter, puffing out his chest and making proclamations. Eventually, he went back to pecking at the cracker, and before long, his beak speared it. He shook his head from side to side to dislodge the cracker, and it flew off some distance. The pigeon looked for it anxiously, as did Pigeons B and C.

At this point, a baby ran down the sidewalk, scattering the pigeons. The baby found some object wrapped in foil and put it in his mouth. I looked around for someone to intervene, and saw the baby’s mother running over. She chased the baby off down the sidewalk, yelling something in Polish that was probably, ‘Spit it out right now!’ Meanwhile, the fat pigeon found the cracker again, and was fighting over it with the two smaller pigeons. He sunk his beak into one of the smaller pigeon’s wingpit, and the bitten pigeon squawked and shimmied sideways, flapping its wing wildly against the fat pigeon’s head. Right that this moment, a tiny brown sparrow swooped between the fighting pigeons and the third pigeon who was hunkering to make another break at the cracker, snatched up the cracker in its beak and attempted to fly off. You could just tell how smart it thought it was by the set of its tailfeathers in flight. Unfortunately, the cracker was too big for it to fly with in a balanced way, and it was forced to land several times to rearrange its grip – the three outraged pigeons giving full, waddling chase. Finally, the sparrow managed to get the cracker to the grass, where it nestled down and became camouflaged. The pigeons went all over the place looking for it, and it worked at the cracker as quickly as it could.

I wish that was the end of it, but at some point when I wasn’t looking, the fat pigeon got the cracker back. The sparrow flew off like a shot, and there was the fat pigeon, puffing and proclaiming and strutting in tight little circles in the grass, while all manner of other pigeons made runs at the cracker. The pigeon kept battering everyone who got near, then took hasty pecks at the cracker, leaving off in time to attack each new intruder – he would even take on three adversaries at once.

I hate that Pigeon A won in the end. He was one fat, shiny, self-congratulatory, greedy, entitled jerkface, and as I sat watching him guard his meal, I wished harm upon him.

My current position on this is, I eat meat and probably always will, and I don’t feel much compunction about it, but I don’t approve of needless cruelty and suffering for animals raised for consumption. While I don’t make much effort to curtail my consumption of animal products, neither would I go to bat for it – if meat were unavailable, I wouldn’t eat it. Those of us lucky folk in the developed world have an abundance of food these days, and all questions of the historical food chain aside, we don’t need to eat animals to survive anymore. Food is not that important and I don’t see meat-eating as somehow essential to my character or inheritance. So, if humane conditions on farms, and in dairies and slaughterhouses and so forth, led to less available and pricier meat, I would think it a worthwhile sacrifice. I would love to know that any animal-derived product I bought had never been the cause of pain and misery to any living creature at any stage of its growth, manufacture and transport – and hell, let’s extend that wish to all clothing, electronics, home furnishings and so forth – and if that guarantee meant that instead of piles of affordable goods to choose from, I had a smaller selection of pricier items, I’d happily make the trade-off and quit inadvertently subsidizing and profiting from exploitation and suffering.  I just don’t want to have to work at it.

The more we learn about the evolution of our species, the more difficult it becomes to draw a firm and absolute line between humans and other animals. Apparently, the latest word is we’re closer to dogs than chimps, which may go some little way toward explaining why we treat dogs like they’re people:

The marketing folks of the pet industry, in fact, use the term “humanization” to explain their good fortune. The pet owners driving the growth, many of them baby-boom empty-nesters, aren’t satisfied with shopping for their pets as animals. They’ve promoted them to junior humans, entitled to the same concern for health and happiness and company. Nearly half of pet owners in one survey say their animal sleeps in their bedroom (which probably explains the boom in the grooming business) and the most popular names for pets—Max, Chloe, Bella—sound a lot more like babies than the Spots and Fidos of yesteryear.

While the pet industry may be recession proof, we do not apparently ascribe the same importance to zoos, which have in fact declined in society’s estimation, at the same time as house pets have risen:

A lot of people wonder how much the current economic downtown resembles that of the Great Depression. One big difference comes in the support of zoos. In the ’30s, the institutions received significant support from Roosevelt’s Works Projects Administration. Artists created advertisements encouraging the public to visit zoos, and new buildings and exhibits sprung up in zoos across the country. St. Paul’s Como Park Zoo, for example, came out of the Depression with a bear grotto, monkey island, barn, and main building, thanks to the WPA.

Now, however, any allocation of funds to struggling zoos is immediately decried as wasteful spending. (I’m not saying I disagree.) And apparently, we haven’t been doing such a hot job of tracking and protecting endangered species, either.

Some feminists have long drawn parallels between mankind’s entitled disregard for animal welfare, and man’s viewing of women as an obligated sex class – both cases involve one group defining itself by its ownership of and right to use another group. Typically, these arguments are attempts by animal rights activists to persuade women of the importance of respecting all life as autonomous; PETA, on the other hand, offensively uses images of degraded women to market their animal rights agenda to men. (To me, the first is a stretch; the latter, an outrage.) Here’s Twisty on this:

The parallels between the myth of the happy hooker and the myth of the self-sacrificing meat animal are legion. . . . Both represent the privileged class’s celebration of itself and its contempt for anything it happens to debase in the course of its daily pillages. And the myths about oppressed individuals choosing to serve the vulgar interests of their oppressors have been created to allow the dominant culture’s beneficiaries to sleep at night.

Actually, these comparisons predate feminism:

A distinguished philosopher, Thomas Taylor, reacted to Mary Wollstonecraft’s 1792 call for “the rights of woman” by writing a mocking call for “the rights of brutes.” To him, it seemed as absurd that women should have rights as that animals should have rights.

(from the Kristof article discussed below)

Really, though, we all use animals to serve our purposes, even if that only involves misinterpreting canine affection as familial love, which, while not likely to cause any duress to the animal in question, might be nauseating to other humans.

But despite the many persuasive arguments for prioritizing the ethical treatment of animals, I can’t seem to work up much steam over animal rights. I know that worthy causes need not compete with each other, and that the way we treat animals is part and parcel of our overall attitude toward (and stewardship of) life on this planet, and so animal welfare is an integrated part of everything else in our long march toward a more advanced society. But at the same time, I care more about starving babies and enslaved women than tortured pigs and cows. (And by “care about”, I of course mean “think, read and blog about.” Not “donate to” or “campaign on behalf of.”)

Luckily, while my capacity for caring may be limited, no wee chicken is beyond the reach of the sheltering arms of my favorite journalist, Humanitarian Hero-at-large, Nicholas Kristof, who recently took a break from his usual coverage of the abuse, poverty and disease of unfortunate humans to pen a column on animal welfare:

One of the historical election landmarks last year had nothing to do with race or the presidency. Rather, it had to do with pigs and chickens — and with overarching ideas about the limits of human dominion over other species. I’m referring to the stunning passage in California, by nearly a 2-to-1 majority, of an animal rights ballot initiative that will ban factory farms from keeping calves, pregnant hogs or egg-laying hens in tiny pens or cages in which they can’t stretch out or turn around. It was an element of a broad push in Europe and America alike to grant increasing legal protections to animals.

Let’s hope there’s more of this, and that “guilt-free” food will come to mean something more significant than “low-calorie”.

I am a fan of the singular ‘they,’ but some people get very heated about its use.  They think that it’s incorrect, and that its increasingly widespread acceptance is yet another example of ridiculous PC capitulation to craaazy feminists, etc., etc., and that there’s no real reason that ‘he’ and ‘his’ can’t be used to refer to groups of men and women.  On the other hand, there are also plenty of people who think using ‘they’ is totally legitimate and sometimes necessary, because using the masculine pronouns for mixed groups can be confusing.  I bring all this up because I just came across a sentence in a Richard Bausch short story that completely illustrates why we need the singular they.  The story is about a teenage boy, his mother, and his aunt all spending Christmas together.  Here is the sentence:

They spent the early part of the evening wrapping presents for the morning, each in his own room with his gifts for the others…

Again, this sentence is referring to two grown women and a teenage boy.  How much less confusing and disorienting would be:  ‘…each in their own room with their gifts for the others….’

While reading this story, I enjoyed a Naked juice drink.  Naked juice claims to use a pound of fruit per bottle, and on the side of the label, it lists the fruits included.  This particular bottle lists:  3/4 peach, 1/2 mangosteen, lots of yummy white grapes, 2 3/4 apples & a hint of lemon.  Of course, by “lots of yummy white grapes,” what “they” mean is “this juice is about 98% concentrated grape juice.”  A quick glance at the ingredients list confirms this.  Which is fine – I knew I was drinking juice from concentrate, and this is noted on the front of the label.  But what’s so annoying about the “lots of yummy white grapes” language is how condescending it is.  It’s like the Naked juice people know that the Achilles heel of their all-natural, whole-fruits juice packaging is that there’s concentrated juice in there, but rather than just not emphasize that part of it, they highlight it with a bunch of silly, misleading language.  It’s like when I waited tables, and everything fried was described as “crispy,” which only led to a ton of people getting pissed when fried food came out, and sending it back, making more work for everyone and costing the restaurant money.  People avoid ordering fried foods because they don’t freaking want fried food, so trying to fool them by changing the word is just a ridiculously pointless strategy that is doomed to fail.

Well, dear readers, it was bound to happen eventually: I actually went on a date last week. And you’ll be happy to hear that it was on every level an absolutely insane and embarrassing failure…not because you’re rooting for my continued loneliness (though you may be, I don’t know), but because it makes for a really entertaining story.

I met this fellow (let’s call him “Patrick”) while waiting for the G-train late one night. I was too tired to read anything and didn’t have my headphones with me. He made eye contact and I cut him dead with a glare, as is my habit. But he came over and started talking to me anyway, and well, he was really, really good-looking. So I gave him my card.

After the usual three-to-four day waiting period, Patrick called, and we agreed to meet up in the Village for dinner. He explained that he had to pick something up at 7:15p.m. around Washington Square Park?

I said that was fine, and then he said (and I thought this was really odd at the time), ‘Hey, wear pants, alright? Not, like, a skirt or anything.’

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Are we going bowling or something?’

‘Uh, did you want to?’ he asked. ‘I mean, I thought we’d just grab a bite and maybe-’

‘Oh, yeah,’ I said. ‘No, I just thought, because you said to wear pants that-’

‘That we were going bowling! That’s hilarious – do you always bowl when you wear pants?’ he laughed (a lot). ‘You’re so funny!’

‘Well,’ I said. ‘Why did you-’

‘So, I’ll see you then, then, in your bowling pants!’ he said, and rung off.

So, okay, whatever. People are strange.

Anyway, the big date night arrived, and I went down to the park (wearing my usual jeans), and soon Patrick arrived. He was still really good-looking. And he was carrying a small cage with a guinea pig in it.

‘Hi,’ he said.

‘Hi,’ I said. ‘What’s with the guinea pig?’

‘Well, this is what I had to pick up,’ he explained. ‘I did some work for this friend of mine, I, uh, I built this really piece of furniture for him, you know, and so then – get this – I get done, and he’s like, oh, I don’t have any money to pay you. But he just got this guinea pig? And I don’t know, I was just like, well, I’ll take the guinea pig. Because I’ve been wanting a pet, but I don’t have a lot of space. I’ll have to get a bigger cage for him, though. I sort of wonder…do you think they kill mice?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘He’s cute. What are you going to name him?’

‘I’m thinking Palin,’ he said.

‘Topical,’ I said. I then told Patrick about how I knew this guy in Tennessee who raised guinea pigs and had cage after cage of them in his garage, and took them to guinea pig shows and so forth. And that there’s a guinea pig transport system, where if you live in South Carolina and you buy a purebred guinea pig from Seattle, there are people signed up in every state that will drive the guinea pig along to you, like a sort of pony express for guinea pigs.

‘I don’t believe you,’ said Patrick.

‘It’s true,’ I said.

‘I think you’re making up stories, and honestly, if you are, you should just stop it, because I’m about just being real.’

This was sort of funny, because I really do make up stories sometimes when I’m talking to strangers I don’t think I’ll see again (say, at a party…although sometimes I do end up seeing them again, often, and then it’s awkward because the lie has to be kept up forever), but this was actually true – I do know a bit about guinea pigs. I sort of apologized and changed the subject, and then we went back and forth on where to eat, and Patrick suggested Red Bamboo, which is this vegetarian place that I’d been to before and was agreeable to. When we got there, we had some issues with the guinea pig at the door. The hostess wasn’t sure we could bring Palin in, since Palin is basically a rodent, but after Patrick promised to keep the cage discreetly under his chair with his jacket over it, she said it was probably fine.

‘So,’ I said, as we looked at the menus. ‘Are you a vegetarian?’

‘No,’ said Patrick. ‘But I tend to…what I do is, I’ll like pick a color? And then for a week, I have to only eat things that are that color. So, this week, I’m only eating black things. So, I’m thinking I’ll get this black bean ginger stir-fry, but I have to check and make sure it really looks mostly black.’

Now, a lot of you may be thinking, ‘Freak!’ But I actually have really weird eating habits myself (Clif bars, anyone?), so I’m sort of understanding about this type of compulsive behavior. And additionally, I had once flipped through this book at Barnes & Noble about challenging your brain every day a little bit to keep sharp and stave off Alzheimer’s, and it basically said that you had to always be looking for ways to break your routine in non-routine ways so your brain doesn’t just go into habitual autopilot, and one of the specific suggestions it gave for doing this was to make a new eating rule every week, like maybe just pick a certain color and only eat things that were that color for a week. So, I figured Patrick had read this book.

‘Did you get that idea from a book about keeping your brain entertained?’ I asked.

‘What?’

‘Um, eating all things of one color,’ I said. ‘Did you read to do that in a book about how to keep surprising your brain, so that-’

‘-It’s got nothing to do with my brain,’ said Patrick. ‘It’s about my body. I figure you should only ask your body to break down a certain kind of compound at one time, you know?’

This was a really bad sign, as I have no patience whatsoever when people start spouting this kind of bullshit, so I quickly changed the subject, and the conversation was more or less okay until the server came to take our order.

‘Is the black bean stir fry black?’ asked Patrick.

‘Well,’ she said. ‘It’s black beans, yes.’

‘But is it black-colored? Like, if I looked at the plate, does everything look black?’

‘Um,’ she said. ‘It’s in a black-bean glaze, but it’s all vegetables, but it’s…’

‘Is it mostly dark?’

‘I guess.’

He sighed heavily. ‘But is it- you know what, forget it, I’ll just get a double order of the black rice, and black beans, and a chocolate milkshake.’

Seriously.

So, fine, you know what? I got a gigantic dessert for my meal. Because I am always wanting to get dessert for dinner, but I always figure people will give me shit about it. But at this point, Patrick sure couldn’t say anything about it, so I got a slice of peanut butter tandy heaven cake with a scoop of mint chocolate chip ice cream.

‘That’s disgusting,’ said Patrick.

‘I’m only eating desserts this week,’ I replied, and stared him down.

At this point, I’ll admit, I was actually kind of thinking Patrick and I might be perfect for each other. I began to think it might be quite freeing to be with someone so much more eccentric than I am that I could just give total free reign to my own eccentricities. I imagined how being weird in a pair in public would be far more comfortable than being weird alone, and you know, actually, I could probably kick it up a notch and be even weirder if I had a partner who could act as a buffer. It might be really fun. And the conversation was going along just fine, the food came, all was well. And then…

We got to talking about our favorite authors, and I mentioned how upset I had been that David Foster Wallace just died.

‘Oh, me too!’ agreed Patrick.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘In fact, I have to say, I kind of cried when I read that-’

‘Me too!‘ screamed Patrick, and he burst into tears. I shit you not. Right there at the table, out of nowhere – and we’re talking giant, chest-heaving, gape-mouthed, wrenching sobs. I mean, he was screaming. Everybody in the entire restaurant went dead silent and turned and stared at us. I was mortified. I didn’t know what to do. It seemed like that moment went on and on for hours, for days. Patrick just bawled his head off – he didn’t even put his hands over his face, he just stared straight ahead with his mouth wide open and howled – and everybody stared at us, and I was so humiliated I wanted to drop through the floor…and then I started to laugh. I kept picturing the scene from the outside, as if it were in a story, the way it looks now as I’m blogging it, and it was just so damn hilarious that I went into a sort of hysterical, giggling anxiety fit and couldn’t stop. Patrick sobbed, and I brayed with laughter, and we sat there over our insane dinners with the guinea pig scrabbling around under Patrick’s chair, and I feared we’d be frozen there in that demented tableau for all eternity.

What eventually happened was the manger came over to ask if we were okay, and we both said that we were fine, and he suggested that we might be happier the hell out of his restaurant, so we paid (well, I paid – Patrick apparently had forgotten to go by an ATM), and got out of there as quickly as possible.

‘Do you want to come with me to shop for guinea pig stuff?’ asked Patrick, who had more or less gotten himself together, but had not apologized for his mad behavior.

‘I should probably head home,’ I said. ‘I have to be up early tomorrow.’

And then, even though I knew I should leave it alone, I just had to ask:  ‘Patrick,’ I said. ‘Why did you tell me to wear pants?’

‘What?’ he said.

‘On the phone, you said I should wear pants. Why?’

‘Look,’ he said, looking pissed off. ‘I move slowly, okay? I’m a slow-moving guy. And I’m honest about myself. And I don’t make any apologies. So, just, you know, I take my time! And I won’t apologize for that.’

I didn’t want to press him further. I went home, and I haven’t heard from him since, about which I’m extremely relieved.

I rarely take a chance on going out with a complete stranger, and sure enough, every time I actually throw caution to the wind, the guy invariably turns out to be a complete psychopath.  My intuition is either hopelessly broken or missing entirely, so perhaps I’m wise to be standoffish.

First of all, every time I go to Trader Joe’s, I swear it’s the last time. But then, I forget, and I go again. It really is ridiculous. The line was so long today that there was actually a guy staggering admission to the store, like it was a club or something. I had to wait in line to wait in line. But the amazing thing is, the lines really do move quickly. It’s just the insanity of how long they are – you feel like a damn fool to get in one, especially if you’ve just got five boxes of Clif bars.

When I finally got to the cashier, this is what happened (I swear this is verbatim):

Cashier: ‘Shit. Do you know how much these are?’

Me: ‘Well. I know they’re 99 cents a bar. And there are twelve bars per box.’

Cashier: ‘Okay. So…that’s… Let’s see. There are twelve per box and you have five boxes, that’s…’

Me: ‘Uh…yeah.’

Him: ‘That’s 120, yeah?’

Me: (drawing with my finger on the counter) ‘Uh, well, let’s see…it’s, uh, five times 2, then you carry the…’

Him: ‘No, 70!’

Me: ‘I have trouble keeping the visual of the– wait, let me just look on my cell phone-’

Him: ‘I mean, I know it, but it’s like, I get so lazy standing here, and-’

Me: ‘-No, of course, I mean, it’s so simple, but how often do you – 60, it’s 60.’

Him: ‘Awesome.’

Me: ‘We should be really embarrassed right now.’

Him: ‘I don’t think anyone saw.’

In all fairness to the cashier, he was at work, so was probably baked. I have no such excuse. I just genuinely can’t do simple math.

Speaking of, when I first moved to New York, I actually filled out a job application at Trader Joe’s, and there’s this whole page of simple addition, multiplication and division problems you have to do, and they give it to you to fill out right there in the middle of the store, with everyone buzzing around. And I couldn’t do any of them. I was trying to cheat with my phone in my purse without anyone seeing me, thinking about how I wasn’t even qualified to work at Trader Joe’s and would probably never find a job. It was a real low point in my life so far.

So, I recently joined the YMCA in my neighborhood.  As it’s been over two years since I belonged to a gym and had regular access to weights, I’ve entirely forgotten my old regimen.  So, I bought a few women’s exercise-type magazines to find a couple of routines.  I usually steer clear of women’s magazines because they tend to make me both angry and depressed, and these were no exception.

I seem to recall reading Shape several years ago, and it was 95% about actual exercise, and the models were all ripped. Not anymore.  Now, it’s 95% hideously overpriced clothes, and interviews with lying celebrities (“I mostly care about being happy and healthy, and my kids!”), and advice on how not to eat, or do anything much but spend insane amounts on worthless crap.  And only 40 pages in (or 3 pages in, if you don’t count advertisements), there is an interview with Kaley Cuoco.  Apparently, she is an actor on a sitcom, The Big Bang Theory.  I’d never heard of her or the show.  She’s 22-years-old, and this is what she has to say:

I go to [spinning] class three times a week, without fail.  I always get there early so I can sit in the front of the studio, and I’m ready to go as soon as the instructor comes in.*

And:

…right now I can’t get enough of the 6-inch vegetarian whole-wheat sandwich from Subway.  I pick one up after my Spin class . . . It’s my default meal; I know exactly how many calories are in it – 260 – and I never have to think about what to order.*

And worst of all:

Diet cola is my absolute favorite drink in the world; I used to drink four cans a day.  But to help me cut down, I’ve turned it into a treat.  Now, instead of having dessert, I’ll have a can of diet soda.  Putting a limit on how often I can drink it has helped me appreciate it more.*

Oh my God, Kaley!  I want to kill myself!  You are the saddest girl in the whole world!

Seriously, I myself am far more ascetic in most respects than your average person could bear to be, and I often find my own self depressing in some ways.  But even I want to kidnap this girl and make her go on some insane sky-diving, Fleet-Week-cruising, cocaine-snorting adventure in irresponsible hedonism.  What’s the point of being rich and famous if your best idea of an awesome time is go to spin class and then eat a Subway sandwich and drink a can of Diet Coke?

Jeez.

–
These quotes taken from Shape’s October 2008 issue (Vol. 28, No. 2); I don’t really know what the procedure is for footnoting in a blog post.  Please don’t sue me, Shape.  Oh, and also – your magazine blows.

He was still there, snuffling around outside the door.

‘Virginia,’ he whined. ‘Virginyaaa.’

‘What, what, what?’ she said in a whispery staccato, pushing herself from the floor onto the couch. ‘What?’

‘Virginia! Virginyaa….’

‘What? Oh, what?’

She wondered if she had a different name, would he incant it thus? Would he go as wild for Wanda? Or Elizabeth? Or Vanessa?

‘I’ve a cheese sandwich all made. And some teeeeaaaa. Virginia.’

‘Go away from the door. Go down the hall.’

But she let him in. She slunk from the couch, unbolted the door, and he tipped in backwards – he’d been leaning against it.

‘Oh, oh, oh, oh, what?’ she asked him, pushing her face back into the couch’s upholstery. He hated it when she had fabric imprints across her cheeks.

‘I’ve brought tea. I’ve had Nancy fix tea, and I brought it up to you on a little cart. I thought…’ he looked at her upside down, over his poofy hairline, from his position on the floor.

‘You thought what? You look ridiculous.’

‘What? I can’t hear you. Take your face from the cushions.’

‘You thought what?  What?!’ she asked.

‘I thought we might,’ Leonard raised himself up and sniffed mightily. ‘Drink it. You see.’

‘Oh, damn,’ said Virginia. ‘And now we have to.’

‘Oh, good, oh, good,’ cried Leonard, leaping to his feet, and skipping in the air like a Disney Frenchman, he spun the tea tray in between them and busied himself with the cups.

‘You’ll love this,’ he cried, clapping his hands, and he handed her a saucer. ‘Will you eat the sandwich, or shall I? It’s cheese.’

‘Why is there only one?’

‘Well, because I didn’t really think you’d want one, you see,’ explained Leonard, through a mouthful of sandwich.

‘I want so many things,’ she sighed, and poured out the tea. Leonard held his cup with both hands.

‘Haven’t we any frankfurters?’ she asked, and Leonard shook his head no, his cheeks bulging from his face.

I have mentioned on this blog before that I am a compulsive eater.  One easy way I have found to manage my weight is never to buy and bring home more than I plan to eat at any one sitting.  While this is a more expensive way to eat, it didn’t used to be that unreasonable.  You could generally eat for $5, and there were any number of $.99 snack food items in any drugstore or minimart you happened to pass.

Now, I understand that everything is more expensive now.  I don’t like it, but I am beginning to accept it.  What I don’t understand, however, is why there don’t seem to be single-serve portions of anything anymore anywhere.  I regularly find myself with five minutes to spare before work running into every damn drugstore all up and down the snack aisles, and there are just giant bags of chips, huge cans of nuts, jumbo pouches of trail mix.  What is this?  I don’t want seven servings of a snack.  If I take seven servings of a snack into the office, I will be eating seven servings of a snack.

The only single-serve portions available anywhere now, however, are those 100-calorie pack things, which are just totally worthless.  One hundred calories on an empty stomach just prods it enough to make it furious – you’re better off not eating.  I operate from a continuous base of low-level hunger, and when that hunger kicks from low- into high-level, I want to have just enough food in my purse to knock it back a little.  If I have more than that, I’m going to eat until I’m actually really full, and then I’m going to eat whatever small amount is left after that, because there’s not that much left and I may as well finish it.  And then I’m also still going to eat dinner three hours later anyway, even though I’m totally full, because I was so looking forward to dinner that I can’t bear the disappointment of just going straight from the office to whatever I’m working on that evening without my dinner break.  And there you have it – the Duane Read has just ruined my whole day just because it’s no longer stocking single-serving bags of nuts.

I have this dream that there would be a wonderful grocery store that caters to people like me.  This grocery store would have nothing but inexpensive, single-serving portions of all different kinds of food, and for an added bonus, maybe it could even be healthy food.  And a wide variety.

Well, actually, there is such a place.  It’s called Trader Joe’s, and there’s only one, and if you want to go there, you have to fight your way through a crowd of thousands and wait online for upwards of 45 minutes.  Wouldn’t you think, every other retailer in Manhattan, that, given the immense popularity of TJ’s, there might just be a market there that could stand to be capitalized on???

Single-servings of portable, precooked food items for $5-$6.50 a pop!!  And single-serve snacks for under $2!!!  Available at a great number of convenient locations throughout the five boroughs!!!!

Somebody cater to my specific need, damn it!

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Oh, and also, if you don’t already read Fafblog, this Sarah Palin post is a great time to start:

As a Jesus-fearing moose-hunting hockey-mom mother of five who hunts moose for Jesus, Sarah Palin is kin to the wild outdoors and appreciates its bountiful splendor as she is gunning it down from her airplane. Sarah Palin understands that America is dangerously addicted to oil, and that the only cure is more oil. . . . Sarah Palin may not know if global warming is man-made. She may not know if global warming is real. She may not know what global warming is. But if global warming is caused by abortions, Sarah Palin will fight it – by banning abortion, just in case the first couple times didn’t take.

Go, read all of it, and then read the entire rest of Fafblog, because it never fails to kick ass.

Regular readers of this blog will know that I am no fan of superstars. I resent the hell out of anything beloved by all. But sometimes somebody will deserve every last lick of praise they get, and Joshua Ferris is one of those people. I can’t even hate. TWCTTE is a fantastic novel – hilarious, relevant, charitable to everybody, and well-written. Go read it now, because no matter who you are, you’ll enjoy it. Damn it.

Remainder, on the other hand, is a whole bunch of nothing. I can’t believe I finished it. I got about thirty pages in, and thought, ‘Ah, this is very interesting. I think it’s going to go in one of several directions, and can’t wait to see which.’ Twenty pages further in, I thought, ‘Huh. It hasn’t gone anywhere yet.’ Twenty pages further in, ‘Still in the same place.’ And when I finally finished it, ‘Well. That really was just about that. All the way through.’

Wow, those are some slight reviews. So, here are some cool things this week:

Scientists got blood from stem cells:

Scientists have used embryonic stem cells to generate blood — a feat that could eventually lead to endless supplies of type O-negative blood, a rare blood type prized by doctors for its versatility.

Computer scientists thought of a good way to make use of those text boxes you have to fill out online all the time:

You may be deciphering a word from a decaying old book, helping to transform a historic text into a new digital file.

This entertainer found a way to use cicada shells to adorn herself (via CP). If you’ve never experienced the weird joy that is picking cicada shells off a tree, you should probably do that at some point. When I was a little kid visiting my grandparents in Mississippi, my Granddaddy and I used to pick grocery sackfuls of cicada shells off the trees in the front yard. We had no real object in this harvesting – I don’t know exactly what happened to the sacks full of bug shells, but it’s far more likely my Grandmother threw them out than that she wove them into her hair.

Also, this NY Times article proclaiming that coffee is nothing but good in every possible way, and even overconsumption of coffee works nothing but good effects on your body is the best news possible, and makes me feel utterly vindicated. I’m sure it’s unreliable and probably the studies behind it were funded by giant, evil coffee cartels, but I don’t care. I choose to believe it, because it is what I want to hear. Now all I need is an article saying that a cake-based diet prevents cancer.

Ali Smith’s The Accidental has a freaking form poem flight thing in the middle of it. No book ever has the right to priss about being cute with the layout of text on page – I hate that. If there were a gimmicky little concrete poem in the middle of the greatest book ever written, I’d detest it. Short sentences, run-ons, overlapping dialogue – fine. I love me some DFW footnotes. But any actual text effects belong on motivational posters or in powerpoint presentations, not in the middle of a novel I am trying to read. I can’t stand gimmicks.

I took a poetry class in college wherein the professor went on and on about the way poems looked on the page, the shape of the thing. What were we, calligraphers? If you have something to say and you’re a painter, show it to me visually. But if you’re a writer, freaking write it! Don’t put a precious little fucking flipbook in the middle of your novel, don’t put one word on each page for a time, don’t make the paragraph look like a cat when you turn the book to the side. How trite and cute can you be? I can’t believe real critics have any patience for this kind of nonsense, but sickeningly, it seems to be increasing every year. What’s next? Music boxes that play when you flip the pages? A small hologram? A scavenger hunt? A free toy in a hollowed-out space in the middle? A plush bunny on the cover with a squeak in its tail? Come the fuck on! If you can’t blow my mind with your prose, you won’t make up for it in doodles. And the hell with you for wasting my time.

And yes, I liked House of Leaves (although I don’t consider it revelatory or anything), but it is the exception that proves the rule. And I realize graphic novels are growing in importance and popularity, and eventually there might be bleedover and to enforce a stern boundary between novel-novels and graphic-novels will be pointlessly rigid and fusty. But I’ll adjust my ideas about that when I see it. Meanwhile, I don’t want to read the free verse horridness painters from a decade back were fond of scrawling across their canvasses in metallic gold paint pens, and likewise, I don’t want a toy or a bauble in text form from a writer.

And lest I be misunderstood, my issue with all this is not its novelty, but its meaninglessness.

Ahem. Even beyond the alienating concrete poem bit of stuff in the middle of The Accidental, I didn’t particularly care for the book. I just felt it tread over a lot of really familiar territory without adding anything much. I didn’t take away any truth or insight into the human condition. But apparently, people loved this book. It was short-listed for the Booker and had mostly good reviews.

I did really enjoy the passages in Astrid’s point of view, the family’s 12-year-old girl. The family is staying in a rental house, and at the beginning of the novel, Astrid spends a lot of time trying not to touch any of the surfaces of the house, or anything in it, because she’s disgusted by the idea of all the people who have used the house before them. She arranges a sheet over the bed before lounging on it, she tears bread from the middle of a loaf rather than use a knife and so forth. I can attest to the accuracy of this portrayal; I spent a ton of time in childhood trying not to touch anything. And actually, I never really grew out of it. Even as I backpacked across Asia, I had my rituals.

I was talking to a friend about this the other day. My friend was saying something about hygienic restaurant conditions, or something to do with food. And I said that I have no squeamishness about food and don’t really stress about the conditions in which it was prepared, because, even though I know that people not washing their hands and then handling food transfers diarrhea around (hence traveler’s tummy), and even though that’s disgusting if you actually think about it…well, really, all that happens is you maybe get a little sick for a day.

I said that I really have more worries in the tactile realm – that I don’t like to touch surfaces.

And then I suddenly realized how freaking crazy that is. I mean, I always knew that my obsession over not touching anything wasn’t rooted in any actual germaphobia, and had no real base at all – that it was rather just a general feeling of squirmy discomfort. It’s just that some things you have to touch are gross, the way you find some foods gross – it’s not that you think they’re dangerous; it’s just that you don’t like them. But I never thought about how nuts it is to put any old thing inside my body, but obsess about things touching the outside of my skin. Not to put too fine a point on it, but apparently, I would rather eat feces than sit in them.

Not that the realization did away with my baseless phobia, but I thought it was worth remarking on.

Jose Saramago’s The Double did not annoy me with any gimmicks, and I did walk away from it with, I felt, greater insight into the human condition. It’s commonly advised that, if you’re not “into” a novel by 100 pages in, you should put it down and start another. I have read quite a few books, however, where I wasn’t sure if I liked it or not until I finished the very last page. Perhaps these are books that don’t so much reflect how I see the world, as explain in a complete and compelling way how the world appears to someone else (the author). So, while I don’t hook into them immediately, by the time I come to the end, I feel satisfied. The Double is one of those books for me. And the same books that I can’t figure out if I like them or not until I finish the last words are generally those about which I cannot articulate what I liked, so I have nothing else to say about this.

I am excited beyond belief to share with all of you, dear readers, a grand realization I had this past weekend. This was the sort of ‘aha!’ lightbulb moment after which the world is never the same again, but is a little wider, a little shinier, a little more bearable.

I realized that the best way not to be surrounded by obnoxious, loud people in public spaces in New York is to sit near a bunch of quiet people to begin with, rather than go sit off by yourself somewhere.

Here’s how I came to that realization: I bought a sandwich and went to consume it in a pretty, park-like area, and, as usual, went straight for a bench in the most deserted stretch of park. I was halfway through my sandwich when a couple of giggling teenagers came and sat right on top of me, despite the general emptiness of the area, and began to converse, in loud and squealing terms, about their burgeoning sex lives.

My entire life I have whined about how strangers seem to seek me out. I find the close proximity of other people repellent on a visceral level that most people do not feel for their fellow humans, which I realize is a personal shortcoming, but which I cannot help, because it is a kneejerk, gut-level reaction, cultivated in early childhood and continually reinforced by the fact that other people really do consistently suck out loud in every conceivable fashion. And yet, despite my extreme misanthropy, people gravitate towards me like metal filings. I need only install myself in a totally deserted area to make that area the most coveted spot in town. No matter where I am standing – even if it’s next to the only Port-a-Pot in a malarial swamp – five seconds after I have begun standing there, at least ten people will urgently need to stand right where I’m standing, usually with their dogs and babies and cameras and stereos and B.O. and inappropriately loud domestic fights and all.

I’d always assumed that this was a sort of karmic punishment for my disliking other humans’ close proximity so much – a sort of ‘who the hell do you think you are’ rebuke from the universe. Except that I don’t really believe in any sort of large-scale cosmic justice, so I kept looking for other reasons.

Anyway, back to this weekend, these teenagers were yapping on about their various forays into the wide world of sex, both homo- and hetero-style, and how they sometimes did so with hesitancy and sometimes with great enthusiasm, depending upon the other person involved, the amount of various intoxicants in their systems, and the suitability and romance of the atmosphere. And they were doing that thing where they were actually looking right at me and projecting in my direction while they ostensibly talked to each other. I provided an audience for them, which made the whole thing more interesting to them, I suppose. At some point, something so very ridiculous was lobbed so obviously in my direction that I audibly sighed, rolled my eyes, got up and packed up my sandwich and moved on.

I began looking for another deserted stretch of park, when suddenly, I had the inspiration to sit instead right smack between two older couples who were each murmuring quietly to each other while glaring at everyone passing by.

It was the best decision I ever made! I enjoyed my sandwich in peace and solitude, buffered on both sides by a cranky, old couple that didn’t want to look at me, or for me to overhear word one of their conversations. And it was at this point that I realized why people had always been coming to sit by me: they had been doing it on purpose precisely because I was quietly reading a book! They knew that they would be able to dominate the space, and that my presence would ensure against any louder people coming to sit next to them.

In New York, you never sit in an empty area, because no area is empty for very long. Rather, you pick the least offensive strangers, and then you scooch in right on top of them. That way, you have some control over your fate. I put this new theory into practice over the rest of the weekend, and I have to say, my quality of life has improved by leaps and bounds. I feel less angry, less hassled, happier and more well-inclined towards my fellow man. And I’m beginning to think that perhaps New York is somewhat livable after all, if you just learn how to work with it.

–

Speaking of despicable haters, I have really taken note of the passing of Jesse Helms. I think that the worst possible thing that you can do with your life is live it in such a way that, five seconds after you’re in the ground, people everywhere burst forth with celebrations of your death and denunciations of everything you were. Scores of private assholes are despised posthumously by everyone who knew them, but it seems like, if you are going to be an asshole, at least do yourself the courtesy of limiting your own exposure. Because to be a hated asshole on such a very grand scale as the late Senator Helms seems to me to be far, far worse than spending your entire life in your room doing nothing and seeing no one. I really hope that, whatever I do or don’t do in life, I don’t do such a grandly awful job of it as to be remembered as the world now remembers Jesse Helms.

Of course, if I can’t be confident of the purity of my heart saving me from such a fate, at least I can rely on my lethargy and ineffectiveness.

–

Related, what does make people so social? Mirror neurons:

Mirror neurons are the only brain cells we know of that seem specialized to code the actions of other people and also our own actions. They are obviously essential brain cells for social interactions. Without them, we would likely be blind to the actions, intentions and emotions of other people. The way mirror neurons likely let us understand others is by providing some kind of inner imitation of the actions of other people, which in turn leads us to “simulate” the intentions and emotions associated with those actions. When I see you smiling, my mirror neurons for smiling fire up, too, initiating a cascade of neural activity that evokes the feeling we typically associate with a smile. I don’t need to make any inference on what you are feeling, I experience immediately and effortlessly (in a milder form, of course) what you are experiencing.

(via 3QD)

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Here in America, even in our public parks, everybody thinks it’s their own, personal bench. Blame it on the Renaissance:

This focus on the individual, and its false equation with democracy, began back in the Renaissance. The Renaissance brought us wonderful innovations, such as perspective painting, scientific observation, and the printing press. But each of these innovations defined and celebrated individuality. Perspective painting celebrates the perspective of an individual on a scene. Scientific method showed how the real observations of an individual promote rational thought. The printing press gave individuals the opportunity to read, alone, and cogitate. Individuals formed perspectives, made observations, and formed opinions.

The individual we think of today was actually born in the Renaissance. The Vesuvian Man, Da Vinci’s great drawing of a man in a perfect square and circle-independent and self-sufficient. This is the Renaissance ideal.

It was the birth of this thinking, individuated person that led to the ethos underlying the Enlightenment. Once we understood ourselves as individuals, we understood ourselves as having rights. The Rights of Man. A right to property. The right to personal freedom.

(via 3QD)

–

Briefly:

Kids make their parents miserable.

Noooooooo!!!!! 99% of my diet is soy!!! It was the one thing that was never bad! That’s it, screw it, I’m going back to living on microwave burritos and beer.

This is good stuff to know.

…now that Weight Watchers has launched its new “Diets Are Mean” campaign:

“Are you trying to be in movies? No? Then what do you want to be thin for?”

–

“I think you have a lovely, womanly figure!”

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“Hell, how long’s it been since you last had sex? Give yourself a damn piece of cake!”

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“No one who’s had the day you’ve had could get by on 1500 calories.”

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“It’s just harder for you to lose weight than other people – you have a different kind of body.”

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“You went to the gym today – go ahead and have seconds!”

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“Oh, so you ate the whole pint. At least you’re not a heroin addict.”

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“If you’re being good and eating a boring salad for lunch, you should at least get to jazz it up with fried chicken strips and ranch dressing.”

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“You know, you’re a good, kind person, and you’re intelligent. If you’re also fifty pounds overweight, well, that’s just more of you to love!”

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“Skinny people look like anorexics with cancer.”

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“If you just concentrate on making yourself happy, the weight will go away on its own.”

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“Everything in moderation – even moderation!”

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“Calories don’t count on your birthday/at Christmas/on your friend’s birthday/at a wedding/on vacation/when it’s this beautiful out/on the weekends/when you’re celebrating/on Flag Day/when they’re free/when someone surprises you with a treat!!!!”

I’m already bored of Wall-E. I haven’t seen it. I haven’t really heard all that much about it. I’ve seen, I think, one preview. I’ve listened to everybody I’ve talked to in the last couple of weeks assert that it’s really very good, and that I ought to see it right away. And I’ve seen headlines of articles and blog posts about it on every site I visit – I haven’t even read the articles; I’ve just seen the headlines.

And I’m already sick of it. This is what happens to me all the time with whatever culture thing everybody goes nuts for. It’s not that I don’t want to see it, or that I wouldn’t like it on its merits. I’m sure it’s great, and I’m sure I’d love it. But I probably won’t see it, just like I never ended up seeing Juno or, well, really any movie, honestly. I think in the last year, I saw The Orphanage and Miss Pettigrew Lives For a Day (both with other people, after all the movies on offer went through the rigorous screening process that is everybody else’s tastes and what they’ve already seen, so you end up left with something random, but by and large unobjectionable like The Orphanage or Miss Pettigrew), and that’s it.

It’s just that, within five minutes of a film being released, it’s freaking everywhere, and I feel like I’ve seen it, not just once, but over and over and over again.

And furthermore, I guess that some people are glad for the next cool thing, but personally (and I know I’m not the only one), I’m always drowning under a cultural backlog of things that I must absolutely see, read, experience, be up on, and whenever someone tells me that I simply must drop everything and see this thing RIGHT NOW, it feels downright rude. I have enough culture to be wading through! I don’t need somebody barging into my little culture-absorber’s library carrel and screaming, “Drop everything! We’re all seeing a movie about a robot RIGHT THIS MINUTE!” What the crap? I’m still working on seeing Juno! Are we done with that already? I still haven’t seen The Godfather. Or Say Anything. Or the first Batman – the one with Christian Bale, not the twelve Batmans before that. And I never saw Brokeback Mountain, either. Not to mention there are oodles of You-Tube videos people simply won’t speak to me until I watch now right now. So, you know what, Wall-E might not get watched right this damn minute, and he’ll just have to wait his turn, won’t he?

I’m feeling stressed just thinking about it. I realize that some people think that films and books and web bits and stand-up comics are things to be enjoyed recreationally, as they come, and need not be amassed like plunder in the various stockpiles of one’s brain. I realize that for some people, word of a new cultural sensation they’d not heard of before is a treat, not a sign of personal failure. But I think these people are of a different species from me entirely.

These are the type of people who say things like, “I’m looking for a good book to read.” A statement which I cannot believe anyone could ever utter in all sincerity. Who are these people?

Here, odd, disinterested space-people: here is my 58-page single-spaced insane book list I’ve been adding to since I was twelve years old, with titles scribbled all up and down the margins and extra Post-It notes covered in chicken scratch stuck on all over. Close your eyes and point to one. You’re welcome.

Meanwhile, I’m off to see Wall-E. I mean, The Dark Knight. I mean, STOP MAKING MUST-SEE MOVIES FOR A LITTLE WHILE, WON’T YOU?

–

Speaking of glut, the 4th of July is the day for one of America’s greatest annual events: Nathan’s Famous 4th of July International Hot Dog Eating Contest, the competitive eating event of the year. I’ve mentioned my obsession with competitive eating several times on this blog, and all the heavies will be at Nathan’s this year: Kobayashi, Joey Chestnut, and my personal favorite, Sonya ‘The Black Widow’ Thomas. Thomas is a 100-lb., 5′5″ Korean woman who has consistently demonstrated an astounding ability to put away large amounts of food:

She swallowed the egg. Then she swallowed 64 more in six minutes and 40 seconds. She could have eaten more but the organizers ran out of eggs. . . . “Eggs are easy to eat,” Thomas explains. “I could eat 80 or 90.”

(My obsession with all this, however, is not so unreasonable that I would actually go down to Coney Island this morning and experience first-hand the crush of humanity crowding around the Nathan’s Famous stand there.)

Speaking of impressive athletes, click here to marvel at the mind-blowing physique of Dara Torres, 41-year-old swimmer who’s attempting to qualify for the 50-meter freestyle in the Olympics this year. If I were to pick a role-model between the two, I think eating 64 eggs in 6 minutes is a slightly more reachable goal for me than looking like Ms. Torres when I’m 40.

It’s probably a good thing all of my goals are in culture consumption.

I stopped reading the Times columnists back when the website started charging for that content, and, since I didn’t miss them at all, I haven’t gone back to reading them.  So, granted, I haven’t read any of the columnists in quite some time, but based on my recollections of when I read them daily (before Kristol was hired, but then, I’m familiar with him), I mostly agree with this assessment:

Unlike David Brooks, another Times conservative, Kristol gives the reader nothing to chew over. Brooks is smart — and usually wrong. But he makes me think and sometimes he gets it just right much as George Will does. One of Kristol’s problems is that he clearly doesn’t believe half the things he writes. . . . He has to pretend he cares about choice and low taxes because he is playing at being a conservative. All that pretending produces seriously bad columns, inept columns. Krauthammer’s columns are crazy but his writing is fine because all the hate energizes him. He loves hating and it shows! Kristol isn’t even a good hater.

I can enjoy reading people with whom I entirely disagree, if they write well and with conviction.  I also adore a good, witty, ranting hater, even if he’s hating on the convictions I hold most dear.  (Incidentally, I have next to no patience for conspiracy theories of any kind, but the closest I come to actually holding one is I kind of think the Times hired Maureen Dowd on purpose to make women look stupid.  Really, is there any other explanation for her?  [And the conspicuous continuing absence of any other women on the Op-Ed page?])

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Speaking of paying for content, I can’t access this New Criterion article without subscribing, but I want to quote the intro:

Sometimes I forget and ask for Tall, Grande, or Venti, but usually I ask, defiantly but with some embarrassment, for small, medium, or large, because I resent being forced into a greater intimacy than I desire with the Starbucks corporate culture. I want to be a customer, not a member of the Starbucks Club who validates his membership along with his entry on the premises by speaking the Starbucks idiolect.

I too resent and avoid the Starbucks pseudo-Italian nomenclature, because using it makes me feel like a tool.  I realize that blogging about my refusal to use it makes me even more of a tool, but I can’t help myself.  Seriously, I don’t understand the whole ‘foreign words sure are classy’ marketing trend to begin with.  Many Americans (including me) only speak English, which is embarrassing enough (especially because they then have the nerve to bitch like all Dickens when somebody else can’t speak it to them), but if that’s the case, we should all just fess up to it.  It’s stupid to try to sprinkle foreign terms we don’t understand and can’t pronounce into our commercial transactions, because the unfamiliar sounds expensive (or authentic, which means authentically expensive).

–

Vogue Italia has realized black women can objectify themselves and glamorize greed just as well as white women:

Having worked at one time with nearly all the models he chose for the black issue — Iman, [Naomi] Campbell, Tyra Banks, Jourdan Dunn, [Liya] Kebede, [Alek] Wek, Pat Cleveland, Karen Alexander — [photographer Steven] Meisel had his own feelings. “I thought, it’s ridiculous, this discrimination,” said Mr. Meisel, speaking by phone from his home in Los Angeles. “It’s so crazy to live in such a narrow, narrow place. Age, weight, sexuality, race — every kind of prejudice.”

(via Kottke)

Hooray for equality.  Meanwhile:

Over at Supreme Dicta there is an amusing, if disturbing, report by a grader for the Advanced Placement exam in US Government of some of the more comical statements made in response to an essay question about the 15th Amendment. . . . such as the statement that: “Strom Thurman [sic] was the first black man in Congress”. . .

Really, I think that’s how Strom ought to be remembered.

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Yesterday President Bush told President Arroyo that her people sure make good kitchen workers:

I want to tell you how proud I am to be the President of a nation that — in which there’s a lot of Philippine-Americans. They love America and they love their heritage. And I reminded the President that I am reminded of the great talent of the — of our Philippine-Americans when I eat dinner at the White House. (Laughter.)

Meanwhile, Jim Comey explains why he wasn’t quite sure warrantless wiretapping wasn’t legal:

Well, I suppose there’s an argument — as I said, I’m not a presidential scholar — that because the head of the executive branch determined that it was appropriate to do, that that meant for purposes of those in the executive branch it was legal.

(both via Firedoglake)

On McCain’s foreign policy credibility, Representative Brad Miller writes that no President truly knows and understands another country, and what we really ought to evaluate is how willing a candidate is to listen to the people who do:

After World War II, governments that we thought were stable, governments headed by leaders we found impressive for their western qualities, repeatedly fell to revolutions or coups. To avoid unpleasant surprises, we developed expertise in the State Department and our intelligence agencies to understand other nations. We employed analysts who have lived in different nations and have friends who live there still, speak the language fluently, read the newspapers, watch the television, respect the religion, eat the food, and listen to the music. Our analysts stay in touch with the Americans at universities and in business who travel frequently in those countries and know people there.

With the exception of environmental scientists, no one in the federal government has had less to say about our government’s policies in the last seven years than those analysts. . . . The Bush Administration had open scorn for the analysts who argued that Iraq was an intensely nationalistic society that would resent a foreign army on their soil, and that it would be difficult to establish a government that Iraqis would accept as legitimate.

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I don’t know why I’m suddenly interested in Amtrak:

The number of passengers traveling by train in the US rose significantly in May. Unfortunately, Amtrak is reaching full capacity with no real way to increase the number of trains or routes at its disposal for several years.

I guess just because I really think the age of the personal car is going to eventually end, and I’m curious about how our lives will change when that happens.  I have not had a car since college – I’ve lived in Chicago, and now New York, pretty much the only places in America where you can reasonably live without a vehicle – and honestly, the necessity of getting a car is one huge barrier to my moving elsewhere.  I don’t want to buy one, I don’t want to pay to gas and maintain it, and I don’t want the responsibility of driving.

I wonder:  if public transport becomes more widespread, will inexpensive storage-locker facilities suddenly spring up in all manner of places?  Because that would be good.

I am 27. Having a June birthday, I’ve very rarely celebrated it, because when I was a kid and cared about birthdays, either I was at camp all June long, or everyone else was. Summer birthdays are sort of non-events.

But not this year! This year I’m throwing a party, along with my two roommates and my friend Sara (whose actual birthday is Saturday). It’s this Saturday at my apartment, and if you live in the NYC area and know me, but this is the first you’re hearing about the party, you should contact me for directions. We haven’t really done any prep work yet, so I don’t know exactly what you’ll be in for if you come; however, I did wake up this morning to discover that a large piece of sound equipment was rolled into the living room sometime after I went to bed last night, so, you know.

Today being my actual birthday, I went to Rice to Riches on my way home last night (which, if you are not aware, is a place on Spring Street that sells nothing but flavors of rice pudding), and purchased a small tureen of pecan pie rice pudding, which I’ve just consumed as my birthday breakfast. So, the day is off to a rip-roaring start! (Actually, to be honest, it was way too much pudding, and I feel more than a little nauseous, but I’m sure that will subside.)

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On to feminism!!

You’ve probably already heard about this, but according to Fox News, all black women are angry black women:

Cal Thomas: I want to pick up on something that Jane said about the angry black woman. Look at the image of angry black women on television. Politically you have Maxine Waters of California, liberal Democrat. She’s always angry every time she gets on television. Cynthia McKinney, another angry black woman. And who are the black women you see on the local news at night in cities all over the country. They’re usually angry about something. They’ve had a son who has been shot in a drive-by shooting. They are angry at Bush. So you don’t really have a profile of non-angry black women.

(via Feministing)

Speaking of Fox News pissing everyone off, Salon explains why this was so bad (for those who actually need an explanation of why this is offensive):

“Stop Picking on Obama’s Baby Mama!” Those were the words running on the bottom of Fox News’ screen Wednesday, during a discussion about right-wing attacks against Michelle Obama’s patriotism between anchor Megyn Kelly and conservative blogger Michelle Malkin. . . . Though of course it does rhyme, and there’s the innocuous Tina Fey allusion, Fox News’ attempted subliminal ghettoization of Michelle Obama is still quite clear.

Undoubtedly, you’ve also heard a lot about all these angry, alienated white women who will now be voting for McCain out of sheer spite. I don’t personally know any women who fit this profile, but the media assures me that they’re everywhere. I like Bitch Ph.D.’s post on the topic:

. . . yes, I think that the women saying “I’m staying home” are overreacting. But I also think that the men saying “you selfish feminists, how dare you” are *also* overreacting–to the expression of female anger, disappointment, autonomy. . .And yes, the reality of party politics means that in this election, women who care about women’s rights . . . should *of course* vote for Obama, because McCain is opposed to to all these things. And maybe some of the feminist outrage is indeed an expression of white entitlement and/or class entitlement–since, after all, representation at the top is more of an immediate issue for professional women than it is for working-class women. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t a legitimate expression of anger against sexism as well.

Speaking of McCain:

. . . John McCain canceled a Texas fundraiser to be given by Clayton Williams after it was revealed that Williams, during his 1990 campaign for governor of Texas, compared rape to the weather: “As long as it’s inevitable, you might as well lie back and enjoy it.” After canceling the fundraiser, McCain’s campaign said that they would be keeping the money raised by Williams – more than $300,000.

Related, FP’s list of the worst places in the world to be a woman. (via Economic Woman)

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Here’s a fascinating article on moral psychology, and how it does and does not differ across different cultures. Included in the article are the “Trolley Problems,” which I heard a year ago (on an episode of Radio Lab as replayed on an episode of This American Life), and used as a conversation starter all summer long:

. . . Hauser and his lab have collected judgments about Trolley Problems from thousands of people in more than a hundred countries, representing a broad range of ages and religious and educational backgrounds. The results reveal an impressive consensus. . . . even in this enormous sample and even for complicated borderline cases, participants’ responses could not be predicted by their age, sex, religion, or educational background. Women’s choices in the scenarios overall were indistinguishable from men’s, Jews’ from Muslims’ or Catholics’, teenagers’ from their parents’ or grandparents’. . . . Also interestingly, Hauser, Mikhail, and their colleagues found that while the “moral instinct” was apparently universal, people’s subsequent justifications were not; instead, they were highly variable and often confused.

(via A&LD)

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Finally, following up on the Obama campaign’s rumor-dispelling site I linked to yesterday, see also this:

Barack Obama buys AMERICAN STUFF. He owns a FORD, a BASEBALL TEAM, and a COMPUTER HE BUILT HIMSELF FROM AMERICAN PARTS. He travels mostly by FORKLIFT.

Obama has launched a site aimed entirely at putting to rest [four of] the eight billion rumors widely spread about him and his family:

Faced with a new crop of deceptive online smears, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama ratcheted up his online counteroffensive Thursday with a new site aimed at debunking the latest web and e-mail rumors about him and his wife. The site, called Fight the Smears, launched listing four claims against Obama. It counters each with a rundown of the facts, in some cases accompanied by supporting video footage.

That’s great and all, but in my opinion, these types of rumors are only believed by people who are already convinced against a candidate, and really, these people would be against the candidate regardless of all this nonsense. I don’t really feel that this type of stuff does as much harm as everyone’s convinced it does – when voters are asked why they dislike Obama, and they say, for example, ‘he’s a Muslim,’ they may or may not really believe that, but even if they knew it wasn’t true, they still wouldn’t be for him.

Or maybe I’m underestimating the power of such talk – at any rate, it’s very annoying to hear people parroting baseless claims, and I’m glad Obama is committed to dispelling rumors about himself, unlike some past candidates.

Meanwhile, Josh Marshall has this to say about the McCain campaign’s accusations of Obama’s fp naivety:

. . . on the topic of using Jim Woolsey as your presidential surrogate to call your competitor “delusional” and “naive”, I’d almost forgotten Woolsey’s freelance James Bond mission to England back in 2001 to prove the crackpot theory of Laurie Mylroie who came up with the idea that Saddam wasn’t just behind the 9/11 attacks but was actually behind the original attack on the Twin Towers back in 1993.

Related, here is a very long and detailed post on the various theories for why the South went Republican in the ’60s:

We thus know that a significant number of white voters in the South would desert the national Democratic Party—even for a Republican, as they did in 1964—if it wavered in its commitment to white supremacy. . . . But wait, now. Along come some political scientists to tell us this Republican racism is a bit of a side show, that the real story of the GOP’s new southern eminence has to do with the emergence, at long last, of a New South, ushered (ironically) into being by Democratic programs of New Deal and wartime mobilization.

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More on why Amtrak sucks so much, (and why it’s still around):

The American passenger rail-once a model around the globe-is now something of an oddball novelty, a political boondoggle to some, a colossal transit failure to others. The author James Howard Kunstler likes to say that American trains “would be the laughing stock of Bulgaria.” . . . Since its ill-fated formation as a quasi-public, for-profit corporation in 1971, Amtrak has seen only meager growth and loses billions of dollars annually.

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Ten reasons the CA DoH should leave genetic testing companies alone:

When some overprotective Luddites from the California Department of Health Services sent cease-and-desist letters to thirteen genetic testing companies, they proved that someone in their office must have single nucleotide polymorphism that causes poor judgment. Interfering with the nascent industry is not a good idea for a plethora of reasons.

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I really think Japan might be paradise on Earth. White noise machines in public restroom stalls to cover any noises you might be making; government-mandated thinness tests; sushi; seppuku; Hello Kitty…and now, you can actually SWIM IN POOLS OF COFFEE (OR WINE)???? Check out these photos, and tell me you’re not dying to go.

Guests at The Guardian Hay festival ask one question (whatever they most want to ask) to whoever they most want to interview:

Andre Vincent, comedian asks Marcus Brigstocke, comedian

Q You’ve got a fantastic life that I envy. Why do you get depressed so much?

A What an awful question, you horrid man. Well, I made a rule that if I don’t care about something, I won’t write about it. So I have involved myself in loads and loads of things that I passionately care about in the news and after a while, as they’ve accumulated, I have lost faith in the world being a benevolent place. . . . But I would be a mug not to realise that the life that I have is actually enviable, and enjoyable for the most part.

And:

Stephanie Merritt, author and journalist asks Omid Djalili, comedian and actor

Q Should comedy change the way people think about the world, or is it just pure entertainment?

A People can be entertained by comedy of the most puerile nature. People with great motives can also be capable of the most cringingly earnest experiences cloaked as entertainment. When motive and entertainment fuse you get the best combination.

(via Kottke)

(There are also many questions about things political.)

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P.J. O’Rourke visits the Field Museum:

A very wordy inscription details the theories of when and how humans arrived in the New World. Translated from the academese: “We dunno.” An encomium to the Ice Age hunter-gatherers follows. “People like us,” it concludes, “prospered in ancient times.” We did indeed–if your idea of prosperity is fastening a “Clovis people” spearpoint to a stick and stabbing long-horned bison, giant grand sloths, wooly mammoths, mastodons, and New World horses until they were all extinct. The economic boom didn’t extend to casual wear and sports clothes. Ice Age or no, everyone in the talentlessly painted murals is naked. Nipples seem to have been vague and smudgy in ancient times, and a mastodon or giant ground sloth was always getting in between mural viewers and your genitals.

(via A&LD)

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Whoa.  Burger King + advertising + Amsterdam = hugely inappropriate (yes, there is a photo):

The trayliner depicts the airport-style high security Burger King uses to ensure that only the top ingredients are used. Images include a scared Onion with his trousers down around his ankles while a fierce-looking Pickle guard with a latex glove, prepares to digitally examine him! Scattered about him from his open luggage are veggie porn mags!

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Maybe this explains a problem I’ve been having:

What you may not have realized is that perceiving sarcasm, the smirking put-down that buries its barb by stating the opposite, requires a nifty mental trick that lies at the heart of social relations: figuring out what others are thinking. Those who lose the ability, whether through a head injury or the frontotemporal dementias afflicting the patients in Dr. Rankin’s study, just do not get it when someone says during a hurricane, “Nice weather we’re having.”

(via BB)

Ever since moving to NYC, I have had trouble with people interpreting my every comment as sincerely made.  I am sarcastic about 99% of the time, and, until I moved here, so was everybody else.  But for some reason (maybe it has more to do with the age bracket I’ve moved into), I now find myself constantly responding to “Really?!” with “No!  Of course not, I was being sarcastic!”  It’s so weird – you would think New Yorkers would be more sarcastic than everybody else, wouldn’t you?

Here’s an example of an actual conversation I had not too long ago:

Woman (off a star mag she was reading):  “Oh, Gwenyth Paltrow’s feeling harassed by paparazzi again.”

Me:  “Oh, that’s really awful.  I feel really terrible for celebrities.  They have to put up with so much.”

Woman (carefully):  “Yes.  But, you know, they choose that life, and they do really well for themselves, so I don’t always think it’s so bad.”

Me (blinking):  “Me neither.  I don’t feel sorry for celebrities at all.”

Woman:  “What?”

Me:  “I was…being entirely sarcastic.”

Woman:  “Oh.  Oh, I see.”

Me:  “I’m going to back slowly away from you now.”

This might sound like an extreme example, but I swear, this has been happening to me all the time.

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Finally, Todd Levin tells a hilarious subway tale.

Seems everybody wants to keep the racism and lose the term for it. Here, M. LeBlanc at Bitch Ph.D. responds to Geraldine Ferraro’s recent op-ed:

Bringing up sexism or racism has become, in the minds of those outraged by accusations that they might be sexist or racist, “playing the gender card” or “playing the race card.” . . .

I’ve been astonished at the degree to which “playing the race/gender” card has flourished as a phrase and concept in the conversation about this primary race. I’ve heard it from so many bloggers, pundits, straight-up newscasters, and even some of my personal friends. I want to be as absolutely clear as I can: it’s a bogus concept, and using it makes you part of the problem.

Race and gender are not “cards” that you play, like laying out trump in bridge and winning the hand. Because when you have to bring up racism or sexism to explain what is happening around you, that means you’re already losing.

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News that’s not news: shopping and eating cookies can help you forget about death:

The authors believe people with low self-esteem use consuming as a way of subconsciously escaping self-awareness, which is heightened by thoughts of dying. “When you indulge in shopping or eating, it helps you forget yourself,” says Smeesters.

(via Serious Eats)

Related, people in Japan should eat more cookies. So should the U.S. Army. And the Russian army.

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Jeffrey Goldberg interviews John McCain on Israel, Iran and Obama, among other things:

JG: Let’s go back to Iran. Some critics say that America conflates its problem with Iran with Israel’s problem with Iran. Iran is not threatening the extinction of America, it’s threatening the extinction of Israel. Why should America have a military option for dealing with Iran when the threat is mainly directed against Israel?

JM: The United States of America has committed itself to never allowing another Holocaust. That’s a commitment that the United States has made ever since we discovered the horrendous aspects of the Holocaust.

In addition to that, I would respond by saying that I think these terrorist organizations that they sponsor, Hamas and the others, are also bent, at least long-term, on the destruction of the United States of America. That’s why I agree with General Petraeus that Iraq is a central battleground. Because these Shiite militias are sending in these special groups, as they call them, sending weapons in, to remove United States influence and to drive us out of Iraq and thereby achieve their ultimate goals. We’ve heard the rhetoric — the Great Satan, etc. It’s a nuance, their being committed to the destruction of the State of Israel, and their long-term intentions toward us.

(via FP Passport)

In the same interview, McCain takes issue with Obama’s willingness to talk to Iran. Here’s what Thomas Friedman thinks about all that:

Mr. Bush was also right: talking with Iran today would be tantamount to appeasement – but that’s because the Bush team has so squandered U.S. power and credibility in the Middle East, and has failed to put in place any effective energy policy, that negotiating with Iran could only end up with us on the short end. We don’t have the leverage – the allies, the alternative energy, the unity at home, the credible threat of force – to advance our interests diplomatically today.

Here’s Matthew Yglesias responding:

We’re a giant rich country and they’re a medium sized middle income country. We have military forces in two of Iran’s neighbors, we maintain sanctions on Iran that hurt their economy. Our closest ally in the country is a rich nation with a power military establishment and nuclear weapons, their closest allies in the region are non-state militia groups. We have plenty to offer Iran that would be valuable to them insofar as they’re willing to change their behavior in ways that are valuable to us. That’s all the leverage you need to start a process of negotiation.

And Yglesias on McCain:

I was walking earlier today thinking to myself, “you know, say what you will about John McCain, but he’ll almost certainly be a better President than George W. Bush so we have something to look forward to no matter what happens in America.” Then I thought to myself that to write that up, you’d need to include the all-important to-be-sure sentence. Specifically, something like “if, that is, he manages to avoid any catastrophic new wars that lead to massive bloodshed.”

Also worth a mention (although to me this doesn’t sound like as big a deal as the whole Phil Gramm thing):

Before Rick Davis began serving as John McCain’s campaign manager, his lobbying firm had a pretty cosmopolitan set of clients. For example, Ukranian billionaire Rinat Akhmetov, who has several business links to Iran.

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A history of the L…

…and a gallery of the coolest subways. Included is the best subway I’ve ever experienced:

The Hong Kong MTR has the distinction of being one of the few subway systems in the world that actually turns a profit. It’s privately owned and uses real estate development along its tracks to increase revenue … and ridership. It also introduced “Octopus cards” that allow people to not only pay their fares electronically, but buy stuff at convenience stores, supermarkets, restaurants and even parking meters. It’s estimated that 95 percent of all adults in Hong Kong own an Octopus card and they generate more than 10 million transactions each day.

Not to mention, it’s clean as a whistle and a piece of cake to navigate.

Timely to study what works, since lately, Americans are cuckoo for public transit!!!

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The Balkans are totally safe now (well, unless you’re a woman).

Are you brave enough to take on these death-defying tasks? Are you man enough to go where no man has gone before? Are you bold enough to attempt the impossible? Take my challenge: prove your mettle by performing one or more of these terrifying stunts:

1. In earliest morning, put on your fanciest cocktail dress. At about 11:00 a.m., go alone into an upscale restaurant in your city’s business district. The restaurant will be nearly empty at this hour, but there will be a few servers sitting toward the back, eating breakfast and polishing silverware for the lunch crowd. Stand there patiently until one of them approaches you. Ask if it’s too early to be served. Request a large, central table. When seated, do not get out a novel, newspaper or cell phone. Rather, make eye contact with the staff, all trying very hard to look anywhere but at you. When the busser brings bread and asks what you’ll have to drink, ask for a wine list. When the server offers the lunch menu, ask if there’s a prix fixe. Order several courses. Have the Porterhouse steak for two, or, if there’s a dish that involves the server wheeling out a cart and/or setting something afire tableside, go with that. Get dessert – ask if the chef can do a tasting menu. Linger as the restaurant fills up with businesspeople and their clients, all having Diet Coke and chef salads. Ignore the hustle, the bustle, the fact that your large table is now desperately needed. Sit, placid and content, in your gown and jewels, polishing off your bottle of wine, and working steadily through your feast.

If you can pull this off, you are more courageous than 98% of the population.

2. Think back to your junior-high or high-school years. Who was the first boy you ever dated? Google him. Look him up on MySpace. Email him and ask him if he remembers you. He’ll probably reply, excited to hear from you, and ask what you’re up to these days. Ask for his phone number – tell him that there’s something you must discuss with him, and you don’t feel like typing it all out. There will be a couple days’ delay after this request, but he’ll probably give it to you eventually. Call him up. Get drunk first. Call at about 11:30 p.m. on a Tuesday evening. Tell him that you realize this probably comes as a shock to him, but you’ve been seeing a therapist lately about your inability to connect with men, and you’ve decided that the only way to move past your dating hurdle is to confront it, head on. Inform him that he is that dating hurdle. Tell him that you never got over him, that he was your first and only love. That in the twenty-odd years since the two of you shared your first tongue kiss under the bleachers at that Saturday afternoon JV soccer game, you’ve never had more than a single date with any other man. Tell him that you think about him every day, and wonder where he is and what he’s doing. That at night, you dream of him, and wake up feeling bereft and empty. That you compare every male friend, every coworker, every actor on the screen with him…and they all come out unfavorably. Tell him that, even though you know you must move on, if now or at any point in the future, he were to call to you, you would leave whoever you’re with, and any children you might have with that person, and you would run to his side – immediately and without question. Tell him that you’ll always be his deep down in your heart, and that you need him to know that, so that you can go on with your life. Ask him if he knows that.

If you can do this, there’s really nothing you can’t do.

3. Ask out that guy that seems like he kind of likes you, but is far more attractive than you are, and is already sort of dating that really stunning woman who works in accounting. When he starts to politely decline, begin to cry and tell him that you’re sorry, it’s just that your parents and your cat recently died (your parents were cat-sitting for you and all three of them were shot to death by a couple of junkies in what was probably a gang initiation of some kind) and sometimes it hits you at odd moments. Get yourself together, and ask him, sorry, he was saying? He’ll probably agree to go out with you. Tell him that since you invited him, you insist on picking the event and paying. Tell him that he’ll be coming along to see you make your open-mic debut at Caroline’s. Tell him he has to promise to laugh really loud, even if you totally blow. On the evening in question, wear a dress that is a little too young for you, and a lot too short. Wear it with heels that are brand new and uncomfortable. Part your hair on a new side, and wear a giant flower pin in a totally ironic way, but worry that people might not get that you’re joking. When you’re all awkwardly trussed, take a cab to Caroline’s and wait out front for your date. Get there 40 minutes early, and mention this when he shows up ten minutes late. Get over your nerves by having a few martinis. Tell him that you totally didn’t eat because you wanted to look pretty in your dress, which you think is maybe just a tidge too small. Tell him you can admit these things, because you have a good sense of humor about yourself. When your name is suddenly called, take the stage. Perform the following stand-up routine:

“Hey there, folks! Whoo, are we having fun tonight? Having a few drinks? I know I’ve had a couple. Who here finds me attractive? Huh? Anybody? Did you note my giant flower pin? I put it on today and I thought boy, this looks goofy. I sometimes will do things to be funny, and people will think I’m serious and feel bad for me! But the joke’s on them – because I think that’s hilarious! I’m on a date tonight, folks. First time in awhile. Stand up, Eric! Take a bow. Oh, that’s…where did he go? Oh, there he is. He’s cute, right? Yeah. Dating’s tough these days, am I right, ladies? It’s hard to DATE when you’re DATED!!! Ha, ha. I dated a Hispanic one time, and boy, did he love my cellulite. Am I right, ladies? You know I’m right! I sure do find my body hair unmanageable. But life today, with the Britney Spears and the iphones…. Who can keep up? I don’t know, it’s crazy. All my friends are gay guys. And cats. And that’s my set!!! Thanks, you folks have been terrific.”

Run excitedly back to your seat and ask your date how he thought it went. Tell him you thought it was awesome, and you’ve never felt so great. Tell him you’ll probably give notice at work the next day, and ride this wave all the way to the top. Ask him if he’d like to do something insane and just go to Maine this very night! Just go to freaking Maine! Fart audibly, and giggle in embarrassment. Tell him that, okay, you understand…in that case, he can come back to your place. Topple over onto the sidewalk, and stand up, blaming it on the heels. Explain that you’re really not that drunk. Tell him that, alright then, you’ll go back to his place. Start to cry. Scream that he’ll be sorry someday, when you’re the next Lisa Lampanelli and he’s still working IT in his dippy little tie and dating his anemic, beanpole of a girlfriend who’s never made a joke in her life. Calm down, and ask him if he can spot you a $20 for cab fare. Tell him that you’re super stoked he was on your arm to witness your big debut, and that you feel the two of you are going to be really great friends, no matter what else fate may have in store for you.

If you can pull of this evening, and show up at work the next day, you are the bravest mortal ever to walk the face of the Earth.