All is Quiet on New Year’s Day

It was a weekend of debauchery.  There was one day when all Birmingham & I ate was food leftover from my New Year’s Eve Eve party: adult rice krispie treats, scraps of cheese, eggnog fudge, Sam Adam’s Winter Lager, only to go to his friend’s house for a small get together where we ate brownies with brownie ice cream and watched in horror as they rolled Dick Clark out to “celebrate” New Year’s Nivea Sponsored Eve.  Somewhere around record hour 47 of time spent together for me and my favorite on-again boy we decided that’s when we need to stop putting off seeing Black Swan, a task that’s been lingering like that unwatched “Inglorious Basterds” Netflix DVD and vacuuming under the couch.

Speaking of 2010 was a lot like “The 6th Sense.”  The first 95% of the year sucked and seemed to go on and on with no point.  Then, at the very end, it pulled a mind-blowing ending out of nowhere.  I say this with the caveat that I would like the rest of my life to turn out like the rest of M. Night Shyalaman’s body of work.

Jews are just funny*

There’s no two ways around it, I’m a starfucker.  (For those of you who are my mother, that means that when I encounter famous people, become obsequious, and then tell the world that I met so-and-so.)  This is still true for me despite having spent some years working in the entertainment industry.

Speaking of, this weekend I met the hilariously wry Paul Rudnick!  He was at the bookseller convention promoting his new book, “I Shudder.”  You can buy it here:

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(The blurb on the back of the book is from Steve Martin, who I met once, btw.)

As I was saying, Paul Rudnick, author of “I Hate Hamlet” and all the good parts of The New Yorker, was at the book show in Baltimore this weekend.  And since he makes me laugh, my goal was to make him laugh (and notice me, and converse with me and recommend me to his agent and his editor and anyone else who will make me famous.)  But mostly I wanted to make him laugh.  I bet you’re dying to know if I succeeded.  Reader, I did.

He and a bookseller at my table were talking about Jews and being Jewish and how being Jewish is automatically funnier than anything else.  *I’m not Jewish, but my great-great grandmother on my mother’s side was, making me eligible for Judaism if I want, I think.  I also think that also gives me permission to make the occasional good-natured generalization, like I did in the title.   To safely use negative sterotpyes for humor, I think you have to be raised Jewish, or at least have a Jewish grandmother.

Anyhoo, Mr. Rudnick and the bookseller were talking about how they knew wonderful old Jewish women who would find the most wonderfully ridiculous ways to complain.  That’s when I knew I had to tell the story of the greatest worst awfulust complaint I had ever heard.

Years ago, I used to work at a retail store in New York.  In my tenure there, the owner of the store converted to Judism so that she could be buried in the same Jewish cemetery as her deceased (non-practicing at the time of his death) husband.  You know what they say about converts…  Once she finished her conversion, there was not a single conversation where she couldn’t find a way to bring up being Jewish.  At first it was annoying, but after a while, I began to appreciate the art of it.  For instance, she’d wish a staff member a happy birthday but only with the reminder that she would have eaten some of the birthday cake if only someone had thought to cut the cake with a kosher knife.

If you asked her how she was doing, she’d often say something like, “as good as anyone can be with the state of Israel these days.”

But the best story of all, the one that made Paul Rudnick and the rest of the table laugh, was the one that took place on a really hot day one summer.  I was standing at the front counter with Ira, a Brooklyn resident, who was Jewish by association and first name more than anything else.  I don’t think he ever gave his heritage much thought, and never mentioned anything, and could always be counted on to work on Yom Kippur.  As we stood there, the convert/owner of the store walked by at the same time a guy came into the store, dripping with sweat.  We greeted him and he grimaced and said, “geez, the heat out there!  It’s oppressive!”

To which the store owner/convert replied. “Well, Ira and I know what it’s like to be oppressed.”

You can’t make this stuff up.  But you can convert to it.

District Men

I was a great consumer of media yesterday.  I went to see “District 9” at the movies and then I went home to watch the eagerly-anticipated season premier of “Mad Men.”  On the surface, it would seem that a movie about aliens in South Africa and a television show about the early 60’s advertising industry in New York have little in common.  But that’s not going to stop me from trying to compare the two.

Background: District 9: Aliens arrive on earth, and instead of bringing peace, war, or Reese’s pieces, they turn out to be bad house guests that look like 6-foot-tall uncooked shrimp cocktail, and in turn become victims of a bureaucracy, that relegates them to the slums of Johannesburg.  The government agency in charge of the district decides to evict the aliens, chaos ensues.

Mad Men: Advertising men (and woman) convince housewives they need Popsicles, raincoats, and relax-a-cizors, while looking dapper in their suits with thin ties and dresses with thin waists.  They don’t seem to suspect the cultural revolution waiting in the wings, we keep watching to see how chaos will ensue.

Characters: District 9: A nebbishy government man who only gets hotter as he starts to grow alien parts, his wife who is way out of his league but stands by him until she doesn’t, an alien dad who’s given the classic slave name “Chris Johnson,” and his adorable son who looks like the spawn of E.T. and the thing that came out of John Hurt’s stomach in Alien.

Mad Men: Don Draper, a 100% suave ad man who only gets hotter as he finds new ways to cheat on his wife, his wife, Betty, who is way to perfect to be in anyone’s league (by 1950’s housewife standards, anyway), Pete Campbell, who is a slave to his emotions, and his wife Trudy, who wore a hat in last night’s episode that made her seem like an alien from the movie Coneheads.

Illicit sex: District 9: In an early scene, we learn that prostitution runs wild in the alien slums, which leads the audience to wonder, “how, technically, does intergalactic sex between a woman and a huge crustacean work?”  Later in the movie, a character is disgraced by accusations of alien sex, leading people in the fictional world to ask, “seriously, how can a dude have sex with a freaking crustacean?”

Mad Men: Going on a business trip is an excuse to have sex with someone who is not your wife, and the men count on the fact that the women never wonder, “seriously, what do you do on those business trips?”  In last night’s episode, we came really close to a scene featuring (gasp!) gay sex, which leads us to wonder, “did anyone in the repressive 1960’s even know how that worked?

Fashion: District 9: The aliens had undefined private parts, meaning some wore rags and others wore nothing at all.  Call me racist, but all the aliens looked alike to me, so the only way I could tell the difference between alien characters was by the rags they wore.

Mad Men: As I type this, I’m wearing a poofy pleated skirt that sits at my waist with my shirt tucked in to show off my well-fed curves.  To keep myself out of trouble, I had to put my credit card on ice when I learned Banana Republic was featuring a (full-priced) Mad Men themed line.  You might have noticed there’s actually no direct comparison between the movie and the TV show.  I just wanted to take this opportunity to mention how much I really, really like the modern retro fashions.

Moral of the story: District 9: Limit your exposure.

Mad Men: Limit your exposure.

Last post for a little while…

Or until Blogshare, or possibly until something happens that makes a hiatus liar out of me.  Sorry for a little confusion I caused with the last post, my intent was to bow out gracefully by first ranting about comments, and then responding to any last questions you might have.  So for those of you who asked, here goes:

Cadiz asked about my favorite book as a kid.  I was a Dr. Seuss fan through and through, and I devoured every new Babysitter’s Club book as it arrived.  I had an unreasonable hatred for Beverly Cleary, but I think that was just me establishing my personhood.  The one book I remember reading over and over was Three Days on a River in a Red Canoe.  I used to wish that my family was a camping kind of family, but Mom is 100% hotel-(or B&B)-centric.  But I got my fill when I went to summer camp, those were the happiest of my life.

Chris, aka apollocreed, asked me to write a post on swimmer’s towels.  He’s right, they’re weird.  They only work when they’re wet, and they had a ridiculous capacity for absorption of water and smell.  An inferior version, the sham-wow, is sold by a freak with a microphone.  Maybe I’ll save that topic for an in-depth discussion when I get back.  It’s always good to have a back burner post.

-R-, Courtney and Abbersnail wanted to know about the cult of commenting.  See yesterday’s post, which I believe you did.  Courtney also wanted to know if there were any new boys in my life.  Honestly, no.  Since November, when I realized I would probably have to find a new job, that’s been all-consuming for me.  I have a great group of friends here that I see almost every day, and they provide my daily companionship needs.  Sometimes I worry that it’s keeping me from going out and getting someone, but I can honestly say that I’m not worried about it right now.  There is one person on the far-far horizon that I’ve met twice, and a mutual friend is trying to facilitate our future meetings, but he’s geographically undesirable at the moment. Birmingham and I remain good friends.

Howling Hill asks that I keep blogging.  And I ask her to get a full RSS feed.  But I’m not promising that I’ll come back once she does.  I will probably keep Twittering and Facebooking, though.

Bing asks about my favorite local eats.  While the Culinary Institute of America is so close to here, I’ve only been once, and it was meh.  I might should go again soon, because it was still fun to be there.  When given the choice, my favorite lunches come from Adams Fairacre Farms.  They have a great salad and sushi bar, and the best ingredients when I’m cooking for myself.  I’m currently writing this from Panera Bread, because they have an awesome comfy couch next to a fireplace, and I need to get away from my own couch.  I wish hadn’t just checked online to realize that the egg souffle I ate was 470 calories, and probably has enough sodium to kill a horse.  I probably won’t eat out again for the rest of the week because of that, unless I go to the movies in Rhinebeck and eat at the Garden Street Cafe.  The woman who runs the place is a lioness, and she scares me, but it is worth it for their fantastic salad with brown rice and Japanese dressing, or whatever insane dessert she’s concocted.  I also love all the ethnic restaurants near Vassar College (Thai Spice!) and the new bakery, Baby Cakes.  Osho is a fun place for Hibachi parties, and the Chinese restaurant across the street from my apartment did not give me food poisoning, and that’s about the best thing I can say about that.  I’m probably missing a few others, but lately I’ve been working hard to save money and calories by eating at home more.

The Modern Gal wants to know who was the boy on my April 2008 masthead.  Thanks for bringing back up that MAJOR INTERNET CONTROVERSY, MG, but I’ll still never tell.

Tomorrow is my fourth interview with the insurance company.  I’ve spent much of this potentially final unemployment week watching the Academy Award nominated movies, which have been great.  Thumbs up to Slumdog Millionaire and Frost/Nixon.  I also really loved Milk, but I kind of wish that it didn’t start out with Harvey Milk being desperately unhappy because he is an insurance salesman.  I also got a little bummed out on Tuesday when one of my top ten favorite movies of all time, Groundhog Day, was playing on TV.  The idea of being a financial planner, a.k.a.: glorified insurance sales person is growing on me, but I do not want to become Ned Ryerson and I do not want to be punched in the face by people from high school, even if I sure as heck-fire remember them.

That is all.  See you soon, I’m sure, but maybe not before this year’s Blog Share.

Blogworthiness

Thanks to everyone who commented yesterday, that was a fun little deep-thoughtish discussion.  I appreciate all of your internet-comment personalities, and I wonder if they’re distinct from your other personalities.

For some reason, yesterday I was thinking about blog topics for today all day long.  It was one of those days when my first reaction to any event was, “can I blog about that?”  Eventually, I rejected each topic on its own merits.

Cases in point:

I filled out the application to a December swim meet using yard times instead of meters, but caught the mistake in time. Imagine my embarrassment if I had shown up to swim the 50 freestyle with a 34 second seed time when it would actually take me 38 seconds!  Blogworthiness: save it for Twitter.

I went to the gym at the peak hour of 5:30 PM, and literally bumped into three other women in the locker room, and then opened the bathroom stall door on a woman who hadn’t locked it properly, and then got on the world’s squeakiest elliptical machine, and then got scolded for putting free weights on a bench instead of the floor.  Blogworthiness: Save up those stories for a longer post so I can use my “I’m not judging you” category.  Remember, free pizza night is just around the corner.

SisterAlyson called and referred to Birmingham as “that pigeon kicker” Blogworthiness: do a quick search of The Daily T and realize that maybe I never told the story of the time Birmingham kicked the pigeons but still never used the word “douchebag.”  Really?  I never told that story?  Well, it’s too late, I already started this post.  I’ll have to save that story for later.

Micki had a bad case of “if you think it smells bad going in, you should smell it coming out” yesterday.  As I was cleaning the litter box, I noticed that her poo had taken the shape of the symbol Prince used when he stopped going by a name.  I was held it in the scooper debating whether I should take a picture of it or not.  In the end, I decided this is not a scat blog, and you’re just going to have to take my word for it that it happened.  Blogworthiness: Maybe a Facebook status update.

Saw the movie A Thousand Acres last night.  It’s based on the Pulitzer-Prize winning book of the same title by Jane Smiley.  It tells the story of three sisters, Ginny, Rose and Caroline and their father Larry, the most respected farmer in the county.  He decides to divide the farm among the three sisters, but Caroline, the favorite daughter, rejects that idea.  Larry cuts her out of the deal and the family, but quickly regrets that decision, and accuses the other daughters of trying to steal his land.  He becomes more and belligerent, eventually blowing up at his two eldest daughters right before a thunderstorm.  Instead of letting their husbands take him home, he goes raging into the storm.  From then on, all is lost.

I read the book shortly after college, upon my mother’s recommendation and I loved it.  As we were discussing it afterward she said, “and didn’t you love all the parallels to King Lear?”  People, I read King Lear in high school AND college, an I worked on a production of it during my sophomore year.  No clue.  I had no freaking clue until my mom brought it up, even though the plot is almost exactly the same.

The movie was great too, by the way.  I don’t understand why it’s not more well known.  It stars Jessica Lange, Michelle Pfeiffer, Jason Robards, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Colin Firth, Keith Carradine, (a young) Michelle Williams and Elizabeth Moss, and the actor who played the teacher in Just One of the Guys who told Terry she should be a model.  Good stuff.  And now you can put it on your Netflix queue, and never have to go through the embarassment of having your mother be the first to tell you it is based on one of the greatest plays in the English language.  Blogworthiness: I just sort of blogged it just now.

Multi-media

Holy cow, I did absolutely nothing on Sunday, only leaving the house once to go grocery shopping and once to attempt a run, although my breathing issues procluded me from going longer than 20 minutes, so I can’t even count it.  What I did do is spend a lot of time reading, watching, and listening to some really good and really bad stuff.

Reading: I finished Cecilia Galante’s The Patron Saint of Butterflies.  It’s a YA novel about two girls who grow up in a religious cult.  It was “miss your subway stop” good, so I’m glad I read it in my living room where there was no chance of me ending up in Far Rockaway.

Movies: I’m on a bit of a spending freeze this month, so I declined to see W this weekend, and instead I relied on my Netflix.  The disparate choices this weekend were 80’s classic Mannequin and The Piano Teacher, one of the 1,001 movies I must see before I die.  I already knew I loved Mannequin, and I watched it with an appreciation that they just don’t make movies like that anymore.  Nowadays, people prefer their plots to “make sense,” or at least have a lot of T&A.  As for The Piano Teacher, *in a Men on Film voice* Hated It!  While the acting was good, the overall fuckedupedness of the rest of the movie did not make up for that.  It almost made me want to start hating the French, it was that bad.  In short, I only watched 3/4ths of the movie, but once the Piano Teacher started making out with her own mother, I decided that I’ll be fine if I die without finishing it.

TV: OMG, everything you heard about The Wire is true.  The show is more addictive than the herion being sold on the streets of Baltimore.  The cats woke me up at 5AM on Sunday with their incessant catfighting and when I couldn’t get back to sleep, I stayed up to watch three epidsodes to finish up Season 4.  I was going to pace myself before moving on to the final season, but by the end of the day, I decided I couldn’t wait and put Season 5 on the top of my queue.

Listening: There’s a local band called The Felice Brothers, and I popped on some of their music while making five days of Falafel for lunch this week.  The songs are still in my head.  Now they can be in yours:

Sports: Is there some kind of baseball thing going on this week?  The Mets aren’t in it though, right?  Meh.  I can’t say I was bothered to watch any kind of sports this weekend.

The Internet: Again, I ignored it.  All weekend, except for one time when I went to check the weather, and one time when I checked the TV listings.  (Note: in the years since I’ve been TV-less, there is still nothing good on Sunday afternoons.)  I didn’t miss anything, did I?

Quid Pro No

Before I moved to the Hudson Valley, I was a location manager for films and television shows in New York City.  For most of my jobs, I was just a locations assistant, taking orders from my boss, telling pedestrians to clear the shot (walk on the other side of the street) and ask anyone in the vicinity who is making noise (lawn mowers, ice cream trucks, veterans playing billiards on the floor above) to cut it out.  As a shy quiet person, you can imagine how much I loved doing that.

After working in that arena for about two and a half years, I was offered my first (and last) job as a full-fledged location manager, which would mean I got to tell other people to go tell the civilians to be quiet, and in excahnge for that, I would be part of the original pre-production team and be soley resonsable for the budget and hiring of my crew.  Also, they offered me a boatload of money.  Because it was October, the most active production period in New York, literally every other location manager in the city was working on some other job, so I got bumped up.

To say I was unqualified for the position is an understatement.  To say that the director and production crew were way over their head with a super-small budget for a mostly on-location shoot is also a major understatement.

Working on the movie literally broke me.  I had to learn to write New York City permits on the job, and if those things aren’t perfect and on time, you don’t get to shoot on the streets or police assistance you need (which happened once during production).  We didn’t find the location for the main character’s apartment until two weeks into filming.  Every day we went over time and over budget, and while we were shooting, I was scavenging and scrambling to get the next day’s locations firmed up and set in time to write the permits, create directions for the entire crew, and let the assistant directors know if they would be able to shoot the scenes they wanted or not.

On top of all that, the movie was not very good.  The production company had some lofty goals, and considered their film groundbreaking.  We had two young stars who are getting well known. (Although the male lead keeps losing parts to certain young actor, and did not much appreciate it when I off-handidly mentioned I was looking forward to seeing the gay cowboy movie.) However, the plot of the movie just made no sense at all, and was trying to do too much with too little.

So now it’s been almost three years since the day that I collapsed in a heap on the production company floor, shaken so badly that I couldn’t even cry.  (That day I had mis-labeled a permit, and we had to move all of our production trucks off of a main avenue, and this came on the heels of a neighborhood block association complaining about our presense earlier in the day meant that we had to move about 20 bags of garbage (that wasn’t ours!) to a trash receptical five blocks away, and after I spent the night at the production office making maps and directions for the next day’s shoot.)

Directly after the production ended, Birmingham and I took a trip to California where he hid my phone so I couldn’t take stray calls from the production office while they worked on some post stuff.  I had to change my cell phone ring, because just the sound of it sent shivers up my spine.  (Is that the city office guy calling to say that he’s changed his mind and we can’t use his building after all?  Or is that the mayor’s office calling to say my permits are denied and I can’t get a police unit on the scene?  Maybe just the head of production telling me that I messed up again, but they’re not going to just take pity on me and fire me?)

It was bad.  But after all these years, the movie finally came out.  Almost direct to DVD, but for a few festivals they played, and the one week it was in general release.  I had it on my Netflix queue for a while, but I was afraid that watching it would send me into a spiral of depression or something.  Because this weekend was pretty great (saw friends in the city on Friday, went to a swim party on Saturday, helped friends move) I felt ready to bear down and watch the movie, and I’ve emergen unbroken, but annoyed that I put so much into that thing.

Some thoughts:

• The story makes even less sense when you haven’t throughly studied the script.
• They cut the scene of the car crash!  That was our first day of shooting, and we had to go all the way out to the middle of nowhere in New Jersey and trucked in a crashed car.  They just showed some driving shots that could have been filmed anywhere.
• The Chinese restaurant scene was only a minute long, and it took us about three days just to get permission to shoot in Chinatown, and then a whole day to shoot.  You can’t even tell that the scene was in Chinatown.
• The scene in the Bronxville mansion was cut!  Arg, it was so hard to find that location, I actually hired Birmingham for a day to scout for it.
• The scene with [Holling from Northern Exposure] was cut!  And we spent an entire day cleaning out the office of this church pastor so we could turn it into a doctor’s office!
• Come to think of it, everything we shot in that church was re-shot after principal production, and re-cast.
• They cut the final scene!  WTF?  That was our last day of principal photography, and we shot it at the park near my old apartment.  I got up at 4:00am that morning, and lied through my teeth to the city park official as we brought in cranes and trucks that we were not permitted to have.
• The scenes we shot at the Brooklyn Museum were pretty damn beautiful.  Maybe it was worth spending half my budget on that location.
• But it was not worth moving the garbage, because that scene did no look good.
• Writing this post is making me remiss too much about those two months of my life.

On one hand, I should have never taken the job.  On the other, I needed something that truamatic to shake me up and get me out of the business where I had no business.  I interviewed for my current job the day I got back from California, moved up here a few months later, and do not regret it at all.  I don’t want to leave a hyperlink trail to the actual movie, but if you want to ever watch it, you’ve got all the info you need from the post title.  And if you watch the whole movie including the credits, after names of the gaffers, post production assistants, key grips, casting associates and caterers, you’ll see my name go by, in really small print.

Reality

As you may know, I’ve lived without cable for all of my adult life, “adult life” being defined as the time since I started signing leases and paying rent.  I made the decision to abandon television during the harrowing days of the 2000 election.  I was a recent college grad, and I was working at a Colorado Casino stage managing “Island Holiday: A Mariah Carey Christmas.”  It was just about as awesome as you can imagine, based on that title and the fact that it was a 45-minute musical review starring a Mariah Carey impersonator, a Santa Claus, a Mrs. Claus, some elves, and four showgirls.  We did two shows a night, six nights a week, and then we had the rest of the day to ourselves.

This meant that I had a lot of time to hang out in my hotel room and watch TV, including every last minute of the television coverage of hanging chads, Supreme Court battles, and pundits pontificating.  And then they handed the presidency to that guy, and I couldn’t believe that I would have to spend the next four years listening to him mangle the English language while trying to govern the country.  So I made the decision to turn off the TV until he and his conservative misdirection were gone from my television.

I was sure he’d be gone by 2004.  I mean, how could someone so mismanage the country and not get the boot?  I mean, some of his actions are downright criminal.  Surely, if we can impeach someone for getting a blow job, we can impeach someone for allowing torture and starting a war with the completely wrong country, right?  Wrong, as you all know.  So I kept the TV off.

While I was away, a great many changes happened in TV land.  The year 2000 was the debut of “Survivor,” the granddaddy of reality-based game shows.  I watched every episode diligently, and then I never wanted to watch that show or any other scheming battle-like show again.  But evidently, TV viewers disagreed, and reality is the new reality.  I seriously don’t understand why anyone enjoys watching these shows, but then again, I don’t understand why anyone would vote for the Republican party, even though almost half the country did.  (Although, let’s never for get that it was LESS THAN HALF in 2000…)

I’m digressing here, mixing my politics and television.  My other point here is that while a certain segment of TV was getting worse and worse, another segment was getting better and better.  Since 2000, TV has brought us 30 Rock, Arrested Development, Heroes, Lost, The Office, Pushing Daisies, Rescue Me, Six Feet Under, The Sopranos, Sex and The City, The Wire, and of course, Battlestar Galactica.  These shows are all so much better than the shows of my youth, including the ones that I was too young to watch.  And the other wonderful invention of the past eight years, Netflix, has allowed me to rent all these television shows and catch up on the entire series at once, like the addict that I am.  When I do, sometimes I’ll get an inkling to hook up the cable again.  But then I remember that in order to watch any of these shows I have to be home at a specific time and place, and they are liable to be interrupted at any time by a state of the Union speech.

Here I am at my new place now.  I’ve gotten the internet hooked up so I can be online anytime, anywhere day or night.  The guy from Verizon who installed my system told me that Verizon cable may be available in my area soon, so I might get a discount if I wait and get both services through the same company.  But, he suggested, in the meantime, I should just see if the cable coming out of my floor is live, because often in these apartment complexes, they don’t turn off the cable from the previous tenant.

So I tried it.

It worked.

My crappy, dirty 27-inch TV which I got for free from The Gray Boy’s mom that takes about 10 minutes to warm up before the sound comes in clear, is showing TV!  But there is a hitch.  The remote control to the TV doesn’t work, because I’ve never needed it before.  I was forced to pick a station and stick to it as I watched TV last night.  That station ended up being Fox, showing their new game show “Hole in the Wall.”

For those of you who may be blissfully ignorant of TV, “Hole in the Wall” is a game show where people have to jump through a HOLE. IN. THE. WALL.  If they miss, the wall knocks them into a pool of water.  WTF?  This is where TV has come in the past eight years?  The good shows have gotten great and the bad shows have gotten to jumping through a hole in the wall.  And Flying Spaghetti Monster help me, if I have to watch that kind of crap on top of this kind of crap for the next four years, I’m leaving that thing unplugged.  From the linked video:

Interviewer: “What experience does [Governor Palin] have in the field of national security?”

McCain: “Energy.”

It makes me want to crawl into a hole in the wall.  But sadly, the wall is moving at me fast, and is threatning to slam me into a pool of brackish water.

The top 10 things I learned this weekend

• Two days is not enough time to be considered “time off.” If you’re planning on going out of town for a weekend in the month of August, just take Friday off.  Everyone else is doing it, so it’s not like you can reach anyone you need to anyway.
• SisterAlyson has definite ideas about music that she likes. On Friday morning, I picked up my little sister at the train station and drove her to Boston with me so she could visit her friends while I visited mine.  My iPod, which is loaded with about 600 songs was in the car, and she played DJ, which meant that she rejected most of my music for being too slow, too weird, or “good, but I don’t want to listen to that right now.”  At least she stopped and listened whenever Springsteen came on.
• The black plague started in India in the 1340’s. On Friday I met up with Nancy Pearl Wannabe, and we went to the Boston Museum of Science, a place that she’s been many a time with her middle schoolers.  We had some fun taking shadow pictures, flattening pennies, and generally making things go.  I’m no scientist, but I knew a lot of the science stuff already, because the museum is not exactly dealing with quantum physics.  But there was a display about the history of the world, and it included that little snippet about the plague, which I never though of existing before London in the 1600’s.  Now I know.
• I should have seen The Lost Boys a long time ago. It would be a damn shame if I went all the way to Boston and actually went out and saw any of it, breaking my near-perfect record of going there for short work trips, swim meets, and religious functions (in my past life…) So while NPW and I were thinking of something to do, we ended up staying in, drinking Margaritas, and watching The Lost Boys because I never had before.  When it was over, I told NPW that watching it is a lot like swimming the butterfly.  If I had just done it fifteen years ago, it would be a lot easier to deal with it now.  But wouldn’t you know it, knowledge of the movie gave me a little edge when we played Scene It later that night!  Speaking of the fly…
• Sometimes it’s better to do a half stroke than to glide in. 1/100th of a second! Crazy.

• It turns out that I’m actually kind of good at skee-ball. I was a bit nervous, going all the way to New Hampshire for Beej’s birthday, where I would meet Aaron for the first time, after this long, arduous internet flirtation we’ve had.  I knew that skee-ball was going to be involved, and the last I remember, my skee-skills were equivalent to my mini golf skills, which is to say not skillful.  But NPW, Chris and I got some practice in while we were waiting, and I scored 300 points not once, but twice!  So when Aaron and Mara finally came back from their trip to Massachusetts to put money in their car meter (how did that take such a long time?), we were all on a level playing field.  Sadly, I had to leave after only a couple of hours, but when you have that much awesomeness in one arcade (me, NPW, Chris, Aaron, Mara, Beej, Beej’s gal, Beej’s offspring, and Ted, who I didn’t realize was an actual person until I saw him in person) it’s hard to contain it.  Because they’re such great hosts, I gave my skee-ball ticket winnings to NPW and Chris so they can put it towards their dream of winning the lobster salt and pepper shakers.  You can see photo evidence of the skee ball on NPW’s blog.
• I’m still pretty great at driving cross-town. On the way back from the beach, we picked up SisterAlyson, and the two of us went to Queens via the LIE and the most beautiful sunset I’ve ever seen over Manhattan.  I was Jersey-bound after dropping her off, and instead of taking the FDR uptown, I decided I had enough time to drive across 57th St and take the West Side Highway to the GWB, just for old time’s sake.  I love driving cross-town (espeically in someone else’s car,) because there’s a trick to changing lanes quickly so you never get stuck behind someone who’s trying to turn uptown or downtown.  It makes for a thrilling ride, and it was good to see the city at the street level, however briefly.
• Babies are cute, and they don’t all hate me. My friends and their 6-month old son just bought a new house in Jersey, and they put out an APB for friends to help them paint and get the place ready for their move-in at the end of the month.  So I went over on Sunday to help them out.  In between edging the doorways, I went upstairs to chat with my friend and play with the baby.  That’s when I got put on babysitting duty for a few minutes, with the instructions to pick him up if he fussed.  I did it, and he even stopped fussing!  I even enjoyed it and his little baby smell, but I was totally happy to give him back and continue my edging after a short period of time.  Verdict: not ready for motherhood, not by a long shot.
• It’s very easy to hook up a Mac to my parents’ wireless router. I spent about an hour trying to figure out how to get my new computer or my old computer, which is now my mom’s computer, hooked up to their wireless connection.  The only success I had was when I was able to hook up their PC laptop to the wireless network, which is pointless because that computer does not having working “shift” key, and makes a scary whirring noise when it does anything.  I called The Man of Action for help, but he was MIA until I was driving home, when he was totally available, but I was exactly half way between both places of computer trouble.  By the time I got home, he was already on his way to Scotland, as always happens when I need technical help.
• My cats really, really do not get along. The Dutchess of Kickball was brave enough to potentially encounter the landlesbian in order to feed my cats for me while I was away.  But being well-fed did not stop them from fighting, as evidenced by big tufts of Lucy hair all over the bathroom and living room, adjacent to the piles of cat puke, and best of all, the big old puddle of cat pee on the loveseat where Lucy likes to hang out cower.  It took me about an hour of clean-up last night, and Lucy is not smelling so great at the moment.  I fear that there is not enough pheromone spray in the world to keep Micki from being a nut job, and I’m not sure what I’m going to do when I go away for a full week in September.

The floodlighted night

I’m going on record here.  I am the one person on the internet who didn’t really like the new Batman movie.

Admittedly, I went in more interested in being air conditioned for two and a half hours, not because I was hoping it would be The Greatest Movie Of All Time.  But still, I was kind of disappointed.  Not to write a movie review or anything, I just thought that it was convoluted and overly self-important, and I think it’s a tragedy to bring Cillian Murphy into a movie and then only put him in one scene where he has a bag over his head 90% of the time.  Also, I just can’t stand movies where stuff gets wantonly destroyed.  Under no circumstance should anyone crash a car that is worth more money than I will make in my entire life.

And yes, Heath Ledger was great like they all say, but that wasn’t enough to make me want to sit though it again or heartily recommend it to everyone I know.  All that being said, it was still better than The Ruins.

Other than that, I had a totally rocking weekend where I went sailing and got to ride in a convertible and ate homemade ice cream in a complete affront to no-sugar July.  And then I had an encounter with the landlesbian.

I’m almost loathe to tell stories, because I think she’s reached a tipping point of going from eccentric to actually certifiable.  Her tangents are even more tangential and her outbursts are even more outbursty.  And she’s been leaving lights on all night long, and they shine into my backyard.  Earlier, I was leaving the house and she was standing around, looking at my tomato plant.

“Noelle, your tomato is ready to be eaten.”

“I noticed, I’m planning on leaving it on the vine another day and then I’ll pick it.  You can have it if you want it though.” (I’m practically a sharecropper!)

“You need to pick it and show it to your friends!”

“Or I could just eat it.”

“You know, we have a great bounty and history here in Connecticut and New York and it needs to be shared with friends!”

“um, right.”

“In fact, in Connecticut they have stone houses that are so old, they charge you $100 an hour to restore them.  So think about that!”

“Would you like the tomato, landlesbian?”

“It’s just a damn shame how much they charge you to restore buildings.”  (I am not aware that she owns any property with stone structures in Connecticut, but whatever.)

“Anyway, I think I need to go now.”

“You’re just like Isabel Archer.  Now pick that tomato and show it off!”

I told her I would and drove off as quickly and deliberately as possible.  I did not pick the tomato at that time.  I hope I don’t come home to find that she’s burned down the plant in revenge or something.  And I sure as heck hope that she doesn’t get recruited by the Joker as part of his army of the insane.