Yoga, schmoga

OK, I’m officially Done with yoga.

Internets, I’ve tried. I mean, it’s kind of the law in Northern California. Plus, around here, you can’t smash the windows of a mani-pedi joint without the concussions causing a few cracks in the yoga studio next door. So, you know, I’ve tried. Maybe not every single variant, but a good half-dozen, and the only one that didn’t drive me bugfuck nuts was Bikram (because I like working out in the heat, and Bikram is the only form of exercise since I quit ballet that actually gives me a good enough stretch — but A, I’m pregnant so the heat is right out; B, that shit goes on for ninety minutes, and bitch, that’s too long).

The thing is, as a physical experience, yoga’s neither here nor there — not a good workout (unlike Pilates, which KILLS and which I love), and not really all that relaxing (unlike watching an entire season of Twin Peaks while on Tramadol).

And don’t get me started on the “spiritual” aspect. What a cartload of horseshit. All that directed “breathing” and “centering” and “feeeeling” this or that go through you — jesus BALLS, man. I can’t “center” anything when my eyes are bout to roll right out my head, and the “deep, cleansing breaths” are generally ruined by loud snorts of derision. I hear you’re supposed to be, like, focusing or something, but I’m sitting there in some really uncomfortable stretch alternating between composing a grocery list and thinking about what bullcorn this yoga stuff is.

So, like, bully for you if you like it and get something out of it, but as of last Saturday, when the prenatal yoga DVD kept encouraging me to “inhale deeply, expanding [my] ribcage to give the precious new life more room inside of [me],” I’m gonna have to give it a pass.

Om, mothafuckas.

Come Armageddon, come Armageddon, come

Oh for FUCK'S SAKE.

What next, the captain of the hockey team asks Sha ... non to the prom? Canada's equivalent of the head cheerleader invites her to a sleepover, where all the other cheerleaders listen, enthralled, to ten straight hours of her trying to get through three paragraphs of a story about Special People's Camp?

Meanwhile, offscreen, Granthony is carefully tucking his tiny bait-n-tackle up into his undercarriage so they won't ruin the line of his panties, slicking on some Dippity-Do, and shuffling over to the elder Pattersons' place to ask John for his lovely daughter's hand in holy matrimony. And he'll say it like that, too -- just you wait.

This is GARBAGE. September cannot come soon enough.

Just writing this is giving me the howling fantods

Arachnophobia. Such a pretty name for such a horrible horrible aieeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

OK, start over.

Last night, I had to kill a Creature of the Damned, one of Satan’s most loathsome minions. It was ON THE WALL NEXT TO MY BED. A big, black, ugly motherfucker, tripping merrily down the wall. If I’d waited for Mr. Gleemonex to come in there and kill it for me — my usual method — the hideous bastard would’ve made it behind the bed and I’d’ve had to burn the house down to make sure it couldn’t get me while I slept. I even knew better than to scream — the sound died in my throat as my brain’s lizard core reminded me that the [thing] would hear me and scramble even faster to a safe place and I would never sleep again. What came out was a miserable moaning sound with half-words in it, something like “o helpme, oh this is bad, ooooh god auuugh.” I grabbed the first solid object I found with enough width between me and the [thing] — a fun bedtime read titled “The Nursing Mother’s Companion” (I gots homework to do, y’all) — and CRUSHED THE EVERLOVING SHIT OUT OF IT. The remains came away with the book, which book I carried at arm’s length out into the living room, still moaning, to make Mr. Gleemonex dispose of. If left to my own devices, I probably would’ve thrown the whole (borrowed) book off the cliff half a block from our house and into the ocean, but Mr. Gleemonex is fortunate not to be burdened with this crippling unreasoning phobia of mine, so he took care of the [thing]’s corpse for me. Bless his heart.

Internets, I’m not kidding you, I’m shivering right now, thinking of it (and feeling like there might be one on me RIGHT NOW), getting goosebumps, feeling kind of ill. I once almost drove my car off the road, trying to avoid a tarantula in the road (it could snag on to the car’s undercarriage as I went by at 40 mph, hook a ride, and get into the interior, doncha know). If I ever get caught by the Thought Police and sent to the Ministry of Love, they’re already well aware of what to fill Room 101 with.

Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeegh.

And on that note ... wooooooooo.

Heathen/apostate that I am, reading the Sunday New York Times with my coffee is my most sacred ritual in life. So in the uniformly awful Sunday Styles section of this week’s edition, there was a long piece about dudes who do the Hamptons-summer-share-house thing well into their 40s and even 50s (and there was one dude who admitted to 60).

Oh. My. God. What a bunch of fucking douchetards (that’s douchebag + fucktard).

It’s like those creepy old skeezebuckets who go to Spring Break, decades out of kollege, to hook up with drunk 19-year-olds — same people, different geography. They profile this one guy who, at 42, has a girlfriend (age 25, natch), but wouldn’t let her in on the share house — because he wants to keep his options open. Ugh.

I mean, I’d never do the Hamptons share house thing anyway — I’m well past the age (um, 13?) at which I’d think rooming in an overpriced rental with up to 30 strangers in some sort of bizarre arrested-development social blender would be fun — but to still make it a priority of your life when you’re in your late 30s or 40s? Jeeee-ZUS. Grow the fuck up already.

I’m not saying you have to be married and have kids and all, but by that age, shouldn’t you at least have the financial resources to rent your own fucking summer place? Shouldn’t you have the mental and emotional maturity to manage a vacation that doesn’t depend for its success on having a neverending supply of fairly desperate, usually shitcanned women in-house? Hasn’t your imagination progressed beyond “wouldn’t it be great if I could live in the frathouse forever and ever?” Aren’t you tired, by that age, of these silly-ass hookups whom you then have to avoid when you get back to the city? Don’t you feel like a complete asshole for still using the word “hookup” when you’re over FORTY?

Casualties of the Booze-Free Lifestyle

You know what’s just no damn fun when you can’t drink? The social event I’m gonna call The Long Hangout. That’s when there’s a gathering with no real activity or purpose — for example, no Thanksgiving dinner or bowling or whatever — when you just sit around with your friends and drink. Infer what you will about us, but that’s the overwhelming majority of social situations with my friends: We’ll go over to somebody’s house and drink, or sit outdoors all day on a bar’s patio and drink, or spend an entire weekend at Blondie & Diamond Mike’s place, drinkin by the pool. Drinking is both the fuel for the entertainment and the entertainment itself. You just mingle and chat with your friends, shootin the shit and enjoying life. You don’t even know how long you’re sitting there, really — your perception of time gets fuzzy and you don’t much care anyway unless you have to be somewhere at a certain time.

But when you’re at a Long Hangout, and you can’t drink, there’s nothing to do but listen to drunks bray the same story into your ear five times while you say things no one will remember, and watch … the … time … crawl … more … slowly … by … the … everlovin … minute. The first hour, you’re OK. Halfway through the second hour, you’re getting a little antsy. By the end of hour three, you can’t stand the sight of another motherfucking club soda with lime and you’re just trying to keep yourself from hucking a Dos Equis bottle at the wall mit force and bellowing at everyone to just FINISH YOUR FUCKING SEVENTY-THIRD MARGARITA ALREADY AND LET’S GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE.

And there’s not really any way around it. What am I gonna do, suggest we all make some goddamned arts and crafts instead, or something? People always try to tell me how great it is that at least I can watch the drunks’ antics and laugh to myself, but you know what? That shit is mean-spirited and boooring, and kind of judgmental — just the sort of thing your Career Non-Drinker is prone to — and besides, my friends aren’t the lampshade-on-the-head types with the crazy antics that you could actually laugh at. Well, a couple of them are, but these days, now that we’ve all rounded the corner of 30 and some of us are playing footsie with 40, that sort of thing mostly just happens at Diamond Mike’s. Heh.

Combine that with the fact that I am frankly and obviously jealous of people who get to drink, and it’s pretty lonely and isolating. Even more than is usual, I much prefer just being alone with Mr. Gleemonex, and I find myself choosing more and more to opt out of Long Hangout situations; our friends, noticing this, may be all “see? Once people get pregnant, they never wanna party anymore!” but that isn’t precisely the truth. I want to — it’s just no damn fun anymore.

Points at which my life coulda gone way, way wrong

OK, gonna put up a real post later today, but I just wanted to correct a factual error from a few posts back — I got into three of the five kolleges I applied to, not two: the third was UCLA. I had … vague ambitions of something to do with the movie industry, or something. My brain blocked out my acceptance there, maybe because I never gave Thought One to actually going there once I got the packet:

—I would be living “on campus,” however vaguely that is defined, in a dorm suite consisting of two triples connected to one bathroom.

—"Financial Aid" consisted of a bunch of loans toward the $23K/yr. cost (out of state, doncha know), plus the hyoooge National Merit Scholar award (which award, for some reason I no longer remember, stipulated I had to apply to an out-of-state college, chosen before I even knew where I would be accepted): $1,500.

—I realized I would have no car. In Los Angeles.

Anyway, it was a great mercy to me that I didn’t end up going, because as it turned out, my worst and most hated class of all four years at Columbia — including Major Topics in East Asian History (four thousand years each of the history of China, Japan, Korea and Vietnam, taught by the guy that literally wrote all the books on same), two classes under Annette "Behold My SEK-shoo-ality!" Insdorf, and Analysis of Film Language (Schamus was great, but I was in waaay over my head and the weekly dread of this class nearly made me sick) — was Production, the one where we had to actually make a bunch of short movies (using whatever jank-ass equipment we could scrounge from the department after the grad students had bogarted all the good stuff for themselves) and then edit them, and then SHOW THEM to the rest of the class. GOD, did I suck at that. Anyhoo …

Makes you long for the days of rice cakes and speed

Good LORD, y’all. I … I am struggling to find the words here. The words, they don’t so much come easily when I am this horrified.

See, there’s this … this diet pill … and using it MAKES YOU SHIT YOUR PANTS.

And people … people are BUYING IT. Lots of it. Lots of people — women, mostly, and quelle surprise there, eh? — are buying lots of jars full of this magical fucktacular pill! Because it MIGHT help them lose a little weight!

This makes actual bulimia — which as we all know is a DISEASE that can KILL YOU — look terribly attractive. I must quote the Salon article that somehow penetrated my mental defenses against learning about this horrorshow:

What sort of [side] effects? Well, you may get "gas with oily spotting," "loose stools" or "more frequent stools that may be hard to control," the page says, before likening the undigested fat -- which will show up in the toilet -- to "the oil on top of a pizza." … Putting it a different way, if alli prevents you from absorbing a quarter of the fat you eat, that means that for a meal with 15 grams of fat in it (at nine calories per gram), it'd be saving you approximately 36 calories. Not to get all philosophical, but if someone were to ask me how many calories it would take to get me to risk shitting myself in public, it'd be a hell of a lot more than 36.

No fucking kidding. Oh Internets, how has it come to this?

Satan's garden mulch

People.

Can someone please tell me what is the point of arugula? I am right this minute interrupting my lunch -- an otherwise quite good chef-type salad from the work cafe -- because it is made with arugula instead of normal lettuce (Romaine, iceberg, butter, red leaf, green leaf, what have you) and I had to ask you guys about this.

Arugula. Jesus. It's got that sort of waxy thing going, like spinach (you know how it creaks against your teeth?), but with a very -- I dunno, leafy overtone, like if you were to eat a handful of ficus leaves. Dusty, kind of limp ficus leaves. And it looks like a cross between spinach and dandelion greens.

It's like, they use arugula because Romaine is so passe, so Middle America or something -- it's purely snob shit, because nobody -- NOBODY -- loves them some arugula.

This is bullshit, man. And I won't stand for it.

[Hey, csr_reporting_is_my_life: d'you think this has something to do with Pride Week in the caf? You do remember the "Flaming" something-or-other from last year ... ]

Well, suck me sideways.

Like my homeslice bgirl, I try to keep the politics off my blog, mostly because all I can do is sputter deranged-sounding diatribes that, while true, and honestly felt, do my side no credit at all — for nuanced analysis, y’all should read the rather brilliant offerings of my other homeslice, the Hip Hop Lawyer.

But sometimes the molten lava just breaks through the solid crust, and I have to leave off talking about, say, comic strips I hate but which hold me in thrall, or desperate social maladjusts, or bands that totally rule. Like today (and yesterday) when I’m reading about Il Douche's veto — again — of the embryonic stem cell research bill.

This semi-retarded pisswad loves, loves, LOVES to talk about his famous “respect for life,” ignoring — as he expects us to — the lives of the already-born, particularly if they are female or dark-hued of skin or didn’t get into and cruise through Yale instead of Viet Nam because their daddy was the director of the C.I. Motherfuckin A. The utter hilarity of hearing him say that "Destroying human life in the hopes of saving human life is not ethical” almost makes up for how FUCKING OUTRAGEOUS that statement is, coming from the Salesman-In-Chief of the hopeless bloody boondoggle that is Operation Kill All The Brown Ones And Take Their Oil, No Matter How Many Of Our Soldiers Get Cut Up And Used As Chum.

So: Let me put it to you slowly and clearly, shitheel:

1.) The embryos you’re talking about are the embryos that will go unused by the fertility patients for whom they were created.
2.) These embryos that will go unused are going to be DESTROYED — no babies will be grown from them under any circumstances ever.
3.) Therefore, unless they are donated for stem cell research, they can be of no use to anyone.
4.) If they are allowed to be used for stem cell research, they can potentially be of great help to humanity, both the already-born and the yet-to-be-born variety.

THAT’S respecting life, you fucking halfwit.

Franks and beans!!!

Oh … great. A …week …of …Saint …April …and …the …Special …People …Club. I …guess …it’s …better …than …watching …Fortuna’s …Wheel …bring …Granthony …and …Liz …together …in …sweaty …doughy …union.

Half a dozen awesome: Things I did as a kid that are, in retrospect, astounding

People could get away with a lot back in the 70s and early 80s. These are a few of the things I cannot believe my parents let me and my friends do, things that today would get CPS called on your ass or get you or your parents arrested, things that — amazingly — didn’t get us killed. And things that, for the record, probably I won’t be letting Kid Gleemonex do.

--Riding around town sitting on the top of the back seat of the Rabbit convertible, its top down, my feet in the seat, one hand casually on the roll bar (a roll bar that years later probably saved my life, but that’s a story for another day) unless I was also eating or drinking something at the time, in which case, hands-free!

--Scooting along the highways and main thoroughfares of Cowburg, helmetless, licenseless, flip-flop-clad and not-so-very-mechanically-inclined, on the Honda moped (age 11-ish to 13-ish)

--Spending entire evenings with my friends throwing things at cars going past my house (water balloons, rubber bands shot from wooden rubber-band guns that in the dark must’ve looked like the real thing)

--Selling things door-to-door, alone, for school fundraisers or just to make extra money — and of course, going inside whenever I was invited, which was often.

--Disappearing for hours and hours, by myself, sans water, communication device or any kind of safety gear, on my bike, miles out on country roads

--Jumping off of various tall and/or unstable objects (such as scaffolding erected by drunks) onto our trampoline, usually with other people already on the thing.

Note: I bet the Hip Hop Lawyer’s list is lots better — i.e. scarier — than mine. He was the person I was trying to impress with lots of my silly-ass shenanigans, which were pale copies of his own.

I been payin it. TEN YEARS I been payin it!

Awwwwww yeah, beyotch! The beast is off my back! Today I mailed the check containing the final payoff for the last of the last of my student loans, nearly two years ahead of schedule — and the Citibank Student Loan Corporation can kiss my pasty white ass, cause they ain’t gettin another dime of interest from me! Woooooo!

As much as I have cursed the “fucking Stafford people” all this time, not to mention cursing the constant stream of fundraising calls/direct mailers/emails I have received over the years (seriously, bitch, I’m not giving you any damn EXTRA money until I’m done PAYING YOUR ASS OFF FOR THE FIRST GO-ROUND, and they hit us up for dough before we had even graduated, goddammit) — now that that’s out of the way, I want to say a word in praise of Columbia University’s need-blind financial aid program.

My family was pretty po’ back in the day; when your father is a freelancer and doesn’t want your mom to work, there are flush years and lean years, and 1991 was a real lean year in a series of several such (and by the way, growing up like that is why the life of a writer, artist, or self-employed/freelance person holds zero romance for me) — I even had the application fee waived, and to their credit, CU didn’t hold it against me.

I applied to Columbia, Harvard, UCLA, and UT’s Honors Program (and then for reasons he would not explain to me, my dad — Harvard ’68 — made me also apply to Yale). I got in to two of the five: CU and UT. The good folks at UT offered me what they called a financial aid package, complete with an honors scholarship and parent loans (not that the ‘rents could’ve qualified for those, mind you — lean year, series of lean years, no financial planning AT ALL of ANY KIND and the bad parental credit to show for it); it would’ve covered about a third of my bill, and I wasn’t guaranteed to graduate in four years. Assuming I made the four years work, I’d’ve graduated with about $25-30K in debt.

Columbia, working with the same information, gave me a package that covered tuition and housing over the four years they expected my degree to take; I would of course have to do work-study during the year, work during summers, and do a lot of scrambling and legwork corralling my parents and, frankly, crying in the bursar’s office at the beginning of every single semester, and it wouldn’t cover extras like study abroad or travel between Texass and NY, but it did not include parent loans, and in retrospect was altogether a smashing deal: For an education that cost well over $100,000 (1992-1996 prices), I ended up graduating a mere $13,000 in the hole.

Now, I tacked a couple grand on during grad school, which added to the total and delayed the start of payments, but I’d say that’s a pretty fucking good deal, eh? And those four years and everything after were worth every dime spent, every penny pinched, and every single bit of agita it cost me.

Rock on, need-blind financial aid. Rock the fuck on.

And thank you, fucking Stafford people and what once was the federal student loan guarantee program, for meaning something back then -- I hear kids today don't get half the deal we did, and the pResident's cronies have been allowed to plunder and corrupt this system like they've plundered and corrupted all the other systems they put their dirty suppurating fingers all over, but for myself, I thank you very much.

Flappy Friday

Good name for a band: Your Racist Granddad.

Actual name of a band, on a CD I saw in Rasputin Records: Suburban Kids with Biblical Names.

This one time, when I was viciously hideously hung over (some jackass bartender had made our pitcher of Tomazos with the cheapshit New Jersey tequila instead of Sauza Hornitos but charged us for the Cadillac version, and by the way, that fucktard got fired not long after), I was waiting for Mr. Gleemonex to finish shopping in Rasputin Records (he can disappear in a record store the way I can in a bookstore, which is to say, for days without food or drink) and I had to leave the store because all the words all over the place were making me sick (rapid-saccade eye movement is not the hungover bitch's friend). I stood there in the doorway, eyes closed, listing heavily to port, while the usual bums and tourists swarmed around me. And this was after I’d almost horked in the dressing room of Banana Republic. Not the most pleasant Saturday morning ever.

Friend of mine IMs that over in the East Bay, where he lives, they don’t have many bums. Except in Berkeley. To which another party on the IM replies: “Bumkely.” I think it’ll stick, don’t you? That town is a fuckin rathole of the first order.

This one time, we went to a pub in Berkeley before a Pixies show at the Greek Theatre and had a bunch o’ drinks and some very good food. We took the leftovers out with us with the purpose of handing them to a homeless person, as good New Yorkers and Northern Californians are trained to do. Gave mine to an old lady, who promptly screamed at all of us (unintelligible gibberish) and totally spiked the box to the ground, mit force. Alllll rightythen.

If I ever get another tattoo — which I won’t, but if I did — it’ll be the Pixies’ flying “P” logo thing, about the size of a nickel, on the outside of my left heel.

The tat I already have reminds me that yes, everybody was eighteen and stoopid once. Even me, your beloved Gleemonex.

[claps twice, shows hands to eye in the sky, walks away from table]

You know what? Forget it. Just forget it. Liz, you deserve Granthony. If all it takes is him shaving the pornstache and discovering hair product and Men’s Wearhouse for one day, then go for it. Slurp it up. Lick it clean, pick your teeth with your fingernails, wipe your hands on your pants and ask for seconds.

Wiggy Wednesday

David Bowie.
I think I first became aware of him in the immortal classic 1986 movie Labyrinth. ("You cowered before me. I was frightening.") He has one blue and one brown eye; this is cooler than I can even articulate. Life on Mars is a kickass show on BBC America -- you should watch it. He is 60 this year (fellow Capricorn), and even so, I'd probably hit it. (You know you would too.) He might actually be an alien. And he is very disappointed in you.

Shut up.
Average number of seconds between mentions of the Yankees' payroll by the A's broadcasters, when we have the misfortune of watching a Yanks-A's game on the local channel: 78.

Not a people person.
Dreading tomorrow's off-site team-building meeting -- a FIVE-HOUR affair involving the same 15 people we work with every day and see and talk to every. day. Followed by drinks at Gordon Biersch. These are the sorts of things at which I am a one-woman Vortex of Annoyance, the sorts of things which get me branded as an Attitude Problem. And I can't even goddamn drink at the thing after.

Potpourri Tuesday

MUSIC TO MY EARS
Let’s have a word about Journey, shall we? "Don't Stop Believin'" is probably on everyone’s mind because of the Sopranos finale — I’m not gonna parse its meaning or lack thereof to the episode, because blah blah blah sophomore MassComm major-cakes. However, I just wanted to say: I fucking love Journey. It was part of the background noise when I was a kid, I guess, but I never paid it that much attention. But over the years, I’ve come back around, and started listening to it — at first just ironically, but then realizing that this band really kicks ass. They’re so … committed, you know? We’ve tried to play some of their stuff in the Drunken Jackass Band, and Diamond Mike’s pick of “Stone in Love” is now my favorite track and a highlight of our setlist — but YOU try getting anywhere close to Steve Perry’s vocal range. (Don't look at me -- I'm a bassist, I'm not gonna do it.) Oi. And but so my point is, once you’ve paid $45 for a shirt with a band’s name on it, like I did three weeks ago, you’re not being ironic anymore — you’re a fan, and you should just damn hell admit it.

THIS THING OF OURS
I was in a gang once. It was called the Stray Cats, name inspired by the band, and particularly their song “Stray Cat Strut.” We were a particularly threatening group of second-grade girls, I can assure you of that. If you pissed us off, we would totally write mean notes about you.

UNHOLY MATRIMONY
Yay! Big Love is back! Great first ep, and I’m really glad we re-watched the Season 1 finale beforehand — pretty complex storylines and a long time between seasons. Can’t wait to see where this is going. Harry Dean Stanton: scariest motherfucker EVER, without having to say a word.

GENTLEMAN’S C
So we saw Ocean’s Thirteen last weekend, and y’all — it was good! I liked the first two a lot (funny, fast-moving, sophisticated, interesting twists — good times), and this one was better than the second. I also followed it a lot better than I did 11 and 12, possibly because I wasn’t BALLS DRUNK like I was those other times. (And by balls drunk, I don’t mean tipsy, or even just drunk — I mean completely fucking blind gibbering shitcanned, like the rest of my friends; none of us could remember the whole thing, or even most of it. We just tried to piece it together over even more drinks at Tommy’s Joynt after the show). But I want to make special mention of The Clooney, and how totally delicious his shirts are. They’re hand-tailored of the most wonderful soft-looking yet crisp fabrics — they just look … buttery. You want to rub your face all over them. You want to marry them and have like ten thousand of their babies, these shirts. In heaven, we shall all have shirts like those belonging to The Clooney, yea Lawd, yea Lawd. Rapture me Jesus.

Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?

Sopranos finale, folks. I can’t even talk about the stuff I thought was great (e.g. A.J.’s insane glee when he recounts the SUV fire to his shrink — it was as hilarious as Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes talking about burning down Andre Rison’s house, man). I’m too pissed off about this colossal bullshit.

Since 1999, we’ve been getting our chains yanked every which way by these people, but in the best way — never simple, never easy, never the usual or the expected. They had us rooting for a bunch of murderous thugs — really no better than the other murderous thugs — even when they showed all the collateral damage “this thing of ours” causes (both human and property-wise) — like when you unconsciously root for the car holding the murdered woman to sink all the way into the bog in Psycho, you know what I mean?

And last night, they just — fucking left our cheese in the wind. I didn’t need every end tied up with a sparkly pink bow, but jesus, I feel like I’ve been taken in a really spectacularly well-done long con. There’s going to be all kinds of talk about how “brilliant” and “genius” it was to leave us hanging like that, as if making me wonder for a solid totally enraged minute whether it was the satellite feed or the TiVo that had cut out at this crucial juncture and which bitch I should cut first was just the very tops in narrative construction. Listen, sophomore, the fact that you ran out of time writing this shit before class and had to hit “print” on what you’d done so far? DOESN’T MAKE IT GOOD.

And this a-hole Chase has done it before — I bet you ten dollars cash American that someone, somewhere on the Internets (a series of tubes) has already photoshopped Tony Soprano walking out of the Pine Barrens into Manhattan.

Pinnacles

You know what was great about last night? (Besides the Yankees winning! We're threatening to climb out of the basement, folks!)

So you know what was great? Huh? Huh? DO YA? DO YOU KNOW WHAT WAS FUCKING GREAT ABOUT LAST NIGHT?

The Oakland A's (a team I haaaaate) snatching Curt "Asshole Supreme" Schilling's no-hitter away from him with ONE OUT LEFT IN THE NINTH!

Oh god, you guys, it was BEAUTIFUL. Jerktard shook off his catcher's call, and used his mighty prick-for-brains to decide to chuck a fastball ... which Shannon Stewart singled to right: dink! No-hitter, DENIIIIIED! Suck on THAT, Schilling! Stuff it in your stupid bloody sock and SMOKE IT. Wooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!

Nadirs

Discussion arising from an over-the-cube-walls convo: Disregarding major personal tragedies like the death of a parent or horrific events like 9/11, what has been the worst year of your life so far?

To a person, every woman in the group said “Seventh grade.” I don’t think I really have to elaborate on why — most of y’all can just think of seventh grade, and cringe.

So that was too easy. But the interesting thing was, almost universally again, the second-worst turned out to be age 22. Now, 22 gets fetishized in sitcoms and The Real World and lad mags and what have you, but I remember it as an anxiety-filled, at-loose-ends kind of year — my bod was still kind of not great (too much herbal refreshment + munchies, and beer, and not enough exercise in those last months of college), 21 was gone and the dread 25 was looming, school was over and I didn’t know what to do next, everything was just kind of up in the air in the worst way — and that seems to have been a really common experience.

The men couldn’t really agree on a single worst year, in general — or maybe they just didn’t want to share why. Guys, any thoughts?

Not unless they invent a stat for punk-ass bitchery

Question posed by Mr. Gleemonex:

IF the Yankees were to win a few World Series in the next 5 years, AND A-Rod was a HUGE contributor to that, WHILE achieving and maintaining Gehrig-like personal stats:

Would the Yankees retire his number?

Point is probably moot, since that boy ain’t gonna be long in pinstripes (and besides, have you seen the 2007 Yanks? Oi.), but … Mr. Gleemonex and I both agreed, NO WAY. No matter what his contributions might possibly, theoretically be at some future point, there is no love for him in NYC. No love. And the love is a crucial element in whether they retire your number.

They’ll retire Jeter’s, and rightly so.

But never, ever A-Rod.

Discuss amongst y’selves.

Don't let the door hit you in the vagina on the way out

So I knew I get pretty good maternity leave and benefits — I work for 1) a California company, with 2) a big investment in making itself a “family friendly” employer, which company is 3) over 70% female and 4) in a female-dominated industry in 5) a city chock-full of employment choices for well-educated, qualified employees, both male and female, so there’s a good deal of concern with making sure people want to work here, and keep working here.

But I didn’t realize HOW good until my friend, who works for a national banking company which rhymes with “Mells Margo,” told me what SHE gets (she’s about 3 weeks behind me, gestationally speaking):

You have to take 1 week PTO before it can kick in, then 3 weeks fully paid and then 2-4weeks at 65% (2 weeks for a vaginal delivery and 4 weeks with C-Section). Then it looks like you are on your own!

People who work at convenience stores get better leave than that. I guess Mells Margo doesn’t care about having women work there, at all, huh?

What’s wrong with America today

Well, besides the whole “being mired against our will in an illegal, immoral, and unwinnable war, while the ship of state is helmed by a total asshole with the ego of Napoleon, William Shatner and Genghis Khan combined and the brain capacity of intestinal flora” thing …

There were, I think, seven (7) previews before the main attraction Sunday (Knocked Up — go see it!), all but one of which featured nothing but slapstick of the “pretty girl walks right smack into a flagpole and falls on her ass” variety. Two were vehicles for the two biggest half-empty used douchebags in the entertainment industry (namely, Jason Biggs and Dane Cook), and one was a criminal misuse of The Office’s John Krasinski, who apparently spends the entire movie being orbited, gnatlike, by a totally phoning-it-in, shoulda-never-quit-coke Robin Williams.

The chuckleheads next to us (RIGHT next to us, in a half-full theater, what the fuck is up with that? do you not recognize the convention of leaving a seat between you and the stranger who was there first?) got big laffs through all of these previews of fine masterworks of American cinema, yet were silent and slackjawed during the preview for Superbad, written by Seth Rogen.

DO NOT UNDERSTAND.

What I wouldn't give for a large sock, filled with manure

So on the way out of Knocked Up last night (which by the way is one of the best and funniest movies I've seen in years -- NO cliches, super-sharp writing, acid & sweet in equal measure, just seriously hilarious and great, you should totally see it asap), we were in the elevator in the parking garage with a guy (love child of Conan O'Brien and Jay Mohr) and his girl (very pretty twenty-five-ish Asian/Indian chick).

Apparently they'd just been to see Pirates of the Caribbean, cause he asked her, prefatory to some other remark, if she knew who Keith Richards is.

No. No, she didn't. At all. Total blank.

Who the fuck doesn't know who Keith Fucking Richards is?

Where is my mind?

Waaaaay out there, on the water, see it swimming …

Partial list of things I have done recently, which may or may not be attributable to “pregnancy brain,” but if you say that phrase to me, I will — mark my words, I will — choke out a bitch:

* Possibly gave a $40, or maybe $60, tip to a delivery guy for a $25 meal; I can’t find my money anywhere, and I really don’t know what else I could’ve done with it.

* Goddamn near clipped my own left pinky finger off with the verysharp German-made kitchen scissors (while trying to snip the plastic rings from a six-pack, so they don’t get caught around sea birds’ necks). The cut was about a half-inch long and bled like a mofo, but no stitches necessary. Says me.

* Determined that the bucket on the floor at Starbucks was NOT a trash can (it was for umbrellas, or some toy donation drive or something), and then deliberately tossed my wadded-up straw wrapper in, despite standing right over the trash receptacles provided for that purpose.

* Paid for and then failed to take a small bottle of water from the work cafeteria (twice).

* Neatly pared off about half of the fingernail on my left middle finger with the verysharp German-made chef’s knife, in the course of trying to chop up a red onion.

* Tried to wash my hair with conditioner; wondered for a distressingly long time why it wasn’t lathering up at all.

* Blanked out, completely and terrifyingly, on how to set up my bass and amp with the compression pedal and distortion pedal, a setup I have done a hundred times; the various cords and the order in which they connect to each other and the amp and the power strip might as well have been crayolas and chicken nuggets, for all that I knew what to do with them, plus the entire rest of the Sauce band was looking at me and I could not make Mr. Gleemonex understand that I DID NOT UNDERSTAND THE WORDS COMING OUT OF HIS MOUTH when he was trying to tell me how to do it.

F-U-C-K-E-D

Yesterday’s events just illustrate the random cruelty that is inherent in the workings of the National Spelling Bee: You can memorize all the words your brain will hold, you can drill to the dawn, you can prep and rehearse and meditate and pray to the Dark Lord Satan all you want — but if you somehow psych yourself out, or if you get that one word you didn’t come across in your studies and you don’t guess right when you take a swing at it, you’re just as fucked as the kid who left the second “r” out of “quarterback” in your school-level bee. ('Sup, Shane?)

It’s especially bad for the repeaters like my boy Samir Patel, the kids who climbed that steep and crevasse-riddled mountain more than once, only to crap out at the Big Show. Again. So much is luck — you’re sitting there onstage, watching kids miss on words you could totally spell shitcanned on Boone’s, and when you get up there, you get socked with something you’ve never heard of. Them’s the breaks, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

And I don’t much like this kid who won — his fave subject is math, which he says he likes better than reading and spelling and word stuff in general, and that spelling is “just memorization.” Maybe it is to YOU, robot boy, but if you’d drawn a word you hadn’t memorized, you’d have no hope of figuring it out on your own — you got lucky, you little homeschooled shit, as does everyone who wins, to some extent, so why don’t you stop playin like it was easy? Get some social skills, JESUS.