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.