buyblue.org

phew—tangueray, j crew, and netflix gave money to the democrats this year. starbucks and barnes & noble, evil as they are, did too. my mother won't like the news that saks gave $110,000 to the bushies.

eGREgious suffering

it was awful but it is over. i was not prepared for the absurdity of such arbitrary judgment exacted by an unfriendly computer terminal while being forced to sit on my butt for four hours, addled by hunger and frustration at the strange mentality that demanded repeatedly, cruelly, that i answer committee-formulated, whole-picture questions from an uninformed yet well-adjusted perspective.

the inanity of the princeton review's practice tests did not prepare me for the bludgeon that is ets mentality. extra stress on the mental there. here's an analogy to summarize my experience:

princeton review :: ets: cafe lolita :: a) kahlua b) everclear c) franzia d) a kahlua bottle that actually contains...heroin.

the correct answer is d).

ambitions in canary yellow

trying to make everything happen for my nyu app and trying to be articulate at the same time is making my brain hurt. it feels less like a race against the clock than a stampede traced on a flurry of post-its. maybe they would like an all-post-it grad school app.

re: diculousness of corporate titles

Did you know Les Moonves is the Co-President and Co-COO of Viacom?

Apparently he's not the only one.

actual sentence from a GRE practice reading comprehension

from the princeton review's test-prep cd (the novels in question are toni morrison's beloved and faulkner's absalom, absalom!):

"Both are considered by some critics a Bildungstroman, or coming-of-age novel. Morrison's Sethe and Faulkner's Quentin, find self-worth instead of relying on dominant society's values. Also, although using psychological realism plot style, both novels have a complex, experimental structure, using fragmented viewpoints to further the plot and juxtapose perspectives. I call this method psychological juxtapositioning."*

elsewhere in the passage, the author says morrison addresses the 'psychological affects of slavery,' a flub repeated in one of the questions. how disheartening to be trying to beat a test asking me to comprehend writing that belongs on engrish.com.

*this sentence is faithful to the original. i carefully typed all the errors as they appear in the test. just imagine one giant sic over the whole thing.

harper's rejection came in the mail yesterday. even tho i was prepared for it and had even already rationalized it away, it was still totally demoralizing. i had planned to start my nation letter and study for the GRE, but i just couldn't do it. so ed came over and we drank port with holly's theatRE friends and scarfed many varieties of chocolate.

well, i didn't get an elite internship, but i did get cute shoes for a steal on ebay. they are $240 mary janes made by birkenstock (i know! the nerve!), and i got them new for $60.

so really, my evening had happy ending. my dreams of catapulting into secret literary zones where no one makes excel charts were capitulated,* but as long as i'm pumping my meager paycheck back into the economy for identity-reaffirming goods, who cares? it's the beauty of the capitalist machine that you can't have bootstraps without first having boots.

*more slightly flubbed uses of GRE words coming soon

hopped up on coffee and calling insurance companies

i went to the rockefeller center postal service (amazing that i was able to distinguish it from all those mail-delivery-system-wannabe emotronica bands out there. cuz they're so hard to tell apart. just like wilco and those bible-belt fillin' stations of the same name. i never know who to ask for cigarettes and who to boogie to.) to mail some internship applications, and the concourse was crawling with tourists sucking on starbucks and becoming acquainted with the bathroom line and the concept of 'bathroom usher.' most people complain about tourists, but i've developed an affection for them. they are nice, pleasant people who are nearly always happy to be here. they have a sense of humor about being crammed up against each other in the elevator. and they walk slower than i hobble.

today i will do EVERYTHING.

heh heh.

forget liberal bias—butt bias is the real issue

"Astronomers took a closer look at Uranus, and found it stormy, with 'vigorous convective activity in the southern hemisphere'; they described the rings around Uranus as 'a layer of chunks.' " —Harper's Weekly Review

"Earlier human ancestors, like chimpanzees today, had pelvises that could support only a modest gluteus maximus, nothing like the strong buttocks of Homo." —New York Times

strong buttocks of homo . . . could be the tagline for the next abercrombie catalogue, or another suppressed lynne cheney novel going for $1,000 on ebay.

direction

i just registered for the GRE. i'm applying to NYU's cultural criticism & reporting program at the j-school so that i can learn how it's done from former voice and harper's editors. screw internships. i knew i was sluggish on applying to MFA programs for a good reason. writing isn't the thing i need schooling for; it's the body of knowledge cultural critics have that constitutes the gulf between my current job prospects and the ones i want to have. i just applied for an assistant editor job at parenting.com, and i don't think they want to hear about how their advertiser-driven content is part of the slow but pernicious brain-warping that causes people to rely on purchases for emotional meaning.

this morning on the way to work a lady with a headset wouldn't let me get within fifty feet of my building. they were shooting a movie, and i had to stand on the sidewalk until a silver car ostensibly containing matthew mcconaughey pulled up to the 21 club. they stopped all the real pedestrians so that the extras who were skillfully playing new yorkers could bustle past and ignore the movie set. i'm really good at ignoring movie sets, and i'll be good at bustling once my cast comes off tomorrow, so they should pay me to walk and fro in front of work.

activists are normally such understated, delightful people

(from the open newswire) "Students and activists interrupted the launch of Victoria's Secret's 'Angels Across America' tour today with a rowdy protest by people dressed in angel wings and lingerie and wielding chainsaws, and including a large banner reading 'Victoria's Secret: Their Catalogs Destroy Endangered Forests.' "

i've been googling for independent press outfits that look interesting enough to ask for a job. it occurred to me today that although interning at a literary magazine certainly would be more relevant to my interests than my current job, i might have better luck trying to work for some indy paper or indy media advocacy group. unfortunately, alternet is out in san francisco with mother jones, and they're the ones who are really legit and on top of their game. so i googled for ny organizations and came up with indypress.org, whose superearnest populism i recognized from some distant freakfest my memory had muddled with bust, bitch, butch, and all the other self-marginalized media i came across in college. three clicks later the words 'campus alternative journalism awards' brought it all back. russ and i entered libertas my junior year, and after i wrote our application and spent ten minutes on the phone explaining to some indypress fellow in arizona why we didn't just write off the meatheads and the godsquad at our school even though, yes, they were funny—oops, of course i meant 'poisonous'—russell the love muscle and i were shocked by the kind of tripe they hailed as winners. and we were proud to have lost.

i don't think i will ask them for a job. i want to be independent of corporate control, but i also want to be independent of sucking.

discovery!! followed by democracy in scare quotes

the #2 bran muffin in the new york metro area is a four-minute hobble from my apartment. (#1 lives at phoebe's, the cafe that is unassumingly neither too cute nor too scruffy and very assumingly near ed, and is delicious toasted with butter.) this muffin is bran fig, and it has big, spaced apart crumb-units, as though it's made of a larger sub-muffitomic particle, that are buttery but not too sweet. satisfying big rough-textured muffin top, too.

i voted in midtown manhattan this morning. crazylong line all the way down the block, understaffed voting center, mysterious vending machines full of crayons. never a better time to be on crutches. one guy working saw me and said, honey, you sit down, we'll get you to the front of the line. it then took fifteen minutes for him to communicate to the only other person working the lines that he had someone on crutches and could she get through.

my boss voted on the upper west side, where they had only one machine per district and no one to move along the hundreds of disgruntled voters more efficiently. you'd think in a city with thousands of ATMs we could manage voting at least competently. ATMs even give receipts. how hard could it be to write software that would allow the sweet juices of our beloved republic to course through every city's ATM system for one day every four years?

i think kerry will win the election, but who knows if he'll become president.

when i got to work this morning i discovered a big brownish-yellow stain on the side of my blue corduroys. this stain, invisible in the yellow light of my apartment, is glaring and gross in the fluorescent light of the office. mmm, scary to think what i would find if i systematically wore my entire wardrobe to work. i just hope no one notices, because any attempt to explain it would land me in the slob's catch-22. either i know about the stain and a) don't care or b) none of my other pairs of pants is any cleaner OR i have revealed myself as someone who thinks i can get away with avoiding laundry even when i have spilled coffee all over myself.

nothing to be done but eat cookies for breakfast.

last night i went to a book party i was invited to through class. my prof edited this book, food for the soul: selections from the church of the apostles soup kitchen writers' workshop, which has an intro by ian frazier because he runs the workshop. a bunch of the writers read, but it was hard to understand them without a copy of the book because they either stood too close to the mic or too far away, had thick foreign accents, or were retarded. the stories were pretty much what you'd expect from a soup kitchen's writers' workshop, except for one woman with this beautiful voice. she was a tall, striking, mulatto ex–manic depressive alcoholic drug user who was sharp. perfect for an oprah segment only much deeper and more real. she sang her own song about hard times and grace and god in the soup kitchen and everyone cried.

mainly i went to the party to confirm that there was no point in going; otherwise i would've convinced myself that i had missed my chance to meet X harper's or new yorker editor, or at the very least, my mom's friend's writer son who told me about the prof whose class i'm taking now. being connected with him seemed to offer some promise last november when i called him for advice (he said he got my prof her job at the new yorker), and i've felt really stupid for never following up and sending him the piece i said i would. so i was looking forward to asking my prof about him and maybe finally meeting him. after spending most of the reception talking to other students of limited interest, i found my prof and asked her if he was here, and she was like, 'oh him? he's nutso! i love him to death, but last time i saw him, he showed up to a thing with his dog and was flipping out about how the world was going to end.' she then introduced me to a retard writer and moved on.

awesome.

born-again ankle

i just got back from the orthopedist's, where the nurse removed my bigheavy splint and gave me a cast. she tore apart the splint and the buttload of cotton i had sort of suspected was in there, and afterward it looked as if my foot had very forcefully hatched itself out of a giant cocoon.

there were all kinds of crazy used casts lined up on a shelf. there was a little mermaid, a kermit, a green cast with googly eyes and a tongue flap just where the toes come out, and a virgin mary done in sequins. i chose baby blue for mine. if i were a cast-plaster manufacturer, i'd sell wraps in stripes (brown and baby blue, of course) and license designer logos like luis vuitton and the burberry plaid so that sufferers of orthopedic trauma no longer must give up their brand loyalty in such difficult times. when you can wear only one designer shoe, you've got to make up for it somehow.

i just looked at my insurance website and discovered that i have a $6,000 tendon in my foot. whoa. it was itemized under 'prostheses.' my ankle has become my priciest accesory.

first day back at work and it is quiet. i'm the only one who didn't leave for lunch. it's usually the opposite. i didn't expect this, but crutching around the office makes me feel sort of pathetic. something to do with the way the crutches blend in with all the gray plastic in here. and how their rhythmic creak can be heard over the hum of computers and kitchenette appliances.

last week's recovery was an excellent break from work. i got my harper's intern app done friday (ed took it down there for me and, through an entertaining series of snafus in their office's system for receiving packages, actually ended up putting it in the hands of the man who will read it), which astounds me, because i never really believed i would hand it in. this weekend i had dreams about telling my boss i'm leaving. in between dreams involving accidental walking and what my stitches look like.

here you can see a video of jon stewart's appearance on crossfire.

if that link doesn't work try this one.

another friend getting married! let's see, now that's one from childhood, one from high school, one from college, and one from study abroad. i find this awfully...symmetrical. i don't keep up with anyone from summer camp, so who's it gonna be next?

arise, frankenfoot!

is my daily incantation for keeping my new, post-operative ankle elevated. for those of you who knew i was going to have my right ankle surged upon by an orthopedic surge-on this thursday past, i am ok and my new clubfoot and i are getting on fine. on those of you who didn't know, i bestow the relief of never having worried.

the surgery was for ligament repair (i had ligaments so stretched and barely there i needed a tendon transfer, i.e., a tendon from a dead person, hence the frankenfoot nickname, coined by greg, to give all credit where credit is due), took four hours, and will keep me on crutches for 6 weeks. the foot is bigger than my face and will be pacified by narcotics (great buzz when combined with coffee, fyi) for a few more days. i'm taking the same class of hydrocodone that got rush limbaugh in trouble...it was that or the robert downey jr–endorsed vicadin, a prescription i could still fill if i were into spending a week of my life doing some truly mind-bending dvd watching. in all seriousness, i think skipping work, lying around my apartment, and taking federally controlled substances is just the break i need to attack that harper's internship application i keep saying i'm gonna do.

leave comments with netflix recommendations or costume ideas for my foot and me for halloween.

apples without stickers

is just one reason farmers markets are great. another is that they are reliable mealiness-free zones.

although i am glad for the chickens and cows who range free and grass feed, i am disappointed by the absence of organic, which is to say conventional (as opposed to poisoned), foods.

purchased:
one vegan granola raising cookie (immediately consumed)
four punkin scones
raspberry-currant jam
small bottle of cider
three macintosh apples

they also had some goodlookin muffins and pies and whatnot, but renting another stomach is a bit out of my price range. maybe that is the answer to world hunger--if americans could rent space in starving africans' bodies to store their extra flab, everyone would win. instead of exporting mcdonald's and burger king, we could just unload our fat directly on the rest of the world. tho i guess there'd be problems in the event of a fat-transfer defrauding scheme. if the same pounds get bought for multiple people, credited to them, but then taken away months later when the error is discovered, the africans could potentially owethe world pounds, and *poof* they are gone!

uh-oh. i think this plan would actually be very attractive to our goverment. you mustn't let this very workable proposal fall into the wrong hands. it could turn into a vast pound-indebtitude disaster on the scale of subway's notorious diet campaign, which contended that you could have lost 73 pounds last year if you had eaten a turkey sub every day. which translates into 146 pounds if you ate two every day, and so on...

i just walked past a group of black people protesting how rolling stone/miller beer's eight-can series of rock musicians 'white washs' music made great by blacks. they were outside a big business center, which i entered for its starbucks, where i found a black man behind the counter and asked him to make me a white hot chocolate.

behavioral finance?

i just ran across this term in some verrrry interesting media-bigwig bios i'm editing, and it sounds very, very creepy. creepy as in let's take advantage of the way this term mimics the credible-sounding behavioral science, and then let's sock 'em with our catlike cataloging skills when their pants/defenses are down.

praytell, what is behavioral finance? is it the prediction of consumers' spending patterns w/r/t our biological and social profiles? this sounds scary. or could it be the more straightforward practice of giving people money when they behave a certain way? like, prostitutes are financed when they behave in a blowjob sort of way around certain men.

i've been to two doctors today and have two more to go. needless to say, there have been/will be more post-physician icecream treats. well, the chiropractor doesn't count as a physician. have i mentioned i'm going to a REAL spine m.d. next month? i am stoked. smoked. lately i've been asking every m.d. i go to if i can blame this-or-that problem on the chiropractor. they always smile and say sure.

the last doktor i go to tonight is the shrink. yay! i have been waiting for this for a while. and really, it was easier than my insurance-phonecall-avoiding mental block told me it would be. i hope this woman is cool. over the phone she sounded a bit dull. but no worries if we don't work out...there are more shrinks in manhattan than there are people.

this morning the warmly paternal yet brusque orthopedist (#1) diagnosed me with patella-blahblah syndrome, so i am skipping happily (he told me i can skip) back to physical therapy, and tomorrow i will finally achieve what i have been lovingly referring to as my epantsipation (he told me i can wear my mary janes instead of sneakers).

greg is having a dance party on sept. 11. there will be twin kegs. rob is coming up. everyone else come! you can stay with me.

it's time for a haircut when

an intern mistakes you for an older, heavier, blander person she has already met.

my hair has gotten too long to wear down, so i've had it back in boring buns and ponytails, but this is the last straw. why couldn't she have confused me with someone better looking?

really i don't begrudge new people their confusion; i have been guilty of fusing plenty of very distinct faces in my effort to absorb the large amount of information they take for granted. when i was new this older lady would confuse me with another new and unfortunately frogfaced girl with a mop for hair and BANGS, but i got back at her by confusing her with a really spacy older lady who works on the same floor.

if there is an edge, hyphens will push me over it.

and i hope there are a lot of phoebe's bran muffins on the other side.

october 22

i have just been informed in pleasant, measured tones via modern telecommunication that this is the date on which my right ankle will surge. it's a little too close to thanksgiving for comfort, since holiday airports are already a nightmare when i have two functioning feet, so i asked them to call me if they can work out anything sooner.

for now, there will be lots of fun and revelry-making: kt's tennessee lakehouse with the rest of jam304 for labor day, homecoming maybe, and medonna III (new york) with brewton as choreographer in mid-october. then the Punishment arrives, with lots of hobbling and whining to follow.

for right now i am excited because rania, my favorite person from high school, is coming to nyc to work at the human rights watch! rania is one of the frankest, most refreshing people i know, and in high school we had lots of fun cutting each other's hair and dancing in the rain. we even had a crush on the same egomaniacal (to us, 'inspiring') boho-boy, and only now are we wise enough to know that we two make far better company than he.

so rania's coming over for dinner tonight, and she is going to meet ed, and we are all going to drink wine and eat this chick-pea and spinach stew i have yet to make, as well as a key lime pie that ed and i made last night while drinking brazilian sugar cane liquor and taking turns shouting over the phone with russ, who is moving to chicago in a week and whom i've just realized i can't visit when emily does because duh, that's in the middle of the week and some signs i'm picking up from my environs (gray desk, plastic 'walls,' staples catalogs 2002 and 2004) are suggesting to me that i just might have a job.

the point of copyediting is to keep people from sounding stupid. there are some people whose stupidity i am tired of concealing from the world.

this article makes me want to cry. it's one of those life-is-shit-but-so-and-so-overcame gigs. but it's so true! life is shit! i am lucky to have what i have, but i have nothing if i am shitty to myself all day, which is harder to avoid doing than it sounds.

do we need the possibility for advancement and future comort for happiness? for acceptance of the shit we are doing in the present? e.g., can communism work for regular people, not just monks (who are capitalists anyway because they brew beer)?

ok, everyone go read the article mr. fridrik posted in the comments to my entry on 7.14. it's about the wars on obesity. normally i pity the pro-fat wing of opinionators as both misguided AND unstylish a la the ugliness-as-conscientious-dissent soapbox occupied by BUST, bitch, and other dubiously feminist publications whose editors make a profession of marginalizing themselves, but this article makes some sense in concept, even if some of its numbers aren't so credible (an 80 pound range of 'healthy weight' for anyone, no matter how big-boned or hairy, seems unreasonable).

last night dorothy said on the phone (best read in dreamy dorothy drawl): 'i've been having fantasies about going grocery shopping with my mom, where i pick out things i want and she pays for them, and she picks out things that i wouldn't have thought of.'

my goals for the weekend are to heal from my various injuries, buy a new glug-glug jug of tangueray, read more book than news, and see the metallica movie. and maybe write a long soulful email to my brother, king of the long (and short) soulful email, and a long intelligent email to the only contact i have in the world of Jobs I Want.

don't wake that life

last night i fell asleep to waking life, which, now that i've seen it semisober, i've decided really is best watched stoned. lots of half- (or totally) baked ideas from philosophy one-oh-point-five. ed and i decided that an animation overlay of one of dr. robb's classes would be much better, and his sweaters would look faaaahbulous.

iron-maidenform girdle?

man, i can understand how people get fat working these desk jobs. food is about all you can look forward to in the course of the day, especially when svelte coworkers abandon delicious chocolate cheesecakes in the fridge in effort to offset the caloric danger to themselves and their own. the cheesecake was lunch yesterday, and i have just eaten a banana on the verge of overripeness to prevent the cheesecake from being breakfast too. also, i am trying to avoid learning too much about the scrumptious and expensive offerings of 52nd street, because lately i have been venturing out to get black coffee and just happening to run into other delectables in the process. like the $1.75 oily kindergarten-birthday-style cupcakes in a deli just a few doors down and the chocolate-covered grahams in the starbucks housed protectively by the financial center across the street. if i try the $3 pizza-by-the-slice from global kitchen, i'm afraid i will find myself living on (and for) it for the next month. i am, however, particularly thankful for the proximity of midtown's best gyro cart on hangover days.

boring old job and exciting new knee condition!

everyone i talked to this weekend about feeling restless in my job said i should get out before too long to avoid being pidgeonholed as a copyeditor. i feel like i'm starting all over again, like last summer, and i've just managed to keep myself taken care of for the past year, though that counts as a worthy goal in itself. it's tough. it's tough to think of giving up health coverage and working for free at harper's or the voice just so i can have a gamble at doing the thing i want to do. but that's why i'm here living in this expensive supercili-city to begin with. if i wanted to just support myself, i could do a much better job of that somewhere else, like, while frying fish on the beach.

tentative plan: stay at work and in apartment through christmas and have surgery on the company plan; apply for grad school for next fall and internships for this spring; consider moving to brooklyn once off crutches and if an ok situation comes along.

state of knee tendonitis: bearable and improving. the weather is too nice to miss running outside. the plan for today is walk-run intervals followed by the rolly thing (i am obsessed with this, my hard-foam cylindrical physical therapy device--much easier to manage than sitting on a tennis ball, miss kt!) some knee exercises with ankle weights, and ice & ibuprofen.

had some wacky dreams this weekend. they rely on aural puns, tho, so i'll refrain here. if you want to witness the verbal stretches my sleeping mind finds hi-larious (thomas ward would be proud), the phone will have to be your medium.

it's one of those 'what do i do with my life?' days. it started as a busier-than-usual day at work, the drudgery levels of which are usually manageable, if not nearly suppressable, but then it came roaring to the surface when an all-staff email was sent out about the open position for a curatorial assistant. i read the description with a clenched stomach, hoping hoping hoping that it's low-level enough not to require a master's degree (it doesn't), desperately wanting to surround myself with interesting people thinking about ideas, which would be a nourishing environment for my brain, as opposed to interesting people keeping track of facts and versions of pieces of paper, which seems harmless on the surface but is mentally debilitating when you really think about it. but then there's the whole politics of even asking to change departments within the museum, of abandoning the people who so carefully taught me their...paper-shuffling techniques (ok) and who generally are charitable enough to ignore the way i slink into work late in the mornings and even later after a mysteriously long lunch. all this got me curious about what jobs are available outside the museum, which, by the way, is a very efficient way to further torture someone already deep into the let's-throw-my-whole-life-into-doubt game. i really didn't want to know that i could make $16 an hour freelance editing tv trivia questions until as late as 1 a.m. on weeknights and work weekends too, even on top of my current job; or that the magazine looking for a copyeditor whom they insist shouldn't harbor affection for the serial comma (wtf?) is, as revealed by some web investigation, an 'uplifting' christian magazine with sayings of the day and drop-down prayer menus; or that martha stewart magazine wants a copyeditor and pays much better than i currently make but still probably not enough to make it worth working there. or maybe not. does it matter, really, when the people at the top of my workplace are just as crooked and fake and vain and clueless as i imagine the people at the top of martha stewart co. are? and it's not like i'm at my job to get better at the job itself. i'm there because it's a particularly low-pain version of a profession i'm good at but not much interested in. and because it sounds much cooler than it is and could get me in the door somewhere else that's actually cooler. not so with uplifting christian mag, tv trivia, or martha stewart.

so where am i trying to go? what to do with this restless engergy?

well, for now, the answer is run. run run run, tendonitis or no.

a free REED'N. (but not the miss cleo kind)

i saw david foster wallace and george saunders last night for free at the public theater. ed's roommate jake really wanted to go, so they stood in line for an hour and a half, and i left work just in time to cut in line and consume a powerbar before they let everyone in. dfw & gs were amusing and did the usual 'writer talk' gig, shifting between clever cynicism and warm fuzziness. i was curious about how dfw would look and sound in person, and here is the consensus we arrived at by the end: math nerd who discovered weed.

seriously. he was like wayne and garth, only with these little effeminate gasps and cluck-clucks and choo-choos in between the stoner-droner stuff. and fidgety. brought a plastic fork onstage. and was dressed in (somehow) mismatched all white. he did give a refreshingly honest monologue on the franzen/oprah hooplah. one notch closer to the heart than the uge.* 'refreshingly honest' writer talk.

i'm having a birthday party at my place most likely friday the 9. more info to follow in traditional mass email form. would do it the 10, but cousin rodney's baby's christening is at a brooklyn episcopal church at 8:30 sunday morning, and it's a bit too sinister for my taste to be hungover for/puking after a christening.

this day at work has been another example of the many ways in which the president of our museum is a total fucking dunderhead. more on that later.

*is there any good way to transcribe this conversational abbreviation for 'usual'? i think we need a new character in the alphabet. same thing happens to snappy casual. it ends up looking like 'snappy cash,' which sounds like something advertised on the subway. how about a z with a little notch over it, like in czech?

reading materials

i envy alain de botton a lot and nicholson baker maybe just a little.

also i want a birkenstock tan.

good hippie snack reminiscent of preschool gooey snack

hungry for sweet crunchy sustenance? like to play with your food? need food NOW without jeopardizing your sincere intentions to eat dinner?

try HIPPIE SNACK!*

all you have to do is happen to be the kind of damn fool hippie who would actually have on hand things like this:

hippie peanut butter (concession: other peanut butter will work too)
wheat germ
grape nuts
hemp granola
maple syrup for enhanced gooeyness

directions:

1. assemble ingredients in bowl
2. moosh ingredients together (fingers work best but fork will do)
3. shovel in mouth while making 'mmm mm' noises

probably is also very good with sunflower seeds, which is the gooey preschool snack ingredient most prominent in my memory, other than sugary kid peanut butter. this snack appeared in ball form.

*to be distinguished from the hippie snack promoted by the healthful and exuberant appearance of ms. dorothy

bonus: like a diy energy bar, but looks like dog food, so no one will want to eat it up before you get home

sentimental existentialism, or 'yeah, we're all going to die. together!!'

i realized as i was walking back to work after a lunchtime spent nursing a hungover emily and greg back to waking life (without doing any self-conscious philosophizing or edgy animation and with special greasy eggs and black russian toast and lots of ketchup) after d's socially exhilarating party, an arguably unwise but successful drive through and decision to park in midtown, and lots of pizza and ridiculousness and pink-bow wearing and falling-to-the-floor laughing, that i spend half my time feeling bludgeoned by the drudgery of the world and the other half feeling exhilarated through every pore by how amazing all of the people i love are and how lucky i am to know them, and i think how i want to be around them all the frikkin' time.

employment: consensual sustained low dosage of electroshock therapy

work makes me braindead. i think that is why they pay me. i am renting out my brain for $13 an hour. it is, like, a zero return for a cost of a bazillion eleventy billion. companies are all about hiring highly creative people to find solutions for their highly boring problems in exchange for lowly compensation. it's so boring, in fact, that i'm going to spare you the description of the meeting i came on here to work up the disdain to mock.

happily, today is dorothy's birthday, and tonight is one big bright bloomsday future of a bigyummy salad, playing dress-up, cupcakes from magnolia bakery, and an outing to the great lakes bar in park slope. but right now i feel like crawling under my desk for that nap.

today on mcsweeney's

diary of a congressional candidate in florida's fourth congressional district by richard grayson

a good read for those of you squandering yet another day at the boring old office. which, from what i can tell from my mostly unemployed and/or traveling-to-new-york-this-minute readership, is just katie today. so, ahem, katie, you will enjoy reading this narrative by a florida write-in candidate as you sit in your office looking for distractions to-day.

eighties movie catchup weekend!

also eighties movie ketchup weekend, judging from the volume of greasy food i ingested to combat the waves of carsick-y feeling i suffered over the weekend, even tho i don't have a car in this city!! unfair, i tell you. but my steady diet of the nyc spin on road food (much better than actual road food in an un-ac'd pickup, ms. roodtree) and my careful avoidance of anything leafy and green has evidently cured me, 'cause i haven't felt the ick creeping in since saturday. hey, yeah, i must have been metaphysically on that road trip i've been hankering for, and that explains the carsickness and all the gyro, belgian frites, pad thai, coke, popcorn, currywurst, and ice cream i stuffed myself with for three days. d, i was with you all along, says my stomach! good thing you are getting here soon, because i think it is time for some salad.

so the eighties movies i saw for the first time this weekend were heathers and say anything, both of which i liked. i loved heathers, which i found appealingly dark in some of the same ways as hal hartley's trust, except h. was almost more penetrating because it told of a warped mindset taking hold in a familiar environment, as opposed to the alternate universe of trust, where a warped mindset is the norm and people go around saying things like, 'a family's like a loaded gun; you point it in the wrong direction, you're gonna kill somebody' every second of the movie. which is great. but also easier to extract yourself from by the end because it's so obviously stylized that way. i also liked say anything, which ed and i agreed is a much more realistic movie about teen love than the shallow buttload the post-dates it.

and and and!! last night we saw the first episode of the new season of six feet under. i like this show. it makes me feel oddly (or evenly?) relieved to see these really heavy problems that are never resolved neatly by the end of the episode, and certainly not before new complications spiral out into whole new heavy issues that in turn take episodes and seasons to subside. all without being trashy. a boon, this hbo.

a bigger boon: big bloomsday birthday bar blast & dorothy and emily get here tomorrow!

upchuck update

well, i didn't end up booting, but i had a couple of close calls. i almost wished i had, even with the risk of being overheard and arousing eating-disorder suspicions, because i would've made the day go quicker. maybe i should have brought the dictionary into the bathroom, since it's really the combination of reading small print and exercising mental powers of discernment that work such antigravity wonders on my stomach. i was still feeling yuk after work and wanted to crawl into bed with a pizza, but i decided to apply katie's sister's cure and go for a run while listening to loud techno music. the run may have helped but did not work miracles, so now i am equipped with a very miraculous-smelling spicygreasy gyro, which is much better in this part of town than the pizza is.

looks like i should have taken chaser last night...

man, those $4 bottles of wine will get you. this one was much crueler (and more delicious) than the $2 variety. i think my hangover is actually worse than when i woke up. normally i would consider curling up underneath my cubicle for a nap, but it seems i actually had a job today. it's lunchtime, and i've already done several things, many of them involving taking elevators and picking up phones and sending emails to people who are waiting for them. gotta watch out for that bright flashy light on the copier, tho. that shit is boot-inducing without proper eye protection.

ideologues in the roomplace kitschen

after receiving a blank stare from the polite, epitome-of-southern-liberal-arts-college subletter, in response to my comment, "now THAT'S telling," after being informed that all the major businesses in new york are closed tomorrow in honor of reagan, i'm beginning to suspect that we landed this particular subletter thanks to our kitchen decor's experiment in ironoclasm--that is, our glossy piece of republican "grassroots" kitsch, the stilted photo of george & laura that was charmingly, painfully made out in full scripty font to "mr. lamar c——, a charter member of the republican party of new york." i was so sad to be turned down by the nice liberal jewish law student interning at human rights watch this summer, but i'm beginning to think the photo's presence during our interview may have spooked her, despite all my earnest talk of harper's, mcsweeney's, and what it was like to be liberal at a southern conservative college. i'm now convinced she was thinking, 'liberal? sha!" ah well. perhaps we would have been too earnest a pair. living in that apartment seems to require bizarre ideological mixes of people.

amazing!

my boss just walked by and said 'good night' while i was actually absorbed in doing something, rather than my usual blank stare-n-scroll at something on the internet. that may have happened only once before. normally i scramble to arrange my face into what i imagine is an engaged but serious brow furrow but is probably just one variation of the many nervous guilty eyelid flutters i use to deflect the dull stare of the working world every day. i used to long for my boss's chance walk-bys to coincide with the 1/8 of the time i spend doing real work, but now that this has happened, i am convinced that i look more suspicious doing something i am supposed to do because such activities call attention to how rare the sight of me working actually is. wait...what am i doing here?

if you are experiencing a life-threatening emergency, press 1

i'd like to see a shrink, but before i do, i must subject myself to all manner of alarming recordings and menus. so much time and paper shuffling and button pressing all of the sake of...mental clarity. phew. i'm sure glad something in this world adds up. i was in such despair over our wilting, anemic health industry (sick industry? as in really, really sick? make that macabre industry.) that i pulled a luke and didn't put the no-splashy thing in the food processor before i turned it on to give my smoothie its smooth nature. up, up, up went the almond milk and pieces of frozen banana. smoothie rejoice! smoothie rapture! smoothie can fly!

hmm, there may be a lesson here. no, the lesson is not put lids on things before you electrically activate them. the lesson is clearly a far swishier deepak chopra–style allegory: the no-splashy thing is the insurance company, and they are trying to put a lid on my frozen bananas and almond milk and spirutein soy protein powder. i am the food processor (ha! processor! see? see?), and i have been told by society that i must constantly smoothify, make everything smooth, but maybe some things need to be upchucked so they can fly free, free! that is clearly what it all means.

confidential to dorothy: delete some email, bitch! my emails kept bouncing back, so i gave up and wrote to your yahoo account.

joys of copyediting II

in a passage about hitchcock, the writers in the education department kept putting quotation marks around the words surprise and suspense and scary. i marked to take all of them out with the note, "no need for SCARE quotes, har har" and promptly thought of randy ingram, who would have made the same note with extraordinary amounts of glee. i think puns are even funnier to me because i know that man and the overwhelming sense of satisfaction and amusement they bring to his life. and there's that slightly sneaky look he gets on his face so you know that what's coming is an especial favorite--the lovingly recycled pun.

googlesluttin'

today has been so slow and quiet that i've been googling boys i made out with in high school and boys my friends made out with in high school, and a surprising percentage of them are gay, in new york, and very sad about the passing of a man who was, i take it, one of their favorite theatRE profs at fsu (the google-flagged [fagged?] site that gave me the most plentiful and most recent info about them was a guestbook in memory of this prof, which two of them, both of whom were cursorily invovled in my and my friend's life yet unknown to one another circa 8th grade [except they may know each other by now, huh, and wouldn't it be indecorous of me to suggest that they may have even smooched?], signed just a few days apart). another one, i learned from the online obituary section of some local CA paper, had an aunt who died in march in san diego. it's so strange to suddenly acquire personal, if mostly peripheral, knowledge of someone i knew ten years ago--the kind of information i imagine was relayed to them seriously--perhaps even tearfully--up a flight of stairs or over the phone by someone very close to them and completely unknown to me. another two fellows were google-proof, with absolutely no leads that led to them, which i find both preposterous and slightly alarming in these times, like not having a finger print.

last weekend i crashed my own 5-year high school reunion. we were all supposed to pay ahead, but i snuck in through the back of the golf course tent while the bartender wasn't looking. man, i had forgotten what kind of people i went to school with. the girls were in strapless dresses of only slightly varying silhouettes, and the guys were in white pants and blue oxford shirts. the guys (chuckling and slapping one another on the back, naturally) all made a few line drives before slamming back their bud lights. some people had increased their smooth factor x10 (every sentence i said to these people was met with gutteral, chest-thumping iterations of 'nice, nice, glad that's workin' out for ya,' punctuated by sudden jerks of the chin); one girl increased her waistline x10 (but overall class weight remained constant, because she was balanced out by one guy who got suddenly, inexplicably very skinny); and awkwardly worded pseudo-latinate plaques were awarded (lots of WHEREAS clauses, no verbs unless they were couched in WHEREAS clauses) to retiring teachers.

i reconnected with one or two people who were important to me, though, and that was the purpose of going. also i gave this one guy a really hard time for selling out and working for a bank and owning a condo at 23, even as he was driving me to the train station in his shiny beamer.

verdict: crash 10-year reunion, where alcohol is free.

oh no

i knew that my boss was a regular reader of NRO, because i see the blue logo with its three broadcasting waves on her screen whenever i go in her office; i just didn't realize that NRO stands for national review online. shit! i always imagined her as at least liberal in principle, if not in practice. she has such a lovely personality and a fine mind, tho i guess she is rather fixed in her ideas. but isn't everyone? and doesn't the world look down on looseness of ideas as a sort of mental incontinence that should be eliminated before it soils our overly sanitized ideologies? perhaps that is wasteful reasoning. the only thing i am certain of is that the fecal matter puns should end with this paragraph.

maybe she only reads all those new yorkers i bring her for the art news and the reviews. maybe all those lefty talk of the town columns are lost on her, or just skipped entirely. or maybe she wants to keep up with the opposition (tho that seems ridiculous, since it's an opposition that sells red t-shirts depicting reagan's head drawn in the style of che guevara's, above the words 'viva la reagan revolucion.' wtf? who is the target market for that? those grim-faced 'christian punk' kids i read about in the ny times style section?).

i feel like a hamster whose wheel has been overturned, or like a vintage-clothing junkie who, thanks to the catalog that shows up in her mailbox, realizes her entire wardrobe likely came from urban outfitters. is it true? could my boss really be a conservative disguised in sparkly pink shoes, rhinestone earrings, and a 60s mod spring coat?

departments are organized groups of people who agree in precisely the same way on what is wrong with everyone else.

"join us for a 2.5-mile walk to fight asthma"

read a sign near the prescription pickup line in duane reade.

i tried sort of hard to stifle the laughter. a walk? 2.5 miles? is that all they can do? that's not going to get asthma very far, i'm afraid. someone should tell them the breast cancer people are already way ahead. and, tell me, how do i sign up for the ten-foot shuffle to the fridge to fight obesity?

oh, i'm so mean. i won't be laughing in october when my foot's in a boot and i can't carry my own tasti-d-lite.

tho she doesn't own a necklace of rocks,

the middle authority here in my department manages to giggle like wilma flintstone. she even squints her eyes and does that rapid-vibration-approaching-hummingbird-levels thing with her shoulders. this is not to say that she doesn't also know how to cackle unattractively like gargamel.

hey, was i alone in my childhood misconception that gargamel is a woman? which, given that he is balding, is a bad call, but on the other hand, could i be blamed if the creators put him in a shapeless dress and red booties?

without even thinking

i just said to my boss, 'yeah, i love the occasional plain-speaking flight attendant.'

she was like, 'whaaa...? OH, p-l-a-i-n plain. good one.' har har.

quote of the day

from dan kennedy, who solves your problems with paper on mcsweeneys.net:

"I'm currently in the habit of dumping eleven bucks a morning on something called a venti caramel macchiato, an orange Odwalla, and a blueberry Bliss Bar just to try and have some fun in the face of what feels like a wave of gray, sensible, humorless, pained so-called adulthood that is trying to kill us all."

on friday i went straight from nap to party upstairs at wake forest dave's. on the roofdeck. one of his penthousemates (the bolivian interior decorator) was celebrating her birthday with sangria, a potful of paella, and a roomful of very fine liquor, including my diabolical friends tangueray no. ten and vintage porto. dave (from my program in italy), who managed to live two floors above me for three months before we ran into each other in the elevator and began getting shitfaced on the roof together, took me to meet carlos, the penthousedweller across the way and custodian of the veryfine roof place, so that i would be welcome to come up without dave and dave's penthousebrethren.

carlos gave us the first allow-me-to-show-off-my-room-and-all-of-my-fabulous-toys tour i've been on since the fourth grade. first, he showed us the front room with its blue-muraled walls that climb to retarded heights and its giant fish tanks and, yes, its jacuzzi from which you can remote-control the air-conditioning or one of the penthouse's many stereo units, or pretty much anything electric. for all his affection for the remote control, this man also has a great fondness for the orgasmically posed cast-metal feminine figure. they pepper each room, sometimes free-standing, sometimes paired together in a concave formation to support a clear glass tabletop. the tour reached its pinnacle when carlos opened closet after closet of suits, always making stroking motions through the air (the best comparison to which i can make being wayne and garth's DOO-doo-doo wavy motion that signals yet another alternative ending) while intoning, 'versaaassssshhhh, versaaasssshhh, ALL versaaaasssh, ONLY verssssaaaasssssh.' then we saw the shoes. those had their own closet ('manolo BLAAAAHHnik, yes, yes, manoooolo'), including a snazzy pair of white leather short boots that dave wanted to borrow.

while we were gone, dave's bathroom caught on fire! and you know what? i was too drunk to notice. i went in there and was like, hmm, there's sort of a strong smell in here. and who put all those ashes in the sink? and, man, that sure is a beautiful black streak going up the wall. i hadn't noticed it before.

duuuude...a technical position just opened up in our NY museum, on ed's, like, second day in the city. i am so excited. i think it looks like something close enough to what he's done. i am containing myself by wisely drinking yet another cup of coffee and munching on donut.

you're all a bunch of milk-packagers and surgeons, aren't you?

notice those ads (powered by google, of course) at the top of this page? their content changes when mine does. as i type this, they're pushing dairy packaging technology and sterile biotech probes. sort of amusing to see what they isolate out of all these streams of words. will the google ads, having scoped the previous sentence for nouns it can match with its ad inventory, implore you to give yourself a break and finally take that wilderness vacation as soon as i post this? even if i type 'streams of urine'? or streams of insults? or streams of streamers and streamy steamy seamy same-y streaming extreme streams you can streak along?

all this makes me suspect that the free 1-GB google email accounts with targeted ads based on email content will be more humorous than scary.

re: how can this be?

amazing! the ny times heard my call and rescued me from my bafflement. from "Thinking Outside the Can: A Fresh Look at Food in a Box" by kate murphy, nyt, march 14, 2004

"...Aseptic packaging tends to cost more, but it also allows for more delicate processing of foods than do alternative methods like canning. As a result, aseptically packaged products are especially plentiful in high-end natural and epicurean food stores like Whole Foods Market, where shelves are stacked with boxes of roasted red pepper soup, hazelnut milk and loganberry juice....

"...The technology for commercial aseptic processing has been available for a half-century and took hold in Europe in the early 1960's, but it was not approved for food in the United States until 1981. Parmalat, the Italian conglomerate now in bankruptcy and embroiled in an accounting scandal, embraced the technology early and became the world's most widely distributed brand of milk.

"The process involves sterilizing the packaging and the food product separately and then filling and sealing the containers in a sterile environment. That allows the food to retain more color, texture, taste and nutrition than it does when subjected to the more heat-intensive conventional methods used in canning and bottling.

"Manufacturers were slow to adopt aseptic technology in the United States because of high equipment costs and slow line speeds, and because the brick-shaped packaging was unfamiliar to American consumers.

"But the cost of aseptic machinery has declined significantly in the last five years, while energy costs have gone up. "It takes less energy to run an aseptic plant," said Andrew H. Jacobson, general manager of the nondairy division of the Hain Celestial Group, based in Melville, N.Y., which sells more than 100 aseptically packaged products, including Soy Dream and Rice Dream beverages and Imagine soups and broths. Manufacturers also save because they do not have to add vitamins and minerals to replace those lost in processing.

"And, of course, there is no need for refrigerated storage or refrigerated delivery trucks. "The return on capital is great if you can stand the initial investment," which is $5 million to $7 million for a basic aseptic operation, Mr. Jacobson said. The major equipment suppliers, all based outside the United States, include Tetra Pak of Sweden, Krones of Germany, Shibuya Kogyo of Japan, Procomac and SIG Simonazzi of Italy, and Stork Food and Dairy Systems, a unit of the Stork Group of the Netherlands...."

link to article

our graceful new prez

if you go to www.mtr.org, you'll see right at the top a picture of our new president. even tho it's only a picture of his head, he somehow manages to look short. he is. he's also the type who doesn't think it polite to nod to his underlings even when they are standing right next to him, nay, scooping cream cheese from the same tin as he. damn yankee jew.

damn the man, save...empiricism

this weekend ed and i watched empire records (he had never seen it!), only it was the dvd version, and so of course they had to put in scenes (some of questionable merit, as is usual for dvd rereleases) that were not in the original movie. like, after rex manning fucks renee zellweger, and a.j. jumps him and then rex punches a.j., and the kids say 'you're just a washed-up has-been, man,' 'we all hate your new album,' and 'your hair looks stupid,' instead of mockingly bowing and saying 'why don't you all just...fade away' rex says, 'hmm, you may be right' and leaves. they had this whole undeveloped dimension of rex's character being a real person, a guy who was passionate about guitar and who was sad about his campy fame (there's even an implausible scene with rex and berko smoking in front of a lake, and berko inexplicably has his guitar with him so they can have a lead-in for this soft-side-of-rex conversation. and there's even an extra scene in which the band on the roof at the end plays 'say no more, mon amour' in this alterna-rock way, and rex and berko sing together, and rex looks truly happy and isn't wearing eyeshadow anymore. also the dvd includes the whole 'say no more' video, which is hi-larious. lots of frilly shirts and water and ros-ay being splashed orgasmically on the harem of rex women. i recommend the dvd version if only for that. otherwise, you're in for a lot of partially developed subplots, some details you probably would have inferred from the vhs version if you had thought really hard about it, and a graphic comment about blue cheese dressing.

how can this be?

why is parmalat 2% milk so rich and so creamy compared to its milk brethren, and how does it stay good for weeks, even once opened?

yeow, what a hangover

last night was the museum's annual gala, where semi-rich and semi-famous people pay $1000 a head to go to the waldorf and tribute a very rich and very famous celebrity. this time it was tom brokaw, and dan rather and peter jennings (who is a womanizer--who knew?) gave heartwarming and noncontroversially funny speeches. conan o'brien hosted. the idea is that well fed, emotionally primed people in a room with charming celebrities, lots of booze, and swelling music accompanied by nostalgic tv images will start to feel like they are part of something important and larger than themselves and, because they have nowhere in particular to spend their money because they are not famous and don't know it's all a load of crap anyway, they siphon it into the museum.

most museum employees go, and we check the rich people in, give them table cards, etc, but then we sit down too and see the whole thing. not really worth $1000, but i filled up on steak and wine, both of which were very red. the special events chicks had a room to stay the night, so we grabbed as many of the leftover wine bottles as we could carry and went up there in our fancy clothes and smoked in the bathroom. it was so very prom, except for the hours of gossip and dramatizations of catty situations at work, which are pretty threadbare to begin with. and, of course, there was the loud, drunken conversation about who at the museum you'd fuck if you had to pick someone, and frankly people's answers were very revealing. i was surprised--no one picked anybody our age, not even the chuck-taylors-and-a-tie kid, and instead it was a pretty even split between the tall white-haired vp (firm handshake) and the tall black maintenance guy who smiles at everyone.

if you want a sexy occupation, try copyediting

one of our upcoming screening series is the history of gays and lesbians on tv. it can make for some unintentionally racy emails, even in our rote officespeak. like the one i just sent, "how long is the young and restless gay teen package?"

also last week i saved museum face (perhaps regrettably) by turning a line in a brochure meant to attract socialites and make $$$. before i got to it, the first line of this brochure was,

These remarkable, invitation-only gatherings begin with cock-

really they mean to say cocktails, so i turned cock to the next line. but i'm beginning to regret it; i think they're better off beginning with cock. then we'll see about the cocktails.

so the other day i went for a second opinion on whether i should have surgery on my ankle, and it was the worst doctor experience i've ever had. i was there for three hours, most of it waiting. i think the little kids who sob in doctor's offices are onto something. no wonder there are lollipops. i've come to realize there's just no way to get around it--my ability to run five miles a day for the rest of my life is contingent on some other person's idiosyncratic way of gathering information and synthesizing concepts. maybe orthopedists are a slightly slower breed of doctor--the golden retriever of the medical world, if you will--but i wish they wouldn't let it all hang out so much. this one wanted to take an x-ray with my foot turned in sharply, which admittedly was a new way for me, and a good idea, i think (tho he took all these other x-rays and didn't look at my MRIs, and if i had known he would do that, i would have brought my x-rays instead), and this x-ray involved putting my leg in a vice-grip-type thing, but not before studying the diagram on the back of the grip's assembly manual for a good five minutes while i was standing there watching him, and then turning a handle so that my foot would turn in and turn in until my ankle hurt. except he put the pushy part of the grip in the middle of my shin, so of course when you go to turn the knob, my shin will be the limiting factor for the turning, not my ankle. and i was like, you don't understand, my shin already hurts; my ankle does not. you must move the grip. so he moved it UP my leg, and my ankle turned even less because my shin was even more in the way. i was like, sir, if you please, move this grip thing close to my ankle, and you will see how very far it turns. i have a hard time with spatial relationships sometimes, so i understand how easy it is to completely flip spaces around like in a mirror and proceed confidently in precisely the wrong way, but my god, if you are a surgeon!! this alone (never mind the cruel assistant, the hours of waiting, and the lack of lollipops) exempted me from listening to anything he said thereafter. i was so mad by the time i got home that i went for a run in the dark on an uneven surface.