delicious drink

so much more than a smoothie, so much healthier than a milkshake (but it'll still get you sloshed):

• ripe bananas, frozen
• milk or soymilk
• rum (or kahlua or creme de cacao)

blend milk and bananas, add rum to taste. the frozenness of the bananas gives the smoothie a whipped texture that approaches the icecreamlike. the rum gives your brain a whipped texture, too, which may approach the completely smashed. also, it can be vegan!

tonight, self-reflective new yorkers will venture to east 65th st and pay $10 to hear the talk East Side v. West Side, Downtown v. Brooklyn: Does your choice of neighborhood say something about you and your neighbors?

so after paying $1400 to live in the east village and feel edgy and slightly underground (but still pretty), we need to pay $10 more just to hear someone else tell us that? on the upper east side?

once again, sunday styles confirms my worst fears about america

last week, the nyt ran an amusing yet thoroughly disturbing story on plastic surgery for skinny people. check out "do my knees look fat?" for a well-proportioned serving of complaints by enviably attractive women who are bothered by things like chunky ankles and bra fat. an excerpt:

"'I had a little roll of fat hanging over the back of my jeans, like a spare bicycle tire in the back,' said Dana Conte, a bartender in Manhattan. It was so obvious that her mother constantly came up behind her and pulled her shirt down over it, Ms. Conte said. 'When your mother is doing that, it means there's a problem.'"

no, it means you should lay off the low-rise jeans, or at least buy longer shirts. since when does a mother's corrective measure translate in a daughter's mind to a call for surgery? it gets better:

"Dr. Lawrence S. Reed, the plastic surgeon who operated on Ms. Conte, the bartender, said some patients who choose micro liposuction want to reduce such negligible deposits that doctors can have trouble seeing the problem when the patients are undressed."

why can't these women accept that if they look good naked, they're doing well? why can't they just avoid certain styles of clothing? (maybe that hasn't occured to them since their biggers don't, but everyone's so distracted by an actual tummy or bum that offense by muffin top is completely ruled out.) and wait, right, this is the country that likes to throw fancy technological solutions at simple problems. commission an expensive and unreliable missile defense shield instead of building better international policies or, hey, cutting back on oil consumption. develop genetically modified strains of rice that will thrive off of global warming instead of working to offset the trend. have costly and painful surgery instead of buying better-fitting clothing. i woke up (yet again) believing in a logical world, but the nyt reminded me that this is how we operate around here.

i, too, can eradicate bra fat—and for a lot less money. with no medical training whatsoever, i am prepared to surgically remove spandex and lycra-blend tops from malls everywhere. and if you think your knees look chunky, try gaining some weight in the thighs. that should do the trick.

i have 0 friends; i've watched 666 videos

that's what youtube says when i arrive at their site. how alarming.

for my internship (where i mostly dig up not-yet-viral videos for a video blog), i spend all day numbing my brain with boring pet videos and keg stands gone wrong so that everyone with a real job can come to our site and waste time more efficiently.

here are two things i can't post because they're too old/they've already made the rounds.

a QVC demo blooper from 2003:



from last year's scripps howard national spelling bee:



so...if any good videos cross your inbox that haven't already graced boingboing or snopes, or if you or anyone you know makes funny sketches or animations and posts them online, i'll make you/them famous.

i've been skeptical of anyone who attempts the harper's notebook column after lewis lapham stepped down, but this month's essay by ben metcalf, on simple human decency, is both smart and playful. he lobbies for the right of anyone to say in print, "I would like to hunt down George W. Bush, the president of the United States, and kill him with my bare hands," toying all the while with the possibility that he really means it.

-istas

since school ended, my interest in shopping has returned to its museum-employment levels. i just got back from a trip up 5th ave (the bklyn one, not the mnh one, to speak in craigslist abbreviations), only to get sucked into the new anthropologie catalog as soon as i walked through the door. anyone know any interesting shopping blogs out there? i'm tempted to post pictures of my booty (the pirate-metaphor kind, not the anatomical kind), which includes some skirts and a dress made by german designers, acquired during our trip to bonn/cologne.

i find myself, though, miffed at this season's fashions, wondering why anyone in her right mind would want to wear stretchy cotton koolats and those boob doilies known as bolero sweaters and especially those hippie empire-waisted blouses. who wants to wear maternity clothes when they're not pregnant? it's great for women who are, because they can just shop at the regular stores without having to seek out fashionable maternity boutiques, but anyone who wants to show off her waistline must make do with whatever's already in her closet. why slim down for summer when you can fit a whole chocolate cake under the halter tops they're selling now?

maybe i'm looking at this the wrong way. maybe the fashion world has finally acknowledged women's tendency to, well, eat, and i should be celebrating my stomach's independence from scrutiny. oh, except wait—those stretchy koolats don't look good on anyone who isn't already so skinny they'd look hot in a garbage bag (ahem, D.) if they decided to put one on. designers might be applauded for cutting women some slack if it weren't for the unsightly koolat cameltoe they've inflicted on all of us by making the pants in sizes above 2.

i know that fashion cycles are as demanding as 24-hour news channels, that there's a recurring space that must be filled with something new to keep people hanging on. they sold us leggings in the 80s only to have us repudiate them in the 90s so that we'd nostalgically embrace them now. there's clearly strategy at work here, some manufactured consent involving long strands of beads and stretch-cotton koolats (which i'm told were very fashionable during a decade not disclosed to me because it would've revealed my interlocutor's age), but mustn't there be limits? are there no fixed standards of taste that accompany us into the stores each season?

the popularity of the koolat suggests not. we'll be encouraged to laugh at them in 2016, to feel shame when perusing old photographs of ourselves looking wide-hipped and wedgie-ridden, but i don't need hindsight to feel shame. why don't people who, when confronted with a Mapplethorpe or a dung-strewn Virgin Mary, argue for unchanging aesthetic standards in the nation's editorial pages carry those same standards with them to the mall? art may depart from habitual notions of beauty and still be successful because no one's asking us to wear the elephant dung. but the utilitarian nature of everyday clothes should guarantee a world in which we don't prance around in humiliating outfits. somehow, that's precisely the world we live in.

seasonal habits

two things that i was unaware of having acute needs for till this week:

• iced coffee. until i developed a craving for it while walking in the brooklyn heat up to a memorial day party last weekend, i had no idea that such a substance was even necessary. turns out it's the life force. which is not an invitation for starbucks to market the cappu"chi"no, which would probably be some unnatural form of espresso infused with green tea (this year's most promiscuous ingredient), topped with pistachio whipped cream. in fact, i can totally see that. i may have even received a coupon for it in valupak.

• the future bible heroes' 'real summer.' this song is really important.

unspeak

here's a blog that disassembles the words of dissemblers: steven poole's unspeak.net. his book just came out, and i'm afraid the too-convenient barnes & noble will get my money again because i really want to read it. poole, who writes for the guardian, does an orwell-style dissection of common sound bites—'climate change,' 'war on terror,' 'muslim community'—to reveal the partisan viewpoints bound up in them. entire chapters are devoted to 'freedom' and 'terror,' and poole also pays attention to more minute shifts in idiom—e.g., how using 'asylum seekers' for 'refugees' shifts the emphasis 'from what a person was fleeing to the demands he was making on the country he arrived in.'

as for the blog, the may 18 entry on global warming is rote, but the previous ones on 'islamic terrorism' and 'turning points' are really sharp.

because the nyt won't print the word 'cooter'

from the below-mentioned "war on contraception" article:

"The linking of abortion and contraception is indicative of a larger agenda, which is putting sex back into the box, as something that happens only within marriage." —William Smith, vice president for public policy, Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States.

back in the box, eh?

guess that's what the anti-gay activists are going for, too.

p.s.

i've committed the folly of backposting. scroll down to april 18 if you want to see something old but new. man, it's like april 18 is dead but now all these illuminating letters from it are coming out posthumously.

almost done

last week, from sunday to saturday, i wrote about 7500 words. i have maybe 1500-2000 to go, plus an internship application that is making me nervous as hell, before wednesday, when ed and i leave for germany. 2 classes down, 1 to go, and maybe i can finally drink that bottle of prosecco on top of (oops—now in) my fridge, waiting since the last time i did craploads of work but couldn't pause for more than a day before beginning anew.

from friday morning to yesterday at 4pm, with a pause somewhere in there for 3 hours of sleep, i wrote my anthropologie piece. i think it's a good draft and i'm excited about it. i cracked open a beer at 3, once i knew it was safe and had the ending cinched. there are only two kinds of papers that call for beers in the home stretch: really good ones and really bad ones.

then, in honor of anthropologie, i put on a dress and went to manhattan to drink a gin & tonic before heading to a rooftop barbecue. i was in bed by 11, tho, and every time i got close to sleep, i'd start trying to edit the random sentences that were running through my head. i remember having lots of trouble with subordinating clauses. then i'd get frustrated and remember i was finished with my article. this happened maybe 5 times before i fell asleep. it was just like in high school, when i'd spend all week studying and when i was finally finished and sleeping over at my friend's house, i'd be falling asleep and scrambling to list the 4 main functions of the judiciary branch and their significance.

anyway, hooray for spring, which i have completely missed, and on to read the sunday times. i'm glad someone has finally done the article on the war on contraception, even tho i almost can't bear to read it.

also: thankyoustephencolbert.org has 51,524 thank-yous as of this posting. mine was 37,840 or something, and that was on wednesday. it'd be way cool if it got to 100,000.

this has been a post about numbers.

unanticipated perk of nyu library database access

dr. phil's advice columns in the oprah magazine are more interesting than ann 'here's the 800 number for the domestic abuse hotline' landers, yet also uninhibited by the nyt mag ethicist's occasionally tiresome mantle of intellect and do-gooderism. they are pure voyeurism, and dr. phil's answers have a satisfying pop (which the meandering and verbose cary tennis of salon would do well to learn from).

through eight months in the journalism program, it had never occurred to me to use my proquest and nexis access to read trash. yes, i have arrived. tho i still think a real-life subscription to us weekly is in order, since you can't see pictures in the databases. goodbye mother jones, hello brangelina.

a downside to this unprecedented wallowing is realizing to an even fuller extent what a retard chuck klosterman is. oh well. i suppose knowledge has always had its compromises.

poisonous people who unfairly escape retribution and humiliation

or, people i shouldn't let get to me, but who do anyway.

1. PR people, esp. in press offices
2. real-estate agents you aren't paying
3. real-estate agents you are paying
4. subway pushers
5. hairdressers who don't listen

suggestions welcome.

hooray for backposting! i meant to add this at the time and now i'm typing in preview mode and the letters pop up in the heading right as i type them.

yesterday i interviewed for an internship at a magazine i'd really like to work for. i thought i would just be talking to this one scruffy guy who recently graduated from my program, but instead i was faced with a mini-conference room of 3 important people to charm. i think it worked—they asked me to bare my soul, talk about my dream job, what i really want from work and hence life, and i totally confessed to wanting to be a series of old men: harper's ed lewis lapham, septagenarian (but so sexy!) brit artman john berger, and my media theory hero thomas de z, the only one of the group under 60. i left feeling pried open and good, but slightly embarrassed in that morning-after way, when you wake up realizing you got too drunk on a first date and revealed your soul to a cute guy you'd like to see again, except he hardly talked about himself at all.

myself as a man

it has taken me till 4 to start on the day's task, even tho i got up at 8:30. that is because it's a tedious one. for my anthropologie project i must transcribe an hour-plus-long interview (normally i reconstruct conversations from my notes, which is faster, but this must be a word-for-word transcription, as stipulated by the prof).

i'm doing slow playback so that i can get everything, which makes my interviewee and me sound like men. stoned men. yet gay, because we are being chatty women, talking about clothes, and that rhythm and inflection comes through even in slow-mo.

this is funny because the company is run by a gay couple, who live in philly but keep a pied-a-terre in manhattan. the headboard on their bed was inspired by an english garden gate from the 1870s, i recently learned from a shelter mag. they had repros made for the store, and now you can own one, too—for $1,348.

sparkles, ruffles, and other grownup pursuits

almost two years ago i found this bag at a now-defunct boutique on curry row in the east village. but like so many over-the-top things that i love, the purse, i determined after a mental assessment of my wardrobe, belonged with dorothy.

i was right, but later i missed it dearly, just like dorothy now misses the ruffle she cut off the bottom in a pointless bout of asceticism. we both looked for the bag online, googling for the mysterious 'malina' scripted in plastic and dangling from a removable string on the handle. nothing. the boutique made it out to be from a local designer, which is probably true, if by designer you mean machine and by local you mean china.

fast forward to last weekend, when ed and i were eating at a peruvian place around the corner from our apartment. the woman at the table next to us had a bag that looked just like this one, except it was pink and had brass handles. when i interrupted her conversation with her date, i learned that she had gotten it on the street in new orleans and that her date hates holding it for her.

less than an hour later i had found the same green one as d's on ebay and bought-it-now. along with my yellow cherry dress from anthropologie, this bag signals my early-life crisis, in which i buy up fashion items i could've only dreamed about as a five-year-old.

still looking for those blue-gray sparkle mary janes, tho.

amazing and pathetic food-industry interest group

i'm up early/late preempting a hangover with leftover chinese and cheese toast. this week's new yorker is on the table, opened to an ad that says 'concerned about mercury? you shouldn't be, unless you eat this,' around a fictional can of whale meat. after some explanatory text that poses a no-win hyphenation setup—'heavy fish-eaters'—the ad says 'fish is good for you. baseless anxiety (or whale blubber) isn't' and refers the reader to fishscam.com.

the page is run by the innocuous sounding center for consumer freedom, whose press releases unite the government and PETA in a conspiracy to make us all anxious as hell and not buy foods that are good for us.

here's my favorite quote:

'Is there any doubt that the animal rights movement is targeting your kids? In a new report, "Your Kids, PETA's Pawns," the Center for Consumer Freedom explores how one group, the $24 million People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), devotes substantial resources toward capturing children -- the next generation of potential meat eaters, milk drinkers, circus-goers, and fishermen -- in its cult-like web.'

and this headline from the fishscam site should retire to the onion: Fishy Mercury Scare Based On Study Of Whale-Heavy Diets, Says Ad in U.S. News & World Report.

now in brooklyn: edwards key lime

the pie finder is wrong! heretofore unavailable in new york city, the delicious key lime pie has found its way to target on atlantic avenue, formerly a total hellhole. now it's a total hellhole with a prize gleaming in the freezer section.

i got the last one. not even a whole pie, but the box of two slices, which cost $2.02. i am serious, this pie is better than any i have ever made. and yes, it's frozen. the best way to eat it is only partially defrosted and accompanied by cheap asti, as we in jam304 found.

in other news, i got really excited and then partially bummed, but still sort of excited. my culture-critic hero, thomas de zengotita, was slotted to teach a class on the history of media theory in the fall in a different program. i emailed him—spending hours on a few simple lines, of course—to ask permission to register for it, and he got back to me very quickly. unfo, the class will be next spring, after i've graduated (unless i get especially delinquent these next few months), tho i imagine i'll still be able to audit.

he signs his emails 'tdez.' that's pretty awesome.

fifteen minutes early and 3.5 months late

as of 11:45 last night, i am finally done with my incomplete. now i can in good conscience drink the bottle of prosecco ginny brought before my last week of school in december. tho it was not a gift meant in reward for finishing, it became a symbol for it, and so all winter and through the very late beginning of spring here in ny (i.e., last week), that beribboned bottle has sat atop my fridge, taunting me with the knowledge that i have made it halfway through the program without managing to finish my first semester. but now. it is time to drink. at 8:56am saturday morning. yeah. no. instead, it's time to go to the whitney biennial.

look at these pictures of my cats

if it's true that the engine of technological progress is porn, it's equally true that feline fixations bring up the caboose. either way, you can't get on the web without being inundated with pussy.

and so, in lieu of getting a little too friendly with ed's digital camera, i present pictures of our new(ish) kittens, peas and tilde. peas is peas's full (and birth) name, given by his foster mommy. his sisters, carrots and potatoes, made their home with a man who probably didn't stick with their original names. but peas can never be anything else. after considering some unfortunate names for sugar, his adoptive companion (ranging from 'poops' to 'Qs'), we settled on tilde (formally: mrs. tilde [~] peabody). her feisty pursuit of anything that moves—feet, for instance, but more often string attached to something jingly—is often punctuated by desperate cartwheels and three-foot-high leaps, and so she has quickly earned the nickname tilderator.

	peas is the stripey one. he has lots of riblike stripes on the skin of his belly, giving him the appearance of wearing one of those skeleton-torso shirts, but on his whole underside. tilde has patches on her skin that line up exactly with the patches on her fur. the black over her eyes extends in a V-shape down the back of her head, mullet style. shown here keeping some sort of mafia secret.
	this candid shot reveals peas's softer side, thanks to ed's ruthless paw-parazzi pursuit.
	tail-er trash?
	tilde wows with her catlike ninja skills, while peas exhibits his catlike...skills.
	also it snowed here. this is the basketball hoop in our downstairs neighbor's backyard.