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.